This is the third and last of my reports about the best books I read in 2014--these being books I'd read once before. I re-read them because, for one thing, I realized I'd mostly forgotten them. For another, I realized that since I'd enjoyed them once, I'd surely enjoy them again. Too: I thought it would be interesting with some, especially, to see if a more mature perspective changed my opinion of them. In alphabetical order, here are the best.
1. Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop. (This, of course, harks to my love of New Mexico with Cather's fictionalizing the life of the first Catholic Archbishop to the region, the French Father Lamy, here called Father Latour. His old chapel still exists, now part of a ranch resort called The Bishop's Lodge, out in that rural part of Santa Fe called Tesuque.)
2-5. Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet. Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea. (Four separate books tallying a thousand-plus pages. Splendid and irritating at the same time. He's a poet and can't go wrong with his descriptive language--his lemon seas and lavender skies. But I longed for a good editor to trim some of the stories within stories within stories. Everything about Alexandria and the characters, major and minor, reveals the exotic, the bizarre, the smoldering. The first three books tell and counter-tell the same story during pre-war days. The final book carries on chronologically from war to post-war days. Durrell dives deep, loving repetition, loving pulling things apart farther and farther. Psychoanalyzing. Adding intriguing snippets. Yes, it was worth re-reading.)
6. W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence. (I always liked Maugham though today he's considered out of fashion. This is his re-creation of an Englishman who leaves all behind to go off to the South Seas to paint. Maugham is, of course, fictionalizing the life of Frenchman, Paul Gauguin. A good yarn.)
7. Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, An Inquiry into Values. (Here's one I especially wanted to re-read, remembering that I had found it quite oblique when I read it back in the '70s when it was published. Parts of it were still oblique, but I was able to concentrate better this time. It's what I might now call a comparison of the romantic and the classic. Intuition and imagination vs. logic and reason. Art vs. technology. As with Durrell, I longed for a good editor to take out parts that seemed to carry on and on and on. The book juggles between the description of the author and his son's motorcycle trip west ... and the harking back to the author's philosophical explorations when this inquiry into values gave him a nervous breakdown. In the end, he seeks Quality with a capital Q or what might be called The Middle Way. Whew.)
8. Conrad Richter, The Sea of Grass. (A classic, spare tale of the Old West--cattlemen vs. ranchers--beautifully written. Unfortunately, out of print. Richter is a superb writer, not only in this but in his trilogy, The Trees, The Fields, The Town about the coming of civilization to the wilderness.)
9 - 10. Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped. And its sequel: David Balfour. (It's too bad these are considered "boys' adventures" since they are splendid, lively tales many would enjoy. And, alas, though Kidnapped is still in print, its sequel--that is, HALF the story--David Balfour, is not. I found some difficulty in translating some of the Scottish dialect but otherwise loved both books. I'd read both as a girl and wanted to see if I would still enjoy them. I did. Setting: Scotland in 1751-1752 after the Jacobite uprising. )
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