Twenty-One Stories by Graham Greene

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Two stories stood out to me. The first was of a middle-age English couple who go to Paris on vacation. The wife wants to see something risque. The time period is between the wars. The husband ends up taking his wife to see a "blue movie," a term I had not heard or read in years. At the end of the movie the male actor in the film turns and faces the camera. It is the first time in the film that the audience sees the man's face. Of course it is our character in the story. He is not proud of his performance. His wife, it turns out, is far more interested in knowing who the female performer is. She seems not at all surprised to discover that her husband is in the film, which had been made more than 20 years in the past.

The second story that remains with me is set during the blitz. An old man who lives alone in a large house somehow has his house survive the bombing. All the other houses in the neighborhood have been destroyed. A gang of teenage boys take offense to the situation. The manage to lock the old man in his own outhouse and proceed to destroy the house themselves.



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The Best American Essays 2019 by Rebecca Solnit

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I was torn between a 4 and a 5 star rating this year. As with collections of short stories, this anthology is focused on diversity, which seems to have become the theme of this decade. We'll have to wait and see how well this holds up after the twin catastrophes of Donald J Trump and the coronavirus.



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Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition by Umberto Eco

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I freely confess that I didn't understand half of what Eco was trying to tell me in this book. Linguistics is fascinating, but my background, despite a semester's worth of study in grad school, is too limited. Still, Eco is a fine writer, and his examples/illustrations are often entertaining.

This is a book meant for serious students of linguistics, and not the faint of heart (to coin a phrase).



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The Complete Poems by Constantinos P. Cavafy

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Cavafy was an important Greek poet during the first three decades of the twentieth century, who influenced E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot and others in the English speaking world. I encountered his name off and on studying those writers when I was in college, but I've only just now found the time to read his work.

He was born and lived most of his life in Alexandria, which somehow seems appropriate: a Greek living in a Greek city in a foreign land?

Cavafy was an advocate of demotic Greek (think democratic). Perhaps this was influenced by an early study of Dante. Likely, this became part of his mystic. By this point, writing in the vernacular seems hardly revolutionary.



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