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The River We Remember by William Kent Krueger

I’m becoming Kreuger fan. In The River We Remember, he fashions a mystery (who killed the execrable Jimmy Quinn?), along with a period study of the fictional small town of Jewell, Minnesota, in the post-war 1950s. The plot revolves around character of damaged characters and family secrets, and the tale features an ensemble of engaging characters from the sheriff to the café owner to the Native veteran who is accused of the murder yet refused to defend himself.

Close to Death by Anthony Horowitz

I’m new to Anthony Horowitz—this was a selection for my book club. The plot focuses on a disagreeable financier who moves into an exclusive community and winds up murdered—an arrow through the throat. The members of the community all have motives and seem to be hiding something. A bit into the book, we learn that this is actually a cold case and one that author Anthony Horowitz, the Watson to Hawthorne’s Holmes, is attempting to reconstruct without much help from the detective. The narrative structure creates a bit of initial confusion for a first-time Horowitz reader, but once you get the hang of it the story progresses nicely and we learn how the clues all fit together at the end. I liked it well enough to want to read more of the series, perhaps starting at the beginning.

This Perfect Day by Ira Levin

A friend told me that This Perfect Day was her all-time favorite book and loaned me a copy, so I re-read this dystopian tale by the author of Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives. It holds up well, despite some 1970s sensibilities. After a revolution, the world is run, efficiently enough, by a central computer and the population takes regular treatments to remain docile and happy. But no everyone is and there are rumors of islands of free-thinkers. If you’ve never read This Perfect Day, give this bit of retro-futurism a try.

The Two Cultures by C. P. Snow

I also reread The Two cultures, the 1959 lecture by the English chemist/novelist, in which he laments the gulf between scientists and humanists. In a (much quoted) key passage he laments the way in which old school literary intellectuals are at one pole and physical scientists are the other scientists, and “Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. They have a curious distorted image of each other. Their attitudes are so different that, even on the level of emotion, they can’t find much common ground. Non-scientists tend to think of scientists as brash and boastful, … shallowly optimistic, unaware of man’s condition. On the other hand, the scientists believe that the literary intellectuals are totally lacking in foresight, peculiarly unconcerned with their brother men, in a deep sense anti-intellectual, anxious to restrict both art and thought to the existential moment. And so on.” He characterized the polarization as a dangerous misunderstanding but nevertheless worried that humanistic intellectuals were “natural luddites” unwilling or incapable of comprehending the scientific revolution.

It seems to me that his two cultures have more in common that in opposition (thought they sometimes have little patience for one another). Revisiting The Two Cultures leads me to think that there are perhaps four cultures: those or science and the humanities, which share an interest in intellectual autonomy and discovery (scientific or humanistic), professionalists, whose highest calling is efficiency and return-on-investment, and anti-intellectuals, who resent the elites of the other three cultures. Maybe someone needs to write The Four Cultures.

The Shakespeare Requirement and The English Experience by Julie Schumacher

A while back I read Dear Committee Members, Julie Schumacher’s Thurber Award winning send up of academic idiosyncrasies. In The Shakespeare Requirement and The English Experience, clueless Jay Fitger is back, first as the newly elected chair of his department (English, naturally) and in the second leading a group of Payne University students a board. While Dear Committee Members was a epistolary novel—largely a series of letters of recommendation which all turn out to be about Fitger, The Shakespeare Requirement centers on curriculum change and corporatization—in the spirit of Richard Russo’s Straight Man and just as funny: the chair of Economics, flush with resources sets out to eliminate the Humanities; an ancient Shakespearean resists. It’s a serio-comic take on the values of the university and its future, you find a good (if rueful) laugh every few pages. In The English Experience, Fitger finds himself chaperoning Payne University’s winter term “Experience: Abroad” with a quirky cast of students he finds himself appreciating. Despite their acid, all three novels are essentially hopeful and in the end, Fitger has grown and has grown on me–not as a hero to emulate, but as a tale of what could have been.