What I read this summer

I read fiction regularly - - one book a year, in summer.

This year I read both The 42nd Parallel and Big Money by John Dos Passos. Fast moving, engrossing stories. But most importantly, they conveyed the emotional ambiguity and wandering taking place 100 years ago as people transitioned into this unfamiliar industrial age where traditional values and morals and behaviors had just been thrown out the window.

The three points I got from the books:
1. The new materialistic urge to make money, and what that did to relationships and people. We take it for granted now, but it was quite a new phenomenon then.
2. The working man and women's struggles  to deal with the  injustices of the new order, trying to get decent wages, health and so on. And the frustration,  lost battles, ostracizing.
3. The emotional wandering among so many young people. With the old rules and roles gone, many people were without a moral or value compass. Not in the crime sense, just in the "where do I fit in" sense.  Passos portrays this emotional weightlessness so well. 

Books on the top 100 novels of the 20th century list.  I recommend both. Great reads.
(photo of John Dos Passos)

Comments

[Terry Newman]

I like to get away from reality in the summer but found myself reading a lot of Steinbeck anyway. I also try to read a classic and a children's chapter book each summer. Finished up the summer with a couple murder mysteries. I'm afraid I'm not as ambitious as you, Bill!