Anecdotal Evidence: `All Our Ladies Read Now'

Anecdotal Evidence: `All Our Ladies Read Now'
Excerpt:
Another flight to Seattle, another calibration of print requirements: How to carry sufficient reading matter to fill the four-hour-and-forty-minute flight, plus time seated in the terminal, but not over-burden one’s self with cargo, and yet to budget thirty minutes or so for the crossword puzzle in the airline magazine? Such are the trials facing the savvy traveler, especially one accustomed to reading three or four books simultaneously, and who likes to mix genres and subjects.

The latest issue of First Things arrived Thursday, and I was strong – I saved it for the flight. Next, Janet Lewis’ first novel, The Invasion (1932), which I recently bought with birthday money and started reading on Thursday. Call it consumer testing: I like to be certain a book will occupy my attention. How frustrating to start one midair and find out it’s unreadable (hardly likely with Lewis – I’ve read all of her other novels and poetry). Not only could I not read it, I’d have to lug it around for the rest of the trip unless it was so bad I gave it to my seatmate, which I once did with a much-touted George V. Higgins novel.

I’m also packing the latest volume by the prolific Victor Davis Hanson, The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern (Bloomsbury Press, 2010). In the first essay, “Why Study War?” he writes: “Few classicists seemed to remember that most notable Greek writers, thinkers, and statesmen—from Aeschylus to Pericles to Xenophon—had served in the phalanx or on a trireme at sea and that such experiences permeated their work.”

The new books I carry are devoted to old themes and the old ones read like new. .................