Ephron - The Bibliophiles Devotional: 365 Days of Literary Classics

The
BIBLIOPHILES
Devotional

365 DAYS OF LITERARY CLASSICS

HALLIE EPHRON, PHD

Copyright 2009 by Hallie Ephron, PhD
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Contents

Introduction

The Library in the Garret
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Books, books, books!
I had found the secret of a garret-room
Piled high with cases in my fathers name;
Piled high, packed large,where, creeping in and out
Among the giant fossils of my past,
Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs
Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there
At this or that box, pulling through the gap,
In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy,
The first book first. And how I felt it beat
Under my pillow, in the mornings dark,
An hour before the sun would let me read!
My books!...

MOST OF US do not have the great good fortune of growing up, like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in a house with a garret-room overflowing with book-filled boxes. Nevertheless, many of us are unabashed bibliophiles who, if we could, would line our walls with books and read as many as our busy lives permit. We savor the heft of a book in our hands. Thrill at reading a books opening paragraphs and slow down to delay reaching The End despite a bedside table stacked high with books beckoning to be read.

The Bibliophiles Devotional contains the merest preview of 365 books, one a day, each handpicked to nourish the book lover in each of us. Some are classics that have stood the test of time; others look as if they will. Think of this as a tasting menu. It is my dearest hope that each taste will send you scurrying to your bookseller or library so you can read (or reread) that book, cover to cover. Some you will want to savor slowly, others you will find yourself compelled to devour in a single sitting, while others will need to be chewed and digested.

January

JAN.

NEW YEARS
DAY

WHITE TEETH

BY ZADIE SMITH

At 06.27 hours on 1 January 1975, Alfred Archibald Jones was dressed in corduroy and sat in a fume-filled Cavalier Musketeer Estate face down on the steering wheel, hoping the judgement would not be too heavy upon him.

THIS DAZZLING NOVEL tells the modern Dickensian saga of interconnected families, one from Jamaica and the other from Bangladesh. It begins New Years Day, 1975. Hapless, coin-flipping, forty-seven-year-old Archibald Jones, bereft over his divorce from the mad Ophelia, tries to gas himself. But the thinnest covering of luck was on him like fresh dew and an irate butcher rousts him from his illegally parked car. On New Years Eve, 1992, the story ends with Archies accidental (preordained?) release of a mutant mouse programmed to do away with the randomness of creation.

With satirical bite and an ironic take on race and religion, the novel tells of an improbable friendship between working-class Jones and Bengali Muslim Salmad Iqbal, forged during World War II in a stifling five-man tank. Salmad is torn between his deep Muslim faith and his growing attraction to Poppy Burt-Jones, his twin sons lovely music teacher. As an act of contrition and to keep the boy pure, Salmad has one of the twins kidnapped and sent to Bangladesh. His plan goes awry. Just as improbably, Archie falls for beautiful seventeen-year-old Clara, black as ebony and crushed sable, who lost her front teeth courtesy of a motor scooter accident.

White Teeth won the Whitbread and Guardian prizes for first novel in 2000.

Some fearless outside referee had to barge in and try to adjudicate theculture wars, so let us rejoice that its Zadie Smith. She brings almosteverything you want to the task: humor, brains, objectivity, equanimity,empathy, a pitch-perfect ear for smugness and cant, and then still morehumor.

FRANK RICH , NEW YORK TIMES

JAN.

MIDDLEMARCH

BY GEORGE ELIOT

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.

GEORGE ELIOT TAKES on Victorian marriage and mores in this novel set in the provincial English town of Middlemarch.

Dorothea Brooke is stuck in a lifeless marriage with Mr. Casaubon, an aging academic. Miss Brooke seethes with ideas and yearns to be useful, but upper-class society offers her no outlets. Casaubon is blind to her intelligence as well as to her passion. She, on the other hand, was able enough to estimate himshe who waited on his glances with trembling, and shut her best soul in prison, paying it only hidden visits, that she might be petty enough to please him. In such a crisis as this, some women begin to hate. Fortuitously, Casaubon dies, but his will specifically forbids Dorotheas marriage to the man she loves.

Also unwisely wed is Dorotheas friend, the young, poor, ambitious physician Tertius Lydgate. Hes tethered to the frivolous Rosamond Vincy (the flower of Mrs. Lemons school, the chief school in the county, where the teaching included all that was demanded in the accomplished femaleeven to extras, such as the getting in and out of a carriage) whose pursuit of wealth and status brings them both to the brink of ruin.

Eliot doesnt satirize so much as sharply observe, and even her most odious characters are sympathetic and believable. The novel is considered a masterpiece, and Dorothea Brooke is one of English literatures first intellectually aspiring women. Readers were ready for herin 1871, its first year in print, the novel sold an amazing 20,000 copies.

[George Eliots] power is at its highest in the mature Middlemarch, themagnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the fewEnglish novels written for grown-up people.

VIRGINIA WOOLF, THE COMMON READER

JAN.

THE DEATH OF IVAN ILYICH

BY LEO TOLSTOY