1945

I finally going back to my date of birth, and am looking at a fairly obscure year.

1. Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor has 248 owners and 7 reviews. this historical romance is her only big book.

2. The Robe by Lloyd C Douglas has 372 owners with 2 reviews. His most significant book and was #2 in 1944. (Christian fiction)

3. The Black Rose by Thomas B Costain has 88 owners (no reviews). This book was also #8 in 1946. (Medieval)

4. The white tower by James Ramsey Ullman has 15 owners (no reviews). His Banner in the Sky, also about mountaineering has 107 owners with 2 reviews.

5. Cass Timberlane a novel of husbands and wives by Sinclair Lewis has 64 owners with 1 review. He is much better known for Babbitt with 780 owners and 7 reviews.

6. A Lion is in the Streets by Adria Locke Langley has 7 owners and 1 review. A novel based on Huey Long - her only book.

7. So Well Remembered by James Hilton has 23 owners, no reviews. He is much better known for Lost Horizon with 577 owners and 6 reviews.

8. Captain from Castile by Samuel Shellabarger has 46 owners and 1 review. A novel of Mexico.

9. Earth and high heaven by Gwethalyn Graham has 16 owners and no reviews. The first Canadian book to be on a U.S. bestseller list. It's the story of a Montreal Protestant marrying a north Ontario Jew.

10. Immortal Wife: the biographical novel of Jessie Benton Fremont by Irving Stone has 30 owners (no reviews). Jessie was the wife of John Fremont, explorer during the Lincoln years. Stone is much better nown for The Agony and the Ecstasy a novel of Michelangelo with 641 owners and 14 reviews.

I had a history class on Tudor Stuart England. One of our assignments was a truth in fiction report on a novel about the era. My selection was Forever Amber. Loved the book and those Cavalier days, but was crushed to only make a C in the class. I remember learning from Amber how people cleaned their teeth back then. I still feel sorry for that "meddlesome jade."

Gwethalyn Graham has only one other book on LT: Dear Enemies: a dialogue on French and English Canada, copyright 1963 and co-written with Solange Chaput Rolland. The Connecticut state catalog also lists Swiss Sonata, from 1938, published under the name G. G. E. Brown.

Looking at Wikipedia, It says that Cormorant books in Canada has reissued both "Swiss Sonata" and "Earth and High Heaven" in 2003.

have read the The Robe by Lloyd C Douglas

I loved The Black Rose by Thomas B. Costain. I read it back in 1968. I also liked the movie with Tyrone Powers, but the book was better.

US Non-Fiction

1. Brave Men, Ernie Pyle 120 copies on LT

2. Dear Sir, Juliet Lowell 7 copies

3. Up Front, Bill Mauldin 170 copies

4. Black Boy, Richard Wright 933 copies

5. Try and Stop Me, Bennett Cerf 27 copies

6. Anything Can Happen, George and Helen Papashvily 36 copies

7. General Marshall's Report, U.S. War Department General Staff 1 copy

8. The Egg and I, Betty MacDonald 222 copies

9. The Thurber Carnival, James Thurber 692 copies

10. Pleasant Valley, Louis Bromfield 17 copy

I think I read The Egg and I when I was a teenager and found it pleasant. I've also picked off The Thurber Carnival. We did it as a play in high school and I had a non-speaking part as a party guest. I do recall something about the Unicorn in the Garden.

I read The Egg And I with great pleasure decades ago and yearned to be transported to the Olympic Peninsula.

Papashvily was a Georgian of the Caucasus Mountains type, not southern U.S. The book is supposed to be quite funny.

I don't think I've read any of these books, but we must have had Bill Mauldin's book lying around the house growing up. And James Thurber was well known in his day.

I read Black Boy in school.

Brave Men by Ernie Pyle was his last book. It included his columns from the Battle of Iwo Jima up until the day he was killed.
I just looked in our copy of his book & there was a newspaper clipping telling of the death of Ernie's wife 6 months after the war,

Black Boy was intense. Wright has been one of my most respected authors for a long time.

I've read A Thurber Carnival, or everything in it along the way. At his best, he was side-splitting.

Forever Amber was the Moll Flanders of its day, and is still an entertaining read. Shellabarger's Captain From Castile is a fine novel that mines one of the greatest first person historical accounts written--Bernal Diaz' The Conquest of New Spain--and adds an equally interesting subplot about the attempts of a Spanish nobleman to avenge the wrongs done to him and his family by the Inquisition. Great historical novel!

In his book Making the List Michael Korda points out that Kathleen Winsor's Forever Amber was in its 2nd year on the list, calling it "the biggest bodice ripper of the 20th century, and the first book to become a bestseller because it was considered outrageously sexy", and of course it was, literally, banned in Boston. Korda notes that The Robe was also a carry-over from the 1944 list, "thus exemplifying the bipolar sexual mentality of the American reader, which could absorb both a pious religious epic and a bawdy Restoration historical novel at the same time".

1945 was the year before I was born, but I've read The Robe, and remember making a stab at Forever Amber when I was about 14, but was bored by it and never made it past 20 pages or so. I also read The White Tower by James Ramsey Ullman which I recall as being extremely entertaining, and even read several of Ullman's books after that too.

The non-fiction list looks like mostly war and more war, but I have read Ernie Pyle's Brave Men, Richard Wright's landmark Black Boy, and I still have a copy of The Thurber Carnival which I was just thumbing through again last week. Brave Men was another bestselling carry-over from 1944, and with Pyle winning the 1944 Pulitzer for his war reporting, the book's popularity was cresting as the war began to wind down in the spring of 1945. Unfortunately Pyle was killed in action in April 1945, but this only boosted Brave Men's sales numbers and made it the ultimate best seller of 1945.

The 1945 Pulitzer for fiction went to John Hersey's wonderful novel A Bell for Adano, and 2 classics were published that year in the UK: Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited and George Orwell's Animal Farm.

I have several of these on my shelves, but the ones I've read are Brave Men and A Thurber Carnival.

I love Forever Amber!

I did too. I had to pick a novel to write a paper on, "truth in fiction" about Tudor/Stewart England and Forever Amber was my pick. Unfortunately, it was too low brow for my professor's tastes and I don't recall that I did that well on it, but that "meddlesome jade" Amber sticks with you.

The Thurber carnival
Finished reading: 25 February 2013



The Thurber carnival is another short story collection of timeless pieces by James Thurber. It is a parade of deviance. In each story one of the characters is either eccentric, weird or totally nuts. However, in each case there is sufficient suspense to let the reader gradually discover where the screw is loose.

In "The secret life of Walter Mitty" a war veteran "has not come home" so to speak. He sees the enemy hidden behind every tree, while out shopping with his wife. It is a classic story, with an almost endearing touch. "The catbird seat" tells the story of envy and backstabbing in the office, and how to get rid of troublesome colleagues. A very humourous, and cruel story. "In "The MacBeth murder mystery" a reader get Shakespeare all wrong, or all right, depending on your perspective.

Most stories are rather short, the volume as a whole being just over 60 pages. The stories are highly original, and hardly dated, so they can be enjoyed by contemporary readers. Great stuff.



Other books I have read by James Thurber:
My life and hard times