For all the children out there who think their moms aren’t up to snuff, let me suggest that your Mother’s Day reading includes books on my list of worst literary mothers (for the mothers out there who feel they aren’t appreciated enough by their children, make one of these books your Mother’s Day gift to them!). You might want to reconsider ….

Medea by Euripedes – Does it get any worse than killing your own sons as revenge against their father? Perhaps literature’s original bad mama, she set the bar high.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert – Emma Bovary’s romanticism doesn’t extend to motherhood. Her suicide, soon followed by her husband’s death, leaves her daughter alone, penniless and forced to work in a mill.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck — Cathy Ames (later known as Kate Albey) is this epic’s Satan, Jezebel, and Eve all rolled up into one. Running a brothel aside, she’s also responsible for the deaths of many people including her parents. Add to that, she slept with her brother-in-law, shot her husband and abandoned her twin sons (after failing to abort them with a knitting needle). Even after committing suicide, she further inflamed the Cain and Abel relationship between her sons by leaving all of her possessions to only one.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov – No matter how sorry we may feel for Charlotte Haze’s bovine, clueless existence, her desire for what she imagines is the fine life leads her to bring pedophile Humbert Humbert into her nubile adolescent daughter’s life. Disaster for all but, somehow, Nabokov elicits absurd humor in this tale.

Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth – There are overbearing mothers in every culture but Sophie Portnoy is every cliché of the overbearing Jewish mother, rolled into one. Her punishment is the son she has to mother.

Carrie by Stephen King – Here’s what happens when your mother is a fanatic, in this case a religious fanatic. Margaret White’s warped view that it is sinful to be a woman dooms her daughter and nearly an entire town before bringing on her own awful demise (for which we find ourselves cheering).

Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews — Creepy Corinne Dollanganger leaves her kids with her own terrible and abusive mother, then feeds them arsenic so she can keep her inheritance. The epitome of the creepy mom.

Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin – Once you’ve procreated with your twin brother, it’s doesn’t matter how much you say you love your kids when the one you most support turns out to be psychopathic, animal-torturing monster.

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver presents the only mother on my list created by a female author (yes, Lionel is a woman). Kevin had as little chance in life as his victims. Before he became a teenage mass murderer, he endured Eva Khatchadourian, one of the most depraved mothers in literature. Nature? Nurture? Chilling!

The Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St. Aubyn – The epitome of self-denial and self-indulgence, Eleanor Melrose is victimized before becoming the victimizer of her son through omission and commission.

For younger readers and the child in all of us:

Coraline by Neil Gaiman –This is a great way to instill an appreciation of mothers by their children. “Think another mother will be better than me? Let me read you the story of Coraline!” Buttons for eyes! Buttons for eyes! A dark novella with a lesson for all of us who thought at some point in childhood that our parents were less than perfect.

Stranger than fiction:

Mommie Dearest by Christina Crawford – Can this list not contain a memoir about having Joan Crawford for a mother? All the more horrific because this is non-fiction. But it is a warning to parents that your children will probably have the last word on your parenting.

April 22nd is Earth Day. Like sinning six days a week and praying on the seventh for forgiveness while promising to do better (or try to do better), we set aside Earth Day to acknowledge the wonder of the beautiful planet that sustains us, pray for its wellbeing and promise to show more reverence for it the remaining days of the year.

One day of prayer and promise can be quickly forgotten in a year full of distractions. Fortunately, there are many excellent books – non-fiction, novels and poetry — to inspire us and remind us of the daily devotion the earth deserves. One of my favorite ecologically-minded books is Echoes of Earth. Watch my 2013 video webcast interview with author Sue Baugh to see why. Then check out these other worthwhile books:

Non-Fiction
Silent Spring – Rachel Carson
An Inconvenient Truth – Al Gore
Hot, Flat and Crowded – Thomas L. Friedman
Moral Ground – Kathleen Dean Moore and Michael P. Nelson (editors)

Fiction
Ecotopia – Ernest Callenbach
Prodigal Summer – Barbara Kingsolver
The Shell Collector – Anthony Doerr
The Road – Cormac McCarthy

For Children
The Lorax – Dr. Seuss
Dear Children of the Earth – Schim Schimmel
The Great Paper Caper – Oliver Jeffers

Poetry
The Walk – Friedrich von Schiller
The Triumph of Life – Percy Bysshe Shelley
A Forest Hymn – William Cullen Bryant
Song at Sunset – Walt Whitman

Don’t forget to recycle your books by sharing them.

On April 12th, a Living Legend will turn 100. Beverly Cleary, the Newberry and National Book Award-winning author received that official moniker from the Library of Congress in 2000. A well-deserved honor for the creator of treasured children’s books, including Henry and Ribsy, Beezus and Ramona, Ralph S. Mouse, and Dear Mr. Henshaw.

On becoming a centenarian, Cleary mused, “I’m surprised that I’m almost 100. I sometimes write the figures down on paper to make sure.”

How does a writer become a legendary author? Many authors will tell you they loved reading from the get-go. Not Cleary. She was assigned to the lowest reading group in first-grade, considered a late reader. Instead, she’d daydream, getting beaten on her hands by her teacher. The reason Cleary gives for avoiding books was because she didn’t find them interesting.

Lucky for us, she was encouraged by her parents, discovering books more to her liking in the third grade and eventually leading her to the inspiration for writing a new style of children’s books.

In a recent interview with Publishers Weekly, Cleary recounted, “When I was young, I told my mother I wanted to write, and she said, ‘That’s fine, but you must have a way of earning a living. Work for one year before you try to write.’ It was sound advice, so I went to library school and became a children’s librarian.”

During her years as a librarian in Yakima, Washington, Cleary had an encounter with a child that would shape her writing career years later. “It was a little boy who changed my life,” she says. A boy who “marched right up to my desk and demanded, ‘Where are the books about kids like us?’ I couldn’t find any books about kids who played on the sidewalk in front of their houses. Authors back then thought their characters needed to go to sea or have big adventures. Well, most kids don’t have adventures, but they still lead interesting lives. My life is interesting to me, but I’m surprised it’s interesting to anyone else. I haven’t had any spectacular adventures or gone to sea. Finally, when I sat down to write, I thought about that little boy.”

The result was Cleary’s first novel, Henry Huggins, published in 1950. For the next two decades, the prolific author churned out at least one book a year, often starting the day after New Year’s Day and finishing in May or June. The remainder of the year was used to let new ideas take seed, much in the way a farmer lets the land seasonally go fallow. To date, hers books have sold more than 85 million copies.

Cleary’s favorite character is Henry’s pesky kid sister, Ramona. Although Cleary contends “I was a well-behaved girl,” she adds, “but I often thought like Ramona.” For example:

RAMONA drummed harder to show everyone how bad she was. She would not take off her shoes. She was a terrible, wicked girl! Being such a bad, terrible, horrid, wicked girl made her feel good! She brought both heels against the wall at the same time. Thump! Thump! Thump! She was not the least bit sorry for what she was doing. She would never be sorry. Never! Never! Never!

Of the many rewards that come with success, Cleary says the greatest reward from her writing career has been, “the children who have discovered the pleasure of reading with my books. I remember when I made the same discovery in third grade, and it was a turning point in my life.”

Happy 100th, Beverly Clearly!

An epistolary novel is one in which the story is told through a series of documents. While documents might be news clippings or diary entries — in modern times it could be broadcasts, internet correspondence and social media posts – they began and remain most often as love letters in some fashion. Cárcel de Amor (Prison of Love), c.1485 by Diego de Dan Pedro is the earliest reported epistolary novel. James Howell is credited with writing the first epistolary novel in English, Familiar Letters (1645-50), covering prison life, foreign adventure … and the love of women.

Over the next century, the epistolary novel form gained complexity as the narrative introduced varying viewpoints. This was most notably seen in Aphra Behn’s Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (three volumes in 1684, 1685 and 1687), in which intrigue was created by false letters, and letters delayed or misused by people with bad intentions.

As a genre, the epistolary novel became popular throughout Europe in the 1700s. In England, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (1740) inspired the “Pamela Bonnet” fashion. The French Les Liaison Dangereuses (1782) by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (with original illustration by Jean-Honoré Fragonard) has been adapted to stage, ballet, opera, radio, film and television.

Other notable epistolary novels born in Europe include: Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion (1797 and 1799), Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (considered the first detective novel in the English language, 1868) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).

Stateside, the first epistolary novel appeared in 1769: Frances Brooke’s The History of Emily Montague. Since then, our best-known epistolary novels include:

Address Unknown (1938, an early endictment of Nazism) – Katherine Kressman Taylor
Flowers for Algernon (1958) – Daniel Keyes
Carrie (1974) – Stephen King
The Color Purple (1982) – Alice Walker
The Princess Diaries (series, 2000-2015) – Meg Cabot
World War Z (2006) – Max Brooks

Reliance on subjective points of view made the early novels a precursor of the modern psychological novel. The novels I listed are categorized under a variety of genres but they follow the same epistolary format. At the heart of these novels, be they epistolary or psychological, you are likely to find an aspect (or effect of) love (supportive or destructive). The epistolary form provides a special degree of intimacy. And that’s why we love them.

We look back with an air of smugness at the rules of society that regulated manners in generations past. How quaint. How restrictive. How ridiculous, we opine. We are amused that people would invest time and money to maintain certain social “graces” that often complicated lives to no one’s benefit. So old fashioned. So un-American – at least that would appear to be our frame of mind, judging by what we see in traditional and social media.

Now I’m not against insulting people. I just abhor how mundane our insults are, especially in the political arena. The author of The Art of the Deal hasn’t mastered the art of the insult. There’s no originality. I’m frustrated that the most entertaining attempts at insults in recent political news arose from Sara Palin’s propensity for malapropisms (also referred to as Dogberryism, based on a Shakespearian character in Much Ado About Nothing). The insults hurled across such social media as Facebook also manage to be both intense and dull.

C’mon folks. We can do so much better than that! Let’s use our words, we have so many to choose from. Let’s lace them together to form the affable daggers that make their point as they get to the heart of the matter. To inspire you, consider these lovely literary lances:

“Thou art a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave; a lily-liver’d, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mungril bitch.” – King Lear by Shakespeare

“You blithering idiot! … You festering gumboil! You fleabitten fungus! … You bursting blister! You moth-eaten maggot!” – Mathilda by Raold Dahl

“Well, Ben Rogers, if I was as ignorant as you I wouldn’t let on.” – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

“If your brains were dynamite there wouldn’t be enough to blow your hat off.” – Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut

“He is simply a hole in the air.” – The Lion and the Unicorn by George Orwell

“I misjudged you… You’re not a moron. You’re only a case of arrested development.” – The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

“He was one of the numerous and varied legion of dullards, of half-animated abortions, conceited, half-educated coxcombs, who attach themselves to the idea most in fashion only to vulgarize it and who caricature every cause they serve, however sincerely.” – Crime and Punishment by Feodor Dostoyevsky

“He’s not human; he’s an empty space disguised as a human” – The Collector by John Fowles

“Nothing has more retarded the advancement of learning than the disposition of vulgar minds to ridicule and vilify what they cannot comprehend.” – The Rambler by Samuel Johnson

Finally, though not in a book, Gore Vidal after being punched by Norman Mailer: “I see Norman, words have failed you again!”

Of the many excellent movies I’ve seen this season, the one I’m recommending to booklovers is Trumbo, the true story of author/screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and the Hollywood Blacklist. I first became aware of Trumbo as the author of the groundbreaking antiwar novel Johnny Got His Gun. Published by J. B. Lippincott, the novel won one of the early National Book Awards: the Most Original Book of 1939. But Dalton’s greater fame came through his screenwriting (original or adapted screenplays) for some of Hollywood’s most acclaimed and successful movies, among them Kitty Foyle, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Roman Holiday, The Brave One, Spartacus and Papillon.

In 1947, Dalton Trumbo was swept up in the hysteria of the Cold War with the paranoia stoked by certain people in politics and the media under the guise of patriotism. He became an upfront face in what became known as “The Hollywood Ten” — writers, directors and producers who were cited for contempt of Congress after refusing to answer questions from the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) about their alleged involvement with the Communist Party. As a result, these people were imprisoned and stripped of their livelihoods by being blacklisted by the movie industry.

The HUAC (1938-1969) continued blacklist hearings from 1947 to 1956. Over those years, the names of the defamed grew, destroying the lives of hundreds of others, including actors, authors, playwrights, composers, lyricists, musicians, comedians, dancers, artists, journalists and teachers. You know many of their names and I’m sure some of your favorites are on that list although you may be unaware, six decades later, of what they endured during this dark period in American history.

The HUAC gained its greatest notoriety under Sen. Joe McCarthy whose meteoric rise came from his increasingly egregious accusations against “known communists”. Tolerated by his Republican Party while he directed his unfounded attacks against the Democratic administration of Truman, the escalating erratic behavior became unpalatable to both parties once Eisenhower entered the White House in 1953.

McCarthy’s destructive path finally and dramatically started its downward spiral during open hearings when he, as Chairman of the Senate Government Operations Committee, charged that the U.S. Army was infiltrated by communists. Joseph Welch, special counsel for the U.S. Army, effectively countered McCarthy, summing up with, “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” Then he added the now famous question, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” Exposed for who he really was, McCarthy was (finally) officially condemned by the U.S. Senate for contempt against his colleagues in December 1954.

The reason Trumbo is timely and important is because our current American political rhetoric is becoming as much of a threat to our democracy as it was in a past generation; it echoes the dangerous broad and unfounded demonization of individuals and groups whose views are different. How this plague was allowed to spread from the 1930s to the early 1960s is worth exploring further. Playwright Arthur Miller addressed the issue in his 1953 play, The Crucible. Rod Serling wrote and narrated the memorable 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone titled The Monsters are Due on Maple Street, which ended with this wise warning:

The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices – to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill – and suspicion can destroy – and a thoughtless frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own – for the children – and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is – that these things cannot be confined – to the Twilight Zone.

There are notable heroes and villains in the movie Trumbo but the point of the movie is not so much to look back in time and point fingers (pointless). Rather, it is to reflect on how easily “good” people can be pulled into the vortex of paranoia, turning on each other, to the diminution and possible destruction of the accusers as well as the accused. See the movie Trumbo. Then, as a booklover, read more about a time in our past that should stand as a lesson for now and the future.

There’s only one chance to make a good first impression. That’s especially true in books where the reader is asked to invest time and (often) money to travel to the end of the story. We don’t usually stop to consider the importance of the opening lines of a novel, or even a short story. Yet those lines, sometimes just one sentence, must hook us and reel us in.

You may recall some favorite opening lines from books you’ve read or recognize famous first sentences from titles you didn’t know … yet. How many of these opening lines have hooked – or will hook – you into great books?:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” – Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
“Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.” – The Stranger by Albert Camus
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” – Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into an enormous insect.” – The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
“I was born in the city of Bombay…once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. The time matters, too.” – Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
“It was a pleasure to burn.” – Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.” – A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
“It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.” – Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
“I am an invisible man.” – Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
“Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Island to divorce his wife, Shuyu.” – Waiting by Ha Jin
“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish aboard.” – Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
“All children, except one, grow up.” – Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie
“It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.” – Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” – The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” – Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” – Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy