Catriona McPherson

Catriona McPherson (she/her) was born in Scotland and immigrated to the US in 2010. A former linguistics professor, she is now a full-time fiction writer and has published: preposterous 1930s private-detective stories; realistic 1940s amateur-sleuth stories (The Edinburgh Murders is latest); and contemporary psychothriller standalones (The Dead Room is the brand-new one). These are all set in Scotland with a lot of Scottish weather. She also writes modern comic crime capers about a Scot-out-of- water in a “fictional” college town in Northern California sneezedavissneeze. Scot’s Eggs, No. 8 just won for best humorous novel at Left Coast Crime in San Francisco. Her other novels have won Agathas, Anthonys, Leftys and Macavitys and been finalists for an Edgar, a CWA Dagger and three Mary Higgins Clark awards.

McPherson is a proud lifetime member and former national president of Sisters in Crime.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. McPherson's reply:

I’ve been having a fantastic run of reading just recently. Yes, my alphabetically-through-the-TBR policy has come good again. I’m in the Hs – Greg Herren, Mick Herron, Georgette Heyer – and these three I’m picking out today.

Edwin Hill is a pal and so I went to my local bookshop (Avid Reader, Davis) when I heard he had a new one out. Shamingly enough, though, I realised I was two books behind, rather than one, so it’s Edwin’s 2024 psychothriller Who to Believe that I’ve just devoured.

It’s a structural masterclass. I never mean that to suggest that the structure is what you’re going to notice – which sounds like no fun at all – but always that the structure is an advanced undertaking that disappears completely into an enjoyable read. That’s certainly true here. If I wrote a murder multiple times, once for each of the characters who was there at the metaphorical kill, I’d bore myself, my agent and possibly my editor. If my agent ever passed it on. I wouldn’t bore anyone else unless a burglar broke in and took it from the drawer where it belonged. But Edwin? Fantastic stuff. The murder, its lead-up and its aftermath get more fascinating with every new narrator. And, for once, even though each narrator is compelling, you’re never sorry when the change happens. I can’t recommend this highly enough. It’s a triumph.

A book I picked up because it was next on the list, but didn’t expect to gallop through with any great enthusiasm was Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. I know, I know. But doesn’t that ever happen to you? You miss the first explosion of hoopla and then you keep hearing about it and it gets on top 100 lists and then there’s an anniversary re-issue and somehow you end up thinking it’s going to feel very good for you and worthy. Like having the kale instead of the chips. In this case, the thought of a story set against the turbulent recent history of Afghanistan – understatement alert – didn’t suggest much in the way of actual pleasure either. And it was a debut. So maybe the writing would be ropey. (Mine was.) Well. If we needed more proof that I’m an idiot. The characters are beguiling, the story rips along, the twists cause gasps and the writing is so vivid I’m kind of glad I didn’t read it when I was just beginning. I’d have got disheartened and given up. So hardly breaking news, but there it is: The Kite Runner is wonderful.

And as if that wasn’t late enough to a literary party, I also recently read Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. From 1937. And this came with an introduction, an afterword, a reading guide and a wheelbarrow load of sociological and academic contextualisation. Did it promise fun? No. But was it short? Yes. (Am I a Philistine? Three guesses.)

First off, I’m not going to lie: Hurston depicts the vernacular of her characters with a lot of novel spellings and apostrophes and it takes a while to get your eye in. But once you do, their voices ring out in your head. And her voice – in the narration – rings out like cathedral bells. It’s amazing. That said, the novel is still a tough read. Much more like what I was expecting the Hosseini to be. I mean, it’s the Jim Crow South for a start and also she’s unflinching in her treatment of colourism in the Black community she’s creating. Besides that, there’s an acceptance of domestic abuse as an expression of love and commitment that makes you glad it’s now instead of then.

I’m back nearer then than now for the next read, mind you: Michael Innes’ A Private View, where Sir John Appleby has just been persuaded by his artist wife, Judith, to attend one (a private view) at a London gallery, whereupon a valuable painting is stolen from under everyone’s eye. I’m only two chapters in, but I’m remembering why I love Innes so much. He’s just said Appleby “fed his wife into a revolving door and met her outside”. Bliss.

Visit Catriona McPherson's website.

The Page 69 Test: Go to My Grave.

Writers Read: Catriona McPherson (November 2018).

My Book, The Movie: The Turning Tide.

The Page 69 Test: The Turning Tide.

My Book, The Movie: A Gingerbread House.

The Page 69 Test: Hop Scot.

The Page 69 Test: Deep Beneath Us.

Q&A with Catriona McPherson.

The Page 69 Test: The Witching Hour.

Writers Read: Catriona McPherson (September 2024).

Writers Read: Catriona McPherson (December 2024).

The Page 69 Test: Scotzilla.

My Book, The Movie: Scotzilla.

The Page 69 Test: Scot's Eggs.

Writers Read: Catriona McPherson (November 2025).

The Page 69 Test: The Dead Room.

--Marshal Zeringue

Shay Kauwe

Shay Kauwe is a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) author from Hawaiʻi. She grew up on the Homestead in Waimānalo but moved to Russia because she fell in love with a boy. They now live in Oʻahu. Kauwe holds an M.Ed in Education and was named an NCTE Early Educator of Color in 2021. In 2022, she was awarded an Empowering ʻŌiwi Leadership Award by the Hawaiian Council, for her work in storytelling and literacy.

Her debut urban fantasy The Killing Spell is the first traditionally published adult fantasy novel by a Hawaiian author.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Kauwe's reply:

I just finished The Reformatory by Tananarive Due, a historical horror set in the Jim Crow era, centered around the experiences of two siblings: Robbie, who’s been sentenced to a school for troubled boys, and his sister Gloria, who’s trying to get him out. The emotional intensity of this book left a lasting impact. I needed a little break from ghosts after this.

Lately, I've been drawn to Westerns, so The Great Work by Sheldon Costa was a peculiar romp through a wild American West, following a drunk alchemist and his teenage nephew as they hunt down a salamander whose blood may be the key to bringing the dead back to life. Dark and unsettling, it was a unique, new vision for the subgenre of “Weird Westerns.”

For non-fiction, I read, Who Gets to Be Indian? Ethnic Fraud, Disenrollment, and Other Difficult Conversations About Native American Identity by Dina Gilio-Whitaker which discusses the ethnic fraud of indigenous people using socio-historical analysis. Gilio-Whitaker’s deep dive on the slippery issue of “pretendians” is insightful and tracked down the historical roots of this modern phenomenon (California by the way).

And finally, Aloha Rodeo: Three Hawaiian Cowboys, the World’s Greatest Rodeo, and a Hidden History of the American West by David Wolman and Julian Smith, which is the true story of the three Hawaiian paniolo (cowboys) who triumphed at the 1908 Cheyenne Rodeo. I picked this up expecting a dry historical account, but it surprised me. Fast-paced and written in a prose that jumps off the page, I thoroughly enjoyed this!

Visit Shay Kauwe's website.

Q&A with Shay Kauwe.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer Pearson

Jennifer Pearson is a former teacher and author who lives in the northeast of England with two energetic boys and her somewhat energetic husband. She’s the author of several middle grade novels, writing as Jenny Pearson, and has been short-listed for the Costa Children’s Book Award and the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, and was the winner of the Lollies (Laugh Out Loud Book Awards). When she’s not writing, Pearson can either be found doing something sporty or binge-watching true crime documentaries while eating astounding quantities of cheese.

Her new novel is Drop Dead Famous.

Recently I asked the author about what she reading. Pearson's reply:

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

I picked this up after it won the Women’s prize and I absolutely adored it. Set in Holland in the 1960s, we see the main character, Isabel slowly lose control of her small, regimented life, when Eva comes to live with her. It’s a novel of buried tensions, unspoken histories and suppressed longing. It shines a light on a dark period of history and asks the question about what happened when the Jews returned from the camps after the second world war.

The Heirs by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé

Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé is a big hitter in the world of YA thrillers and I’d been looking forward to reading her latest book, The Heirs, since it was announced. The story centres around the Button siblings, who were adopted by Leontes Button and trained to become exceptional. It’s a real page turner, that explores family dynamics, sibling rivalries and the pressure of expectation. It’s dark and twisty and layered – everything a YA thriller should be!

Visit Jenny Pearson's website.

My Book, The Movie: Drop Dead Famous.

The Page 69 Test: Drop Dead Famous.

Q&A with Jennifer Pearson.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paige Classey

Paige Classey is an author and school librarian who lives with her family on the Connecticut shoreline. Her middle grade debut, Anna-Jane and the Endless Summer, is a Junior Library Guild Selection and earned a starred review from School Library Journal. Her articles on libraries and education have appeared in School Library Journal, TEACH Magazine, and Education Week.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Classey's reply:

I am currently reading All the Colors of the Dark (2024), by Chris Whitaker, which a trusted friend recommended to me. Set in the mid-1970s, the story follows the abduction of a boy named Patch and how his absence impacts friends, family, and acquaintances. Through short, gripping chapters, readers get a vivid glimpse into a small Missouri town rocked by tragedy. The swift pacing and heart-wrenching character depictions have made it difficult for me to put down. It would be a great fit for anyone who enjoyed The God of the Woods (2024) by Liz Moore.

I generally like to alternate reading a book for adults with reading a YA or middle grade book. Along with writing for children and teens, I am a school librarian by day, so it's important to me to have plenty of recommendations for my students. Prior to All the Colors of the Dark, I read Kill Creatures (2025) by Rory Power. I picked it up because I had really enjoyed her novel Wilder Girls (2019). It also doesn't hurt that her books always have such compelling covers! Kill Creatures is another dark and twisty story, but in this case, our narrator is the one harboring a dark secret. Nan and her three best friends went out one summer night into a nearby canyon and only she returned; the other three vanished. At the one-year anniversary vigil, one of the missing girls suddenly returns. Our narrator can't quite understand how... considering she distinctly remembers murdering all three friends. I loved the unreliable narrator and the fresh storyline.

Visit Paige Classey's website.

Q&A with Paige Classey.

--Marshal Zeringue

April Howells

With a background in magazine publishing, April Howells has built a career in global communications and employer branding.

Raised in southern Ontario, she now resides on the west coast of Canada with her husband and a Greater Swiss Mountain Dog named Chief.

Howells's debut novel is The Unforgettable Mailman.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

I’m currently reading The Retirement Plan by Sue Hincenbergs and loving it. I enjoy books with older protagonists and the cat-and-mouse approach to this story caught my eye.

I recently finished Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting by Clare Pooley. I adored How to Age Disgracefully and picked up Clare’s backlist knowing it would be up my alley. I was right. Iona is a fun, tenacious main character others can’t help but gravitate to. She’s the perfect blend of grouchy and inspiring. The multi-POV ensemble cast kept me turning the pages to find out what happened to each of them in the end. Heartwarming and joyful, I recommend this one to anyone looking for unexpected friendships. Or, if you spend your commute imagining things about your fellow passengers.

Visit April Howells's website.

Q&A with April Howells.

My Book, The Movie: The Unforgettable Mailman.

The Page 69 Test: The Unforgettable Mailman.

--Marshal Zeringue

Leslie Karst

Originally from Southern California, Leslie Karst moved north to attend UC Santa Cruz (home of the Fighting Banana Slugs), and after graduation, parlayed her degree in English literature into employment waiting tables and singing in a new wave rock and roll band. Exciting though this life was, she eventually decided she was ready for a “real” job, and ended up at Stanford Law School.

For the next twenty years Karst worked as the research and appellate attorney for Santa Cruz’s largest civil law firm. During this time, she discovered a passion for food and cooking, and so once more returned to school—this time to earn a degree in Culinary Arts.

Now retired from the law, Karst spends her time cooking, singing alto in the local community chorus, gardening, cycling, and of course writing. She and her wife and their Jack Russell mix split their time between Santa Cruz and Hilo, Hawai'i.

Karst's latest Orchid Isle mystery is Murder, Local Style.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

I’m currently reading Fell Murder, by E.C.R. Lorac, the pen name of Edith Caroline Rivett, who was a member (along with Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and G.K. Chesterton) of the prestigious “Detection Club.” First published in 1944, this mystery novel is set in the fells and dales of England not far from the Lake District, and concerns the murder of the patriarch of a family who’d farmed the north country for generations.

What I most love about Fell Murder is the slow pace and detailed descriptions of the tight-knit and insular farming community, the dramatic landscape, and the World War II setting. Reading this book reminds me of how much crime fiction has changed over the years. Time was, slow pace and detailed descriptions were the norm, and readers relished reading the story deliberately and thoughtfully as they tried to outwit the author and sleuth and solve the crime along with them. But of late, it seems mystery novels tend much more towards the fast-paced, with short chapters and action on most every page.

This book reminded me that it’s lovely to slow down when reading a novel and savor the individual words, the accounts of the weather, and the musings of the characters as they ponder their daily life. I think we could all use a little more of this in these complicated and frenetic times.

Visit Leslie Karst’s website.

Coffee with a Canine: Leslie Karst & Ziggy.

My Book, The Movie: The Fragrance of Death.

Q&A with Leslie Karst.

The Page 69 Test: Waters of Destruction.

My Book, The Movie: Waters of Destruction.

Writers Read: Leslie Karst (April 2025).

The Page 69 Test: Murder, Local Style.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael O'Donnell

Michael O’Donnell is the author of the bestselling novel Above the Fire and the new novel Concert Black. In 2023, Apple Books named him a debut writer to watch. His essays and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and many other publications. A longtime member of the National Book Critics Circle, he practiced law in government and the private sector for over twenty years after clerking for a federal judge. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Indiana University and his law degree from Boston College. O’Donnell lives with his family in the Chicago area.

Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. O'Donnell's reply:

I always seem to be reading too many books, evenly divided between fiction and non-fiction. I’m thoroughly enjoying Michael Crummey’s The Adversary, a wonderful novel about a pair of nemesis siblings—a crude, violent brother and a brilliant, amoral sister—living on a remote coast of Newfoundland in the early nineteenth century. I recently found myself traveling without a book to read and its brilliant cover design and sparkling first page jumped out at me in a local bookstore. It reminds me a good deal of Ian McGuire’s The North Water, a remarkable novel from 2016 about physical and spiritual warfare on a whaler during the age of sail.

Crummey has also clearly been influenced by Cormac McCarthy’s prose (“His father was unaccustomed to circumstances that resisted his influence and he swung wildly and uselessly in his strategies to correct the wayward youngster.”) As it happens, I’m just coming to the end of McCarthy’s Suttree—the last of his novels that I’ve read, and also the longest and the funniest. It has taken a while to get through, but I’m glad to have stuck with it, as the final quarter has some of McCarthy’s loveliest writing. I have supplemented the physical book with an excellent audiobook recording narrated by Richard Poe.

I recently finished Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a devastating novel about prisoners of war under Japanese control during World War Two. Flanagan writes with quiet moral force and lovely turns of phrase, and I have read several of his books over the past year.

On the non-fiction side, I recently finished Tom Junod’s extraordinary memoir In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be A Man, which I wrote about for The Wall Street Journal. Junod’s father Lou was as complicated as a character in a Saul Bellow novel, a surging metropolis of outrageous contradictions and pathos. I predict this exceptional book will make several best-of lists at the end of 2026. Finally, I recently finished The Last Kings of Hollywood, by Paul Fischer, a smart and entertaining account of Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas in the 1970s, which I wrote about for The Atlantic.

Finally, I am reading Allison Hoover Bartlett’s The Man Who Loved Books Too Much. As this summary shows, it is for me a cautionary tale.

Visit Michael O'Donnell's website.

Q&A with Michael O'Donnell.

The Page 69 Test: Above the Fire.

Writers Read: Michael O'Donnell (December 2023).

The Page 69 Test: Concert Black.

--Marshal Zeringue

D.W. Buffa

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on The Education of Henry Adams:

Written in 1905, The Education of Henry Adams was printed in a private edition of one hundred copies, limited, perhaps, to that number because it was thought to be as large an audience as it was likely to command. Adams explains at the very beginning the somewhat unusual ambition he had for the book.

“American literature offers scarcely one working model for high education…. Except in the abandoned sphere of the dead languages, no one has discussed what part of education has, in his personal experience, turned out to be useful, and what not. This volume attempts to discuss it.”

Five hundred pages later, in a chapter entitled, “The Abyss of Ignorance,” Adams tells us what he had hoped his education would teach him and why this was a necessary sequel to something else he had written. The century 1150-1250, expressed in Amiens Cathedral and the Works of Thomas Aquinas, was, he believed, “the unit from which he might measure down to his own time, without assuming anything as true or untrue, except relation.” He had written Mont Saint Michel: a study of thirteenth-century unity so that he could, from that point, “fix a position for himself, which he would label: The Education of Henry Adams: a study of twentieth-century multiplicity. With the help of these two points of relation, he hoped to project his line forward and backward indefinitely, subject to correction from anyone who should know better.” Adams was serious. This was not some generalized scheme of historical movement; he had something quite specific in mind: to trace, to “triangulate,” not just the movement, the “acceleration of movement in politics since the year 1200, as he was trying to fix it in philosophy and physics; in finance and force.”

Born on February 2, 1838, Adams had more than the ordinary chances of acquiring the education he needed. His great-grandfather, John Adams, and his grandfather, John Quincy Adams, had both been President, and his father, Charles Francis Adams, was the American minister to England during the Civil War. Henry Adams, however, was never to have anything like the same kind of career. “As it happened he never got to the point of playing the game at all; he lost himself in the study of it….” It was not because he was a particularly good student. He hated school, “and the prejudice became deeper with years. He always reckoned his school-days from ten to sixteen years old, as time thrown away.” There were, really, only four things he thought he needed to know: Mathematics, French, German, and Spanish. “With these he could master in very short time any special branch of inquiry, and feel at home in any society.” It is a mark of how much has changed in what we mean by education, that Adams added, “Latin and Greek, he could, with the help of the modern languages, learn more completely by the intelligent work of six weeks than in the six years he spent on them at school.”

After the wasted years of ten to sixteen, Adams wasted four more at Harvard. Looking back on it, he could only shake his head. “The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.” For its part, Harvard, which was then a school of only a handful of teachers and a few dozen students, was “probably less hurtful than any other university then in existence. It taught little, and that little ill, but it left the mind open, free from bias, ignorant of facts, but docile.” When he graduated, the only thing he felt certain about was that “Education has not begun.”

Adams voted for Lincoln in the election of 1860 and finally learned something worth knowing. While no one wanted civil war, or expected it, “Southern secessionists were certainly unbalanced in mind,” and “were stupendously ignorant of the world. Cotton-planters were mentally one-sided, ill-balanced and provincial to a degree rarely known. They were a close society whom the new fountains of power had poured a stream of wealth and slaves that acted like oil on flame.” This, for Adams, was “his first object-lesson of the way in which excess of power worked when held by inadequate hands.” Ignorance was not confined to the South; there was never so much of it as in Washington in the winter of 1860-61. “The few people who thought they knew something were more in error than those who knew nothing.” No one wanted it, but the war came and his father was chosen by Lincoln to become minister to England. Henry Adams went with him as his private secretary.

It was history repeating itself, as Charles Francis Adams understood. He remembered how his grandfather, John Adams, had taken his eleven-year-old son, John Quincy, when he sailed for Europe in the winter of 1778 during the American Revolution, a voyage that often took eighty days; and how his father, John Quincy, had taken him, as a baby of two years, to Russia when Napoleon was about to invade it. When they arrived in England, Henry Adams “supposed himself, as one of the members of a famous anti-slavery family, to be welcome everywhere in the British islands.” But not long after he arrived, “England recognized the belligerency of the Confederacy,” and taught Adams that power had loyalty only to itself. No one “doubted that Jefferson Davis had made or would make a nation. Nearly all were glad of it, though not often saying so.” They thought it a good thing if the South won the war: a Southern victory would diminish the power of a country that had become, at least potentially, a “dangerous power.” After the Union defeat at Bull Run, everyone in England, everyone in Europe, expected the American legation in London to close. Adams was not surprised, “Familiar as the whole tribe of Adamses had been for three generations with the impenetrable stupidity of the British mind….”

Adams did learn something of lasting value. “Then, at last, if never before, Adams acquired education. What he had sought so long, he found; but he was none the wiser, only the more astonished.” He met Algernon Swinburne. No one now remembers Algernon Swinburne; it is doubtful his name is listed as anything more than a footnote among the English writers mentioned in American textbooks on English literature, but according to a high British authority at the beginning of the twentieth century, “The service which Swinburne rendered the English language as a vehicle for lyrical effect is simply incalculable. He revolutionized the entire scheme of English prosody.” More than what Swinburne did, it was what Swinburne was that made him irresistible. “The effect of his artistic personality was in itself intoxicating, even delirious.” He had that effect on Adams, and everyone else who was gathered around the table where they had dinner. No one could “believe his incredible memory and knowledge of literature, classic, medieval and modern; his faculty of reciting a play of Sophocles or a play of Shakespeare, forward or backward, from end to beginning; or Dante or Villon, or Victor Hugo….” He could “write a Greek Ode for a Provencal Chanson as easily as an English quatrain.” Adams was mesmerized. “The idea that one has actually met a genius dawns slowly on a Boston mind, but it made entry at last.”

When the war was over, when the Union had won and Lincoln had been assassinated, Adams stayed longer in Europe and became a writer for the North American Review. Though it had a circulation of only three or four hundred copies, it was the leading American literary periodical. An article required three months work, and paid not more than five dollars a page. “Not many men even in England and France could write a good thirty page article, and practically no one in America read them; but a few score of people, mostly in search of items to steal, ran over the pages to extract an idea or a fact….” Having acquired a reputation as a writer, Adams returned to the United States in 1868 and lived in Washington where he began an annual political review. Washington “was rural, and its society was primitive.” In twenty-four hours, “he could know everybody; in two days everyone knew him.” There was no competition; he had the field to himself. “With his sources of information and his several intimacies at Washington, he could not help saying something that would command attention.” Among other things he wrote, he wrote about President Grant.

Everyone voted for Grant in the election of l868, or at least four-fifths of them, and did it because of “the parallel they felt between Grant and Washington.” Both had been great generals; both, being soldiers, represented order. Grant had organized and commanded half a million, or a million, men in the field; he had to know how to administer a government. But then Grant named his cabinet, men so mediocre, so unqualified, so corrupt, that it changed Adams’ “intended future into an absurdity so laughable as to make him ashamed of it.” A friend of Adams who had served under Grant in the war, described him as “an intermittent energy, immensely powerful when awake, but passive and plastic in repose…. The intellect counted for nothing.” Grant taught a lesson to Adams, a lesson that threatened all hope. “The idea that, as society grew older, it grew one-sided, upset evolution, and made of education a fraud. That two thousand years after Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, a man like Grant could be called - and should actually and truly be - the highest product of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous. One must be as commonplace as Grant’s own commonplace to maintain such an absurdity. The progress from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.” There was corruption everywhere, and every intelligent man in government prepared to leave. “The system of 1789 had broken down, and with it the eighteenth century fabric of a priori, or moral principles.”

Several chapters after Adams had written this, he entitled a chapter, chapter twenty-one, “Twenty Years After.” The story of his education has a gap, twenty years, about which he says only, “Education was ended in 1871; life was complete in 1890; the rest mattered so little.” Adams never explains what this means; those who knew him did not need to be told. In 1872 Adams married; in 1885, his wife, Clover, committed suicide. The missing years of education were years of happiness, and then years of tragedy, that taught him everything he wanted, or needed, to know. Happy or heart-broken, he had not stopped working, writing about the most serious things in American history. While his friend, John Hay, who had been one of Lincoln’s two White House assistants, had spent ten years writing his life of Lincoln, Adams had spent close to a dozen years writing his history of Jefferson and Madison. They had, between them, “written nearly all the American history that was to write.”

At the end of the nineteenth century, it had become obvious to Adams that energy had given a new definition to power; that power in its new form was rapidly getting beyond the possibility of control; that the machine was taking over. Adams called this The Law of Acceleration. Between 1800 and 1900, the coal output of the world had doubled every ten years. “An immense volume of force had detached itself from the unknown universe of energy, while still vaster reservoirs, supposed to be infinite, steadily revealed themselves….” At the rate of progress since 1800, Adams concluded, “every American who lived into the year 2000 would know how to control unlimited power.” The effects were not always what might have been desired. “Prosperity never before imagined, power never yet wielded by man, speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid.” The government created by the Founding Fathers, designed to “neutralize the energy of government,” was not equipped to work in “a 20-million h.p. society, where much work needed to be quickly and efficiently done.” Then President McKinley was assassinated and power took on a whole new meaning.

The effect of power, Adams had learned, was on all men “the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.” The effect of power on Presidents had larger consequences. It “had always been tragic, chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first and the worse reaction afterwards; but also because no mind is so well-balanced as to bear the strain of seizing unlimited force without habit or knowledge of it…” The case was proven by Teddy Roosevelt. “All Roosevelt’s friends knew that his restless and combative energy was more than abnormal. Roosevelt, more than any other man living within the range of notoriety, showed the singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter, - a quality that medieval theology assigns to God, - he was pure act.” The effect of power on Presidents, “the effect of unlimited power on limited mind,” was also seen in the men who had come to control the “masses of power,” the great corporations and industrial trusts that had come to dominate the American economy and give shape to much of American life. They were, in Adams’ judgment, “forces as dumb as their dynamos, absorbed in the development or economy of power.”

The question Adams is left with was whether there is “a necessary sequence of human movement.” The mere sequence of time is artificial; the sequence of thought, chaos. He had turned to the sequence of force, and found himself, “in the Gallery of Machines in the Great Exposition of 1900, with his historical neck broken by the sudden eruption of force totally new.” And then he remembered the year 1200, when the Virgin, the Virgin Mary, and not the Dynamo, was the moving force in the world; when it was understood that “sex was strength.” Goddesses were not worshipped for their beauty; the Virgin was “Goddess because of her force; she was the animated dynamo; she was reproduction - the most mysterious of all energies; all she needed was to be fecund.” This was education. “On one side, at the Louvre and at Chartres…was the highest energy ever known to man, the creation of four-fifths of his noblest art, exercising vastly more attraction over the human mind than all the steam-engines and dynamos ever dreamed of; and yet this energy was unknown to the American mind.”

What then of the question of sequence? The power of the Dynamo, the power, the energy, of the modern age, now appears more a decline than an advance; a power that has made those who have it as dumb as their dynamos, or as excitable, and even insane, as those who, holding high office, attempted to use it. Is the sequence, the history from the thirteenth to the twentieth century, an education that, at the end, teaches nothing so much as the necessity of going back to learn what those who lived in the thirteenth century knew that we have forgotten? Adams does not tell us. Instead, he has given us the history he entitled: Mont Saint Michel and Chartres: a study in thirteenth-century unity. It is up to us to decide whether, like Henry Adams, we are still in need of an education of our own.

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered; Père Goriot; The Remarkable Edmund Burke; The Novels of W.H. Hudson; America Revised; The City And Man; "The Use And Abuse Of History"; I, Claudius; The Closing of The American Mind; History of Rome; Before The Deluge; Herodotus's Histories.

--Marshal Zeringue

Helen Benedict

Helen Benedict, a British-American professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of nine novels, six books of nonfiction, and a play.

Her new novel is The Soldier's House.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Benedict's reply:

Like so many people these days, I feel overwhelmed and distressed by the many injustices crowding in on us, from the wars in the Middle East to the dismantling of the natural world, the destruction of our environment, the persecution of immigrants and Latinos, and the deriding of science and fact. I could go on.

So I recently retreated to rereading my favorite novel in the world: Middlemarch, by George Eliot, only to find that she was writing about all the same things a century and a half ago. The way hypocrisy and lies destroy people, including the hypocrites and liars. The evils of greed and destruction. The consequences of unkindness and selfishness. The healing qualities of kindness and reason. Eliot describes all this with irony, satire and yet great affection for her characters, or at least for those who are not wholly irredeemable. I do believe Middlemarch is one of the wisest, and funniest, books ever written in the English language.

Visit Helen Benedict's website.

My Book, The Movie: Sand Queen.

The Page 69 Test: Sand Queen.

The Page 69 Test: Wolf Season.

Q&A with Helen Benedict.

The Page 69 Test: The Good Deed.

My Book, The Movie: The Soldier's House.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alex Ritany

Alex Ritany is a nonbinary Canadian artist, musician, and author of Dead Girls Don't Say Sorry, I Wish You Wouldn't, and Maybe Tomorrow I’ll Know.

Recently I asked the author about what they were reading. Ritany's reply:

For fiction:

Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells

I’m working away at the Murderbot series whenever my library has copies for me. At the moment I have just finished the first one, and it absolutely lived up to the hype. I love “robot” fiction and this take on consciousness and duty was absolutely fascinating. Plus Murderbot’s sense of humour is just awesome. I’ve had this recommended to me countless times, and honestly put off reading for so long only because I knew I’d be completely obsessed whenever I did pick it up (and I was right!), and I can’t wait to explore the rest of Wells’ work.

Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi

Anything Frankenstein is an automatic win in our house, so I knew I’d like this book even before I’d picked it up. So far it’s not disappointing me! It tackles very different themes than its namesake, but I love what this author is doing with layers of narration and exposition. It’s a more distant POV than I usually favour and the story can feel quite scattered at times, but I’m only about halfway through, so I look forward to seeing how it resolves.

For nonfiction:

Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane

This book is a deeply empathetic and informative look into the titular question: Is a river alive? Does a river have rights? What deep significance do rivers have throughout history, and what can we learn from them? It’s got absolutely gorgeous prose and features one of my favourite musicians, Cosmo Sheldrake, which was a fun surprise. I’m about a third of the way through and have a feeling that this will be one of my top nonfiction reads of the year!

Visit Alex Ritany's website.

Q&A with Alex Ritany.

The Page 69 Test: Maybe Tomorrow I'll Know.

--Marshal Zeringue