The Mill On The Floss – George Eliot, 1860 ★★★½

A Current Affair

A great novel doesn’t have to be a fun read. In fact, a case can be made that a certain amount of reader pain is required for any literary masterpiece to be properly appreciated.

But what can you say about a book that focuses on not one, not two, but three coincidences that are each ridiculous and painful in equal measure, all of them involving the river that figures in the second half of this novel’s title?

Don’t work or live on a river if you can at all help it, I guess.

Suez To Singapore – Cecil Brown, 1942 ★★★½

Making Waves, On and Off the Air

When the H. M. S. Repulse was sunk by Japanese aircraft near Singapore less than a week after the Pearl Harbor attacks, not everyone was happy American journalist Cecil Brown was one of its survivors.

The news correspondent for CBS Radio had made plenty of enemies in Singapore, including its British commander, Lt. Gen. Arthur Percival. The officer in charge of Percival’s press office made himself conspicuous by his cold silence when Brown reported back to duty.

My Twenty-five Years In Fleetwood Mac – Mick Fleetwood, 1992 ★★½

Looking Back at "Twenty-five Years," 25 Years Later

Windsor, England is home to Great Britain’s Royal Family; half a century ago it spawned rock royalty, too. Sunday, August 13, 2017 will mark the 50^th anniversary of the debut on a Windsor stage of a blues quartet that became a pop sensation and finally a cultural institution.

Let’s jump back halfway from that auspicious day to 1992, and the publication of this scrapbook-style memoir marking the 25^th anniversary of that band, Fleetwood Mac.

The March – E. L. Doctorow, 2005 ★★½

Trudging through Georgia

The American Civil War remains a touchstone for understanding what it means to be American. Whether it’s race and regionalism, human rights and civil liberties or westward expansion and technological progress, everything that makes America American runs through the Civil War like a teeming railroad junction or the mighty Mississipp.

No wonder so many American fiction writers take a shot at writing about it.