The centerpieces of this are, of course, the Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, both of which stand the test of time as well as any seasonal tales I’ve read. I go back to these every year and have read them aloud to my children more than once. Disney’s animated Ichabod and Mr. Toad does a pretty respectable job of bringing Sleepy Hollow to life; in my view it’s probably the best adaptation of the tale, complete with Bing Crosby crooning and narrating his way through.
The entire Sketch-book is quite worth reading; it includes some great Christmas tales, as well, and some ghost stories, essays, and tales of a trip to England, all told by the good humored, erudite narrator, Mr. Diedrich Knickerbocker.
Rip Van Winkle is such an amusing story, and I am particularly struck by how poor hen-pecked Rip doesn’t miss a beat, or his wife, when returning from his two decadeslumber in the Kaatskills, though he is surprised to learn there has been a revolution. Diedrich states humorously: “Rip, in fact, was no politician; the changes of states and empires made but little impression on him; but there was one species of despotism under which he had long groaned, and that was–petticoat government. Happily, that was at an end; he had got his neck out of the yoke of matrimony, and could go in and out whenever he pleased, without dreading the tyranny of Dame Van Winkle.” He happily returns to a life of idleness and lives with his now grown daughter.
Sleepy Hollow has become such a part of American culture that it would feel wrong to not read it every fall, at some point. Several years ago, I made a pilgrimage to Sunnyside, Irving’s home near the town, which I highly recommend. Irving was one of America’s first professional authors, and well-known in his lifetime as such. It is fun to visit his estate in the fall. There are some great guided tours and events each weekend for children. The nearby cemetery, where he was laid to rest, is also worth a visit.
What strikes me most about reading this tale is the humor of it, and the tongue in cheek manner Irving uses. It’s a lively tale that feels modern; to me its no wonder Irving found such a ready audience for his writing. I highly recommend reading it and the rest of the Sketch-book this fall.
I first read Young Goodman Brown in high school and recall being puzzled by it. Hawthorne’s prose was perhaps a bit too dense for me, as I suspect it was for most of my ninth grade English class. But there was something unsettling about it, and I returned to it again and again through the years. Eventually, Hawthorne became one of my favorite writers, but it was an acquired taste.
We’re in the Puritan village of Salem; the tale was written in 1835 but Hawthorne is reaching back to the witch trials of 1692-93. The story seems straightforward. Young Goodman Brown leaves his wife, Faith, to go out on some ‘evil purpose,’ against her wishes. He travels past the town meeting house in Salem Village, and Hawthorne sets a foreboding tone:
“It was all as lonely as could be; and there is this peculiarity in such a solitude, that the traveller knows not who may be concealed by the innumerable trunks and the thick boughs overhead; so that, with lonely footsteps, he may yet be passing through an unseen multitude.”
“What if the devil himself should be at my very elbow!” Brown remarks, as he continues on his way. He meets others from the village on his path, including a man who is older than him, around age fifty, but who looks just like him, and remarks in a very matter of fact way that he had done terrible things with Young Goodman Brown’s grandfather:
“I helped your grandfather, the constable, when he lashed the Quaker woman so smartly through the streets of Salem. And it was I that brought your father a pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own hearth, to set fire to an Indian village, in King Philip’s War. They were my good friends, both; and many a pleasant walk have we had along this path, and returned merrily after midnight. I would fain be friends with you, for their sake.” The stranger goes on to say that he is acquainted will the deacon, the governor, and other elders of the town. This shakes Brown’s understanding of his own family and village, leaving him quite unsettled.
This stunning section ramps up the tension until Brown hears the voice of his wife, Faith, and is distraught that she is in the woods. He arrives at a clearing where all the village is assembled; he and Faith are to be initiated in a ceremony, binding them to the devil. He calls out to Faith that she must resist and “look up to heaven,” at which point the villagers disappear.
Brown is unsure whether the entire story was a dream, but it bewilders him to the point that “A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man, did he become, from the night of that fearful dream.” Hawthorne’s final sentence is: “And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave, a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children and grand-children, a goodly procession, besides neighbors, not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone; for his dying hour was gloom.”
It may not be entirely fashionable today to believe in good and evil or supernatural powers, but this story still leaves me unsettled. The idea that your friends and neighbors, or your entire conception of the world, may be totally wrong, is something no one wants to admit. But the devil is right there in the story, cheerfully informing Brown that his father committed atrocities, that his grandfather enthusiastically persecuted his neighbors, and that Brown himself is on friendly terms with evil. Everyone in Salem is implicated; the story takes place during the Witch trials, at which Hawthorne’s own grandfather was a judge, making this tale even more grim.
There are no easy interpretations or answers in this tale. Brown lives the rest of his days haunted by his knowledge. There’s no redemption for him from God, or from anyone else, even his beloved Faith.
Hawthorne wrote plenty more in this vein: A Scarlet Letter, The House of Seven Gables, and numerous stories, and all of them leave me with this same feeling of helplessness in the face of evil. They’re also incredible to read, with the stylized, romantic prose adding to the sense of gloom and mystery.
I am not sure of Hawthorne is still taught in high schools, but he ought to be. This is one of the best short stories you’ll ever read, one that has stayed with me in the three and a half decades since I first encountered it.
October has long been my favorite month. I love Christmas, too, as well as every other holiday that affords me time to spend with my children. But there’s always been something special about October 31. As a child, I knew Halloween was a night devoted to kids, where magical things happened, where you had a bit of independence to go out with friends and have a grand time. The costumes, the folklore, the changing of the seasons, all add warmth and wonder to this grand day. My own children have enabled me to experience these feelings again. It is so fun enjoying the fall with them: decorating the house, creating costumes, getting ready. The anticipation of it, the colors and sounds and stories, are almost better than the day itself.
The stories are the things that really animate it for me. The list of writers I admire in this season is almost endless, but it begins somewhere around Shakespeare and continues into the present. Shelley, Poe, Hawthorne, Stoker, Lovecraft, Jackson, Bradbury—my list goes on and on. The only thing that stops me from reading all these authors constantly is lack of time.
This October, time permitting, I intend to have a project on this blog, where I write some thoughts about some of my very favorite tales in the genre. I can’t promise I’ll do so every day, though that is the goal. Certainly, I’ll do a post weekly, or every couple of days. These posts aren’t meant to be comprehensive, scholarly, or to offer some kind of profound critique. It’s mostly just for me, to write up thoughts and impressions and appreciation of these tales that affected me: why I like them so much, how they work, why I have such affection for them, in that vein. Hopefully I’ll add to the catalog throughout the year, with other seasonal tales. Maybe some readers out there feel the same way about some of these stories. My hope is to document some of my very favorite books and stories, and perhaps turn some readers out there onto some tales they may have overlooked, or never heard of. There are a great number of unappreciated stories out there that ought to have more attention, in my view.
So, I’ll see how it goes. If you’re a like minded reader, I hope you join in the fun by commenting or offering your own thoughts.
I’ll probably begin early, before October 1, with some other seasonal type stories to get started. I’ll throw in some children’s stories that I’ve been reading with my family as well.
I’ll post more soon. I hope those reading this enjoy the season. I plan to be outside as much as possible in the next six weeks, to enjoy the beauty of fall, before it gets too cold and the leaves are gone.
A curious thing happened today: I received a memo about policy regarding generative AI that the author admitted was partially written by generative AI. We must use it ethically, I’m told. It’s unclear to me how you ethically use an unethical monster. Using it sounds more to me like theft and plagiarism.
Generative AI is simply a tool, say its proponents, no more and no less. It requires copyrighted works for its ‘training’, but its creators, well, they just don’t feel like getting permission or paying for the rights to use the works, since–get this–it would just be too much trouble.
So if it’s a tool, then it’s one that was created by ruthless, conscience-free scum who have pirated millions of words in copyright, not to mention thousands of copyrighted works of art. All those hours of work, and all those lives, steamrolled like they’re nothing. It’s sickening, and I hate to dwell on it, but it seems the situation will only get worse as time goes on.
Even if generative AI had been created ethically and with good intentions, which it surely was not, what damage is it doing to those who outsource all their thinking to such machines? According to the soon to be defunct Department of Education, 54% of adults in the US read below a sixth grade level. Do you think this abysmal number will improve now that we’ve created these machines to do all our reading and thinking for us?
It is hard to be optimistic about where all this is ultimately headed. I look to the future and see people even dumber and worse than the current administration running things. It’s such a sorry state of affairs that it often feels to me that all we can do is take care of our families and hold a candle against the dark.
We saw the Naked Gun tonight. My kids loved it. So we have that. Comedy is important, and we had a good laugh. No one can replace Leslie Nielsen, but Liam Neeson is very funny, and it was the perfect antidote for the times. I loved the old series and I wholeheartedly recommend this new version and hope it does well. There aren’t enough good comedies out there. Lord knows we all need to laugh more often. It’s one of the few ways I have to tune out all the bad news.
The 2025 Poughkeepsie Children’s Book Festival was a huge success. Many thanks to both the Merritt Bookstore and the Poughkeepsie Public Library, who worked tirelessly to put on a great event. It was really heartening to see so many enthusiastic children and young adults. They’re the next generation of readers and the future of our world, and they need our support.
Many thanks to all the people I met, and to those who bought books from me and the more than 100 authors who were there. My children had a great time, met some authors, and came home with lots of great stuff to read. I hope by next year’s event I’ll have another book to bring with me.
In the last installment of The King of Dogwood Street, (a comedy of good, evil, and home improvement), Billy Joe had a day of reckoning when the police showed up to put an end to his drunken property destruction.
In chapter three, he and his dimwitted buddy, Travis, are in the town lockup trying to figure out where it all went wrong. Will they escape? What charges might they face? Will they drive their arresting officer crazy? And will Billy ever overcome his hangover? Read on to find out!
Yesterday I saw an ad for a company that promises to publish eight thousand (yes, you read that right) books next year using the power of AI. I won’t link to their page because if you’re reading this, you have probably seen it, or something about it, and if you have not I don’t wish to give the tech bros behind it any more traffic, slight as it may be from this unseen corner of the internet. Even so, I feel I must write something about this, because it enraged me so much to see it.
This company promises to cut down production times for a book from the usual 12-18 months to a few weeks. How? You might ask. I’ll tell you: they will do a horrible job of it and flood the market with unreadable trash. What truly sets these guys apart is the way they’ll steal from aspiring authors and turn out a lousy product, while happily saying they’re ‘tech disruptors’ without a shred of self-awareness or irony. They’re immensely proud of themselves and their predatory business model.
This brings me to the larger problem of AI in general, which we are constantly told is a wondrous new tool, an inevitability, a technology that will transform everything.
Why is this tech inevitable? Well, our tech overlords say so. They are never wrong, of course, and all their innovations have done nothing but improve our lives. Just look around—isn’t everything great? We have access to more information than at any point in human history, and the world is a veritable paradise, with only the wisest, kindest, most learned people in charge everywhere.
In my view, AI writing tools produce junk. If you want to use it to produce your own special brand of garbage, have at it. “But it’s a tool!” you protest. “Same as a wrench or a bicycle! It will make everything better.” Yes, everything will improve, except your ability to write and think clearly, your ability to read and understand information. It will not help this at all. In fact, it will likely do immense harm to these skills. It’s a plagiarism machine, trained unethically to churn out generic awfulness. But hey, it does it very quickly, and with minimal effort. Just dump in a few prompts, and call it a day.
Right now, higher education is in a race to see who can adapt to these AI machines quickest. Never mind the effect it may have on learning, they’ll just use it. We’re about to turn universities over to tech companies. And why shouldn’t we? What does it matter if people are educated and humane, so long as profits are healthy?
And in another generation, some other whiz bang tech developer will come along peddling some other kind of junk, and once again every education administrator in the land will get in the marching band and beat the drum for it, no matter what it may be.
Who cares what students are learning, anyway, except a few oddball humanities people who still actually read books, which are obsolete, dusty artifacts that any machine can produce in just a few minutes.
One of my fondest, most primal memories of childhood is being up late in the summertime, reading a good book, while everyone else in our busy house was asleep. There were so many novels I enjoyed back then, and I read indiscriminately, for the pure joy of being lost in a fantastic new world.
There were many great series for young people back in the early 1980s, and I read many of them. The Hardy Boys, The Black Stallion, Matt Christopher’s sports stories, Encyclopedia Brown the boy detective, Danny Dunn, a boy wonder who created all kinds of machines with his pals, and on and on. There were some great works of literature too, like Madeline L’Engle’s A Wind in the Door, Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer Detective, Ray Bradbury and The Martian Chronicles, and others. Today I can see how much more sophisticated these last three are, but as a young boy I didn’t care about their literary merit, I just wanted to read.
To read as a nine year old meant getting lost in another world that seemed so real I became irritated when my mundane surroundings intruded. It meant an escape into magic and mystery and wonder, into past eras that seemed completely real, as if I were suddenly in a time machine, transported to colonial era America, or King Arthur’s Court. Perhaps I’d go to a distant strange planet, or an isolated pacific island, or any other a million different times and places. There was nothing so wonderful in the world as being lost in those pages, many millions of miles away from wherever I was and whatever was happening around me in my little corner of the world.
I’m now fifty, and very occasionally this magnificent feeling will come over me again when I’m reading a truly great, original book. It seems to happen less and less these days; perhaps that is a failure of imagination on my part, or perhaps it just happens with age. After you’ve read so many books, they cannot all have that glorious impact, and many of them will seem merely adequate. I’ll say that in the past few months, Ron Chernow’s Hamilton was a biography that transported me to the early days of America in a way that was quite breathtaking; I don’t normally read a lot of history, but he is such a fine writer, telling the story of the founder in such an empathetic way, that I was swept up in the drama of it and couldn’t wait to read more.
Novels are a different matter, and as I’ve read so many of them, it has become harder for me to find ones I truly love, that affect my outlook so dramatically, that can transport me in that same primal way. Susanna Clarke’s writing does that for me, and I recall a well-spent winter evening not long ago, when I was up through the night, finding revelations on every page of her incredible book, Piranesi, which I finished in one sitting. I can’t recommend her work highly enough, and I was ecstatic to learn she has a new novel arriving this fall.
In this hyper-connected age, it is increasingly difficult to shut out the outside world and enter the fortress of mystery and imagination that is a great reading experience. I read whenever I can, as much as I can, but with the demands of a job and a family it’s not always easy. I’ll stay up late at night when I’m not too tired, or read when I have downtime on the train or before the rest of my family is up. I guard my reading time jealously, just like when I was a boy, and get frustrated sometimes when there isn’t enough time or quiet for me to read every novel or work of history or criticism on my shelves. My collection is wide and varied–I have books on a great many topics, because I am never sure which one I will need at any given moment. This is one of the great things about being a librarian, as well: if I don’t have it on my shelves at home, I can almost certainly find what I need in the library.
I enjoy movies, though I’m not exactly a movie critic. I have found that films, television and video games don’t transport me the way a good book does. Maybe some people find the same elation and deep mystery watching things or playing video games, but it doesn’t happen for me. I can enjoy such media, but it won’t impact me in the same way, and while I don’t know for certain, I suspect that the effort required of a careful, thoughtful reader will always make the reward of reading that much greater. To me, it’s a bit like the difference between hiking to the top of a mountain and taking in the view, as opposed to having someone drive you up there on a paved road. (The same can be said for writing vs. AI-assisted writing, but that is the topic for some other post.)
One of the essential things about reading is the way it can change your perceptions, your outlook, your knowledge of the world, and perhaps even knowledge of yourself. The greatest works help us do this and will enrich your life in ways like nothing else. For me, reading a great book is one of the last bulwarks I have in guarding my mind from a ceaseless stream of meaningless junk that increasingly defines modern life.
The other night my young daughter, who is brilliant and perfect, happened upon the Twilight Zone episode, “Time Enough at Last,” with the great Burgess Meredith. I hesitated to show it to her, but she was eager to see it and I relented. At the end, she was in tears for Henry Bemis, the tortured man who lives through an atomic war only to be left utterly alone, despondent, bereft of all hope, sans spectacles. “I hate this,” she said. “He was finally able to read and now he can’t.” I felt like an awful father for having shown her the episode. We talked a bit about the message of the show but she was inconsolable, much like I was decades ago when I first saw it.
In these waning days of summer, I admit I feel some pressure to read what I haven’t from my list so far, but my task shall be Herculean. I have a copy of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, which I have never read and will likely not get to before the end of August. I have works by Saul Bellow, Robert Caro, Don DeLillo, Tim Powers, Toni Morrison, Barbara Tuchman, Octavia Butler, and too many others to list sitting on my shelves, waiting to be opened, calling to me, but time is running out. I’ll get to a few of them, and the rest will likely need to wait for winter break, or next summer, when I will have time enough at last.
There has been so much written on Hamilton that I can’t add a whole lot here, except to say that I would not delay on reading Ron Chernow’s masterful biography of the man. Just a brilliant book, combining voluminous research with engaging, lively writing. Hamilton’s life story lends itself to such an epic scope, and I can see why it has captivated so many. It’s not often someone rises from absolutely nothing to the highest levels of fame and power.
Whatever your thoughts on Hamilton, whatever you already know about him, I would give my highest recommendation to Chernow’s book. A few years back I read his Grant biography, which was a similar tour-de-force, and kept me so eager to read more, despite its massive size.
I’m looking for other summer things to read, and am eyeing Chernow’s Washington, which won the Pultizer in 2011. I may have to dive into that next. Such a fine writer, really doing a great public service by helping us better understand these early years of our country.
My summer reading list is large and always too ambitious. I have a few other big ones I might read, will have to see what strikes my fancy. But I was considering Pynchon’s Against the Day, which I’ve never read, as well as some other history books (I recently got Bruce Catton’s civil war trilogy) and a few fantasy novels. As always, there are so many great things to read, and so little time!
Christopher Tuthill 