I read oodles of science fiction stories authored in the second half of the 20th century that involved interstellar travel, but the reality is that we never managed to get anyone beyond Earth orbit after 1972, and arguably even the dozen men who briefly walked on the moon were still orbiting the Earth. Only five robot spacecraft have interstellar trajectories, and they won’t be exiting our Oort cloud for tens of millennia. Physics tells me that nothing material can exceed the speed of light, so many sci-fi stories are just a form of fantasy.
I was an avid fan of the original Star Trek and The Next Generation, but the cultural momentum built up in childhood that carried me through Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise was dissipated by the friction of my increasing skepticism, and I haven’t been able to muster any enthusiasm for the later series. In recent years I read a few still-active sci-fi authors, such as Alastair Reynolds and Becky Chambers, but I’m increasingly uninterested in stories that ignore physics or pretend there are workarounds to its limitations. As for cinema, many movies are now crafted by people who obviously grew up on video games, and the suspension of disbelief their computer-generated spectacles require is often simply beyond me.
There are still plenty of science fiction stories that take place within our solar system, however, and during the Covid-19 pandemic, I discovered the Bookpilled channel where Matt, a liberal arts major, offers thoughtful and insightful reviews of science fiction works. I respect his opinion, although we inevitably differ in our tastes, evidenced by how recently on Patreon he absolutely hated Niven’s Ringworld, which was one of my teenage favorites.
I am glad to support Matt on Patreon, as he approaches the genre from a more literary perspective and exposes me to many potential new reads, which is helpful since I am now so resistant to much of science fiction. He sometimes takes on classics from the major authors of my childhood, but he ranges widely across 20th century sci-fi.
This was a harsh but memorable read
Back in May 2023, Matt reviewed D.G. Compton’s Farewell, Earth’s Bliss from 1966. He described it as one of the bleakest books he had ever read, with “wonderfully sharp and crystalline and well-realized characters” and being truly immersive. I was sufficiently intrigued to purchase and read the book, and it was as he had described. I certainly didn’t find it a pleasant read, but it was memorable and worthwhile.
In December 2023 he reviewed an even more obscure book, One on Me by Tim Huntley. He said it was a funny and well-written dystopia set on the Earth in a distant future, but significantly flawed by its inclusion of forbidden relations. Matt said, “I don’t know that I recommend it. If you can just hold your nose and plug your ears for a couple parts, it is a good book, but I don’t know if you should.”
The book is certainly not well known. I found only one review online, by Kenny in north Texas from 2019, and he opened with a paragraph of complaints about its objectionable elements, condemning it as “vulgar and gross”. However, he then echoed Matt by stating, “Despite all that, there is a compelling story.”
My “banned” book
Well, that was enough to interest me. The book wasn’t available electronically, so I bought a used paperback copy on Amazon for $7, and if Amazon had not had a copy, I would have checked AbeBooks. I received it in early January and tossed it on a shelf.
Seventeen months later, finding the various possible reads in my Kindle library unappealing, I scanned my shelves and noticed that 221-page DAW paperback published in 1980. I vaguely recalled that it was considered off-putting, it didn’t appear to involve impossible interstellar travel, and since it happened to be Banned Books Week, I decided to read it.
My used copy had been embossed on its title page as having once been in the library of George H. Siehl III, and I had some fun tracking down who that was.
Going beyond the title page, I was thankful to discover that there was little detail in the novel’s treatment of disturbing relations, and they did serve a purpose in showing how different the dystopian culture was from our sensibilities, an effective illustration of the decadence of both sides in a later conflict. A bit of earthy humor about the narrator also struck me as far more comedic than offensive. It lacked the explicit intercourse that graces some trashy romances, but it certainly mentioned unfortunate sexual behavior, torture, and the like. I was glad to find those topics handled fairly quickly and at a remove; the book didn’t strike me as seeking to titillate.
Donald A. Wollheim
The disturbing elements actually served the plot, which made sense to me since the book was published by DAW in 1980, when founder Donald A. Wollheim was still in charge. He was one of the major science fiction and fantasy editors, publishing pulp authors Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and H.P. Lovecraft in the 1930s and later nurturing future greats like Poul Anderson, Philip K. Dick, and Andre Norton at Avon and Ace Books before creating his own imprint.
A fun story about Wollheim was how he called up J.R.R. Tolkien in 1964 to ask if he could publish Lord of the Rings as Ace paperbacks. Tolkien reportedly said he would never allow his work to appear in so “degenerate a form”. That is said to have incensed Wollheim, who discovered that Tolkien’s American hardcover publisher had neglected to protect the work in the USA, so he went ahead and published them as unauthorized Ace paperbacks.
Tolkien rewrote the books enough to obtain a new copyright, sold them to Ballantine, and successfully pressured Ace to stop publishing the unauthorized versions and pay him some royalties on the 100,000+ copies they had sold. The squabble helped ignite the Tolkien boom and launch the modern high fantasy field, but it also damaged Wollheim’s reputation.
The unauthorized Ace editions of The Lord of the Rings are now collectors’ items
I have a soft sport for Ace paperbacks. When I was a young teenager, one of my uncles gifted me his science fiction paperbacks, which included several of the Ace doubles. The tête-bêche format books published from 1952 to 1973 each contained two novellas, with the front cover and interior of one novella rotated by 180 degrees and bound back-to-back with the front cover and interior of the other. That way neither novella is preferred, and if you buy one and end up abandoning it, you can always flip the book around and try again. I suppose you might occasionally like both stories! One of the old doubles managed to survive my Digital Age Downsizing in 2010.
As for DAW, you can read more about that imprint here. Wollheim published popular, though not always critically acclaimed, works. I wouldn’t expect him to publish outright trash, and I enjoyed One on Me. I couldn’t predict how its tale would unfold, and I found it prescient in several ways.
The book was good enough that I downloaded a sample of Huntley’s other novel, which was self-published 30 years later when he was about 70. It is even more obscure, but EarthGame: A Player’s Guide came out late enough that it is available on Kindle. The title is misleading, as the book is a comic novel. I’m not ready to try EarthGame, having just wrapped up One on Me, but it is on my list as a tempting final outing with Huntley, who died in 2019 a week before he would have been 79 years old.
My tastes have evolved considerably over the 40 years since I was a teenager, and I seldom seek out science fiction these days. Thankfully there are countless other books on offer, and my amazing access to them still strikes me as, ahem, feeling like science fiction.
Mary Stewart was a British novelist, born Mary Florence Elinor Rainbow in 1916. She taught in grade schools and lectured part-time at Durham University before moving to Scotland with her husband in 1956. After nearly dying from an ectopic pregnancy and left unable to bear children, she wrote her first novel and effectively launched the genre of romantic suspense, producing a score of novels that sold over five million copies.
Mary Stewart
A very private person, she reacted against the “silly heroine” of mid-20th-century thrillers who “is told not to open the door to anybody and immediately opens it to the first person who comes along”. She reportedly crafted poised, smart, highly educated young female characters who drove fast and knew how to fight but were also tender-hearted with a strong moral sense.
A change of direction came in the 1970s when she surprised her publishers with a novel about the early years of Merlin, The Crystal Cave, which led to four more Arthurian books. I presume she was influenced by T.H. White’s success with The Once and Future King as well as her own fascination with Roman-British history.
Arthurian Attempts
An early exposure to Arthurian retellings
I read The Crystal Cave back in 2020, a few months before Covid-19 changed our world. I’d waited decades to try another book based on Arthurian legends.
In 1983, when I was in high school, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon was published. I noticed its striking cover at the Henry Higgins bookstore in our local shopping center and eventually read it. That retelling of Arthurian legends from the perspective of the female characters was quite popular in its day, long before disturbing allegations about the author’s behavior came to light.
However, I did not enjoy The Mists of Avalon, despite the praise heaped upon it. I don’t recall if I finished it or not, but I remember finding it obscure. I also didn’t care for most movies or miniseries set in King Arthur’s time, save for the hilarious Monty Python and the Holy Grail. So I generally avoided Arthurian books, although I did listen to the engaging J. Rufus Fears lecture on Arthurian myths.
Sorry, but this cover looks like an Ozarks cave pamphlet to me
In early 2020, for reasons I do not recall, I decided to read something Arthurian. I had no intention of trying 1485’s Le Morte d’Arthur, and I wasn’t ready to commit to T.H. White’s fantasy retelling. I chose Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave because it was praised as being more realistic and historical and is told from Merlin’s viewpoint.
It was yet another bildungsroman, following Merlin from age six to young manhood. Thankfully it was indeed light on the fantasy. Instead of a young adult sword and sorcery tale, it was a more serious evocation of fifth century Britain. I recall it as well-written, but I was repelled by Merlin’s machinations to allow Uther Pendragon to tryst with Ygraine and thus create Arthur, and I didn’t continue with the later books in the trilogy. I generally dislike tales of feudalism outside of listening to the Kingsbridge series by Ken Follett or the Chronicles of Brother Cadfael by Edith Pargeter, who wrote them as Ellis Peters.
The onslaught of Covid-19 disrupted my world for some time, and I forgot about Mary Stewart, remaining oblivious that she had pioneered romance suspense with capable female protagonists.
As a Gen-Xer, I wasn’t around in 1964, but I’ve seen that year’s Mary Poppins many times, while I had never heard of The Moon-Spinners, and I’ve never seen Hayley Mills other than in some episodes of The Love Boat back when I was a bored teenager in a home with only broadcast television. Hayley’s 1964 film was edited into a three-part movie of the week and shown on The Wonderful World of Disney in 1966, but it was never reissued in theaters.
I had no interest in watching the Disney film, although I was intrigued by the beautiful shots of real-world locations in Crete. Ever since reading Mary Renault’s The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea for an undergraduate college seminar on ancient Greece, I’ve been interested in Minoan Crete and Sir Arthur Evans‘ fantastical recreations.
The Moon-Spinners has some beautiful locations
The Once Upon a Record video mentioned that Mary Stewart had authored the 1962 book the movie was loosely based upon and how she was not pleased with Disney’s adaptation — a common authorial complaint for Disneyfications. I’ll blame the intervening Covid chaos for the mention of Mary Stewart in the video failing to remind me of reading The Crystal Cave a half-decade earlier.
Ever curious, I downloaded a sample of The Moon-Spinners e-book on my Kindle and also read about the author, finally realizing she had also written The Crystal Cave.
Ugh
When I was a child, my mother and my spinster aunts read hundreds of Harlequin Romances, which I dismissed as boring trash, although I never actually read one. In 1957, Harlequin had acquired the North American distribution rights to the romance novels published by Mills & Boon in the British Commonwealth. It eventually acquired Mills & Boon and published six novels each month which were sold in supermarkets, drug stores, and the like. My aunts remodeled an entire room of their house, filling it with shelf after shelf of Harlequin Romances. The company has published about 5,000 titles under that imprint but has many others, and it currently publishes over 120 new titles each month in North America and over 800 globally. I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the storylines are now developed with artificial intelligence and eventually are entirely drafted by AI with human proofreader edits.
I have always enjoyed mysteries, and romances have blended into many of them. Given that Mary Stewart is touted as a talented pioneer in romance suspense, and remembering how her first Merlin book was well-written, albeit unable to prompt me to continue that series, I decided to read The Moon-Spinners. I needed a palate cleanser after reading Thornton Wilder’s ponderous The Eighth Day.
The Romance Suspense
Mary Stewart sketched a Cretan windmill for her publisher as a design idea for the book cover. Hodder in the UK used that for its first edition hardback book cover, but I notice that a later paperback edition added a running male figure to the scene and “Nicola — in an island nightmare of terror and pursuit”. Neither were improvements to my eye, but they would have been helpful to casual shoppers, although they are confusing since Nicola is actually the female protagonist of the story and not pictured on the cover. The US cover was similar to the original UK one, but instead of depicting a windmill in the bright Mediterranean sunlight, Charles Geer‘s illustration was dark and moody.
You might think the windmill has something to do with the title, but while a windmill does play some role in the plot, the character of Nicola shares the tale of the moon-spinners to help lull someone to sleep:
They’re naiads – you know, water nymphs. Sometimes, when you’re deep in the countryside, you meet three girls, walking along the hill tracks in the dusk, spinning. They each have a spindle, and onto these they are spinning their wool, milk-white, like the moonlight. In fact, it is the moonlight, the moon itself, which is why they don’t carry a distaff. They’re not Fates, or anything terrible; they don’t affect the lives of men; all they have to do is to see that the world gets its hours of darkness, and they do this by spinning the moon down out of the sky. Night after night, you can see the moon getting less and less, the ball of light waning, while it grows on the spindles of the maidens. Then, at length, the moon is gone, and the world has darkness, and rest, and the creatures of the hillsides are safe from the hunter, and the tides are still . . .
Then, on the darkest night, the maidens take their spindles down to the sea, to wash their wool. And the wool slips from the spindles into the water, and unravels in long ripples of light from the shore to the horizon, and there is the moon again, rising above the sea, just a thin curved thread, re-appearing in the sky. Only when all the wool is washed, and wound again into a white ball in the sky, can the moon-spinners start their work once more, to make the night safe for hunted things . . .
The novel begins with Nicola being dropped off after a car ride at a trailhead to a small Cretan village by the American tourists Mr. and Mrs. Studebaker. It may not have been Stewart’s intention, but I interpreted those as names the protagonist gave to them that merely reflected the make of car they drove.
On her walk toward the village, Nicola pauses at a bridge and then takes a side path up to the villagers’ fields where windmills whirl, pumping irrigation water through the ditches. She then opts to follow an egret up a ravine. Stewart’s writing is evocative:
For some reason that I cannot analyse, the sight of the big white bird, strange to me; the smell of the lemon flowers, the clicking of the mill sails and the sound of spilling water; the sunlight dappling through the leaves on the white anemones with their lamp-black centres; and, above all, my first real sight of the legendary White Mountains . . . all this seemed to rush together into a point of powerful magic, happiness striking like an arrow, with one of those sudden shocks of joy that are so physical, so precisely marked, that one knows the exact moment at which the world changed.
She ascends the hillside and is soon threatened by a knife-wielding man, tends a man with a bullet wound, and is drawn into ‘skulduggery’. Nicola’s independence and self-assurance are rapidly made evident.
Nicola’s first hint of trouble was a sudden shadow, and near the conclusion of the resulting scene, with the immediate threat vanquished, Stewart adjusts her grip on the reader with Nicola thinking, “Suddenly, out of nowhere, fear jumped at me again, like the shadow dropping across the flowers.”
Nicola & Mark in the Disney universe
Her style is light and deft in a speedy first-person narrative that was a welcome contrast to the pontificating third-person prose in the Thornton Wilder novel I had just finished. I was soon 1/8 into the book and struck by how Stewart’s elegant prose elevated scenes reminiscent of the childhood Nancy Drew or Trixie Belden mysteries my spinster aunt loaned me when I had exhausted the Hardy Boys.
While as a kid I was fine with the minimal involvement of the teenage sleuths’ nearly invisible romantic partners, I quickly sensed that in this story the 22-year-old Nicola might well end up romantically entangled with Mark, the young man who had been shot, even though Stewart was careful not to overplay their initial introduction.
Mind you, Stewart moved fast in her own romance. Elsie of the Tea & Ink Society shares this: “Mary met her husband Frederick at a Victory in Europe Day celebration dance in 1945. It was a costume party, and Frederick was unselfconsciously wearing a girl’s gym tunic, lilac socks, and a red hair ribbon. It was pretty much love at first sight, and the couple were married three months later.”
Stewart begins each chapter with a brief literary excerpt. For Chapter 3 she selected, “When the sun sets, shadows, that showed at noon but small, appear most long and terrible.” That is drawn from Nathaniel Lee and John Dryden’s 1679 adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus. A fuller quotation is:
Nathaniel Lee
When the Sun sets, Shadows that shew’d at Noon But small, appear most long and terrible; So when we think Fate hovers o’er our Heads, Our Apprehensions shoot beyond all Bounds, Owls, Ravens, Crickets seem the Watch of Death, Nature’s worst Vermin scarce her godlike Sons, Echoes, the very Leavings of a Voice, Grow babling Ghosts, and call us to our Graves: Each Mole-hill Thought swells to a huge Olympus, While we fantastick Dreamers heave and puff, And sweat with an Imagination’s Weight; As if, like Atlas, with these mortal Shoulders We could sustain the Burden of the World.
Heady stuff!
Stewart’s descriptions of the settings were superb. I could readily visualize them, thanks to paragraphs like this:
The place he chose was a wide ledge, some way above the little alp where the hut stood. As a hiding place and watch-tower combined, it could hardly have been bettered. The ledge was about ten feet wide, sloping a little upwards, out from the cliff face, so that from below we were invisible. An overhang hid us from above, and gave shelter from the weather. Behind, in the cliff, a vertical cleft offered deeper shelter, and a possible hiding-place. A juniper grew half across this cleft, and the ledge itself was deep with the sweet aromatic shrubs that clothed the hillside. The way up to it was concealed by a tangling bank of honeysuckle, and the spread silver boughs of a wild fig tree.
Google Gemini produced this based on that description; not bad, although the ledge is tilting the wrong way
The story zips along at a fairly rapid clip, with Nicola showing no hesitation in staying overnight to care for the wounded man with a murderer on the prowl, with the next 1/8 of the novel spent on the mountainside avoiding his search. Nicola reaches the village 1/3 of the way into the story and immediately starts to piece together the puzzle.
Nicoloa’s much older female cousin appears, as the character herself phrases it, “at half-time”, and I appreciated this description of her: “Some people, I know find her formidable; she is tall, dark, rather angular, with a decisive sort of voice and manner, and a charm which she despises, and rarely troubles to use.”
The story includes a major red herring, so Stewart does not shy away from manipulating the reader. Overall, I enjoyed the novel, although I did not discern deeper meanings in it beyond a fun adventure, and it lacked the emotional depth and connection that Edith Pargeter could bring to some of her characters in the Brother Cadfael and Inspector Felse mysteries. The first person narrative sometimes shifts plot points into remote retrospectives that are relayed, not related, to the reader. I didn’t find Stewart’s tale particularly romantic, with little time given for Nicola and Mark to develop any sort of relationship beyond trying to protect each other and implausible feats of derring-do, although the settings were suggestive.
I regard the work as a well-written adult version of a Nancy Drew mystery with superb travelogue elements. I’m certainly willing to read more of Stewart’s romance suspense stories, but I would only expect them to be light reads that serve as quick escapes and palate cleansers.
The current Kindle edition cover art
Publishers Hodder & Stoughton have reissued much of Mary Stewart’s fiction under the Beloved Modern Classics label, at least in Kindle editions. I appreciate their beautifully restrained cover designs featuring illustrations that resemble travel posters.
Given her evocative descriptions of the settings, her standalones seem well-suited to armchair travelers. This fast-paced adventure set on the sunny isle of Crete would have been especially welcome on a cold wintry day.
Stewart wrote 15 standalone novels in the romance suspense genre, separate from her five Arthurian books. Elsie of the Tea and Ink Society says, “Her earlier books supply greater drama and thrills and are more Gothic in tone, while her later novels are gentler but still masterfully plotted.”
For both yours and my reference, here is Elsie’s listing with her Amazon links and brief descriptions of Stewart’s standalones:
Madam, Will You Talk? (1955) – set in Provence, France Wildfire at Midnight (1956) – set on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. Murder mystery elements. Thunder on the Right (1957) – a Gothic novel set in the Pyrenees in France Nine Coaches Waiting (1958) – elements of Gothic, fairy tale, and fugitive story. Set in the mountainous Savoy region of France. My Brother Michael (1959) – set in mainland Greece The Ivy Tree (1961) – an impostor/mistaken identity story set in Northumberland, England The Moon-Spinners (1962) – set in Crete This Rough Magic (1964) – set in Corfu Airs Above the Ground (1965) – a murder mystery with a touch of espionage, set in Austria The Gabriel Hounds (1967) – set in Syria and Lebanon The Wind Off The Small Isles (1968) – a novella set in the Canary Islands, Spain Touch Not the Cat (1976) – set in the Malvern Hills in the West Midlands of England. Fantasy/supernatural elements. Thornyhold (1988) – set in Wiltshire in South West England. Fantasy/supernatural elements. Stormy Petrel (1991) – set on a fictional island in the Hebrides of Scotland Rose Cottage (1997) – a gentle mystery of family secrets, set in a small village in the North of England
Stewart’s quick story was most welcome after my failing to complete V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas and reading Thornton Wilder’s remote The Bridge of San Luis Rey and stolid The Eighth Day, but I’m not ready to tackle more “literature” just yet.
As I compose this post, I am still listening to film director William Friedkin’s splendid memoir on my weekend walks, so I want to stick with fiction in my physical or electronic book reading for now. My Kindle collection still has five unread Ellis Peters novels, along with a couple of novellas and sixteen short stories, but I’m not ready for another mystery, either.
So, since it is now Banned Books Week, I’ve started Tim Huntley’s little-known 1980 novel, One on Me, a science fiction pulp paperback I bought at the end of 2023 after Bookpilled cited it as funny but having some controversial content. I doubt there were ever enough copies in circulation to get it banned, but it certainly would offend the blue-nosed bullies.
Hippocrates promulgated the first known personality model over 2,400 years ago, which led Galen to name four temperaments: sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic, which were associated with proportions of four bodily fluids. Thankfully little of that nonsense survives outside of adjectives authors employ for their characters. We modern enlightened folk (yes, that is intentional sarcasm) instead rely upon a mix of pseudoscientific and psychospiritual humbug, some useful behavior patterns, and a handful of traits measured on a continuous scale.
Myers-Briggs
The pseudoscientific Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is probably the best-known of the personality tests. It uses answers to 93 questions to assign people one of 16 personality types based on four sets of opposing qualities: Extraverted/Introverted, Sensing/iNtuiting, Thinking/Feeling and Perceiving/Judging. Its publisher makes millions per year on the test and related products.
The test is based on Carl Jung’s interesting but empirically unsupported theories on how the human brain works. Jung’s made-up principles were adapted by Katherine Briggs and her daught Isabel Briggs Myers, who had no formal training in psychology.
Myers-Briggs uses false, limited binaries for its categorizations although human traits are generally spread across a spectrum. For example, people are not true extraverts or introverts, but have a mix of extraverted and introverted qualities. The test is also inconsistent, with up to half of people arriving at a different result if they take it over a month later. It uses flattering, vague descriptions and thus benefits from the Forer-Barnum effect, a technique used in astrology, fortune-telling, and pseudoscience.
The Forer-Barnum Effect in action; don’t all of these sound wonderful?
However, so long as you recognize its severe limitations, the test is still fun for most people. Its four traits also correlate roughly to four of the five personality factors that do have some scientific support, although the five factors exist on continuous scales. I’ll delve into that later.
When I first encountered some version of Myers-Briggs decades ago, I was classified as INTJ. Nowadays that type is often given the flattering labels of The Architect or The Mastermind.
Who wouldn’t want to be a quick, imaginative, strategic, self-confident, independent, decisive, hard-working, determined, open-minded, jack-of-all-trades? As for the weaknesses attributed to INTJ people, I certainly can be arrogant, clueless in romance, and judgmental, but surely those weaknesses are fairly common across a range of personalities, not merely the tiny fraction who are categorized as INTJ.
For the first time in many years, I took one of the free tests based on Myers-Briggs (refusing to pay for the real thing), and it categorized me as ISTJ, The Logistician. Did I really shift from iNtuiting to Sensing over the years? Maybe, but I wasn’t taking the actual for-profit Myers-Briggs test and the various classifications are a false binaries…our traits map out across spectra.
I think of Myers-Briggs as a fun exercise in narcissism or, if you want to put a nice spin on it, as a tool for introspection. Most of us enjoy being categorized, especially when various positive traits are then attributed to us, although I’ve also noticed a trend of people embracing being labeled as neurodivergent, which can be a fraught topic.
Enneagram
I couldn’t make much sense from my Enneagram result
Another pseudoscientific personality test is the Enneagram of Personality, which has been popularized by Truity Psychometrics, not to be confused with our local Truity Credit Union. Its typology traces back to the Bolivian psycho-spiritual teacher Oscar Ichazo and the Chilean psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo, but it doesn’t originate from a validated scientific theory.
I took the test five years ago and retook it for this post. My results were quite stable, which is an improvement over Myers-Briggs, although I found the Enneagram less interesting. My Enneagram score categorizes me as a Type 1 Moral Perfectionist, Reformer, or Improver. But golly, I also scored high in Type 8, the Protective Challenger, and what did my high scores for Types 3, 5, and 6 mean? Not much, at least to me.
BEST Communication Styles
The personality pattern instrument I have found the most useful in my professional life measures the BEST Communication Styles. Dr. James Brewer adapted and expanded work by William Marston and Ned Herrmann on measuring dominant behavior patterns; Marston was quite a character and invented both the polygraph and Wonder Woman. Brewer developed a basic description of four personality types: Bold, Expressive, Sympathetic, and Technical.
Aspects of the BEST Communication Styles
My clear preferences were for Technical and Bold, with minimal scores in the Sympathetic and Expressive styles. Interestingly, my wife has very similar scores.
What I appreciated about the BEST system was learning the scores for some of my fellow administrators and using that to tailor my interactions with them, in hopes of communicating more clearly and effectively. It also helped me understand better where other leaders were coming from. It is also simple enough that I can make some use of it, while some corporate-style trainings I’ve endured had so many complex steps, acronyms, categorizations, and procedures that I couldn’t be bothered to try to apply them in real life.
The Five Factor Model
In psychometrics, the five-factor model is the most common these days, and at least it was based on empirical research. It measures five factors on a continuous scale: extraversion, neuroticism/emotional stability, amicability/agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness/intellect & imagination.
A problem with the five-factor model is the naming of the five factors. As you can see, at least three of them have alternate names. This in part reflects how some terms carry positive or negative connotations. Many people might dislike being found less agreeable or conscientious or more neurotic. So alternate terminology is often employed at the cost of confusion.
I took the Open-Source Psychometrics Project’s Big Five Personality Test. Its names for the five factors are shown in the results, including misspelling extraversion, which comes from the Latin extra vertere or “to turn outside”, as “extroversion”. That arose from folks who do not know Latin and thus misspell extraversion to match the spelling of introversion.
My insistence on using extraversion reflects my personality: relatively low in agreeableness and high in conscientiousness.
My Big Five Personality Test results
While Myers-Briggs-style tests always classify me as introverted, I actually scored as more extraverted than 2/3 of those taking the test. People often confuse introversion with shyness or depression, neither of which I suffer from, but I definitely prefer less stimulation and more time alone than those I consider extraverts, and I have to recharge after social interactions.
Emotional stability is an inverse measure of neuroticism. My result says I have an above-average tolerance for stress and change, which I suppose is a function of brain chemistry and also might reflect a happy childhood with few adverse experiences. It might also be influenced by my embrace of Stoicism in adulthood. This factor has no parallel in Myers-Briggs.
Almost 4 out of 5 test-takers scored higher than I did on agreeableness/amicability. My result is thus associated with a lower motivation to maintain social harmony and being more likely to express my opinions forcefully. I’m useful to have on a committee if you don’t want a yes-man. It is also associated with lower levels of compassion, cooperation, and empathy along with enhanced critical thinking, independence, and self-sufficiency. The Thinking/Feeling binary in Myers-Briggs corresponds to this factor. Thinking is associated with low agreeableness while Feeling is associated with high agreeableness.
Independent empirical measures such as my career-long low absenteeism, job stability, and exercise routine correlate with my high score in conscientiousness. I’m a planner with strong impulse control and self-discipline, but that also means that I am quite stubborn and am irritated by those who are impulsive or disorganized. The Judging/Perceiving binary in Myers-Briggs corresponds to this factor. Judging is associated with high conscientiousness while Perceiving goes with low conscientiousness.
My most extreme score was for intellect/imagination, which is most commonly known in the literature as Openness to Experience and is associated with a general appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, imagination, curiosity, and variety of experience. Folks like me are said to be more likely to hold unconventional beliefs. The Sensing/iNtuiting binary in Myers-Briggs corresponds to this factor. Sensing is associated with low openness while iNtuiting goes with high openness.
My results illustrate some of the problems with personality tests. I have many of the characteristics of introversion, but was rated as more extraverted than 2/3 of the test-takers. I also had a very high score in Openness in the more scientific test, which matches up with the N in my early INTJ label on Myers-Briggs, but I’ve also had tests offer the contradictory label of ISTJ.
The star positions reflect my percentile scores on the Big Five Personality Test
Note that these traits are not fixed; most people shed some of their neuroticism and thus gain emotional stability as they age, and we tend to become more conscientious over time. I do like the continuum of the traits in the Big Five test, which reminds me of how the Kinsey Reports broke ground in the mid-20th century by classifying sexual orientation on a continuum rather than strict binaries. The limitations of heterosexuality and homosexuality spectra then led to initialism in the form of LGBTQ, then LGBTQIA2S+, etc. Golly, but people do love to label and identify themselves and each other.
The utility of most personality tests is dubious, but I do find them interesting. I wouldn’t recommend spending any money on versions of Myers-Briggs or Enneagrams, which I regard as more suitable for entertainment. However, I have found the BEST Communication Styles useful in working with team members, and the Open-Source Psychometrics Project’s Big Five Personality Test is completely free and the five-factor model does enjoy some scientific support.
There are several cultural touchstones I remain rather ignorant of, despite countless references to them throughout my six decades of existence.
Peter Pan, for example. As a child, I ate plenty of his peanut butter, saw the animated Tinker Bell at the start and end of Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color (a lie broadcast weekly into our home, which didn’t have a color television until 1973), and my mother had a phonograph record by Mary Martin with a photograph on the album’s back showing her flying across a room as the character in the 1950s musical.
I recognize these characters, but I don’t know their stories
However, I never saw the animated Disney film or the Peter Pan plays or musicals, and despite being an avid reader, I never read a Peter Pan book. So while I can recognize some of the Disney characters, I don’t know their stories. I did see the Spielberg film Hook in 1991, but I was somewhat mystified by the crocodile and other plot elements.
The character first appeared in Chapter XIV of J.M. Barrie’s 1902 book The Little White Bird, followed by the 1904 play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, and the 1911 novelization Peter and Wendy. Disney’s animated film came out in 1953 and was re-released in cinemas in 1958, 1969, 1976, 1982, and 1989. I was too young to see the June 1969 re-release, and I was almost ten when it came back around in June 1976, and by then, it was far too juvenile to interest me. Nowadays, many parents can readily make it, or virtually any other suitable film, available to their children at the appropriate age, but I missed out.
My wife is named Wendy, a name which became quite popular in the second half of the 20th century due to the character of Wendy Darling in Peter Pan. Yet my knowledge of the story is so limited, despite its many related works, that I had to go look up that character’s last name.
Peter Pan created a surge of popularity for the name Wendy
The video went on to theorize that the father character might be the son of Captain Hook. However, none of that is enough to motivate me to watch the movie nor actively partake of any of the multitude of other media offerings about a boy who won’t grow up.
I followed that distasteful experience with downloading and reading L. Frank Baum’s original The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. While it was interesting to note the various differences from the beloved classic movie, I didn’t care for that book, either. It was too nonsensical and disjointed for my taste.
I’m also somewhat ignorant of less fantastic cultural touchstones. I’d wager that while most of us are quite familiar with the basic plot and characters of Robin Hood, few have actually read Howard Pyle’s influential The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood from 1883, let alone the various earlier ballads. I certainly haven’t.
Similarly, I’m often ignorant of the origins of various memes that populate the internet. Recently, several of the video channels I watch on YouTube have used inserts like these to indicate a passage of time:
At first, I thought they might be imitating CuriousMarc, a French electrical engineer who documents restorations of exceptional vintage electronics. But then I noticed the meme on channels that certainly wouldn’t be referencing anything that nerdy. So I looked it up and found out they are taken from the SpongeBob SquarePants television show.
Wendy once had me watch an episode, but it definitely wasn’t to my taste. Similarly, I doubt that I’ve ever seen a complete episode of The Simpsons despite its hundreds of episodes since 1989. I’ve seen various clips, which I often found funny, but they were hardly engaging enough to tempt me to watch the series. Gosh, whenever I hear Marge, I think of Brenda Morgenstern from Rhoda.
I haven’t discerned any meaningful handicaps from my cultural ignorance. I’m fine with remaining unable to recognize any Taylor Swift songs, opera librettos, or many sports references. As I approach retirement, I’m skeptical about investing my forthcoming free time in such pursuits; FOMO is not healthy.
Freedom to choose your own life; freedom to pursue your own interest; freedom to enjoy your own likes, provided they are not harmful to you and the society. I feel I was very fortunate to grow up with so much of freedom, like a tree in the forest…
-Sudha Marty, How I Taught My Grand Mother to Read: And Other Stories
Thornton Wilder is still widely remembered for his 1938 play Our Town, and his second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, won the Pulitzer in 1927 and made Modern Library’s list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century.
I only found one YouTube video about The Eighth Day, and it was AI slop. I found a handful of online articles about it and reference a couple of them in this post, but it has fallen utterly out of fashion despite winning the National Book Award for fiction in 1968.
The Neglected Book Page offered, “…it sold over 70,000 copies in hardback, was picked up by the Book of the Month Club as a featured title, and stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for half a year. Nor was it a complete critical failure. Edmund Wilson [the influential literary critic who championed Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Nabokov] called it Wilder’s best work ever, and it received the National Book Award for fiction.”
However, the Neglected Book Page also shared: “Stanley Kauffmann, writing for The New Republic, called it ‘a book that means nothing.’ Josh Greenfield in Newsweek assessed Wilder’s message in the novel ‘a worthless bauble.’ In The New Yorker, Edith Oliver judged that ‘none of the characters, major or minor, rings credible to the reader.'”
The Greatest books of All Time‘s meta-analysis ranked the book at 10,696 considerably below other works of his such as The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Ides of March, Theophilus North, and Our Town. Nevertheless, I opted to read it, based on its national award and its plot device of a murder mystery.
I purchased and read the Kindle edition, with little initial impression of its considerable length. Wilder’s early novels were quite short; his most famous work, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, is only 33,000 words. The Eighth Day turned out to be his longest novel at 141,000 words.
While that is not nearly as daunting as All the King’s Men, which we were assigned in high school, despite its word count of 286,000, or Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell at a rather numbing 309,000 words, it is still considerable. Wilder split his longest work into six parts, which reminds me of how Tolkien’s 455,000-word Lord of the Rings was similarly subdivided, although it was wisely published as a trilogy.
The character of Dr. Gillies in the novel says, “The Bible says that God created man on the sixth day and rested, but each of those days was many millions of years long.” Reading The Eighth Day similarly took me awhile…about a month.
I was thankful that Wilder structured his meandering tale around the mysteries of a murder and a daring rescue from execution. That provided an impetus to carry me through his digressions and the multitude of pronouncements by his omniscient narrator.
Wilder began the book during a self-imposed exile of 20 months in the desert town of Douglas, Arizona along the Mexican border. In 1962, a month after turning 65, Wilder fled the distractions of too much travel, talk, and busy-ness and steered his Thunderbird convertible out of his Connecticut driveway towards the Southwest. He broke down outside Douglas and stayed there, enjoying “solitude without loneliness.”
Wilder stayed at The Gadsden Hotel in Douglas, AZ for a couple of months
Wilder rented an apartment in Douglas for about 18 months
He extended a night at the Gadsden Hotel into a stay of a couple of months and then rented a three-room furnished apartment in what is now, over sixty years later, an assisted living center.
Wilder had earned three Pulitzers, including ones for the plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth. Over the 15 years since his last novel, he had written five plays, but during his Arizona exile an idea took shape that was more suited for the page than the stage.
During his exile, he went by his middle name, Niven, and peppered people with questions, including how one would set up a boardinghouse, with the answers becoming part of his new novel. Wilder didn’t finish it in Douglas, leaving town in late 1963 to resume his peripatetic ways. He accepted the Medal of Freedom from President Johnson and continued writing during trips to Nice and Cannes, to the Netherlands Antilles, to Casablanca, and more. It was finally published in 1967, three weeks before his 70th birthday.
But what of the book itself? Wilder shared that its writing was influenced by the works of the Danish theologian and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, the German novelist and Nobel laureate Thomas Mann, and the French Jesuit and polymath Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. I confess to possessing only fragmentary interest in and frequent exasperation with literary analysis and philosophy, so I read Wilder’s novel with little regard to such influences.
1927’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey was set in 1714. I leapt ahead four decades in Wilder’s career in following that up with 1967’s The Eighth Day, which was set between 1880 and 1905. The later novel consists of six parts, identified by location and durations of years. I enjoyed Part I, set in Coaltown, Illinois from 1885 to 1905. The Horatio Alger story of how a daughter of a convicted murderer rescued her family by setting up their home as a boardinghouse intrigued me with its sharply drawn character portraits, although I found the mother figure rather bland and impervious to empathy.
Here is an example of the maxims and observations that pepper the pages:
So defenseless is hope before the court of reason that it stands in constant need of fashioning its own confirmations. It reaches out to heroic song and story; it stoops to superstition. It shrinks from flattering consolations; it likes its battles hard won, but it surrounds itself with ceremonial and fetish.
Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous. The defeat of hope leads not to despair, but to resignation. The resignation of those who have had a grasp of hope retains hope’s power.
Fortune telling [generated by Google Gemini]
Part II relates the story of the escaped fugitive’s travels and adventures as he fled south to Chile from 1902 to 1905 and was quite a diversion. While I enjoyed some of the character sketches, particularly of three wise independent women who spirit him along different phases of his flight, the fugitive remained a remote personality to me, perhaps intentionally so.
He is a figure of faith, but not piety. Wilder shares these views on such people:
We have described these men and women in negative terms—fearless, not self-referent, uninteresting, humorless, so often unlearned. Wherein lies their value?
We did not choose the day of our birth nor may we choose the day of our death, yet choice is the sovereign faculty of the mind. We did not choose our parents, color, sex, health, or endowments. We were shaken into existence, like dice from a box. Barriers and prison walls surround us and those about us—everywhere, inner and outer impediments. These men and women with the aid of observation and memory early encompass a large landscape. They know themselves, but their self is not the only window through which they view their existence. They are certain that one small part of what is given us is free. They explore daily the exercise of freedom. Their eyes are on the future. When the evil hour comes, they hold. They save cities—or, having failed, their example saves other cities after their death. They confront injustice. They assemble and inspirit the despairing.
When the evil hour comes, they hold. That’s a good line, worthy of Tolkien, but I particularly like We were shaken into existence, like dice from a box.
The entertaining and empowered character of Mrs. Wickersham is a humanitarian and widow who runs a hospital, school, and orphanage in addition to her hotel. She labors to save the fugitive from capture and destruction, and shares this amidst a torrent of words after the fugitive shares his story:
“. . . Cities come and go, Mr. Tolland, like the sand castles that children build upon the shore. The human race gets no better. Mankind is vicious, slothful, quarrelsome, and self-centered. If I were younger and you were a free man, we could do something here—here and there. You and I have a certain quality that is rare as teeth in a hen. We work. And we forget ourselves in our work. Most people think they work; they can kill themselves with their diligence. They think they’re building Atenas, but they’re only shining their own shoes. When I was young I used to be astonished at how little progress was made in the world—all those fine words, all those noble talkative men and women, those plans, those cornerstones, those constitutions drawn up for ideal republics. They don’t make a dent on the average man or woman. The wife, like Delilah, crops her husband’s hair; the father stifles his children. From time to time everyone goes into an ecstasy about the glorious advance of civilization—the miracle of vaccination, the wonders of the railroad. But the excitement dies down and there we are again—wolves and hyenas, wolves and peacocks.—What time is it?”
And then, abruptly, just as the fugitive appears to have again escaped into the future, we get this lonely line about his fate as Part II comes to a close: He was drowned at sea.
What? We have travelled many miles with this character and the mysteries swirling about him, with hopes and plans for an eventual redemptive return to his family, buoyed by a mention in the book’s prologue that he would eventually be exonerated, but then nature sweeps him into the abyss? There is a disquieting and disturbing symbolism in that.
Part III shifts us back north in geography and backward in time to Chicago in 1902, where the son of the fugitive stumbles his way into good works as a newspaper columnist, reminding me of the early idealistic portrayal of Orson Welles’ protagonist in Citizen Kane. Various characters are introduced, offering their own takes on life and its meanings or lack thereof. One garrulous character pronounces:
“What’s that? What’s that you’re saying? Listen to me: there is no sense behind the universe. There is no reason why people are born. There is no plan. Grass grows; babies are born. Those are facts. For thousands of years men have been manufacturing interpretations: life’s a test of our character; rewards and penalties after death; God’s plan; Allah’s Paradise, full of beautiful girls for everybody; Buddha’s nirvana—we get that anyway, it means ‘see nothing, feel nothing’; evolution, higher forms, social betterment, Utopia, flying machines, better shoelaces—nothing but THISTLE DUST! Will you get that into your draughty head?”
Contrast that to a hospital orderly who shares his vision of people reborn countless times as they ascend a ladder of merit, with none able to step over a threshold into supreme happiness until “all of the men on all the stars have purified themselves.”
Wilder’s characters frequently break with convention, in ways that challenge our expectations for the late Victorian and early Edwardian eras. The future fugitive and his common law wife had four children in nineteen years without having been formally married; the son who fights injustice and suffering has affairs with girls of many races and nationalities before marrying the daughter of the man his father supposedly murdered; a daughter who becomes a famous concert singer supports herself and her bastard son by singing in churches; and so forth.
Part III concludes as the fugitive’s son meets the daughter of the murdered man, with promises of revelations that might solve the murder mystery. We are given no satisfaction, however, as Part IV leaps way back to 1883 in Hoboken, New Jersey, and we are treated to more paragraphs extolling the virtues and delineating the shortcomings of the future fugitive. He hunts for a wife, making a choice by a process of elimination, and then elopes with her.
St. Kitts [generated by Google Gemini]
Part V jumps back a bit further and much farther, to St. Kitts, an island in the West Indies, in 1880. We are finally provided background on the murder victim’s family, something that had been given short shrift in the first 2/3 of the novel. Staging stories in long separate parts, as Wilder did in the 1960s, seems quite old-fashioned to the modern reader. I am used to books that interleave chapters, quickly jumping back and forth, often changing voices or narrators to increase the contrasts versus the drone of an omniscient narrator. I suspect that broadcast and cable television made such tight interleaving more commonplace, as holding the viewer’s attention was vital to the advertising that funded the programming back in the day, with frequent advertising breaks acting like chapter breaks.
Epistolary novels use a series of letters or other fictional documents for such interleaving. 1897’s Dracula is perhaps the most famous example, being composed entirely of letters, diary entries, newspaper clippings, telegrams, doctor’s notes, ship’s logs, etc. Wilder’s Ides of March is another example.
Part V finally provides a motive, previously portrayed as inexplicable, for the murder. I enjoyed the re-introduction of the murder victim:
Breckenridge Lansing was born in Crystal Lake, Iowa. As a boy he planned to enter the Army of the United States and to become a famous general. With his brother Fisher he did a great deal of hunting. Good Baptists cannot take life or do anything else enjoyable on Sunday, but they killed and killed on Saturdays and holidays.
The final Part VI was thankfully the strongest, with a superb opening:
This is a history.
But there is only one history. It began with the creation of man and will come to an end when the last human consciousness is extinguished. All other beginnings and endings are arbitrary conventions—makeshifts parading as self-sufficient entireties, diffusing petty comfort or petty despair. The cumbrous shears of the historian cut out a few figures and a brief passage of time from that enormous tapestry. Above and below the laceration, to the right and left of it, the severed threads protest against the injustice, against the imposture.
Herkomer’s Knob [misinterpreted by Google Gemini]
There is a superb sequence in which the fugitive son learns how his father was spared from execution. I especially enjoyed the symbolism of a home-made rug:
He returned into the house and placed the letter on the table beside the Deacon and sat down. The Deacon was gazing intently at the home-made rug at his feet and Roger’s eyes followed his. It had been woven long ago, but a complex mazelike design in brown and black could still be distinguished.
“Mr. Ashley, kindly lift the rug and turn it over.”
Roger did so. No figure could be traced on the reverse. It presented a mass of knots and of frayed and dangling threads. With a gesture of the hand the Deacon directed Roger to replace it.
“You are a newspaperman in Chicago. Your sister is a singer there. Your mother conducts a boardinghouse in Coaltown. Your father is in some distant country. Those are the threads and knots of human life. You cannot see the design.”
There was such a rag rug in one of my grandparents’ homes. The chaos of knots created a soft cushion beneath the order presented to the world. While I do not share the perception of a weaver, but instead only human pattern-seeking, the symbol is strong.
Existentialism is addressed as well:
Again he pointed to Coaltown: “They walk in despair. If we were to describe what is Hell it would be the place in which there is no hope or possibility of change: birth, feeding, excreting, propagation, and death—all on some mighty wheel of repetition. There is a fly that lives and lays its eggs and dies—all in one day—and is gone forever.”
I appreciated the novel’s concluding paragraph, once I defined arras as a rich tapestry:
There is much talk of a design in the arras. Some are certain they see it. Some see what they have been told to see. Some remember that they saw it once but have lost it. Some are strengthened by seeing a pattern wherein the oppressed and exploited of the earth are gradually emerging from their bondage. Some find strength in the conviction that there is nothing to see.
Less welcome were the glum glimpses of characters’ futures, reminding me of the epilogue montages in some movies. Wilder confessed in a 1965 letter, “It’s only lately come clear to me what an awful lot of suffering there is in the book. I never intended that. I hope it’s not immediately apparent to the reader because most of the characters don’t regard themselves as suffering—they’re learning and struggling and hoping.”
Well, Thornton, it was certainly apparent to me, as was your excision of much of one daughter’s story, not that I cared to read it. The book would have greatly benefited from a revival of his early “habit of compression” and, if he could not bring himself to do it, an editor demanding a culling, that the historian’s cumbrous shears be grasped far more firmly.
Nevertheless, I am glad to have read it given the exquisite prose he regularly manifested and the sharp wit he could deploy. However, while I found some of the characters interesting and well-drawn, the ones he spent the most time with remained too nebulous, vague, and impenetrable for my liking.
The Thornton Wilder Library
From 2016 to 2022, HarperCollins worked with the Wilder family on a reprinting of Wilder’s seven completed novels and three of his plays in what it called the Thornton Wilder Library. Paperbacks with new covers, linked by the use of the Londonderry Air font, incorporated revised afterwords by his nephew Tappan Wilder, who has served as the literary executor for a quarter-century. That Library is also available in audiobook and e-book formats.
Back in 1967, The Eighth Day became a bestseller in its second week and remained on the list for half a year. Before falling out of print in 1992, two million copies were printed and it had 17 foreign editions. It became his second-best selling and earning book.
I remain intrigued by Thornton Wilder’s handling of matters of faith and existentialism. I enjoy how he subverts expectations while incorporating biblical and Puritan traditions into his works. His Christian humanism led him to a sense of optimism grounded in a faith in improvement and redemption, without shying away from portraying the dull triteness, rank hypocrisy, and intellectual vacuity which readily afflict both the pious and the profane.
The length and many paragraphs of philosophy of The Eighth Day haven’t put me off reading Wilder, but I do need to be selective. I have not found ratings on Goodreads to be of any value, although the number of ratings is an indicator of a book’s popularity. I still prefer using LibraryThing over Goodreads to track my reading, but I continue to update both services given Goodreads’ popularity.
Book
Greatest Books Rank
# of Goodreads Ratings
Words
Kindle Edition length
Year
The Cabala
—
258
43,000
144 pages
1926
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
623rd
37,997
33,000
115 pages
1927
The Woman of Andros
—
227
23,000
75 pages
1930
Heaven’s My Destination
—
416
54,000
250 pages
1935
The Ides of March
2,683rd
2,180
87,000
315 pages
1948
The Eighth Day
10,696th
1,822
141,000
454 pages
1967
Theophilus North
4,915th
1,214
133,000
425 pages
1973
Statistics on Wilder’s Novels
After gathering the statistics and reviewing synopses, two of the remaining novels pique my interest the most. Heaven’s My Destination is a road farce about a born-again evangelist traveling across Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas peddling textbooks in the Great Depression. Having spent a lifetime surrounded by evangelicals, with one grandmother who was a Holy Roller Pentecostal who spoke in tongues, that sounds like fun since Jonathan Rosenbaum holds that the protagonist spreads “havoc and consternation wherever he goes with his hilarious and maddening fanaticism.”
I’m also somewhat intrigued by The Woman of Andros after reading its exquisite opening paragraph. Even if it proves to be a humorless tragedy, it is sublimely short. Theophilus North is lengthy, but portrayed as a series of related short stories, which prevents its immediate dismissal. The Cabalawas early but also short, while I’ve little interest in The Ides of March having had my fill of Gaius Julius Caesar in various histories, plays, and in translating Commentarii de Bello Gallico in the original Latin decades ago.
However, after successive Thornton Wilder books, I need to cleanse my palate. My next target is The Moon-Spinners by Mary Stewart.
Meador Manor 