I read more than a dozen books in 2020 . . .

. . . and these are the dozen that I thought were the most impressive, in order of best to less significant.

1.    The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe 1944-45 V3 of the Liberation Trilogy by Rick Atkinson (2013). The conclusion of Pulitzer Prize winning Atkinson's opus on the Allied ETO war effort from the American POV. The trilogy reaches its conclusion with complete victory over Nazi Germany in this stunning denouement that details the end of WW2 in Europe, from the D-Day landings to the fall of Berlin (to the Russians) with the Anglo-American armies poised on the Elbe River a short distance away and Germany prostate and utterly beaten.

2.    To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960). This book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and is a revered American novel, with small-town lawyer Atticus Finch fighting for justice in the Jim Crow south even as his two small children, Scout and Jem grow up in a racist town. Boo Radley, a reclusive figure who strikes fear in their hearts, saves them in the end in a morality tale that shows that often nothing is as it appears to be.

3.    An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa 1942-43 V1 of the Liberation Trilogy by Rick Atkinson (2002). This Atkinson book about Operation Torch, the American landings in Vichy French North Africa, won the Pulitzer Prize for history. Atkinson is a florid writer--it's almost like you're reading literature, no history--and using all sorts of metaphors he describes the North African campaign where: a) the Americans got into the fight against the fearsome German army for the first time; and b) learned how to take on the Wehrmacht; c) learned valuable amphibious assault lessons against feeble, half-hearted resistance that the Vichy troops threw up; which d) stood them in good stead for invading Sicily, then Italy and then the Big Show, Normandy.

4.    American Predator: The Hunt For The Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century by Maureen Callahan (2019). This true-crime book is a page-turner (I stayed up all night reading it). Utterly fascinating and chilling.

5.    Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson (2015). The sinking of this passenger liner (reputedly carrying munitions to the Allies) in 2015 almost brought America into the Great War a couple of years before Woodrow Wilson, a president too proud to fight, finally successfully petitioned Congress for a declaration of war against Germany in 2017. The narrative recreating the destruction of the great ship is memorable.  Interestingly, infected American troops going Over There in 1918 brought on the deadly "Spanish Flu"pandemic of 1918-1919 which killed 60 million persons worldwide, triple the number of persons killed by The War To End All Wars. The flu had originated in the cattle farms of rural Iowa, where it was a local phenomena of "pneumonia" which spread to the troop barracks on the East Coast then to the trenches of the frontlines in France and then to the world.

6.    Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution by Nathanial Philbrick (2013). A long version of the Bunker Hill battle, fought on Breed's Hill in Charlestown across the bay from Boston, and the people and events leading up to it and resulting from it.

7.    The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan (1959). The old standby reference for the D-Day invasion that liberated Europe from the Nazi scourge.

8.    Lincoln's Sanctuary: Abraham Lincoln and the Soldiers Home by Matthew Pinsker (2003).  An interesting book about "Lincoln's Summer Cottage," a little known National Historical Place on the northern edge of Washington which Lincoln rode to, usually alone, every evening during the summers because it was cooler there. He was shot at, accosted, and suffered a runaway horse before a guard troop was finally encamped there. The book touches on the emancipation proclamation, claiming it was largely written there.

9.    Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution by James McPherson (1993). The redefinition of liberal democracy expostulated at Gettysburg.  A new birth of freedom.  All those white national January 6th fascistic traitors should effin' read this book.

10. The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy 1943-44 V2 of the Liberation Trilogy by Rick Atkinson (2007). The Allied effort in the ETO continued with a leap across the Mediterranean to Sicily then Italy. But this was bloody war in a sock for the Allies because Italy has a mountainous spine and the Germans always had the high ground. The Americans on the left and the British on the right hammered away in frontal assaults on well-prepared and heavily fortified mountain strongholds for two years, lending little to the Allied success in beating Nazi Germany.  Vally after valley had a mountain range bristling with enemy guns facing it.  The idea was to tie down German divisions thereby helping the Soviets on the Eastern Front but the Allies expended more divisions in attacking than the Germans used in defense.

11.    Custer's Fall: The Native American Side of the Story by David Humphreys (1957). I'm a sucker for any book on Custer. I didn't find anything new here. Read Black Elk Speaks by John Neihardt (1932) instead.

12.    The Life of Johnny Reb by Bell Irvin Riley (1943). This has long been considered a classic Civil War exposition by this Emory University professor using local sources of how the hardy, emaciated Rebel soldier lived and fought but I found it to be long, boring, unilluminating and racist.  I gave away my copy of his subsequent book, The Life of Billy Yank.

 

Books I read in 2021, Part II

In 2021 I read 18 books, and earlier this month I posted the first six of the dozen that had the most impact on me. Here are books 7-12 on my list of favorites.

7. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams #1954. This play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1955. Big Daddy and the machinations swirling around his fortune and his alcoholic sexually ambivalent favored son, Brick and his dissolute wife Maggie. She speaks wisdom that is applicable to our polarized country one year out from January 6: "Silence about a thing just magnifies it. It grows and festers in silence, becomes malignant . . ."

8. The First Wave: D-Day Warriors Who Led the Way to Victory in WW2 by Alex Kershaw #2019. Extraordinary heroism at work on the five invasion beaches and beyond by men who were the tip of the spear that pierced the Third Reich and destroyed fascism in the world, at least until it reared its ugly head here on home ground during the last enabling, potentially fatal presidency. When I visited the five beaches with the aid of a paid guide in 2019 with friends, it cracked us up when the guide referred the three beaches (Sword, Juno and Gold) stormed by the Britsh and Canadians as "the Commonwealth beaches." When I stood on Omaha Beach, the bloodiest beach to secure and a very near thing, I was standing on a place of now-lost American exceptionalism.

9. Das Reich by Max Hastings #2013. The bloody tale of the blood-soaked trail left across France by this elite SS Panzer Division as it made its way from garrison duty watching the coast in Southern France to the raging battle in Normandy after D-Day. Traveling mostly at night to avoid Allied air interdiction in the daylight, it took 10 days to arrive at the battlefield because the division stopped to exact terrible retribution upon innocent civilians almost every time it was attacked in any fashion by the French Resistance enroute--expending murderous German fury over the lost war on the hapless and helpless French population.

10. 1776 by David McCullough #2005. The book dragged on a bit as it covered a bewildering cast of colonial characters while it described the important events of the fashioning of our nation like Lexington and Concord, the Battle of Bunker Hill and finally Washington forcing the British to withdraw from Boston by maneuver rather than battle.

11. Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the US Navy by Ian W. Toll #2006. An interesting account of the early growth of the US Navy from gunboats guarding the rivers and coastline of the nasceant United State building warships able to challenge British warships in proper one-on-one situations and to project American power overseas, especially against the Barbary Pirates.

12. "A Few Acres Snow" The Saga of the French and Indian War by Robert Leckie #1996. A French minister consoled the French king who was lamenting losing Quebec and the upper Mississippi Valley to the British during this war by describing the loss as merely a few worthless acres in a winter wasteland while France still controlled rich sugar-cane islands in the Caribbean. How did that work out for the French?

The other six books were hardly worth mentioning but I did glean a few factoids and interesting tidbits from each of them, I suppose.

2021 Books--A half dozen

 I lost control of my blog in late 2020 and wrote about 60 posts in a nearby blog which now I can't locate.  C'est le guerre.  I seem to have found a tenuous route back to my original blog so copied straight from a FB post last year here are the half dozen most impactful books of the 18 I read last year.  I like summarizing lists.

In 2021 I read 18 books, the most I'd read since before I retired five years ago. In the next two days I'll list the dozen books that had the most impact on me.

Fifteen of the books were histories of some sort, focusing upon WW2 and the American Revolutionary War mostly but I also read a book on the Black Plague of the fourteenth century, the French and Indian War and the Civil War. One book was a play--I try to read a play a year--one book was a biography of an artist with lots of pictures of his drawings so it went down easy, and one book was literature, not fiction but literature as I try to limit any made-up story I read to be a classic as long as I usually only read one fictional tale (non-play) per year.

1. As I lay Dying by William Faulkner, #1930. I love Faulkner. Everybody should read Faulkner. Such scathing disapprobation of the racial inequities in the South, but also such love for its uniqueness. And its strong women, what depictions of them! There's subtle humor that's occasionally laugh-out-loud in them, like when the poor white trash family in this book can't afford to take an adult family member to the doctor when he breaks his leg, they try to fix it themselves by making him a cast out of concrete. But first they have to persuade the store owner to break open a 25-pound bag to sell them 10 cents worth of cement, which he finally does to get this noisy, smelly out-of-town riff-raff out of his store. Having a cement cast does not do the injured family member any good, it turns out. I suppose it was worth a try, in a poor-man's canny self-help sort of way.

2. The Conquering Tide: War In The Pacific Islands 1942-44 by Ian W. Toll, #2015. My Dad fought in the Pacific War with the First Marine Division at two horrific battles and was training to be in on the invasion of the Japanese mainland in 1946, with its projected one million American casualties, before we dropped the bomb which finally caused beaten Japan to surrender already. Sorry, but not sorry at all about that.

3. Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific 1944-45 by Ian W. Toll, #2020. The Americans ruthlessly and relentlessly brought the ruthless and implacable Japanese to the peace table just before the Russians' cynical, opportunistic and cheap land grab garnered a prized Japanese island for themselves and communism. The ensuing Cold War would never have been the same. The section on the peaceful occupation of Japan itself made the book fascinating and worthwhile.

4. The British Are Coming! The War For America 1775-77 by Rick Atkinson, #2019. Volume One of the Revolution Trilogy by the Pulitzer Prize winning author of the Liberation Trilogy (WW2, ETO), which I read last year. I can't wait for volumes two and three to come out.

5. Stars In Their Courses, The Gettysburg Campaign June-July 1863 by Shelby Foote #1994, 1963. This is a "book" lifted straight out of Foote's magisterial Civil War Trilogy and deposited whole as a history of the Gettysburg campaign, with all of its star-fated actors, Lee who lost the war on the afternoon of Pickett's Charge, Meade who steadfastly defended his high ground that couldn't be taken but just as steadfastly refused to come out of his redoubt and attack a defeated foe and therefore consigned the nation to another two years of bloodletting, Reynolds who died after setting the Union line in its winning position, Ewell who hid behind the words "if practicable" in Lee's order of the first day to attack the reeling enemy and knock him off of his dominant position and therefore failed to unhinge the Union line while it was still possible and assured the loss for the Confederacy of the key battle in North American history. I read the massive trilogy back in the nineties and still remember it as a great read, even if written from a Southern POV. Every American adult should know something, or more, about the Battle of Gettysburg, it is where slavery was doomed to die in North America.

6. The Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific 1941-42 by Ian W. Toll #2012. The desperate first two years of WW2 in the Pacific, at least until the Battle of Midway changed the course of WW2 in five minutes on June 22, 1942 when American dive-bombers from the US carriers Enterprise and Yorktown arrived simultaneously over the attacking Japanese fleet by happenstance from different directions and battle groups and sank three of the four Japanese carriers in the enemy's taskforce in the most momentous five minutes of WW2. Japan never seriously regained the initiative again during the war, just as Nazi Germany never seriously regained the initiative again after the Battle of Stalingrad was fought to a standstill in 1942, before the Russians annihilated the overextended and encircled German Sixth Army in January 1943.

Pickleball and . . . literature?

 For 75 minutes on Saturday morning I practiced PB with a friend, volleying, serving and returning, and backhands. "Yes! " would ring out in mock triumph as she put yet another slant shot off to one side of the court causing me to run way over there for a weak, lunging return, and then hit the wide-open court as I desperately tried to reverse course and run back into the play. I would hit volley shots at her that would handcuff her between forehand/backhand stabs at the ball and laugh as she quixotically looked at her paddle that had just failed her by trying to return a chicken-wing shot off its narrow banding edge. In between faux triumphs we would discuss Rick Atkinson's fascinating opening volume in the Revolution Trilogy which we both are reading, The Redcoats Are Coming. "Atkinson has a felicity for turning history into literature," says the Washington Post. No score was kept, only momentary scores were settled. I love pickleball.

Sunday, as showers threatened and the sky spit raindrops, I showed up at general PB Drop-In and filled out a 4-some on a water-slicked court hoping to quickly get in a couple of games before a deluge made playing untenable. I thought I was being handy by immediately filling out a 3-some even though our two opponents were half my age and the best players (one by far) of the 12 toilers playing on three courts. The game went quickly as Pen put his wicked spin serve onto the wet court where it sliced wickedly away off the moist veneer of the hard court and weak lunging rally returns were put away decidedly by Player at the Kitchen Line with triumph aplomb. We went up for faux "good game" platitudes at 1-11 and I drolly said, "Work up a sweat, you two?" The losing two of us expectantly waited for Pen and Player to split up with us in some more equitable matchup that would, you know, be more fun but Pen and Player wanted to remain together. Okay. We became a mere ballboy and ballgirl for game two chasing down smashed winners so they could thereupon perform more spectacular kitchen putaways and spin-serves that actually curved wickedly in the wet-laden air from "out" to "in." Quickly dispensing with the false platitudes at the net following the 0-11 shellacking (Pickled!) I kept on going, got into my car and drove home to finish reading my depressing Thomas Hardy novel where the heroine gets hanged for murdering her rapist and her husband, the perfect man, runs off with her sister, equally beautiful but half his age, at the exact moment that poor Tessie is strung up for her "crimes." "'Justice' was done, and the President of the Immortals in the Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess." There was more profit in reading those lines than playing those games. I hate pickleball.

Summer's half gone...

. . . and I haven't been to the beach yet or even in the water other than the shower.  Last summer I took a July 4th car trip to get out of town so I didn't have to listen to our ridiculous liar-in-chief talk on the Mall about patriots securing all the airports during the Revolutionary War.  I swam in the ocean off Cape Hatteras, saw a baseball game in Atlanta, visited the Andersonville Civil War POW Camp, explored the Chickamauga battlefield, toured the D-Day Museum in Bedford and finished up the trip at Appomattox Courthouse where the Civil War came to an end.  But this year, nada.

I've planted many perennial flowers in my yard, walked the streets round my house to get some roadway miles in, went to BLM Plaza in the District twice to try to figure out why military troops were patrolling ("dominating" in our clown-in-chief's words) the DC streets, donate blood once, talked to a Kaiser doctor on the phone to try to get the coronavirus antibody test so I could engage in plasma therapy but she wasn't having any of it (of course--I live in America and there are no adequate tests anywhere for anyone except the for the White House and for major league sports) and I read three books including two pulitzer prize winners, but that's a pretty paltry summertime report.

I got my taxes done, that was a big thing for me.  Basically I moved piles of documents around my dining room table for weeks and then on July 9th shoved a disorganized sheaf of jumbled papers in an envelope and overnighted them to my accountant in Colorado (I used to live there).  He was hopping mad, I thought he was going to discharge me but he got them finished and filed on time and I have even received a refund already.  Trying to do taxes drives me into the thrall of lassitude and days pass by with no progress.  After I spent a day trying to get my 2019 W-2, I learned that retirees like me don't get W-2s, they get 1099-Rs instead.  My 401K continues its dizzying (sickening?) decline but I anticipate a change come January and hope it'll come back then.

So what to do?  Stay home and read more books and each day's copy of the Washington Post?  There's no baseball to go watch in person, which could have otherwise afforded me a satisfactory small side trip.  I've thought about taking a short trip to North Carolina where I could be on the coast and take a dip in the ocean but I don't want to get or spread the virus.  The shortness of breath, which makes it so I can't sleep and I have to get up no matter how exhausted I am and sit upright or walk about downstairs or in the cool of  the early morning air outside, occasionally comes back and causes me to wonder if I have or still have or had the virus and my lungs are scarred,  It exhausts me thinking about it.  There's no testing in Trump's America, have I already say that?  So I can't find out in these lonely hours as the weeks and months pass by whether I'm sick or have been sick or not; am I hypochondriac or normal, stalwart in my enforced semi-isolation or depressed by it?  The whole reality of where we are and what we've become is driving me crazy.  Good job, you 63 million reckless voters of four years ago who brought about, predictably enough as to the ultimate outcome albeit not the actual event itself, our disastrous response (151,000 American deaths in five months headed towards maybe over half a million or more) to this predictable enough worldwide calamity.

The year so far?

What's been good about 2020?  Well, the pandemic, and especially our national response to it which was and is criminally negligent and extremely political and slothful (does the man actually have a job he does?) isn't one of them, as over 149,000 needlessly dead Americans could attest to.  But November 3d is coming up in less than 100 days and that is good after four four chaotic, dystopian years; make sure you all carefully vet the candidates this time, eschew wishing upon a star when you vote this time, and actually vote, and responsibly, this time!

I went to a wedding in a ballroom in a new hotel along the new DC waterfront in January and that was a great time, dancing well into the night, and I caught the very last train back to Virginia that night, by 3 minutes!  I went to see the Academy Award winning best picture Pandemic, er, Parasite, on Valentine's Day in a movie theater (perhaps my last visit to a movie theatre ever), and during the lengthy, dystopian foreign movie in Korean with English subtitles I started coughing, and by nighttime I was coughing my lungs out and spent the next two weeks with a debilitating malady that still goes undiagnosed ("you had the flu" everyone tells me, including a doctor I spoke with on the phone later trying to get an antibody test so I could participate in plasma therapy--naw, Kaiser doesn't that).  I went down to the Tidal Basin on a weekday morning in the spring and enjoyed seeing an early version of the Cherry Blossoms before the nation shut down in an effort to control the coronavirus which we have since squandered.

I have enjoyed infrequent meals at a Little Tykes Table on my front porch a have dozen times with a friend who comes over from the District (she doesn't have a place that would afford outside seating), and I keep up with a friend, former colleague and mentor who lives in Florida now via bi-monthly virtual lunches on FaceTime on that very same front porch.  I enjoyed reading, or re-reading, To Kill A Mockingbird, a Pulitzer Prize winning novel (I almost always read history for relaxation) that I thought I had read in ninth grade but now I'm not so sure because I wasn't familiar with any of it, and good on Boo Radley.  I finally put my eye travails of the last two years (detached retina) behind me, for now, by fitting my fifth and last procedure into the tiny window I had between my recovery from my February malaise and the nation shutting down, along with almost all health services, for a long time; the laser-shot treatment following my four eye surgeries improved my diminished vision noticeably, so that was good.

I went to two protests in the District on behalf of BLM and against our out-of-control president and his chief henchman the butterball inveterate liar Bill Barr, and I enjoyed treading on BLM Plaza a block north of the White House, and I tried to speak with National Guardsmen guarding various monuments who Trump brought into the District to "dominate" the streets but mostly they wouldn't tell me where they were from or why they were here.  I stopped going anymore when such gatherings seemed to sometimes turn into potential flash-mobs that might act upon a momentary notion to tear down statues as diverse as Andrew Jackson and Mahatma Gandhi.  I really enjoyed seeing a magnificently restored B-29 bomber roar over my house on July 4th at about 500 feet escorted by four P-51 Mustang fighters, two WW2 planes that played an outsized role in winning the war against Germany (Mustang) and against Japan (B-29); that moment still stands out as I just hang out in the house or yard these days.

Book List 2019

I read thirteen books this year.  Many were about the run-up to World War I, because I believe as the world currently re-arms and separates into warring camps, history is repeating itself a century later.  I read several World War II histories, all battle histories, because I went to Normandy this year to visit the five D-Day beaches, perhaps the greatest military enterprise that was successfully (albeit with a frightenly slender margin for success) in world history.  It literally changed world history.  I believe that the short era of peace between the two world wars was merely an interregnum in a greater clash between governmental models, authoritative or liberal, and really, World War II was merely a continuation and the conclusion to World War I; and perhaps later history, if mankind survives this century, will treat the two great wars as one continuing worldwide war, sort of like the Hundred Years  or the Thirty Years War.

Other than bellicose books pointing us towards our perhaps immediate future, I read a novel (literature), a play, and a antebellum civil war book--all had a political bent that point towards American peculiarities that have forged us as a world power, racism (slavery) and the power of propaganda and misspeak.  Plus a couple of other books of interest to me.

Here are the top ten books I read this year in my estimation, in the order of how much they caused me to contemplate, deeply or otherwise.  Several were scintillating to me (page turners) and others were a slog to get through.

1.  The Fires of Jubilee--Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion by Stephen Oates (1975). Terrorist or Freedom Fighter?

2.  Castles of Steel--Britain, Germany and the Winning of the Great War at Sea by Robert Massie (2003). This I considered to be a scintillating book (832 pages), especially the you-are-there lerngthy description of the Battle of Jutland, describing naval gunfire practically salvo by salvo.

3.  Animal Farm by George Orwell (1946). Who could ever forget the image of stalwart, loyal Boxer being sent off to the glue factory by Napoleon when his usefulness was over as the other "free" animals watched helplessly in despair?

4.  Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (1955). The Scopes Trial in play-form (see: American racism).

5.  Dreadnought--Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War by Robert Massie (1991).  The steady drumbeat to a great war--especially chronicling the incompetent egotistical boob that was the Kaiser; the quoted foreign embassy dispatches often describe what a ridiculous strutting cock he was, shallow and a complete hindrance to old-style statesmanship and steady progress towards peaceful solutions--remind you of anyone constantly in the headlines currently?

6.  Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand (2010). The Louis Zamperini story of perseverance, survival and redemption, a true story set amidst the destruction and cruelty of World War II.

7.  D-Day, the Battle for Normandy by Anthony Beever (2009).  Apparently there are a few inaccuracies in this book but it provides an overview of the Allied assault upon Hitler's Fortress Europa and the 3-month slugging match between the Wehrmact and the Americans, British and Canadian forces before breakout in the Coentin Peninsula that followed the lodgment effected on June 6, 1944.

8.  The Wehrmact's Last Stand--The German Campaigns of 1944-1945 by Robert M. Citino (2017).  Like the Lost Cause, tough men fanatically defending a reprehensible regime.

9.  Power at Sea--The Age of Navalism, 1890-1918 by Like A. Rose (2008). Two empires decline (France and Britain), several empires are vanquished (Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and the German Empire for two decades), an empire is spawned (Japan), and an empire emerges (America).

10.  The First World War by Hew Strachan (2003, 2013).  World War I is an introduction to World War II and a presage to current times.

Lists

Yeah, I write lists.  I started my list of Books Read when I was a senior in high school and now I'm somewhere between 1500 and 2000 books read since then.

Actually, when I mention this (not very often) to folks, many seem amazed.  Perhaps they don't read many or any books and would be embarrassed, or perhaps it never occurred to them that this records their scholastic, mental and intellectual ebbs and flows during their lives.  I mean, if you read Uncle Tom's Cabin in college for a course, it would remind you of the inclinations and persuasions of that professor, wouldn't it; and if you read Nietzsche for pleasure, that would indicate your mental or perceived intellectual state at that period in your life, because nobody would read Thus Spoke Zarathustra for pleasure, right, or don't you know even who wrote that?

Book Read number 1000 decades ago was Moby Dick I remember, a great American novel (a top five), although it stalled adding to my reading list for four months while I plowed through it (while working and raising children long before my family was utterly destroyed by American divorce wars . . . well, that's another Western civilization story), because that was a momentous number and I wanted it to be a momentous book.  I'll die soon enough and take my book list to St. Peter's gate, where it'll be my ticket of admittance showing a life well lived, or maybe it'll show a life squandered.

Mostly I read history, especially of WW2 because my dad fought in that war and he was the greatest man I ever knew, but I try to read literature at least once each year.  This year it was Animal Farm because some animals are more equal than others, like, you know, Republicans.  I read at least a book a month and my next post, I'll let you know what the best dozen books were and what I thought about them.

Do you read?

I read a little in 2018.  I wish I had read more, but my vision was occluded by my retina degeneration and I spent many weeks in recovery.  Reading books for information, knowledge or pleasure is a lifelong multifaceted enterprise--history, philosophy, biography, literature, fiction, the sciences, great books, poli-sci, but I think many modern Americans will default to a one minute search of wikipedia, and done. Knowledge stored and confirmed.

Here's the baker's dozen list of books I read in 2018, in order of how significant I thought they were to me.  Past is  prologue, and knowledge is power.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.  This book took me a year to read and I read it in response to a course I took on Victorian female authors, whom I had never read as a boy growing up in the 1960s.  The book was very dense and went on very long but it had its interesting moments, and now I can read a novel by Jane Austen and be done with this enlightening quest.

Legs by William Kennedy.  Crime in the 1930s brought to us (along with the Mafia and scoffing at laws) by the Prohibition Amendment.  Molding our country's more's through constitutional amendments, and this novel describes the unintended aftermaths.

1493 by C Charles C. Mann.  The Columbian Exchange, which was mostly one-way, foodstuffs towards Europe, diseases to the Americas.  This book was very interesting but it went on too long, getting into very obscure subjects.

Codename Downfall by Thomas Allen and Norman Polmar.  The American plan to invade Japan in 1945 and 1946.  It would have been very bloody, involving millions of casualties and probably would have seen the tactical use of nuclear and chemical weapons on the battlefield and resulted in a Japan divided into a communist north and a democratic south, just like in Korea.

Why Germany Nearly Won by Steve Merctante.  Germany (the Nazis) acted very badly and lost World War II.  The Americans, British and Canadians stormed Fortress Europa on D-Day in 1944 and won the war in ten months but meanwhile the Soviet forces were tying up two thirds of the Wehrmacht's forces.  Not that I feel sorry or grateful for the Russians, they participated with the Nazis in dismembering Poland in 1939 which was the naked invasion that started World War II.  The Russians did most of the fighting against the Nazis for four years but they got what they wrought.

Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson.  The greatest natural disaster in US history, a hurricane that devastated Galveston and killed 15,000 Americans.

The Storm of the Century by Al Roker. Yep, 15,000 Americans drowned in Texas in 1900.  A story of meteorology, racism and fake news.

Operation Sea Lion by Leo McKinstry.  Would the English have thrown the Nazis back into the sea in 1940, and thereby saved the world we now know?  America barely helped, but thank the lord that the British developed radar and produced the Spitfire fighter and barely saved history.

The Origins of the Second World War in the Pacific by Akira Irtiye.  The war actually started in 1931 when the Japanese threatened then invaded China.  Japan couldn't actually subjugate all of China to end the fighting and had its own Vietnam there.

Asiatic Land Battles by Trevor Dupuy.   Yep, we beat the Japanese, with some Australian and British assistance.  Ours was more of a naval and aerial war, but there was ground fighting in Burma and on the islands, large and small, in the Pacific.

World War Two, The Battle of the Bulge Re-Assessed by Charles Whiting.  No matter how you look at it, the Allies won.  The Nazis threw their last reserves against American forces in the Ardennes in December 1944 in the greatest battle in U.S. history, and thereby greatly aided the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe.

The Profiler by Pat Brown. My guilty pleasure, crime scenes deciphered (I was a policeman for nine years before I went to law school).

Dragon Teeth by Michael Crichton.  Another "found" manuscript by a science fiction author who died more than a decade ago.

Reading a Little

In accord with the chaotic year just past, I only read 8 books in 2017.  I am currently reading three other books simultaneously but I am bogged down in all three, although one has become more informative and interesting near the end (I have ten more dense pages to go on a study by an academic on Japan's rush to war with the U.S. in 1941), another book I'll eventually struggle through because it is classic literature by Virginia Woolf but I'm not getting its point yet, and the last one is a tedious survey of the last 500 years of community histories following the Columbian Exchange.  I expect you'll read about these books next year here.

The best book I read was Hell to Pay by D.M. Giangreco, copyright 2009 & 2017, a detailed study of detailed American and Japanese war plans in 1945 for the Americans' final assault on the Japanese Empire's home islands in 1945 (on Kyushu) and 1946 (on Hokkaido).  It would have been hell, with a million casualties on the American side and ten million or more on the Japanese side, with tactical use of nuclear bombs by the Americans on the battlefield, over which the American infantrymen would traverse because of the immature realization at the time of radioactive aftereffects.  It was gruesome if laborious reading to me because my Dad was a combat Marine in the theatre, with two horrific battles already engaged in (Peleliu and Okinawa), and he almost certainly would have been killed at age 21 in the bloody assault.  Perhaps you can already guess how I feel about the use of two nuclear bombs on Japanese cities (which induced Japan to surrender) and whether its use in Asia was "racist" or not (these bombs would certainly have been used on Germany when available if that country hadn't already been overcome).  Japan had over 15,000 radar-evading wooden-framed kamikaze planes hidden away in hardened, hidden hangars for the final battle (three times as many as the American planners reckoned on), thousands of similarly radar-invisible wooden high speed suicide boats collected for use against the Allied armada, and many combat-hardened divisions brought over from China dug in at and behind all the invasion beaches (they knew by deduction exactly where the Allies would land), just waiting for the ultimate Gotterdammerung.

A close second as the best book I read last year is The Unvanquished by William Faulkner, a novel published in 1938.  Using exquisite language and spellbinding descriptions, Faulkner deals head-on with the racial problem in America, focusing on the racist South where racism was casual and non-controversial, a white author using the N-word liberally and casually.  Because, like it or not, that's the way it actually was back then, whether you want to deny it and ban it or not.  I loved this book, about the family majordomo, Granny, who keeps the family together during the waning days of the Civil War when the menfolk are away fighting.  With the help of her teen grandson's companion slave, a very clever boy the same age as her kin and raised in the household with him, she bilks the invading Yankees out of much livestock (which she distributes to the needy) and scores of contraband (liberated) slaves (whom she sent back to their "homes," where else did they have to go?) who represented a drag upon the bluecoats' offensive impetus.  This matriarch's death at the hands of a band of renegade Rebel deserters in one last sham transaction leads to a tale of devastating southern vengeance.

The other half-dozen books I read were interesting (like Last to Die (2015) by Stephen Harding, about the last U.S. airman to die in the air on a photo reconnaissance mission over Japan two days after the Japanese acceptance of the Allies' surrender terms, at the hands of fanatical Japanese fighter pilots who refused to accede to the Emperor's surrender dictum) or not (like Operation Barbarossa (2011) by Christian Hartman, a formulaic short account of Hitler's dreary war in Russia which doomed his Third Reich practically from the outset of this onslaught).  Here are the remainder of the books I read last year in addition to those already mentioned:  Monty's Men (2013) by John Buckley, an account of the British and Canadian armies under the command of British General Bernard Montgomery in northwest Europe after D-Day; Lincoln and His Generals (1952) by T. Harry Williams, any description of the Young Napoleon, General George McClellan who prolonged the war by years due to his megalomania and indecisiveness, is always interesting; The First World War (1998) by John Keegan, an insightful and pithy exposition of the run-up to the conflict and an insightful and pithy exposition of its aftereffects sandwiched around 400 pages of dreary recounting of large armies on the move; and Sinai Victory by S.L.A. Marshall (1956) about the abortive but successful Israeli military takeover of the Sinai peninsula in 1956 on a shoestring basis, sort of a precursor to the 1967 war which forged the modern Middle East.

More books

The year is slipping away! A blue funk, since November 9th last year.  Way back in May I posted that last year I read 14 books, two of which were entirely inconsequential (light reading by the same historian on the history of World War One and World War Two using the same minimal outline for both), and listed the six most significant (to me) works in ascending order (Oswald's Tale, Silas Mariner, Death of a Salesman, Jane Eyre, True Grit, Agnes Grey).

I've been trying to get away in the last couple of years from reading recent history almost exclusively and get back into literature.  So now that I have listed the six most impressive (to me) books I read last year, here are the next half dozen:

Case Closed-Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK by Gerald Posner (1993).  Yep, Lee Harvey Oswald did it.  I've visited the sniper's perch on the 6th floor of the Texas Book Depository and that street below where the presidential motorcade was crawling away below the sniper-scoped viewpoint of the assassin is a killing zone.  Couldn't miss.  That, of course, doesn't explain how the perfect storm of events came together that led this derelict of history at that moment to be there ready to kill this historical figure.  I'll note that his Russian wife Marina was probably a KGB operative, and Kruschev was humiliated by Kennedy in the Cuba showdown that threatened to eradicate all human life on the planet.  I read this tome while recovering from double hernia surgery.

Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era 1910-1917 by Arthur Link (1954).  Woodrow Wilson was a near near-great American president, who accomplished many things, many of which were good.  He was also a racist.  I have learned not to comment on the Internet about presidents who owned slaves or were clearly racists.  So...Zip the Lip.

Yoni: Hero of Entebbe by Max Hastings (1979).  Don't know what Entebbe was?  Look it up.  Yoni was the revered older brother of the current Israeli prime minister, and he died at Entebbe and his nation mourned.

The Day the World Came to Town by Jim DeFede (2002).  A heart-tugging book about how the inbound travelers to the USA from overseas had to scramble on September 11, 2001 and in the week that followed, when US airspace was closed on that tragic day.  The eastern-most international airport in North America, in Canada, which had been relegated to backwater status after the Cold War (the US basically built it so its forces could quickly deploy to Europe) and the town reverted to about 2,000 close-knit residents who mostly maintained this world-class airport.  About 120 jumbo jets landed there on September 11th and 12,000 refugees overran the isolated town's resources immediately.  You think the Canadians didn't cope, take care of and welcome these confused, fearful travelers?  Think again.  O Canada!

Dieppe by Harold Palin (1978).  Don't know what Dieppe was?  Oh, never mind.  This is an account of the armed incursion that presaged Operation Overlord two years later.  It was a disaster but O Canada!

The Interloper-Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union by Peter Savodnik (2013).  A portrait of newly-weds, and Russian agents in the apartments next door and the recordings that came out of their planted bugs.  Did they capture the full breadth of the first days of these two "lovebirds" (one was abusive, the other was an agent), because the Minsk agents knocked off at 12PM.  Two years later Lee Harvey Oswald slew the president of Russia's greatest adversary, and his wife knew nothing about it!  Yeah.

Psst!

"Do you have your Safeway card?"
"Yeah, sure. Here it is."
"What's this? It's a library card."
"Oh, I brought the wrong card in from the car."

"Well, enter your phone number, that'll work."
"Okay. This probably means that my Safeway card wouldn't work at the library."
"That's what I'm thinking too. Here's your receipt."

"Thanks, and would you do me a favor?"
"What's that?"
"Please don't tell anyone that I read books. It could ruin my reputation."

Reading, a little.

You might think that because I'm retired now, I would have a lot of time to read these days.  Somehow the days go by and although I'm busy around the house, I haven't made much time to read.  I blame it on two things this past year; my double hernia surgery last summer which took me longer to fully recover from, and the shock of November 9th when it became fully apparent that the Russians had pulled off a stunning coup and our world had changed for the rest of our lives.  I read fourteen books, however, and discarding the two short, sketched-in-outline-of-the-conflict on WWI and WWII by the same cruising historian, here are the best half dozen in ascending order, roughly.

Oswald's Tale by Norman Mailer.  Mailer was a great writer and this book was every bit as good as his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Executioner's Song.  This book on Lee Harvey Oswald, a still-mysterious figure that, perhaps lone wolf style, changed US history forever with his assassination of President Kennedy.  (Think Vietnam, the Great Society, RMN, Watergate).  The book details Oswald's dreary and closely monitored (by the Russkies) time in the Soviet Union after he defected, and when he came back married to perhaps a KGB operative.  In short order this secretive, querulous lazy-bones drifter committed the most improbable crime of century.  It was an interesting book, Mailer came to no conclusion as to whether Oswald acted alone, he said--Maybe.  Mailer did, however, convince me in seven pages at the end of this tome that Jack Ruby probably acted on behalf of the mob to rub out Oswald.

Silas Mariner by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans).  This short novel about a reclusive gold-hearted, gold-hoarding tailor is classic literature and tugs at your heart as all comes out right in the end.  It's depressing to think that in the nineteenth century women authors had to write under male names to get their books published, reviewed seriously and read.

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller.  This classic play introduced Willie Lomax to American lexicon, a prototypical loser, destroyed at the end, and full of closely guarded secrets, as are several of his family members also.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.  My reading of Victorian novels by female authors continues, they are all worthwhile and I wasn't exposed to them in my educational upbringing at an all-boys high school.  I read Dickens and my sisters read Bronte.  I loved Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell) , which I read in 2015, and this was a good book too, especially the first half.  The incredible, improbable plot-driven coincidences piled up too high by the end for me to think this book is superior to her sister's stunning novel but it did give us the notion of the crazy relative in the attic.  Watch the 1943 movie starring Orson Wells, and read the book, and you'll be richly rewarded.

True Grit by Charles Portis.  A little known western novel that is totally engrossing.  Most people are familiar with the two cinematic adaptations, starring John Wayne or Jeff Bridges, both interesting in their own right, but this book will absorb you and is full of homilies and life truisms.

Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte.  The least known of the Bronte sisters' novels, interesting and convoluted.  From hard beginnings, this governess persevered and prospered because of the wholeness of her staid and sturdy character.  Is there a common theme running through the Bronte novels, do you suppose?  I just wish Emily had lived past age 30 and written at least a second novel.

World War One

A hundred years ago yesterday, the U.S. declared war on the Kaiser's Germany and entered the Great War, later known as World War I, which had already raged for three bloody years.  German U-boats had unleashed unrestricted warfare on worldwide commercial shipping bound for the war zone, in a final desperate effort to starve England out of the war, and this violated one of President Wilson's grand Fourteen Points, Freedom of the Seas.  (Over There.)

The best account I have read of the confusing and senseless lengthy run-up to WWI is The Long Fuse by Laurence  Lafore.  The reverberations of the war lasted well into the last century, detailed well in Paul Fussell's book The Great War and Modern Memory; for instance think of the phrase going "over the top" (of your own trench in an assault).  (British troops go over the top at the Somme in 1916.)

WWI begat World War II twenty years after the Versailles Treaty, with its "war guilt" clause and its unsustainable, savage reparation payments requirements, that ended the Great War.  Nobody won that peace, as the follow-up war dwarfed the horrific casualties and devastation of the earlier war.  (A doughboy.)

My favorite novel of the war is One of Ours by Willa Cather, and the best popular history of the initiation of the war is The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman, both of which won Pulitzer prizes.  As American missiles rain down on Syria, possibly striking some Russian or Iranian personnel, following a grisly gas attack by Syria on helpless civilians, I leave you with the close of the most popular novel of WWI, the ironically titled All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Remarque:

"He died in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.

He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long: his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come." (A soldier from the war, my grandfather.)

Books

I read only ten books last year, my lowest total in 35 years.  But on the positive side, I started reading classical literature after decades of reading mostly history books.  Here's how I would rank the half-score of books I read, in order of their importance to me.

• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, published in serial form around 1861.

This is a fabulous book, all about Pip's coming of age and his ultimate change from an ungrateful and foppish dilettante into a worthwhile man.  Who could forget the aging yet frozen-in-time jilted bride, or the beautiful but cold and heartless Estella.  And there are two endings to choose from.

• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, published in 1847.

The perfect love triangle, also a sort of ghost story, set on the unforgiving Scottish moors.  Heathcliff and Catherine are unforgettable and inseparable in both life and death.

• The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature.

The novel depicts New York City's upper-crust society in the 1870s, exposing its sycophantic, seething and unseemly nature, plus it is a great revenge piece.  Wharton's well-deserved prize made her the first female recipient.

• Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck, published in 1954.

Cannery Row's sequel, this follow-up novel is a sweet rendition of the unforgettable new girl in town, Thursday.

• The Missing of the Somme by Jeffrey Dyer, published in 1994. 

A haunting evocation of the somber and reflective memories evinced by the many monuments and memorials populating the WWI battlefield at the Somme River, where in 1916 the flower of English manhood was slaughtered as it walked in straight lines into German guns.  An ethereal travel-guide.

• The Apostle: A Life of Paul by John Pollack written in 1972.

Everybody should know more about the life of St. Paul than the abridged version that is taught in bible class.  After all, he is at the center of Christian doctrine.

• The Wehrmacht Retreats: Fighting a Lost War, 1943 by Robert Citino, published in 2012.

The German will to carry on their barbaric war after it was obviously and irretrievably lost by 1943, and the tenacity and skill with which they did so, are astonishing.

• Winston's War: Churchill 1940-1945 by Max Hastings, published in 2009.

This was a great man.  Utilizing his great oratory, he single-handedly propped up the British will and ability to resist.

• Hitler's War by Edwin Hoyt, published in 1988.

The Germans lost the war in this book too.

• Quest for Decisive Victory: From Stalemate to Blitzkrieg in Europe, 1899-1940 by Robert Citino, published in 2002.

Most people don't know anything about the series of post WWI Balkan Wars.  These conflicts were the petri dish where the form of war known as blitzkrieg, so successfully used by the Germans to conquer most of Europe by 1942, was developed.

The Age of Innocence

I'm reading The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton about decadent highbrow New York society in the 1870s.  It won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature.  It's  a great book.

I knew from the start that the book wouldn't end well for its protagonist, Newland Archer, a young man who resists the hypocrisy and self-absorbed nature of upper-crust haughty society even as he is caught up in it.  He is enmeshed in a chaste but cloying love triangle which he hastily thinks he solves by marrying his fiancee, May Welland, quickly at its onset, when the exciting but very bohemian Countess Olenska shows up from Europe to tempt him, from whence she has fled her husband.

Newland thinks he's ahead of his time by wishing for and ascribing to women independence, hence his attraction to May's cousin, Ellen Olenska, the countess who has the audacity to leave her husband and live independently, frequenting gathering places of writers and actors, the lessor people of society who have to toil for their daily bread.  But Newland has proposed to May, whom he considers to be a blank slate to be filled up with knowledge he imparts to her from his vast, eclectic reading.

Newland, an attorney, is assigned to Ellen's case as she seeks to file for divorce.  Following his firm's orders and against his better judgment, he advises her not to pursue the matter since proper people don't divorce and she is a part of the highfalutin society even though she is different.  There is mutual attraction between them, the married lady and the engaged man, and here is the author's description of their first chaste moment of almost irresistible physical desire.  Ellen, "dressed as if for a ball," is inspecting herself in a mirror by the mantelpiece in the drawing room when Newland re-enters, having seen Ellen's aunt off to her waiting carriage, which will soon return for the countess.

"Madame Olenska did not move when he came up behind her, and for a second their eyes met in the mirror; then she turned, threw herself into her sofa-corner and sighed out: 'There's time for a cigarette.'

"He handed her the box and lit a spill for her; and as the flame flashed up into her face she glanced at him with laughing eyes and said: 'What do you think of me in a temper?'

"Archer paused a moment; then he answered her with sudden resolution: 'It makes me understand what your Aunt has been saying about you.'

"'I knew she'd been talking about me.  Well?'

  ""She said you were used to all kinds of things--splendours and amusements and excitements--that we could never hope to give you here.'

"Madame Olenska smiled faintly into the circle of smoke about her lips.

"'Medora is incorrigibly romantic.  It has made up to her for so many things!'

"Archer hesitated again, and again took his risk.  'Is your aunt's romanticism always consistent with accuracy?'

"'You mean: Does she always speak the truth?'  Her niece considered.  'Well, I'll tell you: in almost everything she says, there's something true and something untrue.  But why do you ask?  What has she been telling you?'

"He looked into the fire, and then back at her shining presence.  His heart tightened with the thought that this was their last evening by that fireside, and that in a moment the carriage would come to carry her away."

So short, so suggestive, that magic moment in the mirror when their eyes locked.  This weekend I cheated and watched the Martin Scorsese movie, filmed in 1993, even though I'm 100 pages from the end of the book.  The film was mostly faithful to the book, and was filled with actual quotes from the book.  Now I know how the story ends, with its devastating consequences for Newland.  In the movie, Scorsese has the two clench and kiss in this scene, which as you can see, didn't happen in the book at this moment, but perhaps that was to have a scene that enlivens up an otherwise dreary and dull movie up to that point.  The movie picked up steam from this point onwards.

Wuthering Heights

I am currently reading Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.  She died shortly after she wrote this classic, one year in fact, when she was barely 30.  As one reviewer stated, "She poured the secret thoughts of her tormented soul into her one prose creation."

Here's a paragraph I read that I paid close attention to.  The malevolent Heathcliff, speaking to the faithful servant Nellie, the story's main narrator, of the young, practically helpless "whelp" that he created, Heathcliff says of his own son:

"I despise him for himself, and hate him for the memories he revives!  But that consideration is sufficient; he's as safe with me , and shall be tended as carefully as your master tends his own.  . . .  I do regret, however, that he so little deserves the trouble; if I wished any blessing in the world, it was to find him a worthy object of pride, and I'm bitterly disappointed with the whey faced whining wretch!"

A classic passage in a great novel about a disappointed father's reflections on a child of his.

Heathcliff Is the Model

I'm reading Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.  Here is a quote from it that I dedicate to the mother of my three children who, during our divorce proceedings last decade, acted in concert with a coterie of agenda-driven "professionals" to overbear the wills of these tender young minor children, the end result being that their dad was ripped away from them extra-judicially.

On the night she dies, narcissistic Catherine bespeaks her true inner self to her paramour Heathcliff, the dark foundling who bestrides the pages like a super egoistic Iago.  All will be destroyed at the altar of self-worship.

"' I wish I could hold you,' she continued bitterly, 'till we were both dead!  I shouldn't care what we suffered.  I care nothing for your sufferings.  Why shouldn't you suffer?  I do!  Will you forget me?  Will you be happy when I am in the earth?  Will you say twenty years hence, 'That's the grave of Catherine Earnshaw.  I loved her long ago, and was wretched to lose her, but it is past.  I've loved many others since; my children are dearer to me than she was, and, at death, I shall not rejoice that I am going to her, I shall be sorry that I must leave them!'  Will you say so, Heathcliff?'"

Great Expectations, the final chapter.

Joe & Biddy, Herbert & Clara, Wemmick & Miss Skiffins, they all get conveniently and neatly married at the end of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. All the relationships are tied up in a neat bow. 

Even Jaggers the lawyer has his wild housekeeper, whom he seems to tame and also maintain. Oh, did you know that…(SPOILER ALERT)...she turns out to be Estella's mother? 

Or that…(SPOILER ALERT)…Provis, Pip's benefactor, turns out to be Estella's father? Or that Compeyson, Provis' mortal enemy throughout the book, who is responsible for Provis' capture and sentence of death and who was killed by him, is the…(SPOILER ALERT)…man who jilted Miss Havisham at the altar decades earlier and turned her into a vengeful recluse? 

Even the leg iron that Provis the convict sawed off his ankle years earlier during his first escape attempt, using the file that Pip the child brought to him from Joe's blacksmith forge, was used by Orlick the mean apprentice to kill Mrs. Joe, Pip's older sister, in a dastardly murder. That's a lot of interweaving and wrapping up of all the moving parts. In the revised ending, Pip gets the girl in the end.

Estella, the breaking moonlight touching the tears dropping from her eyes, says to Pip at their chance encounter, "'I have been bent and broken, but--I hope--into a better shape. Be as considerate and as good to me as you were, and tell me we are friends.'

"'We are friends,' said I, rising and bending over her, as she rose from the bench. 'And will continue friends apart,' said Estella. 

"I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her."

This is the end…or is it?

I was assigned Great Expectations in 8th grade and thought I'd read it then, or major parts of it at least. Now having finished "re-reading" it decades later, I have become quite certain that I didn't read any of it back then because I didn't recognize anything.

Whatever didn't make it into the Classics Illustrated comic back then, I didn't know about.  Do you suppose, in the pre-Internet days, eighth grade English teachers were familiar with the 64-page cartoon book rendition of Great Expectations and asked final exam question slightly outside of its exposition?

Dickens ties everything up so neatly, nothing and nobody wanders through its 500 pages for no purpose. The critics say this is his most pared down book!

Its ending was re-written before publication, his editor prevailing upon Dickens to alter the ending to provide for Pip's total redemption.  The brutally brief and cold discarded ending had Pip walking along in London, much later, when he was summoned by a servant to a nearby coach being driven by a lady of means, Estella.

"[T]he lady and I looked sadly enough on one another. 'I am greatly changed, I know, but I thought you would like to shake hands with Estella, too, Pip.'  … .  I was very glad afterwards to have had the interview, for in her face and in her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the assurance that suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham's teaching, and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be."