by Richard Subber | Oct 30, 2025 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Joys of reading
the fish isn’t the thing…
Book review:
The Old Man and the Sea
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952
127 pages
The old man has a name. Santiago. He is a perilously old fisherman. He has befriended a boy, a helper—but he fishes alone.
The Old Man and the Sea isn’t about the sea. You know what it’s about. It’s about the old man, a big fish, and the vicissitudes of life concentrated in one long, lonely, painful, heroic, unsatisfying, and redemptive fishing trip.
Santiago lives a life after he hooks a marlin that is too big for him to catch. He suffers, he marvels, he learns about himself, he lives a dire philosophy, he yearns for help as he endures the hours, he accepts again and again that he is responsible for his life that may end quickly.
Santiago unknowingly shares his boat with fate and chance. He gives up his illusion of control when the sharks begin to destroy his prize.
He returns to his solitary life ashore, and the battered carcass of the fish tells no tales.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Blithedale Romance
by Nathaniel Hawthorne, not his best…
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As with another eye: Poems of exactitude with 55 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Oct 26, 2025 | Book reviews, Books, Books Commentary, Joys of reading
Spread the word
Book review:
History in English Words
Owen Barfield
Hudson, NY: The Lindisfarne Press, 1953
240 pages
I have found a beautiful book, and I want to share it with you. Indulge me.
Owen Barfield, an Oxford graduate who loves language even more than I love it, wrote History in English Words. In his Foreword, W. H. Auden calls this delicate, powerful work “a weapon in the unending battle between civilisation and barbarism.” All foes of barbarism should procure a copy immediately.
This is not an easy read, but it’s easy to keep reading it. Barfield brings his remarkable erudition to nearly every page; the reader learns much about words—in English, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and the Indo-European protolanguage—and learns much about history, philosophy, religion, literature, culture, mind, and the deep structures of consciously human society. I’m not kidding. This book is unique in my experience.
Here’s a casual teaser:
“…it has been said that there are more [new words] in Shakespeare’s plays than in all the rest of the English poets put together.”
Examples of the Bard’s imagination:
advantageous, amazement, critic, dishearten, dwindle, generous, invulnerable, majestic, obscene, pedant, pious, radiance, reliance, sanctimonious
Throughout 240 pages, Barfield implicitly emphasizes a dynamic point: new words are created continuously in all languages by all peoples, and old words continuously acquire new meanings in all cultures.
The way we think and express our thoughts and feelings today could not have been done—in the fullness of our modern meanings and understandings—as little as 100 years ago.
Take a minute and speak three carefully considered sentences about three topics that you think are important or exciting. Almost certainly, no human being has ever before experienced your exact thought processes and used precisely your words to express them.
Spread the word.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
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My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 52 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Oct 14, 2025 | Book reviews, Books, Books Commentary, Joys of reading, Language
a one-man library…
Book review:
Literary Life: A Second Memoir
by Larry McMurtry (1936-2021)
Simon & Schuster, 2009
McMurtry moves me to want more, read more….
It’s incredibly easy to read McMurtry—I’ve read Books: A Memoir, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, and now Literary Life. It seems, repeatedly, that he writes in an off-hand way; thoughts and scenes and chapters can end very abruptly. Yet, the work seems polished. The prose is spare, as Larry acknowledges.
I am titillated by his familiar references to so many authors and works. I would love to be a “man of letters,” as McMurtry claims to be. The draw for me is McMurtry’s immersion in books. I would be thrilled to own 200,000 books. Desperately thrilled.
I’m pretty sure that McMurtry’s passionate engagement with books and authors is a believable lifestyle. His many references to re-reading books is a believable commitment.
I have for some time, since I retired, envisioned taking the pledge to read the entire oeuvre of an author I like. Now I am moved to read McMurtry’s books. I plan to re-read Books and Literary Life to get clues about how to read them. I’ll consider reading his works in order by pub date, except for the Lonesome Dove and Berrybender tetralogies, of course.
I don’t think I’ll be disappointed.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: Hag-Seed
by Margaret Atwood…it ain’t Shakespeare
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Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 74 free verse poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Sep 28, 2025 | Book reviews, Books, Joys of reading, Language
and another read, another day…
Book review:
The Book Lovers’ Anthology:
A Compendium of Writing
about Books, Readers & Libraries
Oxford, UK: The Bodleian Library, 2014
344 pages
Are you dying to know what 201 authors who picked up a wide array of quills, pencils, and pens in the last 500 years had to say about books, readers, and libraries?
This anthology leaves out a few remarks, to be sure. I guess it’s fair to say there’s something for everyone.
You don’t have to be a book lover to soak up some of the joys that some of these authors tried to immortalize on paper.
You don’t have to be a book lover to imagine what else they might have said.
You can open The Book Lovers’ Anthology to a random page, and read for a while, and experience most of the good feeling that you’re going to get from opening to any random page.
You can leave a lot of it for another read, another day.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Fire in the Lake (book review)
you should have read it in 1972…
by Frances FitzGerald
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My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 53 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Sep 9, 2025 | Human Nature, Joys of reading, Tidbits
goal-oriented…
A little girl was diligently pounding away
on her grandfather’s typewriter.
She told him she was writing a story.
“What’s it about?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she replied, “I can’t read.”
When you want to do something,
don’t let most things stop you.
Thanks to my friend George.
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Myths of Tet
How people get killed by lies…
by Edwin E. Moïse
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Seeing far: Selected poems with 47 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Aug 31, 2025 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Joys of reading, Language
prime times of life…
Book review:
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
by Muriel Spark (1918-2006)
New York: Harper Perennial, 1961, 1994
187 pages
Miss Jean Brodie, an exceedingly unconventional teacher, described every part of her life and her commitments and her outlook as being “in my prime,” but it is a hallmark of Muriel Spark’s magnificent talent in assembling the best words that it is left to the reader to completely imagine what “prime” may mean.
The defining value of the novel is the unceasing willingness and undaunted desire of Brodie’s carefully chosen students—the girls in the “Brodie set”—to try to figure out what “prime” means and to try to understand the effects their teacher is having on them.
The pages are filled with interactions and misunderstandings and hormonal energies. Miss Brodie and the other grownups dramatically pursue their teaching roles, but the girls largely find their own ways to learn things and work at growing up while doing so.
The book ends but the story doesn’t end. Henry Adams said a teacher can never tell “where (her) influence stops.” The ultimately humiliated Miss Brodie dies, but her prime has no boundaries and her students make their own lives.
p.s. the acclaimed movie with the same name and Maggie Smith as Miss Brodie is first class entertainment, but it mostly ignores Muriel Spark’s grimly realistic portrayal of the life forces that animate the “Brodie set.”
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Proud Tower
…a lot more than a history book…
by Barbara Tuchman
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Seeing far: Selected poems with 47 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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