Surprise of the Day: Cowen and Deerslayer

We didn't often get off the farm, except to go to town.  One time I particularly remember is a trip to Cooperstown, sometime in late summer after the hay was in the barn and before moving the old hens out and the pullets off the range into the henhouses.

Anyhow we visited the Baseball museum and the Farmer Museum--mom was particularly into the latter, much to my sister's disgust. Mom had grown up on a farm pre-WWI so all the tools brought back memories.  The museum is on the site of the old Cooper farm, so the store had some books on him.  I successfully argued to buy one, IIRC a child's biography of James Fenimore, perhaps my first book purchased in a store not a Christmas present.

My sister got into Cooper at some point, so I followed along.  I''m not sure whether I was reading her books, or from the school library, but I read a number, not just the Leatherstocking ones, but some of his sea books as well.

So I had an affection for Cooper.  Over the years it's pained me to see his reputation among scholars decline, so today, when Tyler Cowen wrote this, it was a big surprise:

"Yes,I mean the book by James Fenimore Cooper.  I am reading it for the first time and it is much better than I had expected.  Mark Twain’s mockery of Cooper led me wrong, as I let it turn me away from being an appreciator.  And for all the more recent talk of the book being archaic and racist, I am finding it surprisingly sophisticated...."

A Canticle for Leibowitz

One of the best science fiction novels of my youth was Miller's "Canticle for Leibowitz".  Via Brad DeLong, here's the New Yorker's nice appreciation of it.

Travis McGee

John D. MacDonald started in New York (Syracuse U.), but ended in Florida. I loved his novels, reading everyone I could find. Found a couple in a bookstore in Hawaii when the Continental plane landed to refuel. Finished them before we touched down in Saigon.

The LATimes has a piece on the possibilities his Travis McGee character will finally hit the movies. (Though Wikipedia is more comprehensive.) From the piece:

One abiding concern for McGee -- a dropout from society who seems more libertarian than liberal despite the '60s and '70s settings -- was the environment. Years before a full-fledged environmental movement, he was describing Florida's Mangrove Islands as "one of the few strange places left which man has not been able to mess up." In 1973, McGee talked about "instant Florida, tacky and stifling and full of ugly and spurious energies. They had every chain food-service outfit known to man, interspersed with used-car lots and furniture stores."