The joys of re-reading - favorite novels - Good Old Books, part 1 - Bibliography

"CHARACTER," said J. C. Watts, "is doing the right thing when nobody is watching." Recommending books is a golden opportunity to do the sublime thing while everybody is watching, which is why so many book lists kick off with the Bible or War and Peace and pitch "the complete works of" with such lofty certitude.

Oh, please. Breathes there a man with soul so dead that he could read the complete works of Sir Walter Scott? Nobody has read all of Scott except Scott, and that only because he had to read proof.

I've read my share of classics and reviewed countless new books in the last 15 years, but the books I enjoy most are old favorites that I re-read when I'm too tired to do anything else but not tired enough to go to bed. Most are out of print now, but they sold so many copies in their day that they continue to turn up regularly in used-book stores. They might be a little dog-eared but they still make good stocking stuffers. If your loved ones object to secondhand presents, keep the old books and get some new loved ones.

"It was on an afternoon in May of 1844 that the letter came from Dragonwyck." I challenge anyone to read that opening sentence and put this novel down. Its structure is flawless. By the end of the first page we know who the heroine is, her age, her appearance, where she lives, and what she's like -- all the things that Joan Didion may or may not get around to revealing by the last page of hers. My initial reaction to Anya Seton's Dragonwyck (1944) corroborates the feminist group on the Internet who called me an elitist psychopath. The villain of this gothic tale is Nicholas Van Ryn, a reactionary Hudson River patroon who murders his wife with oleander leaves ground up in a nutmeg mill, but the first time I read it at the age of 13 I thought he was the hero and didn't realize my mistake for several years.

The aristocratic Nicholas is still my idea of Mr. Right, and so is the real-life enemy of populist democracy who makes a cameo appearance in the book: James Fenimore Cooper.

Another favorite Anya Seton novel is Katherine (1954), about the love affair between John of Gaunt, the ambitious younger son of Edward III, and Lady Katherine Swynford, whose four bastard children became the progenitors of the York and Tudor lines in fulfillment of the ancient prophecy, "Thou shalt get kings though thou be none." Richly descriptive of medieval life, the story dramatizes major events of late-fourteenth-century England -- the Black Plague, the Lollard heresy, the storming of the Savoy palace in the Peasants' Revolt -- and presents a brilliant fictional portrait of Katherine's brother-in-law, Geoffrey Chaucer.

Like many who read Katherine the year it came out, I thought Charlton Heston and Susan Hayward should star in the movie, but it was never made, probably because Katherine lived openly as John's mistress and produced those four bastards. They were legitimized by Richard II when John married Katherine late in life, but even so, this movie wasn't possible in the Fifties. Ironically, the sex scenes in the book achieve an exquisite balance between eroticism and sweetness that isn't possible in the Nineties.

The town in Kings Row was modeled on Fulton, Missouri, which erupted when native son Henry Bellamann published his 1941 novel of sex and sadism in the heartland. Fulton got better press in 1946 when Winston Churchill made his "iron curtain" speech at its Westminster College (Aberdeen College in the book), but by then Ronald Reagan's performance in the movie had immortalized another line of demarcation.

Reagan's character is far from the only medical victim in the book. Omitted from the movie are Patty Graves, who becomes a fanatic housekeeper after Dr. Gordon spays her; Ludie Sims, the complaisant grass widow whose face is disfigured after Dr. Gordon treats her earache; and the excitable Lucy Carr, who dies after Dr. Gordon gives her a sedative.

In contrast to Dr. Gordon's busy HillaryCare practice, Dr. Alexander Q. Tower has no patients at all, just a worn shingle flapping outside his gloomy house. In the movie Dr. Tower shoots himself after poisoning his daughter Cassandra to save her from the insanity she has inherited from her mother, but that's a toned-down Hollywood version of what happens in the book. My lips are sealed. Suffice to say that Kings Row is immensely satisfying to read during political campaigns when the Trad Vals pile up too high.

Betty Smith's first novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, was such a smash hit that her later work was never fully appreciated. My favorite is her third novel, Maggie-Now (1957). As usual it's set in pre - World War I Brooklyn, but for once we get a Smith heroine who is not a compulsive reader.

Maggie Moore (her childhood reprimand, "Maggie, now," becomes her nickname) is a simple Irish-Catholic girl who wants only to marry a good man and have children. But along comes Claude Basset, a Protestant-agnostic college graduate with an ironic wit that goes over her head and a wanderlust she doesn't find out about until after she marries him.