Tag: books

I know I’ve been writing a lot of “something wonderful” posts about books lately. I promise to write about something else in my next post of this sort. But because I associate Smith of Wootton Major with Christmas (I’ll explain why later), this feels like an appropriate time to write about it.

Smith of Wootton Major is essentially a 50-page fairy tale by J.R.R. Tolkien. Those 50 pages include illustrations by Pauline Baynes, best know for her illustrations for The Chronicles of Narnia. As in fairy tales, the characters are not complex and the story is simple. This is not The Hobbit, but I’m a sucker for a good fairy story. If you go in expecting that, you’ll find Tolkien’s tale enchanting.

The story opens with a wintertime feast, The Feast of Good Children, held once every 24 years. The highlight of the feast is the Great Cake, an opportunity for Wootton Major’s Master Cook to show off. Nokes, the village’s Master Cook, is incompetent; he relies heavily on his odd apprentice, Alf. When the time comes for Nokes to make the Great Cake, he decides to top it with a fairy queen, “a tiny white figure on one foot like a snow-maiden dancing.” Alf is clearly displeased with Nokes’ notion of fairies. He’s even more displeased that Nokes won’t take him seriously when he claims a star in the spice box is “from Faery.” The one thing Nokes and Alf agree on is that the star belongs in the cake, along with other trinkets and coins. It is swallowed by a boy, who becomes the eponymous hero.

It is this feast that makes me think of this book every time Christmas rolls around. The children and the cake topped with a balletic fairy queen remind me of The Nutcracker. And just as the Kingdom of Sweets is opened to Clara after she rescues the Nutcracker, the doors of Faery are opened to Smith soon after he swallows the star. He develops the habit of leaving his work and family behind to venture into Faery from time to time. Tolkien gives us tastes of Smith’s dreamlike journeys without ever allowing us to follow him completely.

When he first began to walk far without a guide he thought he would discover the further bounds of the land; but great mountains rose before him, and going by long ways round about them he came at last to a desolate shore. He stood beside the Sea of Windless Storm where the blue waves like snow-clad hills roll silently out of Unlight to the long strand, bearing the white ships that return from battles on the Dark Marches of which men know nothing. He saw a great ship cast high upon the land, and the waters fell back in foam without a sound. The eleven mariners were tall and terrible; their swords shone and their spears glinted and a piercing light was in their eyes. Suddenly they lifted up their voices in a song of triumph, and his heart was shaken with fear, and they passed over him and went away into the echoing hills.

I cannot tell you much more without spoiling the story. There are discoveries and loss and a final conflict between Nokes and Alf. The story won’t have you on the edge of your seat. But it is thoughtful and beautiful, and I love it.

You will often find Smith of Wootton Major paired with another novella, Farmer Giles of Ham. Although the latter book does not enchant me the way the former one does, it is definitely worth reading. It’s very different from The Smith of Wootton Major. A humorous story with a flawed hero, Farmer Giles of Ham doesn’t feel the least bit like a fairy tale. It’s lively and lots of fun, and because of that, you may like it the best of the two stories. As for me, I think it’s an enjoyable read, but it’s Smith of Wootton Major that calls to me every year as Christmas approaches.

There are plenty of beloved books that people pull out at Christmas, books like A Christmas Carol or The Polar Express. Here are three that you may not have read. The newest is 60 years old and still in print. The other two are out-of-print but can be found for less than $20 each.

The Story of Holly & Ivy

The Story of Holly & Ivy (1957) almost promises that all will be well with its very first sentence: “This is a story about wishing.” Of course, not all wishes come true, but you know right away that in this story, wishes have power. It’s about a doll, Holly, who wishes for a little girl, and an orphan girl, Ivy, who wishes to spend Christmas with a family of her own. The doll and the girl meet each other through a shop window, and both know they belong together. There are obstacles along the way — especially in the form of a very nasty toy owl, a villain that terrifies the other toys in the shop. But Godden promised you that this was a story about wishing, and so you know that Holly and Ivy will overcome everything that comes between them.

I’ve written about Godden’s doll books before. Similar themes pop up among them, including wishing. More than once in Miss Happiness and Miss Flower, Miss Flower frets “What can we do?” Miss Happiness responds, “Wish.” You might say that Godden was the Walt Disney of doll stories.

There are multiple editions of this book. I recommend the one with Barbara Cooney’s illustrations. It’s currently in print.

The Doll in the Window

The Doll in the Window (1953) by Pamela Bianco presumably was illustrated by the author. If not, it’s a pity that the illustrator wasn’t credited, because the pictures are part of what makes the book special.

This is another story about a girl and a doll in a shop window, but it’s very different from Godden’s book. Victoria, the oldest of six girls, is saving her coins to buy her sisters Christmas presents. When she falls in love with a doll in the toy shop, she has a dilemma: buy herself the doll, or buy presents for her sisters. The story is simple and offers a clear message about buying gifts for yourself, but one character, a Cub Scout, saves the story from becoming too moralistic. Although his selflessness is offered as a contrast to Victoria’s selfish wishes, he also brings some much-needed humor to the book.

“Why are you crying?” he asked.

“I’m not crying,” said Victoria. To change the subject, she pointed to the beautiful doll. “She’s pretty. Isn’t she?”

“Yes,” said the little boy. “She’s as pretty as anything, and she really flies!”

“Really flies?” said Victoria. “What do you mean?”

“Oh!” said the little boy, laughing. “I meant the blue airplane.”

“I meant the doll,” said Victoria. “I hadn’t even noticed the airplane.”

The little boy looked at the beautiful doll. “She’s pretty, too,” he said. “A streamlined doll.”

Of the three books in this post, I understand why this one is out of print. It’s a bit simplistic and right on the edge of being too preachy. Still, it’s worth hunting down for the story and the illustrations.

The Christmas Anna Angel

The Christmas Anna Angel (1944) was written by Newbery Award-winner Ruth Sawyer and illustrated by another Newberry winner, Kate Seredy. It’s a shame this gorgeous book is no longer in print. Sawyer takes us to war-torn Hungary, where Anna dreams of Christmas cakes, although she is told that the shortage of flour means there will be no cakes this year.

The children always felt very brave while they were looking through the windows; but when St. Nicholas sprang out of his sleigh, when his hand lifted the latch and he stepped inside the door — then they scampered like frightened mice into corners.

The Christmas saint was big and towering. His bishop’s hat with the golden cross reached almost to the rafters. His bunda was the most beautiful the children had ever seen, with colored pictures of angels and stars, of shepherds and mangers. He pointed to Anna: “You, Anna, have you been a good girl?”

Anna’s voice squeaked like a little mouse: “I haven’t been too good. I have washed the dishes and said my prayers; but I did take the frog to school and put it in Minka Czurczor’s desk — to scare her.”

“Not too good — but then — not too bad.” St. Nicholas looked at Anna’s mother, then back at Anna: “One present is deserved. What shall it be?”

Anna answered quickly: “One Christmas cake — shaped like a little clock. Please, St. Nicholas.”

“I have already told you,” Matyas Rado began. They were all looking at Anna. They were expected her to change her Christmas wish. That seemed too much to ask of anyone.

The Christmas Anna Angel is not to everyone’s taste. One reviewer on Goodreads called the book “weird.” Another said “it was too long and wordy.” Nevertheless, I heartily recommend it. I’ve read it over and over since I was a child. If you only seek out one of the three books in this post, make it this one.

I’ve already mentioned that I like the notion of letting books inspire your life. When I was young, there were two books in particular that filled me with dreams of dolls with interesting wardrobes and furniture. I’m not very good with my hands, so the dreams came to nothing. But maybe the books will inspire you or your children. If not, they’re good stories in and of themselves.

The Fairy Doll is one of Rumer Godden’s lesser-known books. A prolific British author, Godden is best known for Black Narcissus and The Greengage Summer, as well as for many of her children’s books about dolls. Hitty, which won the Newbery Medal in 1930, is by Rachel Field. She was also author of Prayer for a Child, which won the Caldecott Medal in 1945.

The Fairy Doll is a short book about Elizabeth, the youngest of four children. Next to her brothers and sisters, Elizabeth feels klutzy and stupid. They order her about and tease her mercilessly. One Christmas her great-grandmother proclaims that Elizabeth needs a good fairy, just as the family’s tree topper — a fairy doll — falls off the tree.

Elizabeth uses a bicycle basket, moss, and sawdust to make a home for her fairy doll. Then she fills it with a seashell bed and other things.

She asked Father to cut her two bits from a round, smooth branch; they were three inches high and made a table and a writing desk. There were toadstools for stools; stuck in the sawdust, they stood upright. On the table were acorn cups and bowls, and small leaf plates. Over the writing desk was a piece of dried-out honeycomb; it was exactly like the rack of pigeonholes over Father’s desk. Fairy Doll could keep her letters there, and she could write letters; Elizabeth found a tiny feather and asked Godfrey to cut its point to make a quill pen like the one Mother had, and for writing paper there were petals of a Christmas rose.

As an adult, I realize that Fairy Doll’s home would be relatively easy to make. When I was a child, I was both enchanted and intimidated by the idea. Since I didn’t have a fairy doll to make such a home for, I never even attempted it. But I read the book over and over again, entranced by the story of a child who begins to grow up after acquiring a seemingly magical doll.

In sewing they began tray-cloths in embroidery stitches; perhaps it was from making the small-sized fairy things that Elizabeth’s fingers had learned to be neat; the needle went in and out, plock, plock, plock, and there was not a trace of blood. “You’re getting quite nimble,” said Miss Thrupp, and she told the class, “Nimble means clever and quick.”

“Does she means I’m clever?” Elizabeth asked the little boy next to her. She could not believe it.

I haven’t read all of Godden’s doll books, but there is at least one more among them that inspires the same sort of doll-house dreams. Like The Fairy Doll, Miss Happiness and Miss Flower involves an awkward child in a family of six. In this case, the child is Nona, a girl who has been sent from India to England to live with her aunt, uncle, and three cousins. She is sad and fearful, but then a package of Japanese dolls arrives. Nona blossoms as she works to make the dolls their own house. My original copy, which I no longer have, had a floor plan for a Japanese doll house. Even without that, a handy person could make a good start on such a house based on the information in the book.

Hitty concerns a little wooden doll that travels from owner to owner over the course of 100 years. Hitty is lost and found, hidden away and found again, over and over. In India, she acquires a coral necklace; in Philadelphia, her young Quaker owner sews her appropriately plain clothing. At one point, a woman uses her to show off her skills as a seamstress. Through it all, Hitty retains her original chemise with her name cross-stitched on it. Although Hitty sometimes has a few belongings in addition to her clothes, such as a cradle and a sea chest, it was her wardrobe that captured my imagination when I was young. Again, nothing came of it, but I wanted to dress one of my dolls in all of the outfits that Hitty had during her first hundred years.

[H]ow she could sew! I am sure no doll ever underwent so great a change in two short weeks. No butterfly emerged more resplendent from its cocoon than I from the hands of Miss Milly Pinch. Except for my corals, only my chemise remained of my former wardrobe. I doubt if this would have been kept had she not thought it a remarkably fine piece of linen cloth. How is it possible for my poor pen to do justice to my new attire — to the watered-silk dress with draped skirt, fitted waist, and innumerable bows? How can I describe the blue velvet pelisse embroidered with garlands no bigger than pinheads? How tell of the little feathered hat and muff of white eiderdown?

I’ll warn potential readers that it had been a long time since I’d read Hitty when I sat down to write this. As I skimmed through it, I found that it was full of stereotypes that I’d managed to forget. There has been one time when I chose not to write about a book because its contents were not what I remembered. In this case, I’m willing to write Field’s stereotypes off as ignorant, not hateful.

If you love dolls or have a child who loves dolls, or if you enjoy making things, consider picking up The Fairy Doll or Hitty… or Miss Happiness and Miss Flower, for that matter. All of these books are easily obtainable online, if not in bookstores. Enjoy the stories and, if you wish, allow the books to inspire you to create something for a doll.

I recently visited a few national parks in Utah: Arches, Canyonlands, and Capitol Reef. While I there, I read Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey, a sort of love letter to the area through which I traveled.

In some ways, it’s not a surprise that I loved the book. I spent part of my childhood in the southwestern United States. Books about that area speak to me. I also love books that touch on solitude, such as Thoreau’s Walden, and books with a sense of place, such as Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon. Abbey’s book is full of both of these things.

On the other hand, Abbey is not the sort of writer I feel I could bond with if I met him in person — an impossibility, since he is dead. There are many books that give me a sense of kinship with the writer. (I suppose this sort of thing plagues popular writers.) If I find myself often saying, “Yes, me too!” while I read, then I begin to see the author as someone with whom I could be friends.

Desert Solitaire is different. Although I love the same landscapes that Abbey loved and have other things in common with him, the Abbey I encountered in the pages of this book was a crank. To some degree, I understand why he was a crank. He loved the wilderness of the southwest. He was horrified by over-development and the failure of others to appreciate things as they were. But while I understand and even sympathize with that point of view, I still don’t find him very likable.

His dark sense of humor doesn’t help. I’m not against dark humor, but I almost believe that Abbey didn’t really like people. In his chapter about tourism and national parks, he wrote:

A venturesome minority [of tourists] will always be eager to set off on their own, and no obstacles should be placed in their path; let them take risks, for godsake, let them get lost, sunburnt, stranded, drowned, eaten by bears, buried alive under avalanches — that is the right and privilege of any free American. But the rest, the majority, most of them new to the out-of-doors, will need and welcome assistance, instruction and guidance. Many will not know how to saddle a horse, read a topographical map, follow a trail over slickrock, memorize landmarks, build a fire in rain, treat snakebite, rappel down a cliff, glissade down a glacier, read a compass, find water under sand, load a burro, splint a broken bone, bury a body, patch a rubber boat, portage a waterfall, survive a blizzard, avoid lightning, cook a porcupine, comfort a girl during a thunderstorm, predict the weather, dodge falling rock, climb out of a box canyon, or pour piss out of a boot. Park rangers know these things, or should know them, or used to know them and can relearn. They will be needed.

While some of the things on his list of what tourists don’t know made me smile, there’s a small part of me that wonders if he isn’t a bit serious about the more ridiculous things on the list. “Well, he’s dead. Let’s bury him here and move on.” I fear I am too earnest and value others too much to be entirely at home with Abbey’s humor.

I’m even more bothered by his hypocrisy. I’m sure we’ve all failed to live up to who we claim to be. I know I have. Still, Abbey shocked me a bit — although maybe he was lying, indulging in more of his odd sense of humor. At any rate, in one chapter he wrote:

Arches National Monument is meant to be among other things a sanctuary for wildlife — for all forms of wildlife. It is my duty as a park ranger to protect, preserve and defend all living things within the park boundaries, making no exceptions. Even if this were not the case I have personal convictions to uphold. Ideals, you might say. I’m a humanist; I’d rather kill a man than a snake.

I took him at his word about wildlife (and assumed he was joking about people). But in the next chapter, he wrote about killing a cottontail with a rock — an experiment to see what he was capable of if he were starving.

Abbey did warn readers in his introduction that we might be disturbed. “I quite agree that much of the book will seem coarse, rude, bad-tempered, violently prejudiced, unconstructive — even frankly antisocial in its point of view.” He thought these things would make readers dislike Desert Solitaire. In fact, I enjoyed the book immensely, which is why I’m recommending it to you.

Besides the fact that I like Abbey’s subject matter, I love the way he writes. He is an inspiring, masterful wordsmith. You can sense this in his introduction:

For my own part I am pleased enough with surfaces — in fact they alone seem to me to be of much importance. Such things for example as the grasp of a child’s hand in your own, the flavor of an apple, the embrace of friend or lover, the silk of a girl’s thigh, the sunlight on rock and leaves, the feel of music, the bark of a tree, the abrasion of granite and sand, the plunge of clear water into a pool, the face of the wind — what else is there? What else do we need?

He and I disagree philosophically, because I do believe in something beyond the surface. But we both appreciate the beauty of those surfaces, and I love the way he described that beauty.

I also think that he had some great suggestions for reforming national parks. In the chapter I mentioned earlier on tourism and national parks, he recommended doing away with automobile traffic. You get to the park, park your car, and proceed on horseback or bicycle or foot or even, if you must, by shuttle bus.

I’d love to see his ideas implemented. I can’t claim that my family hasn’t driven into many a national park. We have. But we don’t really see the park until we get out of the car and actually interact with it, hiking along a trail, attending a ranger-led viewing of the night sky, taking things at a pace that allows us to truly observe our surroundings and not only see but smell, hear, and (when appropriate) even touch and taste things.

And what’s good for the visitors is even better for the place we visit. Significantly reducing motorized traffic into the park would reduce emissions within the park and prevent some of the damage caused by people who insist on driving where they shouldn’t.

If you read Desert Solitaire, and I hope you do, you may find that you like not only the book but Abbey himself. And perhaps, were he to be at one of those hypothetical dinners populated with people living or dead, I would find that I was wrong about him, that I actually liked him very much. But, whoever Abbey was as a person, he was an excellent writer with a deep love of wilderness and the desert and that alone means you should not neglect this book. That goes double if you are traveling to “Abbey country” anytime soon.

There are many ways a book can be inspirational. The other day, a friend and I briefly discussed A Jane Austen Education, in which the author writes about how reading Austen’s novels changed him as a person. That’s a wonderful thing, but that’s not what I’m writing about here. In this case, I mean something a little less practical and a little more magical.

My guess is that many of us who are serious readers have sometimes wanted to live inside a book. Certainly many a Harry Potter fan has wanted this; that’s why the Wizarding World of Harry Potter exists and why some colleges have quidditch teams. This desire to live inside a book is also why there are tons of literary cookbooks and online recipes, including The Little House Cookbook, The Unofficial Narnia Cookbook, and Voracious: A Hungry Reader Cooks Her Way through Great Books.

Like many readers, I love food scenes in books. I think picture books are an often overlooked source of inspiration. How can anyone resist the supper Margaret makes in The Maggie B.?

“Margaret and James ate the beautiful sea stew and dunked their muffins in the broth, which tasted of all the good things that had cooked in it. For dessert they had the peaches with cinnamon and honey, and glasses of warm goat’s milk.”

And Bread and Jam for Frances is full of food inspiration. Albert and Frances’ lunches sound particularly delicious.

“I have a cream cheese-cucumber-and-tomato sandwich on rye bread,” said Albert. “And a pickle to go with it. And a hard-boiled egg and a little cardboard shaker of salt to go with that. And a thermos bottle of milk. And a bunch of grapes and a tangerine. And a cup custard and a spoon to eat it with.”

“I have a thermos bottle with cream of tomato soup,” she said. “And a lobster-salad sandwich on thin slices of white bread. I have celery, carrot sticks, and black olives, and a little cardboard shaker of salt for the celery. And two plums and a tiny basket of cherries. And vanilla pudding with chocolate sprinkles and a spoon to eat it with.”

While I’ve made adjustments to their menus (I hate celery), I’ve allowed both of these meals to inspire my lunches.

But it’s not just food in books that can capture your imagination. When I was a child, I read and reread All-of-a-Kind Family, a story about five Jewish girls living in New York during the 1910s. While the food was enticing, there were many other things that I loved about the girls’ lives. One of my favorite chapters involved the sisters discovering wonderful books in their father’s junk shop. In another chapter, their mother made dusting an enviable chore by hiding buttons and the occasional penny. It’s hard to hide buttons from yourself before dusting (unless you’re very forgetful), but the ideas behind the stories — discovering treasures among used books, turning a chore into play — are easy enough to make a part of your life, if they aren’t already.

Ursula Nordstrom’s The Secret Language, a book which deserves far more young readers than it has, filled me with dreams of midnight feasts, hidden huts, and fun but impractical Halloween costumes when I was little. As an adult, I still appreciate the May basket the girls made — a tiny scene made of moss, flowers, a twig, and a mirror to make a pond. And if I knew a child at boarding school, I’d be tempted to imitate Victoria’s aunt and send a gift of tiny dolls a few weeks before Christmas break to help the time pass more quickly.

And then there are books that are just asking for a touch of magic. If Universal Studios can take visitors as close as they’ll ever get to Harry Potter’s world, then surely someone can do something similar for The Night Circus! Imagine a place filled with black and white tents, containing amazing acts and seemingly impossible things, like an ice garden. If nothing else, I’d love to attend (or attempt to create) a party based on Chandresh Christophe Lefèvre’s Midnight Dinners, with fabulous food, red and gold decor, and entertainment. The fact that I’m not much of a night person is a problem, but I’m sure I could stretch myself for such an occasion.

Nonfiction, too, can be inspirational. While Elizabeth Gilbert probably wanted me to pay more attention to her interior journey in Eat Pray Love, what I came away with was the desire to take a year to live in a few different places. Under the Tuscan Sun also sparks my desire to live abroad for a while, as well as make some of the food and visit some of the places in the book.

There are plenty of things in books we read that are unattainable. Perhaps they’re as impossible as Celia Bowen’s magical carousel. Perhaps they’re merely impractical, like taking a year off work to travel the world when money is tight. But if a book captures your imagination, ask yourself, “What about this can I bring into my life now? How can I make it a reality on some level?”

Perhaps you’ll be the person to create that Night Circus I want to visit.

You probably know T. H. White for his collection of Arthurian stories, The Once and Future King. His book Mistress Masham’s Repose is less well-known, but it’s worth your while. I think I’ve read it three or four times!

The book follows the well-worn literary trope of the mistreated orphan. Even though there are a ridiculous number of orphans in British literature, many of the books and book series that fall into that category are quite good: think Jane Eyre, the Harry Potter series, and A Little Princess. I would add this book to that list.

Our orphan is Maria, a child of a once wealthy and powerful family. She lives in the ruins of her ancestral estate with her governess, Miss Brown, whom White describes as “cruel in a complicated way.”

For instance, when Maria’s last uncle had been alive, he had sometimes remembered to send the child a box of chocolates for Christmas. Miss Brown’s arrangements for any such parcel had usually been fixed in stages. First, Maria had not been allowed to open it when it came, “in case it had germs.” It had been sent down to the kitchen to be baked. Then Maria had been sent for, to the Northwest Drawing Room, in which Miss Brown resided, and the ruined parcel had been placed before her to be undone. The next step had been to claim that Maria had dirty hands, untruly, and to send her back to the kitchen, a ten minutes’ walk, to wash them. When she had got back at last, agog with expectation, and the poor melted chocolates had been unstuck from the brown paper, Miss Brown used to condemn them as improperly packed and throw them into the nearest lake with her own fair fingers “for fear they would make the child sick.”

On a day when Miss Brown is indisposed, Maria, playing pirate, wades ashore on Mistress Masham’s Repose, an island on her estate. There she makes a discovery: the island is inhabited by Lilliputians who were abducted and brought to England. When they escaped their captors, they managed to hide on the island until Maria found them.

Maria and the Lilliputians develop a complicated relationship. She loves them, but she is immature and has trouble relating to them as equals. White masterfully writes about the humanity of the Lilliputians without getting preachy or talking down to his audience. He also includes a great deal of humor, so things never get too heavy. This is the kind of book you might be tempted to read all Saturday afternoon, instead of taking care of those weekend chores you planned to knock off your list.

I almost hesitate to confess this, but in the interest of being honest with my readers, I will: I have never read The Once and Future King. That’s not because I’m not interested. I like Arthurian stories, and I love White’s writing; I just haven’t gotten to it yet. So I cannot compare Mistress Masham’s Repose to the author’s more famous work. I can assure you that it’s an excellent book. If you have children, get a copy and read it to them. If not… don’t let that stop you from treating yourself!

I’m not really into horror or zombies. Blood, guts, jump scares, and excessive suspense just aren’t my thing.

Colson Whitehead’s book Zone One is one of the exceptions to this rule… though part of why I like it is because Whitehead limits the blood, guts, and jump scares and delivers just the right amount of suspense. It’s more literary fiction than a horror story about zombies, but the sense of menace is there.

You may have heard of the author, since he just won a Pulitzer this year for his novel The Underground Railroad. It’s not his first award. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Fellowship (a.k.a., “the Genius Grant”), and he’s also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN award, and the National Book Award (also for The Underground Railroad), among other prizes.

When I first read Zone One, The Underground Railroad had not yet exploded onto the scene, and I was woefully ignorant of Whitehead and his work. I picked it up because it was on a list of science fiction and fantasy by women and people of color, nestled alongside names like Octavia Butler and Ursula Le Guin. Because it was recommended, I decided to read it, although I felt a bit wary of the topic. By the end of the book, I wanted more.

The story takes place during reconstruction efforts after the worst part of a zombie apocalypse, although Whitehead never uses the term “zombie.” Instead, he writes of a plague — transmitted by bite from “skels” — shambling undead creatures who seek out human flesh. Most humans affected by the plague become skels, but a handful become “stragglers,” harmless individuals frozen in time as they stare into copy machines or sit in their places of work, seemingly waiting for the next client. “Mark Spitz” (we never learn his real name) is part of a team that is cleaning up stragglers in “Zone One,” a walled off section of Manhattan that has been cleared of most skels by the Marines and is now being prepared to once more hold human inhabitants. Although the core of the story takes place over three days, Whitehead includes plenty of flashbacks, allowing the reader to gradually piece together the story of the apocalypse and how Mark Spitz has survived to date.

Whitehead balances the mood of the book perfectly from start to finish. He introduces us to the horror of the skels early on, letting us know that, although Zone One is largely free of the creatures, there are still a few the Marines did not get — and outside the wall there are plenty more, constantly being shot down by patrolling soldiers. This horror is mixed with the optimism that people feel as the United States begins to rebuild itself bit by bit and re-establish some contact with other parts of the world, with sadness over the losses that have occurred in the lives of the survivors, and with a good dose of humor to keep the book from getting too dark.

Many writers can tell a good story, but Whitehead is one of those who goes beyond that. He’s a master of the written word. It’s hard for me to pick one passage from the book to introduce you to his style, but this part of his description of Mark Spitz can give you an idea:

He staked out the B or the B chose him: it was his native land, and in high school and college he did not stray over the county line. At any rate his lot was irrevocable. He was not made team captain, nor was he the last one picked. He side-stepped detention and honor rolls with equal aplomb. Mark Spitz’s high school had abolished the yearbook practice of nominating students the Most Likely to Do This or That, in the spirit of universal self-esteem following a host of acrimonious parent summits, but his most appropriate designation would have been Most Likely Not to Be Named Most Likely Anything, and this was not a category. His aptitude lay in the well-executed middle, never shining, never flunking, but gathering himself for what it took to progress past life’s next random obstacle. It was his solemn expertise.

Also, not surprising for a recipient of a genius grant, Whitehead is smart enough to tell a story that is realistic. He spots the clichés that make no sense and corrects them.

In the cinema of end-times, the roads feeding the evacuated city are often clear, and the routes out of town clotted with paralyzed vehicles. … It makes for a stark visual image, the crazy hero returning to the doomed metropolis to save his kid or gal or to hunt down the encrypted computer file that might — just might — reverse disaster, driving a hundred miles an hour into the hexed zip codes when all the other citizens are vamoosing, wide-eyed in terror, mouths decorated with flecks of white foam.

In Mark Spitz’s particular apocalypse, the human beings were messy and did not obey rules, and every lane in and out, every artery and vein, was filled with outbound traffic.

I said that when I finished this book, I wanted more. Unfortunately, this seems to have been Whitehead’s only foray into this particular territory. No matter. He has other books that sound intriguing — not just The Underground Railroad but four other novels and two nonfiction books. I have a feeling that any of them could be worth your while, but my recommendation today is that — even if you don’t like horror — you pick up a copy of Zone One and immerse yourself in Whitehead’s writing.