Gretchen McCullough's 3 favorite reads in 2023

By chance, I was watching Walter Isaacson’s interview with James McBride on Amanpour’s television show. I didn’t know McBride’s work. I liked the fact that he didn’t answer in a rehearsed way to Isaacson’s questions. The novel looked offbeat. I was also interested because the novel was set in the twenties and thirties, and I am writing a novel set in the thirties.

I loved this novel because of the relationships and friendships between idiosyncratic characters: Orthodox Jews who stay rooted in an African-American neighborhood when everyone else has vamoosed.

The uncovering of a skeleton in the seventies in Chicken Hill, in Pottstown, Pennsylvania is the trigger for this tale, set in the twenties and the thirties. Moshe Ludlow, a Romanian Jew, runs a theater, where African American perform, while his wife, Chona runs the Heaven and Earth grocery store.

Generous-spirited and kind, Chona helps anyone in need in the neighborhood. When Dodo, a deaf boy is about to be sent to an asylum, the neighborhood closes ranks. Despite the cultural differences with their African-American neighbors, there is goodwill, genuine affection, and practical help. Dodo is eventually sent to an institution. Even though the place is horrific, Dodo manages to communicate and befriend another patient with multiple sclerosis.

I love to write about relationships of characters from different cultural backgrounds who have rapport. McBride doesn’t sugarcoat anything---the racism and xenophobia of the thirties is described in the novel, but he also shows the power of good neighbors.

I visited Fort Davis, Texas, this past summer as part of a research trip for a new novel. Fort Davis was established in an isolated part of West Texas to protect settlers heading westward from Indians. At the Fort Davis museum, I stumbled upon The Last Camel Charge, The Untold Story of America’s Desert Military Campaign. I had already read about how the US military had imported camels from the Middle East in 1855.

I loved this book because of the quirky historical details that are recounted as an engaging narrative. Johnson’s non-fiction book reads almost like a novel!

Jefferson Davis, who was Secretary of War in 1855, was receptive to the idea that camels might be a good alternative to horses and mules for carrying supplies to the Southwest. We hear of the adventures of army officer Henry Wayne (later, Confederate Brigadier Genera,l), who went on a tour of the Middle East, searching for camels. But there are also the flamboyant characters he brought with him to train the camels.

An Ottoman Greek named Phillip Tedro, who converted to Islam and called himself Hadji A, was hired as a camel driver for the US Army. Other colorful characters, like the explorer Sam Bishop, appreciated and respected the camel. When he and his tiny expedition were outnumbered by Mojave tribe, they broke through the siege with a herd of camels. The federal government abandoned this experiment with the onset of the Civil War.

Because medical quackery, healing, and illness are themes in my new novel, a professor friend recommended that I read Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

I loved this leisurely, episodic novel, set shortly before the First World War. I was especially interested in how Mann explores the line between medical experimentation and quackery, especially in diseases with no known cure. At the time the novel was written, there was no cure for tuberculosis.

The novel is set in Davos, Switzerland, in a sanitorium high on a mountain. In his twenties, Hans Castorp visits his cousin, Joachim, who has been diagnosed with tuberculosis. Castorp, who is not interested in the family business, seems to have found the perfect escape from middle-class drudgery.

While the atmosphere at first seems pleasurable with outings, concerts, and diversions, Castorp starts to feel that the escape may be a trap. Many of the patients die. A few unscrupulous doctors are exploiting wealthy patients for profit.

I was delighted by the odd range of characters who are part of the scene: an expressive Italian, a Jewish Jesuit, a promiscuous Dutchman.