Tea for me

Normally I avoid those "BeforeYou Die" books. You know, books to read, movies to watch, places to go, etc., before you die. I plan to make my own decisions about what I want to to do in the years I have left, thank you very much.

Yet I could not resist 101 Teas to Steep Before You Die (2025), just as I cannot resist a good cup of tea. I hoped the book would reveal some teas I might want to experience. I was not disappointed.

The book is the work of Nigel Melican, James Norwood Pratt, Maria Uspenski and Shabnam Weber, tea experts who provide commentary on each of the 101 selected teas.

While the title may suggest that these are the 101 best teas in the world, this is not the case at all. Sometimes the experts admit that they don't even like them. Rather they select noteworthy teas in various categories, including teas you can buy in any grocery store, such as Constant Comment and English Breakfast.

Other categories include healthful teas, teas that changed history and teas that were discovered more or less by accident. Not until chapter 9, "Desert Island Teas," do we get to the teas the four authors really love. Here we find teas like Gyokuro, Clouds and Mist and Big Red Robe, teas I had never heard of but would love to try.

We normally think of tea as coming mostly from China, India and Japan, but this book shows us that fine tea can come from unexpected places, including parts of Africa, New Zealand and even Mississippi.

They treat tea as wine snobs treat wine, talking about aromas, hints of chocolate and fruits or whatever, and even the food that goes best with certain tea.

If you love tea as I do, you will love this book. Otherwise, move on and enjoy your coffee.

To read is to wander

To read is to wander in a direction, to yield to a current.

Heather Cass White, Books Promicuously Read

Heather Cass White

To read a book for the first tune is a kind of wandering, as Heather Cass White suggests in Books Promiscuously Read. That is, we don't know where a book is taking us. We wander to discover what's around the next corner or over the next hill. We read to discover what the author has for us next.

Sometimes, as when we read a thriller or a mystery, surprise is the whole point. But even in more serious novels and most nonfiction, there is a sense of wandering and discovery. We read books in hope that they will be, at the very least, interesting. There will be something we have never encountered before.

We can often be disappointed, of course. Often there is nothing interesting at all around the next curve in the road or over the next hill. Similarly the next chapter of a book can be a letdown. Wandering involves risk, which is why so many of us prefer to read books by authors we have come to know and love.

White's next metaphor, "to yield to a current," is slightly different. Wandering suggests free will, making choices. You can always turn around or take another path. Floating down a stream, however, implies, as her phrase tells us, "yielding." Which is most apt when it comes to reading? Are we wandering or yielding?

Any metaphor can be taken too far, and perhaps it doesn't really matter. In any case, I like the idea of reading as a kind of discovery. As Forrest Gump says about chocolates, you never know what you are going to get.

Keyboard magic

"My imagination doen't really work unless a typewriter is sitting directly in front of me," novelist Larry McMurtry once said. "I am all but incapable of conceiving stories abstractly."

One of Larry McMurtry's Hermes typewriters

I found this quote in Tracy Daugherty's fine biography of McMurtry, and I have no idea when he said, whether it was before or after the computer age. But it doesn't really matter. Even after other writers had switched to writing on computers, McMurtry continued using the same kind of typewriter he had used since early in his writing career. When he was sitting there with his fingers on the keyboard, he was in his comfort zone. That is when his imagination fired up and the stories and characters came out.

Although I switched effortlessly from typewriters to computer keyboards, I identify with McMurtry. I have written previously about how, in my early teens, I had no interest in writing and no clue that I had any writing ability at all until my parents brought home a portable Smith-Corona typewriter. I seemed to turn into a writer overnight.

Even now I usually have no idea what I am going to write about when I sit down at my computer to write a blog post. Yet when my fingers are on the keyboard, ideas begin to form. Words come from somewhere and flow through my fingers and those keys and onto my computer screen. Give me a pen and paper and I am incapable of writing anything noteworthy, as I learned when I had to write all those in-class college essays on test days.

Our minds operate in strange ways. Some writers can only write when they are standing up, like Hemingway, or sitting in bed. Whatever works.

Reason to live

Larry McMurtry

In Tracy Daugherty's biography of  novelist Larry McMurtry, who seemed to write books so that he could afford to buy books, he quotes something McMurtry's older sister, Judy McLemore, said about him. "He told me once he wasn't afraid to die; he was just afraid that he wouldn't get all the books read that he needed to get read. I told him, 'Larry, you have been reading since you were four. Surely you have most of them read.' He replied, 'No, I'm not even close.'"

They say that old people often stay alive longer if they are waiting for certain milestones — to reach a 90th birthday, to see a grandchild graduate from college, whatever. Reading all the books one wants to read before dying may be an impossible goal. Even so, it makes sense to me.

I would gladly settle just for all the unread books in my condo, which might keep me going strong for several more decades.

If one needs an incentive to keep breathing, books seem to me to work as well as birthdays and graduations.

Murderbot in love?

The hard reality was that I didn't know what Mensah was to me.

Martha Wells, Exit Strategy

The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells may be, on the surface, adventure novels, shoot-'em-ups in space. Yet what makes them so compelling is that the Murderbot in question is mostly a robot, yet partly a human being. He (or is it it?)  can even pass as human, even though he doesn't need to eat or sleep. He calls himself a Murderbot because he was designed to protect people, usually by killing other people.

By deactivating his governor early in the series, he became a free agent. He follows no orders and can spend all his time watching the videos he has downloaded into himself, which is what he says he wants to do. Yet he  confesses in Exit Strategy (2018), the fourth book in the series, that watching all that media has made him "feel like a person."

What's more, he may actually be in love with Dr. Mensah, his former owner. Now on his own, he sets out to rescue Dr. Mensah from an evil corporation holding her for ransom.

Wells throws in enough imagined scientific jargon of the far future to satisfy any geek, but the Murderbot's shred of humanity is always what drives these novels. This one may not be one of the best in the series, but it is still impossible not to love Murderbot at least as much as he may, or may not, love Dr. Mensah.

How to speak sheep

This strikes me as rather sad — that we can only understand parrots if they're speaking our language about things we've decided are important to us.

Amelia Thomas, What Sheep Think About the Weather

For generations scientists have been trying to teach various kinds of animals to communicate using human speech. But if these scientists are so smart — smarter, one assumes, than those animals — then why not learn to communicate with them using their own forms of communication?

Amelia Thomas is no scientist but just an intelligent woman who loves all animals. In What Sheep Think About the Weather (2025), she tells about her efforts to understand what these animals may be trying to say.

Her amateur studies take her to interview many actual scientists and to examine the communication tools used by whales, dogs, birds, monkeys, horses and many other animals, including sheep. Her book reaches its climax when her beloved but weakening horse, Major, puts his forehead against her own, telling her in his own way that he is ready to die.

Because each of the many species of animals communicates in its own way, and most of them have no interest at all in communicating with humans, it will be a great challenge for Amelia Thomas or anyone else to ever turn into Doctor Doolittle. But Thomas does show us that the true challenge is not teaching chimpanzees or any other species to speak English but rather learning how these animals are speaking to each other, and sometimes to us, in their own way.

Nothing new

I have a view about great art, whether it's stories, music, whatever. None of it tells you anything new; it merely reminds you of something you already knew but forgot you knew. And that's what Larry did, You start reading Lonesome Dove and you feel you already know these people. They're already in you. They've always been in you.

Bill Wittliff writing about Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Larry McMurtry himself disagreed with what Bill Wittliff says above, although his biggest beef seems to have been with Wittliff suggesting that Lonesome Dove is "great art." McMurtry did compare his novel with Gone with the Wind, but then he pointed out that Gone with the Wind is not a great novel either.

But I don't think art has to be great for what Wittliff says to be true. It merely has to be good art.

Art need not tell us anything new. Science does that. Art reminds us of what we know. But it does so indirectly, obliquely even. It may reflect reality, but that reality may be different for different people. Art allows for interpretation. It allows for different opinions. Art so often takes the form of a puzzle.

I was a newspaper book reviewer when Lonesome Dove was published in 1985. I received an advance review copy, and I can recall reading it while on a family vacation that took us to Arkansas, Memphis and Mammoth Cave. If I were asked what book I most enjoyed reading and reviewing, I would say this one. I knew nothing about cowboys and cattle drives other than what I had seen in movies and TV westerns, yet this story moved me as few others have. The characters seemed real to me, as if, as Wittliff suggests, they were already in me.