Pluck in Portugal

If you have a taste for plucky heroines, World War II espionage and adventure stories that are (almost) G-rated, you will find what you want in Alan Hlad's The Book Spy (2023).

Maria Alves works wonders with microfilm at the New York Public Library when the war breaks out. She speaks Portuguese and thanks to her pluck manages to gain acceptance microfilming Axis publications in neutral Lisbon. She is told that she most definitely will not be a spy. If you've read the title, you know very well that this is not true.

In Lisbon, she falls in love with a bookstore owner, who supplies her with all the German books and magazines she can handle, but even so she becomes involved with a Swiss banker who works for the Germans. Soon she finds herself a double agent, spying on the Germans while supposedly spying on the British. She provides misinformation about the location of the D-Day invasion and even seriously contemplates trying to assassinate Hitler at a wedding she attends. Talk about pluck.

The novel seems a bit amateurish (not as good as Hlad's The Long Flight Home), but it should please many readers, especially girls in their early teens and old ladies.

Writing about food

Part autobiography and part Barlett's Familiar Quotations, The Upstairs Delicatessen (2023) is also Dwight Garner's tribute to his favorite things (not counting his wife, Cree) — literature and food.

Garner goes meal-by-meal through the day — breakfast, lunch and dinner — and tells us what various writers have had to say about these meals and the foods commonly eaten. He also has chapters on drinking and shopping for food. It turns out that food and drink are a favorite topic of writers great and not so great.

John Steinbeck writes in Travels with Charley about making coffee "shine" by dropping an egg white and the shell into the coffee pot. Garner tells of David Sedaris abandoning a lavish lunch to step outside and buy a hot dog from a vender. Charlotte Bronte wrote in a letter, "I have had a hideous dinner of some abominable, spiced-up mess, and it has exasperated me against the world at large." And you thought you once had a bad meal.

Garner shifts quickly from one reference to another. In a single paragraph about oysters, he quotes, or at least mentions, Vladimir Nabokov, Pat Conroy, Roy Blount Jr., Samuel Pepys, Padgett Powell, P.G. Wodehouse and Edward St. Aubyn. One marvels at his ability to accumulate these hundreds of references to food and drink. With a career as a book critic, of course, he has read a great deal and no doubt took many notes along the way.

Much of this book is fascinating. Much of it is deadly dull. But reading it is something like a buffet — you can take what you want and ignore the rest.

Heavy lifting

Whenever someone writes a mystery novel, the publisher is almost certain to ask if it is the first in a series. If not, the novel may be less likely to be published.

Publishers like series novels because readers like them. If you enjoy the first book in a series, you are more likely to buy the second and the third.

But why do readers like them. Shannon Reed explains it well in her book Why We Read: "But a series usually only asks us to do that heavy lifting at the beginning of the first book, and from then on we can simply wander."

By "heavy lifting" Reed refers to the process of becoming familiar with the major characters, the scene, the time period, etc. When one reads the second or third novel in a series, much of the mystery has already been solved — meaning the mystery of the framework of the story — and you can focus on just the mystery in that particular plot.

Any standalone novel or first novel in a series at first requires some effort on the part of the reader. What's going on? Who are these people? Why should I be interested? Just yesterday I started reading a novel and gave up on page 9. The novel began with a dream which made no sense. When the man woke up, the narrative still didn''t make sense. And I disliked both of the characters introduced so far, which I could tell from the dust jacket were the novel's main characters. That was more heavy lifting than I was willing to do, and I moved on to another novel.

One reason I do not read as many short stories as I would like is that each story in a collection requires that same heavy lifting. One must familiarize oneself all over again with new characters and new situations in each story. And let's face it, a story, like a journey, is more fun when you know where you are.

Murder? Who cares?

In the traditional mystery novel, the hero often feels compelled at the end to explain to other characters (and, of course, to readers) what really happened and what evidence led to the killer. In John Banville's intriguing 2024 novel The Drowned, however, the situation is reversed. It is the reader who wants desperately to explain everything to the hero.

The heroes — actually there are two of them — are too busy dealing with their own personal problems to give much thought to a possible murder. Quirke, the 1950s Dublin pathologist, still mourns the shooting death of his wife in a previous novel in the series. Detective Inspector Strafford is told by his wife that she wants a divorce and by Phoebe, Quirke's daughter, that she is pregnant by him. So who can worry much about a woman who disappears in the night in rural Ireland and may have drowned in the sea?

Even when the woman's body is found and Quirke discovers she has drowned in fresh water, not salt water, our investigators don't seem all that interested. Yet the novel's omniscient narrator tells readers exactly what happened, not only to this woman but to a woman murdered in a previous novel. Quirke and Strafford remain preoccupied with their own problems.

While fictional detectives, whether professional or amateur, who don't actually solve mysteries might seem disappointing, the fact is that for readers, too, their personal problems may seem more compelling than the murder.

Advantages of reading fiction

Fiction reading, often regarded as a mere leisure activity, has remarkable impacts on readers.

Walt Hickey, You Are What You Watch

There are those who seem to regard reading fiction as a kind of moral failure. Serious people read history, biography, science, politics or whatever might be found on the nonfiction shelves. If one must read fiction, it should be highbrow fiction, one of the classics, not mysteries, thrillers, romance novels, westerns or science fiction.

Walt Hickey

I have never believed this, and it was reassuring to read Walt Hickey defend reading fiction of all kinds, especially as his defense comes in a book mostly about watching movies and TV shows, You Are What You Watch.

Here are some of his arguments, rephrased in my own words:

• People often say that a particular book changed their life. Often these life-changing books are works of fiction.

• Studies find that reading fiction helps prevent cognitive decline as we age.

• Those who read fiction often make more money. (Of course it may be that intelligent people make more money, and intelligent people are more likely to read a novel once in awhile.)

• Reading fiction, perhaps even more than watching a movie or a television program, encourages a person to identify with other people, even with people completely unlike the reader. Ideally this will carry over into real life.

• Fiction helps clarify one's moral code. When we read a story, we want the good guys to win and the bad guys to lose.  We want couples to find true love. We want happily ever after.

How movies change us

We are changed by movies and television programs, as well as by other forms of popular entertainment, Walt Hickey shows in his 2023 book You Are What You Watch.

Sometimes the change is physical. Our blood really does curdle when we watch blood-curdling movies, he says. The composition of the air in theaters changes during exciting, suspenseful and funny scenes in films.

Changes can be different than what we might expect. Violent movies tend to reduce violent crime, not cause more of it, it has been found. For one thing, the young men who most enjoy these movies are spending their evenings watching them, rather than out in the streets and in bars getting into trouble. Plus, the violent scenes seem to satisfy their passion for violence at least temporarily.

What we see on screens also affects our interests. Fraternities and toga parties became more popular thanks to Animal House. Archery became more popular after Hunger Games.

Hickey gives us lots of graphs, charts and graphics of other kinds of graphics to make his book more interesting. Unfortunately he seems to have run out of prime content at about the halfway point. The second half of the book covers less pertinent topics such as a brief history of Hollywood movies and a brief history of professional wrestling.

One topic that Hickey might have covered, but doesn't, is how phones, texting and social media have changed human behavior. People don't seem to get together as much as they once did. Instead they stay home and communicate in impersonal ways. Young people tend to date strangers they find on online dating sites rather than people they work with or meet at social gatherings. Almost anyone now can potentially become a media star, whether on YouTube, OnlyFans or whatever. But perhaps all this is a book in itself.

Self-assigned reading

There are books you read because you want to, and other books you read because you think you should. As for the latter, I am not referring to assigned classroom reading. Most of us are beyond that stage of life. In previous posts over the past few weeks I have discussed required reading for book clubs and books one feels obligated to read because they were given to you by a friend. I am not here referring to those situations either.

Rather my topic is those books we want to have read but keep putting off actually reading. They are unusually long or challenging or serious or literary or old — whatever it is that makes us reluctant to actually open them when there is a thriller that offers more temptation.

I have never read The Great Gatsby, I am ashamed to say. Most college freshmen in my tear read this novel, but I was in Honors English and read Tender Is the Night instead. I have always felt I read the wrong Fitzgerald, yet have never corrected the error.

I haven't read any Shakespeare since I was in school. I rarely read any poetry, although I did read a couple of Robert Frost poems the other day. I have long wanted to tackle Thomas Wolfe. I have read Gilead, but there are so many other Marilynne Robinson novels I keep putting off. Such books are easier to purchase than to actually read, especially when time is limited and the competion for one's reading attention is so intense.

Shannon Reed

In her book Why We Read, Shannon Reed writes, "There have been so many times when I've so-called assigned myself a book because I felt I should read it and then ended up enjoying the writing itself, on its own merits." This shouldn't be surprising. Books become thought of as important, in most cases, because they are worth reading. They offer rewards, however challenging they may be. 

I have found this to be true for a number of Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens novels, as well as other classic books,  however intimidating they seemed at first. Of course, there are also intimidating books that don't hold one's interest at all once one has gotten up the courage to tackle them. But for us adults, when we assign ourselves a book, to use Reed's term, there's no penalty if we don't complete the assignment.