This year's superlatives

This is the time of year for superlatives, although in year-end reviews about the only superlatives we see are best and, at times, worst. I could do the same, and often have at the end of a year, but as in 2018 I choose to gain the inspiration from a book called Remarkable Reads and examine the year's reading with a number of other superlatives in mind. In that book. J. Peder Zane asks a number of successful writers to write essays assigning superlatives to books they have read. Using a few of those same superlatives, here is a look back at my 2019 reading.

Ivan Doig

Most Enchanting Book: I rarely want to read books suggested or given to me by friends, but I made an exception for Last Bus to Wisdom by Ivan Doig, and I was glad I did. This tale about a boy's adventures on a Greyhound bus enchants from beginning to end.

Most Important Book: If Ann Patchett's little book The Care and Feeding of an Independent Bookstore, containing two essays and one list of book recommendations, inspires just one person to open a bookstore somewhere, its importance will be demonstrated.

Most Daunting Book: Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything wasn't particularly daunting for me, but it must have been so for Bryson. He is not a scientist but rather a professional writer best known for his humorous travel books. Yet here he wrote a long history of science, virtually every field of science, and explained difficult concepts in language for the layman.

Wisest Book: Theologians, preachers, writers, poets and others have been finding wisdom in the biblical story of Adam and Eve for hundreds of years. Bruce Feiler finds still more in The First Love Story.

Most Familiar Book: I read Mario Puzo's The Godfather even before they made the movie, and I have seen that movie several times. So when I reread the novel this year, the story was certainly familiar. Yet I was most struck by those forgotten passages that were left out of the movie. The Johnny Fontaine character figures much more prominently in the novel, for example.

Most Incomprehensible Book: John Brockton solicited essays about the most brilliant ideas in science and assembled them in a book called This Idea Is Brilliant. I enjoyed most of this book, but some of those essays were way over my head.

Most Beautiful Book: There are many contenders for this title, but my vote goes to Nobody's Fool by Richard Russo. At the same poignant and comic, the novel explores the invisible strings that tie us together. Beautiful.

Rob Bell

Most Fearless Book: The very people perhaps most likely to read Rob Bell's book What Is the Bible?, namely evangelical Christians, may be the very same people most likely to be offended by some of its conclusions.

Most Surprising Book: When I began reading Scott Spencer's novel Willing I didn't know it was about a man who takes a sex tour. So that was a surprise. Then I was surprised by how terrific the novel is.

Most Disappointing Book: I expected The Library by Stuart Kells to be much more interesting than it is. It is a history of libraries, after all, a subject that seems up my alley. But the book interested me only in spots.

Most Unpleasant Book: I loved photographer Sally Mann's memoir Hold Still. But then there is her chapter, complete with lots of photographs, about her photographing human bodies in various stages of decomposition out in the open air.

Most Luminous Book: All the Light We Cannot See does not sound like the title of a luminous book, luminosity being light that we can see. Similar in theme to Russo's Nobody's Fool, this great novel by Anthony Doerr is about the powerful influences that unseen people and objects can have over us.

Twelve questions

Every year at this time I like to try to answer the same series of questions using only the titles of books read that year. Let's see how it works in 2019.

Describe yourself: Uncommon Type

How do you feel? Alone

Describe where you currently live: Neither Here Nor There

If you could go anywhere, where would you go? Wonderland (The Rhine and The Library would also work nicely)

What's your favorite form of transportation? Last Bus to Wisdom (or it might be The Silver Locomotive or Driving Like Crazy)

Your best friend is: Nobody's Fool

You and your friends are: Loop Group

What's the weather like where you are? Stormy Weather (that was too easy)

What is the best advice you could give? It's All Relative (or perhaps Give Me Your Hand)

Thought for the day? This Idea Is Brilliant (or Things That Matter)

How would you like to die? When the Music's Over

What is your soul's present condition? Saying Yes

Well, that was painless. And I didn't even have to use such possibilities as Willing and Straight Man.

What's inside the card?

The Christmas cards we send, as with greeting cards in general, say what we might say ourselves if we could write that well and/or if we weren't too lazy to actually say it ourselves.

When I shop for  cards I don't judge them by their covers but by what's written inside. Is is a sentiment I agree with? Is it too long? Is it too short, conveying nothing beyond "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Birthday"?

But how many people who receive these cards actually read them? I ask this because I realize that with the exception of comic cards or handmade cards, I rarely read the printed words inside the cards I receive. I just look to see who they are from and read any handwritten messages or printed Christmas letters I find inside. That, not the messages supplied by Hallmark or whomever, is what's really important.

I have no beef with the greeting card industry. They help put something besides bills and mailers in our mailboxes on special occasions, while also putting something in the coffers of the U.S. Postal Service. Yet these cards, as beautiful, cute or clever as they might be, mean precious little without a personal note inside, however brief.

Why own a bookstore?

I wanted to go into retail as much as I wanted to go into the army.

Ann Patchett, The Care and Feeding of Independent Bookstores

So who is now part owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville? The very same Ann Patchett, author of such books as State of Wonder and the recent The Dutch House. And why would a successful author, whose novels are both literary and best-sellers, decide to sell books as well as write them? She explains in a slim 34-page book, almost a booklet, called The Care and Feeding of Independent Bookstores (2016).

The impetus for this rash decision came with the realization that Nashville, not exactly a small town, had lost the last of its independent bookstores, never mind that those bookstores had been profitable. Just like newspapers, which had begun to sharply reduce their staffs and their content long before they had to just because they assumed they were doomed by technology, so owners of independent bookstores, believing they were seeing the writing on the wall, often closed prematurely. There were still used bookstores and, of course, Barnes and Noble, but independent stores offering exceptional service and charm along with their books were lost.

Then she met Karen Hayes, a woman as devoted to books as she was, who had the drive and know-how to run a bookstore but lacked the capital. Patchett had the money, as well as some things at least as important: a name and a personality that could attract customers from all over the country (myself included) and loads of author friends only too happy to come to Nashville for a reading and book-signing.

The store, despite its less than ideal location, has been a goldmine, for customers as well as for its owners. Some bookstores have cats in residence. Parnassus has dogs, lots of them depending upon which staff members are on duty. Patchett tells of one dog that "could sell a book just by sitting on it." Children are encouraged to read books to these dogs.

"Book by book, our customers vote against free overnight shipping in favor of a community of book lovers," she writes. "They vote for us, and I could not love them more."

Patchett, like members of her staff, enjoys recommending books she loves, and at the end of this little volume she lists 52 such books, with a wonderful little comment about each one. For example: Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury, "My mother gave me this book for my 13th birthday and I carried it with me everywhere so I could read it over and over again'" and Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, "Humbert Humbert is in love with his stepdaughter. Nabokov is in love with the English language. I am in love with this book."

Pleasant surprises

Very few people imagine their own future accurately. And then they're often pleasantly surprised.

Alexander McCall Smith, The Good Pilot Peter Woodhouse

A good novel, like a good life, is one that offers pleasant surprises, and Alexander McCall Smith's 2017 stand-alone novel The Good Pilot Peter Woodhouse certainly does this. His first surprise is that Peter Woodhouse turns out to be neither a pilot nor even a man but a dog.

The story covers nearly 40 years and several countries, beginning in England during World War II. Val Eliot joins the Women's Land Army, meaning that she takes work on a farm while most of the young men are fighting the war. She proves a good worker for Archie, an elderly farmer. She soon falls in love with Mike, an American pilot stationed nearby.

As for Peter Woodhouse, he belongs to a nearby farmer who mistreats his animals. Val's simple-minded cousin Willy works for this farmer and steals the dog after a beating, taking him to Archie's farm. So the other farmer won't find him, Peter Woodhouse is passed on to Mike at the base. Mike begins taking the dog on his reconnaissance flights over Germany, the reason for "the Good Pilot" part of the title. When Mike is shot down over the Netherlands, Peter Woodhouse goes down too.

By then the war is nearly over, and Ubi, a German soldier who never liked fighting anyway, finds the pilot and the dog but protects them both, leading to a postwar friendship.

The plot moves quickly, with numerous sudden turns along the way, not all pleasant ones. Yet with the possible exception of surviving the plane crash without benefit of parachutes, they seem realistic ones. And as with Forrest Gump's box of chocolates, readers never know what they are going to get. It proves a pleasure finding out.

The new Ian Rutledge

The titles of Charles Todd novels usually strike me as bland and easily forgotten. I can never remember which of these books I have read and which I haven't. These qualities may also be true of A Divided Loyalty, the latest Inspector Ian Rutledge novel, yet still I find it a solid title for it describes not just the inspector's dilemma, but also that of his chief suspect and even that of his superior back at the Scotland Yard. Nobody, it seems, knows exactly which side he should be on.

Rutledge is assigned to investigate the murder of an unidentified woman in rural England, while another man from the Yard, Chief Inspector Brian Leslie, is assigned a similar case in another rural province. Rutledge quickly gets his man, but when Leslie comes up empty, Rutledge is dispatched to see if he can do better.

Evidence is scant and the dead woman proves difficult to identify, but Rutledge is shaken when he discovers that what little he knows points to Leslie himself as the killer. Rutledge's job is already in jeopardy with a boss who wants to get rid of him because of the lingering effects of shellshock from the Great War (this is 1921), so how does he convince Chief Superintendent Markham that one of his own officers may be a murderer?

This may be one of the best of the Rutledge novels, and there are now more than a score of them. Suspense builds at a steady pace, and just when the reader begins to relax, it builds some more.

It all started in Columbus

You could take James Thurber out of Columbus, which is exactly what his first wife did when she decided his talent was too big for Ohio's capital city, but you could never take Columbus out of Thurber. His hometown and the people he knew growing up and in his early newspaper career there remained the focus of his work for the rest of his life.

Bob Hunter, a former sports columnist at Thurber's old paper, The Columbus Dispatch, takes a detailed look at Thurber's life in Columbus and the stories it inspired in Thurberville.

In 48 relatively short chapters, Hunter writes about the people. places and things from Columbus that later showed up in his writing, usually fictionalized, but not by much. These include family members, boyhood friends, girlfriends, professors and fellow students at Ohio State and people he worked with in his newspaper career before he fled to New York City, joined the staff at The New Yorker and became famous.

Who was the real Walter Mitty? What inspired "The Day the Dam Broke"? Who might Thurber have had in mind when he drew those cartoons of large, intimidating women? Hunter tells all, and it turns out that all started in Columbus.

Thurberville manages to be a full biography of the great American humorist, arguably second only to Mark Twain. It takes us from birth to death, but even though much of that life was lived in New York and Paris, Columbus always remained its center. And it lies at the center of Hunter's book as well.

Hunter includes a few photographs in his book, but far too few. What the book really lacks is a map of Columbus showing readers exactly where the many homes where the Thurber family lived were located, as well as the locations of the other places mentioned. I am fairly familiar with Columbus, having been there many, many times, but even so I couldn't place houses, hotels, parks, etc., with simply an address as a guide.

Inventing Christmas

The Man Who Invented Christmas, which I watched last night, will probably not rank as anyone's favorite Christmas movie. While entertaining enough to watch once, it is not the kind of movie one watches willingly in whole or in part every December, as is the case for so many people with It's a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story or even Love Actually.

The film tells of Charles Dickens's struggle to write A Christmas Carol on a tight deadline and how that book turned a relatively minor holiday, at least in England, into the month-long celebration that it is today and also how the tradition of increased charitable giving at Christmas began.

Yet what I found most fascinating was what the movie, based on the book by Les Standiford, shows about the writing process.

Dickens, the movie tells us, had had three flops in a row and was desperate for a book that would reverse his fortunes. (I am now in the middle of one of those "flops," Nicholas Nickleby, and I find it amazing that such an entertaining novel could have failed to appeal to his readers.) It was already late in the year, so Dickens faced enormous pressure to get even a short book in print before Christmas.

Ideas came to Dickens from everywhere. He met a man named Marley. He overheard an Irish maid tell his children a Christmas ghost story. He encountered a miser. He had nightmares about his boyhood when his father was sent to debtor's prison. Any good piece of writing, even a newspaper story or a school essay, needs multiple sources. It is in the melding of those bits of inspiration that creativity lies.

Dickens says at one point that when he finds the right name, a character comes alive to him, which is exactly what happens when he settles on Scrooge as the name of his miser. Scrooge himself, played by Christopher Plummer, appears in the room and starts conversing with him. Soon other characters join the discussion, guiding him to the resolution of his plot.

Perhaps the most important contribution to the story comes from that Irish maid, who insists that because it's a Christmas story, Tiny Tim cannot die and Scrooge can change. Today every Christmas story has a positive ending, just another way in which Charles Dickens invented Christmas.

On taking notes

Mental Floss ended its run as a magazine three years ago, confining its product, what might be termed interesting trivia, to its website. This fall, however, they've printed a special edition of Mental Floss, reminding former readers, especially those like me who forget to check the website, what they have been missing. One of its many brief articles is about the value of taking notes on paper, just like we used to do in school.

The writer says "taking handwritten notes can benefit your brain by fostering clearer paths of understanding, increasing your ability to recall key discussion points and inspire ideas that forge new paths."

Handwritten notes, like handwriting itself, are threatened with obsolescence. Even shopping lists are today more likely to be found on phones than sheets of paper. But notes on a phone or iPad aren't quite the same as notes on paper, according to Mental Floss, which uses the phrase "science shows" without actually naming the source of that science. I am willing to believe it, however.

I take notes on index cards with every book I read. Often I don't even have to consult my notes when writing my review, except perhaps to find a page number if I need a direct quote from the book. Or I will review my notes to look for lines, ideas or themes that I may want to write about. Would electronic notes work as well? Perhaps, but that actually seems more cumbersome than a few words written on a card.

As I mentioned recently, I jotted down a few notes when I heard Susan Isaacs talk at a book event in St. Petersburg. Without those notes I would have been lost when trying to write about what she said.

Mental Floss discusses different ways of taking notes, the outline method, for instance, or the mapping method, which is less a list than a diagram. How one takes notes may depend upon how one's mind works.  I just jot down key words, then try to organize them afterward in a way that makes sense. When I was a newspaper reporter I often just jotted down words and phrases, except when trying to get few good exact quotes. From these few scraps, which triggered memories of the interview, I could usually put together a story that captured the gist of the interview or speech.

I am all for putting things on paper, which is what I wish Mental Floss would do more often.

Hero's journey

The hero takes a journey in Ivan Doig's ceaselessly entertaining 2015 novel Last Bus to Wisdom, although that hero is just "eleven going on twelve." He is an orphan named Donal Cameron, who goes by several other names as well during the course of his journey, mostly by Greyhound. Making up stories, as well as names, proves to be Donny's best talent, suggesting that in him, to use another cliche of minor-league literary analysis, we have an unreliable narrator, to say the least.

He is being raised by his grandmother, a cook at a Montana ranch, but when she needs surgery and expects a summer-long recovery, she sends him by bus to her only relative, a sister in Wisconsin with who she has never gotten along.

We soon discover why the sisters aren't close. Despite a physical resemblance to Kate Smith -- this is 1951, when even an 11-year-old boy would know what Kate Smith looks like -- Aunt Kate is a miserly, argumentative woman. Every morning Donny wakes up hearing her and Herman, the man he assumes to be her husband, arguing over the way he eats his toast. When she catches Donny stealing money, which he insists is rightfully his since his own money disappeared soon after his arrival and he was not rewarded for helping her win at cards, she puts him on a bus back home, likely to end up in foster care.

But who should show up in the seat next to him but Herman, a retired Great Lakes sailor and an illegal German immigrant who has just been living with Kate. He is a big fan of Karl May's novels about the Wild West, and he wants to see the real West with Donny.

And so begins an adventure that takes them from a rodeo to Yellowstone to a ranch owned by Rags Rasmussen, the greatest rodeo cowboy of them all.

This 450-page novel is chockfull of colorful  characters, most of whom sign the autograph book Donny takes with him. By summer's end Donny faces a terrible dilemma: return to his now-recovered grandmother, whom he has been deceiving all these weeks, or remain with Herman and Rags on the ranch he has come to love. Doig gives us a resolution, but not until the very last delicious sentence.

Good story well told

Even good stories don't tell themselves, especially when they are as complex and with as many subplots as the sinking of the passenger liner Lusitania off the coast of Ireland by a German U-boat in 1915. It takes someone like Erik Larson to tell the story well, which he does in Dead Wake, published in 2015 in time for the 100th anniversary of the disaster that killed more than a thousand people, many of them Americans.

The sinking may or may not have brought the United States into the Great War against Germany. It was a contributing factor certainly, but the U.S. did not actually declare war until nearly two years later after U-boats had sunk several other ships with Americans aboard. Germany gambled that it could sink any ship on the seas, enemy or not, and win the war before the Americans could get mobilized against them. Even with a two-year advantage, they lost that bet.

Many things had to go wrong for the Lusitania to be sunk that day, especially after being hit by just one torpedo. It took delays in the ship's departure from New York, putting it behind schedule. It took a Cunard order to travel at less than maximum speed to save fuel. It took a U-boat captain willing to attack a passenger ship. It took a British decision not to send out escorts to protect the liner as it neared port. It took a sudden change in course that put the Lusitania into the U-boat's path. It took a torpedo that actually worked. Most of them didn't at this stage of the war. It even took the U-boat captain's misjudgment about the Lusitania's speed, leading to a strike in perhaps the one part of the ship where it could sink after just one hit.

All this and more, Larson tells us, had to happen for the liner to sink as it did. One positive circumstance was a clear, calm May day, which helped 764 survivors reach shore. These included the ship's captain, William Turner, who was promptly blamed by the British, especially Winston Churchill, for the sinking, perhaps as a cover for their own negligence.

Meanwhile back in the United States, President Woodrow Wilson was in love, and his romance with Edith Galt seems to occupy most of his attention, as well as Larson's, during the lead-up to the attack.

All in all, this makes a terrific story, told from many sides, and Larson keeps readers on edge during the telling.

Getting started

Back in journalism school we were taught that the first paragraph of any news story was the most important. Not only must it be good enough to entice readers to move on to the second paragraph, but it must give them the gist of the story in case they didn't. It was called the Inverted Pyramid. Put the most important facts first, then add less important details in descending order. Few readers get to the end of any story, but that's OK. They will know the basics if they read only that first paragraph.

In most other kinds of writing, writers want you to get to the end and don't want to reveal too much too soon. A murder mystery, even if written by a former newspaper reporter, rarely begins with a line like, "The butler did it." Still it is necessary to write a first paragraph that will entice readers to keep going.

That's why most writers, like reporters, give a lot of thought to opening lines. This is true of novelists, poets, short story writers, magazine writers and writers of every kind of nonfiction book (with the possible exception of most academic writers, who seem to think they need to be boring all the way through). The better the opening lines, the greater the chance readers will get hooked and want to continue reading.

Because writers give so much attention to opening lines, I as a reader like to do the same. Recently I have encountered two novels with exceptional opening lines. Let me share them with you.

The first is from Scott Spencer's Willing, reviewed here two days ago:

"So there I was, Avery Jankowsky, New York City, early twenty-first century, not terribly well-educated in light of all there was to know, but adequately taught in light of what I had to do. I wasn't someone you could push around, but I was not a leader, not a standout. I was a face in the crowd, a penitent on the edge of a Renaissance painting, a particularly graceful skater in a Breughel, the guy in the stands at the World Series, right behind the crepe bunting, his hand on his heart and his eyes bright with belief during the singing of the national anthem. Why would you even give him a second look? But you do. ..."

It goes on like this. I've given you only about half of that paragraph, but it is enough. If you are a reader who wants a murder, or at least a hint of conflict, in the opening lines, you know already this book is probably not for you. But if you enjoy novels by writers who can really write, this tells you to keep going. It could get interesting.

Now here are the opening lines Charles Dickens wrote for Nicholas Nickleby:

"There once lived in a sequestered part of the county of Devonshire, one Mr. Godfrey Nickleby, a worthy gentleman, who taking it into his head rather late in life that he must get married, and not being young enough or rich enough to aspire to the hand of a lady of fortune, had wedded an old flame out of mere attachment, who in her turn had taken him for the same reason: thus two people who cannot afford to play cards for money, sometimes sit down to a quiet game for love."

Again there is nothing here that even hints at the novel's plot. Godfrey Nickleby, in fact, soon fades from the scene and so doesn't even qualify as a main character. The lines tell us very little, yet how could one not want to keep reading?

Mother knows best

No one really expects you to get your life on firmer footing while you're on a sex tour.

Scott Spencer, Willing

If there's one thing worse than being on a sex tour you don't really want to be on, it's meeting your mother along the way. And so we have the situation in Scott Spencer's 2008 novel Willing.

Avery Jankowsky (his fourth surname because he has had four fathers) is a frustrated freelance writer looking for a big idea to fatten his shrinking bank account. Then Deirdre, his girlfriend, reveals she has been unfaithful. So when his uncle offers him a spot, free of charge, on a sex tour featuring high-class European call girls, he views it as the gold mine he has been looking for, as well as perhaps a way to get back at Deirdre.

Off he goes with an assembly of wealthy men, trying to conduct interviews without anyone realizing that is what he is doing. Stops include Iceland, Norway and Latvia. The girls, while interesting, don't help him forget Deirdre. But why does he keep seeing his mother at every hotel?

This sounds like it should be a comic novel, and it certainly has comic elements. Deirdre is a student of Russian history, and she tells Avery she thought an affair with a Russian man might be useful research. And Spencer gives us phrases like "Scarlet A Bomb" and "I knew where the caged bird craps." Still this is serious stuff, and Spencer writes beautifully about the neediness of those who seem to have everything, about the boundlessness of a mother's love and about the power of grace.

It turns out meeting one's mother on a sex tour might not be such a bad thing after all, not if it puts one's life on firmer footing.

A good crop of words

What the words ad-lib, bimbo, red ink, self-service, supersonic and white-collar have in common is that each is 100 years old this year. And none of them shows its age.

New words coined during the war years (1914-1918) were often influenced by the war (bomber, machine-gunner, enlistee, buck private, etc.) or the Russian Revolution (Bolshevist, Soviet, neo-marxism). And many of the words from that period now seem dated. Not so the majority of the words from 1919, which in many cases still sound relatively new, even modern, a century later.

I am using as a reference Sol Steinmetz's book There's a Word for It, which lists words originating in the years from 1900 to 2009.

Here are a few other words Steinmetz says were coined in 1919: air freight, aircraft carrier, airmail, barbital, culturalism, co-star, dunk, mandated, offline, overreact, skyway, snooty, synchronized, technocracy and tweenie.

Fifty years later, in 1969, there was another war going on, and some of the new words from that year reflect it: grunt, Vietnamization and weaponization, for example. And so many words from that year already seem dated, such as acid freak, jockette and Naderism.

By comparison 1919, with its return to peace and prosperity, seems to have been a banner year for new words.

The textbook conspiracy

There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of mildly interesting and was always at least a long-distance phone call away from the frankly interesting.

Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

Bill Bryson

On the television series Young Sheldon, Sheldon Cooper loves his textbooks and finds them fascinating when they aren't too far beneath him. But this is a comedy, and that's one of the gags. Do you remember any interesting textbooks from your own school days? I don't either.

Well, I take that back. I do recall being enthralled by those lessons on weather in my eighth-grade science book, so much so that I considered becoming a meteorologist for a time.  And my literature classes provided interesting  reading. Not always, of course. We did have to read Henry James. But usually the reading was well above the typical textbook.

I love it that Bill Bryson's memories of boring science textbooks inspired him to write A Short History of Nearly Everything, a science book that is anything but boring. He proves one can present a vast amount of information -- names, dates, scientific terms and all that -- without putting his readers to sleep. He accomplishes this with a breezy style and metaphors that seem to make even difficult concepts understandable. For example, when talking about exploring the ocean bottom in early submersibles with little visibility, he writes, "It's rather as if our firsthand experience of the surface world were based on the work of five guys exploring on garden tractors after dark."

Bryson ridicules scientists who couldn't write well enough to explain their discoveries to others, such as James Hutton, the 18th century geologist, who was "without rival when it came to understanding the mysterious slow processes that shaped the Earth." Yet, he adds, "Nearly every line he penned was an invitation to slumber." Hutton could have written geology textbooks.

So why are textbooks so dull? Partly it's because their authors want to pack them so full of information that they are willing to sacrifice readability for content. Mostly, however, it is probably because textbooks are written by specialists in particular fields, not by professional writers. There are scientists, historians and other academic types who can write very well, but they would rather write best-selling books than textbooks. Textbooks are usually left to the academics who know their stuff but can't explain it very well.

As for Bill Bryson, he is no scientist, just a gifted writer who devoted himself to learning enough about the various sciences and their histories to explain it in an entertaining way. His new book, The Body, is a sequel of sorts. He explains how the human body works in language we can understand.

Science for nonscientists

Sometimes the world just isn't ready for a good idea.

Bill Bryson,  A Short History of Nearly Everything

Reading Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, his 2003 history of science for readers who don't know beans about science, one gets the idea that the world isn't ready for a good idea not sometimes but rather most of the time. The science establishment was reluctant to accept the big bang theory, continental drift, evolution, the theory of relativity and just about every other major discovery in science you might think of. Scientists, like just about everyone else in the world, are slow to welcome change.

Those who propose new scientific theories often don't live long enough to see their theories accepted, and even then somebody else often gets the credit for them. Bryson does much to right some of these wrongs.

Much of his book is dated now. More than 15 years after its first publication, scientists have explored much deeper into the oceans and much farther into space than they had in 2003, to cite just two examples. But history books should be read more for what they say about the past than what they say about the present, and here the author excels even now.

The book covers just about every field of science you might think of, from astronomy to zoology, and does so with easy transitions from one to another. A background in any of these fields proves unnecessary to grasp what Bryson writes or to enjoy his narrative. As readers of his other books know well, he has gift for explaining things in a way that makes reading seem more like entertainment than work.

Again and again Bryson returns to what has been called the Goldilocks effect. That is, everything has been just right for life on Earth and for human existence. Not too close to the sun nor too far away. The right kind of orbit, the right kind of atmosphere, the right circumstances at just the right time. We are overdue for another ice age, he writes, and overdue for another catastrophic explosion of the Yellowstone volcano. You name it, we have been very fortunate, even blessed. Yet even in 2003 Bryson warned of negative human influences on the planet's climate and the survival of species. Such warnings have not been dated by the passage of time.

Reading A Short History of Nearly Everything proved to be a very good idea, even if it did take me a decade and a half to get around to it.

Jazz, dogies and the Irish

Most of the words that Daniel Cassidy attributes to Irish origins in How the Irish Invented Slang, reviewed here a few days ago, make perfect sense. Large numbers of Irish immigrants sailed to the United States to escape poverty and famine, and most of these settled in eastern urban areas such as New York City and Boston. And so words that sound like they could be urban slang, such as biddy and hokum, seem quite reasonable. But jazz and dogie (as in "Git Along Little Dogies")? How can they be Irish?

Jazz, after all, began in New Orleans, not New York or Boston, and it began with black musicians, not Irish musicians. For years some people thought of jazz as black music. It turns out, as Cassidy explains, jazz (sometimes spelled jaz or jass in the early days) was a name later attached to that form of music, but not by those who performed it. In fact, early jazz stars hated the term and declined to use it themselves. Some preferred calling it ragtime or Negro music. Duke Ellington once said that calling this music jazz was like calling it a "four-letter word." Still the name stuck. But where did it come from?

Cassidy says it comes from the Irish word teas, which is actually pronounced as j'ass or chass, he says. It can mean heat, passion, excitement or ardor, all feelings that might be generated by the music in question. A century ago the word was usually associated with sex, one reason why musicians frowned on the word and why authorities in New Orleans wanted to ban the music. It was Scoop Gleason, an Irish-American baseball writer, who popularized the word jazz in San Francisco. He was writing about baseball, but the word spread and soon became attached to the music that emerged from New Orleans.

And what of the word dogie? Google the words "Irish cowboys" and you will discover that there was a significant presence of Irishmen in the Old West, Billy the Kid among them. There is even a book called How the Irish Won the West. So Irish words certainly could have made their way into western slang.

As for dogie, Cassidy writes it stems from the Irish word dothoigthe, meaning hard to rear, hard to fatten or an orphan calf. An orphan calf would certainly be hard to fatten without a nursing mother. Every large herd in the West must have had some dogies, as well as some Irish cowboys.

Creating memories

Photography would seem to preserve our past and make it invulnerable to the distortions of repeated memorial superimpositions, but I think that is a fallacy; photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories.

Sally Mann, Hold Still

Sally Mann

For a woman whose career is taking photographs, Sally Mann, in her memoir Hold Still, makes a surprising number of negative comments about photography. One of these, that photography is "an invasive act,"  I mentioned in my review of the book two days ago. One the same page she writes that "many, I daresay even most, good pictures of people come to one degree or another at the expense of the subject."

Yet her sharpest comment, one she makes above in her prologue and repeats throughout her memoir, is that photos corrupt memories while creating their own.

"I believe that photographs actually rob all of us of our memory," she writes. Later she says she remembers photos of her father more clearly than she remembers her father himself. "It isn't death that stole my father from me; it's the photographs." Still later she observes that photos "not only corrupt memory, they also have a troubling power to distort character and mislead posterity." That is, we can easily misjudge a person's character on the basis of that person's expression in a single photograph, something biographers are guilty of all the time. In fact, Mann does the same kind of thing herself when commenting on a photo of one of her ancestors.

So which is right, do photographs preserve memories or alter them? Both, I think. Yesterday I looked at a professional portrait taken when my son was about 18 months old. I recalled not that particular occasion but the studio where that and other portraits were taken during his childhood, the photographer, the clothes my son wore that day, his haircut and the way he looked as a child. Rather than distort my memory, the photo brought back memories that might otherwise stay forgotten.

Yet photos show just an instant in time, and that instant can be misleading. We don't always look the way we look when our photos are taken. We usually straighten our hair and our clothing before the shutter is snapped. Women check their makeup, men their flies. We stand up straight. We say cheese. Photos at their best show the ideal, not the reality.

Mann gives us an example in a photograph her father took of her she was a little girl. Something of a wild child by her own admission, she was "not the most willing subject," but her father finally got a photo of which he was proud and which he later framed for his office. It may have distorted reality, but only because one moment in time cannot represent every other moment in time.

Being as much into words as Mann is into photographs, I have often thought that words can distort reality in a way similar to what she says about pictures. Why do witnesses in a courtroom, or let's say an impeachment hearing, see the same thing so differently? It has much to do with their attitudes and world views, but it may also have something to do with how they first put what they observed into words. Afterward they may remember their words more distinctly that they remember the actual events they observed.

An invasive act

Photographer Sally Mann won both fame (or was it infamy?) and fortune with the publication in 1992 of Immediate Family, which included many photographs of her naked children. More recently (2015) she won a measure of literary fame with her excellent book Hold Still, a memoir filled with photographs taken by her and members of her family.

Over her creative life, Mann (now in her 70s) has moved from one major project to another, each taking several years. After photographing her young children, she moved on to landscapes, then black men. Later she focused her camera on dead bodies. If you think you are shocked by her nude children, wait until you get to the chapter showing photos of decaying corpses.

Mann describes herself as a rebellious child who refused to wear clothes and, when forced to put them on, refused to take them off, wearing them until they became filthy rags. She offers photos taken by her parents to prove both points. The rebellion continued into college and, indeed, until her marriage to Larry Mann. When they had children of their own, clothing was optional on their isolated farm, and neither she nor her children saw anything wrong with her photographs. Thus she says she was amazed when much of the reaction to Immediate Family was negative. It even led to stalkers and fears for her life. Yet the book continued to sell for years. The public, shocked or not, wanted to own her book.

She writes not just about her own life but about the lives of her parents and grandparents, and about Larry's parents, as well. These details, mostly discovered in attic trunks and supported by old photos also found there, are much more interesting than you might think. Her father, for example, was a physician, yet his abiding passions were art and death, usually art about death. Mann, when she got to the point in her career where she found herself photographing corpses, realized she had much more in common with her father than she once thought. "Am I suggesting here that I was born to redeem my father's lost artistic vision, the child destined to make the art that he was unable to make ...?," she asks. "Maybe I am, and maybe I was. God knows I have tried."

Mann returns again and again to her thoughts about the power and legitimacy of photographic art. At one point she describes photography as "an invasive act, a one-sided exercise of power, the implications of which, when considered in historical perspective, are unsettling." She is speaking here about her pictures of black men, but the words can apply as well to those of her children.

Irish slang

Long a puzzle to linguists is why the Irish, despite Ireland's proximity to England and the large number of Irish immigrants to the United States, have had so little influence on the English language. English has loads of French words, Spanish words, Latin words, Greek words, Arab words, Indian words and even American Indian words. So why so few Irish words other than the likes of shamrock and blarney?

David Cassidy, founder of the Irish Studies Program at New College in California, wondered the same thing until someone gave him an Irish dictionary. At first he wanted to just throw it away, but then he decided to cover a few words each night before going to sleep. The result of this unusual bedtime reading is How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads.

What he discovered was that numerous English words, mostly slang or originally slang, were introduced by the Irish, but so subtly that nobody seemed to notice. His 303-page book includes a dictionary of Irish-American vernacular more than 200 pages long. That's a lot of words, and includes such words and phases as drag race, jazz, poker, humdinger, hokum, lunch, so long, nincumpoop. scallawag and scam.

So how is it possible that so many trained linguists could have missed the Irish connection to so many words? Cassidy doesn't have much to say on this topic, but I have a few ideas:

1. Although linguists tend to learn a variety of different languages, Irish (or Gaelic) is not necessarily one of them. The number of people who speak it continues to shrink, so why bother?

2. If respected experts have previously concluded that the Irish language had little influence on English, later scholars may have been disinclined to challenge them on that question.

3. Irish words, as is true of many languages, don't look the way they are pronounced, at least not to English speakers. Ailteoir seaoilte, for example, doesn't look much like helter skelter, yet the pronunciation is similar, as are the meanings.

4. Most of these English slang terms were probably coined by second generation immigrants who learned Irish in their homes and English at school and on the streets. They took Irish words but gave them English pronunciations, often substituting existing English words that sounded like the Irish words.  Thus the Irish word anacal, meaning mercy or surrender, came to be uncle, as in "say uncle," when one boy gives up to a tougher boy.

"The Irish had invented slang by remembering the Irish language without knowing it," Cassidy writes.

In Robert L. Chapman's 1987 reference book American Slang, he traces the word guzzle to the French word gosier, meaning throat. Cassidy, on the other hand, says guzzle sprang from the Irish word gus oil, meaning "high-spirited, vigorous drinking." My vote goes to Cassidy.

Treasure hunt

Novelist Louis Bayard likes to build his fiction around real people (Edgar Allan Poe, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln), although in Mr. Timothy he imagines a famous fictional character, Tiny Tim, all grown up. In his 2010 effort, The School of Night, his focus rests on Thomas Harriot, a prominent 17th century English scientist who is little remembered today, although a recent biography may help.

Harriot knew William Shakespeare, at least according to the novel, and was a pal of Sir Walter Ralegh (the novel includes an interesting discussion of why this spelling is favored here over the more familiar Raleigh). Harriot, Ralegh and other prominent men of the day used to meet at night to discuss topics frowned upon when discussed during the day, such as atheism. This they called the School of Night, which surprisingly has relatively little to do with Bayard’s plot.

It seems that Harriot has left behind a treasure map so vague that it isn’t even clear if the treasure, whatever it might be, is in the United States (he had once visited the colonies) or England. People die, or in some cases appear to die, while scholars compete to find the prize.

Bayard shifts his story back and forth from 2009, where the treasure hunt takes place, to 1603, where we find Harriot discovering love with a servant girl almost as brilliant as he is.

My enthusiasm for Bayard’s novel seemed to rise and fall as the pages turned. Sometimes it seemed wonderfully clever and other times contrived.

First the character, then the story

Susan Isaacs

Last Saturday at the Tampa Bay Times Festival of Reading in St. Petersburg, I had the opportunity to listen to novelist Susan Isaacs talk about writing. Now in her mid-70s, Isaacs said she was a bored housewife on Long Island, reading as many as four murder mysteries a week, when she decided she could write one too. The result, in 1978, was the bestseller Compromising Positions, which like several of her books features a bored housewife as its heroine.

I had a notebook with me, but I wrote down just four Susan Isaacs quotes from that 45-minute presentation. Here they are:

“The character comes first.”

Some other novelists may start with the plot, then find a character to put at its center. Isaacs said that doesn’t work for her. As an illustration she cited her latest novel Takes One to Know One, which she worked on for more than two years without having a main character she could believe in. She knew the plot was good, but while going through it one last time before submitting it for publication she realized she needed to find her character, then start over.

“It’s more like taking dictation than writing.”

This comes after she has her main character and her plot, of course. That’s the hard part for her. Then, once begun, the story seems to flow out of her mind and through her fingers as if she were only the medium. I have heard other novelists says much the same thing, while on the other side are those, like Ann Patchett, who maintain they are very much the captains of their ships, the source of everything that ends up on their pages.

I tend to think both points of view are correct. If the dictation theory were literally true, then anyone, including you and me, could write novels as good as anything both Isaacs and Patchett have written. But we don’t. Rather I think that when a good writer, like a good wood carver or a good clothing designer, has done good work often enough, good work comes to seem natural, requiring less thought, less effort than it once did.

“I write the story I most want to read and nobody else is kind enough to write.”

Isn’t that true of anyone who creates anything, whether it’s a book, a painting or a pot roast? We make what we like. If some else likes it, all the better. The first objective of artists is to please themselves.

“Knowing the ending is a comfort.”

Before writing the beginning of a novel, Isaacs said she knows how it will end. Or at least how it may end. Because she is only “taking dictation,” in her phrase, her novels don’t always end the way she she first imagined in her outline. But having an ending in mind when she begins gives her confidence that she will not, after working months on a book, find herself in a dead end.

How Popular Science has changed

I have before me four copies of Popular Science, a magazine founded in 1872, or almost 150 years ago. One is the July 1927 issue with an illustration of a speeding race car getting the checkered flag on the cover. The July 1937 cover shows what appears to be a tank on a safari, but instead of guns the occupants of the vehicle have a camera and a microphone aimed at a tiger. The December 1952 issue has a cover illustration showing the new 1953 Plymouth and Packard in the snow. Finally the fall 2019 issue has what looks to be a cross between a robot, a parking meter, one of those viewing devices sometimes available to tourists at overlooks and a periscope sticking out of the water and, perhaps, peering into the future. Some observations.

1. The cover price was 25 cents in 1927 but dropped to 15 cents in 1937, perhaps because of the Depression. In 1952 the magazine again cost 25 cents (although I paid $3.50 for it in an antique shop). The magazine, now a quarterly rather than a monthly, costs $7.99 today.

2. The current issue has a theme, "The Fringes of What We Know," unlike the earlier editions, which each focused on a variety of topics, from cars to home movies to bridges to how to make a porch lantern.

3. The size of the magazine has changed over the years. The 1927 and 1937 publications are both 8.5"-by-11.5" and relatively thin, just 120 pages in the case of the 1937 issue (again the Depression and reduction in advertising may be the reason). The 1952 issue is 6.75"-by-9.5", which was the size of the magazine for many years. This issue is 276 pages long and is loaded with advertising. The classified section alone fills 14 pages. Today there is hardly any classified advertising at all. The magazine measures  8"-by-10.5" and is 130 pages long.

4. Font sizes have also varied over the years. The largest body type, and thus easiest to read, is found in the 1952 issue, which also helps explains why it has more pages. Reading the other issues can be a challenge, especially the current edition, which often has black type on blue or brown backgrounds or white type on black or red backgrounds. The font size on sidebars is even smaller than it is for main articles.

5. Articles today are longer than they used to be, but they usually deal with real science. This fall's issue has articles on exploring the deepest parts of the world's oceans, the challenge of living on Mars, digging up the ruins of Pompeii and mirrored telescopes. Compare this with articles on traffic cops of other lands (1927), surfboarding (1937) and how the automatic choke works (1952). Whether making the magazine finally live up to its name makes it more interesting, and thus more popular, is another matter. I am not so sure. I doubt the magazine still has as much circulation as it once did, or it might still be a monthly.

6. Like so many magazines today, Popular Science has gone arty. While earlier generations of the publication had loads of photographs and vivid illustrations, the magazine today features few photos. Obscure drawings dominate the pages. Many of these seem like wasted space, and rather than luring me into the articles, which should be their purpose, they tend to scare me away.

The power of rhymes

I tell you, one reason I like rhyming poetry is it forces ideas you wouldn't have otherwise.

Kurt Vonnegut, interview, Pages magazine, November/December 2006

Kurt Vonnegut

Today we think of Kurt Vonnegut as a novelist, primarily as the author of Slaughterhouse-Five. Yet he was also, at various points in his career, a journalist for both newspapers and magazines,  an advertising copywriter, an essayist and a short story writer. He was also, as suggested by the above quotation, a poet and a writing teacher.

In The World's Strongest Librarian, which I recently read, there is a wonderful seven-line poem by Vonnegut, reprinted from Cat's Cradle. And yes, it rhymes. As for being a writing coach, he was a favorite instructor at the Iowa Writers Workshop back in the Sixties, and for decades afterward many of America's best writers remember his contribution to their careers. One of his strengths was that he could teach a variety of different kinds of writing

So it may be worth listening to his advice about the value of poetry that rhymes.

Until a century ago, most poetry rhymed. Then came free verse, and rhymes began to seem dated, something serious poets avoided. Rhymes were left to songwriters, writers of light verse and children's verse, and Robert Frost.

Yes, Frost continued to believe in rhymed poems after most of his contemporaries had left them behind. Perhaps he would have agreed with Vonnegut, that rhyming poetry "forces ideas you wouldn't have otherwise."

So what did Vonnegut mean? Writers of free verse may be too willing to settle for the first line that comes to mind, or at least the first line that sounds good to them. Writing poetry becomes like writing prose. It is just the expression of an idea, albeit in more beautiful language. A necessity to rhyme, however, closes some doors while opening others. A rhyming scheme can force poets toward ideas they might otherwise have never had, perhaps more beautiful and original than they might have at first imagined.

The illustration that comes to mind is not from Frost or any other serious rhyming poet but rather Ogden Nash, the mid-20th century master of light verse. Consider these lines from a poem called "The Voice of Experience."

There is none so irate and awkward
As a husband being Chautauquard.

Nash was famous for making up clever words or clever pronunciations of existing words. Yet an invention like Chautauquard, which makes perfect sense in the context of the poem, would have been pointless in free verse. The necessity of a rhyme forced creativity and gave us awkward and Chautauquard and, later in the same poem, vestryman and pedestriman.

If rhyming forced creativity like that for Nash, imagine what it must have done for Frost or Wordsworth.

An existential threat to comprehension

"... for here, as in the legal and medical professions the more impenetrable a man's speech, the higher the esteem in which he is held. Nothing would be more injurious to our reputation in this house, than for us to speak intelligibly."

Neal Stephenson, The System of the World

Several of the candidates for the Democrat presidential nomination have used the phrase "existential threat" in reference to climate change. As the word existential has to do with existence, it might seem appropriate in this context, yet it is mainly a philosophical term and is over the heads of most Americans, and I would assume most of the presidential candidates. Were I a reporter covering the campaign I would love to ask any of them what existential means, preferably while a camera is running.

Everyone understands the word threat, but what is an existential threat? Perhaps those lines spoken by a character in the Neal Stephenson novel The System of the World explain why this word is used as much as it is. It makes the speaker sound smart. The "more impenetrable a man's speech, the higher the esteem in which he is held."

Lawyers write in legalese partly to be more precise but also partly because lawyers will be required to interpret it.

For centuries Mass was conducted in Latin even though hardly any worshippers understood Latin. Until the Reformation, Bibles too were in Latin. Only the educated elite knew what was being said.

One reason for the lingo found in virtually every profession is that it separates those on the inside from those on the outside. The same is true of slang.

Because insurance agents, brokers, bankers, doctors and such speak in words we don't understand we tend to believe they are smarter, and thus trustworthy. That may, in fact, be true. But maybe not. If they were really smart they would be able to speak so that we can understand them.

Lost in Shanghai

A young American spy is sent to Shanghai with no more explicit assignment than to learn the language and culture and to wait and see what happens. So begins Charles McCarry's 2013 espionage thriller The Shanghai Factor.

Not much happens other than that some Chinese thugs toss him into a filthy river for no apparent reason. And he has an affair with a beautiful and mysterious young woman, who eventually disappears as suddenly as she appeared in the first place. Then he is offered a job with a big salary and little responsibility by the head of a large Chinese corporation.

Yet soon his job is terminated and our spy is back in the States, still being followed everywhere, as he was in Shanghai, by Chinese stalkers. Then he encounters a woman who is both a wonderful cook and a skilled assassin, a Chinese-American lawyer with whom he attended college and a Chinese spy who wants to recruit him as a double agent.

The tension builds gradually as the reader, like our young American spy, tries to figure out what is going on. And what exactly is his handler, with the unlikely name of Luther Burbank, trying to accomplish?

McCarry has been turning out first-rate spy novels for decades. His readers won't be disappointed with this one.

Fun with language

Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson novels can be a feast for lovers of language, and The System of the World is no exception. Word origins, for example, are often sprinkled into the narrative.

The story has much to do with English coinage, so readers learn very early that the word coin came from the archaic word coign, meaning corner. Coins apparently were originally square, but assayers removed corners to test the purity of the metal. Similarly characters discuss the origins of such words as club, mob and machinery.

Stephenson often uses 18th century spellings so that club is clubb, mob is mobb and top is topp. The words fantasy and fantasize are always spelled with a ph. Yet he frequently mixes in words and phrases that sound more modern than 1714, when the story is set.

An Internet source says the phrase "queer the deal" dates from 1812, or a century later than the story. I don't know when the phrase "absentee landlord" came into the language, but a book called Absentee Ownership was published in 1923. The phrase cocktail party also appears to have been a 20th century invention.

I have a feeling Stephenson was well aware of such language incongruities and hoped readers would enjoy them as much as he did.

Dawn of a new age

For the war is over; most of the great conflicts have been sorted out; Natural Philosophy has conquered the realm of the mind; and -- today -- as we stand here -- the new System of the World is being writ down in a great Book somewhere.

Neal Stephenson, The System of the World

As Neal Stephenson's ambitious (nearly 3,000 pages) Baroque Cycle draws to a close with the third novel, The System of the World (2004), England is bathed in optimism. A new king mounts the throne in 1714. The nation is at peace. And science (or Natural Philosophy) seems to have explained how the universe works. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, both major characters as well as real people, have much to do with this optimism.

The Baroque Cycle is unusual science fiction in that it deals with real science and real people, yet the plots are mainly fiction. This time the story revolves around Newton's work at the Royal Mint, an unusual job for one of the world's greatest scientists, but he is also an alchemist. Newton uses his position at the mint to watch for Solomon's gold, supposedly once owned by King Solomon himself and supposedly heavier and more valuable than other gold.

Meanwhile Jack Shaftoe, a vagabond who will be familiar to readers of other books in the series, has been counterfeiting coins, putting Newton's reputation in jeopardy as his life draws to a close. In even greater danger is Shaftoe himself after he is captured and sentence to be hanged, then drawn and quartered. The final chapters make compelling reading. The rest of the book, like much of the trilogy, requires patience.

The world is changing in 1714, although perhaps not as quickly as characters anticipate. They speak of binary code, a Logic Mill (or computer) and an Engine for Raising Water by Fire (or steam engine), but all these must wait for the future. Still, that future rested on the likes of Newton and Leibniz.

Library miracles

Josh Hanagarne

Josh Hanagarne, in his memoir The World's Strongest Librarian: A Book Lover's Adventures, makes a couple of observations about libraries that may be worth comment.

"I really want this building to serve the purpose for which it was intended -- as a breeding ground for curiosity."

Hanagarne mentions some other purposes some patrons at the Utah library where he works seem to think the building serves. Parents drop their children off while they go to work, expecting librarians to serve as babysitters. Some people seek quiet places in the library to sleep. Teenagers seek out the same places to make out. I recently used a public library for the purpose of getting coached on the operation of a new insulin pump.

Libraries themselves, especially in recent decades, have expanded their purpose in a multitude of ways. They have cafes, computers for patron use, public meeting rooms and a wide variety of programs.

But is being a breeding ground for curiosity the main purpose of a library? It could be argued that in most cases a person becomes curious before entering the library. One goes to the library to satisfy that curiosity -- to find the answers to questions, to scratch an already existing itch.

Yet answers have a way of stimulating more questions. As has been often stated, the more we know the more we realize we don't know. And often when we go to a library to get one thing, our eyes are drawn to another book, another magazine, another video, whatever. So, yes, libraries do breed curiosity, or at least more curiosity.

"A library is a miracle. A place where you can learn just about anything, for free. A place were your mind can come alive."

In an age when almost everyone has a world of information available to them at all times on phones they carry with them everywhere, it seems amazing how busy libraries are. Sometimes even finding a place to park can be a challenge. I have seen standing-room-only author talks and genealogy meetings. Video stores may have closed, but people still go to libraries to find movies to watch. Most days when I go to the Largo Library in Florida I see the same woman in the same chair reading a different book. Patrons line up to check out books or to ask questions. At the Largo Library, they also line up just to get in when the doors open in the morning.

The real miracle may be the fact that it is all free. We also live in age where almost everything has a price, and that price is rarely cheap. Even dollar stores now charge more than a dollar for most merchandise. Yet you can walk into any public library and walk out with an armload of books, CDs, DVDs or whatever, all for free. You have to bring them back, of course, and the fact that most people do is another miracle.

A library story

Josh Hanagarne may actually be The World's Strongest Librarian, as the title of his 2013 memoir boasts. He is six-feet-seven-inches tall and weighs 260 pounds, lifts weights and tosses cabers, rocks and other imposing objects at Highland Games. Yet neither his unusual size and strength nor, for someone of his dimensions, unusual job is the most central part of his story.

Since childhood Hanagarne has had Tourette Syndrome, meaning he is subject to involuntary movements and speech, often self-destructive and often embarrassing, especially for someone with a very public job. His weight training, along with breathing exercises, has helped somewhat to control his Tourette's, which he has nicknamed Misty.

Another part of his story is that he was raised a Mormon, the product of a devout mother and a father who went through the motions out of love for his wife. Now, years later, Hanagarne finds himself in the same situation as his father: a devout Mormon wife, a son who may or may not have Tourette's and a wavering faith. In Mormon terms, he fears he has "lost his testimony," but then again, maybe not.

The book alternates between past and present, between his life story and his experiences as a staff member at a large public library in Utah. He always loved books and became a secret Stephen King fan despite his mother's objections. Yet because of Tourette's he had difficulty in school. He started college many times, only to be forced to quit. Jobs, too, came and went until he discovered the library as a perfect fit for a man who didn't seem to fit anywhere else.

His love story is a beautiful one, as is his account of the couple's struggle to have a child, then a struggle to adopt one and finally a surprise pregnancy that gave them a son.

Hanagarne has had an intriguing life, but it didn't write itself. He skillfully put it all together in a way that makes compulsive reading.

A wartime murder

Reading just two James R. Benn novels is enough to make his Billy Boyle books one of my favorite mystery series. Rag and Bone (2010), like Billy Boyle, the first in the series, is an ideal blend of history, mystery and wartime adventure.

Boyle was a young police detective before World War II intervened and he was assigned to the staff of his Uncle Ike, none other than Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, to solve a ticklish murder. More murders follow, and so the series continues. Even in wartime, when people are being killed all the time, a murder is another matter.

This time the murder that draws Ike's attention is that of a Russian officer stationed in London. Evidence suggests the killer could be Polish, perhaps even Billy's best friend, Kaz, a Polish officer who got out of Poland before the Germans invaded. Now the Soviets covet Poland, and Kaz blames them for the massacre of Polish prisoners at Katyn Forest (an actual event), for which the Soviets blame the Germans. Because the United States has a large Polish population and because the Allies need the Russians to help defeat Germany, the situation is tricky. Ike wants his nephew to discover what really happened to that Russian officer, preferably without making things anymore complicated than they already are.

His investigation takes Billy into both the London underworld and the underground, for there seems to be a connection between the murder and a poetry-reading gangster who, because of German air attacks, has made his temporary headquarters in a subway tunnel. Along the way he comes into contact with Winston Churchill and even Kim Philby, later discovered to have been a spy for the Soviets.

Benn keeps the plot moving nicely, gives us fascinating characters and turns a riveting murder mystery into a painless history lesson.

Writers go to college

Like most academics, he is fascinated by childish, unprofessional behavior.

Richard Russo, Straight Man

Richard Russo

I've noticed that several of the novels I have read this year feature college professors as characters, usually main characters. These include the recently reviewed Straight Man by Richard Russo, in which an English professor heads his department during threatened staff reductions; Nobody's Fool, also by Russo, in which the son of the main character is a professor; Ethan Canin's A Doubter's Almanac, about a mathematics professor who, because of age and careless living, has lost his brilliance at mathematics; Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss by Rajeev Balasubramanyam, about an economics professor who takes a leave to try to restore a happy family life; and David Lodge's Changing Places about two professors, one from Great Britain and one from the United States, who participate in a professor exchange program and find themselves leading the other fellow's life.

These books were written over a period of years, so perhaps they do not reflect a trend. I may have just happened to read these particular novels this year, yet I suspect there are enough other college-based novels and short stories (such as Mark Winegardner's "The Visiting Poet" and "The Untenured Lecturer," also read this year) to reflect at least a mini-trend.

If so, the reason is probably because so many of today's novelists and poets (and a few non-fiction writers, such as Les Staniford) are based at colleges and universities. As writers in residence they can teach a few classes, usually creative writing, and still have lots of time to write. Because most books make little money, the teaching jobs give them income to support their families. Their academic surroundings also give them material for their literary work. Even the best writers tend to write what they know.

Winegardner, according to the cover of his book of short stories, That's True of Everybody, is director of creative writing at Florida State. Balasubramanyam taught at Hong Kong University, among other places. Canin is on the faculty at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. David Lodge taught at the University of Birmingham. I don't know about Russo, but Straight Man certainly reads as if the author knows something about colleges and, in particular, English departments.

Many of the works mentioned above have certain themes in common, especially the fascination with "childish, unprofessional behavior" referred to in Russo's novel. The professors in these tales tend to drink too much, sleep with the wives of other professors and with their students, and worry constantly about departmental politics. Occam's Razor (stated simply: the simplest answer is more often the correct one) features in two or three of the novels. The narrator in Straight Man even names his dog Occam.

In the spirit of Occam's Razor, I conclude that putting writers in university faculties leads to novels about university faculties.

A disappointing Edgerton

Some novels seem to be more than the sum of their parts. Clyde Edgerton's Redeye (1995) somehow seems less.

With outlandish characters, a love triangle of sorts, a murder, a determined dog with an eerie red eye and loads of outrageous comedy, you might think the novel would offer satisfaction. Instead it falls flat. It's less than 250 pages long, and when you finish it you may find yourself asking, "Is that all there is?"

It's 1891 along the Colorado-Utah border where ancient cliff dwellings are discovered and immediately viewed as a possible tourist attraction. Other parts added to the mix include a would-be mortician who thinks blowing up a corpse is an ideal way to promote his business, a young woman from the East pursued both by a handsome Englishman and a Mormon bishop (who may or may not have several other wives), a mute old woman who's convinced a mummified baby from the cliff dwellings is her own dead baby and a stranger plotting to kill the bishop in revenge for his part in the Mountain Meadows massacre (a true event in which Mormons are believed to have plotted with Indians to wipe out a wagon train).

So that sounds interesting doesn't it? Maybe there's just too much going on, or perhaps the novel is too short to develop the possibilities. Whatever the case, Redeye is at times a pleasurable ride, but it goes nowhere.