Tapping the energy in great books

You can teach writing by teaching reading. With that sound philosophy, writing coach Roy Peter Clark, author of such books as Writing Tools and How to Write Short, gives us The Art of X-Ray Reading: How the Secrets of 25 Great Works of Literature Will Improve Your Writing (2016).

Those "25 great works of literature" (actually a few more than 25) are a varied lot, everything from Shakespeare's sonnets and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby to a cookbook by M.F.K. Fisher (How to Cook a Wolf). The authors are as distant as Chaucer and as recent as Donna Tartt. In each case Clark uncovers writing lessons that other writers can learn from, whether they include professional authors and journalists or students just trying to write better term papers.

Clark advises taking it slow when we read great books, analyzing each word, each phrase, each sentence, each paragraph, reading it over and over again until you discover what makes it work, what makes it great and what it really means. Why did Shakespeare write, "The queen, my lord, is dead" rather than "The queen is dead, my lord" or "My lord, the queen is dead"? What makes Shakespeare's choice the best one? That's the kind of stuff Clark gets into, yet without ever boring his readers. Clark's own writing, in fact, is worth studying.

A good book, Clark says, is "a perpetual motion machine. It "drives a story and lets the reader feel the energy." That energy will be there each time one opens that book and, if the book is really good, it will still be there hundreds of years from now when anyone reads the same words. The Art of X-Ray Reading demonstrates why this is so.

Testing a theory

Gerald Costanzo

Poet Gerald Costanzo has written a series of poems the last lines of which are the first lines of favorite mystery novels by John D. MacDonald, George C. Chesbro and others. At a Writers in Paradise reading last week in St. Petersburg I got the opportunity to hear him read some of those clever poems. And so I found myself thinking again about first lines versus last lines.

A week ago in my review of Famous Last Lines by Daniel Grogan I argued that first lines are more likely to be memorable, and thus more famous, than last lines. This may not be true in poetry, but I think it is in novels. Costanzo apparently agrees for he chose the first lines of mystery novels, not their last lines, for his poems.

I challenged readers last week to compare the first lines and last lines of any novels at hand to determine which seems more memorable. So why not do that myself? Here then are the first and lines lines of some novels I've read recently.

The Impossible Fortress by Jason Rekulak

First line: My mother was convinced I'd die young.

Last line: And just like that we were back in business.

My comment: No question here. The first line wins.

Tiny Americans by Devin Murphy

First line: In the fall of 1978, our father brought home a stack of books from the library on activities to do with us kids as an attempt to get himself sober.

Last line: Terrance bent into Lewis's arms and knew he would endlessly re-create this day in his mind, and that the effort would take the memory of all his days to do it justice.

My comment: Seems like a tie to me. Both lines are special.

Doc by Mary Doria Russell

First line: He began to die when he was twenty-one, but tuberculosis is slow and sly and subtle.

Last line: Calypso did the best she could.

My comment: First line wins again. No contest.

Miss Julia Inherits a Mess by Ann B. Ross

First line: "Julia!" Barely catching her breath, LuAnne Conover started talking as soon as I answered the phone.

Last line: So, since he asked, I told him.

My comment: Neither line is notable, but the first is certainly more interesting.

Blackbird House by Alice Hoffman

First line: It was said that boys should go on their first sea voyage at the age of ten, but surely this notion was never put forth by anyone's mother.

Last line: "We'll see if it's any good."

My comment: First line wins in a landslide.

New York by Edward Rutherfurd

First line: So this was freedom

Last line: Imagine. Freedom. Always.

My comment: What's notable here, which I didn't notice while reading this 860-page novel, is that the last line echos the first. By themselves, neither line is very good. Together they excel.

I rest my case.

Revisit the Eighties

Einstein isn't the only genius to have done poorly in school. Some kids in their teens, or even younger, have minds so focused on their true passion, art perhaps or automobile mechanics or insect life, that they can give little attention to such mundane things as social studies, algebra and English grammar.

Jason Rekulak's remarkable 2017 novel The Impossible Fortress takes us into the life of one such student, 14-year-old Billy Marvin. Although a potential A student according to intelligence tests, Billy is barely passing his classes. His single mother works nights, leaving Billy home alone. When he should be doing homework, he designs games on his Commodore 64.

Yes, a Commodore 64. This is the mid-Eighties, at the dawn of the home computer age when the Commodore 64 was a popular option. Its memory wasn't much, but still Billy could do amazing things, amazing at least to his best friends, Alf and Clark. His best game yet, still in its early stages, is one called The Impossible Fortress.

Alf and Clark are the kind of guys for which the phrase "with friends like these ..." might have been invented. Billy knows better, but he is weak-willed enough to go along with his pals' crazy schemes. Most of these schemes have to do with getting a copy of the latest Playboy magazine, which has nude pictures of Vanna White inside. The boys are all too young to buy a copy, so a nefarious plan is called for. Alf, especially, thinks the more complicated the better when it comes to nefarious plans. Plan after plan fails until Alf comes up with one he claims is foolproof, requiring Bill to sweet talk Mary Zelinsky, daughter of a neighborhood store that sells magazines, into revealing the store's security code.

Billy yields to the ridiculous plan after learning Mary has computer skills even surpassing his own. She tells him of a game-creation contest for students, and they start working together each day after school to perfect The Impossible Fortress.

Through the course of the novel, Billy himself faces one impossible fortress after another: finishing the game on time, breaking into Zelinsky's store and, finally, sneaking into the fortress-like Catholic girls' school Mary attends.

Rekulak gives his novel a soundtrack of Eighties music. Not literally, but songs from that period are mentioned throughout. The story even has the feel of one of those Eighties movies featuring teenage characters. It's all great, nostalgic fun. And to continue the fun, Rekulak even has Billy and Mary's game The Impossible Fortress on his website (www.jasonrekulak.com).

Growing up slow

The whole country seemed to offer up people made to feel small by one thing or another. Sun. Space. Each other. Tiny Americans everywhere. Drifting and drifting.

Devin Murphy, Tiny Americans

In Devin Murphy's novel Tiny Americans (2019), the three Thurber siblings are made to feel small by their quarreling parents, a drunken father and a mother more committed to her art than to her family. The parents have their own reasons for feeling small.

Beginning in 1978, when the kids are young, and following one character or another over the next 40 years. Murphy shows us the consequences of parental neglect.

Terrance Thurber, the father, soon abandons his family and heads out to a remote part of the West.

The son Lewis, one of the most intriguing characters, becomes a sailor, first in the Navy and later the merchant marine. He feels fully a man only when at sea.  Connor, the other son, reflects in 2005, "I'd become the kind of father I resented my own dad for being." Jamie, the daughter, seemingly prospers, but it takes years before she can say of her parents, "Everything I thought they burdened me with suddenly seems to switch from their lack to something different. Something I couldn't see until now. A wash of forgiveness comes."

The siblings independently become ready for reconciliation by the time Terrance sends each of them a letter inviting them to a family reunion.

The novel's chapters read like standalone stories, yet together they show a family that however broken remains bound by love. Murphy shows that love makes us bigger.

Famous last lines?

I was suspicious at the start of Daniel Grogan's Famous Last Lines: Final Sentences from 290 Iconic Books. Are there 290 famous last lines in all of literature? I can think of famous first lines, such as "Call me Ishmael" and "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times ..." But famous last lines? There's Huck Finn's line about lighting out for the territory, but not much else comes to mind.

I think the reason is that last lines require context for them to make sense. You have to have read the book, or at least be familiar with the story, to appreciate its ending. First lines, on the other hand, don't require context. Their job is enticement. They are designed to persuade the reader to move on to the next line, and then the next. Most first lines can stand alone better than most last lines. Try it yourself by reading the first line of any novel and then the last line. Which is more memorable? In most cases, I'd bet it's the first line.

Grogan's book doesn't prove my case, but neither does it prove Grogan's. Famous last lines, even familiar last lines, are few here. Many of those 290 "iconic" books cited aren't famous either. Grogan has a passion for experimental and postmodern novels and for metafiction, in other words books not likely to be read by enough people to make their last lines, or their first lines or even their titles, famous.

He gives the "famous last lines" in order of the book’s publication date, from Don Quixote in 1615 to How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia in 2013. The most notable books come in the early going. This owes a lot to the fact that only notable books from earlier centuries, including most of the 20th, are readily available to readers, including Grogan.

After putting the last line first, the author adds a paragraph that attempts to explain its context. Sometimes this will at least help the reader appreciate the line in question. Sometimes not.

Some last lines are so good one wishes they were famous. One such comes from Them by Joyce Carol Oates (1969): “He took his sister’s hand and kissed it and said good-by, making an ironic, affectionate bow over her with his head; it was the Jules she had always loved, and now she loved him for going away, saying good-by, leaving her forever.” That last line is so good it could be a first line. It makes you want to read the novel.

Other worthy last lines come from such novels as In Country, In the Lake of the Woods and The Book Thief.

Some last lines Grogan presents to us might be terrific, if only we knew what they were talking about. Still others just make you want to say, “Huh?” For instance, Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon: “Now everybody—“ Or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: “Are there any questions?” Or Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost: “TO BE CONTINUED.”  Surely there must be better, more famous last lines than these — “They lived happily ever after,” for instance.

Little lies, harmless falsehoods

Here was a truth: she loved the little lies she told as a detective, the license it gave her to nudge people along with harmless falsehoods ...

Laura Lippman, Butchers Hill

Laura Lippman

While reading the Laura Lippman mystery Butchers Hill, I thought the novel revolved around unwanted children, children born to parents incapable of taking care of them, foster children placed with people interested only in the extra income those children provided for them, children placed for adoption and a vast system that's supposed to protect such children but somehow doesn't.

Having finished the book and having had time to think about it, I would say the novel is more deeply about lies, and not just the lies that adversely affect the lives of these children or that result in the murders the detective investigates.. Lies lie everywhere in Butchers Hill, more plentiful than the literary references (Jane Austen, Anne Tyler, Rudyard Kipling, James Cain, etc.) Lippman sprinkles throughout the novel.

Early in the book a woman hires Tess Monaghan to find another woman. It turns out the second woman is actually the first woman by her original name. She explains she was just testing to see how a good a detective Tess is, but the lie infuriates Tess. How dare her client lie to her! Yet, as the above line from the novel illustrates, lying is how Tess does business, how she extracts information. She even enjoys it. Her "little lies" are whiter, she believes, than those of others, those lies that make her job more difficult.

She tells her client at one point, "The truth may set you free, but it doesn't get you much in the way of information. Trust me, when we start looking for your daughter, you're going to appreciate what the right lie can do." And yet Tess supposedly dedicates her life to discovering the truth.

One finds this all the time in television crime dramas. Cops and detectives lie to suspects and witnesses in their pursuit of the truth. Good lies are justified, it seems, when they expose bad lies.

This is not just something we find in fiction. Former FBI director James Comey famously said, "Good people lie. I think I'm a good person, where I have lied." Andrew McCabe, former deputy director of the FBI, is being prosecuted on charges of lying to investigators. It seems obvious that others in the FBI have been lying with regularity. Perhaps the agency's name should be changed to the Federal Investigation Bureau, or FIB. Meanwhile people are going to prison for lying to the FBI.

Everyone, it seems, thinks their own lies are somehow less serious than the lies told by others. Lies told by a spouse, a child, an employee, a salesman or a friend rank as a major offense, perhaps even unforgivable, while we regard our own as white lies, little lies, harmless falsehoods.

That's the truth.

Finding kids leads to finding murder

Police, not private detectives, investigate murders, making it a challenge for authors attempting to write a murder mystery with a private investigator (or any amateur sleuth) as the protagonist. The hero need not just solve the mystery but get involved in the case in the first place.

Laura Lippman solves this problem neatly in Butchers Hill, one of her earliest Tess Monaghan mysteries published in 1998. Butchers Hill is a neighborhood in southeast Baltimore where Tess opens her new office and where Luther Beale, a man call the Butcher of Butcher Hill, becomes one of her clients. Years earlier, angered at being harassed by a group of neighborhood kids, all foster children with little supervision, had fired a gun to scare them off. One child died of a bullet wound, and Beale served his time. He hires Tess to find the other children, now older teens, saying he wants to give them each an anonymous financial gift.

Tess then gets a second case, also involving finding a child. A woman wants her to locate the daughter she gave up for adoption years before. Now having regrets, she says just she want to know her child is OK and, if possible, do something for her.

Both cases seem like easy money to Tess. We know this isn't likely, and sure enough both cases soon blow up in her face. Most seriously, after a break-in at her office, kids she has found for Beale start dying in suspicious ways. The police suspect Beale but have no evidence. Tess suspects him, too, but decides to check out his claim that not only didn't he kill these children but neither was he responsible for the death that sent him to prison. He claims that fatal shot came from a passing car. And so, through the backdoor, Tess gets involved in a murder case.

Lippman delivers thrills and surprises, even in the adopted child case. I dare not say much about that one without being a spoiler.

Verbal traps

It amused Charlie how old money in America had somewhat adopted the English custom of leaving verbal traps for the social unwary.

Edward Rutherfurd, New York

Edward Rutherfurd

When Charlie, a character in Edward Rutherfurd's novel, thinks of "old money," he is thinking of those, like his own family, who have enjoyed wealth for a long, long time. And how do such people set verbal traps? By means of both pronunciation and vocabulary.

Charlies explains, "Old money pronounced certain names in ways that discreetly separated them from the rest. There were words, too. The modern custom of referring to a man's casual evening dress as a 'tuxedo,' or even worse a 'tux,' was definitely considered vulgar. Middle-class America said 'tuxedo.' Old money said 'dinner jacket.'"

Such verbal traps can be found everywhere, in virtually every group in virtually every region, every occupation or profession, every hobby. It's not just "old money" that does this. Old anything does it. It’s how veterans separate themselves from rookies, the old-timers from newbies, those who have lived in a place all their lives from those who have just moved in.

Not that setting these traps is deliberate. Nobody decided to start saying “dinner jacket” in order to catch wannabes saying “tuxedo.” But language evolves, lingo develops even without design, physical separation creates particular accents. The traps themselves may not be deliberate, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be used to single out, and perhaps laugh at, outsiders.

When I am in Florida I always try to order soda, not pop, in restaurants. The latter is a word I can use in Ohio. In Florida it’s a verbal trap.

When books come calling

Mary Doria Russell

Reading about people in stories was like having visitors.

Mary Doria Russell, Doc

With a demanding husband and a house full of children, Virginia Earp has little time for herself. When she does rebel, she does it with a book. Visitors are rare in this home where Wyatt and his siblings spend their childhood, but their mom, when she can sneak an opportunity to read a bit, thinks of the characters in stories as her visitors. So writes Mary Doria Russell in Doc, her fine novel about the life of Doc Holliday, in which the Earp brothers play a major part.

Yesterday I came across a similar idea in Vaddey Ratner's novel In the Shadow of the Banyan: "Milk Mother said that stories are like footpaths of the gods. They lead us back and forth across time and space and connect us to the entire universe, to people and beings we never see but who we feel exist." And so through these mysterious footpaths called stories, people visit us or we visit them.

I do love lists, so I thought I might make a list of ways in which books are like visitors.

1. Visitors come in two basic varieties, those who are invited and those who drop in unannounced. The books we most enjoy usually seem to be those we invite into our lives, those we read because we choose to. Drop-in books are those assigned by teachers, those picked by someone else in our book clubs and those given to us by friends who say, "You've got to read this." Sometimes we like them, sometimes we don't. Either way we feel obligated to read them.

2. Visitors tell us something about the world outside our own experience. That's why we read books, to learn something we don't know, in the case of nonfiction, or to learn about the lives of others, even if those others happen to be entirely fictional.

3. Visitors break up the routine of our day. Actually I make reading a part of the routine of my day. Yet every day is different because every book, like every visitor, is different.

4. Visitors mean conversation. Books are the same, or should be. Readers may say nothing, but they should be responding in their minds, thinking about what they read. I am grateful for this blog, as I was for my weekly book column when I worked for a newspaper, for allowing me to respond to the books that come calling.

Borrowed happiness

"You know how people say, Don't borrow trouble? Well," said Morgan, "I guess it's the opposite of that. Doc is borrowing happiness."

Mary Doria Russell, Doc

Mary Doria Russell's magnificent 2011 novel Doc may be fiction but at times it reads like biography. It reads like truth, or at least like a truth we would like to believe. Biographies of John Henry "Doc" Holliday, especially the earliest ones, painted him as more gunfighter than dentist, more drunken gambler than polished Southern gentleman. Russell seeks to set the record straight.

I first learned Russell was writing a novel about Doc Holliday when I heard her speak several years ago in Columbus. She mentioned, as she does briefly in the novel, that Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone with the Wind, was his second cousin. What's more, Mitchell may have modeled Ashley Wilkes after him, she said. The refined Doc Holliday was as out of place in Dodge City as Wyatt Earp would have been in Atlanta. He settled there under the mistaken belief the prairie air would cure his tuberculosis, from which he was slowing dying. He drank because it relieved his coughing. He gambled because it paid better than dentistry and didn't require as steady a hand. He carried a gun, even if illegally, because he often won at cards and was wary of sore losers.

Russell blames Bat Masterson for starting and spreading the stories about Doc Holliday being a notorious gunfighter. Masterson doesn't fare very well in Doc. Nor does Kate Harony, the well educated Hungarian prostitute who was Doc's on-again, off-again mistress. The author blames Kate for much of what went wrong in Doc's life, including the Gunfight at OK Corral, which is not dealt with directly in this novel. It was her idea that they move to the dusty prairie town of Dodge City.

The Earp brothers, Wyatt, Morgan and James, are painted with almost as much affection as Russell paints Holliday. James and his wife run a brothel where the women are protected and treated with dignity. Morgan is a bookish young man, a friend to all, who views Doc as his mentor. Wyatt comes through as tough yet almost saintly. He enforces the law equally for all, whatever the consequences, attends church and avoids liquor. After his first dental appointment with Doc Holliday, he at first refuses the free toothbrush offered, thinking it must be a bribe.

There are mysteries in the plot, yet they are hardly necessarily, for it is the characters that actually move the story along. Even those who know the history will want to read Russell's version of it.

For all his trials with declining health, an often angry Kate and the false stories spread by Bat Masterson, Doc Holliday makes the most of his life in Russell's novel. When happiness eludes him, he feeds off that of others.

Lives intertwined

Charlie shrugged. "Maybe I'm just being a novelist." Novelists liked to imagine the interconnectedness of things -- as though all the people in the big city were part of some great organism, their lives intertwined.

Edward Rutherfurd, New York

Edward Rutherfurd gets personal twice in his 2009 novel New York, and the lines above mark the second time. Commenting on one of his characters he is also commenting on himself and on what he is attempting to do in this novel and all the others he has written: to imagine the interconnectedness of things -- as though all the people in the big city were part of some great organism, their lives intertwined.

He succeeds admirably, even more so than he did in an earlier Rutherfurd novel I read, London. The reason may be simply that New York City has a much shorter history than does London. In his novels he follows a few fictional families through the entire history of a city, country or region, conveying important details of history while displaying how key events impact his characters and then showing how these characters impact the lives of descendants who will not remember them. That task can be daunting in a place with as long a history as London. New York, however, has been around just a few hundred years, and so some of his characters can stay around for several chapters in some cases, and readers can follow more closely as one family member passes the baton to the next generation.

Rutherfurd's main characters are part of the Master family, some of whom lived in the city when it was still called New Amsterdam at the time of Peter Stuyvesant. The family business prospers, and the Masters become part of the New York elite. They witness the Revolution, the impact of slavery on the city, the Civil War, major fires and the blizzard of 1888, the arrival of large numbers of immigrants, the Great Depression and, eventually, the terrorist attack on the twin towers. The author mixes in families representing different groups, including blacks, Irish, Jews and Puerto Ricans. In a sense, Rutherfurd demonstrates that the history of New York City is also the history of the United States.

The author errs here and there in his massive novel. At one point, for example, he writes that "General Grant had just smashed the Confederates at Gettysburg." Grant was attacking Vicksburg at the time of the Battle of Gettysburg. Later the British author rites of a family going to the beach for a few days, saying it "was one of the best holidays they'd had in years." Americans normally refer to such days away from home as vacations, not holidays.

This novel proves totally absorbing, demonstrating as much as any novel can the "interconnectedness of things."

And as for the other time Rutherfurd gets personal. He pokes fun at himself when he has one of his characters say about another, "Of course ... he was never a gentleman. He even wrote historical novels."

Howard's women

If you find yourself glancing at the periodicals for the latest news each time you pass through the supermarket checkout line you are likely to enjoy Karina Longworth's Seduction: Sex, Lies and Stardom in Howard Hughes's Hollywood, even if the Hollywood gossip inside is more than half a century out of date.

The book is something of a Howard Hughes biography, although Hughes disappears from the text, as he did from the Hollywood scene, for long periods of time. Mostly Longworth writes about the women in his life, and there were many of them. The names of the Hollywood actresses that fell into his orbit include many of the most prominent actresses from the 1920s through the 1950s: Billie Dove, Jean Harlow, Bette Davis, Ginger Rogers, Katherine Hepburn, Jane Russell, Ida Lupino, Ava Gardner, Gina Lollabrigida, Jean Peters and Terry Moore, among others.

Hughes used these women, and shamelessly so, but the women also used him, or at least tried to. Jane Russell was one who actually got the best of him, even if he turned her into more of a sex symbol than she wanted. Some of the women, notably Peters and Moore, fell in love with him and, for a time, were willing to live with his lies and manipulation.

Longworth writes of Hughes, "He seemed to draw comfort, if not pleasure, from knowing women were waiting for him to pay attention to them -- and then withholding that attention." His standard operating procedure was to scout out young beauties, often by watching movies for hours, even days, at a time. Then he would have his agents sign them to contracts, promising them acting lessons and a chance at Hollywood stardom. His spies would follow them everywhere, controlling every part of their lives. Often they would never even meet Hughes, nor ever get a part in a movie. Others became stars more in spite of Hughes than because of him.

From a young age Hughes had been reclusive and afraid of germs. That became worse as he aged, especially after some spectacular air crashes and getting knocked on the head by Ava Gardner after he abused her. Eventually he gave up pursuing woman and was content just to watch them in movies around the clock.

The book, like Hughes in his prime, is seductive, but something less than good.

Year's best, sort of

I often post something about the best books read in the year just ended. This year I thought I would use some of the superlatives employed in the book Remarkable Reads, which I reviewed last week. Let's give it a try.

Phaedra Patrick

Most Enchanting Book: The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper by Phaedra Patrick. A widower discovers his late wife's charm bracelet, and those charms reveal a life before their marriage that he knew nothing about. Truly enchanting.

Most Important Book: Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens. A wealthy man fakes his own death to discover if the woman pledged to him will love him for himself, not for his money. Of course, this being Dickens, there is much, much more going on.

Most Daunting Book: Middlemarch by George Eliot. I started this novel in college, and it took me more than 50 years to finish it. Now that's daunting.

Wisest Book: No Time to Spare by Ursula le Guin. This collection of essays from the blog Le Guin wrote in the years before her death last year is packed with wisdom about literature and life.

Most Eloquent Book: My Antonia by Willa Cather. A successful man remembers an immigrant girl who grow up on a neighboring farm and is delighted when they meet again after many years and he discovers harsh prairie life has not changed her at all. This beautifully written book turned 100 in 2018.

Most Familiar Book: The Return of the Moguls by Dan Kennedy. Kennedy writes that if newspapers are going to survive, it may depend upon wealthy individual owners, not newspaper chains, to show the way. As a newspaper veteran, I found myself nodding in agreement with much of what he says.

Most Incomprehensible Book: Version Control by Dexter Palmer. Time travel itself seems incomprehensible to me. Palmer's book ranks among the best time-travel novels I've read, but it's even more incomprehensible than most.

Most Beautiful Book: The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters. A woman and her grown daughter let out part of their house to a flamboyant young couple. What follows is a secret romance, then a secret crime. Waters builds her novel slowly into a thriller, while maintaining the grace of her prose throughout.

Most Fearless Book: Antifragile by Nassim N. Taleb. Taleb skewers bankers. intellectuals and others while advancing his idea that true success means not just withstanding setbacks but growing from them. He doesn’t seem to care whom he offends.

Most Surprising Book; The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben. Do trees feel pain? Do they communicate with one another? Do they nurse their young? Wohlleben says they do.

Donald Ray Pollock

Most Disappointing Book: Cinemaps by Andrew deGraff. The author draws colorful maps showing the movement of characters in favorite movies. This may sound like fun, but those maps are too confusing to give much pleasure, other than through the beauty of the images themselves.

Most Unpleasant Book: The Heavenly Table by Donald Ray Pollack. Three Georgia brothers of very little brain turn to crime after the death of their father, then head for the border (the Canadian border) on horseback. I loved the novel, but Pollack spares none of the unpleasant details.

Most Luminous Book: Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. An opera singer and other party guests are held hostage by a band of young terrorists. In time the captivity begins to seem more rewarding than the party. No wonder this novel is a favorite among Patchett readers.