Reading gets personal

Each of us brings our autobiography to the reading of any text ...

Roy Peter Clark, The Art of X-Ray Reading

This isn’t just true with reading. It is just as true with watching movies, listening to music or sitting through a Sunday morning sermon. Who we are and where we’ve been influences all of our experiences. How does this compare with that? What does it remind us of? How we respond now depends upon how we were impacted then.

Roy Peter Clark, however, is talking about what we read, so let’s stick with that subject. Specifically he is referring to Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, which has a more personal connection to him than it might to you or me. Thus he responds to the book differently.

Sometimes, as with Clark and Plath, our connections to what we read are obvious. In recent months I’ve read The Rhine by Ben Coates, which brought back memories of my cruise down the Rhine last summer; The Book Artist by Mark Pryor, which I read with my own two visits to Paris in mind; Life with Father by Clarence Day and Nobody’s Fool by Richard Russo, both of which I was constantly comparing with the movies based on each; and Bob and Ray: Keener Than Most Persons, which brought back memories of listening to Bob and Ray on the radio. In each case I brought my autobiography to the text.

Yet our autobiographies are there even when it is not so apparent. Certain characters in novels may remind us of people we have known. Plots may remind us of similar novels we’ve read. Reading one book may cause us to think about another book by the same author. And so on.

Not only do we bring our autobiography to what we read, but what we read immediately becomes a part of our autobiography, thereafter influencing our future reading

Mystery within a mystery

As gimmicky murder mysteries go, Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz is one of the best, which is why it created something of a sensation among mystery readers when it was published a couple of years ago. The gimmick is that it contains a mystery within a mystery, giving the reader two for the price of one, while at the same time producing a satisfying single story.

Susan Ryeland is an editor for a small British publishing company that is in the black only because of one author, Alan Conway, whose ninth Atticus Pund mystery will be the last because both Pund and Conway himself are dying.

This ninth book in a popular series involves the mysterious death of a housekeeper in a fall down some stairs and, days later, the vicious murder of her employer. Although Pund, an amateur detective with remarkable success, had previously decided that, because of his declining health he would accept no new cases, this murder case he finds impossible to ignore.

After reading a few pages about Susan, we are treated to virtually the entire Conway novel. But the ending of that novel is missing, she finds, and then Conway is found dead of an apparent suicide. Susan wonders if it might have been murder, and while searching for the missing chapters she herself plays amateur detective. Not until she finds her murderer (and the missing chapters) do we return to observe Pund catching his.

The two mysteries are interrelated in clever and creative ways, clues to one mystery being found in the other.

When love comes first

Arranged marriages remain a mystery to most of us who live in cultures where young singles are expected to find their own spouses. Farahad Zama's 2008 novel The Marriage Bureau for Rich People helps to erase some of this mystery.

The story, set in India, tells of a retiree named Hyder Ali who, looking for something to do, sets up a marriage bureau in his home. The business becomes an unexpected success, helping many families find suitable mates for their sons or daughters, nephews or nieces, even brothers or sisters. By suitable, they usually mean someone of the right caste (in the case of Hindus), someone who can afford a proper dowry, someone who has the right kind of job and lives in the right area. Families would prefer their daughters not have to move into a home where their mother-in-law lives. Rich people don't want daughters-in-law who want to work. Being previously married, whether widowed or divorced, usually disqualifies a candidate. And everyone it seems wants a match with "fair skin," meaning light skin.

One part of Ali's success is that he preaches compromise. Finding someone who checks off every box may be impossible. First decide what's most important, he says, then make allowances for the rest.

Another part of his success is Aruna, the young woman he hires to assist him and who quickly become indispensable, not just to the office but to the novel itself. In fact, what begins as Ali's story soon turns into Aruna's story.

She comes from a relatively poor family, and because of her father's medical bills there is no money for either Aruna or her younger sister to get married. Aruna needs the job to support her family, never imagining that she might find her own husband through the marriage bureau.

A love marriage is frowned upon, even scandalous, in this culture where marriage comes first, love later. So what happens when love comes first? Zama shows us in this always fascinating, ever pleasurable, constantly informative story.

Pages fly by, villains pile up

A thriller works if a reader can’t turn the pages quickly enough. So David Baldacci’s End Game (2017) certainly works. Yet readers who do slow down long enough to take a breath may notice the plot fails the reality test. (Of course, this is probably true of most thrillers, especially when body counts rival that of John Hersey’s Hiroshima, yet seemingly without repercussions, let alone headlines.)

In this the fifth installment in the Will Robie series, featuring another government marksman named Jessica Reel, Robie and Reel are ordered to find their boss, whom they call Blue Man. Blue Man has disappeared while on a fishing vacation in eastern Colorado, where he grew up. There seem to be no clues, but there are plenty of villainous characters, most of them neo-Nazis who outnumber local law enforcement and so operate with impunity. Our heroes have one confrontation after another with these guys without finding Blue Man.

It turns out eastern Colorado has villains even more evil than these Nazis, and we observe as Robie and Reel take them out one by one. You may not believe it, but you will love it.

As an added bonus, Baldacci also gives us a love triangle almost as believable as the body count.

Biased reading

What’s called prejudice or bias when it involves other people is more likely termed taste or preference when we’re talking about anything else, even when our discriminating tastes and preferences happen to give us negative thoughts about people with quite different tastes and preferences.

We all like certain kinds of music and certain performers while detesting others. The same with movies and actors, restaurants and foods and, of course, books and authors. It is the latter which I choose to address.

Most readers prefer certain genres while avoiding others. Some even read only mysteries, or thrillers, or romances, whatever. Some read only fiction or only nonfiction. As a longtime book reviewer, I read a diverse assortment of books. Still I have my biases.

James Lee Burke

I read mysteries but avoid those that are too violent (I stopped reading James Lee Burke novels for this reason) or too cute (if there's a pun in the title, I avoid it even if I enjoy the pun). I have little interest in horror stories. If a book is a bestseller I am more likely to avoid it than grab it up. I ignore most political books (unless they are by somebody like P.J. O'Rourke), most war novels (unless they are about submarines) and most thrillers (unless they were written by David Baldacci -- see my next post). I am unlikely to ever read a book about playing tennis, drinking wine, crocheting sweaters, growing vegetables or hunting big game.

Even certain book titles can turn us off, as in the case of those mysteries with puns in their titles. I usually pass on novels with the words girl or daughter in their titles. Some titles are just too bland, too forgettable. If the title is unimaginative, will the book be any different? I think this even though I know the title is not necessarily the author's choice.

And so it goes. Some discrimination in the books we choose to read, while it can prevent us from reading some really good books we might actually enjoy, can even be a good thing. After all, so many books, so little time. We need some way to narrow the choices or we could never decide what to read next.

Building our literary canon

I began reading serious novels, written for adults, when I was about twelve years old. The Hardy Boys gave way to The Last Hurrah by Edwin O'Connor, a sophisticated novel of Boston politics and Irish family loyalties. When I finished the book and felt the weight of it in my hand, I knew that my life had changed forever. I had access to the secrets of the adult world at my fingertips.

Roy Peter Clark, The Art of X-Ray Reading

When reading The Art of X-Ray Reading several months ago I would have known Roy Peter Clark and I were of the same generation even if I had not previously seen him in person. So many of the books that shaped his youth also shaped mine. "Each of us finds our own literary canon," Robert Morgan writes in Remarkable Reads, and that canon begins forming in our youth. It may even stop forming in our youth. Those books we read before we are 25 may be the ones we hold most dear for the rest of our lives.

As it happened, I never read a Hardy Boys mystery, nor did I ever read The Last Hurrah, although I acquired a copy in my youth and held onto it for many years before realizing I would never read it. What I identified with in Clark's statement above was the age at which he suddenly switched from kids' books to adult books. That was about the age I started riding my bike to our village library, some three miles away, and heading straight for the "new books" shelves. That's where I would go every couple of weeks, never even glancing at the children's section.

I don't recall the first the first adult book I read, although I do remember that John Updike's Pigeon Feathers and Jack Finney's Assault on a Queen were two of the earliest books I took home. Unlike Clark, apparently, science fiction served for me as a bridge to adult reading. Among the first sci-fi novels I read was Isaac Asimov's The Naked Sun. Books by John Steinbeck also introduced me, as they did so many others of my era, to more grown-up fiction.

When Clark and I were growing up, there were no large young adult sections in either bookstores or libraries. There were books, usually accepted classics, that teens were encouraged to read. These included works by Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, etc. But few books were actually being written specifically for teens.

Today, of course, there are scads of young adult books. When I walk into a Barnes and Noble, these books seem to dominate the store. They are everywhere, not just in the young adult section. Sometimes I even buy one, such as The Book Thief.

Are the presence of so many young adult books a plus or a minus for young readers? I don't know. They do seem to draw young readers into bookstores, giving them lots of stories about people their age that they enjoy reading. I just hope such books do not delay young readers' entry into serious literature and what Clark terms "the secrets of the adult world." Or their literary canons could one day be much different than that shared by Roy Peter Clark and me.

Truth rescued

“Grin and bear it” might have been the new motto for Britain, in which the ability “to take it,” rather than any significant victory, became a source of national pride, and even of optimism.

Michael Korda, Alone

Michael Korda

At Dunkirk in the spring of 1940, British and French troops weren’t alone in being rescued. As Michael Korda tells it in his book Alone (see my June 10 post), truth also returned to Britain.

It has often been said that truth is the first casualty of war, and that was the case at the start of World War II. The Ministry of Information practiced heavy censorship, supposedly to protect the British public from the terrible truth of what was happening in Western Europe as German tanks rolled through miles of Allied territory each day. When British troops withdrew from Brussels, it was termed a “readjustment of the front,” not a retreat, in The Times of London, Korda writes.

Words are easier to censor than maps, however. Korda says that perceptive readers could tell what was really happening by studying the printed maps of the position of troops. The rapid shrinking of Allied territory told a story different than that told by the headlines.

War news, if still propaganda to some extent, became more truthful with the Dunkirk evacuation. Here are three reasons:

1. The evacuation of nearly 400,000 troops from France before they could be killed or captured by the Germans was good news, and governments have less reason to censor good news.

2. Dunkirk was possible because of the contributions of hundreds of private sailors, ferry boat crews and others who helped bring those troops across the English Channel. How could the Ministry of Information have silenced so many people even if they had wanted to?

3. Prime  Minister Winston Churchill, unlike his predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, or anyone else in the government at that time, had a gift for rallying others behind him even when he told the truth and even when that truth wasn't pretty. The British may have been alone after France fell, but Churchill's speeches gave citizens, as well as soldiers, confidence they would prevail.

At the time that may not have seemed like the truth, but as it turned out, it was.

Picture books

Writers make pictures for readers, the better the writer, the more vivid the pictures.

Peter Gay, Remarkable Reads

Peter Gay

I have no argument with Peter Gay's statement. Writers do create pictures with their words, and better writers do make better pictures. Yet I think we can also make a true statement by changing just three key words:

Readers make pictures for writers, the better the reader, the more vivid the pictures.

After all, readers play a key role in the writing process. It is in their minds, not on the printed page, that those pictures take final form. Readers either see those pictures or they don't. They either see them clearly or they don't. And some readers may see different pictures than others.

As an example, let's take a paragraph from Ethan Canin's novel A Doubter's Almanac:

As soon as they were done, Dad sat down on the new couch. He'd made no objection to any of it. Out had gone the chipped linoleum table and the ramshackle chairs. The cracked wooden bench beneath the window. When the old, thready couch was tilted through the door, he followed it with his eyes; but he said nothing. As the truck pulled away, Cle unpacked a box of candles in pewter cups and set them them along the window ledges.

Ethan Canin

The paragraph is mostly descriptive, and some readers skip over descriptions. Others skim them. Still others read every word without necessarily getting the whole picture. I must be in that category because when I read that paragraph the first time I think I pictured Dad on the new couch watching others take the old furniture out of the room. But read the paragraph closely and you see that Dad didn't sit down on the new couch until the others had finished moving furniture. We know Dad was in the room the whole time because he was watching, but whether he was standing or sitting we do not know.

The paragraph gives us not just one big picture but lots of little pictures. A chipped linoleum table. Ramshackle chairs. A cracked wooden bench. The old, thready couch that was tilted through the door. (That verb creates its own picture.) Dad following the old couch out the door with his eyes, then sitting down on the new one. The truck full of old furniture pulling away. The candles in pewter cups along the window ledges.

Ethan Canin created those vivid pictures, yet his readers either did or didn't see them all.

A victory of sorts

Evacuation is as neutral a term as one might find to describe what happened at Dunkirk in May and June of 1940, and Michael Korda uses it frequently in Alone: Britain, Churchill and Dunkirk: Defeat into Victory (2017). Yet as the subtitle indicates, other terms can be used as well.

At one point he refers to Dunkirk as a "victory of sorts." By the time it was over, the British people were celebrating the removal of some 400,000 British and French troops from France while under heavy fire from German forces. Yet it was also a defeat. British troops were in France to help stop the expected German attack that spring. They were pushed back further and further until the port town of Dunkirk remained their only path of escape across the English Channel. So escape and retreat are other words that can also apply to Dunkirk.

To the Germans it was a blunder. With more concentration of forces they could have easily prevented the evacuation of so many troops. Some French generals saw Dunkirk as a betrayal. They had, in fact, tried to keep French forces between the British and the channel to prevent what later occurred.

Yet Korda points out that nearly half of the troops evacuated were French. This did little good, however, for most of these were soon back in France, where they became prisoners of war upon the French surrender. And some of those French generals most critical of Britain's supposed lack of honor were quick to collaborate with the Nazis.

Although Dunkirk is likely what a reader will most remember about Alone, the book actually describes how the war started, how British attempts at appeasement failed and how Winston Churchill came to power. It is also, surprisingly, something of a memoir, even though the author was just six years old when these events occurred. Yet what memories he has remain vivid and fascinating

Korda was born to a prominent show business family. His mother was a successful stage actress. His father, Vincent, was a set designer for his brother, Alexander Korda, a major film director who was working on The Thief of Baghdad and That Hamilton Woman even as these events were unfolding. The author knew Hollywood actress Merle Oberon, then married to Alexander, as Auntie Merle. Korda writes that even while he was busy directing the British war effort, Churchill helped write dialogue for That Hamilton Woman, which he viewed as a propaganda film intended to help draw the United States into the war.

It took more than a year for the U.S., thanks to Pearl Harbor, to enter the war. And thus Korda's title: Alone.

Korda is a gifted writer. As in Ike: An American Hero, with its focus on D-Day, and With Wings Like Eagles, about the Battle of Britain, he describes key events in World War II in a simple way without being simplistic.

What animals think and feel

As good as it is, and The Inner Life of Animals is very good, it could never top The Hidden Life of Trees by the same author, Peter Wohlleben. After all, once you’ve said that trees can feel pain, nurse their young and communicate with each other, there is not much shock value in saying animals are more intelligent than most people give them credit for.

Yet Wohlleben does provide plenty of surprises. Slime molds can find their way through a maze. Bees  can remember people. Butterflies can detect the age of plants. Chickens dream. A horse’s whinny can mean different things depending on its pitch. Many animals, he says, have a sense of fairness.

Ornithologists have found shy tits have at least one advantage over more aggressive tits: They notice things their more extroverted, quickly-moving fellows do not, such as seeds left over from the previous summer. (It occurs to me that introverted humans also notice things missed by extroverts.)

Wohlleben manages a forest in Germany, so sensitivity to trees should come with the territory. But forests have a variety of animal life, and his family has owned numerous pets, as well as those goats shown on the cover of his book. So his own observations fill out the book, while the results of many scientific studies, as interpreted by the author, make up most of the text. And Wohlleben tends to interpret those findings in such a way that emphasizes an animal’s intelligence and sensitivity. Other people, such as those who hunt, fish or operate slaughterhouses, might interpret them differently, or more likely ignore them altogether.

What makes the cut?

When people compose lists of books they would want with them on their proverbial desert islands, these lists are usually just 10 books long. (I can remember once making such a list, but the only entry I recall is Winnie-the-Pooh.) Ten books to last, perhaps, for the rest of one’s life.? They had better be good ones. And long ones. (Winnie meets one of those criteria.)

In Books for Living, Will Schwalbe tells of a bibliophile friend who, upon nearing 80, decided to keep only 100 books. Whenever he wanted to keep a new book, he forced himself to surrender one of the 100.

I am still a few years shy of 80, although a birthday this week reminded me of how close I am getting. Either 10 books or 100 seems ridiculously limiting. I have 74 books just in the small bookcase beside me. They would last me for about nine months. Even so, books, like money, cannot be taken with you. A shrinking lifestyle (and lifespan) necessitates a shrinking library, if only out of kindness to one's heirs. Reducing one’s library (whether to 10 books, 100 or 1,000) involves answering certain questions.

Books read or books unread?

Obviously some of each. Some books you’ve already read and loved are sure-things. You are likely to love them again. (Even mysteries can be read more than once because we hardly ever remember who the murderer is.) But we can’t give up all those books we are dying to read, especially those recently purchased.

Fiction or nonfiction?

Fiction tends to dominate desert-island lists, and I think it will be more likely to survive my weeding. With a few exceptions, nonfiction books are rarely read a second time.

Old books or newer books?

The longer we own something, the more sentiment attached to it. I have ragged books from my college years I cannot bear to part with, nor would I accept new editions of the same books. And some of the old books I love have no newer editions. Yet I love new books too. I love their smell, their cleanness and crispness. So, again, some of each.

Reference books?

Probably few, but some. I couldn’t manage without a good print dictionary. Some Bible references are essential. I like a good atlas, even if I rarely open it. I sometimes consult my book of home remedies. But I will say goodbye to most of my reference books. I hear there’s something called Google.

Coffee table books?

No coffee table in the world would hold all my coffee table books. When I reviewed books for my newspaper, I would get several coffee table books each year, usually a few weeks before Christmas. I now buy one or more such books a year, also usually just before Christmas when they are often on sale. So I have hundreds. Many are beautiful, but I doubt most will make the cut.

Signed books?

If I wouldn’t keep a book that was unsigned, I doubt I would keep it just because the author signed it. There are, however, books that have letters tucked inside them from authors responding to my reviews. These I may keep.

Rare books?

I have few books of great value, and those I am more likely to want to sell than keep. I can use the money. The problem is finding a buyer. And do I keep them until I find a buyer?

Trim book collection to fit new space limitations or rent a storage unit?

If I choose the second option, I might not have to get rid of so many books. I’m liking the sound of that.

In any case, Winnie-the-Pooh stays.

The curse of genius

Mathematicians tend to bloom early and die early.

Charles Krauthammer, Things That Matter

Milo Andret, the mathematical genius in Ethan Canin's novel A Doubter's Almanac (2016), lives too long, at least as far as he is concerned. Not only did his genius burn out years before, but he is haunted by the fear that his greatest work, for which he was awarded math's most coveted prize, may contain an error. Now he lacks the ability to find out for sure, and the doubt gradually destroys him.

The lengthy novel covers virtually Milo's entire life, his rise, his fall and his family. His two children (especially his son) and his two grandchildren (especially his granddaughter) are also math wizards, a fact that petrifies their mothers. For genius does not make for an easy life.

Milo's life is certainly not easy, although that is mostly his own fault. He succumbs early to the lure of strong drink and other men's wives. His genius makes him proud, so arrogant that his colleagues despise him. Before long he is booted off the Princeton faculty and is lucky to find a job teaching math at an obscure Ohio college.

The second half of the novel is narrated by Milo's son, Hans, who uses his own genius to make millions on Wall Street, despite a serious drug addiction. Later, as his father's health declines, Hans goes to the Michigan cabin where Milo, like a hermit, has spent his last years. While nursing his father, he learns to love him.

If the book's first half is difficult to read, the reader like Milo's colleagues finding him too obnoxious to bear, the second half (for those who stick with it that long) makes the early anguish worthwhile, for Canin gives us some beautiful and inspiring prose.