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.