2022 superlatives

For a few years now, as the calendar nears its end, I have applied certain superlatives suggested by J. Peder Zane in his book Remarkable Reads to books I read during the year. Let's try it again.

Most Enchanting Book: I wish I had a three-sided coin to help me decide among Cuyahoga by Pete Beatty, Miss Benson's Beetle by Rachel Joyce and A Damsel in Distress by P.G. Wodehouse. Put a gun to my head, I'd have to go with Miss Benson.

Most Important Book: There are some fine biographies of writer Shirley Jackson, but to really understand her you need to read The Letters of Shirley Jackson. This collection is that important.

Most Daunting Book: Not only is Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now a long book — full of facts and figures, graphs and diagrams — but he's a smart guy and his text is often challenging. It's worth the challenge, however.

Wisest Book: Peter Roy Clark summarizes the wisdom of numerous writing guides into one book, Murder Your Darlings. Writers, especially beginning writers, would be wise to read it.

Most Familiar Book: It had been decades since I last read J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories. Still, it was like going home again.

Most Incomprehensible Book: I don't know if What Are We Doing Here? by Marilynne Robinson counts since I never finished it, it being so incomprehensible. Time after time in these collected essays and speeches she says something so wise and wonderful that I want to underline it, but then she loses me again on the very next line. Her mind is too quick for me.

Most Beautiful Book: Thrity Umrigor is a fine writer, at her best in The Space Between Us. The story, set in India, tells of a longtime servant of an upper-middleclass woman who comes to realize that however close their relationship, the distance between them remains impossible to cross.

Most Fearless Book: It must take a certain amount of courage to argue that trees communicate with each other and nurture their young. Yet Peter Wohlleben does it again in The Secret Network of Nature.

Most Surprising Book: I didn't know what I was getting myself into when I opened The Green Man by Kingsley Amis, never having read one of his novels before. And even after I finished it, in a rush, I wasn't certain what I had read.

Most Unpleasant Book: I don't like reading about prison camps, torture and the like. Who does? Yet for all the unpleasantness, Elizabeth Kostova's Shadow Lands is one fine novel

Most Luminous Book: After the first chapter I didn't care much for Fredrik Backman's My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry, but by the time I finished I was in love with it. Luminous? Almost every sentence shines.

Game for readers (2022 edition)

Each year at this time I play a game — you are welcome to join me — where I attempt to answer a dozen questions, truthfully or not, using only the titles of books read during the year. Here comes the 2022 version. Let's see what happens.

Yep, that's me

Describe yourself: Word Nerd (or For the Love of Books)

How do you feel: Why Me?

Describe where you currently live: A Far Off Place 

If you could go anywhere, where would you go: Easy Street

Your favorite form of transportation: The Last Train to London

Your best friend is: An Unwilling Accomplice

You and your friends are: A Grand Success

What's the weather like where you are: In the Dark Places (It is December, after all.)

What is the best advice you could give: We're Wrong About Nearly Everything

Thought for the day: Everyone Brave Is Forgiven 

How would you like to die: Books to Die For

Your soul's present condition: Enlightenment Now. (It's better than The Darkness Knows, isn't it?)

Well, that was fun. Try it yourself.

Caged

Caging Skies, a 2019 novel by Christine Leunens, loses its juice long before reaching its conclusion, but until that happens it proves to be an original and totally absorbing story.

Young Johannes Metzler is an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth in Vienna as World War II breaks out. Allied bombing leaves him crippled, but his allegiance to Hitler remains unfazed. So it shakes his world when he discovers that his parents have been hiding Elsa, a Jewish girl, in a secret room. His first impulse is to kill her, as he believes a true Nazi would do, but then he falls in love with her.

Years pass. Both of his parents are killed as traitors, yet no one discovers Elsa's hiding place. When the war ends, Johannes fears Elsa will leave him, so he convinces her that Germany won and that her life remains in danger. The boy finds it difficult to get a job because of his injuries, so for them to survive he must sell off all the possessions in the large house and finally the house itself. He ships Elsa in a box to a small apartment.

Leunens portrays neither of these young people as sympathetic characters. By the end they seem to deserve each other, and eventually Johannes realizes that he is the one who is the prisoner.

I was shocked to discover that Caging Skies was the inspiration for the film Jojo Rabbit, a comedy in which Johannes (Jojo) stays the same age throughout the entire war and Elsa remains beautiful and perfectly groomed despite being imprisoned in a small room for years. Hitler himself keeps showing up as an imaginary comic character. I think I might have actually enjoyed the oddball movie if I weren't, at the time I watched it, still reading the somber, depressing novel on which it was based.

Two kinds of readers 2

C.S. Lewis

 In his slender 1961 book An Experiment in Criticism, C.S. Lewis lists four ways in which serious readers can be distinguished from casual readers. These are my terms. Lewis himself calls them the few and the many. The few, as I discussed a few days ago, often reread favorite books. The many rarely do. 

This time let's consider a second distinguishing mark: their attitude toward reading.

The majority of readers, Lewis says, view reading as a last resort. It's something they do when there is nothing better to do. "They abandon it with alacrity as soon as any alternative pastime turns up," Lewis writes. "It is kept for railway journeys, illnesses, odd moments of enforced solitude, or for the process called 'reading oneself to sleep.'"

Yet many such people, it seems to me, don't even read much in these situations. They may take a book to the beach or a summer cabin but read just a chapter or two during the entire week. On a long flight they would rather watch a movie or talk to a stranger in the next seat than open a book. In a waiting room, they would rather just wait.

Contrast that attitude with that of the few, those of us who deliberately set apart a portion of each day for reading. For some this may be bedtime, though as with Lewis this makes little sense to me. I go to bed to sleep, not to read. I set aside most of the afternoon for reading. I maintain a stack of four books, two fiction and two nonfiction. I usually read a portion from each book each afternoon.

Usually some books are more interesting than others, but my ritual keeps me disciplined. I always feel fulfilled when dinnertime comes around and I have read my quota of pages. I have accomplished something, even if I haven't actually finished reading anything.

"When they are denied such attentive and undisturbed reading even for a few days they feel impoverished," Lewis writes. How right he is. 

Illustrated wonders

Books about bools have long been a genre of their own, but recently there seems to be developing a new sub-genre — art books about books.

I recently commented here about  So You Think You're a Bookworm? and A Library of Misremembered Books, both dominated by their artwork. Several months ago I reviewed Bibliophile, in which Jane Mount presents drawings of book covers, bookstores and even bookstore cats. Today I will mention two others.

I Will Judge You By Your Bookshelf by Grant Snider is a wonder, though I don't know quite how to describe it. Snider is a writer and a comic artist who loves books, so he combines those interests here in a series of creative comic strips with titles like "Some potential bookmarks" (these include balloons and a feather, even a bonsai tree) and "Writing a poem is like riding a bicycle" ("Impressive at a young age ... but considered eccentric among adults.")

All this is delightful and something you will probably want to reread before you loan it to your best friends.

Then there's The Call Me Ishmael Phone Book by Stephanie Kent and Logan Smalley, which incredibly enough is an actual phone book. But it's a phone book unlike any you've ever seen before and something only a bibliophile could love.

The clever idea is this: You can dial 774-325-0503 and either record your comments about what a certain book means to you or listen to other people's recorded comments about their own favorite books. The four-digit numbers in the phone book are next to book titles. Dial 3778, for example, to hear what someone thinks of Moby-Dick, the source of the "Call me Ishmael" line. Many books are listed multiple times.

So where does the art come in? Well, like the Yellow Pages, this book has ads on virtually every page, illustrated "ads" that serve as literary puzzles. You can probably guess which books are referred to by Ahab's Whale Tours and Sewell's Stables. Dial the numbers on the ads to see if you're right. In addition, the authors list bookstores in every state in the union and provide numbers for stories about many of these stores.

You thought interactive books were for kids? Think again. Here's a book that will provide any book lover of any age with hours of fun.

Discovered secrets

Lauren Belfer's novels — and there aren't very many of them — always entertain and enlighten, and her latest, Ashton Hall (2022), is no exception.

Although it’s her only novel to date set entirely in the present, Belfer still manages to turn it into a historical novel. Hannah Larson and her nine-year-old son Nicky visit her beloved Uncle Christopher, dying of cancer, in a large manor house near Cambridge. Two difficult family problems trouble her, and she hopes an extended stay in England will help her find answers.

One problem is Nicky, a sweet and brilliant child ordinarily, but when frustrated he becomes uncontrollably violent and swears a blue streak. The other problem is her husband Kevin, who she recently discovered is bisexual and has had a long relationship with a man she thought was just his best friend. She loves Kevin, but can she stay with a man who has deceived her since the day they met?

Not long after their arrival at Ashton Hall, Nicky discovers a centuries-old skeleton of a woman in a remote, never-visited part of the house. Soon Hannah becomes deeply involved in probing the story of this woman, who turns out to be Isabella Gresham, born in 1552. Who was she? Why was she abandoned in this room?  Did she die of the plague, starvation or what?

Clues are found in financial records, a register of the books family members borrowed from the manor house library and drawings Isabella made during her brief life. Little by little Isabella is revealed. And little by little Hannah makes decisions about what to do with her own life.

Two kinds of readers

Early in An Experiment in Criticism (1961), C.S. Lewis makes a distinction between two kinds of readers. He calls them the few and the many, as one group is much larger than the other. While it would be easy to accuse Lewis of elitism, he takes pains to point out that neither group is morally superior to the other. It's just a difference in how people view books. And some people, because of changing circumstances in their lives, may float from one group to the other.

Lewis suggests four ways to tell one group from the other. I propose to discuss these four ways in separate installments, spread out over the next few weeks.

First, he points out that most people never read the same book more than once, while others — the few — may read certain books numerous times. Rereading enhances the pleasure of a good book, the few would argue. Knowing the ending of, say, To Kill a Mockingbird or Great Expectations, doesn't make rereading it any less pleasurable, assuming you like the book.

My wife was in the former group. She would often ask me if she had already read a certain book, as if I could remember what books she had read. Often she would refrain from reading a certain book because she feared she may have read it at some point in the past. I told her that if she couldn't remember reading it, it made no difference whether she read it again. She didn't want to waste her time, however, with a book she may have already read. (And it probably could have been argued that if she had really loved the book, she would have remembered reading it.)

I am not entirely certain which group I belong to. As a book reviewer for most of my life and as someone who yearns to read a vast assortment of books, I mostly read books just once. Yet there are exceptions, and especially since retirement I have tried to return to books I enjoyed in the past.

I've read Moby-Dick twice. I even read Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror twice. Most of Thomas Hardy's major novels I have read at least twice. I don't consider Graham Greene's Travels with My Aunt to be his best novel or even my favorite, yet I've read it three times. And J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey I've read read four times. Numerous others I have returned to at least once.

Yet I've heard of other readers who read favorite books a dozen times or more, sometimes even once a year. I envy them. Oh to be able to reread certain books again and again. I guess my heart is with the few, even though in practice I am usually among the many.

The imagined woman

Every time you open your mouth you create something.

Frank Baker, Miss Hargreaves

Genesis tells us God created man by speaking a few words. What if man could, at least once, do the same thing? In a 1940 novel called Miss Hargreaves, republished a decade ago, Frank Baker imagines just that.

Young Norman Huntley, a cathedral organist, and his friend Henry are having a lark in Ireland when Henry insists they enter an old church, where a proud caretaker gladly gives them a tour. The pair have always enjoyed making up stories together, each contributing something outrageous to the tale. So when their guide mentions a revered former vicar named Archer, Norman invents an old woman named Constance Hargreaves whom he says he knows very well and who was once a dear friend of the late vicar. Henry adds details, and soon Miss Hargreaves is a poet who likes to travel with her harp and her own bathtub.

They no sooner return home than Norman finds his slightly addled father reading a book of poetry called Wayside Bundle by one Constance Hargreaves. Then a harp arrives at the family home with a message that Miss Hargreaves is on her way.

Miss Hargreaves turns out to be everything Norman imagined. She and his father get along famously, but Norman is terrified. Where did she come from? How is it possible that she actually exists? How can he get rid of her?

Norman finds himself in a love-hate relationship with this 83-year-old woman — loving his creation while hating the way she has taken over his life. He discovers he can still fill in the blanks of her history. When someone asks if she has ever been to Scandinavia she can't remember until Norman nods. Suddenly she recalls the details of her visit there. When he unwisely refers to her as Lady Hargreaves, she quickly turns pompous and insists on the title wherever she goes.

Baker sprinkles poems from Wayside Bundle throughout the novel. Most of them are delightfully atrocious, but a few lines from one poem prove revealing.

I sometimes feel that I am but a thought,/A piece of thistledown, a thing of naught;/Rocked in the cradle of a craftsman's story/And destined not for high Angelic glory.

As real as she seems to everyone around her, Miss Hargreaves senses that she is but a figment of someone's imagination. For her sake, as well as his own, Norman must find a way to imagine her out of existence.

Miss Hargreaves is an amusing and imaginative novel that provokes thought while it entertains. One thought I had is that scientists who hold the multiple-universe theory seem to believe that each of us create not just people but entire universes by the choices we make and the words we speak.

That sounds like another good reason to be careful what we say.                  

It's about this big whale

In a Barnes & Noble store recently I was approached by an employee who asked if she could help me. This is a rare occurrence at Barnes & Noble, as the few employees there are usually busy doing something else. Not wanting to waste an opportunity, I said I was looking for an author whose name began with the letter V.

Although I couldn't remember his name, after a false start (Butterflies Salamander) I recalled that the novel I had read was Hummingbird Salamander. By the time she had returned from checking her computer, I had moved from the general fiction section to the science fiction area, where I discovered several other novels by Jeff VanderMeer. (A few days later at another Barnes & Noble, I found VanderMeer shelved with general fiction rather than science fiction. So I'm not the only one who can't decide where he belongs.)

Those who work in bookstores and libraries probably have fun at their after-hours gatherings telling stories about patrons with queries like mine: something by an author whose name begins with the letter V. If so, they should particularly enjoy a tiny book by Maria Luz called A Library of Misremembered Books (2021).

This is actually an art book, a collection of fanciful covers displaying titles of books people have asked for. For instance:

Cat Possibly Named Henry

Ice Was in the Title

It Was All a Dream

How to Kill a Mockingbird

Polar Bear Wearing Pants Possibly Named Victor or Vincent

Dentist Being Extorted

Because of the lack of vivid colors and the artist's practice of putting light lettering on light backgrounds, I often found her images difficult to appreciate. But what I could read I enjoyed.

If you want a copy of this book, just walk into any bookstore and ask for something like A Collection of Wrong Titles. I'm sure they'll be amused.

A case that isn't a case

When Precious Ramotswe attends a wedding and sees an old friend she thought was dead — or late, as the good people of Botswana prefer to say — she unsuspectingly begins a new case that, at least officially, isn't a case at all.

Alexander McCall Smith's 20th entry in his wonderful The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, To the Land of Long Lost Friends (2019), is hardly the best of the lot. Still it makes a fine read.

The old friend turns out to be very much alive, the victim of confusion because another woman with the same name had died. She confides to Mma Ramotswe that she is troubled because her grown daughter has ceased contact with her. She doesn't understand why, and it breaks her heart. Although not asked, let alone hired, to look into the matter, our favorite traditionally built detective nonetheless begins a puzzling investigation that involves a diamond factory, a charismatic preacher and a sparkling Mercedes Benz.

Subplots are fewer than usual this time out, the main one involving Charlie, the part-time mechanic and part-time assistant detective who finds himself, without even trying, engaged to the lovely daughter of one of the richest men in Botswana. And poor Charlie can't even afford to take Queenie-Queenie out to dinner.

Fans must read this book to catch up with all those charming characters, including Mma Makutsi and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, even if the story itself falls a wee bit short of the standard.

The corruption of language

Orwell argued famously that political corruption leads to language corruption, which leads to further political corruption.

Roy Peter Clark, Murder Your Darlings

When people in power stumble when trying to define what a woman is, when the U.S.-Mexico border is called secure while people flood across it by the millions and when an unarmed riot at the U.S. Capitol is termed an insurrection, it is clear that both the language and the political system in America are corrupt. Those most likely to use the term misinformation seem to be the ones most likely to spread it.

Roy Peter Clark in his 2020 book Murder Your Darlings points out that even the word propaganda has been corrupted, although not recently. The term once had a positive spin. It comes from the word propagate and was used by the Roman Catholic Church to describe what would later be called evangelism or "spreading the gospel."

S.I. Hayakawa

According to S.I. Hayakawa, it was the Nazis — talk about political corruption — who corrupted the word, and as Clark puts it, "we lost a name for good propaganda." Good propaganda? Nowadays that sounds like a contradiction in terms. Yet broadly interpreted, any language used to convince anybody of anything is propaganda. This includes public relations campaigns, commercial advertising and even a teenager trying to borrow a parent's car. This blog, by that loose standard, is propaganda whenever I suggest that certain books are worth reading and others not so much.

All propaganda uses the language and in some cases exaggerates the language. For example, a book called a "best seller" may actually have not climbed very high at all on the best-seller list. But political corruption goes further and corrupts the language, making it unclear what formerly clear words mean. And that seems to be the point.

When words no longer mean what they so clearly meant 10 minutes ago, you know something must be amiss. George Orwell said so.

Let the planet save itself

Scientists,  Jane Goodall among them, have been criticized for anthropomorphizing animals. Forester and best-selling author Peter Wohlleben often draws criticism for anthropomorphizing trees.

Consider some of the phrases found in his 2019 book The Secret Network of Nature:

• "Trees agree among themselves over long distances."

• "Thirsty trees send out a warning over the wood wide web and advise all others."

• Beeches "love their families."

• Because of climate change, "trees have to escape north."

Wohlleben, author of the incredible The Hidden Life of Trees, defends his language choices by asking, "But can a language stripped of emotion even be called a human language?" Read some scientific papers and you may be inclined to agree with him. Besides, he writes for the general public, not for scientists, and what he describes, however one says it, is what actually happens.

Trees really do somehow communicate with other trees, sometimes over hundreds of miles. Trees lacking sufficient water do somehow signal to other trees to moderate their water intake. Beeches, like some other trees, do support their own offspring by sending out roots to nourish them. Trees do migrate, as a species, to places where conditions are better, even though this may take centuries.

Wohlleben's book does not entirely focus on trees, although he keeps coming back to them. Ants raise aphids the way farmers raise cattle, he says. In a chapter called "Creatures in Your Coffee," he writes about just that — minuscule creatures that live in water pipes and eventually wind up in your food and beverages.

Mostly his topic is how all nature fits together and how human beings sometimes help, but more often hurt, the natural process. He explains why, for example, that the more trees left along bodies of water, the more fish there are likely to be in that water. Feeding deer during a harsh winter can actually cause more deer to starve to death.

Perhaps the most surprising thing he has to say he saves for the end: "The positive message from all this is that not only can we win back the original forests, but doing that could also steer the climate in the right direction. And to achieve this we don't even need to do anything. Just the opposite, in fact. We need to leave things alone — on as large a scale as possible."

Save the planet by doing nothing? What a concept.

Repeating the magic

Creating a first-rate television series out of a first-rate film can rarely be accomplished. (Nor, for that matter, can creating a first-rate movie out of a first-rate TV series.) Yet somehow Noah Hawley did just that. And not just once but again and again.

The movie was Fargo, released in 1996. Without using any of the characters or plot details from the film, Hawley has so far created four FX miniseries that somehow capture the atmosphere of the Coen Brothers movie, and a fifth series is planned. And as in the film, the city of Fargo is barely relevant.

We get a good sampling from the first three years of the series in Hawley's Fargo: This Is a True Story (2019). The subtitle does come from the film and, as in the film, it is not true. 

The large, 430-page photo-filled book includes dialogue from several episodes, as well as interviews and commentaries. This is book that will appeal to fans only, but even fans may prefer watching the episodes again rather than reading them 

What's so funny?

If it makes you laugh, it will make the reader laugh. Trust yourself, especially about humor. Humor is the highest art form. Satire, irony, whatever you choose to call it. If you think it's funny, the reader will too.

Ellen Gilchrist, The Writing Life

Ellen Gilchrist

The above is what novelist Ellen Gilchrist says she tells the students in her creative writing classes. She is right, I think. But she is also wrong.

First, why is she wrong?

She's wrong because people laugh at different things. Many share my delight in P.G. Wodehouse. Many others don't. The same is true of any other humor writer you might mention. I wrote a few months ago about a novel (Nobody, Somebody, Anybody) that the book jacket described as "laugh-out loud funny" but which I did not find funny at all.

My late wife and I rarely laughed at the same things. We shared laughs when we watched Laurel and Hardy together, some situation comedies and some romantic comedies, but not much else. She never found anything funny about Abbott and Costello, Woody Allen or Mel Brooks. Her favorite comedian was Red Skelton, and in fact he may have been the only comedian she enjoyed. Yet I think she laughed much more than I ever did. She just laughed at things I didn't find amusing at all. Whenever I laughed,  she looked at me as if to say, "What so funny about that?"

So if something makes you laugh, it won't necessarily make a reader laugh.

But them why is Gilchrist also right? Because you can't write humor for someone other than yourself. If you write something that seems funny to you, it may not be funny to someone else; but if you write something that isn't funny to you, it almost certainly won't be funny to anyone else either. If you are going to try to write humor — and it's not easy for most writers — you have to write what seems funny to you and hope others will share your delight. It's the only way.

God, ghosts and sex

What is one to make of The Green Man, a novel by Kingsley Amis published in 1969? Is it a ghost story? A horror story? An adventure story? An erotic novel? A theological exploration into the possibility of life after death? A satire? A work of literary genius? Well, yes, to all of the above. But is it any good?

The title refers, at least at first, to a British country inn managed by Maurice Allington, our narrator. The inn is reputed to be haunted by a ghost from the 17th century, although there have been no sightings in recent decades — at least not until Maurice begins seeing things. He alone sees, in order, a red-headed woman, a man named Thomas Underhill (whose grave is near the inn) and a giant, violent creature whose limbs seem to be made of trees and other plants. This is the other Green Man.

Maurice drinks heavily, making his visions suspect when he shares them with others. That is until his teenage daughter begins seeing things, too, and he realizes she may be the true target of these visits from the spirit world.

As for sex, Maurice tries to organize an orgy, when he isn't busy running an inn and dealing with ghosts, but it doesn't quite go as planned. And as for theology, one of his nighttime visitors is Someone who answers his questions about life after death and promises to abide with him forever. For Maurice, this may be the scariest thing of all.

But is the novel any good? I had trouble putting it down, so I guess it must be, although as with Maurice and life after death, I have my doubts.

Murder on ice

Talk about cold cases ... In The Darkness Knows (2017), a fascinating mystery by Arnaldur Indridason, the well-preserved body of a man missing for 30 years is found in a melting glacier in Iceland. Konrad was the cop who led the investigation at the time. Now retired and restless, he is prompted by the discovery of the body to pursue his own independent investigation of what is now clearly a murder.

A witness at the time of Sigurvin's disappearance had said that a business associate named Hjaltalin had threatened to kill him, making Hjaltalin the prime suspect. Yet there was never sufficient evidence to charge him with anything, especially with no body, and Konrad had always had doubts about his guilt. Yet now the police are again focusing on Hjaltalin, who is dying of cancer.

The key to solving the case turns out to be another death, this of a man who may have been a witness to the original crime but, because he was a boy at the time, had never come forward. Later he may have talked about it too much, for he has been killed in a suspicious hit-and-run. If Konrad can solve this case, perhaps he can solve the much older one.

Subplots abound in this fine murder mystery, including an even colder case involving the murder of Konrad's own father, also a cop, but reputed to be a dirty one.

Arnaldur (I am following the Icelandic tradition of referring to people by their first names) has written a number of fine mysteries and thriller, and The Darkness Knows ranks among the best.

Lippman's lady

Laura Lippman says in an author's note that she did not intend Lady in the Lake (2019) to be a newspaper novel, but sometimes you really do write what you know, even if you are an experienced novelist. And Lippman was a newspaper reporter in Baltimore before she became a bestselling author, so she knows the territory very well.

Lady in the Lake may be one of the best and most unusual murder mysteries you will find — unusual because virtually every character, no matter how insignificant, becomes one of the many narrators. Yet always at the center of the story is Maddie Schwartz, a beautiful 37-year-old Jewish housewife who feels her life rushing by,  leaving all her potential behind her. Potential for what, exactly, she doesn't know because she has no obvious talent, other than wrapping most men around her finger. But she decides to leave her wealthy husband — and her teenage son — and strike out on her own.

The novel, set in 1966, has two murders that are unrelated except that they both happen in Baltimore and both draw Maddie to them. She finds the body of girl, then provides evidence leading to the murderer. And this she turns into a low-level newsroom position at a Baltimore paper. Struggling to become an actual reporter, she begins investigating another murder that nobody else either at the newspaper or the police department seems to care about.

That's because Cleo Sherwood, called "the lady in the lake," was black. But Maddie does care, partly because she hopes the story will launch her career but also because of a hot affair she is having with a black police officer, Ferdie. At that time in Baltimore black officers, like women approaching middle age working for newspapers, have little chance of advancement. They aren't even trusted with patrol cars. Yet Ferdie learns things that provide valuable tips for Maddie. The rest of her success depends on her own gumption and her refusal to take no for an answer.

The novel describes how an amateur reporter solves two murders without even trying — she's after stories, not killers — yet in Lippman's hands this hardly seems unlikely at all. It is, in fact, highly entertaining. The final reveal, however, does seem like a stretch, not that it will spoil the reader's enjoyment.

Words that catch the eye

I have written previously about the popularity of the words daughter and girl in the titles of novels, especially novels aimed at a female audience. Put either of those words in your title and you are almost guaranteed to catch some browser's eye in a bookstore.

But they are hardly the only words that appear again and again in titles. Paris is another, perhaps inspired by the popularity of Paula McClain's The Paris Wife. The French capital is practically synonymous with romance and intrigue, so setting a novel there, like putting a mystery in Victorian London, is always a good idea.

Now you can find The Lost Girls of Paris (how can that title fail?), The Paris Inheritance, The Paris Detective, Daughter of Paris (another twofer), The Paris Daughter (ditto), Lost Christmas in Paris, The Postmistress of Paris, The Last Restaurant in Paris, Peril in Paris, Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris (an old book back in print because of the recent movie), Jacqueline in Paris, Night Flight to Paris, The Perfumist of Paris, The Paris Bookseller, The Paris Library, The Paris Apartment, The Last Dress from Paris, Until Leaves Fall in Paris, The Paris Architect, The Little Paris Bookshop, The Paris Network, The Paris Secret, Daughters of Paris (still another twofer), The Paris Affair, The Paris Package, Perestroika in Paris, Lost and Found in Paris, Paris Is Always a Good Idea, P.S. from Paris, Forgiving Paris, Keep Paris, Christmas in Paris, The Madwomen of Paris and so many, many more.

Above I mentioned The Paris Bookseller, The Paris Library and The Little Paris Bookshop, and these titles contain other words currently popular in novel titles: bookseller, library and bookshop. Many readers are drawn to these words. (I know I am.) People seem to enjoy romances and adventures set in bookshops and libraries.

Here are some titles you might find: The Bookshop, The Bookshop of Secrets, The Boardwalk Bookshop, The Bookshop by the Bay, How to Find Love in a Bookshop, Christmas at the Mysterious Bookshop, The Bookshop of Yesterdays, The Bookshop on the Corner, The Lost and Found Bookshop, The Bookshop on the Shore, The True Love Bookshop, The Last Bookshop in London, The English Bookshop, The Bookshop of Second Chances, The Banned Bookshop, The Christmas Bookshop, The Forgotten Bookshop in Paris, The Bookshop Murder, Murder in an Irish Bookshop, the Bookshop at Water's End, The Island Bookshop, The Mayfair Bookshop, The Beach Reads Bookshop, Bookshop by the Sea, The Printed Letter Bookshop, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore, etc.

Or these: The Midnight Library, The Littlest Library, The Woman in the Library, The Seaside Library, The Library of the Unwritten, The Last Chance Library, The Forbidden Library, The Lending Library, The Last Library, Summer Hours at the Robbers Library, The Library of Lost and Found, The Library of Legends and so on.

Bookseller is less popular in titles, but still you can find Confessions of a Curious Bookseller, The Bookseller, The Bookseller of Dachau, The Bookseller's Secret, The Bookseller's Promise, The Bookseller and the Earl, The Bookseller of Inverness, The Bookseller's Secret and Death of a Bookseller, among others.

The ideal title for a novel might very well be something like The Paris Bookseller's Daughter or The Girl in the Paris Library.

Writers tell their own stories

Both the title and the subtitle of The First Time I Got Paid for It: Writers' Tales from the Hollywood Trenches (2000) are suggestive and ambiguous. The subtitle informs us that neither the title nor the cover illustration reflect what the book is really about, yet what the subtitle suggests isn't quite accurate either.

The often entertaining (and often not) collection of brief memoirs edited by Peter Lefcourt and Laura J. Shapiro rarely describes how writers sold their first screenplays to the movies, and we can perhaps be glad of that. Most screenplays are collaborations, especially those involving beginners. Most such stories would probably sound pretty much alike.

Fortunately the 50-plus contributors interpreted the directions broadly, and the result is essays about a number of different kinds of "firsts."

Nat Mauldin, who would later write screenplays for Dr. Doolittle and The Preacher's Wife, tells of discovering he could write when he was called on to write an obituary for singer Ronnie VanZant, whom he had never heard of, that was well received.

Men in Black writer Ed Solomon remembers selling a joke to Jimmie Walker for $25 while in a comedy club, and enjoying the laughter when Walker performed the joke that very night.

Melville Shavelson tells of being sued by Mamie Eisenhower (his first lawsuit), who wanted to block the broadcast of a miniseries he wrote about Dwight Eisenhower's relationship with Kay Summersby, his driver, during World War II.

Anna Hamilton Phelan, who wrote Gorillas in the Mist, tells about getting her first agent. Gail Parent, who wrote comedy skits for Carol Burnett, describes what it was like earning the respect of male comedy writers. Charlie Hauck tells of getting his start after being encouraged by comedian Phyllis Diller. Peter Tolan, later to write Analyze This and The Larry Sanders Show, has an amusing tale about starring in a high school production of Bye Bye Birdie.

Screenwriters tend to be an anonymous lot, except to those few who bother to read credits. But a few contributors to this book have names that may ring a bell, including Alan Alda, Cameron Crowe, Delia Ephron, Larry Gilbert, Carl Reiner and William Goldman, who provides the foreword.

This is a mixed bag, but it contains enough entertaining show business stories to make reading it worthwhile.

Categories of readers

A few days ago I panned a book called Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops ("Bookshop rants," Oct. 28, 2022), in which the author targets mostly those who enter bookshops without actually buying anything. Now comes Jo Hoare's So You Think You're a Bookworm?, which tries the same kind of thing with people who actually read books.

Hoare's book is slightly more successful, and that has much to do with the amazing artwork of Paul Parker that decorates just about every page.

Like Shaun Bythell in the other book, Hoare tries to group people into various categories: The Binger, The Book Thief, The Scholar, The Faker, The Sci-Fi Lover, etc. Her humor is more often humorous, fortunately, and if you happen to be a target of that humor (as I am frequently), the hits prove painless, for unlike Bythell she is obviously just kidding.

In addition to these profiles, Hoare tosses in quizzes and lists of various kinds. For example, there's an amusing piece called "How to Upset a Book Lover" and another gem called "12 Thoughts All Bookworms Have When They Go Into a Bookstore."

Most of the humor falls flat, however, or seems forced. Still, there are all those illustrations to enjoy.

Break up the gray

The white space is a visual form of ventilation for the text.

Roy Peter Clark, Murder Your Darlings

The New York Times has often been called "the old gray lady" for a good reason. It's not as gray as it once was — photographs have appeared on the front page for years now— but it's still more gray than most newspapers. The Wall Street Journal, once equally gray, now even puts color photos on page one, and not all the headlines are the same size.

When I worked for a newspaper, we often mentioned "white space" when talking about page design. Break up large blocks of type with photos and other design elements. Give the reader's eye a break. Leave some small spaces entirely free of ink, especially on lifestyle covers.

Roy Peter Clark is thinking the same way above with respect to any kind of writing. Basically what he means is: Write shorter paragraphs. This is the newspaper way, but it works for other kinds of writing, as well.

Why did I start a new paragraph right here? To create white space. To break up what could be one long paragraph into shorter paragraphs that give the reader a little relief.

Long paragraphs, like long sentences or even a series of long words, can become tedious. Readers can easily lose their way, especially if distracted in the middle of a long paragraph. Even simple ideas seem more complex in long paragraphs, while shorter paragraphs seem to give readers more time to digest difficult ideas.

I like Clark's phrase "visual form of ventilation." White space on a page can be a breath of fresh air or simply a chance to take breath. Even the leading, or the space left between lines, helps with this. The more white space, the breezier it all seems. 

Imagine trying to read the old copy of the New York Times shown above. How many of us today would even attempt it?

Do what you must

Like it or not, sometimes you just have to do what you have to do. What Alma decides she has to do in her West Virginia town in 1924 is open a brothel. Julianna Baggott tells us the story, based on her own grandmother's experiences, in her profound 2003 novel The Madam.

When the novel opens, Alma and Henry, her husband, operate a boarding house for show people. Her tenants include an aged bear, part of an act. She also has three kids. She makes extra money working in a hosiery factory.

Then Henry stupidly buys a trunk found in a shipwreck off the Florida coast, believing it contains treasure. He and Alma leave the children behind — Irving to mind the house (now empty of tenants) and Lettie and Willard at a Catholic orphanage — and head for Florida. The trunk's contents are worthless, of course, and Henry, broken by the disappointment, sends Alma back alone.

She has already quit her job, which didn't pay much anyway, and the boarding house won't support her family, so Alma turns it into a brothel to pay her bills. Prostitution always remains only a prominent background for this story, which has more to do with Alma and her family, as well as a few other major characters. Dimwitted Willard remains in the orphanage, where the rigid routine suits him. Sensitive Irving is soon old enough to start trying to find his own way in the world. Lettie avoids becoming a prostitute, yet her teen romance with an abusive policeman makes the life of a prostitute seem almost idyllic.

By the novel's end, Alma discovers there is something else, even more disagreeable than opening a whorehouse, that she must do for the good of her family.

This story about making difficult choices is powerful stuff that probably generated some interesting book club discussions when the novel was new.

Flapper words

For several years now I have been celebrating the 100th birthdays of words used by Americans, at least according to Sol Steinmetz in his 2010 book There's a Word for It. I've noticed that many of the words seem to reflect the times in which they were coined, which certainly makes sense.

By 1922 the war had been over for a few years and Prohibition had yet to begin. The Roaring Twenties were in full swing, and so many of the words coined that year seem to reflect happy times. I'm thinking of words like beauty queen, beauty salon, bistro, chorine, downfield, duplex, gigolo, jayvee, motorboat, moviegoing, mudpack, off-tackle, oops, playset, Pollyannaish, prepper, putt-putt, rumba and tux. These are fun words, words that suggest gaiety and leisure.

Other words that first appeared in print that year suggest more serious topics, reflecting new technology and social change, among other things. These include bicarb, broadcaster, decommission, entrepreneurial, Formica, isolation, libidinal, millisecond, notarize, polyester, pre-puberty, sickle-cell anemia, sodbuster and transvestite.

Some words from 1922 may seem older than that. Sodbuster, for example. Haven't we heard that word in movie westerns set in an earlier time? Uncle Tom was first used in that year too, decades after Uncle Tom's Cabin was published. Other words, such as vacuum used as a verb and putt-putt, might sound newer to us.

Longing is belonging

Why do we like sad songs? Susan Cain began thinking about that question in college while listening to melancholy tunes by Leonard Cohen and others. Now in middle age she has written Bittersweet (2022) about how sad songs, sad stories and a deep longing for an ideal world connect us with each other.

Cain, whose book about introversion, Quiet, became a bestseller, once again probes her own experience to make sense of the experience of others, and vice versa. The central experience of her life may have been her relationship with her mother, who showered love on her during her early years, then became possessive, demanding and suspicious when she became a teenager. One day, while a Princeton student, she gave her mother her diaries to take home for her, perhaps knowing her mother would read them.

And so a bittersweet relationship developed, deep love counterbalanced by recrimination and conflict.

Other Princeton students always wore smiles and seemed to lead blissful, fulfilling lives with perfect parents and a perfect home. She eventually came to realize this wasn't true, and years later she returned to the university to prove it by surveying some of Princeton's "perfect" students. She describes this false front, which goes way beyond Princeton, as a "culture of enforced positivity." We wear smiles to hide what's really going on in our lives. When we pretend perfection, it only makes others resent us because they know they don't have perfect lives. When we let our pain and insecurities and doubts show, it brings others closer to us. Those sad songs and sad stories do much the same thing.

From Leonard Cohen to C.S. Lewis and from studies in psychology to the writings of most of the major religions,  Cain explores the wisdom of balancing bitter and sweet — "a time to weep and a time to laugh," as it says in Ecclesiastes.

I suddenly remember the wonderful comedy Lovers and Other Strangers released in 1970. One of the lines repeated several times in the film is, "You gotta take the good with the bad." Susan Cain would agree.

Padlocks and letters

British author Phaedra Patrick likes to build her stories around meaningful objects, such as the charm bracelet in her debut novel The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper. In The Secrets of Love Story Bridge (2020), there are two such objects — or three if you want to count the bridge.

Mitchell Fisher, still mourning the death of his girlfriend, is a former bridge designer whose downhill career has fallen to removing the padlocks that people fasten to a certain bridge. Instead of carving their initials on trees, lovers signify the permanence of their love with padlocks, before tossing the keys into the river. The city wants the padlocks gone, and that's now Mitchell's job.

One day he sees a woman in a yellow dress attach a padlock, then fall into the river. He jumps in after her. After he saves her life, he becomes a hero, but somehow the woman remains anonymous. His daughter's music teacher, Liza, thinks the mysterious woman is her missing sister, and she enlists Mitchell's help in finding her.

Meanwhile Mitchell starts getting dozens of letters, mostly praising his heroism. And letters become the second physical object guiding the story, but not just these letters from strangers. Mitchell still writes letters to his late girlfriend almost daily, while being afraid to open a letter she wrote to him shortly before her accidental death. And then there is the letter he writes to Liza at the novel's conclusion. Letters, in the end, mean much more than padlocks.

Perhaps because of all those various objects battling for significance, this Patrick novel lacks the curious charm of her others.

Fools for censorship

There is a distinct affinity between fools and censorship. It seems to be one of those breeding grounds where they rush in.

Heywood Campbell Brown

I have long believed that virtually everyone supports censorship, except that everyone favors drawing the line at a different point. Child pornography is one point that almost everyone can agree on. As a general rule, conservatives like to draw their line somewhere on matters relating to sex and/or religion. Liberals usually draw their line on political and social thought. Puritan-like, holier-than-thou attitudes can be found at both ends of the spectrum.

Amy Coney Barrett

Recently most of the push for censorship has been coming from the left. A number of authors, members of the press, publishers and people who work for publishing companies and even Barnes & Noble just sent an open letter to Random House urging the publisher to stop publication of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett's scheduled book, on which a $2 million advance has already been paid. 

The signers began their letter by claiming they "care deeply about freedom of speech," before demonstrating that they actually don't. "We are not calling for censorship," they wrote in a letter calling for censorship. Without having read Barrett's book, they advocate blocking its publication. And these are people whose very livelihoods depend on freedom of expression and the publication and sale of books not everyone will agree with.

The controversy over Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter sounds very similar. Critics claim to favor free expression of ideas while objecting to the wider spectrum of ideas that Musk's ownership may bring about. These may be the same people who argue that fair elections somehow threaten democracy.

The United States was founded with a fundamental belief in free speech and a free press. Courts may sometimes permit exceptions, such as child pornography and falsely yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater. Everything else must be allowed, including fools who claim to oppose censorship while advocating censorship.

Thoughts becoming words

Does the act of writing clarify one's ideas or obscure them? There would seem to be two points of view on that question, and I side with both of them.

The essayist Logan Pearsall Smith said this, "What things there are to write, if one could only write them! My mind is full of gleaming thought; gay moods and mysterious, moth-like meditations hover in my imagination, fanning their painted wings. But always the rarest, those streaked with azure and the deepest crimson, flutter away beyond my reach."

Virginia Woolf said something similar in fewer words: "No book is born entire and  uncrippled as it was conceived."

I can recall hearing the novelist Ann Patchett say that no matter how hard she tries, the words she puts down on a page never quite equal the vision she had in her mind.

I know this can be true, for I have experienced it myself. Yet more often I have experienced just the opposite, where the words that come out are much grander than the thoughts that inspired them. Where, I wonder,  did that come from? I don't remember thinking that, but there it is.

Samuel Butler wrote, "Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such."

And E.M. Forster famously said, "How do I know what I think till I see what I say?" Exactly. Writing clarifies one's thoughts, except of course when it doesn't.

Bookshop rants

A book with a title like Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops has got to be good, right? Well, it's not, unless you happen to enjoy reading someone's rants.

Shaun Bythell owns a used bookshop in Scotland. Writing a book making sport of his customers doesn't seem like a sound business strategy, but that's what Bythell does here. Perhaps he can get away with it because often he writes about those people who visit his shop without buying anything and those who try to sell him old books he doesn't want in his store.

Yet the author even disparages those who do buy books, such as those who try to bargain for lower prices and those who seek out fine old books he hasn't yet had the chance to raise the prices on.

Bythell groups customers in the way a biologist would group animal species, complete with Latin names. Senex cum barba, for example, translates as "bearded pensioner." In this chapter he discusses the retirees with time on their hands who spend too much of their time in his shop. Unfortunately he devotes several paragraphs to lamenting the annoying driving habits of elderly people, as if that has anything to do with his bookshop.

Then he breaks down each species of bookshop customer into subspecies. In the retirees group, for example, he includes Downsizers, who try to sell him their old Reader's Digest books, and the Lycra-clad, who annoy the shopkeeper simply by what they wear.

Occasionally Bythell says something witty or something kind, but this doesn't happen often enough to make his book as much fun to read as you might hope

Get to the story

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do; once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, "and where is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?"

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

In The Heart's Invisible Furies, novelist John Boyne gives us a minor character who would agree with Alice. In a conversation with Cyril, the main character, about books they are reading, she asks whether Colm Toibin's novels are anything like Jeffrey Archer's.

"'Does this fella tell a story? He doesn't spend twenty pages describing the color of the sky?'"

"'He hasn't so far.'"

"'Good. Jeffrey Archer never talks about the color of the sky and I like that in a writer. I'd say Jeffrey Archer has never even looked up at the sky in his entire life.'"

This wonderfully comic passage goes on, but you get the idea.

We may think of this woman as stupid and Alice as immature, but most of us probably would agree with both of them to some extent.

We all like conversation in our stories. The Boyne passage above is composed entirely of conversation, and it is wonderful. No description is necessary. Most novels don't really get going until a second character shows up and a conversation begins.

As for pictures, we may think we left picture books behind us years ago, but admit it, don't you love to find pictures of any kind in the books you read? The pictures I've discovered in novels by William Boyd, Umberto Eco, Marisha Pessi and others have enriched the reading of all of them. The popularity of graphic novels proves, too, that grownup readers enjoy illustrations with their stories almost as much as children do. When I read a history book, a science book, a biography, or any other kind of nonfiction, I  want there to be photographs, drawings or graphs to break up the text.

Descriptions in novels are intended to take the place of pictures, and the best writers can do this very well. But some take it to an extreme. How much detail do we really need about the sky or the weather or the clothing worn by a character. A phrase or two can usually do the job. Then give us some action. Give us some conversation. And a picture or two wouldn't hurt either.

Irish intolerance

The title of John Boyne's 2017 novel The Heart's Invisible Furies stops you in your tracks. Does this really sound like something I want to read? What could it possibly be about? It sounds too serious, too angry, too challenging. The fact that it's 580 pages long is intimidating in itself.

I still can't decide if it's a good title or not, but I can now say it is a terrific novel, much easier to read than you might think but not so easy to grapple with.

This is the story of man's life, from birth to death. That man is Cyril Avery, who is not a real Avery, as his adoptive parents tell him repeatedly during his youth. Maude Avery, his adoptive mother, spends most of her time closed up in a room smoking cigarettes and writing novels she hopes nobody will ever read. (They do, and after her early death from cancer she becomes one of Ireland's greatest writers.) Charles Avery, his adoptive father, is a wealthy man but also a cheat, both on his wife and on his taxes.

As for his real mother and father, we read about them too. Catherine Goggin gets pregnant as a teenage girl, then is disowned by her parents and banned from the church and the town by an intolerant and hypocritical Irish priest. As this is Cyril's first-person account of his life, we know Catherine will reappear again somewhere in his story, and in fact she does several times. Their lives intersect at various points before they discover they are actually mother and son.

Irish intolerance shapes Cyril's own life, as he is a homosexual and Ireland despises homosexuals even more than it does unwed mothers, And so he must keep his heart's furies as invisible as possible, at least until he moves to Amsterdam later in his life. Before that, however, Cyril actually gets married and has a son, though not in that order. He deserts his wife immediately after the wedding ceremony, disappearing for years, leaving his bride in a country where divorce, too, is not tolerated.

If so much of the novel is about separation and distancing, Boyne eventually brings everyone together — mother and son, husband and wife, father and son, prodigal and homeland. Yes, the story is as serious as the title suggests, yet parts of it are as funny as anything P.G. Wodehouse ever wrote.

When nature breaks the law

Remove the dust jacket from Mary Roach's newest book and look at the spine. You'll see that it reads "ROACH FUZZ," which, accident or not, suggests the sense of humor that has made her books bestsellers.

In Fuzz (2021) Roach turns her attention to the eternal struggle of humans versus animals, or as her subtitle puts it, "When Nature Breaks the Law." Some animals kill and even eat people. Rats and other pests eat crops. Birds get in the way of planes and rockets. She doesn't tackle mosquito bites or the fly in your soup, but she travels the world to explore more significant points of conflict.

In their quest for easy food, bears wander into homes and supermarkets, and this problem sends her to the Canadian Rockies. Elephants kill a lot more people than bears or lions do, so Roach goes to India to see attempts at a solution. At the Vatican she explores what's being done, in a very Christian way, to battle bothersome gulls and rats.

Animal behavior interests Roach, but she is even more interested in how scientists and others are trying to solve these problems without going to the extreme of killing troublesome animals. Scientists, for example, are looking for a way to get mice to produce only male babies. And what might the unintended consequences be if these experiments prove successful? She asks about that, too.

Scarecrows don't really work, or at least not for long. Smart birds soon realize that a scarecrow means food, so it actually attracts them. What will scare them away? Noise? Motion? Dead birds? Scientists are looking into all these things.

Roach is as much a humorist as she is a science writer, and her books never fail to be as fun as they are informative. Readers, in fact, may be more likely to take away odd bits of amusing trivia from Fuzz than anything else. (Much of this is to found in footnotes, so don't ignore them.) For example:

There is such a thing as a chicken gun, but it's not for shooting chickens. Rather it's for shooting supermarket chickens at plane engines to test the effects of bird strikes.

As dangerous as elephants can be when they're sober, they are even more dangerous when drunk. And they like to get drunk.

The Vatican is the only nation in the world where no one has ever been born.

When you were a kid you probably came across books with titles like Science Can Be Fun. Mary Roach proves again and again that that is true.

In the shadows

Elizabeth Kostova first visited Bulgaria as a young American woman soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall. She fell in love with this beautiful country and, in time, with a Bulgarian man. Then in 2017 she mixed a little bit of her own history with a lot of Bulgarian history to create a knock-out book, The Shadow Land.

The novel finds a young American woman, Alexandra Boyd, landing in Bulgaria to teach English, but before she can even leave the airport she finds herself caught up in intrigue, danger and a hint of romance.

She encounters an old man in a wheelchair, an old woman and a tall handsome younger man trying to get into a cab. She stops to helps, but after they drive away she discovers she is still holding an urn containing somebody's ashes.And so, after just a few minutes in the country, her adventure begins.

Her own cab driver, Bobby, a gay poet and political activist, volunteers to help Alexandra return the ashes to the three unknown people. Against his advice, she reports finding the ashes to the police. After that their every move is monitored.

Kostova takes us step by step through Alexandra and Bobby's search, while at the same telling the story of the man whose ashes fill that urn. He was perhaps Bulgaria's finest violinist, at least until he was sent to a work camp by the communist government then in power. He left an account of his years of hard labor, and somehow this hidden history threatens some powerful person in modern Bulgaria.

Kostova tells her story an even pace, gradually accelerating toward the exciting resolution.

Signs of progress

The point of calling attention to progress is not self-congratulation but identifying the causes so we can do more of what works.

Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

When I read Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature a few years ago, it made sense to me. He argues in that book that human beings and civilization in general are getting better, and I have read enough history to believe this to be true.

So I was surprised to read in Pinker's follow-up book, Enlightenment Now (2018), how controversial that earlier book was. Critics argued that the world is getting worse, not better, and they had many examples to point to. In the later book, Pinker defends himself, going point by point, using plenty of graphs and statistics, to show that conditions really are improving in such areas as health, wealth, peace, the environment, democracy, knowledge, quality of life and equal rights.

There are many setbacks, he acknowledges, and he considers Donald Trump one of the big ones. He takes a punch at Trump in just about every chapter. One might wish he had waited for the Biden administration to finish his book. Yet to some extent Pinker anticipates Biden by slamming many left-wing ideas that threaten human progress. In his mind, progressives work counter to progress.

Capitalism works better than socialism, he argues. Environmental extremists pose a serious danger, he says, adding, "As with many apocalyptic movements, greenism is laced with misanthropy, including an indifference to starvation, an indulgence in ghoulish fantasies of a depopulated planet, and Nazi-like comparisons of human being to vermin, pathogens, and cancer." He believes science can conquer all environmental problems and that efforts should focus more on nuclear energy than windmills.

More troublesome is Pinker's apparent support of world government, as if such a government could be guaranteed to work for the people rather than for its leaders and other elites, and his hatred for all religion. He strongly favors humanism, which he defines as "good without God." Yet when disaster strikes, as in the recent Florida hurricane, humanistic do-gooders tend to get caught up in bureaucracy, red tape and now calls for equity, while religion-based groups set quickly to work helping people. Much of the human progress Pinker points to, such as colleges and hospitals and the end of slavery, were often the work of devout men and women with strong religious beliefs, while atheists gave us communism and the worst kinds of environmental extremism.

Adventurous readers

True readers boldly go where they haven't gone before.

Michael Dirda, Browsings

One of the advantages of reviewing books for a newspaper for so many years, in addition to all those free books, was that it forced me to read a great variety of books by a great variety of authors. Some reviewers somehow manage to specialize. They may review only mysteries or only romances or only children's books or only literary novels. But you may have to work for the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal to do this. Most book reviewers probably have to sample a little bit of everything.

Of course, reading a variety of books is something that qualifies a person to review books in the first place. So, chicken? Or the egg?

Michael Dirda

But Michael Dirda above is not just talking about book reviewers like himself. He speaks of "true readers," then gives a definition of that term: those who "boldly go where they haven't gone before." True readers, he suggests, are explorers. Adventurers. Astronauts. They may never write a book review in their lives, yet they have at least sampled William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, James Patterson, Emily Dickinson, Danielle Steel, Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker, Nathaniel West, T.S. Eliot, Flannery O'Connor, C.S. Lewis, Zane Grey, etc. (No, I have never read Danielle Steel. I guess I am not really that adventurous.)

But in the same paragraph of the same essay, Dirda makes another, equally important comment. "Well, I say if you don't like them, don't read them. You're not in school any more. Even the best mountaineers aren't always up for an ascent of Mount Everest."

Sometimes being bold means, no, I'm not going to read that. I don't care if it is a bestseller. Or one of the great books. Being bold can mean not reading any more of a book or an author one has tried and found boring.

Bold readers don't always read the same kinds of books by the same authors, books they know they will like. Bold readers experiment, sampling other authors, other writing styles, other kinds of books. But they don't necessarily finish them. Sometimes it takes courage to give up.

Two treasures

Can you discover more than one treasure at the same time? Charlie Lovett's wonderful 2017 novel The Lost Book of the Grail answers, why not?

If you have read much Anthony Trollope, you have probably heard of the fictional English town of Barchester. Lovett takes us there again in the company of Arthur Prescott, named after King Arthur and obsessed with Holy Grail legends since his childhood. Now he works happily with ancient manuscripts in the Barchester Cathedral Library. Suddenly those manuscripts are threatened.

Bethany Davis, a young American, comes to Barchester to digitalize these manuscripts. In his mind, Arthur views this project as making them expendable. His suspicions gain validity when Bethany's employer, an American billionaire, makes an offer to buy the manuscripts, and the cathedral hierarchy, desperate for money, takes the offer seriously.

Bethany turns out to be a Grail enthusiast, too, and together, along with a couple of friends, they begin a quest not for the Grail itself but for a book about the Grail and an almost mythical early saint. When they find it at last, it turns out to be more than Arthur could have hoped for. And the other treasure? Why, it's Bethany's heart, to Arthur an even greater prize.

Lovett first won acclaim for his novel The Bookman's Tale, but I found this an even more rewarding tale. And his scholarship is as impressive as his writing.

Not isolated enough

It's an old story. Governments just won't leave you alone.

In I'm Staying Here (2018), Italian writer Marco Balzano lets a woman named Trina tell her story. Her people live in Curon, a tiny and seemingly isolated mountain village so far north in Italy that everyone speaks German. Trina, a teacher, is among the few who can actually understand their own country's language.

Trina addresses her story to Marica, her beloved daughter, whose disappearance seems to trigger all the trials that follow, almost as if it were all her fault. In the 1930s the people of Curon are being pulled in two different directions — by Mussolini and the Fascists in the south and by Hitler and the Nazis in the north. Some of the people are lured north, where at least others speak their language. Some of Trina's relatives are among them, and they secretly take Marica with them.

While the Nazis prepare for war, the Fascists talk of building a dam and flooding the valley in which Curon sets. When war breaks out it swallows up Erich, Trina's husband, who is forced to fight for the Fascists, while their son, Michael, idolizes Hitler and eventually joins the German army. When Erich returns from combat with injuries, he vows never to fight again when he recovers. Yet his war isn't over.

To escape both the Fascists and the Nazis, the two of them flee into the Alps to wait out the war with a few others. When the war ends and they are finally able to return to their farm, however, they find that the dam project remains very much alive. The novel is based on reality, and the cover illustration shows the church's bell tower that still today juts out of the lake covering Curon.

Even translated into English, Bolzano's graceful prose shines through. This is both a beautiful novel and a powerful one with a message so many of us can identify with: Why can't they just leave us alone?