Bird brain

Scientists who study animals have traditionally underestimated them. Animals can't use tools. When Jane Goodall proved otherwise, others refused to believe it. And when Irene M. Pepperberg proved that Alex, her grey parrot, could communicate by speech, not just repeat words, and even do basic math, she was not immediately believed either.

Pepperberg tells their story in her 2008 book, Alex & Me.

Alex lived a shorter life than most grey parrots, yet it was a spectacular, headline-making life. Amazingly, the author had simply picked him at random among other parrots in a pet shop. She only wanted to examine scientifically just how good these parrots might be at language. One parrot, she thought, was as good as another.

She was trained as a chemist, earning a doctorate, yet had always loved birds and she was drawn to studying them, even though throughout her career she had difficulty finding teaching positions and getting study grants. Her success with Alex even seemed to work against her, as colleagues became jealous of the publicity her work generated.

Even Pepperberg underestimated Alex. Partly this was the result of the nature of science. Behaviors had to be tested over and over again before anything could be proven, yet Alex quickly became bored with repeating the same tests. Often he would simply refuse to cooperate. Or he would come up with something unexpected and clever.

Once when he was frustrated at not being given a nut, Alex said, "Want a nut. Nnn ... uh ... tuh." In effect, he had just spelled the word nut. At another time, he expressed the concept of zero without being taught. Pepperberg writes, "This parrot, with his teeny brain, seems to have come up with a concept that had eluded the great Greek mathematician Euclid of Alexandria."

Had Alex lived longer and had he been encouraged to learn more than he could with those simple tests he was put through repeatedly, who can say what he might have been capable of?

The author sums up her parrot's contribution to science in this way: "Birds can't learn to label objects, they said. Alex did. OK, birds can't learn to generalize. Alex did. All right, but they can't learn concepts. Alex did. Well, they certainly can't understand 'same' versus 'different.' Alex did. and on and on."

Save the music

Sometimes sounds turn me almost inside out with longing.

Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth's Wild Music

The sounds Kathleen Dean Moore writes about in the above line from Earth's Wild Music (2021) are the sounds of nature, Other naturalists write mostly about animal behavior or the visual beauty of nature, but Moore's focus is on what she hears when she steps outside.

These essays contain some of the most beautiful nature writing — or any kind of writing — one is likely to find. She writes about the songs of humpback whales, a rattlesnake's rattle, the calls of birds, the warning calls of various animals and even the sounds heard in one of the few places left in the United States where no human sounds can be heard.

"The whole planet sings," she writes. Yet the sound is getting dimmer. While the mission of her book is to call our attention to the sounds of nature, it is at the same time about making her readers aware that so many species are rapidly diminishing. Under the threat of expanding human development, pollution, climate change or whatever, animal life is simply not nearly as abundant as it once was. Our grandchildren will live in a very different world, one in which there is much less wild music.

"Our work is not to save our way of life," she writes, "but to save the world from this way of life's destructive power."

Reading the labels

Lewis Carroll's Alice reads a marmalade jar's label as she tumbles down the rabbit hole. This scene is a reminder, somehow, that the worst thing about death is that you can't take a book with you.

Dwight Garner, The Upstairs Delicatessen

Most people seem to crave a heaven that offers the best of what they most loved about life, whether that be a certain person, flowers, music or, in the case above, books. But my concern today is less the afterlife than Alice reading the label of that marmalade jar. Does that sound like something you might do while tumbling down a rabbit hole? Or even while sitting at the breakfast table?

I may have read my share of marmalade jars and cereal boxes in my time, mostly in my youth, but as an adult reader I believe myself to be a bit more discerning. I don't pay that much attention to labels, other than contents and carbs, or to printed advertisements. Give me a book while I am eating alone, and it had better be a good book. And while tumbling down a rabbit hole, I think I would have other priorities.

For the sake of this blog, however, I decided to read some labels, starting with a cereal box:

Cracklin' Oat Bran — "Each oven-baked, distinctly shaped 'O'-like cluster is packed with the unforgettable flavor of golden oats, coconut, and a touch of cinnamon!"

Analysis — I have long enjoyed this cereal, although it is one of the most expensive brands out there and I don't buy it often. A BOGO deal made it irresistible this time. I hadn't realized it was "oven-baked." The phrase "distinctly shaped 'O'-like cluster" is interesting. When it says 'O'-like, it actually means the cereal consists of rectangle shapes. Why not just say so? Is the flavor unforgettable? I know that the flavor is good, but what is really unforgettable is the wonderful, long-lasting crunch.

PG Tips tea — "Our envelopes are fully recyclable and the plant-based tea bags inside them can be disposed of in your food waste bin, so they can biodegrade into compost and go back to nature."

Analysis — This is a British tea, very popular in Great Britain, but we Americans might wonder, what is a food waste bin? Can you put these tea bags down your garbage disposal?

Ben's Original Ready Rice — "You know us as the brand behind the world's best rice. Now find out how we're making the world better, creating opportunities that offer everyone a seat the table."

Analysis — The world's best rice? Somehow I doubt that, but it certainly is convenient. The rest is essentially an invitation to check out their website. I might be willing to read a food label, but a commercial website? Probably not.

Nature's Bakery Gluten Free Fig Bar — "Our snacks are equal parts wholesome and delicious. From hearty whole grains to sun-ripened fruit, what we bake in is as important as what we leave out."

Analysis — I like this label the best of any of them. It even makes me want to actually open the package and taste one, although I notice it is already six months past the "best by" date. I bought it for the hurricane power outage that never happened.

The joy of solving murders

People always say that your wedding day is the happiest day of your life, but honestly, people should try solving murders more often.

Jesse Q. Sutanto, Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers

Many of us who read or watch murder mysteries probably wonder from time to time how we might do if we had a murder to solve. Most likely, of course, we would be terrible at it. But when Vera Wong finds a body in her Chinatown tea shop, she has no doubt at all that she can do a better job at finding the killer than the incompetent police. They even think it's an accidental death. What fun would that be?

Jesse Q. Sutanto gives us a truly wonderful thing in Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers (2023) — a good mystery novel that is hilarious at the same time.

Vera Wong is a 60-something widow whose tea shop has just one customer, even though the sign out front boasts that it is "world famous." She needs a little excitement in her life, and the body of Marshall Chen provides that. His death is determined to be from exposure to bird dander, to which he was allergic.

Vera quickly settles on four suspects, each with a reason to kill Marshall. They include his neglected wife Julia, his resentful twin brother Oliver, and Sana and Riki, two people Marshall had betrayed in his nonstop efforts to get rich by using others.

The trouble is, Vera comes to love her suspects. She moves in with Julia and encourages her to realize her dream of becoming a photographer while babysitting her daughter. Oliver is a nice young man who was once Julia's best friend before Marshall came between them. Sana is a talented artist whose paintings were stolen by Marshall; Riki has computer skills that Marshall took advantage of.

While trying to determine which of them might be a murderer, Vera sets about improving each of their lives, while each of them helps improve her own.

Sutanto's novel is as warm and cuddly as as murder mystery can be. And it contains a nifty mystery that Vera Wong, not the police, manages to solve.

On repeat

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves — that's the truth.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, One Hundred False Starts

F. Scott Fitzgerald

In the same article in a 1933 edition of the Saturday Evening Post, F. Scott Fitzgerald also wrote, "We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives — experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way before."

The experiences Fitzgerald describes so well usually happen in one's youth. Older people generally know better. Such things as falling in love, getting one's heart broken and mourning the loss of a loved one seem more profound and unique the first time they happen.

For most authors who strive to write literature, such experiences become the foundation for most of what they write. It helps explain why first novels are so often the best the authors ever write. Such novels as The Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace and To Kill a Mockingbird are about youthful characters who have life-shaping experiences. For Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, their most moving experiences occurred when they were in the middle of war-torn Europe during World War II, resulting in the novels Slaughterhouse-Five and Catch-22.

Because, as Fitzgerald points out, such experiences are limited, writers tend to quickly run out of profound things to write about. And, thus, they repeat themselves. Or sometimes, like J.D. Salinger and Harper Lee, they simply stop writing anything of consequence altogether.

Famous, yet unknown

I had to let her know that the reason she'd never heard of me was because I was famous.

Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks

The wonderful line above actually makes perfect sense.

Neal Stephenson tells of attending a writers' conference and being approached by a prominent literary novelist who had never heard of him. Making small talk, she asked where he taught. So many literary writers like herself teach at universities to supplement their incomes. When he said he didn't teach, she then asked what he did to support himself. He told her that he just wrote for a living, and she was shocked. How was it possible she had never heard of a writer who can make a living by writing?

The answer, of course, is that he is a popular writer, a famous writer. Many people buy his books, unlike the books of most literary writers like herself. He writes science fiction, a genre she totally ignores, but many people love. She sells books by the hundreds, or perhaps dozens. He sells books by the thousands and makes a decent living. She must teach so she can write on the side. He just writes.

Dante Alighieri

It has always been this way. Stephenson makes a distinction between what he calls Beowulf books and Dante books, suggesting just how long this division of literature has been going on. Dante, like so many great artists, depended on a wealthy patron for support. Beowulf is a collection of popular tales that didn't need a patron.

This division continues in the literary world to this day. Those who write for the masses, those who write best-sellers, can often support themselves, often very well, with their writing. The likes of C.J. Box, James Patterson, Harlen Coben, Danielle Steel and Stephen King do not need to take second jobs. Most readers recognize their names, but they might be strangers if they attended certain literary events.

Meanwhile, literary writers earn praise in literary journals and get reviews in The New York Times, but to feed their families they must teach creative writing somewhere, or perhaps take a job selling insurance or marry someone else with a job.

Disappearing islands

The Great Reclamation (20923) is hardly the most enticing title for a novel. And the paperback cover illustration doesn't help. Yet Rachel Heng's book makes good reading despite these disincentives.

The title refers to an ambitious postwar project in Singapore to expand the shoreline, giving  the growing population more land. Yet Heng's novel is actually about the people most affected by this, those who live along the shore and make their living by fishing.

Ah Boon is a boy who isn't cut out to be a fisherman. He is even afraid of water. Yet when he goes out into the sea one day with his father and older brother, they find islands that weren't there before. And in fact, they can't be found again without Ah Boon. These disappearing islands are home to countless fish that help his family and neighbors prosper.

Ah Boon's soulmate is a girl named Siok Mei. They promise to love each other forever. Trouble comes when they become involved in student protests as they get older. Siok Mei becomes fully committed to the Communists, while Ah Boon decides to go back home. She marries someone else. He does, too.

In time he joins the Gah Men, the government men who are pushing the reclamation project. He talks his family into moving into apartments. How does this project, the mysterious islands and Siok Mei come together at the crisis point of Ah Boon's life? Read the story to find out.

I don't think the supernatural aspect of the novel — those islands — really works. Too many questions remain unanswered. Why can only Ah Boon find them at first, yet others can find them later? What is their meaning? Why is this the only supernatural part of his life? Why place disappearing islands at the heart of what is otherwise a historical novel?

So, yes, Heng's novel is less than totally satisfying. Good, but not outstanding.

Expanding the definition

Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson has described science fiction as idea porn. He has a point. Those who devour sci-fi do so for ideas, not sex.

Stephenson has written a number of science fiction stories and is a widely recognized author in that genre, yet he also wrote the trilogy that included Quicksilver, The Confusion and The System of the World, all of which read more like historical novels about scientists, Isaac Newton among them. Yet these massive novels are full of cool ideas, and sci-fi fans loved them.

So many novels — literary novels, romance novels, mystery novels, etc. — are about the human condition in one way or another. They may be original, yet for the most part they lack original ideas. There's not much there to grab the attention of science fiction fans. As Stephenson puts it, "In arty lit, it's become uncool to try to come to grips with ideas per se."

Stephenson, in a lecture given at Gresham College in 2008 and published in his book Some Remarks, expands science fiction to include any fiction with original, mind-bending ideas.

Many thrillers qualify. He especially mentions The Da Vinci Code.

The novels of Matt Haig are not grouped with science fiction in bookstores. Yet they are filled with sci-fi-like ideas. In The Midnight Library, a woman relives different versions of her life in an attempt to find one in which she is happy. In The Humans, a being from space visits Earth and takes the body of a mathematician, discovering what human beings are like.

Things in Jars, a mystery by Jess Kidd but not normally classified with either mysteries or science fiction, is about a girl who may be a mermaid.

Spirit Crossing, a William Kent Kruger mystery, tells of a murder investigation aided by the spirits of victims.

I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger describes a future where bodies are floating in Lake Superior and a large medical ship uses captives as guinea pigs.

In Cassandra in Reverse, a novel by Holly Smale that I hope to read soon, a woman discovers she can go back in time and reverse her mistakes.

None of these books are considered science fiction in the usual sense, yet all qualify as Stephenson defines the term. So are such classics as Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Pinocchio and Lost Horizon. Where there's an original idea that produces wonder, there one can find science fiction.

Flabbergasting facts

Truth truly is stranger than fiction (which may help explain why so much fiction is based on truth). 1,342 Facts to Leave You Flabbergasted (2016) proves this to be true almost 1,342 times.

Other books in this series promise to blow your socks off, make your jaw drop, knock you sideways and leave you speechless. Most of these facts are, in fact, stunning.

Walruses suffer from dandruff.

Hens given alcohol lay half as many eggs.

Pope John Paul II drew his own comic books.

These facts are presented mostly in single, simple sentences, allowing a reader to be flabbergasted at a rate of four times per page. Yet many of these facts do raise questions, at least in my mind.

The oldest living turkey in Britain is called Dinner. As this book was published in 2016, chances are that turkey has already become dinner, making this no longer a fact.

Bad mood?

When Donald Trump is in a bad mood, he wears a red hat. How many times have you seen Trump with a big smile on his face while wearing a red MAGA hat?

The loudest word ever shouted was "Quiet!" by a primary-school teacher from Northern Ireland. Interesting, but how can anyone possibly know that was the loudest word every shouted?

Half of all museum specimens are thought to be wrongly labeled. The key word in that sentence is thought. I thought that was stupid. Does my thought make it a fact?

Jack London, Hugh Walpole and P.G. Wodehouse were all published by Wills & Boon. Perhaps in Great Britain, where this book was first published, this fact may be interesting. Few Americans who have never heard of Mills & Boon are likely to be flabbergasted.

Newborn babies have accents. Huh?

46% of Japan's population hide when someone rings the doorbell. How do you suppose that was determined so precisely?

More people are killed by teddy bears than by grizzly bears. I don't question that one at all. I'm just flabbergasted.

Single-owner books

When we can't share them directly, one-to-one, our common informational heritage is threatened.

David L. Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading

David L. Ulin

David L. Ulin is talking about ebooks. Other problems with ebooks are more commonly discussed. A device doesn't feel as good in one's hands as an actual book. It is more difficult to go back and reread a memorable passage. It is too easy, depending upon the device, to be distracted by a game, email, texts or something else.

There are significant advantages, of course. One can take 20 ebooks on a cruise if one wants to without actually having to carry 20 books in one's luggage.

Yet Ulin puts his finger on one problem with ebooks we may not immediately think about: It has just one owner. The ebook belongs to whomever owns the device the ebook is downloaded to. It can't be loaned or given to anyone else. You can read it or ignore it, keep it or delete it, but that's about it.

If you own a car, you are free to sell it, let someone borrow it or give it away. That is not the case with ebooks.

As I have written previously, I do not ordinarily like to either borrow books or lend my own books to someone else (although I do give many of my books away). But for many other people, passing books around is standard operating procedure. If they enjoy a book, they want their friends to read it. And so they pass it around, from friend to friend. If it never returns to the owner, no harm done. The owner has already read it.

In Ulin's phrase, "our common informational heritage is threatened" when books cannot be given to others or borrowed from others.

Public libraries were based on the concept of many people reading the same book. That is a "common informational heritage." There are no ebook libraries. There are no used ebook stores. There are no secondhand ebooks.

Of course, friends can download the same ebook based on your recommendation, and book clubs can still discuss these books. Even so, it is not quite the same — and it's costly for everyone who wants to read the same book.

And so many books are not even available as ebooks.

I, for one, am glad ebooks have not become as popular as many of us once feared they would become.

Something for nothing

The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency doesn't get paid for some of its most rewarding cases, and that proves true again in A Song of Comfortable Chairs (2022), the 23rd book in this wonderful series by Alexander McCall Smith.

Precious Ramotswe, who runs the agency with Grace Makutsi in Gaborone, has a kind heart and a clever mind. When someone needs help and she has an idea as to how to help, she pitches in whether there is compensation at the end or not.

In this installment, there are two such problems that Precious seeks to solve in elaborate ways.

First, Grace's husband faces bankruptcy with the start of a rival furniture store that undercuts his prices, thanks to inside information. Precious comes up with a plan that turns her longtime friend, Mma Potokwane of the Orphan Farm, another woman of traditional build, into a model in an advertising campaign.

The second difficulty involves a friend of Grace's with a 14-year-old boy who resents his mother's new boyfriend. Precious plots to change the boy's mind, but then doesn't know if her plan worked or if Charlie, her part-time assistant detective, is the one who worked the magic.

It's all highly entertaining. McCall Smith even manages to turn Mma Makutsi into a more likable character by the end of this Botswanna adventure.

A moment of truth

David L. Ulin

This is what literature, at its best and most unrelenting, offers: a slicing through of all the noise and the ephemera, a cutting to the chase. There is something thrilling about it, this unburdening, the idea of getting at a truth so profound that, for a moment anyway, we become transcendent in the fullest sense.

David L. Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading

I love David L. Ulin's description above about the value of literature, but I seem to be most struck by his phrase "for a moment anyway."

Great novels can last a long time, and great lines from great novels may be repeated over and over again, yet Ulin is right. The profound truths that can be found in the best novels do tend to be fleeting. They strike us with power in the context of the story we are reading, but can never be quite as powerful again. Readers become transcendent, as he puts it, only briefly. And then reality swallows us up again.

I find that I recall certain novels with great fondness without remembering the reason, or even remembering much about the story itself or any of the characters. Perhaps what I am really remembering so fondly is that moment or moments of transcendence, those passages that momentarily hit home so powerfully.

Ulin sees the temporariness of literature as its virtue. "Its futility is what makes it noble; nothing will come of this, no one will be saved, but it is worth your attention anyway." Some people, including both nonreaders and those who read nonfiction exclusively, view fiction as a waste of time. What's the point?

The point, or at least one of them, is that occasional moment of truth.

Reading rediscovered

In The Lost Art of Reading (2018), David L. Ulin meditates on that very subject: Is reading a lost art?

Ulin read everything and anything in his youth. He is surprised when his 15-year-old son, assigned by his teacher to read The Great Gatsby, tells him literature is dead. He decides to help his son by rereading the novel himself. When he finds it difficult staying focused on the book he once loved, he wonders if his son might be right.

With so many electronic devices and social media, keeping one's attention focused on a book, especially one hundreds of pages long, seems like an impossible challenge to many people today, especially those who are young. They would much rather watch the movie, except that fewer novels are being adapted for the screen these days. 

Shorter books may be better at holding one's attention long enough to read them, and Ulin keeps his book short — just 156 pages, plus an introduction. Yet even his book proves hard to focus on, though that may have more to do with his meandering style than anything else.

In the end, he rediscovers for himself the joy and the art of reading that at least a few of us still enjoy. The question remains, however: How does one teach this art to others?

The door to everything

One of the joys of teaching literature is the freedom it allows to talk about any subject, so long as there is a short story, novel, play, or poem that mentions it.

Donna Leon, Wandering through Life

Donna Leon

What Donna Leon writes about teaching literature — that it opens the door to all subjects — is also true when it comes to writing about literature. It is one reason I have been able to keep this blog going for so many years, with few interruptions.

Before starting a blog, while still working at a newspaper, I gave a lot of thought  to whether a blog was really a good idea. I didn't want to be one of those bloggers — probably the majority of them — who start with energy and enthusiasm but then burn out within a matter of months, or even weeks. Their posts come less and less often and finally dry up altogether. I didn't want to be one of those.

I chose language and literature as my subject matter because they were topics I knew something about. I had worked for a newspaper for many years and had reviewed books for many years. Better yet, they opened the door to every other topic in the universe. Anything that could be written about, I could write about. I would never run out of material.

And this has proven to be the case. Nearly half of my posts are short book reviews. Thus, each time I read a book I get material for a new post. And often, as in the case of Wandering through Life, they provide me with ideas for multiple posts.

Add to this the endless subjects that become available by reading those books, as well as by reading newspapers, magazines and even street signs and bumper stickers. I can write about the lives of writers. I can write about bookstores and the reading life. I can write about history, science, human relationships, crime and all the other subjects covered in books. I usually try to avoid politics in this blog, but even that hot topic sometimes becomes irresistible, as when I wrote about Steven Pinker's observations in The Stuff of Thought about how politicians bamboozle the public.

When Donna Leon taught literature classes she found it gave her the freedom to talk — and teach — about virtually anything, while still talking about literature.  I have enjoyed the same kind of freedom.

The other Booths

Villains have families, too. That's not something we often think about. When villains die in movies, it doesn't occur to us that they must have had someone who loved them. And it is much the same way with real-life villains.

This thought led Karen Joy Fowler to write her excellent 2022 novel Booth about not John Wilkes Booth but rather his family.

Fowler tells her story through the eyes of various members of the Booth family, but never John Wilkes, the handsome, unpredictable younger brother. It is Edwin, an older son in a family of actors, who becomes the family's central figure. It is he, not Junius or John, who matches their father's greatness on the stage.

It turns out that their father and mother had never actually married. It's a shock to all when his actual wife arrives from England and begins making demands. Then there is his alcoholism, a trait passed down to his elder sons. The daughters — Rosalie, the plain one, and Asia, the beauty — also feature prominently in the novel.

Although the Booths have slaves — set free but still working for the family — their sympathies lie with the North when war breaks out. That is, except for John, who has lived in Richmond, and Joe, an even younger brother, who was notable for being a deserter from both armies.

The assassination of Abraham Lincoln comes as as much of a shock to the Booths as to anyone else, and they all pay the price of notoriety. Edwin's acting career tanks; Junius spends time in prison for the crime of being John's brother.

At times you don't know whether you are reading fiction or history, and this uncertainty seems to be deliberate on Fowler's part. Little is actually known about Rosalie, one of the best drawn characters, and so she is almost entirely fictional. Others left letters or are mentioned more in historical records, and so their stories read more like history. All in all, it makes for an impressive book, not as good as some of Fowler's other novels, yet better than many books written by historians about this tragedy.

Doing the right thing

Small Things Like These is a title that could describe the book itself, a wonderful 114 -page novella by Claire Keegan published in 2021.

Set in Ireland in 1985 in the days just before Christmas, the story tells of Bill Furlong, a coal merchant. With the holidays approaching and the weather getting colder, Furlong stays busy and misses having more time with his wife and daughters.

He feels blessed with this family, for he grew up an orphan. His mother died young, and he never knew his father (although he has a good idea by the end of this story). He was raised by a kindly woman who made everything else in his life possible.

With this background, Furlong takes it very hard when he discovers a freezing girl locked in the coal shed at the local convent. He takes the girl into the convent, returning her to those who locked her up, unsure whether he has done the right thing or not. Would he do things differently if he had another chance? It turns out that he gets another chance on Christmas Eve.

If the Catholic Church was rocked but evidence of priests sexually abusing altar boys, it was rocked in Ireland even before that by the so-called Magdalene laundries. Pregnant teenage girls were taken in by the nuns. Their babies were put up for adoption, while the girls themselves, as well as orphan girls, were turned into virtual slaves in these laundries managed by the nuns. The last such laundry did not close until 1996. Keegan suggests as many as 30,000 young women may have been forced to work in these places — not such a small thing after all.

Her novella, one of several small books by Keegan now available in hardback editions, gives this tragedy human faces.

Movies at their best

For people who love movies, 1939 has often been mentioned as Hollywood's greatest year. That was the year that gave us Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Wuthering Heights, Ninotchka, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and so many others. Stephen Farber and Michael McClellan beg to differ. In Cinema '62 (2020), they make their case that 1962 was, in fact, "the greatest year at the movies," as their subtitle body declares.

The list of notable films from that year is no less impressive — To Kill a Mockingbird, The Miracle Worker, Ride the High Country, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Longest Day, Lolita, The Manchurian Candidate and so many others, including Lawrence of Arabia, which they call "the quintessential film" of that year. Yet they also point out that 1962 was notable for much more than just its great movies.

This was the year when black and white films finally surrendered to color.

It was a great year for female actors, even if Lawrence of Arabia had hardly any women in the entire film. Anne Bancroft, Geraldine Page, Lee Remick, Katharine Hepburn and other women excelled, while Bette Davis and Joan Crawford reclaimed their positions in Hollywood with Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

Foreign films were excellent that year, with the likes of Through a Glass Darkly, Electra, Sundays and Cybele and Last Year at Marienbad.

Movies focused on sexuality issues more openly than in the past, several of them dealing with homosexuality and Lolita touching on the issue of adults preying on children.

Farber and McClellan, while building their case that 1962 was an outstanding year for movies, also make it clear that that whole period — the 1960s in general — was something of a golden age. Today so many movies are remakes or sequels, or they feature comic book heroes or are live-action versions of popular animated movies. Back in 1962, by contrast, a significant number of films were adapted from great novels and plays — Billy Budd, Long Day's Journey into Night, To Kill a Mockingbird, Mutiny on the Bounty, etc. Movies back then had depth. They told stories. Today they have special effects.

The best toy ever

Donna Leon

In her book Wandering through Life, Donna Leon recalls the first time her mother read to her the rhyme that has delighted all of us:

Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear./Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair./Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn't fuzzy,/Wuzzy?

She writes, "And I still remember the bolt of delight I felt as I grasped this miraculous truth: a word could have two separate meanings. Suddenly language was revealed to me as the best toy ever."

Peter Farb makes a similar point in his book Word Play. People in every culture play word games, he says. They have fun with riddles, outrageous insults. jokes having to do with confusing words and so on. Most of the humor in episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies, one of the most popular situation comedies of its day, had to do with the Clampetts and others engaging in conversations in which each party thought they were both talking about the same thing when, as only the audience knew, they were actually talking about very different things.

Most one-liners told by comics have to do with word play. "Take my wife ... please," Henny Youngman said. The line got a laugh because you thought he was using his wife as an example, and then with one word he suddenly gave his words a literal meaning.

Yet language need not be funny to be "the best toy ever." Writers enjoy what they do because of the pleasure words give them when they are shaped into sentences that express meaning, that reveal beauty, that give amazingly accurate descriptions, that produce emotions, that encourage others to change their opinions or to take action.

I was 14 when I suddenly discovered one day that writing was fun. Words had become, thanks to a blue portable typewriter, the best toy ever. Now in my 80s, I still play every day.

Murdering the dying

Why would anyone want to murder a person already dying with Alzheimer's in a nursing home? It turns out there can be multiple reasons, which Julia Keller explores in her 2016 novel Sorrow Road.

Belfa Elkins is the prosecuting attorney in Acker's Gap, W. Va., as well as the protagonist in several of Keller's novels. When Darlene Strayer, a former classmate, asks Bell to investigate the death of her father at Thornapple Terrace, she does not take it seriously, even though there have been other recent deaths there. Isn't that what people do in nursing homes?

But then Darlene dies that very night while driving intoxicated on a snowy road. Again, there is nothing suspicious, although Darlene had not been drinking when Bell had left the bar with her.

Meanwhile Carla, Bell's 21-year-old daughter, returns home with a clearly serious problem she is not willing to disclose. Carla gets a temporary job, which takes her to, of all places, Thornapple Terrace.

Little by little developments happen and deductions are made until Bell discovers the truth about what really happened to Darlene's father. It turns out it all began way back in 1938. As for Carla, she uncovers another murder plot, after finally confessing her own crime.

Sorrow Road turns out to be a very fine mystery, full of interesting characters, occasional suspense and a conclusion a reader can believe. One wonders why Julia Keller is not a bigger name in the mystery field.

Smiley out west

Jane Smiley is certainly a versatile writer — fiction and nonfiction, literary fiction and popular fiction, books for adults and books for children. She has even excelled at westerns, as she proved with The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton and now again in A Dangerous Business (2022).

Writing the novel itself may have been dangerous business for Smiley for she writes about a prostitute in California in the 1850s with more sexual detail than one would expect in a Jane Smiley novel. Again, there's that versatility.

Eliza goes to Monterey with her husband soon after the Gold Rush. She was forced into marrying a man she doesn't love and who doesn't treat her well, and so she doesn't mourn when he is shot and killed. But then, how will she make a living?

She is recruited by Mrs. Parks, one of the madams in a town with relatively few women. Eliza takes the job and comes to like it, discovering that most of her customers are much nicer than her husband. And they always go home afterward, while her savings pile up.

But then the bodies of other women in this same "dangerous business" begin showing up, brutally stabbed. There is not much law in Monterey at that time, and nobody seems to take the murders seriously. Eliza and her new friend, Jean, another prostitute who specializes in female clients, begin reading detective stories written by Edgar Allan Poe. They decide to discover the murderer themselves.

This is a short novel, barely 200 pages, but it remains fascinating every step of the way. 

May or must?

In most situations you may is the most polite and you must the most rude.

Peter Farb, Word Play

Peter Farb

After making the statement above in his book Word Play, Peter Farb goes on to explain how the two phrases you may and you must can be confusing to those for whom English is a second language. As he says, in most situations the first usage is more polite than the second. But if that is true "in most situations," it means there are exceptions.

As a general rule, most of us prefer hearing the word may rather than must. The latter sounds like an order, while the former gives us permission. We like having a choice. It sounds like a kindness, while must sounds severe. Even when we were children, "you may go outside and play" sounded much better than "you must go outside and play." Even if we wanted to go outside and play, we didn't want to be ordered to do so. It took away some of the fun.

Yet as Farb suggests, there are exceptions to this rule. The example he gives is when a hostess at a dinner party passes her special dish to a guest and says, "You must try some of this." Is that an order? No, it is more of a recommendation. It means she thinks the dish is outstanding. If she had said, "You may try some of this," a person who grew up speaking English could think there was something questionable about it. They may like it or they may not. If you are finicky eater, you may very well pass on that dish.

Or suppose a friend tells you, "You must be crazy." This is neither an order nor a suggestion. Rather it is a joke, and obviously so to anyone who grew up speaking English. The words "you may be crazy" somehow seem less light. Perhaps your friend actually thinks you're crazy.

If you are learning English as a second language, these exceptions to the rule must be confusing. Or is it, may be confusing?

Shy books

One of the problems that comes with having coffee shops in bookstores is that they can turn bookstores into gathering places or social places, which doesn't sound like such a bad thing but can be. (Another problems is that those sitting in the coffee shops are often free to browse through books or magazines as they eat and drink, then put them back on the shelves when they are through with them.)

Just as silence has always been favored in libraries, so it is important in a good bookstore. Browsing for the right book takes concentration, privacy and some measure of silence. You don't want children running around, friends trying to chat or strangers trying to make friends.

Christopher Morley

Quoting Christopher Morley, bookseller Jeff Deutsch says this in his book In Praise of Good Bookstores, "This is how the browser recognizes their book: privately, usually in silence, 'for often the most important books are shy, and do not press forward to the front counters,' as Morley observes. We must maintain quiet and allow for concentrated browsing, understanding that our role is drawing readers across the threshold, that they might confront these volumes."

I like the idea of shy books. So often the right book for you never finds its way to the front of the store, on a table with best-sellers. It may be hiding away on a corner shelf, or on a bottom shelf or top shelf, and thus more difficult to find.

The right book may take some time to locate, and the search may require quiet solitude.

Novelist Ann Patchett says she made a deliberate decision not to sell coffee or food of any kind in her Nashville bookstore. She wanted to sell books, just books, for people who like books. But then she and her co-owner decided to allow dogs in their store, and so customers who aren't talking to each other are probably talking to dogs.

Saying our lines

One of the wonderful things about the English language is that, unlike French, we welcome new words and phrases from anywhere. And one prime source has always been show business. Josh Chetwynd brings these many words and phrases together in his 2017 book Totally Scripted.

We all love repeating, and sometimes rephrasing, favorite lines from favorite movies. Who among us hasn't found opportunities to say lines like "I'll be back," "here's looking at you, kid," "Houston, we have a problem" and "an offer he can't refuse"? Even if we never saw the movie these lines came from, we have probably heard the lines said by friends and repeated them ourselves.

Then there are phrases like "get out of Dodge," "stage fright," "Hollywood ending," "in the limelight," "Looney Tunes," "stay tuned" and "the peanut gallery." They may have had their origins in movies, television, vaudeville or some other form of entertainment, but their use has since expanded  metaphorically to mean many other things. 

We can get out of Dodge any time we evade a difficult situation. We may get stage fright when we have to speak to a group, stage or no stage. Any goofy behavior can be termed Looney Tunes. Anything simple can be called Mickey Mouse.

The origins of many of these terms and famous movie lines can sometimes be surprising. Arnold Schwarzenegger objected to saying "I'll be back" in The Terminator. He didn't think it was very manly. Also, because English was his second language, he admitted to not understanding contractions.

The phrase "peanut gallery" did not begin with Howdy Dowdy, as many of us older folks might think. It first referred to the cheap seats in theaters, where patrons often ate peanuts during a live show. The TV children's show simply gave the phrase a new meaning.

Chetwynd's small book will delight anyone who loves language and/or popular culture.

Finding a book for Dad

My email includes something from Barnes & Noble practically every day, and lately they have been sending out Father's Day teasers. Every merchandiser tries to make money out of every holiday, but for bookstores, Father's Day can be a challenge. I visit a bookstore at least once a month, but I see mostly women there.

When I look over the tables covered with the latest novels, spotting a book written by a male author can be a challenge. Not only are most new novels written by women, but they are mostly intended for female readers. I am currently in the middle of a novel written by a woman, which I am actually enjoying, yet I have noticed that virtually every important character is a woman. I expect the murderer will turn out to be a man, but otherwise it is a story about women for women written by a woman.

And so, how does one pick out a book that Dad might enjoy?

I think Barnes & Noble has mostly done an admirable job in their selections for the upcoming holiday. Mostly they focus on nonfiction, which are the books men may be most likely to read.

Among these suggestions are The Fate of the Day by Rick Atkinson, a book about the start of the American Revolution; The Determined Spy by Douglas Waller, about the early days of the CIA; the massive new Mark Twain biography written by Ron Cherow; How Countries Go Broke by Ray Dalio, and Why We Love Baseball by Joe Posnanski.

As for fiction, they recommend the latest Stephen King novel, Never Flinch; Buffalo Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones; The First Gentleman by Bill Clinton and James Patterson; Twist by Colum McCann; and I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger.

All these are books written by men, many of them expressly for men. Relatively few women read books about war or baseball.

There is still something for Dad in bookstores. You may just have to look a little harder than you did when you were shopping for Mom last month.

Missing mermaid

A detective having a ghost as a sidekick may not be an original idea — Charles Todd's Ian Rutledge listens to the spirit of a soldier who served under him in World War I while he is solving cases — yet Jess Kidd's Things in Jars (2019) still seems unique.

The novel, as strange as its title, features a young female detective named Bridie Devine. Her Watson is a half-dressed, tattoo-covered former boxer named Ruby Doyle, whom she can see and hear even though nobody else can. Having an invisible companion turns out to be advantageous.

The action takes place in London in 1863, although there are flashbacks to events in Bridie's troubled youth, which then impact the present story. Bridie is hired to find Christabel, supposedly the daughter of a wealthy man. This man turns out to be a collector of odd animate objects, those things in jars. Christabel, thought to be a mermaid, was, in fact, stolen. Now she has been stolen again.

Bridie was herself sold as a child, and she has a great deal of sympathy for Christabel. She assumes the girl has probably been sold to a circus, or perhaps to another collector.

Kidd, gifted at telling strange stories, excels in this one. Weird characters and situations abound. Bridie even falls in love with Ruby. Those things in jars are not the only oddities to be found here.

From novel to movie

Never before have I attempted to review both a novel and the movie adapted from that novel at the same time, but I happened to watch the Jean-Pierre Jeunet film The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet just before finishing the Reif Larsen novel The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (2009), so why not?

The title changed between book and screen, yet the story changed little. Jeunet, the director responsible for such wonderful French films as Amelie and A Very Long Engagement, stays remarkably true to the novel. Most of his changes actually improve the story.

The basic plot is this: As in the Young Sheldon television series, T.S. is a young prodigy growing up in an ordinary family. In this case, it's on a ranch in Montana. His initials stand for Tecumseh Sparrow. His father is a silent man who loves cowboy movies and clearly loved the boy's older brother, who died in a gun accident. His love for T.S. remains unclear. The mother is supposedly a beetle scientist, yet seems more devoted to writing a romantic story about an ancestor. His older sister talks mostly about beauty pageants. T.S. feels out of place, "not a creature of the ranch," as he puts it in his narrative.

His special gift takes the form of illustration. His drawings can be found on virtually every page of the novel, illustrating everything from the Mormon cricket to how he and his sister play cat's cradle. He has been sending his scientific drawings to the Smithsonian Institution, and he is surprised when the Smithsonian, not realizing how young he is, invites him to Washington to accept a prize and give a speech.

Without telling his family, he hops aboard a freight train and heads East.

The change Jeunet makes that I least liked was in making T.S. the inventor of a perpetual motion machine. Larsen's version, in which he is someone who can illustrate virtually anything, seems less fanciful. Yet in other ways the film is better for being less fanciful. Larsen sends T.S. through a wormhole in the Midwest and makes him the youngest member of a secret scientific society with underground tunnels in the District of Columbia. Jeunet ignores all that nonsense and tells a more believable story (other than that perpetual motion machine).

The movie also ignores the boy's mother's book, which T.S. takes with him the train. Larsen makes her novel a part of his novel, and it simply isn't very interesting and adds little. The movie is better for leaving it out.

In the film T.S. is 10, not 12, perhaps because the actor who plays him looks 10, not 12. The movie also turns an important male character into a female character, but without much change in the story.

Otherwise the stories align nicely. Both are enjoyable. In both T.S. discovers that he is not a creature of Washington either and would rather be home.

One should read the novel so as not to miss all those wonderful drawings, which T.S. calls maps. One should watch the movie for all those beautiful images Jeunet is justifiably famous for. To experience both at the same time is pure joy.

Good guys, bad guys

German soldiers in World War II

Readers continue to devour novels set during World War II, even though most of these readers — and the authors, as well — were not even alive during the war. In recent weeks I have read The Book Spy and The Book of Lost Names, both of them about young women who use their forgery talents to help defeat the Nazis. I have several other World War II novels waiting in line.

An article in The Wall Street Journal observes that the hottest trend in children's books is stories with World War II themes. In one of these, Rescue by Jennifer A. Nielsen, a 12-year-old girl becomes part of a dangerous mission in occupied France during the war.

How does one explain the popularity of these books 80 years after the close of the war? It may have something to do with the clarity of the evil. During that war the Nazis we're so evil and the Japanese so savage that it has always been clear who the bad guys were and who the good guys were.

In today's more relativistic world, it is not so easy to differentiate between heroes and villains. Movie makers seem to wrestle with the problem of identifying a villain all the time. There are certain groups of people who cannot be the bad guys for one reason or another. The Chinese, for example, cannot be bad guys if Hollywood wants their movies shown in China. In the new Mission Impossible movie, the "bad guy" is an artificial intelligence called The Entity to avoid this problem. Meanwhile, the good guys must have enough flaws to be believable. In David Baldacci's novel The Innocent, which I reviewed here a few days ago, the hero is a paid government assassin. 

In a World War II setting, there are no such difficulties. When I was in Germany a few years back, our tour guides readily confessed that their Nazi ancestors did evil things. There is no debate about it. Nobody is offended.

The days when the heroes in western movies wore white hats and the bad guys wore black hats are long over, yet perhaps readers and moviegoers still yearn for a clear distinction. World War II stories give us that.

Donna Leon's wandering

... I am feckless and unthinking by nature and have never planned more than the first step in anything I've done.

Donna Leon, Wandering through Life

Anyone who reads Donna Leon's 2023 memoir Wandering through Life hoping for insights into her popular Venice-set mystery series featuring Guido Brunetti is likely to be disappointed. By my count she refers to her books just three times, and then just in passing.

Mostly this book, a very readable one, is a collection of personal essays about her life when she is not writing. As the title suggests, her long life — she is now in her 80s — has been mostly one of aimless wandering from one thing to another, from one country to another. She spent periods as an English instructor in Iran and Saudi Arabia. Her life changed when she took a job teaching English at an army base near Venice. She fell in love with the city. How that love affair led to her mystery series she doesn't bother to tell us.

Leon, born and raised in New Jersey and without a drop of Italian blood, has long had a passion for opera and the music of Handel. She devotes one chapter to her interest in bees, which she was able to work into the plot of her novel Earthly Remains, the only one of her novels she mentions. There's another chapter about a cat named Tigger.

Several chapters relive her childhood — Halloween memories, her first day of school, one particular Christmas turkey. She has one chapter called "Drugs, Sex, and Rock 'n' Roll" that hardly mentions any of the three. Other people are the ones who took the drugs — and apparently had the sex. There is no mention of a significant other.

While in Saudi Arabia she helped develop a game based on Monopoly that she called Saudiopoly. She and other Americans there played it in secret until they could finally leave the country.

Leon wanders through this book the way she has wandered through life. It makes fine reading, but readers of her Brunetti novels will probably not enjoy it any more than anyone else.

Thinking with words

Until language has made sense of experience, that experience is meaningless.

Peter Farb, Word Play

Infants who have not yet mastered language nevertheless seem able to think. If they see a toy  a few feet away from them, they can crawl over and get it. They can distinguish the voice of their mother from that of others. Eventually they may figure out how to climb out of a crib by themselves.

Years later they will have no memory of any of this, however. If what Peter Farb says above is true, perhaps this helps explain why it is true. Perhaps we have no memory of our earliest years because we had no way of putting those experiences into language. Once we learn how to put experience into words, we can more easily remember it,

Language does seem to give meaning and memory to our experiences. Chances are you cannot remember what you had for lunch a week ago. But you might remember it if you told somebody about it, if you put the experience into words, even if only in your own mind. We do remember very special meals because we think about them and talk about them. Even then we probably remember our conversation at that meal more clearly than the food itself.

Dreams dissolve very quickly upon awakening. Yet when I quickly relive a dream in my mind, putting it into words, I find that I can remember it, sometimes for years. We may forget the dreams themselves, but we can remember our mental descriptions of them.

This may also help explain why our memories tend to change over the years. What we now remember may not be exactly what happened, as we can discover if we read what we wrote in a diary or a letter at the time. As we tell the story or relive it in our minds, we embellish it to make it a better story. And then we remember the embellishments more clearly than the actual occurrence.

Thinking, Farb says, "is language spoken to oneself." That may not be literally true, for as I have said, infants can think without language. So can animals. Yet most of us humans, once we learn language, do seem to do most of our thinking with words. Some thinking may be instinctual, as when we suddenly hit the brakes when a deer crosses the road ahead of us, but mostly we do our thinking with language. And we get meaning (and memory) from words more than from the experience itself.

You can't say that

Indeed, freedom of speech does not exist anywhere, for every community on earth forbids the use of certain sounds, words, and sentences in various speech situations.

Peter Farb, Word Play

Peter Farb

Peter Farb makes the point that when it comes to freedom of speech, culture is much more restrictive than government.

All of us all of the time must watch our language. There are words we might use with our friends that we would not use in front of our mother. Or pastor, Or boss. 

There is jargon we use routinely in our jobs that we don't take home with us. And there is language we use when speaking with our small children at home we dare not use at work.

There are things we may say to a spouse or a lover that we would never say to anyone else. And vice versa. One of the gags often used on the ad libbed TV show Whose Line Is It Anyway? involves things you can say about your house or your car or whatever that you can't say about your significant other. It's always funny. And always true.

Mere civility and politeness prevents us from telling people what we we really think about them.

Some things we cannot say because they are too personal, too painful.

Most censorship is, in fact, self-censorship.

Playing with language

Although it was published in 1973 and has become outdated in many ways, Peter Farb's Word Play remains an important book on the subject of "what happens when people talk," his subtitle.

Farb covers numerous aspects of spoken language — why learning languages is easy for children but difficult for adults, criminal slang, playing the dozens (word play common in black communities where the object is to insult one another's mother in amusing ways), lying, jargon, translation from one language to another, baby talk, artificial languages and on and on.

Playing with language is common in most cultures, he tells us. Just as American blacks play the dozens, in many cultures the ability to quickly come up with clever lines, sometimes in rhyme, can be a test of belonging or even of manhood. Hierarchy can sometimes be determined with speech rather than fists. He uses Marx Brothers movies as a prime example of first-rate word play in the United States.

Farb concludes that all human languages are alike in many respects. Yet they can sometimes be very different. In English, for example, we think of the future as being ahead of us, the past behind us. In the Quechua language of Peru, however, it is the past that lies ahead. A Quechua speaker "logically states that past events can be seen in the mind since they already happened, and therefore they must be in front of his eyes. But since he cannot 'see' into the future, these events must therefore be out of sight or 'behind' him."

It is differences like this can make translation so difficult. One place where his book seems dated is when he writes that using a computer to translate one language into another is impossible. Today many people have apps on their phones that can perform at least basic translation of major languages.

Who needs cookbooks?

Book critic Dwight Garner writes in his book The Upstairs Delicatessen that "reading cookbooks is how I unwind." And this is a man who reads books for a living.

Another bookish person, Shannon Reed, also writes about reading cookbooks fo fun in her book Why We Read.

I confess I never read cookbooks, even when I'm cooking. I just throw things together and see what happens. The trouble with recipes is that I never seem to have the necessary ingredients.

It baffles me that some people read cookbooks more for pleasure or relaxation than for help in the kitchen.  Garner says, "I read myself to sleep with them." And thus a cookbook can be bedtime reading, although the size of many cookbooks would seem to make them unwieldy in bed.

I do not read at bedtime — I may watch PlutoTV if I can't sleep — but sometimes during the day I may want something short and relaxing when I don't have enough time to open a novel or a serious work of nonfiction. I have a few options, other than cookbooks, for these moments.

I have collections of comic strips, for example. I particularly like my Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes books.

I also love books containing movie reviews by Pauline Kael. I always find them enjoyable in short doses — and most of her reviews, originally printed in The New Yorker, are brief.

Early Dave Barry books also serve this purpose very well.  There is nothing like a good laugh for relaxation.

But if other people prefer cookbooks to unwind, that's fine with me.

Mental play

What makes the nursery rhyme so remarkable is that it encourages mental play.

Angus Fletcher, Wonderworks

I am old enough to remember those Dick and Jane readers. Dick, Jane, their sister Sally and their dog Spot were so ordinary. They were so well-behaved. Nothing truly funny, unusual, exciting or strange ever happened to them. I cannot imagine any child ever deliberately choosing to read about Dick and Jane.

Over the centuries most children's literature has been something like this, more instructive than fun. Yet most such books have been quickly forgotten. Nursery rhymes and fairy tales, meanwhile, stick around for centuries, and more recent creations such as Winnie-the-Pooh and the Dr. Seuss books seem to possess immortality, as well.

Angus Fletcher may have put his finger on the explanation — mental play. In his book, Wonderworks, he illustrates this with the nursery rhyme that begins "Hey diddle diddle,/The Cat and the Fiddle ..." He goes on, "What is a diddle? Why is a cat with a fiddle? How is a cow vaulting through space? And where is the spoon planning to go?"

It's all about mental play. Having fun with words. Imagining the impossible, Enjoying sounds that rhyme. Laughing at pure silliness.

Not only are the cat and fiddle more fun than Dick and Jane, they are probably more educational. Exciting minds is a good first step toward stimulating intelligence.

I recently commented on the book Surely You Can't Be Serious about the movie Airplane! That movie, it seems to me, may be a modern equivalent of nursery rhymes. It is amusing nonsense that may actually make us smarter.

Don't call me Shirley

Confronted by a book with the title Surely You Can't Be Serious, the only possible reply is, "I am serious, and don't call me Shirley."

The movie Airplane!, released in 1980, was the first Hollywood movie with three directors, David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker, also the authors of this 2023 book about the making of that groundbreaking film. Having three directors was not as difficult as one might think, they say. Majority ruled. Plus, all three of these Wisconsin natives shared the same sense of humor, which nobody else in Hollywood seemed to share at that time.

The key to the success of this comedy, thought by many to be the funniest movie ever made, was being completely serious, they tell us. Hollywood bigwigs insisted they needed someone with the comic stature of Chevy Chase or Bill Murray to make a funny movie. Instead they chose the most serious dramatic actors they could think of — Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves and Leslie Nielsen. Nielsen, of course, went on to become a comic genius in film after film, but he did it by always playing his roles seriously, just as this young trio taught him.

Every actor in the film was told to play each scene as if they were in a B-movie drama like Zero Hour!, the 1957 B-movie that it parodied. Having serious actors deliver ridiculous lines seriously worked. Audiences never stopped laughing, and still haven't after all these years. The comedy holds up remarkably well so many years later. (I have been watching several Airplane! scenes on YouTube lately, and each one makes me laugh as hard as I did the first time I saw them.)

The book takes the form of a movie screenplay, but with lots of stills from the movie. It is a compilation of quotes about what happened before, during and after the making of the movie. Many of the comments come from people like Jimmy Kimmel and Maya Rudolph who had nothing to do with making the movie but have fond memories of watching it.

The trio got away with many gags that would not have been allowed in other movies and would certainly be impermissible today. Yet the jokes are so funny and fly by so quickly that nobody seems to mind. Many parents have watched Airplane! with children too young to understand the jokes.

Reading this book is a poor substitute for watching the movie, but it makes a wonderful companion to it.

True, but misleading

In a restaurant the other evening, I saw a tall woman at another table. The adjective that came to mind was striking. Was she beautiful? No. Was she even attractive? Not really. Perhaps she once had been, but now she was simply striking. I don't remember the other three people at her table at all. Just her.

This experience reminded me that there are certain adjectives that can sound more flattering than they actually are. You might, for example, tell a large man that he is imposing. He will likely be pleased. Yet what you actually mean may be that he is tall or overweight.

I recall Olive Oyl in the movie Popeye trying to come up with something flattering to say about Bluto, the man she was expected to marry. The best she could come up with was large.

People often asked to write recommendations for others probably become masters at words that sound better than intended. They may want to say something about the job applicant that can be interpreted as positive. A word like personable might actually mean that the person spends more of his or her working hours talking than working. A word like commanding might suggest leadership qualities, when the word bossy may be what the writer actually has in mind.

Real estate agents are also masters at words and phrases that sound better than what is actually being described.

Most of us want to be truthful without giving offense, and we may need a few such words in our arsenal for certain occasions. And thus had I been asked, I could have described that woman in the restaurant as striking and slept very well that night.

In love with books

Once you've fallen in love with books, their presence can make you feel at home anywhere, even in places where you shouldn't belong.

Kristin Harmel, The Book of Lost Names

Kristin Harmel

I like the above comment about books found in the middle of Kristin Harmel's novel about a book-loving young Jewish woman who during World War II helps smuggle Jewish children out of France. I would like to comment on it phrase by phrase.

Once you've fallen in love with books ...

Just as you can date men or women, whatever your preference, without falling in love with them, so you can read books without falling in love with them. You can even enjoy reading books for pleasure without falling in love with them.

Harmel includes the word once, suggesting that there was a time when you were not in love with books. Perhaps falling in love was a gradual process, as it was for me, or perhaps it came suddenly. Whatever the case, it happened beyond your control. It was not a choice. It just happened.

... their presence can make you feel at home anywhere ...

I am struck by her use of the word presence, which suggests that it is not just reading a book that is significant but merely the fact that it exists in one's vicinity. Thus this phrase can have two meanings.

1. Books give comfort. When I am in someone's home or office for the first time, I can feel ill at ease, as if I don't really belong (to skip ahead to the next phrase). Yet spotting a shelf full of books instantly seems to comfort me. I am immediately interested. I want to review the titles of those books. I want to hold some of them in my hands and turn some pages. Frankly, I would sometimes prefer to ignore those whose home or office it happens to be and devote more attention to their books.

2. Books take you places in the comfort of your own chair. They can take you to other planets, to other countries, to other periods of history, just as Harmel's novel takes her readers to France during World War II. Wherever one travels in a book, one soon feels at home.

... even in places where you shouldn't belong.

This phrase underlines the fact that fiction allows readers to experience people and places you not only will never experience in your own life, but people and places you would never want to meet or visit. In Harmel's novel, there are Nazis, for example. One can read a thriller and feel danger without ever actually being in danger. In a love story you can have an affair with someone you wouldn't dare have an affair with in real life.

All this is yours when you fall in love with books.