The octopus detective

Can an octopus be a detective? Well, he can in Shelby Van Pelt's wonderful first novel Remarkably Bright Creatures (2022).

Marcellus is an octopus in an aquarium in a relatively small town in the state of Washington. He is nearing the end of his four-year life span, and he is smart enough to know it. He is also smart enough to read English, to identify people by their fingerprints on the glass of his tank, to escape each night to consume seafood in other tanks and even to have a hidden coin collection.

Marcellus is a part-time narrator, as well, but mostly the novel is about Tova, a 70-year-old woman who cleans the Sowell Bay Aquarium each night, and Cameron, a 30-year-old man who leads an aimless life until he starts working there, too.

Tova still mourns the recent loss of her dear husband, as well as the death of her teenage son at sea 30 years before. Yes, those 30 years are significant. Marcellus is the one who recognizes that Tova and Cameron are related somehow. One thing he can't do is speak, so how can he communicate what he knows to these two hapless humans? And can he do it before his own rapidly approaching death?

Van Pelt makes us believe this fantasy. She fills her novel with pleasures and surprises, strong characters and an octopus to love.

Dialogue versus monologue

Dialogue, then, is the basic form of human speech — and monologue, in which one speaker is silent for a very long time, exists only in special cases such as theatrical performances, prayers, and ceremonial speeches.

Peter Farb, Word Play

Peter Farb never met my father or a guy I used to work with or any number of other people I've known who can't seem to stop talking. I saw an old man in a restaurant one day who wouldn't pause his monologue long enough for his server to break away and attend to other diners.

Ideally dialogue is the basic form of human speech, yet monologues are found in more than just stage plays, literary works, speeches and prayer. (Actually, prayer is ideally supposed to be a dialogue. Most people just don't do it very well.) So many individuals enjoy the sound of their own voices. They have their stories to tell and insist that others listen to them, even if they have heard them before. So many of us just don't know when to shut up. Listening is the part of conversation most often ignored. Even when we seem to be listening, we may actually just be waiting for a chance to launch into our own monologue.

Tom Hanks in Cast Away

The best conversations are, of course, dialogues. And dialogue is often the best part of a novel, at least when the author is kind enough to remind us frequently who it is who is talking. Movies without much dialogue are possible — I am thinking of Robert Redford';s Alone and Tom Hanks's Cast Away. Yet in most movies, as in most plays and TV shows, things start to get interesting when people talk to each other.

And so it is in life. Most of us need somebody to talk with, at least once in awhile. Those monologues we recite when we are alone just aren't the same.

Wartime murder

The social dislocation and the emotional toll of war increased deadly violence in the family and among strangers, while the bomb-scarred landscape helped to hide the victims.

Amy Helen Bell, Under Cover of Darkness

As if the Germans didn't kill enough Londoners during World War II — with the Blitz and later the V-1 and V-2 missile attacks — the city's residents seemed driven to kill each other during this period, as well. Amy Helen Bell tells us about it in her 2024 book Under Cover of Darkness: Murders in Blackout London.

Before the war, murders in London averaged between 250 and 300 a year. The murder rate rose throughout the war, climbing to a high of 492 murders in 1945, the last year of the war. And because the bombing left behind so many bodies, there is no telling how many other murders went undetected.

Some of the most tragic cases detailed by Bell were the result of the fear of a German invasion. A nanny killed the child in her care and herself to keep the girl out of the hands of the Nazis. A mother killed her beloved daughter for similar reasons.

Other murders were committed by soldiers stationed in London. Their victims were usually women.

Abortion was illegal, yet not uncommon during this period. Some murder cases involved abortion in one way or another. Women, as well as babies, often became statistics in suspicious-death cases.

People of other races came to the city during the war, and some murders were racially motivated.

Bell tells us about two serial killers operating in London. In one of these cases, an innocent man probably went to the gallows for a murder committed by someone else.

And then there were the domestic crimes, usually husbands killing wives, that are all too common even in peacetime.

Bell observes that in most crime reporting, the focus usually falls more on the killers than their victims. She tries to reverse that spotlight as much as possible in her book, telling us as much as she can about the victims. Yet this is not always possible, for the killers are the ones who are thoroughly investigated and who go to trial, while victims often leave little behind in the public record.

Wandering minds

Is a wandering mind a good thing or a bad thing? It depends.

When our minds wandered when we were in school it was a bad thing, or at least it seemed that way. That moment seemed to be when your teacher was most likely to ask you a question. When our minds wander at work, we could lose some time, lose a customer or even, as in my father's case, lose a finger.

I know when my mind is wandering in church because that is when I am most likely to start yawning. Yet sometimes during a sermon my mind turns to a sermon I might preach on that same topic, and because I do sometimes preach sermons, this is perhaps not all bad.

The worst time for mind-wandering, it seems to me, is when one is trying to sleep. Sometimes I awaken at 3 a.m. and cannot get back to sleep because my mind will not relax. It floats from one topic to another — things I've done, things I need to do and fantasies about things I wish would happen. Yet sometimes during these wanderings I think of something I need to do but would have otherwise probably forgotten. So even here, a wandering mind can sometimes be beneficial.

As a part-time writer, I find a wandering mind vital to what I do. So many of my best ideas come unbidden, while my mind is straying from one topic to another. Great thoughts come to me while driving or while taking a shower when I didn't even realize I was thinking about what those ideas pertained to.

I suspect that many of the best inventions, most original business ideas, best lines of poetry, best novel plots, etc., have been the result of a wandering mind.

Unreturned books

McKinney Hubbard

Everything comes to him who waits, except a loaned book.

McKinney Hubbard

Public libraries stamp their name on every book they loan out, as well as the date when it is due back. They know the names of the lenders and where to find them. Yet even they often don't get their books back. Try to walk out of a library with a book you failed to check out properly and alarms will likely go off.

If libraries with their various levels of security have difficulty keeping track of all their books, it is certainly no easier for individuals to ever see their books again after letting friends or acquaintances borrow them. There are many reasons for this:

1. People often have difficulty finishing books, however much they want to. They put them aside to get back to later, and days turn into months and into years.

2. Books can get lost. We put books on top of books. We move. We put clutter away when company comes, then fail to put things back where they were.

3. As time passes, we forgot who actually owns a particular book. Is this mine or did I borrow it from somebody? If I borrowed it, from whom?

4. After a long period of time, it can be embarrassing to return a borrowed item. It calls attention to the failure to return it promptly. Maybe the owner has forgotten all about it. Or at least we may hope.

5. Sometimes those who borrow books like them so much they simply don't want to give them back.

The death of a critic

British mystery writer Anthony Horowitz became more successful than ever when he started making himself a main character in his novels. In The Twist of a Knife (2022) he makes himself the prime suspect.

While Horowitz may be a main character, he is not the main character. That would be Daniel Hawthorne, a former police officer who now gives police officers fits by being smarter than them. The author plays the hapless Watson to Hawthorne's Sherlock.

The idea of the partnership is for Hawthorne to solve perplexing murder cases while Horowitz observes and then writes books about them. The two have parted ways at the beginning of this story, Hawthorne being a difficult man to get along with. But when Horowitz writes a play and when a severe drama critic is then murdered with his dagger after opening night, he begs Hawthorne for help.

The evidence against Horowitz is substantial. His fingerprints are on the murder weapon. One of his hairs is found at the scene. And so on.

The novel becomes more Agatha Christie than Sherlock Holmes, complete with a final scene where all the suspects, plus the investigating officers, are present while Hawthorne makes the great reveal.

This is an engaging murder mystery, one of the best in the series.

Re-creating hope

In his book Wonderworks, Angus Fletcher recalls what Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote about poetic language, how it "rearranges usual speech in order 'to re-create.'" Put another way, poets force us to stop and think.

Fletcher uses the example of a poet writing "a flower blue" instead of the more normal "a blue flower." Merely by rearranging words, the poet makes us pause a split second to picture that "flower blue" in our minds.

Emily Dickinson

Lately I have been thinking about Emily Dickinson's wonderful short poem about hope:

Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul,/And sings the tune without the words,/And never stops at all.

She might have written, "Hope is like a bird," but "the thing with feathers" stops us in our tracks. It is what most people remember about this poem.

Dickinson changed the way we think about hope. Birds don't normally come when you call them. They perch where they will. And this bird flies into our soul, each of our souls, perches and stays there. The tune without the words suggests something indefinite. We don't know precisely even what we are hoping for. We simply hear the tune within us that lifts our spirits whatever our circumstances might be.

Emily Dickinson re-created the way many people think about hope. It is not something we can manufacture. "Be positive," we tell each other in vain. Instead hope is just something that flies in and stays there, always singing, always inspiring us to keep going.

The meaning of motions

Who knew there could be so many different gestures with so many different meanings? Francois Caradec enlightens us in his 2005 book Dictionary of Gestures (translated into English in 2018).

Caradec's book is more than 300 pages long, usually with three to five gestures per page. So that's a lot of gestures from around the world, many of them with multiple meanings.

He includes obscene gestures, and there are more of them than you might think, and childhood gestures, and everything in between

Many of these are motions you might not even think of as gestures, such as arm wrestling and playing footsie under the table. Even applause is a gesture that needs explaining in this book.

Most gestures are illustrated, and the drawings often indicate the sex, the age or the nationality of the person most likely to use the gesture. Literary quotations accompany many of the entries.

To make it easier to find the gesture one is looking for, Caradec divides his book into chapters according to the body parts involved in the gesture. Thus, there is a chapter for gestures involving the armpits, the fist, the tongue, teeth, the neck and each finger, as well as every other part of the body.

Because gestures can mean different things in different parts of the world, one needs to be careful. Caradec tells us that American soldiers killed multiple Iraqis who did not stop after being given the halt gesture. It turned out that in the Middle East a raised hand, palm out, is a sign of greeting.

Where ideas are born

Norman Cousins

Norman Cousins once said, "A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life."

Many people may think just the opposite, that a library, whether large or small, is something more like a cemetery where old ideas, old history and old stories are laid to rest. The future, to them, lies elsewhere. Libraries represent the past.

I often think back to high school. Why did our teachers insist that we have a certain number of references for our reports and essays? This was a nuisance to so many students, who preferred to find one good source, usually World Book encyclopedia in my day, and then paraphrase it.

I did not understand it at the time, but I came to realize that different ideas from different sources can produce something new and original when melded together in the mind of an original thinker.

It was much the same when I became a newspaper reporter. A news story with just one source — or worse, from a press release — tended to be weak and uninteresting. But when there were multiple sources, some from each side of an issue, the story had life and originality. It became something new.

The library is a storehouse of ideas, observations, stories and records that, as Cousins suggests, gives birth to something new. The best nonfiction books often have many pages of references at the back. I pulled David McCullough's 1776 off my shelf. It has more than 70 pages of source notes and bibliography. To produce his original book, he clearly spent hours upon hours in various libraries. History came alive, thanks to libraries.

Shopping list

Most of us who go shopping, especially for food, have shopping lists. Otherwise we are certain to forget something we need. I seem able to remember two items, but not three or more. I need a list even when I shop for clothing.

On my list

And I also have a shopping list for books, but it is more than a sheet of paper. It is a small notebook that can fit easily into my shirt pocket, one reason I prefer shirts with pockets.

Whenever I see a book or hear about a book or read a review of a book that interests me, I write the title and author down in my notebook. Sometimes I see a clothbound book in a bookstore that looks like something I might want to read. I enter it into my notebook while waiting for the paperback to come out.

For fiction, I list the books alphabetically by author. Thus there is an A list, a B list and so on. I usually put all nonfiction in one long list.

When I buy a book, I cross it off the list. Sometimes, after finding a book in a store, I decide I don't really want it after all. I cross it off my list. There are some books I never find, or I must resort to Amazon.

On my H list right now I have Close to Death by Anthony Horowitz, Burn by Peter Heller and The Life Impossible by Matt Haig. Many other titles have been crossed out. Every title on my E list now has a line through it. Obviously I buy a lot of books.

Serial books about serial killers

Sometimes one serial killer is not enough, or so Alex Grecian seems to think in The Harvest Man (2015) and his other novels

Jack the Ripper remains at large in London in 1890, but he has rivals who also enjoy cutting people up. One of these is Alan Ridgeway, an obvious copycat. Another is called the Harvest Man, an original. He is a small man who thinks himself still a child, and he is looking for his parents. When he finds couples who look something like his parents, he hides in their attics, then attacks at night, rearranging their faces with his knife before killing them.

Scotland Yard has a Murder Squad assigned to tracking down these killers, and the quest occupies a series of novels. In this one, Inspector Walter Day  is still recovering from injuries sustained through torture in The Devil's Workshop. He has a wife and two small daughters he needs to protect while still trying to find the killers. Nevil Hammersmith is a former cop who still acts like one, determined to track down Jack even without a badge. Dr. Kingsley is the coroner who has more work than he can handle in these books. Fiona is Kingsley's daughter, who loves Hammersmith even though he seems too preoccupied to notice.

I tend to prefer novels that have both a beginning and an end, rather than those with stories that, like those serial killers, just keep going and going and going.

Accountability

He'd made a mistake and she could choose to dissect and examine every particle of his actions, or she could try to move on.

Phaedra Patrick, The Little Italian Hotel

The Little Italian Hotel (2023) is the first novel by British author Phaedra Patrick that I've read that I have not enjoyed, and the line above helps explain why. It is all the husband's fault.

Adrian, Ginny's husband, does make a mistake, certainly. He tells her early in the novel that he is leaving her after 25 years of marriage. "There are cracks in our marriage and they are getting wider," he says. He has joined a dating site.

To celebrate their 25th anniversary, Ginny, who makes a career giving advice on a radio show, has scheduled a holiday in Italy without discussing the trip with her husband beforehand. The money is nonrefundable.

Such controlling behavior suggests the kind of widening cracks Adrian refers to. Yet her actions are never mentioned again in the novel. Everything is his fault, which may satisfy Patrick's female readers, but to this male reader it all seems a bit unfair, especially after Adrian returns to Ginny and apologizes and after she has developed a passion for her Italian hotel keeper. As far as we know, he has never so much as kissed another woman, but we witness her kissing another man. She, of course, never apologizes.

The gist of the novel is that Ginny, because the trip in nonrefundable, goes to Italy without her husband, inviting along listeners to her program who have also suffered heartbreak — one who has lost a daughter, one who is losing a mother to dementia, one who has lost a dog and one who knows he is dying. The real question, of course, is not whether Ginny can help the others feel more positive about their own situations, but whether she can patch up her own life.

Female readers may read Patrick's conclusion differently than I did.

Behind Heller's novel

Novels, especially first novels, are often as much fact as fiction, and that was true of one of the best novels to come out of World War II — Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Patricia Chapman Meder tells us about it in The True Story of Catch-22 (2012).

Meder is the daughter of Willis F. Chapman, the model for Colonel Cathcart in Heller's novel. This relationship gave her an inside connection with many surviving veterans of the 340th Bomb Group, in which Heller served as a bombardier. Heller, who died in 1999, contributed little to this book other than quotations from his novel, but many of those who served with him in Italy were able to tell their version of events, describing where the novel and the truth parted company.

The term catch-22 was an invention — Heller originally called it catch-18 — but the idea behind it was real. The number of bombing missions required before a flier could be sent home kept increasing as the war went on because of the need for veteran fliers. The only way to avoid these dangerous missions was to claim insanity, which was proof you were not insane. That was the catch.

Heller, the model for Yossarian in the novel, only wanted to survive each mission, his former mates recalled. Whether his bombs actually hit their targets did not matter much to him.

In the end, Meder's book is more military history than literary history. Those with an interest in both will no doubt appreciate it more than those interested in just one or the other.

Authors in person

Just about everyone who gets an opportunity to meet with an author in person ends up feeling mildly let down, and in some cases, grievously disappointed.

Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks

Heroes can disappoint us. Writers who spend hours crafting perfect sentences may not be nearly as engaging in person. I understand what Neal Stephenson is saying above. I just don't agree with him.

I have met and spoken with many authors over the years as a book reviewer and as a frequent attendee at literary events, and for the most part, they have impressed me, or at least not disappointed me. Most of them seemed like ordinary people, and I liked that. It was reassuring somehow. I don't want my heroes to be superheroes.

Novelist Ann Patchett has appeared at a couple of events I have attended. She was the key speaker both at an event at Kenyon College in Ohio and another at Eckerd College in Florida. I found her bubbly and personable and intelligent. Whether giving a prepared speech or answering questions, she had something interesting to say.

Jess Walter

Jess Walter is an introverted former journalist, just like me.

Laura Lippman is another former journalist who loves reading books, again just like me.

Mark Winegardner grew up in northwestern Ohio, also just like me. His high school was one of my high school's rivals.

I enjoyed talking with Alan Hlad, Cathie Pelletier, Tony D'Souza, Dandi Daley Mackall, Christopher Moore (a phone interview), Walter Tevis, Jack Mathews, Les Roberts, Donald Ray Pollock, Carla Buckley, Thrity Umbrigar and others.

I was impressed listening to talks by Richard Russo, Russell Banks, Alexander McCall Smith, David McCullough, Stewart O'Nan, P.J. O'Rourke, Susan Isaacs, Lee Smith, Amor Towles and others.

I can't think of any author who actually disappointed me in person. Perhaps if you don't put authors on a pedestal when you read their books, you will be less likely to be disappointed when you meet them in person.

Something in common

The Girl by the Bridge (2018) is another in a series of fine mystery novels by the Icelandic author Arnaldur Indridason.

There are three different mysteries from three different periods that would appear unconnected, yet have common threads.

In the present there is the drug death of a young woman who had been involved in smuggling drugs. Was she murdered? Was it accidental? Was it suicide? Danni has lived with her grandparents, who seemed to have taken excellent care of her. So why had she hated them?

The novel's title refers to a girl whose body had been found near a bridge years earlier. Her doll was found nearby. Her death was called accidental at the time, and records tell very little. Konrad, a former cop, wonders if she might have been murdered. Meanwhile, Danni's grandparents ask him to look into the death of their granddaughter.

At the same time Konrad has his own personal mystery that has bothered him since his youth. What kind of man was his father? Who had murdered him so many years ago? And why?

Indridason shifts his focus from one case to another and back again, gradually revealing what all three have in common.

American readers will be challenged by many of the names in the novel. This is not a book you will probably want to read aloud to somebody else. When you read this fine story to yourself, however, you are allowed to skim over the names.

In pursuit of a killer

Paulette Jiles has become one of our best writers of western fiction, and she does it again in Chenneville (2023).

The plot seems simple enough, familiar to anyone who has watched many 1950s western movies. A Union officer comes out of a coma after the close of the Civil War and struggles to regain his memory. Recovery is slow, but gradually he regains his health, then heads back to his home near St. Louis. There he learns that his sister, her husband and child have been murdered by a man named Dodd. The rest of the novel tells of his long pursuit of Dodd into Texas. He aims to kill Dodd, whatever the consequences.

Yet Jiles throws in enough complications to make this simple plot interesting, even if not always unpredictable.

It's winter, and John Chenneville must struggle through the frigid temperatures and deep snow. Dodd rides horses until they wear out, then gets another. Chenneville is kinder to his animals, and thus slower. Even so, he sometimes gets ahead of Dodd. Along the way he picks up a dog with puppies. He gets very sick. A telegraph operator whom he meets later gets murdered by Dodd after he leaves, but Chenneville becomes the prime suspect. A U.S. marshal pursues him. Thus he is wanted for murder before he has a chance to commit one.

And then the best complication of all — Chenneville meets and falls in love with a female telegraph operator in Marshall, Texas. Can she dissuade him from his vow to avenge his sister by becoming a murderer? Or will she help him?

The author's News or the World was turned into a Tom Hanks movie. This novel could be turned into another fine film. Where's Randolph Scott when you need him?

Required reading

A front-page headline in The Wall Street Journal recently read, "Books in English Class Shift Little in Decades." In other words, high school students today are mostly reading the same assigned books that their parents read.

I find this surprising. I had assumed that with feminism and wokeness dominating schools of education in recent years that high school English curriculums would now be mostly books written by women, people of color and homosexuals. Yet the article says, "All of the authors of the top 10 books are white, eight men and two women."

This probably has much to do with English teachers, administrators and school board members favoring the books they themselves read in high school. Sticking with the tried and true is usually easier and safer.

Literature favored in many high schools often includes The Great Gatsby, The Crucible, Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird and Hamlet.

The article concludes with a comment by an Illinois teacher, "I more than anything want to create a lifelong reader."

I think that should be the goal of all English teachers. Unfortunately much required reading may accomplish just the opposite. How many students forced to read Hamlet will then volunteer to read Macbeth? Probably not many. They might even avoid Shakespeare for the rest of their lives.  To Kill a Mockingbird might have a better success rate.

The ideal assigned reading for high school students should possess the following qualities:

1. It should be relatively short. Short books like Of Mice and Men are less intimidating. Students are constantly distracted by friends, activities, video games and social media. Short books are more likely to be actually read in full.

2. It should be meaningful. That is, it must bring out issues that stimulate the mind and make students want to talk about them in class.  It need not be a book about a contemporary teenager, but that might help.

3. It should be wholesome. I am talking about today's standards, not those of 50 years ago. Even so, there must be standards. Why invite controversy from parents?  A novel does not need graphic sex and four-letter words to be profound and engaging.

4. It should be interesting, even exciting. People read books because they enjoy them. When assigned a book that makes a reader want to keep turning the pages to discover what happens next, a student will be more likely to finish reading that book and perhaps even want to find another book just like it.

In that case, mission accomplished.

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?