The beauty of trees

Few works of art are as beautiful as an old tree.

I live in a part of Florida where ancient trees, mostly oaks, can be found practically anywhere — surrounding my condo complex, on an adjacent golf course where I like to walk in the evening, on the grounds of a nearby church. They take my breath away.

And so I love Susan Tyler Hitchcock's Into the Forest: The Secret Language of Trees. Hitchcock writes beautifully about trees, yet her words are overpowered by the photographs that dominate this National Geographic book. One cannot turn a page without finding a gorgeous photograph — a Japanese maple, an ancient apple tree, fig trees in Australia, children climbing a tree, beech trees in Virginia, cypress trees in a Louisiana bayou and on and on.

One need not read a word to love this book. But anyone who does read the text will be rewarded. Hitchcock's essays are brief — to make room for all those photos — but they say a lot in few words. She tells of a tree estimated to be more than 5,000 years old. Its location is kept a secret to protect it. Trees still survive that were in Hiroshima when the city was otherwise destroyed by an atomic bomb. She describes "forest bathing" — simply walking through a forest slowly and breathing in the air.

Trees have value even beyond their beauty and the worth of the wood and fruit they produce. The author writes that just one red maple tree in Ohio removes 5,500 pounds of carbon emissions over 20 years. It saves 570 kilowatt-hours of electricity. Imagine what a forest can do.

No prizes

There are no prizes for reading, no pay raises in it, no competitive advantage in it. It accomplishes nothing.

Heather Cass White, Books Promiscuously Read

Those are surprising words to find in a book celebrating reading. Are they true? Well, no, but yes.

Schools and libraries give children prizes for reading books all the time. Reading accomplishes nothing? Don't let students ever hear that. No pay raises and competitive advantages? You mean all those self-help books and business books are worthless? How can English teachers and literary critics advance in their careers without reading?

Heather Cass White

Yet for most of us most of the time, Heather Cass White probably has a point. Most of us get little or nothing of permanent value from reading a book. A week after reading a Stuart Woods novel or a Catherine Coulter novel you may have difficulty even remembering the plot. If there are any great lines or great passages or great truths in a book you've just read, you may have difficulty holding them in your mind for more than a few days, or even a few hours. There truly are no rewards for reading most of the time.

White responds to her own words above with this wisdom: "All reading has to offer is a particular, irreplaceable internal experience. Readers should keep faith that that experience is enough."

Sadly, most experiences in life, including the best ones, tend to be fleeting. A convervsation with a friend, a great movie, a walk in the park, a wonderful meal — they are all experiences that offer no prizes, no pay raises, no competitive advantages. They accomplish nothing. And yet, like reading a good book, they make life worth living.

Good, good 'Seymour Brown'

The title character in the 2023 Susan Isaacs novel Bad, Bad Seymour Brown has been dead for two decades. He may be dead, but the mysteries surrounding his life and death remain.

The novel is the second in an entertaining series featuring Corie Geller, a former FBI agent not fully recovered psychologically from her first adventure (Takes One to Know One), and her father, a retired New York City cop. He had been a police detective when Brown and his wife were consumed in an arson fire that destroyed their home and everything in it. Well, not quite everything. Their five-year-old daughter, April, somehow managed to escape.

April is now a college professor specializing in film studies. When someone tries to run her down with a car, she remembers the detective who was so kind to her years before. That's how Corie and her dad get involved in trying to figure out what's going on.

Can this apparent attempted murder have anything to do with Seymour Brown's murder? He had been a money launderer for mobsters. Are they still trying to get back all the money they lost with his death? But why would they have killed him? And why would they want to kill his daughter? Or might Seymour's philandering be the explanation for all this?

Isaacs is known for her female-centric mysteries and thrillers, starting with Compromising Positions in 1978. Her stories tend to be lighthearted and deadly serious at the same time, and Bad, Bad Seymour Brown is no exception. It's a thrill from beginning to end, with lots of giggles along the way.

What makes a classic?

"A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say," Italo Calvino said.

For those of us who have wondered what makes a literary classic, that may be as good a definition as any. If each generation can read a book and find that it has something to say to that generation and if each person can reread a book and discover that it says something this time that it didn't say last time, then you have a classic.

Most books frankly do not fit that definition. Read a typical best-selling novel from even a decade ago and it probably does not hold the same magic that it once did. You may even wonder how it ever became a bestseller. Or reread a book you enjoyed just a couple of years ago, and it may not entertain you or inform you nearly as much this time. You know the ending. It's all familiar. There's nothing new in it. There's no excitement left. What you have is definitely not a classic.

Children often enjoy hearing the same book read to them at bedtime over and over again. To them, this is a classic story. Each time they hear it, it delights them again. For adult readers, classic books work in much the same way. Some people reread the same book every year or two. They never tire of it because they always find something new in it. They view the characters in a different way each time. They find themes they had not realized were there previously. They may simply enjoy revisiting familiar characters.

And then there are old books that each generation discovers anew. They are often taught in school. Or they may be suggested by parents, who may have learned about the books from their own parents. Books like Little Women, Black Beauty, Journey to the Center of the Earth and To Kill a Mockingbird fit into this category. And of course, all fairy tales and nursery rhymes have become classics in the same way.

Classics are almost impossible to predict at the time they are first published. Some books seem like classics, then quickly disappear. Others don't make waves, then are rediscovered and become recognized as classics years later. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is one such book.

Some classics can fade in and out of fashion as tastes and attitudes change. Some classics speak mainly to intellectuals, those with the kind of mind that can appreciate something like Paradise Lost. Other classics speak to more ordinary readers. I was surprised recently to find that Jacqueline Susann's 1966 novel Valley of the Dolls remains in print. Does that make it a classic? I guess it does, at least according to Italo Calvino.

Fun with maps

You might think a terrible map would be one that, for example, shows Illinois west of the Mississippi River, not east.Yet Michel Howe in his Terrible Maps doesn't take maps seriously. The idea in his book is to have fun with them.

Some of his maps are, in fact, hilarious, as promised in his subtitle: "Hilarious Maps for a Ridiculous World." Others are yawners.

The map on the cover shows a typical Howe map. It shows the United Status. Indiana is in red. "Outdiana" is in green. Similarly a map of Africa shows Togo in red. Other countries are labeled "For here." A map of France is called "Map of Nice people." Only the city of Nice is in red. The rest of the country is green.

Howe tends to repeat the same joke over and over. For example, "Railway map of Antarctica" is blank. Likewise a map of Roman air bases in 2nd century AD. After the first, they're yawners.

Sometimes Howe really gets clever. One map shows the word for coma in all European languages. In every case it is either coma or koma, except for Poland, where the word is spiaczka. Another map shows countries with the moon on their flag and other countries with their flag on the moon.

All in all, the book is worth a few laughs, quick to read and fun to show to friends.

Guilty pleasures?

The idea of these books as lesser works, or "guilty pleasures," is baffling to me.

Louise Wilder, Blurb Your Enthusiasm

I, too, am baffled.

Louise Wilder

What Louise Wilder is talking about above is so-called genre fiction — mysteries, romance, science fiction, thrillers and westerns. Why should such books, as a whole, be considered lesser works? Why should a person ever feel guilty about reading a book in any of these categories?

True, some of these books may be poorly written. Some may be trite. Some may be mostly filled with violence, sex, profanity and descriptions of disgusting behavior. But isn't this also true of some books in the general category, even what's regarded as literary fiction? Bad books can be found anywhere, but so can good books.

The concept of dividing novels into genres began, I assume, for the convenience of readers. Many readers prefer reading mysteries or romances or westerns or whatever. And so bookstores began setting these books apart. Why should someone looking for a good sci-fi novel have to look through every book in the store to find the right one? If general fiction could be so easily divided into smaller groups, booksellers would no doubt do so.

Those who review books and teach books in literature classes, unfortunately, have tended to view genres as literary ghettos. These are considered second-class books before they can even be read. The problem with this way of thinking however, is that Jane Austen's Persuasion is a romance novel. George Orwell's 1984 is a sci-fi novel. Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove is a western (which won a Pulitzer). In other words, quality can be found in genres just as it can be found anywhere else.

And even if one is not looking for literary quality, but just wants a good time, why should you feel guilty about reading what you enjoy?

Maigret, both victim and hero

The cover of the most recent paperback edition of Georges Simenon's Maigret's Pickpocket (1967) shows the interior of a small Parisian restaurant. This is a good choice, for much of the novel takes place in such a restaurant. Most of the witnesses in this murder case, as well as all of the suspects, eat and drink here most evenings.

The story begins when a young man picks Inspector Maigret's pocket on a bus. The stolen wallet includes his police badge. Yet the wallet is soon returned with nothing missing. The thief reveals himself and pleads with Maigret for his help.

Ricain is an impoverished, but apparently talented, man trying to break into the film industry. He tells Maigret that while he was out searching for someone to loan him some money, his wife, an aspiring actress, was murdered in their apartment. Although the husband is the most likely suspect, Maigret does not arrest him and, after the first day, does not even keep him under surveillance. He considers everyone a suspect — those men with whom Sophie had shared her sexual favors, jealous women, those who have loaned Ricain money.

As usual in Simenon novels, Maigret gathers information bit by bit, processes it silently and reveals all only after he has worked everything out in his mind. Readers hear the same clues but have no idea what is going in Maigret's head. Cases seem to be solved suddenly, rather than gradually, surprising all including the inspector himself.

This novel, which has a twist you won't find in many mysteries, is another winner for one of the most prolific of all mystery writers.

A social experience

The extremity of the Dostoevskian world is a good reminder that the prolonged exposure to a novelist's sensibility required by a lengthy novel is akin to a long train ride with a stranger, sometimes more demanding and uncongenial than the reader is prepared for. In that sense, every novel is, in the end, a social experience as well as an experience of solitude.

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Jane Smiley compares reading a long novel, like Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot, to talking to a stranger on a long train ride. I don't know why the metaphor would not work just as well with a short novel and a short train ride.

Later in her book she states that "the novel is always a social occasion."

The point is that even though one may be reading in solitude, there is a conversation going on. The author is speaking to you and, at least in your own mind, you are speaking back.

Sometimes authors, in a sense, become our friends, and we keep returning to their novels because we enjoy conversing with them. A novel by a new author is more like talking with a stranger on a train or a plane. One never knows what to expect, whether we are going to like this person or not. What the author says may surprise us or even shock us. The language used by an author may repel us or confuse us — or simply delight us.

Yet the social experience of reading a novel, it seems to me, involves more that just conversing with the author. One also meets a variety of characters. And like the strangers one might meet at a party, you are drawn more to some than others. Some you want to spend more time with, others you would prefer to avoid.

Again, the appeal of novel series with continuing characters has to do with our wanting to spend more time with old friends. I keep reading Alexander McCall Smith's novels set in Botswana because I enjoy sitting in on conversations with Precious Ramotswe, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni and the others. Reading novels is indeed a social experience, ideally a rewarding one.

Comfort books

We know what comfort foods are. They usually are the kind of meals Mom used to make — vegetable soup, meatloaf, baked chicken, macaroni and cheese, whatever.

But what about comfort books? Can there be such a thing? I think so.

In one sense, these are books that thrilled us in our youth, books we return to, at least in our minds. Sometimes we may actually want to sit down and read them again. With luck, these books still have the same impact, or at the very least remind us of the impact they once had. I know of a man who tried to collect all the books he read as a child, or that were read to him, preferably in the same editions he remembered from his boyhood.

In another sense, at least for some of us, books give comfort in themselves. The very presence of books might do this. Preferably they are your own books, although libraries and bookstores might help, as well.

A. Edward Newton

I came across the following quotation from A. Edward Newton, a noted collector of books: "Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired (by passionate devotion to them) produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can peradventure read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity ... we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance."

Books, Newton suggests, give comfort even if unread. I am sure that is not true for everyone, or even for most people. For some of us, however, it is very true. Some people find comfort in the art on their walls or in family photos or in various trophies and souvenirs from their lives. But for some of us who understand what Newton meant, books do the job by their very existence.