An escape or a confirmation?

Lawrence Durrell

"I don't believe one reads to escape reality," the British novelist Lawrence Durrell said. "A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he had not experienced."

But can't both be true, even at the same time?

A man may work in an office in Cincinnati or as a plumber in Philadelphia and, in the evening, enjoy reading western novels. He may want to both escape the reality of his own circumstances — perhaps there is even a nagging wife — while at the same time wanting to experience a reality, even if it's an imagined one, that he can never experience in real life.

Or a war novel may be read by someone with no military experience at all. He will never know what it is really like being in combat, but a book can confirm that reality, while at the same taking him briefly away from his normal routine.

A lonely middle-aged woman who has never experienced romance in her life may read one romance novel after another to confirm a reality that she believes other women have known.

And so on.

Thanks to books, one can travel into space, explore the deep ocean, find true love, win a bar fight, hit a home run in the World Series, solve mysteries, travel the world or do almost anything else. There are many more realities than any one person can experience in one lifetime. Books expand our possibilities.

Behind the scheme

Emily St. John Mandel's 2020 novel The Glass Hotel is a bit hard to peg. It covers a lot of years in relatively few pages. There are numerous characters. It is about a Ponzi scheme, yet it is also a ghost story

All this adds to the novel's charm.

The hotel of the title is where the novel begins and where it ends. Hotel Caiette is isolated on Vancouver Island, accessible only by boat. Only rich people stay there. Only those who prefer isolation can work there.

Early on Jonathan Alkaitis, a wealthy investor, meets Vincent, the bartender. Despite the misleading name, Vincent is actually a beautiful young woman. Alkaitis quickly makes her his pretend wife, never a replacement for his beloved late wife, but an attractive woman to keep on his arm and to share a bed with.

The life suits them both of them until authorities arrest Alkaitis for stealing from his many wealthy clients. He goes to prison. Vincent goes into isolation, working aboard ships where nobody knows her past.

Meanwhile Mandel looks into the lives of the scheme's victims, as well as those who worked with Alkaitis and suspected something was wrong yet were making too much money to take a stand. While all this is going on,  ghosts come and go, appearing to several people during the course of the novel.

This is not your usual crime novel — or ghost story — but it is a gem.

Why no ads?

Magazines and newspapers can have more ads than articles. Television interrupts every show every few minutes with several minutes of commercials. Even supposedly ad-free public television throws in ads at the beginning and end of programing. When you go to the movies, you must sit through several minutes worth of commercials before the movie finally starts. On the web, you can't watch YouTube videos, do a Google search or do much of anything else (reading this blog being an exception) without encountering ads.

So how have books survived all these years without advertising?

To be sure, each book's publisher probably promotes other books they publish, especially those by the same author, somewhere in each volume. But you don't find Pepsi ads between chapters. You never find a State Farm ad on the back cover. How can this be?

Other media survive thanks to advertising, but not books. Advertising makes mass communication free, or at least relatively cheap. Somebody has to pay for "free" television programs. Somebody has to pay for web searches. Film producers and movie theaters need extra income to stay afloat.

Yet publishers keep publishing books, more and more each year, without putting advertising between the covers. What gives?

First, many people like to see their words in print, meaning they are willing to write books for little financial return. For publishers, books are relatively inexpensive to print, but they are not inexpensive to purchase. We readers are the ones who pay the freight. Books might actually be less expensive if they contained advertising. We must now pay about $30, sometimes a lot more, for a hardback book and nearly $20 for a paperback. Perhaps some advertising would help publishers, authors and readers, at least financially.

We are spared advertising in books, in part, because most books aren't all that popular. Most books, in fact, sell only a few thousand copies, if that. Even bestsellers don't necessarily sell enough copies to make authors — or potential advertisers — rich. Thus advertising in books doesn't make much sense in the book business. Why buy advertising in a book that may sell relatively few copies? And if publishers ever became dependent on advertising, fewer books might be published.

The ad-free tradition helps. It's how books have always been. We don't want our books "sponsored" because advertisers may try to influence content. Sometimes, for example, we see certain products in films because the manufacturers of those products have invested money in the productions. We might possibly see something similar if books contained advertising.

Quite piossibly the future of book publishing depends upon the industry keeping books ad-free.

Underwater sound

We may have heard about humpback whales that sing in the ocean, but it may not have ever occurred to us that other forms of sea life communicate by sound, as well. It was Jacques-Yves Cousteau who coined the phrase "the silent world" in one of his films about the sea, and most people believed him.

Yet the oceans are a concert of sound, it turns out. Amorina Kingdon tells us about it in her 2024 book Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Under Water. Many different species communicate by sound. These are not necessarily vocal sounds. Some species produce sound by rubbing body parts together or in other ways.

Kingdon writes, "Sculpins move their pectoral girdle. Toadfish, squirrelfish, and others drum on their swim bladder with special muscles or tendons, making resonant hums, moans, and boops. Blue grunt or beau-gregory scrape or grind special teeth in their throats. Some fish burp or expel gas from their anus."

Researchers have speculated that the songs of humpback whales may actually, in a sense, rhyme.

Whale sounds can travel many miles. It is how they communicate with each other. Some species use sound to attract mates or to find their young in dark water.

Humans have a way if interfering with the natural world without meaning to, such as by simply cutting down  dead trees. This is true of underwater sound, as well. The engines of ships, sonar and windmills, for example, can make life difficult for sea life and may be responsible for those mysterious beached whales.

Kingdon gives us the good and the bad of underwater sound.

Caught in a blizzard

Iceland is a small country that has produced some remarkable writers of thrillers and mysteries. One of these is Ragnar Jonasson, whose Outside (2021) makes compulsive reading.

The plot seems simple enough. Four friends go on a mid-winter hunting trip when an unexpected storm sweeps in. Yet the blizzard is just the first, and perhaps the least, of many surprises.

They seek shelter in a cabin, where they find a still, silent man holding a gun. Gunnslaugur may be a respected lawyer but he is also an alcoholic who, this being a hunting trip, has his own gun. In a panic, he shoots the silent man. Now what do they do?

It turns out that the four friends are not as friendly as we were first led to believe. In fact, one of the novel's big mysteries is why these four people would ever go hunting together in the first place. Nobody really likes Gunnslaugur. Daniel left Iceland to become an actor in London. He doesn't like guns and isn't that fond of any of his "friends." Armann is an outdoorsman and a professional guide, and it is he who organized the trip, but he has a violent past. Helena, we learn, is Armann's twin sister, and she carries grudges against both Gunnslaugur and Daniel.

One disaster leads to another in Jonasson's story. The brief chapters, each told from the point of view of one of the four main characters, will keep every reader turning the pages as quickly as possible.

Whose rules?

The English language has always been tolerant of contributions from elsewhere. So many of the words we use, other than the basic Anglo-Saxon ones, come from other languages. English speakers may change them and pronounce them differently, but we keep them and make them our own.

Yet trouble seems to follow whenever other languages become too highly regarded by English speakers, often supposed language experts. Many of the silly language rules we older folks learned in school were imported from Latin as late as the 19th century. These include not splitting infinitives and not ending sentences with a preposition. Yet English is a Germanic language, not a Romance language. Latin rules do not apply to English.

After the Normans conquered England in 1066, numerous French words entered the English language — at least the English spoken by aristocrats. Thus, chickens became poultry and pigs became pork, among many others. Again, English welcomes words from anywhere.

But there are many words and phrases that English speakers have adopted simply because they sound French, yet they are not French at all. We just like to pretend they are French because they make us sound more sophisticated. These include such expressions as piece de resistance, nom de plume, affair d'amour and even negligee. These are unknown in France. The British simply made them up.

Over the years the British were quick to accept French spellings of English words. In fact, Americans spell many English words in a more traditional English way than the British do. The British now use the word honour because of French influence. Americans spell it as honor, the way the English used to. Similarly, Americans use theater, center and fiber, while the British, under French influence, now spell these theatre, centre and fibre.

But the English language isn't French, any more than it's Latin. We English speakers can take their words, but we should follow our own rules.

Picking up the pieces

So many brave young men died in World War I, yet yet the trials for those who survived, both men and women, continued even after the war was over. Somehow Helen Simonson produced a light-hearted novel, The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club (2024, out of this serious situation.

During the war, young British women had to step up and do many of the jobs young men had done before the war. Some of them discovered they liked doing these jobs, but when the war was over they were expected to quit and get married, never mind that there were fewer men available to marry. Meanwhile, wounded veterans found themselves unwanted for the many jobs newly available. Soldiers from India who had contributed to the war effort were less welcome in England once the war was over.

Set in the summer of 1919, Simonson's novel centers on Constance Haverhill, who did her part during the war, but now her bookeepping skills are unwanted. She is employed as an aide to a wealthy elderly woman who will soon need her no longer. Mrs. Fog is set to marry a sweetheart from long ago.

Constance doesn't know what she will do with herself, but then she befriends Poppy, an outgoing young woman who rode motorcycles during the war and wants to continue doing the same. She has several friends, female riders or mechanics, with similar frustrated ambitions. Poppy's brother, Harris, was a pilot in the war, but now he has a wounded leg, and the bank job promised to him before the war is no longer available. And although he is a gifted pilot despite his bad leg, nobody wants him flying their planes.

A badly damaged Sopwith Camel, purchased by Poppy, gives Harris incentive to live again, and with Constance as his unexpected flying partner, he begins to see a brighter future for himself. Will that future include Constance?

There are complications, of course, all of which result in an absorbing novel with just the ending readers want.

The right word

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

We think of Ruth Bader Ginsburg more for her legal commentary than her literary commentary, yet she once wrote something that must ring true to writers everywhere: "Even today, when I read, I notice with pleasure when an author has chosen a particular word, a particular place, for the picture it will convey to the readers."

Words matter to a writer, as well as to a discerning reader. Why one word and not another? Why one descriptive phrase and not another? Why set a story in one location and not another? Such choices matter, and often they matter a great deal.

In Muse of Fire, Michael Korda's book about World War I poets, he tells in detail how Siegfried Sassoon influenced changes in one of Wilfred Owen's most famous poems. Even the title was changed dramatically with one word choice. "Anthem for Dead Youth" became "Anthem for Doomed Youth." That single word change made the title more powerful, more mysterious, more memorable.

Sassoon suggested the poem be written in third person, rather than second person, as Owen originally wanted. The poem's first line changed from "What passing bells for you who die in herds?" to "What passing bells for those who die as cattle?" You became those; in herds became as cattle. These changes widened the scope of the poem somehow.

And so on.

The poem remained Owen's, yet Sassoon's editing made it immortal. All this demonstrates the importance of good editing, but it also illustrates Bader's point that a particular word choice can make a world of difference.

The poets' war

World War II produced several novelists of note, including James Jones, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut. World War I, however, was the poets' war. It produced one of the greatest war novels of all time, All Quiet on the Western Front, yet poetry still ruled the literary world, even though it was all but dead just a few years later when the second big war erupted.

Michael Korda, the author of a number of wartime histories, including With Wings Like Eagles, has written a fine book about World War I seen through the eyes of its poets, Muse of Fire (2024).

He focuses on six poets who fought in the war and wrote verse about their experiences: Rupert Brook, Alan Seeger, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Only Graves and Sassoon survived the war.

Their poetry changed as the war went on and on. To Brook and Seeger, the only American in the group, the war was a great adventure. "What bloody fun!" Brook wrote in a letter. In one of his best-known poems, he said: "If I should die, think only this of me:/That there's some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England."

Seeger, related to folk singer Pete Seeger, was even more romantic about combat. "I have a rendezvous with death ...," he wrote. And "that rare privilege of dying well."

The others viewed the war more realistically. No less patriotic that the other two, they nevertheless saw the war as pointless and a terrible waste of human life.

They were also shockingly blunt about what soldiers did in war. Writing about killing an enemy soldier with a bayonet, Sassoon wrote: "Sweet Sister, grant your soldier this;/That in good fury he may feel/The body where he sets his heel/Quail from your downward darting kiss." In another poem he wrote the phrase, "The place was rotten with dead."

Authorities strictly censored letters, books and anything else written about what was actually going on in the trenches. Yet for whatever reason — perhaps because the censors had little patience for poetry — the poems of these men somehow got through.

Translater, traitor?

There is an Italian adage that goes, "Traduttore, traditore." It means "Translator, traitor," but of course, that is a translation.

It means simply that something is always lost in translation. Of course, if you are someone who needs the translation because you can't read the original language, then you will never know if the translator is really a traitor or not.

I have read many books that have been translated into English. I am presently in the middle of one that has been translated from Icelandic. I think it's a terrific novel, but am I missing something? I will never know if the translation has betrayed the original or not.

I have mentioned in this blog that I sometimes write and even preach sermons, and a few months ago I preached one that relates to this topic. (Actually all sermons relate to the subject because all sermons are based on translations of either Hebrew or Greek texts. We can always wonder, what has been lost in translation?)

I found that Job 35:10 has been translated very differently in different Bible translations. For example, the New International Version translates it as "But no one says, 'Where is God my Maker, who gives songs in the night ...'"

The Complete Jewish Bible says that God "causes glad songs to ring out at night.," which is more specific than simply "songs." The Good News Bible puts it this way: "God their Creator gives them hope in their darkest hours."

The New Catholic Bible makes it more personal: God "protects me during the night." In the New Revised Standard Version, God "gives strength in the night."

Then there is The Message, which says, "God puts spontaneous songs in their hearts."

That's the same Hebrew text translated six very different ways. Some mention songs; others do not. Some mention the night; others do not. Some simply translate the metaphor; others attempt to interpret the metaphor. I liked all six translations, and I preached six mini sermons, one on each of them.

Are all six translators traitors to the original? Or does each bring out something different that was there all along?

A place to tarry

When dining in a restaurant, the server will often place the check on your table and say something like, "There's no hurry." We already know this, of course, and when I have had a good conversation partner, I have sometimes sat at the table for two hours or more. During busy times, however, when people are lined up waiting for a table, the management probably wants desperately for you to move on, whatever the servers might say.

Speed is a priority at a number of business, such as the one that promises a "10 minute oil change." Nobody likes standing in a long line at the grocery store or sitting in a crowded waiting room at a doctor's office.

So I am impressed by the slogan of the Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago: "Stranger, here you will do well to tarry, Here our greatest good is pleasure." The line comes from Epicurus in reference to his school, but it seems ideal for a bookstore. The more time people spend in a bookstore, the more books they are likely to find that they cannot resist.

And while books are often about instruction and reference and guidance, they are mostly about pleasure. We usually read what we enjoy reading.

The best bookstores encourage customers to stick around. They have chairs, for example. They serve coffee. Some have cats or even dogs. Some have authors signing books or giving talks. Children's departments have story times, giving parents a chance to browse. The more books a store has, the more time book lovers are likely to spend there, and of course the more money they are likely to spend.

One does wonder, however, whether the "here you will do well to tarry" motto still applies as closing time approaches.

A courtesan's story

Juhea Kim's sweeping novel Beasts of a Little Land (2021) covers much of 20th century Korean history, mostly from the point of view of a courtesan named Jade. The novel all but ignores the Korean War, oddly enough, focusing mostly on the years of Japanese occupation, which ended with Japan's defeat in World War II, although the story continues to 1965.

Jade is just 10 years old in 1918. Before long she becomes an apprentice courtesan, training to entertain wealthy men. She develops into a beauty, beloved by many, including two boys closer to her own age who both want more from her than she can give.

JungHo is a homeless ruffian when he befriends Jade. He later becomes a communist enforcer, even though he lacks communist sympathies, returning from time to time to help Jade until, many years later, she is in a position to try to help him.

HanChol meets Jade as a teenager who takes Jade home each night in his rickshaw. They become lovers, though she eventually must reject him. He goes on to become one of the wealthiest men in postwar Korea, yet never far from Jade's mind.

Although there is much here about hunting tigers, the human beasts in this little land are mainly the Japanese oppressors, who try to dominate every aspect of Korean culture and commerce.

This is a powerful story told with grace by the young author, now a Princeton grad living in the United States. "Death was such a small price to pay for life," she writes near the end, and her novel makes you believe it.

The soul laid bare

Guy de Maupassant

Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.

Guy de Maupassant

Are those words by Guy de Maupassant really true? Or is the opposite true? Are spoken words more or less likely to be truer than written words?

Since the great French writer of short stories said those words, technology has confused matters even more. Now we have the telephone, allowing us to hear words without the benefit of seeing the face saying them. We have email and texting, allowing spontaneous reactions, which may often be more truthful because the writer often acts before thinking of a more diplomatic way of saying what was said.

Certainly we can be dazzled and deceived by words spoken to our face, but can't we also be dazzled and deceived by words written on paper? Writers have more time to deliberately craft their words than speakers do. Written language, in fact, is better designed for dazzling, at least in the hands of a skilled writer, than plain speech is. As with texts and emails, people tend to speak before they have thought it through, not giving themselves time to consider the best way to say something.

People often lay the soul bear in arguments or when making cruel jokes that they later regret. On the other hand, it may be easier to write a Dear John letter (or email) than to break up a relationship in person. It may also be easier for someone to say "I love you" in writing. Very soon people will be sending each other valentines to say things they cannot bring themselves to say in person.

I don't know if Guy de Maupassant got it right or not.

Reality disguised

The people you know actually dread reading the novel you are about to write — they don't want to read about themselves, they don't want to be bored, and they fear embarrassment for everyone. You are, therefore free,

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

Novels, and especially first novels, are often an embarrassment to those who know the novelists. Just ask the women who were close to Philip Roth. Just ask Pat Conroy's father. And so on.

First-time novelists tend to retell the key story from their own early lives. Their difficult childhoods. Their first awkward stabs at romance. Their most traumatic high school or college experiences. All this and more often winds up, slightly disguised, in first novels.

But even experienced novelists, who may have run out of profound personal experiences to write about, will still base characters on the people they know and base episodes in their novels on events from their own lives or the lives of people they know. Fiction is often the truth reimagined.

Flannery O'Connor was famous for her outrageous, often evil, characters. Yet she is said to have based these characters on the people she knew in the town where she lived. She simply exaggerated their flaws to such an extent that the individuals they were based on rarely recognized themselves. And few people in her town ever read her stories.

To know a novelist, as Jane Smiley observes, is often to fear being recognized in one of those novels. Serious novelists must steel themselves to not be overly intimidated by the concerns of others. These are the ones, in Smiley's view, who are therefore free.

Baby talk

Apparently speaking baby talk does no harm, and it may even be a valuable aid in the early stages of acquiring a language.

Peter Farb, Word Play

The English word infant apparently stems from a Latin word meaning "speechless." True enough, when a child begins talking we usually stop using the word infant, replacing it with toddler. Albert Einstein didn't begin talking until he was about 3, perhaps meaning that he was considered an infant longer than most other children with lesser brains.

We begin learning a language before we begin speaking it. Children begin learning language as soon as they are born, if not before. They learn, for example, the sound of their mother's voice. They learn that human sounds have meaning, even if they do not understand that meaning.

Peter Farb

The question Peter Farb deals with above is whether parents and other adults using baby talk help or hinder a child's speech development. Many people do speak baby talk around small children, yet most of those children grow up speaking their language as the adults around them speak to each other, not baby talk. When adults do speak baby talk around other adults it is usually an affectation, such as a woman trying to appear cute around men.

I have often prided myself on speaking like an adult around children, under the belief that this might help them learn to speak properly. Yet, I confess, I often used baby talk around my own son. More accurately, I adopted some of the pronunciations he used. For example, he pronounced certain words beginning with an S as if they began with the letter P, such as pasgetti for spaghetti. I started doing the same. He liked Fritos but called them Friggytoes. I have been calling them friggies ever since. In fact, I still sometimes say pasgetti when no one else is around.

Yet my son grew up speaking perfectly good English. Only I, apparently, was adversely impacted by baby talk.

Eugene Peterson at his best

Eugene H, Peterson

Eugene H. Peterson, who died in 2018, may be best remembered today for transforming the Bible into The Message, a popular paraphrase that puts Scripture into language Americans can better understand. Yet he was mainly, for many years, the pastor at Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Md., and a very fine preacher.

In 2023 some of his sermons were collected in the book Lights a Lovely Mile: Collected Sermons of the Church Year. The book makes good reading.

Many preachers, and perhaps most preachers, base their sermon on gospel texts, but if this collection is any indication, Peterson favored passages from elsewhere in the New Testament, especially Paul's writings. And the word passages is misleading, for usually these sermons are based on just a single verse. And it is amazing how much he could find in that single verse.

He said this in one of his sermons, "Paul. Why do I like him so much? An opinionated man, verging on cockiness, quick tempered, and capable of soaring anger. He wrote on subjects that are of surpassing importance to me: God, my eternal salvation, the meaning of my life, how to think of Christ. These are things I very much want to get clear and straight."

As the subtitle suggests, the sermons cover the church year — Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, etc.

Like any good preacher, Peterson sometimes said surprising things. He began one sermon, called :"The Most Dangerous," by saying, "Do you know that the most dangerous thing you can do is go to church?" He went on to say, "The temptations that take place inside church are much more severe and have much bigger consequences than those outside." What sins did Jesus most condemn? Well, sins like spiritual pride and hypocrisy, sins more likely to be found in a church than at any bar on a Saturday night.

Want a good sermon without having to step into a "dangerous" church? Give Eugene Peterson a try.

Sealing the deal

The other day I ate lunch with my family at the Oxford Exchange in Tampa, a striking downtown restaurant with both a bookstore and a tea shop, both as attractive as the food to me. I bought some tea, my granddaughter bought a book, everyone enjoyed lunch.

While there I picked up a bookmark with a quote from Edgar Degas: "Art is not what you see, but what you make others see." 

After lunch we walked across the street to the University of Tampa, where we saw the Sticks of Fire sculpture by O.V. Shaffer. I confess I did not see much beyond several slender metal pillars pointing toward the sky. I am sure the sculptor saw something more, and if you read about the sculpture you will find it has a deep meaning for the campus. All this escapes the casual viewer, however. The sculpture is clearly more impressive at night, as the accompanying photograph shows.

Whether one is talking about sculpture, literature, painting, theater, film, photography or any other art form, a kind of transaction takes place. Others complete the transaction. A book is no good without a reader, a painting no good without a viewer, a play no good without an audience. Thus, what the artist sees is only part of the deal, as Degas suggested. Someone else must complete it. And what others see is at least as important as what the artist sees.

So was the sculptor of Sticks of Fire a failure, according to Degas? Or was I the failure? Or did I simply view it at the wrong time of day?

Invisible detectives

Now You See Us (2023) by Balli Kaur Jaswal is partly a murder mystery, but that's only a small part. Mostly it is a novel about how those in the servant class live invisible lives, or perhaps they are just seen differently.

Cora, Angel and Donita are Filipina domestic workers in Singapore. Cora, older than the others, works for a rich widow whose daughter is getting married. The woman, embarrassed by her late husband's infidelity that everyone but her seemed to know about, treats Cora like her only friend, which both Cora and the daughter find inappropriate for different reasons.

Angel has an elderly employer. Donita works for a woman who treats her more like a slave. Both of these young women are involved in tumultuous love affairs in their one day off each week.

Then a fourth domestic worker, Flordeliza, is arrested for the murder of her employer. The other three women don't believe it. One of them says she saw Flordeliza elsewhere when the murder occurred. The three of them play detective in their limited spare time. When they find the answer, will anyone believe them?

A significant number of women from the Philippines work as domestic workers elsewhere in the world. The author, who was born in Singapore and lived in the Philippines, knows this story from both sides.

Facts can spoil stories

The historian is required to give up dramatic interest in the pursuit of accuracy, but a novelist must give-up accuracy in pursuit of narrative drive and emotional impact.

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

That sentence by Jane Smiley in her book 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel is packed with lessons.

Don't expect historical novels to be completely reliable.

Don't expect historical accounts told in story form to be completely reliable either. Is it possible that the more interesting a history book is, the less accurate it is likely to be?

Don't expect memoirs and autobiographies to be completely reliable.

Don't expect the stories people tell, whether in divorce court or at parties, to be completely reliable.

To tell a good story, one must, to some degree, fudge the facts. We tend to make ourselves the hero of our own stories. We eliminate anything that might spoil the story or that make us look bad. We exaggerate anything that makes the story more entertaining or that makes us look better.

The more we tell favorite stories the more we embellish them, and the more we embellish them the more we believe the embellishments. Our memories gradually conform more to our stories than to what actually happened.

When I worked for newspapers, a favorite insult was, "He didn't let the facts get in the way of a good story." That was funny because it was often so true.

Fear not ... and read

President Eisenhower (left, center) at Dartmouth College

Not long after he became president of the United States in 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower gave the commencement address at Dartmouth College. He said, among other things, "Don't join the book burners. ... Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book."

Perhaps he should have said any book. I think I would fear trying to read every book in a public library of any size.

But let's take apart Eisenhower's words. Book burning in any form — actual book burning, censorship, protests, refusal to add to a public library's collection or to a bookstore's shelves — doesn't work. You have probably noticed that bookstores and libraries everywhere often have a table of "banned books." Most of these books have never actually been banned, certainly not in the United States, but they have been frowned upon publicly by somebody. The result is that these very books become highlighted, put on display and made more attractive to those who otherwise might never be drawn to them.

The best way to sell a book is to have somebody raise a fuss about it.

And so book burning is counterproductive. You can't burn every copy. You can't ban everyone from reading a book, printing it or selling it. It simply makes more people want to read it. And in a country with a free press, it would be illegal anyway.

This is not to say that there are not certain books that can be controversial in certain circumstances. A prominent man recently drew controversy when he was exposed on the Internet leafing through a lingerie catalog on an airliner. Carrying a book by a prominent conservative author on a liberal college campus could get a person in hot water with friends and professors. Reading a book denying the existence of hell, as was published a few years back, might raise eyebrows in certain churches.

Eisenhower was right. Don't be afraid to read any book. But you might want to be careful where you choose to read it.

Just friends?

Can men and women be "just friends"? Well, maybe, Or maybe not. Gabrielle Zevin explores the possibilities in her 2022 novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, a line from Shakespeare's Macbeth.

The novel covers about three decades and takes us inside the video game industry. Sam and Sadie meet when they are both kids. Sam is hospitalized with a bad foot, that will be amputated later in the novel. He is uncommunicative and mostly just plays video games. Sadie likes games, too, and they play together, gradually building a friendship, a rocky friendship as it turns out.

They meet again a few years later, he a student at MIT, she a student at Harvard. They decide to build a game together, which leads to more games and then a thriving video game company.

Can they be more than friends? More than business partners? Both ask these questions but hesitate to bring them up with each other. Why spoil a good arrangement? But then Sadie takes lovers, both of them involved in their video game business. Why these others but not Sam?

Meanwhile there is a lot about video games and how the industry changes through the years. Zevin goes into detail about fictional games you might wish were real so you could play them along with the characters. Eventually Sam and Sadie develop a relationship in a game that they lack in real life. But this proves no more satisfactory.

The novel probably works better for readers younger than me. I haven't gotten much beyond playing Spider and FreeCell. But even I am intrigued by the question: Can you be "just friends"?

The things that offend us

In a three-way conversation with friends a few days ago, the subject turned to books and, in particular, the things we found most offensive in the novels we read. Although we are close friends of about the same age who attend the same church and share similar world views, we found we were bothered by very different things in the novels we read.

Is it the graphic sex that bothers us? Well, yes ... or no. The person I expected might be most bothered by the sex turned out to like it. Was it the bad language? Well, yes, but not to the same degree for each of us. Was it the violence? We all read thrillers, and no violence at all in a thriller can be dull. But even so, extreme and graphic violence can be offensive. What about certain social or political viewpoints? Well, it depends.

Isn't it interesting how different things bother different people in different ways? And if I am any judge, I think different things can bother the same person at different stages of life.

I have read Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel Lolitia twice in my life, once as a college student when it was assigned reading for a class and again when I was in my 70s. Very different things bothered me in each reading, I noticed.

As a young man, the violence when Humbert Humbert kills another man disturbed me most. I hardly noticed the sex, probably because it was mostly implied and not explicit. When I read the novel again decades later, I hardly noticed the violence, probably because I have read so much fictional violence in the meantime, but the the sex between a middle-aged man and a young girl offended me. At this point in life I could read between the lines.

The novel had stayed the same, but I had changed.

The "aching urge" to write

John Steinbeck

Novelist John Steinbeck once wrote, "The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader."

We write, I suppose, for the same reason we talk — because we think we have something to say. Steinbeck uses the phrases "aching urge" and "something he feels important." These phrases seem to raise the stakes. They suggest that we feel compelled to say what we have to say. And it's not just important to us. It's important to others, as well.

This caused me to think about the various kinds of writing I have done in my life. Are Steinbeck's words true in these instances?

School essays and reports — What was most important here was the grade. The aching urge was more about satisfying the teacher or professor — producing the 100 words or eight pages or whatever was required by the assignment.

News stories — I was a newspaper reporter in my early professional life. Importance was a required for anything printed as news. The most important stories went on the front page and got a byline. But even minor inside stories were expected to have some importance to someone. The "aching urge," quite frankly, probably had more to do with keeping my job.

Editorials — I was an editorial page editor for much of my career. I wrote opinions, which in most cases were manufactured opinions. That is, I had to manufacture feelings about things I would not have otherwise cared much about. The best editorials I wrote, however, were those for which I felt Steinbeck's "aching urge."

Columns — I wrote many columns over the years, mostly book reviews but also columns of a more general kind, including many that were intended to be humorous. Many of these I wrote simply because I had to write them, yet quite often they were very important to me and I felt like I had something valuable to say.

Blog posts — For the first time, beginning more than 15 years ago, what I wrote was entirely optional. I wasn't being paid. Nobody could fire me or flunk me. Steinbeck's formula began to make more sense to me.

Sermons — For the past few years I have tried my hand at writing and often preaching sermons. Again this is optional, and yet I find myself writing what I feel compelled from something inside me to write, saying what I sense is important for someone else to hear.

Over the years I believe my writing has actually improved as it has become less a requirement and more an aching urge.

Understanding each other

Jane Smiley

The death of the novel, if that is what is happening, may be more serious than we thought. Jane Smiley certainly thinks so in her book 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, and her book was published in 2005. Things have not improved in the past two decades.

Novels have been around for only a few hundred years, just as widespread literacy has been common for only a few hundred years. Certainly human life has changed during this time, mostly for the better. Might the novel have had something to do with this? Smiley thinks so. Novels take us into the lives of other people, often people very different from ourselves. We occupy, however briefly, the minds of these people. Novels help us to better understand one another. If fewer people read novels, perhaps much of this understanding and empathy will be lost.

"If the novel has died for the bureaucrats who run our country, then they are more likely not to pause before engaging in arrogant, narcissistic, and foolish policies," Smiley writes.

"If the novel has died for men (and some publishers and critics say that men read fewer novels that they used to), then the inner lives of their friends and family members are a degree more closed to them than before," she writes.

And this affects women, too, for most of the novels they read are written by other women, thus depriving them of the male point of view.

"If the novel dies, or never lives, for children and teenagers who spend their time watching TV or playing video games, then they will always be somewhat mystified by others, and by themselves as well."

Do we really want to go back to a time before vast numbers of people — men and women, rich and poor, old and young — began reading Defoe, Dickens, Austen, Scott, Twain, Stowe and all the others and thus began to better understand each other?

What Pulitzer prized

Joseph Pulitzer, the newspaper publisher best remembered today for the prizes made possible through his legacy, often criticized his children, especially his sons, for their lack of ambition, for being spoiled by wealth.

Yet the old man himself, as described in Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print. and Power (2010) by James McGrath Morris, acted much the same way himself once he had made his fortune. He owned thriving newspapers in both New York City and St. Louis, yet in the latter half of his life he spent most of his time in Europe or at sea. He often left his family behind, but he took along many underlings who pampered him, read to him because of his poor vision and made arrangements for his comfort, such as by making sure his rooms were as soundproof as possible. He was sensitive to every stray sound.

As a younger man, however, Pulitzer made his great fortune through nonstop ambition. Although "accuracy, accuracy, accuracy" became his cry at his newspapers, he himself lied at will when it benefited his position. He lied frequently about his age as a teenager in order to get an early start on his career.

His editorial pages regularly blasted the wealthy class, the very people he mingled with and spent winters with at Jekyll Island.

He may have made his money in journalism, but Morris makes clear that Pulitzer's true love was politics. He had the misfortune, however, of being a Democrat in the post-Civil War years when Republicans won the White House every four years. He sought political office himself, both in St. Louis and New York, yet when he was finally elected to Congress, he quickly realized that a congressman had much less power than the publisher of a great newspaper, and he promptly resigned.

Another dark side to his personality came through his treatment of his younger brother. He regarded Albert as a hated rival, perhaps even more hated than William Randolph Hearst. While Joseph owned the thriving New York World, Albert owned the New York Morning Journal, which was not as successful yet was still too successful for his big brother. He once hired away Albert's entire staff.

Joseph Pulitzer may have been a great man. He just wasn't a very good man.

Breaking the rules

Peter Heller

"I'll try," Beckett lied.

Peter Heller, Burn

I have a few pet peeves when I am reading fiction, and one of these is illustrated in the brief line above from Peter Heller's novel Burn.

Back in the 1960s when I attended Ohio University, I took several creative writing classes. Among the lessons remembered from those classes are these two:

1. It is better to show than to tell.

2. Avoid such phrases as "he boasted," "he implied," "he questioned," "he proclaimed," etc. There may be many words that indicate speech, but it is best to stick with "said." Ordinarily a fiction writer should avoid using the same word too often, but in this case using "said" again and again works best because the word becomes virtually invisible. It does the job without calling attention to itself. Again, you should show, not tell.

Heller, like so many writers, violates both of these rules with the word lied. To be fair, the above line comes near the end of the novel, and the author lacks much opportunity to demonstrate that Beckett is lying. Yet there must still be other ways to avoid telling us outright that Beckett is lying:

"Beckett said with an obvious lack of sincerity." "Beckett said in a distracted manner." "Beckett said. though Jess didn't believe him" "Becket said, putting up a brave front." "Beckett said without conviction."

Heller, in my view, could have revealed Beckett's lie in a more sophisticated manner than simply telling his readers that he is lying.