Same book, different experience

Rereading can be a tricky process, in which, for better or worse, you're brought face-to-face with both the present and the past. It's different than reading, more layered, more nuanced, with implications about how we've changed.

David L. Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading

I am rereading a book of science fiction short stories I first read when I was a teenager. (More on this book in a few days.) The comment above by David L. Ulin rings true for me. The nine stories in the book have remain unchanged since 1962, yet the passing decades have changed me quite a bit.

And not only am I a different person than I was in 1962, but the world has changed dramatically since then. The stories still read like science fiction — talking robots, time travel, travel to other planets, aliens from other planets living on Earth next to humans — yet they sound like 1962. Centuries may have passed in the stories, but the names, the speech patterns and the attitudes are those of America in the middle of the 20th century. In one story a character is shocked that it will cost $78.90 to fix a tractor. This is a story taking place in the distant future, yet just 65 years after the book was published $78.90 sounds downright cheap to fix almost anything.

I find the stories entertaining, yet they probably don't shock and amaze me as they once did. As I read them I try to be a teenager again in the belief that I might enjoy them more.

Anne Fadiman

In his book Ulin quotes Anne Fadiman on the distinction between reading and rereading: "The former had more velocity; the latter had more depth. The former shut out the world in order to focus on the story; the latter dragged in the world in order to assess the story. The former was more fun; the latter was more cynical."

Each of her points makes sense to me.  And then comes her final point about rereading a book,  "... I saw the book through the complicating lens of adulthood, I also saw it through the memory of the first time I'd read it."

How true.

A lifetime guilt

Guilt can last a long time, a lifetime in fact.

In The Stolen Child (2024), Ann Hood gives us a story about Nick Burns, a man dying of cancer in 1974, who wants resolution and perhaps grace before he dies. As an American soldier in a trench in France during World War I, he was handed a newborn baby boy by a female artist on whose land the trench was located. Then she disappeared.

What is a man at war supposed to do with a baby? And so he abandoned the newborn, hoping somebody else would find him and take care of him. Now near death, he desperately wants to discover what happened to that baby.

He hires Jenny, a college dropout with her own demons, to accompany him to Europe to try to find the man the baby may have become. 

The more serious guilt in this story would seem to belong to the mother who, because of her desire for artistic success, abandoned her baby in a battlefield trench, yet Hood mostly ignores her to focus on Nick. Even Nick doesn't blame the mother. He blames only himself. Everyone is responsible only for his own actions.

Hood's title, taken from a Yeats poem, is misleading, for the child is never actually stolen — abandoned certainly and passed around a bit, but not stolen. What happens to the child, to Nick and especially to Jenny, who eventually becomes the book's central character, makes a fascinating story.

Life and love

Life is not simple, nor love inevitable.

Niall Williams, As It Is in Heaven

Niall Williams demonstrates the above line, found early in As It Is in Heaven (1999), in the novel itself. He also demonstrates its flip side: Love is not simple, nor life inevitable.

Both life and love are precious treasures, not to be taken casually, Williams tells us through his novel, as lyrical a love story as one is likely to find.

Philip Griffin loses both his wife and daughter in a tragic accident early in the story. Now, dying of cancer, he worries about his lonely son, Stephen, a 28-year-old teacher whose life seems to have already hit a dead end. The two men say little to each other as they play lengthy games of chess, yet Philip notices signs that his introverted son may actually be in love.

Stephen has become infatuated with a beautiful Italian violinist, stranded in Ireland by a lover. He goes to her recitals, even when it means ignoring his teaching duties. Gabriella finally notices him, and a relationship develops, though having been burned, she is reluctant to commit herself to a man. And let's face it, Stephen is not the man of most women's dreams. She returns to Italy, pregnant with Stephen's baby.

Life not being simple, nor love inevitable, the reader doesn't know how this will turn out. This is not your typical romance novel, after all. Midway in the book, Williams tells us, "Gabriella Castoldi shared with Stephen Griffin the expectation of failure and the familiarity of despair." Readers of literary novels share these expectations. One must wait for the very end to discover whether both life and love are possible for Stephen and Gabriella.

Novelist as scientist

Jane Smiley

When Jane Smiley argues, as she does in 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, that a novelist is like a scientist, who is more likely to be offended. the novelist or the scientist?

On the surface, a novelist and a scientist are very different people. If you ever got a college degree, it was probably either a bachelor of arts or a bachelor of science degree. A novelist does art. A scientist does, well, science. There have most likely been novelists who did science and scientists who have written novels, but for the most part they think differently. They do different kinds of things.

Still, Smiley may have a point.

A scientist works with a hypothesis. "A novel is a hypothesis," she writes.

Both a novelist and a scientist are observers. They both ask "what if" questions. A chemist may wonder what happens if a little of this chemical is added to a certain chemical compound. A novelist may wonder what happens if a major character dies in the second chapter.

And so there are similarities, as Smiley observes. Even so, scientific results are supposed to be reproducible. What one scientist discovers upon doing an experiment, another scientist is supposed to be able to find when doing the same experiment. Novelists, however, are expected to discover something entirely different each time. Or else we wouldn't pay any attention to them.

Garbage words

Remember that what you're likely noticing and reacting to is the word's frequency, not its grammaticality.

Anne Curzan, Says Who?

When people talk, unlike when they write, their sentences often contain useless words and sounds. The most common are "like" and "you know." Others say "right" or "um" or favorite vulgar words. When we are talking and trying to think of what we want to say next, we insert these things to hold our place or to fill in the blanks.

And there are those who are overly fond of certain cliches. "At the end of the day" seems popular these days.

It is these pointless words and expressions that Anne Curzan is talking about in the line quoted above from her book Says Who? Usually, as she observes, it is the frequency of their use that bothers listeners, not the words themselves or how they are used in the sentence. She's right.

If someone said "you know" once every 10 sentences we might not even notice. But there are some people who can put two or three "you knows"  in a single sentence. Not only do we notice, but many of us get downright annoyed. Sometimes when I hear someone talking, I ignore what they are saying and just count the "you knows." Yet speakers probably doesn't even notice how often they are using the phrase.

It's natural that our speech should be different from our writing. When you are writing something, even a simple text, you have extra time to think, and you also don't want to take the extra time to write "like" and "you know" every few words. Speech, however, gives us little time to think, and if we pause too long, our speech may get interrupted by someone else, as so often happens in conversation.  And so we put in those garbage words and sounds to hold our place. We may not even notice, but if we do it often enough it is certain that other people will.

More about the octopus

In The Soul of the Octopus, Sy Montgomery told us amazing things about this eight-legged, nine-brained sea creature. Now in Secrets of the Octopus, she tells us more — and shows us lots of pictures besides.

Montgomery is a skilled nature writer who, in her long career has written about many different animals, including cheetahs, tigers, hummingbirds, pigs, apes and hawks. Yet none of them amazed her the way the octopus has. Even after two books (actually three, for she also wrote a children's book), one wonders if she is through talking about them.

There are so many incredible things about octopuses. Though they lack bones, they can walk bipedally. They can change color in an instant to blend in with their surroundings. Some can take the form of various fish and other sea creatures to fool predators. Many of them are cannibals, usually the female eating the male after mating. They can solve puzzles, open jars and escape through impossibly small holes. Not only do they have personalities, but each of their legs may have a different personality.

They are incredibly smart. And they live brief lives, some of them less than a year. And so, not only can they in some ways rival human intelligence, they can do so in less time than it takes a human child to learn to talk.

Octopuses come in many different breeds and many different colors. Most live solitary lives, unusual for intelligent creatures, yet other breeds live in communities. Some octopuses are smaller than a human hand, while others are larger than a human being. Usually the bigger they are, the longer they live.

This is a National Geographic book, so you know the photographs are of high quality. It is a relatively short book, even with so many pages of photos, but it is loaded with information about one of nature's most unusual creatures.

Language debates

Debates about language are almost always about something more than language.

Anne Curzan, Says Who?

Anne Curzan

What linguist Anne Curzan says about language debates being about something more than language seems profound to me. 

It could be geography, for example. What do you call a sandwich in a long bun? Is it a sub, a hoagie, a grinder, a hero or something else? It depends upon where you are from. Not too many people argue about sandwiches, but there other words or speech patterns or accents that can cause anger — or ridicule that leads to anger.

British people and American people make fun of each other, or insult each other, because of how they say or spell English words. Is it theater or theatre? Is it a trunk or a boot? 

The debate can be generational. When we were in school we learned one thing. Now they are saying something else. What's wrong with people today? Why are they ruining our language?

Or the debate can be political. We even have the term "political correctness." We are pressured to say something in a certain way, even though we are really thinking, and most everyone else is thinking, something else. 

When Democrats use the word democracy they clearly do not mean the same thing Republicans do when they use the same word. The same goes for fascism and many other words.

In YouTube videos, I hear the f-word all the time. Yet people often are not allowed to say the word rape. They must say grape instead. They say corn instead of porn.

There is the continuing debate about pronouns. We are pressured to accept certain euphemisms. Some words can be said by some people but not by others. Some words, like retarded, cannot be said at all.

Someone, it seems, is always trying to control what you say and how you say it. And it is only partly about language.

Conversations with a killer

The titles of some novels are revealing. Others not so much. The title of Georges Simenon mystery Maigret and the Killer (1969) made me stop. Heroes in detective novels normally catch killers, but this title suggests a relationship. There must be something going on between Inspector Maigret of the Paris police and the killer he is looking for.

Simenon cleverly resolves both the mystery of the murder and the mystery of the title.

Maigret and his wife are enjoying an evening with his doctor friend when the doctor is called to help the victim of a stabbing on a nearby sidewalk. It immediately becomes Maigret's business, too, especially when the victim dies.

The young murder victim always carried a tape recorder and had recorded conversations he overheard in public places. Is this the motive for the murder? Did he record something someone didn't want recorded? But then why wasn't the recorder taken by the murderer?

Maigret solves mysteries in mysterious ways, one reason for the lasting appeal of Simenon's novels. This time he knows what the killer looks like before he knows his name, yet he hesitates to publish the photograph. He believes the killer will ultimately come to him.

And so it happens. The killer calls repeatedly to talk with the police inspector, who becomes something of a counselor.  All this ends in a low-key, yet still exciting way that Simenon was known for.

Making a choice

In the 2017 novel The Boat Runner, Devin Murphy tells about a Dutch boy, Jacob Koopman, who comes of age during World War II. Jacob, the first-person narrator, faces the question many Europeans must have faced during the war: Which side should he take?

Before the war, for business reasons, Jacob's father sends him and his brother to a Hitler Youth Camp. His father runs a light bulb factory, and he thinks this will help him win a contract with Volkswagen. And so the boy has early sympathies for the Nazis, strengthened when he later blames the Allies for the death of both his brother and his mother. Yet his father apparently died running from the Germans.

Martin, his uncle, has Jacob help him when he kills Nazi soldiers he is transporting on his boat and when he sinks a German submarine. Jacob eventually joins the German navy and even singlehandedly sinks a British ship, becoming a hero. But when he witnesses the extermination of large numbers of Jews, he thinks differently yet again.

Many of us who read this fine novel may think we, in similar circumstances, would have immediately made the right choice and fought the Nazis. That's easy to think now. At the time it could not have always been that easy. Chances are we, in similar circumstances, would have asked the same kind of questions: How can I best survive? Who is most likely to win? And who is responsible for the deaths of those I loved?

Breaking the shackles of time

What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles.

Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan

Just days after writing my post about trying to define what a book is ("What is a book?" July 20), I came upon the definition offered by scientist Carl Sagan on his famous TV series Cosmos.

He calls it "a flat object made from a tree." That's two things I didn't find in the dictionary definition: a "flat object" and "made from a tree." In general, those words describe what we usually think of as a book. Of course, a book doesn't necessary have to be flat, such as a scroll, or made of paper (Clay tablets? A Kindle?). Even so, his words ring true most of the time.

And then he adds, "on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles." If you are illiterate, of course, funny dark squiggles are what you see when you open a book. The same is true when you open a book written in some language you cannot read.

Then Sagan goes on, "But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you."

Of course, for this to happen, words must be more than squiggles. One must be able to read and understand those squiggles.

Further, he says, "Writing is perhaps the greatest human invention, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

I like that a man of science, speaking on a show about science, was able to recognize the importance of language, reading, writing and books that made that science, and so much else, possible.

Rules or myths?

Most of us think of dictionaries as authoritative. Whether we are playing Scrabble or just writing a letter, we look to a dictionary, whether online or in print, to tell us how words are spelled, what they mean and even whether they are really words at all.

Yet those who put dictionaries together, if they are any good, look upon the rest of us as the authorities. That is, dictionaries don't dictate what's right or wrong about words. Instead they reflect how words are actually used, what the people who use them mean by them and how most people spell them.

Linguists, if they are any good, do much the same thing. Consider Anne Curzan, a professor at the University of Michigan and the author of Says Who? (2024).

As her title suggests, she doesn't think the traditional language experts are necessarily correct. This is especially true of our English teachers back in the day who chastised us for putting prepositions at the end of sentences or splitting infinitives.

In chapter after chapter, all written with a light touch, Curzan attacks the myths of proper language usage. Her subtitle even includes the word funner, certain to drive a lot of know-it-alls crazy.

Don't get the idea that anything goes with Anne Curzan. The important thing about language is always communicating what you have to say. If the other person doesn't understand what you're saying, you must be doing something wrong. So some language guidelines are necessary.

Yet different standards apply in different situations. You write differently than you talk. Usages that might be fine in a text or email might be out of line in a formal letter or a term paper. She even argues that aesthetics are important. How does it look on the page?

When Curzan uses the word "rule"  she normally puts it in quotation marks, as I just did. Some rules are just suggestions to her. Others are just myths. Whatever works for you works, she seems to be saying. This is your language. You are the authority.

Life with children

There is a passage in Life among the Savages (1953) where Shirley Jackson is asked her occupation. After she repeatedly says "writer," the person asking the question puts down "housewife." That she was both is illustrated in this, one of two amusing books she wrote about her family.

Her fiction consisted mostly of horror stories and ghost stories, and the titles of her family memoirs reflect a similar theme. The other is Raising Demons.

Her children — she gives birth to her third child early in Life among the Savages and a fourth at the end — actually seem typical, especially for the period she writes about. They are rambunctious, imaginative, ornery, sweet and so on, just like the kids in every other family. What's different is Jackson's ability to make the incidents in a typical family's life worth reading about.

She writes about finding a house big enough and affordable enough for her family, about learning to drive (her husband has no interest in driving), about a daughter's imaginary friends, about a son's imaginary and trouble-making classmate, about what happens when everyone in the house is sick at the same time, about the impossibility of finding a reliable housemaid, about trying to go shopping with three children in tow and so forth.

Many of these incidents were excerpted in magazines like Good Housekeeping and Collier's at the time. and deservedly so. Even 75 years later they bring chuckles. For those of us who grew up in the 1950s, they bring memories.

What is a book?

I have an American Heritage College Dictionary, now nearly 20 years old, that lists the first definition of the word book as "A set of pages fastened along one side and encased between protective covers."

For most of us, something like that is probably what comes to mind when we think of a book. Yet this definition, or any definition, leaves something to be desired.

If the pages are blank, is it still a book? What if the pages are utter nonsense, perhaps typed by one of those infinite number of monkeys?

Does a pamphlet become a book if it is given a more protective cover?

Does a writer's manuscript become a book when it is published or does it become a book if it is placed in a three-ring binder (a protective cover)?

If a novel is published first in a magazine, as so many Charles Dickens novels were, is it a book?

If we listen to a book on some kind of electronic media, can we still count it as a book? What if we read it on a Nook or a Kindle?

Any definition one can come up with can be either too restrictive or not restrictive enough. With a broad definition, as in the American Heritage Collegiate Dictionary, almost any of us can say we have written a book. Ever kept a diary? Ever put a term paper in a stiff cover? Congratulations, you are an author.

On the other hand, the definition can suggest that one of Dickens' serialized novels isn't really a book, at least not yet.

Emma Smith proposes an interesting definition in her book Portable Magic. She writes, "A book becomes a book in the hands of its readers, It is an interactive object. A book that is not handled and read is not really a book at all."

To me, that is utter nonsense. If she were correct, bookstores and libraries contain no books. Those paper objects do not become books until someone takes them home and reads them. Then, apparently, they cease to be books when put back on the shelf. That's like saying a chair isn't really a chair unless someone is sitting in it.

No thanks. I prefer the dictionary definition, as inadequate as it may be.

Magic moments

Once in a great while during the course of our lives, something happens that seems magical. Sarah Addison Allen packs a lot of those magical moments into Lost Lake (2014).

Lost Lake is a small resort in Georgia that has seen better days. Eby, who bought it years before with her late husband, believes it's time to sell. Hardly anyone comes there these days. Then the magic starts.

Kate, her niece who hasn't been to Lost Lake since she was a little girl, returns with her daughter, Devin.  Kate is a young widow whose mother-in-law has been controlling her life for the past year. Now both she and her daughter want to escape.

At Lost Lake she finds Wes, with whom she had played when they were children. He still pines for her.

Meanwhile the few regulars return for a summer stay and decide to throw a goodbye party for Eby. When the town hears about it, everyone shows up, including the man who wants to buy Lost Lake.

The novel has an alligator that only Devin can see, a box hidden for decades in the lake, an aging woman down to her last charm that enables her to seduce any married man she wants and a mute French woman who keeps a chair in her kitchen for the ghost of the boy who killed himself years ago after she rejected him.

There's magic aplenty in Lost Lake, but perhaps the most magical thing about the novel is the way everyone just takes the magic in stride. Magic, like death and taxes, just happens.

Black and blue

The title of Eowyn Ivey's 2025 novel Black Woods Blue Sky was inspired by Marcel Proust. In Swann's Way he wrote, "Now are the woods all black, but still the sky is blue. May you always see a blue sky overhead, my young friend ..."

Those words fit Ivey's novel very well, for it is a story about black woods and blue skies, life at its best and at its worst.

Arthur, raised at first by bears, then adopted by a human couple, doesn't seem to know what he is. Sometimes he wears a bearskin and lives a bear's life. At other times he lives as a man, even if an odd one, in the Alaskan wilderness.

Birdie, a bar maid who drinks almost as much as she serves, lives a wild life while trying to raise her little girl, Emaleen, at the same time. She falls in love with Arthur, a wild man whom she thinks might be able to tame her, and takes Emaleen to live with him. The girl realizes before her mother does that Arthur may be more bear than man.

In the last portion of the novel, Emaleen is a grown young woman who returns to Alaska and, against the advice of others, tries to find Arthur.

Ivey gives us a powerful story of hope and love, while taking us through the black woods at the same time.

Migratory books

Books' intrinsic portability means they are always on the move, always migratory, always displaced.

Emma Smith, Portable Magic

Most of us hate to throw out old books. Instead we give them away when are done with them. We donate them for library book sales. We take them to used book stores.

The condo library, which I oversee, depends upon this difficulty people have to throw out old books, even well-worn books. Instead they donate them to the library, providing "new" books for our shelves, while also leaving me with the responsibility of getting rid of older books. Most I donate for resale elsewhere. Some I must reluctantly recycle.

I hate to write in books, but wouldn't it be nice if each person left a record in each book owned? That is, we could write our name, along with the date the book was acquired and the date it was passed on. At one time, public libraries did something like this. Those who withdrew a book left their names and dates on the library card.

For some books, I think this trail might be very interesting. I own a number of books that were used when I got them. Who owned them before me? How far have these books traveled?

Emma Smith hints at this when she writes above about the portability of books, about their migratory nature. Books remain for years on one particular shelf, but then when their owners die or decide to downsize, they are passed on somebody else, and then perhaps to somebody else. The best books end up in collections, in university libraries, in museums.

Sometimes there have been attempts to save books by destroying them, photocopying them, digitizing them or whatever. Yet the books themselves, though made of paper, can last a very long time with proper care. Books hundreds of years old can still be read. Paper lasts much longer than modern media, which can become outdated within a few years.

If only we could know the history of old books.

Books are for reading

Those who collect books rarely read them. If they want to read the book, they will buy a cheap reading copy. They may not ever open the collectible. Any wear at all decreases its value.

It is something like the person who collects Star Wars action figures. A true collector never takes them out of their boxes. They are toys that are never played with.

This is how I knew I could never be a book collector, even though at one time I had several books worth a little bit of money. I owned a book because I wanted to read it. When I finally sold my first edition of A Is for Alibi for $1,000, the buyer wondered why it was so worn. To me it was never a collectible. I read it, and I loaned to other people to read.

At the same time, and this may sound contradictory, I acquire books I may want to read but know I am unlikely to ever read. But I don't own them because I expect them to increase in value. I own them because I like having them in my library. I like the thought that I might actually get around to reading them someday. I like the sight of them. I like owning them. Some books seem to make me smarter just by being on my shelves.

Perhaps this doesn't make sense. But then neither does keeping a Star Wars action figure in its box.

Books that help us

Emma Smith

All books are really self-help books.

Emma Smith, Portable Magic

Self-help books are, of course, a whole category books. They help us — or at least promise to help us — do almost anything: lose weight, improve our looks, build a deck, fight addiction, recover from divorce, whatever. But are all books, in a sense, self-help books, as Emma Smith suggests?

It is an interesting idea. We do, after all, read books to help us in some way, even if we only want to be entertained. We read a history book because we want to know more about that particular part of history. We read a biography because we want to know more about the person who is the subject of the biography.

The Bible is a self-help book. So is Gone with the Wind, Pride and Prejudice, The Sun Also Rises and Gone Girl.

Are there some books that are not self-help books? Probably. Reading some books can hurt us more than they help us. Some books are a total waste of time. Some books are so boring that we either never finish them or we remember nothing from them after we have finished. Some books can help one person but not another.

Most books, if not all books, can be seen as self-help books. Even so, it is good that most books are not categorized in that way. Leave that designation for the likes of these recent releases: Party for One: Perfectly Portioned Recipes Just for You and Just Diagnosed: A Survivor's Guide to Navigating Cancer.

The magic of books

 In Portable Magic (2022), Emma Smith writes about that little piece of magic that is called a book. It is partly a history of books and partly a collection of trivia about books.

She writes about why Marilyn Monroe liked to be photographed with books (right), especially intellectual books such as Ulysses; the moral questions involved in either publishing, selling or reading Hitler's Mein Kampf;  books bound with human skin, and book burning, among many other topics.

Sometimes she contradicts accepted wisdom. The Bible was not actually the first book Gutenberg printed on his printing press. Charles Dickens did not invent the modern Christmas with the publication of A Christmas Carol. More books are destroyed by those who publish them than by anyone else. (What did you think happened to the books the stores can't sell?)

Much of Smith's book is fascinating. Even more of it is deadly dull. One of the magical things about a book is that one is not required to read every word.

Secrets behind secrets

Everyone has secrets. In Chris Pavone's The Expats (2012), the levels upon levels of secrets could destroy a seemingly typical American family — or perhaps save it.

Dexter and Kate have two kids and what might seem like a settled life when Dexter tells his wife they are moving to Luxembourg. His job, which he has never been specific about, is taking him to that European banking capital to help a secret client improve its security.

Kate has her own secrets. Before she married Dexter, she was a CIA agent, who lived by her wits and sometimes survived by killing people. She thinks that life is behind her, even though she strangely misses it. Being a stay-at-home mother is kind of boring.

Then another American couple seems to force friendship upon them. Kate's suspicions lead her to the discovery that Bill and Julia are FBI agents investigating Dexter for possibly stealing millions.

But this is just the beginning of the secrets that keep unraveling right up to the end of this magnificent early novel from Pavone, who has gone on to become a major author of espionage thrillers.

Start with words

The sooner you put words on paper, the happier you will be.

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

E.M. Forster

Jane Smiley above is talking about writing a novel, but her wisdom applies to many of us who write, even someone who is just writing a letter or an email. The sooner you put words on paper (or on your computer or phone screen), the happier you will be.

That's because rewriting is almost always easier than writing. Start with words, then find better words. I found this to be true when I was a newspaper reporter. When I didn't know how to start a news story, I just started the story. Soon enough it would become clear to me what was most important and how I should actually start it. Meanwhile, having something on paper made me feel better, even when I knew what I had written so far was garbage.

I have found this to be true in other kinds of writing, as well — newspaper columns, editorials, blog posts, sermons, emails, whatever.

"Writing is writing, not planning," Smiley writes. Not that there is anything wrong with planning. Writing comes easier when you know what you want to say before you begin. I have heard some novelists say they don't start writing until they have an outline. They must know the ending before they can start the beginning. Well, that's OK if that's what works for them.

Others of us have only a vague idea of what we want to write until we start writing. Novelist E.M. Forster said it best, I think: "How can I tell you what I think until I see what I say?"

Why people write

How do you explain the fact that so many people write books that are never published? Or they are published, perhaps even financed by the authors themselves, but read by almost no one?

Thousands of books are published each year, yet thousands more are written and unpublished, or started and never finished, or envisioned in someone's mind but never put down on paper. How many people say something like, "I could write a book ..."?

Alfred Kazin

Perhaps the answer to all such queries can be found in the words of literary critic Alfred Kazin: "In a very real sense, the writer writes in order to teach himself; to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax."

The actual publication of a book is, in so many instances, truly anticlimactic. This is probably not true of professional writers, those who actually make their living by writing books. If their books are not published, their families don't eat.

Yet for amateur writers — those who write books to see if they can, those who have a story that is burning inside them, those with ideas bursting to get out — the actual writing, not the illusive possibility of publication, is the true objective.

Underground future

When sci-fi writers contemplate an Earth that is no longer inhabitable, they usually think up — sending people into space to start over on another planet. Hugh Howey thought down instead and put his human survivors into silos buried deep underground.

The first novel in the trilogy is Wool (2012). Why wool? Because capital punishment involves sending condemned prisoners out of the silo to clean the few windows with a wool cloth before the poisoned environment kills them. And the windows often need cleaning, it seems.

Another way of keeping down the population is to have a lottery. the winners being permitted to have a child.

Howey kills off one main character after another in the early chapters, and so when Juliette is sentenced to a cleaning we don't know if she will survive or not. But she survives long enough to discover another silo and eventually inspire a better future for her home silo.

The silo goes down 144 floors, meaning that characters must constantly climb or descend using the tiring staircases. There are no elevators. Juliette works way down in the mechanical area when she is chosen as the new sheriff of the silo. The man who thinks he should be the one actually running the silo objects to her selection, leading to her being sent out to clean.

The people of the silo know nothing of past civilizations before the silo was built. Horses and elephants seem mythical to them. They don't even know that there are 49 other silos, at least until Juliette finds one of them. War there has left few survivors, and war threatens her home silo as well. Can she save either or both silos?

Wool is first-rate science fiction, both a great story and an intriguing imagining of a possible future.

Definitions in conflict

Nagasaki destroyed by atomic bomb

When near the end of World War II, the Allies demanded that Japan surrender, the Japanese premier replied with a statement that included the word mokusatsu. Unfortunately, as Peter Farb tells the story in Word Play, this Japanese word has two meanings. The Allies translated it as meaning "take no notice of." But the word can also mean "consider," which is what the premier may actually have meant. As a consequence, atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Might a different translation have changed history?

Yet even without translating from one language to another, words with opposing meanings can create difficulties. One wonders whether the Japanese ever get confused over the word mokusatsu.

English speakers can certainly get confused over their own language. Does the verb dust mean to take away dust, as when cleaning a room, or does it mean to add dust, as when dusting crops?

If you say that your suitcases are unpacked, do you mean that everything has been taken out of them or that everything is still in them?

If you sanction something, are you allowing it or punishing someone for doing it?

If you peruse a book, do you mean you read it carefully or simply skim through it? You can find both meanings in a dictionary.

Usually we use context and have no problem with such words. Sometimes, as at the end of World War II, the problem can be profound.

Big ideas

Jane Smiley calls Mary Shelley's Frankenstein the first high-concept novel. I think Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, written a century earlier, might take that title.

What is a high-concept novel? I think of it as a novel with a plot that can be stated in just one or two sentences. Or it could be said that it is a novel based on an idea. The idea in Frankenstein is about creating life. In Robinson Crusoe, the idea is about a man surviving on a desert island.

Great novels like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Moby-Dick could also be described as high-concept novels, although they are of course about much more than a boy and a slave going down the Mississippi River together on a raft and a ship's captain pursuing a great white whale at all costs.

In contrast, such great novels as Middlemarch or Bleak House would be difficult to summarize in a few words. Are they better novels? Not necessarily.

I enjoy novels of both kinds, but I must admit that a high-concept novel is more likely to catch my eye in a bookstore. And it is usually easier to become engrossed in. You have some idea what the story is about before you even start reading because you have read the dust jacket or the back cover of a paperback. You probably know the idea before you open the book.

Some of the best novels have a little of both. Ann Patchett does not normally write high-concept novels, but I think her Tom Lake, reviewed here recently, excels because it has a little of both in it. It is about a woman who finally tells her grown daughters about her long-ago romance with a famous Hollywood actor. But she doesn't tell them everything. That is the high concept that draws reader in. The story itself is more low-concept.

Other recent novels of note similarly have a high concept to get readers interested, then go off in unexpected directions. I am thinking of such novels as Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt and The Sacrament by Olaf Olafsson.

Reading whenever

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau thought reading was so important that he sought to "consecrate morning hours" to doing it.

Not everyone tries to do the important things in the morning, but Thoreau did. Similarly, my mind works best in the morning, but that is when I do my writing, including any emails or letters I want to write. I also run my errands and schedule most of my appointments in the morning. Not only does my mind work best in the morning, but my whole body does. I get up early, so my mornings last a long time. When I have something important to do, I try to do it before noon.

Do I not consider reading important? Well, yes, I do, but I reserve that for the afternoon, after a nap. For me, a nap is like starting a new day. Rarely do I read — or write — in the evening, when I am tired.

Other readers do things differently, of course. They may have a job during the day or children to raise. They must read whenever they can — in bed before going to sleep, at mealtimes or perhaps on weekends when they can find a few quiet moments. Others read mostly on vacations or when on airplanes. Or they listen to books while doing other things.

Does it matter when we read or how? Perhaps not, providing it works for us. Providing we are able to concentrate on what we are reading. Providing we are able to enjoy it or learn from it, whatever our objective may be.

Living the Constitution

I realized just how much the Constitution is a national Roshach test. Everyone, including me, sees what they want.

A.J. Jacobs, The Year of Living Constitutionally

Author A.J. Jacobs doesn't just write his books. He lives them.

Before writing about the Encyclopaedia Britannica in The Know-It-All, he read it, cover to cover. Before writing The Year of Living Biblically, he devoted a year trying to follow Hebrew law to the letter. And so before writing The Year of Living Constitutionally, he devoted himself to doing just that.

He wore 18th century clothing, carried a musket in reenactments of Revolutionary battles and tried his best to understand what men like James Madison and Benjamin Franklin were thinking when the U.S. Constitution was written.

Jacobs also did his best to take seriously parts of the Constitution that are now mostly ignored. The Constitution is rarely amended, but he circulated a petition to amend it so that instead of just one chief executive there would be several.

The Constitution actually has a provision allowing pirate ships to act in support of the country. So he borrowed a friend's boat, called it a pirate ship and tried to get a "Letter of Marque and Reprisal."

The Constitution prohibits the quartering of soldiers in a citizen's home without consent. So he gave his consent to quartering a solder.

Jacobs is a humorist, and there is much to laugh at in his book. At the same time he makes his readers take a good look at the Constitution, both what it says and what it doesn't say, how both interpreting it too strictly and not strictly enough can lead to trouble.

When books show wear

Jules Verne

We are of opinion that instead of letting books grow moldy behind an iron grating, far from the vulgar gaze, it is better to let them wear out by being read.

Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth

As the person in charge of my condo association library, one of my main responsibilities is to decide which books stay and which books go. Residents donate books almost every week, and as shelf space is limited, whenever one book is placed on a shelf, another has to be taken off.

How do I decide which books need to go?

First, I look for duplicates. Sometimes we have a book in hardback and the same book in paperback. I see no need for two copies, no matter how popular a book may be. One of them has to go, usually but not always the paperback.

I may look at the publication dates. New books are more likely to be keepers than old books.

Some books have been on the shelf for a long time, and to my knowledge unread by anyone. They are vulnerable.

And then there are the books that show obvious wear. This happens sooner with paperbacks, of course.  Many paperbacks are not designed for multiple readings, and some readers tend to be hard on paperbacks. With clothbound books, it is the dust jackets that first show wear. Not all readers remove the dust jacket when reading a book, and then dust jackets do not last long. I do not shelve hardbacks without their dust jackets.

And that brings me, finally, to the quotation from Jules Verne above.  When a book shows wear, it is actually a good sign. It shows the book has been read and even loved. Someone spent some time with it, perhaps folded back some pages, perhaps even placed a coffee mug on it or spilled some food on it.

I may have to remove worn books from these library shelves, but I do so with respect. Better wear than mold, as Verne said.

Have you a heart?

As short as Hard Times is, at least for a Charles Dickens novel, it packs in a lot of story. Perhaps there are even two stories.

There is, for example, the big story — the impact of the Industrial Revolution in England. Coketown is a dirty industrial community where the haves and have-nots know their place. Then there's the more personal and more interesting story about how this social structure impacts two of the children of one of the town's wealthiest men, Thomas Gradgrind. 

Gradgrind (as usual, the names Dickens chooses for his characters say a lot about them) teaches his children the importance of Facts (capitalized to show their importance to him). Anything whimsical, anything fun, anything fictional is discouraged. Growing up in this environment,  Tom and Louisa seem lost and purposeless. When her father arranges a marriage with a much older man, Josiah Bounderby, Louisa accepts, assuming there can be nothing better for her in life than marriage to someone she doesn't love. Tom, meanwhile, takes a job, but wastes his money gambling, a habit Louisa supports on the sly.

There are a variety of developments, including a younger man who tempts Louisa and a bank robbery in which Tom may or may not be involved.

The climax comes when Gradgrind, finally realizing how his teachings have negatively impacted his children, asks another character, "have you a heart?" Some things, it seems, may be more important than Facts.

Hunting hunters

Someone is hunting hunters in C.J. Box's 2008 novel Blood Trail.

In a western state where hunting is a way of life, this is a very big deal for Game Warden Joe Pickett. Hunting is prohibited until the killer can be found, and because the law enforcement personnel are less than competent, as usual in these novels, it falls on Pickett to discover what's really going on.

Strong characters are key in Box thrillers, and this one is no exception. Joe himself has his demons, and his temper gets him into big trouble by the end. His relationships with Marybeth, his wife, and his daughters, who mature as the series continues, are vital. And then there is his relationship with the governor, for whom he has become a private investigator on the public payroll, and with Stella, the governor's aide, with whom Joe has a history.

Klamath Moore, a radical anti-hunting activist, comes to the state to cause trouble just as the murders pile up. Is he connected to the crimes? Is he perhaps the killer? And then there is Randy Pope, Joe's boss, who may also be his greatest enemy.

Blood Trail lives up to its title. It is a violent, bloody novel that never ceases to entertain.

Backbone of literature?

Cheating is the backbone of literature.

Lixing Sun, The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars

In the Charles Dickens novel Hard Times, a man raises his children with Facts. Anything that is not factual is prohibited. This includes novels, fairy tales, music, poetry, jokes or anything else that brings joy, especially to children.

This father, Dickens shows as his novel goes on, is the cheater, depriving his own children of joy and happiness and love.

Lixing Sun

In his book, Lixing Sun argues that lying and cheating are the backbone not just of literature but of life itself. Up to a point anyway, he has a point.

One thing you can say about fiction, however, is that it represents truth in advertising. We are told upfront that it is all lies. Fiction means it's not true. Yet it can still be entertaining. It can still be informative. And it can still contain truth. Jesus told parables not because they were true stories but because they conveyed truth. In the same way, a novel like Hard Times conveys truth.

Sun has a better point, however, when he observes that much of what we call nonfiction is also, in fact, fiction. His own book, as I mentioned in my review the other day, illustrates this. Memoirs are not entirely reliable. Neither are history books or even science books. Mistakes are made. Some facts are ignored, while others are highlighted. All writers are biased in one way or another.

So is cheating really the backbone of literature? To me that point of view seems too much like that of the father in the Charles Dickens novel. 

Unable to stay

It isn't fair to be the kind of creature who is able to love but unable to stay.

Charlotte McConaghy, Migrations

Following Arctic terns as they migrate from the top of the world to the bottom in search of fish is just one of the migrations Charlotte McConaghy writes about in her 2020 novel Migrations.

More significantly the novel is about the personal migrations of its main character, Franny Stone, always on the move, always looking for her mother, always trying to escape her guilt, always looking for death while clinging to life.

McConaghy imagines a future where animals are mostly extinct. Among the few birds still living are Arctic terns, who once again are making their annual migration in search of the few fish that remain. Franny manages to get aboard a rare fishing boat. She promises the birds will lead them to fish, if any fish still exist, even though the ship's captain has never gone below the Equator.

The narrative goes back and forth, from the present to the past — Franny's childhood, her time in prison and her marriage to a professor committed to protecting animal life. She lacks academic credentials herself, but in honor of him she pretends to be a scientist as she pursues the terns.

Repeatedly in the novel, Franny dives into frigid water, as much to feel life again as to flirt with death. The narrative is something of a back and forth, sort of like migration.

Book of lies

Lies work because most of us expect the truth. And society wouldn't work if nobody expected the truth.

In The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars (2023), Lixing Sun looks at lying at all levels of life, from bacteria to human beings. Liars are found everywhere. Birds, even those that supposedly mate for life, cheat on their mates. Some insects pretend to be leaves. Many species of animals "play possum," or pretend to be dead to fool predators interested only in live food.

In the last half of his book, the author focuses on human lies, from cheating in business deals to cheating in marriages. He categorizes lies, some being destructive and hurtful, while others are necessary for making others feel good, such as by telling one's wife that the dress doesn't make her look fat.

Some lying, even the hurtful kind, Sun says, is necessary for human society to function. Yet, once lying becomes too frequent, too obvious, nobody can trust anyone else. And then everything collapses.

"Cheating not only underpins many aspects of our economic, intellectual, artistic, and social lives, it also helps define our desired moral values," the author writes. "Without lies and deceptions, who would care about honesty?"

Unfortunately Sun does his share of lying, as when he confuses his political opinions with the truth. His casual attitude toward truth threatens the integrity of his own book about lies.

One book, one reader

Seminary Co-op Bookstore

In his book In Praise of Good Bookstores, Jeff Deutsch, points out that in 2019, the Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago, which he manages, sold roughly 28,000 titles — not books, but titles. Of these, nearly 17,000 were single copies. Think about that for a minute.

That means that in a year's time, nearly 17,000 different books sold just a single copy in that store. The bookstore stocked all these books just to sell one copy. Most books, in fact, sell very few copies. Even the so-called best-sellers, in most cases, don't actually sell that many copies. There are so many books being published and so many readers that relatively few people may be interested in reading the same book.

I have been a member of LibraryThing for many years. You might call this social media for bibliophiles. You list your library on the web site and post your reviews of the books you read. You can also have conversations about those books or anything having to do with books.

LibraryThing has thousands of members, yet I've noticed that several of the books I own are owned by nobody else on the site.  One of these is The Photographer's Guide to Great Lakes Lighthouses. Meanwhile, more than 93,000 other members own Pride and Prejudice.

As a reader, here are my conclusions:

1. I am glad people write books even though relatively few people will ever want to read them.

2. I am glad there are publishers still willing to publish books that few people will want to pay money for.

3. The more different books stocked in a bookstore, the better.

4. The longer these books are kept on their shelves, the better.

5. Eventually every book will find its reader.

Word for word

A poem must be remembered word for word or it loses its identity.

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

One of the movie cliches that I hate comes when one character quotes a line of poetry and then someone else, usually an attractive person of the other sex, either quotes the next line of the poem or names the poet and the title of the poem.

Does this ever happen in real life? Rarely. If you said, "I think that I shall never see," I might be able to respond with "A poem lovely as a tree." There are a few lines of poetry that a lot of people know. Yet few people today even read poetry, let alone remember much of it. The odds of two people both having memorized lines from the same obscure poem are astronomical, yet in movies it happens frequently.

I am more accepting of those characters, such as Horace Rumpole in the old PBS series, who quote lines of poetry here and there when it seems to apply to the situation. It is much more likely that one person has memorized a poem than that two people, potential lovers, have done so.

Still, and this is what Jane Smiley seems to be getting at in the line quoted at the top of this post, lines of poetry are much more likely to be quoted word for word than lines from a novel. There are exceptions, such as the opening lines from Moby-Dick and A Tale of Two Cities, but you can paraphrase a novel with more ease than you can paraphrase a poem. Reader's Digest has never condensed a poem. You just can't do it or, as Smiley says, "it loses its identity."

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is remarkable in that, at the end, characters memorize entire books because the government is burning books. (Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which books burn.) A few people are said to have memorized the Bible, but generally speaking people never memorize books word for word. They are simply too long, and the language is rarely beautiful enough to merit memorization or repetition to other people.

Even jokes and folk tales are rarely repeated word for word.

Poetry, however, has power because it can be remembered word for word, and must be, even though few people do it anymore.

In praise of daydreaming

I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.

G.K. Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton

As someone who might frequently be described as absentminded, I rather like the above quotation from British author G.K. Chesterton. Those who are called absentminded are, in most cases, simply thinking about something else.

In school they used to call it daydreaming. We daydreamers may not have been thinking about the lesson or the lecture, but we were certainly thinking about something. I suspect that many of today's most successful people — the inventors and innovators — were once called daydreamers.

I recall the old Disney movie The Absentminded Professor. Fred McMurray played a professor whose mind always seemed to be somewhere else. Nevertheless he invented flubber, an anti-gravity substance.

Albert Einstein, often thought to possess the greatest mind of his age, had a reputation for absentmindedness. So what? In the final analysis, wearing matching socks is hardly the most important thing in the world.

The rest of the story

I look at my girls, my brilliant young women. I want them to think I was better than I was and I want to tell them the truth in case the truth will be useful. Those two desires do not nearly coexist, but this where we are in the story.

Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

Rarely can a novel be summarized in a single paragraph from that novel, but this is the case in the above paragraph found about three-fourths of the way through Ann Patchett's terrific 2023 novel Tom Lake.

Lara's three daughters are grown women, still unmarried and at home for the annual cherry harvest at the family farm near Traverse City, Mich. One of them, the eldest, believes she may actually be the daughter of Peter Duke, the famous movie star. While they pick cherries, Lara decides it is finally time to tell them the story of when she and Duke were lovers. As the paragraph suggests, she wants to tell them the truth, but just not the whole truth. The latter she saves for us readers.

Lara, originally just Laura, is in high school when she first plays Emily in the Thornton Wilder play Our Town. She turns out to be a natural in the part. She eventually goes to Hollywood to make a movie. While waiting for the movie to come out she finds herself at Tom Lake in Michigan, a summer stock theater that is putting on Our Town. Once again she is a natural for the part of Emily.

Also in the cast is charismatic young actor named Peter Duke, with whom she falls instantly in love. Patchett's novels do not normally focus much on sex, but this one is an exception, although of course Lara does not tell her daughters all the juicy details.

Joe, Lara's husband and the father of all three girls, thinks he knows the story, and he listens to just part of what she says among the cherry trees, but he doesn't really know the whole story either. Joe, whose family, owns that cherry farm as Lara's story unfolds, is then a director who helps get that Tom Lake production under way, and later he becomes a cast member. Even then he loves Lara, but she is Duke's girl and he does not interfere. They meet again much later.

The love story has its ups and downs, as most love stories do, but Duke is star material, and Lara soon realizes that she isn't. She may be a natural to play Emily and her only movie is a hit, yet she realizes there at Tom Lake that acting isn't really her future. Besides, Duke is not a one-woman man, though Lara comes to realize she is a one-man hoe.

Patchett has written a series of wonderful novels, all remarkably different. I place Tom Lake right there at the top, along with The Patron Saint of Liars and State of Wonder.

When animals age

If old age can be rough for human beings, even with Social Security and retirement communities, it must be much worse for animals. Herbivores become easy prey when they slow down, and carnivores can starve to death when they can no longer catch anything to eat.

Yet this is not always true, as Anne Innis Dagg tells us in The Social Behavior of Older Animals (2009).

A quick death in old age is not always certain in many species, although roles and behaviors certainly change. Dominate males and females lose their place when they age, as younger and stronger rivals take charge. Yet in many species the elderly are valued for their wisdom, and they may actually become leaders again when a crisis forces others to follow their lead. Older right whales, for example, know best where to find food in certain situations. Older mountain goats know what to do when a storm approaches.

In some species, older females continue to give birth, although their young may be fewer and born farther apart. Because of their experience, the older mothers often have a better success rate when it comes to raising their young.

Dagg's book is not based on any new research. Rather she simply reports what others have discovered while researching something else. Her book is valuable because so few others have focused specifically on the subject of what happens to older animals.

Better than sticks and stones

Most parents engage in wishful thinking when they regard name-calling as good-natured fun which their children will soon grow out of. Name-calling is not good-natured and children do not grow out of it; as adults they merely become more expert in its use.

Peter Farb, Word Play

That children do not grow out of name-calling, as Peter Farb suggests above, can be shown by the current political climate — and in fact by the political climate in the United States for all of its 250 years. When in doubt, call your political opponent names, it seems.

Do adults "become more expert in its use"? That is debatable.

Democrats say it is beneath the dignity of the president of the United States to refer to them as "Dumocrats" or to call Sen. Elizabeth Warren "Pocahontas" just because she pretended for years to be an American Indian. Yet they see nothing undignified about them labeling the president of the United States a racist, a fascist or even a Nazi.

According to American Heritage, George Washington was called illiterate. John Adams called Thomas Jefferson ignorant. Ulysses Grant said of James Garfield that he had "the backbone of an angleworm." Theodore Roosevelt called Woodrow Wilson a skunk. Herbert Hoover called Franklin D. Roosevelt "a gibbering idiot."

It is probably wishful thinking to believe our politicians will ever grow out of name-calling.

Sensitive, but is it a crime?

Sometimes the line between one's work and one's personal life can get a bit blurred, as it does for Ulf Varg in Alexander McCall Smith's The Talented Mr. Varg (2020).

Varg is the detective in charge of the Department of Sensitive Crimes in Sweden. His case this time — if it can even be called a case — comes when Anna, a fellow police officer in his department, asks him to investigate whether her husband is having an affair. She has found an earring in his underwear. An added complication is that Varg is secretly in love with Anna. If he can find conclusive evidence of an affair, would he possibly have a chance with her?

Complications follow, of course, not the least of them being the fact that he is using police force time and police force personnel to investigate what is clearly not a police matter. But then the investigation points to what may be an actual crime.

McCall Smith has three different series of detective novels in progress, but they can all be described as detective light. Murders don't happen, and other acts of violence are rare. Mostly there is just conversation about everyday topics, most of it interesting but hardly suspenseful. And such is the case in this novel, as well.

Yet Varg is a fascinating character, and Martin, his deaf and depressed dog who can read lips, may make this novel worth reading.