Bedtime reading

Many busy people get a chance to read only when they go to bed at night. What puzzles me is how busy people can stay awake to read anything once they hit the pillow. I've never been able to read more than a couple of pages before it's lights out.

Reading in bed can accomplish one of two things: either put one to sleep or keep one awake. I have never understood those who say a certain book kept them awake all night. Why read thrillers or edge-of-the-seat mysteries at bedtime? Isn't going to bed usually about going to sleep, not staying awake? Another poor bedside book would be something challenging that requires one's full focus, such as a textbook or a literary novel, unless falling asleep, not understanding what you are reading, is your main objective. I recently used a collection of poems by G.K. Chesterton as my nap time reading, one  or two poems a day. The poems helped me sleep, but I feel I shortchanged the poetry.

Clifford Fadiman

In his essay "Pillow Books," written in the 1950s, Clifton Fadiman argues that to use books to either put one to sleep or keep one awake is a misuse of those books. To read through the night "is to trespass upon nature," he says. But "dull books soothe only dull brains -- a moderately healthy mind will be irritated rather than rested by a dull book," he argues. He favors a middle ground, a book that is interesting but not too interesting, relaxing but not too relaxing.

To Fadiman, Anthony Trollope is the perfect author for bedtime reading. "He never fails to interest, but not too much; to sooth, but not too much," he writes. Reading Trollope, or any comparable author, one can turn off the light whenever one chooses. They are books one can easily put down, but which one will be eager to pick up again the following night.

As for me, I never read novels of any kind before sleep. For a time I tried reading short stories, but it could take me weeks, even months, to read a single story of moderate length, simply because of my inability to read more than a couple of pages a night. Most nights I am too tired to read anything at all. Besides I have always been able to find other times during the day to read, so I have never felt that bedtime was my only chance.

For my bedside table, I favor books with very short segments. Meditations can work if they don't require too much concentration. Better are books of quotations or light verse. I have long felt Ogden Nash to be the ideal writer for late at night, and I have one of his books beside my bed right now.

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Girl becomes detective

Constance Kopp doesn't think of herself as a detective until the very end of Amy Stewart's engaging 2015 novel Girl Waits with Gun, and if not for messages conveyed by the title and cover drawing, readers wouldn't either for much of the book. Constance is an unusually tall, unmarried woman in her mid-30s who lives on a New Jersey farm with her two sisters, Norma and Fleurette. It's 1914. She just wants to collect the money she thinks she is owed by Henry Kaufman, a business owner, after he and his carousing friends damage the sisters' farm wagon with their car.

Kaufman doesn't think he should have to pay, even maintaining at one point that the horse and buggy ran into his car. Soon the sisters get threats, some delivered by bricks thrown through windows. The threats usually has to do with Fleurette, an alluring, overly-dramatic teenager. Constance will do anything to protect Fleurette, including learning how to use that gun mentioned in the title.

Meanwhile there's a girl whose baby boy, Kaufman's son, is missing, and an overworked sheriff who takes Constance's complaint seriously but is handcuffed by lack of evidence and the fact that Kaufman has a business (even if it is his sister who is actually running it.).

All this, a mostly true story, may not sound like enough plot to power a 400-page novel, especially one as compelling as this one, but Stewart keeps her focus more on character than plot, and her characters are wonderfully rich and always fascinating. Constance has a deep, dark secret. Steady Norma wants only to run a farm and raise her pigeons. Fleurette seems like a typical teenage girl, but then much, much more. These three, plus the sheriff and a few other characters, are sufficient to support the novel, as well as bring us back for the others in the series.

The making of a novelist

Graham Greene explains the odd title of his 1971 memoir of his youth, A Sort of Life, in its very first sentence: "An autobiography is only 'a sort of life' -- it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely."

The word selective certainly describes the great British novelist's attempt at autobiography. It begins with Greene's earliest memories from his childhood, and he seems to remember more than most of do from that period and seems to tell us everything he remembers. Later the selectivity begins. Certain individuals and incidents from his early life are singled out for mention, sometimes in great detail, while others are all but ignored. A notable example is the detail with which he describes his first love for a woman about a decade older than him, his siblings' governess, while barely mentioning the woman he later married or the child they had together.

To be sure, his severe depression after the governess left to get married contributed to his prolonged dependency on Russian roulette to snap him out of it. Apparently his wife led to nothing as dramatic, so was worth mentioning only in passing.

Other than the Russian roulette, easily the most mentioned part of A Sort of Life whenever the book is discussed, the book's significance lies in what it tells us about Greene's becoming a novelist. He wrote some early novels that went nowhere, while working for newspapers to pay the bills. Eventually The Man Within found a publisher in 1929. Lest you think "the rest is history," his struggles continued, and not until 1932 with the publication of Stamboul Train did he finally feel he had arrived, and there his memoir ends, with his most important works such as The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair still to come. Yet his experiences during these early years did find their way into some of those later novels, and these insights, too, make this memoir worth reading for Graham Greene admirers.

What makes bestsellers?

The best books don't necessarily become bestsellers. That's easy enough to understand. Most of us most of the time don't look for great books when we go to a bookstore. We look for good books, books that will entertain us in the case of fiction or inform us in the case of nonfiction. Sometimes great books also happen to be good books, which is why Pride and Prejudice and To Kill a Mockingbird continue to sell many copies each year. And sometimes great books do work their way to the top of bestseller lists, as in the case of The Goldfinch a couple of years back.

But how do certain books become bestsellers when other, often better, books do not? We rarely buy books we have already read, unless as a replacement copy or as a gift. So we don't know ahead of time that we will like a book, or that we will even read it past the first few pages. So why are some books purchased more often than others? Here are some reasons that come to mind.

Publicity

Advertising sells books just like it sells anything else. A frequent complaint of authors is that their publishers spent little or nothing on publicity. Relatively few books manage to get ads in The New York Times Book Review or other publications, but those that do can benefit from them. Yesterday USA Today ran a quarter-page ad promoting a live video chat with Jenna Bush Hager and Barbara Pierce Bush promoting their book Sisters First. Both the ad and the chat should help sell a few copies of the book, and in the book world, it really doesn't take that many copies to make a bestseller.

Promotion by the authors themselves

Ann Patchett signs one of her books.

In lieu of paid advertising, most publishers expect their authors to sell their own books. This is done by book signings at book stores, appearances at book fairs, talks to literary groups and video chats like the one mentioned above, among other things. Some authors are better at this than others. I've attended two speeches by novelist Ann Patchett, plus a panel discussion in which she was one of the panelists. She seems to do a lot of this, and I'm sure it sells a lot of books because of her big smile and warm personality. Not all writers are as effective in public, however, and they may sell fewer books as a result.

Track record

This reason may be most important. There are bestselling books, but there are also bestselling authors. These are those whose books repeatedly climb the bestseller lists. If you liked one book, you are likely to want to read other books by the same author. Thus, virtually anything written by Mary Higgins Clark, James Patterson, David Baldacci and others are all but certain to become bestsellers. They may even become bestsellers before they are even published on the basis of preorders.

Reviews

Good reviews can sell a few copies, and bad reviews may discourage some sales, but I doubt that book reviews are really that important in creating bestsellers, for the simple reason that few reviews are read by large numbers of people. What reviews can do, however, even if they are not actually read, is inform the public that certain books by certain authors have been published. If it's an author we like (see "Track record" above) that alone may send us running to the bookstore.

Covers

When authors don't have much of a track record on bestseller lists, a good cover illustration, a good title and some good blurbs from prominent individuals can help get them on those lists. I judge books by their covers all the time, and I'm sure others do, too.

Popularity

Most of us, some more than others, like to be in with the in-crowd, which is why fashions change and we change with fashions. Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature writes about an experiment done via a website in which subjects could download songs. When they could see which songs others had downloaded, people tended to download those same songs. If different songs were shown to be most popular, then those songs were most likely to be the ones downloaded.

So it goes with books. People buy books others are buying, which explains why once a book makes it to the bestseller list, it tends to stay there. Success begets more success. But sometimes even the perception that a book will become a bestseller, such as perhaps that book by the Bush sisters, may help it become a bestseller. Even better than being part of the crowd is being ahead of the crowd.

Rules for mysteries

In a used book shop in Akron a couple weeks back I found stacks of The Armchair Detective, a magazine published from 1967 to 1997 that was dedicated to mystery fiction. It contained a few original stories, but mostly the magazine carried interviews with authors, articles and reviews. I subscribed to the quarterly from the mid-'70s to the mid-'80s. The first issue I received looked like it had been written on a typewriter and copied, the pages then stapled together. The only graphic elements in the magazine were an amateurish cover drawing and an ad for a California bookstore specializing in murder mysteries.

The quality of the publication improved with the very next issue and continued to improve over the years until it actually had a slick color cover and was bound with glue, not staples. Still, it was always a low-budget magazine, even though the subscription prices kept climbing and my own low budget eventually forced me to drop it. So finding copies of TAD, as it liked to called itself, in that Akron bookstore was a delightful surprise. Learning that they were giving the magazines away was even better news, and I left with an armload of copies from the quarterly's last few years.

One of the articles that has caught my attention so far is in the fall 1985 issue, or just a couple of issues after I let my subscription drop. It's called "The Whodunnit List" by Herbert Resnicow. The list is that mystery writer's 40 rules for whodunnits.

His first eight rules could apply to fiction of any kind. It must be entertaining, educational, internally consistent, etc. Not until rule 9 does Resnicow get down to whodunnits: "The crime must be murder." Most mystery writers do follow this "rule," although interestingly, Arthur Conan Doyle, one of the pioneers of whodunnit fiction, usually did not. Most Sherlock Holmes stories did not deal with murder at all. Other exceptions include mysteries written for children, such as those Nancy Drew stories.

Rule 16 states, "The killer must be an amateur." One finds professional killers in thrillers, but rarely in detective stories, and probably for good reason. A good murder mystery gives us a number of suspects, any of whom may have had a reason to kill the victim. Such a group is unlikely to have a professional hitman in it. There could be somebody who would hire a killer, however.

One of the oddest rules is No. 25: "Red herrings, per se, are out. No person or clue may be introduced solely for the purpose of confusing the reader ..." I thought that's what all mystery writers did. The murderer usually winds up being the least likely suspect and the most important clue is usually the one not even noticed by the reader. So doesn't that make every other suspect and every other clue a red herring there "for the purpose of confusing the reader"?

I like rule 29: "Luck is OUT." Too many fictional detectives just get lucky at the end. Or killers reveal themselves by committing other murders or by doing something stupid that gives themselves away. I like detectives, whether amateurs or professionals, to actually do some detecting.

"All questions must be answered, none left hanging," says Resnicow in rule 31. That's why there is usually a chapter after the one in which the killer is revealed. The detective has to explain how he or she arrived at the right answer and how and why the crime was committed. Answering all questions is one reason whodunnits rarely, if ever, qualify as literature. Literature always leaves questions unanswered, something to talk about after the last page. There's not much to talk about after an Agatha Christie or Robert Barnard mystery. Although maybe I'm wrong. The Armchair Detective found plenty to talk about for 30 years.

A love triangle that works

Men feel lonely when they do not do the one thing they ought to do. It is only when we fully exercise our capacities -- when we grow -- that we have roots in the world and feel at home in it.

Eric Hoffer, Working and Thinking on the Waterfront

Eric Hoffer, writing in his journal in 1958, neatly summarizes the plot of Carrie Brown's novel Lamb in Love, written 40 years later. Actually, this describes the essence of quite a number of novels: a character steps out in faith from his or her confined, routine life and discovers life at its fullest and richest. Brown's beautiful 1999 novel seems particularly to fit, however.

Middle-aged Norris Lamb leads a quiet life as a postmaster in a small English village. Never married, he collects stamps and plays the organ on Sunday mornings. That's just about it. Then one night, as it happens the same night that Neil Armstrong walks on the moon, he happens to see Vida Stephen dancing naked in a garden. He has known Vida, now in her 40s, all her life, but only now does he fall in love with her. Never having been in love before, he has no idea what he "ought to do," and so he does it all wrong. What to him seems like a bold, if anonymous, declaration of love, his own "one small step for man,"  would, to most other people, seem more like stalking.

As for Vida, she became a nanny for baby named Manford as a young woman. Now more than two decades later, she remains Manford's nanny, for though his body has grown into that of a man, a very large man, his brain remains that of a small child. And he has never spoken, or as much as made a sound, in his life. Manford's mother is dead, and his wealthy father is an architect who is rarely home. Even when home, he remains distant from his son. So Vida, too, is ripe for love, or for just about anything that can break her out of her routine. She has not enjoyed a holiday, or as much as a day off, since she became Manford's caregiver.

Love triangles in fiction tend to be complications, obstacles to be overcome if they don't lead to tragedy first. In Brown's hands, this unusual love triangle helps all concerned to, in Hoffer's words, "have roots in  the world and feel at home in it." Manford loves Vida, but when Norris befriends him, giving him a male friend for the first time in his life, his life becomes richer and the creativity hidden inside him emerges in surprising ways. Norris loves Vida, but he probably has little chance of winning her until he also discovers his affection for Manford. Vida loves Manford, but hers is a narrow, confined life until introverted, awkward Norris opens doors for her.

In other hands, all this could easily turn into sentimental slop, but Brown manages it skillfully and artfully. Lamb in Love is a novel to be savored, sentence by sentence.

Doctors who write

Amit Majmudar

Amit Majmudar of Dublin, Ohio, was among the featured authors at the 2014 Ohioana Book Festival, where he participated in one of the panel discussions I attended. The following year he was named Ohio's poet laureate. Besides poetry, he has also written novels, including The Abundance, and a number of published articles and short stories. Most of the time, however, this writer is referred to as Dr. Majmudar, for he is also a diagnostic nuclear radiologist.

Both a medical career and a writing career require a great deal of devotion, not to mention time and talent. Yet  Majmudar is hardly the only doctor to also become a successful writer. Nicholas A. Basbanes mentions a number of them in his book Every Book Its Reader.  Some may surprise you. John Keats became a licensed surgeon before turning his full attention to poetry. Anton Chekhov once called medicine his "legal wife," while referring to writing as his mistress, Today his medical practice is all but forgotten. His patients are all dead, while his short stories and plays live on.

Other writing doctors mentioned by Basbanes include John Locke, Tobias Smollett, Oliver Goldsmith, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mikhail Bulgakov, W. Somerset Maugham and, more recently, Oliver Sacks, Lewis Thomas, Michael Crichton and Ethan Canin.

Some doctors turned writers were not particularly successful doctors. Arthur Conan Doyle is one of these. He had few patients, which gave him plenty of time to write. Soon writing proved much more profitable than medicine.

Basbanes doesn't even mention A.J. Cronin, who had a thriving medical practice in London before developing an ulcer. His own doctor advised rest, and it was during his time off that he wrote a novel, which became a bestseller. He preferred writing, which was also less stressful, and he soon gave up medicine.

Other doctors who became famous as writers include William Carlos Williams, Robin Cook, Walker Percy, Khaled Hosseini, Abraham Verghese, Tess Gerritsen and dozens of others whose names are less recognizable. Gertrude Stein dropped out of medical school or she could be added to the list.

Perhaps we should not be surprised that highly intelligent people should be able to succeed in more than one arena. Yet somehow it just doesn't seem fair.