This year's best reading

Carrie Brown

Two of the best books I read in 2017 were novels I probably never would have read but for a literary discussion group at my local library. I connected with the group in mid-summer when I noticed they would be discussing Jon Clinch's novel Finn at their next meeting. I had read the book years previously and I wanted to hear what others said about it. I ended up staying with the group until coming south in November, and two of the books we talked about during this period were The Opposite of Everyone by Joshilyn Jackson and Lamb in Love by Carrie Brown. Both novels made a good impression.

Jackson's novel tells of a divorce lawyer, someone who views her calling as breaking up families, discovering she has two siblings she doesn't know she has and finding herself in the position of struggling to bring a family together. Brown writes about a middle-aged postmaster who falls in love for the first time in his life and seems to do everything wrong, yet somehow manages to do everything right.

Other notable novels read this year (none of them actually published in 2017) included Tracy Chevalier's The Last Runaway, about a young Quaker woman who settles in Ohio in the mid-1800s and becomes involved in the Underground Railroad while falling in love with a man trying to round up runaway slaves; Marilynn Robinson's Gilead, about a dying pastor's attempt to explain himself to his very young son; and Anthony Trollope's Cousin Henry, about a lost will and characters who take moral stands for less than moral reasons.

Which is the best of these? I'd say Lamb in Love, with The Last Runaway a close second.

Michael Korda

That said, I must admit the most fun I had reading this year was with Old Boys, a spy novel by Charles McCarry. Not far behind is Crosstalk by Connie Willis, which I reviewed here just a few days ago. For pure pleasure reading, it would be hard to beat these two books.

As for nonfiction reading, I had a good time with biographies in 2017. The best was Michael Korda's Clouds of Glory about Robert E. Lee, but Coolidge by Amity Shlaes, Mr. Strangelove by Ed Sikov (about actor Peters Sellers) and Ike's Bluff (about the Eisenhower presidency) were also first-rate.

Other nonfiction works that impressed me were The Road to Character by David Brooks, Sanctuary of Trees by Gene Logsdon, Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett and The Better Angels of Ourselves by Steven Pinker.

Let us play

As another year draws to a close, I want to return to a little game I like to play in late December. The object of the game is to answer a series of questions using only the titles of books read during the year. Let’s see how I do this year.

Describe Yourself The Opposite Of Everyone

How Do You Feel? Limitations

Describe Where You Live In Plain Sight

If You Could Go Anywhere, Where Would You Go? Easter Island

Your Favorite Form Of Transportation The Road to Character

Your Best Friend Is Mr. Strangelove

You and Your Friends Are Old Boys

What’s the Weather Like Where You Are? The Heat of the Sun (Ordinary Thunderstorms and The Delicate Storm would have also worked.)

What Is the Best Advice You Could Give? Suffer the Little Children (Or perhaps Start Without Me)

Thought for the Day The Night Is Large

How Would You a Like to Die? Burial at Sea

Your Soul’s Present Condition Clouds Of Glory

OK, some of the answers are a bit weak. I guess I just failed to read the right books this year.

Bluffing his way to peace

Dwight Eisenhower liked playing cards as much as he liked playing golf, but he was better at cards and one reason for that was his skill at bluffing. Evan Thomas explores how this particular skill carried over into his presidency in his 2012 biography Ike’s Bluff: President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World.

Having spent a career in the U.S. Army, culminating in his appointment as Supreme Commander in World War II and a military success that led to his election to the presidency in 1952, Eisenhower came to believe you shouldn’t fight wars unless you were fully committed to victory. Put another way, all or nothing.

Throughout the 1950s, the Cold War threatened to turn into a hot one. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons pointed at each other. Smaller wars threatened to break out everywhere, such as over the Suez Canal, and any small war could ignite a larger one.

What Ike knew, thanks to the U-2 flights and other espionage, was that the Soviets were bluffers, too. They didn’t have nearly the nuclear weaponry or the delivery capacity they pretended to have. But they could still be formidable in a conventional war. Ike’s bluff, in a nutshell, was all or nothing. There would be no small wars. If the Soviets wanted a fight, they would have to face American nukes. Would Eisenhower really have done it? Nobody really knows, but most important, Nikita Khrushchev didn’t know, and as a result, Thomas argues, the 1950s, for all their tension, were a relatively peaceful time. “The United States was blessed to be led by a man who understood the nature of war better than anyone else, and who had the patience and wisdom, as well as the cunning and guile, to keep the peace” he writes.

Presidents after Eisenhower, beginning with John F. Kennedy, have committed American troops to smaller wars, such as in Vietnam and Afghanistan, without being fully committed to victory. The consequences have not been pretty.

Thomas suggests that Ike bluffed not just the Soviets but the American people, as well. He pretended in public to be a low-key, slightly confused old man who would rather play golf than focus on the nation’s business. In truth the golf was a means of relieving the tension from his intense attention to affairs of state. Even today some historians still fall for the bluff and underestimate Eisenhower’s presidency, says Thomas.

Nothing but the truth

There's such a thing as being too connected, you know, especially when it comes to relationships. Relationships need less communication, not more.

Connie Willis, Crosstalk

Part science fiction, part paranormal fantasy, part romantic comedy, Connie Willis's entertaining 2016 novel Crosstalk may more than anything be a satire on contemporary culture's desire for connection, preferably through technology rather than by people actually talking to one another. The lines above spoken early in the novel by C.B. Schwartz, one of the main characters, would seem to summarize the author's own view: Communication, like most other things, is best used in moderation.

Briddey Flannigan, like C.B., works for a company in the competitive smartphone industry. She and her boyfriend, Trent, have decided to each get an EED, an implant in the brain that supposedly allows lovers to communicate their emotions to one another even at a distance. Almost instantly everyone in the company finds out about their plan, and C.B., a scruffy young man who hides out in the frigid basement, tries to discourage her. She goes ahead with the operation anyway, but instead of being connected to Trent, she finds herself connected to C.B. And it's not just their feelings that are shared, but virtually every thought the two of them have.

You might not think Willis could possibly sustain this farce for 500 pages, as comic novels, like movie comedies, usually work best when relatively short, but somehow she does. The complications keep coming and coming. If some of them are predictable -- you know C.B. and Briddey will fall in love and that Trent is up to no good -- most of them will surprise most readers.

I will close with another C.B. Schwartz quote, my favorite: "If people really wanted to communicate, they'd tell the truth, but they don't."

Preserving without protecting

Nicholson Baker

The words conservation and preservation don't quite mean the same thing, though their meanings are similar. Generally we use conservation when speaking of a limited resource, such as clean water or farmland, and preservation when speaking of something rare, such as art or antiques. But both words suggest protection, whatever it is that is being protected. In Double Fold, the book I reviewed here a couple of days ago, Nicholson Baker says librarians have very different meanings when they use these two words.

To librarians at many of the major libraries across the United States, he says, conservation "refers to the repair or restoration of the original object." The object in question is usually a book. Preservation, on the other hand, refers not to the protection of the book itself but rather the contents of the book. Thus, a librarian can speak of preserving a book by copying its contents onto microfilm, even though the act of doing so leads to the destruction of the physical book, however rare and valuable and irreplaceable it may be.

"Reversibility -- the potential to undo what you or your predecessors have done -- is a watchword of modern book conservation," Baker writes, "book preservation, by contrast, is often irreversible, because the book is gone." Microfilming usually requires taking a book apart and copying it page by page. Even if it may be possible to put the book back together in some form, it is not something  librarians are interested to doing, for the main objective of microfilming is to create more shelf space and save money (even though, Baker argues, microfilming is more costly than building additional storage space).

And so, rare books have been destroyed in the name of preservation. But isn't the essence of the book, its contents, preserved? Not when microfilm, both as a material and a technology, has such a limited lifespan, much less than the original books themselves.

I should explain the meaning of Baker's title, Double Fold. It refers to a common test librarians have used to demonstrate that paper is fragile and will fall apart. You simply bend over a corner of a page. How many folds can you do before the corner comes off? But folding almost anything weakens it. You can easily tear even new paper after folding it a couple of times. How well do you think microfilm would hold up under the double fold test?

A library scandal

It's as if the National Park Service felled vast wild tracts of pointed firs and replaced them with plastic Christmas trees.

Nicholson Baker, Double Fold

Destroying something to protect it sounds like something out of Catch-22. Instead it's something out of the Library of Congress and numerous other prestigious libraries across the United States. What they have destroyed, or allowed to be destroyed, are countless irreplaceable old books and newspapers and, along with them, a good portion of American history.

So argues Nicholson Baker in his persuasive 2001 book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper.

Baker attacks the claim that because paper is fragile and deteriorates with time, old books and newspapers should be copied onto microfilm, preferably with government funding. Because copying usually means taking apart these books and newspapers, they are no longer fit to be returned to shelves. So they are discarded. But saving library space, not saving books and newspapers, or even the contents of those books and newspapers, has really been the main objective all along, he says.

To be sure, the purpose of most public libraries is to serve the public, and the public mostly wants to read today's books and today's newspapers, not books and newspapers from a hundred years ago. Libraries must regularly discard older books in order to make room for new ones. Baker argues, however, that major metropolitan libraries, university libraries and especially the Library of Congress should have different standards and different objectives. These are the libraries most used by historians, writers and researchers of all sorts, and these are the people most hurt by the actions of these libraries. (But in smaller towns all over the country, old newspaper stories remain the main source for researching local history.)

Isn't microfilm just as good? During my newspaper career I sometimes had to search for old newspaper stories on microfilm. Rolls of microfilm were certainly lighter and easier to handle than bound volumes of newspapers, and one could speed through the microfilm fairly quickly to find what one was looking for. The problem was being able to actually read what you found. Reproduction on microfilm can be iffy, especially around the edges. It is also in black and white, even though portions of the newspaper pages may have been printed in color. Baker shows examples of  newspaper pages from a century ago that had beautiful color drawings and cartoons that appear drab on microfilm.

What's more, Baker says, paper doesn't actually deteriorate as quickly as librarians argued to justify their scheme. Many of us have some very old books in our attics that can still be read without fear they will fall apart in our hands. And old books in libraries don't get heavy use. Usually those historians and researchers are the only people who want to handle them.

Finally, the author says, microfilm has been found to not last as long as those supposedly fragile books and newspapers. There are newer technologies, but how do you make a good digital copy from a blurry, decaying strip of microfilm? You need the originals, and in most cases, these have been destroyed.

Hangwoman

Sharyn McCrumb's Prayers the Devil Answers has a murder, but no mystery. The man who pushes his wife from a cliff fails to notice he has two witnesses. He makes no attempt to escape and offers no defense at his trial. He goes to the gallows without protest. So where lies the drama, where the suspense? It turns out there is drama and suspense aplenty, just not where one might expect to find it.

McCrumb focuses mostly on a young woman named Ellie Robbins, who with her husband and two sons comes down from the Appalachian hills to try their luck in town. It is 1936, the Depression is at its worst and jobs are hard to come by. Her husband, however, manages to win an election for sheriff. He doesn't hold the office long, however, before he becomes sick and dies.

The author prolongs his death, perhaps longer than necessary, yet these pages may be the most powerful and most moving in the novel. She takes us into Ellie's mind, showing us how her husband's illness and then his death impacts her in so many ways. Later, a terribly introverted woman, she must bear up under the strain when people, many of whom she barely knows, come to the house to offer sympathy and bring food. She has no idea what to say and only wants to see them gone.

Then comes the question of how she will support her boys. She hits on the idea of asking the county commissioners to appoint her sheriff until a new election can be held. Strangely, nobody else wants the job, and so this timid young woman is sworn in as county sheriff. Mostly she just acts as administrator and handles the paperwork, something she already did for her husband. Then the young man murders his wife and is condemned to death by hanging. And she learns state law requires the sheriff to be executioner. (The novel is loosely based on an actual case in Kentucky in 1936.)

Complications abound. Relatives want to take her children away from her. Reporters come from all over, making the female sheriff, not the condemned man, their story. She discovers her husband was not quite the man she had believed him to be. She had gotten what she wanted, to be made sheriff, but she has to wonder if it was really God who answered her prayer.