Reading gets personal

Each of us brings our autobiography to the reading of any text ...

Roy Peter Clark, The Art of X-Ray Reading

This isn’t just true with reading. It is just as true with watching movies, listening to music or sitting through a Sunday morning sermon. Who we are and where we’ve been influences all of our experiences. How does this compare with that? What does it remind us of? How we respond now depends upon how we were impacted then.

Roy Peter Clark, however, is talking about what we read, so let’s stick with that subject. Specifically he is referring to Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, which has a more personal connection to him than it might to you or me. Thus he responds to the book differently.

Sometimes, as with Clark and Plath, our connections to what we read are obvious. In recent months I’ve read The Rhine by Ben Coates, which brought back memories of my cruise down the Rhine last summer; The Book Artist by Mark Pryor, which I read with my own two visits to Paris in mind; Life with Father by Clarence Day and Nobody’s Fool by Richard Russo, both of which I was constantly comparing with the movies based on each; and Bob and Ray: Keener Than Most Persons, which brought back memories of listening to Bob and Ray on the radio. In each case I brought my autobiography to the text.

Yet our autobiographies are there even when it is not so apparent. Certain characters in novels may remind us of people we have known. Plots may remind us of similar novels we’ve read. Reading one book may cause us to think about another book by the same author. And so on.

Not only do we bring our autobiography to what we read, but what we read immediately becomes a part of our autobiography, thereafter influencing our future reading

Mystery within a mystery

As gimmicky murder mysteries go, Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz is one of the best, which is why it created something of a sensation among mystery readers when it was published a couple of years ago. The gimmick is that it contains a mystery within a mystery, giving the reader two for the price of one, while at the same time producing a satisfying single story.

Susan Ryeland is an editor for a small British publishing company that is in the black only because of one author, Alan Conway, whose ninth Atticus Pund mystery will be the last because both Pund and Conway himself are dying.

This ninth book in a popular series involves the mysterious death of a housekeeper in a fall down some stairs and, days later, the vicious murder of her employer. Although Pund, an amateur detective with remarkable success, had previously decided that, because of his declining health he would accept no new cases, this murder case he finds impossible to ignore.

After reading a few pages about Susan, we are treated to virtually the entire Conway novel. But the ending of that novel is missing, she finds, and then Conway is found dead of an apparent suicide. Susan wonders if it might have been murder, and while searching for the missing chapters she herself plays amateur detective. Not until she finds her murderer (and the missing chapters) do we return to observe Pund catching his.

The two mysteries are interrelated in clever and creative ways, clues to one mystery being found in the other.

When love comes first

Arranged marriages remain a mystery to most of us who live in cultures where young singles are expected to find their own spouses. Farahad Zama's 2008 novel The Marriage Bureau for Rich People helps to erase some of this mystery.

The story, set in India, tells of a retiree named Hyder Ali who, looking for something to do, sets up a marriage bureau in his home. The business becomes an unexpected success, helping many families find suitable mates for their sons or daughters, nephews or nieces, even brothers or sisters. By suitable, they usually mean someone of the right caste (in the case of Hindus), someone who can afford a proper dowry, someone who has the right kind of job and lives in the right area. Families would prefer their daughters not have to move into a home where their mother-in-law lives. Rich people don't want daughters-in-law who want to work. Being previously married, whether widowed or divorced, usually disqualifies a candidate. And everyone it seems wants a match with "fair skin," meaning light skin.

One part of Ali's success is that he preaches compromise. Finding someone who checks off every box may be impossible. First decide what's most important, he says, then make allowances for the rest.

Another part of his success is Aruna, the young woman he hires to assist him and who quickly become indispensable, not just to the office but to the novel itself. In fact, what begins as Ali's story soon turns into Aruna's story.

She comes from a relatively poor family, and because of her father's medical bills there is no money for either Aruna or her younger sister to get married. Aruna needs the job to support her family, never imagining that she might find her own husband through the marriage bureau.

A love marriage is frowned upon, even scandalous, in this culture where marriage comes first, love later. So what happens when love comes first? Zama shows us in this always fascinating, ever pleasurable, constantly informative story.

Pages fly by, villains pile up

A thriller works if a reader can’t turn the pages quickly enough. So David Baldacci’s End Game (2017) certainly works. Yet readers who do slow down long enough to take a breath may notice the plot fails the reality test. (Of course, this is probably true of most thrillers, especially when body counts rival that of John Hersey’s Hiroshima, yet seemingly without repercussions, let alone headlines.)

In this the fifth installment in the Will Robie series, featuring another government marksman named Jessica Reel, Robie and Reel are ordered to find their boss, whom they call Blue Man. Blue Man has disappeared while on a fishing vacation in eastern Colorado, where he grew up. There seem to be no clues, but there are plenty of villainous characters, most of them neo-Nazis who outnumber local law enforcement and so operate with impunity. Our heroes have one confrontation after another with these guys without finding Blue Man.

It turns out eastern Colorado has villains even more evil than these Nazis, and we observe as Robie and Reel take them out one by one. You may not believe it, but you will love it.

As an added bonus, Baldacci also gives us a love triangle almost as believable as the body count.

Biased reading

What’s called prejudice or bias when it involves other people is more likely termed taste or preference when we’re talking about anything else, even when our discriminating tastes and preferences happen to give us negative thoughts about people with quite different tastes and preferences.

We all like certain kinds of music and certain performers while detesting others. The same with movies and actors, restaurants and foods and, of course, books and authors. It is the latter which I choose to address.

Most readers prefer certain genres while avoiding others. Some even read only mysteries, or thrillers, or romances, whatever. Some read only fiction or only nonfiction. As a longtime book reviewer, I read a diverse assortment of books. Still I have my biases.

James Lee Burke

I read mysteries but avoid those that are too violent (I stopped reading James Lee Burke novels for this reason) or too cute (if there's a pun in the title, I avoid it even if I enjoy the pun). I have little interest in horror stories. If a book is a bestseller I am more likely to avoid it than grab it up. I ignore most political books (unless they are by somebody like P.J. O'Rourke), most war novels (unless they are about submarines) and most thrillers (unless they were written by David Baldacci -- see my next post). I am unlikely to ever read a book about playing tennis, drinking wine, crocheting sweaters, growing vegetables or hunting big game.

Even certain book titles can turn us off, as in the case of those mysteries with puns in their titles. I usually pass on novels with the words girl or daughter in their titles. Some titles are just too bland, too forgettable. If the title is unimaginative, will the book be any different? I think this even though I know the title is not necessarily the author's choice.

And so it goes. Some discrimination in the books we choose to read, while it can prevent us from reading some really good books we might actually enjoy, can even be a good thing. After all, so many books, so little time. We need some way to narrow the choices or we could never decide what to read next.

Building our literary canon

I began reading serious novels, written for adults, when I was about twelve years old. The Hardy Boys gave way to The Last Hurrah by Edwin O'Connor, a sophisticated novel of Boston politics and Irish family loyalties. When I finished the book and felt the weight of it in my hand, I knew that my life had changed forever. I had access to the secrets of the adult world at my fingertips.

Roy Peter Clark, The Art of X-Ray Reading

When reading The Art of X-Ray Reading several months ago I would have known Roy Peter Clark and I were of the same generation even if I had not previously seen him in person. So many of the books that shaped his youth also shaped mine. "Each of us finds our own literary canon," Robert Morgan writes in Remarkable Reads, and that canon begins forming in our youth. It may even stop forming in our youth. Those books we read before we are 25 may be the ones we hold most dear for the rest of our lives.

As it happened, I never read a Hardy Boys mystery, nor did I ever read The Last Hurrah, although I acquired a copy in my youth and held onto it for many years before realizing I would never read it. What I identified with in Clark's statement above was the age at which he suddenly switched from kids' books to adult books. That was about the age I started riding my bike to our village library, some three miles away, and heading straight for the "new books" shelves. That's where I would go every couple of weeks, never even glancing at the children's section.

I don't recall the first the first adult book I read, although I do remember that John Updike's Pigeon Feathers and Jack Finney's Assault on a Queen were two of the earliest books I took home. Unlike Clark, apparently, science fiction served for me as a bridge to adult reading. Among the first sci-fi novels I read was Isaac Asimov's The Naked Sun. Books by John Steinbeck also introduced me, as they did so many others of my era, to more grown-up fiction.

When Clark and I were growing up, there were no large young adult sections in either bookstores or libraries. There were books, usually accepted classics, that teens were encouraged to read. These included works by Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, etc. But few books were actually being written specifically for teens.

Today, of course, there are scads of young adult books. When I walk into a Barnes and Noble, these books seem to dominate the store. They are everywhere, not just in the young adult section. Sometimes I even buy one, such as The Book Thief.

Are the presence of so many young adult books a plus or a minus for young readers? I don't know. They do seem to draw young readers into bookstores, giving them lots of stories about people their age that they enjoy reading. I just hope such books do not delay young readers' entry into serious literature and what Clark terms "the secrets of the adult world." Or their literary canons could one day be much different than that shared by Roy Peter Clark and me.

Truth rescued

“Grin and bear it” might have been the new motto for Britain, in which the ability “to take it,” rather than any significant victory, became a source of national pride, and even of optimism.

Michael Korda, Alone

Michael Korda

At Dunkirk in the spring of 1940, British and French troops weren’t alone in being rescued. As Michael Korda tells it in his book Alone (see my June 10 post), truth also returned to Britain.

It has often been said that truth is the first casualty of war, and that was the case at the start of World War II. The Ministry of Information practiced heavy censorship, supposedly to protect the British public from the terrible truth of what was happening in Western Europe as German tanks rolled through miles of Allied territory each day. When British troops withdrew from Brussels, it was termed a “readjustment of the front,” not a retreat, in The Times of London, Korda writes.

Words are easier to censor than maps, however. Korda says that perceptive readers could tell what was really happening by studying the printed maps of the position of troops. The rapid shrinking of Allied territory told a story different than that told by the headlines.

War news, if still propaganda to some extent, became more truthful with the Dunkirk evacuation. Here are three reasons:

1. The evacuation of nearly 400,000 troops from France before they could be killed or captured by the Germans was good news, and governments have less reason to censor good news.

2. Dunkirk was possible because of the contributions of hundreds of private sailors, ferry boat crews and others who helped bring those troops across the English Channel. How could the Ministry of Information have silenced so many people even if they had wanted to?

3. Prime  Minister Winston Churchill, unlike his predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, or anyone else in the government at that time, had a gift for rallying others behind him even when he told the truth and even when that truth wasn't pretty. The British may have been alone after France fell, but Churchill's speeches gave citizens, as well as soldiers, confidence they would prevail.

At the time that may not have seemed like the truth, but as it turned out, it was.