Looking at the novel

Jane Smiley's ambitious doorstop of a book, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005), seems like two books in one.

The first half addresses her title. She looks at the novel, in general, in 13 ways: its origins, its psychology, how it views history, how it approaches morality and so on. This is interesting stuff, and I will have much to say about her points in the weeks to come, and in fact I have already begun to do that.

The second half of her book consists of her reviews of the "100 novels" she mostly refers to in her first half. I put this phrase in quotation marks because she writes about many more than 100 novels. She writes about three P.G. Wodehouse novels as if they were one. Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time,  seven novels, is treated as one. I haven't done the math, but there may be 130 or 140 novels in all that she talks about in detail.

Many of these novels are ones you, like me, have never heard of, let alone read. Don Quixote is commonly regarded as the first novel, but Smiley puts it seventh on her chronological list. The oldest, The Tale of Genji, was written by an 11th century Japanese woman.

She doesn't choose the novels she necessarily considers the best. For example, she says she regards Our Mutual Friend as the best novel Charles Dickens ever wrote, as well as one of the best novels ever written, yet the Dickens novel she writes about here is A Tale of Two Cities. She includes Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, even though she regards as "a bad work of art."

Many of the novels on her list she has read multiple times. One wonders how she found the time, especially considering how many of her own novels she has written.

Whether one writes novels or just likes to read them, Jane Smiley offers much to ponder.

Happy birthday, twerp

Albert Einstein

Einsteinian became a word in 1925. It was, of course, in reference to Albert Einstein, the great physicist who even now, a hundred years later, is synonymous with brainy. Perhaps in his spirit, that seems to have been a good year for long words in general. Among words coined that year were arachnophobia, Australopithecus, compartmentalize, configurational, neonate, neurosurgeon, oncologist, puerilism, and readability.

Each year at this time I like to celebrate the 100th anniversary of words, according to There's a Word for It, a 2010 book by Sol Steinmetz.

Some product names became part of the language in 1925: Kleenex, Leica, Tootsie Roll and Wheaties. Perhaps because of Tootsie Rolls, we also got the word chewy that year.

The year had its share of new slang words: ball-hawking, coulda, cuppa, dis, dream team, fink, freebie, giddap, gimp, hightail, nudnik, twerp and whoops.

We also got cannoli, cosmic rays, guppy, knitwear, makeover, marathoner, middlebrow, motel, mothproof, needlepointer, pinboard, quiche, superstar, usherette and zipper that year.

Some of these words have already all but dropped out of the language, but many off them seem as fresh as they were a hundred years ago.

The beauty of trees

Few works of art are as beautiful as an old tree.

I live in a part of Florida where ancient trees, mostly oaks, can be found practically anywhere — surrounding my condo complex, on an adjacent golf course where I like to walk in the evening, on the grounds of a nearby church. They take my breath away.

And so I love Susan Tyler Hitchcock's Into the Forest: The Secret Language of Trees. Hitchcock writes beautifully about trees, yet her words are overpowered by the photographs that dominate this National Geographic book. One cannot turn a page without finding a gorgeous photograph — a Japanese maple, an ancient apple tree, fig trees in Australia, children climbing a tree, beech trees in Virginia, cypress trees in a Louisiana bayou and on and on.

One need not read a word to love this book. But anyone who does read the text will be rewarded. Hitchcock's essays are brief — to make room for all those photos — but they say a lot in few words. She tells of a tree estimated to be more than 5,000 years old. Its location is kept a secret to protect it. Trees still survive that were in Hiroshima when the city was otherwise destroyed by an atomic bomb. She describes "forest bathing" — simply walking through a forest slowly and breathing in the air.

Trees have value even beyond their beauty and the worth of the wood and fruit they produce. The author writes that just one red maple tree in Ohio removes 5,500 pounds of carbon emissions over 20 years. It saves 570 kilowatt-hours of electricity. Imagine what a forest can do.

No prizes

There are no prizes for reading, no pay raises in it, no competitive advantage in it. It accomplishes nothing.

Heather Cass White, Books Promiscuously Read

Those are surprising words to find in a book celebrating reading. Are they true? Well, no, but yes.

Schools and libraries give children prizes for reading books all the time. Reading accomplishes nothing? Don't let students ever hear that. No pay raises and competitive advantages? You mean all those self-help books and business books are worthless? How can English teachers and literary critics advance in their careers without reading?

Heather Cass White

Yet for most of us most of the time, Heather Cass White probably has a point. Most of us get little or nothing of permanent value from reading a book. A week after reading a Stuart Woods novel or a Catherine Coulter novel you may have difficulty even remembering the plot. If there are any great lines or great passages or great truths in a book you've just read, you may have difficulty holding them in your mind for more than a few days, or even a few hours. There truly are no rewards for reading most of the time.

White responds to her own words above with this wisdom: "All reading has to offer is a particular, irreplaceable internal experience. Readers should keep faith that that experience is enough."

Sadly, most experiences in life, including the best ones, tend to be fleeting. A convervsation with a friend, a great movie, a walk in the park, a wonderful meal — they are all experiences that offer no prizes, no pay raises, no competitive advantages. They accomplish nothing. And yet, like reading a good book, they make life worth living.

Good, good 'Seymour Brown'

The title character in the 2023 Susan Isaacs novel Bad, Bad Seymour Brown has been dead for two decades. He may be dead, but the mysteries surrounding his life and death remain.

The novel is the second in an entertaining series featuring Corie Geller, a former FBI agent not fully recovered psychologically from her first adventure (Takes One to Know One), and her father, a retired New York City cop. He had been a police detective when Brown and his wife were consumed in an arson fire that destroyed their home and everything in it. Well, not quite everything. Their five-year-old daughter, April, somehow managed to escape.

April is now a college professor specializing in film studies. When someone tries to run her down with a car, she remembers the detective who was so kind to her years before. That's how Corie and her dad get involved in trying to figure out what's going on.

Can this apparent attempted murder have anything to do with Seymour Brown's murder? He had been a money launderer for mobsters. Are they still trying to get back all the money they lost with his death? But why would they have killed him? And why would they want to kill his daughter? Or might Seymour's philandering be the explanation for all this?

Isaacs is known for her female-centric mysteries and thrillers, starting with Compromising Positions in 1978. Her stories tend to be lighthearted and deadly serious at the same time, and Bad, Bad Seymour Brown is no exception. It's a thrill from beginning to end, with lots of giggles along the way.

What makes a classic?

"A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say," Italo Calvino said.

For those of us who have wondered what makes a literary classic, that may be as good a definition as any. If each generation can read a book and find that it has something to say to that generation and if each person can reread a book and discover that it says something this time that it didn't say last time, then you have a classic.

Most books frankly do not fit that definition. Read a typical best-selling novel from even a decade ago and it probably does not hold the same magic that it once did. You may even wonder how it ever became a bestseller. Or reread a book you enjoyed just a couple of years ago, and it may not entertain you or inform you nearly as much this time. You know the ending. It's all familiar. There's nothing new in it. There's no excitement left. What you have is definitely not a classic.

Children often enjoy hearing the same book read to them at bedtime over and over again. To them, this is a classic story. Each time they hear it, it delights them again. For adult readers, classic books work in much the same way. Some people reread the same book every year or two. They never tire of it because they always find something new in it. They view the characters in a different way each time. They find themes they had not realized were there previously. They may simply enjoy revisiting familiar characters.

And then there are old books that each generation discovers anew. They are often taught in school. Or they may be suggested by parents, who may have learned about the books from their own parents. Books like Little Women, Black Beauty, Journey to the Center of the Earth and To Kill a Mockingbird fit into this category. And of course, all fairy tales and nursery rhymes have become classics in the same way.

Classics are almost impossible to predict at the time they are first published. Some books seem like classics, then quickly disappear. Others don't make waves, then are rediscovered and become recognized as classics years later. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is one such book.

Some classics can fade in and out of fashion as tastes and attitudes change. Some classics speak mainly to intellectuals, those with the kind of mind that can appreciate something like Paradise Lost. Other classics speak to more ordinary readers. I was surprised recently to find that Jacqueline Susann's 1966 novel Valley of the Dolls remains in print. Does that make it a classic? I guess it does, at least according to Italo Calvino.

Fun with maps

You might think a terrible map would be one that, for example, shows Illinois west of the Mississippi River, not east.Yet Michel Howe in his Terrible Maps doesn't take maps seriously. The idea in his book is to have fun with them.

Some of his maps are, in fact, hilarious, as promised in his subtitle: "Hilarious Maps for a Ridiculous World." Others are yawners.

The map on the cover shows a typical Howe map. It shows the United Status. Indiana is in red. "Outdiana" is in green. Similarly a map of Africa shows Togo in red. Other countries are labeled "For here." A map of France is called "Map of Nice people." Only the city of Nice is in red. The rest of the country is green.

Howe tends to repeat the same joke over and over. For example, "Railway map of Antarctica" is blank. Likewise a map of Roman air bases in 2nd century AD. After the first, they're yawners.

Sometimes Howe really gets clever. One map shows the word for coma in all European languages. In every case it is either coma or koma, except for Poland, where the word is spiaczka. Another map shows countries with the moon on their flag and other countries with their flag on the moon.

All in all, the book is worth a few laughs, quick to read and fun to show to friends.