Reason to live

Larry McMurtry

In Tracy Daugherty's biography of  novelist Larry McMurtry, who seemed to write books so that he could afford to buy books, he quotes something McMurtry's older sister, Judy McLemore, said about him. "He told me once he wasn't afraid to die; he was just afraid that he wouldn't get all the books read that he needed to get read. I told him, 'Larry, you have been reading since you were four. Surely you have most of them read.' He replied, 'No, I'm not even close.'"

They say that old people often stay alive longer if they are waiting for certain milestones — to reach a 90th birthday, to see a grandchild graduate from college, whatever. Reading all the books one wants to read before dying may be an impossible goal. Even so, it makes sense to me.

I would gladly settle just for all the unread books in my condo, which might keep me going strong for several more decades.

If one needs an incentive to keep breathing, books seem to me to work as well as birthdays and graduations.

Murderbot in love?

The hard reality was that I didn't know what Mensah was to me.

Martha Wells, Exit Strategy

The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells may be, on the surface, adventure novels, shoot-'em-ups in space. Yet what makes them so compelling is that the Murderbot in question is mostly a robot, yet partly a human being. He (or is it it?)  can even pass as human, even though he doesn't need to eat or sleep. He calls himself a Murderbot because he was designed to protect people, usually by killing other people.

By deactivating his governor early in the series, he became a free agent. He follows no orders and can spend all his time watching the videos he has downloaded into himself, which is what he says he wants to do. Yet he  confesses in Exit Strategy (2018), the fourth book in the series, that watching all that media has made him "feel like a person."

What's more, he may actually be in love with Dr. Mensah, his former owner. Now on his own, he sets out to rescue Dr. Mensah from an evil corporation holding her for ransom.

Wells throws in enough imagined scientific jargon of the far future to satisfy any geek, but the Murderbot's shred of humanity is always what drives these novels. This one may not be one of the best in the series, but it is still impossible not to love Murderbot at least as much as he may, or may not, love Dr. Mensah.

How to speak sheep

This strikes me as rather sad — that we can only understand parrots if they're speaking our language about things we've decided are important to us.

Amelia Thomas, What Sheep Think About the Weather

For generations scientists have been trying to teach various kinds of animals to communicate using human speech. But if these scientists are so smart — smarter, one assumes, than those animals — then why not learn to communicate with them using their own forms of communication?

Amelia Thomas is no scientist but just an intelligent woman who loves all animals. In What Sheep Think About the Weather (2025), she tells about her efforts to understand what these animals may be trying to say.

Her amateur studies take her to interview many actual scientists and to examine the communication tools used by whales, dogs, birds, monkeys, horses and many other animals, including sheep. Her book reaches its climax when her beloved but weakening horse, Major, puts his forehead against her own, telling her in his own way that he is ready to die.

Because each of the many species of animals communicates in its own way, and most of them have no interest at all in communicating with humans, it will be a great challenge for Amelia Thomas or anyone else to ever turn into Doctor Doolittle. But Thomas does show us that the true challenge is not teaching chimpanzees or any other species to speak English but rather learning how these animals are speaking to each other, and sometimes to us, in their own way.

Nothing new

I have a view about great art, whether it's stories, music, whatever. None of it tells you anything new; it merely reminds you of something you already knew but forgot you knew. And that's what Larry did, You start reading Lonesome Dove and you feel you already know these people. They're already in you. They've always been in you.

Bill Wittliff writing about Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Larry McMurtry himself disagreed with what Bill Wittliff says above, although his biggest beef seems to have been with Wittliff suggesting that Lonesome Dove is "great art." McMurtry did compare his novel with Gone with the Wind, but then he pointed out that Gone with the Wind is not a great novel either.

But I don't think art has to be great for what Wittliff says to be true. It merely has to be good art.

Art need not tell us anything new. Science does that. Art reminds us of what we know. But it does so indirectly, obliquely even. It may reflect reality, but that reality may be different for different people. Art allows for interpretation. It allows for different opinions. Art so often takes the form of a puzzle.

I was a newspaper book reviewer when Lonesome Dove was published in 1985. I received an advance review copy, and I can recall reading it while on a family vacation that took us to Arkansas, Memphis and Mammoth Cave. If I were asked what book I most enjoyed reading and reviewing, I would say this one. I knew nothing about cowboys and cattle drives other than what I had seen in movies and TV westerns, yet this story moved me as few others have. The characters seemed real to me, as if, as Wittliff suggests, they were already in me.

Behind a masterpiece

I watched Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window again the other night, while I was in the middle of Jennifer O'Callaghan's Rear Window: The Making of a Hitchcock Masterpiece in the Hollywood Golden Age (2025). I must agree. It is a masterpiece.

This 1954 classic entertains audiences even as it convicts them. Jimmy Stewart plays a world-traveling photographer confined by a broken leg to his own apartment. To entertain himself he watches neighbors in a building across the way, sometimes using binoculars. He imagines stories about them. What some may call people watching, others might call voyeurism. Might we under the same circumstances do much the same thing?

Jefferies, the Stewart character, comes to believes a man across from him has murdered his nagging wife. His girlfriend who wants to marry him, played by Grace Kelly; the woman who comes by to give him a daily massage, played by Thelma Ritter; and a police friend, played by Wendell Corey, all think he is letting his imagination get the better of him. But then they become believers, too.

O'Callaghan tells us in detail how this great movie was made, how the elaborate set was built and why it worked so well and how Hitchcock tricked censors into letting him get away with more than they may have imagined.

Yet only about half the book is actually about the making of the film. The rest tells us much about the careers of Stewart and Kelly, especially Kelly, whom O'Callaghan follows from Hollywood to Monaco. She even has a lot to say about Tom Hanks, the modern actor most like Stewart in his common-man appeal. Kelly, however, she regards as one of a kind.

Along the way, she tells readers some fascinating trivia. Who was the highest paid actor in Rear Window? Would you believe Thelma Ritter? And did you know that Ross Bagdasarian, who plays the composer in one of the windows, later became better known as David Seville, the man behind the Chipmunks?

If you enjoy Rear Window — and who doesn't ? — you will have fun with O'Callaghan's lively book.

A nun in Iceland

Icelandic author Olaf Olafsson makes reading his novels a challenge, as in Touch, a book that wowed me a couple of years ago. In The Sacrament (2019), an earlier novel, there is more of the same. Time jumps around, so the reader is never sure what is happening now and what happened way back when. Quotation marks are used sparingly. Much of the narrative is obscure.

Yet Olafsson proves worth the trouble.

Sister Johanna Marie, a French nun, is sent back to Iceland for a second time, two decades after her first visit, to conduct another investigation. Her main qualification as an investigator seems to be that she learned the Icelandic languages from her Icelandic roommate, Halla, when she was in college.

Because Catholic priests and nuns are not allowed to marry, the priesthood sometimes draws homosexual men, partly the reason for the problem the church has had with priests and choir boys. And this is why Johanna is sent as an investigator to Iceland. But does a nun's life also attract lesbians? This is true in Johanna's case, and each time she visits Iceland she has Halla on her mind.

Will she and Halla reunite? That is but one of the novel's mysteries. Also, will misbehaving priests ever face justice? Why did a priest fall to his death from a bell tower during Johanna's first trip to Iceland? And what happened to the boy she rescued from a locked closet?

Olafsson's novels may be puzzles, but they are a joy to solve.

Why not rabbits?

In Version Control, Dexter Palmer wrote one of the most original time-travel novels you are likely to find. In Mary Toft: or, The Rabbit Queen (2019), his creative mind takes off in a very different direction.

Now it is 1726 in a small English village, where a woman seems to be giving birth to dead rabbits. The novel is based on a true story.

Zachary is a village boy who becomes an apprentice to John Howard, the village physician, after he shows interest in a traveling show of human oddities. If this boy has the stomach for this sort of thing, he must have what it takes to be a good doctor, Howard reasons. Mostly the story comes from Zachery's point of view.

But then comes the case of Mary Toft, who gives birth to dead, dissected rabbits every two or three days. At that time it was believed that women who give birth to odd, misshapen children — such as the two-headed woman who shows up late in the novel — must have had something traumatic happen to them during their pregnancy. So why not rabbits?

Soon this oddity attracts surgeons from London, each claiming to represent the king. They take turns delivering dead rabbits and finally take Mary to London to impress the king and others in the big city. Of course, Mary stops giving birth to rabbits once she is in London.

Although this story has comic potential, Palmer mostly plays it straight. He deftly explores the odd human desire to believe the impossible. Whenever we see a magic act, we want to believe the magic tricks are not tricks at all. So again, why not rabbits?