Turtle time

Sy Montgomery, whose book about octopuses (The Soul of the Octopus) so enchanted me, does it again in Of Time and Turtles (2023).

Montgomery, who has also written about apes, hummingbirds, pigs and other animals, immerses herself in her subject and those who study it professionally for months at a time before writing her books. This time she embeds herself with the Turtle Rescue League, a small group dedicated to saving the lives of turtles.

Slow-moving turtles often need to cross roads and highways to get to their nesting sites or wherever, and many are struck by cars each day. Others are used for target practice by hunters and archers. Those in the rescue league don't give up on these injured turtles, even those who don't appear to have any chance at recovery. Turtles move slowly even in their healing process. They can heal, but it takes time. And time is something turtles have in abundance. They can live a long time and are in no hurry.

The author tells remarkable stories, such as about turtles who seem to be dead, yet come back to life. She describes the trial-and-error attempts to build a wheelchair for a turtle, whose inured back legs take a long time to heal. She goes on a long night-time rescue mission to save turtles caught in freezing weather.

All this takes place during the Covid pandemic and during the 2020 election, both of which become part of Montgomery's story, although sometimes just distractions. Turtle time, as she calls it, also leads her to philosophical meditations on time itself.

Delightful society

William Gladstone

"Books are delightful society," William Gladstone, the former British prime minister, said.

This seems to be a common thought among readers, perhaps especially readers who spend most of their time alone. Books can be companions, even friends. Just the other day I heard a man refer to his books as his friends. He didn't want to part with them.

Books can even be lovers. Faith Sullivan flirts with this idea in her novel Goodnight, Mr. Wodehouse, in which a widow takes a P.G. Wodehouse novel to bed with her every night. In a recent article in Oh Reader magazine, Melora Wolff writes, "My only lasting romance in life has been with books."

Books are something you can hold in your hand, when there is no other hand to hold. Books are something you can have a conversation with. They speak to you, and you can speak back, even if just in your mind.  And even familiar books can sometimes say something new to you. Books can be complicated, filled with many layers of meaning, just as another person can be.

Even sitting on a shelf for years at a time, a book can be companionable, especially if it is a book with fond memories attached.

2024 superlatives

Other year-end literary lists focus on the year's best. I favor other superlatives. This year I am adding a new category: most fun. And remember, these are just books I read this year, not those published this year.

Most Enchanting Book: Reading Leif Enger's Peace Like a River makes a person believe in miracles.

Most Important Book: Published a number of years ago, David McCullough's The Great Bridge, about the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, still seems important for what it teaches us about how big ideas become reality.

Most Daunting Book: What I found daunting about Sy Montgomery's The Soul of the Octopus was the subject matter. Each of an octopus's eight tentacles has its own brain and its own personality. Staggering.

Wisest Book: Who would have suspected that a book about a famous madam could explain so much about what was going on in the United States between the wars? But Debby Applegate's Madam, about Polly Adler, does just that.

Most Familiar Book: The Funny Stuff is a collection of highlights from the work of P..J. O'Rourke. Even those excerpts I had not read before seemed familiar because of O'Rourke's distinctive wit.

Most Incomprehensible Book: In The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy, Arik Kershenbaum attempts to predict what creatures on other planets, if they exist, might look like. Huh?

Most Beautiful Book: William Kent Krueger's The River We Remember may be a mystery, but it is a beautifully written  mystery.

Most Fearless Book: In The Power of Eight, Lynne McTaggert takes a scientific approach to prayer. A small group of people praying for the same thing at the same time brings amazing results, she says. What takes bravery is not so much writing the book or reading the book as acting on what it says.

Most Surprising Book: I didn't expect Elizabeth McKenzie's The Dog of the North to be as much fun as Charles Portis's The Dog of the South. But it is.

Most Unpleasant Book: I love Patrick deWitt's other novels, but Ablutions describes some of the very worst human behavior, and I found it disgusting.

Most Luminous Book: Olaf Olafsson's beautiful novel Touch tells of an Icelandic man who fell in love with a Japanese girl in his youth. Now retired and widowed, and in the midst of a pandemic, he flies to Japan to try to find her.

Most Fun Book: All of Richard Russo's Fool novels are fun to read, but Somebody's Fool, the last in the trilogy, puts the icing on the cake.

A full life

The novel written about the life of Dita Kraus was called The Librarian of Auschwitz. Kraus tells her own story in her 2020 autobiography A Delayed Life.

Written when she was 89, her book covers her entire life and does not dwell on her time in Auschwitz or her experiences in Nazi labor camps. She deals with her experiences as the extermination camp's librarian in just a few sentences. There were only about a dozen books that Jewish prisoners had brought with them and were left behind after their deaths. Only 14 years old at the time, she was briefly put in charge of them.

Kraus writes about the deaths of her parents, the starvation diet she and other prisoners endured and the work she was forced to do to stay alive. She survived only by lying about her age, saying she was a year older than she actually was. A teenage girl at the time, she seems to remember more about the boys she liked than the horrors of camp life.

Most of the book deals with her life after the war, first as a translator for British soldiers, then as a wife and mother and settler in the new state of Israel. Her description of life in a kibbutz is particularly interesting. She tells about the kibbutz raising pigs, not caring about Jewish dietary laws, while residents were disciplined if they used the name of Jesus when they swore. There were no marriages. Couples simply declared that they wanted to live together.

In the end, Dita Kraus looks back on a full and rewarding life, even if it was delayed by that horrible experience as a prisoner of the Nazis when she was apparently doomed to an early death.

A Game for Readers (2024 edition)

Each year at about this time I try to answer the same 12 questions with the titles of books read that year. It's a game anyone who reads a lot of books can play. If you do play, please comment with your own answers. Here are mine:

Describe yourself: Somebody's Fool

How do you feel: Touch (literally)

Describe where you currently live: The Old Place

If you could go anywhere, where would you go: Two Nights in Lisbon

Your favorite form of transportation: Hitchhiker

Your best friend is: Hid from Our Eyes

You and your friends are: The Messy Lives of Book People

What is the weather like where you are: A New Day in the City

What is the best advice you could give: Doesn't Hurt to Ask

Thought for the day: I Shall Not Want

How would you like to die: Every Man Dies Alone

What is your soul's present condition: Peace Like a River

Alien abduction can be fun

Light-hearted sci-fi novels are not that common, so we should be grateful for Connie Willis. Her The Road to Roswell (2024) is, like Crosstalk, a comic gem.

Francie goes to Roswell, N.M., to be maid of honor at her former college roommate's wedding, although her real objective is to try to talk Serena out of marrying a UFO kook. Yet no sooner does she get to Roswell than she is snatched by an actual space alien who looks like sagebrush with multiple octopus-like tentacles.

Her fears subside as she begins to realize the alien does not want to harm her but rather needs her help. Before long four others are abducted by Indy, the name given to the alien because he uses those tentacles like Indiana Jones uses his whip.

Indy learns English by watching western movies, leading to many hilarious conversations. One of his favorite expressions becomes, "MIGHTY GRATEFUL MA'AM." Indy's mission is to find a missing friend, but he feels so bad about Francie missing the wedding that he insists on going to a Las Vegas wedding chapel so that she can marry Wade, one of the men he has abducted. He seems to know before either Wade or Francie that they are in love.

Indy and his human crew are chased through the West by both the FBI and other aliens. This may not be classic science fiction, but it is all outrageous fun. 

Hard on books

First edition

Why are first editions of classic children's books in good condition relatively hard to find? Simply because children are hard on books, especially the books they love.

Very small children even chew on books. So do their pets. Children want their parents to read the same favorite stories over and over again at bedtime. They like to carry these books with them and take them places, even outside when they play. Before they learn to read, they enjoy sitting down with these books to look at the illustrations and relive the stories in their minds.

Like teddy bears and favorite dolls and toys of any kind, few favorite books survive childhood in good shape. They may eventually get tossed. If kept, they may become prized possessions to their original owners, yet they may not be prized by collectors looking for something more pristine.

It is probably true that any book, whether written for children or adults, that remains in a condition loved by collectors was never truly loved by its original owner.