Individual thought

We seem to live in a world now where all thoughts are focused on the idea of prevailing, of imposing one's beliefs on others, and no thoughts, no thoughts are given to the costs of prevailing, or even what it means. Have the people never read Moby Dick? Well, no, they haven't.

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

Jane Smiley's book was published in 2005, yet her words above could have been written today. As she observes, people think they are right, whatever they happen to believe. Those who think differently obviously have it all wrong. This is the way it is not just in politics but in virtually everything else. What's wrong with you if you don't like my kind of music? How can you believe that? How could anyone stand to eat that? Or in that restaurant? What does she see in him?

Jane Smiley loves literature, so perhaps she is guilty of the very thing she criticizes. She thinks other people should love literature, too.

Yet she does have a point. Reading novels is, at least to some extent, an antidote for self-centered thinking.  That's because every character thinks differently from every other character, meaning that the reader is thrown into the minds of a variety of very different people with conflicting ideas, tastes and agendas. Fiction forces one to, in effect, wear the moccasins of others.

One need not even read Moby Dick or anything else that sophisticated. Winnie-the-Pooh makes the same point. Each character thinks in a different way than everyone else. Owl may be Pooh's friend, but that doesn't mean he has to be as obsessed with honey as Pooh is. Tigger likes bouncing, but he doesn't expect anyone else to bounce. And yet they all get along and together, using their very different minds and opinions, manage to solve problems and have a good time together. Imagine what it would be like, as Smiley warns, if they all thought the same way about everything.

Tea for me

Normally I avoid those "BeforeYou Die" books. You know, books to read, movies to watch, places to go, etc., before you die. I plan to make my own decisions about what I want to to do in the years I have left, thank you very much.

Yet I could not resist 101 Teas to Steep Before You Die (2025), just as I cannot resist a good cup of tea. I hoped the book would reveal some teas I might want to experience. I was not disappointed.

The book is the work of Nigel Melican, James Norwood Pratt, Maria Uspenski and Shabnam Weber, tea experts who provide commentary on each of the 101 selected teas.

While the title may suggest that these are the 101 best teas in the world, this is not the case at all. Sometimes the experts admit that they don't even like them. Rather they select noteworthy teas in various categories, including teas you can buy in any grocery store, such as Constant Comment and English Breakfast.

Other categories include healthful teas, teas that changed history and teas that were discovered more or less by accident. Not until chapter 9, "Desert Island Teas," do we get to the teas the four authors really love. Here we find teas like Gyokuro, Clouds and Mist and Big Red Robe, teas I had never heard of but would love to try.

We normally think of tea as coming mostly from China, India and Japan, but this book shows us that fine tea can come from unexpected places, including parts of Africa, New Zealand and even Mississippi.

They treat tea as wine snobs treat wine, talking about aromas, hints of chocolate and fruits or whatever, and even the food that goes best with certain tea.

If you love tea as I do, you will love this book. Otherwise, move on and enjoy your coffee.

To read is to wander

To read is to wander in a direction, to yield to a current.

Heather Cass White, Books Promicuously Read

Heather Cass White

To read a book for the first tune is a kind of wandering, as Heather Cass White suggests in Books Promiscuously Read. That is, we don't know where a book is taking us. We wander to discover what's around the next corner or over the next hill. We read to discover what the author has for us next.

Sometimes, as when we read a thriller or a mystery, surprise is the whole point. But even in more serious novels and most nonfiction, there is a sense of wandering and discovery. We read books in hope that they will be, at the very least, interesting. There will be something we have never encountered before.

We can often be disappointed, of course. Often there is nothing interesting at all around the next curve in the road or over the next hill. Similarly the next chapter of a book can be a letdown. Wandering involves risk, which is why so many of us prefer to read books by authors we have come to know and love.

White's next metaphor, "to yield to a current," is slightly different. Wandering suggests free will, making choices. You can always turn around or take another path. Floating down a stream, however, implies, as her phrase tells us, "yielding." Which is most apt when it comes to reading? Are we wandering or yielding?

Any metaphor can be taken too far, and perhaps it doesn't really matter. In any case, I like the idea of reading as a kind of discovery. As Forrest Gump says about chocolates, you never know what you are going to get.

Keyboard magic

"My imagination doen't really work unless a typewriter is sitting directly in front of me," novelist Larry McMurtry once said. "I am all but incapable of conceiving stories abstractly."

One of Larry McMurtry's Hermes typewriters

I found this quote in Tracy Daugherty's fine biography of McMurtry, and I have no idea when he said, whether it was before or after the computer age. But it doesn't really matter. Even after other writers had switched to writing on computers, McMurtry continued using the same kind of typewriter he had used since early in his writing career. When he was sitting there with his fingers on the keyboard, he was in his comfort zone. That is when his imagination fired up and the stories and characters came out.

Although I switched effortlessly from typewriters to computer keyboards, I identify with McMurtry. I have written previously about how, in my early teens, I had no interest in writing and no clue that I had any writing ability at all until my parents brought home a portable Smith-Corona typewriter. I seemed to turn into a writer overnight.

Even now I usually have no idea what I am going to write about when I sit down at my computer to write a blog post. Yet when my fingers are on the keyboard, ideas begin to form. Words come from somewhere and flow through my fingers and those keys and onto my computer screen. Give me a pen and paper and I am incapable of writing anything noteworthy, as I learned when I had to write all those in-class college essays on test days.

Our minds operate in strange ways. Some writers can only write when they are standing up, like Hemingway, or sitting in bed. Whatever works.

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.