Lost at the beginning

The plot of a typical novel has four parts. Jane Smiley calls them exposition, rising action, climax and denouement. These are usually easy to identify in any novel you are reading. You are first introduced to the key characters and the situation at the beginning of the story. Then things start to happen.  Then comes the resolution. Finally comes the summing up, the return to normalcy, or the "happily ever after" perhaps.

Lately, perhaps because growing older has made me impatient, I have been having trouble with the first part, the exposition. It seems that I start novel after novel and abandon it after 50 pages or less. Not only don't I know where the story is going, but I find that I don't even care. I don't like the characters. Their situation doesn't interest me. Or I simply don't understand what is going on. I don't read novels to be bored. I want to care early on about what's going to happen next.

Just the other day I abandoned Monk and Robot by Becky Chambers. The book actually contains two novellas with the same characters. Not that I got very far into the first story. The monk is called Dex, but I jumped ship before the robot came along. Mostly I was turned off because Chambers gives Dex plural pronouns. He was always "they." I just didn't care what happened to Dex and "their" robot." I didn't like being confused. I turned to what I hoped will be a more interesting novel. It is.

And so it has gone too frequently. It is not that I necessarily want the action to start earlier. I loved When the Cranes Fly South despite the fact that there is hardly any action at all through the entire novel. But I liked the main character and wanted to know what would happen to him.

Some novelists begin their novels at the end, giving us a taste of the climax before going back to the beginning. Sometimes this works, but usually I prefer stories in chronological order. Save the climax for the climax. Even so, novelists need to do a better job of making their expositions interesting enough — or their characters interesting enough — to keep readers, including old and impatient readers like me, hanging around.

The mailman's life

If you think your letter carrier isn't keeping a list of who's naughty and nice, you are not living in reality.

Stephen Starring Grant, Mailman

The person who delivers our mail each day is one of those people most of us just take for granted. We just expect our mail to be placed in our box each day at about the same time. We give little thought to everything that goes into getting our mail to us.

And so reading Stephen Starring Grant's Mailman (2025) might be a good idea for all of us.

Laid off from his corporate job at the age of 50 in the middle of Covid, and with a family depending on him, Grant took a job delivering the mail in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia. He delivered the mail for a year, and his experiences are eye-opening.

Grant underwent the post office training expected of all new hires, yet even after weeks on the job he felt incompetent and ready to quit. Sorting the mail correctly, dealing with all those packages (especially during the Christmas season), delivering the mail to the right place at the right time and, yes, dealing with all those dogs that seem to hate mail carriers was a daily struggle for him.

Yet he struck with it and, he now believes, became a better man for it. He talks about the paper cuts, the other injuries common to mail carriers, the importance of rubber bands, the difficult deliveries to ridiculous places and everything else that becomes a part of a mail carrier's life.

He says at one point that his "greatest accomplishment was not quitting." And yet eventually he did quit when he got another, better-paying job in the corporate world. But at least he gave us this book about what the post office looks like from the inside.

Following the crowd

Haruki Murakami

Japanese writer Haruki Murakami said, "If everyone only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking." I only half agree with that statement.

People can read the same books and think very different thoughts about those books. That is the basis for literary criticism. One critic thinks one thing about a book, while another critic thinks something entirely different about the same book. If this is true of Pride and Prejudice, it can also be true of the hottest book on the current best-seller list. Just because we read the same books it does not mean that we all think the same way. Book clubs wouldn't be much fun if that were true.

On the other hand, and this is where I agree with Murakami, only reading the same books everyone else in your circle is reading does display a lack of independent thinking. You may be reading for the wrong reasons. You may be more interested in belonging, in being part of the crowd, than in following your own interests and your own taste in literature.

While two people can think differently while reading the same book, their individuality is even more enhanced when they read different books. Reading the same book can bind together those in the same friend group, the same book club or the same literature class, but following our own individual literary tastes is what makes us truly unique. Because we are reading different books we are able to think different thoughts when reading the same books.

On the way out

Words come and go. New words enter the English language each year, while others are used less and less often until they finally fade from the language altogether.

Read Shakespeare or almost any literature from a century or more ago and you are likely to find head-scratching words. What does that word mean? Or when did it mean that and not this? Dictionaries describe certain words and certain meanings of words as archaic. These words were once important. Now they are ignored.

Anne Curzan

In her book Says Who?, linguist Anne Curzan predicts that whom is one of those words likely to disappear from the language. Already, in fact, its use is rare. When someone says something like, "Whom did you tell?" it raises eyebrows. It sounds snooty, even though it may be grammatically correct. Most of us would say, "Who did you ask?" and hardly anyone would look down on us.

Even Curzan herself admits that in informal writing and speaking, such as in email, she uses who even when sticklers for proper English usage would insist upon whom.

Even when who may be improper, at least according to our English teachers of old, it sounds proper to us. Whom, on the other hand, almost always sounds improper. Or it sounds too proper. It's not how real people talk or write.

For now, whom survives ... barely. In another 50 years or so, it may have become archaic.

Sci-fi women

When I started reading science fiction as a teenager in the late 1950s. it was a male-dominated field. Both writers and readers were predominately male. Writers like Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson, Clifford D. Simak, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Heinlein, Harlan Elison, H.L. Gold and Philip K. Dick ruled the roost. We teenage boys loved them. Girls had other things to read.

Sure, there were a few female writers in the game. Writers like Anne McCaffery  and Ursula K. Le Guin   were popular outliers. And then there was Alice Sheldon, who fooled readers and editors alike by writing under the name of James Tiptree Jr.

Martha Wells

Look at the science fiction shelves in any bookstore today, however, and you will find almost as many female authors as male. And perhaps even more. One finds veterans like Connie Willis, Martha Wells and Octavia E. Butler, as well as younger writers such as Becky Chambers, Sarah Brooks, Bethany Jacobs, Alexandra Gleeman, Emily Hamilton, Sierra Greer, Lindsay Ellis and Dani Francis. And then there are writers like Peng Shepherd, who write imaginative science fiction but don't call it that. 

If greater numbers of women are writing science fiction, it stands to reason that more of them are reading it, too. As a consequence, unless it is just my imagination, sci-fi books are gaining a more prominent display in bookstores than they once had. 

Making the world right

It does not become clear what country the title of From a Far and Lovely Country (2023) by Alexander McCall Smith refers to until the end of the novel, but that is not the only mystery resolved in the long, final chapter.

The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels are not mysteries in the usual sense — nobody gets murdered — yet even so the agency's founder, Precious Ramotswe, looks for answers to do her part to make the world right.

In this, the 24th in the series, a woman comes from America to try to find relatives of a man who meant a lot to her and who may have come from Mma Ramotswe's own hometown. He left during World War II and never returned home. Does he still have relatives in Botswana?

And then there is a singles club that may actually just be a ruse so that married men can meet single women. Charlie, the apprentice mechanic and apprentice detective who is not particularly good at either, gets his chance to handle his own case. Now a married man himself, he is sent to investigate the singles club.

Those are the mysteries, such as they are, but a reader doesn't need a murder for Precious and her colleagues to provide interesting reading.  This may not be the best in the series — in fact the books seem to have hit a bit of a snag lately — but it is still good enough to, for the reader at least, make progress toward accomplishing Mma Ramotswe's objective of making the world right.

The balm of the familiar

Rebecca Lee

Sometimes a book wins literary acclaim and may even become a bestseller because of its originality. We are drawn to the book because it is unlike anything we have ever read before. Yet, let's face it, mostly we choose books that have what Rebecca Lee calls "the balm of the familiar."

She makes this comment in her book How Words Get Good. "Readers know what they are getting, and that's the way they like it," she writes.

Most of us readers like the authors we like, and we are a little anxious about trying authors we have never read before. Further, we like characters who are familiar to us. Had Arthur Conan Doyle dropped Sherlock Holmes after one story, we would not have heard of him today. Doyle, in fact, tried to kill off Holmes, but the character's popularity forced the author to bring him back. Readers liked Sherlock Holmes more than they liked his creator.

Robert B. Parker may have died, but his detective, Spenser, lives on in novels written by other people. So it goes with James Bond and other characters. We like familiar characters. Their creators, it seems, are expendable.