An escape or a confirmation?

Lawrence Durrell

"I don't believe one reads to escape reality," the British novelist Lawrence Durrell said. "A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he had not experienced."

But can't both be true, even at the same time?

A man may work in an office in Cincinnati or as a plumber in Philadelphia and, in the evening, enjoy reading western novels. He may want to both escape the reality of his own circumstances — perhaps there is even a nagging wife — while at the same time wanting to experience a reality, even if it's an imagined one, that he can never experience in real life.

Or a war novel may be read by someone with no military experience at all. He will never know what it is really like being in combat, but a book can confirm that reality, while at the same taking him briefly away from his normal routine.

A lonely middle-aged woman who has never experienced romance in her life may read one romance novel after another to confirm a reality that she believes other women have known.

And so on.

Thanks to books, one can travel into space, explore the deep ocean, find true love, win a bar fight, hit a home run in the World Series, solve mysteries, travel the world or do almost anything else. There are many more realities than any one person can experience in one lifetime. Books expand our possibilities.

Behind the scheme

Emily St. John Mandel's 2020 novel The Glass Hotel is a bit hard to peg. It covers a lot of years in relatively few pages. There are numerous characters. It is about a Ponzi scheme, yet it is also a ghost story

All this adds to the novel's charm.

The hotel of the title is where the novel begins and where it ends. Hotel Caiette is isolated on Vancouver Island, accessible only by boat. Only rich people stay there. Only those who prefer isolation can work there.

Early on Jonathan Alkaitis, a wealthy investor, meets Vincent, the bartender. Despite the misleading name, Vincent is actually a beautiful young woman. Alkaitis quickly makes her his pretend wife, never a replacement for his beloved late wife, but an attractive woman to keep on his arm and to share a bed with.

The life suits them both of them until authorities arrest Alkaitis for stealing from his many wealthy clients. He goes to prison. Vincent goes into isolation, working aboard ships where nobody knows her past.

Meanwhile Mandel looks into the lives of the scheme's victims, as well as those who worked with Alkaitis and suspected something was wrong yet were making too much money to take a stand. While all this is going on,  ghosts come and go, appearing to several people during the course of the novel.

This is not your usual crime novel — or ghost story — but it is a gem.

Why no ads?

Magazines and newspapers can have more ads than articles. Television interrupts every show every few minutes with several minutes of commercials. Even supposedly ad-free public television throws in ads at the beginning and end of programing. When you go to the movies, you must sit through several minutes worth of commercials before the movie finally starts. On the web, you can't watch YouTube videos, do a Google search or do much of anything else (reading this blog being an exception) without encountering ads.

So how have books survived all these years without advertising?

To be sure, each book's publisher probably promotes other books they publish, especially those by the same author, somewhere in each volume. But you don't find Pepsi ads between chapters. You never find a State Farm ad on the back cover. How can this be?

Other media survive thanks to advertising, but not books. Advertising makes mass communication free, or at least relatively cheap. Somebody has to pay for "free" television programs. Somebody has to pay for web searches. Film producers and movie theaters need extra income to stay afloat.

Yet publishers keep publishing books, more and more each year, without putting advertising between the covers. What gives?

First, many people like to see their words in print, meaning they are willing to write books for little financial return. For publishers, books are relatively inexpensive to print, but they are not inexpensive to purchase. We readers are the ones who pay the freight. Books might actually be less expensive if they contained advertising. We must now pay about $30, sometimes a lot more, for a hardback book and nearly $20 for a paperback. Perhaps some advertising would help publishers, authors and readers, at least financially.

We are spared advertising in books, in part, because most books aren't all that popular. Most books, in fact, sell only a few thousand copies, if that. Even bestsellers don't necessarily sell enough copies to make authors — or potential advertisers — rich. Thus advertising in books doesn't make much sense in the book business. Why buy advertising in a book that may sell relatively few copies? And if publishers ever became dependent on advertising, fewer books might be published.

The ad-free tradition helps. It's how books have always been. We don't want our books "sponsored" because advertisers may try to influence content. Sometimes, for example, we see certain products in films because the manufacturers of those products have invested money in the productions. We might possibly see something similar if books contained advertising.

Quite piossibly the future of book publishing depends upon the industry keeping books ad-free.

Underwater sound

We may have heard about humpback whales that sing in the ocean, but it may not have ever occurred to us that other forms of sea life communicate by sound, as well. It was Jacques-Yves Cousteau who coined the phrase "the silent world" in one of his films about the sea, and most people believed him.

Yet the oceans are a concert of sound, it turns out. Amorina Kingdon tells us about it in her 2024 book Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Under Water. Many different species communicate by sound. These are not necessarily vocal sounds. Some species produce sound by rubbing body parts together or in other ways.

Kingdon writes, "Sculpins move their pectoral girdle. Toadfish, squirrelfish, and others drum on their swim bladder with special muscles or tendons, making resonant hums, moans, and boops. Blue grunt or beau-gregory scrape or grind special teeth in their throats. Some fish burp or expel gas from their anus."

Researchers have speculated that the songs of humpback whales may actually, in a sense, rhyme.

Whale sounds can travel many miles. It is how they communicate with each other. Some species use sound to attract mates or to find their young in dark water.

Humans have a way if interfering with the natural world without meaning to, such as by simply cutting down  dead trees. This is true of underwater sound, as well. The engines of ships, sonar and windmills, for example, can make life difficult for sea life and may be responsible for those mysterious beached whales.

Kingdon gives us the good and the bad of underwater sound.

Caught in a blizzard

Iceland is a small country that has produced some remarkable writers of thrillers and mysteries. One of these is Ragnar Jonasson, whose Outside (2021) makes compulsive reading.

The plot seems simple enough. Four friends go on a mid-winter hunting trip when an unexpected storm sweeps in. Yet the blizzard is just the first, and perhaps the least, of many surprises.

They seek shelter in a cabin, where they find a still, silent man holding a gun. Gunnslaugur may be a respected lawyer but he is also an alcoholic who, this being a hunting trip, has his own gun. In a panic, he shoots the silent man. Now what do they do?

It turns out that the four friends are not as friendly as we were first led to believe. In fact, one of the novel's big mysteries is why these four people would ever go hunting together in the first place. Nobody really likes Gunnslaugur. Daniel left Iceland to become an actor in London. He doesn't like guns and isn't that fond of any of his "friends." Armann is an outdoorsman and a professional guide, and it is he who organized the trip, but he has a violent past. Helena, we learn, is Armann's twin sister, and she carries grudges against both Gunnslaugur and Daniel.

One disaster leads to another in Jonasson's story. The brief chapters, each told from the point of view of one of the four main characters, will keep every reader turning the pages as quickly as possible.

Whose rules?

The English language has always been tolerant of contributions from elsewhere. So many of the words we use, other than the basic Anglo-Saxon ones, come from other languages. English speakers may change them and pronounce them differently, but we keep them and make them our own.

Yet trouble seems to follow whenever other languages become too highly regarded by English speakers, often supposed language experts. Many of the silly language rules we older folks learned in school were imported from Latin as late as the 19th century. These include not splitting infinitives and not ending sentences with a preposition. Yet English is a Germanic language, not a Romance language. Latin rules do not apply to English.

After the Normans conquered England in 1066, numerous French words entered the English language — at least the English spoken by aristocrats. Thus, chickens became poultry and pigs became pork, among many others. Again, English welcomes words from anywhere.

But there are many words and phrases that English speakers have adopted simply because they sound French, yet they are not French at all. We just like to pretend they are French because they make us sound more sophisticated. These include such expressions as piece de resistance, nom de plume, affair d'amour and even negligee. These are unknown in France. The British simply made them up.

Over the years the British were quick to accept French spellings of English words. In fact, Americans spell many English words in a more traditional English way than the British do. The British now use the word honour because of French influence. Americans spell it as honor, the way the English used to. Similarly, Americans use theater, center and fiber, while the British, under French influence, now spell these theatre, centre and fibre.

But the English language isn't French, any more than it's Latin. We English speakers can take their words, but we should follow our own rules.

Picking up the pieces

So many brave young men died in World War I, yet yet the trials for those who survived, both men and women, continued even after the war was over. Somehow Helen Simonson produced a light-hearted novel, The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club (2024, out of this serious situation.

During the war, young British women had to step up and do many of the jobs young men had done before the war. Some of them discovered they liked doing these jobs, but when the war was over they were expected to quit and get married, never mind that there were fewer men available to marry. Meanwhile, wounded veterans found themselves unwanted for the many jobs newly available. Soldiers from India who had contributed to the war effort were less welcome in England once the war was over.

Set in the summer of 1919, Simonson's novel centers on Constance Haverhill, who did her part during the war, but now her bookeepping skills are unwanted. She is employed as an aide to a wealthy elderly woman who will soon need her no longer. Mrs. Fog is set to marry a sweetheart from long ago.

Constance doesn't know what she will do with herself, but then she befriends Poppy, an outgoing young woman who rode motorcycles during the war and wants to continue doing the same. She has several friends, female riders or mechanics, with similar frustrated ambitions. Poppy's brother, Harris, was a pilot in the war, but now he has a wounded leg, and the bank job promised to him before the war is no longer available. And although he is a gifted pilot despite his bad leg, nobody wants him flying their planes.

A badly damaged Sopwith Camel, purchased by Poppy, gives Harris incentive to live again, and with Constance as his unexpected flying partner, he begins to see a brighter future for himself. Will that future include Constance?

There are complications, of course, all of which result in an absorbing novel with just the ending readers want.