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.

An old man and his dog

So many plots are complicated, full of subplots, twists and turns. But sometimes simplicity works best, as in the case of When the Cranes Fly South (2025) by Lisa Ridzen.

The Swedish author gives us a simple and poignant story about an 89-year-old man with little left to live for other than his memories and Sisten, his elkhound, who sleeps next to him. His wife has dementia and no longer remembers him. He remembers her by keeping her scarf in a jar, opening it now and then to catch her scent.

Bo has always had anger issues, and he struggles to control it when Hans, his son, insists he must take Sisten away from him because he is no longer able to take proper care of the dog. As for Bo, he is taken care of by a series of caregivers who come in several times a day. They leave little notes about Bo and his care, which are interspersed between sections of the novel.

And that is pretty much it. Yet Ridzen writes with such power and sensitivity that readers will find this simple tale totally engrossing.

The best candy shop

Maya Angelou

"The best candy shop a child can be left alone in is the library." So said author Maya Angelou.

A memory that sticks with me through the decades is of a mother, a woman I knew, walking into a public library with her three children and carrying a large box full of books. While she fed the books into the book return, she released her children to find new books. Now and then a child would return with an armload of books and deposit them in the box, then go back to look for more books. Soon enough the box was full again, and the family left for home.

Years later, one of these children, a classmate of my son, became the class valedictorian. No surprise there.

To this family, the library truly was the "best candy shop" in the sense Maya Angelou spoke about. These children could take anything they wanted and all they wanted. They chose books galore to satisfy their own individual sweet tooth. They did not get fat. They got smart.

One bad turn

Nothing could stop her now. She was meant to succeed. Her task was holy.

Peter Robinson, The First Cut

Revenge is sweet, or so they say. But it can turn sour, as Peter Robinson shows in The First Cut (1990), written before his Inspector Banks series became so popular.

The story is about two young women, or so it first appears. Kirsten is a student slashed within an inch of her life when she goes out alone at night. Martha comes to Whitby, England, with murder on her mind. She aims to kill the so-called Student Slasher.

Soon enough it becomes clear to any reader that these are one and the same woman. Through hypnosis, Kirsten thinks she remembers enough about her assailant to find him and kill him. Unfortunately innocent men have to die first. Is one serial killer really better than another?

There are many ways this novel could have ended. Robinson chooses perhaps the simplest one. But is it the best one?