One book, one reader

Seminary Co-op Bookstore

In his book In Praise of Good Bookstores, Jeff Deutsch, points out that in 2019, the Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago, which he manages, sold roughly 28,000 titles — not books, but titles. Of these, nearly 17,000 were single copies. Think about that for a minute.

That means that in a year's time, nearly 17,000 different books sold just a single copy in that store. The bookstore stocked all these books just to sell one copy. Most books, in fact, sell very few copies. Even the so-called best-sellers, in most cases, don't actually sell that many copies. There are so many books being published and so many readers that relatively few people may be interested in reading the same book.

I have been a member of LibraryThing for many years. You might call this social media for bibliophiles. You list your library on the web site and post your reviews of the books you read. You can also have conversations about those books or anything having to do with books.

LibraryThing has thousands of members, yet I've noticed that several of the books I own are owned by nobody else on the site.  One of these is The Photographer's Guide to Great Lakes Lighthouses. Meanwhile, more than 93,000 other members own Pride and Prejudice.

As a reader, here are my conclusions:

1. I am glad people write books even though relatively few people will ever want to read them.

2. I am glad there are publishers still willing to publish books that few people will want to pay money for.

3. The more different books stocked in a bookstore, the better.

4. The longer these books are kept on their shelves, the better.

5. Eventually every book will find its reader.

Word for word

A poem must be remembered word for word or it loses its identity.

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

One of the movie cliches that I hate comes when one character quotes a line of poetry and then someone else, usually an attractive person of the other sex, either quotes the next line of the poem or names the poet and the title of the poem.

Does this ever happen in real life? Rarely. If you said, "I think that I shall never see," I might be able to respond with "A poem lovely as a tree." There are a few lines of poetry that a lot of people know. Yet few people today even read poetry, let alone remember much of it. The odds of two people both having memorized lines from the same obscure poem are astronomical, yet in movies it happens frequently.

I am more accepting of those characters, such as Horace Rumpole in the old PBS series, who quote lines of poetry here and there when it seems to apply to the situation. It is much more likely that one person has memorized a poem than that two people, potential lovers, have done so.

Still, and this is what Jane Smiley seems to be getting at in the line quoted at the top of this post, lines of poetry are much more likely to be quoted word for word than lines from a novel. There are exceptions, such as the opening lines from Moby-Dick and A Tale of Two Cities, but you can paraphrase a novel with more ease than you can paraphrase a poem. Reader's Digest has never condensed a poem. You just can't do it or, as Smiley says, "it loses its identity."

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is remarkable in that, at the end, characters memorize entire books because the government is burning books. (Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which books burn.) A few people are said to have memorized the Bible, but generally speaking people never memorize books word for word. They are simply too long, and the language is rarely beautiful enough to merit memorization or repetition to other people.

Even jokes and folk tales are rarely repeated word for word.

Poetry, however, has power because it can be remembered word for word, and must be, even though few people do it anymore.

In praise of daydreaming

I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.

G.K. Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton

As someone who might frequently be described as absentminded, I rather like the above quotation from British author G.K. Chesterton. Those who are called absentminded are, in most cases, simply thinking about something else.

In school they used to call it daydreaming. We daydreamers may not have been thinking about the lesson or the lecture, but we were certainly thinking about something. I suspect that many of today's most successful people — the inventors and innovators — were once called daydreamers.

I recall the old Disney movie The Absentminded Professor. Fred McMurray played a professor whose mind always seemed to be somewhere else. Nevertheless he invented flubber, an anti-gravity substance.

Albert Einstein, often thought to possess the greatest mind of his age, had a reputation for absentmindedness. So what? In the final analysis, wearing matching socks is hardly the most important thing in the world.

The rest of the story

I look at my girls, my brilliant young women. I want them to think I was better than I was and I want to tell them the truth in case the truth will be useful. Those two desires do not nearly coexist, but this where we are in the story.

Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

Rarely can a novel be summarized in a single paragraph from that novel, but this is the case in the above paragraph found about three-fourths of the way through Ann Patchett's terrific 2023 novel Tom Lake.

Lara's three daughters are grown women, still unmarried and at home for the annual cherry harvest at the family farm near Traverse City, Mich. One of them, the eldest, believes she may actually be the daughter of Peter Duke, the famous movie star. While they pick cherries, Lara decides it is finally time to tell them the story of when she and Duke were lovers. As the paragraph suggests, she wants to tell them the truth, but just not the whole truth. The latter she saves for us readers.

Lara, originally just Laura, is in high school when she first plays Emily in the Thornton Wilder play Our Town. She turns out to be a natural in the part. She eventually goes to Hollywood to make a movie. While waiting for the movie to come out she finds herself at Tom Lake in Michigan, a summer stock theater that is putting on Our Town. Once again she is a natural for the part of Emily.

Also in the cast is charismatic young actor named Peter Duke, with whom she falls instantly in love. Patchett's novels do not normally focus much on sex, but this one is an exception, although of course Lara does not tell her daughters all the juicy details.

Joe, Lara's husband and the father of all three girls, thinks he knows the story, and he listens to just part of what she says among the cherry trees, but he doesn't really know the whole story either. Joe, whose family, owns that cherry farm as Lara's story unfolds, is then a director who helps get that Tom Lake production under way, and later he becomes a cast member. Even then he loves Lara, but she is Duke's girl and he does not interfere. They meet again much later.

The love story has its ups and downs, as most love stories do, but Duke is star material, and Lara soon realizes that she isn't. She may be a natural to play Emily and her only movie is a hit, yet she realizes there at Tom Lake that acting isn't really her future. Besides, Duke is not a one-woman man, though Lara comes to realize she is a one-man hoe.

Patchett has written a series of wonderful novels, all remarkably different. I place Tom Lake right there at the top, along with The Patron Saint of Liars and State of Wonder.

When animals age

If old age can be rough for human beings, even with Social Security and retirement communities, it must be much worse for animals. Herbivores become easy prey when they slow down, and carnivores can starve to death when they can no longer catch anything to eat.

Yet this is not always true, as Anne Innis Dagg tells us in The Social Behavior of Older Animals (2009).

A quick death in old age is not always certain in many species, although roles and behaviors certainly change. Dominate males and females lose their place when they age, as younger and stronger rivals take charge. Yet in many species the elderly are valued for their wisdom, and they may actually become leaders again when a crisis forces others to follow their lead. Older right whales, for example, know best where to find food in certain situations. Older mountain goats know what to do when a storm approaches.

In some species, older females continue to give birth, although their young may be fewer and born farther apart. Because of their experience, the older mothers often have a better success rate when it comes to raising their young.

Dagg's book is not based on any new research. Rather she simply reports what others have discovered while researching something else. Her book is valuable because so few others have focused specifically on the subject of what happens to older animals.

Better than sticks and stones

Most parents engage in wishful thinking when they regard name-calling as good-natured fun which their children will soon grow out of. Name-calling is not good-natured and children do not grow out of it; as adults they merely become more expert in its use.

Peter Farb, Word Play

That children do not grow out of name-calling, as Peter Farb suggests above, can be shown by the current political climate — and in fact by the political climate in the United States for all of its 250 years. When in doubt, call your political opponent names, it seems.

Do adults "become more expert in its use"? That is debatable.

Democrats say it is beneath the dignity of the president of the United States to refer to them as "Dumocrats" or to call Sen. Elizabeth Warren "Pocahontas" just because she pretended for years to be an American Indian. Yet they see nothing undignified about them labeling the president of the United States a racist, a fascist or even a Nazi.

According to American Heritage, George Washington was called illiterate. John Adams called Thomas Jefferson ignorant. Ulysses Grant said of James Garfield that he had "the backbone of an angleworm." Theodore Roosevelt called Woodrow Wilson a skunk. Herbert Hoover called Franklin D. Roosevelt "a gibbering idiot."

It is probably wishful thinking to believe our politicians will ever grow out of name-calling.

Sensitive, but is it a crime?

Sometimes the line between one's work and one's personal life can get a bit blurred, as it does for Ulf Varg in Alexander McCall Smith's The Talented Mr. Varg (2020).

Varg is the detective in charge of the Department of Sensitive Crimes in Sweden. His case this time — if it can even be called a case — comes when Anna, a fellow police officer in his department, asks him to investigate whether her husband is having an affair. She has found an earring in his underwear. An added complication is that Varg is secretly in love with Anna. If he can find conclusive evidence of an affair, would he possibly have a chance with her?

Complications follow, of course, not the least of them being the fact that he is using police force time and police force personnel to investigate what is clearly not a police matter. But then the investigation points to what may be an actual crime.

McCall Smith has three different series of detective novels in progress, but they can all be described as detective light. Murders don't happen, and other acts of violence are rare. Mostly there is just conversation about everyday topics, most of it interesting but hardly suspenseful. And such is the case in this novel, as well.

Yet Varg is a fascinating character, and Martin, his deaf and depressed dog who can read lips, may make this novel worth reading.