The transgression of reading

The greater the clams a social system makes on an individual, the graver the transgression of reading will be,

Heather Cass White, Books Promiscuously Read

Joyce Carol Oates

Heather Cass White's comment above seemed relevant to me before reading Hazards of Time Travel by Joyce Carol Oates. Afterward they are all the more relevant.

The novel tells of a high school student who is punished for being smart. For reading books. For asking questions. For thinking independently. The story may be set in the future, but as White suggests, something similar could happen at any time, past, present or future. Social systems, political systems, religious systems can all, at their extreme, seek to control information.

This happened during the COVID epidemic. It happened in Hollywood during the Hays era. It happens at so many colleges and universities today where diversity and inclusiveness are celebrated, at least until someone says something or reads something that might be considered conservative.  It happens when Amazon makes certain books difficult to purchase. Reading, especially the reading of fiction, is frowned upon by many parents.

White cites an example in Jane Austen's novel, Northanger Abbey, where one woman interrupts another, "'And what are you reading, Miss —?'" The other replies, "'Oh, it is only a novel!'" She then "lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame."

In Austen's story, the prejudice against reading a novel is at least subtle. Nobody is seizing the book or burning it or preventing its circulation.

Reading, White says, can be viewed as a "crime" in two ways. First, it is an independent act — one person voluntarily reading something, whatever it might be. Second, "it removes that self from circulation, from its possible use as the property of others."

Systems, at their extreme, want to own you. They want to control you. They want to dictate what you read and, therefore, what you think.

Through time with Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is one of our most prolific novelists, a prolificacy revealed not just in the number of her novels but in their variety. With Hazards of Time Travel in 2018, she even turned to science fiction and did it better than most sci-fi writers.

Her narrator is a high school senior named Adriane Strohl, who lives in a time, not far in the future, when becoming class valedictorian can be viewed by an oppressive government as an act of rebellion. You aren't allowed to ask questions or to think independently. You must conform or else. Adriane doesn't even get to give her valedictorian speech before she faces the "or else."

She is exiled, transported back to 1959 where she finds herself a coed named Mary Ellen Enright at a Wisconsin college. You might think she would enjoy the relative freedom of 1959. Everyone else is worried about the threat of nuclear war with the USSR, but coming from the future, she knows that never happened. Yet she misses her parents and friends. And she is puzzled by the technological simplicity of this age. She must learn how to use a typewriter. She must turn pages to read a book. Telephones are plugged into the wall and are just for talking.

Then she falls in love with a professor, Ira Wolfman, whom she learns is also an exile from her own time. Both believe they are being monitored by the powers-that-be in the future, but can they escape?

Oates takes us in directions we may not expect, all while warning her readers not so much about the hazards of time travel as the hazards of expanding technology and artificial intelligence. She makes 1959 sound pretty good.

You can be replaced

In the coming weeks I plan to get a new crown on one of my teeth and to have cataract surgery on both eyes. In other words, I will be replacing some of my original equipment with artificial replacement parts.

And this is the subject of Mary Roach's entertaining new book Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy (2025). As usual in her books, she makes science fun. You may not think there is anything amusing about hip replacements, artificial hearts, breast implants, mechanical joints and the like, but Roach can bring a smile while writing about just about anything.

When she is visiting a place where bodies are carved up to retrieve donated organs,  she comments about the music played in the building — Wanted Dead or Alive, Another One Bites the Dust and Only the Good Die Young, among other songs on the morgue playlist.

She writes about women who change breast implants as often as they change boyfriends. She tells of gene-edited pigs so that individuals who may eventually need new organs can have their "personal pig" when the time comes. She writes, "Hip replacement has the visual drama of a visit to a Chevron station."

Even her footnotes are worth reading. In one she reveals how she lost her virginity. That's not something one expects to find in a science book.

Roach doesn't appear to be squeamish about anything, allowing her to view and then describe things most of us might wish to avoid. And her humor makes all this easier for the reader to handle.

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.