This year's best reading

Carrie Brown

Two of the best books I read in 2017 were novels I probably never would have read but for a literary discussion group at my local library. I connected with the group in mid-summer when I noticed they would be discussing Jon Clinch's novel Finn at their next meeting. I had read the book years previously and I wanted to hear what others said about it. I ended up staying with the group until coming south in November, and two of the books we talked about during this period were The Opposite of Everyone by Joshilyn Jackson and Lamb in Love by Carrie Brown. Both novels made a good impression.

Jackson's novel tells of a divorce lawyer, someone who views her calling as breaking up families, discovering she has two siblings she doesn't know she has and finding herself in the position of struggling to bring a family together. Brown writes about a middle-aged postmaster who falls in love for the first time in his life and seems to do everything wrong, yet somehow manages to do everything right.

Other notable novels read this year (none of them actually published in 2017) included Tracy Chevalier's The Last Runaway, about a young Quaker woman who settles in Ohio in the mid-1800s and becomes involved in the Underground Railroad while falling in love with a man trying to round up runaway slaves; Marilynn Robinson's Gilead, about a dying pastor's attempt to explain himself to his very young son; and Anthony Trollope's Cousin Henry, about a lost will and characters who take moral stands for less than moral reasons.

Which is the best of these? I'd say Lamb in Love, with The Last Runaway a close second.

Michael Korda

That said, I must admit the most fun I had reading this year was with Old Boys, a spy novel by Charles McCarry. Not far behind is Crosstalk by Connie Willis, which I reviewed here just a few days ago. For pure pleasure reading, it would be hard to beat these two books.

As for nonfiction reading, I had a good time with biographies in 2017. The best was Michael Korda's Clouds of Glory about Robert E. Lee, but Coolidge by Amity Shlaes, Mr. Strangelove by Ed Sikov (about actor Peters Sellers) and Ike's Bluff (about the Eisenhower presidency) were also first-rate.

Other nonfiction works that impressed me were The Road to Character by David Brooks, Sanctuary of Trees by Gene Logsdon, Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett and The Better Angels of Ourselves by Steven Pinker.

Let us play

As another year draws to a close, I want to return to a little game I like to play in late December. The object of the game is to answer a series of questions using only the titles of books read during the year. Let’s see how I do this year.

Describe Yourself The Opposite Of Everyone

How Do You Feel? Limitations

Describe Where You Live In Plain Sight

If You Could Go Anywhere, Where Would You Go? Easter Island

Your Favorite Form Of Transportation The Road to Character

Your Best Friend Is Mr. Strangelove

You and Your Friends Are Old Boys

What’s the Weather Like Where You Are? The Heat of the Sun (Ordinary Thunderstorms and The Delicate Storm would have also worked.)

What Is the Best Advice You Could Give? Suffer the Little Children (Or perhaps Start Without Me)

Thought for the Day The Night Is Large

How Would You a Like to Die? Burial at Sea

Your Soul’s Present Condition Clouds Of Glory

OK, some of the answers are a bit weak. I guess I just failed to read the right books this year.

Bluffing his way to peace

Dwight Eisenhower liked playing cards as much as he liked playing golf, but he was better at cards and one reason for that was his skill at bluffing. Evan Thomas explores how this particular skill carried over into his presidency in his 2012 biography Ike’s Bluff: President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World.

Having spent a career in the U.S. Army, culminating in his appointment as Supreme Commander in World War II and a military success that led to his election to the presidency in 1952, Eisenhower came to believe you shouldn’t fight wars unless you were fully committed to victory. Put another way, all or nothing.

Throughout the 1950s, the Cold War threatened to turn into a hot one. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons pointed at each other. Smaller wars threatened to break out everywhere, such as over the Suez Canal, and any small war could ignite a larger one.

What Ike knew, thanks to the U-2 flights and other espionage, was that the Soviets were bluffers, too. They didn’t have nearly the nuclear weaponry or the delivery capacity they pretended to have. But they could still be formidable in a conventional war. Ike’s bluff, in a nutshell, was all or nothing. There would be no small wars. If the Soviets wanted a fight, they would have to face American nukes. Would Eisenhower really have done it? Nobody really knows, but most important, Nikita Khrushchev didn’t know, and as a result, Thomas argues, the 1950s, for all their tension, were a relatively peaceful time. “The United States was blessed to be led by a man who understood the nature of war better than anyone else, and who had the patience and wisdom, as well as the cunning and guile, to keep the peace” he writes.

Presidents after Eisenhower, beginning with John F. Kennedy, have committed American troops to smaller wars, such as in Vietnam and Afghanistan, without being fully committed to victory. The consequences have not been pretty.

Thomas suggests that Ike bluffed not just the Soviets but the American people, as well. He pretended in public to be a low-key, slightly confused old man who would rather play golf than focus on the nation’s business. In truth the golf was a means of relieving the tension from his intense attention to affairs of state. Even today some historians still fall for the bluff and underestimate Eisenhower’s presidency, says Thomas.

Nothing but the truth

There's such a thing as being too connected, you know, especially when it comes to relationships. Relationships need less communication, not more.

Connie Willis, Crosstalk

Part science fiction, part paranormal fantasy, part romantic comedy, Connie Willis's entertaining 2016 novel Crosstalk may more than anything be a satire on contemporary culture's desire for connection, preferably through technology rather than by people actually talking to one another. The lines above spoken early in the novel by C.B. Schwartz, one of the main characters, would seem to summarize the author's own view: Communication, like most other things, is best used in moderation.

Briddey Flannigan, like C.B., works for a company in the competitive smartphone industry. She and her boyfriend, Trent, have decided to each get an EED, an implant in the brain that supposedly allows lovers to communicate their emotions to one another even at a distance. Almost instantly everyone in the company finds out about their plan, and C.B., a scruffy young man who hides out in the frigid basement, tries to discourage her. She goes ahead with the operation anyway, but instead of being connected to Trent, she finds herself connected to C.B. And it's not just their feelings that are shared, but virtually every thought the two of them have.

You might not think Willis could possibly sustain this farce for 500 pages, as comic novels, like movie comedies, usually work best when relatively short, but somehow she does. The complications keep coming and coming. If some of them are predictable -- you know C.B. and Briddey will fall in love and that Trent is up to no good -- most of them will surprise most readers.

I will close with another C.B. Schwartz quote, my favorite: "If people really wanted to communicate, they'd tell the truth, but they don't."

Preserving without protecting

Nicholson Baker

The words conservation and preservation don't quite mean the same thing, though their meanings are similar. Generally we use conservation when speaking of a limited resource, such as clean water or farmland, and preservation when speaking of something rare, such as art or antiques. But both words suggest protection, whatever it is that is being protected. In Double Fold, the book I reviewed here a couple of days ago, Nicholson Baker says librarians have very different meanings when they use these two words.

To librarians at many of the major libraries across the United States, he says, conservation "refers to the repair or restoration of the original object." The object in question is usually a book. Preservation, on the other hand, refers not to the protection of the book itself but rather the contents of the book. Thus, a librarian can speak of preserving a book by copying its contents onto microfilm, even though the act of doing so leads to the destruction of the physical book, however rare and valuable and irreplaceable it may be.

"Reversibility -- the potential to undo what you or your predecessors have done -- is a watchword of modern book conservation," Baker writes, "book preservation, by contrast, is often irreversible, because the book is gone." Microfilming usually requires taking a book apart and copying it page by page. Even if it may be possible to put the book back together in some form, it is not something  librarians are interested to doing, for the main objective of microfilming is to create more shelf space and save money (even though, Baker argues, microfilming is more costly than building additional storage space).

And so, rare books have been destroyed in the name of preservation. But isn't the essence of the book, its contents, preserved? Not when microfilm, both as a material and a technology, has such a limited lifespan, much less than the original books themselves.

I should explain the meaning of Baker's title, Double Fold. It refers to a common test librarians have used to demonstrate that paper is fragile and will fall apart. You simply bend over a corner of a page. How many folds can you do before the corner comes off? But folding almost anything weakens it. You can easily tear even new paper after folding it a couple of times. How well do you think microfilm would hold up under the double fold test?

A library scandal

It's as if the National Park Service felled vast wild tracts of pointed firs and replaced them with plastic Christmas trees.

Nicholson Baker, Double Fold

Destroying something to protect it sounds like something out of Catch-22. Instead it's something out of the Library of Congress and numerous other prestigious libraries across the United States. What they have destroyed, or allowed to be destroyed, are countless irreplaceable old books and newspapers and, along with them, a good portion of American history.

So argues Nicholson Baker in his persuasive 2001 book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper.

Baker attacks the claim that because paper is fragile and deteriorates with time, old books and newspapers should be copied onto microfilm, preferably with government funding. Because copying usually means taking apart these books and newspapers, they are no longer fit to be returned to shelves. So they are discarded. But saving library space, not saving books and newspapers, or even the contents of those books and newspapers, has really been the main objective all along, he says.

To be sure, the purpose of most public libraries is to serve the public, and the public mostly wants to read today's books and today's newspapers, not books and newspapers from a hundred years ago. Libraries must regularly discard older books in order to make room for new ones. Baker argues, however, that major metropolitan libraries, university libraries and especially the Library of Congress should have different standards and different objectives. These are the libraries most used by historians, writers and researchers of all sorts, and these are the people most hurt by the actions of these libraries. (But in smaller towns all over the country, old newspaper stories remain the main source for researching local history.)

Isn't microfilm just as good? During my newspaper career I sometimes had to search for old newspaper stories on microfilm. Rolls of microfilm were certainly lighter and easier to handle than bound volumes of newspapers, and one could speed through the microfilm fairly quickly to find what one was looking for. The problem was being able to actually read what you found. Reproduction on microfilm can be iffy, especially around the edges. It is also in black and white, even though portions of the newspaper pages may have been printed in color. Baker shows examples of  newspaper pages from a century ago that had beautiful color drawings and cartoons that appear drab on microfilm.

What's more, Baker says, paper doesn't actually deteriorate as quickly as librarians argued to justify their scheme. Many of us have some very old books in our attics that can still be read without fear they will fall apart in our hands. And old books in libraries don't get heavy use. Usually those historians and researchers are the only people who want to handle them.

Finally, the author says, microfilm has been found to not last as long as those supposedly fragile books and newspapers. There are newer technologies, but how do you make a good digital copy from a blurry, decaying strip of microfilm? You need the originals, and in most cases, these have been destroyed.

Hangwoman

Sharyn McCrumb's Prayers the Devil Answers has a murder, but no mystery. The man who pushes his wife from a cliff fails to notice he has two witnesses. He makes no attempt to escape and offers no defense at his trial. He goes to the gallows without protest. So where lies the drama, where the suspense? It turns out there is drama and suspense aplenty, just not where one might expect to find it.

McCrumb focuses mostly on a young woman named Ellie Robbins, who with her husband and two sons comes down from the Appalachian hills to try their luck in town. It is 1936, the Depression is at its worst and jobs are hard to come by. Her husband, however, manages to win an election for sheriff. He doesn't hold the office long, however, before he becomes sick and dies.

The author prolongs his death, perhaps longer than necessary, yet these pages may be the most powerful and most moving in the novel. She takes us into Ellie's mind, showing us how her husband's illness and then his death impacts her in so many ways. Later, a terribly introverted woman, she must bear up under the strain when people, many of whom she barely knows, come to the house to offer sympathy and bring food. She has no idea what to say and only wants to see them gone.

Then comes the question of how she will support her boys. She hits on the idea of asking the county commissioners to appoint her sheriff until a new election can be held. Strangely, nobody else wants the job, and so this timid young woman is sworn in as county sheriff. Mostly she just acts as administrator and handles the paperwork, something she already did for her husband. Then the young man murders his wife and is condemned to death by hanging. And she learns state law requires the sheriff to be executioner. (The novel is loosely based on an actual case in Kentucky in 1936.)

Complications abound. Relatives want to take her children away from her. Reporters come from all over, making the female sheriff, not the condemned man, their story. She discovers her husband was not quite the man she had believed him to be. She had gotten what she wanted, to be made sheriff, but she has to wonder if it was really God who answered her prayer.

Fake news or just careless reporting?

The phrase "fake news" suggests to me either satire, as with The Onion or Saturday Night Live, or propaganda, deliberate lies spread by governments, political candidates, big business or anyone else evil enough with money enough (not that money is still a requirement, thanks to Twitter and the Internet). As a former journalist, I am hesitant to apply the term to others in my profession. Not that I don't recognize the blatant errors that keep cropping up and that President Donald Trump uses to denigrate the press and network news.

Some of these errors have, in fact, been deliberate. A case in point is the photo a Washington Post reporter sent via Twitter showing a sparse crowd in an auditorium which the president had claimed was "packed to the rafters." He later admitted the photo had been taken long before the president spoke. Even though it was on Twitter, not the Washington Post, I think it can still be called fake news.

In most instances, however, I think the journalists in question think they were reporting the truth but are guilty of carelessness and/or wishful thinking.

The now rampant use of anonymous sources, especially in Washington, is an invitation to disaster. Sources who will not allow the use of their names are notoriously less dependable than those willing to stand behind what they say. Of course, leakers in the White House, the Department of Justice and so on are not likely to allow the use of their names. The challenge for reporters is to find ways to confirm the information. Careless reporters don't bother.

As for wishful thinking, I suspect most of us are more likely to believe positive things about those we like and negative things about those we don't like. When the president is victimized by errors, what he terms fake news, they are almost always the work of journalists who don't like him, who want to discover negative things to report about him and whose standards thus are lower than they might otherwise be.

A Monkee looks back

Many people are best remembered for one thing when they would prefer to be remembered for something else, such as retired athletes who have become successful in business yet are famous only for what they did in the field or on the court decades before. One such person is Michael Nesmith, who will forever be known as one of the Monkees back in the Sixties, never mind all the innovative things he has accomplished in music, technology and philanthropy since then.

In his recent autobiography Infinite Tuesday, he puts his brief career as a Monkee in perspective. It gave his show business career a big boost, allowed him to form friendships with such individuals as John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash and Douglas Adams, but he has had many other more important accomplishments since then. If others won't mention them, then he will.

Nesmith, for example, invented the music video, way before MTV. He had written a song called Rio, but when he tried to get it some airplay in England he was asked to provide a video. What was actually wanted was just a cheap video of himself performing the song, but instead he put together a costly, highly entertaining video. Everyone who saw it loved it, but nobody knew what to do with it. It was an idea whose time had not yet come.

Michael Nesmith

Nesmith tried his hand at making movies, calling himself a Hamburger Movie Tycoon, his term for people who make their fortunes in other fields, then think they can be successful in Hollywood, too. Usually they can't, and Nesmith couldn't either.

He had more success buying up rights to countless videos for low prices before VHS tapes became as popular as they soon became. He was later sued by PBS, who wanted their rights back and resented Nesmith acquiring them so cheaply. Their ruthless attempt to ruin him and use the courts to steal the videos back may make you think twice about pledging to PBS in the future. Yet Nesmith ultimately won the case.

He has also had success on the Internet and with the philanthropies entrusted to him by his mother, who made her fortune after inventing Liquid Paper, then dying young.

From this you might get the idea the book is full of little more than name-dropping and boasting. There is some of that, to be sure, but I was impressed with his candor about the many mistakes he has made both in his personal life and in his career. He regards himself as perfect illustration of what he calls Celebrity Psychosis, or thinking oneself more important, more special than one really is. He doesn't seem to have liked the other Monkees, for he has little to say about them, but it would appear the feeling was mutual.

With age comes wisdom, at least sometimes, and such appears to be the case with Michael Nesmith.

An Ace fantasy

Since the 1970s, Alan Dean Foster, who just turned 71, has been a popular and prolific author of fantasy and science fiction novels. I am wondering if his career might easily have taken off in a different direction early in his career, however.

I recently found found Foster's 1988 novel, Maori, a paperback original, in my library and decided to read it. The book may have been sent to me for review, but I managed to ignore it for nearly 30 years. When I started reading I had no idea what to expect. I recognized Foster's name as a sci-fi writer. The novel's cover calls it "the epic historical fantasy of the year!" On the back it says, "One man ... on the mystical adventure of a lifetime" and "discovered a magical world beyond his strangest dreams" and "a dazzling epic fantasy of a strange but enchanted land."

It turns out the novel has more in common with James Michener's Hawaii than Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World. It tells the history of New Zealand from the early 19th century when whalers stopped there to resupply their ships to the late 19th century when it became the first part of the British Empire to give women the vote. In between were decades of war between the white settlers and the Maori natives. Mostly we follow the story through the eyes of Robert Coffin, a businessman who builds his fortune while helping to build a country, yet managing to destroy those he loves along the way.

The novel might qualify as a fantasy in the way any novel is a fantasy, the work of the author's imagination. But Ace Books, Foster's publisher at that time, built its reputation selling fantasy and science fiction, not serious historical novels. So what were they to do with Maori? What they did, apparently, was to disguise it as a fantasy novel, thus disappointing those who bought it expecting a fantasy and keeping it hidden from those readers who might have actually enjoyed it. Had I known what it is, I might not have waited three decades to read it.

It's too bad, for Maori is a good novel, one that deserved a wider audience than it probably received. Had it gotten that audience, Alan Dean Foster might have chosen to write more books like it.

Why keep books?

The question most asked of bibliophiles is probably, "Have you read all these books?" Not far behind, however, comes this one: "If you've already read them, why do you keep them?"

To true bibliophiles, this question seems like a no-brainer. They collect books because they like books, the way someone who collects tea pots likes tea pots or someone who collects stamps likes stamps. The fact that a tea pot may never again hold tea or a stamp may have already been canceled has nothing to do with it. Nor does the fact that a book has been read, or for that matter, may never be read.

Two years ago members of LibraryThing (a place on the web where booklovers gather) discussed this topic and provided some interesting answers to the question of why they collect books. Here are some I particularly liked:

"The same kind of panic about not having anything to read that caused my mother-in-law to fill closets full of toilet paper so she would never, ever have to face running out."

"Because knowing I have more books in my immediate environment than I can possibly read in this life makes me feel happy in the way the monied feel knowing they will never run out of dough."

"When I read a book, I'm forming a relationship. Once I'm done, I could throw it away. But do you do that to your friends once you've made them?"

"Life is short and books are nice."

All these are good reasons, especially the one about forming relationships with books. Parting with a good book really is something like parting with a good friend.

Personal catch-phrases

What a revoltin' development this is.

Chester A. Riley (William Bendix) on The Life of Riley

Among the earliest catch-phrases I remember from television is the one above often heard on The Life of Riley, an NBC comedy that ran from 1953 to 1958, although there was an earlier version of the show starring Jackie Gleason that I never saw. Soon Gleason would have his own catch-phrase ("How sweet it is!"), as well as others as Ralph Kramden on The Honeymooners.

Many other television series generated popular catch-phrases. Those on situation comedies always drew laughs, no matter how many times they were repeated. Other kinds of shows, such as Superman, Dragnet and The Lone Ranger had them, too, and they are repeated to this day even by people who have never seen the programs. Modern shows have their own catch-phrases, such as The Big Bang Theory ("I'm not insane. My mother had me tested.").

As entertaining as these TV catch-phrases can be, the fact is that many of us have our own personal catch-phrases, and most often they are just annoying, at least to those who have to listen to them. I had some X-rays taken last week by a very nice woman who prefaced almost every request for a change of position with the words "do me a favor." This was endearing at first, but soon I cringed each time she said it.

I am a fan of The Great Courses lectures, and I often have one playing in my car. One course I thought I would enjoy was about the books written by C.S. Lewis, a favorite of mine. Unfortunately the lecturer is one of those people who repeats the phrase "but guess what" again and again. I had to force myself to complete the course.

On a Great Courses podcast recently I heard a philosophy professor talking about his course. He kept saying things like "The truth should be valued in and of itself, right?" and "What good is that, right?" I don't think I want to invest in that course, right?

In our conversations we can hear speakers inserting expressions such as "like I said," "you know what I mean" and "first of all" into everything they say. Others punctuate their speech with their favorite profanities. Maybe these kinds of things don't bother you, but they bother me. But I am also bothered by the thought that I may have my own personal catch-phrases I am not even aware of but others are.

Listening to the Fifties

The early rock and roll of the 1950s was subsumed and transformed by the rock and roll of the 1960s.

Michael Nesmith, Infinite Tuesday

During our two-day drive down to our winter paradise in Florida last week, Linda and I listened to nonstop Fifties music on SiriusXM. Other than Blue Moon by the Marcels and some songs by the Platters, Bobby Darin, Della Reese and a few others, I am not that fond of the songs of the Fifties (nor was I that fond of them back in the Fifties), but they do rekindle memories. Best of all, unlike other Sirius stations, there are few songs so objectionable one feels compelled to change to something else.

After we arrived in Florida I began reading Infinite Tuesday, an autobiography by Michael Nesmith, once one of the Monkees. Nesmith is a contemporary of mine, someone who grew up in the Fifties, then reached adulthood in the Sixties. He says that in the Sixties, "Popular music was coming from the hymnal of a new church." He is right. By the mid-Sixties, popular music was radically different from that of the Fifties. He attributes the change mostly to the influence of the Beatles and Bob Dylan.

During the long drive from Ohio, I noticed several things about Fifties music that separate it not just from Sixties music but from the music of every other decade. Here are some of them:

1. A major theme of rock and roll music of that decade was rock and roll music.During that decade we were subjected to Jailhouse Rock, Jingle Bell Rock, Rock Around the Clock, Shake, Rattle and Roll, Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay and other variations on the theme.

2. Another popular theme was teenage girls, especially 16-year-old girls. Consider Sweet Little Sixteen, Sixteen Candles, Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen and others. Young love, of course, has always been a major topic of popular music, but has there ever been as much focus on girls still in high school?

3. Male singers in that decade favored little-boy names. There was Buddy Holly, Ricky Nelson, Frankie Lymon, Jimmy Reed, Jackie Wilson, Richie Valens, Johnny Mathis, Johnny Cash, Johnny Burnette. Bobby Darin, Bobby Freeman, Bobby Vee and numerous others. You might add to the list Little Richard, Little Anthony, Little Willie John and Little Walter.

4. Novelty songs were unusually popular. Every decade has its novelty tunes, of course. These are songs played just for laughs. My favorite novelty tune of all time has to be Junk Food Junkie from 1976. But in the Fifties these songs seemed to get radio play all the time. There was Charlie Brown by the Coasters, Christmas Don't Be Late by the Chipmunks, The Thing by Phil Harris, The Purple People Eater by Sheb Wooley, Monster Mash by Bobby Pickett and many others.

So yes, popular music changed in the 1960s. It matured, as did those who performed it.