A year in the Here and Now under a Paradise Sky

Each year at this time I enjoying a game that involves answering questions, the same ones each year, using only the titles of books read that year. Let's see what happens.

Describe yourself: Ruined by Reading

How do you feel: Going Around in Academic Circles

Describe where you currently live: Here and Now

If you could go anywhere, where would you go: The Bookstore

What's your favorite form of transportation: Trains and Lovers

Your best friend is: Our Mutual Friend

You and your friends are: The Invisible Ones

What's the weather like where you are: Paradise Sky

What is the best advice you could give: The First 25 Years Are the Hardest

Thought for the day: No Time to Spare

How would you like to die: Die Laughing

What is your soul's present condition: The Heavenly Table

Well that was easier than I thought. Most of my answers even contain at least a grain of truth.

Fun with superlatives

I can't think of a superlative for Remarkable Reads: 34 Writers and Their Adventures in Reading, edited by J. Peder Zane. This book, however, is all about superlatives. Bebe Moore Campbell writes about the most memorable book she has read, Frederick Busch writes about the most dangerous book he has read, Robert Morgan about the wisest, Charles Frazier about the most tempting, Lee Smith about the most luminous, and so on.

The chosen books are fascinating, as are the superlatives and the essays explaining how those particular superlatives apply to those particular books. Many of the books are classics, or at least books you are likely to have heard about. Among these are E.M. Forster's Howards End, Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. Other books may be new to most readers, such as The Tarahumara by Antonin Artaud and  Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo.

The superlatives don't always mean what you might think they mean. When Eric Wright calls Howards End the classiest book he has read, what he refers to is the novel's focus on the British class system of the time. Perhaps the most interesting thing Wright has to say is his observation that all the great children's books by British writers, from The Wind in the Willows to the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, were written by middle-class writers for middle-class children. All those references to nannies, cooks and housemaids meant little to children in lower classes. (Of course,  they mean little to today's middle-class children, but those children still love the stories.)

Possibly the book's best essay (there's my superlative) is the one in which Nasdijj describes To Tame a Land by Louis L'Amour as the saddest book he has read. He doesn't mean he shed any tears while reading it. Rather he means the novel is what he terms "cow manure." Nasdijj has worked as a cowboy and knows something of the history of the West, and this novel, he says, "kills even the shadow of truth." It describes "a picture of a place that never was and a time that never happened." He says he and other modern cowboys would sit around campfires at night and make fun of Louis L'Amour novels. That is sad.

A sad comic novel

There's something special about novels that can make a reader both laugh and cry, sometimes both at the same time. Patrick deWitt's French Exit is such a novel.

Frances Price is a 65-year-old heiress who has gone through her fortune and has virtually nothing left but a mama's boy son, Malcolm, who depends upon his mother for everything. A young woman, Susan, has fallen in love with him against her better judgment, but Malcolm prefers the company of his mother.

Booted out of their longtime New York City residence, they sell what possessions they have and escape to Paris, where they move into the apartment of Frances's only friend. Yet almost immediately she begins to make new friends, or at least hangers-on who want to see what happens next in the life of this fascinating woman. As for Frances herself, her main goal in life seems to be to spend what little money she has left as quickly as she can.

But I have not mentioned Little Frank, the cat Frances believes is her late husband reincarnated. Frank Price was a cut-throat attorney who made lots of money for his beautiful wife to spend. When she discovered his naked body following his heart attack, the cat was on his chest. Rather than call the authorities, Frances had just gone ahead with the ski trip she had planned. That act made the newspapers and made her a notorious woman, even in Paris when she arrives there years later, Little Frank in her handbag.

The book's title has multiple meanings, but at novel's end DeWitt leaves a hint of a possible French Entrance, a new life about to begin for at least one of his characters.

I listened to the audio version of the novel, perfectly read by Lorna Raver.

Swaddled

At Christmas Eve services around the world tonight, Christians will hear these words from the Gospel of Luke: "And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn." When I hear them tonight I will likely focus most on the word swaddling.

Until a few days ago I had never given the phrase “swaddling clothes” much thought. I assumed it was just another term for baby blanket. Weren't all babies wrapped in something warm soon after birth? It turns out the purpose of swaddling has as much to do with restriction of movement as warmth. A Wikipedia article states, "Swaddling clothes described in the Bible consisted of a cloth tied together by bandage-like strips. After an infant was born, the umbilical cord was cut and tied, and then the baby was washed with salt and oil, and wrapped with strips of cloth. These strips kept the newborn child warm and also ensured that the child's limbs would grow straight."

Swaddling went out of fashion in Europe about three centuries ago, although it is still practiced by some parents in some cultures, usually for less than the eight or nine months common in earlier times. I would think that swaddling would limit muscle development more than it would ensure straight limbs, but what do I know?

More recent translations of the Bible do not mention swaddling at all. In the New Internatonal Version, Mary just wraps her baby in cloths. In The Message it’s just a blanket. Perhaps the use of the word in the King James Version stems from the fact swaddling was still practiced in England at that time.

What prompted my attention to the practice of swaddling was the article “The Gift of Wrapping” by Jeff Peabody in the December issue of Christianity Today. “The conditions of his advent were a small metaphor for his entire life,” he writes. Consider what happened after Jesus died. He was anointed with oil and wrapped tightly in cloths and placed not in a manger but a tomb. And he died nailed to a cross. What could be more constricting than that? And yet, Peabody points out that as the Son of God, Jesus “experienced an unfathomable limitation of himself” his entire life. Perhaps the Resurrection was not just a victory over death but a victory over life itself.

This is a thought to ponder not just on Christmas Eve but on Christmas morning as I remove the wrappings from my gifts and set them free.

Vigor, complexity and flavor

I love to look at old books for some of the same reasons botanists like to study old vegetable strains. They have not been through the often highly dubious processes of refinement that have weeded out vigor and complexity, and flavor, too, from the contemporary language of ideas.

Marilynne Robinson, "Grace and Beauty," Ploughshares

Linguist John McWhorter tells of Civil War soldiers, many of them with barely eight years of formal education, writing wordy letters, filled with (to us) challenging sentences and references to Greeks and Romans and great works of literature, to their wives, sweethearts or parents back home. That's just the way people were taught to write once upon a time, with prose full of what Marilynne Robinson terms vigor, complexity and flavor.

Today clarity and simplicity are favored by those who teach writing and most of those who read it and write it. The use of words that somebody might have to look up or cultural references that are not clear to everyone are discouraged. As I noted a few weeks ago, those who read the Bible today are more comfortable with The Message, a paraphrase by Eugene Peterson, than the King James Version. Clarity trumps grace and beauty, especially when one is in a hurry, as we all seem to be.

To be sure, one can still find writing of recent vintage that is full of vigor, complexity and flavor. Try reading Robinson's essay in its entirely, for example, or any of her novels.

Thankfully Robinson is not alone either in writing books of this type or in preferring to read them. There will always be some who would rather read Jane Austen than Danielle Steel, Charles Dickens than James Patterson, King James than Eugene Peterson.

Grace and beauty, peanut butter and jelly

As a fiction develops, a writer has the exhilarating experience of losing options, of saying "Of course!" to things that emerge on the page with an aura of necessity about them.

Marilynne Robinson, "Grace and Beauty," Ploughshares

Marilynne Robinson

Imagine desiring a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch and then having to select a supermarket from all those in your area, at which you must pick one loaf of bread from all those many available, one jar of peanut butter from all those on the shelves and one jar of jelly from the many different brands and flavors you have to choose from. Thankfully, unless we happen to be in the mood for something different, we already know which supermarket, which kind of bread, which brand of peanut butter and which flavor of jelly we prefer. Thus we can shop with our mind free to ponder more important decisions, such as what to get for that evening's main course.

So is this the kind of "exhilarating experience" Marilynne Robinson is talking about? As a writer makes more and more choices about a story and the characters who populate it, there become fewer and fewer choices yet to be made. The writer is free to focus on more important questions, such as where to go with the story and how best to get there.

But there is something more here, suggested by that phrase "aura of necessity." Those early decisions don't just make the later ones easier. They also make them obvious, or at least more obvious. Many authors speak of their characters as having minds of their own. Once they are given a personality and a backstory, they seem to make their own decisions about what to do next. From the author's perspective, what those characters do is what they must do. Yet somehow in the best fiction, what may seem so obvious to the author never seems obvious to us readers. We are almost always surprised. Perhaps that's because we readers don't know the characters as well as the author does.

Robinson goes on to say this about Charles Dickens, "A great part of the pleasure of reading Dickens comes from the strange compound of utter originality and perfect inevitability invested in his best characters. After one or two brilliant details, every subsequent choice is disciplined by them." The result is grace and beauty, the subjects of Robinson's essay.

Two tips for readers

H.W. Brands

Historian H.W. Brands tells in Remarkable Reads about being assigned the book The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams as an 18-year-old college student and finding it lacking. Many years later he read it again, and then again and again, each time finding much of value there. So why the difference? Brands offers two explanations: he was a different person when he read the book a second time, and as a student he had skipped the book's introduction.

If one were to make a list of tips for readers, these two should be on that list:

1. Read a book at the right time.

2. If a book has an introduction, read it.

When I wrote about Middlemarch earlier this year I told how I had found George Eliot's novel incomprehensible when I attempted to read it as a college student. Decades later I found it rich and rewarding. The book hasn't changed, but I have. Some books, such as The Catcher in the Rye or A Separate Peace, are best read in one's youth. I think the high school and college years are the best time to read most of the classics. That time of life is when great literature is most likely to speak profoundly to us.

As for nonfiction, the obvious time to read it is when it interests us. You wouldn't read a book about parenting before parenthood or after the kids are in college. Of course, some books would interest us if we would only give them a chance, so a reader needs to be open to new possibilities.

As for introductions, reading them is wise, especially for students. A book's introduction is often like the overture to a Broadway musical, summarizing what is to come. It can make a book, especially one one like The Education of Henry Adams, easier to follow. An introduction often tells how the author came to write the book, as does the introduction to The Rhine, a new book by Ben Coates. He says the idea for the book came to him after ice skating in Amsterdam. Bryan Kozlowski's introduction to What the Dickens?, a book I reviewed a week ago, tells of Charles Dickens's passion for unusual words.

Not all books have introductions. Taking a few books off one of my shelves I found, for example, that David McCullough didn't think one was necessary for The Great Bridge, nor did Oliver Sacks for his autobiography On the Move. Good for them. I admire writers who can get right to the point. But when a writer deems an introduction necessary, it's best not to ignore it. If it's important to them, it may be important to us.

Introductions are rare in novels. There are often prologues, but they are a different beast. An author might write an introduction for a new edition of a successful novel first published 20 or 30 years earlier. Classic novels often have new introductions penned by professors of literature. The edition of Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens that I read earlier this year has such an introduction. It helped me follow the novel, and students especially would be wise not to pass it over.

Not a dull paragraph

A couple of years ago William Morrow reissued the Inspector Banks novels by British writer Peter Robinson in new paperback editions, giving those of us who missed them the first time around a second chance. I took that chance with Blood at the Root, first published in 1997, and I am delighted I did.

The inspector prefers music, especially opera, to solving crimes, and there are references to his passion for music every few pages. Even so Banks is an excellent detective, so excellent, in fact, that it nearly costs him his job.

The case seems open and shut. Twice in fact. A young man, who it turns out was a racist and would-be Nazi, is found beaten to death in an alley. He had had words with young men with darker skin at a pub earlier that night, so they seem likely suspects. Evidence is lacking, however, and holding them causes political repercussions. So the investigation continues.

Acting on a tip, Banks goes to Amsterdam for a weekend, right after his wife has left him, and he gets information relating to the case from an undercover cop. Upon his return he learns the murder has been solved after a young man has confessed and, what's more, Banks is suspended for dereliction of duty by leaving the country. Not trusting his boss to keep quiet about the undercover man and still not having all the evidence he needs, Banks stays mum and continues investigating on his own.

There's not a dull paragraph in the book, yet it seems incomplete. Questions remain after the final page, such as, will Banks get his job (and his wife) back? Apparently so, for Robinson continues to write Inspector Banks novels.

We all need a Flo

One television commercial I actually enjoy watching is the one in which Flo (played by Stephanie Courtney, who may just be the best actress on TV) leads some people through the jungle to a tribe of insurance agents, whose strange language she translates for them. Who among us wouldn't love to have a translator with us when speaking with insurance agents?

In fact, we could use such a translator when talking with doctors about our test results, with bankers about a mortgage, with mechanics about car repairs, with contractors about our remodeling project or when we attempt to tackle our federal income tax forms on our own. Last night our condo association faced decisions regarding reserve funding, pooled reserves and surplus operating funds. Where was Flo when we needed her?

Every industry, and even a hobby like sewing or stamp collecting, has and needs its own vocabulary. The more technical the activity, the more obscure the lingo will be to outsiders. The best insurance agents, doctors, bankers, etc., know how to talk in laymen's language.

A few days ago I read a Popular Science article about geologist Lucy Jones, who has made a career out of being the Flo between seismologists and the politicians, builders and the citizens of California, explaining the dangers posed by future earthquakes and what can be done about them. One civil engineering professor says of her, "What makes her different from other technocrats is she can understand what people outside her discipline are telling her very quickly, and she can extract stuff that you really need to know. I can't think of five people who have the ability to distill information the way she does."

If safer buildings, bridges and dams are going to be built and existing ones are going to be made safer, people like Lucy Jones are going to be necessary.

After reading the article, it occurred to me that understanding the technical and the complex and explaining it in terms others can understand is what Popular Science magazine has been doing since 1872.

Words Dickens loved

I wallow in words.

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Like William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens invented many words. Unlike Shakespeare, the words coined by Dickens rarely found their way into the language. Some words associated with Dickens, such as humbug, were not actually his inventions. Rampage, footlights, boredom, kibosh and snobbish have also been wrongly attributed to the great Victorian novelist.

One finds this information in What the Dickens?, a wonderful dictionary of Dickensian words written by Bryan Kozlowski and published a couple of years ago.

Dickens loved interesting names and interesting words, as any of his readers can attest. Often he enjoyed turning his characters' names into words, such as, Barnacleism, Pecksniffian, Nellicide, Smallweedy and Pumblechookian. Considering how many common English words have been formed from the names of real or fictional people, it seems surprising that none of these words has caught on.

My vote for the best Dickens creation goes to sassigassity, found in his story "A Christmas Tree." The word, meaning audacity with attitude according to Kozlowski, is fun to say and should be a part of everyone's vocabulary. Unfortunately it isn't. Other Dickens failures include adverbiously, comfoozled and the delightful phrase gas and gaiters, meaning everything is satisfactory.

In his commentary on each word, Kozlowski usually strays into trivia about the author's life and works, making his book almost as much a biography as a dictionary. About the word trumpery (which one would think would be undergoing something of a revival these days), he tells us that Dickens seemed to need a title before he could get serious about writing a novel. Before he could write Martin Chuzzlewit, for example, he flirted with such surnames as Sweezleden, Sweezleback and Chuzzletoe. Not until he came to Chuzzlewit did the novel fall into place.

For those who love Charles Dickens and those who love words, and these may well be mostly the same people, What the Dickens? is a good book to wallow in.

Technology makes writers

Linda and I had never baked bread in our lives until she was given one of those bread-making machines as a Christmas gift. Just like that we became bread bakers, at least until the machine broke down and was never replaced. When new technology makes something easier, more people are going to do it. That goes for writing, as well.

John McWhorter

Listening to a lecture by linguist John McWhorter the other day, I heard him say, "I'm a writer because of word processors." McWhorter has written several books, and I have read some of them. They are terrific. Would he never have written them had not the word processor been invented? He said he hated writing with a typewriter. Remember the bother of making corrections or doing any kind of correcting or rewriting?

Yet, being of an earlier generation, it was the typewriter that made a writer out of me. I was 13 or 14 and had never noticed any interest in writing or aptitude for it. Then my parents brought home a typewriter, and I was hooked almost immediately. Typing was so much easier than scratching something out with pen and ink, especially with my poor penmanship.

But I can imagine someone from a still earlier generation becoming a writer because of the ease of writing with a fountain pen or even a ballpoint. Certainly the invention of the printing press made writers out of many people.

Today people can write easily on their home computers, tablets and even phones. Anyone can start a blog, write reviews of books, restaurants or almost any kind of product or service, and what they write may be read by thousands of others. New technology has also made self-publishing easier and more affordable, turning many would-be authors into actual authors.

If you are over a certain age, you can probably remember a time when you didn't know anyone who had written a book. Today most of us probably know several such people. We may have even written one ourselves.

Technology may not turn us into great writers, or even good writers, but it can turn us into writers. Just ask John McWhorter. Or me.

Miss Julia starts slow

To be the executor of an estate is an important job, and for some people it may even be an interesting one. Rarely does it lead to comedy or adventure, however, so Ann B. Ross faces quite a challenge when she has Miss Julia named executor of a casual friend's estate in her 2016 novel Miss Julia Inherits a Mess. How can she turn this dull premise into a typical, rollicking Miss Julia novel? Unfortunately she can't, at least not until the final chapters.

For most of the way this is pretty tame stuff. Mattie Ross, an elderly woman Miss Julia knows, but not well, dies and surprisingly names her to see that her many beneficiaries receive the money she bequeaths them. But there may be more beneficiaries than money. Except for a modest bank account, Mattie didn't seem to have much.

Things start to get interesting when some of the dead woman's jewelry and furniture hint at value and a man turns up claiming to be Mattie's long lost nephew interested only in family history. Mattie had never mentioned any living relatives. Whether an actual relative or a con man, his very presence makes Miss Julia more alert. Might Mattie Freeman have been worth more than what is apparent to the executor of her estate?

Eventually this tale shifts into typical Miss Julia gear, and the conclusion is great fun

How we talk vs. how we write

Spoken language has always differed from written language. Humans have been talking to each other for eons, but we've been writing for just a few thousand years. And for most of those few thousand years, only a handful of educated people could read or understand what had been written.

When people wrote, whether it was poetry, a book that would eventually become a part of the Bible or a letter home, it would inevitably be in more formal and proper language than what they spoke in normal conversation. Shakespeare probably didn't sound like Shakespeare when he went home at night. When we are writing, we have time to think about what we are saying. We can go back and make corrections. We can dress up our language to make a good impression.

In the movie The Green Book, a rough nightclub bouncer is hired by an educated black pianist to drive him on a concert tour. Along the way Tony Vallelonga writes stumbling letters to his wife, but then Don Shirley, the musician, helps him dress up those letters in eloquent prose. The wife isn't fooled. She knows Tony has had help. Still the letters make the desired impression.

Over the past half century or so, thanks to e-mail and a variety of other factors, the differences between spoken English and written English have narrowed, yet still differences exist, and probably will continue to do so.

Here are some ways in which how we talk differs from how we write:

1. Shorter sentences. Complex sentences are rare in normal conversation.

2. Incomplete sentences. One of my previous blog posts tells of my difficulty in getting a good quote as a newspaper reporter because my sources often didn't complete their sentences.

3. Simpler words. You can't look up a word in a thesaurus when you're talking on the phone.

4. More slang, more profanity.

5. Repetition. When we can't think of what to say next, we repeat what we've said before.

6. The use of conversation fillers like "you know" and "like" and "ummm."

7. Context. When you are writing, you have to explain the context. What or who exactly are you writing about? In conversation, however, the other person probably already knows or even shares the context. They may be in the same room. They see what you see and hear what you hear.. That's why reading the Watergate transcripts is so confusing. Had you been in the Oval Office at the time knowing what Richard Nixon and his henchmen knew, it would have made perfect sense. In the same way, a transcript of your conversation with a friend probably wouldn't make much sense to a stranger reading it.

8. Impermanence. What we say disappears into the air, while what we write has a bit of a shelf life. Anyway this use to be true. Now one never knows when one's words are being recorded. This is especially true of politicians and other well-known individuals. They need to always be careful about what they say, and this too may be serving to bring spoken language and written language closer together.

Lost causes in grammar

In 1951, when I was in the first grade, a paperback book called Grammar at Work was published. It was the work of Joseph Bellafiore, principal of Lafayette High School in New York City. I was recently handed a copy of this book, on the cover of which is written in ink, "Desk Copy - H.R. 18." The book remains in remarkably good shape, so apparently it was not used that much.

Leafing through it, I was drawn to a section called "Errors to avoid in diction or choice of words." There are 78 of these errors to avoid, and most of them still make sense all these years later. The first one, for example, advises not to say accept when you mean except. The last one discourages the use of youse. Good advice, I'd say.

Yet several of these 78 points remind me of how true are this book's very first words, "a living language." Living things change. And the English language has changed since 1951.

Take for instance the use of the word some as an adjective meaning excellent. Bellafiore forbids this. Yet the very next year, 1952, Charlotte's Web was published. And we all remember the words Charlotte spun on her web to save her friend, Wilbur the pig, from the dinner table: "Some pig." This book was written by E.B. White, one of the authors of The Elements of Style, a much more important book than Grammar at Work on the subject of proper English usage. The battle to save some from being used as an adjective in this way
was lost right there.

Some other lost causes that Bellafiore fought for include these:

Do not say aggravate as a synonym for irritate. Yes, aggravate means "to make worse," but meanings change over time, and now most people think it means to irritate, only more so.

Do not use can when you are asking for permission. Kids of my generation grew up playing the game "Mother May I?", the point of which seemed to be to teach us that may was the proper word to use when asking for permission. It didn't work. I suspect that most of the English teachers I had said can rather than may, at least outside the classroom.

Do not say healthy when you mean healthful. Children are healthy because they eat healthful foods and get healthful exercise. But when is the last time you heard anyone use the word healthful?

Do not use mad when you mean angry. Mad may actually mean insane, but most of us get a little insane when we get angry. At any rate most people have been saying mad to mean angry for a long time. That ship has sailed.

Use the word nice to mean "refined or carefully discriminating," not "pleasant or well-behaved." What? I can't remember a time when nice didn't mean pleasant or well-behaved.

Say plan to, not plan on. Sure. I plan on doing just that.

The joy of gobbledygook

Some words are just more fun to say than others. Rutabaga, for example. Or pumpernickel.

Somehow neither of these words made the cut for L Is for Lollygag: Quirky Words for a Clever Tongue, a charming dictionary of words that are a pleasure to pronounce. Many of these words, such as gobbledygook or humdinger, aren't even necessary. We have other, shorter, simpler words we could use. But, especially in the spoken word as opposed to the written word, brevity and simplicity are not primary objectives. More important, at least in casual conversation, is entertainment value.

Comedians know this. Writers like Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll knew it as well. Yes, they were working with written language, but they knew their books would be often read aloud and enjoyed as much for the sound of the words as for their meaning. (In Carroll's case, sometimes the words didn't even have any meaning.) We might say the same thing about Dr. Seuss.

Say aloud some of these words from L Is for Lollygag: cantankerous, dungarees, haberdasher, hullabaloo, peccadillo, plethora, rapscallion, rumpus, scalawag, serendipity, wisenheimer and Zamboni. Pleasurable words need not have several syllables. Even words like crux and rogue are included.

I was surprised how often I thought of my mother while reading this book. I didn't realize it during my youth, but she must have loved the sound of such words as catawampus, conniption, gadabout, gallivant, gumption, kitty-corner and persnickety. All these words are in the book.

If the words are fun, so are the definitions. Here's how this book defines amok: "going  crazy or out of control, like children who've had too much sugar. People usually run amok because walking amok would take too long." With writing like that it's a shame Chronicle Books did not see fit to give the writers, Molly Glover and Kate Hodson, cover credit. Their names are listed, however, in small print, on the copyright page. To that I say fiddlesticks!

A novel collection of stories

Is it a novel or a book of short stories? Surprisingly, it isn't always easy to tell.

Take Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, for example, or Mister Monkey by Francine Prose. Both consist of stories that could stand alone, yet they have characters and a few other points of reference in common. It helps when the author makes it clear what it is, as Edward Rutherfurd does when he tells the history of places like London, Paris and New York in a series of stories, some of which may take place decades or even centuries apart. He calls his books novels, so that is what they are. Other writers aren't as helpful.

I started reading Alice Hoffman's Blackbird House (2004) under the impression it was a novel. Soon I was not so sure. Some editions of the book identify it as a novel. Mine does not. Neither the paperback cover nor the copyright page makes it clear. Then I skipped ahead to a conversation with the author at the end of the book, where Hoffman refers to her "stories." So let's call it that, yet her book actually has much in common with Rutherfurd's. While Rutherfurd tells the history of a certain place with related, sometimes reoccurring characters, Hoffman does the same thing, but her place is a fictional New England house. Her "history" tells of the occupants of that house over a couple of centuries.

These stories are beautifully written in that lyrical style Hoffman does so well in her best work. Some end tragically, as with sailors lost at sea, a murder or a suicide, while others paint more positive pictures. As for painting pictures, the most important color on Hoffman's palette is red. In these stories we find red hair, red skin, red pears, red oaks, red-winged blackbirds and so on. There is the more common blackbird in the first story, "The Edge of the World," but after that it is a white blackbird that flies through the stories, as if it were the ghost of that original bird. Some characters view it as an omen, but whether it brings good luck or bad varies from story to story.

Hoffman says in the conversation at the end that Blackbird House began with a short story she was asked to write for the Boston Globe. That story, "The Summer Kitchen," inspired the rest.

I love this book, whatever it is.

Reading as character building

Karen Swallow Prior

I have yet to read Karen Swallow Prior's book On Reading Well, but I did find an interview with her on the web that I found interesting. She argues that reading builds character, or at least can build character. It depends upon what we read, how carefully we read it and how well we digest what we read.

"What we read contributes to virtue when we read timeless works that convey universal human experiences that transcend time, place, and social position," she says. "In the book, I show how we can learn about diligence from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, patience from Jane Austen's Persuasion, justice from Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities — and much more."

Watching the PBS series The Great American Read I was struck by how often those people interviewed to promote one novel or another spoke of the virtue conveyed through that particular novel. It wasn't just an entertaining story. It was a story with a good message, a story that teaches something good to its readers.

I recall one woman saying that reading a good novel was a better way to work through one's problems than going to a therapist. It may also do more to make you a better person than listening to any sermon. A novel places you in the mind of another person, putting your feet into that person's moccasins, so to speak. Just the act of viewing things from another person's point of view can make you a better, more sensitive person.

Can movies do the same thing? Well, yes, at least up to a certain point. Movies, however, deal more  with images than with words, and never mind the expression that a picture is worth a thousand words. In reality, words carry more lasting impact. Last Satuday at the Festival of Reading in St. Petersburg I heard Roy Peter Clark, author of The Art of X-ray Reading, say that if you add up all the words in the Gettysburg Address, the preamble to the Constitution, the 23rd Psalm, the Lord's Prayer and a few other notable pieces of writing, you come up with fewer than a thousand words. Yet no picture could mean as much or convey as much as those words.

Words from war

A few days ago we marked the 100th anniversary of the end of the Great War on Nov. 11, 1918. The war was great only in the sense that it was big, not that it was very good. Just a few years later there was an even greater war, so now we just call it World War I. Let's hope we stop counting.

Big events often add words to our vocabulary, and that was certainly true of that war. Each fall I try to celebrate, or at least observe, the 100th anniversary of the birth of new words or expressions in the English language, and it should be no surprise that the war that finally ended in 1918 produced a number of new words, including a few that year such as buck private, D-day and recon, all words I would have expected to have come out of World War II. The word internee may also be a product of the war. The expression oo-la-la probably also resulted from the war, since we associate it with French women, and American soldiers certainly met a lot of French women during and after the war.

Jeannette Rankin

The Russian Revolution began in 1917, but not until the following year did a lot of words associated with that event find their way into the language. Consider Bolshie, Leninism, neo-Marxism and Red Army.

The election of Jeannette Rankin of Montana to Congress in 1916 led to the creation of the word congresswoman in 1918. Why it took a full year for that to happen I cannot imagine.

Here are some other useful words that sprang into existence that year: baby blues, blah, breakthrough, decertify, defeatism, defeatist, devalue, both extrovert and introvert, fadeout, force-feed, major (as a verb), maladapted, Mickey Finn, motorboating, Murphy bed, narcissistic, politicization, pre-med, roomie, rustproofing, scrimpy, shimmy, speedster, streamline (as a verb), surrealist and umpteen.

A few words coined in 1918 have all but disappeared from the language. I am speaking of farmerette Girl Guiding, Indianization and pitch-in dinner.

As always I am grateful to Sol Steinmetz and his book There's a Word for It for this little birthday party.

Dogs take charge

The dogs had to have their chance. Had to be left unhampered to try for success where the human race had failed.

Clifford D. Simak, City

In City, Clifford D. Simak’s classic sci-fi novel from 1952, the world has gone to the dogs, quite literally. Educated dogs like Bounce and Rover aren’t even sure that Man ever existed. He may have just been a mythical creature. Nevertheless they ponder the meaning of a series of eight tales that describe the gradual disappearance of humans and the emergence of dogs as the dominant species.

Sometimes thousands of years pass between these stories, so great changes sometimes take place between tales. Mankind does not become extinct exactly. Most humans choose to relocate to Jupiter, where existence is possible only by taking a radically different form, thus becoming something other than man. This new form somehow alters the mind in a way that makes it becomes to the human mind. Those who do not migrate elect instead to "take the sleep," or hibernate, for long periods, forever in some cases.

They leave behind their dogs, who have learned to think and speak like humans, and robots, which can do all the things dogs can't do, lacking thumbs. This new world seems like an ideal one, for there is a strong moral code forbidding violence against other creatures. Dogs won't even harm their fleas, though the fleas don't seem to live by the same code.

Yet trouble is brewing in this Eden. The world is becoming seriously overpopulated, and killing may be the only solution.

Simak maintains a serious tone throughout a relatively short novel that could easily turn comic. He tackles some tough issues and poses some intriguing situations. He also, in a book published 66 years ago, offers a perceptive look into 21st century living: "It was all here. By simply twirling a dial one could talk face to face with anyone one wished, could go, by sense, if not in body, anywhere one wished. Could attend the theater or hear a concert or browse in a library half-way around the world. Could transact any business one might need to transact without rising from one's chair." Except for that "twirling a dial" part, that's a pretty accurate picture of the Internet.

English words from non-English places

Two books I read recently were goldmines of word origins, a subject I find interesting.

In Hero of the Empire, Candice Millard's account of Winston Churchill's daring escape during the Boer War, she mentions the possible origins of such words as:

Early trench coats

trench coat — So called because British soldiers wore a similar coat designed by Thomas Burberry in the trenches in France during World War I. Earlier Burberry made gaberdine coats for soldiers fighting in South Africa.

sniper — In India, riflemen skilled enough to kill small birds called snipes were termed snipers.

khaki — Derived from a Urdu word for dust.

corral — The Boers got their word kraal from the Portuguese word curral, meaning a circular livestock enclosure. The English turned it into corral.

Tony Horowitz serves up even more word origins in A Voyage Long and Strange:

saga — It "stems from a Norse word for 'say,'" says Horowitz.

canoe — From the native word canoa, heard by Christopher Columbus.

hammock — Caribbean islanders called this swinging bed a hamaca.

tobacco — Islanders smoked rolled-up weeds, which they called tabacos.

cannibal — Natives told Columbus about a man-eating tribe called the Canibales.

hurricane — From the Taino word huracan.

barbecue — From the Taino word barbacoa.

Appalachian — There was an Indian tribe in Florida called the Apalachee.

moccasin — From the Algonquin word mockasin

tomahawk - From the Algonquin word tomahack.

raccoon — From the Indian word aroughcun.

Horowitz also suggests, without much conviction, that the Indian chammay, meaning friend, may be where the English got the word chum.

Before the Pilgrims

Mid-November may not be the best time to mention it, but the settlement of North America by Europeans did not begin with the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. A whole lot of exploration and settlement took place before that, and all this is the subject of a fascinating book by Tony Horwitz, A Voyage Long and Strange (2008).

Americans make a big deal about the Pilgrims, and in a few days most of us will feast in their memory, but Horwitz wanted to know about those explorers and settlers who came before. He wanted to, as much as possible centuries later, walk in their footsteps and see what they saw.

It is not a pretty picture, which may be why most Americans, including most American history teachers, choose to ignore it, or at least gloss over it. By 21st century standards, these were not nice people. They lusted after gold. They robbed, raped, enslaved and massacred the native people they encountered. They didn't even behave kindly toward their own people, as in the case of the Roanoke settlers who were abandoned.

Horwitz begins with the Vikings, who explored and founded short-lived settlements in the northeastern regions of the continent around the year 1000, then turns to Christopher Columbus, who succeeded "because he was so stubbornly wrong." He died believing he had found a new route to India. After that Horwitz examines such explorers at DeLeon and DeSoto and the settlements in St. Augustine and Jamestown.

But Horwitz looks not just at the past but also at the present. He travels to places that may (or in some cases may not) have been visited by these people, looks for remnants of their time there and talks with both scholars and people who now live in these areas to get their take on the past. Much of this is written in the manner of Bill Bryson, full of information presented in a wry and whimsical way.

As important as history may be, Horwitz concludes by stating that myth may be more important. It feels good to ignore a "monstrous man" like DeSoto and failed settlements where so many people died and focus instead on myths about Pilgrims. (They weren't called Pilgrims until many years later, they had a feast but didn't make a big deal out of it, the Indians were uninvited guests, they probably ate venison and fish but not turkey, etc.) As journalists like to say in jest, why let the facts get in the way of a good story?

Great American reading

Regarding the Great American Read concluded last month by PBS, some observations:

1. The selection of To Kill a Mockingbird as America's favorite novel should have surprised no one. Most of the books on the list of 100 finalists have a certain constituency: female readers (Pride and Prejudice, Little Women), male readers (The Hunt for Red October, The Godfather), younger readers (The Hunger Games, Ready Player One), older readers (The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath), black readers (The Color Purple, Invisible Man), Asian-American readers (The Joy Luck Club), Latino readers (Bless Me, Ultima, Dona Barbara) Christian readers (The Shack, This Present Darkness), romance readers (The Notebook, Outlander), mystery readers (And Then There Were None), science fiction readers (Foundation, The Martian) and so on. In fact, the majority of the books on the list appeal mainly to certain groups of readers.

Yet To Kill a Mockingbird seems to appeal to everyone who reads it (or has seen the movie starring Gregory Peck). Thanks to English teachers across the nation, it has been read by many, many people. This was an obvious choice.

2. Outlander as the second choice does surprise me. I know it is a very popular series of novels, but more popular than the Harry Potter series (third place) or James Patterson's Alex Cross books? I would have guessed Pride and Prejudice would finish second. In fact it was fourth.

3. Wisely PBS counted a series of books as a single book. I am wondering if this is why Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn did not make the list of 100 novels, though The Adventures of Tom Sawyer did. Were these books considered a series just because they have a few characters in common? If not, I would have thought Finn the more popular novel.

4. I spend a lot of time wandering in bookstores and leafing through book catalogs, so I was surprised at how many novels in that list of 100 I had never heard of. I'm speaking of books like The Coldest Winter Ever, Ghost and The Mind Invaders. Each of these novels finished near the bottom of the list, so maybe a lot of other people haven't heard of them either.

5. Everyone was permitted to cast one vote a day, whether for the same book or a different one. Thus the vote has almost as much to do with the commitment of its fans as with the popularity of the book itself. I did not vote at all, but if not To Kill a Mockingbird, which novel would have gotten my vote (or votes)? Lonesome Dove (22), perhaps, or the Narnia series (9), or The Catcher in the Rye (30) or The Grapes of Wrath (12)? I didn't vote mainly because I don't have a favorite novel. I love many novels, including many not on that list.

6. Although there were books on the list obviously written for adult readers, a surprising number were books for young readers, whether children (Charlotte's Web, The Little Prince, the Narnia series, etc.) or teens and young adults (the Harry Potter books, Where the Red Fern Grows, The Book Thief). Many of the books, in addition to To Kill a Mockingbird, are books commonly assigned in classrooms. Many of those listed books are novels I read for college classes. Many adults read few books, whether because of lack of time or lack of interest, but they remember, sometimes fondly, those books they read for school. I suspect the reading done in those early years greatly influenced the final tally of votes.

Living by the sword

In the fencing master's house, one had only to close the shutters in order for time to stop in its tracks.

Arturo Perez-Reverte, The Fencing Master

In a mystery-suspense novel about a man who teaches fencing, you know that sooner or later the fencing is going to be for real. Arturo Perez-Reverte does not disappoint in The Fencing Master, one of his earliest and best novels (1988).

Don Jaime, a man of advanced middle age, is a respected fencing master in Madrid in 1868, a time when a sword is no longer the weapon of choice. Fencing is being seen more as a sport or a physical fitness routine than as means of self-defense or the way to settle matters of honor. He misses the old days, but continues to teach a few students.

These are restless times in Spain as talk of rebellion against the queen is heard on the streets and in the cafes. Don Jaime has little interest in all that.

Then he gets an unexpected pupil, a beautiful woman, already skilled in fencing, who asks him to teach her a certain maneuver he has taught only a few, a dangerous but usually effective way to decide a fight with another skilled opponent. With some reluctance, for as a traditionalist Don Jaime believes swordsmanship is a man's business, he agrees. She is, after all, very beautiful.

When he introduces her to another of his students, he loses her to him. Then that man is found dead, a victim of a wound from a sword like what would result from the trick Don Jaime taught the woman. He doesn't tell the police, but suspects she might be the killer. That is, until a woman's body is recovered and identified as the woman in question.

From there the plot moves along at a fast pace, culminating in the most exciting sword fight not found in The Princess Bride.

Tapestry with loose threads

Linda raised her head and put on a smile. "A school is a tapestry of threads," she began.

Laurie R. King, Lockdown

Not only is a school "a tapestry of threads," but so is Laurie R. King's latest novel, Lockdown. Many different, seemingly independent and unrelated threads eventually come together to reveal a complete pattern or picture. Anyway that's the metaphor King plays with, and it works more or less.

Linda McDonald is the principal of Guadalupe Middle School, whose plans for a Career Day are coming to fruition. (Do middle schools really have career days?) In a series of mostly short chapters, mostly focused on a single character's thoughts and actions, King shows us the threads. An unbelievable (and I do mean unbelievable) number of these characters have troubled, even violent, pasts and could be the cause of the trouble we know is in store for this school on Career Day. Exactly who it is and what they will do is the picture the author withholds until this tapestry nears completion.

The school itself has a troubled and violent past. One student has been murdered, another is missing. Unfortunately King, best known for her popular Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes mystery series, does not weave all these many threads into her completed tapestry. But the novel certainly is suspenseful.

Determined to become a hero

The name Winston Churchill causes most of us picture an old man acting heroically during World War II. In her 2016 book Hero of the Empire, Candice Millard gives us a new image to consider, a young man acting heroically during the Boer War.

As a young man, Churchill yearned to be a hero the way so many young men today yearn to be rock stars. He ultimately wanted a political career, but what better way to win a seat in Parliament than to become a national hero? To this end, he was willing to go anywhere in the world and face any risk, even to the point of riding a white horse into battle. As a journalist he helped start the Boer War, then went to South Africa to cover the war, but carrying a gun and intending to do more fighting than writing.

His chance for heroism came when he and others aboard a train were captured by the Boers and imprisoned. Churchill tried to convince the Boers that because he was a journalist he should be released, but too many of them had seen him with a gun in his hands. He was also, even then, too famous to release.

When he heard that others were planning an escape from the military prison, he wanted to be part of it. Yet they declined to tell Churchill the whole plan because of his habit of talking too much. They couldn't trust him with the secret. Some four decades later this would be British prime minister trusted with one of the greatest secrets of all time, the D-Day invasion.

On the night chosen for the escape, the others decided at the last minute the time was not right, but Churchill went ahead anyway and managed to get over the fence by himself. Thanks to his resourcefulness and a good deal of luck, he managed to travel hundreds of miles to safety. As a national hero, he was easily elected to Parliament.

As she did with the story of Theodore Roosevelt's narrow escape in the Amazon in The River of Doubt and the unsuccessful attempt to save the life of James Garfield in Destiny of the Republic, Millard makes this narrative as suspenseful as a thriller. Biographies of Roosevelt, Garfield and Churchill give these incidents brief attention. Millard inflates them to life-size to show her readers just how significant they actually were at the time they happened.

A dark knight

I cannot tolerate this age. And I will not.

Walker Percy, Lancelot

People who do terrible things always blame somebody else, usually their victims. Just read the accounts of recent atrocities, or much older ones. So it is with Lancelot Lamar, a prisoner in a mental facility in Walker Percy's 1977 novel Lancelot. He has done something terrible, though we do not find out what it is until late in the story.

The novel is a stream-of-consciousness monologue that, as Lancelot is talking to an old friend who has become a priest, is part reminiscence and part confession. Like a typical mental patient, he can't stay on  subject, so his narrative twists and turns over a broad area, making the novel a difficult read that readers may or may not find worth the effort.

Lancelot tells how he discovered that his wife has been unfaithful. His daughter has a blood type she couldn't possibly have if he were her father. Margot, a woman whom he once could not breathe without (as he says repeatedly), is now an actress in a film being shot partly on the Lamar estate in New Orleans. The film features a hurricane, and coincidentally a real hurricane is now bearing down  on the city. He sets up cameras in various bedrooms to determine exactly who is sleeping with whom. Then he takes action.

The name Lancelot is not the only allusion to King Arthur, Camelot and all that. "Guinevere didn't think twice about adultery," he says at one point. He makes frequent mention of the Holy Grail and his own quest for an “unholy grail.”

The story has an upbeat ending, or at least Lancelot thinks that it does. But isn’t he crazy?

Memories are realities

Published 100 years ago in 1918, Willa Cather's My Antonia remains a remarkable work of literature. Thomas C. Foster features it in his book Twenty-Five Books That Shaped America, observing "it is beautifully written and was recognized as such from the moment of its publication."

Although relatively short, the novel covers a lot of territory and many years. It can be said to be about  many things, among them:

"Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again."

1.  The power of memory

Two men who grew up together in a small Nebraska town decide to share written memories of a girl they both knew, a Bohemian immigrant named Antonia Shimerda. Jim Burden is the only one who actually does so, and this book is what he remembers.

Although she is four years older than him, Jim tutors her in English. He is a brilliant boy who eventually goes to Harvard and becomes a lawyer. She becomes his playmate, a lifelong friend and, thanks to the power of memory, the love of his life.

"I knew where the real women were, though I was only a boy; and I would not be afraid of them, either!"

2. The strength of immigrant women

Antonia's father becomes so lonely for the Old Country (the power of memory again) that he commits suicide. Later her husband similarly pines for the land he left behind, but Antonia's strength and optimism (and a house full of children) helps keep him focused on the present. Unlike in Glendon Swarthout's The Homesman, the female prairie pioneers are the sturdy ones, able to meet any obstacle with good cheer and a little extra effort.

Of all the girls in his rural community, Jim Burden finds those immigrant girls the most appealing. "If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry," he says.

"Everything was as it should be: the strong smell of sunflowers and ironweed in the dew, the clear blue and gold of the sky, the evening star, the purr of the milk into the pails, the grunts and squeals of the pigs fighting over their supper."

3. The lure of the prairie

The prairie was the focus of all, or at least most, of Willa Cather's books, and My Antonia was the third novel in her prairie trilogy, which also included O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark. Jim Burden's education and later career takes him far from the Nebraska home where he came of age, but as the saying goes, you can't take the country out of the boy. The prairie, like Antonia herself, remains a part of him and draws him back.

The Barnaby Skye challenge

Although I have read quite a number of Richard S. Wheeler westerns over the years, I have avoided his Barnaby Skye series, mainly because there are so many novels in the series (about 20). I can handle trilogies. After that the challenge just seems too imposing.

Nevertheless I have read The Far Tribes (1990), one of the early books, and found it to be wonderful. Barnaby Skye is a former British sailor who ventured into the American West and stayed, becoming a hunter, trapper, guide and Indian expert. He travels with his two wives, Victoria and Mary, each from a different Indian tribe. Mary has a baby, Dirk.

Mister Skye, as he insists on being addressed, is hired to escort a party of Easterners to tribes in the Yellowstone area. They include a businessman, traveling with his wife and daughter, who views the Indians as potential customers and wants to show them his wares and determine what products they might most desire; a military man gathering intelligence that might prove useful in the Indian battles likely to come; and a scientist.

The way west proves interesting enough, but the real drama happens on the way back, as winter nears, when they are attacked by a renegade band while still sleeping. Virtually everything they have except the skimpy nightclothes they wear and Skye's ornery horse, Jawbone, is either stolen or destroyed. They are left to die in near-freezing rain.

How Mister Skye brings his party, or most of it, to safety and handles the treachery from within makes for a riveting tale. Wheeler has always striven for realism in his fiction. In some cases, as in novels about Bat Masterson and Major Reno, he writes about real people and events. In other novels he writes about problems pioneers, settlers, cattlemen and miners, etc., would have faced in the West. In The Far Tribes his detail about how a group of people in such a desperate situation might have found shelter, built a fire, gotten food, made clothing and so on is truly stunning.

I'm glad I still have so many Barnaby Skye novels yet to read.

Details matter

When I worked for a newspaper I noticed that when the editor left for a week's vacation, it didn't seem to affect anyone else. We all went about our usual business in the usual way, ignoring the empty corner office. Yet when the lowly clerk took a vacation, it impacted everyone. She knew where everything was stored, whom to call when something needed attention and, perhaps most important, how to tend to the copy machine.

Computers were supposed to decrease the amount of paper consumed in a newsroom, as in other offices, but that never seemed to be the case. Reporters wrote their stories on their computers but still wanted a hard copy. Copy editors designed pages on their computers but still wanted a proof of each page. And multiple copies were as easy to make as a single copy.

The clerk knew how to put in toner. Most of the rest of us didn't, so her absence usually meant gradually fading ink quality. Most of us knew how to add paper to the copier. It was simple, but no one was eager to actually do it. When someone, and this was often me, did put in more paper, there would always be a large quantify of backed-up print jobs flowing from the copier for the next several minutes, and people from all over the newsroom would suddenly flock there to pick up the copies they had been waiting for. Whoever put in more paper would get his or her copies last.

These memories came back to me yesterday when I called my investment office and got a recorded message saying the office manager, among the last people in America who actually answers the phone when it rings, was gone until November. You could leave a message if you didn't mind waiting until then for a return call or you could try one of two other people in the office. This I did and got a long, detailed, quickly-stated message with no less than 10 options. I chose to keep hitting 0 until I finally heard the voice of an actual person who, though she did not know as much as the office manager, was nevertheless able to help me.

Decades ago my doctor had one employee, a nurse/receptionist. Virtually every call to the office was answered. Today the same practice has a different doctor who must have 8 or 10 people on his staff, none of whom answers the telephone when you call. You have probably heard a message like this: If this is an emergency, hang up and dial 911. Office hours are such and such. To schedule an appointment, press 1. To speak to the nurse (which usually means to leave a message for the nurse), press 2. There can be several other options and instructions. Chances are someone will eventually call you back, but because of so many calls each day from telemarketers, most of us don't want to answer our telephones either.

Whenever I hear the oft-repeated phrase on recorded messages: "Your call is very important to us," I have to laugh. If my call was important, someone would pick up their phone and answer it.

And so what began as a reflection on how the lowest-paid workers in any office can sometimes be the most valuable turned into a rant about the frustrations of unanswered calls. The common thread is that in business, as in one's personal life, little things matter.

What life censors books reveal

In books I found explicitly, flamboyantly, everything censored in life.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Ruined by Reading

Lynne Sharon Schwartz is writing about her youth. Children and teenagers who read, especially those who are introverts, learn from reading what many of their peers learn from experience or, perhaps more commonly, from older kids. We, Schwartz and I, are speaking mostly about sex, but there are plenty of other adult mysteries that open up to youngsters who read.

Today most bookstores have large and seemingly growing sections of books for young adults, meaning older kids. Such sections did not exist in my own youth, and there were relatively few books to stack in such sections had they existed. When I left children's books behind, somewhere about the seventh grade, I went directly to the adult section of the local public library. Words that weren't spoken in my home were written in these books. Sex acts, death, violent crimes, imaginary worlds (such as those in Green Mansions and Journey to the Center of the Earth) opened up to me. This was an education unlike anything I had learned in school.

As I think about it, however, I am not so sure this phenomenon, books revealing what is "censored in life," isn't true almost as much for adult readers as for younger ones. So many things just aren't talked about, or are spoken of rarely, in adult conversation. Homosexuality is mentioned much more than it used to be, yet it remains a rare subject, at least among the people I converse with. How about the most personal thoughts and actions of other human beings? People don't often talk openly about certain things, yet amazingly they write books about them.

And then there are all those subjects that fascinate you but not anyone else you know. If you don't live in a big city you may not be able to find someone, much less a group of someones, who shares your interest in butterflies, say, or antique pedal cars. The web now makes possible connections with others who share your interests, but for a long time we depended on books to learn what we wanted to know about these obscure subjects.

Notice the pair

Mark Twain

When he began writing for a newspaper in Nevada as a young man, Samuel Clemens chose "Mark Twain" as a pseudonym. The name stuck, and he continued to write as Mark Twain for the rest of his long and celebrated literary career. The usual explanation for this choice of names is that it comes from his brief career on a Mississippi riverboat, "mark twain" being a term used to mean two fathoms, or a safe depth of 12 feet.

Yet it it interesting to examine his life and work in terms of the literal meaning of that chosen name. The phrase "mark twain" would mean something like "note the two" or "notice the pair." Just the fact that the man had two names, Samuel Clemens the private citizens and Mark Twain the famous writer, gives significance to the choice.

Twain may be America's most celebrated humorist. The Mark Twain Prize for American Humor is awarded each year to some deserving humorist, few of whom have reputations for wit that will survive anywhere near as long as Twain's. Yet, especially toward the end of his life because of a string of personal losses, he was a bitter, depressed man. He has been described as a nihilist. Most of his later literary output was not printed until after his death because it was so unlike the books he was famous for.

The man was celebrated in his own time for his literary success, yet in his business dealing he was an abject failure. He loved new technology and invested heavily in products, such as an early type-setting machine, that he thought would make him so wealthy he could retire from writing. Instead he lost everything and was forced to continue writing and then go on long lecture tours to make enough money to pay his debts.

Just as he was a man with two sides to his personality, character and reputation, so the characters in his stories so often came in pairs: Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Huck and Jim, the prince and the pauper, the duke and the king (or the duke and dauphin). Twain seemed fascinated by the idea of Siamese twins, and in one of his best novels, Pudd'nhead Wilson, he writes of two babies, one white and the other a light-skinned slave, who are switched soon after birth. Twain once wrote a sketch about an imagined twin brother.

And so it goes. When reading Twain, or reading about him, notice the pair.

Thrill-seeking

With barely a twinge of conscience, I hurl down what bores me or doesn't give what I crave: ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. For, more than anything else, readers are thrill-seekers, though I don't read thrillers, not the kind sold under that label, anyway. They don't thrill; only language thrills.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Ruined by Reading

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Did P.G. Wodehouse write thrillers? Well, yes, if you define the word thrill as Lynne Sharon Schwartz does, as a reader's reaction to exquisite language, language that soars, language that sings. That may be the whole reason for reading Wodehouse. A century after it was written, in some cases, his prose still amazes us. With Wodehouse, it is not so much what he says as how he says it. His readers mine each of his books for thrilling lines like this one from Something Fresh:  "I have often wondered what General Sherman would have said about private tutoring if he expressed himself so breezily about mere war."

One reason I use unlined 3x5 cards as bookmarks is so that I can make note of some of the most transcendent lines I come across in my reading. That Wodehouse line is one example. The one by Schwartz is another. Here are a few others:

"The secret motive of the absentminded is to be innocent while guilty." Saul Bellow, More Die of Heartbreak

"People who are flamboyantly good usually aren't." Richard S. Wheeler, Restitution

"Remembering my youth makes me aware that I never really had enough of it, it was over before I was done with it." Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

"We all write poems; it is simply the poets are the ones who write in words" John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman

"I will love him like a camera lens that closes at too much light and opens at too little, so his blemishes will never mar my love." Akhil Sharma, An Obedient Father

"By populating the world with so many different minds, each with its own point of view, God gives us a suggestion of what it means to be omniscient." Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver

I have been coming across thrilling lines that beautifully describe the weather we are beginning to experience in the Northern Hemisphere. Wodehouse, again in Something Fresh, writes, "Cold is the ogre which drives all beautiful things into hiding."

Early in The One-Way Bridge, Cathie Peltier puts it this way, "Mother Nature knew what she was doing all right. She was giving everyone some last splashes of red and orange and golden yellow before she gave them a solid blanket of white for months. Maybe, Edna thought, autumn was nature's way of apologizing."

Just yesterday afternoon I came upon this line in My Antonia by Willa Cather: "It was as if we were being punished for loving the loveliness of summer."

When one reads what is commonly called a thriller, the thrills happen only once. Read it again and the thrill is gone. Not so with literary thrills like those listed above. The thrill returns again with each rereading.

Mary and Martha and Mary Martha

Can you imagine a tearful love story filled with as much spirituality as romance? Well, Tim Farrington could, and the result is his well-received 2002 novel The Monk Downstairs.

Rebecca is a 38-year-old divorced woman with a little girl and a devoted boyfriend whom she doesn't love but who won't stop asking her to marry him. Her ex-husband, who gets Mary Martha on weekends, spends his days surfing and smoking pot. To help make ends meet, Rebecca decides to rent out her small garage apartment.

The first person who inquires about it is Michael Christopher, who has spent virtually his entire adult life in a monastery. After differences with his superior, who thought Michael emphasized contemplation over work (as in the gospel story about Mary and Martha), he is now on his own in the real world. He carries all his possessions in a small bag. He gets the apartment, and soon like so many others gets his first job at McDonalds.

While the romantic relationship that builds gradually between Rebecca and Michael may seem predictable, the path Farrington takes the couple down is full of surprises. A lapsed Catholic, she doesn't think much of her tenant's contemplative nature either. That is, until his spiritual insights, combined with a gift of servanthood unrecognized at the monastery, help pull her through the crises that soon overwhelm her.

An intriguing cast of supporting characters, including Rebecca's irrepressible mother and her playboy boss, add substantially to the story.

Farrington, like Rebecca, was a Catholic who lost his way before finding it again. He actually spent part of his boyhood in a convent, where his aunt was a nun. So he knows the territory, and he makes the most of it in this intriguing novel.

Worms under rocks

As a gardener, she knows that if you turn over a rock, you will find worms and potato bugs.

Jessica Shattuck, The Women in the Castle

In Germany after the war, finding ex-Nazis or Nazi sympathizers was as easy as turning over a rock. Even Marianne von Lingenfels finds this to be true in Jessica Shattuck's powerful 2017 novel The Women in the Castle.

The widow of a man  executed for his part in a plot to assassinate Hitler, she tries after the war to gather up as many wives and children of resisters as she can find and take them to her family castle. She finds just two of the women on her list, beautiful Benita, the widow of Marianne's childhood friend who was also executed by the Nazis, and Ania, a somber woman whose name on the list is something of a mystery. Both women have young sons.

Years pass, and life in postwar Germany gradually gets easier. Yet Marianne discovers disturbing things about the two women she has adopted as part of her family. Benita falls in love with a former Nazi and wants to marry him, while Ania already has a Nazi husband who turns up after she marries a nearby farmer.

Marianne feels betrayed, but by 1991 when the novel ends she wonders if she is not the one who has betrayed her friends. Are there not worms even under her own rock?

Shattuck's book explores the lives of the war's widows and the ways Nazi guilt spread to them and even to their children, proving that Nazi Germany, the subject of so many novels since the 1930s, can still be mined for original plots and ideas.

Bennett's Don'ts

James Gordon Bennett Jr.

Most of us probably have certain words and phrases that we try to avoid in both our speech and writing. We find them tacky, stilted, vulgar, whatever. James Gordon Bennett Jr., the celebrated publisher of the New York Herald who died 100 years ago this year, had the clout to require others to follow his particular biases, and Stanley Walker, once city editor of the New York Herald Tribune, listed some of these in his 1934 book City Editor.

"His 'Don'ts' were rigid, but most of them were sensible," Walker writes. Yet less than two decades after Bennett's death, Walker goes on to say that "many of his particular abominations are in almost universal use today, for better or worse."

All these decades later it is something of a mystery to try to determine why these prohibitions were once thought necessary and, if these usages were not permitted, what was considered proper? Were retired copy editors, and I am one, to have a reunion, this might even make an interesting party game.

Bennett's Don'ts

Don't call a theatrical performance a "show."

Presumably this term was once thought too lowbrow, yet within decades such phrases as "the show must go on," "there's no business like show business" and "let's put on a show" were commonly heard, either in or about theatrical performances.

Don't apply "schedule" to the movement of persons, as "Ambassador Bacon was scheduled to leave Vienna."

Presumably Ambassador Bacon planned to leave Vienna. His departure, however, was scheduled.

Don't use "New Yorker." 

The New Yorker started publishing in 1925. Interestingly, that magazine has long been noted for its own list of Don'ts for editors and writers.

Don't use "week-end" or "over Saturday."

As for "over Saturday," Bennett was a winner there. Do you ever hear anyone say that? But how would we manage without "weekend?" My own newspaper had a weekly section called Weekend.

Don't use "guest of honor" or "maid of honor."

So what terms do you suppose Bennett considered proper?

Don't use "gang" or "gangster."

Walker wonders what Bennett would have thought of the term mobster, common by 1935. Today gangster seems dated.

Don't us "diplomat"; use "diplomatist."

Diplomatist? Diplomats today would probably give you a funny look if you called them that.

Don't use "plan" except in connection with drawn architectural or engineering plans. Do not use it as a verb.

So I guess Ambassador Bacon didn't plan to leave Vienna after all.

Don't use (hotel) "patron" or "guest."

I think I may understand Bennet's dislike of the idea of a "hotel guest." The term guest suggests that somebody else will be paying the bill. But if a hotel staff member refers to you as their guest, guess whose credit card is going to be charged? The term patron doesn't sound right either for a hotel, though perhaps for a hotel gift shop. But lodger now sounds old-fashioned, and resident seems too permanent for someone just staying a night or two.