Pleasure versus duty

At bottom, of course, the issue in choosing what to read (and what to do and how to live) is the old conflict, dating from the Garden, of pleasure versus duty: what we want to read versus what we think we ought to read, or think we ought to want to read.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Ruined by Reading

As a student in high school and in college, there were always books that were required reading. The assigned reading for my college literature classes (all eight semesters) was especially oppressive. Yet somehow I always managed to sneak in pleasure reading (although many books in the latter category (such as The Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies and The Grapes of Wrath) might well have been assigned reading in other literature classes.

Then during my career I wrote a weekly book column for nearly 40 years, and so review books mostly dictated what I read. Non-required reading, as when I was in school, had a bit of that forbidden fruit quality about them.

Now I'm retired and can read whatever I choose, yet still the above the line from Ruined by Reading by Lynne Sharon Schwartz rings true for me. Now the reading requirements are set by time, not professors or newspaper deadlines. How many years do I have left to read books, many of them classics, that have been sitting on my shelves for decades waiting for the right time, the right inspiration? How much time do I have to reread treasured books from years past?

Some books just seem more important that others, yet just as a plate of burger and fries draws us when we know we should order a salad, so a thriller or murder mystery or romance is what we are tempted to pick up to read, leaving the George Eliot novel, the Shakespeare play or the collection of modern poetry for another day.

One way I attempt to discipline myself is to keep four books on my reading table, beside which I spend most afternoons. These books usually include one light novel, one serious novel, one work of relatively light nonfiction and one more challenging work of nonfiction. Then I read one chapter of one book, put it at the bottom of the stack and read a chapter of the next. This way I can usually read a little of each every day.

It is not a perfect system, but it allows me to get my burgers and fries, and my salads, too.

Calvin and Calvin

Brock Clarke explains in his acknowledgments that his latest novel Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe? was inspired by Graham Greene's 1969 novel Travels with My Aunt, although anyone who has read Greene's book will realize this within the first few pages.

Calvin Bledsoe is a tame middle-aged man who meets an aunt he never realized he had after the death of his mother. As in Greene's version, the mother's sister is a very different sort of woman, one very experienced in the world who views laws as challenges and breaking them as sport. She takes Calvin on a trip, during which he does things he could have never imagined doing in his former life.

So far the story follows Greene's blueprint, but Clarke soon veers off into his own wild territory.

While Greene was a Catholic writer, Clarke puts the reformer John Calvin at the center of his own story. Calvin Bledsoe's mother was a pastor of a Calvinist church and the author of a world-famous book about Calvin. Her son, who makes his living as a blogger for the pellet stove industry, quotes John Calvin frequently in his narrative, at least at first. Later on he quotes his Aunt Beatrice more frequently.

The lessons he learns from his aunt include the following: 1) thou shall avoid conflict unless the other persons wishes to avoid conflict, and in that case thou shall pursue it, 2) someone is always also someone else, or at least has the capacity to be someone else, if someone else is indeed what he wants to be, 3) pretty much everyone has an illicit lover and 4) thou shall never apologize.

Calvin and his aunt start in Ohio but are soon in Europe, traveling from city to city. Beatrice seems to have a plan in mind, which eludes Calvin. Soon they are joined by a variety of other characters, including Calvin's former wife, Beatrice's former lover, his mother's lover, Beatrice's son, a neighbor from back in Ohio and an Interpol agent with whom Calvin falls in love.

Much of what happens is totally unbelievable, although nothing is as unbelievable as the popularity of that book about John Calvin. In Europe, everyone seems to have read it. As in his earlier novel An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, Brocke uses dark humor and tall tales to create his art, sort of in the manner of Joseph Heller or Kurt Vonnegut. He doesn't totally succeed (I prefer Greene's version), but he does offer some entertaining reading.

The presumed oddness of collectors

Bibliophiles must endure all manner of insults. Critics have accused book accumulators of being irrational, peculiar, life's voyeurs, obsessed with inanimate lovers, the classic cold fish."

Stuart Kells. The Library

Collectors of almost anything are likely to be subject to abuse. Most people seem to admire public libraries and museums, but when individuals turn their own homes into private libraries or miniature Smithsonians, they are likely to be thought a bit weird. It's just not what normal people do, except that normal people do collect things, whether that be teapots, stamps, autographed baseballs, old hand tools, cars or Steinbeck first editions.

Perhaps it is just that people who collect one thing find it odd that other people might want to collect something else.

Margaret Fountaine

A few weeks ago in this space I reviewed David Long's English Eccentrics & Their Bizarre Behavior. Many of these "eccentrics" were just collectors, extreme collectors perhaps, but just collectors. One of these was Margaret Fountaine (1862-1940), who collected more than 22,000 specimens of butterflies from all over the world. These can now be found in the Norwich Castle Museum. So, OK, not everybody collects 22,000 butterflies, but Fountaine made a significant contribution to science, yet she is included in a book alongside a man who gave each of his thousands of workers a donkey and an umbrella on the condition that they never looked at him or spoke to him. This was a man who usually wore two overcoats at the same time and a two-foot top hat, and so might have been fun to look at..

Those who accumulate books are usually thought no less eccentric than those who accumulate butterflies. It's just not something normal people do. I've noticed that anyone who makes reference my extensive library always does so with a smile that suggests they find my particular passion amusing. That's why I rarely show my books to visitors. If they knew the true state of my collection they would really think I'm weird.

Woody at his best

Must one be a reader to be a writer? Film director Woody Allen would answer in the negative. Once in a Newsweek interview, Allen said he read very little for the first 15 years of his life. He was too interested in playing ball. Then he added, "Even when I was reading nothing but Donald Duck and Batman I could write real prose in school compositions. There was never a week when the composition I wrote was not the one that was read to the class."

To experience Allen's skill as a writer one could read one of his books, such as the humor classics Without Feathers and Side Effects, or watch any of his movies, which he wrote as well as directed (and in most cases starred in). There is a third alternative, and that is The Illustrated Woody Allen Reader, edited by Linda Sunshine.

The book was published in the United Kingdom in 1993, so all his work from the past two and a half decades is unrepresented. Still there are nearly 300 pages of choice material here, excerpts from his movies, books, monologues (he was a standup comic back in the 1960s), essays and interviews. Sunshine organizes the material according to the major themes of his work: his own life, love, analysis, New York City, religion and death, for instance.

Here are a couple of brief samples:

In Shadows and Fog, he has one character say, "Oh, now there's only one kind of love that lasts. That's unrequited love. It stays with you forever."

He writes in Without Feathers, "What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet."

The book has a generous amount of illustrations, mostly stills from his movies.

Not everyone likes Woody Allen or approves of his moral character, but for those who can separate the work from the man, this book offers a great deal of pleasure.

Smart writers, smarter readers

I think readers are always smarter about books than writers. And that's good. If the writer knows everything and plots it all out, especially in a novel, it's just not as organic, and it's not as interactive. I think of Emily Bronte. Did she understand all the many psychological pieces of Wuthering Heights? I don't think so. That's why it's such a fascinating puzzle. You as a reader put in your own vision.

Alice Hoffman, interview, Pages magazine, July/August 2004

Bert G. Hornback

I have an old book (1972) by Bert G. Hornback, a University of Michigan literature professor, called Noah's Arkitecture: A Study of Dickens' Mythology. Here's a sample excerpt about Little Dorrit: "In terms of his mythic vision, the destruction of the world is always compromised by Noah and the Ark."

So was Charles Dickens thinking about the destruction of the world when he wrote this or any of his novels? Were Noah and his Ark even on his mind? I doubt it. But does that mean Hornback was full of baloney? Maybe he was, but probably not.

As beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so meaning is in the mind of the beholder, or the reader in this case. Alice Hoffman may have overstated the case when she said "readers are always smarter about books than writers," for I'm sure many writers pack their novels with meaning and metaphors, then wonder why their readers  never seem to catch on. (I have been told by more than one writer that I was the only reviewer to understand what he or she was trying to say.) That's because readers are finding their own insights that the authors probably never thought of.

The better the writer, the greater the variety of meaning that can be found in a novel. That's why literary scholars continue to find new insights into Little Dorrit, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Scarlet Letter, Wuthering Heights and other literature of note. Their authors were smart, but their readers, at least as a group, are smarter.

Polar secrets

While it draws from the historical record, its purpose is not to answer historical questions or settle historical controversies.

Wayne Johnston, Author's Note, The Navigator of New York

That author's note comes at the end of Wayne Johnston's 2002 novel The Navigator of New York, but perhaps it should have been in large bold letters at the beginning. For the novel deals with one of the great scientific/historical controversies of all time: Who got to the North Pole first, Robert E. Peary or Frederick A. Cook? Or did either of them ever make it to the pole? Should the honor actually go to Richard E. Byrd or Roald Amundsen?

Johnson doesn't settle the matter, either in fiction or in fact, but he does draw some fictional conclusions that may seem like fact to readers. So beware.

The Canadian novelist tells his story through the voice of a Newfoundland orphan named Devlin Stead. His father, a doctor, abandons his family to become a polar explorer with Peary. Cook is the other doctor on the expedition, which fails to reach the pole. At some point Dr. Stead walks off into the ice and snow and is not seen again. Later Devlin's mother dies in a jump from a cliff. The boy is raised by his aunt and uncle.

Then comes a series of letters from Dr. Cook, who claims he is Devlin's actual father. He says he met the boy's mother in New York when she visited New York City before her marriage to Dr. Stead. They fell in love, but later when she revealed her pregnancy, Cook declined to marry her. Stead did, but he couldn't forgive her, which was why he fled to the north.

When the boy is older, he himself flees Newfoundland to join Dr. Cook in New York and eventually joins him on his polar and mountain climbing expeditions, even saving Peary's life on one occasion.

Once colleagues, Peary and Cook become bitter rivals. Neither is portrayed as a hero. Peary is shown to be bitter, obsessed and, after losing most of his toes to frostbite, barely able to walk. Cook, at first, seems the more admirable man, yet he too is bitter and obsessed. To Devlin he keeps dribbling out secrets, each more horrifying than the last. Devlin struggles to maintain his trust in and support for Cook, and the reader faces the same struggle.

Each explorer returned from the polar ice at about the same time, both claiming to have gotten to the North Pole first, but neither had proof, records or even a knowledgable witness. The scientific community first gave one the credit, then the other, then back again. The debate goes on. Today it hardly seems to matter, but it certainly did a century ago. Johnston nicely captures both the public and personal quest for truth.

Unread books

While listening to my car radio recently, I heard the host of a local talk show say he was celebrating 50+ years on radio. When the subject of gifts for the occasion came up, his immediate response was, “Don’t give me any books. I already have six books I haven’t read.”

Just six books he hasn’t read? I must have at least 600 books I haven’t read. Probably a lot more. I know I won’t live long enough to read them all, but that doesn’t keep me from acquiring more. I suspect the real reason he doesn’t want any gift books is that he just doesn’t like reading that much.

Yet I must agree with him, for I wouldn't want gift books either, not because I already have so many books to read but because nobody else can know what I might want to read. And I hate feeling obligated to read books other people think I should read or might like. Rarely have I enjoyed books given to me as gifts, unless I had previously expressed an interest in them. Bookstore gift cards are another matter. I always enjoy book shopping with other people’s money.

Now as for all those unread books, I see them as an incentive to live a long, long time. Some people will themselves to live to celebrate their 90th birthday or to see their grandchildren graduate from high school. I want to live long enough to read Bleak House. And I’m in no hurry to read Bleak House.

What our books say about us

Creating a library is a psychically loaded enterprise. In gathering their bounty, book-lovers have displayed anxiety, avarice, envy, fastidiousness, obsession, lust, pride, pretension, narcissism, and agoraphobia — indeed every biblical sin and most of the pathologies from the American Psychiatric Association manual.

Stuart Kells, The Library

Stuart Kells

Books, like knickknacks on a shelf or clothes in a closet, tend to accumulate over time. On rare occasions someone might set out with a plan — to collect William Faulkner first editions, for example, or books on railroading — but most of us acquire a book here and another there. A library book sale brings in a boxful. In time we may have a bookcase full of books, and some of us may even find ourselves with a rather large personal library.

So is this really as random as it seems, or does it, as Stuart Kells suggests in The Library, reveal much about our personalities, our passions, our history and our sins? I think our books are, or at least can, be revealing. I'm sure there are some people who have shelves full of books but never read them and never even purchased them in the first place. They are just books given to them or perhaps left behind by parents or a former roommate. So books can be misleading, but in most cases I believe our books do say something about us.

So what do my own books say about me?

Above me to my right is a shelf of books about time: philosophy books, psychology books, science books, self-help books, history books, you name it. All about time.. A casual observer might wonder about this. In truth, the books date from when I worked on an eventually aborted book on the Judeo-Christian perception of time, a straight line as opposed to a circle.

Over to my left is another shelf full of books about submarines, both fiction and nonfiction. Other books about submarines are scattered here and there throughout my library. So why submarines? This collection might be confusing to people who know me, misleading to those who don't. I don't know exactly, but I suspect these books stem from the fact that I am a bit claustrophobic. I don't read horror stories. When I want a good scare, I read a book about submarines.

My large collection of books about Christianity, especially works by and about C.S. Lewis, says something about my faith. My shelves full of aging classic novels and collections of short stories may suggest I studied literature in college, and their publication dates may reveal my approximate age.

My nonfiction books cover a broad spectrum of topics, while my fiction collection includes a multitude of genres, as well as books that might be considered both high-brow and low-brow. I own a lot of novels written by and mostly read by women. What I hope all this says about me is that I am someone with broad interests, diverse tastes and no insecurities about my sexual identity.

Saved by fun

Fun saves us from political dictatorship.

P.J. O'Rourke, Driving Like Crazy

Conservative political humorist P.J. O'Rourke has always regarded cars in general and driving cars in particular as fun. Thus the above line from his 2009 book Driving Like Crazy nicely combines two of the main themes of his writing life into one pithy declaration.

Although the book includes a few digs at the likes of Sarah Palin, Barack Obama and the Bushes, his main focus throughout is cars and how much fun they are.

Besides being a political writer, O'Rourke has also written frequently for car magazines and for other magazines on the subject of cars. Most of the chapters in his book originally appeared as magazine articles or are based on articles he has written. He gives readers no notice of this beforehand, which could cause some readers to get no further than the first chapter, a celebration of the youthful pleasures of driving fast while drinking to excess, doing drugs and having wild sex. This is a satire he wrote years ago for National Lampoon, but he doesn't tell us this until later.

Most chapters concern test drives or endurance races through difficult areas, such as India and Baja California. In each case there are problems aplenty, sometimes mechanical and sometimes not, and there would be a sameness to these accounts except that O'Rourke's jokes are always different. And if O'Rourke drives cars for fun, we read his books for fun.

Here's a sample of his wit about the Jeep: "My personal theory about the visceral appeal of the Jeep is that it is purposeful-looking while having no clear purpose. The Jeep is inadequate as a pickup, drafty as a sedan, oversized as an ATV, and lacks sufficient cargo space to be an SUV. True, Jeeps will go almost everyplace but, if you think about it, Jeeps mostly go everyplace there's no reason to go."

Then there's this comment he makes, in an interview at the end of the book, about the federal government subsidizing General Motors: "Governments have monopolies on certain things, like eminent domain and deadly force. What's another example of an organization that gets into the same business that you're in, except that their guys have got guns? That would be the Mob."

There he goes again. Cars and politics.

Libraries before books, after books and in books

Not to be confused with The Library Book by Susan Orlean, The Library by Stuart Kells (2017) is more interesting in parts than as a whole. That's probably because it reads more like an encyclopedia of library history than a single narrative about the history of libraries. Some entries just appeal more than others. A reader may be tempted to skip around in the book as its author does in his history of the library.

Libraries go back a long time. They even, Kells says, predate books. He counts the practice of preliterate tribes of remembering the legends of their culture as early libraries. In some cultures this still goes on. The film The Good Lie shows Sudanese children drilling each other on the names of ancestors they never knew so they would never forget them

From there Kells goes on to talk about libraries before paper or printing, when books were written on a variety of materials, including papyrus, palm leaves ivory, wood, stone and even such exotic materials as silk, bamboo, copper, turtle shells, antlers and the intestines of elephants. He writes about how books were stored (they haven't always been placed on shelves), organized, copied, preserved, treasured, censored and, too often, destroyed.

Fictional libraries get a surprising amount of attention. Kells calls Umberto Eco's creation in The Name of the Rose "the most captivating library in fiction" and, just two pages later, "the most enchanting library ever captured in words." He gives attention, too, to libraries described in The Lord of the Rings and other books.

There is much to like about The Library, but there are also times when the reader may be tempted to find a good library and pick out a better book to read.

Buying it here

Northwest Michigan has Lake Michigan, lighthouses, Earl Young’s mushroom houses, lots of trees,  lots of nice people and lots of good restaurants, all of which I have been enjoying this week, but mostly I have been appreciating its surprisingly active and arty downtowns and the independent bookstores located in those downtowns.

I’m from Ohio, where most people ignore their downtowns and shop at Walmart. If they buy books, they get them at Barnes and Noble or from Amazon. Independent bookstores? What are they? I think there’s a Barnes and Noble in Traverse City, but I’ve never seen it in three trips to this area. But I know the city has Brilliant Books on Front Street, which is where I stopped again yesterday.

Smaller towns in the area each has its own bookstore, and each seemed to have a steady stream of customers when I was there this week. Charlevoix has Round Lake Books, Harbor Springs has Between the Covers and Petoskey has McLean & Eakin, not just the best bookstore in the area but one of the best you’ll find anywhere. At least author Ann Patchett thinks so, and she has her own bookstore in Nashville (which is good, but not this good).

McLean & Eakin is a deep, narrow, beautifully designed bookshop that has everything, or so it would appear. I saw books there I’ve seen nowhere else, and I bought some of them. Here and at least one other bookstore in the area I saw a sign that read, “Find it here. Buy it here. Keep us here.” That alludes to the curse of independent bookstores: people find it there, then buy it cheaper somewhere else. I like book bargains as much anyone else, but I decided to follow the spirit of that slogan on this trip in hopes all four stores will still be here on my next trip north.

At McLean & Eakin I purchased Miss Kopp Just Won’t Quit by Amy Stewart, I Shot the Buddha by Colin Cotterill, Rise & Shine, Benedict Stone by Phaedra Patrick and The Care and Feeding of an Independent Bookstore by Ann Patchett. Three of the four I haven’t seen, or even seen mentioned, anywhere else.

During my stop in Harbor Springs, a charming town I hadn’t visited before, I found So Much Life Left Over by Louis de Bernieres. In Charlevoix I bought The First Love Story: Adam, Eve and Us by Bruce Feiler. Then yesterday at Brilliant Books I came away with Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens. I paid full price for all but the Feiler book, which was on the half-price table.

Do I feel guilty for spending so much money? Yes, I do, but not nearly as guilty as I would if I had found the books here then bought them from Amazon.

What mattered to Krauthammer

Politics is the moat, beyond which lie the barbarians.

Charles Krauthammer, Things That Matter

The late Charles Krauthammer had originally intended this collection of columns and articles to focus on the things that mattered most to him, things other than politics, things like baseball, chess, science, medicine and family. Then he realized that ultimately everything that mattered most to him depended on politics. Consider how the political change that created Nazi Germany affected every aspect of life in Germany, and the rest of Europe as well.

So Krauthammer did include political commentary in Things That Matter, although these essays now seem the most dated, at least those that relate specifically to issues that were hot topics during the Clinton years or either of the Bush administrations. Obama discussions seem a bit more topical. The book predates the Trump administration.

When writing about politics in general terms, however, it sounds like it could have first appeared in print yesterday. One example is when he writes, “Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.” Krauthammer wrote this in 2002, but today conservatives are ranting about the stupidity of the open borders and Medicare-for-all advocated by left-wing politicians, while liberals use any excuse to call conservatives Nazis or racists.

Still he is at his best when writing about subjects more dear to his heart — why religion should be taught in the schools (“A healthy country would teach its children evolution — and the Ten Commandments.”), why Winston Churchill was the most important figure in the 20th century, why turning the border collie into a show dog is likely to ruin its most important quality — its intelligence, and so on.

This is good stuff, stuff that will matter to most readers as it mattered to Charles Krauthammer.

The disappearance of whom

Popular Science is not a magazine where one would expect to find an article on language usage, especially if the subject is not even scientific language. Yet the fall issue has a page dedicated to the word whom.

The two most interesting points are these.

1. A study found that men who use whom in their profiles on dating sites get 31% more messages in reply. It doesn’t explain why, so we can only guess. Perhaps the word suggests a man is more educated, more refined and more prosperous, whether or not that word is actually used correctly.

2. There has been a steady decline in the use of whom in literature since 1800, and literature is produced by people who actually are educated and refined (if rarely prosperous). In 1800 .050 percent of words in literature written in English were whom. Today it’s only about .010 percent.

This decline in usage among those who know the language best is echoed among the rest of us. We rarely if ever say or write the word whom. We seem a bit hoity-toity when we do. Most of us don’t even remember why we were supposed to use the word or when.

I am old enough to remember when Johnny Carson hosted a daytime television game show called “Who Do You Trust?” There were protests from grammarians that it should properly be called “Whom Do You Trust?” Today I doubt anyone would complain.

Whom isn’t quite an obsolete word yet, but it gets little attention anymore. Except, apparently, from women looking for date.