This year's superlatives

Once again this year rather than simply listing the best books read in the past 12 months I will use some of the superlatives used by J. Peder Zane in his book Remarkable Reads:

Most Enchanting Book: Few writers enchant me in the way P.G. Wodehouse does, and Aunts Aren't Gentlemen, the last of his Jeeves and Bertie novels, ranks among the most enchanting of his books.

Most Important Book: I read two books about writing this year that are as much memoirs as self-help books, Stephen King's On Writing and Dani Shapiro's Still Writing. King's book is better known, but I would give the edge to Shapiro's for its practical value to writers.

Most Daunting Book: The stuff of Steven Pinker's thought can be daunting indeed, so reading his The Stuff of Thought was often a challenge, but worthwhile just the same.

Wisest Book: Jane Hamilton's novel A Map of the World is worthy of several of these superlatives, but I'll choose this one. Reading it would be wise, understanding it wiser and following its wisdom wiser still.

Most Familiar Book: Thomas E. McGrath was my pastor for several years, so his collection of sermons Aren't You Glad You're Here This Morning? has a familiar voice. In fact, I seemed to hear him reading the book to me.

Most Incomprehensible Book: I wanted very much to understand Carlo Rovelli's The Order of Time. I'm just not that smart.

Most Beautiful Book: There is much to admire in Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens. The passage of so many years has not diminished its charms.

Most Fearless Book: Thomas Sowell's The Vision of the Anointed was a fearless book to write in 1995. In today's culture it has become a fearless book to read or even to have on one's shelf.

Most Surprising Book: I have long known that some birds are more intelligent than most animals, but still Jennifer Ackerman's The Genius of Birds is full of surprises.

Mary Roach

Most Disappointing Book: Catherine Shaw's mystery The Library Paradox sounded like a fascinating book. It isn't.

Most Unpleasant Book: Mary Roach's good humor keeps Grunt, her book about protecting soldiers and helping them recover from their injuries, from becoming more unpleasant than it is at times.

Most Luminous Book: Elizabeth Savage's prose all but glows in her novel The Last Night at the Ritz.

Twelve Questions — 2020

It is time for another round of Twelve Questions, where I attempt to answer specific questions using only the titles of books I've read in the past year. Let us begin.

Describe yourself: Healing After Loss

How do you feel? Wish You Were Here

Describe where you currently live: City of Promise

If you could go anywhere, where would you go? Where My Heart Used to Beat

What's your favorite form of transportation? The Perfect Horse

Your best friend is: Healer

You and your friends are: The Secret Lives of Introverts

What's the weather like where you are? Aren't You Glad You're Here This Morning?

What is the best advice you could give? Reader, Come Home

Thought for the day: That Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means

How would you like to die? Death in Devon

What is your soul's present condition? The Terrible Speed of Mercy

Some of my answers may even be true. I'll let you guess which ones.

Celebrating the Psalms

N.T. Wright may be a New Testament scholar, but he makes it a point to read five Psalms a day because he believes the Psalms belong at the center of Christian worship and Christian thought. He makes his point in The Case for the Psalms (2013), and anyone who reads it will likely be swayed toward that same opinion.

We may assume the Psalms to be a random assortment of Hebrew poetry not unlike an anthology of notable American poetry or British poetry. Having read all 150 of them so many times, Wright thinks differently. He views them as deliberately ordered with common themes running through them.

The themes he focuses on in his book are time, space and matter, and he writes about how God connects with mankind through each.

About time, for example, Wright says, "This is what poetry and music themselves are there to do: to link the present to the past, to say, 'Remember,' to say, 'Blessed be God,' even when the tide is running strongly in the wrong direction."

As for space, Wright traces in the Psalms the Hebrews' evolving understanding of where God dwells, from a holy place, to the Temple, to all mankind, the soul of each human being.

"Matter matters," the author tells us. The Psalms celebrate not just God but God's whole creation.

Wrights quotes at length from many of the Psalms, and in the most personal chapter of his book describes how particular Psalms have spoken to him in significant ways through his life.

Forming a writer

This is not an autobiography. It is, rather. a kind of curriculum vitae — my attempt to show how one writer was formed. Not how one writer was made. I don't believe writers can be made, either by circumstances or by self-will (although I did believe those things once.) The equipment comes with the original package.

Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

That Stephen King's On Writing (2000) is as much a memoir as it is a how-to book may surprise other readers as it surprised me. Before he addresses the usual stuff about avoiding passive verbs and unhelpful adverbs, he writes about about enjoying horror movies as a kid and getting disciplined in high school for writing satire about faculty members. The latter details, however, may be more interesting, and they tell us something about how this particular writer was formed. Not made, as he points out. He was born a writer, a storyteller, he believes. But his early life shaped him into the kind of writer he became.

Even when King gets to the how-to portion of his book, he displays a gift for making the familiar seem fresh. When writing about those passive verbs, for example, his prose surges with enough active energy to keep us engaged. Yet he also throws in original writing advice left out of The Elements of Style, still the basic handbook for writers. He writes about closed door writing and open door writing. The first describes the beginning stages of writing when the ideas are just forming and you still don't know whether you have anything worthwhile or not. Keep the door closed, figuratively speaking. Don't talk about it with others. Don't let anyone see what you you are writing. You may even want to literarily keep the door closed. The fewer interruptions the better. Later on input from others may prove helpful. A trusted reader may see faults you miss and have the courage and sufficient tact to tell you about them without destroying your confidence.

His thoughts about descriptive writing strike me as being on target. Describe just enough, but never too much. That just slows down your story and bores your readers. He offers examples about how to do this.

King returns to memoir later in his book. During the writing of it, he says, he took his usual walk down a country road in Maine one day when he was struck by a vehicle and seriously injured. (He mentions the name of the driver not just once but numerous times, which seems a bit cruel.) He describes the event, the injuries, the long recovery and especially his struggle to return to writing. You might say a broken writer was reformed.

To Mars and back

I can't say much for the science in Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, but the fiction is terrific.

Surely even in 1950, when Bradbury's classic sci-fi novel was published, scientists were aware that Mars lacked a breathable atmosphere, that humans could not withstand the planet's temperature extremes without insulating spacesuits and that the supposed "canals" of Mars were probably not filled with flowing water. Yet the novel imagines the planet as something of an Eden that attracts colonists from Earth in great numbers.

The problem is there are Martians who don't take kindly to being colonized. The first explorers who land on Mars in 1999 are eliminated in imaginative ways, but eventually like North American Indians, the Martians are overwhelmed.

Bradbury's novel takes the form of a series of related short stories, which is why so many chapters from the book could be so easily published in science fiction magazines of the 1940s. Some characters return in subsequent chapters, while others appear, then disappear for good.

Eventually a massive nuclear war starts on Earth, and the new Martians strangely develop a need to return home, apparently not wanting to miss a good war. This all but leaves Mars a desolate planet, an Eden after the Fall and after the Expulsion.

The novel, like all good science fiction, is more about humanity than science. These people may have relocated to Mars, but they remain Earthlings at heart. Their return to Earth for the big war proves it.

Ray Bradbury was born 100 years ago in Waukegan, Ill. Reading, or rereading, The Martian Chronicles  seems like a good way to honor his memory.

Before Doogie Howser

The winners generally get to name the war. Had the South won the American Civil War, we might know it today as the War Between the States, the War of Northern Aggression or perhaps, in a masterpiece of understatement, the Disagreement.

It was the latter that Nick Taylor chose as the title of his excellent debut novel, The Disagreement (2008), which focuses not on battles but on the medical care for wounded soldiers in the South. Much has been written about the difficulty the less industrial Confederacy had acquiring arms and ammunition, but Taylor puts his focus on the shortage, and eventual absence, of quinine and other necessary drugs and medical supplies. Eventually traditional home remedies were all that was available to hospital doctors.

Still in his mid-teens when the war breaks out, John Muro is the son of a Virginian who gave up his medical practice for a presumably more lucrative career in business, manufacturing Confederate uniforms. After a nephew returns from an early battle missing a limb, the father decides to send John to medical school to protect him from combat. Because of the large number of wounded soldiers, John, still just 17, and his fellow medical students are thrown into full-time on-the-job training. He is still a teenager when, by necessity, he becomes a full-fledged doctor and, because of his skills, is soon mentioned as the likely postwar head of the hospital.

Meanwhile John falls in love with Lorrie, the niece of his professor; develops a close friendship with a Union soldier whose life he saves (then gets a scolding for wasting precious medicine on an enemy) and becomes increasingly estranged from his family. The war, we find, is not the only disagreement in this tale.

Taylor's novel provides readers with a fine story, but also an intriguing look inside a bit of history we might otherwise have never given a thought.

Salinger surprises

Kenneth Slawenski's J.D. Salinger: A Life contains a number of surprising tidbits about Salinger, some of which I mentioned two days ago in my review of the biography. Here are some others:

• "The present day concept of J.D. Salinger makes it difficult to imagine him happy in the army," Slawenski writes. Yet for the most part, Army life suited him well. He had attended a military school as a youth and had thrived there. Later the discipline of military life helped develop him both as a man and as a writer.

• Before the war Salinger lived in Europe for a time, spending time with a Jewish family in Austria and developing a crush on the family's daughter. After the war, before returning home, he tried to find this family and learned all of them had been killed in a concentration camp.

• The regiment in which Salinger served had the highest casualty rate of any American regiment in Europe.

• Salinger returned from Europe with a war bride. She soon left him and returned to Europe.

* The Catcher in the Rye was published in Great Britain before it was published in the United States. Harcourt wanted the author to make significant changes in the book, causing Salinger to turn to another publisher, Little, Brown. The New Yorker, which later printed most of his stories, "refused to print a single word" of the novel. The editors didn't like it. Later the magazine rejected "Zooey" until the editor overruled his subeditors.

• After moving to Cornish, N.H., Salinger led a church youth group for a time and frequently invited teenagers over to his house.

That last item may be, for me at least, the most surprising thing in the entire biography.

Famous for fleeing fame

Considering the extent to which J.D. Salinger withdrew from the public eye and guarded his privacy for most of his life, much is known about him, as Kenneth Slawenski proves in his 2010 biography J.D. Salinger: A Life.

Salinger wasn't always so withdrawn. As a young man he was popular with women and someone who went out for a drink with the guys. Slawenski identifies several factors that eventually led to his isolation in Cornish, N.H., and his decision to continue writing but to cease publishing his work. His experiences in Europe during World War II affected him greatly. He wasn't the only veteran who pulled back within himself after the war ended. Even on the front lines, Salinger worked on his short stories, and many of his stories, including "For Esme — With Love and Squalor," were heavily influenced by the war.

Then there was the The New Yorker, which for several years exclusively published his stories. The magazine has long emphasized the importance of the story over its author, something Salinger took to heart. Removing his photograph from The Catcher in the Rye in later editions was just one way he attempted to make himself secondary to his work.

Eventually he carried this to the extreme by writing his stories but then hiding them away. This decision was fueled by his devotion to Zen Buddhism and meditation. Prayer, Slawenski writes, became his primary ambition. The popularity of his books provided him with enough income to live on and support his family, but as a virtual hermit, especially after his wife (the second of three and the mother of his children) left him, he didn't need much money.

Yet for someone who tried to put his work ahead of himself, Salinger couldn't stop putting himself and his beliefs front and center in that work. His characters, from Holden Caulfield to Buddy Glass, speak for him, thus giving a biographer plenty to work with. Slawenski discusses in detail every published story. Many of these stories Salinger refused to have reprinted and thus are difficult for fans to find.

The writer's life intersected with those of other famous people in surprising ways. Salinger's first love, the daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill, married Charlie Chaplin instead, During the war, Salinger would sometimes slip away to compare notes about writing with war correspondent Ernest Hemingway. His best friend in Cornish was the esteemed Judge Learned Hand. Jackie Kennedy once called him on the phone, trying to persuade him to come to the White House.

The irony of Salinger's withdrawal from the world is that it made him, not his fiction, the public's primary focus. Any Salinger sighting became news.

Salinger died just as Slawenski was wrapping up this biography. This was fortunate for the biographer in that it allowed him to tell a more complete story, but it also saved him, an obvious Salinger fan, from becoming another Salinger enemy, yet another person invading the privacy of someone who had had enough of fame and just wanted to be left alone.

Compulsory greatness

A case of mistaken identity is almost as surefire a way of getting laughs as putting a man in a woman's dress, so it may come as a surprise that the great humorist Mark Twain wrote The Prince and the Pauper not as a comic novel but as a mostly serious historical novel, even perhaps a thriller.

Tom Canty is a poor London boy, frequently beaten by both his father and his grandmother when he fails to return from a day of begging with sufficient money. Somehow he meets Edward, the son of King Henry VIII, a boy who looks a lot like him. They decide to see what they look like in each other's clothes. Just then they are interrupted, and Edward is mistaken for a pauper boy and sent away, while Tom is assumed to be the Prince of Wales.

Both boys are frustrated by their new circumstances, but despite their claims about their true identities, both are assumed to have suddenly developed a mental disability. Meanwhile the king dies and Tom is proclaimed the new king, with the power to do just about anything but go home. Even now Tom, who liked to pretend to be royalty when he was a pauper, is unhappy about his "compulsory greatness." Edward struggles to return to the palace in his rags while various forces, including Tom's father, work against him. Both boys, in their new identities, get a useful education about how the other half lives, and Twain gives us a great line about how "kings should go to school to their own laws at times, and so learn mercy."

It's a bit difficult to believe now, but Twain's own family thought this novel to be his best book, and in fact Twain himself was so taken with the idea that he interrupted writing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn so he could write this much shorter novel. Today the story seems a bit lame, although that probably has much to do with Twain's decision to have his characters speak in Shakespearean English, now even more difficult to wade through than it was 150 years ago.

Bamboozling the public

Anyone who engages in intellectual debate comes to recognize the tactics, ploys, and dirty tricks that debaters use to bamboozle an audience when the facts and logic aren't going their way.

Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought

Steven Pinker

Perhaps I should have commented on Steven Pinker's comment during the political season, except that it is always the political season, and what he says is as true in December as it was in October.

In The Stuff of Thought, Pinker offers three examples of common tools for bamboozling audiences:

1. The appeal to authority.

Most recently the authority most often appealed to is science. "Follow the science," politicians like to say when discussing the present pandemic, except when science runs counter to what these politicians want to do. Then they ignore the science. Thus schools remain closed in some areas even though medical authorities generally agree that school children are neither endangered by the virus nor likely to pass it on to others. Further, scientists don't always agree with each other, allowing politicians to pick the science they prefer. Medical experts don't even always agree with their own previous statements on the subject, sometimes changing their positions on the wearing of masks, the wisdom of lockdowns and related issues. Like a lawyer in a courtroom, a politician can always find an expert to back up any position.

2. The ascription of motives.

Amy Coney Barrett, the new justice on the Supreme Court of the United States, supposedly would vote to end health insurance protection for persons with preexisting conditions. Democrats supposedly intend to pack the Supreme Count and make Puerto Rico a state. Much of what passes for political debate comes down to bold, usually exaggerated statements about what the other side will certainly do if they gain power. Using statements actually made by politicians on the other side is one thing, but putting statements into their mouths is something else.

3. The calling of names.

Donald Trump and anyone who supports him is a racist, perhaps even a Nazi, according to many Democrats. Republicans are fond of calling their political opponents socialists, perhaps even communists. No doubt some Trump supporters are racists (as are some Biden supporters), and no doubt some Democrats are socialists at heart. Still the name-calling has more to do with bamboozling the public than with facts and logic.

Thomas Merton in small doses

Even Thomas Merton himself didn't quite know what to make of his 1965 book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. The much-revered monk insisted it was not a spiritual journal. Nor, he said, was it "a venture in self-revelation or self-discovery" or "a pure soliloquy." Finally in his preface he settled on "a series of sketches and meditations, some poetic, and literary, others historical and even theological, fitted together in a spontaneous, informal philosophic scheme in such a way that they react upon each other," not that that helps much.

I would call it simply a collection of brief essays, some just a sentence or two long, others going on for a page or two. Many of these essays reflect the point in history in which he was writing, the early 1960s. There is much here about President John F. Kennedy, a fellow Catholic whom Merton greatly admires, and the monk is clearly crushed by Kennedy's assassination. Pope John also dies during this period, another blow to him. Merton writes about the Cuban missile crisis, nuclear testing and the civil rights movement, giving any reader the temper of those uncertain times.

Yet much of what Merton writes could have been written yesterday. His thoughts on theology, morality and humanity are not so easily dated. Here's a sampling of some of his most intriguing comments:

"Nor is it certain that we have any urgent obligation to find sin in ourselves. How much sin is kept hidden from us by God Himself, in His mercy? After which He hides it from Himself!"

"Perhaps the man who says he 'thinks for himself' is simply one who does not think at all."

"Note of course that the doctrine of original sin, properly understood, is optimistic. It does not teach that man is by nature evil, but that evil in him is unnatural, a disorder, a sin."

"It is because religion is a principle and source of the deepest freedom that all totalitarian systems, whether overt or implicit, must necessarily attack it."

"The more perfect, the more idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization."

"The greatest temptation that assails Christians is that in effect, for most of us, the Gospel has ceased to be news. And if it is not news, it is not the Gospel."

"Man is the image of God, not His shadow."

"He who fears death or he who longs for it — both are in the same condition: they admit they have not lived."

Rarely does Merton get personal, but there are occasional references to his life before he became a monk, his life in a Louisville monastery and a brief hospitalization. Perhaps the most striking comment in the book comes when he writes, "I think sometimes that I may soon die, though I am not yet old (forty-seven)." In fact he did die of an accidental electrocution in 1968.

A good book can be a bad one

"Good" books can be pretty awful sometimes.

Nick Hornby, Housekeeping vs. the Dirt

Just because Ulysses, The Sound and the Fury and Mrs. Dalloway are often considered not just good books but great books doesn't mean there's something wrong with you if you can't get past page 15 in any of them. Nor does it mean that those who do appreciate those books are superior to you intellectually or in any other way. (Maybe they are, but maybe they aren't.) Nor does it mean that those books and others like them are in any way inferior just because you don't like them.

Nick Hornby

It's not often that the preface is the best part of a book, but that may be true in the case of Nick Hornby's Housekeeping vs. the Dirt (reviewed here Nov. 25, "Keeping It Positive"). Hornby rants for several pages about reading books and writing about books (the subject of his book), and it is fascinating stuff. Most fascinating, because of the way they prop up a reader's confidence, are his words about individual reading tastes. We all aren't the same, and it's much better to read what we like than to try to read what somebody else likes and end up getting discouraged and not reading anything at all.

I like the above quote from Hornby's preface, but here are a couple of other gems:

"Turning pages should not be like walking through thick mud."

"Read anything as long as you can't wait to pick it up again."

I have been writing book reviews for most of my life, and one of the conceits of book reviewing is that one should never say or even suggest something like "in my opinion." If you think a book is good or bad, then say it is good or bad. You don't acknowledge that anyone might think differently. But of course other people do think differently, as they have every right to do. And each reader has the right to think like a book reviewer does: Like it and it's a good book. Dislike it and it's a bad book. So there. Yet this isn't actually true, either for book critics or for anyone else.

Fortunately we do not all like the same books. There are many books in every bookstore and every public library. Somebody exerted a lot of effort to write each of them, and each deserves an appreciative reader. But that doesn't mean that reader must be you.

A bloated folktale

Aren't folktales supposed to be short? Diane Setterfield's Bellman & Black (2013) may not be a long novel, but it is still a novel, yet it has the flavor of a folktale. It should begin with, "Once upon a time ..." It all seems like too much for too little.

As a boy William Bellman kills a rook with a catapult. Rooks, Setterfield tells us, never forget such things, and they will eventually get their justice.

Bellman grows up to become an uncommonly successful businessman, first in the textile business and then in the funeral business. Like Midas, everything he touches turns to gold, even though he no longer has any use for that gold after most of his family dies in a fever plague. He lives in his office, working practically around the clock. His surviving daughter gives up expecting him to visit.

The story takes place in England during a time when formal mourning lasted a year or more, funerals were lavish, and the sale of black garments, flowers and other accessories was big business. Bellman succeeds not just because of his timing and his bard work, but also because of a mysterious Mr. Black, who seems somehow responsible for Bellman's one surviving family member. Bellman makes Black a partner, even though he doesn't know why or who Mr. Black is or even if that is really his name. He seems to run into the man only when a death occurs. So is Mr. Black the Devil, Death itself or perhaps a human representation of those rooks that never forget?

Bellman & Black may disappoint readers who enjoyed Setterfield's first novel, The Thirteenth Tale. It just reads like a swollen short story.

A week at the lake

Many extended families gather along a lake or a seashore for a few days each summer. It's usually fun for everyone involved, but is there enough in such a family vacation for a novel? Stewart O'Nan thought so, and in 2002 he published Wish You Were Here, not just a novel about a week at the lake but a 517-page novel.

The family is the Maxwells, the subject of other O'Nan novels. Henry and Emily Maxwell have taken their family to their cottage along Chautauqua Lake in western New York for many years. Now Henry has died, and Emily gathers her family for one last week at the lake before she sells the cottage. Family members include Arlene, Henry's never-married sister; Kenneth, Emily's son, his wife Lise and their two children, Ella and Sam; and Margaret, Emily's daughter, and her children, Sarah and Justin.

This week at the lake never develops much more of a plot than any other family's week at the lake. Early in the week Kenneth stops for gas soon after a young female attendant at the gas station disappears, presumably kidnapped, and this thread weaves through the novel now and then, but it never turns into a crime novel. The closest O'Nan comes to an actual plot is that nobody in the family wants to lose the beloved cottaged, but only Emily can afford to pay the taxes, and she doesn't want the responsibility. Yet that is hardly enough to sustain 500 pages.

But we keep reading. There is something compelling about a family's attempts during a mostly rainy week to find things to do that will keep everyone amused. It is all familiar somehow, much like our own lakeside family reunions.

The author offers the point of view of each of the nine characters, switching from one to another. Each person is loving part of the family, yet we see that each is secretly petty, selfish and even somewhat vindictive. Unacknowledged conflicts rage beneath the surface, sort of like in most families. Only the two boys are young enough to allow their true feelings to come out in the open. Disciplining them amounts to teaching them to hold those feelings inside like the adults do.

The novel, while never riveting, nevertheless proves interesting enough to keep the pages turning. The missing woman does not turn up, and other problems remain unresolved as well. Emily is still lonely. Kenneth still can't make a decent living from his first love, photography. Margaret, just divorced, still wants to drown her depression in drink. Lise still thinks her husband has more to say to his sister than to her. Ella still has a crush on her prettier cousin. And so on. Family vacations usually don't solve problems. They just give us a break from them, or in some cases just bring them out into the open.

For many years my own extended family spent weeks each summer in a cottage along Chautauqua Lake, so O'Nan's many references to places along the lake — such as the Lenhart Hotel, the Bemus Point ferry, the Book Barn, the casino, etc. — made this novel especially appealing to me. It made me wish I were there.

Faceless writers

How many authors would you recognize if you saw them on the street? Probably not very many. Stephen King has a distinctive face, so you it might look familiar if you saw him across a room. James Patterson is sometimes seen promoting his books on television, so his face might ring a bell. Yet most writers, even those who have written bestsellers and have their photographs on each copy, can usually blend into a crowd, even if that crowd includes fans of their books.

This relative anonymity is fine with some authors, even if others may wish for a bit more celebrity. On a recent morning at breakfast I read in Kenneth Slawenski's J.D. Salinger about that Salinger's distaste for his photo on the back of The Catcher in the Rye. He soon had the photo removed from subsequent editions of the novel, and he once commented, "The poor boob who lets himself in for it (publishing a book) might as well walk down Madison Avenue with his pants down." Of course, it was the unexpected popularity of his novel that was most responsible for his unwanted celebrity. The photograph just made him easier to recognize on the street. Probably very few people actually did recognize him on the street by his photo, but the ultra sensitive Salinger wanted to reduce the chances.

One might think that because authors make more public appearances than they once did — thanks to book signings, book festivals and the like — that their faces would become more familiar. Yet relatively few people actually attend these events, just as relatively few people read their books. Nick Hornby in Housekeeping vs. the Dirt mentions that 43 percent of Americans  and 40 percent of Britons never read books, so why would they even care what James Patterson or Nick Hornby looks like?

Writing is in more ways than one an ideal fit for introverts. Not only can they comfortably work alone for long hours to produce their books, but they can achieve considerable success in their field, even to the point of winning awards and writing bestsellers, while staying in the shadows.

Salinger had to go into seclusion to escape public attention. Most writers can just lead normal lives. Even their own neighbors may not know — or even care — what they do for a living.

Keeping it positive

Housekeeping vs. the Dirt, published in 2006, is another in a series of collections of Nick Hornby's delightful columns printed monthly, or almost monthly, in Believer. That his column does not appear every month is something of a running joke in these columns, which ran from February 2005 to June/July 2006. From time to time Hornby comments about being suspended by the magazine's editors for making negative comments about the books he reviews. They supposedly tolerate only positive reviews. Yet Hornby's comments about the magazine, his editors and himself are often so fanciful that one doesn't  always know what should be believed. Only when writing about books and literature in general does his commentary seem sincere and trustworthy.

At the top of each column Hornby lists both the books bought that month (although he also includes books given to him) and the books read that month. Then he writes about the books he read in a stew of an essay that mixes in other commentary, as well.

He reads quite a variety of books, mostly in the middle range between the high-brow and low-brow extremes and mostly contemporary books. Yet he does comment on Voltaire's Candide, G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday and Robert Warren's All the King's Men, each a classic from years gone by. Naturally the commentary that most interests me is that about books I've read and appreciated, such as Jess Walter's Citizen Vince, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, Michael Frayn's Spies and The Trick of It and Tom Perrotta's Little Children. He likes them, too, and one believes that his positive reviews are not just the result of some edict from Believer editors.

Hornby's book also includes a few brief excerpts from books he reviews that may entice readers to try them even if his reviews do not.

Hornby is himself a novelist, the author of such books as About a Boy and A Long Way Down.

If you think books reviews have to be stuffy, read Hornby's columns and think again.

No rules

When we were kids in school, language studies were mostly about learning rules — rules for grammar, rules for spelling, rules for pronunciation, even rules for what were and weren't actual words. There seemed to be a right and wrong way of saying and writing everything. For the rest of our lives we may feel a bit guilty, or at least embarrassed, whenever we are caught breaking one of these rules.

Yet the language experts, those with more expertise than our elementary school teachers, insist that what we were taught in school were not so much rules as customs. We were being taught to speak and write like the educated adults in our community. It was something like being taught which fork to use for the salad. Steven Pinker suggests as much when he writes in The Stuff of Thought, "Designating a sentence as 'ungrammatical' simply means that native speakers tend to avoid the sentence, cringe when they hear it, and judge it as sounding odd." Sounding odd is not quite the same thing as being wrong.

As we got older we learned — to our amusement or horror, as the case may be — that ain't is listed in dictionaries, that words used in different parts of the country can mean something different than what we are used to and that the English people, who should certainly know how to to use the English language, don't sound like the people we grew up with. We also became more aware that the "rules" we learned are often inconsistent and sometimes make little sense. A noun is made plural by adding an s. So house becomes houses, yet mouse becomes mice (at least when you are talking about the animal).

Language is always evolving, which is why Shakespearean English sounds so strange to us, even though in Shakespeare's own time it was quite ordinary English. Imagine if language "rules" from that period of history were still enforced today. (William Shakespeare didn't even spell his own name the way we spell it today.) What seems like a rule is simply a custom that has come to be observed by the majority of people in a particular area. Language customs change with time just as other kinds of customs do.

Happy birthday, bozo

T-shirt — the word, not the shirt itself — is now a century old. That’s one of the curiosities to be found in Sol Steinmetz’s book There’s a Word for It. New English words enter the language each year, and Steinmetz attempts to list words according to the first year they appeared in print. (Words, of course, may have been spoken long before they were printed in a surviving document, but there is no way to know when a word was first spoken.)

Each year I try to celebrate those words that, according to Steinmetz, have reached the century mark. I always find this interesting, and often surprising. Some words turn out to be much older — or younger — than you might think.

Adventurist is one word that sounds a century old. Now it seems dated. Today we would probably say adventurer instead. Palooka is another word that sounds like something from the 1920s. The same with ritzy.

Yet words like homophobia and craftsperson suggest a more recent, politically correct time. And then there’s jihadi, a word you might have sworn originated within the past 30 or 40 years. 

Other words from 1920 include backsplash, bongo, bozo, columnist, daiquiri, deflationary, leotard, martial art, miscue, mock-up, nonviolence, off-the-rack, paranormal, periodontist, proton, rabbit-punch, tempura, upgrade, wimp, wow and yippee.

Back to Kellerman

I was one of the original Faye Kellerman fans, starting with her first novels, The Ritual Bath and Sacred and Profane, and continuing through a half dozen or more Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus adventures. Then somehow I strayed away, pursuing other mystery series. It has been a pleasure returning to Kellerman with her 2007 novel, The Burnt House.

The crash of a commuter plane into an apartment building kills everyone aboard and several residents and triggers not one but two murder investigations. That the two murders are somehow related seems like a stretch, but otherwise this is a first-rate police procedural.

The airline can't seem to decide whether a flight attendant named Roseanne Dresden was aboard the doomed flight or not. She was not assigned to the flight and did not have a ticket, but she may have gotten aboard anyway. Her husband, Ivan, says she was aboard and wants to collect her insurance money. Her father, however, insists she was not aboard and that Ivan killed her, using the crash as a cover.

One unidentified body is found at the crash scene, but it is not Roseanne's. Rather it is that of a young woman who was apparently murdered in the 1970s.

Lieutenant Peter  Decker and his team have their hands full with one murder and one missing person to deal with, and these two parallel investigations are absorbing to follow. There is little for Rina to do this time, other than to be a sweet Jewish wife and mother. Decker works such long hours that he doesn't even get home much. Rina does come through at the end, however, to resolve one last remaining problem.

All in all, The Burnt House is a fine murder mystery, leaving me eager to read some of the other unread Kellerman novels that have been piling up.

Ursula Le Guin's confession

Jealousy sticks its nasty yellow-green snout mostly into my life as a writer. I'm jealous of other writers who soar to success on wings of praise, I'm contemptuously angry at them, at the people who praise them — if I don't like their writing.

Ursula Le Guin, No Time to Spare

That one writer should be jealous of another writer's success is no surprise. Aren't most people jealous of those who achieve what they themselves yearn to achieve — like, for example, the fellow actor who wins the Oscar, the teammate who hits the game-winning homer, the prettier girl who goes to the prom with the captain of the football team?

But two things do surprise me about what Ursula Le Guin writes in an essay called "About Anger," published in her book No Time to Spare. One is that she admits it. Most of us just put on a brave face and say something magnanimous in public, whatever our true feelings. Then we nurse our wounds in private or with those closest to us.

Le Guin tells us how she really feels. "I snarl at what I see as the unending overestimation of James Joyce," she writes. "The enshrinement of Philip Roth infuriates me." (I happen to agree with her on both of these points, though without the anger.)

The other things that surprises me is her final phrase: "... if I don't like their writing." Her jealousy, in other words, applies only to those writers she considers overrated and undeserving of their sales, their awards, their respect in the literary world. "I can read endless appreciations of Virginia Woolf," she says. "A good article about Jose Saramago makes my day."

Thus what she terms jealousy actually seems less like jealousy than critical discernment. Aren't we all a bit disgruntled when a trashy novel reaches the top of the best-seller list while a novel we love and consider much better doesn't even make the top 50? Don't we hate it when a movie that bored us wins an Oscar, while the makers of our favorite film must pretend it was an honor just to be nominated?

So Ursula Le Guin makes a confession here, but it seems to me that her sin may be something less than the jealousy she confesses.

A mystery that rings true

Published in 1992, Wednesday's Child came relatively early in Peter Robinson's terrific series of Inspector Banks novels, a series still going strong.

As usual Banks and his team of investigators have two major crimes — perhaps related, perhaps not — to deal with at the same time. (How the English village of Eastvale can have so many major crimes is a mystery itself, on a par with the many murders that occur in Jane Marple's quaint village of St. Mary Mead.) A young couple pose as social workers and take away a woman's seven-year-old daughter, Gemma, supposedly because of suspected child abuse. Then the body of a man knifed to death is found.

At this point early in the series, Alan Banks is still just the No. 2 man among Eastvale investigators. In charge, though nearing retirement, is Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe, who for personal reasons decides to take charge of the kidnapping case, leaving the murder to Banks. Readers follow both investigations step by step, waiting to see if the two paths connect.

Except for the abundance of evil in Eastvale, these books suggest realism throughout: believable characters, believable crimes, believable detective work and finally a believable outcome. Unusual for the series, Wednesday's Child includes both a chase and a shootout, yet even these seem real.

This novel will satisfy all those Robinson fans who, like me, get to it late.

Misunderstood

All that darkness was in the service of eternal brightness. All that violence was in the service of peace and serenity.

Jonathan Rogers, The Terrible Speed of Mercy

Few 20th century writers, or at least those writers taken seriously by literary scholars and taught in college classrooms, have been as committed to conveying the Christian understanding of grace and redemption as Flannery O'Connor. Yet her stories are so dark, so violent, so grotesque that few readers readily grasp what they are really about.

O'Connor, a devout Catholic who tried to attend Mass every day, made no secret about what her goals were in her fiction, yet most of those who read her novels and short stories see something else in them. She hated reading reviews of her books because reviewers so rarely understood them.

Brad Gooch wrote an excellent biography in 2009, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor, so perhaps another biography wasn't necessary so soon after, yet the much shorter The Terrible Speed of Mercy: A Spiritual Biography of Flannery O'Connor by Jonathan Rogers (2012) serves a different end. Rogers, while giving a good summary of her life and making good use of Gooch's book in the process, has another goal in mind. He seeks to discover what made O'Connor tick, what she believed and how those beliefs shaped her fiction.

"My audience are the people who think God is dead. At least these are the people I am conscious of writing for," O'Conner once wrote in a letter. These, in fact, may have been the people who liked her stories best. Christians, especially those who were her neighbors in Milledgeville, Ga., either didn't read her books or didn't like them if they did. They were proud of her literary accomplishments but just wished she would write a different kind of fiction, something a bit nicer.

Rogers writes, "For O'Connor, the real horror was never violence or deformity, but damnation." Even her morally worst characters usually find sudden grace by the end of her stories, that "terrible speed of mercy" brought home.

O'Connor suffered from lupus for much of her short life. She was just 39 when she died. She left behind two novels and numerous short stories that will be read, and perhaps occasionally understood, for years to come.

The people we know best

A great part of the appeal of reading fiction is the discovery that the reader knows much more of the inner life of the characters in the book than of his or her own family members or friends.

Paul Theroux, Figures in a Landscape

Paul Theroux

This statement by Paul Theroux may seem startling at first. Can it possibly be true that I know Huckleberry Finn or Scout Finch better than I know my own child? How can I possibly know more about the people in that mystery I'm reading than I know about my best friends? They aren't even real people, but just fictional characters.

Yet of course it is true. The key is that phrase Theroux uses, "inner life," referring to thoughts, feelings and secrets. In the real world, the only inner life we can know anything about is our own. There are, of course, those people who seem always ready to share their thoughts, feelings and secrets with us, whether we are interested in them or not. Once they do, however, these revelations cease to be "inner life," and there will always be some thoughts, feelings and secrets that remain unrevealed.

Reading fiction is like reading minds. The reader quickly learns things about fictional characters that could never be known about a friend or relative. In real life we often don't understand why people do the things they do. In fiction we do because authors tell us. This insight does not transfer from page to screen, a big reason why movies are rarely as good as the books from which they were adapted. Showing an actor's face is about all a director can do to reveal what is going on in a character's mind, which is about all we have in the case of the people in our own lives. In real life we read faces, voices, actions and words and from this must deduce what a person is actually thinking. An author writing in third person can simply tell us.

Consider these opening lines from novels:

"Her first name was India — she was never able to get used to it." — Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell Jr.

"Hale knew they meant to murder him before he had been in Brighton three hours." — Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

"Harmony is driving home, eastward out of Las Vegas, her spirits high, her head a clutter of memories." — The Desert Rose by Larry McMurtry

"As Benedict Stone huffed his way to work, the sweet smell of the cherry scones in Bake My Day made him forget for a moment that his wife, Estelle, had packed her purple suitcase and moved out of their home." — Rise & Shine, Benedict Stone by Phaedra Patrick

In each case the words sound like fiction, not fact, and the giveaway is the inner life the lines reveal. Maybe someone writes lines like these in a biography, but not likely. The novelists take us inside a character's mind. India has never gotten used to her name. Hale knows someone wants to murder him. Harmony is happily pondering a clutter of memories. Benedict Stone momentarily forgets that his wife has left him. Were these real people, our friends perhaps or even members of our own family, we might never know these things about them.

All this makes reading pleasurable, even if those fictional people in our books can never really replace the real people in our lives.

A world without blue

Was Homer colorblind? With that question linguist Guy Deutscher begins his fascinating 2010 book Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages.

That question perplexed scientists for many years, In the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer describes the sea as "wine-looking," the same description he assigns to oxen. And he describes honey as green. But it wasn't just Homer. The Old Testament, in the original Hebrew, describes gold as being green. So was everyone colorblind back then?

The explanation, says Deutscher, is not that Homer and other ancient writers were colorblind but that they simply did not have words for all the colors. Even now languages used by people in isolated parts of the world often do not have words for blue and yellow. Every language has a word for red, he writes. Blood is red. Red dye is relatively easy to make. Red is an important color to everyone. Green, too, is an important color because so much of the natural world is green. The sky is blue, but not much else. Nobody in those cultures had blue eyes. And just as English-speaking people may describe both navy blue and baby blue as blue, so some languages have used the word green to cover a broad range of the color spectrum, including what we would call yellow or gold.

Although still a controversial idea, the author argues in the second half of his book that our language can affect how we think. Those who speak languages, such as Spanish and Italian, that assign a gender to each word — something English did until the 11th century — tend to give masculine or feminine characteristics to inanimate objects, studies suggest.

Deutscher, who is originally from Australia, discusses one nearly extinct Aborigine language, one of several found in the world, that has no words for left or right. Instead they use compass directions to reference everything, such as their north hand (which becomes their south hand when they turn around) or the jug on the east side of the table. Even when taken to a strange place by a roundabout way, they somehow know instantly in which direction everything is. And they can remember these directions when they share memories later. Yet when these people learn English, they have no trouble learning left and right. In their own language, however, they always think in terms of directions.

The research Deutscher discusses may not be conclusive, but it is suggestive. The language we speak may influence how we view the world. If we had no word for blue, what color would a clear sky be?

Behind a modern movie classic

The story of the film The Shawshank Redemption may not be as dramatic as the story in the film, but it comes close. Mark Dawidsiak tells about it in The Shawshank Redemption Revealed: How One Story Keeps Hope Alive (2019).

It was director Frank Darabont's first movie. With the exception of Rob Reiner's Stand by Me, adaptations of Stephen King stories had not been well received by either audiences or critics. The actors wanted for the lead roles were not available. The movie, when it was released in 1994, was a box office disappointment and was left in the dust by Forrest Gump when the awards were handed out. Yet today, more than 25 years after its release, movie fans, many of whom confess to watching it several times a year, rank it among the very best of all time, well above Forrest Gump.

The film became a success when it was released on home video and when television networks found that their ratings shot up whenever they showed it. 

Meanwhile Mansfield, Ohio, a city of about 50,000 people midway between Cleveland and Columbus, suddenly became a popular destination for tourists from around the world because that is where most of The Shawshank Redemption was filmed. The former Ohio State Reformatory, completed in 1900 and closed in 1990, had been scheduled for demolition, but that was postponed so Darabont could make his movie there. It had previously been used as a set for Harry and Walter Go to New York and Tango and Cash, but now that all prisoners had been moved to a new prison next to OSR, the entire property was available to the director. Afterward the striking old prison, sometimes called Dracula's Castle, attracted so many visitors that it was saved from demolition.

So popular has the movie become over the years that Dawidsiak had no trouble finding people eager to talk about it, including its usually reticent star Tim Robbins. He also talked with the other major star, Morgan Freeman, Darabont, Stephen King, other members of the cast and crew and many Ohio people who worked as extras or were otherwise involved in making the movie. He also spoke with many of those who have traveled many miles, in some cases halfway around the world, to sit on the bench where Brooks (James Whitmore) sat to feed pigeons and to walk down the country road where Red (Freeman) walked.

In fact, Dawidziak does a marvelous job of covering just about every aspect of the film. His book is filled with photographs, including stills from the movie and shots taken by Becky Dawidziak, his daughter.

As a personal note, I will mention that Mansfield is where I worked as a journalist for more than 40 years. As a rookie reporter I was given a sobering tour of OSR while it was a high-security prison. One of my colleagues, reporter Lou Whitmire, plays a newspaper reporter in the film. (This wasn't the only case of typecasting. Former OSR guards also appeared as Shawshank guards.) My son, then a college student, worked that summer in a prison uniform, an extra in the background of several scenes.

Truth in ambiguity

Ambiguity is not necessarily a bad thing.

I wrote a few days ago about the need for clarity in our speech and writing (See Misunderstandings, Oct. 28). Yet often people who are quite capable of clarity deliberately choose ambiguity. It is quite possible to tell a truth that amounts to a lie, something politicians, cheating spouses and teenagers become quite skilled at. Ambiguous statements are a useful tool toward this end.

Robert Frost

Yet there can also be truth in ambiguity. It is this truth that is the goal of fine literature. Our best poets and novelists are rarely crystal clear about what their works mean. What was Robert Frost getting at when he wrote those last lines in "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"? "The woods are lovely, dark and deep,/But I have promises to keep,/And miles to go before I sleep,/And miles to go before I sleep." Is this simply a description of an event, or is there something deeper going on? Frost leaves it ambiguous and lets each reader decide what it means. Readers can — and have — interpreted these lines very differently. Or the lines can be appreciated just for the beauty of the language, never mind what they mean.

So it goes with most works of literature, prose as well as poetry. Often the more ambiguity, the more respected the novel or poem. Unfortunately, this allows some writers to write works that suggest great depth but which are actually nonsense.

Ambiguity is also one of the strengths of the United States Constitution. Had it been more specific, it would have had to be much longer. It might also have become obsolete years ago. Its ambiguity allows for changing interpretations as times change. That's why the Supreme Court exists — to tell us, for example, what the right of free expression guarenteed by the First Amendment mean in the age of the Internet and Twitter and what the right to bear arms means in the age of semi-automatic weapons.

And then there is Scripture. The appeal for many people of Eugene Peterson's The Message and other modern translations and paraphrases of the Bible is that they clarify what the most confusing passages actually mean. But clarifying Scripture can actually be misleading because one meaning is chosen over other possible meanings. Much of Scripture, such as the teachings and parables of Jesus, seems to be deliberately ambiguous, not to obscure meaning but to allow a range of interpretation by different people at different times in different places. Every sermon preached on the prodigal son is not the same sermon, and that seems like a strength, not a weakness.

Dickens and grace

My dear children, I am very anxious that you should know something about the History of Jesus Christ. For everybody ought to know about Him. No one ever lived, who was so good, so kind, so gentle, and so sorry for all people who did wrong, or were in anyway ill or miserable, as he was.

Charles Dickens, The Life of Our Lord

Charles Dickens wrote The Life of Our Lord not for general circulation but for the sake of his own children. He was more subtle in his novels and stories, yet the same gospel message can be found there, as well. Sin, grace, compassion for the sick, poor and needy — all can be found in abundance in his work.

To prove that point, Gina Dalfonzo, editor of Dickensblog, has assembled a number of excerpts from his work for a new book called The Gospel in Dickens. It is one in a series of similar books from Plough Publishing House highlighting the Christian message found in the work of such writers as Dorothy L. Sayers, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.

Dickens novels are often critical of Christians, something Dalfonzo describes in her introduction as "policing his own side." Dickens had no problem with Christianity, just with those hypocrites whose own actions do not conform with their supposed beliefs. And Dickens counted himself among those hypocrites. His own actions toward his wife and family hardly matched the Christian ideal, and he knew it. At the core of the Christian faith, however, is not so much righteous living as grace for flawed living. This idea is perhaps most famously illustrated by Dickens in A Christmas Carol, when miserly Scrooge discovers both grace and joy. If God can forgive Scrooge, then why not Scrooge's creator?

Dalfonzo mines for gospel gold in the writer's best-known books, such as Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, as well as in some lesser-known stories, such as The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain. She divides these excerpts into three categories: Sin and Its Victims, Repentance and Grace and The Righteous Life. Out of context, these excerpts do carry the same impact they have when reading the novels themselves, although the editor does a good job of explaining the situation in each case. In all there are 36 excerpts from Dickens's fiction, as well as two letters the author wrote.

In all the book makes a good case that Dickens, whatever his own sins, had the gospel of Christ on his mind while writing his enduring stories.

Misunderstandings

 That's the goal of using language — to communicate ideas and desires in the clearest way possible.

Ross and Kathryn Petras, That Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means

That seems obvious, doesn't it? When we speak or when we write, we want to be understood. Yet it is amazing how often we misunderstand others and others misunderstand us. We seem to spend a good part of our lives clearing up misunderstandings or living with the consequences of those misunderstandings. How many people haven't spoken to each other for years because once one misunderstood another?

The presidential debate last week provided a number of examples of misunderstandings, not all of which were deliberate. When President Trump spoke of coyotes bringing children across the border from Mexico, he was using a fairly common slang term for human smugglers, yet many people, including some in the media, pictured animals dragging children across the border.

Was Joe Biden, the former vice president, just using imprecise language when he spoke on other occasions of ending fracking or on Thursday night of phasing out the oil industry? In both cases there have been attempts to clarify what he actually meant.

There are many reasons why language can be misunderstood. Here are just a few:

1. We tend to hear (or read) what we want to hear (or read). This is especially true in the political arena where everyone wants to interpret the other side's language in the most negative way possible, yet all of us are guilty of this from time to time.

2. Instead of simple, easily understood words, some of us tend to favor more pretentious ones, especially in our writing. Not everyone understands pretentious words.

3. One frequent consequence of the above is that we choose words that, as Ross and Kathryn Petras say in their book, don't mean what we think they mean. Thus we might say assure when we mean ensure or ensure when we mean insure or insure when we mean assure.

4. We are ambiguous when we should be specific. If on Wednesday you tell a friend, "I'll see you next Friday," should that friend expect you in two days or on Friday of next week? Just because something is clear to you, doesn't mean it is equally clear to the other person. I once showed up at a restaurant a week early for dinner with my sisters because of this very kind of misunderstanding.

5. Sometimes we simply mishear or misread what someone says. Even plain talk can be misunderstood by someone. Sometimes we don't give the spoken or written word our full attention.

6. Some comments made in jest are taken seriously, while other comments made in earnest can be taken as jokes.

7. Some statements are deliberately ambiguous. But this is a topic for another day.

The prince on the case

British mystery writer Peter Lovesey is best known for his long Peter Diamond series of novels and, to a lesser extent, his initial series of mysteries featuring Sergeant Cribb. In between, however, he wrote a brief but delightful series of Victorian mysteries with Albert (or just Bertie) the Prince of Wales as his protagonist.

The first of the three books, Bertie and the Tinman (1987), explains in Bertie's words that he has a talent for solving mysteries but because of his royal position he cannot expose himself to the publicity. His mother, Queen Victoria, would certainly not approve. Thus his account of his first case will be sealed away for 100 years, or until 1987.

Because no one will read it until long after his death, not to mention his mother's death, he feels free to speak freely about his exploits, not just those about solving crimes but also those about romancing women other than his wife.

The death that turns a prince into a detective is that of his favorite jockey, Fred Archer, nicknamed the Tinman. Archer has committed suicide, and it is in fact a suicide. Still the official explanation seems suspicious to Bertie. There must be more to the story than just temporary madness. His investigation leads to an actual murder and a serious threat to his own life. How he solves the case, while keeping his name out of the papers and preventing his mother, not to mention his wife, learning his secrets, make for an enjoyable  reading experience. The other two books in the series — Bertie and the Seven Bodies and Bertie and the Crime of Passion — are no less entertaining.

Finding family

Our  magnificent lake is practically overhead. What curious geography. A lake in the sky.

Mary Hogan, The Woman in the Photo

In The Woman in the Photo (2016), Mary Hogan weaves three stories into one. These three threads include Lee, a contemporary California woman who has long known she was adopted as a baby but knows nothing about her birth parents. On her 18th birthday she is given a glimpse at an old photograph that shows two women, one of whom may be her ancestor. This starts her on a quest to discover what she can about the women in that photo.

Another thread, and for much of the novel the main thread, is Elizabeth Haberlin, a spoiled rich girl from Pittsburgh who is the daughter of the personal physician to that city's wealthiest families. In 1889 she is about the same age as Lee is now and about to make her debut, when she is expected to have her pick of some of the wealthiest young men in western Pennsylvania. And there is even a handsome young Englishman who is charmed by her.

The third woman — the third thread — is none other than Clara Barton, founder of the Red Cross.

What brings these three together in one story is one of the great American tragedies, the Johnstown Flood, which tore so many families apart. Elizabeth is one of the privileged few who spends summers at the exclusive South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club in the mountains above Johnstown, Pa. For their pleasure, a mountain stream has been dammed to create an artificial lake just outside their mansion-like cottages. When heavy rains cause that dam to give way, a tidal wave of water pours over Johnstown, killing more than 2,200 people.

The flood brings Clara Barton to Johnstown. And when Lee finally identifies her in that photo, she is on her way to identifying that other woman and, in time, find a family she didn't know she had, right there in Johnstown. Meanwhile two of the three women find true love, poor Clara remaining a spinster. How all this happens makes a good story, even if it sometimes seems a little too neat and Hogan's language at times inflated. Yet this latter fault might be excused by the fact that part of the story has a 19th century narrator, a time when inflated language was customary.

Mystery lessons

In the United States, most of us know very little about Iceland, either about its history or its culture. It is a mystery few of us even care to solve. Yet Icelandic novelist Arnaldur Indridason, whose books are widely read in the U.S., helps solve this mystery with his mysteries.

His novels are set in Iceland, but at various points in the 20th century, thus giving readers a feel for what was going on in that island nation at the time. In The Shadow Killer (2018), it is the middle of World War II when the body of a man is found in another man's residence with a swastika carved in the forehead. A cyanide pill is found nearby, suggesting that either the dead man or Felix, the man in whose home the body is found, might have been a Nazi spy. But where is Felix? And is he the killer?

Indridason gives us not one but two investigators, each pursuing a different line of inquiry. One is Flovent, a relatively new man in Reykjavik's Criminal Investigation Department. The other man is Thorson, a man with Icelandic family ties, who works for the U.S. Military Police, the Americans now having a number of troops stationed in Iceland. The two men work independently, while meeting occasionally to compare notes.

While one man pursues the espionage angle — there are rumors that Winston Churchill might be coming to Iceland, suggesting the murder might somehow be connected — while the other investigates whether the murder might be a domestic crime, perhaps involving an attractive woman, Vera, with a habit of pitting one boyfriend against another.

I didn't find The Shadow Killer as compelling as most Indridason mysteries I've read. The pace seems a bit slow. Still it is a worthy read, as well as another fine lesson in Icelandic history and culture.

Inventing childhood

Writing about Little Women in his book Twenty-Five Books That Shaped America, Thomas C. Foster comments about "a thirty-five year period that invented childhood." During this period in literary history, Lewis Carroll published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women (1868), Mark Twain produced The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and L. Frank Baum gave us The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900).

Each of these books is now regarded as a classic in children's literature, although not all of them were intended for children when they were written. Twain thought he was writing Tom Sawyer for adult readers, for example. It was supposed to be a nostalgic reminder of the days of youth.

Foster's point, however, is that these books gave readers, both adults and children, a different way of thinking about childhood. Earlier Charles Dickens had given readers greater sympathy for children in such novels as Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, showing how they were so often put to work at a young age or neglected in orphanages or mistreated in schools. These later novels, building on Dickens, elevated "childhood to a state of grace, touched by safety, adventure, comfort, love, play, and even magic, qualities about which a great many children of that era dared not even dream," Foster writes.

Today it seems difficult for most of us to conceive of a time when children were widely regarded as just miniature adults, capable of making their own way in the world. Once children routinely worked in factories and brothels, were sent to sea or enlisted to beat drums on battlefields. In some places such things may be still be happening, but these novels helped change society in those parts of the world where they have been read.

That old Russo magic

Suddenly it was as if his dead parent, his living one, his old profession and his boyhood self were all clamoring for attention.

Richard Russo, That Old Cape Magic

Never mind not being able to go home again, there are so many of us who are unable to ever leave home in the first place. Or perhaps more accurately, our childhood home, our parents, our youthful experiences (especially the more traumatic ones) never leave us.

Such is the case with 57-year-old Griffin, the central character in Richard Russo's 2009 novel That Old Cape Magic. His life is in a state of upheaval. He is separated from his wife, his daughter is getting married and he has yet to decide what he really wants to be when he grows up. Does he prefer to be a Hollywood screenwriter, less secure but more exciting, or a college professor like his parents?

Even after death, his parents seem to want to dominate his life. For a long time he carries his father's ashes in the trunk of his car, then his mother dies and her ashes join them. Both wanted their ashes spread on Cape Cod, though in separate locations, but Griffin can never seem to find the right spots for them. Perhaps, despite spending his entire adult life trying to stay away from them, he doesn't really want to part with them.

His snobbish parents both taught at a college in Indiana, but each summer they would take their son to Cape Cod, where they could pretend to possess a higher social status than they ever actually achieved. His mother in particular thought they deserved to be professors at some Ivy League school, or almost any college on the East Coast. Being stuck in Indiana seemed shameful to her. But at least they could vacation on Cape Cod and enjoy what they called "That Old Cape Magic."

Does the Cape have any magic left for Griffin? Can he leave his parents behind, both literally and figuratively, and confront his current problems as a grownup?

Russo, as usual, uses wit to address serious human issues, making a reader laugh between the tears, or cry between the laughs, whichever the case. There's a wedding rehearsal dinner that turns into a disaster worthy of a Laurel and Hardy movie. His various characters are wonderfully drawn, so real you can almost see them. This is a novel that itself contains a bit of magic.