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.