2022 superlatives

For a few years now, as the calendar nears its end, I have applied certain superlatives suggested by J. Peder Zane in his book Remarkable Reads to books I read during the year. Let's try it again.

Most Enchanting Book: I wish I had a three-sided coin to help me decide among Cuyahoga by Pete Beatty, Miss Benson's Beetle by Rachel Joyce and A Damsel in Distress by P.G. Wodehouse. Put a gun to my head, I'd have to go with Miss Benson.

Most Important Book: There are some fine biographies of writer Shirley Jackson, but to really understand her you need to read The Letters of Shirley Jackson. This collection is that important.

Most Daunting Book: Not only is Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now a long book — full of facts and figures, graphs and diagrams — but he's a smart guy and his text is often challenging. It's worth the challenge, however.

Wisest Book: Peter Roy Clark summarizes the wisdom of numerous writing guides into one book, Murder Your Darlings. Writers, especially beginning writers, would be wise to read it.

Most Familiar Book: It had been decades since I last read J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories. Still, it was like going home again.

Most Incomprehensible Book: I don't know if What Are We Doing Here? by Marilynne Robinson counts since I never finished it, it being so incomprehensible. Time after time in these collected essays and speeches she says something so wise and wonderful that I want to underline it, but then she loses me again on the very next line. Her mind is too quick for me.

Most Beautiful Book: Thrity Umrigor is a fine writer, at her best in The Space Between Us. The story, set in India, tells of a longtime servant of an upper-middleclass woman who comes to realize that however close their relationship, the distance between them remains impossible to cross.

Most Fearless Book: It must take a certain amount of courage to argue that trees communicate with each other and nurture their young. Yet Peter Wohlleben does it again in The Secret Network of Nature.

Most Surprising Book: I didn't know what I was getting myself into when I opened The Green Man by Kingsley Amis, never having read one of his novels before. And even after I finished it, in a rush, I wasn't certain what I had read.

Most Unpleasant Book: I don't like reading about prison camps, torture and the like. Who does? Yet for all the unpleasantness, Elizabeth Kostova's Shadow Lands is one fine novel

Most Luminous Book: After the first chapter I didn't care much for Fredrik Backman's My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry, but by the time I finished I was in love with it. Luminous? Almost every sentence shines.

Game for readers (2022 edition)

Each year at this time I play a game — you are welcome to join me — where I attempt to answer a dozen questions, truthfully or not, using only the titles of books read during the year. Here comes the 2022 version. Let's see what happens.

Yep, that's me

Describe yourself: Word Nerd (or For the Love of Books)

How do you feel: Why Me?

Describe where you currently live: A Far Off Place 

If you could go anywhere, where would you go: Easy Street

Your favorite form of transportation: The Last Train to London

Your best friend is: An Unwilling Accomplice

You and your friends are: A Grand Success

What's the weather like where you are: In the Dark Places (It is December, after all.)

What is the best advice you could give: We're Wrong About Nearly Everything

Thought for the day: Everyone Brave Is Forgiven 

How would you like to die: Books to Die For

Your soul's present condition: Enlightenment Now. (It's better than The Darkness Knows, isn't it?)

Well, that was fun. Try it yourself.

Caged

Caging Skies, a 2019 novel by Christine Leunens, loses its juice long before reaching its conclusion, but until that happens it proves to be an original and totally absorbing story.

Young Johannes Metzler is an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth in Vienna as World War II breaks out. Allied bombing leaves him crippled, but his allegiance to Hitler remains unfazed. So it shakes his world when he discovers that his parents have been hiding Elsa, a Jewish girl, in a secret room. His first impulse is to kill her, as he believes a true Nazi would do, but then he falls in love with her.

Years pass. Both of his parents are killed as traitors, yet no one discovers Elsa's hiding place. When the war ends, Johannes fears Elsa will leave him, so he convinces her that Germany won and that her life remains in danger. The boy finds it difficult to get a job because of his injuries, so for them to survive he must sell off all the possessions in the large house and finally the house itself. He ships Elsa in a box to a small apartment.

Leunens portrays neither of these young people as sympathetic characters. By the end they seem to deserve each other, and eventually Johannes realizes that he is the one who is the prisoner.

I was shocked to discover that Caging Skies was the inspiration for the film Jojo Rabbit, a comedy in which Johannes (Jojo) stays the same age throughout the entire war and Elsa remains beautiful and perfectly groomed despite being imprisoned in a small room for years. Hitler himself keeps showing up as an imaginary comic character. I think I might have actually enjoyed the oddball movie if I weren't, at the time I watched it, still reading the somber, depressing novel on which it was based.

Two kinds of readers 2

C.S. Lewis

 In his slender 1961 book An Experiment in Criticism, C.S. Lewis lists four ways in which serious readers can be distinguished from casual readers. These are my terms. Lewis himself calls them the few and the many. The few, as I discussed a few days ago, often reread favorite books. The many rarely do. 

This time let's consider a second distinguishing mark: their attitude toward reading.

The majority of readers, Lewis says, view reading as a last resort. It's something they do when there is nothing better to do. "They abandon it with alacrity as soon as any alternative pastime turns up," Lewis writes. "It is kept for railway journeys, illnesses, odd moments of enforced solitude, or for the process called 'reading oneself to sleep.'"

Yet many such people, it seems to me, don't even read much in these situations. They may take a book to the beach or a summer cabin but read just a chapter or two during the entire week. On a long flight they would rather watch a movie or talk to a stranger in the next seat than open a book. In a waiting room, they would rather just wait.

Contrast that attitude with that of the few, those of us who deliberately set apart a portion of each day for reading. For some this may be bedtime, though as with Lewis this makes little sense to me. I go to bed to sleep, not to read. I set aside most of the afternoon for reading. I maintain a stack of four books, two fiction and two nonfiction. I usually read a portion from each book each afternoon.

Usually some books are more interesting than others, but my ritual keeps me disciplined. I always feel fulfilled when dinnertime comes around and I have read my quota of pages. I have accomplished something, even if I haven't actually finished reading anything.

"When they are denied such attentive and undisturbed reading even for a few days they feel impoverished," Lewis writes. How right he is. 

Illustrated wonders

Books about bools have long been a genre of their own, but recently there seems to be developing a new sub-genre — art books about books.

I recently commented here about  So You Think You're a Bookworm? and A Library of Misremembered Books, both dominated by their artwork. Several months ago I reviewed Bibliophile, in which Jane Mount presents drawings of book covers, bookstores and even bookstore cats. Today I will mention two others.

I Will Judge You By Your Bookshelf by Grant Snider is a wonder, though I don't know quite how to describe it. Snider is a writer and a comic artist who loves books, so he combines those interests here in a series of creative comic strips with titles like "Some potential bookmarks" (these include balloons and a feather, even a bonsai tree) and "Writing a poem is like riding a bicycle" ("Impressive at a young age ... but considered eccentric among adults.")

All this is delightful and something you will probably want to reread before you loan it to your best friends.

Then there's The Call Me Ishmael Phone Book by Stephanie Kent and Logan Smalley, which incredibly enough is an actual phone book. But it's a phone book unlike any you've ever seen before and something only a bibliophile could love.

The clever idea is this: You can dial 774-325-0503 and either record your comments about what a certain book means to you or listen to other people's recorded comments about their own favorite books. The four-digit numbers in the phone book are next to book titles. Dial 3778, for example, to hear what someone thinks of Moby-Dick, the source of the "Call me Ishmael" line. Many books are listed multiple times.

So where does the art come in? Well, like the Yellow Pages, this book has ads on virtually every page, illustrated "ads" that serve as literary puzzles. You can probably guess which books are referred to by Ahab's Whale Tours and Sewell's Stables. Dial the numbers on the ads to see if you're right. In addition, the authors list bookstores in every state in the union and provide numbers for stories about many of these stores.

You thought interactive books were for kids? Think again. Here's a book that will provide any book lover of any age with hours of fun.

Discovered secrets

Lauren Belfer's novels — and there aren't very many of them — always entertain and enlighten, and her latest, Ashton Hall (2022), is no exception.

Although it’s her only novel to date set entirely in the present, Belfer still manages to turn it into a historical novel. Hannah Larson and her nine-year-old son Nicky visit her beloved Uncle Christopher, dying of cancer, in a large manor house near Cambridge. Two difficult family problems trouble her, and she hopes an extended stay in England will help her find answers.

One problem is Nicky, a sweet and brilliant child ordinarily, but when frustrated he becomes uncontrollably violent and swears a blue streak. The other problem is her husband Kevin, who she recently discovered is bisexual and has had a long relationship with a man she thought was just his best friend. She loves Kevin, but can she stay with a man who has deceived her since the day they met?

Not long after their arrival at Ashton Hall, Nicky discovers a centuries-old skeleton of a woman in a remote, never-visited part of the house. Soon Hannah becomes deeply involved in probing the story of this woman, who turns out to be Isabella Gresham, born in 1552. Who was she? Why was she abandoned in this room?  Did she die of the plague, starvation or what?

Clues are found in financial records, a register of the books family members borrowed from the manor house library and drawings Isabella made during her brief life. Little by little Isabella is revealed. And little by little Hannah makes decisions about what to do with her own life.

Two kinds of readers

Early in An Experiment in Criticism (1961), C.S. Lewis makes a distinction between two kinds of readers. He calls them the few and the many, as one group is much larger than the other. While it would be easy to accuse Lewis of elitism, he takes pains to point out that neither group is morally superior to the other. It's just a difference in how people view books. And some people, because of changing circumstances in their lives, may float from one group to the other.

Lewis suggests four ways to tell one group from the other. I propose to discuss these four ways in separate installments, spread out over the next few weeks.

First, he points out that most people never read the same book more than once, while others — the few — may read certain books numerous times. Rereading enhances the pleasure of a good book, the few would argue. Knowing the ending of, say, To Kill a Mockingbird or Great Expectations, doesn't make rereading it any less pleasurable, assuming you like the book.

My wife was in the former group. She would often ask me if she had already read a certain book, as if I could remember what books she had read. Often she would refrain from reading a certain book because she feared she may have read it at some point in the past. I told her that if she couldn't remember reading it, it made no difference whether she read it again. She didn't want to waste her time, however, with a book she may have already read. (And it probably could have been argued that if she had really loved the book, she would have remembered reading it.)

I am not entirely certain which group I belong to. As a book reviewer for most of my life and as someone who yearns to read a vast assortment of books, I mostly read books just once. Yet there are exceptions, and especially since retirement I have tried to return to books I enjoyed in the past.

I've read Moby-Dick twice. I even read Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror twice. Most of Thomas Hardy's major novels I have read at least twice. I don't consider Graham Greene's Travels with My Aunt to be his best novel or even my favorite, yet I've read it three times. And J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey I've read read four times. Numerous others I have returned to at least once.

Yet I've heard of other readers who read favorite books a dozen times or more, sometimes even once a year. I envy them. Oh to be able to reread certain books again and again. I guess my heart is with the few, even though in practice I am usually among the many.

The imagined woman

Every time you open your mouth you create something.

Frank Baker, Miss Hargreaves

Genesis tells us God created man by speaking a few words. What if man could, at least once, do the same thing? In a 1940 novel called Miss Hargreaves, republished a decade ago, Frank Baker imagines just that.

Young Norman Huntley, a cathedral organist, and his friend Henry are having a lark in Ireland when Henry insists they enter an old church, where a proud caretaker gladly gives them a tour. The pair have always enjoyed making up stories together, each contributing something outrageous to the tale. So when their guide mentions a revered former vicar named Archer, Norman invents an old woman named Constance Hargreaves whom he says he knows very well and who was once a dear friend of the late vicar. Henry adds details, and soon Miss Hargreaves is a poet who likes to travel with her harp and her own bathtub.

They no sooner return home than Norman finds his slightly addled father reading a book of poetry called Wayside Bundle by one Constance Hargreaves. Then a harp arrives at the family home with a message that Miss Hargreaves is on her way.

Miss Hargreaves turns out to be everything Norman imagined. She and his father get along famously, but Norman is terrified. Where did she come from? How is it possible that she actually exists? How can he get rid of her?

Norman finds himself in a love-hate relationship with this 83-year-old woman — loving his creation while hating the way she has taken over his life. He discovers he can still fill in the blanks of her history. When someone asks if she has ever been to Scandinavia she can't remember until Norman nods. Suddenly she recalls the details of her visit there. When he unwisely refers to her as Lady Hargreaves, she quickly turns pompous and insists on the title wherever she goes.

Baker sprinkles poems from Wayside Bundle throughout the novel. Most of them are delightfully atrocious, but a few lines from one poem prove revealing.

I sometimes feel that I am but a thought,/A piece of thistledown, a thing of naught;/Rocked in the cradle of a craftsman's story/And destined not for high Angelic glory.

As real as she seems to everyone around her, Miss Hargreaves senses that she is but a figment of someone's imagination. For her sake, as well as his own, Norman must find a way to imagine her out of existence.

Miss Hargreaves is an amusing and imaginative novel that provokes thought while it entertains. One thought I had is that scientists who hold the multiple-universe theory seem to believe that each of us create not just people but entire universes by the choices we make and the words we speak.

That sounds like another good reason to be careful what we say.                  

It's about this big whale

In a Barnes & Noble store recently I was approached by an employee who asked if she could help me. This is a rare occurrence at Barnes & Noble, as the few employees there are usually busy doing something else. Not wanting to waste an opportunity, I said I was looking for an author whose name began with the letter V.

Although I couldn't remember his name, after a false start (Butterflies Salamander) I recalled that the novel I had read was Hummingbird Salamander. By the time she had returned from checking her computer, I had moved from the general fiction section to the science fiction area, where I discovered several other novels by Jeff VanderMeer. (A few days later at another Barnes & Noble, I found VanderMeer shelved with general fiction rather than science fiction. So I'm not the only one who can't decide where he belongs.)

Those who work in bookstores and libraries probably have fun at their after-hours gatherings telling stories about patrons with queries like mine: something by an author whose name begins with the letter V. If so, they should particularly enjoy a tiny book by Maria Luz called A Library of Misremembered Books (2021).

This is actually an art book, a collection of fanciful covers displaying titles of books people have asked for. For instance:

Cat Possibly Named Henry

Ice Was in the Title

It Was All a Dream

How to Kill a Mockingbird

Polar Bear Wearing Pants Possibly Named Victor or Vincent

Dentist Being Extorted

Because of the lack of vivid colors and the artist's practice of putting light lettering on light backgrounds, I often found her images difficult to appreciate. But what I could read I enjoyed.

If you want a copy of this book, just walk into any bookstore and ask for something like A Collection of Wrong Titles. I'm sure they'll be amused.

A case that isn't a case

When Precious Ramotswe attends a wedding and sees an old friend she thought was dead — or late, as the good people of Botswana prefer to say — she unsuspectingly begins a new case that, at least officially, isn't a case at all.

Alexander McCall Smith's 20th entry in his wonderful The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, To the Land of Long Lost Friends (2019), is hardly the best of the lot. Still it makes a fine read.

The old friend turns out to be very much alive, the victim of confusion because another woman with the same name had died. She confides to Mma Ramotswe that she is troubled because her grown daughter has ceased contact with her. She doesn't understand why, and it breaks her heart. Although not asked, let alone hired, to look into the matter, our favorite traditionally built detective nonetheless begins a puzzling investigation that involves a diamond factory, a charismatic preacher and a sparkling Mercedes Benz.

Subplots are fewer than usual this time out, the main one involving Charlie, the part-time mechanic and part-time assistant detective who finds himself, without even trying, engaged to the lovely daughter of one of the richest men in Botswana. And poor Charlie can't even afford to take Queenie-Queenie out to dinner.

Fans must read this book to catch up with all those charming characters, including Mma Makutsi and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, even if the story itself falls a wee bit short of the standard.

The corruption of language

Orwell argued famously that political corruption leads to language corruption, which leads to further political corruption.

Roy Peter Clark, Murder Your Darlings

When people in power stumble when trying to define what a woman is, when the U.S.-Mexico border is called secure while people flood across it by the millions and when an unarmed riot at the U.S. Capitol is termed an insurrection, it is clear that both the language and the political system in America are corrupt. Those most likely to use the term misinformation seem to be the ones most likely to spread it.

Roy Peter Clark in his 2020 book Murder Your Darlings points out that even the word propaganda has been corrupted, although not recently. The term once had a positive spin. It comes from the word propagate and was used by the Roman Catholic Church to describe what would later be called evangelism or "spreading the gospel."

S.I. Hayakawa

According to S.I. Hayakawa, it was the Nazis — talk about political corruption — who corrupted the word, and as Clark puts it, "we lost a name for good propaganda." Good propaganda? Nowadays that sounds like a contradiction in terms. Yet broadly interpreted, any language used to convince anybody of anything is propaganda. This includes public relations campaigns, commercial advertising and even a teenager trying to borrow a parent's car. This blog, by that loose standard, is propaganda whenever I suggest that certain books are worth reading and others not so much.

All propaganda uses the language and in some cases exaggerates the language. For example, a book called a "best seller" may actually have not climbed very high at all on the best-seller list. But political corruption goes further and corrupts the language, making it unclear what formerly clear words mean. And that seems to be the point.

When words no longer mean what they so clearly meant 10 minutes ago, you know something must be amiss. George Orwell said so.

Let the planet save itself

Scientists,  Jane Goodall among them, have been criticized for anthropomorphizing animals. Forester and best-selling author Peter Wohlleben often draws criticism for anthropomorphizing trees.

Consider some of the phrases found in his 2019 book The Secret Network of Nature:

• "Trees agree among themselves over long distances."

• "Thirsty trees send out a warning over the wood wide web and advise all others."

• Beeches "love their families."

• Because of climate change, "trees have to escape north."

Wohlleben, author of the incredible The Hidden Life of Trees, defends his language choices by asking, "But can a language stripped of emotion even be called a human language?" Read some scientific papers and you may be inclined to agree with him. Besides, he writes for the general public, not for scientists, and what he describes, however one says it, is what actually happens.

Trees really do somehow communicate with other trees, sometimes over hundreds of miles. Trees lacking sufficient water do somehow signal to other trees to moderate their water intake. Beeches, like some other trees, do support their own offspring by sending out roots to nourish them. Trees do migrate, as a species, to places where conditions are better, even though this may take centuries.

Wohlleben's book does not entirely focus on trees, although he keeps coming back to them. Ants raise aphids the way farmers raise cattle, he says. In a chapter called "Creatures in Your Coffee," he writes about just that — minuscule creatures that live in water pipes and eventually wind up in your food and beverages.

Mostly his topic is how all nature fits together and how human beings sometimes help, but more often hurt, the natural process. He explains why, for example, that the more trees left along bodies of water, the more fish there are likely to be in that water. Feeding deer during a harsh winter can actually cause more deer to starve to death.

Perhaps the most surprising thing he has to say he saves for the end: "The positive message from all this is that not only can we win back the original forests, but doing that could also steer the climate in the right direction. And to achieve this we don't even need to do anything. Just the opposite, in fact. We need to leave things alone — on as large a scale as possible."

Save the planet by doing nothing? What a concept.

Repeating the magic

Creating a first-rate television series out of a first-rate film can rarely be accomplished. (Nor, for that matter, can creating a first-rate movie out of a first-rate TV series.) Yet somehow Noah Hawley did just that. And not just once but again and again.

The movie was Fargo, released in 1996. Without using any of the characters or plot details from the film, Hawley has so far created four FX miniseries that somehow capture the atmosphere of the Coen Brothers movie, and a fifth series is planned. And as in the film, the city of Fargo is barely relevant.

We get a good sampling from the first three years of the series in Hawley's Fargo: This Is a True Story (2019). The subtitle does come from the film and, as in the film, it is not true. 

The large, 430-page photo-filled book includes dialogue from several episodes, as well as interviews and commentaries. This is book that will appeal to fans only, but even fans may prefer watching the episodes again rather than reading them