2023 superlatives

Others write about the best books of the year. I choose to focus on other superlatives when remembering my year of reading. Here are my choices for 2023.

Most Enchanting Book: Ghost Forest by Pik-Shuen Fung enchants less for its story — about a Chinese woman's growing relationship with her dying father — than for the way the author tells her story, using few words and lots of white space. Sometimes less really is more.

Most Important Book: "I Talk to the Trees" is a song from Paint Your Wagon. In The Power of Trees, Peter Wohlleben argues that we should let the trees talk to us. We might learn something about saving the planet.

Most Daunting Book: I tried reading Charles Dickens's massive classic Bleak House while I was in college. This year I finally read it through, and with pleasure.

Wisest Book: In Letter to the American Church, Eric Metaxas compares the American church today to the German church in the 1930s,  too reluctant to speak out against the social and political changes that threaten our culture.

Most Familiar Book: This year I reread Bel Kaufman's Up the Down Staircase, which raised a stir back in the 1960s. It still seems innovative and still gives pleasure.

Most Incomprehensible Book: Michio Kaku wrote Physics of the Impossible for the common reader, but it's still physics and much of it I found incomprehensible. Yet I loved the book.

Most Beautiful Book: There are many contenders for this prize, but I give it to Charlotte McConaghy's Once There Were Wolves, which is about a woman's attempt to reintroduce wolves to the Scottish Highlands and then becoming involved in a murder case.

Most Fearless Book: I described Cleaning Nabokov's House as a Cinderella story yet Cinderella didn't run a whorehouse. Author Leslie Daniels showed some guts,

Most Surprising Book: Steven Johnson surprised me in How We Got to Now by pointing out, to cite one example, how the telephone made skyscrapers possible.

Most Unpleasant Book: I found Mark Twain's racist comments in Following the Equator most unpleasant.

Most Luminous Book: I expected to like Karen Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves because I enjoyed her other novels, but I didn't expect to love it as much as I do. It's wonderful.

A Game for Readers (2023 edition)

When the year draws to a close, I like to play a little game where I answer 12 questions by using the titles of books read over the past 12 months. Let's try it again.

Describe yourself: A Fish Out of Water (less pretentious than A Dedicated Man)

How do you feel: These Precious Days

Describe where you currently live: Such a Quiet Place

If you could go anywhere, where would you go: Following the Equator

Your favorite form of transportation: The Night Ship

Your best friend is: The Puzzler

You and your friends are: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

What's the weather like where you are: A Fine Summer's Day (I know it's winter, but I'm in Florida)

What is the best advice that you could give: Give Unto Others

Thought for the day: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

How would you like to die: Before the Poison (better than after the poison)

What is your soul's present condition: Words Fail Me

Taking dreams seriously

In other cultures and in earlier times even in western culture, dreams have been taken seriously. The Bible tells us much about pharaoh's dreams, Nebuchadnezzar's dreams, Joseph's dreams and so on. Yet more recently in the West we have become reluctant to even mention our dreams to others, even though when we do mention them we discover that we often have similar dreams — about not studying for a college test, about being naked in public, about flying, etc.

In Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey (2018), Alice Robb takes dreams seriously, and she explores the insights of scientists and dreamers who do the same.

Robb argues that our dreams can tell us something, but that also we can tell our dreams something. As for the latter, she writes about techniques that some people use to guide the direction of their dreams and to make nightmares less common or less frightening. Other techniques she describes help some people remember their dreams or to dream more lucid dreams.

Dreams offer "a window into our psyches," she writes. They can tell us what's really bothering us, and in some cases they can even provide solutions. There are many examples of individuals solving problems because of inspiration gained in a dream. Such people as Stephen King and Salvador Dali have used dreams as inspiration for some of their creations.

A sitcom husband is often chastised by his wife for something he did in her dream. Robb tells us this sort of thing can actually happen when dreams are confused with reality.

Robb suggests keeping a dream journal and sharing dreams regularly with like-minded individuals. If our minds are going to provide us with so much nighttime entertainment, why not remember it, share it and discuss it — just like one might do with a good book or movie?

Robot makeover

I'm programmed to be paranoid.

Martha Wells, Artificial Condition

I loved Isaac Asimov's novels and short stories about robots. They centered around the Three Laws of Robotics, which seemed simple enough, but in Asimov's imagination led to a variety of perplexing ethical questions and plot twists.

Now Martha Wells has raised the stakes in her Murderbot Diaries series of novels, the second of which, Artificial Condition (2018), I have just read. Where Asimov just had humans and robots to deal with, Wells imagines an even more complex future. There are simple robots. There are robots, or constructs, with a little bit of human tissue, brains and feelings mixed in. There are augmented humans who are partly robotic. And then there are humans.

Murderbot, as it calls itself because it was designed to protect humans by often killing other humans, is a construct that has become a free agent by disabling the governor that allows it to be controlled. Yet it is human enough to feel compelled to help humans who engage its services, even though it would much rather just watch television. In this novel, Murderbot helps three foolish humans trying to retrieve important files from a woman who wants to kill them.

Murderbot undergoes surgery to allow it to pass as an augmented human. To accomplish this it allies reluctantly with a robot that controls a spaceship and is capable of doing things Murderbot cannot do alone.

This short novel, like its predecessor, All Systems Red and like all those Isaac Asimov stories, fires the reader's imagination as it entertains with an exciting tale.

Books require patience

Books require patience at every level — creating them, producing them, marketing them, selling them, and reading them.

Jeff Deutsch, In Praise of Good Bookstores

There are reports of writers churning out a book in a manner of days, but this is rare. Most writers invest months, even years, in writing their books. It takes patience. Then more patience may be required while trying to find someone willing to publish it.

As Jeff Deutsch points out in the line quoted above from In Praise of Good Bookstores, the other steps in the life of a book require patience, as well.

An agent may be needed to sell that book to a publisher, but the agent will probably want to read the book first. Then someone at a publishing house, and perhaps several publishing houses, must read the book to determine if it is worth publishing. Then comes the editing, which requires more patience while the anxious author waits, and then the cover design and the marketing, which add to the wait.

Some readers can knock off a book a day, but most of us read more slowly. It may take us days, weeks, months, even years to finish a book. It it's a good book, it may take readers and critics several years, even decades, to determine just how good it really is. It all takes time.

Yet as a bookseller, Deutsch's main point is that selling books requires patience, too, and this is often ignored by booksellers eager to make a profit. If a book doesn't sell quickly, it may be yanked from the shelf too quickly and replaced with a newer book that may have a better chance at success.

Deutsch argues that books need to be given a chance to find their readers, and vice versa. That takes patience.

The good with the bad

Born in Iowa, Bill Bryson has spent most of his life in Great Britain. He met and married an English woman on a visit and stayed. In the early  1990s, he and his wife decided to move to the United States for a time to give their children a chance to experience life in another country. Before he went, however, Bryson took a goodbye tour of Great Britain, and the result was Notes from a Small Island (1992).

Readers of Bryson's other travel books will know what to expect: rapture and ridicule, delight and disgust, the good and the bad alternating each step along the way. Everything is described in hilarious detail, but the bad is always much funnier than the good.

He writes a lot about architecture. Bradford's role in life, he says, is "to make every place else in the world look better in comparison." Two new buildings in Inverness he calls "two piles of heartbreak." He has nothing good to say about the British habit of tearing down beautiful old buildings to construct modern monstrosities.

He describes a certain castle as "everyone's favorite ruin after Princess Margaret." He calls Liverpool "a festival of litter." He hates the metal chairs now found in so many beautiful English cathedrals.

He often pans the places where he stays and the restaurants where he eats. He discusses hotel dining rooms where you get "three courses of pompous description and overcooked disappointment."

One of the highlights of his tour, and there are many more than I am suggesting here, is the chance to see This Is Cinerama once again. This movie extravangza, which introduced the short-lived Cinerama films, delighted him when he was a boy back in the 1950s, and is shown, or at least was shown at this time, on a regular basis in an otherwise unimpressive British town. Bryson visited just to see the movie again and was not disappointed.

His book, though now decades old, does not disappoint either.

Things that need to be healed

A wind had arisen — and it touched them now,, gently, reminding them, and it had rain on its breath, a token of that which heals the things that need to be healed.

Alexander McCall Smith, How to Raise an Elephant

Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels are so light and fluffy and charming that we may read them without even noticing that they carry serious themes — that they are actually about something.

Precious and Grace, for example, was about grace, not Grace Makutsi but rather the power of forgiveness. The author expands on this theme in How to Raise an Elephant (2020). The line quoted above is the last line in the novel, nicely summing up everything that has taken place. It's been all about healing the things that need to be healed.

As Botswana suffers from a long drought, Charlie finds himself with a baby elephant in his care. The mother has been killed by poachers, and now the mechanic/junior detective feeds it baby formula in his backyard. Soon everyone in the detective agency and the adjoining garage becomes involved in caring for the elephant, and they enlist the aid of Mma Potokwane, who runs the Orphan Farm. She should certainly know what to do with an orphan elephant, they think — and she does.

Meanwhile a distant relative of Precious Ramotswe comes to her asking for money. After visiting the woman, both Precious and Grace become suspicious. Something doesn't add up. And a quarreling couple move into the house next to that of Precious and Mr. J.LB. Matekoni.

All of these issues, drought included, require healing, and in just 242 light, fluffy and charming pages we watch it happen.

About bumblepuppies and mammiferous hamadryads

Why is it that the words we most like to say and most like to hear are so often words that are hardly ever used? Meanwhile words we don't like the sound of — such as no, fattening, gut, war, gun violence and politically correct — are heard all the time.

Take the word bumblepuppy. Have you ever heard the word spoken? Me neither. But wouldn't it be fun to use it in conversation? It is the name of a game played with a tennis ball tied to a post, a game I have never played or seen anyone else play. So the word goes unused and we have to settle for pickleball, which isn't bad. The word bumblepuppy has actually been given other meanings to increase its use, but those other meanings — a particular fishing fly, for example — haven't helped much.

A hamadryad, according to one artist

Then there's hamadryad, which can mean either an Abyssinian baboon, a tree-dwelling nymph or a certain venomous Indian snake, none of them things we are likely to talk about. And so the delicious word goes mostly unused.

Mammiferous simply means having breasts, so it could be used more often if it weren't so impolite and, in most cases, so unnecessary. Even so, it is fun to say.

I would love to be able to use the word firkin in conversation, but until I find myself discussing a small tub of butter I am out of luck.

Some enjoyable words are much more common and most people know the meanings of them, yet even so we rarely have the chance to either say them or hear them. I am thinking of words like lollipop, daffodil, ephemeral, lullaby and rutabaga.

A slang version of daffodil is daffodowndilly, which is more rare but also much more fun to say.

Other worlds

What child after reading or listening to a parent read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis hasn't wished for a such wardrobe or a magic closet through which one could, by entering and going deep enough, walk into another world?

Scene from Outlander on Starz

Many adults who read Diana Gabaldon's Outlander may experience a similar fantasy. Why can't I find a place where I can be suddenly transported to a faraway time and meet the perfect lover?

Yet the best we can hope for is to realize that books, these two and others, are themselves doors into other worlds. Jeannette Winterson suggested this very thing when she said, "Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and go through into another world."

Are books a poor substitute for reality? Well, yes and no. Certainly a real romance is better than an imagined romance. Actually going to Paris beats reading a novel set in Paris. (When I visited England I read a novel set in England, enjoying the best of both worlds.)

Yet through our reading we can have experiences that would be impossible in real life. Or if possible, they would be dangerous, uncomfortable or morally wrong. How many women have imagined affairs with the men they meet in novels, such as those by Gabaldon, without having to break their marriage vows? How many men have imagined killing other men in crime stories or war stories or westerns and then closed the book without guilt?

Sometimes fantasy trumps reality.

A modern Cinderella

Cleaning Nabokov's House, the 2011 novel by Leslie Daniels, amounts to a modern Cinderella story, although instead of a glass slipper there are, as Daniels tells us in the opening lines, a blue pot floating in a lake, a house where Vladimir Nabokov once lived, a book, a lawyer, a whorehouse, science and from there the world.

As the story opens Barb Barrett, pushing 40, has lost everything — her husband, her two children and her self-respect. She left her home of her own will and now cannot return. Her husband has already found another woman and has won custody of the children.

She finds herself living in a house where the author of Lolita once lived (as did the author herself, it turns out), and there she finds scraps of a novel, perhaps a draft written by Nabokov himself. The novel is about Babe Ruth, hardly a likely topic for the author more interested in butterflies than baseball. But perhaps he did write it. Can she turn the book into enough money to win back her children?

Barb does make enough money to resuscitate her life, but it comes not through the book but through that whorehouse. She notices that the town where she lives seems to be full of bored housewives, and so she hires college men to be her whores, who mostly just listen to the women talk. She manages to turn it into scientific research. The fact that the judge who decides her custody appeal has been one of her clients helps her win her case. And, yes, there is a charming prince.

As with Cinderella, not much here is convincing, yet readers get the happy ending they desire. And unlike Cinderella, this story is hilarious. Daniels is a wonderfully comic writer whose sentences dazzle. Yet I can find no trace of a second Leslie Daniels novel. Too bad.

Death in Dublin

In John Banville's latest Quirke novel, The Lock-Up (2023), the Dublin pathologist has returned to his hard-drinking, melancholy ways. His beloved wife, Evelyn, died at the end of the previous novel, April in Spain, and Dr. Quirke is lost without her.

Yet he is not lost enough not see something suspicious about the apparent suicide of a young Jewish woman, Rosa Jacobs, in a rented garage, or lock-up. John Strafford, the police detective who killed the man who killed Evelyn in Spain, becomes involved in the case. Quirke doesn't like Strafford, feeling he should have shot the killer before Evelyn was killed, not afterward, and he dislikes Stafford even more after he becomes involved with his daughter, Phoebe, with whom Quirke now lives.

The story takes place in the 1950s, not long after the close of World War II. A German man with a connection to Rosa, has become prominent in Ireland because of his wealth. Now he becomes a suspect in her murder, especially after his son happens to be in Israel at the same time as another Jewish woman, also with a connection to Rosa, is killed under mysterious circumstances.

In between bouts of Quirke's drunkenness and their disagreements with each other, he and Strafford find resolution to the case. Or do they? The surprising final chapter suggests they aren't even close.

Banville's mysteries, many of them written under the name of Benjamin Black, tend to be atmospheric and character-driven. The ending of this one may be disappointing — we like our heroes to actually outsmart the bad guys, even when they drink too much — but otherwise this entry ranks high in the series. And the unsolved mystery may give Banville a starting point for his next book.

Books teach reading

Roald Dahl

Teachers teach children to read, right? And sometimes parents do. Yet children's author Roald Dahl had a different idea: Books teach children to read. It makes sense.

Most of what we learn we learn because we want to learn it. You learn to bake a pie because you want to bake a pie. You learn auto mechanics because you have an interest in motors and machinery. And so it is with reading. My grandson learned to read at a young age, nearly two years before he started school, because he wanted to play a computer game that required reading.

The books that parents read to their young children, if they are exciting enough and funny enough, will encourage the children to want to learn to read such books by themselves.

Dahl's idea was to write the kind of books children like to read. And the books that children like to read are not necessarily the kind of books parents, teachers and librarians want them to read. The author of James and the Giant Peach and other classics often had trouble with publishers, parents, teachers and librarians for this very reason.

Dahl once described what, in his view, children love to read: "They love chocolates and toys and money. They love being made to giggle. They love seeing the villain meet a grisly death. But they hate descriptive passages and flowery prose. What else do they love? New inventions. Unorthodox methods. Eccentricity. Secret information. The list is long."

The writer also knew that children are not put off by long words providing those words are fun to say, with the definitions suggested by the context or the words themselves. He filled his books with many invented words: scrumdiddlyuptious, fizzwiggler and squizzle, for example. The words were fun to say and fun to imagine meanings for.

Dahl echoed an idea also expressed by C.S. Lewis, author of the Narnia books, when he said, "The nicest small children, without the slightest doubt, are those who have been fed upon fantasy. The nastiest are the ones who know all the facts."

A real Dahl

Most people are walking contradictions, but the writer Roald Dahl perhaps more than most, as Nadia Cohen shows us in her enlightening biography The Real Roald Dahl (2018).

The author of so many popular children's books lived an R-rated life. As a young man he attracted older women, most of them married and famous. Cohen tells how he once attended a movie premiere with actress Nancy Carroll and left with Congresswoman Clare Booth Luce, both women married and much older. Later he left his wife for a younger woman.

Although one of the most kind and generous of men, he also loved an argument and could be insufferably rude, even to guests at his own parties.

Although a literary man with no medical training, his pioneering efforts led to the invention of the Dahl-Wade-Till Valve used to save the lives of nearly 3,000 children around the world. This work was inspired by the brain damage suffered by his son, Theo.

Brain damage became a strange and tragic family curse. He had suffered head injuries as a pilot in World War II. His wife, actress Patricia Neal, had a brain-damaging stroke. His daughter Olivia died from a brain injury. Another daughter had a brain tumor.

Through it all Dahl wrote James and the Giant Peach, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and other gems that children have loved for generations.

Roaring Twenties words

The Twenties were really roaring by 1923. This is reflected in some of the words coined that year, according to Sol Steinmetz's book There's a Word for It. The Charleston dance craze began that year. Shimmy became a verb. Heebie-jeebies, wham, moonchild and fag entered our vocabulary.

Other words first recorded in print that year may suggest another time: aerosol, comfort zone, compartmentalization, debunk, mass media, media, mastectomy, microworld, robot, ultrasound.

That was also the year the country welcomed debunk, deplane, fundamentalist, hijack,  intro, junkie, moviegoer, muscle head, nonjudgmental, popsicle, posh, sleepwalk and spotlight into the language.

Americans that year were dancing, going to movies, beginning to fly in planes, enjoying the fruits of science and just having fun. The war was over. The Depression hadn't started yet. The new words hint at the kind of year it was a hundred years ago.

Empty spaces

... the artists who invented xieyi painting were scholar-amateurs, and they were not interested in depicting the physical likeness of things. They left large areas of the paper blank because they felt empty space was as important as form, that absence was as important as presence.

Pik-Shuen Fung, Ghost Forest

In her first novel, Ghost Forest (2021), Pik-Shuen Fung gives us the literary version of the xieyi painting she describes. Absence is as important as presence. Even the title suggests this idea. There's a forest there, but you can't see it.

Hers is minimalist writing with short chapters, sometimes just a few sentences long. Lots of empty space. The reader can fill in the blanks. Reading it is almost like reading poetry.

Like the author herself, the narrator was born in Hong Kong, moving to Vancouver with her family as a little girl just before Hong Kong was turned over to the Chinese. Yet her father stays behind to work in Hong Kong, and she, her mother and younger sister usually see him just once a year. Her father is, for the most part, an empty space.

Most of the novel takes place after she reaches her adulthood and her father is dying of cancer. She has always had an uneasy relationship with her stern, unsmiling father. She doesn't miss him when he's gone, yet she cries whenever they must part. Now that he is dying she begins to build a relationship with him, even to the point of telling him she loves him and hearing him say "I love you" back. Such exchanges are rare in Chinese families, we are told.

Yet there is not enough time, and the novel's last pages are full of regrets and white space. Earlier Pik-Sheun defines the Chinese phrase lik bat chung sam. "It means, what your heart wants but you can't do. It is an uncomfortable feeling. It's the feeling of wanting to do something and not being able to." And those final pages describe that feeling very well.

Out of the past, into the future

She struggled to recall anything but, as with most things concerning her mother, her memory was more wish than real.

Sarah Addison Allen, Other Birds

Zoey Hennessey had hardly known her mother at all. She had been a prostitute who died young. But she had left an apartment for her daughter on Mallow Island off the coast of South Carolina, and now as Other Birds (2022) by Sarah Addison Allen opens, Zoey, 19, moves to the island to discover her future, and perhaps something about her past.

She quickly becomes involved in the lives of the four other tenants in the small apartment building owned by a man named Frasier. Two of the tenants are sisters, Lisbeth and Lucy. Lucy is a hermit, rarely seen. Lisbeth, meanwhile, is seen too much, always complaining about everything her neighbors do. The others living there include Mac, a talented chef, and Charlotte, a talented henna artist. Every character, it seems, either has a past to discover or a past to hide.

And then there are the ghosts, more than you will find in most ghost stories, yet none of them is frightening. They are ghosts who behave more like angels, looking out for those they love. The novel also has many birds, who may also be angels. "Birds are supposed to be messengers between heaven and earth," Charlotte says at one point. Zoey has her own bird, Pigeon, whom nobody else can see.

So, yes, this novel is a bit weird, yet it also proves tender, moving, meaningful, beautiful. Ghosts disappear. Love happens. The past fades as the future opens up.

Mastering chess

The world is playing chess, and you're playing checkers.

Robert Dugoni, The World Played Chess

Good Vietnam War novels are still being written, even if those who experienced the war are getting a bit long in the tooth, and Robert Dugoni's The World Played Chess (2021) is one of them. As the title suggests, it's a complicated world out there, in peace as much as in war.

Dugoni tells three related stories at the same time. One is the journal kept by William while a marine serving in Vietnam. Other marines die around him, and later his guilt from what he did in the war is compounded by the fact that he survived and they didn't.

After the war, he works with Vincent, a recent high school graduate, on a construction crew. Vincent makes his own mistakes, faces his own dangers and takes his own risks even without a war. Meanwhile William shares a little about his Vietnam experiences.

In the third story, Vincent is a middle-aged adult with children of his own when he receives William's journal in the mail. Meanwhile, Vincent's son. Beau, is also just out of high school and struggling into manhood in a dangerous, complicated world.

With parallel stories of boys becoming men and facing many of same struggles, Dugoni weaves a compelling story about growing into manhood. This novel was recommended to me by a woman, so obviously its message is not for men alone.

Looking in the mirror

Many things have been powerful influences on literature, the invention of the printing press, for example, and the spread of literacy beyond the clergy and the upper classes. For individual writers, their work is influenced by their early lives, their failures and frustrations, their painful rejection slips, etc.

Steven Johnson

Yet in his book How We Got to Now, Steven Johnson points to something I would have never guessed — the mirror.

He gives credit for this insight to Lewis Mumford. "Self-consciousness, introspection, mirror-conversation developed with the new object itself," Mumford wrote. There was a time, not so many centuries ago, when people had little or no idea what they looked like. The mirror had a profound impact on people, and especially on artists. Painters began to paint self-portraits. If no model was handy, they looked in a mirror. The mirror allowed the Renaissance to happen, Johnson argues.

Writers, too, felt the influence of the mirror. They began thinking more about themselves. They began writing first-person novels. "The psychological novel, in a sense, is the kind of story you start wanting to hear once you begin spending meaningful hours of your life staring at yourself in the mirror," Johnson writes.

This argument requires a certain degree of conjecture. Certainly people thought about themselves a great deal even before the invention of the mirror. There are first-person accounts in the Bible and elsewhere. Yet it's not hard to believe that commonplace mirrors must have had a huge impact on human lives, just as commonplace cell phones have. And surely some of that impact must have affected how people write and what they write about.

After the hanging

The Grace Fox murder case is so cold that hardly anybody still remembers it or, if they do, still considers it an open case — until Chris Lowndes, a Hollywood film composer, returns to England and unknowingly purchases the large house where Grace Fox supposedly poisoned her husband. She was hanged for the crime in 1953. Chris moves into the house in 2010.

This is the situation in Peter Robinson's amazing standalone novel Before the Poison (2012).

A fan of Robinson's Inspector Banks novels, I was initially disappointed when I started reading this book and realized it is not part of the series. Yet I was quickly engrossed and wondering why he hasn't written more novels that stand on their own. Before the Poison demonstrates even more clearly than his mystery series what a talented writer Robinson is.

Chris is a man not unlike Banks, especially when it comes to his love of music and his ability to solve mysteries. Unlike Banks, this man mourns his deceased wife and sees ghosts. Perhaps one of the ghosts is that of Grace Fox. At any rate, he decides Grace wasn't really guilty of murder and that there must be much more to the case than came out at the trial. And so he begins to dig.

Not many people remain alive who remember Grace Fox, but Chris travels to Paris and to South Africa to track them down. He works with Louise, Grace's granddaughter, who also wants to believe in  her innocence.

In the end, Grace helps solve the mystery herself after her journal describing the horrors she experienced as a nurse in World War II is discovered

You wouldn't think the investigation of a murder case this old could have so many twists and turns and surprises, but Robinson gives us everything you might hope for. And more.

Around the world

I never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.

Mark Twain, Following the Equator

Truth or lies? There's probably some of each in Mark Twain's Following the Equator (1897), although I was more concerned with what was interesting and what was not. And most of Twain's account of his trip around the world is not that interesting, at least not to 21st century readers. There's a lot of stuffing — copied material from other sources,  dull stories told by fellow travelers and memories from previous journeys not special enough for other books, for example.

Yet it is a long, long book, and Twain strikes gold here and there. Some of the better portions consist of his diary entries, such as this one: "Sailed in the Rosetta. This is a poor old ship, and ought to be insured and sunk." That sounds like the Mark Twain we love. I was fascinated by his long list of odd town names in Australia, such as Goondiwindi, Tungkillo and Woolloomooloo. 

He goes into much detail in describing Thuggee and suttee practices in India. The former involved a religious cult of murderers and the latter widows who burned themselves with the bodies of their husbands. The British had mostly eliminated these practices by the time Twain visited.

Although Twain made the journey with his wife and daughter, he hardly mentions his family at all in his book, and never by name.

Much in the book will shock today's readers. He brags about killing 16 tigers in India. About South Africa, he writes, "The great bulk of the savages must go," and suggests humane ways of "diminishing the black population." Elsewhere he writes, "The world was made for man — the white man." One wonders why Adventures of Huckleberry is controversial, while Following the Equator isn't. Perhaps it's because few people still read the latter. And for good reason.

The network of ideas

It's not just a matter of a solitary genius coming up with a brilliant invention because he or she is smarter than everyone else. And that's because ideas are fundamentally networks of other ideas.

Steven Johnson, How We Got to Now

Like James Burke, whose Connections series ran on BBC and PBS in the late 1970s, Steven Johnson is interested in how one thing leads to another. Ideas are built on other ideas, often in surprising ways.

Johnson narrated his own BBC and PBS series, and the book based on that series, How We Got to Now, was published in 2014. Easier to follow than Burke, Johnson concentrates on six areas of discovery: glass, cold, sound, clean, time and light.

The discovery of glass, by accident, led to windows, lenses, fiberglass and eventually modern electronics. "The World Wide Web is woven together out of threads of glass," he writes.

As for cold, for many centuries nobody gave any thought to creating artificial cold, although artificial heat in the form of fire had been around for a long time. But then they started transporting ice in ships, which led to ice boxes, refrigerators, frozen food and air conditioning.

Discoveries lead in unexpected directions, Johnson points out. Because of air conditioning, population centers in the United States have moved south, from New York, Chicago and Detroit to Houston, Los Angeles and Miami. Telephones made skyscrapers possible. Because of barcodes, big stores like Walmart, Lowes and Target came to be.

We celebrate inventors like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell as if their genius was unique. Yet if they hadn't done what they did, somebody else would have. And in many cases somebody else did but never got the credit. Truly unique ideas are rare.

Facing fear

Our fears can do one of two things: prevent us from doing what we want to do or inspire us to overcome those fears by doing what frightens us. Those people we are most likely to have heard about are those who chose the second option. Those who take the first option are the ones sitting alone somewhere. They never asked out the girl who charmed them. They never applied for the job they wanted. They never wrote the book they only thought about writing.

Ralph Keyes

Writing takes courage, as Ralph Keyes tells us repeatedly in The Courage to Write. That's what the book is about, after all. All writers are afraid, he says. They are afraid of rejection. They are afraid of being laughed at. They are afraid of getting it wrong. They are afraid of hurting those they write about. They are afraid of being unable to equal prior successes. Fear for a typical writer never stops

Keyes goes so far as to call fear a necessity for writers. Fear is, he says, "an invaluable part of the writing process." Fear inspires us. It heightens our awareness and sensitivity. It makes us more careful, more diligent. Fear makes success and survival all the more sweet.

Yet there is another invaluable part of the writing process. And that is overcoming that fear. Writers must finally be willing to write and put their work out there for others to read and judge, come what may.

A crime-free mystery

Real crime was rare in Venice: the worst problem they had was a handful of bored adolescents using the cover of night to break into shops long closed by the pandemia to steal, or vandalize, merchandise in which they had little interest.

Donna Leon, Give Unto Others

Somehow Donna Leon has managed to write a successful series of mysteries set in Venice, a city in which serious crime is rare.

For much of Give Unto Others (2022), set at the close of the Covid pandemic, it appears as if there is no crime at all. An old woman, a neighbor he remembers from when he was a child, comes to Commissario Guido Brunetti to ask him to discover why her son-in-law acts so strangely. There appears to be nothing going on but a little adultery, but Brunetti, having nothing better to do, agrees to look into the matter. He feels guilty about using police resources to investigate a private matter, and even guiltier after he enlists the aid of several of his colleagues. who also apparently have nothing better to do.

Eventually Brunetti finds a charity in Belize that may not be on the up and up, and there's a vandalized veterinary office operated by the woman's daughter. An intriguing mystery does eventually develop, although still without a serious crime. No one is charged with anything.

I am a Donna Leon fan, yet I found this entry in the series a disappointment. What Venice needs is a good murder.

That's wonderful

"He certainly didn't ever want me to say I didn't like something," admitted John Steinbeck's widow, Elaine. "He wanted me to say, 'That's wonderful,' and I did."

Ralph Keyes, The Courage to Write

We all want someone to tell us, "That's wonderful," and believe it to be true, although the latter is optional.

I took several creative writing classes at Ohio University, and each week we would critique one another's stories. Mostly we criticized them. We searched for things we didn't like or didn't believe. We found grammatical errors and spelling errors. But what each of us really wanted was something on the order of, "That's wonderful." The poet Cecil Hemley, one of my instructors, called one of my stories "artful," a comment I have treasured for decades.

Scott Adams

Recently I heard Scott Adams, the "Dilbert" creator, talk on the radio about a Dale Carnegie class he attended where only positive comments were allowed. The group was intended to train people to speak effectively in public. He remembers one shy woman who gave a terrible speech. What positive comment could possibly be said about it? The instructor told her how much courage it must have taken for her to stand up before the group and speak. Her next speech was much better, as was the one after that.

Years after college I attended a retreat for editorial writers, where a group of us commented on one another's editorials. As in those creative writing classes, we mostly criticized each other's work. When my turn came I had found nothing wrong with the editorials in question. I felt like a failure. Yet when I said the writing was flawless the smile on the writer's face told me I had said the right thing, the best thing.

Most of us remember criticism longer than we remember praise. Perhaps the sting can motivate us to do better next time, if it doesn't discourage us from ever trying again. And if nobody points out those grammatical errors and factual errors, etc., how might we ever find out about them?

Even so, you can't beat "That's wonderful."

Wild books

Virginia Woolf

Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.

Virginia Woolf

There truly is something wild about the books one finds at a used book store or a library sale or the book table at a Goodwill store. They may not be organized in any way. They may be forgotten books by forgotten authors. Or they be former bestsellers who now years later nobody cares to read. And the books certainly are homeless, some of them looking as bedraggled as an old dog at the pound.

Each of these books has an unknown history, although some of them may have the name of a previous owner printed on the inside front cover.

Perhaps the saddest-looking used books are the newer ones, whose previous owners didn't think enough of them to keep them very long after their purchase, whether read or unread. Older books must have had an owner who treasured them on a shelf for years, or perhaps a series of owners who loved them before passing them on to someone else, who may also have loved them.

In a store that sells new books, all the books look new. They appear more domesticated, as Virginia Woolf put it. Or perhaps they are just virginal. With used books, one never knows. Some look as good as new. Others show their age. Some have pages folded over. Some have coffee stains or food stains. Some may even have passages underlined, a clue showing that a previous owner found something of value inside.

Human monsters

Two orphans, a girl and a boy, separated by 360 years, are marooned on the same island off the coast of Australia in Jess Kidd's beautiful 2022 novel The Night Ship. And when I call it beautiful, I refer not just to the story she tells but also to the clothbound book itself. Publishers don't always give such artistic attention to novels, but Atria did so here with the cover design and the inside art. The pages are even a physical pleasure to turn.

As for the story, Mayken is aboard the Batavia bound from Holland to the Dutch Indies in 1629 in the company of her nursemaid, Imke. But while Imke sleeps at night, Mayken loves to explore the ship, even breaking all rules, disguised as a boy, to roam below decks in search of a monster she believes to be hiding there. Through her wanderings she meets a variety of men and women aboard the ship, many of whom will later help her and others who turn out to be worse than any imagined monster.

The Batavia wrecks, with most of the passengers finding their way to a small island with no fresh water and little food other than what can be salvaged from the ship. The novel turns into The Lord of the Flies revisited as men divide and seek to conquer the limited resources, women included.

In 1989, the death of his mother sends young Gil to this same island, where his grandfather, Joss, is a fisherman at odds with most of the other fishermen on the island. Gil is described as weird, and some of his actions deserve that adjective. Like Mayken so many years before him, he becomes targeted, especially after other boys come to the island to summer with their fathers.

Meanwhile scientists on the island dig for artifacts to try to determine exactly what happened to the Batavia and its passengers. Much of this story is based on historical events.

Kidd takes us back and forth in time to tell two stories that gradually become one.

Peaking too early

War makes everything simple. There's a tunnel in front of you and you put your head down, and you struggle forward for the light at the end of it, one bloody impossible step at a time, and that frees you up somehow.

Louis de Berniece's, So Much Life Left Over

Peaking too early in life can cause a problem for many people, such as athletes, gorgeous movie stars and fashion models, ballerinas, chess masters, mathematicians, the best boy sopranos, whatever. What do they do with the rest of their lives?

Louis de Bernieres applies this idea to soldiers and nurses in the years between one world war and the next in his provocative 2018 novel So Much Life Left Over. They survived the war. How can they survive the peace?

Although there are many characters, most of the attention falls on Daniel Pitt, a pilot who didn't expect to live through the war. Now he looks for a career involving planes or motorcycles or anything fast and dangerous. He marries Rosie, who lost the man she loved in the war. They have a daughter and then a son, losing a boy in between. Done having children, Rosie turns Daniel away and then tries to turn the children against him.

Daniel turns to other women, first a girl in Ceylon, where they live after the war, and later a housemaid in England. Rosie's sister, a lesbian, wants children and invites Daniel into her bed, with her lover's permission. They have two children together, with Daniel called their godfather.

The lives of these and other characters don't seem to come into focus again until a new war with Germany breaks out. War makes everything simple again.

Whose fault?

When you read something that you don't understand, do you blame the writer or do you blame yourself? Most of us probably blame ourselves most of the time. I'm not smart enough to understand that. I didn't read carefully enough. I couldn't concentrate. Any of these may be true, of course, but writers sometimes need to share the blame.

The whole point of writing is to communicate, to convey one's thoughts, one's ideas, one's information, one's inspiration or whatever to others. When the message doesn't get across, the writer may be as much to blame as the reader.

Thomas Pynchon

A writer's message may be intended for certain readers, of course. Scholars write for other scholars, not for ordinary people on the street. Poets write for those who appreciate poetry. Thomas Pynchon didn't write for the same audience as Danielle Steel. The writer is more likely at fault when the intended audience doesn't understand.

I often don't understand what I am reading. Certain Bible passages baffle me. Sometimes I tackle books about black holes or time travel that are mostly beyond me. But then that was also true when, in the first grade, I first encountered a Dick and Jane reader. Some of the Robert Frost poems I've been reading lately I can appreciate, others not so much. Some of those William Trevor stories I reviewed here recently left me perplexed. My fault? Trevor's fault? I don't really know, but I'm willing to take the blame.

How to celebrate a birthday

Writing in Oh Reader magazine, Mary Ellen Collins says she wanted to do something special to celebrate her 50th birthday, something in addition to the trip to Africa she was planning with her husband. Her decision was to purchase 50 books, all at the same time.

And so the two of them headed to a Barnes and Noble with her list of desired books. She found all if them, she reports: Running with Scissors, Blue Shoe, The Art of Happiness and all the others. They stacked books on the checkout counter while they went back to search for others, drawing admiring fans as they went. They left with several shopping bags full of new books.

I have walked out of Barnes and Noble with a single shopping bag full of books, and I know how exciting just the heft of the bag can be, knowing what's inside. Imagine having four such bags at once.

If I walked into Barnes and Noble with a list of 50 books I desired, I doubt they would have even half of them in stock. Even a large store rarely has on its shelves the books I most desperately seek. So I am not sure I could pull off what Collins does, even if I had the funds for it. I would have to search a number of independent book stores, used book stores and, as a last resort, Amazon to find what I want. That would at least stretch out the pleasure. But that is pretty much what I do anyway, without the birthday excuse.

I already have more than 80 books waiting their turn to be read. Even so, my 80th birthday appoaches, and a man can dream.

Misdirection

Although not a mystery writer in the usual sense, the late William Trevor was nevertheless a mystery writer. Each of the 10 stories in his final collection of short stories, Last Stories, is a little mystery, full of subtle clues that lead to a final resolution. Or don't. Sometimes the resolution, like the clues themselves, are so subtle readers may be left scratching their heads.

As in any good mystery, there is a lot of misdirection in Trevor's stories. Even the titles misdirect the reader. When the title refers to someone, the story is most often about someone else. "The Piano Teacher's Pupil," for example, is actually about the piano teacher, not the pupil. Once she had a lover who in time abandoned her, yet she treasures that time when he was hers. Now she has a student, more gifted than any other, who steals something each time he comes to her house. Yet she treasures having him as a pupil. Paradise comes at a price she's willing to pay.

"The Crippled Man," rather than being about the crippled man, is mostly about the woman who takes care of him, although it turns out that he is taking care of her.

In "The Unknown Girl," Trevor's focus falls on Harriet, a woman whose home this girl had sometimes cleaned before stepping into traffic and being killed. Gradually Harriet comes to realize that the girl's death may be related to her unrequited love for Harriet's son.

Trevor's stories are like paintings on which the artist adds a dab of paint here and a dab of paint there. Not until the final brushstroke does an observer realize what the painting reveals. At times he even refers to different characters in alternate sentences in the same paragraph, requiring careful reading (and rereading) to understand what exactly is going on.

His stories don't make easy reading, yet they are so tender, so beautiful, so delicate that they are all worth the effort.

Curses!

Except for the two years I lived in a college dormitory, I have rarely been around people who swore habitually. My family, my friends and, for the most part, my work associates have rarely used profane or obscene language.

Most of my exposure to such language has come through novels, movies and, increasingly, television. Yet I recall so many great novels, movies and TV shows in which bad language was nonexistent, or in the case of Gone with the Wind, virtually so. The absence of crude language may have sometimes actually been a significant factor in their success. I recall how the television comedy Seinfeld used such words as "master of my domain" and "shrinkage" to avoid crude language, thus creating classic episodes.

Rarely have I mentioned the bad language in the novels I review here, although I did on Aug. 14 when I called Lee Smith's Silver Alert a "surprisingly potty-mouthed novel." The only other book by Smith I had read was her memoir Dimestore, from which I got the picture of her as an elegant, older Southern lady. So I didn't expect cover-to-cover cursing in the novel. Some of her characters might be expected to swear, making their language choices more understandable, yet even Smith's narration was curse-filled. What made this even more surprising was that her story will appeal mainly to older readers, especially older women, the very people most likely to be repelled by such language. What did Smith hope to gain by this?

The television show Gutfeld! bleeps out most of the obscenities, often leading to sentences where so many words are bleeped that the TV audience has to guess not just what words are being spoken but also what point is being made. Is this an argument for not bleeping bad language? No, it's an argument for avoiding language that must be bleeped.

Timothy Jay, a college professor, was quoted in The Wall Street Journal as saying, "People who have better vocabularies, which is related to intelligence and education, are better at swearing." True or not, this makes little sense to me. Better vocabularies should mean better alternatives to crude words. And the fact that those same Gutfeld! guests refrain from swearing when they appear on other television programs demonstrates that they know other ways of making the same points.

The headline on that Journal article, published last April, was "Curses! Why All The Crude Talk?" I pose the same question.

Stick to the stories

Any fan of P.G. Wodehouse might think a book called A Brief Guide to Jeeves and Wooster (2013) would be irresistible. Yet spending more than a few minutes with Nigel Cawthorne's book is enough to find it unnecessary.

The most unnecessary chapters are those in which Cawthorne gives long and detailed summaries of every short story and every novel featuring Bertie Wooster and his gifted manservant Jeeves, but with none of the wit. If one wants to know what happens in these tales, better to read them. That would at least be amusing, while these summaries are just dull. He said this and then he did that? Who needs this?

Much better are those chapters which describe Bertie's aunts, and there are many of them; the many women Bertie becomes engaged to or nearly so (who knew he is engaged to marry Florence Craye four times and escapes each time?); his buddies, all with nicknames likes Sippy and Gussie; and the grumpy older men and policemen who always seem to block Bertie's path. These chapters help us keep the characters straight (for when we wonder, where have I seen this name before?) and, best of all, include a sampling of Wodehouse's humor, the reason for reading the stories in the first place.

This book might make a decent reference for a diehard fan. Otherwise pick up an copy of The Code of the Woosters or Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit and actually enjoy yourself.

Sucking up space

The woman is a word plague/A literature Barbie doll/Nearly every damn journal/I subscribe to, she's there/Sucking up space

Fred Harrington, A Crawdad's Rhapsody

Now that's not very nice, is it? But I can appreciate the sentiment.

Joyce Carol Oates

Those lines above come from a poem called "The Quotients" by Fred Harrington, found in a collection of his poetry, The Crawdad's Rhapsody. Most of his poems are tender, sometimes beautiful. But everyone loses his temper sometimes, and this time Harrington's anger is directed at the prolific writer Joyce Carol Oates.

Oates writes books faster than many of us can read them, and short stories, plays, articles and poems besides. She has been doing this for decades. Now 85, an age at which most people have slowed down if not died, she continues to produce quality material. She has written at least 58 books. The Wikipedia article may be dated.

She has also written a number of mysteries under the name Rosamond Smith.

I have read relatively few of her books, the novel Black Water among them. I have liked what I have read, and there is one of her novels that I am itching to read now. Perhaps her massive output discourages me and others from reading her more than we do. Where do you start? How do you finish?

More seriously, however, her prolific career may impact her critical appreciation. She has won literary honors, to be sure, but the very number of her books makes it difficult for any of one book to stand out. She won the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award, for example, yet Fitzgerald is revered for The Great Gatsby and perhaps Tender Is the Night. Literary critics can read all of his work in a brief period of time and compare one book against another. How could one do that with Oates?

The 19th century British author Anthony Trollope may be under appreciated for the same reason. As soon as he finished one novel, he started another and churned out books by the dozens. Scholars would much rather deal with Jane Austen or Thomas Hardy. 

And so Oates intimidates both readers and critics. As Fred Harrington observes in his poem, she also intimidates other writers. This "literary Barbie doll," as he calls her, sucks up the space.

Reading experiences

William Styron

"A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end," said novelist William Styron. "You live several lives while reading."

That simple statement requires at least three comments:

1. I doubt that a book has to be great to leave the reader with a variety of experiences. Most books, being more than just a few pages long, tend to be a collection of facts and ideas in the case of nonfiction books or incidents, images and conversations in the case of fiction. Each of these, for the diligent reader, can produce a new experience, something to ponder, something to question, something to inspire. Mostly we just keep reading to find out what comes next, but the potential for new experiences is always there.

2. After a movie at a theater, I often like to sit for awhile to watch the credits. Not that I am interested in the credits, but I do like to listen to the music and think about the movie. Am I a little exhausted by the story? Perhaps. But I do like to spend a few moments thinking about what I have just watched.

In the same way, books often require a few moments for thought. Or maybe a few days. In the case of a novel, we may need to take the story apart and put it back together again. What does it mean? Do we really believe it? Has it changed us?

3. Living several lives at once may be the best reason for reading fiction. We get to be different people and enter minds very different from our own yet in so many ways just like our own. Reading The Elephant of Belfast recently I got to be a young female zookeeper trying save a young elephant's life, an older woman oppressed by sorrow, a member of the Irish Republican Army willing to do anything for his cause and several other people, as well.

All this while sitting in my easy chair just being myself.

Not as it seems

Innocent-looking communities that turn out not to be so innocent after all can often be found in fiction. Consider Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives or "The Lottery," the classic Shirley Jackson story. Megan Miranda successfully revisits this idea in her 2021 novel Such a Quiet Place.

Hollow's Edge is a small neighborhood where residents tend to be relatively young, seemingly friendly and employed at a local college. Yet this quiet place hasn't been quite the same since two neighbors died of carbon monoxide poisoning and Ruby Fletcher was convicted of murdering them.

Now Ruby has been released from prison after the discovery of new evidence and without asking permission moves back into the home of Harper Nash, our narrator. Everyone else in Hollow's Edge still believes Ruby to be a murderer, and Harper, although she testified in Ruby's defense, isn't sure. Soon it becomes clear to her that Ruby, who acts so strangely and so mysteriously, has scores to settle.

Harper turns detective, attempting to discover what Ruby is up to and whether she is really a murderer. Then another mysterious death adds to the tension.

Everyone in Harper's Edge seems to have a secret to hide, and readers may find it difficult to juggle them all. At least I did. But confused or not, we must keep reading, and Miranda rewards us with an ending that proves both exciting and satisfying.

Mystery in Laos

By the time the Communists took over Laos in the 1970s, most of the doctors in the country had already left. Among the few who remain is Siri Pailboun, who loves his country even if he has his doubts about Communism. Despite being in his 70s, he becomes the national coroner. This is the background of Colin Cotterill's series of mystery novels featuring Siri.

The second of these is Thirty-Three Teeth (2005), in which a series of deaths seem to have been caused by a bear. Or perhaps a tiger. Or perhaps a weretiger? Siri investigates.

The strange title — and strange titles are a Cotterill speciality, including Curse of the Pogo Stick and The Rat Catchers' Olympics — refers to Siri's discovery that unlike most people, he has 33 teeth. The Buddha supposedly had 33 teeth, and this is said to be a sign of a bridge to the spirit world. Siri's unusual powers occasionally show up in this and other novels in the series.

The novel's mystery, although leading to a breathless conclusion, tends to be less interesting than Cotterill's characters and the details he provides about Lao history and life under the Communists. For example, he tells us that Laos children are frequently given ugly nicknames "to ward off baby-hungry spirits." Siri's brilliant nurse, Chundee Chantavongheuan, is called Dtui, meaning Fatty. In her case, unfortunately, the nickname fits. It is Dtui's peril that brings Siri to the rescue and leads to that exciting climax.

Where the magic happens

Sometimes I think I can't think at all unless I'm behind my typewriter.

Joan Didion

Joan Didion

There's not much that Joan Didion (1934-2021) wrote that I could have written, but those words quoted above are an exception.

I never thought I could write and certainly had no ambitions in that direction before that day in my early teens when I sat down in front of a typewriter for the first time. Suddenly, as if by magic, I could think and I could write. Words flowed out.

I no longer own a typewriter, but any keyboard (well, not a piano keyboard) will do. Usually I have no idea what I am going to say, or sometimes even what my subject will be, until I sit down at my computer to write another blog post. Once my fingers touch the keys, however, something happens. My mind focuses and words spring out.

Perhaps this is why many writers, Larry McMurtry being just one example, continued to write on a typewriter long after home computers made typewriters obsolete. Their old typewriter was where their magic happened.

Other writers find their magic elsewhere, to be sure. John Cheever wore a business suit when he wrote his stories. William Maxwell always wrote while wearing pajamas. Others have preferred to write naked or in their underwear, usually because in this condition they would be less likely to leave their writing room until they had accomplished something. Ernest Hemingway, Lewis Carroll and Virginia Woolf wrote while standing up. Mark Twain, Eudora Welty and Jessamyn West did some of their best work while lying in bed.

Perhaps this is all just a matter of habit. Or maybe it really is magic.

Imposter

Ulysses S. Grant, broke as he was dying of throat cancer, managed to finish his memoirs just before his death to provide money for his widow, Julia, to survive on. In his novel Grant Speaks (2000), Ev Ehrlich imagines Grant living long enough to write two memoirs, one of which told the truth and was kept hidden for more than a century.

The novel is that hidden version, which for the most part follows the authorized version. Most of the characters and most of the incidents are historically accurate, even if conversations are imagined or embellished. Ehrlich strays from history by imagining not one Ulysses Grant but two and not one Julia but two.

Grant's original first name was Hiram. In his hometown there is a dominating upperclass boy named Ulysses Grant, often called Useful Grant. Hiram is called Useless Grant. The first Julia is Hiram's high school sweetheart, whom Useful seduces (or rapes?) with Useless as a witness. Useful wins an appointment to West Point, then loses his memory in an accident. Hiram's father convinces him to steal the other's identity and go to West Point in his place.

From there the author mostly follows history. The new Ulysses S. Grant becomes a capable soldier, fighting in Mexico with Robert E. Lee and other officers he would later fight with and against in a much bigger war. He meets and falls in love with the second Julia, the daughter of a slave owner.

Grant proves his greatness as a soldier in the Civil War, yet he proves hapless at everything else he tries before the war and even as president of the United States and in business after the war. And he keeps encountering Useful Grant, even though the other man doesn't recognize him. And by the end of the story, he again encounters the other Julia.

Ehrlich weaves a masterful novel out of truth and invention, causing both Grant and readers to wonder who actually won the Civil War.