Mysterious map

There are some places you can't find without a map. That is literally true in the Peng Shepherd novel The Cartographers (2022).

Everyone in this story loves maps, and you probably will too by the time you're done reading it. Nell Young still can't understand why her father, head of the map division at the New York Public Library, fired her a few years earlier simply for finding a box full of junk maps. Now she learns that her father has died in his office, and there she finds one of those maps. Why was this ordinary 1930s road map not just worth severing his connection with his daughter but also important enough to keep close to him all these years?

Then she learns that someone is willing to pay a large sum of money for this very map. She suspects her father may have been murdered for it after other deaths follow at the library.

The pieces start falling together when Nell tracks down some of her father's college friends, who once called themselves The Cartographers. It was they who found this mysterious map and learned its secret, leading somehow to her mother's death in a fire. Now one member of the group will do anything to get his hands on the lasting remaining copy, the one Nell now possesses.

Shepherd's story soon turns from a realistic thriller into a fantasy thriller, which fortunately relieves her of the responsibility of being logical. Accept the premise, however, and you will likely find the novel great fun.

Banned books for sale

Walk into any bookstore these days and you are likely to find a table of "Banned Books." This always seems strange to me, for if the books are banned, what are they doing in the store?

I live in Florida, where controversy swirls around government efforts to keep certain books and certain kinds of books out of public schools. But is this really censorship? Again, the books are readily available in bookstores for any parents who might want to buy them for their children. I doubt that many parents do, for these books often contain images and language that many consider pornographic, or at least too sexual for children. Newspapers, television stations and radio stations could not reproduce these controversial excerpts for their audiences. Even school board members are uncomfortable when images from the books are displayed or certain passages read at their meetings. So why should the books be in school libraries and classrooms?

Weren't some of those books on the "banned" table actually banned somewhere in America at some time? Rarely is that the case. A few books such as Ulysses and Lady Chatterly's Lover may have been restricted in certain places, but courts have consistently ruled in favor of public access.

Most of the so-called banned books are simply books that have been challenged by parents. Parents who discover certain words and certain sexual acts in their children's assigned reading sometimes object to their school board. An objection is hardly censorship. Even if the school board removes the book from the school's curriculum, it does not qualify as censorship. It is the school board's job to determine which books are suitable or unsuitable for their students, just as it is a parent's job to determine which books are suitable or unsuitable for their children. 

Barton Swain pointed out in The Wall Street Journal last weekend that the "closest thing to real book bans in the U.S. today is perpetrated by precisely the sort of people who bewail book bans." These include publishers who refuse to publish certain kinds of books by certain authors on certain subjects and booksellers, especially Amazon, that refuse to sell such books as When Harry Became Sally and Irreversible Damage, both critical of the transgender movement.

Any book readily available for sale is hardly banned. Is the Bible taught in your child's public school? Does that make it a banned book? Have you found a Bible on any Banned Books table?

On the prowl

Why couldn't she, for once, be attracted to strength? Why did so many men look so quivery when you looked at them hard? Why did the slight of a man she liked or perhaps loved, make her feel so alone?

Larry McMurtry, The Evening Star

The pages of Larry McMurtry’s 637-page novel The Evening Star (1992) seem to turn by themselves even if reading about the sex lives of senior citizens may not be one’s idea of a good time.

Aurora Greenway, the central character in Terms of Endearment, returns in this sequel older but not necessarily wiser. Now in her 70s, Aurora shares her bed with Hector, a retired general a decade older. But Hector no longer satisfies in that bed, so she remains open to other possibilities, including her much younger analyst, Jerry.

Rosie, her longtime maid, is a woman of similar age with similar appetites. Over the years their relationship has become a close friendship, even if one does work for the other. They complain that men are weak jerks, yet they are always on the hunt for these men, much like the aging women in McMurtry's later novel Loop Group.

The novel has a large cast of characters that includes Aurora's three troubled grandchildren (Emma, her daughter, died in the earlier novel) and her great-grandchildren. As the novel opens, Tommy is in prison for murder. Teddy suffers from mental illness, as does his wife and apparently their infant son, Bump. Melanie, the plump granddaughter, lives her life trying to please a boyfriend who keeps leaving her for hotter women, then returning. But by the end of the novel, which covers a number of years, all three of these grandchildren manage to make something like success out of their lives.

McMurtry constantly flips the novel's point of view from one character to another, sometimes as often as three or four times in a couple of pages. Even the babies have a point of view, which is how we suspect Bump may not exactly be a well-balanced child.

Old people eventually die, and death finds a number of the characters in this novel, including Aurora herself. Even so McMurtry's narrative remains light and breezy, often hilarious, sometimes wise and always compelling. And so the pages keep flying by. 

Library laws

S.R. Ranganathan, a university librarian in India, proposed what he called the Five Laws of Library Science in 1931. These laws still hold true, I believe, not just for libraries but also for bookstores and even for private libraries. Here they are:

1. Books are for use.

This seems like an obvious truth, yet for some people books are considered mostly decorative. But even that is a use, I guess. Yet books are intended to be read by somebody at sometime. Most books do spend most of their lives sitting on shelves, but that's OK. Except for the most popular books with long waiting lists, even most library books mostly just sit on shelves.

Unfortunately, out of necessity to create space for new books, public libraries must discard older books, and the criteria they use is mainly their frequency of use. If a book hasn't been checked out for a certain period of time, it may be taken off the shelf unless it is considered a classic and worth keeping for that reason alone.

2. Every reader his or her book.

Some readers may need a long time to find their book, which is why books should be kept on library shelves and bookstore shelves for as long as possible. Somebody will find them eventually.

This law is why bookstores and library must offer a great variety of books, catering to all tastes, all ages all political and social views and, as much as possible, all languages spoken in that particular area. For private libraries, of course, the books usually reflect the owner of the library.

3. Every book its reader.

There are some books that make you wonder: How would anyone be interested in reading this? Yet someone obviously thought the book interesting enough to write, suggesting there must be someone out there who thinks it interesting enough to read. Like the second law, this third law argues for variety.

4. Save the time of the reader.

In other words, organize the library or bookstore in ways that make sense to the browser. Organize nonfiction by subject matter. Organize fiction by author alphabetically. Make signage easy to read and understand. The Dewey Decimal System has long helped public libraries obey this law. Bookstores and owners of private libraries have a more difficult time. A knowledgeable staff is a big help. 

5. The library is a growing organism.

This sounds more like a statement of fact or perhaps an ideal than a law to be obeyed. My own private library always seems to grow, unless I make a deliberate effort to weed out books, as I had to do when I sold my house and moved into a condo.

Yet even with limited space, as is true of all libraries and all bookstores (except perhaps for Amazon), the books undergo constant change. New books are published each day, some of which are added to the shelves. Change itself is growth, in a sense, and book collections should never be allowed to become stagnant. So perhaps this is a law, after all.

Out of the ruins

I don't know if Tracy Chevalier has ever been described as a literary novelist, yet her historical novels, especially Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Last Runaway, certainly approach that standard of excellence. And so does her 2019 novel, A Single Thread.

Violet Speedwell lost both her fiancé and her brother in the Great War. Now in her late thirties, with single men her age scarce in England, she reluctantly settles into a spinster's life. She moves to Winchester to escape her oppressive mother, takes a job as a typist and joins a group of women embroidering kneeling cushions for Winchester Cathedral. It is far from the life she had imagined for herself, yet gradually she begins to make it her own  — if only her mother's declining health doesn't force her to return home.

Then one of her new friends turns out to be a lesbian, compelling Violet to get involved protecting her and her lover and placing her reputation at risk. And she begins a relationship — more than friendship, less than a love affair — with Arthur, a married man 22 years her senior who is one of the bell ringers at the cathedral.

These various factors, including her mother's declining health, could easily ruin a life that already seems in ruins. How Violet manages to turn her trials into triumph will satisfy most readers, except perhaps for those looking for something a bit more literary.

Ideas in waiting

In her book Words Fail Me, Patricia T. O'Conner advises writers to never throw away an idea. It may come in useful later.

I am not sure I entirely agree with her. Certainly there are ideas I should have thrown away. Instead I used them and was embarrassed by them later.

Yet I also, more often, have resurrected old ideas that didn't work in an earlier piece yet were perfect for something new I was writing. Some bad ideas are just good ideas in waiting.

Blue Moon has been recorded countless times over the decades, yet a 1961 recording by The Marcels stands out from the rest because of some nonsense bass sounds that go something like "baum-baumba-baum-baumba-baum..." I've heard that that sound was actually invented for an earlier recording, but it just didn't work. So they set it aside, then brought it back later for Blue Moon. A discarded idea later became a brilliant idea. It made their version of the song a classic.

Caught by the fish

I only knew I ached at times in certain ethereal directions and I believed that in this direction there might lie the object toward which I ached, the Real Thing that would satisfy the homeward aching and make me feel at long last as I long had longed and longed to feel.

Eric Metaxas, Fish Out of Water

Anyone who has read much C.S. Lewis, especially his Surprised by Joy, will experience a bit of deja vu when reading the above line in Fish Out of Water (2021) by Eric Metaxas. Both men experienced a persistent longing — which Lewis calls joy and Metaxas calls "homeward aching" — that eventually led them to a vital Christian faith that ultimately influenced countless others.

Their early lives, which in most respects were quite different, had commonalities. They were both raised in ostensibility Christian families and attended prestigious universities — Lewis, Oxford and Metaxas, Yale — where they drifted into conformity with the intellectual trends of their generations. They rejected God, even while being incessantly and unwillingly drawn to him.

The son of a Greek immigrant father and a German immigrant mother, Metaxes was soaked in both cultures from an early age, even while growing up in the United States and experiencing that culture firsthand. He visited relatives in both Greece and Germany at various points in his youth. His family belonged to a Greek Orthodox church where even the priests never seemed to believe much of anything. The church was always more about culture than faith.

At Yale, he showed a flare for writing, yet despite a few successes rarely seemed to have anything to write about.

All the while Metaxas says he felt like a fish out of water, as if he didn't really belong in whatever environment he found himself. He says his conversion came in a dream in which he pulled a golden fish out of the water, and he realized, upon waking, that the fish represented Jesus Christ. A fish has long been a Greek symbol for Christ. What Metaxas had been looking for had found him.

Since then Metaxas has become a biographer of notable Christians, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and he conducts interviews on a weekly television show and on podcasts. Among the surprises in his fine book is his connection to Larry David, creator of Seinfeld, and the real individuals behind two of the main characters in that popular series.

Listen to the trees

In most of his previous books, German forester Peter Wohlleben amazed us with his insights into how trees think, feel, nurture their young and communicate with each other. Now in The Power of Trees (2023), he focuses on what trees can teach human beings.

When it comes to saving the planet, trees know best, he argues. To a large extent, he says, climate change has resulted from cutting down so many forests around the world, whether to clear fields for agriculture or to provide lumber for construction or wood for fires. With fewer mature trees, the climate has turned warmer and dryer, for forests both cool the air and help manufacture rain. When you are in your own backyard on a hot summer day, you prefer to stand or sit under a tree because it's cooler there. Multiply that by thousands of trees, and this cooling effect impacts a large area.

Planting young trees doesn't make up for clear-cutting mature trees. It can take hundreds of years for younger trees to do the work of older ones. But rarely are they even given the chance to do that, for the forest industry needs their lumber before they have a chance to mature. And to make it worse, the industry tends to replace old forests with trees that grow fast but are not necessarily suited for the climate or soil. Better to plant trees that grow naturally in the area, Wohlleben argues.

Meanwhile, the heavy machinery used to clear forests compacts the soil so severely that young trees cannot develop the root structure they need for a long, healthy life. Trees actually grow best, he says, in the shade of other trees, not out in the open. Too much sun too early leads to a shorter lifespan for trees. Young trees out in the open also provide easy meals for deer.

His solution to the climate problem is simply to let trees do their thing. Let them grow naturally and spread their seeds naturally. Yet this isn't really so simple. Virtually every building that goes up means trees must come down. And so many buildings require large amounts of wood for their construction. Most other foresters work more for the timber industry than for the trees or for the environment, he argues.

Wohlleben doesn't exactly stand alone with these opinions. Even so, among his fellows, he often feels more like a single tree out in the open than part of a forest.

Discovering what happens

Once I start writing things down, I feel like I'm nailing the story in place.

Ann Patchett, These Precious Days

Ann Patchett

Some writers say they write a story to discover how it will end. Ann Patchett says she needs to know how her story will end before she even begins writing it. I can understand both approaches. I don't write stories, but sometimes when I'm writing I know exactly where I'm going before I start. Other times I haven't a clue. I just start writing and see what develops. I can have good results — or bad ones — either way, although I will admit that knowing where I'm going usually makes for easier writing.

Yet Patchett must not just know the ending before she writes the beginning, but apparently she must know everything else in her story. I wonder, how is this even possible?

In her essay "These Precious Days" in her book with the same title, the novelist writes, "When I'm putting together a novel, I leave all the doors and windows open so the characters can come in and just as easily leave." And this is before she begins the actual writing.

"When I rely on my imperfect memory, the pieces are free to move," she says. But with an imperfect memory, how does she remember where they move to? There is too much coming and going in a novel for anyone to remember where everyone is, I would think.

And yet I am left wondering if Ann Patchett is really so differently from those writers who write in order to discover what happens. She goes through the same exciting process of discovery, except she does it before she starts writing.

Still earns an A

Way back in the mid-1960s, Bel Kaufman's unorthodox novel Up the Down Staircase (1964) was the hottest book in America. Does it hold up more than 60 years later? Well, yes it does, I discovered.

Kaufman, herself a New York City school teacher, imagines Sylvia Barrett as an idealistic young English teacher in her first semester at Calvin Coolidge High School in New York. What's unorthodox is the author's telling of her story without any narrative whatsoever. The novel is simply a collection of memos, announcements, notes, blackboard scribblings, student excuses, etc.

The frustrations Sylvia endures comes as much from the school's administrators as from her students. She writes in a letter to a friend, "We have keys but no locks (except in the lavatories), blackboards but no chalk, students but no seats, teachers but no time to teach."

Humor stays plentiful, as when one of her students leaves her a note saying, "You are my most memorial teacher, you teach a subject as fast as it can enter and stay put in my brain." Yet there is as much bitter as sweet, as when a girl attempts suicide and a surly boy corners her in a dark room after school.

Sylvia is pretty — nothing wrong with that, certainly — but Kaufman reminds us of this over and over again until it gets annoying. But perhaps this just helps reveal the immaturity of her students, both boys and girls, who can't resist mentioning it.

Really good books stay good with the passage of time, and I think Up the Down Staircase passes this test.

Intellectual fashion

"It's going down very well with the more progressive customers."

Matthew laughed. "You flatter me, Lou. Progressive. Very nice."

Big Lou had not intended it as a compliment. "Progressive actually means conformist, Matthew. A follower of intellectual fashion."

Alexander McCall Smith, A Promise of Ankles

Alexander McCall Smith

Alexander McCall Smith's gentle novels rarely stray into anything controversial or political, but the small exchange quoted above dips a toe into the social-political controversy that is altering, perhaps forever, the entire western world, including Scotland, where his novel A Promise of Ankles is set.

Look up the word progressive in any dictionary and you will be unlikely to find any mention of conformity. Definitions suggest just the opposite, in fact. Used as an adjective, according to one online dictionary, the word means, among other things, "making use of, or interested in, new ideas, findings, or opportunities." As a noun, it is said to be "one believing in moderate political change and especially social improvement by government action."

Yet Big Lou's definition actually seems much more accurate in today's world. How else to explain how quickly "progressive" ideas are accepted by so much of culture? If a man puts on a dress and calls himself a woman, then he is a woman? Five years ago that would have been considered a preposterous idea by just about everybody. Today a significant number of people actually believe it, and a great many others pretend to believe it in order to conform with, as Big Lou puts it, intellectual fashion.

This helps explain why Democrats in the United States, the more progressive party, tend to act like sheep, easily herded to vote however their shepherds tell them to vote and believe whatever their shepherds tell them to believe. Meanwhile Republicans behave more like cats, each straying off in their own direction. It also helps explain why Democrats win most of the votes. Who doesn't want to fit in with one's fellows?

Back to Scotland Street

Alexander McCall Smith's A Promise of Ankles (2020) is the 14th installment in his 44 Scotland Street series, a light-hearted soap opera about the people who live in a building at that address in Edinburgh. The title, which may suggest ladies in floor-length gowns in an earlier age, refers instead to Angus Lordie's dog, Cyril, who cannot always resist the urge to nip at a tempting ankle.

The novel, like others in the series, has no plot, just numerous subplots. As in a typical Seinfeld episode, these subplots often intersect, creating a pleasing whole. I didn't find A Promise of Ankles as pleasing as others in the series, however, probably because Matthew, possibly the least interesting of the continuing characters, dominates this time. Two days after finishing the novel, I have trouble recalling what his particular subplot is about.

Much more interesting is the excitement of Bertie, the precocious seven-year-old boy who gets the opportunity to live in Glascow for a month with his friend Ranald. Bertie is also happy because his oppressive and progressive mother, Irene, has run off to Aberdeen with her therapist. Irene hates all things Glascow, so Bertie assumes it must be a fine place.

Meanwhile Stuart, Bertie's caring father, finds his excitement with Katie, a young woman totally unlike Irene — until she runs off with another man, as well. She cannot resist the handsome Bruce, just as Cyril cannot resist a good-looking ankle.

Meanwhile there is the discovery, by Cyril, of what may or may not be a Neanderthal skull and a phony duke being held prisoner by someone trying to teach him Gaelic.

If you have never read a 44 Scotland Street novel, do so. Just don't start with this one.

A fine day goes bad

Charles Todd's 2015 novel A Fine Summer's Day may seem to have an odd title for a murder mystery, yet I find it perfect. Todd novels tend to have bland titles — A Test of Wills, A False Mirror, etc. — which, in comparison, make this one memorable. The title will always remind the reader of what it is about.

Tragedies so often happen on what start out as fine days — 9/11, for example — and so it is on this beautiful June day in 1914. Ian Rutledge, a promising young Scotland Yard detective, is about to become engaged to the woman he loves, Jean, a military officer's daughter. How can anything spoil this paradise? Yet very quickly two things do just that.

First, and at the time more significantly, Rutledge becomes involved in a murder investigation that takes him away from Jean for days at a time. But on that same day in Sarajevo, Archduke Ferdinand is assassinated, leading soon to the Great War, which will separate Ian and Jean forever.

This entire novel is a flashback. Other novels in the series feature Rutledge as a detective in the 1920s, still haunted by memories of the war. More specifically, he is haunted by the ghost of Hamish MacLeod, who also becomes engaged to be married on that same fine summer's day. Hamish will later become a soldier in Rutledge's unit whom Rutledge, as the commanding officer, has executed for disobeying an order.

As for the mystery, it involves a series of murders that look like suicides. Men drink milk laced with laudanum or are found hanging in their homes. Yet none of the men had seemed likely to commit suicide. They have nothing in common until Rutledge discovers they all served on the same jury in Bristol years before.

He identifies the likely suspect fairly early. The tricky part becomes discovering how this man persuaded the men to kill themselves and then actually catching him. Thus the novel becomes more a thriller and historical novel than a murder mystery in the usual Charles Todd mold. Any fan of the series should read it.