Pinocchio's lessons

There's nothing subtle about The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collidi. First published as a book in 1883 — installments were printed in an Italian magazine for children previously — the story tells how a disobedient puppet becomes a boy (after first becoming a donkey). Today more people are familiar with film versions or Golden Book versions than the novel itself — and for good reason. The tale is just too heavy-handed for modern audiences of whatever age.

Time and again, Pinocchio promises to obey instructions, go to school, study hard, etc., then becomes distracted. He yields to temptation. Each time he does, disaster strikes. He is cheated. He is taken prisoner. He is nearly eaten. He is swallowed by a fish. He is, as mentioned, turned into a donkey. And of course, when he lies, his nose grows to uncommon lengths.

The book's lessons are made clear and obvious to any reader. The golden rule works best for all. Those who disobey will get in trouble. Liars pay for their sins. Yet one wonders whether Collidi might actually have been teaching just the opposite of the intended lessons. Mischievous little boys might notice:

1. Some kind soul invariably rescues Pinocchio and gives him another chance.

2. Once Pinocchio becomes a good boy, his adventures end.

Worth bragging about

Bragging finds its way into most autobiographies, but I have never read any autobiography with as much boastfulness as All About Me! (2021) by Mel Brooks. Yet except for the final chapter, in which he describes the awards he has won and the glowing things famous people have said about him, none of this is grating. It's just part of the fun, and besides, as it has been said, it's not really bragging when it's true.

Certainly it's true that Brooks is a comic genius. Everything he touches turns to laughs. The book has a few personal details — his childhood in Brooklyn, his World War II service in Europe, his meeting and marriage to actress Anne Bancroft — yet the focus falls mostly on his many show business successes, each remarkable in its own way. He wrote skits for Sid Caesar, won a Grammy with Carl Reiner for the 2000 Year Old Man record, helped create the Get Smart TV series (he's the one responsible for Maxwell Smart's shoe-phone) and then directed a string of classic movie comedies before turning to Broadway, where years before Ethel Merman in Anything Goes had first inspired him to go into show business.

Brooks may boast a lot, but he gives plenty of credit to Caesar, Gene Wilder, Madeline Kahn,  Cloris Leachman,  Nathan Lane and many others. I don't remember him saying a negative word about anyone. Even Hitler gets a kind word for inspiring Springtime for Hitler, the play within The Producers.

Most of his films are spoofs of film genres. Blazing Saddles takes on westerns, Young Frankenstein (my personal favorite) spoofs classic horror films, High Anxiety plays with Hitchcock, etc.  While Spaceballs may be having fun at the expense of Star Wars, it is actually a remake of It Happened One Night, Brooks says.

One secret to his success, he confesses, is that he always ignored Hollywood producers. He would always agree with whatever orders producers gave him, then go ahead and do everything his way. The producers always forgot their instructions to him when they saw the final result — and when they started counting the money that flowed in after the film's release.

If Brooks didn't listen to producers, he always listened to audiences, even if that audience was fellow writers or members of the cast and crew on a movie set. If they laughed he kept the joke in; if they didn't laugh or didn't laugh hard enough, he took it out.

People will always laugh at Mel Brooks films. And that is something to brag about.

Books have a future

For a number of years now e-books have seemed like the future. A recent article in The Wall Street Journal suggests they may already be the past.

Perri Ormont Blumberg writes that the Kindle and similar electronic readers are now much more popular with baby boomers than they are with their children and grandchildren, who much prefer actual paper books. This may not be great news for Kindle, but I call it wonderful news for the rest of us.

If this news surprises us it is because most people in today's world, except for the very old and the very young, seem glued to their electronic devices all day long. They do so many things one-handed because the other hand always holds their phone. Whether eating or shopping or driving a car, their phone is on and active. So why are these very people the ones reading books?

One explanation Blumberg finds is that books seem to encourage rather than discourage conversation. When phones are used more for texting than for actual conversation, we may get the idea that younger people want to avoid talking with others. The fact that people sitting together in restaurants are so often checking their phones, instead of talking with the person across from them, may suggest the same thing. But perhaps that is not entirely the case. Perhaps the young enjoy the fact that having a book in your hands invites more conversation than holding a Kindle does.

Books have covers, which unlike an anonymous book on a Kindle, can draw comments and start conversations. I recall an Amtrak conversion I once had with a man who noticed I was reading Robert McCammon's Boy's Life, a novel he had enjoyed. Then there was the woman who burst into laughter when she saw I was holding P.J. O'Rourke's Don't Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards. Those pleasant conversations with strangers were inspired by books.

Blumberg also writes, "For other younger readers, a physical book offers a blessed break from a digitized life." If you work all day in front of a screen, then spend so much of your free time looking at your phone or a television, a book made of paper with pages you can turn may seem like a wonderful change of pace. They may also be easier on the eyes.

Baby boomers, meanwhile, were among the first Kindle customers. They learned to like them, and now in retirement they still find them convenient, especially when on a cruise or sitting in the backyard. Older people are trying to reduce their possessions, not add to them, and electronic readers help them in this cause.

Of course, you might draw the same conclusion Blumberg did just by walking into a bookstore. Most of the customers one finds there are younger than baby boomers.

The book publishing industry still has a future. Whether or not the ebook industry has one remains to be seen.

Maigret in trouble

In Maigret Defends Himself (1962), Georges Simenon gives us one of the most unusual murder mysteries you will ever read in that Maigret solves the murder case even before the reader realizes there has been a murder.

Maigret, a famed Paris police detective, is just a few years away from retirement when he himself becomes the suspect. A young woman tells Maigret's superiors that he got her drunk, took her to a hotel room and took advantage of her. Only Maigret knows that is a lie, but the lie threatens his career and his reputation.

The detective defies orders to investigate the matter himself. Obviously someone is using the woman to try to destroy him. Is it revenge or is it an attempt to prevent him from discovering something? Following his intuition as well as the few vague clues he uncovers, Maigret, in just 155 pages, gets to the shocking bottom of things.

I become a bigger Simenon fan with every Maigret book I read. This is the best one I have found yet.

Machines for meaning

The best books don't mean one thing. They are machines that can be used to generate all kinds of ideas, including contrasting ones.

Amor Towles, The Writer's Library

Amor Towles

The point Amor Towles, author of Rules of Civility, makes in the lines quoted above is one I have made numerous times in this blog, including most recently in "Shifting truth" (July 3). I have never made it as well, however.

A great novel is "a machine for meaning," Towles says in an interview reprinted in The Writer's Library. That is, it generates meaning, but not the same meaning each time to each reader. Good books are worth rereading because there always seems to be saying something new. They keep giving us a new way to view the same story, a new way to interpret what that story means.

As Towles puts it, "great works can discover different ideas, feel different emotions, draw different conclusions, and support the validity of their impressions by pointing to various elements of the text."

Yet this is true not only of novels. It is also true of poems. And songs. And classical music. And folk tales. And the parables of Jesus. And, for that matter, all of Scripture. And great paintings and sculpture.

In other words, art of any kind is a machine for meaning. And that is how to determine whether something is art or not. To insist that art has but one meaning is to destroy its artfulness.

Is the impossible possible?

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke's third law

Michio Kaku's Physics of the Impossible was published in 2008, making much of the science dated. Even so the theoretical physicist's book will amaze readers, especially those of us with relatively little knowledge of science. We may also be amazed at how much of his book we can actually understand.

Kaku enjoys science fiction novels and movies, and like the rest of us who enjoy these stories he wonders if time travel might really be possible. Could space travelers ever exceed the speed of light? Could someone ever be teleported from one place to another, as on various Star Trek episodes? Might the light sabers and Death Star of Star Wars ever become reality? Is invisibility scientifically possible?

To such questions, Kaku usually answers yes, or at least maybe. Some of these may be just decades away, while others may be centuries away. He writes, for example, "There is no law of physics preventing the creation of a Death Star or light sabers." Common sense tells us time can never go backwards, but Kaku writes, "the mathematical equations of subatomic particles tell us otherwise."

To accomplish most of these impossibilities, however, will require much more energy than human beings can now produce, the author warns. Finding cheap, abundant energy must come before time travel and invisible men.

Night at the museum

Although I've been a Donald E. Westlake fan for decades, I had never read any of the novels he wrote under the name Tucker Coe. I finally remedied that with Don't Lie to Me (1972).

Not humorous like most of the novels he wrote under his own name or as hard and passionless as those he wrote as Richard Stark, this story takes a middle ground, although still with that unmistakeable Westlake style.

Mitch Tobin, a former police officer, now works as a nightwatchman at a New York City museum. He had been booted off the force when his partner was killed while he was in the arms of a criminal's wife. Now that woman reenters his life by coming to the museum at night to ask for Tobin's help in getting her husband out of a jam. Then they discover a naked dead man in one of the museum galleries, where Tobin had walked through just minutes before.

Tobin wants to keep the woman's presence at the crime scene a secret from the police, while trying to protect her husband from the hoods trying to get him back into crime. To accomplish these goals and get the police off his back, he soon realizes he must first solve the murder at the museum. And this leads to being roughed up by both the police and the crooks, leaving Tobin barely able to walk by the time he puts everything together.

Coe, in the usual Westlake manner, gives us a complex mystery that is not all that difficult for readers to follow. Too many mystery writers can't do that, certainly not as well.

The good bookstore

(F)rom a purely profit-driven perspective, the good bookstore is bound to stock books it shouldn't.

Jeff Deutsch, In Praise of Good Bookstores

A good bookstore should stock books it shouldn't? What an outrageous idea, and yet it makes perfect sense.

Most bookstores, being profit-driven, need to focus mostly on bestsellers and classics. That's where the money is. It makes sense to have a large display of Lessons in Chemistry near the front of the store. That's a novel many people are buying these days. Make it easy for them to find it.

Yet true bibliophiles, those individuals who are the best bookstore customers even if not the most numerous, read beyond bestsellers and classics. They read the more obscure books by authors they love. They seek out books nobody else has ever heard of by authors nobody else has ever heard of.

Too often such readers must resort to Amazon because the local bookstore doesn't have the books they are looking for. And sometimes they may not even know a book they might love even exists because they never see a copy of it in a store. Serious browsers can spot single copies of unusual books on store shelves. For example, I recently spied a lone copy of Abultions, the obscure first novel by Patrick deWitt, on a store shelf. Someone at the store may have been relieved that the book, published in 2010, finally sold. Meanwhile, I was thrilled to discover a book I had never before heard of by an author I love.

Jeff Deutsch writes in In Praise of Good Bookstores that in 2019 his Seminary Co-op bookstore in Chicago sold copies of 28,000 different books, yet nearly 17,000 of those were single copies. That is, most of the books sold that year sold just a single copy. And that's in the huge city of Chicago. The store's profits were the result of sales of multiple copies of those 11,000 other books, yet many customers left happy, and will likely return again, because they found that one obscure book they didn't expect to find. That sounds like a good bookstore to me.

Broken family

Three children, one story....The only reason I'm the one telling it is that I'm the one not currently in a cage.

Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

A story centered around a chimpanzee with a title like We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves sounds like it will be a barrel of laughs. And while Karen Joy Fowler's first-rate 2013 novel is often witty, it is mostly heartbreaking.

Fowler's narrator, Rosemary, spends her first five years of life as part of a science experiment. Her father, a psychology professor in Indiana, wants to raise a human baby with a chimpanzee baby to see how they will influence each other. Their house is filled with chaos and grad students, but also love. Rosemary thinks of Fern as her twin sister, a feeling apparently shared by Fern.

Then suddenly Fern is taken away. The experiment ends. The grad students leave. And the happy family begins to disintegrate. Lowell, Rosemary's older brother, becomes an animal-rights terrorist while still in his teens. Her father turns to drink. Her mother has a breakdown and stays in bed for a long period. Rosemary, the talkative little girl, goes silent.

The novel covers more than two decades, with Fern never far from Rosemary's thoughts. How she finds a way to become reunited with her sister, after her brother's efforts have failed, lead to Fowler's inspiring and surprising conclusion.

This is a wise, wonderful novel unlike anything you have read before.

Grizzly murder mystery

When writers of mysteries place their stories in a certain location — London, Paris, New York City or Southern California, for example — the locale often becomes part of the story, almost as if it were another character. And so it is with Christine Carbo's The Wild Inside (2015), the first in a series of novels set in and around Glacier National Park.

Ted Systeed, her main character, spent his early youth in Florida, as the author did herself. Then the family moved to Montana, where when he was 14 his father was mauled and killed by a grizzly bear while the two of them were camping in the park. Years later Ted is a special agent for the Department of the Interior.

When a dead man is found in Glacier bound to a tree, and shot, then partially eaten by a bear, Ted is called in to investigate. The location of the crime, so near to where his father was killed, and the fact that the crime involves a grizzly bear impacts him profoundly, making it difficult for him to focus on the puzzling case.

And it doesn't help that the man in charge of the park is the same one who years before had falsely cited carelessness as a contributing factor in Ted's father's death. Nor does it help that the grizzly apparently swallowed the bullet that was in the victim. Will the bear have to be sacrificed to retrieve that bullet?

Carbo nicely balances the detective work with the personal drama, while giving everyone a big surprise at the end.

What next?

Susan Choi

How does one decide what to read next? When Susan Choi is asked how she decides in an interview for The Writer's Library, she describes her choice as arbitrary. "I tend to have a lot of books around that I haven't read, and so a lot of it is visual, like they're lying around."

The trouble with this approach, it seems to me, is that it would be too easy to ignore books that aren't lying around. The newest acquisitions, which haven't yet been shelved, would usually be the first ones read.

Other readers, and these include some of the writers interviewed for The Writer's Library, find an author they like and try to read everything they can by that author in something like a reading binge. Others focus on a particular kind of book they like, such as romance novels, thrillers, mysteries, Civil War histories or whatever.

When making my own reading choices I try to balance randomness with deliberation. At a restaurant it is usually easier to decide what to order from a small menu than a large one, and so when selecting a book I seek ways to narrow my choices before I have to choose. Thus I have a small bookcase that serves as something like the bench the coach has to choose from at a sporting event. When looking for a book to read, I go to this bookcase. Do I want fiction or nonfiction? Do I feel like a light book or something more serious? Instead of having to review my entire library, I just choose from these relatively few books. Then I go to other bookcases or boxes and grab another unread book of about the same size to fill the vacant space.

Meanwhile I have a small box filled with novels by authors whose last names begin with a certain letter of the alphabet. Right now that letter is C. When I finish one C book, I reach blindly into the box and pick out another one. When the box is empty, I will go to my storage unit and fill it with books by D authors.

I have another small book case filled with books, mostly thick ones, that will easily lie open on the table to make them easy to read while I'm eating. I call these my breakfast books. The Evening Star, reviewed here recently, was a breakfast book. Now on my breakfast bar is a Baldacci thriller.

This may seem like a complicated system for choosing what to read next, but for me it simplifies matters while at the same time making the selection process more interesting, more like a game. 

What writers read

Most writers are readers, but what do they read? Nancy Pearl and Jeff Schwager wondered about this very thing, and so they decided to ask some of them. The result is The Writer's Library (2020), which contains interviews with nearly two dozen authors.

Typical questions asked by Pearl and Schwager include: What did you read as a child? Did any book inspire you to become a writer? Which books have been most important to you? Do you read while you have a book in progress?

The answers are varied, of course, yet certain books and certain authors pop up frequently. Several authors remember reading the Narnia Chronicles, Beverly Clearly, The Lord of the Rings, Judy Blume, Watershed Down and Charlotte's Web as children. Many, both men and women, read science fiction in their youth, especially such authors as Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov  There are frequent mentions of Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Lorrie Moore, J.D. Salinger, Raymond Carver, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Flannery O'Connor and John Updike, although sometimes there are striking differences in reading tastes. Some admire Updike, while others don't. The same with Dickens. Some books once admired are in some cases now despised, such as Agatha Christie mysteries or those Narnia stories.

Some of the best-known writers interviewed included T.C. Boyle, Amor Towles, Dave Eggers, Richard Ford, Donna Tartt and Russell Banks. Some of them will no doubt be mentioned at some point in the future when other writers are asked what books are on their shelves.

Shifting truth

For the intelligentsia, it seems, there is but one truth. The problem is, that truth keeps changing.

Eric Metaxas

Eric Metaxas addresses this phenomenon as it applies to literature in his book Fish Out of Water. He recalls writing a paper on George Eliot's Middlemarch while a student at Yale in the early 1980s and getting a disappointing B. His professor found his paper flawed because he had "insufficiently appreciated the book's feminist message." At that point in history, every work of literature had to be judged according to its feminist message, whether or not the author even had a feminist message.

Later, he says, he studied Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and was shocked by the subject matter — a man preying on an underage girl. By this time Metaxas was wise enough not to dare reveal his true feelings about the novel because professors then considered it improper to make moral judgments. A few years later, it was considered wrong to read the novel without making such moral judgments. Today the intelligentsia appears to becoming more accepting of sexualizing children — consider the drag shows for children in schools and libraries — and so expect a different proper reading of the novel any day now.

Truth does, in fact, shift in literature, but there is never just one truth. Truth shifts from one reader to another. Sometimes a novel may mean something different to a reader at 50 than it did when that same reader was 18. Older novels usually do seem dated, yet they were written to reflect their own times and the views of their author, not future times and the views of future readers.

Metaxas read Middlemarch differently than his professor, and that should have been good enough as long as he wrote a sound paper. Similarly his view of Lolita should have been as valid as his professor's. Literature, like any other form of art, does not have a truth that can be nailed down, even temporarily, by anyone.