Words of creation

Language shapes even creates, experience. Putting something into words brings it into existence.

Frank Cioffi, One Day in the Life of the English Language

Those words from Frank Cioffi may sound outlandish at first, but think about them for a minute.

The Declaration of Independence created the United States, although there was also a bit of war involved. The Constitution, just words on paper, created the government that nearly 250 years later continues to guide the country's path. The laws written by Congress and other governmental bodies control our lives.

Marriages are created by repeating two simple words: "I do." A marriage is a legal thing, a physical thing, a spiritual thing. Words also end marriages.

Friendships are formed and also ended with mere words. Words do shape and create experience.

Cioffi's idea is also a biblical one. Genesis tells us that God created the universe and everything in it with mere words. "In the beginning was the Word," wrote John.

Cioffi's book is about language usage, and his final point is this: If words are this important, we had better try to use them clearly and correctly.

A voice for everyone

Frank L. Cioffi

To my mind, the most interesting part of Frank L. Cioffi's book One Day in the Life of the English Language comes at the very end when he reflects on why proper language usage, which is what his book is about, is important.

"Language matters because its careful use makes society work more smoothly," he writes. This is one of those things that seem so obvious that we rarely give it much thought. Of course language makes society work more smoothly. To get along and to get things done, we need to communicate effectively with each other. That's what language is all about.

One of the many negatives about four years of an open U.S. border is that the majority of those flooding across that border do not speak English. This poses difficulties not just for assimilation but also for education, employment, law enforcement, medical care, shopping and even driving down streets and highways.

Yet even among those who speak the same language, misunderstandings and conflict can occur when one or more parties does not understand the meaning of words or cannot communicate clearly.

Cioffi goes even further when he says, "Giving everyone a voice is the start —no, more: a prerequisite — for a better, even a moral, culture." And so he moves from a smoothly operating culture to one that is better and finally to one that is more moral — all because of better language usage.

He is talking not just about speech, which has obvious importance. But now, perhaps more than ever before, it is important for people to be literate. So much communication is now done through texts, emails and other platforms that require reading and writing.

In a smooth running, better operating and more moral society, everyone has a voice, but that requires everyone knowing how to use that society's primary language.

Still learning the language

After 16 years of formal education and a lifetime spent working with the English language, including several years as a copy editor, I still do not know what terms like gerund and past participle mean. Nor do I care. So why did I read a language-usage book called One Day in the Life of the English Language (2015) by Frank L. Cioffi that is full of such terms?

Perhaps it was the title and the concept behind the book. Cioffi simply picks a day — Dec. 29, 2008 — and samples various newspapers, magazines and other publications printed that day and explores how the English language was used on that particular day. Mostly he finds fault, which is interesting especially when his target is The New Yorker, a magazine with a reputation for its careful editing.

The fact is, there is much disagreement about what is proper language usage, and Cioffi even concedes that writers and editors should follow the style of their own publication, even while insisting that his own views are more correct.

For instance, he says there should be a comma before the "and" in a series, as with "bell, book, and candle." The Associated Press Stylebook, which I followed during my long newspaper career, regards that comma as unnecessary. In other words, AP favors "bell, book and candle." I continue to follow AP style, and not just out of habit, except in rare instances where one more comma can add to clarity. Cioffi's view is that, yes, that last comma is usually unnecessary but should be used anyway because of those rare instances when it is helpful.

Most of his book is about as interesting as any English class about grammar and usage you ever sat through when you were in school, yet it does have its moments, such as when he finds fault with highbrow publications like The New Yorker. ( And when he writes about when to use such as and when to use like. Did I get it right this time?)

The time for low standards

Isaac Asimov

Sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov famously said, "If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster."

Asimov was known for being a prolific writer, with hundreds of books to his credit. These included not just science fiction, but also books on science and such subjects as Shakespeare and the Bible. He was also noted for writing quickly off the top of his head. He didn't worry about drafts or revisions, and he left the editing to his editors.

Asimov would not have agreed with writing teacher Roy Peter Clark, who not only urged starting with a rough draft but also said, "Lower your standards at the beginning."

While I admired Isaac Asimov and have read many of his books, I write more in the way Clark suggests. Start with a draft and with low standards. And I mean low standards about everything — spelling, punctuation, grammar, factual accuracy, style, everything.

The important thing is to get your basic idea or argument or story down on paper — or on your computer — and then improve on it later. Spend too much time getting your first paragraph perfect and you can lose track of where you intended to go with your second paragraph.

Asimov, in effect, wrote nothing but first drafts, and perhaps he was not as far from Roy Peter Clark's thinking as it might first appear. He put down his ideas, and that was enough for his readers because they were wonderful ideas. He was never known for his style or for the grace of his language. He just wrote first drafts, and for him that was enough.

Joy and light, but not much else

It still baffles me that one must go to the mystery section of any bookstore to find the novels of Alexander McCall Smith. Even his No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency novels are out of place there. In The Joy and Light Bus Company (2021), the most intriguing mystery is whether Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni will lose his shirt, his auto repair shop and his wife's detective agency by investing in a bus company.

Precious Ramotswe does have a client for her agency, a man worried that his aging father will leave his home to a "wicked woman," the nurse who had taken care of him for years. But this generates little interest. Let's get back to the Joy and Light Bus Company, readers are probably thinking.

The 22nd novel in the wonderful series retains the charm and humor that has made the series so popular, yet it lacks the cohesive strength of earlier books. McCall Smith does give us some weak surprises, but they are not enough to make a novel we will remember as fondly as some of the others.

Keeping pace

The art of reading is among other things the art of adopting that pace the author has set. Some books are fast and some are slow, but no book can be understood if it is taken at the wrong speed.

Mark Van Doren, American poet

Mark Van Doren

I like Mark Van Doren's phrase "the art of reading." When we learned to read, it was a science. We learned the words, how to pronounce them, what they meant. We learned about punctuation. With time reading became an art, or it did for most of us. Two equally literate people do not necessarily read in the same way. One may see meanings and implications that the other misses. Writing that excites one person can bore another.

Van Doren's main point is about adopting the pace of the author. What does "pace of the author" mean? Well, compare David Baldacci with Henry James. Baldacci writes thrillers, with short chapters, mostly simple words and lots of action. You probably aren't going to read a Baldacci novel at a pace of one chapter each night before turning out the lights. It wasn't written that way. If you try to make such a book your bedtime reading, you will probably not get much sleep.

A James novel would be an equally poor choice as a bedside book. It wouldn't keep you awake, but would rather put you to sleep after a paragraph or two. (On second thought, it sounds like an ideal beside book.)

Seriously, to appreciate a Henry James novel or almost any work of serious literature, one needs to be wide awake, fully alert and willing to read at the same pace as the writer — slow and deliberate, in other words. A few pages at a time may be enough,

Read a Baldacci novel too slowly and you would forget what all the excitement is about. Read a Henry James novel too quickly and you will miss everything.

Campaign lies

George Orwell

During the political season — and isn't it always the political season? — one's thoughts can turn to George Orwell. "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others," we remember from Animal Farm. It sounds like the double-talk we hear during political campaigns, doesn't it?

Politicians lie, of course. That's just what they do. They need to win votes, so they say what they need to say to win those votes. Thus, one group is told one thing and another group something else. How they act once in office often bears little resemblance to what they said on the campaign trail.

Listen to U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown's campaign ads this year and you might think he is a Republican and a friend of Donald Trump. I have known Sherrod since we were both in our 20s and have spoken with him many times and sometimes wrote newspaper endorsements in support of him, and believe me, he is not a Republican. Rather he is a Democrat running for re-election in Ohio, which is now a Republican state, and he will say what he needs to say to win votes.

Both presidential candidates have told us lies, but they seem to be different kinds of lies. Donald Trump exaggerates. He boasts. He promises impossible things. Yet there is a positive side to these lies. They at least tell us what he believes in, what he desires for the country, what he hopes to accomplish.

With Kamala Harris, we are left in the dark. Her campaign seems more designed to hide what she believes in, what she desires for the country, what she hopes to accomplish.

Orwell wrote, "The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink." Word salad, in other words.

Wrapping up

Richard Russo ties up his Fool trilogy nicely with Somebody's Fool (2023), following in the footsteps of Nobody's Fool and Everybody's Fool.

North Bath, N.Y., the small town at the center of the earlier novels, has ceased to exist in the third one, having been swallowed up by its wealthier neighbor, Schuyler Springs. The characters we have come to know, like their town, seem lost. Where do they fit in now?

Doug Raymer, the former North Bath police chief, lost his job when the force was disbanded, while Charice, his girlfriend (or is it former girlfriend?), has been named police chief in Schuyler Springs. Yet because she is both black and female, her new position seems shaky.

Janey lost her abusive husband in the previous novel, but now she has replaced him with an abusive boyfriend, a dirty cop and one of Charise's main foes.

Peter, the son of Sully (the central figure in Nobody's Fool), can't decide whether he wants to leave or stay or whether he wants to continue as a college professor or work with his hands like his late father did. And then one of his estranged sons shows up, gets beaten badly by that dirty cop and gives Peter both a new problem and a possible solution to his other ones.

Jerome, Charice's twin brother, has lost all his swagger. His sister has given up on rescuing him from his depression and turns the job over to Raymer.

Russo, with his usual wit and style, gives direction to these and other lost characters by the time he concludes both the novel and the series. Somehow the everybody-wins ending doesn't destroy the art.

Breathing in, breathing out

Reading is my inhale, and writing is my exhale.

Glennon Doyle, American author

I do my writing in the morning, my reading in the afternoon. It is mostly a matter of energy. I have more of it in the morning, so that is when I write, which takes more energy than reading. In the afternoon I enjoy relaxing with a book and a pot of tea.

Glennon Doyle

I am drawn to Glennon Doyle's observation that reading and writing are both part of the same thing, just as inhaling and exhaling are both parts of breathing.

In my case, that is literally true. In this blog I write mostly about the books I have read. Yet in some sense this is true of everyone who writes. There was a reason our teachers insisted that we cite references in our term papers. What we wrote was supposed to be based on what others had written, not a copy or a paraphrase but rather a digestion of the writing of others into our own thoughts and words. Writing builds on what has been read.

This is true not just of content. It is also true of style and grammar and spelling and punctuation. We learn as we read, and what we learn influences how we write as well as what we write.

Even our letters, texts and emails are often a response to the letters, texts and emails we have received. We breathe in, and then we breathe out.

The burden of untold stories

Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou once said "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."

I touched on this topic a couple of weeks ago ("How can stories be bad?" Oct. 4). When you have story, you must tell it to someone. It's like scratching an itch. Sometimes anyone will do. My father used to love to tell his stories. Within a couple minutes of meeting a total stranger he would be off and running with his stories, and he would continue telling them as long as the stranger was willing to listen.

I tried to satisfy my own compulsion to tell my stories by writing my memoirs during Covid, when there wasn't much else to do.

Novelists and short story writers who, in addition to having all those personal stories that all of the rest of us have inside us, have fictional stories bursting to get out. To some extent, they write stories because they must. Stories come to them, and so they write them down and share them with anyone willing to pay money for them. Unlike the rest of us, they get paid for their compulsion.

Angelou uses the word bearing in regard to untold stories, suggesting that an untold story is a burden. One relieves the burden by telling the story. That works for most of us, but not for my father. He needed to tell the same stories over and over again, sometimes to the same audience.

Giving away Sis

As much as Lonnie is impossible — and everyone agrees that she is — she's still my dear, sweet, lumbering big sister, and you can't give away a sister!

Laurie Fox, My Sister from the Black Lagoon

More than a quarter of a century after it was published in 1998, Laurie Fox's novel My Sister from the Black Lagoon may be even more topical now than it was then.

Clearly autobiographical — the subtitle reads "A novel of my life" — the first-person novel tells of Lorna, a girl growing up in the 1960s whose big sister is loud, uncontrollable and driven by dark compulsions. Mostly Lonnie wants to be a boy and hates it when her mother forces her to wear a dress.

Lorna loves her sister, yet resents it that Lonnie gets most of their parents' attention. She also hates it when Lonnie is sent to a home for autistic and mentally ill children.

Sometimes the novel is as funny as its title and cover illustration suggest, yet the story proves ultimately sobering, especially as Lorna matures, goes to college and realizes that she herself has, in effect, given away her sister. She calls Lonnie or visits her only as often as guilt forces her to.

What's more, Lorna has become her sister in a sense, a misfit struggling to find her place in the world.

There's much to like about this disturbing novel.

Mysteries galore

Julia Spencer-Fleming's Hid from Our Eyes (2020) begins with one mystery and ends with another. (Don't you hate those mystery series that you must read in order to properly appreciate, when so many of us just read them as we find them?)

Actually there are three mysteries as the novel opens (and at least that many as it ends). The body of a young woman in a party dress is found in the middle of a road, both her identity and cause of death unknown. But an identical unsolved crime also happened in 1972 and earlier in 1952.

Millers Kill police chief Russ van Alstyne, who as a young Vietnam veteran was the initial suspect in the 1972 case, now has his job on the line because of an approaching vote that could disband the small-town police force. The pressure to solve these crimes, or at least the most recent one, and save his department becomes intense.

Meanwhile the chief's wife, Clare, the Episcopal priest, has a new baby to take of while she fights her compulsion for alcohol and/or drugs. Just the same, she gets involved in helping her husband solve this perplexing mystery.

The novel has much more going on, including the chief's mother's longtime relationship with the former police chief and a lawsuit involving one present deputy and a former one.

As for the mysteries Spencer-Fleming leaves us with at the end, they include the disappearance of one of the novel's characters, Russ's future after he is forced to resign and the question of what will happen to Clare after she yields to temptation.

Another mystery, at least to me, is which of her novels I will read next, a later one in the series or one of the earlier ones I missed?

The pride of discovery

Describing his book collecting habits, author Jonathan Lethem said, "I remember pursuing — in a way, what I still do — writers that seemed to me that only I knew about. So collecting them wasn't a matter of spending a lot of money."

Yes, collecting something that nobody else is can be a cheap hobby. Yet Lethem's phrase "writers that seemed to me that only I knew about" suggests something more than just pinching pennies. It hints at pride, the pride of discovery.

Most of us enjoy discovery, something we can tell our friends about. Whether it's a new restaurant, a new movie (or perhaps even an old movie nobody has talked about in years), a new song or that author that nobody else in our group has read, it can give us a sense of satisfaction, even pride.

Perhaps there is even the pride of being something of a rebel: Everybody else is listening to the latest popular songs or reading the latest bestsellers, but you are listening to this obscure singer or reading this obscure author that others haven't found yet.

I was in college when I "discovered" Edward Lewis Wallant. Wallant died in his mid-thirties after writing just four novels, but I devoured all four of them and thought he was something special. I have not read any of these books since then, and I do not know how they hold up. I do know that the general public never did discover Wallant, which in one way was a disappointment to me. Maybe I was totally wrong about him. Or perhaps I was among the few who recognized his genius. Let's go with that one.

Recovering from an introvert hangover

The Powerful Purpose of Introverts (2020) by Holley Gerth may not be the best book for introverts — that might be Quiet by Susan Cain — but it will be helpful for many of those convinced there is something wrong with them.

She includes many useful points. For example, she quotes Dr. Debra Johnson as saying, "We're not slow thinkers; we're deep thinkers." I have often thought of myself as a slow thinker because I don't think of the right thing to say until after it's too late to say it.

Later she quotes a psychologist as saying that introverts would rather find meaning than bliss. In my own experience, meaning produces bliss.

Gerth gives words to feelings introverts know well. Introverts, she says, need to time alone to recover from peopling. She calls this an introvert hangover or being dopamine drunk. Being around other people, especially talkative people, for too long drains energy from introverts. Time alone or time with one special someone relieves this condition.

The author is fond of lists, tests, quizzes and diagrams, and a reader may get tired of checking boxes and filling in blanks. Yet some of these may prove revealing and worthwhile, so don't ignore them all.

In the end, Gerth makes the same points made by Cain and others: If you are an introvert, there is nothing wrong with you. Your mind just works differently than that of an extrovert. There are more of you than you think. You can do some things better than extroverts can. Many of the world's most successful people have been introverts.

One question remains, however. Why don't extroverts need books like this to make them feel better about themselves?

Going to the source

When we read history written by Candice Millard, it is easy to imagine we're watching a movie. Whether she is telling about Theodore Roosevelt nearly dying while exploring the Amazon (The River of Doubt) or the death of President Garfield (Destiny of the Republic), her details are so vivid that we picture them as if on a giant screen.

This happens again in River of the Gods (2022), her book about the attempts by Richard Burton and John Speke to find the source of the Nile. How could someone not want to make a movie about this?

Now it seems hard to imagine that finding the source of the Nile River was considered so important to mid-19th century explorers. As Millard tells, it was mostly an excuse to explore the interior of Africa, which was then still largely a mystery to those in Western Europe. Europeans went to the coast of Africa to buy slaves, but they didn't know what they might find in the interior of this huge continent.

Burton and Speke began as allies, turned into rivals and eventually became enemies. This was more Speke's doing, than Burton's. Burton was easy going and quick to forgive. Not so Speke.

Burton was a restless British intellectual who spent little time in Britain. He learned languages easily and made most of his money translating dirty books from other cultures. He considered the Nile a worthy challenge, and hired Speke, a dedicated hunter, to go with him on his underfunded expedition in 1856.

Both men were sick from one illness or injury or another for most of the journey. They discovered Lake Tanganyika, which seemed like a good candidate for the source, but Speke alone was healthy enough to make it to Nyanza, which he renamed for Queen Victoria, and decided that was the true source. Burton remained unconvinced, but Speke beat Burton back to London and took all the credit, even though Burton had headed the expedition.

Speke later returned to Africa to better explore Lake Victoria. Back in London, although Speke had the advantage of seeing Lake Victoria and of having more friends and more money, he was a terrible writer and a terrible speaker, skills that Burton possessed in spades. On the night before they were scheduled to debate the subject, Speke, the experienced hunter, "accidentally" killed himself with a shotgun.

There is much more to the story, of course, and Millard tells it well. Even now the question of the source of the Nile may not be entirely answered. After all, there are rivers feeding into Lake Victoria. So where is the true source of the Nile?

Still Popular after all these years

I happened to acquire an April 1949 issue of Popular Mechanics magazine at the same time I had a May/June 2024 issue. So how much has this long-surviving magazine changed in 75 years?

The first obvious change is the size. The magazine has become both larger and smaller. Once 6 1/2 by 9 1/2 inches, Popular Mechanics has grown to 7 by 10. Yet the magazine that had 336 pages in the 1949 edition now has just 76 pages. And this is a magazine that now publishes just six times a year, rather than 12.

The price has jumped from 35 cents to $5.99. Compared to other magazine prices, $5.99 still seems like a bargain.

The difference in pages clearly stems from the fact that the older magazine contains significantly more advertising. It also contains numerous short articles, rather than just a few longer ones.

The covers are strikingly different. The earlier issue shows a man pointing toward a new house and telling a woman, "We built this cabin for $300." The more recent issue shows a circle of moons from our solar system. In the middle are the words "Every. Single. Moon. Ranked." This is Popular Mechanics? It looks more like Popular Science.

Articles in the older issue cover such subjects as how to swing a golf club, fly casting, handmade paper, how debris is removed from New York harbor and, of course, building that $300 cabin.

Other than the main article about moons, which I found to be the most interesting article in either magazine, the contents of the 2024 version of Popular Mechanics are not that unexpected. There are articles about California freeways, a female participant in the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb and the best way to fix foundation cracks.

Popular Mechanics magazine has always covered a lot of ground, something for everybody.  And now it even covers the stars. Or at least the moons.

Second chances

In Carla Buckley's intriguing 2019 novel The Liar's Child, there is so much lying going on that it is never quite clear to whom the title refers. And this proves to be a good thing when truth eventually wins out.

Sara Lennox gets a new life as part of the witness protection program, though she has no intention of staying around to testify. Her father taught her never to cooperate with the authorities. In the meantime she lives in an apartment near North Carolina's Outer Banks and works in a dreary job cleaning places rented by tourists.

Her neighbors are a troubled family. The beautiful wife accidentally left Boon, their preschool son, in a hot car for hours. The child survived, but now a child welfare worker checks up on them frequently. Whit, the husband, seems out of his depth, especially after his wife disappears. Cassie, their daughter just entering her teens, has become rebellious and dependent. She frequently escapes her homelife by dangerously leaping from one balcony to another and exiting through Sara's apartment.

Then comes a hurricane. With their mother missing and their father busy elsewhere, the kids look to Sara as their reluctant rescuer. She can think only of ditching the kids so that she can disappear into another new life.

But then, of course, things happen, and she finds a new life she never expected.

Buckley keeps things moving and the suspense building. Her novel is never quite a thriller and never quite a mystery, although there are elements of each. Mostly it is a novel of second chances and unexpected saviors.

Misery plus poetry

Her father was bigger than the world and a lot less wonderful.

Anne Enright, The Wren, the Wren

Beauty and ugliness often seem to come together, as if in a package. That is true in the world we live in, in the people we know, in our own lives and even in the novels we read. That may be the message in The Wren, the Wren by Anne Enright (2023).

The novel tells of the broken lives of three women in the family of Phil McDaragh, an admired Irish poet whose poems are sprinkled throughout the novel. McDaragh writes poetry about romantic love, and for inspiration he thinks he needs a succession of young lovers. He abandons his wife when she becomes seriously ill. His daughter, Carmel, and his granddaughter, Nell, feel the same abandonment as they lead their confused, often aimless lives. Their own love affairs are no more meaningful or lasting than McDaragh's. They just lack the poetry, which may be why they return again and again to his.

Enright does not deny us the ugly details of these relationships in language that is sometimes beautiful and often vulgar. The contrast seems to be important.

My favorite line in the novel comes early: "We don't walk down the same street as the person walking beside us." How true. We see different things even when looking at the same thing. How we perceive what we see depends upon our different backgrounds, different experiences, different ways of thinking. Carmel and Nell may walk down the same streets as those next to them, yet as the offspring of this famous poet they see different streets.

How can stories be bad?

Before I leave the book The Last Unknowns, edited by John Brockman, I must comment on what, to me, seems like the oddest question posed in this book of questions:

Jonathan Gottschall

"Are stories bad for us?" This question is posed by Jonathan Gottschall, who teaches in the English department at Washington & Jefferson College.

How could stories be bad for us? And how could someone who teaches stories for a living suggest such a thing? I would be interested in hearing Gottschall's argument. I'll bet there's a story there.

Everyone tells stories. Some are true. Some are embellished. Some are entirely fiction. Yet we all tell stories. And we all listen to them or read them or even dream them, usually with pleasure, which is itself a good.

When you experience a funny incident or perhaps have a near-collision on the highway or an unexpected surgery, one of your first impulses is the tell your story to someone. Somehow you don't feel fulfilled until you can tell your story. The better the story, the more often you will tell it.

We learn from stories. That is why literature is taught at Washington & Jefferson and most other colleges. Stories teach us how other people live and how other people think. They teach us about good decisions and bad ones. They help us practice empathy. They excite our imaginations.

History, at its best, is a series of stories. And so we learn history through stories. In fact, a good many disciplines, from art to zoology, are taught, in part, through stories.

Our entertainment, whether we read novels, watch movies or listen to popular songs, is often story-based. Even a TV reality show usually takes the form of a story. A baseball game tells a story. We stick around to the ninth inning to see how it turns out.

Religions are also usually story-based. The Bible is a collection of stories.

The articles we read in magazines and newspapers are often called stories.

There are bad stories, certainly, but stories are vital and basic to human existence. How can that be bad?

Challenging questions

John Brockman

In my last post I wrote about some of the lame questions I found in the book edited by John Brockman, The Last Unknowns. Now I want to give equal time to some of the questions I consider more challenging.

"Why is the world so beautiful?" If there is no God and no purpose to the universe, how does one explain sunsets and rainbows and spring mornings?

"Where were the laws of physics written before the universe was born?" asks a physicist. Because the laws of physics are themselves beautiful, this sounds very much like the last question.

"Why do we experience feelings of meaning in a universe without purpose?" Here we go again. Aren't "feelings of meaning" also beautiful? So maybe there is a purpose after all.

"Are people who cheat vital to driving progress in human societies?" That may seem like an odd question, but it is an interesting one. Consider that the Jewish people trace their origins back to Jacob, who cheated his brother out of his rightful inheritance. We have a system of justice, a good thing, in part to protect people from those who cheat. How many advanced human societies are built on land won by cheating native peoples? I'm sure we could find many other examples.

"What will be the use of 99 percent of humanity for the 1 percent?" This frightening question is rapidly coming close to a frightening answer. As artificial intelligence makes human workers obsolete, what good are they? Increasingly the masses just become a burden and a danger for the few who are in charge.

Talking about scary questions, how about this one: "Will we pass our audition as planetary managers?" And if we don't pass the audition, who is going to say so? Those who rush us toward global government surely must realize that dictatorship is the only possible result. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and all that.

"Is the brain a computer or an antenna?" I don't know what that means, but it sounds profound.

"Is scientific knowledge the most valuable possession of humanity?" I like the fact that this question was posed by a philosopher, not a scientist. That suggests what the questioner believes.

No such thing as a stupid question?

John Brockman invited many of the best minds in the world to pose questions for his book The Last Unknowns. So why do so many of their questions seem stupid to me?

Stewart Brand

Stewart Brand, best known for Whole Earth Catalog, asks, "Can wild animals that are large and dangerous be made averse to threatening humans?" Does he want to tame lions and alligators? Or does he want to drug them or kill them? Can humans be made averse to threatening wild animals?

Someone else asks, "Will scientific advances about the causes of sexual conflict help to end the 'battle of the sexes'"? Understanding the battle of the sexes is one thing, but do we really want science to end it? Wouldn't that mean ending the differences between men and women?

"How do I describe the achievements, meanings, and power of Beethoven's piano sonata Appassionata?" Yes, how do you describe it, and how is that more important than how any other music lover describes it? And is this really the last question humanity should be asking?

"How can we design a machine that can correctly answer every question, including this one?" Some questions have answers, but some don't. There are rhetorical questions, for example. There are questions like, "How are you feeling today?" that can have imprecise answers or different answers depending upon circumstances. Why would we even want a machine to answer all questions?

"How will we know if we achieve universal happiness?" Maybe when everyone is happy. I wonder, has this scientist ever read 1984 or Brave New World?

"Can we create new senses for humans — not just touch, taste, vision, hearing, smell, but totally novel qualia for which we don't have words?" No comment necessary.

"Will civilization collapse before I die?" According to people on both sides of the political spectrum, it could happen soon after the next election.

"Has consciousness done more good or bad for humanity?" Is this professor suggesting that we might be better off if we were all unconscious?

"Will questioning be replaced by answering without questions?" This comes from a physicist, in whose field I am sure answers sometimes come before anyone thinks to ask the questions. But on the whole, a world without questions seems neither desirable nor possible.

A journalist named Carl Zimmer asks, "How does the past give rise to the the future?" The answer, I believe, is that thin dividing line known as the present.

"How can the process of science be improved?" Someone else asks a similar question. The answer seems obvious to me — stick to science. Forget about politics and political correctness. When scientists no longer feel free to express dissenting findings in such areas as climate change, the treatment of Covid, gender transition and evolution, real science is no longer being practiced.

Last questions

For more than two decades, John Brockman annually posed a question and then invited scientists and others to answer it in short essays. These have resulted in fascinating books, some of which I have reviewed here. In the last book in the series, The Last Unknowns (2019), Brockman invited individuals from a variety of fields to pose the ultimate unanswered question. Thus the book is composed of many questions, suggesting that Brockman could have continued his series for many more years. There are numerous "last unknowns," it turns out. Some questions are posed multiple times, in one form or another, in these pages.

"Is a single world language and culture inevitable?" asks a professor of evolutionary biology. A Harvard professor answers that question with another question: "In which century or millennium can all human be expected to speak the same primary language?"

Immortality is another frequent topic on the minds of intellectuals. One asks if immortality is even desirable. Another wonders if even a thousand years would be too long to live. Yet another worries about the practical implications of humans living significantly longer than they do now.

Many questions center around artificial intelligence. One man asks, "Will AI make the Luddites (mostly) right?" Another puts it differently: "How far are we from wishing to return to the technologies of the year 1900?" I would settle for the year 2000. Other experts take a much more positive view of AI. One wonders how AI can help create global institutions that we can trust. I would ask, how can we trust AI?

A common subject of these questions has to do with religion and spirituality. "Why is religion still around in the twenty-first century?" asks Elaine Pagels, professor of religion at Princeton. (Does she want to put herself out of a job?) Others ask variations of the same question. In other words, why do we still have religion when people should know better by now?

Others seem to be asking about what religions call the spirit, without actually using that word. One person asks, "Does consciousness reside only in our brains?" Another asks, "Can consciousness exist in an entity without a self-contained physical body?" Another, "Is there a subtle form of consciousness that operates independent of brain function?"

Interesting questions. More next time.

Bot dilemmas

Who knew being a heartless killing machine would present so many moral dilemmas.

Martha Wells, Rogue Protocol

When Murderbot, as it calls itself, freed itself from human control by disengaging its governor, it hoped to spend its time watching the thousands of hours of media stored in its system. But this SecUnit has enough human cells built into its machinery to not just look human but also, sometimes, to feel human.

And thus at the end of Rogue Protocol, the third installment of The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, we find Murderbot saying, "I hate caring about stuff. But apparently once you start, you can't just stop."

This time Murderbot finds itself on an abandoned space station with helpless humans. All humans are helpless, in its view. But not all are innocent. Murderbot hopes to remain out of sight but must reveal itself to protect the humans from killing machines left to guard the station. Then it discovers that two of the humans have killing on their minds, as well.

The short novel offers plenty of action, yet the heart of the story involves Murderbot's relationship with Miki, one of the human's pet bot. The two bots work together, forming something like a friendship. Could it even be more than friendship?

Murderbot wants to get back to its videos, but once you start caring about stuff, you can't just stop.

Gone and forgotten

How could he be remembered if he could not be described?

Dan B. Miller, Erskine Caldwell: The Journey from Tobacco Road

Erskine Caldwell: The Journey from Tobacco Road by Dan B. Miller was published in 1994. Thirty years later it seems unlikely that anyone would bother to write — or read (except me, of course) — a biography of this man who was once one of the most famous writers in America.

William Faulkner, Saul Bellow and others considered Caldwell one of the best writers of the 20th century..

His paperbacks outsold those by every other writer of his time.

He was married to one of the most glamorous women in the country, the photographer Margaret Bourke-White.

His short stories were once a staple of most college courses on contemporary American literature.

Yet today few people recognize Caldwell's name, and even his most notable novels, Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre, are difficult to find, assuming there is anybody looking for them.

This was all true in 1994, and is even more true today.

Caldwell may have been his own worst enemy. He tended to burn bridges, whether it was with his wives, his friends, his agents or his publishers.  He was often paranoid, believing everyone was out to get him, while failing to recognize his own faults.

Caldwell strived for art, yet wrote sleaze, often at the same time. And it is this that makes him hard to describe and thus hard to remember. In which category does he ultimately belong? The main reason his paperbacks sold so many copies was the sleazy covers, which usually promised more than his books actually contained, though even his best work contained enough. Eventually his reputation suffered, although the sales certainly padded his bank account for many years.

Perhaps the most admirable thing about Erskine Caldwell is that he never burned the bridge connecting him with his beloved father, a preacher, just as his father never stopped loving and believing in his wayward son.

Men reading women

For years I worked with a man, a photographer, who was an avid reader, and we sometimes talked about books. One day he surprised me by saying he never read a book written by a woman. It sounded like a boast.

Certainly there is nothing wrong with preferring one kind of book over another, action and adventure over relationships and romance, for instance. Yet some women can write action and adventure very well, while men, Nicholas Sparks among them, can write best-selling romances.

George Eliot

Male readers (and publishers) favoring male writers has long been a problem for female writers. It is why Mary Ann Evans wrote under the name of George Eliot and why J.K. Rowling, like so many other women, have chosen to put their initials on their books or used a name that could be taken for male, such as Harper Lee.

This is clearly less of a problem today than it once was. A visit to any bookstore makes it obvious there is more fiction being written by women than men — and being read by women, too. My photographer friend might have to search a bit to find the kind of male-written novel he is looking for.

Yet there are plenty of men, including many in my own generation, who do not look first at the sex of the author before choosing a book to read. Another friend of mine, a retired farmer, sometimes reads Amish romances. I know a retired pastor who likes Debbie Macomber novels.

I, too, fit into this minority, men not ashamed to be caught reading novels written by women mostly for women. Just consider some of the novels I've reviewed recently on this blog: The Messy Lives of Book People, Take What You Need, Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse, Rock Paper Scissors, The Psychology of Time Travel and Kopp Sisters on the March.

Female writers, like male writers, write some pretty good books. Why not read them?

The poetry of three

Whenever I look for examples of something to bolster an argument, I strive to find three of them. One proves nothing. Two examples are insufficient. Four seem superfluous. But three, that is the ideal.

It's not just me, of course. Consider the Apostle Paul's "faith, hope and charity." Or "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" from the Declaration of Independence. Somehow poetry comes in threes, and not just in haiku.

Sarah Hart

Sarah Hart explores the power of three in her book Once Upon a Prime. "What can explain the hold that the number 3 has on our psyche?" she asks. "I propose that the mathematics of triangles and trichotomies enables the triumph of the triple." I won't try to say what trichotomies are, as if I could, but she goes on at length with her explanation. But in essence, you can't make a geometric shape with just two sides. You need at least three. And for physical objects you need three dimensions.

There are many examples of common threes in our culture and in our literature, and here are more than just three. Morning, noon and night. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. Three cheers. Small, medium and large. Our ABCs.  "Row, row, row your boat." Three little pigs. Three bears. Three billy goats gruff. The Holy Trinity. Gold, frankincence and myrrh. In jokes it is usually three people who meet in a bar. And on and on.

"Stories themselves have a beginning, middle, and end. The most common multivolume set is the trilogy," Hart writes. Even her own book has three parts.

Words and numbers

Of all the subjects we may have studied in school, math and literature might have seemed to have had the least in common. Sarah Hart begs to differ in her intriguing book Once Upon a Prime (2023).

Hart is a British mathematician who also enjoys reading a good book, and she has noticed that mathematics plays a vital role in a great many notable literary works, such as Moby-Dick, Ulysses and Middlemarch.

She observes, for example, that haiku poetry is built on prime numbers: three lines including two with five syllables and one with seven syllables, for a total of 17 syllables. She describes a short book that contains 100 trillion poems, more than you could read in a lifetime. How is this possible? She tells us how.

Some notable literary works were written by mathematicians and not surprisingly are full of mathematical ideas. These writers include Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland) and Edwin Abbott (Flatland). Other fiction has been written by people such as Herman Melville, George Eliot and James Joyce who were simply fascinated by mathematics.

Her analysis includes several contemporary novels, such as The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton and A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles.

The professor checks the work of all these writers and doesn't give all of them a passing grade. Jonathan Swift, for example, got much of  his math wrong in Gulliver's Travels, as did Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code. Of the latter novel she writes, "my goodness, there's a lot of mathematical nonsense in it."

She includes a section on novels about mathematicians, although she somehow ignores A Doubter's Almanac by Ethan Canin.

This good-humored book will delight many who love either math or literature. For those who love both, as Sarah Hart does, it may be a priceless joy.

Happy trails

I knew I had to read The Dog of the North by Elizabeth McKenzie (2023) because I loved The Dog of the South by Charles Portis.

Although the McKenzie novel was clearly inspired by the Portis novel (1979), the only clear allusion to the earlier work comes early when Penny Rush, our narrator, asks why a beat-up old van is called the Dog of the North.  She's told it was named "in honor of a beloved novel with a similar name." And, yes, the Dog of the South is also the name of a vehicle, an old bus.

The newer novel is by no means a sequel, and the characters are entirely different, yet it has a spirit similar to that of the Portis novel. It is also a hero-takes-a-crazy-journey kind of story, this time with a female hero.

Penny has family troubles. She has left her husband. Her mother and stepfather disappeared in the Australian outback five years before. She goes to Santa Barbara to try to help her grandparents, who divorced years ago, to sort out their problems. Her grandfather has been given the boot by his current wife,  while her grandmother, Pincer, a retired physician, has gone loopy, lives in clutter and filth and is found to have a man's skeleton on her property.

Penny takes a shine to Burt, a man who owns that van and who has been trying to help Pincer. He develops serious health problems, which brings his brother Dale to his side. And then Penny takes a shine to him.

The scene shifts to Texas, and then she and her grandfather decide to fly to Australia to make one last attempt to discover what happened to her mother and stepfather.

And it all ends in Carlsbad Caverns.

Many novelists have attempted to tell wacky travel adventures of this sort, but few have succeeded as well as Charles Portis. And now Elizabeth McKenzie.

Beginning with the ending

Over the past several months I have written a couple of times about novels with unique chapter headings. Back in April ("Clever foolishness," April 15, 2024) I wrote of A Fool's Alphabet by Sebastian Faulks, in which each chapter is headed by the city in which the action takes place, all in alphabetical order. Then in June ("Playing games," June 14, 2024) my subject was the Amor Towles novel A Gentleman in Moscow, in which chapter titles use only words beginning with the letter A.

In the meantime I was reminded of The Curious Incident of the Dog at Night-Time by Mark Haddon, in which the chapters are numbered but only prime numbers are used. Thus there is no chapter 4 or chapter 6.

Michael Faber

Michael Faber has his own unique way with chapter headings in his novel The Book of Strange New Things. He makes the last words in each chapter the title of that chapter.

The first chapter, for example, is called "Forty Minutes Later He Was Up in the Sky," which is exactly how the chapter ends. Thus in each chapter `you know the ending before you read the beginning, not that it actually tells you much.

Missionary in space

Peter leaves behind his beloved wife Bea to become a Christian missionary on the distant planet of Oasis in Michael Faber's strikingly original 2014 novel The Book of Strange New Things. He is not there as a chaplain for his fellow settlers, who show little interest in Christianity, but rather for the benefit of the native inhabitants of the planet.

The settlers cannot get their own crops to grow on Oasis, meaning that, except for rare shipments from earth, they must get their food from the Oasans. These odd but peaceful beings want two things in exchange: someone to teach them about The Book of Strange New Things, their name for the King James Bible, and any excess pharmaceuticals available. It is not clear why they want the drugs, for their diseases are nothing like those of humans, but the drugs are regularly delivered just the same. And soon Peter is going and returning with the drug deliveries, finding the Oasans amazingly receptive to Christian ideas and quick to learn English.

While this novel may sound like science fiction, Faber clearly has no interest in science. The planet is described as a billion miles from Earth, yet the trip takes a matter of days, and communication between Peter and Bea takes just minutes. And all this happens in the 21st century, not the distant future. Humans living on this distant planet listen to the likes of Frank Sinatra and Patsy Cline, as if it were an even earlier century.

Peter desperately misses Bea, especially as he is drawn to Grainger, the female pharmacist who transports him back and forth. The messages Bea sends from England become more and more disturbing. Natural disasters strike with increasing frequency, even as civilization rapidly crumbles around her. Nothing works anymore, not businesses, not government, not even the hospital where she works as a nurse.

This dystopian novel, viewing the collapse of human society from a billion miles away, may disturb readers. Yet Oasis is hardly paradise, as becomes more clear the longer Peter stays. The Oasans, with their beloved Book of Strange New Things, seem to be the only ones who have it together.

Love on hold

Covid, which practically brought the entire world to a standstill for a couple of years, has been all but ignored by novelists. It is as if it never happened. That is not the case with Touch by Olaf Olafsson (2022).

Olafsson bookends his wonderful novel with two events, Hiroshima and Covid, in which human existence was threatened by human technology. Life is precious, the author tells us with his beautiful prose. Don't waste it.

Kristofer, our narrator, closes his Reykjavik restaurant in the middle of the pandemic. He is of retirement age and has money saved. More importantly he has received a cryptic Facebook message from Miko, a Japanese woman he met and fell in love with while working in her father's restaurant in London back in the 1960s. He decides to fly to Japan to find her, Covid or no Covid.

Miko's mother died because of radiation from the Hiroshima bombing. Those exposed to radiation, as Miko was as a baby and her father was, were ostracized in Japan. So she and her father moved to London. The  two lovers work side by side in the restaurant, all the while keeping their relationship a secret from her father for reasons Kristofer doesn't fully understand.

Then one day Miko and her father disappear. After a long and fruitless search, Kristofer gradually accepts the truth. He marries another woman he never truly loves and raises a stepdaughter who never loves him. He buys a restaurant and lets the decades pass. Now widowed and 75 years old, he gets the message from Miko, and his heart catches fire again.

Olafsson builds his story with agonizing slowness, a little bit about the present followed by a little bit about the past. And this pace works to perfection. The ending may or may not surprise you, but either way you will love it.

An element of deceit

There is, naturally, an element of deceit in what copywriters do. Writing "blurbs," or the copy that appears on the back of a book, involves distorting the truth in some way.

Louise Wilder, Blurb Your Enthusiasm

The above comment by professional blurb writer Louise Wilder is not really as shocking as it may first sound. When you are trying to sell something, whether it's a book, a can of peas or yourself on a first date, you naturally accentuate the positive and try to eliminate the negative.

The purpose of the blurb is to sell the book. Buyer beware. Some books may actually be better than their blurbs, but in most cases blurbs make books seem more interesting, more exciting, more essential than they actually are. That's what advertising is all about.

A box of cereal in my cupboard says this on the back: "Our unique combination of tastes and textures are simply a cut above the rest." That's a cereal blurb. Don't expect to find any negatives in a blurb, but because nothing is perfect, there is naturally "an element of deceit" in every blurb. One just needs to bring that understanding with you when you go to a bookstore — or a grocery store.

Laws now require pharmaceutical companies to mention possible side effects in their advertising. meaning that drug advertising often devotes more words to the negatives than to the positives, even though the negatives may impact only a very small number of people.

Imagine if there were similar legislation relating to book blurbs. Blurb writers would have to tell us that anyone reading this particular mystery novel may be able to identify the killer by page 50. Or this novel starts out with a bang, but become tedious in the middle. Or this memoir amounts to little more than boasting and name-dropping.

No, pointing out flaws is the book critic's job. Let the blurb writers do their job, which is to try to sell us books, even if they do employ an element of deceit.

 

Game warden detective

In The Disappeared, C.J. Box's 2018 Joe Pickett novel, the Wyoming game warden gets assigned by the new governor to investigate the disappearance of a prominent British businesswoman from an exclusive dude ranch in another part of the state. Because his eldest daughter, Sheridan, works at the ranch, Joe welcomes the assignment, yet wonders why a missing person case should be a game warden's responsibility.

Kate's disappearance was months ago, and other investigations have gone nowhere. The fact that the game warden in that part of the state also disappeared at the same time adds to the mystery. Then there is the mystery, which readers learn about long before Joe Pickett does, about someone paying bribes to burn something in the middle of the night in a sawdust burner. And why does the fire those nights smell something like burning flesh?

Box juggles these and other elements of the plot with great skill, leaving readers guessing all the while. Unfortunately the guessing must continue even after the last page, for Box leaves some questions unanswered. Such as, will Joe, fired by the governor midway through the novel, get his job back? I hate having to read series novels in the proper order to get the whole story.

The wisdom of subtitles

Are subtitles really necessary?

Good question.

When it comes to fiction, the answer is clearly no. A number of famous novels have had subtitles that have been all but forgotten. Thomas Hardy called his classic novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman. Nobody uses the subtitle when discussing the book. I would even call the subtitle a mistake. Let the reader decide whether Tess is a pure woman or not. Kurt Vonnegut called his famous novel Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade. Again the subtitle has been mostly ignored, although it does give scholars something to write about. 

And of course the original title of Robinson Crusoe is The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pyrates. Written by Himself. Who needs all that?

Most novels published today have the same subtitle: A Novel. It's not really a subtitle, of course, yet it is found under the title of most novels, letting readers know that they are holding fiction in their hands. That may not be necessary, but I am grateful for those words sometimes when it would not otherwise be clear if a book is a novel, a memoir or something else.

Subtitles are much more common in nonfiction, and for good reason. Nonfiction titles are often clever, but ambiguous. The subtitle usually gives a clearer picture of what the book is actually about. In that sense, it is a good thing.

The Great Bridge by David McCullough, which I reviewed here two days ago, carries the subtitle: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge. For those who do not recognize the bridge in the cover illustration, that subtitle serves a valuable purpose.

When biographies don't include the name of the subject in the title, a subtitle seems necessary. For example: American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell. That subtitle, in fact, seems more necessary than the title. When the subject's name is in the title, biographers often use the standard subtitle A Life, which serves much the same purpose as A Novel.

Objects of Our Desire makes a provocative title, but what is the book about? The subtitle gives us a better, if still obscure, idea: Exploring Our Intimate Connections with the Things Around Us.

When Witold Rybczynsi wrote City Life, he didn't think a subtitle was necessary. The two words in the title tell us enough, he apparently thought, although at first glance the book might be taken as a novel.

For most nonfiction books, subtitles are all but essential.

Building the Bridge

The late historian David McCullough built an impressive career writing big books about big people (John Adams and Harry Truman), big events (the American Revolution and the Johnstown Flood) ) and big structures (the Panama Canal). His early book The Great Bridge (1972) helped established the pattern.

Nearly 150 years after it was completed, the Brooklyn Bridge still stands, still fills a necessary purpose and still impresses everyone who sees it. 

The suspension bridge was the brainchild of John Roebling, an engineer who built bridges and who also owned a wire business, wire being essential for the construction of suspension bridges. For many years he was credited by many with building the great bridge over the East River, connecting Brooklyn with New York City. Yet he died while the bridge was still in its early stages, and the actual construction was supervised by his son, Washington Roebling, a Civil War hero.

Yet Washington was himself absent during most of the bridge construction because of a disabling injury caused by the bends. He, like many of his workers, came to the surface too quickly from a caisson deep under the river. He supervised the construction from his bed, his gifted wife Emily learning about bridge engineering at his bedside and passing down instructions to supervisors.

The chief engineer's absence did not become controversial until late in the construction when there was an unsuccessful attempt to oust him. Other controversies, however, had a bigger impact. The project became involved in political corruption because of Boss Tweed and others. Because it was thought the Roebling wire company should not supply the wire for the bridge, the contract went to a supplier who substituted inferior wire for the specified wire after it was inspected and approved. The bridge cost much more than estimated, not only because the graft. And, of course, some people didn't approve of Emily Roebling's prominence in the project.

Men died during the construction, and later people died jumping from the bridge.

Yet the bridge was eventually completed and opened in 1883 to a massive celebration.

McCullough may tell you more about bridge-building than you really want to know, yet his book also tells a fascinating human story.

Breaking the rules

Charles Dickens

In her book Blurb Your Enthusiasm, Louise Wilder says Charles Dickens committed the three cardinal sins of commercial fiction: He liked plots, he was popular and he was funny.

I think she meant to say "literary fiction," not "commercial fiction." Most readers love novels with strong plots and that provide a few laughs, and they also enjoy reading what other people are reading. The intellectual elite, however, views things differently.

The books most favored by literary critics and high-brow readers tend to have weak plots, or even no plots at all. Laughs, or even happy endings, are frowned upon. And if the masses like something, it must not be very good.

Yet Dickens was taught in literature classes when I was in college, and perhaps he still is, even though he is a dead white man. The literary elite seems more forgiving of pre-20th century novels guilty of the three cardinal sins than the work by more recent writers. Thus Pride and Prejudice and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, despite their humor, strong plots and popularity, are still recognized as great. The snobbiest critics are much less sure about To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, All the Light We Cannot See and other 20th and 21st century novels that break one or more of those rules.

Just as I wish more movie comedies won Academy Awards, I wish more light-hearted, plot-driven novels won literary prizes. Just because people like something doesn't make it inferior.

Cleaning up messes

British author Phaedra Patrick has a gift for writing stories about characters discovering the unknown in their own history or in the history of someone they love. She did this in novels like The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper and The Library of Lost and Found, and she does it again in The Messy Lives of Book People (2022).

Liv Green, a woman in her 40s with two sons in college, works as a cleaning lady for a famous novelist, Essie Starling. She once aspired to become a writer herself, but she has settled for working for one and reading every one of Essie's bestsellers over and over again. Her husband, Jake, is part of a family that owns a book publishing business.

Essie's sudden death comes as a shock. An even bigger shock comes when Liv is told that Essie, fearing her death, had declared that Liv should finish writing her 20th novel. She is given six months, until Nov. 1, to complete the task. And not until that day will Essie's death be announced to the world.

Liv recognizes that Essie's main character, Georgia Rory, represents Essie herself. To properly complete the series of novels, she feels she must dig into Essie's past and and try to discover the identity of her one true love.

Discovery follows discovery as she researches Essie's history, which shockingly intersects with her own history. The mystery of why Essie chose her cleaning lady, of all people, to complete her final novel becomes clear at last.

Liv must keep her work a secret, even from Jake, and this puts a strain on their marriage. The fact that her research puts her in close contact with Essie's attractive former lovers doesn't help her home life. Thus things do get messy for these book people. But Liv is a cleaning lady, or now a former cleaning lady, and she knows something about cleaning up messes.

Mangled relationships

 I thought I could be both. Mostly grandmother, and on occasion a bit wolf.

Idra Novey, Take What You Need

Little Red Riding Hood is not the only fairy-tale allusion in Idra Novey's striking 2023 novel Take What You Need. The story may also remind readers of Cinderella or any fairy tale with a wicked stepmother. Is Jean, Leah's stepmother, wicked or not? Is she the grandmother or the wolf?

Leah loved her stepmother when she was a little girl, but Jean's marriage to her father didn't last, and the two were separated for many years. A reunion a few years before left Leah questioning her previous affection for Jean, and they parted under unpleasant circumstances. Now with a family of her own, Leah learns Jean has died and she is invited by a man named Elliott to come to Jean's house to, in effect, "take what you need."

In alternate chapters we read Leah's story in the present and Jean's story filling in the time between her marriage to Leah's father and her own death from falling off a sculpture in her own home.

Jean is a frustrated artist who uses her retirement years to create sculptures in her living room. She calls them Manglements. Her art is made from scrap metal, discarded mirrors and other junk found in her Appalachian town —"take what you need," in other words. Eventually it becomes so enormous, yet so impressive, that after her death nobody knows what to do with it.

Elliott is a young man with no apparent future,  but with an unsuspected appreciation for art. He provides the muscle for her work and eventually moves in with her. In between he often breaks into her house at night (while she listens from her bed) and steals things — once again, "take what you need."

The novel's three major characters have complex relationships with one another, each of them mostly grandmother, and on occasion a bit wolf.