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.