Reading on the run

We are doing our reading on the run snatching time pledged elsewhere.

Jerome Weidman

Ideally reading is something we reserve time for. Some read to relax, such as just before going to sleep at night or when they are vacationing on a beach or on the deck of a cruise ship. Others prefer to read when they are most alert, most able to fully understand what they are reading. The best students do this.

Jerome Weidman

Most people — or at least most people with books in their homes that they hope to read — probably identify with the comment by Jerome Weidman quoted above. We do "our reading on the run, snatching time pledged elsewhere."

I have seen drivers with books in their hands while they wait at traffic lights. I read in doctors' waiting rooms and while waiting for my food in restaurants. We grab moments here and there so that we can read without interrupting our busy schedules.

One of the appeals provided by thrillers is that it is literally difficult to put them down.  Reading the next chapter and then the next becomes more important than "time pledged elsewhere." Most other books are easier to place lower on our agendas.

I wrote book reviews for most of my career, forcing me to into the habit of setting aside time for reading each day. In retirement I still maintain this discipline, or at at least I try to. Yet even now, with so few things actually on my agenda, I still often feel that I am reading on the run. There's always something else one could be doing.

The man after Lincoln

Countless books have been written about Abraham Lincoln. Very few have been written about his successor, Andrew Johnson. Yet Johnson's presidency also had an immense impact on American history. As Howard Means says in the closing words of his 2006 book The Avenger Takes His Place, "His failures are still with us."

The title comes from a poem by Herman Melville. The couplet reads, They have killed him, the Forgiver —/The Avenger takes his place. Johnson's attitude toward Reconstruction was expected to be, and probably was, quite different from what Lincoln's might have been. Chances are, however, even Lincoln at his merciful best would have had a difficult time not making a mess out of what was left after the Civil War — an impoverished South, a vengeful North, freed slaves who had no place in a still-divided nation.

Johnson was a Southerner — from Tennessee — whom Lincoln chose as his running mate because he was anti-slavery. Yet Johnson's reasons for opposing slavery had little to do with the slaves themselves. He was resentful of those who profited from slavery, the rich planation owners and the industrialists who got rich from the cheap labor. He opposed slavery not because it was unfair to blacks but because it was unfair to whites. When slaves provided the labor, there were no jobs for lower-class whites, like himself. To him, slave owners were the evil, not slavery itself.

Johnson was not without his good points, and much of his press coverage at the time was glowing. Yet he was unwilling to compromise, and his strong biases caused him to make mistakes that Lincoln might have avoided. Even so, America was well on its way to recovery and equality of the races until the 1960s, when another Johnson — Lyndon — screwed things up again with his War on Poverty that set back the fortunes of so many descendants of slaves by making them dependent on the federal government.

Buyers or browsers?

The good bookstore sells books, but its primary product, if you will, is the browsing experience.

Jeff Deutsch, In Praise of Good Bookstores

For those who enjoy shopping, is it the buying that is most pleasing or is it the search for something to buy?

Unlike women, most of whom seem to enjoy looking at new clothing whether they purchase anything or not, most men enter a clothing store thinking only about what they want to buy, whether it's a new shirt or a new belt. They find what they want as quickly as possible, then leave without looking at anything else. Yet in a hardware store or an electronics store, men may be the ones who like to look around at what's new.

Bookstores have both kinds of customers. Some people are looking for a particular book, a best-seller perhaps, but others just want to look at books, whether they find anything they want to buy or not. What's interesting about Jeff Deutsch's comment above is that a "good bookstore" prefers the second kind of customer, the one who comes just to look around rather than the one who comes to buy something and then leaves.

In the long run, the browser probably buys more books. I am a browser, and I buy a lot of books, yet I rarely enter a bookstore with a specific book in mind.

I doubt that many browsers leave a bookstore empty-handed.

Bookstores need to cater to browsers just as most department stores cater to their female customers. 

Hidden genius

The title of Elaine May's biography, Miss May Does Not Exist, are her own words, written as her biography on an album cover. On the same album cover, Mike Nichols, her comedy partner at the time, wrote a relatively long, name-dropping biography about himself.

It is actually a good title for Carrie Courogen's 2024 book about the Hollywood and Broadway genius who somehow flew under the radar for most of her life. Some of May's best work was as a script doctor for such successful films as Tootsie, What About Bob? and Ghostbusters II, for which she insisted she receive no screen credit. May was also a hidden influence on most of the films directed by Nichols, her former partner in comedy sketches that became famous in the 1950s.

When she did get credit, as in the film Ishtar and various Broadway flops, her work was often panned. Staying hidden seemed to work for her.

As if May's frequent anonymity did not make Courogen's work difficult enough, there is the problem that even when May did talk about herself, it was mostly lies. She told different stories to different people at different times. Even when Miss May did exist, the truth about her often didn't.

Yet the author was able to talk to many other people who worked with or knew Elaine May over the decades, giving her book more credibility than its subject might prefer. She paints May as a genius, a perfectionist and a workaholic who was loyal to her friends, and she had many of them despite the introversion that often drove her into hiding.

She was at her best as a writer, although she also drew raves as a performer. As a director, whether in Hollywood or on Broadway, she never considered her work complete. This caused her to shoot so much film that she would spend months in the cutting room trying to make a film short enough to be shown in theaters. In her plays, mostly one-act ones, she would rewrite scenes from one performance to the next. Although her difficult reputation may have been deserved, much of her work, especially Ishtar, was better than its own reputation. And some of her work, especially her early film A New Leaf, was much better than even she would admit.

Elaine May was most prominent in the public eye back when her comedy act with Mike Nichols was seen frequently on television and was a smash on Broadway. Few people still alive  remember that, but Courogen's fine book helps bring Miss May back into existence.

Write for yourself

Let the reader in you influence the writer in you. Put yourself in the reader's place, then write what you'd like to read.

Patricia T. O'Conner, Words Fail Me

Patricia T. O'Conner

Patricia T. O'Conner's advice for writers — write what you want to read — may be the best advice any writer or would-be writer will ever hear. Some writers seem to do just opposite. They write whatever seems to be most successful at the time. Their work seems imitative, unoriginal. They follow a formula. And if what they write is half-way successful, they imitate themselves

I admire writers like Ann Patchett and Jane Smiley, who never seem to write two novels alike. When something catches their attention, they build a story around it. They write the stories they would like to read, and being avid readers, they don't want to read the same story over and over again.

For the past few years I have tried my hand at writing sermons — and sometimes preaching them. I realize now that this compulsion of mine has something to do with the fact that I have been listening to sermons all my life and found most of them forgettable. I wanted to try writing the kind of sermons I would like to hear.

I think a sermon should have something for the mind (it should be intellectually stimulating), something for the heart (it should stir emotions) and something for the spirit (it should in some way make the listener a better person). And it should be something that can be remembered for at least a day or two. Have I succeeded? I do not know. But I do know they are the kind of sermons I want to hear on Sundays.

Implausibility makes the story

Jane Smiley stopped me cold when I read this line in

Jane Smiley

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel: "Every form of the novel contains some basic implausibility."

Can she be right? Isn't plausibility something we look for in a novel? Don't we want a story we can believe? Don't we criticize novels that seem implausible? I know I do.

And yet the more I thought about it the more I realized that it is implausibility that, in some sense, makes the story. There can be too much implausibility, but there can also be too little. This is true of any story, not just a novel.

If you go to the grocery story to buy a dozen eggs, it doesn't make much of a story. It is entirely plausible. But if, while at the grocery story, you encounter someone you haven't seen in 20 years and whom you didn't know was within 500 miles of that grocery store, you would have a story you would want to tell somebody. The two of you being in the same grocery store at the same time was implausible, but that is what makes it a story worth sharing.

Just the fact that a boy would get on a raft with a runaway slave and float downriver seems implausible. And why would a runaway slave want to go south, not north? And yet here we have the basic plot of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, one of America's greatest novels.

What are the chances that an escaped prisoner encountered by a boy would one day become that boy's benefactor? Yet there, in that implausibility, you have the plot of Great Expectations, the notable Charles Dickens novel.

Implausibility makes a story. Too much of it can destroy it.

Being nice

Midway into Kim Ho-Yeon's lovely novel The Second Chance Convenience Store, one character says to another, "Pretending to be nice, even when you don't mean it, actually makes you nicer." The story is about a  man whose life fell apart because he wasn't very nice and who gets his second chance literally by being nicer to people.

Dokgo is a homeless alcoholic who spends most of his time in the Seoul train station. He has lost all memory of his previous life. He finds a woman's purse in the station, and it has the owner's phone number inside. Instead of just taking the money in the purse, he calls that number. The elderly woman is on a train, but returns as quickly as possible to reclaim her purse. She rewards Dokgo with free food from the convenience store she owns and eventually, when he agrees to stop drinking, she offers him the night-shift clerk's job at her store.

Now committed to being nice, despite his rough exterior, Dokgo manages to give the store itself a second chance by increasing nighttime business. He also changes the lives of several of the store's customers.

But then the woman's son, who wants her to sell the store and give him the money for a business investment, realizes that Dokgo is the obstacle he needs to eliminate to make this happen. He hires a private detective to discover who Dokgo really is.

Kim gives us a charming story about the power that can be found by simply being nice.

Our idea of heaven

Where shall we find the time and peace of mind to read the classics, overwhelmed as we are by the avalanche of current events?

Italo Calvino

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

Jorge Luis Borges

In a way, Jorge Luis Borges answers Italo Calvino's question.

Jorge Luis Borges

Borges is not the only person to fantasize about heaven in the form of a library. I have done so myself. I assume that most people who believe in heaven want that heaven to provide them with the best of what they found in life, whether that be a reunion with loved ones, a prime fishing spot, beautiful music (those images of heavenly harps suggest this very thing) or whatever else it might be. If heaven doesn't give us what we most want, we may think, then what good is it?

One thing that heaven promises, whether it offers harps or books or fish, is eternity — not endless time but rather an end to time. And thus, to return to Calvino's question, there would be ample opportunity to read those classics. Or those best-sellers. Or all those mysteries and thrillers and romances we never found the time for. Then we could read them all over again.

And since it's heaven, maybe we would be able to listen to beautiful music and go fishing, as well. Any heaven we can imagine must have more than just books.

Artificial language

In his book Word Play, Peter Farb says that roughly 700 artificial languages have been created. None of them has ever caught on.

The most famous of these languages may be Esperanto, invented by a Polish physician in 1887. The idea was to simplify language so that people around the world could easily communicate with each other. Thousands of people have learned the language over the years, but not nearly enough. Esperanto speakers have found that the only time they can use it is with each other. When they come together, they can speak Esperanto, but when they go to a grocery store or to their jobs, they must revert to English, French or whatever language the people in their own community speaks.

Similarly a few Star Trek fans have learned the Klingon language (Klingonese), spoken by an alien race in movies and TV episodes, but have found that they can use it only with fellow fans who have also learned the language. Otherwise Klingonese is useless.

This is not altogether a negative thing. Just as slang is developed for use by insiders, not those outside the group, so an artificial language can serve this purpose. Those who speak the Klingon language probably enjoy being on the inside, even if they can't speak the language outside.

The problem with artificial languages is simply that they are artificial. Real languages develop naturally and very gradually over thousands of years. People who live in close proximity and must communicate on a regular basis speak in a way those around them will understand. We speak a language not because it is simple — most languages are not — but because we must use it to communicate with those we want to communicate with.

We may think it odd that the people of Germany, France, Spain, Italy and other European countries speak different languages even though, in today's world, they seem very near to each other. But for most of history, these cultures and languages developed separately. People didn't travel that much.

Many students learned French or Spanish in high school, yet soon forgot what they learned because they lacked the opportunity to use that language in the community where they lived. These are not artifical languages, but they might as well be in an area where there is little chance to use them.

A possessed father

Raising a teen-age daughter must be terrifying, especially for any father who remembers what teenage boys can be like.

Matt Haig explores this terror in his 2008 novel The Possession if Mr. Cave. Terrence Cave is a dealer in antiques whose wife was killed and then his son commits suicide early in this novel. And now Terrence must raise the boy's twin sister, Byrony, who is 15 and beautiful, by himself — or with the help of his mother-in-law, who always takes the side of the rebellious daughter.

As if this situation would not be intimidating enough for any committed father, Haig adds a complication, The title refers to "possession," and Terrance comes to believe he is possessed by the spirit of his son, who was always jealous of Byrony. Now, Terrance believes, Reuben is trying to harm her through him.

Increasingly the father becomes more desperate, especially as Byrony establishes a serious relationship with a boy judged unworthy of her.

Haig's novel begins with one tragedy, and every reader will know the story is moving headlong toward another one. For this reader, at least, just the initial situation was frightening enough.

Obsolete bookstores

We no longer need bookstores to buy books, even serious books. In fact, bookstores might well be an inefficient way to buy books in the twenty-first century, and it is certainly the case that we have become creatures of efficiency and convenience.

Jeff Deutsch, In Praise of Good Bookstores

Keep in mind that the above lines were written by a bookstore manager, Jeff Deutsch, director of Chicago's Seminary Co-op Bookstores. His career depends on bookstore sales, yet even he concedes bookstores have become unnecessary.

In today's world. where efficiency and convenience reign supreme, stores of almost every kind have become unnecessary. Some people even buy their cars online. Some people get Amazon deliveries of products almost daily. Grocery stores and restaurants will deliver food to your door. Pharmacies do the same, or you can use a drive-through so that you never have to actually enter the store. Many jobs you can do from home. Doctors no longer make house calls. Otherwise, you almost never have to leave home.

But our focus here is bookstores.

I rarely purchase books through Amazon, but two or three times a year I will order relatively rare books I cannot find elsewhere. More commonly I order books from the catalogs of Edward R. Hamilton Bookseller, a company that seems almost as obsolete as a bookstore. Hamilton has a website, but searching through thousands of book titles online can be oppressive. Their catalogs — several each month — are more fun to browse through. Some books are new, sold at discount. Others are remaindered, meaning they did not sell in bookstores and are now available at more extreme discounts.

Then you list the books you want, write a check and send the order form through the U.S. mail, all steps that seem somehow old-fashioned but yet work perfectly well, even though it can take weeks for delivery, not like an Amazon truck showing up in a day or two.

Yet I prefer shopping in bookstores, those few that remain. I like the atmosphere of a bookstore — shelves full of books, tables piled high with books, people who love books, like me, looking for treasures in print.

Just as many of us would rather hold an item of clothing in our hands, try it on and look at ourselves in a mirror before purchasing it, rather that ordering it online and perhaps having to send it back, many of book lovers prefer holding books in our hands. We like to read the cover, leaf through the pages and perhaps read a few lines before making a purchase. I have placed books back on at the shelf simply because I didn't like how they felt.

As long as there are people like us — people who prefer shopping and eating at an actual business, rather than doing everything online and never having a reason to leave home — these businesses will hang on, obsolete or not. Bookstores included.

The wonder in literature

Bryce Canyon

We mostly associate the phrase "state of wonder" with the natural world. A starry night, a glorious sunset, our first glimpse of Bryce Canyon or even a walk through a woods on a perfect autumn day can give us this feeling of wonder.

European cathedrals or skyscrapers can do the same, as can extremely unlikely coincidences, the first glimpse of our newborn son or daughter and a few other experiences in life. But what of literature? Can we experience wonder when we read?

I think the search for wonder may be one of our main motivations for reading. When we read thrillers, for example, some wonder comes with each plot twist. Because there can be so many of them in one novel, thrillers are extremely popular. The fingering of the killer in a murder mystery, usually an unlikely suspect, gives us the wonder we have been reading the whole novel to discover.

In other types of fiction, wonder takes different forms. Often it is found in the perfect sentence somewhere in the midst of a novel where we discover what the title really means or what the story is actually about, when we had thought it was about something else. Sometimes we discover that a character is not the kind of person we had thought all along. Or it may come when the main character, at the end of the story, takes some action we had not foreseen. Sometimes a lovely metaphor offers wonder.

In fiction, revelation provides wonder. Surprise provides wonder. Beauty provides wonder. Not unlike Bryce Canyon

Voting for W.C. Fields

"Is it possible to be funnier than W.C. Fields?" Dick Cavett asks in his foreword to a 2016 reprint of Fields for President, a book Fields wrote for his mock campaign for president in 1940.

Well, yes, it is possible to be funnier than W.C. Fields. Even in his prime, Fields was not funny to everyone. And even those of us who have laughed at his movies over the years have not laughed at everything he did. He had hits and misses, like everyone else who tries to be funny.

His book, which undoubtedly has lost some of its humor over 85 years, has some of both.

Fields's "platform" for the presidency covers seven subjects: marriage, income tax, resolutions (or campaign promises), etiquette, physical fitness, the care of babies and business success. He devotes a chapter to each.

Regarding marriage, he says, "Never try to impress a woman! Because if you do she'll expect you to keep up the standard for the rest of your life." A hit.

On the income tax, he says, "In other words, the government fixes it so that you have a choice of (1) starving to death by having an income so low that you do not have to pay a tax; or (2) have an income high enough to pay a tax — and then starving to death after you've paid it." A hit.

As for kissing babies on the campaign trail, he writes, "I always carried a number of sterilized blindfolds, which I would casually place over each baby's eyes before I kissed it. This prevented its growth from being stunted through terror." Another hit.

The comic's misses tend to come when he gets wordy, as in a long story about a common house fly on the wall at Harvard Medical School that ends up getting a degree. What does this have to do with running for president? Not much, and the humor ends long before the story does.

Those who love W.C. Fields will find enough pleasure here to make reading the book worthwhile. Others should simply avoid it.

An international language

English has become an international language in two different ways. First, people almost everywhere in the world learn English in school even if it is not spoken in their homes. Whether it's for business, for enjoying western movies, websites, books, etc., or simply for speaking with American tourists, it makes sense to learn English wherever one lives.

Recently I stayed in a home where several young men from Nepal were living while attending college in Ohio. In conversing with each other they always spoke their native language, but they could switch to English very easily whenever I stepped into the room. I, on the other hand, know English and only English.

I have known visitors from China, Nigeria, South Korea and other countries who spoke my language as well as I did, often without much of an accent. That's because English is an international language. English speakers can visit almost anywhere in the world and find someone who understands what they are saying.

English is international in another way, as well. The language readily welcomes new words from anywhere. While French is a language that discourages acceptance of foreign words, English readily accepts foreign words and is enriched by them.

Consider the origin of several words so common that we might think of them as being English from the start: rocket (Italian), rapids (Canadian French), punch (Hindi), boss (Dutch), emotion (French), tycoon (Japanese), robot (Czech).

The reason foreign words sound English when English speakers say them is that while we may accept foreign words, we do not, as a rule, accept foreign pronunciations. We may accept ukulele from the Hawaiian language, but that doesn't mean we say it the same way native Hawaiians say it. We turned it into an English word.

By contrast, when an English word is adopted into many other languages, it is often pronounced as an English speaker would say it. Thus, it can be surprising to listen to a German radio station, for example, and to suddenly hear English words, said as an American might say them, inserted into otherwise German sentences.

When other languages sometimes adopt English words, they often take them pronunciation and all. English speakers, on the other, welcome words from anywhere, but then we make them our own.

Nothing respectable

I read in preference to almost every other activity, though I didn't read anything respectable.

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

Jane Smiley

Like so many girls of her generation, Jane Smiley enjoyed reading the adventures of the Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew, as she describes it now, not "anything respectable." Nevertheless she matured into one of America's most respected and versatile novelists, as well as the author of 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, a 500-plus page book that analyzes 101 major novels, none of them featuring Nancy Drew or the Bobbsey Twins.

I guess one could consider today's brief essay as a continuation of the one I posted a few days ago, "Too many or too few?" At that time I considered the question of whether low-brow books drive out the high-brow ones. In Jane Smiley's case, that was obviously not true.

And I don't think it's true for young readers in general. Anything they read with pleasure, whether it's Nancy Drew mysteries or comic books, encourages the habit of reading. Perhaps they will transition one day from Nancy Drew to Harlequin romances, and that's OK. At least they are still reading. Some of these avid young readers, however, will transition to Jane Austen and George Eliot. What's important for the young is developing the reading habit, an even more challenging goal in an age of smart phones and social media.

My granddaughter, who recently turned 24, always has several books going at once, just like her grandpa. She was overjoyed when I gave her a gift card to buy more books. She is proof that even in today's world it is still possible to create avid readers, not unlike Jane Smiley.

Fake news

I loved The Onion once upon a time. Then I found the Babylon Bee, which  had sharper, funnier satirical headlines and was more consistent with my own worldview.

The other day in Greensburg, Pa., I found the first copy of The Onion I had seen in years, and I bought it to see how it stacked up in 2025.

All satire, including the Bee, has hits and misses, and much of this depends upon the individual. Some things just strike some people as funny, but not other people. This issue of The Onion had a few hits, though not many in my opinion.

On the front page, I liked the story headlined "Trump Imposes 25% Tariff On Chinese-Made Trump Products." Also funny were a couple of teasers for stories not actually in the fake newspaper: "Trump Writes Netanyahu Strongly Worded Check" and "Grandma Recalls Wild Teenage Year Before She Met Grandpa."

Inside there is a mostly dull graphic called Alligator Alcatraz By the Numbers that has one redeeming gag: "3 — Average outfit changes per Kristi Noem photo op." To be funny, satire should be exaggerated reality. Too much exaggeration and it's not funny. Not enough reality and it's not funny. This gag hits the mark perfectly.

By contrast, there is a graphic on the opposite page headlined "CDC Figures It Easier To Start Tracking People Without Measles." Here we have too much exaggeration and not enough reality. Back in the Covid-19 days, a similar map might have actually been amusing.

Most of the rest of this issue of The Onion has a similar imbalance and thus fails to tickle my funny bone.

The Babylon Bee has its own share of failures, too, and I read very few of their fake news stories because they fail to consistently amuse. Their headlines, however, are usually first-rate. Consider some recent examples:

"Entire American University System Officially Designated A Terrorist Organization."

"Millions Of Christian Extremists Gather To Pray For Those Who Want To Kill Them."

"Navy Recruitment Soars After Going Back To Blowing Up Pirates."

"Trump Invites Doubting Democrats To Touch The Hole In His Ear." (That may be a bit sacrilegious, but it's still funny.

"Chuck Schumer Said He's Never Felt In Danger Walking In DC And Neither Have His Ten Bodyguards."

"CNN: Charlie Kirk Memorial 'Mostly Hateful'"

The right dose of exaggeration combined with the right dose of reality. Now that's funny.

Too many or too few?

Is a multitude of books a good thing or a bad thing?

John Steinbeck

"I guess there are never enough books," John Steinbeck said.

On the other hand, Voltaire said, "The multitude of books is making us ignorant."

So which view is the correct one? I tend to agree with both.

I have never thought I owned too many books, even when they were in multiple stacks in the attic of my Ohio home — or now when they fill a storage unit so that I can barely enter. I just received a check for more than $1,400 from the sale of several first editions. I can't help viewing this windfall as an excuse to go book shopping.

Yet Voltaire has a point, too. When there are so many books, it becomes difficult to focus on the best ones. I am presently reading a thrilling C.J. Box novel. I enjoy his books, but I could intsead be rereading something by Steinbeck, which might be more edifying. Most of us choose mysteries or thrillers or romances over serious novels and poetry and challenging nonfiction most of the time. Is that making us ignorant?

At one time most people had very few books in their homes. And these were mostly books of high quality — the Bible, perhaps something by Dickens or something by Milton or something by Shakespeare. These were read over and over again. Then came the so-called penny dreadfuls and then cheap paperbacks, and the world of literature changed. Did it change for the better? I think so, but then again, maybe not.

Cold cases

In mysteries, old murders can help solve new murders and new murders can help solve old ones. Both are true in Peter Robinson’s 2023 Alan Banks novel, Standing in the Shadows.

Two stories, nearly 40 years apart, come together. In 1980, a student radical is found murdered, and her former boyfriend, Nick, is a prime suspect. Nick, who narrates this part of the tale, suspects Mark, Alice’s new boyfriend, but he has disappeared, and the police show no interest in finding him. And soon they lose interest in Nick, as well, and even in the case itself. What's going on?

In 2019, an archaeologist digging for Roman ruins finds a skeleton in a field, clearly just a few years old. Identifying the victim proves difficult, but gradually it is found to be the remains of a nattily dressed underworld figure.

How these two very different unsolved cases tie together makes for an interesting entry in this top-rate British police series.

Mysterious flights

The migration of birds has long been one of the great mysteries of nature. In Long Hops, Mark Denny adds to the mystery even as he tries his best to solve it.

Not that Denny fails in his task. Rather he points out so many variables in bird migration that simple solutions do not suffice.

We normally think of birds flying south for the winter and north for summer, at least in the northern hemisphere. Yet some birds migrate east-west. Others go up and down — up the mountain in warm weather, down again when it turns cooler. Robins have been known to change direction in mid-migration as temperatures change.

Blue grouses can’t fly. They migrate on foot.

Some birds migrate by sight, following coastlines or other markers. Others migrate by smell or by infrasound. Some follow their favorite foods. Others find their way by the stars. Others by internal compasses. Some seem to have been hatched with the knowledge of where they are supposed to be at a certain time of year.

As his title suggests, Denny is primarily interested in birds that travel long distances, sometimes thousands  of miles. He lives in Hawaii, and birds that migrate to and from there must fly a long way without stopping to rest or to refuel. He estimates that a high percentage of birds die simply because they lack the energy for such distances.

Denny’s book, published in 2016, is probably too basic for experts in this field, yet often too technical for us amateurs. There is enough here, however, for anyone with even the slightest interest in bird migration to find fascinating. And mysterious.

Mellowing period

In the book business you can usually reckon that it takes at least ten years for work of any really subtle quality to become widely known. That is not as regrettable as you might imagine: ten years is a fair mellowing period, and strong work does not easily evaporate.

Christopher Morley, John Mistletoe

Christopher Morley

Christopher Morley points out that it took several years for the quality of Emily Dickinson's poems to be recognized and appreciated. The same is true of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and a number of other works of literature. He calls this a "mellowing period," the time it takes for the cream to rise to the top.

When I notice how quickly books, even excellent books, disappear from Barnes & Noble shelves, I find it difficult to be as optimistic as Morley. How can quality books be rediscovered a few years from now if they cannot be found? And nowadays used book stores are disappearing as quickly as independent bookstores.

Yet examine those same Barnes & Noble shelves and one can find many books published a number of years ago and yet still in print. One can still find new editions of novels by James Michener, Ken Kesey and Jacqueline Susann, for example, decades after they were first published. But are such books still in print because of their quality or their popularity? The best books are not necessarily the bestsellers, and publishers are mostly interested in making money.

At one time literary critics and literature professors played an important role in rediscovering quality literature. They wrote books about forgotten books and writers, bringing them back into the public's attention. They lectured on these books in college classes, and if one must read a book for a class, one assumes it must be a quality book. And thus its stature rises.

At present, however, the author of a book — sex, race, sexual preference — can be more important than literary quality. It can be a challenge these days even for white heterosexual men to get a book published, let alone for it to receive literary attention.

And then there is the issue of quantity, as well as quality. This has always been a problem, I suspect. My view is that there are probably more fine books written than can be fully appreciated, mellowing period or no mellowing period. Just as only so many movies and so many actors can be nominated for Academy Awards, only so many works of literature can gain wide acceptance and appreciation over time.

Many fine books and poems are likely to always be ignored or forgotten. There is room at the top only for the fortunate few.

The octopus detective

Can an octopus be a detective? Well, he can in Shelby Van Pelt's wonderful first novel Remarkably Bright Creatures (2022).

Marcellus is an octopus in an aquarium in a relatively small town in the state of Washington. He is nearing the end of his four-year life span, and he is smart enough to know it. He is also smart enough to read English, to identify people by their fingerprints on the glass of his tank, to escape each night to consume seafood in other tanks and even to have a hidden coin collection.

Marcellus is a part-time narrator, as well, but mostly the novel is about Tova, a 70-year-old woman who cleans the Sowell Bay Aquarium each night, and Cameron, a 30-year-old man who leads an aimless life until he starts working there, too.

Tova still mourns the recent loss of her dear husband, as well as the death of her teenage son at sea 30 years before. Yes, those 30 years are significant. Marcellus is the one who recognizes that Tova and Cameron are related somehow. One thing he can't do is speak, so how can he communicate what he knows to these two hapless humans? And can he do it before his own rapidly approaching death?

Van Pelt makes us believe this fantasy. She fills her novel with pleasures and surprises, strong characters and an octopus to love.

Dialogue versus monologue

Dialogue, then, is the basic form of human speech — and monologue, in which one speaker is silent for a very long time, exists only in special cases such as theatrical performances, prayers, and ceremonial speeches.

Peter Farb, Word Play

Peter Farb never met my father or a guy I used to work with or any number of other people I've known who can't seem to stop talking. I saw an old man in a restaurant one day who wouldn't pause his monologue long enough for his server to break away and attend to other diners.

Ideally dialogue is the basic form of human speech, yet monologues are found in more than just stage plays, literary works, speeches and prayer. (Actually, prayer is ideally supposed to be a dialogue. Most people just don't do it very well.) So many individuals enjoy the sound of their own voices. They have their stories to tell and insist that others listen to them, even if they have heard them before. So many of us just don't know when to shut up. Listening is the part of conversation most often ignored. Even when we seem to be listening, we may actually just be waiting for a chance to launch into our own monologue.

Tom Hanks in Cast Away

The best conversations are, of course, dialogues. And dialogue is often the best part of a novel, at least when the author is kind enough to remind us frequently who it is who is talking. Movies without much dialogue are possible — I am thinking of Robert Redford';s Alone and Tom Hanks's Cast Away. Yet in most movies, as in most plays and TV shows, things start to get interesting when people talk to each other.

And so it is in life. Most of us need somebody to talk with, at least once in awhile. Those monologues we recite when we are alone just aren't the same.

Wartime murder

The social dislocation and the emotional toll of war increased deadly violence in the family and among strangers, while the bomb-scarred landscape helped to hide the victims.

Amy Helen Bell, Under Cover of Darkness

As if the Germans didn't kill enough Londoners during World War II — with the Blitz and later the V-1 and V-2 missile attacks — the city's residents seemed driven to kill each other during this period, as well. Amy Helen Bell tells us about it in her 2024 book Under Cover of Darkness: Murders in Blackout London.

Before the war, murders in London averaged between 250 and 300 a year. The murder rate rose throughout the war, climbing to a high of 492 murders in 1945, the last year of the war. And because the bombing left behind so many bodies, there is no telling how many other murders went undetected.

Some of the most tragic cases detailed by Bell were the result of the fear of a German invasion. A nanny killed the child in her care and herself to keep the girl out of the hands of the Nazis. A mother killed her beloved daughter for similar reasons.

Other murders were committed by soldiers stationed in London. Their victims were usually women.

Abortion was illegal, yet not uncommon during this period. Some murder cases involved abortion in one way or another. Women, as well as babies, often became statistics in suspicious-death cases.

People of other races came to the city during the war, and some murders were racially motivated.

Bell tells us about two serial killers operating in London. In one of these cases, an innocent man probably went to the gallows for a murder committed by someone else.

And then there were the domestic crimes, usually husbands killing wives, that are all too common even in peacetime.

Bell observes that in most crime reporting, the focus usually falls more on the killers than their victims. She tries to reverse that spotlight as much as possible in her book, telling us as much as she can about the victims. Yet this is not always possible, for the killers are the ones who are thoroughly investigated and who go to trial, while victims often leave little behind in the public record.

Wandering minds

Is a wandering mind a good thing or a bad thing? It depends.

When our minds wandered when we were in school it was a bad thing, or at least it seemed that way. That moment seemed to be when your teacher was most likely to ask you a question. When our minds wander at work, we could lose some time, lose a customer or even, as in my father's case, lose a finger.

I know when my mind is wandering in church because that is when I am most likely to start yawning. Yet sometimes during a sermon my mind turns to a sermon I might preach on that same topic, and because I do sometimes preach sermons, this is perhaps not all bad.

The worst time for mind-wandering, it seems to me, is when one is trying to sleep. Sometimes I awaken at 3 a.m. and cannot get back to sleep because my mind will not relax. It floats from one topic to another — things I've done, things I need to do and fantasies about things I wish would happen. Yet sometimes during these wanderings I think of something I need to do but would have otherwise probably forgotten. So even here, a wandering mind can sometimes be beneficial.

As a part-time writer, I find a wandering mind vital to what I do. So many of my best ideas come unbidden, while my mind is straying from one topic to another. Great thoughts come to me while driving or while taking a shower when I didn't even realize I was thinking about what those ideas pertained to.

I suspect that many of the best inventions, most original business ideas, best lines of poetry, best novel plots, etc., have been the result of a wandering mind.

Unreturned books

McKinney Hubbard

Everything comes to him who waits, except a loaned book.

McKinney Hubbard

Public libraries stamp their name on every book they loan out, as well as the date when it is due back. They know the names of the lenders and where to find them. Yet even they often don't get their books back. Try to walk out of a library with a book you failed to check out properly and alarms will likely go off.

If libraries with their various levels of security have difficulty keeping track of all their books, it is certainly no easier for individuals to ever see their books again after letting friends or acquaintances borrow them. There are many reasons for this:

1. People often have difficulty finishing books, however much they want to. They put them aside to get back to later, and days turn into months and into years.

2. Books can get lost. We put books on top of books. We move. We put clutter away when company comes, then fail to put things back where they were.

3. As time passes, we forgot who actually owns a particular book. Is this mine or did I borrow it from somebody? If I borrowed it, from whom?

4. After a long period of time, it can be embarrassing to return a borrowed item. It calls attention to the failure to return it promptly. Maybe the owner has forgotten all about it. Or at least we may hope.

5. Sometimes those who borrow books like them so much they simply don't want to give them back.

The death of a critic

British mystery writer Anthony Horowitz became more successful than ever when he started making himself a main character in his novels. In The Twist of a Knife (2022) he makes himself the prime suspect.

While Horowitz may be a main character, he is not the main character. That would be Daniel Hawthorne, a former police officer who now gives police officers fits by being smarter than them. The author plays the hapless Watson to Hawthorne's Sherlock.

The idea of the partnership is for Hawthorne to solve perplexing murder cases while Horowitz observes and then writes books about them. The two have parted ways at the beginning of this story, Hawthorne being a difficult man to get along with. But when Horowitz writes a play and when a severe drama critic is then murdered with his dagger after opening night, he begs Hawthorne for help.

The evidence against Horowitz is substantial. His fingerprints are on the murder weapon. One of his hairs is found at the scene. And so on.

The novel becomes more Agatha Christie than Sherlock Holmes, complete with a final scene where all the suspects, plus the investigating officers, are present while Hawthorne makes the great reveal.

This is an engaging murder mystery, one of the best in the series.

Re-creating hope

In his book Wonderworks, Angus Fletcher recalls what Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote about poetic language, how it "rearranges usual speech in order 'to re-create.'" Put another way, poets force us to stop and think.

Fletcher uses the example of a poet writing "a flower blue" instead of the more normal "a blue flower." Merely by rearranging words, the poet makes us pause a split second to picture that "flower blue" in our minds.

Emily Dickinson

Lately I have been thinking about Emily Dickinson's wonderful short poem about hope:

Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul,/And sings the tune without the words,/And never stops at all.

She might have written, "Hope is like a bird," but "the thing with feathers" stops us in our tracks. It is what most people remember about this poem.

Dickinson changed the way we think about hope. Birds don't normally come when you call them. They perch where they will. And this bird flies into our soul, each of our souls, perches and stays there. The tune without the words suggests something indefinite. We don't know precisely even what we are hoping for. We simply hear the tune within us that lifts our spirits whatever our circumstances might be.

Emily Dickinson re-created the way many people think about hope. It is not something we can manufacture. "Be positive," we tell each other in vain. Instead hope is just something that flies in and stays there, always singing, always inspiring us to keep going.

The meaning of motions

Who knew there could be so many different gestures with so many different meanings? Francois Caradec enlightens us in his 2005 book Dictionary of Gestures (translated into English in 2018).

Caradec's book is more than 300 pages long, usually with three to five gestures per page. So that's a lot of gestures from around the world, many of them with multiple meanings.

He includes obscene gestures, and there are more of them than you might think, and childhood gestures, and everything in between

Many of these are motions you might not even think of as gestures, such as arm wrestling and playing footsie under the table. Even applause is a gesture that needs explaining in this book.

Most gestures are illustrated, and the drawings often indicate the sex, the age or the nationality of the person most likely to use the gesture. Literary quotations accompany many of the entries.

To make it easier to find the gesture one is looking for, Caradec divides his book into chapters according to the body parts involved in the gesture. Thus, there is a chapter for gestures involving the armpits, the fist, the tongue, teeth, the neck and each finger, as well as every other part of the body.

Because gestures can mean different things in different parts of the world, one needs to be careful. Caradec tells us that American soldiers killed multiple Iraqis who did not stop after being given the halt gesture. It turned out that in the Middle East a raised hand, palm out, is a sign of greeting.

Where ideas are born

Norman Cousins

Norman Cousins once said, "A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life."

Many people may think just the opposite, that a library, whether large or small, is something more like a cemetery where old ideas, old history and old stories are laid to rest. The future, to them, lies elsewhere. Libraries represent the past.

I often think back to high school. Why did our teachers insist that we have a certain number of references for our reports and essays? This was a nuisance to so many students, who preferred to find one good source, usually World Book encyclopedia in my day, and then paraphrase it.

I did not understand it at the time, but I came to realize that different ideas from different sources can produce something new and original when melded together in the mind of an original thinker.

It was much the same when I became a newspaper reporter. A news story with just one source — or worse, from a press release — tended to be weak and uninteresting. But when there were multiple sources, some from each side of an issue, the story had life and originality. It became something new.

The library is a storehouse of ideas, observations, stories and records that, as Cousins suggests, gives birth to something new. The best nonfiction books often have many pages of references at the back. I pulled David McCullough's 1776 off my shelf. It has more than 70 pages of source notes and bibliography. To produce his original book, he clearly spent hours upon hours in various libraries. History came alive, thanks to libraries.

Shopping list

Most of us who go shopping, especially for food, have shopping lists. Otherwise we are certain to forget something we need. I seem able to remember two items, but not three or more. I need a list even when I shop for clothing.

On my list

And I also have a shopping list for books, but it is more than a sheet of paper. It is a small notebook that can fit easily into my shirt pocket, one reason I prefer shirts with pockets.

Whenever I see a book or hear about a book or read a review of a book that interests me, I write the title and author down in my notebook. Sometimes I see a clothbound book in a bookstore that looks like something I might want to read. I enter it into my notebook while waiting for the paperback to come out.

For fiction, I list the books alphabetically by author. Thus there is an A list, a B list and so on. I usually put all nonfiction in one long list.

When I buy a book, I cross it off the list. Sometimes, after finding a book in a store, I decide I don't really want it after all. I cross it off my list. There are some books I never find, or I must resort to Amazon.

On my H list right now I have Close to Death by Anthony Horowitz, Burn by Peter Heller and The Life Impossible by Matt Haig. Many other titles have been crossed out. Every title on my E list now has a line through it. Obviously I buy a lot of books.

Serial books about serial killers

Sometimes one serial killer is not enough, or so Alex Grecian seems to think in The Harvest Man (2015) and his other novels

Jack the Ripper remains at large in London in 1890, but he has rivals who also enjoy cutting people up. One of these is Alan Ridgeway, an obvious copycat. Another is called the Harvest Man, an original. He is a small man who thinks himself still a child, and he is looking for his parents. When he finds couples who look something like his parents, he hides in their attics, then attacks at night, rearranging their faces with his knife before killing them.

Scotland Yard has a Murder Squad assigned to tracking down these killers, and the quest occupies a series of novels. In this one, Inspector Walter Day  is still recovering from injuries sustained through torture in The Devil's Workshop. He has a wife and two small daughters he needs to protect while still trying to find the killers. Nevil Hammersmith is a former cop who still acts like one, determined to track down Jack even without a badge. Dr. Kingsley is the coroner who has more work than he can handle in these books. Fiona is Kingsley's daughter, who loves Hammersmith even though he seems too preoccupied to notice.

I tend to prefer novels that have both a beginning and an end, rather than those with stories that, like those serial killers, just keep going and going and going.

Accountability

He'd made a mistake and she could choose to dissect and examine every particle of his actions, or she could try to move on.

Phaedra Patrick, The Little Italian Hotel

The Little Italian Hotel (2023) is the first novel by British author Phaedra Patrick that I've read that I have not enjoyed, and the line above helps explain why. It is all the husband's fault.

Adrian, Ginny's husband, does make a mistake, certainly. He tells her early in the novel that he is leaving her after 25 years of marriage. "There are cracks in our marriage and they are getting wider," he says. He has joined a dating site.

To celebrate their 25th anniversary, Ginny, who makes a career giving advice on a radio show, has scheduled a holiday in Italy without discussing the trip with her husband beforehand. The money is nonrefundable.

Such controlling behavior suggests the kind of widening cracks Adrian refers to. Yet her actions are never mentioned again in the novel. Everything is his fault, which may satisfy Patrick's female readers, but to this male reader it all seems a bit unfair, especially after Adrian returns to Ginny and apologizes and after she has developed a passion for her Italian hotel keeper. As far as we know, he has never so much as kissed another woman, but we witness her kissing another man. She, of course, never apologizes.

The gist of the novel is that Ginny, because the trip in nonrefundable, goes to Italy without her husband, inviting along listeners to her program who have also suffered heartbreak — one who has lost a daughter, one who is losing a mother to dementia, one who has lost a dog and one who knows he is dying. The real question, of course, is not whether Ginny can help the others feel more positive about their own situations, but whether she can patch up her own life.

Female readers may read Patrick's conclusion differently than I did.

Behind Heller's novel

Novels, especially first novels, are often as much fact as fiction, and that was true of one of the best novels to come out of World War II — Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Patricia Chapman Meder tells us about it in The True Story of Catch-22 (2012).

Meder is the daughter of Willis F. Chapman, the model for Colonel Cathcart in Heller's novel. This relationship gave her an inside connection with many surviving veterans of the 340th Bomb Group, in which Heller served as a bombardier. Heller, who died in 1999, contributed little to this book other than quotations from his novel, but many of those who served with him in Italy were able to tell their version of events, describing where the novel and the truth parted company.

The term catch-22 was an invention — Heller originally called it catch-18 — but the idea behind it was real. The number of bombing missions required before a flier could be sent home kept increasing as the war went on because of the need for veteran fliers. The only way to avoid these dangerous missions was to claim insanity, which was proof you were not insane. That was the catch.

Heller, the model for Yossarian in the novel, only wanted to survive each mission, his former mates recalled. Whether his bombs actually hit their targets did not matter much to him.

In the end, Meder's book is more military history than literary history. Those with an interest in both will no doubt appreciate it more than those interested in just one or the other.

Authors in person

Just about everyone who gets an opportunity to meet with an author in person ends up feeling mildly let down, and in some cases, grievously disappointed.

Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks

Heroes can disappoint us. Writers who spend hours crafting perfect sentences may not be nearly as engaging in person. I understand what Neal Stephenson is saying above. I just don't agree with him.

I have met and spoken with many authors over the years as a book reviewer and as a frequent attendee at literary events, and for the most part, they have impressed me, or at least not disappointed me. Most of them seemed like ordinary people, and I liked that. It was reassuring somehow. I don't want my heroes to be superheroes.

Novelist Ann Patchett has appeared at a couple of events I have attended. She was the key speaker both at an event at Kenyon College in Ohio and another at Eckerd College in Florida. I found her bubbly and personable and intelligent. Whether giving a prepared speech or answering questions, she had something interesting to say.

Jess Walter

Jess Walter is an introverted former journalist, just like me.

Laura Lippman is another former journalist who loves reading books, again just like me.

Mark Winegardner grew up in northwestern Ohio, also just like me. His high school was one of my high school's rivals.

I enjoyed talking with Alan Hlad, Cathie Pelletier, Tony D'Souza, Dandi Daley Mackall, Christopher Moore (a phone interview), Walter Tevis, Jack Mathews, Les Roberts, Donald Ray Pollock, Carla Buckley, Thrity Umbrigar and others.

I was impressed listening to talks by Richard Russo, Russell Banks, Alexander McCall Smith, David McCullough, Stewart O'Nan, P.J. O'Rourke, Susan Isaacs, Lee Smith, Amor Towles and others.

I can't think of any author who actually disappointed me in person. Perhaps if you don't put authors on a pedestal when you read their books, you will be less likely to be disappointed when you meet them in person.

Something in common

The Girl by the Bridge (2018) is another in a series of fine mystery novels by the Icelandic author Arnaldur Indridason.

There are three different mysteries from three different periods that would appear unconnected, yet have common threads.

In the present there is the drug death of a young woman who had been involved in smuggling drugs. Was she murdered? Was it accidental? Was it suicide? Danni has lived with her grandparents, who seemed to have taken excellent care of her. So why had she hated them?

The novel's title refers to a girl whose body had been found near a bridge years earlier. Her doll was found nearby. Her death was called accidental at the time, and records tell very little. Konrad, a former cop, wonders if she might have been murdered. Meanwhile, Danni's grandparents ask him to look into the death of their granddaughter.

At the same time Konrad has his own personal mystery that has bothered him since his youth. What kind of man was his father? Who had murdered him so many years ago? And why?

Indridason shifts his focus from one case to another and back again, gradually revealing what all three have in common.

American readers will be challenged by many of the names in the novel. This is not a book you will probably want to read aloud to somebody else. When you read this fine story to yourself, however, you are allowed to skim over the names.

In pursuit of a killer

Paulette Jiles has become one of our best writers of western fiction, and she does it again in Chenneville (2023).

The plot seems simple enough, familiar to anyone who has watched many 1950s western movies. A Union officer comes out of a coma after the close of the Civil War and struggles to regain his memory. Recovery is slow, but gradually he regains his health, then heads back to his home near St. Louis. There he learns that his sister, her husband and child have been murdered by a man named Dodd. The rest of the novel tells of his long pursuit of Dodd into Texas. He aims to kill Dodd, whatever the consequences.

Yet Jiles throws in enough complications to make this simple plot interesting, even if not always unpredictable.

It's winter, and John Chenneville must struggle through the frigid temperatures and deep snow. Dodd rides horses until they wear out, then gets another. Chenneville is kinder to his animals, and thus slower. Even so, he sometimes gets ahead of Dodd. Along the way he picks up a dog with puppies. He gets very sick. A telegraph operator whom he meets later gets murdered by Dodd after he leaves, but Chenneville becomes the prime suspect. A U.S. marshal pursues him. Thus he is wanted for murder before he has a chance to commit one.

And then the best complication of all — Chenneville meets and falls in love with a female telegraph operator in Marshall, Texas. Can she dissuade him from his vow to avenge his sister by becoming a murderer? Or will she help him?

The author's News or the World was turned into a Tom Hanks movie. This novel could be turned into another fine film. Where's Randolph Scott when you need him?

Required reading

A front-page headline in The Wall Street Journal recently read, "Books in English Class Shift Little in Decades." In other words, high school students today are mostly reading the same assigned books that their parents read.

I find this surprising. I had assumed that with feminism and wokeness dominating schools of education in recent years that high school English curriculums would now be mostly books written by women, people of color and homosexuals. Yet the article says, "All of the authors of the top 10 books are white, eight men and two women."

This probably has much to do with English teachers, administrators and school board members favoring the books they themselves read in high school. Sticking with the tried and true is usually easier and safer.

Literature favored in many high schools often includes The Great Gatsby, The Crucible, Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird and Hamlet.

The article concludes with a comment by an Illinois teacher, "I more than anything want to create a lifelong reader."

I think that should be the goal of all English teachers. Unfortunately much required reading may accomplish just the opposite. How many students forced to read Hamlet will then volunteer to read Macbeth? Probably not many. They might even avoid Shakespeare for the rest of their lives.  To Kill a Mockingbird might have a better success rate.

The ideal assigned reading for high school students should possess the following qualities:

1. It should be relatively short. Short books like Of Mice and Men are less intimidating. Students are constantly distracted by friends, activities, video games and social media. Short books are more likely to be actually read in full.

2. It should be meaningful. That is, it must bring out issues that stimulate the mind and make students want to talk about them in class.  It need not be a book about a contemporary teenager, but that might help.

3. It should be wholesome. I am talking about today's standards, not those of 50 years ago. Even so, there must be standards. Why invite controversy from parents?  A novel does not need graphic sex and four-letter words to be profound and engaging.

4. It should be interesting, even exciting. People read books because they enjoy them. When assigned a book that makes a reader want to keep turning the pages to discover what happens next, a student will be more likely to finish reading that book and perhaps even want to find another book just like it.

In that case, mission accomplished.