A bit part

Now he was a stranger, the old guy with the dog, relegated to a bit part, his only lines throwaways.

Steward O'Nan, Henry, Himself

Stewart O'Nan has written a series of fine novels about the Maxwells, an upper-middle-class Pittsburgh family. Emily got her turn in Emily, Alone. The author steps back in time to focus on her husband Henry in Henry, Himself (2019).

The novel covers the year in which Henry turns 75, and the end of the book suggests it could be his last birthday. Henry played his part well throughout his life. As a successful engineer, he provided comfortably for his family — a son and a daughter — and did everything a good husband and father is expected to do. Now well into retirement, he finds himself the man described in the line quoted above — an old guy relegated to a bit part with throwaway lines. (As an old man myself, I can tell you that this is how many old men feel.)

Henry's purpose in life now seems mostly just to do whatever Emily tells him to do. Oh, he plays golf with three friends and watches the Pirates play on television every night, but even these pleasures have become dull routines. Often he lives in memories, especially his sweet secret memory of a society girl named Sloan he knew before Emily.

O'Nan writes in brief chapters, some just a paragraph or two long. Each is something of a short story, each advancing the story yet each a story in itself. We find Henry tending his yard, interacting with grandchildren, running errands, paying bills and doing other ordinary things. This may sound a bit dull, and perhaps it would be to many readers who are not also old guys now relegated to bit parts.

Book ownership

Charles Lamb

A book reads the better, which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of the blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.

Charles Lamb

A book reads the better which is our own ... (I don't know why Charles Lamb put that comma in there. It seems unnecessary to me.)

I have long felt this way. I rarely visit the public library these days because I no longer listen to recorded books, and they were just about the only thing I have borrowed from libraries for many years. Once I could afford to buy my own books I mostly stopped borrowing library books. I am a condo librarian and often donate books to the cause, yet I have rarely borrowed a book from this collection.

For many years I received books for review from publishers, and these became my books. I didn't have to give them back, though I eventually gave most of them away.

I dislike borrowing books from friends.

Like Lamb, I much prefer reading my own books. There is no deadline for finishing them, or even for starting them. Usually books sit on my shelves for years waiting their turn. I seem to know when it comes time to read them.

After I have read them — and as Lamb observes, they are often stained with tea and various food particles if I read them at mealtimes — I put the best of them back on my shelves or, nowadays, in a box in my storage unit. I like looking at them and knowing they are there in case I ever need to refer to them or, in some cases, read them a second or third time.

The best books in the world, as far as I am concerned, are those that belong to me.

Around and around the world

"It seems," said the woman, "that the world you travel through is not the same world we travel through."

Douglas Westerbeke, A Short Walk Through a Wide World

Can you imagine a woman who cannot stay in one place for more than three days without becoming seriously ill and so spends her life traveling, mostly on foot, around the world again and again? Well, Douglas Westerbeke can, and the result is his engaging fantasy, A Short Walk Through a Wide World (2024).

It is 1895 in Paris when this strange affliction first strikes nine-year-old Aubry Tourvel. Eventually she must abandon her mother and keep walking. She fashions a spear, disguised as a walking stick, with which she learns to kill her own food. She explores different cultures and gets to know countless people, however briefly. Lovers come and go. Friends come and go. Or rather, they come and she goes. She must keep moving to stay alive.

Marta, a journalist who wants to write about Aubry, keeps up with her the longest. She becomes a close friend, but eventually she also must be left behind.

Aubry not only sees the world like no other person, she also experiences a world no other person gets to see. Often she finds shortcuts, such as through the Himalayas, in the form of libraries full of books that consist of drawings, not words. Eventually she adds her own story in pictures.

Fantasies often take us to other worlds. Westerbeke takes us through this world in surprising ways.

After Reichenbach

Sherlock Holmes has been fair game for numerous mystery writers over the years. Laurie R. King, for example, has written a popular series of novels featuring Holmes as an old man. What's different about Anthony Horowitz is that he has the sanction of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle estate to write his books.

One of these is Moriarty (2015), an exciting tale about what happens after that incident at Reichenbach Falls, where both Holmes and Moriarty are presumed to have died in their struggle. Inspector Athelney Jones of Scotland Yard (mentioned in the Holmes stories) meets Frederick Chase of the Pinkertons over a body, presumed to be Moriarty's, Chase is in pursuit of an American master criminal, Clarence Devereux, believed to have migrated to England to take over Moriarty's criminal empire. And Devereux is much more violent than Sherlock's foe ever was.

Jones, who has studied to make himself Holmes-like in his detective skills, teams with Chase in pursuit of Devereaux. They trace him to the American embassy in London, where because of diplomatic immunity he seems untouchable.

The struggle to stop Devereaux takes violent and unexpected turns, with the final surprise likely to shock most readers. Holmes himself does not appear in this inventive novel, but Holmes fans will not want to miss it anyway.

A writer or not?

If you talk, you are a talker. If you golf, you are a golfer. If you write, you are a writer.

Roy Peter Clark, Murder Your Darlings

Roy Peter Clark

I love what Roy Peter Clark says. "If you write, you are a writer." Yet I am not sure that I believe it.

Even when I wrote for a newspaper every day, I did not think of myself as a writer. I was a journalist. I was a newspaperman. I did not call myself a writer.

In retirement I continue to write almost every day. I post something on this blog three days a week. Often I blog about the act of writing. Otherwise I write lots of emails and a few letters. For the past couple of years I have been writing and preaching sermons on occasion. I write, but does that really make me a writer?

The problem, I think, is that the word suggests a certain level of professionalism. A novelist is a writer. Someone whose articles are printed in magazines is a writer. A blogger, on the other hand, is a blogger.

Can a portly middle-aged man who plays softball on weekends justifiably call himself an athlete? Should someone who plays Chopsticks on a piano be able to call himself a pianist? Can a woman who sometimes works on a friend's hair refer to herself as a hairdresser?

How we think of ourselves is one thing. I can easily be a writer in my own mind. The question is, how does one introduce oneself at parties? I would never tell a stranger that I am a writer, for that would give the wrong first impression. I am simply a retired journalist who still likes to write.

Like a wolf in the forest

It's rare to see a person with a book or magazine these days; it's like glimpsing a wolf in the forest.

Dwight Garner, The Upstairs Delicatessen

Dwight Garner

People apparently still read. Bookstores still have customers perusing their shelves. Book clubs remain popular. Magazines survive. And yet Dwight Garner is right: You rarely see anyone holding a book or a magazine. Instead they have their phones in their hands.

Medical offices and barbershops may still have a few magazines on hand, yet I rarely see anyone looking at them. Instead they are all looking at their phones.

In restaurants, virtually everyone, whether sitting alone or with someone else, is holding a phone in front of them.

I live about a mile from the Gulf of America, but it has been a long time since I have been to the beach, even to see a sunset. Yet I suspect that those reclining in the sun are mostly looking at their phones, not at one of those thick, spicy novels that used to be called "beach books."

I am proud that my granddaughter, like me, packs her books before packing her clothing when taking a trip. She, too, is a rarity in today's world. How many people have books with them on planes, even for long flights? How many take a book with them for a week at a cabin or a resort?

Some people do read e-books, to be sure. I applaud them. Yet somehow it is not quite the same.

Prefabricated phrases

Patricia T. O'Conner

Patricia T. O'Conner writes about prefabricated phrases in her book Words Fail Me. She doesn't like them, and neither do I.

A prefabricated phrase (her term) happens when certain modifiers predictably precede certain nouns. Take for example the phrase "foolish pride," which can be heard in any number of popular songs. Why can't they avoid the cliche and write something like "silly pride" once in awhile?

O'Conner lists many of the phrases she notices too often: oil-rich Kuwait, golf-ball-size hail, hastily summoned, seriously considered, sweeping change, measured response, overwhelming odds, viselike grip, narrow escape and knee-jerk reaction.

After George Floyd's unfortunate death several years, we saw or heard the phrase "systemic racism" everywhere. The phrase turned out to be more political than accurate, but people used it anyway, and many people still do.

O'Conner states the remedy for this kind of sloppy writing better than I could: "Modifiers should be fresh, alive, interesting, not predictable. So if a descriptive phrase springs to mind, preassembled and ready to use, put it back in the box."

Led by the spirit

The mystery in William Kent Krueger's Spirit Crossing (2024) is solved as much by the dead as by the living.

Young women have been disappearing in this area of Minnesota, but authorities concentrate mostly on the daughter of a prominent politician. That American Indian women have also disappeared doesn't interest them, even when it seems likely the disappearances may have the same explanation.

A little boy called Waaboo is attuned to the spirit world. He senses where dangers lie, and also where bodies lie. Soon he, too, becomes a target.

Waaboo's grandfather is Cork O'Connor, a retired lawman and the hero of Kruger's mystery series. He listens to the boy, even if the authorities don't. In fact, his entire family gets involved in the case, including a daughter, who has returned to Minnesota to die of a brain tumor.

If too many cooks spoil the broth, perhaps too many detectives can spoil a murder mystery. At any rate, this novel gets a bit confusing and is not as satisfying as some of Krueger's other books.

Reading positions

Hermione Lee

In his book The Upstairs Delicatessen, Dwight Garner quotes English biographer Hermione Lee as dividing reading into two kinds — vertical and horizontal.

This distinction could be taken literally. One refers to when we are upright, whether at a library table or in a comfortable chair at home. The second is mostly done in bed, but sometimes on a sofa or perhaps a recliner. In our youth we may have read while stretched out on the floor. I have done little horizontal reading in this sense. When I lie down, I usually fall asleep. Even David Baldacci can't keep me awake in bed for very long.  I prefer to read during daylight hours.

But Lee is referring to more than just body position with these terms. She defines vertical reading as "regulated, supervised, orderly, canonical and productive." Horizontal reading, meanwhile, is "unlicensed, private, leisurely, disreputable, promiscuous and anarchic."

Presumably all the adjectives need not apply to the same book at the same time. Reading can be productive without being supervised, private without being promiscuous.

Most of us would simply make a distinction between serious reading and leisure reading or, if we are still in school, between required reading and reading for fun. Many readers would probably prefer to tackle one of Lee's books while sitting upright, while saving a sexy thriller for after dark in their beds, so perhaps both understandings of the terms vertical and horizontal can apply at the same time.

Family complications

She couldn't follow all the lines out in every direction: all the people to whom she was by marriage mysteriously related.

Ann Patchett, Commonwealth

If a character in Ann Patchett's Commonwealth (2016) can't keep the members of her own family straight, pity the poor reader. But that is the point of this wonderful novel: Families are complicated.

That confused character is Franny, the novel's main character, if there is one. She is a baby at her own christening party when the novel opens, a mature woman well into her 50s when it ends at another family party. The chapters jump around from here to there, finally giving a picture of an American family as complicated as any of them.

At that christening party an uninvited guest named Albert Cousins shows up with a bottle of gin, a most unsuitable christening gift. Bert only wanted an excuse to get away from his own house and his own family on a Sunday afternoon. Soon other alcohol is brought to the party, guests drink too much and by the end Bert is kissing Beverly, Franny's beautiful mother, and an affair begins that leads to the break up of both families.

The six children from the two families often share time together because of custody arrangements. But then new marriages crumble, leading to more divorces, more stepparents and an ever more complicated family.

As if things weren't complicated enough, Franny, in her 20s, has an affair with a prominent novelist, Leo Possen, who is looking for an idea for his next book. Franny's family story becomes the plot for this novel, which is also called Commonwealth. The book complicates her family even more as members start reading it. Years later it is turned into a movie, making everything still worse.

Franny feels guilty for her unplanned role in bringing embarrassment to her own family, just as she is sorry for all the trouble that resulted from that kiss at her christening party. And yet she thinks, too, of all the good that resulted. So it goes with families. Bad marriages result in good children. Youthful indiscretions lead to mature wisdom. Negatives sometimes become positives, and vice versa.

Families are complicated.

Pluck in Portugal

If you have a taste for plucky heroines, World War II espionage and adventure stories that are (almost) G-rated, you will find what you want in Alan Hlad's The Book Spy (2023).

Maria Alves works wonders with microfilm at the New York Public Library when the war breaks out. She speaks Portuguese and thanks to her pluck manages to gain acceptance microfilming Axis publications in neutral Lisbon. She is told that she most definitely will not be a spy. If you've read the title, you know very well that this is not true.

In Lisbon, she falls in love with a bookstore owner, who supplies her with all the German books and magazines she can handle, but even so she becomes involved with a Swiss banker who works for the Germans. Soon she finds herself a double agent, spying on the Germans while supposedly spying on the British. She provides misinformation about the location of the D-Day invasion and even seriously contemplates trying to assassinate Hitler at a wedding she attends. Talk about pluck.

The novel seems a bit amateurish (not as good as Hlad's The Long Flight Home), but it should please many readers, especially girls in their early teens and old ladies.

Writing about food

Part autobiography and part Barlett's Familiar Quotations, The Upstairs Delicatessen (2023) is also Dwight Garner's tribute to his favorite things (not counting his wife, Cree) — literature and food.

Garner goes meal-by-meal through the day — breakfast, lunch and dinner — and tells us what various writers have had to say about these meals and the foods commonly eaten. He also has chapters on drinking and shopping for food. It turns out that food and drink are a favorite topic of writers great and not so great.

John Steinbeck writes in Travels with Charley about making coffee "shine" by dropping an egg white and the shell into the coffee pot. Garner tells of David Sedaris abandoning a lavish lunch to step outside and buy a hot dog from a vender. Charlotte Bronte wrote in a letter, "I have had a hideous dinner of some abominable, spiced-up mess, and it has exasperated me against the world at large." And you thought you once had a bad meal.

Garner shifts quickly from one reference to another. In a single paragraph about oysters, he quotes, or at least mentions, Vladimir Nabokov, Pat Conroy, Roy Blount Jr., Samuel Pepys, Padgett Powell, P.G. Wodehouse and Edward St. Aubyn. One marvels at his ability to accumulate these hundreds of references to food and drink. With a career as a book critic, of course, he has read a great deal and no doubt took many notes along the way.

Much of this book is fascinating. Much of it is deadly dull. But reading it is something like a buffet — you can take what you want and ignore the rest.

Heavy lifting

Whenever someone writes a mystery novel, the publisher is almost certain to ask if it is the first in a series. If not, the novel may be less likely to be published.

Publishers like series novels because readers like them. If you enjoy the first book in a series, you are more likely to buy the second and the third.

But why do readers like them. Shannon Reed explains it well in her book Why We Read: "But a series usually only asks us to do that heavy lifting at the beginning of the first book, and from then on we can simply wander."

By "heavy lifting" Reed refers to the process of becoming familiar with the major characters, the scene, the time period, etc. When one reads the second or third novel in a series, much of the mystery has already been solved — meaning the mystery of the framework of the story — and you can focus on just the mystery in that particular plot.

Any standalone novel or first novel in a series at first requires some effort on the part of the reader. What's going on? Who are these people? Why should I be interested? Just yesterday I started reading a novel and gave up on page 9. The novel began with a dream which made no sense. When the man woke up, the narrative still didn''t make sense. And I disliked both of the characters introduced so far, which I could tell from the dust jacket were the novel's main characters. That was more heavy lifting than I was willing to do, and I moved on to another novel.

One reason I do not read as many short stories as I would like is that each story in a collection requires that same heavy lifting. One must familiarize oneself all over again with new characters and new situations in each story. And let's face it, a story, like a journey, is more fun when you know where you are.

Murder? Who cares?

In the traditional mystery novel, the hero often feels compelled at the end to explain to other characters (and, of course, to readers) what really happened and what evidence led to the killer. In John Banville's intriguing 2024 novel The Drowned, however, the situation is reversed. It is the reader who wants desperately to explain everything to the hero.

The heroes — actually there are two of them — are too busy dealing with their own personal problems to give much thought to a possible murder. Quirke, the 1950s Dublin pathologist, still mourns the shooting death of his wife in a previous novel in the series. Detective Inspector Strafford is told by his wife that she wants a divorce and by Phoebe, Quirke's daughter, that she is pregnant by him. So who can worry much about a woman who disappears in the night in rural Ireland and may have drowned in the sea?

Even when the woman's body is found and Quirke discovers she has drowned in fresh water, not salt water, our investigators don't seem all that interested. Yet the novel's omniscient narrator tells readers exactly what happened, not only to this woman but to a woman murdered in a previous novel. Quirke and Strafford remain preoccupied with their own problems.

While fictional detectives, whether professional or amateur, who don't actually solve mysteries might seem disappointing, the fact is that for readers, too, their personal problems may seem more compelling than the murder.

Advantages of reading fiction

Fiction reading, often regarded as a mere leisure activity, has remarkable impacts on readers.

Walt Hickey, You Are What You Watch

There are those who seem to regard reading fiction as a kind of moral failure. Serious people read history, biography, science, politics or whatever might be found on the nonfiction shelves. If one must read fiction, it should be highbrow fiction, one of the classics, not mysteries, thrillers, romance novels, westerns or science fiction.

Walt Hickey

I have never believed this, and it was reassuring to read Walt Hickey defend reading fiction of all kinds, especially as his defense comes in a book mostly about watching movies and TV shows, You Are What You Watch.

Here are some of his arguments, rephrased in my own words:

• People often say that a particular book changed their life. Often these life-changing books are works of fiction.

• Studies find that reading fiction helps prevent cognitive decline as we age.

• Those who read fiction often make more money. (Of course it may be that intelligent people make more money, and intelligent people are more likely to read a novel once in awhile.)

• Reading fiction, perhaps even more than watching a movie or a television program, encourages a person to identify with other people, even with people completely unlike the reader. Ideally this will carry over into real life.

• Fiction helps clarify one's moral code. When we read a story, we want the good guys to win and the bad guys to lose.  We want couples to find true love. We want happily ever after.

How movies change us

We are changed by movies and television programs, as well as by other forms of popular entertainment, Walt Hickey shows in his 2023 book You Are What You Watch.

Sometimes the change is physical. Our blood really does curdle when we watch blood-curdling movies, he says. The composition of the air in theaters changes during exciting, suspenseful and funny scenes in films.

Changes can be different than what we might expect. Violent movies tend to reduce violent crime, not cause more of it, it has been found. For one thing, the young men who most enjoy these movies are spending their evenings watching them, rather than out in the streets and in bars getting into trouble. Plus, the violent scenes seem to satisfy their passion for violence at least temporarily.

What we see on screens also affects our interests. Fraternities and toga parties became more popular thanks to Animal House. Archery became more popular after Hunger Games.

Hickey gives us lots of graphs, charts and graphics of other kinds of graphics to make his book more interesting. Unfortunately he seems to have run out of prime content at about the halfway point. The second half of the book covers less pertinent topics such as a brief history of Hollywood movies and a brief history of professional wrestling.

One topic that Hickey might have covered, but doesn't, is how phones, texting and social media have changed human behavior. People don't seem to get together as much as they once did. Instead they stay home and communicate in impersonal ways. Young people tend to date strangers they find on online dating sites rather than people they work with or meet at social gatherings. Almost anyone now can potentially become a media star, whether on YouTube, OnlyFans or whatever. But perhaps all this is a book in itself.

Self-assigned reading

There are books you read because you want to, and other books you read because you think you should. As for the latter, I am not referring to assigned classroom reading. Most of us are beyond that stage of life. In previous posts over the past few weeks I have discussed required reading for book clubs and books one feels obligated to read because they were given to you by a friend. I am not here referring to those situations either.

Rather my topic is those books we want to have read but keep putting off actually reading. They are unusually long or challenging or serious or literary or old — whatever it is that makes us reluctant to actually open them when there is a thriller that offers more temptation.

I have never read The Great Gatsby, I am ashamed to say. Most college freshmen in my tear read this novel, but I was in Honors English and read Tender Is the Night instead. I have always felt I read the wrong Fitzgerald, yet have never corrected the error.

I haven't read any Shakespeare since I was in school. I rarely read any poetry, although I did read a couple of Robert Frost poems the other day. I have long wanted to tackle Thomas Wolfe. I have read Gilead, but there are so many other Marilynne Robinson novels I keep putting off. Such books are easier to purchase than to actually read, especially when time is limited and the competion for one's reading attention is so intense.

Shannon Reed

In her book Why We Read, Shannon Reed writes, "There have been so many times when I've so-called assigned myself a book because I felt I should read it and then ended up enjoying the writing itself, on its own merits." This shouldn't be surprising. Books become thought of as important, in most cases, because they are worth reading. They offer rewards, however challenging they may be. 

I have found this to be true for a number of Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens novels, as well as other classic books,  however intimidating they seemed at first. Of course, there are also intimidating books that don't hold one's interest at all once one has gotten up the courage to tackle them. But for us adults, when we assign ourselves a book, to use Reed's term, there's no penalty if we don't complete the assignment.

Mystery solved

Georges Simenon's 1965 novel Maigret's Patience is basically a continuation of Maigret Defends Himself (see "Maigret in trouble," July 24, 2023).

What the veteran Paris police officer is patient about is a series of jewel robberies that has been going on for years.The break comes with the murder of a wheelchair-bound suspected criminal, whom Maigret has, also patiently, kept under observation. Palmari may have been in a wheelchair, but Maigret suspected him of still being involved in criminal activity, perhaps even those robberies.

Interviews with the murdered man had been vital just weeks earlier, as told in the previous novel, when Maigret, against orders, investigated unfounded accusations of sexual misconduct against himself. There are many references to the earlier novel in this one.

This case is something like a locked room mystery. Aline, the young woman who cared for Palmari, had gone out, and both she and the building itself were under close police observation. Nobody has gone in or out. Other residents seem to have had no connection with either Palmari or Aline. The man had been killed with his own gun.

Maigret soon gets to the bottom of things, perhaps regretting his patience when a second body is discovered in the building.

All these years after they were written, Simenon's short mystery novels remain top-grade reading.

In or out

Jerry Seinfeld

Interested as I am in words and wordplay, one of my favorite comedy bits in Jerry Seinfeld's Is This Anything? has to do with peculiar idioms that seem to make sense until you stop to think about them.

He recalls that as a boy he lived in Brooklyn, but later his family lived on Long Island. Sometimes they went out to Jersey or down to the beach. Then he observes that we get on a train but in a cab. All this is much funnier when he says it, of course.

Seinfeld could have expanded on this. Why do we say "out west," but "back east?" This probably has to do with the fact that the East Coast was settled first, and pioneers literally went out west. Some of them returned back east. These usages have remained with us through the decades.

The phrases "up north" and "down south" probably have more to do with maps, where north is up and south is down.

Growing up in rural Ohio, when I heard someone say they were going "to Toledo" it suggested to me somewhere on the outskirts, such as the Westgate Shopping Center where my family often shopped. When I heard "into Toledo" it suggested the downtown area.

I have never understood the difference between uptown and downtown. Billy Joel had fun with this in his song Uptown Girl. Here the difference seems to be social status, upper class versus lower class. But when I was young, I referred to the center of the city when I used the phrase "downtown Toledo." The word uptown meant nothing to me at that time, and it doesn't mean much to me now.

Old routines, new laughs

The title of comedian Jerry Seinfeld's 2020 book asks the question Is This Anything? Sometimes, sadly, the answer is no.

Yet more often the reader will give a positive answer, especially when one can imagine Seinfeld himself delivering these lines. The question in the title, he explains, is what comedians ask each other when they develop new routines.

Seinfeld has kept all the routines he has written since he began working comedy clubs back in the 1970s. He reproduces them here, decade by decade. The comedian is famous for his commentary on everyday life — parking lots, consumer products, women's pocketbooks, the competition for armrests in movie theaters, etc. Usually he finds gold in these bits. Sometimes not.

One of his worst is about kitchen sponges. What's funny about sponges? Even Jerry Seinfeld doesn't know. Yet he does find the humor when he observes that sports fans basically just root for laundry. Players come and go and are swapped for other players from other teams. The only constant is the uniform — the laundry. Or when he comments that your home is basically a "garbage processing center." Everything that comes in — new phones, new furniture, new clothing, etc. — eventually winds up in a landfill.

Seinfeld's routines, because they cover so many decades, provide both a cultural history of America and an autobiography of the comedian himself. Early routines cover such topics as dating, sex and childhood memories. Later on his jokes move on toward marriage and raising children. His humor is nonpolitical and non-topical, meaning that it has more staying power than most comedy acts.

At the beginning of his book Seinfeld explains the appeal of his chosen career: "I love hearing a laugh that's never existed in the world before." He didn't hear my laughs as I read his book, but they were audibly there just the same.

Why Reed reads

Reading gives me the world.

Shannon Reed, Why We Read

Those drawn to Shannon Reed's 2024 book Why We Read probably already know why they read. Mostly the book tells us why the author reads, but other readers will find much they can identify with.

Reed, who now teaches creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh, was the kind of child who was punished for reading by being forced to watch television. My own mother punished me for reading by forcing me to go outside and play, so I can identify.

Her life has been full of contradictions. She dislikes scary books but once taught a course on vampire literature. She doesn't cook much but devours cookbooks. She hates assigned reading and has doubts about its benefits, yet as a teacher she has often assigned reading to her students.

Reed writes with a light touch about a lifetime spent in the company of books. Her mostly brief essays cover such topics as why series books are popular, why some books make us cry, how books can help cure loneliness and even why Ethan Frome is so often taught in high school — "because it's short and there are about five billion copies available in our nation's school book rooms."

Reed reads just about everything and anything. She reads the classics, too, but doesn't seem to hold them in much higher regard than more popular books. My favorite line from her book: "It's undeniable, if slightly appalling, that half of the joy of reading books like Moby Dick is that you get to tell everyone you're reading them."

How true. Have I mentioned that I've read Moby Dick twice?

Slavery and beyond

Slavery and its repercussions are examined artfully in four stories told by Caryl Phillips in his book Crossing the River (1993).

Phillips uses letters and journal entries more than straight narrative to tell his stories. In "The Pagan Coast," letters are written by plantation owner Edward Williams and Nash Williams, a freed slave, but somehow the letters never reach their destinations, leading to frustration and disillusion on both sides.

Edward believes he is doing the noble thing by sending former slaves, each given the Williams surname, to Liberia, a nation founded in northern Africa expressly for ex-slaves returned to their native continent. Nash has an education and a deep Christian faith, and Edward expects the best of him.

Disappointed because he has heard nothing from Nash, Edward travels to Liberia himself to try to find him. Once there, his disappointment continues.

In "West," Phillips tells about an aging woman who joins a wagon train with other former slaves heading toward California, or "for a place where things were a little better than bad." She hopes to somehow find her daughter, sold separately years before. Instead her health fails her and she winds up in Dodge City and then Leavenworth, where things go from bad to worse.

The title story, the weakest of the four, consists of journal entries written by the captain of a slave ship off the African coast in 1752.

"Somewhere in England," the longest and best story, is narrated by Joyce, a British woman who falls in love with a black American soldier during World War II. Travis, the soldier, does not even appear until more than halfway through the story, Joyce's loveless first marriage being the main focus early on.

The book does not make easy reading because of all those letters and journal entries and because of the way Phillips shuffles time, especially in that last story, yet his book is well worth the effort.

Chapter preferences

Just as we all have preferences in authors, books, in genres, in subject matter, in writing styles, etc. we may also have preferences in chapters. Some books don't even have chapters, which I find annoying. I prefer chapters to break up the text. They provide obvious stopping points. If I want a tea break or to stop reading for the day, I like being able to stop where a chapter ends. Otherwise I must stop in the middle of the narrative, making it more difficult when I resume reading

Here are some of my other preference in chapters:

1. I like it when chapters are numbered. 

2. Chapter titles in novels are an unexpected bonus. Most novelists don't title their chapters, but I love those that do. Alexander McCall Smith is noted for his intriguing chapter titles. Recent novels I've read, including This Disaster Loves You, The Midnight Library and I Cheerfully Refuse, have chapter titles, making these good books even better. This Disaster Loves You gets extra credit for having both numbered chapters and chapter titles.

3. I dislike prologues in novels. Just call it chapter one already. The same goes for epilogues. Again I must mention This Disaster Loves You. This novel has an epilogue that actually works better than a final chapter. Most epilogues, like most prologues, should just be chapters.

4. When authors change the scene and even the characters in the middle of a chapter, I wonder what purpose they think chapters serve. Just write shorter chapters.

5. And I like short chapters. Is a chapter just two or three pages long? Wonderful. That means I can read multiple chapters today instead of just one or two. I get the illusion of speeding along through the book even when I am reading at the same slow pace I usually do. And, in fact, it does speed up my reading. When chapters are short, I find that I tend to read more each day. The next chapter's just three pages? I have time to do that. And on and on.

Animals first?

"Do you think you're the last ranger that puts the animals first?" Yellowstone park ranger Ren Hopper asks himself early in Peter Heller's The Last Ranger (2023).

Animals or people is a dilemma that runs through Heller's novel. Much of Ren's work involves stepping in when Yellowstone tourists, eager for good photos, get too close to animals, putting both in danger. Increasingly he worries about poachers, one in particular. How far can he go to stop them?

Ren's best friend in the park is Hilly, a famous expert on Yellowstone wolves. She, too, struggles with the animals or people question. When she is caught and nearly dies in a leg-hold trap that seems to have been set expressly to trap her, Ren's rage toward the suspected poacher boils over. As does Hilly's.

The women in Ren's life have long been a source of internal conflict for him. His alcoholic mother was suspected of a mercy killing. His ailing wife killed herself. Might Hilly, the woman he discovers he loves, also have killing on her mind? And then there's that animals or people question that Ren struggles with right to the end.

Here we have another first-rate outdoorsy novel from the pen of Peter Heller.

Read this

The problem with applying the Golden Rule to books is that not everybody thinks of books in the same way.

Some people like being handed books by friends and told, "You're going to love this." And so they do the same with their own books, give them to friends who might like them.

I fall in the other camp. As I mentioned in a recent post about book clubs, I prefer to make my own choices about what I am going to read. When I am handed a book by a friend, especially if it is a loan rather than a gift, it feels like a burden. Not only do I feel compelled to read it, but I feel compelled to put it ahead of other books on my reading schedule. And then I feel obligated to report back on how much I loved the book, whether I loved it or not. If I actually loved the book, I probably will want to keep it, not give it back.

And so I have rarely dropped a book into someone else's hands and urged them to read it. (I do make an exception for gift books, which in my mind have no strings attached.) If someone expresses an interest in a particular book or in the subject matter covered in a book, I might suggest it. But then I will wait for them to ask to borrow it.

As it happens, and despite everything I've said above, I am presently in the middle of two books handed to me by friends, and I am loving them both. Neither is a book I had ever heard of, and I would otherwise never have read them. So I am glad the books were given to me unsolicited.

Go figure.

A book club without all that reading

Just twice in my life have I become involved in a reading group, both times just for a brief period. In both instances, I joined because of my interest in the book they were discussing. And then I dropped out when they chose books that didn't interest me. It became too much like the assigned reading in high school and college, more work than play.

Participants who fail to read the assigned books is a common complaint about book clubs. People enjoy the social aspects of the group and like the discussions, but actually reading the book or finding the time to read the book can be challenging.

But does reading an assigned book always have to be a book club requirement?

The one time I was asked to lead a book group, we met near library shelves. I asked each person to find a novel they were unfamiliar with, then keep it facedown on their laps. In turn, each person read only the first line of their novel. We simply discussed that first line. Did it sound like a detective story, a thriller, a romance, a comic novel, a literary novel or what? Did the line hint at a mystery of some sort? Most importantly, did it make us want to keep reading? And so we had a wonderful discussion in which everyone participated. Some even took their books home with them to discover what happened next.

Book clubs can find other ways to talk about books without actually having to read an assigned book. This being February, club members might be invited to talk about their favorite love story or perhaps the fictional character they could most easily fall in love with.

Other months they could each spend a few minutes talking about a favorite mystery or thriller or classic novel or book remembered from childhood. They could talk about what movie adaptation is most (or least) faithful to the novel? The group could have literary quizzes or trivia contests. Or each person could take turns reading a book they chose and telling others in the group about it, making the meetings less a discussion than a lecture, with a discussion afterward.

Sometimes an assigned book is unusually long or makes difficult reading. Members might enjoy having an extra month to read it. In between the group could have one of those meetings where no reading is required.

I think I would like a book club like this. Or better yet, a book club where I alone got to make all the selections.

The stupid war

Wars are almost always stupid, but rarely are wars as stupid as World War I.

First, the war could have easily been avoided with a little basic diplomacy. Second, the armies mostly occupied trenches, stretching nearly 500 miles, and took turns attacking the other's trenches and getting massacred in the process. Millions of young men — the lost generation — sacrificed their lives for little gain. And this went on for years.

British historian John Keegan gives us an excellent summary of this war in The First World War (1998). 

European countries had been making war against each other for centuries, and so most of them already had plans for the next war. The generals and national leaders seemed too eager to put these plans into effect, allowing an obscure assassination in a secondary country to escalate into global war. But technology made the war bigger and more deadly than these generals, accustomed to soldiers charging on horseback, knew how to deal with. And so armies facing each other in trenches and slaughtering each other became all but inevitable.

While the technology to kill had advanced, the technology to communicate with one's armies had not kept pace, Keegan observes. Generals often had no idea what was going on on the battlefield until it was too late.

Americans like to believe that their late entry into the war turned the tide, but this British war historian judges the Americans mostly irrelevant and gives them very few pages in his book. "It was indeed immaterial whether the doughboys fought well or not," he says. The mere fact that the Germans had run out of young men by 1918  made their army ready to topple when American soldiers started landing in Europe in large numbers.

And then the stupid war was followed by a stupid peace treaty that made the next war all but inevitable.

Keegan takes a broad view of the war, covering not just the major battles like Verdun and Somme but also telling us what was going on in Turkey, Italy, Russia, at sea and elsewhere. This books offers an intelligent overview of a stupid war.

Lost love

It's almost worth it, isn't it? Losing something,  just so you can get it back.

Richard Roper, This Disaster Loves You

Richard Roper gives us two love stories for the price of one in This Disaster Loves You  (2024).

Brian and Lily are a happily married couple who run a popular English pub. Then one night Lily mysteriously disappears, and Brian waits seven years for her to come back to him. A postcard from her gives him hope because it suggests she plans to return. "I'm going away for awhile," the card says.

After seven years, Brian notices that someone who sounds a lot like Lily has been posting online reviews of pubs and other businesses around the country. He decides to try to track her down.

Along the way he meets Tess, a tourist whose own marriage is in ruins. She aids him in his search, and their growing relationship threatens to develop into something more — except for that Lily factor.

Meanwhile Roper keeps flashing back to Brian and Lily's romance and marriage. It turns out that the "disaster" in the novel's title refers to Brian. He is something of a hapless character, good-hearted but introverted and ill at ease much of the time. A disaster or not, he loves Lily more than anything.

The flashbacks offer clues as to what might have happened to Lily, but for most of the novel, these clues take readers in the wrong direction. The final resolution is a surprise, and yet not really. Tess, we knew all along, is there for a reason. Perhaps the title means something else entirely.

The wisdom of trees

Maybe society should keep old Mother Trees around — instead of cutting most of them down — so they can naturally shed their seed and nurture their own seedlings. Maybe clear-cutting the old, even if they're not well, wasn't such a good idea.

Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree

Part memoir and part science book, Suzanne Simard's Finding the Mother Tree (2021) tells readers how it was learned that trees are actually social creatures.

Born into a forestry family in Canada, Simard's early jobs included "weeding" new forests that had been replanted after clear-cutting. The idea was that other trees, like birch, competed with the trees foresters wanted for future harvesting. This didn't make sense to her, and as she got her education and eventually became a college professor, she completed numerous experiments showing that, in fact, trees don't so much compete as cooperate.

Trees exchange carbon and water, as needed, to benefit each other, she found. Mother Trees, as she calls older trees, nurture younger ones, especially their own kin. Thus, neither clear-cutting nor removing birch or other unwanted trees actually encourages forest growth. Instead, planted trees are likely to grow more slowly or die from disease without older trees nearby to help them along.

Convincing the forestry industry of the truth of her findings proved difficult until other scientists duplicated and supplemented her findings. Eventually this troublemaker became a hero.

Along the way, Simard had an up and down life. She tells about the tragic death of her rodeo cowboy brother, her marriage and divorce, her daughters and the breast cancer that resulted from the Roundup she applied years before to kill those "weeds."

You may have a superpower

It seems hard to believe, but cursive writing has, in effect, become a foreign language in the United States. Because cursive writing is no longer taught in most schools, many younger people can no longer read it, or even use it to sign their own names. Letters and diaries written by their grandparents are foreign to them, and are probably just thrown away. They might as well be written in Mandarin.

And thus the ability to read cursive is becoming a rare skill. A recent New York Post article reports that the National Archives has more than 5,000 volunteers transcribing more than 300 million digitized objects so that future historians, who probably won't be able to read cursive writing either, can study them. And they are looking for more volunteers.

Yet most of those who learned cursive no longer use it. Except for signing my name, I have not used it for years. Few people write letters today, and if they do, they may write them on a computer, as I do. Appointment calendars and shopping lists are usually kept on phones, not paper. Thus the number of those skilled in reading cursive shrinks by the day.

Unfortunately the National Archives seeks volunteers, not paid workers, but with 300 million documents covering more than two centuries, and with the number of people who can read cursive shrinking, this skill could soon become valuable enough for a person to make a good living — if that person is still young enough to want a job. Already the National Archives calls this ability a "superpower." That should be worth something.

No surrender

Leif Enger's I Cheerfully Refuse (2024) is a stranger-comes to-town-story that turns suddenly into a hero-takes-a-journey story. It is a happy, contented love story that turns suddenly into a thriller. Those who open the novel expecting another Peace Like a River, Enger's previous best-seller, will find something very different.

Rainy and his wife Lark live a peaceful life on the shores of Lake Superior during an unpeaceful time. Civilization crumbles around them, but they manage, he as a part-time musician, she as a part-time book seller. They take in a young boarder, Kellan, who partly pays with a book, also called I Cheerfully Refuse, that Lark had been looking for.

Soon a mysterious older man, Werryck,  shows up in the community, Kellan disappears and Rainy finds Lark brutally murdered. Believing he might see Lark again, or her spirit, on an island on the other side of the lake, Rainy sails off in his small sailboat, pursued by Werryck in a large ship. Kellan, it turns out, is an escapee from that ship.

Bodies floating in Lake Superior, as well as the sudden popularity of a suicide drug called Willow, give testimony to society's decay, as does Rainy's strange difficulties with people he meets on his journey. Yet along the way he rescues Sol, a nine-year-old girl who has never been to school, and in the end she rescues him from a life of despondency and defeat.

Enger gives us a surprising story about how life can still offer something worthwhile if we cheerfully refuse to surrender.

Our other lives

When one learns of the multiverse theory advanced by many physicists, one is likely to begin pondering about what one's life might be like in these other universes. Are we better off or worse off?

The quantum theory, as I understand it and as supposedly shown to be true by advanced mathematics, is that there are an infinite number of universes. A decision made in one universe creates another where a different decision has been made. In one universe your life takes one direction; in another it takes another path. And on and on and on.

Matt Haig explores this idea in his best-selling 2020 novel The Midnight Library.

Nora, still a relatively young woman as the novel opens, contemplates suicide. She has made many choices in her life, and now it seems they were all the wrong ones. Near death, she finds herself in The Midnight Library surrounded by an infinite number of books, each representing a different version of her life.

She begins to choose one life after another. In one life she is a rock star. In another a glaciologist or an Olympic medalist or a college professor and a happily married mother. and there are many, many others. Yet she does not feel entirely comfortable in any of them. This has a lot to do with the way The Midnight Library works. She is always placed in the middle of this other life without knowing what came before. When she is a rock star, she doesn't know the songs she is supposed to sing. When she is happily married, she doesn't know the name of the man in bed with her. And so it all seems unfair to her, and the novel's only possible ending is the one every reader expects.

Yet the novel, like the multiverse theory itself, makes one think. In that sense, it is much like Haig's other, better novel The Humans. He gives his readers many truths we all must learn to accept. We all have regrets. No life is perfect. There are degrees of good and bad. Little things can have big importance. Perhaps the life you are living is the one you would choose.

Where are the books?

There's a wonderful cartoon in a recent issue of Oh Reader. It shows a man reading in a chair while a woman heads out the door with her purse. She says, "We need throw pillows, potpourri and coffee, so I'm going to the bookstore."

That's funny because it's so true. Bookstores stay in business because they sell so many things other than books and magazines, as The New Yorker cover at right illustrates. I have commented previously about the college bookstore at Grove City College, where my son once attended, that other than textbooks sold no books at all. You could find mugs, sweatshirts, etc., but no books.

Most bookstores do sell books, but often these are kept toward the rear of the store. Upfront is where they place the greeting cards, calendars and so forth that may actually be more profitable for them.

This can be annoying to those of us who go to bookstores to shop for books. We want to see books when we walk through the door, not birthday cards. Yet I am as much at fault for this reality as anyone else.

Consider some of the non-book items I have purchased in bookstores over the years: datebooks, puzzles, games, tote bags, calendars, food, large quantities of tea and, of course, many magazines and greeting cards. One of my favorite bookstore purchases is a carrying case for my iPad that doubles as a makeshift desk when I travel.

But at least I have never purchased throw pillows, potpourri or coffee in any bookstore.

Vibe shift

Back in the day when I reviewed books weekly for my newspaper, I read and reviewed a great many children's books. They were easy to read and write about, and I liked them because they gave me a chance to catch up on my other reading. Plus, I enjoyed passing the books on to my son when he was young and years later to my grandchildren.

In recent years I have read few children's books, except for such classics as Winnie-the-Pooh and Pinocchio. So I have little knowledge about the gender ideology and identify politics that have apparently infested the children's book industry, along with much else in our society.

I was interested in a recent column by Meghan Cox Gurdon, who writes regularly about children's books for The Wall Street Journal. She sees signs of a "vibe shift," although it may take a few years before this shift becomes apparent, she says. That's because it can take years for books to be started, finished, illustrated, edited and published. Thus, many of those books still in the pipeline are of the woke variety.

But Gurdon sees signs for hope and a return to sanity. Because of the pandemic, parents became more aware of what their children were reading and what they were being taught in school. The new administration in Washington and the votes that brought that administration to power are another indicator of change. 

"For years, children's publishers faced little resistance as they promulgated titles that earlier generations would have had no trouble seeing as inappropriate for the young," she writes. "The industry went too far, and now it's facing resistance."

So there is hope for the future. In the meantime, parents should continue to keep a close eye on what their children are reading.

Did JFK do it?

Billy Boyle meets both Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy in the South Pacific in James R. Benn's 2015 World II mystery The White Ghost. Only Kennedy becomes an important character, however.

Boyle was a Boston police officer before the war. Thanks to having an uncle named Dwight D. Eisenhower, he escapes combat but instead helps solve military murders. One can't have people killing other people during a war, after all.

This time Lt. Boyle's strings are pulled by a wealthy Boston man named Joe Kennedy, who wants him assigned to clear the name of his son, John, a suspect in a Navy murder case. And so Boyle gets sent to the Pacific Theater to try to solve a case that may or may not implicate Kennedy, a man with whom he has had unpleasant encounters in the past.

Kennedy is portrayed as a spoiled rich kid who uses others to advance himself. Boyle has been used by him in the past, and he resents being used again. Yet Kennedy is also shown to have noble, even heroic qualities, and Boyle soon dismisses him as a serious suspect.

Two other murders follow the first, including that of a pretty nurse Kennedy had been busily seducing.

Boyle may have gotten a relatively cushy wartime assignment, yet here he winds up on a Pacific island swarming with enemy soldiers. But that is also where the murderer is, and Boyle gets his man, no matter what.

Pros and cons

Continuing my discussion of audio books, this time I want to write about the advantages and disadvantages of both reading a paper book and listening to an audio book.

I much prefer books printed on paper. I like to hold them in my hands and see them on my shelves. I like to make notes as I read, something that becomes more difficult with audio books. I rarely underline passages, but many people do that. That can't be done with an audio book. You can't very well indicate a page number in your notes because there are no page numbers on audio books. I often like to reread passages I particularly like or do not  understand. Again that is more difficult to do with audio books.

When my phone rings while I am reading a book, I can put in a bookmark. Later I can come back and start again at the beginning of the sentence, paragraph or page. When you pause an audio book because of an interruption, you usually must restart it in the middle of a sentence. You may not remember the first part of that sentence, and going back to the start can be challenging.

Yet you cannot read a paper book while driving a car, unless you have a self-driving car or are one of those people who read at traffic lights. (I have actually seen drivers reading books in moving vehicles.) You can also listen to a book while washing dishes, cooking a meal, doing the laundry, painting a house, washing your car, or doing any number of other tasks that do not require 100 percent concentration.

Can you focus on an audio book in the same way you can a paper book? Perhaps not, especially if you are driving or doing something else at the same time. Thus, lightweight books, such as thrillers or romances. may be better suited for audio. Yet I have difficulty focusing on some challenging paper books. For example, I am now in the middle of a history of World War I with long paragraphs, long sentences, many difficult words and detailed descriptions. I think I would actually prefer listening to someone else read this book for me. I might tune out now and then, but I am doing this anyway even with the book in my hand. I think I would actually get more out of the book if I could listen to it. And yet the book has valuable maps and photographs, which would be lost in an audio book.

Reading a book and listening to a book are not quite the same thing, but there are pros and cons to each.

Reading without reading

Can you say that you read a book if you listened to somebody else read the book?

I have addressed this question in the past in this space, always in the affirmative, but I bring it up again in response to a recent front-page article in The Wall Street Journal. Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg writes about Brittany Lowry, a 34-year-old Canadian woman who claims to have read 80 books in 2024, yet she didn't actually read a word. She listened to all these books while doing something else.

So, did she read the books or not?

There are arguments on both sides of this question. If listening counts as reading, then an illiterate man could rightly claim to have read War and Peace. Yet at the same time, this man who can't actually read, but listened to the novel, knows it much better than a person who can read but has never read that particular book.

Could you say that you read a speech after listening to that speech or that you read a friend's comments after engaging in a face-to-face conversation? No, each of these would be ridiculous. Yet the phrase "reading a book" suggests knowing the book, knowing the story if it's fiction, knowing the subject matter if it's nonfiction. One can do those just as well by listening as by actually reading. (But not by watching a movie based on that book, I would argue.) In fact, some individuals with reading disabilities have gotten college degrees by having other people read the textbooks to them. Did they cheat? I don't think so.

I think it comes down to what you consider most important in the phrase "reading a book," the word reading or the word book. Reading suggests a specific act, transforming images into meaningful words. A book, however, consists of the words themselves and what they mean, not on the page but in one's mind. And this can happen by sight, by sound or, in the case of the blind, by touch.

A contributor to Oh Reader magazine avoids this debate altogether with the following sentence: "Between print and audio, I experienced seven to nine books per month ..." That's clever, but then I can experience a book by moving it from one shelf to another.

If Brittany Lowry had had to sit down and read her books page by page, chances are she would have read very few of those 80, if any at all.  I, for one, am willing to give her credit for reading all 80. Of course, I also want credit for reading countless books over the years that I only listened to while driving my car.

Next time I will focus on the advantages and disadvantages of both kinds of reading.

Lonely in Alaska

The human body was eighty percent water; that meant she was literally made of tears,

Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

There are an abundance of tears shed in Kristin Hannah's 2018 novel The Great Alone. Many more will flow from the reader by the end of this heart-rending story.

Leni is just 13 in 1974 when the story opens. Her father, Ernt, may have been a wonderful man before he went to Vietnam and became a prisoner of war, but now he is short-tempered and violently jealous when another man even looks at his beautiful wife, Cora. She pays the price in beatings, yet can't stop loving him.

When a fellow veteran leaves Ernt a piece of land in Alaska, he believes this will change his family's fortunes significantly. It does, but in the wrong direction. The long, dark Alaska winters make Ernt even more paranoid, more jealous, more isolated.

Meanwhile Leni, while walking on eggshells in her own home, falls in love with Matthew, the only boy her age in her class at school. Unfortunately for her, Matthew happens to be the son of Tom, the town's wealthiest man and the one at whom Ernt directs most of his anger and jealousy — for which Cora always pays the price.

"The Great Alone," poet Robert Service's phrase to describe Alaska, takes on added meaning as Leni and her family become more and more isolated. And then it gets worse.

Yet Hannah manages to give us a conclusion brimming with togetherness, love ... and tears.

The last word revisited

Will Schwalbe

Back in 2019, I wrote an essay for this blog ("The last word," May 27, 2019) about a comment made by Will Schwalbe in Books for a Living. Schwalbe says he was told by someone that to discover what a book is about, simply read the last word in the book.

I put this whimsical shortcut to the test and found that nearly 50 percent of the time that is actually true. The last word in a book often does, in fact, tell you what the book is about, more or less. Of course, you may have to read the entire book to interpret that word in a significant way.

I decided to revisit this notion with a few books I have read over the past year..

Take, for instance, Madam, Debby Applegate's biography of Polly Adler, the famous New York madam in the 1930s and 1940s. What should be the last word but "desires." Yep, that's what the book is about, although of course it is also about much more.

The last word in Sy Montgomery's Of Time and Turtles is "eternity" — or endless time or timelessness. Turtles move so slowly and live so long that time must seem endless to them.

I was smitten by Olaf Olafsson's novel Touch last year. It's about an elderly man who cannot forget a Japanese girl he fell in love with decades before. He flies from Iceland to Japan to try to find her again. The last word in the novel is "her." The last two words are "touch her."

The final word in the Amor Towles novel A Gentleman in Moscow is, appropriately enough, "waited." The novel tells of an aristocratic man sentenced by the Soviets to spend the rest of his life in a Moscow hotel — in effect, waiting.

In Somebody's Fool by Richard Russo, the last word is "else." Again, one must read the book for this word to gain significance, but the novel is about making choices, changing directions, trying something new, something else.

I have not mentioned the majority of books I have read in recent months in which the last word suggests nothing at all about the book itself. Still it is fun to discover just how often the last word actually does tell us something about what comes before.

Seeking the ideal

Years ago I wrote a newspaper column, unpopular with some female readers, in which I suggested that a woman's taste for romance novels and romantic movies is comparable to a man's taste for pinups and centerfolds. It is all about the pursuit of the ideal.

That is, women favor love stories in which the male figure looks, talks and acts like the man of their dreams. Similarly, a man browsing through the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition (or something more explicit) is looking for the woman of his dreams.

In real life, most men and women have to settle for something less than their ideal. Not every man can marry the homecoming queen or a swimsuit model. Not every woman can marry the quarterback or a handsome millionaire over six-foot tall. In a happy marriage, this less-than-ideal spouse turns out to be the perfect choice. (But that doesn't mean happily married women don't still read and watch love stories and happily married men don't still sneak peeks at the swimsuit edition.)

So I was interested in an article called The Perfect (Fictional) Boyfriend by Kiran Josen in Oh Reader magazine. 

Focusing on romance novels, Josen agrees that such books provide models of high-standard men. "Crafting the perfect fictional male love interest is a science, and no one does it better than romance writers," she says. "They're meticulous as they carefully select the right elements to bring their creation to life. A bit of charm, verbal foreplay, a crooked grin, a T-shirt that hugs the biceps just right, a slight scent of cedar wood."

What Josen notices is that a woman's ideal has changed over the years, a change reflected in romance novels. A few years ago, during the Fifty Shades of Grey era, female readers seemed to want lusty men who seduced women quickly. It was all about the sex. She has noticed "a shift toward books that I would call 'rom-com with big feelings.'"

She goes on, "Nowadays, I'm drawn to novels that show a more normal supportive kind of love. Because the things I value in a relationship now are more practical, I think my reading reflects that." Her observation is that in more recent romance novels, the ideal man has become less idealized and more like actual men. If that is true, it's got to be a good thing.

Meanwhile, men are still dreaming of that perfect face and perfect figure, while in most cases settling for something less.