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.

After the prom

Love triangles are nothing new in fiction, but Laura Lippman gives us a love quadrangle in her compelling  2023 novel Prom Mom.

The title is a pejorative nickname given in 1997 to Amber after she is found in a hotel room with a dead baby. She is a high school girl on prom night whom no one suspects is pregnant. Joe, her date that night, had abandoned her in that room after discovering that the girl he truly loved might still love him. Amber spends time in prison for the death of her baby, then leaves Baltimore for places where she is unknown.

In 2019 she returns, however, and begins life anew as an art dealer. By now Joe is a successful real estate agent happily married to Meredith, a plastic surgeon. Despite his happy marriage, Joe has an affair with Jordan, who becomes clingy and demanding when he tries to break up their relationship.

Then Joe and Amber become reunited, and old sparks get rekindled. Thus he has two affairs going on at the same time. Significantly complicating matters, the Covid pandemic strikes, severely wounding the commercial real estate business, Joe's speciality.

Losing his fortune, unable to get untangled from Jordan and afraid his marriage to Meredith is endangered, Joe turns to Amber for help, just as he did back in high school when he needed tutoring to get into college.

Lippman pours on the surprises at the end of her novel. Some of them seem a stretch, but getting to this point makes good reading.

Which side sells the book?

The front

In her book Blurb Your Enthusiasm, Louise Wilder recalls that when some British bookstores reopened during the last stages of Covid, books were displayed "with their back covers facing outwards, so that they could be read without customers having to touch them."

I don't recall seeing that practice at the few Florida bookstores I visited during that period. But it makes me wonder: If you could display only the front or the back of a book, which practice would be better for sales?  We do, in fact, often judge books by their covers, but is it the front cover or the back cover that makes the sell?

The front cover usually tells us little more than the title and the author, but often that is enough for us. We all choose books written by authors we know, and often I purchase books simply because I love the titles. I recently visited a friend and, of course, examined the books on her coffee table. Almost every one of them had an engaging title, such as The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. When I commented on this, she confessed that she, too, is drawn to books with striking titles.

Cover illustrations also help sell books. Some books I enjoy owning simply because of their cover art.

The back

You can usually, though not always, find the title and the author on the back cover, but if they are there they may be difficult to find. We normally look to the back cover of a paperback to read what the book is about. On the back we can usually find a brief synopsis of the story, if it is a novel. If it's nonfiction, we can get the gist of the subject matter. For a hardcover book, you have to read the book flap inside the front cover, which you can't do without touching the book.

Wilder writes book blurbs for a living, and most of these are found on the back. I rarely read them, but some shoppers probably do.

Most people today carry phones, on which they can, if necessary, quickly discover what a book is about and even read reviews if they choose. Thus, back covers are not absolutely necessary for most book shoppers. The front covers are mostly about drawing our attention to books we didn't know existed, more time-consuming on a web search, or to books we happen to be looking for. We may or may not even look at the back cover.

So in my view, American bookstores were smarter during the pandemic. They showed us the front covers.

Let the text cool off

One of the things I most disliked about being a newspaper reporter was often having to finish a story in the last minutes before deadline.

At that time ours was an afternoon paper, meaning the deadline for reporters was around 11 a.m. I would come in at 8, finish up any stories begun the day before, then head over to city hall to make my rounds. If I turned up a good story, I would either phone it in to the rewrite desk or, more often, rush back to the newsroom to get my story written before deadline.

The problem was not just having to write under deadline pressure, but also not having the time to review my story before turning it in. To be sure, there were copy editors to catch most of my errors, yet I always felt my work would have been better if I could have let it set for at least a couple of hours, then come back to it with something like fresh eyes.

Roy Peter Clark

Writing coach Roy Peter Clark calls this letting the text cool off. A few days is even better than a few hours. The longer the period of time before finishing a piece of writing and reading it again, the more likely you are to find not just factual errors and spelling errors, but also awkward phrasing, awkward sentences, missing words, repeated words and so on.

When you have just finished writing something, whatever it may be, you know what it is supposed to say, so you are less likely to notice that that is not what it actually says. A cooling-off period gives you the chance to look at your work fresh, almost as if it were written by somebody else and you don't know what to expect.

"The cooler the text, the more clear-eyed the revision," Clark says.

Later in my career I turned to writing editorials and columns, where I could usually work ahead, finish a draft hours before deadline and then come back to it with new eyes. I liked that much better.

Turtle time

Sy Montgomery, whose book about octopuses (The Soul of the Octopus) so enchanted me, does it again in Of Time and Turtles (2023).

Montgomery, who has also written about apes, hummingbirds, pigs and other animals, immerses herself in her subject and those who study it professionally for months at a time before writing her books. This time she embeds herself with the Turtle Rescue League, a small group dedicated to saving the lives of turtles.

Slow-moving turtles often need to cross roads and highways to get to their nesting sites or wherever, and many are struck by cars each day. Others are used for target practice by hunters and archers. Those in the rescue league don't give up on these injured turtles, even those who don't appear to have any chance at recovery. Turtles move slowly even in their healing process. They can heal, but it takes time. And time is something turtles have in abundance. They can live a long time and are in no hurry.

The author tells remarkable stories, such as about turtles who seem to be dead, yet come back to life. She describes the trial-and-error attempts to build a wheelchair for a turtle, whose inured back legs take a long time to heal. She goes on a long night-time rescue mission to save turtles caught in freezing weather.

All this takes place during the Covid pandemic and during the 2020 election, both of which become part of Montgomery's story, although sometimes just distractions. Turtle time, as she calls it, also leads her to philosophical meditations on time itself.

Delightful society

William Gladstone

"Books are delightful society," William Gladstone, the former British prime minister, said.

This seems to be a common thought among readers, perhaps especially readers who spend most of their time alone. Books can be companions, even friends. Just the other day I heard a man refer to his books as his friends. He didn't want to part with them.

Books can even be lovers. Faith Sullivan flirts with this idea in her novel Goodnight, Mr. Wodehouse, in which a widow takes a P.G. Wodehouse novel to bed with her every night. In a recent article in Oh Reader magazine, Melora Wolff writes, "My only lasting romance in life has been with books."

Books are something you can hold in your hand, when there is no other hand to hold. Books are something you can have a conversation with. They speak to you, and you can speak back, even if just in your mind.  And even familiar books can sometimes say something new to you. Books can be complicated, filled with many layers of meaning, just as another person can be.

Even sitting on a shelf for years at a time, a book can be companionable, especially if it is a book with fond memories attached.