Smiley out west

Jane Smiley is certainly a versatile writer — fiction and nonfiction, literary fiction and popular fiction, books for adults and books for children. She has even excelled at westerns, as she proved with The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton and now again in A Dangerous Business (2022).

Writing the novel itself may have been dangerous business for Smiley for she writes about a prostitute in California in the 1850s with more sexual detail than one would expect in a Jane Smiley novel. Again, there's that versatility.

Eliza goes to Monterey with her husband soon after the Gold Rush. She was forced into marrying a man she doesn't love and who doesn't treat her well, and so she doesn't mourn when he is shot and killed. But then, how will she make a living?

She is recruited by Mrs. Parks, one of the madams in a town with relatively few women. Eliza takes the job and comes to like it, discovering that most of her customers are much nicer than her husband. And they always go home afterward, while her savings pile up.

But then the bodies of other women in this same "dangerous business" begin showing up, brutally stabbed. There is not much law in Monterey at that time, and nobody seems to take the murders seriously. Eliza and her new friend, Jean, another prostitute who specializes in female clients, begin reading detective stories written by Edgar Allan Poe. They decide to discover the murderer themselves.

This is a short novel, barely 200 pages, but it remains fascinating every step of the way. 

May or must?

In most situations you may is the most polite and you must the most rude.

Peter Farb, Word Play

Peter Farb

After making the statement above in his book Word Play, Peter Farb goes on to explain how the two phrases you may and you must can be confusing to those for whom English is a second language. As he says, in most situations the first usage is more polite than the second. But if that is true "in most situations," it means there are exceptions.

As a general rule, most of us prefer hearing the word may rather than must. The latter sounds like an order, while the former gives us permission. We like having a choice. It sounds like a kindness, while must sounds severe. Even when we were children, "you may go outside and play" sounded much better than "you must go outside and play." Even if we wanted to go outside and play, we didn't want to be ordered to do so. It took away some of the fun.

Yet as Farb suggests, there are exceptions to this rule. The example he gives is when a hostess at a dinner party passes her special dish to a guest and says, "You must try some of this." Is that an order? No, it is more of a recommendation. It means she thinks the dish is outstanding. If she had said, "You may try some of this," a person who grew up speaking English could think there was something questionable about it. They may like it or they may not. If you are finicky eater, you may very well pass on that dish.

Or suppose a friend tells you, "You must be crazy." This is neither an order nor a suggestion. Rather it is a joke, and obviously so to anyone who grew up speaking English. The words "you may be crazy" somehow seem less light. Perhaps your friend actually thinks you're crazy.

If you are learning English as a second language, these exceptions to the rule must be confusing. Or is it, may be confusing?

Shy books

One of the problems that comes with having coffee shops in bookstores is that they can turn bookstores into gathering places or social places, which doesn't sound like such a bad thing but can be. (Another problems is that those sitting in the coffee shops are often free to browse through books or magazines as they eat and drink, then put them back on the shelves when they are through with them.)

Just as silence has always been favored in libraries, so it is important in a good bookstore. Browsing for the right book takes concentration, privacy and some measure of silence. You don't want children running around, friends trying to chat or strangers trying to make friends.

Christopher Morley

Quoting Christopher Morley, bookseller Jeff Deutsch says this in his book In Praise of Good Bookstores, "This is how the browser recognizes their book: privately, usually in silence, 'for often the most important books are shy, and do not press forward to the front counters,' as Morley observes. We must maintain quiet and allow for concentrated browsing, understanding that our role is drawing readers across the threshold, that they might confront these volumes."

I like the idea of shy books. So often the right book for you never finds its way to the front of the store, on a table with best-sellers. It may be hiding away on a corner shelf, or on a bottom shelf or top shelf, and thus more difficult to find.

The right book may take some time to locate, and the search may require quiet solitude.

Novelist Ann Patchett says she made a deliberate decision not to sell coffee or food of any kind in her Nashville bookstore. She wanted to sell books, just books, for people who like books. But then she and her co-owner decided to allow dogs in their store, and so customers who aren't talking to each other are probably talking to dogs.

Saying our lines

One of the wonderful things about the English language is that, unlike French, we welcome new words and phrases from anywhere. And one prime source has always been show business. Josh Chetwynd brings these many words and phrases together in his 2017 book Totally Scripted.

We all love repeating, and sometimes rephrasing, favorite lines from favorite movies. Who among us hasn't found opportunities to say lines like "I'll be back," "here's looking at you, kid," "Houston, we have a problem" and "an offer he can't refuse"? Even if we never saw the movie these lines came from, we have probably heard the lines said by friends and repeated them ourselves.

Then there are phrases like "get out of Dodge," "stage fright," "Hollywood ending," "in the limelight," "Looney Tunes," "stay tuned" and "the peanut gallery." They may have had their origins in movies, television, vaudeville or some other form of entertainment, but their use has since expanded  metaphorically to mean many other things. 

We can get out of Dodge any time we evade a difficult situation. We may get stage fright when we have to speak to a group, stage or no stage. Any goofy behavior can be termed Looney Tunes. Anything simple can be called Mickey Mouse.

The origins of many of these terms and famous movie lines can sometimes be surprising. Arnold Schwarzenegger objected to saying "I'll be back" in The Terminator. He didn't think it was very manly. Also, because English was his second language, he admitted to not understanding contractions.

The phrase "peanut gallery" did not begin with Howdy Dowdy, as many of us older folks might think. It first referred to the cheap seats in theaters, where patrons often ate peanuts during a live show. The TV children's show simply gave the phrase a new meaning.

Chetwynd's small book will delight anyone who loves language and/or popular culture.

Finding a book for Dad

My email includes something from Barnes & Noble practically every day, and lately they have been sending out Father's Day teasers. Every merchandiser tries to make money out of every holiday, but for bookstores, Father's Day can be a challenge. I visit a bookstore at least once a month, but I see mostly women there.

When I look over the tables covered with the latest novels, spotting a book written by a male author can be a challenge. Not only are most new novels written by women, but they are mostly intended for female readers. I am currently in the middle of a novel written by a woman, which I am actually enjoying, yet I have noticed that virtually every important character is a woman. I expect the murderer will turn out to be a man, but otherwise it is a story about women for women written by a woman.

And so, how does one pick out a book that Dad might enjoy?

I think Barnes & Noble has mostly done an admirable job in their selections for the upcoming holiday. Mostly they focus on nonfiction, which are the books men may be most likely to read.

Among these suggestions are The Fate of the Day by Rick Atkinson, a book about the start of the American Revolution; The Determined Spy by Douglas Waller, about the early days of the CIA; the massive new Mark Twain biography written by Ron Cherow; How Countries Go Broke by Ray Dalio, and Why We Love Baseball by Joe Posnanski.

As for fiction, they recommend the latest Stephen King novel, Never Flinch; Buffalo Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones; The First Gentleman by Bill Clinton and James Patterson; Twist by Colum McCann; and I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger.

All these are books written by men, many of them expressly for men. Relatively few women read books about war or baseball.

There is still something for Dad in bookstores. You may just have to look a little harder than you did when you were shopping for Mom last month.

Missing mermaid

A detective having a ghost as a sidekick may not be an original idea — Charles Todd's Ian Rutledge listens to the spirit of a soldier who served under him in World War I while he is solving cases — yet Jess Kidd's Things in Jars (2019) still seems unique.

The novel, as strange as its title, features a young female detective named Bridie Devine. Her Watson is a half-dressed, tattoo-covered former boxer named Ruby Doyle, whom she can see and hear even though nobody else can. Having an invisible companion turns out to be advantageous.

The action takes place in London in 1863, although there are flashbacks to events in Bridie's troubled youth, which then impact the present story. Bridie is hired to find Christabel, supposedly the daughter of a wealthy man. This man turns out to be a collector of odd animate objects, those things in jars. Christabel, thought to be a mermaid, was, in fact, stolen. Now she has been stolen again.

Bridie was herself sold as a child, and she has a great deal of sympathy for Christabel. She assumes the girl has probably been sold to a circus, or perhaps to another collector.

Kidd, gifted at telling strange stories, excels in this one. Weird characters and situations abound. Bridie even falls in love with Ruby. Those things in jars are not the only oddities to be found here.

From novel to movie

Never before have I attempted to review both a novel and the movie adapted from that novel at the same time, but I happened to watch the Jean-Pierre Jeunet film The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet just before finishing the Reif Larsen novel The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (2009), so why not?

The title changed between book and screen, yet the story changed little. Jeunet, the director responsible for such wonderful French films as Amelie and A Very Long Engagement, stays remarkably true to the novel. Most of his changes actually improve the story.

The basic plot is this: As in the Young Sheldon television series, T.S. is a young prodigy growing up in an ordinary family. In this case, it's on a ranch in Montana. His initials stand for Tecumseh Sparrow. His father is a silent man who loves cowboy movies and clearly loved the boy's older brother, who died in a gun accident. His love for T.S. remains unclear. The mother is supposedly a beetle scientist, yet seems more devoted to writing a romantic story about an ancestor. His older sister talks mostly about beauty pageants. T.S. feels out of place, "not a creature of the ranch," as he puts it in his narrative.

His special gift takes the form of illustration. His drawings can be found on virtually every page of the novel, illustrating everything from the Mormon cricket to how he and his sister play cat's cradle. He has been sending his scientific drawings to the Smithsonian Institution, and he is surprised when the Smithsonian, not realizing how young he is, invites him to Washington to accept a prize and give a speech.

Without telling his family, he hops aboard a freight train and heads East.

The change Jeunet makes that I least liked was in making T.S. the inventor of a perpetual motion machine. Larsen's version, in which he is someone who can illustrate virtually anything, seems less fanciful. Yet in other ways the film is better for being less fanciful. Larsen sends T.S. through a wormhole in the Midwest and makes him the youngest member of a secret scientific society with underground tunnels in the District of Columbia. Jeunet ignores all that nonsense and tells a more believable story (other than that perpetual motion machine).

The movie also ignores the boy's mother's book, which T.S. takes with him the train. Larsen makes her novel a part of his novel, and it simply isn't very interesting and adds little. The movie is better for leaving it out.

In the film T.S. is 10, not 12, perhaps because the actor who plays him looks 10, not 12. The movie also turns an important male character into a female character, but without much change in the story.

Otherwise the stories align nicely. Both are enjoyable. In both T.S. discovers that he is not a creature of Washington either and would rather be home.

One should read the novel so as not to miss all those wonderful drawings, which T.S. calls maps. One should watch the movie for all those beautiful images Jeunet is justifiably famous for. To experience both at the same time is pure joy.

Good guys, bad guys

German soldiers in World War II

Readers continue to devour novels set during World War II, even though most of these readers — and the authors, as well — were not even alive during the war. In recent weeks I have read The Book Spy and The Book of Lost Names, both of them about young women who use their forgery talents to help defeat the Nazis. I have several other World War II novels waiting in line.

An article in The Wall Street Journal observes that the hottest trend in children's books is stories with World War II themes. In one of these, Rescue by Jennifer A. Nielsen, a 12-year-old girl becomes part of a dangerous mission in occupied France during the war.

How does one explain the popularity of these books 80 years after the close of the war? It may have something to do with the clarity of the evil. During that war the Nazis we're so evil and the Japanese so savage that it has always been clear who the bad guys were and who the good guys were.

In today's more relativistic world, it is not so easy to differentiate between heroes and villains. Movie makers seem to wrestle with the problem of identifying a villain all the time. There are certain groups of people who cannot be the bad guys for one reason or another. The Chinese, for example, cannot be bad guys if Hollywood wants their movies shown in China. In the new Mission Impossible movie, the "bad guy" is an artificial intelligence called The Entity to avoid this problem. Meanwhile, the good guys must have enough flaws to be believable. In David Baldacci's novel The Innocent, which I reviewed here a few days ago, the hero is a paid government assassin. 

In a World War II setting, there are no such difficulties. When I was in Germany a few years back, our tour guides readily confessed that their Nazi ancestors did evil things. There is no debate about it. Nobody is offended.

The days when the heroes in western movies wore white hats and the bad guys wore black hats are long over, yet perhaps readers and moviegoers still yearn for a clear distinction. World War II stories give us that.

Donna Leon's wandering

... I am feckless and unthinking by nature and have never planned more than the first step in anything I've done.

Donna Leon, Wandering through Life

Anyone who reads Donna Leon's 2023 memoir Wandering through Life hoping for insights into her popular Venice-set mystery series featuring Guido Brunetti is likely to be disappointed. By my count she refers to her books just three times, and then just in passing.

Mostly this book, a very readable one, is a collection of personal essays about her life when she is not writing. As the title suggests, her long life — she is now in her 80s — has been mostly one of aimless wandering from one thing to another, from one country to another. She spent periods as an English instructor in Iran and Saudi Arabia. Her life changed when she took a job teaching English at an army base near Venice. She fell in love with the city. How that love affair led to her mystery series she doesn't bother to tell us.

Leon, born and raised in New Jersey and without a drop of Italian blood, has long had a passion for opera and the music of Handel. She devotes one chapter to her interest in bees, which she was able to work into the plot of her novel Earthly Remains, the only one of her novels she mentions. There's another chapter about a cat named Tigger.

Several chapters relive her childhood — Halloween memories, her first day of school, one particular Christmas turkey. She has one chapter called "Drugs, Sex, and Rock 'n' Roll" that hardly mentions any of the three. Other people are the ones who took the drugs — and apparently had the sex. There is no mention of a significant other.

While in Saudi Arabia she helped develop a game based on Monopoly that she called Saudiopoly. She and other Americans there played it in secret until they could finally leave the country.

Leon wanders through this book the way she has wandered through life. It makes fine reading, but readers of her Brunetti novels will probably not enjoy it any more than anyone else.

Thinking with words

Until language has made sense of experience, that experience is meaningless.

Peter Farb, Word Play

Infants who have not yet mastered language nevertheless seem able to think. If they see a toy  a few feet away from them, they can crawl over and get it. They can distinguish the voice of their mother from that of others. Eventually they may figure out how to climb out of a crib by themselves.

Years later they will have no memory of any of this, however. If what Peter Farb says above is true, perhaps this helps explain why it is true. Perhaps we have no memory of our earliest years because we had no way of putting those experiences into language. Once we learn how to put experience into words, we can more easily remember it,

Language does seem to give meaning and memory to our experiences. Chances are you cannot remember what you had for lunch a week ago. But you might remember it if you told somebody about it, if you put the experience into words, even if only in your own mind. We do remember very special meals because we think about them and talk about them. Even then we probably remember our conversation at that meal more clearly than the food itself.

Dreams dissolve very quickly upon awakening. Yet when I quickly relive a dream in my mind, putting it into words, I find that I can remember it, sometimes for years. We may forget the dreams themselves, but we can remember our mental descriptions of them.

This may also help explain why our memories tend to change over the years. What we now remember may not be exactly what happened, as we can discover if we read what we wrote in a diary or a letter at the time. As we tell the story or relive it in our minds, we embellish it to make it a better story. And then we remember the embellishments more clearly than the actual occurrence.

Thinking, Farb says, "is language spoken to oneself." That may not be literally true, for as I have said, infants can think without language. So can animals. Yet most of us humans, once we learn language, do seem to do most of our thinking with words. Some thinking may be instinctual, as when we suddenly hit the brakes when a deer crosses the road ahead of us, but mostly we do our thinking with language. And we get meaning (and memory) from words more than from the experience itself.

You can't say that

Indeed, freedom of speech does not exist anywhere, for every community on earth forbids the use of certain sounds, words, and sentences in various speech situations.

Peter Farb, Word Play

Peter Farb

Peter Farb makes the point that when it comes to freedom of speech, culture is much more restrictive than government.

All of us all of the time must watch our language. There are words we might use with our friends that we would not use in front of our mother. Or pastor, Or boss. 

There is jargon we use routinely in our jobs that we don't take home with us. And there is language we use when speaking with our small children at home we dare not use at work.

There are things we may say to a spouse or a lover that we would never say to anyone else. And vice versa. One of the gags often used on the ad libbed TV show Whose Line Is It Anyway? involves things you can say about your house or your car or whatever that you can't say about your significant other. It's always funny. And always true.

Mere civility and politeness prevents us from telling people what we we really think about them.

Some things we cannot say because they are too personal, too painful.

Most censorship is, in fact, self-censorship.

Playing with language

Although it was published in 1973 and has become outdated in many ways, Peter Farb's Word Play remains an important book on the subject of "what happens when people talk," his subtitle.

Farb covers numerous aspects of spoken language — why learning languages is easy for children but difficult for adults, criminal slang, playing the dozens (word play common in black communities where the object is to insult one another's mother in amusing ways), lying, jargon, translation from one language to another, baby talk, artificial languages and on and on.

Playing with language is common in most cultures, he tells us. Just as American blacks play the dozens, in many cultures the ability to quickly come up with clever lines, sometimes in rhyme, can be a test of belonging or even of manhood. Hierarchy can sometimes be determined with speech rather than fists. He uses Marx Brothers movies as a prime example of first-rate word play in the United States.

Farb concludes that all human languages are alike in many respects. Yet they can sometimes be very different. In English, for example, we think of the future as being ahead of us, the past behind us. In the Quechua language of Peru, however, it is the past that lies ahead. A Quechua speaker "logically states that past events can be seen in the mind since they already happened, and therefore they must be in front of his eyes. But since he cannot 'see' into the future, these events must therefore be out of sight or 'behind' him."

It is differences like this can make translation so difficult. One place where his book seems dated is when he writes that using a computer to translate one language into another is impossible. Today many people have apps on their phones that can perform at least basic translation of major languages.

Who needs cookbooks?

Book critic Dwight Garner writes in his book The Upstairs Delicatessen that "reading cookbooks is how I unwind." And this is a man who reads books for a living.

Another bookish person, Shannon Reed, also writes about reading cookbooks fo fun in her book Why We Read.

I confess I never read cookbooks, even when I'm cooking. I just throw things together and see what happens. The trouble with recipes is that I never seem to have the necessary ingredients.

It baffles me that some people read cookbooks more for pleasure or relaxation than for help in the kitchen.  Garner says, "I read myself to sleep with them." And thus a cookbook can be bedtime reading, although the size of many cookbooks would seem to make them unwieldy in bed.

I do not read at bedtime — I may watch PlutoTV if I can't sleep — but sometimes during the day I may want something short and relaxing when I don't have enough time to open a novel or a serious work of nonfiction. I have a few options, other than cookbooks, for these moments.

I have collections of comic strips, for example. I particularly like my Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes books.

I also love books containing movie reviews by Pauline Kael. I always find them enjoyable in short doses — and most of her reviews, originally printed in The New Yorker, are brief.

Early Dave Barry books also serve this purpose very well.  There is nothing like a good laugh for relaxation.

But if other people prefer cookbooks to unwind, that's fine with me.

Mental play

What makes the nursery rhyme so remarkable is that it encourages mental play.

Angus Fletcher, Wonderworks

I am old enough to remember those Dick and Jane readers. Dick, Jane, their sister Sally and their dog Spot were so ordinary. They were so well-behaved. Nothing truly funny, unusual, exciting or strange ever happened to them. I cannot imagine any child ever deliberately choosing to read about Dick and Jane.

Over the centuries most children's literature has been something like this, more instructive than fun. Yet most such books have been quickly forgotten. Nursery rhymes and fairy tales, meanwhile, stick around for centuries, and more recent creations such as Winnie-the-Pooh and the Dr. Seuss books seem to possess immortality, as well.

Angus Fletcher may have put his finger on the explanation — mental play. In his book, Wonderworks, he illustrates this with the nursery rhyme that begins "Hey diddle diddle,/The Cat and the Fiddle ..." He goes on, "What is a diddle? Why is a cat with a fiddle? How is a cow vaulting through space? And where is the spoon planning to go?"

It's all about mental play. Having fun with words. Imagining the impossible, Enjoying sounds that rhyme. Laughing at pure silliness.

Not only are the cat and fiddle more fun than Dick and Jane, they are probably more educational. Exciting minds is a good first step toward stimulating intelligence.

I recently commented on the book Surely You Can't Be Serious about the movie Airplane! That movie, it seems to me, may be a modern equivalent of nursery rhymes. It is amusing nonsense that may actually make us smarter.

Don't call me Shirley

Confronted by a book with the title Surely You Can't Be Serious, the only possible reply is, "I am serious, and don't call me Shirley."

The movie Airplane!, released in 1980, was the first Hollywood movie with three directors, David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker, also the authors of this 2023 book about the making of that groundbreaking film. Having three directors was not as difficult as one might think, they say. Majority ruled. Plus, all three of these Wisconsin natives shared the same sense of humor, which nobody else in Hollywood seemed to share at that time.

The key to the success of this comedy, thought by many to be the funniest movie ever made, was being completely serious, they tell us. Hollywood bigwigs insisted they needed someone with the comic stature of Chevy Chase or Bill Murray to make a funny movie. Instead they chose the most serious dramatic actors they could think of — Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves and Leslie Nielsen. Nielsen, of course, went on to become a comic genius in film after film, but he did it by always playing his roles seriously, just as this young trio taught him.

Every actor in the film was told to play each scene as if they were in a B-movie drama like Zero Hour!, the 1957 B-movie that it parodied. Having serious actors deliver ridiculous lines seriously worked. Audiences never stopped laughing, and still haven't after all these years. The comedy holds up remarkably well so many years later. (I have been watching several Airplane! scenes on YouTube lately, and each one makes me laugh as hard as I did the first time I saw them.)

The book takes the form of a movie screenplay, but with lots of stills from the movie. It is a compilation of quotes about what happened before, during and after the making of the movie. Many of the comments come from people like Jimmy Kimmel and Maya Rudolph who had nothing to do with making the movie but have fond memories of watching it.

The trio got away with many gags that would not have been allowed in other movies and would certainly be impermissible today. Yet the jokes are so funny and fly by so quickly that nobody seems to mind. Many parents have watched Airplane! with children too young to understand the jokes.

Reading this book is a poor substitute for watching the movie, but it makes a wonderful companion to it.

True, but misleading

In a restaurant the other evening, I saw a tall woman at another table. The adjective that came to mind was striking. Was she beautiful? No. Was she even attractive? Not really. Perhaps she once had been, but now she was simply striking. I don't remember the other three people at her table at all. Just her.

This experience reminded me that there are certain adjectives that can sound more flattering than they actually are. You might, for example, tell a large man that he is imposing. He will likely be pleased. Yet what you actually mean may be that he is tall or overweight.

I recall Olive Oyl in the movie Popeye trying to come up with something flattering to say about Bluto, the man she was expected to marry. The best she could come up with was large.

People often asked to write recommendations for others probably become masters at words that sound better than intended. They may want to say something about the job applicant that can be interpreted as positive. A word like personable might actually mean that the person spends more of his or her working hours talking than working. A word like commanding might suggest leadership qualities, when the word bossy may be what the writer actually has in mind.

Real estate agents are also masters at words and phrases that sound better than what is actually being described.

Most of us want to be truthful without giving offense, and we may need a few such words in our arsenal for certain occasions. And thus had I been asked, I could have described that woman in the restaurant as striking and slept very well that night.

In love with books

Once you've fallen in love with books, their presence can make you feel at home anywhere, even in places where you shouldn't belong.

Kristin Harmel, The Book of Lost Names

Kristin Harmel

I like the above comment about books found in the middle of Kristin Harmel's novel about a book-loving young Jewish woman who during World War II helps smuggle Jewish children out of France. I would like to comment on it phrase by phrase.

Once you've fallen in love with books ...

Just as you can date men or women, whatever your preference, without falling in love with them, so you can read books without falling in love with them. You can even enjoy reading books for pleasure without falling in love with them.

Harmel includes the word once, suggesting that there was a time when you were not in love with books. Perhaps falling in love was a gradual process, as it was for me, or perhaps it came suddenly. Whatever the case, it happened beyond your control. It was not a choice. It just happened.

... their presence can make you feel at home anywhere ...

I am struck by her use of the word presence, which suggests that it is not just reading a book that is significant but merely the fact that it exists in one's vicinity. Thus this phrase can have two meanings.

1. Books give comfort. When I am in someone's home or office for the first time, I can feel ill at ease, as if I don't really belong (to skip ahead to the next phrase). Yet spotting a shelf full of books instantly seems to comfort me. I am immediately interested. I want to review the titles of those books. I want to hold some of them in my hands and turn some pages. Frankly, I would sometimes prefer to ignore those whose home or office it happens to be and devote more attention to their books.

2. Books take you places in the comfort of your own chair. They can take you to other planets, to other countries, to other periods of history, just as Harmel's novel takes her readers to France during World War II. Wherever one travels in a book, one soon feels at home.

... even in places where you shouldn't belong.

This phrase underlines the fact that fiction allows readers to experience people and places you not only will never experience in your own life, but people and places you would never want to meet or visit. In Harmel's novel, there are Nazis, for example. One can read a thriller and feel danger without ever actually being in danger. In a love story you can have an affair with someone you wouldn't dare have an affair with in real life.

All this is yours when you fall in love with books.

Unputdownable

I don't know who invented the word unputdownable, but they must have had David Baldacci in mind.

Baldacci usually writes long novels, but they don't seem long because the pages fly by so quickly. Such was the case with The Innocent (2012), a story about Will Robie, a 40-year-old man who kills people for a living. At the beginning one doesn't know whether to root for him or not. By the end he is the greatest of heroes.

Robie works for the U.S. government, eliminating bad guys around the world. In this new assignment, however, he discovers his target is a sleeping woman with two small children. When he hesitates to pull the trigger, a second assassin fires through the window, killing the woman and one of her sons.

On a bus, trying to escape the scene, Robie saves the life of a 14-year-old girl, whose parents, somehow connected to the woman he was supposed to kill, have also been killed. The two of them flee the bus, just before it blows up, and go on the run together, not knowing who to trust.

The plot gets more and more involved, yet Baldacci skillfully keeps everything clear enough so that readers can follow, in most cases, what is going on. And even if they do get lost, the nonstop action will keep them turning the pages anyway.

Animals at play

Animals play. Anyone who has ever had a dog or a cat knows this. And it is not just young animals. Even an old dog enjoys a game a fetch, as long as it's a short game.

Yet for a long time animal play was virtually ignored by science. In his 2024 book Kingdom of Play, David Toomey reviews what researchers from Charles Darwin to present-day scholars have had to say on the subject.

The observation of wild animals leads to surprises. Who knew that turtles play? Or fish? Can you imagine adult elephants sliding down muddy hillsides and delightfully crashing into each other at the bottom?

Mostly scientists are curious about why animals play. What are the benefits? Does it help with mating or self-defense? Some studies suggest play helps animals prepare for the unexpected. Piglets have been observed running wildly and deliberately tumbling. Does this help prepare them for the unexpected when they are being pursued?

The most obvious explanation for play seems to be the one scientists most want to avoid: Play is fun. It breaks up the routine. Perhaps some birds play catch in the sky — dropping objects so others can catch them — for the same reason children play catch — or hide and seek, Monopoly or whatever. It's fun. If animal play helps with hunting or mating or escaping predators, perhaps that's just an unintentional bonus.

Two of the most interesting findings in Toomey's book are these:

First, play among animals, as with humans, seems to lead to innovation. Play can help with problem-solving.

Second, dreaming may be a form of playing. Sections of the brain that are active during play are also active when we dream.

Forced apologies

Kat Timpf

Every time we apologize for something that we don't really think is wrong, especially publicly, we're just adding another nail to the plank that someone is going to be forced to walk off of someday."

Kat Timpf, You Can't Joke About That

In our ultra-sensitive society today, in which everybody perceives themselves as victims, demands for apologies are commonplace. Any joke, any comment, any action that someone finds offensive can lead to a demand for an apology. And many comedians, politicians, commentators, whatever, often quickly offer these apologies, which are then usually ignored. Insincere and forced apologies are not much better than no apologies at all. Such apologies rarely satisfy those who claim offense, and those who supposedly gave offense just appear wimpy. And their careers can be irreparably harmed.

This is what happened to me a number of years ago.

I was editorial page editor of my newspaper in Ohio, One of my tasks was choosing a cartoon to run on the editorial page each day. Sometimes I purchased cartoons from local artists on local issues, but usually I chose from a number of syndicated cartoons.

During a slump in automobile sales, I selected a timely, if not very funny, cartoon showing a car salesman trying to seal a deal with a hesitant customer. The caption read something like, "For an extra $500 I will throw in the entire dealership."

The next day our publisher told my editor to fire me. The latter put his own job on the line and demoted me instead to the copy desk with a big cut in pay. To my mind, the cartoon suggested that it might be an excellent time to get a good deal on a new car, but one or more local car dealers found it offensive and complained to the publisher.

Because I was no longer editorial page editor and did not start on the copy desk until the next day, I left early that day. Unknowingly, I avoided being forced to write an apology for offending car dealers with a lame cartoon. The editor was angry because he had to write it himself. I was pleased, however. I don't know if I could have brought myself to do it.

The incident later drew national attention when it was reported in a magazine. My career never recovered, but of course I received no apology.

Lost identities found

Eva is an old Jewish woman in Florida in 2005 with a secret past her late husband and her son knew nothing about. She revisits that past in Kristin Harmel's fine World War II novel The Book of Lost Names (2020).

Eva's past, although she doesn't want to talk about it,  was more heroic than shameful — well, except for her love affair with a Catholic man in France during the war. 

She lives in Paris with her parents when the Nazis and their French sympathizers start rounding up Jews. They take away her father while she and her mother are away. Eva turns out to have a gift for forgery and manages to create papers good enough to get her and her mother out of Paris and to the Swiss border. Yet they don't quite make it all the way to freedom. In Aurignon she is recruited by a priest to help smuggle Jewish children out of France. Her forgery skills prove indispensable. In this underground network she meets Remy, the Frenchman she falls in love over her mother's strong protests.

As for the Book of Lost Names, this is a name give to an old book found in the priest's church. Eva and Remy use a code to list in this book the real names of the children they must give non-Jewish names to when they sneak them across the border. Eva fears the smallest children may forget their real names if they are not recorded somewhere.

When she learns of the discovery of the book 60 years after the end of the war, she knows she must return to claim it — and to see if Remy, whom she learns died in the war, left a final message in it for her.

Harmel's plot may be a bit too neat and tidy to be totally believable, but that will be OK with her readers. Who doesn't love happy endings?

Fair game

Jordan Peterson has argued that comedy is like a canary in a coal mine — the less freedom comedians have to make jokes, the less freedom there will be in society at large. Kat Timpf makes the same point in her book You Can't Joke About That (2023).

Timpf, best known as a witty regular on Gutfeld! weeknights on FoxNews, struggled as a standup comic early in her career. Many of her jokes were about the most difficult parts of her own life — the death of her mother, her many health issues, her poor choices in men — and she says laughing at such trials actually helped her cope with them, even though others sometimes thought her humor insensitive. "How can you joke about that?" they wondered. She defends the right to joke about anything — death, rape, disease, natural disasters, corruption in your own political party, whatever.

"Actually, I've found that the harder something is to talk about, the funnier the jokes about it can be," she writes.

Her personal trials have continued since the publication of this book. She says that she once "joked with friends that my bra size is 'Double Mastectomy.'" Since writing those words she gave birth to her first child, but then was diagnosed with breast cancer — and had a double mastectomy. She has not yet returned to her TV program, but it will be interesting to see if she can joke even about that.

Timpf goes beyond the personal into the political in her book. That is the real coal mine. Are comics free to joke about the government? During the Biden administration most of the late-night comics avoided joking about President Biden, apparently out of fear for their careers, focusing their humor on Donald Trump instead. But the canary remained very much alive on Gutfeld!, where anything and anyone is fair game, thanks in part to Timpf.

Getting a pass

Recently I watched a public-service ad, filmed many years ago, in which Barbra Streisand uses the word retarded. The word was in the name of the organization she was promoting at the time. Today, of course, that word is verboten. Comics are permitted to say any four-letter word they can think of, but they better not say that word. Nor can anyone else say it without getting a negative reaction. Crippled is another such word. There are many other words that were once in common use but cannot now be said in polite company.

I heard someone say, only half in jest, that everyone should get a pass on any words that were in common use before they turned 30. I believe it was the novelist Walter Kirn who said that. In other words, if you could say the word retarded before you were 30 without repercussions, you should be able to say it when you are 60. It's hard work for older people to keep up with the fast-moving trends in language. Should they be required to?

Perhaps Joe Biden should get a pass when he uses words like boy and colored when talking about black people. (Today most people write Black people, but the word was lower case when I was under 30 and I don't plan to change.) Actually, being a prominent Democrat, Biden does get a pass, but Donald Trump, of a comparable age, would certainly not if he used those words.

Most of us can probably remember being embarrassed by something our parents or grandparents said. Either a) they used words that were no longer considered polite or b) they used youth slang they were too old to use. My father, hardly a racist, nevertheless used the n-word from time to time. I wanted to hide. Fortunately he never tried out youth slang.

In a way, using slang from a younger generation may be the bigger offense. In his book Word Play, Peter Farb writes that the very purpose of slang is to exclude people. Only those on the inside know what the words actually mean. Only they should be allowed to use them. Older people don't get a pass when they try to use the slang of younger people. They just sound foolish.

At the same time, older people should get a pass to go on using the slang they mastered as teenagers.

Read it again

The process of relearning enriches each day of our life.

Angus Fletcher, Wonderworks

Angus Fletcher

We talk much about learning, not so much about relearning. Yet Angus Fletcher is right: It is something that enriches each day of our lives. We relearn whenever we watch a movie we have seen before, visit an old friend, hear a favorite song or open a box in our attic after we have forgotten what it contains.

We forget so much of what we experience, Relearning is the act of bringing it back.

As Fletcher's book, Wonderworks, is about literature, he is particularly interested in what happens when we read books we have read previously. He writes, "As you start to turn the pages, you'll feel your brain entwining old details it remembers with new ones it never grasped before, mingling nostalgia with epiphany and making the novel feel novel once more."

Rereading a novel provides two benefits — becoming reacquainted with characters and a plot we had previously enjoyed and discovering new insights we totally missed the first time through — "mingling nostalgia with epiphany," as Fletcher puts it.

"So, by forgetting and then relearning, we create an opportunity for a special kind of discovery that brings wisdom from the past but also fresh eyes from the present," he says.

Thus, forgetting much or even most of what we've read can actually be a good thing, as strange as that sounds. Relearning leads to deeper learning.

The catch, of course, is that we actually have to read the book a second time.

The science in literature

Words like technology and invention are not normally tossed around when discussing literature, yet Ohio State professor Angus Fletcher uses both words frequently in his book Wonderworks (2021). His subtitle is Literary Invention and the Science of Stories.

Fletcher argues that literature can accomplish certain goals, such as feeding creativity, decreasing loneliness and warding off despair. Certain authors and certain books have proved inventive in demonstrating how to accomplish such things with mere words.

The authors he discusses are diverse, from Homer, Plato and Shakespeare to Franz Kafka, Maya Angelou and Tina Fey. The works discussed range from the Book of Job and Hamlet to Winnie-the-Pooh and To Kill a Mockingbird.

At one time, he writes, it was thought that literature, especially popular novels, caused anxiety, especially among women. Virginia Woolf, among others, showed through the invention of stream of consciousness writing that literature could do just the opposite.

How can reading The Godfather improve your health? Fletcher tells us how. What was Jane Austen's contribution to neuroscience? He explains, "Prior to Jane Austen, no novels had drawn us into feeling irony and love at the same time."

This book, while not easy reading, gives us an inventive way to look at literature.

The war goes on

Dehumanizing the enemy comes with the territory during wartime. It can take years for former enemies to seem human again. Following World War I, this process sped along more quickly thanks to Erich Maria Remarque and his great novel All Quiet on the Western Front. Published in 1928, the book describing the war from a German point of view quickly became an international bestseller, even in countries such as the United States that a decade before had been at war with Germany.

Remarque later became a U.S. citizen and married a movie star (Paulette Goddard), but he continued to write about the war from the German point of view. Among these writings is Eight Stories (2018), a collection of tales he wrote for American magazines, mostly Collier's.

The stories show us that long after a war is over and after the citizens of warring nations have accepted each other as human again, the war still goes on for those who fought on the front lines. They can never really go home again

In "Where Karl Had Fought," a friend drives Karl Broeger back to the battlefield where he had fought 10 years before. A bank manager now, he was a sergeant then, leading a charge. The narrator says, "In the midst of the fourteen thousand crosses on the broad central pathway a solitary man, remote and small, goes to and fro, ever to and fro. That is more afflicting than if all were still. Karl pushes on."

"Josef's Wife" tells of a soldier who doesn't remember his wife when he is brought home to her after the war. They own a farm, but he is useless on it. Nothing helps Josef until his wife decides to take him back to the battlefield, to the very site where he sustained his injuries.

The first story in the book may be the best of the lot. Called "The Enemy," the story makes the point that the real enemy in wartime is not the soldiers on the other side but rather the weapons that all soldiers carry. When one holds a tool of any kind, whether it's a hammer or a gun, it must eventually be put to use.

In the story, German and French soldiers temporarily put down their weapons and exchange simple gifts in no man's land. This echoes a true story about a brief Christmas truce between the trenches in 1914, dramatized in the wonderful French film Joyeux Noel.

All of these stories are brief. Each is poignant. Together they give us a picture of war that lasts as long as the soldiers do.

Genuine poetry

T.S. Eliot

Susann Magsamen and Ivy Ross, the authors of Your Brain on Art, quote T,S, Eliot as saying that "genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood."

I am not sure I understand that, but it does communicate something to me. Poetry is an art, perhaps the oldest literary art. One need not understand a painting, a ballet or a symphony for it communicate something to you, so why not poetry? Perhaps it is simply a feeling or a mood. The point of Magsamen and Ross's book is that art makes us feel better, and so it must communicate something.

I notice that Eliot, himself a genuine poet, used the adjective genuine in his comment. Even that part of the statement makes us wonder what he meant. Did he mean serious poetry? Good poetry? Did he mean poetry that by its very nature can be challenging to understand or that can be understood in a multitude of ways?

The authors observe that poems are often read at celebrations and ceremonial events, such as funerals, weddings, commencements and presidential inaugurations. These read or recited poems are not necessarily understood by everyone who hears them, yet they do communicate something. They declare that this is a serious moment, a profound moment. It is the kind of moment that genuine poets write about.

Ordinary people

The most remarkable thing about the men Jesus chose to become his closest disciples is that they were all remarkably unremarkable. John MacArthur makes this point in the title of his fine 2002 book Twelve Ordinary Men.

Several of them were fishermen. One was a tax collector, even less popular with his countrymen than an IRS agent would be today. One was a zealot, what in today's world we might call an activist, an extremist or even a terrorist. For most of the 12, we have no idea what they were. We know virtually nothing about them, yet MacArthur someone manages to write several pages about each of them.

He writes 35 pages about Peter, who is mentioned again and again in the gospels and in Acts, yet then manages 16 pages about Nathanael, even after beginning by saying he is mentioned just twice in John's gospel and elsewhere named only in the lists of disciples. In other words, MacArthur knows how to make much out of very little.

He calls Nathanael "the guileless one," Philip "the bean counter," Andrew "the apostle of small things" and so on. For each there is a lesson in the author's hands. Together they teach the lesson that Jesus has a purpose for all varieties of ordinary people.

The importance of art

Art is not optional, Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross tell us in Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us (2023). 

"Art-making laid the basic foundation for cultural and community among our earliest ancestors," they say late in their book. Without art, we as a people could not exist. And even if we can exist as individuals without art, we cannot exist very well. A healthy, happy life requires art in some form, they argue.

It helps that the authors expand art in ways you may not have imagined. Gardening or the presentation of food on a plate can be creative outlet. (A woman working at a buffet restaurant once complimented me for how artistic my salad looked.) So can listening to music as well as making music. Or taking a walk in the woods. Even looking out a window at a natural setting can make us feel better. They cite a study showing that hospital patients with beds next to a window tend to have shorter stays.

Art need not be good to be beneficial. They point to a study showing "that the simple act of doodling increases blood flow and triggers feelings of pleasure and reward. It turns out that doodlers are more analytical, retain information better, and are better focused than their non-doodling colleagues."

Music helps those with dementia. Dancing benefits those with Parkinson's disease. Coloring books reduce stress. "The arts have the ability to transform you like nothing else," they write.

Their book, unfortunately, does not make easy reading. Reading it often seems more like work than relaxing art appreciation.

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.