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.