Old routines, new laughs

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Reed reads

Reading gives me the world.

Shannon Reed, Why We Read

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slavery and beyond

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter preferences

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

Here are some of my other preference in chapters:

1. I like it when chapters are numbered. 

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

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

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

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

Animals first?

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

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

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

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

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

Read this

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

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

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

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

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

Go figure.

A book club without all that reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The stupid war

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lost love

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

Richard Roper, This Disaster Loves You

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

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

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

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

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

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

The wisdom of trees

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

Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree

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

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

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

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

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

You may have a superpower

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

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

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

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

No surrender

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

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

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

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

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