Self-assigned reading

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

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

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

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

Shannon Reed

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

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

Mystery solved

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

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

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

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

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

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

In or out

Jerry Seinfeld

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

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

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

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

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

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