Reading on the run

We are doing our reading on the run snatching time pledged elsewhere.

Jerome Weidman

Ideally reading is something we reserve time for. Some read to relax, such as just before going to sleep at night or when they are vacationing on a beach or on the deck of a cruise ship. Others prefer to read when they are most alert, most able to fully understand what they are reading. The best students do this.

Jerome Weidman

Most people — or at least most people with books in their homes that they hope to read — probably identify with the comment by Jerome Weidman quoted above. We do "our reading on the run, snatching time pledged elsewhere."

I have seen drivers with books in their hands while they wait at traffic lights. I read in doctors' waiting rooms and while waiting for my food in restaurants. We grab moments here and there so that we can read without interrupting our busy schedules.

One of the appeals provided by thrillers is that it is literally difficult to put them down.  Reading the next chapter and then the next becomes more important than "time pledged elsewhere." Most other books are easier to place lower on our agendas.

I wrote book reviews for most of my career, forcing me to into the habit of setting aside time for reading each day. In retirement I still maintain this discipline, or at at least I try to. Yet even now, with so few things actually on my agenda, I still often feel that I am reading on the run. There's always something else one could be doing.

The man after Lincoln

Countless books have been written about Abraham Lincoln. Very few have been written about his successor, Andrew Johnson. Yet Johnson's presidency also had an immense impact on American history. As Howard Means says in the closing words of his 2006 book The Avenger Takes His Place, "His failures are still with us."

The title comes from a poem by Herman Melville. The couplet reads, They have killed him, the Forgiver —/The Avenger takes his place. Johnson's attitude toward Reconstruction was expected to be, and probably was, quite different from what Lincoln's might have been. Chances are, however, even Lincoln at his merciful best would have had a difficult time not making a mess out of what was left after the Civil War — an impoverished South, a vengeful North, freed slaves who had no place in a still-divided nation.

Johnson was a Southerner — from Tennessee — whom Lincoln chose as his running mate because he was anti-slavery. Yet Johnson's reasons for opposing slavery had little to do with the slaves themselves. He was resentful of those who profited from slavery, the rich planation owners and the industrialists who got rich from the cheap labor. He opposed slavery not because it was unfair to blacks but because it was unfair to whites. When slaves provided the labor, there were no jobs for lower-class whites, like himself. To him, slave owners were the evil, not slavery itself.

Johnson was not without his good points, and much of his press coverage at the time was glowing. Yet he was unwilling to compromise, and his strong biases caused him to make mistakes that Lincoln might have avoided. Even so, America was well on its way to recovery and equality of the races until the 1960s, when another Johnson — Lyndon — screwed things up again with his War on Poverty that set back the fortunes of so many descendants of slaves by making them dependent on the federal government.

Buyers or browsers?

The good bookstore sells books, but its primary product, if you will, is the browsing experience.

Jeff Deutsch, In Praise of Good Bookstores

For those who enjoy shopping, is it the buying that is most pleasing or is it the search for something to buy?

Unlike women, most of whom seem to enjoy looking at new clothing whether they purchase anything or not, most men enter a clothing store thinking only about what they want to buy, whether it's a new shirt or a new belt. They find what they want as quickly as possible, then leave without looking at anything else. Yet in a hardware store or an electronics store, men may be the ones who like to look around at what's new.

Bookstores have both kinds of customers. Some people are looking for a particular book, a best-seller perhaps, but others just want to look at books, whether they find anything they want to buy or not. What's interesting about Jeff Deutsch's comment above is that a "good bookstore" prefers the second kind of customer, the one who comes just to look around rather than the one who comes to buy something and then leaves.

In the long run, the browser probably buys more books. I am a browser, and I buy a lot of books, yet I rarely enter a bookstore with a specific book in mind.

I doubt that many browsers leave a bookstore empty-handed.

Bookstores need to cater to browsers just as most department stores cater to their female customers. 

Hidden genius

The title of Elaine May's biography, Miss May Does Not Exist, are her own words, written as her biography on an album cover. On the same album cover, Mike Nichols, her comedy partner at the time, wrote a relatively long, name-dropping biography about himself.

It is actually a good title for Carrie Courogen's 2024 book about the Hollywood and Broadway genius who somehow flew under the radar for most of her life. Some of May's best work was as a script doctor for such successful films as Tootsie, What About Bob? and Ghostbusters II, for which she insisted she receive no screen credit. May was also a hidden influence on most of the films directed by Nichols, her former partner in comedy sketches that became famous in the 1950s.

When she did get credit, as in the film Ishtar and various Broadway flops, her work was often panned. Staying hidden seemed to work for her.

As if May's frequent anonymity did not make Courogen's work difficult enough, there is the problem that even when May did talk about herself, it was mostly lies. She told different stories to different people at different times. Even when Miss May did exist, the truth about her often didn't.

Yet the author was able to talk to many other people who worked with or knew Elaine May over the decades, giving her book more credibility than its subject might prefer. She paints May as a genius, a perfectionist and a workaholic who was loyal to her friends, and she had many of them despite the introversion that often drove her into hiding.

She was at her best as a writer, although she also drew raves as a performer. As a director, whether in Hollywood or on Broadway, she never considered her work complete. This caused her to shoot so much film that she would spend months in the cutting room trying to make a film short enough to be shown in theaters. In her plays, mostly one-act ones, she would rewrite scenes from one performance to the next. Although her difficult reputation may have been deserved, much of her work, especially Ishtar, was better than its own reputation. And some of her work, especially her early film A New Leaf, was much better than even she would admit.

Elaine May was most prominent in the public eye back when her comedy act with Mike Nichols was seen frequently on television and was a smash on Broadway. Few people still alive  remember that, but Courogen's fine book helps bring Miss May back into existence.

Write for yourself

Let the reader in you influence the writer in you. Put yourself in the reader's place, then write what you'd like to read.

Patricia T. O'Conner, Words Fail Me

Patricia T. O'Conner

Patricia T. O'Conner's advice for writers — write what you want to read — may be the best advice any writer or would-be writer will ever hear. Some writers seem to do just opposite. They write whatever seems to be most successful at the time. Their work seems imitative, unoriginal. They follow a formula. And if what they write is half-way successful, they imitate themselves

I admire writers like Ann Patchett and Jane Smiley, who never seem to write two novels alike. When something catches their attention, they build a story around it. They write the stories they would like to read, and being avid readers, they don't want to read the same story over and over again.

For the past few years I have tried my hand at writing sermons — and sometimes preaching them. I realize now that this compulsion of mine has something to do with the fact that I have been listening to sermons all my life and found most of them forgettable. I wanted to try writing the kind of sermons I would like to hear.

I think a sermon should have something for the mind (it should be intellectually stimulating), something for the heart (it should stir emotions) and something for the spirit (it should in some way make the listener a better person). And it should be something that can be remembered for at least a day or two. Have I succeeded? I do not know. But I do know they are the kind of sermons I want to hear on Sundays.

Implausibility makes the story

Jane Smiley stopped me cold when I read this line in

Jane Smiley

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel: "Every form of the novel contains some basic implausibility."

Can she be right? Isn't plausibility something we look for in a novel? Don't we want a story we can believe? Don't we criticize novels that seem implausible? I know I do.

And yet the more I thought about it the more I realized that it is implausibility that, in some sense, makes the story. There can be too much implausibility, but there can also be too little. This is true of any story, not just a novel.

If you go to the grocery story to buy a dozen eggs, it doesn't make much of a story. It is entirely plausible. But if, while at the grocery story, you encounter someone you haven't seen in 20 years and whom you didn't know was within 500 miles of that grocery store, you would have a story you would want to tell somebody. The two of you being in the same grocery store at the same time was implausible, but that is what makes it a story worth sharing.

Just the fact that a boy would get on a raft with a runaway slave and float downriver seems implausible. And why would a runaway slave want to go south, not north? And yet here we have the basic plot of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, one of America's greatest novels.

What are the chances that an escaped prisoner encountered by a boy would one day become that boy's benefactor? Yet there, in that implausibility, you have the plot of Great Expectations, the notable Charles Dickens novel.

Implausibility makes a story. Too much of it can destroy it.

Being nice

Midway into Kim Ho-Yeon's lovely novel The Second Chance Convenience Store, one character says to another, "Pretending to be nice, even when you don't mean it, actually makes you nicer." The story is about a  man whose life fell apart because he wasn't very nice and who gets his second chance literally by being nicer to people.

Dokgo is a homeless alcoholic who spends most of his time in the Seoul train station. He has lost all memory of his previous life. He finds a woman's purse in the station, and it has the owner's phone number inside. Instead of just taking the money in the purse, he calls that number. The elderly woman is on a train, but returns as quickly as possible to reclaim her purse. She rewards Dokgo with free food from the convenience store she owns and eventually, when he agrees to stop drinking, she offers him the night-shift clerk's job at her store.

Now committed to being nice, despite his rough exterior, Dokgo manages to give the store itself a second chance by increasing nighttime business. He also changes the lives of several of the store's customers.

But then the woman's son, who wants her to sell the store and give him the money for a business investment, realizes that Dokgo is the obstacle he needs to eliminate to make this happen. He hires a private detective to discover who Dokgo really is.

Kim gives us a charming story about the power that can be found by simply being nice.

Our idea of heaven

Where shall we find the time and peace of mind to read the classics, overwhelmed as we are by the avalanche of current events?

Italo Calvino

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

Jorge Luis Borges

In a way, Jorge Luis Borges answers Italo Calvino's question.

Jorge Luis Borges

Borges is not the only person to fantasize about heaven in the form of a library. I have done so myself. I assume that most people who believe in heaven want that heaven to provide them with the best of what they found in life, whether that be a reunion with loved ones, a prime fishing spot, beautiful music (those images of heavenly harps suggest this very thing) or whatever else it might be. If heaven doesn't give us what we most want, we may think, then what good is it?

One thing that heaven promises, whether it offers harps or books or fish, is eternity — not endless time but rather an end to time. And thus, to return to Calvino's question, there would be ample opportunity to read those classics. Or those best-sellers. Or all those mysteries and thrillers and romances we never found the time for. Then we could read them all over again.

And since it's heaven, maybe we would be able to listen to beautiful music and go fishing, as well. Any heaven we can imagine must have more than just books.

Artificial language

In his book Word Play, Peter Farb says that roughly 700 artificial languages have been created. None of them has ever caught on.

The most famous of these languages may be Esperanto, invented by a Polish physician in 1887. The idea was to simplify language so that people around the world could easily communicate with each other. Thousands of people have learned the language over the years, but not nearly enough. Esperanto speakers have found that the only time they can use it is with each other. When they come together, they can speak Esperanto, but when they go to a grocery store or to their jobs, they must revert to English, French or whatever language the people in their own community speaks.

Similarly a few Star Trek fans have learned the Klingon language (Klingonese), spoken by an alien race in movies and TV episodes, but have found that they can use it only with fellow fans who have also learned the language. Otherwise Klingonese is useless.

This is not altogether a negative thing. Just as slang is developed for use by insiders, not those outside the group, so an artificial language can serve this purpose. Those who speak the Klingon language probably enjoy being on the inside, even if they can't speak the language outside.

The problem with artificial languages is simply that they are artificial. Real languages develop naturally and very gradually over thousands of years. People who live in close proximity and must communicate on a regular basis speak in a way those around them will understand. We speak a language not because it is simple — most languages are not — but because we must use it to communicate with those we want to communicate with.

We may think it odd that the people of Germany, France, Spain, Italy and other European countries speak different languages even though, in today's world, they seem very near to each other. But for most of history, these cultures and languages developed separately. People didn't travel that much.

Many students learned French or Spanish in high school, yet soon forgot what they learned because they lacked the opportunity to use that language in the community where they lived. These are not artifical languages, but they might as well be in an area where there is little chance to use them.

A possessed father

Raising a teen-age daughter must be terrifying, especially for any father who remembers what teenage boys can be like.

Matt Haig explores this terror in his 2008 novel The Possession if Mr. Cave. Terrence Cave is a dealer in antiques whose wife was killed and then his son commits suicide early in this novel. And now Terrence must raise the boy's twin sister, Byrony, who is 15 and beautiful, by himself — or with the help of his mother-in-law, who always takes the side of the rebellious daughter.

As if this situation would not be intimidating enough for any committed father, Haig adds a complication, The title refers to "possession," and Terrance comes to believe he is possessed by the spirit of his son, who was always jealous of Byrony. Now, Terrance believes, Reuben is trying to harm her through him.

Increasingly the father becomes more desperate, especially as Byrony establishes a serious relationship with a boy judged unworthy of her.

Haig's novel begins with one tragedy, and every reader will know the story is moving headlong toward another one. For this reader, at least, just the initial situation was frightening enough.

Obsolete bookstores

We no longer need bookstores to buy books, even serious books. In fact, bookstores might well be an inefficient way to buy books in the twenty-first century, and it is certainly the case that we have become creatures of efficiency and convenience.

Jeff Deutsch, In Praise of Good Bookstores

Keep in mind that the above lines were written by a bookstore manager, Jeff Deutsch, director of Chicago's Seminary Co-op Bookstores. His career depends on bookstore sales, yet even he concedes bookstores have become unnecessary.

In today's world. where efficiency and convenience reign supreme, stores of almost every kind have become unnecessary. Some people even buy their cars online. Some people get Amazon deliveries of products almost daily. Grocery stores and restaurants will deliver food to your door. Pharmacies do the same, or you can use a drive-through so that you never have to actually enter the store. Many jobs you can do from home. Doctors no longer make house calls. Otherwise, you almost never have to leave home.

But our focus here is bookstores.

I rarely purchase books through Amazon, but two or three times a year I will order relatively rare books I cannot find elsewhere. More commonly I order books from the catalogs of Edward R. Hamilton Bookseller, a company that seems almost as obsolete as a bookstore. Hamilton has a website, but searching through thousands of book titles online can be oppressive. Their catalogs — several each month — are more fun to browse through. Some books are new, sold at discount. Others are remaindered, meaning they did not sell in bookstores and are now available at more extreme discounts.

Then you list the books you want, write a check and send the order form through the U.S. mail, all steps that seem somehow old-fashioned but yet work perfectly well, even though it can take weeks for delivery, not like an Amazon truck showing up in a day or two.

Yet I prefer shopping in bookstores, those few that remain. I like the atmosphere of a bookstore — shelves full of books, tables piled high with books, people who love books, like me, looking for treasures in print.

Just as many of us would rather hold an item of clothing in our hands, try it on and look at ourselves in a mirror before purchasing it, rather that ordering it online and perhaps having to send it back, many of book lovers prefer holding books in our hands. We like to read the cover, leaf through the pages and perhaps read a few lines before making a purchase. I have placed books back on at the shelf simply because I didn't like how they felt.

As long as there are people like us — people who prefer shopping and eating at an actual business, rather than doing everything online and never having a reason to leave home — these businesses will hang on, obsolete or not. Bookstores included.

The wonder in literature

Bryce Canyon

We mostly associate the phrase "state of wonder" with the natural world. A starry night, a glorious sunset, our first glimpse of Bryce Canyon or even a walk through a woods on a perfect autumn day can give us this feeling of wonder.

European cathedrals or skyscrapers can do the same, as can extremely unlikely coincidences, the first glimpse of our newborn son or daughter and a few other experiences in life. But what of literature? Can we experience wonder when we read?

I think the search for wonder may be one of our main motivations for reading. When we read thrillers, for example, some wonder comes with each plot twist. Because there can be so many of them in one novel, thrillers are extremely popular. The fingering of the killer in a murder mystery, usually an unlikely suspect, gives us the wonder we have been reading the whole novel to discover.

In other types of fiction, wonder takes different forms. Often it is found in the perfect sentence somewhere in the midst of a novel where we discover what the title really means or what the story is actually about, when we had thought it was about something else. Sometimes we discover that a character is not the kind of person we had thought all along. Or it may come when the main character, at the end of the story, takes some action we had not foreseen. Sometimes a lovely metaphor offers wonder.

In fiction, revelation provides wonder. Surprise provides wonder. Beauty provides wonder. Not unlike Bryce Canyon

Voting for W.C. Fields

"Is it possible to be funnier than W.C. Fields?" Dick Cavett asks in his foreword to a 2016 reprint of Fields for President, a book Fields wrote for his mock campaign for president in 1940.

Well, yes, it is possible to be funnier than W.C. Fields. Even in his prime, Fields was not funny to everyone. And even those of us who have laughed at his movies over the years have not laughed at everything he did. He had hits and misses, like everyone else who tries to be funny.

His book, which undoubtedly has lost some of its humor over 85 years, has some of both.

Fields's "platform" for the presidency covers seven subjects: marriage, income tax, resolutions (or campaign promises), etiquette, physical fitness, the care of babies and business success. He devotes a chapter to each.

Regarding marriage, he says, "Never try to impress a woman! Because if you do she'll expect you to keep up the standard for the rest of your life." A hit.

On the income tax, he says, "In other words, the government fixes it so that you have a choice of (1) starving to death by having an income so low that you do not have to pay a tax; or (2) have an income high enough to pay a tax — and then starving to death after you've paid it." A hit.

As for kissing babies on the campaign trail, he writes, "I always carried a number of sterilized blindfolds, which I would casually place over each baby's eyes before I kissed it. This prevented its growth from being stunted through terror." Another hit.

The comic's misses tend to come when he gets wordy, as in a long story about a common house fly on the wall at Harvard Medical School that ends up getting a degree. What does this have to do with running for president? Not much, and the humor ends long before the story does.

Those who love W.C. Fields will find enough pleasure here to make reading the book worthwhile. Others should simply avoid it.