Keyboard magic

"My imagination doen't really work unless a typewriter is sitting directly in front of me," novelist Larry McMurtry once said. "I am all but incapable of conceiving stories abstractly."

One of Larry McMurtry's Hermes typewriters

I found this quote in Tracy Daugherty's fine biography of McMurtry, and I have no idea when he said, whether it was before or after the computer age. But it doesn't really matter. Even after other writers had switched to writing on computers, McMurtry continued using the same kind of typewriter he had used since early in his writing career. When he was sitting there with his fingers on the keyboard, he was in his comfort zone. That is when his imagination fired up and the stories and characters came out.

Although I switched effortlessly from typewriters to computer keyboards, I identify with McMurtry. I have written previously about how, in my early teens, I had no interest in writing and no clue that I had any writing ability at all until my parents brought home a portable Smith-Corona typewriter. I seemed to turn into a writer overnight.

Even now I usually have no idea what I am going to write about when I sit down at my computer to write a blog post. Yet when my fingers are on the keyboard, ideas begin to form. Words come from somewhere and flow through my fingers and those keys and onto my computer screen. Give me a pen and paper and I am incapable of writing anything noteworthy, as I learned when I had to write all those in-class college essays on test days.

Our minds operate in strange ways. Some writers can only write when they are standing up, like Hemingway, or sitting in bed. Whatever works.

Reason to live

Larry McMurtry

In Tracy Daugherty's biography of  novelist Larry McMurtry, who seemed to write books so that he could afford to buy books, he quotes something McMurtry's older sister, Judy McLemore, said about him. "He told me once he wasn't afraid to die; he was just afraid that he wouldn't get all the books read that he needed to get read. I told him, 'Larry, you have been reading since you were four. Surely you have most of them read.' He replied, 'No, I'm not even close.'"

They say that old people often stay alive longer if they are waiting for certain milestones — to reach a 90th birthday, to see a grandchild graduate from college, whatever. Reading all the books one wants to read before dying may be an impossible goal. Even so, it makes sense to me.

I would gladly settle just for all the unread books in my condo, which might keep me going strong for several more decades.

If one needs an incentive to keep breathing, books seem to me to work as well as birthdays and graduations.

Murderbot in love?

The hard reality was that I didn't know what Mensah was to me.

Martha Wells, Exit Strategy

The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells may be, on the surface, adventure novels, shoot-'em-ups in space. Yet what makes them so compelling is that the Murderbot in question is mostly a robot, yet partly a human being. He (or is it it?)  can even pass as human, even though he doesn't need to eat or sleep. He calls himself a Murderbot because he was designed to protect people, usually by killing other people.

By deactivating his governor early in the series, he became a free agent. He follows no orders and can spend all his time watching the videos he has downloaded into himself, which is what he says he wants to do. Yet he  confesses in Exit Strategy (2018), the fourth book in the series, that watching all that media has made him "feel like a person."

What's more, he may actually be in love with Dr. Mensah, his former owner. Now on his own, he sets out to rescue Dr. Mensah from an evil corporation holding her for ransom.

Wells throws in enough imagined scientific jargon of the far future to satisfy any geek, but the Murderbot's shred of humanity is always what drives these novels. This one may not be one of the best in the series, but it is still impossible not to love Murderbot at least as much as he may, or may not, love Dr. Mensah.

How to speak sheep

This strikes me as rather sad — that we can only understand parrots if they're speaking our language about things we've decided are important to us.

Amelia Thomas, What Sheep Think About the Weather

For generations scientists have been trying to teach various kinds of animals to communicate using human speech. But if these scientists are so smart — smarter, one assumes, than those animals — then why not learn to communicate with them using their own forms of communication?

Amelia Thomas is no scientist but just an intelligent woman who loves all animals. In What Sheep Think About the Weather (2025), she tells about her efforts to understand what these animals may be trying to say.

Her amateur studies take her to interview many actual scientists and to examine the communication tools used by whales, dogs, birds, monkeys, horses and many other animals, including sheep. Her book reaches its climax when her beloved but weakening horse, Major, puts his forehead against her own, telling her in his own way that he is ready to die.

Because each of the many species of animals communicates in its own way, and most of them have no interest at all in communicating with humans, it will be a great challenge for Amelia Thomas or anyone else to ever turn into Doctor Doolittle. But Thomas does show us that the true challenge is not teaching chimpanzees or any other species to speak English but rather learning how these animals are speaking to each other, and sometimes to us, in their own way.

Nothing new

I have a view about great art, whether it's stories, music, whatever. None of it tells you anything new; it merely reminds you of something you already knew but forgot you knew. And that's what Larry did, You start reading Lonesome Dove and you feel you already know these people. They're already in you. They've always been in you.

Bill Wittliff writing about Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Larry McMurtry himself disagreed with what Bill Wittliff says above, although his biggest beef seems to have been with Wittliff suggesting that Lonesome Dove is "great art." McMurtry did compare his novel with Gone with the Wind, but then he pointed out that Gone with the Wind is not a great novel either.

But I don't think art has to be great for what Wittliff says to be true. It merely has to be good art.

Art need not tell us anything new. Science does that. Art reminds us of what we know. But it does so indirectly, obliquely even. It may reflect reality, but that reality may be different for different people. Art allows for interpretation. It allows for different opinions. Art so often takes the form of a puzzle.

I was a newspaper book reviewer when Lonesome Dove was published in 1985. I received an advance review copy, and I can recall reading it while on a family vacation that took us to Arkansas, Memphis and Mammoth Cave. If I were asked what book I most enjoyed reading and reviewing, I would say this one. I knew nothing about cowboys and cattle drives other than what I had seen in movies and TV westerns, yet this story moved me as few others have. The characters seemed real to me, as if, as Wittliff suggests, they were already in me.

Behind a masterpiece

I watched Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window again the other night, while I was in the middle of Jennifer O'Callaghan's Rear Window: The Making of a Hitchcock Masterpiece in the Hollywood Golden Age (2025). I must agree. It is a masterpiece.

This 1954 classic entertains audiences even as it convicts them. Jimmy Stewart plays a world-traveling photographer confined by a broken leg to his own apartment. To entertain himself he watches neighbors in a building across the way, sometimes using binoculars. He imagines stories about them. What some may call people watching, others might call voyeurism. Might we under the same circumstances do much the same thing?

Jefferies, the Stewart character, comes to believes a man across from him has murdered his nagging wife. His girlfriend who wants to marry him, played by Grace Kelly; the woman who comes by to give him a daily massage, played by Thelma Ritter; and a police friend, played by Wendell Corey, all think he is letting his imagination get the better of him. But then they become believers, too.

O'Callaghan tells us in detail how this great movie was made, how the elaborate set was built and why it worked so well and how Hitchcock tricked censors into letting him get away with more than they may have imagined.

Yet only about half the book is actually about the making of the film. The rest tells us much about the careers of Stewart and Kelly, especially Kelly, whom O'Callaghan follows from Hollywood to Monaco. She even has a lot to say about Tom Hanks, the modern actor most like Stewart in his common-man appeal. Kelly, however, she regards as one of a kind.

Along the way, she tells readers some fascinating trivia. Who was the highest paid actor in Rear Window? Would you believe Thelma Ritter? And did you know that Ross Bagdasarian, who plays the composer in one of the windows, later became better known as David Seville, the man behind the Chipmunks?

If you enjoy Rear Window — and who doesn't ? — you will have fun with O'Callaghan's lively book.

A nun in Iceland

Icelandic author Olaf Olafsson makes reading his novels a challenge, as in Touch, a book that wowed me a couple of years ago. In The Sacrament (2019), an earlier novel, there is more of the same. Time jumps around, so the reader is never sure what is happening now and what happened way back when. Quotation marks are used sparingly. Much of the narrative is obscure.

Yet Olafsson proves worth the trouble.

Sister Johanna Marie, a French nun, is sent back to Iceland for a second time, two decades after her first visit, to conduct another investigation. Her main qualification as an investigator seems to be that she learned the Icelandic languages from her Icelandic roommate, Halla, when she was in college.

Because Catholic priests and nuns are not allowed to marry, the priesthood sometimes draws homosexual men, partly the reason for the problem the church has had with priests and choir boys. And this is why Johanna is sent as an investigator to Iceland. But does a nun's life also attract lesbians? This is true in Johanna's case, and each time she visits Iceland she has Halla on her mind.

Will she and Halla reunite? That is but one of the novel's mysteries. Also, will misbehaving priests ever face justice? Why did a priest fall to his death from a bell tower during Johanna's first trip to Iceland? And what happened to the boy she rescued from a locked closet?

Olafsson's novels may be puzzles, but they are a joy to solve.

Why not rabbits?

In Version Control, Dexter Palmer wrote one of the most original time-travel novels you are likely to find. In Mary Toft: or, The Rabbit Queen (2019), his creative mind takes off in a very different direction.

Now it is 1726 in a small English village, where a woman seems to be giving birth to dead rabbits. The novel is based on a true story.

Zachary is a village boy who becomes an apprentice to John Howard, the village physician, after he shows interest in a traveling show of human oddities. If this boy has the stomach for this sort of thing, he must have what it takes to be a good doctor, Howard reasons. Mostly the story comes from Zachery's point of view.

But then comes the case of Mary Toft, who gives birth to dead, dissected rabbits every two or three days. At that time it was believed that women who give birth to odd, misshapen children — such as the two-headed woman who shows up late in the novel — must have had something traumatic happen to them during their pregnancy. So why not rabbits?

Soon this oddity attracts surgeons from London, each claiming to represent the king. They take turns delivering dead rabbits and finally take Mary to London to impress the king and others in the big city. Of course, Mary stops giving birth to rabbits once she is in London.

Although this story has comic potential, Palmer mostly plays it straight. He deftly explores the odd human desire to believe the impossible. Whenever we see a magic act, we want to believe the magic tricks are not tricks at all. So again, why not rabbits?

Minor writers

Larry McMurtry

Larry McMurtry, best known for Lonesome Dove, took satisfaction in being regarded as a "minor writer." Relatively few writers ever achieve that distinction, he noted.

Most writers make no splash at all. Minor writers are important in their own generation and perhaps for a few years afterward. Then they disappear. A very few major writers — like Dickens, Austen and Tolstoy — continue to be read a hundred years later and more.

McMurtry placed such respected 20th century writers as Norman Mailer, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow in the "minor" category. He didn't mention John Updike, but it is hard to imagine Updike still being read in the next century. Relatively few people read him now.

The only one of his contemporaries he mentioned as a major writer was Flannery O'Connor. "I think she was a true genius, painful genius," he said.

McMurtry also said, "It's fine if you're minor. I 'm glad I got that high. Not everybody does."

His comments reflect both humility and reality. True greatness in any field is rare, and should be. We think of the word minor as being insignificant or average, if not below average. And if we are thinking only of our own time, such descriptions may be true. McMurtry, however, was a bibliophile perhaps even more than he was a writer. He read great books from many centuries and many writers. He looked at literature on a big screen. In the big picture, the Mailers and the Roths and the Bellows, not to mention the McMurtrys, are truly minor. Even so, they made it to the screen.

McMurtry's life

Writers can come from anywhere, as is proven once again in Tracy Daugherty's fine 2023 biography Larry McMurtry: A Life.

McMurtry was born into a struggling Texas ranch family. Bookish even in a home without books, he was certainly not made to be a cowboy. Yet his experiences growing up in that environment allowed him to create an impressive library of western fiction, both contemporary such as The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment and of the Old West variety, such as Lonesome Dove.

Like his novels, where his characters always seem to be going somewhere, McMurtry lived his life mostly on the road. Archer City, Texas, may have been his home base, where he eventually brought thousands of books in hopes he could turn this nothing town into a literary haven, but mostly he traveled. He owned a bookstore in Washington, D.C. He  went often to Hollywood, where he wrote screenplays (like Brokeback Mountain) and built friendships with the likes of actresses Diane Keaton and Cybill Shepherd. He became pals with author Ken Kesey in California and the Pacific Northwest and eventually married Kesey's widow. He spent a lot of time in Tucson.

McMurtry may not have looked like a ladies' man, but like a sailor he seemed to have a girl in every port. His relationships with women, from Susan Sontag to Diana Ossana, were extremely close, even when they were not sexual. As Daugherty puts it, "He gathered women as he gathered books, and for much the same reason: so as not to feel bereft." And so many of his best characters were women, many of them based on the women in his life.

Daugherty says that "loss was the major theme of his writing." The loss of the Old West, his father's and grandfather's generations, was certainly dominant in his work. But there are other kinds of loss, as well. So many of his main characters die in his books, reminding readers that life is fleeting. 

And now we have lost Larry McMurtry. Yet, at least for the time being, we still have his books.

Carried away by metaphors

We are moved by metaphors, carried away, transported by them. In its simplest form, metaphor sets side by side two things that are different and purposes to the mind that they are alike. Metaphor does not change things, it asks us to consider them in the light they shine on one another. Everything looks different  depending on the light in which we see it. The right metaphor educates and delights our sense of seeing."

Heather Cass White, Books Promiscuously Read

Metaphors have been on my mind lately. I am leading a series of discussions on the 23rd Psalm. The psalms are poetry, and poetry depends heavily on metaphors. "The Lord is my shepherd," like virtually every phrase in the psalm, is a metaphor. It "sets side by side two things that are different" — God and a shepherd — "and purposes to the mind that they are alike."

Heather Cass White

The metaphors in the psalm ask us "to consider them in the light they shine on one another." Metaphors can mean different things to different people, or even to the same person at different times. That's because, as Heather Cass White puts it, "Everything looks different depending on the light in which we see it."

Thus, I think our discussions on the 23rd Psalm could be very interesting.

But if poetry depends heavily on metaphors, the same is true of fiction. Moby-Dick is a great novel, in part, because the huge whale is a great metaphor. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a great novel, in part, because the raft and the river are great metaphors. The effective use of metaphors is essential to good writing.

But then metaphors are also essential to communication in general. The Big Bang metaphor makes it easier to explain the universe. Two apples plus two apples makes it easier to explain basic arithmetic.

As White puts it, "The right metaphor educates and delights our sense of seeing."

Message in a bottle

To write, publish, or distribute a book is like putting a message in a bottle and tossing it into the sea: its destination is uncertain.

Gabriel Zaid, So Many Books

Gabriel Zaid, above, is clearly not talking about the likes of James Patterson, Laura Lippman, Michael Connelly or any other author of popular books, although what he says may very well been true of these authors early in their careers.

For writers starting out, it can be a great challenge getting an agent, then finding a publisher and then, perhaps most challenging of all, attracting readers. The message in a bottle metaphor is actually spot on in most cases.

Writing a book takes hours upon hours of work. For writers who cannot yet get an advance from a publisher, this is unpaid labor. The labor includes research, especially in the case of nonfiction books, and countless hours spent writing and editing — usually spare time, because these writers often have full-time jobs or families to take care of. They must struggle with plots, sentences, grammar, clarity and, in some cases, trying to create art. All this must be done without ever knowing if anyone will actually pay money to read all those words.

The book publishing industry exists and succeeds because there are so many people in the world with something they want to say who are willing to take this great chance — to, in effect, put their message in a bottle with the hope that someone someday will actually find it and read it.

Relatively few of the books written are actually published, and few of those published actually sell a significant number of copies. 

Zaid concludes his thought on an optimistic note: "And yet again and again the miracle occurs: a book finds its reader, a reader finds his book."

How to apologize

Gary Chapman's five love languages have, over the years, become an essential tool for helping people understand how they both express and experience love. In 2022, with the help of Jennifer Thomas, he produced the book 5 Apology Languages, which does the same kind of thing with apology.

Just as we do not all think of love in the same way, so we do not all think of apology in the same way. Thus, what one person thinks of as an apology may seem totally insufficient to the person receiving the apology. The five languages are expressing regret, accepting responsibility, making restitution, planned change and requesting forgiveness.

The authors give us many case studies involving individuals who either cannot bring themselves to make an apology or, if they do, fail to do it in a way that is meaningful to the offended person. Simply saying you are sorry won't work for someone who expects change or restitution.

The authors touch on, but to my mind do not give enough attention to, the fact that in many, if not most, conflicts, both people share some guilt. One thing leads to another in so many disagreements, each causing escalation. Yet often it is just one person who is expected to make an apology.

Chapman and Thomas add helpful material to the end of their book. What should we avoid saying when we are trying to apologize? What things should we say? How can we determine what our own apology language might be?

Their book can be useful for anyone involved in a personal relationship — in other words, all of us. 

Too many books

For most of my life, the phrase "too many books" was a foreign concept to me. You can never have too many books. Any book worth reading was worth keeping, I thought. And that's what I did.

My personal library began growing when I joined the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club as a teenager. Almost every month I got one or two cheap hardbacks by people like Isaac Asimov and Clifford D. Simak. In college I took lots of literature classes, each requiring the purchase of several books. In addition, I loved spending any extra money I had at college bookstores.

Near the start of my newspaper career I began reviewing books, which meant publishers sending me books by the armload. In my mid-thirties, my wife and I purchased a spacious new home that seemed to have an endless amount of room for an endless number of books.

But then I got old and the time came for downsizing. I like having lots of books around, but my son does not feel the same way. And then we bought a condo and, eventually, I sold my big house. "Too many books" became a reality, one I am still trying to deal with.

I sold about half my library at auction. Most of the rest are in storage. Yet old habits die hard, if they die at all, and I continue to acquire books. I no longer, however, feel compelled to keep every book I read. Even so, I am practically buried in books.

And then I became condo librarian. Residents regularly donate books, which is good, but since the shelves are already filled, I must take one book off the shelves each time another is donated. Here too there are too many books.

I was fascinated by the very first page of Donna Leon's 2023 mystery So Shall You Reap. Guido Brunetti, Leon's hero, has but four bookshelves in his own home — his wife, a professor, claims the rest — and they are full. It is time for what he terms The Cull.

"The first shelf held books he knew he would read again; the second, at eye level, held books he wanted to read for the first time; the third, books he'd not finished but believed he would; and the bottom shelf held books he had known, sometimes even as he was buying them, that he would never read."

I have many more books than Brunetti has, and my shelves are not nearly as well organized, and yet my approach to culling is essentially the same as his. He begins at the bottom, with those books he knows he will never read. And that is where I must also begin.

Books that flatter us

Always be cautious with books about books! The risk is flattery,

Robin Sloan, introduction to So Many Books by Gabriel Zaid

Robin Sloan

Books about books are always popular with those who love books. Why? Because they flatter us, Robin Sloan says. They compel us to buy them. We like to read about ourselves, and books about books are, in some way, about us.

I have never in my long life seen so many novels with book-related themes. There are novels about librarians who become heroic spies during World War II. There are novels about romances set in bookstores and libraries. There are novels about writers, about book clubs and about lost books.

Among the unread novels on my own shelves are The Fiction Writer by Jillian Cantor, The Librianist by Patrick deWitt and The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams. Bookstores are currently filled with tempting titles that I have, so far, been able to resist.

As for nonfiction, there are almost as many books about books. So Many Books by Gabriel Zaid was published in Spanish in 1996. It was translated into English in 2003. I own the 2025 edition. In other words, we readers still want to read it because it is about what we like read about — books and the people, like us, who read them.

Consider some of the books about books I have read and written about here: 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley, Books Promiscuously Read by Heather Cass White, In Praise of Good Bookstores by Jeff Deutsch, So Many Books So Little Time by Sara Nelson, Browsings by Michael Dirda, A Reader's Manifesto by B. R. Myers, Ruined by Reading by Lynn Sharon Schwartz, The Joy of Books by Eric Burns and Phantoms on the Bookshelves by Jacques Bonnel, among others.

So why, other than flattery, should we be cautious about books about books? It is too easy to be taken in by a title. This may especially be true of novels. Just because fiction is set in a bookstore or a library doesn't mean it will be something worth reading. This is true of genres of all kinds. Just because you like westerns (or romances or sci-fi or mysteries) does not mean that all westerns, etc. are worth reading. And it seems to me that books about books have become a genre all their own.

UFOs and donuts

Joe R. Lansdale turns out one entertaining novel after another, yet somehow flies under the radar of most readers. His The Donut Legion (2022) is another enjoyable experience.

As the title suggests, the novel is a bit off the wall. There's a ghost, flying saucers, a killer chimpanzee and, of course, lots of donuts.

Charlie Garner is visited one night by his beautiful ex-wife, Meg. Yet it soon becomes clear that she was never really there, although a hint of her perfume remains. When he goes looking for her, he discovers that both she and her new husband have disappeared. Did she somehow get mixed up in a nearby flying saucer cult, into which both people and large sums of money seem to be disappearing?

With assistance from his brother, Felix, a private investigator; Cherry, his brother's girlfriend and an attorney; and Scrappy, a pretty woman pretending to be a newspaper reporter who soon proves she deserves that nickname, Charlie begins digging into what's really going on inside that cult.

This proves to be dangerous business, even after they enlist the local chief of police in their campaign. As for the donuts, it seems the cult gets much of its money from a string of donut shops.

The novel proves to be fun, even as bodies keep piling up.

Saving our schools

Charles Dickens

Nowadays computers and iPhones outnumber books in so many American classrooms. It is no coincidence that reading scores have dropped and so few young people read books. They may read social media, but not Austen, Dickens or Twain.

So many teachers don't even assign books to their students. Instead assignments require reading just a few pages. The potential impact is tremendous — the loss of mental skills, a decline in the ability to hold jobs and a shrinkage of western heritage. At one time most people knew at least something about Animal Farm, Huck Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird.

Salvation may depend more on state legislators than on educators. Mark Bauerlein and Stanley Kurtz are pushing legislation they call the BOOKS (Books Optimize Our Kids' Schools) Act. This would require English teachers to assign at least two books per semester to their students. Half of these books must have been published before 1900, meaning that students would be required to tackle something written by the likes of Shakespeare, Alcott, Thoreau and Homer.

For us older folks, that sounds like a normal and good education.  To too many students today it sounds impossible. This explains why so many parents are turning to home schooling, private schools and charter schools to educate their young. If Bauerlein and Kurtz have their way in a few state legislatures, even public school students may start doing better.

Miss Kopp rides again

Amy Stewart's Constance Kopp novels make compulsive reading, and Miss Kopp Just Won't Quit (2018) ranks with the best in the series.

Six-foot-tall Constance Kopp, based on an actual person, is the first female deputy sheriff in Hackensack, New Jersey, in the years just before America enters World War I. She takes care of the female prisoners and sometimes spends the night in her own cell. Yet as a woman in a man's world, she is always newsworthy and even controversial. especially now that it is an election year. The election of a new sheriff could jeopardize her fledgling career.

Yet that is a mere subplot here. The title's real significance applies to her determination to help a housewife whose husband routinely sends her to a mental asylum. Charged with taking the woman to the institution, Constance becomes convinced there is nothing mentally wrong with Mrs. Kayser. Although told to back off because it is not her responsibility to question a judge's order, she nevertheless pursues justice for this woman, even to to the point of getting an attorney and a private investigator.

Meanwhile her home life once again proves entertaining. Her sister, Norma, remains all business, always busy and totally committed to getting the Army to use her carrier pigeons when they go to France. Her other sister (actually her secret daughter), Fleurette, remains flighty, gifted at making clothing but more interested in singing and dancing.

This novel doesn't end with a bang, but rather peters out, but keep in mind that it is fiction based on true events.

Novel relationships

Every novel. every narrator can't help offering the promise of a relationship.

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

Relationships are important to all of us — friends, lovers, families, even store clerks and those working in medical offices whom we see periodically. But novels or the narrators of novels? Can we have meaningful relationships with them?

Jane Smiley

I like that Jane Smiley, in making the statement above, clarifies it with the phrase "offering the promise of a relationship." This promise is not fulfilled in every novel or in every narrator. Some novels we read and soon forget. Of course, that also may be true of some human relationships. First dates don't always lead to second dates. Even close friendships can evaporate quickly after one person moves away.

I think something very much like a relationship can develop while one is engrossed in a novel. The same is true of movies, of course. We become invested in the story. The words and actions of the characters matter to us. We want to give them advice: Don't open that door. Don't believe what he's saying. Kiss her, you fool.

Some fictional relationships can last longer than many real human relationships. Why do we keep some novels on our shelves long after we have finished reading them or why do we want to read some novels again and again?  It's because the relationship isn't over.

Fun with English

Patricia T. O'Conner formerly worked for the New York Times, helping writers and reporters clean up their prose, but perhaps she might have been been more at home at the New York Post.

The Post is known for its fun-filled and pun-filled headlines, A recent issue, for example, had headlines like "AND THE DRESS IS HISTORY," about Melania Trump's inaugural gown being donated to the Smithsonian, and "Snow way! More white stuff for us?" about another predicted storm for New York City.

If you can enjoy the Post for its headlines, you might enjoy Origins of the Specious by O'Conner and Stewart Kellerman (2009) for its subheads (and a lot more). For example:

"Wake My Day" — Should we say "I woke" or "I waked" or "I have woken" or "I have waked" or "I have woke"? I have been a writer for most of my life, but I am still confused by that one. O'Conner, in her always witty and informative fashion, sets us straight. Any will do.

"A Niche in Time" — What is the proper way to pronounce the word niche? Should it be NITCH or NEESH? She says NITCH, thank goodness. Only snobs say NEESH.

"Ivory League" — Here she digs into the question of why we use the term "ivory tower" to refer to the intellectual elite. She gives us quite a history of the phrase, beginning with the Song of Solomon, where we can find, "Thy neck is as a tower of ivory." She moves on to Mary McCarthy's 1963 novel The Group," which include the sentence, "We called you the Ivory Tower group."

"Axe, and It Shall Be Given" — Here she delves into the question of why so many people, especially black Americans, pronounce the word ask as axe. Guess what! This goes back to England hundreds of years ago. Chaucer, for example, wrote, "a man that ... cometh for to axe him of mercy."

O'Conner, with Kellerman's assistance, makes the language fun.

An escape or a confirmation?

Lawrence Durrell

"I don't believe one reads to escape reality," the British novelist Lawrence Durrell said. "A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he had not experienced."

But can't both be true, even at the same time?

A man may work in an office in Cincinnati or as a plumber in Philadelphia and, in the evening, enjoy reading western novels. He may want to both escape the reality of his own circumstances — perhaps there is even a nagging wife — while at the same time wanting to experience a reality, even if it's an imagined one, that he can never experience in real life.

Or a war novel may be read by someone with no military experience at all. He will never know what it is really like being in combat, but a book can confirm that reality, while at the same taking him briefly away from his normal routine.

A lonely middle-aged woman who has never experienced romance in her life may read one romance novel after another to confirm a reality that she believes other women have known.

And so on.

Thanks to books, one can travel into space, explore the deep ocean, find true love, win a bar fight, hit a home run in the World Series, solve mysteries, travel the world or do almost anything else. There are many more realities than any one person can experience in one lifetime. Books expand our possibilities.

Behind the scheme

Emily St. John Mandel's 2020 novel The Glass Hotel is a bit hard to peg. It covers a lot of years in relatively few pages. There are numerous characters. It is about a Ponzi scheme, yet it is also a ghost story

All this adds to the novel's charm.

The hotel of the title is where the novel begins and where it ends. Hotel Caiette is isolated on Vancouver Island, accessible only by boat. Only rich people stay there. Only those who prefer isolation can work there.

Early on Jonathan Alkaitis, a wealthy investor, meets Vincent, the bartender. Despite the misleading name, Vincent is actually a beautiful young woman. Alkaitis quickly makes her his pretend wife, never a replacement for his beloved late wife, but an attractive woman to keep on his arm and to share a bed with.

The life suits them both until authorities arrest Alkaitis for stealing from his many wealthy clients. He goes to prison. Vincent goes into isolation, working aboard ships where nobody knows her past.

Meanwhile Mandel looks into the lives of the scheme's victims, as well as those who worked with Alkaitis and suspected something was wrong yet were making too much money to take a stand. While all this is going on,  ghosts come and go, appearing to several people during the course of the novel.

This is not your usual crime novel — or ghost story — but it is a gem.

Why no ads?

Magazines and newspapers can have more ads than articles. Television interrupts every show every few minutes with several minutes of commercials. Even supposedly ad-free public television throws in ads at the beginning and end of programing. When you go to the movies, you must sit through several minutes worth of commercials before the movie finally starts. On the web, you can't watch YouTube videos, do a Google search or do much of anything else (reading this blog being an exception) without encountering ads.

So how have books survived all these years without advertising?

To be sure, each book's publisher probably promotes other books they publish, especially those by the same author, somewhere in each volume. But you don't find Pepsi ads between chapters. You never find a State Farm ad on the back cover. How can this be?

Other media survive thanks to advertising, but not books. Advertising makes mass communication free, or at least relatively cheap. Somebody has to pay for "free" television programs. Somebody has to pay for web searches. Film producers and movie theaters need extra income to stay afloat.

Yet publishers keep publishing books, more and more each year, without putting advertising between the covers. What gives?

First, many people like to see their words in print, meaning they are willing to write books for little financial return. For publishers, books are relatively inexpensive to print, but they are not inexpensive to purchase. We readers are the ones who pay the freight. Books might actually be less expensive if they contained advertising. We must now pay about $30, sometimes a lot more, for a hardback book and nearly $20 for a paperback. Perhaps some advertising would help publishers, authors and readers, at least financially.

We are spared advertising in books, in part, because most books aren't all that popular. Most books, in fact, sell only a few thousand copies, if that. Even bestsellers don't necessarily sell enough copies to make authors — or potential advertisers — rich. Thus advertising in books doesn't make much sense in the book business. Why buy advertising in a book that may sell relatively few copies? And if publishers ever became dependent on advertising, fewer books might be published.

The ad-free tradition helps. It's how books have always been. We don't want our books "sponsored" because advertisers may try to influence content. Sometimes, for example, we see certain products in films because the manufacturers of those products have invested money in the productions. We might possibly see something similar if books contained advertising.

Quite piossibly the future of book publishing depends upon the industry keeping books ad-free.

Underwater sound

We may have heard about humpback whales that sing in the ocean, but it may not have ever occurred to us that other forms of sea life communicate by sound, as well. It was Jacques-Yves Cousteau who coined the phrase "the silent world" in one of his films about the sea, and most people believed him.

Yet the oceans are a concert of sound, it turns out. Amorina Kingdon tells us about it in her 2024 book Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Under Water. Many different species communicate by sound. These are not necessarily vocal sounds. Some species produce sound by rubbing body parts together or in other ways.

Kingdon writes, "Sculpins move their pectoral girdle. Toadfish, squirrelfish, and others drum on their swim bladder with special muscles or tendons, making resonant hums, moans, and boops. Blue grunt or beau-gregory scrape or grind special teeth in their throats. Some fish burp or expel gas from their anus."

Researchers have speculated that the songs of humpback whales may actually, in a sense, rhyme.

Whale sounds can travel many miles. It is how they communicate with each other. Some species use sound to attract mates or to find their young in dark water.

Humans have a way if interfering with the natural world without meaning to, such as by simply cutting down  dead trees. This is true of underwater sound, as well. The engines of ships, sonar and windmills, for example, can make life difficult for sea life and may be responsible for those mysterious beached whales.

Kingdon gives us the good and the bad of underwater sound.

Caught in a blizzard

Iceland is a small country that has produced some remarkable writers of thrillers and mysteries. One of these is Ragnar Jonasson, whose Outside (2021) makes compulsive reading.

The plot seems simple enough. Four friends go on a mid-winter hunting trip when an unexpected storm sweeps in. Yet the blizzard is just the first, and perhaps the least, of many surprises.

They seek shelter in a cabin, where they find a still, silent man holding a gun. Gunnslaugur may be a respected lawyer but he is also an alcoholic who, this being a hunting trip, has his own gun. In a panic, he shoots the silent man. Now what do they do?

It turns out that the four friends are not as friendly as we were first led to believe. In fact, one of the novel's big mysteries is why these four people would ever go hunting together in the first place. Nobody really likes Gunnslaugur. Daniel left Iceland to become an actor in London. He doesn't like guns and isn't that fond of any of his "friends." Armann is an outdoorsman and a professional guide, and it is he who organized the trip, but he has a violent past. Helena, we learn, is Armann's twin sister, and she carries grudges against both Gunnslaugur and Daniel.

One disaster leads to another in Jonasson's story. The brief chapters, each told from the point of view of one of the four main characters, will keep every reader turning the pages as quickly as possible.

Whose rules?

The English language has always been tolerant of contributions from elsewhere. So many of the words we use, other than the basic Anglo-Saxon ones, come from other languages. English speakers may change them and pronounce them differently, but we keep them and make them our own.

Yet trouble seems to follow whenever other languages become too highly regarded by English speakers, often supposed language experts. Many of the silly language rules we older folks learned in school were imported from Latin as late as the 19th century. These include not splitting infinitives and not ending sentences with a preposition. Yet English is a Germanic language, not a Romance language. Latin rules do not apply to English.

After the Normans conquered England in 1066, numerous French words entered the English language — at least the English spoken by aristocrats. Thus, chickens became poultry and pigs became pork, among many others. Again, English welcomes words from anywhere.

But there are many words and phrases that English speakers have adopted simply because they sound French, yet they are not French at all. We just like to pretend they are French because they make us sound more sophisticated. These include such expressions as piece de resistance, nom de plume, affair d'amour and even negligee. These are unknown in France. The British simply made them up.

Over the years the British were quick to accept French spellings of English words. In fact, Americans spell many English words in a more traditional English way than the British do. The British now use the word honour because of French influence. Americans spell it as honor, the way the English used to. Similarly, Americans use theater, center and fiber, while the British, under French influence, now spell these theatre, centre and fibre.

But the English language isn't French, any more than it's Latin. We English speakers can take their words, but we should follow our own rules.

Picking up the pieces

So many brave young men died in World War I, yet yet the trials for those who survived, both men and women, continued even after the war was over. Somehow Helen Simonson produced a light-hearted novel, The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club (2024, out of this serious situation.

During the war, young British women had to step up and do many of the jobs young men had done before the war. Some of them discovered they liked doing these jobs, but when the war was over they were expected to quit and get married, never mind that there were fewer men available to marry. Meanwhile, wounded veterans found themselves unwanted for the many jobs newly available. Soldiers from India who had contributed to the war effort were less welcome in England once the war was over.

Set in the summer of 1919, Simonson's novel centers on Constance Haverhill, who did her part during the war, but now her bookeepping skills are unwanted. She is employed as an aide to a wealthy elderly woman who will soon need her no longer. Mrs. Fog is set to marry a sweetheart from long ago.

Constance doesn't know what she will do with herself, but then she befriends Poppy, an outgoing young woman who rode motorcycles during the war and wants to continue doing the same. She has several friends, female riders or mechanics, with similar frustrated ambitions. Poppy's brother, Harris, was a pilot in the war, but now he has a wounded leg, and the bank job promised to him before the war is no longer available. And although he is a gifted pilot despite his bad leg, nobody wants him flying their planes.

A badly damaged Sopwith Camel, purchased by Poppy, gives Harris incentive to live again, and with Constance as his unexpected flying partner, he begins to see a brighter future for himself. Will that future include Constance?

There are complications, of course, all of which result in an absorbing novel with just the ending readers want.

The right word

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

We think of Ruth Bader Ginsburg more for her legal commentary than her literary commentary, yet she once wrote something that must ring true to writers everywhere: "Even today, when I read, I notice with pleasure when an author has chosen a particular word, a particular place, for the picture it will convey to the readers."

Words matter to a writer, as well as to a discerning reader. Why one word and not another? Why one descriptive phrase and not another? Why set a story in one location and not another? Such choices matter, and often they matter a great deal.

In Muse of Fire, Michael Korda's book about World War I poets, he tells in detail how Siegfried Sassoon influenced changes in one of Wilfred Owen's most famous poems. Even the title was changed dramatically with one word choice. "Anthem for Dead Youth" became "Anthem for Doomed Youth." That single word change made the title more powerful, more mysterious, more memorable.

Sassoon suggested the poem be written in third person, rather than second person, as Owen originally wanted. The poem's first line changed from "What passing bells for you who die in herds?" to "What passing bells for those who die as cattle?" You became those; in herds became as cattle. These changes widened the scope of the poem somehow.

And so on.

The poem remained Owen's, yet Sassoon's editing made it immortal. All this demonstrates the importance of good editing, but it also illustrates Bader's point that a particular word choice can make a world of difference.

The poets' war

World War II produced several novelists of note, including James Jones, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut. World War I, however, was the poets' war. It produced one of the greatest war novels of all time, All Quiet on the Western Front, yet poetry still ruled the literary world, even though it was all but dead just a few years later when the second big war erupted.

Michael Korda, the author of a number of wartime histories, including With Wings Like Eagles, has written a fine book about World War I seen through the eyes of its poets, Muse of Fire (2024).

He focuses on six poets who fought in the war and wrote verse about their experiences: Rupert Brook, Alan Seeger, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Only Graves and Sassoon survived the war.

Their poetry changed as the war went on and on. To Brook and Seeger, the only American in the group, the war was a great adventure. "What bloody fun!" Brook wrote in a letter. In one of his best-known poems, he said: "If I should die, think only this of me:/That there's some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England."

Seeger, related to folk singer Pete Seeger, was even more romantic about combat. "I have a rendezvous with death ...," he wrote. And "that rare privilege of dying well."

The others viewed the war more realistically. No less patriotic that the other two, they nevertheless saw the war as pointless and a terrible waste of human life.

They were also shockingly blunt about what soldiers did in war. Writing about killing an enemy soldier with a bayonet, Sassoon wrote: "Sweet Sister, grant your soldier this;/That in good fury he may feel/The body where he sets his heel/Quail from your downward darting kiss." In another poem he wrote the phrase, "The place was rotten with dead."

Authorities strictly censored letters, books and anything else written about what was actually going on in the trenches. Yet for whatever reason — perhaps because the censors had little patience for poetry — the poems of these men somehow got through.

Translater, traitor?

There is an Italian adage that goes, "Traduttore, traditore." It means "Translator, traitor," but of course, that is a translation.

It means simply that something is always lost in translation. Of course, if you are someone who needs the translation because you can't read the original language, then you will never know if the translator is really a traitor or not.

I have read many books that have been translated into English. I am presently in the middle of one that has been translated from Icelandic. I think it's a terrific novel, but am I missing something? I will never know if the translation has betrayed the original or not.

I have mentioned in this blog that I sometimes write and even preach sermons, and a few months ago I preached one that relates to this topic. (Actually all sermons relate to the subject because all sermons are based on translations of either Hebrew or Greek texts. We can always wonder, what has been lost in translation?)

I found that Job 35:10 has been translated very differently in different Bible translations. For example, the New International Version translates it as "But no one says, 'Where is God my Maker, who gives songs in the night ...'"

The Complete Jewish Bible says that God "causes glad songs to ring out at night.," which is more specific than simply "songs." The Good News Bible puts it this way: "God their Creator gives them hope in their darkest hours."

The New Catholic Bible makes it more personal: God "protects me during the night." In the New Revised Standard Version, God "gives strength in the night."

Then there is The Message, which says, "God puts spontaneous songs in their hearts."

That's the same Hebrew text translated six very different ways. Some mention songs; others do not. Some mention the night; others do not. Some simply translate the metaphor; others attempt to interpret the metaphor. I liked all six translations, and I preached six mini sermons, one on each of them.

Are all six translators traitors to the original? Or does each bring out something different that was there all along?

A place to tarry

When dining in a restaurant, the server will often place the check on your table and say something like, "There's no hurry." We already know this, of course, and when I have had a good conversation partner, I have sometimes sat at the table for two hours or more. During busy times, however, when people are lined up waiting for a table, the management probably wants desperately for you to move on, whatever the servers might say.

Speed is a priority at a number of business, such as the one that promises a "10 minute oil change." Nobody likes standing in a long line at the grocery store or sitting in a crowded waiting room at a doctor's office.

So I am impressed by the slogan of the Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago: "Stranger, here you will do well to tarry, Here our greatest good is pleasure." The line comes from Epicurus in reference to his school, but it seems ideal for a bookstore. The more time people spend in a bookstore, the more books they are likely to find that they cannot resist.

And while books are often about instruction and reference and guidance, they are mostly about pleasure. We usually read what we enjoy reading.

The best bookstores encourage customers to stick around. They have chairs, for example. They serve coffee. Some have cats or even dogs. Some have authors signing books or giving talks. Children's departments have story times, giving parents a chance to browse. The more books a store has, the more time book lovers are likely to spend there, and of course the more money they are likely to spend.

One does wonder, however, whether the "here you will do well to tarry" motto still applies as closing time approaches.

A courtesan's story

Juhea Kim's sweeping novel Beasts of a Little Land (2021) covers much of 20th century Korean history, mostly from the point of view of a courtesan named Jade. The novel all but ignores the Korean War, oddly enough, focusing mostly on the years of Japanese occupation, which ended with Japan's defeat in World War II, although the story continues to 1965.

Jade is just 10 years old in 1918. Before long she becomes an apprentice courtesan, training to entertain wealthy men. She develops into a beauty, beloved by many, including two boys closer to her own age who both want more from her than she can give.

JungHo is a homeless ruffian when he befriends Jade. He later becomes a communist enforcer, even though he lacks communist sympathies, returning from time to time to help Jade until, many years later, she is in a position to try to help him.

HanChol meets Jade as a teenager who takes Jade home each night in his rickshaw. They become lovers, though she eventually must reject him. He goes on to become one of the wealthiest men in postwar Korea, yet never far from Jade's mind.

Although there is much here about hunting tigers, the human beasts in this little land are mainly the Japanese oppressors, who try to dominate every aspect of Korean culture and commerce.

This is a powerful story told with grace by the young author, now a Princeton grad living in the United States. "Death was such a small price to pay for life," she writes near the end, and her novel makes you believe it.

The soul laid bare

Guy de Maupassant

Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.

Guy de Maupassant

Are those words by Guy de Maupassant really true? Or is the opposite true? Are spoken words more or less likely to be truer than written words?

Since the great French writer of short stories said those words, technology has confused matters even more. Now we have the telephone, allowing us to hear words without the benefit of seeing the face saying them. We have email and texting, allowing spontaneous reactions, which may often be more truthful because the writer often acts before thinking of a more diplomatic way of saying what was said.

Certainly we can be dazzled and deceived by words spoken to our face, but can't we also be dazzled and deceived by words written on paper? Writers have more time to deliberately craft their words than speakers do. Written language, in fact, is better designed for dazzling, at least in the hands of a skilled writer, than plain speech is. As with texts and emails, people tend to speak before they have thought it through, not giving themselves time to consider the best way to say something.

People often lay the soul bear in arguments or when making cruel jokes that they later regret. On the other hand, it may be easier to write a Dear John letter (or email) than to break up a relationship in person. It may also be easier for someone to say "I love you" in writing. Very soon people will be sending each other valentines to say things they cannot bring themselves to say in person.

I don't know if Guy de Maupassant got it right or not.

Reality disguised

The people you know actually dread reading the novel you are about to write — they don't want to read about themselves, they don't want to be bored, and they fear embarrassment for everyone. You are, therefore free,

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

Novels, and especially first novels, are often an embarrassment to those who know the novelists. Just ask the women who were close to Philip Roth. Just ask Pat Conroy's father. And so on.

First-time novelists tend to retell the key story from their own early lives. Their difficult childhoods. Their first awkward stabs at romance. Their most traumatic high school or college experiences. All this and more often winds up, slightly disguised, in first novels.

But even experienced novelists, who may have run out of profound personal experiences to write about, will still base characters on the people they know and base episodes in their novels on events from their own lives or the lives of people they know. Fiction is often the truth reimagined.

Flannery O'Connor was famous for her outrageous, often evil, characters. Yet she is said to have based these characters on the people she knew in the town where she lived. She simply exaggerated their flaws to such an extent that the individuals they were based on rarely recognized themselves. And few people in her town ever read her stories.

To know a novelist, as Jane Smiley observes, is often to fear being recognized in one of those novels. Serious novelists must steel themselves to not be overly intimidated by the concerns of others. These are the ones, in Smiley's view, who are therefore free.

Baby talk

Apparently speaking baby talk does no harm, and it may even be a valuable aid in the early stages of acquiring a language.

Peter Farb, Word Play

The English word infant apparently stems from a Latin word meaning "speechless." True enough, when a child begins talking we usually stop using the word infant, replacing it with toddler. Albert Einstein didn't begin talking until he was about 3, perhaps meaning that he was considered an infant longer than most other children with lesser brains.

We begin learning a language before we begin speaking it. Children begin learning language as soon as they are born, if not before. They learn, for example, the sound of their mother's voice. They learn that human sounds have meaning, even if they do not understand that meaning.

Peter Farb

The question Peter Farb deals with above is whether parents and other adults using baby talk help or hinder a child's speech development. Many people do speak baby talk around small children, yet most of those children grow up speaking their language as the adults around them speak to each other, not baby talk. When adults do speak baby talk around other adults it is usually an affectation, such as a woman trying to appear cute around men.

I have often prided myself on speaking like an adult around children, under the belief that this might help them learn to speak properly. Yet, I confess, I often used baby talk around my own son. More accurately, I adopted some of the pronunciations he used. For example, he pronounced certain words beginning with an S as if they began with the letter P, such as pasgetti for spaghetti. I started doing the same. He liked Fritos but called them Friggytoes. I have been calling them friggies ever since. In fact, I still sometimes say pasgetti when no one else is around.

Yet my son grew up speaking perfectly good English. Only I, apparently, was adversely impacted by baby talk.

Eugene Peterson at his best

Eugene H, Peterson

Eugene H. Peterson, who died in 2018, may be best remembered today for transforming the Bible into The Message, a popular paraphrase that puts Scripture into language Americans can better understand. Yet he was mainly, for many years, the pastor at Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Md., and a very fine preacher.

In 2023 some of his sermons were collected in the book Lights a Lovely Mile: Collected Sermons of the Church Year. The book makes good reading.

Many preachers, and perhaps most preachers, base their sermon on gospel texts, but if this collection is any indication, Peterson favored passages from elsewhere in the New Testament, especially Paul's writings. And the word passages is misleading, for usually these sermons are based on just a single verse. And it is amazing how much he could find in that single verse.

He said this in one of his sermons, "Paul. Why do I like him so much? An opinionated man, verging on cockiness, quick tempered, and capable of soaring anger. He wrote on subjects that are of surpassing importance to me: God, my eternal salvation, the meaning of my life, how to think of Christ. These are things I very much want to get clear and straight."

As the subtitle suggests, the sermons cover the church year — Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, etc.

Like any good preacher, Peterson sometimes said surprising things. He began one sermon, called :"The Most Dangerous," by saying, "Do you know that the most dangerous thing you can do is go to church?" He went on to say, "The temptations that take place inside church are much more severe and have much bigger consequences than those outside." What sins did Jesus most condemn? Well, sins like spiritual pride and hypocrisy, sins more likely to be found in a church than at any bar on a Saturday night.

Want a good sermon without having to step into a "dangerous" church? Give Eugene Peterson a try.

Sealing the deal

The other day I ate lunch with my family at the Oxford Exchange in Tampa, a striking downtown restaurant with both a bookstore and a tea shop, both as attractive as the food to me. I bought some tea, my granddaughter bought a book, everyone enjoyed lunch.

While there I picked up a bookmark with a quote from Edgar Degas: "Art is not what you see, but what you make others see." 

After lunch we walked across the street to the University of Tampa, where we saw the Sticks of Fire sculpture by O.V. Shaffer. I confess I did not see much beyond several slender metal pillars pointing toward the sky. I am sure the sculptor saw something more, and if you read about the sculpture you will find it has a deep meaning for the campus. All this escapes the casual viewer, however. The sculpture is clearly more impressive at night, as the accompanying photograph shows.

Whether one is talking about sculpture, literature, painting, theater, film, photography or any other art form, a kind of transaction takes place. Others complete the transaction. A book is no good without a reader, a painting no good without a viewer, a play no good without an audience. Thus, what the artist sees is only part of the deal, as Degas suggested. Someone else must complete it. And what others see is at least as important as what the artist sees.

So was the sculptor of Sticks of Fire a failure, according to Degas? Or was I the failure? Or did I simply view it at the wrong time of day?

Invisible detectives

Now You See Us (2023) by Balli Kaur Jaswal is partly a murder mystery, but that's only a small part. Mostly it is a novel about how those in the servant class live invisible lives, or perhaps they are just seen differently.

Cora, Angel and Donita are Filipina domestic workers in Singapore. Cora, older than the others, works for a rich widow whose daughter is getting married. The woman, embarrassed by her late husband's infidelity that everyone but her seemed to know about, treats Cora like her only friend, which both Cora and the daughter find inappropriate for different reasons.

Angel has an elderly employer. Donita works for a woman who treats her more like a slave. Both of these young women are involved in tumultuous love affairs in their one day off each week.

Then a fourth domestic worker, Flordeliza, is arrested for the murder of her employer. The other three women don't believe it. One of them says she saw Flordeliza elsewhere when the murder occurred. The three of them play detective in their limited spare time. When they find the answer, will anyone believe them?

A significant number of women from the Philippines work as domestic workers elsewhere in the world. The author, who was born in Singapore and lived in the Philippines, knows this story from both sides.

Facts can spoil stories

The historian is required to give up dramatic interest in the pursuit of accuracy, but a novelist must give-up accuracy in pursuit of narrative drive and emotional impact.

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

That sentence by Jane Smiley in her book 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel is packed with lessons.

Don't expect historical novels to be completely reliable.

Don't expect historical accounts told in story form to be completely reliable either. Is it possible that the more interesting a history book is, the less accurate it is likely to be?

Don't expect memoirs and autobiographies to be completely reliable.

Don't expect the stories people tell, whether in divorce court or at parties, to be completely reliable.

To tell a good story, one must, to some degree, fudge the facts. We tend to make ourselves the hero of our own stories. We eliminate anything that might spoil the story or that make us look bad. We exaggerate anything that makes the story more entertaining or that makes us look better.

The more we tell favorite stories the more we embellish them, and the more we embellish them the more we believe the embellishments. Our memories gradually conform more to our stories than to what actually happened.

When I worked for newspapers, a favorite insult was, "He didn't let the facts get in the way of a good story." That was funny because it was often so true.

Fear not ... and read

President Eisenhower (left, center) at Dartmouth College

Not long after he became president of the United States in 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower gave the commencement address at Dartmouth College. He said, among other things, "Don't join the book burners. ... Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book."

Perhaps he should have said any book. I think I would fear trying to read every book in a public library of any size.

But let's take apart Eisenhower's words. Book burning in any form — actual book burning, censorship, protests, refusal to add to a public library's collection or to a bookstore's shelves — doesn't work. You have probably noticed that bookstores and libraries everywhere often have a table of "banned books." Most of these books have never actually been banned, certainly not in the United States, but they have been frowned upon publicly by somebody. The result is that these very books become highlighted, put on display and made more attractive to those who otherwise might never be drawn to them.

The best way to sell a book is to have somebody raise a fuss about it.

And so book burning is counterproductive. You can't burn every copy. You can't ban everyone from reading a book, printing it or selling it. It simply makes more people want to read it. And in a country with a free press, it would be illegal anyway.

This is not to say that there are not certain books that can be controversial in certain circumstances. A prominent man recently drew controversy when he was exposed on the Internet leafing through a lingerie catalog on an airliner. Carrying a book by a prominent conservative author on a liberal college campus could get a person in hot water with friends and professors. Reading a book denying the existence of hell, as was published a few years back, might raise eyebrows in certain churches.

Eisenhower was right. Don't be afraid to read any book. But you might want to be careful where you choose to read it.