Living the Constitution

I realized just how much the Constitution is a national Roshach test. Everyone, including me, sees what they want.

A.J. Jacobs, The Year of Living Constitutionally

Author A.J. Jacobs doesn't just write his books. He lives them.

Before writing about the Encyclopaedia Britannica in The Know-It-All, he read it, cover to cover. Before writing The Year of Living Biblically, he devoted a year trying to follow Hebrew law to the letter. And so before writing The Year of Living Constitutionally, he devoted himself to doing just that.

He wore 18th century clothing, carried a musket in reenactments of Revolutionary battles and tried his best to understand what men like James Madison and Benjamin Franklin were thinking when the U.S. Constitution was written.

Jacobs also did his best to take seriously parts of the Constitution that are now mostly ignored. The Constitution is rarely amended, but he circulated a petition to amend it so that instead of just one chief executive there would be several.

The Constitution actually has a provision allowing pirate ships to act in support of the country. So he borrowed a friend's boat, called it a pirate ship and tried to get a "Letter of Marque and Reprisal."

The Constitution prohibits the quartering of soldiers in a citizen's home without consent. So he gave his consent to quartering a solder.

Jacobs is a humorist, and there is much to laugh at in his book. At the same time he makes his readers take a good look at the Constitution, both what it says and what it doesn't say, how both interpreting it too strictly and not strictly enough can lead to trouble.

When books show wear

Jules Verne

We are of opinion that instead of letting books grow moldy behind an iron grating, far from the vulgar gaze, it is better to let them wear out by being read.

Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth

As the person in charge of my condo association library, one of my main responsibilities is to decide which books stay and which books go. Residents donate books almost every week, and as shelf space is limited, whenever one book is placed on a shelf, another has to be taken off.

How do I decide which books need to go?

First, I look for duplicates. Sometimes we have a book in hardback and the same book in paperback. I see no need for two copies, no matter how popular a book may be. One of them has to go, usually but not always the paperback.

I may look at the publication dates. New books are more likely to be keepers than old books.

Some books have been on the shelf for a long time, and to my knowledge unread by anyone. They are vulnerable.

And then there are the books that show obvious wear. This happens sooner with paperbacks, of course.  Many paperbacks are not designed for multiple readings, and some readers tend to be hard on paperbacks. With clothbound books, it is the dust jackets that first show wear. Not all readers remove the dust jacket when reading a book, and then dust jackets do not last long. I do not shelve hardbacks without their dust jackets.

And that brings me, finally, to the quotation from Jules Verne above.  When a book shows wear, it is actually a good sign. It shows the book has been read and even loved. Someone spent some time with it, perhaps folded back some pages, perhaps even placed a coffee mug on it or spilled some food on it.

I may have to remove worn books from these library shelves, but I do so with respect. Better wear than mold, as Verne said.

Have you a heart?

As short as Hard Times is, at least for a Charles Dickens novel, it packs in a lot of story. Perhaps there are even two stories.

There is, for example, the big story — the impact of the Industrial Revolution in England. Coketown is a dirty industrial community where the haves and have-nots know their place. Then there's the more personal and more interesting story about how this social structure impacts two of the children of one of the town's wealthiest men, Thomas Gradgrind. 

Gradgrind (as usual, the names Dickens chooses for his characters say a lot about them) teaches his children the importance of Facts (capitalized to show their importance to him). Anything whimsical, anything fun, anything fictional is discouraged. Growing up in this environment,  Tom and Louisa seem lost and purposeless. When her father arranges a marriage with a much older man, Josiah Bounderby, Louisa accepts, assuming there can be nothing better for her in life than marriage to someone she doesn't love. Tom, meanwhile, takes a job, but wastes his money gambling, a habit Louisa supports on the sly.

There are a variety of developments, including a younger man who tempts Louisa and a bank robbery in which Tom may or may not be involved.

The climax comes when Gradgrind, finally realizing how his teachings have negatively impacted his children, asks another character, "have you a heart?" Some things, it seems, may be more important than Facts.

Hunting hunters

Someone is hunting hunters in C.J. Box's 2008 novel Blood Trail.

In a western state where hunting is a way of life, this is a very big deal for Game Warden Joe Pickett. Hunting is prohibited until the killer can be found, and because the law enforcement personnel are less than competent, as usual in these novels, it falls on Pickett to discover what's really going on.

Strong characters are key in Box thrillers, and this one is no exception. Joe himself has his demons, and his temper gets him into big trouble by the end. His relationships with Marybeth, his wife, and his daughters, who mature as the series continues, are vital. And then there is his relationship with the governor, for whom he has become a private investigator on the public payroll, and with Stella, the governor's aide, with whom Joe has a history.

Klamath Moore, a radical anti-hunting activist, comes to the state to cause trouble just as the murders pile up. Is he connected to the crimes? Is he perhaps the killer? And then there is Randy Pope, Joe's boss, who may also be his greatest enemy.

Blood Trail lives up to its title. It is a violent, bloody novel that never ceases to entertain.

Backbone of literature?

Cheating is the backbone of literature.

Lixing Sun, The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars

In the Charles Dickens novel Hard Times, a man raises his children with Facts. Anything that is not factual is prohibited. This includes novels, fairy tales, music, poetry, jokes or anything else that brings joy, especially to children.

This father, Dickens shows as his novel goes on, is the cheater, depriving his own children of joy and happiness and love.

Lixing Sun

In his book, Lixing Sun argues that lying and cheating are the backbone not just of literature but of life itself. Up to a point anyway, he has a point.

One thing you can say about fiction, however, is that it represents truth in advertising. We are told upfront that it is all lies. Fiction means it's not true. Yet it can still be entertaining. It can still be informative. And it can still contain truth. Jesus told parables not because they were true stories but because they conveyed truth. In the same way, a novel like Hard Times conveys truth.

Sun has a better point, however, when he observes that much of what we call nonfiction is also, in fact, fiction. His own book, as I mentioned in my review the other day, illustrates this. Memoirs are not entirely reliable. Neither are history books or even science books. Mistakes are made. Some facts are ignored, while others are highlighted. All writers are biased in one way or another.

So is cheating really the backbone of literature? To me that point of view seems too much like that of the father in the Charles Dickens novel. 

Unable to stay

It isn't fair to be the kind of creature who is able to love but unable to stay.

Charlotte McConaghy, Migrations

Following Arctic terns as they migrate from the top of the world to the bottom in search of fish is just one of the migrations Charlotte McConaghy writes about in her 2020 novel Migrations.

More significantly the novel is about the personal migrations of its main character, Franny Stone, always on the move, always looking for her mother, always trying to escape her guilt, always looking for death while clinging to life.

McConaghy imagines a future where animals are mostly extinct. Among the few birds still living are Arctic terns, who once again are making their annual migration in search of the few fish that remain. Franny manages to get aboard a rare fishing boat. She promises the birds will lead them to fish, if any fish still exist, even though the ship's captain has never gone below the Equator.

The narrative goes back and forth, from the present to the past — Franny's childhood, her time in prison and her marriage to a professor committed to protecting animal life. She lacks academic credentials herself, but in honor of him she pretends to be a scientist as she pursues the terns.

Repeatedly in the novel, Franny dives into frigid water, as much to feel life again as to flirt with death. The narrative is something of a back and forth, sort of like migration.

Book of lies

Lies work because most of us expect the truth. And society wouldn't work if nobody expected the truth.

In The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars (2023), Lixing Sun looks at lying at all levels of life, from bacteria to human beings. Liars are found everywhere. Birds, even those that supposedly mate for life, cheat on their mates. Some insects pretend to the leaves. Many species of animals "play possum," or pretend to be dead to fool predators interested only in live food.

In the last half of his book, the author focuses on human lies, from cheating in business deals to cheating in marriages. He categorizes lies, some being destructive and hurtful, while others are necessary for making others feel good, such as by telling one's wife that the dress doesn't make her look fat.

Some lying, even the hurtful kind, Sun says, is necessary for human society to function. Yet, once lying becomes too frequent, too obvious, nobody can trust anyone else. And then everything collapses.

"Cheating not only underpins many aspects of our economic, intellectual, artistic, and social lives, it also helps define our desired moral values," the author writes. "Without lies and deceptions, who would care about honesty?"

Unfortunately Sun does his share of lying, as when he confuses his political opinions with the truth. His casual attitude toward truth threatens the integrity of his own book about lies.

One book, one reader

Seminary Co-op Bookstore

In his book In Praise of Good Bookstores, Jeff Deutsch, points out that in 2019, the Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago, which he manages, sold roughly 28,000 titles — not books, but titles. Of these, nearly 17,000 were single copies. Think about that for a minute.

That means that in a year's time, nearly 17,000 different books sold just a single copy in that store. The bookstore stocked all these books just to sell one copy. Most books, in fact, sell very few copies. Even the so-called best-sellers, in most cases, don't actually sell that many copies. There are so many books being published and so many readers that relatively few people may be interested in reading the same book.

I have been a member of LibraryThing for many years. You might call this social media for bibliophiles. You list your library on the web site and post your reviews of the books you read. You can also have conversations about those books or anything having to do with books.

LibraryThing has thousands of members, yet I've noticed that several of the books I own are owned by nobody else on the site.  One of these is The Photographer's Guide to Great Lakes Lighthouses. Meanwhile, more than 93,000 other members own Pride and Prejudice.

As a reader, here are my conclusions:

1. I am glad people write books even though relatively few people will ever want to read them.

2. I am glad there are publishers still willing to publish books that few people will want to pay money for.

3. The more different books stocked in a bookstore, the better.

4. The longer these books are kept on their shelves, the better.

5. Eventually every book will find its reader.

Word for word

A poem must be remembered word for word or it loses its identity.

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

One of the movie cliches that I hate comes when one character quotes a line of poetry and then someone else, usually an attractive person of the other sex, either quotes the next line of the poem or names the poet and the title of the poem.

Does this ever happen in real life? Rarely. If you said, "I think that I shall never see," I might be able to respond with "A poem lovely as a tree." There are a few lines of poetry that a lot of people know. Yet few people today even read poetry, let alone remember much of it. The odds of two people both having memorized lines from the same obscure poem are astronomical, yet in movies it happens frequently.

I am more accepting of those characters, such as Horace Rumpole in the old PBS series, who quote lines of poetry here and there when it seems to apply to the situation. It is much more likely that one person has memorized a poem than that two people, potential lovers, have done so.

Still, and this is what Jane Smiley seems to be getting at in the line quoted at the top of this post, lines of poetry are much more likely to be quoted word for word than lines from a novel. There are exceptions, such as the opening lines from Moby-Dick and A Tale of Two Cities, but you can paraphrase a novel with more ease than you can paraphrase a poem. Reader's Digest has never condensed a poem. You just can't do it or, as Smiley says, "it loses its identity."

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is remarkable in that, at the end, characters memorize entire books because the government is burning books. (Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which books burn.) A few people are said to have memorized the Bible, but generally speaking people never memorize books word for word. They are simply too long, and the language is rarely beautiful enough to merit memorization or repetition to other people.

Even jokes and folk tales are rarely repeated word for word.

Poetry, however, has power because it can be remembered word for word, and must be, even though few people do it anymore.

In praise of daydreaming

I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.

G.K. Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton

As someone who might frequently be described as absentminded, I rather like the above quotation from British author G.K. Chesterton. Those who are called absentminded are, in most cases, simply thinking about something else.

In school they used to call it daydreaming. We daydreamers may not have been thinking about the lesson or the lecture, but we were certainly thinking about something. I suspect that many of today's most successful people — the inventors and innovators — were once called daydreamers.

I recall the old Disney movie The Absentminded Professor. Fred McMurray played a professor whose mind always seemed to be somewhere else. Nevertheless he invented flubber, an anti-gravity substance.

Albert Einstein, often thought to possess the greatest mind of his age, had a reputation for absentmindedness. So what? In the final analysis, wearing matching socks is hardly the most important thing in the world.

The rest of the story

I look at my girls, my brilliant young women. I want them to think I was better than I was and I want to tell them the truth in case the truth will be useful. Those two desires do not nearly coexist, but this where we are in the story.

Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

Rarely can a novel be summarized in a single paragraph from that novel, but this is the case in the above paragraph found about three-fourths of the way through Ann Patchett's terrific 2023 novel Tom Lake.

Lara's three daughters are grown women, still unmarried and at home for the annual cherry harvest at the family farm near Traverse City, Mich. One of them, the eldest, believes she may actually be the daughter of Peter Duke, the famous movie star. While they pick cherries, Lara decides it is finally time to tell them the story of when she and Duke were lovers. As the paragraph suggests, she wants to tell them the truth, but just not the whole truth. The latter she saves for us readers.

Lara, originally just Laura, is in high school when she first plays Emily in the Thornton Wilder play Our Town. She turns out to be a natural in the part. She eventually goes to Hollywood to make a movie. While waiting for the movie to come out she finds herself at Tom Lake in Michigan, a summer stock theater that is putting on Our Town. Once again she is a natural for the part of Emily.

Also in the cast is charismatic young actor named Peter Duke, with whom she falls instantly in love. Patchett's novels do not normally focus much on sex, but this one is an exception, although of course Lara does not tell her daughters all the juicy details.

Joe, Lara's husband and the father of all three girls, thinks he knows the story, and he listens to just part of what she says among the cherry trees, but he doesn't really know the whole story either. Joe, whose family, owns that cherry farm as Lara's story unfolds, is then a director who helps get that Tom Lake production under way, and later he becomes a cast member. Even then he loves Lara, but she is Duke's girl and he does not interfere. They meet again much later.

The love story has its ups and downs, as most love stories do, but Duke is star material, and Lara soon realizes that she isn't. She may be a natural to play Emily and her only movie is a hit, yet she realizes there at Tom Lake that acting isn't really her future. Besides, Duke is not a one-woman man, though Lara comes to realize she is a one-man hoe.

Patchett has written a series of wonderful novels, all remarkably different. I place Tom Lake right there at the top, along with The Patron Saint of Liars and State of Wonder.

When animals age

If old age can be rough for human beings, even with Social Security and retirement communities, it must be much worse for animals. Herbivores become easy prey when they slow down, and carnivores can starve to death when they can no longer catch anything to eat.

Yet this is not always true, as Anne Innis Dagg tells us in The Social Behavior of Older Animals (2009).

A quick death in old age is not always certain in many species, although roles and behaviors certainly change. Dominate males and females lose their place when they age, as younger and stronger rivals take charge. Yet in many species the elderly are valued for their wisdom, and they may actually become leaders again when a crisis forces others to follow their lead. Older right whales, for example, know best where to find food in certain situations. Older mountain goats know what to do when a storm approaches.

In some species, older females continue to give birth, although their young may be fewer and born farther apart. Because of their experience, the older mothers often have a better success rate when it comes to raising their young.

Dagg's book is not based on any new research. Rather she simply reports what others have discovered while researching something else. Her book is valuable because so few others have focused specifically on the subject of what happens to older animals.

Better than sticks and stones

Most parents engage in wishful thinking when they regard name-calling as good-natured fun which their children will soon grow out of. Name-calling is not good-natured and children do not grow out of it; as adults they merely become more expert in its use.

Peter Farb, Word Play

That children do not grow out of name-calling, as Peter Farb suggests above, can be shown by the current political climate — and in fact by the political climate in the United States for all of its 250 years. When in doubt, call your political opponent names, it seems.

Do adults "become more expert in its use"? That is debatable.

Democrats say it is beneath the dignity of the president of the United States to refer to them as "Dumocrats" or to call Sen. Elizabeth Warren "Pocahontas" just because she pretended for years to be an American Indian. Yet they see nothing undignified about them labeling the president of the United States a racist, a fascist or even a Nazi.

According to American Heritage, George Washington was called illiterate. John Adams called Thomas Jefferson ignorant. Ulysses Grant said of James Garfield that he had "the backbone of an angleworm." Theodore Roosevelt called Woodrow Wilson a skunk. Herbert Hoover called Franklin D. Roosevelt "a gibbering idiot."

It is probably wishful thinking to believe our politicians will ever grow out of name-calling.

Sensitive, but is it a crime?

Sometimes the line between one's work and one's personal life can get a bit blurred, as it does for Ulf Varg in Alexander McCall Smith's The Talented Mr. Varg (2020).

Varg is the detective in charge of the Department of Sensitive Crimes in Sweden. His case this time — if it can even be called a case — comes when Anna, a fellow police officer in his department, asks him to investigate whether her husband is having an affair. She has found an earring in his underwear. An added complication is that Varg is secretly in love with Anna. If he can find conclusive evidence of an affair, would he possibly have a chance with her?

Complications follow, of course, not the least of them being the fact that he is using police force time and police force personnel to investigate what is clearly not a police matter. But then the investigation points to what may be an actual crime.

McCall Smith has three different series of detective novels in progress, but they can all be described as detective light. Murders don't happen, and other acts of violence are rare. Mostly there is just conversation about everyday topics, most of it interesting but hardly suspenseful. And such is the case in this novel, as well.

Yet Varg is a fascinating character, and Martin, his deaf and depressed dog who can read lips, may make this novel worth reading.

Watching the novel

Watching the movie after one has read the novel can often be disappointing, which can also be true when one does it in the opposite order. Kristen Lopez looks at things a little differently in But Have You Read the Book? (2023). She argues that the book and the movie may often tell somewhat different stories, but they both can have value.

She looks at 52 movies, from Frankenstein in 1931 to Passing in 2021) and the novels from which they were adapted. Her conclusion? The novels are as worth reading as the films are worth watching.

As the title suggests, Lopez writes with a movie bias. That is, she starts with the movie, then tells us what's different in the novel, rather than vice versa. Rarely does she say that one is better than the other, even when they are very different.

As a practical matter, to tell the entire story contained in a typical novel, including all the characters and all the conversations and events, could make the adapted film six hours long or more. Thus much has to be cut out.

Less forgivable, at least to those who read and loved the book first, filmmakers often change the names of characters, the locales, the titles and even the plots. The first filmed version of Frankenstein, for example, is radically different from Mary Shelley's book. Some remakes have been more faithful, yet that doesn't make the original film any less worth watching. The same is true of Rebecca, Dr. No, Rosemary's Baby, True Grit, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Princess Bride, Fight Club and all the other films/novels she discusses.

All this has frustrated students down through the years who have written "book reports" after watching the movie.

So typically different are novels and the movies based on them that it can be startling when a movie like No Country for Old Men comes along. The Coen Brothers film is essentially the same as the Cormac McCarthy novel. So if you've seen the movie, why read the book? Lopez asks. But look at it the other way around. When one loves a novel, what one most wants is a movie that puts the identical story on the screen.

The enemy of novelists?

Novelists are often portrayed by their natural enemies, biographers, as throughly in the grip of unconscious impulses or addictions or social pressures, or other forces that produce the novels, or produce what the novels really are (as opposed to what the novelists themselves thought they were).

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

There's lot to unpack in that convoluted Jane Smiley sentence, so let's take a stab at it.

The essential point may be her assertion that biographers are the "natural enemies" of novelists. Is this really true? I think of Tim Page, whose impressive biography of Dawn Powell led to a temporary revival of her work. Her books were all republished thanks to Page. There are other examples of biographers whose work revived interest in novelists.

Yet Smiley nevertheless has a valid point. A biographer's job when writing about a novelist is to not only tell us about that writer's life but also to tell us how that life became reflected in the novelist's work. Sometimes biographers go too far.

Of course, one's life is often reflected in one's writing. So many novels, especially first novels, are autobiographical. And these are often the best work the writer ever does. And the society in which a novelist is raised — Larry McMurtry on a Texas ranch, for example — often proves vital in the novels later written.

Yet biographers can give the sense that the novels are all but inevitable, that novelists are little more than conduits that lack free will. Biographers can also give the impression that their interpretation of novels is the correct one, even if novelists themselves say differently.

The beauty of great novels is that they can be interpreted differently by different people. The biographer is not always right. But then neither is the novelist.

Wear the old coat

Austin Phelps

Austin Phelps was a 19th century Congregational minister and educator who, among other noteworthy comments, said, "Wear the old coat and buy the new book."

One's priorities are reflected in how one spends money. Some people with modest incomes dress spectacularly. Someone else with the same income might drive a fancy car or live in a beautifully furnished apartment. Another travels overseas regularly. None of them can afford all these things at the same time, but they make a choice according to their priorities. Thus, the person who drives a luxury car may live in a dumpy house. The one who wears the latest fashions may drive a 30-year-old wreck.

Relatively few of us can afford to own everything we might want. Thus we have to make choices. In the view of Austin Phelps, that choice should be books. I tend to agree.

I may shop for clothing twice a year, if I have to. I got to a bookstore at least twice a month.

I have not always been this way. When I had a wife and child to support, my priorities were different. I once put a high priority on travel. I used to have to dress for my job. Today I live alone and am old enough that my needs and priorities are few. Spending my money on books, even books I doubt I will ever have time to read, does not seem wasteful to me. A new coat, however? Who needs it?

Bad choices, good results

If one makes bad decisions that somehow lead to a wonderful result — such as a bad marriage that results in a good child — were they actually bad decisions?

Leif Enger's 2008 novel So Brave, Young, and Handsome leads the reader to think such thoughts. The title comes from The Cowboy's Lament, which places that dilemma in this couplet: "For we loved our comrade, so brave, young, and handsome/We all loved our comrade, although he'd done wrong."

Enger's novel is narrated by a frustrated writer, Monte Becket, who after one successful novel seems unable to write anything of value. He, his wife and son become fascinated by a boat-building neighbor named Glendon. When Glendon decides to go West to try to find his Mexican wife, whom he abandoned years before, Becket decides to go with him, a decision his wife, Susannah, somehow approves of.

Along the way, Becket learns that abandoning his wife is the least of Glendon's sins. He is also a train robber and murderer being pursued by an aging, former Pinkerton agent named Siringo, who never gives up.

Instead of returning to his family in Minnesota, Becket decides to stick with Glendon, even when this makes himself a fugitive pursued by Siringo.

The consequences of Becket's decisions go from bad to worse, yet somehow it all works out in the end. And Becket, who tells his wild story, proves he can still write after all.

Back in the hills

I'd never seen a Tussie's pants worn out at the knees. They wore out on the seat first ...

Jesse Stuart, Taps for Private Tussie

I first read Jesse Stuart's Taps for Private Tussie (1943) when I was in high school. I just finished reading it for the third time, each reading from the original edition with those wonderful Thomas Hart Benton illustrations. The novel doesn't get old.

Narrated by a boy named Sid, whose parentage remains a mystery until the end, the story tells of what happens to a hill family after Kim Tussie's widow, Aunt Vittie, receives a check from the government along with Kim's remains following a World War II battle.

Members of the Tussie family, especially the men, are allergic to work. They prefer to drink, dance, sleep and subsist on relief checks. As the story opens they are living in a schoolhouse that bas been left vacant for the summer.

Vittie proves generous with her money, however, and soon the family is living in a 16-room mansion with more food than they can imagine. Tussies from miles around hear about their good fortune and move in with them. One of these is Uncle George, Grandpa's brother, whose slick words and lively fiddle music steal Vittie's heart, angering Uncle Mott, Kim's brother, who wants Vittie for himself.

Soon enough the money runs out and the bad feelings that had been kept below the surface boil to the top.

Meanwhile, Sid has belatedly started attending school and discovers that he is a good student with what is perhaps a different world view than others in his family, however much he love them all.

Stuart is all but ignored by readers today, but in his day he was an important American writer, and Taps for Private Tussie is his masterpiece.

Saving the world

Weddings have long been a favorite way to wrap up film comedies, Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, television series or whatever. But thrillers?

Joel C. Rosenberg brings not just The Beijing Betrayal (2025) but his entire series of Marcus Ryker thrillers to a climax not just with a wedding but with a wedding that takes up several chapters. I don't think I have ever seen a fictional wedding that is described in such detail. I kept expecting terrorists to show up at any second. But no. It's just a wedding.

Ryker finally gets to marry Annie, his CIA sweetheart, and after six world-saving adventures, they deserve it.

Ryker, also with the CIA, expects the president to fire him at the beginning of the novel after his previous mission ends in embarrassment. But he is given one more chance to kill an aging terrorist, who has teamed with China to poison Americans as a diversion so that China can attack Taiwan. 

As in previous novels in the series, Rosenberg keeps the adrenaline running. Even transitional chapters, needed to set up the next bit of action, are brief and tension-filled.

One hopes nobody in China reads this novel. It might give them ideas.

The transgression of reading

The greater the clams a social system makes on an individual, the graver the transgression of reading will be,

Heather Cass White, Books Promiscuously Read

Joyce Carol Oates

Heather Cass White's comment above seemed relevant to me before reading Hazards of Time Travel by Joyce Carol Oates. Afterward they are all the more relevant.

The novel tells of a high school student who is punished for being smart. For reading books. For asking questions. For thinking independently. The story may be set in the future, but as White suggests, something similar could happen at any time, past, present or future. Social systems, political systems, religious systems can all, at their extreme, seek to control information.

This happened during the COVID epidemic. It happened in Hollywood during the Hays era. It happens at so many colleges and universities today where diversity and inclusiveness are celebrated, at least until someone says something or reads something that might be considered conservative.  It happens when Amazon makes certain books difficult to purchase. Reading, especially the reading of fiction, is frowned upon by many parents.

White cites an example in Jane Austen's novel, Northanger Abbey, where one woman interrupts another, "'And what are you reading, Miss —?'" The other replies, "'Oh, it is only a novel!'" She then "lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame."

In Austen's story, the prejudice against reading a novel is at least subtle. Nobody is seizing the book or burning it or preventing its circulation.

Reading, White says, can be viewed as a "crime" in two ways. First, it is an independent act — one person voluntarily reading something, whatever it might be. Second, "it removes that self from circulation, from its possible use as the property of others."

Systems, at their extreme, want to own you. They want to control you. They want to dictate what you read and, therefore, what you think.

Through time with Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is one of our most prolific novelists, a prolificacy revealed not just in the number of her novels but in their variety. With Hazards of Time Travel in 2018, she even turned to science fiction and did it better than most sci-fi writers.

Her narrator is a high school senior named Adriane Strohl, who lives in a time, not far in the future, when becoming class valedictorian can be viewed by an oppressive government as an act of rebellion. You aren't allowed to ask questions or to think independently. You must conform or else. Adriane doesn't even get to give her valedictorian speech before she faces the "or else."

She is exiled, transported back to 1959 where she finds herself a coed named Mary Ellen Enright at a Wisconsin college. You might think she would enjoy the relative freedom of 1959. Everyone else is worried about the threat of nuclear war with the USSR, but coming from the future, she knows that never happened. Yet she misses her parents and friends. And she is puzzled by the technological simplicity of this age. She must learn how to use a typewriter. She must turn pages to read a book. Telephones are plugged into the wall and are just for talking.

Then she falls in love with a professor, Ira Wolfman, whom she learns is also an exile from her own time. Both believe they are being monitored by the powers-that-be in the future, but can they escape?

Oates takes us in directions we may not expect, all while warning her readers not so much about the hazards of time travel as the hazards of expanding technology and artificial intelligence. She makes 1959 sound pretty good.

You can be replaced

In the coming weeks I plan to get a new crown on one of my teeth and to have cataract surgery on both eyes. In other words, I will be replacing some of my original equipment with artificial replacement parts.

And this is the subject of Mary Roach's entertaining new book Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy (2025). As usual in her books, she makes science fun. You may not think there is anything amusing about hip replacements, artificial hearts, breast implants, mechanical joints and the like, but Roach can bring a smile while writing about just about anything.

When she is visiting a place where bodies are carved up to retrieve donated organs,  she comments about the music played in the building — Wanted Dead or Alive, Another One Bites the Dust and Only the Good Die Young, among other songs on the morgue playlist.

She writes about women who change breast implants as often as they change boyfriends. She tells of gene-edited pigs so that individuals who may eventually need new organs can have their "personal pig" when the time comes. She writes, "Hip replacement has the visual drama of a visit to a Chevron station."

Even her footnotes are worth reading. In one she reveals how she lost her virginity. That's not something one expects to find in a science book.

Roach doesn't appear to be squeamish about anything, allowing her to view and then describe things most of us might wish to avoid. And her humor makes all this easier for the reader to handle.

Individual thought

We seem to live in a world now where all thoughts are focused on the idea of prevailing, of imposing one's beliefs on others, and no thoughts, no thoughts are given to the costs of prevailing, or even what it means. Have the people never read Moby Dick? Well, no, they haven't.

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

Jane Smiley's book was published in 2005, yet her words above could have been written today. As she observes, people think they are right, whatever they happen to believe. Those who think differently obviously have it all wrong. This is the way it is not just in politics but in virtually everything else. What's wrong with you if you don't like my kind of music? How can you believe that? How could anyone stand to eat that? Or in that restaurant? What does she see in him?

Jane Smiley loves literature, so perhaps she is guilty of the very thing she criticizes. She thinks other people should love literature, too.

Yet she does have a point. Reading novels is, at least to some extent, an antidote for self-centered thinking.  That's because every character thinks differently from every other character, meaning that the reader is thrown into the minds of a variety of very different people with conflicting ideas, tastes and agendas. Fiction forces one to, in effect, wear the moccasins of others.

One need not even read Moby Dick or anything else that sophisticated. Winnie-the-Pooh makes the same point. Each character thinks in a different way than everyone else. Owl may be Pooh's friend, but that doesn't mean he has to be as obsessed with honey as Pooh is. Tigger likes bouncing, but he doesn't expect anyone else to bounce. And yet they all get along and together, using their very different minds and opinions, manage to solve problems and have a good time together. Imagine what it would be like, as Smiley warns, if they all thought the same way about everything.

Tea for me

Normally I avoid those "BeforeYou Die" books. You know, books to read, movies to watch, places to go, etc., before you die. I plan to make my own decisions about what I want to to do in the years I have left, thank you very much.

Yet I could not resist 101 Teas to Steep Before You Die (2025), just as I cannot resist a good cup of tea. I hoped the book would reveal some teas I might want to experience. I was not disappointed.

The book is the work of Nigel Melican, James Norwood Pratt, Maria Uspenski and Shabnam Weber, tea experts who provide commentary on each of the 101 selected teas.

While the title may suggest that these are the 101 best teas in the world, this is not the case at all. Sometimes the experts admit that they don't even like them. Rather they select noteworthy teas in various categories, including teas you can buy in any grocery store, such as Constant Comment and English Breakfast.

Other categories include healthful teas, teas that changed history and teas that were discovered more or less by accident. Not until chapter 9, "Desert Island Teas," do we get to the teas the four authors really love. Here we find teas like Gyokuro, Clouds and Mist and Big Red Robe, teas I had never heard of but would love to try.

We normally think of tea as coming mostly from China, India and Japan, but this book shows us that fine tea can come from unexpected places, including parts of Africa, New Zealand and even Mississippi.

They treat tea as wine snobs treat wine, talking about aromas, hints of chocolate and fruits or whatever, and even the food that goes best with certain tea.

If you love tea as I do, you will love this book. Otherwise, move on and enjoy your coffee.

To read is to wander

To read is to wander in a direction, to yield to a current.

Heather Cass White, Books Promicuously Read

Heather Cass White

To read a book for the first tune is a kind of wandering, as Heather Cass White suggests in Books Promiscuously Read. That is, we don't know where a book is taking us. We wander to discover what's around the next corner or over the next hill. We read to discover what the author has for us next.

Sometimes, as when we read a thriller or a mystery, surprise is the whole point. But even in more serious novels and most nonfiction, there is a sense of wandering and discovery. We read books in hope that they will be, at the very least, interesting. There will be something we have never encountered before.

We can often be disappointed, of course. Often there is nothing interesting at all around the next curve in the road or over the next hill. Similarly the next chapter of a book can be a letdown. Wandering involves risk, which is why so many of us prefer to read books by authors we have come to know and love.

White's next metaphor, "to yield to a current," is slightly different. Wandering suggests free will, making choices. You can always turn around or take another path. Floating down a stream, however, implies, as her phrase tells us, "yielding." Which is most apt when it comes to reading? Are we wandering or yielding?

Any metaphor can be taken too far, and perhaps it doesn't really matter. In any case, I like the idea of reading as a kind of discovery. As Forrest Gump says about chocolates, you never know what you are going to get.

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.