Too much information

When my son was a boy, I discovered it could be a mistake to ask him about what he was reading. What I wanted was a simple review. What was it about? Did he like it? What I got instead was a long, plot twist-by-plot twist description of everything that took place in the book.

That memory returned as I was reading Literature in 30 Seconds or Less! (2021) by Tim Rayborn. Rayborn, whose name appears nowhere, not even on the cover, until an "About the Author" at the end of the book, gives us two-page summaries of 100 literary classics, including several you have probably never heard of. He covers numerous cultures and time periods. If the work — novel, nonfiction, poetry, play — was important to somebody at some time in some place, he includes it.

The trouble is, he tells us about these literary works sort of like my son used to tell me about a book he had just read. This happened, then this happened, then this happened, etc. When we are reading a book, these developments come gradually, giving us time to understand and digest each one. When presented altogether, they become a confusing jumble.

Even works I loved when I read them seem terribly boring when Rayborn writes about them. Why would anyone want to read them?

Two books in particular escape this treatment. One is The Trial by Franz Kafka. Kafka's plot is so simple that the summary sounds enticing, rather than confusing. The other is War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. This novel is long and has so many characters that a two-page summary would be impossible. And so Rayborn gives us just a general idea of what the novel is about, which works. Never before have I actually wanted to read that novel.

As a long-time book reviewer, summarizing books is sort of what I do. Yet I try to avoid the details and just give the gist of the book. Most of the characters and most of the plot developments I simply ignore. I think this works. If you want to know everything that happens, read the book.

When writing about Fahrenheit 451, Rayborn tells us that the author Ray Bradbury hated "the very idea of ... a summary." He should have paid more attention to Ray Bradbury.

Divided love

When I last visited the Murderbot Diaries, in Exit Strategy, the part-human, part-robot at the center of the series had feelings for Dr. Mensah, the woman for whom it is more or less working. (After having deactivated its governor at the start of the series, the SecUnit is a free agent, but it likes protecting Dr. Mensah because it likes Dr. Mensah.)

In the next installment, Network Effect (2020), however, the self-described Murderbot develops feelings for an intelligent spaceship, a research transport named Perihelion. Murderbot calls it ART. They quarrel like lovers. Is that what they have become?

In the novel, Murderbot works to protect Dr. Mensah's daughter, a teenage girl named Amena. But she, Murderbot and others are kidnapped and find themselves aboard ART. The novel is more technical and complex than others in the series, and it is also much longer than the others, but readers can get the gist as Murderbot struggles to protect its humans, rescue ART's humans from evil ones simply called Targets and return to Dr. Mensah — with the news that it is leaving her for ART.

Along the way, Murderbot must duplicate itself, creating Murderbot 2.0. Murderbot's faithful readers won't want to miss Network Effect, despite all the difficulties it poses both for them and Murderbot.

Nurse Fletcher

The writer Robert A. Liston is best known for his book The Pueblo Surrender, but he wrote books of all kinds and was amazingly prolific. He wrote books on alcoholism, urban America, psychotherapy, censorship, housing and numerous other topics. He also wrote novels.

For a time he lived in Richland County, Ohio, where I worked. I reviewed books, including his books, and sometimes he appeared in my office for a conversation. On one occasion he told me that he also wrote romantic novels using a female pseudonym. He refused to tell me his pen name, fearful that I might reveal his secret identity and that women would stop buying his books if they knew they were written by a man.

The best books of his that I read were a couple of thrillers, The Seraphim Code and The Brandywine Exchange. Both were paperback originals and neither was a bestseller, but I liked them and gave them good reviews. One of them, however, contained perhaps the most embarrassing mistake I have ever found in a book, and it was weird being the one to tell the author about it.

Louise Fletcher

The book makes a reference to "Nurse Fletcher" in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I had read the Ken Kesey novel as well as seen the movie, so I knew the character's name was actually Nurse Ratched. She was played by Louise Fletcher in the movie, and she won an Oscar for that performance.

I can remember the shocked look on Bob's face when I told him this, his smile turning quickly into a frown. It was a silly mistake that both he and his editors missed. Perhaps it was an understandable mistake, revealing just how closely Louise Fletcher was identified with that character. I don't think she ever had another notable role.

I doubt that the novel ever had a second printing, meaning that it was a mistake that could never be corrected or apologized for. Perhaps I shouldn't have told him about it.

Living other lives

The quantum multi-universe theory that physicists like to talk about has been explored by novelists, especially Matt Haig. Peng Shepherd considers the possibilities in her 2024 novel All This and More.

Shepherd imagines a reality TV show in which a 45-year-old woman named Marsh, with a marriage that has lost its spark and a talented daughter who seems to be growing apart from her, is given a chance to explore different lives. She once fantasized about joining a circus, being an actress and so forth. Now she is given a chance to actually live these lives.

Marsh isn't the only once who gets choices. Readers, too, can decide which path they want her to take. Or so it seems. A believer in the sanctity of marriage, I chose paths that promised a second chance with Dylan, her husband. Yet each of these lives quickly led to Ren, a high school boyfriend who hasn't given up hope.

Marsh tries life after life, seemingly finding all the happiness that was missing from her real life. As women always seem to think the men in their lives need improvement, most of the changes in her life seem to be motivated by her desire to make small changes in Ren.

Yet one thing is always true about reality shows. They aren't real. There are all those cameras, for example. And just as the readers' choices seem manipulated, so do hers.

Marsh must eventually face the question of whether a perfect life is what she really wants.

Reading All This and More can be confusing. And it doesn't seem consistent with quantum theory. If you could move from one universe to another, would you remember your life in other universes, as Marsh does? Yet her daughter doesn't — and doesn't even seem aware of all those cameras.

The novel reminds us, as Matt Haig's The Midnight Library does, that the life we have may not really be so bad after all.

Children's books for adults

C.S. Lewis

It was C.S. Lewis who said, "A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest."

C.S. Lewis, of course, wrote the Narnia Chronicles, including The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, some of the most popular children's stories of all time. I did not read them until I was an adult. I loved them.

The same can be said about the Winnie-the-Pooh stories and other books supposedly written for children.

Why do certain children's stories — Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, Black Beauty, the Dr. Seuss books, for example — have staying power generation after generation? Because adults like them. Parents buy them for their kids, who remember them when they become parents and then buy them for their own children.

Also, parents — at least good parents — read to their small children, usually at bedtime. And children often like to hear the same stories over and over again. They had better be stories that entertain the parents, as well.

I can remember reading Nate the Great and Amelia Bedelia stories with my son. I liked them, too.

Not saying what you mean

Some book titles are just perfect, and one example of this is How Not to Say What You Mean: A Dictionary of Euphemisms by R.W. Holder (2002). How could a title be any more perfect than that?

Not saying what you mean is what euphemisms are all about. The trouble is, for a euphemism to work, you have to know what it means. And if you know what is meant, sooner or later you will need another euphemism for the euphemism. Thus we have words and phrases like restroom, bathroom, washroom, lavatory, little girls' room, throne, tearoom, facilities, commode and so on. We don't even know what the original word is that we are trying so hard not to say.

The book is about 500 pages long and with fairly small print. Thus, it contains many, many euphemisms and because it was published more than two decades ago, a newer edition would doubtless contain many more pages.

As you might expect, most euphemisms deal with delicate subjects, especially sex, bodily functions, drunkenness and death. The last 50 pages or so of the book may actually be the most interesting, for here, instead of going euphemism by euphemism in alphabetical order, Holder gives the meaning we are trying to hide and then lists the euphemisms.

The euphemisms for drunkenness go on for nearly three pages. These include such words as battered, bender, boiled, floating, foggy, gone, high, loaded, plastered, ripped, shot, stewed and zonked, and this is just a fraction of the total.

If you don't want to say what you mean, there are clearly many ways to say it.

Some euphemisms have multiple meanings, and so context is key. The word cold, for example, can mean dead or it can mean not interested in sex or it can be a word used to hide a more embarrassing ailment. Or it can simply mean cold.

Sometimes Holder lists as euphemisms words I assumed were not euphemisms at all, words like bisexual and boyfriend. I knew there were euphemisms for bisexual, but is bisexual itself a euphemism? What is it a euphemism for? Holder doesn't say. He just provides a definition, which is what an ordinary dictionary does.

Read before you write

I have said on more than one occasion that more people write poetry than read poetry. That may be an overstatement, but not by much.

How many people have tried their hand at writing a poem or two? Most literate people have probably done so, at least in their youth. I wrote a few poems myself when I was in college. Fortunately for both me and the world, I chose journalism, not poetry.

Gabriel Zaid

Gabriel Zaid goes even further in So Many Books. He opines that many people write books, or at least think about writing a book or talk about writing a book, without actually reading a book, or without reading very many books. With the ease of self-publishing today, virtually anyone can publish a book. I could very easily assemble my blog posts into a book. I can't imagine anyone actually paying money to buy such a book, however, so I don't go to the trouble. But many other people do something similar. It's so easy. You can write that novel you've been thinking about for years or assemble letters or your sermons or your memoirs or all those poems you wrote in your youth and very quickly have a book with your name on it. How cool would that be?

Zaid puts the thinking of many people into words: "Don't ask me to pay attention to you; pay attention to me. I don't have the time or the money or the desire to read what you've written; I want your time, your money, your desire. Never mind your concerns; what about mine?"

Those words convict me, too. I write a blog, but I rarely read other people's blogs. The same may be true of people who have podcasts or who have accounts on YouTube, or TikTok  or whatever. It is even true in conversations. We want to be heard. Never mind about other people might have to say. Instead of listening, we think about what we will say when it is our turn.

Poet Judson Jerome suggested that writers of little-read books, like poetry, should place a five-dollar bill in each new copy. That way readers would be encouraged ... and rewarded. It's a bad idea — writers of little-read books usually don't have spare cash and it would be too easy to snatch the money without reading the book — but it at least addresses the problem.

Zaid has another idea. He suggests a National Regulatory Board of Supply and Demand that would require that you read so many poems before you could publish one poem or so many books before you could publish your own book. Again, it's a bad idea. Do we really want government telling us when we can write something or monitoring what we read? Those barely literate celebrities who hire ghost writers to tell their story would really be stymied.

Yet it is something we should be thinking about. If we want other people to read what we're writing — or hear what we're saying — perhaps we should be more willing to do the same for them.

Reading to live

Gustave Flaubert

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

Gustave Flaubert

So what do you suppose that means?

Amusement and instruction are, in fact, the most common reasons for reading. When we read mysteries or thrillers or romances, we probably want to be entertained. If we read history books or self-help books or cookbooks, we probably want to learn something.

But what books does one read "in order to live"? I think all of the above, and more.

Living is about experiences. It's about meeting people, exchanging ideas, learning more about yourself, feeling real emotions, thinking, accumulating memories, developing relationships, loving, forming opinions, becoming a better person and so on.

I don't think reading should be a substitute for living. A person who does nothing but read probably does not have much of a life. Sometimes you must put your book down and go out and actually do something, preferably with someone else. But when we do read, and this may be what Flaubert was getting at, we should read to enhance those real-life experiences, not replace them.

Alleluia to the world

A certain lucent correspondence has served me, all my life, in the ongoing search for my deepest thoughts and feelings. It is the relationship of my own mind to landscape, to the physical world —especially to that part of it with which, over the years, I have (and not casually) become intimate.

Mary Oliver, Little Alleluias

The poet Mary Oliver died in 2019. Little Alleluias (2025) is a posthumous collection of her writings, both poems and essays. In one of these essays she calls her poems "little alleluias," her "way of offering praise to the world."

She writes in a poem called "The Return": From my mouth to God's ear, I swear it; I want only to be a song.

Even her essays often read like poems. Consider this line from an essay called "Flow." "This enormity, this cauldron of having green and blues, is the great palace of the earth." Doesn't that sound like a little alleluia?

Yet she is at her best in her poetry. True, she sometimes stretches for meaning, yet she shines when she lets the meaning come to her. As she writes,

The poem is not the world.

It isn't even the first page of the world.

But the poem wants to flower, like a flower.

It knows that much.

Sometimes she gets personal, as when she recalls her school days:

I went out of the school fast

and through the gardens and to the woods,

and spent all summer forgetting what I'd been taught –

Mostly she writes about the natural world that she explored each day of her life since she was a school girl ... and sings her little alleluias.

A blow against the devil

The obsolete book, printed on paper, is both immortal and perishable at the same time.

Stephen Starring Grant, Mailman

Stephen Starring Grant

Stephen Starring Grant spent a year of his life as a rural mail carrier in Virginia and devotes one chapter of his memoir to books. The post office has always treated books as special — there is a lower rate for books — and as a mailman, Grant says he also gave them special care.

He writes that the Jesuits believe "every word you write is a blow that strikes the devil." Then he adds, "Every book I delivered did the same."

He notes that books left in the rain or chewed on by dogs can easily be ruined, and these are things that can happen to book packages left carelessly by mail carriers. All packages, but especially those containing books, needed to be treated with care, he says.

Grant goes into post office history, telling the reasons why books have always been given priority treatment. "With the help of the U.S. Post Office," he writes, "the homestead was no longer some isolated island of humanity. Instead, by a coal oil lamp and later electricity, it became a node in a network, connected to a larger universe of ideas."

The post office has changed through the years, yet books still get special treatment. Grant, for one, doesn't find anything wrong with that.

Frankly, my dear

Movie lines, whether by design or not, can become part of our language. Everybody repeats them and then reframes them to suit different situations. Brian Abrams collects these movie quotes in his book "You Talkin’ to Me?" (2023).

Some movies, such as The Godfather and Casablanca, are treasure troves of famous lines. In fact, there are so many in these movies that Abrams ignores some of them. Instead he gives us lines hardly anyone has ever repeated from movies hardly anyone has ever seen, such "Bye, Felisha" from Friday.

On the plus side, Abrams tells us how famous lines ended up in particular movies and/or how the scenes developed in which the lines were said. He tells us that the first character to say "May the force by with you" isn't even named in Star Wars. In Gone with the Wind, Clark Gable was supposed to say, "Frankly, my dear, it has become of no concern to me."

"Follow the money" from All the President's Men, is now said frequently in many contexts. As has "You had me at 'Hello'" from Jerry Maguire. 

The 1989 film Field of Dreams is remembered for the line, "If you build it, he will come." I paraphrased that line in an email just the other day, demonstrating how certain movie lines have life because they can be used in a variety of situations and bring a smile to anyone who remembers where the original line came from.

Abrams doesn't make this observation, but reading his book makes me wonder whether the age of great movie lines may be coming to end. The last line he quotes is "Wakanda forever" from Black Panther, which is not exactly memorable or repeatable in other contexts. This is from 2018, or five years before his book was published. People no longer go to movie theaters to watch the same few movies as we used to. We now watch movies on television, but there are so many of them that we don't necessarily watch the same ones. For movie lines to mean something, we all have to know where they came from. Nowadays that is rarely true.

Lost at the beginning

The plot of a typical novel has four parts. Jane Smiley calls them exposition, rising action, climax and denouement. These are usually easy to identify in any novel you are reading. You are first introduced to the key characters and the situation at the beginning of the story. Then things start to happen.  Then comes the resolution. Finally comes the summing up, the return to normalcy, or the "happily ever after" perhaps.

Lately, perhaps because growing older has made me impatient, I have been having trouble with the first part, the exposition. It seems that I start novel after novel and abandon it after 50 pages or less. Not only don't I know where the story is going, but I find that I don't even care. I don't like the characters. Their situation doesn't interest me. Or I simply don't understand what is going on. I don't read novels to be bored. I want to care early on about what's going to happen next.

Just the other day I abandoned Monk and Robot by Becky Chambers. The book actually contains two novellas with the same characters. Not that I got very far into the first story. The monk is called Dex, but I jumped ship before the robot came along. Mostly I was turned off because Chambers gives Dex plural pronouns. He was always "they." I just didn't care what happened to Dex and "their" robot." I didn't like being confused. I turned to what I hoped will be a more interesting novel. It is.

And so it has gone too frequently. It is not that I necessarily want the action to start earlier. I loved When the Cranes Fly South despite the fact that there is hardly any action at all through the entire novel. But I liked the main character and wanted to know what would happen to him.

Some novelists begin their novels at the end, giving us a taste of the climax before going back to the beginning. Sometimes this works, but usually I prefer stories in chronological order. Save the climax for the climax. Even so, novelists need to do a better job of making their expositions interesting enough — or their characters interesting enough — to keep readers, including old and impatient readers like me, hanging around.

The mailman's life

If you think your letter carrier isn't keeping a list of who's naughty and nice, you are not living in reality.

Stephen Starring Grant, Mailman

The person who delivers our mail each day is one of those people most of us just take for granted. We just expect our mail to be placed in our box each day at about the same time. We give little thought to everything that goes into getting our mail to us.

And so reading Stephen Starring Grant's Mailman (2025) might be a good idea for all of us.

Laid off from his corporate job at the age of 50 in the middle of Covid, and with a family depending on him, Grant took a job delivering the mail in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia. He delivered the mail for a year, and his experiences are eye-opening.

Grant underwent the post office training expected of all new hires, yet even after weeks on the job he felt incompetent and ready to quit. Sorting the mail correctly, dealing with all those packages (especially during the Christmas season), delivering the mail to the right place at the right time and, yes, dealing with all those dogs that seem to hate mail carriers was a daily struggle for him.

Yet he stuck with it and, he now believes, became a better man for it. He talks about the paper cuts, the other injuries common to mail carriers, the importance of rubber bands, the difficult deliveries to ridiculous places and everything else that becomes a part of a mail carrier's life.

He says at one point that his "greatest accomplishment was not quitting." And yet eventually he did quit when he got another, better-paying job in the corporate world. But at least he gave us this book about what the post office looks like from the inside.

Following the crowd

Haruki Murakami

Japanese writer Haruki Murakami said, "If everyone only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking." I only half agree with that statement.

People can read the same books and think very different thoughts about those books. That is the basis for literary criticism. One critic thinks one thing about a book, while another critic thinks something entirely different about the same book. If this is true of Pride and Prejudice, it can also be true of the hottest book on the current best-seller list. Just because we read the same books it does not mean that we all think the same way. Book clubs wouldn't be much fun if that were true.

On the other hand, and this is where I agree with Murakami, only reading the same books everyone else in your circle is reading does display a lack of independent thinking. You may be reading for the wrong reasons. You may be more interested in belonging, in being part of the crowd, than in following your own interests and your own taste in literature.

While two people can think differently while reading the same book, their individuality is even more enhanced when they read different books. Reading the same book can bind together those in the same friend group, the same book club or the same literature class, but following our own individual literary tastes is what makes us truly unique. Because we are reading different books we are able to think different thoughts when reading the same books.

On the way out

Words come and go. New words enter the English language each year, while others are used less and less often until they finally fade from the language altogether.

Read Shakespeare or almost any literature from a century or more ago and you are likely to find head-scratching words. What does that word mean? Or when did it mean that and not this? Dictionaries describe certain words and certain meanings of words as archaic. These words were once important. Now they are ignored.

Anne Curzan

In her book Says Who?, linguist Anne Curzan predicts that whom is one of those words likely to disappear from the language. Already, in fact, its use is rare. When someone says something like, "Whom did you tell?" it raises eyebrows. It sounds snooty, even though it may be grammatically correct. Most of us would say, "Who did you ask?" and hardly anyone would look down on us.

Even Curzan herself admits that in informal writing and speaking, such as in email, she uses who even when sticklers for proper English usage would insist upon whom.

Even when who may be improper, at least according to our English teachers of old, it sounds proper to us. Whom, on the other hand, almost always sounds improper. Or it sounds too proper. It's not how real people talk or write.

For now, whom survives ... barely. In another 50 years or so, it may have become archaic.

Sci-fi women

When I started reading science fiction as a teenager in the late 1950s. it was a male-dominated field. Both writers and readers were predominately male. Writers like Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson, Clifford D. Simak, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Heinlein, Harlan Elison, H.L. Gold and Philip K. Dick ruled the roost. We teenage boys loved them. Girls had other things to read.

Sure, there were a few female writers in the game. Writers like Anne McCaffery  and Ursula K. Le Guin   were popular outliers. And then there was Alice Sheldon, who fooled readers and editors alike by writing under the name of James Tiptree Jr.

Martha Wells

Look at the science fiction shelves in any bookstore today, however, and you will find almost as many female authors as male. And perhaps even more. One finds veterans like Connie Willis, Martha Wells and Octavia E. Butler, as well as younger writers such as Becky Chambers, Sarah Brooks, Bethany Jacobs, Alexandra Gleeman, Emily Hamilton, Sierra Greer, Lindsay Ellis and Dani Francis. And then there are writers like Peng Shepherd, who write imaginative science fiction but don't call it that. 

If greater numbers of women are writing science fiction, it stands to reason that more of them are reading it, too. As a consequence, unless it is just my imagination, sci-fi books are gaining a more prominent display in bookstores than they once had. 

Making the world right

It does not become clear what country the title of From a Far and Lovely Country (2023) by Alexander McCall Smith refers to until the end of the novel, but that is not the only mystery resolved in the long, final chapter.

The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels are not mysteries in the usual sense — nobody gets murdered — yet even so the agency's founder, Precious Ramotswe, looks for answers to do her part to make the world right.

In this, the 24th in the series, a woman comes from America to try to find relatives of a man who meant a lot to her and who may have come from Mma Ramotswe's own hometown. He left during World War II and never returned home. Does he still have relatives in Botswana?

And then there is a singles club that may actually just be a ruse so that married men can meet single women. Charlie, the apprentice mechanic and apprentice detective who is not particularly good at either, gets his chance to handle his own case. Now a married man himself, he is sent to investigate the singles club.

Those are the mysteries, such as they are, but a reader doesn't need a murder for Precious and her colleagues to provide interesting reading.  This may not be the best in the series — in fact the books seem to have hit a bit of a snag lately — but it is still good enough to, for the reader at least, make progress toward accomplishing Mma Ramotswe's objective of making the world right.

The balm of the familiar

Rebecca Lee

Sometimes a book wins literary acclaim and may even become a bestseller because of its originality. We are drawn to the book because it is unlike anything we have ever read before. Yet, let's face it, mostly we choose books that have what Rebecca Lee calls "the balm of the familiar."

She makes this comment in her book How Words Get Good. "Readers know what they are getting, and that's the way they like it," she writes.

Most of us readers like the authors we like, and we are a little anxious about trying authors we have never read before. Further, we like characters who are familiar to us. Had Arthur Conan Doyle dropped Sherlock Holmes after one story, we would not have heard of him today. Doyle, in fact, tried to kill off Holmes, but the character's popularity forced the author to bring him back. Readers liked Sherlock Holmes more than they liked his creator.

Robert B. Parker may have died, but his detective, Spenser, lives on in novels written by other people. So it goes with James Bond and other characters. We like familiar characters. Their creators, it seems, are expendable.

An old man and his dog

So many plots are complicated, full of subplots, twists and turns. But sometimes simplicity works best, as in the case of When the Cranes Fly South (2025) by Lisa Ridzen.

The Swedish author gives us a simple and poignant story about an 89-year-old man with little left to live for other than his memories and Sisten, his elkhound, who sleeps next to him. His wife has dementia and no longer remembers him. He remembers her by keeping her scarf in a jar, opening it now and then to catch her scent.

Bo has always had anger issues, and he struggles to control it when Hans, his son, insists he must take Sisten away from him because he is no longer able to take proper care of the dog. As for Bo, he is taken care of by a series of caregivers who come in several times a day. They leave little notes about Bo and his care, which are interspersed between sections of the novel.

And that is pretty much it. Yet Ridzen writes with such power and sensitivity that readers will find this simple tale totally engrossing.

The best candy shop

Maya Angelou

"The best candy shop a child can be left alone in is the library." So said author Maya Angelou.

A memory that sticks with me through the decades is of a mother, a woman I knew, walking into a public library with her three children and carrying a large box full of books. While she fed the books into the book return, she released her children to find new books. Now and then a child would return with an armload of books and deposit them in the box, then go back to look for more books. Soon enough the box was full again, and the family left for home.

Years later, one of these children, a classmate of my son, became the class valedictorian. No surprise there.

To this family, the library truly was the "best candy shop" in the sense Maya Angelou spoke about. These children could take anything they wanted and all they wanted. They chose books galore to satisfy their own individual sweet tooth. They did not get fat. They got smart.

One bad turn

Nothing could stop her now. She was meant to succeed. Her task was holy.

Peter Robinson, The First Cut

Revenge is sweet, or so they say. But it can turn sour, as Peter Robinson shows in The First Cut (1990), written before his Inspector Banks series became so popular.

The story is about two young women, or so it first appears. Kirsten is a student slashed within an inch of her life when she goes out alone at night. Martha comes to Whitby, England, with murder on her mind. She aims to kill the so-called Student Slasher.

Soon enough it becomes clear to any reader that these are one and the same woman. Through hypnosis, Kirsten thinks she remembers enough about her assailant to find him and kill him. Unfortunately innocent men have to die first. Is one serial killer really better than another?

There are many ways this novel could have ended. Robinson chooses perhaps the simplest one. But is it the best one?

Booksellers versus book buyers

Jeff Deutsch

In his book In Praise of Good Bookstores, Jeff Deutsch lists some of the criteria necessary for a bookstore to be profitable. Here are the first three:

1. Nearly 20 percent of the inventory must consist of products other than books.

2. The books on the shelves must be mostly from the major presses.

3. Stores must leave books on their shelves no longer than four months.

Each of these may work in the favor of bookstores and their bottom line, yet each of them works against those who may actually be their best customers, people who buy lots of books.

Bookstores commonly sell coffee, pastries, greeting cards, magazines, calendars, gift items and a variety of other non-book products. I bought a cup of tea in a bookstore last week. For many stores, these sales keep them in business. But for those of us who go to bookstores to look at books, it often means going to the rear of the store to find what we are looking for.

The big presses publish most of the best sellers and the most famous authors. Yet serious readers are often frustrated when they cannot find less-promoted books by lesser known authors. You can order them, of course, if you know about them, but most of us prefer to hold a book in our hands before committing to buying it.

Even those who shop for books several times a month rarely see every book in the store. I, for example, rarely look at books on the bottom shelves simply because of the inconvenience. Thus it can easily take more than four months for a book to find its reader. Often I don't even hear about a book that sounds interesting until more than a year after it has been published. By then, finding it in a bookstore can be impossible. I must turn to Amazon or order the book from a store.

And so, the rules that make sense for bookstores don't make sense for some of their best customers.

The past catches up

Sometimes the past just won’t stay in the past. Such is the case in Megan Miranda’s 2020 thriller The Girl from Widow Hills.

Twenty years before little Arden Maynor was found in a storm drainage pipe after having gone missing in a storm several days before while sleepwalking. For 20 years she has been trying to escape all the hoopla.

Now with a new name, Olivia, and living in a new state, she tries to live a newlife working for a hospital. Then, sleepwalking once again, she discovers the body of the very man who rescued her those 20 years before. Who might have murdered him? Could she, unknowingly, be the killer?

The more things happen, including the disappearance and death of a friend, the more it seems what happened in Widow Hills is involved in what is happening now. But how is that possible?

Miranda keeps the suspense bubbling in this unconventional thriller. It is never entirely convincing that Olivia would try so hard to keep little Arden in the past, but once you accept that premise, the novel proves a good one.

Strangers become family

When David Baldacci writes a standalone novel, you can usually predict it will be very different from his series books. That is, there will probably be no spies, no assassins and no murderers.

And there you have Strangers in Time, his 2025 novel. But this does not mean the story lacks all the excitement of a typical Baldacci novel. It is just more PG rated.

The persistent German bombing of London during World War II destroyed families as well as buildings. Baldacci brings together three people left alone by the war, creating a new family out of perfect strangers.

These include Charlie,an orphan who must do whatever he can to survive, including theft; Molly, a girl from a wealthy family who returns from the country to find both parents missing; and Ignatius, a bookseller/air raid warden broken-hearted from the death of his wife.

A mystery or two surrounds each of these characters, but together they solve them all.

Obscure books can have a future

Readers are almost alway particular to some obscure author or another, and so, as long as a book is available in Earth's big bookstore (which I construe as every bookstore and every used book store and every library in the world), it has a chance of finding a new audience.

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

Jane Smiley

There's a lot to like about the long Jane Smiley sentence printed above. Let's take it apart.

"Readers are almost always particular to some obscure author or another ..."

Many readers stick with the best-sellers, reading the same books as everybody else. But Smiley is talking about those more serious readers who discover particular authors and then wonder why everybody else isn't reading their books.

In my younger days, as I've written about previously, I was fond of Edward Lewis Wallant and D. Keith Mano. Why, I wondered, weren't their novels best-sellers? Today few people have even heard of them. More recently I have become enamored with Dexter Palmer and Olaf Olafsson. Why aren't other people reading them, too?

You probably feel the same way about "some obscure author or another."

"... Earth's big bookstore (which I construe as every bookstore and every used book store and every library in the world) ..."

Sadly, neither bookstores nor public libraries keep books around for very long. They need to make room for newer books. Meanwhile used book stores keep disappearing. Yet, as I wrote about a few days ago, people hate to throw out books after they have finished with them. Thus older books by some of those obscure authors can still be found in thrift shops, garage sales, estate sales and other places.

"... it has a chance of finding a new audience."

Some obscure books don't find their audience when first published. Yet books can actually last a long time, and only partly because people hate to destroy them. Sooner or later, as in the case of Moby-Dick and many other classics, they can find their readers. Obscurity doesn't always last forever.

Making a book

Writing, at least on the professional level, is a group effort. We don't normally think of it that way, of course. If someone's name is on the book, the magazine article or the newspaper story, that is the person who gets the credit — or the blame. Yet there are others, usually many others, who are involved.

Rebecca Lee makes this clear in her 2022 book How Words Get Good. Her expertise is book publishing, and in her career she has been involved in many of the steps in the process of making words good, now including writing a book herself.

Even though authors are the ones whose names are on the books, they need help. They need agents to find someone to publish their work, for example. They need editors. Many authors are terrible spellers. They make mistakes of all kinds, and writers are often the last ones to notice their own mistakes. (I know this from sad experience.)

And then there are proof readers. What is the difference between a copy editor and a proof reader?  Lee tells us. Essentially, a copy editor gets a manuscript ready to be printed. A proof reader checks for errors made by the printer. Does the printed work match what was supposed to be printed?

Lee even devotes chapters to footnotes (her own footnotes are superb, well worth reading), cover designs, blurbs, fonts and what happens when books go out of print. Her book covers an amazing amount of territory — probably too much, actually — and it is a wonderful resource for anyone wondering what goes into making a book.

Feelings attached

But it (a story) exists not as words written in books but as images with feelings attached.

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

"Images with feelings attached." I like that phrase. 

A few days ago I posted something on the subject of how reading a book a second time is different from reading it the first time ("Same book, different experience," Aug. 17, 2026). This is what Jane Smiley is talking about in the line above quoted from her book, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel.

Marlon Brando
 in a scene from The Godfather

I think this is one reason movies based on novels we have read tend to be so disappointing. The images in the films conflict with the images left in our mind from the novels. Because film images are so powerful, they tend to overpower those in novels. I read Mario Puzo's novel The Godfather before I saw the movie, yet ever after it has been the movie images that come to mind, not those I had while reading the book. I can't even remember how the novel differed from the movie.

One way to rekindle those original images is to reread the novel, although even then the images in your mind will be different from those you had when you first read the book, and they also may be heavily influenced by the movie.

Yet we still usually want to watch movies adapted from novels we love. We always hope against hope that the images in the film will conform with the images that linger with us from reading the book. Unless the film is really, really good, as The Godfather is, we are usually disappointed.

A distinctive style

Thomas Hart Benton's artistic style is so distinct that even an art amateur like myself can recognize one of his paintings easily. Yet, as Justin Wolff tells us in Thomas Hart Benton: A Life (2012), it took years for him to develop that style. Look at his early paintings and they look nothing like those we know him for.

Benton was the son of U.S. Senator Thomas Hart Benton, who wanted his son and namesake to follow in his footsteps. Instead the younger Benton went his own way, lived in poverty for years and eventually found the style that made him more famous than his father.

Benton called himself a realist, known for his murals that seem to shimmer. His images, while stationary, seem to writhe. Nobody has adequately described Thomas Hart Benton paintings, yet they are instantly recognizable.

Benton met and married Rita, the love of his life,  and she stuck with him through his years of poverty, his heavy drinking, his carousing and his failures, protecting his image as well as his images, selling and promoting his paintings.

It may be difficult to believe that Jackson Pollock, known for his abstract drip paintings, was his student, as well as one of his closest friends. Benton's hot-and-cold relationship with President Harry S. Truman also makes fascinating reading. Benton wanted Truman's approval, yet Truman tended to say what he felt, not necessarily what others wanted him to say.

What I find hard to swallow in Wolff's biography is his conclusion that Benton should have been more like Pollock, more open to abstract expressionism. True, Benton may have been out of step with many of his contemporaries, but he ultimately found his style, and that style served him well.

Library longings

Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag once called her personal library an archive of longings. Can this be true, not just for her but for everyone who reads? Perhaps.

You have heard it said that you are what you eat. Can we also say, "You are what you read?" No, I don't think so. But we might say, "You would like to be what you read."

This is sort of the point of James Thurber's famous short story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty." Mitty is an ordinary man who imagines himself the hero of a variety of adventures, in part as a result of what he reads.

And so, those who read thrillers, mysteries and adventure stories probably imagine themselves the hero. How would they solve the crime or defeat the bad guys or get out of an impossible situation?

Those who read romances probably imagine themselves involved in similar love affairs.

Those reading the Bible long to be better than they are. They probably imagine Jesus telling them, "Well done, good and faithful servant."

A few weeks ago I wrote about Marilyn Monroe liking to be photographed reading a James Joyce novel. Perhaps she longed to be someone who actually read and understood James Joyce novels.

Want to know what someone longs for? Look at their books.

The Oxford comma

Until I read Anne Curzan's Says Who? I didn't know the term "the Oxford comma." I was well aware of the question the term refers to, but I didn't recall hearing the term itself previously.

The question, which most people never think about and is important mainly to writers and editors, is this: When words are printed in a series, should there be a comma before the and?

That is, should the title of the Steve Martin-John Candy movie be Planes, Trains and Automobiles," as it actually is, or should it have been called Planes, Trains, and Automobiles? Who cares? you ask. Well, those in the word business do care.

I have a newspaper background, and so I almost always eliminate this comma. (I do include it in quotations.)  In newspapers we try to save space wherever we can, and even a little comma takes up space. Why bother with an unnecessary comma?

The trouble is, sometimes the comma is necessary. Curzan gives an example, often cited. A book dedication supposedly read, "This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God." Without the comma, the dedication suggests that God and Ayn Rand are the author's parents. That is probably not the case. And so a comma is needed.

But take another phrase mentioned by Curzan: "my brother, the doctor, and the nurse." The comma indicates the brother is a doctor. If that is not the case, the comma is misleading and should have been left out.

It is called the Oxford comma because way back in 1893 Oxford University Press adopted a style that this comma be included in any series. The Associated Press thinks differently, and most U.S. newspapers follow the AP Stylebook.

Yet, as the two examples above show us, the comma is sometimes needed. Other times it should be left out. Most of the time, of course, it doesn't matter at all. Do whatever you please.

What if ...?

The late Clifford D. Simak, like other science fiction writers, started his stories with an idea. In his case, the more outlandish the better.

Reading the nine stories that make up All the Traps of Earth and Other Stories (1962), one can imagine him wondering, "What if ....?"

What if the creatures on a distant planet conquer others by sacrificing themselves? ("Drop Dead")

What if an alien on Earth gets drunk by listening to the sad stories all humans have to tell? ("Crying Jag")

What if chemically-induced homesickness were the only way people could be persuaded to leave their home planet and travel in space? ("Condition of Employment")

What if a time machine leaves explorers stranded thousands of years in the past? ("Project Mastodon")

What if aliens from another planet seem to be perfect baby sitters, accepting no payment because they are stealing the youth from their charges? ("The Sitters")

And so it goes in these totally unbelievable, yet entertaining, tales.

Yet I notice that the shorter his short stories are, the better they usually are. Sometimes he packs too many "what ifs" into a story, as in "Installment Plan," and it becomes too much to manage. One or two weird ideas per story seem to work better.

You guys

Is the phrase "you guys" offensive to women or not? It is hard to know, for one hears some women complain about it while other women use it themselves when talking to other women.

A "guy," of course, is understood to be a male. If there is a sign on a door in a restaurant that says "Guys," women do not enter. Yet one may hear female servers in that very restaurant address a table of female diners as "you guys."

Even more confusing is the expanding use of the word "bro" in conversation. It is an abbreviation of brother, a masculine reference. Yet increasingly one hears both men and women using the term when addressing women, as well as men.

Should we go with the flow and consider both "you guys" and "bro" to be genderless terms? Or should we pay attention to that shrinking number of women who are offended? I try to avoid both terms in all contexts.

As for the phrase "you guys," that is just another consequence of the problem English gives us because the word you can be both singular and plural. We may know it to be true, but it just doesn't seem right when we use it as plural. We want to add something. And so, depending upon where you are in the world, you may hear "you all" or "y'll" or "youse" or "you'uns" or whatever. The phrase "you guys" may turn out to be the winner, crossing state lines and international boundaries.

The end of writing?

Heather Cass White

Writing itself is a technology, and a fairly recent one, that decimated older forms of communication and experience, and created new ones that shape the world as we currently understand it.

Heather Cass White, Books Promiscuously Read

We probably don't think of writing as a technology, yet for most of human history, writing did not exist. Human beings made do, however. Then it existed but only for an educated few. Eventually it became widespread, Wherever there are schools, children learn to write. The world is better because of writing, but is literacy essential for civilization to continue?

Not all technology lasts forever. The wheel and fire may be permanent. The eight-track tape not so much. What about writing? It seems inconceivable that writing could become lost, but there are disturbing signs.

One is the fact that children are no longer being taught to sign their own names. Today most writing is done using keyboards, and most reading is done with words reproduced on keyboards. Young people today cannot read their grandmother's letters or diaries. They may never want to, of course, but historians and biographers of the future may need to. What if they can't? For that matter, what if nobody cares?

So many college graduates know little about history or great books. Other than texting, they do little writing. Artificial intelligence can do the writing for them. Why bother?

It seems unlikely that writing — or reading — will disappear altogether any time soon, but it seems conceivable that a return to the Middle Ages could be possible, a time when only the educated few know how to read and write. Most people, because of new technology, won't need to.

White writes, "If reading disappears, something else will take its place. Not its precise place; if reading were lost, much that is valuable would be lost. But we would get over it, or successive generations would, and whatever replaced it would have advantages we can't imagine."

Before literacy, most people didn't miss it, just as we didn't miss home computers or cell phones until they became a necessary part of modern living. What Heather Cass White says about the disappearance of writing is disturbing, but it could be true.

Testing who belongs

The common denominator of all slang, whether it be the speech of adolescents or the jive talk of musicians, is that it tests who belongs to the group and who is an intruder. That is because slang is fully intelligible only to the initiated.

Peter Farb, Word Play

Most slang starts with the young, who normally have two contradictory impulses going on at the same time. On the one hand, they want to be accepted as adults doing adult things — driving, drinking, smoking, having sex, enjoying independence, having secrets, whatever — while at the same time they want all the benefits of youth and being with each other, distant from their parents and other adults.

Youth slang helps them with the latter. They invent terms that become significant only to themselves. The fact that their parents don't know what they are saying is part of the fun. When adults begin to understand youth slang, and worse begin to use it themselves, the young must invent new slang. Thus virtually every generation of young people comes up with new slang terms that they enjoy repeating over and over again.

Some slang terms eventually become part of the language — the word cool, for example — but when this happens they cease to be slang. As Peter Farb says, the purpose of slang is to designate who belongs to the group and who doesn't. Once it enters the dictionary, the word belongs to everyone.

As Farb suggests, older groups such as musicians can also develop slang terms, although when older people do it it usually becomes jargon, rather than true slang. Most businesses, most hobbyists, most adult groups of any kind develop jargon of some kind. Jargon makes the activity easier, whatever that activity may be. Those on the outside have no use for these terms and may not even be curious about them.

Yet as with slang, jargon also tests who belongs to the group and who doesn't.

The burden of being alone

The title of Liz Moore's magnificent 2012 novel Heft describes both a main character, 550-pound Arthur Opp, and the weighty truth Moore writes about: people need people.

Arthur was once a college professor. Now he just sits at home and eats. He sends out for whatever he needs. But he also pines for a shy former student, Charlene, the closest he has ever come to a love affair. He lost his job because of her, even though she was no longer his student by then and even though they were more friends than lovers. Over the years they have written letters to each other, letters each has treasured and saved and read over and over again.

Arthur finally hears from Charlene for the first time in years. Thinking she might come to visit, he begins to shape up — or at least to get his house in better shape. He hires Yolanda, a pregnant teenager, to clean his house. It turns out that she needs him as much as he needs her.

Meanwhile Charlene has an addiction of her own. She has become an alcoholic, and Kel, her teenage son, cares for her more than she cares for him. Kel is an outstanding high school athlete who thinks he may have a future in professional baseball. His mother's suicide makes this lonely boy even lonelier. He begins the search for his father. Is he the man he has always thought of as his father, the man who abandoned the family years before? Or could it be Arthur Opp?

Without ever bringing Arthur and Kel together, although there is the promise of their meeting when the novel closes, Moore writes poignantly about how much they need each other. Or at least, like Charlene and Yolanda, they need someone.

Same book, different experience

Rereading can be a tricky process, in which, for better or worse, you're brought face-to-face with both the present and the past. It's different than reading, more layered, more nuanced, with implications about how we've changed.

David L. Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading

I am rereading a book of science fiction short stories I first read when I was a teenager. (More on this book in a few days.) The comment above by David L. Ulin rings true for me. The nine stories in the book have remain unchanged since 1962, yet the passing decades have changed me quite a bit.

And not only am I a different person than I was in 1962, but the world has changed dramatically since then. The stories still read like science fiction — talking robots, time travel, travel to other planets, aliens from other planets living on Earth next to humans — yet they sound like 1962. Centuries may have passed in the stories, but the names, the speech patterns and the attitudes are those of America in the middle of the 20th century. In one story a character is shocked that it will cost $78.90 to fix a tractor. This is a story taking place in the distant future, yet just 65 years after the book was published $78.90 sounds downright cheap to fix almost anything.

I find the stories entertaining, yet they probably don't shock and amaze me as they once did. As I read them I try to be a teenager again in the belief that I might enjoy them more.

Anne Fadiman

In his book Ulin quotes Anne Fadiman on the distinction between reading and rereading: "The former had more velocity; the latter had more depth. The former shut out the world in order to focus on the story; the latter dragged in the world in order to assess the story. The former was more fun; the latter was more cynical."

Each of her points makes sense to me.  And then comes her final point about rereading a book,  "... I saw the book through the complicating lens of adulthood, I also saw it through the memory of the first time I'd read it."

How true.

A lifetime guilt

Guilt can last a long time, a lifetime in fact.

In The Stolen Child (2024), Ann Hood gives us a story about Nick Burns, a man dying of cancer in 1974, who wants resolution and perhaps grace before he dies. As an American soldier in a trench in France during World War I, he was handed a newborn baby boy by a female artist on whose land the trench was located. Then she disappeared.

What is a man at war supposed to do with a baby? And so he abandoned the newborn, hoping somebody else would find him and take care of him. Now near death, he desperately wants to discover what happened to that baby.

He hires Jenny, a college dropout with her own demons, to accompany him to Europe to try to find the man the baby may have become. 

The more serious guilt in this story would seem to belong to the mother who, because of her desire for artistic success, abandoned her baby in a battlefield trench, yet Hood mostly ignores her to focus on Nick. Even Nick doesn't blame the mother. He blames only himself. Everyone is responsible only for his own actions.

Hood's title, taken from a Yeats poem, is misleading, for the child is never actually stolen — abandoned certainly and passed around a bit, but not stolen. What happens to the child, to Nick and especially to Jenny, who eventually becomes the book's central character, makes a fascinating story.

Life and love

Life is not simple, nor love inevitable.

Niall Williams, As It Is in Heaven

Niall Williams demonstrates the above line, found early in As It Is in Heaven (1999), in the novel itself. He also demonstrates its flip side: Love is not simple, nor life inevitable.

Both life and love are precious treasures, not to be taken casually, Williams tells us through his novel, as lyrical a love story as one is likely to find.

Philip Griffin loses both his wife and daughter in a tragic accident early in the story. Now, dying of cancer, he worries about his lonely son, Stephen, a 28-year-old teacher whose life seems to have already hit a dead end. The two men say little to each other as they play lengthy games of chess, yet Philip notices signs that his introverted son may actually be in love.

Stephen has become infatuated with a beautiful Italian violinist, stranded in Ireland by a lover. He goes to her recitals, even when it means ignoring his teaching duties. Gabriella finally notices him, and a relationship develops, though having been burned, she is reluctant to commit herself to a man. And let's face it, Stephen is not the man of most women's dreams. She returns to Italy, pregnant with Stephen's baby.

Life not being simple, nor love inevitable, the reader doesn't know how this will turn out. This is not your typical romance novel, after all. Midway in the book, Williams tells us, "Gabriella Castoldi shared with Stephen Griffin the expectation of failure and the familiarity of despair." Readers of literary novels share these expectations. One must wait for the very end to discover whether both life and love are possible for Stephen and Gabriella.

Novelist as scientist

Jane Smiley

When Jane Smiley argues, as she does in 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, that a novelist is like a scientist, who is more likely to be offended. the novelist or the scientist?

On the surface, a novelist and a scientist are very different people. If you ever got a college degree, it was probably either a bachelor of arts or a bachelor of science degree. A novelist does art. A scientist does, well, science. There have most likely been novelists who did science and scientists who have written novels, but for the most part they think differently. They do different kinds of things.

Still, Smiley may have a point.

A scientist works with a hypothesis. "A novel is a hypothesis," she writes.

Both a novelist and a scientist are observers. They both ask "what if" questions. A chemist may wonder what happens if a little of this chemical is added to a certain chemical compound. A novelist may wonder what happens if a major character dies in the second chapter.

And so there are similarities, as Smiley observes. Even so, scientific results are supposed to be reproducible. What one scientist discovers upon doing an experiment, another scientist is supposed to be able to find when doing the same experiment. Novelists, however, are expected to discover something entirely different each time. Or else we wouldn't pay any attention to them.