Mysterious map

There are some places you can't find without a map. That is literally true in the Peng Shepherd novel The Cartographers (2022).

Everyone in this story loves maps, and you probably will too by the time you're done reading it. Nell Young still can't understand why her father, head of the map division at the New York Public Library, fired her a few years earlier simply for finding a box full of junk maps. Now she learns that her father has died in his office, and there she finds one of those maps. Why was this ordinary 1930s road map not just worth severing his connection with his daughter but also important enough to keep close to him all these years?

Then she learns that someone is willing to pay a large sum of money for this very map. She suspects her father may have been murdered for it after other deaths follow at the library.

The pieces start falling together when Nell tracks down some of her father's college friends, who once called themselves The Cartographers. It was they who found this mysterious map and learned its secret, leading somehow to her mother's death in a fire. Now one member of the group will do anything to get his hands on the lasting remaining copy, the one Nell now possesses.

Shepherd's story soon turns from a realistic thriller into a fantasy thriller, which fortunately relieves her of the responsibility of being logical. Accept the premise, however, and you will likely find the novel great fun.

Banned books for sale

Walk into any bookstore these days and you are likely to find a table of "Banned Books." This always seems strange to me, for if the books are banned, what are they doing in the store?

I live in Florida, where controversy swirls around government efforts to keep certain books and certain kinds of books out of public schools. But is this really censorship? Again, the books are readily available in bookstores for any parents who might want to buy them for their children. I doubt that many parents do, for these books often contain images and language that many consider pornographic, or at least too sexual for children. Newspapers, television stations and radio stations could not reproduce these controversial excerpts for their audiences. Even school board members are uncomfortable when images from the books are displayed or certain passages read at their meetings. So why should the books be in school libraries and classrooms?

Weren't some of those books on the "banned" table actually banned somewhere in America at some time? Rarely is that the case. A few books such as Ulysses and Lady Chatterly's Lover may have been restricted in certain places, but courts have consistently ruled in favor of public access.

Most of the so-called banned books are simply books that have been challenged by parents. Parents who discover certain words and certain sexual acts in their children's assigned reading sometimes object to their school board. An objection is hardly censorship. Even if the school board removes the book from the school's curriculum, it does not qualify as censorship. It is the school board's job to determine which books are suitable or unsuitable for their students, just as it is a parent's job to determine which books are suitable or unsuitable for their children. 

Barton Swain pointed out in The Wall Street Journal last weekend that the "closest thing to real book bans in the U.S. today is perpetrated by precisely the sort of people who bewail book bans." These include publishers who refuse to publish certain kinds of books by certain authors on certain subjects and booksellers, especially Amazon, that refuse to sell such books as When Harry Became Sally and Irreversible Damage, both critical of the transgender movement.

Any book readily available for sale is hardly banned. Is the Bible taught in your child's public school? Does that make it a banned book? Have you found a Bible on any Banned Books table?

On the prowl

Why couldn't she, for once, be attracted to strength? Why did so many men look so quivery when you looked at them hard? Why did the slight of a man she liked or perhaps loved, make her feel so alone?

Larry McMurtry, The Evening Star

The pages of Larry McMurtry’s 637-page novel The Evening Star (1992) seem to turn by themselves even if reading about the sex lives of senior citizens may not be one’s idea of a good time.

Aurora Greenway, the central character in Terms of Endearment, returns in this sequel older but not necessarily wiser. Now in her 70s, Aurora shares her bed with Hector, a retired general a decade older. But Hector no longer satisfies in that bed, so she remains open to other possibilities, including her much younger analyst, Jerry.

Rosie, her longtime maid, is a woman of similar age with similar appetites. Over the years their relationship has become a close friendship, even if one does work for the other. They complain that men are weak jerks, yet they are always on the hunt for these men, much like the aging women in McMurtry's later novel Loop Group.

The novel has a large cast of characters that includes Aurora's three troubled grandchildren (Emma, her daughter, died in the earlier novel) and her great-grandchildren. As the novel opens, Tommy is in prison for murder. Teddy suffers from mental illness, as does his wife and apparently their infant son, Bump. Melanie, the plump granddaughter, lives her life trying to please a boyfriend who keeps leaving her for hotter women, then returning. But by the end of the novel, which covers a number of years, all three of these grandchildren manage to make something like success out of their lives.

McMurtry constantly flips the novel's point of view from one character to another, sometimes as often as three or four times in a couple of pages. Even the babies have a point of view, which is how we suspect Bump may not exactly be a well-balanced child.

Old people eventually die, and death finds a number of the characters in this novel, including Aurora herself. Even so McMurtry's narrative remains light and breezy, often hilarious, sometimes wise and always compelling. And so the pages keep flying by. 

Library laws

S.R. Ranganathan, a university librarian in India, proposed what he called the Five Laws of Library Science in 1931. These laws still hold true, I believe, not just for libraries but also for bookstores and even for private libraries. Here they are:

1. Books are for use.

This seems like an obvious truth, yet for some people books are considered mostly decorative. But even that is a use, I guess. Yet books are intended to be read by somebody at sometime. Most books do spend most of their lives sitting on shelves, but that's OK. Except for the most popular books with long waiting lists, even most library books mostly just sit on shelves.

Unfortunately, out of necessity to create space for new books, public libraries must discard older books, and the criteria they use is mainly their frequency of use. If a book hasn't been checked out for a certain period of time, it may be taken off the shelf unless it is considered a classic and worth keeping for that reason alone.

2. Every reader his or her book.

Some readers may need a long time to find their book, which is why books should be kept on library shelves and bookstore shelves for as long as possible. Somebody will find them eventually.

This law is why bookstores and library must offer a great variety of books, catering to all tastes, all ages all political and social views and, as much as possible, all languages spoken in that particular area. For private libraries, of course, the books usually reflect the owner of the library.

3. Every book its reader.

There are some books that make you wonder: How would anyone be interested in reading this? Yet someone obviously thought the book interesting enough to write, suggesting there must be someone out there who thinks it interesting enough to read. Like the second law, this third law argues for variety.

4. Save the time of the reader.

In other words, organize the library or bookstore in ways that make sense to the browser. Organize nonfiction by subject matter. Organize fiction by author alphabetically. Make signage easy to read and understand. The Dewey Decimal System has long helped public libraries obey this law. Bookstores and owners of private libraries have a more difficult time. A knowledgeable staff is a big help. 

5. The library is a growing organism.

This sounds more like a statement of fact or perhaps an ideal than a law to be obeyed. My own private library always seems to grow, unless I make a deliberate effort to weed out books, as I had to do when I sold my house and moved into a condo.

Yet even with limited space, as is true of all libraries and all bookstores (except perhaps for Amazon), the books undergo constant change. New books are published each day, some of which are added to the shelves. Change itself is growth, in a sense, and book collections should never be allowed to become stagnant. So perhaps this is a law, after all.

Out of the ruins

I don't know if Tracy Chevalier has ever been described as a literary novelist, yet her historical novels, especially Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Last Runaway, certainly approach that standard of excellence. And so does her 2019 novel, A Single Thread.

Violet Speedwell lost both her fiancé and her brother in the Great War. Now in her late thirties, with single men her age scarce in England, she reluctantly settles into a spinster's life. She moves to Winchester to escape her oppressive mother, takes a job as a typist and joins a group of women embroidering kneeling cushions for Winchester Cathedral. It is far from the life she had imagined for herself, yet gradually she begins to make it her own  — if only her mother's declining health doesn't force her to return home.

Then one of her new friends turns out to be a lesbian, compelling Violet to get involved protecting her and her lover and placing her reputation at risk. And she begins a relationship — more than friendship, less than a love affair — with Arthur, a married man 22 years her senior who is one of the bell ringers at the cathedral.

These various factors, including her mother's declining health, could easily ruin a life that already seems in ruins. How Violet manages to turn her trials into triumph will satisfy most readers, except perhaps for those looking for something a bit more literary.

Ideas in waiting

In her book Words Fail Me, Patricia T. O'Conner advises writers to never throw away an idea. It may come in useful later.

I am not sure I entirely agree with her. Certainly there are ideas I should have thrown away. Instead I used them and was embarrassed by them later.

Yet I also, more often, have resurrected old ideas that didn't work in an earlier piece yet were perfect for something new I was writing. Some bad ideas are just good ideas in waiting.

Blue Moon has been recorded countless times over the decades, yet a 1961 recording by The Marcels stands out from the rest because of some nonsense bass sounds that go something like "baum-baumba-baum-baumba-baum..." I've heard that that sound was actually invented for an earlier recording, but it just didn't work. So they set it aside, then brought it back later for Blue Moon. A discarded idea later became a brilliant idea. It made their version of the song a classic.

Caught by the fish

I only knew I ached at times in certain ethereal directions and I believed that in this direction there might lie the object toward which I ached, the Real Thing that would satisfy the homeward aching and make me feel at long last as I long had longed and longed to feel.

Eric Metaxas, Fish Out of Water

Anyone who has read much C.S. Lewis, especially his Surprised by Joy, will experience a bit of deja vu when reading the above line in Fish Out of Water (2021) by Eric Metaxas. Both men experienced a persistent longing — which Lewis calls joy and Metaxas calls "homeward aching" — that eventually led them to a vital Christian faith that ultimately influenced countless others.

Their early lives, which in most respects were quite different, had commonalities. They were both raised in ostensibility Christian families and attended prestigious universities — Lewis, Oxford and Metaxas, Yale — where they drifted into conformity with the intellectual trends of their generations. They rejected God, even while being incessantly and unwillingly drawn to him.

The son of a Greek immigrant father and a German immigrant mother, Metaxes was soaked in both cultures from an early age, even while growing up in the United States and experiencing that culture firsthand. He visited relatives in both Greece and Germany at various points in his youth. His family belonged to a Greek Orthodox church where even the priests never seemed to believe much of anything. The church was always more about culture than faith.

At Yale, he showed a flare for writing, yet despite a few successes rarely seemed to have anything to write about.

All the while Metaxas says he felt like a fish out of water, as if he didn't really belong in whatever environment he found himself. He says his conversion came in a dream in which he pulled a golden fish out of the water, and he realized, upon waking, that the fish represented Jesus Christ. A fish has long been a Greek symbol for Christ. What Metaxas had been looking for had found him.

Since then Metaxas has become a biographer of notable Christians, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and he conducts interviews on a weekly television show and on podcasts. Among the surprises in his fine book is his connection to Larry David, creator of Seinfeld, and the real individuals behind two of the main characters in that popular series.