Reasons I've Stopped Reading (or Watching) a Series

This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt asks why reviewers have stopped reading (or watching) a series. 

For me the most usual reason has been inconvenience. If a series seemed worth reading at the public library, and the library had volumes one and two, or volumes 1 through 93 (as in the case of The Baby-Sitters Club), I've often read the existing volumes in order. If, however, more volumes came out later and the continuity of reading the series of library books was broken--maybe the librarian decided not to order volume 94, maybe I'd moved to a different neighborhood where the library didn't have that series--I've not usually made any effort to keep up with the series. Two or nine or ninety-three volumes have seemed like enough. 

Then there's the sheer size of some series. I liked Nancy Drew, in grades two and three, but not enough to read all sixty volumes. Just two volumes of The Hardy Boys and three of The Bobbsey Twins felt like enough. 

There are series that are generally agreed to have lost their inspiration, the later volumes having been cranked out just to sustain interest in the volumes the author really enjoyed writing. Anne McCaffrey wrote two unforgettable trilogies about her fictional planet Pern, then published another book set on Pern every year for years afterward. Everyone remembered the Dragonriders and Harper Hall trilogies but did anyone remember any of the later volumes? 

Some have similar feelings about Piers Anthony's Xanth series. For nine volumes, this quirky fantasy-adventure-comedy series impressed even critics. The philosophical questions raised in Night Mare were even considered seriously in some philosophical and religious books of the 1980s. Perhaps it was just the reputations of their different publishers that made critics feel that later volumes like Vale of the Vole and Zombie Lover contained no serious thought but were just comedies based on puns. Certainly, though, as Xanth became familiar to its readers and its author, its plots have grown thinner. If you like Xanth you don't ask every volume to be as philosophical as Night Mare. Not everyone likes Xanth. I like Xanth and would have gone on collecting all the volumes if I'd had the money to spare. 

 

I suppose all fictional series will become harder to believe beyond a certain length. Readers could suspend disbelief in Lenora Mattingly Weber's Beany Malone and similar children's stories where each school year or term brought a child protagonist a new adventure, even if that meant that Beany Malone belonged to two different demographic generations, being a teenager in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Readers suspend disbelief in cartoon strip series like "Blondie" and "Peanuts" where the characters never matured noticeably in any way, because a cartoon strip captures a moment rather than a stage in someone's life. If "Blondie" and "Peanuts" had been published as graphic novels I'd imagine that even primary school readers would notice that the characters have stayed the same age for an unconscionably long time. The number of years the Baby-Sitters Club spent being thirteen wasn't even decent. A story worth putting into a book ought to have some effect on its characters. Lord Peter Wimsey stayed believable, and likable, because he and his fellow characters learned from their previous adventures; Agatha Christie's characters seemed to be muddling through the same stories over and over, as Dame Agatha aged, because they didn't. 

Books I Wish I'd Discovered Sooner

This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt asks about books we wish we'd discovered sooner.

There are books I remember discovering. The discovery of some books is a memorable experience. I remember the first time I read The Sneetches, Yertle the Turtle, Hop on Pop, and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, all of which I was supposed to have been too old to like, but I read them with my younger siblings and loved them. I remember the delight of getting to know, all in one winter, My Friend Flicka, Caddie Woodlawn, and A Little Princess, all of which I was supposed to have been too young to like, the winter between Hop on Pop and The Sneetches. That was grade two. I don't remember any discoveries or learning experiences at school, but what a lot of them I had at home.

It's easy to remember when I first read books during school terms, because I remember what we were doing at school, which was never as interesting as a good book. Grade three: Louisa May Alcott's Little Men. Grade four: The Bad Times of Irma Baumlein (recently reprinted as Irma's Big Lie), Gone-Away Lake, A Story of the Stone Age, and I spent a lot of time with Spanish for Beginners. Grade five: The House of Dies Drear. Grade six: the year my brother and I really got into the Little House books, at which I'd glanced, but which I'd not really read, before; A Wrinkle in Time, So Dear to My Heart. And so on.

I remember which year I read some books for the first time as an adult, too, though as an adult, doing more of what I chose to do, I did the same things for several years in a row, and the memories run together. Nevertheless. 1987 was the year Margaret Mahy's award-winning young adult novels were printed in the United States. 1988 was the year I discovered Crescent Dragonwagon's Year It Rained and Joan Aiken's If I Were You (Deception in the UK). 1989 was the year I began knitting; Kaori O'Connor's Creative Dressing, Annette Mitchell's Country Diary Book of Knitting, Sue Bradley's Stitches in Time, Erica Wilson's Knitting Book, stand out in memory. 1990: Chellie Pingree's and Helene Rush's Maine-theme knitting pattern books, and Christian de Falbe's Designs in Hand Knitting. And so on.

I don't remember thinking "I wish I'd discovered this book sooner." There've been other pleasures I've wished I'd discovered in time to share them with departed friends. Books haven't been on that list; friends who like books have tended to find their own. I remember being glad I found Langston Hughes' "Jess B. Semple" stories in time to share them with my husband and our students; everyone laughed over them. Glad, too, to share Cleveland Amory's Ranch of Dreams with my parents, and Hop on Pop with The Nephews, and so on. But generally the discovery of a new book has seemed to be what it is. I might not have liked it so much if I'd read it before reading other things, anyway. With historical literature, the more you've read, I find, the better it all gets. 

I do remember a time when I thought, "I'm glad I gave this one a second look!" That was in grade three, with Elizabeth Enright's Then There Were Five. Mother had found it while we were thriftshopping and asked if I wanted it. I opened the book; my eyes fell on a longish paragraph in which a character was preaching on, in dialect, "Erosion they call that...that's where my scrap metal goes." I thought, Oh ick, another book about things like soil erosion for children, told as a story; better say I'll read it and hope nobody asks whether I ever did; so I agreed to the purchase of it. Some months passed, and one evening I sat down and picked up the book with soil erosion in it. (I knew a fair bit about soil erosion from riding the school bus along Route 23, where red clay earth and sometimes rocks were still bleeding down into the road.) I was surprised, and delighted. I enjoyed all four Melendy Family books, all the way through school.

Later on I remember some books that I wish had been written sooner. The work hadn't been done to allow them to be, but it would have been nice to have known that my whole family were Elaine Aron's Highly Sensitive Person (s). Would I have felt motivated to go to university to do the research that went into Kathleen Desmaisons' Potatoes not Prozac, if that book had been written earlier, and how would my life have been different if it hadn't started with chronic mononucleosis? How different would Mother's life have been if Maximum Metabolism had been available in 1970? It's all idle speculation but it is possible to wish that knowledge had progressed a little faster than it did.

A Genre I'd Like to Read More

This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt is "A Genre I'd Like to Read More of in the Coming Year." 

That would be nonfiction.

Nonfiction does not fit into the Book Funnel's marketing mold, which is one great thing in its favor. 

My tastes flipped, during my reading lifetime. As a child I was most interested in fiction, and various adults used to try to push me to read more nonfiction, to which I used to respond by choosing the most frivolous topics available. Books written to teach things to children tended to be dumbed-down and preachy and aimed at boys. Children's novels had a better chance of being interesting and aimed at least partly at girls, and sometimes piqued my interest enough that I even looked up a topic and read nonfiction about the topic, to find out what the characters in a novel were talking about.

As an adult I found it to be the other way round. Novels written for adults can be very good, but are generally pretty bad. In the twentieth century the consensus of literary critics' opinion was that genre fiction--romances, mysteries, "westerns," and many critics added science fiction--was garbage. So what were the rules for novels that were not considered garbage? Some critics liked a lot of travel; some liked a "cross-section of society," with something like DEI in the selection of characters. Depressingly few, and nearly all of them were female, wanted the female characters to be believably human. Serious literary fiction was usually about adultery, or murder when everybody knew who'd done it; it focussed on the male experience and usually involved a lot of alcohol and tobacco, and had the general mood of a dirty ashtray. The critics always paid tribute to authors who could write about war, but they were more interested in authors who, like themselves, had been unfit for service.  \

Cartoon by James Thurber, who was actually one of my favorite twentieth century male writers.

Mostly the male writers and their characters lived in places where women lived too, and had active relationships with women; in the twentieth century any hint of sympathy for homosexuality would cost a book sales, even after the left-wingnuts of then took up homosexuality as a cause and actively marketed it to, e.g., graduate students in literature or psychology. But the successful male writers tended to write about their relationships with women as if they would rather have been homosexual. They wrote like a lot of pathetic aging graduate students, all sitting around in someone's basement wearing black shirts and getting drunk, terrified that marriage would lead to responsibility and gainful employment and would destroy their creativity. In most cases, if they had lost all interest in writing books, from the viewpoint of English Literature that might have been a good thing.

This attitude had, of course, already spawned the beginning of the 1960s and 1970s outbreaks of Loony Left feminism, as defined by divorcing men (sometimes they were those male writers, sometimes the audience for the male writers), having abortions, using bad language, wearing polyester leisure suits instead of dresses, not admitting it if they liked children, screaming in the streets at political demonstrations for this and that, picking up disgusting diseases because in the thinking of those days people who weren't married and weren't seriously religion were supposed to summon the stork as soon as they'd shaken hands, writing convoluted arguments about how a sexual act to which they had consented at the time was really a form of rape because male privilege, and sitting around in someone's basement wearing polyester pantsuits and getting drunk. Some women who got into that lifestyle were depressed, for what then seemed the obvious and sufficient reason that it was a depressing lifestyle. Meanwhile women of less extreme views made great progress just by being less depressing to have around than the Loony Left.

One sign of this progress was that literary critics were forced to stop raving about fiction in which male characters' idea of success was to sleep around without ever getting married, and acknowledge the merits of novels in which women achieve what they want to achieve without, or in spite of, men. Literary critics could now celebrate novels like The Color Purple as being much better than novels like I'll Take Manhattan, in which the twenty-something chick saves the family business from her evil uncle by taking a loan from the young Donald Trump. 

What the literary critics carefully avoided saying, Joan Aiken, whose father the literary critics admired, was able to say: Adults writing for adults usually rely on stereotyped characters and predetermined plots. Fiction for adults only occasionally reflects any real "creativity." Adults writing for children often mix up the stereotypes and twist the plots in ways that add humor and freshness to their fiction. As a result a novel for children, about how the protagonist survives the first term at a school with a tradition that nobody speaks to new students, or qualifies to be a prairie schoolteacher at age seventeen, or just wins the championship game, can be more interesting and realistic than a trite tale of adultery and murder for adults. 

Or even a good tale of adultery and murder for adults. Macbeth is a classic fictional reenactment of real history that gave new phrases and even new words to our language, but what it really tells us is that murder is a bad idea. Er, um, we knew that. 

But nonfiction liberates writers from having to worry about making characters recognizably different from stereotypes, and allow them just to describe what happened. Nonfiction written for adults is much more varied, realistic, broad-ranging, etc., than novels written for adults are. Good nonfiction does have a plot; it tells a story about how one unique event happened, or how several similar events have happened, or how a writer set out to find out what happened. Good nonfiction is fun to read even if you're not researching that specific thing that happened. Good nonfiction doesn't have to be as "creative" as James Herriot's veterinarian stories to be well worth reading, for information or for entertainment, and when the information in good nonfiction goes out of date, good nonfiction still has value as history and as entertainment. Good nonfiction is what blogs would like to be when they grow up. All bloggers can benefit from reading good nonfiction books.

Some examples of what I mean, or what I'd like to discover:

Cleveland Amory, The Proper Bostonians

John James Audubon, Birds of America

Sue Bender, Plain and Simple

Elisabeth Bumiller, May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons

Euell Gibbons, Stalking the Wild Asparagus

Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism

Booton Herndon, The Seventh Day

Tony Horwitz, One for the Road

Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse

Shirley Jackson, Life Among the Savages

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (or The Five Loves)

Alison Lurie, The Language of Clothes

Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Dedth

V.S. Naipaul, A Turn Through the South

Kathleen Norris, Dakota

P.J. O'Rourke, Eat the Rich

Vance Packard, The Waste Makers

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

James Thurber, My Life and Hard Times

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

Audiobooks I've Enjoyed

This week's Long & Short Reviews prompts asks which audiobooks reviewers have enjoyed.

I haven't, really. 

I like the idea that the technology now exists to allow people who can't see books to have computers read books to them. Any book they want to hear...at least until the computer "updates" and won't read the book they left off "reading" last month, any more.

I, personally, prefer to read books the good oldfashioned way. I read a lot of books online these days, but I greatly prefer printed books.

There was a time, before publishers almost automatically released audiobook versions of everything and if the publishers didn't bother to hire readers your computer would read almost any book aloud for you, when blind people had to recruit friends to read books on tape for them. I read a few books onto tape for my father and his blind friends. Their tastes were surprisingly compatible with mine.

They always said that the existing library of books-on-tape for blind people contained too many bestselling novels. They wanted more nonfiction--history, biography, travel, health news, the books that grew out of breaking news stories. Regretfully they said that although charts and numbers were good in serious nonfiction books, they made boring tapes. They liked books that were funny and informative. They liked sound effects and hated when the author relied on pictures or visual effects to convey information. Most of them had liked reading once, and had liked Readers Digest as a guide to further reading. (They'd agree with those who said that Readers Digest was bland and superficial, but they appreciated its monthly selections of a bland, superficial first story about something people might or might not want to learn more about, every day.) Cleveland Amory's Ranch of Dreams was one book, new at the time, that I enjoyed reading and they enjoyed hearing. 

(Does listening to an audiobook count as reading? some ask. I say, if people are seriously studying something and listen to audiobooks while they commute, exercise, even eat, until they can recite the information along with the reader, that counts as reading. If they listen to audiobooks as background noise, shout conversations over the recorded voices, fall asleep with the narrators running on, that counts as, well, who's never fallen asleep over a book? The question is whether people get information or insight or entertainment out of audiobooks. Obviously they do. But most people who are not blind or severely dyslexic can get the information or insight or entertainment more efficiently out of real books.)

Books About Knitting

This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt was "Books About My Favo(u)rite Topic."

No, that would not be butterflies, or even cats, and it certainly wouldn't be glyphosate. Going by my actual purchase records, my clear favorite topic is knitting.

And here are ten favorite books, long enjoyed, from the 300 or so on the pattern hoard wall in my Home Office:

Madeline Weston, Classic British Knits

Eighties interpretations of lightweight textured ganseys, colorful (often all-natural-colors) fairisles, chunky cabled Arans, and lacy knitted shawls. They really deserve to be knitted in English and Irish wools, though I've made most of them in cotton or even acrylic yarn. When people say they want a sweater they can wear indoors, this is a book I show them. In the nineteenth century, when these knitting traditions began, people prized "fine" yarns and would rather layer on two or three lightweight sweaters than wear a "coarse" chunky one, so the most traditional, true-to-the-museum-piece English sweaters are knitted with wool no thicker than crochet cotton. Most knitters today think such lightweight, slow-growing knits might as well be done on machines. It's still possible to buy the "fine" English wool yarn, though, even in the US, if you want to pay for it.

Annette Mitchell, The Country Diary Book of Knitting

In the 1980s, when publishers expanded their vision of knitting pattern books from plain little how-to-knit manuals (which were often easy to carry around, cheap, and useful) into big glossy coffee-table patterns for Eighties Sweaters as Art and Fashion, this was my first "favorite." It's still a favorite. The retro-Edwardian clothes were over-the-top, and still are. The sweaters are relatively simple styles, good choices for the second or third sweater someone knits, and still wearable today. This book is the source of the cotton sweater I model when marketing my knits, and of the "cluster lace" pattern shown above. (Cluster patterns were very popular in actual Edwardian knitting books but they weren't used to make entire sweaters--that's an Eighties Thing. They were usually used to make borders, sometimes lace edgings sewn onto bed linens of woven fabric.) Ahead of its time, this book also contained patterns for easy-to-make accessories. I've made all of the hats and about half of the sweaters, over the years; most recently I consulted the book for stitch patterns to use in the dish rags that still sell fairly fast in summer. 

Sue Bradley, Around the World in 80 Sweaters

Ironically, while Annette Mitchell's Country Diary Book of Knitting doesn't give a count but does contain more than 80 patterns, this book as published doesn't come near that number. The publisher undoubtedly trimmed back the page count. The book is still a gorgeous coffee-table confection with lots of the museum pieces that inspired these elaborate, very Eighties designs, lots of additional museum pieces for would-be designers, and at least three suggested variations on each of the sweaters that were actually featured in the book. Knit the elaborate versions featured in the full-page, full-color photos if you want to make something that screams "Eighties" (and has high potential for becoming an Ugly Sweater after a few years' wear and tear), or knit the simpler variations if you want something easier to wear and likely to last longer. I've made and worn several designs from this book and its companion...

Sue Bradley, Stitches in Time

Again, about twenty patterns with at least three variations each, suggested by museum pieces. My bead-free version of the "Byzantine" sweater, for which the pattern recommends beads, is shown above. 

Christian de Falbe, Designs in Hand Knitting

Challenging sweater patterns that showed off the knitter's skills were another Eighties Thing, and this book is full of them. This designer published enough designs to put out magazines twice a year, in the 1970s and 1980s, and the hardcover book contains the ones people liked best. When I've knitted them, they've sold. Marketing his designs to experienced knitters allowed de Falbe to design sweaters that were a little more fitted to the female body than was typical in the 1980s, when, no matter how flowery and "feminine" the knitted-in pictures might be, or how fluffy the fabric, most sweater shapes were unisex. He was also marketing his yarn, which was thinner than most hand knitting yarn sold in the US, and made lighter, more wearable sweaters.

American School of Needlework, The Great Knitting Book 

My late Eighties fluorescent-colors version of the early Eighties preppy blue and green sweater (and cap) on the front cover. This book contains patterns for almost everything that can be knitted, including stuffed toys, doilies, edgings to put on towels or pillow cases, blankets, hats, socks, and of course several relatively simple sweaters. You can make the sweaters look totally Awesome Eighties by using, e.g., fluorescent yarn, but they're relatively traditional, timeless patterns.

Kaffe Fassett, Glorious Knits 

Fassett did a lot to market handknitting and handknitted sweaters, as Art and Fashion, in the Eighties with his trademark rule, "When in doubt, add twenty more colors." Shown is a variation on the snug-fitted, very girly-girly floral jacket near the end of the book; someone wanted to see that pattern on an oversized floppy "comfort" sweater for a large person, so here it is. Some of the other designs in the book are even harder to overlook, and some are relatively subdued mixes of neutral colors for men.

Linda Ligon, Homespun Handknit

As the editor of Threads magazine Ligon ran a contest for original designs for hats, mittens, socks, and matching sets of the above. The winning designs were printed as a book. This is the book. Knitters can make most of these projects from scraps left over from sweaters and blankets, and they always have a timeless, cute, handmade look. 

Monica Lewandowski, Folk Mittens

Most of the traditional knitting patterns that were used to design Eighties Sweaters came from old socks, caps, and mittens found in museums. In this book all the best known knitting patterns from museum pieces are reapplied to mitten designs made with yarn that was available around 2000. 

Debbie Anderson and (later US Senator) Chellie Pingree, Sweaters from the Maine Islands

This book caught people's eye, in the late Eighties, because the cover featured not only a knitted-in hen image on a sweater but a model actually holding up a pet hen. I've knitted most of these sweaters; sold several of them. They're fun to knit but, be warned, they were designed by and for young women with thin upper arms. When knitted as designed they'll make some clients complain that they're tight around the arms and hard to wear. So, you can simplify the sleeves, as I did in the cardigan above, for a very Eighties effect, or you can add gussets to the patterns. 

"Books I Wish I Could Read Again for the First Time"

This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt is "Books I Wish I Could Read Again for the First Time." 

That's not an emotional experience I've actually had. One can always read a book again, and again, each time focussing on a different aspect of what the author had to say. As a child whose access to books in general used to be limited to a narrow selection of mostly unappealing books, I read some favorites literally dozens of times. As an adult I have more opportunities to read new books for the first time, but there are still books I can enjoy revisiting. 

In some other L&SR-prompted posts I've focussed on the first books I can remember in the category, which has meant children's books. This time, for variation's sake, I'd like to focus on books I read for the first time within the past twenty years, which means skipping over the children's books I don't actually need a child's help to enjoy revisiting and the reading list classics...

1. Dakota by Kathleen Norris

While she was only getting acquainted with the monastic people she would write about in her mega-sellers, Norris wrote this slimmer book of essays--long, short, and short-short--about her life with her husband in a small town. The topophilia is delightful. I wouldn't like to live in South Dakota but Norris makes it clear why she did.

2. Juniper Gentian and Rosemary by Pamela Dean

Given a contract to write a novel based on an old ballad, Dean strayed a bit from the topic. The oldest versions of the English riddle songs seem to date back to a time when people were seriously afraid of "devils" and relished legends of how someone might have outwitted one. By the time the ballad picked up the refrain, whether sung as "juniper, gentian, and rosemary" or "gentle fair Jennifer, Rose, and Marie," interest in "devils" had declined and the plot became that the young man chose, of three young women, the one who gave the best answers to riddles. In this novel Dean mixed both motifs. The three sisters are named after magical herbs because their parents anticipated that they'd need to defend themselves against malevolent magic. All three are attracted to a mysterious young man who moves into their neighborhood. The attraction is not primarily sexual; something murkier is going on. "Devils" wanted to corrupt souls. The malevolent power in this novel wants to derail one of the sisters' career by separating her from her own life, education, family, friends...drawing on another old song that warned "girls that flourish in their prime" to "let no man steal your time." I love that this novel finally calls out "boyfriends" as a harmful, corrosive factor in young women's lives. Dean's ability to portray a healthy family life and vibrant friendships has no equal.

3. Peace Talk 101 by Suzette Haden Elgin

After the success of her Native Tongue trilogy, the writer known as Suzette Haden Elgin had an interesting late career. She was also a linguist and language teacher known for the slow steady bestseller series that began with The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense. Those books continued to sell. Elgin continued to learn and write more about communication with verbal self-defense books for every market demographic that suggested itself. Each one seemed to do better than the last, while critics, feminists, and English teachers raved over Native Tongue. But...but...Native Tongue hadn't sold a lot of copies in its first run. Worse, because it had been not only recommended for many contemporary literature courses but actually used in a university research project, instead of forcing sales of lots of expensively produced copies it had been photocopied and distributed to students by teachers. Publishers didn't want to risk a novel like that and didn't want to publish the next science fiction series Elgin wanted to write. 

Meanwhile, she was privately counselling a young person in distress. She published no details about the person but she did self-publish, as a free e-book, a short novel about a depressed young man who gets some good advice that may or may not make his life less depressing, but it seems to start working in his favor. She called it Peace Talk 101. It 's a sort of summary of what she'd learned in a richly varied career, and it's a good read.

4. The Straight Dope (series) by Cecil Adams

Selected from a weekly newspaper column, this was a delightfully random collection of fun facts. People sent in questions and Adams researched and wrote up the answers to the ones with the highest snarky adult comedy potential. Teenagers love this series. My inner teenager is one of them.

5. The Dilbert Principle by Scott Adams

Common sense advice about work and communication, presented by cartoon characters.

6. The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges

If you want a book of manageable size that can be opened anywhere for goofy fun and memorable insights, this one is worth looking for. It used to be available in both English and Spanish. 

7. Eat the Rich by P.J. O'Rourke

The title is, of course, a joke, not a serious recommendation. O'Rourke visits places he considers examples of "good socialism," "bad socialism,"  "good capitalism" and "bad capitalism."

8. Clueless (series) by H.B. Gilmour, Randi Reisfeld, et al.

Remakes and reviews of the classics of English literature as reenacted by rich high school kids. 

9. Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg

Thoroughly researched historical classic, with a snarky sense of humor.

10. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

Actually, any book by Anne Lamott. I don't always agree with her but I love the way she writes.

More Humorous Book Titles

Long & Short Reviews asked reviewers for lists of humorous book titles before, and this week they're doing it again. Can I think of a new list? I can try...These are books I've read. Not all of them are primarily comedy. The titles are not the only funny lines in the books. 

Scott Adams, Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel

Maya Angelou, Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas

Dave Barry, Babies and Other Hazards of Sex

Lesley Conger, Love and Peanut Butter

Cathy Crimmins, When My Parents Were My Age They Were Old

Will Cuppy, The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody

Hildegarde Dolson, Sorry to Be So Cheerful

Joseph Epstein, With My Trousers Rolled

Cynthia Heimel, If You Can't Live Without Me Why Aren't You Dead Yet

Stilton Jarlsberg, Johnny Optimism (the series)

Florence King, Wasp Where Is Thy Sting

Sam Levenson, You Don't Have to Be in Who's Who to Know What's What

Merrill Markoe, What the Dogs Have Taught Me

Patrick McManus, Never Sniff a Gift Fish 

P.J. O'Rourke, Eat the Rich

Ishmael Reed, The Free-Lance Pallbearers

H. Allen Smith, Life in a Putty Knife Factory

James Thurber, Let Your Mind Alone

P.G. Wodehouse, Love Among the Chickens

Bryan Woolley, Home Is Where the Cat Is

A New Book I'm Looking Forward to Reading

The first Long & Short Reviews prompt this year asks reviewers about new books we're looking forward to reading.

This will be a short one. It feels as if it ought to be a Top Ten List, but I'm not aware of that many forthcoming books I'm really looking forward to reading. So I'll say that the new-to-me book I'm reading, with interest, is the next volume of Michelle Warren's New Kind of Zeal trilogy. 

It was written some years ago, and speculates about what might happen if someone really, literally did what Jesus would have done in a hypothetical future New Zealand. The character Joshua doesn't just commit to being a better neighbor. He organizes a religious group, many of whom appear to be homeless beach bums, of people who behave very well but point out errors in both the organized church's and the government's policies. Let's just say that volume one did not end with Joshua happily married and leading a growing business. Volume two tells what the survivors do about it.

I think Americans really should read more books from the other English-speaking countries. Long & Short Reviews has a certain natural tendency to support this practice, although I found A New Kind of Zeal in the Book Funnel. (Where Warren did not opt into the spam scheme, I'm glad to say; she does send out newsletters, and does take time to make each one worth reading.)

A Genre I Wish Were More Popular

This week, Long & Short Reviews asks if there's a genre of books reviewers wish were more popular.

I like literary nonfiction. I mind bitterly that most public libraries have purged it from their shelves. I'd like to see more of it, just because, when people have written both novels and collections of essays (or even book-length deep dives into a single subject), I almost always like their nonfiction books best.

Arguably blogs meet our "need" to read each other's personal essays. I'd argue "nay." Blogs are interesting but, as someone said around the time the brand known as Priscilla King was born, the word "blog" sounds like a glob of dough and that's how blogs read. Blog posts are things that, if our friends show enough interest in our writing on the topic, could be made good enough to be printed in creative nonfiction books. 

That's about all I have to say on the subject, this being a busy week, but here's a quick list of nonfiction books I like, as suggested by what's on my shelves in the office today:

1. Knitting Around by Elizabeth Zimmermann

In the 1970s Elizabeth Zimmermann was probably the best known knitter on Earth. Having written the how-to-knit and how-to-knit-current-fashions books most people still like best, she'd been asked to do TV shows about knitting. People respected her not saying much about the rest of her life, but they wished for a memoir of her early life in England and immigration during the War. So she wrote one. The book alternates between chatty discussions of knitwear she'd designed, with variations, and her autobiography in short, pithy stories. She also did drawings and paintings; there's a centerfold showing those.

2. The Bachelor Home Companion by P.J. O'Rourke

Only slightly exaggerated discussions of the way many of our generation lived when we were young and single. 

3. The Dog with the Chip in His Neck by Andrei Codrescu

Some of his short funny essays for NPR, some of his longer but still witty literary studies as required by his teaching job, bring the 1980s back to life. 

4. Lighten Up by Ken Davis

Christian preacher tells funny stories about his life and observations.

5. Dakota by Kathleen Norris

First of the trilogy of literary nonfiction she wrote while all but moving into the monastery near the hospital where her husband was treated for cancer. He was not a Christian. She wasn't sure she believed that Christianity was true, but she found herself both practicing and preaching the faith anyway. In this book she's still close to her earlier life in the New York publishing world and reflects on the poems she wrote in a successful poetry collection, on her students' concerns, on her roots in South Dakota and her life there. 

6. Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat

He studied timber wolves up close and personal. He even tried eating mice.

7. The Language Imperative by Suzette Haden Elgin

One of her more abstruse linguistic books, but Elgin was constitutionally incapable of being abstruse. She surveyed people who speak more than one language and wrote about what they'd reported about the way they spoke. It's actually a fun read, at least if linguistics interests you.

8. The Skeptical Feminist by Barbara Walker

She was even more of a polymath than Elizabeth Zimmermann. She wrote about folklore and rocks and what seemed like all the knitting patterns on Earth, and she wrote about the life experiences that pushed her away from Christianity. Quite well.

9. The Dog Who Wooed at the World by Laura Lee Cascada

Cascada and about a hundred of her e-friends reflect on our encounters with different kinds of animals... from manatees to beetles, with of course a lot of dog and cat stories. My freaky-looking cat Mogwai is about the middle of the book.

10. Grazing Along the Crooked Road by Betty Skeens

I suppose, if I were imposing Dewey Decimal classification on my books, I'd call this one a cookbook but it's also history, memoir, art, photography, and above all a great gorgeous guide for tourists from the early 2000s. Several of the places and people featured in the book are still around. 

Some Books That Have Influenced My Life

Should people who are not rich write about the books that influenced our lives? Does that amount to telling many readers, who want to become rich, what to avoid?

Whatever. Ten books that come to mind as having influenced my life may repeat with other lists I've posted  this year...

1. Good News for Modern Man

This was the collective name for early editions, first just of the Gospels, then of the whole New Testament, of what became Today's English Version of the Bible. As an adult I don't like "copyright" Bibles, but I will say that TEV makes it easy for children to follow the story.

2. Victory over Arthritis by Rasmus Alsaker

There must have been an epidemic of viral arthritis as a complication of flu in the late 1960s. Thousands of people read this book, marvelled at their quick, complete, long-lasting cures of arthritis (at least the post-infection kind), and went on to read some or all of the other "health food" books and buy "special," less popular products at "health food stores." My mother was one of those people. Within ten years after reading Victory over Arthritis she was one of the early readers for new books from the Rodale Press. 

3. The Waste Makers by Vance Packard

Not new when I read it, but there's a timeless quality to this writer's snarky skewering of Waste Age foolishness. Read this book and say farewell to fashion.

4. Little Town on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder

It's Laura's story, but she had considerable help from her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, in writing and publishing her "Little House books." Most of these books are simple stories, written to be read aloud to four-year-olds by twelve-year-olds, about what children did and how they did it in the late nineteenth century. The character Laura enjoyed flowers and fashion and old songs, but she was not much of a philosopher. In Little Town on the Prairie there's a scene that's not unusual or out of character, but is unlike anything else in the books. Laura reflects on the Declaration of Independence, which used traditionally to be read aloud at Independence Day events, and thinks that being free means "governing" herself--taking moral responsibility for her actions. It's a short, simple reflection, suitable for children. It sank in and stayed with me after I read it. People have wondered, however, and have found evidence that it was written in by Rose rather than Laura. 

5. The Girl Scout Handbook (and The Boy Scout Manual for that matter)

A certain amount of political and philosophical twaddle was written into these books, but the general idea of "Scouting" was that children could be best amused by learning skills that might be useful. One can learn a lot of life skills by following the suggestions "for fun" in the Scout manuals. When we were at the right ages, I was a Girl Scout who usually wore the uniform and seldom missed a meeting, though the meetings weren't as much fun as learning the skills and crafts at home. My brother thought the Boy Scouts were just a lot of town kids who sat around fantasizing about doing the sort of thing we did at home. But we both got ideas for having fun at home from the manuals.

6. The Serenity Book by Marylou McKenna

Badly produced such that first editions didn't last long, it's not been reprinted and has become hard to find. It's a handbook of Sensory Awareness meditation, which is very useful for things like adjusting to temperatures, lowering blood pressure, and working out muscle tension that causes lingering pain after an injury. 

7. Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster

At a time when many churches were discarding traditional rules, especially the ones about frugality, Foster reconsidered the spiritual meaning these disciplines had had for people who chose to follow them. 

8. The Last Word: On the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense by Suzette Haden Elgin

Applies principles of English grammar, not so much to avoiding specific kinds of sneaky verbal abuse (which were discussed at length in earlier books) but to presenting ideas in ways that minimize disagreement from the beginning. Because so many variables are present these principles of grammar won't guarantee that your first words on a topic will be "the last word," but they will increase its chances.

9. Men Are Just Desserts by Sonya Friedman

This is a longish psychological self-help book full of 1980s ideas--good and bad--but what stayed with me has been the title, in both of its senses. The men we attract are our "just desserts" in the sense that we build the relationships we get, and having men in our lives at all is "just dessert" in the sense that it may be a source of pleasure but we can get on very well without it. 

10. The Gift of Good Land by Wendell Berry

Explores humans' relationship with our environment and the value of ancestral roots. 

Books I Read on Someone's Recommendation

This week, Long & Short Reviews asks reviewers about books we read on someone else's recommendation. I will exclude teachers and school librarians from this list...not a Top Ten List, but a list of books someone else, either in real life or in a non-school book, recommended and I was glad I listened...another First Ten That Come to Mind List.

1. Charlotte's Web by E.B. White

Recommendations remind me of how manipulative even my favorite adults were. When I was four years old, my mother loved the idea that I was reading a Chapter Book recommended by the neighborhood librarian. (Which neighborhood was that? Might have been Folsom, California; I'm not certain.) When I was eight years old and delighted to have a teacher who didn't think imagination was a bad thing, my mother thought reading Charlotte's Web again was regressive. Bah. The character Fern is a "little girl," presumably eight or ten or so, so people assume that that's the best age to read the book, but plenty of adults enjoy Charlotte's Web. 

2. Rascal by Sterling North

Already discussed here...Dad read it because North was a fellow polio survivor; this story is based on his memories of the last couple of summers before polio. When I was ten or eleven or so Dad found a copy in a secondhand store and assured my brother and me that we'd like it. We did. It's another book where the main character may be pre-teen but adults usually enjoy the story too. I think it's probably better read as an adult, actually. Adult readers will remember, even as they laugh at Rascal's adventures, that those adventures consist mostly of property damage and were enjoyed as comedy because the character Sterling is both rich and a bit spoiled. You do not actually want a raccoon as an indoor pet. 

3. My Friend Flicka by Mary O'Hara

My mother had seen the movie and thought I might enjoy the book. I did...at seven, and for some years afterward. At sixteen I found Wyoming Summer, the still somewhat fictionalized selection from the author's diaries that explains how My Friend Flicka was written, and I've liked it much better ever since. But at seven I didn't mind that the novel falsified important facts. 

4. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

I've discussed this one before too. I disliked my fourth grade teacher, Mr. Ed. --, enough that his constant reminiscences about having fought the Germans made me think there might have been something to be said for the Germans. My parents did not directly say anything. Dad found a copy of Anne Frank's diary and left it where I'd find it. Mother said it was depressing and I probably shouldn't read it--which might have been a deft use of reverse psychology. I smuggled it to school, read it there, and liked it. I think what I liked might have been that Anne started out as the sort of well-off, talkative, thoughtless girl who reminded me of what were called my friends, at home, but who were not friends at that school in that superficially nice neighborhood in California. She got what they might have needed and deserved; she had to hide in a storage room for four years. And it forced her to focus on learning, reading, doing exercises, and writing her little book. She knew at the time that she was living through an adventure that would make a marketable book. It was not the usual tedious mess of childish "secrets" about childish social drama. Anne read her diary entries aloud to her parents and revised and edited them for eventual publication. I don't think she was much more intelligent than the average teenager; I think the adventures narrated in her diary would make a writer of any young girl, or boy, if they didn't destroy person altogether. 

5. Stalking the Wild Asparagus by Euell Gibbons

Recommended to Mother and me at the health food store in Sacramento. Stalking the Good Life, Stalking the Healthful Herbs, and Stalking the Blue-Eyed Scallop were sequels. All are useful. All were fun to read, and reread, all the way through middle school. I don't cook the wild plants I use in many of the ways Gibbons did, now, but most of his discussions of wild plants have a recipe for everyone. 

Caveat: The properties of wild foods vary, as do the properties of cultivated foods, depending on where and when the plants grew. A species that one person finds delicious as it grows in this particular field may taste nasty or even contain toxins when it grows somewhere else. Gibbons didn't recommend anything that's likely to kill you but he liked some things you may hate and was unenthusiastic about some things you may love. 

6. The Seventh Day by Booton Herndon

Recommended by someone at the Seventh-Day Adventist church we visited regularly when I was nine or ten years old. Writing a biography of Desmond Doss, a war hero, led Herndon to write about the church to which Doss belonged. Herndon didn't join the Seventh-Day Adventists but he learned about the church's teachings and the state of its ministries in the 1960s. He was given many good stories to tell. He told them well.

7. Downright Dencey by Caroline Dale Snedeker

Recommended by a committee that made up lists of good books for children of various ages, in the 1950s and 1960s. I don't think many people would recommend it now. I wouldn't recommend it to children, generally, now. Snedeker made a novel-length version of a family story about how the daughter of a rich family married the son of a drunken "Indian." There are cringe moments and quaint phrasings and quite a lot about the spirituality of Quakers in the early 1800s. I think the spirituality always was what I liked best. The childhood friendship that grew up with the characters became more interesting after the first reading, at age twelve.

8. The Waste Makers by Vance Packard

One of those books that appealed to real adults that Dad was always trying to get me to read. (He would have been even better pleased if my brother had read those books; did not happen.) Packard wrote about the Advertising Age at its height in the 1950s but he wrote well and wittily enough that I think, and recently a publisher also thought, people would enjoy revisiting his world and thinking about how much it's like ours. 

9. Jubilee by Margaret Walker

In my twenties I read lots of literary essays--long-form book reviews really. They steered me to read a lot of books. Many of those books, like Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea and L.P. Hartley's Facial Justice, were well enough written that I could see why they became other writers' favorites, but they didn't become mine. Jubilee, recommended by Alice Walker, did become a favorite. It contains some material that is as raw and horrible as the most off-putting contents of Toni Morrison's books, but the character Elvira--who may seem impossibly nice because she was based on Walker's memories of her grandmother--transcends the awfulness that surrounds her, and so does the reader. Elvira survives being a slave in the house of a woman who hates her, loves and is loved, achieves reasonable success after the end of slavery, gets her choice of two men, and finds inner peace. 

Jubilee has been called "the Black Gone with the Wind." Both are longish novels set in the Civil War period; both focus on young women who, at a time when the supply of young men was so depleted that many women had no chance to marry, had a choice between two attractive men. Both books took more than ten years to write. But that's one of the major differences. Margaret Mitchell spent those years working out details of plot and characterization because she was writing a metaphoric study of the Southern States; she had all the historical documentation she needed. Margaret Walker spent those years digging for her historical documentation. 

10. Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

I grew up in between the waves of this series' popularity. It wasn't recommended to me as a child; it was recommended in my late twenties by a cousin. (Who was a teacher, but not one of mine.) Everybody likes the whole series. 

Books I Don't Plan to Read

Long & Short Reviews asked. Let's put it this way. I don't plan to buy a lot of books, although I would if I were rich, because I am not rich. I've inherited the home libraries of a few friends so I already own a lot of books I've yet to read.

I do not sit down and say to myself, "Eww ick, that's a bestseller, so it can't be any good. I will not read anything by James Patterson or John Grisham or Jude Devereaux or Stephen King or Danielle Steel..." I don't feel much need to boost those authors, but I have read some of each one's books. There are reasons why they're so popular. There are less popular authors who deserve more attention from more discerning readers. Boosting their signals is what book blogs are for. But I see no reason to deny that readers get more than material for Freudian fantasies out of bestsellers. Some books that have reached the bestseller lists are actually pretty good.

I don't say "Eww ick, no books in this or that genre or by this or that type of writer," either. There are genres in which I expect to enjoy more books than others. There are genres I'm not really qualified to criticize. I'll read just about anything.

I just passively plan to read the popular books when I'm all caught up on everything else I want to do. Realistically, it's possible that that might happen, but it's not likely. 

I'm aware that popularity...well...you remember how in high school you'd been a good friend over the years, but someone else had more expensive stuff, so at some point somebody said something like "I like whatever it is that you and I do but I can do that any old time whereas this may be the only chance I eeeevvvver get to ride in X's new car..." and you felt betrayed? Popularity for books works something like that. Bestseller numbers are shaped when big-city bookstores order a few hundred copies at a time before throwing a big book party celebrating a new release by a big corporate publisher. If your book sold to a small publisher or an academic publisher or even a large denominational publisher, that won't happen. If your book expresses a viewpoint the monster corporations don't like...you can become a successful author, working with small publishers, self-publishing, even starting your own publishing house if you happen to be as brilliant as J.I. Rodale or Thich Nhat Hanh, but your books may never be on the New York Times bestseller list. And, well, discovering authors like J.I. Rodale and Thich Nhat Hanh does happen to be one of this web site's main goals.

If and when I have a physical bookstore I don't expect it to be big enough to need lots of copies of the bestsellers of the week, but I expect to order them on demand.

I expect to stock books that aren't featured in the big-chain bookstore on the mall. Books whose appeal might be considered "academic" because they're serious science, well researched history, or just books that tend to appeal to educated readers. Christian books, and other books by people who take other religious traditions seriously. True Green books, as distinct from Poison Green. Books that J.I. Rodale would have published, before Rodale Press was swallowed by the European monster Penguin has become. Books that those who want global tyranny want to ban.

People can always buy bestsellers on the mall...but that doesn't mean I want to ban bestsellers. I just figure that a book that's on the bestseller list this week is going to be available for a dime in aid of charity next year, whereas a new writer nobody's heard of yet needs a sale now.

Books I Would Reread, and Why

This week Long & Short Reviews links up posts about the books reviewers would or wouldn't review, and why.

This question seems to invite generalizations.

Books I would reread, or at least re-skim? That would be most books I've read. I skim-read fast enough not to mind the time it takes if someone asks which volume in a series had a particular minor character in it, or whether a quote attributed to the author online sounds like even a rephrasing of anything the author said in...A day will probably come when I'm not able to do this any more, but it's true for now.

Books I would not reread? Not just the ones I've deleted from Kindle or Book Funnel to save space. If the blog says I enjoyed a book, or even that I didn't like it much but you might, it's probably not one that I want to keep and reread every year, but it's one that I'd skim-read if, say, I was reading a volume that came later in the series and wanted to remind myself of the story about how the characters met. The ones I would not reread are the ones that seemed to be completely dishonest, like a horrible novel that claimed to be Christian in which a family seemed impossibly nice and cheerful and sweet because they were all on drugs, or like the genre fiction that never even shows a seam where the author actually wrote a single scene without help from a chatbot, or like the bestseller of bygone years where the twelve-year-old seduced the grown-up. That's not merely bad; it's worse.

(Though of course everyone's definition of the very worst in books is subjective, and subject to cultural influence. Because my culture values the growing-and-learning time of life in ways most human cultures never did, I think fiction should not mention any sexuality characters might have before they're sixteen. This may seem arbitrary to some people...deal with it.)

Most books that are identified as classics are generally worth rereading but, for a change, let's encourage new writers with a list of ten recent books that are currently in my Kindle, that I intend to keep there until I get printed copies, because I'm likely to want to reread...

(This list is arbitrarily discriminating against new books that I received in formats other than Kindle. That's because I'm offline, and Kindle is working better than Book Funnel or PDF at the moment. If that's not the best reason why your book's not on the list, at least it helps me narrow the selection down to ten. These have all been reviewed at this web site recently, and should be in your favorite bookstore. They were selected by looking down the list of titles in the "recently accessed" view in the Kindle app.)

Isabel Allende, My Name is Emilia del Valle

Emily Dana Botrous, With Love Melody

London Clarke, The Neighbor

Sallie Cochren, Let the Purring Begin

Channelle Desamours, Needy Little Things

Carl Hiaasen, Fever Beach

Robert Malone, Lies My Govt Told Me

Neal Shusterman, All Better Now

Sharon Srock, For Mercie's Sake

Barbara Wright, Anny in Love

Authors I Wish More People Knew About

Regular readers of this web site probably do know about them by now. Ten off the top of my head, alphabetical order...unfortunately, although I started raving about these writers while they were alive, in some cases that was a long time ago. 

1. Joan Aiken 

Conrad Aiken, who was rated high as a poet in his day, was the father of two internationally renowned authors of genre fiction, Joan Aiken and Jane Aiken Hodges. Genre fiction was considered sort of opposite to poetry or "great" fiction, in their century, the twentieth. So, both daughters could write their "frivolous stuff" and get paid for it without competing with their father, and they did. Jane Aiken Hodges did it well. I think Joan Aiken's frivolous fiction is great in its own way. Her superpower was drawing even me into even Regency Romances, at an age when I was not buying or reviewing books for resale and would not normally touch a Regency Romance with a ten-foot pole. 

2. K.A. Ashcomb 

Nobody else will ever write like Terry Pratchett, and nobody else should try, but this young writer has admittedly studied Pratchett's techniques at length, and uses them to good effect in writing a different kind of stories. 

3. Wendell Berry 

A lot of people have known about Wendell Berry for a long time. An early contributor to Organic Gardening & Farming, Mother Earth News, etc., he wrote excellent essays, fiction, poetry, and criticism. Berry fans tend to be quiet inconspicuous people who enjoy feeling just a little bit like a revolutionary cell--his work is too Green to be promoted by corporate interests, though also too popular to be completely snubbed by the commercial media, a situation that seemed to amuse Berry and his fans inordinately for an inordinate length of time. 

4. Emily Dana Botrous 

She's broken out of the Book Funnel. This is a young writer, still pounding out potboilers while raising small children; in another twenty years she may be great. Currently what she writes are romances, but much more thoughtful, insightful, than the average romance. And she writes honestly about the Blue Ridge Mountains as they really are today; though also about other places. 

5. Anna Dale 

Author of frivolous fantasies for children, but also the author of the statement that Amber-Eyed Silver Tips are "the creme de la creme of witches' cats." So she obviously has things to say about the real world.

6. Suzette Haden Elgin 

She wrote about the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, she wrote whimsical science fiction, she basically invented the genre of science fiction poetry, and she had one of the first and best blogs, still available "as a memorial" at ozarque.livejournal.com. Always with wit and charm and a writing "voice" that could only belong to a Southern Lady. In each of the niches to which her writing appealed, her writing quickly formed a small hard core of admirers. I'm one. I even admired her crocheting...and I'm a knitter. 

7. Ruth Ozeki 

A year of writing documentaries for TV that were sponsored by a cigarette company, and required each episode to show someone smoking the sponsor's cancersticks, too, prompted a debut novel called My Year of Meats, in which a fictional TV documentarian is supposed to give Japanese audiences a better impression of beef, but every show she and her crew work on gives them a worse impression of the beef industry. Pretty frank about the effects of synthetic hormones on humans--the protagonist tries to have a baby (though she's not married) and fails, her boss is impotent and blames his wife, a man she interviews is somewhat "feminized" although a grandfather, a five-year-old girl is suffering premature puberty--but that kind of thing does come up when we study the facts on this topic. When this novel came out I reported to the Friends of the Library that its one fault was that "it does nothing to break up the stereotype of Japanese people being perfectionistic overachievers; it is a perfectionistic overachievement." Enough reviewers made that kind of noises that Ozeki made her other books quite different from My Year of Meats. But still excellent. 

8. Laurence J. Peter 

Best remembered for the assertion of The Peter Principle (an early book) that everyone is promoted to per level of incompetence. He wrote further books about his further observations of Life. 

9. Barb Taub 

The only mom-com books that have made me laugh out loud as often as hers did were early Erma Bombeck. I don't know why she's not a super-seller, as Bombeck was. It's not radical political views; she's such a moderate D she's married to an R. She writes within the rules. I think it's just that although mom-com is still madly popular with actual readers, it doesn't fit into the left-wingnut agenda that dominates the conglomerate of what used to be the big publishers.

10. Iris Yang

So far, this living writer's been best known for a series of novels about how to be an excellent human being, in the specific context of the Flying Tigers, a real group of Chinese pilots who teamed up with the US Air Force in the 1940s.

Books I Keep Meaning to Read, but Haven't

Actually, I worked ahead of schedule and wrote this one in May, which means I've read one book that was on the list by now, but here we are:

1. Because I've used a quote from it here, but not read it: Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow.

2. Because her promotional video was flawless, and I'm impressed: Melania Trump, Melania. Though she accepts the blame for The Donald being pro-abortion, which we all know is the field mark for a cheating husband, or at least a husband who still identifies as being young enough to cheat. 

3. Because I never have read it all the way through: War and Peace. 

4. Because I never have found a copy, although I read an excerpt long ago and liked it: Herman Melville, Typee 

5. Ditto: Omoo. 

6. Because at the time of writing I'd opened the PDF more than once and lost it when Google lost tabs: K.A. Ashcomb, Council of the Dead. I have read it now, and liked it. For those who think this means another book ought to be on the list, let's try: Tom Cox, Everything Will Swallow You.

7. Because it sells and I don't know why: Jeff Kinney, Diary of a Wimpy Kid. 

8. Because I've not bought a copy yet, although I know I want one: Margaret Atwood, The Testaments 

9. Because I've liked her other books, and this one's hard to find: Jessamyn West, Crimson Ramblers of the World Farewell. 

10. Because I really should have read it before doing the Hemileuca posts: Tuskes, Tuttle, and Collins, The Wild Silk Moths of North America. You'd want four or five hundred dollars per copy of a book, too, if you'd reared stingingworms to check all the facts in it. Awesome job.

Books That Deal Well with Tough Topics

Today's Long & Short Reviews asks about books that deal well with tough topics. Others may choose different topics. I want no trendy "tough" topics here. When a topic is being beaten to death in the commercial media, probably serving to distract attention from other topics, I think the best way to deal with it is to leave it alone. I'm interested in topics that are tough enough to intimidate the commercial media.

1. Tough topic: "How bad was COVID? How bad were the vaccines? What kind of evil conspiracy would be necessary to develop vaccines that were worse than the disease?" 

Book: Lies My Govt Told Me by Robert Malone 

From a scientist who worked on mRNA "therapies" and then warned that they weren't (yet) a good idea, I'd expect an un-phobic yet unflinching answer to these questions. No "conspiracy" was necessary. People just wanted a vaccine. New technology seemed interesting. No vaccine is totally contamination-proof or safe for everyone. New vaccines that are released as experiments carry high risks. So why did government officials push the experimental COVID vaccine as if it were a tested, reliable vaccine against a disease that was likely to kill a healthy person--which COVID was not? Malone's in a position to offer reasonable answers, and does. 

 2. Tough topic: "Is 'depression' a really dangerous disease? I've felt 'depressed' myself. Does that mean I'm going to end up feeling a need to commit homicide-suicide?" 

Book: Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman 

Babies react to everything with their emotions. That's not all bad; their howling and kicking gives them needed exercise and may summon help when it's needed. As we grow up, however, we increasingly process unpleasant input through brain circuits involved in logical thinking rather than emotion. The gender split demonstrates that this is something we learn from the bigger, older people who help or scold children crying about different things. Males are at least subtly punished for expressing emotions associated with feeling weak and helpless, like grief, fear, and pain, so as boys grow up they learn to detach emotion and think logically about things that provoke those feelings, yet most men are still anger-prone. Females are at least subtly punished for expressing emotions associated with feeling strong and tough, like anger and competitiveness, so as girls grow up they learn to detach emotion and think logically about things that provoke those feelings, yet many women are still prone to sentimentality. Almost all people, of almost any age, can learn to think logically about things that still provoke overwhelming emotions that don't serve them well; that's a primary function of psychotherapy--talking logically about the emotions until they wear out and go away. 

We can choose to "stay in touch with our feelings" enough to communicate with babies and animals. However, crying about being locked out is generally less useful once we've developed the ability to use keys and unlock doors. The specific set of emotions we call "depression" has a survival function--it's a symptom of ill health that can help us find and treat its cause. 

3. Tough topic: "If people can learn to think logically about their 'depression' as a symptom of a disease that can be diagnosed and treated, why do so many people think they need antidepressant drugs? How dangerous are these drugs, exactly?" 

Book: Prozac Backlash by Joseph Glenmullen 

Many people don't want to explore the subtle causes of their "depression" (food intolerance, chemical sensitivity, lack of exercise, a very early stage of treatable cardiovascular disease). Many already have a diagnosis of an incurable condition with symptoms that include "depression" (rheumatoid arthritis, AIDS, inoperable cancer, various rare fatal diseases). Personally, I think antidepressants should be withheld from the former group, but they were made for the latter group. For some patients who aren't going to recover real wellness--and doctors are now beginning to be able to identify which ones--antidepressants extend life expectancy and improve the quality of life. For the majority of people who think they want antidepressants, antidepressants complicate treatment and allow physical diseases to become more serious, while making pharmaceutical companies profitable. For about one in twenty patients, antidepressants produce a very specific physical syndrome of intense pain, pseudo-memories that seem to account for the pain, and eventually a plan to commit homicide-suicide as a final remedy for the pain. If you choose to use an antidepressant or live or work with someone who does, you should at least know what to report immediately to your doctor. 

4. Tough topic: "Isn't withholding antidepressants from people who feel depressed cruel? What are they supposed to do--just go on feeling bad while they pay for hundreds of expensive tests for rare diseases?" 

Book: Potatoes Not Prozac by Kathleen Desmaisons 

Most things that go wrong with our bodies have a depressing effect on our moods. Most people can, however, feel better faster, and cheaper, by treating their "depression" with diet and exercise. This book explains how to deploy potatoes, and other foods most people naturally like, along with exercise to reduce depression even in some patients with incurable diseases. In fact some "depression" is a symptom of conditions as curable as nutrient imbalances and lack of exercise; when that's the case this book will tell you how to cure the whole thing at one delightful swoop. 

 I've been heard to say that I switched to a psychology major in order to write this book and, after it was written, I didn't need to finish my degree because my mission had been accomplished. That's a hindsight perspective if ever one was, but it's close enough to being true. I switched to a psych major, not "to deal with my own problems" (although I was nineteen, so I had problems) so much as because I'd had outstanding success peer-counselling other undergraduates dealing with anxiety and depression. I was having the insights that led Dr. Desmaisons to do the research and write the book. 

5. Tough topic: "Most novels for and about teenaged girls are romances! Are there any stories about teenaged girls who are already having sex, and if they're consenting to it that's in order to protect their even younger siblings, and it's a family member--often a 'step' relative in a 'blended' family--or teacher who's doing it, and the last thing they want is to add a 'boyfriend' to the existing mess even if they have a brother or male friend whom they like? If such a girl does want to explain the situation to a male friend, or even just vent to her brother or cousin, how would she ever start?" 

Book: Chinese Handcuffs by Chris Crutcher 

I've not been in this situation. My adoptive sister, who has, started recommending this book as soon as it reached local libraries. 

6. Tough topic: "What about teenaged girls who just have lives, and don't feel a need to mess up their lives by being silly about 'boyfriends'?" 

Book: The Harper Hall of Pern (Dragon Song, Dragon Singer, Dragon Drums) by Anne McCaffrey 

In volume one, Menolly's life is greatly improved by not having to deal with any men any more, at least during her summer in the cave on the beach. In volume two, while her focus is on which of the men at the Hall are most prejudiced and what to do about it, three of them clearly feel more than just unprejudiced about her, but she accepts their good will as a normal part of life and does not think foolish thoughts about possible future "romance." In volume three, when she's all grown up and established in her career, we find out which one will be her Partner for Life. 

7. Tough topic: "What about teenaged girls who have difficult, complicated lives, far beyond just being 'gifted' students like Menolly with her perfect pitch and lovely voice, and really don't need to mess up their lives by being silly about 'boyfriends'?" 

Book: Dicey's Song by Cynthia Voigt was the first and best book in this category, after years when publishers just didn't want to publish anything about characters who wanted to remain uncoupled. There have been more novels about girls and women who solve their problems while single, since. (This web site had the privilege of reviewing some new ones. Check out Needy Little Things by Channelle Desamours. When I classified Upon Destiny's Song by Michael B. Ericksen as this kind of story, I was thinking of Ane's completing the trek as a young single girl; however, Mike Ericksen e-mailed, after reading my review, that the real Ane later agreed to marry a man to pay off a debt...so, does she count? I still say she does.) 

 8. Tough topic: "Are there good literary novels by White male authors any more?" 

Interestingly, even in the 1950s publishers were willing to print lots of stories about boys whose sports and adventure stories seemed to be complete without dragging in a romance. Teenaged boys, however, mostly seemed to leave those stories to the better readers in primary school, because most of them were so bad. (Lots of shameless exploitation of their fantasies--"Even though he still needs an adult to reach the controls of his craft, little Billy is a much better astronaut than any of the full-grown men in the Space Force!") Apart from the current fad for discrimination, the other reason why there aren't more good male novelists is that so many men feel that they've outgrown reading or writing fiction. Often the reason for that is that their standards for fiction are high--they like only very good novels. So they don't want to count men who do genre fiction well, even Douglas Adams, Tony Hillerman, Stephen King, or James Patterson. By "good literary novels" they mean "as good as Mark Twain's or Herman Melville's or John Steinbeck's." This does leave a...lot of room for improvement in today's literary scene. John Kennedy Toole died too young. I doubt that Tom Cox is up to these men's standard, either, but they should at least try his books. If not quite on the same level with Milton and Shakespeare, he is at least consistently funny.

9. Tough topic: "Are there good books, fiction or nonfiction, about being a Christian in high school today?" 

Book: The Road to Home by R.A. Douthitt 

It's new, still obscure, and unpolished, but it's good...There aren't a lot of well known ones. Denominationalism has allowed Christian writers and publishers to form denominational ghettos. Within denominational ghettos, what's published may be what's doctrinally correct, and/or what's written by influential members of the denomination, more than what's good. And good true stories about Christian teenagers may not be available: I'm currently sitting on the true story of a Christian teenager whose parents didn't want publicity while they were alive, and whose sisters have yet to release the story. But there are good, true stories about young people practicing Christianity. Sometimes it's hard to spot because the writer or publisher doesn't want to make anyone feel left out by specifying whether the character is Christian or Jewish. The Road to Home is explicitly about a Christian.

10. Tough topic: "What about going back to the land, getting off the grid, investing in real property and always paying cash?" 

Book: The Tightwad Gazette by Amy Dacyszyn 

One of many. Lots of different people want to do these things, in lots of different ways, lots of different places and stages of life. What serves A well may be useless to B, and so on. Generally anything from the Rodale Press (Prevention, Organic Gardening & Farming) or Mother Earth News has been useful to somebody, but may or may not be relevant to you. The Tightwad Gazette is more frugal than Green but, for a book, I think it may have the highest number of tips that have worked for people I know. 

Bonus tough topic: "I thought biodegradable plastic was a good thing. How bad is it? Of the increase in chronic disease since the 1980s, especially in pseudo-celiac conditions, and the increase in deaths from diseases (like celiac disease) that used to be considered non-fatal and not even disabling, how much is due to biodegradable plastic and how much to glyphosate?" 

Book: Tragically, there isn't one. These questions badly need to be answered. The simplest way to answer them would be a total ban on all use or production of glyphosate, since no "herbicide" accomplishes anything steam can't do better. Meanwhile, anecdotal information from people in places where glyphosate has been banned and biodegradable plastic has been used indicates that the focus of the Glyphosate Awareness movement does not need to shift to plastic...though reducing plastic waste would also be a good thing. 

Bonus tough topic:"What about glyphosate itself? Aren't there books on that by now?" 

Book: Merchants of Poison by Stacy Malkan 

There are several. If they're not at your bookstore or library, that may be due to censorship. We should demand that all public libraries stock at least Merchants of Poison. 

Bonus tough topic: "Is growing my own food a complete solution to glyphosate, glufosinate, and other "pesticide" problems? Are there books about raising my own food" 

Book: There are actually hundreds. Some of them may be helpful for you, even though gardening is a matter of how individual plants do in specific conditions, so the best tips for you will probably come from any old Green gardeners and farmers who live near you. (The "garden" suburbs of Washington, in Maryland and Virginia, illustrate this nicely. Some of the flowers tourists cruise through these residential neighborhoods to see are hard to kill in one neighborhood and hard to keep alive in a contiguous neighborhood; everyone in Takoma Park has azaleas, great solid masses of every color, while in Hyattsville only a few varieties of azalea can be kept alive, and even they don't bloom the way azaleas do in Takoma Park.) 

Bonus tough topic: "Concerned about the effects having dozens of vaccines at once can have on babies, we've kept ours out of "day care" and "play groups" and "preschools" and even primary schools. They've had only essential vaccines, and only one each year. Now our thirteen-year-old wants to go to a public school that insists she have the measles vaccine, though measles is one of the non-fatal diseases for which we think it's safer to acquire natural immunity. Are there books about how to change this kind of rule, or work around them?" 

Book: People in the Children's Health Defense network have written some. They tend to be self-published, removed from stores or libraries if ever displayed there, and the ones that contain true, recent success stories tend to involve living in a place with liberal "religious exemptions" to vaccine policies. A really satisfactory book on this topic has yet to be written. Suffice it to say that, if your unvaccinated teenager gets into school and is then exposed to measles, she'll probably want to move to a different State. And change her name. And, considering that the strain of virus most often called measles these days can keep healthy people in bed with "cold-or-flu-type symptoms" for six weeks...I gave in and had the jab for the sake of peace, and then spent two years doing very little but regretting that decision. There is no really good solution. 

Bonus tough topic: "It still isn't easy being Green--and a Christian--and 'gay.' I'm not talking about wanting to sleep with lots of other people's husbands, or sons; I'm looking for a Partner For Life. I'm not talking about evangelizing. I'm not rich myself, so the last thing I want to do is inflate property values and taxes. I only want to know whether there are any other people out there anywhere who are like me. Are there books about such people?" 

Book: I've not seen one, but the Internet is there to help it get published so that people can find it.