Omit Needless Words

Posted on November 9, 2026 by Kathy

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that he make every word tell. –The Elements of Style, William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White, 1959

The New Yorker is well known for its careful editing, rigorous fact-checking, and long tradition of disciplined research and clear, pristine writing. E.B. White remains the New Yorker stylistic avatar, at least for someone my age. The pellucid prose of his own work, including essays and novels like Charlotte’s Web, reflects the precepts of his venerable writing handbook The Elements of Style. Many readers now consider the book outdated, but (again, at my age) it’s hard to let go of principles learned in Mildred Morgan’s 10th grade English class. I strive for an E.B. White level of succinctness and clarity in my writing (often missing the mark) and admire these qualities in other writers.

Hence, this rant about Richard Brody, who currently shares New Yorker film-critic duties with Justin Chang. Film buffs often assail Brody for his contrarian opinions; he tends to champion esoteric, arty movies and critique the hits beloved by the crowd. I have no beef with him on that count.

My beef is with his convoluted, often incomprehensible phraseology. I frequently read his sentences aloud to my husband, wailing, “What is he talking about? Why does the New Yorker let him get away with this stuff?” My husband conjectures that Brody “has something” on editor David Remnick.

For example. I share Brody’s admiration for Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s new documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, You Can See Everything. It’s not his opinion I deplore. It’s his sentences. In a passage about the visual element of the film, Brody writes, “Multiple cameras set on tripods yield intently composed images that contrast with the spontaneity of the events they capture. (A downside is the movie’s snippety editing, which precludes the tension of continuous unfoldings.)” 

Snippety editing precludes tension. If you say so. And continuous unfoldings? Does he mean that quick cuts disrupt the graceful rhythm that has gone before?

Who can say?

At the review’s end, Brody compares the film to Robert Bresson’s classic Pickpocket (1959). No spoilers here: Brody does not bother with mundanities like what happens in the movie. Instead, he writes,

“Bresson projected Christian exaltation. ‘You Can See Everything’ achieves something even more surprising: a rational sublimity, a twist of conceptual beauty, like an equation that proves the existence of love.”

Those words sound pretty. Brody’s going for something sublime himself, I guess. But what the heck. What’s an equation that proves the existence of love? What’s a twist of conceptual beauty? What’s rational sublimity?

Beats me.

Let me know if you disagree.

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What I Should Have Said at Book Group

Posted on October 19, 2026 by Kathy

Engraving by William Blake. Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash,

The other night, three of us liked Nobel-winning Olga Tokarczuk’s 2009 novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. The other five attendees did not. They found the book, translated from the Polish, too gloomy. too obscure, and too weird. When asked what I liked about it, I referred vaguely to feminism, black humor, and the book’s many references to the poet William Blake.

My answer to the question was superficial. The book, in fact, spoke to things I feel and think about every day. And also the air that I breathe, the water I swim in–a culture I’ve grown up in that I’m not always conscious of.

Here’s the book’s premise, if you haven’t read it. The novel’s main character is an eccentric elderly woman who lives alone in a remote area of Poland on the Czech border. The plot is an ostensible murder mystery: several men die in mysterious circumstances in the village around her. The woman argues strenuously to everyone who will listen that, because these men were all hunters, the animals in the forests around them took their revenge and killed them. She points to deer hoof prints in the vicinity of several of the bodies as evidence. No one listens. She may or may not be insane.

I don’t have to ruin any more of the story for you to explain what I should have said at book group.

We live in a society in which many of us–both women and men–have always felt a sense of exclusion or alienation. How many times have I been told I’m too emotional? Irrational? Impractical? Unrealistic? Too many times to count.

The novel is a fable. You don’t have to hate hunters or be an animal rights activist to appreciate the themes. The culture around us is frequently rule-bound, rationalistic, judgmental, violent, and hierarchical. (Thank you, William Blake.) We spend our tax dollars on weaponry that kills Iranian citizens and Gazans, that levels houses and villages. We conciliate gun owners who turn their guns, too frequently, on their wives and children. We take away food stamps and health insurance. We cosset entitled young men who think it’s okay to take pictures of a young woman as she’s raped and joke about it in a group chat. At our book group meeting, before the discussion began, one woman matter-of-factly described having to buy a dog for protection when she rented a ground-floor apartment. The worst insult the Vice President can imagine is to imply that another man is gay. Our President belittles “trannies” on his social media account.

In the novel, hunters, particularly “sportsmen,” are an allegory for the mindset. It’s a mindset that glories in conquest and dominance and control. It exalts man-made rules without acknowledging that men themselves made the rules. The elderly woman Janina is taking on the powers-that-be in her town, the men who are in charge, who try to convince us that life on earth is the way they represent it, without acknowledging that they created it and are maintaining and benefiting from it. She’s raising her voice as well as her fist, resisting, despite being dismissed and ridiculed.

The book is darkly funny, passionate, beautifully crafted, and unique. This is what I should have said at book group.

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Annie Dillard, 1945-2026

Posted on September 20, 2026 by Kathy

It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out.

I just looked back to see how many times I’ve referenced Annie Dillard, who wrote about nature and spirituality, in this blog. Three posts are devoted to her (linked below); others cite her. The one concerning our dog’s death in 2011 in takes its title from the Heraclitus epigraph to Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, quoted above.

I’ve described how sometime in the mid-70s I picked up a paperback in a bookstore, probably the News Depot in Canton, Ohio, with an intriguing cover: Pilgrim, Dillard’s first book, is to the left in the photo. My father had died in 1971, and my dog had died very recently. Opening the book, I read the Heraclitus lines and started to cry. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek remains one of my favorite books. As my friend Barb (also a fan) recently wrote to me, “These affinities from our 20s can take root so deep inside us.”

I think I’ve read all of Dillard’s books. After seeing her New York Times obituary last Tuesday, I found an essay collection I’d never heard of, The Abundance, published in 2016, in the library card catalogue, but it contains only two new essays. Both definitely worth reading, I soon discovered.

Dillard wasn’t writing much of late, but painting instead. I read that she has donated proceeds from the sale of her paintings to Partners in Health and cited Ophelia Dahl and Paul Farmer of that organization in The Abundance’s acknowledgments. Another of my favorite books is Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder’s powerful 2003 portrait of Dr. Farmer and his efforts to bring medical care to all the world. I wonder if she learned about him through Kidder’s book.

I was an intense young woman in the mid-seventies, wrestling with grief. Dillard’s gnarly lyricism, her profound delving into the meaning of suffering–these appealed to my self-serious, self-conscious, readerly persona. But this week I’m aware that one of Annie Dillard’s most appealing features is her sense of humor. I always knew that, but I’m appreciating it more now.

One section of Pilgrim begins, “Fish gotta swim and bird gotta fly; insects, it seems, gotta do one horrible thing after another.” She proceeds to recount the horrors many insects species inflict on their victims. Her images and her language are full of wit, even when she’s conveying nature’s horrors or her inscrutable mystery.

Nature is a fan dancer born with a fan; you can wrestle her down, show her on the stage and grapple with her for the fan with all your might, but it will never quit her grip. She comes that way; the fan is attached.

The novelist Eudora Welty famously equivocated about Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in the New York Times Book Review. She gave the young writer credit for her ambition and beautiful language, writing, “A reader’s heart must go out to a young writer with a sense of wonder so fearless and unbridled.” But then, quoting a poetic passage about death, Welty is flummoxed: “I honestly do not know what she is talking about at such times.” Some years later, Welty visited Kent State, where I asked her about this review. Hesitantly, wrinkling her nose, she said, “I really didn’t like it very much.”

I rarely share that feeling that while reading Pilgrim but am sometimes bewildered by passages in other books. Holy the Firm is a tough one. For the Time Being is too, though it taught me everything I know about the theologian Teilhard de Chardin. (Not much has stuck after 25 years.) If I had to recommend a book besides Pilgrim, I’d choose Encounters with Chinese Writers (1984), which might seem surprising, but bear with me.

In 1982, Dillard traveled to China with a group of American writers as part of a cultural exchange and later helped host a delegation of Chinese writers visiting the U.S. She is a witty and sympathetic guide and observer, both for her Chinese cohorts and for us readers. There’s none of the convoluted prose that bothered Ms Welty. My favorite anecdote concerns the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who disgustedly dubbed a jingoistic film the group watched at Disneyland “Mickey-Mouse,” leaving the Chinese writer he’s talking to totally mystified. The film wasn’t about Mickey Mouse! he insists.

Here’s Annie Dillard’s straightforward, graceful ending to the introduction of this book.

These are only glimpses, not portraits; their subject is not China, and not even entirely Chinese writers, but a few vivid, equivocal moments in the days of some of earth’s people in the twentieth century. What interests me here, and elsewhere, is the possibility for a purified nonfiction narration–a kind of Chekhovian storytelling which might illuminate the actual world with a delicate light–coupled with humor in the American tradition and no comment.

When I wrote the post I called “Fan Mail, Reversed” last year, I couldn’t find the birthday post card Annie Dillard sent me. Turns out it was tucked into Encounters with Chinese Writers and so has just been found. As I describe in the post, my then-boyfriend, now-husband wrote to her on Lummi Island off the coast of Washington, where she was then living. He told her how much I loved her and asked her to send me a birthday greeting. Here’s what she wrote.

Dear Kathy–Woops, missed your birthday! Mailboats to the islands are slow. So all I can wish you is a wholly excellent life in general, which I’m happy to do, and hope my wishes come true as well as they often do. Cheers, Annie Dillard

P.S. John Ewing loves you.

Fan Mail, Reversed 5/18/2025

Truth or Consequences? 12/3/2022

Patting the Puppy 4/4/2020

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Classics and Soon-to-be Classics

Posted on August 16, 2026 by Kathy

A good run of reading recently, marked especially by getting through The Count of Monte Cristo (1846) by Alexandre Dumas, all 1200 pages. Endearing Instagram blogger Chris Fizer recommended it. In fact, he recommends it in almost every post. Lots of other people do, too, so many that one could say this hefty opus is having a moment. Dumas and his collaborator, Auguste Paquet, provide action, plot twists, suspense, and surprises on nearly every page. There’s violence, I would warn you, but this is one of the most satisfying and enjoyable reads of my life.

I read The Leopard, another classic, because Ann Patchett recommended it on one of her weekly book posts and I was always intending to. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s single novel was published posthumously, in 1958, and deals with the downstream effects of the Risorgimento, the Italian unification effort of the 1860s. The book didn’t go as fast as the Count did, but it’s a memorable and moving. Fabrizio, the main character, is an aristocrat who is seeing his privilege and his life slipping away. Lampedusa writes gorgeous passages and gorgeous sentences. Last night I followed up by watching the 1963 Luchino Visconti film, three hours long, starring Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale, and Alain Delon (available on Amazon and YouTube). Sumptuous and mostly faithful to the book, it shortchanges nuance, especially regarding the women characters. It also, understandably, cuts short the ending, which is one of the most affecting parts of the novel. Beautiful, nonetheless.

Soon to be a classic is 2025’s Raising Hare, a memoir by British writer Chloe Dalton. Finding an abandoned newborn hare on a walk near her country house, Dalton hesitantly picks it up, brings it home, and spends the next several years observing it and cherishing the experience. She goes so far as to build a little hare door on her house, and the hare (always unnamed) spends its nights outside and its days sleeping near her as she works. This is Dalton’s first book, beautifully written and a smash best-seller.

Amongst all of these, I sporadically pick up What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life (2020) by poet Mark Doty. I loved Doty’s 2007 memoir Dog Years. He appears in an excellent new documentary, Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World (available now on PBS), where he reminded me of himself. At the same time, I’m making my way through Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” which I’ve never read all the way through. Both are gratifying and enjoyable, but not as action-packed as The Count. Sui generis.

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Many Workbooks Available

Posted on August 1, 2026 by Kathy

It all started in the car, where a lot of interesting conversations with kids take place.

As we drove from their house to ours, the grand-twins, Celia and Hank, now 5, were asking me if driving was fun. I responded that I generally enjoy driving. They wondered, they said, because driving the kiddie cars at a local amusement park is fun. They asked me if the kiddie rides would be helpful when they finally learn to drive. Are they actually learning some useful skills? That led to some talk about the required age for driving, which flowed into wondering when you can have a cell phone, which they seemed to think also had a legal minimum age. (Alas, it doesn’t.) They mentioned some teens they know who can drive and who have phones.

Arriving at my house with visions of adulthood dancing in their heads, they immediately set about playing grownup. Celia planted herself at Papa’s desk with some paper and pens, establishing a doctor’s waiting room where she would greet patients and take their vital signs. First, Papa had to fashion a computer for her by writing the alphabet on keys drawn on a sheet of paper. Celia assiduously tapped her fingers on the keys before she called Papa in as her first patient. She appeared to combine the roles of receptionist, nurse, and doctor.

Meanwhile, Hank was asking me questions about grownup books, which, he noted, have so many pages and so many words, but no pictures. He was understandably intrigued by my current book, The Count of Monte Cristo, consisting of many thousands of words filling up 1200 pages. How does such a book happen? he wondered. Does the person writing it produce it in their house? I provided a quick overview of the process of writing the book, sending it to a publisher, and the publisher producing many copies, which people can then buy. (Yep, that’s how easy it is.) I skirted the issues around Alexandre Dumas’s publishing the book in installments first and the complications of translation into English.

I’ll be a publisher, he said. While the medical professional labored in one half of the living room, Hank began setting up his business in the other half. He’s been creating a lot of dinosaur books recently with his own illustrations and dino facts, the pages glued or stapled together. Today, though, he didn’t want his usual quantity of blank paper to draw on. Instead, he asked for paper with writing on it. He wanted pages with text. Papa found him some old printouts with film reviews and press releases. Then we pulled out the stapler and fastened the pages. Hank wasn’t doing any drawing yet.

He wanted one blank sheet of paper for the cover. He asked me to spell out the words that he had chosen for the title. Many. I spelled many. Workbooks, he said, but told me to just spell work because he could spell books. I spelled work, and Hank wrote it down. He hesitated. He told me that he could spell book, but not books. That was easily solved.

Next, Hank asked me to spell Uh. Puzzled, I said, Many Workbooks Uh? Hank said, No. Many Workbooks Uh-Vailable. So I dutifully spelled available, which Hank dutifully transcribed.

His book title was Many Workbooks Available. Don’t ask me. I have no idea.

Because grown-up books usually have some art on the cover, Hank moved to the dining room table to complete the cover. We stapled it to the front of his pages. Under the title Many Workbooks Available was a drawing of a woman with her breast exposed as she fed a baby. Hank has a two-month-old baby brother.

The book went home with the twins. They requested it be read to them at bedtime. The parents reported that the film-related text on Hank’s book pages had largely to do with Holocaust movies, requiring some on-the-spot editing as they read. The kids asked for this bedtime reading at least a couple of evenings in a row, but were nonplussed that Mommy and Daddy’s readings, with their impromptu censorship, differed slightly. Even so, Celia’s verdict was that she liked it.

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What Is a Phone?

Posted on June 16, 2026 by Kathy

Recently I posted the following on Facebook:

Grandson wanted Papa to make him a phone out of paper. Papa became exasperated not knowing how to do this but eventually followed directions. The result was several smallish pieces of paper stapled together. “How is that a phone?” Papa asked.

Grandson answered, “I’m going to write information on the pages. Then when someone want to know something, they can look it up.”

A phone to my five-year-old grandson, then, is mainly a device for looking up information. When he has a question about sharks, dinosaurs, or outer space, the adults in his life often grab their phones. Phone = Google. The phone he created contained drawings of Tyrannosaurus Rex and Triceratops. That’s the kind of info people would be looking for, after all.

I did not add his twin sister’s follow-up activity to my Facebook post, which was like her brother’s but different. She wanted to make a phone, too, and so we stapled together a similar book-like collection of blank paper, roughly the size of a cell phone. On the front page she wanted to write the date and time. (I told her it was 2:15, and she wrote “512.”) The date was June 8, 2026, which we added to the front in some fashion.

On the next page, she asked me to write the numbers 1-40 in small squares. I think this was her best approximation of a phone keypad. On the next page, she wrote the alphabet. On later pages, she drew pictures of her family members.

I surmised that she was creating a representation of her mother’s phone as she experienced it. First comes the lock screen with the date and time. If you’re making a call, you tap on the keypad. I think she knew vaguely that the alphabet appears thereabouts amidst a bunch of numbers. The family portraits approximate her mom’s plethora of photos–images of friends, family, and places.

Both versions seemed fascinating to me. Not brilliant or artistically advanced–I’m not bragging about them. I’m just interested in how integral to their reality phones are and how similarly and differently they view them.

This activity didn’t make me feel old, as one might expect, and it didn’t make me bemoan the omnipresence of cell phones in all of our lives, as I do in other contexts. I just shared my husband’s initial bewilderment with the project and then enjoyed understanding what they were going for. So interesting to see how they both saw it as feasible to make a phone out of paper and at the same time had completely different versions of the same device.

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An Etymological Course

Posted on June 5, 2026 by Kathy
Photo by Fausto García-Menéndez on Unsplash

A person dear to my heart is currently in the throes of prodromal labor. Its common synonym, false labor, is something of a misnomer, because it’s not a mere fake out; it’s a precursor. Prodromal is used for any early stage of a medical condition, for example, the headache or mild nausea that might precede a cold or flu. It’s not false. It’s just early.

Not surprisingly, the prefix pro means “before.” The Greek root of –dromal means “race” or “course,” so precursor is an almost literal synonym. In fact, pregnancy’s end stages, from confusing contractions, to aching joints, to fatigue and sleeping disturbances, all the way to true labor and childbirth, might well be considered an arduous course the mother must run. Prodromal labor is an early part of the race.

Speaking of courses, the Greek used dromos to create hippodromos, a course for horses. Ruins of Greek hippodromes survive on Delos, at Delphi, and in Alexandria, among other places. Because they were built to accommodate an audience, the term hippodrome came to mean theater or auditorium. Cleveland’s Hippodrome theater opened on Euclid Avenue in 1907 and was at the time the world’s second largest theater, holding over 3,000 spectators. No horses allowed.

Hippos, too, would be banned from the premises. As you probably know, hippopotamus combines the Greek words for horse and river. Hippos, then, were river horses, named by apparently nearsighted Europeans. In Swahili, they answer to kiboko. The Zulu term invubu means “mixed up” or “combined,” presumably because of hippos’ confusion as to whether they’re land animals or water animals.

The root potamus did not give our Potomac River its name. which is of Algonquin origin, but it helped name Mesopotamia. That land is between (meso-) rivers: the Tigris and Euphrates. Meso- appears in many English words, including mesosaur, a middle-sized dinosaur.

Dinosaur itself means “awesome/terrible lizard.” One of the most impressive dinosaur names is the not medium-sized acrocanthosaurus, meaning “high-spined lizard.” Acro-, meaning “high,” can be seen in words such as acrobat, acrophobia, and Acropolis.

Like pregnancy, this discourse must come to an end, although once we get started on dinosaur names it could go on endlessly. (Ask my grandson.) Pregnancies seem short in retrospect, but at the time seem like racing an endless course, like connecting one word with the next and the next, kind of like a palindrome, running forward and back .

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Vestibular Adventures

Posted on May 29, 2026 by Kathy
Photo by Franco Antonio Giovanella on Unsplash

Last week, the ER nurse gave me a prescription for meclizine, the main ingredient of dramamine, to treat my vertigo. My world had been spinning for almost a week at that point She said it wasn’t a cure but would lessen the dizziness. “How does it work?” I asked. “If it doesn’t fix the problem, what does it do?”

Surprisingly, she couldn’t answer, but, impressively, she googled it. She read aloud something like this: “Meclizine is an antihistamine and anticholinergic medication used to suppress the inner ear, or vestibular system.” That wasn’t much help, frankly, but I appreciated the effort.

At home later that day, I (of course) looked it up myself. I was especially intrigued by the word vestibular. I knew it had to do with the inner ear, but felt compelled to know what it meant, that is, what its root was.

As I began searching, suddenly vestibule jumped out at me. I know what a vestibule is. It’s the entryway to a church, just outside the doors of the sanctuary. It’s where the ushers hang out during Mass rather than attending to the the sermon. The term seems to be interchangeable these days with narthex, although I associate that term with my Protestant in-laws and never heard it in the Catholic churches I grew up in. Narthex comes from the Greek word for fennel, because the area’s narrow shape mimicked the plant’s. But narthex has nothing to do with my ears, so we’re moving on.

There is an impressive bunch of things in the inner ear, including the cochlea, the stapes, the otolith organs, the urticle, the saccule, and a fluid called endolymph. So many words! So many etymological blog posts!

Focus!

Turns out the vestibular area of the ear has an actual vestibule. It’s a fluid-filled cavity that, as you probably know, aids in balance. It’s a space, just like the vestibule in St. Paul’s in North Canton, the church I grew up in. The Latin word vestibulum means “an entrance hall,” or, the open space between the street and the entrance to a Roman house.

Vestibulum in turn derives from the noun vestis (as in vest, vestment, and divest, and many others). The vestibule was the appropriate place to remove or adjust your outdoor clothing. The suffix -bulum frequently refers to a place.

The answer to my emergency room question was something like this. The antihistamine in my vertigo medication prevents the inner ear’s discombobulation from being communicated to the brain. I used only one tablet, and my vertigo resolved itself a day or two later. My vestibular inner-ear space has, thankfully, settled down.

As to vertigo, if you’ve ever experienced it, you won’t be surprised to learn that it comes from the Latin word for “turn” or “spin.”

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To Ban or Not to Ban

Posted on March 23, 2026 by Kathy
Photo by Austrian National Library on Unsplash

I belong to a Banned Book Book Club (BBBC) that meets once a month via Zoom. At each meeting, we discuss where and why our book was banned – often more difficult to determine than you might think. This month’s selection, for example, Regeneration (1991) by Pat Barker, seems to have been challenged as “supplemental reading” in a Georgia school district in 2020 for “explicit” or “unacceptable” content. This content may have been the homosexuality of some of the characters, the sexual behavior of other characters, or the violence and horror of some of the scenes. Regeneration takes place during World War I, and there’s nothing more violent and horrible than the trenches of France in 1917.

I’m learning to question the offhand use of the word banned. Is a superintendent’s refusal to okay a book on a supplemental reading list the same thing as banning? If parents question a teacher’s assigning Slaughterhouse 5, is that the same as banning? If a district removes Judy Blume’s books from their library, is that the same as banning? Does the Department of Defense’s removal of almost 600 books from their schools’ classes and libraries—focusing on subjects like diversity, race, puberty, and LGBTQ themes—constitute banning?

These actions seem different to me, but they’re all lumped under the umbrella term banned books. In some cases, a more accurate term might be challenged. At the very least, such book challenges complicate the lives of teachers and librarians. At the worst, they may result in firing or impair readers’ ability to read books. But a particular school’s deciding not to teach I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is not the same as, say, an entire city removing Maya Angelou from its libraries.

I recently tripped over another complication with the term book banning. Having just read Making Mary Poppins: The Sherman Brothers, Walt Disney, and the Creation of the Classic Film by Todd James Pierce, I picked up the original Mary Poppins by P. J. Travers, which I had never read. Thinking about the concerns some fundamentalist Christians have with The Wizard of Oz and other books involving magic, I googled to see if Mary Poppins’s magical adventures had ever been banned. They have, but not by conservatives.

Some on the left have trouble with Mary Poppins. They have objected to Travers’s use of the word Hottentot. Mary tells her little charge Michael not to behave like a “Red Indian.” In the original edition of 1934, Mary and the children use a magic compass to visit the four corners of Earth and encounter “Eskimos” in the North, and people in the South who are “black all over and with very few clothes.” Travers changed this chapter, called “Bad Tuesday,” first in 1967 and then again in 1981, transforming the people into animals (e.g., a polar bear and a macaw).In 1980, a librarian named Joan Dillon defended the San Francisco Public Library system’s removing the book from circulation, saying, “It’s not censorship. It’s selection after careful review. It’s not a very good book.”

I understand the concerns about race and stereotypes, but I’m not comfortable with Ms. Collins deciding that a book can’t stay on the shelves because it’s “not a very good book.”

Also from the left, J.K. Rowling books are being blackballed, not because of the wizards and spells, but because of Rowling’s expressed attitudes about transgender medical treatments.

One more. In July of 2008, I recall a friend’s suggestion that copies of Barry Blitt’s controversial cartoon cover of the New Yorker depicting the Obamas as militant radicals be burned. She knew that the image was satiric, but most people would take it literally, she said. An avowed liberal, she wanted to burn the magazines she objected to.

I’m not going to sum things up here at the end, because I’m not sure what I think about all of the above. I lean toward a libertarian dissemination of books and information, but I respect parents’ rights to have a say in what their kids read, just not in what other kids read. Otherwise, I can tell you that I recommend all the titles mentioned above, especially Regeneration.

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David and Kathy in Transit

Posted on March 1, 2026 by Kathy

I first encountered author David Guterson in 1992, when he was a handsome young father homeschooling his children and working as a public-school English teacher on Bainbridge Island in Washington State. In 1992, I was also a homeschooling parent and a once and future English teacher. I read everything about homeschooling back then, including Guterson’s Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense, a personal account of his family’s homeschooling life. He was a clear, appealing stylist, and we shared reservations about the mass education of young people. Like me, Guterson liked teaching and liked his students, but loved watching his kids flourish at home with the attention of both of their parents.

 His 1994 novel, Snow Falling on Cedars, along with a movie deal (the film came out in 1999), made him famous. I read and loved his 1999 novel, East of the Mountains, even more. I think I may have read Ed King in 2011, although I don’t remember it.

Since then silence, that is, for me. I didn’t keep up with David. Turns out he’s written thirteen books in all, which I didn’t realize until the other day, when I walked past Evelyn in Transit on the New Releases shelf at the library and thought, “Oh. My old friend David Guterson.”

Evelyn is an odd book. The two main characters, who are featured in alternate chapters, have no connection for three fourths of the book. Guterson, in effect, buries the lede–their surprising connection comes at the end. In addition to this unorthodox structure, the writing style is notably spare, cryptic, and unsentimental.

Thus, I won’t be recommending Evelyn in Transit exactly. It’s something other than a compelling narrative–character-driven and theme-driven instead. Guterson wants to explore how to live a meaningful life and chose to write an unconventional novel to do so. A lot of readers on Amazon and Goodreads have disliked it.

I understand those readers, but I disagree. I like and respect Evelyn in Transit. Pick it up if you’re interested in Tibetan Buddhism, reincarnation, odd-duck characters, and occasional sparks of ironic wit. Guterson has written an economical, meticulous, intentional novel. I’ll use this opportunity to advocate for excellent, interesting midlist books. Not every worthwhile book is reviewed in the New York Times and featured on NPR.

David Guterson’s homeschooled kids are grown up now. He’s a grandfather. My kids are grown up too, and I’m a grandparent. I see on YouTube videos that David’s hairline has receded. I won’t enumerate my own physical changes in the past thirty years, but David likely wouldn’t recognize me. I’m so glad to learn that he’s still writing, and that there are lots of his books to catch up on. Let us know if you’ve read any of them.

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