Mavis Staples and Jeff Tweedy reflect on civil discourse and the limits of human understanding

This evening Mr Neff and I ate dinner to the music of Mavis Staples in her new album, You Are Not Alone, produced by Jeff Tweedy of Wilco fame, who also wrote two of the songs.

Earlier in the day we'd been talking about Alan Jacobs' article in Big Questions Online, "The Online State of Nature."  Jacobs, a professor of English at Wheaton College, asks (quoting Thomas Hobbes): "Why has Internet discourse devolved into a 'war of every man against every man'?"

Well, Mavis and Jeff have a song for that.  It's called "Only the Lord Knows," and you can watch a version of it here.

Here's the refrain:

What can you do, what can you do when you can't trust

Anybody to tell you the truth?

Can't trust him, can't trust her - what to do, what to do now?

Only the Lord knows, and he ain't you.

"That's a wonderful example of epistemological humility," said Mr Neff.

Took the words right out of my mouth.

Though I've been in love with Mavis Staples ever since she teamed up with Aretha Franklin in "Oh Happy Day" in the late 80s, and with Jeff Tweedy ever since I met him, his wife, and their toddler son eating celery sticks backstage after a Wilco concert in the mid 90s, I would never have thought of putting them together. Two years ago, however, Tweedy joined a small audience as Staples recorded a live album, and two weeks after that, Tweedy and Staples did lunch.

The resulting album, the one we listened to tonight, was released this week, and it's a match made in heaven. Maybe literally. You can read positive reviews in the Chicago Tribune, Paste Magazine, Rolling Stone, and even Christianity Today. Or you can watch Staples and Tweedy chat. Or, of course, you can just download the album and enjoy the whole thing beginning five minutes from now.

When to quit reading a book

A friend gave me this useful formula : Subtract your age from the number 100, and the answer is the number of pages you have to read before giving up on a book you're not enjoying.* Her advice came to mind the other day as I was preparing to return yet another partially read book to the library. Oops, I thought : am I dangerously deficient in perseverance?

No, I said to myself. Life is short - why spend it with books I don't really want to read?

Here's a list of the books I've quit reading (or listening to) since June. Every one of them, by the way, is worth reading.

• Animal Factory by David Kirby. Important discussion of how factory farms damage the earth. I had recently read several books on the topic and decided after several chapters that I wasn't in the mood to read more - but I recommend the book.
• March Violets by Philip Kerr. Friends swear by this author, and I thought I'd like a thriller set in pre-war Berlin. Somehow, I didn't. Maybe I'm just not a hard-boiled girl.
• Au Début d'un bel été by Jacques Duquesne. Looked like a fun fluffy read that would help my French fluency. In the event, my French fluency didn't want to be helped.
• Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga. I loved his White Tiger. This is good too, but I wanted a novel and not a book of short stories, so I read the first one and quit.
• Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. Love his daffyness. Didn't want quite that much of it. Was listening to the audiobook, and I understand the actual book includes a fair amount of visual humor. Maybe I'll try it.
• The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. Very impressed by first 50 pages or so. This is the book that inspired the U.S. to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. Was amazed at how many of the abuses are still happening today: exploited immigrant labor, careless inspections, vertical ownership of industry, inhumane treatment of animals... But decided to quit listening to the audiobook because I was getting depressed.
• 36 Arguments for the Existence of God by Rebecca Goldstein. Amusing send-up of academic and philosophic pomposity. PW gave it a starred review, and I was pleased that a good friend thought I'd like it. But I passed it on to a philosophy major who, I thought, would enjoy it more than I did.
• The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. One granddaughter described the YA series (of which this is Book 1) thus: "they are soooooooo good." The other granddaughter wrote, "i read like the last page or so and i didnt like it. nor the plot. too scary." After reading a few chapters, I agree with both girls. Really well done. If you like dystopic fiction.

Not reading those books gave me time to read (or listen to) 34 others. One of the best was The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Uh oh. Is a mild Internet addiction to blame for my willingness to abandon so many fine books?

Or have I just wisely given up my youthful doggedness?

Whatever. In any case, I well remember a day maybe 20 years ago when I took a deep breath and spoke to a bookcase full of unread books. "I don't have to read you," I announced. And felt much better.

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I don't know the source of my friend's formula, but Nancy Pearl's "Rule of Fifty" is similar - and very good.

ONAEDO, THE BLACKSMITH'S DAUGHTER by Ngozi Achebe

Ngozi Achebe's first novel, Onaedo, The Blacksmith's Daughter, is a good book you're probably never going to read, and that's a shame.

Hey, it's not your fault. The book is not in your library, nor is it in any bookstore near you. You can order it from Amazon, but at $19.95 (even though discounted today to $17.05), it's overpriced. If you're looking for a historical novel by a Nigerian woman who lives in America, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun is a better deal at $10.85.

And yet Onaedo is an engrossing story about a likeable, gutsy woman, and it is rich in fascinating cultural and historical detail. The story is set in western Africa some 500 years ago. Onaedo, the teen-aged daughter of a prominent Igbo elder, is resisting one suitor after another. Her heart belongs to Dualo, but he is not prosperous enough to ask for her hand. Enter Oguebie, a rich but unscrupulous suitor who is involved in some nefarious business with a couple of Portuguese fortune seekers. You guessed it, probably sooner than Oguebie does - these are slave traders, and they want him to help them capture his neighbors.

Like her uncle, the famed Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease), Ngozi Achebe depicts a culture rich in familial relationships and traditional beliefs but threatened by European invaders (see my reviews of two of her uncle's books here and here). Whereas the uncle created tragic heroes who cannot reconcile the old and the new, the niece gives us a spunky heroine who manages to survive one disaster after another. Onaedo may never be a classic, but it's a page-turning historical romance.

The book has problems, though. It appears to be the first and only book ever published by Mandac-Goldberg, about whom I could find no information except the little that is on their website. To their credit, they have given the book an attractive cover (though the title needs more contrast with the background if they want bookstore browsers to notice it) and a functional interior design. However, their publicity materials, including back-cover copy, are amateurish; their pricing is unrealistic; and they apparently haven't figured out how to get the book into bookstores and libraries.

The biggest problem with the book is its inadequate editing at all levels. The copy editor, if there was one, did not understand standard syntax or comma placement. No content editor helped the author see that the 21st-century Prologue and Epilogue in no way helped the story, or that the Prologue's clumsy writing and tangled time sequences were likely to put off potential readers before the real story ever got started. Nobody helped the author shape her complex plot with its multiple points of view and its sometimes confusing roster of characters whose names, strange to Western ears, all begin to sound alike.

This is unfortunate, because Onaedo is a good story by a talented writer who deserves better than she got. The book ends just as a new adventure is about to begin, so there will surely be a sequel. In addition, Achebe told an interviewer that she is now at work on a "coming of age story ... set during the Nigerian/Biafran Civil war." An established publisher with a crew of professional editors and marketers could do well with Achebe on their list.

If she is very lucky, some such publisher or editor will read Onaedo as if it is a manuscript, not a published book; will see its possibilities and the potential for equally gripping sequels; will buy the rights from Mandac-Goldberg; and will work with the author to turn it into the excellent book it ought to be. I'd like to be able to recommend Onaedo without reservations. Perhaps someday that will be possible.

Books about dogs

The United States has more pet dogs and more dogs per family than any other country in the world. According to the Humane Society, 39% of our households include at least one dog, and nearly 80 million dogs live within our borders. Two of those dogs belong to us. We are desperately in love with them.

So I suppose we are the intended market for the flood of dog books that followed John Grogan's phenomenal publishing success, Marley and Me. When it sold 5 million copies and was made into a major motion picture, lots of publishers sat up and wagged. Whole litters of dog memoirs followed, most with appealing pups on their covers. Most were quickly remaindered, for good reason. Copy-cat books, even if they're about dogs, seldom appeal.

Let me recommend instead some excellent dog books that were published before Marley and are still available. All of these authors have written other good books too.

• Jon Katz: The New Work of Dogs: Tending to Life, Love, and Family (2003)

Time was, dogs earned their keep by herding, hunting, maiming intruders, or even fighting other animals. Some dogs still do - but most have quite a different job description nowadays. "The new work of dogs," says Katz, "is attending to the emotional lives of Americans, many of whom feel increasingly disconnected from one another." This insightful book highlights the dog-human relationship through stories about new dogs and their people.

• Patricia B. McConnell, The Other End of the Leash: Why We Do What We Do Around Dogs (2002)

McConnell, who is an adjunct associate professor in zoology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an animal behaviorist, and a dog trainer, helps us understand how our dogs think and helps us communicate so that our dogs will understand us. Who knew, for example, that you can get a dog to stop pestering you by gently patting it on the head? Unlike the ever-popular but controversial Cesar Milan, McConnell favors benevolence over dominance.

• Caroline Knapp, Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs (1998)

This is memoir as it should be written: a delicate interplay between the author's emotions and the world beyond herself. Knapp adopted Lucille, a German shepherd mix, when she was recovering from 20 years of alcoholism, the death of both her parents, and a failed relationship. Using her relationship with the dog as a springboard, she explores many facets of the human-animal bond.

• Peter Mayle: A Dog's Life (1995)

Pick up this book if you love Mayle's Provence books, or if you simply want to spend a delightful evening or two curled up with a laugh-out-loud story. Boy, a large French dog of uncertain ancestry, is the narrator. After a brutal childhood and adolescence ("a lesser dog might have despaired"), he is rescued from the side of the road by Madame. "The other half" grudgingly agrees that the dog may stay, and a series of hilarious adventures follow. Illustrated throughout by New Yorker cartoonist Edward Koren, this book would make a great gift for all the francophilic book lovers on your list. Me, for example.

•  Elizabeth Marshall Thomas: The Hidden Life of Dogs (1993)

Thomas had a rich career as an anthropologist and novelist before turning her observant eye on dogs. The result is a fascinating study of how dogs think, what they want, and why they act the way they do. Warning: dog lovers and dog trainers protested her hands-off approach to dog care, and scholars hated her anthropomorphizing (which she cheerfully admits and defends). Nevertheless, the book became a bestseller because - hey - it's really interesting!

• J.R. Ackerley: My Dog Tulip (1956) 

Ackerley spent his life looking for what he called an "Ideal Friend," finally finding it in an Alsatian bitch (U.S. translation: German shepherd female). This is his paean to a dog that was probably worse than Marley - so bad, in fact, that most of Ackerley's human acquaintances stopped visiting. He didn't care. In their absence he got a lot of writing done - and anyway, he had the dog. Now a minor motion picture starring the voices of Christopher Plummer, the late Lynn Redgrave, and Isabella Rossellini, My Dog Tulip is unlikely ever to play at a theater near me. It's touring a few cities between now and November, though, so click on the link to see if one of them is near you. Or buy the book, which Truman Capote called "one of the greatest books ever written by anybody in the world."

THE MEMOIRS OF MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS by Carolly Erickson

Is it too much to ask of a historical novel that it be, well, historical?

Alas, The Memoirs of Mary Queen of Scots, soon to be released in paperback, is not.

Never mind that the author, Carolly Erickson, has a PhD in medieval history from Columbia University, or that she has written some fine biographies from the Tudor period including Great Harry and The First Elizabeth. If you want to learn more about the doomed queen on France, Scotland, and (in her mind, at least) England, don't start here.

To be fair, Erickson never claims historical accuracy for her novel. In fact, in a note to the reader at the back of the book, she writes:

Just a reminder that in this historical entertainment, authentic history and imaginative invention are blended, so that fictional events and circumstances, fictional characters and fictional alterations to the past intertwine. Fresh interpretations of past personalities and events are offered, and traditional ones laid aside.

Of course. That's how every historical novelist operates. In my review of Brenda Rickman's The Heretic's Wife, for example, I point out that she gives a biased Protestant interpretation of Sir Thomas More and I suggest that she too easily disregards the religio-political context of her time. Still Rickman, for the most part, sets her story within a real historical framework.

Erickson, by contrast, plays fast and loose with events. She begins by having Bothwell, Mary's third husband, present at her execution, though he is believed to have died nine years earlier. She admits this "whimsy" in her note, as well as other "thick-coming fancies" that "crowd out sober evidence": Mary and Bothwell's island trip, Mary's meeting with Elizabeth, and the circumstances surrounding the death of Mary's second husband, Darnley. She doesn't mention some of her other fancies: Riccio and Darnley's gay relationship, for example (in reality, Darnley hated Riccio, who was widely believed to be the father of Mary's son).

These are mere peccadilloes, however, compared to her entirely made-up account of Mary's sabbatical from captivity, to which Erickson devotes some 70 pages.

Mary lived in England as Elizabeth's prisoner from 1568 until her execution in 1587. In this novel, notwithstanding, Mary escapes to Rome in 1575, spending two years consorting with the pope and a famous general. She then follows the general to Flanders. When it becomes obvious that he is not going to rescue her, she proceeds to Normandy, where she spends a couple more years with her grandmother and daughter. Eventually she returns to England and begins searching for some letters Elizabeth allegedly wrote to her lover Leicester, proving Elizabeth's complicity in his wife's murder and thus her unsuitability to be queen.

Virtually none of this last third of the book is based on what actually happened. Mary never escaped from her well-guarded house arrest. Even the letters turn the real story inside out. Yes, letters were involved in Mary's trial - but they weren't by or about Elizabeth. Instead, they were allegedly written by Mary to her lover Bothwell, proving her complicity in Darnley's murder and thus her own unsuitability to be queen.

It's easy to understand why Erickson would choose to stray so widely from the historical record. The last 18 years of Mary's 44-year life were, except for a few abortive plots, extremely boring, as critics of Philippa Gregory's The Other Queen have pointed out. No doubt Erickson, who knows her history, decided to have a little fun and spice up the story.

Well, we all know that memoirs aren't necessarily factual, and we expect historical fiction to include invented characters and conversations and events. But we also expect memoirs - even fictional ones - to elucidate a character's inner workings, and we anticipate that historical fiction will bring a long-ago period to life. By building so much of Mary's story on an invented historical framework, Erickson shows us too little of Mary or of the Tudor/Stuart period.

She does, however, give us some charming Scottish ruffians.

Full disclosure, size XL

The midterm election season is upon us, the first since the Supreme Court's January 21 ruling that allows corporations to spend as much as they wish on political advertising - as long as they disclose their involvement.

It seems to me that corporate disclosure isn't enough. I want an easy way to know who is buying my candidates, my member of Congress, my senators. Sure, I can go to the extremely informative Open Secrets website and find out for myself that, for example, Nancy Pelosi's number one contributor was American Income Life Insurance while John Boehner's was the American Financial Group.

But after reading this morning how corporations are funding our elected representatives' favorite charities in mutual back-scratching deals, I think it's high time for a more direct approach to disclosure. Even the 27% of Americans who don't read books need to know who is buying their politicians.

Let's make good use of America's favorite communications medium: the T shirt.

Let's require every person holding elected office, and every candidate for elected office, to wear a T shirt at all times listing his or her top three contributing industries. T shirts should be updated at least every three months.

It may be hard at first for Ms. Pelosi to give up her lovely designer suits or for Mr. Boehner to abandon his dazzling white shirts and silk ties, but Zazzle offers a wide variety of styles for men and women. The Speaker will be able to choose flattering colors and necklines, and the Minority Leader can continue to wear stark white to highlight his tan.

It's good to know who's buying the ads, but it's even more important to know who's buying the candidates.

CORDUROY MANSIONS by Alexander McCall Smith

The cast of characters is what makes the first book in Alexander McCall Smith's new series, Corduroy Mansions, compulsively readable.

William, a middle-aged wine merchant, is trying to figure out how to get his rude, freeloading son, Eddie, to move out and get his own apartment. Dee, who works at a vitamin shop, has offered to give her young male colleague a colonic irrigation. James, an art student, is having a sexual identity crisis - he thinks he might be straight. Oedipus Snark, a lazy, unprincipled Member of Parliament, is so loathsome that his personal assistant Jenny, his girlfriend Barbara, and even his mother, Berthea, can't stand him. The one entirely sane individual in the book is Freddie de la Hay, a Pimlico terrier (a breed invented to order) - though he is clearly not the sweet puppy pictured on the U.S. book jacket.

In 100 short chapters, the characters get into and out of hilarious predicaments, ruminating as they go. "Ugliness can be beautiful," says James in a typical aside. "Anything can be beautiful. And maybe that's what a certain sort of artist is trying to do: he - or she, of course - is trying to open our eyes to a beauty we would not otherwise see." Surely that is what McCall Smith is trying to do: he loves his flawed characters, and after spending an hour or two enjoying his gentle humor, one sees one's friends and neighbors with kinder eyes.

Don't expect tight plotting, though. McCall Smith wrote this book for The Telegraph as a genuine serial novel - a chapter a day, five days a week, for six months (this is also how he wrote the 44 Scotland Street series for The Scotsman) - and he clearly did not start out with any particular destination in mind. Loose ends abound, but they aren't a problem. We know he'll be back next year to tie some of them up and to leave still more hanging.

Indeed, the second book in this series, The Dog Who Came In from the Cold, has already been published in the U.K., and the third book's first installment will soon appear. This brings McCall Smith's 2009-2010 literary output up to seven and a fraction books (well, he had to do something during the six months when he wasn't writing Corduroy Mansions books). According to a 2007 Associated Press-Ipsos poll, the typical American claims to read about four books a year. That's how many books Alexander McCall Smith writes.