It is a story with a love triangle. Not just any ordinary love triangle, mind you, but one including a man, a woman and an elephant. Incredibly, the triangle is probably the most normal part of the tale.

It’s also a story about the circus, the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth, no less. I haven’t read a book about the circus since Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes came out back in ’62. Circuses have always been dark places for me. It is not surprising then that I found Water for Elephants a dark book. It is about the seamier and steamier side of a life not evident under ‘The Big Top’. It takes place during the Great Depression, adding a layer of dreariness and desperation.

It’s a story about being trapped. Jacob Jankowski, in a decrepit body dumped in a claustrophobic nursing home where only memories of his days in the circus provide relief. Marlena, the star of an equestrian act, in a bad marriage to an abusive husband. Rosie the elephant, in a circumstance hardly of her choosing only seconds away from the painful prodding of a bull hook. All three in a world of wonder, excitement, passion and abject cruelty.

Most importantly, it’s a story about escape. Jacob loses everything when his parents are killed in a car accident. He runs away with the circus where his training as a veterinarian would come in most handy. He then has to escape the circus when the darkness begins to close in. Finally, altogether too many years later, he has to escape the straightjacket of his confinement and run back to the only home he ever really knew.

Inevitably, the book, as life, comes full circle. It is the way.

Interesting sidebar on this book and on Sara Gruen, a Canadian born and bred author currently residing in an environmentalist community outside Chicago. Despite the moderate acclaim earned by her first two novels, Riding Lessons and Flying Changes, her publisher turned down Water for Elephants. Eventually, she struck a cheap deal with Algonquin. 12 weeks on the N.Y. Times best-seller list and a quarter million dollars later, Gruen was set. Spiegel & Grau paid $5 million for her fourth novel, Ape House and another as-yet-unnamed book.

Eventually, talent, as life, becomes its own reward. It is also the way.

According to the dictionary, the verb unfriend means to “remove someone as a friend on a social networking site such as Facebook”.

This is a most unfortunate word, coming out of the unlovely side of social media. I am not unaware of the networking realities of Facebook and I am not unsympathetic to those not yet friended who are unhappily burdened with being unattached in a vast interconnected world. In that context, unfriending seems particularly unkind and makes friending in the first place an almost capricious exercise. Being thus uncoupled undercuts one’s sense of belonging and underscores the fleeting uncertainty of friendships altogether.

I am unsure of how the dons of the Oxford American Dictionary made their selection. Apparently, part of the appeal of unfriend was the rarity (unusuality?) of an ‘un’-prefixed word assuming a verb sense of friend, i.e., to friend, that is not used. You do not friend, you befriend. As such, says Christine Lindberg, a senior lexicographer with the dictionary, “unfriend has real lex appeal”.

Oh, really?

Among the contenders for the WOTY Award were a number of sniglets, including:

• intexticated - distracted by texting on a cell phone while driving a vehicle; and
• freemium - a business model in which some basic services are provided for free with the aim of enticing users to pay for additional, premium features or content.

There were the compound words and images, my favourite being ‘tramp stamp’, a tattoo on the lower back, usually on a woman. My only issue here is that I am sure tramp stamp is already several years old.

I also admit to being impressed by the seemingly endless stream of neologisms Twitter is contributing to the English language, many of which vied for Word-of-the-Year. If you don’t like the words, you at least have to love the chutzpah inherent in twitterati and twitterature. With such pretension, it is no wonder that people become tweetaholics.

In fact, the web contributed disproportionately to the lexicon in 2009. Sad, really, when you consider that the beauty and strength of the English language stem directly from the diversity of its sources.

The WOTY winner must “reflect the ethos of the year” and it must “have lasting potential as a word of cultural significance and use”. Unfriend, begat by the spread of social media, may well reflect the ethos and, indeed, the pathos of 2009. But as to having lasting cultural significance, I would think it most unlikely.

(For more on neologisms, please see: Don’t Snigger at Sniglets and A Case of the Twiggles.)

With its famed Museum and Library, Alexandria was the centre of the world for learning and Euclid was just one of a host of distinguished alumni.

Ptolemy, with his Hellenic philosophical bent and Pharaonic aspirations, saw Alexandria as a nexus for commerce, knowledge and dynastic control. The city was a jewel in its conception, planning and construction. The lighthouse at Pharos, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, was just one of many architectural marvels. But it was the intellectual capital that made Alexandria so rich and its legacy so enduring.

The Library’s collection was vast, housing virtually all the written works of the age. Its only competition was the Library at Pergamum, said by Plutarch to house some 200,000 volumes. Until, that is, Mark Antony turned over the entire Pergamum collection to the Library at Alexandria as a wedding present to his beloved Cleopatra (last of the Ptolemys).

Among the early librarians was Apollonius, author of the poem Argonautica. That epic tells the story of Jason and the heroes who sailed on the Argo to capture the golden fleece from Colchis. Apollonius’ successor was a brilliant mathematician and scientist, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, credited with having calculated the Earth’s circumference. Eratosthenes was a close friend of Archimedes who came from Syracuse to Alexandria to study and was a frequent visitor of the Museum.

The first head of the Museum was Ctesibius of Alexandria. He wrote the first treatises on the science of compressed air and its uses in pumps, earning him the title of “The Father of Pneumatics.” His protégé, Hero of Alexandria, created the first steam engine, predating the industrial revolution by two millennia.

The Museum was also the centre of philosophical discourse. Platonists and neoplatonists, stoics and epicureans all passed through the hallowed halls. Neoplatonism was one of the most influential philosophies of late antiquity and Plotinus’ metaphysical writings in the Enneads inspired centuries of pagan, Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Gnostic and mystical thought.

The Septuagint, the first translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, was carried out in Alexandria in stages between the 3rd and 1st centuries BC by Jewish scholars, to whom Philo and Josephus ascribed divine inspiration.

Philo used allegory to fuse and harmonize Greek philosophy and Judaism. There are those who believe that his concept of the Logos as God’s “blueprint for the world” formed the basis of Christianity.

No Literarian post would be complete without at least a few quotes and Philo is good for it:
“Those who give hoping to be rewarded with honor are not giving; they are bargaining.”
“Grey hairs are signs of wisdom…if you hold your tongue.”
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”

In short, Alexandria was the mainspring from which philosophical, mathematical, scientific, medical, cosmological and religious thought emanated for centuries. It was a coming together of genius, a place where ideas were exchanged and creative energy flowed freely.

In the end, Julius Caesar, possibly a tsunami, certainly the inevitable ravages of time, conspired to bring destruction to the Museum, the Library and much of the city itself. The record is not as certain as the result. The Library of Alexandria and all its invaluable contents are gone. The legacy, though, will last forever.

To learn more, get yourself a copy of The Rise and Fall of Alexandria, Birthplace of the Modern Mind. The authors, Justin Pollard and Howard Reid are noted producers of PBS documentaries. Their intellectual rigor, flare for the dramatic, and accessibility to all audiences are well-honed and shine through in this work.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was a versatile and enormously gifted writer. He was also a prolific writer, having published some 80 books, a dozen posthumously. The fact that he was both perceptive and productive, that he combined a discerning eye with a fertile mind, that he saw life through a prism of paradoxes, made it almost inevitable that he would become the source of a near endless array of punchy lines and pithy sayings, so many of which resonate to this day. Unlike my unfortunate and now undone colleague, Chesterton was a man of many ideas and, a century later, there is still little to fault with any of them.

Chesterton had strength of character and conviction. For a self-described ‘rollicking journalist’, he had strongly-held opinions and defended them vigorously.

Still in his 20s, he was one of the few journalists who publicly opposed the Boer War. Over the years, he held fast to his anti-war sentiments. “The only defensible war”, he wrote in his Autobiography (published in 1937), “is a war of defense”.

Chesterton was highly politicized, his politics coloured by his deep distrust of concentrated wealth and power.

On the nations’ leadership, he scathingly wrote: “Democracy means government by the uneducated. Aristocracy means government by the badly educated.” And: “When a politician is in opposition, he is an expert on the means to some end; when he is in office he is an expert on the obstacles to it.”

His take on national pride is a classic: “(Saying) ‘My country right or wrong’ is like saying ‘my mother, drunk or sober’.”

Chesterton’s gregarious manner and wry humor belied a deep troubling over the vagaries, paradoxes and inconsistencies of life. He found answers in Christianity; his books on the subject contained some of his most memorable thoughts, not always religious ones.

From his 1905 Heretics: “Progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.” The sequel, Orthodoxy, appeared three years later and provided this gem: “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.”

Ultimately, the failings of other societal structures gave way to the constancy and incontrovertibility of faith. From his Introduction to the Book of Job (1907), Chesterton makes it clear that “the riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man”. In Christendom in Dublin, published in 1933, he wrote: “Once abolish the God… government becomes the God.” And, finally: “When people cease to believe in God, they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything”.

Of course, not all his subjects were lofty; some of his targets were, frankly, of low stature. Consider these observations on thieves: “Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become theirs so that they may more perfectly respect it.” And “Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before.”Anything and everything was grist for his always turning, ever-churning mill. “There is no such thing…as an uninteresting subject”, he wrote. “The only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.”

According to Charles Dickens, “trifles make the sum of life”. This has special meaning when it comes to Chesterton, whose keen eyes caught the essence of even the most mundane things. You know someone can put things in their proper perspective when he can write a book called On Running After One’s Hat, All Things Considered. Perhaps the best example of Chesterton’s ability to turn trivia into timeless truths is his wonderfully witty Tremendous Trifles, published in 1909.

From this classic and others, come the following Chesterton observations worth contemplating:

“He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.”

“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”

“To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.”

“One sees great things from the valley, only small things from the peak.”

With a broad sweep from his unique vantage point, Chesterton managed to take in everything, great and small.

The Gargoyle, published by Doubleday, is the first effort by Andrew Davidson. And it is an extraordinary one. This is a book that successfully slips and slides between realities and magically transcends time. Of course, it is the acceptance of time as non-linear that enables you to define what is and what is not reality.

In other words, if you can suspend disbelief, as the principal character does when Marianne Engel, a beguiling schizophrenic, transports him to a past they supposedly shared together, you will be open to the paradoxes and parallels that run throughout.

In their previous, fourteenth century lives, he was a mercenary felled by a flaming arrow who became a stonemason. She was a novice in the Engelthal monastery; her talents for language found their fullest expression in the stifling Scriptorium. He is now the ex-porn star whose budding career was cut short by a car accident in which he was horribly burned; he becomes a writer telling of a sculptor/temptress whose madness and mastery over stone bring gargoyles to life.

“I absorb the dreams of the stone, and the gargoyles inside tell me what I need to do to free them. They reveal their faces and show me what I must take away to make them whole…It’s like I’m digging a survivor out from underneath the avalanche of time …They’ve been hibernating in the winter of the stone and the spring is in my chisel. If I can carve away the right pieces, the gargoyle comes forth like a flower out of a rocky embankment.”

Of course, she also brings him back to life, subtly but relentlessly chipping away at a cynical and contemptuous veneer.

There is always the story behind the story, the underlying message, the over-arching theme that ties a string of apparently disparate tales together. Characters, at least the main ones, are fully developed. And yet they remain inscrutable. They are hardened, yet vulnerable. They are intertwined, yet separate. They are all gargoyles.

In short, this is a book with a remarkable depth.

Parental Guidance: Unless you are into burn victim physiology and psychology, you might find the book a  bit of a struggle for the first 60 pages or so. Just a warning.

The longest word ever to appear in the English dictionary is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis at 45 letters long. This disease, an inflammation of the lungs caused by the inhalation of very fine silica dust, is also known by its shorter name, silicosis.

It is easy to imagine why no one remembers the longest word in second place.

Admittedly, once you get past pneumonoceteracetera, everything else is somewhat anticlimactic. But, for those who enjoy word play, there are a number of other interesting words to pull out on an exceedingly slow night when the only other option is reading Henry James.

Everyone knows that ‘e’ is the letter that appears most often in the English language. Simply because it is there, a number of authors have taken on the challenge of writing entire novels without using the letter ‘e’. The earliest, Gadsby, was penned by Ernest Vincent Wright back in 1939. In 1995, Gilbert Adair published A Void, a translation of George Perec’s French-language mystery, La Disparition. Neither the French nor English version contains the letter ‘e’.

So, down to the bite-sized, the longest English word that does not contain the letter ‘e’ is floccinaucinihilipilification. This one, meaning “the action or habit of estimating as worthless”, weighs in at a welterweight 29 letters.

If, by the way, you think you cannot do much with words like this, you are wrong. Take out a couple of affixes, then add in a couple of new ones and you get new, wonderfully evocative words: floccinaucical (”inconsiderable, trifling”) and floccinaucity (”a matter of small consequence”). You will note that neither contains the letter ‘e’.

Not quite the same challenge, but interesting still are dermatoglyphics, misconjugatedly and uncopyrightable, each 15 letters long, tied for the longest words in which no letter appears more than once.

Aegilops is the longest word with its letters arranged in alphabetical order. Spoonfed is the longest word with its letters arranged in reverse alphabetical order.

Esophagographers, 16 letter long, is the longest word in which each of its letters occurs twice.

And so it goes. And goes and goes, with the longest word in alphabetic order, the longest palindromic word, the longest homophonic anagrams, and – to really stretch the point – the longest words that consist of only letters with ascenders, descenders and dots in lower case (lighttight and hillypilly).

Well, for now, that’s about the size of it.

Not surprisingly, many, like Ti, a woody plant native to the Pacific islands like Samoa and Tahiti, are not your English garden variety words but ones that emerge from the remote corners of our linguistically fertile planet. As you seed the board with these short but sweet exotica, you can show that you are both well-versed and well-traveled.

There are animals, running the full spectrum of the alphabet, from Ai, a South American three-toed sloth, to Zo, which is a Dr. Suess-like cross between a yak and a cow.

For the esoteric, Ba is the eternal spirit in Egyptian mythology. Qi (pronounced chee as in, but different than, tai chi) is the Chinese life force. Another mystical universal force is Od, sometimes manifesting itself in supernatural phenomena. (This, by the way, is not Odd, another universal force manifesting itself in the unnatural behaviour of various aunts on my mother’s side.)

Everyone knows an Em is a printer’s measure, but most don’t know that an En, also a printer’s measure, equals half an Em.

Yes, Fa is a perfume, but it’s also the fourth note in the diationic scale (do re mi fa so…) and perfectly acceptable Scrabble fare. As are Greek letters like Mu, Nu, and Xi. Xi should not be confused with Xu, a Vietnamese coin. Xu, by the way, is also the plural of Xu; you may get called on it.

Another weird one is Gu, a violin played in Shetland, an archipelago off the northeast coast of Scotland. It comes with a bonus: you can also spell it gue and gju.

It’s now time to finish off your frustrated foes. You can continue to bury them bit by bit with your Ko, a Maori digging stick, or cut directly to the chase with a Da, a Burmese knife that would make Crocodile Dundee proud.

When you’ve got dozens of two-letter words down, it’s your choice.

Displayed prominently on these bookcases are the literary classics. Your Dickens collection, the Russians and, of course, the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. They must be given their due and this means appropriate positioning. Especially those with proper leather binding, fading somewhat from evident use rather than from bleaching in the sun.

What, however, do you do with the weird books, the arcane and the obscure? Do you file Titania’s Book of White Magic alphabetically. Under what subject heading would you fit Browser’s Book of Endings? Where do you put your Tao of Pooh?

In my collection is the small but precious Bizarre Books, compiled by Russell Ash and Brian Lake and published by Pavilion Books (London, 1998). Any number of the titles listed would create havoc with your inner Dewey.

The specialty books are easy to file. It is easy to imagine a strip mall including The Care of Raw Hide Drop Box Loom Pickers; Wall Paintings by Snake Charmers in Tanganyika; European Spoons Before 1700; Locomotive Boiler Explosions (always engrossing, sometimes disturbing); A Toddler’s Guide to the Rubber Industry (Alice in Rubberland?); and the essential Umbrellas and Parts of Umbrellas Except Handles (a Report to the President of the United States).

In keeping with the interests of this blog’s readers, we do offer some madcap literary miscellanea: Selected Themes and Icons from Spanish Literature: Of Beards, Shoes, Cucumbers and Leprosy; Benedictine Maledictions: Liturgical Cursing in Romanesque France; A Compendium of the Biographical Literature on Deceased Entomologists; New Teeth for Old Jaws: Bookselling Spiritualized; An Irishman’s Difficulties with the Dutch Language; and, my favourite, So Your Wife Came Home Speaking in Tongues?

Now, be honest. Would you really try to keep these treasures under wraps or would you have them front and center, a full frontal trove of trivia and tripe for compulsive browsers?

My wife felt that I could not be trusted alone with the books, that I would almost certainly be distracted by their charms and sooner rather than later go derelict on her. She was, as always, correct.

I found dozens of treasures and more than a few oddities. Here are just two, from our literary collection, to start things off.

Restoration and Augustan Poets: From Milton to Goldsmith. I would normally have avoided any anthology that included Dryden, but this one did have Milton and, most importantly, Alexander Pope. Pope was then and remains today one of my favorite writers, less so for his mock-heroic classic, The Rape of the Lock, and more so for his philosophical musings. From his Essay on Man and his Essay on Criticism come countless aphorisms for which, Literarian readers know, I have a weakness. The essays are the sources for countless gems that have today become almost clichéd: “A little learning is a dang’rous thing”; “To err is human, to forgive, divine”; and “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread”.

The Restoration and Augustan periods also encompass the Graveyard Poets, the gloomy folk whose meditations on mortality, epitaphs and worms are now considered precursors to the Gothic novel. Unexpectedly – how did I miss it then? – one of the editors of the collection was a certain W.H. Auden.

Tucked demurely into a corner of one bookshelf was a tiny leather-bound book entitled The Lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff Esq – Revised and Corrected by the Author (Richard Steele). To enjoy this, a little background is necessary. Isaac Bickerstaff Esq was a pseudonym used by Jonathan Swift. His biting satire was at its best when he took aim at almanac publisher John Partridge. Angry at Partridge’s swipes at the Church, “Bickerstaff” first predicted his nemesis’ demise, announced it publicly and finally published an elegy to his memory, though, all the while a much-beleaguered Partridge was still very much alive. Steele boosted the launch of his newspaper, The Tatler, by putting Bickerstaff on the masthead as editor. Swift did, in fact, contribute to The Tatler, but it was Steele who did most of the writing. Lucubrations is a collection of excerpts from The Tatler.

The book’s dedication is to The Right Honourable William Lord Cowper, Baron of Wingham. If the name seems familiar, that’s because Cowper was an Augustan poet. It’s a wonder how things come together.

Cowper was hardly a great poet and would never, on his own, have made my collection. His hymnizing, however, did produce the invariably misquoted “God moves in a mysterious way” line (from the Olney Hymns, ‘Light Shining out of Darkness’). Actually, his best line was “God made the country, and man made the town”. Cowper’s religious leanings led him to associate with John Newton who is best remembered for his classic hymn, Amazing Grace. That is as close as the troubled poet ever came to amazing or to grace.

There were other neat discoveries which will feed into future posts. Right now, however, I have to get back to ‘work’.

Mysteries, like all genres, are formulaic. There is the creation of an ordered, sometimes very elaborate, universe to serve as the backdrop for the story. In a world of shifting time and shape, such as that in The Eyre Affair, there is at least consistency. As the stories evolve, we inevitably delve into the lives of the victim, the criminal and the detective. Even those mysteries that deal with the supernatural are studies of human nature. They are also morality plays and, as such, good always, ultimately, triumphs over evil.

Still, there are the differences and it is these that distinguish genres and their fans. To begin with, there is an increasing diversity of mystery sub-genres. There are the classic, complex, who-dun-it puzzles. Think P.D. James. There are the thrillers, as well as the science fiction, fantasy, horror, historical, western, romance and literary mysteries.

I have two weaknesses. The first is for the Sherlock Holmes-type consulting detective who uses observation, deductive reasoning and inference to solve difficult cases. Holmes’ intellectual prowess is, admittedly, in your face. That of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown is more subtle and rather more humbly provided.

My other weakness is the literary mystery. I have previously reviewed Shadow of the Wind, a beautifully written novel by Spanish writer Carlos Ruiz Zafón (please see Out of the Shadows). In it, I introduced Literarian readers to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.

My first literary mystery was The Rule of Four, authored jointly by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason. Two students discover that the key to solving a murder lies in the decoding of the extremely rare, very beautiful and very mysterious Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. The Rule of Four is a bit heavy-handed and not especially suspenseful. That said, the Hypnerotomachia is an intriguing document worth pursuing for lovers of early Renaissance romances. It is an incredibly complex allegory in which Poliphilo pursues his love through a dreamlike landscape. Look for it at your corner bookstore under its original name: Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, ubi humana omnia non nisi somnium esse ostendit, atque obiter plurima scitu sanequam digna commemorate. (I try to be helpful.)

Somewhat less arcane is The Sign of the Book by John Dunning. Antiquarian book dealer and reluctant private investigator Cliff Janeway is sent to the mountain town of Paradise, Colorado, to look into the murder of a mysterious figure with a secret collection of signed first editions. Number four in Dunning’s Bookman series, it is a classic detective story with an incidental love interest and characters in constant danger.

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde follows the adventures of literary detective Thursday Next, who lives in London with her pet dodo, Pickwick. Thursday investigates the theft of the original manuscript of Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit. She loses her first confrontation with arch-villain Acheron Hades; he would, in fact, have done her in had his bullet not been stopped by the copy of Jane Eyre she had in her breast pocket. Coming to her side was none other than Jane Eyre paramour, Rochester. This wonderfully absurd story flips between historical eras and slides easily in and out of literary classics.

As you no doubt know by my previous posts on Shakespeare (see Ten Things You Don’t Know About William Shakespeare and Where There’s a Will), few documents exist written in Shakespeare’s own hand. Finding one in – where else? - an antiquarian bookstore sets off a deadly chase in The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber. It is an international conspiracy in which you can hardly tell the good guys from the bad. My scholarly friends tell me the premise is ridiculous, so to maximize the suspense, you’ll need a willing suspension of disbelief.

Less of a thriller, perhaps falling into the category of historical fiction, is People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks. To authenticate a rare, illuminated Passover Haggadah, Australian rare book expert Hanna Heath travels the globe, following clues like missing silver clasps, blood stains and butterfly wings. In the process, she maps out its perilous journey through the centuries; the Sarajevo’ Haggadah survived the ravages of war and outrages of the auto de fe only by dint of the determination and uncommon dignity of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. This is a heart-rending story by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. It is a great book if not the best mystery.

Top pick: Shadow of the Wind. Most fun: The Eyre Affair.