Tyrades! by Danny Tyree

“Here’s a novel idea: read more fiction,” blared the headline of a recent Wall Street Journal article by Gerard Baker.

(The less said about that other Journal headline, “Here’s a limerick idea: buy a timeshare in Nantucket,” the better.)

Baker gruffly lamented the digital age and society’s abhorrence of reading books in general, but he laid a particularly strong guilt trip on the males who do still read for gravitating toward nonfiction (history, biographies, self-help, The Big Book of Just A Couple of Beers, Officer Explanations, etcetera) instead of novels or short stories.

I must plead guilty as charged, regarding Baker’s accusation. (Don’t worry, folks: one of the self-help books I read was “5 Easy Steps to Disarming Your Ankle Monitor.”) Although I enjoyed the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lewis Carroll, Roald Dahl, John Steinbeck and Emily Bronte back in school, the only novels I’ve read in the last 15 years are “11/22/63” (Stephen King) and “A Million Ways to Die in the West” (Seth MacFarlane).

I make no apologies. My daily routine of reading three newspapers, 100 comic strips and whatever magazine articles and Christian apologetic books I can skim does not leave a lot of room for curling up with a work of fiction (i.e. a glorified version of “My dog ate my homework”).

It’s still a free country, so I’ll concentrate on the fate of the apostles rather than the fate of the Character Who Is A Representation of the Author’s Own Adolescent Id And You’re A Dummy If You Don’t Recognize That.

(And I’ll probably learn more about keeping it a free country by reading a nonfiction book by Mark Levin than an account of “the dame with legs that seemed to go all the way to the Big Dipper.”)

Although nonfiction writers can sometimes seem preachy about finance or time management, fiction writers have spent millennia failing to read the room. In spite of the fact that nobody likes a know-it-all, along comes insufferable Mr. Omniscient Narrator.

(“His facial expression did not betray it, but John was thinking about cotton candy — just like the cotton candy he consumed on April 7, 1973 while in the company of that girl of Lithuanian-Salvadoran ancestry, who was preoccupied with memories of the blister she wore on her left pinkie on the evening of February 27, 1965…”)

Baker implied that immersing yourself in a good novel is a superior way of learning about the Human Condition, but I’ve found that mere good intentions are sufficient.

Spend a few decades of saying, “Sorry, John Grisham, but my boss will pound me with a gavel if I don’t accept a double shift…sorry, Agatha Christie, but I can’t solve the mystery of how to get out of my child’s cowbell recital…sorry, Leo Tolstoy, but my ‘honey do’ list is longer than ‘War and Peace’…” and you’ll be intimately acquainted with the Human Condition.

Baker seems to have more time for reading than some men do. It’s hard to care about the symbolism of a Great White Whale when you’re dealing with the reality of a Great Green Blob that needs pressure washing.

But, guys, if you do have the time and inclination to read a novel, go for it.

It’ll probably have fewer unpleasant surprises than the pop-up version of the Officer book: The Big Book of Just A Couple of Beers, Officer…Blaaarrrgghh!!!

–

Copyright 2025 Danny Tyree, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Danny Tyree welcomes email responses at [email protected] and visits to his Facebook fan page “Tyree’s Tyrades.”