Assigned Reading

So now we’re reading tenth grade essays, in which the students are asked to write about a character in a work of literature that has to stand up for something. Thus, there are about 1,000,000 essays on To Kill a Mockingbird (set in the “sleepy, prejudiced town of Maycomb County”) and The Odyssey (“After the suitors were done mooching Odysseus’s food and drinks and servants, they started trash talking him behind his back.”) and Romeo and Juliet (who stood up for love! Love!) and Of Mice and Men (for a reason I can’t quite determine since often it’s the fact that George stood up for killing Lenny). Occasionally there are the science fiction ones, in which you are thrown directly and without warning into Middle-earth since you obviously know what they’re talking about (you don’t) or the Twilight ones (which are, without exception, terrible, and which are also, without exception, written in that big round girly handwriting).

But the essays I have liked most turn out to be the ones on The Catcher in the Rye. (Man, it always comes back to Salinger for me, doesn’t it?) Partly for the observations (the fact that Holden smokes so much is always commented on, which I find hilarious) and partly because it reminds me of what a great book it is and partly because it reminds me of my hometown. My favorite quote so far: “He makes it back to his hometown of New York City where he finds phones at every turn.” Yup, that’s exactly right.

And of course this makes me think about the books we read in high school. Despite the fact that I went to one of those sciencey high schools in New York, English was always my favorite subject, though I can’t say that any of my English teachers there were as good as my aforementioned seventh grade one. I recall Mr. Casella talking about something something transcendentalism in The Grapes of Wrath, which to this day I don’t really get, and the part in The Great Gatsby (a book I truly loved) where F. Scott Fitzgerald describes the ash heap in Flushing Meadows, which eventually became the site of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Though actually the thing I remember most about that book was the look of surprised delight on Mr. Casella’s face when, after calling on my friend Loraine, she shrugged and said, Well, like, you know the way daisies are like, white on the outside, and like, yellow on the inside, so, like Daisy was like pure on the outside, but really not on the, like, inside? Did he really fall for this? Could he not see this high-level thinking was pretty much impossible for anyone but a writer of Cliffs Notes, whose insight Loraine had sought five minutes before class? He could not. Because wouldn’t you want to believe that a student could actually come up with something like that on her own? And Loraine, smarty though she was, had a way of talking that was truly admirable in its teenagery-ness (Wait, do you, like, like him?), which also added to the appeal, I suspect.

The unfortunate thing is that some otherwise amazing books seem much less so when they are assigned by a teacher, which is why I suspect I never read another Steinbeck book or even Dickens, after slogging through the first (!) 800 pages of David Copperfield and then just giving up. It’s not that I disliked any of these books. I think it’s just the fact of being assigned books that always threw me off, which is something I’ve addressed here before. Due to some kind of gap in my education, I never developed any particular respect for authority, which was somewhat evident in high school. (My physics teacher called me “fresh” and wanted to fail me based purely on my bad attitude, but could not because I had passed the physics Regents. Rock on, state tests!) So my point is that once a book was assigned, I always read it, but there was something kind of ruined for me, which I think happens to a lot of kids. If you go back, say, years later, and read all those assigned books for the first time or even reread them, you will truly love them. Which, of course, doesn’t mean that teachers should not be assigning these books. It's just that, perhaps unfortunately, the best books we read are often ones we’ve chosen ourselves.

It's a Sky Blue Sky

“They looked down on me, thinking I was some jerk to believe in the Lord Christ.” This is the first line of an essay I read yesterday written by a seventh grader in M___. The question this year on the big state test asks the kids to think of a time they were proud and then write about it. The young man quoted above was proud that he did not fight the kids who taunted him, but rather quoted at length from the Bible, which he considered a greater victory, though I think it’s safe to say that the other kids probably considered him even more of a jerk afterward.

So what are seventh graders proud of? You probably won’t be surprised to learn that many of them talk about winning some kind of baseball or basketball or soccer game, which almost always includes a detailed play-by-play of the action that my coworker Jenni likened to the Phil Rizzuto section of “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” There are also dance and gymnastics competitions and trying out for cheerleading. (Everyone at my table hates the cheerleaders.) There are unnecessary descriptions of simply everything: “I walked up to my friend, whose eyes were like pools of blue-green water.” But then sometimes you get that Bible-quoting kid or the boy who was proud of holding his breath for two minutes and thirty seconds, and who pointed out that the worst thing that could happen would be that he’d black out. His goal is to reach three minutes. Perhaps the best thing about these papers is how the kids throw in random vocabulary words that are almost always used awkwardly. These are the sentences we quote to each other all day long: “The time I was supercilious was a benevolent day.”

And this got me thinking about actually learning the word “inevitable” in the seventh grade. One day I didn’t know this word and the next day I did and suddenly I couldn’t imagine how I’d never known it before. We had this great English teacher, who may have been all of 24 at the time, who gave us extra credit anytime we saw one of our vocabulary words in real life. We just had to write down the sentence it was in and show it to her. And at the beginning of every class there were always kids rushing up to her with scraps of paper scribbled with sentences containing words like “balderdash” and “harried.” And most of us did exceptionally well on the vocabulary tests that year too. It was, you know, inevitable.

But back to today’s seventh graders, who sometimes write about Justin Bieber and sometimes about learning to do ollies on their skateboards and sometimes just want to make things perfectly clear: “My jaw dropped all the way to my blue crocs that were in style then.”

Of course, I'm sure it's no surprise that reading these all day can be tedious and that sometimes we skim them (especially the sports ones, oh man, the sports ones), but that sometimes there is that seventh grader that shines as brightly as the daisy yellow sun in the cornflower blue sky. Wait, someone will say. Listen to this! And we'll all marvel at the fact that some kid out there will go on to do great things, even though most of these essays leave us generally discouraged about the youth of America.

But here, the last line of a baseball essay about the last game of the season, in which a girl pitched a winning game against a team that included a mean girl named Angelica, who had been taunting her all season: “I remember the hoots and howls of the crowd when I threw that changeup and the look on Angelica’s face when she swung five seconds too early.” We all know that look. Sorry, Angelica.

Paper and Pens for Everyone!

For about five minutes today I thought I would see David Sedaris at Proctors Theater in Schenectady in a couple of weeks, but that thought was quickly dashed when I saw the ticket prices, which started at $95. Which isn’t to say that David isn’t worth $95 (I mean, he probably is), but I think my problem is the idea of the ticket price. Did I think the tickets would be $12? Um, maybe. And also, I did wonder what exactly we would be seeing for $95. The only other time I have been to Proctors Theater was when I took my daughters to see The Nutcracker there some years ago and there was, in fact, a live horse onstage pulling a carriage. I’m not drawing any conclusions here exactly, but maybe there is more to this show than just David standing in front of a lectern and reading from his latest book. Even though David standing and reading is pretty much all you’d need for a good time. (However, David being pulled onstage by a live horse might actually be worth the so-called price of admission.)

I know that David has to make a living and all and I’m not arguing against that, but it makes me wonder if I’m not going because of the ticket price (and I think I have mentioned that there were times when literally the only books I could read were David’s), then who else isn’t going? And we can all imagine who is going and how David’s fabulous chain-smoking mother would have hated them all. But then it occurs to me that maybe someone getting paid lots of money for being funny and a good writer is exactly right. I mean, if you have something worthwhile to offer shouldn’t you actually be rewarded for it? Shouldn’t David get to live a life of luxury simply for being a kind of human antidepressant? Maybe.

I mean, we all agree that J.K. Rowling was well-rewarded, right? Here was this poor, single mom who could only write in the few hours when her daughter was napping, and yet somehow, during these few hours, she managed to write all of the first Harry Potter book. (For this alone, I think she should have been rewarded. Most of my own writing ends up happening when I should be doing something else. Like right now I should be researching the Civil War, and I’ll get to that in a minute. But first.) So suddenly J.K. Rowling is rich and famous and we love her story, we all just love it. Because her books are fantastic and she worked so hard to get where she is! And then there are other authors, no less talented, who had a much easier ride. And we wonder if maybe they should have struggled more or shouldn’t be getting quite so much money. It’s like when your favorite band gets signed to a major record label and you immediately decide that they’ve sold out. (Is this an apt metaphor for these modern times? What exactly is a major record label?)

But think about the best books you’ve ever read, how they’ve stayed with you forever. How someone was able to take mere words and turn them into pictures in your mind. Shouldn’t everyone who ever did that for you get to live in a nice big house with maybe a lifelong supply of paper and pens? (I mean, actually I think that everyone should, if they so choose, get to live in a nice big house with a lifelong supply of paper and pens, but that is precisely the direction our country has been furiously heading away from.) Though, of course, this line of thinking leads me back to the idea that David Sedaris should be for The People and maybe his tickets could be a little less pricey. Is my love and devotion simply not enough for this guy? I mean, really.

Based On No Recommendations

Sometimes you find a book and it will be exactly the right book to read exactly when you need to be reading it. Or like a few months ago when a friend suggested I read Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts/The Day of the Locust, which were both not only perfect but were exactly what I needed to be reading at that time. And this I have to say is rare for me actually since, and I have to be straight up about this, I don’t like book recommendations. Probably the worst thing someone could get me as a gift is a book. That’s truly insane, but it is the truth. I might read about a book and then want to get it, but when people I like and respect tell me about good books they are reading, well, it has almost the opposite effect. It feels like, and maybe this is the problem, homework. Yeah, fine, force this book on me and I will suddenly have no interest in it. However, I can easily be tricked into reading something in a much more subtle way.

Once many years ago my friend Rachel told me about how she saw some high school kid reading Brideshead Revisted on the subway and what thrilled her was how he had a huge grin on his face the entire time he was reading. This made me read the book. Or if a book (City of Thieves by David Benioff) is just lying on someone’s coffee table, say, and I pick it up and the person says, Oh my god, that book was fantastic! I will say, Oh really? And then a few weeks later take it out of the library. (Note: that book was fantastic.) And sometimes an approach like, Well, I really liked this book, but whatever, works wonders for me.

It’s not so much that I don’t want to read what other people are reading. Except try as I might I could not get into The Corrections. And I don’t feel like reading those Girl with the etc. books. Or the Twilight books because, well. And since there is always the panic with every single book I read that once I am done I am certain that I will never read another good book again, you’d think that I would like book recommendations. But I just usually need to get to books in a very round-about way. So that it seems like I’m the one who decided to read the book without any outside intervention.

The strangest (and possibly unrelated) thing about all this is what I end up reading when I have to kill time in a bookstore. An entire store of books to choose from and I will end up reading, oh, I don’t know, Kathy Griffin’s autobiography (Brooke Shields is really nice!). Or some graphic novels that I always mean to buy but never do. So you could say that left to my own devices I don’t always make the wisest choices. But they are my choices! And usually when someone has lent me or bought me a book, I will either try to read it and fail or put it aside for a long time and eventually read it when I am good and ready. I can’t fight this weird resistance to book recommendations. But I do always take note of everything everyone else is reading.

Because really it’s just the approach that matters. I think this is because the most vivid memory I have of this sort of thing is my mother, for some reason uncharacteristically low key, handing me the book The Catcher in the Rye one day the summer before high school, and calmly saying, I think you might like this. Just that simple sentence, as though it hardly mattered at all. And it seemed to me that there was no reason at all not to read it. And so I did.

Denouement

What Really Knocks Me Out

The very first author I wrote to was Judy Blume in what I think was the sixth grade. Like pretty much all girls my age I had read Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret so many times that I could practically recite the entire book by heart (“We moved the Tuesday before Labor Day. I knew what the weather was like the second I got up.”). Although I will say that though Judy Blume’s books appealed to me because they were just about ordinary kids, I was also drawn to the great Paul Zindel, whose books were always set in Staten Island and whose main characters were always miserable and lonely and freaks of some kind. Anyway, after writing to Judy Blume, I was greatly disappointed to receive from Judy a very friendly but unmistakable form letter, since of course being so busy she couldn’t possibly answer every fan letter she got, much as she wanted to. What made this even more of a crushing blow was that another girl in my class had written to the much-lesser-known YA author Paula Danziger and had received a handwritten letter in green ink! With drawings and everything! So disappointed was I by Judy Blume’s response that I didn’t write to another author for years. But then when I did, it was a different story entirely.

You know that thing that Holden Caulfield says in The Catcher in the Rye? “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.” This is pretty much the reason I started writing to authors again.

Way back before the internets were invented, this was more of a challenge than it is now, but it turns out that I was usually up to the task. Which is why, when I happened to look through an old Manhattan phone book (thanks, Dad, for never throwing things like that out!) about fifteen years ago, and found David Sedaris’s address on Thompson Street, well, I figured that was reason enough to write. And he sent me back a lovely typewritten letter from France, which is where he was living at the time, and in addition to a bunch of other things he mentioned how the day before, while taking a walk in the woods, he saw a fox and screamed like a girl and ran. (Oh David, may you never stop screaming like a girl.) After this, well, I have pretty much always tried to write to authors that I particularly like, sometimes for the mere fact of thanking them for their great writing. It’s not like I’m writing to authors regularly or anything. Just, you know, maybe once a year or so. But take note, Judy Blume, you were the first and last author to respond with a form letter!

And now we come to my most recent experience of writing to an author, an author I once dared to disparage on this very blog. What happened was that I was pretty sure he wasn’t very funny, even though much of the literary world seemed to be certain that he was. And then I read something recently he wrote and I found it funny! This was kind of startling actually. I went in so sure I would hate it and I didn’t! Either I had been wrong all along or his writing was now completely different. I have no idea. Though I’m not sure if I should spend too much time pondering why the complete turn around. (I mean, wasn’t it the great poet Madonna who said “life is a mystery”?) Thus after this transforming experience, I figured, well, I’d been going around knocking this guy for some time (though it is safe to say he had no idea) and I decided to come clean. So I wrote an email to him apologizing for thinking he wasn’t funny when he was in fact funny! And he wrote back very graciously accepting my apology, saying he was funny enough. Which just confirms the fact that authors really like being written to. I mean, despite notable exceptions, you might even say that authors write for an audience. And of course, if you think about it, people who spend a good portion of their lives writing are probably the sort of people that are going to write you back.

Not Actually Reading

What happens when you mean to write a blog about reading and you’ve stopped reading for a time? I mean, no, that’s not right. I am always reading something. It’s just that I haven’t read an actual book in a while. How did this happen? It’s kind of hard to figure out, but it’s the truth. Just recently I could not keep up with the New Yorkers arriving seemingly every two minutes and now I’m practically racing down to the mailbox every thirty seconds to see when the next one is here.

This is new for us, by the way, this having the mail arrive in our actual house. We have a mailbox in what might be considered our vestibule (if I knew actually what a vestibule was and I only think I do) and every morning our mailman drives up in his little almost-truck with the steering wheel on the wrong side, sits in there for a while, sorting the mail and smoking, and then actually delivers the mail into our vestibular mailbox. We have a little wire thingie at the bottom of our mailbox in which we can leave our letters to be mailed, and he just takes them away! But see, before this, for ten years we’d had to go to the post office to get our mail because where we lived did not have actual mail delivery.

Now where we lived previously, in North Chatham, the post office was just across the street from us in what was once the parlor of what was once Alberta’s house. It was Alberta’s house for a long time and Alberta was the postmaster for a long time too, but now it’s just an emptyish house with a post office inside it. And for a long time I liked having a post office that was inside an actual house, but I have lately discovered that having mail delivered in my own actual house is even better. Even so, this has very little to do with why I haven’t been reading books lately. I want to read books, don’t get me wrong, but I keep forgetting to buy books or take them out of the library and then the evening comes and there is not a single book to read. And all our old books are still packed up in their 60 plus boxes, just in case I was interested in rereading anything, which I might have been, if I had access to them. So then I just read various things online, and somehow hours go by, but really it's just not the same.

Yet sometimes you kind of need a small break like this. You need to get all distracted and even bored and restless and then, when it’s time to come back to books, you will remember why it is that you keep reading them and writing about reading them. As long as books are around, you will always have something to do.