This morning I took my younger daughter to her swim lessons at the lake we’ve been going to for I think seven summers now. She’s been doing these lessons for the past two weeks, but today was the first time I took her. Usually, in past summers, it was me taking my girls to these swim lessons, and so today I planned to approach it antisocially as I have been doing the past couple of years, which involved sitting way over to the side at these picnic tables and reading The New Yorker or whatever book I would be distractedly managing to work through the entire summer. But when I got there today I noticed that the picnic tables were not shaded as they usually were, but blazingly right in the sun. This is not the kind of day to be messing with sun. I took my magazine over to the shaded benches where all the other moms were talking about things their kids said and soccer tryouts and that sort of thing and I tried to read in my usual distracted way. I squinted way out at the dock where my daughter was practicing dives and I could just make her out.
Then I noticed someone sitting all alone at one of the picnic tables the way I used to do, not even minding the sun, and reading a book. I was immediately interested. Then I realized that I actually knew this woman, that we had talked over the years, mostly at picnic tables at this very lake, and I headed over there. As I approached I saw the name Mary Oliver on the book she was reading and I knew then that I was heading for something good.
The book was called A Poetry Handbook, and in it Mary Oliver kind of guides readers on how to write poetry, but in such a beautiful and graceful way, as she can’t help doing. And so this woman and I talked about Mary Oliver and poetry and Mary Oliver poems and writing in general (she too is a writer) and it was then that I began to realize that the knotted feeling in my stomach that I had brought to the lake with me was slowly unknotting. I have noticed something like this happening to me a couple times before in the past year, but the first time was last summer where at this huge retrospective Picasso exhibit at the Met, I literally felt something just lift up and out of my body. I mean, not to get all clichéd and everything, but it was a feeling of transcendence. When we got through the Picasso exhibit, I told my friend Alisa that I needed to go back to the beginning and go through it again, and so she went off to look at medieval paintings, and I lingered there, noticing, always noticing, the lightness that had come over me.
And so here at the lake, talking about the Mary Oliver book, it was happening again. I know that I’ve said this many times before, and even here, but there’s that line from Oliver’s famous poem “The Summer Day” that I can’t stop thinking about: “I don't know exactly what a prayer is/I do know how to pay attention…” Which, exactly.
After a while of talking, our kids came out of the lake, and I said to this woman, this almost friend of mine, Hey, do you want to get together sometime? My question kind of took us both by surprise, and she said, Sure, that would be great. Before I left, she told me to look for this other Mary Oliver poem that I didn’t know called “Wild Geese.” I think you’ll like it, she said.
Here’s how it ends:
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Monday, July 18, 2011
Scary Stories
One day when I was about 13 or 14 I stayed home sick from school and somehow came across the book Rosemary’s Baby on the bookshelf in our hallway. Several hours later I was to be found frozen in bed having read the book in its entirety and too terrified to move. The important thing to know is that it is a book about devil worshipers, and you’d think by then I’d have learned my lesson regarding this topic, but clearly I did not. Even now I’m not sure I can think of a scarier book.
I don’t know if it’s the devil-worshiping topic itself that was so terrifying to me, though there was that (and strangely being raised by atheists somehow failed to make me doubt the devil’s existence). But the one part that really stuck with me, and it's a theme you'll see again and again in scary stories, was the fact that Rosemary goes to her doctor and explains the whole story to him and you think that finally someone will believe her, but the doctor simply leads her back to the devil worshipers who have convinced him that she is simply crazy and needs their care. It’s like that short story, “I Only Came to Use the Phone” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which ends up doing the same sort of thing. I mean, take look at the title. A woman’s car breaks down and she gets a ride on a bus that’s going to a mental hospital. She gets admitted as a patient and no one believes that she isn’t. She is ultimately forced to stay there forever. Now, that’s scary!
But just the other day I found myself rereading Paul Auster’s City of Glass, which I’d first read about 12 years ago. I totally remember the experience of reading it on the subway and looking around in horror and wondering if maybe I had to stop reading it because it was so disturbing and creepy. It wasn’t scary exactly and yet, had I been alone in bed reading I might have remained there frozen for some hours. Yet reading it the other day was a totally different experience. Really I just took total pleasure in its creepiness. I could say that it starts like all Paul Auster books, but since that was the first book he wrote I guess I could say, It starts like all the Paul Auster books that would come after it but at this point it was still quite unique, in which an ordinary guy who just had some tragic event occur in his life finds himself in an extraordinary circumstance. And eventually he is plunged into madness. So it isn’t exactly scary, in the true sense of the word, but there is much to disturb the reader. At least there’re no devil worshipers in that one.
But what has gotten me thinking about all this is that right now I’m reading (and by reading I mean at the exceedingly slow pace of like five pages every three days, which is how I read books in the summer) Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. You probably know Shirley Jackson from her famous story “The Lottery,” but it’s almost a shame if you do because everything else she wrote is just so damn funny and purely a joy to read. But is it scary? This is what I keep asking myself and, to be honest, complaining about to my entire family. This book is so much fun to read, but it’s not scary. The quote from the New York Times Book Review on the cover says, “Makes your blood chill and your scalp prickle.”
Well, no, it doesn’t, really. Sure there are parts with doors unexpectedly locking and mysterious writing found on the walls of the house. But really I find myself more pleasurably distracted with things that the character of Eleanor thinks, to calm herself: “I have red shoes, she thought—that goes with being Eleanor; I dislike lobster and sleep on my left side and crack my knuckles when I am nervous and save buttons.” And really there are some scary things going on in the house, like a room that is suddenly covered in blood or an area next to the nursery that is unspeakably cold or the fact that Hill House itself seems to be alive. But it hardly seems to matter. So this makes me wonder: am I no longer so easily scared? Or is it just that I can no longer be scared by stories? Or is it that the last ten pages of the Jackson book are so terrifying that when I (finally!) get to them I won't be able to speak for hours afterward?
Coming soon: answers to these questions.
I don’t know if it’s the devil-worshiping topic itself that was so terrifying to me, though there was that (and strangely being raised by atheists somehow failed to make me doubt the devil’s existence). But the one part that really stuck with me, and it's a theme you'll see again and again in scary stories, was the fact that Rosemary goes to her doctor and explains the whole story to him and you think that finally someone will believe her, but the doctor simply leads her back to the devil worshipers who have convinced him that she is simply crazy and needs their care. It’s like that short story, “I Only Came to Use the Phone” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which ends up doing the same sort of thing. I mean, take look at the title. A woman’s car breaks down and she gets a ride on a bus that’s going to a mental hospital. She gets admitted as a patient and no one believes that she isn’t. She is ultimately forced to stay there forever. Now, that’s scary!
But just the other day I found myself rereading Paul Auster’s City of Glass, which I’d first read about 12 years ago. I totally remember the experience of reading it on the subway and looking around in horror and wondering if maybe I had to stop reading it because it was so disturbing and creepy. It wasn’t scary exactly and yet, had I been alone in bed reading I might have remained there frozen for some hours. Yet reading it the other day was a totally different experience. Really I just took total pleasure in its creepiness. I could say that it starts like all Paul Auster books, but since that was the first book he wrote I guess I could say, It starts like all the Paul Auster books that would come after it but at this point it was still quite unique, in which an ordinary guy who just had some tragic event occur in his life finds himself in an extraordinary circumstance. And eventually he is plunged into madness. So it isn’t exactly scary, in the true sense of the word, but there is much to disturb the reader. At least there’re no devil worshipers in that one.
But what has gotten me thinking about all this is that right now I’m reading (and by reading I mean at the exceedingly slow pace of like five pages every three days, which is how I read books in the summer) Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. You probably know Shirley Jackson from her famous story “The Lottery,” but it’s almost a shame if you do because everything else she wrote is just so damn funny and purely a joy to read. But is it scary? This is what I keep asking myself and, to be honest, complaining about to my entire family. This book is so much fun to read, but it’s not scary. The quote from the New York Times Book Review on the cover says, “Makes your blood chill and your scalp prickle.”
Well, no, it doesn’t, really. Sure there are parts with doors unexpectedly locking and mysterious writing found on the walls of the house. But really I find myself more pleasurably distracted with things that the character of Eleanor thinks, to calm herself: “I have red shoes, she thought—that goes with being Eleanor; I dislike lobster and sleep on my left side and crack my knuckles when I am nervous and save buttons.” And really there are some scary things going on in the house, like a room that is suddenly covered in blood or an area next to the nursery that is unspeakably cold or the fact that Hill House itself seems to be alive. But it hardly seems to matter. So this makes me wonder: am I no longer so easily scared? Or is it just that I can no longer be scared by stories? Or is it that the last ten pages of the Jackson book are so terrifying that when I (finally!) get to them I won't be able to speak for hours afterward?
Coming soon: answers to these questions.
Saturday, May 14, 2011
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.
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.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
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.
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.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
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.
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.
Sunday, March 6, 2011
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.
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.
Friday, February 18, 2011
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