Fiction and food, the familiar and the faraway

I read a variety of books this month,  but I noticed as I looked over the list that many of them, fiction and nonfiction alike, featured food prominently. Location mattered, too, as I gravitated towards books set near and far, from Seattle to New England, from New York to Paris, to the mountains of Bhutan. I guess I was craving a virtual getaway. The rest of the household stuck to some familiar themes. I’ll start with their reading.

The Computer Scientist, who is a former Marine, enjoyed The Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan. He says it’s a great read for anyone interested in the dynamics and challenges of Special Forces and what they faced in Afghanistan. He also read I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson, because Stephen King cites Matheson as an influence in his writing. He found the stories enjoyable and says some are intriguing enough to re-read.

The Preteen just read an Enola Holmes book by Nancy Springer, The Case of the Cryptic Crinoline. She pronounces this latest mystery featuring Sherlock’s younger sister, “great.” She says she likes Enola because she “sticks up for herself.”  She enjoyed the Summer Reading Kickoff at Gibson’s, and started reading a series Nancy Keane recommended, the Books of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau.

Bookconscious regulars know the Teenager lives and breathes soccer. His summer reading, and writing, is focused on the beautiful game. He recently read Soccer in a Football World and Beckham: Both Feet on the Ground: An Autobiography. He’s also been enjoying the New York Times. We recently restarted our home delivery of the paper, and he’s been impressed with the soccer coverage, the business section, and the paper’s global scope.

We  finished reading T.S. Eliot’s “The Four Quartets” in our literary circle. In an earlier bookconscious post, I explained that the Teenager requested Eliot and we’ve been reading our way through some of his major poems since April. He found “The Four Quartets” very appealing because he felt it was a little easier to penetrate than “The Waste Land,” but still full of intriguing language and fascinating imagery. When we talked about “Little Gidding” he said he liked the storytelling voice that seemed to take over the poem.

I enjoyed “The Four Quartets” very much myself. I liked the way Eliot refers back to some of his own earlier work and gives readers of “The Waste Land” a sense of completion — many of the disturbing spiritual and emotional disconnect is restored and reconnected in the later poem. As a not very accomplished student of mindfulness, I think Eliot masterfully describes the trouble with the human tendency to look backwards and forwards, rather than seeing what’s happening right now in this moment

Eliot also clearly values literary history and is very concerned with war and its inevitable connections to both the past and future. I think his poetry reflects a mindfulness influenced by his Western perspectives, recognizing the suffering our attachments and desires cause us, scrutinizing our historical mistakes, and trying to carry the best of human experience (including great literature) with us as we move into the future.

The way Eliot synthesizes so many influences — grail mythology, Hindu texts, Buddhist philosophy, Christian spirituality and mysticism, and literature from ancient to modern — makes his work endlessly intriguing. He’s definitely an example of the bookconscious theory of interconnectedness. It sometimes feels like he puts everything he’s ever read, and everywhere he’s ever been or thought of going (as well as a few imagined locations) into his work.

The Computer Scientist found some useful secondary sources at Ohrstrom Library that helped us untangle the layers of meaning in “The Four Quartets.” Two were The Composition of the Four Quartets by Helen Gardner and T.S. Eliot: The Longer Poems: The Wasteland, Ash Wednesday, Four Quartets by Derek Traversi. He also found artist David Finn’s inviting book of paintings, Evocations of Four Quartets, from Ohrstrom library, which added a whole new dimension to our Eliot explorations. I would love to see these works in person.

Another artist whose work I admired this month is Brian Andreas. I picked up Volume 5, Hearing Voices, in his series of “Mostly True Stories and Drawings” at the Five Colleges Book Sale last spring. Andreas writes in his introduction that his creative process is about listening: “Every line is a whisper of memory, of my life at that moment.” He suggests, “There may be answers hidden in the quick connections of this book. Or maybe they’re just beyond the edges, waiting for us to hear.”

An example of the stories in Hearing Voices is Invention. Story or art? You decide. I took this book to the beach (one of the only days in June that it didn’t rain) and both kids thought it was funny and strange.

Eliot’s poems and Andreas’s stories were the two things I read that had nothing to with food. One book I very much enjoyed focused on what animals eat, specifically deer, wild turkeys, and other New Hampshire wildlife. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has a new book coming out in September, The Hidden Life of Deer: Lessons From the Natural World. It’s the first “ARC” or advanced reading copy, I’ve read as events coordinator at Gibson’s Bookstore. I’m working on setting up a date for Thomas to come read from the book and sign at the store. Watch our events calendar, because she’ll be coming in the fall.

In The Hidden Life of Deer, Thomas writes about what she learned as she fed deer and turkeys near her home after the  the oaks failed to produce their usual crop of acorns a few years ago. It turns out there is a very good reason for the dearth of acorns, which Thomas explains. She decided to help her animal neighbors avoid starvation, and she doesn’t shy away from discussing the arguments against putting out corn, the possibility that when she fed the wildlife she was “meddling” with nature, and why she chose to do so.

In fact, one of the nicest things about this book is that although Thomas writes beautifully and presents a great deal of very specific scientific information, you get the feeling she’s just telling you the story as you sit with her. I liked hearing about her interactions with a hunter neighbor and the NH Fish and Game Department, as well as her observations about the deer’s family groups.

Thomas’s knowledge and exploration of the natural world began when she was just a girl, and she shares some of the formative experiences that have fed her interest in animals and plants and their symbiotic relationships. She has a beautiful way of elucidating these interdependencies, both among flora and fauna and between humans and the wild.

I found these passages fascinating and educational.  Thomas talks about inadvertently destroying a “refugium of flies” in her shed, something I’d never heard of.  And her distress over the chain reaction she accidentally set off when ridding her office of rats gave me pause.

Thomas’s musings on ethics, history, and biology, and her deep curiosity and keen observations, make The Hidden Life of Deer so much more than a well written, thoughtfully researched book on deer. How many people have ever heard a mouse sing? Who else has written about it? Thomas has a gift for this kind of remarkable detail. Look for her book this fall.

From a book that’s not yet in stores, to one I’ve had for years but left in the to-read pile until recently: Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey Into Bhutan by Jamie Zeppa. I’ve recently become friends with a refugee family from Bhutan, who’ve spent years in a camp in Nepal waiting to either go home or be resettled. I remembered that I had the book on my shelf after we talked about their leaving Bhutan.

Zeppa arrived in the country just before the unrest. She was there as a volunteer teacher with a Canadian NGO. Beyond Earth and Sky is her memoir of moving to Bhutan, overcoming culture shock, embracing Buddhism, teaching in an elementary school and then in a college English department, and falling in love.

Beyond the Sky and the Earth provides an honest look at what many international volunteers go through as they not only adapt to their new surroundings, but also feel differently about their native culture.  I enjoyed reading about Zeppa’s personal transformation, especially because she was honest about the setbacks she experienced as well as the discoveries. If you liked Eat, Pray, Love, but felt like it was a little unrealistic, try Beyond the Sky and the Earth.

Zeppa’s  descriptions of Bhutanese food, culture, and landscape transported me away from rainy New Hampshire, and helped me figure out what I’ve been eating at my friends’ house. But the book that made me hungriest this month was Giulia Melucci ’s I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti. Melucci is coming to Gibson’s on August 5th, for a reading sponsored by the Women’s Fund of New Hampshire.

Her memoir of life as a young professional in New York, looking for love and loving to cook, is a fun read. Melucci writes fondly of her family and friends and even some of her exes, but my favorite part of the book is the mouth watering meal descriptions and recipes. I dare you not to nosh while reading this book — I went through large bowls of popcorn, myself.

Both Zeppa and Melucci not only describe great meals, but also write beautifully about places they love — Bhutan and Canada, New York and Connecticut.  Even though Melucci’s locations aren’t as exotic, she manages to bring them to life. I could see all the places these talented women described, from Brooklyn neighborhoods to mountain trails, and I really love a book that can take me somewhere, whether it’s familiar or faraway.

Seattle is a relatively familiar place, since we lived in the area for five years. The Computer Scientist worked for a large software company located in nearby Redmond, Washington. Seattle region has long been a foodie paradise. Matthew Amster-Burton’s memoir, Hungry Monkey, describes his determination that fatherhood was not going to end his forays into Seattle’s many markets and restaurants.

I enjoyed some of this book, but ended up skimming the rest, mainly because it reminded me of many reasons that our five years in Seattle were some of the loneliest and most frustrating of my life. It’s not Amster-Burton’s fault, personally. But everything from his hyphenated name to his trendy eating habits (I suspect that even the little ethnic hole in the walls he slums in are hot spots with other slumming urbanites) brought back bad memories. I suppose I should be thankful, because our time in Seattle brought us “home” to New Hampshire.

Also, I had such a hard time fitting in with young hip parents in the Northwest that I found my way into my first ever book group, which met a local branch library. I was the youngest member by at least a dozen years or more, but those women eased my loneliness and helped me find my tribe: book people. Which led me, eventually, to feel so at home in New Hampshire, a place brimming with book people.

New Hampshire was more like Seattle this month, as we had one of the grayest, rainiest Junes on record. I spent many a late night curled up listening to rain on the roof and reading a novel. I also finished Olive Kitteridge and discussed it with Gibson’s Book Club. We talked for a couple of hours straight about Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer winning linked story collection.

While I enjoyed reading Olive Kitteridge, I had a hard time with all of the “issues” — every story featured something appalling straight out of the headlines. It felt like too much to me. A linked story collection, also set in Maine, that I liked better was Monica Wood’s Ernie’s Ark.

I also read Adiga Aravind’s The White Tiger, Alice Hoffman’s The Story Sisters, and Elinor Lipman’s The Family Man. I enjoyed all three, for entirely different reasons.  Like the nonfiction I gravitated towards this month, these three novels depend on a strong sense of place and feature mouth watering descriptions of food.

The White Tiger won the Man Booker Prize last year. Set in India, the novel follows the progress of a young man, Balram Halwai, from his village to the city as a servant to the son of one of the “big men” who control politics and business back in “The Darkness,” as Balram calls the countryside. Balram tells the story in a series of letters to Wen Jiabao (the Chinese premier) written over seven nights after he has found freedom.

Like Slumdog Millionaire, The White Tiger presents the cavernous divide between the rich and poor in contemporary India, as well as the ongoing tension between Hindus and Muslims and the corruption that taints all levels of government. Balram calls his story “The Autobiography of a Half-Baked Indian,” in reference to his unfinished education and limited opportunities.  Balram ultimately pulls himself out of poverty, but his tale is far from uplifting or inspiring, although it was hard to put down.

Adiga, who was a journalist for many years, recently told NHPR’s Virginia Prescott that “India is mind bogglingly complex” and that he sets out to to portray the “social complexity of life in India” in his fiction. His prose not only brings the narrative to life, but also gives readers who’ve never been to India the sights, sounds, and smells his characters are experiencing in vivid detail. He certainly tells a compelling story.

Both The Story Sisters and The Family Man are well written, entertaining, good old fashioned yarns. The Story Sisters is the more complex of the two books, with snippets of a fair tale interwoven with the story of three sisters growing up with a single mother in Long Island, and a grandmother in Paris. After a traumatic experience as a young girl, the passionately imaginative eldest sister creates the fairy tale world the sisters escape into, and her yearning for an alternate reality ultimately leads her into a troubled adolescence.

While the novel is a story of her coming of age and the impact it has on the rest of the family, Hoffman also gives attention to the other sisters, their mother, and an array of secondary characters in a series of intense subplots. It’s a haunting, layered book that emphasizes human resilience and the power of love, without becoming maudlin or spiraling into cliche.

Hoffman brought Long Island, Manhattan, Paris, and the New Hampshire North Country to life. And like Giulia Melucci cooking for the men she dates in New York, the youngest Story sister cooks first for an elderly couple who find love late in life, and then for a family friend she eventually falls in love with. You’ll want to go to Paris when you finish this book. Or at least cook something French.

The Family Man is also set in New York and is the story of a newly retired lawyer, Henry, who reconnects with his step-daughter after his ex-wife is widowed, and also finds a partner after nearly giving up on love. Lipman’s book is as astutely observant of social mores and as subtly hilarious as a Jane Austen novel. The ex-wife is a funny but humane send-up of wealthy New York society wives. She’s also the catalyst for the novel’s narrative, which brings together a lovable cast of characters in a narrative full of crazy twists and turns and an “all’s well that ends well” sensibility. If you like social comedy, try The Family Man.

Last week I finished Mudbound, ahead of schedule (it’s the Gibson’s Book Club July selection. Join us July13 at 7 pm or August 17 at noon to discuss it).  I really enjoyed the shifting point of view Hillary Nelson employs in telling the story. That said, I would have liked to hear more from some of the six characters who speak, and I think it would have been interesting to hear the racist father-in-law’s perspective.

Mudbound is set in postwar Mississippi, where the characters are dealing with the financial and physical challenges of farming, as well as racism, the social dynamic of sharecropping, and post war trauma. A dramatic book, Mudbound relies on personalities and perceptions as much as plot. The land itself, from the muddy Delta cotton country to the battlefields of WWII, has a starring role.

I’ve begun reading Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas. Yesterday I read one of the most creative running scenes I’ve ever come across anywhere. I’m really enjoying the prose, and I pointed out to the Teenager this afternoon that  “The Four Quartets” figures in the story. The bookconscious literary circle is discussing the first third of Farenheit 451 this week. I clipped this photo of Ray Bradbury and hung it near the kitchen sink, and I’m happy to be re-reading one of my favorite books.

A final thought on connections and the nourishment of books. My kids had eschewed my reading aloud for months. They came to my first preschool story time this week at Gibson’s, and this evening my son told the Computer Scientist he’d forgotten how much fun my story times are. My daughter agreed. The entire exchange lasted maybe thirty seconds, but I sensed an opening.

A few days ago, I’d brought home The Serial Garden from the library. I loved Joan Aiken’s books when I was young. However, since I suggested it, the Preteen glanced skeptically at the cover and said, “maybe,” in that special terse tone of voice she reserves just for me. But this evening, as the busy weekend drew to a close, and fireflies flickered in the deepening dark, I began to read aloud. They both listened. Stories, good ones, take us away even from our selves, into a place where it doesn’t matter how old we are, how we’re feeling, how awkward and uncomfortable the world seems, how grown up we want to be.

Share a book with someone tonight, or with yourself. Let it fill you up.

Powerful personalities, poems, and promises

It’s rainy and cool here in New Hampshire as I start this post, perfect weather for getting into pajamas after supper and curling up with a good book. I have somewhere to be, however. It’s a place I’ve mentioned several times on bookconscious: Gibson’s Bookstore. Tonight will be different: I’m the new events coordinator for the store!

I admit I’ve been in a more or less constant state of panicky excitement since accepting the job. “Cool, I’m going to meet so many authors! Aagghh, when will I write? It’s nice to have someone be so confident I’ll do a good job. Ack, what if I can’t figure out how to organize more events, increase attendance etc.? Oh stop worrying, you’ll do fine!”

Despite the interruptions from this annoying internal dialogue, I have managed to read most evenings, and the rest of the family, who are all utterly unruffled by my new status as an employed person, have all kinds of good books going. So without further ado, here’s what we’re reading in the bookconscious household.

The preteen is back to reading Royal Diairies, which she enjoys because they are historical fiction accounts of famous women’s girlhoods.  She’s also reading Live Free and Eat Pie, which I recommended, because the Computer Scientist took her and her best friend to one of Rebecca Rule’s storytelling evenings. They all thought it was hilarious fun, and apparently, he entertained them on the way there with an amusing anecdote about getting a cocktail straw stuck up his nose at a swanky party at the Superintendent’s house when he was a midshipman first class at the Naval Academy.

The teenager continues to read and study T.S. Eliot. He’s analyzing “What the Thunder Said,” which is the final section of The Waste Land, in order to write an essay. Next we’re going to read and discuss “The Four Quartets.”  He asked me the other day if we can keep reading poetry for our literary discussion group, instead of going back to novels. He’s also reading Instant Physics: From Aristotle to Einstein, and Beyond, because he’s started a physics course and wanted to supplement it with a good read. Kid after my own heart.

The Computer Scientist is reading T.S. Eliot along with us, and is also digging into Rick Atkinson’s The Day of Battle, which is the second in a planned trilogy about WWII. He’s also got a bookmark in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Like me, he often has more than one book going. The other one on his nightstand with a bookmark in it is A Place on Water, which is a book of essays by three friends — Wesley McNair, Bill Roorbach, and Robert Kimber — who have “camps” (New England lingo for cabins) on a pond in Maine.

I just started a book set in Maine, Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. It’s the Gibson’s book club June selection, and it also just won the Pulitzer Prize.  I’ve just read the first of the book’s thirteen linked stories, called “Pharmacy,” and I really enjoyed it. The title character wasn’t the focus of the first story, and I’m looking forward to seeing how she pops up throughout the book. My first impression of  Strout’s writing is that it’s not predictable, and by the end of the first story I really adored the main character, Henry.  “Pharmacy” is an emotionally rich tale without being overblown or gooey with sentimentality.

Another writer whose work I enjoyed in May who is far from “gooey,” or as they might say in England, “treacly” about emotional topics, is Carol Ann Duffy. Like Strout, her writing packs a strong emotional punch. When I read about her selection as poet laureate of England, I checked the local library for her books. They have two of her books for young readers, The Tear Thief, and Queen Munch and Nibble, which the Preteen pronounced, “really cool stories to read to younger children, with cool illustrations, especially in The Tear Thief.”

Unfortunately, I had to order Duffy’s poetry collections on inter-library loan, but that takes no time here in New Hampshire, and I soon read two: The World’s Wife and Feminine Gospels. Both were amazing. It’s a bit humbling to imagine the intellect and creativity behind these poems.

The poems in The World’s Wife are told from the point of view of women in famous men’s lives throughout history and mythology, while Feminine Gospels deals more generally with themes of womanhood and female experience.  Both are full of powerful personalities that come alive. In both books I was impressed with Duffy’s poem craft — the way the language sings in her hands, her inclusion of rhythm, rhyme and near rhyme in thoroughly modern ways, the way she weaves voices and narratives. Lovely.

In May I read two other poetry books. One caught my eye in February, when it was Darwin’s 200th birthday: Darwin: A Life In Poems, by Ruth Padel. Padel happens to be Darwin’s great great granddaughter, but she is also a scholar, poet, BBC radio presenter, musician, and writer of acclaimed nonfiction books on everything from Greek views on the inner life of humans to tiger conservation. She’s led a fascinating life, and it’s the reading public’s good fortune that she is a talented writer who shares her experiences on the page.

Darwin was interesting because Padel used a variety of poetic forms, but also wrote in fairly contemporary style, with lots of enjambment (lines that wrap around), natural rhythm, and near rhyme rather than formal rhyme and meter. The stories of Darwin’s life told in the poems were also interesting — I’ve never read much about him beyond what one learns in history or science classes, and in the myriad magazine articles that appeared this year. The family stories, and Padel’s portrait of the Darwins’ marriage, were particularly fascinating. Interesting, too, to have these poems so recently in my mind as I began Olive Kitteridge, because Strout’s stories look closely at marriage.

The other poetry I read in May was a book I heard about on the Knopf poem-a-day newsletter in April, Du Fu: A Life in Poetry, translated by David Young. In his introduction, Young acknowledges earlier translators of the great Chinese poet’s work, as well as other poets who encouraged Young as he worked on the new translations, including Charles Simic, who referred to Du Fu as “a swell guy.”

I’d had a taste of Du Fu, or Tu Fu as he is sometimes known, when the kids and I learned about China. I enjoy many kinds of Asian poetry, especially Chinese classical poems and Japanese forms including senryu, haiku, and haibun. Young’s book is not only enjoyable poetry, but also informative translation and editing — his frequent notes provide historical, cultural, and biographical context that enriches the poems. It’s especially interesting reading Du Fu today because he wrote as a “golden” time in China was descending into upheaval.

Upheaval is a major theme in Fields of Light:A Son Remembers His Heroic Father by Joseph Hurka.  Bookconscious readers know I took a workshop from Hurka at NH Writers’ Project’s Writer’s Day this year, and read his novel last month. I enjoyed this memoir even more. Hurka visited his aunt in the Czech Republic in 1993, shortly after the fall of communism. He visits places important both to Czech history and his own family’s history, and tries to deepen his understanding of his father as well as the country.

Hurka’s writing is beautiful — evocative but uncluttered. As my grandmother would say, (and this is the highest praise she gives a book) there’s not one extra word.  Most of all, I loved Fields of Light because of the way Hurka seeks connections between what he knows and what he is discovering as he immerses himself in his journey. As an added bonus, I learned a great deal about Czech history, too.

Last month, I learned about Irish history around the time of WWI while reading the Gibson’s book club selection, A Long Long Way. Author Sebastian Barry gives readers another glimpse into Ireland’s past in his more recent novel, The Secret Scripture. This time, the book is set mostly in Ireland, and is told through two diaries the main characters are writing. One is a psychiatrist, and the other is a patient in an asylum which is being closed. The doctor is trying to asses whether the  patient, a 100 year old woman, can be discharged or should be moved to the new facility.

I enjoyed the story, although like his earlier book, Barry goes to the bone emotionally, and parts of The Secret Scripture were painful to read. The language was strikingly different — perhaps more modern, certainly less musical than the prose of A Long Long Way. The ending caught me off guard. I’m not sure if it was because I had less time to read this month and stayed up far too late, so just wasn’t alert to the clues, or if it really was an unexpected twist.

One reason I had less time to read other books was that I promised a friend I’d read both Concord Reads 2009 selections. Bookconscious fans know I chaired last year’s CR, which is our town’s “one book, one community” program. This year, the committee selected two books: Pay It Forward, a novel (and it turns out, not the first novel to use the phrase “pay it forward” and The Soloist, a nonfiction book. Both are well known as films, and both are about someone making a difference.

I won’t go into much detail now, because I am going to be leading book discussions about both titles in the fall, and I’ll be interested to report then whether other readers shared my initial impressions. Also, I’ll re-read the books before then and perhaps come up with some new thoughts.

I enjoyed Pay It Forward (although I thought the ending was fairly predictable and disappointing). The author, Catherine Ryan Hyde, employs a shifting point of view that was engaging. By the end of the book, I cared about the three main characters, and some of the minor characters were very interesting. Towards the end of the book, although I had guessed the outcome, I was intrigued by some of the turns in the plot.

I’m afraid that I didn’t enjoy The Soloist, which I hope means I’ll lead a good discussion because I’ll add a bit of dissent. The story itself is interesting, and Nathaniel Ayers and all the other people dealing with mental illness deserve the attention and help that’s come their way as a result of Steve Lopez’s columns.

I gave the book an “okay” on Goodreads, mainly because I got the impression it was not so much a well crafted book as a bunch of columns looking for a more lucrative deal and a bigger spotlight. In fairness, there may be good reasons for Lopez to seek those things — as he reminds readers repeatedly, the attention he brought to Skid Row in L.A. caught the eye of people in power who could bring about change.

Every book I read this month was chuck full of promises — made, kept, broken, bent, modified, renegotiated. From Du Fu’s lament over imperial posts that never worked out to Darwin’s struggle with his wife’s wishes that he resolve religion and science in his work, to Barry’s and Hyde’s fictional betrayals and Lopez’s struggle to get Nathaniel Ayers off the street, promises everywhere, many of them unfulfilled or unfulfilling.

Eliot explores the way people don’t remain true to each other or to any kind of lasting belief system in the Wasteland and end up leading empty lives. Carol Ann Duffy and Elizabeth Strout look at tough women able to varying degrees to navigate all the treachery the world might throw at them without totally losing it. Hurka faces the extent to which his father’s generation dealt with communism’s false, cruel promises after the long struggle against fascism.

But despite all the disappointment, deceit, treachery, selfishness, betrayal — each one of these books leaves at least a tiny pinhole for hope to fill. In every case, the characters I read about this month looked around at their imperfect, broken world and all the people hurting each other and letting each other down and found a way to survive. In fact, the common thread seems to be that even if they often do the wrong thing, humans are almost all gifted with the ability to go on, get up, try again, right their lives and make them work.

And that, when you think about it, is one of the reasons literature exists, to remind us that no matter how bad things get, we’ll get by. Even Eliot’s dark Waste Land ends with “Shantih, Shantih, Shantih” — which his note says is like “the peace which passeth all understanding,” beyond our human capacity to process, but with us, abiding in us and carrying us through, regardless of our frailty and our endless capacity to fail. Something bigger than any of us helps us transcend the worst in us.

What would Thoreau think?

April turned out to be a busy month, but I did find time to read. I suspect that the author of one of the books I finished, Walden, would not think much of either my hectic schedule or my eclectic reading. I started reading Walden last year, when the kids and I were learning about Thoreau and friends.  I ended up setting it aside, not only because I had other things to read, but also because Thoreau is a bit of a scold, and I wasn’t in the mood for his lectures.

After our visit to Concord in March, I decided to pick it up again. I tried to tune out the lecturing tone, and managed to finish the book. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it, and I think Thoreau was an incredible thinker and writer. I enjoyed Walden overall. It’s just that when Thoreau gets on his high horse about certain topics — including reading — he sounds a bit like a modern day television pundit, railing about a manufactured controversy. Even when I agree, maybe especially when I agree, I hate it when someone makes his or her points by disdaining opposing views.

I can generally identify with many of the things Thoreau gets hot and bothered about, like people not noticing how their “stuff” is ruling their lives, or how they are rushing along through life without really needing to, or missing out on the serenity and even maybe the sacredness of the natural world as they hurry up and “improve” the land for man’s purposes. It’s amazing actually, that Thoreau was asking questions in his time that we have still not answered for ourselves as a society today, and that many of us don’t ever answer for ourselves personally.

But even though I admire him and believe there is a much to learn from Walden and from his essays, Thoreau sometimes aggravates me with his harping. The chapter of Walden on reading irked me the most, even though I think Thoreau makes some very good points. It bothers him that some people haven’t read the “ancient classics in the language in which they were written,” (at the time, he tells us, there aren’t any translations of Homer, Aeschylus, or Virgil into English), and laments that his fellow citizens read the Bible but don’t even know other cultures have sacred scriptures, let alone what they teach.

OK, Henry, I’m with you so far. Sure, the classics are an amazing repository of human thought and beauty (although I can’t say much about reading them in the original, because I’ve only read translations). And I’m a big fan of learning about other belief systems, and learning from them about the universality of human experience, especially the seeking we all do for meaning, ethics, and purpose.

But Thoreau isn’t content just to long for a more broadly educated populous, steeped in the classics and comparative religion. He is also offended that not enough people are intellectuals. “Most men learned to read to serve a paltry convenience,” he grouses, “of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing, yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to while the while, but what we have to stand on tip-toe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to.” Good grief, this makes me cringe.

He also complains, “Most men are satisfied if they read or hear read, and perchance have been convicted of the wisdom of one good book, the Bible, and for the rest of their lives vegetate and dissipate their faculties in what is called easy reading.”  And if that’s not bad enough, “The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers. What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this town, with very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even in English literature, whose words all can read and spell.”  By now I was muttering to myself.

The  librarian in me chuckled a bit at Thoreau’s distress over the light reading material available at Concord’s library, such as novels. Some things never change –  library’s today still deal with patron complaints about what a library has in its collection (or doesn’t). Thoreau adds with disgust, “We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate, and in this respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my townsmen who cannot read at all, and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects.” Kind of makes you want to wrap your beach read in a towel, doesn’t it?

Thoreau has good intentions, beyond all this complaining. He believes that people would be better for reading good books, explaining, “The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones . . . . Moreover, with wisdom we shall learn liberality.”  I have to agree with his underlying premise, that understanding our lives in the context of man’s universal, timeless quest for wisdom would expand our minds, improve us and our world.

He is disgusted that school ends when one is grown, and calls for universal life learning: “It is time we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women.” As an autodidact trying to raise kids who know that learning isn’t a kids’ activity that happens in particular buildings during particular times, I couldn’t agree more.

But I have to say that I occasionally enjoy “chick lit,” I thought Nanny Diaries was hilarious social commentary, and I firmly believe what my Grandmother taught me: when times are tough, take comfort in a nice Agatha Christie mystery or maybe a Mrs. Pollifax spy adventure.  I don’t think telling people they are wasting their minds if they read for fun is fair. Who knows what connections they’re making? It’s like junk food in my mind — it’s not good for you, and you don’t need it, but a little bit isn’t going to kill you. And no one likes being around someone who stands next to the chips and dip at a party and lectures everyone within earshot about the dangers of fat and salt.

I encourage my family to read good books, and if you’ve followed bookconscious you know we’ve even discussed what makes a “great” book. A little bit of my schooled mind cringes, like Thoreau’s, when I see them reading comic strips instead of something I would classify as literature. But I am not a book snob, and I’ve learned that there’s philosophy in Calvin and Hobbes, and Foxtrot frequently illustrates the Computer Scientist’s contention that “math is life.” As a former librarian and life long “libraryologist” as the C.S. calls me, I’ve come to believe that if kids are reading something they love, it doesn’t matter what it is. Offer them a varied reading diet and they’ll get enough fruits and vegetables, but don’t deny them cheese puffs or candy in moderation.

I fear Thoreau would scold librarians for adding graphic novels to their collections, or featuring movie tie-in books. But I feel a little better knowing that even back in 19th century Concord, a place overflowing with writers and intellectuals and a well-read population, a place where many a farmer had learned a little Latin or Greek in his youth, where there was no television or world wide web or massively multiplayer online role-playing games, someone was already wringing his hands over the End of Reading. Because it didn’t happen then, and I don’t believe it will happen now. Writers will keep writing, and readers, reading.

In fact, despite the tanking economy, I’ve read recently that bookstores and libraries are reporting more patrons than ever. Reading is inexpensive entertainment, it lasts, and it can be a social event. I’ve invited my neighbor to come along on Monday, when Gibson’s book club will be discussing our May book, A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry.

Barry is a playwright and poet as well as a novelist. The protagonist of A Long, Long Way is Willie Dunn, brother of Annie Dunn, title character of Barry’s earlier novel. Annie Dunn also appears in Barry’s award winning play, The Steward of Christendom. That play, in turn, was based in part on Barry’s own great-grandfather. In an interview Barry mentions other experiences and family stories that made their way into A Long, Long Way. It’s a beautiful example of the Bookconscious Theory of Interconnectedness.

A Long, Long Way is, first of all, gorgeous. Barry’s language is so poetic, I could hear the book in my head as I read. As a novel, it’s tight and well crafted. The story is hard — Willie Dunn serves in the trenches of WWI, and as the war goes on not only does he deal with the horror but also with the political and social turmoil brewing in Ireland, and the fact that his service in the war will bring him personal troubles. Even when you want to turn away, the book’s terrible beauty holds you.

Like Willie Dunn and the men he comes to know in war, the reader can’t help but wonder how anyone growing up can possibly sort through the world’s propaganda and the things we’re told in childhood, on the long way towards figuring out what not only who we are but what is real and true and how to think independently. Willie leaves Ireland sure of what he knows and loves and believes, and experiences disillusionment but also transformation. We see him come of age, bringing the core of himself through the terror, making his way, finding family in his comrades at arms.

I won’t spoil the plot for you by telling anymore. I will add that I am so taken with Barry’s prose that I plan to check out The Secret Scripture and Annie Dunn in the future, and to try to track down his poetry on inter-library loan. The rhythm and lilt of his sentences reminded me of Seamus Heaney’s poems.

Speaking of WWI and of poetry, you may recall that the Teenager requested we read T.S. Eliot in April for our lit crit circle. He was struck by the quote on the National Poetry Month poster: “Do I dare disturb the universe?” So far we’ve read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and the first two parts of “The Waste Land.” Last weekend as we discussed “The Burial of the Dead,” and “A Game of Chess,” the Teenager pronounced Eliot a snob. All those literary references — he just has to rub his smarty-pants knowledge in our faces. Of course, Thoreau might point out that if we’d had the kind of classical education he urges, and stayed away from novels and comics, we’d be in a better position to understand.

And yet, The Teenager doesn’t dislike “The Waste Land,” nor did he dislike “Prufrock,” at least not entirely. He’s impressed by the language. It’s also somewhat satisfying to try and penetrate what seems like such utter bloody weirdness on first glance. The Computer Scientist and I let him know that we too are somewhat irritated by the know-it-all obscurity of the references and the hoity toity tone of the notes — where Eliot makes it clear he expects his readership to be as well read as he is. But we are persevering because we all want to know what made this poem so influential, and to understand it as best we can.

A number of secondary sources are helping us, including From Ritual to Romance and The Golden Bough, which Eliot mentions in his notes, and some annotated hypertext versions of the poem online. Essays on “The Waste Land” are easy to find, including a collection at the Modern American Poetry site, hosted by University of Illinois.

I also picked up some books at Ohrstrom Library: The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose, edited and annotated by Lawrence Rainey; The Waste Land: A Poem of Memory and Desire by Nancy K. Gish; and Valerie Eliot’s The Wasteland: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound. We probably won’t read any of these cover to cover, but referring to them and then discussing what we’ve learned helps unlock the poem.

Before the Dogs’ Night Out poetry reading I read Sharon Olds’ The Wellspring and Philip Schultz’s failure. Both poets write about family and love, life in a time of catastrophes, connections we seek. I go into more detail about their poems in my post on the reading.

On impulse one day at the library, I grabbed Contemporary Poetry of New England, an anthology edited by Jay Parini, from the poetry month display as I was about to check out. It’s an interesting collection, with some poems and poets new to me and others quite familiar. I was mystified that any collection of recent New England poetry could omit Donald Hall, but otherwise, I enjoyed it. Anthologies are great fun, and often lead me to seek out more of a particular poet.

After NH Writers’ Project Writers Day, I read Taking Down the Angel, a poetry collection by Jeff Friedman and Before, a novel by Joseph Hurka, because I took their workshops. Friedman’s poems in Taking Down the Angel are narrative, a little like Wesley NcNair’s, and I especially enjoyed his midrashic poems — pieces that enter a bibical story and add a new perspective, that serve as poetic commentary on the meaning and mystery of stories we think we know, telling them in new ways.

Hurka’s novel was not one I would normally have gravitated towards. I am a wimp when it comes to crime and suspense, and I tend to avoid anything that’s as scary as the newspaper. I’m glad I read Before, even though I didn’t care for the creepiest parts. Hurka’s writing is piercing. He must do scads of research, because the details of the characters’ lives are extremely fine tuned.

The main characters in Before are fascinating people — a former Czech resistance fighter and holocaust survivor living both in the present and in his memories as he undergoes therapy after a stroke and writes what he remembers, a college student struggling with her own losses as she tries to make life and art, and a disturbed criminal haunted by abuse who was once a very successful businessman.

Even the minor characters are vivid. Before is a short book, but dense. Through his interesting characters and a tense plot, Hurka explores memory and unconscious and the ways our interactions with other people are informed by what’s come before. I’ve got Hurka’s nonfiction book, Fields of Light: A Son Remembers His Heroic Father, on inter-library loan and I’m looking forward to it.

I haven’t started it yet because I had a couple of new books out of the library that I needed to finish first, since they have shorter loan periods. I’ve nearly finished Darwin: A Life in Poems by Ruth Padel, who is not only a well known British poet but also Charles Darwin’s great-great grandaughter. The book is fascinating, as the poems tell Darwin’s life story, and Padel’s notes include family details she learned in letters and other research. I’m finding the structure of the book a bit overwhelming — in order to keep up with the story, you have to keep reading, but reading several poems in a row feels rushed.

The other new book I finished last week was a quick read. A few weeks ago on the way to Concord, Massachusetts, we heard Scott Simon interview Jeffrey Archer on Weekend Edition Saturday. They were talking about Archer’s new novel, Paths of Glory, which is a ficitonalized biography of George Mallory and an account of the British effort to summit Mt. Everest. The interview picqued my interest — Simon’s interviews have led me to many a new book — so I reserved Paths of Glory.

Thoreau would likely not approve. Archer’s book was a fun, easy read. He did a great deal of research but the book didn’t require me to stand on tip-toe or flex my intellectual muscles. What it required — what much reading requires — was a suspension of reality for the duration of the book, an escape into another world, fictional or real. No one knows for sure whether George Mallory made it to the top of Everest. But he led a fascinating life before he died on the mountain that had bewitched him since his youth. I’m never going to summit Everest, and it was a great deal of fun going along with Archer as he imagines what may or may not have happened.

Archer’s book was a great escape into history, adventure, and romance. And like A Long, Long Way, “The Waste Land,” and Before, Paths of Glory illuminated the utter waste of war, which wrecks lives and leaves whole cultures unalterably damaged. Authors since Thoreau’s beloved Homer have explored the ways men and women survive war and either heal themselves and each other or succumb to their wounds for the rest of their lives. No matter the form — poetry or prose, classic epic or best seller, highbrow literary masterpiece or mass market phenomenon, readers benefit from probing the ideas each author unearths and making connections for themselves.

April in paradise, part III: book buying heaven

My family knows I have a sixth sense that spots used book stores and sniffs out library sales. My inner reading deals beacon honed in on a brief notice about the Five Colleges Book Sale in The Concord Monitor’s “Livewell” insert several weeks ago. The sale, which has run since 1961 and raises money for scholarships, features 35,000-40,000 used books! To paraphrase Kevin Henkes’ picture book, Lily’s Purple Plastic Purse, all I could say was “Wow!”

Which is why I was up at 6:30 am last Saturday. I removed all non-essentials from my purse in order to save my arm and shoulder strength for bags of books, ate a good breakfast, packed a granola bar, and drove about an hour to Lebanon, NH. Then I waited in line, chatting with my fellow book nuts, for another hour. It’s easy to chat with fellow members of the book tribe — the young woman in front of me was thrilled that I recognized the Finnish characters on her handmade tote bag: Moomins.  We were all in a state of giddy anticipation, and by the time the doors opened at 9 am, the line wrapped back around the school. And oh, was it worth the wait!

The Five Colleges Book Sale is by far the best sale I have ever attended, anywhere. The folks who run the sale have thought of everything. There’s an ample supply of boxes in case your tote bags prove to be too heavy, and plenty of space to take boxes to sort. They even offer a box storage area so that if you have so many books you can’t easily push them around, you can leave your boxes while you continue to browse.

Roving volunteers constantly straighten the tables of books, restock from clearly marked tables where people can return any books they’ve had second thoughts about, and even offer express checkout for those people with only a few books. All of these efforts reduce the impact of dealers on the individual shopper, and I found the whole atmosphere pleasant and the volunteers knowledgeable and helpful. Even the dealers — who were there in large numbers, because this is the largest sale in New England, were polite to individual buyers, and I saw no cut-throat grabbing of prized titles, which happened at all the sales I attended in a large metropolis in the Northwest where the Computer Scientist once worked for a large software company.

Ahead of the sale, the website tantalized with a list of this year’s sale highlights. In fact, this list pushed me over the top — I was wavering, considering staying home with my family on Saturday to enjoy our strange taste of summer weather (we had record setting heat). But when I saw this list, I could not resist.  And we’re all glad I went.

I bought 36 books, and spent $50.50, for an average of $1.40 per book. I concentrated on nonfiction, but I have to admit there were whole tables I never looked at — cookbooks, architecture, and psychology come to mind. With so much to look at, I had to be ruthless in considering a book’s appeal to the rest of the bookconscious household, so I put back anything I wavered over. I also tried hard to resist books I know I can get at the library.

I found books of poems and essays, a number of science and nature books that I knew would appeal to the Teenager and Pre-teen, as well as a book on mystics, another on sacred time, one on cultural memory and another on geography. Also, a book of Gerald Durrell’s essays and a collection of early work by Jane Austen. No doubt some of these will turn up in future bookconscious posts.

When I got back and unpacked my bags of treasure, the whole family gathered on the screened porch to see what I’d found. None of them think I’m crazy for spending a lovely Saturday lugging bags of books around a gym, bless them. And I’ve noticed them “grazing” on new books I’ve left on end tables to catch someone’s interest. The teenager even thanked me for finding him a new book on the universe, and the Computer Scientist grilled supper so I could focus on blogging. What a great day in paradise!

Quick aside: I carried my books around in two tote bags, one of which was a felted bag my friend Tricia made. You can check out her hand knit items and handspun wool at her etsy shop.

The final event in my April in paradise was Book Club Evening at Gibson’s. Wine, delicious appetizers from Concord Cooperative Market, fantastic desserts from Bread and Chocolate, and three publishing reps (Ron Koltnow and Lesley Vasilio of Random House and Ann Wachur, with Penguin) who each talked up about a dozen titles newly out in paperback. They even gave out book party favors (including advance reading copies) and raffled off tote bags. I sat between my next door neighbor and a fellow Songweaver. There’s good company in paradise.

I didn’t win any raffle items, but I can report that the food was delicious, and I noted a number of books for my “to read” list. Koltnow, Vasilio, and Wachur each talked about books they love, and as we visited around the store, lots of people were chatting up their favorite reads as well. I managed to limit myself to one purchase, Olive Kitteridge, which Gibson’s book club is discussing in June.

I was tempted to buy a memoir that sounds very interesting, Twenty Chickens for a Saddle, but I resisted, in part because I’ve got 36 new-to-me books from the sale. I will probably give in to temptation and go back and get it, eventually! Unless some other member of the bookconscious household is reading this and would like to know what to give his or her mother for Mothers’ Day . . . tell Dad Gibson’s gives 30% off to anyone parked in the garage — just show your ticket!

There are only two more days left in April, and I still haven’t written about the books I’ve read this month. Stay tuned for the next bookconscious post, which I’ll try to publish next week, for a peek at what we’ve been reading around here, in between fabulous literary events. And if you’re free next April, I recommend your spend your spring break here in paradise.

April in paradise, part II: Dogs’ Night Out and Writers’ Day

After the reading at Gibson’s, I was primed for another evening of extraordinary poetry, an event I mentioned in last month’s bookconscious post — Dog’s Night Out. Mike Pride, the retired Concord Monitor editor and a poetry lover, organized this event and wrote about the three poets who graced the stage: Philip Schultz, Wesley McNair, and Sharon Olds.  You read that right — three blockbuster poets. Last year’s reading, Poets Three, featured Maxine Kumin, Donald Hall, and Charles Simic. Paradise, I am telling you, is right here in the Granite State.

The Computer Scientist and I decided to attend Dogs’ Night Out on a date, sans kids. We had a wonderful time. Concord is a small city, and you tend to see people you know whenever you go out. I ran into several fellow Songweavers (singing, one could argue, is musical poetry), a handful of Concord Reads pals, and other book-minded folks as we waited for the doors to open.

The Computer Scientist is a logistical and spatial genius, and he figured out the optimal spot for a height challenged person (me) to see the stage.  He is also a kind husband who is unembarrassed that his poetry geek wife had a notebook on her lap and took copious notes during the reading. As we settled into our seats we took in the art gracing the stage — a number of large wire sculptures of dogs.

Mike Pride opened the evening by explaining that the sculptures are the work of Monica Banks, who is married to Philip Schultz, and that he had first seen one of her dog pieces at an exhibition at the Fells here in New Hampshire in 2007.  When he met Schultz at the Pulitzer prize dinner last year, and invited him to read here, the theme of the evening — Dogs’ Night Out — took shape in Pride’s mind, because of Banks’ sculpture and several poems in Schultz’s Pulitzer prize winning book, failure.

Pride introduced Wesley McNair first, who I had the privilege to meet and speak with at the 2008 NH Writers’ Project Writers’ Day (quick aside: I also said hello after Dogs’ Night Out, thanked him for some advice he offered while signing a book for me last year, and introduced the Computer Scientist. McNair was warm and encouraging — what a joy, to talk with a gifted person who is so down to earth, and so willing to share his time with fans and students). Pride also pointed out that just as with the Poets Three reading, he asked each poet to read one poem by one of the others, and that each poet would be reading something about dogs, in keeping with the theme.

McNair opened with one of his own poems, “The One Who Will Save You,” which is a superb narrative piece set in central Maine, featuring a large mongrel dog. Next he read Sharon Olds’ “First Thanksgiving,” a lovely poem about anticipating a child’s return from college. McNair went on to say he became a poet to “talk about a broken family in a broken world,” and explained that his first poem was one word: “Wanted,” which he wrote beneath a picture he drew of his father. Then he read “How I Became a Poet,” which describes this first effort to create meaning, to transform ordinary experience with words.

McNair read other personal and family poems, including “The Good Boy Suit,” “The Book of A,” and “As I Am,” a poem that perfectly describes the state of absorbed distraction my family frequently notes in me. I sometimes worry that this is evidence of my lack of mindfulness, but McNair’s poem helped me see it as a different sort of mindfulness, in which one is present in that open space between the inner and outer worlds that Diana Durham mentioned in her talk at the Kalevala conference.

McNair also read a number of what I think of as his observational poems, such as “Smoking,” “Hymn to the Comb-Over,” and “An Executive’s Afterlife,” which he wrote years ago about an executive in hell. A timely topic, perhaps. These are not just poems, but cultural sketches, art work that is utterly accessible, that fit McNair’s own stated goal of writing “poems for the back pockets of Americans.” He closed with “It,” a poem that pokes fun at the way most of us are linguistically unspecific in our everyday speech.

Next Mike Pride introduced Sharon Olds. Through his introductions, it was clear that these poets came together to read because Pride is their common denominator — and McNair called attention to the fact that Pride is a wonderful advocate for the arts, and especially poetry, and his Monitor pieces bring poetry to a wide audience. He met McNair many years ago, and met Philip Schultz at the Pulitzer dinner. Pride drives Donald Hall to Harvard every year where he gives a talk with another poet, and one year that was Sharon Olds. In talking with her, they learned she was living in New Hampshire. Paradise, that is.

Olds opened with three poems by other poets: “The Garden,” by Schultz; and then two poems with dogs in them, “Dog Biscuits,” by Chase Twichell; and “Love,” by Ethan Stebbins. Then Olds began to read her own poems, opening with the delightful “Diagnosis,” a poem both humorous and profound in this age of experts. She continued with two other family poems, “High School Senior,” and “The Last Evening,” about being with her dying mother.

Reading poems set along the spectrum of female life, from babyhood to the death bed, Olds showed her evocative power. With a few words she conjures the enormity of human emotions, and sometimes probes the tender places nearly to the point of pain. If you’re a child or a parent, read Sharon Olds and you’ll shiver with recognition.

Olds also read “April, New Hampshire,” which is the most devastatingly beautiful funeral poem I’ve ever heard, and also a poignant tribute to Jane Kenyon and Donald Hall, and “Ode to a Composting Toilet,” which is hilarious, but like her other work, more philosophical than you might think if you just glance the surface. The poem set at Kenyon’s funeral also mentioned Hall’s dog. As we drove home later, the Computer Scientist remarked that her description of Hall looking eagle-like was eerie, and also really accurate.

Last, Pride introduced Philip Schultz, who opened with Wesley McNair’s “The Man He Turned Into,” praising McNair for the vulnerability in his poems — a characteristic of Schultz’s own work.  He went on to read the opening poem from failure, “It’s Sunday Morning in Early November,”  and other poems featuring his family, including “The Magic Kingdom,” a mindful poem about gratitude, and “My Dog,” a sad and wise pet elegy, as well as several parts of his long 9/11 poem from failure, “The Wandering Wingless,” whose protagonist is a dog walker. Schultz closed with two newer poems, “The Sweet Under Taste,” and “The God of Loneliness,” which the Computer Scientist said perfectly evokes being a dad.

I’d say the reading had a deeper theme than dogs, and these poets have more in common than knowing Mike Pride and being some of the greatest poets writing in America today.  McNair, Olds, and Schultz take the power of raw human emotions — straight out of everyday ordinary experiences like loving your partner, child, or parent, making your way in the world, doing work, or noticing what’s going on around you –  and hone those emotions and experiences into works of art. These are poems of the real world, poems with dirt and sweat and fear and pain, and yes, shit, in them. And they’re dead gorgeous, often witty, and incredibly wise.

I went to bed that night on a poetry high, only to wake up early to go to Writers’ Day, the spring conference of the New Hampshire Writers’ Project. If you write in NH and you don’t belong, join. The NH Writer newsletter, edited by Martha Carlson-Bradley, is excellent, and the events NHWP puts on are always well done. I signed up early for Writers’ Day, both to take advantage of the early bird price, and to get into my first choice workshops. I ran into a friend who said even though she registered early bird, many of her top choices were full.

This year’s keynote speaker was Meredith Hall, author of Without A Map. Her talk was inspiring, because her wildly successful writing career didn’t blossom until she was in her fifties. After a series of setbacks earlier in her life, Hall won a $50,000 grant, wrote a moving memoir (which she says came out as is — no revision needed!), watched it become a best seller, and heard from scores of people who wrote to tell her she’d changed their lives. It was hard to make any kind of practical take home notes for myself from this remarkable story. Hall herself admits her sudden success has been beyond her wildest expectations. The excerpts she read from Without a Map were lovely. I’ve put it on the long term “to read” list.

My first workshop session was “Writing In Open Forms,”  led by Jeff Friedman. We did two exercises, one on writing a poem about a color using all of the senses except vision, and the other on alliteration.  Despite having close to thirty people in the workshop, Friedman was able to have everyone read one of the two poems. He made some kind of positive comment about every piece, which is always nice in a one-off workshop where you don’t know any of your fellow poets and it’s excruciating to read a completely unpolished piece. He also gave us another exercise to do at home, which is a great way to end a workshop, with people eager to go out and keep writing.

“Mining Memory,” with Joseph Hurka, was my second session. Hurka writes fiction and memoir, and his books are on my “to read” list as well. I like to wait until after I’ve had a workshop with someone before I read their work, so I don’t form too many preconceived notions. Hurka talked about his belief that we all have profound stories in us, and that writers just need to work at figuring out the way to tell our own stories uniquely. He also talked about focusing on writing, not on what *may* happen later — publication, reviews, renown, fame. A grounding and important message.

Like Friedman, Hurka had us write a couple of exercises in the workshop, and left us with more to take home. I ended up with some interesting raw material for a project I’ve got in mind to combine poems and prose in a hybrid memoir. The exercises were short but really generated a burst of writing — people all around me cranked out a couple of pages in the brief time allotted. Hurka’s practical advice about what to do with these “mined memories” in terms of creating stories was helpful as well.

At my lunch break, I sat down at a table where I didn’t recognize anyone except Jeff Friedman. We talked a bit more about the poetry workshop. Several people at the table were talking about MFA’s, and I nearly felt brave enough to bring up my “independent MFA,” but then chickened out. After all, I was in their territory — most of the people at my table had MFA’s or taught in MFA programs. I spent the rest of the break networking, making sure I chatted with people I’d met at the Kalevala conference, readings, or other events. I also bought Friedman’s Taking Down the Angel, asked him to sign it.

My afternoon session was the most intriguing of the day. The exercises in the earlier sessions exceeded my expectations, and both Friedman and Hurka gave practical, helpful, encouraging writing advice. But this last session, “Getting Abroad,’ with Jim Kates, was a chance for me to try something entirely new and thought-provoking: literary translation.  I expected to just get an overview, but we actually tried it, and I’m hooked.

Kates, who is president of the American Literary Translators Association,  is clearly passionate about literary translation and that really made the workshop fun — his joy in this work was palpable. After reading some examples, and talking about the problems and issues literary translators face and what sets their work apart from literal translation, we split into two groups, one to work on a prose poem, and one to work on verse. My group had the verse, and the four of us each took a stanza of Rene Villard’s “Le Cemetiere De Saint-Nic.” Everyone in my group had at least a passing knowledge of French, but to make our work easier, Kates gave us a literal translation as well as the original French.

Literary translation brings together so many of my interests — reading, writing, the universality of human experience, the joy of discovering what’s unique in different cultures, the deep meaning of art, the creation of connections, knowing oneself and the world, relating one thing to another, contacting the space between the inner and outer worlds — it’s all there. Taking this workshop, with such an enthusiastic and accomplished person leading the way, was a fantastic finish to a couple of really intense weeks of thinking about writing.

I hung around for NH Literary Idol, which was a fun conclusion to the day, and went home full of thoughts and ideas. I had a great week of writing, and made a point of following up with some of the people I saw at the conference, which was one of my goals — to work on networking. All week, I also looked forward to the next book related event of the month, held last weekend: The Five Colleges Book Sale.

If you love buying books, check out the next post. The Five Colleges Book Sale is definitely a shopping paradise!

April in paradise

Maybe when you picture paradise, it’s someplace warm enough to sustain palm trees, or to support a brisk business in cocktail umbrellas.  I picture barely leafed out trees, mud studded with boot prints, boulders baring their lichen patched shoulders to the sun after months of snow cover.  In New Hampshire, April may or may not mean pleasant weather, but it does mean the rich literary landscape of my adopted home awakens as towns come alive with events celebrating poetry, libraries, and books.  I was able to get to two conferences, two poetry readings, an enormous book sale, and a book club publishers’ preview, so I thought I’d give bookconscious readers a taste of my April in paradise.

A few weekends ago, I spent a Saturday reveling in the mysteries of the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic poem. This fascinating program, put on by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire, caught my eye for two reasons. First, I had been trying to figure out what to do for a day long “artist’s date” for The Artists’ Way, and second, the Kalevala conference was free, thanks to sponsors and a grant from The NH Humanities Council.

The conference took place at an inn in Rochester, NH, near the seacoast. Driving over, I considered what I already knew about the Kalevala: it grew out of folk poetry and stories, which Elias Lonnrot compiled into an epic during a time of emerging Finnish cultural awareness after Finland gained independence in the first half of the 19th century. This much I knew from learning about Finland last year with my kids. From the pre-conference emails outlining the talks, I knew that the epic influenced Tolkien. That was about it.

The morning opened with a talk on Tolkien and the fantasy genre. Much of this material was familiar to me, having studied fantasy and mythology before I wrote a novel for young people (as yet unpublished), The Last Unicorns of Georgia. Quick aside to any editors reading this: it’s a middle grade novel about a New England girl whose family moves to the Deep South, where she finds that a small group of unicorns are living in the dense woods behind her house. At the urging of the unicorns’ matriarch, she uncovers a plot to harvest unicorn horns for use as a masking agent for athletes’ performance enhancing drugs.

My novel isn’t purely fantasy — it’s more of an eco-mystery which happens to hinge on unicorn mythology, but as I prepared to write it, I read several great fantasy books aloud with my kids, and I also read fantasy theory, such as Ursula LeGuin’s The Language of the Night, some of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces, and a number of essays in The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. I read about Tolkien, but I admit that although the Computer Scientist and the Teenager have both read his books, I haven’t (they are on my long term “to read” list).

Besides Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy — which bookconscious fans know the Teenager claims are so good they have made it impossible for him to find other books that hold up to the Tolkien standard of storytelling — some of our family favorites are the Harry Potter series, the Narnia books, Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence, The Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander, Half Magic and other titles by Edward Eager, and the Eragon cycle.

So the talk on fantasy was appealing to me, if not exactly unknown territory.  The speaker, Clia Goodwin, gave a good presentation on “J.R.R. Tolkien and the Uses of Fantasy,” but didn’t add much about the Kalevala, except to say that Tolkien read the epic as a young man, Finnish was one of many languages he learned, and there is evidence he was influenced by the poem.  That said, Goodwin’s talk was very interesting, and later speakers built a bit on what she said about Tolkien’s views on the cultural rewards of fantasy — recovery, escape, and consolation  –  in terms of explaining the role of epic poetry and the Kalevala specifically in Finnish culture.

The next speaker, Diana Durham, is a poet as well as an Arthurian legend specialist who has written about the grail myth as a path to our inner selves. She gave an intriguing talk on “The Poet as Shaman.”  Durham opened with her thoughts on what poetry and mythology share — a reliance on symbolism to transform not only words, but the way the reader experiences words, and assimilates that experience into personal meaning or even healing. As an example, she read “Postscript,” by Seamus Heaney.

The rest of  her talk focused on the grail myth and how story, song, and poetry draw people out of their ordinary lives into the place where inner and outer worlds connect. She used Bernard Chandler’s photograph of the chalice well cover in Glastonbury as a visual metaphor for this idea, and referred to T.S. Eliot’s poetry, which happens to be what we’re reading for our book discussion with the Teenager this month. Like Goodwin, Durham spoke only peripherally about the Kalevala, but her presentation was fascinating. I am still thinking through her ideas on the way poetry and myth make meaning that transcends time and place.

Much of my “bookconscious theory on interconnectedness” has to do with the ways that we interpret ourselves through what we read, and the work interprets us, as we interact with it. In the process, we make connections for ourselves and with other people not just in reading, but in thinking about, writing about, discussing, reading reviews, and otherwise processing what we’ve read and placing it in our own mind map of what we know, believe, and love.  How many times have you read something written in another place and time and felt as if you belonged there? I don’t think that’s coincidence. We somehow identify ourselves in writing or music or art because in some primal sense we know those creations deep in our beings.

After a break for lunch, during which I let my head swim with thoughts of interconnectedness, the Kalevala conference re-convened, and Borje Vahamaki, a professor of Finnish studies, language and literature scholar, translator, and publisher, spoke on “Language and Meaning in the Kalevala.” He is in the process of recording audio CD’s of the poem, mostly in English but with a bit of Finnish to give listeners a sense of the original. Having heard him read just an excerpt, I’d guess the CD’s are fabulous.

Vahamaki is a Kalevala expert, and his passion came through in his talk, which was a quick introduction to Finnish history and language as well as a crash course in the Kalevala itself. Dr. Vahamaki made suggestions for delving more deeply into the Kalevala, and pointed out that the epic has inspired other writers, like Longfellow, and composers, most notably Sibelius, which perfectly illustrates the ideas we’d already heard about the impact of myth and poetry, and my theories that reading creates connections we carry into the rest of our lives.

The last speaker, Sarah Cummings Ridge, is a Maine resident of Finnish descent, whose father gave her a type of Finnish folk harp called a kantele as a wedding gift. In the Kalevala, the hero makes and plays a kantele made from a pike bone. Cummings Ridge said she had no idea when she received her father’s gift that it would change her life. She now leads The Maine Kanteles, and the group played a number of songs to end the conference.

The Kalevala event was one of the many activities of the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Recently the group moved their monthly readings and open mic night to one of my favorite places: Gibson’s, Concord’s independent bookstore. April’s reading featured two New Hampshire poets familiar to bookconscious readers: Martha Carlson- Bradley and Alice Fogel. I was getting over a nasty virus, but I dragged myself out to hear these two wonderful poets read. Next time I am going to stay for the open mic (and maybe even sign up to try reading myself).

I was struck again by Fogel’s amazing use of language.  I mentioned in my post last year about her book Be That Empty that she also makes clothing — Lyric Couture is her fashion company, and it’s tag is “collaged fashions from reprised goods.”  Filtering the sound of her poetry through my somewhat illness addled mind, I was struck by how similar the two arts are — poetry and the creation of fashions. In both cases Fogel is piecing together things that at first may not seem to fit:  images and words, parts of other articles of clothing. Stitched together, the final product, whether verbal or visual, is beautiful.

I hadn’t heard Carlson-Bradley read before, but I read her book Season We Can’t Resist a few months ago.  I commented then that Carlson-Bradley has an eye for fine detail, and listening to her poems as she read, I noticed her observations of nature are scientific as well as artistic. In fact, both she and Fogel mentioned science as big influences in their work. Carlson-Bradley write poems rich in sensory detail that bring the reader right into the natural world near her home here in New Hampshire. If you’re not convinced by my contention that NH is a kind of paradise, read Carlson-Bradley’s poems and you’ll see our flora and fauna rival any old tropical rain forest, at least in their literary value.

Readings are a good reminder that poetry is an oral tradition as well as a written one, and hearing Carlson-Bradley read highlighted the way she beautifully connects human nature with the physical environment we live in. Poetry is an art especially prone to creating connections, and to exploring our connection to each other, and many poets have explored the man/nature continuum. I find Carlson-Bradley’s work particularly evocative because she writes about things many of us probably pass by in cars or even on paths in the woods, without noticing them or reflecting on their — and our — place in the world.

Check out “April In Paradise, Part II,” which I’ll post in the next couple of days, to hear about the rest of this amazing literary month.

Mindful march moments

March flew past. I meant to savor it, mindfully. Instead, I’ll have to be satisfied that I had some mindful moments and keep practicing. Mindfulness is a way of being aware in the present — hard if you are someone who multitasks, and hard in our culture, that values being busy.

For me being mindful also means being aware of the connections between what I’m thinking, doing, or reading and all that has come before and will come after. It’s probably no surprise to those of you who’ve read my monthly musings here that I equate mindfulness with finding  interconnectedness.

That may not be “real” mindfulness, but it works for me, because one of the my goals in practicing mindfulness is perspective — awareness of what one of my favorite prayers in the Book of Common Prayer calls “the changes and chances of this life.”  Mindfulness for me is about being more fully present with the people and experiences I’m having, not racing ahead in my mind to the next ten things I need to do. At the same time, mindfulness, and other meditation practices, remind me to rest in God’s “eternal changelessness.” (from the same prayer in BCP).

Two books I read this month inspired me to work on mindfulness in my writing and in life. Patricia Donegan’s Haiku Mind: 108 Poems to Cultivate Awareness and Open Your Heart reminded me of all the reasons I love haiku. Really good haiku is not necessarily the 5-7-5 poem you learned about in elementary school (some good haiku use this form, but the majority don’t). An excellent haiku is a little “aha” moment — a glimpse into the poet’s mindfulness, because writing great haiku requires the poet to distill a moment of awareness into a few words.

Donegan adds annotations to each poem in this collection, which includes work by both classic and contemporary poets. Her own background as a poet and scholar, as well as a student of meditation and a colleague of Allen Ginsberg at Naropa Institute, inform her insightful commentary.

This isn’t straight up literary criticism — while Donegan calls attention to each poem’s beauty, her criteria for including poems in this collection had as much to do with content as craft, as the subtitle indicates. In fact, I was interested in reading the book not only because I love haiku, but also because I want to “cultivate awareness and open (my) heart.”

One reason I am on a quest towards mindfulness is that I see it as a crucial part of being a good parent. To that end, I’d been meaning to read Jon and Maya Kabat-Zinn’s book, Everyday Blessings:The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting. Over the years I have read a large number of books on being a parent.

The Computer Scientist likes to tell people that when we brought our older child home from the hospital, he hid the books on top of a tall bookcase so that I would relax and rest with the new baby. Our children howl with laughter when we describe administering our son’s first bath: I read the directions, step by step, from a parenting manual, and the Computer Scientist followed them.

Everyday Blessings is not a prescriptive manual, and you won’t get step by step advice from the authors. But it is an important guide, and one of the most honest parenting books I’ve come across. Rather than setting up perfect parenting examples and talking about the wonderful experiences the authors have had in applying their stellar techniques, the Kabat-Zinns provide hope and encouragement but also tell it like it is: parenting is not easy, kids are not always easy to live with, and you’re going to lose it at some point.

But mindfulness can offer perspective, can help people through challenges, and can foster peace when emotional storms have passed. The Kabat-Zinns open their home to readers and share their own parenting experiences, but they also don’t claim to have all the answers, and frequently let readers know that parenting is a judgement call, and it’s alright to not always know what to do.

As a mother of a preteen and teen, I found that comforting. When I was younger and wanted “how to” information I might not have appreciated it as much. I found myself sharing bits of this book with the Computer Scientist and also with the kids. One thing I shared with them is that the Kabat-Zinns quote T.S. Eliot’s “The Four Quartets” several times in Everyday Blessings. This impressed the Teenager — you’ll find out why later in this essay. I was fascinated to connect Eliot’s poetry with mindfulness.

Everyday Blessings points out that being mindful in relationships is enormously helpful — it may not be the key to determining how to handle every parenting challenge, but it will help you to know whether there really is a challenge. So often there isn’t; one or the other person is simply overwhelmed by emotions — in our house we call it “reacting to stimuli.”  Being aware of what is happening, rather than half paying attention while doing three other tasks, can make a huge difference in accepting, understanding, and responding fully.

A novella I read this month addresses the full horror of humans not taking the time to be aware and accepting of each other: Blonde Roots by Bernadine Evaristo.  It’s a book about slavery and colonialism, but it reverses history, and makes Europeans slaves of African overlords. An interesting concept, realized in a fast paced story.

Racism is racism, no matter who perpetrates it. Slavery was barbaric. None of this is new, but Evaristo’s twisted history forces readers to consider man’s inhumanity to man in a fresh way. It was an interesting read, with a page turning plot.

As I mentioned in last month’s post, reading a novel set in South Africa inspired me to pick up Power Lines: Two Years on South Africa’s Borders, by Jason Carter, about his time in the Peace Corps. He lived there during the end of Nelson Mandela’s presidency. As President Carter’s grandson, he got to meet Mandela, and he writes about what a phenomenal experience that was. During the rest of his tour, he worked in a small town near the Swaziland border.

Power Lines is not just a book about Carter’s time volunteering, although he does explain the frustrations and challenges of Peace Corps work. Because he lived in South Africa at such a seminal moment, as the country began to recover from apartheid and enter a new democratic era, he also tells readers about the history of the area where he worked, the changes taking place, and the racial attitudes he encountered.

As a person who spent five years as an outsider in a small southern town, I felt that much of what he wrote about was eerily familiar. Because I grew up fairly insulated from the civil rights era struggles, I was surprised by the ongoing misunderstanding and mistrust between blacks and whites in the small town where we lived. I had the ignorant impression, before we lived in the south, that race issues were a thing of the past in America.

One thing that I was unaware of, naive as it may sound, is that racial mistrust goes both ways — and even within races. Carter really describes vividly the ways that people judging each other, rather than seeking to know each other as individuals, hurts communication and understanding. Of course, this goes on wherever humans, of any race or culture, are together.

In Power Lines, Carter touches on the very thing my family and I learned: economic discrimination and stereotyping is a major factor in racism.  Lack of educational resources and jobs meant that some of the South Africans he met had less hope about the future than others, and that in turn often influenced their attitudes about race. Some of the whites he met were able to make friends with other city dwelling, professional people of either race, but routinely he met whites who were afraid of poorer blacks, and cautioned him against riding in black taxis or hitchhiking.

He also found it frustrating that many of the educators he worked with routinely told him that they couldn’t do something because they were black, or asked his advice in areas that were well beyond his expertise, simply because as a white man, they believed he knew better than they did. Around the time Barack Obama declared his presidential candidacy, a fellow librarian in the southern town where we were living told me that several African American women on the library staff believed that Obama must be a foreigner because of the way he spoke. I suspect that racial stereotypes will be around for a very long time in South Africa, as they are here.

Carter’s book was also intriguing because he openly doubts his own idealistic views and the value of his work, which I think is realistic.  Anyone who spends significant time volunteering is likely to have his or her idealism crushed by the system at one point or another. The only other Peace Corps memoir I’ve read, Dear Exile, by Hilary Liftin and Kate Montgomery, also addressed disillusionment.

I’ve experienced it myself, when I found that many of my fellow volunteers at an ecumenical food pantry mistrusted the clients and were more concerned with The Rules than with ending hunger. And when I realized the obvious: that food handouts probably have little to do with solving the problem of hunger. Hard to swallow, because I wanted to be Making a Difference. Turns out I was having a Thoreauvian epiphany, I just didn’t know it yet. Hang on, we’ll get to that.

Straight talk about doubts and fears makes Power Lines an interesting read, one that could foster discussions about the of the pros and cons of volunteer programs. Carter also shares the few negative experiences he had, and the societal problems he saw, such as alcoholism and organized crime. At the same time it’s clear he loved the people he came to know, he loved what he was doing, and he did make a difference. I’m glad he didn’t leave out the challenges and struggles.

Carter’s  honest appraisal made the book vivid and informative, and timely as our government talks about ramping up American volunteerism.  The book reinforced my belief that the experience of living in another culture, making friends, and trying to understand the world and one’s place in it, is life changing not only for the people volunteers meet and work with, but also for the volunteers themselves. Person to person understanding is valuable regardless of how well the actual work of a volunteering mission goes.

Last night I sat down to read a bit of Walden — more on why in a moment — and in the way it so often does, what I read connected to my prior reading. Just as I had been reflecting that Jason Carter’s examination of the motive, purpose, and impact of the work he is in South Africa to do are the most thought provoking passages in Power Lines, I discovered that Thoreau covers this same territory in Walden.

Thoreau writes that rather than doing good, people should focus on being good, and that instead of throwing money at the poor, philanthropists would be better off solving the societal problems that cause poverty: “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.”

In other words, handing out food at the food pantry isn’t going to end hunger. Working to help people be self reliant so that they can feed themselves, might. Living your own life so that your actions aren’t making someone else hungry (even if that’s not what you intend), is probably the best option.

As my family and I have learned about social justice and been involved with nonprofits (the Computer Scientist worked for a large international NGO while we lived in the South), we’ve spent time debating this very idea, of how best to make a difference. We tend to support the work of nonprofits like Heifer International and Habitat for Humanity, which help people change their own lives. My 95 year old grandmother has always told me she thinks handouts are no good because they take away a person’s dignity — a legacy of living through the Great Depression. Habitat’s motto is “a hand up, not a hand out.”

The private development world has moved in this direction, towards sustainable aid, local control of projects, microlending, and partnership. But recent discussions of development, and particuarly government aid, on public radio programs Speaking of Faith and Word of Mouth would sound familiar to Thoreau, and many developing world economists and writers are saying much the same thing that he did: attack the root, not the branches, and above all, don’t throw money at the tree.

I started reading Walden last year, when the kids and I were learning about the famous 19th century residents of Concord, Massachusetts.  I picked it up again, along with The Flowering of New England: 1815-1865 by Van Wyck Brooks, because a couple of weekends ago we finally visited Concord, so I’ve set aside some other “to read” books and am revisiting Concord’s literary heritage.

We walked around Walden Pond to the site of Thoreau’s cabin. We also saw the homes where the Alcotts, Hawthornes, and Emersons lived. At the Concord Museum, which is well worth a visit if you are interested in the town’s famous residents, the Computer Scientist and I each found some really cool books for planning future outings: R. Todd Felton’s A Journey Into Transcendentalist New England and Susan Wilson’s The Literary Trail of Greater Boston. So far I’ve only dipped into each of these, but they are both beautiful and fascinating.

Museum bookshops are one of my favorite places to browse, and a few weeks ago we visited an entire museum exhibit devoted to the work of a man whose books are often found in museum shops: David Macaulay. The exhibit features the drawings and paintings he’s done as he’s illustrated books as well as models he built for Mosque, journals from some of the research trips he’s done, and the books themselves.

The Computer Scientist thought Underground was really cool, and I chose Angelo for our nieces and nephew, who are visiting at Easter. The Teenager and his younger sister liked seeing the art from The New The Way Things Work, and we were inspired to check out several Macaulay titles from the library after the museum visit, including a couple of really innovative picture books, Shortcut and Black and White.

Another book that multiple family members enjoyed recently is How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization by Franklin Foer. Both the Computer Scientist and the Teenager think this is an intriguing book. Foer delves into the sociopolitical lessons of soccer, which he says is  “further along in the globalization game than any other economy on the planet.”

Our book discussion group with the Teenager is chugging along. So far we’ve read, discussed, and journaled about The Old Man and the Sea, The Great Gatsby, and Of Mice and Men. Our focus is 20th century American authors.  Not the most uplifting bunch of stories, so far, but the Teenager seems to find validation for his own angsty outlook. For example, he commented that Steinbeck doesn’t appear to believe that it’s worth having a dream, based on the fact that the characters who dream of better lives are all thwarted in Of Mice and Men.

If you look at the current events he’s known so far, you might understand why he just shrugged and said, “but that’s life.” I tried being mindful, and told him I thought we actually have it pretty good, really. He’s not really as pessimistic as he’d like people to think, and acknowledged that I’m right, just before asking cheerfully what’s for dinner. It’s good to be young. So far it’s not that bad being middle aged, either. And it’s interesting having a teenager’s perspective on books, and life.

I put up a poster for National Poetry Month last week and the Teenager did a double take. “Who wrote that?” he asked. “That’s really powerful.” I immediately tracked down two copies of The Collected Poems of T.S. Eliot. Granted, he’s usually grouped with 20th century English writers, but he was born American, so that’s what we’ll read next for our book group. I felt like Eliot was calling to me — first in Everyday Blessings, where I enjoyed the references to “The Four Quartets,” then in my son’s immediate, forceful reaction to the poster.

Eliot came up at an event I attended last weekend — a one day conference on the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, put on by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. One of the speakers, Diana Durham, has written a book on the grail myth, and her presentation at the conference, “The Poet As Shaman,” included a discussion of the way Eliot conjures up the spiritual desolation of 1920’s London in “The Wasteland,” but then heals the wounds, twenty years later, in the completed “Four Quartets.” Her talk was very interesting, and reinforced my Theory of the Interconnectedness of Reading.

Another author whose work fit nicely into everything else I read this month is Mary Oliver. I was at Ohrstrom library checking out books by Dorianne Laux, who I’ve heard is coming to the campus. On their new book shelves, I saw The Truro Bear and Other Adventures: Poems and Essays.

Oliver is a master of mindful awareness of her surroundings, and her poems are haiku-like not in their form, but in their immediacy, their descriptive power, and the way they capture the extraordinary in everyday experience. I also find her poems transformative — you can so clearly see what she sees that it’s easy to feel what she feels, too. This collection is mostly made up of previously published poems, all relating to animals, and in many cases, our connection to the natural world.

A final note on connections. The Pre-teen is reading a book I picked up on a book store sale table a few years ago, We Just Want To Live Here: A Palestinian Teenager, An Israeli Teenager — an Unlikely Friendship. It’s the true story of Odelia and Amal, girls who meet on a trip designed to bring Israeli and Palenstinian teens together to learn about each other’s lives. They become friends and stay in touch. Through their letters, readers get an idea of the huge gulf in understanding the girls try to overcome.

I enjoyed this book when I bought it, and the Pre-teen likes reading about girls in other countries. I attended a very moving talk given by two members of Combatants for Peace last month, and shared what I heard about person to person peace efforts in the Middle East, so maybe that is what led her to choose this now. When she browsed our shelves and came across We Just Want To Live Here, I knew that even if it means having to stack books on the floor someday, I’ll resist weeding — you never know when a book will be right for someone, and I love sharing reading connections with my family.

In my “to read” pile if I finish Walden and The Flowering of New England in April? I watched a re-run of Masterpiece Theater’s David Copperfield and decided I’d like to read the book (which was waiting on my shelves), and I’ve pulled out an old Powell’s Books  find called Beyond the Sky and the Earth: Journey Into Bhutan, because I am volunteering with refugee resettlement, and the family I’m helping welcome are Bhutanese. They’ve lived in a camp in Nepal for 18 years — so what I read about Bhutan will be clouded by what I know of their experience. But I’m curious nonetheless.

I also bought a copy of Krista Tippett’s Speaking of Faith, which she signed, when I went to hear her interviewed by NHPR’s Virginia Prescott last week. I’ve read it before, but Ive left it out to dip back into. I’ve been slowly reading The Making of a Sonnet, a Norton anthology, and I’m up to the 19th century (perfect as I read about the same time period in New England’s literary scene). And of course, I’ll be reading T. S. Eliot with the Computer Scientist and the Teenager.

I also plan to read poems by three amazing poets who are coming together for a reading next week. Mike Pride, retired editor of the Concord Monitor and a poetry fan, sent me a note this afternoon because he saw my bookconscious post on last year’s fantastic Poets’ Three reading.

Mike says, “Dogs’ Night Out: Three Great Poets, will be held next Friday (April 17, 2009) at the Concord City Auditorium. The poets are Wesley McNair, Sharon Olds and 2008 Pulitzer prize winner Philip Schultz. They’re all terrific, accessible poets, and it should be a fun night. In tomorrow’s Monitor (April 9) and in the online Monitor, there will be profile-interviews of the three poets, along with a sample of their work.”

Tickets for Dogs’ Night Out are $10, and any proceeds above costs will go to local homeless charities. The time is 7 p.m., and tickets are available at the Monitor, at concordmonitor.com, at Gibson’s and at the box office. Thanks, Mike.  The Computer Scientist and I have our tickets, and we’ll see you there!

So I’ve got quite a pile “to read” (my kids are relieved that I no longer stack books on my nightstand — when they were younger and when we lived in tornado country, they used to fret that the stack would fall on me in the night). But no matter how many books I browse, I will read one thing at a time.  Mindfully.

Reading fast? I’m too hungry.

In February 2008, I began tracking my reading at Goodreads. As of today, I’ve added 106 books to my lists there. Four of those are on my “currently reading” shelf. I’ve read 102 books in the past 13 months, which may explain why I am often sleep deprived.

Goodreads is a social networking site for readers. You can keep track of what you’ve read, see what friends are reading, and read reviews of books. It’s a helpful tool for me, but I have to admit I haven’t done much social networking with it. I’m a little shy about sending my friends invitations to join stuff online. But I do use Goodreads to help me write each month’s musings here at bookconscious.

Last month I mentioned that I’m reading The Artist’s Way, a twelve week program to revitalize creativity.  Last week the exercise I was supposed to do was give up reading for the whole week.  It was one of those weeks where a lot of things went wrong (sick kids, worn out tires, broken stove, gray skies), so I wasn’t in the mood to have a book tell me to quit reading, but I also just can’t conceive of such a thing.

My Goodreads list breaks down to an average of 8 books a month in the last year. I also try to read the numerous magazines that pass through the bookconscious household (many due to airline mile subscriptions). At one time or another over the last year that’s included New Yorker, Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, Newsweek, Wired, Time, The Economist, National Geographic, and Science News;  also Cooking Light, Bon Apetit, Episcopal Life, and a number of nonprofits’ publications, like Nature Conservancy Magazine); writing and literary journals (The Writer, Poets & Writers, Frogpond, bottle rockets, Modern Haiku, Isotope, Envoi, the Poet’s Touchstone); a local daily newspaper, and a few New York Times articles a day.

Maybe I am addicted to reading. Maybe, as the author of The Artists’s Way suggests, reading is blocking me from accomplishing my life’s work. But I’m more of a “glass half full” kind of gal, so I have another thought: maybe reading is my life’s work. It seems to me that reading informs not just my writing, but my life. I am what I read.

Reading has been important to me for as long as I can remember. Even as a kid, I loved getting a new issue of a magazine in the mail, loved checking out a stack of library books, loved curling up with a book at my grandmother’s house that she’d left on the bed for me. Reading is why one of my favorite places at college was my study carrel at Julia Rogers Library, why I went to graduate school to become a librarian, why I love helping a friend or a child find something good to read, why I tend to chat with fellow library patrons and bookstore goers.

So, for now, the “reading fast” is not happening.  I understand the point — take a break from reading and see what else happens if your life — but I’m not really looking for a reading replacement, because I see reading as a source of creativity, not a distraction. As a guest blogger for NHPR’s Word of Mouth, I find ideas by reading widely. A number of my poems have grown out of something that struck me in a magazine or a book I’ve read. Reading feeds me.

I told the computer scientist I thought it would be more relevant to find out what would happen in my life if I gave up cleaning the house. Or falling down the Internet rabbit hole when I check email. So instead of cutting back on reading, I’m cutting back on chores.

I’m only going to dust, vacuum, and mop every other week, and I’ve vowed to let it go if the kids forget to clean their rooms or the family room (instead of doing it myself — they either do it or they live with dust). I’ve also unsubscribed from a number of email lists that were sapping more energy than they were creating. I’m anticipating creative sparks and more reading time

With that I am going to get on with telling you what the bookconscious household has been reading.

The computer scientist finished a book he got for Christmas, Stephen King’s Just After Sunset. He’s a huge King fan, and he says this collection includes “classic Stephen King” stories and “re-readers” — one thing I’ve noticed is that I can tell if something’s bothering my better half or if he’s getting sick, because out come the old reliable Stephen King books. In fact, he re-reads The Stand during every major illness. I’m not going to try and analyze that, but it’s a good way to tell if he’s really feeling poorly.

He also just finished Dennis Lehane’s The Given Day, which his mother recommended. He said it was enjoyable. It’s a popular book at the library with a long reserve list, so while he was waiting, he tried Lehane’s collection of short stories, Coronado. On his Goodreads review he says the “character relationships were excellently developed and thoroughly believable.”

We’re reading The Great Gatsby in our lit crit circle with the teenager. I told my grandmother, a former teacher who still discusses books with me at 95, that although I’m pretty sure I read Gatsby in high school, I don’t remember the beautiful language.  She chuckled and said that getting her students to read Gatsby was like pulling teeth, and assured me it’s perfectly normal that the teenager isn’t enjoying it as much as his parents are.

The computer scientist and I both noted this passage: “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” The teenager admitted this was very nice, but was aggravated that each of the first three chapters of Gatsby seems to introduce a different story, and said it’s hard for him to be excited about the selfish people doing boring things in this book. But he’s hanging in there to see what happens.

More to the teenager’s taste lately was The Ultimate Hitchiker’s Guide to the Universe, which he called “weird,” but which held his attention for over 800 pages. He also finished Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby’s memoir about football fandom in the UK and Hornby’s own passion for Arsenal. The teenager’s first real jersey was from Arsenal, and he once asked, when he was going through puberty and was having one of those alter-ego fits of angst, why we couldn’t have raised him in England so he could be steeped in real football from infancy.  He says Fever Pitch is “eye opening” and that it describes what it really means to be a fan.

Europe is on his mind right now, because he’s going to Freiburg, Germany this summer (on a soccer exchange, to train with the youth team of a semi-pro club). He  just started Europe Between the Oceans: 9000 BC-AD 1000, which he asked for after reading a review in Atlantic Monthly. The teenager is a big history fan, and he’s also enjoying The Scientists: A History of Science Told Through the Lives of Its Greatest Inventors. He finds the story of science very interesting, and says he likes that it’s not quite as political as other aspects of history.

If all that seems a bit heavy, don’t worry. He’s also reading Bill Bryson’s Neither Here Nor There, because it’s about Bryson’s travels in Europe, and because as far as either of my children is concerned Bill Bryson is the wittiest man on the planet. In fact, we can drive for hours in complete peace and tranquility, with no sound save spontaneous outbursts of laughter, if we’ve got a Bryson audio book playing. My daughter has entire passages of I’m a Stranger Here Myself memorized.

She read a couple of Fairy Chronicles this month and started Carl Hiassen’s latest children’s book, Scat. This wise child is the person who taught me to put down a book if I’m not feeling excited to get to the end, and that’s how she felt about this one.

On her brother’s recommendation, she’s reading The Amulet of Samarkand, which is book one in the Bartimaeus Trilogy. She says she enjoys the “remarks” Bartimaeus makes, because he’s funny. She is also a huge comics fan, and has been enjoying a couple of Foxtrot compendiums (quick aside — comic strips have taught my kids everything from history to vocabulary, algebra to physics, and usually without their feeling “taught to”).

Maybe because so much of the news is unpleasant, I’ve been seeking humor in my reading as well. Like the kids, I enjoy subtle wit as much as laugh out loud hilarity.  The Uncommon Reader is a delightfully witty novella which opens with Queen Elizabeth II discovering that a mobile library visits Buckingham Palace every week. She begins to read and to discuss books with the young man she meets in the bookmobile, who she promotes from working in the palace kitchens. Author Alan Bennett imagines what the reading life might do for the Queen, and if you love books and reading, you’ll find his ideas both reasonable and fun. And you may occasionally disturb your partner’s sleep by laughing out loud; I did.

Less humorous, but more helpful for burrowing through some of the impenetrably illogical nonsense that sometimes passes for news, is Being Logical: A Guide to Good Thinking. This handy little book is a short introduction to argumentation, and I enjoyed it so much, and found the explanations so clear, that I’ve ordered it in paperback to have around the house. If more people learned to argue logically, rather that shout soundbites or quarrel, our society might be more civil. As my grandmother has always said, “you can’t change everything, but you can do your best.” So I’m making good thinking a goal and I’m going to encourage it in my family!

Both Being Logical and The Uncommon Reader are books that were on my “to read” list. But I also sometimes peruse the new book shelves, particularly at Ohrstrom Library at Saint Paul’s School, where I worked last summer.  I found two great reads there recently.

Early in the month I picked up What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, by Haruki Murakami. This short memoir has a unique focus — the author’s life as a runner, and how running and writing intersect in his life. I am not a runner and have no desire to be, but I loved the book, in part because of its novelty; reading a book from another culture is a vicarious vacation from one’s status quo.

But cultural appeal aside, I also liked Murakami’s perceptions, and the fact that he’s a life learner. You get the sense that he’s always trying to improve, which I can identify with. He pursues his interests passionately, and he seems to embrace his own curiosity. And he writes about his sense of human interconnectedness, which is something I like to think about, too.

I was so intrigued by the memoir that I went back and checked out the first of his novels that appeared in English: The Wild Sheep Chase. It’s so unlike anything else I’ve read recently, or maybe ever, that I am not sure how to even do it justice here. The story is mysterious and its conclusion blew me away.

And yet it’s not just a mystery. I’d say there’s a philosophical slant to it, a love story, and an examination of friendship, loyalty, and even patriotism. The computer scientist has been to Japan several times, and he says it’s a mind blowing experience, because absolutely everything is overwhelmingly foreign to a non-native.  The Wild Sheep Chase felt that way. I’ve checked out another of Murakami’s books which I am going to start tonight.

Also on Ohrstrom’s new book shelves, I found P.F. Kluge’s Gone Tomorrow. This one is also a mystery of sorts, but instead of a missing body, the protagonist is looking for a missing manuscript. He finds himself named literary executor to a famous author he’s met only a few times on the campus of the small college where they both teach.

He comes across one manuscript, which turns out to be a memoir of the author’s final year at the college. But despite multiple references to “The Beast” — the novel this author has allegedly been working on for decades — no one knows where the great man’s great work is, or if it even exists.

My only beef is that the women in Gone Tomorrow seem like stock characters. But if you’re looking for a unique page turner, check it out. Both Kluge and Murakami are authors who draw you in with local color, interesting characters who are not perfect people, and intriguing possibilities. Both Gone Tomorrow and The Wild Sheep Chase keep readers guessing without screaming “mystery.” I really enjoyed both authors and I plan to work my way through the rest of their books.

But first, I wanted to read the March selection for Gibson’s book discussion group: The Syringa Tree, by Pamela Gien. It’s unusual in that Gien wrote it as a play first, before turning it into a novel. In fact she also performed it as a one woman show.

Set in South Africa around the time that Nelson Mandela is beginning to rile authorities, it’s the story of a girl growing up with a mentally ill mother and a doctor father who is a very good man, but frequently absent. One of the constants in the girl’s life is her nanny, Salamina. The Syringa Tree is a dramatic story set in a dramatic time, and a book I stayed up late trying to finish because I was anxious to know how things would turn out.

Gien wrote the play after a story telling exercise in an acting workshop. A couple of The Syringa Tree’s key events, which really happened in Gien’s childhood, came back to her in the workshop. As a writer, I find that trigger both inspiring and a little awesome — what might I remember that could feed me this way? I don’t think anything in my childhood was as dramatic as Gien’s experiences, but it’s helpful to hear, as I plug away at my narrative time line, about another author’s experience mining memory.

My poetry reading this month was inspired by a workshop I took at St. Paul’s School in late January with Joseph Millar. I read both of his books, Overtime and Fortune, so I’d have an idea of where he might be coming from. I’d describe his poetry as masculine, gritty, but in many ways also delicately crafted. I picked up some interesting ideas in his workshop, such as looking at a draft and assuming the first line isn’t really at the literal first line you’ve written, but deeper in the poem somewhere.

After the workshop I read poems by Philip Levine, Robert Lowell, and Jack Gilbert, all of whom Millar recommended. He used Levine’s “Grandmother In Heaven” as an example of a poetic character sketch, and he referred to Lowell and Gilbert as other examples of poets whose characters stand out.  I read Lowell’s Life Studies and Gilbert’s Refusing Heaven, and also read poems online. The poetry tool is a great place to find biographical information as well as poems.

I’ve got a few poetry journals on my reading pile, as well as Haruki Murakami’s The Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. After reading The Syringa Tree I dug out Power Lines: Two Years on South Africa’s Borders by Jason Carter, who is President Carter’s grandson. It’s a book I bought at a library sale some time ago, and it’s about the author’s stint in the Peace Corps, which began just as Nelson Mandela finished his term as president  of South Africa. I’ve only read the beginning but so far it’s fascinating.

And isn’t that why we read? Fascinating nonfiction, page-turning fiction, poetic prose and poems that feature well crafted characters — there’s so much to learn, so much to absorb, and so much to discuss or write about, so many reasons to stay up late, laughing and crying. One man who thought kids’ books ought to be all of that instead of boring and didactic, who helped change children’s literature forever, was Dr. Seuss.

It’s his birthday today, and the kids and I learned that addition to enlivening “beginning readers,”  Dr. Seuss sent his friend Art Buchwald a special version of Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!, which Buchwald ran in his column on July 30, 1974.Take a look and you’ll see it’s a piece of Americana. Nixon resigned on August 8th. I wonder if he read the column?

My daughter and I chatted about Dr. Suess’s stories this afternoon, and the way they are incredibly fun but also often include a philosophy to live by, like caring for the earth (The Lorax), being truthful (And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street), and caring about each other rather than about how much stuff we have (How the Grinch Stole Christmas). Obviously he’s fairly heavy handed about the “message,” but for some reason the stories are incredibly appealing nonetheless. My daughter is usually quick to put down “preachy” books, but she said she likes Suess.

So we hung out by the fire on a snowy March day, and I read aloud, both the historical version of Marvin K. Mooney and, by request, The Lorax. Even the teenager listened with amusement. You’re never too old to for Dr. Suess. And I can’t change everything, but I can do my best. Books will guide my way.

Endurance and inspiration

January always gets me thinking about new beginnings.  This year is even more conducive to forward thinking: as Will I Am sings far more eloquently than I can say, “It’s a New Day,” and President Obama reminded American in his inaugural address that in hard times, we can “pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again . . . .”  Inspiring stuff, on the heels of a National Day of Service on MLK Day. What a beginning!

The bookconscious household has long been interested in serving our community, both local and global, and this week we renewed our commitment to doing our part, looking for a place to volunteer together in the New Year, and in my case, ordering the Mothers Acting Up calendar.  But a conversation with a friend and fellow writer before the holidays, and her unexpected gift, gave me inspiration of a more personal sort, and reading material to help me dust off my writing synapses.

Some bookconscious fans know I am a poet. I went through a dry spell last fall, as well as a spate of rejection letters and a rebellion against using my already limited time seeking new markets that will mostly reject my work. This perfect storm of limiting factors forced me to rehash the existential argument with myself most writers have from time to time: why am I doing this? Am I writing to write or to publish?  I came to the conclusion after a few months of feeling miserable (and quite possibly making those dearest to me miserable as well) that the answer, for me, is a version of the former — thank heavens, because if it were the latter, I may have quit for good!

I write to be me, to work out what I see in the world. Like many who feel this compulsion, I don’t know of a time when I didn’t do this; even as a little girl, I wrote and I had imaginary internal dialogues when I couldn’t write. One of my oldest and dearest friends, a fellow writer I’ll call Khrushchev (even though I adore her) sent me The Vein of Gold, by Julia Cameron, which has prompted me to remember writing’s place in my life.

Due to an amazon.com shipping mishap, I got this book without it’s predecessor, The Artist’s Way, on the second to last day of 2008, not long after I spoke to Chev about my poetry blues.  The Artist’s Way arrived this week, and since Cameron refers frequently to The Artist’s Way in Vein of Gold, I’m now a bit confused as to which would be the more helpful to read first. Either way, Khrushchev’s thoughtful gift has helped me commit myself to a creative reboot.

Both books are intended to help artists reconnect with their core creativity. They are books to read slowly and to interact with. So far, I’ve incorporated Cameron’s idea of “morning pages” into my routine. I’ve tried to take walks, which she also recommends, but it was -20 something one morning last week, so I’ve sometimes substituted snow shoveling or walking indoors in a gym with a lovely view of some woods for the real deal. I’m having trouble taking a weekly “artist’s date” exactly as Cameron recommends; I intend to keep trying.

But I am muscling my way through a narrative time line, which Cameron recommends early in Vein of Gold, and that got me thinking about why I write and how I’ve always felt a need to. So thanks, Chev. I’ll keep reading and working, and I’ll remember to give myself permission to adjust Cameron’s program to my life when necessary.

Early January also brought the first Gibson’s book club meeting of 2009. We talked about Bleak House, which we’d given ourselves two months to read instead of the usual one. I’ve read Hard Times and Great Expectations, but Bleak House was new to me. If you’ve never read Dickens, I highly recommend it. It was the most enjoyable classic I’ve read in a long time. All of us at the meeting loved it, and it inspired some discussion of what makes a book “great.”

Endurance was one characteristic we came up with, but why does a work endure? Of course we didn’t come to any grand far reaching conclusions, but for Bleak House, the things we kept returning to were it’s masterful plot and fascinating characters.  It’s simply brilliant, but even better, it’s fun — entertaining and humorous and full of small delights.

It’s a massive, complicated book, but it never plods, never bores, and despite its length, also never loses or confuses the reader. I’ve heard people complain that Dickens is too wordy, but once you get into the book, the style blends with the story. Bleak House is part social satire, part mystery, part love story, part parable — but you won’t feel preached to, and the connections between the characters are never forced, the outcome of the various twists and mysteries are neither overly foreshadowed nor too sudden or pat.

I couldn’t get over how familiar the people in Bleak House are — you’ll think of modern characters or real people who seem much like Lady Dedlock (Dickens would have had fun with Lady Diana), Skimpole (unfortunately, Bernard Madoff comes to mind), Richard (the 30 something who just won’t grow up), Mrs. Jellyby and Mrs. Pardiggle (today they’d forward campaigns to join and petitions to sign online).

I could go on, but there are so many characters, I won’t. Besides, half the fun is making your own connections. Treat yourself to Bleak House — you’ll feel proud of yourself for reading such a brick of a book (930 pages in paperback), and if it’s below zero, pouring, or snowing where you are, you won’t have to go out again anytime soon for something else to read.

In an effort to intrigue the teenager and his younger sister, I brought up the idea of  defining “great” literature or any other art at the dinner table a couple of weeks ago. A friend suggested that what’s “great” is what you love; my 11 year old immediately said she disagreed with this, citing her love of The Secrets of Droon, a paperback series that she doesn’t think kids will read in a hundred years (we’d already discussed great books’ long lives), but she enjoys enough to ask me to buy each new volume, and even to re-read.

Both kids felt that a great book should appeal to people of many ages and cultures, even if it’s rooted in particulars. For me, a great book is also a “total package” — beautifully written, with excellent story telling, finely drawn characters and images that bring the whole thing to life.  We didn’t solve the problem around our dinner table, but agreed that the concept of “great” art is probably a blend of the esoteric (think Harold Bloom and college lit crit classes) and the earthy (love = classic).

Bookconscious is a blog about what we’re reading and how our reading resonated with us (or didn’t), rather than a place for literary criticism.  But we did decide to try our own version of a lit crit circle at the bookconscious house. The Computer Scientist suggested that we read “classics” that often turn up on reading lists for the college bound, and discuss them as if we are a literature seminar class. The teenager actually agreed to this, and we’ve started The Old Man and the Sea.

The idea is to introduce him to talking about books the way college classes do –  taking a book apart and examining its parts, then commenting on their colors and textures, where and how they were created, and the way they work together, and hopefully remembering how to put everything back where it was without wrecking the whole thing.  Not long after he read the first part we planned to discuss, the teenager asked, in true New England style, “Why are we reading a book that compliments the damn Yankees? You didn’t tell me Hemingway was a Yankees fan!”

We had our first discussion about the beginning of the novella, up to: “But today is eighty-five days, and I should fish the day well.”  My contribution was some feminist analysis of Hemingway’s analogy that the sea, when it acts up, is like a woman affected by the moon.  We’re planning to discuss the author, his views (even the cranky ones), inspirations and influences, when we get to the end and don’t risk reading a  spoiler. Discussing women and cycles of the moon did seem to make the Computer Scientist slightly cranky, in a playful kind of way.

Is there anything that makes a reader crankier than anticipating a book by a favorite author only to dislike the new offering? I didn’t even finish Unaccustomed Earth, even though I really liked Jhumpa Lahiri’s earlier books. All the characters in the stories I made it through are struggling with pain, addiction, dysfunction, or some other crisis, and I just found it too much of a downer right now.

In fairness, the quality of the writing didn’t disappoint me, it was the content I couldn’t get into. And actually in the first few stories, the theme was the same — Bengali immigrant has generation gap with older immigrant parents and also doesn’t’ fully fit into mainstream American or British culture either, and therefore suffers emotional pain. I like a little more variety, even allowing for the fact that most authors have favorite themes.

I’m still interested in essays and memoir, even though I also enjoy reading fiction and my writing goal these days is to get my poetry mojo back. So I read a memoir I’ve been thinking of picking up for awhile, David M. Carroll’s Self-Portrait With Turtles. Carroll lives in nearby Warner, and has been on my radar since reading about him in the local paper.

Reading this book, in which Carroll traces his lifelong passions for turtles and art and how he made them his life’s work, was particularly interesting as I write about my childhood for the narrative time line exercise in Vein of Gold.  Self-Portrait With Turtles also confirmed my belief that in an ideal world, kids would be free to learn as they explore their interests, rather than in classrooms where they must set aside their interests in order to prepare to take a standardized test or regurgitate facts.

In keeping with following my own interests, I read three books of poetry recently: Elephant Rocks, by U.S. poet laureate Kay Ryan; Last Island, by former Portsmouth poet laureate Mimi White; and Season We Can’t Resist, by NH poet Martha Carlson-Bradley. I’d seen reviews of the first two books when I was working at St. Paul’s School as the interim reference librarian last fall. I found the third book on my local public library’s new books shelf.  I enjoyed all three.

Ryan’s poems are like those little wooden puzzles you can play with but never manage to get back together — I prefer to enjoy them whole, acknowledging I may never really figure out what makes her words fit in such a curious and complicated way, or how they start out as ordinary words and become beautiful, mind bending poems. White, whose poetic perseverance is inspiring and uplifting for someone struggling with publishing, writes with broad metaphoric brushstrokes. Carlson-Bradley impressed me with her eye for the finest detail.

None of these women writes poems that are merely lovely or masterful; each uses language and craft to wend her way through truth as well as beauty.  Poems often tell a reader something about herself once she’s gotten know them better, and good poems make the reader want to take the time to go beyond a handshake and really get acquainted. I felt that way in the company of several selections from all of these books.

And I felt that way upon hearing Elizabeth Alexander’s “Praise Song for the Day.” I was pleased to read it here –  poetry is a visual as well as an oral art form, so I was happy to find the poem in the form Alexander wrote it, rather than just as a transcript on a news site.

Besides poems and the Julia Cameron texts on creativity, I have several other books in progress on my reading pile. The kids and I are all enjoying Philip Reeve’s latest Larklight book, Mothstorm. What a clever, imaginative, thoroughly delightful yarn Reeve spins! Fun for all of us, including the teenager. If you’ve missed reading aloud but your kids think they’re too old for it, crack open one of these books and see if they don’t come lounge in a nearby chair and listen (even if they may pretend all the while to be studiously ignoring you). You’ll feel the way you did when, as a child, you lost yourself in a fantastic book, flopped on your belly in the grass or on your bed on a rainy day, and you won’t want to stop reading.

I do *need* to catch up on Old Man and the Sea so I’ll be ready for this weekend’s chat — we’re reading up to the midst of the old man’s struggle with the big fish. And I picked up a collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories, edited and with commentary by his biographer, Matthew Bruccoli. I was curious to read the original The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I haven’t read it yet, or seen the film, but I am really enjoying Fitzgerald’s other stories, and Brucolli provides a brief  introduction to each piece, which are interesting. I’m thinking of continuing to read short fiction, since I tend to have a few books going at once, on the theory that it’s easier to finish one story and set the book aside than it is to re-enter a novel.

A work of fiction I’m enjoying while I read but am having trouble re-entering is The Life and Times of Horatio Hornblower, on loan from my father-in-law. We’re both fans of C.S. Forrester’s Hornblower books, but either because it’s been awhile since I read the series or because it’s somewhat confusing to read a fictional character’s biography, I keep feeling lost. I probably ought to sit down and read it through.

If you like the satisfaction of finishing a book., two books I found at Ohrstrom library’s graphic novel display recently are easy to finish in a sitting: Robot Dreams by Sara Varon, which is a wordless book about a friendship between a dog and a robot; and Thoreau at Walden by John Porcellino.  Porcellino’s book is actually a  graphic biography.  Both are excellent. If you’ve tried Bleak House or read a lot of poems and your head feels full, either of these books will sweep you clean, refresh your reading spirit, and make you eager for more books.

Until next month, all good reading to you!

Searches for meaning, theories of everything

Two of us here at the bookconscious household were NaNoWriMo winners this year — which means we wrote a novel each in November. As I noted last month, it’s absolutely nuts of me to try and write 50,000 words in November, especially 50,000 words that should make sense in some kind of compelling way. My daughter did the Young Writers Program, which allowed her to set her own word count.  She sensibly set it low and exceeded her goal, and took plenty of days off.

Although I finished, it took a lot more effort than I recall expending on my last NaNoWriMo. Yet I still enjoyed struggling through to the end, which made me reflect on something interesting about my enjoyment of reading. Post-novel writing, I realized that part of my reading pleasure derives from sharing a sense of the struggle, either on the part of the author or the characters, that brought the story to fruition. For me, a good read is a vicarious quest.

A great example of a recent book that drew me in that way is Brisingr. Of course I have very little idea of the effort involved in a part human, part elf Dragon Rider’s struggle to master all he needs to learn with his dragon to save his world from an evil overlord while dealing with interracial conflicts, personal issues, spiritual confusion, and coming of age.  But I can feel for Eragon because author Christopher Paolini makes his hero so alive, drawing on emotions and thoughts that I can easily identify with.

Despite the challenging language (Paolini invented several languages for his book cycle, and even with the glossary I have trouble keeping words and names straight), the difficulty of remembering what happened in the earlier books, and the complexity of Alagaesia, the fantasy world where the stories are set, the Eragon books are enthralling because of Paolini’s mastery — not just in writing well, which he does, but in portraying universal human struggles, even in characters that aren’t human. He makes elves, dwarves, urgals, etc. distinct, but he makes every race a reflection of some aspect of humanity, a mirror we can look into, sometimes happily, sometimes a bit uncomfortably. For me, this makes the reading absorbing.

One thing about Eragon that is so endearing to me is his constant thirst to learn and to understand. He seeks not only information — Who are his parents? What must he learn to defeat the enemy? — but also meaning. What is the purpose of his life’s work? Why do we love, and what does love do to us? Why do different races in his world have different gods? Should he pray to any or all, and how?  In an autodidactic household where each of us is on our own life learning journey, these questions make Eragon seem like one of us. This kind of book feeds my imagination and I’d even say, my soul.

The question of souls, and how to feed them, brings me to A. J. Jacobs’ The Year of Living Biblically, which describes the author’s struggle to follow rules for living from the bible as closely as possible. Jacobs is a terrific writer whose earlier book, The Know-It-All, was a delight, especially for those of us who would like to indulge in prolonged reference book reading ourselves.  I’ve been meaning to read The Year of Living Biblically, and when my son’s best friend told me he was reading it, I figured it was a good time to go check it out.  I’m glad I did.

In nonfiction, I’m drawn to the same appealing factor that I look for in novels and stories: a sense of connectedness with what I’m reading. Whether it’s the writer or the subject of the writing that engages me, I get into a book or article I can feel caught up in. Jacobs writes endearingly of his own imperfections — much as another of my favorite nonfiction authors, Bill Bryson, does — and this makes his writing feel conversational. The Year of Living Biblically is arranged by month, so that the reader is carried along on the year’s adventure, which adds to the “we’re all in this together” feeling.

Jacobs is an excellent observer. He doesn’t just decide to try keeping the Sabbath (and admits, endearingly, that he can’t keep his hands off his keyboard and creates little exceptions so he can check his email anyway), he explains how his efforts begin to make a change in him, to create an awareness of the benefit of slowing down. I really enjoyed his observation that cleaning up his language helped him feel more peaceful, less angry about whatever he would ordinarily swear about. And his descriptions of each biblical adventure made it easy to see what he was seeing.

As with his first book, this one is not only about his own exploration of a subject, but what impact his devotion to  immersion journalism has on his family. For example, his struggle to be biblical includes growing a really big beard — which can be off-putting to strangers, not to mention his wife. He also writes candidly about he and his wife experiencing infertility and their pursuit of treatment so that they can have a second child.  With a small child, a wife and an extended family, work, and the trappings of modern life all around him, Jacobs tries to reconcile his life and his quest to understand biblical living, in a way that gives his project context for readers.

Two other things made this one of my favorite books of the year: Jacobs writes beautifully about being a dad, struggling to do the right thing, to be a contemporary parent caught up in timeless worries, and to even process the overwhelming love and concern a parent feels. So many other authors whose writing is fine, whose work is interesting, whose books I otherwise enjoy absolutely turn me off when they write authoritatively about their excellent children and their fantastic parenting. Makes me want to put the book down with a hearty “Puhlease!”

Not so with Jacobs. He tells us, candidly, about what works, what doesn’t, what he worries about when it comes to his son, what he wants to be as a parent. In real life, parents do that — question, wonder, hope, and yes, even pray, that we’re doing our best. So I love his honesty, and it makes his books more like sitting down with a friend and laughing over life’s speedbumps than sitting in a lecture hall and hearing how Informed, Enlightened Authors do things.

If you’re wondering whether Jacobs just puts on the kindly dad persona in the book, and whether he’s actually a conceited famous author in person, let me share a quick personal aside.  Late in The Year of Living Biblically, Jacobs discusses a fringe fundamentalist Christian group and explains why they alarm him. So far, so good. Then he mentions they were important to the rise of homeschooling!

Aghast, I labored over an email that would politely inform Mr. Jacobs of the diversity of background, belief, and educational philosophy that makes homeschoolers too vast and varied a group to stereotype, and would let him know that homeschooling wasn’t founded by extremists. He wrote me back very soon after I took a deep breath and hit send, and he was kind, understanding, and gracious.

When it comes to accepting that no one person or group has a lock on the best way to do things, Jacobs also excels. His exploration of biblical correctness included a circle of both Jewish and Christian advisers, and he tries to consider various perspectives. He also tells readers where he’s coming from: he’s an agnostic, a secular Jew, curious about religion but not convinced.

I appreciated that perspective as he shares what he finds transformative or doesn’t, what he learns that seems credible and what’s incredible, what appeals and what revolts. He’s fair, finding something good in just about everyone he meets in the book. And he’s gentle in the conclusions department — he doesn’t make any grand declarations about Truth and Meaning, but he explains, simply, what’s changed in his life and what he learned.

Life changing experiences come in many degrees of impact, and fortunately, most of us will never experience what Nastaran Kherad has.  After growing up in Shiraz, Iran, with her maternal grandmother, who she called Bibi, she was arrested on false political charges when she was only 18. While she was in prison, her beloved brother, Mohammed, was executed, in part for his efforts to be supportive of other prisoners. In the House of My Bibi: Growing Up In Revolutionary Iran describes the author’s upbringing and her family, and life in Iran for a working class family during the period just before and in the early part of the Iranian revolution.

Bookconscious readers know that last spring, I blogged about a couple of books I’d read about travel and life in Iran. I received a review copy of In the House of My Bibi as a result of my blogging.  Like Jasmine and Stars, whose author also grew up in Shiraz, In the House of My Bibi is a book that brings Iran to life. Kherad’s book deals only with her childhood memories, because she hasn’t been back since she fled Iran twenty some years ago. So the book doesn’t go into a great deal of detail about what was happening politically and socially in the country. Instead, it gives readers a view of growing up there, of living an ordinary childhood.

Other Iranian memoirs I’ve read, including Reading Lolita in Tehran and Persepolis, are the stories of people whose family or social circle were well off or well educated, or both. Kherad’s grandmother and mother are both widows, and both work to feed the family. Her grandmother works in a pickle factory and is illiterate, and her mother was married to an older man when she was still a teenager. Kherad writes clearly and simply, without analyzing, letting the reader come to conclusions she was struggling to sort out herself as an adolescent.

Besides Bibi, Kherad’s most caring relative is Mohammed, who takes his little sister to get a library card and introduces her to the ideas he is exploring as a young man. She describes him as a person with great empathy for the poor and for his fellow political prisoners.  The reader can guess, when the young Kherad tells her brother she wants to be a writer when she grows up, he won’t be there to read her work.

I enjoyed the book, and I think Kherad succeeds not only in helping show another facet of her country, but also in writing fairly about the things that were good in her life there. The bad is obvious; she writes vividly about her imprisonment. But she does not fully explain events leading to her arrest in one section of the book, and I found myself backtracking to try and get a clear picture.

Kherad portrays poverty and wealth, tradition and modernization under the Shah’s regime. But perhaps because she tells the book from her own perspective and she was still very young, I got no sense of when the revolution took place in her narrative and how it changed life for her family at first, before the arrests. There are hints — her brothers argue about whether Iran needs a monarchy, her Bibi admires the Shah, and Mohammed is disillusioned that the Islamic Revolution does not bring about compassionate social justice. It’s understandable that a child would only piece this information together in bits, but the telling is a bit disjointed.

In the final chapter, when she is about to leave Iran, she reconciles the strained relationship she has with her mother, but there is little closure, since we never hear much about Bibi once Kherad enters prison. On the whole, I thought the writing was vivid and considering the difficulty of revisiting these memories, the book is remarkably detailed. But I felt lost from time to time — perhaps that was intentional? Since she has spent nearly her entire adult life as an exile, the sketchiness of some parts of her childhood may be an authentic part of her memoir, rather than a weakness in the book’s structure.

While the other books I read this month touched on journeys of understanding, searching, and remembrance, my favorite recent purchase is Theories of Everything: Selected  Collected and Health-Inspected Cartoons, 1978-2006. For a mere $6, in a labyrinthine used bookshop in Manchester, I bought this volume, which may hold the secret to life somewhere within its magical pages. For those unfamiliar with Roz Chast, a staff cartoonist at the New Yorker, I recommend you go to the library and request this book. Chast has a knack for putting her finger on just what people wonder about, and spinning a humorous view of life’s mysteries and humanity’s foibles. Her humor is quirky and gentle even when it’s pointed, and her artwork is distinctive and delightful.

Next up a the bookconscious house? The teenager has begun Fever Pitch, which I picked up at the Audubon society book sale, and has also been poring over How to Photograph Absolutely Everything. His sister is reading The Great Santa Search but also — Hallelujah! — browsed the library shelves today. Has anyone else noticed that kids tend to search online for books, rather than losing themselves in the library stacks? I have such warm memories of several different libraries’ shelves, and myself in front of them pulling out book after book, choosing a pile, and anticipating many happy hours of reading. Online searching is convenient, but not nearly as much fun as serendipitous shelf browsing. Anyway, she found a couple of books that way and I hope to encourage more browsing.

We were at the library so I could pick up The Journal of Helene Berr, a  WWII era diary of a young French woman, newly published in English, which I heard reviewed on a BBC radio program. I’m also reading  Bleak House, which Gibson’s book group is discussing in January. As snow falls on the bookconscious house it’s time for making both Christmas cookies and latkes (my recipe is from a favorite picture book: The Miracle of the Potato Latkes), and I’m planning to dig into our selection of holiday books this weekend. Happy Holidays, and I hope all of you are the pleased recipients of good books this month!