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Most of All

Most of All

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Yesterday, I read an entire book. The title isn’t important. Let’s just say it wasn’t War and Peace. But it’s worth mentioning because it’s been a while since I’ve read a book in a day, and it was satisfying in and of itself.

I must clarify that by “day” I mean 24 hours, which includes reclining in the hammock on a perfect late-summer afternoon as well as reading in the middle of the night, unable to sleep — with the latter a more common condition than the former, I’m sorry to say. But still, the words were digested, the book was read.

What this means, what I’ve known all along, is that reading is one of those things I’ll find a way to do no matter what. It’s one of the things I love to do most of all.

Why We Write

Why We Write

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There are certainly mornings when I wonder what I’m doing here. Why share these observations with the blogosphere when I could just as soon express them to family or friends or jot them down in my journal?

I know the answer to that question, but I’ve seldom seen it explained as well as Susan Orlean does in her 2018 nonfiction bestseller The Library Book. 

Admitting that before the idea for The Library Book struck her she had sworn off writing books — “working on them felt like a slow-motion wrestling match,” she wrote — she goes on to talk about why the idea pulled her in. The book, which recounts the Los Angeles Public Library’s great fire of 1986 and the beauty and fragility of libraries in general, grew from the love of books Orlean developed as a child and the memory of afternoon excursions to the Bertram Woods Branch of the Shaker Heights (Ohio) Public Library system with her mother. Her mother, much older now and in the throes of dementia, wasn’t remembering those library visits anymore. That left Orlean to remember for both of them.

“I knew I was writing this because I was trying hard to preserve those afternoons. I convinced myself that committing them to a page meant the memory was saved, somehow, from the corrosive effect of time.

“The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not just that I, personally, will be forgotten, but that we are all doomed to being forgotten—that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world, and then we vanish, and the mark is erased, and it is as if we never existed. …

“But if something you learn or observe or imagine can be set down and saved, and if you can see your life reflected in previous lives, and you can imagine it reflected in subsequent ones, you can begin to discover order and harmony. You know that you are part of a larger story that has shape and purpose — a tangible, familiar past and a constantly refreshed future.”

Learning the Significance

Learning the Significance

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I learned from the Writer’s Almanac that today is the birthday of Frank McCourt, author of Angela’s Ashes. I remember reading that book the first time and marveling at the pathos and the humor and that marvelous opener: 

“It was, of course, a miserable childhood: The happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood. People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and all the terrible things they did to us for 800 long years.”

Angela’s Ashes was on the best seller list for three years, won a Pulitzer and sold four million copies in hardcover. McCourt is the patron saint of late bloomers. He wrote the book in his mid-sixties. 

Re-reading McCourt’s obituary I came across this lovely anecdote. When speaking with high school students in New York in 1997, he said this about his book and the writing of it, something that should gladden the hearts of all those who labor with pen and keyboard, or the hearts of all of us, period. “I learned,” he said, “the significance of my own insignificant life.” 

Stegner and Home

Stegner and Home

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It made sense that I finished this year’s “beach book” just hours before firing up the work computer.  It made sense, though it made for less than 40 winks. That’s the way it is — or can be, when the book is good enough. 

In this one, it was almost as if I could see Stegner coming into his own as a writer from the beginning of this 562-page saga to the end. The Big Rock Candy Mountain was Stegner’s second published novel and an autobiographical gem that becomes wiser and stronger as the writer (and the characters) mature. 
I’ve always loved Stegner’s depiction of the American West, his love for the landscape and the way he grapples with the nature of home. And here I could see this in full flower: 
It was a grand country, a country to lift the blood, and he was going home across its wind-kissed miles with the sun on him and the cornfields steaming under the first summer heat and the first bugs immolating themselves against his windshield. But going home where? he said. Where do I belong in this?
…Where is home? he said. It isn’t where your family comes from, and it isn’t where you were born, unless you have been lucky enough to live in one place all your life. Home is where you hang your hat. (He had never owned a hat.) Or home is where you spent your childhood, the good years when waking every morning was an excitement, when the round of the day could always produce something to fill your mind, tear your emotions, excite your wonder or awe or delight. Is home that, or is it the place where the people you love live, or the place where you have buried your dead, or the place where you want to be buried yourself? 
…To have that rush of sentimental loyalty at the sound of a name, to love and know a single place … Those were the things that not only his family, but thousands of Americans had missed. The whole nation had been footloose too long, Heaven had been just over the next range for too many generations.
Traveling Twice

Traveling Twice

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This year’s beach read is The Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner, a family saga as broad and as deep as the western horizon. It’s been a fine book for this year’s trip, accompanying me on the plane and on the strand.

There aren’t many readers on the beach these days. There are plenty of people on their phones, and, believe it or not in this age of air buds, plenty of people listening to portable radios loudly enough that everyone nearby can hear them, too.

But I spotted only three or four people reading books on yesterday’s walk, though the day before I happened to park myself by an entire family in thrall. But though few in number, readers stand out. There they sit in perfect communion with the printed pages, as waves break and gulls swoop. They could be anywhere — running through an airport in Bangkok or driving cattle through a freak spring snowstorm in Montana.

I like to think that these readers have discovered what I have: that when you travel with a book, you travel twice.

Overwritten

Overwritten

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That I’m an Annie Dillard fan will come as no surprise to anyone who glances at the title of this blog with its Dillard quotation below. It’s taken from my favorite of her books, An American Childhood. A more perfect evocation of growing up, of coming to inhabit one’s self, I do not know.

I’ve been less a fan of Dillard’s fiction. But a few days ago I picked up The Maytrees. It has a slightly standoffish quality that keeps me from fully digging in, but, like all Dillard’s works, it has lines that stop me in my tracks. Here’s a passage that did just that:

Often she missed infant Petie now gone … He fit her arms as if they two had invented how to carry a baby. … Later she washed his filthy hair and admired his vertebrae, jiggled his head in toweling that smelled like his steam. She needled splinters and sandspur spines from his insteps as long as he’d let her. Every one of these Peties and Petes was gone. That is who she missed, those boys now overwritten.

How beautifully does she say what parents feel as their children grow up. That as much as you love them, love them more each year though it seems scarcely possible, you miss them, too, miss their younger selves that flit in and out of their smiles and expressions, tantalizing just enough to let us know they’re in there still, somewhere. Thanks to Dillard, I have a new word for where they are. They are “overwritten,” stuck beneath layers like primary code.

Outside the Lines

Outside the Lines

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I won’t say I wrote the first over-parenting book, but I did write an early one. So I pay attention when new volumes come out on the topic.  One of the latest is Parenting Outside the Lines by Meghan Leary, which is excerpted in the Washington Post today.

Leary has her work cut out for her. The little I’ve been learning about the commercial assault on and considerable expectations of parents these days, the more amazed I am. Take the products and gadgets that are supposedly filling needs but are actually inflaming fears.

There’s something called the Owlet Smart Sock, which keeps tabs on baby’s vital signs so you can sleep in peace. Sleep in peace, that is, until baby kicks off the Owlet Smart Sock, at which point you run, heart-pacing, into the nursery to find your sweet babe snoozing in rosy good health. Of course, you’re awake for the night.

One thing I’m sure of — every parent wants the best for her child. The question is, how to achieve it. And the infuriating answer is .. we don’t really know for sure. Accepting that answer, believing in that answer, can take a lifetime.

Anniversary of a Classic

Anniversary of a Classic

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Catching up on email, I learned from the Writer’s Almanac that To Kill a Mockingbird was published 60 years ago yesterday — and that it was not an easy book to write (if any book is). 

Apparently, Harper Lee was so frustrated by her work-in-progress that in 1957 she threw the manuscript out the window. Luckily, she retrieved it and went on to finish the book, which has sold 30 million copies, been translated into 40 languages and won the Pulitzer Prize.


Lee admitted that she didn’t know what to expect when the book was published, and hoped that if it was panned, it would be a “quick and merciful death” at the hands of the critics. She later admitted that she found the success almost as frightening as the “quick and merciful death” would have been.  And in fact, Lee never wrote the next book.

If communication is the point, how our work is perceived by others, then perhaps Lee said everything she needed to say in that classic and her silence was justified. But if the point of writing is the doing of it … then Lee was robbed.

Books, Books and Books

Books, Books and Books

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From a book I’m reading that I may have read once before, I caught an aha moment last night. It’s a passage from Jewelweed by David Rhodes, and it involves a conversation between a man in prison and the minister who comes to visit him.

“Is there anything you’d like me to bring next time?” she asks.

Yes, says the man in prison, whose name is Blake. “Three things … books, books and books.”

When the minister asks what kind of books, Blake says he will read most anything, but what he really wants are … “thick books with fine print, difficult sentences, long words, and enormous ideas, books written in a feverish hand by writers who hate the world yet can’t keep from loving it, whose feelings so demand to be understood that if they didn’t write them down they would go blind.”

Sounds good to me.

Reading Double

Reading Double

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What’s a reader to do when she becomes totally engrossed in an Audible book while already reading a page-turner the old-fashioned way? There’s only one answer to that: spend all non-work hours reading or listening.

Beyond that, though, there are some considerations. One can “read” an Audible book while walking or dusting or chopping vegetables, but one cannot read an Audible book before bed. I’ve tried that before, have fallen asleep to a mellifluous voice carrying me sweetly from novel to dreamland only to find myself hopelessly lost and frantically rewinding (using that five-seconds-back key) in the clear light of day.
With eyes on paper, though, the worst that can happen is that you lose your bookmark in the bedcovers. But that, and one’s place in the story, is easily found the next morning. 
So there develops the two-channeled reading mind, which thrills to American Dirt in the evening and revels in The Heart’s Invisible Furies in the morning. And why should it not? After all, it’s the same mind that holds recipes and birthdays, addresses and passwords. It can juggle more than one movie or television show in an evening, so why not two books in a day?
 I say this now, of course, but I’m only a few days into reading double. We’ll see later how it all turns out.