A Walker in the Suburbs

Some books start strong and peter out as they go forward. Others pick up steam in the middle and race you to the finish. The Social Animal, by David Brooks, is neither of these. It’s a strange hybrid of a book, an attempt to explain the latest research on learning and emotion through the stories of two fortunate, happy (fictional) people, Harold and Erica.

Harold and Erica for the most part make their own good fortune, and they are likeable people, or at least Brooks makes you like them. My problem was, I wanted to know them better. The fiction part of the book kept getting in the way of the nonfiction part, at least for me.

But as the book progressed, I got used to its split personality and was uplifted by Harold’s final revelations:

“Harold tried and failed to see into the tangle of connections, the unconscious region, which he came to think of as the Big Shaggy. The only proper attitude toward this region was wonder, gratitude, awe, and humility. Some people think they are the dictators of their own life. Some believe the self is an inert wooden ship to be steered by a captain at the helm. But Harold had come to see that his conscious self — the voice in his head — was more a servant than a master. It emerged from the hidden kingdom and existed to nourish, edit, restrain, attend, refine and deepen the soul within.”

This is a book about depth — and the depth makes all the difference.

Sometimes when the house is very quiet I can sneak in a few hours of reading early in the morning. I’m sharper after a night’s sleep, not dropping off on every page, and what I run my eyes over stays with me longer.

What stays and what doesn’t is the subject of the book I just finished, Moonwalking with Einstein, by Joshua Foer. It’s a book about memory and memorizing, how a journalist covering the U.S. Memory Championship spent a year developing his memory — and became the U.S. Memory Champion himself.

Basically, anyone can improve his or her memory, Foer says. Or anyone with reasonable intelligence willing to spend hours a day practicing. The mnemonic techniques Foer uses were well known hundreds of years ago, before printed books made memorizing less important.

In my favorite chapter, “The End of Remembering,” Foer provides an intellectual history of memory’s steady assault by scroll, codex, silent reading, indexes, the printing press — and more recently by computers, cell phones, Google and Post-It notes. Why bother to hold information in our heads when there are so many other places to put it?

“Our memories make us who we are,” Foer writes. “They are the seat of our values and source of our character. … Memory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it’s about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human.”

I couldn’t agree more. But just to be sure, I will now write “Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein” in the back of my journal. It’s where I inscribe the names of all the books I read. If I didn’t, I’d forget I had read them.

Chincoteague is what you call a one-horse town. The one horse is Misty, from the book Misty of Chincoteague by Marguerite Henry. The story of a family determined to raise a filly born to a wild horse, the book won the Newbery prize and was made into a movie. I remember seeing the movie as a child, and I read the book to our girls when they were young.

The book put Chincoteague on the map. It popularized the herds of wild ponies that roam the island. It lent its name to dozens of shops, restaurants and tours. The Chincoteague High School team is — you guessed it — the Ponies. Hardly a fearsome name but, as Claire pointed out when we passed the high school yesterday, an artist has tried to make the ponies look fearsome. There is steam coming from their nostrils and they have a tough, no-nonsense gaze.

Tom and Celia chanced upon Misty herself the other day; she is stuffed and on display at a local museum. Ghoulish and over the top, to be sure. (Even in Kentucky, where horses are king, we bury our famous ones.)

But the hype is gentle as hype goes. It makes me feel tender about this place and, above all, glad to know that a book still has the power to change a place.

I just finished reading Pat Conroy’s My Reading Life. His prose rolled over me like a big wave and left me dizzy in the way a wave makes you dizzy as it recedes and leaves you teetering behind on the sand.

“I’ve built a city from the books I’ve read,” he writes. “There are thousands of books that go with me everywhere I go. A good book sings a timeless music that is heard in the choir lofts and balconies and theaters that thrive within the secret city inside me.”

Say what you will about Conroy’s writing — that his prose tends to purple, for instance — but I have never doubted that he is the real thing, and this book proves it.

“Here is what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of a writer’s heart.”

Since we hoard books in our house, it is often likely that when a particular classic is called for in a high school English class, we already have it. Of course it is not a pristine copy; it is usually adorned with such “English majorisms” as “illustrates dichotomy between life in city and life in country” or “example of bildungsroman.” While our children initially balked at taking such tomes to school, they began to see their advantage. There were answers in those margins!

Turns out that other people appreciate marginalia, too. I learned this several years ago when I wrote an article about the rare old books in the Georgetown Law library. And a new exhibit at Chicago’s Newberry Library celebrates “Other People’s Books” with marginal notes by the likes of Mark Twain and Thomas Jefferson.

A recent article about the exhibit in the New York Times points out that while it’s possible to annotate electronically, it is not so easy to preserve those digital annotations. So add marginalia to the list of What We Have Lost with E-Books (along with, perhaps, paper cuts and Borders?).

Life on the margins: It may be better than we think.