summer reading

“The first sentence of every novel should be: ‘Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.’ Meander if you want to get to town.” — Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion

My summer reading, which I had looked forward to all spring, is over. Today I opened Three Cups of Tea, which I’ll be teaching in the fall and which promises to be wonderful, but summer reading has the allure of being completely my own. So begins lesson planning and required reading.

I had wanted to read page-turning, feel good stories such as Water for Elephants, with a few classics thrown in to make me feel less like I’ve been schlepping through my reading life. But between writing, working, and Anna Karenina, I only made it through Joyce’s Dubliners, Fugard’s Skinner’s Drift, Moore’s Sleeping Beauties, Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, Choi’s Foreign Student, and the massive Anna.

People with English degrees continue to tell me that I must read the classics so that I can understand what’s come before me. And I can say, from this limited sample, that I preferred the contemporary stories to the classic ones. Granted, I chose them because they touched on things I’m interested in right now, mostly self-exile. I loved Fugard, Moore, Ondaatje and Choi, and I learned a great deal about technique from Joyce and Tolstoy. Making this distinction, reading for pleasure versus reading for form, makes me feel as if I’m growing as a reader.

This is not to say that I did not learn from the contemporary writers as well, it’s just they had the added bonus of being hard to put down. I inhaled, as always, Moore’s work; I seriously pondered Choi’s characters, I reveled at the brilliant POV shifts of Fugard, and felt lost in the beautiful poetry of Ondaatje’s novel.

Also (since the Tolstoy read deserves a mention), what’s wonderful about Anna Karenina is it’s breadth; it’s wonderful, intersecting story lines that have the pace of real life. Things take time. His characters are distinct, three-dimensional, with wonderful interior monologue. His humor and tragedy is spot on. I’m sure I’ll return to it again and again as its student.

In all, it was a wonderful summer of reading. Francine Prose, in her Reading Like a Writer, states that we read for courage. I believe that. There’s a world full of books that break the rules, that show us how it can be done and it’s sometimes more beneficial than a classroom full of people to tell you how it can’t.

gordimer

Not a good day, so I returned to the books.

I recently finished Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People, and while it was not a page turner, it was so beautifully written that I’ve just ordered her The Pickup. Some criticism of her is that she’s a (gasp!) unconventional writer. I like that, her sentences are so poetic, her observations razor-sharp. The story follows the Smales family in South Africa, who escape terror in the city by returning to the village of their servant, July. The book is full of the subtleties of race and marriage relations, and how those weak links break. These don’t make much sense out of context, but they’re my favorite sentences in the book.

…

The subtlety of it was nothing new. People in the relation they had been in are used to have to interpret what is never said, between them.

…

–African people like money.– The insult of refusing to meet her on any but the lowest category of understanding.

…

She told him the truth, which is always disloyal.

…

you don’t actually have to read the books

The New York Times‘ Sunday Magazine interviewed University of Paris French Literature professor Pierre Bayard about his book How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. The interview is great, but here’s a tickler.

Q. Then why are you so willing to devalue the experience of close reading in favor of skimming? You seem to believe that knowing a little bit about 100 literary classics is preferable to knowing one book intimately.

A. I think a great reader is able to read from the first line to the last line; if you want to do that with some books, it’s necessary to skim other books. If you want to fall in love with someone, it’s necessary to meet many people. You see what I mean?

Q. You suggest in your book that schools destroy a love of literature, in part because they don’t allow skimming.

A. Yes. Sometimes I help my son write book reports. Guillaume — he’s 14. It’s terrible. The questions are so specific about the names of characters, dates and towns where the heroes went that I am unable to answer the questions. It is the model of reading in France. A kind of scientific reading, which prevents people from inventing another kind of reading, which should be a form of wandering, as in a garden.

becoming un-stuck

With school canceled for the week due to the fires, I was a very lazy girl. Well, at least in that productive write-your-research-paper way. I did start writing my next short story, however, since my last story was workshopped a few weeks ago. I found myself stalking my characters, trying to get to know them. I wandered around the apartment thinking of what they would say to each other, and then, questioning their decisions. I fretted over structure, told myself something has to happen (action’s not my strong suit) and more or less banged my head against the wall for a few days. Godammit, why won’t they just tell me what they want?

At the same time, I started reading for myself, finally putting a dent into Granta’s Best Young Novelists 2, beginning Kaui Hemmings Hart’s House of Thieves, and slowly plodding away at One Hundred Years of Solitude (again) for class. It was there, in those pages, rather than the blank ones on my computer screen, that prompted me to keep going. While my stories begin with germ of an idea—a dream, an image—these texts inspired me by breaking up a the traditional narrative, by offering that one telling detail, by showing me worlds beyond my own, a lens in which to see my characters. And of course, they’re just so damn good.

And so I finished the first full draft a few days ago. Of course, now I’ve got the emotional lull because it’s not really mine anymore. Not exclusively. But mostly, I hope this is a lesson: When stuck, go back to the books. Keep reading.

It reminded me of something I read from Julia Glass, after I read her novel, Three Junes. Here’s what she had to say (the truncated version) about reading while writing.

But inspiration, that’s a kinder, gentler matter — and if I turn a less covetous eye on my list, I could say it’s a list of writers who inspire me: amplify my senses of the physical world, my joy in language, my faith in the power of make-believe. The only impediment to reading their books is the urge — the almost literal itch — they sometimes give me to heave them aside like burning coals and get to work on mine.

I have heard writers claim that while they’re working on a new book, they won’t read anything contemporary, won’t read anything they haven’t read before, or simply won’t read at all. They’re too impressionable, they claim. I find such restrictions as absurd as protesting that you can’t eat out if you’re the household cook or can’t give birth if you’re an obstetrician. And when, after all, is a writer not working? In my head at least, the business of spinning stories has no closing time. Twists in my characters’ lives, glimpses of their secrets, obstacles to their dreams…all arrive unbidden when I’m getting cash at the ATM, walking my son to camp, singing a hymn at a wedding.

The books I read, if they intrude on my writing, do so as weather will pass through and touch a landscape — affecting it, yes, but only now and then leaving a permanent mark. This kind of inspiration struck, perfectly timed, when I was about two-thirds of the way through writing Three Junes. … I went right out and bought a collection of Cameron’s stories and his previous novel, The Weekend, a book that would prove fortuitous to the completion of mine.

I was also facing down the true challenge of writing a novel: ending it. I knew who the characters were in the final third of the book, I knew the present action would take place over a weekend at that house on Long Island, I knew the alliances as they would stand at the end and that the end would be hopeful, but I did not know quite how the characters would get there. In The Weekend, I was surprised (and a little unnerved) to encounter a cast of characters from the very same world, even (as in Three Junes) a man still mourning the loss of another man to AIDS and a mother preoccupied with the fate of a small child. More remarkably, the novel ended, as I knew mine would, with the main character’s return to New York City. I might have been depressed at the similarities, but I was energized.

I felt as if I had traveled abroad and run into next-door neighbors I’d never met at home or as if my characters, drifting about in my head, had discovered a gang of soul mates — souls who seemed not frivolous but tragically weighted. I was heartened by this kinship, even though Cameron’s writing has a conciseness I could only envy. And now I confess to an act of theft.

the great stories

“The secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen.. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again. That is their mystery and their magic.”

—Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

book rats beware: it’s time to let go

Our bookshelf is a frightful thing to behold. Only our frequent moves have kept things a bit in line. Buggah won’t let go of any book in his library and I enjoy book shopping at second hand shops. Needless to say, they pile up. Sure there’s some I never got through (Middlemarch) and others you couldn’t pry out of my cold, dead hands (The God of Small Things). Some I’ve been meaning to get to (two years ago).

Anticipating our move, we’ve probably rid ourselves of 60 books. But they’re still there, like those ghost Mario Bros. characters that never die. We just packed six large boxes and there’s more. The truth is, I do want more. But what I want is more books I really want to own and really want to read and some premium shelf space to house them.

Enter BookMooch, book karma for bums like me who have attachment issues. Face it, I’m not gonna read Beloved this year. But if someone else wants to read my copy, than who I am to deprive a fellow reader? You just list books you’re willing to part with and if someone wants it, you send it at your expense (a couple bucks). You get a point, allowing you to request a book from anyone in the entire network. I’ve already sent five books to readers across the country and four books for my fall lit class are on their way to me. I’ve got a few extra points to request books on my wishlist. It’s like approaching the register at Borders, and the cashier says, “This one’s on the house.”

The great news is, once you’re done with the book, you can keep it or pass it on. Check out more liberating book ideas here.