Betrayed!

So, yesterday, I'm on the train with the kids on the way to The Muppet movie (which, by the way, was a little sad -- when did Kermit get so sad?) and we're reading Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, by Louis Sachar. Now, I'd gotten the book because my daughter had asked for Sideways Stories from the Wayside School, and the bookstore didn't have it, but they had Stranger stories. And, I'd recently read Holes, also by Sachar, which is a lovely book (until the end, when it's a little too much good news even for a kids' book). But, I have to say, in Stranger stories we got to a chapter about one Mr. Gorf who has three nostrils and uses one of them to steal children's voices and then calls their moms and tells each mom how much her son or daughter hates her. (Mr. Gorf said he did this because these students "took his mommy away and he's going to take their mommies away." His mommy turned students she didn't like into apples.) In any case, this didn't feel like the cruel, fascinatingly horrible things that happen in fairy tales, or in, say, A Tale Dark and Grimm (which I loved). Nor did it feel like the bad but you know it's not serious kinds of things that can happen in books when the author is being "funny". It just read as mean, gratuitously mean. Granted, we didn't get to the end of the chapter because we arrived at our subway stop, but I have to say, I was pretty disappointed in Mr. Sachar. When choosing books for kids, we trust authors we know, authors we've read, and while not every story has to be like the others, I wasn't expecting revenge via prank calls. Boiling evil magicians, now that I'm OK with. Prank calls that make children cry? Not so much.

Update: I just asked Helen if she finished the chapter with her dad. She did. She liked the ending when a pepper pie made Mr. Gorf sneeze out all the voices and then Mr. Gorf's whole nose flies off. I admit it, it's funny. But funny enough to make up for this stricken faces in the middle? I don't know. Maaaybe.

E-Books, Revisited

Lately, the thought of curling up with my Nook to read a good Book just makes my toes curl. I know I'm not the only woman giving up on screen reading. K.J. Dellantonia, our new Motherlode blogger, has done the same. I wish my reasons for not wanting e-books were as clear as hers. She wants her kids to see her reading. This means Ms. Dellantonia has "quiet time" in her house during which they all read together. We don't have that. Then again, my kids are early readers so I shouldn't feel bad yet for not having quiet reading time. I can wait for two years from now when, I hope, my kids will be reading away but not during the quiet time when we all read together. No, I'm not that into e-books just BECAUSE. Because I'm tired of screens being everywhere and doing everything. It's not that I don't appreciate the screens I use. I've come to quite like this new computer, and I'm not ready to give up my TV, even though I watch it less and less. But, I can't help it. I still like reading books that are only books and don't glow, except, you know, on the inside. So will I read Villette, my next big not-chilrden's novel, on the Nook? Or, will I get it from the library? I guess we'll just have to see how long this jag of grump lasts.

The Secret Garden

For a while now I've wanted to write something about The Secret Garden. I read it for the first time a few weeks ago, and when I started it, I thought, "Oh this is magic!" But the more I read of it, what with what happens to Miss Mary Quite Contrary in dank, infected India and then how she blossoms once returned to the moors and sent outside; and then how the lovely and pan-like Dickon comes along and opens the secrets in the garden Mary's found; and then how Dickon's mother, and mother to 13 others, Susan Southeby, is full of motherly wit and wisdom, not to mention the kindheartedness to buy a poor little rich girl a jump rope; and how Colin is discovered and saved....well, it all got to be a little too much. I was going to suggest it was, possibly, the weirdest children's books ever, but then Marjorie Ingall blogged about what I'd forgotten was actually the weirdest children's book ever. Now I'll just say it's an extremely odd and discomfiting book for all it doesn't recognize about itself. It's all that unconscious reinforcement of the healing power of rosy cheeks and fresh milk that makes me nervous. I know that sounds kind of awful, because really, what could be wrong with rosy cheeks and fresh milk? But there are things deeply wrong with said cheeks and milk The Secret Garden because the author seems to think they're So Right. For odd and off, I suppose I'd rather read a book like Coraline which knows that it's being very odd and plays with the whole idea of the big English house, along with some other pretty wonky ideas about mothers and power and buttons for eyes. All this to say, I may never hand Helen or Elliot The Secret Garden and say, "You've got to read this!" Then again, maybe I'll do exactly that, because if I do, Helen, at least, won't ever read it, at least not for a good long while, and I think that may be AOK.

Poser: My life in twenty-three yoga poses

I first learned of Poser, Claire Dederer's memoir about yoga and family, when I walked past a book store and saw the book in the window. I remember taking in the cover and having a familiar, small, bitter encounter with sour grapes. I wished I'd written a book like that! Could I have written a book like that? Could I bring myself to read a book like that? What if it was really annoying, everything that bothered me about yoga when I used to take yoga? Or, even worse, what if it was everything I'd loved about yoga and more?

Then, conveniently, I forgot all about it until a friend who'd just read it said something exceedingly generous and kind. She said, "You could write something like that." Having read the book all I can say now is: "I WISH!"

Dederer is a terrific writer. She's spot on about so much. Her book is about yoga in America. It's becoming a mother and coming to terms with her own mother, family, and the 1970s. Dederer also and of course writes about the culture of mothering in which she (we) finds herself. (For a nice discussion of the book, read Sue Dickman's review.

Before I had children, I did yoga. I would even go so far as to say I practiced yoga. For years. In my mid and late twenties, yoga pretty much anchored my life and while I never threw off coffee and thirty pounds in pursuit of the perfect down dog, in my mind I came close by going to classes more than three times a week four weeks a year and contemplating yoga retreats as vacations. When I was depressed, I had yoga. When I couldn't get pregnant, I had yoga. When I thought I would never get pregnant, yoga turned into a way to make peace because through yoga I thought I'd explore things my body could do by banging on the doors of a host of things I thought it couldn't. (Hello split!) And now, I don't practice yoga anymore for a couple of specific reasons, so reading about Dederer's yoga classes felt like a little bit of time travel through which I got to be smarter and funnier than I really am and do an arm balance to boot.

All this to say, if you've taken yoga or haven't, had kids or haven't, or loved From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler or didn't (although I don't know anyone who didn't love that book and really don't want to think about the person who wouldn't), you can appreciate Dederer's book. She builds a world and fills it in and flips back to another world and it's not all perfect and the whole time it's great to be there with her.

Frindle

Frindle is an absolutely charming book about a boy, his teacher, a big idea and the power of language to bind them altogether. I often cry when I read children's books (oh to see me at the end of Knuffle Bunny Free), and my kids kind of love it kind of hate it. To them it's like seeing a rare and somewhat bizarre insect. They want to huddle up and peer as if farsighted at the strange event unfolding in their immediate universe. Anyway, they got to do just that at the end of Frindle, because I'm a sucker for a life-enhancing student-teacher moment. It's short, it's brisk, the characters play their parts pitch perfectly, it's a great read, even if you're not going into fifth grade.

My E-Reader, My Friends, and Me

So, I now have an e-reader, a nook color, and I like it, mostly. Here's some of what I like: I can check out library books with it. I was very interested in reading a book from Canada called The Myth of Ability and waited months for a paper copy which never came. With the book backordered until who knows when, I bought the e-version and am very glad for it. I'm also glad to be reading Treasure Island and to have Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone queued up in there. (Thank you, New Yorker, for the recent Wilkie Collins essay.) And I like that I can read my nook in a dark room while my kids are falling asleep. (Please don't ask why I'm in my kids' room when it's dark and they're falling asleep. Someday I won't do it and I won't be a short order cook and hopefully my kids won't be ruined for all my mistakes.)

Here's what I don't like. I don't like that I've read a few books on the nook that I've wanted to pass along to friends and can't. And I don't like that if I'm reading on the nook on the train or in a restaurant there's absolutely no chance that anyone will ask me about what I'm reading. I've had someone ask me about the nook itself, but that's it. If you're reading a book with a cover on it, it's like there's an opening into asking about it. The other day I saw someone reading The Thing About Life is One Day You'll Be Dead, a book I've been wondering about for a while now. I asked him about it and we had a pleasant, brief exchange and I still want to read it, but if he'd been reading it on the nook, I wouldn't have been reminded that that's a book I want to read.

During my course on teaching literacy this past Spring, my literacy teacher made the point that reading is a social act. I'd never seen it that way before. In fact, I approached reading as a deeply private act. But it's not. And one of the ways it's not is that when you're reading out of doors, used to be everyone could see what you were reading. Reading on the nook, while convenient, feels five steps more isolated because everything I read is on my machine. These feelings don't exactly make sense, I know, and I'll continue to read on the nook, but let's just say that when I gave my kids the option of either buying the books of Harry Potter three and four and getting them on the nook, it was no contest. They wanted the books. They wanted the things, and even though I'm going to have to schlepp those things along with me on vacation, I was glad for it.

My First Real Book Review

Months ago, a review I wrote for Moment Magazine of a book called Kosher Nation was published. I didn't even know! If you're curious, here's the link. It's my first book review not on this blog.

The Great Black Hole

There is a great black hole somewhere in my apartment - I'd yet to discover where, exactly, it is -- but I know what falls in. Library books. We don't have a regular library routine. That is to say, we don't go to the library every Friday and return the three books we checked out the week before and get three more books and stop on the way home for our shabbos candy bar. No. We go to the library intermittently and take out books enthusiastically. This is both thrilling and ridiculous because it means that every few weeks I'm scouring the apartment, panicked, looking for the library books which I will not find. And then there's the school library situation. What's that situation? It's the one that crops up when you return a big hardcover book you didn't buy on purpose to the public library and not the school library. Not good.

It may be that when I'm a classroom teacher and have to thoughtfully arrange my books in baskets that I'll naturally extend my newly found professionally developed organizational skills to our home environment. But I'm not optimistic. Just like my kids loose it most with me, I loose it most at home. It's OK, though, we all have our work.

On My Wish List

I'm SO reading this book.

Buzz: A Year of Paying Attention

A few months ago I read a memoir titled Buzz: A Year of Paying Attention, by Katherine Ellison. In it, Ellison describes what life was like for her the year she decided to focus on her older son and his ADD, a brain based disorder she shares. (In the LA Times, Ellison used "ADHD" to describe the condition she and her son have. For the purposes of this post, and the book, the difference doesn't matter.)

Buzz is one of the best memoirs I've read and one of the best parenting books. I haven't read that many ADD/ADHD books, but I'm guessing it's one of the best books about the disorder a parent or person affected by it in some manner shape or form could read. It's clear and honest about what it means to live with ADHD yourself and what it's like to try to help a child navigate life with it. In fact, my husband is reading it now and he read a line to me from it last night and I said, "I want to re-read that book."

Ellison is a wonderful writer and she portrays herself and her family members with compassion, grace, sarcasm, anxiety, and great good humor. She's no sugar-and-spice-and-everything-nice kind of mom; she is unafraid to show her nagging self, her impatient self, her demanding self, her worrying self. But she's so funny and real. She's trying really hard, like we all do. I wish I lived next door to her and I hope fervently that she'd like me. (Except that if I did I'd live in California and I'd have to drive everywhere.)

One of the most moving parts of the book is the year Ellison chose to pay attention to her son and his ADD (as well as her own) also happened to be the year before his bar mitzvah. The big event isn't the main focus of the book, but it's a big part of the family's story and it's so incredibly moving, well, I'm getting a little weepy just thinking about it. I won't write about what the bar mitzvah talk made me think about what I had to do for me and my family, but I will urge everyone to read this book. Even if you don't have a child with ADD or ADHD, there's something to be gained from wondering about the limits of equanimity and the role of the parent.

Comic Fiction-or Funny Moments in Fiction?

Howard Jacobson has an essay in the Guardian asking why comic novels aren't taken more seriously. He gives examples of funny moments from Anna Karenina and Little Dorrit.....which seems to me to sort of conflate what might be funny in a book that's about so much life it can't help but include the funny parts and what's meant to be a comic book.

I got to the essay via Maud Newton who thinks maybe Muriel Spark is too funny to get the respect she deserves. (I'm a Spark fan, but I don't think that's why Spark isn't taken more seriously.) Anyway, it's all interesting because it's all about how people don't think that comic and complex can go together.

A Visit from the Goon Squad

I love this book. I just loved it. I've read other books composed of short stories that wind together. (I'm thinking particularly of Joan Silber's powerful Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories.) I tend to like how they mess around with structure and I'm a sucker for the serendipities they rely on. But I loved A Visit from the Goon Squad in a way that goes beyond appreciating it's structure, which is terrific, and the writing, which is brilliant. I loved it in the way you love a book you can't wait to read and so to finish and then you actually finish it and get that feeling of "Nooooooo! Please don't end!" Plus, the book had me speaking a line to my husband I never thought possible: "Just read the chapter in power point because I cried on the subway when I read it." Really.

Franzenfest/Manenfraude

I should say that I've been trying to write something about the whole Jodi Picault, Jennifer Weiner, Jonathan Franzen situation for a while now. I've gotten nowhere. But Liza Mundy over at Slate XX, she got somewhere. Check it out here.

In the Kitchen with a Good Appetite

Melissa Clark's new book, based on her New York Times column, comes out today! Since I have an advance proof I've already read most of it; since I'm an ardent fan I've made many of the recipes. Even if Melissa weren't one of my very closest friends I know I'd love this book. It's got exactly what you want -- beautifully rendered essays about the ways food comes into our lives and the people who bring it in, showing with good humor and grace how our lives are better for it all. And, unlike Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking with its terrific food writing and recipes that don't quite work all the time, these recipes will quickly become your stand-bys. If you buy one cookbook this year, buy this one. You won't be disappointed.

Oh the Mailers

Last week, I read a piece in The Observer called "Where Have All the Mailers Gone?" In it, Lee Siegel argues that The New Yorker Twenty under Forty fiction writer list was not only annoying, but revealed just how culturally irrelevant fiction writing has become. Why? It's too safe. Too professional. Siegel writes:

"The carefulness, the cautiousness, the professionalism that keeps contemporary fiction from being meaningful to the most intellectually engaged people is also what is stifling any kind of response to The New Yorker. After all, kick against The New Yorker's conventional taste and you might tread on some powerful person's overlapping interest."

This may be true, but it also may be overstated. Not bothering to put up any dukes to The New Yorker at a time when the Gulf of Mexico is filling up with oil every day, generals are dismissing presidents, refugees are fleeing from Kyrgyzstan with small children and elaborate tapestries in tow, and things in general seem hot and bad might be a sign of exhaustion, but irrelevance?

Siegel lays out a reasonable argument for the demise of fiction's place in the cultural theater. He pines for the good old days when commercial fiction was better and Mailer was there to mix things up. Yet I can't help but wonder a little bit at people saying it was so much better when Mary McCarthy and Phillip Rahv and Mr. Mailer were smoking their way through downtown bringing urgency to the literary endeavor. I mean, OK, it was different, and people as in the general public probably read more fiction than they do now. And?

Siegel goes on to argue that these days, non-fiction writing is so good, it's taken over the place of fiction among people who think and write big thoughts.

I don't know. Honestly, I don't even know what it means for fiction to be culturally irrelevant. People don't read like they used to; it's a truism of our time. The relevance of fiction, and non-fiction, for that matter, is so personal, so private. Even when great ideas of life and power are being discussed, the impact they might have happens one by one, one page, one reader at a time.

So, yes, maybe fiction writing programs tell people to drown too many of their kittenish sentences. (For a perfect description of this problem, read The Possessed by Elif Batuman.) Yes, people can and should argue about books and ideas in a public forum. OK, maybe there's not enough of that in the bigger writerly venues -- I wouldn't really know since I don't have time to read all of those venues and also read books.

But, for me, fiction or non-fiction, either way, a writer is telling a story. People like to read stories. They need to read them, and they can engage with big ideas about life and power and justice and love and all that through both fiction and non-fiction writing. (Plus, non-fiction writers may not fictionalize, but they must construct a narrative which must be much more streamlined than any situation fully lived.) As long as we keep reading, and as long as we don't only turn to The New Yorker for guidance on fiction writers, I think the question of the relevance of one form of writing versus another may just be irrelevant.

A Book Binge

Maybe in anticipation of the spate of recent articles (here's one) on electonrica and what it does to your attention span, I've found myself in the grips of a book buying fever. Truthfully, it all started with this Op-Ed that concluded the greenest way to get a book is to go to the library. I read it and vowed to get all my books from the library, except for the ones I can get from the guys on Broadway selling them for a dollar or four a throw. From them, I've bought a book by Lee Child because I heard Child on the radio, or someone talking about Child, and I got curious. I got To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf because why haven't I read it? I bought The House of Fortune Street by Margot Livesy because I liked Eva Moves the Furniture so much. I could go on, but I won't.

Then there were the books that I didn't get on the street. There's Hungry, because it's just out in paperback and I've wanted to read it for a long while, and The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel, because I liked the Babel essay in The Possessed so much and a Babel story comes up in The Ask. I also bought The Death and Life of The Great American School System, which I've just finished and mean to blog about. It's the serious relative to Mother on Fire. Way more serious. Then there's a book of poems: Museum of Accidents by Rachel Zucker. I've read two of them, the poems. They're amazing.

I am now reading a book I actually got out of the library: The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich. So far so good, five pages in. I'm also reading the galleys of Melissa's new cookbook In the Kitchen with a Good Appetite, which is the cookbook you dream about when you dream about reading a cookbook in bed. I recommend putting it on your wish list. It comes out in September. God I love a wish list of books.

The Ask

I've just read The Ask, by Sam Lipsyte. (You can read the NY Times review here. Full disclosure: I know Sam Lipsyte.)

The novel is over the top, spot on, deeply funny. There were some scenes that felt like too much and others that felt so real it was like I was breathing the same air as Milo Burke, the book's protagonist. Burke is around forty and at the start of The Ask he's working as a development officer at a third-tier university in New York City. He has a son in the mid-threes and a wife with whom he "cuddled in the way of a couple about to not have sex." He's got a mom in New Jersey, a dead father, and a web of frayed connections to himself and the people who occupy different pockets of his life. All told, Milo Burke is a rich character and through him Lipsyte explores the way we in this place (New York, which happens to be in America) and time (now) conflate the moral obligation embedded in our relationships with something like (or actually) a quid pro quo. Whether the relationship is to our child, our friends, our soldiers, or our mentally ill neighbors, the book looks hard at what we could do, what we should do, what we want to do, what we can't help doing, and what we buy our way out of doing because we can.

Lipsyte does all this using language that's almost ecstatic. He's never met a ten dollar word he can't put to good use in a sentence about a two dollar bargain passing itself off as a fifty dollar steal; he'd really rather not use "and"; and he loves to end a sentence with a comma and a gerund. But the ten dollar words feel like they were originally assembled to be exactly where Lipsyte puts them, the text gallops along if you let it, and the way he ends a sentence, it can make you laugh out loud or break your heart. His language asks you to suspend disbelief and if you feel like it, I'd recommend doing it. It's worth spending some time with Milo Burke. He's not perfect, but he's got what to say.

Giving Up the Ghost and the Book

Last night I stopped reading The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk with maybe fifty pages to go because I just couldn't bear the thought of walking across the apartment to get it. I'm amazed by this, when I think about it. It's not like there were any stairs involved. I should have been able to overcome my antipathy to the novel, but I just couldn't. I'm frankly annoyed I stuck with it so long. While it has some perfectly observed scenes, most of the book is filled with reductive observations about family relationships and how they strip away a sense of self in a net of obligation and through what we're supposed to recognize as love. Instead of inspiring recognition, the book made me think about the ways my own life has gotten better since I've had kids -- and not better just because I love my kids so much (even though I do), but better for just me. For example:

1) I'm a better cook. I used to worry every step of every dish, hover over saute pans, obsess about having all the right ingredients. Now, between my kids and reading Melissa Clark's Good Appetite column (seriously), I'm more relaxed, knowledgeable, improvisational, and, it has to be said, successful in the kitchen, and this means a lot to me.

2) I've made new friends and met really interesting people. After college, it's hard to make friends. Work friends stay at work, neighbors move, but having kids means meeting other women and men who've had kids and it turns out you can meet people you never would have otherwise.

3) I started writing. I wrote some before I had kids. But once Helen and Elliot were actually here, something shifted. Writing was no longer the most important thing I could ever imagine doing, so important that I couldn't even imagine that I could do it for real live (as my kids would say). With this lowered status, what came out when I wrote wasn't always so serious, so heavy, so striving (even if the topic was serious in its own way). As with cooking, I stopped worrying so much about the writing, and that made the writing better. Plus, not worrying about what I might write and whether it was worth writing opened up new space to worry about terrorism and climate change.

4) I appreciate time more. This means I have less patience for books I don't like and more excitement for those I do.

I could go on, but I won't. I should also say that I recognize my life could've changed in all these (and other) ways without having had kids. Because life itself makes us change, right? But, pace Cusk, for me, it's not all so bad in its new, post-children form.

Running with Elif (The Possessed)

This morning I was running through Central Park and as I was coming around the top of the hill that marks the final third of my route I saw this young man in front of me. He was running, too. Then he started to speed up, then he suddenly leapt over this small wooden fence, pushing his arms to the side and his legs forward. It should have looked awkward but it didn't. It looked graceful, and it looked fun. I plodded along behind him, and he did it again. And again. And again. My legs were tiring and he was circling his arms and throwing himself into the air. I thought to myself, "He's running like Elif Batuman writes. She moves along, moves along, moves along and then Zow! The Leap. It's elegant, it's unnerving, sometimes, it's fun." At least this is how I felt about Batuman's book The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, which I finished last night. Read, read, read...Jump! I recommend it.

Re-Reading

Enjoy!