I began a list of books for 2014. I have only finished one:
Lord of the World (discussion at
Reading for Believers.) Meanwhile, I have started many. Can't seem to find time or attention to finish them. And maybe the fact that I fall asleep while reading or saying prayers with the kids at about 8:30 has something to do with it. Last night I couldn't finish our chapter of Charlotte's Web. I fell asleep with my mouth open on the couch. I heard my older boys comimg in from their Tuesday night Bible Study, chatting with my husband, getting something to eat. I hadn't seen them all day. But I just couldn't move. My brain was still halfway functioning, but my body was paralyzed in its slouch. In my half dreaming state, I invented a conversation with the boys. I wondered what their impression of pregnancy is from my slide into indolence. Earlier in the evening, I neither helped make dinner or clean-up, but let my husband heat up leftovers while I sat riding shotgun on my 9 year old so he would finish up his mission scrapbook. Guilt and discomfort finally pervaded my consciousness enough for me to roll my body off the couch, prop open my eyes, and pose some obligatory questions about the day to the boys before going to get on pajamas and get into bed. Such is the state of affairs of this pregnant 40 year old.
These kinds of nights happen more often when I spend the day away from home, as I did yesterday. Had field trip duty for the fourth grade - they went to see a one-man play about bullying called "I am Jack." It made me wonder about how easy it is to take a mediocre storyline, some emotional and slightly naughty dialogue (jokes about underpants), and make money off of it if it is about a touchpoint issue.
After my chaperoning duties were over, I ran some errands, including checking out some books at the library with the intention of finding something EASY to read.
The books I have going:
Mansfield Park. It's been some time since I read any Jane Austen. This one I downloaded on the Nook last year, but only looked at after finishing Benton's
Lord of the World early enough one evening that I still had energy to read. Reading Austen is pure pleasure, especially since I'm defecting right now from Downton Abbey. I'm just a few chapters in, but it's enough to highlight the superiority of Austen's dialogue over DA's. Probably going to switch from the Nook to my copy in the Penguin collected works of Austen; although it's a cumbersome object, I have very pleasant memories of my grandfather purchasing it for me at a little bookstore in the town where we vacationed in Michigan. Although I was perhaps too young to really appreciate the tensions in Austen, I was attracted to the book's size and pretty pink cover. The pink cover is now falling off, but it is a book that has been well-loved for its content and provenance.
Number two:
The Reef by Edith Wharton. Again I am not far along, but already enchanted by the dialogue, even though Wharton's book is tinged by melancholy that threatens to get worse, while the early melancholy of Fanny Price in
Mansfield Park promises to be relieved. I was looking for another E. M. Forster book when I came across this book in a drawer of my desk. I don't know when I bought it. A surprise, like finding $10 in the pocket of your winter coat when you first put it on for the year.
Number three: St. Francis de Sales'
Thy Will Be Done. This is one of those spiritual books that I have started more than once and never finish. Like spinach, it is sure to be good for me to read, but it's written in a style that's hard to digest in its certainty and sweetness.
For balance, at the library yesterday I picked up Anne Lamott's new book
Stitches:A Handbook on Meaning, Hope, and Repair. It is a long essay on finding meaning. Sometimes I like Lamott's writing better than other times. I've only read the first chapter while hiding in the bathroom, but so far it lacks the charm and originality that the other books of hers I've read (
Bird by Bird, Traveling Mercies) have had. Maybe she overemphasizes the uncertainty? Or as the reviewer said in the link above, maybe it's the weariness detectable even in the first few pages that colors the idea that we carry on through tragedy by relating with others.
The engaging, easy book I started reading at breakfast is a new memoir, "
The World's Strongest Librarian," by Josh Hanagarne (his blog
here). It's the story of his struggle with Tourette Syndrome and finding work and love, intertwined with a memoir of his life with books. I prefer life with books memoirs over most other kinds of memoirs, perhaps because, with my infinitely ordinary childhood, I identify with them more than with narratives about difficulty and distress. (This morning on the way to school my kids asked me if I said "duh" much growing up in the 80s. I know I did to my siblings, but I think I was too nerdy at school to pose that kind of sarcasm to fellow classmates. I don't even remember many conversations with classmates. I could never write a memoir.) Hanagarne's tone is engaging - and his description of his early years spent falling in love with books and libraries encourages empathy -- a desire to say, "me too!" Except I wonder, how much does he remember from those years before first grade? I do vaguely remember the branch library near the house where we lived until I was seven, but I don't recall any specific books that I loved at that early of an age, except Tasha Tudor books,
Are You My Mother?,"and the illustrated, abridged version of
Bambi and the Little Golden books at my grandparents' houses - in particular,
The Tawny, Scrawny Lion,
the Pokey Little Puppy, Eloise Wilkin's little prayer book, and
Rudolph. Richard Scarry books,
A Prayer for a Child, and Margaret Wise Brown books were a part of our baby library, too, but they are so familiar, I'm not sure I remember anyone reading them to me, as I recall my mom's dad reading the
Pokey Little Puppy and my dad's mom using a deep voice to invoke Bambi's father, as much as I recall them being around and reading them to my little brother who was born when I was almost eight.
This book also brings back sketchy memories of a summer during high school when I took government and economics during summer school. The summer classes were populated mostly by students who had failed these prerequisites for graduation, plus a couple overachievers like my friend and myself who wanted to get ahead in credits so we could take more electives. The econ class was taught by a business man, not a professional teacher, and he had us bring in a couple of dollars to invest in a real stock for the duration of the class. He was engaging in a way that most teachers ground down by the daily struggle to instill some facts in recalcitrant students weren't. He treated us like we had ideas, even though we were an odd mix of flunk-outs and nerds. In between his unusual, casual style of teaching, and the several hours that the condensed class consumed on summer mornings, my other overachieving friend and I made friends with a couple of boys who, during the normal school year, usually hung out in the back of the school parking lot where other members of the Future Farmers of American parked their pick-up trucks. (Rural Indiana Public School, remember.) We checked the stock market readings in the business section of the newspaper together to see how our stock was performing. One of these boys had Tourette's. He had odd facial tics and would sometimes let loose a string of profanities. I remember him confiding this to me - at first I thought he was just telling me a story to elaborate about why he used such bad language, but then the profundity of his confidence sunk in. He was telling me he had a disability, which back then was not a label you wore with pride. I had always judged him to be a misfit by choice, someone who got in trouble because he didn't care about school and spurned authority figures. But I realized by the end of the six weeks or so (over which we each made about $1 on our stock choice), that he might have been someone else, if he wasn't embarrassed and angered by his body's inability to be controlled.
By the end of the class, he was calling me to talk, not just to ask about class, and would show up places where my friend and I were hanging out. Eventually I asked him to stop calling and following me around. Shadowy memories of being almost of afraid of him when I saw him punch a wall in frustration have been locked away for decades in the odd spaces of memory. I have the same deep shame about the way I treated him - rarely acknowledging him on the rare occasions when our paths crossed once the regular school year began -- as I do about the miserable selfishness I displayed when I asked one of my orchestra classmates not to tell anyone I had gone to the symphony with him one weekend. How and why was I so mean? I read a lot of books about misfits and empathized with independent characters in books, but in real life I was just as concerned with "reputation" and being liked as most other teenage girls. An ugly stage.
So anyway. I'm reading this book and intend to enjoy it, despite its ability to resurrect painful memories. I expect it will also help me recall pleasant associations with Books I Have Read. I'm also interested in his experience of Mormonism, which fascinates me. Now if I can just stay awake to finish some of these books.
