More Book Notes

Book notes are something I primarily do for myself. Someone - I think it was Melanie Bettinelli but I can't find it - shared a link to an article about how people are reading in order to post about it, or they are thinking about what they are going to post about a book while they are reading it. At first I felt defensive when I read the article: I don't post on Facebook what I'm reading! ... but I do on my blog. And I have asked myself, "Is this a bloggable book?" I pick books to read based on other people's social media recommendations and I also admit I read books that are lists of books that someone says you should read to be well read in order to be well read.

Is it a problem to read a book with an eye to what you can say about it? Book reviewers do it. There's an air of vanity about reading in order to look smart.  But didn't people used to read books so they'd have something to talk about at parties? Weren't people motivated by the desire to look intellectual at the next salon? I used to be inspired to read more by characters in books who were well read. I wanted to be a great books major so I could recognize the references to Homer and the Bible and Shakespeare in old books.  And I wanted to read all the books on the list of books to read to be well educated in order to look well educated as much as to be well educated.

Who doesn't have mixed motivations for reading, along with so many other things we do? Yes, I sometimes read with an eye to what I can post on a blog.  But I like reading what other people write about books in order to determine what to read next or to see what someone else thinks about a book I found difficult or confusing. I have many times gained a greater appreciation for a book I thought was so-so by reading or listening to someone else point out what they like about a book or a connection I missed.  This sharing of insight is also why I like reading in groups - book clubs in real life or online. Book clubs encourage me to pick up a book I might not have read otherwise. And sometimes I feel justified in not having read that book before... but talking about even a mediocre or bad book over a cup of coffee in someone's living room, or at the coffee shop, or in front of the computer, creates connections between people as well as between the reader and writer.

One last reason I post on a blog about what I read is so that I will actually learn something from a book. I find that although there are many books that I really enjoy reading or that I find very inspirational or beautiful or whatever, I can't really say why I like them unless I go back a second or third time to the book and start looking at the text more closely. Blogging about a book (or taking notes for a class) forces me to do this. When I go back to pages I marked and copy out passages, I gain greater insight into the book - and into what I was thinking at the time. Sometimes I wonder, "Why did I underline this?" or why not that... Sometimes I see connections I didn't see before.

So yes, sometimes I read books for vain reasons. But there are a host of other reasons to be a social reader. Conviviality and sharing ideas override vanity in the ranking of motivations, in my mind.

Hence, some book notes:

Francine Prose in Reading Like a Writer  also recommends copying out favorite passages for books, not just to remember content but to study an author's style.  I'm a big fan of writing as a means of remembering - and I wish I had made my kids do more copy work than what they did.  In the end I gave up on handwriting programs and just picked sentences or stanzas for the kids to copy those last couple years of home schooling.  Perhaps that is why they have such bad penmanship, but they did learn a couple Bible verses, retained for at least for a week.

But about Prose's book - it's a book about reading and writing and helpful in many ways. She devotes chapters to Word, Sentences, Paragraphs, Character, Dialogue, Gesture, Narration, and Details, among other topics important to both writers and readers and wannabe writers.

From the chapter about Prose's love affair with Chekhov, I copied this long passage, from one of Chekhov's letters:

"That the world 'swarms with male and female scum' is perfectly true. Human nature is imperfect. But to think that the task of literature is to gather the pure grain from the muck heap is to reject literature itself. Artistic literature is called so because it depicts life as it really is. Its aim is truth -- unconditional and honest. A writer is not a confectioner, not a dealer in cosmetics, not an entertainer; he is a man bound under compulsion, by the realization of his duty and by his conscience. To a chemist, nothing on earth is unclean. A writer must be as objection as a chemist.
It seems to me that the writer should not try to solve such questions as those of God, pessimism, etc. His business is but to describe those who have been speaking or thinking about God and pessimism, how and under what circumstances. The artist should be not the judge of his characters and their conversations, but only an unbiased observer.
You are right in demanding that an artist should take an intelligent attitude to his work, but you confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for the artist.
It is time for writers to admit that nothing in this world makes sense. Only fools and charlatans think they know and understand everything. The stupider they are, the wider they conceive their horizons to be. And if an artist decides to declare that he understands nothing of what he sees -- this in itself constitutes a considerable clarity in the realm of thought, and a great step forward."

Makes me want to read Chekhov.

Which is why it is hard to write a book about writing and to try to teach writing.  Prose wishes she had told her class: "Forget observation, consciousness, clear-sightedness. Forget about life. Read Chekhov, read the stories straight through. Admit that you understand nothing of life, nothing of what you see. Then go out and look at the world."

Some of the writers Prose recommends I'm not familiar with and some I am.   Prose praises the oddball characters, the unlikable, unsympathetic, insane, obsessed, criminals in novels by authors like Beckett, Gogol, William Trevor, Patricia Highsmith (the later I've never read). Other authors she mentions: Dorothy Sayers, Isaac Babel, James Baldwin, Balzac, Barthelme, Brodkey, Baxter, Bowen, Elizabeth, Jane and Paul Bowles, Italo Calvino, Raymond Carver, Chekhov, Stuart Dybek, Junot Diaz, Mavis Gallant, Gogol, Henry Green, Randall Jarrell, Diane Johnson, Denis Johnson, Samuel Johnson, Nadexdha Mandelstam, John Le Carre, Marquez ,Alic Munro, Tim O'Brien, ZZ Packer, Tatyana Tolstaya, William Trevor, Tolstoy, Tugenev, Rebecca West, Joy Williams, Virginia Woolf, Richard Yates, et al.

Prose muses at the end: "Reading can even offer the writer courage during those moments when (given how much suffering there is in the world, the dangers looming around us) the very act of writing itself begins to seem suspect. Who can be saved by a terrific sonnet? Whom can we feed with a short story?"

Then she closes with Czeslaw Milosz's translation of Zbigniew Herbert's poem "Five Men," which she sent to a friend concerned that she was writing "weeds" instead of "roses."  Prose's answer is "So one final reason for reading is to confront this problem of roses versus weeds in the company of geniuses, and with the pleasure of looking at the roses that have actually been produced, against all odds. If we want to write, it makes sense to read -- and to read like a writer. If we wanted to grow roses, we would want to visit rose gardens and try to see them the way that a rose gardener would."

"Literature is an endless source of courage and confirmation." Can social media compare?

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The novel I read next, The Known World, by Edward P Jones, is a Pulitzer Prize winner. It's the story of the interconnected world of a fictional Virginia County - Montgomery. The largest landowner, William Robbins, allows a couple of his slaves to buy their freedom and that of their son, Henry Townsend. Robbins also frees his slave mistress and her children by him. These free blacks make a life for themselves in the County, not fleeing to the north. Henry marries another free black woman that he met through their teacher, Miss Fern. They also become friends with Dora and Louis, Robbins' children. Robbins makes Henry his protege and schools him in running a plantation. Tensions rise as Henry buys slaves and  becomes a landowner.  And when Henry dies, his small empire begins to crumble under Caldonia's lack of leadership.

This book was my distraction during labor. My mom had finished it on her trip out here. I enjoyed reading it, and it fulfilled its purpose: it was distracting.  I can't say I loved it - it's written in an interesting style: a non-linear narrative, shifts in focus, fabricated "facts" about Montgomery County mixed in with the plot. And the characters and the context are interesting, but it hasn't haunted me. In fact, I had to go back and look up the names when I was writing up this summary. It would be a good book to read with a book club. My current book club tends to read books like "A Child Called It" and "Language of Flowers," pretty accessible.  This book was perhaps most interesting because of the interplay between the free blacks and the black slaves they owned. 

While we watched Twelve Years A Slave over spring break, this book came back to me. The movie makes the slave owners seem so wholly depraved, while this book, written by a black man, acknowledges the mixed influences that contributed to the perpetuation of slave holding in America.  What is perhaps most fascinating to me is the complex and seemingly swift change in perception and mental attitudes towards slavery.  Maybe it wasn't as quick a shift as I imagine, but how did it go from being legal to being abhorrent in the course of a couple generations? I wonder if the cultural shifts regarding marriage and Christianity will follow the same pattern. 

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The last book I wanted to make notes about is Willa Cather's A Lost Lady.  I have the same feelings about Willa Cather that Prose has for Chekhov - Cather has a wideness of vision that makes you feel that the whole world is beautiful and interesting but dangerous and full of sympathetic, disillusioned characters. She presents characters who are beautiful but flawed and whose motivations are not entirely clear. In this case, it is Mrs. Forester, the beautiful young wife of a railroader who settles in a little western town and is admired by the town boys, especially Niel Herbert, who falls in love with her. As a boy, Niel admires her for her beauty, sophistication, and kindness, but as he ages, he is disappointed by her failure to live up to his admiration.  Her husband, many years older than herself, falls ill, and she can't go to Colorado Springs for the winters any more. She begins to drink and to associate with another man.  Gradually, her shining exterior is blemished, and Niel's youthful idolatry changes into a sense of disappointment and loss. Does she fall from grace out of loneliness, vanity, desperation?  Her husband seems blind to her indiscretions, but "The longer Niel was with Captain Forrester in those peaceful closing days of his life, the more he felt that the Captain knew his wife better even than she knew herself; and that, knowing her, he, - to use one of his own expressions - valued her."  So even when she is false to him, he admires her.

But is this "valuing" not the same as loving? Do Niel and Mr. Forrester both betray her by not admitting her betrayal? Maybe she wants to be caught, to have the excitement of an argument and the consolation of a reconciliation?  Is there some irony in Niel's conversation with another friend from his childhood who brings news of her last days:  "She was well taken care of till the end. We may be glad of that"  Maybe she didn't want to be well cared for? Maybe she wanted a little more independence. Cather makes Niel's voice and vision the perspective from which the story is related, but as I'm reading this the second time in middle age, I have a little more compassion for Mrs. Forrester than I did when I read the book as a young person.  Her position doesn't excuse her behavior, but it's easy to see how ideals can fade as you age if you don't keep them burnished. Perhaps that is why the Captain continues to value his wife even as she betrays him.

*****

Also just finished reading Mr. Popper's Penguins with the kids - I'd never read it myself, even though the older boys read it at some point. Good fun. Although right after I praised Mr. Popper for making the right decision about what is good for the penguins, he runs off on his wife and kids for a couple years of arctic exploration. And all Mrs. Popper can say is that she's glad she won't have to work so hard to clean the house when he's not around. She's such a good sport. She'd make a good military wife.