New Bookshelves for Departed Writers

This weekend I took the long drive into the nearest town that has more stores than our single Walmart. Five furniture stores later, I landed in the overpriced Pottery Barn and finally found what I needed: a pre-assembled half-height bookshelf. (I am deathly sick of assembling bookshelves myself - the last shelf lay in my living room half-finished for about a month.)

I immediately filled the bookshelf with the last box of books rescued from my parents' basement. I have great satisfaction in having a copy of Pat Conroy's Beach Music waiting for me out in the open now.

Pat Conroy died this week at the age of 70. Harper Lee and Umberto Eco died in February this year. Last year we lost Oliver Sacks, Jackie Collins, and Ann Rule.

Each author left behind a unique literary legacy, and they all meant something to me personally, too. Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, a murder mystery set in a library labyrinth, led me to Jorges Luis Borges, one of my favorite authors.

I once bought a paperback copy of Ann Rule's The Stranger Beside Me, but as at the time I lived in Seattle and was attending the University of Washington, I immediately chickened out and gave it away. Her books are read to pieces in my library, but I lack the necessary courage to pick them up at this point. Someday! (Maybe.)

I read To Kill a Mockingbird as a teenager, and feel it is overdue for a re-read. I don't plan on reading the controversial Go Set a Watchman anytime soon.

Oliver Sacks' compassionate accounts of treating patients with neurological disorders, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, made me see medicine and mental illness in a new way. His TED Talk on hallucinations is a great introduction to his work, given near the end of his life.

Pat Conroy's The Prince of Tides amazed me by being a literary story that was also a page-turner - an incredibly rare combination.

Jackie Collins' American Star kept me well-entertained, and is the perfect level of fluff, which in my book is praise. It is no simple thing to write an effortlessly entertaining book. Many try, few succeed.

Rest in peace, you wonderful authors. I will cherish your works.

The Child That Books Built

The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading by Francis Spufford
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A lifelong reading addict guides us through not only his own autobiographical journey, but also through the wild geography of children's literature, from Little House on the Prairie to Narnia and beyond.

This has to be hands-down my favorite books about the reading life, which is why I reread it this year. It's not your typical autobiography, nor your typical reading life journey. Spufford is much more interested in the movement of the human mind from childhood to adolescence, and he brings a panoply of deeply literary references to bear on the subject. His style is reminiscent of my other favorite essayists, particularly Annie Dillard (if you haven't read her and love gorgeously written science essays, start with Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, though her other collections are also excellent).

Spufford starts with a dense discussion of the universal psychology of child development, moving from Freud and Jung to Piaget. Each of the next three sections is about a different type of encounter with literature - the pure joy of entering Narnia, with a thoughtful and nuanced take on C.S. Lewis's fervently sensualist Christianity; an Englishman's perspective of America, informed by encounters with Laura Ingalls Wilder and To Kill a Mockingbird; and an adolescence where his reading arc moved from children's literature to science fiction (like Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness) to the metafiction of Jorges Luis Borges and Italo Calvino (two of my favorite writers).

In fact, his childhood reading life so closely mirrors my own that it felt spooky to read the journey of someone who was born a continent and an ocean away, who is roughly the age of my parents, and male - but who read the same books with many of the same emotions. (He only read other books after the discovery of Narnia, he says, because there were only seven Narnia books and he couldn't be constantly rereading them.) Of course, I did not have a sister with a devastating disease, either, or have to wrestle with the complex guilt he felt at his instinctive reaction to her illness.

Spufford is what Nancy Pearl would call a story reader, primarily in it for plot, coming to the pleasures of more subtle adult fiction where character and language overcome story and setting much later, and never as a native to the territory. I'm similarly in it to be carried along by a great story or taken to a fascinating new world. Thanks to Spufford I picked up Arthur Ransome's wonderful Swallows and Amazons (it beats even the first The Boxcar Children hollow as a story of childhood independence), and discovered the alternative-history England - chillingly wolf-infested - of Joan Aiken.

It is tempting to simply spin out title after title of the great books he discusses with such clarity and insight, but I'll resist and instead pepper you with quotations. I was amazed, since it's been so long since I first read this, at how many of his insights and opinions I have internalized without remembering their source. One of the dangers of reading great essayists: your mental landscape will never be the same.

Quotable:
On learning to read
The formerly sacred nature of books

"Compared to the books I was used to, and was growing out of, grown-up literature seemed spectacularly open-ended. I would read a few pages, and there would seem to be no edges and limits to what was going on; no sense of an evolving shape, and so no urgency, and no particular reason to read on. Of course, the reformulating jump into adult fiction consists exactly of a retuning of your reading mind to those subtler, wider, but still ultimately decisive cues to meaning that a writer for adults constructs in the expectation that the person reading will bring an active, participatory judgment to the task. No book is truly open-ended." - 170

On science fiction genre reading in his teens:
"Some of it was frankly bad. Some of it was good on one point only - one idea, one invention - and the whole of the rest of the novel existed only as a scaffolding to hold that one good thing in place. And some of it was 'good' in a purely efficient way, because it worked out a daft premise sleekly. So what. Who cares. Good books are so often committed to self-denial of one sort or another. They make their fictional world real by making it austere; they hammer events into proportion, and subdue them with probabilities." - 178

"Sensible, probable books keep sending you back where you came from. It's the wild and tacky ones that let you see further into the world you do not yet know. It's the books that dispense with rigor and proportion that let your imagination billow out, and go exploring. They give you time, space, empire, power; an existence answerable to your wishes as your own really is not. Their freedom from what really is becomes your freedom, very directly. They give you scope." - 178

The Lost Art of Reading

The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time by David L. Ulin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a book-length meditation on reading which started out life as this editorial in the L.A. Times. As essays do, it wanders through the author's own experiences and political ideas. Fortunately, he's not a Luddite and accepts e-reading as reading, and even considers that reading on the Internet may also be real reading: his point is that we have lost the ability of paying sustained attention to anything, particularly books.

Interesting premise, but I'm not sure this expansion is an improvement of the original essay. It doesn't cover new ground, and it doesn't retread the old territory better than other books of this type. An exceptional reading memoir is Francis Spufford's lovely The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading.

Ulin makes good points about the drawbacks of ebook technology, points I've heard before: limited selection (you can find Faulkner now!), readers' inability to share ebooks, censorship and the threat a monopoly poses to our shared cultural heritage. Ebooks can close up our reading choices, unlike the openness of books on shelves that your friends can see and comment upon. (I've had some great conversations at my bookshelves, but rarely around my Nook and never around my iPad.) Also, reading books on a device like an iPad invites distraction - and I suppose I proved Ulin's point by being distracted as I read by looking up the books and articles he mentions while at the same time taking notes for this review.

Further reading:

Ulin mentions the book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas G. Carr (another book that began life as an essay, this one for the Atlantic Monthly).

Everyone interested in information and libraries should read Jorge Luis Borges' short story "The Library of Babel"! Borges' story may be magical realism, but the slim So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance by Gabriel Zaid (translated by Natasha Wimmer) reveals our book-glutted reality and may make you rethink your relationship to your "To Read" list.

Quotations:

• "How do we pause when we must know everything in an instant? How do we ruminate when we are constantly expected to respond? How do we immerse in something (an idea, an emotion, a decision) when we are no longer willing to give ourselves the space to reflect?" - 78
• "In December 2009, a study by the Global Information Industry Center at the University of California, San Diego, found that, 'in 2008, Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillions hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day. Consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day.' One hundred thousand words is the equivalent of a three-hundred-page novel, and it's encouraging to learn that we all read that much." - 81
• "For the culture, though, books serve as a collective soul, a memory bank, bigger than mere commerce, not only to be bought and sold. When we can't share them, directly, one-to-one, our common informational heritage is compromised." - 123