I'm having this problem...shocker

I'm having this problem with reading lately and I can't tell whether the books aren't worth reading or if teaching has turned my brain.

And I'm a little worried it's the latter.

Back in the day. Way back in time when I had time - and room in my brain - for reading, I looked down my book snob nose at people who read fluffy books. My grandmother, for example - who worked two jobs and had nine kids - read a lot of romance novels. I never understood it.

With age comes stress and possibly a little wisdom.

I see that for her - and now for me - reading couldn't be something she put her full heart into. I don't have the luxury right now to run away with reading. And when I try to read books that will make me think? I find my eyes glazing over and all of a sudden I'm lesson planning instead of reading and thinking.

Example? OK.

Chad - from Fiction is So Overrated and I decided (if decided means I stalked him down, emailed him, and made him agree because I think he's cool) to read some books together. He chose our first selection: The Tiger's Wife.

While Chad is awesome, I did not find The Tiger's Wife to be as awesome. It was kind of like when my young adult book club read an adult book and I picked Claire Messud's latest because I love her and she is fabulous and then I hated the book. Sad.

Now. Get ready. I'm about to get scientific, because I really need to figure out why I didn't like this book.

Later - post reading - I found out Tiger's Wife is the new hotness book that everyone thinks people should read. We know I hate those books on priciple. However, Chad and I had a pact not to research our book selections. So I didn't know, which means I wasn't tainted by my snobbery against books Oprah and Amazon and my feminist book store tell me I should read.

It wasn't my snobbery. But was it my teaching brain?

I tried to like it. I really did. Parts were beautifully written and poignant, but I couldn't stay focused. It was the kind of book where you are reading along and all of a sudden you are on a tangent, which is followed by tangent off of the tangent, and by the time you look up you're like: I don't care in the slightest why this town only has one gun and who brought it here - shoot the stupid tiger already.

And I love tigers.

It reminded me of A. S. Byatt's The Children's Book. And I hated that book before I started teaching.

Perhaps there are remnants of my brain left intact. Perhaps I can still find joy in books that don't have fighting sequences to keep me awake.

There's hope for me yet.

"Is your heart a sponge or a fist?"
Tea Obreht

The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks

For a while I've tried to articulate the kind of fiction some of my favorite writers write. Lately I've been calling it: quiet fiction. Face - who I'm now calling Nico - would call it a story without a plot. I would call it life. Life is only sometimes plot driven. The rest of the time it is all about character development.

Cathie Pelletier not only does some mean character development, but - through Will Durant - articulates this sub-genre of fiction: History may only record the river of civilization, but there is a whole other world taking place right next to it, on the banks. And the banks are funny and heartwarming. Richard Russo says she walks on the edge of "hilarity and heartbreak." I agree.


Funeral Makers, Once Upon a Time on the Banks and The Weight of Winter make up Pelletier's trilogy concerning the inhabitants of Mattagash, Maine. The families are so real, and hilarious, that I keep Googling Mattagash, like maybe this time the internet will confirm it as a real place.

I finished Once Upon a Time on the Banks and immediately wanted more. More weddings in school gyms where everyone is wondering if the bride is pregnant. More pesky neighbors who steal the rims off cars and moon people who are in a funeral procession. More husbands cheating on their wives with women who look like Marilyn Monroe and then realize their mistake. More wives finding out who they are. More ghosts of relatives past. More eavesdropping on the phone. More gossip. More family. More love. More life.

"I'm all heart and nerve and memory."
Cathie Pelletier

Stories in which ponies and/or babies die should come with a warning label

Recently, I've overheard too many for my liking negative opinions concerning John Steinbeck and his works.

Just like most everyone, I read Of Mice and Men in high school (two times actually...thanks moving) and felt fine about it. But then, after college I read East of Eden and fell in love. Next, I picked up The Moon is Down and was equally entranced.

After these three, I just really didn't get how people could be like: Steinbeck...blech. It seemed impossible.

And so I decided to pick up a few quick Steinbeck reads to investigate further.

First up: The Red Pony - a novella in four parts. *SPOILER ALERT...The pony dies in the first part. In no way did I see that coming. I mean, the boy left the pony outside for one day (one day!) and it gets sick and dies. Steinbeck was all, you like ponies? This boy likes ponies? Let's kill the pony and show that life isn't always fair.

You know what else isn't fair? That I was on the bus when I got to the dead pony part. I can only imagine my face as I read on in horror. Reading about a little boy's pony dying before 9 a.m. just isn't right.

It was kind of downhill after the pony death. The boy goes through a dark punishing everything around him to punish himself phase, but then ends up getting another pony, but only after the mom horse is killed to save the baby...tough lessons.

Next: The Pearl. Another novella, this time concerning Native American pearl divers (fishers?).

In the first chapter (first chapter!) the only baby of a happy couple gets bitten by a scorpion and the doctor won't see them because they don't have money and aren't white. The baby gets better (thanks to the quick thinking sucking out of venom on the mom's part), and the dad goes diving and finds a gigantic pearl.

I imagined it as the hope diamond of pearls.

*SPOILER ALERT...The pearl (metaphor for greed) is pretty much evil and everyone is now out to get the man. Including priests. Including neighbors. Including the doctor who I'm pretty sure poisoned the baby to show that he could cure the baby.

And they have to run away after someone dies (or is maybe murdered by the husband) in a tussle. And the wife wants to throw the pearl into the ocean, but the husband has envisioned a bright future for his child and can't abandon it now. So they run.

And you know who dies?

THE BABY.

In the end, they return (broken) to the village and throw the pearl into the ocean: "and the music of the pearl drifted to a whisper and disappeared."

In conclusion: sad.

East of Eden was sad as well, but it was also grandiose and epic and tragically beautiful. And each of these stories had beautiful, hopeful moments, but then they just really bummed me out. A lot.

Steinbeck is still an amazing writer. I still look to him to blow my mind with elegant and glorious and true statements on life. It's just that I finally closed the door on an awful month (November 10; Claire 0). And right here, right now, in this moment I want no part of heartbreaking excellence.

"And, as with all retold tales that are in people's hearts, there are only good and bad things and black and white things and good and evil things and no in-between. If this story is a parable, perhaps everyone takes his own meaning from it and reads his own life into it."
John Steinbeck

He was the great love of her life...one always thinks that every, every time

"He was the great love of her life...one always thinks that every, every time."

This is how Nancy Mitford ends her novel on love: sardonically.


Since the last quietly hilarious book I read - Excellent Women - I've kept my eye out. Because who doesn't love self effacing commentary on love and being a woman?

Mitford's The Pursuit of Love depicts - of course - the search for love, but also the search for self (sometimes through love). Luckily, the reader gets to hang out with Mitford's perfectly flawed characters, getting to know them first as children who engage in Child Hunts (it is what it sounds like...only no death) with their eccentric father and hunting dogs, but then as teenagers who yearn for social norms.

There are clashes between generations, mainly: "The argument...that young men were not very likely to propose to girls they hardly knew, was brushed aside as nonsense."

But once the ladies get out into the world, they realize some things: "...the behavior of civilized man really has nothing to do with nature, that all is artificiality and art more or less perfected."

The entire book is pulled off with an air of light seriousness. I imagine the following line being said/thought sitting on a chase wearing a silk dressing gown, martini in one hand while the other waves lazily to make her point: "She had found neither great love nor great happiness...and now she was doomed to the lonely, hunted life of a beautiful but unattached woman."

In the end, love is found, but there's a war on.

The lesson (if you are a true romantic) seems to be: die at the apex of love.

"Like all the very young we took it for granted that making love is child's play."
Nancy Mitford

Love funeral makers

Excuse my brief-ness.

Hurt a tendon in my finger.

Apparently right hand staging a protest against the gym.

Makes typing difficult, among other things (button up pants...).

This may mean I have to live in the world, sans computer.

Silver lining: sweatpants don't have buttons.

Have to say one thing though: I LOVE CATHIE PELLETIER.

Finished Funeral Makers last night. After playing around in young ad. lit and nonfiction, it felt amazing to get back to serious fiction. Her characters are real and tragic and hilarious. I can't speak for all her books, but I can say I loved this one. LOVE.

I found that I couldn't wait to cradle my out of commission hand and read about life. Full of mess. Full of pain. Full of love.

"...will go on with its cycles of life. There will be husbands lying down in the wrong beds. Wives caught in the wrong arms at the wrong time. There will be hasty weddings. The dying will die and move aside for the living to die, and the patterns of life will continue..."
Cathie Pelletier

The muddled, befuddled, and downright confusing history of love

*SPOILER ALERT - if you went to Saint Mary's and are still reading The History of Love...stop reading.

The topic? Unrequited love.

The question? How long do you hold on?

If you listen to Jane Austin's Persuasion, women love longest when all hope is gone. However, one of the male characters in the One Book One Saint Mary's selection (The History of Love) is trying to prove that some men should share this sad title.

The History of Love is also about the art of writing and life. And it is filled with beautifully tragic words like: "When I got older I decided I wanted to be a real writer. I tried to write about real things. I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely."

But then love walks in: "Maybe the first time you saw her...Part of you thought: Please don't look at me. If you don't, I can still turn away. And part of you thought: Look at me."

And then love walks out: "For a long time, it [your heart] remained hollow...If it weren't for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it."

And then there was this immensely sad part that wasn't even about love at all. It was about getting older. This man would purposely go out in public and make a ruckus (aka spilling milk at the coffee shop or knocking down a KY display at the grocery store) just so that people would notice him. Why? So that he wouldn't have to die on a day when no one noticed him.

...

But then, I got to the end, and it was like I was watching The Sixth Sense all over again. Because I said: huh? Wait a minute. That other guy doesn't exist? This isn't amateur hour. I'm basically a professional reader. So when I get to the end of a book and 1. am confused about who ACTUALLY wrote the book that the ENTIRE book is about and 2. didn't realize the guy has a heart attack in the last sentences (thanks for clearing that up Wikipedia)...I must call shenanigans and say that some clarifying sentences needed to be strategically placed in between the poetic ones.

I ask: why make a book confusing on purpose when the foundational story is great? You don't need all the pomp and circumstance.

I will show this by providing a short synopsis:

In The History of Love that is about a book named The History of Love, there is a first guy who wrote the book about a girl he loved and basically has dedicated his life to unrequited love, but he gave it to another guy - I'm still not sure why - but I think it has something to do with WWII and the other guy published the book under his name to get a woman to love him, but he put the first guy's self-written obituary as the last chapter like a 'sorry'. And the first guy goes his whole adult life not knowing that his great work has been published. In other news, the first guy has a friend - who turns out to be imaginary - who also used to love the girl - which is why their friendship ended - and who is also a writer and he also might simply be another version of the first guy but this is complicated by the fact that he really did used to be a guy who loved the girl and subsequently died - I think - and I thought for a minute that the first guy stole the book from the imaginary guy but turns out I don't think so and the first guy gets his book back - secretly in the mail - and the entire thing ends with him dying on a park bench next to a girl who was named after the girl in the book because her father gave the book to her mother and it turns out the mother is the one who is translating it into English for a man who turns out to be the first guy's son who the first guy thought never knew he was his father since he had to let another man raise him because the love of his life thought he was dead and gave up on him.

See? NOT NECESSARY.

"Once upon a time there was a boy. He lived in a village that no longer exists, in a house that no longer exists, on the edge of a field that no longer exists, where everything was discovered and everything was possible."
Nicole Krauss