My mom used to divide her library into sections. Lots of space was dedicated to fiction and the sturdiest shelves held her coffee-table sized books on the movies. But one special part of the library was devoted to chronicles of everyday life, virtually all of them written by women. Some also wrote Kid Lit. or humor like Jean Kerr and Judith Viorst while others wrote novels or plays but every book on that shelf was what I called a “Domestic Chronicle”; an account of everyday life. If those books sounded boring, they weren’t. All of them were clear-eyed observations on a fascinating, multi-faceted worlds. usually recorded with dry wit. These books had a remarkable effect on the reader. Novels might be read for excitement or entertainment and non-fiction for excitement or knowledge but domestic chronicles could appease the soul. So my question is, where are the books of this genre today? According to my mom, the best writer in this genre was Gladys Taber, author of the Stillmeadow series. In book after book, Ms. Taber recorded life at her New England farmhouse, Stillmeadow. She was not a farmer or a New England Yankee from birth so her stories deal with…
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I still remember the first time I saw it. I was browsing through a used book store and re-reading The Great Gatsby for pleasure, (hey, you have your pleasures, I have mine) when I saw it at the end of Chapter three. Someone had underlined the last sentence in the paragraph and drawn a star beside it at the end. They wrote in a book. A book full of someone else’s words. I wasn’t aware people did that. Not that my family tried to safeguard our books; you can’t safeguard possessions you love and use daily. Our books were tattooed with coffee-cup stains, dog-eared and limp with wear. A few loved storybooks suffered with fractured spines and key pages had to be turned carefully. We were hard on the books we loved, but we never wrote on their pages. I bought the used book, partly because I love the story and partly because I was curious about the previous owner’s additions. The check marks and dashes seemed like someone else’s coded commentary that expanded my vision of the story. I wanted to decipher the code. I never quite succeeded in that but I learned why some folk annotate text: they…
In my first iteration as a college student, I had trouble choosing between English and Theatre as a major. (We theatre geeks spell the subject with the British “re” instead of “er”. It shows our snobbish devotion to British plays.) During every semester, almost every week, I’d wrestle with the issue: was my primary devotion to the stage or to books? It turns out I lack the temperament necessary for a theatrical life. I like regular hours, daylight, and sleeping at home instead of a green room. What I do like is reading plays. In their dormant form, plays look the like every other book; reading them takes a slightly different set of skills. With the publication of Rowling/Tiffany/Thorne play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, those differences have become apparent to a wider audience. Just remember, novels and plays are different ways of seeing a story. In a novel, the author controls the story world and lyrically shows the reader what he/she needs to see. The description may be confined to a few, sparse details (like Hemmingway’s) or may roll into long, lush paragraphs. These parts are where the narrator’s voice soars before dropping back to the dialogue of the…
My sister, the educator, was grousing this week about an interesting blog post (sorry to say, not one of mine) on the question of whether Middle Grade and Young Adult books have gotten too “dark” for their target audience. The post’s author made an eloquent argument to justify the current “serious” themes but Sis’s response was “There has to be a happy [book], every now and then. Well, that surprised me because my sister dear has never shied away from kids’ books with dramatic stories and tragic elements. She’s the one who turned me on to Harry Potter and The Graveyard Book (great stories that both start out with murders) and as a teenager, she devoured every Judy Blume YA story-with-a-taboo as soon as it came out. So I had to ask: “What’s the problem? You like dark.” “Of course I do” she said. “But every story pushed at kids right now right now is all about dark issues. It’s dystopias and addiction and depression and death. Every once in a while, people need to laugh too, you know?” “Well, yeah” I replied. “But didn’t the books you loved best as a kid usually bring on the tears?” (I wasn’t ready to concede.)…
One of my dear friends and fellow book-nuts holds a round-robin post each week. Every Wednesday on her group page, the question appears: What are You Reading Right Now? Everyone responds and it’s a good spot to exchange book news and compare thoughts but I don’t know how to tell them the truth: for each new book I’ve read, I’ve re-read at least 4 or 5 more. My question is: does that make me a nut? A lot of people seem to espouse the “seen this, done that” philosophy. Each new day is a different challenge to accept; every vacation explores a different horizon. One very nice man I know dislikes seeing a movie more than once. For him, one viewing is sufficient and a lot more people seem to read books that way than watch movies. Does my re-reading mean that I’m slow? On one level, I suppose the answer is “yes” but (ironically) it’s because I’m a fast reader. Put a well-paced, interesting book my hands and I’ll rip through the story like a tornado. I’ll pick up the plot and pursue it, scanning the pages faster and faster on a breakneck trip to the end. I’ve…