Yesterday after meeting my class I went to a shopping center in the big city near the college I commute to because I'd seen a beautiful peacock scarf there this past weekend and had finally come up with a good rationalization for why it had to be mine. (Now it is; see my new profile photo.) And I can't go to a shopping center without visiting the bookstore, and of course can't leave the bookstore empty-handed, so I came home with the new Anne Tyler novel, Noah's Compass, and finished it before I went to bed last night.
I think Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is Anne Tyler's masterpiece, and that the one right after it and the four right before it are almost as good. I didn't like the last seven or the first four novels nearly as much, so I wasn't expecting a lot from this new one. I thought maybe I just wasn't old enough yet to sympathize with her older characters. (Here's a list of Anne Tyler's novels in case you don't have the order memorized!)
But then I met Liam Pennywell, and he's a lot like me, even though he is older. Here's how we're introduced to him:
In the sixty-first year of his life, Liam Pennywell lost his job. It wasn't such a good job, anyhow. He'd been teaching fifth grade in a second-rated private boys' school. Fifth grade wasn't even what he'd been trained for. Teaching wasn't what he'd been trained for. His degree was in philosophy. Oh, don't ask."
I know so many people lately who feel a bit like that--"oh, don't ask." One of them has a PhD in philosophy and has been laid off from her job as a young adult librarian since last summer. Three of them have been looking for work for over a year. Another, of course, is me. I have part-time jobs, but none of them are what I was "trained" to do or how I thought I was going to make my mark on the world. What Liam is facing-- like the rest of us--is the distinct possibility that he's never going to make any kind of mark.
Liam is having issues with memory after a knock on the head, and at one point wonders why his sister can remember more than he can about their childhood. He wants a "rememberer," someone who can remind him of things. I actually have rememberers; I have Iris for high school memories, Miriam for college memories, and recently I've started calling on Laura for graduate school memories.
Also Liam's reaction to one of his daughter's attempts to share her religion with him is similar to my reaction in a similar situation:
"He refrained from telling her that even talking about religion made him wince with embarrassment. Even hearing about it embarrassed him--hearing those toe-curling terms that believers employed like share, in fact, and my faith."
Occasionally Liam makes a grand gesture, like telling the woman he loves that he can't live without her, but he doesn't follow up on that gesture and lets her go. I don't identify with him there at all; in fact, his rigidness and passivity irritate me. Later he does make a grand gesture with one of his daughters, though:
"In desperation, he pushed his chair back and slid forward until he was kneeling on the patio. He could feel the unevenness of the flagstones through the fabric of his trousers; he could feel the ache of misery filling his throat. Xanthe froze, gaping at him, still holding her dishes. 'Please,' he said, clasping his hands in front of him. 'I can't bear to know I made such a bad mistake. I can't endure it. I'm begging you, Xanthe.'"
The gesture is just what was needed. The theatricality of it reminds me of the time my parents were sitting in a booth in a restaurant and my mother pushed my father's shoulder away in annoyance; he made himself fall out of the booth and onto the floor, just to exaggerate how hard she'd pushed.
Noah's Compass is a quiet and occasionally bleak story, but the undercurrents seem to me to bring it closer to the magic of those novels from Tyler's middle period. Liam thinks "we live such tangled, fraught lives...." and who can't identify with that? Every morning and evening I'm holding my breath while my 16-year-old continues learning to drive in the snow that keeps falling every night. Fraught, yes, and in a year or so I probably won't remember it. But that doesn't mean it doesn't push at my life in a certain direction.
Are you one of those lucky people who had a plan for what you were going to do when you grew up and got to follow it? Or are you like Liam and me, who got knocked off course and ended up in places we never expected to go?
Showing posts with label Anne Tyler. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anne Tyler. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Olive Kitteridge
Everyone knows an indomitable old woman. Most of us are related to at least one. Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout's series of thirteen related short stories (winner of the Pulitzer prize for fiction), shows us the world as Olive sees it and is seen.
I was introduced to this book over at A Guy's Moleskine Notebook and then found it as an audiobook at my library. Driving around and listening to it over the past week made me think of many formidable women I'm fond of but don't completely understand, chief among them my mother and my friend Helen, who was my stand partner at the symphony until October. Standing in the hot sun at Helen's memorial service this weekend, I was thinking about Olive, and about how little we can know of the adult life of our elders. When people got up to say something about Helen, most of it was a memory of what she cooked for a holiday dinner or some kind of good advice she gave. By the time an old person dies, there might not be anybody left to say something about her irreverent attitude and what an unquenchable spirit she had in her youth. We remember only the old woman who liked a good argument.
There might be something of a bygone era in Olive's emotionally-laden response to finding out she has dripped ice cream sauce across her blouse. She thinks it shows that she's grown addled with age, like an older relative of hers who used to spill on herself, and so she blows the incident out of proportion and won't talk about it. I've seen this with my mother, and I've seen it in Pearl Tull in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.
Olive's dislike of parties also reminds me of my mother and Pearl, but Olive's willingness to talk to people who might need her help makes her unique. In one very low-key story, she talks a young man out of committing suicide so effectively that he dives in to save a young woman Olive has spotted in the act of trying to commit suicide. The interesting thing about the story is that you don't know for sure if Olive knew the young man was suicidal. On the whole, however, I give her credit for knowing more than she lets on. I like her, even as I discover more about the way she dominated her husband and the way she treated her son.
Her treatment of her son, in particular, is deftly shown so that her cruelty and her vulnerability are visible in their twisted and inseparable strands. She could no more have understood how formidable she seemed to her little boy than she could have protected herself from her own barbs. I felt so much sympathy for her, overhearing her new daughter-in-law's cruel remarks about the dress she'd made for her son's wedding and in which she'd felt special, that I understood the pettiness of her reaction. And I loved the descriptions of her large size, rare in a woman of her generation.
Yes, I identified with Olive, which shows the cumulative power of these stories. She is a large and hungry woman, a voracious person who continually underestimates the effect of her strong emotions on others. In one of my favorite scenes, she talks to a young anorexic girl about her illness, saying:
"You're starving."
The girl didn't move, only said "Uh-duh."
"I'm starving too," Olive said. The girl looked over at her. "I am, Olive said. "Why do you think I eat every doughnut in sight?"
"You're not starving," Nina said with disgust.
"Sure I am. We all are."
Although some reviewers call Olive "flawed" or even "grotesque," I see her as a larger-than-life portrait of the kind of strong woman I have always loved and admired, and who I ultimately expect to become something like. My hope, of course, is that seeing how maladaptive so many of her traits are will allow me to bypass some of the biggest and worst. Perhaps the line of formidable women can improve as it goes on.
I was introduced to this book over at A Guy's Moleskine Notebook and then found it as an audiobook at my library. Driving around and listening to it over the past week made me think of many formidable women I'm fond of but don't completely understand, chief among them my mother and my friend Helen, who was my stand partner at the symphony until October. Standing in the hot sun at Helen's memorial service this weekend, I was thinking about Olive, and about how little we can know of the adult life of our elders. When people got up to say something about Helen, most of it was a memory of what she cooked for a holiday dinner or some kind of good advice she gave. By the time an old person dies, there might not be anybody left to say something about her irreverent attitude and what an unquenchable spirit she had in her youth. We remember only the old woman who liked a good argument.
There might be something of a bygone era in Olive's emotionally-laden response to finding out she has dripped ice cream sauce across her blouse. She thinks it shows that she's grown addled with age, like an older relative of hers who used to spill on herself, and so she blows the incident out of proportion and won't talk about it. I've seen this with my mother, and I've seen it in Pearl Tull in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.
Olive's dislike of parties also reminds me of my mother and Pearl, but Olive's willingness to talk to people who might need her help makes her unique. In one very low-key story, she talks a young man out of committing suicide so effectively that he dives in to save a young woman Olive has spotted in the act of trying to commit suicide. The interesting thing about the story is that you don't know for sure if Olive knew the young man was suicidal. On the whole, however, I give her credit for knowing more than she lets on. I like her, even as I discover more about the way she dominated her husband and the way she treated her son.
Her treatment of her son, in particular, is deftly shown so that her cruelty and her vulnerability are visible in their twisted and inseparable strands. She could no more have understood how formidable she seemed to her little boy than she could have protected herself from her own barbs. I felt so much sympathy for her, overhearing her new daughter-in-law's cruel remarks about the dress she'd made for her son's wedding and in which she'd felt special, that I understood the pettiness of her reaction. And I loved the descriptions of her large size, rare in a woman of her generation.
Yes, I identified with Olive, which shows the cumulative power of these stories. She is a large and hungry woman, a voracious person who continually underestimates the effect of her strong emotions on others. In one of my favorite scenes, she talks to a young anorexic girl about her illness, saying:
"You're starving."
The girl didn't move, only said "Uh-duh."
"I'm starving too," Olive said. The girl looked over at her. "I am, Olive said. "Why do you think I eat every doughnut in sight?"
"You're not starving," Nina said with disgust.
"Sure I am. We all are."
Although some reviewers call Olive "flawed" or even "grotesque," I see her as a larger-than-life portrait of the kind of strong woman I have always loved and admired, and who I ultimately expect to become something like. My hope, of course, is that seeing how maladaptive so many of her traits are will allow me to bypass some of the biggest and worst. Perhaps the line of formidable women can improve as it goes on.
Monday, April 6, 2009
I Have News for You
I am a person who likes drama. I used to like storms, before I moved to a rural area where electricity is evidently hard to sustain. I like exaggerated gestures and vacations with something exciting to do every moment. I like The Reduced Shakespeare Company, because watching them makes me laugh so hard my stomach hurts.
Sometimes I try to imitate people who are calm and cool and laid-back about things. Yeah, we'll do that when we get to it, I think. And the next minute I'm up and racing around, yelling "it's time! We're going to be late!"
And sometimes I try to imitate people who accept the world at face value, and who try to say what they mean, as if I hadn't been reared by people who always asked me to go in the kitchen and get them a glass of water when the conversation went above my head, people who will sit silently in the dining room, like Pearl Tull in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, and wait for someone to notice they want the butter passed.
These are just some of the reasons I love this poem, I Have News for You, by Tony Hoagland, sent to me by my friend Laura (who can see the whole story of a childhood in her first glance at a broken playground swing):
There are people who do not see a broken playground swing
as a symbol of ruined childhood
and there are people who don't interpret the behavior
of a fly in a motel room as a mocking representation of their thought process.
There are people who don't walk past an empty swimming pool
and think about past pleasures irrecoverable
and then stand there blocking the sidewalk for other pedestrians.
I have read about a town somewhere in California where human beings
do not send their tuberous feeder roots
deep into the potting soil of others' emotional lives
as if they were greedy six-year-olds
sucking the last half inch of milkshake up through a noisy straw;
and other persons in the Midwest who can kiss without
unpacking the imperialist baggage of heterosexuality.
Do you see that creamy, lemon-yellow moon?
There are some people, unlike me and you,
who do not yearn after love or fame or quantities of money as
unattainable as that moon;
Thus, they do not later
have to waste more time
defaming the object of their former ardor.
Or consequently run and crucify themselves
in some solitary midnight Starbucks Golgotha.
I have news for you:
there are people who get up in the morning and cross a room
and open a window to let the sweet breeze in
and let it touch them all over their faces and bodies.
Don't you like the way the ending of the poem suggests the old story about the person who turns on the weather to see what it's like outside, and the other person who says to just go and open the door?
I'll bet "people who get up in the morning and cross a room/and open a window to let the sweet breeze in" are calmer partly because they live in a better climate. (It's going to snow here today! Aaurgh! Will it stick? Will I make it through my commute tomorrow morning?) And I'll bet those calmer people don't spend too much of their time writing little updates on Facebook or Twitter.
Anyway, what do those folks who update that they're feeling sick want from me? A dictionary? A link to a sad violin solo? Me boarding an airplane feeling like Beth March, with a pot of chicken soup? Is it a matter of life and death? Is it already too late? Aaahh!
Sometimes I try to imitate people who are calm and cool and laid-back about things. Yeah, we'll do that when we get to it, I think. And the next minute I'm up and racing around, yelling "it's time! We're going to be late!"
And sometimes I try to imitate people who accept the world at face value, and who try to say what they mean, as if I hadn't been reared by people who always asked me to go in the kitchen and get them a glass of water when the conversation went above my head, people who will sit silently in the dining room, like Pearl Tull in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, and wait for someone to notice they want the butter passed.
These are just some of the reasons I love this poem, I Have News for You, by Tony Hoagland, sent to me by my friend Laura (who can see the whole story of a childhood in her first glance at a broken playground swing):
There are people who do not see a broken playground swing
as a symbol of ruined childhood
and there are people who don't interpret the behavior
of a fly in a motel room as a mocking representation of their thought process.
There are people who don't walk past an empty swimming pool
and think about past pleasures irrecoverable
and then stand there blocking the sidewalk for other pedestrians.
I have read about a town somewhere in California where human beings
do not send their tuberous feeder roots
deep into the potting soil of others' emotional lives
as if they were greedy six-year-olds
sucking the last half inch of milkshake up through a noisy straw;
and other persons in the Midwest who can kiss without
unpacking the imperialist baggage of heterosexuality.
Do you see that creamy, lemon-yellow moon?
There are some people, unlike me and you,
who do not yearn after love or fame or quantities of money as
unattainable as that moon;
Thus, they do not later
have to waste more time
defaming the object of their former ardor.
Or consequently run and crucify themselves
in some solitary midnight Starbucks Golgotha.
I have news for you:
there are people who get up in the morning and cross a room
and open a window to let the sweet breeze in
and let it touch them all over their faces and bodies.
Don't you like the way the ending of the poem suggests the old story about the person who turns on the weather to see what it's like outside, and the other person who says to just go and open the door?
I'll bet "people who get up in the morning and cross a room/and open a window to let the sweet breeze in" are calmer partly because they live in a better climate. (It's going to snow here today! Aaurgh! Will it stick? Will I make it through my commute tomorrow morning?) And I'll bet those calmer people don't spend too much of their time writing little updates on Facebook or Twitter.
Anyway, what do those folks who update that they're feeling sick want from me? A dictionary? A link to a sad violin solo? Me boarding an airplane feeling like Beth March, with a pot of chicken soup? Is it a matter of life and death? Is it already too late? Aaahh!
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Comfort and Joy
This really happened (as Cody used to say every time he told a story about his childhood, in Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant).
This is the end-of-dinner conversation at my house on a wintry Tuesday night:
Ron comes out of the kitchen, where he has been making tea, scoops the cat (Sammy) up because he's been following him around squeaking insistently, and holds him near Eleanor's face, as she eats her doughnut. I say don't hold the cat up to peoples' faces when they're eating. Ron says that Sammy wants attention and kisses him. Walker and I tell him to take the cat in the bedroom. "Forbidden love," the kids say and then we all chorus "the love that dare not squeak its name."
“I’m laughing too hard to eat my doughnut” I choke.
“That’s the ultimate sign that your life is good” Eleanor declares.
Gradually, I recover from my laughing fit. The parakeets in the corner of the dining room adjust their volume down a notch as I do. Ron goes back to telling Eleanor what she should say to the teacher who told her she had a red face today in the cafeteria. "That's racist," he insists. "She'll give me detention for being a smartass," Eleanor replies.
We continue discussing the school dress code and wondering why it's not allowed to wear a t-shirt with a heart on it if the heart has spikes through it.
After dinner, we watch a heart-warming Christmas special in which Santa and Jesus do a nightclub medley of Christmas songs and Satan sings "It's Christmastime in Hell." Later I have to drive to work in the freezing drizzle, but Ron is reading to both kids and what I have to do ends up taking only a few minutes, so I'm back in time to say goodnight.
Eleanor's declaration has colored the whole evening, for me. It's like this Wallace Stevens poem, Anything Is Beautiful If You Say It Is:
Under the eglantine
The fretful concubine
Said, "Phooey, Phoo!"
She whispered, "Pfui!"
The demi-monde
On the mezzanine
Said "Phoeey!" too,
And a Hey-de-i-do!"
The bee may have all sweet
For his honey-hive-o,
From the eglantine-o.
And the chandeliers are neat...
But their mignon, marblish glare!
We are cold, the parrots cried,
In a place so debonair.
The Johannisberger, Hans.
I love the metal grapes,
The rusty, battered shapes
Of the pears and of the cheese
And the window's lemon light,
The very will of the nerves,
The crack across the pane,
The dirt along the sill.
Sometimes you take a step back to be able to see something you've missed from day to day, like the dirt along the sill, in order to clean it up before you invite guests for dinner. And then sometimes you are spurred to take a giant step back ("mother may I?" "Yes, you may") and you can see everything, even the dirt, as part of the particular joy of that moment.
This is the end-of-dinner conversation at my house on a wintry Tuesday night:
Ron comes out of the kitchen, where he has been making tea, scoops the cat (Sammy) up because he's been following him around squeaking insistently, and holds him near Eleanor's face, as she eats her doughnut. I say don't hold the cat up to peoples' faces when they're eating. Ron says that Sammy wants attention and kisses him. Walker and I tell him to take the cat in the bedroom. "Forbidden love," the kids say and then we all chorus "the love that dare not squeak its name."
“I’m laughing too hard to eat my doughnut” I choke.
“That’s the ultimate sign that your life is good” Eleanor declares.
Gradually, I recover from my laughing fit. The parakeets in the corner of the dining room adjust their volume down a notch as I do. Ron goes back to telling Eleanor what she should say to the teacher who told her she had a red face today in the cafeteria. "That's racist," he insists. "She'll give me detention for being a smartass," Eleanor replies.
We continue discussing the school dress code and wondering why it's not allowed to wear a t-shirt with a heart on it if the heart has spikes through it.
After dinner, we watch a heart-warming Christmas special in which Santa and Jesus do a nightclub medley of Christmas songs and Satan sings "It's Christmastime in Hell." Later I have to drive to work in the freezing drizzle, but Ron is reading to both kids and what I have to do ends up taking only a few minutes, so I'm back in time to say goodnight.
Eleanor's declaration has colored the whole evening, for me. It's like this Wallace Stevens poem, Anything Is Beautiful If You Say It Is:
Under the eglantine
The fretful concubine
Said, "Phooey, Phoo!"
She whispered, "Pfui!"
The demi-monde
On the mezzanine
Said "Phoeey!" too,
And a Hey-de-i-do!"
The bee may have all sweet
For his honey-hive-o,
From the eglantine-o.
And the chandeliers are neat...
But their mignon, marblish glare!
We are cold, the parrots cried,
In a place so debonair.
The Johannisberger, Hans.
I love the metal grapes,
The rusty, battered shapes
Of the pears and of the cheese
And the window's lemon light,
The very will of the nerves,
The crack across the pane,
The dirt along the sill.
Sometimes you take a step back to be able to see something you've missed from day to day, like the dirt along the sill, in order to clean it up before you invite guests for dinner. And then sometimes you are spurred to take a giant step back ("mother may I?" "Yes, you may") and you can see everything, even the dirt, as part of the particular joy of that moment.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Perspectives
When I was in college, I saw the play Rashomon, which tells the same story from four different perspectives. Recently I saw the movies Vantage Point and Atonement, and they show the same events from different characters' perspectives. This has been much more common in the novel, as it's less jarring. One of the first novels I read that did this almost as well as Faulkner does it in The Sound and the Fury is Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. It not only tells the same events from different perspectives, but it moves the characters through time and adds events while letting each character (members of a family) have his or her say. The mother gets her turn first, both because she tells about events before the children were born and because otherwise you might see her as the children do. (One of the things this novel conveys is how little we can know of our parents as people.)
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant has one of the best beginnings I've ever read:
You should have got an extra mother, was what she meant to say, the way we started extra children after the first child fell so ill. Cody, that was, the older boy. Not Ezra here beside her bed but Cody the trouble-maker--a difficult baby, born late in her life. They had decided on no more. Then he developed croup. This was in 1931, when croup was something serious. She'd been frantic. Over his crib she had draped a flannel sheet, and she set out skillets, saucepans, buckets full of water that she'd heated on the stove. She lifted the flannel sheet to catch the steam. The baby's breathing was choked and rough, like something pulled through tightly packed gravel. His skin was blazing and his hair was plastered stiffly to his temples. Toward morning, he slept. Pearl's head sagged in the rocking chair and she slept too, fingers still gripping the ivory metal crib rail. Beck was away on business--came home when the worst was over, Cody toddling around again with nothing more than a runny nose and a loose, unalarming cough that Beck didn't even notice. "I want more children," Pearl told him. He acted surprised, though pleased. He reminded her that she hadn't felt she could face another delivery. But "I want some extra," she said, for it had struck her during the croup: if Cody died, what would she have left?
...."I don't know why I thought just one little boy would suffice," said Pearl.
But it wasn't as simple as she had supposed. The second child was Ezra, so sweet and clumsy it could break your heart. She was more endangered than ever. It would have been best to stop at Cody. She still hadn't learned, though. After Ezra came Jenny, the girl--such fun to dress, to fix her hair in different styles. Girls were a kind of luxury, Pearl felt. But she couldn't give Jenny up, either. What she had now was not one loss to fear but three. Still, she thought, it had seemed a good idea once upon a time: spare children, like spare tires, or those extra lisle stockings they used to package free with each pair.
As a mother, I sometimes worry that my love for my children will be overtaken by the intensity of my fears for them. But I've internalized so many of the lines from this book that when I tune up to that pitch, I remind myself to be more like Pearl's daughter, who is "learning to make it through life on a slant. She was trying to lose her intensity." It's a part of my continuing effort to not turn out exactly like my own mother, a person generally acknowledged to be (as I am, as my daughter is) a formidable person.
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant has one of the best beginnings I've ever read:
You should have got an extra mother, was what she meant to say, the way we started extra children after the first child fell so ill. Cody, that was, the older boy. Not Ezra here beside her bed but Cody the trouble-maker--a difficult baby, born late in her life. They had decided on no more. Then he developed croup. This was in 1931, when croup was something serious. She'd been frantic. Over his crib she had draped a flannel sheet, and she set out skillets, saucepans, buckets full of water that she'd heated on the stove. She lifted the flannel sheet to catch the steam. The baby's breathing was choked and rough, like something pulled through tightly packed gravel. His skin was blazing and his hair was plastered stiffly to his temples. Toward morning, he slept. Pearl's head sagged in the rocking chair and she slept too, fingers still gripping the ivory metal crib rail. Beck was away on business--came home when the worst was over, Cody toddling around again with nothing more than a runny nose and a loose, unalarming cough that Beck didn't even notice. "I want more children," Pearl told him. He acted surprised, though pleased. He reminded her that she hadn't felt she could face another delivery. But "I want some extra," she said, for it had struck her during the croup: if Cody died, what would she have left?
...."I don't know why I thought just one little boy would suffice," said Pearl.
But it wasn't as simple as she had supposed. The second child was Ezra, so sweet and clumsy it could break your heart. She was more endangered than ever. It would have been best to stop at Cody. She still hadn't learned, though. After Ezra came Jenny, the girl--such fun to dress, to fix her hair in different styles. Girls were a kind of luxury, Pearl felt. But she couldn't give Jenny up, either. What she had now was not one loss to fear but three. Still, she thought, it had seemed a good idea once upon a time: spare children, like spare tires, or those extra lisle stockings they used to package free with each pair.
As a mother, I sometimes worry that my love for my children will be overtaken by the intensity of my fears for them. But I've internalized so many of the lines from this book that when I tune up to that pitch, I remind myself to be more like Pearl's daughter, who is "learning to make it through life on a slant. She was trying to lose her intensity." It's a part of my continuing effort to not turn out exactly like my own mother, a person generally acknowledged to be (as I am, as my daughter is) a formidable person.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Favorite Books
When I go to a party and someone asks what I "do" and I tell them some variation on "I have a PhD in English and try not to waste it entirely," there are two categories of response. One is "oh, I'll have to watch my grammar." I laugh politely at that one. The other is "oh, I never have time to read." I like that one a little better because it gives me a way to say that we make time for what we can't do without.
My favorite response to the what do you "do" answer came when I was still in graduate school. The man who eventually married our friend Miriam said to me "what are you studying in grad school?" I said "English." There was a pause. "Haven't you learned it yet?" he said.
So what do you do when someone asks what your "favorite" book is??? I have various strategies for answering such a question, including picking six off the top of my head, as I did for my blogger profile: Animal Dreams, Love In the Ruins, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Lord of the Rings, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Princess Bride.
A strategy that makes more sense is to pick two or three favorites from a specific genre--favorite science fiction books: Stranger in a Strange Land, The Door Into Ocean, Ender's Game.
My favorite way to answer this question now is a strategy I borrowed from my friend Lemming's Christmas letter. She and her husband used to recommend their favorite book of the year. This narrows down the selections to a manageable level, plus you can buy the favorite book of the year for everyone on your list. My favorite book of this past year is Boomsday.
Of course, this strategy necessarily privileges contemporary literature. How can we include favorites from the past? Usually I don't try. There's no need to repeat what thousands of high school English teachers have said before me: To Kill a Mockingbird is a great book. One of the purposes of telling other people what your favorite books are is to get them to read those books.
With that purpose in mind, tell me what your favorite books are. I'm the person you know who is most likely to read them.
My favorite response to the what do you "do" answer came when I was still in graduate school. The man who eventually married our friend Miriam said to me "what are you studying in grad school?" I said "English." There was a pause. "Haven't you learned it yet?" he said.
So what do you do when someone asks what your "favorite" book is??? I have various strategies for answering such a question, including picking six off the top of my head, as I did for my blogger profile: Animal Dreams, Love In the Ruins, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Lord of the Rings, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Princess Bride.
A strategy that makes more sense is to pick two or three favorites from a specific genre--favorite science fiction books: Stranger in a Strange Land, The Door Into Ocean, Ender's Game.
My favorite way to answer this question now is a strategy I borrowed from my friend Lemming's Christmas letter. She and her husband used to recommend their favorite book of the year. This narrows down the selections to a manageable level, plus you can buy the favorite book of the year for everyone on your list. My favorite book of this past year is Boomsday.
Of course, this strategy necessarily privileges contemporary literature. How can we include favorites from the past? Usually I don't try. There's no need to repeat what thousands of high school English teachers have said before me: To Kill a Mockingbird is a great book. One of the purposes of telling other people what your favorite books are is to get them to read those books.
With that purpose in mind, tell me what your favorite books are. I'm the person you know who is most likely to read them.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
