1.
I don't know what I'm preparing for. My whole life I've considered valuable certain experiences, accomplishments, and knowledge simply because I imagine they'll be useful to me in the future. I'm beginning to doubt this proposition.
Here's an example. For the last ten years, I've kept a Word document for quotes. Any time I come across a worthy passage, I file it away. By now, the file has grown to over 30,000 words from hundreds of books, articles, poems, and plays. I do this not in the interest of collecting quotable prose or for the benefit of inspiration or encouragement or even insight. What I'm looking for are potential epigraphs.
You see, I
love epigraphs. Everything about them. I love the white space surrounding the words. I love the centered text, the dash of the attribution. I love the
promise. When I was a kid, they intimidated me with their suggested erudition. I wanted to be the type of person able to quote
Shakespeare or
Milton or, hell,
Stephen King appropriately. I wanted to be the type of writer who understood their own work so well that they could pair it with an apt selection from another writer's work.
If I ever wrote a novel, I told myself, about a writer, maybe I could quote
Barbara Kingsolver: "A writer’s occupational hazard: I think of eavesdropping as minding my own business.” Or maybe one of
Philip Roth's many memorable passages on the writer's life, like:
No, one’s story isn’t a skin to be shed — it’s inescapable, one’s body and blood. You go on pumping it out till you die, the story veined with the themes of your life, the ever-recurring story that’s at once your invention and the invention of you.
Or, taking a different tack:
It may look to outsiders like the life of freedom — not on a schedule, in command of yourself, singled out for glory, the choice apparently to write about anything. But once one’s writing, it’s
all limits. Bound to a subject. Bound to make sense of it. Bound to make a book of it. If you want to be reminded of your limitations virtually every minute, there’s no better occupation to choose. Your memory, your diction, your intelligence, your sympathies, your observations, your sensations, your understanding — never enough. You find out more about what’s missing in you than you really ought to know. All of you an enclosure you keep trying to break out of. And all the obligations more ferocious for being self-imposed.
In some cases, I'd read something that was so eloquent and succinct, so insightful, I'd be inspired to write something around it, even if I didn't have anything to go on other than the quote.
Aleksander Hemon's The Lazarus Project is positively riddled with possible epigraphs. Right away, on page two, we get this: "All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.” (Recognize that one? If you do, that's because it has already been used as an epigraph for
Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, except McCann changes all of the
I's to
we's.) Then, on the very next page, this: "There has been life before this. Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.” A few pages later: "I am just like everybody else, Isador always says, because there is nobody like me in the whole world.” On page 106: "Nobody can control resemblances, any more than you can control echoes." That one made me want to write about a despotic father and the son who's trying to avoid following in his footsteps. I didn't have a great need to write that story, but the quote would have fit it so perfectly I actually have an unfinished draft somewhere in my discarded Word documents.
This is, of course, a stupid way to go about crafting fiction. I learned that lesson. You can't write something simply because you've found the perfect epigraph, the perfect title, the perfect premise –– there has to be a greater
need, a desire that you can't stymie.
Charles Baxter once wrote, "Art that is overcontrolled by its meaning may start to go a bit dead." The same is true of art overcontrolled by anything other than the inexplicable urge to put story to paper. I know this now.
Yet I still collect possible epigraphs. And so far, I have yet to use a single entry from my document at the beginning of a piece of fiction.
2.
Epigraphs, despite what my young mind believed, are more than mere pontification. Writers don't use them to boast. They are less like some wine and entrée pairing and more like the first lesson in a long class. Writers must teach a reader
how to read their book. They must instruct the tone, the pace, the ostensible project of a given work. An epigraph is an opportunity to situate a novel, a story, or an essay, and, more importantly, to orient the reader to the book's intentions.
To demonstrate the multiple uses of the epigraph, I'd like to discuss a few salient examples. But I'm going to shy away from the classic epigraphs we all know, those of
Hemingway,
Tolstoy, etc., the kinds regularly found in lists with titles like "The 15 Greatest Epigraphs of All Time," and talk about some recent books, since those are the ones that have excited (and, in some cases, confounded) me enough to write about the subject in the first place.
A good epigraph establishes the theme, but when it works best it does more than this. A theme can be represented in an infinity of ways, so it is the particular
selection of quotation that should do the most work. Philip Roth's
Indignation opens with this section of
E.E. Cummings's "i sing of Olaf glad and big":
Olaf (upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
"there is some shit I will not eat"
For a book titled
Indignation, this seems a perfect tone with which to begin the novel. Olaf's a heroic figure, who suffered unrelenting torture and still refused to kill for any reason, which means Roth here is also elevating the narrative of his angry protagonist to heroic status. Marcus Messner is a straight-laced boy in the early 1950s, attending college in rural Ohio. Despite his best efforts, Marcus gets caught up in the moral hypocrisy of American values, winding up getting killed in the Korean War. Marcus and Olaf are, as Cummings wrote, "more brave than me:more blond than you."
Authors do this kind of thing all the time. They borrow more than just the quoted lines. In Roth's case, it was Cummings's moral outrage about American war he wanted aligned with his novel.
In
Jennifer Egan's Pulitzer Prize-winning
A Visit from the Goon Squad, she opens with two separate passages from
Proust's In Search of Lost Time:
Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.
The unknown element in the lives of other people is like that of nature, which each fresh scientific discovery merely reduces but does not abolish.
The theme of Egan's novel is time and its effects on us –– how we survive or endure, how we perish, how things change, etc. –– a fact established here by quoting the foremost authority on fictive examinations of time, memory, and life gone by. But more than that, Egan is connecting her novel –– which is full of formal daring and partly takes place in the future –– to a canonical author whose own experimentation has now become standard. Like the music industry in her book, the world of literature has changed, maybe not for the worse but irrevocably nonetheless, and Proust's monumental achievement has become, to most modern readers, an impenetrable and uninteresting work. Egan's choice of epigraph places her squarely in the same tradition. The Modernism of Proust gave way to the Postmodernism of Egan. Years on, to readers not yet born,
A Visit from the Good Squad may seem a hopelessly old-fashioned relic. Such is the power of time.
James Franco also opens his story collection
Palo Alto with a selection from
In Search of Lost Time, but the effect is severely diminished in his case. First of all, the quoted passage reads:
There is hardly a single action that we perform in that phase which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to annul. Whereas what we ought to regret is that we no longer possess the spontaneity which made us perform them. In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything.
Though a fitting passage for a work that focuses on young, troubled California teenagers, there is nothing other than the expressed idea that justifies Franco's specific use of Proust as opposed to anyone else. And Franco attributes the quotation to
Within a Budding Grove, which is the second book in, as Franco has it here,
Remembrance of Things Past. Those two translations of the titles are, by now, somewhat obsolete, the titles of older translations.
Within a Budding Grove is now usually referred to as
In the Shadows of Young Girls in Flower. There is something a tad disingenuous about Franco's usage here, a more transparently self-conscious attempt to legitimize his stories, something he didn't need to do. His stories, despite some backlash he's received, are pretty good.
Some writers are just masters of the epigraph.
Thomas Pynchon always knows an evocative way to open his books. His
Against the Day is a vast, panoramic novel that features dozens of characters in as many settings. The story begins at the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893 and goes until the 1920s, a period of remarkable technological change the world over. Electricity had been commercialized and was becoming commonplace.
Tesla was conducting all his experiments. Pynchon reduces all of these pursuits to a wonderfully succinct quote:
It's always night, or we wouldn't need light.
––
Thelonious Monk
First of all, have you ever even
thought about the universe in this way? That darkness is its default setting? Secondly, have you ever heard a more beautiful and concise explanation for one of the great plights of humanity? We're afraid of the dark, and the desire for light (both literal and metaphorical) consumes us. Referencing Monk does the opposite of referencing Proust. Pynchon's working with high theme here, but he's coming at it with the spirit of a brilliant and erratic jazz artist.
His so-called "beach read,"
Inherent Vice takes place at the end of the 1960s, an era that clearly means a lot to Pynchon. Earlier, in
Vineland, radicals from the 60s have become either irrelevant eccentrics or have joined the establishment. It's a strange, mournful meditation on the failures of free love.
Inherent Vice takes a similar approach. Doc Sportello is a disinterested P.I. for whom the promise of that optimistic decade offers very little. That optimism is where we begin the novel:
Under the paving-stones, the beach!
–– Graffito, Paris, May 1968
A very pointed reference. Paris in May of 1968, of course, was a hotbed of protest and civic unrest, a time of strikes and occupations, and, for hippies and radicals, a harbinger of the changes to come. Well,
Inherent Vice takes place
on a beach. No paving-stones need be removed for the beach to appear. Yet the promise of the graffito –– i.e., that beauty and natural life exist under the surface of the establishment –– seems, to Doc Sportello (and us, as readers, in retrospect) a temporary hope that, like fog, will eventually lift and disappear forever. In the end, as Doc literally drives through a deep fog settling in over Los Angeles, he wonders "how many people he knew had been caught out" in the fog or "were indoors fogbound in front of the tube or in bed just falling asleep." He continues:
Someday...there'd be phones as standard equipment in every car, maybe even dashboard computers. People could exchange names and addresses and life stories and form alumni associations to gather once a year at some bar off a different freeway exit each time, to remember the night they set up a temporary commune to help each other home through the fog.
The fog will lift, and the dream of the 60s will become a memory, murky but present. For Doc, and for us, all he can do is wait "for the fog to burn away, and for something else this time, somehow, to be there instead."
For many,
Inherent Vice was a light novel, a nice little diversion, and it mostly is, but for me it has more straightforward (and dare I say, sentimental?) emotional resonance than many of Pynchon's earlier novels. And this epigraph is part of its poignancy. Doc's complicated personal life becomes a panegyric for an entire generation, all in the form of a "beach read."
Sometimes, though, epigraphs offer a different kind of poignancy
Christopher Hitchens’s last collection of essays,
Arguably, opens with this:
Live all you can: It's a mistake not to.
–– Lambert Strether, in
The Ambassadors
Hitchens, by the time
Arguably was published, had already been diagnosed with esophageal cancer. He knew he was dying. This epigraph stands as Hitchens's final assertion of his unwavering worldview. Even more retrospectively moving are the epigraphs of
Hitch-22, a memoir he wrote
before the doctors told him the news. One of these passages is the wonderful, remarkable opening of Hitchens's friend
Richard Dawkins's book
Unweaving the Rainbow:
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of the Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, who are here.
Though I'm not sure how "ordinary" Hitchens viewed himself (he seems to have thought a great deal of himself), this still seems an uncannily prescient sentiment to be quoted so soon before his diagnosis.
But maybe my all-time favorite epigraph comes from
Michael Chabon's recent
Telegraph Avenue:
Call me Ishmael.
––
Ishmael Reed, probably
This is one of the cleverest, funniest, and most
arrogant epigraphs I've come across in recent years. "Call me Ishmael" is, as we all know, the opening sentence of
Moby Dick. Ishmael Reed was a black experimental novelist, author of the classic
Mumbo Jumbo, a writer steeped in African American culture not depicted in mainstream art. Chabon's novel takes place in Oakland and focuses, in part, on race. It is Chabon's most direct attempt to write a Great American Novel (it even suggests as much on the inside flap of the hardcover), with its grand themes and storied setting, its 12-page-long sentence, its general
literariness. By framing his book with an irreverent reference to one of America's definitive Great American Novels, placed in the mouth of a black writer, Chabon both announces his intention to write a Great book and denounces the entire notion that there can be Great books. How does the supposed greatness of
Moby Dick speak to the black experience? What does its language offer them? So here, the most revered sentence in American literature becomes, for a man named Ishmael, a quotidian utterance, a common request.
Call me Ishmael. Just another day for Ishmael Reed. And
Telegraph Avenue works like that, too. It's just another day for Archy and Nat, the book's main characters. Is
Telegraph Avenue Chabon's
Moby Dick? His
Ulysses? Perhaps. But it's certainly in conversation with those books; the epigraph makes that much clear.
Epigraphs are, ultimately, like many components of art, in that they can pretty much accomplish anything the writer wants them to. They can support a theme or contradict it. They can prepare readers or mislead them. They can situate a book into its intended company or they can renounce any relationship with the past. And when used effectively, they can be just as vital to a novel's meaning as the title, the themes, the prose. An epigraph may not make or break a book, but it can certainly enhance its richness.
And, more, they can enhance the richness of the epigraph itself. Because of Michael Chabon, I can never look at
Moby Dick's famous opening the same way again. When I read Cummings's poem "i sing of Olaf glad and big," I have a new appreciation for its political implications. Literature is wonderful that way. It isn't merely the creation of new work; it's the
extension of the art itself. Each new novel, each new story, not only adds to the great well of work, it actually reaches back into the past and changes the static text. It alters how we see the past. The giant conversation of literature knows no restrictions to time or geography, and epigraphs are a big part of it. Writers continuously resurrect the dead, salute the present and, like epigraphs, hint at what's to come in the future.
3.
Now that I think about it, I realize that all those quotes I'd been saving up over the years finally have a purpose. Since I've become a literary critic, I've mined my ever-growing document numerous times, not for an epigraph, but as assistance to my analysis of a literary work. I've used them to characterize a writer's style, their recurring motifs or as examples of their insight. These quotations have become extremely useful, invaluable even. In fact, I see my collection as a kind of epigraph to my own career. At first, I didn't understand their import, but as I lived on (and, appropriately, as I
read on), those borrowed words slowly started to announce their purpose, and when I revisit them (like flipping back to the front page of a novel after finishing it), I find they have new meaning to me now. They are the same, but they are different. Like Pynchon writes in
Inherent Vice: "What goes around may come around, but it never ends up exactly the same place, you ever notice? Like a record on a turntable, all it takes is one groove’s difference and the universe can be on into a whole ‘nother song.”
I don’t want to put words in Alan Jacobs’s mouth, but I think his suggestion is true inasmuch as my birth—both the circumstances of it and my genetics etc.—had much to do with my making those chance library discoveries that led me to my illustrious career as an MFA candidate and anonymous Harry Potter fanfiction writer.
One of the first things I remember about books is that the mechanics of reading came easily to me, when almost nothing else did; that, I think, more than the accessibility of books, brought me to literature at a young age. “I can read faster than you,” not better but faster, was one of my first weird attempts at positive self-identification as a beaten-up primary schooler.
Of course that doesn’t diminish the affecting personal anecdotes you’ve tied together here—the 13-year-old stranger is particularly sad to follow through into her alternate universes, especially the one where she becomes Harvard’s first professor of Steve Himmer studies. As for the first story, I can’t believe your local library is in the habit of giving four-year-olds the third degree—are we really so flush with would-be library users that we have to turn some away at the door?
Beautiful article. Heartbreaking stories. I want the mental images of your daughter trying so hard to write her name on the card and both the girls’ crestfallen faces when they were disallowed from reading as they wished (sure, your daughter got to read the books because you had a library card, but what about kids who walk to the library themselves – and, anyway, she wanted her own library card! How admirable of her! What kind of library turns that down. Any free speech-loving librarian would find a way around that inane policy!) I remember having moments that remind me of what happened with the 13-year-old girl when I was in elementary school – picking out and then being told that something by Judy Blume or Jack London was “too old for me” (London, I remember specifically, and I was not only furious about having a librarian determine my reading level but also because I was pretty sure it had something to do with my being a girl – I’m in, like, second or third grade here); my response was usually, “But I read [x not-kid’s classic] this summer,” which did not work.
I always thought the librarian was telling me the books were too difficult for someone in my grade to literally read and comprehend. It was only after I started working for American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, which co-sponsors Banned Books Week and co-runs the Kids’ Right to Read Project that it more likely had to do with the books’ contents. I think this article will be my morning ABFFE tweet.
For your daughter and the other children in the area, I might suggest contacting the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom and asking them if such a policy is legal or compatible with the Library Bill of Rights, to which I kind of think the library is beholden if it’s an ALA member, and most libraries (or librarians) are. That library is discouraging kids from reading, and if kids who don’t read aren’t getting much help with learning to write anything, even their own names. I guess kids whose parents don’t take them to the library have to wait until they’re 5 or 6 to start reading? Good luck with your standardized test scores, graduation rates, crime rates, and, oh yeah, unemployment rates, state.
I work for a public library and never have I heard of such a backwards policy as this. What is the point of such a rule? At our public library, we even give cards to babies from birth to 4years of age (one made specially for babies, with a cuter design), and at 4 they get a normal adult card just like anyone else. No hoops to jump through.
Great article! I was moved by both your stories about young readers. I also think you’re absolutely right about the fact that readers are made, and not necessarily born. The best is example is that so many people of my generation weren’t readers until they discovered the Harry Potter series, and then moved on to other books, seeking a similar pleasure and eventually learning to appreciate books for more than just the thrill of a good plot. It’s important that kids and teens have access to people and places that stimulate their reading habits and give them that first opportunity to read, which can then develop into a true love of books.
Cheers!
CAFS
Mr. Himmer, this is a really lovely article; very evocative. I have a few quibbles with the examples (although not with your underlying message): Are you saying that the women who called books “tricky” were rarifying them? I’m not so sure I would agree with that–books ARE tricky these days for girls around 13. I’m a passionate book person both personally and professionally, and an equally passionate supporter of free speech, but as a parent I still look at it as my job to limit my kids’ exposure to subject matter that isn’t age-appropriate, whether in a book or a movie or a video game. (When I say “age-appropriate” I don’t mean that in a generic sense; I mean appropriate given what I know about my own kids’ individual readiness to explore some adult topics.) In practice, I can’t remember a single book I’ve said “no” to, but I can appreciate the hesitation. I do think some books for young teens these days are a bit “tricky” for scads of reasons. It is precisely because I so believe in the power of books to influence our thinking as well as open our minds that I wouldn’t jump to judge those women. (Someone in that girl’s household appears to have “made” her into a reader already, right?)
Even the library policy doesn’t strike me as rarifying books; I see it another way. When your daughter does learn to fit her name on the card (or turns five), I bet that trip to the library will be one of the proudest, most memorable of her young life. The folks at that library seem to believe that the card signifies a certain level of maturity and responsibility, and that policy can be seen as a way to increase the value of both the card and the books for young children. Of course there’s a good argument to be made that perhaps it’s not the library’s job to parent, but in this case as well I’m not so sure the policy rarifies books as much as acknowledges their value.
Anyway, thanks for this great piece of writing. I’m inspired to address it at more length myself! I’d love your thoughts on my thoughts.
Beautiful column. Striking images. And a powerful moral.
loved the article – any booklover would be moved by it.
I definitely agree with your premise about reading being an encouraged act. Sure, there are always going to be sensitive souls, linguistic prodigies or just good old fashioned curious minds who become great readers in enviornments where there aren’t a lot books around (which I think would support Alan Jacobs’ argument). But- and this is a huge but- encouragement is all-important. After all, you could have parents whose shelves are filled with stuff and forbid the children to come hear them…
Great piece. “One of the first freedoms I had”- way to put that freedom to use!
Both of my daughters learned to write their names with one thing in mind: to get their library cards. They only needed to sign their first names, I will always cherish their cards (they will always too), on the back their sweet scrawl big round choppy letters, their names, their cards, their keys to the libraries treasures!
I dream of putting books in any/every child’s hand at that moment, that exact moment when their soul is ready for it –whether for a book in general, or in particular.
Oh, how the world can change with a book, with a library, with a word.
My word for you is THANKS. (I am going to use paper and print this article to keep.)
My sympathies to your daughter. When I was a child, my public library required us to be able to sign our name–in cursive–to get a library card. So I made my mother teach me, and got my library card when I was about 5. However, my elementary school teachers spent several years crossing out my name on papers and hand printing it above because I wasn’t supposed to know any cursive yet. Heaven help our children from power-tripping authority figures.
Bravo! And thank you for this article! Your central point is essential in this day and age.
Many of my experiences as a child reader mirror yours. The discoveries I made on my own, and knowing that my parents trusted me to make them, formed much of the foundation on which I built my sense of self.
I also appreciate that you don’t want to judge the guardians of the young teenage girl. It’s always tricky when you’re dealing with materials that may not be age-appropriate. Still, though – I just can’t get behind the idea that the best way to deal with these materials is really to our children’s exposure to it and shelter them from it. Mainly because the world doesn’t actually work that way – our kids see all kinds of things we don’t even know about. Kids are too curious by nature, and far too clever not to find their way to some of these tricky materials despite our best efforts to prevent it. If they’re going to get exposed it, then it seems to me that best thing we can do is to do is to try our very best to make them ready.
That’s what my parents did for me. They knew the risks of letting me explore on my own – and lord knows I got into plenty of stuff that wasn’t age-appropriate by today’s standards! -but they also believed that it was the greatest skill they could teach me regardless of those risks. And I always knew that I could go to them whenever I saw or read things that I didn’t understand or that disturbed me. Any question, any idea, any issue or strange feelings these things engendered in me – no matter what, my parents would help me to find my way through it, to answer my questions and deal with the issues without flinching. Nothing I could ask them was “bad” and I didn’t need to be embarrassed by any of it. And guess what? On those occasions when I wasn’t able to come to grips with something I’d read or seen, I would invariably choose of my own free will not to seek out that material anymore.
I can never thank my parents enough for doing things that way! This strategy did me more good and helped to make me a stronger, more adaptable person than any attempts they might have made to protect or shelter me. I can’t help but think that the impulse to shelter our children has more to do with our own adult squeamishness than with our children’s ability to learn and cope. I think our kids can be stronger than that, if we raise them the best we can.
Sorry, the sentence in the third paragraph is supposed to read, “I just can’t get behind the idea that the best way to deal with these materials is to LIMIT our children’s exposure to it and shelter them from it.”
I hit “Submit Comment” too soon!
Our local library does not have a minimum age. The child can sign their own name on the back or someone can sign for them, but regardless, they get a card!
Wow, as a librarian I find that your daughter could not get a card horrifying. We give cards to babies when they are born http://sclibs.net/Kids/borntoread.aspx. And books to take home and keep forever too.
This article brought back some memories for me of getting my first library card at age four and writing my first name and last name around the wrong way, but getting away with it. The weekly visit to the library became a wonderful time of discovery and freedom of choice.
I had hoped to keep the card, but an overzealous librarian cut it in half ten years later as they were updating their cards. I remember asking tearfully if I could keep the bits.. but no, ‘not our policy’ was the answer… It can’t of damaged me too much though, ‘cos now I’m a librarian! (not the make you cry type ;-)
It’s a very well written piece and agree with the sentiments expressed .. However I like the fine distinction that one commentator Jody Reins makes in her “quibble” as she calls it, that the two examples the author quotes as “acts of rareifying” are wonderful story hooks but not the best illustration of the point.
Not every library / book store is a ‘careful selection’ of books .. trashy material snuggles with ‘classy’ ones. The act of reading is one thing, .. but what happens in the formative years and mind of a child given to the pleasures of reading requires a little active guidance … NOT dictatorial but some mediation and negotiating .. through BOTH the trash and the classy and regular fare.
I truly subscribe to the fact that just as what you eat builds your body, what you read builds your mind, thoughts and person – books ARE POWERFUL .. and one needs to learn how to equip themselves with the tools of judging their value.
Except of course, that’s not *quite* what Alan Jacobs said, is it? In fact, that’s really not at all close to what he said at all. In trying to make your point even more powerful you’ve actually weakened your case quite considerably by incorrectly quoting, making me wonder what else you’ve made up.
Hmmm it’s great that this Dad is so focused on making books available to kids. But I was once a 4-year-old and had to practice long and hard to write my name on the library card. And the main thing I remember is the huge feeling of accomplishment and pride when I finally got that card, my scraggly writing beautifully entombed in official-looking plastic. I was so grown-up, I could write, I had my own card, I could take out BOOKS!
It was one of the many hurdles that come with learning, and I, like other kids, like kids are meant to do, took on the rest of the hurdles too: the toughness of learning to read, figuring out math, learning to share, etc.
During the time it took me to learn to write my name on the card (and during the agonizingly long two-week period I had to wait for the now-signed card to be properly printed up in plastic) my parents took out books for me on their cards. To be perfectly honest, for all practical concerns, I didn’t really need my own card. It was more a symbol of my increasing abilities and independence than anything else (and kids love such symbols!)
As to the girl who was refused a book because it might not be age-appropriate, I sympathize with the authors sentiments–it really annoys me when kids are quarantined into the (age 4-7) groups; I think it’s good to encourage kids to take on stuff that might be a bit above (or a lot above) their current level of understanding. It shows them that there’s lots of room left yet to explore, and they can come back a couple years or months later with a huge sense of pride because what once was barely comprehensible is now so easy.
At the same time, I was refused a lot of books by my parents because of sexual content/violence, etc, and it didn’t seem to hurt me. I generally found a way to smuggle them in under the covers eventually anyway, and it gave me a sense of both proprieties/rules/boundaries–and how to break them.
I do entirely agree that closing libraries is despicable though–just because books are going digital doesn’t mean we still don’t need librarians and places of learning to gather in. How are we going to reopen them/build new ones/make them better complements to the many new ways of accessing information? I think such issues would as worthwhile of discussion as how to protect our kids from the harsh, philistine librarians who think that children can actually learn to write their own names and should, perhaps, not have access to porn.
I’ve worked in and with many public libraries over the years and I’ve never heard of one where the child needs to be able to print their name before getting a card. Most of the time, the parent or guardian just has to fill out the application and sign it so they are responsible for the child’s materials. I hope this library considers changes their policy. Libraries are all about access and especially for children access should be as quick and painless as possible.
I read something age-inappropriate when I was a kid. This was before the Internet of course, and I was curious about what naked people looked like. Well, the only place I could find them was in my dad’s medical library, and they were pretty hideous pictures. Not normal naked people. But you know what? It didn’t make a damn bit of difference. I knew what I was looking at.
My great joy as a child was taking the bus to the next town over where they had a library and spending hours there. Long live the book!
On the article and on the first comment displayed: it’s very hard to grow up a book lover without books around. It reminded me of me and my elder sister: both my parents were eager readers, and my dad used to read Jules Verne to us (instead of “Sesame Street” or “Fluffy Teddy Bear Takes the Bus”) every night. I began reading and writing short stories (about ponies and the like) when I was five, and I loved getting dirty in those used Buenos Aires bookstores I searched with my mother (we were rather poor) looking for something new to read.
My sister, though, wasn’t at first very fond of reading as a kid. The strategy my parents found? They kept an open mind and invited her to explore different kinds of books so that she would find something she considered interesting. They kept the bookshelves open and kept inviting her to the family visits to the used books store, inviting her to pick any book she liked while they got something for themselves. During her early teens, she did find something she liked: first, the quite unsophisticated romantic short novels by Corín Tellado, later good vampire stories… Eventually she developped a literary taste and she keeps reading a lot. If my parents hadn’t done that back then, if they had thought she wasn’t born with it, or that she was meant to read more “appropriate” things, my sister would most likely have given up on books long ago.
Wow! I was really tired when I posted that comment. So many incomplete thoughts and sentences! Sorry for subjecting everyone to that!
Excellent article. You made some good points about reading and readers that I think we need to listen to. I personally would do anything to not disappoint or obstruct that first contact with a potential life-long reader.
It’s lovely how you took the time and effort to help your daughter get a card, and sad she couldn’t get her own. This brings back so many memories of myself as a young reader – being told I wasn’t old enough for To Kill A Mockingbird (and ironic, when you think of Scout being punished by her teacher for knowing how to read, essentially), the one and only time I forged my mum’s signature because I needed it to borrow a book (how weird is that rule?), and the sense of accomplishment when I reads my first book without any pictures at all. (wry smile) Also, staying up late under the covers with a flashlight to read.
I think reading should absolutely be encouraged – readers are made, not born. It helps to have books casually lying around the house, littering counter tops and tables, but a good library really helps. And yes, the younger the better.
So says Steve Himmer but he fails to consider the millions of children born into poverty who cannot become readers because their parents don’t read; because books are not found in their home; because the library is not where you go to get a book, but where you go to use the internet for the assignment that can only be done online and yet you don’t have an internet connection at home. Yes, it’s lovely that Steve’s 4 year old wants to read. But had Steve been born to a poor family and had no access to Tintin would he have been a reader? A writer? Let us not forget that for the 1 in 4 children in the US who live in poverty, an “accident of birth” has a profound effect on not only a love of reading but basic literacy. Statistics show that children who start school already behind in literacy never catch up.
I don’t mean to detract from Steve’s main point here, that all children should be encouraged to read, but it simply is not as easy as that.
I remember as a little girl wanting to borrow something from the adult (as opposed to children’s) section of the library. My mother had to write a note agreeing to let me borrow a book by Charles DIckins. Fortunately, libraries have changed, hardly a shush to be heard these days!
Alan,
Please do not think that all libraries are like that. At my library also, anyone of any age can have his/her own card. We too issue them to babies.
Please tell your daughter that we cherish her (and you!)
Sincerely,
Kathleen F. Lamantia
Canton, Ohio
oh
this is lovely, steve–
thank you–
gary
When my oldest daughter was about eight, and had already been reading a while, I decided to try and subtly influence her taste in authors and classics. As Tom Sawyer and white washing fences, I made a point of her seeing me happily read ‘Of Mice and Men (I thought it was of a level where she could grasp most of the message). It worked and she devoured it. To this day, and she is 29 and a successful architect, we share books and reviews on a regular basis. It is one of the most enduring and rewarding aspects of our relationship.