Making Room for Readers

Essays Notable Articles
August 18, 2011 | 39 6 min read

One recent morning, my almost four year old daughter started crying out of the blue. I asked her what was wrong, and she wailed, “I don’t have a library card!” So with a proud paternal bibliophile’s heart swollen in my chest, I strapped her into her car seat and we set off for the library in search of a library card and — at her request — in search of Tintin books like those I’d told her were my favorite stories at the library when I was young.

We went first to the branch library in our end of town, a small, round building with walls almost entirely of glass. All those windows, and the books behind them, make it look pretty inviting, and we parked our car in the lot and I held my daughter’s hand as she skipped to the door, bubbling over with excitement. Unfortunately, it was closed; I’d known municipal budget cuts had reduced the hours of all library branches, but I’d thought that only meant it was closed on Fridays. Instead, it meant this branch — and all others, apart from the main library downtown — were open only a couple of hours four afternoons through the week. No mornings, no evenings, no weekends.

My daughter’s bubbling enthusiasm turned to tears outside that locked door, so I hustled her back to the car and drove to the main library as quickly as traffic and speed limits allowed. It was open, thank goodness, and we spent a long time exploring the children’s room, learning how to find “a book about astronauts” using the signs on the stacks and numbered shelves, and choosing other stories about dinosaurs, kids in school, and a penguin. We consulted the online catalogue, but the nearest Tintin books were a few towns away and would have to be requested for later (something the computers in the children’s room didn’t seem capable of doing, for whatever reason, unlike those in the adult section upstairs).

When we’d found enough books, my daughter strutted up to the circulation desk, stood on her tiptoes, and announced to the librarian, “I need a library card!”

The librarian, who must have been through this before, sighed and her face took on the look of someone who knows she’s about to disappoint a young patron. “Well,” she said, “here’s the rule. If a child is under five — and I know it seems kind of backwards — if a child is under five, she needs to be able to print her first and last name on this form.” She slid a small blue card in front of my daughter, and pointed to a narrow space for her name.

“She can write her name,” I said, “but maybe not small enough for that line.”

“I can do it,” my daughter said, so I got her a pencil and she did a great job writing her first name, Gretchen, but unfortunately those letters took up the whole space. We should have chosen a shorter name, I thought, as she got frustrated — understandably — and tried to print her last name, which she hasn’t practiced as much, in the margins of the card and ended up with a mess. “I can’t do it,” she said, her face melting.

“We’ll practice at home and try again soon,” I told her, while sliding my own library card onto the desk. The librarian gave us a couple of blank cards to practice with, and I drove home with a crestfallen face in the rearview. And she has practiced, with tongue-peeking determination, but she still can’t quite fit her name in that space so she still can’t quite get a library card.

Later in the day, I told my wife about what had happened, and she said, “It’s just like that girl who wanted your book.” I hadn’t made the connection myself, but a few weeks earlier I’d gone to Maine for a book tour event, a sidewalk signing for which I sat outside a bookstore and hand-sold my novel to passersby. I had some great conversations and lots of fun, and even sold a few books, but it’s the one that got away I’ll remember.

A young teenager — a tween, I suppose, but that label feels infantalizing — came down the sidewalk with two older women, and the eyeball on the front of my book drew her in as her companions kept walking. Her face lit up as she read the back cover, and she said, “This sounds good. Can I buy it?” At this point, though, her escorts had realized she wasn’t with them and had backtracked to my table.

Before I could answer her question, one of the women said, “I don’t know…”

“It’s okay, I have my own money,” the girl said, but the women with her shook their heads.

“Is it appropriate for a thirteen year old?” one of them asked, and I admit, it’s a question I hadn’t been asked before.

“I think so,” I told her. “It’s not graphic or violent or anything. I don’t think there’s any swearing.” But I should have played the “I’m a parent card” to increase my credibility, because apparently I wasn’t convincing. Or perhaps I should have borrowed Mitch Hedberg’s line that, “Every book is a children’s book if the kid can read!”

“We should ask your mother,” said the second woman, a note of finality in her stern voice. “Books are so… books are tricky. That’s something your mother needs to decide.”

“But I have my own money!” insisted the girl, her face as low as my daughter’s would be at the library later. “I can buy it myself.”

At that point, I would have given it to her for free, and I would have paid for any book she wanted in the whole store, just to keep her reading, but I had a feeling that offer would make it all worse. The decision had been made, and as the two woman turned and walked away up the sidewalk, the girl (a niece, perhaps?) took a last look at the cover, then gave a sad, apologetic look to me as I gave an equally sad, apologetic to her. Then she put the book down and dragged her feet up the sidewalk.

I don’t blame those two women any more than I blame the librarian. Their responsibility as guardians, whether they were aunts or family friends or much older sisters, is to watch out for the young person in their charge. Thirteen is a liminal moment between childhood and adulthood, so who am I to say what’s appropriate for someone that age, and for this particular thirteen year old I don’t know in the slightest. And let’s face it, there are probably lots of parents who’d worry about their son or daughter (or nephew or niece) buying a novel about a hermit who spends most of his story naked from a scruffy guy like me. That’s easy enough for me to accept. As my protagonist says, “if I saw myself bursting out of the woods, I might not offer help either.”

Yet I can’t help but remember that reading — both the careful selection of books and being given enough privacy to quietly read them myself — was among the first freedoms I had. Those early choices, and being trusted to make them, seem like foundational experiences now, decades later. That’s how my brothers and I found those Tintin stories, in fact, wandering the stacks of the library unhindered until we happened upon a whole box of Hergé’s books in a cardboard box on the very bottom shelf in the very back corner of the collection. They may have been stuck there as an afterthought or an embarrassment, forbidden from mingling with “better” books, but to me they were buried treasure. And now, as a father and author, I want my daughter to find treasures of her own in the stacks, and I want a girl like the one I met in Maine to find books that are hers, only hers, and to find them all on her own. I can’t think of a better honor than to have something I’ve written be that book for someone.

It’s a mistake to rarify reading and put books out of reach. It’s a mistake to assume, as Alan Jacobs did recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education (in a passage later quoted by Shelf Awareness), that readers are, “mostly born and only a little made.” Because those discoveries in libraries and bookstores — and, yes, on my parents’ shelves, too — are what made me a reader, not some mysterious, bibliogenic accident of birth. That kind of thinking not only makes fewer readers, but might unmake the ones already forming. In an era of reduced library budgets and hours, closing bookstores, declining sales, and lost readers, discouraging anyone, of any age, from picking up a book they’re interested in seems like the last thing we should be doing. And to the thirteen year old girl I met in Maine, if you should somehow read this, any time you want it my book is yours. I’ll throw in a few others you might enjoy, too.

 

Image credit: woodd24/Flickr

is author of the novels Fram and The Bee-Loud Glade, and editor of the webjournal Necessary Fiction. He teaches at Emerson College and has a website at stevehimmer.com.

Essays

My Own Private Iceland

Essays
June 11, 2013 | 10 7 min read

1.
Icelandic poet, playwright, and novelist Sjón (pronounced “Shohn”) rummages through all of nature, history, and imagination in his newly translated trilogy, cobbling found fragments together. The resulting work holds up not through any logical scheme or solid foundation but through collective heat and gravity. More important than the fragments themselves, however, are the gaps between them, which open onto a larger and more sublime world, far beyond what any single book can encompass.

Perhaps best known as a lyricist for Björk (he co-wrote the Oscar-nominated “I’ve Seen It All” from Dancer in the Dark, as well as many other songs), three of his books – The Blue Fox, The Whispering Muse, and From The Mouth Of The Whale – have just appeared for the first time in America, in snazzy FSG editions translated by Victoria Cribb.

They’re peculiar things. Ribald, raunchy, sometimes brutal and sometimes unselfconsciously goofy (a revered 17th century Danish scholar is named Dr. Wormius; a merchant ship sets sail for Mold Bay), they combine legends and tall tales, magical realism and biblical allegory, landscape and maritime studies, arcane scientific and theological musings, YA-style swashbuckling and personal confession. Calling to mind Borges and Sebald with their cracked pseudo-scholarship and deliberately pedantic inquiries into botany, zoology, geography, and the cosmos, they’re wonder books, cabinets of curiosity, and extended riffs, not straightforwardly plotted and thematically streamlined novels.

Projecting tricks of light and memory across frozen fields, lonely islands, and stormy seas, Sjón takes a distinctly human pleasure in relating how harsh and inhospitable the world can be to human habitation within it. He renders nature, which “breeds in its lap both unimaginable horrors and precious gems,” with the romantic longing of Caspar David Friedrich and the cool desolation of Nicholas Winding Refn’s film Valhalla Rising.

2.
Life impacts Sjón’s characters like Forrest Gump bled of all corny uplift. Dwarfed by superstition, politics, and endless winter, they bear their torment by thinking and talking endlessly, spinning a loose narrative web out of whatever absurdity is afoot.

Entering this web as a reader felt like slipping into a drawn-out encounter with an enthusiastic and linguistically agile stranger at a bar. Professing to be in no hurry, I listened to the stranger toss off boastful yarns and laments about his and the world’s younger days. As we both went on drinking and the night got deep, I found myself believing him more and more.

There’s something frivolous about an exchange like this, a sense that nothing concrete can be accomplished, but there’s also a desperate import, a sense that transitory, half-coherent communication is our only recourse in a world that always gets the better of us. The truth can never be said outright, but a storyteller like this convinces you it can be stabbed at.

In The Blue Fox, a priest trapped for five days under a glacier begins to fear for his sanity, “so he did what comes most naturally to an Icelander when he is in a fix. That is to recite ballads, verses, and rhymes, sing loud and clear to himself…This is a failsafe old trick, if men wish to preserve their wits.”

It’s a failsafe old trick in much of world literature, but there’s something distinctive in the simultaneous lightness and heaviness of Sjón’s touch, the way in which his narrators are always both joking and not-joking. “Uncouth exclamations about endless nights, burning snow, whales the size of mountains, trumpet blasts of the dead from volcanoes and icebergs”: Jonah, the exiled scholar who narrates From The Mouth Of The Whale, lists “far-fetched tales” about his homeland. But, he concedes, “in some strange way they come close to the stories we ordinary, humble folk tell ourselves in an attempt to comprehend our existence here and make it more bearable.”

3.
What is Iceland to me? As soon as my imagination strays from the clean modern streets of Reykjavik, it lapses into a medieval dreamscape of glaciers, fjords, elves, bright astral phenomena, ships emerging from or disappearing into the mist.

I’m woefully ignorant when it comes to the Edda, which Sjón is surely playing with, and I quake before Halldór Laxness, Iceland’s “Nobel Prize winner who bridged the nation’s literary past and future,” their Mann or Hamsun. Sometimes I range over his books on the shelf and fantasize about having read them, but most of the time I fear I’m no longer brave or patient enough to take that plunge for real.

Beyond this, of course there’s Björk, but, more crucially for me, there’s Sigur Rós. Their eerie, spacey soundscapes, built of sporadic percussion, bowed guitar, and angelic falsetto vocals, have soundtracked many a headphones-wearing bus or train trip through the dead of night, or hours spent half-sleeping in layover airports…so much so that I hear them now whenever I enter these disembodied headspaces, whether or not I’m listening to their music.

They first took root in me when my freshman year roommate passive-aggressively strung a bunch of Christmas lights across our shared sleeping quarters. Instead of asking him to take them down so I could maybe sleep (I don’t think I even considered this option), I started playing Sigur Rós on repeat all night on my laptop.

For that year and several thereafter, I couldn’t sleep without going to the place their music took me to, which is to say that I couldn’t sleep without going to Iceland. I’ve never been there in my waking life, but I’ve spent thousands of sleeping hours constructing a dream-version of it.

4.
In a coincidence that didn’t feel like one, I read David Shields’s Reality Hunger and How Literature Saved My Life at the same time as I read Sjón.

At first, Shields’s call for boundary-breaking fiction is laughably at odds with Sjón’s compendia of wonders and horrors. Almost too fittingly, from Reality Hunger:
I don’t have a huge pyrotechnic imagination that luxuriates in other worlds. People say, “It was so fascinating to read this novel that took place in Iceland. I just loved living inside another world for two weeks.” That doesn’t, I must say, interest me that much.
But, as I thought more about it while continuing to read both, they drew unexpectedly together.

What I understand Shields to be saying, beneath his supposed attack on fiction, is cut to the chase. Whatever you’re trying to do in writing, do it right away. Don’t build a house for the things that are important; just spill them naked onto the page.

Sjón’s ultra-digressive style does just this. Though he relishes not getting to any particular point, soaring through stories within stories like a rogue angel of history, he makes no attempt to do anything else. His narrators aren’t dragging their feet or turning their backs on more pressing matters. They’re interested in a great many things and they leap freely and sometimes jarringly among them, but they aren’t motivated by anything other than their own genuine interest.

These aren’t books designed to be filed in memory as discrete artistic units. Rather than telling any definite and delimited story, they open a tap and let out a draught of Story, formless and potent as beer. “What a symphony,” Whale’s Jonah exclaims as he tries to gather his thoughts. “It is as if the east wind is bringing me all the songs of Earth at once, bellowing out the saddest dirge together with the most joyous paean…”

This is a recognition, in the mind and in nature, of the same charged collage quality that Shields hungers for in literature.

5.
As if I needed any help, Shields got me thinking hard about death. He has no interest in literature that doesn’t confront it directly; he won’t invest in a writer who promises escape or treats writing like a safe haven.

Without getting too Jungian here, I’ve always felt that leaving behind plot and entering Story (what John Crowley calls “The Tale” in Little, Big) is a means of subjectively overcoming the dominion of my own death, not just of ignoring it for a while.

Conventional novels begin and end. Whether or not the characters you identify with die, the last page marks the death of the world the novel has labored to create, a world that has tried to impress its autonomy and uniqueness upon you. This death is singular and finite. You can read the novel again but you can’t use it to enter a place bigger than what it contains.

The Story that Sjón’s books open onto is such a place. It’s a place of Life and Death, not of individual lives and deaths. When I’m truly engrossed in this realm, I feel neither alive nor soon-to-be-dead. I feel nothing but engrossment. Death becomes no less awesome, but it does not remain in ultimate opposition to everything else. It becomes part of the party rather than the infinite darkness that shuts it down.

The drunken storyteller, like the 1940’s sailor in The Whispering Muse who claims to have sailed with Jason and the Argonauts, takes on a life that’s immeasurably greater than that of a single person. Both he and Jonah appreciate that “God’s tongue…pronounced the world, as if it were a tale so tremendous that no one but He Himself would live to hear it all.” Story is greater than any lifetime and yet only realized, in the moment of telling, through a living teller: somehow it houses life while housed within it.

6.
Sjón’s narrators aren’t talking about other worlds; they’re talking about the real but often unseen places beneath and inside of this one. In a flight of especially poetic prose, The Whispering Muse characterizes the onset of Story thus:
Once the ear has fallen asleep, the humming takes on a new form. It becomes a note, a voice sounding in the consciousness, as if a single grain of golden sand had slipped through the mesh of the sieve and, borne on the tip of the eardrum’s tongue, passed through the horn and ivory-inlaid gates that divide the tangible from the invisible world.
Ships rarely get where they’re going, but this voyage away from the tangible world and into the invisible proves possible for those who sincerely attempt it. For me, it was a journey back to the Iceland I first discovered during those long nights in college, contemplating the grim relief of drifting off to the place the music was coming from and never returning.

David Shields won’t place his faith in the bulwark of a novel that claims to encompass everything. He wants porous, disjointed work that makes no attempt to master all that it takes on. One way or another, the literature that saves his life has to take on everything, all of Life and all of Death, and break down in the face of that ambition, rather than living and dying in a vacuum. He doesn’t want to hang out in a place of make-believe with Death lurking just outside. Neither do I. I want to open the door, invite Death in, and take it from there.

Essays
| 10 7 min read
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Essays

Will Kindle Worlds Commodify Fan Fiction?

Essays
June 3, 2013 | 1 6 min read

1.
I learned about the unfathomable amount of cash that Yahoo planned to throw at Tumblr last month, when the news inevitably crept up on my Tumblr dashboard. The reactions were predictably negative, and the general sentiment was clear: “They are going to ruin all of what we’ve built.” For the most part, they echoed the reactions of the press at large, questioning yet another one of these crazy big internet deals, the wisdom of banking so much on users as advertising targets, and the near-universal assertion that you “can’t buy cool.” Was there ever a more stark contrast than between the purple-and-white tabloid jumble of Yahoo’s homepage and the stripped-down malleability of Tumblr? Yahoo went on record promising “not to screw it up,” which was somehow less reassuring than it should have been.

But I lead a double life on Tumblr: I follow bookish people and things, posting my own work there, attached to my real name, but I also lurk around a number of interlocking fandoms — interlocking because one has inevitably led me to the next: as people whose taste I trust migrate towards new obsessions, I sometimes migrate in turn. They have begun to crowd my dash, the weight of a thousand animated gifs slowing the site’s functionality to a crawl — and I love everything about them. There is a vernacular that links these communities, some of it held over from the time when LiveJournal ruled the fannish world, and some of it new and constantly evolving, borne on a blogging platform designed for sharing and speed and expansive warm-heartedness — I spend so much time smiling while scrolling around on Tumblr that it’s kind of alarming. (I browse Twitter stony-faced, occasionally barking out a harsh laugh, which means I’m either doing it wrong or Twitter and I just aren’t meant for each other.)

For the most part, fan communities seem to shy away from any organization that tries to insert itself from the top down. There is a sense that on Tumblr, fandom is planted and cultivated — grown, in a way that feels more palpable than LiveJournal ever did. It’s in your average stack of reblogged posts, fanning out in a sideways pyramid, each subsequent comment riffing on the one before it — and then seeing it days later, the joke or the expression of sympathy of the series of gifs piling up exponentially. You go to “like” it and note, with some surprise, that you already have. You can literally build on an idea, and this is how fandoms blossom and thrive.

It is an organic space, which must be at the heart of what’s made it such an unprofitable space, the sponsored posts unobtrusively tucked over to the far right, simple enough to train your eye away from, and subtle enough to even invite a curious click or two. But how would the intrusion of an organization as heavy-handed as Yahoo affect these communities? Rumors began to spread suggesting that content would soon be censored, and that advertisers would be given much more space within a matter of days. Nothing was confirmed, but a vague sense of foreboding persisted: would they know to leave well enough alone, or would all of this organic community building prove too tempting not to attempt to monetize, to control, to ruin?

The answer, of course, remains to be seen — it’s far too early in the game. We woke up to a blogging platform that looked much the same as the day before; a week later, no discernible change. The site chugs onwards, a million little corners of the internet, perfect little microcosms of the world — or the world as we wish it could be. For now, anyway.

2.
It is fitting, perhaps, that the same week as the Yahoo/Tumblr acquisition, Amazon announced a project entitled “Kindle Worlds.” It feels like more of a broader trend than a coincidence, because the Kindle Worlds endeavor is about an organization inserting itself from the top down. “Worlds,” we learn, are Amazon-ese for fandoms — individual universes constructed by books, movies, television shows, comics, etc. — and the program is a platform for publishing fan fiction — quoting myself here, from a year ago (I’m currently accepting my lot as The Millions’ official fanfic correspondent): “fan fiction is original work with largely unoriginal foundations, in which writers take established fictional worlds and spin them into something else entirely.” Yeah, I apparently used the term “worlds” as well, but at least I didn’t capitalize it.

The Amazon deal was struck with Alloy Entertainment, the YA juggernaut behind Gossip Girl, The Vampire Diaries, and Pretty Little Liars, amongst a number of other ubiquitous book-cum-television-show enterprises about teenage girls being cruel and/or sexy. These three are the official launch-point for Kindle Worlds: fanfic writers in these communities (and elsewhere eventually, Amazon promises, with “licenses for more Worlds on the way”) will be able to digitally publish their stuff for Kindle via Amazon, exchanging full rights to their ideas for somewhere between 20-35% of the profits, based on the length of their stories. The first offerings when the store launches in June will be commissioned works, the Worlds homepage filled with cheerful testimonials from these writers beside a dusting of hard facts and figures.

Much has already been written on the financial and legal details of Kindle Worlds, and the interpretations tend to vary based on the source. With a few exceptions, fan fiction is written, disseminated, and consumed entirely for free: obvious legal reasons compel writers to mark each story with very clear disclaimers, crediting their source material, however far an interpretation strays from the original. In the extremely rare instance that a fan work is published for money, it is after the story has been transformed beyond recognition — the Fifty Shades trilogy is the most famous example, evolving from 100 chapters of Twilight fan fiction. To the casual observer, Kindle Worlds might seem like a vast step up for your average fanfic writer, the best of whom are paid in praise alone. There’s actual money here, though, to be fair, not a whole lot of it, accompanied the establishment’s stamp of approval, published by Amazon and sanctioned by the corporation that owns the source material.

The actual money leads to other financial questions, because with Alloy, we’re not talking about borrowing the characters of a single author: these books, and the scripts of the accompanying shows, are written by a slew of work-for-hire writers. Book-industry types far more familiar with media tie-in writing than me have suggested that the Kindle Worlds move might be another Amazon attempt to circumvent traditional publishers and writing models. If this actually catches on, Alloy and other organizations may come out winners, because by publishing on this platform, a fan fiction writer gives up rights to the content of their stories — Alloy and Amazon will have full rights to original characters and ideas. Why hire a team of traditional writers when your fans can generate new ideas for you — at no cost beyond the few cents per Kindle single you’re required to pay them?

The whole venture hints at broader questions that swirl around a lot of Amazon’s recent projects as they attempt to knock traditional publishing models out of whack. If it didn’t feel like such a fundamental and remotely insulting misunderstanding of fan culture, if it didn’t feel like a prime chance for corporations to exploit rather than promote, I might even praise Amazon (praise Amazon, for Christ’s sakes) for trying yet one more thing that deviates from the publishing status quo. If the barriers for entry are lowered, does publishing great fiction becomes a question of talent alone — even as something crucial is given up in the exchange? There are parallels with self-publishing and parallels with the broader Kindle Single platform. Who deserves to be published? Why isn’t it simply the person whom people would most like to read?

3.
Surely every person in the entire realm of fan fiction is tired of the monetization question by now. The simple answer is that it really, really isn’t about the money. But people keep on asking anyway: how can so much time and energy and a sheer dizzying number of words be spent on something for no financial compensation? It’s easy enough to say that the person who asks that question doesn’t understand the idea of fan fiction, or doesn’t fully grasp what it means to be a fan of something in general — but that feels dismissive and unhelpful. There is a disconnect here, though, and it’s one that’s tricky for me to articulate, between Amazon and Alloy and the fan fiction community, or between Tumblr and Yahoo and the people who look at 100,000 reblogs and can only see a missed opportunity for advertising.

Is a person who believes in the ultimate democratizing power of the internet bound to be disappointed sooner or later? That scrappy start-ups inevitably sell out — great ideas get acquired by big companies, then twisted beyond recognition? Of course, those great ideas can come from anywhere, right? Perhaps that’s not enough to stem the disillusionment. So maybe that’s one of the appeals of fan fiction, or of the exchange of images and ideas amongst fandoms on Tumblr and elsewhere: there is absolutely no endgame there, beyond the satisfaction of sharing something you like, obsess over, deeply love with other people who love it just as deeply.

There is an enormously freeing diversity in the world of fan fiction. I don’t mean that the writers are diverse — they are mostly female, and surely there must be socioeconomic implications in the ability to sustain such a hobby. I mean that the whole point of it, beyond all that deep love and celebrating any given fandom, is taking a character or a setting or just the tiniest inkling of an idea and rolling with it. The possibilities spin off into exponentially increasing permutations, spurring weird stuff and beautiful stuff, quite often fiction that’s better written than the source material that inspired it, creating fandoms that are so broad and varied and encompassing that a person can usually find whatever they’re seeking within. If not, well, that person may as well just write it herself. If that’s not the most accurate reflection of the rest of the internet — the organic, cultivated internet, grown from the bottom up, with no contracts, no exchanges of cash — then I don’t know what is.

Essays
| 1 6 min read
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Essays

New Yorker Fiction by the Numbers: The Many Stories by the Few

Essays
January 8, 2009 | 4 2 min read

Earlier this week we took a qualitative look at recent fiction in the New Yorker, and now, with help from a Millions reader, we’re going to take a quantitative look.Last year, Frank Kovarik, who writes and teaches English in St. Louis, sent us a spreadsheet that he has used to catalog New Yorker fiction since 2003. We looked at the numbers last year, and now, with another year of data included, were going to revisit Frank’s spreadsheet.Frank’s spreadsheet records not just the titles and authors, but things like gender, country of origin, and frequency of appearance. He also includes his own personal quality rating for each story (your mileage may vary).Frank has once again generously offered to make his spreadsheet available to Millions readers. If you’re interested, you can see it here.With six years of fiction compiled, we can get some hard info on the New Yorker’s tendencies.Frequency: The headline takeaway from this exercise is just how many of the stories that appear in the New Yorker come from just a few writers. Just nine writers account for 73 (or 23%) of the 312 stories to appear over the last six years. Just 18 writers account for 118 (or 38%) of the stories. When discussing New Yorker fiction, I often hear complaints about how rarely the magazine surprises readers with talented but less well known writers. This is undoubtedly a valid complaint. While many of the New Yorker’s favorite fiction writers happen to be brilliant masters of the form – Alice Munro and George Saunders come to mind – it’s also true that readers can grow weary of these same voices recurring again and again. On the flip side of this argument, however, there are 76 writers who have each appeared a single time in the New Yorker over the last six years (almost 13 per year), though only nine one-timers appeared in 2008.Gender: Of the 312 stories in the New Yorker from 2003 through 2008, 119 or 38.1% were penned by women. (That’s up from 37.4% last year.)Nationality: The fiction section of the New Yorker is a pretty multi-cultural place, but Americans still make up the bulk of the contributors. 157 of the stories, or 50% (down from 52% after 2007), are American (and this leaves off several writers who could be conceivably classified as both American and a native of another country). Coming in in second are the Brits at 22 stories and in third the Irish at 21 stories.Returning to the frequency question, below are all the writers who have appeared in the New Yorker at least five times over the last six years. These are the superstars of New Yorker fiction:12:Alice Munro10:William Trevor8:T. Coraghessan BoyleTessa Hadley7:Louise ErdrichJohn UpdikeRoddy DoyleHaruki Murakami6:Thomas McGuane5:Antonya NelsonTobias WolffGeorge SaundersCharles D’AmbrosioJonathan LethemEdward P. JonesRoberto BolañoLara Vapnyar

Essays
| 4 2 min read
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Essays

Reading Just for Pleasure

Essays
September 10, 2010 | 13 7 min read

A few weeks ago I ventured into the English Faculty Library at the University of Oxford to borrow a work of fiction. A friend had recommended the novel Money: A Suicide Note, by Martin Amis, and for a variety of reasons the only library from which I could borrow one of the University’s fifteen copies was the English Faculty. (All but two of the copies were owned by college libraries – none my own, and colleges do not lend to non-members – or by libraries that do not permit borrowing to anyone. The second circulation copy was out.) Although my subject is History and Politics, the English Faculty does permit non-members to borrow from its collection, but with some rather curious reservations.

When I presented the volume to be checked-out, the librarian examined my card (which discloses my subject), pursed her lips, pressed her palms protectively over Martin’s image on the dust jacket, and clearly made herself ready to say something that she regarded as unpleasant:

Librarian: “Are you reading this book just for pleasure?”

Me: “Well, I suppose, not entirely…”

Librarian: “Because you know some people may be studying this for a course or an exam.”

Me: “Well, um, even in the summer?”

Librarian: “Oh, perhaps not, but we really don’t like to lend just for pleasure reading. That’s not what these books are for.”

To be fair, my responses were even less coherent than what this paraphrase suggests, which may be why the librarian did not offer much compelling justification for her reluctance to share the work of the younger Amis. (No doubt Martin’s father, Sir Kingsley Amis, descended from solid Wodehousian stock, would have pipped me to the riposte, but despite my meagre performance I was permitted, in the end, to borrow the book.) For one thing, surely no English student, when deprived of a sought-after volume, would find any consolation in the knowledge that their degree was being sacrificed at the altar of a D.Phil. dissertation, rather than merely for my pleasure. It might be said that if non-English students  were prevented from borrowing, the chances of any volume being available would increase, but this ignores both the curious tendency for all students to equate borrowing books with reading books (thus drawing perverse and prolonged comfort from the mere presence in their bedroom of the volumes on the reading list), and the academic equivalent of a mutually-assured destruction, the threat that other faculties will impose reciprocal bans on non-members and thereby obliterate each and every Dreaming Spire.

It is no small irony that the work at issue was by Martin Amis, one of the University’s most precocious children. Amis read English at Exeter College in the late 1960s and took a “Congratulatory First,” a title bestowed by examiners at an undergraduate’s viva (oral defence, now defunct), telling the student how much they enjoyed reading his examination scripts. Amis is renowned for his command of, and appreciation for, the English language, which he deploys to dark and hysterical effect in The Rachel Papers, Dead Babies, Success, and the aforementioned Money. While it is difficult to imagine Amis himself taking anything like a diminutive view of reading just for pleasure, there remains much to be said in defence of other readers, who react more moderately to a thoughtful turn of phrase, or for whom Milton may do just as well as a glass of warm milk before bedtime – in short, The Millions of us who read just for pleasure – and why these might not be so readily turned away from the circulation desk.

At the same time I was reading Money, I was (and still am) working through the collected works of Lewis H. Lapham, editor emeritus of Harper’s Magazine, in preparation for an interview in late September. While more recently remembered for his eloquent, sharp, and (at the time) lonely criticism of the Bush Administration after September 11, 2001 (collected in Theater of War, Gag Rule, and Pretensions to Empire), Lapham’s earlier writing considered the existence of an American aristocracy (what he calls an “equestrian class”), and the enervating effects of a culture worshipful of money. Lapham published Money and Class in America in 1988, which could be described as a non-fictional explanation of the world Amis depicts in Money, which was published in 1984, and over half of which takes place in New York City, where Lapham also resides. While John Self, the protagonist in Money, is certainly not a member of Lapham’s equestrian class, it is not difficult to imagine Lapham nodding grimly as he reads of Self’s destructive attempts to ape his betters:
I have money but I can’t control it: Fielding keeps supplying me with more. Money, I think, is uncontrollable. Even those of us who have it, we can’t control it. Life gets poor-mouthed all the time, yet you seldom hear an unkind word about money. Money, now this has to be some good shit.
Or, perhaps not, and instead we should feel, after reading Amis, that:
The irony which at first made one smile, the precision of language which was at first so satisfying, the cynicism which at first was used only to puncture pretension, in the end come to seem like a terrible constriction, a fear of opening oneself up to the world.
This is how a former professor of English at the University of Oxford described the work of Amis and other of his British contemporaries (including Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie) in a newspaper article published the very same week that I was wondering whether to include a question about Amis in my interview with Lapham. While it is tempting to view with awe and wonder such a web of meaning and connection, spinning-up as if from nowhere as the literary stars align, in fact the effect is nothing more banal than seeing a new friend all around town: before being introduced, you just didn’t think to notice.

Those who are at all familiar with Lapham’s prose will appreciate this point especially, recalling his preference for historical, cultural, and literary allusion. Lapham’s essays are a study in the art of the “almost tell,” meaning that his arguments are presented less as Polaroid truths and more as symphonic orations, including the presumption that the audience will withhold any applause until the end of the last movement, and its final judgment until after a good night’s rest and perhaps mulling over the reviews in the next day’s newspaper. The first chapter of Money and Class in America is entitled “The Gilded Cage,” which is the phrase used by Edith Wharton in The House of Mirth to describe the circumstances of New York’s social elite at the beginning of the twentieth century. Lapham elaborates the allusion, intimating that:
The House of Mirth addresses itself to what in 1905 was an irrelevantly small circle of people entranced by their reflections in a tradesman’s mirror. In the seventy-odd years since Wharton published the novel the small circle has become considerably larger, and the corollary deformations of character show up in all ranks of American society, among all kinds of people caught up in the perpetual buying of their self-esteem.
The literary reference at once illuminates Lapham’s point with the full range of Wharton’s sensibility and refined description, or at the very least the reader is directed to a source of further understanding – provided she remembers to tell the librarian that her visit to Wharton’s Upper East Side drawing rooms is for business, not pleasure.

The specific terms in which the librarian formulated her anxiety – “…some people may be reading this for a course or an exam…” – bespeak something of the insecurity that perpetually darkens the horizon outside the offices of every English faculty, especially during the rainy season otherwise known as the humanities department budgetary review. The appeal is made to a higher purpose – “That’s not what these books are for” – and the hope is that despite having paid our admission to the theme park we will continue to respect the height requirements on the literary roller-coaster, not to mention its place amongst the park’s founding attractions. The irony is that by protecting the importance of the enterprise with the threat of restricted access and the real pain of condescension, the operators put at risk both a life-sustaining custom, and the continued existence of the very thing that they purport to discover:
But I incline to come to the alarming conclusion that it is just the literature that we read for “amusement,” or “purely for pleasure” that may have the greatest, and least suspected influence upon us… Hence it is that the influence of popular novelists, and of popular plays of contemporary life, requires to be scrutinized most closely. (T.S. Eliot, “Religion and Literature,” 1934)
There are other passages from Eliot that bear directly on this subject. In the same essay, Eliot rejects what must be the librarian’s view of the aim of wider reading (“an accumulation of knowledge, or what sometimes is meant by the term ‘a well-stocked mind'”) in favour of what Lionel Trilling might have recognized as The Liberal Imagination, that  “very different views of life, cohabiting in our minds, affect each other, and our own personality asserts itself and gives each a place in some arrangement peculiar to ourself.” But to belabour the point with too much critical quotation risks begging the question, and confessing the very thing we are suggesting should be irrelevant, or at least beside the point.

The final explanation for the use of the diminishing modifier “just for pleasure” is lost somewhere in the fog surrounding that overwrought and spectacularly hackneyed phrase “work-life balance.” The circumstances may be less clear when one is studying Plato, John Rawls, or J.R.R. Tolkien, compared to a difficult translation of Greek or Latin, an econometric proof, or an equation in particle physics, but there is only so much time one can or should devote to even academic work. Not only does the law of diminishing returns extend beyond discounted cash flow analyses and the building of brand collages, but like a Blackberry or a conference call, under no circumstances should any of these appear during family dinners, cocktail parties, or on the bedside table.

The problem for the librarian, no less than for the career consultant, the occupational health and safety supervisor, and the beleaguered investment banker, is that the notion of a “work-life balance” is a terrible false dichotomy, the Marxist equivalent of giving all your chips away before the deck is even shuffled and then borrowing from the dealer to buy a round for the table. It is manifestly impossible to divide one’s life into neat or even approximately spherical compartments (how many New York Times crossword puzzles have been completed with a “Eureka!” exclaimed while on the family dog’s midnight promenade), and the decision to deny the obvious is generally employed by those who actually know better, which is why they are forever unsatisfied with the level of the scales. While it is plainly true that one can read a book more or less closely (substitute a beach blanket and a daiquiri for a pencil and a desk), it is equally true that something of everything we read is retained, to be recalled, by chance more often than design, on some or another future occasion, a dinner conversation, a tutorial essay, or a game of Trivial Pursuit. As every student who has written an examination knows all too well, it is impossible to predict when the most felicitous recollections  – legend has it, the essential ingredients in the making of a “Congratulatory First” – will occur, but the chances are most assuredly increased in direct proportion to the number of books we read.

Even, just for pleasure.

(Image: Lecture Hall, image from sprochello’s photostream)

Essays
| 13 7 min read

39 comments:

  1. 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?

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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

  5. 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.

  8. 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!

  9. 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.)

  10. 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.

  11. 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.

  12. 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!

  13. 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!

  15. Pingback: Don’t judge a book by its….content? | bringyournoise

  16. 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 ;-)

  17. 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.

  18. 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.

  19. 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.

  20. 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.

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  22. 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!

  23. 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.

  24. Wow! I was really tired when I posted that comment. So many incomplete thoughts and sentences! Sorry for subjecting everyone to that!

  25. 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.

  26. 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.

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  28. 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.

  29. 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!

  30. Pingback: On Appropriateness (and the lack thereof) (and learning not to worry about it) | Kelly Barnhill: Author, Teacher, Mom.

  31. 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

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  37. 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.

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Essays

Feels Like the First Time: On Discovering Writers

Essays
June 29, 2016 | 3 3 min read

When I found Jim Thompson’s The Transgressors at a recent used book sale, I became cartoonishly excited. Thompson is one of my favorite pulp novelists, and there was nothing to dislike about my find: its cover depicted an old coupe stuck in rutted mud, with someone rushing, I guessed, to check a captive in its trunk. The back-cover copy described a reliably sadistic tale; an old New Republic blurb promised “a tour of hell.” It was called The Transgressors, for Christ’s sake. I couldn’t have asked for more.

My excitement stemmed from The Nothing Man, a 1954 Thompson novel that I discovered a decade ago, having never before heard of the book or the author. It told the story of a sexually disfigured veteran who goes on a killing spree to cover up his secret — as if being a serial killer was the lesser shame. It was a bizarre, unsettling book, angry with energy, that seemed to have been written yesterday, not during the Dwight D. Eisenhower years.

Unfortunately, it’s been downhill from there. In the years since, I’ve returned to Thompson again and again, and I’ve never recaptured the feeling that jumped from The Nothing Man. The Getaway — made famous by Steve McQueen, and later, Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger — came close, but was derailed by an outré epilogue that seemed imported from a different book. The Killer Inside Me, The Golden Gizmo, Pop. 1280 — all were fine, but none supplied the blast of that first discovery. The Transgressors turned out to be readable, but was the worst Thompson I’ve read — and it led me to ask myself a question common to fading relationships: Is it him or is it me?

I’ve experienced this pattern — manic love, followed by a futile attempt to regain said manic love — with others: I fell for T.C. Boyle after my brother slipped me The Tortilla Curtain, and despite Drop City, When the Killing’s Done, The Harder they Come, and others, it remains my favorite Boyle. Portnoy’s Complaint, The Sun Also Rises, and Billy Bathgate are my favorite Philip Roth, Ernest Hemingway, and E.L. Doctorow novels — and were the first of each I read. These are legendary figures, responsible for a raft of classics. Is it possible that out of all of their works, those three are the best? Did I just happen to choose each one’s greatest effort right out of the gate?

I would say that I didn’t. My experience with Thompson, and to a lesser degree with Boyle, has led me to believe that the discovery of a new style — Thompson’s turbo-charged dissolution; Boyle’s burbling streams of words — eclipses the storytelling that the style supports. Reading the stylistically unfamiliar — be it Evie Wyld or Lauren Groff or Patrick deWitt — can be so pleasingly disorienting that it leaves the reader giddy: This is incredible, we think as we flip on through. This is a totally new experience. As a reader, it’s the moment you seek — but that euphoria can also distort your inner Michiko Kakutani and set future expectations impossibly high.

Breakfast of Champions might not have been Kurt Vonnegut’s hands-down masterpiece, but I read it before any of his others — and for that, it’s elevated in my mind. With its drawings of sphincters and cows and general jokiness, it’s no Cat’s Cradle or Slaughterhouse-Five — but it doesn’t need to be, because the Vonnegut basics were there. And most importantly, for me, it came first. When you see a beautiful stranger across a crowded room, it doesn’t matter that he or she might not be having the most attractive day of his or her life. The spark fires either way, and you won’t forget the moment.

This isn’t to say that quality doesn’t matter. The first Danielle Steel novel you read will be as crummy as your last, and no matter when you read Tough Guys Don’t Dance, it won’t top The Naked and the Dead. But when a work is discovered can, at the very least, insert a welcome uncertainty to an overbearing consensus. In everything I’ve read about Jim Thompson, I haven’t seen much mention of The Nothing Man. This isn’t all that surprising, since he wrote more than 30 books. But critics consistently cite The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280 as two of his best. Maybe they are. But maybe those critics would think differently if they’d read The Nothing Man first. As for me, I’ll keep trying: there are still a few unread Thompson novels sitting on my shelf.

Image Credit: Flickr/Steven Guzzardi

Essays
| 3 3 min read
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Essays

Travesty and American Usage

Essays
March 29, 2017 | 9 12 min read
The Unethical Appeal is a permanent part of Internet culture — its founding rhetoric, perhaps. It’s a cheat code, nonbiodegradable trash. A rhetoric is a kind of technology, and we would just as soon vanquish the Unethical Appeal as we would bring back factory jobs, or speak to one another on the phone. Its pervasive role in the election — and the elevation of those for whom the Unethical Appeal is their sole expertise — is what’s truly unprecedented; I imagine it also accounts for the distinct feeling that we’re living in a revenge porn of a country.
Essays
| 9 12 min read