Here's a wonderful poem to commemorate today, the first day we had snow.

Enjoy!

Theodore Taylor, The Cay

One of the delights of having a twelve-year-old son (other than having someone else who can now collect the household trash and put away the laundry) is that it exposes me to some literary gems that have heretofore escaped my own reading. The Cay is one such book.

Set in the Caribbean during WWII, The Cay tells the story of Phillip Enright, a twelve-year-old boy who is torn from his mother and suddenly blinded when their boat is torpedoed off the coast of Curacao. He finds himself aboard a raft with Timothy, an old Jamaican man who serves as a father figure and Phillip's protector. When the two happen across a small island in the Caymans, it is Phillip who learns important life lessons about racism, sacrifice, and personal responsibility as they battle starvation and a hurricane, awaiting rescue all the while.

Beautifully written in a simple style, with action a-plenty told at a brisk pacing, The Cay is obviously an excellent novel for middle-schoolers. And there's just enough symbolism and social commentary to make this a wonderful introduction to the realm of literary analysis for youngsters.

My son just finished reading this novel in his Language Arts class and, with me reading it concurrently, it has given the two of us some opportunities for wonderful literary discussion! = )

Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice

This novel is pure, unadulterated fun! Guilty pleasure fun!

Set along the beachfronts of Los Angeles in 1969-70, our author gives us yet another Pynchonesque schlemiel, Larry "Doc" Sportello, a sandel-wearing private investigator cut from the familiar cloth of Tyrone Slothrop (Gravity's Rainbow), Oedipa Maas (The Crying of Lot 49), and Zoyd Wheeler (Vineland). Doc is confronted by old flame Shasta Fey Hepworth, who hires him to find her new lover, Mickey Wolfmann, who has recently disappeared. The ensuing investigation, which is a fun send-up of the traditional noir plot, sends Doc on a complex investigation that involves everything from Vegas lounges to port schooners to an underground organization (or is it?) called the Golden Fang. With its femme fatale, network of seedy minor characters, and seemingly endless smoking (tho what Doc smokes is a bit more ... um ... pungent), Pynchon channels Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler brilliantly in this homage to all things noir!

And for Pynchon fans, all the usual images and motifs and themes are there: the wacky song lyrics; the silly names; the really, really bad puns and doper humor; green and magenta; lightbulbs; mayonnaise; photography and film; paranoia -- it's all there! This is a veritable treasure trove for fans of The Man's works. A-and what struck me most was how long it's taken an author, whose fiction typically centers around the investigation of a mystery wherein the investigation becomes more and more complex, to finally come around to writing a work of noir fiction!

Maybe that's what makes the book "work" so well ... Pynchon (and his characters) were made for noir fiction!

Groovy!

Orhan Pamuk, Snow

Desperately seeking a literary work to get me out of my recent reading rut, I turned to a novel suggested by one of the listers on the College Board listserv for A.P. English instructors ... and the novel turned out to be one of the best things I've read all year.

Set in Istanbul in the early 1990s, Snow tells the story of an exiled Turkish poet, Ka, who returns to his homeland posing as a journalist who is reporting on a recent series of suicides by young girls (these "Suicide Girls" have been struggling with the social and religious implications of covering their hair with the traditional headscarves). Ka is suffering from a profound writer's block -- and a blizzard is just beginning that will eventually seal off the residents of Kars for the next few days -- but Ka's return creates a sensation as he encounters members of a local theater troupe, fundamentalist radicals, Turkish law enforcement, and Ipek -- a beautiful woman who exposes Ka to love *and* the ability to once again compose poetry.

A simple summary, of course, doesn't give you much of a feel for the power of the prose, achieved through compelling conversations between characters that explore the various interpretations of words and actions that make up the belief system of Islam. For me, some of the most fascinating passages involved characters as they discussed the actions within a publicly televised play, and what social and religious implications those actions held for viewers. Pamuk's portrayal of both liberal and conservative Islamic mindsets remains compassionate throughout the narrative, offering the reader a rare glimpse of the impetus behind the tensions that continue to exist between Middle Eastern and Western lifestyles.

There is also a subtle complexity to the storytelling that I found enjoyable. Part of that subtlty comes from Pamuk himself, who is ultimately a character within the story (and who, it is revealed, is telling us this story four years hence). Additionally, I found delightful Pamuk's descriptions of the nineteen poems Ka comes to compose while in Kars; as readers, we are given vague sketches of each poem -- its composition, its style, its themes and images -- yet never given the actual poems ... which somehow heightens the overall effect and power of each poem.

A thoroughly enjoyable book that I highly recommend! Check it out.

The Rudderless Ship of Reading: Summer/Fall, 2009

It's been an odd few months of reading, and very unlike me to be this haphazard in my literary choices over a period of months. So although I've written nothing here since early June about what I've read, I have actually read quite a bit -- it's just been "all over the place."

Over most of the summer months, my reading consisted of four books: rereading Paradise Lost, Nicholas Nickleby, and The Old Curiosity Shop for my two Newberry classes, and tackling David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. While my interest was piqued early on in the reading of Wallace's "masterpiece" -- and certain passages were by turns hysterical, brilliant, or incomprehensible -- I was having a tough time keeping any sort of Big Picture in mind during the reading. Since Wallace is often compared to Pynchon and Delillo, I found myself noticing various parallels in style, motif, theme, etc. But, to be frank, a thousand pages is still a thousand pages, and although a friend of mine and I met up one evening for pizza to discuss our readings of the book (she was reading it too, and totally digging it!), it became more and more difficult for me to continue. Finally in early August, just as I was around page 600 in Infinite Jest ...

... Thomas Pynchon's new novel Inherent Vice came out! YES! So I took a week or so to slowly, savoringly enjoy the wackiness of this beautifully written work (which I have yet to write about here, but I will soon). Afterward, I found it impossible to return to the Wallace tome. And it was the start of the school year anyways by that time, so ... Infinite Jest remains, sadly, unfinished.

Overlapping much of this time period, however, was the prep time I needed for a fall seminar I was scheduled to co-teach with a Newberry colleague of mine. We were planning to collaborate on a seminar whose focus was Thomas Pynchon's thousand-page Against The Day, and so a portion of my summer months was additionally occupied with rereading that novel and doing some preliminary research. Unfortunately, low enrollment and some unforeseen school obligations led me to bow out of teaching the seminar, leaving Against the Day only partially reread and researched.

By late August school had begun and I was in the mode of rereading the usual books I have to teach during the early months of school -- The Crucible, The Scarlet Letter, Macbeth, Letters From Wolfie. During this time I "tried on" several books, just to jump-start a reading pattern that would kinda get me back to normal: I reread some passages from Lord of the Rings, a few chapters from some random Dostoyevsky, toyed with reading a Philip K. Dick novel, and even read a beautiful book by Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (which I have yet to also write about here, but I will soon). Nothing was grabbing me ...

... Until I started reading Orhan Pamuk's Snow. This was one of the most captivating books I've read all year, and I simply stumbled across the title via the College Board's listserv for A.P. English teachers. I'll finish the book in the next few days, and I look forward to writing about it here (as well as catching up on my other book reflections).

So, while I haven't read much ... I have read a lot ... much of it a strange collection of rereadings, incomplete readings, and two or three gems. I'll catch you up on the gems shortly. = )

Some Thoughts on the Pleasures of Being a Re-Reader
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: May 29, 2009

I’ve always admired my friends who are wide readers. A few even pride themselves on never reading a book a second time. I’ve been a wide reader at times. When I was much younger, I spent nearly a year in the old Reading Room of the British Museum, discovering in the book I was currently reading the title of the next I would read.

But at heart, I’m a re-reader. The point of reading outward, widely, has always been to find the books I want to re-read and then to re-read them. In part, that’s an admission of defeat, an acknowledgement that no matter how long and how widely I read, I will only ever make my way through a tiny portion of the world’s literature. (The British Museum was a great place to learn that lesson.) And in part, it’s a concession to the limits of my memory. I forget a lot, which makes the pleasure of re-reading all the greater.

The love of repetition seems to be ingrained in children. And it is certainly ingrained in the way children learn to read — witness the joyous and maddening love of hearing that same bedtime book read aloud all over again, word for word, inflection for inflection. Childhood is an oasis of repetitive acts, so much so that there is something shocking about the first time a young reader reads a book only once and moves on to the next. There’s a hunger in that act but also a kind of forsaking, a glimpse of adulthood to come.

The work I chose in adulthood — to study literature — required the childish pleasure of re-reading. When I was in graduate school, once through Pope’s “Dunciad” or Berryman’s “The Dream Songs” was not going to cut it. A grasp of the poem was presumed to lie on the far side of many re-readings, none of which were really repetitions. The same is true of being a writer, which requires obsessive re-reading. But the real re-reading I mean is the savory re-reading, the books I have to be careful not to re-read too often so I can read them again with pleasure.

It’s a miscellaneous library, always shifting. It has included a book of the north woods: John J. Rowlands’s “Cache Lake Country,” which I have re-read annually for many years. It may still include Raymond Chandler, though I won’t know for sure till the next time I re-read him. It includes Michael Herr’s “Dispatches” and lots of A.J. Liebling and a surprising amount of George Eliot. It once included nearly all of Dickens, but that has been boiled down to “The Pickwick Papers” and “Great Expectations.” There are many more titles, of course. This is not a canon. This is a refuge.

Part of the fun of re-reading is that you are no longer bothered by the business of finding out what happens. Re-reading “Middlemarch,” for instance, or even “The Great Gatsby,” I’m able to pay attention to what’s really happening in the language itself — a pleasure surely as great as discovering who marries whom, and who dies and who does not.

The real secret of re-reading is simply this: It is impossible. The characters remain the same, and the words never change, but the reader always does. Pip is always there to be revisited, but you, the reader, are a little like the convict who surprises him in the graveyard — always a stranger.

I look at the books on my library shelves. They certainly seem dormant. But what if the characters are quietly rearranging themselves? What if Emma Woodhouse doesn’t learn from her mistakes? What if Tom Jones descends into a sodden life of poaching and outlawry? What if Eve resists Satan, remembering God’s injunction and Adam’s loving advice? I imagine all the characters bustling to get back into their places as they feel me taking the book down from the shelf. “Hurry,” they say, “he’ll expect to find us exactly where he left us, never mind how much his life has changed in the meantime.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/30/opinion/30sat4.html

Infinite Summer

David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest has been on my bookshelf for about a decade, unread. I've wanted to read it, but never had the ambition to tackle all 1,079 pages. And then Wallace dies last year, thereby ruining my hopes of ever running in to him in a local Appleby's and asking him if reading his novel is really worth my time ...

Enter "Infinite Summer," an online group read project that divides the novel into approximately 15 weeks of reading (75 pages or so per week), which is very do-able for me (given all the other stuff I'm currently reading). Coupled with a website, a message board, a Facebook page, and an XML feed, it's the perfect opportunity to read this book within an online community and discuss accordingly. Plus, a few colleagues and friends are thinking about joining in on the reading, too.

Many thanks to my friend Ilene for sharing this with me! I look forward to starting this in a couple of weeks.

http://infinitesummer.org/