Surprise: this place is full of children’s books!

I’m interviewing potential roommates all week, and a dilemma this has raised is: how much do I want to portray a better version of myself that someone might actually want to live with, vs. portraying myself accurately so I find someone who actually wants to live with me?

Specifically, this dilemma has come up around cleaning my house, because I am a mess, but attempting to reform, and I know from experience that if I live with another messy person, it’s all over. I need to live with someone who has a culture of putting things away so that I learn how to do it, too. But if I live with someone who’s deeply bothered by mess and clutter… well, we’ll kill each other within the month.

So it’s a delicate balance. With house cleaning, I found — I think — a middle ground involving presenting myself as I realistically aspire to be: the place is neat, but you can kind of tell that the person who lives here doesn’t totally have her shit together.

But anyway, especially now that the place is cleaned up, it strikes me how much the books are the dominating feature of the space. Piles and piles and piles of books. Books about politics and history (the vast majority), books about writing and statistics, and oh so many children’s books.*

I actually mentioned in my Craigslist ad that I bring to the roommate relationship an outstanding collection of classic teen television on DVD. Now maybe I’ll find a roommate who walks in and gets excited by my Sarah Dessen collection. Or the Ramonas. I would definitely trust a roommate who still felt strongly about Ramona.

* The last all live together; I have a case that’s just for my books — my books on things my boyfriend doesn’t care about, that is — which has all the kids’ books, the stats and math books, and the books on teen TV, all living together happily. (The political books, we read each other’s.)

This is possible only because the overwhelming preponderance of my children’s books still reside in New York. Some of these are at my parents’ house, and I cycle some of these back and some of those here when I visit; I should just have them all shipped to me. More of my old favorites, my mom tells me, are “in storage,” and all I can say is that I sincerely hope that’s not a euphemism in the vein of, “Furrball is so happy out on the dairy farm in Westchester!”

Apparently, that storytelling isn’t a recitation of mundane occurrences dressed up with Deep Thoughts on What It’s Like to Be an Adolescent is one of the harder things to learn from Judy Blume.

I’ve been reading EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT BEING A GIRL I LEARNED FROM JUDY BLUME, edited by Jennifer O’Connell (who writes for adults in that name and young adults as Jenny O’Connell). Which, so far, has been kind of disappointing. Many of the essays — despite some notable exceptions — are almost astonishingly poorly written (considering they’re all written by professional novelists — though not, I suppose, essayists), and most are oddly didactic as well.

In that last vein, the most peculiar that I’ve read so far has got to be Jennifer Coburn’s meditation on “White Guilt,” ostensibly about Blume’s IGGY’S HOUSE. After a plot summary of that book, most of the essay consists of Coburn assuring us many, many, many times that her efforts to prove herself the most enlightened and anti-racist white person ever were misguided and condescending… and actually, I do respect her willingness to recount some of her more unfortunate activities in this regard.

It’s possible I would have judged the essay as a whole more charitably had it not explained early on that Coburn’s New York City upbringing suffered no lack of diversity; after all, as a sixteen-year-old she once shared a cab with a “Middle Eastern dignitary.” …Seriously. It’s the kind of statement that you feel must be intended as irony or satire, except surrounded as it is by more normally earnest statements about the ethnic mix at her schools, I think it’s… not.

The essay as a whole mostly just made me sad: here’s someone who’s obviously quite horrified by racism; we’re in a country where 1 in 15 Black men are in prison or jail and where the Black middle class is perhaps being obliterated, and the (published!) preoccupations of an anti-racist are… this?

One thing I am enjoying about EVERYTHING I LEARNED, though, is seeing some variety in what in Blume’s work spoke to folks. There’s a particular example that struck me, which, now that I’ve puzzled over Coburn’s essay for a lot longer than I expected, will have to be taken up in my next post…

The travails of the curly-tressed continue.

Y’all, I’m sorry to compound my extended absence from blogging (while I was preparing for, and then attending, this conference) by having my first return post be about not children’s books, but that other topic of much interest here, straight-haired people’s misapprehensions about curly hair. But I just got a haircut, and it kind of sucks.

It’s just… overly fluffy. And, like, why?

My theory is that straight-haired people who love curly hair do so for entirely wrong reasons, from a curly perspective. They envy us our volume, whereas every curly-haired woman I know has spent her life trying to make her hair less voluminous. This leads to incompatible desires between our straight-haired ‘dressers and we with the curls.

Or, as my friend Anna said more simply (if plaintively) upon seeing me yesterday, “Why do they always do that to us?”

Wednesday Words: I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy…

…well, maybe my worst enemy.

I hope the next time you get a double-decker strawberry ice-cream cone the ice cream part falls off the cone part and lands in Australia.

- Judith Viorst, ALEXANDER AND THE TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD DAY

False foreshadowing

Since Ellie validated my mistaken reading of GIFTS over in that post’s comments thread, I thought I would elaborate. ‘Cause what interested me, when I was reading GIFTS, was how much I thought the foreshadowing worked, which made it doubly jarring that it was… you know, not really foreshadowing at all.

I’ve complained before about books that make you wait while they catch up to where anyone who’s ever heard a story before can see they’re going, and on my reading, LeGuin’s book was doing exactly that; I had very specific opinion about what was going to occur that I thought we’d basically been told, and yet I still felt suspense.

Some of this is because, given my misreading, a lot of lines in the book read as ironic to me that, in retrospect, actually weren’t. And actually, those lines did turn out to be important, but in a much more straightforward way than I imagined: while I assumed that the protagonist was going to do a specific thing, and that dialogue asserting he never would was thus meant as ironic foreshadowing, actually those assurances wound up having a different significance at the book’s end. So, it wasn’t necessarily that LeGuin was less careful than I thought she was being; I just misunderstood how.

But now that I know it wasn’t foreshadowing, I’m curious about some of the choices LeGuin makes early on. After the line that set me off on the wrong track, she turns to a few chapters of backstory. Some of this is establishing the kind of mythic mood of the book, but still, I remember thinking, “If she hadn’t just set up this anticipation, this would be kind of a boring choice.” I attributed my continued interest to wanting to see how she got to where I thought she was going.

It’s a bit like this book about plotting that I remember reading in high school; it urged you, at all costs, to avoid writing lengthy descriptions of sunsets… and then gave a counterexample: a classic Western (sorry, I can’t remember which one) in which our hero is supposed to be murdered at sundown. Suddenly all the details of the fingers of orange curling across the sky are a lot more interesting.

So I read GIFTS in that vein, but I’m interested that it worked for me. The whole structure of the first half of the book is basically a series of things I usually hate — a prologue (it’s not called that, but it functions as one), the backstory — worse, it’s backstory about the character’s parents! So in the book’s first fifty pages, you don’t even get a clear sense of what the protagonist is like. And yet. I kept reading. I liked it. I am befuddled.

Wednesday Words: Perhaps we picked the wrong day for this series

You can’t help respecting anybody who can spell TUESDAY, even if he doesn’t spell it right; but spelling isn’t everything.  There are days when spelling Tuesday simply doesn’t count.

- A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

On taking things literally.

Like the blogger Drek at the sociology blog Scatterplot, from which I am stealing this video, I take things much too literally. I, too, blame this trait for my inability to “get” poetry (a fact which causes no end of frustration to my boyfriend, who writes it; he thinks I’m just not trying).

There’s a particular irony in my case, though, because I am a highly sarcastic individual. And yet also highly gullible, as I am, inexplicably, prone to interpreting others credibly. Said boyfriend and I used to live in Brooklyn, where we had a really busybody landlord living on the ground floor of the same building — a fact I was not too happy about. I was kind of ill when we moved in, so I went to sleep in the middle of the floor, surrounded by boxes, while he went out with his friend. The next morning I was expressing my fears about living with a landlord who always seemed to be hanging around watching, when this exchange occurred:

BOYFRIEND: Yeah, she was still sitting outside watching when I got in last night.
ELIZABETH: What? What time was that?
BOYFRIEND: Maybe 2, 3 AM.
ELIZABETH: Oh my god. We’ll never be able to get away from her! We’ll have to run in and out of the house!
BOYFRIEND: Actually, she said she was going to stop by for brunch this morning.
ELIZABETH: [horror]
BOYFRIEND: I think she’ll be here any minu– [pauses, listening] — Is that her?
ELIZABETH: [grim, efficient determination] Okay, let’s think. Maybe we can sneak out the window!

I was totally serious, y’all. (We lived on the third floor of a building with very high ceilings, by the way.) The boyfriend, fortunately, was not.

Anyway, after that excessively long and irrelevant set-up, here is the literally-minded Total Eclipse of the Heart:

And now, to finally make this nominally relevant to our blog: I have noticed that my reading habits have changed with the blog, and I’m not sure if it’s blogging itself (which has made me think more about what I’m reading and take note of cool lines for the Wednesday Words) or things I started doing at around the same time, which partially inspired me to start the blog (reading other blogs, reading books about how fiction is constructed, reading more new children’s lit instead of my same old favorites). But one thing I’ve observed is how much more I appreciate metaphors than I did when I was little.

Like, I had this bizarre experience reading PAPER TOWNS:

Internal Monologue Dialogue

• I love this passage about the strings and the ships and the grass!
• Um, it’s a two-page passage about metaphors for death.
• But it’s beautiful!
• The characters are talking to each other about what’s the best metaphor for death!!!
• But they’re picking such good ones!

(I have very explicit arguments with myself in my head.)

So, is this just a sign of getting older — I was never one of those super-literary kids; I loved to read, but it was always trash — or is book blogging going to make me a more high-minded reader? Might I somehow become a poetry fan after all??

(…Doubtful.)

Books I felt I ought to have liked but really didn’t: The Phantom Tollbooth

Everybody loves THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH. It is many of my friends’ absolute all-time favorite kids book. I know I read it as a kid. I know I didn’t like it. I know I didn’t read it again. And that’s all I remember, and somehow even though everyone was always saying how much they loved it, I never picked it up again until now. Anyway, that’s the back story.

My feeling on recent reading is this: good book, but I totally can see why it hit wrong with me as a kid. Because the number one adjective I want to use for THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH is clever. Its incredibly clever. Its witty. The wordplay and puns are great, and I’m sure I would have picked up on them and enjoyed them back then as well.* But clever and witty alone does not a great book make. And that I think is my problem with this one. I did enjoy it. But I wasn’t really engrossed at all – there’s very little character-building, the characters are all kind of purposefully caricatures, and even when feelings or reactions by people were described, they were just kind of stated very matter of fact. I never actually found myself identifying with anyone. And while the constant humor kept the story from feeling like there was too much moralizing, it was nevertheless very clear that at each place, and with each character, a not-so-subtle point was being made about modern life, the way people behave, etc; to the point where those points felt in and of themselves to be the purpose of the story. Again, not something that really draws you (or at least me) in.

My other issue was that even plot-wise, the story kind of reads like a litany of “and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened.” Not much variety in pacing, and no time spent once the “point” of each episode had taken place – just “ok, that happened, next.” I’m being a little more negative than I really felt while I was reading the book – I really did enjoy it. But I can also totally see how as a kid I would have gotten bored. Puns are funny. A few pages or even a few chapters of clever wordplay and obvious-but-still-fun set-ups are fun. But a whole book of that and nothing else just isn’t enough.

Actually, now that I’m writing this and thinking it through further, I feel like a lot of the pieces of THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH would make for great picture books – short, clever, funny stories, with imaginative premises, and a lot of great illustrations already included. But a whole series of those just strung together one after another doesn’t quite do it for me. And that’s why I can’t summon the love of this book that so many folks have (although I’m glad that I now see why they do love it. Especially as so many of my friends are language-loving types), and why I probably read it once, was kind of amused and kind of bored, and was left without a strong enough impression to lead me to pick it up again.

*I was raised in a very pun-filled household. In my family, birthdays and other card-giving occasions are basically a standing competition to see who can find the card with the best pun or bad joke. There have been some real prize finds over the years.

Gifts and grief, and girlfriends who matter.

Ursula K. LeGuin’s GIFTS was yet another book for which my reading experience was massively distorted by assuming the story was building to one thing and… being wrong.

And I mean that for more than half the book, I was enjoying what I thought was “foreshadowing” related to the ending that I thought had been announced to us. And embarrassingly enough, I don’t think LeGuin was trying to mislead us and then provide a twist; I think I just misunderstood.

GIFTS is a great book, though, for at least two reasons. One is that it has some of the best description of grief that I have ever read. For example, this paragraph, from a longer passage that’s all extremely well done:

So I call it in my mind: The dark year.

To try to tell it is like trying to tell the passage of a sleepless night. Nothing happens. One thinks, and dreams briefly, and wakes again; fears loom and pass, and ideas won’t come clear, and meaningless words haunt the mind, and the shudder of nightmare brushes by, and time seems not to move, and it’s dark, and nothing happens.

(This kind of metaphor fits the character, by the way; it’s not like a lot of lesser YA where you have a kind of inarticulate protagonist who’s suddenly spouting all this poetic wisdom about whatever philosophical point the author’s trying to make.)

The other thing that I appreciated about GIFTS is that the love interest is a real person. There’s a lovely scene where said love interest, whose name is Gry, offers a theory about the gifts at the heart of the book (and it’s a fascinating theory that I didn’t anticipate). And our protagonist Orrec narrates:

I knew from her voice that she was saying something important to her. It had to do with her use of her own gift, but I wasn’t certain what it was.

This stood out to me because it is astoundingly rare that love interests in teen novels have their own struggles, rather than being preternaturally patient and infinitely wise vehicles for the protagonist’s journey. The blogger Ames has described the particular pattern where it’s an all-knowing boyfriend as Sarah Dessen Syndrom (you can tell this made a big impression on me because I’ve remarked on it several times, which might reflect defensiveness about the deep and bizarre joy I get from Dessen’s books). LeGuin, here, does a very nice job of keeping the focus on Orrec’s struggle while making us certain that neither Gry nor Orrec is thinking only about him.

It made it a deeper romance, in the sense that I didn’t just want the two to end up together because I cared about one of them and had been told that’s what he wanted. Like, when I read Dessen’s THE TRUTH ABOUT FOREVER, I feel very strongly about the protagonist Macy getting the love interest Wes. But it’s only because I’ve grown to care about Macy, and it’s clear that’s what she wants (and, I mean, understandably; Wes is the ultimate fantasy boyfriend, the humble, artistic hottie who sees Macy like no one else does. It’s a bit absurd, actually).

Here, I felt something different. I cared about Orrec and Gry, and I believed that their best shot at life was together. I believed that being together would let them figure out the considerable challenges they faced. Isn’t that the essence of romance? I feel sickly sentimental just writing it. Yet for someone who reads teen romances with alarming voraciousness, I’m finding this a rare surprise.

Wednesday Words: Well, I suppose that’s something.

He was a man and I a boy, he was a thief and I was honest, he had seen the world and I had not, but I knew evil better than he did.

– Ursula K. LeGuin, GIFTS