Generation Gap

Back in late June, I was talking to my friend Adam, who was going to see his nieces, ages 11 & 13.  They were passing through NYC on their way to summer camp, and Adam wanted some gift ideas.  Now, my memory of summer camp is that the best thing one could possibly receive was a food package, particularly if that package contained ramen noodles, Easy Cheese, and candy.  But that concept was rejected out of hand, so we moved on to books.  Adam went through a list of books he still had from back in the day, and I yay’d and nay’d and pondered age-appropriateness (which has never been my forte).  Paula Danziger? Totally.  Bridge to Terabithia? Probably read it in school.  Lord of the Rings?  Oh right, the movies.  Sylvia Plath?  Mmm, maybe wait a few years for the teen angst to bloom more fully.  Anyway, I was having fun, but Adam eventually decided to bring several options and let them each pick one out.

The report the next day? The 13-year-old heartily recommended that her younger sister take The Giver.  To which the younger sister replied, “yeah, well – I have a kindle.”

And then I felt old and out of touch.  Because that had not even for a second crossed my mind.

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!”

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.

History, Historical Fiction, and I’m a Dork

Since starting this blog, I’ve altered my reading habits somewhat. I’ve always been a one-book-at-a-time kind of girl — I just can’t do the being in the middle of lots of books at once — but I’m now usually switching back and forth between whatever adult book I’m reading (mostly on the subway) and kids books (mostly at home evenings and weekends).  And since for adult books I mostly read history, I’ve been thinking a lot about why I read so little history as a kid.

My thoughts go something like this:

I love reading history, particularly histories with a radical or left-wing bent. And its because a well-written history about something I care about that happened is, first and foremost, an exciting and engaging story. Even if I know the outcome more or less, there are truly inspiring characters, people I can relate to, situations that may be set in a different  time and place but that resonate with my own experiences.  There are exciting plot lines with frustrating moments, upsetting moments, triumphant moments.* In short, a lot of the same elements that make for a good fiction story.

Now, what’s odd to me is that I read very little history as a kid or teenager. I did read a lot of those blue biographies of famous people’s childhoods.** And I liked the “If you were alive in the time of…” books, which apparently are still around with updated covers, and I should check them out. But mostly I read tons and tons of historical fiction. The interest in history was there – I always loved social studies and history in school, I was always interested in and inspired by what I knew of the history of the labor movement,*** women’s movement, and abolitionist & civil rights movements. Part of what I liked so much about historical fiction was learning the history. I think if they had crossed my path, I would have been interested in good non-fiction histories of those movements and periods of time. I also had a very deep interest in the holocaust, read tons of historical fiction on it, but very little straight history that I can recall until I was maybe 15.

So I guess what I’m wondering is, why didn’t I read more history as a kid? Were there just not a lot of good, engaging history books out there? Did I just not come across them? Or I guess because my only experiences of reading history at that point were from school textbooks, I might have thought of history books as boring, even as I felt the subject matter was interesting and enjoyed learning about it.

I’ve read a lot of good things about WE ARE THE SHIP, which I haven’t gotten a chance to read yet. Are there other good non-fiction books that folks have come across lately, or remember from childhood?

*I get such strange looks on the subway sometimes because I’m reading what must look like a big boring history book and I’m grinning and almost jumping out of my seat in excitement because something so awesome just happened. Like, I just read a great history of Solidarity in Soviet Poland, and when all the workers were heading to their factories with food and sleeping bags to lock them selves in I just couldn’t contain my enthusiasm. (Yes, I am a huge dork.)

**I was talking about these with my dad the other day and he noted that this series idealized historical figures to the point of becoming fiction. Somehow I didn’t note that at the time, which is surprising since the history I got in elementary school was relatively non-idealized. (For example, in fourth grade my class put Columbus on trial for crimes against the Native Americans. I got to be the judge, which was super exciting, and when the jury found Columbus guilty I got to name the sentance and I gave him an infinity of homework.) 

***Which I first learned about from old folk songs. Picture a 4 year old skipping around the house, singing along to The Weavers’ Talking Union, and pausing to ask, “Daddy, what’s a scab?”

What the kids are reading these days

Ok, so when I was growing up, I did not walk 2 miles in the snow to school going uphill both ways.  I took the crosstown bus.  And candy bars did not cost a nickel – more like 60 cents.  But, back in my day, there was no such thing as Junie B. Jones, or Magic Tree House (only a Magic School Bus – more on that later).

Those two newfangled phenomena first came to my attention a few years ago when I spent about 4 months working in the kids’ section of Barnes and Noble, and one of the first things to learn was how to direct inquiring 7 year olds to those two series, which were conveniently right next to each other. I did not, however, read them until this past weekend, when I read the first book  in each of those two series.

I liked JUNIE B. JONES AND THE STUPID SMELLY BUS. It has a distinct voice, but mostly Barbara Park just does a great job of portraying the thoughts, feelings, and logic of a 6 year old with accuracy and respect. This is what makes the Ramona books so excellent, and I was strongly reminded of those, although the Junie B. series are shorter, simpler, and aimed at a younger audience. I did find that some of the language devices Park uses to put the narration in the voice of a kindergardener got a little annoying, but I might not have minded as a kid.

On the other hand, DINOSAURS BEFORE DARK, the first in Mary Pope Osborne’s Magic Tree House set, was boring. There wasn’t enough to the characters to get me interested – I could see the types they were supposed to be, but they kind of felt flat. And even at the scary parts, I didn’t feel like the kids were actually scared. The other aspect to this series is that on each of their adventures the kids go back in time or to foreign place, so there are facts on the relevant topic sprinkled in. Which could totally appeal to kids loving to learn about dinosaurs and castles and outer space and such. The problem is that, at least in this case, the information stayed so shallow that I don’t think it would fulfill that child-obsessed-with-a-topic desire for depth and details. Any 6-7 year old with an interest in dinosaurs would know ten times as much about them as was given here – at least, I did when I was in my dinosaur phase.

Here is where I thought of the Magic School Bus series, which I loved as a kid, and which did an excellent job of being funny and entertaining but really being science books. Granted, its not a fair comparison, because the Magic Tree House Books are going for something different – stories with facts included, not science books with an engaging story for a frame. To me, the one I read just didn’t wind up being a good story. Then again, thousands of kids can’t get enough of them, so perhaps its just me.

Books I felt I ought to have liked but really didn’t: Harriet the Spy

Before picking up HARRIET THE SPY by Louise Fitzhugh again, I tried to remember why I didn’t like it many years ago. And all I could remember was that it gave me an uncomfortable, squirmy, unhappy sort of feeling that stemmed from reading about Harriet doing things she shouldn’t that were clearly going to cause Bad Things to happen. Now what’s odd is I wasn’t really a goody-two-shoes kid, and I liked lots of other books about characters that were naughty, or even who did things I felt they shouldn’t, who did things that I saw as hurtful, etc. So there must have been something more to it than that, but my memory consists entirely of the squirmy feeling.*

And then I opened the book, and the degree to which this is an obnoxious girl with no discernable redeeming qualities, with whom I cannot sympathize at all, and who is not even interesting to make up for it, absolutely bowled me over. Harriet’s attitude towards the people on the subway when they go to visit Ole Golly’s mother really turned me off. I began to get slightly more interested in Harriet as a character only when her spy notes began to be less observations and more musings. Like:

What is too old to have fun? You can’t be too old to spy except if you were fifty you might fall off a fire escape, but you could spy around on the ground a lot.

Harriet’s reaction to being an onion for the Christmas play went a long way towards endearing her to me as well, so by mid-book I actually cared about the main character, which is helpful. I vaguely recollect that my original reaction to Harriet’s friends reading her notebook was more on the friends’ side, but this time through I thoroughly empathized with Harriet, particularly as she goes through the subsequent days miserable and misunderstood. So from that turning point on I was properly hooked, and I really did enjoy the rest of the book, but I likely wouldn’t have gotten that far naturally (like, without being determined to finish and blog about the book).

A few other random thoughts:

• What the hell kind of a name is Ole Golly? I mean, seriously.

• I think Harriet seems like a 9 year old, not an 11 year old. The things she wonders about, her level of awareness (or lack thereof) of her friends’ and classmates’ having feelings, and just her general behavior, don’t ring true of an 11-year old for me. That made it hard for me to buy into the character; I eventually just decided that in my mind she’d be 9, and that made it all work much better.

• I suspect as a child I was confused by the progressive-type school Harriet attends, particularly as it would have seemed incongruous with the other time period cues given in terms of the parents’ behavior, etc.

• I’m not sure I find it believable that Harriet was permitted to print the newsletter items she did – but I enjoyed the twist of her not actually being reformed or learning her lesson.

*I recall a different kind of squirmy feeling from some books that I loved but that creeped me out or were deeply affecting in a way that stuck for days after reading (especially Time windows book), so that I started hesitating to re-read them, even though I loved them, because it was too big a psychological commitment. I do a similar thing with some movies now – I really want to see them, but I’m sure they’ll leave me depressed, and I’m never willing to commit to that so I keep really wanting to see them but when the time comes to actually sit down and watch something I choose fluff.

Books I should have read in childhood: Jacob Have I Loved

This is the cover I recently bought used (image from http://wordlily.wordpress.com), and I think it sucks

JACOB HAVE I LOVED, by Katherine Paterson (famous for BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA, THE GREAT GILLY HOPKINS, and others), is one of the books that I owned but never read as a child.

Having just finished it, I can attest that this may have something to do with its boring as all get-out prologue. Seriously, four pages describing the island it’s set on and crab fishing, when we don’t yet care about the characters? Why did a writer as skillful as Paterson ever think that was a good idea?

Another possible explanation for my never having really cracked its spine in all the years it sat on my shelf is that, as I recall, the cover of my childhood edition strongly emphasized the biblical reference in the book’s title. Since I was totally unfamiliar with this*, the book became associated in my mind with Hard Things I Don’t Understand.

All of which is too bad, because it’s actually a great book. Shortly before reading it, I happened to read a discussion on writer Jennifer Hubbard’s blog about how good writing is about revealing emotions that we wouldn’t typically associate with an event, but that ring true when we read them. Or, as she put it much more pithily, “what it feels like instead of what it’s supposed to feel like.”** As it turns out, this is one of the things Paterson excels at in this book.

Here’s a handful of the tiny details that stuck out to me in this vein:

• “The pain in my arm became the only real thing, a sharp point of comfort in the midst of a nightmare.”
• “I was quite sure I was crazy, and it was amazing that as soon as I admitted it, I became quite calm.”
• “Call and Caroline were waving back and calling out to him, but I was standing there shivering, my arms crossed, my hands hooked up under my arms and pressed against my breasts.”

The biggest example, though, is a plot twist that I won’t spoil, but that definitely took me by surprise midway through the book. Suffice it to say that our protagonist develops an emotional response that I most certainly did not see coming, and that I think most authors would be hard-pressed to include today.

And speaking of things that felt dated (and I don’t necessarily mean that as an epithet): JACOB HAVE I LOVED follows its protagonist from age 13 until well into her adulthood. I think this would be a very rare choice today. Anyone got counterexamples, or a sense of whether I’m right or wrong that this this might have been more normal in the late ’70s/early ’80s?

* My most embarrassing story of how my childhood reading was distorted by my total ignorance of all things biblical: I was probably about nine when I first read Madeleine L’Engle’s MANY WATERS, and as I read this story about modern-day twins transported back to the dry, dry desert… living with a man who is the town laughingstock because he thinks God told him to build a big boat… a man named Noah… it did not occur to me that this was a retelling of Noah’s Ark until it actually occurred to the book’s main characters to speculate on this fact.

On the other hand, I did learn the story of Abraham from a very early age. Except, I think the part about how God said he wanted the killing done out on Highway 61 may have been embellished.

** It took a mighty effort to repress a MY SO-CALLED LIFE reference here. Bonus points to anyone (besides Emily!) who can identify it in the comments.

Books I felt I ought to have liked, but really didn’t: Anne of Green Gables

This is the first installment of a new series/experiment. There are plenty of books I never liked, and that’s fine, but there are a few that I felt a kind of compunction to like, and was always kind of regretful that I didn’t So, (here’s the experiment part) I’m going to read them again, and see what I think now. The thing is, once I didn’t like these books the one time I read them as a child, of course I didn’t read them again, so I have limited, vague memories of why I didn’t like them, which makes it hard to hold up my side in discussion with everyone who love love loves them.

Anyway, first up is ANNE OF GREEN GABLES by L.M. Montgomery. This one is actually a slight exception to the group, because I never felt as much of a strong sense that I ought to like this book as a kid. But what’s puzzling is I loved Montgomery’s EMILY OF NEW MOON and its sequels, read them over and over again. Granted, they had the special appeal of a main character with my name, which I’m sure is what made me spot them and pull them off the shelf in the first place. Because I loved the EMILY series so much, I tried ANNE a few times over the years…and never got past the first couple of chapters, it was just too boring. So then I stopped trying it, until, as an adult, I discovered the deep love many of my friends have for the ANNE books (and movie, which I have not seen). So I gave it a shot last week, and definitely would have put it down again after a couple chapters if it hadn’t been for my determination to do this post. I will say, about half way through it got a lot more engaging, and while I don’t think I’d read it again I’m glad I got through it the once.

I think the issue is that it has a lot of what I don’t like so much in the EMILY books, but amplified, and without much of what I do like. In both, I lose patience with the endless descriptions and have to skim – I started enjoying ANNE a lot more once I started skimming. But I find the devices used in the EMILY books to express that side of the character more believable, and less inclined to take over the whole character. Anne’s defining characteristic is her imagination – she gets lost in imaginings and forgets what’s going on around her, and talks endlessly about her imaginings and observations and how beautiful various trees are. Whereas Emily gets similarly lost in her writing, which for me is more believable than a 12 year old spending hours and hours just sitting and imagining; and Emily’s endless descriptions of how beautiful something is, etc come out primarily in her writing, so they don’t dominate her interactions with people and her whole character as much.

Another key difference for me is that the other characters in the EMILY books are both more interesting and better developed than the supporting characters in ANNE OF GREEN GABLES. Emily’s friends are fully developed and have interesting and distinct personalities, whereas Anne’s friends are kind of flat and boring. And Emily’s adversaries are much more genuinely adversarial than Anne’s – there’s a clear parallel between Marilla in ANNE and Aunt Elizabeth in EMILY, but Marilla gives really only token opposition, whereas Aunt Elizabeth and Emily genuinely clash throughout much of the first book. Plus Emily has Aunt Ruth and her teacher to detest, whereas Anne has no parallel foes.

The reason I’m writing so much about the EMILY books in this post about ANNE OF GREEN GABLES is that most of my sense of ought-to-like-it for ANNE came from the fact that I loved the EMILY books. But I’ve now concluded that the EMILY books are really quite excellent, whereas ANNE is mediocre and kind of boring, so I am now content with my lack of ANNE love.

Next up in this series: Louise Fitzhugh’s HARRIET THE SPY. But maybe not for a little while, because its not the easiest thing to get yourself to sit down and read a book you think you’re not going to like, and two in a row is just too much. Besides, I have to go re-read the EMILY books now that I’ve thought so much about them.

Friday Why: Why on earth did I love this book?

I re-read THE SECRET GARDEN for the first time in many years, and I’m left with the question: Why on earth did I love this book so much? Because this time around, while its slightly charming, its also kind of boring. I don’t really like or care much about any of the characters. The way the dialect is written in a lot of the dialogue is, as Elizabeth points out, difficult to read, enough so that it jarred me out of the story. And the sort of moralistic-sarcastic omnicient narrator is kind of grating. It really was a favorite when I was a kid, and for most books that I loved growing up, even if I don’t have the same reaction now that I’m older, I see why I loved them then. This one, though, I can’t figure it out.

I know its a classic and a common favorite – can anyone discuss what they loved or still love about this book?  I genuinely want to know, I’d like to reclaim my happy warm nostalgic feelings on it.