A Geography of Reading

"It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the world in which we live." -Orhan Pamuk

Living, Thinking, Looking with Siri Hustvedt

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Living, Thinking, Looking - Siri HustvedtI have no clue why I’ve been drawn to essays lately, but when I saw Living, Thinking, Looking at the bookstore, I thought “I liked The Summer Without Men, maybe I’ll like Siri Hustvedt’s essays, too.” I had no idea that I was on the verge of finding my authorial twin and a source of constant inspiration.

Spanning Disciplines and Tickling My Brain

Siri Hustvedt isn’t writing your standard, “I think this, so you should too” kind of essays. Instead, she’s bringing insights from neuroscience and psychology to fantastically thoughtful essays on creativity, art, and life. The result is a book filled with deeply personal, but also wildly open, essays on topics that matter to me and not only inspire me to think more broadly about the world around me but also provide me with new frames for seeing that world.

For example, in “Critical Notes on the Verbal Climate,” she calls out how fear-based political speech preys on our limbic systems. She discusses the need to divide, our tribal natures, and George W. Bush’s angel/devil discourse. She delves into the hypocrisy of a nation that bases itself on freedom yet “curtails civil liberties at home, defies the Geneva Convention for prisoners of war, and through ugly legalisms, sets in motion a justification for torture.” The result is a political commentary that directly pinpointed the reasons I struggle to reconcile my political ideals with our current reality, and is, unfortunately, equally timely now as it was when she wrote it in 2005.

Other topics Hustvedt helped me understand more deeply include: the tyranny of the desire to please, the nature of truth in autobiography (something I’ve been wanting to write about but have now seen done better than I could ever accomplish), and the importance of narrative not only to fiction but to life.

What She Wrought

Living, Thinking, Looking inspired an incredible storm of brain activity for me. As I slowly read through this book (something I only do with the best of books), not only was I soaking the pages of the book with ink, I was also tweeting up a storm of quotes from Hustvedt:

Best of all, Hustvedt sparked me to think more deeply. She showed me that, rather than being a scatterbrain, being interested in a diverse array of topics might actually be a strength. I realized that there are parts of my life I’ve been trying to keep separate (work and writing) that might function better if I integrate them. And she inspired me to write a manifesto to both gather my thoughts and to commit to making great work in the way that feels true to me. She also sparked me to speak out about the social media shaming that seems to happen when people express sympathy about tragic events in the western world.

About My Dad

Something else came from the inspiration and kinship I felt in the pages of Living, Thinking, Looking—I also started to better understand my relationship with my father. I adore my dad in the way that many daughters do. I’ve looked up to him and wanted to be like him and also to earn his approval. But I’ve sometimes struggled to understand the difference between things I want for myself and things I think would please him.

Hustvedt’s father is also a professor, and like me, she’s chosen to be a writer rather than following in his footsteps. In her essay, “My Father/Myself,” I could relate not only to the loving relationship that she portrays but also to the distance she sometimes feels from him. She delves into the nature of fatherhood, where that distance comes from, and how necessary it might be. It’s incredibly poignant to read how much she ached for a friendship with her father and how long in life she had to wait for that to occur.

Some of the brightest moments of my life have been when I felt that kind of friendship with my dad. Thanks to a nudge from my husband, he even reads this blog and sometimes I get the sweetest email replies about posts. Reading this book, I understood how much of my desire to be a thinker comes from that emulation of my dad, and I realized that my rejection of the life of a professor isn’t a rejection of him. Instead it’s me finding my own way to live out the values we share.

Our lives are very full and often overly busy. When my dad celebrates his birthday is in eight days, I won’t get to be there like I was last year. But I’m grateful to have a better understanding of our relationship. And I’m grateful to be able to tell him here, publicly, how important the moments we can share an adult friendship are to me. Happy birthday, Dad! I love you.

Birthday tree planting with my dad and brother, 2015
Birthday tree planting with my dad and brother, 2015

If you want Siri Hustvedt to stretch your thinking, pick up a copy of Living, Thinking, Looking from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Building a World in Wool by Hugh Howey

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Wool Omnibus - Hugh HoweyOne of the things I admire most about dystopian and fantasy novels is the author’s ability to create a whole other world. Few have done this better than Hugh Howey in Wool, the first book in the Silo series.

Capturing the First Sentence

There’s a lot of pressure on a first sentence. You have to create tension and pique the reader’s interest. You have to start the story and literally set the tone. When you’re writing about a world that’s foreign to the reader, you also have to begin immersing them in that world without alienating them.

The children were playing while Holston climbed to his death; he could hear them squealing as only happy children do. – Hugh Howey, Wool

In this first sentence of Wool, Howey creates tension by juxtaposing the impending death of Holston and the joy of the little children. He piques our interest by putting us right there in the middle of the last few moments of Holston’s life. As many writers do, he’s starting this story in medias res and it’s hard not to care that this man (even though we have no idea who he is) is about to die and Howey’s writing about it all so matter of factly, in direct, unadorned language.

Last, but not least, this one sentence is already showing us a world where a person can climb to one’s death and you get the feeling that he’s not mounting a cliff. We don’t know much but we do know that despite this desolate moment in Holston’s life, the world itself is not desolate if it’s filled with happy children.

It’s amazing what just a few words can do.

Imagining a World

What continued to amaze me is how much Howey accomplished on the next couple of pages to immerse me in this world he has created.

Holston could feel the vibrations in the railing, which was worn down to the gleaming metal. That always amazed him: how centuries of bare palms and shuffling feet could wear down solid steel… Each life might wear away a single layer, even as the silo wore away that life. – Hugh Howey, Wool

With this passage, Howey starts to show and tell us about the centuries the people of this world have been there and the effect that time has had on the place. We begin to understand that resources are limited and that the world itself is limited to the confines of this silo.

Alive and unworn, dripping happy sounds down the stairwell, trills that were incongruous with Holston’s actions, his decision and determination to go outside. – Hugh Howey, Wool

This sentence introduces a tension between the inside of the silo and the outside. In a way, we want Holston to go outside because it pulls us free of the confines, but then we remember that he’s on his way to death. Outside means death.

[H]e thought, not for the first time, that neither life nor staircase had been meant for such an existence. The tight confines of that long spiral, threading through the buried silo like a straw in a glass, had not been built for such abuse. Like much of their cylindrical home, it seemed to have been made for other purposes, for functions long since forgotten. What was now used as a thoroughfare for thousands of people, moving up and down in repetitious daily cycles, seemed more apt in Holston’s view to be used only in emergencies and perhaps by mere dozens. – Hugh Howey, Wool

Although inside means life, this passage constricts the world. This further ratchets up the tension. This is also where Howey starts to let loose some real details of what the inside of the silo is like. We understand that it’s underground, not above like we would expect. It begins to sound like a buried office building. Did it get buried? Was it built that way? What happened?

There is so much familiar in this world (the stairs, the children, the glass, the straw) but it’s all (literally) tipped over. By using all of those familiar elements and analogies, Howey’s giving us something to grab onto while he reinterprets how the thousands of people living in the silo interact with those things.

And Holston doesn’t know how the silo got there.

Two pages. Howey has written, by this point, two pages and already I’m enthralled with this new world he’s built. I have to understand how it got there. I have to understand the society and the rules. Most importantly, I have to understand what happens when Holston goes outside.

Self-published Author Makes Good

The story of the publication of Wool is every self-published author’s dream. It started as a short story and it was so popular that Howey began writing (and self-publishing) more and more segments until it was a full-fledged book and then a series. He’s sold the movie rights and now has a relationship with Simon & Schuster. It’s inspiring to see how compelling writing can find it’s way to an audience.

The book is far from perfect (there’s a villain so cardboard I kept waiting to see him twist the long ends of his mustache), but it’s a hell of a read and it’s been a long time since I was so drawn into a world so quickly.

How do you build a world? Or do you have a writer you think does it especially well? I’d love to hear your experiences in the comments.

To learn more about life in the silo, pick up a copy of Wool: Omnibus from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Contemplating Zoroaster’s Children by Marius Kociejowski

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Zoroaster's Children - Marius KociejowskiI’m always excited when I get a package from Canadian publisher Biblioasis. The books they publish (including Alphabet, The Tuner of Silences, and The End of the Story) are intelligent, creative, and well-written and Zoroaster’s Children by Marius Kociejowski is no exception.

To call Kociejowski a travel writer is to do him a grave disservice. Although he writes about cities from Colombo to Toronto, he’s not writing about destinations and sites. He’s exploring these places and cultures through the lens of the individuals he meets. He’s delving into the very roots of what make creativity as he spends the day with a calligrapher in Aleppo. He’s not laying out the most scenic routes; he’s remembering the “people who guided [him] over and beneath surfaces” in Iran. He’s writing about culture and also about the moments and connections that make us human. The book is filled with short essays that made me want to sit… contemplate… digest… understand.

“I did what most people visiting for the first time do, so I will dispense with glowing descriptions of museums and churches.” – Marius Kociejowski, Zoroaster’s Children

The (In)Human

In “The Man on the Train from Galle,” Kociejowski exposes the geopolitics of Sri Lanka through his interaction with one man—a fellow passenger on the train who also happened to be a colonel. They speak (and we learn) of Sinhalese history and culture, of religion, and of war. In the end, the man unburdens the secret of one act he committed in the name of war. It’s a complex situation—one that’s posited as self defense but sounds more like a war crime. Kociejowski poses the man against Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz and then lets us sit with that story, the feeling of having met the man, and the amazing change of life and perspective that can happen in a mere three hours—a mere seven pages.

The Artist

“The Master Calligrapher of Aleppo” can only be read these days with the clamoring background of the war in Syria—a war that has decimated Aleppo along with millions of lives. How strange (and special) it is, then, to sit with Kociejowski as he sits with a calligrapher in a 13th. c. mosque as he writes and rewrites verses from the Koran using the ancient art of calligraphy. “‘You can spend months on a single letter,'” Kociejowski quotes the calligrapher, yet in a few short pages we travel through the history of calligraphy, the nature of art, and the relationship between man and God.

“The calligrapher’s work lies in search of the absolute; his aim is to penetrate the sense of truth in an infinite movement so as to go beyond the existing world and thus achieve union with God.” – Salah al-Ali, Islamic Calligraphy: Sacred and Secular Writings

“History is everywhere here,” Kociejowski writes of Aleppo, and I wondered if that’s indeed true anymore after the massive bombing that continues even now. But then he quotes an 11th c. poet saying, “Take care where you walk, because you walk upon the dead,” and I remember that history is not some textbook on my shelf. It is the layers of life and conflict, of rebuilding and destruction, that we create every day. This is the power of Kociejowski’s writing—to shake the reader out of the complacencies of our everyday lives even as he’s exploring the subtle details of one day in one life.

The Union between Writer and Reader

As good as Kociejowski’s writing is, some of my favorite moments reading this book were as I drifted in and out of consciousness as I napped with my baby in my lap. It wasn’t just the cozy maternal feeling I was enjoying. It was also this incredible series of moments where I was so tired I was mingling Kociejowski’s words with my own on the page. He had given me the gift of opening up my thinking brain and the space to express my writing self in this space between us. I can’t remember any of the words I inserted onto his pages, but I still carry the sense of having touched some divine creative force. The kind of force that can sustain me through a long drought of time for creation.

I could tell you of “The Saddest Book I’ll Never Write” where Kociejowski introduces friend after friend he met in Syria while wondering if any of them still survive. I could also tell you about “‘Moonlight and Vodka'” which is as much about poetry as it is Russia. Or I could tell you about the title essay where we learn about the layers of religion in Iran while conversing with a bookseller who loves most the works of Virginia Woolf.

What I want to tell you, though, is the highest praise I can conjure: This book is open to the world. Open to experience. And Kociejowski is a flaneur of prose. I would follow him on his wanderings anywhere and can’t wait to read another of his books.

To travel with Kociejowski, pick up a copy of Zoroaster’s Children from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Books that Don’t Make the Cut

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If you’ve read more than a few of my reviews, you’ll notice that I usually only take the time to review books I like. That’s because I prefer to delve into the positive aspects of a work but also because my time is valuable and I often don’t finish books I’m not enjoying. At the beginning of this month I went back to work after maternity leave and time is now more precious than ever—evidenced by the fact that I tossed aside book after book in my first week back. This is the story of the books I didn’t finish and why.

Parallel Stories by Peter Nadas

Parallel Stories - Peter NadasThis was actually the second time I tried to read this book. I took it on a week-long beach getaway for my husband’s and my first anniversary. Then it sat on my bedside table for a couple of years and I managed to read 100 pages before tucking it away. So when I knew I’d be home for a prolonged maternity leave, I dug it out again. I knew from reading Love and A Book of Memories that his work is often gorgeously slow but worth the effort.

Parallel Stories started out strong. A body is found on a bench and the first scene is a delicate and thoughtful interplay between an investigator and the man who either found the body or murdered the man. Nadas reveals so much of the men’s psychology as the scene unfolds and we come to learn that the investigator does suspect the man but that he actually doesn’t care. It’s very soon after the Berlin Wall came down and there is so much more going on in all of their lives. The scene is surprising and riveting.

If only the rest of the book was that way. Instead, Nadas starts following the story of a family in Hungary. We only really ever see two characters at a time in conversation and I came to understand that the juxtaposition of odd bits of these characters’ natures was the source of the title. I also stumbled on the most extensive and dull scenes of masturbation I’ve ever read. I kept trying to push farther into the book to see if we could get back to the mystery or if there was anyone I could care about in the book, but, well… eventually my poor brain was as chafed as the character’s genitals and I had to stop reading. At least I got over 200 pages into this 1100+ page tome.

Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes

Flauberts Parrot - Julian BarnesI picked this book up at the local Little Free Library because I’ve enjoyed many of Julian Barnes’s novels. I thought it would be a quiet, meditative, well-written novel that would reach into my subconscious and teach me things about writing. I did not think it would be about Flaubert’s parrot. Literally. Well, actually, two parrots (because only one could have really been Flaubert’s), stuffed.

The book is filled with all kinds of biographical details about Flaubert’s life, which is great if you’re a Flaubert scholar or subscribe to the school of thought that the life of the writer is equally interesting to the work. I don’t. I did read the collected correspondence of Gustave Flaubert and George Sand because I adore the art of correspondence, and after that I knew more than enough about their lives.

It’s possible that this book contains a mystery or a brilliant narrative or some brilliant writing. I’ll never know because 60 pages were plenty to turn me off.

The Loser by George Konrad

the loser - george konradKonrad is one of those obscure Eastern European writers I read in grad school. And loved. I read The Case Worker, a squirrely novel about a case worker in Communist Hungary. That one was hard to read but worth the effort. The Loser was just weird.

The book starts out in an outlandish nightmare then transitions to a mental asylum and then the countryside of Communist Hungary and then the asylum again. I think. The type was so small and the writing so dense that I only ever got between two and five pages read per night. So where I could have been immersed in a gorgeous metaphor that revealed what life really felt like in Communist Hungary, instead I felt like I was in a nightmare. Kind of like the time we watched a Japanese horror film in a drafty theater at midnight. This early bird kept falling asleep and waking again as the characters descended into a neon-lit Buddhist hell. I was freezing nd had no idea what was happening. All I wanted—during the movie and in this book—was to GET OUT. I think I completed a whole 40 pages.

Did I give these books their fair shake? Probably not. Am I too tired in these first couple of weeks as a working mother to really engage with literature? Maybe. Do I sound a little cranky? Yes. Sorry about that. I love books. I sincerely believe there are great books that will just never quite hit me right. These might be among them. But I’ll never know. If you want to find out for yourself whether I’ve just maligned some of the best books in the universe, check out the Little Free Library on 12th Ave NE and around 90th in Seattle later today 🙂

Thanks for bearing with me as I figure out this whole mom/worker/writer thing. I’m going to try to find something I enjoy and get a new review out to you soon. Just as soon as the kiddo and I finish another round of Dr. Seuss’s Mr. Brown Can Moo Can You? which he ADORES. And if he had his way, he’d grab this laptop right out of my hands and type up a review right quick. Or put it in his mouth. Judging by the way he “consumes” his favorite books, I’m not going to find out.

The Price of The Pearl by John Steinbeck

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the pearl - john steinbeckThe first time I read The Pearl by John Steinbeck was in junior high. It was the book that made me hate symbolism. All I can remember is my teacher going on and on about the pearl of great price—a litany that landed with such a thud in my heart that I decided never to study literature lest I come to hate books.

So I don’t know what made me re-read the book this week, but I’m glad I did. I still heard that “pearl of great price” echo throughout my read, but I also learned to appreciate the book as a work of art, and I fell under the spell of the symbolism after seeing it in its natural environment and getting to experience the metaphor and message rather than have them dictated to me. The book opened up for me and helped me attach language to the experience of being a new mother.

The Sound of a Fable

The prologue to The Pearl immediately set me in the fabulous or folkloric space:

In the town they tell the story of the great pearl—how it was found and how it was lost again. They tell of Kino, the fisherman, and of his wife, Juana, and of the baby, Coyotito. And because the story has been told so often, it has taken root in every man’s mind. And, as with all retold tales that are in people’s hearts, there are only good and bad things and black and white things and good and evil things and no in-between anywhere.

This paragraph is a gorgeous piece of expectation setting. I knew something about the characters. I knew the story would be filled with archetypes. And I knew it would have the weight of a moral. All of this information is gorgeously wrapped up in that tiny paragraph and still it feels like literature rather than a lesson.

The book then opens in a scene of Kino waking. Within the first page we see the dawning of a family’s peaceful day with the baby in a hanging box and Kino’s wife pleasantly by his side. Steinbeck calls their rhythm “the song of family” and there is no better description for it. And although the nature of such a story is that the song must change, the interruption of a scorpion climbing down toward Coyotito’s crib is no less menacing than the introduction of the wolf in Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf.”

Steinbeck weaves other “songs” into the narrative including the (siren) song of the pearl. I kept wanting to have the skills to create a movie from this film that was scored entirely with these songs. It’s a gorgeous way of telling a story that works especially well for this form and I could feel the threads coming together as the baby gets sick, Kino fishes for (and finds) a great pearl, and the town reacts to their newfound wealth.

The Song of Family

I could not have appreciated the song of family in the same way the first time I read this book as a teenager. The family you are born into is more of a given and it’s hard to know what life would feel like without that family. But having recently given birth to a child, I had a whole new appreciation for exactly what that song of family is. The song of family is the daily rhythms of the things we do to sustain our lives with the ones we love. For Kino and Juana it’s cooking and cleaning and nursing the baby. For me it’s waking and feeding and changing. It’s going downstairs mid-day to relax on the couch and do tummy time. It’s working with my husband to make sure the bottles are clean and it’s singing to the baby in the evenings to try and get the baby to sleep. It’s curling up with my husband for an hour or two after the baby finally does sleep.

The song of family is the most beautiful thing in the world and the most important to me. Reading The Pearl, I thought of my own impending interruption to this song (enter Peter’s wolf) when my (very generous) maternity leave is up at the end of this month. I hope I will remember every day how beautiful and important this song is and how lucky I have been to be immersed entirely in it for the past four months. It’s a dream I’m not ready to wake from and I keep thinking that there’s an alternative narrative where I don’t have to (like if Kino had followed Juana’s wishes early on or they had been able to escape the song of the doctor), but at least the real world is not black and white like a fable and I can enjoy the greys of getting to experience both the song of work and the song of family.

There is much, much more to The Pearl. Like all great literature, it’s a book that will grab onto and speak to different readers in different ways. It’s also a very short book—I read it in the space of a rare but much appreciated afternoon bath—and I highly recommend you revisit it sometime soon.

If you want to experience the magic of the song of family or the song of the pearl, pick up a copy of The Pearl from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.