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

Blowing Apart Language in Joie de Vivre by Lisa Jarnot

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What I wanted to do this evening is hide out in my basement and continue to ignore my writing. I had a really wonderful burst of creativity in Port Townsend two weeks ago, but it’s easier to keep that notebook closed than to actually look at the poems this evening (writers, this is not how you finish a project). Anyway, I made myself flip through the stack of book I’m planning to review and in it I found Joie de Vivre: Selected Poems 1992-2012 by Lisa Jarnot, and I’m so glad I did. From the very first page her poems shocked me and engaged me and made me want to read on. Now I know why I keep finding this book on the floor of my office–the fates have been throwing it at me for weeks, but I wasn’t ready to catch it. Here’s how this book shook me right out of my funk.

Step One: Read a Book Aloud

“I am ebbing in and out, I am dreaming dreams I hardly know and have tattoos, I am dreaming dreams outside of dreams and fish tanks and the spanishest of music.” – Lisa Jarnot, from “Sea Lyrics”

Reading a book aloud is a luxury. It’s slower and can be taxing on the vocal cords. It also requires solitude (or patience from your housemates). But reading aloud, especially a certain kind of poetry, is worth the effort. I found myself slipping into a southern drawl as I pronounced each of Jarnot’s words. I learned things about the way her poems worked when I spoke more or different words than are on the page. While I wouldn’t recommend reading War and Peace aloud anytime soon, reading a really good poem (or book of poetry) is a great way to (re)awaken your love of language.

Step Two: Throw Your Sentences in a Blender

“Blood in my eyes followed by truck in motel. either severely or proper. followed by police activity. followed by truck in. followed by followed by. followed by truck in motel. at the library. at the truck in motel. at the of.” – Lisa Jarnot, from “blood in my eyes”

This is not the right book for a lot of people, but the poems in this book, especially the selections from Some Other Kind of Mission accosted me with language. And I was grateful. They are filled with jarring compositions and staccato, unfinished sentences that leave room for me to leak into their interstices and complete the stories. I felt challenged by these poems and I wanted to hate them for their rawness and simplicity, but I kept falling in love with the richness of their repetition and the way the sentences evolved. They rocked my world and made me consider each word and each phrase and each mark of punctuation in a way that will help me write and edit both more carefully and more creatively in the future.

The repetition isn’t always as artful, and “molecules, selling crawfish” went too far toward the comical for me.

“Molecules, selling crawfish. selling selling crawfish. selling crawfish selling. wrecked in crawfish selling highway.” – Lisa Jarnot, from “molecules, selling crawfish”

But when the repetition works (which is more often than not) the anaphora and epistrophe and straight up repetition is pure magic. And in poems like “Greyhound Ode” the whimsy works better for me.

Step Three: Leave Your Work Open for Interpretation

Something else I loved about this book was the way the selected poems, again, especially those from Some Other Kind of Mission, bled into one another. There were no titles on the pages of that section and Jarnot uses unusual words like “meticules” and “tern” and “firs” over and over so that the poems can be read as one continuous narrative. But they are also individually constructed and each can stand on its own. I loved how that engaged me as a reader and I could feel myself making choices about how I wanted to read the book.

I didn’t love the poems later in the book as much as I loved the early ones, but I can see how Jarnot has been evolving over the years and playing with new ideas and forms. I appreciate a writer’s willingness to change and grow even while maintaining a few signatures. For Jarnot I’d say those signatures are that gorgeously evolving repetition of phrase and her ability to create images like “upon the moon in silver deep.”

What writers shake you out of your writing funk or challenge you to rethink everything? I’m going to build a list for nights like these.

If you need to shake up the way you see language, pick up a copy of Joie de Vivre from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

A Tightrope of Tension in Life of Pi by Yann Martel

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life of pi - yann martelI’m pretty sure I’m the last person on the planet to read Life of Pi by Yann Martel, but if I’m wrong and you haven’t yet read it, skip this review until you have. It will be full of spoilers and I hate to ruin good books. What impressed me most about this book was Martel’s ability to maintain tension in a novel that is literally lost at sea.

Introduction

I stayed away from this book for a long time because I like to read books on my own terms without any hype or intervention. And when people would tell me, “It’s this amazing book about a boy on a lifeboat with a tiger, but it’s really about God,” I thought it sounded weird but kept the name for future reference. When the Ang Lee film came out, I could see that it was going to be beautiful and knew I had to see it on the big screen (which meant being subject to Hollywood’s schedule). The movie was stunning and I’m not sorry I saw it, but I also think seeing it before reading the book robbed me of some of the book’s brilliance. I picked up the book this week because I wanted a story, something I could rely on.

Let’s talk about that paragraph I just wrote. It’s long, ambling. It covers a lot of time but doesn’t really have a center. The ideas are there, but it’s not tight and it could definitely be edited down. I bet you even skimmed part of it. I would have. In contrast, Martel’s intro to Life of Pi is tight. The first 50 pages of the book cover all the backstory of an Indian family with a zoo who is moving the zoo animals and themselves to the Western Hemisphere. It covers the story of a boy’s life and his experience as a religious omnivore. It even has an essay on the relationship between animals and humans. But it’s not messy, it’s enthralling.

So how does Martel do it? How does he keep the reader’s interest as he lays all this groundwork. I think it’s precisely the messiness that is so fascinating. But he does have an organizing principle–he uses the author’s introduction to frame for us that this is a story that will make us believe in God (a pretty encompassing idea anyway) and then he lets Pi Patel speak. And it’s no accident that the authorial interjections are more frequent at the beginning, he’s still framing the story for us and interpreting what these divergent threads might someday form, but once we’re hooked, he lets us hear directly from Pi.

Promising a Happy Ending

Would you read a book about a boy who has lost his entire family adrift on the ocean and in mortal danger every minute of every day? I wouldn’t. And I love depressing books. Page after page you’d have no idea if he’s going to get saved or not and eventually your hope would wear thin. You might abandon it before the boy gets saved or eaten.

So why do we read and love this book? Why do we recommend it to friends? Martel very smartly controlled the emotional stakes of the story. We know from the beginning that Pi survives. We don’t know how and we’re still curious as hell about this tiger thing, but we are free to hope. The most ingenious part of this emotional buoying for me was how just before we actually see Pi get lost at sea, Martel describes his family today, and then he writes, “This story has a happy ending.” Wow.

Would I suggest you do this with any other book? Absolutely not. But in a story where despair could be truly overwhelming, it was a genius move.

Keeping the Tension at Sea

Pi is adrift for a very long time. That’s another tricky proposition for a writer. How on earth do you keep readers engaged in what must be the most mind-numbing of days? Here Martel divides up the experience into little sections and each is tightly wound around one idea. There is the quest to get fish and observations of birds. He includes descriptions of distilling and collecting water and other essential knowledge for survival at sea. Oh, and there’s the tiger, Richard Parker.

Richard Parker is essential to maintaining tension out at sea, but even that could get dull for a reader over time. What was interesting for me was how Martel shifted the relationship between Pi and the animals. We get to experience with him the initial uncertainty, the pervasive fear, and the eventual reigning and caretaking. But even when Richard Parker is “tamed,” he’s still a wild animal capable of anything, and Martel doesn’t let us forget that either. All it takes is one swipe of that large claw to refocus our innate survival instincts.

But it’s About God?

What I did lose on the ocean in the book that I did not lose in the movie was the sense of God. At the end I do prefer the allegory to the events retold with human players. But I missed the direct connection with religions that Pi had been experiencing early in the book. And maybe the point is that God is everything and we can’t filter God through a religion. Maybe I need to think about it some more.

I’ve heard told that you know you are done editing a book when you run through one draft and add in commas and on the next draft you’re taking them back out. Life of Pi is that tightly edited and I loved that about it. In some ways the organization of a book that can have exactly 100, naturally segmented chapters with nothing missing and nothing superfluous makes me believe in perfection, order, and destiny. And maybe that’s the part of God I’m looking for right now.

If you still haven’t read Life of Pi, pick up a copy from Bookshop.org. Then read it when you are ready for it. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

My Bookstore, My Community: A Love Note to Indie Booksellers and My Dad

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With any luck, the Postal Service delivered a package to my dad yesterday. He will have opened it by now and found my standard Father’s Day gift to him, a book. I send him books instead of ties because books are a language my dad and I share, and this year I was especially excited to be able to send him My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop edited by Ronald Rice. This book helped me understand just what it is I love about independent bookstores and even better, it filled me with happy memories of a childhood spent in bookstores. So this post is for you, Dad. Happy Father’s Day!

The Bookstore I Was Raised On

I couldn’t possibly tell you the first time I entered Twice Sold Tales in Moscow, Idaho. It was a used bookstore in a craftsman cottage on the edge of downtown. The store was filled, and I mean packed, with books (in shelves and piled on the floor) and because it was my first bookstore, the one my dad took me to often, it all seemed wonderfully normal. In fact, the office where I write today has many things in common with that little house (including book piles in inappropriate places and a closet turned into a bookshelf).

Before I remember my dad introducing me to Betty, the owner, I remember him loading stacks of paperbacks on her counter. She would tabulate the number of Xs stamped on the top of each book (each denoted $0.25 of value) and then pull out a plastic recipe box filled with 3×5 cards and subtract my dad’s purchase from the amount of credit he had on file. One summer, about the time I became engrossed in horror novels, I started going to the bookstore on my own. I was there so often that Betty offered me a job, to be paid in credit. I never did take her up on that, but I loved taking books out one day and returning them for credit the next. I used that store like my personal library and I was glad to pay the fee.

My dad took me to other bookstores too. There was the Waldenbooks in the mall where we waited in a long line (there must have been 20 people) every time a new Patrick McManus came out. It was such a family tradition that my brother and I have both laid claims on my dad’s stash of signed McManus books. We frequented Brused Books in Pullman and often ran into Bruce, the owner, at garage sales around town as he was replenishing his inventory. We spent time in BookPeople of Moscow (even before it moved across the street) although I never got to know Bob as well as the others. It’s a shame because I think he and I would have a lot to talk about now, but I wasn’t ready for that bookstore just yet.

We even had bookstores as destinations when we traveled including Half Price Books in the U District in Seattle (and every other used bookstore on the Ave). And of course, Powell’s in Portland. But Twice Sold Tales holds the most special place in my memory.

My Bookstore(s) Today

Now I live in Seattle and am surrounded by bookstores. It’s easy for me to go to Half Price Books in the U District or Capitol Hill (which is closing or moving) or Lynnwood. I still take my dad there when he visits. He thinks I’m humoring him, but really it’s for me. And not just because he sometimes pays for my armloads of books. I have boxes of books in the basement that I trade in on a semi-annual basis, but I get cash instead of little Xs on a card, so it’s not quite as romantic and the money often gets frittered away.

Bookstores are changing and so am I. The art books that draw my husband and me to the University Bookstore on the Ave are fewer in number. I rarely visit Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park (which has the best essays section) since my writing group up there dissolved. I nip over to Ravenna Third Place as much for the cafe as for the books. The monster Barnes and Noble at U Village that so excited me when I moved here has since closed, and the Barnes and Noble at Northgate (within walking distance), that I was thrilled to see go in now prominently features a Nook display next to the toy section. I most often do not find the books I’m looking for there.

The bookstore I most love is Elliott Bay Books. For over a year I held a weekly writing date with myself there. I wrote more letters than fiction, but that was good too, and invariably I came away with a book (or five) to add to those piles of books on my floor and in my shelves. I’m shy, though, and I don’t know the booksellers like I’d like to. I recognize their faces and they are always kind to me, but it’s hard for me to build relationships with many people at once. Maybe I’m waiting for my dad to introduce them to me (or me to them). And recently, I’ve been really busy, so I’ve been allowing myself to order a hard to find book from Amazon instead of asking at the bookstore like I know I should. Yes, I was seduced by Prime and I hate myself for it.

My Bookstore, the Book

What I loved about this sampler platter of writers’ favorite independent bookstores is that it reminded me of how central bookstores had been in my life. It showed me the community I was allowing to slip by not engaging with it. There are writers you’ll recognize in this book (Wendell Berry, Isabel Allende, Ann Patchett, and more) and some you won’t. Each writer gets a few pages to tell you about their favorite bookstore and four of the stores I named above are featured. There’s a kind of stilted insider lingo that develops in some of the essays (maybe because these writers know they are writing for devoted readers) that it took me some time to get over. It was good to read about other parents who have instilled a love for reading and bookstores in their kids, and that I’m not the only one who gets her books paid for.

But even when the stories start to sound the same (and some are wildly different), the collective voice is saying something I needed to hear. The bookstore, especially the independent bookstore, is the center of my community. It’s where I grew up and where I learned to love books. And it needs me to stay alive.

This book made me trek over to Elliott Bay Books where I bought an armload of books and then walked over to the park, sat in the sun, and read a book by Pico Iyer whose work I first encountered in My Bookstore. And that hour I took for myself to browse and read was a moment of stepping back into myself when I really, really needed it. And I’m grateful to all the people who have supported Elliott Bay Books so it could be there when I needed it. I will return the favor.

I learned this week that Write Bloody will be publishing a book of writing prompts I co-authored with Rebecca Bridge. Maybe that will force me to go in to Elliott Bay and all my other wonderful local stores and introduce myself so I can start building those bookseller relationships that my dad has in his home town.

Why Independent Bookstores?

If you don’t know what the fuss is about Amazon, you’ll understand by the end of this book. You can also read the Melville House blog. A quick summary is that they (legally) evade taxes, squeeze profit margins, and don’t exist in a physical space. I do buy from Amazon (movies, bags for dog poop, and other random items), but when I was looking for an affiliate program, a way to make a small amount of money off the many loving hours I put into this blog, I chose to work with Powell’s instead. And I realize that Half Price Books isn’t an independent bookstore either, but my family comes from Austin and my brother-in-law worked at the store in the U District for years, and I still know people there, so it still feels like home.

About My Dad

My dad’s coming to town next weekend. I’ll let him pretend he’s dragging me to Half Price and Elliott Bay if he wants. I’ll even let him pay for my armloads of books. Or maybe I’ll pay for his. I hope he’ll read My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop (which I purchased at Third Place) and remember some of the same wonderful moments I did.

Thank you, Dad, for sharing with me your love of books and bookstores. We’ll miss the Third Place Semi-annual Sale (June 15-16), but we should check out Magus and all the others next weekend and then Tattered Cover in September.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Nicole Hardy’s Confessions of a Latter-Day Virgin

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nicole hardy confessions of a latter-day virgin coverIf I told you Confessions of a Latter-Day Virgin by Nicole Hardy was about a single, Mormon woman wrestling with her faith and her choice to remain a virgin, I wouldn’t be doing the book justice. Saying that it’s a memoir based on her touching Modern Love column might lead you to think the book was more about throwing off that faith and rebelling in the big city. But that isn’t true either. Let me explain…

About the Mormon Thing

Bur first, here’s my confession. I grew up with a lot of Mormons, but not the pious-types; instead, I ran around with the Jack Mormons. The first boy who broke my heart talked for months about how we would lose our virginities to each other, and then he slept with someone else. His brother swore he’d pledged his love to me with his CTR ring, but that had to be some other girl, too. So a tiny, ugly part of me hoped this book would reveal stories of weird Mormon conspiracies.

Instead, Hardy paints a loving picture of her childhood faith, even when you can tell she feels rejected by the doctrine and the way that “questioning feels, to them, like betrayal.” I won’t spoil the tender ways she deals with her faith. If you’re looking for a tell-all Mormon bashing, this isn’t that book, but you should read it anyway. She reminded me of the humanity of the church and how, a very long time ago, Mormon missionaries helped my family get life-saving vaccines when we were far from home and how they made us part of their family. Reading about someone parting with something they still love so deeply is much more nuanced and interesting than a hate-filled tell-all, and I learned something about compassion from the way Hardy handled the church.

What Does it Mean to be a Woman?

Hardy wrestles with many of the same issues all women face. Will I have children? Will I find someone to love me? Will I find someone I love and will I learn to love myself? And the stakes are raised by her Mormon upbringing with its expectation that the fulfilling life for a woman is as a wife and mother. Hardy writes, “There cannot be only one way to be a woman. My identity cannot be something I’ve never felt.” I loved the way she explored myriad paths to self-fulfillment and how she never impugns others for their choices even as she makes different ones.

“Not everyone has been raised to believe silence should accompany doubt. Not everyone has been raised in a culture of perfection: they don’t see a benefit in the shellac required to keep up appearances.” – Nicole Hardy

Dealing with Sexuality

One of the things I loved about this book is how unabashedly sexual Hardy confesses to being. From reading The Joy of Sex in fifth grade to becoming captivated by a discussion of frotteurism while at BYU, she writes openly about the sexuality that most girls feel but aren’t supposed to talk about. She shares her desperation and her successes and failures as she dates, still in search of the one. The book is open without being salacious. Of course I wanted to know if she finally lost her virginity, a question I felt revealed a lot about the weight that virginity carries, and I was glad she gave me the space to contemplate my cultural prejudices rather than immediately satisfying my curiosity.

Story of Becoming

“This is how it feels to stand at the precipice of a different, dreamed-of life. To know, even as it’s happening, that this is the day that changes everything.” – Nicole Hardy

Confessions of a Latter-Day Virgin is also the story of becoming a writer, and the day that Hardy decides to apply to Bennington, she writes simply, “There is a master of fine arts program for creative writing, which admits nine to ten students per genre twice per year. I decided to become one of them.” I wanted to stand up and cheer for her and the matter-of-fact way she embraced herself as an artist.

It’s also the story of becoming Nicole. You should read for yourself about the brave choices she makes along the way and how she becomes more and more of herself with every one. I learned from her courage every step of the way.

But What About the Writing?

True story: I was so immersed in reading this book on my way to work that I read it all the way from the bus, up the escalator, into the building and to my desk. And then I wanted to hide in the bathroom and read it some more. The writing is good and the story is engrossing. I was sometimes thrown by the use of present tense in flashback, but that didn’t interfere with my enjoyment at all.

Whether you’re a Mormon housewife who chose kids and the church at a young age or a proudly heathen and poly-amorous (or anyone in between), you’ll be touched by this funny, sweet, and candid book and you’ll fall in love with Hardy at the same time.

The End of the Story: My Love/Hate Relationship with Lydia Davis

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This week Lydia Davis won the Man Booker International Prize and the world rejoiced–especially the world of short fiction (and short, short fiction) writers. Davis is a must-read in writing classes of all stripes. Although I’ve read a story or two of hers, it was her endearingly unrehearsed acceptance speech in which she defends translation (plus a bonus day off from work) that inspired me to finally open one of her books.

Beginning at The End of the Story

Lydia Davis The End of the Story CoverThe first novel by Lydia Davis, The End of the Story, is both a book about the end of a love affair and a book about writing a book. The first sentence folded into itself wonderfully, “The last time I saw him, though I did not know it would be the last…” The next couple of pages were spare and striking, but eerily familiar, like I’d read them before. It turns out that I had, and in fact Davis repurposed many of her shorts to compile this novel. I find that odd. Although I believe each writer has his or her obsessions and we write about the same themes over and over (sometimes even when we try not to), I like to think that each piece of work has a natural form that we are trying to shape the work into. This vague reworking of previous material seems like treating your own writing like “found” writing and I can’t imagine having the distance from my pieces to do that. But I also believe that Davis is in complete control of her tools, so I kept reading…

The Haze of Memory

“I’m not sure whether we walked on dirt or asphalt, what we passed, or how he walked next to me, whether awkwardly or gracefully, quickly or slowly, close to me or a few feet away.” – Lydia Davis

One of the most interesting things Davis does in this book is describe a shifting space of memory where she at once enumerates possibilities and signifies that the details themselves are unimportant. It’s accurate to the experience of memory, but I’m not sure it served the narrative for me because the details were so hazy that I had trouble engaging with the story.

Narrative Monologues

“I am inefficient in the way I work on the novel and that inefficiency infects other things I try to do… I still become confused and forget what I was doing when I left off the day before. I have to write instructions to myself on little cards with an arrow in front of each. I look for the arrow, read the instruction, follow it…” – Lydia Davis

Interspersed with the story of a love affair from the past is the story of the narrator today as she writes the book about the love story. It could be an interesting device, but the prose is too accurate for my taste to the experience of day-to-day life. By that I mean that it feels unedited and it took some serious patience to endure the writing blow by blows. Worse yet were the sections about what’s happening in the present time that has no relation to the love story and no relation to writing about the love story. One passage goes into the types of grasses that grew in a meadow before it was turned into a townhouse. It could be poetic if I really wanted to compare her relationship to that meadow, but there are no parallels between the two except that both changed with time. I wanted to edit this all out so badly, but it had to be there for a reason… right?

Part of me hoped that it would develop into a full-blown metafiction, but instead it reads like a roman à clef, and not a very artful one at that. Technically, Davis is drawing attention to the book as a work of art (so you could call it a metafiction), but her writing about writing is more pained than pointed.

Turning Words into Images

“No address of his was good for very long and the paper in my address book where his address is written is thin and soft from being erased so often.” – Lydia Davis

Like Grace Paley, Davis has a way with detail. But Davis’ language is less concise than Paley’s (in the above quote, I would have deleted the whole first clause) and Davis often draws attention to a random object that isn’t otherwise significant in the story. This happens late in the story when the characters are quite broken up and the narrator mentions the grey hair on the sink that a house guest left. In a book where I was searching for something to hold onto, this treatment of significant detail was further disorienting and I couldn’t tell (and at times ceased to care) what was supposed to be important.

Scene vs. Summary

One of the things many readers have remarked on about this book is that there’s no dialogue. More importantly, there are barely any scenes. Usually in a novel, the writer summarizes wide swathes of narrative to move you quickly through unimportant moments and then starts adding in detail and slowing down time to indicate that you’re coming up on something important–a scene–a critical moment in the development of the plot. But just as significant details are thrown around willy nilly, Davis doesn’t develop scenes in the book. Everything is related from a distance that was one more reason I found it difficult to engage with the story.

Am I Just Jealous?

Yes. Although I’ve read this book (originally published in 1995), it is strikingly similar to the first draft of my second book–a draft I hated for its self-consciousness, its lack of story, and my failure to step outside of myself when writing it. Though The End of the Story has gotten mixed reviews and many say it’s simply not their favorite of her books, I couldn’t help but feel if I had presented my book as it was to anyone, I would have been lambasted for the things I’ve mentioned above.

But then again, maybe I’m not jealous, because before I even knew of this book, I chose to begin rewriting my book into something I’d like to read. Maybe Davis’ writing is too close to my own and I can’t love it (especially in this form) because I can’t step far enough away from it to see the art of what she’s done versus how I would have done it. Maybe I need to give her writing some space before approaching it again. Promise not to wait until she wins the Nobel.

If you want to decide for yourself whether I’m being too harsh, pick up a copy of The End of the Story from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.