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 Powell’s Books. 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 Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

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 Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Rediscovering Language in Poems by Maya Angelou

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poems maya angelouI might be the last person on the planet to actually read Maya Angelou’s Poems, but I’ve finally done it and I’m so glad I waited because in reading this book aloud to my newborn son I was able to fully appreciate not only the content of her writing but the musicality as well.

Rhyme and Cadence

Is there anything more enjoyable to read aloud than intelligently rhymed poetry? I’ve been stuck in a rhyming rut with my own work for over a year now (where the rhymes come—dumb or not—and I can’t stop them no matter what I try) and it was such a relief and an inspiration to see how well Angelou works with rhyme and its cousin, cadence.

Part of the beauty of her rhyme is that she breaks from traditional rhyme schemes. While the first stanza of “Song for the Old Ones” she plays with a variation of the classic abab pattern:

My Fathers sit on benches
their flesh count every plank
the slats leave dents of darkness
deep in their withered flanks

Where benches is barely a slant rhyme with darkness but plank and flanks could hardly rhyme more closely. But in the second stanza, she abandons what would be the “c” in the cdcd rhyme you’d expect:

They nod like broken candles
all waxed and burnt profound,
they say, “It’s understanding
that makes the world go round.”

Breaking with those conventions also means breaking up the sometimes sing-song character of rhyme and made for an enjoyable (and instructive) read.

Repetition

Part of Angelou’s musicality is how she’s unafraid to repeat a refrain to the point of near exhaustion. In “Picken Em Up and Layin Em Down” she repeats the title phrase twelve times in two pages. In my own work I’d edit that right on down to a modest number that gives a hint of what I’m saying. But here it’s the sheer excess that works. Not only do you see the narrator’s trans-American journey of tomcatting, but you get to feel its never-ending quality. And for me the phrase repeated enough times to open up a sad, empty feeling beneath the behavior.

Angelou uses this excess of repetition equally artfully in “Ain’t that Bad?” where the refrain shifts just enough to keep me engaged and watching for what she’ll do next:

Now ain’t they bad?
And ain’t they Black?
And ain’t they Black?
And ain’t they Bad?
And ain’t they bad?
And ain’t they Black?
And ain’t they fine?

There’s a complexity of feeling to these lines that evolves as the repetition shifts and I can’t imagine a better way to express that.

Accessible Language

While I’m not a huge fan of overly highbrow language in poetry, I was still surprised by how colloquial Angelou’s poetry can get. And I loved it. From the hybrid verb/adjectives of “Little Girl Speakings” where she channels a little girl admiring her mother’s “cookinger” skills with pie to her frequent use of contractions, she’s unafraid to use just the right word or slang to catch the voice of her narrator and/or audience. This draws attention to the voice. It also shows that the manner of someone’s speech does not in any way indicate the depth of their thoughts or feelings—an important lesson for intellectual elitists like me.

As with everything else discussed here today, it’s clear that Angelou is using those colloquialisms as a tool and because she is, she has a much wider range of language at her disposal. This freedom is something I’d like to experiment with in my own work. I can only hope to capture as much authenticity with my language as she does.

Re-imagining Imagery

Just because Angelou (sometimes) uses simpler language does not mean that her poetry is in any way simplistic. The way she uses images like “wombed room” and “brain-dust / of rainbows” made every little synapse in my head wake up and engage. Sometimes all it took was a slight shift of phrase as in “little dyings” to rock my linguistic world, but Angelou showed me how much can be done with the everyday blocks of language. Of course it can be very difficult to find exactly the right image or a new way of expressing something without making a poem all about that one phrase, but I have a lot to learn from Angelou about how to do it well.

Broadening My Perspective

As a white woman, the things I have teach my son about the world are limited. That’s not because I’m white or because I’m a woman but because I have one set of life experiences to share. And the lily white shade of my reading tastes was never more obvious to me than when I was teaching a class at Mary’s Place, a local shelter for homeless women. Although I brought in textbook-ready poems like “We Real Cool” by Geraldine Brooks, I failed to really venture into anything that wasn’t already in the mainstream—something my students were (rightly) quick to point out.

Reading Angelou opened up a world of understanding to me of both how an African American woman might see the world and also some historical events that were merely history book entries to me before. Yes, her work has been accepted into the mainstream, but Poems allowed me to read far beyond “Caged Bird” (which is a gorgeous starting point to discussing race in America, but only a starting point) to the pained, angry cries of “Africa”:

brigands ungentled
icicle bold
took her young daughters
sold her strong sons
churched her with Jesus

And I loved how she juxtaposed that with “America,” starting with how “The gold of her promise / has never been mined” and delving into the abundance and justice that so many never experience. And I’ll never look at Gone with the Wind (or Antebellum history) the same way after reading “Miss Scarlett, Mr. Rhett and Other Latter-Day Saints.”

Am I sorry that I waited so long to read Maya Angelou? Not really. I’ve loved stumbling through poetry on my quest to understand it and I’ve found some real gems along the way. But I’m sure glad that I read Angelou now. I can’t wait to incorporate what I’ve learned as I edit my growing manuscript of pregnancy and early parenting poetry.

If you want to rediscover language yourself, pick up a copy of Maya Angelou’s Poems from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

The Power of Family Lore in Carrying Albert Home by Homer Hickam

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Carrying Albert Home Homer HickamI was delighted when my review copy of Carrying Albert Home by Homer Hickam arrived in the mail. Not only was I not expecting it, but I’d felt such a close connection with the film October Sky (based on Hickam’s memoir Rocket Boys) that I was looking forward to learning more about his family. And the timing could not have been more perfect.

Family Epic: Novel or Memoir?

Billed as “The Somewhat True Story of A Man, His Wife, and Her Alligator,” Carrying Albert Home is what Hickam calls a “family epic.” Coming from a family of storytellers, I’m very familiar with this genre—although I hadn’t before considered it could be a genre—and this book helped me understand what I loved so much about the novel and film Big Fish.

We’ve all been told stories of how our forefathers walked dozens of mile to school in snow up to their necks and uphill both ways. The exaggeration of these tales somehow helps us remember undercurrents of who our ancestors were. Hickam captures the spirit of family lore with the epic tale of his parents’ journey to deliver their pet alligator back to Florida.

Although the details are too good to be true, I wanted them to be, and as Homer (the elder) and Elsie encounter John Steinbeck, Communists, bootleggers, and bank robbers during their quest I felt like I was getting to know the core of those two characters—Homer who endures all and Elsie who wants to experience every possible excitement life has to offer. Although the book is packed with greater truths, I was so glad I didn’t have to care if the details of the story were accurate.

The Art of Plotting a Journey

Hickam’s folksy storytelling style and the ever-escalating events reminded me of that other Homer’s The Odyssey and like that classic work, this book is a textbook example of Aristotle’s plot arc.

story plot arc
The ground situation—Homer living with a restless Elsie in Coalwood with a rapidly growing alligator—turns into a story when they set on the road to deliver Albert home. Each new plot complication (the aforementioned bootleggers, bank robbers, and more) is a struggle Homer and Elsie have to overcome to get Albert back where he belongs.

What makes this book an exceedingly good example of how to structure a story, though, is how clearly you can trace not just Albert’s physical journey, but also the emotional journeys of Homer and Elsie. Hickam uses each of the plot points is a new opportunity to examine and shift their desires and the possible outcome of their love story.

If you want to get even headier about how this book exemplifies story structure, read up about Joseph Campbell’s monomyth and use that information to trace Elsie’s “hero’s journey.” It’s an excellent exercise to learn how to refine a plot.

My Own Family’s Epic

When I said I felt a close connection with October Sky, it’s because my grandfather was a coal miner who broke free from his small town by becoming a chemical engineer like (a generation later) Hickam broke free from his coal mining destiny by becoming a rocket scientist. But that’s the boring version of my Djiedo’s story. In his self-published memoir My First 80 Years, Djiedo (Dr. John J. McKetta) details a wild lifetime of anecdotes starring everything from beating Perry Como in a singing contest to being bitten by a blue-footed booby.

Although some of the stories seem far too large to be true, I want them to be, and they’ve become such a part of the family lore that I want my son to know the stories as they are—somewhat outsized versions of a fabulous life. And I get a special chance to make him part of that epic as we all converge on Austin this October to celebrate Djiedo’s 100th birthday. The coal mining boxer-engineer-trumpeter-presidential advisor will be feted by a family including my father the pilot-sign carver-forester-economist-bookseller and me the novelist-marketer-reviewer-mother (as a younger member of the family I still have some time to catch up on my dashes). Storytellers all, whatever unlikely events happen during the weekend celebration, the version we later remember will be one hell of a story and I can’t wait to enlarge and improve upon it as I retell it to my son over the years.

Happy birthday, Djiedo! Thanks for setting a fantastic example. May all our stories be as long and rich as yours.

If you want to set on the adventure of a lifetime with Hickam’s family, pick up a copy of Carrying Albert Home from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.