lit.er.a.ti

I’m about to head off to Florida for our annual spring break retreat, and will visit my favorite book store in Cedar Key. Curmudgeonalia is such a fabulous store for such a little town. One thing I like is that the owner knows his literature. Another thing I like is that he features Florida writers, so it’s easy to get something new to remind me of Florida. Mostly I like his reviews, posted on so many books on his shelves that I marvel that he had time to read all of them. Then I get a bit jealous about what it must be like to read and sell books in paradise.

I have begun reading Things Fall Apart, which I am reading at the same time as my student from Sierra Leone. In order to help her learn and to share the reading experience with her, I created a new Blog for the two of us called We Read.

So far, I really like the novel. It sounds African, like other books about Africa that I have read. I will be doing my reflection of this book at We Read.

At some point a book is just paper. But when you begin to actually use it as paper, first owning it by putting your name inside and then using the margins as a space for your thoughts, it becomes so much more than that. For it is not until you begin to transform the ideas with your ideas that the paper becomes what it was meant to be–a book.

The woman who recommended Ishmael Beah’s memoir a long way gone to me, said she wept at the end.

I didn’t weep. I was too horrified to feel sad. I feared for Ishmael’s safety right up to the end, even knowing from the opening pages that he was eventually safe, even happy.

Seeing the movie Blood Diamond helped me understand the violence that occurred in Sierra Leone even more fully. But still, it is not something I can grasp emotionally. I suppose that on some level I can understand civil war. I can understand how greed can drive people to kill each other. I cannot understand how politics or greed can cause people to turn children into cold blooded murderers.

These children became monsters. They were no longer children. Their innocence was not only stolen, it was manipulated so that it worked against them.

If there is a hell or retribution for evil, people who destroy children deserve such pain as they inflicted.

If there is anything to be learned from Beah or from other similar stories, it is that our children deserve the best we can give them, not in money or in things but in our love and our hope for their future.

“Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.” P.J. O’Rourke

This is a different way to think about what we ought to read. One of my favorite philosophical questions is “how ought we to live?” and “what ought we to read?” seems to fit into it quite nicely.

After all, there is only so much time and there are so many books. Maybe, instead of thinking about what books will make us look good, we should think about what books will make us good.

What I mean is we should be reading books that can make us better people. I posted a list of book qualities in my Polliwog Journal. I do think it’s possible that books can “make” us better.

I am about to read Ishmael Beah’s memoir, A Long Way Gone. It is his story of being forced to be a child soldier in Sierra Leone. The book jacket implies there are lessons to be learned. I can only imagine that I will emerge from the experience knowing more what true courage is. A book can teach me this.

We may think we live in isolated times, each person in his own digital universe via a cell phone or an iPod, but the truth is we live in a world that is growing smaller and smaller every day.

The lessons we need to learn are not only about courage and love and strength but also about what it means to be a person living in fear, in poverty, in war. As an American, I do not fear for my life as I head to work each day, but I live in the same world with those who do. I breathe the same air as they do. We have recycled each others’ breaths.

To be a citizen of my universe, I need to know what I cannot know from my own experiences. I cannot learn what I need to know from the news or from TV. But books can teach me.

We have been watching these retrospectives of Saturday Night Live. It seems like they are covering five year spans. They’re interesting, but mostly they transport me back in time. We have watched every year of that show since the beginning, since 1975. For all of those years except two, we’ve watched them together.

What does it mean to know a show for thirty years? I have thought about this before. A television show, if a lot of people watch it, can bring a group together. It can provide a foundation for cultural connectedness.

In the early days of television, everyone watched the same shows. It was a long time before there were more than three networks. PBS, as far as I can tell, arrived on the air in 1961. I was six years old.

While I don’t watch too many shows these days (HBO or movies or peripherally, sports), I memorized it all when I was younger. These stories and characters were part of my life. There are things that people my age just know from our common exposure to television that bind us together.

There are so many choices now, too many choices. I can’t imagine how television could be a cohesive force now. Unless a show really connects with people, like American Idol, for example (a show I have never, and I mean, never, watched).

But Saturday Night Live is something I have lived with for over half my life, for nearly all of my married life. It is more than a show. It gives me a scope of reference, a way of knowing. I know it was not always funny. Sometimes the show was downright dreadful, but as we look back on it now, I realize, and not for the first time, that a lot of brilliance came out of that show.

But who watches it now? I kind of think it’s a nostalgia thing for baby boomers. We stick with it now for better and for worse. We’re married to this show as much as to each other. We couldn’t not watch. It’s who we are.

I recently read Love by Toni Morrison, whom I am ashamed to admit I had not read yet. I was given this novel by a friend several years ago and it called out to me this summer. From this one experience with Morrison, I can see why she is considered a great writer. On the other hand, I sometimes felt that I was missing too many puzzle pieces. I am not a stupid reader, but when I finished that novel, I had a lot of questions. I felt that I just didn’t get the ending.

Even so, there were enough of those grab-you-in-the-gut beautiful phrases and sentences to make me very happy I read it. I need to try another of hers to see if the experience is in any way similar to this one.

I just finished it! I really liked it. It read fast for me, though it took me a week to finish it. I sometimes put it down on purpose, not wanting it to end too quickly. I’m not HP fanatic, but I have read them all and have enjoyed each one. Before this seventh book, the fifth, The Order of the Phoenix was my favorite.

I will have to reread all of them, someday, and in quick succession to appreciate the world J.K. Rowling invented. How much of that world did she already know when she sat in that cafe all those years ago writing the first book? It will be interesting to hear the interviews with her now that she’s completed the series (after sufficient time has passed for most people to have read this last book).

Everyone was worried about who would die and while some important losses occurred, no one will be abjectly sad at the end of this book.

I am glad to say that Snape, in whom I always had a kind of faith, was venerated at last, though not in a way I expected.

And Dumbledore turns out to be quite human and not the g0d-like man we may have thought him to be.

I wished that Draco would have been kinder after all. I wish that he would have been a better person than he was. Dudley kind of softened though, and that was unexpected.

It was a good book, but it will be a violent movie. I wonder how they’ll handle this one.

I had met Larry Watson at the 2006 Great Lakes Writer’s Festival and found him to be wonderful and smart about the process of writing. He was open and honest with my students as well. I had heard from my friend Pat Schulze, who uses this book in one of her courses, that it was very good, but I had never read it. I was resolved to change that this summer.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but when it came in the mail, I was surprised that it was such a small little book.

Size isn’t everything.

Watson’s book is everything I like in a novel: a good story, characters who are real people with real needs and problems, and prose that makes me jealous. I have never been to Montana, but I can see the hills where David rode on his horse and shot at cans with his friends. The basement jail after all the jars were smashed is also vivid in my mind right now.

I would highly recommend this book.

I finished reading Khaled Hosseini’s second novel yesterday. There are very few books that leave me sobbing. I know that Mariam and Laila will live on in my heart. This book is about everything important that one can know in life, especially hope, forgiveness and love.

I loved this book. I cannot even imagine how people survive when war rages around them and against them.

One thing I wondered as I read this novel was how true to life the experiences of these women were. I have no doubt that their lives mirror thousands of real lives, except perhaps for Rasheed’s vile nature. Still, in a country that cannot bear to see women’s faces, what is a beating or two?

I hope that Tariq is proof that gentle men live in Afghanistan too. And Hosseini himself, of course.

Lastly, as an American, I feel ashamed that our support for Afghanistan waned in our zealous need to overthrow Sadaam Hussein. Our enemy after 9-11 was never Iraq. We are mired now in what seems like endless confusion. We are directionless. In Afghanistan, there was a direction–there was also a moral purpose. We did not devote the energy and money to do what was right in Afghanistan.

I hope all the Lailas and Tariqs can forgive us for that.