The Diamond in the Window

How Do You Know if You Like a Book?

One of the awesome things about being a grownup is that I am not so bothered my own predilections. I may be wrong in disliking Don DeLillo's work—in fact, I know I am—but at the same time I am happy to accept that it's true, so I can go my merry way and find books I do like and not be bothered by my aesthetic failures.

Or so I thought.

My basic way of deciding whether something is a good book takes a lot from Emily Dickinson's pronouncement on poetry (doesn't that make me sound classy? I am counteracting the weight of the DeLillo admission).

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?” 

It's mainly a physical thing. I know that if I read something I really love—something great—I will feel it. There will be excitement, the desire to get back to the book every single second, a sensation of heat rising in me.

Or so I thought. And then I read this book:

(Image courtesy GoodReads)

See, first I had read this book:

(Image courtesy GoodReads)

And it was pretty awesome. It had shown up on someone's stoop, and I expected it to be one thing. But it was another entirely. It was resoundingly un-American in its overall attitude, and it had this stubborn refused to verify the meaningfulness of what its characters did, which was both frustrating and gratifying—bracing, really. So when I saw Any Human Heart I thought, sure.

And then I wasn't crazy about it. It's long, and I read, and read, and read, all the time distracted by this or that. And I see that susceptibility to distraction as a sign that a book isn't grabbing me.

And then I finished it. And I can't stop thinking about it. All the time. It's grabbed me after the fact, somehow.

What is this? I think I really liked it. But I didn't know I really liked it. I am confounded.

And does this go for kids reading too?

Half-Baked Ideas: Why You Keep Reading Something You Hate

So, this is the least baked of all the half-baked ideas. In fact it's almost raw, because I don't exactly know why, when I hate a book, I keep reading it. I know there are a whole lot of you out there who will start a book, find it's not to your liking, and put the book down, never to pick it up again, and go merrily on your way.

I am not like that.

There is a certain mid-level type of book, a book I just don't get drawn into, that I can leave in the first chapter or so. But a book that rubs me the wrong way? That really, for some reason, pisses me off? I finish it. Almost always.

Why is this? Here's my half-baked theory, replete with (as all the best half-baked theories are) fake psychology. You know that whole "Hate isn't the opposite of love, indifference is the opposite of love" thing that many people feel compelled to point out? That. Essentially: my hating these books was evidence of some strong response I was having to something in the books. This goes along with: it's better to be hated than to be ignored, etc etc. That is part of the theory. (Is this even a theory?) The other possible reason is less charitable both toward book and reader, which makes me think it's somehow more likely to be true: I think on some level I just want to be pissed off at the book. It's like some warped relationship where I'm (metaphorically) driving around with the hated book in the car and saying "God, you're always like this. I just knew you'd be like this. Look, there you are doing it again!" And the book is muttering under its breath and doing the same irritating thing over and over.

Does this make sense? I mean as a semi-coherent idea, not as in "Gee, what a great way to enjoy the pleasures of reading." 

I don't know what this feeds in me. I don't go looking for books I hate, I just come upon them and then we go along together through an 8-day or so nasty sniping period and then we gratefully break apart and I try to find a book I like better. Books that make me particularly irritable? Like so:

Unpleasantly lyrical. If the back says "lapidary prose," this is a warning.

Sure of their own rightness. Is this a political or a cultural problem? I don't even know, I just know it as an "Oh no, it's trying to convince me of something."

Smug. Ugh.

Am I alone here? Are you guys strong enough to start hating a book and just put it aside? Or do you have to berate it all the way to the end, then part grumbling?

Oh, and the kids? They don't seem to have this problem. I am envious.

Curing Series-Avoidance

I have had...a problem for a while. It was, as usual, an attitude problem. 

It was the whole series thing. Percy Jackson. Magic Treehouse. Harry Potter. Series, series, series, it was making me sort of crazy. Are there any just books anymore, I cried out to the heavens.

And then I came home to find Diana sprawled on the couch reading, post-library. I asked her how the library was, because I'm someone's mother now and am compelled to ask innumerable obvious questions. She said, "Good. Daddy got the best book in the world."

?

"The best book in the world?"

"Yeah." She seemed pretty matter-of-fact, not impressed or anything, but to me it suggested further investigating, which is how (and why) I eventually found out the best book in the world: the memoirs of Casanova. Note: if you are the e-reading sort you can get this FOR FREE, which is pretty amazing, given that it is, apparently, the best book in the world. Note the second: this book is very, very dirty. But exceedingly well-written.

Now, his memoirs apparently run to sixteen volumes, so best book was really first volume of best book. Which made me remember something: volumes are really series. And books have ALWAYS been in series. Well, not always always. I mean, Pride & Prejudice isn't part of a series (despite the ignoble attempts to add on to it), but so much of Dickens, etc, that was published as serials, which are really series. This whole series thing is old, not new. It is not, necessarily, a sign of a civilization in decline.

I am beginning to hear myself and wonder whether I'm only OK with books that are CLASSICS and have OBVIOUS LITERARY MERIT (gee, this is like Dickens, which means it's A-OK!). But it's not the classicism that reassures me (I think). It's just reassuring to think of this endless wave of series (serieses?) has some precedent, and isn't issuing from some drastic narrowing of our collective imagination, able only to repeat variations on the same story over and over again, comfortable hearing only about characters we've already accepted, in a television version of reality that shrinks and shrinks until our humanity has vanished.

See, don't you feel better now? 

We Have Come to the Electronic Frontier, or "Why Aren't All Books Free?"

On the occasion of Chestnut's graduation from elementary school (sob!), my mother very generously offered to buy her...an e-reader. In fact, heaping generosity upon generosity, she offered to by both my collaborators e-readers.

It's not like we hadn't thought of it, you know? If you've gone ahead and seen Moonrise Kingdom by now like a reasonable person, you know the kind of suitcases we travel with: chockfull of hardcover books. Each child brings an entire bag of books with her whenever we go far from home and it's heavy. Also, they take up a lot of room. Also...maybe it's the future? And we should be there?

I myself have not succumbed to the siren song of the e-reader yet. Of course I like the idea of never running out of books. And having 1,000 books in my bag at all times, without it weighing me down. But when my good friend got an early Kindle, I tried it and pretty much immediately detested the strange flash that happens when you advance a page. I couldn't take it, and so, I let it go.

But that was me, and this is them.

Here's what happened.

Diana refused. I mean, just refused outright. "I like the feel of a book in my hands, I like the way books look, I don't want to read them that way. I like to go to the bookstore and look at all the different books there and to pick one out from seeing it." This is a person who reads blogs. Who is very happy playing RPG on the computer, or enjoying the company (?) of her DS. But she was immovable (for now, anyway) on the subject.

Chestnut accepted. She was delighted, even. And so, she now has a Nook. A very basic one, no color or internet connectivity or anything like that. And she loves it. She has taken to browsing the free downloadable books section of the Barnes & Noble website and sampling in a much wider and freer way than she would if she were, say, buying books, or even having to carry them back from the library. But here's the thing. She said "I wish all the books were free. Why aren't they? It's not fair."

I understand it. I mean once you get used to something's being free, it's hard to swallow being asked to pay for it. And it was, as they say, a teachable moment. We talked about how the authors would get paid otherwise, and she said "But you're not really getting anything. I mean, nothing you can hold in your hand."

It gave me pause. Not the kind of "Maybe you're right" pause, more the "Holy crap, this is what kids growing up now will think about writers and ideas and payment, and it doesn't bode well for any of us."

And this is a girl whose dad is a writer.

I can't remember how I thought about paying for books when I was a kid. Maybe I was just less aware of everything than she is. But in time I understood things like why people should be paid for the work they do. And somehow today's young 'uns will grow to appreciate the stories they read, even as they magically and invisibly insinuate themselves into their machines without fanfare.

They will, right?

Break on Through to the Other Side? But What if I Don't Want to?

First we were shoe shopping. I know for some people this is like saying "First we went to get ice cream sundaes." I am not one of those people.

Chestnut and I were looking for small happy sandals. She is 10, after all. We looked, and we looked, and we looked. When we got to the third shoe store, it was thronged. The music was relentless. I was barely hanging on. But we found what we were looking for, sandals with three big bows (trust me, it would like nice on her) and asked for her size. When the shoe store person heard us, she took the shoes with bows away. "Oh, for that size, you need to go to the other side."

Do you want to know what the other side is? It's where they keep the grownup shoes. Shoes that may have bows, but they're not what I would call friendly bows.

And then I was at Barnes & Noble. (I know this is starting to sound like some hallucinatory bad dream, but it's all real. I'm just skipping the nonessential—I was solo this time.) I'd tried looking for Fun Home at my local bookstore, but they didn't have it. I was out of books, and I was wandering in the hopeless way that afflicts me in large and impersonal stores. I though, "I've been meaning to read When You Reach Me. Maybe I'll look for it here?" And I thought, maybe I'll get something for Diana. I wandered to the children's section. I looked for chapter books—and they were all "ages 7 to 12." Or "Through Grade 6." Apparently if you want to get a book for someone older, you have to go to the other side of the bookstore, far far away, where you disappear into the endless shelves of "Teen Paranormal Romance."

I feel immensely foolish even saying it, and heaven knows plaintive as well, but why must there be this big divide? I feel like I'm about to push my kids out the airlock. As if there's a here—and then there's a there, and it's nowhere near where you started.

Must the gradient be quite so steep? I wish, somehow, that one could drift from A Wrinkle in Time to The Hunger Games to...well, to anything. I want all the books to organized by greatness, not by age. I don't want Diana to feel like the children's section has no place for her anymore. I want Chestnut to be able to buy sandals with giant freaking bows and smiley faces too. I want....

I want, I guess, things that aren't quite possible.

Against The Lord of the Rings?

Here's what I had: a kid who started at The Boxcar Children, then went to Secrets of Droon, to Animorphs, to Warriors, and ever onward. There were many side trips: to all things Pokénon, an ongoing love affair with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, many, many, many manga. A long, deep dance with The Sword in the Stone. The Princess Bride continues to make appearances. Throughout it all, Dungeons & Dragons has been, shall we say, an abiding interest.

If there was anything I thought I could predict, it was a trajectory. What did I see? I saw fantasy. Magic. Other worlds.

I sat back with my arms crossed and (possibly) a smug look on my face, and waited for The Hobbit to make its appearance, followed closely by The Lord of the Rings.

And waited.

And waited.

Then, a year or two ago, I asked her if she'd read The Hobbit. She had, she said. "Meh." I said, "Really?" Her dad said, "Try The Lord of the Rings. It's better."

She read The Lord of the Rings. "Meh."

?

Before I go further, full disclosure: I was not a Tolkien kid. My sister was. She had the full on "Come to Middle Earth" poster on her door, she read The Hobbit many, many times. And I don't know whether it felt like her turf, or I needed to assert my difference, but I just didn't go for it. I didn't like The Hobbit, I didn't even try Lord of the Rings. 

I've read Lord of the Rings as an adult and I really liked it, but that's a different thing, isn't it? But Diana? I kept waiting for her to discover them, it just seemed too obvious—inescapable! But it just didn't happen. There was no love, only indifference.

And then this year—things changed. She was in the middle of talking about something else and she said, "—so I was explaining why I hate Lord of the Rings, and then—."

"Wait, what?"

Yup. She will now go—happily!—on the record as being out and out against The Lord of the Rings. "But why?" I asked. And she knew! She said, "It is utterly without humor."

Wow. I just.... I don't remember thinking about books that way. And the thing is: she's not wrong, exactly. It's just that I didn't expect things to go like this. 

Being a parent is weird.

Girls Read Guys Read?

There was a mass purge of bizarre branded items, review copies and other freebies where I work a few weeks ago, and I spent most of my time at the books table, where, among other things, I got this:

I just thought: what self-respecting children's book blogger would pass this up? Not that I'm exactly a self-respecting children's book blogger, but I try to be. It's a lot of memoir-type writing by male authors.

It came home with me and went to live on the coffee table, which is essentially our holding pen, where things wait to be blessed or damned. Did I read it? Of course I didn't read it. I've been too busy feeling sorry for myself for an array of ordinary-life trials and browsing aimlessly in the internet to actually read anything. Who did read it? Diana.

What a strange cognitive dissonance it is to see a girl reading a book that cries out on its cover: Guys Read.

She came at it fairly pissed off: "What do you mean guys read? Are you saying I can't read this?" She soon transitioned to irritation and suspicion: "This isn't a novel at all. It's not even fiction? WHY would you have Garth Nix, who is so awesome at writing fantasy, write something that's not even fiction?" Which gave way to absorption. She just read it. And read it. And then she read it some more. It migrated up to her room, where it lives happily shuttling between her desk and her dresser, a much-sampled, confusing new genre.

She did want to know why there would be a book just for guys, the very concept rubbing her the wrong way, and gnawing at her easily triggered injustice reflex. I talked a little bit, and probably none too coherently, about the covers that a lot of YA and middle-grade books have, and how they might be embarrassing for a guy to carry around, and the general stereotypes of who likes to read etc. She took it under consideration.

She feels that books should have no gender. I feel like that's sort of akin to saying there should be no racism. Of course there shouldn't be, but given that it's there, it's better to acknowledge it and try to eradicate it? Right? Maybe?

But really, what I thought would end up being about gender, instead ended up being about a kid reading authors she loves, but reading them in another genre—reading their memories, their actual voices. It's been strangely earth-shaking for her, at least that's how it looks from the outside. When you read a novel by Garth Nix, he's there on the cover, but other than that you're inside his mind. He vanishes from sight, because you're looking through his eyes. When you read his nonfiction story of his youth, he's there in front of you, inescapable, a person. It's like the end of the Wizard of Oz when they lift the curtain.

Did you guys ever read memoir type stuff when you were kids? What do you think?

Why Would They Have a Book Like That for Kids? Or, Woe to the Sensitive Soul

Long, long ago, when everyone in my house was much younger, there were certain books that had to be banned. I'm not proud of it, but there it is. See, some books were just too painful to read—their stories were too traumatic, their messages too sharp. And while we generally view ourselves in the tough as nails bunch here, when a book is too harsh, too real, too gritty...well, we have to stop reading it, that's all.

Public Enemy # 1: Are You My Mother?

The first time we read this, as the baby bird was wandering the parched desperate land, asking the various things "Are YOU my mother?" we got to the snort and—well. That was it. A howl of grief, a gush of tears. "No! No! No! WRONG!" Or something along those lines. The book was slammed shut, and the person refused—refused—to ever read it again. For YEARS. When teachers read it she left the room, when adults pleaded she was stony and unyielding.

Did I explain that it all worked out in the end? Of course I explained that it all worked out in the end! But to no avail. She could not forgive.

It wasn't just this book, and it wasn't just her. Another young person of my acquaintance (do you like how we're protecting reputations here at TDITW?) was traumatized by this nihilistic horror:

Yes, that's right, Five little ducks went out one day, over the hills and far away, Mother duck said "Quack quack quack quack"—but only four little ducks came back.

Oh my god. Only four came back.

The child in question wept. "Why?" she pleaded, "Why would they have a book like that for kids?"

Explanations, again, went pretty much nowhere. Let's just say logic is not the most effective tool with this bunch.

All of which begs the question: What is up with my children? I mean, they're over it. They could (probably) read these books now without turning a hair (they could, right? RIGHT?). But for whatever reason (incompetent reading/mothering) these books just...well, it goes beyond bombed really. They backfired.

I wrote this post because I figured, I can't be the only one. Other peoples kids have misread and turned against well-loved children's classics, haven't they? It doesn't indicate anything bad—of course not! Heh heh.

Your kids have, right?

Half-Baked Theories: When Worlds Collide! Or, Some Ideas about Science Fiction and Fantasy and the Fifth Wall

Diana is a meta sort of kid. She likes narrative asides to the reader—Lemony Snicket was an awesome thrill. She likes breaking through that fourth wall. When we watched Blazing Saddles (truly an awesome film for the fart-joke-loving middle school crowd), at the end of the movie when they crash through the walls of the set onto the set of another movie, she gave an audible shriek and leapt to her feet in a paroxysm of joy. It's what she loves about Monty Python—the constant strange balance of the separate worlds, one within the other.

At dinner last night, Diana mentioned, "You know why I love the first book of any fantasy series the best? Because that's the one where they discover the other world."

And I've been thinking about it.

I know what she's talking about. That moment when Lucy pushes through the old coats and ends up in the snowy wood. That sense of otherness, of the world's having more dimensions than you thought it did. And what I was thinking was that maybe that's one way fantasy makes more sense to me than science fiction does. Fantasy somehow implies that there's this world, and then there's another one, and you can move between the two, and that's what's so awesome. Science fiction gives you an alternate world, but it's the world there is—it's the future. It's farther along a continuum but not on a different plane, if you follow my tortured not-quite-mathematically-accurate metaphor.

Of course, once I thought of this I immediately saw that I was wrong. Some fantasy doesn't involve movement between worlds (though my favorite fantasy always seems to). And no doubt some sci-fi posits multiple worlds. But still, I feel like there's an idea here somewhere, if I could only grasp it. Ah, the trials of the half-baked theory.

What do you think? Are you a fan of that moment when one world connects to another? Is it part of fantasy only? And, just because I want to know, what's your favorite intsance of this moment? Please?

The Great Ones

There are many excellent books, as it has been my pleasure to find out. And yes, I love finding new ones—strange ones by authors I have never heard of, books I discovered at library sales or left out on the street or under someone's bed.

This post is not about those, however.

It's about those people you just can't believe exist, children's book authors who have the uncanny (uncanny!) ability to run some crazy wire from their own minds deep into the minds of some universal kid soul and connect. People like Judy Blume, and Cynthia Rylant, and Louis Sachar. People who seem to be able to do it over and over again, like they're returning to some hidden inner spring. Who else? Terry Pratchett. Beverly Cleary. Roald Dahl.

Who else?

This is the question I am asking you, my most excellent readers. See, I am thinking that I need to use this blog to make some acknowledgement of these giants who stride (or strode) the earth, but there are no doubt more than I am thinking of. So I need to come up with a list.

What are the qualifications? Well, here's what I have so far:

1) a magical, inexplicable (or explicable, either way) connection to kids

2) have written a variety of books, displaying said author's previously mentioned magical ability to connect to kids of different ages at will

3) some combination of greatness and utter lack of pretension, which is, I guess, part of greatness anyway.

So what do you guys think? Help me out, if you would, in the comments.