I am a man of many and varied non-fiction interests. You will find me reading a lot about presidents and presidential politics, for instance, as well as history and a good many other things. Up to this point I have written quite a bit about the fiction I have read here and I am in the middle of good non-fiction book now: Winston Groom's Shiloh, 1862. Like every good Southerner, I consider myself an amateur Civil War historian. And I am a proud, proud native of the Commonwealth of Virginia. I also like to think of myself as an honorary citizen of the great states of Tennessee and Georgia, if they will have me. You know by now that I have obsessions and that I am ever picking one up, spending some time with it for a while and then moving to the next one. Reading Groom's book prompted me to revisit Ken Burns' masterful and epic documentary that first aired on PBS in 1990. And by revisit I mean I watched the entire thing over the past weekend. No, not straight through, but all ten hours at different points between Friday and Sunday. After all, it was due back to the library on Monday and with a hefty $2.00 fine per late day, mind you.
Do not get me wrong, though. I am not one to weep over the tragedy of the Lost Cause. I understand and revile completely the unfettered evil that prompted that war. And let us not mince words here. It was about one thing only. Reasons for the war are complicated and not of a singular dimension, no, but it did boil down to one thing. I am a firm believer in the rights of individual states and also understand that peculiar Southern viewpoint that one's home state ranks as high or higher in the heart as one's country. But the fact of the matter is that the rights and the way of life that were defended by the South during that war were morally unconscionable. No questions in my mind about that.
What I am one to weep over is the unimaginable tragedy of the war itself. We still easily comprehend the magnitude of suffering that occurred with the deaths of thousands of Americans on one day in September eleven years ago. The Civil War was fought 150 years ago, though, and so perhaps it is not as readily considered that thousands of Americans died on such a scale as 9/11 in a matter of hours during that war--on many days and over the course of four long years. Over 600,000 American lives wiped away. That number is so large as to be beyond the realm of complete comprehension. Part of the tragedy of it all, though, is that it had to happen. It had to happen to do so many things: to finish our revolution, to answer the questions avoided in the creation of the Constitution, to prove that our great experiment could work, to validate our claim as human beings to certain natural rights and to liberty itself, to solidify our sense of what it means to be American, and, most important of all, to make certain that it could never happen again.
Shelby Foote, the late and preeminent Civil War historian, who became a bit of a sensation after the release of Ken Burns' documentary, says at one point in the film that because it is America's civil war, then of course we must think of it as the greatest war ever fought with the greatest generals to ever live leading the greatest armies to ever walk the earth fighting the greatest battles to ever have been waged. It is singularly an American kind of perspective and one that I admittedly share. It is also a bit of a Southern perspective to dwell on our civil war a bit, even today and for many reasons. I grew up in Virginia, site of so many key battles and, of course, seat of the Confederacy, and I was lucky enough as a child to have people in my life who thought it important to take me to visit all the great battlefields in our grand commonwealth and to understand what happened at those places and the hallowed ground under my feet and the enormity of the blood shed on that ground. I have walked also the fields at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania and Sharpsburg in Maryland. I have had many moving moments in the early morning hours in my life, but one that remains clear to me is the early morning I ran a marathon at Chickamauga Battlefield in north Georgia, right outside of Chattanooga. It is a relatively small event as marathons go these days and there was time for much solitary contemplation. The fog rolling across that quiet landscape as the sun began to bathe us with its warmth, the monuments and cannon peeking out from the mist, reminded me of the sanctity of what had taken place there.
Foote also remarks that one has to admire someone who is willing to give their life for what they believe, even if that belief is not shared. In the end, those who died for the Southern cause in the Civil War were still Americans. I do not honor the Southern cause, but I do honor the Southern men who died such horrible deaths. I honor their valor. I admire their sense of honor, the one that has been nearly lost to us today. They were mostly fighting what they saw as an invasion of their homeland. And, I do also love the South as a place. I love it completely, the good, the bad, and the ugly of it. I love it also as my home. (For a truly sublime and lyrical book that is the best expression of the complex and haunting place that is the Southland, please add Ben Robertson's classic Red Hills and Cotton to your reading list. I have included it on my list of Shipwreck Books.)
Shiloh, 1862 is distinctive for its personal stories of what happened over the course of those two days in western Tennessee almost exactly 150 years ago. Groom draws from so many letters and memoirs of both ordinary soldiers and of those whose names we all know. I am curious to know where Groom ranks among historians. He is, after all, the novelist who gave us Forrest Gump. This book is certainly more accessible than most historical books and it reads at a faster pace and with less minute detail than a more academically inclined work. It does not, however, sugarcoat the ghastly and gruesome carnage that happened at Shiloh. In fact, Groom's use of the personal recollections give the reader a powerful sense of what it must have been like in the heat and fire of the battle, in the midst of so much awful death. To think of what terrible things humans are capable of doing to one another. There is, as example, quite a bit shared from Ambrose Bierce, who was serving as a Union infantryman and who later became an American literary giant. A particularly poignant description of the battle from him reads,
"the battle became a 'dull, distant sound like the heavy breathing of some great animal below the horizon . . . the air was full of thunder and the earth was trembling beneath [our] feet. Below us ran the river, vexed with plunging shells and obscured in spots by blue sheets of low-lying smoke.'"
In April of 1862, near the Shiloh church, named for the Hebrew word that means, of all things, "place of peace," Americans inflicted more casualties upon one another than they had suffered at the hands of foreign enemies in all previous wars combined up to that point. The first Battle of Manassas showed the country that the conflict would not be resolved quickly, but Shiloh showed clearly what the cost in blood would be.
"Nothing like it had ever happened before in the Western Hemisphere, and the Northern people's initial elation at a great Union victory soon turned to shock, and then to outrage, as the casualty lists came in. For Grant, it was the end of a grand illusion . . . he had convinced himself that a Union victory in a single great battle would cause the Confederacy to dissolve. However, after Shiloh, he reversed himself entirely with the stark conclusion that the Union could be restored only by the total conquest and subjugation of the South."
I am not one to gush. Although, it is true that an abundant sentimentality that I carry in addition to my proclivity for an earnest tone, I am fully aware, are to be found in my entries here. Perhaps it is simply the case that more often than not I find really good books to read or perhaps I have such an affinity for books in general or perhaps I just overdo it. I can admit that.
No matter. I finished The History of Love from Nicole Krauss last week and was thoroughly blown away. Again. Last year, well before I began writing about my reading life, I read Great House by this writer, and so now her first novel, Man Walks Into a Room, has shot to the top of the reading list. The former I believe to be one of the best books I have ever read and henceforth, I will consider myself an unabashed fanatic of Nicole Krauss.
Though I am hesitant to say this, because there must only be a matter of time before she gets lumped into that certain category that I might call wildly popular. There are already movie options in place and possibly another actually in the works, clear enough qualifications, it seems to me, of the appropriateness of such a classification. Her husband (to remain unnamed for our purposes at this point) is also a writer and falls within the ranks of you-have-most-likely-heard-of-him. I suppose I should clarify or attempt to clarify what I am trying to say here. You see, I am not against wildly popular authors and books nor am I against, as any general rule, movies that have been made from books. Of course, though, in my mind, the book is always better. If you have read anything else here, you have seen that I am pro-literacy first and foremost, so anything that has people reading is a good thing from my perspective. It is just that I tend to lean in another direction when it comes to my reading life, a slightly lower key direction, if you will. I am not sure I have clarified anything here. I do not try or desire to be a reading snob, but I suppose if I were completely honest with myself, I would have to confess the fact that such a label is not entirely unwarranted in my case. On the other hand, I would not say that I read things that are altogether obscure either. I populate my reading list using all manner of resources, including book reviews in the major newspapers. In fact, I tend to find most of what I read in a monthly magazine called BookPage or from authors I have heard interviewed by Bob Edwards, neither of which are unfrequented sources by any means. I will call myself a discerning reader then, and will understand if others may choose a slightly less polite way of putting it.
I am not sure what it is, but when everyone is reading something, I become skeptical. Remember that old story about how Joseph Kennedy was saved from the ruin of the stock market crash of 1929 because he overheard a shoeshine boy offering stock picks and he took this as a clear signal that it was time to get out? Well, that is the closest I can come to explaining how I decide what I want to read. Like most things, though, there is no black and white on this. For all the so called rules I have for my life, this one is not hard and fast or written in stone. When I tell people that I am a big reader, they inevitbly ask what I am reading or who my favorite authors are or what kind of books I like most. So, when this happens, it is a small point of pride for me to introduce someone to a writer of whom they likely have never heard or who they might not otherwise have discovered. So, there you go, I am simply a reading evangelist, of sorts. How about that?
I have gone way off track here and may revisit this issue in a later post, but at least it has helped to keep the gushing to a minimum.
Yet again, I am impressed by an author's ability to push the boundaries when it comes to the actual physical construction of a narrative. As someone who aspires to write quality fiction, I have learned a lesson from Krauss about how the placement of words on the page and the assembly of a chapter can raise the level of emotion and underscore the sense of drama, thereby driving the story not only with words, but with an entire array of other tools. Sometimes and in certain ways, this kind of thing can come across as gimmicky, but Krauss is a master and thus rises from mere author to the level of craftswoman in my eyes. Her words and her story are in and of themselves outstanding, but the way she has put the book together and the way she tells the story make it all the more superb.
The History of Love is about a book and her most recent work, Great House, is about a desk. Both are seemingly ordinary objects, the likes of which we see around us everyday. Krauss uses these common sorts of items to bring together disparate and otherwise divergent lives and to ask very poignant questions about how we think of ourselves and how we relate to other human beings. In each novel, the object itself is an obvious symbol for a larger and common struggle in the different lives of the characters, but Krauss' brilliance as a writer allows the symbolism to happen in an understated way. Once again, just the kind of books I enjoy most -- so much going on beneath the surface and also providing me an opportunity to see new and different ways in which fiction can work.
I cannot call it my first real job, but the first job I had for more than a couple of months was at the local library in my small hometown in southwest Virginia. What a blessing. I still remember going for my interview with the director, a bit of a severe and stern woman it seemed to me at the time, but who I came to know for her dedication and for her understated kindness. I wore corduroy pants and an overly serious wool coat to our meeting after school. It was a cold and snowy afternoon and I was as nervous as I could be. After all, at the ripe age of sixteen, I was vying for my dream job. Despite the clarity of certain details in my memory of that meeting, I do not recall our conversation much at all, except to imagine that, as such a rather dull and shy kid, I was probably lucky to get the job. I could not have been more excited when I did.
At the time, the Vaughan Memorial Library was in a little, old house on Stuart Drive and had been there for as long as I could remember. It was not an especially impressive building at all and was showing more than its share of wear and tear. I used to shudder at the prospect of having to go into the basement to file back issues of periodicals. It might as well have been a dungeon. I would race back up the shaky stairs, flipping off lights behind me as I went, never looking back. When I joined the staff, the library was finishing up the process of converting the checkout system from the card-in-the-back-cover days to a barcode system. Each and every volume in the building had to be barcoded and electronically cataloged, a tedious and tiresome project, even for such a modest collection as could be found there. It seems quaint and unimaginable now that, even in the early 1990s, the computerization of the library was only just beginning to happen. Remembering this, I recently found myself trying to explain to my daughter what a card catalog was. Try as I did, the concept was completely alien to her. Tiny drawers? Cards in the back of books with lines of date stamps? How did we ever survive?
Survive I did. I ate it up. I read nearly everything I could get my hands on, except for that sagging shelf of Danielle Steele books, of course. I swear I never cracked open one of them, not even out of curiosity, though they were likely high on the list of the most circulated volumes in the place. In my innocence, I took great thrill in my furtive and quick reads of the newest bestsellers as they waited behind the desk with me for the next patron on the reserve list, feeling as if I was enjoying privileged access somehow by reading them before anyone else. I would dream up, and sometimes complete, nerdy challenges for myself, like starting with "A" and reading the entire fiction section. That one did not happen, but I am fairly certain I read ninety percent of the biographies and there was probably more than one occasion when I made it through an entire letter of the alphabet. It was in my pillaging of those shelves of fiction that I came to revere the writing of Ernest Hemingway. And, it was also where I first became a true political wonk as I plowed through the 973 section in the non-fiction room. As you are already indulging me in this tribute to libraries, I will refrain from expounding on the beauty of the Dewey Decimal System or any tretise on the merits of it as compared to the Library of Congress System. Speaking of filing, my job at the library only cultivated my burgeoning obsessive/compulsiveness and most likely helped to ingrain it into my psyche. I was comforted looking out from my perch behind the circulation desk, knowing everything had its proper place and that it was my responsibility to make sure of this. There were reams of information before me, all easily found if you knew how to look -- by flipping through those tiny drawers. There was a certain grace in the organization of it all, a clarity and certainty of oneself in the midst of chaos.
I am still a library guy. As much as I love the mere physical presence of books, not to mention the look, feel, and smell of books, I rarely purchase books. Do not get me wrong, our home is full of them. They are the one purchase in which we readily indulge our child, almost without question. The number of books that belong to her in this house would likely rival the number that belong to the adults, in fact. Nevertheless, I rarely buy books for myself for many reasons, not the least of which are the challenges of budget and space. Also, there are so many books I want to read that there are very few I take the time to read again, so it would also be a matter of tremendous waste to have them only for lying around or being stacked neatly on shelves untouched. Mostly, though, I find the whole idea behind what happens in libraries as immensely noble. At its most basic, a library is a repository of information, but a library also speaks to our highest ideals of freedom, democracy, and a well-informed and active and engaged citizenry. Not only do libraries catalog and store the information, they make it readily available for anyone who desires to to use and see and enjoy it. For free. All they ask is that you bring the information back with you in the near future unscathed so that someone else may also use and enjoy it. Then there are all the things community libraries do to make the places we live all the better: story times for children, providing places to study and to be tutored, access to computers, availabilty of newspapers that are read the world over, reading groups, and I could go on, but the most important detail would be the one simple yet powerful thing libraries stand for, the sheer idea of literacy.
Since that little hometown library I have sought out and seen many libraries in many places. From the New York Public Library to the university libraries of places like Harvard and Princeton to other small libraries in rural towns, I have made a point to visit and to make use of them. No matter their size or their reputation, they all have given me the same sense of wonderment and immense possibility. And maybe that is really what it comes down to for me: all those books in one place, just sitting there, waiting to be read.
National Library Week
Readers,
We earn a mention today in the blog of friend -- one of the longest standing friends, I might add. It is one of my intentions in this endeavor to interact and to dialogue. So, please also visit her work and enjoy as much as I do. Wordy Evidence of the Fact
Best,
S.
One of the many benefits of being a reader is the unexpected stumble into a book that shakes you from your reading doldrums and astounds you with the satisfaction of finding that diamond in the rough, a gem of a book that will be long remembered and regularly recommended. I have come to be grateful for these occasions and have also come to know full well that they cannot be anticipated, but are probable enough to keep me waiting for them. I know that eventually it will happen, simply as a matter of time. I just keep working my way down that ever growing reading list and one day, in a pleasant turn of events that feels like and counts for me as a blessing, one of the small gifts that life seems to grant us from time to time lands in my lap.
Yes, I realize it all sounds rather schmaltzy, but we each have our little things we celebrate quietly and to ourselves -- small joys, slight reminders that there is good in the world. I have my own list of them, as do you. Admit it.
The most significant events are few and far between, sparsely dotting our life's timeline, and that is precisely why they are counted as milestones. But, is not life actually lived in the ordinariness and drudgery of Everyday? We look up and entire decades have passed and slipped away from us, but we are still able to pinpoint the beginnings and the endings. The in-between, however, is a bit jumbled up and cloudy.
And so, you must cling to the little things. Find joy where and when you may and relish the moments when you are surprised by it. I, for one, savor the early morning hours, times when there is a bit of frost on the ground and the sky is clear and the sun is only a faint wish above the treetops and I am steaming and spent from a run and the world is silent and belongs for a little while only to me. Similar is the feeling left by the surprise of an exceptional story or, as in this latest case, a story of stories. I recently finished Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife, which had long languished on my reading list, but was well worth the wait. Just as striking to me as the incredible tale that is masterfully woven by Obreht is that she is as young as she is. A few years still stand between her and the age of thirty. Not that the fact of her age is altogether extraordinary. It is, I confess, simply a matter of envy for me of her accomplishment of being a published author, let alone an award-winning one, at such an age. Obreht was honored for The Tiger's Wife with the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2011, which is given each year to the best original novel by a woman and published in the United Kingdom, putting her already in the heady company of the likes of Ann Patchett, Marilynne Robinson, and Barbara Kingsolver, among others.
There is a lot going on in Obreht's book, so much so that I will admit to the regular need as I was reading to flip back chapters at a time to refresh my memory and make sure of certain details and characters. But, this is in large measure part of what makes The Tiger's Wife so impressive. Tea Obreht deftly entwines multiple stories into one interconnected narrative that is stunning in both its separate forms and its entirety. I am struck not only by her abilities as a writer to tell a great story, but also at her sheer skill in bringing so many moving parts together. So, I have found also in her book yet another qualification for me of quality writing, and that is the occasion when a writer will do something in creating the structure of their work that is unique or particularly artful. Not only did Obreht's book give to me one of those unexpected small pleasures that is a memorable read, she also allowed me to think anew about the craft of writing itself.
