BACK

There is my endless backlog of books to be read. It lies in the piles by the chair, on the desk, on the bedside table, in the back seat, on the "official" reading list, and on the "unofficial" reading list that exists in a scattering of scratched out notes to myself that seem to follow me about. It does make me anxious at times, but it also brings some measure of comfort, a guarantee of sorts. There is always another book to be read.

Then there are the surprises. The titles and authors I jot down and keep bypassing for whatever inane reason or other. Every now and then, I come across a book in the library or in a store and remember that it is one that I meant to read. Years ago. And it will turn out to be a book of such merit that I begin to find it auspicious that I saved it for later without ever meaning to. As if there are certain books that come and go and then find their way back to me.

So it was with Leif Enger's So Brave, Young, and Handsome. I read Enger's first and only other novel, Peace Like a River, when it was still new and enjoyed it enough to be eager to read So Brave when it published, though it ended up relegated to my own remainder pile. Enger is from Minnesota and he writes with that straightforward Midwestern sensibility and with a sparse richness that might be called elegant in its own way. It is the kind of working in words that I particularly favor.

This novel reads like a song. The best reference I can offer as example that you might recognize is that of Charles Portis with True Grit. You likely remember the movie recently remade and originally starring John Wayne, but you may not know that it first found life as a book, one that you should read, of course. If you have read the book or seen the movie -- in which, thankfully, the original lines of dialogue are salvaged nearly word-for-word -- then you know of the peculiar use of language that sets it apart and makes it so enjoyable. The characters speak in a way that is poetic and earthy, almost Shakespearean. And while you quickly take note of its high-mindedness, it does not seem at all out of the ordinary. You find yourself wondering why we do not all speak this way, because it sure makes for a far more interesting discourse. It also builds a narrative that is tough and sharp and literary and still altogether believable.

And, like True Grit, Enger's book is a bit of a cowboy tale. You know I like those. Though it involves few horses, there is much traveling and outlawing and campfires and a bit of Spanish spoken. But, do not let that steer you away from it if you are not as inclined as I toward such things. There is much to love here -- the plain and the scrubby country that shines in the background always and the characters who are crafted as solidly as woodwork and the dialogue that dances. It is also a melodious story of true friendship and of finding the things we did not know we sought. And it is about writers.

Though I did not mean to save it for later, I am glad that I did. It was worth the wait.

ENCOUNTERS

There is this with which I shall begin. From an interview with Jhumpa Lahiri in the regular feature of the New York Times Sunday Book Review called By the Book:

"From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar."

Lahiri is a particular favorite of mine and I have been anticipating her forthcoming novel for most of this year. Put her novel The Namesake on your reading list now. I am grateful for her words in this interview about the "immigrant novel." Because, yes, are not they all immigrant novels in one way or another, as her quote above prompts us to consider? But, her own work as it explores the experience of immigrants to America from India is particularly poignant. She is able to capture as well as anyone else I have read the alienation, the loneliness of transience and, as it were, of being and becoming American -- the anxiety and disquiet of a life of fragile connections. There is also something about the way food figures into her writing, in especially The Namesake. We often ignore the importance of food to our identities and not just in a cultural way, though it is primary. I am thinking of how we may take our meals, gathered around a family table perhaps, and of the work of preparing it and of growing it and of what happens after the meal is done, what is said and what is not. Who does this or that chore. The sensory experience of it. The smells and tastes and sounds -- sizzling oil in a pan, the creak of an oven door, the clacking knock of the knife blade against the cutting board. These are the kinds of ordinary and small details that beat out the rhythms of our lives and give shape to our memory. And, they are the kinds of details that Lahiri shoves into the quiet spaces of her narrative so that it rings all the more true.

As much as I tend to revere authors and have also expressed my surprise here before about a similar answer to one of these interviews, I am taken by another quote from this piece. 

"The idea of meeting writers of the books I’ve read doesn’t interest me. That is to say, I wouldn’t go out of my way. If the book is alive to me, if the sentences speak to me, that’s enough. A reader’s relationship is with the book, with the words, not with the person who created it."

And, of course, we have also talked many times before about those encounters beyond the familiar -- what a way to put it, no? -- with which we are blessed when reading fiction. As my job plants me again behind the wheel of my car for long stretches of time, I am relishing the audio books once more. I never know what I am going to get with those things, so I walk out of the library with stacks of them, hoping for a treasure in the bunch. At least I generally know within a few minutes if I will be finishing one or not. The current offering is the memoir from Sonia Sotomayor, My Beloved World. Part of what makes Sotomayor's own story a compelling one is, of course, that classic American mythology of moving beyond the confines of race, class, and gender to reach a pinnacle of personal achievement; for her, of course, to be appointed to sit on the highest court in the land. What we might not think of most times is that the justices of our Supreme Court are first and foremost writers. Writing is what they spend the largest majority of their working life doing, after all. Nevertheless, I am surprised to find this one an audio book that has drawn me in. It is a story of growing up in America and it is a well-told one. What I have enjoyed most, though, is the thread that shows itself over and over, the vital importance of reading to her life. Though she does not ever say it directly, it is clear that those encounters beyond the familiar that she craved as a child and throughout the rest of her life had an immeasurable impact. It was through books that she first began to see what lay beyond her own known world. And, while it is difficult to say that if she had not been a reader she would not have attained such prominence and success, I think you and I both still know that a love of books can, without doubt, lend a certain boundless shape to a life and mind.  

MUCH

I have written often here of my love of Wendell Berry's fiction. I was pointed this week to an article written by his daughter, Mary Berry, in which she offers a stirring reflection upon who he is and what his life and work is about and in which she also writes so well of the kinds of meaningful gifts a father may offer his children. All that she writes here speaks to things that are continually spinning their way around my own mind. You can find the article here and I hope you will take a quick moment to read what is a relatively short piece because there is so much more than a mere three or four thoughts with which I am left. So much, in fact, that I hardly know where to begin, so I will just do what I can. First off, though, what is treasure enough are the pictures that Mary Berry has shared from her family's life. But then, there are these things, too:

"Daddy was encouraged to seek his fame and fortune elsewhere; in fact, he was told that coming home would ruin his career. I don't have to imagine, however, the great happiness that was his when he knew that he could come home because I experienced that . . . Coming home was not encouraged by any influential person in my life except my family."

This in particular is something that has been on my mind of late. As I daily grapple with the frustration brought by the intolerance and woeful ignorance that seemingly abound in the place where I live -- especially in what feels like such a politically divisive time in our country, I cannot help but wonder about a life elsewhere. I am old enough to know, of course, that intolerance and ignorance exist everywhere. But those of us who are born and raised in mountains and in the rural parts of the world never really cease to feel distinctly the struggle between an ambitious longing for something more and a need to remain anchored in the place that makes us who we are and that gives us a landscape and a voice felt deep within our bones. We are told from early on in so many direct and indirect ways that success is something that does not happen here. It happens away from here. It is made known to us over and over again that our place is bereft of jobs and opportunity and culture. These are all things that are to be found in other places. If we are lucky, like Mary Berry, we come to understand that things are maybe not quite so clear as that. There are deliberate choices to be made about the life we want to live and the kind of community of which we want to be a part. Happiness and success are the sorts of ethereal things that can be defined in a host of ways and in a host of places. Perhaps they can be dug out of grimy, fertile soil just as they may also be found among the glistening towers and hustling din of the urban. Either choice is both difficult and incomplete. This is not just the story of my place, though. It is the story of America -- the unyielding pull from both directions to either claim a destiny that lies always just over the next horizon or to hold tight to all that we know as everything we are. Wendell Berry's fiction, among other things, is an exploration of that choice and its effects on both the people and the place.

"My brother and I grew up with stories, both oral and written. The stories were so compelling to me as a child that I thought, until I was pretty close to adulthood, that I could remember things that happened before I was born. This gave me the sense that I have never lost, of living partly in the past and of loving men and women that I did not know."

How well I also know such feelings. It might even be said by those who know me best that I live partly in the past. I grew up hearing stories of people who had gone on before me but who, nevertheless, I came to feel I knew as well as anyone living and walking beside me. They were stories that connected me to a place and to a people. I must credit my close friend, Tal Stanley, for bringing this article by Berry to my attention. Because it was also Tal who, over so many conversations through the years in his office, or over meals, or in cars as we wandered -- sometimes knowing exactly where we were and sometimes not -- over many a winding mountain road, first helped me to begin to see the importance of the stories that are our own. His book, The Poco Field: An American Story of Place, which you should seek out and read for yourself, actually calls us to leverage the power of our own stories to create a new paradigm of education and of citizenship. Likewise, Wendell Berry's fiction helps us ask important questions about what it means to be a citizen of a place, something he calls membership, which includes, as Mary Berry so beautifully puts it, that "unbroken line of stories." 

I found surprising Berry's confession that she had read next to nothing of her father's writing until going off to college. Then again, being a father myself, maybe this makes complete sense. Imagine, though, discovering in this way that the man about whose existence you know the most mundane and ordinary details is of such prominence in certain circles. The book she writes of reading as a student, The Memory of Old Jack, is a favorite book of my own. In fact, I wrote about it in my very first post here, even quoting some of the same portions Mary Berry does. What she says the book did for her in terms of providing clarity helps me further sort through what I have also written about, that what we are given by Wendell Berry through his stories about a world that is fading utterly from our view is, in the end, hope. As his daughter says,

". . . that if we actively choose it over and over everyday, we can indeed live in the world of affection and membership that he honors in his life and in his stories."

Even after all this, though, what strikes me most each time I read her article is what Mary Berry has to say about Wendell Berry as a father. 

"The gift that my father gave me so many years ago was the knowledge that I live in his love, and if forgiveness is needed it has already been given. What greater gift could a parent give a child?"

Indeed.

PILES

Every now and again I get a bit overzealous in my reading life and bite off a little more than I can chew. I had thus far been successful in avoiding such a situation since the calendar turned, but I fear I have allowed it to happen once again. There is a giant stack of big books piled high on my bedside table. There are enough that as I lug them about the house to grab a few minutes here and there for chipping away at one or another, I sometimes lose track of one or forget which it was that I was last enjoying. I suppose it speaks to some sort of compulsion I carry, this gathering of books, but I am not qualified nor am I inclined to  try and sort that out. No one ever said a reading life was an easy one.

The pile -- to which I swear I have stopped adding -- currently includes Talking Appalachian: Voice, Identity and Community, edited by Amy Clark and Nancy Hayward, Jon Meacham's Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, a collection of stories called Fire and Forget (more on that one below), Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, and the novel I have not yet started but could not bring myself to abandon to the wilds of the library's new book shelf, Dina Nayeri's A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea. Then, of course, there are the magazines, the newspapers, the most recent issue of Ploughshares that came in the mail and seems to be teeming with really good stories, and even mentioning that pile over there in the corner of books that I would like to read makes me anxious. I am surrounded by piles. You can imagine it makes my wife happy.

Anyhow, I have managed of late to actually complete one book and it was a dandy. Just when I felt like I had slipped into a bit of a reading slump, I picked up one of the better stories I have read in a long time, a novel by Liz Moore called Heft. Liz Moore is a new discovery for me and someone whose work I feel I should get to know. It also happens that I am especially fond of her publisher. This is her second book and her first, The Words of Every Song, is, of course, now on the reading list. Once again, I am amazed at the skill and artistry of a very young writer. Heft is a novel about a lot of things and brings together two characters seemingly from opposite poles who allow us to explore those all too human feelings of emptiness and loneliness. The immense tragedies of the two lives Moore has rendered here end up giving us a deep sense of hope and a clearer understanding of the power of choosing to be a part of a community.  She reminds us of the good in the world. As is said often here at ToFGT in one form or another, one of the most important things good fiction does is give us room to process and think through realities that are nearly impossible to make sense of. Sometimes the only way to see clearly through the messiness that life gives us is to share the story.

Now and then I pick up a book that I want to savor and so I do not feel nearly as bad for taking my time to finish an anthology edited by Roy Scranton and Matt Gallagher called Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War. I owe my discovery of this one to Bob Edwards, on whose radio show I heard an interview with Scranton and Gallagher and one or two of the authors in the collection. The book is the product of a writing workshop sponsored by New York University for veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I cannot begin to adequately convey the quality and power of these pieces, so I will not try. They are quite simply gut punches of reality. I have a penchant for war stories for a number of  different reasons. Colum McCann, in his introduction to Fire and Forget that is in itself compelling enough for you to seek out this book, expresses some of the more important ones.

"All stories are war stories somehow. Every one of us has stepped from one war or another. Our grandfathers were there when the stench of Dresden hung over the world, and our fathers were there when Vietnam sent its children running napalmed down the dirt road. Our grandmothers were there when Belfast fell into rubble, and our mothers were there when Cambodia became a crucible of bones. Our sisters in South Africa, our brothers in Gaza. And, God forbid, our sons and daughters will have stories to tell too. We are scripted by war."

 "We are drawn to war because we are, in the words of William Faulkner, drawn to 'the human heart in conflict with itself.' We all know that happiness throws white ink against a white page. What we need is darkness for the meaning to come clear. We discover ourselves through our battles -- our awful revelations, our highest dreams, our basest instincts are all on display." 

 

National Teacher Day

As the saying goes, if you are reading this, you can thank a teacher. And I, of course, can thank one for being able to write it. We owe much to the teachers in our lives for our abilities to do these things. It is fitting to have a National Teacher Day and a Teacher Appreciation Week. We fail to consider fully the power of our own literacy and of the startling halt our lives would come to on a daily basis without it. Of course, it is more than just reading and writing for which we are grateful. Somewhere along the way someone taught us something that remains a part of who we are today. And we are better for it.

It seems particularly important here on a blog devoted to the reading life to mark the occasion. To do so, I direct you to this post from last year.  

STORIES

I am a runner. As a runner, I know other runners, whether I have ever met them or not. We who run are part of a community of like-minded souls. We understand one another. I stand with the runners of Boston in defiance of the attack on an event that has long shown the world all the very best things about running. If ever a wrong event was chosen to terrorize, however, it was a marathon. We runners are a gritty, never-say-die lot. We are determined. We persevere. We endure. Our spirit can be bruised, but it will never be broken. We know what it means to travel to the outer limits of pain and then to return. Again and again. If weather and aches and pains and blisters and heat and cold and sweat and all the people who are always asking if we are crazy and who flip us off and play chicken with us in their cars will not stop us, then neither will your careless violence or anything else. So, just understand. This is the way it is.

As we try and process yet another horrific and senseless and violent tragedy that has seized our attention and our collective grief, I am taken by the fact that as these kinds of events unfold we are drawn, with seeming helplessness, to the unceasing coverage of them. Whether it be through social media or online news or television news, we find ourselves transfixed for a time as the same few facts and images are presented over and over. We become immobilized. We stand with open mouths and shaking heads and muttered curses while the business of our daily lives comes to a quick halt.

Part of it, I might suppose, is our need to feel some sense of the immense grief of our fellow humans, to act upon our basic connection to them in the only way we can -- by paying attention -- and perhaps also, in a small way, to be reminded that our own lives were spared from something that cannot be predicted. In our sorrow for those we do not know, we are a little more grateful for our own lives and the people in it.

I might suggest that what we are also drawn to the stories. Stories of survivors, of heroism, of those who faced the unimaginable, and of tragic and needless carnage. I think often of how important stories are to us, even the stories of true horror. It seems to me such a basic human thing to tell stories, and I cannot help but be amazed at how long we have been doing it. Imagine how telling stories has shaped us as a species, how it has moved us along and civilized us, how telling stories has taught us elemental things like where the food is or how we will catch it or how to heat it up. And think, too, of how telling stories has given meaning to the things we cannot fathom or explain, how it has spread ideas and questions and how it has bound cultures and nations. The stories we have told and will tell to one another help us to see the beauty in the world and also all that makes it ugly and nasty and that makes living in it wondrous and glorious and so difficult that we must make up other realities sometimes to try and understand our own.

I have been wanting to share with you for a while now a piece by Bruce Feiler published in the New York Times last month. In The Stories That Bind Us, Feiler discusses psychological research that showed that the biggest predictor of the emotional health and happiness of children was a clear and strong family narrative. A story of us, in other words. Imagine it, time around the dinner table or simply a few minutes here and there spent talking and sharing stories of how we came to be might just, as Feiler contends, be "the single most important thing you can do for your family." Children who had the most self-confidence and who were most resilient were the ones who heard and came to know a family narrative along the lines of we have had ups and downs, there have been good times and tough times, but we have hung in there and we have seen one another through. Such a story allows children to see that they belong to something larger than themselves, just like stories do for each of us. They help us make sense of things that otherwise we cannot.

GOSPEL

It was not purposeful, but maybe appropriate somehow, that I finished on Sunday Naomi Alderman's exceptional novel, The Liars' Gospel. It is not a book I had known about, but one of those treasures I happened to have noticed on a shelf in the library and ended up enjoying immensely. Her first novel, Disobedience, also one with which I was not familiar, was recognized with an Orange Award for New Writers in 2006 and now finds the latest spot on the to-be-read list. Gospel is told from the imagined perspectives of four individuals who share their story of knowing or having met a man called Yehoshuah who raised a small ruckus in Roman-occupied Judea some seven decades before the great siege of Jerusalem and the subsequent destruction of the Second Temple: Miryam, his mother, Iehuda of Qeriot, a favorite among his followers, Caiaphas, the High Priest of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, and Bar-Avo, a leader of fighters against the Romans whose own life was spared in exchange for the execution of Yehoshuah.

What this book is not is a retelling of the story you know from the four canonical gospels of the Christian Bible. It is, on the other hand, a book that might engage you in a deeper conversation about your thoughts on that story. So often, people forget that the Bible did not fall from the sky one day, fully complete in the form and structure that we recognize. (Leather-bound, of course, King James Version. But, pardon my cheekiness.) The definitive Bible as we know it, in fact, only really came into being as late as the sixteenth century. Ignoring this not only fails to recognize the humanity of the decisions that resulted in the Bible we know today, but it also comes dangerously close to idolatry in my opinion. More importantly, though, it negates the full complexity of all the stories told within, and thus, their full effect.

I have thought for a very long time that the story of Jesus of Nazareth, the Romanized name more familiar to us than the Hebrew Yehoshuah that Alderman rightfully uses in her novel, would be a far more powerful one if readers and believers kept sight of its historical and social and political contexts. And, it is a political story, like it or not. Judea, in the time of this man Jesus, was a place near bursting with political tension. Jerusalem in particular threatened to boil over each day with a simmering rage and the country was rife with preachers and teachers and healers and rebels bent on shucking off the heavy rule of Rome and proclaiming a new kingdom for the chosen people of Yahaveh. The savior and messiah for whom the Jewish people were waiting was especially central to their collective story at a time when they felt most neglected by God. If you are a believer that Jesus existed and walked the earth, then you cannot ignore him as an historical figure whose message was a direct response to this crisis. To do so would be to deny the essential tenet of his humanity, a very necessary component of Christian doctrine.

Forgotten as well is that over the centuries the Jesus story was, and is still today, co-opted and used for all manner of agendas, both the well-intentioned and the dangerous. Even the four gospel writers that we know of had their own specific audiences. They used deliberate language and intentional imagery and they tweaked their version of the story to drive home their own individual points of view. They were storytellers, after all. Even the most unsophisticated reading of the New Testament gospels cannot avoid noticing the clear differences and distinctions between them.

Alderman's imagining of these characters and their roles in the story reminds us that it is a human story. And what sets this man Yehoshuah of Natzaret apart in her story, what made him different and unique from all others claiming to be the messiah, the savior of the Jewish people, and what made his message truly profound was this particular notion: Love your enemy. This teaching was not only new and dynamic, it was a provocative and radical kind of worldview for a people long-suffering under a brutal and tyrannical enemy.

"It is a dreamer's doctrine. Visionary, astonishing. And a hard road, in times of war and occupation. If all involved had listened to those words, matters would have fallen out quite differently . . . But perhaps the idea was too difficult, for it is not much observed . . . Easier to prefer one's friend to one's enemy. Easier to destroy than to build or to keep a thing standing . . . This was how it ended. And all the sorrow that came after followed from this."