The Way We Lived Then

I preached on these texts (Track 1) yesterday at St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Conway. What a lovely correspondence they had to my gender and religious belief class this semester, to my work with older women in prayer shawl ministries over the past few years, to my obsession with the category of "widow" in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, and to the raging war over the moral statuses of the poor and of women in our culture. I think the sermon turned out rather well.

Sermon for November 8, Proper 27 Year B

A few years ago someone recommended that I read Anthony Trollope, a prolific and very popular British novelist of the nineteenth century. His Victorian-era fiction turned out to be right up my alley, like a mix of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. Most of his characters are marginal members of the aristocracy -- clergy with a parish granted by the local lord, baronets who gamble at London clubs and play at Parliament, widows with money besieged by suitors with none. The rules were different at that time and place, and among those people. A young man with a title was not supposed to stoop to earn money with a regular job, but at least if they lost all possibility of living off inherited wealth, they could go into law or finance, shameful as such a fate might be.

Trollope’s women, however, are in an altogether more desperate situation. Every now and then some spirited young lady will take it upon herself to explain to a male character that while he might not like his options, at least he has them. She has none. Her choices are: (1) marry, and acquire some share of her husband’s property and independence, (2) live with family members as a spinster until she dies, (3) become a live-in companion to a widow or a tutor to someone else’s children. Getting a job, much less a profession, simply isn’t a path that’s open to her. So when an offer of marriage evaporates because the man changed his mind, or a parent can’t afford to outfit a daughter for the social scene where potential husbands roam, these women stare into the maw of impending doom. It’s not just that they will fall off the approved track of their culture and into some disreputable state. It’s that their very lives have become insecure. Who will take care of them? How will they live?

Those women came immediately to mind when I read the passage from Ruth. “My daughter, I need to seek some security for you, so that it may be well with you,” Naomi tells Ruth, before outlining exactly what that security means: a wealthy husband, a landowner. And how does one get such security? By “uncovering his feet” when he lies down to sleep. I have to keep this sermon G-rated, so I’ll just say that in this biblical euphemism, feet does not mean feet. You can find other examples of this delicate language in Exodus, regarding the circumcision of Moses’ son, and in Isaiah’s vision of the seraphim covering themselves with their three pairs of wings. I’ve seen some Bible commentaries that try to sanitize this story by claiming that Ruth was trying to wake up Boaz by making his feet cold. But Naomi specifies that Ruth is to wait until Boaz finishes partying at the threshing floor, put him in a state of undress, and lay down next to him. It’s clear that she is bent on creating a situation in which Boaz believes he is obligated to Ruth, and indeed, in the next chapter, Boaz takes it upon himself to make sure that Ruth has a husband -- a “guardian-redeemer” as the text puts it -- whether it be himself or another relative who has a claim on Naomi’s property. That is the only way a woman can find security. Faced with no way to fend for herself, her only option is -- by hook or by crook -- to get a man to accept her upkeep as an obligation.

The readings for today are unified by the theme of widows. Perhaps we gloss over that word without too much thought in our ordinary reading. Widows are women whose husbands have died; it’s a simple designation of marital status. But it’s anything but simple for women in the ancient near east. In both Hebrew and Hellenistic law and custom, a woman has no independent legal status as an individual. She can only be represented in society by a male guardian -- first her father, then her husband, and finally perhaps, her son. A woman without any of those people to protect and speak for her is the most vulnerable member of the community, with the exception of slaves. She literally has no standing -- no way to acquire a secure footing from which to lead a life that deserves respect and contributes to the community.

So when Jesus praises the widow who gives her mite at the synagogue, he was noting not just her financial contribution relative to her economic wealth. He points out that she is relinquishing the only thing that stands between her and nothingness. How is she to get something to live on? There is no one to procure it for her, and she has no respectable avenue of procuring it for herself. She is giving up the possibility, slender and temporary as it might be, of the pretense of membership in the community. And she does it, Jesus says, for the sake of a greater community in which she hopes to find a place.

I would like to think that those who heard Jesus’ words didn’t just watch the widow walk out of the synagogue with the vague thought that God would reward her bye and bye. Perhaps one of them ran after her and said, “My mother,” or “My aunt, I need to seek some security for you, so that it may be well with you.” After all, that’s what the community of apostles did, the author of Luke and Acts tells us, organizing a system of contributions and support for the widows and orphans among them -- a welfare system, a social safety net, if you will. They did not wait for the coming kingdom of God to make things right. They took responsibility for creating that reality in the here and now.

Too often the message “give sacrificially and trust that the Lord will provide” gets preached disproportionately to those for whom any giving is a risk. For these, a finger pointed to the Lord as provider is a finger pointed very deliberately away from those of us right here and quite able to provide for more than ourselves. I hope women have more and better options for finding security these days than tricking men into marrying them. (I’m terribly afraid that many do not.) But what I really see in these passages is a reminder that we are responsible for each other -- that when one of us casts off their last mite and throws herself on providence, they should find that God’s sheltering hands look a lot like my own.

Shelfie

I woke up to an email from a student, asking for a list of ten or so books "that you have found essential in the formation of what we know as Donna." Having taken a few minutes to put together a briefly-annotated list, I thought I might as well share it here. Links are to the Goodreads page, so you can add whatever takes your fancy to your "to-read" shelf or click on through to buy from Amazon.

Paula Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ -- a very readable account of the transformation of Jesus' message in the first few centuries of the common era, not just philosophically and religiously but also politically.

Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics -- an entire aesthetic and media theory in the guide of a comic book about how comic books work. Amazing.

Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms -- using records from the Inquisition, historian Ginzburg reconstructs the diversity of the intellectual enterprise from the side of both commoners and elites during the tumult of Reformation. A constant reminder that intellectual history isn't just the record of great thinkers, it's also the story of how ideas were received and transformed by the population, and how that transformation boomeranged back on the elites.

Erasmus, Enchiridion -- Erasmus is my favorite Reformation writer, and this is his great work on the life of faith. He's just such an amazing prose stylist, even in translation.

David Hume, The Natural History of Religion -- Hume demolishes the idea that religion began with pure revelation and has degraded to the conditions we see today, with wit and irony, in this brief little treatise. Essential to my understanding that every reality we encounter has an evolutionary history.

Elizabeth Moon, The Deed of Paksenarrion -- my favorite book, which I reread every couple of years, a fantasy trilogy about a soldier who becomes an instrument of the gods. You may find it very silly if fantasy isn't your thing, but it's undeniably the work of fiction that has most shaped me.

Shusako Endo, Silence -- For years Martin Scorsese has been trying to make a movie of this novel about Jesuit missionaries in 19th c. Japan. The most powerful portrayal I know of the sacrifice of Jesus.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun -- an examination of women's lives in colonial America through the objects they made. Reads like a detective story, uncovering something previously anonymous and subterranean.

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead -- A pastor reflects on life and faith and relationships as he nears his own death. Engages with all kinds of great thinkers, but never ceases to be an unfolding revelation of a novel.

Paul Collins, Not Even Wrong -- One of the great non-fiction writers tries to understand his autistic son by digging back into the prehistory of autism.

Girls will be boys and boys will be girls

Twitter is a-twitter with critiques of these books from Scholastic: How To Survive Anything (Boys Only) and How to Survive Anything (Girls Only). Ryan North (creator of Dinosaur Comics), working off a tip from this Canadian books blog, breaks down the tables of contents and makes some excellent points. The authors can't be bothered to actually make the girls' version about, y'know, surviving things, like the boys' version is. Because girls aren't into danger, presumably, like boys. So their book has chapters about becoming a great babysitter and teaching your cat to sit (?) instead of handling swarms of bees and zombie invasions.

Here's the thing. Yes, this looks really bad. Yes, it does cater to gender stereotypes. But any parent who reads the Scholastic book flyers regularly knows that this kind of thing is pervasive in their offerings. The flyers have little subsections for books mainly of interest to girls (BFF quizzes, friendship-bracelet crafts) and to boys (who would win in a fight between a shark and a lion, gross stuff). It's rarer to see the same book marketed in boys and girls versions, but the model here is clearly The Dangerous Book for Boys and The Daring Book for Girls. The marketing on Scholastic's website even makes reference to "those books that are a little too dangerous/daring."

As far as I know (and I don't know far, I admit), The Dangerous Book for Boys and its follow-up did not provoke widespread condemnation as sexist. The intent behind them seemed to be taken in a positive way by parents, educators, and the culture at large: to recapture some of the adventure and exploratory spirit that used to be promoted for children by publications in the forties and fifties. Experiment, take a chance, go off the beaten path, be self-reliant, escape the cocoon. The division by gender was part of the retro appeal, but also was understood as a way to craft identities for boys and girls that weren't simply based on current stereotypes. The books seemed to react against the lazy assumptions about boys (video games, boogers) and girls (sleepovers, glitter) by hearkening back to a time when boys wanted to learn the skills to become men and girls wanted to learn the skills to become women. The books are less about gender than their titles make them seem. The real appeal to their audience lies in the promise of not being treated like a child.

Granted, How To Survive Anything doesn't get it. The whole life-skills thing gets buried under a pile of naked appeals to "things boys like" and "things girls like." And consequently, the focus is on perpetuating childhood obsessions rather than peeking over the wall at the more independent, less self-indulgent world of grown-ups. This attempt to capitalize on the success of Dangerous/Daring is a tone-deaf failure.

But the reason for its failure isn't just that there's a boy book and a girl book, clearly; otherwise, Dangerous/Daring would be equally reprehensible. It's the way the creators have executed that concept that deserves criticism.

And I'm not sure how much criticism even that deserves. When Scholastic markets books about horses to girls and football players to boys, they do have something positive in mind beyond making money. They are trying to get kids to read. And catering to preferences already present in the audience is presumably an effective way to do that.

There's something important about having a counter-cultural conversation about children and gender -- about pushing back against the pink/blue, rhinestone/denim, giggle/fart shorthand. And I'm not defending How to Survive, because those tables of content are indeed alarming. But let's not throw out the babies with the bathwater. Every instance of producing two versions divided by gender is not culturally regressive or demeaning to women. And Scholastic's publishing and marketing choices have the good intention of promoting reading for kids at a critical time in the development of lifelong habits. Sure, they could feed them only what's the very best for them -- classic literature, progressive ideas, moral uplift. Some of us can probably remember what it was like to be excited about reading comics, or books about celebrities, or thrillers, and to find those enjoyments disapproved by those who didn't think that reading was good, full stop, but ought to be purged of its junk food elements.

Count me among the people who think we ought to let kids pick from the full smorgasbord of options, because the act of reading is not analogous to the act of eating in one very important sense. Eating isn't a choice. So we should make kids eat their vegetables, because they're going to eat something else if we don't.  Reading is a choice. If they don't have choices they like, they're not going to read at all. Some kids (like my daughter) are going to venture way beyond the gender-coded choices in the catalog because they have acquired the taste already. Some (like my son) won't read unless the book fits with his pre-existing obsessions and quirks. For people whose kids' preferences are more bound to gender stereotypes than mine, it might be critical to offer them sparkles and princesses on the one hand, slime and ninjas on the other. I'd rather have them read than be spared the stereotypes, if those are the only options.

Thank you Mr. Carnegie

On Saturday, I took my kids to the library.

It's a supremely ordinary weekend thing to do.  Millions upon millions of parents and kids do it every Saturday.  Yet it thrills me every time because of what libraries mean to me, and what they mean, period.

I spent countless Saturdays in Chattanooga's downtown library.  To this day, when I think of libraries, it is that modern-looking concrete edifice with its steel waterfall sculpture out front that I picture.  I came home from those trips with towering stacks of books, as many as I could carry, as thick as I could find.  I was blessed with parents who didn't obsess over what I might be reading, but facilitated my habit and left me alone to get on with it.

Sometimes I take my kids to the library just to return the piles of books we've managed to hoard and temporarily lose in various corners of our house.  But without exception, we leave with more.  Who can resist the treasures therein?  Don't we always want to leave with all of them -- or some subset so much larger than our ability to consume, it might as well be all of them?

As we were entering the library yesterday, I commented to the kids how glad I was that we had a library. Imagine if the only people who could read books were people with money, I said.  And I ask you to imagine it.  Imagine if we had to buy each individual book we wanted our kids to read, or that they wanted to read.  How could we feed their minds as full as we need to fill their stomachs?  I buy stacks of books for our kids; they come home on Scholastic delivery day with their backpacks bulging.  But it's not nearly enough for a hungry mind, for an expansive imagination, for a life stretching decades into the future with so much to learn and do.

Walter Dean Myers, the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, has taken as his theme "Reading is not optional."  I heard him in a radio interview explaining that we tend to promote reading as a wonderful escape, something that can take you around the world and into the past and future.  But what so many young people need to escape is not boredom, and what they seek is not entertainment.  If the children in our communities are not to be limited by their circumstances, they need the flexible skills to do more than their parents or neighbors, to imagine more than what is in their immediate environment.

If reading is not optional, then libraries are not optional.  I'm grateful that I live in the age of libraries, and I hope to high heaven that I don't live to see their end.

Lifelong readers

For Cady Gray's birthday, we got her the last three books in the Harry Potter series.  Earlier this summer, she tore through the first four books in alarmingly short order and with great enthusiasm.  So it was a natural gift idea.  When she took them out of the bag, the first thing she did was stack them up and raise them over her head.  "Look at all these pages!" she crowed.

One of the best things about her sudden affinity for Harry Potter is the sight of her, night after night, with a giant thick book in front of her face.  When I trolled the library as a kid, I looked for the fattest books I could find.  The hours upon hours of reading that a tall stack of thick books promised filled me with joy.

My mom expressed a little disappointment that we were encouraging Cady Gray's interest in Harry Potter.  I get it; along with many others with her religious convictions, she disapproves of the series' emphasis on witchcraft and wizardry. "There are so many good books she could be reading," was her comment.

My way of thinking comes from a different direction.  Sure, there are good books and bad books.  But absent a moral opposition to magic, the general consensus from people who know about such things is that the Harry Potter books are good books -- imaginative, well-written, engaging, world-building.  And frankly, I'm less concerned that she chooses books based on a canonical standard of quality than that she chooses books.  That is, that she is reading, that she chooses to read and gets something out of that choice.

The cultural conversation frequently throws me for a total loop.  For years people have been apocalyptic about how reading is on the decline.  And then when there is a surge in interest and reading thanks to some massive hit series, suddenly the crisis is that they are reading the wrong thing.  A few months back,  one of my Twitter friends shared a link to a profoundly misguided essay on young adult literature that complained about a preponderance of dark themes. All of a sudden we're being asked to picture teenagers locked in their rooms devouring books that might harm them, when previously the hue and cry had been about their inability to sustain attention over a novel's length or remain interested in anything that's not a video game.  I don't get it.

It's not that the objections are without merit.  It's just that the priorities seem to be out of whack.  If we want kids to read, let's be happy when they want to read and are excited about reading.  That will lead to a lifetime of reading, and to encounters with all the classics we might think are the best the written word can offer.  A sure way to discourage budding readers is to tell them what they enjoy doesn't count as reading, or isn't worth their time -- that if they want to read, it has to be from this shelf of approved nourishing ingredients.  It's like telling kids who want to cook that all they can make is vegetables.

I could be completely wrong, and I suppose I'll know it when this generation of young people who have grown up on Harry Pottery turn out to be Satanist sociopaths.  Right now I'm too jazzed seeing my just-turned-seven year old showing a preference for the longest-lasting books she can find.  I've been there, and it was the best way to grow up that I could have imagined.

Bullet points

I've got bullet points on the brain, since it's the name of tonight's episode of Breaking Bad (my recap post will go up at 10 pm Central).  But I've also had a bunch of random stuff on my mind today.  Here's some of it.

• My unsweet tea regimen on weekdays and diet soda indulgence on weekends have left me little room to try other summer drinks.  But in need of refreshment on the road last week, I tried a frozen strawberry lemonade at McDonald's.  Mmmmmm ... surprisingly tart, cool and utterly delicious.  I had another one today.  Nothing cuts through the heat of this brutal summer better.
• Over the years living with a man who keeps shaving cream on the vanity, I've noticed that the cans always get rusty around the exposed metal rings at top and bottom.  Which makes me wonder -- why are they typically made out of metal?  Is there something about the foam or gel contents, or about the aerosol propellant, that precludes a plastic container?
• It was the first-ever back-to-school sales tax holiday in Arkansas this weekend.  We took advantage both yesterday and today, getting just about everything on the kids' supply lists and some work clothes for me.  The crowds were certainly out, but we shopped early on Saturday and late on Sunday, and seem to have avoided the worst of the crush.
• I thought this piece by the great Robert Lipsyte about the punishing ascendency of jock culture in this country got to the heart of the matter a bit more than the usual handwringing.  Short and thought-provoking.

Nose in a book

Cady Gray is a reader -- and proud of it.  All we have to do is stock her shelves with anything we think she might like, and within a day or two she has found whatever's new, pulled it down, and started in.  She spends time every day walking around with a book in front of her face, lying on her beanbag chair or stretched out on the floor with an open book in front of her, or (my personal favorite position) curled up on the bed reading.

She comments whenever I find her like this that she is losing herself in a book, or that you can always find her with her nose stuck in a book.  Clearly she has embraced her bookworm identity.

At age 6, she is reading books that Archer's teachers are recommending for his level -- Harry Potter, Pseudonymous Bosch, and all the Roald Dahl she can get her hands on.  I'm ready to introduce her to Narnia and maybe even Bilbo Baggins.

The problem with your kid reading above her age level is that it's hard to gauge appropriateness both in terms of language sophistication and content.  I'm not too worried about content because she's a thoughtful and mature little girl, but obviously there are plenty of topics and tones that ought to wait.  She's starting the Harry Potter books at just the right time; if we can keep her from tearing through them all at once, she'll grow up with them and be ready for some of the darker stuff when she gets to it in later books.

I'd love to get your suggestions for books and authors the precocious readers in your family enjoy!

Though the heavens fall

A couple of weeks ago, in response to my welcome message, a new Raveler engaged me in a discussion of literature.  (My username on the site is that of a literary character; those who know the book often ask about it, striking up any number of pleasant conversations.)

When I mentioned my recently-discovered love of Dickens, she mentioned that I ought to check out Anthony Trollope.  Her description made Trollope sound right up my alley, and after a look at his Wikipedia entry, I downloaded the first of his Barsetshire novels, The Warden, from Project Gutenberg.

I'm enjoying it immensely.  It's the story of a minor churchman whose position includes the guardianship of a group of poor elderly men, with stipends provided by the income from some land.  Over the centuries the income has grown, but the small pensions played to the men has not; instead, the amount going to the warden's position has become quite lucrative.  A would-be reformer takes up the cause of the men through the courts and the press, and the warden's son-in-law defends the arrangement in the name of crushing all those who criticize the prerogative of the church.

What the warden wants is what's truly right.  But like so many of us, what we thought must be right was whatever arrangements were in place when we came on the scene.  The reformer believes it wouldn't be right to abandon the suit just because he hopes to marry the warden's younger daughter -- he quotes the maxim "Let justice be done though the heavens fall" -- but Trollope doesn't agree.  For him, justice is not just objective fairness, but also attention to individual circumstances and needs.  The old men aren't being deprived, and the warden isn't greedy; the men are susceptible to being turned against their loving caretaker, and the warden is hurt by the thought of being made into a symbol of clerical arrogance in the press.  On the other hand, the archdeacon who is so zealous in making sure the suit goes nowhere doesn't care about any of those things -- he's thrilled when he gets a legal opinion that the suit was filed against the wrong parties and need not ever be resolved at all.

It's really a book about politics and people, and how poorly the two intersect at times.  A good book to be reading in the middle of the wrangling in the halls of Congress, which so seldom seems to take any account of the good of people, caring only about the purity of abstract principle or the defense of power.

Daily reading

You'll find a lot of folks out there decrying the dumb stuff to be found on the internet.  Absolutely -- like everything, 90% of the internet is crap.

But what people miss when they talk about the idiocy of Twitter or blogs or whatever is that you get to choose what you read therein.  You could send a Martian into any bookstore and they'd conclude that books are mostly awful, because awful dominates in terms of sheer volume -- self-help, diet, celebrity, cash-ins, etc.  We don't think of books as a sewage pit because we know we don't pick a random sampling to read, but make informed choices based on what we want to read.  And within the range of things we might want to read are more wonderful books than we could consume in a lifetime, even though that range constitutes only a small sliver of the pie chart of books the market produces.

If, like me, you experience in the internet mostly through a feed reader, the internet looks very different than it does to the doomsayers.  I subscribe to interesting sources through Google Reader, then flip through the hundreds of documents it serves up daily for me using the fantastic iPad app Reeder.  In thirty minutes I can discover two essays I want to use in class, useful advice, cogent perspective on current affairs, inspiring and sobering personal stories, and a good laugh.  If I see something I think deserves wider attention, I hit a button to share it with folks who have chosen to follow me; similarly, many of the items I read are those my friends have passed along by hitting that same button.

Seen through my screen, the internet is a place that enriches, informs, and entertains me every day.  I choose to filter out the crap.  You do, too, every time you watch something you've DVR'd rather than flipping channels, every time you go to your favorite author's shelf in the library, every time you refrain from sweeping everything from the grocery store endcap display into your cart.  More choices always means a gross proliferation of crap, but that's not the important factor on which to focus -- instead, it's that we develop better tools for keeping our personal consumption nourishing, and watch the miniscule sliver of the pie that we want grow along with the part we're happily ignoring.

Sideways arithmetic

Lately Archer has been interested in creating word addition problems of the type he reads in his beloved More Sideways Arithmetic from Wayside School.  Wikipedia tells me that these problems are called "cryptarithms"; an example would be "one plus one equals zero."  The puzzle is to find out what digit each letter represents.

Archer has been trying to make his own, but the trick of constructing them so that all the elements are real words is slightly beyond him.  (He did offer "no plus no equals too" today.)  Yesterday he emerged from his room with "problems plus problems equals srbenpolm," and suggested -- without prompting -- that "srbenpolm" might be a city in a foreign country.

Cady Gray tried her hand at one last night.  She brought me out a sheet last night headlined "Bonus."  On it she had constructed "quail plus quail equals lequqi."  As a starting point she gave me that E=3 and L=1.  Can you figure out what Q, U, A, and I are?

Didja notice?

Like most American homes, ours has a bathroom well furnished with reading material. And for the last few months, every time I've gone in there, I've seen this comics collection cover:



It's one of the DC Showcase volumes of Silver Age superhero comics. This one is the third volume of World's Finest stories -- World's Finest being the series that teamed up Superman and Batman.

I looked at that cover over and over for weeks. And then I began to idly wonder who the heroes were punching out. What was the context for this moment of triumphant mayhem? Was this just a generic image, or did it have a story?

One day I realized the truth. They are punching out their non-super alter egos. It's a little hard to tell, but the signifiers are there: Note the glasses flying from Clark Kent's face, Robin's youthful (and vaguely swarthy) opponent, and ... Bruce Wayne's shoes look expensive, sorta, don't they?

I assume there's a sensational issue from which this splash page was taken, in which some sort of ginned-up appearance of conflict between the costumed versions and the secret identities. What's interesting to me, though, is that every time I see the cover now, I go through a ten-second version of the realization that took me weeks the first time: Oh, that comic book again, hm, who are they punching, oh yeah, it's themselves!

How long would it have taken you to figure it out? Or did you know right away?

Stop the presses

I've been a subscriber to the New Yorker for several years.  I love having access to the digital archives, and occasionally I leaf through the magazine to see if there's a current story I want to read.  But in reality, the physical printed copy that arrives in the mailbox every week is a burden to me.  I don't want to carry around a magazine, I don't want to stack them on my bedside table, and I don't want to recycle them.  What I want is simply to have access to the stories that interest me (usually my attention is called to them by blogs or tweets or longform.org) in digital form, added to my Kindle or available on the web.

What I want, in other words, is an online-only subscription.  And I would gladly pay the same rate I do for a print subscription (even though it would be nice if, given the costs of printing and mailing, the online-only were available at a discount).  It would be worth it to have free access to decades' worth of magazine content online, and to be able to selectively read anything in the current issue that had been pointed out to me as worthwhile.

I suspect that many of us are paying for services we don't want half of, in order to get the half we do want. Do you have an example?  And is there an answer to my online-only subscription wish -- are any venerable publications giving people that option?

The reading list

One of the tricks to a happy life, I often tell my students, is to find a way to make what you really want to do into your job.  By that I don't mean finding a career doing the thing you would do even if nobody paid you for it, but putting yourself in a position where the valuable experiences you might be too lazy or too scared to choose voluntarily are what you get assigned.

Joining a book club has that effect for a lot of people.  Faced with a choice between a slightly more difficult or serious book and the sweeter, more palatable entertainments on offer, a lot of us wouldn't read the book. But if we commit ourselves to other people to read it, we're often grateful for the push, getting an experience we wouldn't have had the discipline to choose for ourselves when there are more immediately pleasurable options for our leisure time.

I've been grateful for the A.V. Club's Wrapped Up in Books feature, which has enabled me to put several books under my belt that I now love but probably never wouldn't have gotten around to without the assignment.  The latest was David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, a formidably thick tome whose premise is about nested stories and intertextuality.  Sounds like a chore, no matter how many positive reviews you read.  But it was often stunning and frequently moving, and I didn't just admire the virtuosity -- I was delighted by it.  There have been a couple of selections for WUiB I haven't cared for, but by and large I have been so glad to be pushed into these experiences.

What assignments have enabled you to live the life you really want, but that you might not have chosen voluntarily?

It's everywhere

I'm on record as a Kindle lover.  My first-generation Kindle is always with me, tucked into my satchel to be pulled out at lunch or at the gym or at the coffeeshop.  On it you'll find books I've recently reviewed, upcoming and past Wrapped Up In Books selections, and a long list of Project Gutenberg books and other e-texts that I've grabbed off the web and sent to my Kindle's address for conversion.

Prompted by the elegant and astounding website longform.org, I've recently revived a neglected tool for my Kindle.  Longform.org selects and links to long form non-fiction feature writing -- from magazines, newspapers, and blogs.  You can send its finds to your Kindle so that whenever you have a moment to read, you have a collection of high-quality journalism waiting for you.  I find that I don't want to read long pieces on my computer screen; scrolling is awkward, the bright light is tiring to the eyes, and the computer is a place where I multitask rather than concentrate on a text for an extended period of time.  By contrast, the Kindle is exactly the place where I read longer texts, happily and naturally.

To make the longform.org to Kindle connection, your intermediary is Instapaper, a miraculous service that allows you to save the text of any webpage to read later.  Create a free account at instapaper.com.  Then drag the "Read Later" bookmarklet to the toolbar of your browser.

You'll need to set up your Instapaper account to send bundles of articles to your Kindle.  There are a few options; I think the service is well worth the 15 cents per instance that Amazon charges to receive a document and put it on your Kindle wirelessly.  Instapaper allows you to maximize your bang for that fraction of a buck by sending up to 20 of your unread items in a single file, every week or every month, whenever you have accumulated a minimum of 10 items.

Now go to longform.org -- or do what I do and add the site's feed to your favorite feed reader.  Mine is Google Reader.  Whenever longform.org adds a link to an article, it shows up in Reader along with all the blogs I follow.

Click on the "Original Article" link in the longform.org post.  Off you go to the website where the article sits on the web.  Then click your "Read Later" bookmarklet.  A pop-up informs you that Instapaper has saved the text to your account.  (If you don't happen to have your Kindle at any given moment, read your Instapaper articles on your iPhone or iPad, too.)

Pretty soon you'll start clicking "Read Later" all over the web, saving articles from your online newspapers and magazines and blogs.  And your reading time will be that much more diverse and enjoyable.  It's like stuffing your messenger bag full of newspaper sections and magazine issues for the next time you are in a waiting room with time on your hands -- except the selection's always growing, you only have the articles you're interested in, and if you're in the mood for Dickens, The Pickwick Papers is still open to the page where you stopped last time.

Good reads

I've had a few days in between required reading for my various jobs and avocations, and that's given me a chance to catch up on some of my blogs and feeds.  Some great writing out there recently, and since I rarely do the courteous thing and link to my favorites, I thought I'd rectify that tonight.

• The Secret Knitter sent me down memory lane and made me resolve to find more time for radio comedy with his remembrances of Gary Burbank, a Cincinnati radio personality from his youth.
• I was by turns horrified, amused, and deeply moved by the Yarn Harlot's description of her disastrous first pitch at a Toronto Blue Jays game.
• This beautiful little video has been making the knitting rounds lately, but I encountered it in Kay and Ann's elegantly minimalist framing.
• And now that I have odd moments to read some of the great journalism I've been rushing past for as long as I can remember, I'm utilizing longform.org and Instapaper to pop them over to my Kindle and iPhone.  You can't beat a nice meal-sized chunk of nonfiction, available whenever and wherever you are.

Whatever you're reading, I hope it's as inspiring and relaxing!

A lifetime's worth

Yesterday I showed you my yarn stash, one that will certainly last me decades at the fastest foreseeable rate of consumption. Today I'm thinking about the book stash that I've had all my life and continue to accumulate. These days it's more on my Kindle than in physical form, thank goodness, but I still love finding a book I want to read and adding it to my queue.

I've always loved libraries more than any other social institution. My parents could park me there all day when I was a kid; in college I spent countless hours exploring their riches. I used to keep lists of books I wanted to read, first on sheets of paper (writing as small as possible, with columns for call number and title), then on Hypercard stacks and e-mailed search results. I thumbed through every reader's guide and best books list I could, in book, newspaper, or magazine form, to add to my list.

I've never stopped doing that, although at least 95% of the books on those various lists remain unread, and although long weeks and months go by when I read nothing except what I must for my work. It's still a joy to find the books and file them away, anticipating the joys of immersing myself in them someday, secure in the knowledge that I'll never be at a loss when I have the urge to read for my own pleasure. Just today I came across an enticing list of novels about domestic life in the midst of some other research I was doing, and I couldn't resist dropping everything for ten minutes to look up the authors on Wikipedia, Amazon, Project Gutenberg, and my local libraries' catalogs to see how many of the books in the list were easily accessible to me.

There will be a sight more books left over at the end of my life than yarn, I hope. But the whole point of such a stash is that it is an opportunity, not an obligation. Knowing that running out of one's chief pleasures isn't a problem -- well, it lends all of life an air of abundance.

Days of future past

In response to yesterday's post about Archer's recent literary tastes, Doc Thelma suggested A Wrinkle In Time. I had had the same thought; just a few months back, I would have thought those books way beyond his comprehension, but now I suspect he might be fascinated by them. I'll put them on his reading list!

I realized that it would be helpful, to those of you who might have books to recommend, to describe why I thought time travel would be an enticing subject.

Incident 1: A couple of weekends ago, Archer fell and got a bad rug burn on his arm. He refused all medical attention but seemed distressed. A few minutes after the event he came up to us with tears in his eyes and a quaver in his voice. "If only I could travel through time, everything would be all right," he managed.

Incident 2: During the tornado outbreak last weekend, we had to go to the bathroom (our safe room) when a funnel started forming near our location. I had the Weather Channel radar on my laptop, and we were watching the time-lapse "weather in motion" view. Archer was fascinated by the timestamps on radar images, especially noting the fact that the latest one -- the "right now" image -- was actually five to ten minutes old. After the danger had passed, when I was tucking him into bed, he said with a delighted smile on his face: "It's like the radar was taking us back in time."

I'm sure there are lots of books where time travel is a mechanism to get some kind of plot going about history or whatever. Are there books he might like, similar to A Wrinkle In Time, where the nature of time and the consequences of moving through it in an unorthodox way are major themes?

Trying out fiction

I read with Archer every night. He's made a habit of bringing home non-fiction books of various kinds -- science, weather, biography -- many of which are really far below his level. I've been trying to tempt him with various longer-form juvenile novels, using the little I know about the fiction he has enjoyed ... stories from the perspective of animals, or with a school setting.

After I asked him to bring home a storybook that is "a little more challenging," Archer delighted me a couple of weeks ago by selecting Frindle by Andrew Clements. And to my further delight, he seemed utterly engaged and charmed by the story. The school setting helped, as did the notion of the new word, the dictionary, and the real-world consequences of Nick Adams' coinage.

Last night Archer read the final chapter to me, and he could barely keep the grin off his face as he described the secret messages and surprises being passed back and forth between the protagonists ten years after the events of the main story. I asked him afterwards if he thought that was a good ending. "That was a great ending," he corrected me.

I guess he was listening when I talked about how much I enjoyed the book and hoped he would bring home another like it. Another Andrew Clements book was in his backpack today -- The Report Card. Archer is already talking about the back blurb, which describes the plotline of a girl who gets bad grades on purpose even though she's a genius. Will this be the start of a more broad-based enjoyment of fiction? Or will this Clements phase be a passing craze? I'd love to get your suggestions for books at this level (fourth to sixth grade) that he might like, what with his various autistic obsessions. A special request: Archer has made two memorable references to time travel in the last few weeks, a concept I suspect he got from Bill Nye, and it would be great to find him some time-travel fiction.

The joys of fiction

Cady Gray's kindergarten teacher has worked hard to find chapter books that will challenge her. The latest book sent home in her backpack is a Boxcar Children installment called The Pizza Mystery. Usually Noel handles Cady Gray bedtime reading duties while I take Archer, but for the last couple of nights, for various reasons, I've been listening to Cady Gray read about the Boxcar Children.

Now, I know nothing about the Boxcar Children. And I came into the book midway. But I was struck by how quickly I became curious about what was going on. In last night's chapter, a young woman was hired by pizza parlor owners the Piccolos, and tonight the Alden children are getting tired of being yelled at by her. They also saw the woman leafing through Mrs. Piccolo's secret recipe book. And mysterious customers are ordering pizzas they don't want and causing the store to lose money.

I'm genuinely concerned about this situation. And it was interesting to see how animated Cady Gray's reading became as the chapter went on and the problems deepened. Both of us were caught up in this simple conflict, and the open-endedness of it created a desire to know more.

Now that I'm on the downslope of the semester, I have more time to read for pleasure. I've started going back to the gym just to give myself a half-hour reading window. For a long time I've been wanting to give Elizabeth Moon's science fiction another try; she's the author of my favorite fantasy series, The Deed Of Paksenarrion, but in the past I haven't been grabbed by her sci-fi work.

Maybe it's a sign that I have a different relationship to fiction these days -- a far less critical relationship, perhaps -- that I was grabbed this time, immediately. I had just finished Oath of Fealty, the latest book in the Paksenarrion series, and was absolutely riveted by its careful delineation of political and military maneuvering in Paks' world. Much of what I've always loved about Moon's work, I realized, is the interest in organizational detail. And so I immediately recognized those elements in Trading in Danger, the first volume of the Vatta's War series, which reminded me more of Charles Stross's Merchant Princes books than the military sci-fi that I had been expecting. It was as much a primer in the shipping business as it was a tale of adventure. I just started book two, and I wish I had more than an hour a day to devote to it.

Why am I so easily captivated by fiction these days? Have I been lucky enough to have only really good books come my way lately? Or is my interest in the fate of the Boxcar Children an indication that I'm a sucker for any story?

Girded

It's always a good day when you start to read a new book by your favorite author. Having cleared the last pages of two tomes for work, I was free today to begin Oath of Fealty by Elizabeth Moon.

Although she is best known as a science fiction author and frequent collaborator with other sci-fi writers, Moon is my favorite author because of The Deed Of Paksenarrion. It's a fantasy trilogy focusing on a female soldier who becomes a paladin, or religious knight. I've read and reread it many times, and I've passed it on to many students. It always inspires me to show more courage in my life, and sets me ruminating on saints, sects, and religious pluralism.

When you wait this long for a new adventure in a beloved world, and for the reappearance of familiar characters, you want to read every word slowly, to make it last. I'm afraid that even the 496 pages of this (in hardcover ... I'm reading the Kindle edition) will pass by too quickly. Then it's a year to wait until the next book in this second trilory, Kings of the North arrives -- a year at least (the book's not on the publishing schedule yet). Meanwhile, though, there is a lifetime of other books and series to dive into. I'm still in a holding pattern on many I started more than a year ago, and have had to put aside for the constant stream of reading that needs to be done for work. Perhaps this summer I'll be able to sink back into series fantasy with a sigh of pure relaxation.