Work that taps into our humanity.
Routine work can be outsourced or automated; artistic, empathic, nonroutine work generally cannot.
Tag: Books
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I am super excited. I’m about to start on an entirely new and foreign-to-me part of the country on my Andrea Reads America reading project: Idaho. What I’m most giddy about is that there is an author I’ve been hearing about for years — on book podcasts and in my book-nerd circles — and I’ve been waiting to get to Idaho so I can finally read her. The author? Marilynne Robinson.
Robinson is probably best known for Gilead, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, but Gilead is set in Iowa and I haven’t gotten to Iowa yet. Instead, I’ll be reading Housekeeping, which is set on a glacial lake in Idaho, Robinson’s home state. Like Gilead, Housekeeping glitters with awards and nominations, including nominations for both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award.
I’m dying to download Housekeeping, which is apparently set on a glacial lake and is a dark and intense read. I know nothing about Idaho, and even less about glacial lakes in Idaho, and so I’m eager to not only read a (hopefully) phenomenal book, but a (hopefully) phenomenal book set in a harsh, unknown-to-me climate.
I’m dying to download the book, but I’m refraining. I’m delaying gratification until I’ve finished my write-up for the Hawaii books I read. I’ve been sitting on these Hawaii notes for months, and it is time to compile and post them. Housekeeping — and Idaho — will be my reward for publishing, and for finally getting back on track with Andrea Reads America. I can’t wait!
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I suppose I should write about warm wooden tables and dark interiors, walls lined with heavy shelves that stretch from floor to ceiling, cozy nooks to hide and read in, quiet, peace, the endless options for learning or for escaping into a fictitious world.
I do love all those things about libraries. These new modern libraries with shiny white walls, giant atriums, minimalist archictecture and bright Ikea-inspired decor — they don’t speak to me. They don’t make me want to stay and cozy up. They feel cold and sterile, and they are noisy. I want warmth and muffled sound from a library.
But that’s not really what I want to write about. Library means something different to me now. Library doesn’t mean a place I drive to so that I can browse and check out books. Library means the suite of books stored on my nook. It means lightweight, easy to hold, no-car-needed access to any literature I could ever want. It means instant gratification when I finish a book and don’t yet have another. It means nonfiction during the day and fiction at night, without having to carry more than one book. It means I can carry Lonesome Dove and Gone With the Wind, and Pillars of the Earth, and they weigh ounces instead of pounds. It means readable without having to turn a light on, so I can read in bed without keeping my husband up.
To me, library now means portable. Library means the collection of books I carry in my purse.
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I loved the Little House on the Prairie books when I was growing up. I don’t know what the draw to them was, but it was strong. The family unit was intimate, and life was hard but wholesome, simple, and earthy. I loved how real everything was, and how memorable: a piece of candy on Christmas was spectacularly special: it came only once a year and there was no sense of, “Whaaaat? Only an orange and a peppermint stick in my stocking?” Kids in my life get those things every day.
But also there was the prairie in those books. Like Lonesome Dovelater, and O Pioneers!, and any other novel filled with sweeping vistas of golden wheat, or sweet heather, warm and grass-smelling in the sun, the prairie was a place I always fantasized about and romanticized. It represents the wild frontier, the families rough and raw and strong, who planted themselves on land that went on forever without trees or wind break, just flat open land covered in a sea of grass, grassland as far as you can see, and they planted themselves in it and wintered in the bitter cold of winters in sod houses or hand-built log cabins that wind and snow whistled through the cracks of. Winters that I could barely stand in a modern house with solid, double, insulated walls, and plastic-sealed windows.
There were grasshoppers in Little House — a plague of them — and glass windows were an extravagance. There were sod floors and people lived close to the earth, working the land, appreciating every small thing it provided. And they made their own clothes and pies and furniture, and Pa played the fiddle, and they read the Bible.
So when we moved to Minnesota, I wanted to visit the prairie. It was a mythical place to me, wholly unlike the coastal seascape of my childhood. And it was everything I imagined it to be, only better because I could smell it. It smelled of warm grass and wind, of sunshine and dirt, and of ozone as we watched the lightning storm and its black bulk crawl over the vast grassland toward our campsite.
For the month of April, I will be publishing a 10-minute free write each day, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Trying to get back into the writing habit.
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I used to volunteer in our kids’ classrooms on Mondays, helping our son’s third grade teacher with copies and helping our daughter’s first grade teacher with word-sort groups. I worked with a group of three kids in our daughter’s class – a fun, quick little boy who liked to shout out answers, an intense, commanding little girl, and a somewhat serious, quiet little Korean-American girl who, based on her sweet but mysterious smile, I suspect has a rich inner life with just a tiny bit of mischief.
One Monday, I was working hard to prevent the little boy extrovert and the assertive girl from dominating the lesson, as quickly-spoken kids tend to do, and so I asked the quiet girl a direct question, shushing the other two so that she could think and answer. After she hadn’t spoken for a good 20 seconds, I was about to prompt her when I remembered a passage from Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking. In her chapter about “Asian-Americans and the Extrovert Ideal,” the author interviews a Chinese-American man working in America:
A software engineer told me how overlooked he felt at work in comparison to other people, “especially people from European origin, who speak without thinking.” In China, he said, “If you’re quiet, you’re seen as being wise. It’s completely different here. Here people like to speak out. Even if they have an idea, not completely mature yet, people still speak out.”
I am not a patient person, and as my husband and friends can tell you, I am an interrupter, a sentence-finisher, a buttinsky. A prompter. So it was with great self-restraint that I held my tongue, telling myself that this sharp little girl had the answer in her, she was just letting her thought mature before speaking it. Another five or ten seconds passed, and then, with perfect poise, this six-year-old girl gave her answer fully formed, with no shyness, no “um”s, not one bit of hesitation. With no leading into an answer and looking to me for reaction to see if she was on the right track, with no question in her mind about the accuracy or thoroughness of her response. And as you can guess, she was concise, articulate, and absolutely correct.
I fell in love with her right then and was so grateful that I had read Susan Cain’s book. On top of helping me understand my husband and son better, Quiet gave me the restraint I needed to give this soft-spoken, highly intelligent girl a chance among her gregarious peers. Moreso, it showed me the rewards for patience, for I will always carry with me that moment of pride for this little girl. A moment neither one of us would have experienced had I prompted as I was tempted to do.
“I ♥ Introverts” originally published November 2012.
If you are an introvert, or are married to an introvert, or your best friend or child is an introvert, or if you don’t understand introverts, or if you have no interest in introverts whatsoever, or if you want a deeper understanding of humanity and your relations with people, you should read this book. I devoured it. -
To those who have found Nora hard to like, Messud points out that she would seem extremely likable if you met her, “and that’s the point. It costs her a great deal to be a likable character … underneath that she feels she has had to hide, up to this point, her real thoughts, her real dreams, her real desires, because they would be in some way unseemly or perhaps offputting to people.” – Claire Messud interviewed by Alex Clark in The Guardian
Two weeks ago I would have told you that characters are critical to me enjoying a book, a story, a creative non fiction piece. And by good characters I would have meant likeable characters. I would have told you, I’m not going to get attached, I’m not going to get into their stories, I’m not going to keep reading if the characters are jerks. If I don’t like them, why would I care what happens to them?
Like my friend, for whom setting is critical – she wants to spend time in a place she wants to be – I read to spend time with people I want to hang out with. Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call (Lonesome Dove) are probably my best friends in literature, and despite the fact that the story always ends the same way, no matter how many times I read it and hope that it won’t, I read and reread Lonesome Dove because I like to be with Gus and Call. With Gone With the Wind, I read it over and over again because even though Scarlett O’Hara drives me bananas, I’ll spend all day and night with Rhett Butler, thank you very much.
But after three recent books I read, I’m reconsidering my position on characters. Until I read them, I would have argued that even if there are ugly or annoying characters in a book, their detestablity provides delicious tension when balanced against the protagonist (think Disney movies) – will my guy triumph? Will the nasty character amend his ways? But now, I’m not so sure.
The first of the game changers was The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud. Messud’s novel sent the literary world into a tizzy because the main character is, according to everyone else, unlikable. I’ll concede that she’s not sweet-natured, but unlikable? That’s a stretch for me. Either way, I’m not sure why this has caused such a fuss because personally, a) I found Nora to be quite relatable, and if not someone I’d want to be best friends with, I at least understood her, and b) she was WAY more likeable than either of the – protagonists? – in Gillian Flynn’s insanely popular Gone Girl. (Perhaps it is because Nora is an unlikable woman?) I question the term protagonist for Flynn’s characters because protagonist suggests the one you’re rooting for, and honestly, even though Amy and Nick are the lead characters, one of whom should technically be considered the protagonist, I wasn’t rooting for either of them. They are anti-heroes, antagonists, and they both made me snarl (and also laugh) as only a well-crafted villain can. Was there such a fuss about their unlikability as there was with Messud’s character Nora? I don’t know.
The third book that kept me turning pages, even though the characters repulsed me, was The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara. Within the first five or ten pages, I didn’t trust or like the narrator nor his best friend, Norton, around whom the story revolves. The more I read, the more disgusted I was by both of them – their arrogance, their superiority – and yet I kept turning pages, all the way to the end, when I was so revolted that I took the book back to the library within minutes of finishing it. I wanted it out of my house.
I’m not generally a rubber-necker. I don’t enjoy train wrecks, neither the literal nor the figurative kind, and I don’t gape at gore – I turn away before I see it. And yet… With all three of these books, contrary to what I would have told you two weeks ago, I devoured them despite the unlikability, despite the train wreck stories, of the characters. I wouldn’t have wanted to hang out with or get close to any of these people, yet I did still care what happened to them. In fact, of all the books I’ve read this year, these were the three that I devoured, that I put writing and chores and sleep aside for. Why? I can’t figure it out. Perhaps it is because of these characters’ realness. These authors took human traits that all of us are prone to – anger (The Woman Upstairs), self aggrandizement (Gone Girl), entitlement (The People in the Trees) – and rather than push them down, they brought them to the surface. These authors showed us what goes on inside an unsympathetic character’s mind, granting us understanding (Gone Girl, The People in the Trees) and sometimes even compassion (The Woman Upstairs). They also showed what happens to a person when these traits become dominant, the types of sorry lives they lead when they don’t keep their meanness in check. They showed what could happen to us if we hide too deep and too long, or at the other end of the spectrum, if we think only of ourselves and let loose all our faults.
Maybe I was wrong, then, about needing characters to be my best friend if I am to enjoy a book. My gorging on these novels is testament to that. None of them even had good guys to balance the antagonistic “protagonists” against, and yet I ate them up. I do know, though, that in order for me to want to read it again, for me to willingly spend time in a story over and over, I’m going to need to love a novel’s players. I’ll hang out with ugly people once and listen to their tales, but if I’ve checked them out from the library, I can pretty much guarantee that they’ll be going right back, without me scooping up a copy for my own shelves. Because for me to want to buy a character’s story and keep it in our home, in our company, the characters not only have to be likable, they have to be my friends.
What about you? How do characters affect your enjoyment of a book, or your likelihood of re-reading it?
I highly recommend The Woman Upstairs. The work is exquisitely crafted, and as I said, Nora wasn’t particularly unlikable to me. Her intelligence and articulation might merit a re-read, even if I don’t want us to be besties. For my immediate reactions to the three books mentioned, here are my reviews on Goodreads, written as soon as I finished reading: The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara (curiously, the book I liked least was also the most thought-provoking).Originally published September 16, 2013.
Butterfly Mind 