I started reading the US in three books per state in January of 2014, nearly three years ago. I just finished reading Kansas, the 17th of 51 states (and the District of Columbia).
This is going to take a while.
Tag: reading
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I have another blog. It’s called Andrea Reads America, and it chronicles my reading tour of the United States. Until yesterday, I had abandoned it.
I didn’t like spending time there anymore. The blog’s theme was outdated, the look was stale, and the thought of overhauling the site overwhelmed me. I finished reading the state of Iowa in March — five months ago — but I felt so blah about Andrea Reads America‘s look, I didn’t even want to visit the site, much less write for it. I was uninspired to publish an Iowa writeup.
Which means I also stopped my reading project.
It’s funny how invisible obstacles build up in your psyche like that. I wasn’t conscious of the fact that my site’s look blocked me from continuing my reading tour of the US. But as the Iowa book summaries gathered dust in my composition book, without making progress towards the keyboard and the screen, I wandered away from reading America.
I’ve read a couple of excellent books in the interim — it has not been a complete loss to have abandoned the project. But after finishing a few good books outside of Andrea Reads America, I started wandering aimlessly in my reading. I’ve become indecisive about selecting novels. I’ll pick something up, and put it down. Pick something else up, put it down.
A couple of days ago, I started missing my reading project. I needed direction. And after reading a few sailing books, I longed for land: for the prairies of the central US.
I didn’t feel good about starting with Kansas while the Iowa writeup still lingered, though. And I didn’t feel good about publishing the Iowa writeup with my site looking the way it did. So Friday night, I finally overhauled Andrea Reads America. I gave it a new theme, Libretto.
It’s simple. I like it.
Yesterday, after giving Andrea Reads America a makeover, I took my laptop and my dusty notes to my chair under the dogwood tree, and I unblocked myself. I wrote my Iowa post.
And now? I’m on the prairies, reading Kansas.
Also of note: I discovered when I was writing the Iowa post that we have wifi under the tree!
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I remember in grade school we would sometimes get puzzles or logic problems to work on. My favorites were rebuses, the pictograms that represented a word or phrase. For some reason, this one always stuck with me:
I think it stuck with me because though I solved the puzzle — Read between the lines — I didn’t understand the expression. I knew what it meant at an academic level, but I had never experienced reading between the lines before. I didn’t know how to do it or when it was necessary.
It wasn’t until much later in life, when I started reading Hemingway, that I finally felt the Aha! moment of picking up on allusions, of filling in the blanks the author leaves empty, of understanding what the author is telling you without telling you.
Hemingway is a master of this. His words tell one story — a story that often seems simplistic and superficial when the lines are the only thing you’re reading. It’s the words he leaves out that tell a deeper, more complex, more human story, as in the frustrated love between Jake and Brett in The Sun Also Rises, or the unspoken story behind the dialogue in “Hills Like White Elephants.”
I remember the sensation of it all clicking for me when I picked up on the unwritten story in a book. I don’t recall the book — it may have been Life of Pi — but I remember thinking, “This is what it means to read between the lines.” It was one of those moments when your scalp prickles and you get a rush of heat in your chest. And when it all clicked, when I finally understood, I thought of that pictogram from grade school, as I still do whenever I think of reading between the lines.
The bigger mystery to me now is how does a writer achieve this phenomenon, of creating a story behind the words? It requires deliberate, precise choices: this act of omission, this art of leaving negative space. It is a rare and precious skill.
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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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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 