Too Many Books

April 9, 2012 By Siobhan Curious in books, education, learning, literature, personal, reading, society, teaching Tags: Joyce Carol Oates, Marcel Proust, real life 33 Comments

The Husband and I are moving soon. The other night, we invited a mover over to give us a quote. He looked around and said, “It’s going to cost you a fortune. You have too many books.”

I know what some of you are thinking. Never! Sacrilege! No such thing! These were not my responses. I nodded, resignedly, and said, “I know. I know.”

We do indeed have too many books. How do I know this? Because for days – nay, weeks – now, I have been ruthlessly culling books. I’ve been pulling books off shelves and staring at them and saying things like, “Where did this come from?” and “Why did I buy this?” and “When will I ever, conceivably, read this again?” The Husband has been doing the same, and we now have a pile of what looks like hundreds of books in the middle of the living room floor, waiting for the second-hand bookstore man to come and sort them and judge them and, we hope, pay us for some of them.

Purging books is a painful business. Why? Why is it so much harder to let go of a book, even a book we don’t particularly like or a book whose purpose has been served, than it is to dispose of most other things, even more expensive things – an article of clothing, a tchotchke, an electronic gadget?

A friend recently told me that she regularly tries to winnow down her book collection and can’t do it, because even the books she doesn’t like or has never read symbolize something: her independent intellectual life, which is so different from the life lived by everyone else in her working-class immigrant family. She described pulling a collection of Joyce Carol Oates stories from a shelf – a collection she’s never read – putting it on the “discard” pile, and then pulling it back out and returning it to the shelf. ”I bought it when I began university,” she said. ”It was a book that signified the person I was becoming, a person who read contemporary American literary authors. I can’t stand Joyce Carol Oates! But I still have that damn book.”

I find myself feeling exactly the same thing as I stand before my shelves staring once again at that copy of Swann’s Way that I have tried to read four times. On my last attempt, I trudged 300 pages into it before giving up. Every time I do a book purge, I consider getting rid of it. This time I was successful! Why? Because I have bought myself the newish Lydia Davis translation of Swann’s Way, and so I can still be the sort of person who has Proust on my bookshelf, and who can firmly believe that I will one day be the sort of person who has actually read Proust.

(Repeat for: Ulysses, The Voyage Out, about twenty back issues of Granta, Barack Obama’s memoir, and so forth.)

Other reasons I struggle when giving up a book?

It has a personal inscription in it, even if a) I’ve never read the book, or b) I didn’t like the book, or c) I no longer like the person who gave it to me.
It was given to me by The Husband, mostly because I know he will be peeved when he finds it in the “discard” pile.
It might, possibly, contain an article, short story or chapter that I might, possibly, use in a course that I might, possibly, design one day.
I loved it once, even though I will certainly never read it again.

One of the biggest problems is my collection of children’s and young adult books. I keep some of them because I still love them and can imagine re-reading them from time to time. Others have sentimental resonance. But I have far too many, including some I’ve never read all the way through. I sometimes consider paring the collection down, but I have a fantasy that I will one day propose, and have approved, a project for a reading zone at my college. This reading zone would be a quiet room full of books appealing to teenagers, and I would re-design my Preparation for College English course around it. I would bring my struggling second-language readers to the reading zone and present them with shelves and shelves full of books that would instantly grab their attention because they are made to do so, unlike the dusty dun-coloured hardbacks in the library. How can I get rid of these books when it’s possible that I can someday bring this project to fruition? Never mind that it will never be approved, for a thousand reasons. I need to cling to these books just in case.

I know: some of you will say, “Why on earth would you want to get rid of any of your books? Who cares what the movers say or how much it will cost to move them? Books are sacred! Hold on to your books!” (This is more or less what my father said to me on the phone this afternoon.)

But here’s the thing: I love books, and I find them beautiful, and I become very attached to some of them. But they aren’t sacred. They’re things.

This seems to be a great point of contention for some people. For example, I’ve been reading a lot of home decor magazines and blogs lately, and a lot of attention is paid to books as decorative objects. This upsets some readers. A lot. Check out this post on my favourite design blog, Apartment Therapy, in which the writer argues for the practice of organizing books by colour, and some commenters respond with rage verging on apoplexy.

I’m not sure I could bring myself to treat books with quite that degree of objectification. (Besides, I don’t think it looks all that nice.) But there have been moments of my purge in which I have given myself pause because I have wondered if my house will look sad and empty because it will be less bursting with books. If, god forbid, my house will look like less of a READER’S house.

And these moments have confirmed for me what I have suspected all along: books are stuff. They take up space. And the more space I devote to the ones I don’t really care about, the less respect I am showing for the ones I really love. So I have to be ruthless to be kind. Kind to myself, kind to our budget, kind to my house, kind to my movers, and kind to my favourite books.

Are you able to treat your books with both the love and the firmness they deserve? When a book has had its day, are you able to let it go? Or do you love your piles and piles of books as much as you love each book itself? Do you wish you could liberate yourself from your mountains of books, or do those mountains make you happy? I always feel lighter, if a little saddened, when a pile of books makes its way out the door. I rarely miss a book once it’s gone, and in the age of Amazon, I can be pretty sure that if I do, I’ll be able to find it again. If your home is full of books you don’t love, maybe it’s time to start saying goodbye.

But according to my movers, I’m no one to talk.

Image by Marja Flick-Buijs

My Top 10 Books of 2011

January 12, 2012 By Siobhan Curious in blogging, education, literature, personal, reading, society Tags: Arts, Carl Wilson, Carrie, Celine Dion, Chester Brown, Craig Thompson, Emma Donoghue, Habibi, jeffrey eugenides, julian barnes, Kyran Pittman, Montreal, Stephen King, Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games, Tom Perrotta 27 Comments

For English teachers, reading for pleasure can be tough. After grading papers all day, the last thing I want to do is read more. Also, my personal reading has become subtly oriented toward finding material for my courses; I seem to be approaching every novel and memoir through the (imagined) perspective of a (precocious) seventeen-year-old, and this alters my ability to enjoy things.

(Case in point: 150 pages into Ondaatje’s beautiful The Cat’s Table, I yelled, “Finally, Michael, a hint of a #*&@ing plot! Gawd!” I didn’t use to do that kind of thing.)

Nevertheless, I read some books for fun this year, and some of them I flat-out loved. Here they are.

These books were not necessarily published in 2011, but they were part of my 2011 experience.

1. Carrie by Stephen King

Yes. Carrie. I am not a horror fan, nor a Stephen King fan; also, I’ve never seen the film. However, the morning of my birthday, I watched a video by Professor Adam Crowley in which he lectures undergraduates on the importance of reading, and recommends Carrie as a book everyone should read. Later that afternoon, my present from The Husband arrived in the mail: a Kindle. The great thing about a Kindle is that you can download samples; immediately after opening it, I got myself excerpts from eight different books: seven recent critically acclaimed literary masterpieces, and Carrie. I read through all eight excerpts. Not one of them did a thing for me except Carrie - the two seconds it took to download the full book were agonizing. I read the whole thing in one afternoon and evening. If you haven’t read it, do yourself a favour. It’s riveting and elegant, although you’ll have to contend with a lot of menstrual blood and screaming. In this story, King is the kind of writer I aspire to be: transparent, sensitive, and a little bit manipulative, all while making it look so easy.

2. Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson

Again, I feel like some caveats are called for – appropriate, because this book is one long caveat. I’ve been meaning to read it for years, not only because it has been so acclaimed, but also because I used to know Carl Wilson a little – he lived in Montreal, with a couple of my friends, for a while in the 90s, and he was always good company and a very funny storyteller. Reading this book is like hanging out with him and listening to him rant, in the most articulate and entertaining way imaginable, about the horror that is Celine Dion and the horror that is his horror of Celine Dion. In the process, he tells us a lot about art, class, taste, humility, and the pitfalls of being “cool.” The last two chapters sent me into the open-mouthed paroxysms of intellectual delight that you always hope pop-culture analysis will bring about (and it almost never does.) It’s a little tiny book. You have nothing to lose but your pretensions.

3. Room by Emma Donoghue

This book deserves every word of acclaim that it has received. I had to take two stabs at it, though, because the first time, I was having a bad day, and it is not a book to read when you are having a bad day. The story of a little boy who is being raised in captivity by his kidnapped and confined mother is totally convincing; Donoghue’s capturing of a very peculiar five-year-old voice will leave you astonished. (I also read Donoghue’s Slammerkin and The Sealed Letter this year, and they are both also great.)

4. The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta

This book was a Christmas present from The Husband. He knows what I like. I love Tom Perrotta, from Election (yes, the movie was wonderful but the book was an entirely different kind of wonderful) to Little Children (ditto). Perrotta’s writing is often called “dark comedy,” but I don’t really see it – The Leftovers is funny in spots, but is mostly a finely wrought character drama about the people who have been left behind after an inscrutable Rapture-like event, in which a seemingly random sample of the population up and disappears into thin air. Apparently an HBO series based on the book is in the works. CAN’T WAIT.

5. The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

It won the Booker. It deserved it. This slender story, about a man who can’t let go of a long-defunct love affair, is both puzzling and satisfying. The “sense” one has at the “ending” is that one wants to go back and read the whole damn thing again to see if one has properly understood. There’s been some bashing – It’s too simple! It’s too complex! It thinks it’s complex but it’s really not! – but isn’t there always when a book wins a big prize? I used to teach Barnes’ Talking it Over in my International Baccalaureate class, as it was the perfect vehicle for discussing the technique of point of view, and a theme that Barnes seems obsessed with: the unreliability of memory and the fallibility of any single perspective. What really happened? is a question that any novelist – and anyone who cares about human life and nature – should really be thinking about all the time.

6. Paying For It by Chester Brown

I’m certainly glad I never dated Chester Brown. (I’ve dated men who were something like him. There were problems.) That said, I’m also glad I read this book. The subject wasn’t immediately appealing. Brown decides that he’s had enough of the responsibility entailed in real “relationships,” but that he’s not willing to forego sex, and so the only rational move is to begin frequenting prostitutes. This is a graphic – in all senses of the word – chronicle of the years that follow. The illustrations of his sexual encounters are explicit yet clinical, terms that I expect apply to Brown himself. One of Brown’s previous works is a lauded comic-strip biography of Louis Riel; it’s one of my favourite books, so I wasn’t altogether surprised by how much I loved this one.

7. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

A student who had made it clear all semester that he had no intention of reading any of the assigned books, or any books at all for that matter, asked me out of the blue one day, “Miss, have you read The Hunger Games? Would you be surprised if I told you that I read the first two books this weekend? It’s actually interesting.” Yes, folks, sometimes books are interesting. Yes, this one’s great. It’s just great, so just read it. I am halfway through the second book now and am not having the same gripping experience, so savour the first one for all it’s worth.

8. Habibi by Craig Thompson

It will probably make you weep uncontrollably. It’s very fat, but you’ll want to read it slowly, so, as graphic novels go, this one will take you a long time. I’m not a visually attuned sort of person – when reading comics, I focus on the text and let the images wash over me – but this book won’t allow that sort of reading. You need to immerse yourself in it entirely and linger over each page, if only to say, “Holy crap, this one frame must have taken him MONTHS.” Stunning.

9. The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

I struggled with myself over this one, and it made the list because I didn’t have enough reading time this year, and so couldn’t find a better candidate. (Okay, belated English teacher’s New Year’s Resolution: less TV, more books.) It was fine. I loved The Virgin Suicides - I reread that this year, too, as I was teaching it – so I’ll always have a soft spot for Eugenides, but the story here is very slight, if mostly well told. I moved along through it easily. The characters were not loveable, but the brilliant manic-depressive Leonard was skillfully drawn. I recognized the world Eugenides was capturing: recent college graduates trying to reconcile everything they learned about critical theory with the blood and mud of real life. If you care about emerging adulthood and Barthes, give it a shot.

10. Planting Dandelions by Kyran Pittman

Full disclosure: Kyran Pittman and I grew up in the same small town, and her parents were family acquaintances; her father, the poet Al Pittman, was one of my professors at university. Much of my pleasure from reading this “memoir” – more of a collection of personal essays – may have come from the sparks of real recognition I felt while reading it, as I encountered people and places familiar to me. That said, it’s a lovely book. Pittman details her flight from a little city in Newfoundland and an unhappy marriage, to Arkansas and a man she met on the internet. Then she tells us about the years that follow, in which she and her new love marry, raise three boys, and build their life in a place as foreign to her as the Middle East might be. I’ve always wanted to visit the south of the United States, and Pittman’s accounts give me a sense of how I might feel there. She also helps me understand what it is to be a mother, and how it feels to have your little blog become a big phenomenon and, eventually, a book. It’s fun and funny and honest, and manages to be cozy, exotic and totally ordinary, all at once.

Have you read any of these books? What did you think? And please, please tell me what to read next.

Life and Death and Anthologies

October 31, 2011 By Siobhan Curious in books, education, literature, personal, reading, writing Tags: anthologies, Dublin, Galway, Ireland, real life, travel 11 Comments

Anthologies are odd. They’re compiled of a lot of stuff that someone thinks we should read, and so they have little to do with the real experience of reading. Being a “reader” is as much about wandering down the aisle of a bookstore looking for attractive covers, or downloading an excerpt on a Kindle based on a friend’s recommendation, as it is about curling up in a chair and getting lost. Anthologies are meant to educate us; they are not meant to transport us. But sometimes they do both.

On Saturday, a column by Mireille Silcoff, in the National Post, begins when she goes into early labour, and is rushed off to the maternity ward in such haste that she arrives without reading material. Her husband, hapless when it comes to books, brings her some duds from home, including her old Norton Anthology of English Literature. At least, I’d have called it a dud, but she takes a different approach. She settles in with it, and discovers a lot of things about herself and, most tellingly, about her undergraduate education. All those things are interesting, and I will write about them later, but I was first struck by Silcoff’s unexpected affection for her anthology. It resembles an experience of my own.

When I was twenty-nine and in the middle of my Masters degree, I went off to Ireland for a summer, in order to research the novel I was writing and earn some transfer credits doing a “writer’s course” through, of all things, the University of Arkansas. I planned to arrive a couple of weeks early, so I could spend some time with a friend in Dublin, and drop in on a postcolonialism conference at the National University of Ireland campus in Galway, where my course would be held. I was an experienced traveler, and had learned to travel light. There would be no shortage of bookstores in Ireland, but I needed one good read to get me there, something small but full of stuff to chew on, so that after my arrival, I could put off buying more books for as long as possible.

My “writer’s course” was going to consist of a creative writing master class and a survey on contemporary Irish fiction. The survey required an anthology, the Penguin Modern Irish Short Stories. Perfect, I thought. Or, at least: adequate. A book. Lots of things in it. I have to read stuff from it anyway. It’ll do.

Once I settled into my seat on the airplane, I discovered the first problem: the first fifty pages of the anthology were missing. There was no table of contents; the collection began in the middle of a story by George Moore. There was also no index. The authors and titles of the stories were indicated in headers at the top of each page, but I had to thumb through scores of unfamiliar names to find the names I wanted: Yeats, Synge, Joyce, Beckett, and … well, truthfully, those were the only twentieth-century Irish writers I knew anything about. I sighed. All right, fine. What else was I going to do? I settled in, turned to Beckett’s “Dante and the Lobster,” and started reading.

I carried that anthology everywhere with me for the next two weeks. I read from it as I lay wrapped in a blanket, at four a.m., ravaged by jet lag, in the lamplit hammock in the yard behind my Dublin friend’s apartment block. (The hammock was the only place I could read without disturbing anyone. My friend and I were sleeping on the floor of her one-room; there was a chair next to the communal telephone outside her apartment door, but the light switch beside it illuminated the hallways of the whole building for three minutes, after which it shut off automatically.) I read that anthology in cafes in central Dublin, in between visits to Nora Barnacle’s house and the National Gallery. I read it on the four-hour bus ride to Galway, and then during the interminable lonely stretches in the hostel common room as I tried to work up the nerve to make conversation. (For someone who has spent so much time on my own in foreign countries, I’m a terrible solo traveler.) I read it between presentations at the postcolonial conference, and even a little bit during Terry Eagleton’s keynote speech (sorry, Mr. Eagleton). And I kept reading it, marking each story with a dog ear when it was done, until I’d settled into my dorm room at the National University to begin my course.

Flipping back and forth through the pages and choosing stories by whim or chance, I discovered several writers that would stay with me long after that, Elizabeth Bowen and John McGahern in particular. (McGahern would show up as a speaker during my survey course, along with Patrick McCabe and Dermot Healy and a number of others, whose names I would probably recognize if I met them now. Our teachers kept telling us what an honour it was to spend time with these writers, but we knew nothing about them, and the honour was lost on us.) I don’t remember a whole lot about the anthologized stories themselves. I couldn’t for the life of me tell you now what “Dante and the Lobster” was about. But that wasn’t the important thing.

The important thing was partly that I was in Ireland and was learning snippets of what it means to be Irish. I was learning things I would have known if I had gone to school in Ireland, if I had read literature at an Irish university, even if I had just spent my youth drinking in the pubs of Ireland and watching Irish television. Lying on the beach on the island of Inisheer, where the novel I was working on would be set, I began reading Mary Lavin’s “Happiness.” While I was in the midst of it, a young Australian man I’d met on the ferry came to sit next to me on the sand and chat me up, and although he was handsome and friendly and I’d been lonely, I was annoyed. I’d been caught in a little teacup of Irish life, and he’d sloshed it. I eventually froze him out, probably rudely, and he went off to find someone less bookish and more grateful, and I returned to Mary Lavin’s world.

I was getting more than a cultural education. I was captivated by the intensity of each bit of narrative. Short stories are like that, but there was something about the book itself, about the incredible density of this small volume. It was like a chunk of paper dark matter. Or a chocolate box, except that each bonbon might turn out to be a bite of foie gras, or a marble, or a leaf of mint.

Silcoff describes her experience rereading her Norton Anthology by saying that when one is in the hospital,

Best to read short things about big ideas that can capture the imagination quickly. You are in a place of life and death, after all. It’s only normal to become a little philosophical.

She’s talking about the maternity ward, but she could be talking about Ireland. Or any new place, really – any place we travel to. Everything seems both more alive and more mortal when you’re traveling. The smallest thing leaps out of the landscape like a butterfly, and then, in no time – a moment or a few weeks – it’s gone. Just like the title of a story might leap out at you from the page in the middle of a thick little book, and then, within a few moments or an hour, the story has faded and given way to another.

Once I was done with the anthology – every single story – some classmates and I made a pilgrimage to the Galway bookstores. Ireland is famously in love with its own literature, and Irish writers were always the most prominently displayed. I was able to buy novels by Elizabeth Bowen and Flann O’Brien with confidence now, having already tasted their wares. I loved those novels – I should really go back and read them again – but they were heavy, immersive experiences, very different from the delicious flashes of the short stories in that anthology.

It’s in front of me now on my desk. On its cover, a coachman glares over his shoulder at me, his whip at half mast. In the midst of all my grading and research and household cares, I don’t have the time or energy I need to return to it right now. And maybe returning to it is not the point. I’m an English teacher, and so have shelves of anthologies around me, at home and in my office at school, the detritus of many years of publishers begging me to impose their books on my students. Maybe I need to choose a random volume – immigrant narratives or Victorian poetry, gothic tales or African drama – and taste some new mouthfuls. I’m not in labour, or on the road, but every place, everywhere, is a place of life and death.

Thanks to Erin M. for the link to the National Post column! It comments on more than just anthologies – its main thrust is the uses of a college education (anthologies included). More on that topic soon.

Willing to Read and Write

September 1, 2011 By Siobhan Curious in education, learning, literacy, literature, philosophy, reading, society, teaching Tags: books, classroom, education, learning, literacy, literature, philosophy, reading, society, teaching, writing 31 Comments

Yesterday, I told my college students that they need to read the next 150 pages of the novel we are studying, Life of Pi, over the next seven days. This is not news – they got a reading schedule on the first day of class, and were told to read ahead. Nevertheless, there was a collective gasp and more than a little laughter. A few moments later, during a close reading exercise, I asked them to talk about a passage with a group and come up with a point that they might focus on “if you had to write a couple hundred words about this piece.” Around the room, students looked at each other with horrified amusement. A couple hundred words? About this? What does she think we are, writing machines? There were quiet snorts and groans, subtly and not-so-subtly rolled eyes.

It’s early in the semester, and I still have reserves of patience that I won’t have in a few weeks’ time. By October, I may break down and say something like:

“If you’re not sure you can read one hundred fifty pages of clear, simple prose in a week, or if you’re not sure you can write two hundred words about a two-page passage, that’s ok. It’s not a problem if you don’t know how to do it – you can learn. However, if you don’t want to learn how to do these things – if you don’t want to practice and get feedback and meet that challenge, and if you resent me for asking you to – then college is not the place for you.”

The previous class, I’d asked students to interview each other about their reading habits, and write a paragraph about their partners’ reading lives. A predictable number of students said that they don’t like to read, never read for enjoyment, and last read a novel in the ninth grade, because it was required. (The number was predictable to me, that is – anyone who doesn’t teach college might be astonished by the number of college students who have absolutely no interest in reading.)

I would like at some point to ask similar questions about writing, but they seem redundant – surely people who don’t read also don’t write? However, “writing” has become a much more complicated phenomenon in the age of digital communication, and many would argue that our students “write” all the time, although a middle-aged fuddy-duddy like me might be reluctant to call much of the texting, messaging and Facebook posting they do “writing,” any more than I’d call a to-do list “writing.” Maybe what I’m talking about is long-form writing: long emails in the spirit of “letters,” diary entries that go on for pages and pages, poems and stories and even stabs at novels, blog posts.

A few weeks ago, an article appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education called “We Can’t Teach Students to Love Reading.” In it, Alan Jacobs explains that

“‘deep attention’ reading has always been and will always be a minority pursuit, a fact that has been obscured in the past half-century, especially in the United States, by the dramatic increase in the percentage of the population attending college, and by the idea (only about 150 years old) that modern literature in vernacular languages should be taught at the university level.”

Jacobs points to the American GI bill, and the influx of soldiers into American universities after WWII. From then until now,

“far more people than ever before in human history were expected to read, understand, appreciate, and even enjoy books.”

Once, only a tiny minority of people were expected to get a post-secondary education; now almost everybody is. However, it is still unreasonable to expect everyone to enjoy reading, even though a university education – at least a traditional one – is difficult to pursue if you don’t.

Jacobs divides people into those who love reading, those who like reading, and those who don’t. Universities, he says, are full of

“…often really smart people for whom the prospect of several hours attending to words on pages (pages of a single text) is not attractive. For lovers of books and reading, and especially for those of us who become teachers, this fact can be painful and frustrating.”

Jacobs says this is genetic – such people are “mostly born and only a little made.” A furor has arisen around this assertion – here’s one post that takes it on – but I think he may in part be right. But if readers and writers are at least “a little made,” what can teachers do to help make them?

According to Jacobs, maybe nothing.

“[The] idea that many teachers hold today, that one of the purposes of education is to teach students to love reading—or at least to appreciate and enjoy whole books—is largely alien to the history of education.”

Now, I’m ok with the fact that a lot of people don’t like reading and writing. I think they’d be better off if they did, but I also think I’d be better off if I liked playing team sports, going to parties full of strangers, and drinking wheatgrass. And I’ve written before about the wisdom or lack thereof of pushing your children to love writing. If it’s possible for me to help my students like reading and writing more than they do, I’d love that – and I dedicate a lot of thought and time to this end. But if not – if many students will never like to read or write no matter what I do – I can accept this reality.

I do, however, want and expect my students to be willing to read and write. I want and expect them to see college as an opportunity to practice these activities, and to even be open to enjoying them. I know that teenagers are not usually “open” by any measure. Much of their energy goes into defining themselves as “this not that” – athlete, not reader; gamer, not writer. However, I’m irritated at the prospect of another semester of complaints about being expected to read a lot and write a lot in English class.

Are there things we can do to make our students willing, if not eager, to read and write? We can try to give them “books that interest them,” but in an extremely diverse class of 42 students, coming up with books that will please everyone is not possible. We can give them choices about what they’ll read and what they’ll write about, but if reading and writing are themselves the problem, even making such choices can be difficult and frustrating. By the time they get to college, is it too late? Do I just have to grit my teeth and say, “I know you don’t like it, but you’re in college”? Or is it time to start asking less of them?

Jacob believes that we should ask, if not less, then at least different.

“Education is and should be primarily about intellectual navigation, about…skimming well, and reading carefully for information in order to upload content. Slow and patient reading, by contrast, properly belongs to our leisure hours.”

If this is true, then there is no place for the study of literature at college, at least not as core curriculum for readers and non-readers alike. Can we extrapolate from this that there is no need for “deep writing” either? That asking students to write longer pieces – which is not to say two hundred words, which they would call long, but perhaps one-thousand-word essays – is asking too much of most, that the ability to do such a thing can only “arise from within,” as Jacobs puts it, and cannot be explicitly taught to anyone?

I would argue that the skills of deep reading and deep writing can be taught to anyone. The caveat is that students must be, not necessarily enamoured of these activities, but simply willing to engage in them. They must open to the possibility that they may enjoy them more than they expect, but also to the possibility that they may not. They need to be prepared to keep stabbing away at them even if they find them difficult, boring or even infuriating, in the hope that they will get better, and with the faith that they will learn something.

Is this skill – openness, or gameness, even in the face of obstacles and possible failure – something that can be taught? Because if we can teach our students (and ourselves, for that matter) how to be willing, how to relish trying, then we will all truly be learners.

Image by Peter Galbraith

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What Young Adults Should Read

June 9, 2011 By Siobhan Curious in books, education, learning, literature, personal, reading, society, teaching Tags: adolescence, books, education, learning, linda holmes, literature, pop culture happy hour, reading, society, teaching, twilight, young adult fiction 18 Comments

There’s been a lot of furor over the recent Wall Street Journal essay that claims that YA fiction has taken a turn to the dark side. It isn’t surprising that my favourite commentary on this piece so far comes from Linda Holmes, editor of the NPR pop-culture blog Monkey See and moderator of my fifth-favourite podcast in the world, Pop Culture Happy Hour. Holmes’ response aligns entirely with my own: adolescence is a dark time. If we want teens to have some hope of emerging from it in one piece, we can’t present them only with, as the WSJ writer would have it, “images of joy and beauty.” Holmes explains it this way:

It’s difficult to say to a teenager, “We don’t even let you read about anyone who cuts herself; it’s that much of a taboo. But by all means, if you’re cutting yourself, feel free to tell a trusted adult.”

I teach mostly seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds. In my course on personal narrative, I prepare a list of books and ask students to tell me which ones they’d prefer to read. When preparing the list last year, I hesitated over a couple of titles, including Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss (about the author’s consensual adult sexual relationship with her father) and Alice Sebold’s Lucky (about the author’s brutal rape and its aftermath). In the end, I decided to include Lucky on the list, and when I presented the book to the class as one of their choices, I told them about its subject matter and my hesitations. I warned them that certain passages were very graphic, and that they should keep this in mind when deciding whether they wanted to read the book. True story: almost every girl in the class, and about half the boys, put it on their list of preferences; most girls put it at the top. I assigned only five students to each book, but for their final course reading, they were allowed to choose any other book from the list that they wanted, and most girls and many boys chose Lucky.

What does this say? Does it say that teenagers nowadays are inured to violence? I don’t think so; many readers said that they found the book upsetting but rewarding. Many of the boys who read it said it helped them understand the effect rape has on a woman; many girls said it allowed them to see how, after a terrible and scarring experience, someone could struggle on and make use of their suffering to help others. But mostly they said that it was a really good read.

The reasons that it’s a good read may vary from reader to reader, but it probably has something to do with the fact that life is hard, especially when you’re seventeen or eighteen, and someone else’s experience of hardship – even if it’s extreme or, in the case of some YA fiction, less than totally realistic – can help you understand your own. As Holmes puts it,

stopping — actually stopping — a YA reader from picking up a particular book because it describes behavior you don’t want him to emulate potentially cuts him off from something that might reach him in exchange for … nothing, really, except your own comfort level.

I think it comes down to this: kids read what they read for a reason. They have a natural aversion to things they can’t handle, and a natural inclination toward things that speak to them in some way. It may be that parents or teachers have to occasionally take something out of their hands or put up firewalls so they can’t stumble upon things that truly injure them, but I think the decision to do so needs to be very carefully considered.

If I had a teenage daughter, for example, I’d want to take Twilight away from her, not because it’s about vampires and has violence in it, but because it’s badly written and the heroine is a sap and it teaches teenage girls terrible things about being “rescued” by creepy men who are hundreds of years too old for them. (Some commentary on my feelings about Twilight can be found here.) But I wouldn’t take it away from her. (As if confiscating it would mean she wouldn’t read it anyway!) What’s more, I’d try my best not to make her feel bad about reading it if it meant something to her. I’d ask her why she liked it, and I’d listen to her answers, and maybe I’d try to recommend something along the same lines that was, well, a good book.

But I wouldn’t expect her to read it. That wouldn’t be up to me.

Image by Lauren J

Does Reading Great Literature Make You A Better Person?

June 1, 2011 By Siobhan Curious in books, education, literature, psychology, reading, society Tags: books, jane austen, literature, psychology, reading, society, william deresiewicz 23 Comments

I love Laura Miller, the Books critic for Salon.com. However, in today’s Salon she’s making an argument that I’ve heard a lot and that I do not like.

She’s reviewing William Deresiewicz’s new book, A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship and the Things that Really Matter. I have not read this book – Miller’s review is the first I’ve heard of it – but it’s gone straight to my wish list. In it, according to Miller, Deresiewicz

explains how his long engagement with [Austen's novels] helped convert him from a surly, preening grad student — “about as dumb, in all human things, as any 26-year-old has a right to be” and grandiosely convinced that anything other than “complex, difficult, sophisticated” modernist fiction was beneath him — into a decent, civilized man.

Miller is not convinced that the novels were responsible for Deresiewicz’s transformation. Her argument is basically this: lots of readers are bad people. In fact, everyone loves stories, but the world is still full of nastiness.

Some of the best-read people I know are thoroughgoing jerks, and some of the kindest and noblest verge on the illiterate…. There’s a theory…that fiction builds empathy, and therefore morality, by inviting us into the minds, hearts and experiences of others. This is what the British children’s book author Michael Morpurgo implied recently…when he claimed that “developing in young children a love of poems and stories” might someday render the human-rights organization Amnesty International obsolete. While I’m all for cultivating such tastes in children, I also don’t think the love of stories has to be taught. Most children are keenly interested in stories in all their forms. (Reading is a different matter.) They always have been. Yet there has always been a need for groups like Amnesty and it seems probable there always will be, no matter how many stories we pump into our youth.

I hear a lot of variations on this argument. ”Joseph Goebbels loved literature.” ”Sit in on a PhD literature class and see if you come away thinking that literature makes people more empathetic.” These statements strike me as identical to saying, “Broccoli isn’t good for you – people who eat lots of broccoli still get cancer.” That is: sure, literature doesn’t cure terminal meanness, arrogance, or psychopathy, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t improve many people. What’s more, a particular book may not turn me into a bodhisattva, but I still might be more compassionate, having read it, than I was before.

Do you buy the idea that literature teaches empathy, that books can make us better people? I still do, but maybe you can convince me otherwise.

In Which Siobhan Does Not Lose Her Temper Over Important Literary and Pedagogical Matters

May 30, 2011 By Siobhan Curious in education, learning, literature, reading, teaching Tags: education, learning, literature, memoirs, philosophy, reading, real life, teaching 28 Comments

Is non-fiction less “literary” than fiction? Someone has suggested to me that it is, and I’m so mad about it I could spit.

Last week, I attended a meeting with English teachers from several colleges. We were there to give feedback to the creators of some online essay-writing activities. We looked at some sample exercises, in which students were asked to read a short essay and identify a main idea from the essay. After some discussion, one of the other teachers – let’s call her Teacher A – spoke up. ”I just want to give the point of view of my department,” she said, “and we would never use an activity like this. I don’t teach essays in my courses, and I don’t know anyone who does. I teach poetry, fiction and drama. I would have no use for activities where students learn to analyze essays, and I’ve never really understood why the provincial Exit Exam requires them to do so.”

“I teach essays,” I assured the creators, “both personal narrative essays and argumentative essays. I teach a whole course on each. It would make sense to have separate activities, though, for argumentative essays and, say, narrative prose, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction.”

A third teacher – let’s call her Teacher B – sucked her teeth and shook her head. ”Oh no,” she said, “you mustn’t teach students to analyze fiction and non-fiction in the same way.” She pointed to a list of literary elements – imagery, characterization, setting etc. – that made up part of one of the exercises. ”You couldn’t discuss these techniques in an analysis of a non-fiction work.”

“Well, certainly you could,” I said, “if you were analyzing a personal narrative. A personal narrative uses characterization the same way a short story does.”

“But no – in non-fiction, you can’t credit the author with inventing the character,” Teacher B replied.

It stared at her for a moment, flummoxed. ”But the author is communicating the character to the reader through the selective use of detail,” I said, “in the same way that the writer of fiction does.”

“Then call it description,” Teacher B retorted. ”It is not characterization. I know that markers of the Exit Exams are very hard on students who treat non-fiction as though it were fiction. I have one colleague who tries to insist that we fail students who do that.”

Now, I marked Exit Exams for many years and no such ideology ever revealed itself. If it had, I would have (after a stunned silence) fought it with all claws out. I did not yield to my impulse to say, “Such a person should not be grading Exit Exams, or teaching literature at all. Such a person has no understanding of the act of literary creation or the act of reading.” I did not use such terminology as “backward” and “pedagogically indefensible.” I sat back and held my tongue, even as several more comments were made about “literature” as distinct from “non-fiction.” I did not launch into a rant. If I had, it would have sounded like this:

“The idea that there is a clear line to be drawn between non-fiction and fiction is itself fictional. The techniques of narrative are the same whether the narrative is based on something ‘true’ or not. For example: a character in a memoir is no more a ‘person’ than a fictional character is. It is no more a ‘person’ than a portrait hanging on the wall is a person. A portrait is an artifact created by the artist out of paint. A character is an artifact created by the writer out of words. When analyzing literary technique, we are analyzing the artifact, not the author’s intentions or the ‘truth’ or ‘fiction’ of the story.”

Why am I so mad about this? Well, it’s partly because I am a writer of both fiction and non-fiction narratives, and the suggestion that they are technically different is, in my personal experience, balderdash. It’s partly because I feel that fossilized attitudes toward what constitutes “literature” are alienating students from their literature classes and from reading.

Mostly, though, it’s because I teach a course in personal narrative in which I teach students to analyze memoir in exactly the way they analyze fiction. I explicitly tell them that in memoirs they encounter characters, not people, and that authors very carefully craft those characters, as well as plots and settings, in the same way that fiction writers craft stories from their imaginations, and that even the distinction between “fact” and “imagination” is an area for much discussion. The idea that my students might then be penalized if they discuss a personal essayist’s use of “characterization” makes me want to picket the Ministry of Education and set up dogmatic training camps for literature teachers across the country.

However, the flip side is this: maybe I’m angry because I’m wrong. Here is my favourite principle of learning psychology: learning is often upsetting, because it challenges our preconceived notions of the world, and this is disorienting and scary. Maybe I’m angry because I just learned something. Maybe I need to scrap my whole Personal Narrative course because I’m teaching my students an approach that is invalid. Maybe my students need to clearly distinguish between fictional and non-fictional stories and use different terminology when analyzing them, and I have been messing them up.

And maybe you have some ideas about this. What is the difference between a personal essay and a short story, or a memoir and a novel, in terms of literary technique? If a student is analyzing non-fiction, is he or she required to approach the analysis differently than when analyzing fiction? Where does “creative non-fiction” fall? Am I crazy?

Image by Kriss Szkurlatowski

Character = Behavior: A Lesson Plan

March 7, 2011 By Siobhan Curious in classroom management, education, learning, literature, personal, society, teaching Tags: adolescence, career, classroom, education, learning, literature, real life, society, teaching 9 Comments

Two parallel experiences over the last couple of weeks have culminated in a lesson plan that I may need to add to my permanent roster.

First, I’ve been meeting with students to look at their first at-home essay. Their essays have to include a discussion of characterization, but it’s clear that many of them are still not certain how to write about characterization in their essays, and are still not making the connection between a character’s behaviour and what it says about him or her as a person. What’s more, some don’t seem to recognize the connection between their OWN behaviour and what it says about THEM as people. Most are polite, punctual and constructively inquisitive; others show up late with blank faces and no questions and are unable to let me finish a single sentence without interrupting me to make excuses or go off on tangents.

Secondly, many university applications were due this past week, and so, leading up to March 1st, I received a number of requests for reference letters. I am usually delighted to write references for students, but, as a previous post attests, every year some of these requests are baffling. Students who talked with their friends and played with their phones all class, who showed up late when they showed up at all, who sat passively during group work and said, “I didn’t read the story,” when I called on them, nevertheless somehow believe that I will have something nice to say about them in a reference letter.

So when I went into class on Thursday, I relayed the above information to the students, and told them the story of the most recent incident in which I felt I couldn’t provide someone with a reference. ”She sat in the back and talked with her friends when I was lecturing or other students were speaking,” I said. ”She spent half the class with her phone held up in front of her face, reading and replying to texts. When she did group work with people other than her friends, her group members often complained about her, because she wasn’t prepared and didn’t contribute. I had to tell her no, I wouldn’t write her a letter, and she didn’t ask why, so I didn’t tell her…but a couple of things occurred to me.”

By this time, they were riveted. Cell phones were forgotten, whispered conversations were abandoned, faces were wary but attentive.

“First of all, it might have been helpful to her if she had known the impression she was making AT THE TIME SHE WAS IN MY CLASS. It’s too late for her to do anything about it now, but if she’d realized then what her actions were saying about her, she might have been able to change something. So I took some time and made a list of behaviours that will get you a good reference letter from me, and behaviours that will make me say no. If you’re interested, I’ll show you my list at the end of the class.

“What’s more, it occurred to me that this is a real-life demonstration of characterization at work. When we discussed characterization, what did we say is the best indication of a person’s character?”

“Their behavior,” the class chorused.

“Exactly. Writing reference letters is an exercise in characterization: you identify the character traits you believe a person possesses, character traits that qualify them for a profession or a field of study, and then you identify the behaviours that have suggested that they have those character traits.”

So I showed them a good reference letter I wrote a couple of years ago – with the name of the referrant changed, of course – as an example. Then I explained, “You will probably also have to write reference letters at some point in your lives. You may be a teacher, or somebody’s boss, or somebody’s colleague. Someone may ask you to write a comment about them on LinkedIn. You will need to describe people and give evidence for your description. So we’re going to practice that today.”

I had them form groups of three, draw professions from an envelope (primary school teacher, dog walker, event planner, garbage collector…) and discuss whether the three main characters in the novel we are reading possess the character qualities necessary to do these jobs. Each group member then had to write a letter. One wrote a reference letter for the character they thought was best qualified for the job; the other two wrote letters of apology to the other characters, explaining why they could not give them letters of reference.

When they were just about done, I asked if they’d like to see my list of pro- and anti-reference-letter behaviours, and they said, “YES YES YES.”

DO NOT ASK ME FOR A REFERENCE LETTER IF…

you often talk in class when you should be listening to me or other students
you spend a lot of class time typing on your phone (especially if you hold it up visibly so that I and everyone can see that you’re not listening)
you are often absent or late, or leave early, without documented reasons for doing so
you often fail to submit assignments or submit them late
you often half-complete in-class work or sit passively while other group members complete work for you
you’re often not able to answer my questions or participate in group work because you’re not prepared
you do homework from other courses in my class
you sulk when you get bad grades, or you complain about your grades without asking polite, constructive questions about how you can improve
you write me careless email messages without a greeting or signature (eg. “i wasnt in class today did I miss anything”)
I have ever caught you cheating on anything (including “small” infractions like copying in-class work from other students)
you are not an excellent, engaged, attentive student who tries hard, is polite and treats the people around you with consideration, regardless of your grades. When writing you a reference letter, I do not care about your grades. I care about how hard you try and how much you learn.

I WILL BE DELIGHTED TO GIVE YOU A REFERENCE LETTER IF…

you are always attentive in class, with your phone out of sight and your ears open
you attend class and are punctual, with very occasional exceptions
you ask polite questions when you don’t understand things
you always do your reading and make an effort to respond to questions about it, whether or not you “get it right”
your work is always complete, even when it doesn’t “count for grades,” and you submit it on time
you come to me for extra help if you need it, or you seek help at the Learning Centre
you inform me when you know you will miss a class or will be late for class, and you make an effort to catch up on what you miss
you do your best when working with other students and pull your weight (even when others don’t)
you write me polite, clear email messages (eg. “Dear Ms. Curious: I’m sorry I had to miss class today; I had to take care of a personal matter. Could you let me know what I missed and what I should do for homework? Sincerely, Jane X.”)
you are an excellent, engaged, attentive student who tries hard, is polite and treats the people around you with consideration, regardless of your grades. When writing you a reference letter, I do not care about your grades. I care about how hard you try and how much you learn.

Immediate results? A lot of polite and enthusiastic “Goodbye Miss”s at the end of class, a number of polite and well-formulated messages this weekend asking pertinent questions (and apologizing for disturbing me on the weekend) and a lot of thorough and thoughtful (and sometimes hilarious!) reference letters for fictional characters. Down side? I’m anticipating an unprecedented number of reference letter requests next year…but if they’ve earned them, I’ll happily write them.

Students are understandably obsessed with grades, and this means they sometimes miss the bigger picture. And so do we – I spend a lot of time trying to attach grades to things so that students will take them seriously. Reminding students that grades are not the only thing that counts – even when it comes to immediate, concrete goals like university admission – can go a long way, not only toward establishing a productive classroom, but also toward preparing them for life outside of school. I have no idea what the long-term effect of this lesson will be, but if nothing else, maybe it will help them understand how “characterization” functions, not only in literature but in life.

Image by miamiamia

My Top 10 Books of 2010

December 31, 2010 By Siobhan Curious in books, education, literature, personal, reading, society Tags: a visit from the goon squad, amy ignatow, books, brian k vaughan, cathleen schine, david nicholls, graphic novels, jeannette walls, jennifer egan, jonathan franzen, literature, memoirs, ms hempel chronicles, novels, personal, reading, sarah shun-lien bynum, society, tana french, the glass castle, the imperfectionists, the likeness, the popularity papers, the three weissmanns of westport, tom rachman, y the last man, young adult fiction 3 Comments

I encourage you all to make your own lists, either in the comments below or on your own blog (please post the link in the comments) because of course I don’t already have enough unread books in my house.

Note: These books were not necessarily published in 2010, but they were part of my 2010 experience.

1. A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

I really don’t care about the ins and outs of the music industry, but this novel made me care. It also made me believe that a PowerPoint presentation can be as poignant and funny as a short story. Without question, the best book I read all year. Down side: I’m not sure there’s any point in my writing fiction ever again.

2. The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

A bunch of people working at, or linked to, an English-language newspaper in Rome. Similar in structure to Jennifer Egan’s book in that it seems at first to be a series of disconnected stories, but it’s not. Even the characters who seem the least lovable are completely absorbing. Also: funny.

3. The Three Weissmanns of Westport by Cathleen Schine

I cried at the end of this one. Works best if you have recently read or watched Sense and Sensibility, but I expect it would be a joy ride regardless. Sent me running for Schine’s earlier works, none of which really did it for me, but I’m waiting on tenterhooks for her next one.

4. The Likeness by Tana French

I am not usually a mystery reader. Exceptions include P. D. James and Kate Atkinson. I am totally chuffed about finding Tana French. I finished The Likeness just last night and, although it was well past my bedtime, I reread the last page four times because I didn’t want it to end. In short: detective is called to the scene of a murder. The victim looks exactly, but exactly, like her. Beautiful, heart-gripping chaos ensues. French has a new book out this year and it’s garnered her a lot of new attention – I wish I were one of the cool people who had discovered her earlier.

5. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

Enough has been said about this book. My two cents: believe the hype. It’s that good.

6. One Day by David Nicholls

Follows a “couple” – they sleep together in college and remain friends – by dropping in on them on the same day every year. Very funny, often painful, at times a bit lumpy but worth it.

7. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

This is a bit of a cheat – I listened to this on audiobook last year, but read it for the first time this summer so I could teach it. One of the most enjoyable memoirs I’ve ever read – easy, funny, moving, perfect for the classroom. Walls renders her horrifying childhood and her impossibly selfish parents without a drop of pathos or self-pity. Hard to believe such terrible memories could have produced such a wonderful and touching romp.

8. Ms. Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum

Linked short-stories about a middle-school teacher. I don’t know if I loved it because I’m a teacher, but it seems I’m not the only one – Jonathan Franzen and Michael Cunningham both give it raving blurbs. I don’t read a lot of short-story collections these days, but this one feels almost like a novel, like a string of perfectly irregular jewels.

9. Y: The Last Man: Book 4 by Brian K. Vaughan et al.

I am a graphic novel lover. I’m not so much into the post-apocalyptic sci-fi vein, but the Y: The Last Man series is my favorite graphic novel series ever. A young man named Yorick, and his male monkey Ampersand, are the only male animals left on earth after a mysterious plague. They set off to find Yorick’s girlfriend. Problems: they don’t know where she is, and being a man in this manless world is … complicated. Stephen King calls it “the best graphic novel I’ve ever read,” if that matters.

This beautiful little book, styled like a note/sketchbook, is aimed at tween girls, and I wish I’d read it when I was one, but it just came out this year. Lydia and Julie are not popular, but they have a plan to become popular, and this book is an illustrated log of their progress. As you can imagine, their plan takes unexpected turns and even puts their friendship in jeopardy. The two girls are enchanting, the pictures are delicious, and reading it made for an afternoon that I would have very much appreciated when I was twelve years old and unhappy with who I was. Give it to a girl you know; it might change her forever, but at the very least, she’ll have a good time.

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