Robertson
Davies was a Canadian writer, playwright, and professor – who, by the time I
belatedly discovered him, had a bushy white beard that made him look (depending
on his expression) like Rasputin, Charles Darwin, or Santa Claus. He’s known
for his rich, dense, wonderful novels (I love them) but the book that had
practical impact on me was The Papers of
Samuel Marchbanks.
Samuel
Marchbanks is Davies’s curmudgeonly alter-ego. Under the name of Marchbanks,
Davies, in the 1940s, wrote essays and editorials for an Ontario newspaper, of
which Papers is a collection of the
best. Among these is a year’s-worth of Marchbanks’s irascible daily (daily!)
journal. In it, he reflects and reports on an immense array of topics, comments
on the human condition, skewers everything he doesn’t like (dogs, opera), and
complains about his evil coal furnace. It’s funny, eccentric, caustic, and
catchy.
I’d like to try that, I thought.
Now I keep a daily journal - part record, part writer’s
notebook, part sounding board – and I can’t imagine how I ever did without it.
I owe it to Samuel.
The name
Virginia Woolf is usually followed by the descriptor “author of To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway” – and yes, those are
wonderful books and I love them. I am a Woolf groupie.
However, the
first of her books that I read were her essay collections, The Common Reader and The
Second Common Reader. These essays, which left me in awe of Virginia, are
all gorgeously crafted works of art – clever, perceptive, erudite, the sort of
essays any writer would strive to emulate. But for me, Virginia packed a double
whammy, because of Dorothy Osborne.
Dorothy – the
subject of Woolf’s essay “Dorothy Osborne’s Letters” – was born in 1627, and
fell in love at the age of 19 with Sir William Temple, a suitor of whom her
family violently disapproved. In the seven years before they could marry (they
had to wait for the deaths of both objecting fathers), they wrote letters. None
of William’s survives, but the British Library has 77 of Dorothy’s – all
crammed with a vivid and opinionated personality, speaking her mind on any
number of topics (including marriage; she’s not sure it’s a good idea).
However, she
eventually marries William and spends the rest of her life dutifully supporting
his career and having seven children. She never wrote again, and all the
sparkle that was Dorothy seems to have gone out of her. The last glimpse we
have is a casual mention in a note from her husband’s secretary, who describes
her as “mild.” (Dorothy, mild!) I
hope she was happy, but it’s hard not to see her life, as Woolf does, as a
feminist tragedy. You wonder what she might have done if only she’d had money
and a room of her own.
I’ve loved many novels with feminist themes – Middlemarch, The Handmaid’s Tale, The
Color Purple – but Dorothy just struck a lasting chord. Perhaps because she
was real. Perhaps because she was born, so unfairly, 300 years too early.
Perhaps because I’ve never liked the word mild.
And perhaps
because Virginia Woolf didn’t either.
Alice in Wonderland is brilliant and I’ve loved it since I learned to read. I come back to it time and again.
I think that we all could do worse than believe six impossible
things before breakfast.
There are a lot of books told from the point of view of a child
– but very few that really, beautifully, work. Harper Lee puts you back in a
kid’s bare feet and lets you walk around in them. This is a wonderful book for
many reasons, but one of them is that it helps me remember what life – the
confusing world of adults, the elusive world of childhood - truly looked like
when I was eight.
It’s also a moral compass. When it comes to issues of right and
wrong, I ask what Atticus Finch would do.
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| Illustrated by Brittany Montejano |
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
I got Little Women for
my ninth birthday, read it that very night, and thought Jo made a huge mistake
in chucking Laurie (heir to a fortune) in favor of that pudgy middle-aged
German professor. I’ve since come around on the professor (who was, after all,
played in the 1994 movie version by Gabriel Byrne) and anyway Laurie must have
had problems since he went on to marry Amy. Amy.
Please.
Little Women is an inspirational classic
for nine-(and up)-year-old female bookworms – along with Anne of Green Gables and Harriet
the Spy. We all identify with tomboy
Jo, who wants to be a writer, is a whiz at amateur theatricals, and is
disastrous when it comes to parties and clothes.
But here’s the
thing about Little Women: BETH DIED.
It was my first experience of heartbreak. I can’t say this totally prepared me
for future tragedy, but it did give me my first awful taste of what it might
feel like.
J.B. by Archibald MacLeish
J.B. is a poem, a play, and the story of
Job. Job - J.B. – is a happy man, rolling in dough, with a wife, five children,
and faith in the Almighty. Then – due to a bet between God and Satan – he’s
divested of everything. (Children dead; wife and property gone.) It’s the
quintessential story of horrible things happening to a good person – a problem
formally known as a theodicy: how to explain evil in the world in the light of
a supposedly loving God? MacLeish sums this up: “If God is God, he is not
good/If God is good, he is not God.”
Ultimately J.B.
and his wife, Sarah, reunite, determined – even though there is no justice in
the world – to overcome tragedy and forge a new life.
It’s a
powerful, painful, and uplifting play, and an object lesson in the power of
human hope and love in the face of adversity.
It contributed
to making me an atheist.
I love English. It’s such a lush and versatile language (look at
all the synonyms we have). On the other hand, I wish I were bilingual. Or tri.
Hofstadter’s book is a 600+-page tome about literary
translation. It takes as its theme a catchy little ditty by French Renaissance
poet Clement Marot - a rhyming get-well wish to a sick little girl. The poem
begins “Ma mignonne” – a word for which there is no direct equivalent in
English. (Sweetie? Cupcake?) Throughout the book, dozens of volunteers and
Hofstadter himself take stabs at translating the poem – and all attempts are
wildly different. It’s an astounding look at the scope and span of language.
I’ve always loved language as the tool of my trade, but this
book made me appreciate how truly miraculous it is that we can all talk to each
other.
Randy, my
husband, and I homeschooled our three sons – in the course of which we hit a
number of books with themes that have popped up ever since in the course of
various heated arguments. Among these are Dr. Seuss’s Butter Battle Book, Eleanor Farjeon’s “The Goldfish,” Shel
Silverstein’s The Giving Tree,
Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, and
John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards.
And Whatever Happened to Justice?
Whatever Happened to Justice? is a
homely paperback published by a teeny press in which the author (in the role of
“Uncle Eric;” the book is aimed at teenagers) discusses the nature of law.
Maybury is a proponent of natural or scientific law, which is based on
time-honored historical precedent, as opposed to political law, which is
arbitrary and changeable. (Natural law: Do not steal. Political law: in
Massachusetts, it is illegal to put tomatoes in clam chowder.)
All laws, according to Maybury, can and should be boiled down to
two: (1) Do all you have agreed to do, and (2) Don’t encroach on other people
and their property.
This changed the way in which, ever since, I have viewed our
legal system, our political process, and Congress.
Carl Sagan’s birthday falls on November 9th, and
around here, we celebrate it.
My education, from freshman year to Ph.D., is science all the
way – a discipline in which I was hooked by books (the kids in The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom
planet built a spaceship; Meg Murry’s mother has her own laboratory off the
kitchen in The Wind in the Door) -
plus a chemistry set, a dissecting kit, and a couple of pickled frogs. I’m
passionate about science, and I deeply regret the loss of Carl Sagan – public
defender of skepticism and critical thinking, master communicator of the wonder
and excitement of the scientific world.
This, perhaps my favorite of his books, is subtitled “Science as
a Candle in the Dark.”
The lesson of Barbara Cooney’s picture book Miss Rumphius is “Do something to make the world more beautiful” –
and Miss Rumphius, the original guerilla gardener, does just that, by seeding
her sea-coast neighborhood with lupines.
If only we were all like her.
When I was in
fourth or fifth grade, my best friend Jeannie passed on to me her brother’s
discarded collection of science-fiction comic books. I’ve been a science
fiction fan ever since. The above title, in all fairness, should read Jeannie’s
Brother’s Cast-Off Comic Books.
That said, for
me the appeal of science fiction – aside from sheer entertainment value – is
the fact that it’s all an enormous thought experiment, the ultimate in What ifs? There are, of course, many
terrific science fiction books, but outstanding among them are those by Ursula
LeGuin, whose wonderfully imagined worlds give us a chance to re-evaluate ours.
I found The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy in a bookstore on a long-ago
school-class trip and forked over every penny of my lunch and spending money to
buy them. It was my first and never-forgotten experience of beggaring myself
for books.
But not the
last.
This week I should have been thinking of great ways to save you money, or maybe embarked on a new Short Attention Span Challenge task, but I have been so incredibly engrossed in this book, The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson, it is leaving me unable to think of anything else but getting back to the book. This is the most recent Pulitzer prize winner (and actually part of another one of my personal challenges - reading all the novel and fiction Pulitzer Prize winners). The story is about Pak Jun Do, a North Korean orphan turned professional kidnapper, who loyally serves the "greatest country in the world" and the "supreme leader", Kim Jong-il . The book has plunged me into the mysterious and horrifically dark world of North Korea, and as far as I know, a book is probably the only look (difficult as it is) that I will ever get. 
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