Books: Interest rates and death

Recently, I realized that I am tired of books about death, and returned to Jade Chang’s The Wangs Vs the World. This book is funny, evocative, pointed. It’s not angry in a warping way. But it’s angry enough to be fun to read.

It is the perfect antidote to the poetic deaths of small fish and beloved pets in Mary Oliver’s poetry. It’s a kind of response to the murders, both nonfictional (the bombing of a murder victim in a barn in 1970s central Kentucky) and fictional (there’s generally a body in the violent Oxford of Inspector Morse). It has become my essential reading in the face of an entire book journeying back and forth through time but always both towards and away from suicide; a book opening with a drowning and haunted by the specter of SIDS; and a children’s book that is filled with the deaths of animals in a way that seems not to bother children.

When I couldn’t stand one more dead creature, frozen in a particularly hard winter, when even the death of a named goose was too much for me, I knew I needed a new book. So, I returned to a novel that I haven’t read in months. I needed to escape to a different world, and a benefit of reading many books at once is that I knew exactly where to turn: The Wangs Vs the World! I left them eating hotdogs in the kitchen of a desert trailer…no, I left them just as they headed onward:

”Even in failure, Charles Wang was a success. Looked at from one level up, from a perspective devoid of good or bad, where action trumped stasis, this was a perfect failure. Swift and complete…Charles had somehow tricked himself into erecting a needless deck of financial cards that went up only to be toppled by a historically anomalous financial tornado.”

My rich reward for returning to the cross-country road trip of a family ruined by the grand failure of a make-up company —and widespread financial disaster —by the third mention of interest rates in as many days! Interest rates in The Wangs Vs. the World! Interest rates in Lake Life by David James Poissant! Interest rates in Gary P. West’s Murder on Youngers Creek Road! Interest rates high, interest rates changing, interesting rates shaping our lives in mysterious ways.

Perhaps unfortunately for myself, I’m not excited about reading books about interest rates per se, and if I were, such a mention would be no more than expected. But getting three mentions in three books not about interest rates is one of the little joys of reading many books at a time.

Is it possible to read “too many” books at once?

Before I went everywhere with a loaded digital book device, I would always choose the wrong book. I would go to the airport with one book and before my flight left, I would know it was the wrong book, and I would buy something different. I once did this and then foolishly lent my new purchase to a fellow traveler with nothing to read at all. I then spent the rest of the flight—a decently long one—struggling and failing to read the book I originally selected for the trip.

I read a lot, but I do other very time consuming things too, like cook, draw, teach, and amuse my kids. The question of whether it’s possible to be reading “too many” books at once is not a question about spending more or less time reading.

Some people, including readers more avid than I, read one or two books at a time. Intellectually, I have always known this to be true. I have not always been fully aware of this on an emotional level.

“I’m going to try not to read so many books at a time,” a colleague confessed, as we chatted about changes we might make after a workshop on mindfulness and academic life. I was intrigued by this resolution, as it was frankly not one that had occurred to me over the course of the workshop.

“How many do you normally read at once?” I asked innocently.

I am not sure what number she admitted to—maybe three or four. Maybe five or seven. She wanted to pare that down!?!

I read so, so many more books at a time.

Part of the difference is semantic: if I start a book a few times before committing or rejecting it, it’s on my list. If I’m re-reading two or three or four books, maybe just late at night or before my morning coffee, maybe just on the weekend, that counts. If I’m re-reading part of a text that I’m studying or reading a batch of books for an upcoming course, that counts too. To say that I’m reading these books, even if someone else wouldn’t “count” them, is not the result of a desire to inflate my “current reading” count.

This isn’t a matter of virtue or commitment.

If not that, then what? To be currently reading a book is to hold that book in mind, the shape of it, my sense of it, my expectations of it, my perhaps faulty memories of past reading experiences, my anticipation of a range of interpretations or receptions the book might have gotten or might get… or these overlapping ideas and feelings hover in reserve at the edge of my mind. If this all sounds awful, my colleague’s goal of reducing the list of books in the current reading stack is an excellent resolution.

But for me, being limited to a few books would prevent me from reading. My book would always be the wrong book for the moment. When I’m reading many books, I don’t have this problem. One of them is ready for me, or I am ready for one of them. Or I just start another book.

Family Poems: Wind

Wind poems are perfect for fall. Lately, we’ve enjoyed some classics like Christina Rossetti’s Who Has Seen the Wind and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Wind.

I am tempted to wax eloquent about about wind, or perhaps fall, or maybe poetry. Trying to catch a leaf before it hits the ground is satisfying. So is staying inside and listening to the power of the wind from the other side of a wall.

In some initially related poetry googling, we found a new favorite The Everything of Everything by Shu Cai.

We can’t seem to finish Percy Bysshe Shelly’s Ode to The West Wind. Maybe next year.

Family Book Review: The Water Dragon

Sometimes it’s the story that makes a book special, and sometimes it’s the story of how we come to a book. Last summer on a family road trip vacation, we went to the beach, visited family, and checked out city sites. This should be the perfect vacation, right? Something for everyone!

The kids loved this trip. Especially the public library where we stopped to break up the drive home, which is where we stumbled upon Ji Lian’s The Water Dragon: A Chinese Legend.

This is truly an any age tale, timeless, and crafted to not include any “ripping kids from their parents” elements. We like the illustrations too.

This is a great read for those with an interest in Chinese dragons, and a good intro to them for those already interested in the dragons of Western stories.

Listen to Antonia Bembo

I enjoy listening to J. S. Bach, especially when my soul needs to be organized. But until recently, I’d never heard of Antonia Bembo. If you just want to listen to Antonia Bembo, consider yourself invited to listen to Lamento della Vergine.

Pondering whether to listen to Julian Bream on lute or whether to explore one of the many violin concerto albums available, I realized that what I really needed to do was find out something—anything—about women composers of the Baroque era. As is obvious, I’m not a music expert, but fortunately, expanding your personal canon is easy, unless you get derailed by the endless choices available: Top hits the year I was born vs Chinese opera, anyone? For some of us, this is the kind of problem that could send us straight back to Bach.

Even the comparatively limited vast array of Baroque women composers that are ridiculously less famous than Bach could overwhelm you.

Warning: it totally might.

So Google around, or listen to one musician I found: Bembo.

She is featured on the album Donne Barocche: Woman Composers from the Baroque Period, of which Rick Anderson wrote for the Music Library Association (volume 59, issue 2, page 412): “When the point of a recording is to showcase compositions by women, critical evaluation can be something of a political minefield. … In this case, it may be sufficient to say that the works on offer are every bit as expertly written as one might expect from these musicians' more commonly recorded male contemporaries.”

Enjoy.

Inktober as an Inspiration

Inktober as a fun motivational strategy

Every mid-October, I realize that Inktober https://inktober.com/ has already started. I’m not an ink artist or even an artist, but it seems so appealing, so specific, so simple. This October 1st, I had the good fortune to stumble upon an Inktober post in time to participate—sort of.

I’m doing it with the kids and using Copics and microns. We are sticking with black/white/gray, though. And I’ve added a special twist to keep things manageable: We each have one sheet of paper and are making tiny illustrations or additions each day.

The limited materials and the tiny provocative prompts and the fact that I have only a tiny amount of space have given me ideas beyond the scope of this project. When I woke up at 4 am worrying about several of the things to worry about, I shifted gears and spent the wee hour envisioning miniature word quilts, perhaps destined never to be created. That’s definitely better than worrying about home repairs, presidents, email, and derailed conversations from long ago. 

My five year old woke up on October 2nd asking what the Inktober prompt was, and we were ready to go.

What do we mean when we say “The Classics”?

Confession time: I’ve never read The Catcher in the Rye. I figure it’s been read so many times by so many people, that it doesn’t really need to be read by me. It’s nothing personal, Holden. I’m sure it would be a pleasure to finally meet you in person, so to speak, after hearing so much about you over the years. One day, I might pick up Catcher and read it. I read Slaughterhouse Five on a whim a few months ago, so there is always hope.

I probably escaped Catcher, or it eluded me, because I was homeschooled, and my parents and their educational philosophy never happened to lead to it. I read some weird stuff in the coming-of-age stage when other people read Catcher, everything from a random Civil War diary I found on my history-loving grandfather’s shelf to all of Dorothy Sayers’s mysteries.

I definitely read some of “The Classics,” too, whatever that means. It’s a bit like the famous Supreme Court case and the pornography: you know it when you see it. And see it again and again, on bookshelves and on lists of what everyone should read or does read or has read. If you get a point for it because you’ve read it on an list on the Internet, it just might be a classic. Or not. It might be a new popular book, like The Hunger Games (which I haven’t read) or Beloved (which I have). It might be a more obscure book, quite possibly one included on the list to add “diversity.”

So let’s end with this: here are three must-read, readily available 19th century American books. Two that aren’t “classics,” or maybe they are, depending on how you look at it, and one that is definitely “a classic,” but somehow instead of reading it, everyone was reading Catcher in the Rye:

1. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom: Or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery

2. Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee, Giving an Account if Her Call to Preach the Gospel

3. Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Family Book Review: Mangoes, Mischief, and Tales of Friendship

What makes Chitra Soundar’s retelling of Indian folk tales frustrating for some adults and older kids —-reviews ask for background information on the stories or historical and cultural context—is not as likely to bother younger kids. Every story is new or newish anyway, and they are often more willing to process without context. Older readers can of course do this too. It’s a different kind of reading for challenge for people who want to know things to just read the stories.

The storytelling in Mangoes, Mischief, and Tales of Friendship is enjoyable and the pacing comfortable. The drive for justice is child-friendly, and the cultural context lightly handled. When books get heavily fact people context -based, I sometimes am reminded that I promised “a story” not “news.”

That didn’t happen once with this book.

Looped freewriting to generate creativity

Sometimes I forget that everyone is not an English teacher. Some people actually don’t spend most of their time trying to squeeze words and ideas from others! And that means there are probably some creative adults, maybe people who want to write, who may not have tried looped freewriting, or at least not lately.

Google “looped freewriting” and possibly the name of its developer writing scholar Peter Elbow, and you’ll find countless descriptions of the process, but basically, here is how it goes:

1. Write about your topic for 5-15 minutes without editing.

2. Read what you wrote, underlining key ideas or phrases or even words.

3. Write about one of your underlined selections for 5-15 minutes.

4. Repeat as needed or desired.
   

You can type or write with a pen or pencil, or a stylus. I recommend using a method that is comfortable for you, and experimenting with different tools. My go-to for this technique is a nice pen and unlined paper.

If I really want to change this up, for whatever reason—for me, when my hands are tired or I’m doing something else at the time, or I want to jolt my relationship with language—I record myself and use a speech to text program or something like YouTube, which may create a decent transcript (depending on how well it understands your speech AND details about your language such as technical terms, the prevalence of names and numbers, and so forth). For me, often just trying to talk it through with the idea of recording and doing a looped freewrite gives me a path forward.