Childhood Bonding with Fictional Characters

Sometimes as children we feel a strong bond with certain characters, almost believing that the characters are real rather than make-believe. One such feeling of connection is still vivid in my mind: when I read "Ellen Tebbits," by the great children's author Beverly Cleary, and believed that the eight-year-old main character's secret was just between her and me, no one else. The secret was trivial, even quaint from today's perspective: Ellen's mother made her wear woolen long underwear. I didn't have to wear long underwear, but something about sharing a secret with this fictional character made me feel fiercely protective of her, and I hoped and believed that no one else would learn her secret and embarrass her about it. I think I believed that if I wished it enough, no one else would even read the book besides me! Of course part of my connection was that, like every little girl, I loved having secrets. As a girl with three brothers, I sometimes had to protect my own secrets very carefully! (Yes, brother K., I still remember when you read my diary!). But it also seems to me now that this bond with Ellen was an early instance of the intense connections I have so often, over the years, felt with characters in books.

Books Remembered and Forgotten

My friend Mary V. recently asked me if I generally remember the books I read. I had to answer that in many cases the answer is "no." Sometimes books, especially genre books such as mysteries, are written and read for entertainment, and are soon forgotten. Other more "literary" books are just not very memorable. But the main reason for forgetting so many books is that there are just too many to remember. In my case, I read about 100 books a year, and have been doing so for many years, so it would be impossible to remember all of them. When I look through the list of "Books Read" that I have kept since I was ten years old (see my posts of 1/24/10 and 1/25/10 about this list), many of the titles bring few or no specific memories to mind. But I believe that all the books we read leave traces of themselves on our minds. I also believe that what we learn from and remember about books is cumulative: as we read more and more, and as the various reading experiences intersect and intertwine in our minds, we are constantly expanding and enhancing our universes of experience and imagination, and we are infinitely enriched by the complex worlds we as readers contain.

Not THAT Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor (1912-1975) was a wonderful English author who wrote a dozen observant, gently witty novels and four short story collections about -- mostly -- the lives of upper-middle-class women. Her stories were often published in The New Yorker. Taylor's own life was quiet and low-key, and she preferred, she said, to write books in which "practically nothing happens." But the "nothing" she describes is a compelling one; Kingsley Amis called her "one of the best English novelists" born in the 20th century. She, like Jane Austen, was especially good at portraying the kinds of self-deception we all practice. Virago Press, the excellent publisher I posted about earlier (2/17/10), republished all of her books in the 1980s, and then again republished several of her novels this decade. Thank you, Virago, once again! And thank you, Benjamin Schwarz, for the article of appreciation of Taylor's work in the September 2007 issue of the Atlantic, some of which I have drawn on here.

The novels include "At Mrs. Lippincote's," "A View of the Harbor," "In a Summer Season," and "Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont," which in 2005 was made into a lovely movie starring the perfectly cast Joan Plowright. Over the years, I have read all of Elizabeth Taylor's published novels and short stories, some volumes more than once, and highly recommend her work to you.

Book Parcels

There is something exciting about getting books in the mail. Maybe I feel this way because when my brothers and I spent our boarding school holidays in the small town in India where my parents worked, we had no access to bookstores with books in English, so my mother would occasionally order us books from a large city. What a treat it was when the box bursting with paperback books arrived, and we scrambled to open it and put "first dibs" on the most promising looking volumes. What bounty! Even now, if I have ordered books directly from a publisher, or if a friend mails me a book, I feel an instant lift of spirits at the prospect of opening the package to find a book or books - fresh and new - ready to be devoured!

Books from our Baby Boomer Youth

For Baby Boomer high school and college students, certain books epitomized youth, freedom, nonconformity, coolness, intensity, and a refusal to be impressed by or controlled by "The Establishment." These books made us feel that our generation, and we personally, could be different, challenge the status quo, make our own rules. They are redolent of rebellion, irreverence, spirituality (sixties versions), politics, and of course, "sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll." The books do not "belong" to our generation; some of them are still widely read. But many of them are products of a specific time in history: the sixties and early seventies. For a trip down memory lane for those who came of age during that time, cast your mind back to your late teens and early twenties, and see if this sampling of books looks very, very familiar...

The Autobiography of Malcolm X
The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath
Catcher in the Rye (and the other novels and short stories), by J. D. Salinger
Cat's Cradle (and many other novels), by Kurt Vonnegut
A Coney Island of the Mind, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
The Doors of Perception, by Aldous Huxley
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe
Eros and Civilization (and other works), by Herbert Marcuse
Howl and Other Poems, by Alan Ginsberg
The Making of a Counter Culture, by Theodore Roszak
On the Road (see also The Dharma Bums and other novels), by Jack Kerouac
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey
The Politics of Experience, by R. D. Laing
Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion
Steppenwolf (see also Siddhartha and other novels), by Hermann Hesse
The Stranger, by Albert Camus
Summerhill, by A. S. Neill
The Wisdom of Insecurity, by Alan Watts
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig

Some of these titles are impossible for me to reread now, but they meant a lot to me at the time, so I honor them for that.

(As I look over my list, I see that these books are almost all by male authors. Although this is distressing, it is not really surprising, because the time in question is just before and at the beginning of the Second Wave women's movement, when many influential books by women started to appear. Soon I will write a separate post about some of those books.)

Carol Shields

If you have not read Carol Shields' novels, please put them at the top of your to-read lists. This Canadian author wrote some 20 books, all wonderful, but I particularly recommend three. Her first big success, "The Stone Diaries" (1994), won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Governor General's Award. It is the story of the long life of an "ordinary" woman, Daisy Goodwill; it explores the concept of how we understand our own lives. "Larry's Party" (1997) tells the story of an equally "ordinary" man who works as a florist and then, surprising himself and everyone else, becomes a famous builder of garden mazes. The title refers to the dinner party that takes place at the end of the novel, one at which Larry's current lover and his two ex-wives are present. "Unless" (2002) tells of a mother and her bafflement when her college-age daughter inexplicably starts silently panhandling on the corner of a busy Toronto street. All three novels are very original, beautifully written, with an almost Woolfian lyricism, yet are very concrete and down to earth as well. Sadly, Carol Shields died in 2003; she is greatly missed.

Ms. Magazine

I recently posted about two resources for books about women: Virago Press, and the Women's Review of Books. Another valuable resource, one which I have subscribed to and read for many many years, is Ms. Magazine. Ms. provides a wealth of information and inspiration regarding women's issues: political, social, economic, health, art, and much more; it also occasionally publishes fiction and poetry. Here I want to highlight the numerous book reviews in every issue. Reviews cover fiction and nonfiction, on a wide variety of topics and by a wide and inclusive variety of writers. The current issue (Winter 2010), for example, reviews such titles as "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," by Rebecca Skloot; "Shadow Tag,"by the noted Native American novelist Louise Erdrich; "Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message that Feminism's Work is Done," by the well-known media studies scholar Susan J. Douglas; "The Unfinished Revolution: How a New Generation is Reshaping Family, Work and Gender in America," by Kathleen Gerson; and "Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone," by Nadine Cohodas.