Pat Conroy's Summer Reading as a Youth

Yesterday (7/10/11) I wrote about Parade Magazine’s special issue on summer reading. Today I would like to focus on Pat Conroy’s essay in that issue, “The Sweetest Reading Season.” He writes about how his family would go every summer to stay at his grandmother’s cottage on a lake in North Carolina. (Those of us who have had the good fortune to spend parts of our summers at a cottage on a lake can relate to this.) The summer he was 15, he brought seven substantial, classic books to the cottage. These books had been recommended to him by his Jesuit English teacher, a man who thought that, in Conroy’s words, “literature itself was a form of holy orders and that reading could shape and exalt anyone.” (Isn’t that a beautiful statement?) Conroy read these seven books steadily and with great enjoyment, and then passed them on to his mother and his sister. Then the three of them would discuss the books, often on the deck on the lake, watching the sun go down. Conroy says that to this day, he always carries a carefully selected pile of books with him on vacation. (This careful selection of vacation reading resonates with me, as I have written before, and probably resonates with you as well). Here I would like to give tribute to this English teacher, and to all the many, many other English teachers who have encouraged and inspired young people to read good books. What a great influence these teachers, as well as other teachers and adults in young people’s lives, have had when they have given the gift of the world of books. Oh, and in case you were wondering what the seven books were, here is the list: Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” Dickens’ “Great Expectations,” Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary,” Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!” and Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” We may or may not have chosen that exact list of books, but it is definitely a good one for a start. What a rich, wonderful foundation such books provided for the 15-year-old future writer of "The Great Santini," "The Prince of Tides," and many other books, including the very recent "My Reading Life"!

Parade Magazine's Issue on Summer Reading

I opened today's Parade magazine (7/10/11), which comes with my Sunday San Francisco Chronicle, and which focuses this week on "Summer Reading," with both pleasure and trepidation. Anything that promotes books and reading is great, but I was wondering which books it would focus on. I was pleasantly surprised to see many excellent books featured, rather than just the same bestsellers by the same authors that are often considered prime summer reading. (Please don't think I am being condescending, as I am happy to read good "summer novels," as I have posted about before. I was just hoping there would be more of a mix, and there is.) One juxtaposition that is a bit ironic is the full-page illustration to the "2011 Summer Reading Guide" on one page, showing an idyllic green nature scene of a boy leaning against a tree reading -- wait for it -- an E-READER, while on the facing page is a lovely essay by Pat Conroy about his childhood reading at a lake, with an extended mention of the sensory, tactile feel and smells of books (REAL books, the old-fashioned kind!), their pages and covers. Surely no one will wax poetic about the feel and smell of books on an e-reader...will they? Despite being struck by this ironic contrast, I enjoyed the special issue of Parade, with its lists of "great summer books" and great audio books, and its blurbs by various famous people about which books they will be reading on their summer vacations. (Sample answer: Kathryn Stockett, author of "The Help," says that she is reading "Gone with the Wind," because "People ask me all the time what I think about that book, so I've resolved to tackle it." Other samples: actor David Hyde Pierce says that he is reading the diaries of Christopher Isherwood and really enjoying them, and Elizabeth Gilbert is reading Tina Fey's "Bossypants"...a book that is on my list too.)

"Catch-22" Revisited

Does everyone remember reading Joseph Heller's "Catch-22," probably in college? And how amazing and funny and tragic and unique it was? Who could forget Yossarian and Milo Minderbender and all the other strange, quirky, funny, touching, and very human characters? Who could forget the crazy humor and the dead seriousness of the book? There is a fascinating article in the August 2011 issue of Vanity Fair about the writing, publishing, and reception of the book. Titled "The War for Catch-22," it is adapted from Tracy Daugherty's biography of Heller. Heller worked extremely slowly, and revised multiple times over a period of eight years. He made outlines, wrote chapters out by hand, typed them, then cut them up and shuffled the pieces, over and over. He was fortunate to have caught the attention of the agent Candida Donadio and the (later very famous) editor Robert Gottlieb. The book was originally titled "Catch-18," but when Leon Uris came out with "Mila 18," Heller and Gottlieb had to find a new title. They agonized over various numbers, briefly fixing on "Catch-14," but finally settling on "Catch-22." They predicted the book would be well-received but not sell a lot. The hardcover version sold respectably, but it was the paperback version that really took off and sold in huge numbers. It became one of those zeitgeist novels, like "Catcher in the Rye," that everyone -- especially the young and hip -- had to read. And although it was about World War II, it also became a part of the discussion about the Vietnam War.

On Googling Oneself

We all do it...don't we? We google ourselves, right? Don't make me go out on a limb and be the only one confessing to it, OK? We want to know what the world is saying about us. Many of the results are trivial and random. Some items are just listings of various sorts. But sometimes we are lucky enough to find something interesting, even complimentary, about ourselves, and we are vain enough -- or maybe insecure enough? -- to enjoy that. Each mention is a tiny mark we have made upon the world. In a strange way, finding references to ourselves is a kind of affirmation, however frail and insignificant.

Memorable Weddings in Novels

Another in my series of "memorables" lists: Memorable weddings in novels.

Some of these weddings are elaborate, some are simple; some are fated to end well, some are interrupted, botched, or doomed to go bad. But all are vivid and memorable.

-Meg and John in “Little Women” (Alcott)
-Anne and Gilbert in “Anne’s House of Dreams” (Montgomery)
-Jane Eyre and Rochester in “Jane Eyre” (Bronte) – the famous interrupted wedding
-Charles and Emma in “Madame Bovary” (Flaubert)
-Newland and May in “The Age of Innocence” (Wharton) – while he thinks only of Ellen
-Adam and Dinah in “Adam Bede” (Eliot)
-Sergeant Troy and Fanny Robin in “Far From the Madding Crowd” – a comedy of errors that turns to tragedy

"The Guy Not Taken," by Jennifer Weiner

For a recent long plane trip, I picked up what seemed like a perfect “plane trip book,” Jennifer Weiner’s “The Guy Not Taken: Stories” (Atria, 2006). (I know I have mentioned several books from my "recent plane trip" -- a perfect illustration of what I have written about before: that I always take many books on trips, being afraid I will run out of reading matter several thousand feet in the air....) I have read a couple of Weiner’s other books, so I knew what to expect, and I got what I expected: a book that is accessible, readable, enjoyable, but still at least somewhat “literary,” as opposed to beach reads/chick lit. (I have posted about this fine line before, for example on 2/8/10, 3/17/10, and 9/10/10.) Some of the stories in this volume are connected, sharing characters and history, and some not, but even the ones that are not share similar themes, most notably the after-effects of divorce on families. In an intriguing postscript, Wiener provides a bit of background information on each story and its inspiration and context; one of her main points is that she drew extensively on her experiences with her own parents’ divorce. She also writes about adolescence, sisters, families, starting out one’s career as a young woman in her twenties, romance, affairs, and marriage. These stories combine serious themes with a breezy style, and somehow this combination works well.

French vs. Creole Literature in the Caribbean

Last month I attended a professional conference on language studies (ISLS: The International Society of Language Studies) in the Caribbean, and one of the most interesting papers I heard there was titled “The Linguistic Crossroads of French Caribbean Writers.” The speaker, Maria Moreno, pointed out the conflict felt by Caribbean writers (she focused on those from Haiti, Martinique, and Guadaloupe), who were torn between using the native language(s) that they were/are proud of -- in this case Creole -- and the more prestigious and widely known French. Because Creole was considered by the larger world, and even many in those countries themselves, as a patois, a "bastardized" version of French, writers tended to write in French instead. Yet, as Moreno showed, beginning in the 1940s and 1950s, writers such as Maryse Conde began to introduce more words and elements of Creole into their writing, first with explanations and then proudly standing on their own. I learned much from this conference paper about the specifics of literature in these countries (although I had read some of Conde’s work a while ago); I am aware of related conflicts experienced by writers in other parts of the world as well. For example, some African writers have chosen to write in English in order to be more widely read, while others have chosen to write in local languages in order to be accessible to local readers, and in order to help preserve those languages. The same situation exists in some cases in India and elsewhere. There are of course many more social/political/literary aspects of these questions around the world, and there is no one “right” answer for any specific writer or locale. This paper on French Caribbean writers was a good reminder of the ongoing issues.