7 (Not So Quick) Takes: Life-Changing Literary Works

Or perhaps thought-changing would be a better term. These are books that challenged my thinking or shifted a paradigm. (These are not particularly "quick" takes, and it's no longer Friday. Oh well.)

1

The Giver, by Lois Lowry

I was nominally pro-life before I read The Giver. That is, I thought abortions were tragic, and I certainly would never have one, but I hadn't delved into the root of the issue. I also hadn't given much thought to other "life" issues. If pressed, I was pro-death penalty in specific, severe cases. I was against torture, but I didn't have a clear, compelling reason other than vague thoughts about human dignity. I had studied ethical models in college, and I knew that I was not utilitarian. However, I could not have told you why. 

Reading The Giver as part of a children's librarianship class changed all of that. This children's book about a society that has eliminated suffering should be required reading for everyone. Through the eyes of a young boy, we walk through what it really means to never suffer. If you haven't read it, please, stop what you're doing and go to the library. Or just buy it; you won't regret it. I won't say more for fear of ruining the story.

2

For Your Own Good, by Alice Miller

Growing up evangelical, corporal punishment was considered as essential to the Gospel as Jesus Christ. WORLD magazine, our favorite news source, published numerous stories about parents who were jailed for "correcting" their children, usually in Canada or Western Europe. I remember one story about Canadian Christians who considered themselves martyrs for the Gospel because the law forbade spanking with implements and leaving visible marks. All these years I've remembered a quote from one of the parents, that they "need to use a stick or belt; a hand isn't hard enough." When people talked about the problems of contemporary society, they never failed to mention that "you can't paddle kids in school anymore." (This isn't even true in many states, certainly not where I'm from. In Tennessee, schools don't even need parental permission or knowledge). Even after I changed my views on Calvinism, I still operated under this mindset. 

Reading For Your Own Good upended everything I thought I knew on the subject. In horrible detail, Miller shows how the "spare the rod," mindset led seamlessly to Nazism. The basic argument is that German parents taught their charges to mindlessly obey authority, always. The authority was always right, and weakness was always abhorrent. I'm normally suspicious of any Nazi analogies, but in this case it fits. For those of us who grew up in poisonous religious environments, it was interesting to see how secular wisdom fit so seamlessly with the fundamentalist mindset that small children and infants are little devils that must be beaten into submission. Of all the disturbing images in this book, the one that stuck the most was that one late 19th century German book suggested having the "the talk" in a morgue so as to instill the most potent sense of shame about the human body. What it instilled instead was comfort with seeing piles of dead bodies. When you dehumanize someone, the results are bound to bring hell on earth.

3

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass 

I recently discussed the racism in my background. One aspect I didn't mention was that many Southerners, even to this day, don't really believe that slavery was so bad. In a vague, hypothetical sense they believe that it was contrary to human rights, but if you discuss it sooner or later someone will say "but their lives were much better under slavery than they were after they were freed" or "most slave owners worked in the fields alongside their slaves." The Gone With the Wind version of history reigns quietly supreme in white, Southern households. I was even taught that the "first KKK" was not so bad, because they were trying to reign in the criminal black elements that were unleashed during Reconstruction. The most insidious notion of all was that history had been "revised" - that prior to about the 1980s, historians understood that slavery in the U.S. not not nearly so horrid as, say, Roman Empire slavery. (In many ways, it was much worse, actually. Among other things, Roman slaves captured in war might one day be free, while race-based American slavery ensured a permanent second-class status even to "freemen.") I also heard that "the winners write history," implying that those damn Yankees made everything about the antebellum South sound horrid.

Frederick Douglass' autobiography was the perfect antidote. It was written during slavery, so you can't discount it was "revisionism." It was written by someone who was actually a slave, giving yet another layer of authenticity. And it shows, indisputably, that the system of slavery itself was a nightmare. 

Of the many realizations I had while reading this classic, two hold fast in my memory. The first was his telling of his childhood, such as it was. I had heard the stories of parents torn from children, but I didn't realize what it was like to be born into slavery and never have a family. Douglass never knew his father, though he heard many rumors about their master. He and his mother did not have a relationship of any depth. He had siblings, but they did not really know each other. His mother was more of a wet-nurse than a family member. I didn't truly realize how much people were treated like farm animals until I read this account. The second thing that stuck out was Douglass' memory of a slave owner who converted to Christianity. I'd assumed that Christian slave owners were kinder to their slaves, but Douglass blew the lid off that assumption. In fact, in his experience religious conversions were a terrible calamity for slaves. Rather than change their behavior, owners now had an iron-clad religious excuse for owning slaves, and even for savagely beating them.

4

Justice, by George MacDonald

The reason I titled this "literary works" and not books is because Justice is an unspoken sermon. However, I couldn't leave it out of this list. Without this sermon, my spiritual life would look profoundly different. 

During my freshman and sophomore years of college, I struggled to have this thing called "faith." I had slowly realized that the God of Calvinism was a monster, but to my dismay, the non-Calvinist, evangelical model did not solve the problem. There was still this underlying issue of penal substitutionary atonement. This model teaches that all people are born sinners. God cannot look at sin and must punish all sins, but because He loves us He punished His Son instead. The entire reason Jesus came to Earth was that He could live a perfect life and then die the most horrific death. Our sins were placed on His account, and His righteousness was placed on ours.

As I struggled, one of my major problems with this doctrine was that it offered nothing on earth. Everything good about salvation happened after death: there was no healing for the sickness of sins while still living. This seemed fundamentally wrong and, dare I say it, unjust. MacDonald's sermon articulated all the problems that I had noticed, and the relief was indescribable. For one thing, I'd been told that my questions were irreverent, the equivalent of back-talking God, and that every Christian in history had believed in penal atonement, so it was get with it or get out. Later, I would learn that this was historically false, but in that moment I needed some thread to hang onto. This sermon was that thread. 

5

Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun, by Geoffrey Canada

In this fascinating memoir, Canada shows how violence escalated in the South Bronx through the 60s-90s. I grew up in a poor neighborhood - though it was not as dangerous as his - but the "gun" stage was all I knew. Canada's book traces the problem of violence and gangs and shows how the influx of guns into inner cities created catastrophe. I grew up in the South, where guns are part of the religion, and I've always heard "guns don't kill people" and similar slogans. Canada's book blew this out of the water. If you want to better understand urban crime, gang culture, the interplay of drugs and weapons, and what can be done to improve ghetto neighborhoods, this is the place to start. It should be required reading for anyone who works in public education, as it explains that students are highly unlikely to care about math and English when their very lives are at stake. This book challenged my thinking on multiple areas, but especially that of gun control.

6

Blue Like Jazz, by Donald Miller

This book was a tremendous success in the late 90s/early 2000s among evangelicals and post-evangelicals. I didn't read it until college because it had an air of the forbidden about it, even though the author maintains a fairly traditional Christian faith throughout the memoir. It was "forbidden" because it dared to say what so many of us were thinking: that evangelical culture had failed those of us who grew up inside of it. Blue Like Jazz was like a love poem to everyone burned: those who didn't fit into a youth group culture that favored the cool and popular; those whose politics were left of George W. Bush; those who lived in the wrong neighborhoods and didn't get the material blessings promised by health and wealth preachers; those who wanted to be Christians without shutting out the world. This was the book that made me think I could actually be a Christian without being miserable.

7

And... I don't have a seventh book! Those are the ones that stick out to me the most, and there are no other books that I can automatically think of as "life changing," i.e., that changed the paradigm of my thinking on particular issues. There are many wonderful books out there that I would likewise recommend, but they strengthened or added to a thought pattern that I already had. 

What books changed your thinking? Were there any poems/sermons/short stories that made you question something you'd always believed?

*Don't forget to check out the other blogs at This Ain't The Lyceum!

Spitting Out the Bones: A C.S. Lewis Series

If you've been around a group of Christians for any period of time, you've heard or read a C.S. Lewis quote. Doesn't matter the denomination or tribe: Baptist, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Orthodox, Anglican (of course), Methodist, Lutheran, non-denominational, conservative, liberal - everyone can find something in Lewis.

That is, until you actually read Lewis. Then you realize it's not so simple.

For one thing, Lewis had an odd twist on Christianity. His friend Tolkein converted him by way of myth: by teaching that Christianity was the true Myth, the end of Lewis' search for the elusive Joy. Lewis was not just classically trained in the usual British schoolboy way; he was obsessed with story, myth, and especially with "the North" of Nordic mythology. This mythological flavor is responsible for Narnia, but it's also responsible for a way of thinking about theology and God that permeates everything he wrote.

For another, Lewis was, as we all are, a particular person living in a particular time and place. During my husband's ordination to the diaconate this morning, the bishop preached on God's "particularity" of love, such as the particularity of a young girl in Palestine in the Roman empire who said "Be it unto me." When we say God is love we forget that God also loves, as a verb, all the quirky and wacky people in the world in their specific times and places. I'm aware of the wackiness that is the 21st century Deep South, and I love it because it's my family, my home, my own brand of crazy. Lewis belonged to a different brand, and it's important to remember that. For anglophiles like myself it's important to remember the deeply dysfunctional side of his culture, and to take certain cultural observations with a grain of salt. At the same time, it would behoove us to remember that we too have a brand of wacky, and there's no guarantee that ours is better.

These thought percolated as I reread The Four Loves. More than most of his books, this one sends me from one passion to the other, from underlining his words and wanting to share them with the world, to throwing down the book and pacing, wondering why this idiot was ever published. And yet, I know that there is enough meat in the book that is healthy and succulent, even if I have to do some serious bone-picking.

That's what this series will be about. What in Lewis, starting with The Four Loves, is helpful and what is not. Much of this is highly individual, but for what it's worth here's what I get out of it, and here's why some folks will want to take an aspirin before reading.

Why You Should Re-Read Lord of the Rings

If you haven't read it for the first time - where have you been, living under a rock? Turn off the computer and get thee to your local bookstore.

Now this is for those of you who read it and loved it, but maybe haven't picked it up in awhile. (And super-nerds like Casey :)

When I first read LOTR, I was in the throes of adolescence. As a typical self-absorbed teenager, I identified solely with Frodo, feeling his physical anguish, the depression, the angst (mine that is, not his real suffering). The Two Towers frustrated the hell out of me because it leaves the reader stranded, literally, on the shoreline watching Frodo and Sam ride off down the river. I actually skipped ahead to the beginning of every chapter until I found them again. (I know, it's terrible. Mea culpa). I worried about them like a mother hen, and every chapter that took me away from their plight was an irritant and a distraction. Who cares about these damn walking trees? I need to make sure Frodo is OK!

As the years passed, I would re-read various sections - and yes, I did actually read The Two Towers in its entirety. I saw the movies, which came out when I was in high school, and had a blast nerding out with my dad about the discrepancies. But I hadn't re-read the entire book (it's not really a trilogy, by the way) until this January.

Naturally I'm in a different place: I'm now starting my third year of marriage, working full time at a law firm, living in an apartment in metro DC, with our friends and family a full 12 hours away. Moreover, I've discovered Catholic spiritual devotions and theology, which opened up so many nuances of Tolkein's Catholic text. Also, and even more importantly, I've started to believe that God actually loves everyone, not just His frozen chosen. It's like being a different person and reading it for the first time.

And that's the first reason why you should read it again: your entire perspective on the characters may have changed. You may identify with another character, or find interest in something you dismissed before. Maybe you've read more fantasy and have a better sense of how this literature "works," or maybe you have better appreciation for poetry this time around. This is especially true if you've experienced major life-events since reading it, such as marriage or the birth of a child or the death of a parent.

The second reason you should re-read it is because this time you can linger. A lot of times we book-lovers get so focused on the plot that we forget to savor. It's understandable, and it's how novels hook us in the first place. We need to know how it ends, and a good book makes you obsess about the fate of its characters. But now you know that Gollum had to live in that final hour and that Eowyn found true love. So now you can really read those words and soak up the beauty and wisdom.

For instance, this time I found myself enthralled with the Ents, whereas before I just wanted to get them out of the way and move back to Frodo. But how could I have thought that when the Ents are so wonderful? I actually read the poem of the lost Ent-wives this time, and I noticed just how many times Fangorn repeats his sad refrain that there would be no Entlings, and to really ponder what that meant to him. I noticed the deep sadness of the text, even in the midst of joy at the end, because killing the One Ring meant destroying the power of the Elves and entering the age of Man. I saw the sadness of Fangorn, waiting so many centuries for the beloved Entwives to return, seeing his friends revert back to trees, seeing the Orcs destroy what was left of his home, knowing that his was a dying race.

I was also struck by the juxtaposition of hope and despair throughout the text. All the wonderful Gandalf quotes about hope leapt out at me this time around. My favorite is when Gandalf is rallying the troops in the Return of the King, before they prepare to march on Mordor. The steward of Gondor succumbed to despair and killed himself, and he wasn't being unrealistic. The very idea of marching with a few thousand men to Mordor to take on the Orcs and oliphants and (above all) the Nazgul would make anyone despair. So Gandalf doesn't lie, doesn't sugar-coat the truth, and doesn't use typical battle-prep, cheerleading language. What he does is so much better:

My lords, listen to the words of the Steward of Gondor before he died: You may triumph on the fields of the Pelennor for a day, but against the Power that has now arisen there is no victory. I do not bid you to despair, as he did, but to ponder the truth in these words.... Hardly has our strength sufficed to beat off the first great assault. The next will be greater. This war then is without final hope, as Denethor perceived. Victory cannot be achieved by arms, whether you sit here to endure siege after siege, or march out to be overwhelmed beyond the River. You have only a choice of evils; and prudence would counsel you to strengthen such places as you have... I do not counsel prudence... I still hope for victory, but not by arms.

He continues to explain to his captains the Ring and the Ringbearer, on whose success they depend. And he finishes in this way:

It may well prove that we ourselves shall perish utterly in a black battle far from the living lands; so that even if Barad-dur be thrown down, we shall not live to see a new age. But this, I deem, is our duty. And better so than to perish ourselves... and know as we die that no new age shall be.


This changed my perspective on what it means to hope. This vision of Gandalf's is clear-eyed and, on the surface, does not sound very hopeful in the colloquial sense. But it seems that part of hope is doing what we are meant to do, even if the odds are stacked high against us, in hope that good will come - and maybe not even to ourselves. The hope of Gandalf, Frodo, Sam, Aragorn, and Treebeard is selfless and giving, a hope to those who might live on or be born after them in the new age. And if doing charity means that one will die (or, in my privileged case, be tired or embarrassed) there is still hope beyond our own ends.

Five Favorites: Children's Picture Books

There are two necessary ingredients to a good picture book: a good story, and good pictures. Notice I said story. When I used to babysit, some of the kids had these gosh-awful books about "This is a fireman. He wears a red hat. This is a policeman. He wears a blue hat." Kill me now. These books aren't like that, because they have actual stories paired with gorgeous pictures.

1. Agatha's Feather Bed: Not Just Another Wild Goose Story

This was one of my favorites when I little. Don't you love the cover? And the story is great too, about how the naked geese come shivering to Agatha's window to get their feathers back from her bed.

2. Something Nasty in the Cabbages

(By the way, don't do an image search on this one. Some of the images... well, you can guess). This is a retelling of the classic French tale of Chantecler the cockerel, and it is hilarious. The writer has a great ear for language.

3. Crysanthemum

All I have to do is show some pictures, and you will buy this for your children:

It's about a little mouse named Crysanthemum who wishes she had a more normal name like Rose or Daisy. No one could pronounce my (very common) name - everyone thinks it is Carolyn, and I can't convince them otherwise. So I thought this story was the bee's knees. 

Eh, whatever, just 3. It's one of those weeks, and I feel like cheating. 

C.S. Lewis and Misogyny

There are a lot of different opinions on whether or not C.S. Lewis was a misogynist or not. I think that the confusion is due to at least two separate issues: one, the difference between traditional gender views and misogyny, and two, who Lewis was pre and post his wife Joy.

First off, what is misogyny? I would argue that there is a distinction between "traditional" (read: pre- Second Wave feminism) and pure hatred or dislike of women on principle. At face value, C.S. Lewis was clearly a proponet of the first, but his views could be subtle. Most of us have heard of the infamous line in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, in which Father Christmas tells Susan and Lucy that they won't fight in the battle because "wars are ugly when women fight." I personally think Lewis is being a bit tongue in cheek here. The battle scenes he describes in the Narnia books are far uglier than the cleaned up versions in most children's literature of that time.In Peter's battle with the wolf attacking Susan, he sees red, feels sick, and is not even aware of the exact moment when he kills the wolf. In The Horse and His Boy, Shasta is overcome with fear when he realizes how unprepared he is for the realities of battle. In Narnian battles, favorite characters are injured, sometimes killed, and the sense of foreboding and anxiety mixed with sudden action are ever present. So the wars are "ugly" even when no women are present. Readers should also note that Lewis was stationed in the trenches during World War I, exposed to the raw horror of modern warfare. So he was no stranger to the ugliness of wars, with or without women. It could be that his terrible experiences filled him with the desire to shield women from the trauma.

Another book is more damning however, and that is That Hideous Strength. There are many good things about this book, most of them surrounding Mark and his tendency to blindly follow an evil crowd to be accepted. But every time the action shifted to Mark's wife Jane I wanted to throw the book across the room. She was "perhaps not an original thinker;" she was a "modern" women in need who was "chastened" by the demi-god Ransom; Merlin considered her a candidate for beheading based on her (presumed) contraceptive use; worst of all, her marriage was on the rocks because she had "never attempted obedience." To underline his point, Lewis quotes the Donne line: “Hope not for minde in women; at their best / Sweetness and wit, they are but Mummy possest” which Jane puzzles over while working on her Donne thesis. Now, I think Jane does have serious character flaws, chief among them her inability to open herself to others out of fear of losing control. But the antidote Lewis prescribes is poison. And don't even get me started on the creepy character Ransom and how he kisses the married women so they can give his kisses to their husbands (!). The passages between him and Jane made me want to take a shower.

What I found most irritating about this book, however, is his portrayal of Mrs. Hardcastle, a cheroot-smoking, sadistic and probably lesbian chief of police at the evil NICE. Her only makeup is lipstick, which she smeared on with "no attention to the shape of her mouth." She doesn't wear a corset in spite of being overweight. Most damning of all (in Lewis' view) she associates solely with the men, making crude jokes and acting like one of the boys (when she's not torturing pretty women prisoners, that is). His associates claimed this was a thinly veiled critique of women academics, who made Lewis profoundly uncomfortable.

And who can forget his obsession with "sexually frigid women"? This comes up in Mere Christianity, That Hideous Strength, and The Four Loves, off the top of my head. This sounds just like those needy boys in the "manosphere" who bemoan the fact that intelligent women don't like them. This just smacks of an inferiority complex and a need to blame women for Lewis' relationship struggles.

Now, to be fair to Lewis, there is a part two: he had rarely ever been around women. His mother died when he was young, whereupon he was promptly shipped to a brutal boys' school that he called "Belson." His subsequent life experiences included war and an academic career at the overwhelmingly male Oxford. One of his greatest joys was "the sound of male laughter." So I can't really blame him for his fear of what he didn't understand.

What is clear is that after falling in love with Joy, his perspective on women changed drastically. Joy is not the meek, submissive wife that he extols in That Hideous Strength. She's a brass American Yankee divorcee with a tendency to hang with the boys, and Lewis can't get enough of her. The Narnia books that he writes after marrying Joy have a different tone towards women. Consider Jill, who is a superior marks-woman, wood scout, and all-around courageous girl. Not only does she fight in the last battle, but she is the one who recklessly enters the stable and finds the poor donkey. Prince Rillian says she was disobedient, but he says it with a smile. Most notably, Lewis wrote the beautiful Till We Have Faces, with its complex female protagonist Orual struggling to find real love and peace in this retelling of the Cupid and Psyche story. It's important here that we are seeing things through the first-person account of the older sister Orual, who covers her "ugly" face with a veil in the latter half of the book, not through the feminine Psyche. This shows a complete about-face in Lewis' view of women.

I think the earlier misogyny stemmed from misunderstanding and lack of contact with real flesh-and-blood women, not mere antipathy. But doesn't it always?

Harriet the Spy as Social Satire

***Warning: contains spoilers***

Harriet the Spy is one of those books you should read twice: once as a child, and again as an adult. As a kid, you'll laugh out loud at Harriet's escapades and maybe learn a valuable lesson about kindness. As an adult you'll appreciate the hilarious social satire of 1960s Manhattan.

Harriet's parents are wealthy New York socialites with the world at their feet. Her father "works for television" (we're never told how). When Harriet asks what her mother does, the mother says she does "many unappreciated things," among them being packed in mud for beauty treatments. Harriet is raised by her nurse, Ole Golly, and fed by the cook. Her parents are minimally involved in her life, and yet they are shocked when their darling daughter turns out to be amoral. Rather than taking a moment of serious introspection, they sent Harriet to a psychologist, who informs them that nothing is psychologically wrong.

Her parents are not the only adults with priority issues. One of the couples on Harriet's spy route is a materialistic husband and wife whose only hobby is accumulating extravagant purchases to show off to their acquaintances. Between expenditures, the couple sits idly on their couch without a word to say to each other. While this portrayal is far less subtle than the picture of Harriet's parents, it drives home the point about materialism and shallow values.

In fact, the only characters who escape this problem are poor, eccentric, or both. Harriet is inspired by a poor Italian family who owns a grocery store. They are a large, argumentative immigrant family, Catholic in an era of WASPS, but they pull together and care for one another in adversity. Another sympathetic character on the spy route is a cat-loving bachelor who creates sculptures in his home and struggles to feed both himself and the cats. After his multiple cats are taken from him by the city for violating health codes, he wastes away in mourning until he finds a kitten. In a rare moment of humanity, Harriet is moved to tears by the sight; she writes in her journal that "There are as many ways of living as there are people."

In spite of the satire, Fitzhugh resists the urge to create mere caricatures. The parents are very flawed, but they still love their daughter. The wonderful Ole Golly is no saint; she sees the deep flaws in Harriet but responds in enigmas that fail to penetrate. Harriet herself is a delightful mix; at times I wanted to slap her, but in the end she learned what it means to empathize:

She looked at them each carefully in the longish time it took them to reach her. She made herself walk in Sport’s shoes, feeling the holes in his socks rub against his ankles. She pretended she had an itchy nose when Janie put one abstracted hand up to scratch. She felt what it would be like to have freckles and yellow hair like Janie, then funny ears and skinny shoulders like Sport. 

The author Louise Fitzhugh knew firsthand what it is to live on society's fringes. Her background of divorce and parental neglect makes Harriet's look like a model of stability, which adds poignancy to Harriet's obsession with consistency (for instance, she will only eat tomato sandwiches for lunch, much to the cook's chagrin). Although Fitzhugh herself was a liberal bohemian, her books delight in poking holes in the agnostic sophistication of New York's elite.

Those who reveled in the satirical aspects of Harriet should read the odd but brilliant sequel, The Long Secret. But more on that another day.

Hollywood and Heroines - On to Harriet

Most people have a misconception of Harriet M. Welch from Harriet the Spy. Perhaps it's because they only saw the abysmal 1996 movie. I was only a kid when I saw the movie, so I didn't know that casting Rose O'Donnell as Ole Golly was a red alert, not to mention the fact that it was produced by Nickolodeon. (As a 90s kid, I equated Nick with Animaniacs and Doug, which I still say are great cartoons. Nick, why didn't you stick with cartoons?)

The real Harriet is probably a psychopath. She takes meticulous and consistently negative portrayals of everyone she knows (or finds): her parents, classmates, and random strangers in Manhattan whom she spies on through windows. (In one case, she goes so far as to break into a woman's house and go up the elevator to watch the woman in bed). Her life plan is to become the most famous writer in the world and to know EVERYTHING EVERYTHING EVERYTHING (she also has a fondness for all caps). The obvious problem is that she lacks an ounce of empathy for the people in her way, and she takes delight in crushing them. The only person with the ability to have a good influence on her is the no-nonsense nurse Ole Golly, who gets married and leaves Harriet about mid-way through the book. The rest of the book is about Harriet coping with this loss in increasingly destructive ways before finally learning the basics of empathy. The book is a complex, subtle look at the different ways of knowing, and it shares a lovely secret: that you can know all the scientific, surface details of a person without knowing them at all.

I can't expect the movie to match the complexity of the book. What I can expect is for Harriet to still be Harriet. Here is Harriet M. Welch sporting her "spy gear," the belt equipped with flashlight, canteen and other supplies which she always wears on her spy route:

And here is the movie version of Harriet with her notebook: 

In other words, the individualistic, rambunctious Harriet was too much for Hollywood. She needed to be tamed, to become a girly-girl with lip gloss. I can see Louise Fitzhugh turning summersaults in her grave.

There is more to be said, but in the interest of shortening the blog post....

                                   

Seven Quick Takes

Thanks to Jennifer at Conversion Diary for hosting! Unfortunately, I lack her ability to post 7 random but profound/ hilarious observations, so I'm stuck with a theme. For today, it's classics (books, stories and poems) that I just can't appreciate.


1. The Swiss Family Robinson. This is supposedly a rollicking story of a ship-wrecked family who explores a tropical island.  It's actually the most boring children's book I've ever been forced to read. If the parents said "Well done, Franz!" once, they said it 195 times. Note to aspiring authors: if you find yourself using the words further, more, again, and another for chapter titles, chances are you're being repetitive. Chances are that a child will throw your book across the room when they're forced to read it for a book report. One amazon reviewer said that "the father's endless prattling about his knowledge on each subject made me want to row him out to the wreck, and then ditch him there." Amen.

This cover is misleading

2. "A Pair of Silk Stockings" by Kate Chopin. In this short story, the mother of a large, poor family decides that buying a pair of silk stockings is a good trade-off for buying food for her family. The supposed theme is how one downtrodden mother learned to satisfy her own desires for a change, that she had a "great awakening." At least, that's what I was told in college. My impression was that this story is deeply anti-feminist, portraying women as selfish and trite, willing to sacrifice their own family's needs for vanity. Am I missing something? 

3. Stuart Little by E.B. White. I know, it's technically an excellent book. I just couldn't get into it, probably due to my own artistic failings as a nine-year-old. This is another example of failed education: I started reading it for a book report and, about 30 pages in, decided to ditch it. For the sake of "perseverance" I was told that I must read the entire book merely because I had begun it. Note to parents and teachers: this method will not inspire a love of reading in your children. Thankfully I was also allowed to choose my own books.

4.Sarah, Plain and Tall. There is a tendency in schools to assign books based on length rather than content. If you homeschool, please avoid this trap. Just because a book has fewer than 200 pages does not make it child-friendly, and some "long" books like Treasure Island keep you on the edge of your seat. With Sarah, Plain and Tall, the short length made it look like a children's book, but most children are not mature enough to appreciate the themes of a pioneer woman coping with loneliness and alienation. Or maybe I was just shallow.

5. If The Swiss Family Robinson takes the prize for most boring children's book, it's only because Ethan Frome is an adult novel. Otherwise, Ethan Frome would win hands down. Unfortunately, this was another case of a short novel being foisted upon middle school students who couldn't care less. I might actually enjoy it now, but I have post-traumatic stress from downing liters of Coke to keep myself awake. Why do schools do this? Did an education professor decide this was a good idea?

6. Ulysses by James Joyce. Yes, it is packed with literary allusions. Yes, the final chapter is a brilliant feminine monologue. That doesn't change the fact that this book is an exercise in literary one-upmanship, a chance for Joyce to prove to the world just how clever he is. The only reason it is still in print is because literature professors are enamored with obscure allusions. The contemporary equivalent is 100 Years of Solitude, which I refuse to read.

Prepare to be disappointed

7. The Road Not Taken. This is really a case of over-exposure. This poem is not the best by Robert Frost by any stretch, but people persist on printing it on posters and calendars. It's interpreted as a call to unique living, to bucking the trend. Be all that you can be! Never mind that Frost never says that the road was better or more fulfilling, simply that it "made all the difference." Don't take my word for it; here's his own reading of his poem. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSQ0L39n6xM

If I come to a fork in the road and choose a path that leads to a pack of wolves, that will indeed make all the difference. Different does not equal better, people. The American myth of individuality is just that, a myth. Most of us have "ordinary" lives with sublime, quiet moments of joy. Nothing wrong with that.

I took the path of exorbitant student loans, and that has made all the difference.

Happy reading!