Who, Me?!

"You can't move furniture around like that," said a stern voice beside me. "And you can't block the aisle. Put the chair back where you got it."

I stared open-mouthed at the library security guard hovering over me. Was she talking to ME? I had pulled a chair from a nearby table in order to see the books on the bottom shelf, having reached the age when reading call numbers is a challenge and floor-sitting (and floor-getting-up-from) is best avoided. No one else was near my aisle; I would certainly have moved out of the way of anyone who came near.

I sat there blinking up at her in disbelief. "Put the chair back," she said again, her tone of voice ratcheting up a notch. I felt a surge of rage rise up inside me, and I almost said, "Are you kidding?!" Then, since I never want to be a Difficult Person and since I obey all authority figures, especially those in uniform, I swallowed my anger and humbly dragged the chair back to its place. The guard moved on, stopping to have a loud conversation with some people at the next table. I returned to the shelves whose titles I now could not see, gathered my things, and left in a huff, promising myself I would never again return to that library. I knew I was reacting like a teenager, but I didn't care.

In the car I sat in appalled disbelief. I JUST GOT YELLED AT IN A LIBRARY! I kept telling myself. I considered going back into the library, finding the director, and telling him/her that I would never be back, that a library is a sacred place for me, a place I would never profane. I spent half my childhood in various libraries, and never once got yelled at. As an English teacher I was one of the few faculty members who actually used the library and insisted that my students use it. I loved it so much I became a school librarian, doing everything I could to make the library a place kids would want to be. I even wrote a novel with a library as the setting! I am a Friend of the Library! I am one of the few people left who still whispers in libraries! I DO NOT GET YELLED AT IN LIBRARIES!!

I calmed down and tried, in fairness to the guard and the library's higher authorities, to imagine why it would be necessary to enforce or even have a rule against moving a chair. Of course there are people who will move a chair and not move it back. There are people who will block an aisle even when someone clearly needs to get by. This particular library is heavily used by homeless people, and I'm sure the librarians are torn between making patrons feel at home and keeping them from taking over the library as their home. Having spent five years as a librarian to teenagers who were often just looking for a place to hang out, I know what havoc some patrons can wreak.

But moving a chair in a nearly-empty library to sit quietly studying books is not wreaking havoc. Acting as if it is can only drive patrons away. In this age of declining readership, that just makes me sad. I'm already over what happened today. Now I hope the library will recover.

Kindle: Warm Spark or Destructive Fire?

I’m the kind of person who wanders around a bookstore picking up books just to feel them. I love to open a book that’s never been opened, to run my fingers over the virgin pages. Let’s be honest: I cuddle books. I caress them, I stroke them, I breathe in their inky perfume. Eventually I take them home and make them my pets.

I never feel lonely if there are piles of books in every room. In my comfy chair by the fire, I am perfectly happy just gazing sideways at my bookshelf, admiring the various titles and fonts, the colors of the dustjackets, the publishers’ symbolic logos on the spines. I can wallow for hours in happy anguish over which book to start next. At some point, I choose one. After consuming every word on the dust jacket, examining the front matter and table of contents, and leafing through a few pages, I finally begin to read. And for a short time, all’s right with the world. Or should I say without the world.

So reading for me is an experience of physical comfort as well as intellectual stimulation and emotional contentment--all provided by a handful of compressed wood pulp covered with tiny black symbols. It’s hard to imagine the pleasure of reading without the book itself, or with another kind of “book,” something with a different form and feel—say a small plastic box with a screen. Horrors! part of me thinks. That’s not a book! It doesn’t look like a book, feel like a book, smell like a book, or quack like a book. I can’t read that! What’s the world coming to?

If you ask Jeff Bezos, creator of amazon and of the new electronic reader Kindle, what the world’s coming to is a revolution that will change not just the form of books, but their readers, writers, and publishers and the processes they use to create and consume books. And that change will come about—indeed, is already underway—without sacrificing most of the traditional book’s beloved qualities.

Bezos wanted Kindle to be as “bookish” as possible. It’s the size of a paperback (no matter how many pages it has), it doesn’t plug in (except for recharging), and it doesn’t talk to you. You can curl up in bed with it. You can write in the margins. Yet it’s not physical characteristics like these that define a book, says Bezos; “the key feature of a book is that it disappears.” Like the storybook frames that usher us into the old Disney cartoons and then disappear once we’re inside the magic kingdom, a book is only the vehicle that propels us into another world. A book “takes you down the rabbit hole,” is the way he puts it. And the pleasure of that fall, he says, is what makes us love the physical book—not the other way around. So he’s betting we can come to love another package that can deliver the same rush.

Especially when that package does so many things the traditional book or bookstore can’t, starting with acquisition: With Kindle you can order and immediately GET an entire book on literally the spur of the moment. That’s because of Kindle’s built-in wireless connection to the internet, which also enables you to instantly look up reviews, definitions, and background information. It’s accessible from anywhere, says amazon. (Some Kindle readers in remote places have found otherwise.) Kindle books are cheaper than paper ones: new books are $10, older ones less. Kindle also has an email component, so you can chat with friends about the books you’re reading. It even saves your place automatically. And for students, researchers, or just book-hogs like me who can’t get on a plane without at least four books, it offers a way to carry hundreds of books in a “suitcase” the size of one. You can highlight favorite passages, search any book for a name or phrase, and even change the font size. And Kindle’s not just for book-length reading; you can subscribe to newspapers, magazines, and blogs as well. Kimdle users praise the ink-on-paper-like appearance of the text. And, as one reader said, “you don't have to fight to hold it open while eating a sandwich.”

What’s the down side of Kindle, besides not being a real book? The most obvious is that most books aren’t available, though amazon offers more than 90,000 books, including most current best sellers. (Bezos’s vision is that in five years, every book ever written will be available.) And you can’t lend out or resell the books you buy. Depending on which source you read, you may or may not be able to cut and paste passages you want to save. For me, Kindle’s instant connection to Wikipedia for reference is a drawback, since I prefer more trustworthy sources.

Still, the Kindle keeps calling my name, and eventually I will probably succumb to the temptation to have one. Based on user comments posted on amazon, I’ll wait for the next version and hope it has fewer kinks and a lower price. Because one thing is for sure: I might enjoy reading with a Kindle, but it won’t keep me out of bookstores.


For more information, see Steven Levy’s “The Future of Reading,” Newsweek, 11/26/07, http://www.newsweek.com/id/70983 and http://www.newsweek.com/id/71251. On amazon’s Kindle section, you can watch the Charlie Rose interview with Bezos and read thousands of user comments, including many that go beyond the practical and personal-preference issues to the philosophical questions raised by the technology and “DRM” (Digital Rights Management). Very thought-provoking.

Michael Chabon Takes the High Road

I collect beautiful sentences, and in Gentlemen of the Road, Michael Chabon has given me a bookful of them, a collection so intoxicating that it almost doesn't matter, to a stylist like me, what the story's about.

Luckily, the story's as much fun as the prose. An unlikely pair of "gentlemen"--Amran, an earthy African axe-wielder, and Zelikman, a lonely, high-minded healer--roam the medieval world in search of adventure, wealth, and wrongs to right. They remind me of all the great male duos of literature and film: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, juggling idealism and hard reality; Luke Skywalker and Han Solo one-upping each other with innocence and experience; Butch and Sundance shrugging as they jump off the cliff together. In every chapter the "gentlemen" encounter ambushes, traitors, orphans who need saving, corrupt rulers, savage mercenaries, animals with superhuman powers, torn and bleeding bodies--all the stuff of a Marvel comic book or an Indiana Jones movie. It's no surprise that the boys save the day and get the girls before they ride off into the sunset.

But what is surprising in such a story is the subtlety of characterization, conveyed in short bursts of dialogue. “I don’t save lives,” Zelikman the healer says. “I just prolong their futility.” In one of the few long speeches in the book, Zelikman captures both the melodrama and the nobility of the book when he proclaims: “I am not overly encumbered by principle, as you know. I am a gentleman of the road, an apostate from the faith of my fathers, a renegade, a brigand, a hired blade, a thief, but on this one small principle of economy, damn you, and damn that troublemaking little stripling, and damn every one of those men out there, living men, in full possession, for the most part, of all their limbs and humors, I have to hold firm: if we can only save them one man at a time, then by God we must only kill them one man at a time.”

That long sentence, with its rich vocabulary, skillful repetition, meandering structure, and delayed punchline, is typical of Chabon's writing. I kept wandering away from the plotline to admire the linguistic scenery along the way. In the best passages, and there are many, action, character, emotion, and description intertwine to produce a kind of High-Def prose where the beads of sweat on the faces of the men in the foreground, and the terror drumming in their hearts, are as clear as the invading ships in the distance. Case in point: "He wept silently, after the custom of shamed and angry men, so that when the pursuit party came tumbling, pounding, scrabbling down the trail, past the fold in which he and Hillel [his horse] stood concealed, he could hear the creak and rattle of their leather armor with its scales of horn; and when the Arsiyah returned, just before daybreak, at the very hour when all of creation seemed to fall silent as if fighting off tears, Zelikman could hear the rumbling of the men’s bellies and the grit in their eyelids and the hollowness of failure sounding in their chests."

Chabon pulls out of his bag of tricks two other conventions of old-fashioned storytelling that kept me turning the pages. His chapter titles are elegant and seductive: "On the Seizing of a Low Moment"; "On a Consignment of Flesh" ; and finally, "On Following the Road to One's Destiny, with the Usual Intrusions of Violence and Grace." And in case we're still not having enough fun, sprinkled through the slim book are fifteen pen-and-ink illustrations in the style of the best books I read as a kid in the sixties. They are by Gary Gianni, who, fittingly, draws the never-ending comic strip "Prince Valiant."

So what's a nice Pulitzer Prize-winning author doing in a place like this? In an endearing afterword, Chabon tries to answer that inevitable question. "You catch me in the act of trying, as a writer, to do what many of the characters in my earlier stories...were trying, longing, ready to do: I have gone off in search of a little adventure....Adventures are a logical and reliable result--and have been since the time of Odysseus--of the fatal act of leaving one's home, or trying to return to it again. All adventure happens in that damned and magical space, wherever it may be found or chanced upon, which least resembles one's home. As soon as you have crossed your doorstep or the county line, into that place where the structures, laws, and conventions of your upbringing no longer apply, where the support and approval (but also the disapproval and repression) of your family and neighbors are not to be had; then you have entered into adventure, a place of sorrow, marvels, and regret. Given a choice, I very much prefer to stay home, where I may safely encounter adventure in the pages of a book, or seek it out, as I have here, in the friendly wilderness of my computer screen."

I'm so thankful that Chabon chose the literary form of adventure and then invited us all along for the ride. And if he gets hooked on the genre (my word, not his; he hates the way books are slotted into discrete categories that carry automatic judgements and misjudgements) and produces the next Lord of the Rings, I'll be first in line at the bookstore.

Octavian Nothing: Really Something

Most adult readers assume that "young adult" fiction consists of smarmy high school romances full of stereotypical teens learning Hallmark life lessons while indulging heavily in sex, booze, drugs, and hip-hop, or whatever's the latest pop-culture flavor-of-the-month. The best YA literature--and I do not use the term loosely--may indeed include such ingredients (just as Shakespeare and Jane Austen did), but it can also transcend the age and cultural limitations of teens to entertain and enlighten readers of any age. M. T. Anderson's The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume 1, which won the National Book Award last year, is such a novel.

Set in the Boston area in the early days of the American Revolution, Octavian tells the story of an African boy who was born a prince and then sold into slavery with his mother. His bondage is an unusual one: he is raised in a College of philosophers and scientists who provide him a classical education and a refined life while scrupulously documenting everything from his intellectual achievements to his feces, all as part of an experiment to determine the relative abilities of different races. Octavian's realization of his ironic dilemma comes amidst a minor smallpox epidemic and a major revolution, one in which he gladly participates even though he knows the freedom he is fighting for will never be his.

Anderson manages to suggest just about every issue of the history of race in America in the experiences of this one boy. The tragic facts he portrays and the terrible questions he raises challenge readers of every age to become newly aware of the horrors of both slavery and war. Octavian is disempowered at every turn, and when he is finally shackled and made to wear an iron mask that prevents him from speaking, we understand in our guts why he must cancel out the emperor's name bestowed on him by his "benefactors" with the surname "Nothing."

And then there is the style. Some writers for teens adopt a simple, pared-down style, or resort to the teenspeak of the day--nothing dates a book faster--or pepper their dialogue with "edgy" invective and sarcasm. I suppose a whole novel will soon be written, if it hasn't been already, in the truncated language of texting. Anderson instead chooses to challenge his young readers by adopting the lofty, lengthy, multi-syllabic, formal, abstract, semicolon-sprinkled and sometimes beautiful language of the eighteenth century Rationalists he castigates. It's intimidating to all but the most erudite reader. It almost lost me, and it will, I regret to say, keep the vast majority of young readers from getting very far into his book--just as the YA marketing will keep adult readers who would love the book from finding it. And while I admire both the work it must have required and the results, I wish he had made a different choice. It's as if he brought into a classroom a young man with a moving, intense, life-changing story to tell, but he dressed him up in a powdered wig and silk hose and expected the kids to take him seriously. A few will listen, but most will be too busy giggling at the foppery to hear the message.

And yet I would love to teach this book to kids who could handle the style. There is so much here to think and talk about: the language itself, the values and practices of the time, the questions felt in the revolutionary hearts of all adolescents, the horrors echoed in our own unsettled day. The reader of any age who can stick with it will be hugely rewarded.

From One Extreme to the Other (Our Trip, part 2)

Hoover Dam provided a transition from the wild extremes of nature to those of human nature. It's an amazing engineering feat, explained so that even we non-engineers can begin to understand how difficult it must have been. Yet it came in early and under budget, due in part to the hundreds of workers who died in the process. It's a tribute to what people can do when they set their minds to something seemingly impossible.

And I guess the same can be said of Las Vegas, though with less admiration. On the one hand, the Strip was far from the dirty, tacky place I'd expected. We spent much of our time walking around the grand hotels, and they do take your breath away--in both elegance and mileage! No dime or detail was spared to create The Bellagio, The Venetian, Caesar's Palace, Paris, New York, The Mirage, etc., or should I say to re-create Lake Como, Venice, Rome, etc. The fountain picture, the only one we took in Vegas before the camera died, represents well the grand and beautiful side of this city my Frommer's guide called "Disney World on Steroids." The high point was probably Cirque du Soleil's "Mystere." If you haven't seen a show by this group, put it on your must-do list. Another place well worth the admission was Siegfried and Roy's Secret Garden, a gorgeous zoo and serious research facility with more than a dozen very active white tigers and lions, alpaca sheep, and dolphins. We also saw David Copperfield's show, but he was surprisingly underwhelming. I got the feeling he was both bored and more impressed with himself than we were.

As for the decadent side of Sin City, I found the worst thing to be the hawkers of girlie shows who line the sidewalks clicking their fingers against the ad cards they stick in your face. Watching people gamble can be both exciting and depressing. Other than wasting a few bucks on the slots (actually, Ray won there), we didn't gamble, preferring to spend our money on beautiful expensive food. Not to mention Venetian glass earrings. But hey, I bought the cheapest ones in the store!

Three days in Vegas was enough to say Been there, done that. Next time I want to see Rome or Paris, it will be the real deal. But the rest of the West--well, I'll be back.

From The Land of the Gods

We're in the middle of our long-awaited trip west, where our most frequent utterance is "Wow!" followed shortly by "Double Wow." Beyond that, it will take a better writer than me to do verbal justice to this land, so I'll just summarize our travels and share a few photos.

After a painless flight to Vegas and a half hour lost to congestion there, we (Ray and I with friends Linda and Rich) were finally on our way to Zion Natl Park. As the land opened up and vast vistas spread out before us filled with giant formations I'd never even imagined, I could feel my blood pressure drop and my breathing expand. Even Ray relaxed! He even turns off his crackberry for an hour or two now and then. We spent the first night in lovely Springdale, Utah, at the foot of Zion Park, and the second at the park lodge-both very nice. We walked along the Virgin River or just stood still gaping at the rocks towering above us--and sometimes at the climbers who dared to scale them. The weather was perfect.

Exiting the park via the Mt Carmel Scenic highway, with its hairpin turns, was unforgettable. A few hours later we arrived at Grand Canyon Lodge in rain and fog. I was astonished. Who ever heard of RAIN at the Grand Canyon? isn't this desert country? Soon it stopped and we walked in the fog out one short but sobering path to the end of a promontory, where the clouds lifted enough for a few frustrating glimpses of what lay beyond. We went to bed a bit disappointed, which made the next morning all the more wonderful, when we saw the canyon in all its glory under a brilliant sun. After walking the paths by the lodge, we drove through a gorgeous pine-and-aspen forest to other outposts, marveling at the vastness and variety of the land forms. Then we returned to the lodge, snagged chairs on the porch, put our feet up, and decided what music to put on our ipods for the sunset. (I chose Handel's "Zadok the Priest" performed by The Opera Band, which repeats the word "Rejoice" over and over in a glorious crescendo. It was perfect.) That hour watching the canyon formations glow and darken as the sun descended was one of the most magical and unforgettable of my life.

Today is the first of two days at Bryce Canyon. Each of these parks is so glorious and so completely unique. At Zion you are humbled and awed by the majesty and power of the rock walls rising hundreds of feet over your head; at the Grand Canyon you look out and down at the endless beauty below and the flat emptiness of the South Rim beyond; here at Bryce you are again staring down, now at the tops of "hoodoos" that look like giant sand dribble castles left by giants playing in the dirt. Ray and Rich descended to the canyon bottom, a short walk down and a long steep climb up. Linda and I were content to stroll the path along the rim.

Tonight we'll return to the park from our motel nearby to see the stars. Time for me to get out of the room and take a walk in this glorious place before it gets dark. We'll spend two nights here, then on to vegas. Right now it's hard to imagine enjoying its man-made "beauty," but I'm sure we'll manage to have fun!

To write in a book or not to write, that is the question

Since my blog's title is BookWoman, I thought I better write something about books, my chief passion in life. Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda underreacted recently when an online reader huffed superciliously that one must never write in a book, as every true book lover knows. Sadly, I was too late to enter the chat, but steam was coming out of my ears. Then a few days later, I was horrified when a woman in a book discussion group I was attending said the same thing. I couldn't believe there were two such "book lovers" in the world.

HOW DOES A BOOK LOVER NOT WRITE IN A BOOK? The better the book, the more you need to mark it up. (Except collectibles which you might sell, obviously.) Oh sure, you could use post-its, or keep a notebook with every book you're reading, but then your questions and comments and exclamation points are in one place and the actual words that inspired them are in another. What good is that? One of the things I like about library books and used books is seeing what passages were marked by previous readers. (Exception: highlighting, which should be done only when you have to take a test on the book and then never open it again.) True book lovers of the world, unite, pens in hand!

I just started re-reading Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. If you're like me and can never have enough books (or read all the books you have), it's worth a trip to the library or bookstore to enjoy the first few pages of this one, a catalog of all the types of books that can assault you when you walk into a bookstore. My favorite: The Books You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down and Really Read Them.

And there I was on the front porch without a pen when I came across this sentence: "Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears." And this was written before the internet! Still, it leads right back to what I wrote yesterday. Don't you love it when that happens?