Category Archives: reading

My curious mother

23 Wednesday Nov 2022

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It’s hard to guess which of us was more surprised. In our most recent book group, Irene Palmer asked me if I had read “House Made of Dawn” by N. Scott Momaday. Happens I had, thanks to a literature professor committed to diversity in the literary canon she taught.

But hold on there, Irene. How did you happen on this literary treasure, published back in 1969 that won a Pulitzer Prize and established Momaday on the literary scene. A Kiowa who grew up in New Mexico among the Pueblo and Navajo, Momaday is credited with nudging Native American literature into the mainstream.

Irene discovered Momaday, when he was mentioned in a Ken Burns documentary on World War II. It turns out that Momaday, among many awards, received the Ken Burns American Heritage Prize in 2019, which honors an individual whose body of work has advanced our collective understanding of the indomitable American spirit. That’s Irene, she takes notes and searches things out.

I haven’t read Momaday since my college days, but I kept my paperback of “House Made of Dawn” among the books I couldn’t part with (Terry Tempest Williams, Willa Cather, John Nichols, Wallace Stegner, Tony Morrison, Edward Abbey…). But unlike the books from those other authors, I didn’t go back and reread House Made of Dawn.

Until now.

Thanks to my mother whose curiosity — always far-ranging — has lately pulled her into the realm of fiction. Previously, she has preferred nonfiction — biographies, history, philosophy, religion.

What we are remarking on, as we read Momaday, is the poetic cadence of his story-telling. It should be no surprise that this well-regarded author has several volumes of poetry. I expect we’ll go there next. Unless my curious mother finds some other path to wander.

A master craftswoman

08 Thursday Sep 2022

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British author Edith Pargeter, who also wrote under the psuedonym Ellis Peters, does a masterly bit of work in the second novel of her fine Cadfael Chronicles. That book, One Corpse Too Many, is set in 1138 England and includes a scene pivotal to the plot of the story, but also meaningful for its glimpse into human tragedy. Following the hanging of more than 90 men who were in rebellion against King Stephen, the families of the fallen come to claim their bodies for burial. It’s quiet and sad:

Some dozen or so had been claimed by parents and wives. Soon there would be piteous little hand-carts pushed up the slope to the gate, and brothers and neighbors lifting limp bodies to carry them away. More of the townspeople were still coming timidly in through the archway, women with shawls drawn close over their heads and faces half-hidden, gaunt old men trudging resignedly to look for their sons.

Among the men hung by the orders of the king, is one murdered and then thrown in among the other dead and it falls to the series’ hero Brother Cadfael to both discern that one corpse is not like the others and then to discover the killer.

I found myself moved by the small detail of a horror of war — the trauma of reclaiming the dead — and impressed that this scene was also pivotal to the development of the plot.

I’ve been enjoying Pargeter’s Cadfael Chronicles, impressed with her diligence in creating a believable historical setting but also with her skill in building a compelling narrative. It’s one thing when a scene evokes deep emotion. It’s a mark of expertise when it serves the plot so well.

The mystery of a good book

20 Saturday Aug 2022

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I’ve read or listened to more than a dozen books this year, but I only fell into one. You might know this feeling. You start reading a book and somewhere in the first 20 pages or so you become immersed in the story. When you open the book the world around you drifts into fog. When you are away from the book, it is sitting in a corner of your mind, waiting for you.

This is not the demand of a compelling plot that lures the reader on through the simple device of making you want to know what happens next. This is something else. The place of the book comes up around you. You see it, you hear it and smell it and it becomes a place you feel you know. As the characters in the book reveal themselves, you are drawn to them. You begin to feel what they feel. They rejoice or recoil, or are filled with wonder or alarm and you with them.

In the best books, you find yourself thinking in the special language of the book.

And when the book ends well, not happily but truly, having fulfilled the promise of its early pages, you are a little bereft because you will never have this experience again. You can never read this book in this way again, revisit it though you may.

Betsy James’ Roadsouls was this way for me. I don’t know how this happens, exactly, this resonance between book and reader. And we are all so individual in our tastes, in what resonates, that it can’t really be predicted. In a perfect world a book find its way to its perfect readers.

A writer wants to achieve this. To create a world a reader slips into like still water. And yet while writing, you don’t think about this. You are thinking about the plot. You are moving characters around in a room or on a mountain. You are describing place and setting mood. You are thinking about the words, the way they sound together. You are making choices every day in the writing that limit the choices that will come later. It doesn’t feel like a magical process. Some days it feels, in its middle parts, tedious. But worth remembering, at the end of a tedious writing day: the goal. Using words to create the illusion of a world and a story that will draw in the perfect reader, the one your book is written to, is a fine goal. And difficult. And worthy.

Between the author and the reader

30 Thursday Jun 2022

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I haven’t been a fan of audio books, but listening to compelling stories reduces the tedious aspects of hand stitching a large quilt. (Yes, endless spirals. What was I thinking?) While half a dozen audio books have helped me make good progress. I’ve been surprised to learn that the voice reading the book has a significant effect on my appreciation of the story.

I don’t care for the person reading Gregg Hurwitz’s “Orphan X” series (a guilty pleasure I confess to). If I hadn’t read the first few books in the series I doubt I could have listened to the entire “Prodigal Son” while quilting. And I recently tried (and failed) to listen to Karen Joy Fowler’s The Jane Austen Book Club. The reader’s voice interfered so much with my ability to connect with the story that I gave it up after the third chapter.

Because Fowler is such a respected author, I began to wonder whether the insertion of someone else’s voice between me and the written page was having an impact on my sense of not just the quality of the narrative but also the nature of the characters.

Casting about for something else to listen to, I stumbled on Elizabeth Bear, thanks to author John Scalzi’s inimitable and wondrous blog Whatever. This time, rather than just jumping into the audio book, I read the first few chapters, using Amazon’s “Look inside” feature. Reassured that I liked the both the writing and the story, I turned to the audio version and found the voices fit the story for me.

I appreciate my local library making audio books available through the Hoopla digital streaming service. I absolutely do buy books, but can’t buy all the books all the time.

I’m listening to Bear’s “The Stone in the Skull” now and suspect that the actual purchasing of Bear books won’t be long in coming.

Listening to books has reinforced for me the notion that reading is an oddly private and intimate act between author and reader, two people who rarely meet, but find themselves drawn together in an inner invisible dance. While audio books draw me back to my otherwise tedious needlework, I prefer no intermediary between me and the page.

May my eyesight last until someone pulls the last book from my cold fingers.