A Gift That Keeps on Giving

This week's question:

Presents! November 6, 2008
Filed under: Wordpress — --Deb @ 1:20 am



So, it’s my birthday today. (Please, no applause.) But it’s inspiring today’s question–

What, if any, memorable or special book have you ever gotten as a present? Birthday or otherwise. What made it so notable? The person who gave it? The book itself? The “gift aura?”

I was pleased when I realized it was Thursday, as I had no idea what I was going to write about today. But I like this question a lot.

I have received probably hundreds of books as gifts over the course of my lifetime. My Aunt Barbara is a retired reading teacher and currently active on the board of her local library, so growing up, I could always count on a book from her at Christmas. My parents and sister usually give me books for Christmas and my birthday. My boyfriend has gotten my books. I've received some great books from friends, things that I never would've read otherwise like A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and (cough) Dante's Inferno (I did get about halfway through and liked it a lot, but something which I can't even recall anymore came up).

However, I'd have to say that the most meaningful gift was Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends, in hardcover. My grandfather died shortly before I turned six. Of his four grandchildren, I'm the only one with any clear memories of him at all: my sister wasn't even three yet, my cousin was still a baby, and my other cousin wasn't born yet. I mostly remember things like him throwing a ball over the roof of his house (which never failed to impress me), his typical greeting to me ("Here Comes Trouble!") and his plaid upholstered rocking chair. But I'm told that he loved baseball and reading, and that he always had three or four books going at once.

I was also told that he intended to buy me Where the Sidewalk Ends for my birthday that year. After he died, they found a couple of books that he'd bought recently and never had a chance to read. My parents used the store credit to pick up Where the Sidewalk Ends for me, as a sort of last gift from him. Since I wasn't even six yet, my memory on some of these points may be faulty. I could even have the story all wrong: maybe he already had the book, and they just gave it to me, maybe the money came from somewhere else, I'm not really sure, but that's how I remember it. I also remember it as being the first "nice" book that I had. This was no board book, no paperback. This was even nicer than the "Childhood of Famous Americans" series that I liked in the local library (my father the history teacher hated this series, as it consistently stopped short of the part where the Americans actually became famous. So I would wind up knowing all about the farm on which, say, Babe Didrickson grew up, or the brother she had that died...but no idea why I should care.) No, my copy of Where the Sidewalk Ends had a hard cover and a glossy jacket and looked more like an adult book than a kid's book.

I still have my copy of it at home. I have a lot of special books: the one from the collection of my graduate-school professor that died, the one that the head of the drama club gave me before my last play with him, and some of the James Herriot books that my mother got as a special gift for the same grandfather that gave me Where the Sidewalk Ends. But I'd say that one is the most special to me.

Congratulations Obama, Congratulations America

It was definitely an exciting night. I watched the election returns with my parents, and after Obama's victory speech we set off some fireworks outside. It was such a hopeful and exciting feeling to see him elected, and helped erase some of the negativity of the last eight years. I think he'll bring the right attitude and image to the White House, and I'm glad to see that reason prevailed over fear tactics.

By the way, the amazing pciture above was taken on a beach in Puri, India and is part of a photo essay depicting celebrations of Obama's election all over the world. You can see more of them
here. It's a Turkish news website, part of hotnewsturkey.com. The photo essay is great, I reccomend you take a look! We'll be back to books tomorrow, especially since it's Booking Through Thursday (why do I get the feeling I'll be looking forward to that day every week for the rest of the month?).

Vote

The day is upon us Americans. It's kind of surreal, because it feels like the election's been going on for almost two years now, but in less than four hours, the polls will close. That gives you four hours to go vote, if you haven't done so already.

Obviously, from my endorsement a few weeks ago, you probably know who I'm hoping you'll vote for. But at the very least, if you vote for McCain or a third party candidate, I'm begging you to do so because you think they're the best choice, not because you believed their lies about Obama being some sort of Muslim Arab Commie Terrorist. In the final few weeks of the campaign, the bullshit was flying so thick and fast that not even the 24-hour news networks, with their massive shovels, could keep up with it. They've counted on people to be stupid and scared like they always do. Don't let it work on you. Make the best, most well-informed choice you can.

And if you've already done so, here is an old YouTube Eminem video from the last election for your enjoyment.


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A New Feature: Books of a Feather: College

I've had this idea for a while now, but I've kind of been saving it for NaBloPoMo, when I'd really need it. The idea is that I take a theme (hopefully, ultimately one a reader suggest, but for now one I've just made up) and I talk about a bunch of books or short stories related to that theme.

As you may have guessed from the title of this post, my first theme is "college". The three books I picked are My Name is Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe; Everything Looks Impressive by Hugh Kennedy; and The Secret History by Donna Tarrt.

All three depict real colleges, but only one comes out and says so. Everything Looks Impressive is set at Yale, and tells the story of Alex, a young man from a lower-middle-class family who is living his dream there on a scholarship. Yet, he finds it pretty socially challenging. His roommates (they stuck him in a suite) are not so much living a dream as fulfilling a destiny. Alex faces many embarrassing financial moments, where he's expected to return the expensive favors his roommates do for him ("Hey, it's nothing," they say after paying a $500 tab, "you can get it next time!"). He's not as hip and trendy as most of the other students, either. The only person he truly manages to connect with is Jill, a senior and feminist who flirts aggressively with him, yet has a female lover. When she dies in an ugly gay-bashing incident that Alex suspects his roommate my have participated in, it messes up his already fragile grip on the social scene at Yale.

The Secret History and Charlotte, on the other hand, go out of their way to disguise their true setting. Hampden College, of The Secret History, is obviously Bennington College, with its rural Vermont locale, its liberal arts curriculum and its hefty price tag. The true locale of Charlotte was a bit more difficult to pin down, but I believe it to be Duke University, strong on academics, athletics, and Greek life, and founded by an heiress just as Charlotte's Dupont is, although Dupont is somewhere in the Northeast.

Of the three books, Charlotte and Everything Looks Impressive are the most similar, dealing with the disillusionment of a bright but poor young student. Both, too, are as much a chronicle of the times as of the lives of the people in the story. Alex's tale was set and published in the late 1980s, and there are ample references to 80s music and fashion, to the drugs and cars popular at the time. Charlotte's tale came out in 2004 and the references are even more amped up. Diesel Jeans, in particular, got such freqent mention that it started to seem like product placement. There are also some references to academic fashion, and fashion of belief. For Alex, the arbiters of cool on the campus dress in all black and throw cross-dressing balls or declare their lives art projects and invite the whole campus to come spy on them. For Charlotte, the arbiters of cool are the ultra-liberal editors of the school paper, who draw cartoons they believe to be edgy and see themselves as the only ones there to learn.

The Secret History, on the other hand, places academics at the center of the novel (imagine that). Richard signs up for Greek on a whim, and becomes part of an elite classics clique, who take all of their coursework from the same professor and generally hold themselves aloof from the rest of Hampden College. It is their immersion in their academics that leads to the explosive events of the novel, as they attempt to hold a Greek bacchanal. The attempt leads ultimately to the group murdering one of their own, and getting away with it in only the legal sense. Of the three, it's the strangest and the best. The characters are the most vividly drawn, the moral dilemmas they face the most thought-provoking.

What I find striking about all three books, though, is that they're clearly not written for people who are in college. In fact, it seems that of all the demographic groups out there, only the elderly are more devoid of a genre aimed at them. There are lots of books for young children, intermediate-grade children, junior high and high school students. They pick back up in the "chick lit" aimed at women in their twenties and early thirties (although I'm sure women of all ages read them too). For men of that age, there is some "dude lit" out there, books full of very technical explanations of things blowing up. And of course, there's also the stuff a cut above that either gender could enjoy, that would carry you for most of your life.

But the college books seem to be more for people who are out of college. Charlotte, to me, was particularly laughable. She was absolutely shocked, SHOCKED that her fellow unmarried students were having sex and drinking. Even after seeing it happen in front of her, repeatedly, she was still shocked. Didn't this girl ever watch a movie, or see a magazine? It wore off, although I did feel he got some details right. I, too, had "friends" like Bettina and Mimi, where the "friendship" was essentially based on having met during orientation and not knowing anyone else. They fell apart pretty rapidly, though, whereas Charlotte kept hers through most of the book. Maybe my college was different, but I have no memory of any sort of elite group that everyone wanted to be in like there was at Dupont.

In fact, of the three books, none of them squares with my own experience. All three were based on freshman alienation. At my school, I didn't meet many people who had a hard time adjusting, and I didn't myself. I found the social groups to be pretty fluid, although there were definite cliques. And most of the people worked at their classes. It wasn't "uncool" to go to the library. If you had to study, you said so, unlike the frat boys and b-ballers in Charlotte, who had to lie. I guess in a weird way, excpet for the murder, The Secret History was the closest to what I experienced in college: a vibrant, fluid party scene (there were no "right ones" at my school, the right one was whichever one had the most beer and the best music); intense, tight-knit friendships (again, without the murder: I want to emphasize this), and thought-provoking classes that we worked hard at. But none of them really captured it, and would probably be laughed at by most people who were in college. I look forward to a college novel for college students. If anyone knows one, I'd like to hear about it.

A Long Wait, A Big Reward

As you can see from the sidebar, Richard Russo is one of my favorite writers. I've been wanting to read his new book, Bridge of Sighs, ever since I heard about it. I finally managed to snag it this past trip to the library, and just finished it. It was worth the wait.

This is another one of his books set in upstate New York. Two of his previous books were set in Mohawk, NY (one of them was even titled after that town), one in Pennsylvania, and one in Maine. Nobody's Fool was set in the fictional upstate town North Bath, and I made a game of trying to figure out which real town it corresponds to. I decided that geographically, it's Ballston Spa: about ten minutes south of the much more prosperous Saratoga Springs and within an easy half-hour drive of both Albany and Lake George as the book specifies, but that Russo was also inspired by the abandoned grand bath resorts of Sharon Springs, between Amsterdam and Utica. I haven't made up my mind where Thomaston is yet, although based on the presence of the tannery and the river, I'm going to guess it's Gloversville. Since I know the state well, this is part of the fun of the books for me, the shock of recognition that someone else knows of the same small towns as I do. Near the end of the book, they referenced the museum where a friend of mine works, and I enjoyed the thought that people all over the country will read mention of it.

As I said yesterday, the book is slow to start. On the surface, our first narrator Lou (or Lucy, as he's often called) couldn't be more ordinary or boring. Lives in the same small town in which he grew up, married to his high school sweetheart, running the family business, along with his adult son and daughter-in-law. But in Richard Russo's books, things are never quite what they appear. The story is not just of Lou, but of Bobby, with whom he had a complex, one-sided friendship. Lou is telling his life story, with Bobby and his wife Sarah interjecting their points of view intermittently.

The story is rich with what I'd call realistic nostalgia. Lou, at 60, has clearly never really gotten over the death of his father decades earlier. The passages about Big Lou, a man simple and sweet in his optimism and faith in humanity, are glowing with joy and longing. But all the bad stuff is there too: the poverty, the strict social stratification of Thomaston, the ugly, violent relationship between Bobby's parents that was mirrored in countless homes around town. Perhaps the best example of this is Lou's recollection of the YMCA dances all the junior-high kids attended. In his first description of them, the poor, tough boys from the West End were too cool to show up much before the dance was almost over, preferring to do their own thing until it was time to exhibit their coolness before the rest of the kids, who just liked to pretend. Several chapters later, he acknowleges that coolness had nothing to do with it, that they couldn't pay to get in and hung around outside until the cash boxes were put away and the dance almost over, even though he still remembers them as cool and tough.

Another thing about this book that I liked is that it's the story of a town as well as of the people in it. The fate of Thomaston mirrors that of many upstate New York communities. Even those, like myself, too young to remember it can't help but feel sad as they drive through towns like Schenectady and Utica and notice how you could tell it used to be really nice. The Thomaston of Lou's youth is one of the days when the factories were still open and there was still a good part of town, and more of the town's residents were making something of their lives than weren't. The present-day Thomaston is the "after" one that I recognize, after the cancer rates rose and the factories pulled out and Victorian mansions with stained-glass windows and hardwood floors sit on the market at $15,000 for years. Sadly, that could describe many upstate New York communities.

This is a rather long book (500+ pages) and would make an excellent winter project. In almost any book of that length, there are things that the story could have done without, and this one is no exception. The racial subplot stands out in my mind. The ending, where the decades-old pent-up attraction between Bobby and Sarah fizzles before the cork is even let out, was also somewhat of a disappointment. But all in all, it was an excellent read and will probably become one of my favorite Richard Russo books.

NaBloPoMo, Day 1

Yes, I'm doing it again! Last year, it was fun and addictive. I looked for new groups on the NaBloPoMo site to join everyday, I made up a few of my own, I was constantly checking my profile for comments and friend requests...good times. If you're doing it too, you can find me over there here.

Unfortunately, I don't have a whole lot to say today. I'm reading Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo, which was a slow start but has gotten good. Halloween was a bit of a disappointment this year. Last year was like an ideal Halloween in my neighborhood. I was mobbed with adorable kids in clever costumes. I dressed up as a witch to give out the candy, which they all loved. This year, there were a lot fewer kids, and many more older kids who didn't dress up. I started at around6 and shut it down around 8:30. But I did find a true gem: TCM showed a ton of old horror movies. They were only about an hour and a half long each, so we watched three or four of them, with Vincent Price and Boris Karloff and guys like that. They had a theme of movies based on H.P Lovecraft stories. I tried a book of them last year, read one and had the crap scared out of me, but maybe I'll try again...

Fear

I finished Augustyn Burrough's new book A Wolf at the Table a couple of days ago, and have put off writing about it. It's so horrifying that I don't even want to think about some of the stuff that happened in it, and so well-written that it's worthy of attention, but what to say? "It was a good read?" "I recommend this one?" "I liked it?" They all seem inappropriate.

The title character is Augustyn's father. At the beginning of the book, he stated that for a long time, he had no memories whatsoever of his father. Then, when he started remembering, he couldn't stop. His father is a terrifying, shadowy figure. When he was at his best in this book, he was denying any attention or affection to young Augustyn. So great was his need that at one point, he stole some of his father's clothing and made a "dummy dad" to cuddle with in bed at night.

When his father was at his worst, he was violent and abusive. He imbued the entire household with an aura of fear. For me, the worst scenes were those involving the family pets. I've always had an extremely strong emotional reaction to any sort of animal abuse or neglect. When Augustyn and his mother left the house in fear of their safety for the last time in the book, I was practically shaking because I knew there was one more household pet to go.

To Augustyn's credit, he tried to get inside his father's head using the few tools that he had. He tells us that his father lived the first eight years of his life with a doting grandfather and three teenaged aunts who treated him as a living doll. He was then thrown back to the home of his abusive biological parents. He won Augustyn's mother's hand by threatening to kill himself if she rejected him, and they lived horrifyingly-ever-after. This doesn't make you any more sympathetic to the man, but it helps explain how a normal person could become like that.

I'd read part of the same story a week earlier, from Augustyn's older brother's perspective. He'd hinted darkly at how his Asperrger's just may have saved his life, but the point was brought home even more clearly after this book. John Elder was older and less innocent than his brother when things started to go really bad. He was more independent (old enough not to want to cuddle) and was able to withdraw into his electronics (Augustyn remembers sneaking into his bedroom and seeing the rivulets of hardened solder on the carpet, and tubes and wires everywhere). But John Elder left out the part where he got into a violent argument with his father and Augustyn found his gun and begged him to kill their father for him; also the part where he started sneaking back home for Augystyn at night, to teach him how to shoot and defend himself. It was fascinating to see a different perspective on the man whose death I'd cried over a few days earlier. When I read the death scene in this book, all I felt was regret that it was apparently peaceful.

I read this book quickly, but it was a difficult read. I've felt sort of haunted by it ever since. I almost don't want it in the house with me. I think it's because of the ending, or lack thereof. There are plenty of books out there written by people who were abused as children. There are several narratives that they follow: "All this happened, but (s)he didn't get away with it;" "All this happened, but we made it up in the end;" "All this happened, and I survived it and look at me now." The story of Augustyn's father doesn't follow any of those. He remarried and died surrounded by the family he almost killed. Augustyn did escape the house, but his new "family" was far from suitable either. He never stopped trying with his dad, and never had much more success as an adult than as a child. And the book doesn't finish by showing him as a happy, successful adult, but as an alcoholic haunted by what he sincerely hopes are bad dreams but what he believes might be memories.

No, the narrative of this story only expands on the beginnings of those sentences: "All this stuff happened, behind closed doors, while all the while we went to school and work and the store, just like you do. All this stuff happened right down the street from someone just like you, right by people who hate child and animal abuse just like you do. So who's to say it's not happening on your street, and how do you know that man in the grocery store who gave you the cat food coupon isn't going home to starve his own son's cat to death? The man in my story could be anyone. Why, he could even be your new husband." And that thought is more terrifying than anything Stephen King ever wrote.