Hitting the Books

Saturday started a little earlier than it should, but once again set the mood for my weekend. In the six or so months that I’ve lived with Jeremiah, we’ve settled into a very comforting routine on weekend mornings. He gets up and usually starts the coffee before heading off to the World of Warcraft until I wake up. Anywhere between 1 and 4 hours later, I emerge, hair pointing to each of the cardinal directions, to claim my coffee. Then one area of the house gets tackled before breakfast. Last week it the laundry monster on the recliner in the bedroom (we’re usually pretty good about not turning that into a pile bureau, but it happens in busy weeks) and reorganizing the closet. The week before that, we got the whole house ready for Prater Thanksgiving and decorating for Christmas. This morning, I made my kitchen gleam. (Excuse me—I have to go turn the Christmas lights back on. The timer doesn’t know the difference between weekdays and other days.) Granted, I have to Swiff the floor, but it’s still pretty good. And always the laundry. The most relaxing part of the ritual is putting the first load of laundry in the wash, because it is the start of clean underwear for everyone and usually the end of the morning task. Over the course of the day, coffee tables may be tidied, dishes done, fireplaces swept, but the cleaning impulse has been satisfied and my house is not a wreck. It’s at that point that, no matter how busy or packed full of to-dos the weekend may be, it feels like a weekend and I begin to recharge. Or as they say in French, recharge. With the phlegm.


This week, dear Reader, I remembered that I, too, like to read things other than papers about the potential conflict between oceangoing barges and rambunctious bowhead whales. I like to read books. You know, the kind with characters, and plots, and the occasion for graceful sentences. And pages! Did you know that books happen on paper? Eff you, Kindlezon eReaders, you can keep your convenience and portability. I stare at words on a screen all damn day, and I am not about to fall asleep drooling on my iPad (because first I’d have to deign to buy an iPad, and I still can’t get past the impression that it’s a feminine hygiene product for Aughters. Also because iAnything + water = iHatemylife). But this week, not only did I finish Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen, but I also raced through two Percy Jackson and the Olympians books (Rick Riordan). I have come to the conclusion, after fits and starts with BOOKS FOR ADULTS, that I am drawn to youth lit for the same reason I like light verse. It’s not because it’s lit for idiots, it’s because I am more interested in the story than I am in the person who wrote it, and youth writers tend to be far less self interested than literary writers.

In many cases when reading a literary novella, you can practically see the MFA at his desk, overworking the words and systematically killing the lightness in his story. It’s like watching someone knead the hell out of biscuits—you want to grab their hands and say “Stop at just enough! Too much gluten! I want a biscuit, not a gummy hockey puck!” Don’t get me wrong—I understand. I understand wanting just the perfect sentence, and I understand having this story that you’ve been working on for years like a scarf that gets unraveled and reknit every Christmas. It’s sisyphustian—always pushing and never finishing. But sometimes you get to the top and have to recognize that you’re not a tragedy-stricken Greek; you’re a scarab, and that ball you’ve been rolling uphill is a dense pile of shit. That’s all it is. Yes. It is your dense pile of shit, and you should be proud of having gotten up the hill. You might even be able to pick a few things out of it to use again is some sort of literary upcycling program. And it got published because the other scarabs and their independent presses know all about that ball, and have some of their own, and the more balls that are out there the more we might start thinking they’re diamonds based on density alone.

Youth books, though? They’re biscuits. And I have to tell you that the MFAs I’ve know whose work I’ve really enjoyed? They read Mrs. Dalloway and Harry Potter. They could have a reasoned discussion about either Shakespeare or Silverstein. They put the story first, and the story last, and always the language at the service of the story. That’s what I like about youth writers—I don’t have to look as hard at their work to find that kind of craftsmanship. It’s not as hit or miss as adult lit, where I feel cheated when I read half a book and it still isn’t anything but character development and thesaurus jockeying. Youth lit doesn’t try to make me feel stupid for not understanding something, or rewarded when I do, and conquering the book doesn’t make me feel more worthy to attend cocktail parties with English majors—it’s just a good story. It’s a biscuit, and as we all know: anyone can make a hockey puck. Only the good cook can make a great biscuit.

On to the next. I’m thinking the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then back to The Piano Teacher and The Pilot’s Wife over Christmas. Any suggestions for nexts?