Spread (Literary) Joy

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.” —Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir to the Craft

Photo via Twitter: Books on the Rail

My iPhone suddenly stopped working today and you'd think I lost a limb. It was nearly that traumatic. Okay, not really. I was blessed (cursed?) with a flair for the dramatic. It did contribute mightily to my crankiness level which has been hovering way too high as of late. Then, thanks to our intern who may or may not have a birthday today, I read this and suddenly all was right with the world. I want to become a book ninja and spread literary joy far and wide. Who's with me?

Posted by Rachel

What's In Your Library?

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.” —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Ditching my to-do’s at the southern California border came back to bite me already. (Of course, I’d happily do it all over again.) The semester started up today, and I’m still trying to gear up. It shouldn’t be hard, right?  But I’m still in a golden state of mind.  Despite the reality jolt, I’ve got books on the brain. I have every new student of mine interview another to answer life’s pressing questions like what is your favorite book and your best brush with fame; oh and what’s your most embarrassing moment because once we know that, we can read each other’s writing without pretense.  Besides, you can learn something important about a person based on the books they love.  Book profiling…it’s a real thing.  

Anywho, I’m always interested to hear which books get top billing by some of today’s brightest and best students. The variance is big. In my three classes, taught back, to back, to back, here are the books whose titles I heard 3 or more times.  Since 3 is the magic number, you may want to put these winners on your short list:

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

When Jane Austen was just 21 years old, she began writing Pride and Prejudice.  In less than a year, she completed her manuscript chronicling the highs and lows of the 5 Bennet sisters.  If you haven’t read this, you should drop everything and have at it. Immediately. You’ll be hard pressed to find a character more endearing than Elizabeth Bennet. Jane (yes, we’re on a first-name basis) humbly admitted, “I must confess that I think [Elizabeth] as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least, I do not know.”

ANNA KARENINA

I’m ashamed to admit I haven’t read this masterpiece.  Tolstoy is my favorite Russian writer.  He wrote Anna Karenina, which he considers his first true novel, in serial installments from 1875 to 1877.  This magnum opus recounts Karenina’s life story during late-nineteenth-century feudal Russian society.  Dostoyevsky proclaimed it “flawless as a work of art.” Faulkner believed it’s the best novel ever written (along with 125 contemporary authors of a decade ago).

ENDER'S GAME

Every semester, at least one of my shiny new student’s raves about this read.  I’m not a science fiction sorta girl.  But the adoration of Ender’s Game is getting incredibly difficult to ignore anymore.  The book, set in Earth’s future, won the 1985 Nebula Award for best novel and the 1986 Hugo Award for best novel. From the sound of things, this book shares insights about compassion and empathy—making it not just an entertaining read, but an important one too.

Posted by Tracy

September Book Club Selection

“I have heard of people's lives being changed by a dramatic or traumatic event—a death, a divorce, a winning lottery ticket, a failed exam. I never heard of anybody's life but ours being changed by a dinner party.”

Reentry is Brutal with a big fat capital B. Our annual beach trip is in the books and I'm left feeling like I do when I finish a great read: wanting more. Clearly we were all play and no work (nary a post was produced) and for that we apologize. Work rules our worlds these days so forgive us for ditching our to-do's at the Southern California border. It was lovely, I'm not gonna lie.

This blog is solace for us though, as are you. A much softer place to land than those pesky day jobs of ours. Thanks for sticking with us, dear readers. To make it up to you, we're throwing it back this September to one of my all-time favorites: Crossing to Safety.  I've read it at least three times, maybe four. It's one of the books that made me want to be a writer. The narrator of the story asks, "How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these?" Beautifully, that's how.

Posted by Rachel

The Persistence of Reading

“There comes a time when you have to choose between turning the page and closing the book.”  Josh Jameson

The countdown’s on! We’re less than 48 away from our annual Cali trip—the one where Rachel and I get to do whatever we want, whenever we want and meet up with our forgotten friend tranquility.  The trip where we seriously consider curling up with the Pacific for an endless summer. I couldn’t be more excited.  

We eat good food, watch good movies, generate plenty of good conversation, and of course we get to read good pages for blissful stretches of unmeasured time.  (Naturally, we patronize the good shops too.) Deciding what books to bring is not easy like Sunday morning.  Nope.  It’s tough to settle on a few.  Right now I’m debating whether or not I should tote The Folded Clock in my trusty black Frye pack.  I’m 40 pages in, and while Julavits is a clever writer, I’ve already been seriously offended once. Remember, I have a thick reading skin.  Not finishing a novel, even if only 40 pages deep, goes against my a-book-is-a-dream-you-hold-in-your-hand grain. It’s unnatural to stop.  For an English major, it might fall just beneath original sin.  And yet age may be curing me of book- finishing perfectionism. Life’s too short to read bad books.  Or even mediocre ones.  Rachel, can I get an amen?  

Don’t get me wrong.  I’ll never hang in economics professor Tyler Cowen’s camp—he thinks we should treat books a little more like T.V. channels. What? T.V. channels?  My dad wouldn’t make it past the preface of a single read. But maybe it’s okay to put a book down gently given some time and if resonance is remote like Neverland. Gretchen Rubin seems to think so. And I’m sure the counselor I’m not willing to pay for would agree.  What do you think?  I’m all ears

Posted by Tracy

Missing the Magic

"Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it." —J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

I love me some Harry Potter. We're talkin fervor kinda love. You know that feeling you get when you're at Disneyland at Christmastime and you're watching the fireworks while fake snow falls and Bing sings and you think you might explode from the magic of it all? That's how I feel about Harry Potter.

So naturally I planned on loving Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Well I didn't. And no one's sadder about that than me. The play format took some adjusting to. Turns out Harry minus J.K.'s prose isn't so magical. But I gave my disappointed self a good talking-to and lowered expectations. Focus on the story, I said, not the writing. And that's where it got tricky, folks. J.K. didn't write the play so my dismay didn't feel quite so disloyal. She was, however, heavily involved in the plot, which turned out to be the biggest sticking point with me. There were elements I loved—the friendship between Scorpius and Albus being top among them. Overall though, the storyline felt too contrived and the characters didn't remain true to themselves, in "my not-so-humble opinion." Cue J.K.'s eye roll.

Maybe it all comes down to the fact that Harry, Ron, and Hermione didn't end up as I'd imagined they would. Apparently you can't mess with my beloved literary characters, even if you created them. In the end, I was left underwhelmed. No fireworks, no Bing, no snow. No magic.

p.s. The play is receiving rave reviews and I do really still want to see it. I think the spectacle of the stage production would distract me from some of the inconsistencies of plot and character. One more reason Tray and I need to make that trip to London!

Posted by Rachel

Throwback Thursday

“I can forgive and forget... it is so much less exhausting. You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things.”

I love that Rachel is asking herself, “How have I still not read Middlemarch?” Spoken like an ardent book lover with an unfulfilled and holy reading grail. I get it. Like the need for sleep, I feel it regularly myself. But when our unpaid intern, predisposed to come to the aid of semi-old ladies, recently sent us an article about an avid page turner who read all the Pulitzer winners and then went on to read almost Pulitzer-prize winners, Rachel was dismayed. “How does that work,” she wondered aloud. I pulled out my I-mean-this-in-the-nicest way-possible one-word answer: recluse.

Impressive though that Rae went there—she examined the possibility of pouring over all the winners and near misses. That’s when I questioned if, perhaps, she might have a slight case of what I’m lovingly calling OCB: Occassional Crazy-High Book-Reading Standards.  (I guess that’s OCBS, but you get the idea.)  Sadly, I don’t suffer from OCB…S. Reality has hammered on my pocket fulla dreams. That and the fact that I’m like Winnie the Pooh’s friend Gopher and “I can’t stand around lollygagging all day. I got a tight schhhedule.” (Rachel suffers from this too.)  So, I do the best I can and I get choosy.  Downright picky in fact about what I read.  It’s so nice that I can count on Rae to send the good stuff my way.

Last week, I finished the birthday book she gave me: The Light Between Oceans.  It was a great beach read.  In fact, my sis (who was reading Wolf Hollow) and I were the last ones to leave the Atlantic sand in an effort to get a few more pages in. Hard to believe this was Stedman’s first novel.  She transported me to a remote island where fairness was elusive and choices weren’t casual. Moral dilemmas have existed from the start of time—none of us escape them. But light, hope, and beauty can always be found if we learn to look for it.  Amazing Mark Zusak, creator of The Book Thief, nailed it when he swooned: “An extraordinary and heart-rending book about good people, tragic decisions and the beauty found in each of them.”

p.s. Can’t wait for the movie release on September 2nd!

Posted by Tracy

Bookshop Dreaming

Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world. —Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting

Have we mentioned our dream of owning a cozy little used bookshop someday? Soft chairs, roaring fire, hot cocoa and a whole lotta book love. No set hours, just open when the mood strikes us. We think that last part adds to the quaintness of it—business-minded folks beg to differ. Of course by then we'll be rollin in it so we won't give a fig what the suits think.

So when our intern sent this list of books that fly off the shelves at used bookstores, we naturally took notice. We found the list fascinating (and in some instances, surprising) and thought you might too, even if there isn't a make-believe bookshop in your future. If nothing else it may inspire you to dust off your own copy of one of these elusive reads and donate it to your local store. Look at you being a bookshop hero.

*The list also has me thinking, "How have I still not read MIddlemarch?" and "Who are all these people reading Jonathan Livingston Seagull"?

Posted by Rachel

Weekly Wrap-Up

Chrysanthemum thought her name was absolutely perfect. And then she started school.

WHAT WE LOVE THIS WEEK

Back to school. Seems like it starts earlier and earlier every year, doesn't it? Keep the first-day-jitters at bay with, of course, a good book. We wholeheartedly recommend Kevin Henkes' Chrysanthemum or Wimberly Worried. The Kissing Hand is a surefire hit as well. And you can't go wrong with How Do Dinosaurs Go To School.

One of these will ensure there's a skip in their step on day one. If your kid is craving a character backpack and the thought makes you cringe, one of these may be a good compromise.

Lunch has never looked so good.

Sure you can send them off with the typical box of colored pencils, but why not let them sparkle?

This little reading bag has us wishing we could sew. Fill it with their library finds or books from one of our go-to sources: Peek.

Keep on top of due dates and school events with our favorite wall calendar.

Back to school for them means more reading time for you. Celebrate with a new book bag. Or go ahead and be darling with one of these.

The Grammar Girl in us is coveting this cute tee. This one will do in a pinch as well.

COMING NEXT WEEK

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child review.

What's your DNF (do not finish) policy?