Book Whimsy

Saw this in The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain:

A woman was once introduced to Mark Twain at a Christmas party. Feeling obliged to discuss literature, she asked him if he thought a book was the most useful gift one could give. He replied:

“Yes, but of course it depends on the book. A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat [without hitting the creature, of course! -cjj].”

Now I’ve an addition to Twain’s list. This morning I played the book game that’s been traversing the Internet for a few years. It works like this:

Turn to page 52 of a book near you. Scan down to the fifth sentence and write it out.

I saw some examples that were intriguing, and a collection of examples that made a surreal little story. I reasoned that because I read several books at a time, I should be able to create a nice mash-up of fifth sentences.

How wrong I was. Nearly every sentence was a bore and hardly representative of the books I’m reading.

Marilynne Robinson’s poetic first novel Housekeeping, for example, contains precious little dialogue; instead, she writes long descriptions and ruminations about loss and identity. The book deserves to be read slowly and thoughtfully. So imagine my surprise to copy this as the fifth sentence on page 52:

“Nope.”

That’s it! A one-word sentence. And the sentences from the other books weren’t any more interesting.

So I tried a workaround—the sixth sentence of page 66. This time Marilynne Robinson’s exquisite writing gave me:

“Now?”

I give up. Maybe the trick is combining sentences from a variety of readers rather than from one reader’s variety of books. Why don’t YOU try this game and share your results on Lull. Or, if you prefer, you may e-mail me your sentences and I’ll include them in a future post.

[Photographer unknown; found on Spine Facing Out.]

Bibliotherapy* for Caregivers

When crisis hits, some folks pick up a book to escape; others read to delve deeper into whatever challenge confronts them. Being one of the latter group, I turned to Home by Marilynne Robinson last year when I was deep in the throes of caring for my father.

You probably read Gilead, Robinson’s poetic tale of a small-town minister who, grappling with death and aging, writes a last letter to his very young son. Home is the concurrent account of that minister’s best friend, who is ailing, and his children.

Both novels should be read simply because Robinson is a brilliant and thought-provoking writer. But as a caregiver, I found especially poignant her passages about the adult daughter who returns home to take care of her fragile father:

“Did she choose to be there, in that house, in Gilead? No, she certainly did not. Her father needed looking after, and she had to be somewhere, like every other human being on earth. What an embarrassment that was, being somewhere because there was nowhere else for you to be. All those years of work and nothing to show for it. But you make the best of things. People respect that. It is a blessing to know what is being asked of you.”

Writers connect us with characters, fictional or otherwise, who share our feelings, reduce our sense of isolation, calm our anxieties and guilt, teach us different methods of coping, guide us in understanding ourselves, and enlighten us about the people in our lives. Writers reveal a world to us we may know but not be able to express. To see your feelings in print validates them somehow.

You might as well start a reading list now about caregiving because if the subject hasn’t touched your life already, it will. Maybe you won’t be the caregiver, but someone you know—a friend, coworker, relative, employee—will be. And for the nonprofessional caregivers (the ones neither trained nor paid to give care), the all-consuming nature of those duties will impact every other aspect of their lives: work, friendships, hobbies, health. Even when the creature being cared for is a nonhuman. Rick Bass perfectly describes the strange parallel world caregivers inhabit in his essay “Sick Dog” (part of the anthology WOOF! Writers on Dogs):

“So it goes, in the caregiving mode. You have to get away; you have to get right back. For a long while, your time and even your emotions are not really your own; for a long time, it is you, at least as much as the patient, who is entrapped, held hostage.”

This is the plight of all nonprofessional caregivers. To walk an imaginary mile in their shoes, or to continue toward the finish line in your own, pick up a book.

* Bibliotherapy: the use of literature as a healing experience.

[The Sick Child by Edvard Munch; Sleeping by Georges Lemmen.]

Should It Stay or Should It Go?

As I continue to reduce my library, one question will likely come to mind over and over again: Will you want or need to reread any part of this book? I believe this passage from Nick Hornby's Shakespeare Wrote for Money will prove helpful (and supportive):

“Maybe the best thing to do with favorite films and books is to leave them be: to achieve such an exalted position means that they entered your life at exactly the right time, in precisely the right place, and those conditions can never be re-created. Sometimes we want to revisit them in order to check whether they were really as good as we remember them being, but this has to be a suspect impulse, because what it presupposes is that we have more reason to trust our critical judgments as we get older, whereas I am beginning to believe that the reverse is true. . . . Favorites should be left where they belong, buried somewhere deep in a past self.”

This spoke to me especially after recently rereading the first page of Marilynne Robinson's Gilead: A Novel. I was about to recommend it to my husband to read and was profoundly disappointed to find that I didn't LOVE/RELISH/ADORE it the same way I did upon my very first reading. It didn't hook me and I couldn't guarantee that it would hook my husband. Yet I know Gilead still stands as a triumph of writing. It's just where my head is at right now. And Hornby's take on the matter not only makes sense, but gives me permission to let go of some of my favorite reads when the time comes.

Thank you, Nick.