This is my hundredth blog.

I started with an idea that I should write about reading, and that there were many facets to that. In my mind that includes things as disparate as the pleasure and value of reading to children, my tactics and experiences teaching medieval literature, the puzzles and delights of reading older forms of English (and, indeed, other languages), the nostalgia and grief of reading to my ailing parents, the joys of mystery novels and epic poetry, and the neuroscience of reading.

In practice, I didn’t even stay within these sprawling boundaries. And that’s fine. And whether you’ve read one of these, several, or ninety-nine, I thank you from the bottom of my bookish little heart.

Tonight I’m thinking about neuroscience and magic, and one particular chapter of Maryanne Wolf’s recent book, Reader, Come Home. A doctor once quipped to me that knowledge was just witchcraft until science explained it. That spoke volumes to me—it doesn’t make it more real to have a scientific explanation of something that has worked for centuries. It might make it more repeatable, but it also might not.

When Mem Fox, the Australian literacy expert and author of wonderful picture books, wrote about children acquiring literacy, she called her book Reading Magic. Early in the book she tells an anecdote about her child learning to read in the first two weeks of kindergarten and asking the teacher what her secret was. When the teacher said there was no secret, that she must have been read to at home, and that was all it took, it seemed like magic. Osmosis. Skills absorbed without effort.

So learning to read can seem like magic. But it’s also trackable, if one cares to, and it’s reproducible. Children learn to read quickest in a text-rich environment and when people frequently read and talk to them. If reading time is pleasant and enjoyable, that’s the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine-magic happen without our noticing.

When we grow up, though, reading is no less magical. When we read fiction or poetry, when we let ourselves be affected, nay—transformed--by a story or experience a character has, that is strong magic indeed. We are becoming more human.

But it doesn’t happen on its own. We have to become the cauldron (of rebirth). 

In her chapter on the components of deep reading, Maryanne Wolf says we need some basic ingredients. First, we need the ability to form images in our heads, to concretize the words we read in to ideas and scenes. In speaking to twenty or so classes full of English majors in their Senior Symposium, I am here to say everyone doesn’t need to see images, but everyone needs to feel the words taking shape in their heads somehow, in to a scene or a concept.

Wolf also says we need the ability to empathize—to take on another perspective, to live for the course of the book in the head and heart of its characters. This ability is crucial. If you can’t imagine yourself in the position of some of the characters, the events will wash over you, but not change you fundamentally.

Lastly, she says we need background knowledge. That is, we need stories to understand stories. Italo Calvino notes this in his essay, “Why Read the Classics?” when he argues that people get more acquainted with books’ “instructions for use” as we get older, and therefore we get the most out of books in our maturity. His point, too, is part process, or “instructions” and part content, as he argues that we all are little libraries or constellations (pick a metaphor) of all the things we’ve read and experienced in our lives. The richer our experience, the richer our reading can be.

What I notice about all of these requirements for what Wolf calls “deep reading” is that they all magnify themselves in the very process of reading. The better reader you are, the more you get out of a book—both in terms of how much you understand and enjoy the book at hand, and of how much better you will read the next book you encounter.

Every time you imagine a scene, you get better at it, quicker at it, more nuanced. Every time you empathize with a character, you make it easier for yourself to find another character to “become.” And every time you read a book, you add to your inner library of texts, contexts, and associations, so you read the next one with more understanding and insight. My favorite example of this last one is my students who happen, because of that magnificent alchemy that university life affords, to read two books they think are totally disparate—say a medieval epic and a current political science text book—and they find striking similarities between them that help them read both texts more deeply. This happens all the time, and it’s magic and science and serendipity.

So I am not worried about the demise of reading. We may change how we read, but as long as we let our reading change us, we’re golden.

For the hundredth time, thanks for reading.

More Board Books for Babies and Wee Folk

About a year ago, I wrote a blog about what books are my go-to gifts for baby showers. Today I became a great aunt. It’s time to talk baby books again.

Last time I was talking about the ones I couldn’t imagine a wee one growing in to toddlerhood without. little less color/number introduction and lullaby.

So in the interest of expanding libraries and celebrating baby Jackson, here goes:

 I am a Bunny by Ole Rissom and Richard Scarry. This is a slow-paced, low-action sort of introduction to a cute little rabbit and, by extension, the natural world. He’s wearing overalls and is completely adorable. A quiet-time, sweet moment, snuggling book.

Snuggle Puppy by Sandra Boynton. Speaking of snuggling. But it’s Boynton, so it’s bouncier, and you probably have to sing. My kids are teenagers, but they still remember the Snuggle Puppy song.

Sheep in a Shop by Margot Apple. She’s done a number of “Sheep” books, and they’re pretty uniformly delightful. This one is about a birthday party, so a good first glimpse of these sheepies. Lots of rhyming, bouncy, alliterative verse and silly humor.

 Big Red Barn by Margaret Wise Brown. A classic Tour of the Farm book, it introduces lots of animals and the noises they make. You need other books by her (Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny, but this one is charming too.

 Peek-a-boo by Janet and Allan Ahlberg. A window book featuring a sweet, British family with a delightfully messy house. And when your house is a wreck because you can’t do laundry fast enough to keep up with a new baby, it’s somehow cathartic to see someone else’s messy house.

George Shrinks by William Joyce. Joyce is brilliant, not least in his adapting stories from one medium to another, but this little fantasy about George and his baby brother’s day being complicated by George’s sudden diminutive size is hilarious as well as witty.

Strega Nona by Tomie de Paola. This is a well-known folktale about a magic pot that works with a controlling spell, and doesn’t work if you don’t know the magic words. It’s a common enough trope, and this is a good first version for little ones.

Time for Bed by Mem Fox. We need one lullaby book, and we definitely need one from Mem Fox. She’s a champion for literacy and for reading aloud, and the books she writes are great for hunkering down on the couch and sinking in to a story. This one is an animal book and a lullaby and a lovesong to language.

Happy reading, my friends, and happy snuggling, and if you are fortunate enough to have a baby on your lap and a book in your hand, may you make the most of that magical encounter.

The Meta Blog, or How Reading About Reading Is Making Me a Better Reader

So this is a “Reading About Reading” sort of musing. I’ve recently read Maryanne Wolf’s marvelous new book, Reader, Come Home, which is part Neuroscientist Explaining For Lay Persons How Reading on the Internet is Changing Our Brains, and part Clever Plan to Evolve Purposefully in the Face of a New Shift in Text and Literacy.

I’ll say a bit about this book, a bit about where I’m going from here, and then offer a reading list I’ve given myself and would love to talk about with similarly interested humans.

Reader, Come Home is a written as a set of letters, a real, old-fashioned epistolary book, evocative of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millenium. It is also a series of love letters to the genre of the novel, which she worries may be in danger. But mostly in this book, the author explains the science of reading.

In a brilliant metaphor of the circus, Wolf illustrates the multiple centers of the brain involved in reading, and shows how they represent an adaptation of using multiple centers in quick succession and simultaneously. Reading involves the “circus rings” of the Vision, Language, and Cognition centers in the brain, but also Motor Functions and the Affective center. Suddenly those memes about your brain on television (barely any activity) vs. your brain on books (huge chunks of your brain lighting up) become clear. It takes a lot of work to read, especially to read deeply.

This is enough, frankly, to set my mind whirring for days, but thankfully she’s got a trajectory that kept me moving forward. She’s discovered that our reading patterns have shifted in response to all those hours skimming news on the Internet, zipping from article to vine to clickbait, and that while we are capable of reading much more, we are losing our ability to read deeply.

Reading deeply (she shows a serious predilection for novels that this medievalist finds limited, but forgivable) has been linked to increased empathy, to stress reduction, to critical thinking, and even to happiness, but our ability to sustain deep reading is waning. Even people who have been excellent deep readers are becoming less so in the onslaught of internet reading.

But she offers some hope, too. She advocates training up the next generation as “bi-literate” by which she means able to switch modes given the medium. Little children should be read to from print picture books, and in school they should learn how to use and manage electronic texts, while continuing to develop a relationship with print. (There are lots of reasons to love print, but I think that’s for a different blog.) In this way we can grow readers who navigate the internet without losing their ability to read deeply, for there are simply too many benefits to being able to read deeply.  

You can imagine, for a person who writes a blog on reading, that this book has been a bit of a head cannon. I am puzzled by the idea that we’re not able to read deeply, given the publishing world’s continued success, and my English majors’ habits, but maybe we’re reading “lighter” fare? (Maybe not. I need to be convinced of this. Someone quick—do a study for me.) I am comforted, too, by her findings on children reading print books, as someone whose very favorite moments of child-rearing involved storytime. And I find comfort as a literature professor who aims every year to get more young people intoxicated by the stories of the Middle Ages.

Science now says we need to read. And we need to give it our full attention.

So, naturally, I’ve started another list of books to read in my copious spare time:

The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human by Jonathan Gottschall
The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene
A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel
Why Read? By Mark Edmundson
The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs.

Apparently I’m not alone in my interest here. But before I get to these, I have a mystery novel I’ve been putting off for too long. Happy reading, y’all.

So Much Mothering

I have been mothered by so many wonderful people. Tomorrow is my mother’s birthday. She would have been 82. And I have recently worked on a podcast where the first installment was about fathering. And I’ve been thinking of my academic mothers, one of whom I actually refer to as Doktor-Mutter. All these things have gotten me thinking about mothering.

Is mothering different from fathering, for instance? Does one need both? I think we tend to associate mothering with more nurturing and protecting, and fathering more with providing and preparing, but in my house parenting is pretty gender-neutral, and I certainly wouldn’t say one gender has the market cornered on any of these actions

Yet, there are certain people whom I think of when I think of being mothered. My mom associated mothering with warm bread and secret treats when I was feeling bad. Her job was to make me happy, and she did it well. When I had to leave school because I was sick, the car always veered toward the donut shop on the way home. When I was overwhelmed with school, she brought me a glass of milk and sat with me while I worked, helping where she could and offering moral support if she couldn’t. When I was sad, she made it her goal to cheer me up. She didn’t always get me, but she always loved me, and she made lots of things easier on me.

But in truth lots of women mothered me. My aunt, who recognized the moderately predictable drama of a “smartie” who wasn’t challenged enough in school, had a huge impact on me. Because of her, I parent both of my kids better than I would have. I had a tenth grade English teacher, who, when I was confused and anxious, helped me understand that mental health was just as important as physical health. It was a lot easier to learn that language at 15 than later, I can tell you.

I had professors whom I think of in very motherly terms. One, a Germanicist who taught me Old Saxon, Gothic, and Latin, also taught me how to teach people and how to be a woman in academia, especially a married woman with children. One was a nun--my Doktor-Mutter—who praised my creation of a child as much as my creation of a dissertation, who calmed my tears when I thought I had nothing to say, who bought me oil paints and told me to be creative if I wanted to find my scholarly voice again. She prayed for me even though I didn’t pray for myself, and she called herself a mother of my heart.

And these are just the biggies. I have also been mothered by men—by my husband, certainly, when no one else could have, and by a professor whom I didn’t even take classes with, but who, out of sheer generosity of spirit, coached me to interview for jobs and built me up when I was most insecure. I have been mothered by faculty mentors at my job and by friends who made my well-being a priority, and I even think I have been mothered, if briefly, by strangers who have only shared a few minutes in a shopping line or at the PTA or in a hospital room.

It seems to me, then, that it is incumbent upon me to do my part--to mother my children, my loved ones, my students, my colleagues, the world. Mothering is serious business. I have to pay that stuff forward and backward and sideways and diagonally. I must not seem ungrateful. I think of Angela Carter’s Little Red Riding Hood, who “has been too much loved ever to feel scared.” That’s some powerful mothering. We’ve got work to do.

(These images are of my mother, Marlene Turner Baker, Molly Weasley as played by Julie Walters, and a fox mama and adoring kit that I found on the internet a while back and now can't find an attribution for. And Angela Carter's amazing retelling of Little Red Riding Hood is called "In the Company of Wolves" and collected in her volume, The Bloody Chamber. The wonderful podcast I was referring to above is Steve Zelt's introductory offering on fathering at A Small, Good Thing, available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Og6QvKASQc .)

Ode on a Shortened Summer

The most glorious myth of academic life is the summer vacation. People who don’t teach sometimes assume the summers are one long, three-month margarita party. That’s never the case, of course, although some may start out that way.

Alas.

Instead, those who work at state universities, at least in my experience, spend a significant chunk of summer doing the research or creative work they don’t have time to do during the school year. Then there’s the planning of next year’s courses. This year that was dramatic and demanding, as my school converted from a quarter system to a semester system, so even people who have been teaching the same things for some time had to reconceive their syllabus, reading lists, and teaching strategies.

There’s also a very real need to rest one’s head and do something different for a bit, so you can come back strong. I try to reserve time to read things I will never have occasion to teach. I wrote a beautiful list and made a stack of books at the beginning of summer. In addition to three more novels in my lovely, pulpy, mystery series, I intended to read twelve books, mostly fiction, one a re-read of a book I haven’t read since college (Kamouraska by Anne Hebert).

This year's haul from Solvang. The Book Loft always has the best new fairy tales.

Looking at my list now, I only read four, started four more, and don’t know exactly what happened with the others. I never even pulled the mysteries off the shelf. I did, however, read a tall stack of new fairy tales I bought on a trip with my daughter, write a handful of blogs and a pitch for a children’s novel, and now I am plowing through three non-fiction books I just HAD to read before school starts.

I guess what I’m realizing that what’s valuable about summer for me is the ability to plan and then pitch the plan entirely.

From September to June everything has to be very carefully orchestrated. I keep list after list and plan and organize, so that all goes well in my classes and professional life. Summer is a welcome rest for my brain not just because I’m not prepping, teaching, or grading, but because I can afford to go unscripted for a while. It’s very liberating.

This summer, because we are shifting from quarters that ended in June to semesters that start in August, our summer is about seven weeks instead of eleven. And scripted or not, it has been jam-packed. We’ll be ready, because we must be, but we might all be starting out a little tired, which we usually don’t, I think.

I resisted this conversion for a long time. I voted against it. I grumbled when our vote was ignored, and we were simply told to convert. But now, staring down the barrel of my first week, I’m not worried. I’m glad I’ll have sixteen weeks instead of ten to get to know my students better. I’m glad to have more time to go deeper in the texts I teach and to assign more writing and more revision. I’m part of an academic family, so I’ll be glad to have more holidays match up and have some more time off in the winter. Mostly, though, I’m just always glad to go back. That’s the real perk of this job—not the summer break, but the fall return.  

Never Trust a Vowel

Vowels are shifty things. I teach literature, and when people have trouble making out words in the text that they haven’t met before, I ask them to try and take them apart to see if they recognize the parts; then they can guess at the word’s meaning. I teach medieval lit, so sometimes students are looking at Middle English or another older form of English, but just as often, it’s a Modern English word that’s flummoxing them, and the rules don’t change.

My reasons for not trusting vowels are:

1. Vowels can vary from language to language, so if we know the roots of words, we can see why the vowels are what they are. For instance, Latin “e” often corresponds to Greek “o” as in English “dentist” and “orthodontist.”

2. Vowels can vary to denote tense in English. Now if we invent a new word, we just slap an “-ed” on the end of it to make it past tense, but older forms of English had elaborate systems of vowel gradation, some of which we still have (“sing/sang,” “fly/flew,” etc.). So sometimes if a word has a funky vowel in it, you just aren’t familiar with its old past form.

3. Regional accents change the vowels mostly. Occasionally there will be a consonant difference, like the b/v variation in dialects of Spanish, but usually it’s vowels. The “You say potato; I say potato” song/joke/aphorism makes this pretty clear. It’s not potato/potaco (although I’d be willing to try a potaco). It’s all about the vowels.

So if you’re trying to deduce what a word means, there’s a process I advocate, and vowels figure absolutely last, the treacherous little buggers.

First, try and figure out the root word. Take off anything that looks suspiciously prefixey or suffixey, like “-ey” or “pre-.” Then look at the root in terms of the frame of consonants, not really looking at the vowels.  So if we’re trying to deduce, say, podiatrist, we’d first remove the “-ist“ which is a clearly a suffix. It indicates a person who does the thing at the beginning of the word (like artist or philanthropist). Next we cut off the “-iatr” from Greek iatros, meaning “doctor” (as in psychiatrist), and we are left with “pod.”

Pod. Pod. So how’s your Greek? English speakers are usually better guessing Latin than Greek because English borrowed so much from Latin directly, as well as from French, Italian, and Spanish. But Greek “pod” means ‘foot.’ In Latin it was “ped.” Never trust a vowel. English has more common words with ped-, like a bicycle pedal or a gas pedal, or different animals being bipedal or quadrupedal. But “pod,” not so much. Cephalopod. Arthropod. (These are literally head-footed things, like squids, and joint-footed things, like crabs or ladybugs. But we were talking about vowels.)

And now we’re done. But consider next time you have trouble understanding a person’s accent, just relaxing your head when it comes to hearing vowels. When you don’t recognize a word you read on the internet or in a newspaper, try it with different vowels, and see if you can figure it out. I think adopting a playful, puzzler’s attitude toward language is a recipe for easier understanding, less frustration, and maybe even compassion.

Mothering a Man

Have you ever noticed most fairy tale heroes and heroines have dead or missing parents? The obvious explanation for that is that kids need to forge their own identities in order really to mature.

Beauty doesn’t have a mom, and her dad actually gets in the way of her growing up. Cinderella’s mother is dead, and dad is MIA, so she has to negotiate the female authority in her household and to establish her mature, romantic relationship entirely on her own (once the godmother supplies the dress and shoes). Even Jack must leave his mom (no dad mentioned at all in most versions) and enter the giant’s realm without any guidance. In fact, he comes back and takes care of her; he’s translated from dependent to provider in a few pages.

Kids seem to need serious independence in order to mature and thrive.

But I’m rejecting that today, on the eve of my son’s 18^th birthday, and not feeling a bit guilty. Conflicted, maybe, but not guilty.

I moved out at seventeen. I moved in to a dorm for my freshman year of college, but I never moved back home. That was it. I had been working for a year, driving for nearly two, and I waved to my mom as she stood in the driveway in her bathrobe, and was gone.

Most kids don’t do that these days, especially in Los Angeles county. In fact, most of my kids’ friends don’t even drive. LA is a nightmare for traffic and hazards. My son doesn’t have a job yet. He’s not moving out. His independence is coming a bit later.

He is not alone. Many have noted the expanded adolescence. Laurence Steinberg’s The Age of Opportunity argues that adolescence is both starting earlier and lasting longer these days. Lots of kids aren’t moving out. They can’t afford it. And it’s not such a bad thing.

There’s a case for extended adolescence having neurological benefits. Their longer period of neuroelasticity is allowing them greater ability to learn later in life, both in terms of intellectual content (they have more spots in their brains to pin new information later on), and they have greater emotional understanding and impulse control.

However, there is a serious dearth of awesome stories about nineteen-year olds living with their folks.

Harry Potter doesn’t have parents, but he finds lots of surrogates. Percy Jackson has a mom, but he leaves for school like Harry, so she’s not solving any problems for him. Violet and Klaus (and Sunny!) Baudelaire are largely fending for themselves too, so our stories have not caught up to the culture.

I guess there’s nothing exciting about living in your childhood bedroom in to your early twenties. They can vote; they can be drafted; they can be arrested;they can smoke. But they’re not driving or working enough to support themselves. How do you parent them? 

They’re legal, but dependent.

Maybe I’m just making a mountain out of a molehill. Maybe 21 is the new 18, and 25 is the new 21, and we just chill and move on. But seriously, someone ought to write the thriller about the 19-year old who has tremendous adventures and still lives at home. We could use a script down here.

Here’s some further reading, if you’re interested:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/extended-adolescence-when-25-is-the-new-181/

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/11/metaplasticity/506390/

Steinberg, Laurence. Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence. 2014.