The Desert Island Book List, or what can you not bear to live without?

I mentioned the Kalevala was one of my Desert Island books last week. It is. The Desert Island list is what it sounds like—if you were stranded on a remote island somewhere away from the honking of traffic, the onslaught of internet information, and could only carry ten books, what would they be?

It’s worth thinking about, and, I think, revisiting at various points in your life. It’s a good way to check in and see what’s changed in terms of values and passions, and to see if you’ve discovered some new treasure since you last thought about it.

So if I were stranded on an island in 2018, the books whose words I would feel lost if I could not read again are as follows, and you should know ahead of time that I intend to cheat:

A Collected Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. (See what I did there?) I don’t think I could live too long without access to the Canterbury Tales, but he has other lovely works, like the Legend of Good Women and the House of Fame that I would want those too, if we’re talking about forever.

Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler is also a frame narrative, or a story full of stories, and it’s the kind of book I’d reread once a year even if I didn’t teach it. It’s all about reading and writing and reading like a writer and writing like a reader, and I love it. There is a character who talks about translating like flow—moving in and out of languages like a fish swimming—and it has never left me.

Franz Xaver von Schonberg’s Collected Folk Tales. I used to say the Grimms,’ and I still love them, but if we’re only granted a limited number of books and they might be used to build a new civilization, I’d want the ones with more neutral gender roles, so we don’t have to relive all that damsel in distress nonsense.

The Arabian Nights. I get lots of stories here too, and since I know less about this area and language, I’d defer to the translation by Husain Hadawy, my first year composition instructor from the University of Nevada, so many moons ago.

The Mabinogion, a collection of medieval Welsh folklore and legends with some marvelous characters and scenes, like Caumniated Wives and Wizards who use transfiguration as a punishment.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoesvsky because we probably should have a traditional sort of novel, and Grushenka’s onion was instrumental in my forming healthy adult relationships.

Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson because we probably should have an American, and Dickinson’s poems craft images as if out of clouds.

A World Mythology collection because it’s good to know where we came from and how much we have in common.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and I favor Allen Mandelbaum’s translation. But let’s face it, if I were on an island, I’d have lots of time to work up my Latin, so I should have a dual-language edition. I love so many of these stories so deeply, but the stories of Proserpina and Orpheus alone would merit its inclusion—Proserpina/Persephone so we remember that death and life are inseparable, and Orpheus so that we remember that while art can do almost everything, it cannot bring back the dead—nor do we mortals need it to.

And last, but not least, The Kalevala, because of all the reasons I mentioned last week and because it’s good to remember that words are magic and can change your world.

This is where I am now. If I were honest, I’d say I need ten picture books, ten children’s novels, ten poets, ten novels, ten essayists, and ten non-fiction, but this is where my mind lives most often at this stage in my career and life, and it is a happy place. A folkloric, mythic, medieval wonderland with only occasional forays in to the modern world, and usually by those who value the past.

Of all the personality inventories and internet quizzes that crank out a conclusion about us based on what we like, I think which stories we could not live without is probably the most accurate, at least for me. I need magic. I think in archetypes. I revel in beautiful words and compelling images. And I view story as the most valuable thread back to our collective past and in to our individual selves.

Loving the World: The Literature Approach

I had a cousin who was always fascinated with Japanese culture. He spent a lot of time and travel learning everything he could about it, and he worked it in to his life in lots of ways. With a Welsh last name, he didn’t know he had any genetic tie to Japan until he did a spit-in-a-tube DNA kit, which confirmed for him what he had always felt and even hoped: 5-10% East Asian ancestry.

But what about when you love something you have no claim to—just love?

My relationship with the Finnish Kalevala is long and convoluted. And there is, so far as I can tell, not a cell of Finnish in my body. I don’t care.

When I was nine, my aunt gave me a book about eggs for Christmas. It was a weird little book—not really for kids, I don’t think. I have seen it since (and books like it) in gift shops and bookstores over the years. It’s a little, hardbound, dust-jacketed gift book, with lots of folklore, vintage postcards, customs, and legends about eggs from all over the world. If it were bigger, it would be a coffee table book.

I read the whole book, but a few pages I must have read a hundred times over the years. Some had images that worked on my imagination, sticking there, rolling around, popping up when tangentially related topics or stories crossed my path. I grew up wanting to know how to make Ukrainian pysanky (I learned in grad school, as one does). I knew a Slavonian tale about a witch who turned an egg shell in to a boat. And I learned the weird, spell-like word Kalevala.

One two-page spread had an excerpt from the Kalevala, titled CREATION OF HEAVEN AND EARTH, which, in retrospect, seems momentous enough to catch a kid’s attention. The text describes the water mother Ilmatar, who lifts herself out of the sea, becomes a perch for a bird’s nest, and uses the eggs that fall when she twitches her knee as raw material to shape the cosmos: the shell for the dome of heaven and the earth below, the yolk for the sun, the white for the moon, the mottled parts for stars, the black bits for clouds.

There was a picture. I was done. It stayed with me forever.

All it said at the bottom of the page was Kalevala. Neither of my parents had ever heard of it, and there was no Google in 1980. That was all I knew of it for years and years.

One day in grad school, a friend and I were talking about what it meant to be well-read; we listed all the medieval epics we knew and felt we should know. He mentioned the Kalevala. 

A bell chimed in my head, and that image of Ilmatar was right there, as if it had been fifteen minutes, not fifteen years, since I’d thought of it. Clearly I had to follow up.

A professor of Old English recommended the translation I love and teach now, by Eino Friberg, and the Kalevala became one of my “Desert Island” books. (Do people still do that—think of which ten books you’d need on a desert island?)

When I had the opportunity to design a course around epics, I included the Kalevala. It rounds any epic discussion nicely, being so lately “gathered,” like the Grimms gathered folktales, with similar nationalistic fervor in the 19^th century. Students come in to the class expecting the Odyssey, which they get, but not many think of epics as still being a genre so late as 1870. It feels like a relic, with its shamanism and magic, but the culture it depicts feels fairly modern. It puzzles students and enchants them.

Two years in to my teaching of epics, I stood in line at Subway in Kalamazoo, Michigan at the conference on medieval studies I attend every spring. While chatting up the gal behind me (we all sported the spiffy lanyards with our names and institutions), I learned she was a Finn studying in the states, and she had never met any American who taught the Kalevala. Did I know, she asked, “The Canine Kalevala”?

Of course we’re still friends. The picture book she referred to was hard to find in the United States, but it was available in English. She sent me a copy from Helsinki filled with museum postcards because the illustrator had used famous art depicting scenes from the text, and she wanted me to see the originals.

I shared these “scholarly materials” with my students, and I read that children’s book to my kids any number of times. When my daughter was in second grade and the principal suggested--in light of the “wonderful problem” she presented as too advanced a reader--that I teach her a second language. My daughter chose Finnish. (She lost—I know several other languages well enough to teach a seven-year old, but still not Finnish).  And the Kalevala circle kind of closed.

We have no Finnish ancestry—just a deep love for the characters, the magic, and the world of the Kalevala. That’s enough

We Read to Remember

I said this on a podcast (in a podcast? This is a very new world for me) recently, and when I said it, it rang with more truth than I could articulate at the time. I hope to parse it out more productively here.

Reading has always served a cultural purpose, preserving our past and providing a way for us not to repeat mistakes. We read to remember how wars began, in hopes that we can avoid more. We read to remember our cultural history when we read fairy tales or myths, but also biography and history. Biography tells us one woman’s story; folklore tells us Everyman’s.

When I teach literature and folklore, students are delighted (or aghast) to find themselves in these stories. I taught the medieval German epic The Nibelungenlied a few years ago, and we talked not only about the obvious influences on works like The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, but also the repetition of political dramas relevant to the upheaval in the Ukraine at the time (2014). We read to feel connected and understood when the world seems chaotic beyond measure. Because more than likely, we’ve been here before.

Those are big, sweeping reasons to read to remember. There are more personal ones, of course. We read to remember people we knew and loved. There are lots of books that remind me of my parents—mom loved biographies and romances; dad loved historical fiction, especially set in World War II, and he idolized Frank Lloyd Wright. Every time I pick up a biography I think of my mom because I argued with her for years about their usefulness. I loved to read stories, but true lives held no interest. The older I get, the more interesting people are to me, though, and I know she’d be tickled by that. I still don’t find myself tripping through World War II novels, but every time I read about some new building or, let’s face it—any time there’s any significant structure in a book I’m reading, I read it like an architect’s daughter, and I remember his lessons and esthetics.

That seems pretty personal, but I think the most important reason we read to remember is even more intimate. We read to remember who we were. When we read a book we’ve read before, part of our experience is remembering what we thought the first time—where we were; if someone had made us read it and whether that colored our encounter; and we even find parts of our identity that may have changed radically since then—nearly forgotten past selves—until we dig them up like archaeologists of the soul.

This happens to everyone every time we read books that take us back. But since I had fifteen years of reading to my kids, and since I sometimes teach Children’s Literature, it means the most to me when I reread a children’s book I’ve loved. It’s one thing to read 100 Years of Solitude at 20 and then 30, but it’s quite a different experience to read “The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes” and be able to pinpoint the moment it first occurred to you that women could be something other than mothers. I was little. That was huge. Reading it to my Children’s Lit class was both a return to my youth and a call to arms for the next generation. Reading it to my daughter was a homecoming. I watched her face. I looked for sparks. And I rolled around in the images and ideas, bouncing back and forth between child-me and mommy-me, feeling all the goodness and love important ideas and charming stories fill us with.

Because that’s what it’s about. Feelings. We read to feel, so we can read to remember how we felt. This could be a book that reminds us of a particular person or a time in our lives, or it could be the book just makes us feel great, and we read to capture that feeling again and again.

We read to remember how we feel, how we felt, where we came from, whom we love, who we were. We read to become ourselves.

(The podcast I refer to was a conversation with the brilliant and gracious Steve Zelt, and can be found, if you’re a listening type of person, at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQmIDJH2E54 )

The Wife of Bath's Experience

Last week, as Americans and others watched testimonies before the Senate Judiciary Committee pertaining to a Supreme Court nomination, millions of people relived their own moments of traumatic assault and discussed why women fear they won’t be believed. And I taught "The Wife of Bath’s Tale." In fact, we were discussing how survivors are treated (and were in the middle ages) at the same moment Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was under oath.

The Wife of Bath is, sadly in some ways, still screamingly relevant.

Her name is Alisoun and she is from Bath. Let’s start there. She is the only pilgrim among Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims whose prologue is longer than her tale, because in a very real sense her prologue is her tale.

She begins by establishing the basis for her authority, and it is not the standard. In the medieval period writers based their stories on previously attested, authoritative works. 

People who wrote (and read) were overwhelmingly male, educated by studying languages and literature and theology--what Chaucer affectionately refers to as “olde books.”

Alisoun, traveling in a group of mostly men, of clergy and members of the lesser nobility, as well as tradesmen and middle class managers, asserts her voice and her authority and their basis in experience.

Her subject is marriage, or more precisely the relationship between married men and women. Really she’s interested in who has what she calls “maisterie” or “mastery” in the relationship. She has been married five times and is ready for a sixth; she describes herself as being of “five husbands’ schooling.” And she has a lot to say on the subject.

There are several remarkable things happening here. First, Alisoun is claiming authority for herself in an environment where it is both challenged (by the Friar, who tells her to leave off “preaching” and tell a nice story) and sought out (the Pardoner asks for tips, for her to teach him her “practice”—the same word you might use to describe work in law or medicine).

Second, her tale really is biography and a kind of testimony, where she explains how her marriages worked and gives voice to her experiences, some of which we would characterize today as abuse. She enters the masculine, patristic arena as she challenges St. Paul’s doctrine of chastity and the story of Jesus and the Samaritan, where Jesus tells the Samaritan her current husband is not her “real” husband.

Surely God gave us sexual organs, she argues, not just to purge urine, but also to make begetting children pleasurable. How many of the Samaritan’s husbands “counted,” she wonders aloud, and why would Jesus fix a number on marriages? She advocates for gentler rules—for acknowledging that the highest goal is virginity, but that people who do not maintain such austerity can be virtuous too. In a century of plague and a society with an outrageous mortality rate, she advocates for remarriage as a necessity, but also as humane.

When she’s done arguing, she recounts an overview of her first three marriages, but it’s structured as a laundry list of all the anti-feminist ideas circulating among scholars at the time. She knows these stereotypes and biases, and she manages to turn them back on her husbands, gaining mastery—of her husbands and their finances. These are all the accusations she’s had levied at her since she first married at the age of twelve.

The last part of her story recounts her fourth and fifth husbands, one of whom kept a mistress, and the other of whom beat her regularly, but these two were the ones she loved. That was the problem, she deduces.

Chaucer has done something here. He has let a woman speak, validated her experience, and given her a full, flawed, beautiful character. She explains herself on her own terms and enters a discussion that has not been designed for her presence.

We literally haven’t gotten yet to the Tale she tells about a rapist knight whose life is forfeit to the queen and who is rehabilitated when he discovers that all women want authority over their own lives. Today we don’t need to.

What we need to do is hear Dame Alisoun’s story. We need to believe her. We need to learn from her not exactly what she says, but what she shows—that these problems are centuries old, and it’s past time to fix them.

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.