January 27, 2010
Guh-gung
I have this terrible habit of finding certain things terribly funny in theory, but not considering the long-term consequences of following through on my actions. For example, when I was #143 on the holds list for Patrick Swayze’s posthumous autobiography Time of My Life, it was a funny story. But that hold was going to come in sometime, and that sometime is today, and now, with all the books in my life to be read, I’ve got to add Time of My Life to the teetering stack. A book with such lines as, “It felt like an electric charge suddenly coursed through my body. I looked into Lisa’s eyes, and it was as if I was seeing her for the first time. We moved together as one, and I felt a stirring deep in my soul.” And then a few pages on, he woos her to the sounds of Bread’s “Baby I’m-a Want You.” When they finally have sex on page 46, “it was like a dam had broken and the flood came rushing in.”
This is either going to be the best book ever, or the worst.
January 26, 2010
Expert Recommendations for Family Literacy Week: Author/Illustrator Geneviève Côté
Geneviève Côté has illustrated books for children of all ages, working with a variety of talented authors, like Janet Wong, Gilles Tibo or Susin Nielsen-Fernlund. Her own picture books include Me and You (Kids Can Press 2009), What Elephant? (Kids Can Press 2006) and With you always, Little Monday (Harcourt 2007). Her editorial art has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, l’Actualite and other publications.
She has won several honours, including the Elisabeth Mrazik-Cleaver Award in 2005 and the General Governor’s Award for Illustration in 2007. She lives in Montreal, Quebec.
And she was kind enough to share recommendations for the following books:
1) The True Story of The Three Little Pigs! as told to Jon Scieszka and illustrated by Lane Smith: Outrageous, funny to read aloud and to play-act
2) Penny Lee and her TV by Glenn Mc Coy: Funny enough to wean small kids from TV (at least for a while)
3) The Wishing of Biddy Malone by Joy Cowley, illustrated by Christopher Denise: A tale, rather classic in form, about learning the power of working for what you wish for (thanks to something akin to placebo magic), and therefore being actually happy when you do get what you wish for.
4) The Tree of Life by Peter Sis: A picture book biography of Darwin -who would have thought he would still be a controversial figure 125 years after his death?
5) Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans: Out of nostalgia, mostly, but hey, it worked for me, for my sisters, my niece, and her daughter!
6) Bonjour Madame la Mort by Pascal Teulade, illustrated by Jean-Charles Sarrazin: This one in French. Hotly recommended most of all for any kid mourning a grandparent, but probably many other kids as well. Death here wears a flannelette nightdress, plays cards with the old lady she’s come to claim, and takes silly photographs. Cartoon-like illustrations fit the text – a perfect mixture of tender, sensitive and surprisingly funny. I’d be real interested to know what you think about this one, Kerry! I heard it caused a bit of a stir when it was published, but personally I find it very appropriate.
January 26, 2010
Author Interviews @ Pickle Me This: Patricia Storms (for Family Literacy Week!)
I first encountered Patricia Storms through her blog Booklust, and I think I’ve only ever met her two or three times in person, but I feel as though I know her much better than two or three times would allow. She is a generous spirit who radiates such warmth and energy, she has a delightful sense of humour, and she’s a talented illustrator (of books including The 13 Ghosts of Halloween, Edward and the Eureka Lucky Wish Company, and Good Granny Bad Granny) and now author/ illustrator (of her latest book The Pirate and the Penguin). I love her books, I think she’s fabulous, and I’m so pleased that she’s answered some of my questions about writing and illustrating picture books, and also about family literacy.
I: Funny, we call them “picture books”, but then the pictures themselves are so often regarded as secondary (that an illustrator might not receive the same credit as an author of the text, for example). What role do you think illustrations play in children’s books? And why do the illustrations get less respect?
PS: In my Utopian world, the writer and the artist would get equal-billing, since they are both so dependent on each other. Ideally, the artist (I would hope) would be more than just a hired hand doing grunt work and translating literal images onto the page from the words provided. In a good picture book, I see the illustrator as someone who takes the story to another level of delight, imagination and entertainment. The illustrator should be just as much of a story-teller as the author. But they should not be competing with each other. It makes me think of a couple in love, walking in the forest holding hands, each pointing to the different things they both see on their travels. Each person has a unique perspective, but they are still connected, and are grounded in the same environment (the story).
Perhaps ‘get less respect’ is a tad dramatic. (I know, I know I’m the one who used this phrase in a previous email conversation. Heaven knows, I can be a tad dramatic at times). That being said, I have on occasion encountered a certain lack of appreciation for what illustrators (and might I add, especially cartoonists) do for picture books. It can be small annoying things like every time I illustrate a book I have to send a special request to Amazon so that they will add my name at the top of the book entry, following the author. Or really shocking situations like when Madonna ‘wrote’ all those kid’s books, and the illustrators didn’t have their names on the cover of the book at all (of course that is a unique and hopefully never-to-be-repeated situation by any other author). Usually it just seems to me that in terms of promotion, the writer’s name gets more coverage than that of the illustrator. And yet it is called a ‘picture’ book. But I have to be fair, here. It’s the writer who comes up with the idea for the story, and yes, the words are usually crafted long before any pictures appear. As much as I would like equal billing, I must concede that the writer is steering the ship (am I using too much cheesy imagery here? This is the wannabe hack writer coming out in me). So perhaps it is assumed that since the writer is the one who has thought of the original idea and the story, then the illustrator will never be as ‘creative’ as the author, and is simply following the author’s lead. I would rather not see the relationship of author and illustrator in this manner. And I am starting to ramble. Next question.
I: Over the course of your career, what have you learned about the art of illustrating children’s books that would have surprised you in the beginning?
PS: I had always assumed that when an illustrator was hired to draw the pictures for a picture book manuscript, that the story was completely polished and finished at this point. But this is not always the case, and the artist may go off in some interesting directions, while editors are still actually doing last-minute edits on the story. Sometimes art can change at the last minute because of this.
I was also very surprised to find out how much control the Marketing Department (in some publishing houses) has in terms of which artist is chosen for specific projects. But I do have to remind myself that as much as I may just want to create silly, adorable pictures for kids, it is, in the end, a commercial product, and well, publishers do appreciate making money (as do I).
One aspect of this industry which really surprised me was when I was told that some big box bookstores even have editorial control over potential manuscripts and art. They are consulted by publishers and can say yea nor nay on a project, if they think it will or will not sell. They can also recommend creative changes on book covers. Frightening.
I: You’ve recently made the leap from illustrator to author too, of your most recent book The 
Pirate and the Penguin. Would this be a natural extension for any illustrator? Was it a natural extension for you, and why?
PS: I don’t think making the leap from illustrator to author is for every artist. Not every illustrator has a gift of the written word. Some just have no interest in doing it at all (and really, why would one willingly enter into another career that has the potential to do more serious damage to one’s already delicate ego?)
Becoming a picture book author was a natural extension for me, though. I have always loved words just as much as art, and I think this has a lot to do with my enduring love of cartoons and comics. In fact, that’s how I learned to read through cartoons, comic strips and comic books, in conjunction with picture books, of course. As a kid I wrote and drew countless comic strips, and as I got older, I enjoyed writing stories and poems and my own one-panel gag cartoons. Any chance I could get to not write a standard dull essay in high school English, and instead do something creative, I took it. (For example, in my grade 13 Canadian English course, I opted to write a musical based on Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz).
As much as I enjoy illustrating the words of others, I do have my own ideas that I would love to see come alive in a book. I sometimes have to pinch myself when I look at The Pirate and the Penguin, I can’t believe I’ve managed to get this far with my dreams. I hope I may be allowed to write and illustrate more stories in the future. But I gotta be truthful for me, it’s very hard, writing picture book stories. The writing is much harder to do than the art. So really, just ignore everything I was kvetching about in question one. What the hell do I know? (more…)
January 25, 2010
Our Favourite Family Reads
We’re starting simple in our celebration of Family Literacy Day/Week. To kick it off, I bring you a list of our favourite books to read to our eight month-old daughter.
Though first, I’ll have you know that she now has two favourite books of her own and they are Rainbow Fun and All About Me: A Baby’s Guide to Babies. Sometimes she will only not cry if she is holding/eating/being read Rainbow Fun, and no other book will do. She laughs hysterically throughout A Baby’s Guide to Babies. This absolutely kills me. Text is not foremost in either of these books though, so the books we like best to read to her are a little different. And they are as follows:
1) Peepo by Janet & Allan Ahlberg: I love the rhythm, I love the rhymes. I love bedroom mirror with its rainbow rim, and a mother with a baby just like him. And you could find something new hidden in the illustrations with every reread.
2) Where is the Green Sheep by Mem Fox: We’ve started banging on a drum during story time, and this book has the best beat poet vibe. I have given this book to every child I know. My favourite is the moon sheep and the star sheep, and Stuart loves the near and far sheep. It never gets old, or at least it hasn’t yet.
3) I Kissed the Baby by Mary Murphy: It’s short with strong drawings in black and white, which made it ideal for when Harriet was smaller. It’s question/answer structure makes it fun to read in dialogue. I love to say, “Of course, I kissed the baby. My own amazing baby.” Indeed.
4) Everywhere Babies by Susan Meyers: Harriet always laughs at the “Every day, everywhere, babies make noise” page. We kind of like the book because it has same-sex families, and we get to feel liberal and superior to those who gave it one-star ratings on amazon for that same reason. It also has a wonderful sing-song rhythm to it, adorable pictures, and an ending that makes me cry, crediting baby-people for “for trying so hard, for travelling so far, for being so wonderful, just as they are.”
5) Ten Little Fingers Ten Little Toes by Mem Fox: Though I fear that this book might alienate readers with six toes on one foot, or with three thumbs, anyone with twenty digits will find this Mem Fox/Helen Oxenbury collaboration completely adorable. Page breaks in all the right places allow for optimum emphasis, narrative underlines that babies are delicious the world over, and babies learn about fingers, toes, and then receive three little kisses on their noses.
5) The Paperbag Princess by Robert Munsch: We have an abridged, indestructable board book version that is perfect for story time. Hoping our daughter takes home the message of one enterprising princess, and how she “didn’t get married after all.”
6) Night Cars by Teddy Jam: We love this story of an urban baby who wouldn’t go to sleep, and is the reason I can often be found warning garbagemen to “be careful near that dream.” Stuart particularly likes that Dad is the primary parent in this one, and that it ends with Baby asleep in his arms, albeit in the morning.
7) Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown: This is the mommy version of Night Cars at our house. I love reading it, making the “shhh” sounds (though I am often frightened by the eerie lights on in the dollhouse). And the cow jumping over the moon picture, because that was Harriet’s first nursery rhyme.
8) The Lady with the Alligator Purse by Nadine Bernard Westcott: A hilarious story of three-tiered healthcare, with pizza as the best medicine. It’s weird and joyful, and we read it like a song.
9) Kisses Kisses Baby-O by Sheree Fitch: I love the “Shhh, hush time. Snuggle huggle…” page the best, which features a beautiful picture of a baby breastfeeding (though unlike my baby, that one doesn’t appear to be biting). Fitch manipulates language in her signature style, and the result is sheer delight. Part lullaby, part poem, and all love song.
10) On the Day You Were Born by Debra Frasier: Because of the illustrations with strong contrast and bright colours, because everything in it is true, and because it puts Baby at the centre of the universe. My favourite is the promise from gravity “that you would never float away.”
So those are mine. What are yours, for babies or kids that are bigger?
January 25, 2010
Canada Reads 2010: Independently UPDATE 3
So here at Pickle Me This, Hair Hat just nudges Century out of the lead, mainly because Century isn’t a book that cares about racing.
Julie Forrest reviews Katrina Onstad’s How Happy To Be, and finds that “while biting and satirical, it’s also tender and sweet, and reads like a coming of age story (34 is the new 24, I suppose).”
Writer Guy reads Hair Hat: “What a wonderful work this is: whimsical, sad, profound, and it captures the not-so-ordinariness of many seemingly ordinary lives.”
Charlotte Ashley is reading Canada Reads AND Canada Reads independently, and pairs Nikolski against Wild Geese. Her assessment of the latter: “Contemporary participants in “Canadian realism” should read Ostenso carefully. If you’re going to make your reader hurt, you ought to give them some kind of release, otherwise what you’ve created is nothing more than beautifully written suffering porn… Ostenso does not punish us in this manner, but instead offers us a very well-considered and beautifully executed climax and conclusion. I can’t recommend this one enough.”
And Wild Geese‘s champion Melanie Owen chats with Julie Wilson about her own Canada Reads challenge, dropping a mention of our humble imitation:”Sometimes, I feel really nervous when people ask for book recommendations. I mean, how do I know the one thing that makes me love a book isn’t going to be the exact reason someone else hates it: like my love for classic, the more depressing the better, Canadian literature? When Kerry Clare asked me to recommend a book for Canada Reads Independently, it took me forever to think of something that I felt I could defend because the book you recommend says a lot about you. And, of course, I want to be liked just as much as the book I am recommending.”
Well, Wild Geese is up next for me, so we shall see, Ms. Melanie Owen! I actully suspect that I really am going to love all five of these books, which is not terrible of course, but brings with it certain complications. I think that Century and How Happy to Be are going to end up treated most harshly in the judging, due to their placements at the extreme ends of the accessibility scale. Hair Hat is indeed in the running for my favourite, but then it’s not all up to me, is it?
January 25, 2010
Can-Reads-Indies #2: Hair Hat by Carrie Snyder
Well-executed books of linked short stories such as Century or Hair Hat have the rare power of making the novel look mere. Mere as in only linear, one-dimensional, and narrowly focussed, which is nothing like life or like the world. Whereas the shape of a book of linked stories is like the world, or rather, like the world if it had edges– polyhedronal. Multitudinous sides, perspectives, but only glimpses of these. And so perhaps the novel has the advantage of providing the reader with more satisfaction in its illusion of wholeness, but for the reader who is seeking something a little more true, linked short stories are as close as it gets in fiction.
The stories in Carrie Snyder’s Hair Hat are linked by a man whose hair is cut into the shape of a hat. A creepy cut to ponder, and even someone standing immediately before Hair Hat Man declares the style only “plausible”. Of course, I had to google it, and this guy seems to be the most famous Hair Hat Man on the internet. Carrie Snyder’s Hair Hat Man, however, looks a little different. In fact, he looks a little different to everyone who encounters him, older or younger, shabby or less so, weary or sinister, friend or foe.
“Yellow Cherries” is told from the perspective of a young girl staying with her Aunt, Uncle and cousins while her mother is having a baby. A later story, “Comfort”, is the Aunt’s perspective of the same events, but the events subtly different, calling into question notions of memory, narrative authority and underlines the gulf between what adults and children understand about one another. “Tumbleweed” and “Third Dog” are both stories of motherhood, the first about a mother taking her children on a disasterous beach outing on the day her husband has (perhaps?) left them, and the second a grandmother taking her grandson for a walk one summer day, pondering her daughter’s unhappiness as she relieves her of her maternal duties for a small time. A most vivid moment is the daughter upon their return home, (the narrative is in second person, spoken from granddaughter to grandson): “Give me the baby!” said your mother, running to the back door to greet us. “
It doesn’t take much: the urgent nature of her exclaimation, that she is running, that it’s the backdoor. Snyder uses her materials with such deftness that she almost makes prose look easy, and indeed Hair Hat is a breezy read. But each word, every sentence is weighted, to be considered. Such a wide range of characters, but Snyder is deliberate in showing the different ways that each one speaks.
The narrator of “Harrassment”, for example, who speaks like he’s spouting off, and then we realize he’s erupting. He’s one of several characters who are loners, for whom the Hair Hat Man is a point of connection. Queenie, the obese doughnut shop employee in “Queenie, My Heart” who has just lost her father is another, and on her second encounter with the man, on the subway, the beginnings of a romance are sparked. In subsequent stories, we view this odd pairing from afar, but there is something heartening about their relationship. We’ve only been watching Hair Hat Man from the periphery, observing him as an oddity, but we’re beginning to connect with him too, and he’s somebody we care about.
As the book progresses, we move back and forth in time to get closer to the Hair Hat Man’s story. When we finally encounter him directly, he is so familiar that the hair is plausible, and perhaps the least remarkable thing about him. But still, this is only an extended glimpse. This story “Missing” is from the perspective of his long-lost daughter’s own daughter now grown, given up for adoption and now returned to find him, Hair Hat Man, her grandfather. “I should have brought along a camera. I should have asked a passerby to take a photograph of the three of us. Next time, I thought. But next time is so rare. It’s a hummingbird in the rose bushes: blink and its possibility is gone.”
Not so much for a book, however, for like Century, Hair Hat is a book that begs for rereading. Unlike Century, it is also a book that I would have found my way to, even if not for Patricia Storms’ recommendation. Carrie Snyder’s book with its distinctive cover had been turning up before me increasinly often of late– at the library, at the Eden Mills Festival in September at The New Quarterly booth where I entered a draw to win it but didn’t win. Carrie Snyder had stories published in the most recent TNQ as well, and I was excited to read more of her work once I’d finished reading them.
All right, this ranking thing is terrible when all of the books in question are wonderful. Like choosing between your children, it is, when none of them have colic and they sleep for twelve hours every night. I am going to have to rank Hair Hat over Century, however, because for being less ambitious in its vision, Hair Hat realizes that vision with more success. Or perhaps that I’ll have to read Century thirty-five more times before I get my head around it finally, or that no matter how many times I read it, I never will. For all my derision of readers “seeking the illusion of wholeness”, perhaps I want a bit of it myself, and Hair Hat offers. But this doesn’t mean, I promise, that I love Century any less.
Canada Reads Independently Rankings:
1) Hair Hat by Carrie Snyder
2) Century by Ray Smith
January 24, 2010
Kettle from a headlight
Today I loved Cut/Paste: Creative Reuse in Canadian Design, an exhibit on at the Royal Ontario Museum until the end of the month. Featuring a gorgeous quilt made out of ugly one size-fits-all t-shirts, a toaster fashioned illicitly in penitentiaries out of a cigarette tin, guitar string and a shingle, a lamp made out of a chair, jewelry made out of skateboard decks, and a coffee table made from a toboggon. But my favourite was the K-42 Electric (tea!) Kettle manufactured by GE in the 1940s. Materials were scarce due to wartime, so the kettle was made from a recycled car headlight, but it would set a standard for kettle design throughout the 1950s, and become iconic in kettlish realms. (Image taken from The Canadian Design Resource).
January 23, 2010
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley
In Alan Bradley’s novel The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, our heroine, eleven year-old Flavia de Luce opines that, “Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.” So that it occurs to me that heaven must also be a narrator like Flavia de Luce, who is perfectly precocious in all the right places and suitably limited in others. The latter point being particularly important, because Flavia is the first fictional detective I’ve ever encountered who solved the crimes slower than I did. Not that she’s stupid, oh no, not Our Lady of the Periodic Table of Elements, but hers is a refreshing perspective when her youth shows through.
And yes, in this, she’s much like Harriet the Spy. Or rather, Flavia is a tribute to Harriet, though I wonder how consciously? At first glance, the connections could be coincidental. Flavia is sleuthy, and keeps a notebook, and that she’s charged with the spirit of her late Mother, who was called Harriet. This last point I doubt Alan Bradley means for us to interpret as Flavia being of Harriet (M. Welch) born, mostly because I don’t think male readers identify with Harriet that strongly. (And this, by the way, I’d love to be wrong about).
But I encounter the following paragraph: “I was me. I was Flavia. And I loved myself, even if no one else did.” And I can’t help but think that Bradley was channeling his inner-Fitzhugh after all.
Flavia lives Buckshaw, a grand home outside the English village of Bishop’s Lacey. Her eccentric father scarcely pays her attention, her older sisters torture her mercilessly, the entire household lives under a shroud of sadness from her mother’s death, but Flavia contents herself mixing poisonous concoctions in her chemistry lab at the top of the house. When a dead bird lands on the doorstep, however, with a postage stamp stuck through its beak, and then then a body turns up in the cucumber bed in the garden, Flavia is aware that life is about to get interesting for the very first time. And when her father is arrested with murder, she becomes all the more determined to solve the crime herself and clear his name.
Bradley writes Flavia tongue-in-cheek, his novel a send-up of detective fiction, but he manages to create a rather intriguing mystery all the same. Involving philately, libraries, English reticence, postmistresses– a whole host of infinitely nerdy pleasures. A whimsical book, Bradley writes gorgeous turns of phrase to match– my favourite was when Flavia steps into her dead mother’s long-undisturbed bedroom and feels as though she were “an umbrella remembering what it feels like to pop open in the rain.”
The Sweetness in the Bottom of the Pie is a book built on a the back of other books, on the back of a whole literary tradition, and its charm lies in its references to a world already much beloved. The connections it draws and its own twisty plot make for a deliciously readable delight.
January 22, 2010
An admission and some understanding
I have an admission to make, one that will win me no friends. And while usually I do not knock the books I hate here, this book is so well-loved, I think it can take it. I HATE The Number One Ladies Detective Agency. I got this book free out of a cereal box in 2003 (true story!), and have received it as a gift no less than three times since then. I read it once and found it so boring, I found it offensive, not credible as literature. And I know this will rankle many a reader now, because people love Precious Ramotswe and Alexander McCall Smith, but for the life of me, I could never undertand why.
Until now. I get it now! I still hate The Number One Ladies Detective Agency, but I think my love of Flavia de Luce and The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is analogous to how other readers must feel about Precious and Number One… And not just because they’re both books with colonial flavour, written by old white men in unlikely voices (whether they be those of Botswanan lady detectives, or eleven year-old English girls). I think neither book is meant to ring especially true, authenticity is not the object, that these books get by on their charm, and charming is most definitely in the eye of the beholder.
Stay tuned for a review of Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie from the perspective of this beholder. I loved that book indeed.
January 22, 2010
Escape the ego
I was surprised to be impressed by Elizabeth Gilbert in her recent Chatelaine interview. I am one of those irritating people who has never read Eat Pray Love but holds strong opinions about it anyway, so the interview was the first time I’d ever been exposed to Gilbert directly (as opposed to via one of her ardent devotees). She seemed terrifically level-headed about the impact of her book upon her fans, noting that readers who’d decided to follow in her eating, praying, loving footsteps were probably insane. She had smart things to say about women and their expectations for relationships, for happiness. But what I noted most of all was the following: “I don’t think women today read for escape; they read for clues.”
I loved that. Because it’s exactly the way I read, I think, to break it down and enable me to see the world in miniature, as manageable. Which, however conversely, is to be able to look at the big picture and regard it all at once, perhaps for the very first time. Fiction is a study in the hypothetical, a test-run for the actual. An experiment. What if the world was this? And we can watch the wheels turn and this bit of sample life run its course to discover. And I don’t mean that literature is smaller than life, no. Literature is life, but it’s just life you can hold in your hand, stick in your backpack, and I’m reassured by that, because the world is messy and sprawling, but if you take it down to the level of story, I am capable of some kind of grasp. Of beginning to understand what this world is, how to be in it. Certainly, I read for clues.
But then Elizabeth Gilbert went and ruined the whole thing, continuing, “The criticism of memoirs is that people read them to be voyeurs. But a lot of people read them for help and answers and perspective.” So she wasn’t actually talking about fiction, which takes the wind of out of my sails, and now she’s relegated reading in general to the self-help rack. Which is boring, troubling, limiting. So there ends my love affair with Elizabeth Gilbert, perhaps because I’m skeptical of memoirs and the kind of truth any reader might hope to find there.
And then I came across this video of Fran Lebowitz on Jane Austen (who Lebowitz says is popular for all the wrong reasons). Lebowitz says, “To lose yourself in a book is the desire of the bookworm, to be taken. And that’s my desire… [which] may come from childhood. The discovery of the world, which I discovered in a library– I lived in a little town and the library was the world. This is the opposite way that people are taught to read now. People are consistently told, ‘What can you learn about your own life from the novel?’ ‘What lessons will this teach you?’ ‘How can you use this?’ This is a philistine idea, this is beyond vulgar, and I think this is it is an awful away to approach anything… A book is not supposed to be a mirror. It’s supposed to be a door.”
Which was something I could get behind. I was finished with Elizabeth Gilbert, and was about to jump on the Fran Lebowitz reading-wagon, when it occured to me, “To lose yourself in a book is the desire of the bookworm, to be taken.” And is that not the very definition of “escape”? Escapism, which is all about stupid women reading pink shoe novels on the beach, with Fran Lebowitz alongside them? I couldn’t see it.
But escapism is surely what she’s advocating, however much “the world” is what she is escaping to. And it occurs to me that Elizabeth Gilbert’s clue-seeking readers are escapists just as much, however in a far more literal sense. That they’re plotting a way out of their humdrum lives, just as Lebowitz was doing back at that small town library. Searching for different kind of place for themselves.
Do I read for escape? I don’t know. Does reading for fun count as escape? Does reading to relax? Interestingly, the books I’d read for fun or relaxation are those that would make me “lose myself” the least, which would make them the least escapist of all. I just finished The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, for example, which was fun and fluffy as you like, but Century is a book that’s more taken me away of late. You wouldn’t call it escapist though, because that’s such a pejorative term, but now that I’ve thought about it, I’m not so sure it should be, and it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that the divide is not so firm at all.
It’s about time for a Diana Athill reference, I think. Though she’s a memoirist like Elizabeth Gilbert, and one that people rave about with just as much enthusiasm, but for some reason I actually do plan to read Athill’s memoir one of these days, and I trust the wisdom implicit in what she has to say. My impression is that by reading Athill, we learn about the world through her prism, where in reading Eat Pray Love, we get Elizabeth Gilbert over and over. (Forgive me as I speculate about two books I haven’t read. And correct me if I’m wrong). Perhaps also it’s important that Athill is old and has years of experience, while Gilbert just once took a really great vacation.
Athill is quoted as saying, “Anything absorbing makes you become not ‘I’ but ‘eye’–you escape the ego.” And so is this the kind of escape we’re talking about? What Lebowitz is after? That with the best kind of books we get the world, get out of ourselves for a while, forget our problems.
Perhaps reading is a bit like love. Just when we’re not actively out looking for “help, answers and perspective”, that’s when we might actually stand a chance of finding it.
