February 27, 2012
Bringing Up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman
As I was almost unequivocally the craziest, most anxious pregnant woman who ever lived, I had been particularly nervous what would happen to me when my child was out in the world, the whole “heart on the outside of one’s body” cliche. I’d expected to become neurotic, hovering, unable to sleep at night lest my child succumbed to SIDS, but then I met Harriet, was bowled over by the sheer force of her vitality, her fierceness, and I never really worried again. It was clear to me from the start that she was an actual person separate from me, so absolutely possessed of a distinctive self I’d have very little control over shaping, and it’s been with such fascination that I’ve watched that self developing into the someone she was destined to be from the first ear-piercing scream she ever uttered.
Which is to say that I’m laid-back as parents of 3 year-olds go, which is surprising because I’m laid-back about absolutely nothing else. Though I’m laid-back within certain parameters (which I’ve been lucky enough to have success with): I’ve been maniacal from the get-go about cultivating good eating habits in my child and nurturing an appreciation for healthy food and good flavours. Harriet is usually a pro at eating in nice-ish restaurants. It’s also important to me that Harriet learns to entertain herself and enjoy her own company, which is essential for my sanity as a mother who works from home (and makes it a priority to carve out a good deal of “me time”). And in many ways, these are the priorities that have shaped whatever “parenting philosophy” I’ve established for myself, so when I heard of Pamela Druckerman’s Bringing Up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting, I thought, “Hey, that’s up my street.”
Because it’s important, of course, to only ever read parenting books that affirm your worldview and what you’re doing already. (And I’m not being facetious. The alternative is to be driven insane.)
Druckerman’s book, about her experiences of pregnancy and motherhood as an American expatriate in Paris, is being marketed as this year’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Druckerman herself as a “parenting expert”. Which is misleading, because Bringing Up Bebe is certainly no manifesto, and it has much more in common with the best book about babies that I’ve ever read, which is Dream Babies by Christina Hardyment, a history of baby advice “From John Locke to Gina Ford”. Hardyment’s book instilled in me the empowering knowledge that there is no such thing as a baby expert, and that ideas of baby advice and parenting philosophies (scientifically based or otherwise) have been faddish since the 16th century. So that in those brutal early days of new motherhood when I had no idea what I was doing, at least I could be confident that nobody else really did either.
In her book, Druckerman similarly shows how notions of parenting and parenthood (and also children and childhood) are cultural constructs, and her approach is far more anthropological than “how-to”. She shows how French notions of pregnancy are so different from what she experienced as an American engrossed in week-by-week manuals with advice about how every morsel of food that goes in her mouth should be good for her baby. French women around her worried far less about their pregnancies, eat whatever they want (though Druckerman points out that French women don’t eat a lot in the first place), are encouraged to “nurture their inner woman”, and are not only told that they can have sex in pregnancy but are provided with a list of comfortable positions to do it in.
The book goes on to show how babies in France begin sleeping through the night very early, how they are taught patience and independence by their parents not always responding immediately to their needs (but rather, their parents observe those needs from afar to discern how they can best be met). French babies are considered rational people, albeit small ones, who can come to understand the world around them with reasoned explanation (and can understand the needs of their parents and family as well). French children develop independence by entering day care from an early age, and parents can have confidence in the state-funded institution with rigorous standards, instructors with university degrees who’ve chosen their work as a profession (and are well-compensated for it), and healthy meals brought in by chefs.
Parents maintain authority over their children, have high expectations for good behaviour, and yet also don’t run their children’s lives (or allow their children to run theirs). Children are allowed significant freedom and develop higher abilities and a greater sense of responsibility in accordance. Many of the differences in parenting are subtle, and can be understood through differences in language– instead of “Be good,” French children are told, “Be wise” (or “Show good judgement”). Instead of “discipline”, French parents talk about”education”. There is a set of parameters which parents are unbending about, but their children are offered a great deal of freedom within these.
Though Druckerman shows a clear bias towards the French approach to parenting, her book is not a polemic. She wishes her own children to retain a sense of themselves as Americans as they grow up in France, she devotes an entire chapter to breastfeeding not being a priority for French mothers, she admits that though French women have greater support in furthering their careers, they split household roles with spouses more unevenly than American parents do, and are paid lower wages for their work. She shows that until the 1960s, the French approach to parenting was rigid and cold, that effects of this remain, and that some French people (and American expats) are absolutely starving for American ideas of self-affirmation. And she also shows that being a French parent is not easy, that you can’t figure out how to be one by following a guide, and that like any parent, they’re ever responding to new challenges thrown their way. It’s just that, philosophical approaches to parenthood being what they are, French parents respond to those challenges very differently.
What Druckerman doesn’t give enough credit to, however, is the role of institutionalized daycare in France in creating her institutionalized Frenchness. (She concedes, by the way, that life in France outside of Paris and even outside her social circle in Paris is different from and more varied than what her book portrays.) A few times, she mentions that the mothers of the children with such sophisticated palettes don’t even cook themselves, for example, which leads me to conclude that school lunches have a greater role in shaping children’s food tastes than family meals do. It’s not surprising that French children fall into line in institutional settings along with their peers with such rigorous standards and expectations upon them. Perhaps if we all have the benefit of such a system, all of us could have children so obliging.
So Druckerman’s book is not that useful if you’re reading it in the hope of cultivating a little French-person of your own. (It’s also not useful if you wish to be not fat. French mothers, apparently, spend a lot of time baking with their children, but exercise restraint enough not to eat the result, which is a skill that is beyond me.) But what Bringing Up Bebe is useful for is challenging our ideas about childhood and child-rearing, broadening our perspectives to see the different ways these ideas are approached, and allowing us to see our own approaches as the cultural constructions they are. Druckerman’s writing is also light, funny and engaging, and her book is as informative as it is a pleasure to read.
February 25, 2012
Dimwits and numbskulls
“The universal, yet unique experience of motherhood creates an immediate bond with other women, Cusk explains, and, paradoxically, an unchallenged platform from which to pass judgment, a contradiction she experienced at both a local and a professional level. ‘I didn’t know that that kind of cruelty and criticism you encounter among mothers at the toddler group could find its way into written media until my book came out,’ she says, with force. ‘Then suddenly, I have women like Gill Hornby and India Knight writing articles about me, in effect saying, “Well, I love my children and they’re the best thing that happened to me, I don’t know what’s wrong with you”. I’m not remotely afraid of what that kind of person thinks of me. I have no respect for them and I wouldn’t have given them a second thought had not motherhood grouped us all together in the Venn diagram, which is very big and full of all kind of dimwits and numbskulls.'”–from “Mum’s The Word”, Rachel Cusk Interviewed in 2003
February 22, 2012
Afflictions and Departures by Madeline Sonik
In her essay collection Afflictions and Departures, which has been shortlisted for the 2012 Charles Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction, Madeline Sonik stitches her personal stories to the fabric of her time. Her narrative voice is blessed with startling omniscience, with the benefit of hindsight, and with an acute awareness of both how the extraordinary can be illuminated by ordinary detail, and also of how the ordinary and extraordinary are so often intricately connected. Sonik’s prose reveals her poet’s skill, as does these essays’ use of imagery and symbolism, but the broadness of her vision and the deftness with which she fits together surprising pieces of reality is evocative of Joan Didion’s masterful non-fiction.
In “First Passage”, Sonik imagines her parents’ passage on the Queen Mary in 1959, a glamorous voyage toward hope and possibility that would stand out in contrast to the disappointment of the rest of their lives. As the journey is a point of departure for the collection, it is also such a point for Sonik herself whose conception takes en-route. And so the voyage is also envisioned as a point of departure for absolutely everything that follows after: “It is 1959, a year before birth control pills are made available to women, twenty-three years before the AIDS epidemic makes condoms available everywhere and politically correct. The sun is rising through a starboard hatch.” That the Queen Mary’s rudder weighs 140 tons and that in 1970, and that Sonik’s father will become a violent alcoholic is given equal emphasis, and by the end of 1959, the USSR will have taken satellite photos of the far side of the moon.
In “Korean Moon”, Sonik reflects on her father’s war, The Korean War, humanizing and showing sympathy for a character who’s such a monster in the rest of the book.
“Shadows” is a short study of the dark side of the late ’50s and early ’60s, before the darkness became omnipresent for a while and veneers were cracked once and for all (or for a while). A typical paragraph: “I am whisked away, swaddled in pink flannel, and tucked into a hospital nursery crib far from my mother’s ward. In future years, irreversible brain damage and mental retardation will be linked to the lead-based paint that coat baby cribs. A decade from now, ninety percent of children under the age of six will have elevated lead levels in their blood and the government will ban the use of lead-based house paints. Studies will show that newborns who do not bond with their mothers in the sensitive period after birth risk emotional despondency and insecurity. But right now, as a nurse prepares my first bottle and my mother, still numb, prepares to light a cigarette, the daffodil sun is still shining and we are all blithely ignorant.”
In “For Posterity”, Sonik begins with a ride on The Maid of the Mist, considers Niagara Falls and concepts of love and romance, which brings a connection to the nearby Love Canal (whose name has surprising origins) whose contaminated ground’s toxins are leaking into the Niagara River and turning up scores of dead fish along the shores which they don’t see from the boat, so busy are they marvelling at the majestic power of the falls. She then thinks about suicides, Niagara Falls’ underside, about her parents’ own troubled relationship, and about all she didn’t yet know about love and everything that life would teach her.
In “Easter”, Sonik explores the inner lives of families, what goes on behind the row-on-rows of tidy doors that line their neighbourhood streets. This idea reappears in other essays, the sounds and signs of child abuse going unremarked upon, broken marriages, the inner lives of mothers, the secret worlds of cemeteries and the play they inspire.
“Fetters” deals with her own teenage drama juxtaposed against the backdrop of her father’s slow and painful death from cancer: to the boy who’s just broken her heart, she asks, “‘Just say with me until my father dies.’ It’s a ridiculous request and I don’t know why I ask it…. It shouldn’t surprise me in the least when he says, “No,” but it does… I can’t stop myself from babbling and pleading for him to reconsider. My father is dying. He’s not expected to live beyond the week.’
“Flush” begins with Sonik noting that she was born in the year the toilet made its cinematic debut (in Psycho), and marks the pivotal points in her life at which a toilet has functions as a surprising centre. Containing a line that would be fitting as this entire collection’s subtitle: “I didn’t know then, and it would be years before I learned…”
Afflictions and Departures is a beautiful book, fusing fact and feeling, the specific and universal, the domestic with the whole wide world, and the effect is a dazzling synergy.
February 21, 2012
Big Day: Welcome to The 49th Shelf!
Canadian Bookshelf launched in beta last June, and officially arrives today with a whole host of new features and a brand new name: The 49th Shelf. The selection of books on our front page this week is blowing my mind (including Madeline Sonik’s Afflictions & Departures, which I just finished yesterday and loved), our new I Love Books campaign is excellent, and you can find out more about what’s going on in our latest blog post (and we’re talking giveaway!). We’ve also got an interview with Maggie Helwig whose Girls Fall Down has just been selected for the One Book Toronto program (and which Stuart is currently reading and enjoying).
It’s good news all around and so inspiring to see so much love and support for Canadian books. I’m so thrilled to be a part of it and hope you’ll be a part of it too.
February 20, 2012
Guacamole by Jorge Argueta and Margarita Sada
A couple of years ago, I was totally obsessed with literary avocados, so it was no surprise really that I’d find Guacamole: A Cooking Poem appealing. The kids on the cover live in a hollowed-out avocado, for crying out loud, with a purple bird on the window sill. And the illustrations really are what’s immediately appealing about this book, the sheer delight of the children in the story as they make literal the story’s metaphors about pits so slick you can slide down them, or a spoon you drive like a tractor.
The poem is Spanish poem is translated into English, and both texts appear here. The poem emphasizes feeling and sensuousness, and portrays cooking as a profoundly emotional experience. And experience itself is profoundly about imagination, the text here doing what the illustrations do with metaphors: with your apron on, you feel like a great chef, salt falls like rain, lime juice is a river, and a lime’s seeds are “Little pearls that look like eyes…”
The very best part of the book is that it’s as much recipe book as picture book, and the results are delicious. Our pages are already splattered with food in the very best way. The poem’s recipe is simple enough that Harriet and I could make the guacamole together with neither of us losing patience, and she particularly enjoyed stirring with her tractor spoon. We also took care to involve singing and dancing in the process as instructed (with is always important when you’re working in the kitchen), and I love the way this book shows cooking as something we can do with our family, and also something we can do for our family, and regardless, is connected to togetherness.
Guacamole is part of a series of cooking poems by Argueta which also includes Bean Soup and Rice Pudding. I look forward to trying the others.
February 19, 2012
R is for Rink
Location: Nathan Phillips Square
Many years ago, before there was a Harriet, our good friend (and onetime downstairs-neighbour) Curtis promised that when Stuart and I had a child, he would teach it to skate. These days, Harriet is nearly three and Curtis is just weeks away from the birth of his own baby, but he still honoured his commitment and we all went skating this morning at Nathan Phillips Square in front of City Hall. Harriet has been talking about Curtis taking her skating for months and months, but the reality failed to live up to the promise– I think we have to get her bob-skates to really make this happen. She had fun though, but the real success of the day was that I skated! I’ve only skated once in the last 20 years and I remember hating it, but perhaps there was something about the particular dullness of the City Hall rental skates and how they don’t really go, because I did really well and I loved it. It still ached my ankles and I looked like an idiot, but not a complete idiot, and I wasn’t even terrified. And how nice to be outside on a beautifully sunny winter’s day, right in the centre of the city at such an essential Toronto landmark. I think we might have to do it again.
February 16, 2012
Leaving Berlin by Britt Holmstrom
Leaving Berlin by Britt Holmstrom opens with an epigraph from Carol Shields’ The Stone Diaries: “It is inevitable that each of us will be misunderstood; this it seems, is part of twentieth-century wisdom.” Which sets up two expectations that Holmstrom takes care to meet, the first that these are stories about (dis)connections between people, and also that we’re entering a Shieldsian universe.
And indeed, Holmstrom writes with a similar approach to the short story to Shields’. Her narrators are omniscient, she’s an orchestrator, she doesn’t go in for plot and explosions, and her stories aren’t linear at all. Instead they’re structured like nesting boxes, each story holding other stories inside to be unpacked, and inside those are stories more. So that an single story here can consist of two women sorting their laundry who’ve never had an intimate conversation, or strangers sitting in a train station waiting room, or two women sitting beneath the Eiffel Tower who don’t say a word to one another, and yet feelings, misapprehensions, misunderstandings, and prejudices cause characters to delve deep into their own histories, and whole stories are spun (and stories upon stories). Much like, just say, a story can be written about the absurd sight of an older woman in short-shorts unabashedly mowing her lawn.
These stories are connected by their characters, who are usually unassuming women whose simple theories of the universe are being tested; by their geographies, which are usually small Canadian cities, or European cities as envisioned by the inhabitants of small Canadian cities; by the references to art, artists, music and musicians which recur throughout; and by the marriages, which are usually passionless and horrible. And the connections between women, positive or otherwise. And I absolutely knew I loved this book with “The Company She Kept”, about a group of office mates who become obsessed with a colleague who spins preposterous stories about her exotic life which can never be quite proven false, though the women all know she’s lying, of course. But why does she go to so much trouble to do so? Why would you borrow a punch bowl if you were never going to use it? And as these questions are endlessly fascinating, these women’s fascination takes them beyond limits of their comfort, changing the course of their lives in the process.
“Under the Eiffel Tower” is an exercise on the distance between the way we see ourselves and how others see us, about Carol, a woman whose fear of heights kicks in at the last minute and she’s left to sit and wait as her husband and their party ride to the top of the Eiffel Tower. On a nearby bench is a woman who is probably a Gypsy, though that idea makes Carol uncomfortable. Is it racist to suppose someone is a Gypsy? And thoughts of this woman take her back to a story her mother told from her own childhood in Denmark about playing with Gypsy children, which leads Carol to a story from her own life about a brief (and uncharacteristic) love affair years ago with a fellow traveler who gave her a St. Christopher medal she wears around her neck (though the story of why he gave it to her is not so straightforward). And it’s the medal now that a small boy has his eye on, a Gypsy boy who’s already had the never to ask her for her change, a boy who Carol assumes must belong to the woman on the bench beside hers. Though is that a racist thought too? And as Carol gets up and finally walks away, it is revealed that Carol’s judgments of the woman and boy have been right and wrong in the most shocking ways.
I also loved “The Rebel Doll”, about a Canadian woman who goes to visit her sister in the northwest of England, and forges a connection with a young girl in the train station waiting room. When the woman’s sister makes a casual statement about the woman’s mothering of her own children, however, the nature of the woman’s connection to the young girl is illuminated in ways that surprise us as much as it does the woman.
I loved the characters who were summed with lines like “…an alcoholic misfit who at the age twenty-eight had drowned his litter of ambitions to avoid the tiresome responsibility of having to look after them.” Holmstrom pulls no punches, takes no prisoners, which at best gives her prose a most delicious biting effect, but at worst renders some characters and plots as one dimensional. I really enjoyed “The Sky Above Her Head” about a woman who’s trapped in the ties of her family and takes the sweetest revenge at a prairie gas station (to a Mungo Jerry soundtrack, no less), but I wondered if anyone could be so unrelentingly unsympathetic as that sister was? The effect is decidedly amusing, and I certainly smiled, but such touches lacked the depth of others.
Leaving Berlin is a bit different from most Canadian short story collections I’ve read lately (and I’ve read plenty) in two significant ways that have to do with its author’s biography. First, that Holmstrom was born in Sweden, and her collection reflects such an international awareness of the local, and also what it means to be foreign, even though the foreigners here are usually Canadians abroad. And second, that this isn’t her first book– Leaving Berlin is her fourth book since 1998, and the book lists Holmstrom herself as having been born in 1946. And you sense that with this book, that here is a writer with experience in both writing and life, and who is not striving in the same way as a young writer still learning and yearning to prove herself might be. Which is to say that there is sureness here in Holmstrom’s voice, a real maturity, and what a pleasure it really is to encounter a writer in her prime.
February 16, 2012
"It was not that I merely read The New Yorker; I lived it in a private way"
“It was not that I merely read The New Yorker; I lived it in a private way. I had created for myself a New Yorker world (located somewhere east of Westport and west of the Cotswolds) where Peter de Vries (punning softly) was forever lifting a glass of Piesporter, where Niccolo Tucci (in a plum velvet dinner jacket) flirted in Italian with Muriel Spark, where Nabokov sipped tawny port from a prismatic goblet (while a Red Admirable perched on his pinky), and where John Updike tripped over the master’s Swiss shoes, excusing himself charmingly (repeating all the while that Nabokov was the best writer of English currently holding American citizenship). Meanwhile, the Indian writers clustered in a corner punjabbering away in Sellerian accents (and giving off a pervasive odor of curry) and the Irish memorists (in fishermen’s sweaters and whiskey breath) were busy snubbing the prissily tweedy English memorists.
Oh, I had mythicized other magazines and literary quarterlies, too, but The New Yorker had been my shrine since childhood. (Commentary, for example, held rather grubby gatherings at which bilious-looking Semites-all of whom were named Irving-worried each other to death about Jewishness, Blackness, and Consciousness, while dipping into bowls of chopped liver and platters of Nova Scotia.) These soirees amused me, but it was for The New Yorker that I reserved my awe. I never would have dared to send my own puny efforts there, so it outraged and amazed me to find someone I had actually known frequenting its pages.” –Erica Jong, Fear of Flying
February 14, 2012
The Winter Palace by Eva Stachniak
Historical fiction is one of my groundless literary prejudices, so I must admit that Eva Stachniak’s The Winter Palace was not an immediate draw. But then I got to know Eva a bit and she’s lovely, plus her book’s reception has been so overwhelmingly positive, and having conquered Wolf Hall, I’m not afraid of anything anymore. So I decided to go for it, and I loved it.
That I would love it seemed a sure thing from the top of page 12 when I encountered the line, “My father was a bookbinder.” Another of my literary prejudices is that if you stick a bookbinder if your novel, I will adore it, and in particular if the narrative goes into the intricacies of bookbinding, the book as object, has characters who are readers, and has pivotal scenes taking place in libraries, imperial or otherwise. Everybody is reading in this novel– narrator Barbara’s young daughter leafs through old books looking for pictures of herself, Stachniak so perfectly articulating how children read to see their selves reflected. Her recently-crowned Catherine the Great takes care to keep her afternoons clear so she can read alone in her room (though imperial business threatens to interfere with this arrangement). Barbara herself achieves status in the imperial palace after a chance run-in with the Russian Chancellor in the library, gaining a new position reading aloud to the Crown Prince.
We see the 18th century Russian court through the eyes of Barbara, a Polish immigrant and orphan who is in Princess Elizabeth’s debt because her late- father the bookbinder had once repaired a tattered, treasured prayer book. Barbara is defined by her mutability, even down to her name: “Barbara, or Basienka, my mother called me. In Polish, as in Russian, a name has many transformations. It can expand or contract, sound official and hard or soft and playful. Its shifting shape can turn its bearer into a helpless child or a woman in charge. A lover or a lady, a friend or a foe./ In Russian, I became Varvana.”
Varvana begins working as a seamstress in the Winter Palace, a position for which she is horribly unsuited, but she has other skills, and these are noticed. She is enlisted by the Chancellor to become a “tongue”, one who reports on palace goings-on. She becomes closer to the Empress Elizabeth, and also to the Grand Duchess Catherine who arrives at the palace to marry the Crown-Prince, and soon it becomes unclear where her loyalties lie (or rather, she begins to develop loyalties where she should have none at all). Her unclear loyalties become evident to Empress Elizabeth as well, who marries Varvana off to a Palace Guard to be rid of her, but this doesn’t manage to sever her connection to Catherine. As Elizabeth gets frailer, the system of power becomes precarious, and Varvana must finally take a side, even if just for the purposes of self-preservation. But it’s more than that– she has come to care for and trust the Grand Duchess Catherine, who’s on the verge of becoming Catherine the Great. But is anyone really worthy of trust in the Winter Palace, where loyalties are as fluid as identities are? What will be the consequences of ceasing to be just a pair of eyes and ears, and attempting to live without fear as a real human being?
The historical details through the eyes of Barbara are made accessible and vivid, the latter point by the exquisiteness of Stachniak’s prose. (I kept highlighting passages I especially loved, like the part about the expanding names. I think my favourite line was, “Hope can be as brittle as a wishbone”.) The characters are made human, in particular by their presence in their bodies, which miscarry, get diseases and become disfigured over time. There are no stock characters here, which is saying something a book with so many characters, but Stachniak manages the right strokes to bring her people to life with a remarkably human complexity (in particular, Barbara’s husband, and how I admired the connection that grows up between them). The plot is riveting and makes every page-turn in this 400+ page book seem most worthwhile, and I loved the ending, how the narrator steps away from the tale of Catherine the Great, and we manage to see what we’ve always suspected: that Barbara has been the hero of her story all along.
February 12, 2012
Wild Libraries I Have Known: Quiet Reading Room at the Amundsen Scott South Pole Station
How exciting that the Wild Libraries series hits its 5th continent with this post by Laura Conchelos, perhaps our wildest post yet (or at least most extreme). I met Laura nearly twenty years ago, and ever after, she’s been one of my most fascinating friends. I enjoy her adventures vicariously, and delight in the Christmas cards to the South Pole that our friendship gives me occasion to send.
It may not look like much but the Quiet Reading Room at the Amundsen Scott South Pole Station is pretty important to us. We work for the United States Antarctic Program which runs and supports science at the South Pole with the National Science Foundation. Unlike many libraries these days, it’s strictly books and magazines here with some audio books and CDs thrown in for good measure. For our computer needs, we use our own laptops in our rooms or go to the computer room.
This room isn’t as cute or cozy as many libraries but it is chock full of good reading for 
those with the patience to look. Most recent bestsellers can be found here, left by someone else and available for the taking. I usually end up with a stack of books from this room next to my bed that I have to return at the end of our four-month season. Usually I haven’t read half of them! By the end of the 8-month South Pole winter, the Reading Room looks grand, as somebody often has taken it under his or her wing and put energy into reorganizing and labeling the books. Most of the books are novels but there are history books, short stories, poetry, travel, religion and education sections, amongst others. Just as the books get donated over the years, the reading room has been decorated with odds and ends over time, my favorite items being the masks that were made for our wearable art show a few years ago and which can be seen here.
A locked cabinet in the room keeps most of the Antarctic-themed books and other coveted reading. Most of the knitting books get kept in the cabinet, as do the travel guides like the Lonely Planet. All one needs to do to sign these books out is get the keys from the store during its daily hours of operation.
Apart from pilfering for good reading or doing crossword puzzles here on Sundays 
(our one day off), I spend little time in this room. It does get a lot of use from others, however. As the station is such a public place, there are not many locations within it that offer some sort of quiet. People go here to read, write letters, and nap when they don’t want to make the long trek to their rooms. This room is also used by visiting clergy for Masses and church services.
