By the Book: Stephanie Patterson

I’m sure most of you are aware of the New York Times feature By the Book in which writers and celebrities are quizzed about their reading habits. Since I’m not a celebrity and my manuscripts are mostly unfinished, I don’t think the Times will be visiting soon.

So I decided to talk to myself (something at which I excel) and produce my own BTB.

What books are on your bedside table?

I don’t have a bedside table. I do have a very large end table. Most people would call it the floor. Currently it holds any number of things: Beatrice Webb’s Diaries, Look Who’s Back by Timur Vermes, Chasing Lost Time by Jean Findley. Paris Was Yesterday by Janet Flanner, Knight Errant by Robert Stephens, The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher among others. (We’re talking the floor after all)

What kind of reader were you as a child? Did you have a favorite book?

Indiscriminate. My mother was essentially a single parent so she had to take me along on errands. I got Little Golden Books from the supermarket. Later I remember getting weekly supplements of a encyclopedia and then a world history. The one image I remember from the world history volumes was a picture of Paul Klee’s “Twittering Machine.” I looked at it a lot and finally saw it “in person” in June at the Neue Galerie in New York City. I loved Little Women. I remember scenes and lines from that book more vividly than many books I’ve read more recently. I could never decide whether I wanted to be Jo or Beth. Jo was really more to my taste, but Beth died so nobly.

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

Why do you alway ask about the president? The guy reads, no question. What about what Republicans should be reading? Let’s start with the Constitution. First they would see that the Constitution is not comprised solely of the Second Amendment. Then there’s the bit about “the well-regulated Militia.” Jaylen Fryberg wasn’t part of anybody’s militia. Some people value gun ownership over human life. That upsets me.

The president might try laughing over PG Wodehouse, but of course he’d have to answer for reading frivolous British comedy while the world was going to hell.

If you could have dinner with any writer, living or dead, who would it be?

Well, I’d have to have a dinner party. Shakespeare and Chekov are off the list because they have so many invitations from other writers. For my husband, I would invite George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and Dick Francis. I would also invite Winston Churchill, Anthony Trollope, all of the Mitford sisters (though Nancy probably wouldn’t come as she didn’t like Americans) and George Eliot. I would also like to talk to David Foster Wallace to tell him how much many readers still miss him and to let him know he singlehandedly made me care about Roger Federer. And I’d want to spend some time with Reginald Hill whose mysteries I so enjoyed. For living writers, how about the writers on this blog? They’re lively on the page; I’m sure they’re lively in person. I want to drink Broken Hearts with them. From what I’ve read about the potency of the drink, this would mean spending the night in Manhattan. YAY!

Do you prefer paper or electronic books?

I like both. I have many in both formats. The Kindle allows me to carry around an entire library. I would never have read David McCullough’s Truman if it wasn’t available electronically.

Didn’t you promise your husband you wouldn’t buy paper books once you got a Kindle?

Now you’re getting personal. I have indeed broken that promise. I can’t imagine Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? would be very enjoyable on my Kindle. Many older books are available only in paper. Hard as it is to believe, G. M. Young’s biography of Stanley Baldwin (once described as “the most hostile authorized biography ever written”) is not available as an ebook.

I think you’re making excuses.

Oh, go away. I have better things to do than talk to you. I have to design a reading list for Republicans.

© 2014 Stephanie Patterson

Unsafe to Read

Sunday's New York Times tells us that modern college students are asking for warning labels on certain books in the Literary Canon that they are forced to read, because they may find the content disturbing. Rape victims and returning veterans, they say, are particularly at risk and must be warned before opening their copies of The Great Gatsby or Mrs. Dalloway.

According to Philip Wythe of the Rutgers Daily Targum, our nation's classrooms are thronging with damaged, sensitive people suffering from all kinds of psychological disorders. They must be protected from further abuse, which for humanities majors can take the form of being required to read as many as 35 novels in four months. Maybe even paying attention to the contents.* Since censorship is wrong—we all know that—the answer is for the professors to put "trauma trigger warnings" on their syllabi, so that sensitive students can beg to be excused from reading anything they might not feel safe with.

The concept of trigger warnings is said to have originated with the Women's Movement. If that's true, I'm sorry for it. In my day Sisterhood was Powerful, not an excuse to be let off from reading challenging material.

Great literature is supposed to shake you. But whether you read or not, if you live and stay awake you will be educated. Experience keeps a dear school, as they say, but a fool will learn in no other. There are lessons you're better off learning from examples in books, before you are confronted with them in real life. War is hell, for example. Not everyone who wants to have sex with you loves and respects you. Not everyone who disagrees with your beliefs is evil, or even necessarily wrong. Some people do not regard you as human, and never will. I could go on.

Here's a passage from A. E. Houseman's A Shropshire Lad that seems to me to speak to the point:

There was a king reigned in the East:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all the springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.
—I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.

Hey, I read that in college. It's a metaphor, kids. Nobody is advising you to take poison.

© 2014 Kate Gallison

*If Mr. Wythe's classmates think reading 34 novels in four months is traumatic, wait until they graduate with their humanities degrees and try to find jobs that will enable them to pay off their college loans before they reach the age of retirement.

Reading to Diana

When my phone rang some weeks ago and I heard my friend, Diana, say, “I was just thinking of all those books and articles about apartheid you read to me,” I knew Nelson Mandela had died. I read the books to her because she is blind and it seemed to take forever for some titles to make it onto Library for the Blind cassettes.

But it was Diana who made apartheid something more than a problem that happened “over there” or the foreign policy concern that the Reagan administration met with “constructive engagement.” I read Donald Woods’ Biko and Asking for Trouble because she suggested them. I read Joseph Lelyveld’s Move Your Shadow and Breyten Breytenbach’s The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist to her because I could get my hands on them quickly. We also worked our way through articles about other movement figures like Joe Slovo and Ruth First. It made the horror more personal somehow and I remember our shared sadness when Donald Woods died.

For a number of years Diana and I lived next door to each other at Coles House and we clicked in the way that only readers can when we discovered a mutual love of all sorts of books. We started our shared reading with Gary Kinder’s Victim: The Other Side of Murder which, as its title suggests, looks at long term effects of a crime on victims and their families. The book was horrifying but very well written and I discovered how wonderful reading to someone could be. Rather than just recommending a book to a friend, I could read it to her and we could enjoy it at the same time. It was fabulous.

We had a weekly Sunday reading ritual that centered on the Sunday New York Times. We would skip the formal Coles House breakfast and Diana would bring back the paper, 4 large coffees and 4 donuts. Fueled on caffeine and sugar we began our reading in high spirits no matter how bad the news. We lingered over the Book Review, the Magazine and any especially unusual obituaries.

At Christmas time, the reading of the New York Times included a close perusal of the The Neediest Cases, an appeal to Times’ readers to give money to a number of social service agencies that supported vulnerable populations within the city. Today the profiles of families appear on a daily basis and there is a photograph of the family and the accompanying story suggests that no matter how deeply needy these people might be, there is hope that their lot will improve.

This is an honorable approach, but years ago, the neediest cases were presented in somewhat starker fashion. There was a whole section of the paper devoted to the needy. Illustrations were black and white pen and ink drawings and the stories that accompanied them were Dickensian in both detail and misery. I don’t remember if the writing was good or tinged with purple but the stories were amazingly compelling. Diana and I were riveted to every word.

Diana and I each left Coles House and, for a time, lived on separate floors of the same apartment building. So we continued The Times readings and I would read her things as they struck my fancy. It was at another Christmas that I read A Prayer for Owen Meany. As you will recall, it has a compelling opening line:

"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice – not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany."

I will confess that I usually avoid novels with religious themes but I loved that line and shared it immediately with Diana. Though I do little acting when I read, this book did compel me to come up with an Owen Meany voice, which I can still produce though years have passed. I didn’t read the whole novel to Diana but I read her large sections and we enjoyed his comments about Christmas carols (“‘Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying. VERY Christmasy’”), his defense of Liberace (“‘Well, he was very good to George’”) and his portrayal of the Ghost of Christmas Future—a performance so chilling that one of his classmates wets her pants. It’s not a book that either of us can read every year—the ending is very sad. But we remember that reading as a kind of milestone of our friendship and always talk about it at Christmas time.

Diana and live about 15 minutes from each other now. I still read to her occasionally but certainly not as much as I once did. Modern technology gives her many different ways to find the books she wants. But the intimacy of reading aloud has given our friendship a sort of literary history that no technology can replace.

© 2013 Stephanie Patterson