Number the Stars, by Lois Lowry

Well, it’s Thanksgiving, and I think it makes a lot of sense to write about this book. First of all, I am thankful that it is not the Holocaust. Second of all, Thanksgiving makes me think first about sweet potatoes (if there was a Boston Market in London–oh sorry I just jizzed in my pants), but second, always, it makes me think about genocide, which I understand is less pleasant than side dishes but nevertheless is the real meaning of Thanksgiving. Third, I was in Berlin for a few days, and a few architectural details at the Jewish Museum nearly made me vomit with an excess of feeling. Fourth, I went to Stonehenge today and in honor of recent birthday, threw my old fake ID away in the bathroom. So in general, tragedy, memory and resilience have all been on the brain.

This book was my introduction to the Holocaust and really to the idea that history is important. I remember reading it in third grade and, at the end, walking kind of blankly down to my family’s set of encyclopedias and looking up “Jew.” Number the Stars won the Newbery Award in 1990, and I think it is still assigned widely in elementary schools, as it should be. The way Lois Lowry is able to tell the most painful, deep stories through children and objects–it’s unforgettable. When the Nazis wake up the Johansen family in the middle of the night (remember, they’re trying to pass off Ellen as Annemarie’s sister, who died in the Resistance) and Annemarie rips off Ellen’s star necklace in the dark; when the Nazis insist on seeing baby pictures and you almost die with relief when it turns out Lise Johansen had brown hair as a baby–that shit is a fundamental life lesson about identity and cruelty and the absolutely arbitrary nature of both things.

Till the end it is complex and simple and lovely and sad. Remember when the soldier tries to look in the coffin and Annemarie’s mom gives him .05% back talk and he slaps her? Remember how Kirsti was obsessed with shiny black shoes? And when Annemarie goes on that scary, unknown mission at the end–carrying a package topped with a cocaine-laced handkerchief to numb the Nazi dogs’ sense of smell–it’s the most perfect scene of a little girl irretrievably growing up.

Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich

Premise: undercover journalist works low-wage jobs and realizes, after skipping a few meals and finding that even trailers are out of her budget, that being poor in America is a particularly miserable and largely invisible thing.

Books like this are a conundrum to me. They are hugely readable (Ehrenreich in particular writes the speediest heavy-subject nonfiction I have ever encountered), they become widely-read bestsellers, yet they tackle problems so massive and ingrained that I don’t know what they can really do except make their readers more compassionate. But I guess I say this from the perspective of someone who did not need her mind changed about the working poor in America. Because I guarantee you that the majority of people I know in Texas live in a state of vaguely racist, prosperity-gospel-induced misinformation about basic social facts: for example, the fact that the majority of welfare recipients are white, and the fact that poor people can’t just “work hard,” get rich and start hiring Mexican maids of their very own.

I think everyone should read this book, not because it’s incredibly revelatory (although it might be to some), but because it really hammers home the fact that people working shitty jobs work a lot harder than people working good jobs. Poor should not be equated with lazy. There was a huge Living Wage protest my first year at UVA, when a group of students started fighting really hard to get the UVA staff wage up a dollar or so per hour–enough to provide food for a family and the cheapest of rents–and people went apeshit. Conservative students were truly up in arms at the idea that “the market” wouldn’t take care of this problem, and spouted all this stuff about second jobs and “making it work.” Then they bought a new nail polish or a case of beer, because Living Wage had made for a really stressful discussion in their two hours of class, and took a much-deserved nap.

The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger

This book has been a huge bestseller for the last several years and recently was lamed up into a movie–but if you’ve had exposure to neither, the title gets straight to the point. Henry is a librarian who time-travels uncontrollably (Billy Pilgrim as imagined by Nicholas Sparks) and Clare is his (eventual) wife. Their partnership is wildly unstable but also pre-written in time: Henry, from various points in the future, keeps materializing in a meadow where he meets a tiny redheaded child named Clare, and thus is their weird, earth-shattering love born. It’s good that the timeline is a little complicated, because the cadence of the narrative jumps is just sharp enough to conceal the fact that you’re going to cry at the end, like you did at the end of The Notebook where they were all dying on each other in the old folks’ bed.

So although this book is full of interesting, fairly extreme, gritty things (drugs, bloody fetuses, frostbite, amputations, death, iron cages, giant sculptures of birds, etc), it’s really just best-in-show in the Doomed Love category. But I don’t hate it. I love this book, actually, although I can’t read it anymore because I read it too much in high school. And I’ll freely admit what got me: in the same way that only a really disgusting night can make you truly appreciate sobriety, the jaggedness of the Henry/Clare story recalibrates your appreciation of ordinary between-moments in love. Sometimes I think there’s no greater luxury than that of being able to blink awake in a bed with someone, and love them inconsequentially, purely, like you love the thunderstorm that puts you to sleep–and all the while be anchored by the knowledge that the stakes are low. And Audrey Niffenegger did really write a memorable pairing here; the love between Henry and Clare is so powerful as to be impossible, which is apparently what people want to read about and warp their minds accordingly.

Be warned, some of the writing is pretty ridiculous. Sentences like: “We laugh and laugh, and nothing can ever be sad, no one can be lost, or dead, or far away: right now we are here, and nothing can mar our perfection, or steal the joy of this perfect moment.” YIKES. That sounds exactly like something I would furiously try to etch into a tree trunk if I were tripping on mushrooms.

The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane

I think it’s very, very interesting that they honor Veterans Day a lot more successfully in the UK than we do in America. (Look at me, using “they” and “we” already; so divisive still, these post-colonial minds of ours.) But really, they do it a lot better. They sell very attractive, apparently durable red poppy pins all over the place–in bars, at grocery stores, on the tube–and everyone wears them on their coats, for the month or so leading up to Veterans Day.And seriously, everyone wears them. People on TV wear giant bedazzled versions. The London streets are a veritable field of veteran poppies, and it really brings it home that we need to rethink the American, flimsy, one-day, breast-cancer-ribbon and flag-pin thing. Actually both of those are a big can of worms so let’s not even go there.

Instead, in honor of Veterans Day, let’s talk about the most boring war novel ever, The Red Badge of Courage. Aside from the generally bland-yet-fussy, American-Victorian writing, it’s about a kid who is not brave, so I hate it. However, it has the singular redeeming quality of containing many sentences that, to a tenth-grade classroom, can be hilariously misread as to be all about genitalia. Have you ever played the game with Harry Potter where you substitute “wang” for “wand”–giving yourself the joy of sentences like “Harry shot gold sparks from the tip of his wang,” etc? Well, The Red Badge of Courage is like that except you don’t have to substitute anything. “The color bearer habitually oiled the pole” is the one that I always tried to quote on my essays. And they never stop: “Directly he was working at his weapon like an automatic affair. He suddenly lost concern for himself. He became not a man but a member… He was welded into a common personality which was dominated by a single desire.”

He became not a man, but a member. What an evocative sentence. It evokes Carson McCullers, Spencer Pratt, and the episode of South Park called “The Red Badge of Gayness.” Season 3, not that funny. But probably more enjoyable than this book.

The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

In a pathetic celebration of my unending cold, the total gloom of London this Sunday, the completion of what I hope will be my last standardized test ever, and (as always), my extreme capacity for sloth–I do not plan to get out of bed today. I watched a documentary on the making of The Wizard of Oz, and now I am watching The Wizard of Oz, and naturally, this has turned my attention to everyone’s favorite required reading: a novel that, like the world of Oz, is full of maps, delusion, thwarted dreams, and shiny things. I like The Great Gatsby, obviously. It’s a masterpiece; the writing is perfect. But I have a serious problem with the fact that people read Fitzgerald and process it on the level of “Oh, the Jazz Age, how glamorous, let’s have a theme party” and ignore the fact that all his novels point directly to the futility and creeping desperation that comes from holding Jazz Age priorities: status, “glamour,” luxury. I like parties and cars and mint juleps and the scene where Daisy throws pretty shirts around. I like that stuff as much as anyone. But still–when will girls understand that Daisy was far more sad and desperate than she was pretty or lucky? When will we stop being so easily distracted, like kittens, by sparkly sparkly things? Speaking of sparkly things, who watched last night’s Gossip Girl, because I’m a huge hypocrite!

But really though. Let’s keep a big divide, or at least a strong slash, between fantasy and reality. It really is quite a lot like The Wizard of Oz. (A cross-casting would be amazing: Gatsby as the Wizard, the Tin Man as Nick Carraway, etc). The famous ending: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eludes us then, but that’s no matter–tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. And one fine morning–”

The green light, the Emerald City. Keep on trucking towards shiny fulfillment, like good, beautiful, well-bred and hard-working Americans. But the lesson of The Wizard is that it was all there all along. And the lesson of Gatsby is that there was nothing there all along. There are deep, silly, common-sense truths to be learned by this comparison: if you must be in pursuit of awesome parties (and you must), you need to get courage, a brain, and a heart first. And at the end of both stories, everyone goes home.

Varieties of Disturbance, by Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis is the most honest writer I have ever read. Reading her work is an incredibly affecting experience: it’s like standing in a giant empty airplane hangar, listening to a disembodied William Shatner narrate the plot of an episode of Looney Tunes, and then getting punched violently in the stomach. I’m totally serious. But I won’t fuss it up anymore. This is her story “Insomnia” in its entirety:

My body aches so—It must be this heavy bed pressing up against me.

“Index Entry,” also in its entirety: Christian, I’m not a.

From “Grammar Questions”: Now, during his time of dying, can I say, ‘This is where he lives’?

This is from “Break it Down”:

“The ticket was $600,” he says to himself, “and then after that there was more for the hotel and food and so on, for just ten days. Say $80 a day, no, more like $100 a day. And we made love, say, once a day on the average. That’s $100 a shot. And each time it lasted maybe two or three hours so that would be anywhere from $33 to $50 an hour, which is expensive.” On the other hand, he goes on, he enjoyed his lover’s company every waking hour—roughly 16 hours a day, and “sixteen into a hundred would be $6 an hour, which isn’t too much.”

Lydia Davis is just formally brilliant, and so smart about the things that are the hardest to put into words, in the tradition of Brecht and Beckett more than anything else. I read in an interview in the Believer that she writes like this because she wants to write against the artifice that is inherent in the usual way of describing a scene, which is something a lot more writers would do if only they knew how. Because how do you write about insomnia? You can describe, ploddingly, how you flip the pillow over; you can give yourself a miserably average inner monologue about considering getting a snack, going to the bathroom; you can rue the latte you got after work just because it was red-cup day. Or you can be honest about it, and know that all you remember about insomnia is that sore, despairing, lonely feeling of incoherence. My body aches so—It must be this heavy bed pressing up against me.

And I think a huge part of the power of Davis’s honesty is its odd link to gender. It’s not feminine except for in the cloudiest, most generative Freudian sense–but it is so feminine. She is so incredibly interior, to the point that her narration is necessarily devoid of phallic thought. Does that make sense? And yet (I have to say it) her work penetrates deeper than its masculine equivalent could–by making the ego strangely absent, she gets at the self completely. And, and, her collected works just came out.

Where the Red Fern Grows, by Wilson Rawls

I can’t think of the last time I cried because I was sad. The other day I shed a couple of violent tears when I realized that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are playing London the day I leave, but aside from anger, happiness, and gratitude, in general I am totally devoid of strong emotions. But–I love crying. I love to be sad. I love to pretend my heart is not a hamster running in a cold, metallic wheel. The thing is, crying for me is like sneezing or other unmentionable actions, in that you have to be so overcome that your mind totally vacates. Any level of sophistication or complexity instantly stops my tear ducts, and all that energy just goes rushing back into my head.

That’s why I, like you, loved and will always love Where the Red Fern Grows. It is the simplest, purest, most uncomplicated story ever–innocent and old-fashioned and brilliant when today, puppy stories have degenerated into Jennifer Aniston box office and bulldogs rolling around on YouTube. Wilson Rawls, you make it hurt so good.

Let me remind you! Billy, lovable twelve-year-old country boy, wants dogs more than anything in the world. He saves his money in a baking powder can for two years and can finally buy two coonhounds. He gets made fun of when he goes to town because he’s such a hick, but Billy is a better person than any of us will ever be, and he is humbly and happily in love with his doggies, who he names Dan and Ann after two names he sees carved into a heart on a tree. Treeing coon after coon, Old Dan and Little Ann prove to be the finest hounds in the Ozarks, and when evil bully Rubin tries to kill them, he falls on his own axe. On a crucial championship hunt, the two hounds are lost in a snowstorm, but later found with a layer of ice coating their bodies, still pacing around a tree: they get the coon and win. After that hunt, a mountain lion attacks Billy. The dogs fight it off, saving Billy’s life, and Old Dan is fatally wounded. When he dies, Little Ann dies of sorrow a week later. And a red fern grows on their graves.

From when Billy sees the dogs for the first time: “I knew the pups were mine, all mine, yet I couldn’t move. My heart started aching like a drunk grasshopper. I tried to swallow and couldn’t. My Adam’s apple wouldn’t work. One pup started my way. I held my breath. On he came until I felt a scratchy little foot on mine. The other pup followed. I heard the stationmaster say, ‘They already know you.’ I knelt down and gathered them in my arms. I buried my face between their wiggling bodies and cried.”

As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner

Oh, you’ve never seen this cover before? That would make sense, because it’s actually a concert poster, courtesy of Christian metalcore band “As I Lay Dying.” From that one Wikipedia disambiguation, I think I can say that I’d pay like a hundred dollars not to have to meet them. And that’s saying something because right now I’m in London bleeding money out of my scroll-festooned skull.

I love this book, though. If you haven’t read it, you need to–it will change your idea of what a book can do, how miraculous it is that these artificialities like plot and setting and character and diction can combine seamlessly to make something so piercingly, grindingly direct–and if you are unaware of Southern gothic, don’t be anymore, because really it explains so much about our particular national brand of lunacy and wrongfulness and despair. As I Lay Dying is about a mother dying and her family trying to bring her to a resting place, and her children are, in turn, impaired/psychic/pregnant/delusional, and like, the body is just rotting away and everything is nuts. There are many, many lines that will remain in your head–Dewey Dell, horrifically young and sensual, feeling like “a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth”–Vardaman, the tiny little boy stating flatly, “My mother is a fish”–and Addie, the narrating corpse, saying, “Sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.” Read it.

There was one time last year when my roommate and I were a bit under the influence and I yelled down the stairs, “Tory what are you doing” and she yells back “I’m ready to go out, I’m just reading As I Lay Dying again” and then we both simultaneously burst out laughing for like half an hour because of the thought of “As I Lay Dying Again,” the apocryphal sequel, and then the entire series’ worth of possibilities based on whatever you were doing while you were reading As I Lay Dying–like “Yeah, I picked up As I Lay Dying: At The Bookstore” or “Oh, hold on, I just want to finish As I Lay Dying: Before Gossip Girl Starts.”