The Very Hungry Caterpillar, by Eric Carle

Do you hear that? Do you? That crunch, that rattling, those explosions–kind of sounds like a thousand books in 8 suitcases being transported from Houston to New York to Moscow to Bishkek to my ghetto-ass village and blowing my children’s minds! In no small part thanks to you guys, the Village Library Project is funded, the hard work completed, and the fun has begun.

 I’m waiting to open it until our bookshelves are built, and my inner librarian will not be content until I have a Kyrgie Decimal System up and running in this bitch, but rest assured there will be a fancy ribbon-cutting ceremony and a communal reading of The Giving Tree and fifty kids screaming “THANKYOUVARYMACH” in a video made for your viewing pleasure. It’s all in the works. However, my kids have been anxious for the unveiling, and so today I had my very first Reading Club, featuring, as our first book, the beloved Eric Carle tome The Very Hungry Caterpillar. They fell in love instantly, a bunch of teenagers experiencing the awe of a four-year-old reading this book for the first time.

 Remember the story? It’s pretty simple. The caterpillar is born in the moonlight, is super hungry, eats through a symphony of beautifully painted foodstuffs. On Saturday he eats a piece of chocolate cake (which my students obviously pronounced “chocolate cock”), one ice-cream cone, one pickle, one slice of Swiss cheese, salami, a lollipop, cherry pie, a sausage, a cupcake, and a slice of watermelon. Then he has a stomachache, eats a green leaf to flush all that shit out, goes into a cocoon, and emerges as a butterfly.

 Reading this I noticed that the Very Hungry Caterpillar probably embodies my life’s ethos better than any other “literary character.” Glut yourself to death and then go into an ascetic cocoon assuming that after you emerge something positive will have happened. Really, if you broaden the analogy farther than my six-year-running personal routine of bourbon overdoses leading to volunteer trips, the Very Hungry Caterpillar may be a great universal advocate for the hackneyed but lovely work-hard-play-hard way of life. Except I suppose he wasn’t so much working as sleeping in a cocoon, and also I guess he played rather than worked first, so maybe the message I really should be seeing here is “Eat so much that you fall asleep for two weeks and when you wake up you’ll be pretty.”

The Witches, by Roald Dahl

So, in choosing which books to bring for the library, I have optimistically included several classics of the 4th-7th grade reading level: lots of Roald Dahl, Lois Lowry, E.L. Konigsberg, and Louis Sachar. I intended to distribute them among English teachers so that they can sharpen their language skills. However, this word-for-word transcript of a conversation from a winter teaching conference should show you why this intention is, to put it mildly, flawed. Keep in mind that teachers who work with Peace Corps volunteers are inherently more motivated than the rest. To set the scene, it’s a session on feedback, with me, my friends Ian and Lola, and 3 Kyrgyz teachers (one of whom, no joke, is named DILDOCON) in a small group. The question on the board: “Were the goal of the session achieved?”

Ian: I think it were.
Lola: So the goal was to give direct feedback and encourage it on a regular basis by creating a comfortable forum between each counterpart-volunteer pair.
Me: (to Kyrgyz teachers) What do you think? Was the goal achieved?
Teacher 1: Much time.
Teacher 2: Higher education, yes?
Me: Yes. What?
Everyone: (Silence).
Teacher 3: Challenges.
Teachers 1 and 2: (Nodding).
Me: What… were… the… goals… of… the… session?
Teachers: (Nodding).
Lola: I think we’re done here.

 So whatever. Eventually some driven, self-studying teacher like my counterpart will read The Witches and renew her love for the English language. Until then, I have tons of awesome shit to reread.

 The Witches is not my favorite Roald Dahl book. However, I like that it gives a little cultural background to Dahl’s ever-present macabre tone–his parents were Norwegian, and aside from the fact that Scandinavian folklore is incredibly chilling and violent, “the Norwegians know all about witches, for Norway, with its black forests and icy mountains, is where the first witches came from.” The story involves a boy being turned into a mouse by a hotel convention of child-killing witches and then him plotting revenge with his cigar-smoking grandma (the quintessential Roald Dahl sentence of “‘What an idea!’ she cried. ‘It’s fantastic! It’s tremendous! You’re a genius, my darling!’” appears unsatisfyingly late in the book, a little more than 2/3 through). Eventually they destroy the witches of England and plot to destroy the witches of the world.

 I think my post-America emotions were making me extremely sappy during this reread, but still, the part of the book I liked best was at the very end. “My darling,” the grandma says, “are you sure you don’t mind being a mouse for the rest of your life?”

 ”‘I don’t mind at all,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like as long as somebody loves you.’”

Here We Aren’t, So Quickly, by Jonathan Safran Foer

From “Here We Aren’t, So Quickly,” by Jonathan Safran Foer, from the 20 Under 40 issue of The New Yorker that I just now brought back from home. It’s a short story, not a book, but just… read this. It begins:

“I was not good at drawing faces. I was just joking most of the time. I was not decisive in changing rooms or anywhere. I was so late because I was looking for flowers. I was just going through a tunnel whenever my mother called. I was not able to make toast without the radio. I was not able to tell if compliments were backhanded. I was not as tired as I said.”

From halfway through, when you find out about the baby: “They encouraged us to buy insurance. We had sex to have orgasms. You loved re-upholstering… He could stand himself up, but not get himself down.”

From the end: “I changed and changed and changed, and with more time I will change more… We reached the middle so quickly. After everything it’s like nothing. I have always never been here. What a shame it wasn’t easy. What a waste of what? What a joke. But come. No explaining or mending. Be beside me somewhere: on the split stools of this bar, by the edge of this cliff, in the seats of this borrowed car, at the prow of this ship, on the all-forgiving cushions of this threadbare sofa in this one-story copper-crying fixer-upper whose windows we once squinted through for hours before coming to our senses: ‘What would we even do with such a house?’”

Jesus, this short story is good. All the stories in this issue are knockouts but I think it’s obvious from the first bit that this one is unusual: a wry, exceedingly sad lamentation told in this strict but perfectly fitted formula. I do think something about it is incredibly derivative, though; the rhythm of it sounds like a poem that would not be as good as the story, and there are almost cheesy parts, like this–“We went to Tobey Pond every year until we didn’t”–and the sort of emo quality of “Be beside me somewhere” through the image of “the prow of this ship” is as indulgent as it is affecting. But still, I loved it. I spent most of this story feeling like someone was stabbing me, so it has to be art–isn’t that how it works?

Charlotte’s Web, by E.B. White

There are frequent periods when I feel extremely embarrassed about the entire idea of reviewing books, because–there is no other way to put it–it’s just such a bullshitty thing to do. Just reading this sentence on Wikipedia in the Charlotte’s Web entry made me angry: “Seth Lerer, in his book Children’s Literature, finds that Charlotte represents female authorship and creativity, and compares her to other female characters in children’s literature such as Jo March in Little Women and Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden.” Right. And it doesn’t stop. I laughed out loud reading this next sentence: “Nancy Larrick brings to attention the ‘startling note of realism’ in the opening line, ‘Where’s Papa going with that Ax?’”

 Yes, and it’s a secondary level of ridiculous that I’m writing on a blog about other critics and criticizing them for their over-criticism. But I mean, why ruin Charlotte’s Web by analyzing it like you’re in a freshman literature seminar called “On Bullshit”? The book takes place in a barnyard. Charlotte is a spider. Her “female authorship” consists of weaving messages in her web that the rat finds in the dump on ad copy for detergent (“With new radiant action!”). If there’s anything that can be left out of the endlessly reflexive and paranoid critical world, this book should qualify.

 The Web is good just for its own sake, simple and pure, with an illogical and off-kilter sweetness that never gets cloying. Sure, it’s way more sophisticated than I remembered (I just reread it–thanks, library donors) and Wilbur the pig, like all the characters, is delightfully human (“One day just like another,” he groaned)–but really, who cares? I can hear some douchebag voice in my head saying, “Charlotte’s Web is a treatise on the power of words as well as a defense of the sociological predetermination of contemporary American gender relations” and it would be legitimately defensible in the aforesaid freshman seminar, but it would most importantly be a massive waste of time in comparison to just reading the book like a child would… just enjoying it.