How I Read (Now)

Over the past year, I've noticed a pretty significant change in how I read. It's not just in the books I choose to read (although I have been choosing slightly differently, it's true) but in the way I read them. Instead of latching onto characters who entertain, I've found myself latching on to characters to emulate. The scenes that I've found most moving are the scenes when a character is facing a situation. A decision. Facts about themselves or others they can no longer ignore. It's never that the character is a role model (or, at least, very rarely is the character a role model), but rather that there are elements of the character I aspire to: flexibility, fortitude, empathy.

Maybe they are role models. No one has ever thought they'd like to replicate every single trait someone else possesses, right?

I started thinking about this after finishing The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which is unquestionably this year's Cloud Atlas, albeit without a movie or a soundtrack to buoy the obsession along. This is a book I put off reading for years, because I had heard it was sad, and because I was at a low ebb in my interest in reading "immigrant stories" and blah blah blah.

I'm glad I waited. Waiting meant that I didn't read this book as a high school student, when I probably would have focused exclusively on Sammy's story, or as a college student, when I would have felt the need to keep a running tally of every cameo by a historical figure. Instead, here I am, in this new phase of my reading life, feeling as if I too could scale the Empire State Building or brave Antarctica, just because these characters did and because in them, in pockets, I could see a little of myself and I would most like to be.

This isn't an entirely new concept. When I moved to Chicago I brought books featuring Dido Twite, Mary Ann Singleton, and George Smiley, thinking these were the characters who would stand me in good stead in my new life. I was right, even though I didn't crack the spine and re-read any of these books until I had already been here for two years and the roughest days were behind me. There were actually days when I asked myself what they would do. Dido walked me through rough neighborhoods. Mary Ann got me out of the house on weeknights. George kept me questioning the status quo.

More frequently, I asked myself what my father would do. But most of the time that was in reference to getting the best parking spot.

1178th Most Happy

I'm back!

In general, as is the case today, it's a good sign when I don't blog for weeks on end. It means I'm writing something else. Fortunately, it doesn't follow that because I'm back I'm no longer writing that other thing. On the contrary.

I was starting to feel guilty, though, neglecting My Kind of Fool for so long. And, of course,  I had this to share with you:

Has anything more accurate ever been written? How did they know I was 66-100 years old?!

In other news, I love my new apartment. I can sleep. I can no longer identify every pair of shoes my neighbors own. I felt so grown up and footloose that I bought a TV. Sure, the internet is not as reliable as it once was, but I can live with that. It gives me more time to read and, more importantly, write.

Moving

 Mom came to visit me over the Mother's Day weekend, and it was a great visit, one of the best of all time. (I would even go as far as to say it surpassed Dad Visits and We Go to a Wedding, Part One and tied Subcontinent and Sir U von L Honorary St. Patty's Day and Architecture Boat Tour Extravaganza.) But it was a long time ago now and I've had a couple more visitors since then. Next weekend, I'll have my last visitor to this apartment. Appropriately, it's going to be CC, college roommate extraordinaire.

Last visitor to this apartment, you say? Why yes. On August 1st, I'm moving on to bigger and better things in the form of a one bedroom a stone's throw from here. In one of the best coincidences so far, it will be on the same street as where my aunt lived when she first lived in Chicago, two blocks down.

This is the seventh summer in a row that I've moved. The first five times (moving to college, and then moving back and forth between home and new dorm rooms) were carried out under my own steam and I got so good at it that by the end I was turning down help and packing up my car with scientific precision as my parents (absent for the three previous departures) looking on, impressed, and held my diploma.

Last summer, I wasn't moving myself, and it was the trickiest move of all. In 108 degree heat, I helped my parents move into their new house in Lawrence, Kansas. It was the hardest move, but it was also the best, because the payoff was the greatest. When we hung the corn painting above their fireplace and it instantly fit, I could tell they'd found a great new home.

So last summer I didn't actually move myself. There was no way I was moving apartments in the same month as I was helping my parents move houses. Nonetheless, I was getting sicker and sicker of living in a studio (especially with visitors, no matter how beloved, and especially in winter).

The move this summer is going to be hectic. (It falls at the end of our yearly trip to Colorado.) It's going to be hot. (See: August 1st. Also it's a third floor walk-up.) But, it's going to be worth it.

"Of course it's all trash..."

Sometimes my friends have more faith in me than I have in myself. Several times since he moved to Chicago, R has introduced me to friends of his as a writer. As "one hell of a writer." As "an amazing playwright." Just as frequently, K has reminded me of stories I wrote in creative writing in high school, quoting them word for word. (I had to dredge up the document to fact-check her and, sure enough, she was right.)

This morning, I was reading Christopher and His Kind by Christopher Isherwood (I finished it this afternoon, under a flowering tree), and came across the following excerpt of a letter from his friend Edward Upward:

Olive showed me your letter in which you said something about being silently judged. Of course it's all trash, because--though Marx may not have said it--each of us helps the revolution best by using his own weapons. And your best weapon is obviously writing. It's my misfortune that I have to fight as a fifth-rate teacher.

Those of us who have friends like R and K, and Edward Upward, are the lucky ones. These are the friends who don't believe our nonsense when we say we're headed in a different direction. They insist on continuing to see us as our best selves. It's not that they're inflexible in their conception of our identity, rather they see through all our bluster to the core of what makes us us.

During the Summer of Angst and the following years, I asked myself, "If I'm not a writer, and I've spent my entire life since fifth grade thinking of myself as a writer, then who am I?" I never did come up with a satisfactory answer. Thank goodness. And thank goodness I'm surrounded by people who love me and know better.

Why Roger Ebert Was My Hero (and other facts)

I've been filling out the Proust Questionnaire pretty much yearly since early in my college career. I never consult previous years' responses while I fill it out, although I do compare answers afterward. Each year, for the years that I've done it, I've listed Roger Ebert as one of my heroes. 
 

"The story can either be told in a few sentences, or not told at all."

Because he was kind.

I never met the guy, despite having lived in one of his towns for all but 4 ½ years of my life. I never made it to Ebertfest. (Where was I last year and why didn’t I go?) However, I believe that an unkind man would be unable to capture the tone Ebert did from time to time in his reviews and blog entries. He was a secular humanist. He had wide-ranging sympathies. He had made his mistakes and learned from them. He appeared not to have any regrets.

“Both Curtis and Lemmon are practicing cruel deceptions--Curtis has Monroe thinking she's met a millionaire, and Brown thinks Lemmon is a woman--but the film dances free before anyone gets hurt. Both Monroe and Brown learn the truth and don't care, and after Lemmon reveals he's a man, Brown delivers the best curtain line in the movies. If you've seen the movie, you know what it is, and if you haven't, you deserve to hear it for the first time from him.”

Because he was from Urbana and he wasn’t afraid to love it.

Everyone in Chicago, from the Tribune (ha!) to the Sun-Times and all the rest, ran to present Ebert as the ultimate post-Studs Terkel Chicagoan. That may be true, but he did Champaign-Urbana proud too. He was intelligent, unpretentious, down to earth, self-deprecating, and funny. Again and again in his writing (even in his reviewing), he held up moments from his childhood in Urbana as significant. He didn’t write it off as “downstate,” reduce it to a college town, or fixate on the corn and soybeans. He lived in Chicago and, yes, he was a Chicagoan, but Champaign-Urbana got the film festival, because where else would it be? Home is home.

"On the news last week, there was the story of a child killed by stray gunfire. He was in the middle of a basketball game in a city park. One of his teammates told the camera: "It's a shame he never had the experience of life." There are fuzzy shots of a surveillance camera showing a white car with a sunroof speeding from the site. Inside were probably young men empowered by firearms and an automobile to shoot stupidly into a park and make a pathetic gang gesture. The Interrupters were once such young men — and women. They once were blind, but now they see. […] When I was a child, I rode my bike home from school down a daily network of neighborhood streets. On one street, some kids were sitting on a porch. They pulled me off my bike, punched me and told me it was "their" street. They were white like me. They had no idea what school I went to. By protecting "their" street, they were gaining esteem. I have no doubt they felt good afterward."

Because he was serene in the face of illness.

What could have been the end of his career marked a new period of intense prolificacy and, I think, beautiful writing. He grappled with big questions with humor and perspective. He got frustrated. He was human. He made accommodations. He kept doing his job.

“The reason that O'Brian's readers are so faithful (I am one) is because this friendship provides him with a way to voice and consider the unnatural life of a man at sea: By talking with each other, the two men talk to us about the contest between man's need to dominate, and his desire to reflect.”

Because he could write.

This is the kind of writer I want to be: insightful, approachable, populist. He was a smart man, and it showed. He was funny.

“As a director he has never been willing to settle for plot; he is much more interested in character and situation, and likes to assemble unusual people in peculiar situations and stir the pot.”

Because he had great taste in movies.

And I don’t just mean fine taste. I mean he liked what he liked unapologetically, and 90% of the time I agreed with him. He was just as likely to give an art-house film four stars as a blockbuster. He cared about things like acting, direction, script, and cinematography, and whether it came with millions of dollars of visual effects or whether it was subtitled or whether it was for children didn’t matter. He disliked a lot of movies, but he only hated the ones that really deserved it.

“By the end of the movie, you find yourself reacting to the weddings, and the funeral, almost as you do at real events involving people you didn't know very well, but liked, and wanted to know better.”

"And to do that, you have to let yourself get hooked."

Beginning in April 2007, I started keeping a list of all the books I'd read the previous year. You can find links to previous years at the bottom of this entry. Without further ado, welcome to 2012-2013, the Year of David Mitchell (or: 26 Books, 17 Authors).

Books
1) Affinity by Sarah Waters
2) The Inner Voice of Love by Henri J.M. Nouwen
3) Lord John and the Scottish Prisoner by Diana Gabaldon
4) Following Christopher Creed by Carol Plum-Ucci
5) The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett*
6) Queens' Play by Dorothy Dunnett*
7) Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain
8) The Disorderly Knights by Dorothy Dunnett*
9) Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
10) The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
11) Ghostwritten by David Mitchell
12) Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
13) People by Alan Bennett
14) A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle*
15) A Wind in the Door by Madeleine L'Engle*
16) A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L'Engle*
17) Many Waters by Madeleine L'Engle*
18) number9dream by David Mitchell
19) Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties by Christopher Isherwood
20) Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan
21) Tell the Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt
22) We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
23) Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian by Avi Steinberg
24) Gettysburg: The Graphic Novel by C.M. Butzer
25) Down There on a Visit by Christopher Isherwood
26) A Dublin Carol by Conor McPherson

*re-reads

I have continued the trend of reading fewer and fewer books since graduating from college. Although only being able to list 26 books here depresses me, there is cause for hope! So far, I am only 3 books behind my 50-book challenge for 2013, and several of these were read as a direct result of the pressure to keep up with that challenge.

It may well be that I chose my books more carefully this year. It was, after all, a year of author binges and re-reads. Looking over this list now, there are only four I would not re-read, given the chance, and none that inspired the kind of dislike I've felt for books on the list in the past. It was also, my mother would urge me to point out, a good year for female authors.

Top Five of the Year, in descending order
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Down There on a Visit by Christopher Isherwood
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian by Avi Steinberg
Tell the Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt

Past years
2011-2012
2010-2011
2009-2010
2008-2009
2007-2008

A Purpose Overhaul

Ultimately, I needed to be told. That's what I learned about myself two weeks ago today while sitting opposite my dad in Duke of Perth. He told me that if I wanted to go to grad school I should go to grad school, in whatever field I wanted, impractical or not, and that if I came out the other end without prospects, the second round would be on me. I almost started crying all over my egg-topped burger, because this was exactly what I'd needed to hear.

And it made me realize: I've been spending my time in Chicago trying to partially undo the last twelve years of my life. How stupid could I be? Some of the things I was trying to shut down were the things I liked most about myself: Curiosity for curiosity's sake. Love of travel. Belief in the humanities and their relevance. A strong belief in the power of books.

Empathy, I was keeping, obviously. Ditto observation skills, a sense of humor, and a fondness for other people's stories. The writing, at least, was coming back (thanks to an intensely absorbing Letter Game with K). For the rest, it's as if those well-loved and expertly deployed self-analysis skills I've been gradually developing were worthless. I really couldn't believe I'd allowed myself to fool myself so thoroughly into believing this was the way I should be.

It's not that the past two (four, if I'm honest) years get to just vanish and I get to go back to my English PhD plans. Those, I think, are gone for good. It's that I am no longer actively (if unwittingly) engaged in self-sabotage, and that feels good.

And this whole business has taught me something else, too. I may feel independent, and I may have always felt that way, in this realm. I may have struggled in my early college days to reconcile my roommates' need to appease their parents with my (limited, culturally biased) view of adulthood and how adults make choices. I may have a strong sense of self. All of that may be true; I will still need approval.

So let it be known: the summer of 2014 will be the summer before grad school. I've written it down now, so here we go.