16-Page Read: Green Eggs and Ham

May 13, 2008

It’s come to my attention that Sierra no longer wants to read books.

I should take that back. She’s never really wanted to read books. She’s instead sat idly by while I showed her pictures and read through the words, flipping pages for her and explaining the finer points of Where the Wild Things Are far before she could even comprehend what a book was in the first place.

As she’s grown older, she’s taken a liking to the book themselves – not the pages or the words or the pictures, but the solid item of matter that a book is. It’s a piece to chew on, a physical creation to pick up and hold and turn around and – especially – drop on the floor.

Sierra read books with me because she was a captive audience. The books were more for my enjoyment, serving more as a promise of things to come than a cognitive memory.

Now, she’s active. Sitting in Dad’s lap is fun for about two minutes. She likes her books to be fuzzy, soft, chewable and, most of all, quickly read.

This leaves us small chunky books, books with flaps and other movable parts, plush books that double as teething rings and books that simulate animal fur. More Sandra Boynton, less Mo Willems.

I’ve come to accept this. I still try, and she’s becoming more and more tolerant. She enjoys helping me turn the page, and if she’s in a good mood we can often read the book a second time (but never a third – don’t even dare). Of course, there are still some books that are better left for the future.

Green Eggs and Ham, for instance.

Listen, I love Dr. Seuss to death. But his books aren’t exactly the most colorful batch on the bookshelf. They’re often tri-colored with awkward looking characters and even more awkward situations. They’re weird, to say the least, in a way that a two or three-year-old would enjoy, but a nine-month old would ditch in favor of something that squeaks. They don’t translate well to the pre-year crowd, is all I’m saying.

But hey - that’s okay. When I attempt to read it to Sierra (never making it past the page introducing the box and the fox) I really read it for myself, to relive my own childhood, to revel in the words and the rhymes, the lines that I remember from longer ago than any other book I can think of. It was my first love – one that led me to purchase the cartoon retelling of Green Eggs and Ham on VHS from Best Buy knowing full well I’d never watch it and one that led me to choose it as the perfect children’s book to read during Speech class in high school.

And here’s the funny thing: it’s taken me this long to realize that Dr. Seuss’s most famous book is actually an ode to trying new things.

Yeah. I know. Pretty obvious. But I’ve always seen this book from the anti-egg/ham character’s point of view. No, I don’t want those damned sickly green-colored foodstuffs – I want a normal plate of ham and eggs and I would rather they’ve not been in anyone else’s house or next to a filthy fox. But that’s not it at all. What we’re looking at is a classic tale of “just one bite, I guarantee you’ll like it.”

It reminds me of this scene in a Calvin and Hobbes comic, where Calvin will absolutely not eat any tortellini; he absolutely hates it and refuses to even touch it if his mother cooks it. The next image, after a pregnant pause, is Calvin looking up the word tortellini in the dictionary, proving his fear of the unknown – an aversion to anything new, regardless of whether or not he knows what it is.

The moral in Green Eggs and Ham is simple. Try things once. You never know if you’ll like it if you don’t try it. And if it just so happens you absolutely hate it, then at least you’ll know firsthand.

How about that? It’s only taken me 25 years. But I’ve finally found a moral in a Dr. Seuss book.

Sierra would be so proud of her dad. That is, if she’d stop chewing on the corner of the book and listen to me.

Tags: Books, Sierra, 16-Page Read |

Comment

What I’ve Been Reading – April 2008

May 7, 2008

Books Acquired:
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – Betty Smith
Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences – Lawrence Weschler

Books Read:
The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien

Here I am, seven days late, frantically trying to figure out what I’m going to write about. It’s as if, for this month at least, this column has turned into an albatross around my neck – a weight dragging me down, a job I wish I could just pass on.

But that’s not how I work. I have a meticulous personality that expects nothing less than consistency. A What I’ve Been Reading column every month and a chicken in every pot. I can’t fail the fans, right? Wait – these columns are too long to read anyway? They’re just a sort of literary masturbation? A fit of intolerant rhetoric on why the books I read are worth mentioning and torturing you with?

All kidding aside, I only read one book this month: Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.

“Just one?” you might say. “And I thought you considered yourself a reader!”

I do. Leave me alone. It just so happens that sometimes life doesn’t want me to read. That’s fine. I’m okay. Sure, there’s this itching in my mind from being bled to death by the diodes of a television screen, but it’ll pass. At least, that’s what the guys on television say.

It’s NBA Playoff season, and reading has taken a few steps back while I watch somewhere between a quarter to a half of each playoff game. I’ve taken the Celtics on as my pet playoff team (I’m warming to them as a new favorite team altogether, especially considering my penchant for the early to mid-80s Larry Bird) and have been thrilled to watch tons of great players that I often don’t get to see during the regular season.

Of course, on those days when basketball isn’t the focus, I find myself enjoying the outdoors. Or recovering several weeks of sleepless nights thanks to Sierra. Or monitoring election turnouts. Or visiting friends. Hey, I’m a busy person, and where the winter allows me seemingly thousands of hours of available reading time, a warm weather front pushes that idle page flipping to the back of the room, causing it to crowd with blogging and other computer-related activities.

The Things They Carried isn’t a book that’s difficult to get through. It’s not a dense or overcomplicated story by any means. Quite the contrary – it’s a series of short stories that move from half-fiction to faux-autobiography, simple and easy to read, about a subject that we’re all familiar with in one way or another – war, specifically the Vietnam war.

The Things They Carried was a finalist for the Pulitzer, and I can see why. It’s a no-holds-barred look at the war and how it affected those who were a part of it. And while some stories focus on the crazy darkness of Vietnam’s trenches, The Things They Carried takes care to fill us in on the more positive traits of war – the brotherhood, the stories, the fellowship and the relief of find yourself safe, suddenly, without warning.

Don’t get me wrong - the looming shadow of death is always present. But it’s not the driving factor like many novels about Vietnam seem to think.

There’s a voice that filters through the entire book – the voice of a man who feels fortunate to have made it out alive. Tim O’Brien is not shy about admitting that his stories blur the line between what really happened and what makes the story more memorable – not only for dramatic effect, but also for personal salvation; he changes part of the story because he’s not able to take it on himself.

Admittedly, The Things They Carried is fiction that is based on Tim’s own experiences. But the interjections by the author help make it seem more real. You get the feeling that each death really happened – and probably did happen – with the names and places changed to protect the dead and buried. He talks about the difference between real truth and story truth – the idea that what happens in the heat of the moment is skewed, is remembered in a way that no one else can experience, adding a larger-than-life image to a darkly human story.

These exaggerations aren’t lying, O’Brien explains, but are simply a “happening truth.” They happen to you on another plane of being. If you imagine the bullet slowing down, curving around in midair, striking the head of a friend in a fury of laughter; if the sky darkens as if an eclipse, and the trees bend away from the scene of action – these are all true, because they happened to you. They are part of your story. They are not an exaggeration.

What it creates is a fictional representation that better illustrates the war than the pure facts would. It’s a way to, in his words, “the correct way to clear his conscience and tell the story of thousands of soldiers who were forever silenced by society.”

I only read one book this month. It took me forever, even though it was easy. I seriously wasn’t sure I’d even have it finished by the end of the month.

But it was powerful. And I know this for sure – I’ll barely remember any of the playoff games I’ve watched this month. The Things They Carried? That I’ll be able to keep in my mind for years to come.

Tags: What I've Been Reading, Books, Literature |

Comment

WIBR Tournament - Championship Finals

May 6, 2008

We’re back in business. Now let’s crown a champion.

Click here for the entire bracket.

The What I’ve Been Reading Tournament of Books
CHAMPIONSHIP:

East of Eden - John Steinbeck
vs.
Rabbit Angstrom - John Updike

When you dedicate a novel to your two sons, you tend to pour every ounce of your effort into making it the best.

This was the case with John Steinbeck and East of Eden, a novel that served to capture every ounce of his life in the Salinas Valley in California - every piece of land, every life met, every quirk and blade of grass. He takes the temperature of the area and concludes with an incredibly detailed prescription - a look at what caused every hardship, a plan to recreate the joys, a little something to keep the swelling in his heart at bay lest it break at the notion of losing his home altogether. He didn’t just dedicate it to his sons. He dedicated it to the Salinas Valley itself, writing a love letter to those dusty fields, to that backwater town, to the people he grew up with.

It’s masterfully layered, with each generation’s mistakes piling up on the former, creating a solid foundation of failure - and ultimately, hope - that future generations could build upon; Adam Trask cowered in the memory of his brother and father, Cal and Aron felt the unknown shadow of their long lost mother holding them hostage, each character finding refuge in something unhealthy, in pride and greed and a desire to carve out some sort of legacy among his or her peers.

East of Eden is more than a novel about the Salinas Valley. It’s a veiled attempt at reinterpreting The Bible, a raw and gritty look at the darker side of human nature. It has its fair share of joy. But joy has never made for great drama, and the intertwining lives in East of Eden are filled with a higher level of drama, like the difference between the tension in The Godfather, Part II versus a simple episode of Law and Order.

If Steinbeck ever set out to write the Great American Novel, this was it. In talking about East of Eden, Steinbeck said, “It has everything in it I have been able to learn about my craft or profession in all these years. I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this.”

I say all of this now because I haven’t really had much of a chance to explain my love for East of Eden yet. East of Eden has blown out every book it has faced, leaving me with no need to extrapolate a reasoning from the cause of the destruction. Rabbit Angstrom, on the other hand, has been analyzed and justified for three straight rounds. I’ve had to reason with myself as to why it should make it to the Finals, why it should beat The Road and how I could possibly have taken it over Gilead back in the first match-up.

I took a break in the tournament because I felt the Rabbit Angstrom steam-train was about ready to derail, taking the entire tournament with it and causing every decision to be seen with an air of mockery. With the exception of The Road, these two books are the best I’ve read since writing this column, and East of Eden deserved to put its lackadaisical run to the finals behind it - to curb the momentum of Rabbit Angstrom and see how things match up with a clear head and a logical mind.

A week ago, Rabbit Angstrom would have won.

It deserves it. For it’s importance alone. I’ve thrown around terms like “time capsule” and “voice of the generation,” and they’re all true. Rabbit Angstrom is a chronicle of the turn of each decade since 1960. It’s an amazing case study in the idea of Everyman, a man who lives life with a restless eye turned toward the past, who eats poorly and develops heart disease and experiences the rise and fall of success and divorce and children and death and honor and a confused sense of purpose.

But a week later, with both books battering around my head, with the plots reviewed and the emotions freshened, I can’t look past the fact that East of Eden isn’t just the best book I’ve read in the past three years. The fact is, it could be the best book I’ve ever read. Period. End. That’s it. That’s all she wrote, kids. Stick a knife in everything else, etc.

East of Eden’s path to the Final Four seemed predestined, with a random drawing moving the book into an easy bracket, its closest competitors sitting together in the same quadrant, ready to knock each other off. East of Eden was this year’s Celtics, the best book, but so far ahead that you start to forget about it, start making reasons for its demise and stop believing that it was anything special in the first place.

But it is. Oh, man. It is. The tournament was filled with close match-ups. But when we get down to the end, there was probably only one book that ever had a chance to begin with.

The Winner and WIBR Tournament of Books Champion…
East of Eden – John Steinbeck

Tags: What I've Been Reading, Books, Literature |

4 Comments

WIBR Tournament – The Final Four

May 1, 2008

This, my friends, is what it all comes down to. Four books, each having made it through three tough match-ups, each representing its respective bracket.

We’ve got a quad-logy, a graphic novel, an Oprah Book Club selection and a modern look at humor. We’ve got numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize winner and a Nobel Price recipient.

We’ve got subjects ranging from wild and rangy office life to three generations of fuck-ups (actually, that one happens twice.) We’ve got exposes on the nation in the guise of Everyman and we’ve got a love letter to a former home.

Ware. Steinbeck. Updike. Ferris. Two are legends, two are modern stars.

Only two will move on.

Click here for the entire bracket.

The What I’ve Been Reading Tournament of Books
THE FINAL FOUR:

Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth - Chris Ware
vs.
East of Eden - John Steinbeck

Both Jimmy Corrigan and East of Eden deal with multiple generations. Each corresponding generation has a difficulty learning from the mistakes of its former. Flubs resonate throughout the family, creating a butterfly effect that slaps each family member in the face, one by one, slowly and methodically, like the wings of that butterfly against the wind.

Ware takes Jimmy Corrigan and makes him real. Jimmy is an emotional mess, a bundle of nerves wrapped up, with crucial sections exposed to the world. Life pokes at his ribs, forcing him to choke back restrained tears. He struggles to understand what has happened – how he’s managed to go so wrong, how he’s become so misunderstood.

It’s this struggle that hit me so hard. I’ve never genuinely felt so sorry for someone as much as I have for Jimmy Corrigan. He’s a character that still affects me today, leaves me searching for a way to console him, as if he was a neighbor boy mourning the loss of his mother.

Chris Ware doesn’t just take a novel approach to drawing – he takes a writer’s approach to writing, fleshing out the story through the details, relying not just on his images but on his story, the plausibility and emotion of the words used. The pared back style helps the reader focus on the story, not on beautiful drawing.

Of course, East of Eden is what it is – Steinbeck’s greatest novel, according to some. The Grapes of Wrath was Important. But East of Eden? It’s Good. Simply Good. There was no need to go any deeper, to bring out a political message or rely on historical accuracy – it was just a solid, beautiful story that spanned three generations of Trasks.

It’s still a surprise to me that Jimmy Corrigan made it this far. But you can’t blame me for making the obvious choice.

The Winner: East of Eden – John Steinbeck

Rabbit Angstrom - John Updike
vs.
Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris

Then We Came to the End is a clever and hilariously funny book.

But let’s be frank, here. I’ve already moved Rabbit Angstrom through Gilead, through Travels with Charley and through The Road. I’ve had to go to long lengths as to why I chose the book three straight times. It didn’t get the simple path that East of Eden got – it had to fight its way through the Bracket from Hell.

Then We Came to the End? It beat Atonement, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Black Swan Green. Not a cakewalk by any means. But certainly not two Pulitzers and a Nobel.

When it comes down to this, Ferris is the tournament’s Davidson – a great book that few thought had a chance. And against a book like Rabbit Angstrom? Yeah – it doesn’t.

Thanks, Ferris. It’s been a great run.

The Winner: Rabbit Angstrom – John Updike

Tags: What I've Been Reading, Books, Literature |

Comment

Which book would you save?

May 1, 2008

Today is the final day of the Sioux Falls Big Read.

This year, we celebrated Fahrenheit 451. We’ve promoted book discussions all month long. And tonight, we’ll be putting on a mixer at the Museum of Visual Materials downtown, featuring writing contest winners, The Smoke and Mirrors Band and various local personalities discussing a question often brought up when F451 is mentioned.

If all of the books were being burned, and you could risk your life to save one book…which one would you save?

Do you save an important book – one that has changed the lives of millions of readers? Do you save Beowulf – the English language’s first recorded words – or Plato’s Republic or The Bible? Do you save The Diary of Anne Frank or Fahrenheit 451 itself?

Or do you save your favorite book? Do you stand aside, allowing the rest of the risk takers to worry about the Great Canon of Literature while you grab the book that’s meant the most to you and you alone.

This will come as no surprise: I’m going to lay claim to Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath – for both reasons, really. It’s an Important Book. And, it’s one of my favorites. I’ve always liked East of Eden more, and would probably consider The Pearl and Travels with Charley as well, but The Grapes of Wrath is just more important to literature as a whole.

What about you?

Which book would you save?

Leave your answer in the comments – or post it on your own blog. Let’s send The Big Read out in style.

Tags: Books, Literature |