Great Expectations

I hope everyone has a book that they love to re-read. My son and I have begun to explore the world of Narnia together and even though he likes it, it is so much more mesmerizing for me than it is for him. I distinctly remember the first time I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The feeling I had as I crested the final pages: that I was so sad this story was over. It was the beginning of a life-long love affair with reading.

I read Great Expectations every year in the late fall--a time permeated by cold and drizzle, just as I imagine it must feel on those moors in England when Pip first encounters that blasted convict. Though, to be fair, it does seem that the cold and drizzle permeate most of Pip's days, regardless of his age and socio-economic status. You know what's even better than re-reading a book you love? Re-reading it along with people who are reading it for the first time. Just as I love my son trying to figure out what Mr. Tumnus looks like, or why he is wearing pants and no shirt, I love it when my students declare their loyalty to Pip despite the fact that he continually makes bad decisions. Now, I realize not everyone has the opportunity to experience this joy as frequently as I do, it being a somewhat vital aspect of my job, but it is a lovely thing.

As we speak, my AP Lit students are taking their semester final exam. We have spent the past five months reading novels, plays, poems, essays, short stories and more. We have analyzed and read closely and made inferences and deciphered theme and talked about tone and become masters at describing an author's diction. I'm so proud of them. They are ready for this test--one that is by no means "a breeze". Unlike Pip, their expectations are based on hard work and determination; they have thoughtfully considered where to place their goals and continually measure to see whether they are making progress. We love Pip because we know he has the potential to want the right things; we can see in him a fallibility that is in us all and we long for him to right his course, to justify our 490-page journey through the rain and mud and redeem himself. Isn't that what we are all doing anyway? Pushing through the muck and mire on a metaphorical search for our own daily redemption? Revising our expectations as we go?

While Pip's expectations come from an outside (and secret) source, my students' expectations come from within. Sure, I may have to remind them what they are from time to time, but true growth only happens when expectations are internalized. And we are growing like weeds over here.

Life is a Story

It's been some time since I've blogged about my many and varied literary adventures. Be sure that I haven't stopped reading--it's just that I've been reading so much in an effort to keep up with these people that I've lost the will to live. I mean write. However, as a post-test treat, we've been reading Life of Pi and the intentionally ambiguous ending(s) got us thinking about (and, in the case of my AP students, writing a 5-page paper about) 'what makes a good story?'

I absolutely love Life of Pi. And it didn't hurt my ego one bit to be validated by comments from my students such as "This is my new favorite book!" and "I could not stop reading," and "I'm so frustrated with the ending!@#!" After much deliberation, the general consensus is that this is a 'good story'.

I think a good story has a number of functions--all of which involve action on the part of the reader. The list (as I see it):

#1 A good story causes you to question your beliefs. One of Pi's most endearing characteristics is that he never stops questioning the world around him. Why do I think this? How do I know this? Why would I do that? And the best part about it is that his beliefs are solidified as a result of his questioning. He doesn't question in an effort to disprove his beliefs, he does so to strengthen them. Can any of us really accept holding onto a belief that can't stand up to our own internal questioning? Isn't that just...brainwashing? David Ebershoff's historical novel The 19th Wife (which I just read for my book club) is the fascinating tale of Ann Eliza Young, Brigham Young's 19th wife, and her internal and external struggles with polygamy. She is eventually unable to reconcile her belief in Joseph Smith's vision to the crude and oppressive practice of plural wifery and escapes Utah to help chart the path towards legal justification for the abolishment of this type of slavery in America. As I read, though, I was forced to confront my own faith and beliefs in comparison to what I consider to be the illogical and manipulative tactics of Mormonism. Like Pi, my own questioning functioned to further strengthen that which I hold to be true.

#2 A good story transplants you in another world. It is a well-known fact that I love Harry Potter. I'm not afraid to admit it and I was recently "roasted" concerning this apparent obsession of mine in an all-school assembly. Which only serves to make me happy and not embarrassed. Why is HP the shelf that literary genius will be reaching for and not quite touching for the foreseeable future? It is simple. Because Rowling created a world no one can resist. That doesn't mean that there aren't other amazingly well-written and life-changing tomes being published and cherished on a regular basis. It doesn't mean that there aren't thousands or even millions of pages of prose dedicated to creating new worlds in our minds. But Harry Potter is literally magical. And Rowling makes her readers long for it to be real. She pulls the Hogwarts Express right up to your door and hollers at you to get on before it's too late. And, of course, you do.

#3 A good story engages you in problem solving. Have you read the Dragon Tattoo books? I'm about half-way through the third book and despite the cacophony of similar looking Swedish names they can really draw you into the action. Another recent read of mine, Karen Russell's Swamplandia!, is a tale so simultaneously tall and probable that I found myself teetering on the fence deciding if it was fantasy or not. It's the story of Ava Bigtree, the youngest in a familial line of lady alligator wrestlers and her journey to save her sister from a bad marriage to a ghost. All the while trying to save the family theme park. Every problem lays out an array of possible solutions--some concrete and others vague--begging the reader to help in deciphering the clues and putting the mystery to rest.

My job is many things--most of which I love--and I will tell you honestly that nary a day goes by that I do not come home with a good story.

Franken-Don

It was a dark and stormy season for Don Draper. And then he lived happily ever after.

The season finale of 'Mad Men' this year just so happened to coincide with my AP classes reading Frankenstein. All that discussion about the moral implications of the human decision to create another being got me thinking about my favorite hard-working ad-man and pieced-together ticking time bomb Don Draper. Seems Don could learn a lesson from good old Vic Frankenstein about what happens when one plays God.

Mary Shelley's 1818 novel was intended to be a science-fiction thrill ride about a mad scientist who creates a super-human from a conglomeration of dead body parts. Read now, in an age of scientific record breaking, the discussion centers more around the consequences of the act as opposed to the probability of the action. This being said, most would agree that Victor was wrong to think he could mess with humanity and not suffer because of it. We might say the same for Don.

Don is, in his own way, a combination of both creature and creator. As the creator he is able to reinvent himself time and again, trouble-shooting possible blemishes of his previous doppelganger. But when Anna died we saw the creature come out--lonely and isolated without a soul in the world who really, truly knows him. She was his anchor--just knowing she was in the world, embracing Dick Whitman and all his mortality, was enough to keep him perpetually treading water, head bobbing at the surface. But then she dies and he starts to sink. Or maybe swim. Self reliant for possibly the first time, Don begins to reinvent himself again. Cutting out the alcohol and loose women, he crawls toward redemption in the eyes of the viewer. Is Faye the new Anna!?

*

Alas, no. The creator rises again. A fresh start with a new young thing is all this creature needs to get it right this time.

*

Somehow I think Don's conscience will eventually wear out and we will be forced watch him chase his mangled and vengeful self across the Arctic tundra.

Cathy + Heathcliff Forever

Charlotte Bronte wrote: "Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I don't know. I scarcely think it is."

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If you're not familiar with Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, allow me to sum it up for you:

1. Guy and girl are in love.

2. Guy is bad for girl due to his general monsterness.

3. Guy protects girl from himself by being mean to her and running away.

4. Girl goes with other guy out of desperation and isolation.

5. She is miserable. Spends lots of time in the rain contracting weather-induced diseases.

6. First guy comes back for her and she sees that his skin is sparkly in the sunlight.

7. He is too late.

8. She dies of a weather/child induced illness.

9. He vows to make everyone's life miserable for like, forever.

10. Done and done.

*

Let me tell you, those Brontes must have been a riot to live with. Unrequited love, dreams of death, crazy people abounding. No wonder it is Bella and Edward's favorite book...

The Flight of Summer

We got home from vacation late last night and when I woke up this morning, School was waiting for me. Kind of like when my almost-4-year-old comes in in the middle of the night and stands as close as possible, silently waiting for me to wake up and soil myself. Her good morning message: "I know you and Summer have had a nice fling, but let's be honest, it's not serious and we are getting back together." She's a bossy little thing, but I love her. This post is dedicated to my sweet Summer, who treated me like a princess this year.

It was a great summer for reading and I feel satisfied reflecting on the literary places I've been over the past two months. The quick and dirty shortlist:

Homer and Langley by E.L. Doctorow

In March of 1947, emergency crews responded to a report of a strong odor coming from a brownstone on 5th Avenue and, upon arrival, were met with a wall of junk. Crews were forced to pull things out onto the sidewalk in order to get into the house. After breaking into an upstairs window and crawling over debris for two hours, one police officer discovered the body of the elderly Homer Collyer. His brother Langley was nowhere to be found. Police eventually removed 84 tons of rubbish and debris from the house, only to find, almost a month later, the body of Langley Collyer who had apparently been crawling through a tunnel to bring food to his blind and paralyzed brother when one of his contraptions fell on top of him and killed him. Homer is said to have died of starvation days later. This novel is E.L. Doctorow's fictionalized account of how they got to this point.

The Magician's Assistant by Ann Patchett

Sabine has been in love with Parcifal since she began working as his assistant 20 years before the start of this story. They eventually marry, Sabine knowing full well that Parcifal is gay and dying of AIDS. After his death, Sabine embarks upon a journey of discovering who Parcifal really was that leads her from her comfortable California mansion to a bitter and brutal mid-western winter. Here she learns that, just like any good magic show, there is always more to the magician than what you can see.

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

A ghost story and a love story about a twin who leaves her apartment across from Highgate Cemetery in London to her twin nieces whom she has not seen since infancy due to a falling-out with her sister. Elspeth haunts the strange girls while they develop relationships among her closest living friends both in the apartment above and the apartment below. Niffeneger is best known for The Time-Traveler's Wife, which I loved. Somehow this story was quite a bit weirder...

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

DO NOT tell my AP Lit. students that I read this book for the first time this summer. They are of the impression that I am a long-studied expert on this classic Russian tale. Do you know the story? The crime: murder. The punishment: six hundred pages of the guilty conscience of one Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov.

Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson

I am a big fan of Anderson's powerful YA books (Speak, Catalyst, Twisted), but this one was really tough to finish. Inside the mind of an anorexic teenage girl, the reader truly sees the struggle caused by this disease. Scary. And so sad.

The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder by Rebecca Wells

I happened upon this book while browsing the shelves of the library and was so excited! I love Rebecca Wells, who wrote The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood series. She has a way of creating a setting that makes you want to move to a place, even if that place is the Louisiana bayou. She also writes strong and vibrant female characters the reader can't help but fall instantly in love with. This book rivaled Half-Broke Horses for page-turner of the summer as it is the alternately hilarious and heartbreaking story of Calla Lily Ponder as she grows up, leaves home, and discovers the world her mama would have wanted for her.

Now I'm off to make calendars, set up my classroom, copy my syllabi, and update my school website...

Horses and Heroines

When I read The Glass Castle a few years back, I was sucked into a world so unbelievable and riveting I had to cancel all my goings-on and close myself into the bedroom until every last page was turned. And when I have that kind of connection to a piece of writing, to a story, it can sometimes make me reluctant to read other works by the same pen--for fear she can't possibly do that again and I wouldn't want to ruin her high literary standing in my internal critic's shop.

That being said, Half Broke Horses is brilliant. It's the life story of Lily Casey, Walls' maternal grandmother, told in first person the way only Walls can tell a life story: in short yet voluminous vignettes. Lily Casey was a woman not always dealt the best hand in life, but who always knew how to bluff her way to victory or to work her way out of a debt. She was fiercely ambitious, which often led to disappointment, but she always had a plan for what to do next. This is the kind of story you want to tell your daughter, whom you believe will be the first female president of the United States, to remind her that it's OK to want everything in this world.

I grew up with a fiercely strong and independent mother whose voracious belief that I would one day be the president was not to be extinguished. She also believed I would be a doctor and a lawyer; a teacher and a graphic designer; a famous artist and a famous writer. I'll never forget the Christmas of my 6th grade year. I was going through a phase where my dreams included Harvard Law School and my mom found a Harvard sweatshirt at the local department store. When I opened it Christmas morning she relayed the story of its purchase and the conversation she had with the clerk about her daughter who was going to be going to Harvard. "Wow! Congratulation, that is quite an accomplishment!" the clerk exclaimed, "What will she be studying?" "She thinks law," my mom replied, "but she may change her mind by the time she gets there."

This overwhelming belief that I was rocket-scientist material made me the dreamer I am today. It gave me confidence through adolescence and college--something a lot of women don't encounter until later and then, to some, it is fleeting. Even now, as a 31-year-old, there have been times I've overheard my mother boasting to another relative about some accomplishment of mine the way I might describe my own son's first steps or how he is surprisingly verbose for three. She is a great teacher of many things (hard work, follow-through, and weed-pulling to name a few), but the two most important lessons she has taught me in my life are how to believe in myself unwaveringly and how to believe in others the same.

Lily Casey was a believer and a dreamer. I like to think, if asked about the aspirations of her granddaughter she would have replied, "She will probably be one of the most profound memoirists of her time. That or the president of the United States."

"Anyone who thinks he's too small to make a difference has never been bit by a mosquito."--Lily Casey Smith

Help Yourself

As an English major in college, my focus was American Literature--more specifically Early American Political Rhetoric. Plainly speaking, I studied the struggle to create and form an American Voice. It seems kind of dramatic now, 10 years removed from the world I was once submerged in--looking for America, but I was truly in love. The idea that social injustice was confronted head-on in this new land was fascinating to me. I found myself drawn to eras in which the oppressed would rise against opposing forces and make the world a different place. A better place. The Help catapulted me back into that college mindset, made me want to know more about this particular atrocity that took place in my America.

Kathryn Stockett, a white woman raised by a black maid in Jackson, Mississippi, wrote this story in an effort to seek absolution from the past sin of passivity. The novel follows two African American maids in the 1960s and the white women they work for. The white women who have fallen so neatly into the role of "master" to these black women who raised them and whom, in childhood, they had loved like mothers. It is also the story of Miss Skeeter, who I imagine is none other than Miss Kathryn Stockett herself, a young white woman and a charter member of the Jackson Junior League. Skeeter does what Stockett did not (in her youth) and begins to empathize with these maids and the injustices they face in the 1960s South. She wants to tell their story.

This is my book club pick for April and I am geared up for an array of Southern food tonight including fried chicken, cornbread and chocolate pie. I think I will wear an apron.