Fen, Bog & Swamp

 Annie Proulx, "Fen, Bog & Swamp", Scribner, 2022. pp. 100-101

I learned to read from recognizing the skeleton letters of words as my mother read me bedtime stories.  It fastened my life to books and long years of endless reading.  When I was in second grade I was excited to discover that the school had a library and every chance I got I rushed there to read and read until I was dragged or pushed out to the hatful recess playground.  One day I discovered a startling book, the tan cover showing a rocky bluff and a cave opening.  First published in 1904 it was The Early Cave Men by Katharine Dopp, one of America's early educators.  I looked long and hard at the sophisticated illustrations by Howard V. Brown, later famous for his early sci-fi covers.  I could not get enough of a drawing of two barefoot women clad in ankle-length skin dresses and fighting a bear at close quarters.  One slashed with a stone dagger, the other stabbed the bear with a spear.  Their expressions were intensely fierce.  You can't imagine what that picture meant to an eight-year-old girl who had already noticed that in books women were always pictured holding babies, crouching over a fire or handing food to someone.  Fighting a bear!  The book was wonderful too because it featured a map of the cave people's country.  It was the first map I had seen and it literally shaped the story.  The impression of Paleolithic life that book made on me has lasted a lifetime as I observed how the general population absorbed pronouncements from archaeologists,  historians and artists that emphasized the Eurocentric vision of male-dominated progressive technology.  Thinking of the women and the bear I knew the questions were not all answered.  

Factor Separation Into the Divorce Equation

 Emily O. Gravett, "Factor Separation Into the Divorce Equation," [Modern Love] New York Times,  Oct. 16, 2022 p. ST6. 

Monomaniacal in that way children can be, she knows all about polar bears, and now, I guess, so do I.  Over time, I have checked out every book from the library with a polar bear on the cover....
In the book we have checked out most recently, "The Ice Bear," a polar bear cub is separated from his mother, transformed onto a boy, and raised for many years by human parents.  The mother bear cries over the loss of her cub and the tears etch scars onto her face.  I almost can't read this part aloud. 

COMMENT

The public library is an endless source of reading for children's obsessions.   In this case, a particular children's picture book also provides a metaphor for a parent's pain of divorce.  

Forget the Book on Impractical Boundaries

 Sophia Ortega.  "Forget the Book on Impractical Boundaries"  (Modern Love], New York Times, October 2, 2022 p. ST6.

Around this time my therapist assigned my homework, a book with a mortifying title: "Boundary Boss." I placed a hold at the library and was relieved to learn there would be a six-week wait, giving me plenty of time to bask in romantic recklessness.

COMMENT

The author checks out the book, but never reads it.  This made me laugh.  I use the library the same way, to borrow books I'm not 100% sure I'm really interested in reading. 

The Things I Would Never Do

Cailin Flanagin, "The Things I Would Never Do" Atlantic Dec 23, 2021 https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/12/cancer-teeth-loss/621103/ 

I came across Play It as It Lays in my high-school library when I was 16, and I cut two or possibly three classes to read it. God, I hated high school. I wanted to read, but they wanted me to sit at a desk and talk about “side, angle, side.” I found Joan Didion’s novel electric, bleak, ravishing. More than that: essential.

There I was, on the cusp of womanhood, of being a sexual creature—and in the nick of time, I had stumbled across this invaluable guidebook. In the girls’ magazines, all you ever read about was “boys who only wanted one thing” and how you should be grateful for strict parents, because imagine what would happen to you if they didn’t care enough to give you a curfew? But Play It as It Lays introduced me to what were obviously the real perils, the important ones that the adults were keeping from us. Bad, terrible, unspeakable things that I’d never even considered. Balling at parties! S-M! Yorkshire terriers!

I can remember whole passages from the book, but more than anything that series of she-would-nevers. Over the years, I have come up with my own list, ​​as square and tame as I am.

COMMENT

A work of fiction not only helps a teen shape her own adult identity, the experience of reading it has such a lasting impact that she uses it as the theme for an article  written many, many years later.  This narrative illustrates the long-term impacts of libraries.  Would Caitlin Flanagan have found Joan Didion if the school library didn't have it?

 

The Stranger I Become

 Katherine Coles, "The Stranger I Become: on Walking, Looking and Writing",  Turtle Point Press, 2021.

The author gratefully acknowledges the Emily Dickinson Archive, an open source website though which a number of libraries and institutions have made many of Dickinson's original handwritten poems and other materials available in facsimile for the use of scholars.  Having access to this material changed my relationship to and understanding of Dickinson's work.  [p.140]

COMMENT

There are many more articles about creating digital archives than a about using them, but I expect that this kind of acknowledgement to digitized archives will become increasingly common. 

Desert Vision

 Helen Macdonald, "Desert Vision," New York Times Magazine,  Oct. 17, 2021 pp. 55-

Villeneuve was 14 when he first saw the book, an edition with an arresting cover in the small library near his school in Trois-Rivieres, Quebec: The face of a dark-skinned man with piercing blue eyes against a remote desert background.  It was beautiful, he told me, lifting a copy with the same cover from his desk.  He has kept it though the years and is using it to write the second movie ("Done" is a famously complex novel, and Villeneuve only agreed to adapt it if it could be broken into two films).  Looking at it even now evokes the same emotions he felt back then" "mystery, isolation, loneliness."  Billeneuve has dreamed of making "Dune" since he was a teenager; he tried to make his move as "close to the dream as possibel, and it was very difficult, becaus the dreams of a teenager are very totalitarian.  I was not expecting would be so difficult to please that guy!

COMMENT

Denis Villeneuve says that he has dreamed of making Frank Herbert's novel "Dune" into a movie since he was a teenager.  The cover art of the edition at the public library evoked an aesthetic for the movie of his imagination.  The inspiration of the life-changing book is explicitly tied to the book as a physical object.  Villeneuve bought his own  copy of the same edition to keep as as a kind of  talisman.

The Books that Changed My Life Weren't Very Good

 Danika Ellis "The Books that Changed My Life Weren't Very Good," Book Riot  April 209, 2021. https://bookriot.com/books-that-changed-my-life/?fbclid=IwAR0pNwY-CRmK11x3nfG83MySaefkwDiZOCgKpHWyNXdJ9tmq6PGATuKIoGg

I keep a giant list of books I want to read — actually, I keep three: ones available through the library, through inter-library loan, and ones I’d have to buy to read. These have been steadily growing for decades now, and there are thousands of books on them. I also almost never consult them?? They seem to exist just so I can believe that one day I will read them all.

...

I requested the book, and when I began reading it, my mind was blown. Here was a completely different way of understanding desire and identity. Diamond laid out the incredible complexity of the biological components of sexual attraction, and the book included multiple accounts of women who had gone through the same journey as I had. It rewrote my relationship to my queerness, my identity, my understanding of the basic building blocks of desire. It’s also…not a perfect read. It’s cissexist and has a small sample size. It can be incredibly dry. But it changed my life.

COMMENT

To this writer, the library represents aspirational reading. One day she requests a book on the list from the library (Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire by Lisa M. Diamond) and discovers insights about human sexuality that are relevant to her own identity.

Can You Please Help Me Get Out of Prison

 Emily Bazelon, "Can You Please Help Me Get Out of Prison?", New York Times Magazine, July 4, 2021, pp 27-33, 47, 49.

It started with an email I received from a retired librarian in Oregon  "Dear Ms Bazelon, Karen Oehler write in July 2019.  "I correspond with an inmate, Yutico Briley, at Dixon," a prison in Jackson, La.  For a couple of years, Oehler and Briley had been writing to each other through a support program for incarcerated people. 

...

Briley mentioned that one of his favorite books was "Exodus,' the 1950's novel by Leon Uris about the founding of the state of Israel, which he borrowed from the prison library cart.  I remembered the paperback copy I checked out from the library when I was growing up.  "One of my faviore things to read about is history," he wrote,. "The book I read is old, and the pages crch when you flip them."

...

I went to law school and passed the bar, but I've never practiced law.  I decided, though I had never intervened like this before, to call a few innocence lawyers on Briley's behalf.  I wasn't sure why -- he was one prisoner among millions.  Was it because I wasn't really planning on writing about him?  Because Briley saw himself in the young men in my book?  Because he mentioned the novel "Exodus"?  I didn't know.  But hen that's often true of relationships and of stories.  One spark catches.  Maybe others follow

COMMENT

What a great library story!  Yes, there are lawyers involved, but Briley's innocence wouldn't have been  established without libraries --first, because of a retired librarian who is still involved in social justice work, and secondly, by his choice of reading that happened to establish a bond with Bazelon.  At age 19, Briley was sentenced to 60 years without possibility of parole.   He spent eight and a half years in prison before a new D.A. was elected in New Orleans who campaigned on a promise to re-examine wrongful convictions.

For a Romance Novelist, a Love Worth Writing About

 Alix Strauss, "For a Romance Novelist, a Love Worth Writing About," (Vows) New York Times, June 6, 2021, p. ST10. 

In March 201, during a visit to the Major Hillard Library in Chesapeake, Va., Kimberlee Stevenson  picked up a copy of "Until I Saw You Smile" by J.J. Murray, a romance writer known for his multiracial story lines and characters.

"I finished the novel in three days," said Ms. Stevenson, 38, the owner of a literary website where she blogs about romance novels and a youth contractor specialist for the Hampton Roads Workforce Council, which offers employment services.  "I thought it was great and I like to meet the authors, so I  sent him a friend request on Facebook."

COMMENT

Reader, she married him.  

User Manuals

 Louis Menand, "User Manuals: Charting a  Nation's Soul through its Best Sellers," New Yorker, June 7, 2021 pp. 76-81.

These sales figures are way beyond the range of even the most acclaimed fiction  Some of the books, such as "The Old Farmer's Almanac" and Emily Post's "Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home," which was first published in 1922, are continually updated and reissued, and still maintain market share.  McHugh says that "Etiquette" used to be the second-most stolen book from the library after the Bible  which presumably is taken by people unfamiliar with the Ten Commandments). 

COMMENT 

Perhaps it's a stretch to say that stealing books is a use for libraries, but theft of library books is pretty frequently mentioned in library stories. However, it's not clear whether or not Jess McHugh (author of "Americanon") fact-checked this claim since online sources say that after the Bible it's the Guinness Book of World Records and books about conspiracy theories and the occult.  At one college library where I worked we deliberately left the magnetic anti-theft strip out of copies of a guide about sexual wellness and replaced it as needed. 

I'm not sure how to categorize this one.  Maybe "Life Changing Book"?

Rereading Lolita

 Ian Frazier, "Rereading Lolita" New Yorker, December 14, 2020 pp. 30-35.

As an unformed kid, I envied his self-assurance and Olympian disdain. I tried to imitate the style, dropping into conversations half-cribbed Nabokov-like phrases (“I scorn the philistine postcoital cigarette”). Once I happened upon a slim volume of his in the New York Public Library which no one I’ve met has heard of. It contained a line that I treasured like a rare archeological find. Published in 1947, the book is a short anthology of verse by three Russian poets—Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tyutchev—with Nabokov’s translations, accompanied by introductions in which he explains each poet to an American audience. In the introduction to Pushkin, he describes the poet’s end, when he received a fatal wound in a duel with the French ballroom roué Georges-Charles de Heeckeren d’Anthès, the alleged lover of his wife. About the later career of this pomaded zero who killed Russia’s greatest poet, Nabokov adds that d’Anthès went back to France, got elected to some office or other, “and lived to the incredible and unnecessary age of 90."

COMMENT

     It seems that Ian Frazier learned to write by imitating Nabokov.   While searching the library for all things Nabokov he finds a neglected volume of translated poems and actually reads the introduction (something not everyone does).  There he finds a perfect putdown for a historical nobody -- Hidden Treasure luring in plain sight. 

Shelf Lives

 Min Jin Lee, "Shelf Lives", New York Times Book Review,  April 18, 2021 p. 1, 20-21.

     On a day off, Uncle John went to the New York Public Library to check the classifieds.  He noticed that computer programmers had high starting salaries, so he borrowed books on programming.  the former history graduate student read library books on computer science.  Not long after, he got a job at an insurance company, then, later, I.B.M. hired him as a programmer, where he worked for most of his life.

     In 1975, Uncle John, now an I.B.M. company man sponsored his younger sister's family to immigrate from South Korea.  A year later, we came to Elmhurst, Queens, where Uncle John, his wife and their two American-born daughters lived.  I was 7.

     In our first year in America, Uncle John took my tow sisters and me to the library in Elmhurst and got us cards.   We could borrow as many books as we liked, he said.  We loaded up our metal grocery cart with its tilted black wheels and white plastic hubs.  It creaked all the way home.  

COMMENT

    This single narrative tells a complete immigrant story.  The public library is the pathway to a better job, which enables Uncle John to sponsor other family members to come to America.  In the article Min Jin Lee, reminisces about the library books she read as a child and what they taught her about "the ethos of American rugged individualism and the Korean quest for knowledge.  Based on what she learned from years of reading, she is writing a series of novels about Korean Americans, so just as it did for Uncle John, the library also provided a vocation for the author.

Elizabeth Acevedo

 "Elizabeth Acevedo" [By the Book], New York Times Book Review, April 1, 2021, p 6. 

Most people describe their childhood reading habits as voracious, no? And in my case it still applies. Mami would take me to library every Saturday and as I grew older she attempted to shoo me outside more since I could lie in bed and read the day away.  I wound up taking the books with me and reading on the stoop instead.  

I loved all thing.  The "Baby-Sitters Club" books, "Because of Winn Dixie," "Miracle's Boys," Jacqueline Woodson.  "The House on Mango Street" was a game changer, as was Julia Alvarez's "Before We Were Free."

COMMENT 

Acevedo is an author of young adult novels with a typical Coming of Age story of weekly trips to the library.  She describes the books she found there as "game changers."   

By Observing the "Minutae of Life," Cleary Created the Universal Human Experience.

 Elisabth Egan, "By Observing th "Minutae of Life," Cleary Created the Universal Human Experience" New York Times,  March 28, 2021, p 20.

When [Judy] Blume's children were young she'd come home from the library with armloads of books "most of them went in the 'I don't want to write books like these, they bore me' pile," she recalled. "Then I came to Beverly Cleary and I fell off the sofa, I was laughing so hard.  I thought, oh my God, I want to write books like this."

COMMENT

 It's not a surprise to learn that Judy Blume was inspired by Beverly Cleary. I sometimes even confuse which author wrote which books.  For a children's author, the juvenile collection offers an opportunity for research into what other authors are writing.  The sad truth is, there are a lot of children's books that are poorly written, overly preachy or just plain dull.  Thank goodness for the influence of Clearly and Blume!

Processed Meats

 Nicole Walker. Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh and Navigating Disaster. Torrey House Press, 2021.

When I lived in Portland, I worked at a place called Orlo -- Raising Awareness about the Environment though the Creative Arts.  We published a literary magazine, performed Word on the Street where we stood on the steps of Pioneer Square and the Library and read volubly from Cadillac Desert and Silent Spring. We had an outfit for Vinnie the Fire Boy and one for a bear-looking creature so we could compete with Oregon's other mascots -- the Beavers and the Ducks.  Vinnie and Orlo the Bear walked along the Willamette River, handing out bumper stickers that read "YouENDanger" and "Cows Kill Salmon." [p. 28-29]

COMMENT

 Activists use public space on the library steps to read from life-changing books that inspired their own activism. The hope is that the readers going in and out of the building will be drawn to read influential environmental works and be likewise inspired.  The power of books to change the world is implicit. 

Inside the List

 Elisabeth Egan. Inside the List. [Angie Thomas].  New York Times Book Review, February 7, 2021, p.20.

     Suddenly, my editor texts to tell me that Dr. Jill Biden shouted me out at the American Library Association midwinter conference!  She said she just bought 'The Hate U Give."
     Thomas consulted social media, where she'd been tagged by teachers and librarians and was able to see a video clip of the moment.  She said, "What shocked be was, this novel about a 16-year-old girl dealing with police brutality found its way into the hands of the first lady of the United States.   Had you told little Angie that 20-something years ago, she wouldn't have believed she wrote something that made it that far-- that this little Black girl in Mississippi whose family sometimes didn't know if they would have food would have a book in the White House."

COMMENT

     Teachers and librarians have the ability to promote worthy books.  In this issue of the NYT Book Review, "The Hate U Give" is #4 on the Children's Best Sellers list, with 204 weeks on the list.   Clearly, Thomas' book  already made a huge impact even before Dr. Jill Biden mentioned it in her keynote.  Still, the knowledge that the first lady has read the book offers a hopeful chance that it's message might result in actual social change. 

This Election, Mom Knows Best

 Bret Stephens. This Election, Mom Knows Best. New York Times.  Nov. 3, 2020. p.A31.

The culture that's been cheapened is the one she encountered in midcentury America.  She learned English by reading Archie and Jughead comics, then Nancy Drew mysteries at a New York public library.  In high school, Theodore Dreiser ("barely literate, but a great writer") awakened her to the power of socially engaged literature, as did John Steinbeck.  Her movie crushes were Gary Cooper in "High Noon" and Robert Taylor in "Quo Vadis."

COMMENT

She is the author's grandmother Xenia who immigrated from Russia in 1950 at age 10.  Children's literature at the  library became a way for her to adapt to her new home. Comics and Nancy Drew were a gateway for high school literature. 

The Time is Now for Us to Sit and Listen

Sharlee Mullins Glen. "The Time is Now for Us to Sit and Listen." Deseret News. June 25, 2020, p. A6. 

One evidence of the striking singularity of this particular moment is the fact that there are currently 206 holds at the small library in Kearns, Utah on the book "White Fragility: Why it's So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism."

 COMMENT

     Library use is cited as evidence of community involvement in #BlackLivesMatter protests.  Demand for library books tracks current events. The library can help by purchasing a few extra copies so that readers can get the book faster. 

Ask Ann Cannon

Ann Cannon, "Ask Ann Cannon." Salt Lake Tribune, 5/31/2020 p. D6.

Dear Ann Cannon,
I find that during this time of social distancing, one of the activities I miss most is visiting the library. Any suggestions for borrowing books? Not e-books, not audio book, real books.

COMMENT 

I know advice columnist Ann Cannon is a book lover because last time I ran into her it was at the King's English bookshop.  I also miss the library.  We've had the same books checked out for 3 months now, and we've already read them.  During the pandemic I used the online New York Times at the public library and  some research databases at an academic library, but I've been buying books with my stimulus check because I can barely concentrate on reading at all these days, much less online reading. 

Ann Pratchett on Why We Need Life-Changing Books Right Now

Ann Pratchett, Ann Patchett on Why We Need Life-Changing Books Right Now new York Times, March 30, 2020. Online

     Kate [DiCamillo]and her publicist and I sat in tiny chairs at a tiny table in the school library and ate our salads. They made a big fuss over how nice I was to bring them lunch. The whole encounter lasted less than 30 minutes. Then Kate gave a talk in an auditorium packed with kids and their parents. I hadn’t meant to stay but then I did. She talked about her mother’s vacuum cleaner. She was great.

COMMENT

     The school librarian has invited author Kate DiCamillo to talk to the students, which inspires author and bookseller Ann Pratchett to read a kind of children's literature she did not expect to enjoy.