Les Miserables

It's funny that Brett asked for this one, because my sister and I have been talking about this book a lot lately.  Her 15 year old just finished reading it and she and Jeff are reading/listening to it for the first time as well.  Three years ago, I led an informal reading/discussion seminar with her 2 oldest children with the unabridged text.

It is one of my favorite novels.  For textual, stylistic and sentimental reasons.  Allow me to expound.

I was 17 years old when my niece was born.  Sherry was living in New Jersey, in a townhouse with NO air conditioner.  We were living in Tennessee at the time, so at the end of that summer we found ourselves in New Jersey visiting Sherry.  It must have felt like a home invasion, now that I look back on it.  Our parents and her two youngest siblings crammed into her small home with her husband and two small children.  I vividly remember spoiling her 2 year old (my nephew William) within an inch of his life...he was absolutely darling.  Long and lean with this thick mop of curly orange hair and enormous blue eyes.  So cute.  But I digress...

It must have been just before we headed home, I was upstairs in Sherry's room while she fed or otherwise cared for her daughter.  I was lazily going through the books on her shelf, when I came across a small, untouched, abridged copy of Les Miserables.  I took it down, read the back cover and asked her if I might borrow it.  The reason I think it was towards the end of the visit was that she didn't even look to see what I had, she just said, "Take it."  (Poor Sherry, she has the patience of Job.)  But take it, I did.

Once we got home, I inhaled that book.  I drank it in, as though I had been wandering in the desert.  And when it was over and I had read the final page, I closed the cover, looked around my room and said, "More.  I need MORE."  I can honestly say that Victor Hugo's Les Miserables started me on my academic path.

It is one of those extraordinary books, a gift from a loving Heavenly Father, to one of His gifted children.  And I don't care what you might or might not believe, I absolutely believe that some books are like that, and this is one of them.  The reason the text is so extraordinary, is that Hugo is communicating eternal truths in a way that, regardless of your religious affiliation, regardless of your educational background, or economic status, the moral truths he expounds are universal and told in such a way that ANYONE can know them.  He uses the most ancient ways of teaching, he tells a story.  Or rather, he tells several stories.  And in the telling of them, the reader comes to know and understand what it means to live a moral life.

This is a very old principle, one that has got rather out of fashion these days, the idea that ART should be instructive rather than provocative.  George Eliot was a believer, as was Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Victor Hugo, Leo Tolstoy, William Thackeray and Stendhal.

It marks the difference between Good books and GREAT books.  Great books continue to teach you every time you read and reread them.  Good books, may entertain, distract, and occasionally provoke thoughts--but Great books CHANGE you.  They change the way you see the world and consequently, they change the way you LIVE in the world.

So I grew up and went the University of Washington and took to studying all manner of literature.  I studied French for the sole reason that I wanted to one day be able to read Les Miserables in the original French.  But I never did get to reread it.  Until I read it with my niece and nephew.

So here are my strategies for reading Great books.

Great books can be hard.  I think they're meant to be hard.  The writers of them expected more from their audience than modern authors do.  So my recommendations are these:

• Buy your own copy.  Don't borrow from the library.  Even if you get a cheap paperback from Barnes and Nobles, BUY your own copy.
• Use a decent bookmark.  Don't dogear the pages.  
• Use a post-it note at the back to flag the start of the endnotes, so that if you come across something in the text that you don't understand, you can easily flip to the back to check the notes for an explanation.
• Use a good highlighter and take it with you where ever you happen to be reading, so that you can highlight anything you find moving, relevant, or engaging.  I also took to using a pencil in school so that I could write notes in the margins.  My sister tells me you don't really OWN a book until you've written in it.  Now I go back to the books I read and studied in school and I love reading my old notes.  I used to be SMART!
• When it's a text written in a foreign language (French, German, Russian, Italian whatever), get a GOOD translation.  How can you tell if the translation is any good?  ASK.  The best Russian translators on the market EVER, are Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky.  Translations of the Romance languages (or German) are not that difficult, get a good edition like the Penguin Classics or Oxford World Classics and you're in clover.
• I am a big believer in READING the text the first time through.  If you want to get an audio version for "rereading" that's fine, but first time through, I think it needs to come in through your EYES.  (It's worth noting, that you can load up a Kindle with most of these classics for FREE.)
• Get a good pocket dictionary and keep it with the book.  As you read if you come across a word or expression you're unfamiliar with, look it up.  This was advice given to me when I started at the University of Washington and I followed it and it's changed the way I read.  It's brilliant.

A word or two (or 37) on Audio Books:

• I'm a fan of audio books.  But they can get expensive, and you have to be careful that you're getting what you really want regarding translation and abridgement.  I just discovered Libravox on iTunes, which is a series of podcasts readings of classic works of literature.  And they're FREE.  If you find yourself pinched for time, I recommend a tandem compromise.  READ when you can, and when you can't because you're chauffeuring children around, or hiking up a mountain, load up an ipod with an audio version and listen to it.  Be warned, LISTENING to classic literature is a very different experience from READING it.  Some classics were intended to be read aloud (Dickens wrote his books with the intention that they would be read aloud to the family of an evening), but some were NOT.  As you read through the cannon, you'll get an idea of the books that were intended to be read aloud and those that weren't.  Les Miserables...I would argue, was NOT meant to be read aloud, only because Victor Hugo has some long tangents in there, that were obviously intended to be read and mulled over, rather than listened to.

There you have it, M's very long treatise on Les Miserables and classic literature in general.  I hope it was entertaining as well as instructive.


For the record, I've read Les Miserables three and a half times.  Twice abridged, once unabridged with my niece and nephew, and I've read sections in French, but I haven't read it all the way through in French.  I suppose that's my next challenge.

How to be a Better Writer

READ.


That is all.


Ok.  I'll write more.  But seriously, that's what it boils down to.  Good readers become good writers.  It's the same principle as nutrition, if your body is what you eat, then your mind is what you read. 

Consequently, that means you have to read GOOD books.  If all you read is Twilighty crap, then your writing will remain juvenile and undeveloped.  But if you are constantly stretching yourself and pushing yourself to read more challenging texts, and then pushing yourself to articulate things that are more and more complicated, then you grow stronger and more fluent as a writer.

After reading, I would say practice, practice, practice.  I've been writing various stuff for 18 years now and while I'm paid to edit and assist (and sometimes tutor) people in writing, I would not consider myself to be a good writer.  The English language is so complex, so varied and nuanced, and human experience is so far beyond the constructs of language, that to assume you're a good writer is FOLLY.  Practice writing what interests you--stories or essays or poetry--and never allow yourself to get complacent, there lies stagnation and death.

As you're practicing you have to find your "voice."  It's a hard thing.  That's why reading is brilliant, you read other people's voices to better hear your own.  And then you have to learn to trust it.  Don't compare it to others, don't try to be like other writers you might admire, be yourself.  Write with your own voice, and let that voice guide you.  And while you may never write the Great American Novel, you will write things that are TRUE to you.  And because they are true and YOU, they will be great in their own manner.

My Wake-up Call

So, Samwise, think on this.  I know you're scared and heavy and in lots of pain right now, but in a few short months, you'll have your own version of this AWESOME wake-up service.

Of Time and the River

So, Brett asked my opinion on American Authors, so here you go.

I met Samwise because I wanted to move in to their (Samwise and Juliet, whom I only ever called Julietta (pronouced hoo-lee-eta) a al Baz Lurman's Romeo and Juliet) apartment.  I can't remember if it was Samwise or Julietta who was reading The Great Gatsby, but one of them was reading it for a book group and in my completely oblivious way, I sat down and proceeded to expound on the brilliance of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the greater theme of time and the river in the novel.

I'm pretty sure Julietta thought I'd lost my marbles, but it was fine if I lived there, so I did.

I confess myself decidedly finicky about American authors.  I think it has something to do with the relatively new literary tradition in our country, that American literature is inconsistent and decidedly lacking in luster.  I have a few writers whose works I admire, but in general, I don't care for American literature.  The authors that I admire, I find are more connected with European traditions than American.  Here's my list...

• Louisa May Alcott (I really like her novels, though, after reading 1 chapter of her biography I don't know that I'm a fan of herself.)
• F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Oh my.  I love that man.  I should specify, I love his mind, I love the way he writes, but he himself...was maybe a little iffy.  The Great Gatsby was one of those books I read in high school that totally blew my socks off, and it continues to blow my mind every time I reread it.  I love his melancholic meditation on how fluid time is, how perilous and futile it is to try to resist the passage of time, and how our choice is to learn and grow with the passage of time, or to stagnate and thus reduce ourselves to irrelevance and misery by resisting it.
• Earnest Hemingway.  Hm.  I don't particularly care for him.  And it is with reluctance that I admit that he had considerable talent.  But he did.  He has an interesting style, particularly for someone who thoroughly enjoys the long-winded, effusive 19th century styles of Dickens and Conrad.
• Robert Frost.  I love Robert Frost.  I'm not sure I could say anything more complimentary than that.
• Edith Wharton.  I love Edith Wharton, I love her novels, I love her style, I love how totally unchanged society seems to be from the portrait she painted in the late 19th century.  She is wise and brilliant.

And that's it for classics.  I have a few modern writers that I enjoy, here's the list...

• Jonathan Safran Foer.  Author of Everything is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Eating Animals.  He is quirky and wise and funny and post-modern and thus, not for everyone.  But I think he's just brilliant.
• His wife Nicole Krauss.  Author of the History of Love.  She is also wise and funny and heart-breakingly intuitive.  She has an understanding of the human soul that defies her youth.
• Haven Kimmel.  Author of A Girl Named Zippy, She Got up off the Couch, and the Solace of Leaving Early.  She's local here in North Carolina and she is also quirky and funny and wise and sad.  Apparently, that's my favorite combination in modern literature.  I have everything she's published (except Iodine with is a horror novel) and I'd probably read a cereal box if she wrote it.
• Chaim Potok.  He was recommended to me by my wise and brilliant sister Sherry.  And (I just confessed to Samwise) I read FOUR of his novels in a five week period when I was pregnant with the Boy.  I LOVE him.  His style is vaguely reminiscent of Hemingway, but he's considerably wiser and kinder to human nature than Hemingway is.  I particularly love the Chosen, My Name is Asher Lev and the Gift of Asher Lev.  (I reread those Asher Lev books every other year or so.)
• Thomas Wolfe.  I have to be in the right mood to enjoy Thomas Wolfe (he's early 20th century and his style is...impressionistic), but his books live on my shelves, so he really does belong on this list.

And there you have it.  M's musings on American Authors.  I think my ambivalence is owing to the youth of our country, and you might look at our nation and say, "Well, it's  236 years old!  That's OLD."  But in artistic terms, it really isn't.  There is a richness to European (and Russian) literature that derives from the Romans and the literary traditions of the Middle Ages.  I am willing to admit that in a thousand years, American literature might, might be going somewhere good.

Welcome to Samwise Week

I know that everyone THINKS this is Memorial Day, but really, it's the start of Samwise Week! 

Thank you to my readers (all 2 of them!) for the ideas.  I'm going to post my responses this week for your entertainment and Samwise the Brave's distraction.

The first suggestion was a super fun memory of Samwise...but here's the problem.  I have loads, but they're all sort of like inside jokes, difficult to articulate to the public at large.  But here, let me try...

YEARS ago, when I was still living in Seattle and Samwise was still living in Seattle we decided to celebrate our birthday together.  Once upon a time, there were four Great Friends.  Moi, Samwise, Whimsy and Holly.  And ALL FOUR of us have January birthdays.  We were all single together, some students, some not, but those years felt like a long war and we came out the other side of them very, very close.

So this particular January we headed out to the Cheesecake Factory to celebrate our birthdays.

I can't remember what we ate (I assume cheesecake figured in somewhere), I don't remember if we did anything afterwards, I can't remember what we specifically talked about.  But here's what I remember...

Loud.  Oh goodness.  When the four of us got together we were LOUD.  Rock Concert Loud.  Hearing Damage Loud.  We cracked jokes just to make each other laugh and then we would laugh long and loud and uproariously. 

People, we were so loud that OTHER DINERS were staring at us.  Our poor waiter was at a TOTAL loss as to what to do with us.  I vaguely remember a degree of disdain.  But we were having so much fun we didn't care at all that we were being completely rude to our waiter and fellow diners.  We were young and brash and felt invincible.  And totally sober.  We were that loud and obnoxious and completely sober.

That's the kind of friends we are.

(I can still remember the horrible headache I had the next day.  That's how loud we were, I woke up with a hangover...and we drank WATER.)



The thing about memories is...they're sometimes fickle.  I look back on the past 12 years of my friendship with Samwise and she's this constant, steady presence in my life.  She's the best friend a girl could ask for because she loves you enough to give you just what you need, and to take just what you can give without asking for more.   She's funny and smart and noble.  And inspite of her quiet appearance, she can be LOUD.


(Chris wanted me to include HIS favorite memory of Samwise.  He only made it out to Seattle once, back when we were newly engaged, we went out together for Whimsy's wedding and to meet the family.  Samwise came down to my parents' house for Thanksgiving dinner where he dared Samwise to drink a glass of gravy.  And she totally did it!  I have to admit, I beamed with pride!)

Call for Topics

Trusty, Blog Friends...I need your help.

Or rather, my best friend Samwise needs your help.

Here's what you need to know:  Samwise is AWESOME.  There is a reason I call her Samwise, she is the real hero of my life, the one who isn't the least bit tempted by rings of power.  And she loves to grow stuff in the dirt.  Also, she's stuck with a funky body...it does stuff she'd really rather it didin't and it won't do other stuff she wishes it would.  Right now, she's gestating her second and last baby (a boy!) and she already had some funky problems BEFORE being pregnant, well, you can imagine how her pregnant body is responding, thinking up new and creative ways to reek havoc with her life.

So she's a little bit stressed and in need of some distraction.  This is where WE come in.  See, Samwise lives 2000 miles away from me (or else I would just pop 'round to her house for a visit), so most of our catching up happens on email or via the blog.  She's on partial bed-rest now and I think she could use some fun distractions.

My problem is that I'm having a bit of writers block.  I'm tired and I think it shows in my inability to think of interesting things to say.  So I'm asking YOU to pitch in.  Please to leave a comment and ask a question or suggest a topic or story you would like me to write about on the dear ol' blog to cheer up my Friend.  We'll all ban together to cheer up the best Samwise a girl could ask for.