Category — literature

I recently read an article about two parents who complained that Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved was of no value in the curriculum, and they wanted it – along with Waterland by Grahame Smith – banned. Their complaints centre around the sex, violence and crude language in Beloved,  and that the novel has a Lexile score of 870 (apparently, if a book is simple to read, it must not be very educational or mature – I have no doubt that the authors of  Brave New World, The Hunt For Red October,  To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Sound and the Fury – to name a few – would agree. They all have the same Lexile score as Beloved).

Protests like this never fail to sadden me. I cannot wrap my head around the idea of banning books for the supposed audacity of showing all facets of human life and behaviour – as though not reading about the bad parts of ourselves will somehow insulate us from those bad parts in real life. It astonishes me that we are so eager to ensure that kids, even the college bound ones, never encounter anything bad or upsetting.

I was thinking (and fuming) over this whole book banning nonsense last night as I was getting ready to sleep. I loaded up my toothbrush with some Colgate and grabbed the copy of Fahrenheit 451 ( amusingly, this Bradbury classic has a Lexile rating of 451), from the toilet tank, and opened it to a random page (though now, it hardly feels random at all).

This is what I read (Faber to Guy Montag):

“Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

“So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless…”

A little further on, Guy and Faber have the following exchange:

 “That’s the good part of dying; when you’ve nothing to lose, you run any risk you want.”
“There, you’ve said an interesting thing,” laughed Faber, “without having read it!”
“Are things like that in books? But it came off the top of my mind!”
“All the better. You didn’t fancy it up for me or anyone, even yourself.”

Faber hits it right on the head.

I think this is why people hate and fear books like Beloved, and all the other books they ban; these books show us as we really are. A good book doesn’t “fancy up” human behaviour or thought, it shows it, warts and all. As humans, we are capable of acts of great kindness, empathy, sympathy, bravery and outright heroism. But, we are also capable of being miserable, selfish, petty, murderous and cowardly – and these traits, these bad things about ourselves, about us a species, are mixed in with the good and finer things about us, and they cannot, and should not, be separated.

It is my belief that when we ban books, we are trying to cast out the worst parts of ourselves, and it’s a strange and wasted effort. I don’t suggest we fully embrace the darker aspects of ourselves by murdering and stealing with wild abandon, but I do think that when we try to deny these parts of our human nature via book banning, we’re just giving into another bad thing within ourselves: we’re refusing to learn anything about what it means to be human, we’re being stubborn and denying that the bad things depicted in books often come from the good lives we endeavour to lead.

Beloved, for example, is based on a true story, and I feel that whatever embellishments or liberties Tony Morrison might have made or taken with the actual story, her telling is a window into that first story, a piece of our history – actual, emotional, and spiritual – demanding to be seen and heard. I’ll never have to go through the things that Sethe goes through. I’ll never flee slavery with my children, and I’ll never be driven by despair and fear to kill my own child rather than see her taken back into slavery. But through Tony Morrison’s words, I can read about it. And because she writes so well, because her writing is so accessible, I can feel it – the anger and fear that might drive a mother to keep her child out of the hands of slave owners, anger toward the very foundations of thought that allowed slavery to happen in the first place, the way in which such a life and desperate act must alter the mind and degrade the soul; how open it leaves a person to being haunted – actually or mentally – by their deeds.

When I read the book for the first time in university, these were some of the thoughts I had: the character of Sethe was driven to terrible things by her circumstances. I believe that she is essentially a good person, an innocent person who was stripped of her rights and freedom as a human being, and in being denied the same rights as her “masters”, she gave her child the only freedom she could provide, in the only way she could think of in that moment. Do I agree with her actions? Hard to say from the safety and freedom of the 21st century. But whether I agree with her actions or not isn’t the only point of the story. Do I feel for her? Do I sympathize and empathize, and wish that I could reach through the pages and rescue her? Did the story make me think about the darker moments of our history? Did it make me examine my own beliefs, and poke around in the deep and dusty corners of myself rather than ignoring them? Yes. Very much so; and that is the point of reading any good book.

Books should not be banned on the basis of being difficult, or because of the awful and uncomfortable truths they may contain. Books are about us, about our lives, about our history, about how high we can rise, and how far we can fall. We need to read these things, we need the experience of being human in all circumstances – and especially those which we are unlikely to encounter. We need to think critically while we imagine ourselves in the character’s shoes. Books are a safe way to experience everything, they are a great way to learn about ourselves and others. The experiences we read about may even better prepare us for having to go through them ourselves.

We must all be allowed to read without restrictions so that we can develop emotionally, morally and creatively. These are worthy goals that reading can help us accomplish.

This is what books are for. This is why we cannot ban them.

Title: Charles Dickens: His Life and Work
Author: Stephen Leacock
Publisher: Fitzhenry & Whiteside
Pages: 266
ISBN: 1-55044-767-3
Price: $7.50 – $45.00 (USD – paperback, previously owned only)

I’ve been reading since I was four years old (my first book was a hardback Disney Book Club version of The Three Little Pigs, which I read to my mother), and since then I’ve devoured just about any book I can lay my hands on, but rarely with much thought for the author. Who writes all these words for me to enjoy? What are they like? What sort of lives did they (or do they) lead? What compelled them to write? What sort of conditions did they favour when writing their works?

Despite being a great lover of the written word, despite enjoying several Dickens novels immensely, and even despite carrying around a copy of A Christmas Carol like an adult version of a blankie or teddy bear, I hadn’t really given much thought to the mind of the man who wrote them. This book answered all my questions and them some.

Leacock begins where all biographies begin: with childhood. Charles Dickens’s childhood was not a happy one for the most part; debt, penury, and – finally – debtors’ prison and a blacking factory loom large in Dickens’s early years. His family were good people, but not from illustrious backgrounds, not terribly good with money, and full of overly-ambitious schemes that often came to nothing.

I won’t go through the entire timeline of Dickens’s life. Most people who enjoy reading his books know the basics anyway: a rather unlovely childhood, his rise to fame, his extraordinary public readings of his own work (along with memorable trips to America, and all his editing pursuits and endeavours in England), illness, and then death (not much of eulogy from me, is it?).

But it’s Stephen Leacock’s style of writing that really pulls you in and makes you want to learn more about Dickens. He is cheerfully and politely honest about his subject – this is one of the few biographies I’ve ever read where the person being written about has been presented as a whole person with faults, foibles, and outright character defects, along with the more laudatory stuff about their genius, fame and delightful little quirks. Here, in this book, Dickens is a giant and a legend, but he’s also a man like any other.

I wasn’t surprised to learn that Dickens was intelligent – that’s very clear from his books – but I was a little disconcerted (and slightly amused) to learn that for all his characters who lived in terrible poverty, for all the awful mistreatment of children that he depicted, and for all the crime, unkind people, cruel villains, and even murderers, that live in the pages of his novels, that he was actually not very interested in the politics of how people ended up in those predicaments, nor was he exactly a crusader for children’s rights. He had opinions, and he was unafraid of voicing them in his books and poking fun at those public figures that caught his attention, but he wasn’t out with a bit of bristol board stapled to a rake handle protesting either.

I was surprised to learn that he wasn’t exactly a great guy to be married to. He married a lovely woman, had ten children with her (and when I think of those little Dickenses running about in short pants and tiny dresses, all I can think of is the nephew’s line in the 1951 film version of A Christmas Carol, “…And how is Mrs. Cratchit, and all the small assorted Cratchits…” as though they were a box of chocolate covered nuts or something) and then, when most of their children were grown and had lives of their own, he rather cruelly forced her to move out and live apart from him. She moved out with nary a bad word against him, and the children that were still young enough to be living at home continued to be raised by their aunt (whom Dickens held in high regard, though not in a romantic way).

Dickens had always seemed to me to be a very “happy endings” sort of guy, there are always happy marriages in his books between loving and lovely characters, but his own marriage was a shambles. Dickens seemed to think his wife rather slow and stupid, but really, compared to Dickens, most people would seem rather slow and stupid. It seems unfair to put away your wife of many years, the mother of your many children, simply because she cannot keep up intellectually with someone who was very much above average intelligence.

Of course, given the attitude of the day toward women, small wonder if maybe she actually was a little slow and stupid. Women were decorations for the home and hearth in Dickens’s time; a bit comfort and someone to make babies with. They were housekeepers (or they at least managed the household), and were not given opportunities to be anything more. It’s easy to give little in the way of intellectual stimulation when you’ve never really had any yourself. To make matters worse, even if she had been an intelligent little spitfire, Dickens wouldn’t have wanted her anyway, because he agreed with the prevailing attitude of the time toward women. Mrs. Dickens was damned if she did, and damned if she didn’t.

It ended up being a great lesson between the image (one I didn’t even know I’d been building in my head) of the man, and the man himself. Even then, celebrities led lives that diverged quite a lot from the popular public images of them.

I enjoyed reading about his trips to America (he offended the Americans on the first one, and made up for it on the second) and his public readings of his own works (so powerful were his characterizations of his own works that people fainted, screamed, cried and generally carried on and had to be carried out).

But, most of all, I enjoyed Stephen Leacock’s writing; his honesty and candour about Dickens’s world and life; it has given me a new way of looking at and reading Dickens’s work. I can now see hints of the man, and some of the people he knew, in the characters he created. I know that many authors draw on the people they know – to some extent – when creating characters, but knowing which people are being drawn from really gives you a sense of being in the inner circle.

If you’re at all curious about Dickens as a person, this is a great book to start with.

Title: PopCo
Author: Scarlett Thomas
Publisher:Harcourt
Pages:512
ISBN: 015603137X
Price: $5.46 (USD)

I enjoyed many things about this book – so much so that I read it cover to cover over the space of a day.

Alice Butler, an employee of PopCo in the Ideation and Design section, is headed to Devon, England for a company sponsored “Thought Camp” where she and her fellow employees will try to come up with new ideas for the next toy craze to hit the shelves.

While the work she does on the trip is very interesting, equally interesting to me was the story of her childhood and the mystery surrounding a necklace her grandfather gave her as a kid. The necklace has been engraved with a number that, if she can crack it, holds the key to a location containing millions of dollars in treasure. Much of Alice’s childhood revolves around learning the math that goes with breaking codes and ciphers. As a non-math person, I was really impressed by how Thomas (via Alice) explains codes and ciphers. You don’t need to have a background in math to understand what she’s talking about, and even if it still leaves you confused (or bored as some readers complained of) the mystery of her necklace and the treasure are more than enough to keep you interested.

I really enjoyed Thomas’s ability to remember what it was like to be a kid – the desire to be liked (or at least not teased) by the popular kids. The need to fit in and, at the same time, anger at having to fit in with the right clothes, hair, lipgloss, or whatever thing was currently cool. And the horror of having to hide those things that you were certain would cast you so far down the social ladder, you’d be reaching for the bottom rung – I think Thomas actually says almost exactly that at  some point in the novel. Alice’s ability with codes, ciphers, math and chess – and the fact that she lives with her grandparents – are things she wants to hide from the kids at school – especially the popular girls who seem to have accepted her as one their own.

I also liked that she understands the ways in which all those childhood things carry over into adulthood too. It’s the same sort of stuff even when you grow up (wanting to fit in, irrational worries that other people don’t like you or are upset with you and won’t tell you, trying to figure out what people want from you and what you want for yourself, feeling compelled to do things you don’t like in order to be “normal” etc.). Yet, with all these insights into her mind and being human, I found Alice’s sudden sexual relationship with another Thought Camp attendee, Ben, a little puzzling. Don’t get me wrong, it seems like a great way to pass the time and have fun while at a sometimes dull or pointless work outing – but given her repeated mentions of her shyness, her awkwardness and general lack of interest in being very social at all, I was surprised by the wordless/nameless sex she and Ben have. Their relationship does become more normal, but its beginning was a little jarring.

Despite that awkwardness – and who knows, maybe flings with colleagues happen like that all the time, and I just don’t know because I’ve never had one – I found myself intrigued and delighted with passages such as this:

“…I walk to the bus stop in town, breathing the bonfirey, marshmallowy smells of autumn. I love this time of year, when people start to rehearse for Christmas plays and pantomimes and the air feels like it’s full of magic spells. This is the time of year when arriving home after school feels cozy, like going back to bed.”

Maybe this only resonated with me because  I love autumn, but I found myself thinking, “Yes! That’s it exactly!” – and then bookmarking it. I also enjoyed her thoughts on marketing age-appropriate things to teenage girls (relevant to the plot, but I won’t spoil it for anyone) – and how many things are targeted at these young people but have insidious, adult meanings. Specifically this passage:

“I find it disturbing that there’s so much childishness in those magazines, and so much about sex at the same time…You are encouraged – in a playful, “childish” way – to pay so much attention to the detail of your “cute” socks and your “cute” bag and the cut of your…jeans and your bubblegum-coloured nail varnish because, well, basically because you want boys to think about fucking you. They don’t say that explicitly, though. They talk about fancying and snogging and crushes. What they don’t say is, “Here’s how to make boys your age want to fuck you.”

She goes on to talk about how that ends up making grown women, who are no longer the smooth-faced, thin and small 16 year olds they once were, want the illusion presented by the same magazines too, and so they end up buying age-inappropriate clothing and accessories as well.

It’s not that I had never thought of this, or noticed it, but Thomas put it so well that it was impossible to not think about it once I’d read it. And there are several other succinctly put observations about perfectly ordinary things throughout the book that made me think, “That’s exactly how I would have said it – if I’d been able to think it so clearly!”.

My only truly negative thought about this book involves the ending. Like other readers, and you can check out the reviews on Amazon.com for this, I was disappointed by the ending. The first 2/3 of the book is interesting and moving along at a good clip, and then it just…sort of…ends. I didn’t feel there was any resolution to anything. What sort of stuff was she doing with NoCo? What happened with her and Ben? Where was the treasure (and what was the treasure)? I didn’t feel that Alice had finished becoming whoever she became when the book skipped ahead through her further adventures after Thought Camp and then ended so abruptly.

However, there were many other who felt that the book ended exactly as it should have and I can see their point in this. Alice is smart and resourceful – thinking outside the box is second nature to her, what she does after Thought Camp may even be perfectly obvious, and the exact goings-on between her and Ben are not really crucial to the story anymore. For me, despite all this logical “I can see it your way too” thinking, the story felt unfinished to me. That being said, I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing – because of it, I know that I will go back and re-read this book to see what I missed; to see if the things I missed make the ending better for me. And really, what better praise for a book about a treasure hunt is there than knowing the reader is going back a second time to look for more treasure themselves?