reading The Reader
Reggie Jet made some really interesting comments here about the weird interactions between novels and the movies adapted from them. It’s made me re-think my usual knee-jerk insistence on trying to finish a book that’s been made into a movie I’m wanting to see.
When is it best to try to read a book first before seeing the movie? If you’ve seen the movie first, how likely is it that reading the book will enrich the whole experience? What if a truly crappy film adaptation ruins your memories of a great book?
Before I’d considered Reggie’s conundrum, I powered my way through Revolutionary Road and the Benjamin Button short story just assuming it would ultimately improve the movie-going experiences. I also picked up The Reader on a mad quest to finish off all the Oscar-nominated novels (and, let’s be honest, to bring into the theater some unspoken sense of superiority at having hacked my way through the underbrush of text). Now I’m finally conscious of the real hazards involved here.
For one thing, even though I’ve mostly avoided reading reviews of the movie, I already knew Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes played the two main roles. It was immensely distracting, then, to read the book and try to imagine what sort of old-age or youthful makeup would have to be applied in each scene to make these two actors look appropriate, or in which scenes younger or older actors might be playing their roles. I know Ralph Fiennes is a hell of an actor, but I’m also pretty sure it would take some Benjamin Button-style special effects to put his head on the body of a 15-year-old German lad.
Another obstacle is the almost clinically Germanic tone of the novel’s translation, which I can only assume is true to its original language. By some horrible coincidence I had recently been in a car with a friend who had been listening to an Eckhart Tolle book-on-CD, so I had the German guru’s Sigmund Freud-sounding tones in my head as the voice of The Reader’s narrator–as if visualizing a CGI-ed, pubescent Ralph Fiennes wasn’t distracting enough.
It’s a perplexing novel in any case, full of philosophical and moral paradoxes and powerfully evoking the ruined civilization of post-World War II Germany. Beyond the immediate concerns of the plot, the question asked by a war crimes defendant to her judge in the courtroom, “What would you have done?” resonates powerfully even after the book is finished.
One reviewer noted a later-20th century phrase commonly heard in Germany, “the lucky late-born,” referring to those too young to be held accountable for their behavior during the Nazi regime. The Reader illustrates the paralyzing difficulty of coming to terms with not only personal guilt and shame but the culpability of a whole society, and I’m extremely curious if the movie is able to express those themes as memorably as the novel does.
John Updike, 1932 – 2009
John Updike’s death at the age of 76 has brought a flood of reminiscences and tributes to the American literary giant.
The New Yorker has an impressive “Remembering Updike” collection with thoughts from fellow writers like Richard Ford, Paul Theroux, and T.C. Boyle.
The Guardian U.K.’s coverage features tributes from Jay Parini and Martin Amis, who describes Updike’s mastery of different literary forms:
He said he had four studies in his house so we can imagine him writing a poem in one of his studies before breakfast, then in the next study writing a hundred pages of a novel, then in the afternoon he writes a long and brilliant essay for the New Yorker, and then in the fourth study he blurts out a couple of poems.
The New York Times obituary describes his “kaleidoscopically gifted” writing and discusses the themes of the four Rabbit novels that memorably traced the “questing life” of a middle-class American everyman.
An interesting assessment of his life and work at slate.com proclaims Updike “line for line, without peer, the finest American prose stylist of the postwar era.” The piece also notes that Updike’s practice of producing at least three pages a day resulted in his share of literary clunkers.
Last year Literary Review honored Updike with its lifetime achievement award for bad sex writing in fiction (the annual honorees excerpted here are excruciatingly entertaining as well).
Updike’s poetry is often overlooked amid the almost annual release of novels and his steady stream of magazine pieces and criticism. His poems describe everyday situations with humor and sharp observation, and I’m often reminded of one verse in particular on long, slow afternoons at the office:
Each hour seemed a rubber band
the preoccupied fingers of God
were stretching at His desk.
Academy Award Nominees in Print
I made a serious miscalculation in my pre-Academy Awards reading priorities. I still can’t believe Revolutionary Road didn’t get nominated for Best Picture or for either major acting award, but I started the Richard Yates novel a couple of days before the Oscar nominations were announced and couldn’t put it down anyway.
The novel, as anyone who has seen the movie trailer will surmise, is filled with tense scenes of suburban misery and despair (much like My Bloody Valentine in 3D but with the graphic violence strictly limited to the dialogue). From my current address in the heart of Suburban OKC, I could certainly recognize some of the factors that caused the 1961 novel’s characters to question their identities and the value of their existence. I’ve already noted the criminal shortage of bookstores around here, for one thing.
New Yorker critic James Wood revisits the novel in this interesting piece, and the entertainingly irascible Christopher Hitchens discusses it and “The Suburbs of Our Discontent” in this Atlantic Monthly article.
In order to catch up with the Best Picture nominees adapted from books, I should have tried harder to scrape the “Oprah’s Book Club” sticker off my used copy of The Reader. If only I had noticed the blurb on the back cover heralding its “coiled eroticism,” I may have made it more of an immediate priority, but it is next on my list.
As for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, I was excited to find the entire text of the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story online, and it made for a quick and interesting read before I checked out the movie. Fitzgerald’s story is pretty loosely adapted for the purposes of the film and the time period is necessarily different, but its twisted fairy-tale qualities make it well-worth checking out.
Before watching the end credits, I hadn’t been aware that the amazing Slumdog Millionaire had been adapted from a book as well. Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup’s novel, originally titled Q & A, was greatly streamlined for film purposes, but the general outline of the story is the same. Interestingly, unlike the film, the novel’s protagonist was named Ram Mohammad Thomas, an attempt by the author to create an Indian everyman who could be seen as Hindu, Muslim, or Christian.
This Guardian UK profile of the author describes the origins of the novel and the adaptation choices made by the filmmakers. Thanks to the popularity of the film and its impressive haul of nominations and awards, the novel has since been re-released with the same title as the film. This Sunday Times audio interview with the author touches on the film’s success and the universal themes that have seen its story resonate across cultural boundaries.
The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days
Reports during the Presidential transition period noted Barack Obama was reading Jonathan Alter’s 2007 study The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope as he began planning his own administration’s course. Alter’s book is a record of a pivotal moment in American history where President Roosevelt redefined the relationship between the American people and their government and began steering a course out of the Great Depression.
Alter argues that FDR’s combination of inspirational leadership, open-minded risk-taking, and activist government policies ultimately saved both American democracy and capitalism itself. The book is a useful counterpoint to recent criticisms of Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, and it’s also a gripping read that documents one of the most precarious moments in American history.
Alter paints a vivid portrait of the country in winter 1933 as Roosevelt took office. At the absolute low point of the Great Depression, when Fascism was wildly popular in Italy and Hitler had just gained power in Germany, Alter reveals the temptations Roosevelt faced from advisors who advocated similarly dictatorial steps to solve America’s economic disaster. The book tells the riveting story of Roosevelt’s rejection of this path and the seat-of-his-pants qualities of the interventionist New Deal programs that Alter argues ultimately saved capitalism.
The book includes seldom-told tales like the pre-inauguration assassination attempt that nearly took Roosevelt’s life. Alter also describes the most acrimonious transition in American history, during which President Hoover and Roosevelt barely communicated and FDR’s son claimed his father nearly punched Hoover in the face.
One of the most interesting stories is Alter’s description of the first “Fireside Chat,” on March 12, 1933. Roosevelt’s revolutionary use of the relatively new medium of radio brought the voice of the American President into citizens’ homes for the first time. His warm, conversational style was literally unheard of from previous politicians who had to shout to be heard in un-amplified speeches to large crowds, and Alter compares the effect to the similarly reassuring tones of Bing Crosby’s crooning voice over the radio.
The real revolution was, in fact, Roosevelt’s first two words of the Fireside Chat: “My friends.” The Defining Moment goes a long way toward explaining FDR’s achievements and filling in interesting psychological details of his complicated personality, but those two words, and the resultant redefinition of American government’s role in the lives of its citizens, reveal perhaps the most significant moment of all.
Inaugural Poem Update: Elizabeth Alexander
I’ve read some online reactions to Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem, “Praise Song for the Day,” and national opinion already seems to be as divided on it as with actual pressing political issues. Alexander has been alternately praised or criticized for her deliberate reading style and unadorned language. (Video here.)
Entertainment Weekly’s website features an online forum of reactions to the poem, and the Time Magazine site has a short Q & A with Alexander who spoke about her creative process. Salon.com featured an interesting story about Alexander’s particular challenge in crafting an “occasional poem” and the place of poetry in our political history.
I thought the poem really gathered momentum toward its moving conclusion. Alexander’s measured reading of it in front of a crowd at least a million strong provided a moment of reflection almost as beautiful as the version of “Simple Gifts” played by the all-star classical quartet a few minutes earlier.
Still, perhaps my favorite moment of the inaugural festivities was wheelchair-bound former Vice President Cheney’s unfortunate homage to Dr. Strangelove.
Inaugural Poetry
Despite Robert Frost’s memorable reading at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, the tradition of Presidential inauguration poetry is an intermittent one. On a bright and windy day, the 86-year-old Frost was unable to read the poorly typed copy of a new poem entitled “Dedication” he had composed for the occasion. Instead, as he previously agreed with Kennedy, he recited from memory his poem “The Gift Outright,” composed during the Depression and described by the poet as “a history of the United States in a dozen lines of blank verse.”
Kennedy even suggested a slight edit to the poem’s last line. The original poem’s conclusion reads, “Such as she was, such as she would become,” but in a nod to the occasion’s sense of promise and optimism, Frost read it according to Kennedy’s preferred, “such as she will become.”
Thirty-one years later Bill Clinton asked Maya Angelou to read a poem at his inaugural ceremony, and her newly composed work “On the Pulse of the Morning” brought its celebrated author to national prominence 24 years after the publishing of her memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
Clinton’s second inaugural featured Arkansas poet Miller Williams, whose “Of History and Hope” was a call to its listeners to challenge ignorance and disenfranchisement.
Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony will feature Elizabeth Alexander, an award-winning poet and Yale professor who worked with Obama at the University of Chicago. She is the daughter of the first African-American Secretary of the Army, Clifford Alexander, who was also a civil rights advisor to President Lyndon Johnson.
Ms. Alexander has spoken of her memories of being present on the Mall in D.C. as a small child along with her family to listen to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. As only the fourth poet to read at a Presidential inauguration, Alexander joins an elite company of writers who have sought to challenge the national audience and transcend the political struggles of the moment with their work.
As fellow poet Calvin Trillin has suggested, “It’s more appropriate to have a poem than a prayer” at a Presidential inauguration.
Martin Luther King Biographies
A few years ago after watching a TV documentary about Martin Luther King I looked for a good biography to learn more about his life. The three-volume work by Taylor Branch, America in the King Years, is a comprehensively massive set that has garnered near universal praise, and its broad scope considers the entire civil rights movement along with the life of its most prominent leader. Michael Eric Dyson’s I May Not Get There with You argues for Dr. King’s continuing influence on American life while presenting the flawed, radical, often misunderstood individual at the core of the historical icon.
One of the very best books I found on Dr. King came from the excellent “Penguin Lives” series of short biographies. Acclaimed civil rights journalist and biographer Marshall Frady presents a brief but eloquent study of Dr. King that touches on critical details of his life while also considering the broad scope of his movement and influence.
Frady’s biography describes Dr. King’s emergence from a withdrawn, insecure childhood into the complicated, massively inspiring figure at the center of the civil rights movement. The biography touches on the frustrations and difficulties of Dr. King’s mission as well as its triumphs and the contradictory political and personal struggles he endured in the name of justice.
The “Penguin Lives” series is an excellent resource for short, well-written biographies of compelling historical figures. An all-star list of biographers has been enlisted and thoughtfully paired with fascinating subjects, as in novelist Larry McMurtry’s biography of Crazy Horse and brilliant war historian John Keegan’s study of Winston Churchill.
One of my favorites is southern novelist Bobbie Ann Mason’s lyrical, moving biography of Elvis Presley, in which the author describes his influence and tragic life from the empathetic viewpoint of a fellow southerner. Mason instinctively understands her subject’s motivations and demons, and she portrays both the pride and the sadness of a fan who carefully considered the arc of his amazing life.
Most of the “Penguin Lives” books are around 200 pages and combine compelling and readable writing with thoughtful considerations of historical figures. The fresh reevaluations brought by the authors, many of whom usually write in genres other than biography, make for a fascinating series and a great starting point for deeper research.
If the World Were a Village
All kinds of treasures can be found in the children’s book section. Plenty of juvenile fiction is at least as compelling as the “adult” variety, non-fiction selections can often do at least as comprehensive a job of explaining complex subjects as Wikipedia, and all the large fonts and pictures can make even slow readers like myself feel like speedy geniuses knocking out whole books in an hour or less.
I recently came across a fascinating title in the children’s section that genuinely changed the way I look at the entire world. If the World Were a Village, by David J. Smith and Shelagh Armstrong, presents a vast array of demographic statistics in beautifully simplified form, proceeding from the premise of considering the world’s population as if it were a village of 100 people.
Scaling down the almost unimaginable (even for adults) numbers of billions of the Earth’s people to a manageable size, the book presents a imaginary village in which each of its 100 people would represent about 62 million people from the real world. Beautiful illustrations accompany each page of descriptions of the village’s nationalities, languages, religions, resources, and other interesting statistics.
This innovative way of looking at the world reveals some striking facts along the way. Of the global village’s 100 people, 61 are from Asia, and only 5 are from the United States or Canada. Only 24 of the 100 villagers always have enough to eat, while 26 are severely undernourished. In 1900, only 32 people lived in the village, but by 2050 there could be nearly 200 people.
A short epilogue aimed at parents and other adult readers suggests ways of using the book to illustrate connections among the world’s cultures. The book’s website features follow-up statistics and exercises, and a related DVD is also available.
If the World Were a Village is a great tool for expanding young readers’ minds about the larger world, and it’s sure to encourage further investigations into geography, social studies, and civics. It’s certainly eye-opening for readers of any age to consider a village in which 17 out of the 100 of us cannot read at all.
Oklahoma’s Greatest Book Event
The greatest annual book event in Oklahoma is right around the corner. On the last weekend in February, the Friends of the Metropolitan Library System hold one of the largest used book sales in the country at the Oklahoma State Fairgrounds, and this year’s event promises to be one of the biggest yet.
The Friends of the Library gather donated books, magazines, audiobooks, and videos year-round at their massively stuffed warehouse, and hundreds of thousands of these items are sold, mostly for $1.00 or less, with the profits supporting library services and programs around Oklahoma County.
The book sale is a truly amazing scene — otherwise mild-mannered citizens gather the largest wheeled implements that can be rolled into the Fairgrounds’ “Oklahoma Expo” building and set about filling up their baby carriages, wheelbarrows, and ”Big Blue” trash recepticles with $0.50 paperbacks and $1.00 hardcovers. A special “Collector’s Choice” section features slightly more expensive items, but excellent titles are available at the regular unbeatable prices in every conceivable genre.
The literary treasures available to book-lovers are so vast that for the past two years my wife has forbidden me to attend this all-you-can-grab book smorgasbord as we’ve run out of shelves at home on which to store them. (If anyone knows of a used bookcase sale, please contact Bookmarking Blog Headquarters immediately.) It’s also interesting to check out the array of different state license plates in the parking lot, as booksale tourists from all over the country converge on this massive event.
Admission on February 21 and 22 is free, but a special bonus is available to any of the thousand or so volunteers who help put together this gigantic book extravaganza. On Friday night, February 20, a special pre-sale party is opened to volunteers and Friends members to comb through the unbelievable wealth of great books and other items for sale. Memberships and volunteer applications are conveniently available on the Friends’ website.
I might even make it back to the booksale this time after my two-year disciplinary suspension, having vowed to only buy one book for every two I donate to the sale. Sadly, the wife isn’t nearly as interested as I am in the revolutionary “let’s use stacks of books as end tables!” interior decorating scheme I have long been perfecting.
Libraries and the Economy
There was a really interesting episode of NPR’s “The Diane Rehm Show” this week focusing on the role of public libraries in economic hard times. Guests included present and former presidents of the American Library Association who discussed the often overlooked role libraries play in the economic development of communities.
The guests pointed out to an occasionally surprised host how public libraries are an extremely valuable investment for communities, especially during an economic downturn. Libraries offer great resume and job application help in addition to computer databases for job-hunters, and many libraries around the country are offering free or cut-rate computer skills classes and workshops for displaced workers.
Libraries’ traditional role as a resource for children is especially important for parents whose own resources are stretched thin. A fantastic variety of children’s services and programming are available at Oklahoma County’s 17 Metropolitan Library locations, in addition to the one eternal, unbeatable function of the library: free entertainment for budget-conscious citizens of all ages. In addition to a book collection that easily rivals Barnes & Noble or Borders, the selection of movies and music can make it fairly difficult to stay under the library card’s limit of 30 items at a time.
As the OkieReads blog pointed out, several other media outlets have recently noted increased library usage nationwide.
MSNBC reported on a major upswing in library card applications, and they note that the American Library Association has found the number of library users increasing even more during the current downturn than in previous economic hard times.
Newspapers around the country, like the Charlotte Observer and the San Francisco Chronicle, are noticing this trend as well. They have also reported how the same economic and budget pressures that increase library usage are simultaneously threatening library funding across the country. This week the municipal government of Philadelphia has been involved in a court fight over closing 11 branches due to budget pressures.
Oklahoma City is lucky to have a terrific library system to serve its growing community, but budget issues are a constant worry when communities are looking for places to cut costs. There are several ways to help support our library system, but the best way is just to use the library whenever you can. It’s hard to beat the price, after all, if only the ten-cent-per-day overdue fines can be kept to a minimum.
