About the blog name: "Gently Hew Stone" is a pun on the author's name. Michelangelo said that while carving his statue of David, he envisioned the finished statue inside the block of raw marble and just chiseled away the pieces that weren't part of it. Writing this blog is like that: I picture myself sitting before a hunk of raw possibilities with this keyboard as my chisel, and my labor of love is to reveal the beautiful ideas inside, to hone it to perfection by peeling away layers of ordinary thought and, ultimately, to bring to light the masterpieces just below the surface of it all.
A couple of weeks ago I woke up and the first thing I thought about was Thomas Foster’s How To Read Literature Like a Professor. Now, I had heard of this book and seen a copy when it came out in 2003, but hadn’t actually read it, or even thought about it since then.
Who knows why neurons run around the way they do, or what makes certain synapses fire in any particular way? I’ll never know what was going on in that blob of gray matter in my skull that morning that made it call to attention first thing upon awaking the title of an obscure book that I’d only tangentially encountered several years before.
For whatever reason it happened, I found the thought strong and portentous enough to pick up a copy at the library.
I enjoyed it even more than I thought I would, finding Foster’s explication of basic analytical tools phrased casually, but with enough clarity and examples to make it very useful. My pride would like to say that I already knew everything that Foster pointed out, but the truth is that I learned a lot. Though I did think of a lot of examples besides the ones he used, I discovered new approaches to favorite works (Joyce is one of his primary touchstones) and was introduced to works both classic and contemporary that I haven’t read yet, but now want to put on my to-do list.
The chapters are all very short, and the first several are just to establish the biggest, most foundational aspects of narrative—quests, communion, etc. As the book continues, he gives us simple, useful definitions for a couple of dozen literary devices, all accompanied by a few pitch-perfect examples, and all told in a friendly style that neither irritates with excessive “cuteness,” nor bores with pedantry. Every so often, Foster throws out a pop culture reference or a slangy joke, but he doesn’t point neon signs at them, and he smoothly segues back into business. He keeps the pace brisk and the tone breezy, yet still manages to include heaping helpings of trivia and typical English department jargon (the book ends with a fun little section called “envoi,” which he defines and then proceeds to give us a cheerful modern example, of his own creation). All is as it should be.
Yes, this should be required reading for all book clubs and lit. majors, but it should really be enjoyed by everyone who enjoys reading and wants to get as much out of it as possible. Foster’s guide to analyzing literature is a success in every way a reader would want it to be.
Fair notice: I intend to steal some bits from the “test case” chapter for my own classes!
Two chapters near the end of Jeff Shaara’s historical novel Rise To Rebellion focus on Thomas Paine’s incendiary pamphlet Common Sense. Shaara even includes a handful of choice quotes from Paine, making sure the reader understands that Paine was the common man’s advocate for independence, as opposed to the sincere but often elite (and therefore sometimes out of touch) leaders at the Continental Congress. It was Paine’s words more than those of Adams or Henry or Hancock or Franklin that won over the Americans to the cause of revolution.
Is it a coincidence that I read Shaara’s novel at the same time that I read Glenn Beck’s attempt to update Paine’s pamphlet? Either way, the contrast proved useful.
Shaara’s Rise To Rebellion is the best historical novel I’ve ever read. He begins with the Boston Massacre and takes us through the lives, hearts, families, struggles, and triumphs of our Founding Fathers over the course of the subsequent six years, ending with the Declaration of Independence. He makes Franklin and Adams his protagonists, and suavely works in tons of trivia, as well as bringing to vivid, three-dimensional life the human stories that made their achievements even more awesome.
Here we see John and Abigail Adams trying to squeeze out a bare living as they raise a young family and maintain a loving marriage–it doesn’t help matters that John soon finds himself thrust into the middle of controversy, as he grows increasingly strong in his convictions over time.
Here we see Franklin as he tries to manage the office politics of England, at the cost of his own family relationships. He has much to regret despite his fame and fortune, and the chapters near the end where the emotional break between he and his loyalist son are laid bare are genuinely heartbreaking.
Last summer we started a new ritual: each summer, we would choose a book for all of us to read each month. I got the idea for this because my oldest kids are too old now for our old habit of family story times to be regular any more. This helps takes the place of that. We’d have someone take a turn picking a book as each month started, scrounge up several copies from local libraries, and have a discussion at the end of the month.
Last year I just picked the books, and we only got to do two: John Steinbeck’s The Pearl and Esther Forbes’s Johnny Tremain. Everybody liked The Pearl, but we loved Johnny Tremain. It was an amazing story about a boy’s coming of age during the Revolutionary War. Seriously, why don’t schools make kids read that one anymore?
This year we did three books. Here’s how they went:
In June, my oldest daughter picked The Westing Game, a Newberry Medal-winning mystery that she’d read at school and loved. We all thought it was excellent. It was an extremely clever little puzzle book, well written and full of surprises, not the least of which are its many realistic, humane characters, and in a story appropriate for any young child! I figured out some of the book’s puzzles, but a couple went right by me. Here’s a hint for future readers: pay attention for compass directions.
In July, my oldest son chose The 13th Reality: The Journal of Curious Letters. We all enjoy fantasy, so this was a good fit. It was another wholesome story, with strong characters that you care about, and as much fun and excitement as any novel can have. My favorite part was that the hero’s father–usually absent or a problem in most children’s literature–was a normal, helpful, decent guy here, who even understood and supported his son in his adventure. Very nice!
In August, my wife picked Orson Scott Card’s The Memory of Earth, the first book in his science fiction Homecoming series. She’d had some other books by Card in mind, and wanted something with spiritual tones to it, but also something that would interest the kids. To their credit, they figured out the parallel with the plot of the Book of Mormon very quickly. Our discussion focused on comparing and contrasting the two, and how well Card’s story did or didn’t work in that context. I, for one, just liked the inclusion of a pack animal called “kurelomi” in chapter two. Clever, Orson.
The Huston family summer book club is hereby adjourned until next June.
I picked up Midnight from a library shelf a couple years ago at random and absolutely loved it. I’ve started a couple of other Dean Koontz books since then, but nothing has been nearly as good, and I haven’t bothered finishing them. But I decided to end my summer with a fun, easy, puffball of a book, and I picked up Watchers.
Koontz is not a very good writer, but he is a terrific storyteller. (I cringe every time he flaunts the word “preternaturally” as an all purpose spooky adjective–as he did twice in this book–and I pretend he’s doing it on purpose when his characters converse in speeches more stilted than in an old Disney movie. Still, he knows how to pace a plot, that’s for sure.)
I liked Watchers. Like Midnight, there is suspense and even violence, but it rarely punches below the belt and always affirms individual dignity and even glory, and does so in a very traditional, and often outright spiritual, context. Despite the menacing cover, the title is not referring (as I first assumed) to some voyeuristic spies that the good guys must overcome with their open, honest virtue. No, the title actually refers directly to those Apollonian protagonists themselves: at one emotional point near the end, a character says, “We have a responsibility to stand watch over one another, we are watchers, all of us, watchers, guardians against the darkness.”
Yes, Dean Koontz is the novelistic equivalent of Thomas Kinkade as a painter–much glossy romanticizing in an idealized world (though to make the analogy more apt, Kinkade’s quaint village cottages would have to also be under assault by genetically enhanced killers produced by shadowy collectivist governments who are ultimately dispatched by a sympathetic band of rugged, clean-shaven regular joes who come together to weather the storm)–but so what? I like Thomas Kinkade paintings, too. Kinkade and Koontz make pleasant places.
You know how you always look forward to time off, and make grandiose plans for sucking the marrow out of every second, and then when the time finally comes you invariably squander it? I do that constantly, but summer is the worst. This year I decided to break down some of my larger goals and focus on making small progress on some of them.
On May 22, I wrote a list of 27 things to do this summer. I gave myself until the last day before I would go back to work–August 18–to do them. Now, two of them were very poorly planned, so I really had 25 things to do.
Out of those 25, I did 6. A few others were close or in progress, but only 6 can be confidently checked off.
Still, sadly, that makes this my most productive summer ever.
When I teach grammar, I try to come up with attention-grabbing example sentences. The ones that come in textbooks are notoriously dull (“The person went to the place to get the thing.”), so I want to juice it up a bit and inject a bit of my trademarked brand of life into what most folks see as a dreadfully lame subject.
Here are two examples of standard favorites in my classes:
I kicked the freshman.
“Freshman” receives the action of the verb “kicked,” so it is the direct object.
I threw Paris Hilton a live grenade.
What did I actually throw? Paris Hilton? Good gravy, no. That would require touching her. No, I threw a grenade. That makes “grenade” the direct object. Paris Hilton received the direct object, making her the indirect object. And, hopefully, soon to be an irritating, repressed memory.
This demonstration shares a bit of the twisted humor of Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s classic grammar “textbook,” The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: The Ultimate Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed. Gordon’s approach is to present clear, sprightly explications of general grammatical matters with examples that tend to be about supernatural, nocturnal creatures interacting in the prosaic lives of hapless mortals of a dizzying variety of idiosyncratic bents. (The book never makes this explicit, but I suppose the title character is meant to represent the fact that a transitive verb, like a vampire, only functions when it has an object upon which to act. Cute, yes?)
I labor intensively, ripping asunder the very dendrites of my brain in Herculean attempts to come up with more than few clever example sentences in class; Gordon has filled an entire book where every page presents at least a few laugh-out-loud such sentences.
Examples:
The robot designated the dentist his partner.
There are five more cupcakes than we have frosting for; I’ll leave them for that loner by the river.
Sophie, abandoning her rented canoe, exchanges pleasantries in the shade with a newt.
It’s been a year since I read this review in City Journal of Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow’s 1970 masterpiece, Mr. Sammler’s Planet. That’s how long something has to stand in line when it gets onto my to do list.
This young curmudgeon loved every page. The City Journal review lauds it largely for its precision in describing the squalid conditions of late-60’s/early 70’s New York City. The first chapter, especially, is a delicately, surgically rendered reproduction of a previously fine world that’s fraying, splitting, flying to pieces.
After about fifty pages I regretted reading a library copy and not buying it, because almost every page had these exquisitely quotable axioms about life that seemed like natural landmarks. I wanted to underline them and keep them. They belong in a museum. Here’s just one: “Perhaps when people are so desperately impotent they play that instrument, the personality, louder and wilder.” Yes.
This is also the most literate, philosophical book I’ve ever read. Usages of classic literature appear almost as frequently as the word “the.” Not just references–usages. No name dropping, but elements of everything from Norse mythology to Ulysses integrated into the text, gorgeously.
Lamentably, I confess that at first glance none of them even seemed familiar to me. A second look, though, brought one spark of recognition: Anzia Yezierska’s The Bread Givers. It was assigned to me in a college freshman history seminar. As I recall, I really liked it. All I remember right now is a scene where the protagonist, an ambitious, talented young woman, the daughter of Jewish immigrants, shocks and offends her family when she refuses to tear her expensive work clothes as a sign of mourning when her father dies. No, wait, just as I typed that I remembered something else: when she fails a college class, she demands a refund of her tuition. I liked that.
So if the rest of the books on this list are that good, they’ll have to queue up on the to do list. And I’ll have to check out that Neglected Books site some more.
For some reason, I was recently in the mood for a murder mystery. I don’t know, maybe it was just that it’s one of the few genres I haven’t done yet this year. At any rate, the best murder mysteries, as everyone knows, are written by British women. Thus, I picked up P.D. James’s Death In Holy Orders. I knew James from reading The Children of Men a few years ago when it was made into a movie. (Incidentally, I highly recommend that book–her vision of a globally infertile future and the combination of ennui and hedonism it breeds is eerily prophetic. Sadly, in real life, we’ve voluntarily gone the way of the demographic death spiral. But I digress…)
I was attracted to this one because the murder and investigation in question take place at a small, rural Anglican college. I’ve always liked reading about the Catholic-oriented priesthoods. The scholarship, the history, the tradition, the rigor and discipline–very cool to me. Don’t even get me started on how awesome Jesuits are. Anyway, as expected, James did her research and wrote very approvingly of her setting.
Her style is never dazzling, but I love reading the prose of an older, refined woman who isn’t afraid to pepper her story with the occasional “anodyne” or “genuflected” (both of which stood out to me as I read). The downside of this, though, is that she seems overly fond of the word “discordant,” using it frequently in the first half of the book, sometimes within a few pages or even paragraphs of each other. Why didn’t an editor catch that?
But we didn’t come to this party for the decorations, we came for the games, and James delivers. She manages to introduce and develop a surprisingly large cast of main and supporting characters in the little space of St. Anselm’s. I appreciated that she doesn’t tease or condescend towards the reader–she’ll devote an entire chapter to mundane police procedure when it’s realistic, and she never tries to convince you that one guy is the killer when really you know that it’s too soon in the story for that to come out (this isn’t Law and Order, after all). To the contrary, when the real killer is found, there’s no shocking last minute revelation, a la Agatha Christie. Our detective hero carefully tracks down the last few clues over the last few chapters, by which time we’ve all been fairly well convinced who the killer is. And we’re right!
Don’t let that make you think the whole thing is linear or predictable. Oh, no, not at all. Over the course of the book’s four deaths, we find that they’re connected, but not in any easy way that we might guess at.
Death In Holy Orders is a satisfying British crime story that combines quiet, pleasant narration to a refreshingly well-rounded and dignified narrative.
But that rapturous theological college, with its green grounds, ancient art, classes in Greek and dinner readings from Trollope…maybe I did come to this party for the decorations, after all.
This little biography is no encyclopedia entry on James Joyce, no dry recitation of the vital statistics, listing facts and just getting the job done. Irish writer Edna O’Brien loves James Joyce, may well be in love with him, and that worshipful adoration shines on every page of her story of his life.
O’Brien frequently quotes critics of Joyce’s, then skewers their interpretations with the defensiveness of a mother bear protecting her cub. This emotionally invested element is part of what makes James Joyce such a refreshing work.
The other major factor in its success is O’Brien’s writing: she’s no mere dispassionate acolyte, but a full-blown disciple. Her style is fiercely tempered in the crucible of her master. O’Brien’s prose is a gorgeous, flowing fountain of wordplay, a worthy tribute to Joyce and the only truly appropriate vehicle for telling his story. Though she rarely quotes him directly, she alludes to his language often, weaving it into the fabric of her own tapestry.
Consider this bit of O’Brien, waxing poetic about Joyce’s composition:
to grind up words in order to extract their substance, or to graft one on to another to create crossbreeds and unknown variations, to marry sounds which were not usually joined; assembling and dissembling, forever.
My 10-year-old son recently had a book project to do for school on a fantasy novel he’d just read: Hilari Bell’s Fall of a Kingdom. He really loved it, and he wanted to do something special. He came up with this video idea, wrote out the dialogue, and staged it. I just held the camera.
The first half is supposed to communicate that the book is so engrossing that you’ll be oblivious to everything around you, you’ll be so absorbed. The second half is his actual report, with a good dose of silliness. He and I share the same sense of humor; why a flying monkey? Why not? Everything’s better with a flying monkey in it.
When Olive Kitteridge won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction a few weeks ago, a colleague reminded me that some of her AP students had recently gotten to have a luncheon with author Elizabeth Strout and talk to her about her book. I’m told that the students’ primary question was why her book was so depressing, and that Strout retorted that her book wasn’t depressing, but realistic.
With that personal connection in mind, I read Olive Kitteridge. Strout is right: the book isn’t depressing. But it is plain, ordinary, and underwhelming.
Olive Kitteridge’s closest kin in the American literature canon is Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio; each is a collection of related short stories, which taken together form a mosaic of a town and offer several perspectives on a principal protagonist, in Anderson’s case, Joe Welling, in Strout’s, the eponymous Olive Kitteridge. In that sense, the novel also bears a resemblance to another, more recent work with this same conceit, David Shickler’s excellent (and superior) Kissing in Manhattan.
Anthologies of short stories typically don’t sell well, and most authors avoid them. The copyright page for Olive Kitteridge shows that many of its chapters were published alone over more than a decade. This feeling of discontinuity–or rather, a forced continuity–is apparent throughout. The chapters where Olive isn’t the main character yet she pops up anyway, sometimes only in a throwaway reference, stick out as desperate attempts to make the conceit work. One wonders if older versions of these stories were lightly revised to include Olive’s name just so this could be published as a novel as opposed to the collection of short stories that it is.
Although I was first exposed to Kubrick’s classic film in high school, I was too sleepy/ dumb/ apathetic to pay much attention. Despite that, I was pretty familiar with it, if only because of the ubiquitous references to it in pop culture (I can remember at least a few just from Sesame Street).
A few years ago, I found myself planning for the last day of summer school, where I would spend the first half of the day reviewing and then administering a final exam, and the second half of the day grading it and filling out paperwork. As the students would obviously be done with the course itself after the exam, an extraneous activity was needed to fill the time while I worked. (Technically, administrations are supposed to have us give the exam and grade it during the second half of the last day, while we’re simultaneously supposed to continue doing regular class work with them–an expectation so impossibly ridiculous that nobody anywhere has ever tried to enforce it).
Not being a fan of time-wasting movies, I wanted something calm and cerebral for them to try. Remembering 2001, I checked it out of the library. As long and slow as it is, (and as much as I was trying to focus on my work, which I mercifully finished earlier than I’d expected to), I was dazzled by it, by all of it: the visuals, the music, the ambition of the story’s epic scope. How could such a simple and simply-told movie be so fantastically overwhelming?
Since then, this has been a landmark of art in my mind. Thus it’s not surprising that, eventually, I’d read Arthur C. Clarke’s novel, which he wrote at the same time as he and Kubrick wrote the screenplay.
Short Review: This book is perfect. It is now one of my favorites.
Longer Review: It always bugs me that when people list forms of art, they never put literature near the top of the list, or often won’t include it at all. From now on, whenever anyone fails to recognize the artistic merit of literature, I will use this as my first and last proof.
Madame Bovary is an exquisite masterpiece. After I’d read the first few chapters, I realized that for the rest of the book, I wouldn’t be looking forward to the further unfolding of the plot (which was deft and well executed, but fairly pedestrian–unhappy housewife seeks satisfaction in adultery–so never really captured me), but rather to seeing more of Flaubert’s composition: his prose is some of the finest poetry I’ve ever seen, a bracing achievement of language crafted into its highest possible power.
I was never disappointed. Whenever I found myself daydreaming and not remembering what I’d just read, I went back and read it again, alert, not because I feared that I had missed some important turning point in the story, but because I knew I had missed some elegant phrasing.
Two years ago I was waiting in the drive-thru at a Taco Bell, flipping through the newspaper. I came across a review of a new book called Literacy and Longing In L.A. It was a romance novel, but with a twist: the damsel in dating distress in this story is a bookworm, and she narrates her lovelorn saga with frequent references to things she’s reading.
It sounded interesting, so I picked it up and gave it a whirl. It was, of course, a disaster: every stereotype I’d heard about romance novels was right on the money. It was Sex and the City with literary allusions.
However, in its long list of names that were dropped I found two that I’d never heard of before that genuinely intrigued me. The first was How Proust Can Change Your Life, by Alain de Botton, which I quickly read and thoroughly enjoyed. The other was Iain Pears’ An Instance of the Fingerpost, which looked a little more daunting, so I never dove into it until recently.
And now 2009 has its first perfect ten.
An Instance of the Fingerpost is a massive tome, set against the turmoil of 1660’s England as the monarchy is being reestablished, where four narrators argue that they know who really committed a murder, that of Dr. Grove. Each narrator adds details to that central plot while telling us of his own adventures, each a self-contained novel complete, each in a voice wholly unique and convincing. Think Rashomon, but with cameos by English philosopher John Locke.
A couple of weeks ago I woke up and the first thing I thought about was Thomas Foster’s How To Read Literature Like a Professor. Now, I had heard of this book and seen a copy when it came out in 2003, but hadn’t actually read it, or even thought about it since then. 
Two chapters near the end of Jeff Shaara’s historical novel Rise To Rebellion focus on Thomas Paine’s incendiary pamphlet Common Sense. Shaara even includes a handful of choice quotes from Paine, making sure the reader understands that Paine was the common man’s advocate for independence, as opposed to the sincere but often elite (and therefore sometimes out of touch) leaders at the Continental Congress. It was Paine’s words more than those of Adams or Henry or Hancock or Franklin that won over the Americans to the cause of revolution.
In June, my oldest daughter picked The Westing Game, a Newberry Medal-winning mystery that she’d read at school and loved. We all thought it was excellent. It was an extremely clever little puzzle book, well written and full of surprises, not the least of which are its many realistic, humane characters, and in a story appropriate for any young child! I figured out some of the book’s puzzles, but a couple went right by me. Here’s a hint for future readers: pay attention for compass directions. 
In July, my oldest son chose The 13th Reality: The Journal of Curious Letters. We all enjoy fantasy, so this was a good fit. It was another wholesome story, with strong characters that you care about, and as much fun and excitement as any novel can have. My favorite part was that the hero’s father–usually absent or a problem in most children’s literature–was a normal, helpful, decent guy here, who even understood and supported his son in his adventure. Very nice!
In August, my wife picked Orson Scott Card’s The Memory of Earth, the first book in his science fiction Homecoming series. She’d had some other books by Card in mind, and wanted something with spiritual tones to it, but also something that would interest the kids. To their credit, they figured out the parallel with the plot of the Book of Mormon very quickly. Our discussion focused on comparing and contrasting the two, and how well Card’s story did or didn’t work in that context. I, for one, just liked the inclusion of a pack animal called “kurelomi” in chapter two. Clever, Orson. 
I picked up Midnight from a library shelf a couple years ago at random and absolutely loved it. I’ve started a couple of other Dean Koontz books since then, but nothing has been nearly as good, and I haven’t bothered finishing them. But I decided to end my summer with a fun, easy, puffball of a book, and I picked up Watchers. 
When I teach grammar, I try to come up with attention-grabbing example sentences. The ones that come in textbooks are notoriously dull (“The person went to the place to get the thing.”), so I want to juice it up a bit and inject a bit of my trademarked brand of life into what most folks see as a dreadfully lame subject. 
It’s been a year since I read 
For some reason, I was recently in the mood for a murder mystery. I don’t know, maybe it was just that it’s one of the few genres I haven’t done yet this year. At any rate, the best murder mysteries, as everyone knows, are written by British women. Thus, I picked up P.D. James’s Death In Holy Orders. I knew James from reading The Children of Men a few years ago when it was made into a movie. (Incidentally, I highly recommend that book–her vision of a globally infertile future and the combination of ennui and hedonism it breeds is eerily prophetic. Sadly, in real life, we’ve voluntarily gone the way of the demographic death spiral. But I digress…) 
This little biography is no encyclopedia entry on James Joyce, no dry recitation of the vital statistics, listing facts and just getting the job done. Irish writer Edna O’Brien loves James Joyce, may well be in love with him, and that worshipful adoration shines on every page of her story of his life. 
When Olive Kitteridge won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction a few weeks ago, a colleague reminded me that some of her AP students had recently gotten to have a luncheon with author Elizabeth Strout and talk to her about her book. I’m told that the students’ primary question was why her book was so depressing, and that Strout retorted that her book wasn’t depressing, but realistic. 
Although I was first exposed to Kubrick’s classic film in high school, I was too sleepy/ dumb/ apathetic to pay much attention. Despite that, I was pretty familiar with it, if only because of the ubiquitous references to it in pop culture (I can remember at least a few just from Sesame Street). 
Short Review: This book is perfect. It is now one of my favorites.
Two years ago I was waiting in the drive-thru at a Taco Bell, flipping through the newspaper. I came across a review of a new book called Literacy and Longing In L.A. It was a romance novel, but with a twist: the damsel in dating distress in this story is a bookworm, and she narrates her lovelorn saga with frequent references to things she’s reading. 