After two and half years of sore eyes, carpal tunnel, and a perpetually distracted look on my face, I've finally received my MFA. Aside from the usual glee that accompanies this kind of accomplishment, I felt an overwhelming sense of freedom and joy when it dawned on me that my reading habits would never again be ruled by the requirements of an academic program or the whims my faculty advisors.
Weeeeeeeeeeee!!!! [For the uninitiated, that's the sound you make when you're being pushed very high on a swing, or sledding very fast down a hill.]
I really missed kids' books. In the last six months of my program I rarely had time to crack open a young adult novel, and when I did crack one open, I usually never got beyond the first fifty pages. It became something of a joke on the kids' team. After enthusiastically recommending a title to a customer, a coworker would ask, "Did you actually read that book?" And my answer was inevitably, "Well, I started it..."
My yoga teacher, Anne, used a great book analogy in class the other day. She said (approximately), "In yoga you have to show up and do the work, otherwise there's no progress. It's like buying a book and feeling as though you've read it because you put it on your shelf. But you haven't read it until you've read it." (I bought this great yoga book the other day, incidentally: Iyengar Yoga by Judy Smith. Great pictures! I swear my Utthita Hastapadangustasana gets better every time I see the model in the pictures doing it.)
It's a simple notion, and I can’t believe I've never realized that I do think about books that way. I work in a job in which I could be asked about any book at any time, and I'll confess: at least a dozen times today I will speak with authority about a book I've never read. Seriously. And not because I intend to fiendishly hoodwink our customers. All booksellers do it ? we must. We soak up information from customers, coworkers, and reviews, and file it all away for future use. We can't possibly read all the books. We can't. (We'd never have time to practice Prasarita Padottanasana, for one thing.)
But that doesn't justify reading only the first fifty pages of every new book we encounter, either. I could have finished several books for all the false starts I had. Anne's point was important: my good intentions would only get me so far. So, with all that guilt mounting, I'm trying to make up for it now.
I recently finished Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, a contemporary retelling of the old Scottish ballad. As an English Lit Geek, I fell in love with this book on the first page. The characters are these uber-literate college kids who quote Shakespeare, Keats, and Pope, who perform Jacobean plays for fun, and who spend more time in the library than drinking and having sex. Suffice it to say, it's a fantasy. It's more or less what I romantically imagined college life would be like when I was a high school senior crawling out of my skin to be done with adolescence. There is a faerie element to the novel, but it doesn't figure largely until the end, so those who don't usually go in for Elvish and Orks will enjoy it too.
Lately nonfiction has been appealing as well. Kathleen Krull writes an excellent biography series called Giants of Science. I picked up Sigmund Freud the other day and it's pretty fantastic. Krull is an incredibly engaging writer ? combining anecdotes, quotes, and trivia ? and the illustrations by Boris Kulikov are wonderfully clever. She approaches touchy issues (like Freud's treatment of women) with aplomb, but never sugar-coats the facts (there's a chapter called, "Why Cocaine?" for example).
Karen introduced me to another really spectacular non-fiction series. The Groundwork Guides are unlike other books for young readers in that they explicitly take a subjective stance on a current topic of discussion. For example, Climate Change by Shelly Tanaka, takes the position that global warming is real and that human activities are largely to blame (whereas some children's books present other positions in the debate as well). Genocide, Empire, and Being Muslim are other books in the series. While they aren't flashy, they are well-written and researched, and I actually think that adults will find them great introductions to topics about which we hear so much in the media, but probably know less than we think.
I'm pretty excited about a book that's coming out soon, too. Janet Lee Carey stopped by in December to sign copies of Beast of Noor and left us with an advance copy of Dragon's Keep. Personally, I can't wait for this one to come out. I'll have something new to recommend to the Eragon fans that 1) is well-written (because, let's face it, popularity does not always equal quality), and 2) has a female protagonist. What I love about Carey's books is the sense that she has read and absorbed all kinds of mythology and folklore, and that her underlying knowledge of those older stories imbues her novels with authority and familiarity. The emotional depth of her characters is also impressive ? an element that I think is often overlooked in children's fantasy. She's a phenomenal storyteller. (And hey, you can preorder this one, folks ? that’s not just something we do for Harry.)
One last thing: if you're not into kids' books right now, I highly recommend Vendela Vida's Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name; it is crazy beautiful.