Suggestions for Sam

Wrapped Up Books at Auntie Tina's

"Books are the way that
we communicate with the dead."
Neil Gaiman

from his essay:
"Why our future depends on libraries,
reading and daydreaming"

Playing Chess & Daydreaming in Auntie Jan's Library

"I am not solitary whilst I read and write,
though nobody is with me."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

from his essay
"Nature"

Combining these two thoughts, from Gaiman and Emerson, I love the idea that we are not solitary when reading, because we are communicating with the dead!

When my son Sam asked for some reading recommendations to have on hand, here is the initial batch of titles that immediately sprang to mind:

Take the Cannoli (part memoir, about growing up in the Midwest: Oklahoma, Montana, then Chicago; part American History, tons of wit)
The Partly Cloudy Patriot (how to love the United States of America, even when you're feeling sad and worried)
Assassination Vacation (about Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley)
All three by Sarah Vowell
(see American Historians)

Washington Schlepped Here: Walking in the Nation's Capital
by Christopher Buckley
Perfect for airplane reading if you're on your way to Wash DC, or perhaps as a follow - up to your trip. I read it in just a couple days and learned a lot of U.S. history, even though Buckley couldn't resist bragging about being a Republican (after all, he is the son of the late Wm F Buckley, Jr.), plus the occasional sexist innuendo that I could have done without.
(see Highlights 2003)

Mythology
by Edith Hamilton
(see SSR)

Playing for Pizza
by John Grisham
An American / Italian football novel. In addition to detailed play by play narratives of the game, it is also filled with mouth - watering descriptions of gourmet dining that will have you planning your next vacation to Italy if at all possible.
(see Thanks Dave)

The Last Picture Show
by Larry McMurtry
One of the saddest lines in all of American literature: "He was sweeping . . ."
(also the movie)

And the following from my long-standing
ECLECTIC COURSE OF MUST READS:

Bright Lights, Big City
Brightness Falls
both by Jay McInerney

The Little Prince
by Antoine de Saint Exupery

Summer’s Lease
by John Mortimer

The Daughter of Time
by Josephine Tey

Sam, here is a close - up of the chess board:

P.S. January 2020

"Tolstoy thought well of you
– he believed that his own notions
about life here on earth would be
discernible to you, and would move you.

"Tolstoy imagined you generously,
you rose to the occasion."
~ George Saunders ~

Reading Charm

My Favorite Earring

"What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic. . . .

"Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries."

by Visionary American Scientist, Carl Sagan (1934 - 96)
from his book Cosmos
in Chapter 11: "The Persistence of Memory," pp 295, 297

**************

See also
Neil Gaiman & George Saunders

And of course,
Emily Dickinson:

There is no frigate
like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers
like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may
the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!

Emily Dickinson
American Poet
1830 - 1886

Tolstoy Imagined You

Leo Tolstoy in His Study, 1891
by Ilya Repin, 1844 - 1930

"Tolstoy thought well of you
– he believed that his own notions
about life here on earth would be
discernible to you, and would move you.

"Tolstoy imagined you generously,
you rose to the occasion."
~ George Saunders ~

*************

"Books are the way that we communicate with the dead.
The way that we learn lessons
from those who are no longer with us . . ."
~ Neil Gaiman ~

*************

Nikita:“The thought that he might, and very probably would die that night occurred to him, but did not seem particularly unpleasant or dreadful. It did not seem particularly unpleasant, because his whole life had been not a continual holiday, but on the contrary an unceasing round of toil of which he was beginning to feel weary. And it did not seem particularly dreadful . . .

Vasili: “'I'm coming!' he cried joyfully, and that cry awoke him, but woke him up not at all the same person he had been when he fell asleep. He tried to get up but could not, tried to move his arm and could not, to move his leg and also could not, to turn his head and could not. He was surprised but not at all disturbed by this. He understood that this was death, and was not at all disturbed by that either.”

~ Leo Tolstoy ~
"Master and Man"

*************
George Saunders:
from What writers really do when they write

4
What does an artist do, mostly? She tweaks that which she’s already done. There are those moments when we sit before a blank page, but mostly we’re adjusting that which is already there. The writer revises, the painter touches up, the director edits, the musician overdubs. I write, “Jane came into the room and sat down on the blue couch,” read that, wince, cross out “came into the room” and “down” and “blue” (Why does she have to come into the room? Can someone sit UP on a couch? Why do we care if it’s blue?) and the sentence becomes “Jane sat on the couch – ” and suddenly, it’s better (Hemingwayesque, even!), although … why is it meaningful for Jane to sit on a couch? Do we really need that? And soon we have arrived, simply, at “Jane”, which at least doesn’t suck, and has the virtue of brevity.

But why did I make those changes? On what basis?

On the basis that, if it’s better this new way for me, over here, now, it will be better for you, later, over there, when you read it. When I pull on this rope here, you lurch forward over there.

This is a hopeful notion, because it implies that our minds are built on common architecture – that whatever is present in me might also be present in you. “I” might be a 19th-century Russian count, “you” a part-time Walmart clerk in 2017, in Boise, Idaho, but when you start crying at the end of my (Tolstoy’s) story “Master and Man,” you have proved that we have something in common, communicable across language and miles and time, and despite the fact that one of us is dead.

Another reason you’re crying: you’ve just realised that Tolstoy thought well of you – he believed that his own notions about life here on earth would be discernible to you, and would move you.

Tolstoy imagined you generously, you rose to the occasion. [emphasis added]

We often think that the empathetic function in fiction is accomplished via the writer’s relation to his characters, but it’s also accomplished via the writer’s relation to his reader. You make a rarefied place (rarefied in language, in form; perfected in many inarticulable beauties – the way two scenes abut; a certain formal device that self-escalates; the perfect place at which a chapter cuts off); and then welcome the reader in. She can’t believe that you believe in her that much; that you are so confident that the subtle nuances of the place will speak to her; she is flattered. And they do speak to her. This mode of revision, then, is ultimately about imagining that your reader is as humane, bright, witty, experienced and well intentioned as you, and that, to communicate intimately with her, you have to maintain the state, through revision, of generously imagining her. You revise your reader up, in your imagination, with every pass. You keep saying to yourself: “No, she’s smarter than that. Don’t dishonour her with that lazy prose or that easy notion.”

And in revising your reader up, you revise yourself up too.

*************
I'm guessing that when George Saunders envisions the authors of the past "thinking well of us and imagining us generously," he means the same thing as Marilynne Robinson when she says that the best teachers and poets help us "to assume our humanity."

I have long had a certain shelf of books, not organized by alphabet or genre but grouped together by a sense of specialness that I could never define very accurately until I encountered the words of Robinson and Saunders. Now I can see that the unifying element of these titles is the way in which each has helped me over the years "to assume my humanity." Thanks to Saunders for the profound realization that, in one way or another, across time and distance, these authors "have imagined me generously and I have risen to the occasion."

Here is a partial list,
with some obvious overlap to previous lists & posts,
such as the Must Reads & the Not Too Lates & Does Nanny...?:
It seems only fair to begin with
Home and Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Coming of Age
The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger
The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man - in - the - Moon Marigolds, Paul Zindel

Loose Change, Sara Davidson
How to Save Your Own Life, Erica Jong
Memoirs of an Ex - Prom Queen, Alix Kates Schulman

Last summer (2019) I re-read Davidson, Jong, and Schumann for old time's sake. Wow, did that ever bring back the 1970s! Most interesting, it came to my attention that two passages that I have been ascribing to Erica Jong for the past 40 years actually come straight from Alix Kates Schulman:

"My life looked like a repeating decimal." (122)

Frank: "I'm due at the library now, but I'll be back later. Please excuse me."
Sasha: ". . . he embarrassed me so. Due at the library! -- like an important book." (183)

Cute But Deep
Love, Loss, And What I Wore [and all the rest], Ilene ~ Beckerman
The Tao of Pooh & The Tee of Piglet, Benjamin Hoff
Talk to the Hand, Lynne Truss

Later Coming of Age
It's Called A Breakup Because It's Broken
& He's Just Not That Into You, Greg Behrendt & Liz Tuccillo
Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, Ariel Levy
The Fat Girl's Guide to Life, Wendy Shanker
Girl With Glasses, Marissa Walsh

Fiction & Memoir
84 Charing Cross Road & Q's Legacy, Helene Hanff
The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
A Walk to the Hills of the Dreamtime, James Vance Marshall
Edwin Mullhouse, Steven Millhauser

Peace or Light?
The Master & Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
The Gospel According to the Son, Norman Mailer
The Greatest Salesman in the World, Og Mandino
God: A Biography, Jack Miles
Another Roadside Attraction & Still Life With Woodpecker, Tom Robbins
Our Lady of the Lost and Found, Diane Schoemperlen
Candide, Voltaire
from Expecting Adam
by Martha Beck
"I did, at long last, realize that it didn't really matter
what anyone else's opinion of my decision might be.
What mattered was that I had made a choice that felt as though,
in the end, it would bring me to the place I needed to go."