Education and Creativity--From TED

The World According to My Books

I was halfway through a new blog column (on the subject of the role of the arts in education, following on Mr. Obama's renewed push for a focus on science and mathematics), when a friend of mine sent me this "quiz."  I found myself intrigued; what one reads, it seems to me--and more, what one loves to read--can be quite telling.  So I thought I'd give this a crack for a more light-hearted change.  Thanks to Jen at Corrodentia Weekly for the tip!

 

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"Book Maven" Quiz

You have received this note because someone thinks you are a literary maven. Copy the questions into your own note, answer the questions, and tag any friends who would appreciate the quiz, including the person who sent you this.

1) Which author is most thoroughly represented in your personal collection?  How many of his or her books do you own?

That would have to be Agatha Christie.  I own all of her books--murder mysteries, plays, short stories, and her Autobiography; I also own all of her books written under other names:  a second autobiographical work written under the name of Agatha Christie Mallowan (the story of her life with her second husband), and six novels written under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott.  Mrs. Christie chose a pseudonym for that work because she was concerned that readers might be mislead.  These novels are psychological studies, not murder mysteries, and rather than trade on her reputation and disappoint readers who were looking for more mystery, she chose to present herself as an unknown writer.  This seems to me to have been an honorable pursuit.  One of those books, Absent in the Spring, is a quite brilliant study of what might happen inside the mind of  even a very self-absorbed, self-delusional person who was suddenly stranded for several days without another soul to talk to. 

 

Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple are Agatha Christie's most famous detectives, but my favorite books have always been some of the others--those featuring detectives who only appeared once or twice, and who often weren't actual detectives, just regular people who got caught up in extraordinary situations.  (Very reminiscent, now that I think of it, of the heroes in the books of the author who would be second on the list for this question:  Dick Francis.)  My favorite Christies include:  The Man in the Brown Suit, Why Didn't They Ask Evans?, Murder on the Links, Murder in Retrospect, and Toward Zero. Not a comprehensive list, of course.  Altogether, I own about 100 books by Agatha Christie (including some collections of short stories not published in the US).  Last year, I re-read them all, in order of publication.

 

I see that I answered this question in terms of raw numbers; there are other authors, less prolific, though, of whose works I also own 100%:  Dick Francis, William Shakespeare, Elizabeth George, and Harper Lee (whose one book surely counts as a lifetime oevre of considerable note!) come to mind.  I must be within one of owning all the works of Bill Bryson, too.  I would like to own all the Trixie Belden books, but so far I do not.  I do have all those written by Julie Campbell--those constitute the really good ones--but I do not have all the Kathryn Kenney editions (she took up the task when Julie Campbell stopped writing).

 

2) Of which book do you own the most copies?

Either the collected works of Shakespeare or The Secret Garden.  I have at least four complete collections of the works of Shakespeare.  The first one I ever owned  was the Riverside Shakespeare, which I had to buy for a class as an undergraduate at UC San Diego.  It's a classic; I was using it a year or two ago in a class on Shakespeare (a perfectly DREADFUL class, as it turned, that purported to investigate how well various film versions of Shakespeare's works realized the original text, but turned out to be a poor excuse to watch a bunch of movies), and one of the other students in the class came and asked me where I had gotten that as, she claimed, she had "...been looking for a copy for years!"

 

I also have two sets of the complete works of Shakespeare on CD; one of those is a reproduction, published by Octavo Press, of every page of one of the First Folios owned by the Folger Shakespeare Library.  Very cool.  (I use the CDs for teaching; I do a whole segment on the First Folio and the authorship controversy and so on, basically to establish the First Folio, along with other early printings, as the best we've got in terms of trying to know what Shakespeare "intended."  Then I ask the students to ignore all the editorially interpolated stage directions, and decide for themselves what they would like to see on the stage.  After all that, when I get to the "Exit pursued by a bear" bit in The Winter's Tale, I need a bit of authoritative evidence for its being the legitimate thing, and not the phantasmagorical delusion of some self-important academic.)

 

I have at least six copies of The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, including a beautiful leather-bound copy.

3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?

Must have.  I rewrote them.  Not merely pedantic nitpicking; they really sounded awkward to me the way they originally appeared.

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?

Fitzwilliam Darcy.  Ever since I was 15.  But I don't think it counts as a secret, since pretty much everyone I know knows that.  (Note:  Having just answered number 6, I am reminded that for may years the secret love of my life was Jim Frayne, who makes his first appearance in the very first Trixie Belden mystery:  The Mystery of the Mansion.  He was a secret--I am sure I have never told anyone before now!)

5) What book have you read the most times in your life (excluding picture books read to children; i.e., Goodnight Moon does not count)?

Definitely The Secret Garden.  Or possibly Till We Have Faces, by C.S. Lewis.  Or maybe Pride & Prejudice.  (Now that I think of it, I have quite a few copies of Pride and Prejudice, too.  I can see at least two from where I'm sitting....I bet I have six....)  Those three books I reread pretty much every year.  I would have to think The Secret Garden has the edge, though, since I started with that one in fourth grade.

6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?

We spent my fifth grade year living in Alexandria, Virginia, while my father was on sabbatical leave from UC Berkeley at the Smithsonian Institute.  That was the first year that I can remember being really happy as a result of having lots of real-life friends, so I don't remember anything I read that year at all.  (Except for a book called Almost Twins, that my mother bought me to read on the plane on the way to Virginia from California).   My favorite book from my 10th year, then, will have to be a favorite book from the year before.    I was already onto both The Secret Garden and the Trixie Belden series by then, so those would have been the gold medal winners.  I also loved the other Frances Hodgson Burnett books:  A Little Princess and, much more obscure, The Lost Prince.  For awhile in there, Johnny Tremain was my very favorite book (there was a time when my secret fictional love interest would have been Rab, from Johnny Tremain), but that might have expired by the time I was in fifth grade.  Still, The Secret Garden and the Trixie Belden mystery series were my best friends for many years, and, as a result, I love them still.

 

Ironically, it was while we lived in Alexandria that I suffered my most frustrating reader's moment ever.  I got my first two Trixie Belden books in a box of used books that someone gave us.  They were out of print, and I had only managed to get one or two more (of what was then a fifteen-book series) from used book sales.  Right at the end of our year in Virginia, we went into a drugstore, and I was met by a big display of all the Trixie Belden books--brand new, freshly released.  My mother agreed to buy me one.  I chose Mystery on the Mississippi, and I've always hated it; resentment, no doubt, due to its function as a constant reminder of the fact that I was within touching distance of every Trixie Belden novel ever written, and I had to walk away from all the others. 

7) What is the worst book you've read in the past year?

I read half of Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins before I got so fed up I actually threw it in the trash.  It was one of the selections for my book discussion group, but I couldn't get through that one.  Relentless pointless sex.  I got very, very bored.  I am assured by someone who LOVES the book that there was a point; I just couldn't last long enough to figure out what it was.  I read all of What Came Before He Shot Her, by Elizabeth George (normally a perennial favorite), and loathed that.  WAY too depressing, and no Lynley in sight.

8) What is the best book you've read in the past year?

Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers.  But I could list a dozen more that I loved!

9) If you could force everyone you know to read one book, what would it be?

 

At the risk of sounding supercilious, I have to say that I don't like the idea of forcing anyone to read a book.  I come close enough in my working life, because I get to assign books for my students to read, and they have very little choice in the matter.  One can argue that since the IB program is elective, the IB English class is elective, and so they "chose" to be there; but that's a little weasly.  The truth of the matter is that one way or another, they would be in some English class with someone telling them what to read.  Short of dropping out of high school, they really don't have much choice. 

 

Since I spend my days coaxing and coercing students to try to get them to see all the wonder in the books I love and give them to read, I haven't got much stomach for mandating other people's reading!  That said, I am fond of saying that no one can really consider him or herself to be a literate American unless he or she has read To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby.  These are truly great American novels. If I'm going to pick a book I wish everyone loved as much as I do, it would be Pride and Prejudice.  At least this week.

10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for Literature?

The next one?  I don't know.  How old do you have to be?  How many books do you have to write?  My vote to win one, next or later, goes to Richard Powers.  His capacity for seeing meaning, patterns, and connections between events is unsurpassed.  Reading his books is like seeing into new dimensions you didn't know were there before.

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?

Difficult call.  As a rule, I do not love movies of books that I love.  Partly, this is because the books I love the most tend to be first-person narratives, and it is just not possible to translate a first-person narrative onto film.  A Separate Peace, a truly wonderful book by John Knowles, was made into one of the all-time worst films, (starring Parker Stevenson, which should tell you something!) for example.  There are, of course, some seminal movies which are versions of books (To Kill a Mockingbird comes to mind), but even when they are quite good movies, they are never the same as the book.  (Actually, to be totally fair, Beaches was a fantastic movie which far surpassed the trashy book upon which it was based.  An anomaly.)

 

Murder mysteries translate to film better than most books (third person narratives, mostly!), so I might be interested in seeing an Elizabeth George novel translated to the big screen.  PBS has done a series of Inspector Lynley programs, but they got his partner, Barbara Havers, completely wrong, and most of the programs are just random stories using the characters rather than versions of the actual novels.  If I were to pick one E. George to start with, it might be Playing for the Ashes, which has fabulous characters.  Deception on His Mind  has an action-packed chase scene in a boat at the end, though--complete with cops pointing guns at each other and someone going overboard.  I expect that Hollywood would love it.

 

Plays work much better; there is a remake coming of "Master Harold"...and the boys.  I am quite looking forward to that.

12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?

Till We Have Faces.  It's a first-person narrative, and a brilliant one.  The whole story hinges on the narrator's believing the world and her life in it to have been one thing, only to discover, near the end of her life, that it was something else altogether.  If someone tried to make it into a movie, he or she would no doubt turn it into some sort of cheesy mystery.  The mind boggles.  (Note:  I have discovered, as I have come back to add hyperlinks, that Walt Disney made Johnny Tremain into a movie in 1957.  I bet that's wretched.)

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.

I've had some weird dreams in my life, and I suppose that somewhere in the murky past there have been some dreams involving books, writers, and/or literary characters, but I'm darned if I can remember one right now.

 

14) What is the most lowbrow book you've read as an adult?

Bridges of Madison County.  I read that for another book discussion group (in St. Louis).  It was loathesome.  Dreck.  Sludge.  Absolute trash.  Actually, I have also read The World According to Garp, the book I hated more than any other I have ever read, and I would call that lower than low.  (I refuse to link to those books; if you want to read them, you can Google them yourself!)

 

But both of those no doubt pass as "literature" in some people's eyes, and the question is probably trying to get people to own up to reading pot-boiling bodice rippers and that sort of things.  I have read a few; I just can't remember any of them.  When I was in high school, I read (wait for it!) Harlequin Romances by the truckload.  I could read four or five a day.  I've read hundreds of them.  Deep dark secret:  as an adult, I have actually collected up most of the Harlequin Romances written by Mary Burchell and those by Essie Summers.  I do not have them all; they are actually collectors' items, and some titles run $50 and up.  I confess to having read all of those in the not too distant past.  My favorites?  The Oscar Warrander series from Mary Burchell--all of those are about young unknown singers who get discovered by some handsome rich guy and end up vaulted to fame and fortune.  (It occurs to me that this might be some weird precursor to my guilty and fascinated interest in American Idol, for which my sister and I write pithy commentary every week.)  My favorite Essie Summers book must be Beyond the Foothills, but that might be mostly due to the extremely good looking red-haired man painted on the cover.  Designed specifically to appeal to 15-year-old girls.

15) What is the most difficult book you've ever read?

There are numerous books that were so hard I never managed to finish them.  "Hard" in that case usually meant extremely difficult  to engage with, and so, ultimately, too boring to finish.  I tried War and Peace, for instance, twice.  Couldn't get more than a few chapters in.  Famously, I have never made it past chapter 2 of Catch 22.  Much too hard to swallow.  If I consider the question from the perspective of choosing the most difficult book I actually finished, I'm going with Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance.  Richard Powers' first novel.  I've read it three times, I think.  each time, I get a bit more, but I am always quite certain that I missed a lot.  Everything Powers has written is extremely difficult:  thought-provoking, mentally challenging, and just plain work to read.  But supremely smart and deeply fascinating.

16) What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you've seen?

 Cymbeline,  maybe?  I've seen a lot of Shakespeare plays.  I haven't seen Timon of Athens  or Titus Andronicus; those would be more obscure than Cymbeline, I think.

17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?

Goofy question.  The only French literature I can remember reading are some Maigret novels (murder mystery again!) and No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre.  I've read some Russian novels, but they are quite turgid.  I would have to say Russian, but it's cheating, because it's by virtue of a fabulous production of The Seagull by Chekov that I saw in Stratford-Upon-Avon two years ago with Sir Ian McKellen.

18) Roth or Updike?

My book club is reading The Witches of Eastwick this month in memory of Updike.  I have never read an Updike before, and I haven't read a Roth yet.  I don't even know enough to understand why the two of them are paired in this question.  I'm on about page 50 of Witches of Eastwick, and so far, I am finding it quite palatable.

19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?

As with the Roth-Updike choice, I know too little to understand the pairing.  I have never read Dave Eggers, and I've read only one David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day, for my book discussion group.  Oh, correction--I actually liked it enough that I picked up Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim at the library.  Enjoyed that, too.

20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?

Shakespeare without question.  I will get kicked out of the English teacher's guild for saying so, but I LOATHE both Milton and Chaucer.  Possibly this has something to do with the fact that I had to read them in a Humanities class at UC San Diego when I was 18 and I didn't understand a single word I read, but I loathed them enough to never try again.  Shakespeare, on the other hand, I have loved fanatically since I got the chance to go to Stratford-Upon-Avon, England, for six weeks in 1992 on an National Endowment for the Humanities Grant.  That experience was one of the highlights of my life, and I have been sold ever since.  I have made many good friends through Shakespeare--Miriam Gilbert (the professor who ran the seminar), Skip Nicholson, Sandi Forsythe, and several other Stratford aficionados including John and Susan Ford.  After my real home in Maidens with Tim, the place in which I am the happiest and most comfortable is Stratford-Upon-Avon.  Crazy, maybe, but there you go!

21) Austen or Eliot?

Austen.

22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?

The fact that I have more gaps than wall is probably the most embarrassing reality of my literary history--especially for an English teacher.  I am, infamously, the only English teacher in Virginia who does not have an actual degree in English (I have the equivalent coursework without the degree, which is why I am legally qualified to teach), and, as a result, my English credits were acquired as a random gallimaufry comprising whatever happened to interest me.  As a result, I know very little American literature except 20th century literature, and only a little of that.  I know very little English literature after 1850.   I know poetry on a random, single-poem basis, rather than being familiar with a range of work by any single poet.  I've never read a whole SLEW of the "Classics":  Madame Bovary, Anna Karenenina, War and Peace, or David Copperfield.  I've read a bunch more that I promptly forgot:  Tess of the D'Urbervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Grapes of Wrath. 

 

Perhaps even more shamefully, if one is an English teacher in America, I absolutely HATE John Steinbeck's work--particularly a dreadful thing that I had to read in high school called To A God Unknown that had something to do with some guy worshipping a tree which dies in a drought; the book ends with our hero (?) sacrificing himself to feed the stump of the tree with his blood.  I just thought the guy was nuts.  And don't even TALK to me about Huckleberry Finn  or anything whatsoever by Ernest Hemingway.  

23) What is your favorite novel?

Pride & Prejudice or Till We Have Faces or Galatea 2.2.  This week.

24) Play?

The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare.  Or "Master Harold...and the boys.  But if you want to get into musical theatre, I can really go to town!  (Current favorite there:  Wicked.)

25) Poem?

"One Art," by Elizabeth Bishop or "Patterns," by Amy Lowell or "Proud Songsters," by Thomas Hardy.

26) Essay?

"Once More to the Lake" by E.B. White.  Maybe the best last line ever written.

27) Short Story?

"My Sister's Marriage," by Cynthia Marshall Rich.  This is a brilliant portrayal of a good and loving girl who sells her soul for the love of a worthless father who abandoned her, for all intents and purposes.  That is an absolutely TERRIBLE summation--you have to read the story.   This is another of those deeply important works in my life; I first read the story when I was a graduate student at the University of Illinois in the early 1980s.  I read it for a class in Oral Interpretation of Literature; it was the breakthrough class where I finally learned to understand the whole concept of the narrator.  It was an amazing experience.  I did an oral interpretation of a scene from the short story and it taught me about unreliable narrators.  Eventually, an actress friend of mine wanted to play Sarah Ann, the lead character, and I wrote the stage adaptation that was professionally produced in Chicago.  We got great reviews--including from the author.  She wrote the story when she was 21 years old, and won the Mademoiselle magazine short story contest in 1951.  Amazing that someone so young could see so much.

28) Work of nonfiction?

This one is a tough call; I have been a kind of non-fiction junkie for the last decade or so.  Here's a short list in no particular order (not even the order in which I read them):

Cold Beer and Crocodiles by Roff Martin Smith

Moneyball by Michael Lewis

The Greatest Game Ever Played, by Mark Frost

The Perfect Mile, by Neal Bascomb

The Great Bridge, by David McCullough

No Ordinary Time, by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Blink and Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell

The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman

In a Sunburned Country, A Walk in the Woods, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, A Short History of Nearly Everything, and Shakespeare:  The World as a Stage, all by Bill Bryson

Body of Work, by Christine Montross

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

Waiting for Aphrodite, by Sue Hubbell

Will in the World, by Stephen Greenblatt

 

I could go on at some length.

 

29) Who is your favorite writer?

If that means the writer of my single favorite book even if I don't love the rest of her work as much, then Jane Austen.  If it means the writer of the overall most magnificent collection of work, even if I haven't read it all and even if I wouldn't sit down next to the fire on a snowy night and read one, then William Shakespeare.  If it means the writer whose work I have read the most, then Agatha Christie.

30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?

Ha.  Now there is a question.  So many choices.  Danielle Steele?  Does she count?  Is she still alive?

31) What is your desert island book?

The Collected Works of William Shakespeare.  It would keep me occupied for years.

32) And... what are you reading right now?

The Witches of Eastwick.

How We Decide; non-fiction by Jonah Lehrer.  I'm on the last chapter.  It's great.

Broadsides from the Other Orders, by Sue Hubbell

Winter's Tale, because I'm teaching it.  (Just finished Long Day's Journey Into Night, by Eugene O'Neill, and will be reading "Master Harold"...and the boys next week.)

Sports Illustrated:  Great Baseball Writing

This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin (re-reading that one)

and

Foul! a very old biography of Connie Hawkins by David Wolf.  Reading that because I read it when I was a kid and loved it; it got me interested in the Harlem Globetrotters, and my husband just took me to see them--courtside seats--for my birthday.  Had never seen them before.  Very cool!

 

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This was a very fun exercise for me; in the process of trying to answer those questions, I remembered a lot of books I read and loved and haven't read for a long time, I prowled around my house looking at the bookshelves, and I re-lived, somewhat vicariously, the experience of reading those books before.  Books have always been my friends.  They have opened up the world for me, made me see people differently, helped me understand better why people do what they do.  Books have been the main source of my hope that there is meaning and value and that the future will be better than today is.  This is what I wish for my students, and when I teach them one of those books I chose that they would never choose for themselves, I always hope that I can crack it open just wide enough that they can get at least a single glimpse into what riches there are between the covers of a book.  This is what reading education should give our students, and this is precisely the thing that the multiple choice tests and the concomitant frenzied reduction of literature to collections of grammatical units rob our students of. 

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