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Black History Month, day 21
I love children’s literature. If I didn’t have a child to read to, I’d just have to sit in the children’s section of the library without one. And of course, we have a large bookshelf full of the books we loved as kids.
The characters and the authors of these books are overwhelmingly white. Most of them were written before 1975, many long before, and few publishers then sought out people of color, or encouraged them when they came along. For that matter, as of 2001, one editor writes here, there were still very few African-American writers and illustrators in the field, and a 2007 book by an education professor observes the same thing. And yet, John Steptoe, who wrote and illustrated the gorgeous Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters during his sadly short career, said plainly: “I am not an exception to the rule among my race of people. I am the rule. By that I mean there are a great many others like me where I come from.”
When children read, they need to see people who look like them. This truism, once doubtful in my mind, has become a rock-solid fact since I began spending my days with a small child. The munchkin identifies strongly with people in the books she reads, and most of all with people like herself. To illustrate: she frequently, even obsessively, points to a character on each page and says “I want to be that person.” It is almost never an animal, and it is almost never a boy: it’s a girl. If the girls are only minor characters, she identifies with one of them, putting herself on the margin of the story (thank you, J. K. Rowling, for Hermione Granger–your wizarding world is still male-dominated, but you did put one smart, brave, complex girl in the marquee). If there are no girls in the story, she chooses no one. Fortunately, things have come a long way since A. A. Milne and J. R. R. Tolkien, and female characters are no longer merely a token presence in children’s books. But whom would she see who looked like her if she were black?
I would love to hear about your favorite children’s books that are by African-American authors and illustrators, and/or feature black characters.
Here are some of mine. An * means they have prominent characters who are black, an @ means they’re by a black author or illustrator, though of course I often don’t know anything about them but their name. In some cases, like Bette Greene and Ezra Jack Keats, I know they aren’t African-American, but I might be missing some who are.
* Island Counting 1 2 3 by Frané Lessac. Our favorite counting book, with terrific illustrations of an unnamed Caribbean island, and lots of fun things to find (e.g., on the “four” page there are four vanes on the windmill, four donkeys, four leaves on each plant, etc.).
@ Everywhere Babies, a board book I love for many reasons, but one of them is that families of all types and colors are featured without any comment, just as if families just come in all gender combinations, age combinations, and colors! Imagine!
* ABC A Family Alphabet Book, written by Bobbie Combs, illustrated by Desiree Keane and Brian Kappa. All of the parents are same-sex couples, and many are black.
* The Snowy Day, A Letter to Amy (naturally a childhood favorite), and the others about Peter and friends by Ezra Jack Keats
* Bear on a Bike, written Stella Gladstone and illustrated by Debbie Harter
* @ Lift Every Voice and Sing, words by James Weldon Johnson, illustrations by Elizabeth Catlett
* @ I Want To Be, written by Thylias Moss, illustrated by Jerry Pinkney.
@ for that matter, anything illustrated by Jerry Pinkney
@ Freight Train and anything else by Donald Crews
* Chicken Sunday, Patricia Polacco (Polacco, who is white, has several books with prominent African-American characters–this is the only one of them I’ve read)
* the Max and Kate stories that are featured in each issue of Ladybug.
Moving on to books for older kids:
* Philip Hall Likes Me. I Reckon Maybe, Bette Greene
* Nobody’s Family is Going to Change, Louise Fitzhugh
And the best African-American picture book we haven’t seen:
A Little Bit of Soul Food, Amy Wilson Sanger. As far as I know, Sanger isn’t black, and if this book is like the others of hers we have, it shows no people, but they are such great portrayals of one aspect of a culture–its food. Yum Yum Dim Sum and My First Book of Sushi are perennial favorites in our house.
I bought for Munchkin, but haven’t read with/listened to with her yet, Hip Hop Speaks to Children. She seldom wants to listen to music, preferring audiobooks in the car. It looks great, though.
Your nominees?
Black History Month, day 16
You write today’s post: who’s your favorite black writer?
I asked my wife and she didn’t hesitate: “James Baldwin.” I thought Octavia Butler would have given him a run for his money, since Joy is a big sci-fi reader and loves Butler.
Both of those would be high on my list, as is August Wilson, but I’ll say Toni Morrison for the way she gets inside so many different kinds of people in creating her characters.
Over to you.
(ETA: Thanks, Thea. I’d originally written “Olivia Butler,” may OB’s spirit forgive me!)
Sixteen years ago I was in my second year of an M.A. in religion, and engaged in the leadup to masters’ exams. Putting the exams together was kind of fun. They could be on any three topics that covered a certain diversity of religion, culture, and era, and mine were Feminist Theology, Dogen’s Shobogenzo, and The Theology of Romantic Poetry.
For the Romantics, my reading list consisted entirely of works of five of the Big Six: William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. (The sixth, Byron, didn’t particularly interest me and his work didn’t seem to have many theological implications.) I took note of the lack of female voices–I was studying feminist theology, after all–but didn’t think that there were any that came up to the standard, except maybe Dorothy Wordsworth or Mary Shelley, but neither was noted for her poetry. I hadn’t heard of Hannah More or Joanna Baillie, and somehow thought of Emily Bronte as not quite within the period. Excuses, excuses. If I’d done a little digging, a little looking beyond the canon that had been blessed by men, handed down through generations of male scholars, and endorsed by my male advisor, I’d have expanded my list.
Well, I’m finally remedying the gap by reading Frankenstein. I’m listening to the audiobook version, and it’s making it a little difficult to get out of the car. And wow, here’s something else that might have changed my mind about that reading list (even if it did mean including novels): the subtitle is “or, The Modern Prometheus.” How did I not notice that Mary Shelley and her husband both created masterworks that explicitly expanded upon the myth of Prometheus? Prometheus Unbound was on my exam reading list, you betcha, and it’s the longest poem I’ve ever loved. And Prometheus is such a rich figure for liberal religionists: the human who dared to steal a power the gods had reserved for themselves and give it to humanity, and who, in P. B. Shelley’s reading, is thereby a hero. (I have a feeling that M. Shelley’s point of view is more nuanced. Shh, don’t tell me the end.) Of course, I was a very new UU then, and not yet a minister. Now I’m musing about Prometheus, fire, power, responsibility, and what it means to “play God” if the gods themselves are discredited. And I’m really looking forward to what the novel has to say about all those points.
Next up, some of those female poets who were very famous in their day, I now know, but who got insufficient respect from anthologies and me before.
photo by Lin Kristensen; used with permission (Creative Commons)
I have always been an avid rereader. My dad, who in my childhood was forever introducing me to new authors he thought I’d like (to my everlasting gratitude), would see me reading Sal Fisher at Girl Scout Camp yet again and give a groan of despair. It didn’t take me long to notice that he did a lot of rereading himself, though, although I admit that The Tempest is more likely to turn up new subtleties on the fourth reading than Sal Fisher.
I do reread books to squeeze more juice out of them, though that’s not the only reason. I just like visiting with an old friend. If I liked them once, I’ll like them again, and I’ll laugh with an extra pleasure at the funny lines, as one does when reminded just how funny an old friend can be (I’m looking at you, Lawrence Block), and the sad parts have an extra poignancy when I know they’re coming but the characters don’t. The books I reread regularly tend to be the ones that had a strong effect on me the first time I read them, and also feature characters with whom I want to spend more time: To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee), Animal Dreams (Barbara Kingsolver), American Gods (Neil Gaiman), The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett), The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K. LeGuin), and The Dispossessed (ditto) come to mind. Now that I’ve discovered the pleasures of Austen and Dickens, I think they’re going to become frequent rereads. But don’t be deceived by the depth of these books. I reread Terry Pratchett, not just the ones that really moved me or made me think (which tend to rise immediately to the rank of my favorites: Small Gods, Feet of Clay, Jingo, Reaper Man), but all of them, because he makes me laugh.
I also reread mysteries, which may seem particularly bizarre, but as I don’t read mysteries in order to figure out the puzzle in the first place (since I never can), knowing whodunnit doesn’t diminish the enjoyability. In fact, I am particularly drawn to the ones with the unforgettable solution, such as any one of Agatha Christie’s best, because I can watch how she’s laying clues and red herrings and know that I would never, ever spot them on my own. It’s like watching a magician at work after he’s shown you how the trick is done: the magic is not diminished, but doubled.
Rereading is a bit of a drug. Several months after moving and unpacking most of our books, we finally got the mysteries and scifi on their shelves, and my new reading has slowed way down as I read old favorites. More challenging things stay on my “currently reading” list for a couple of weeks, even though I’m a fast reader, because on a Sunday afternoon when I want to do nothing but veg, I reread Lawrence Block’s Burglar books (and oh how I wish he would write a few more. I don’t care if the places Bernie Rhodenbarr chooses to burgle have an improbably high murder rate rivalling St. Mary Mead’s, I just want to spend another 200 pages with him). In the months when the mind candy was still in boxes, I read more new-to-me fiction than in any period of my adulthood–with the possible exception of last spring, when I also read a lot of new stuff, and for the same reason: we were living in Mexico and had no access to the hundreds of already-read books that usually line our walls, and getting a book out of the library that I own and have already read seemed silly. It has been really great to read so much new stuff, and as my mortality presses on me–my gray hairs multiply, my daughter leaps from newborn to four-year-old in a moment, people my age die–I become ever more aware of the profundity of the t-shirt slogan: “So many books, so little time.”
I recently learned that some people don’t reread very often, and so I wonder: Do you reread a lot? Any books or genres in particular? What makes you pick up a book for a second, third, fourth, umpteenth time–or not? What are you reading or rereading now?
ETA: Welcome to everyone who found their way here via Freshly Pressed, and thanks for all the comments! I’m sorry I can’t respond as fast as you can comment, but I’m loving hearing about what you all reread, or don’t. And d’oh, Harry Potter is definitely on my frequently-read list. I’ve read each one at least three times, and some many more than that, since discovering the series in 2000.
. . . discovering an extra book in a beloved series after you thought you’d read them all. Donald E. Westlake, writer of great comic mysteries and capers (and lots of hard-boileds under the name Richard Stark, and many other books totalling about 100) had the gall to die two years ago, leaving the world with just one more Dortmunder novel coming through the publishing pipeline. I still haven’t read that one, and I’ve been a little reluctant to track it down, knowing that it would be the last taste of these very funny, very well-written capers. Or so I thought. It turns out that there is another, an older one, that we don’t have and neither of us has ever read. I brought it home from the library, an odd but appreciated Hanukah gift, and let Joy read it first. Now I’m reading it and it is not letting me down.
And the story gets better: Joy greeted it with an “oh yeah, there’s one that’s out of print that we don’t have . . . it’s the first Dortmunder book.” But it’s clear, reading this, that it is not the first, because it makes reference to a couple of previous plots. Looking up a chronology confirms that, while these could conceivably be prequels, they’re not. They did come out first. So this is actually the sixth, and the first (The Hot Rock) is still out there, republished and waiting for us to read it. I’m pretty sure I’ve never read Jimmy the Kid either. And then there’s the really-truly-last, Get Real, also deliciously unread.
Simple pleasures. Thanks, Mr. Westlake, for a few gifts from beyond the grave.
One of my “43 things to do in year 43” is to list ten books I want to read and read them. It may seem superfluous, since I read many more than ten books every year, but I wanted to be a little more deliberate, and also to specify fiction or poetry. I read lots of non-fiction and want to feed my imagination instead. Also, without saying so, I was excluding mysteries, since I gobble them down like peanuts but they rarely stimulate any part of my mind except the one that likes puzzles; they are a pleasant way to pass the time, and perhaps, like crossword puzzles, even make me a little smarter, but that’s all. (Gaudy Night, which I just reread–I reread all the Peter Wimsey books regularly–is a rare exception in that it gave me a lot to think about.)
The list:
A Passage to India, E. M. Forster. I’ve meant to read it since seeing the movie when it was released. I just finally did (since drafting this post, so I’ll keep it on the 43/43 list), and am now gobbling down Forster. Therefore:
Howards End, E. M. Forster READ 9/17 ETA I carried on with the Forsterfest and read A Room with a View, finished 9/20. It was perfect reading for Bass Lake, and I loved it. I may have to watch the movie again. Since we never got to see Alice in Wonderlnad on the big screen, we may have to just have a home Helena Bonham Carter film festival, in fact. That should make the Tim Burton fan in the family very happy.
Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman–I love Gaiman, and loved American Gods so much that I have reread it twice since Anansi Boys was published, but couldn’t get anywhere with Anansi Boys itself. I am going to give it another try. READ March 2011. Excellent.
Self-Help, Lorrie Moore–have wanted to read this since it came out at least 10 years ago. It sounded intriguing.
Something by Margaret Atwood. Atwood is very hit-or-miss with me. The Blind Assassin, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Alias Grace immediately went onto my All-Time Favorite Works of Fiction list; Oryx and Crake was a “wow, love it” until it turned into a “well, that ended with an unsatisfying thud” (and I then discovered that she is so painfully, cluelessly disrespectful of science fiction, despite excelling at writing it, that I’ve been disinclined to read the sequel); and there have been a few, like The Robber Bride, that I just couldn’t get into at all and put down after page three. So I don’t know which of the many still-unread novels or short story collections of hers I’ll read. But I’ll try a few, knowing that there’s another Blind Assassin somewhere out there. READ Cat’s Eye 10/25. Definitely one for the “loved” column. READ The Robber Bride 10/30, having found Cat’s Eye so terrific that I was emboldened to take on one that I hadn’t liked. This time I liked it, even though it didn’t rock my world the way Cat’s Eye did.
Voices and Gifts, Ursula K. Le Guin, speaking of science fiction and people who do get it. I read the first in this trilogy, Powers, just before going to Mexico, and so the other two eluded me, but I am now home and in possession of a San Francisco Public Library card and nothing can stop me. READ Gifts May 2011, went on a LeGuin tear, wore myself out, so am going to wait on Voices.
Whichever book someone knowledgeable recommends by John M. Ford. He wrote the poem “110 Stories” I linked to earlier today, and on searching for more by him, I was very excited to learn he was primarily a science fiction writer. I’m always looking for good ones and so seldom find any I like. He wrote some Star Trek books, and while I don’t usually read those, I don’t think I can resist one titled How Much for Just the Planet?; still, I’d like to read a stand-alone book of his. Poetry or scifi or scifi poetry all welcome. Friends, do you have a recommendation?
Beloved, Toni Morrison. I’ve never read it and I can’t imagine why not. I love Morrison. I think this is one to read via audiobook; her own reading of Sula made it so wonderful for me, and she also reads Beloved in its audio version. Not yet, but READ A Mercy, which was the Morrison audiobook I could find at the library when I got the hankering, and which was heartbreaking.
Open Closed Open, Yehuda Amichai. I don’t read much contemporary poetry, but whenever I encounter Amichai I really like him. I actually set out to buy his Selected Poetry, but the book was so badly printed that I put it back. Don’t look at me in that pitying way–I know my eyesight and hearing are getting worse, but I’m nearsighted, not farsighted, and books never give me trouble. Oh well, I’ll take it as a sign: I don’t buy collections of favorite singers’ greatest hits; I buy the albums. So I will read Amichai’s latest volume instead of his greatest hits.
ETA Zeitoun, Dave Eggers. It’s San Francisco’s 2010 One City One Book choice, so, having just moved into the city, reading it is part of my “OMG! I live in San Francisco!” celebration. READ December or January. Disturbing and eye-opening enough to make up for the cheap-journalism style of the writing; I’m glad I read it, and am wondering how I lived in the US during the same period that Zeitoun was locked up and had no idea this kind of thing was happening. Is it still? How would we know if it were?
Buying hardcover is such an indulgence, when a year’s wait will get you a paperback and a month or two’s wait will get you to the top of the queue at the library. So it was a real treat when Joy gave me the newest books from three favorite authors at the holidays: Terry Pratchett (Unseen Academicals), Robert Barnard (The Killings at Jubilee Terrace), and Barbara Kingsolver (The Lacuna). It was Christmas week and my first week on sabbatical, so I wolfed down the mystery and the Pratchett before so much as peeking at Kingsolver’s thick new novel. But by the time I got to page 5 of The Lacuna I couldn’t put it down.
I was a little apprehensive going in, especially when I realized the book was going to deal with overtly political issues. Not that I expect (or want) Kingsolver ever to be apolitical, and Animal Dreams, which wears its politics on every chapter if not every page, is not only my favorite of hers but one of my favorite books, period. But my last go at a Kingsolver book had been Prodigal Summer a few months before, and I couldn’t stand the lectures on the preservation of despised predators that she forced out of her heroine’s mouth. I love Aldo Leopold, but I don’t want to read him reproduced in improbable dialogue. I like my essays to be essays and my novels to be novels. If telling is inferior to showing, ranting is worse than telling.
She does stray into ranting a couple of times in The Lacuna, but late and seldom. I was so captivated by then that I could forgive a couple of unnecessary, distractingly lecture-y passages on the subject of the blacklist. I love the main character, I love the way she writes about people like Kahlo and Rivera and Trotsky so convincingly, I love the painterly detail of her descriptions of Mexico. And I love the metaphor of the lacuna.
A lacuna is a gap, such as a missing page in an old book or a period of silence, longer than a rest, in a piece of music. Kingsolver uses it in multiple meanings, layered and interacting, which is one reason I can tell this book will reward rereading. One is the geological phenomenon of a cave that is actually a tunnel; another is the missing volume in a lifetime of diaries; a third is whatever you don’t know about others’ lives. What they choose to leave out when they tell you about themselves.
The most poignant lacuna evoked by the novel, for me, is the gap in our world created by the failure of Communism, by which I mean not the collapse of the USSR, but the failure that concerns Kingsolver here, the true one, the one that began in the 1920s when Stalin rose to power. What did we lose when the revolution was betrayed to totalitarianism . . . ? Workers’ ownership of the wealth they produce has always struck me as eminently sensible, but I got through four years at what I privately dubbed Marx-and-Freud University without ever reading Marx, something I still regard as a, well, lacuna in my education as a citizen of the 20th-and 21st centuries. (I did read plenty of Freud there. And for the record, as outdated as much of his thinking is judged to be and surely is, I think he was a genius and a hell of a writer.) I’ve never given much thought to Trotsky, the sum of what I know about him being that he was an early Communist leader and visionary, he had an affair with Frida Kahlo, he was assassinated in Mexico City, and he (probably) shows up in Animal Farm as Snowball the pig. All but the latter get attention from Kingsolver. Now I want to know more about him and his philosophy. Her protagonist grieves for him as a person; I grieve for what we lost, as a world, when the great Communist revolutions died.
Not that ideas ever die. The end of the book suggests that there might be life in these “dead” ideas yet.
Another, related lacuna suggested by The Lacuna is the work lost to our culture by our imposition of the blacklist. All those writers and directors and actors who were shut down and never got back to their life’s work. What might they have created? It’s gone now, unrecoverable.
I also realized, with a laugh, that I did my undergraduate art thesis on lacunae. Not that I used the word–thank heaven, undergraduate art majors have enough of a struggle with pretentiousness–but my senior show in ceramic sculpture was called “What’s Not There,” each piece having in some way to do with an absence that makes itself felt as a presence. More on this in another post, as this one is long enough.
Barbara Kingsolver is giving the keynote at the San Miguel Writers’ Conference in a couple of weeks, called “Finding my way into The Lacuna,” and we will be there.
Dan at Yet Another Unitarian Universalist has responded to J. D. Salinger’s death with a spirited grumble. Or was it Mr. Crankypants writing? Anyway, my response was getting into long-and-hijacky territory and I thought I should just post here instead. I hope I am following proper blog etiquette in carrying on a dialogue with another blogger that way, though I acknowledge that by disallowing comments, I’m not playing fair. But that can’t be helped.
Dan was saying that since Salinger’s last published work (“Hapworth 16, 1924”) was “unreadable crap,” most of what he’s written since would be better off burnt unread. I dispute the logic though not the premise. My reaction to his death, along with a pang of sadness (though it was no tragedy–not because he was a cranky old coot but because he’d lived for 91 years) was that it bears a long-awaited silver lining: I’ll finally get a peek at the books he’s reportedly been writing. I fervently hope he ordered them published, not destroyed.
“Hapworth” was crap, but all of Salinger’s crap has jewels in it. And I choose that disgusting metaphor deliberately, because I am definitely willing to dissect the crap for those sparkly sentences inside. Even those who aren’t fans of most of his work (and there are plenty who have no interest in anything not starring Holden Caulfield) can hope that another [insert your favorite Salinger] will now appear. In 35 years’ worth of socked-away manuscripts, there is very likely to be another “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” or “Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters.” I’m glad I’m alive to read it.
Dan wrote: “he was not some immortal writer, he was just an ordinary nutty old man.” I would say he was most likely something in between: a very fine writer (probably immortal for as long as the world produces teenagers, but I won’t quibble on that point). Many artists I admire sound like people I wouldn’t want to live with (Bob Dylan, now that’s a nutty old man. But ordinary? No more than Salinger). We didn’t have to live with Salinger, lucky us. We just get to read his books, putting them down if we don’t like them, and if we do, who cares whether we’d want to hang out with the author. It’s a variation on the theme I struck last month re: Keillor. Writers are as complicated as anyone, and though celebrity culture likes to promote the idea that only good people produce heavenly art, I’ve never noticed a correlation. The value of the work is in the work.
I have strong feelings about fame and privacy. Maybe Dan’s contention that Salinger goosed book sales by foraying into lawsuits is fair; I haven’t paid attention to the trends of Salinger book sales. That would indeed be irritating, but not surprising. If he wasn’t one to fret about his sales and/or status, he’d have published and said be damned to the reviews and reactions. But I think writers are entitled to privacy. If someone were trying to publish my private letters, I’d sue them too. Don’t even get me started on the oft-repeated (not by Dan) idea that artists owe their public something other than their art.
A writer I like at least as much as Salinger, Lawrence Block, has a very funny, cutting, loving take on Salinger, The Burglar in the Rye. Its gist: leave the man alone. Privacy is his due as a human being, and gratitude is his due as someone who wrote a book that changed our lives (for me, it would be Franny and Zooey, not Catcher). Block also got some serious digs in at kiss-and-tell girlfriends. Salinger didn’t sue him.
Sermons in Stones 
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