meeting of the minds

I've just passed the halfway point in my Rare Book School course on scholarly editing. There's so much that I could write about this experience, but it is getting late and my alarm will wake me sooner than I would like. The experience so far has been amazing. It is both exhausting and invigorating. We all come from such different backgrounds--librarians, graduate students, booksellers, private collectors, English professors--but we all come with a passion for books, which makes for a most beautiful meeting of the minds. The week will be over far, far too soon.

From Theodore Drieser's introduction to Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh:

"But for a novel, that is one of the best, certainly the most truthful English novel. It almost makes life a little easier to endure."

for the literature lovers

This morning I led a discussion of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre with six home schooled high school students who are part of a co-op group. Immediately after agreeing to do this a month or so ago, I started kicking myself. It has been so long since I've been in high school and the MA in English changed the way I read and discuss literature, so I was afraid I wouldn't know the proper way to approach the text with a group of 15 to 17 year old kids. Then I pulled my copy of Jane Eyre off the shelf and began re-reading it.

I had forgotten how much I love that novel. The last time I read it was for my MA comps, and I was certainly reading it with a different purpose and lens at the time. This time, while I kept possible discussion topics and questions in the back of my mind, I could just soak in the book.

One of the many things I love about Victorian fiction is how rich the descriptions are. The authors don't just propel the reader from one plot point to another, they paint a vivid, imagination-capturing picture of what life was like in nineteenth century Britain, and they told stories that were deeply rooted in what it means to be human. Today's novels seem almost skeletal in comparison. I love how these books show that in spite of the different cultures and time periods and technologies between that time and this, people are essentially the same. We have the same passions, the same motivations, the same struggles, and the same triumphs. For all of our great progress, we are them, and they painted us so well.

So I decided to share that with these 6 high schoolers. For context I gave them a mini lecture about the life of Charlotte Brontë and the connections between her and the character Jane Eyre. Then we dove into the novel. We had an amazing discussion about the tension between duty and desire and how perhaps it is not either-or but both-and that Brontë advocates. We talked about the role of the governess, the condition of charity boarding schools in the mid-nineteenth century, and the significance of phenomenology and physiognomy during the Victorian age. They had some really great insights into the texts and were so willing to share their ideas and questions about the text.

In short - it was a smashing success. I will very likely guest "teach" a book for their group next semester.

For now though I have an itch to find another long-lost and much loved novel tucked away somewhere on my bookshelf.

all sorts of crazy

This is utterly ludicrous: Halloween Book Burning. Just what are they burning? Any version of the Bible that isn't the King James Version; a wide variety of music including country, rap, contemporary Christian, southern gospel, and soul; and "Satan's popular books written by heretics," including those by Billy Graham, James Dobson, John Piper, Mother Teresa, and Rob Bell. They even have scriptural "evidence" to justify the burning.

Part of me wants to laugh at how crazy this is, but then the rest of me is saddened by how blind and ignorant their actions will be. This level of fundamentalism is soul crushing and in no way reflects who Christ is and why He died for us.

when old becomes new

Today I dazzled and amazed a class of 400-level French students with dictionaries. Yes, you read that right - dictionaries. Not fancy online databases with tons of bells and whistles, not archival products that contain crazy amounts of information, not even online dictionaries. No nothing of the sort. Just your run-of-the-mill dictionaries.

They might have been in French and some were bilingual, but really there wasn't anything special about them. Even so, the students were amazed to learn that such things exist (and in a library of all the crazy places). I suppose if I had grown up with Google and Wikipedia as our students have, maybe I wouldn't have guessed to look in the library for them either. Having grown up before everything was done online, I would think that the library would be a natural place to look for something as basic as a dictionary. Apparently this is not true anymore.

I know that most things go in cycles, so perhaps the old "technologies" behind printed materials will one day become new again for this and future generations. Today's students weren't even freshman. They were juniors and seniors who were just now realizing that they could get these basic resources in the library. Not just dictionaries but grammars, thesauri, verb charts, etc. How different would their experience as a French major been if they had realized that or someone had told them 3 or 4 years ago?

On a related note: you should check this film out:

seduced

Even before I learned to read, I was well on my way to being seduced by books. My mom used to read me, my brothers, and my sister stories. We each had our favorite books - the ones we wanted to hear over and over again. I don't remember the title of the first book I fell for, but if you asked my mom, she might be able to tell you.

Learning to read made the seduction complete. I read voraciously. As wonderful as it was to have stories read to me, it was infinitely better to be able to read to myself. Now I picked the time, set the pace, chose the books. Since my mom was a former preschool teacher, we had scads of books to choose from at home - the Little Golden books, the Beatrix Potter stories, Henry and the Purple Crayon, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. My hometown had a small library, and the town librarian was like a third grandmother to us. When they built the new community center and moved the library into it, Cora let each of us kids take dozens of books home with us so that they'd have fewer books to move. We got to keep them for months.

As a child I read and reread the Mandy books and the original Nancy Drew mysteries, the Little House on the Prairie books and countless others I can't recall. There were books that you could look at the check out slip for and see my name and my brothers and sisters repeatedly signed on the card. In our age category, my older brother and I took turns winning the summer reading contest.

By the time I was in junior high, I had moved past books for young adults and moved on to adult books. I needed new stories, new adventures, and new characters to fall in love with. We didn't have a lot of money to travel, so books took me to places and times that I couldn't go to on my own. On countless nights I would stay up, reading, long past my bed time. Just 5 more minutes, Mom... but I'm almost done with the page, the chapter, the book... I just have to know how it ends.

Since I was seduced at such a young age, I guess it should have been no surprise to anyone that I eventually chose English as my major in college. I love waiting for the story to unfold, for the characters to weave their way into my imagination. Studying literature for 6 years taught me so much about how to read and only served to accelerate my fall.

I love the feel of a book's weight in my hand. I love the way the feel of the pages against my skin. I love the flip-ability (as my fellow sister of the book calls it) of the book. I love the way the spines all line up so neatly on a book shelf.

Sometimes when I'm walking through the stacks in my library, I'll run my fingers lightly across their spines as I walk past. Maybe one day all of their knowledge will seep into me.

When certain people at work start to go on about how e-books are the new thing and that the book is dying, it grieves me. I grieve because the beauty of the book is not simply in the words on the page. So much of the seduction of reading is lost when words are transferred to the screen. Their power and allure do not reach me.

I hope, possibly foolishly, that the book is not a dying medium. I want future generations to fall for the book's seductive charms and be pulled into worlds other than their own. But maybe my hope is a selfish one, one of self-preservation, for as Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams back in 1815, "I cannot live without books."