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Wednesday
Yesterday I wrote about a series of questions about the reading experience that the Guardian asked author Barbara Kingsolver. The questions were so good that I started answering them myself and also invited readers to send in their own answers. Since then I have thought of additional questions, which are included at the end of today’s essay and which I will address in a later post. Again, please feel free to write in with your own answers since I love hearing other people’s reading stories.
Here are the responses, Kingsolver’s and my own, to the remaining questions asked by the Guardian:
The book I reread
Kingsolver mentions George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which many contend is England’s greatest novel. The author reports that she rereads it “at least once per decade, because it’s about everything, for every person, at every age.”
It’s harder for me to come up with a book because there are so many of them. When I was an active teacher, I couldn’t teach a work without rereading it first, no matter how many times I had thumbed through its pages. I vaguely recall Julian Barnes’s narrator in Flaubert’s Parrot mentioning this as an occupational hazard of literature teachers, how they wear works out for themselves through constant revisiting.
While this can indeed be a problem, the compensation is discovering how multi-leveled the greatest works are. But to answer the question, I used to ritually reread Pride and Prejudice after turning in spring semester grades, using it to find peace following the frenzy of the school year. Other works that I particularly loved teaching, and so reread once or twice a year, were Jane Eyre, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Homer’s Odyssey, King Lear, and of course Beowulf.
The book I enjoyed as a teenager but could never read again
Kingsolver mentions J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, saying that, now that she knows that the author groomed young women, this has “poisoned the well.”
It’s interesting that she mentions Salinger since I had the opposite experience with a work of his: I loathed Catcher in the Rye when I read it at 15 but was impressed when I read it again in my 40s. I came to realize that my aversion arose from how it captured my adolescent insecurities only too well. In other words, I couldn’t handle the truth. (Regarding Salinger’s taste for young women, I have only just now learned about it.)
For books that I enjoyed as a teen but can’t read again, I’d have to point to certain D. H. Lawrence novels, especially Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Women in Love. All that focus on male phallic energy I now find tiresome. I speak as one who was so in love with Lawrence in college that I included a poem about turtles mating (“Tortoise Shout”) in our wedding ceremony.
I once heard Sandra Gilbert say (the author of Madwoman in the Attic visited our college in the 1980s) that there are more unfinished female dissertations on D. H. Lawrence than on any other author. Energized initially by his acknowledgement of female sexuality, these female fans would become disenchanted as they explored the man further. My own growth away from him has been slower but I haven’t reread any of his novels in decades (with the exception of The Man Who Died).
All of which is to say that some authors are best encountered when we are young. Unlike, say, Shakespeare, who has something for every age group.
The book I discovered later in life
For Kingsolver, it’s Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, which she says she resisted until late in life. Since both are regional authors (Cather for Nebraska, Kingsolver for southern Appalachia), the love affair makes sense. I too have fallen in love with Willa Cather’s novels in recent years, but the work I resisted reading—but now consider to be one of the great books of my life—is Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
The book I am currently reading
For Kingsolver, it’s Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project, which American conservatives (not just MAGA) have been demonizing ever since it appeared. I myself am currently listening to Antelope Woman by Louise Erdrich, whom Kingsolver mentions in her next answer.
My comfort read
Kingsolver responds,
For long plane trips I grab a contemporary novel I can trust to be fabulous, because I’ve loved everything that author has written: Louise Erdrich, Margot Livesey, Maggie O’Farrell, Amor Towles, Russell Banks and Richard Powers, to name a few. The list is comfortingly long.
I recently wrote about how my go-to comfort read are novels by Haruki Murakami, especially 1Q84, which is a blend of magical realism, mystery suspense, and love story, with a very attractive hero and heroine. And I too have certain writers whose new novels I will read as soon as they come out, including Erdrich, Margaret Atwood, Kate Atkinson, and Kingsolver herself. Oh, and Philip Pullman, whose final volume in his Dust series I’ve been breathlessly awaiting for years.
Now to my own Guardian-style questions, which I’ll respond to in a future post. I limit my answers to poetry, drama, and prose fiction:
–Who is your favorite hero and heroine? (they can be from different works)
–Who is your favorite villain?
–What work has held you in the greatest suspense?
–What work has given you the greatest shock?
–What work has given you the greatest erotic thrill?
–What literary ending do you find the most satisfying?
–What literary ending do you find the least satisfying?
–If you could change an ending to a work, what would you do?
–What work do you most wish had a sequel? (fan fiction is driven by such works)
–What is a work that you believe has damaged you?
–What is a work you wish you had never encountered?
–If you could have any character as a partner, who would it be?
–If you could have any author as a partner, who would it be?
–What literary family would you most like to belong to?
–What is a work that had you laughing out loud?
–What’s your favorite open ending?
–Add your own question and answer.
