Harper Lee on Reading and Remembering

Lord, I wish this woman had written more books!!!

Letters of Note - Some things should happen on soft pages, not cold metal

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Some things should happen on soft pages, not cold metal Posted: 15 Oct 2012 07:11 AM PDT In May of 2006, 46 years after the publication of her only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, reclusive author Harper Lee wrote the following letter to Oprah Winfrey, on the subject of reading and her love of books. It was subsequently published in Oprah's magazine, "O." (Source: O; Image: Harper Lee, via.) May 7, 2006 Dear Oprah, Do you remember when you learned to read, or like me, can you not even remember a time when you didn't know how? I must have learned from having been read to by my family. My sisters and brother, much older, read aloud to keep me from pestering them; my mother read me a story every day, usually a children's classic, and my father read from the four newspapers he got through every evening. Then, of course, it was Uncle Wiggily at bedtime. So I arrived in the first grade, literate, with a curious cultural assimilation of American history, romance, the Rover Boys, Rapunzel, and The Mobile Press. Early signs of genius? Far from it. Reading was an accomplishment I shared with several local contemporaries. Why this endemic precocity? Because in my hometown, a remote village in the early 1930s, youngsters had little to do but read. A movie? Not often — movies weren't for small children. A park for games? Not a hope. We're talking unpaved streets here, and the Depression. Books were scarce. There was nothing you could call a public library, we were a hundred miles away from a department store's books section, so we children began to circulate reading material among ourselves until each child had read another's entire stock. There were long dry spells broken by the new Christmas books, which started the rounds again. As we grew older, we began to realize what our books were worth: Anne of Green Gables was worth two Bobbsey Twins; two Rover Boys were an even swap for two Tom Swifts. Aesthetic frissons ran a poor second to the thrills of acquisition. The goal, a full set of a series, was attained only once by an individual of exceptional greed — he swapped his sister's doll buggy. We were privileged. There were children, mostly from rural areas, who had never looked into a book until they went to school. They had to be taught to read in the first grade, and we were impatient with them for having to catch up. We ignored them. And it wasn't until we were grown, some of us, that we discovered what had befallen the children of our African-American servants. In some of their schools, pupils learned to read three-to-one — three children to one book, which was more than likely a cast-off primer from a white grammar school. We seldom saw them until, older, they came to work for us. Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. Instant information is not for me. I prefer to search library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember it. And, Oprah, can you imagine curling up in bed to read a computer? Weeping for Anna Karenina and being terrified by Hannibal Lecter, entering the heart of darkness with Mistah Kurtz, having Holden Caulfield ring you up — some things should happen on soft pages, not cold metal. The village of my childhood is gone, with it most of the book collectors, including the dodgy one who swapped his complete set of Seckatary Hawkinses for a shotgun and kept it until it was retrieved by an irate parent. Now we are three in number and live hundreds of miles away from each other. We still keep in touch by telephone conversations of recurrent theme: "What is your name again?" followed by "What are you reading?" We don't always remember. Much love, Harper RSS Feed proudly sponsored by TinyLetter, a simple newsletter service for people with something to say.

TinyLetter Posted: 15 Oct 2012 12:58 AM PDT As always, huge thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring Letters of Note, Lists of Note, and Letterheady. About TinyLetter: TinyLetter is a ridiculously easy, spam-free service that enables you — at no cost — to send out a personal email newsletter to an unlimited number of subscribers. Signing up takes seconds, and within minutes of doing so you will have learnt everything needed to send out your first newsletter. The dashboard is refreshingly simple and enables you to quickly read any replies, manage subscribers, glance at stats, and even spruce up your sign-up page. All in all, a fantastic, hassle-free service that I'm genuinely pleased to recommend. Try it out. RSS Feed proudly sponsored by TinyLetter, a simple newsletter service for people with something to say.

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Happy Birthday, Dear Kindle

I was reluctant to embrace the e-reader when they first came out. I love books. I love the way they feel in my hand and the way they smell. I like to write in the margins. After I started publishing e-books, I decided I should check out and support other e-book writers, so I bought a Kindle, with the intention of using it to read e-books, while still buying p-books for "regular" reading.

Well, I have had my Kindle for a year now, and I haven't picked up a p-book since I took it out of the box.

As of this week, I have read 90 books on my Kindle. The vast majority of those were indie authors (or, in some cases, traditionally published authors publishing their back list as e-books). Most of them were free. In the past year, I probably spent more on books than I had for the two or three years prior, because for several years, I had purchased almost no books. I did all my reading from the library. However, this year I spent a fraction of what I used to spend when I was buying books regularly, and I read more books this year than I ever had before. I once figured out that I typically read an average of about 2.5 books a month over a typical year. Since I got my Kindle, I'm averaging 1.7 books a week.

There's a lot of chatter about how much crap is being published as e-books. That may be true, but there has been a lot of crap published in traditional p-books, too. I have started and abandoned only 14 books in the last year. You have to winnow the chaff to get to the grain, but I haven't found as much chaff as I expected. True, there's a lot more to material out there, but in my opinion, self-published e-books are like a vast slush pile that is free (or at least really cheap) and available to anyone who wants to dig around in it. There may be a lot of junk, but there are also some real gems. Perhaps more importantly, there are  a lot of entertaining stories, decently told, and available at very modest prices or even free.That's good enough for me on a rainy Saturday or during those couple of hours between washing the dinner dishes and falling asleep.

I have issues with some of Amazon's business practices, but I'm in love with my Kindle*.

*Affiliate Link: buy great stuff and support this site for no extra charge.

Reading E-books

I sort of knew this would happen! One of the reasons I delayed buying an e-reader for so long was because I was afraid that I'd get carried away with it. I was right. I am a lifelong biblioholic. Before I got married, I spent almost as much money on books as I did on clothes (and I spent a LOT on clothes). When my daughter was born and I decided to be a stay-at-home mother, I vowed to quit buying books to economize, but I didn't stop reading them. I went to the library weekly and loaded up with anywhere from three to five books. I stayed out of bookstores. After I got online, I pretended Amazon.com didn't exist. After I finally went back to work, I allowed myself the occasional foray into a Barnes and Noble store, and once or twice a year (usually at Christmas) I permitted myself a dangerous visit to Amazon.com. Until recently, I still obtained most of my reading material from the library. 

Now, I have a Kindle that is never out of my reach. I spend a lot of time reading. I spend a lot of time trolling the Internet for e-books. I'm having a ball reveling in the thrill of the pursuit of new book adventures. I can't wait until Amazon allows for library loaning on the Kindle (scheduled for later this year). That will be the best of all worlds.

I am so busy reading these days, I'm not writing very much, however. That's a problem for a writer.  I'm thinking of it as "drawing inspiration" instead of slothfully spending my days lost in imaginary worlds created by others. (Which is kind of like spending my days lost in imaginary worlds I created, only less work.)

Now if they could just make the Kindle smell like a book......

Rediscovering Reading

I doubt that there is a writer on the planet who didn't start out as a reader first.

By the time I was in the third grade, I had read all the "little kids" books in my school library and the local branch library. I lived for the monthly visit from the book-mobile from the main library to bring me new books I hadn't read yet.

By the fourth grade, I gave up on kids books altogether and started reading adult novels. My father had an entire basement full of books. I worked my way through them one by one. I read a lot of stuff that was inappropriate for a kid, but my dad insisted that challenging myself to read adult fiction was good for me despite the fact that I might read about sex and other stuff I wouldn't understand at that age anyway. He was right.

Before I got married, I spent more money on books than I did on clothes. When I packed for a vacation, I packed my books first and then fit the rest of my stuff into whatever space was left.

When my daughter was born and I quit working, I resolved to quit buying books and read exclusively from the library. From then until a few years ago, I went to the library every two weeks and checked out anywhere from five to nine books, and I read all of most of them. Today I went to the library to change my address on my library card. I discovered to my horror that my card expired so long ago, I wasn't even in the system any more. It has been probably five years since I've been to the library.

Part of that was because I discovered a thrift store that sold books for a pittance and I love to own my own books.  Because I was working again, I also started buying books on Amazon.com. Mostly my lack of reading was due to the fact that for the last five years I spent so much of my time writing, I didn't take the time to read. Whatever the reasons, when someone like me stops cherishing their reading time, something is wrong. Even writers need to read.  Maybe writers need to read more than anybody.

This week I got a new library card and I checked out two new books. They are both debut novels by new authors.For one thing, I want to see what they have that I don't have. More than that, I want to dive into and luxuriate in other writers' stories for the first time in too long.

I am not sure how much writing I am going to get done in the near future. I have a lot of reading to catch up on!

What I'm seeking in my life now is balance. Instead of burying myself in writing fiction every spare moment of every day and neglecting to feed my spirit with other authors' work, I am going to try to work out a schedule that will accommodate both reading and writing.

Beginning now with my two new library books. I can't wait to get started.

Hanta Yo

I haven't done a lot of reading in recent years because I have spent every spare minute writing. Prior to this writing frenzy, I was a 3- to 7-books-a-month reader. Now that I have more free time, I'm trying to add reading back into my daily routine.

Some people never re-read a book. I am not one of them.  If I haven't read a book at least twice, I didn't like it much. There are several books I've read many times. I keep going back to them because I love them. Re-reading them is like visiting an old friend who is familiar, and yet each time I visit I see something I didn't see before. I understand something new about the story because I am reading it from a different perspective.

The book I've read more times than any other (not counting certain Dr. Seuss books read aloud to children night after night for weeks at a time) is a book called Hanta Yo by Ruth Beebe Hill. It is a novel set in the Great Plains at the time when white people and the Lakota bands first made contact, following the lives of two Lakota friends through their amazing lives. I don't know how accurate the story is as to the actual day-to-day life of the Lakota people (I seriously doubt it's accurate at all). The general trajectory of the history as to the tragedies that attended the American westward expansion is generally accurate, as far as I know. It isn't one of those Indians-are-good-and-white-people-are-bad stories. There are some really bad-assed Lakota and the story at least holds out the possibility that there could be white people of good will.

For me it doesn't matter if the novel is historically accurate in its depiction of the native Americans or the Americans who stole their land. My love for the story arises out of two things: first, the beauty of the language in which the story is written; and, second, the sense of tension, confusion and bewilderment of people who are living in a world that they know is dying.

I have always felt that the culture I live in is very much like the the Lakota's world in this story: it is doomed and there is nothing we can do to stop the changes. All we can do is to learn to live in a new way. The characters know they can't go back to the way things were before. They know that if they make wrong choices, disaster could befall them. They also know they can't stay in one place, so they have to make those hard choices. The 21st Century American reader knows that in the end the traditional Lakota way of life will be destroyed and that the whites will barely notice -- and not care if they do notice. What never fails to intrigue me is that embedded in the story is the barest of hints that something of the beauty of the Lakota way of life will survive on the land, even if it is hidden and dormant, along with the corresponding hint that someday another people will discover that it could learn a lot from the Lakota culture. It is the story of conquest and empire, but it plants the seeds of hope that someday, somehow, a people will live on the land who will create a culture that incorporates the best of both native American and white cultures. I like that theme because I'm a person who believes in living in accordance with the spirit of the land you live on.

The language of the story captivates me more every time I read it. Allegedly the story was written in English and then translated into Lakota and then back into English in order to give it a rhythm and cadence that approximates Lakota speech. I don't believe that. I think that the author did what J. K. Rowling did: she created an imaginary world and then invented words and phrases and a way of speaking that enhances the mystery and magic of the story world. There are those who blast the story because it is not “historical” or “authentic” or “truthful”. I don't care about any of that. It's fiction! It can be anything it wants to be, including historically inaccurate or completely and totally imaginary – providing the reader is entertained. It is even better when the reader comes away with a nugget or two of something that is true-for-her, but that does not necessitate historical accuracy.

I have read this book seven or eight times and I've never failed to be entertained. I still cry at the sad parts and smile at the humor. I have never failed to come away with some insight into my own world that is new for me. I love a book that makes me cry as much on the eighth reading as it did on the first and from which I can learn something about my world that I didn't see before. It may not be Shakespeare, but it's my favorite novel.

Meredith