Take the 10/10/10 challenge

Fresh off the winds of November, widely known in writing circles as National Novel Writing Month or NANOWRIMO, or writing a 50,000 word novel in a month, I would like to present readers and writers with a new challenge. Please consider taking the 10/10/10 challenge: read 10 books, in each of 10 genres in 10 months from January 1st to October 31st.You should read genres that you do not normally read.  That would be 10 books a month for 100 books by the end of the challenge period.

I read an interesting essay as November began this year. The writer opined that while we were all so busy writing bad novels, there was a lot of great reading to be done and maybe we shouldn't waste our time writing bad fiction when we could become better writers simply by reading more.  We need to read more. She then introduced me to 10/10/10.

I gave up on NANOWRIMO several years ago. I just couldn't get excited about churning out really bad prose any more, and after reading this essay I am sure it was the right choice. Now I am intrigued by reading 100 books next year. I am an avid reader and my best reading record so far is 52 books in a year--a book a week. So this challenge seems daunting, but the spirit of it is simply to stretch beyond one's normal reading preferences to read things one would not normally read. And maybe, just maybe, to learn something about writing and the world.

So join me--in reading some new books in the new year. The first one on my list is a book of short stories by Nobel Prize winner Alice Monro.  What is the first new book on your list?

 Amy for the PGM.

Logophile

I am a lifelong Logophile, a lover of words.  Words have been my friends for as long as I can remember. Before I learned to read I remember watching my mother, lost in reading her paperbacks and my dad being totally engrossed in his newspaper. I couldn’t wait to find out what that was all about

As I was growing up, I’m sure my family thought I was lying on my bed reading. But I was actually in England in a haunted mansion, or in Egypt excavating the tombs and reading hieroglyphics, or following Mowgli and Baloo through the jungle.  Words transported me to someplace else, which was exactly where I needed to be.

 I love the way words wrap themselves around your ears and touch your soul.Words spoken or written have the power to heal, wound, inspire and incite.  They change our world. Adolph Hitler used words to incite a whole country to commit atrocities that went against their very nature.  Randy Pausch inspired people to face death with grace and positivity, but to also live life to the fullest in his book The Last Lecture.  Jane Austen made young girls everywhere believe that true love was possible even if the odds were against them. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle turned us into amateur sleuths after reading Sherlock Holmes. Social media, through Tweeting and Facebook connected people who were determined to overthrow a corrupt leader in Egypt. 

Words matter. As is evidenced in our schools with all the bullying that is going on today. I remember my mother never allowing anyone to call me “Red”. She didn’t want me to be diminished by a nickname that only spoke to the color of my hair and not who I really was. In grade school some boys would say to me, “I’d rather be dead than red on the head”. This gave me permission to chase them around the playground and show them how weak they were in the running department.

The word vagina can titillate a room full of women who were born with one when they were asked to ponder, “What was my vagina doing in 1988?”

Sometimes our own words can come back to bite us in the butt, for instance, when we make statements like  I would never…

We begin learning at a very early age how to be effective communicators with our words and how we use them.  My son learned early on that whining got him nowhere. 

Everyday I receive A. Word. A. Day  from: https://www.google.com/#q=wordsmith+anagram

I’m still learning.

Rebekah for the Poplar Grove Muse

The Book Club Refugee Finds Shelter

I have had an essay in progress for some years now, with the working title “Book Club Refugee.” It begins to recount the amazing number of book clubs I have attended, at least briefly, since leaving full-time employment in 1996 and moving to serial small university towns with my growing family.

I do hope I’ll finish the essay eventually. Some of the memories are just painful—the play group from hell that morphed into the book group from hell where the alpha women allowed 15 minutes max of touching on the book before launching into vicious gossip; the university women’s book club that picked a whole year’s slate by a committee of long-time members (who wouldn’t allow newer members to speak); several groups of lovely, earnest, intimate women where I just couldn’t break in.

But some of the memories are priceless treasures. The group I found just before I moved to Bloomington looked to be an excellent fit, with a mix of serious readers and hip professors who genuinely wanted to discuss the chosen selections. The second evening I attended, just as I learned I would be moving, we discussed a fabulous book in a secluded backyard hot tub with glasses of excellent chardonnay and candles balanced on the surrounding ledges, as huge, airy snowflakes drifted down around us in a mild New England evening.

I also attended unbelievably rich, public “Author Events” at the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, MA, a second-generation family-owned bookstore just across Route 116 from Mount Holyoke College; it remains a reader’s paradise, with two floors of well-selected books, cards, and bibliophile paraphernalia, and a full slate of monthly author and reader events. There I, along with 11 other fortunate and avid readers who signed up, got to discuss their books with such authors as Alice McDermott, Ruth Ozeki, Jane Smiley, and others. (I coined the name “Book Club Refugees” for the “club” of two, myself and my dear friend Ellen, so that we could attend an evening event limited to book clubs only.) In those intimate conversations with authors, I learned so much about the assumptions I bring to a text, and how little those assumptions sometimes have to do with the writing decisions made by a contemporary author, among other things.

Here in Bloomington, I am a devoted member of the WWF(a)C Book Club that meets third Thursdays over tea and optional sack lunch at the Poplar Grove Schoolhouse. I cannot say enough about this ambitious, articulate, and thoughtful group of readers. We are all serious, but not humorless, about our reading, and discussion of the selections is always primary. A group of some 10 regulars, most with some connection to the WWF(a)C program, we are led by a wise and dedicated facilitator who usually reads the books at least twice and never fails to challenge us with thought-provoking questions and considerations. In recent months, we have chosen a set of three books that all bear on African American history: James McBride’s haunting “Song Yet Sung,” a tale of escaped slaves in pre-Civil War Maryland, Jon Clinch’s gorgeous and grisly imagining of Huckleberry Finn’s Pap “Finn,” and next month, Isabel Wilkerson’s “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.” We are all looking forward to hearing James McBride speak in Bloomington as a guest of the Friends of the Monroe County Library on November 12.

Each of us has our own history of reading, alone, with friends and partners, as well as in groups, and surely each of us has our own experiences of the pleasures and perils of shared reading with others. Share some of yours! Or come share ours with us!

Mary for the Poplar Grove Muse

What I Did on My Vacation

My family was down to two for a few days this past week. My husband and my youngest daughter flew to California to celebrate his mother’s 82nd birthday between Christmas and New Year’s. Air fares were so outrageous that we only felt we could send half our delegation.

The result was that I was left at home with a fairly self-reliant 15-year-old daughter, post holidays (where for most of a week I prepared three squares a day for larger-than-usual crowds), with very little that I absolutely HAD to do. Faced with this unusual span of available time, I considered dismantling Christmas, various long-neglected organizational tasks, and the obvious housekeeping chores that had been suspended for the immediate needs of houseguests….

And so, of course, I read three novels, back-to-back, in bed, in my nightclothes, for much of the time. It was luxurious, disorienting, and thoroughly restorative.

I find that the only thing that can make me want to ignore my family is a good novel. As a girl, I devoured most reading matter that came my way, including medicine labels, cereal boxes, and junk mail. Before I was allowed, in fourth grade, to check out books from the more mature sections of my library (what a silly and outdated rule!), I would appear at the Bookmobile at the start of their shift in my schoolyard, check out the maximum number of allowed charges, take them home to read, and return just before the vehicle departed to check out a whole new allotment. My mother recalls how she could never send her three children to their rooms as a punishment, since we were never happier than reading in our rooms; I vividly remember the ache of being called from solitary reading to set the table, vacuum, rake, shovel, whatever task the life of the household demanded at the moment. Reading was refuge, escape, transport to other, better worlds, and sometimes seemed like the meaning of life. That luxurious childhood sense of the urgency of reading, and my parents’ acquiescence in my siblings’ and my pursuit of it, is one of the greatest gift of my early years.

However, being a good partner, and a passable parent, I rarely indulge this longing to forget the rest of my world and just read. So this week, with my diminished household demands, was a rare opportunity.

One of my closest friends, Harvard and Oxford educated, a busy physician, parent, and spouse, whom I regularly refer to as “the smartest person I know,” had a childhood ambition for adult success that I treasure. Early on, she defined her standard for adult success as being able to read “a book a day.” It sounds laughable, and in fact I have related this to friends who have laughed at the idea. But it is hard for me to imagine a grownup goal that better incorporates that greatest freedom and pleasure of my childhood, than this one. Needless to say, neither she nor I have achieved this success.

I talk to women all the time, for whom a great regret of adult life is not having time and energy to read. The refrain about reading only a few pages in bed before falling asleep is a common one. As are the piles of unread, long-desired tomes on the bedside table. I know of a number of book clubs that have sadly disbanded, due to the difficulty of mustering a critical mass of members who get the books read month in and month out. Often, there is a tinge of guilt in these narrations, as though we have somehow betrayed our younger, perhaps wiser, reading selves.

In recent years I have rededicated myself to reading more. Nothing makes me feel that I have attended to my core self more than reading. I invite you to join me in this ongoing project in 2011. There are lots of sources for raising your own excitement about making more time for reading: two favorites are Maureen Corrigan’s segments on NPR’s Fresh Air http://www.npr.org/2010/12/09/131763087/maureen-corrigan-s-favorite-books-of-2010 and our own Esmerelda’s “Esmerelda’s Book Thing” http://esmereldasbookthing.blogspot.com/. Consider joining the WWFaC book group, which meets third Thursdays at the schoolhouse.

Happy New Year! Happy Reading! Mary for the Poplar Grove Muse