The Book That Did Not Want to Be Read

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Oh wow, this is one of my favorite sentences from a college linguistics book ... yikes, over 20 years ago! The author was trying to prove that it is possible and acceptable to end English sentences with a preposition. In the mid-1800's the English teachers tried to force English to obey the rules of Latin, where it is impossible to end a sentence with a preposition (or so I've been told, I don't understand Latin!). Some people say it's too hard for English-speakers to understand what you're saying if you put the preposition at the end. And waste: “But that’s all any civilization leaves behind…..Not a single library survived antiquity. It’s just tombs and trash heaps. Historically speaking, we are what we bury.” Her massive ego helped her crush delusions about feminists under each of her shoes- which were smaller than her spectacles. When she wasn't too drunk, she found the intellectual energy to move on and crush another one. Perhaps when Orwell described sheer egoism as a necessary quality for a writer, he was not thinking about the sheer egoism of a female writer. Even the most arrogant female writer has to work overtime to build an ego that is robust enough to get her through January, never mind all the way to December." As I read this I kept thinking of On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft where Stephen King warns idealistic authors not to focus on themes in their fiction. Just write a good story, he says, and the themes will evolve. I wondered whether Jonathan Miles followed this advice. Certainly the novel didn't suffer for this, but the themes were prominent and it's hard to imagine he didn't work from theme --> story as opposed to the other way around.

I do understand the economic principles at stake here and the liability involved but it still seems insane. No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness" - Adrienne rich.Deborah Levy was asked to write a response to George Orwell's essay "Why I Write." She uses the four motives he proposed as titles for the four parts of her essay, Things I Don't Want to Know: On Writing. When the grown-up had struggled and struggled and struggled and made things up and sung and fought and struggled and blown and read and steered and struggled and struggled and struggled, at last the child said, “I want to sleep now. Goodnight.” The remainder of the books touches on her early life in South Africa, a time in which her ANC supporting father was one day arrested and taken away – she wouldn’t see him again for four years. Then there’s a section when, as a teenager living in a North London suburb, she reflects on her time as a rebellious would be writer living ‘in exile’. These anecdotes paint vivid pictures of both time and place, and show something of what her early life must have comprised. Miles does a great job of presenting the same thesis through three very different worlds. As always happens in these sorts of stories, eventually the three worlds collide in a somewhat unnecessary fashion to provide closure. I agree with Miles’s politics and I enjoyed the MANY examples of “over wanting” that he presented. At times, I thought it might be a bit repetitive and preachy, but in general it was a decent read.

Now re-read because I have an ARC of the third part ( Real Estate) and want to read all three parts consecutively. Now on to The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography It all depends on how it’s done. Try to make it relaxing and low-key for a short part of the day. Share something of your own. Read aloud some funny or interesting parts of a book that you’re reading. Draw your child in with a riddle book for kids, a passage from Sports Illustrated, or a newspaper story.Then there's Elwin — a 54-year-old overweight linguistics professor whose wife has just left him. This has left him feeling discarded and sad. In our first scene with Elwin, he hits a deer with his car late at night, and decides to take it home and save the meat (waste not!) — with an assist from his young-20s neighbor Christopher, a Jersey Shore wannabe who is also one of the highlights of this novel. Elwin's father has Alzheimer's and Elwin struggles to comes to terms with the idea that all the memories his father has accumulated over his life are disappearing, like so many I have used prepositions rather abundantly here. So feel free to correct them as well as any other mistakes I may have made. Be sure that I'll correct your German as well. ] Writing made me feel wiser than I actually was. Wise and sad. That was what I thought writers should be." For some high school students, just reading a chapter in a textbook becomes like climbing a mountain, even though they are good readers. How can parents recognize the difference between an emotionally turned-off reader and a child with a learning problem? I had been told to say my thoughts out loud and not just in my head but I decided to write them down."

Now, in his much anticipated second novel, Want Not, Miles takes a giant leap forward with this highly inventive and corrosively funny story of our times, a three-pronged tale of human excess that sifts through the detritus of several disparate lives—lost loves, blown chances, countless words and deeds misdirected or misunderstood—all conjoined in their come-hell-or-high-water search for fulfillment. There are some other striking details provided in this section of the memoir. As a child who was required to be stoical in the face of hardship, Deborah saw in her plastic Barbie doll a kind of model for the way a girl should be. “Untouched by anything horrible that happened in the world,” Barbie was calm, pretty, and plastic. Levy wished that she too could be plastic with painted-on blue eyes “that held no secrets.” Once upon a time, there was a child who couldn’t fall asleep. So the child asked a grown-up, “Can you please read me a book?” And the grown-up said, “Of course I can!”

What encouragement can you give parents of struggling readers?

Things I Don't Want to Know (2013) is the first of Levy's "Living Autobiography,” which now has three short volumes, and maybe more will come. I’ve had a good year reading Annie Ernuaux, and most recently two volumes of Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet, all of which I enjoyed and learned from. Once in a while, a book comes along that’s a little bit different, and we have a book just like that to share with you today. We were sent a copy to review, of The Book That Did Not Want To Be Read, by Swedish author David Sundin with graphic design by Alexis Holmqvist. Not only is this book a little bit different, it’s also absolutely brilliant! I can also appreciate what you are saying. You can overdo things both ways. What I try to teach my students is - I hope - modern, everyday English. I needn't encourage them to put their prepositions at the end a phrase - they do that naturally, anyway (not necessarily five in a row, though ). I very much prefer them to say things like "This is just the thing I have asked for." rather than "This is just the thing for which I have asked." Reading is supposed to feel good to the child. When it does, they’ll become readers. We all repeat things that are pleasurable. How have you made reading fun for kids in your classroom?

I think the most poignant example was the story of Micah and the plastic salesman on the train in India. The man justifies the large quantities of plastic littering the countryside as saving the elephants (plastic was originally discovered as an alternative to ivory), but then Micah sees a sorry elephant in the streets emphasizing that the elephants were not really saved so much as tortured in a new way.This book was amiable enough until it reached a scene at Yankee Stadium. The Yanks are playing the Indians, all well and good, except all the Yankees the author writes about are real and the only Indians player is made up. I could live with that because the scene created around the fake Indians player is funny and couldn't happen with any real Indians player. My real problem was that the real Yankees players in the scene -- Derek Jeter, Johnny Damon, Hideki Matsui, Jason Giambi -- didn't play together on the Yankeee in the year (2009) this takes place. Sure, it's a small detail, but the reason such tidbits are included in books are to make it real in a time and place. Getting that detail wrong didn't change the book. It just diminished it for me because something like that could have easily been fixed. There are a lot of distractions out there. Kids aren’t living in little log cabins where all there is to do is read. It could be a combination of watching too much television at home and doing a lot of boring worksheets in school. Levy divides her book into four sections corresponding to 4 motives for writing: political purpose, historical impulse, sheer egoism, and aesthetic enthusiasm. She speaks of herself at 7, 17, 50, speaking of growing in Apartheid South Africa--with her father imprisoned for opposing it--before going to England in her teen years. She writes of the struggle to speak, to find a voice, to publish while raising two children.