This article from the UK’s Register details a study about connections between writing improvement and online technology. But what constitutes improvement, and what constitutes writing? This is why we need to read beyond the headlines–the “improvement” was self-reported by the kids, and in some cases meant better spelling and handwriting. Some of the “writing” included text messaging. Of course, I haven’t looked at the study myself!
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We wage a continual battle every day with clutter and disorganization. With two working parents, and a nine-year-old and a four-year-old who would much rather do hundreds of other things than clean, it is a losing battle. We spend Saturday mornings cleaning and try to keep up with daily chores, but the mess is inevitable.
One of our biggest challenges is keeping track of library books. I’ve designated places for them—mainly, not mixed in with our other books—but my daughter tends to drop whatever book she is reading in the place she is reading—the bed, the chair, the futon, the car. On library day, there is a mad rush to find books. Needless to say, we pay a lot of late fines. I figure we are more than doing our part in funding the library. After one particularly frustrating (and not totally successful) search for missing books, I went to the library and picked up several books on organization. Not that I haven’t looked at such books before—I even realized later that I’d checked out at least two of them at some point before.
As I read these books, I realize that I already know how to get organized. I understand the principle of categorization and putting things in their place. I know how to file, sort, and what to throw away. The challenge is finding the time to do it, and keeping up with it. And getting my family to do it, too. The truth is, we just have too much stuff to manage, which I guess is one of the basic keys to organization that we haven’t quite mastered.
But the accumulation of goods is, as many of us already know, not essentially a problem of organization. Yes, there are times when we overbuy goods we already have because the house is such a mess we forgot we had it in the first place. But once you have children, the accumulation of goods magnifies a hundredfold. There are grandparents, aunt and uncles and friends who just want to buy stuff for your kids. And then your kids want stuff. And then they go to school and bring home these catalogs and you feel like you are just not a good parent unless you buy some stuff (and by the way I absolutely love the jewelry I’ve bought out of those catalogs—unique pieces that I would never have the time or the conscience to shop for otherwise). We grew up in a culture of materialism, and it’s hard to know how to change your lifestyle to be unmaterialistic. I think in some ways we definitely live by different principles than our parents, but it is a constant battle to fight not only the strong external pressures—the ads and catalogs that come into our house, the birthdays and holidays, the incidental “reward” toys—but also the internal pressures—the emotional bond we’ve learned to associate with playing with a toy, or reading a new book, or teaching our child to ride a bike
One day I told my daughters they each had to find five things to get rid of—either throw away or give away. My younger daughter completely ignored the request. My older daughter promptly went up to the attic and pulled out a toy from their toddler days, two dolls, a stuffed dolphin, and several books. I had to fight the urge to challenge her choices. One doll was a Madeline doll, from the books she so loved as a child and was the first book she memorized by heart. The other was a doll my sister had bought for her. One of the books was a hardcover of Anne of Avonlea, the second book in the Anne of Green Gables series, one of my absolutely favorite series of books as a child and younger teen. Though my daughter is an avid reader, she has not yet show any interest in these books. I think she will, though.
I donated the toy to the toddler room at our church. The dolls and dolphin went into a Goodwill bag along with maternity clothes. They may end up in the trash. The books she’d chosen to give away are still sliding around the back of my car until I decide where to donate them. (Though I’ve recently had the brilliant idea to regift some of them.) The Anne of Avonlea book? I’ve tucked that away, hoping that some day soon she’ll revel in the joy of reading Anne as much as I did.
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Roadtrip Nation: Find Your Path in Life was written (with help) after two college students decided to take a road trip and interview various people to find out how they got to where they were in life. As college seniors (this is in 2000, I believe), they found the paths that seemed to be laid out for them unappealing (one was a business major; the other pre-med; both were just following the family roads). As they put it, “We needed more information. We needed more experience. We needed to meet more people.” They wanted to go beyond the boundaries of the college campus, so they rented an RV, got some money from Monster.com to keep a blog, and hit the road, hitting places like New York, Boston, Maine, Chicago, and Portland, Oregon, as well as their home town of LA.
The book itself seems to be a compilation of interviews with people they met with on their second trip, which was also made into a documentary. Their interviewees range from Gary Erickson, the founder/owner of Clif Bar and Denis Muren, the special effects whiz behind Star Wars to “buzz marketing queen” at Yahoo Luanne Calvert and Manny the Lobsterman, who I personally found the most inspiring, precisely I suppose because he eschewed the corporate world, opting for a life of diving and fishing over working in computers.
The overall message of the book is to find your own path, more or less. Many of the folks in the book either didn’t finish college, or went into careers totally different from where they started. Some of them are just examples of living your passion, like Benjamin Zander, an international conductor and composer. I think what’s useful about this book for college students is that it shows that “what you major in” is not necessarily the make or break decision of your life. There is also a lot in here about having to take risks and believing in yourself, no matter what you want to do, and taking opportunities when they come before you.
The one frustrating thing I found was that several of the interviewees in their reflections noted that they could take the risks they could (usually in their 20s) because they were young and didn’t have families who were counting on them. Not so great if you’re a parent! Nobody addressed the work/life balance question, which is increasingly a concern for young families–I often read that this is more of a concern for Gen X’ers and especially Gen Y’ers than the Boomers (and most of the people interviewed were Baby Boomers). It seems these people got where they were by making some significant sacrifices and probably losing a hell of a lot of sleep. Still, I found a lot of inspiration in this book, and I think it’s a great read for college students, even if the economical outlook is grimmer than it was at the time the book came out. There’s a lot of wisdom in these pages.
At the end, the authors give recommendations for taking your own road trip. Even doing something like this on a small scale is a good idea, especially if you’re in the last year or so of college. They give specific instructions for finding and contacting people, and getting them to talk to you. In HR speak, this is called requesting an “informational interview”–but these guys have some tricks up their sleeves to make them really work!
Since the book came out, Roadtrip Nation has become a movement; they’ve been on PBS and apparently, at least this past summer, you could apply to take your own road trip. There is more information, videos, links, etc, at their website, www.roadtripnation.com.
Good luck on your road trip!
The Book: Roadtrip Nation: Find Your Path in Life by Mike Marriner and Nathan Gebhard with Joanne Gordon (New York: Ballantine, 2003).
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If you are interested, as I am, in knowing more about the actual review process for scientific journals, and whether to always trust studies that are published there, check out this article:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2009/09/ghostwriters_busy_writing_for.html
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Favorite Authors
I frequently get asked who my favorite writers are, I guess because, naturally, as a writer and an English teacher, the subject comes up. My “go to” author is Margaret Atwood. Her work is consistently well-written, fresh, and insightful of both contemporary and universal issues. I love her quirky feminism, her willingness to take on subjects both big and small.
I think the first novel of Atwood’s I read was The Handmaid’s Tale when I was a teenager. It is a dystopian tale about a future America controlled by fundamentalist Christians–Puritans, really. Having spent time at Radcliffe, Atwood drew on the Puritan roots of the Boston area to develop the setting and context. But unlike some feminist novels, the story is a very human one, revolving around the captivity of the central female figure, who has been separated from her family. If this kind of thing doesn’t appeal to your tastes, you might try a novel like Cat’s Eye (another one of my faves), which is a coming-of-age novel that is more firmly entrenched in a realistic setting. One of her more recent novels is The Penelopiad, a thoroughly readable spin on The Odyssey, a tongue-in-cheek satire of sorts that tells Penelope’s point of view. I’ve had fun reading and sharing this with my literature classes, where I often assign “rereadings” of classics.
Jane Smiley is an author who has become a top choice more recently, though I have yet to read two of her more popular books — A Thousand Acres and Moo. I learned a lot about literature, reading, and writing from reading 13 Ways of Looking at a Novel–a great tome for anyone who writes (or is interested in) writing novels, as well as any literature buffs. In addition to in-depth chapters about the different aspects of reading novels, she lists the 100 novels she read, a project she took up after 9/11.
Another author whose work I’ve come to really like, though some books more than others, is Tracy Chevalier. Girl with a Pearl Earring is mesmerizing. Her other novels are good, but don’t reach the level of quality as that one, though I have to say I listened to Burning Bright as an audiobook and was really taken up by the story that she weaves around William Blake. I recently saw it on sale at the bookstore and couldn’t resist buying it so that I could actually see the words on the page and get caught up in the story again. I think this one proves her to be one of the enduring masters.
More than authors, I might also mention some books I particularly admire (in no particular order–I couldn’t dream of trying to rank them). These are the books that I really loved, that I hated having to put down.
Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones. The way in which she handles the narrative point of view (told from the perspective of a dead girl looking at the world she left behind), despite really needing to suspend disbelief, really works.
Toni Morrison, Beloved. This novel has gotten a lot of hype and has become something of a classic. I’ve assigned it in my lit class with good reception. It’s one of the “must-reads” on anyone’s list.
Julia Alvarez, In the Time of the Butterflies. I like all of Alvarez’s work, but having a preference for novels rooted in historical reality, this is one of my favorites.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Hundred Years of Solitude; Love in the Time of Cholera. Marquez has his own style, but you’ll find yourself engrossed in the story very quickly. His prose is lush and rich, an antidote to Hemingway-esque simplicity.
Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice. Really, any of her novels are wonderful. It’s truly amazing how popular her work is today… perhaps the subject of another post. I have to admit I have yet to read Persuasion, but it’s on my list (and I’ve seen various movie versions).
Some (relatively) recent books you might have never heard of, but may want to check out.
The Last Testament of Gideon Mack, by James Robertson. This book was actually recommended by my husband, who is not the avid reader I am. It’s strange and funny and curiously engaging. It leaves you kind of with an unfinished feeling at the end, but that might be on purpose (you’ll know what I mean when you read it!). The premise is an atheist Scottish minister who meets the devil. Sounds absolutely ridiculous–and it is–but Robertson pulls it off!
Elle, by Douglas Glover. Okay, he was my fiction teacher in grad school, but I really loved this book. Another historical book, but it’s weird and (sometimes) funny. It takes place in the early colonial period of Canada; basically a girl who comes to Canada finds refuge with natives (and some bears, too, I believe).
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, by Mark Haddon. I found this strangely engaging and sad.
The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides. If anything, if you’re wondering how to pull off a first-person plural point of view (‘we’), read this book.
(Funny how these are all men, when the list above it is nearly all women! Go figure.)
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Early this morning both our daughters came into our bed. Our older one is fighting with a cold. After awhile of lying next to me, she said, “I’m bored” and wandered downstairs. Later I find her curled up on the “cozy chair” reading. No surprise. Ever since she learned how, she has been an avid reader (and even before she learned how to read, she loved being read to). When she brings home notes about how she’ll get prizes for reading a certain number of books, I can’t help but feel how ridiculous it is. I want reading to be pleasurable–as it is for me. And it is for her. Being rewarded for reading is like being given a certificate for having a dish of ice cream. Of course, this analogy doesn’t quite work, since of course reading is important in our world in so many ways.
Should we get rewarded for something we would do anyway, something that we love to do? Why not? Look at athletes, movie stars, people who love to make money. They are amply rewarded (well, not all them, just some of them). I think there’s a legitimate concern now that we “over-reward” in our culture, particularly in school. The concern is that children won’t do something for the satisfaction of doing it, that somehow giving rewards for something they would do anyway and enjoy somehow cheapens it and makes it less enjoyable. At the same time, why not reinforce the good stuff? Why should we only get rewards for things we don’t like to do ?
It is perhaps unfashionable to say anything bad about reading, but having earned a PhD in English and as a lifelong reader and writer, I think I’ve earned the right to do so. What bothered me about what happened this morning is that reading so easily quells boredom, and I’m not so sure that’s always a great thing. I feel like the time my daughter has spent on more active, creative play has decreased quite a bit since she’s started reading on her own (school has also decreased this as well, since a lot of that effort gets channeled that way). But the ease of going into a book when you’re bored can be dangerous. It was quite early this morning, and I’m pretty sure she would have been better off going back to sleep. But trying to get to sleep is boring compared to reading a book. Who of us has lost sleep because of reading too much? Let’s be honest, reading can be a real distraction to the business of living, to the cultivation of quiet awareness of our world and of rich relationships with each other. Bored, uncomfortable, stressed? Books are great antidotes, but like any antidote, we can come to rely on them too much.
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Recently I read Good Calorie, Bad Calorie: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease (Knopf, 2007). The author, Gary Taubes, is an award-winning science writer whose article on Atkins in the New York Times Magazine generated a lot of controversy several years ago. When I first read that article, I cheered, because I had found that despite a lifetime of lowfat living, it was only when I adopted a low-carbohydrate diet that I lost weight–and also experienced a lot of other positive health effects.
Taubes’s research is impressive. He traces a long history of diet advice and demonstrates how the general prescription to eat low-fat is a fairly new phenonemon, and is not actually based on clear scientific evidence. It seems, instead, that scientists have wanted to believe the implications of fat in the diet so much that they read the evidence as supporting their hypotheses, even when they didn’t. In reality, there have been very few fully controlled studies that show a clear link between fat and heart disease. In the one study that showed that men (only men, not women) had a reduced risk from heart disease from following a lowfat diet, their risk from cancer increased. This is only one point of many that Taubes makes in the book. In the end, Taubes makes a convincing case that refined carbohydrates and sugar are more likely an underlying cause in the uptick of rates of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and obesity.
Taubes also challenges the common wisdom that in order to lose weight you just need to eat less and move more. Instead, he hypothesizes that we eat more and move less because of a disorder in our body, a disorder that is exacerbated by both genes and a diet high in carbohydrates. The science of this is a bit complicated to go into here, but if you take the time, you’ll see he presents a very convincing case for the role of insulin in controlling our body’s fat stores, and how this common prescription actually works against our metabolic processes.
Good Calorie, Bad Calorie is not an entirely easy book to read. You have to be pretty interested and passionate about the subject–as I have come to be. Taubes’s ideas are, overall, not new to me. Sally Fallon and Mary Enig, a nutritionist and biochemist/expert on fats, have written two books (Nourishing Traditions and Eat Fat Lose Fat) that also lay out the dangers of refined carbohydrates and the actual health benefits of fats in the diet. One thing that Fallon and Enig talk quite a bit about–that Taubes fails to cover–is the role of trans fats (hydrogenated fats, often used in baked and processed foods, and now, fortunately are required to be labelled). In fact, they point out that in one study done with rodents that found a link between saturated fat and heart disease, the kind of saturated fat used was a trans fat. Two other physicians who have won a popular following, Dr. Mark Hyman and Dr. Joseph Mercola, also write and talk about the dangers of grains and refined carbohydrates, and the healthful role of fats in the diet. In addition, a 2006 review in Preventive Medicine concluded that no studies conclusively showed that lowfat diets really lowered the risk of heart disease or cancer.
While he does come to some conclusions, the overall thrust of Taubes’s book is to show how the prescription for lowfat living has been based on scanty evidence and has not had any widespread proven effect on the overall health of our society. In the end, he calls for more complete, thorough review and testing of the hypothesis, without which the health of all us is at stake.
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Recently I picked up Sean Covey’s children’s book, Seven Habits of Happy Kids. Check it out here.
Sean Covey works for FranklinCovey; he is the son of Stephen Covey, who wrote Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I recently read this book and was expecting a list of helpful but fairly superficial suggestions–things like make a list, keep an organizer, et cetera, but the book is much deeper than that. It’s about aligning your priorities and actions with your principles. For Covey, his principles come out of Christianity, but he is not in the least evangelical and he does not dictate what those principles should be, for the most part. The habits are not only about how to prioritize your life, but also how to interact with other people. I think his lessons are so important that I’m thinking of incorporating them into my classroom, especially as a way of teaching how my students to work well together.
Anyway, when I saw the children’s book on the clearance rack, I immediately snapped it up. There are seven stories set in a pretend animal-world called Seven Oaks. Each story features a different character and how they learn each of the habits. The stories and illustrations are fun and engaging, and don’t seem preachy at all. Each story is followed by a one-page explanation of the habit and how it applies, and gives tips for applying it to parenting. The first story, for example, exemplifies the habit of being proactive–to act on your world instead of reacting to it. The character, Sammy Squirrel, is bored and goes around asking everyone what he should do. Finally an elder in the village tells him he’s got to find his own fun. He picks up a broken radio and fixes it, then gives it to a sick child.
I think overall younger Covey did a nice job of transforming the 7 Habits into a child-friendly way. My children both seem to like it, too!
Here is a video clip of an interview with Sean Covey.
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I am calling this blog “This Reading Life” because I have realized that many of my expectations and guides for living, for better or for worse, comes from books and reading. My topics will range from various fiction (mostly, I read literary novels and memoir, though occasionally I like to read some fantasy and “popular” literature) to health (nutrition especially) to parenting to women’s issues, particularly birth activism, self-help, and spirituality (particularly Buddhism & Taoism).
