Wendy Lesser is the kind of reader who will track down a bootleg version of Haruki Murakami’s “Norwegian Wood” and compare it line by line with the authorized version. The kind of reader who can find a book list “intensely moving, even in its misjudgements.” The kind of re-reader who wishes “Wolf Hall” were twice as long and at its end heads to the Frick Museum to gaze at portraits of its protagonist Thomas Cromwell.
And she is the kind of writer who can spend 200 pages telling you all about her bookish tastes and beliefs without once urging you to agree. Her tone in “Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books” is akin to a chatty hostess ushering you into her impressive library, fingering the spines of treasured books, and detailing the literary pleasures held within. She meanders through the shelves, pausing to recall a beloved passage here, some author backstory there. Sprinkling bon mots all the while.
Reading is not about progressing toward a finish line, any more than life is.
There is nothing shameful about giving up on a book in the middle: that is the exercise of taste.
In the never-ending conversation about what might count as good literature, there are many worse things than being wrong.
Her musings are informed and far-ranging. She explains why the sequels to great novels are often distinctly inferior. Praises 19th century Russians for setting the standard for writer authority and doubts nonfiction authors who fail to hint at their own unreliability. She quips that the TV show “The Wire” attained an air of “literary profundity.” (Surely, the highest compliment from such an inveterate reader.)
She’s generous, insisting that literature comes in all genres: poems, essays, mysteries, even sci fi–really, any form “well-written enough to last through multiple readings, not to mention multiple generations of readers.”
She hazards some guesses as to which contemporary literature might endure, and a quarter of the 100 books that she recommends for pleasure reading were penned by living or recently departed writers–not bad for a list that spans hundreds of years. Still, she devotes the most praise and attention to close readings of works of the white and dead. “The slight, the facile, and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedians and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and James and Conrad,” she explains.
She shares her reading opinions generously, but the account is scarcely personal. She holds her reader-guests at a respectful distance, limiting the conversation to the books, not the life of the reader. In just one odd passage about D.H. Lawrence, she risks personal disclosure. “I know of no book more true than ‘Sons and Lovers,’” she writes. “I would stake my life on its truths about mothers and their sons, young women and their lovers; I have staked my life on them, at key moments of emotional crisis or existential despair.” But she tells us no more about herself, her crises or her despair, quickly returning to thoughts on how Lawrence can browbeat the reader with his opinions and still allow space for them to choose to believe him or not.
Bibliomemoirs like “Tolstoy and the Purple Chair,” in which the author recounts her experiences reading a book a day for a year, and “The Shelf,” in which the author reads the New York Society Library’s LES-LEQ shelf, may feel inorganic and pat, but they provide a structure and narrative drive that “Why I Read” lacks.
And Lesser’s refusal to tell us what the books really mean to her, beyond an appreciation of admired writers’ deftness with character, plot and craft, ultimately prevents it from reaching its own literary ambitions. “A work of commentary or criticism is not necessarily a work of literature, but it can aspire to that condition and be the better for it,” Lesser wrote in the book’s prologue. “I aspire, in this little book, toward the qualities I have admired in novels and poetry, including the compression, the indirection, the inherent connections, the organic shape.”
A better choice would have been to aspire toward the kind of truth and authority she admires so much in 19th century Russian authors. It might have emboldened her to risk something in her writing and imbue quotidian observations of a reading life with the weight of hard-won revelation. As it stands, “Why I Read” is a delightful compilation of bookish insights. But it remains in the realm of scholarly conversation, not literature.
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Convincing American women to transform workplaces by voting in family-friendly laws involves no small amount of cajoling—and for good reason. Even after decades of feminist manifestos and women’s empowerment tomes (or perhaps partly because of them), it can feel like an admission of deficiency to clamor for a new world order, like you aren’t Oprah or Hillary or Sheryl enough to win in a man’s world.
That’s why personal growth books like Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” are so seductive. They minimize the fact that the game is rigged, and make women feel like we alone possess the power to fulfill our highest career ambitions. They assert women’s capability and downplay their vulnerability in workplaces and communities that devalue them. We can succeed, the books say, if only we work hard enough, marry the right kind of person, time childbirth optimally or forgo it altogether. If, if, if.
Anne-Marie Slaughter’s “Unfinished Business” does not make this mistake. Rather, it suggests that women have simultaneously taken on too much and too little of the burden of workplace progress — too much personal responsibility and too little collective action. We’ve taken exceptionally accomplished women as proof that we can do it too, when we should be more attuned to the innumerable ways American society is structured to hold most women down. Admirably, Slaughter attempts to outline them all.
“We Americans love self-help,” she writes. “Manuals that tell us to lean in or stand up or climb over others as a way to enhance our personalities, overcome our flaws, and assure our progress speak to a national religion of self-improvement. After all, if it’s only up to us, then change is within our control. It doesn’t depend on organizing or mobilizing others within a political system that many of us see as dysfunctional.”
As Slaughter sees it, individual work ethic is no match for the raft of workplace expectations, social customs and government policies that reinforce women’s (especially mothers’) second-class status at work. Children need their mother! It’s the man’s job to provide! Babies are focus-killers! Not to mention the absence of high-quality and affordable childcare and eldercare and paid family and medical leave — policies that would allow more women (and men) to earn a good wage while also being there for loved ones.
We do women a great disservice when we deflect attention from sweeping workplace and political changes like these that would actually make a difference. This becomes obvious when Slaughter examines women at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder and observes that they hold 62 percent of minimum-wage jobs. Half of single mothers make less than $25,000 a year, working in dead-end jobs with no flexibility or benefits. Motherhood is the single best predictor of impending bankruptcy among middle-class single women.
“It just isn’t plausible that too many women are at the bottom of American society because they are not trying hard enough, are too perfectionist, or lack confidence,” Slaughter writes.
As such, her vision for gender equality looks more like a denser social fabric than a shattered glass ceiling. That is, equality is not attained when women can scale the corporate ladder as high and as fast as men. Rather, equality emerges when our nation appreciates (and compensates) caregiving as much as breadwinning. Higher wages and training for paid caregivers, better enforcement of age discrimination laws, financial and social support for single parents, and greater early education investment are pieces of the care infrastructure she envisions. Another piece is raising our value of the unpaid, but vital, caretaking work of family members.
“The message that a woman’s traditional work of caregiving — anchoring the family by tending to material needs and nourishing minds and souls — is somehow less important than a man’s traditional work of earning an income to support that family and advance his own career is false and harmful,” she writes. “It is the result of a historical bias, an outdated prejudice, a cognitive distortion that is skewing our society and hurting us all.”
Slaughter writes that care (of children, aging parents, etc.) is the crucible that can unite women (and men) across the socioeconomic ladder. She doesn’t offer any specifics on how to build such a diverse coalition and bring about cultural transformation, however. Instead, she gives readers a list of policy ideas and a note to check the book’s endnotes for organizations and campaigns to support.
Robotically, she writes “the specifics of policy proposals on each of these issues differ from state to state and often by party affiliation and political philosophy; a comprehensive catalogue is thus impossible.” There’s a sea of opportunity between the eleven bulleted policy ideas she offers and a “comprehensive catalogue” of policy proposals, and it’s a serious weakness of the book that she doesn’t explore it.
In fact, Slaughter simply urges readers to elect more women to public office, as if that’s a specific policy proposal. “Indeed, given the wide-ranging support from everyday Americans of both parties for more government help for caregivers, it often seems as if our legislators are the only ones who aren’t getting the message,” she writers. “There’s a simple reason for that: we are electing too many men.”
This is a variation on the solution she offered in her much-debated 2012 Atlantic article, “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All,” which inspired this book. The article concluded, “We may need to put a woman in the White House before we are able to change the conditions of the women working at Walmart.”
That idea was in line with an earlier statement in the article: “I am writing for my demographic—highly educated, well-off women who are privileged enough to have choices in the first place…We are the women who could be leading, and who should be equally represented in the leadership ranks.” (Emphasis mine.)
In 2015, though, she’s rightly expanded her view to advocate for all women. Given that progress, it’s a surprise that she still sees electing women as a major catalyst for change, versus a symbol of it. It feels as naive as thinking all would be well with “black America” once President Obama was elected. Legislatures rarely dictate public attitudes; rather, public policy tends to ratify them. Unfinished Business, indeed.
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Layered with academic and poetic insights, Maggie Nelson’s memoir “The Argonauts” is a meditation on love, maternity, family, sexuality, and gender. It’s distinguished by a brutally tender chronicling of the physical and hormonal transitions of the author and her partner Harry Dodge, as Nelson undergoes artificial insemination and Dodge navigates a double mastectomy and testosterone injections.
From the first paragraph Nelson establishes that this is not a book for the faint of heart or intellect. In it, she describes the acts that prompt I love you to tumble out of her mouth with her “face smashed against the cement floor of [Harry’s] dank and charming bachelor pad.” It comes as no surprise later in the book when artificial insemination, childbirth, and testosterone injections get similarly graphic treatments.
But this isn’t done to shock, or anyway not merely to shock. With scenes like these, Nelson is grounding the cerebral and emotional trappings of love in the physical ones. She’s arguing that notions of romantic love embrace pleasure seeking in all its perversity and caretaking in all its messiness, too.
The entire book conveys the sense that Nelson is working out a puzzle, trying to express the capaciousness of love in words–blunt tools that are sharpened only when they strike the raw, the guttural, the vulnerable. Sometimes she strikes with a passage from a poet or theorist, set in italics and named in the margin instead of footnotes. Other times, with moving words of her own.
Describing her and Harry’s wedding on the eve of Proposition 8’s halting of “same sex” marriages, she contrasts the public ritual of marriage with the private one of family, which knows no laws. “We let [the vows] stay standard, albeit stripped of pronouns,” she wrote. “The ceremony was rushed, but as we said our vows, we were undone. We wept, besotted with our luck, then gratefully accepted two heart-shaped lollipops with The Hollywood Chapel embossed on their wrappers, rushed to pick up the little guy at daycare before closing, came home and ate chocolate pudding all together in sleeping bags on the porch, looking out over our mountain.”
She builds a world with passages like these that are queer and not, normal and not. She explores the simultaneous insufficiency and pragmatism of labels. Boi. Cis-gendered. Andro-fag. Husband. Mother. The way the meanings change depending on who’s talking. The constant tension between individual experience and categorical ones. The blurred lines of human experience.
In Nelson’s world, a family photo on a mug can prompt a flood of questions.
But what about it is the essence of heteronormativity? That my mother made a mug on a boojie service like Snapfish? That we’re clearly participating, or acquiescing into participating, in a long tradition of families being photographed at holiday time in their holiday best? That my mother made me the mug, in part to indicate that she recognizes and accepts my tribe as family? What about my pregnancy–is that inherently heteronormative? Or is the presumed opposition of queerness and procreation (or, to put a finer edge on it, maternity) more a reactionary embrace of how things have shaken down for queers than the mark of some ontological truth? As more queers have kids, will the presumed opposition simply wither away? Will you miss it?
Is there something inherently queer about pregnancy itself, insofar as it profoundly alters one’s “normal” state, and occasions a radical intimacy with–and radical alienation from–one’s body? How can an experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative also symbolize or enact the ultimate conformity? Or is this just another disqualification of anything tied too closely to the female animal from the privileged term (in this case, nonconformity, or radicality)? What about the fact that Harry is neither male nor female? I’m special–a two for one, his character Valentine explains in By Hook or By Crook.
This train of writing does not make for easy reading, but it does make for deep reading. The kind where you’re forced to pause, think, rethink, reread, reconsider.
Occasionally, Nelson slips into the jargon of “sodomitical maternity,” “ontological indeterminacy,” and “homonormativity” in ways that distract rather than illuminate. They feel like the poor digestion of old academic papers and presentations within this fresh container of a memoir.
Still, Nelson’s account of two individuals risking connection and forging family against a backdrop of mainstream ignorance and shame is provocative and timely. It offers a compelling contrast to the tidier, mainstream born-in-the-wrong-body trans narrative. The perspective that’s gaining steam with shows like “I Am Jazz” and “I Am Caitlyn,” which seek to “normalize” the transgender experience.
Nelson just doesn’t do “normal.” Nuanced, poetic and irresolute is more her style–and her truth.
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“Don’t Let Me Be Lonely” is an evocative exploration of loss. The book of poetry and prose vignettes opens with author Claudia Rankine as a child witnessing her father looking flooded, leaking, breaking, broken. He was grieving his own mother’s death, and Rankine climbed the stairs as far from him as she could, distancing herself from his unfamiliar expression.
“He looked to me like someone understanding his aloneness,” she writes.
The rest of the book ranges over the territory of loneliness–mourning, depression, oppression–with a poet’s flare for imagery and economy. A friend submitting to cancer, safekeeping her death with a do-not-resuscitate sign. Another gazing listlessly at the TV while asking for “the woman who deals in death,” meaning the show Murder, She Wrote. Her sister, a psychiatrist, unable to help herself after her husband and children are killed.
This is challenging terrain, but Rankine navigates it masterfully, evoking sadness, anger, and resignation without belaboring them.
She pierces our illusions with tight analyses of the news of the day, such as a 13-year-old convicted of first degree murder for killing a 6-year-old while play wrestling. “The boy was tried as an adult or he was tried as a dead child,” she writes. “To know and not to understand is perhaps one definition of being a child. Or responsibility is not connected to sense-making, the courts have decided.” This is an unexpected brand of poetry.
Her writing is particularly charged when exploring the visceral, personal experience of grief, disconnection and futility wrought by media depictions of racial violence. She juxtaposes the brutality of police sodomizing Abner Louima with a broken broomstick against the violence of a reporter asking him how it feels to be a rich man after he settles for $8.7 million.
The hybrid prose-lyric-poem form gives Rankine space to both describe and question her experience of news like Amadou Diallo’s senseless death in a hail of bullets. “Sometimes I think it is sentimental, or excessive, certainly not intellectual, or perhaps too naive, too self-wounded to value each life like that, to feel loss to the point of being bent over each time,” she writes.
The opposite, though, is the callousness of President G.W. Bush, unable to recall whether two or three people were convicted for dragging a black man to his death in Texas.
I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life can not matter. Or, as there are billions of lives, my sadness is alive alongside the recognition that billions of lives never mattered. I write this without breaking my heart, without bursting into anything. Perhaps this is the real source of my sadness.
The poetry of “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely” is most of all, I suppose, in Rankine’s refusal to argue a point or come to a clear conclusion. In her decided opacity on what to do with the tensions she’s illuminated, revealed in the abundant white space separating passages. And, of course, in the occasional verse.
Define loneliness? Yes. It’s what we can’t do for each other. What do we mean to each other? What does a life mean? Why are we here if not for each other?
Quoting Paul Celan, she concludes the book by likening a poem to a handshake. “The handshake is our decided ritual of both asserting (I am here) and handing over (here) a self to another,” she writes. “Hence the poem is that–Here. I am here.”
It feels like this is her way of saying, my work here is done. I’ve extended my poem, myself. Don’t let me be lonely. Perhaps that’s all we ever get — an extended hand, a call to risk connection.
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Danielle Evans’s collection of short stories recasts young-adult angst as heartrending drama, with smart, intriguing characters navigating the unexpectedly treacherous terrain of friendship, sex and family.
Each of its eight stories is powerful in its economy, perfectly tuned domestic tensions, and well-drawn diverse characters. A teen avoids her lunch lady mom, embarrassed by the hairnet cutting a line in her broad, sweaty forehead. A grandmother’s cruel rejection pushes a nine-year-old to the edge. A mother throws herself into Christmas “with an enthusiasm as profound and suspect as that of the department stores.” An Iraq vet flails after discharge, unable to make sense of a world that gives him nail gems and cherry blossoms to thank him for his brutal service.
Evans conjures such crossroads with exceptional skill, placing her young protagonists in scenarios that challenge them to make weighty choices with lifelong repercussions. Even her youngest characters perceive that they’re facing significant moments, though they lack the experience or imagination to grasp that they’re defining, identity-forging ones. That the pursuit of independence, status, visibility, help often comes at great cost.
The tales are melancholy without being melodramatic, and they’re attentive to race, gender and class without being preachy or heavy-handed–a rare feat. Take her depiction of a college dorm room bursting with the vital, competitive energy of young women grappling with their power to bring forth life and the limits of their capacity to nurture it.
“I had a thing inside of me that I could not afford, and Laura had things inside of her that she couldn’t afford not to sell, and on the other end of it there were women spending tens of thousands of dollars to buy them because they felt their own bodies had betrayed them,” she writes of one character’s pregnancy and another’s egg donations. “Any way you looked at it, where there should have been a child, there was a math problem.”
In another story, a father and daughter struggle to connect. He clings to her old photographs and craft projects and imagines her adult life as “an elaborate series of barricades against him.” Meanwhile, she bristles at his concern, worries over the line between self-sufficiency and loneliness, and awakens to her self-centeredness.
“She wondered sometimes if it wasn’t all pretense–if, when she shut her eyes and wished restitution upon the whole wounded parade of humanity, she wasn’t really wishing away the world that created war and illness so that she might have a world in which there was room to feel sorry for herself,” Evans writes. “Every day she felt herself losing things it was unacceptable to mourn.”
Evans’s deftness with such an array of characters heralds a bright future for a tremendous literary talent. She captures the innate drama of young adulthood in ways that move readers and remind them of the good fortune of surviving one’s youth.
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Gail Godwin’s “Publishing: A Writer’s Memoir” is a graceful meditation on the author’s years aspiring to publication and her subsequent decades navigating an increasingly cutthroat, capricious industry. Wisdom, perseverance and faith lurk amid the lines of her spare, droll writing, making this an understated yet inspiring read.
Godwin exemplifies a keep-on-keeping-on ethos in sharp contrast to writers like Harper Lee, whose concerns about topping past popularity prevented her from continuing to create new work. From a sales perspective, Godwin’s career peaked in 1982 with the publication of “A Mother and Two Daughters,” which sold more than 1 million copies and was a National Book Award finalist. But she’s still writing today and has published 14 fiction and nonfiction books since.
“Publishing” opens at the University of North Carolina in 1958 with young Godwin presenting five pages of her novel-in-progress to scouts for Alfred A. Knopf. The pages were rejected and Godwin muses: “As I slogged along inside my bubble of failure beneath the Great American Novelist’s ancient trees, it struck me for the first time that I was nothing new, just the latest model of a young person hungry for success, and possibly one of the very many who was not going to make it.”
Of course, the reader knows that Godwin did indeed make it. She went on to publish more than a dozen novels, becoming a National Book Award finalist three times. With a light pen, Godwin uses “Publishing” to offer some insight into how she did it. She highlights deep-seated personal ambition, the role modeling of her writer mother, and the encouragement of teachers and friends. She colors it all with a bit of drama and no shortage of good humor.
The quick read, illustrated with pen and ink drawings by architect Frances Halsband, offers helpful perspective for aspiring writers, all of whom are likely to meet much frustration and rejection along their own publishing paths. The lesson Godwin imparts by sharing her story is that it is how you greet the challenges over the long haul that matters.
For years, Godwin battled insecurity, humiliating failures, and the sense that time was running out on her writing career. Still, she simply kept writing, learning, connecting. “I wrote the next chapter of my remote novel that wouldn’t sell enough copies, and trudged home under the starlit canopy of obscurity,” she wrote of her response to yet another rejection.
She learned this tenacity in part through the example of her mother, who wrote plays during her own studies at Chapel Hill, sold love stories to pulp magazines when rearing Godwin, and wrote novels under a penname while raising three younger children from a later marriage. Some of the most endearing parts of the book feature Godwin and her mother making up stories together, acting out scenes based on people from their church and reading rejection letters her mother received from publishers. They made a duet out of a particularly vexing one:
“Writes like the angels!” (soprano)
“With notes of monstrous tedium!” (alto)
“Merry Christmas to you!” (soprano)
“If you pare the fat!” (alto)
This same sense of levity and steadfastness served Godwin well after she finally won her first book deal in 1968. Her tangled publishing journey since then has included seven different editors and as many publishers, thanks to untimely deaths, industry upheavals, and intractable egos. With great candor, she writes of coming to understand the fear plaguing publishing today and of learning to brace herself for calls announcing the firing of her editor or publisher or both. She also sheds welcome septuagenarian perspective on questions of what’s new and what’s not in today’s publishing environment.
“Publishing as a family business, as a literate, gentlemanly occupation, had already taken on the sepia hues of nostalgia, but the new publishing, whatever that creature would turn out to be, hadn’t reared its head yet,” she writes of the early days of her publishing career. “Not one of the seven houses that wanted to publish ‘A Mother and Two Daughters’–eight, counting Knopf, who reserved the right to match the final bidder–stands by itself today. Six of those bidders are now subsumed into two of the ‘big five’ publishing corporations.”
Throughout “Publishing,” readers can gain a glimpse into the deals, publicity campaigns and industry maneuverings that bring books to the public. One section describes how a book meant to be titled “The Red Nun” wound up with a bodice-ripper-evoking misnomer “Unfinished Desires.” Aspiring writers can take heart at Godwin’s evidence that frustration, rejection and adversity are just a part of the journey–even for some of the most successful writers.
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Tara Mohr is on a mission to help women speak up and influence the world for the better. She says her lifelong calling is ”to recognize where women’s voices are missing and do what I can, in my corner of the world, to help bring them in.”
As a child, Mohr advocated for an English curriculum that featured more women authors and female protagonists. Today, she’s running a global leadership program and sharing its central tenets with a wider audience through her book, “Playing Big.”
Heartening and pragmatic, the book reads as if Mohr is giving an extended pep talk to an imagined reader who has great promise but craves support. “You are that talented woman who doesn’t see how talented she is,” Mohr declares in the opening pages. “You are that fabulous, we-wish-she-was-speaking-up-more woman.”
The message is a variant of the encouragement she’s given to thousands of women through her coaching practice. The book is a distillation of the best material generated in that laboratory–those exercises and advice that women found to be most helpful in creating the lives and careers they sought.
Mohr’s Inner Critic 101 Training and toolkit of 15 ways to quiet fears are worth the cover price alone. Collectively, the many lists, steps and journal prompts fill the void left by other manifestos that tell women what to do without explaining the mechanics of how to do it. For every grand declaration (“One of the most important mental shifts a woman can make to support her playing big is to start thinking of criticism as part and parcel of doing important work”), Mohr offers multiple tips and tools to make it concrete.
What the book lacks, though, is much of the fire and heart that makes manifestos persuasive and memorable. You’ve got to bring your own motivation to this text because it lacks the spunk of Lisa Bloom calling out women for letting celebrity culture distract us from social ills, or the sharpness of Anne-Marie Slaughter listing the 1,001 ways women are thwarted in efforts to advance. Mohr’s tone is decidedly pleasant (not accusatory), in keeping with her stated belief that “tender friendship” is more potent than criticism. While I appreciate how her writing reflects her gentle ethos, I must admit that saltier approaches make for livelier reading.
In fairness, the subtitle is “practical wisdom for women who want to speak up, create, and lead.” It wasn’t designed to awaken latent aspirations. It’s for the woman who already wants to lean in and doesn’t know how.
That’s not to say the book is just for corporate climbers. The text’s frequent references to women of diverse ages, professions, circumstances and aspirations suggests that the advice is widely applicable and effective. Mohr references women from many walks of life who have practiced Playing Big. For example, there’s a Silicon Valley sales director who wants to launch a new line of business, a researcher emboldened to approach a rival lab about collaborating, a social worker who wants to transition into advocacy, and a literacy specialist who wants to open a camp. The women could not be more different, but they all benefitted from Mohr’s core set of tools for quieting criticism, communicating powerfully and taking productive action.
Mohr’s focus on inner work, versus the details of salary negotiations or other tactics with narrow applications, assures the book’s appeal to a wide range of women. And unlike many women’s empowerment books, these practices are not meant to be deployed in a grab for more power and prestige. Mohr’s stated goal is to help women move past self-doubt to create whatever’s meaningful for them. It could be launching a business or winning a promotion, but it could also be leading a community initiative or writing an op-ed for the paper. As Mohr puts it: “This is the very heart of playing bigger: having the vision of a more authentic, fully expressed, free-from-fear you and growing more and more into her, being pulled by this resonant vision rather than pushing to achieve [external] markers of success.”
One of the most compelling portions of the book describes a conversation she had with her childhood dance instructor, who told her that American women were liberated but not empowered, because they lacked imagination. Mohr understood that to mean that women weren’t fully claiming their freedoms because they lacked a “specific, vibrant, compelling vision” for doing so. In short, they were stuck recreating the status quo of playing small because it was modeled all around them and they hadn’t cultivated the inner capacity to create new, better alternatives. This is a compelling idea that bridges the personal and social dimensions of Playing Big. When more women do it, more will see it and do it too.
At several points in the book, Mohr tries to raise the stakes of women playing big beyond the realm of individual happiness to evoke global import. (“In the minds of women around the globe lie the seeds of the solutions to climate change, poverty, violence, corporate corruption.”) She writes that women who speak up are “naturally” change agents and revolutionaries because today’s public, professional and political lives are “not yet reflective of women’s voices or women’s ways of thinking, doing and working.” This is too much of a leap for me. Sarah Palin speaks up, but what she says is ignorant and divisive. The content and intent of speech matters more than the mere fact of it. The elevation of women’s voices is necessary but not sufficient for positive social change.
Although Mohr’s rallying cry fell flat for me, the book’s practical advice remains valuable. It succeeds in equipping ambitious women, if not rousing them.
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Jim Trelease’s “The Read-Aloud Handbook” is so much more than its title suggests. Sure, it explains what to look for in storytime selections (no dialect, obscenities or weak plots, for starters). But its real strength is a smart and compelling explanation of why parents should read to their children early and often, from infancy onward.
Raising a lifelong reader is the single-best investment a parent can make, Trelease insists. Enthusiasm for reading ensures the range of knowledge and learning capacity that kids need to face challenges in school and beyond.
Importantly, Trelease urges parents to provide reading inspiration, not reading instruction. In his view, parents don’t have to learn the ins and outs of phonics and phonemic awareness or even do alphabet drills in order to lay the groundwork for their children’s academic and life success. Quite the opposite, Trelease posits that parents’ first and most important work is merely introducing their children to the world of print in ways that make them want to read. That is, cuddling up daily and enthusiastically reading great books. No specialized training or fancy curriculum required.
In fact, the book argues that much of what kids need to learn about reading from their parents is more “caught than taught.” That is, it comes through consistent exposure, not explicit instruction. Our efforts during the thousands of hours before children enter school — and outside of school in later years — set the tone for their lives. A steady diet of read-aloud time at home can spark sufficient reading inspiration to render much of the school-time remediation we call reading instruction unnecessary.
“Contrary to the current screed that blames teachers for just about everything wrong in schooling, research shows that the seeds of reading and school success (or failure) are sown in the home, long before the child ever arrives at school,” he writes.
As proof, he offers academic research and anecdotal accounts of parents who inspired their children to read through daily reading and role modeling. Kids who are read to, encouraged to discuss books, see a wide variety of printed material at home, see their parents reading, and have ready access to pencils and paper fare better than their peers raised without a literacy emphasis, he says.
Now in its seventh edition, the book has grown in depth and includes stories of people who have put Trelease’s ideas to work and experienced great results. Stories like that of Erin Hassett, whose parent started reading to her on Day One in 1988 (and documenting the books and her reactions), enrich the book. These real-life examples remind us that raising a reader is a years-long process and give parents a vision of the results they may attain with dedicated daily reading.
To nudge readers from contemplation to action, he devotes the latter half of the book to a treasury of thoughtfully vetted books to read aloud to children from infancy through high school. Authoritative, but not definitive, it’s meant to jumpstart reading aloud by pointing to some appropriate and accessible titles, including picture books, novels, poetry and folk tales. Each entry includes a recommended listening level to give you a sense of the text’s difficulty and appropriateness for your child.
While much of the book’s content was not new to me, I closed the book with a sharpened focus on what I should do with the information as both a parent and a citizen. My commitment to daily reading with my daughter was strengthened, as was my drive to advocate for libraries and community-based family literacy programs. “The Read-Aloud Handbook” offers persuasive arguments that reading starts at home and a welcome wake-up call for us all to spread the word.
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I celebrated Dr. Seuss’s 112th birthday by donning a red and white stovepipe hat and reading “The Cat in the Hat” to eager first graders at University of Texas Elementary School.
On my way over, I worried that the book selection was too young for them. As the mom of a four-year-old, I knew the elementary schoolers should have mastered Cat in the Hat vocabulary years ago. They’re beginning readers, I thought, but they’re veteran listeners too. A chapter book might better capture their attention.
Continue reading “How to Be a Read-Aloud Rockstar”June is a big month in this literary town. Austin’s African American Book Festival celebrates its 10th anniversary on the 25th. Swing by the Carver Museum and Library (1161 and 1165 Angelina St, 78702) between 9:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. to take part in the program, which promotes literature by and about African Americans. The festival features young adult author Sharon Flake and also provides a platform for new, emerging and self-published authors to pitch and sell their work.
I produced a short video to celebrate the festival’s big milestone and explain why it’s worthy of our community’s support. “Our festival is important because it brings readers and writers together,” founder Rosalind Oliphant says. “It creates a space for conversation, for dialogue, for creativity, and hopefully in those discussions we’re expanding our thinking, our creativity, and our activism.” Click below to learn about the origin and impact of the small and mighty event.
Continue reading “Must-Attend Austin Literary Events (June 2016)”