Findings

I’m a big fan of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. I saw the movie first, then read the book. Recently Paula of Great Stories reminded me of it, and I thought I’d look for another book by this masterful author. I found Never Let Me Go on the library shelf. 

I’ll give a brief overview that sidesteps spoilers. But then, since part of my purpose in blogging is to remember and come to terms with what I read, I’ll write a bit more specifically about my thoughts and reactions. If you think it’s a book you might want to read, skip that part, read the book — then come back to finish the post and share your thoughts!

What’s it about? The children of Hailsham, a secluded school in Edenic rural England. They’re told repeatedly that they’re “special.” They’re encouraged to be creative and artistic, and above all physically healthy. But there are no parents mentioned, only “guardians.” It’s a somewhat nurturing environment, but curiously impersonal. There’s no sense of purpose, no sense of the future, no transcendent awareness of any kind — only painstaking accounts of the minutia of life: conversations, cliques, social pressures. As the story unfolds, we learn the reasons for the school’s peculiar character.

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As in The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro places us inside an airtight, strictly limited narrative consciousness. 31-year-old Kathy is a product of Hailsham trying to reconcile her experiences in hindsight, and we’re confined to her point of view. There’s no omniscient voice pulling us aside and explaining to us what’s happening; we have to find our own footing in Kathy’s imperfect perspective. Not far into the novel, we learn that Hailsham is a community of clones who have been created to donate their organs. The story raised questions for me regarding:

• Science. This novel has been classed as science fiction, though it doesn’t have some of the trappings I associate with the genre. In some ways it’s a more modern version of Frankenstein, or one of Hawthorne’s stories. But it’s told differently. It’s not a rant or a sermon, but a thoughtful imaginative attempt to get inside the propositions of biological engineering and see what it does to humanness — for the clones, and for those who care for them.
• Incrementalism. I was struck as I read by how the utter objectification of these people was simply an extension of some ways of seeing already in place. We already have many ways of referring to people as a class or type — ethnic labels, gender labels, religious labels, income brackets, medical statistics. We already have ways of blurring our humanity with clinical language. We already have pornography. We already have the reduction of sexuality to “having sex.” It didn’t stretch me too much to imagine the world of this novel, which simply extends these phenomena over the existing lines – rather than inventing new phenomena.  
• Nature vs. nurture. As others have pointed out, the clones don’t protest their fate. Kathy speculates that part of this may be because they were told their purpose early on, when they were developmentally ready to accept it before understanding it. They all grow into adulthood, and not a single one rebels. How am I similarly conditioned? How much have I accepted in the strangely surreal way these clones have accepted their fate? How many things am I passing on to my children, consciously or unconsciously, that they are accepting uncritically? One of the main thrusts of the story is that the clones are fully human, and I think their willingness to be conditioned is one of the more disturbing aspects of humanness.

There are more questions, more ponderings, more responses than I have the wherewithal to write here. But when it comes down to evaluating the novel, I don’t reject its high quality as art, but I don’t think I would recommend it, either. It’s wrenching, but not terribly convincing as a fictional world. Much of it has a contrived feel. It raises worthy questions, but nothing much happens; it moves at a sleepy pace. The author describes the response he hopes for in this interview: 

This is a very sad novel, but there was also something quite affirming in it because the characters are so decent. That response is probably closest to what I was trying to get at. The fact is, yes, we will all fade away and die. But people can find the energy to create little pockets of happiness and decency while we’re here.

That’s a modest aim, and I’d say that’s an accurate description of my response to the story. But in the end, I read in search of something more than that. My worldview dares to hope for something more than that — even though history keeps us honest about our track record as fallen human beings, and even though our present world gives us lots of reasons for anxiety.

There are thoughtful blog reviews of this book (which include more links) at Dog Ear Diary, Semicolon, and Books ‘n  Border Collies. There’s also a review on “Fresh Air” here.

As a matter of curiosity, I requested this book through interlibrary loan back in the fall. It was one of two (the other was this one) that I’d read and reread as an eighth grader after the school librarian recommended it to me. Somewhere in the dim recesses of my mind, I remembered bits and pieces from the book, and I wanted to go back and reread it to get reacquainted with my younger self.

By the time it arrived this week, I’d lost interest. But since they’d apparently had some trouble getting ahold of the book (why else would it take 6 months to secure?), and since I had to pay $.25 for the service, I dutifully reread it over the last few days.

It’s a page-turner. I felt a certain tenderness for my 12-year-old self, eager to learn about life and romance, and soaking up what knowledge I could from a book I now have a literary label for: Gothic romance. I remember reading Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey much later as a student of literature, and enjoying its satire on this genre, without remembering that I had once sat on the edge of my seat, lapping up this book’s key ingredients:

• A beautiful heroine who speaks in the first person of her intelligence and strength, while her husband repeatedly calls her a child and her actions are bewilderingly gullible (”No, don’t get in the carriage and go to the dangerous part of town on a mission of mercy in the dark of night!” or “No, don’t believe that ninny of a cousin YET AGAIN as she sets you up to be kidnapped!” etc. etc… )
• A Gothic castle on the Hudson, full of dark labyrinths, ghost stories, mysterious tales of the past, an ancient curse, and an insane relative inhabiting upstairs apartments
• A tall, dark, handsome hero, just one of the novel’s population of beautiful people — all “tall and broad-shouldered” or ”tall and slender,” with “blond ringlets” or “golden-brown curls,” glittering with jewels and dressed by their maids
• Love at first sight that leads our fair young heroine with her mysterious past into a brilliant marriage 

As an adult, I also noticed that this author seeks to legitimize the book with lots of literary allusions, and that it contains enough American history, and enough reference to real places, to make it interesting.

Sometimes it’s fun to reread. My curiosity seems directed by different forces now than it was in eighth grade, but I also come away from this story reminded of a different kind of reading pleasure. This tale is sheer entertainment, and it brought back the original, carefree context of my first reading of it. I suppose that means I’m like the Red Castle, full of passages into the past, even though I don’t travel them much anymore.

I’ve seen Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card mentioned on a few blogs, and I got the impression that it’s part of the canon, required reading that I missed somewhere along the way. I don’t read sci-fi very often; I really enjoyed Lewis’s space fantasy, but that’s about the only example of the genre I can think of that inspires an enthusiastic response. (Movies are a different story.) Now I have a second example. Plot spoilers follow as I try to come to terms with this book, so if you don’t want plot details, read no further.

“Ender,” this book’s protagonist, is 6 years old at its start. He lives in a future version of earth, where the population is tightly controlled, and where preparation for decisive battle against the “buggers” — an insectoid species that has attacked earth twice and been defeated — is of paramount importance. Ender Wiggin is a “third,” an extra child okayed for the Wiggin family because their genetic promise warrants the risk in hope of producing the next great military commander. Turns out that Ender is gifted enough to be chosen for training, and this tale recounts the chilling process of transforming him into a victorious commander.

It’s a book that constantly turns paradigms on their ear. Its multifacetedness and compression of meaning are nothing short of poetic. For starters, there are the terms used. The “buggers” are depicted as the enemy of humanity, but when we meet Ender, he is himself “bugged” by military officials who monitor his every thought and reaction through a small device sewn in at the base of his skull. It’s a common practice for promising “thirds” in this future earth. So who’s the real bugger? Ender’s military training exemplifies a process of isolating and manipulating and watching him in ways that destroy any possibility of true freedom. “Human beings are free except when humanity needs them,” his supervising colonel tells him. When we meet the buggers at the end of the story, and learn that they are ant-like, controlled by a single mind that sends its impulses through all of them at once, we can’t miss the irony. They are only defeated because humanity has used a similar tactical approach to Ender’s education. The culminating battle, in fact, is fought without his even knowing it’s real; he thinks he’s just playing another video game, not commanding a real battle.

Then there’s Ender. His name is really Andrew, but his sister’s nickname for him has stuck, and fittingly so — he is the ultimate “ender” in the story, for he destroys a world. His name has meaning on more than one level. Same with the “game.” Most of Ender’s training takes place through games: mock battles, simulators, video games. What better way to teach tactics? (Similar to Wargames, now that I think of it, though this book was written several years before that movie came out.) But the true game is being played with Ender’s own mind, a process he’s aware of to varying degrees at varying times. Who is playing with him? His military trainers, his brother Peter (a “moral sinkhole,” we’re told), even his sister Valentine, who loves him but argues that the only freedom comes from learning how to play the game yourself and manipulate others to your own advantage. (There’s a prescient foreshadowing of the internet, and the power of the blogosphere, embedded in this 1977 tale too.) The end of the story reveals yet another player who has been influencing Ender’s mind, and the surprise turns the decisive trick on the reader. The story plays with our own assumptions in so many ways that the real game is the novel itself.

Not being a sci-fi connoisseur, my liking for the book boils down to its success in shedding light on my non-sci-fi life. It takes place in a world where some of our assumptions have run their course and borne fruit, and tackles themes relevant to the world outside the bounds of the story. For instance, what are the limits of your perception, and how are they blocking your understanding? One of the skills Ender needs to learn is how to fight in a gravity-free battle room, and the major share of this is mental — how you think about gravitational orientation. But of course the various forces vying for control of his mind — along with his own emotional experience and self-concept — inspired me to reflect on what currents, inside and outside, may be shaping me, and how. How free are we? And underlying the whole story is the additional question: Is it worth it? Is the preservation of the species, seemingly a noble aim, worth what has been done to Ender? Are the authorities here reliable, either morally or in terms of having correct information? 

Another question: what is the nature of children? None of the heroes of this novel are over 12 years old. Card’s dedication page refers to “how young and how old children can be.” If children are humanity at its purest, what’s the essence of humanity? Are we more good, or more evil? Ender doesn’t want to be a killer, but he keeps finding himself in situations where he has to do serious harm to others to survive. The reactions of others are telling too; he’s a savior of sorts, but this inspires hatred rather than love. One of his most fascinating insights comes after four years of training, when he tells his sister that he hates himself because

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them – 

You beat them, his sister finishes for him. No, destroy them, Ender corrects: “I make it impossible for them ever to hurt me again. I grind them and grind them until they don’t exist.” It’s a penetrating commentary on the power love confers, and the different variables that influence how that power is wielded.   

One reader said of this book that it changed her way of understanding reality. I think I would agree. It plants seeds and questions, not just through its exploration of certain themes, and not just through its creation of a convincing fantasy-world that sheds light on this one, but through the experience of reading it and finding ourselves in Ender’s shoes, having our vision shaped by another’s controlling intelligence. I’m not sure whether I’ll plunge into any of the sequels right away, but this book leaves its reader with plenty to mull. Embers from it will continue glowing in my mind for some time to come.

Sometimes I like books without any idea why. Madeleine L’Engle’s Certain Women is about an actress who returns to attend to her dying father, a stage actor who reviews his life through the lens of a role he longed to play, but never did — that of the biblical King David. If you ask me to tell you what I think about this novel, I’ll say:

• It’s pretentious
• The characters are flat and unconvincing
• The play about King David constantly percolating in discussions among the main characters seems like an interruption rather than an enhancement of the plot
• The characters are fascinated with King David, yet the basic plot of his story is something they’re just learning… so why were they fascinated to begin with?
• The pseudo-theological discussions irritate me
• The book’s conclusions about life and faith are ambiguous

YET… I read it. I finished it. I enjoyed the experience.

Perhaps I’m just a massive hypocrite. Perhaps the book makes sense at a level not yet accessible to my plot-charting analytical side. Perhaps L’Engle’s strengths — strong, rhythmic writing, willingness to deal with hard things in family relationships, a perspective that embraces faith without making her works into thinly-veiled sermons (most of the time) – are enough to outweigh the irritations.

This is kind of a strange book review, isn’t it? But it’s all I have to say about this book.

I’ve always liked Ralph Ellison’s ideas about invisibility in Invisible Man. Here’s a sample from the opening pages:

I am an invisible man… I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me… When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination — indeed, anything and everything except me… I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.

He goes on to describe the anger that boils up out of the “doubt that you really exist” as a result of being unseen. So being invisible is a mixed bag. Sometimes it’s an advantage, but ultimately we’re meant for visibility, and his book explores this rich metaphor on many levels.

Here’s Eudora Welty’s comment on the subject:

My temperament and my instinct had told me alike that the author, who writes at his own emergency, remains and needs to remain at his private remove. I wished to be, not effaced, but invisible — actually a powerful position. Perspective, the line of vision, the frame of vision — these set a distance. (One Writer’s Beginnings 87)

It’s invisibility (boy do I have a hard time typing that word!) in a different context than Ellison’s, but similarly double-edged; on the one hand it’s “powerful,” but on the backside is the potential of tipping into “effacement.”

At a level much less significant than either of these writers, I can affirm the psychological truth of what they’re saying. It brings back the memory of experiences as a child with an older boy down the street from us. Jimmy was really a sweetheart of a boy, but he was about 3 years older than I and when he would come over to play with my brother, he was convinced that he had to talk baby-talk to me. It used to infuriate me. So what did I do?

I pretended I couldn’t talk.

I remember that complex inner awareness of frustration at being regarded as less than I was, mixed with a sense of superiority that I knew more than Jimmy did, mixed with the knowledge that I could make him feel silly any time I wanted to by revealing that I could speak quite well. But I chose not to, I suppose because it felt powerful. I think the danger lies in the chance that you might play the role for too long, and forget the hidden truth of who you are.

Summer Pony by Jean Slaughter Doty is the latest in my read-aloud syllabus for my horse-loving 7-year-old. It’s a story about Ginny, a middle-school aged girl whose family rents a pony for the summer. Though she has dreams of a sleek and beautiful pony, the one she ends up with is an underfed, shaggy, unimpressive pinto with unmatching eyes, rented from a pony farm that badly neglects its animals.

The story has lots of great ingredients: rescue and restoration of an animal in poor condition, a heroine who’s learning the ropes of pony care along with the reader, and the overcoming of first impressions to form a friendship (as Ginny does with her neighbor). Best of all for the young horse fan is the winning combination of understanding parents, and the conversion of a garage into a pony stall. What pony-lover hasn’t entertained that dream? I know I did.

Ginny, the story’s heroine, is plausible. She has her issues with negative attitude and self-doubt, but she grows a lot over the course of the story and gains confidence in the process. The reading level of this book is probably 3rd-6th grade, but my first-grader was able to work through the text herself. I read it aloud, but often she’d get the jump on me by taking it to bed with her and reading before lights out. (So far she hasn’t discovered reading under the covers with a flashlight…)

The question now is where to go from here. I found this list of 30 best horse books, of which we’ve read four: Summer Pony, Old Bones the Wonder Horse, Misty of Chincoteague, and Black Beauty. What next? I notice Ruffian is on this list, and it’s out of the question… I’m still wrenched every time I think of Eight Belles put down after her second place finish at the Derby last week. I dimly remember a book called A Pony for the Winter; maybe that would be the next logical choice. I’m open to suggestions. Meantime it’s back to watching my daughter pore over her well-worn Breyer’s horses catalogue, checking the boxes of… well, pretty much every model ever made and making plans for saving her money.

There are many books I read and enjoy, but few that I swoon over. This one, at least in parts, was swoonworthy for the lyrical beauty of its writing and its unmasking of truthful moments. That’s the best way I know how to say it. But the flyleaf testifies to the difficulty others have had in finding words to capture this author’s power. “It is easy to praise Eudora Welty,” says Robert Penn Warren, “but it is not so easy to analyze the elements in her work that make it so easy — and such a deep pleasure — to praise.”

The Optimist’s Daughter has a simple storyline. It follows Laurel Hand home from Chicago to the South for her father’s surgery and, shortly afterward, his death. A night alone in her childhood home brings her face to face with artifacts and realities of her past, and she comes to a deeper understanding of herself and those who are a part of her history. (You can read an excerpt from the book here.)

This novel is the work of an author with deep roots in her place, a keenly attentive eye, and a penetrating, contemplative intelligence. I don’t want to use this post to go into tons of detail or analysis of the story, except to say that this novel is considered autobiographical, and there are some good questions and other materials for exploring this further here under “Resources.” There’s plenty more information on Welty here. 

I tend to think, and to file information away, in pictures or symbols. This book contains some compelling ones. I’ll conclude with my favorite from the book, a passage of loving description, and one of several in the story that picks up fictionally on the significance of reading and books discussed in Welty’s autobiography, One Writer’s Beginnings. Who wouldn’t become a lover of books with a history that can be described this way?

When Laurel was a child, in this room and in this bed where she lay now, she closed her eyes like this and the rhythmic, nighttime sound of the two beloved reading voices came rising in turn up the stairs every night to reach her. She could hardly fall asleep, she tried to keep awake, for pleasure. She cared for her own books, but she cared more for theirs, which meant their voices. In the lateness of the night, their two voices reading to each other where she could hear them, never letting a silence divide or interrupt them, combined into one unceasing voice and wrapped her around as she listened, as still as if she were asleep. She was sent to sleep under a velvety cloak of words, richly patterned and stiched with gold, straight out of a fairy tale, while they went reading on into her dreams… 

Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio  is a book of short stories that created a stir when it was first published in 1919. My library copy included an introduction by Malcolm Cowley which suggested Anderson’s great strength as a writer was to provide momentary, bright glimpses of character and truth, and this is why 1) this book succeeded, and 2) Anderson never succeeded as a novelist. My Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia mentions its “lyric beauty.” Another source spoke of its logic as song-like. But unlike these critics who seem unanimous on its literary merits, other readers objected to it as “pessimistic or destructive or morbidly sexual” (quoted from Malcolm Cowley’s introduction).

My own reaction to the book is somewhere between these two extremes. I recognize the beauty of its writing. It’s written simply and straightforwardly, capturing characters’ essence over and over with stunning economy. Its narrator functions as a keenly observant eye, never staining the lens with strong personality, moralizing, or emotional heavy-handedness.

Except in the first story, “The Book of the Grotesque.” Here Anderson essentially orients the reader to his purpose by setting forth the book’s organizing myth:

In the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful… And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them. It was the truths that made the people grotesques… The moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.

The only character in this collection of stories, many of them only 5 or 6 pages long, who isn’t a “grotesque” in the sense described here is George Willard, a young reporter who becomes the audience — or perhaps more accurately, the hearer of confessions — for other characters. Over and over, those who are struggling to make sense of life, or who have chosen their course and lived to a disfigured old age, buttonhole him and explain their experience. Usually these encounters take place at night and outdoors, which may have helped to give this collection a timeless quality that transcends its very specific locale of smalltown Winesburg in an innocent era.

Willard himself is a quintessential young man of “a great many vague thoughts,” a passive recipient of information. He appears in almost all of the tales, sometimes as a main character, sometimes as a peripheral character in someone else’s story on whom others project some significance. Eventually, he leaves Winesburg to seek his fortune. If I were to read the criticism of this book, I’m sure it wouldn’t take long before I heard an argument for Willard as Anderson’s writerly persona, a portrait of the artist as a young man. He becomes, in the sense described above, a “composite” of the truths others confess to him but doesn’t really develop or change in any significant way himself. He succeeds in not becoming a grotesque, but it remains to be seen whether he’ll develop into anything else.

For some reason, despite its strengths, I struggled through this book. Very possibly, this isn’t so much the fault of the book as the beautiful weather that’s freed me from my house and taken me outdoors. I’d bring the book with me, but let’s just say my reading process was interrupted more frequently than usual.

A second reason is that if someone had taken Thoreau’s statement that most men lead lives of quiet desperation, and plotted out a fictional argument for it, this would be the resulting book. I don’t despise such truth as it conveys. I’m grateful for a glimpse into other ways of thinking and experiencing. Why else do we read but for that? I’m just saying it began to weigh me down, taken all in a gulp. Quality? No question. Significance as a literary achievement? No question. Pleasure in reading it? Well, there’s a question there. Surely I delighted in some of the book’s beauty, but I also wasn’t sorry to see it end.

We read Marguerite Henry’s Brighty of the Grand Canyon as a family read-aloud. I read it long ago, probably when I was 11 or 12, but remembered virtually nothing. How can this be? It’s full of excitement and the usual emotional highs and lows of animal stories. This one includes a prospector, a lion hunter, a president, and a murderer along with the noble and unassuming Brighty the burro. It also incorporates Ms. Henry’s now familiar theme of love for wild places, taking place in the Grand Canyon before it was made a national park. What’s wrong with me that my mind permits such good stuff to evaporate, while certain episodes of The Little Rascals are firmly established there till my dying day?

In any case, this book was a success for both mother and 7-year-old daughter. The only thing I disliked was what I always dislike about animal stories: bad people who enter the scene and abuse the animals. Fortunately in all the Marguerite Henry novels I’ve read, the animals triumph in the end. But sometimes they have hard going at the hands of people far more brutish than they are. The villain in this story is truly diabolical, a vicious criminal who’s counterbalanced by the brave, straight-shooting (both literally and figuratively) Uncle Jim Owens. His character is carefully and lovingly drawn, respectful of the real Jim Owens after whom he’s modelled.

I should add too that this worked well as a read-aloud. The narrative is interesting and dramatic, and the dialogue/dialect are fun to bring to life.

Brighty was a real burro, named “Bright Angel” after Bright Angel Creek, and some information is gathered about him here. There’s also a movie about him, in which Marguerite Henry’s own burro Jiggs plays Brighty. Though I did know a Breyer’s horse figurine exists (no longer in production), I didn’t realize it replicates a statue of Brighty that sits at the north rim of the Grand Canyon. All of this testifies to Brighty’s popularity and indicates that my enjoyment of this story treads an already well-established path.  

It’s Anne McCaffrey’s birthday this month. I remember enjoying her dragon tales years ago, when I was in college (or newly graduated), so I chose her for the Celebrate the Author Challenge. Rather than rereading something, I chose No One Noticed the Cat to refresh my memory largely because it looked appealing on the library shelf. It’s only about 5.5″ by 6.5″ and the pages all have borders similar to the one on the cover. I guess it fit my expectations of what a fairy tale should look like.

Why, you ask, am I going on and on about the book as a physical object? Because I like to start on a positive note. Once I finished admiring the cover and started reading, it was pretty much all downhill. Not downhill like a sheer cliff; not excruciating. But a gentle and unexciting coast downhill ’twas, just the same. As a refresher course in Anne McCaffrey, it failed to remind me of anything I had liked in the past.

The tale is (supposed to be) about a cat named Niffy, who’s been somehow infused with all the wisdom of a young prince’s deceased regent. Throughout the prince’s “coming of age” as a ruler, the cat (we’re supposed to believe) guides him. Negotiating tricky relationships with other kingdoms? Ask the cat. Choosing a spouse? Ask the cat. Hunting “barguas” (fantasy lands require fantasy animals)? Yes, that’s right: ask the cat.

It might have worked if it didn’t read more like a Masterplots version of a longer story. There isn’t any character development. There isn’t any convincing tension. There isn’t much description of anything other than food served at royal meals, of which there are exhaustive detailings that make you hungry, then fail to satisfy with a good story.

Nevertheless, I’ve really liked Anne McCaffrey stories before. Maybe this one just isn’t representative. Maybe if I hadn’t been a flaky heroine myself, choosing a book by its pretty cover, I would have launched into one of her other novels on the library shelf, and found myself immersed in reminders aplenty of her creative aplomb. (Yes, I’m proud of that: “aplomb.” A nifty word, that.) A quick tour of her bio, publishing history and awards (here, through which you can also link to her personal website) indicates a wide-ranging imagination that spins out several series in several fictional universes, as well as great success in connecting to a diverse readership and achieving professional recognition.   

I think in the past, I felt an identification with her female characters who fought to define themselves in ways that didn’t fit the prescribed mold. This story was about a man, and didn’t include any real female protagonists. Also, I’m at a different point in life, more comfortable with the unwieldy aspects of my personality, and looking for characters that model a different flavor of strength than the rebelliousness that appealed to me in the past.

Not all authors are a lifelong attachment; some speak with great eloquence for a season, then say goodbye and remain mere casual acquaintances. We have friendships at many different levels, with books as well as with living, breathing people. So even though this particular reading was kind of disappointing, I feel like I can celebrate this author in the same way I celebrate other old friends I run into, or relatives I see only rarely. They’re not the ones saved in the speed dial of my phone. Still, they’re a part of who I am.