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i have book-y sorts of things to share. i know you’re shocked and amazed but i cannot keep exciting book news to myself. i am about-to-pop-excited about a new penderwicks book coming out this spring. how ever will we stand the wait? and taido’s sister and mother both gave me new books to curl up with as the winter weather drones on. and one of them is by the same author as tender at the bone. can you even stand it? also, i have discovered this marvelous publication (and website) that is put out by independent booksellers from all over. the list of books recommended by this little flyer i picked up in taos was varied and unfamiliar. stories and words to be discovered. when i need to find something to read. which isn’t now. right now i have loads to read. so i tucked the flyer away for later. but thank goodness there is a website, in case i forget which book i tucked it in.
i am reading this book that makes me sad for book club and i am blogging instead of finishing it right now because i don’t want to be sad. but there are some really wonderful lines. there is one about how reading takes you away. far away from your current setting and you can be lost to your family for a little while, not in a bad way, but just in a nice sort of escape. (watching her mother read: i envy her that strange, faraway look, withdrawn from me, from us, and the silence that envelops her, the absolute stillness that suddenly come over her body.) the author also talks about how often (in her life) people (mostly men) see reading as a waste of time. that you can’t measure what you accomplished when you sat around reading for five hours. i am sad to say that i have often succumbed to this myth that something trivial must come before my reading but i have been happily gifted with ammunition this week for my hours and hours of reading instead of scrubbing.
while we were in taos, we stopped in one day at the most enchanting independent bookstore called moby dickens. isn’t that just precious? it has been there for ages. taido and his sister bought their books there on their summer vacations. upon entering the bookstore with our kids, i was as enthralled by their response to the shelves of treasures as i was by the treasures themselves. they all immediately started taking books off shelves and finding corners to read in. they were silent, except for the occasional, mama look! a new skippyjon jones! (if you haven’t met skippyjon, you really must.) they were engrossed. they were undone. completely satisfied. i have no idea how long we stayed in this little treasure of a spot, but taido kept coming back and checking on us to see if we were ready, and we never were. he was toting simon. they had to be warned. just five more minutes. that’s the last one you can look at. and finally, they were drug reluctantly from the shop. we bought a few (four to be exact) titles, two of them specific to new mexico to take back to school to share where we have been for the last week.
now why does this visit to a bookstore in taos somehow justify my own time spent sitting around reading whatever i want to read? well, i think that loving reading is caught rather than taught. maybe they all just have mine and taido’s gene that loves to read, but really, i think that cole, mary polly and ben find a stack of books and sit down to escape into them because they have seen me spending much much time doing the same. i am actually teaching my family something very important when i am sitting around reading with a cup of tea. training them to grow up and read instead of scrubbing the floor. and they are getting it. when they actually choose reading (instead of my choosing it for them) over xbox, ds, or tv, then i will know i’ve done enough reading in front of them, but our trip to the bookstore shows me that they are starting to get it. mary polly and ben stealthily drank all of my tea tonight while i read the chapter from our current book, a wonderful gift from taido’s sister. little thieves. little bookish tea slurping thieves. i love them.
this shirt, which was purchased for me by the gearhead (actually he didn’t buy it for me. he was hoping it would fit cole, but it was too big…tant pis!), is the most wonderful piece of clothing on earth. i think that everyone should own one. even if it is like $60. (i know someone who can get it cheaper…in fact, if you need to know anything about this sort of gear, taido is currently reading to the point of memorizing his 2008 gear guide from backpacker magazine.) it is the most absolutely perfect shirt for traveling. even though it is thin, it is quite warm since it is wool and so soft! also, it fits nicely…mine is a men’s small which i love b/c they are making shirts fitted for men now, but it is LONGER than a womens’ shirt, thus saving me from the humiliating lifting above my stick-out-belly-pooch. also, it breathes and airs itself out when draped over a chair at night, so you can wear it tomorrow. it does not hold smell. i’m serious. it really doesn’t smell…even if you wear it for several days. i tested this out in taos and remember, i stopped wearing deodorant last year, so for it not to smell is saying a lot! it’s made this way for campers and backpackers who wear the same thing every day without much showering. and this is me in the winter friends. i don’t shower much and i like to pick the clothes up off the floor and wear them again. now i have something to drop on top of my favorite pair of jeans in the pile by my bed. i am cutting way back on my laundry. another way of saving the earth (and my sanity, since i am doing laundry for 6). now if only i can find them in children’s sizes. and school uniform colors…
snow by orhan pamuk. my head is still swimming a bit from all the quotes i want to save up there. it is set in turkey…i was drawn to reading it because i have a friend who is over there right now and it made me feel like i’m sort of traveling to turkey with her to read this story. i feel as though this author has given me a grasp of the cultural framework of modern day turkey, even though a character in the book warns the reader that there is no way he or she could possibly understand in the most remote way what it is truly like to live in eastern turkey from just this story. and the reader would be most presumptuous to believe differently. still, i credit the author’s brilliance (he did win the nobel prize) for including this disclaimer while still giving the reader an intimate picture of the town of kars and the variety of its people.
i am saving my snow quotes here for my own personal reference use. i am finding it more and more useful to house things i want to remember on this blog instead of in my less than trustworthy brain. and alas, the book must be returned to the library so i shouldn’t underline in it. the main character, a poet named ka says frequently in the book that the silence of snow reminds him of God. since he is (mostly) an atheist, the snow in its constancy is sort of his only connection to belief in God. and it is bewitching to watch the snow (it was snowing here this morning) fall and cause so much change and accumulate everywhere without making any noise. simon and i braved the snow this morning to watch the big kids show us their stuff on their skis and as the cold cut through all my layers (many many technically superior layers), i was glad my residence is not a place overtaken with snow and cold in the winter like the town of kars.
here is a great quote from a student when all different kinds of people are sharing (for a mythical newspaper article) what they would say to the “west” if they could only say one thing. “the west” is constantly personified in this book (and in many cultures, i suppose) as this one sort of idea or group of ideas that all people in europe and other parts of the developed world must ascribe to. it is for this reason that i feel it is so important that more westerners, especially those who are gracious and kind, travel to all different parts of the world. an idea of “the west” can only be dispelled by a relationship with a westerner. an individual.
anyway, this student’s one thing he wishes he could say to the west is this:
we’re not stupid, we’re just poor! and we have a right to want to insist on this distinction.
mankind’s greatest error, the biggest deception of the past thousand years is this: to confuse poverty with stupidity.
throughout history, religious leaders and other honorable men of conscience have always warned against this shaming confusion. they remind us that the poor have hearts, minds, humanity, and wisdom just like everyone else.
people might feel sorry for a man who’s fallen on hard times, but when an entire nation is poor, the rest of the world assumes that all its people must be brainless, lazy, dirty, clumsy fools.
more quotes from snow…i know you can’t get enough…
on a poem ka writes during a major political upheaval in the city (artistic excuses!):
one of its important ideas was the poet’s ability to shut off part of his mind even while the world is in turmoil. if this meant that a poet had no more connection to the present than a ghost did, such was the price a poet had to pay for his art!
on being a poet and believing (or not believing) in God. a student speaking to the poet, ka:
you could hear God inside you, and you were trying to forget him. you could see that the world was one, but you thought that if you could close your eyes to this vision, you could be more unhappy and also more intelligent. and you were right. only people who are very intelligent and very unhappy can write good poems. so you heroically undertook to endure the pains of faithlessness, just to be able to write good poems. but you didn’t realize then that when you lost that voice inside you, you’d end up all all alone in an empty universe.
ka is speaking here to a woman he loves and is afraid to love:
the issue is the same for all real poets. if you’ve been happy too long, you become banal. by the same token, if you’ve been unhappy for a long time, you lose your poetic powers…happiness and poetry can only coexist for the briefest time. afterward either happiness coarsens the poet or the poem is so true it destroys his happiness.
i’m still thinking about all of these but i think that in the case of both God and happiness, that brilliant art can be created through empathy, awareness of the suffering of others. sometimes though, an artist is so selfish (a side effect of being so shrouded in their own giftedness) that it does seem that he or she can only tap into their truest art forms for the sake of his or her own suffering. which is where a separation from God (and others) comes in handy, since it is most certainly the greatest suffering i can imagine. this theme runs throughout the book and is a whole discussion unto itself, without even adding the geographical or political setting of the book.
much to ponder.
when the poet describes this man who peppers all his sentences with obscenities, he says,
it didn’t matter what he was saying; he could be making a threat or pontificating about national interests or expounding his highly unoriginal political views. he was like a child who can’t eat his supper unless it’s swimming in ketchup.
isn’t that a brilliant description? i just love it.
yesterday taido and the kids took a break from skiing. during simon’s nap, we went for a walk from the house where we are staying to some property that taido’s dad owned when he was alive. he started a house on this land when taido was 13 and worked on it on and off for 5-7 years before basically abandoning the less than half built structure to move to santa cruz and then to colorado where he was living at the time of his death in 2002. our outing to see the house took about 2 hours even though it was only about a mile and a half away. the whole outing was a chance for the kids to ask all sorts of qustions about taido’s childhood and family, especially his father…his relationship with his dad, his father’s second family and his tragic death. each question led to more questions…all the way there and back. the kids asked and taido talked, speaking of people and times about which we rarely hear. as i listened to him and watched him turn off the dirt road and traipse through snow like a child, looking for this forgotten land of his childhood, i realized that he was indulging a barely visible nostalgia, a remembering i had forgotten he was capable of. i shouldn’t have been so surprised to see this in him. our previous visits to taos (three times in thirteen years of being married) have all unearthed these expressions of happy, though not untainted thoughts from his heart. taido spent his vacations here in taos, whole summers of roaming these hills and woods with his sister, free as a child should be.
everything our kids learned yesterday they had to ask, but between the three of them, they managed to get quite a bit of the story. taido’s story is rich with interesting detail, and as our kids grow older i am certain that they will ask for more. this story of their dad’s is also theirs. they are related to this story in a way that i am not. i know it will be important to them to fill in some of the blanks that were left yesterday. but walking home in the sunshine after finding the house, which was both fun (mission accomplished!) and sad (what is there is falling apart), i was grateful for the time my children are having this week with their sweet daddy, in a place he holds dear in his heart. and for the glimpse of the sentimental in taido, a rare treasure.
this picture represents the near $200 mistake i made in forgetting that we would need snow boots. snow boots in the snow. of course. after a day of wet tennis shoes and snow covered socks, we trekked into town and acquired these. so if you ever need to borrow children’s snow boots, we now have four sizes. right now three pairs of them are out in the snow, keeping those chino toesies warm and dry.
you’re looking at the porch that overlooks the snow covered valley where we are staying in taos. this is where i have set up my yoga stuff. oh so glad we brought yoga stuff! i took pictures of the house when we first got here because i immediately had to move most of the knick knacks which cover every single surface to protect them all from the sad fate of this deer horn sculpture. i am just hoping that everything in this beautiful home is made to appear to be a priceless native american piece of history instead of actually being a priceless, irreplaceable artifact. because you know. we brought simon. he is no respecter of clutter. these horns were broken within ten minutes of our arrival. but now, after several days of moving carved bowls, statues of various animals and clay pots of all shapes and sizes, we have reached an understanding. if i move it over here to this table. this one over here. it’s off limits. don’t climb up there and get it or you will be sorry. very sorry. this is how i have managed to get any reading done. well, this and naps.
books i’m taking to taos
snow by orhan pamuk
the shaping of a life by phyllis tickle
a frozen woman by annie ernaux
when a crocodile eats the sun peter godwin
the sewing circles of herat christina lamb
atonement ian mcewan
the inheritance of loss kiran desai
simply christian n. t. wright
board books simon is taking to taos
more, more, more said the baby vera b. williams
pajama time sandra boynton
the little mouse, the red ripe strawberry and the big hungry bear don and audrey wood
the snowy day ezra keats
jamberry bruce degen
polar bear, polar bear, what do you see? bill martin, jr eric carle
books taido is taking to taos (in case you are suffering from insomnia)
evangelical ecclesiology john g. stackhouse, jr.
the conversion of the imagination richard b. hayes
the nature of atonement four views from four different authors
poor mary polly and ben. they can’t make their lists because they are at school. sigh.
ok…time to stir the granola. making food is something else i would rather do than pack. besides, we can’t travel without granola.
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