Category Archives: Reading

The Year of Reading Leisurely: Book 1 — What I’m Going to Do, I Think by Larry Woiwode

Reading, , ,

When I was searching my bookshelves for a book to read I came across Larry Woiwode’s first book and thought how appropriate I read it for the first book of my book group break. I’ve been meaning to someday read it ever since I was in the 6th grade and Mr. Woiwode visited our class.

Mrs. Anderson, my wonderful 6th grade teacher, had a student teacher named Mary Woiwode. It turned out that Miss Woiwode’s brother, Larry, was a published author. He was invited to give a talk to the two 6th grade classes at Highland Elementary School. It was the 1968-1969 school year, but I don’t recall when the visit took place – I’m thinking second semester, so it was probably sometime in the spring of 1969.

Mr. Woiwode published his first book, What I’m Going to Do, I Think, three years earlier, in 1966, and was either working on, or had just published his second book, Beyond the Bedroom Wall, when he visited our class. I remember him mentioning that the second book might be made into a movie and he named a famous actress of the time who might be in the film.

I only barely remember the rest of his talk. He mentioned John Updike, and may have said, “my friend, John Updike” in answer to a question about writing. Our teachers encouraged us to ask questions, and I asked him what courses in college an aspiring author should take. I don’t remember his answer, except that he said it was a good question. After the talk and the question/answer session he signed autographs. He signed a piece of notebook paper for me – I still have it, but since I wrote, in purple ink, all around it, it probably is worthless.

I don’t know if anyone had him sign copy of his book – probably not because, although he encouraged us to read it, our teacher and parents were a little more conservative about 10 and 11 year olds reading books with adult content in them. The paperback copy – which was published the following year – contains this description on the front:

The literary discovery of the year – The haunting, erotic novel of a young man and his girl and their doomed honeymoon…

Here’s the excerpt chosen for the back:

He saw sand and dune grass and felt he could count the grains of sand below the curve of her shoulder and throat, each was so individually clear as they made love, and he realized she was seeing the sky, the bright blue sky he’d been staring at, and there was the freedom and openness of sky in her body, in its growing lightness of motion, and then all the space of the sky came.
They lay in silence, still linked, with the wind blowing over them.

Then, the quote from a book critic (Robert Phelps, Life Magazine) reads:

“THERE IS PLENTY OF SEX
Chris and Ellen make love abundantly, and in assorted moods, but never merely to put down Puritans. The lovemaking is sweet and horny, bewildering and majestic, funny and emboldening, somber and joyous – everything, in fact, that sex is always in literature, as well as in life, when it isn’t being used to sell something. …The day I read this book was wonderfully quickened, nourished, consecrated for me. I am grateful.”

I finished the book last month and, for the most part, really enjoyed it. I’m not sure I would have liked it if I didn’t have the connection with Mr. Woiwode, but it was well written and had many wonderful passages. I enjoyed meeting the characters of the book: 23 year-old Chris and his 20 year-old bride, Ellen. Ellen’s grandparents were interesting, as were neighbors, Orin and his sister, Anne. As I read the book I felt like I was meeting people I should have met years ago. I’d first heard about them over 40 years ago and, until now, had kept them locked away. Unlike some things, however, characters in a story don’t go bad with storage. There were a few parts that didn’t quite pass the test of time, but I tried to keep in mind how long ago the book was written.

There was not that much sex – and nothing graphic at all by today’s standards.

The hardback cover of the book holds a photograph of a rifle. Mr. Woiwode said something about a gun in his talk. For more than four decades I’ve expected this book to be tragic and as I read it I worried each time a character picked up a gun. The gun, I think, is another character in the book.

The most complex character is Chris. He claims to love Ellen, yet he is alternately jealous of men she may or may not have slept with during their one year apart and completely overwhelmed in his adoration of his wife. He slept with women during their year apart – and flirted with others when they were not apart yet cannot get over her possible infidelities. He carries a lot of baggage from his earlier life as the son of a Catholic farmer.

Ellen is less complex, although has at least as much baggage as Chris has. Her parents were killed in a mysterious accident when she was young – something that makes her so terrified to talk about, Chris rarely brings up the subject. She was raised by her Christian Scientist grandparents.

When Chris and Ellen marry, earlier than planned (she’s pregnant) her grandparents, who dislike Chris, offer their cabin in a remote area of Michigan on the shore Lake Michigan for their honeymoon. The book tells the story of their honeymoon from their arrival to Chris’s hellish day bailing hay for the odd neighbor, Orin to Chris’s demand that Ellen tell him the truth about her year in New York to his jealousy of what she revealed to him. It also introduces the gun and keeps the reader in a sort of suspense not unlike the works of Stephen King. In fact, I found Woiwode’s writing style to be a lot like King’s writing style.

Woiwode has written many other books – I own probably 80% of books he’s written. I recently read online that he is now a right-wing republican who is active in the right-to-life campaign. The blurb I read about him also said he gave up writing. It cannot have been that long ago, because he published a book called “What I Think I Did” within the last ten years.

I’m not going to recommend this book – only because you probably won’t find a copy anywhere. I believe it has been out of print for a while. Also because, while I am happy I read it, it left me flat –wondering if I missed something or if it really ended the way it did.

Finally, here is the description on the inside cover:

There is a remote summer lodge high on a wooded bluff overlooking Lake Michigan. A farm is down the road, and a village seven miles away. But otherwise there are only sky and lake, wildlife and weather – And a young man and his wife on their honeymoon…

L. Woiwode’s What I’m Going to Do, I Think is a hauntingly beautiful novel about youth growing up to the pain of loss, the puzzle of love, and the sense of despair lying near the surface of modern consciousness. This wildly acclaimed first novel introduces an author of unique and memorable talent. A best-seller since it was first published, What I’m Going to Do, I Think has also been bought for motion pictures.

What was going to be a brilliant cohesive post about hope turned into an incoherent ramble

Reading

I’ve written a lot about reading on this and other blogs. I write about it so much because I care about it so much and I mourn the death of my once voracious appetite for books. It’s not that I cannot get into a book now and then — it is more that I can easily put a book down and not pick it up for days, or even weeks. Even books I love.

A friend once said she envied my love for reading — something she never had. She said she read, but didn’t seem to get the same pleasure out of it that I did. I thought everyone loved to read, but were disciplined enough to not give into the habit.

As a child my mother once told me I “read too much”. I’m not sure if I took that as an insult or a compliment back then. Now I take it as a compliment, but I think she was chastising me for choosing books over people or other activities. When I read Lali’s post, B is for Book, I felt comforted knowing that other people were told to put their books down when they were young.

I think that, because of my 15 or so years of being in a bookgroup, reading books has become a chore. Like housework or homework. Like changing the kitty litter. Also my use of the Internet gets in the way of reading for pleasure — that’s a fact and that’s also something I’m going to be working on reducing. I’ve been watching more TV — films and on-demand cable programs that I got hooked on. That’s going to go too, especially since we’re planning on cutting back our cable to basic to help reduce costs.

Last week, I followed a link on Facebook to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Alan Jacobs, professor of English at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois (although I didn’t realize that until a friend of mine from Illinois pointed it out). The article proposes that only a small fraction of people are “extreme readers”, readers who genuinely love reading and read with “sustained, deep, appreciative attention”. He further theorizes that such readers are not made, but born. While I don’t agree with either statement, I did like this article because it gave me some hope that perhaps I’d be able to get back that love of reading that I once had.

My favorite quote in the article mentioned mentioned Narnia and Susan* Pevensie, my favorite character in the series, and completely illustrated my anguish:

“But then there are the people Nicholas Carr writes about in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, and Carr himself: people who know what it is like to be lost in a book, who value that experience, but who have misplaced it—who can’t get back, as Lucy Pevensie for a time can’t get back to Narnia; what was an opening to another world is now the flat planked back of a wardrobe. They’re the ones who need help, and want it, and are prepared to receive it.”

I mistakenly thought that the book he mentioned by Nicholas Carr would have something to do with Narnia, so I immediately downloaded that onto my Nook. (which I really liked, but hoped it would give me ideas on how to learn to love to read again, but it didn’t.)

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’ve given up my book groups for a year — perhaps longer — to see if I can rekindle my love for reading. I’ve read a few books so far since my announcement — but two were obligatory reads — one because I got a free copy and promised to write a review on Amazon and the other because someone lent it to me. Nicholas Carr’s book was my first non-obligatory read in a while.

It seems that Jacobs has a book out on this very subject called The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. In fact the article was an excerpt. Maybe that will be on my list of books to read soon.

*Rereading the quote I realize he mentions Lucy, not Susan. I assumed it was Susan because she is shut out of Narnia after Prince Caspian — a fate I still don’t forgive C. S. Lewis for.

My Brain and Reading

Reading

Sometimes when I try to read it is like my brain has turned into a wall of concrete and the words from the book fling themselves at my brain only to hit the wall and slide down its surface like cartoon characters. There they puddle at the bottom of the wall, leaving a jumble of words that I can make no sense of.

Other times when I read, the words fling themselves at my brain and melt into it as if my brain is room-temperature butter where they all combine into deliciousness and the meaning of the combined words is readily accessible. These times I can devour pages and chapters quickly.

I don’t understand why this happens — why sometimes I can read and other times I cannot. It’s not the content because this happens with books of all kinds. It’s not the time of day because it happens all hours. It must be because of the state of my brain. There must be brain chemicals that, when in high doses (or perhaps in low doses) make reading impossible.

Right now my brain is a butter brain and I’d love to sit and read. However I’ve got work do do before I can sit and read. I only hope the butter brain lasts through my housework and computer work so that I can have a good chunk of pleasurable reading later today.