Dazzled and Breathless

Summer is here! If you’re compiling your summer reading list, the very first book I’d recommend would be The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, by my friend Hannah Tinti. Here’s the dazzled and breathless email I wrote to Hannah when I read it in manuscript form last year.

Dear Hannah,

Oh my god. Your book is magnificent! I started reading it on the ferry and got so completely lost in it I didn't realize the boat had docked, missed my cue to disembark, and made all the cars behind me wait until I threw my iPad aside, frantically tried to start the car, stalled the engine, and finally drove off. I took a bumpy puddle jumper to Vancouver and read all the way and made myself sick, and then continued on the Skytrain into town and almost missed my stop. That was Thursday. This morning I was reading again on the Skytrain on the way back to the airport, and rode to the end of the line before realizing that I actually had missed my stop this time, and so I doubled back, barely made it to the airport, sprinted to the departure gate and arrived just as the doors were closing. When I finally got home, I crawled into bed, where I've been reading ever since, much to the consternation of my husband, who thinks I'm sick. And I just this moment finished, and my heart is racing, and I'm utterly wretched that I have to leave Loo and Hawley behind....Noooooooooo!

Huge congratulations! I don't even know where to begin with my praises. It's such a damn good story, gripping, suspenseful, and full of heart, and so exquisitely structured, too, so at the same time I was biting my knuckles and falling more and more deeply in love with the characters and their world, the writerly part of me was just gasping in awe at what you were doing technically, and tracking the way the story cycles back on itself and moves through time in these great spiraling orbits. And then, there's the overall gorgeousness of the language and imagery, but never too much, never detracting from the story, never getting in the way. So satisfying on every level.

I absolutely love it. This is truly one of the most enjoyable and satisfying reading experiences I've had in recent memory.

Love,

Ruth

So go and get this amazing book and enjoy it, but do be careful where and when you read it!

NOW MORE THAN EVER

Now, more than ever, the world needs books like This Is How It Always Is, a warm, funny and deeply moving new novel about gender identity, by my good friend Laurie Frankel. The novel tells the story of Claude, the youngest boy in a family of five sons, who, at the age of five, announces that when he grows up he wants to be a girl. Claude’s extraordinary family tries to figure out how best to support their bright, funny and beautiful little boy as he slowly transforms into a bright, funny and beautiful little girl named Poppy, while Poppy tries to grow up in a world that is not quite ready to welcome her.

As has recently become painfully clear, we live in a world that is not ready to welcome many of us, especially those of us who do not conform to its dominant ideological “norms.” Laurie’s book encourages us to look beyond these binary, either/or identities—boy/girl, black/white, us/them—and to embrace and defend the vast all-inclusive spectrum of the in-between, where most of us live.

Laurie writes with great compassion and courage, not to mention great humor! She is an inspiration. We all need friends like her. So read this book. Be inspired. Take back the world.

ALA panel & some thoughts on libraries

On Friday, January 25, from 4:00 - 5:15 pm, I'll be on a panel at the American Library Association's Midwinter meet-up to discuss the topic "The Novel is Alive and Well" with Seattle authors Terry Brooks, Ivan Doig, and Gregg Olsen. I'm looking forward to this because I love librarians, I have always wanted to be one, and I do believe that the novel is alive and well so talking to these guys about this topic should be fun.

Regarding libraries—one of my summer jobs in college was in the library, where I was hired to put little magnetic theft prevention strips into the books. This required physically taking each book from the shelf and opening it in order to slip the strip into the spine. Needless to say, this was extremely time-consuming work, because how could you open a book without spending at least a few moments reading it? I remember the thrill of pulling books one by one from the shelves, skimming through them, and watching ideas form in my mind, triggered by these random juxtapositions. It was hugely exciting, and I kept a notebook next to me so I could write down all the stories that emerged. I'm surprised I wasn't fired, but now when I think about it, I imagine all of the other students hired to do this work were similarly occupied, and none of us were working with much efficiency.

That summer, in the library, I discovered the generative power of randomness, juxtaposition, and browsing. Browsability is something we are losing in the Internet age, where so many of our searches are controlled by algorithms, which deliver results that are pre-shrunk and tailored to what we think we want, or we've wanted before. How can we stumble across anything new? Google and Amazon doom us to the rut of our habitual mind where, as we find the same things over and over again, our interests narrow and we grow smug, believing that everyone in the world is just like us, like we are and used to be.

That summer I also learned the approach I still use to write novels, an approach that requires a high degree of randomness, juxtaposition, and browsability. It reminds me a lot of meditation, because it requires keeping the mind alert and open enough to allow disparate elements to filter in, accumulate, and combine into a story. Inspiration is this happy convergence of random factors, which if you are lucky and awake, you can notice and put to good use.

I started thinking about browsability several years ago in the Prelinger Library, talking to my friend Rick. Rick is an archivist and a maverick librarian, who started the Prelinger Library with his wife, Megan. Together, they have raised browsability to a fine art. The stacks are arranged in a way so as to maximize browsability. Here's how they describe it:

The main shelves are organized according to the library’s unique geospatial taxonomy. This arrangement system classifies subjects spatially and conceptually beginning with the physical world, moving into representation and culture, and ending with abstractions of society and theory. It can be summarized as a walk through a landscape of ideas, from feet-on-the-ground to outer space. Within that framework are dozens of associative links between subject sections, moving from site-specific, to mediated, to abstract; from particular to general, and from micro- to macro-. The geospatial system is set up in five rows, each row holding part of the structure in a consistent series of smaller sections. The system begins at the front of Row One and ends at the back of Row Five.

Each labeled section on the main shelves is a composed set of juxtapositions, bringing together government documents, periodicals, monographs, and occasional works of fiction, in greater or lesser order, to illuminate a subject area. Within these sets, the compositional structure is fairly loose.

If you haven't been to the Prelinger Library and you find yourself in San Francisco, you really should make an effort to go. And if you are going to be in Seattle next weekend and you happen to be a librarian, please come to our panel and say hi.