What do you want your fiction to be?

Like many librarians, and many of my friends, I am an avid reader. Especially of fiction. So, I was delighted to catch this segment from Tom Ashbrook's On Point . I even jumped up a little in the car while I was driving. But then I started listening. And I started feeling pretty dismayed when Joshua Ferris talked about fiction becoming the new poetry. In that the number of people who read fiction will dwindle to the small number that actively read poetry.

Granted, I read poetry. Daily. But I know most people don't. So, I found it pretty upsetting to think that so few people will read fiction.

Frankly, I was shocked that this comparison was made. I am reminded of this article from the Times about the number of people reading fiction being on the rise. But, I guess Joshua Ferris's point is that we need to face facts: people aren't reading "literary fiction" as much. (Note: there is an interesting debate in the comments from the show on what constitutes "literary fiction", if anything at all.) And as I think about the series of articles in the Times this week about technology, I am struck by the photo of the dad reading to his little girl on the iPad. I'm not against that, mind you. Reading to your children is vital, no matter how you do it. But that doesn't mean that there aren't unintended consequences to the method you employ. I would contend that there is a difference in modeling and memory for a child who sees their parents turning pages of a physical volume than for a child who sees their parents looking at a screen. You could be reading on your iPad or Kindle or iPhone but does your child know that? Do they know you are reading "literary fiction", the newspaper? Or do they just see you in front of a screen? Does that image matter when it comes time for children to choose activities in which to participate.

But, let me step down from my soap box for a minute.

Tom Ashbrook posed the question to the listening audience: what do you want your fiction to be? And that question is a pretty profound one. And connects, I think, to this issue of the unintended consequences of the mode of reading we employ. What do I want my fiction to be? I think it gets to why do we read?

I read fiction to escape. That is a big part of it for me. To explore my imagination, to envision something other than my own situation, to create a vision for other times, other worlds, other people, other paradigms. And I am not even a "fantasy" reader! I think that is why I actually didn't care for Joshua Ferris's "Then We Came to the End". I am, personally (and reading is perhaps the most personal thing one can do), not interested in reading about the mundacity of office life. I lived that already. I know what that means. I am looking for fiction that takes me elsewhere and gets me thinking about other things.

I want my imagination to go to work with the fiction I read. And I wonder if that it is harder to acheive in front of a screen. In part because of the distractive nature of screens (feel free to reread Nicholas Carr on this topic). In part because of my upbringing and my proclivities. There is plenty of literature that suggests that children of the digital age simply don't have the same issues with distraction that "digital immigrants" might have.

Don't get me wrong. We have seen a huge influx of creativity because of what we can do with computers. I work at a college that prides itself on that. But....but. When I think about the decline of reading, when I think about the increase usage of technology, when I think about the issues it raises in parenting, in education, in every dimension of our lives....I just start to feel...uncomfortable. I wonder if we are sacrificing more than we know. Not to say that I know! I don't. But I am wondering. I am questioning. Not if I want to give up technology. Don't be silly....I just got an iPad! But how I want to use it and for what. How I want to cultivate my imagination and why. What I want to read and why I want to read it? And what I expect it to do for me.

Push back on me here. Am I crazy? Am I not seeing a part of this picture? Am I reading way too much into it?

What am I doing this summer

Rudy posted this meme yesterday and I applaud her and anyone else who is posting their projects. But I am going to take a slightly different take on this meme. Rather than write about what I am doing for the Library, Info Lit, or Champlain, here's what I am doing this summer for myself!

* Gardening. I had a terrific conversation with David Silver last week and gardening was one of the topics of that conversation. He has some terrific pics up on Flickr of his garden and he asked me why I don't post more pictures. I didn't have a good answer so I went home and took some on the spot: This is one of our three vegetable beds and this one focuses largely on leafy greens. I am a pretty aggressive gardener and we just finished a terrific weekend in the garden so I will try to post more pics. And thanks, David, for reminding me one of the cardinal rules of blogging: blog the whole you. In the summer, my attention really does shift. I think I spend so much of the school year at my computer, in the classroom, in meetings, and thinking about logistics or lofty thoughts. It's refreshing and wonderful to ground down, to get dirty, and see the results of your labors. Or eat them.



* Reading. I am a voracious reader. Or I used to be. This being a meme, I remember this post into reading a the beginning of the fall semester. Sadly, with all the work I do, my reading has really suffered. NOT ANYMORE. This summer, I am reading. In the garden. I just finished reading Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. And I am now on to Eva Luna by Isabelle Allende. What else is on the list? Here's the stack at the library, waiting to be checked out:

Please notice: this is all reading FOR FUN. I also have a stack of articles and books for the library that I have going. But it is the reading for fun that makes me feel like summer is really here and I am meant to enjoy it.


*Being outside, preferably with Rigi. In case you didn't know, I have a German Shorthaired Pointer named Rigi (pronounced REE-GEE, with a hard G). In the summer, I bring him to the office on occasion. Here he is at work last Friday:
I love how the quiet summer and the relaxed atmosphere at my library allows me to bring him into work with me a bit more. It makes the work day so special. While he does well at the office, this is a dog that is meant to be outside. And I hope to spend as much time with him outside as possible. Burlington is incredible in the summer. Between the Lake, the music that comes to town, the outdoor cafes, and then all the things that take place out on the trails, Rigi and I will be out there enjoying it (with my husband too!).


So, while I have a lot of work to do, I am also focusing on one of the best parts of this time of year: the time to not work. The time to rejuvenate and recharge. So while I'd love to hear about your projects, planning, and preps for the year to come, what else do you have up your sleeves for the summer? What are you doing for yourself?

Nearest Book meme

"West,' said one young engineer, 'is a prince of darkness."
The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder

Rules:
* Get the book nearest to you. Right now.
* Go to page 56.
* Find the 5th sentence.
* Write this sentence - either here or on your blog.
* Copy these instructions as commentary of your sentence.
* Don't look for your favorite book or your coolest but really the nearest.

Met the Author: T.C. Boyle

Every year, Champlain selects a Community Book for the campus to read and come together to discuss. The highlight to the experience is the author's visit to campus. This year we had T.C. Boyle.

I'll be blogging more about the program and his visit at Champlain on our library blog but I wanted to take a moment here to talk about how AWESOME a person "Tom" was. We've met a number of authors at Champlain but this was the first one who was genuinely interested in getting to know us, the people that brought him here, and share a bit of himself with us. What's amazing is that this is an author who is often known as a renegade. But I, and I feel comfortable speaking with my fellow committee members here, found him to be warm, funny, engaging, and just plain cool. And what's best is that our students felt the same way. They laughed at his stories. They asked him questions. They introduced themselves and talked to him about their interpretations of the book, his experience as a writer, his perspectives on the issues he delves into in his books. It takes a lot to bring authors to campus but those few hours, those few precious hours when you see a student really learning something, really experiencing something by meeting the author...it makes it so worth it. We never know what will put students onto their paths, something that Tom talked about in his lecture and reading. I hope that some student looks back on this visit as a moment that helped them realize there are a lot choices, some of them different than what they find in the box.

If you have a Community Book, whatever you call it, that brought the author to campus, I'd love to hear which authors you've had and how your students reacted to them. We are always thinking about next year's book.

However, I think T.C. will be a hard act to follow.

The Sheck Reads What?

I picked up this Reading Meme from Kate at the Delicious Burden and I can't not get in on reading lists. If nothing else, I do love to read. So here goes.

This is a list of the top 106 books most often marked “unread” by LibraryThing users.
The rules: bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.
Write a note in the comments if you’ve done this one and link to your meme!

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey (this is a regular for me...every few years or so)
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (LOVE THIS ONE!!)
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences (stayed home from work to finish this one….could NOT put it down)
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

TOTALS:
45 read (bold)
12 read in school (underlined)
12 started, but not finished, YET (italics)

This meme couldn't come at a better time...I just finished Ken Follett's World Without End and am in need of a good book.

Are we tagging others? If so, let's get the brainiacs in on it: Rudy Leon, Andy Burkhardt, Steve Lawson, Aaron Schwartz, and Greg Schwartz.

The Sheck READS

Reading...It Never Gets Old.

Soon to be the Sheck's Staff picture on the Library Contact Page.

Teaching Senior Seminar on Society and Technology

How does it go from being the 2nd to the 18th so quickly? Wow: between students coming back to campus and going to Midwinter, the Sheck is moving at a pretty quick pace. A post, or two, about Midwinter is forthcoming but at this very moment, my mind is on my course.

Last semester, I took a first crack at teaching HIS 415: Seminar in Contemporary World Issues. Each professor chooses their own theme for the course. Some focus on globalization, some on genocide, some on Iraq. The Sheck focused on Society & Technology. Students critically examine the impact of technology on a variety of societal aspects including politics, democracy, science and medicine, community, and culture. To reframe our understanding of that impact, we then study and discuss the impact of the digital divide in the United States and in Africa.

The class went very well with students approaching the readings and issues in a creative, thoughtful, and engaging way. I learned a great deal from all of my students and found many of the generalizations often heard about students and technology smashed to bits.

Teaching a senior seminar on Society and Technology has been an incredibly rewarding and interesting but also challenging. Teaching it again this semester is even more exciting than the first iteration. As a new teacher, designing, developing, and running a brand new course is hard work. I rewrote the course during the semester, which I vow not to do again(I'm sure many of you more experienced teachers are shaking your heads at that one!). With classes just picking up steam, I am feeling more knowledgeable and prepared than last semester.

Already though I am thinking ahead. There are so many books I find interesting and valuable as I continue to develop the course and my interest in this area. Here are just a few that I am immersed in currently:
-Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
-Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte
-The Hypercomplex Society by Lars Quvartrop
Classics, perhaps, but new to me.

If you have any suggestions for further readings for the course, please throw them into the comments section!

The Year Ahead in Reading

Much like Jessamyn, 2007 was not a great reading year for the Sheck. While I did get a few truly great books in, as a voracious reader, I felt like I as in the doldrums. Some books did grab me: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (as if that needed to be said), What is the What by Dave Eggers, Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, A Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. But mostly, I spent time reading for others: the Community Book Program, my course on Society and Technology, book clubs.

I am hoping that I will get to a few of the books on my wishlist sooner rather than later. Here are some of the titles that are not related to work that I am itching to get to:
-When Elephants Weep: the Emotional Lives of Animals by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
-Musicophilia : tales of music and the brain by Oliver Saks
-Giving : how each of us can change the world by Bill Clinton
-Woman : an intimate geography by Natalie Angier
-Travels with Herodotus
-How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard
-The Memory Keeper's Daugther by Kim Edwards
-The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst

As I write these down, I am proud of myself for how much nonfiction is on the list. Three New Year's Resolutions ago, I promised that for every piece of fiction I read, I would read a piece of non-fiction. I have always been a voracious reader, particularly of fiction so moving into non-fiction was challenging. Perhaps no longer though, as my list attests.

Best of luck to all of you in finding books in 2008 that take your fancy.

Harry Potter as Literature?

I love Dickens.
I love Milton.
I love Thomas Hardy.
I love Sherlock Holmes.
I love Harry Potter.

Perhaps you say, "Harry Potter? Harry Potter doesn't belong in such a distinguished list, does he? Come on", you might say, "is Harry Potter really literature?"

That is indeed what this article from Inside Higher Ed asks. Emphasis on the word higher, for the author really does seem to take a high art road in his analysis. As example:

It seems as [Matthew] Arnold and [Theodor] Adorno would prefer that kids learn to appreciate forms of cultural creation that will not in any way ever come to the attention of a cable television network.

Come on into the 21st century.
Sure, the book is always better than the movie. Yes, your imagination and the connections drawn from visualization and independent thought is unparalleled. But come on. Are all of my beloved authors to be discredited because a movie or TV executive found the story compelling enough to be shared on a mass scale?

What I think it so obviously missed in this article is that despite the creation of the films, the books have not lost their appeal. Thousands of children and adults are eagerly anticipating the arrival of the BOOK. Thousands of children have been introduced to to the likes of CS Lewis, Philip Pullman, and JRR Tolkien because of Harry Potter (all of these authors are heavily indebted to Milton, by the by). Children, and adults who might otherwise say they are "too busy to read," are reading and finding it enjoyable. Could that not lead to reading more and all that it entails?

Perhaps I am missing the point. As I asked initially, is Harry Potter literature? How do we define it? The Oxford Literary Dictionary takes a crack at it:

Literature.
literature, a body of written works related by subject‐matter (e.g. the literature of computing), by language or place of origin (e.g. Russian literature), or by prevailing cultural standards of merit. In this last sense, ‘literature’ is taken to include oral, dramatic, and broadcast compositions that may not have been published in written form but which have been (or deserve to be) preserved. Since the 19th century, the broader sense of literature as a totality of written or printed works has given way to more exclusive definitions based on criteria of imaginative, creative, or artistic value, usually related to a work's absence of factual or practical reference (see autotelic). Even more restrictive has been the academic concentration upon poetry, drama, and fiction. Until the mid‐20th century, many kinds of non‐fictional writing—in philosophy, history, biography, criticism, topography, science, and politics—were counted as literature; implicit in this broader usage is a definition of literature as that body of works which—for whatever reason—deserves to be preserved as part of the current reproduction of meanings within a given culture (unlike yesterday's newspaper, which belongs in the disposable category of ephemera). This sense seems more tenable than the later attempts to divide literature—as creative, imaginative, fictional, or non‐practical—from factual writings or practically effective works of propaganda, rhetoric, or didactic writing. The Russian Formalists' attempt to define literariness in terms of linguistic deviations is important in the theory of poetry, but has not addressed the more difficult problem of the non‐fictional prose forms. See also belles‐lettres, canon, paraliterature. For a fuller account, consult Peter Widdowson, Literature (1998).
---Oxford's Literary Dictionary

Perhaps difficult to swallow for some but I think clearly indicative that Harry Potter, who deals with terrorism and political corruption as well as the never tiring woes and wows of intellectual and emotional development, is perhaps the greatest representative "meanings within a given culture."

Finally, let's remember that both Dicken and Conan Doyle were serialists and their characters, especially Holmes, were popular figures that might have been discredited if we were to apply these criteria. Where would we be without Holmes? Surely lacking popular phrases and iconic imagery. Where would we be without the muckraking literature of Oliver Twist and Bleak House?

Dickens, Doyle, Rowling: Popular, accessible, influential, essential literature.

What will the future hold?

Let me preface this post by saying that I am not a parent and I can only imagine what it is like to rear a child. But...

I couldn't resist sharing this article from the New York Times on the "Chicken Finger Pandemic" that is "gripping" the nation. David Kamp is spot on! I am amazed at how often children will eat nothing but "kids food." My niece and nephew, who are limited eaters, though they love us, hate to have dinner with their Uncle Jon and I because we make them eat "Sarah and Jon Food." That means NOT chicken fingers, hot dogs, or pizza.

But still, if we raise kids that only eat kids food, or, to bring me back into my librarian line, kids who only watch TV, what kinds of adults can we anticipate? What will happen to artichokes, pancetta, or gefilte fish? What will happen to Dickens, Bronte, and Faulkner? Will they only be what is on the Food Network or out in the latest HBO remake?

Every holiday and birthday, my niece and nephew can count on books from their aunt, the librarian. Those books often sit in the corners of their room, collecting dust. But they are there, waiting for the day that the power goes out or they are sent to their room or they accept my invitation to read on the lawn on a sunny day. They have books in their lives, and "Sarah and Jon food," and I've just got to keep putting both in front of them in the hopes that they'll realize that what's good for them is really, truly, actually good.

Met the Author: Valentino Achak Deng

Champlain's Community Book for 07-08 is Dave Egger's (of McSweeny's fame) novelization of the life of Valentino Achak Deng in "What is the What".


I joined members of the Community Book Committee, that's them, smiling at you, for a talk by Valentino. We will be having Dave Eggers at the college in the Fall so it was sheer luck that Valentino was in Vermont and we were able to catch him.

Valentino was incredible. Many people complain that the Community Book is often depressing. I feel like those people need to reexamine the books we've chosen and "What is the What" is a fine place to start. The true story of Valentino's journey at the age of 5 from his home in ravaged Sudan to refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, his experience is indeed awful. Awful isn't even the right word for it. There are no words for it.

Doubly so, words cannot express the admiration one must feel for Valentino's, and the thousands of other Lost Boys, strength, perseverence, faith, and hope. Valentino's ability to share his experience with others, his ability to learn from the horrors he has experienced, and his ability to "let go," as he says, of the bitterness he could feel is extraordinary. He talked about letting go of this hate, this bitterness, or else he can never move forward. What is the point?, he asks? What is the what that he would hold onto?



Champlain's website for the Community Book will be up soon and I'll link to it then. But we are trying to balance the need to make our student's aware of the genocide in Sudan and teach them they need to care and to act with the incredible journey one man made, in the world and in himself, to realize what is important to him. Students, we hope, will realize that is a journey we all must make to become ourselves. Many of us will never experience as difficult a journey as Valentino but these journeys aren't easy for any of us. And Valentino's message is not to feel bad for him or to compare his journey to ours. But rather to see that we can not just survive but thrive, no matter what. I can't wait to help students see that when we read the book together as a campus in the fall.

In Memorium: Kurt Vonnegut

To be honest, Kurt Vonnegut's writing has never been my favorite. Since going to college, I found my tastes to be better suited to the elaborate, stylistic writings of Dickens and most recently and passionately, Conan Doyle. But there is something about Kurt Vonnegut's passing that stuck with me today. And it seems to have stuck or at least struck a number of other people as well.

Many of the faculty joke with me that they hear about someone's death and by the time they arrive on campus at 9:00 am, I have a display up commerating them. Today, it was 11:00 am. When I went down to the stack to pull our Vonnegut holdings, I stopped though.

That is what Vonnegut has always been for me: the kind of writer that made you stop and think. I remember reading Cat's Cradle for the first time and despite the darkness and absurdity of the revolution (for isn't that the case with most revolutions), I distinctly remember the way in which lovers connected: by pressing the soles of their feet together. By connecting through their connection to our world. Perhaps that is why it was the first book I ever lent to my now husband, Jon. For the simplicity and profundity of the connection. For its romanticism from a writer I consider mostly unromantic. However, that being said, the Times articles I read today while preparing my display of Vonnegut's work commented "To Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness." So apt.

"Scrotum" in the Library

The hoopla surrounding the use of the anatomical term "scrotum" in this year's Newbery Medal is yet another exanple of librarians taking themselves too seriously. It's no wonder that we are often pegged as matronly, out of touch gatekeepers. How can we suggest that the use of an anatomical term in a children's story is inapproriate while children watch primetime tv that exposes them to sexualized content that has no objective or educational value.

The use of scrotum in childrens literature should be used as a teaching tool to help children feel more comfortable with their bodies, more comfortable asking questions about their bodies and sex, and to make books, libraries, and librarians into figures to whome children feel comfortable asking questions. We are not judges. We are guides through the process of learning.