Remembering the Literature That Shaped Us

Earlier today, a friend was buying stocks online and I was taken aback because even though I'm more than old enough to engage in such adult-type activities, if I had enough money to buy stocks, I would likely spend the moolah on dresses or books or fancy dinners before I managed to get anywhere near a, umm, stockhouse? Broker? Trader? E-trade Online?

Anyhow, this reminded me of being a kid and wanting to buy stocks because I had read The Westing Game, in which a very smart and charmingly bratty Turtle Wexler (age7? 10?) knows more about stocks than anyone you'd ever find down at the NYSE. I remember wanting to learn to buy and trade stocks as soon as I had enough allowance, but alas, I never did. The same thing happened with Harriet the Spy, another favorite childhood book. Although I did manage to carry around a notebook for at least two weeks, noting interesting facts about neighbors and hiding in the Maryland woods, spying on one local man I deemed suspicious.

The point is, it's nice when a book inspires you as a child. And while Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time didn't make me want to time travel necessarily, it did open up my mind and stretch my imagination and I remember carrying around a weathered copy as an elementary school kid, enthusiastic to get to the end.

It happened, sadly then, on this day that I was thinking about these childhood favorites, that I read of L'Engle's death. As writers, we are often (or at least I have been) told that it is dangerous to have too much of ourselves in our work. I'm not sure I agree, and L'Engle certainly didn't. The phrase "dictation from her subconscious," I think, is quite an interesting way to look at things:

Her works — poetry, plays, autobiography and books on prayer — were deeply, quixotically personal. But it was in her vivid children’s characters that readers most clearly glimpsed her passionate search for the questions that mattered most. She sometimes spoke of her writing as if she were taking dictation from her subconscious.

“Of course I’m Meg,” Ms. L’Engle said about the beloved protagonist of “A Wrinkle in Time.”

Madeleine L'Engle, Children's Writer, Is Dead

Maybe the Only Two English Degrees That Ever Paid Off

Inside my recent issue of Conde Nast Traveler, I noticed a pull-out advertisement (complete with excerpts) for a new book, The Conde Nast Traveler Book of Unforgettable Journeys. The pull-out guide contained a nifty preview to four or five of the writers who contributed to the anthology, including Nicole Krauss. I have always been a huge fan of her husband, Jonathan Safran Foer. Who seems like a nice guy. Not spoiled. Despite that $6.7 million-you've-got-to-be-kidding-me brownstone in Park Slope. V. Woolf said one needs a room of her own, not a fucking palace. Anyhow, I digress. Below, a sentence from Ms. Krauss' excerpt about Japan:

"We have come to Japan in part because we've had the brilliant idea of turning the patch of nothingness behind our Brooklyn house into a Japanese garden—only we don't know how."

Don't most people just buy a book for that? Like this one? Ah, to be a Krauss-Safran-Foer...