Rating Books

Today in American History, the lecture touched on the subject of the 1st Amendment right that is violated when some one's voice is censured. Book banning--particularly the prohibition of Harriet Beecher Stowe's UNCLE TOM'S CABIN in the Southern states before the Civil War began. Apparently there is one book that, at the moment, is being banned from libraries. I can't remember the name--and the explicit subject matter of the book isn't one that I care to repeat (and thus increase its "fame") but it is being taken (or kept) off of many library shelves. CATCHER IN THE RYE and LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER are two novels that received a disproportionate amount of attention when they were on the "forbidden book" list.

Wouldn't it be great--and I am not being sarcastic here--if we had the resources, dedication and wisdom to devise a system for rating books? I do not want to see movies that are gory or violent or explicitly sexual. The movie business has been required to declare a rating before each movie that is released into public theatres. My son has shown me sites where I can read about a picture's storyline, character list, and reviews. I can also see exactly WHY a movie is rated PG or R--down to the swear words present in the dialogue and the precise moments in the plot where an actor smokes a cigarette or pulls a knife to stab someone. There are even sites that discuss what themes and moral statements are manifest in a movie, with surprising candor and absence of prejudice, and suggestions about how parents and children (or teachers in their classrooms) might discuss the words or impressions or implications of the actors' costumed, the plot entangled, the dialogue uttered, the setting utilized or the social climate inferred. And all this before the film even comes out in "a theatre near you!"

With a B.A. and a Masters degree in English--both attained by reading and writing about a large number of books combined by attendance at an amazingly huge number of hours spent talking about and listening to professors talk about BOOKS. Even now, at 50 years of age, I read very little that isn't found in the Youth section of the bookstore. I don't want people to swear at me or around me in my everyday life--why waste time that could be used actually communicating thought or wonder or excitement or doubt or uncertainty by limiting conversation to an amazingly small collection of trite couplets or meaningless expositions that mean nothing? Some of my most hated are:

"That's what I'm talking about!"

"I, like, can't, like, even believe, like, that she would say/think/do that!"

"S**t!" "D**n!" "H**l!"

"Yeah, I'm into it."

"Dude!"

"Friggin' ****!"

"Yo' mama!"

"I getcha!"

"You bet a rat's a**!"

I hear ALL of these "expressions" used in context to denote excitement, amazement, disappointment, threat, embarrassment, flirtation, exasperation, despair, and in place of the routine "Hi!" I walk down the hallway and hear the same words repeated by people--correct that--by every person--whose conversations are loudly broadcast, impossible to miss as I pass by. The same words over and over. augh.

Were there a rating system for books, I would want the publications that repeat the meaningless kind of gibberish a clear rating: predictable theme, boring dialogue, and insipid characters. The books that are composed with care and panache (the poetry of Emily Dickinson: "zero at the bone"!); with whimsy and drama (A Wrinkle in Time: tesseracts!); with imagination and wonder (Robin McKinley's Beast and Honour); with insight and compassion (The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane and The Princess School). As I think of it, though, I would want a system that would tell me if the author intends to appeal to my sexual desires or to inflame my prejudices or woo my political morals to shift closer to the right or the middle or the left. I would want a book that I could talk about with others, that I would buy in hardback, that I would give away to my best friends, that I would collect and carry with me every time I moved from one place to another.

I think that I am reaching far beyond what anyone can tell me about what I could read, should think about, must act upon. It is too late for me to finish this tonight. I am afraid to look behind me at the clock--I am sure that it is past midnight, past the time when I should be asleep and dreaming about what I am writing about. As my fingers move across the keyboard, faces, adventures, tragedies, heroes, villages, continents all flash behind my eyes. They are from the books that I have read recently--today. They are from books that I have re-read dozens of times over the past four dozen years. They are from books that I am still looking to discover--books that "outpace" even one of Whitman's "magnificent stallions."

I must go and dream now--think more about this concept of rating literature--or perhaps just finding a way to weed out the garbage that debase the marvel that written words are capable of.

But, I digress. Were books to be rated as movies are, then I could look on the covers of books from early in my reading career (I was reading aloud the poetry from The Hobbit and The Ring Trilogy in seventh grade) and after a great many years of reading books. There are "Beginning to Read" and "For Intermediate Readers" and "For Advanced Readers" on the covers of quite a number of books printed for children. I guess, though, I am looking for something that I don't know how to express. I want to know if the book is exciting, well-composed, thought provoking, satisfying to my imagination and an asset to add to my sense of reality.

Some judge a book's value by how many copies sold--the place that some announce as the "Best Seller's List." Liking a book that millions of others have bought, just because others have paid money for it is a lot like being happy with your weight when your body fat percentage matches the "average" for your height and age. The vast majority of people who are as tall and as old as I am are overweight. Somehow being overweight like everyone else just doesn't make feel good about my level of physical fitness. I am somewhat of a snob, I think. I don't want to fit into the "popular' or "cool" group anymore. I was not allowed into that echelon when I was a teenager and desperately wanted to belong. I have finally become wise enough to be thankful for that exclusion.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) has always encouraged its members to be a "peculiar people." We are to decide what to wear, what to read, who to associate with, and where to marry with an eye to the eternity beyond this lifetime. I walk down the halls of the college where I am taking classes now and hear the "popular" groups loudly swear at each other and laugh in short, nervous outbursts. I waunder through the mall and am embarrassed for young women and those my own age who are waddling about in jeans two sizes too small with little fleshy "fat belts" pushing out beneath the bottoms of their tee shirts and tops of their pants. I walk the beach and see boys and men whose shorts are so baggy that they are forced to walk with a "hitch" so that they can hike up their pants between steps--keeping them from falling completely down--or whose Speedo swimsuits are so small that from a distance they are completely hidden beneath well-tanned beer bellies. I know that the most extremely dressed and the loudest talking people are the most easily noticed.

I am just re-discovering that the link between being judged "good" or "best" or "most popular" or "best seller" has nothing to do with what is actually the most entertaining or challenging or interesting. Though I pity them, I will never comprehend how a video game can consume someone's mind and whole life. I cannot fathom how a world completely created and controlled by someone else can be more compelling than the opportunity to create and control my own world. Why would someone buy and play a video game that is given the highest recommendation: "You gotta play this! It is as one of the most addicting games ever! You can't miss it!" ?

I do not want someone else to dictate what I want and how much of it I must have to feel satisfied. I am glad that I cannot understand the draw of such things.

The prevailing "free thinkers" of my age challenged others to "walk to the beat of a different drum."

I don't have a drum in the orchestra that creates the music I hear as I dance through every day.

Read books rated by others? Language is such a rarified medium. Novels and biographies and fantasies and fictions and non-fictions . . . it is a good exercise in debate to think and talk about how to rate books as "good" or "bad." After exercise, though, it is time to rest and replenish our vital balance by reading what up-lifts and cheers and pleases. After the work, the dessert.

Dream Job

I have discovered today, after just a day and a half with my sister Susan, something that I could never have imagined.

My whole life has been dominated by the desire to be with horses: riding then, jumping them, showing them, brushing them, and loving them. My sister Susan has the job that—were I given the choice—I thought I would always want. She manages a horse stable and trains horses and teaches riding. After only thirty six-hours with her, though, I find that (were I given the opportunity to join Susan in her work) I would quickly become worn out and dissatisfied at the immense volume of effort, planning, self-discipline and sheer willpower that it takes to do what she does. In other words: I would hate it.

In living my life as I have, I have left myself with only the ability to pretend at doing what I love. I hear again my mom’s old complaint that I am good at lots of things, but master of none. What I really want is the life that I have—but with time and a horse to ride every day. I have become accustomed to being cosseted by Brent and protected by him from the grit needed to face the public and a real job.

At one time I think I could have worked as most people must, keeping to a time schedule, doing tasks that others have set for me to do, and being who my job needs me to be. I was ruthless in my approach to the “business” of running a family and keeping finances in order. Brent observed that in getting things done, I was unfeeling and aggressive. After almost twenty years of fighting the school system to get what my children needed, stomping down the feelings of others to get through the red tape, crashing through “established channels” to identify the person who could actually make the decision I wanted made, bullying the health insurance department manager into covering the surgery-meds-office visits-procedure-psychologist costs—after almost twenty years of this I was very good at it. But Brent asked me to please stop. I was becoming this “efficient” and “single minded” entity ALL the time—not just when on the phone or in the meetings. He wanted me to become me again. It was not worth the money I saved or the corporate compliance I achieved—my way of getting things done on schedule and under budget was turning me into something and someone that I was not.

So I stopped.

I do not think that I could go back to that “self” and ever come out again. I do not have the miraculous talent that Susan has to take care of business during business hours—and to take care of Susan during Susan hours. I have lost the ability to dichotomize. Brent can be at work and be an attorney and a manager—and still come home and be my husband and sweetheart. Both he and Susan can “leave the office at the office.” I have (if I ever really did have it) lost that ability. Everything I am is connected to everything that I do and think and feel and say and hear and ponder and read and desire. And at this moment of self-discovery, I don’t feel sad at the loss—only a great admiration for both my sister and my husband.

I am still smarting at Rob’s question of what I have that is worth putting on a blog. The only answer that I have, the only response that is genuine, is the contentment that consumes me as I put into physical form an approximation of the complex interchange necessary for my mind and heart to make sense of what my eyes and ears take in. I blog because I love to write . . .

. . . and because someday I hope I might make a difference with the words that I craft and send out into the wide expanse of the internet.