Dune, by Frank Herbert

Ever since I discovered Battlestar Galactica last winter, I've been fairly convinced that I missed something pretty big in terms of Science Fiction throughout high school and college. This winter, it was Patrick Rothfuss's incredible Kingkiller Chronicles.

If Lord of the Rings turns you off, and you can't recite most of the lines from The Empire Strikes Back by memory (hint: it's usually "I've got a bad feeling about this...") then don't bother. But if you haven't picked up Dune in a while, or at least one of these titles above gives you the shivers, it's worth revisiting. Like all great epic tales, Paul's obstacles become the readers own.

In Dune, by Frank Herbert,  Paul Atreides faces the perils of life on Arrakis, or Dune, the planet George Lucas used to inspire Luke's home-planet Tatooine. After the assassination of his father, the Duke Leto Atreides, Paul and his mother, Jessica, escape the hostile usurping forces and join the Fremen, the blue-on-blue-eyed natives of the harshest parts of that desert world.

Paul will remind you of Luke, as well he should, with his Arrakian-exceptionalism and his pithy understanding of both future and past, and I found myself similarly moved and compelled by him. In a novel driven by economics, politics, yes, even jihad, (Interestingly, much of the Freman languauge is nonsense Arabic -- fascinating in a book published in 1965 and read today) Paul is at once strong and completely vulnerable. And so, like Luke and Kara and Harry and so many others after him, Paul faces his destiny.

As Paul begins to take his final steps towards fulfilling his fate, Freman tradition dictates that he must challenge Stilgar, friend, mentor, and current leader of the tribe. But as Paul faces his old friend, he asks:

“Do you think you could lift your hand against me?” 
Stilgar began to tremble. “It’s the way,” he muttered.
As Stilgar remained silent, trembling, staring at him, Paul said:
“Ways change, Stil. You have changed them yourself.”

Perhaps the role of these narratives is to remind us that ways change, and yet, they remain the same. We readers love to find ourselves in the role of these heroes who must decide what can endure in times of tumult, perhaps because they are so similar to, and so different from, the times of challenge and revolution in our own lives.

Dune reminds us that what is most important, be it epic narrative itself or something as simple and commonplace as a friendship, will remain, even as we change our lives to meet our own destinies. Paul may be exceptional, but he reminds us that, assuredly, so are we.

The Name of the Wind, The Lonely Polygamist, and Freedom

More cerebral than Game of Thrones, more grown up than The Golden Compass, and with a protagonist with enough hubris to make Han Solo look modest, The Name of the Wind is transporting. And at 800-plus pages with a 1000 page sequel in The Wise Man's Fear, it will keep you busy for a week at the beach or for many delicious late-nights.

It tells the story of Kvothe, son of troupers Edma Ruh, prodigy archanist, and hapless lover, as he becomes Kvothe the Bloodless, building a reputation at the University and seeking to revenge his parent's brutal murders.

I recommend this one to fantasy nerds without exception or reservation. If you run more mainstream give it a try, but only if you're looking to commit some time.

I am telling you here and now: The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall is one of the greatest novels of the twenty-first century. And not because Sister Wives is hot right now. This is, quite simply, one of the funniest, most moving, most gorgeous books I've ever read, and it has been compared to Catch-22 by people who know. It does not serve to expose the strange lifestyles of the Mormon and polygamist. Rather, it paints its characters with deep sympathy and pathos.

And it is devastatingly, heart-rendingly funny.

This book is now at the top of my Must List. It is too good to miss, it will change you in the way that all great books change you, and please tell me once you've read it. Trust me, you'll want to talk about it.

I know, Freedom by Jonathan Franzen is no news. But hear me out on this one. I bought it when it came out, and it sat on my bookshelf for ages. But my best friend from high school, who freely admits that she rarely reads fiction, recommended it. I opened it on a Saturday and lost myself. And even though I read it in January, I think of it more regularly than any other book I read this year.

It is so devastatingly incisive about modern life, so vividly written, so horribly funny. And the characters are despicable. If you're not particularly interested in dwelling for 1000 pages in the way literature can reveal sometimes-painful truths about ourselves and the way we live, skip it. But if you want a read that will make you feel something, that will challenge you, and yes, possibly depress you for a while, this is perfect.

The Night Circus

For a while now I've been writing at thinking a lot about the life of the imagination and its role in the adult world. So when I found this quotation in an NPR review of The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, well, I figured I better add it to my list:

But don't ask adults who grew up on Harry Potter to give up magic, says Salon reviewer Laura Miller:

"That generation has grown up to say: 'Yeah, I may want to read Jane Austen. I may want to read Jonathan Franzen. But I also want to read this intoxicating imaginative narrative as well. I don't want to have to leave that behind just because I'm a grown-up.' And really there is no reason that they should."

On a side note, when I read that phrase "adults who grew up on Harry Potter," I thought, what?

Oh, right, that's me.

Read Miller's review.

The Borrower, by Rebecca Makkai

As a rule, I dislike epilogues. Everyone already knew that Hermione married Ron and having to watch them put their kids on the train and then shuffle off to their lives of quiet incantation was just a little bit depressing. Surely they fought dragons and Death Eaters for all the rest of their days.

Perhaps part of the problem with epilogues is that they often give a narrative self-awareness, a grounding, the avoidance of which I feel may be vital to fiction itself. And, as the heroine of The Borrower puts it, an epilogue often “[gives] me pause, for a moment, that all my reference points are fiction, that all my narratives are lies.”

But for me, the epilogue of Rebecca Makkai’s debut novel The Borrower may be the best part, which is fitting for a book as much about books and readers as this one.

Lucy Hull, the 26-year-old children’s librarian in Hannibal, Missouri, haplessly runs away with ten-year-old Ian Drake, in a mock-heroic attempt to rescue him from his evangelical parents.

As the narrative grows, it becomes in and of itself a reading list of familiar titles, all the way from Goodnight Moon and The Very Hungry Caterpillar to Oz and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, speaking to those texts, and to a shared love between writer and reader, openly and with a fair amount of glee.

Lucy and Ian form a friendship where it’s not entirely clear who the adult is, and in the end, I might argue that Lucy’s life is changed more than Ian’s. And maybe that relates to the idea that before a real story, before a true book, we are all equalized in the profound world of imagination.

In the final scenes, a clever ploy on Lucy’s part (probably the smartest thing she does in the whole book) and the epilogue leave us Ian on the precipice of discovering and creating meaning in his life on his own. She leaves for him, appropriately subversively stashed in the folds of an evangelical magazine for children, lists of titles Ian should read each year as he grows up. (“‘Books to Read When You’re 12’ started with The Giver and The Golden Compass and ended with Lord of the Flies.” Be still my heart.)

This gesture, those lists of familiar titles, evoked the community of children-now-adults who, like Lucy and like Ian, found such a real world in the lives of Jonas, Lyra, Ralph, that we find those universes still, real and alive.

This is a novel about what we might build with books, what shelter we might find from those bricks of ideas. And our heroine Lucy urges her reader in the end:

Imagine his heaven, where he can float through characters and books at will. Imagine him already there, under his covers with the flashlight. For a blissful eternity, such a world should suffice. For now, it should save him.

Let’s say that it does.

This novel is a paean to books themselves. It made me proud to be a reader, and reminded me that such a safe place “under the covers with the flashlight” is still available to me, and to all of us who seek it.

A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving

After his mother’s death, Johnny Wheelwright finds his best friend Owen Meany’s entire baseball card collection on his front porch.

The boys are only ten or so. And when Johnny asks his chronically-drunk yet perpetually-wise step-father Dan what Owen was thinking, Dan has the insight to know that Owen wants Johnny to return the cards exactly as Owen gave them away.

And Johnny does. Then he reciprocates, giving Owen his favorite stuffed animal, a terrifyingly, thrillingly realistic toy armadillo.

The boys mourn their tragedy through their simple yet precious possessions. And Johnny reflects:

Owen and I couldn’t have talked about those things – at least, not then. So we gave each other our best-loved possessions, and hoped to get them back. When you think of it, that’s not so silly.

In A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving, Johnny Wheelwright tells the story of Owen Meany, diminutive in stature and epic in persona, who from the age of eleven believes himself to be GOD’S INSTRUMENT. As they hurtle through their adolescence towards what Owen believes to be his predestined end, they encounter the armless American Indian totem Watahantowet, Johnny’s sexy older cousin Hester the Molester, an enthusiastically fornicating teacher -couple the Brinker-Smiths, the dolorous and eternally doubtful Reverend Mr. Merrill, Johnny’s formidable grandmother and matriarch of Gravesend Harriet Wheelwright, and a supplicating statue of Mary Magdalene affectionately known as “the Holy Goalie.”

Owen, in turn, unwittingly murders Johnny’s mother, plays the role of not only the Ghost of Christmas Future but also the Christ Child Himself in several amateur theater productions, and ensures that Johnny is not drafted to go to Vietnam with the aid of a granite saw and a lot of rubbing alcohol, but not all in that order.

In high school, Owen becomes The VOICE, a columnist and tastemaker in the Gravesend Academy newspaper. A legend in his own time (at least in Gravesend), Owen takes his small celebrity for granted, yet remains deeply loyal to Johnny. And Johnny watches everything, Joseph to Owen’s Jesus, but secure in the knowledge that Owen will lead him through anything they face.

Many years after the death of Johnny’s mom, he and Owen find themselves at another turning point. And Owen tells his best friend,

“I LOVE YOU,” Owen told me. “NOTHING BAD IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO YOU – TRUST ME.”

And Johnny does.

In the end of the story, Owen and Johnny spend a day drunk out of their minds in a swimming pool in Arizona, playing what Owen calls THE REMEMBER GAME. As they tell themselves the stories of their own lives, the boys-now-men build a temple of friendship and a shelter against the separate challenges they are each about to face.

Owen, as he foresaw, dies the next day.

Johnny, you may or may not be surprised to hear, goes on to be an English teacher.

But his life, and faith, rest on his friendship with Owen and with the stories of his memory and of their friendship.

This book changed me when I read it as a teenager. But it has always stood somewhere beyond my ability to articulate just why I found it so transformative. I think I worried that, like the boys exchanging toys in their time of grief, if I tried to say what it really meant to me, it might destroy something.

But when I read it again, as an adult, in discussing this moment in the story with a friend, he told me what I had been trying to say. As children, at the same time that they express their grief without speaking of it, Owen and Johnny hit the truest aim of friendship:

“We want to be able to offer all of ourselves to someone, trust them with it, and lose nothing.”

This is a novel about a million things, all important: it is about friendship, friendship of the purest, most transformative kind. It is about faith in something – a person, a goal, a destiny.And it is about stories: the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives, the forces that drive them, and the ways they let us build meaning and thereby keep faith itself whole.

We must have faith in our own stories. We devise the heroes of our own mythologies; we worship at the altar of those rare relationships where we give each other our best-loved, most secretly guarded wants and needs and get them back, not only as we gave them, but with the reassurance that they are real and valuable, as are we.

When you think of it, that’s not so silly.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

"You girls," said Miss Brodie, "must learn to cultivate an expression of composure. It is one of the best assets of a woman, an expression of composure, come foul, come fair. Regard the Mona Lisa over yonder!"

Every once in a while I encounter a book that leads me to suspect that it may actually be about me, not in some Ode on a Grecian Urn kind of way, but as in, the author actually wrote the story of my life, both my life as a student at a girls' school before and as a teacher now. Adored as she is by her young students, my suspicion that I may in fact have a great deal in common with Miss Brodie is not a particularly encouraging thought.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is the story of the irrepressible, inimitable Jean Brodie, and the "Brodie Set" -- six students at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh whom she has hand selected as "la creme de la creme," those girls whom she expects to shine, either on their own merits or by the sheer force of her considerable will. They, in turn, devote themselves hopelessly to her and the seemingly bottomless mysteries of her inscrutable adult life.

Miss Brodie is an iconoclast at Marcia Blaine, continually in conflict with the Headmistress Mackay, who spends a large portion of the novel coaxing those of the Brodie set to reveal enough of Miss Brodie's unorthodox teachings that Miss Mackay might find an excuse to let her most troublesome faculty member go.

Miss Brodie, for her part, in the classic tradition of Fictional Humanist Teachers, scorns the standard curriculum and instead regales her students with tales of her travels, love affairs, and cultural and political observations. As Miss Brodie explains to the Set:

The word 'education' comes from the root e from ex, out, and duco, I lead. It means a leading out. To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul. To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education, I call it intrusion.

In this moment, early in the novel, I seem to hear myself on Parents' Night, watching them nod and smile at my idealism and energy.

This book is not, as you might expect, some kind of 1930's Gossip Girl, nor is it the "girl version" of Dead Poet's Society. Miss Brodie's pupils are much younger that those students, and as the story opens, are hapless in their love for Miss Brodie and in their attempts to understand the intricacies of her Adult Life.

As Miss Brodie leads her student out into the world as she sees it, at the same time, the girls occupy themselves imagining the details of Miss Brodie's love affairs with both Mr. Gordon Lowther, the singing master, and Mr. Teddy Lloyd, the one-armed art master, and "the only men on the staff." Who knows what really happens in Miss Brodie's personal life; the version her students imagine is much more real.

For example, best friends and Brodie Settees Jenny and Sandy occupy themselves one term completing "the love correspondence between Miss Brodie and the singing master." In the girls' minds, after Miss Brodie "gave herself to him" she ends her (imaginary) correspondence thus:

Allow me, in conclusion, to congratulate you warmly upon your sexual intercourse, as well as your singing.
With fondest joy,
Jean Brodie

In this way, The Prime of ... hilariously illuminates how much being a teacher is like being a politician or movie star, left vulnerable to whims of grocery store tabloids and, in reality, entirely unable to control public perception.

Miss Brodie is only object in this book; she exists only as she exists in her students' minds. Like Slughorn in Harry Potter, there is something slightly ... if not exactly sinister, something ... pathetic about Miss Brodie's attempts to cultivate her set.

Being a teacher can be heady. I am so familiar with the feeling of watching some TV or film version of a teacher and seeing myself in him or her, sometimes in good ways, other times not so much. Being a teacher can be mostly about being a performer, but with viewers who do not get to choose whether or not they tune in. I am always struggling to avoid using my "teacher voice," that slow and over-enunciated tone and cadence of the teacher who had given her lesson a million times before and for whom the ideas no longer hold any magic.

I do not often reflect on how much influence we teachers really hold over our charges. As much as I think about my students, each of them, in some capacity, spends 45 minutes a day thinking about me. Every student has that teacher whose class they look back on as an adult and see there some moment of recognition that had left a mark on their own identities. Miss Brodie is that teacher. But Muriel Spark doesn't seem to think that teacher was all she was cracked up to be.

The fabric of this novel is about the ways that that role of the teacher is not only performative, but a screen against the real individual, and the way that being a teacher might provide an opportunity to appear, both to others, and to yourself, as other than you are. Miss Brodie's set, from the opening pages of the novel, move through the story realizing that pieces of the Renaissance statue of her image are chipping away all the time, finally to reveal that Miss Brodie may never have had a prime at all.

The Prime ... would be a delightful little book. Except for the fact that it is far too serious to be delightful and that there is nothing little about the social commentary it offers. Throughout the story, frequent mentions of the fact that Sandy, a sort of leader in the set, will ultimately betray Miss Brodie, make the tone feel almost ominous. As she looks back on her years at Marcia Blaine, Sandy begins to realize that Miss Brodie may never have had a prime at all:

She thought of Miss Brodie eight years ago sitting under the elm tree telling her first simple love story and wondered to what extent it was Miss Brodie who had developed complications throughout the years, and to what extent it was her own conception of Miss Brodie that had changed.

This is the central question of the novel, and a question that I ask myself quite seriously: when is our understanding of someone else more about ourselves than it is about them?

I am not sure if this is a novel more about teacherhood or studentship, but it is certainly, from this teacher's point of view, an important commentary on how we see ourselves and how we hope to be seen. And there is some intimation that if we are honest on both counts, some ugliness may be revealed.

The tale is not, however, without its joys. And it does, at the same time that it troubles me, reaffirm for me how magical childhood is, and how lucky I am to have a part in the world of school and of children. As Sandy and Jenny sit down, early in the story, to a birthday, tea, Spark offers this gem:

To Sandy the unfamiliar pineapple had the authentic taste and appearance of happiness ... and she thought the sharp taste on her tongue was that of a special happiness, which was nothing to do with eating, and was different from the happiness of play that one enjoyed unawares.

Though it is rare, there is some opportunity for authentic happiness, even though that happiness might occasionally require a little imagination.

Back to my original point: this book felt like it was about me. And I'm not sure if I'm Miss Brodie or if I'm Sandy, but, in the end, Art teacher Teddy Lloyd tells Sandy:

"You are too analytical and irritable for your age."

Story of my life.

Everything Matters! by Ron Currie, Jr.

If you are the type of reader who would never pick up a book with an exclamation point in the title, then this is the book for you!

Everything Matters! by Ron Currie, Jr. breaks a lot of guidelines that I usually drill into my students' brains in September as the cardinal rules (or at least my cardinal pet peeves) of writing: don't use punctuation to speak for you instead of words, writing in second person doesn't work, use past tense, not present, to tell a story. And it breaks them so successfully and so convincingly that I began to reconsider not only these petty conventions of writing but a million more significant ones as well.

The story of Junior Thibodeau, boy-genius who knows from birth that the world will end when he is 36, never did what I expected it to do. The redemption I expected at the ended turned out to really be more anti-redemption. And that, I believe, is the point: nothing is neat or pretty and nothing lasts. And everything matters because nothing really matters at all.

With the portentous destruction of the Challenger when Junior is in elementary school on one end and the inevitable actual end of the world on the other, Junior's life feels like a cataclysm in and of itself, even without the whole countdown-to-annihilation thing. Junior is paralyzed by his insight and tormented by ... pretty much everything.

Much of the story is narrated by The Voices (emphasis mine) who, from his birth, provide Junior with not only the precise date, time, and astronomic statistics of the impending Armageddon, but also a wide number of other truths and advice, complete with admonitions about, suggestions for, and criticisms of Junior's decisions. The Voices come across as part omniscient narrator, part Hal the Computer, and part interior monologue. Since they address Junior directly, they also made me feel like I was Junior. And, even though Junior might actually be crazy, seeing as he hears voices and all, I am pretty sure that I, and probably a lot of other neurotic-twenty-to-thirty-somethings, actually am Junior in some important ways.

As counterpoint to Junior's angst-ridden and drug-addled life, his father, John Sr., was for me Currie's most convincing evidence in support of the assertion of the title. As a rule I wouldn't say that father-son relationships are a particular area of interest for me. But John Sr. is so solid, simple, straightforward, and strong that he makes Junior's fractured internal life ridiculous and tragic. There's a sense that if only Junior could see things his dad's way, he wouldn't have nearly so many problems. Just listen to this:

John Sr. meets his hero, baseball player Ted Williams, and he explains:

And it was one of the great moments of my life, walking with Ted William's arm around my shoulders, right up there with my boys being born.

John Sr., a man who works three jobs because he simply can't stand inaction, has a moment of such pure paternal love for his ridiculous son that it made me want to hit Junior over the head. And cry. In a good way.

Later, The Voices put a finer point on the difference between Junior and his sainted dad:

In fact it seems true, at least in this case, that great intellectual capacity (that is, Junior's) can sometimes be a handicap, because we're pretty certain that someone of average intelligence would have this figured out fairly quickly ...

The narration is punctuated with these offhand articulations of simple truths that are in no way aphoristic or trite. And while The Voices by no means coddle Junior, they do provide insightful, if unhelpful, advice suggesting ways Junior should just get over himself already.

Amy, the unsuspecting and for the most part of the book unwilling Juliet to Junior's doomed Romeo, also provides good ballast for the bobbing vessel of his psyche, and grants him some grace, especially by the end.

At one point, Amy asks herself:

But what does being an adult teach you, daily, if not how to function in the face of fear?

And, unlike Junior, Amy seems to have found a way:

Move your feet, I tell myself, and I manage one slow step, then another.

This is the magic of the story: somehow, even the most incredibly complex, messed up things in life have a very simple solution that diffuses their significance at the same time that it underlines how deeply important they are. Currie is talented enough that he can say things like "Love, in its purest form, is biology" and have it sound, not cynical, but reassuring.

As they grow ever closer to the end of the world, Amy tells Junior a story about a cross-country drive she made in college. She tells Junior:

I had decided to take the long route through the South. And do you know why I went so far out of my way?

Here, The Voices interject:

You do not. We could tell you, but listen:

Amy goes on:

Because someone had told me about these flowers in Texas that I just had to see. Bluebonnets ... Said it would change my life. And I guess my life felt like it needed changing at the time, because I went to Texas instead of just shooting straight across the plains.

The experience of reading this book was complicated and joyful and left me feeling resolute. To do what, not sure. But definitely to remember that things matter.