Not-As-Good Books.*

This is a three-for-one post. It is your lucky day!

I read three books in the past three days.

All of them were written in the first person voice, from the perspective of a 17 year-old-girl who experiences a large loss and some unspeakably traumatic and heart-wrenching life events. I don’t believe in spoilers, so I won’t get into much more detail than that. One of these books was barely ho-hum, one of them was mildly intriguing, and one of them blew me away. Totally, completely. I could not put it down. It is a good book.**

Historicity.

There is a book on my shelf about Babe Ruth. It is a biography written for children, and, indeed, I read it when I was a child. Beginning with the Babe’s unhappy boyhood in an orphanage, it tells how the first hopeful thing that happened in his life was when he picked up a baseball bat for the first time. He is a child phenom with a bat in his hands, gruff and tough even that young, tumbling through life trying to stay off the streets of Baltimore. Onward, it takes the reader through his baseball career, home run records, and (maybe fittingly for the age group it is written for) glosses over some of the relational messes that were left in his wake.

Truthfully, I have not picked up this book in at least 15 years. I’m trying to comb through my memories to see if I can remember when, and I don’t. I remember when I got the book, in fourth grade. I remember that moment vividly. And I remember reading it again. And again. And again. And again. I remember the images of him as a boy picking up a bat; I remember the images of him as a man preparing for a pitch on the mound. I remember so much of that book, somehow. I loved that book. Not least because Babe Ruth played for the Red Sox (and I loved the Red Sox), and it also connected me to the past.

whoops….!

I almost forgot to post today. Too much was happening in too many quarters of my life/the world/etc.

I didn’t really read anything today. But I hung out with some vegetables, voted, and rested my weary soul. The past ten days have taken quite a toll on this human. But, the world looks up, especially when your guy gets re-elected.

Love to you this night.

Glances and giggles.

This morning on the subway, it seemed like way too much effort to reach down and get my book out, so I sat back and just watched the people around me. Across from me were two girls who were finishing up their homework, heading to school for the first time in a week. One of them was getting to the end of Animal Farm, and I racked my brain to remember when I read that in school. Was it sixth grade, or seventh? It couldn’t have been as far as ninth, could it? She made disturbed faces every few pages, and took notes in the margins. I tried to remember what I could from that book: animals representing Stalin and Lenin. They end up eating each other? Something about the Soviet Union and the Cold War. My synapses were stretching far into the past for 7am. I mentally wished her good luck, and hoped her test wouldn’t be too hard.

Remember, remember.

The Book Thief
By Marcus Zusak
Published 2006

I’ve been thinking a lot about remembering this entire past year. I am a historian, a person in psychodynamic therapy, and someone who tries to keep an active social consciousness of the world around me. The concept of memory plays a central role in all the parts of my daily lives.

Remembering is an intimate form of bearing witness, which is sometimes the only thing that even starts to approach the untouchability of a completely tragic and unjust situation. But even if you are remembering something that wasn’t tragic, I think it still holds extraordinarily great value. Memory – history – is how we keep all the facets of our culture alive.