Booklovers

Maurice Sendak was once quoted as saying that few first editions exist because they have been eaten. But it is not just children’s books that disappear as they are read and re-read!

Alice Sebold said of The Jane Austen Book Club, “If I could eat this book I would.” When I experience a book that makes me feel like that (and The Jane Austen Book Club is one of them), I return to it again and again. The first book I “ate” in this way is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Oh my, what a book that repays attention (though actually I find some of it rather tedious).

I absolutely loved reconstructing everything I could about the writing of Frankenstein and the literary influences on Mary Shelley. I first did this in The Sexual Politics of Meat, as I tried to figure out why Shelley had made the Monster a vegetarian. To do this, I read everything I could about the novel. My editor knew about this obsession and so a few years ago asked me if I wanted to write The Bedside, Bathtub, and Armchair Companion to Frankenstein. Did I? Then I had the really bright idea to get some twenty-something booklovers – whose take on the novel would be so different from me – to join me in this project. Yes, the co-authors are my son and his friend.

I love the Bedside books because they aren’t necessarily linear. There is a certain hypertextual quality about them; we can fly off on divergent paths about science and the making of the Monster, or movies and the making of the Monster, (or how you, the reader, can make the Monster) and always come back to nest in the book itself – who the characters are, how it was structured, where the author herself had traveled in Europe. Now we are doing that with Jane Austen – though there are six beloved novels instead of one.

Rather than devour children’s books, my other son, when much younger, came up with a really wonderful idea: make your favorite book into a board game. The book he used for his original board game was Harry Potter. The end result was a book: Journey to Gameland: How to Make a Board Game from Your Favorite Children’s Book.

From My Bookshelf:

1. The Jane Austen Book Club. Whether you love Jane Austen’s books or not, this is a wonderful book (much better than the movie). I interviewed the author for my recently-published book The Bedside, Bathtub, and Armchair Companion to Jane Austen, and found her to be very lovely, and very helpful! She is also, so clearly, a feminist! I have probably read the book five times and it is funnier each time!
   
   
2. Mark Doty’s Dog Years. I loved it so much that when I was done I wrote Doty a thank you email. I told him that he had made a gift to others from grief and mourning. I was touched by his deep awareness of the dogness of a dog and it has challenged me to acknowledge Holly the dog's dogness in ways I might not yet have done. The book is so rich and I loved climbing into bed at night with Holly, part Border Collie, part Chow, and reading the next few thoughtful, beautifully written pages. Right at the beginning, Doty tells us about being challenged by someone who wants to know why people feel compassion for animals rather than for humans. Doty was told, “When people talk about what they want to do for animals, I always wonder why that compassion isn't offered to other people." Doty writes about getting mad and then tells us: “If I'd been more thoughtful and less offended, I might have said that compassion isn't a limited quality, something we can only possess so much of and which thus must be carefully conserved. I might have said, if I was truly being honest, that I've never known anyone holding this opinion to demonstrate much in the way of empathy with other people anyway; it seems that compassion for animals is an excellent predictor of one's ability to care for one's fellow human beings."
   
   
3. Sarah Waters, The Night Watch. A wonderful, descriptive novel of women’s lives during the Blitz in London.
   
   
   
4. The Known World. Answering the question, what would it have been like for African-Americans to own slaves?, Edward P. Jones creates an incredible landscape of lives lived and conflicts endured.
   
   
   
5. Brutal: Manhood and the Exploitation of Animals by Brian Luke. An important new contribution to the feminist literature about animal oppression.