Re:Print

Recently I finished Australian author Markus Zusak’s fantastic novel, The Book Thief (2006). Coming off of a disappointing read (see my post on Labyrinth), this book reaffirmed my faith in the beauty of prose—and the amazement that comes with reading something entirely new. Besides being an incredible story, this book is creative with words in a way I haven’t seen for too long. Words have an active presence, a forcefulness, almost a will of their own. Liesel, the central character in a narrative told by a surprisingly sensitive Death, is handed over to a foster mother who uses words as weapons:

She seemed to collect the words in her hand, pat them together, and hurl them across the table (35).

Elizabeth Chang writes for The Washington Post:

Death, like Liesel, has a way with words. And he recognizes them not only for the good they can do, but for the evil as well. What would Hitler have been, after all, without words? As this book reminds us, what would any of us be?

Liesel’s claim to fame, her own way of validating her existence in the bizarre microcosm of Nazi Germany, is to steal books, even before she learns how to read at the late-blooming age of 10. Once she starts the thievery, she can’t stop, and it becomes her small act of rebellion in the restrictive confines of 1940s German society.

I thought of Liesel recently when I was asked at my library job to take a pile of denuded (read: coverless), unwanted books to the recycling dumpster behind the high school cafeteria. Tossing in armful after armful of dusty, unread, out of date library books, I thought of Liesel digging a precious overheated tome out of a Nazi literary funeral pyre and hiding it under her jacket, burning herself to save the words (122). She would go to any length to save a book, no matter the effort it cost her, and no matter what the book was. And here I was, tossing them into a dumpster. I took a moment to ponder the literary relativity and the value of words. Death narrates:

Trust me, though, the words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like the rain (80).

I’m looking forward to getting my hands on Zusak’s award-winning 2005 novel I am the Messenger, which was already checked out of the library when I finished The Book Thief. What was your last read that made you appreciate language in a new way? 

I’m a dedicated reader, committed to finishing whatever I’ve started. Sure, there have been one or two notable exceptions, like the time I stumbled across Pasternak’s classic, Doctor Zhivago, my sophomore year of university in the central library and decided that since my namesake is derived from a major character, I should take the plunge. Never finished it, to my shame. I have a shortlist of books that I will read at some point, although I am more often too distracted by books that are right in front of me to go searching for titles on the list.

So how do you decide, especially when the book in question is something you’ve been looking forward to reading, when enough is enough and your time could be better spent reading something more gripping?

When Kate Mosse’s 2005 novel, Labyrinth (Penguin), first came out, I saw it everywhere. From magazine advertisements, to the shelves of every European airport bookshop (it was released in the US in 2006), I was mesmerized by the cover and the premise. Historical fiction is more accessible for me than actual history books, there is no doubt. It didn’t bother me that Labyrinth was yet another Grail legend; it involved a clever mystery, the roots of French civilization, strong female protagonists ... Perhaps this would be the next Da Vinci Code! (Yes, I did find Dan Brown’s story to be a page-turner.)

Although I was a student at the time (read: cheap!) and too distracted by other pretty volumes to actually purchase my own copy of Labyrinth, I figured I’d read it at some point. My chance came recently when a coworker asked the librarian in the high school library where I work for some recommendations. This came off the special hidden shelf, where books go to live when they’re deemed too steamy or violent to be catalogued in the general collection. When I spotted it changing hands I exclaimed out loud and it was immediately handed to me, my coworker protesting that she had plenty of other choices before her and did not care about this particular book. I took it home and started reading. I’d been looking forward to this adventure.

Although I was not immediately enthralled, I did not despair; sometimes it takes me several sessions to really delve into a historically intricate tale, especially one that alternates between parallel stories set 800 years apart. I brushed aside uninspiring descriptions of the modern-day heroine, Alice, as having hair “the color of soft brown sugar” and waited for her to learn a lesson from early mishaps, which largely involved being in the wrong place at the wrong time. No such luck. The alternate leading lady, circa 1200 AD, became far more interesting and I stalled on portions of the narrative set in modern-day France, even considering skipping those chapters and reading only about Alais, who chooses adventure rather than shying away from it.

My first inclination to fast-forward through chapters about Alice and read only about Alais should have been a big warning flag: put down the book and step away. If you’re not interested in half the subject matter of a particular book, at what point do you decide that there are too many good reads out there to waste your time on a story that doesn’t grip you and inspire you to keep turning the pages?

What was the last literary waste of your time?

Taking a position at a local high school/middle school library in the fall of 2007 held unexpected benefits. Sure, I thought being surrounded by books would be great, but arriving in time to check in books returned before school starts each day allows me a glimpse into the literary life of the teens here: I have the advantage of seeing which books go out over and over again. And I can grab them the next time they come through—if the kids are reading them and telling their friends, chances are that the story is well written. Attention spans are short in high school these days. And take out those earbuds, if you please.

Of course I try to be somewhat discriminating, and have managed to avoid the lure of Meg Cabot (The Princess Diaries, Queen of Babble) and Megan McCafferty’s novels, wittily titled things like Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings, which appeal heavily to our older teen girls. Meanwhile I was glad I’d already read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy as with the first movie coming out in December the resident copies have been in high demand. I was quickly alerted to Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series (Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse) about high-school-attending vampires and werewolves in perpetually rainy Forks, Washington (now in movie production) and tore through the first three novels. Although the premise may sound a bit dicey, the characters are totally compelling and the dialogue in particular is genius. I’m now pining for the fourth (Breaking Dawn), currently being written and due to be released in August 2008. Meanwhile I received a tip that led to my discovery of Libba Bray’s Gemma Doyle trilogy, an account of late 19th century English boarding school girls dabbling in the occult, and whizzed through the first two novels. The third, The Sweet Far Thing, was just released in December 2007, and I was in a good position to lobby the head librarian to add the final chapter of Gemma’s adventures to our most recent order of books.

Having the opportunity to discover a whole new generation of page turners is just the thing for a jaded English major who remembers plodding through Dickens and Nabokov (excluding The Defense or Invitation to a Beheading, naturally). Sometimes a little light reading is enough to re-invigorate an appetite for the pure pleasure of fast-paced fiction. What are you reading this week?