by Pamela Paul
Also, I read worse. Some studies allege that child rearing makes people smarter, that we learn to anticipate dangers that operate at the .001 percent level of likelihood, to perform Olympic feats of multitasking, to jump in with adrenaline surges of mastery when necessary. I’m not so sure. Each additional child has only weakened my base multitasking skills and frayed my attention span. I have less time and energy to devote to abstract thought. Sleeplessness seems to have worn the bearings of an already faulty memory, child after child after child chipping away at what once was known. There’s a too-true Roz Chast cartoon about the aging brain’s incapacities: whenever new information goes in (tabloid gossip), something must go out (algebra). The accumulating necessities of small children—the checkups, orthodontic visits, outgrown shoes, broken bones, surgeries, convalescences—take a brutal toll, withering my mental capacity in sad counterpoint to my children’s elastic and expanding minds.
At least kids force you to prioritize. You learn to let go of the bad books more easily and savor the good. Each moment becomes a calculation, and there is always an opportunity cost. Rather than spend this time reading dreck, what could you be doing instead?
When Beatrice was four months old, I went on tour for my second book, and she came along. I’d pass her to my mother as I stood swaying from lack of sleep in front of bookstore audiences, unable to find my place in my own book or to recognize the text within as something I’d been remotely involved in. Next, Beatrice accompanied me to Washington. My husband and I had driven down so I could testify before Congress about my research on the very child-unfriendly subject of pornography. By then Beatrice was a fairly reasonable six-month-old. But so preoccupied was I with the pumping of milk and the timing of the nap and the questionable opacity of the window shades in the hotel room that it wasn’t until my husband deposited me in front of the Capitol that I realized I’d neglected to prepare my testimony.
Here I was, about to talk about hard-core pornography in the halls of Congress. Senator Sam Brownback was sponsoring me, and Senator Orrin Hatch, forever imprinted in my mind holding a copy of The Exorcist during the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas hearings, was there, too. It felt like some kind of diabolical dream sequence, but it was real and it was up to me to wing it. Months later, after the fog of early motherhood lifted, I picked up a photograph taken that day of me, surrounded by senators. I was wearing a miniskirt, which basically isn’t allowed in Washington, and an inappropriately enormous smile, eyes dazed. I vaguely recall having a deeply personal conversation with Sam Brownback about his men’s group.
Now that I had three small children, the number of books I pick up has dropped precipitously, and, with it, the number of books I put down completed. My Book of Books is a rather unkind reminder of this. Though I didn’t think to enumerate my entries in Bob until the list was well into the three hundreds, once I did, the enterprise was unavoidably tarnished. How can you not feel smug about the growing tally? How can you not be eager to add yet another number to the list?
But therein lies danger. The numbers do not, alas, tick upward at a steady rate, and you can easily gauge just how much you’ve “fallen behind.” Have you read as many books this March as you did last? What’s your yearly average? What of the long books that slow you down: Vanity Fair, Hamilton, The Pickwick Papers? Could they not somehow count doubly?
Graphic novels, illustrated works, Dover thrift editions, Penguin 60s, reread books: all of this can feel like cheating. (Even I draw the line at picture books, which do not make it into Bob, much as it would favor the average.) It would be dishonest to deny that part of me sometimes wants to just finish a book already, especially a bad one, so I can move up another digit on my way to the next even hundred.
These ambitions aside, Bob reflects an inexorable decline, its rate dropping in response to accumulated responsibilities, children birthed and tended, piled-up magazines, the dumb side of the Internet. Now, when I should be reading, I find myself instead gazing at baby pictures on my phone or scrolling through Twitter bytes instead. In the year after college graduation, when I was living in Thailand, I read seventy-six books, including whoppers like Moby-Dick, aided considerably by a sporadic level of employment. The following year, in New York and fully employed, the number slipped to thirty-four. Early on, a boyfriend had criticized me for tallying my books and I had balked. Bob and I had nothing to prove! But the truth was, it did matter. My private reading life, as many aspects of private life after parenthood, can easily slip away.
With reading time curtailed, page-turners become a form of punishment. What was once a delicious abandonment to plot, a desperation to finish yet at the same time a rationing to prolong the ecstasy, to please not let it end quite yet, has become something else entirely: a nightmare. A masochistic thrumming of simultaneous desire and deprivation involving late nights and little sleep, ignored and resentful children, furtive retreats into the bathroom to secretly flip the pages. Like cheating.
That was The Hunger Games, a joy and pain. And the way of all top-tier genre—quasi-vampires and spy novels and plot-twisty, mind-sucking domestic thrillers that have to be finished right now without interruption—even when your entire life is interruption. Trilogies or series of any kind, life destroying. Reading is transformed from life’s central act to a secret second (or even third) life that your real life isn’t allowed to know about. Books become compartmentalized rather than integral.
These days I fit reading in on a catch-as-catch-can basis, even as I’ve exorcised most other distractions from my cultural diet. I read about TV more than I watch it. My movie viewing is nearly all animated. Books gnaw at me from around the edges of my life, demanding more time and attention. I am always left hungry.
CHAPTER 19
A Wrinkle in Time
Reading with Children
Certain periods of your life become inextricably linked with certain books. For me, even as I continued to read books for myself, the early child-rearing years were about children’s books, both my kids’ and my own. This was a time of revisiting and rereading and reliving the stories that had remained with me, if in the back of my brain, since my first days as a reader. Those simple yet oddly indelible story lines and the intense emotions they elicit: Leo Lionni’s Little Blue and Little Yellow, which makes you realize even as a child that a relationship can compromise your identity, even make you unrecognizable. Or Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, which alerts you to the power of your own anger, capable of sending you reeling into another world, one from which you’d have to find your way back. To witness feelings you’ve only experienced within reflected in the pages of a book is a revelation. The sense memory of those initial reading experiences resurge in a visceral way and, for an odd time-suspended moment, you can actually see what the pages looked like through your six-year-old eyes, a feeling Spalding Gray called “a complicated present”—one in which you are both in the present and in the past at the same time.
Those early books become imprinted on us like a cherished stuffed animal or maternal embrace. They become part of us, belong to us in a way they don’t belong to anyone else. “Even now, simply thinking about Long John Silver or the waves on Crusoe’s island stirs me far more than reading the original text,” J. G. Ballard once said. “I suspect that these childhood tales have long since left their pages and taken on a second life inside my head.”
That is the awesome power of children’s literature, and children are in power here. Teachers may be able to tell you what to do in school and parents can control what you do at home, whether you get to watch TV and whether you can play at Jenny’s house two days in a row. You may not be allowed to see a PG movie or use the phone after ten o’clock at night. But books are different. From a very young age, most children get to select the books they read or acquiesce to listening to while read by another. Even before you fully learn to read on your own, you are the one who decides which stories to let in.
Most kids weigh this decision by par
sing the freighted cues of cover, illustration, title, and endorsements. It’s what makes book jackets so essential during childhood, when in choosing a book outside the purview of the parent or the teacher or the librarian, the prospective reader has little else to go on. Go on the Internet and search for the covers of your childhood favorites; you’ll recognize “your” covers immediately, each one like a personalized invitation. Is it intimidating or inviting? Are the characters aspirational or relatable? Are you going to entrust this book, this author, with your time? When you pick up a book, Doris Lessing once said, “you are about to enter the mind of someone who thinks differently from yourself.” That requires consideration.
It is no small decision. You, young reader, determine location. You pick your company. You elect which world you enter and what knowledge you procure there. While subject to the author’s whims should you continue reading, you can also reject them and put the book down.
In my Book of Books, I can see the way these choices line up and read the signs along the way that reveal those decisions. Here, a novel selected with deliberation; the next, a matter of circumstance. This one was assigned, but that one a book I was dying to read. My mother-in-law gave me that book. This other one was found in the common room of a New England bed-and-breakfast. All of those choices.
Choosing a book is so gratifying, it’s worth dragging out the process, starting even before finishing the current one. As the final chapters approach, you can pile up the possibilities like a stack of travel brochures. You can lay out three books and let them linger overnight before making a final decision in the morning. You can Google the reviews; ask other people if they’ve read it, collect information. The choice may ultimately depend on the mood and the moment. “You have to read a book at the right time for you,” Lessing also said, “and I am sure this cannot be insisted on too often, for it is the key to the enjoyment of literature.”
And so, the eager new parent thinks, we can pass on that enjoyment to our children. Every night, read-aloud time becomes an extension of the reader’s power. We not only get to pick our own books, we get to pick our children’s books as well. We point them to the good ones. We instruct them in how to read clues on the jacket. We show them how it’s done. They will be good readers, lucky them and lucky us: the culture now values children who read.
I spent a lifetime planning for this. I even had a head start, having begun collecting books for my kids before they were born. I started by stashing away a few key titles while working at Scholastic when I was 100 percent single. My children would never want for books. I’d pass by a bookstore and pick up a few Dr. Seusses on sale figuring, One day, I’m going to need these. I’d find a copy of a beloved childhood favorite in a used bookstore, Miss Suzy or The Story of Ferdinand or Richard Scarry’s Busy Town, and purchase it for my nonexistent children.
Once those children actually existed, they made it quite clear that this planning was for naught. I didn’t have that bonus you-will-read-this power, it turned out—at least not for long. Given the choice (and they were given the choice), they wanted to decide on the books themselves, as I should have well known. They wanted to hear godawful Biscuit books instead of Make Way for Ducklings. They thought Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was boring. They didn’t like homey animal stories or books about trees. They weren’t as beguiled as I was by the prospect of unlimited black-and-white blueberries.
The ability to choose one’s own books becomes slightly less satisfying when you realize your own children have that power, too, and they insist on reading about rainbow fairies or killer cats. You can momishly lead a child in certain directions—point him to particular shelves at the library, refuse to buy certain books, discuss treasured authors in favorable terms and hope he doesn’t hear about the others. But those techniques take you only so far. I was shocked when, after handing my ten-year-old daughter a fiftieth-anniversary boxed set of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time quintet (still but a wee trilogy in my youth), she stopped after the first book. “Don’t you want to continue to A Wind in the Door?” I asked, scandalized.
For girls who came of age anytime during the past half century, reading L’Engle’s Newbery Medal–winning classic was pivotal. The main character, Meg Murry, offered a real departure from the typical “girls’ book” protagonist—as wonderful as many of those varied characters are. Here was an awkward child whose flyaway hair, braces, and glasses existed alongside a fierce intelligence and determination, which she uses to save her father, and ultimately the universe. She reaches girls just as they are actively seeking to define themselves, their own ambitions, and their place in the world, and shows them a way that has nothing to do with looks or popularity or submission.
I had bestowed upon my daughter a sacred nugget of maternal wisdom, and she had cast it aside.
In 1962, when A Wrinkle in Time was acquired by the publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux after it had been rejected twenty-six times, science fiction aimed at girls was a rarity. The stuff of pulp and comics for errant schoolboys, sci-fi was not considered up to the standards of children’s literature. Even today, girls and grown women are not often fans. Half of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-old men say science fiction is their favorite kind of book, compared with only a fourth of young women. And while a sizable portion of young men continue to read science fiction into later adulthood, women generally don’t.
A Wrinkle in Time defied the norm by inviting girls in and valuing them. The story follows three children as they cross the barriers of time and space through something called a tesseract. On a “dark and stormy night,” Mrs Whatsit (whose honorific appeared mysteriously without periods), a celestial being disguised as an old woman, visits Meg; her mother, a microbiologist who later wins the Nobel Prize; and her younger brother, Charles Wallace. Soon Meg and Charles Wallace, a prodigy of sorts—today he might be considered on the spectrum—and Calvin O’Keefe, a high school boy, are tesseracting across the universe in search of Meg’s father.
Meg can perform square-root functions in her head, a mark not of wallflower status but of moral distinction. Still, she harbors doubts about her intellectual abilities, and her exacting expectations rub off on the reader. Yet it’s Meg, a girl who combines both the ordinary and the extraordinary, who overcomes the book’s villain—an evil disembodied brain called IT—with the power of a simple human emotion. At its core, A Wrinkle in Time is about love, a girl’s love for her parents, and her ability to marshal her strengths to rescue and honor them. I desperately wanted Beatrice to see herself in that book and to love it.
She did not. If part of the inevitable maturation of the parent is to realize how different one’s children are from oneself, a corollary is realizing one’s children may not appreciate the same books either. As my kids got older, the evening’s read-aloud time shifted to parallel reading. They read their books, and I read mine. I laugh now that I could have ever imagined otherwise.
Like Beatrice, I’ve always jealously guarded my freedom to choose my own books; I’ve never wanted to have to read a book, whether for work or for play. This is why, throughout my twenties and well into my thirties, I resisted joining a book club, despite longing for a community of readers. What if they chose the wrong book or stole me away from mine?
Then I discovered Kidlit, a children’s book club, or, more precisely, a book club for adults exclusively devoted to children’s literature. The books were easy to read, and they were short. They were also, during this period, central to my life, given my three young children. The members of Kidlit, not all of whom even had children, firmly believed children’s books should be central throughout your life. Now this might work.
I got involved in Kidlit through my friend Gretchen, whom I met in that layered almost conspiratorial way that often happens in New York, via several channels simultaneously. First, I spotted her at an evening salon for women, in which prominent writers were invited to speak to a small group every month or so. Gretchen seemed to know everyone ther
e. Later, I realized she was a fellow mother at Beatrice’s summer camp. There, too, she knew everyone. Finally, we were introduced at a party, and the various intersections coalesced into friendship.
It turned out Gretchen also knew everyone who loved Kidlit. She and her friend Jen, a literary agent, had started the book club when they realized that as adults they both needed to talk about Harry Potter. Not only did they like reading Potter, they liked reading all children’s books, whether written for starry-eyed eight-year-olds or sullen eighteen-year-olds. And they weren’t alone. By the time I joined the group, the group had over a dozen members and had spawned an offshoot. (There are now three branches.) Every six weeks, we would gather over dinner to discuss a children’s book, rotating among classic (Little House on the Prairie), modern (Island of the Blue Dolphins), and contemporary (The Fault in Our Stars) literature.
Kidlit offered something I’d never had before outside of Paris—a place to get together regularly with fellow readers (most of them far better read than I) to discuss books I cared passionately about, without call for embarrassment or excuse. Even when the books were intended for children. Here were my people! Nobody judged anyone else, even as our opinions on particular titles wildly diverged. We argued over whether Katniss was a tool of the state, and whether The Hunger Games was a conventional romance or a subversion of the genre.
All of us took children’s literature seriously. And we had fun. Unlike a lot of grown-up novels, children’s books never lose sight of the primacy of storytelling. Children like to be swept up right away in plot, and frankly, most adults appreciate this too; it’s why so many readers gravitate toward spy novels and science fiction and thrillers, books in which things happen and people get caught up in those events. It is, after all, children’s books that turn us into readers in the first place.
