The Fault in Our Stars—A Double-Blind Review (in a Manner of Speaking)

I’m setting out on a paper adventure.

I have not read The Fault in Our Stars. I have not seen the movie either.

I’m reviewing it anyway. Daina reads John Green books as if Guy Montag himself is about to storm our house to burn them.

Every once in a long season, a book gets you feeling evangelical again about the power of a good story. You marvel at the author at whose hands you find yourself feeling both helpless and superhuman at the same time.

By the end of that book, a strange thing happens: someone else’s words form within you something so perfectly inexplicable that you suddenly have none of your own. You’re left empty and full all at once.

In that long season, wherein you have this sudden gift, you understand how words can break a person. You want the entire world to read them anyway because you know that an important part of being human is being breakable. Without books like these, we risk being unbroken for too long. We risk our ethical periphery someday shrinking to the size of a balance beam. We risk finding ourselves seeing only ourselves and an occasional other exactly like us.

I know The Fault in Our Stars does this because I’ve seen it in my thirteen-year-old daughter. I am torn between reading it because there are lines separating the goodness of things you believe in so much you start selling them, the goodness of things you value so much you don’t trust that others could ever care for them or understand them the way you do, and finally the goodness of things you call sacred. 

Until I’m sure I’ll get that right, I’m leaving it to her.  

Meeting Anna Banks

            Thanks to our dear friend Autumn and the magic of social media, Daina and I learned that one of her all-time favorite authors, Anna Banks, was at Books-a-Million, ten short minutes away, signing books tonight. Anna Banks' Of Poseidon series is one of Daina’s obsessions, so we had to scoot over there before the whole shebang ended.

            It’s one thing to fall in love with a book with the author in an undisclosed location however far away it might be, but it’s another thing entirely to get to look at the person face to face and think you’re the one who did that. Each time it's like discovering penicillin, only you can do it more than once.

            I remember when Daina finished Of Triton. She was sitting beside me as we drove down Lovejoy on the backroads’ way home from yet another trip to the bookstore, and I saw the hardback book shut in her lap, almost on its own, her staring straight ahead, stoically looking through the sun-streaked glass of the windshield in a way she ordinarily didn’t. Ordinarily, she would move onto her backup book, but she just sat there. And then I heard it—a sniffle.

A sniffle at the hand of a book, the first I’d witnessed from her, all twelve best-friend years with this daughter of mine, and it reminded me instantly of the time idiot me took her to see Bridge to Terabithia before we’d read the book and been warned about the ending, as we sat in the theater, shivering out hard and ugly cries conveniently close to the exit door. I remember trying to talk to her and whisper, “We don’t have to stay. We can leave now,” and I remember equally well, her shoving my hand away when I tried to hold her own, as if to say, “I can take this. I can do this by myself. I’m okay with crying through this. I just don’t want to talk about it. Let’s pretend we’re here alone—just until the credits roll.”

That sniffle from Of Triton inadequately prepared me for the deluge that would follow her ending the Divergent series, which was nothing less than a total meltdown with at least a business day’s worth of moping for each book in the series added on for good measure. In her words, “Veronica Roth ripped my heart out, rubbed it in broken glass, and put it back in.”

Thank God for these moments—at all ages. What is life without these moments? They slow us down and remind us we’re breathing. They make the ordinary extraordinary, punctuated. They pull us out from our ostrich selves. The pause and the punctuation, whether for tragedy or triumph, stop us dead in the most beautiful ways.

To get to meet the person who had you at that moment—who got you feeling a thing and created it all from nothing—wow. It is a moment of real and immediate gratitude. At least a thank you must come out first. There is really nothing else to say sometimes.

“She will be my second favorite author I’ve ever met,” Daina said, getting into the car for an impromptu 8 p.m. book signing.

“Who’s your first favorite?” I asked.

            “You,” she said.

            “I’m not a real writer yet,” I told her.

            “You look real.”

Daina’s Terrific Account of Meeting Anna Banks

I bought my first Anna Banks book, Of Poseidon, at Barnes and Noble a couple years ago. I picked it up because it was an autographed copy of a book with Poseidon on it. He’s the Greek lord of the sea, and it had a picture of a teenager in a dress swimming through the water, and I find those sorts of things interesting.

Of Poseidon is about a teenager named Emma who is half-human, half-Syrena, which is kind of like a mermaid. The book is really exciting and fun, so much that I bought Of Triton, its sequel, immediately when it came out. I can’t say anything really about this book without spoiling it for you, but you should read it. Of course, you should read it! If you love marine biology, mermaids, underwater things, or even just seafood, you should read these books. I love those things, and I love these books.

Tonight I got to meet Anna Banks because she was doing a book signing at Books-a-Million for Of Neptune, the newest in the series. My mom had seen a friend post pictures of the signing on Facebook, so we weren’t sure that she would still be there, but we were going to try to catch her before she left. I was so worried that I would pass out on her. I told my mother that, if I did pass out on her, she should tell Anna Banks that I was terribly sorry and would promise to try to never meet her again so that I wouldn’t risk passing out on her again. How embarrassing.

On the drive there, I wanted to jump out of the car and run to Books-a-Million. I yelled at every red light and screamed, “Yes!” every time the light turned green. By the time we got to the parking lot, I wanted to jump off a building in excitement. I was so excited until I walked into the store. At that point, I wanted to run out of the building instead. We walked to the back of the store where we saw some people standing around her, and when I saw her, I wanted to go look at other things and pretend I didn’t know what she wrote or who she was, but I knew I couldn’t because I love the books too much to do that. My mom introduced me to her, and I was nervous, so I told her, “Sorry, I’m just really nervous.” She told me, “Don’t be nervous or else you’ll make me nervous!” She was extremely nice. She let me take a picture with her, she gave me a button with “Angelfish” on it, the nickname Galen gave Emma in the book, and she gave me a trident temporary tattoo and a bookmark, which she signed in gold and blue.

Meeting Anna Banks was a great experience, and I’d love to do it again—maybe when the next book comes out!

So, thank you, Anna Banks, for these moments and memories—the ones you write in books and the ones you make in person. You’ve got the sort of magic that lingers, and that’s the best kind.  

What You Do When Everything Is Fine

I have wondered more than once whether, if a bank teller drew on my hands with one of those counterfeit bill detector markers and forced them under the light for examination, I’d have tells like those of a fake twenty.

The word fraud crosses my mind sometimes as I work stage right and stage left in the classroom talking big about reading and how the best way to become a good writer is to read lots and often.

It crosses my mind as students will ask, as they often do, whether I’ve read fill in the blank off the bestseller list, and I say something about not preferring contemporary lit or something about having been too busy with student essays. A good mood will get you a “That sounds great! I’ll put it on my list for between semesters,” and that may, now that I think about it, register as the emptiest promise I make, very nearly a borderline lie. I just don’t have the heart to break yours.

I cannot tell you the jaws I’ve dropped because I haven’t read any Stephanie Meyer, have gotten only halfway through the first book in The Hunger Games series, and finished exactly one Nicholas Sparks book before throwing it as hard as I could across the room. It was The Notebook, and I’m still not sorry.

I manage still, believe it or not, to classify myself as a literate person despite this. I have read books before. Yes, complete books, start to finish. I have marked them up. I have passed them along. I have bought multiple copies because I wasn’t sure (multiple times) whether I still had my own. To illustrate, note that I can locate four copies of Eat, Pray, Love by moving my head left to right without even trying hard to spot them, and Liz Gilbert, although she is grand, is not counted among my favorites. Let’s just say I felt convicted while watching Mel Gibson’s character in Conspiracy Theory as he compulsively bought copies of The Catcher in the Rye although he’d never read it. 

What gets me is when people ask what I’m reading these days. I want to make something up. I do. I want to say I’ve just read Salman Rushdie’s latest and tell them an anecdote from a Sherman Alexie book. I want to go all gaga about Anne Lamott’s newest one, which I know I’ll love if I ever have a moment to myself. I want more on my tongue and my mind than article snippets about the demise of public schools and higher ed and Julianna Baggott’s brilliant Facebook status updates I peruse while rocking the smallest lovenugget in the house—or maybe her and her brother at the same time if he’s jealous or recovering from a tantrum.

People see me in Barnes and Noble wearing a baby, carrying another nearly upside down under my armpit, juggling a stack of books, and calling the first child to come along with her own tallish stack. They probably think I read. I’m sure the family friend who brings our Amazon Prime packages with super-rushed delivery because I need those unread books now believes I read, too, and read fast because she’ll be back tomorrow as well. My homeschooling friends I bump into at the public library during weekday story hours probably think I read. I’m in all the right places that one should be if one were to read someday.

Babywearer Jr.

Even online I look like a reader. Every social media photograph has a mess of books behind a baby. These pictures aren’t strategically taken; it’s just that the books are everywhere, much like the laundry, so it is rather impossible to take a baby picture without White Noise, White Teeth, or White Oleander in the background. I’ve given up trying to be private about what we’re reading (or planning on reading) nearly as much as I’ve given up trying to hide my son’s Toy Story underwear.

I want to tell them that this literature professor is reading. The truth is I’m not—not entire books, not in long sittings, not for pleasure. And what does that even mean to someone in my season of life? Reading for pleasure. As opposed to what? Reading for torture? Reading for edification? Reading, to me, means your eyes are awake enough to be open and your situation is relaxed enough where your eyes aren’t already committed to watching someone jump off a couch arm or scale a stove. 

Reading means you must be holding a book, which means you haven’t lost complete feeling in the arm that’s holding the baby you cannot put down because she has a runny nose and can’t breathe while lying horizontally. Reading means there must be clean forks in the drawer and cups in the cabinet. It means the dog isn’t whining to be let out or let in. It means you’re not hungry, you’re not cold, and you don’t have to pee or work or yell at someone to do either of these things.

You cannot read for pleasure when the act itself is pleasure. To correct the redundancy, I would say it’s just reading, but I cannot leave that alone on the page. Nothing is just reading, and if it is, you’re doing it wrong.

After a full day in the kitchen trying to bake, puree, and freeze some semblance of stay-at-home motherhood while I am not Dr. Price for a few more days until the semester starts, I crawled under the covers, ignoring the piles of work on the floor, a veritable obstacle course of envelopes, grade sheets, receipts, binders, and oversized books that don’t fit onto shelves. I broke the spine of Tina Fey’s Bossypants, and read fifty pages, my eyes not yet burning from the day, the kitchen cleaned and hallway cleared of Lego traps, tiny plastic horses, and things with wheels, and all the Price babies in bed. And words of comfort I’ve offered to students over the past eleven years circled back around and came to me this time.

This is what we do when everything is fine.

I’ve said that line to students going through divorces, hospitalizations, miscarriages, deaths in the family, job losses and changes—the things that wear us into different people, that make us want to mess with time, to speed it up or slow it down, and make us want to mess with space, to get more of it or less of it—to be at any other pace or place than that which we are.

This is what we do when everything is fine.

I say this to illuminate the comparative lightness of academics when looked at alongside the stuff of life. They hear me preaching, preaching, preaching about syntax and style. They hear plagiarism warnings that conjure eschatological imagery. It matters, but it doesn’t matter. “There is no such thing as an English emergency,” I tell them. 

This is what we do when everything is fine.

I spent the better part of thirty years reading what others gave to me, bought for me, or assigned to me. I recall a small window in my late teens where I camped out on bookstore floors and stayed out late in coffee shops reading everything in sight. I recall switching books with my best friend Kim, having marked up key passages we loved with circles and stars everywhere, playing poems on repeat in the car from Fort Walton Beach to Pensacola to memorize tracks on audiobooks. I remember moments of resurgence between semesters in grad school #1 and grad school #2 after my daughter had entered school where reading happened.

Good reading like that doesn’t happen often anymore. I used to have a series of lengthy, monogamous and semi-monogamous relationships with authors. Whitman was mine all of from 1996-1998. I rebounded with Bukowski all of 1999, then Anne Sexton moved in and brought all her friends. They camped out until…hmm. Okay, so maybe they’re still here, hiding in the walls and under the floorboards. 

Now my desk, bedside table, and the backseat of my car are overflowing with student work and lit anthologies. I pick up the same toys twelve times a day, probably more, and put them with the Where's Waldo? and I Spy books we use as a hard surface for coloring and Play-Doh molds. I reach blindly into backseats to toss my son a book from the floorboard because he sees my older daughter reading. Half the time, I don't know what I've thrown him. It's entirely possible that he's held David Sedaris, The Vagina Monologues, or a Chuck Palahniuk. I'm not even supposed to text and drive; how on earth can I be responsible for monitoring a miniature book club in the backseat during the ballet carpool? 

And a breath here.

As I ended the day with a book in my hands and quiet in the space between me and midnight, the most beautiful thought occurred to hint that I might be emerging from the dark tunnel to at least a sliver of light on the other side.

How am I doing this? How is it possible that I am in a room alone, holding my own book in my hands, with no one sitting on either of my legs? I am reading this sentence, and I can hear myself in my own head. 

There is only one way I could be doing this. I know exactly what this means.

Everything is fine.  

The Care and Keeping of Books

Daina, age 10, reading to Atticus at 3 months old.

If there were a priest of all things literary, I would owe him a couple confessions.

I read and finished exactly one Nicholas Sparks book before throwing it across the room as hard as I could. It was The Notebook, a movie I’d loved and cried over. I’d braced my mind to be blown because the books are always better than the movies. While it’s possible my bar was set too high, it’s also entirely possible that he wasn’t even trying. I think I said that aloud when I got about halfway through the book, “You’re not even trying, are you?” It was just domino line up after domino line up—a suspense machine. We all have our readerly biases, and my criteria for a good read occurs on the sentence level. Ideally, I want to be falling over myself with jealousy for the perfect order and selection of words. Anyone can follow the recipe for apple pie, but if you haven’t picked the right apples, there is really no reason to bother with the pie. Nicholas Sparks is fantastic at following pie recipes, but he’ll put any apple in them, worms and all.

It would be no surprise to me if Nicholas Sparks loved George Bernard Shaw, playwright of Major Barbara, my most hated book of all time. This leads to my second confession: In my younger, edgier years, I finished Major Barbara and promptly tore out every page, singly crumpled up each one, and threw it into the trash can. It was just terrible. Wish it on no one.

These confessions are my full disclosure in the off chance that any of you knows the stories already and wants to call shenanigans on my argument about the care and keeping of books. These were two extreme examples of my violence against the written word, and for these instances, however deserved, I am sorry.

Here are ten book rules we follow in the Price house. For my autumnal assignment today, Daina selected “skeletons.” Because she said the word, and whenever Daina says anything, books come to mind, my thoughts went straight to spines and the eternal question of “To break or not break?” Here are our thoughts on the subject of spines and a few other things.

PRICE BOOK RULES

10. JACKETS

Books wear their jackets. Period.

9. e-BOOKS

No e-book purchases to fill in the gaps in hardback collections.  

8. MOVIE COVERS

            Never buy a book with a picture on the cover from the movie adaptation.

7. ANNOTATIONS

Always write in books. Use a fine-tipped ballpoint pen, never a pencil which will fade or a fountain or felt pen that will bleed.

6. THE FOOT RULE

New books must be stored at least one foot off the ground out of Oscar’s “welcome” range. Oscar was our dog who used to christen everything new in our house. Oscar moved to Michigan, but we still kept the rule.

5. HOARDING
            We’ve found book hoarding to be overlooked by most psychologists as a 
            socially acceptable habit of the literati. And thank God.

4. PINTEREST

No Pinterest crafts that desecrate books for the sake of a half-wit fad may be done in the house. I consider an occasional project with pages of an old, non-literary book acceptable (fanned pages turned into hanging decorations or a L-shaped bracket drilled into an old, non-literary book to create floating bookshelves for less), but my husband cringes at these ideas. They’re quasi-sacred here. We’re like a book sanctuary.

3. DOG-EARS

We don’t dog-ear pages. Anything can be a bookmark, so it’s not possible to be without one. My favorite are Taco Bell receipts, but I’ve used gum wrappers and napkins before. Daina dog-ears books on occasion but believes that it’s only acceptable to do so for a two-day period. I asked her what happens after the two-day period, and her response was that “The Lord of Books will come and eat you.”

2. SPINES

This is the most impassioned debate in our house. I break in a book by breaking the spine, but this makes my husband and daughter cringe. If I really want to cuddle up with it and get close and personal, I bend it right in two so that I can wrap the front around the back and focus on just one page at a time. Based on this sole act, Daina calls me a “book murderer”—the scariest thing of all.  

But here is our most important rule.

1. IF IT’S THERE, IT’S THERE TO SHARE.

The Price Lending Library is open always. See a book? Take a book. 
We can always buy more. And we will.