I did not pull that sword out of the stone.
Okay, I do realize that Arthur is a regional pronunciation for Author. I didn’t know this, when I first started writing, or even when I had my first signing. Remember, I didn’t grow up in this country.
So, there I was, brand spanking author, brand spanking book (and man, were the numbers about to deliver a spanking, but never mind) sitting at a little table at Barnes and Noble waiting for my mobs of adoring fans.
Actually it wasn’t too bad, despite the fact that in a desperate bid to look like a fantasy author (guys, you’ve met me! Well, some of you…) I had put sparklies in my hair. I had no crowd but a continuous stream of local fans.
Then there came a lull and this portly lady comes up, dragging a reluctant five year old by the hand, with the sort of grim determination reserved to making a child eat broccoli or some other dreary but salutary task. She let go of him right in front of me, and while he stared at me with a puzzled expression (probably wondering why my hair sparkled pink and blue. Look, it’s not my fault they make those hair sparkles for little girls) she announced in the tone of a herald, “This lady is an Arthur!”
I eventually figured out, as she went on about the benefits of reading and the wonders of literature, that she meant “author” but for just a split second I was in panic fear I might be required to pull a sword out of a stone. Or worse yet, to put a sword – or a pen, or a keyboard – INTO a stone.
As I was mulling today’s post it came to me that encounter pretty much encapsulated what’s going on with reading and literature today, and also my attitude to it, which was to say, “Oh, no. I’m not an author. Authors are terribly important people with awards. I’m just a lady who writes stories to amuse people.” And then I told the kid about my book, but pointed out it wasn’t quite for his age level. (Well, it’s true. There’s also no better catnip to get a kid to read.)
I suppose I’ll have to explain why I said that incident encapsulates what’s wrong with reading. (My favorite editor, Toni Weisskopf, publisher of Baen books has told me I have a bad tendency to skip steps both in my non-fiction and my fiction and assume everyone’s brain has the exact same wiring as mine. So, I will scatter the bread crumbs, and hopefully you will follow, though I’ve come to believe my path is often weird.)
Before I had children, and while I was a young adult, I thought of programs to encourage kids to read in the way pretty much everyone does. “Oh, it’s a good thing.” And I threw in a dime or two their way when they asked for it. Then I had children.
Children in the abstract – someone else’s children. No, not our friends’ children, horrid brats that they are. If only our friends followed our (childless) advice in raising their own kids, then their kids would be – mythical children, pure and sweet and always smiling, would of course be encouraged to read by t-shirts that say “I read” or by posters saying “yay books” or even by candy and burgers for meeting a reading quota.
Real children, or at least my children (there were days if they got any real-er they’d be made entirely of dirt and cross-grainedness) look at all that stuff and the flags of danger go up. “This is something the adults want me to do. That means it’s either good for me or boring. Or both.” And for the rest of their lives, they’ll regard reading as a chore. A worthy chore, sure, but something to be done when you want to feel virtuous, not something you sneak an hour or two away for when you really, really, really should be working.
Having my kids and remembering all my own misdeeds in childhood, I realized that I had in fact never been encouraged to read. And that the stuff I wasn’t supposed to read was always the most fun. Not only did I never read those insipid picture books about good girls that my poor aged aunts wished on me, but I read books of philosophy that would have gagged a horse, simply because my dad said I couldn’t understand them and they’d be bad for me. I read science fiction because my brother tried to hide his science fiction books from me, since they often had graphic sex scenes (this being the seventies). And while I won’t say I learned English to read Masters and Johnson which my brother had locked away in his bedside drawer, I did study with a will until I could read it and understand it while standing by the bedside table, ready to shove it back in and relock the drawer. (Lock picking I don’t remember learning. But people were keeping things from me, so, obviously, it was my sacred duty to open those doors and drawers and read them.)
I got told that reading was a time-wasting, no-good folly. I got told books would rot my brain. I got told I thought too much and lived in cloud cuckoo land. And I read every chance I got and in the most unlikely places to do it.
I did the same with the kids. (Though I did lock that explicit biography of Julius Caesar where Robert wouldn’t find it till he was a little older, but that was only because no mother should be required to explain “incest” to her toddler.) The older is a reader and the younger… well, he is too, even if he prefers non-fiction to fiction. (Remember, children, even “arthurs” can give birth to little engineers. They have their way, and where would we science fiction monkeys be without them?)
But I had to fight against the schools. The schools wanted to give them candy and burgers for reading x books. They wanted to make them participate in “readathons.” They wanted to make them feel that reading was worthy and difficult and important, and writing was performed by magic creatures with messages or something…
This still relates to the Kris Rusch take on the Wall Street Journal article about the demise of the gatekepers and (according to the WSJ writer) how terrible a blow that will be.
When reading is important, and something that’s good for you, (“brush your teeth, eat your greens, read a book”) then people figure it should also be monitored. I mean, you don’t want to read something that’s not as worthy as you thought it should be, right? You look at the ingredients when you buy those multivitamins, don’t you? You make sure they’re organic or approved or what have you, right? And you look at the stamp of approval on the books you read too.
But I come from a different time, when reading was a guilty pleasure, when I should have been doing something more “normal” like watching cartoons, or something more “fun” like going to a party, or something more “serious” like learning to sew and embroider. I don’t know how many of us there are left, but I hope there are enough. Because we need a synergy of writers who are just trying to tell a story and hopefully make it interesting, and of readers who still think reading is fun, and who want to curl up by the fire and escape elsewhere. (And right now, children, who doesn’t need an escape.)
And we need to get the word out, somehow: reading is fun. You have to be careful, or you end up doing too much of it, and you don’t sleep enough, and you neglect your work. You learn too much and you think too much, and then you don’t fit in right, and you start finding sitcoms boring and predictable. And then you won’t get your friends’ reference jokes. Oh, sure, you’ll have other reference jokes, but who will share them with? – gasp! – not those WEIRDOS who read, right? Reading could ruin your life. You know that guy with the disheveled hair and the reddened eyes in your class? Yeah. He looks like he just tumbled out of bed because he didn’t sleep last night. He was up all night reading a book. He’s a bad influence. Stay away from him.
Meanwhile, I am not an author. I’m a story teller who makes up stuff. If I do my job right, then I’ll keep you up all night and make you forget to feed the cat and change the baby. If I REALLY do my job right, you’ll finish reading my work and have the worst craving for the next book of mine, and stumble over to your computer and order it, and if you don’t read electronic, pay extra for overnight delivery. (And you read electronic, mainline Sarah A. Hoyt under all her pen names for days at a time and emerge dazed, still hungry for more, and start pestering me for more via email [Yes, I know who you are. No, darlings, I really don’t mind. This is why I write.])
Are there books that transcend their entertainment value, that touch something divine within the mere human stories, that capture the eternal human and that help other humans in very different time and places make sense of their circumstances? Sure. How would I deny it? I snuck Shakespeare under the bedcovers with a flash light by the time I was eight. I was raised in Heinlein books, and I love Terry Pratchett. All of them in different ways do that, as do some other writers with less reliability.
But in my poor and limited experience – and I’ll admit I’m a hack – you can’t aim for that. At best, you can do the most competent job of telling a story you know how to, and hope the other stuff will shine through.
And you definitely can’t mandate that someone else do that job. All rules of “good writing” or “good living” for that matter, imposed from above become distorted in the very act of imposing them. Even innocuous things like “eat your greens” are odious and bizarre when they come from above by fiat, even if that fiat is paternal injunction and preaching, and not mandatory.
After all, if you’re choking down that boiled broccoli because it’s good for you, you’ll never imagine how much you could love it, if it were stir fried with garlic and just a soupcon of red wine. Then it tastes good and not like something that’s good for you.
Let’s stop trying to turn genre books into “worthy” exercises in preaching and reading that’s “good for you.” Let’s make them as fun, as much a guilty pleasure as in the pulp days.
Look, the gatekeepers are still there, but we can get around them. Let’s curl up in the big easy chair with a trashy book and kick off our shoes. I have chocolate with marshmallows, and not a hint of broccoli in sight.
According To Hoyt 
Let’s stop trying to turn genre books into “worthy” exercises in preaching and reading that’s “good for you.” Let’s make them as fun, as much a guilty pleasure as in the pulp days.
Or, if you feel the need to preach (Tom Kratman, for example, is writing textbooks disguised as fiction), do a good job of it. Good preaching is show business – if you are not fun, why would anybody care for the material you wish to preach?
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My kid’s elementary school librarian had that quirk of speech.
“Arthur.” It remained mind boggling even after years of hearing it.
And my younger child’s first ever “I want more” book was one he was tempted to read by my stern lecture that I thought he’d like the book, but I didn’t want to hear any of those bad words in there repeated! Shocking thing called _Rats, Bats, and Vats_.
The threshold between “being able to read” and voraciously inhaling information through reading is only as high as that first book.
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Thankfully, our kids have inherited the “have to read books!” mental quirk. When my husband told me our daughter was under the covers with a book and a flashlight when she was very little, my response was “Oh! Good!” with a huge grin. He thought I was daft. I knew the reading bug had bitten :-)
We sent our children to a local day care *very* intermittently (usually when one of my elderly parents had a doctor’s appointment). We stopped even that when I found out that “sit in that corner and read a book” was a *punishment*! X minutes of enforced reading was used to punish children. This, btw, at a well-known “early learning center” that was part of a national franchise!
I have since learned that this is endemic to the warehouses kids are routinely sent to when both parents work. And has been going on for over 20 *years*. Right there, that is reason to lose hope for the future. When reading is a punishment, and, by extension, non-reading is rewarded systematically, no good can come of it.
So here’s to all who continue to crawl under the covers or in the back corners of closets with books and flashlights!
Thank you, Sarah, for not only a wonderfully nostalgic look back at my childhood, but for all the wonderful books you’ve written and will write in the future!
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Both my parents read for enjoyment, plus there were LOTS of strange and wonderful books in the house. Mom didn’t always remember which ones had naughty bits either (“Once and Future King” was put on the high shelf but Canterbury Tales wasn’t …) I think a good example has more of an effect than all the lectures in the world.
And speaking of shunned vegetables, I once made an Afghani version of spinach (with rhubarb and dill). People *asked* for seconds. (I like spinach myself but I know many don’t)
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We should trade recipes. I make a Portuguese spinach dish with egg and cummin that has always been one of the kids’ favorites. And I think I’ve invented a new one, with cheese and spinach and mediterranean spices all baked together. My older son calls it “Spano” because he says it’s spanokopita without the dough part. :-P
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Shall I post it here, and trust all spinache-phobes can shield their eyes with their fans? Love to get more spinach recipies! ;-)
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Several anecdotes, possibly even related and relevant to the post (And WHY, RES, would you want to break character NOW?)
Irish comedian Dave Allen had a sketch on his TV show wherein a young lad draws a sword from a stone, is pronounced King Of All England and asked his name. His reply: “Ar-fer.” This is only funny if you’ve at least some basic grasp of Brit dialects, but if you do we’ll pause while you wipe your monitor.
I heard an interview, I think it was with Roald Dahl but certainly an equivalently significant children’s author, explaining why he doesn’t do “author signings.” He realized that these kids, having barely been forced to learn to NOT write in books, were being traumatized by having their favorite, most precious treasures carted off to a store where they were being given to some strange man to WRITE IN!!!! What do you mean, HE wrote my book??? The handwriting doesn’t look the same as in the book ….
Spinach and garlic. Figure out the recipe yourself, as nobody who can’t figure it out would believe the amount of garlic we add to the frozen spinach to make it edible, much less how much to make it delicious. Beloved Spouse desperatly wants the spinach w/egg & cumin and doesn’t even know the recipe exists. As for broccoli, I like it raw with a vineagraitte or blue cheese dressing, or wok-fried with ginger and garlic and whatever I find in the fridge.
ALL good books transcend entertainment value, because a book that is good contains Truth and all minds that are open crave Truth. And even if there is no Truth in the book the inquiring mind learns new ways of seeing falsehoods. But it is also an attribute of the human mind to see Truths and Patterns in all things it ingests.
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Thank you, Sarah. That memory is still precious, even after all these years … the single worst beating I ever got was the direct result of books-I-wasn’t-supposed-to-read. My sister’s treasured Nancy Drew collection, proudly arrayed on makeshift shelving my father had made by nailing scrap-wood to the wall of her room. I was “much too young” to read them. I was balanced precariously on the arms of her little rocking chair, trying to return the book I had just finished and filch another before anyone came upstairs … I’m sure you can guess the rest …
Thing One will spend *hours* reading (and even, to my amazement, writing!) fan-fic for the various anime series he loves, but won’t crack the covers of anything other than manga (with the notable exception of Harry Potter.) Probably because of exactly the phenomenon you’re describing here: when he was younger, we kept pushing things he “should” read at him …
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Stephen, boys are notoriously slower at getting into the fiction reading thing, normally, too.
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Okay, spinach (did I ever mention I hate that word) with garlic cummin and egg. Take a bunch of spinach and wash well. Chop it into bits (this can be Julienne or bite size. I prefer Julienne) then steam it. When it’s done, squeeze out the water. (If they skimp on size in your region, get two bunches of spinach. You want to have some left after this step.) While it was steaming, you got an egg and beat it till frothy. Now put a small pan on the stove, cover the bottom with olive oil. Throw two garlic cloves (peeled) in and brown the garlic till golden, then remove and discard. Throw the spinach in, and stir-fry in the olive oil till it’s all coated in garlicky olive oil goodness (garanteed to keep vamps away.) Do this for about two minutes, then drizzle in the egg, still stirring. Spice with cummin, salt and pepper to taste. (yes, I know, but it’s oddly wonderful.)
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Spanako but not pita… Take frozen spinach and defrost. One package. Mix with one package of ricota, or — if you’re cheap like me — cottage cheese and one cup shredded cheddar. Mix in three well beaten eggs. Sprinkle on mediterranean spice or Greek seasoning (Yeah, I’m lazy. I know how to assemble it, but I prefer just using it pre-mixed. This is a “lazy dish” something you toss in the oven to go with that pre-cooked chicken from the store. So, now butter a pyrex dish, pour the mixture in and take to a 350 oven. I can’t give you a baking time, because I’m high altitude. It usually takes around 40 minutes up here. However, it is done when it’s golden and firm (no part is liquid.)
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Sabzi Rahwash, or spinach with rhubarb
-2 lbs spinach
-8oz leeks or scallions
-6 tbs oil
-2 tbs dried dill
-2 oz. rhubarb
wash and chop up spinach and leeks, fry up leeks in oil until soft, add spinach and cook until reduced and then a bit more. Add dill and salt and pepper. Meanwhile, wash and chop up the rhubarb, fry it in some oil a bit and then add to the spinach, cooking until soft.
The dill and the rhubarb combine to this lovely unexpected lemony flavor…
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Just to be onery (and if you deduce who I am it should not surprise that I might be) — I believe the children’s author who would not sign books was Sendak. His writing is generally for a slightly younger audience.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for the recipies. Spinach, Garlic, and Cumin! Quick, simple and yum!
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So true, and I never realized it. My favorite morsels from childhood:
“put that book away and come watch TV with the rest of the family” and when I refused to watch game shows with the rest “What’s the matter, afraid you might learn something?”
Now I’m the house with the lamp on until 2 am, because I just have to know what happens next.
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Thanks for the memories. My parents had shelves of books that I was not to read. Of course these were the ones they wanted me to read. But the real magic was the bookmobile librarian who had 6 new books for me every week for years. I also had the flashlight and a rope to haul the book to the second floor because the books were not to be read after bedtime. The rope was also used to air pillows on a hot summer night.
We used a different inducement with our boys. They had a TV until they learned to read. Then they could have all the books they wanted. Our oldest is why I read fantasy and S/F. He brought home the first of the Narnia books and loved it. So I had to read it and then we got them all and just kept reading. The middle boy taught himself to read – I found out when the junior kindergarten teacher told me. This is surprising because he did not talk until he was three. The youngest learned to read so he could play a computer game. His oldest brother taught him because he was tired of answering the questions.
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“The middle boy taught himself to read … This is surprising because he did not talk until he was three.”
A not unusual phenomenon for especially bright children. Economist Thomas Sowell has written two books on the topic, prompted by his experience with his son:
Late-Talking Children
and
The Einstein Syndrome: Bright Children Who Talk Late
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