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A book by its cover


 

I’m rereading In a Sunburned Country, a book by one of my favorite authors, Bill Bryson. This book is autographed by him. I’d had the good fortune to attend a recent book signing/reading — the only one he’d done in New York City on this tour.

Permit me to digress here on an unrelated note to say that this event was standing room only — at least 150 people crammed into a little section of the bookstore. When Bryson appeared and made his way to the podium, the audience gave him a standing ovation before he even said a word. Compare this, if you will, to many Subway Chronicles readings where I’ve actually asked store cashiers to sit in the seats so at least the authors could read to a live person.

If you’ve any familiarity with Bryson’s work, you’ll agree he’s an incredibly astute and humorous writer, honing in on the “everyman” quality of any situation he’s in. It’s not uncommon to be chuckling or suppressing an outright laugh should you find yourself reading his books in public, an experience I had just this morning, which I’ll get to in a moment. Really it couldn’t be avoided as close to 90 percent of my reading is in fact done in public.

My subway commute gives me an hour per day of reading time. Occasionally I read magazines and the free AMNY or Metro newspapers that get shoved into my hand at the station entrances, but most often, I’m reading a book. As a novelist-to-be (Do I say “to be” if I’ve spent six years of my life on the damn thing and am just waiting to hear back from the agent? C’mon Agent, call me!), I’ve got many books in my queue, more than I’ll ever get to in a lifetime, classified as: books I should read (A Tale of Two Cities), books I need to read to stay current (Prep), books I’ve tried to read many times but just can’t seem to connect with (Mrs. Dalloway — sorry Virginia Woolf), and books I want to read to complete some sort of compendium (all books by James Thurber, for example).

Another digression: A recent article in Slate queried well-known writers to find out which books they’ve never read but felt they should have. They called it their “gravest literary omissions.” For Amy Bloom, it’s Moby Dick; for Myla Goldberg, it’s To the Lighthouse (another Woolf avoider); for Lucinda Rosenfeld, it’s Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (BTW — read her fabulous essay in The Subway Chronicles: Scenes From Life in New York; amazingly for John Crowley, it’s To Kill a Mockingbird. This last one, of course, is really unforgivable. No excuses. Here is an occasion I’d let him slide by just seeing the movie — Gregory Peck makes an indomitable Atticus Finch.

I get a lot of reading material suggestions from riding the subway. A few years ago nearly every literate citizen of New York was reading Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn. I ran out to buy a copy with the picture of the blurred elevated tracks to see what all the fuss was about. Then you couldn’t throw a Metrocard without hitting the chalkboard-like cover of Me Talk Pretty One Day, a collection of essays by David Sedaris. Or Eat, Pray, Love — the title outlined in pasta, prayer beads, and silk fabric is so creative, it compels me to believe the writing is also (which it is), however ridiculous this seems. Lately I feel I can’t escape the little crown-wearing green frog of Curtis Sittenfeld’s Man of My Dreams. I like the frog. It makes me want to read the book.

As I was reading In a Sunburned Country on the 2 train, a passage made an uncontrollable snort issue from the back of my throat. My eyes darted around like the worst espionage spy ever while I sneaked a look to see who might have witnessed my embarrassing outburst. A man sitting in front of me laughed and pointed. I was horrified that I was the object of his ridicule.

“That’s a great read,” he said. “Bryson’s the best.”

I smiled and nodded, satisfied that he was pointing at the kangaroo on the cover and just recalling his own Bryson moment — proof that you can judge a book by its cover.

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Political Prose

Bob Herbert on America’s declining fortunes

In his column in today's New York Times Bob Herbert mentions my book The Missing Class and highlights some of its key facts about the precarious status of today's poor and near poor Americans.


In his column in today’s New York Times Bob Herbert mentions my book The Missing Class and highlights some of its key facts about the precarious status of today’s poor and near poor Americans. Herbert also quotes from the book’s foreword by former Senator John Edwards.

We have always gotten a distorted picture of how well Americans were doing from politicians and the media. The U.S. has a population of 300 million. Thirty-seven million, many of them children, live in poverty. Close to 60 million are just one notch above the official poverty line. These near-poor Americans live in households with annual incomes that range from $20,000 to $40,000 for a family of four.

It is disgraceful that in a nation as wealthy as the United States, nearly a third of the people are poor or near-poor.

Former Senator John Edwards touched on the quality of the lives of those perched precariously above the abyss of poverty in his foreword to the book, “The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near-Poor in America,” by Katherine S. Newman and Victor Tan Chen. Mr. Edwards wrote:

“When we set about fixing welfare in the 1990s, we said we were going to encourage work. Near-poor Americans do work, usually in jobs that the rest of us do not want — jobs with stagnant wages, no retirement funds, and inadequate health insurance, if they have it at all. While their wages stay the same, the cost of everything else — energy, housing, transportation, tuition — goes up.”

Herbert goes on to point out the effects that our current economic malaise will have on the future prospects of all Americans, as the desperation that the poor and near poor know well leaches into the ranks of a downsized and debt-ridden middle class. The growing amount of debt that families are taking on and the longer hours they work to make ends meet — topics discussed at length in The Missing Class — are ultimately unsustainable, Herbert notes, especially now that prices are rising and jobs are disappearing. The result is that for many hard-working families the American dream of upward mobility is fast becoming an illusion. (For some hard statistics on this last point, see this report by the Economic Mobility Project, which points out that the average male worker in his thirties today makes less than his father did at the same age.)

Herbert was kind enough to mention The Missing Class in a previous column as well.

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

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Blog

Witches and demons


Catholic Europe is seeing a Vatican-backed resurgence in exorcisms. The brothers and father of the church, with their good book, believe that demons or the Devil are possessing people. Literally. A few bits from the Washington Post article:

"…people who turn away from the church and embrace New Age therapies, alternative religions or the occult…internet addicts and yoga devotees are also at risk [for possession by the devil]."

Oh no, anything except Christianity will make you evil!

"According to what I could perceive, the devil was present and acting in an obvious way," he said. "How else can you explain how a wife, in the space of a couple of weeks, could come to hate her own husband, a man who is a good person?"

You, sir, have never been married.

"More recent horror stories have also taken their toll. In Germany, memories are still fresh of a 23-year-old Bavarian woman who died of starvation in 1976 after two priests — thinking she was possessed — subjected her to more than 60 exorcisms."

Well, I’m sure she’s in a better place now.

This is the 21st century, right? Didn’t we all get tired long ago of the church’s glory days of burnings at the stake? Didn’t we have these centuries in which things like science, reason, and common sense show us that burning people at the stake was rather silly and cruel? But I know, I know — science, reason, and common sense don’t put a dollar in the collection plate on Sunday.

In another related story:  

"The Saudi government is set to execute an illiterate woman for the crime of "witchcraft." She "confessed" to the crime after being beaten by the religious police and then fingerprinting a confession she could not read…Among her accusers was a man who alleged she made him impotent."

I guess Western Christianity and Eastern Islam aren’t so far apart after all. When weak, corrupt, mortal men take the power of God into their hands, the innocent everywhere suffer.

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