Reading List: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men - or Not

As I'm slowly doing some writing about writing, I've been pulling books on the craft from my shelves. I rediscovered How the Light Gets In by Pat Schneider on my shelves in part because it turns out to be written by the mother of a colleague (which I hadn't realized when I bought the book, though on re-reading, I should have known!) Schneider's own poetry laces through the pages of this luminous book, and I cherish her fearless and tender takes on the challenges of writing about things that have entangled themselves in our souls. Perhaps my favorite is the section on tradition and writing, where she reflects on not surrendering her voice —"the unique Ozark twang, the flavor, the very originality of my voice." I hear in her poem, "Mama," a familiar litany of words, "Kerosene, gasoline, Maybelline, Vaseline..." I'm transported back to my paternal grandmother's house, where I too watched the lightning bugs, not the fireflies, dance in the heavy summer air, and wondered at the jars of Vaseline and Pond's on her dresser.

I quoted Sirach at the start of a chemistry essay, "Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us" [Sirach 44:1], which prompted me to pick up James Agee and Walker Evan's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Evan's photographs of these depression era sharecroppers are crystalline. As someone with a predilection for long sentences, I appreciated Agee's ability to have a sentence start on a page, continue through another, full page and finally finish on the third page, without, I think, ever technically running on. The book is often held up as a turning point in non-fiction. Still, I was too put off by the casual racism in the book and a vague sense of shame to be peering into these people's lives even at almost a century's remove to finish it.

I felt utterly seen by Anne Fadiman's essays on reading (Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader). I also take pleasure in cook books speckled with eggs and cocoa, and hang on to beloved books that have been reduced to a loose collection of signatures. (My copy of Meyer and Meyer's Statistical Mechanics is held together with a ribbon.) If you love to read, read this.