Compared to the Classics
What’s on your summer reading list?
There is something so nostalgic about going through the stacks at the library and picking out a few titles that you, “just haven’t had the time for.” I keep a running list on my phone throughout the year because it is inevitable for someone to share with me a fantastic recommendation at the most inopportune moments. This year, I wanted to buff up my summer reading list with a few classics, sprinkled in with the more fun titles. The advice is true: If you want to write, be an excellent reader first.
Reading well takes discipline and determination. Focusing on a book is hardly a passive activity. If it was, we would have more completed books on our shelves than TBR (to be read) piles at our bedsides. To be excellent at reading takes years and years of training your comprehension, stretching your vocabulary, and captivating your imagination to go beyond the pages in the book. I’m also learning to lay aside a critical eye so that the joy of the story is not extinguished.
Like everything done well, practice is the key.
One of the books I added to my pile was a collection of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s writings. I didn’t know too much about the famous author of the Little House on the Prairie series, so I was surprised by the editor of this collection, William Anderson, bold and deliberate choice. He started the book off with this Wilder quote, “I was amazed, because I didn’t know how to write.”
At first glance, not the strongest selling tactic for a book on writing. Nor did it stir up a confidence in me to trust her advice. The first page was as far as I got that day. I needed to sit with those words.
Similar echoes have bounced around in my own mind whenever I pause long enough to recognize that I have completed and published a novel, My Brother’s Mark. The sense of astonishment, wonder, and pure giddiness is amazement. Like that moment when Elle Woods in Legally Blonde delivers the Harvard graduation commencement speech, there was pure delight in her, “We did it!”
Against all odds, talents, abilities, and sometimes understanding, big things are accomplished.
As I pondered on her words, it struck me that Wilder felt comfortable enough in the later years of her life, during the blooming stages of her career (her first book was published at age sixty-five), to state her inadequacies at a craft she was becoming quite famous for in America.
This connection to others, who have amazed themselves in moments of creativity, is so important to our own perseverance in what we can accomplish.
My dad has taken up oil painting. More than that, he is mastering his craft of painting. Every piece is an improvement on the one prior. I once was watching him work out a desert landscape. Each brush stroke an amazing contortion of texture and perception that made sand and wind-whipped vegetation appear before us.
“How do you when know it is done?”
“They are never done,” he said, “I can always see things that I could have done better or would like to change.”
He had taken out a palette knife and was scraping and smearing the paints. Changing the scene the way a dashing hare kicks up a shallow-rooted brush.
“But if I didn’t give these away, and kept messing with them, I would never be satisfied.”
Letting go of our imperfect work is more of a benefit to other’s than if we hold on to something until it is perfect. If we asked every “classic” author if their work was perfect, we might be surprised to hear the responses. Books and poems and essays we revere today because they move us and tell a powerful story could have an author behind it, dumb-struck and amazed that, “They did it!”
This summer, find a book that has that air of amazement. Enjoy the quality of something shared from a creator to their beholder this summer. Please leave me a comment, sharing with what you find. If you need any suggestions, here is what I am planning to read and watch this summer. I hope you find a new story to enjoy!
