The Camera My Mother Gave Me
I am buying my childhood home. My mother has passed and my father has remarried a wonderful woman for whom he bought a new place, a place for them to make their own. It is good for him to leave walls saturated with memories of my mother and her influence, but I didn’t want the house my parents built in 1986 gone forever. My dad packed the things that were most important to him and is leaving behind things that were just filler (I’m getting a new comfy couch from my Bonus Mom I’m super excited about). My mom had a lot of filler.
Since I’m the book lady, he left me most of their books as well. I already have well over 5,000 volumes in my house (I quit counting long ago and just focus on making sure they all have a place to live) and I have four children that I will be moving into a home built for a family of four total (it’s the same size as my current home, but actually has one more room, there was a lot of wasted space in these 1995 builds). So as I go through books, determining what to keep and what to purge, I’m stumbling through decades of reading–my mother’s reading, and my own.
The Christian prairie romances went first. I’ve never been interested in that genre, but it was my mother’s primary reading (I added some to the church library and sent some to be sold at Good Oil Days). I’ve gotten rid of most of the Christmas books, she loved anything Christmas. My church does a holiday market every year where they sell Christmas crafts, decor, and gifts to raise money for various things we cannot afford to do as a congregation. This last year we replaced the doors. The old building was desperate for functioning doors with no cracks or blemishes and the Christmas market afforded us beautiful, but simple, wooden doors to invite the public into our home away from home. My mother would be pleased that she contributed to that. I’m excited to keep the antiques, they aren’t valuable but they are titles we will read and share with our children. There’s a set of Mark Twain I remember well that I’ll “inherit.”
With all this sorting and purging going on at my Dad’s house (soon to be my house), I’m sorting and purging from my own home as well. Books I loved in my twenties just don’t mean the same to me now that I am a mother of four. When we first moved to this house my goal was to make sure there were never stacks of books anywhere (I failed), that every book had its own place on the shelf (I failed big time). I spent the last four years donating anything I read that I had no intention of reading again, mostly books I had acquired for free or cheap over the years that upon finally reading didn’t live up to my latest standards. But now, I’m getting rid of books I loved and just don’t need or want lying around for children to encounter.
So this week I donated The Camera My Mother Gave Me and Girl, Interrupted (and four bags of other things I can’t recall). I loved Girl, Interrupted when I first read it. I think I was nineteen at the time. Susanna Kaysen fascinated me with her angst, her institutionalization, her ambivalence, and finally her resolve… to not be crazy. I respected her final conclusion. At forty-one, I just don’t need that affirmation from her anymore… that we can be surrounded by insanity and decide to not allow ourselves to go insane (mental illness is real, but there are also some who drive themselves nuts out of selfishness and conceit, or giving in to their environment).
Later, when I was running the sociology section at Half Price Books, I stumbled across The Camera My Mother Gave Me. It is a bizarre memoir about Kaysen’s vagina. I was shocked, baffled, and completely riveted by the book. I remember being appalled that I couldn’t put it down. I probably would have kept it forever and maybe read it again years from now because I don’t remember much of it, but I don’t want my sons plucking it off the shelf as emerging readers. It would make an interesting story for a stand-up comedy routine–or their future therapist–so off to the Friends of the Library it went.
I have donated nearly 1,000 volumes every time I have moved. Often it’s a simple Marie Kondo moment, happily removing piles of things accumulated that I’m now happy to give away. This move hits different. Instead of just not wasting some box or storage space, I’m more focused on refining my library. I am actively curating a specific environment to nurture my children.
What books do you enjoy that you still choose not to keep?
Colonel Shaw
I’ve been spying these daily writing prompts in the corner of my dashboard the last few days, wondering if they were something I would ever care to utilize. This evening as I was considering what to post for tomorrow, I saw “Have you ever performed on a stage?” and immediately had a flashback to 1995 and my performance as Colonel Shaw in the play Glory. I’m assuming it was severely abridged for fifth graders. I do know it was shortly after we had read the book Shades of Gray by Carolyn Reeder. I remember my costume smelled funny. I do not recall where that costume was acquired or where it went when I was done wearing it. I think it was meant to teach us an important part of history, but I was not thinking about Lincoln’s War Between the States when I was barking out my Colonel Shaw lines, I was thinking about how I was the shortest girl in the class playing a man in charge of stuff. For the record, I’m a terrible actress and I have no idea how or why I was awarded this role in whatever fifth grade extravaganza was occurring.
Fifth grade was an awkward time when the man I thought would be my favorite teacher ever got deported–to Canada–for an expired Visa, and in return we got the “new” lady. She hated me, got in arguments with my mom, and I still (in my 40s) think she was a moron. Time did not grant me more grace for her, although I do credit her for having Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Field’s Hitty, Her First Hundred Years in her classroom library. Both of which I loved. She’s also the teacher who read Bridge to Terabithia out loud every afternoon until she had her entire class bawling. So, she was either awesome for introducing us to a great book, or a little sadistic for emotionally traumatizing us all. Who knows?
My track record with teachers wasn’t great. In sixth grade I got an amazing GT language arts teacher I will adore forever and we got her again for seventh grade GT, and then she died. Once again, our class got the “new” lady. A fresh out of college gal the boys tormented by just calling her Wendy. She looked like Wendy from Peter Pan, her name was Wendy for real, I still don’t remember her last name because no one ever respected her enough to use it. She lived in my neighborhood with her parents, talked about her boyfriend (who couldn’t spell) a lot, and in hindsight I wonder how any twenty-two year olds enter their classrooms for their first year without having a panic attack. I think that was the year I played a dead girl in theatre and laughed through the entire play. My theatre teacher told me she loved me, but she didn’t want me on her stage again. We laughed. We hugged. When I was in Oklahoma! in high school, I was a chorus girl who happily sat in the barn close to the shotgun mic. I’m not a great dancer either, but I love to sing. Too bad Colonel Shaw didn’t have any singing lines. I’d definitely watch Glory as a Broadway musical, they could still use Matthew Broderick and everything.
Beauty in the Math
As a homeschool mom, I’ve been teaching math every day since 2017 when my oldest officially started first grade. We did Math-U-See Alpha through Pre-Algebra with steady diligence. When we finished the curriculum for the school year, we often used another to review. For years we had colorful, used copies of Singapore (1A-6B) to ensure there were no gaps in our learning. It wasn’t necessary, we just liked it. My oldest also loved reading Life of Fred books for fun until about a year ago when she grew as impatient with them as I have always been. We feel they make great supplements if your kid is into them, but they aren’t really a complete curriculum. (My husband and I honestly don’t understand how anyone learns anything from them at all.) With all this math drilling, I have always passionately felt like I needed to have books that kept that spark–the love of the beauty of math–alive in our home. It’s easy to get lost in crunching numbers and forget that it’s fun to play with numbers, to entertain ideas, and to marvel at the patterns.
Books that have helped me maintain that in the younger years were things like Swirl by Swirl, Blockhead, the Sir Cumference series, The Lion’s Share, and many more. I collect math picture books and biographies of mathematicians for kids like Michael Phelps collects Olympic medals. I love them and I love reading them to my kids. We enjoy Penrose the Cat and Bedtime Math: A Fun Excuse to Stay Up Late. I have a more MathStart picture books than I can count. Not really, Anno taught us to count pretty high. But as my oldest got older, I realized I needed to have more than just picture books to keep that love for math alive.
We started in middle school with books on fractals. She had already read Mysterious Patterns: Finding Fractals in Nature by Sarah C. Campbell, but we needed more. A friend recommended Lisle’s Fractals: The Secret Code of Creation and we ate that up. It’s so beautiful. I even bought and read Mandelbrot’s The Fractal Geometry of Nature from the 70’s, for my own personal amusement.
Then I became even more devoted to being purposeful in adding math books to our history and science reading. Zero: the Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife was a fun one, and I recommend it for 7th and 8th graders tackling Algebra I for the first time. Learning about the beginnings of things, when the world wasn’t quite sure what to make of a concept, is always exciting. Adding living books to a student’s math studies is what I think is greatly missing from the public school system’s approach to math education in the upper grades. As a society we’re helping elementary students get excited with great picture books like The Boy Who Loved Math and then we leave them hanging once they hit Algebra. Books like Derbyshire’s Unknown Quantity aren’t being touched until college, if at all.
Just this week we finished A History of Pi. Beckmann’s writing isn’t as thrilling as Siefe’s, and he often goes on tangents about governments he doesn’t like, showing some interesting biases that made my 9th grader roll her eyes, but I’ll still take his passionate sometimes wrong hot takes over a boring textbook that never mentions the history of 3.14 and how it came to be what it is today.
Once you dive into the world of living math books, it’s actually more difficult to find someone dispassionate about their topic. Francis Su in Mathematics for Human Flourishing also has several political asides while arguing for math bringing virtue to those who study it. While it wasn’t my favorite of the math books I’ve read and I won’t be assigning it, it helped me identify and articulate some of my goals as a math teacher.
What math or math history books have you read that have inspired you as a teacher or student? Books that made the beauty of math shine for you?
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The Mad Women of the Moors
Re-experiencing The Brontë Sisters, Part One
In 2024 I read Brontë’s Agnes Grey alongside the Literary Life Podcast. I hadn’t read a Brontë novel in years, more than a decade I believe. Though I greatly appreciate the Brontës, I’ve always been more of a Jane Austen girl. It’s a rare reader who loves both equally, I find. The Brontës wrote Gothic revival tales with a flare for romanticism (romanticism the movement, not romanticism featuring a meet-cute and happily ever after), whereas Jane Austen wrote satire. The Brontës make me sad and despair for humanity while Jane Austen makes me laugh at society’s nonsense. All four women had much to say about the world around them, they just said it very differently.
Agnes Grey, written by the youngest Brontë, Anne, is not the most riveting of classic works and I suspect it wouldn’t still be in print if Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre weren’t currently so popular. I love to pair reading experiences, rabbit trail from one book to another, an exercise of associative reading, so I plucked a book I already had on my shelf and read it as well.
The book was The Madwoman Upstairs by Catherine Lowell, a contemporary literary mystery with the meet-cute kind of romance thrown in. The book follows fictional character Samantha Whipple through Oxford as the author fan-girls over Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. In a season when I am aggressively purging subpar books from my collection (we have over 5,000 volumes–I stopped counting long ago–and have legitimately run out of space) The Madwoman Upstairs is one I have chosen to keep, for now. I think my oldest might enjoy it after studying a Brontë book or two, it’s an easy breezy weekend novel.
That time might be coming soon as the trailers for this new Wuthering Heights movie blasts across the internet, appalling most readers I know. Teaching Wuthering Heights just moved up my to-do list as I counter parent pop culture, so that when my teen encounters the story for the first time it is not at the hands of the debaucherous movie industry who is advertising what looks like a Fifty-Shades version of what they are calling the “greatest love story ever told.” I thought it was a cautionary tale of what happens to humanity when we give into the monster of sin instead of slaying it. On a supernatural level, Wuthering Heights brings me back to Beowulf (I might be broken, because everything brings me back to Beowulf, it’s a favorite) and the torment of the wild (sin nature and Satan… Heathcliff has that whole Esau archetype going for him that reminds me of Grendel). On a psychological level, Cathy and Heathcliff remind me that sin nature is to be quashed lest we wander the moors ever after as lost souls unable to reach heaven. Apparently, that is not the popular reading, and Hollywood has turned it into some steamy lip biting panty dropper. Gross. But, I haven’t read the book in a coon’s age, and it’s possible I read it poorly and just saw the message I wanted to see.
Alice Hoffman said, “Read Wuthering Heights when you’re 18 and you think Heathcliff is a romantic hero; when you’re 30, he’s a monster; at 50 you see he’s just human.” When I was in my teens, I definitely read him as a tempting monster. I know I read Jane Eyre and Tenant of Wildfell Hall in my twenties, but I cannot recall if I re-read Emily’s work when I first read her sisters’ and stumbled across Gaskell’s biography. I’m 41 now and I’m curious to know how I read Heathcliff today.
English author Jeanette Winterson wrote on her website in 2011:
I read Wuthering Heights when I was sixteen and had just left home. I did not read it as a love story. I thought it was a loss story. Heathcliff loses Cathy. Cathy loses Heathcliff. Edgar Linton loses Cathy, their daughter, his life, and Thrushcross Grange. Hindley loses Wuthering Heights. His son Hareton is dispossessed, Heathcliff’s revenge on everyone, including himself, is matched by Cathy’s death-wish (Why did you betray your own heart?). Heathcliff is a foundling. As an adopted child I understood his humiliations, his ardour, and his capacity to injure. I also learned the lesson of the novel that property is power. It seemed to me that if you want to fall in love you had better have a house. Whatever Emily Bronte was doing, it was not the sentimental interpretation of this novel of all for love and the world well lost. Cathy is a woman and can’t own property in her own right. Therefore she can’t rescue Heathcliff unless she marries Edgar (and that is part of her plan but Heathcliff has already misunderstood and disappeared). Much later when her daughter marries Heathcliff’s horrible son Linton he gleefully claims that all her property is now his – and when he usefully dies, all that was hers passes to Heathcliff. Heathcliff himself starts with nothing—and so can’t marry Cathy. His gradual gain of every house, horse and heirloom belonging to the Earnshaws and the Lintons is his revenge and his ruin. What’s love got to do with it? (All right, quite a lot, but this is not a love story).
As I begin my journey of rediscovery, I find I agree that it is a story of loss. I also think it is a story of revenge, and possibly a story of ghosts… I’ll get back to you in Part Two of this blog series.
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Burgess, Beatrix, and Our Favorite Bear
One thing I didn’t expect to be doing in my forties was re-reading all the books of early childhood. I was a mom of only one for nearly eleven years and thought surely I wouldn’t revisit Thornton Burgess, Beatrix Potter, and Winnie-the-Pooh until I was a grandmother. But then I had three more babies.
I started reading Thornton Burgess out loud to my oldest and two of my niblings when there was a family crisis and I absorbed a niece and a nephew into my household for two months while my second child was two months old. Thornton Burgess always brings calm to an afternoon when you need it. He’s gentle, like Mr. Rogers, and tells you all about the animals the way Bob Ross tells you all about painting. During this season of chaos, we read The Big Book of Burgess, the pale green front board and back board matched my bedroom walls and put us all in a soothing nap-like mood. We usually read over elevenses or afternoon tea, the sunlight from my east facing living room windows often cascading over my shoulders while the baby kicked in the bouncer and the older kids settled in to watch the oak tree’s leaves dance across the area rug and faux hardwood flooring. What I learned then while the fifth graders sat restfully (the only time of day they were restful) and listened, is that I would never stop reading Burgess ever again. Never. Now, we always have a Burgess book going. I read bits of the Adventures of… series to my toddler, Lightfoot the Deer and Bowser the Hound when I had a teenager, a preschooler, and a toddler, and even now with a highschooler, preschooler, toddler, and newborn, we are reading Blacky the Crow. Burgess writes delightful little chapter books every age can enjoy, but…
Beatrix Potter’s work are picture books. I definitely didn’t expect to be reading The Tales of Peter Rabbit nearly every day for another decade. Even more, I didn’t expect to not get tired of them. Jeremy Fisher doesn’t stop being exciting, if anything I think he’s more exciting now that I have a little boy obsessed with fishing. Two Bad Mice is especially amusing with two precocious little human partners in crime scurrying about my home.
Last, I’ll never forget the first time I picked up the Winnie-the-Pooh collection to read to my second born. He was pudgy and snuggly and the lamplight was low and my voice fell into the patterns that my oldest calls my Winnie-the-Pooh voice and I thought, “Oh I get to do this again. How lovely.” The book smells like vanilla and baby powder, the spine reassuring in my palm. Winnie-the-Pooh of the Hundred Acre Wood, floating up to steal honey like a rain cloud really never gets old. It might be my favorite bedtime book.
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Totalitarian Caste Systems in Dystopian Fantasy
A Guest Blog Post by: A.Z.K.R., author of Tales of Porcelain Thrones: Middle School Edition
Totalitarianism is a system of government that is headed by an absolute dictator who supports themselves with some kind of violent force. In a totalitarian country there is no freedom of the people. One example of totalitarianism can be found in Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn. The Final Empire is headed by the Lord Ruler, who uses emotional manipulation against the populous. They are required to believe only what the Steel Ministry tells them and treat the Lord Ruler as god. The Final Empire is also a caste system. A caste system is a system of government in which people are divided into sections based on race and or job description. The Final Empire is not an exact Caste System sine the Garrison and a few merchants come from the Skaa population.
A better example of a Totalitarian Caste System is Suzanne Collins’s series Hunger Games. In Hunger Games President Snow represents the the absolute ruler and the Hunger Games themselves serve as the violent force. The caste system in Panam is much stricter than the one in the Final Empire. The people are confined to geographically separated districts that are each in charge of one resource that is distributed across the whole country, such as coal lumber, and technology. District Thirteen is the rebel district, their Mistborn counterparts would be the thieving crews. In both dystopian societies the government mostly ignored the rebels, avoiding conflict and keeping the peace. Up until the nineteen forties India was a real life example of a totalitarian caste system. The noblemen and Garrison plus the District two and the capital are equal to the Kshatriyas. Likewise the Chandles are similar to the thieving crews or district thirteen.
Totalitarian caste systems are terrible for everyone except the people on top. Even now as a democracy India is a miserable place still scarred by its past government. On the flip side, the opposite of a totalitarian caste system would be a world with no ruler or government system at all. You may note that in the United States religious freedom only goes as far as it can without infringing on other peoples’ rights. Or it was supposed to anyway. Both extremes are bad. People need guidance, not total dominance. Rules, not oppression.
Hard Roads to Cultural Literacy
In May of 2019, I read a book called Hard Road West: History and Geology Along the Gold Rush Trail by Keith Heyer Meldahl. I remember it being riveting. When I logged it on Goodreads all I wrote was, “Excellent and fascinating.” I was dating my now husband at the time and I remember sharing with him sections I thought he would enjoy, as we both like geology and one of our dates was to the HMNS gemstone exhibit. At one point I laughed out loud at something clever Meldahl wrote (I don’t recall what it was) and my husband commented that it is a rare geology book that causes one to laugh in pleasure.
Naturally, I thought this would make excellent assigned reading for my homeschooled highschooler. But one chapter into it she was struggling. It wasn’t the reading level, she has a collegiate reading level and has had one for a few years now. I was certain it couldn’t be the science as she had been perusing geology books since childhood and had done a whole geology curriculum with a friend as part of their own little science club they created. Nerds. I went over the science with her and she kept reading. It became less of a struggle, but she is not laughing out loud with pleasure from her geology book.
Then I started reading Cultural Literacy by E. D. Hirsch and things became clearer. In Cultural Literacy Hirsch talks about a study done on the results of seven year olds who took a reading assessment test. In the test the children were asked to read a story about a spider. The children who had more prior knowledge about spiders scored higher on the reading comprehension questions about the story (which did not require special knowledge about spiders) than those who did not know much about spiders.
I shared this with my oldest daughter, as we often study together while the younger kids are playing. We discussed it and determined that it makes sense to not get hung up on something being mentioned in passing because you already know a lot on a topic and can picture it in your mind with little effort, but to struggle to retain what something is about if it mentions a lot of things you’re trying to picture because you’re not as familiar with them. Perhaps it is easier to envision Charlotte in Charlotte’s Web if as a child you also have watched a real spider build its web, perhaps it is easier to remember the story if you’ve seen or read about how baby spiders hatch. Or, if you’ve had Charlotte’s Web read to you as a child, maybe a technical book on pig husbandry would be easier to retain as an adult. Hirsch includes an example of college students reading a paragraph about Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee and struggling because they had no prior knowledge of who they were and how they related to the Civil War (shocking because these were college students out of Virginia).
I was reminded about a public schooled girl I was working with who had failed her reading portion on her standardized tests. Her phonics were impeccable, but where she struggled was comprehension. When I worked with her, almost every time she struggled to read something it was because she had never heard the word. She didn’t have the vocabulary to support her phonics skills. I advised the family to listen to audiobooks, read stories together at night, talk to each other more, look words up in the dictionary. Children learn the meanings of words by hearing them, then when they see them on paper for the first time while sounding it out… they have a picture in their mind of what that word means, feels like, or how it can be used in different sentences. Kids should always have access to stories above their reading level, so that they can learn grammar structures and vocabulary words organically. Hirsch drives home the idea that you can know how to read and still be illiterate if you don’t know anything about what you’re reading.
I told my daughter how this was interesting to me because my husband had said he thought she didn’t know enough geology to read Hard Road West smoothly, even though I thought it was a very approachable book and that she had a strong foundation in geology. She and I laughed over the time a volunteer at the museum asked her what a specific rock smelled like and the big reveal fell flat when she answered, “Sulfur.” Poor guy deflated and said, “Yes, it’s Sulfur. You must be homeschooled.” Apparently the public school kids her age on field trips liked to shout “Farts!” She was about seven at the time and it is one of her favorite museum memories. (I’m not going to lie, even if I knew it was sulfur at seven, I’d probably have shouted “Farts!” too, but I went to public school.)
“So, why, if you’ve read all the same geology books we read as children, is this geology book difficult? Because I genuinely don’t think it would have been difficult for me at fifteen.” That is when she confessed that the geology books we owned and had spent hours reading… she hadn’t actually been reading them: “I was looking at the pretty rocks. I could tell you the page numbers where all my favorite rocks are, all the prettiest ones, I didn’t read all the stuff…” We genuinely laughed together, two wildly different personalities approaching children’s geology books in wildly different ways. As Charlotte Mason said, “Children are born persons.” But for every moment, like this geology one where she struggles because maybe she didn’t pay as much attention to what was put before her in the past, she has so many where she shines. She catches every Shakespeare reference. Every time. (Hirsch writes a bit about how Shakespeare allusions used to be quite common in all kinds of writing, including business memos, but as of the publication of his book in 1987, that was no longer the case.)
Hirsch’s argument for cultural literacy was never meant to be for homeschool parents to refine the presentation of their educational feasts, his goal is educational reform in the public sector. There is extensive discussion in his book about the struggle to properly regulate education in that if you mandate that schools teach at least two Shakespeare plays there will always be arguments about which two should be selected and that no two districts will choose the same two, therefore knowing who Shakespeare is might be universal, but catching Shakespeare references will vary. (I vote for all the Shakespeare. Every play! All the sonnets!) But I did feel like Hirsch’s essay very much affirmed the education I am providing. Maybe my oldest gets a little bogged down in this particular geology book, but to be fair, it could easily be assigned in a college course, most high school students wouldn’t be reading it between their Homer and Geometry lessons. The paragraph that boggled the minds of the Virginian community college students in the 1980s didn’t phase her, and for that I have hope.
Additional affirmation came when I realized I had owned other books by Hirsch in the past. He’s the one that wrote the series Everything Your ___Grader Needs to Know. My first two years of formal homeschooling (first and second grade), I had read those books out loud the last month of the traditional school year to see if we were covering everything. What I learned was reading those books out loud was a waste of time because a classical Charlotte Mason education is thorough and she not only knew what she needed, but she knew richer versions than the sad paragraphs presented. That was the final nail in the coffin on us ever relying on textbooks. Cultural literacy can be gained from textbooks, but it’s boring and far less effective. The better road to true literacy, in my opinion, is living books. I donated Hirsch’s other books, but I’m keeping Cultural Literacy.
One whole day after finishing Cultural Literacy, I went to our local library to donate a bag of books I was purging from my collection. There on the shelf next to the library bookstore register was E. D. Hirsch’s Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, a compilation of all the things the average American graduate should know, for $2. Of course I bought it.
“Also unrealistic is the pragmatist emphasis on individuality, at least as the idea has been institutionalized. The best teaching does accommodate itself to individual differences in temperament, but a child’s temperament does not come freighted with content. To learn a culture is natural to human beings. Children can express individuality only in relation to the traditions of their society, which they have to learn. The greatest human individuality is developed in response to a tradition, not in response to disorderly uncertain, and fragmented education. Americans in their teens and twenties who were brought up under individualistic theories are not less conventional than their predecessors, only less literate, less able to express their individuality.” – E. D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy, pg. 126.
All About a Face That Launched 1000 Ships
…And a Book That Launched 1000 Rabbit Trails…
Fall of 2025 has been the semester in which my 9th grader has been reading the complete and unabridged Iliad for the first time. We have read picture books, chapter books, and abridged works over the years (Sutcliff’s Black Ships Before Troy, beautifully illustrated by Alan Lee, was probably my favorite), but now we’re nearly in the big leagues (the real big leagues would be reading it in Greek, maybe one day…).
I have maintained my habit of reading something new alongside teaching something old to me over the years, and while re-reading Homer’s Iliad (and listening to the Ascend podcast episodes with the kiddo) I decided to meander through Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore by Bettany Hughes. Meander is the most appropriate word because, like my blog, Hughes’s work frolics about joyfully and a little chaotically. It’s entertaining though repetitive, it’s amusing and long-winded.
Czarney Pies, a Goodreads user, reviewed:
“Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore” is a scatter-gun, scatter-brained work that is nonetheless highly entertaining. Reading it is something like inviting your friends from your undergraduate years over for dinner, plying them generously with alcohol and letting them rant on about whatever literary or artistic idea comes into their minds. History students will express themselves on Beethoven. English lit graduates will give you their opinions on Rabelais while philosophy students will tell you what they think the Federal Reserve Board should do about interest rates. The cacophony is as joyous as it is incoherent. As Hughes herself notes at one point that she may be presenting “a mangle of literary and social references (with a sprinkling of fanstasy [sic]) rather than historical fact.” (pp. 285- 286)
Quite frankly, that is the best description of Hughes’s work that could ever exist, in my opinion. I love this paragraph from Czarney Pies’s review so much I copied it –TWICE– into my commonplace journal. (I didn’t realize I was copying it for a second time until I was halfway through doing it and had a déjà vu moment.)
Pies makes you want to go to that party, and Hughes takes you there. Whether she intended it or not, her Helen magnum opus would be served best over a bottle of wine and a group of chatty nerds. While reading I found myself looking up a lot of paintings I had never seen and re-reading plays I hadn’t touched in decades.
My first rabbit trail was a quote on the top of page eight from Euripides, and I immediately stopped and read Medea and Other Plays from the Oxford University Press World’s Classics series. Translated by James Morwood, the collection highlights the flaws and follies of Grecian women in mythology and includes the plays Medea, Hippolytus, Elektra, and of course, Helen. I had read Medea before and knew about the Lilith/Lamia fashioned child-killer, but Euripides’s depiction of Helen of Troy was new to me. In this version, the adulteress of Troy is presented as a more palatable character who was squirreled away in Egypt for an entire decade long war and was never with Paris at all. The Helen we see in Troy was a phantom Helen created by the gods, and is a victim of circumstance.
Hughes pulls out every myth, legend, play, painting, poem, and tapestry ever known throughout history and discusses them thoroughly. She talks about the things most culturally literate people know off hand and things that only die-hard ancient literature or history buffs have researched. Sometimes treating Helen like a real person, the book takes on a biographical form. Sometimes Hughes detours into fictional fandom and muses on possibilities with whimsy. At all times I can picture Pies’s fictional party spitballing ideas about Helen of Troy, gossiping like pick-a-little-ladies and debating like Mensa meeting attendees.
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A Life With Anne
When I was a child I adored the Anne of Green Gables series. I still do. But the height of me reading through the series was between the ages of 7 and 10, when I knew I could read all eight books in the 19 hour drive from Houston to Denver. I was an avid and precocious reader back then. Now I’m just avid. So color me surprised when I tried to introduce my oldest daughter to Anne during her elementary school years and the book fell flat for her. What we discovered, now that she is totally smitten with the series, is that she didn’t understand the appeal in a character who just sounded exactly like herself. For real, people have commented on how much my kid reminds them of Anne her whole life, but this year is the first year my darling girl has truly delighted in it.
I, apparently, had introduced my dear girl to Anne too soon which was mistake number one regarding my favorite auburn haired heroine (and my life for that matter, despite her being called my mini-me all the time, she is not–in fact–very much like me at all). Mistake number two was assuming everyone else I knew was thoroughly acquainted with her. So when we decided to choose Anne of Avonlea as our first San Salvatore Book Club pick, we were shocked to learn that these women we love and admire had actually never read Anne of Green Gables (some, not all, had watched the Megan Fellows series).
Naturally, I began to approach it as I do teaching. Having been raised on Anne’s beloved Miss Stacy being presented as the ideal teacher (which grew into a love of most things Charlotte Mason as I researched homeschool options), my notes always either begin or end with these questions: What did you notice? What did you wonder? What did you discover? What, if anything, did you find good, true, or beautiful about this book? Are there any other stories you’ve heard or know or read that are echoed in this story?
This post, specifically, is on the first two books and the things I noticed reading the Anne books as a woman in my forties instead of as a girl with a wild imagination.
I love how L. M. Montgomery begins both books with an exotic character. In the first, Anne is the exotic, and in the second Mr. Harrison is our foreign, otherworldly character. He is from elsewhere, new to the neighborhood, and comes with an unruly parrot named Ginger, who reminded me of my Uncle’s macaw, Chicken. Just as Anne asked to called Marilla her aunt in the first book, the opening sequences of Anne of Avonlea includes Mr. Harrison mistakenly calling Marilla Anne’s aunt. In Green Gables, Marilla shuts it down as a falsehood, and in Avonlea, Anne does the same. Harrison and Anne’s exchange regarding the cow invasion mirrors Anne’s first meeting with Rachel Lynde. In the first book, Anne is the outsider throwing a temper tantrum, in the second Anne is established as a true citizen of Avonlea as she suffers a newcomer’s temper tantrum. Montgomery’s alluding to her previous work is beautifully done.
As an adult, I also delighted in Harrison’s stab at Anne’s reading “yellow-jacket” novels. As a child I could visualize the novels perfectly because I grew up haunting antique stores and their book corners. Often, as a child, books were not worth my notice unless they were old, dusty, and had a faint smell of vanilla and moth balls (bonus points if there was a lingering odor of pipe tobacco). As a retired bookseller, this portion hit a bit differently and I laughed out loud. Yellow-jacket (“yellowback”) novels were “railway novels.” They were the equivalent of NY Times Bestselling thrillers or romances perched in a kiosk at an airport terminal (I’d say “today” but I really don’t fly much and I don’t know if people buy airport books these days). They were sensational fiction, much like dime novels, brightly colored (usually yellow) with ads on the back to cover the costs of the printing. Often they were simply cheaper reprints of already popular books. They were in direct competition with the “penny dreadfuls” G. K. Chesterton discusses in his essay A Defense of Penny Dreadfuls. Dracula was one such publication.
I also noticed, diving into the series as an adult, how much the Anne series had saturated the corners of my brain. In my late twenties I wrote two books in what is called The Bookshop Hotel series (book three was written just after I turned thirty, books four and five are still sitting unpublished on my computer). I wrote them under duress and my brain was completely fried, grasping at straws. One of my character’s names is Maud Montgomery. A few years ago I was asked by a reader if I had done that on purpose. I can firmly say, no, I did not. But reading now, I see how my mind had pulled something from a dark corner, something it had known and forgotten, and ran with it. L. M. Montgomery (Lucy Maud), called Maud by her friends, was a deeply religious person who functioned as a caretaker for her mentally ill husband. I can see in hindsight why my mind pulled this name out of the abyss during that time, as I thought I was the caretaker to a mentally unstable alcoholic husband myself. (Turns out, I was wrong, I was actually just a narcissist’s favorite toy. Thank God, that part of my life has passed.) The thread that holds so many of these episodic adventures in Avonlea is often the nuggets of wisdom and religious belief that seep through the pages, the empathy and compassion, the search for the divine, the delight in creation and whimsy.
Another strange moment for me was when I read in Anne of Avonlea:
“I think an old, deserted house is such a sad sight,” said Anne dreamily. “It always seems to me to be thinking about its past and mourning for its old-time joys.”
Leave it to my exhausted brain to also personify a house in my Bookshop series. What we read in childhood truly shapes the way we think.
I was amused to discover how much my parenting seemed to mimic Marilla’s and startled to get to know Miss Stacy as an adult reader. I have been homeschooling my children from the beginning. Public school was never going to be an option for us for many reasons, but as I was reading about Anne’s favorite teacher, whom I had read about hundreds of times in second and third grades, I realized that she embodies all my favorite elements of classical British educators during the turn of the century. More specifically, she has so many qualities Charlotte Mason hailed as correct.
Charlotte Mason lived from 1842-1923 and was known as a turn of the century educational reformer. She established the House of Education in Ambleside in the late 1800’s, which focused on teaching classically but with the added emphasis that “children are born persons.” She wrote a Home Education series I have read several times. When I was using Classical Conversations as a co-op opportunity for my oldest, people often told me I was too “Charlotte Mason.” (Classical Conversations is a nationwide neo-classical homeschool organization based out of North Carolina. There are things I love about their curriculum and things I could do without.) When we tried to connect with Charlotte Mason homeschoolers, die-hard AmblesideOnline families, we were often told we were “too neo-classical.” I now see the truth: we were never Classical Conversations people, nor were we Charlotte Mason followers… my aim has always been Miss Stacy. We are Miss Stacy homeschoolers! We do nature studies, literature based learning, Euclidean geometry. I still use McGuffey’s Readers and Susan Wise Bauer material, while adhering to a lot of AmblesideOnline’s schedules. We have always narrated, as advised by Cindy Rollins and Karen Glass. But in all these details, what I chose to use and what I have discarded, I have shaped my entire homeschool culture off a picture in my mind of the perfect educator–Miss Stacy!– and I wasn’t even aware I was doing it.
My daughter and I read Anne of the Island together, and we will resume the rest of the series soon, but took a break to focus on Homer’s Iliad. I am looking forward to seeing how Anne of Windy Poplars measures up to my memories of it being the best in the whole series, and what other things I notice and wonder, as someone who has been noticing and wondering for a much longer time than when I read it last. I’m excited to see what my real life Anne-girl thinks of her literary counterpart as she reads each book hereafter for the first time as well.
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Dracula
I walked my fifteen year old through Bram Stoker’s Dracula this October. I thought it would be a fun way for a ninth grader to celebrate Halloween. I also thought it would be a neat one to cover with my newly developing book club: The San Salvatore Book Club, primarily made up of my older mentors in my Baptist church. There were gasps of “Are you sure?” and polite “I think I’ll bow out of that one” to which I promptly said, “Why? It’s such a beautiful Christian allegory!”
Side note: I’ve been listening to the Literary Life Podcast with Angelina Stanford for about two years now, caught up on most the episodes and sometimes use them to supplement my home school when I need to be doing something other than teaching literature. My number one complaint to my husband is, “they act like no one knows this and everyone knows this!” to which I am learning every day that, actually, no Angelina Stanford is right: not everyone knows this. I’m not always claiming to have the correct most perfect reads, but I have been shocked to learn I have been reading differently than mainstream society since childhood. So my Angelina Stanford grumbles have ceased now that I know she is operating from the experience of people genuinely not knowing about the material she shares and I’ve been operating under the experience of not sharing because I thought everyone knew. That being the case, my apologies if some of what I share simply sounds like it came from her podcast. It is unintentional, though, yes I listened to her Dracula episodes back in February to make sure when we discussed it in October, I would not have skipped over anything that I assumed “everyone already knew.”
While I was teaching Dracula, I realized I had never written about Dracula on my blog. My blog began, I think, during the height of the Twilight series and I spent so much time focusing on how we shouldn’t be romanticizing vampires with chests that sparkle and misplaced teenage angst, I forgot to write about the roots of vampire lore and my love for Stoker’s classic work, which is in fact a Christian medieval quest to kill a dragon disguised as a techno-thriller. I also realized that I don’t remember what of my essays, stories, and discussions over the years ended up in my journal or my blog, or was relegated only to bookstore employee discussions as we cleaned the store each night. I have spent years reading C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, George MacDonald, all the classics, yet my blog is mainly limited to home school material and book reviews sent to me by authors and publishers. Therefore, as I begin to teach high school literature to my oldest, I imagine there is a lot of who we are as readers not documented on Anakalian Whims.
To read Dracula well, I think you need a foundation in Genesis, specifically 1:26-4:16. It’s important to read John 1 where the New Testament is clear that Jesus is the Word. It’s important to know a little bit about Jewish and Mesopotamian mythology regarding Lilith, who was a demon and seductress, the disordered first wife of Adam who feeds on children and relishes in child sacrifice as opposed to feeding and nurturing children from her own body as God designed. “Lilitu” was a “night monster.” In my teaching notes, I recommend re-reading the book of Revelation (so you can remember how the bible used imagery of dragons and oceans) and Beowulf. While reading Dracula, you might need to recall stories like Hansel & Gretel, Bluebeard, Homer’s The Odyssey, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It’s easy to enjoy Stoker’s work without these tales fresh on your mind, but it might also be easy to fall victim to Freudian false interpretations if you’re not reading from the framework that Stoker was actually writing during the Gothic revival of the 1800’s. You’ll be limited to the Victorian techno-thriller, which is still awesome, and see all the wrong “imagery” of suppressed sex, which is inaccurate and not awesome.
You have to keep in mind the quote from Devendra Varma: “During the period when the forces of Christianity were nearly spent and materialism had dislodged spiritual values, the Gothic novelists planned their novels with an awareness of the Deity and the consequences of a just fate. The villains learn in due course that the wages of sin is death.”
With that in mind, we enter a world where the monster in the night is indeed an evil to be vanquished, not to be loved for his sparkly chest and undying devotion to trying to get the girl. Traditionally, the villain in these stories is a symbol for Satan, a metaphor for evil itself. We see these villains portrayed as witches, monsters, vampires, and werewolves, who modern literature is now conflating with handsome boys who just need more hugs. Since the dawn of time, human beings have suffered from an evil that must be conquered, and in Stoker’s Dracula we have a group of Christians on a quest to conquer that evil… the “Son of the Dragon” or “Son of the Devil” named Dracula. The best literature will always remind us that the ultimate battle is between the Dragon (the monster) and the Savior (Jesus), and the Savior has already won. That is exactly what makes Dracula one of the best pieces of literature. The monster is the problem, the monster is not the love interest. As C. S. Lewis said, “Who is the witch? The witch is Lilith. The witch is Circe. Every child is born knowing who the witch is.” As Angelina Stanford said, “The monster is not the wounded person, the monster is the [cause of the] wound.”
I don’t want to repeat all the information already available to the public for free on The Literary Life Podcast, but I do want to share some of my favorite parts of the novel that get my skin all tingly when I read them. I’ll try not to repeat too much of what they focus on in the podcast.
In chapter two, we walk through an octagonal room. In Babylonian culture, the eighth realm is the realm of the gods, a realm where for Christians, false gods, fallen angels, and demons congregate. Eight, therefore, is often considered a number affiliated with the occult. Charlemagne’s Aachen Cathedral, where his tomb resides, is an octagonal shape believed to be a mesh of where God meets the secular as it is a circle with straight lines and points. I ask my students what they think Stoker is trying to tell us by Harker walking through an octagonal room as he enters Dracula’s residence, just after a wild carriage ride that resembles a descent into Hades.
Later in this chapter, Dracula throws a mirror out the window. It is absolutely chilling as the mirror in medieval tradition is a symbol of divine truth. It doesn’t matter how many times I read Dracula, the Adversary both literally and figuratively throwing Divine Truth out the window gives me chills every time.
The setting of Whitby, which has a castle or abbey with an extensive graveyard by the sea sets itself up for so much intense imagery and meaning. We have our Gothic trope intermingled with the real history of the Synod of Whitby, where two traditions were ended. Meanwhile Dracula is asking Harker if a man of England can have two solicitors or more? Stoker is tossing around ideas of can man serve two masters? Who will man choose? Dracula is basically asking, how can I trick England into abandoning God and worshiping me? Whitby Harbour had a history of ships crashing, which will offer up opportunities for both Tempest and Rime of the Ancient Mariner allusions.
Stoker offers layer after layer of symbolism with the names and social positions of the characters as well. The podcast talks extensively about the roles of women in Victorian society and how Stoker played with Lucy being the “Light of the West” and “angel of the house” and Mina being the modern woman (I’m not sure if they covered the meaning of her name which sums up to be “Resolute Protection of the Lord”), but my favorite is actually the role of the men in this allegory. We have a fellowship of knights on a quest, all devoted to one woman (Mina), headed off to kill a dragon (Dracula), interwoven with Aristotle’s classical elements: Abraham Van Helsing, the professor (Merlin/ father figure, fire); Arthur Holmwood, the future Lord Gadalming (nobility whose name means “Of God-helm” in the Surrey Kingdom where there is a village called Thursley, near Hammer Pond and Thor’s Stone… King Arthur/ Thor, thunder, or air); John/ Jack Seward, whose name means “Guardian of the Sea,” is a doctor and scientist (a knight on our quest, water); Jonathan Harker, Mina’s husband whose name means “The Lord has Given” (earth); and our fifth man Quincey Morris, a cowboy from Texas (the fifth element) and (spoiler alert) our “Good boy. Brave boy. […] all man.”
From a book review standpoint, Dracula is hands-down a five star book. Above I shared my favorite pieces of a very complex allegory, but there’s so much more to it covered in the series of episodes of the Literary Life Podcast, and even more in my teaching notes, imagery that covers the Eucharist, Anti-Eucharist, Passover, John the Baptist and Anti-John the Baptist imagery. The story is one of wars to fight devils and ends on All Saint’s Day, celebrating rebirth in Christ and the achievement of Heaven. If you’re not seeing these metaphors for yourself when you read please go listen to the podcast episodes so that you can enjoy this beautiful work of fiction (and truth) for yourself.
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Anakalian Whims 