390-399: Culture: Fashion, Manners, Daily Life, Holidays, Celebrations, Folklore and Myths

This is a pretty interesting part of the library! It's where you go if you are planning a wedding, planning a wardrobe, or dreading your next social event. It's also where you go to read folklore created by folks and modern fairy tales by Gregory Maguire. It's where I went to score the above four beach reads. Looking good so far!

Speaking of which. Looking good occupies about two shelves in the not-huge public library where I visited today, but you already knew that was a huge concern of our society. How to look good, why to look good, whether we should care at all.... How could I resist a book called Fear and Clothing? And then Cintra Wilson revealed herself as a kindred spirit in at least one respect, speaking of her upbringing in a houseboat community in the 70's: "The casual approach to nudity... gave rise to my firm belief in the magic of garments, a nearly pathological Victorian prudishness, and a lifelong horror of nudists." Well, you may not be sold on the value of fashion, but I hope that little piece of flash memoir will at least impress upon you of the value of clothes. Wilson makes it clear in her introduction that she is not interested in what makes people beautiful but what makes them look like themselves-- not actually in fashion but in style. I chose In Your Face, by Shari Graydon, from this section as well, because I also can't resist a book that promises to attack "the culture of beauty." Graydon's book proves on closer examination to be written for "youth." It's never too early to provide some counterprogramming to all the "pretty princess" and "little heartbreaker" stuff our society mainlines into us from birth.

Bill Bryson's author promo page opens with "Everyone loves Bill Bryson, don't they?" That's what I thought, so I selected At Home: A Short History of Private Life even though it's the size-- and has the look-- of an academic textbook. It's the kind of book I want to like, but I dunno. It's so long (540 pages). It's so heavy-- several pounds, I'd guess. It looks so much like a textbook (I know, I already said that, but really, the resemblance goes beyond striking)!

The Art of Civilized Conversation is by Margaret Shepherd, better known (by me, anyway) as a fantastic calligrapher and author of many foundational manuals of calligraphy. Stands to reason she would want to present the spoken word as elegantly and graciously as she does the written. And she is very thorough, covering all kinds of conversational situations. A sweet little read if you need a pep talk about the value and feasibility of talking to humans.

380-389: Business, communication and transport. My Korean Deli, by Ben Ryder Howe

Have we talked about how much I love stunt memoirs? Books like The Year of Biblical Womanhood and I Was (Blind) Dating but Now I See and even The Reading Promise, which, although it described some stunts, might not technically have qualified, since the writer didn't do them just for the purpose of getting material, will always leap off the shelves and into my hands. Near the end of Ben Ryder Howe's My Korean Deli, someone asks him, "You bought the deli so you could write a book, didn't you? Admit it." If so, I hope he got his money's worth-- it's a charming book and deserves a wide readership.

I don't live in New York, but I go there quite regularly. I have been in my share of corner stores, always with the same sense of trepidation I feel when walking into a small diner on a blue road in the midwest, a trepidation that is caused by not the worry but the certainty that "they" will know I don't belong and will a) shoot me dead on sight b) pretend I don't exist or c) charge me double what the regulars pay. Turns out it's not me, it's them: "At a deli you don't really try to sell people things," Howe confesses, "instead, you act as if you want to kill them, throw their s*(& in a bag, and glare at them until they leave the store."

Howe is a funny guy and excruciatingly self-aware, but his descriptive powers also gave me nightmares. Literal nightmares. Salim's deli "appears to be rapidly falling apart, as if a passing truck could make the whole thing crumble. There's even-- and now of course I know why the lease is so cheap-- a hole in the ceiling the size of a volleyball, as if an elephant's leg had come through, and that hole is currently dripping little bits of plaster. Other parts of the ceiling appear to have caved as well... but these have been covered with sheets of aluminum, then painted, and now support little stalactites of dust that wave back and forth in unison..." That's some scary stuff, there. Especially when you realize not for nothing are these joints called delis. They actually will make you a sandwich right there that you are supposed to put in your body. Lord, have mercy.

Howe's experience was a fascinating glimpse of life behind the counter in the city that never sleeps. Recommended!

370-379: Education. A Mother's Reckoning, by Susan Klebold

Where would you shelve a book by the mother of one of the most notorious school shooters in American history? Is it a book about parenting? Is it about mental illness? Is it a true crime story? Nope, turns out it's a book about a high school, one whose greatest claim to fame is the number of people injured and killed in one horrible incident, and it can be found right between books about why to homeschool (yes, fear of violence is a factor) and about how to get into college.

There are so many reasons NOT to read this book. From before the first page, you know how it's going to come out. Even if you are interested in memoirs of grief or of mental illness, you know this is the worst one you will ever read-- a memoir of a grief that also bears guilt and of illness that wreaked havoc. In almost any category, Klebold and her story are outliers.

It's not an easy book to read-- or listen to, in my case. But, if my original motivation was partly morbid curiosity or some sense of the twisted satisfaction that comes from knowing that someone else's life is worse than yours, I quickly realized that there was much more I could learn from Klebold's experiences.

It's always been very difficult to be a parent and very difficult to be a child because relationships are difficult. But somewhere in the middle of the 20th century, psychology and religion agreed that there are formulas that will guarantee you success with your children, that if you did the right things they would "come out," as if they were cakes, and that if you yourself did not seem to be a successful human, it was because your parents hadn't followed these formulas. The interesting thing was that, although everyone agreed a formula existed, no one could agree on what the formula was. Poor Klebold followed one formula-- family night, organized sports, parental involvement, good schools, nice neighborhood-- and it worked for every other kid at Columbine who didn't shoot up the place.

The story of Columbine is the story of 90's kids raised by this formula, and of their paranoid parents and teachers. It's the story of intruder or lock-down drills (a weird practice that continues to this day), of disaffected, attitudinal white suburban boys (is there any other kind?) being packed off to psychiatrists and counselors by the thousands, of MySpaces and basement places being searched and stalked because what kind of parent doesn't know there are pipe bombs and NeoNazis in their house?!!? In reading this book, I remember why I did some of the weirder things I did, and why my friends still thought I was slacking. It almost makes me long for the Cold War, when we kids hid under our desks to protect ourselves from the Atom Bomb. At least we were hiding from a theoretical enemy, not a theoretical heavily armed friend!

In response to all that paranoia, Klebold's insistence that she was an engaged parent, that she did talk to her kids, that she knew their friends, that she took every reasonable precaution, reinforces what a lot of us discovered: teenagers are very, very good at dissembling, and we, no matter what we would like to think, are crap lie detectors. She cites a study, which I can't track down now, wherein parents, policemen, and customs officials were called in to discern whether 4-year-olds were lying about having done something they had been told not to do. The parents got it about 50% of the time... the trained professionals, less. The policemen and customs officials did worse than blind chance in discerning the truthfulness of four-year-olds.

It's not easy to tell when someone is being truthful. Pretending that you are okay and hoping someone will notice that you're actually not is a fool's game, but it's one teenagers play all the time. Unfortunately, in Klebold's case, the results were deadly, because for Dylan, linking himself to his psychopathic friend Eric and walking into a school with a gun was the best way for him to be sure that he would be successful in ending his own life.

This is where Klebold ends up-- as a member of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. She believes that if she had understood that her son was suicidal-- if she had read his journals and gotten even further up in his face when he seemed discouraged and grilled him about his relationship with Eric-- she might have been able to save his life and the lives of his victims. But I don't know. Part of what makes mental health issues so difficult is that those who are struggling with them so often can't accept that help is what's needed or don't believe that help is really going to be helpful.

A Mother's Reckoning didn't really seem like a book about a high school. But maybe it is a book about being a high schooler.