"Housewife" by Ismat Chugati Banned Books Week Day Five

"Housewife" by Ismat Chugati (1951)

Banned Books Week-2013

September 30 to October 6

Day Five

1915 to 1991

Mumbai, India
Short Stories of the Indian Subcontinent
A Reading Life Project

Prior Posts on Banned Books Week

Today is the last day of Banned Books Week, now in its 30th year.    This was my first year observing Banned Books Week, a world wide event initiated by the American Library Association.   As one might expect, it is a very America centered event with most participants talking only about American books that were banned in the USA for reasons of prudery, racism and political correctness.   I am observing the week by posting five guests posts, courtesy of Open Road Media, from distinguished authors talking about Banned Books.  In addition to this I have posted this week on a short story by two writers whose works were banned for  long periods, Franz Kafka and Zora Hurston.  Today I will post briefly about a story by Ismat Chughtai, one of the foremost 20st century Urdu short story writers.  Her work was banned for a long time in India, Pakistan and in Islamic theocracies (and probably still is) as too radical in its treatment of women and for its open treatment of sexuality.  The stories seem like the mildest of works now to me but that her stories once were so controversial shows the changing of the times.   She was considered a great champion of the rights of women, which is probably what got her in trouble!

Her most famous story by far is "The Quilt" (there is some background information on her in my post on this story) which has very deeply veiled reference to a lesbian relationship, something punishable my death under Islamic law.  (She was a Muslim but she stayed in India after the 1947 partition.)    Of the two stories of Chugati, I found "Housewife" the more interesting.   The story is set among ordinary people in Mumbai.  (I have an attraction to stories and novels about Mumbai/Bombay as I have many wonderful readers who live there).    There are two central characters, Mirza who owns a small shop and his maid, who becomes his wife, Lajo.   I wonder how many millions of women in India had life histories like this:

"Lajo was an orphan.  She was abandoned on the streets by unknown parents.  She lived by begging and snatching a living from garbage until she grew into a shapely an attractive woman.  "Youth etched her body into  bewitching curves and this became her only asset   The street intitiated her into the mysteries of life.   She never haggled   If it was not a cash down proposition, it would be sex on credit.  If her lover had no means, she would even  give herself for free".

No one ever taught her any sense of religious morals, she felt no shame at all.  As she aged she became a maid and all of her masters ended up having sex with her, beating her and then throwing her out, maybe for fear their wives would find out or from shame.  She was almost certainly of the Dalit (untouchable caste) and to have sex with her was a source of great blame for those in higher castes.  It is my understanding that it was, and for all I know still is, a common practice for Brahmins to take Dalit women as mistresses or seek them out as prostitutes, maybe this way they avoid bring shame on higher caste women.  Anyway one day Mirzi's friend brings over Lajo and tells him she should hire her as a maid.  He sees her as a "slut from the street" and at first he does not want her in the house but she offers to work for nothing but some food and a place to stay.  It turns out she is a marvelous cook and a great housekeeper and manages the kitchen budget with total honesty.   She is confused that Mirzi does not want to have sex with her, all the other men she has worked for have been very eager for this.   One day Mirzi succumbs, we knew he would!   He really enjoys having Lajo in his house, he likes her food and he relishes her shapely body and the sexual skills life on the streets taught her.   I will tell a bit more of the story as It will be hard, I think, for most people to read this.  Against the advise and strong wishes of his family, his mother is outraged, he marries her. Now she begins to wonder why he never beats her like a husband should.   He does at last beat her and now she feels like she is truly his wife.   Other men she has worked for loaned her out to their friends but Mirzi is very possessive of this and she likes that.  

This story gives us a good look and life in Mumbai.    Under it all, it is a story of caste issues, heartbreaking poverty and a society which throws out female children.  I really liked it alot and I think anyone who reads it will also. I know it sounds wrong to say this, but it was told with a lot of humor.  I read this in a very good anthology of Indian short stories, Best Indian Short Stories, edited and introduced by Khushwant Singh.   You can download a sample of the book from Amazon which will allow you to read the very interesting introduction and see all the stories in the book.  I bought it and I almost never buy any books.

It was translated from Urdu by Fatima Ahmed.

I was able to purchase this book through the generosity of Max u in providing me with an Amazon gift card.

I hope to post again in Banned Books in 2013.

I will be posting on a good number of stories from the anthology by Singh.

If you know the exact publication history of this story, please leave a comment.  My publication date for it is an estimate.  If you know where more of her work can be read online, please let us know

Mel u
The Reading Life
@thereadinglife

Banned Books Week

Sept 30 to Oct 6

Day Five

Banned Books Week is in its 30th year.   I will be observing the week in two ways.  I am posting a series of five guests posts, courtesy Open Road Media in which well known authors talk about what Banned Books Week Means to them.  I am also doing a few posts on short stories by authors whose work was once banned.

Prior Guest Posts for Banned Book Week

My posts for Banned Books Week

Guest Post

The Last Ones to Know: What Happens When an Author's Book Is Challenged

Patricia C. Wrede, author of young adult fantasy novels:

Writers are usually the last ones to hear if there's been a challenge to their books; it's not like there's a notification system. Often, we hear by accident, as happened in my case. I was speaking to a convention of teachers and librarians shortly after the Enchanted Forest books came out; after my talk, one of the teachers came up and told me that she had nearly been fired when a parent complained that she was "teaching witchcraft by using Calling on Dragons in the classroom." Fortunately, the principal had a sense of humor.

Robert McCammon, author of modern horror and historical fiction:

In 2006, the Hernando County School District near Tampa, Florida, challenged the novel Boy’s Life by Robert McCammon. The author flew down to attend the school board meeting and read an open letter defending his work. The school board decided not ban Boy’s Life. McCammon wrote:

Many changes in our country have been for the better. One most certainly has not. The loss of the good guys. The blurring of white hats and black hats, until all you get is a murky and unreliable gray.

Boy's Life sets out to show the difference between the good guys and the bad guys. I suppose for that reason alone it is a hopelessly old fashioned and nostalgic book. Does it have profanity? Indeed it does, and actually more than I recall putting in there when I wrote it. Is some of it tough, and nasty, and makes your skin crawl? Absolutely yes.

You might ask why I would write a book like that, for young people to read. I would say that I did not write it for young readers. However, over the course of this book's life, it has struck a chord with young readers. I don't know why, since it's set in an era that was lost before they were born. I think it must be something universal, something of yearning and struggle and change and fitting into a world that is very often filled with frightening shadows.

One thing that I believe Boy's Life does very well. Extremely well. Is showing the difference between the good guys and the bad guys. . . .

To finish, there are so many young people who might read Boy's Life and see their own creativity take flight, and possibly their own dreams of writing come true.

And one thing they will take from Boy's Life into the future is a clear understanding of the difference between the ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad.’”

End of Guest Post

My thanks to Open Road Media for offering me the opportunity to share these guests posts with my readers.

When books are banned the sound of the jack boot can be heard in the background.

Mel u

The Reading Life

@thereadinglife

Books Banned in Boston Bannned Book Week Day Four

Banned Books Week

September 30 to October 6

Day Four

Banned in Boston

Banned Books Week is now in its 30th year.   I will be observing the week in two ways.  I will posting a series of five guests posts by distinguished authors, courtesy of Open Road Media.   I have also decided to do a few posts on short stories by authors whose work has been famously banned.   Boston is the capital of the state of Massachusetts, in the North Easterner USA .   Mitt Romney was its governor there a few years ago (OK take that how you like!) but it is also the home to some of America's finest universities.   I will say I am pretty sure Mitt has not read any of the books discussed in the posts for this week.   

Guest Post

"Banned in Boston"

Noah Gordon, internationally bestselling author of the Cole Family Trilogy:

In the city I love above all others, rigid censorship has cast a long and early shadow that remains a stain on its history. In 1621, the town elders  of Boston reacted with cold rage when William Pynchon, founder of Springfield, Massachusetts, wrote a book criticizing Puritanism. They condemned the book and drove the author back to his native England—the sorry beginning of a shabby tradition of Boston book banning.

In the twentieth century so many books were branded that “banned in Boston” became an idiom and a cliché. To Kill a Mockingbird, Brave New World, Native Son, The Sun Also Rises, Strange Fruit, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—and so many other wonderful books, all of them forbidden! The banning guaranteed that I and others immediately sought them out and read them, so the bluenosed banning, while despised, was nevertheless a semicomical happening.

Not so other bannings. In the 1930s, in a square across the street from the University of Berlin, Nazis burned books considered unsuitable for Aryan readers. Today we have graduated to a world where literary disapproval may well involve a fatwa, bloodshed, riot, and murder. One of the most worthy goals of a free society must be to strive for free dissemination of ideas, on a planet in which writers may publish books without fear.

Mary Glickman, author of Home in the Morning and One More River:

In 1983, a translation of The Penitent, a 1974 novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature, was launched. I loved Singer. I devoured every word he wrote. Multiple times. I asked my local library to purchase the book. Weeks later, I was sent a postcard refusing purchase on the basis that the work in question was “offensive” and without redeeming esthetic merit. Why and to whom it was offensive was not revealed.

My local library was in Brookline, Massachusetts, Boston’s epicenter of Jewish life, a bastion of liberalism, as progressive as people got in 1983. The refusal flummoxed me. I never understood it. Until recently, that is, when I googled the book’s New York Times review by none other than renowned professor and critic Harold Bloom, who opined: “It is an extremely unpleasant work without any redeeming esthetic merit or humane quality.”

 oher

I read the book. I do not pretend to the genius of a Harold Bloom, but I found much esthetic merit and humane quality in it. The Penitent may not have been Singer’s best work, but it’s work that expresses ideas from a Nobel Prize–winning mind. While I can’t be certain, I can make a case that it was Bloom’s review that prompted the library‘s attempt to blast The Penitent into oblivion. It was a boneheaded move.

But it’s a cautionary tale, no? Best summed up as: Do not make judgments based solely on the opinions of others. No matter who they are. Especially where great art is concerned.

End of Guest Post

My thanks to the authors who participated in this post

Mel u

The Reading Life

@thereadinglife

"The Gilded Six-Bits" by Zora Hurston Banned Books Week Day Three

"The Gilded Six Bits" by Zora Neal Hurston (1934, 5 pages)

Banned Books Week 2012

September 30 to October 6

Day Three

Zora Hurston\

(1891 to 1960)

Guests Post for Banned Books Week

My post on Franz Kafka

My Prior Posts on Zora Hurston

Banned Books Weeks, sponsored by the American Library Association, is in its 30th year.  I am observing the week in two ways.   I am hosting a series of five guests posts, courtesy of Open Road Media, one of America's most interesting and innovative publishers, in which distinguished authors talk about banned books.   I am also posting this week on short stories by authors whose work has been banned and trying to explain why and how this came about.   

Zora Hurston (1891 to 1960-born in Alabama, in the USA) was a folklorist focusing on African American people in rural Florida during the 1930s.   She was also a playwright,  the author of lots of wonderful short stories and is probably most famous now for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.   Her novel is now considered essential reading in feminists and African American studies but this recognition came only after her death, in total poverty.  (There is additional background information on Hurston in my prior post on her work.)

Hurston's work was banned because of social pressures from two seemingly incompatible directions.   She was trained as a field anthropologist by Frederick Boas and Ruth Benedict.   She was the only non white student at Barnard College and studied along side of Margaret Mead.   Her field work was done in rural Florida, where she grew up,  among descendants of  slaves.  Hurston tried very hard to duplicate the speech patterns and write accurately about the people she observed.   To those in charge of the publishing industry and schools (basically all whites) the people in her stories seemed to speak in a completely uneducated grossly ignorant fashion so they would not publish her work or sanction its teaching.    It was taken up by the literary movement known as The Harlem Renaissance and  affluent white  very educated people who cherished her work as folk tales.   Later she was attacked from another direction.   People turned on her and said she had turned the people in her stories to fools, with the women as near whores and the men as drunken abusers who all spoke in a fashion straight out of an old racist radio and TV show, Amos and Andy.  Hurston was considered to have sold out the people she grew up with for approval and financial support by wealthy whites who supported her work.   So was for many years scorned by black studies programs and by white Racists.   She ended up dying alone, in poverty in a nursing home after years of alcoholism.   

Since her death her stories and folk studies have come to be seen as the best real life glimpse of what it was like to be black in rural Florida in the 1930s.  

"The Gilded Six-Bits" is a great story, not such a historical document (If that was all it was I would not post on it).   It about the married life of an African American couple.   They seem to have a wonderful relationship.  The man works hard at his night job at a lumber mill and the wife works hard at home and in her vegetable garden.   They seem to really enjoy their relationship.   Some may still find the conversations of the characters offensive and think they are patronizing to the people of the milieu.   What I loved about this story so much is how it makes  person, no matter who they are, think about what would happen to their marriage if the husband were to walk in on his wife in bed with a man he hated.

   This is not Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina but it has a great deal to tell us about how adultery happens and the consequences of this for a happy marriage, something the great masterworks do not give us.   It is only a few pages long and I will leave the rest of the story untold (I will provide a link where you can read it at the end of the page.)   It made me wonder what I would do if I were the man in this story.   There is real wisdom in this story.  I think anyone who reads this story will want to read more of Hurston's work.   I know I do.  

The story would offend a lot of people today with its use of now totally unacceptable words, by African Americans on each other and probably might not be teachable in a general classroom in the USA.    She went from being banned by white racists, to being banned in black studies programs as pandering to the prejudices of racists to an icon of American literature and our best source into a lost culture.   She was also banned for the sexual content of her work.  One of her most famous stories, "Spunk" plays on the slang meaning of the time for this word, which is "semen".   Black men do often seem sexually rapacious in her stories and women may be seen by some as portrayed as of low sexual  morals to the conservatives of the times.   

My suggestion is to read "The Gilded Six-Bits" for yourself and make up your own mind on why it was banned or if it deserves to be read.   My guess it will leave you wanting to read her other 49 short stories.

You can read this story, and others by Hurston, here.


Please share your experience with Hurston with us. 

Mel u

The Reading Life

@thereadinglife

Why Is That Book Banned? Authors Share Biggest Banning Surprises

Banned Books Week

September 30 to October 6

This week in honor of Banned Books Week I will be posting a series of five guest posts in which distinguished authors tell us about their favorite banned books.   I have also decided to do a series of posts on short stories by authors whose works have been banned.  I started with Franz Kafka.

Day One Guest Post-Five Authors Share Their Favorite Banned Books with us

"A Country Doctor" by Franz Kafka-banned in his home country for decades

A Guest Post from Open Road Media

Why Is That Book Banned? Authors Share Biggest Banning Surprises

Agustín B. Palatchi, author of the forthcoming book The Florentine Emerald:

The book whose inclusion in the [banned books] list surprised me most is The Lord of the Rings, because it is supposed to be a fantasy. However, it should not be surprising. After all, fairy tales have always been the best way to reveal mythical archetypes and hidden truths to kids without censors being able to realize what lies behind the simple plot.

Scott Spencer, bestselling author of ten novels, including Endless Love:

For a while, my novel Endless Love was banned from libraries in a number of school districts. As part of an evening organized by PEN to bring attention to the problem of censorship of literature, I was invited to participate in an evening of readings from various banned books at the Public Theater in New York. It was there that I met Margaret Hamilton, who most famously played the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz. I read from The Bell Jar, which has been banned here and there, and Ms. Hamilton read, naturally, from one of L. Frank Baum's many novels, and by the end of her reading I was still trying to figure out why anyone in their right mind would want to pull his work off the shelves. 

Ellen Datlow, acclaimed science fiction, fantasy, and horror editor:

To me the most surprising of the books on the banned list are The Call of the Wild by Jack London and Sophie’s Choice by William Styron. I admit that I’ve never read The Call of the Wild other than as a Classics Illustrated title as a child, but from what I remember I can’t imagine who would ban such a book. And why Sophie’s Choice? It deals with ugly historical truths and the fallout for survivors of genocide. If you want to protect young people from the harsh facts of life, you might as well ban fairy tales and all fiction. All a child has to do is watch television, read newspapers, go online to see these things. Are you going to ban the news?

End of Guest Post

My thanks to the authors who contributed to this post.

Please share your thoughts on some of your favorite banned books with us.   What short story writers do you suggest I cover for the week?

Mel u
The Reading Life
@thereadinglife

Three Authors Express Love for Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita Banned Books Week Day Three

Banned Books Week

Sept 30 to October 6

A Guest Post from Open Road Media

I will be observing Banned Books Week, now in its 30th year, in two ways.   I will be posting five guests posts in which distinguished authors share their thoughts on banned books that matter to them.  I will also be posting my own observations on a work by an author who was famously banned.  

My post on Franz Kafka for Banned Books Week

My own post on Lolitia

Prior Guest Posts for Banned Books Week

"Lo. Lee. Ta." Three Authors Express Love for Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita

Mary Glickman, author of Home in the Morning and One More River:

When we think of the people who ban books, images come to mind of the sexually repressed, of Nazi bonfires, of regressive, extremist sectarians, and other assorted nutcases. We wonder why should we be denied the beauty of a paragraph like: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” So what if the novel’s unreliable narrator is a pedophile. It’s not as if Humbert Humbert ends well.

Peter Mountford, contributor to Hotel Angeline and author of A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism:

When I was twenty-five and had just abandoned a fledgling career as an international affairs commentator, I moved into a large abandoned Tudor in northwest Washington, DC, and started working as a waiter in a swanky restaurant. The house—my childhood home (my father wasn’t able to sell it)—had one piece of furniture: a mattress, on the floor of the attic. It was romantic stuff: I had no plan, no money, still smoked cigarettes. For entertainment, I owned a typewriter and a library card. Almost by chance, I discovered Nabokov—I was sufficiently oblivious that I’d thought I was in for something like Tolstoy when I picked up Lolita. From that first page—from that deliriously lyrical first sentence, in fact—I fell desperately in love with Nabokov’s writing. I’d never read anything like that before.

For better or worse, I immediately knew what I had to do with the rest of my life: I had to try to re-create that feeling for other people. My first misstep was to try to copy Nabokov’s style (I failed in that particularly dopey way that people who try to imitate Nabokov will do).

Over three months, I read a dozen of Nabokov’s books—underappreciated Ada became my favorite—before I started on the books he admired. He wrote a series of essays on Gogol, so I forced myself to read Gogol. Something similar happened with Don Quixote, but I gave up, because even Nabokov seemed to find Don Quixote unbearable.

Roser Caminals, author of The Street of the Three Beds:

Certain books have been banned based on technicalities. This is the case of Réquiem por un campesino español (Requiem for a Spanish Peasant), a classic novel on the Spanish Civil War by Ramón Sender. The original title was Mosén Millán (Father Millán) and it was the reference to a priest in a political context that resulted in censorship. Once Sender, an exile in Berkeley, California, agreed to change the title, the book was allowed to see the light without further changes. In the case of Lolita, the censor is a reader who doesn't draw the lines among author, narrator, and character. He thinks that Vladimir Nabokov, a Russian exile in the United States, is a pedophile, and his novel an autobiography that endorses the protagonist’s seduction of a pubescent girl. Irony isn’t written in ink, and so it doesn’t count. When Lolita came out it was derided as a scandal, when in fact it’s a masterpiece that should be a required text in twentieth-century fiction courses. Art can use the vilest materials, such as war, rape, and discarded soda cans, to produce beauty. As Nietzsche said, only through aesthetics do we reconcile ourselves to the tragedy of existence. The censor state can’t. It is stuck with the tragedy of ugliness.

End of Guest Post

My thanks to all the authors who shared their thoughts on Lolita with us.   I respectfully do not agree with Peter Mountford's comment on Nabokov's reaction to Don Quixote.    Maybe Nabokov felt a sense of the futility of the enterprise of the novelist in the face of the overpowering start that Cervantes gave the modern novel.  

Mel u
The Reading Life
@thereadinglife

"A Country Doctor" by Franz Kafka

"A Country Doctor" by Franz Kafka (1919, 5 pages)

Banned Books Week

September 30 to October 6

Guest Post from Five Authors on their favorite banned books.

This week I will be observing Banned Books week in two ways.  One by posting a series of five guests posts authored by well known writers on their favorite banned books and secondly by posting on some short stories by authors whose work has been banned.

 Franz Kafka's work was banned for many years in his birth country Czechoslovakia as decadent and depraved.   In 1989 he was finally given the honor in his home country he deserved.    In 2007 his work was banned from schools in Poland.  During the reign of the Nazis in Germany, his work was banned as "appearing to be too Jewish".  He was also banned during much of the period of the Soviet Union in Russia.  

Franz Kafka (1883 to 1924-Prague) is one of the dominating figures of world literature.   Even writers who have never read any of his works  are very influenced by his surreal plots of people  trapped by absurdities.

   How many times have you read an article in which a writer was described as "Kafkaesque"?    My suggestion is that instead of reading all these imitators we read more of the real thing.  Lots of Kafka's many short  stories, some in brand new translations, can be read for free online (I will provide a link at the end of the post).   I have previously posted on two of  his most famous short work of fiction.  One is  sure one of the most influential short stories of all times, "The Metamorphoses"  and also his amazing story, a bit longer, "The Penal Colony".   Both of these works are very great works of art.   I know a lot of people, as I once did, dismiss short stories as a "lightweight" literary form but I do not think anyone who has read these two Kafka stories would say that.   They are not hard force yourself to read works because they are assigned in a class stories (if they were I would say so) but they are part of the canon of the short story and they are actually quite thrilling to experience.

"A Country Doctor" is a strange (no surprise with that) story about the attempt of a country doctor to save  the life of a sick young boy.  In the middle of the night he needs to go on a ten mile trip to the boy but his horse died the previous day.  Just as he despairs over what to do, a mysterious horse groom appears and offers him two horses to pull his carriage.   The groom looks at the doctor's young housekeeper Rosa with clear intentions of molesting her once the doctor leaves, he forces a kiss on her as soon as he sees her.   The doctor suggests the groom go with him but he wants to stay behind, telling the doctor he will slow down his journey.   The doctor knows he can possibly save the boy but the price may be letting Rosa get raped.   He arrives at the house of the sick boy at an amazing rate of speed.

Once there he sees the boy is terribly sick looking but he can find no cause until he is shown a horrible wound in the boy's side.   He cannot understand what the family is saying to him, as if he were in another world where the language is not German but all else is the same.   The family,the reason is not clear, force the doctor to undress and get in bed with the boy.   The doctor leaves and now the horses  are too exhausted to carry him so he has to walk home through through the snow covered countryside.  

You can read this and lots more Kafka online here

Mel u
The Reading Life
@thereadinglife

Banned Books Week Day One-Five Authors Share Their Favorite Banned Books

• In Honor of Banned Book Week, an international event, I will be hosting a series of five guests posts from well known authors.   Today we have a very interesting post from five writers about their favorite banned books.   I live in a country with strong legal censorship of the media, there is even a move afoot to create a government agency to oversee blogs, so this is not a dead issue in much of the world.   Do not take your freedom to read and write for granted as billions do not have that right.

Five Authors Share Their Favorite Banned Books

Mary Glickman, author of Home in the Morning and One More River:

In 1983, a translation of The Penitent, a 1974 novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature, was launched. I loved Singer. I devoured every word he wrote. Multiple times. I asked my local library to purchase the book. Weeks later, I was sent a postcard refusing purchase on the basis that the work in question was “offensive” and without redeeming esthetic merit. Why and to whom it was offensive was not revealed.

Ellen Datlow, acclaimed science fiction, fantasy, and horror editor:

I first read Lord of the Flies by William Goldman as a teenager and it made an enormous impression on me. The lost boys’ movement from civilization to barbarism shocked me yet seemed utterly believable. 

Agustín B. Palatchi, author of the forthcoming book The Florentine Emerald:

The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. I was shocked because its raw description of children’s cruelty was beyond my imagination, but at the same time it was so realistic in every aspect, that I had to review my idealistic assumptions about human nature.

Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm by George Orwell. I was thrilled by their brilliant criticism of the system that rules modern societies and the fragility of the individual consciousness, our most precious gift. These books show me how mass communication, social manipulation, and the fear to be different from the crowd can be the worst dictatorship of all.

The Call of the Wild by Jack London. It was the first novel I read by myself as a child, and I became fascinated by the powerful images of life struggling to survive against all odds. Only the more primitive and deep instincts can be useful when civilization can no longer protect us from the wild.

The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien. I was thirteen years old when I read it and could not stop until I finished the book. It was like opening the door to another world, a fabulous world about to be covered by the shadow of darkness while angels (elves), were disappearing from the face of the Earth. I was amazed by the author’s ability to create a complete new world, so coherent and appealing that you could feel that it had existed in the past. Or should I say in our present?

Jennie Shortridge, contributor to Hotel Angeline and author of the forthcoming book Love Water Memory:

When I first joined Scout and Jem on their journey in the often-challenged To Kill a Mockingbird, I was probably eleven or twelve. I understood it was a book about a time in the past. I knew that when it said “nigger,” the writer of the story said it in a historical context, and that it was an awful thing to say. I knew already that bad things—like sexual assault and wrongful arrest and discrimination towards those who are different—were part of our world. And I loved that someone was brave enough to tell this story. It made me feel braver just for having read it. It made me want to do the same thing, to write brave books about real things in a way that people would really take to heart, and maybe do something brave themselves because of it. I’ll never write a book as good as To Kill a Mockingbird, but I’ll keep trying to write the most honest books I can, thanks to Harper Lee.

Julián Sánchez, author of the forthcoming book The Antiquarian:

I’ve read and enjoyed many of the titles on the list. Those generally considered to be youth literature stand out in particular: The Lord of the Rings and The Call of the Wild. The Lord of the Rings was the first book I ever bought, when I was twelve, while Jack London’s novels epitomized for me during my youth—and even today—the true meaning of the word “adventure.”

Nevertheless, outstanding among them is the extraordinary socially, historically, and politically charged Nineteen Eighty-Four. I undertook my first reading when I was very young, perhaps fifteen, and I remember the oppressive atmosphere that surrounded the story. Back then, due to my youth, I wasn’t capable of understanding the historical implications of the work; it was later, when I was thirty years old, when I understood that Orwell reflected the anguish of a society that could have come into being and that, fortunately, did not because of the defeat of the fascists in Europe.

And today, after the passing of so much time, in the face of evolving social and historical events and technological progress, I wonder if we’re not far closer to this digital “Big Brother” than we imagine . . .

Whatever the case, the final sentence of the novel is devastating in the way it emphasizes how we can let ourselves be influenced by power in any of its forms, even when we are fully conscious of it.

End of Guest Post

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Mel u

The Reading Life

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