A Prayer for Owen Meany

I went to a very, very good school. I don't mean my college, though that was certainly great as well; the public school system in the town where I was raised (and regrettably, still live, boo) is quite good. All the same, I was not in the habit of reading any of the assigned literature, even though I took all the AP English courses. So my self-satisfied little bubble was quite burst when I actually went down the checklist of books on the two 100 Best Novels lists. For my 101 in 1001 list, I set myself the task of reading 50 of the books on the list(s), with ones read before not to count. Because, in my vast reading experience, I had surely read at least a quarter of them already.

Now, I was a big reader as a little one, but I often chose to relive old favorites rather than pick up new stuff. So I know the whole Little House series, My Side of the Mountain and The Giver by heart. When I got to high school and SSR (sustained silent reading) was done away with, I forgot about books. If I wasn't forced to remember what I was reading during the day, I forgot about it and never finished it. I cannot tell you why, as an avid and I dare say good reader, Going After Cacciato sits on my little girls' blue bookshelf, its binding fresh and crackly. If I knew, I'd market it to all the frustrated kids out there and be a bajillionaire. Alas...

Throughout college, leisure reading was precluded by the always-looming need to read one massive text book or another. I read a lot of peer-reviewed journals in college -- devoured them. I believe that, even including 6 week Christmas breaks and 15 week summer vacations, the only things I read for pleasure were: the Harry Potter series, Wicked, and Son of a Witch.

And big-girl literature is quite different from otherwise-girl literature. I'm sure of any list of top children's books would be much more familiar to me. For instance, I read the Newbery Award winners from 1996, 1995, 1994, 1992, 1990, 1987, 1986, 1978, 1976, 1973, 1971, 1963, 1961, 1949, 1945 (areyoueffingkiddingme?), 1944, 1942, 1940, 1938 (my grandmother always bought me a Newbery Medal winner), and 1936. I stopped being a "child" in 1998 and so have read 1/3 of all the Newbery Medal winners of my time. Which is not to say that the Newbery Medal is the be-all and end-all (I'm sure the relative merits of this award and that list are very contentious in some circles), but for pete's sake, I was a well-read child and I expected to find myself a well-read young adult!

And yet, from the lists I set down for myself, my "50" may not be any of the following: Animal Farm (#31, R#20), Lord of the Flies (#41, R#25), The Call of the Wild (#88, R#75), The Lord of the Rings (R#4), To Kill a Mockingbird (R#5), The Handmaid's Tale (R#53). I have excluded six novels out of a combined 120+. SIX.

On the bright side, I may be an ignorant, ill-read troll of a suburbanite, but at least my options are open.

I think my friend pulled A Prayer for Owen Meany off the shelf in the family room, because she applies herself to leisure reading and is always yanking books off of shelves. There are a few books of each other's we've had so long that we can't remember where they originated. I was putting away her early-morning selections and picked up Owen Meany, and started to read it. Don't worry, I won't spoil it. And take care you don't skip ahead or do something silly like read the Wikipedia article. You need to follow the rules to read Owen Meany, or risk losing the impact of it. So I plodded through it, and an unfortunately-timed cold, which has dovetailed beautifully with my raging pollen allergies, has made me loathe to leave the house. And so today, I finished it. This is my first encounter with John Irving, and I appreciated his affection for New England and old Yankee mannerisms. The way he describes Johnny's grandmother, as if he were doing so to people who had never met a Yankee in their life, made me feel a little less guilty about appreciating it. Perhaps there are indeed people out there who aren't so familiar with New England as to have their preconceived notions. Preppiness, and an appreciation for it that isn't wholly based on the (entirely understandable) love of J. Crew, is comforting to me. I have heard that this theme, his adulation of prep schools (the man grew up in Exeter), Labrador retrievers, and New Hampshire do wear on the reader after six or seven novels with the same throbbing undercurrent, but that is, I think, humanizing. It wasn't until JK Rowling that I understood that a novelist had to make up a universe...make up opinions, tendencies, uhg, all those things about myself that color my world. How is someone able to shed it? Perhaps no one can, or perhaps I just love to proselytize too much.

I liked the main character. He was so refreshingly devoid of self-pity. No, wrong word. Everybody loves an underdog story, right? To reflect this, most characters in novels have something against them. Yes, we want to see them overcome those obstacles, but somehow I doubt that life is about congratulating yourself for overcoming your perceived setbacks. Johnny is an illegitimate child whose mother dies when he's very young. But the novel is not ripe with the poignance of missing her (regret), it's filled with how much he loved her. It's filled with how much he loved his Grandmother, Dan, Hester, and Owen. A Prayer for Owen Meany, as a work of fiction, has a happy ending.

How lovely :)

Books from S

Unfortunately, while Marlo Morgan's Mutant Message Down Under has made its way onto my list of most moving novels, it is not "non-western canon" nor part of The Modern Library's 100 Best Novels, so I cannot cross anything off my lists. Regardless, it deserves at least a brief discussion.

I'm not sure whether or not I find it amusing that while We celebrate interest in other cultures and new experiences, I perceive that "novelty-seeking" is a fault or flaw, associated with rash decision-making, emotional volatility and hedonism. In any event, while novelty-seeking may lead one to buyer's remorse or extravagant car insurance rates, it has led me to explore other cultures.

Watching Australia (2008), I was inwardly a little embarrassed by how little I knew about Aborigines and their cultural roles in contemporary Australia. As an American, my world has always been full of structured information and contextual clues about American Indians ("You can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time"), so I at least feel some familiarity there. Furthermore, even as a child - back in the days before 847590472044 channels - I mostly watched the Discovery Channel, and we always got National Geographic. How quaint, I know. I can remember plenty of coverage for hunter-gatherer and nomadic societies on the African and South American continent, but none featuring Australians. Dear Media: It's all your fault. Again. Love, C. By far the most startling line in Australia was hearing the brother-in-law referred to as "black." Excuse me?

I said as much to S. S is my riding instructor here at home, and my boss at one job, and she spent her formative years in the Australian outback. She lent me Mutant Message Down Under, which is a strange title: the first two words refer to important parts of the story, and the Down Under is just there, I think, to contextualize the title and keep people from thinking it's about six-legged frogs. The forward of the novel, which is short, explains that the experiences were real, but that the content may be more digestible if treated as fiction.

The prose is simple and clear, and the tone is sometimes frustrated or desperate, though I'd hesitate to say "preachy." I left feeling a little cheated, not by the content itself, but by my inability to fully absorb the message of humanism, since I have not had the experiences of the author, whatever they may have been. Briefly, the author is an American woman who was doing advocacy work with a group of half-caste (that is to say, "neither here nor there") people of Aboriginal descent. For her work, she is honored by a meeting with a nomadic tribe. She is under the impression that she is attending a luncheon, but when she is driven out into the middle of the desert, she realizes she may have overdressed. She has no idea where the roads are, so she cannot drive back. Her choices are limited, and she goes with them. Begging your pardon, but whether or not a man's broken leg was healed in a day is not among my priorities.

The last novel I read was Geek Love (which has nothing, nothing to do with romance or nerdiness), and I found this book to be pleasantly devoid of indelicate subjects. We cannot be shocked all of the time! The message is lovely, and the reading uncomplicated.

I have read that Mutant Message Down Under is controversial because some Australian whites feel it casts them very negatively, and some Aborigines feel it is a sweeping generalization. I'm quite sure that the author did not intend a sweeping generalization, but rather that since westerners have very little exposure to relatable stories about the many, many societies that inhabited Australia before the arrival of whites, assumptions are bound to be made. The solution is not to ban the first taste, but to encourage a wider palate with more information. If I do not understand you, tell me and show me!