Day 223 Muggy Reading

July 20, 2015

(This is part of a 365 project during my 70^th year where I write and illustrate a blog on each day’s gift.)

The marriage of muggy summers and reading is in my blood. I grew up in a Baltimore City row house with limited air circulation and before window air conditioners became part of everyday life. In those days, summer seemed to stretch out forever but that didn’t bother me because I had my books. On those summer days after a restless, sweaty night in a second floor bedroom, I had no desire to ride my bike or move much at all. I sat out on the glider swing on our front porch with awnings down to keep the sun off and read one book after another. If the temperature and humidity were really unbearable, I would walk to the next street and read in my grandmother’s basement. My parents’ unfinished cool and damp cellar with scampering water bugs was not an option. My grandmother’s basement, however, was finished with bookshelves, a summer kitchen and a comfortable reading chair. 

Today was too hot to walk in the park and my desktop computer seemed to be generating too much heat. The heat and humidity had sucked out any ambition for productivity. I declared today reading day. I did not consider sitting uncomfortably outside on the porch to read but plopped myself down on the This-End-Up sofa, put my feet on the Ikea hassock and read several hundred pages of a murder mystery. A magic happens when I shed my skin and jump inside the heads of fictional characters with a mystery to solve. I don’t want to put the book down.

Nothing has changed over the past 60 years except that the house air conditioning system now provides more comfort. Oh yes—one other thing has changed. The summer no longer seems to stretch out forever. 

My gift today is time, a book and air conditioning.

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 > Day 224 Solar

You can find links to my other posts on this project here:

http://bjschupp.blogspot.com/2014/12/365-gifts.html

Day 85 – Head Trip

March 4, 2015

(This is part of a 365 project during my 70th year where I write and illustrate a blog on each day's gift.)

When I was a young girl, I found treasure in basements.  I often perused a ledge full of my grandfather’s and uncle’s books in my grandmother’s downstairs kitchen, the cool room used during the summer before air conditioning. There I found Irving Stone’s Love Is Eternal, Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, and The Diary of Anne Frank. Although my parents read newspapers and magazines, I don’t remember ever seeing them reading a book. However, in our basement, I found A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. All of these books I read at least twice.

I also read popular children’s books such as The Bobbsey Twins, Trixie Belden, Nancy Drew and Dana Girls mysteries, Walter Farley’s horse stories, Albert Payson Terhune’s dog novels, Louisa May Alcott, Five Little Peppers. I connected so much with the Bobbsey Twins that when I was around 10, I began writing my own book, The Bobbsey Twins and Me, where I actually finished writing and manually typing 60 plus pages. As I grew older, I learned to treasure books like Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

Today I continue exploring between the pages of books. Although I read nonfiction, I prefer fiction where I get lost in a character’s head. Research suggests that reading literary fiction helps develop empathy. Unlike television where everything is spelled out for the viewer, reading fiction requires a different kind of connection in the brain. When you feel empathy for someone, you feel as if you are in that person’s shoes; when connecting with a character in a book, you step into that person’s head as if it were you. I find myself doing this with Laura Lippman’s books. Two books I read in the past week are also treasures— Jen Michalski’s The Tide King and most recently Christina Kline’s Orphan Train where I journeyed inside the heads of characters Molly and Vivian. The best books are those that not only offer something between the pages, but also between the lines. I understood perfectly when my daughter Lauren once said to me, “I’m sorry that I just finished my book.” She had connected so much with the characters and their lives that it felt like she was separating from a friend. 

My gift today is between pages.

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> DAY 86 Two Forests

You can read my other posts on this project here:

http://bjschupp.blogspot.com/2014/12/365-gifts.html

Read about research on the connection between reading literary fiction and empathy.

http://psychcentral.com/news/2014/08/12/can-reading-fiction-improve-empathy/73521.html              

http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/oct/08/literary-fiction-improves-empathy-study

Reading Uncle Tom's Cabin

Image from Archives of Ontario.

I was an avid reader as a child. The Enoch Pratt Library bookmobile came every other week to my elementary school, Brehms Lane in Baltimore City. I checked out lots of art books and some fiction.

But I wasn’t lacking for books at home either. I spent my $1 weekly allowance on either film for my camera or books. I had a 50-book collection of The Bobsey Twins along with other popular books at the time: Albert Payson Terhune’s dog books, Walter Farley’s horse books, and various mysters— Nancy Drew, Dana Girls, Trixie Beldon.

I could also go downstairs to our basement and find books such as the American Kennel Association’s thick book of pictures of all the approved dog breeds. I could look up anything in the complete set of The Book of Knowedge.

I remember finding a thick green book. Most books were hardbacks then and had no book jacket with a synopsis and other information. The title on this green book was Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I picked it up and read it, losing myself in a time and place strange to me.

This was in the 1950’s. We didn’t have slavery any more. My grandmother did, however, have a “colored” maid named Martha. I never did know her last name. Although my sisters and I were always taught to call adults Mr., Miss or Mrs. (this was before Ms.), we only knew my grandmother’s maid as Martha. Funny thing was that, at the time, I didn’t question why we were allowed to call an adult by her first name.

I read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, grew to love the slave characters in the book and cried at the sad parts. I re-read the book one or two times more. I felt close to the characters. They were like family. I was happy when they were happy and suffered with them through their miseries.

I once heard a speaker from the National Endowment for the Arts talk about how lack of reading, fiction in particular, was affecting involvement in the arts, including the performing arts. We were becoming a nation without imagination and curiosity, a people who didn’t find pleasure in fantasy and pretend, a community interested in facts more than play.

I think there’s another effect, too. Waning empathy. I remember how I climbed inside the heads and hearts of the characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel. I felt for them. I imagined their feelings. I learned to empathize.

Stowe's influential novel about slavery, Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, was first published in book form March 20, 1852, by J.P. Jewett of Boston. The text had previously been serialized in the anti-slavery newspaper, the National Era.

10,000 copies were sold in the first week, 300,000 within the first year. The many different editions published in Europe sold an aggregate of one million copies in the first year. It was the second-best-selling book of the 19th century after the Bible.