Happy Father's Day 06/21/09

Columns

Inactive Columns

Happy Father’s Day
June 21, 2009

I visited my parents today for Father’s Day. After a Mexican lunch at his favorite place, my sisters and brother and I were sitting around the living room casually talking when my father asked me if I wanted any of his books. I was surprised. While he hasn’t read a book in about two or three years because it is hard for him, the bookshelves that crowd his huge bedroom are stuffed with his favorite novels, histories, and biographies. The shelves are so deep that he keeps two rows of books on them, one behind the other, and more books lay on top of those.

These books are different from the ones that crowd the other living spaces of the house. They are my father’s alone, ones he has read and reread and loved. Ones that appealed to his love of the law, the sea, and the imagination. Even though he no longer reads because his vision problems make it hard for him to make out long words in one glance, he keeps these books around for the same reason most of us do: they are keepsakes, reminders of what he enjoyed. They are pleasurable companions that keep him company. So I was taken by surprise when he turned to me and asked if I was interested in taking any of his books.

Dad and I have relatively few reading tastes in common. We share a passion for some history and biographies and a few classics, but for the most part we read very different things. I didn’t expect to find much there. Except for the fact that they are my dad’s books I would have passed almost all of them by without even a glance. But because they are, they are less Tom Clancy or John Grisham than they are the relationship between Dad and me.

I went back into his bedroom and began pulling books off the shelf. What I was looking for were those I had inscribed to him. John Grisham’s The Firm was on the second shelf I came to. It was a hardcover first edition, but what attracted me to it was the brief inscription I had written:

Merry Christmas 1991

The law has arrived, and it’s waiting for you. In a good way, of course.

Love, Lauren

The book was his introduction to Grisham’s legal thrillers, and he immediately became a fan. I was also pleased to have given my dad his first, The Hunt for Red October, of several years’ worth of Tom Clancy books. Alas, I did not inscribe it.

A few minutes later, I came to a row of nonfiction. Among them I immediately recognized four that had been gifts from me: Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, E.L. Doctorow’s The March, Jon Meacham’s Franklin and Winston, and David McCullough’s The Johnstown Flood. I added them to the pile of legal and techno thrillers I had gathered and carted them out to the living room where I set them down between us on the sofa. As I showed each of my selections to him he commented on it, telling me what he liked about it, or what he found exciting. I enjoyed those comments so when I arrived home tonight I took a pencil and made notes on what I remember he said about each book on the inside cover. Then I dated it. What I don’t want to forget is why I have these books, books I normally would not have, on my shelves—because they are my dad’s and because he gave them to me. That makes them treasures.

Upcoming Book Festivals:
New York City is hosting the New York Book Festival this next Saturday, June 28 in Central. Open from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., it will feature exhibitors, ands two stages filled with schedules of author readings and musical performances.

The Pub House:
Let’s travel overseas this week to visit Mercier Press, an Ireland-based publisher founded in 1944. This press publishes books “critically important to Irish life and culture.” In their description they note that in the early part of the twentieth century books in and about Ireland actually came from London. Mercier’s founders determined to change that, and they accomplished their goal.

They were the first publisher to challenge accepted Catholic dogma, and it led the way in books that opened up new religious thinking until the Second Vatican Council sat in late 1962. They then turned their attention to Irish interest books. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the memoir It’s a Long Way from Penny Apples by Bill Cullen, became one of their most successful books ever published.

Mercier now publishes a wide range of books: drama, fiction, folklore, food and drink, gardening, history, human interest, humour, literary criticsm, poetry, true crime, and more. Among their current releases is the fifth in the Penny the Pencil series for children, Penny in Space. A mystery by a new writer, Colm & the Lazarus Key, has two cousins who dislike each other thrown together in order to solve a baffling mystery. Hitler’s Irishmen is the true story of two men, among a handful of Irishmen who fought for Nazi Germany, to actually wear the uniform of the notorious Waffen-SS. Though they had joined the Irish regiment of the British Army where they would have fought against the Germans, their capture on the island of Jersey led to their recruitment to the German special forces. The book is based on their own accounts and on recently released state papers.

Of Interest:
LitLine is a website “for the independent literary community.” What it is basically is an extensive listing of online journals from Abalone Moon (“a poetry and arts journal which is both thematic and eclectic”) to ZuZu’s Petal Quarterly (“A critically acclaimed journal publishing high quality poetry, fiction, essays, and book reviews.”) along with descriptions of what they are and what they publish. Poetry, the arts, reviews, short stories, essays, literary criticism, recorded readings, reviews, interviews, experimental/innovative fiction, philosophy, rhetoric, and more can be found here in journals whose readership may vary widely but whose quality tends to be uniformly good.

This Week . . .
I have something truly new and truly unique. “Penguin Classics On Air” is a new online radio series where the more than 1.400 titles that comprise Penguin’s classics line are discussed and explored in depth with either the line’s editorial director Elda Rotor or the Classics editor John Siciliano. Associate publisher Stephen Morrison wraps up each show by reading the first pages from one of the works discussed.

It began on June 16 with “Why We Love Jane Austen. The next four shows include “The Noli: Jose Rizal and the Novel that Sparked the Philippine Revolution,” “A Hero of Our Time: The First major Russian Novel?”, “Scholem Aleichem: Yiddish Classics by the Creator O Tevye from ‘Fiddler on the Roof’”, and The Birth of Knickerbocker: Washington Irving’s A History of New York.” Future episodes include a talk on the first novel written by a Mexican-American woman, an episode on Tolstoy’s last days; and an in-depth discussion of the Baghavad Gita.

This fabulous “online network” also offers the “Penguin Audio Book Break” where readers can hear audio book excerpts from new literary voices, “A Cup of Poetry” that features exclusive recordings of contemporary and classic poems published by Penguin, “YA Central,” “Project Paranormal,” and “Penguin Storytime.” All of the programming is original with new episodes produced each publishing season. Do. Not. Miss. This. One.

Until next week, read well, read often and read on!

Lauren