This Is Not a Political Statement . . .

Jenna Bush's response to reporter Ann Curry's question about what the American public should know about her father: “That he’s incredibly open-minded, that he’s smart, incredibly smart.”

Read the statement above and then take a good long look at the picture.

Okay, no matter your political leanings, you just have to admit this is funny!

Feel the Shame

I’m in a group of intelligent people, enjoying the conversation, the banter, the witty repartee, when suddenly it happens. Someone in the group mentions one of THOSE BOOKS. You know, one of THE ONES I SHOULD HAVE READ. I grow quiet. It takes only a few seconds to discover that EVERYONE ELSE in the group has read THIS BOOK. My chest tightens, my stomach begins to ache, I feel my face begin to flush.

I’m at work. Colleagues gather in the hall, talking, laughing. Suddenly the conversation is about one of THOSE BOOKS. I cringe inwardly.

A colleague stops by my office. We begin to chat, to talk about something a student said, a class, a current project. “You’ve read THAT BOOK, right?” I’m asked. “No,” I’m forced to admit. I feel the shame.

Now I’m not talking about the latest best seller or some obscure book that one reads because it’s in her concentration area but no one else would be expected to be familiar with. I’m not talking about eighteenth century philosophy texts or the latest book on deconstruction theory. I’m talking about one of THOSE BOOKS—a literary classic that I should have read, wished I’d read, meant to have read, don’t know why I haven’t read, am embarrassed I haven’t read, even though I’ve been reading all my life.

I have no idea how these particular novels have slipped through the cracks. For really long ones, I think it’s because it’s hard to find a big enough chunk of time to devote exclusively to it. But whatever the reason, I’ve been whittling away slowly on my list. Last summer, I read Les Miserables (yes, the unabridged version). The summer before, I read Nobokov’s Lolita. This summer, I read Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy. Surely they count, even if they were on my comps list.

Here’s a list of some of the books I feel I should have read but haven’t yet:

1. Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina
2. George Eliot’s Middlemarch
3. William Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying
4. Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange
5. Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged
6. James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
7. Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses
8. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov
9. Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie
10. Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum
11. Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago
12. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
13. Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook
14. Willa Cather’s My Antonia
15. Joseph Heller’s Catch 22

Prior to this, my list has existed pretty much only in my head, so I’m sure that after pushing that magical “Post” button I’ll think of some I wish I’d included.

Okay. Time to ‘fess up. What are you embarrassed that you haven’t read?

Genre Troubles

Our adult Sunday School class finished up a series on the parables last Sunday with the parable of the Wise and Foolish Builders, and I can never think of this Bible passage without remembering an incident from my childhood.

One Sunday when I was four- or five-years-old, our Sunday School teacher gave us an assignment. During the coming week, we were to ask our parents to help us to learn one of the parables, and then, next Sunday, we’d each share our parable with the class.

I went home and told my Mom about the assignment, but she never helped me learn a parable.

The next Sunday, the teacher went around the room asking each child to share his or her parable. When it was my turn, I told the teacher I didn’t have one. The teacher was surprised but kindly moved on to the next child.

After class, my Mom asked me how I did telling my parable. “I didn’t have one to share,” I replied.

Stunned, my Mom said, “Of course you did. Don’t you remember? We talked about the wise man building his house on the rock, and the foolish man building his house on the sand? And then the foolish man’s house fell down?”

“Oh, Mom,” I said, with the full disdain of childhood. “Of course I remembertalking about that. But that’s a song, not a parable.”

Probably not the first or last time I embarrassed my mother.



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Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park and creator of the TV show ER, died on Tuesday at age 66.

His first novel, The Andromeda Strain, was published in 1969 while he was still attending Harvard Medical School.

Open Mouth, Insert . . .

A few weeks ago at the Christianity and Literature conference, I struck up a conversation with a very nice woman while we were waiting for a session to begin. She told me that she was from California, that her research interest was the early novel, Daniel Defoe in particular, and she invited me to a conference her university was hosting next February.

I told her that I was working on my doctorate at Ole Miss, that my areas of concentration are Restoration &18th century British Literature and Women’s Literature, and that I loved Jane Austen.

“Oh, yes,” she smiled. “Austen’s our ‘candy.’ What are you doing your dissertation on?” she asked.

“Jane Austen,” I replied.

I wish I had a picture of her face to post here.