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----- Original Message -----
From: Debbie Sawczak
To: 'Lance Muir'
Sent: March 11, 2006 21:06
Subject: Stone Reader I liked it. I was going to say I loved it, but then I realized that what I loved wasn’t it but the ideas and impressions it evoked in me—especially the memory of the experience of reading great books. That one scene, where we’re watching his son in the amusement park while the Stone Reader talks about the books he encountered as a young reader, was perfect, because reading really is like a carnival.
When I was 15 & 16 and living in In one of the review excerpts on Rotten Tomatoes, I read: "What Stone Reader offers that's new is
its portrayal of reading not as a supremely civilized and soulful activity but
as a lonely, thwarting and sometimes painfully embarrassing one." I could relate
to that somewhat. It made me think of
CSL’s description of a friend as someone who has read all the same
books you have and found the same thing in each one that you did (as
opposed to the alter-ego kind of friend who found the “wrong” thing
in them), and what a wonderful experience it is to find such a
person. In the Stone Readers’ words, it is like finding someone who
has travelled to the same far-off,
out-of-the-way places you have been to. I
wished that the Stone Reader guy could have found more people who had read the
book and loved it; even when he gave it to his friends to read,
they didn’t really get into it. I
guess when he finally found the author, though, that connection was made--which was all the more wonderful in view of the fact
that, on the surface of things, that was not a guy he would have been likely to
gravitate towards. Remember how he reminisced about reading Joseph
Heller, and being drawn for the first time by the “voice” of an author who was "the friend I could never find in
life”. So I was glad he
did ultimately get to find Mossman in
life. For me the book that falls into a similar category is Ernest Buckler’s Mountain and the Valley (Canadian, 50s, I think). I may have mentioned it to you before. It literally hurt to read it, because it made me aware that I didn’t know anybody in real life whose noticing of things was so much of the same kind as mine. He's sort of a one-book author, too; I believe Buckler has written a couple of other novels but Mountain and the Valley is the only famous one. I’ve never met anybody who had the same reaction to that book that I did. I'd like to read it again and see if I still feel the same way about it.
Also, a few times in my adult life I've tried to find a certain book called Canalboat to Freedom, that I absolutely loved as a child, but I haven’t been able to. It just occurred to me while watching Stone Reader to try the Internet, now that it exists! And lo! Used copies of the book are available from Amazon! The last printing was in 1967. I think I’ll buy it for my kids (...but what if they don’t like it? There's the 'lonely' part again). This was also the first time I’d heard of Harold and the Purple Crayon in many,
many years. I certainly remember reading it in the first few years of literacy.
In fact I can still see myself walking home from It was fascinating to
meet all those people involved one way or another in publishing--especially to hear them talk about the mystery
of success and why some people go on writing and some don’t, and how certain
books that were published 25 years ago would never be published today even
though they are still read and admired. I forget which guy said it was easy to
identify talent but harder
to recognize a person who had
the drive necessary to write a book. Oh--it was the guy who had attended the Iowa
Writers’ Workshop at the same time as Mossman. He also described how the ruthless instructor of
the workshop, whose name I forget, raised for him the question “Does anything
matter to me?” Good question for a writer to ask, and a very scary one if not
being able to write means that nothing matters enough to you.
But I also felt sad watching this (in fact I
think I shed a few tears at the end),
because that feeling of anticipation in the chest, about books, is almost gone
from my experience now. Early on in the
film, as the camera was panning over the titles on his bookshelves—and
mine are arranged like his, by
nationality—I saw the names of authors I read years ago who made a great
impression at the time but whom I haven’t thought of since: Saul Bellow, Joyce
Cary (have you seen the movie Mister Johnson?), Waugh, Kingsley Amis. My reading lost volume
tremendously as soon as we had kids, and has never properly recovered. It
bounced back briefly during the year I worked at CareerQuest editing their
bloody reports: I needed to get my head
out of that boring and unpleasant job so badly that I spent every noon hour
walking as far as I could get from the office in any direction for half an hour
and then turning around and walking back, while reading to distract myself. And
this past summer when I had no editing work, my reading increased some too. Somehow I have to
figure out how to carve more reading time into my life without paying less
attention to the people I love. I am afraid, saying that, that you will react with impatience; surely all that is
required is discipline, Debbie. Well,
maybe, and maybe not. Anyway, thanks for loaning me this, Lance. It was surprisingly good. The really interesting thing, for me, is that it didn't make me want to read The Stones of Summer, although I kept expecting it to; instead, it made me want to reread all the books I've ever loved. Which makes the point about how personal, how 'solitary', reading is.
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