Well-intentioned English teachers have for years tried to assign books to their students that they can relate to, which unfortunately leads to books like Catcher, in all its sober and painful adult reflection, getting forced on kids simply because they are about kids. If I had to name my least favorite assignment books growing up, the ones about children may top the list (“Romeo and Juliet,” The Red Badge of Courage, Huckleberry Finn). When I was in school, my favorite assigned books were things like The Iliad because I liked to read about Ajax mowing down Trojans with a giant tree, or 1984 because it seemed to “get” the growing mistrust of systems that had started to take root in my 7th Grade mind. Kids have simple lives, fixed around the poles of school and home and weekends; kids have problems — extraordinary problems — to be sure, but the pleasures and pains of childhood revolve more around needs and wants being met (or not) and fun being had (or not). Kids haven’t yet started to map their vast interior lives the way we adults obsessively do. I think more about my goals and character flaws and life-track setbacks while in the shower any given morning than I ever did between Grades 1 and 12.

This isn’t to say that those interior lives aren’t there; a child may feel what Holden feels but most likely hasn’t thought about those feelings the way Salinger does in the book. And if a child’s thoughts are primarily occupied with what to practically do with their time in any given moment, it seems a lot to expect them to take a break and ruminate on their life direction and society’s dishonesty and false promises, especially when they have to get to football practice.

All of that is a really odd way to lead off a post on one of the most touching and lasting books I’ve ever read, but there you go, and that’s partly my point. Though no kid will ever find a mundane tale of school remotely interesting (even with the tags “dropping out of” and “rejecting social mores of”), as an adult looking back on that time with the acquired skill of introspection, Catcher dawns heartbreaking understanding on whomever is receptive enough to its characters. As an adult, one sees that the first two thirds of the book (which are about and in reaction to school) is Salinger’s necessary set-up to the wallop of payoff in the final bit, which is instead about the small decisions we make that turn our lives into what they are by the time we arrive at them, without our conscious notice. Mr. Antolini — the teacher whom Holden reaches out to in the middle of the night for a place to stay — drunkenly, ineloquently tries to sum this up for him and for us:

“I have a feeling that you’re riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall. But I don’t honestly know what kind. . . . It may be the kind where, at the age of thirty, you sit in some bar hating everybody who comes in looking as if he might have played football in college. Then again, you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, ‘It’s a secret between he and I.’ Or you may end up in some business office, throwing paper clips at the nearest stenographer. I just don’t know. But do you know what I’m driving at, at all?”

The scene could be read as Mr. Antolini encouraging Holden to go back to school because, of course, that’s exactly what he’s doing — the text of his words is about the benefits of education. But a second reading shows that he’s not speaking to Holden the schoolboy; he’s addressing all of his comments to the man Holden will be one day:

“The man falling isn’t permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement’s designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn’t supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn’t supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started.”

He’s saying that a focus on the immaterial, arguably irrelevant nettles in life is not just a distraction from what matters but a fatal one, a message that’s still true despite the vague pass he makes at Holden a few paragraphs later that possibly undermines it in the teenager’s mind. And in speaking to the falling man, Mr. Antolini gives Holden insight he can’t possibly understand until the moment when he realizes he’s falling. So, reading this at the age when one could be throwing paper clips at stenographers punches hard. Certainly, 30 is not too late to make a change, to make your life about its meaningful parts rather than struggling to define its outlines and architecture (and inevitably failing to find pleasure in that).

To double back a bit, Holden’s reunion with his little sister Phoebe in the prior chapter gives us one of these meaningful parts (one of Holden’s, anyway), and I think it’s safe to say that Phoebe is one of the main reasons the book has such lasting appeal. It’s hard not to tear up when, after all of Holden’s horribly isolated steps through the story thus far, he steps into her room and:

She wakes up very easily. I mean you don’t have to yell at her or anything. All you have to do, practically, is sit down on the bed and say, “Wake up, Phoeb,” and bingo, she’s awake.

“Holden!” she said right away. She put her arms around my neck and all. She’s very affectionate. I mean she’s quite affectionate, for a child. Sometimes she’s even too affectionate. I sort of gave her a kiss, and she said, “Whenja get home?’ She was glad as hell to see me. You could tell.

Giving Holden something so important and then watching him leave it behind at the end is brutal. This makes Phoebe’s last-minute return so relieving, as she stubbornly, resolutely drags her suitcase along to the museum in a heroic attempt to secure her brother with the kind of undeterred nobility only young children have.

Since Holden’s story is about missing the significance of important early steps, maybe it’s fitting that for many of us, the book itself is lost to the mists of childhood schoolwork. But at least it lasts. When Salinger died last year, many personal recollections centered on the book’s final moment: Holden happy in the rain, watching Phoebe going around and around on that carousel. We may have forgotten why it matters, but we’ve never, ever forgotten it.

While it may not look like I’ve been reading much at all by the total lack of posting, you’ll be surprised to know that my lack of posting is due to two things that aren’t that:

1. The “L” key was stuck on my keyboard.

2. I’ve been too busy reading!

I know — not exactly as solid as Jessica’s “I spent the last year creating and raising a human being” excuse, but it’s a start.

As for the reading, what has been going down is that, inspired by David Denby’s classic Great Books project, I decided to, well, not to read all the great books necessarily, but to spend this year reading the books I personally should have read by now. Books most other people read in high school that I managed to avoid by taking extra Latin classes (Catcher In the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird). Books I know I love from reading passages and visiting museum exhibits that I still haven’t read all the way through (Lolita, Catch-22). Books all my friends have said I should read and, in fact, are shocked — SHOCKED — that I haven’t yet (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Fortress of Solitude).

To keep my sanity I have a couple rules for this effort.

1. No Reading Books I Don’t Like — Each book gets 20 pages of my undivided attention before I bail. If I don’t want to turn the page then I stop no matter how highly recommended. A couple titans have fallen to this one already. (I’m looking at you, Adventures of Augie March!)

2. No Need to Read Fast — Time-limit reading challenges bore me. So do massive-amounts-of-reading challenges. You read 200 classics in 10 months? Yawn.

3. It’s OK to Take Breaks — As much as there are books I have to read there are also those I don’t but still will. This weekend I read three issues of the New Yorker and five issues of Howard the Duck, so there.

I’m already several books in so I’m going to try and go back and fill in some of the lost posts here and try in vain to capture some of that spirit of discovery. But the whole entire point of this post isn’t about me (surprise!). It’s about you! Why don’t you read some Books YOU Should Have Read Before? And please tell us about it, won’t you?

Of course, though I would love for you to nominate Yours Truly Humble Blog for anything, our content flow is admittedly spotty so I will point you to a few of those I nominated instead. (Actually, what am I talking about? Jessica posts witty, engaging stuff all the time. Nominate Jessica for awards! Go do it now!!) Any of the below blogs are highly recommended for both award nominations and general reading pleasure. And many gracious thanks in advance for any WWRN noms with which you deem to honor us.

COMICS BLOGS

• Jog the Blog: Joe’s comics criticism is almost thrilling in its scope and readability, and it’s funny, to boot. Though he mainly posts quick guides to what comics are releasing in a given week, when he gets to a lengthy analysis it’s worth pouring a beer, getting comfy, and taking it all in.
• The Kid’s Comic Book Reviews: Liam’s astute gut-reaction reviews are matched only by his freewheeling and fun plot synopses that beautifully capture the current state of comic book culture better than anyone else. Oh, also, he’s 8.
• Thought Balloonists: True literary criticism (read: more than just reviews) from two professors who are also comics lovers. The TB guys don’t post often but when they do it’s brilliant and worthwhile and reminds you of the kinds of discussions you would have with your college lit teachers on the way to class when you were both running late.

REAL BOOK BLOGS

• Stacked Blog: The aforementioned Stacked is so great I nominated it for several categories. Christina is hoping for a few specific awards she mentions in her BBAW post but I wound up throwing in a few others that just made perfect sense, like Marcelo’s searing and spot-on essay on the Harry Potter phenomenon. Anyway, Stacked makes books seem interesting and accessible and relevant to your life — hit ‘em up.
• Paper Cuts: I feel weird recommending a mainstream media blog as mainstreamy as the NY Times, but I can’t help it — I love Paper Cuts! Reading this blog is like hanging out with people I wish I knew at the greatest Sunday afternoon cafe bull session of my dreams. It’s about reading culture, not just reviews, and is worthwhile for anyone who loves reading about books as well as typography, vocabulary words, and what your favorite authors eat for breakfast.

And with that, happy nominating, and we now return you to our regularly scheduled programming.

I hope you enjoyed reading some of these reflections on the sonnets but more importantly, I hope you felt inspired to pick up an edition to peruse on your own, at your own pace, in the little nooks and crannies of your day.

In that spirit, I thought it would be fun to collect a select few images of the many thousands of editions that have been printed since 1609. Keep on the lookout for the one that grabs your eye.

“But thy eternal summer shall not fade.”

The little Love-god lying once asleep
Laid by his side his heart-inflaming brand,
Whilst many nymphs that vow’d chaste life to keep
Came tripping by; but in her maiden hand
The fairest votary took up that fire
Which many legions of true hearts had warm’d;
And so the general of hot desire
Was sleeping by a virgin hand disarm’d.
This brand she quenched in a cool well by,
Which from Love’s fire took heat perpetual,
Growing a bath and healthful remedy
For men diseased; but I, my mistress’s thrall,
Came there for cure, and by that I prove,
Love’s fire heats water, water cools not love.

Am I the odd-one-out for liking the final two sonnets as much as I do? Yes, they’re little cute stories about Cupid and don’t involve any elaborate verbal trickery or even any complex ideas. And yes . . . well, I guess those are solid enough indictments about which I don’t have much to say.

But I can retort with this classic literary argument: come on, now!

While I don’t believe Shakespeare necessarily devised the order of the sonnets (the printer Thomas Thorpe seems to have had a lot of creative influence in how that first edition wound up) I can’t help but read this as a capstone to all the rest. Sure it’s allegorical, but there’s Will again (or, I should say, the poetic subject) in the story with the mythological beings, experiencing something close to a summation of everything he has been painstakingly describing thus far.

Cupid here is set up almost as a sleepy night watchman. He’s left his dangerous weapon untended while he takes a nap, and the forces of chastity are seizing the opportunity to cool this guy off permanent-like. I like the nymphs a lot, actually; here they seem to be trying to do a good deed in their way, taking the heat of love and passion and cooling it down so it can’t harm anyone else. But the opposite happens, Cupid’s arrow heating up the water and turning it into some kind of healthful restorative spring of eternity. Water cools not love, after all.

So much glorious contradiction. Love is a painful malady that needs curing. Yes! Love exists regardless of you, despite you, even. Yes! It’s restorative, lifting you up, curing not itself but quite possibly everything else. Of course. All of it, maddeningly, refreshingly yes. The end feels almost like relief from worry and thought. It’s a statement of fact that we can trust and rely on forever: love burns, heals, rejuvenates, and for better or for worse, no matter what that may mean to you at any given moment of your life, it’s bigger than you and it’s always there.

Always.

Shakespeare ends his deep collection of musings on immortality with a simple, arrow-straight story about always.

Thanks, Will! And happy 400th – you did it.

Then hate me when thou wilt; if ever, now;
Now, while the world is bent my deeds to cross,
Join with the spite of fortune, make me bow,
And do not drop in for an after-loss:
Ah, do not, when my heart hath ‘scaped this sorrow,
Come in the rearward of a conquer’d woe;
Give not a windy night a rainy morrow,
To linger out a purposed overthrow.
If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last,
When other petty griefs have done their spite,
But in the onset come: so shall I taste
At first the very worst of fortune’s might,
And other strains of woe, which now seem woe,
Compared with loss of thee will not seem so.

I wonder how often most of us have felt something like this and been at a loss to explain it; much like all the other sonnets, I know. The confounding thing about these is how expertly they get at the little thoughts and feelings and worries, the tiny stabbing things that sound so silly when you say them out loud. “Don’t leave me when I’m happy,” isn’t something easily expressed to a friend. The best of the sonnets don’t explore the obvious, but the simple and invisible.

This one always makes me think of another of those alone-at-night thoughts I often have: this too shall pass. It’s that old fable or whatever it is, where the king receives a pendant from some wizard or whomever and on the back is inscribed those words of advice he should take to heart in good times and bad. Particularly in the good times, I have a hard time escaping the thought of, “Well that’s all well and good for now, but what about tomorrow?” Not that it’s anything melancholy, just amazed truth: in those days when everything has gone so well, so knocked-out-of-the-park, I know that that’s not it. The days of mistakes and missed opportunities and abject failures will follow, almost to a reassuring predictability.

With that in mind, there’s a kind of heartening folly to 90, with its assumption that if you pile all the sorrows into one afternoon you’ll be done with them, that you’ll have tasted the very worst of fortune’s might. Ha! Will, you know that’s not true — that’s why I love your ridiculous rhyming poems! No matter what you do, that leaving will sting and it won’t be any less painful by coming on the heels of all the other disasters of a day. It’s not that things won’t look up, but you will always come back to sorrow — it’s the cost of happiness, after all.

The beauty of the sentiment to me is in its delicacy. The beloved means so much that the vulnerability is almost unbearable, yet it’s only acknowledged. He doesn’t say, “Don’t leave me,” but, “Do what you will, just please be careful.” It’s not a promise, but at least a question: can we, after weathering the storm, be sure we’ve weathered the worst? Let’s at least hope.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! It is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Hmm . . . I seem to be running on themes. Maybe if I keep up this exercise through to the end I’ll write about some sonnets that aren’t about impermanence and the immortality of love. But also, isn’t this one special in how understated it is? Maybe that’s another thing that makes me love the sonnets so much; an easier yet awfully heavy-handed way to go about these ideas would be to declare everything passionately, but he just says it all so matter-of-factly, with quiet images like wandering ships and starlight.

And yes, let’s not admit impediments, shall we? Time (equal to Death, as always here, taking away, bearing endings) is there, observed, not fussed over, but still there with his endings. But before Time is Shakespeare himself — he can also be a culprit of ending, adding obstacles and diminishing thoughts to something that is bigger than him.

A joining of “true minds” isn’t fickle or fragile or fleeting and survives its own corporeal ending. Time is just a collection of tiny days and weeks, after all, and this is a fixed point, a guidepost. Who are we to try to alter this thing that watches over our incessant alterations and evolutions? We just look up, change course, nod, smile, and carry on, despite the world.

When I consider every thing that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows
Whereon the stars in secret influence comment;
When I perceive that men as plants increase,
Cheered and check’d even by the self-same sky,
Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease,
And wear their brave state out of memory;
Then the conceit of this inconstant stay
Sets you most rich in youth before my sight,
Where wasteful Time debateth with Decay,
To change your day of youth to sullied night;
And all in war with Time for love of you,
As he takes from you, I engraft you new.

One of the things I love most about 15 is that it’s all one sentence. Observing the truth — surprisingly painful for how simple and obvious it is — that everything has just a fleeting moment of perfection before it begins to disappear, sets him off on a rant of syallables that all rush to the point in a mad unique urgency.

What that point may be seems to be a hot debate (or at least it does whenever I bring it up). The surface reading is totally valid — that’s the one where Shakespeare is preserving the young person through this writing. Another view is that it’s a poem about having children — that may or may not be valid (I don’t know, I ain’t no English teacher) but for some reason it kind of pisses me off. It’s true that the sonnets are very to-the-point and often literal, but there’s something so base and unartful about that. I think that poetry can be ruined by the over-explanation and over-literalization, just like those needlessly didactic description cards next to paintings in museums. I wish I could be the person in charge of those description cards so I could write things like, “Holy shit — look at how much BLUE Picasso used! Can you believe all that BLUE?! I mean, look at it!” So much better.

So yeah, the point: I love those last lines.

“And all in war with Time for love of you, as he takes from you I engraft you new” — to all things an ending but does the ending really matter? The ending doesn’t change the existence of the beloved, or the moments, or anything, and the willful “I engraft you new” is so heroic, at odds with the ravages of the open warfare against time. Instead of melancholy and regret at the passing days, you take in the moment of perfection and capture it forever. To me, it only skirts the point to say the poem is about a young person getting old when it’s more profoundly about everything that has its time and goes away: the old loves, the stolen kisses, the triumphant happinesses, the easy times, all of the little things that make up a life and disappear when you’re not paying attention. And in the end it’s about how to pay attention. Everything has an end but everything also lives forever.

Those hours that with gentle work did frame
The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,
Will play the tyrants to the very same
And that unfair which fairly doth excel:
For never-resting time leads summer on
To hideous winter and confounds him there;
Sap check’d with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o’ersnow’d and bareness every where:
Then, were not summer’s distillation left,
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty’s effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it, nor no remembrance what it was:
But flowers distill’d, though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.

Looking back from later years (whether regretfully, nostalgically, whatever it may be) comes back throughout the sonnets and I sometimes think those are the most poignant. Neil Gaiman bookended his Sandman comic book series with two stories about Shakespeare, the last taking place in his old age as he sat down to write one last play — “The Tempest” — hiding all of his past joys and regrets throughout it. Gaiman needed a story about a wizard giving up his tools at the end of his life and he naturally went to Shakespeare. When I read sonnets like 5 I see why.

The hours are the chief decider — they frame how we see everyone and everything, treating everyone the same. However you were in life, you will reach a winter where everything is gone. But we all know that. For me, the key to this poem — the insight that makes it depart from generic backwards-looking woe — is all this stuff about summer’s distillation. It’s one of those nerve-pinching images that stay with you forever.

Summer’s gifts last long past the end of the season through everything stored in the “walls of glass,” all of those jars and bottles that see us safely and happily through the winter. I’ve never given much thought to any symbolism in 5, to be honest; never thought, “Oh, he means the distillations are the old photographs grandma keeps on the mantel.” That bores me. The image as it stands captures something that’s hard to put in words other than those last six lines. Time passes on behind us, the moments lose their show, their appearance. Their sharp edges and colors are lost but the feelings those experiences have given us — the substance, as he puts it — are there forever. There’s no active remembering needed here — the nature of the summer is to end and also to leave behind the substance for us, still living sweet, a subtle affirmation of permanence.

So oft have I invoked thee for my Muse
And found such fair assistance in my verse
As every alien pen hath got my use
And under thee their poesy disperse.
Thine eyes, that taught the dumb on high to sing
And heavy ignorance aloft to fly,
Have added feathers to the learned’s wing
And given grace a double majesty.
Yet be most proud of that which I compile,
Whose influence is thine and born of thee:
In others’ works thou dost but mend the style,
And arts with thy sweet graces graced be;
But thou art all my art and dost advance
As high as learning my rude ignorance.

OK . . . damn.

I mean . . .

Where was I?

Oh yeah, trying to put together something coherent about that one but . . . damn. It’s hard to do that with poems like 78 that just come out of the sky and dollop some whipped cream on what you though were a good batch of sonnets. To quote one of my favorite English teachers (Mr. Benjamin, 7th Grade, Elizabeth Blackwell Junior High), “Shakespeare definitely had the lines.”

It’s easy to fail at a love sonnet. The form, when mishandled, can be goofy, and writing about love is often goofy anyway. The complicated parts of love are the most interesting to read about but sonnets can easily trip into simple, easy, and tedious descriptions of beauty. This one almost goes there in that second quatrain; “thine eyes,” etc., etc. — stop! Please spare us the long list of your beloved’s many virtues. Those kinds of things wind up sounding like too-clever versions of, “Gosh, you’re pretty!”

Shakespeare isn’t doing that here — he’s drawing a contrast between a couple things that make for a more complex observation. The beloved is wonderful, sure — she enhances everything she touches, doubling, teaching, adding. But what does she bring to his writing? Nothing. She can’t add anything to it because she is his art in its entirety.

What I love about this is that I feel Shakespeare means it. He’s not coding a “you’re so awesome” statement. He’s talking about both love and the creative process. He’s not saying here that he only writes about the beloved, but that the presence of the beloved grants him a lightness and perspective and confidence with the pen that brings something new and surprisingly beautiful out of him. In other words, he would still write if she wasn’t there, but why should he bother without the transformation within him that she compels? This is not about the beloved, but the lover, and what changes the lover can bring to the world with this new part of his life.

“But thou art all my art.”

Shakespeare had the lines.