Maximum Shelf: The World’s Strongest Librarian by Josh Hanagarne

Posted on April 11, 2013 by pagesofjulia

Maximum Shelf is the weekly Shelf Awareness feature focusing on an upcoming title we love and believe will be a great handselling opportunity for booksellers everywhere. The features are written by our editors and reviewers and the publisher has helped support the issue.

My editor recently asked me if I’d like to put together my first Maximum Shelf for them, and said she had just the book in mind for me: The World’s Strongest Librarian: A Memoir of Tourette’s, Faith, Strength, and the Power of Family, by Josh Hanagarne. (My father found this a hilarious expression of what my editor thinks of me. I’ll let you work that one out. I haven’t.) I was thrilled; and I loved the book. Because this would make for an extra long blog post, I’ve split the Max Shelf issue into two posts for you, so please enjoy my review today and my interview with the gracious & funny Josh tomorrow.

worldsstrongest

Josh Hanagarne, blogger at The World’s Strongest Librarian, “might be the only person whose first three-hundred-pound bench press was accompanied by the Recorded Books production of Don Quixote.” This is just one of his remarkable singularities. A gentle giant who tears phone books for fun, at 6’7″ he tends to catch the eye at the Salt Lake City Public Library, even when his Tourette Syndrome is not acting up. His memoir explores these contradictions and oddities, and his remarkable journey from idyllic childhood to painfully jerky young adulthood to a contented family and work life.

Hanagarne had a happy childhood, beloved by his mother, an incorrigible prankster and devout Mormon, and his devoted, irreverent bear of a father. He grew up in libraries, a passionate bookworm disturbed only by the tics that began in first grade but would go undiagnosed until high school (although his father suspected Tourette’s from the beginning). By young adulthood, they were not only embarrassing but violent and debilitating. He would eventually suffer a hernia from the force of his involuntary shouting tics, and his larger movements resulted in injury to himself and chaos in his immediate surroundings. After high school he spent years trying numerous cures, in and out of college, working various jobs and struggling with depression. Lifting weights at the gym stilled the tics somewhat, and for a while he got regular Botox injections in his vocal cords to quiet the shouts and whoops. During that time he met and married a lovely Mormon folklorist named Janette. For the first eight months of marriage, he couldn’t speak to her above a whisper.

Although deeply in love, the atmosphere of Josh and Janette’s story early in their marriage remains clouded. For years they try to get pregnant. Janette suffers two miscarriages and they are harshly rejected by the Mormon Church as adoptive parents. Josh continues to tussle with Tourette’s. For a short time, he finds a position as assistant special educator quite satisfying, not least because his tics become unremarkable in a room full of special needs. But he soon leaves that job, because he seeks challenge: crucially, he aspires to overcome Tourette’s, to beat his tics into submission. Pondering what might present the greatest challenge to a man who can’t keep quiet, Josh is drawn to the quietest place he knows, a place that has always offered succor and delight. He gets a job as a clerk in the library and begins a master’s program in library science. And a key piece of marital bliss is finally achieved when Janette delivers a healthy baby boy named Max.

Josh continues to battle Tourette’s in the gym, discovers kettlebell lifting along the way, and makes a new friend in Adam Glass, a former Air Force tech sergeant and strongman: he bends wrenches and horseshoes and tears decks of cards and phone books. Josh’s story takes an inspiring turn as the twitchy librarian and the foul-mouthed strongman gradually develop a friendship; as Adam helps Josh build strength, together they also begin to understand and subdue the tics. He finds Adam a little strange, and the explanation for his social awkwardness is also what makes him the perfect mentor for overcoming Tourette’s: Adam is autistic.

The adult Josh Hanagarne who relates his story is content and stable, happily married, thrilled to be a father to four-year-old Max, and working full-time at the Salt Lake City Public Library. As he relates his stranger-than-fiction story, he intersperses present-day anecdotes from a workplace that he wryly notes is rife with strange and occasionally smelly patrons and events. He muses eloquently and powerfully about the role of libraries in society, and their future possibilities. Throughout his life and this book, Josh struggles with his Mormon faith, as he sets off on the expected mission and faces myriad challenges in school, work, marriage and parenthood. In telling a story about family, church and Tourette Syndrome, he always circles back to libraries and to books, in many charming literary references. And always central to Josh’s story is his love of family. From his loving parents and exceptionally close siblings through the clear delight Josh finds in marriage and fatherhood, he stresses the inestimable gift of a loving family.

Josh’s memoir is thoughtful, heartfelt, often hilarious– and unsparingly honest. He is not proud of every moment in his own past, but he shares nonetheless. The image of the man today who wrote this book and who works in a large branch of a public library in a large city is that of a serious yet funny, mature, loving family man, and this image is only partly at odds with the earlier, less secure young man we come to know in these pages. The younger Josh was unsure and unstable, and the author is more comfortable in his own skin. But both have tics, and stories to tell.

This review originally ran on April 9, 2013 as a Shelf Awareness special issue. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 9 minutes of calm.

Tomorrow: I interview The World’s Strongest Librarian.

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from NYT magazine (thanks Mom)

Posted on April 10, 2013 by pagesofjulia

I just wanted to share this brief piece from a recent New York Times Magazine. Via my mother – thanks, Mom.

(I tried to link to the printable version because it involves no pictures or graphics, which I find distracting. It redirects to the main article. Click print if you’re like me. [I was given a clipping of the print version, and that was nice.])

My mother didn’t include a note explaining the relevance of this piece. I think there is value in the observation of how much can be said in very few words, for obvious starters. But the poignancy is possibly the real point. Take what you will from it; I’m trying not to clutter it up with my own words.

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Teaser Tuesdays: Crossing the Borders of Time by Leslie Maitland, again

Posted on April 9, 2013 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. The idea is to open your current read to a random page and share a few sentences. And try not to include spoilers!

crossing

I continue to enjoy this memoir by the daughter of a French-German Jew who fled the Nazis as a teen and thereby lost her love. I did tease you from it last week, but I thought these lines were too evocative, thoughtful and real not to share.

His impromptu recital was a peaceful close to a day that had wakened to the tumult of athletes speeding through narrow Renaissance streets, crowds cheering at corners and loudspeakers blaring. That evening I would leave feeling grateful for the quiet bravery of all the Ficks and the Fimbels, people who risked their lives to wrestle with power in places whose names are not even footnotes in history’s pages.

The setting for this scene is a French town the author is visiting, one of the several towns along her family’s route from Freiburg eventually to the United States. Fick and Fimbel are two men who helped them escape occupied France. The athletes are triathletes in competition, and the impromptu recital is given especially for the visiting Maitland by Fick, now a very old man, on the organ in his church; and I think all together they make a fine sweeping view of this place in time. For one thing (referencing Maitland’s title), the Renaissance streets that now see triathletes whizzing by on what I’m sure are very fancy bikes surely never expected such a thing. And then add the organ music played by a quietly heroic man for the daughter of a woman he hasn’t seen in many decades… there is something profound in this vignette, isn’t there?

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The Solace of Leaving Early by Haven Kimmel

Posted on April 8, 2013 by pagesofjulia

solaceofleavingLangston Braverman has recently returned to her hometown of Haddington, Indiana. Very close to receiving her PhD she walked out of her oral exams. She is a strange, exceptionally erudite but socially fragile and problematic young woman. She has a dog named Germane: “named not after Germaine Greer, but as in: Germane to this conversation.” (I love that.)

Amos Townsend is Haddington’s pastor, of only a year or two now. He is tormented by the death of a local named Alice; he feels that he should have been able to stop her death, and he is struggling with his faith, which is actually nothing new.

Alice’s two children are left in limbo; their crazy aunt Gail has turned out to be unfit, and their grandmother Beulah is clearly too near death herself to wrangle with two traumatized little girls. Upon Alice’s death, they dispose of their original names, Madeline and Eloise, and state that they are now called Immaculata and Epiphany. They wear costumes from a Renaissance drama from school, that their mother made, all the time. Complete with hats: the tall cone-shaped kind with ribbons streaming off the tops.

Langston’s mother AnnaLee picks up some of the slack, and then insists that Langston step up: she is not in school, not working, and these children need her. Of course, Amos plays a role as well, so that this village will truly raise a child.

Langston and Amos are the stars of this story (along with the striking Immaculata and Epiphany, of course). When they meet, they repel one another like magnets. Despite sharing tastes and interests in reading, philosophy, theology, and (I can’t stress this enough) their particular brands of weird, they repel. And, as is clearly a theme in Kimmel’s work, the cerebral content, the philosophies and theologies that shape this part of the story are complex and thoroughly explored. I think I said this in my last Kimmel review, but: her many references partly pique me to go off and study, and partly exhaust me, making me so glad I don’t have to read Whitehead and Tillich and Frithjof Schuon. It makes me sit back and …wonder… that all these strange, complex, learned thoughts that Langston has are thoughts that Kimmel had to have first, had to conceive to put them in her heroine’s mouth; think of that.

Immaculata and Epiphany see Mary (the Mother of God) in the dogwood tree in their grandmother Beulah’s backyard. Naturally, because that is the kind of world this is. It is very strange and is a kind of beautiful, and again I observe that Kimmel’s gift is to create a midwestern small-town world that is both hopelessly humdrum and depressing and everyday, and also strange and exalted and worthy of examination.

What happens to our exquisitely odd cast of characters should definitely remain a surprise to you, reader. It’s pretty great, though.

I love this author SO MUCH that I am struggling to write reviews; but I will keep reading her. Next up is The Used World, and I am, of course, working to get my hands on her best-known bestselling memoir, A Girl Named Zippy.

I’ll close, as I tend to with Kimmel, with a few lines from the book that particularly caught my eye. Where these have, in the past, been lovely examples of her use of language, these are more concepts that I really liked. There is a book theme here. And the language is great – observe the curry comb, is that an image or what – but it’s the concepts that I like most here:

Amos knew as well as anyone what went into writing a book, having written a master’s thesis, and he considered the process to be akin to having one’s nerves stripped with a curry comb.

Maybe he knows what goes into writing a book as well as anyone… who hasn’t written a book?

The most intractable aspect of his bachelorhood was that Amos was uncomfortable eating without reading; he felt as if he were wasting both time and food.

Me too, Amos. I’m right there with you.

Amos tapped his fingers on his bony knees. “Why do you have a book and I don’t?”

“Because I’m a woman, Amos.”

“Yes, but why do you have a book and I never do in a situation like this?”

AnnaLee put the book down. “I carry a bag. I also have safety pins and emergency money, and a package of those little wet towelettes. We live in Indiana. I could get stopped by a train, I could get bored. I always carry a book.” She went back to reading.

How perfect is that. “We live in Indiana, Amos!” Perhaps it goes without saying that I, too, try to keep a book with me at all times? I fail on safety pins and wet towelettes, though.

I’m sure I’ve failed to do this book justice. But it’s divine.

Rating: 9 ribbons on a hat.

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book beginnings on Friday: The Solace of Leaving Early by Haven Kimmel

Posted on April 5, 2013 by pagesofjulia

Thanks to Rose City Reader for hosting this meme. To participate, share the first line or two of the book you are currently reading and, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line.

solaceofleaving

I am still super excited about Haven Kimmel! The other day I picked up The Used World and read the first few pages, compulsively, and only later noticed that it is (apparently) the third in a “loose” trilogy that began with The Solace of Leaving Early. So I put down the latter (effortfully), and picked up this one. (The book in the middle is Something Rising (Light and Swift), which I loved.) It begins:

It wasn’t given to Langston Braverman to know the moment she became a different person; she only knew later, looking back on the afternoon a simple storm arrived and stayed for days, the afternoon she first saw the children. The woman Langston had been was immune to visions and visitations; she was a head-dweller, an Attic Girl who could quote theologians on the abandonment of reason, but who, nonetheless, trusted reason the way one trusts one’s own skin.

I can already recognize the thinking characters that Kimmel favors. I’m ready.

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A White Heron by Sarah Orne Jewett

Posted on April 4, 2013 by pagesofjulia

I found this story online, for free, here. Thanks to the Open Library project.

thanks to the Boston Public Library for sharing

thanks to the Boston Public Library for sharing

I finally got around to this one, and I’m so glad I did. I’ve seen it referenced before, but it was in Iodine that I saw the allusion that finally got me. And it was pretty easy to find online in full-text form, so no excuses.

It is a simple story. A girl named Sylvia (Sylvy) lives with her grandmother in the woods; she is fortunate to have been the one of a “houseful of children” to be chosen for this life, because she was very unhappy with people and in the city, and now she blossoms. The birds and trees are her friends. She meets a hunter, a pleasant enough young man, who initially scares Sylvy (because he is people) but who she comes to like and esteem. He is seeking a rare bird, a white heron, who does not usually roost in these parts but who Sylvy has seen and knows. In her admiration for the hunter, Sylvy climbs a very tall tree before dawn – a feat of great proportions – to locate the heron’s nest. Perhaps you can see where the central conflict comes from.

This is a very fine example of the art of the short story. It is a brief tale, and simple, but layered and allegorical and very moving. There are only three human characters, of whom the hunter remains unnamed and the grandmother is usually referred to simply as “the grandmother”; only Sylvy consistently gets a name. This adds to the simplistic, and the symbolic, effect. On the other hand, the natural world is well characterized. I love the cow:

…though she wore a loud bell she had made the discovery that if one stood perfectly still it would not ring.

Or the tree Sylvy climbs:

…it must truly have been amazed that morning through all its ponderous frame as it felt this determined spark of human spirit wending its way from higher branch to branch… The old pine must have loved his new dependent.

We can see here the important role that nature plays. Indeed, Sylvy herself is part bird:

…her bare feet and fingers… pinched and held like bird’s claws to the monstrous ladder [of the tree] reaching up, up, almost to the sky itself.

Her tree-climbing adventure seems to me to clearly be an epic journey of a rather religious nature; but I am inexpert in religious texts & symbolism, so I’m not sure I can articulate that for you.

Part of what I love about this story is the deceptive ease with which we sympathize with the bird over the hunter. I read this story in the car, and Husband expressed an interest, so I summarized it for him (which was a pleasure in itself), and he took it for granted that we want the bird, as it were, to win. Well, that’s an easy conclusion to come to; we’re animal lovers, he rescues baby birds that fall out of nests (I call him St. Francis), we like the woods. And this hunter, after all, is a sporting sort, interested in bagging a rare species, rather than feeding his family. But I don’t think the same sympathies would have occurred, let alone been obvious, to Jewett’s original audience (in 1886); they certainly aren’t obvious to the hunter and the grandmother in the story. In other words, Husband and I had very clear-cut sympathies, but I think we read this story differently than it would have read in 1886. The fact that it is moving to us today as it presumably was then, but in a different way, is remarkable to me, and thought-provoking.

This is a lovely little short story in the style of realism, in praise of nature over human industry, allegorical and sweet and very powerful. I have left quite a bit unsaid – like, the ending – because I want you to read it. The link’s at the top of this post, and it won’t take long. Go.

Rating: 9 breaths of fresh air.

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The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo (audio): second half

Posted on April 3, 2013 by pagesofjulia

hunchbackIn brief: better than the first half.

In the first half of this classic novel, I felt there was a bit much explication of aspects less interesting to me personally: most to the point, the architecture of Paris and the history of that architecture. This turns out to be a historical facet that does not fascinate me. If you feel otherwise, enjoy. I said then that Hugo’s strengths lay in the narrative of his story, especially in dialogue; and it seemed to me that this second half had more of that. I am still refraining from plot summary, since that question is well answered by the internet at large. So, briefly, in this second half our characters meet their fates. La Esmeralda, Quasimodo, Claude Frollo, Phoebus, Gringoire and Sister Gudule are for me the central characters, and each comes to a resolution by the end; Hugo wraps up very neatly in that regard.

I found the story interesting – not riveting, but engaging in that I cared about the fates of these characters. It moved a little too slowly to be called riveting, but I did remain mostly attentive. (The description of Parisian building styles through the centuries was not entirely absent in this latter half of the book, so I did still zone out some.) Gringoire’s comic soliloquies are among the best moments; and the Archdeacon’s depravity was shocking and certainly absorbing. I think he easily equals the sociopaths featured on Criminal Minds. One of my observations on finishing this book is that 15th-century French society unfortunately allowed for such crazed and dangerous behaviors if one only held a high position in the church.

This is mild praise, you realize. The Hunchback of Notre Dame struck me as a fine story, but unremarkable. And yet Victor Hugo is a big name, and this one of his best-known works (I am not excited about Les Miserables!), so what have I missed? Well, for one thing, there is this assertion that I got from Wikipedia:

Hugo introduced with this work the concept of the novel as Epic Theatre. A giant epic about the history of a whole people, incarnated in the figure of the great cathedral as witness and silent protagonist of that history. The whole idea of time and life as an ongoing, organic panorama centered on dozens of characters caught in the middle of that history. It is the first novel to have beggars as protagonists.

Notre Dame de Paris was the first work of fiction to encompass the whole of life, from the King of France to Paris sewer rats, in a manner later co-opted by Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert and many others, including Charles Dickens.

And when put in this perspective, I see its value a little more clearly. Upon its publication in 1831 there were no novels like this; okay. On the other hand this is Wikipedia (and there is a sentence fragment in the above quotation, oh the horror), so, grain of salt. Certainly I can see how this is a great, sweeping view of 15th century France, as stated involving both the King and the beggars, and I am happy to nod to the precedent set even if this is not my favorite example of the genre.

The narrator, David Case, turned out to be perfectly fine and appropriate. I liked the different voices he plays for the very different characters of Gringoire (comic, self-important, whinging), the Archdeacon (dark, conflicted), Esmeralda (sort of a wilting lily), and Quasimodo (deaf). He gave the piece flavor.

In the end, though, I shrug at this lengthy audiobook and move on without looking back.

Rating: 5 gargoyles.

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Teaser Tuesdays: Crossing the Borders of Time by Leslie Maitland

Posted on April 2, 2013 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. The idea is to open your current read to a random page and share a few sentences. And try not to include spoilers!

crossing

I am pleased with the early chapters of this memoir, in which the author travels back to Europe to hunt down her mother’s long-lost love, from whom she was separated during World War II. Today’s teaser concerns the mother’s family, Jews who lived on the border between France and Germany in a region that changed hands between those two countries frequently, confusing their sense of heritage.

…for Sigmar, returning to French-controlled Mulhouse after [World War I] – a German war veteran with a new German bride – proved difficult too, with anti-German sentiment in France running so high. Feeling even less welcome as Germans in France than as Jews in Germany, Sigmar and Alice crossed the Rhine once again to settle and start a family in Freiburg.

This is a nuance I had not considered before, and drives home the displacement of Jews in this era.

What are you reading this week?

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Crapalachia: A Biography of a Place by Scott McClanahan

Posted on April 1, 2013 by pagesofjulia

The author of Stories and its followups, Stories II and Stories V!, shares a memoir of Appalachian boyhood filled with the requisite hardships but ultimately redemptive.

crapalachia

Scott McClanahan centers Crapalachia on two characters of his West Virginia youth who rule over much of the narrative–his Grandma Ruby, an ornery, fantastical mother of 13 (or so) children who also photographed dead people, and his uncle Nathan, who had cerebral palsy and enjoyed listening to the radio preacher and having six-packs of beer poured down his feeding tube. We also meet his schoolboy friends, like Little Bill, an eventual roommate with obsessive-compulsive disorder and a destructive crush on a girl down the street.

Crapalachia is an unusual story told in an unusual fashion, peppered with second-person references, advice to the reader on how to live, how to remember and forget. The attentive reader will also appreciate McClanahan’s “Appendix and Notes” for its revelation of where he’s twisted the truth (as he remembers it) to suit the story he wanted to tell. Like many memoirists, McClanahan is concerned with the nature of memory, its credibility and value. He sometimes gets mired in the unpleasant, cringeworthy details of life, then pans out for grand, loving, hopeful statements. This is a gritty look at life–in Appalachia, yes, but also in a universal sense. Historical detail turns what looked to be a memoir of childhood into the subtitle’s promised “biography of a place.” In the end, despite various tragedies, this poetic, rambling series of remembrances is surprisingly optimistic.

This review originally ran in the March 26, 2013 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 6 gallstones.

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book beginnings on Friday: Yellowstone, Land of Wonders by Jules Leclercq; with notes

Posted on March 29, 2013 by pagesofjulia

Thanks to Rose City Reader for hosting this meme. To participate, share the first line or two of the book you are currently reading and, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line.

yellowstone

I am having a difficult time deciding where to “begin” this book, because it opens with not just a foreword or introduction, but:

  • Foreword
  • Acknowledgements
  • Translators’ Introduction
  • Translation and Editorial Method
  • A Note on the Illustrators
  • Preface (by the original author), and…
  • Chapter 1.

All of which is not a problem for me; I read each of these sections happily (most were 2-3 pages); but how to design today’s book beginning? Let’s start with chapter 1:

In 1871 the American geologist Hayden revealed the existence of one of the most phenomenal regions on earth. It was named the “Land of Wonders.”

This quotation comes from an uncorrected advance proof and is subject to change.

As I learned in the copious introductory remarks, this is the first-ever English translation in full of an 1886 publication in French, La Terre des Merveilles, by a renaissance man who spent 10 days in Yellowstone in 1883. It is billed as being remarkable and unique in many ways, and I am looking forward to it.

In the first few pages alone I learned several interesting pieces of trivia, including that Yellowstone is roughly one third the size of Belgium (at least as they both looked in 1886!); that geyser is an Icelandic word; and the definition of the word ‘diadem’ (I was thinking something like jewelry or a tiara, and I was right). And speaking of notes – as I’ve written before, I keep notes while I read: passages I want to quote, words or concepts I want to look up, thoughts I want to include in a review. I have also written before about footnotes; and on this subject I have some observations to make here. For one thing, the endnotes are copious. By the time chapter 2 ended on page 21, I had been cued to reference 47 endnotes. That’s two-and-a-quarter per page! And they are endnotes, meaning they occur at the end of the book rather than throughout; and while some direct the reader to a source for the information given, some make substantive contributions to the text, so that I can’t know to always refer to them or always ignore them; and this makes for a great deal of flipping around. Also, while we’re keeping track, I’ve made only 4 notes myself in those 21 pages (plus 6 pages of notes!), so there you are. This is looking like… are you ready for it?… a noteworthy read.

And what are you reading this weekend?

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