in the cemetery where emily dickinson is buried

summer reading, family edition

I said last time that I’d write here about books as third thing or family hobby. I was about to say “or love language” but love languages are not the same as third things. Love languages are direct expressions of feeling, while third things are more like parallel play.

Third things have their own languages, though. My favorite part of being with book people is not direct literary discussion (often disenchanting) so much as the intimacy of allusion. When Joe and I are on one of our sporadic dates, usually in daytime Amherst, one of us will suggest going to “pay our respects,” which means taking a walk through the cemetery where Emily Dickinson is buried.

The first time we walked there, we didn’t realize it was the Dickinson cemetery, although their family home is a short walk away. We randomly came upon the Dickinson plot, which is accessible through its own small gate in the larger cemetery and has become a sort of shrine, where people leave notes and offerings on Emily and Lavinia’s gravestones. The first time we happened upon it, there was a group of (quiet, respectful) young people gathered inside doing drugs, I assume, since that’s what I used to do in graveyards when I was young and even now prefer to be subtly stoned for the experience.

The second time we came, there was no one else at the Dickinson plot, but there was a small group in historic costume at another nearby grave. On seeing us at Emily’s grave, one of this group complained: “She gets all the likes and subscribes.” This is so funny it feels scripted--maybe they were on a graveyard tour? It reminds me of the funniest Dickinson poem: I’m Nobody! Who are you? Lines for our times:

How dreary – to be – Somebody!

How public – like a Frog –

To tell one’s name – the livelong June –

To an admiring Bog!

Indeed there are much bigger Nobodies in the cemetery than Emily now. I’m most interested in the really old graves belonging to children, some of which have dolls beside them--who put them there? Some gravestones are so old they’re hard to read, and I was thinking of doing a rubbing to decipher one, but a search on how to do this led me to the Association of Gravestone Studies, also located in Amherst, which warns that this can damage old graves and advises using mirrors or inverted photography instead. Maybe they were the ones on the graveyard tour.

If you zoom into the note on her grave, you can see it says "queer like you" <3

Another thing Joe and I do on dates is browse used bookstores. Good ones nearby are the basement of Amherst Books, Montague Bookmill, and Grey Matter Books, where I found a cool book on Nabokov’s synesthetic alphabet. (I think Eva has synesthesia.) But my favorite used bookstore is my friend Alex’s Lost Time Books in beautiful Brattleboro, Vermont, less than an hour’s drive from here. I met Alex 20+ years ago through working in DC indie bookstores, and while he has been selling books online since then, he now has his own shop in downtown Brattleboro, and it’s a delight.

Because Joe and I are VIPs, Alex opened the store for us on a day it was closed, and we tried to spend enough money to make that worth it. It wasn’t hard because the store is expertly curated and a pleasure to browse thanks to details like handmade pine shelves and original Proust art. It’s always a trip for me to get Alex and Joe together since they’re each reigning figures from different eras of my life, and we all share books as a third thing (fourth thing? they also both like soccer, sports being a common third thing among men).

Have you seen a cuter bookstore? In this country??

Alex was reading David Szalay’s Flesh, and described it as being Eichmann in Jerusalem about sex, so Joe and I ended up reading it, too, and thought it was excellent. (Still need to get Alex’s final take--Flesh dinner party?) The Eichmann thing had me laughing; they share a similar abdication of responsibility, you could say.

Other books I’ve made Joe read so we can vaguely refer to them later are Lincoln in the Bardo but not Vigil, although I also read Vigil, but Lincoln in the Bardo is much better, and I’m sure why neither of us read it before now except maybe due to pettiness over George Saunders pivoting from short stories to novels and becoming too popular. I was reading Vigil in a library play area shortly after it came out then looked up to see another mom also reading Vigil. We laughed; she said it was her first Saunders; I told her to read Lincoln in the Bardo. I feel like he might need to leave society to write another book that good, but instead he’s on Substack and adapting Lincoln in the Bardo into a movie starring Tom Hanks.

Joe’s now reading book one of On the Calculation of Volume, a Danish series about a woman reliving the same day, which I thought I was going to like more. It’s not about parenting but felt suffocating to me in the same way parenting sometimes does. We even regularly clear out our staples at the local grocery store! I’d like to know how it resolves but not enough to read all seven volumes (maybe Joe will; he loves Groundhog Day). I still have to finish My Struggle, which is regretfully more my thing.

The rest of this newsletter will be about kids’ books. I was also going to do a section about some of the dark, solitary reading I’ve been doing (mostly horror and true crime) but that’s off topic so will save for a future update.

My kids have obsessive compulsive relationships with certain books, which I find highly relatable. The best way to read a lot is to make it an addiction!

Jojo is 5 and loves a wide range of books during the day, but at bedtime for 6+ months will only allow us to read her Dory Fantasmagory books. It’s testament to how good and funny they are that this has not become completely unbearable. She clearly relates a lot to Dory, who’s also the youngest child and a spitfire, and I relate to Dory’s mom, whose exhausted parenting efforts are so real. I enjoyed this profile on author Abby Hanlon, which inspired me to start transcribing some of the things I hear my kids say while they play. Kid play is wild.

Dory owes a lot to Beverly Cleary’s Ramona series, which Eva is currently rereading, but Jojo only wants Dory. The only books with which I’ve been able to get her to briefly break from Dory are Stella & Marigold, charming story collections about super sweet sisters. These books are by the same author/illustrator as the Ivy & Bean books, although the older sister in Ivy & Bean is much meaner, even meaner than the older sister in Dory, which I think turns Jojo off.

Both my girls were also into the Swedish series, My Happy Life, which despite the title is quite sad! These books deal with parental death and near-death, depression, mean girls, and bullying. None of this really comes into play until the second book, so you could just read the first if you want a more sheltered experience. The rest of the books are harder to find (I’ve been getting them from the library and Thriftbooks), probably for this reason, but since death and mean girls have been topics we’ve dealt with recently, I’ve welcomed them, although Jojo (understandably) no longer wants to read them at bedtime after the father got run over.

For Jojo’s fifth birthday we did a book swap, an idea I got originally from Belle Boggs & Beatrice Allen’s newsletter. In lieu of presents we asked guests to bring a kid book they no longer wanted, then everyone got to take a “new” book (or more) home. I felt a little guilty because people brought some really nice hardcover books while we used this as an opportunity to clear out some much less nice ones from our house, but overall it was a success.

Eva is 7 and reading independently, although we still read to her aloud at bedtime. Our current bedtime routine is to read our own books side by side, then I read aloud a chapter of something-- currently Ramona or A Wrinkle in Time, which Joe thought she might like and we’re now both vying to read. For a while, I was having her read aloud a nightly chapter of Henry and Mudge, a delightful early reader series by Cynthia Rylant, who does it all, from picture books to early readers to middle grade. I recently rediscovered and read Eva her story collection, Every Living Thing, which I remember loving in fourth grade. Each story is about a different human-animal relationship, and I was very influenced by both the hermit crab and parrot ones.

Eva’s favorite literary activity is listening to Harry Potter books on her Yoto player, which I’ve begun to regret buying. It’s advertised as a screen-free device for kids of millennials, but the parent needs a smartphone to set it up, so it’s not actually screen-free, and she’s hooked on it the same way we are on our devices, carrying it around all day listening to Harry Potter. At first this was awesome since it filled so much time (some of the audiobooks are 24+ hours) while she did craft projects, and audiobooks are sort of reading, but now she’s listened to all of them multiple times and I’d prefer her to hone her reading skills with the actual books, yet she isn’t interested because the Yoto’s easier.

But recently her Yoto player stopped working, which I haven’t investigated further because I’m kind of glad, even though it will be the second one we’ve gone through, the first one having literally melted while it was charging (to their credit, they immediately got a real person on the chat and sent us a new one the moment I dropped a photo in there). Last night she started reading the first Harry Potter actual book, and it seems to be going well . . .

Harry Potter shelf in Amherst Books: “When you buy a used book, the author does not receive any royalties.”

What are you and/or your loved ones reading? Have you walked through a cemetery recently?