Day 184 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and Steve is reading Hearts in Atlantis, a set of linked stories by Stephen King, because he needed something to read on the train. I had to admit to Steve that I had not read any Stephen King except On Writing, and he said he had just ordered it. Didn't have the heart to tell him we usually have a couple copies of that at Babbitt's, hardback and paperback.

On second thought, he might have ordered a first edition from somewhere, as I think this Hearts in Atlantis was a first edition. Plus, I realize I have seen the movie, with Anthony Hopkins.

It's been one of those days of multiple, frequently interrupted tasks. Lately I walk into rooms and forget what I've come in for, reminding me of the sleep-deprived days when my babies were...babies. One is about to go back to high school, the other, to college. Driving back from high school registration on a newly repaved road--that is, floating along on a fine black macadam--I forgot to turn left onto the street I needed to be on, had to curve and cross the tracks, turn left at a busier street, and there was a fire truck, parked but flashing, an ambulance in the park parking lot near the pool, a police car. One wonders, one worries.

The radio had just told me about yesterday's derailment of a freight train, no one hurt, but it does delay the passenger trains. One hopes they have books to read.

And a fellow who regularly brings books to Babbitt's gave me Strange Beckoning, poems by Helen Carson Janssen, 1951, signed and inscribed, with a card inside about her book signing at Coe's Book Store on October 15, "the day set aside by Governor Adlai Stevenson as Illinois Poetry Day."

This year, in the annual cemetery walk in our town, I am to play Helen Davis Stevenson, Adlai's mother. They are both buried here.

"It's a vanity press," said the boss, not buying it, and clearly hurting the man's feelings.

"You can call it vanity, but she was a fine woman and a good poet," he said.

And I can't see much difference between Helen Carson Janssen having her book published by Exposition Press of New York and Walt Whitman having his Leaves of Grass published, again and again, revisions of it, by a local printer, and at first at his own expense. Nor much difference between that and a number of small publishers of poetry these days, who leave most of the editing, promotion, and distribution to the poets themselves.

Helen Carson Janssen was born in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, famous now in popular culture for the Leather Goddesses of Phobos, a computer game, and before that because Doris Day's character in That Touch of Mink came from there, and, to bring us back to Stephen King, some scenes from The Shawshank Redemption were filmed there.

But I want to turn to page 24 of Strange Beckoning, to the poem "Old Mr. Kirk," a man thought "queer" by the farmers but loved by the kids because he gave them peppermints. My great grandfather, of Akron, Ohio, sucked peppermints and shared them with us kids.

I don't know what to make of it all.

Have a heart. Especially this one, by Robert Fornal. Or a fine Italian alabaster paperweight, from Barnes & Noble.

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Day 94 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project. Jennifer, who is writing a novel of her own, has been reading Stephen King novels ever since she read On Writing in 2008 and liked his writing advice. I liked his writing advice, too, and I see an anniversary edition coming out in July.

Jennifer has read 20 novels during this King binge, but she did not like all of them. She threw Desperation at the wall. She made an actual dent in the wall where she threw it, so that is where she throws other books she doesn't like.

Like the last book in the Dark Tower series. She threw that. No spoilers, as I haven't read any of them, and she carefully refrained from saying why. But that other guy I talked to said you either love it or hate it. (I think he threw his copy, too!

Jennifer has also been reading Jack Kerouac and likes him a lot, even though "he never met a comma."

And yesterday a young woman came in looking for The Catcher in the Rye. Perennials in the bookstore are coming back like perennials in the garden! Must be spring.

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Day 41 of the "What are you reading, and why?" series.

Today I put together two completely different kinds of writers, as one aspect of American literature these days is to have battered on any barrier between "high" and "low" culture. I know people still do categorize and label--there is "serious fiction" or "literary fiction," and there is "genre fiction," and these things are still organized in bookstores in various ways that keep them apart from each other. But college classrooms put things together, study everything, and have "elevated" certain kinds of writing that were dismissed before. The "comic book" is now the "graphic novel"--or "Graphic Illustration" in Babbitt's--and people are respecting each other's art in new ways that are less hierarchical than when I was growing up.

So I'll tell you that Kim has been reading The Gunslinger, the first in the Dark Tower series by Stephen King, and that Charlie is embarking on Point Omega, the new novel just out in hardcover from Don DeLillo. (Earlier in this blog we heard a bit about Falling Man, a DeLillo novel about the man falling from the dark towers of 9/11..., and the cover pictured here is from Libra, different towers altogether in DeLillo's book about the Kennedy assassination.)

A guy who runs a business down the street came in for another stack of the books he likes to read and was saying the last book in the Dark Tower series was a huge disappointment, and made him feel he had wasted his time reading everything building up to it. But the series was recommended to Kim by Bob, who said the last book made the whole reading adventure worth it, and to definitely start at the beginning! The link above is to a revised edition of The Gunslinger, as King was writing other works simultaneously (the way we read books simultaneously, or the way painters works on numerous paintings simultaneously, etc.) and realized by the end that the beginning needed some adjustment. So Kim might want to figure out which edition she has, and perhaps that's why the guy from down the street was so disappointed. He read the original work, and things didn't add up?!

I'm pretty sure the only thing I've read by Stephen King is On Writing, and, to my mind, he was right on about writing.

Don DeLillo is a writer I've not yet read. I have read excerpts and essays by him, but not a whole novel. I almost took home White Noise the other day, but instead got The Wishbones by Tom Perotta. I'm pretty sure this is "dick lit."

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