Many classic children’s books beg for philosophical readings: the likes of “Charlotte’s Web” or “Are You My Mother?” are well known as complex and subterranean ruminations on death and identity and community. Had you asked Sarah Blackwood from The New Yorker, a couple of years ago, she would not have classified Peggy Parish’s Amelia Bedelia series with this loftier group—my children delighted in the wordplay, but found the books a bit one-note. Here’s here story:

The more I read Amelia Bedelia the more unsettled I felt; I began to suspect that I wasn’t hearing all the notes. The books, with illustrations by Fritz Siebel, depict a young woman who sows domestic chaos in and around the home of her wealthy employers, a snooty older couple who have outsourced the labor of keeping their household, family, and community relations running smoothly. Each book follows a simple formula: Amelia Bedelia, a housemaid replete with apron and frilled cap, encounters various domestic imperatives: clean the house, host a party, babysit, substitute-teach. But, rather than keeping order, Amelia Bedelia creates disarray. She takes each instruction she is given with an absurd literalism. “Draw the drapes,” Mrs. Rogers tells her; Amelia Bedelia reaches for pen and paper. She “dresses the chicken,” but in lederhosen (an homage to Siebel’s Austrian childhood). When asked to “dust the furniture,” she sprinkles powder all over the living room; asked to “change the towels,” she takes scissors to them. She dirties and destroys her employers’ possessions, in other words, breaking one of the primary taboos of domestic employment. She’s a figure of rebellion: against the work that women do in the home, against the work that lower-class women do for upper-class women. Her one undeniable talent—the reason that the Rogerses keep her around—is as a pastry chef: cream puffs, tea cakes, pies, tarts. Every time the Rogerses are about to cast her aside, every time they are “angry, very angry,” she entices them back by appealing to their appetites.

As an employee who produces turmoil at work and is overseen by amiable jerks, Amelia Bedelia reminds me of Bartleby, from Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” from 1853. “I would prefer not to” is Bartleby’s famous refrain; if he took Amelia’s job, Bartleby would neither pull the drapes from the windows nor sketch them with pen and paper but sit and stare at them with stoic despondence. Melville’s story is one of American literature’s great tales of workplace degradation, and, though it takes place in an office, it is in some ways as domestic, as intimate, as a story about a household servant—Bartleby, increasingly depressed, begins sleeping and living at his workplace. But, where Bartleby responds to degradation by withdrawing, reducing, starving himself, Amelia Bedelia produces sugary excess. Throughout her daily grind, she cheerfully acquiesces to her lot even as she subverts almost every task assigned to her. Bartleby teaches us to look for resistance in forms of ascetic refusal; Amelia Bedelia turns passive aggression into a kind of art.

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Agatha Christie knew when to stop writing a detective novel. Today’s flashy adaptations over-embellish the source material. Radha Vatsal from CrimeReads investigates:

Changes need to be made in the process of adapting novels to the screen—that’s just part of what has to happen when you switch between mediums. But in our content-hungry age, if a novel is to be adapted to the small screen, and into a miniseries in particular, this often translates into stretching the original narrative to fit the required number of episodes. If a novel is to be adapted into a feature film, it often seems that something extra is thrown in to give the film the required box office punch. These decisions to add to the narrative have little to do what the original story requires in terms of length or scope, but are based on commercial considerations. We see this played out over and over again—especially in the recent adaptions of Agatha Christie novels.

In her posthumously published autobiography, Christie, who knew a thing or two about the mechanics of a successful crime novel, wrote:

Of course, there is a right length for everything. I think myself that the right length for a detective story is fifty-thousand words. I know this is considered by publishers as too short. Possibly readers feel themselves cheated if they pay their money and only get fifty thousand words—so sixty thousand or seventy thousand are more acceptable. If your book runs to more than that I think you will usually find that it would have been better if it had been shorter.

There are a couple of points worth noting here. First, that Christie’s preferred length is fifty thousand, but since publishers thinks that’s too short she’s willing to write a bit longer. (I like that she says “possibly” readers feel themselves cheated—presumably that’s what her publishers tell her, but she keeps her own council.) And if readers feel themselves cheated with fifty-thousand words, then the reason for writing longer books isn’t because the stories themselves require that length, it’s because that’s what the market (supposedly) demands. And yet, Christie is very clear that when detective stories of the type that she writes go beyond sixty or seventy thousand words, they lose something by doing so.

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Julie Beck from The Atlantic interviews the editor of The New York Times Book Review on remembering books.

Pamela Paul’s memories of reading are less about words and more about the experience. “I almost always remember where I was and I remember the book itself. I remember the physical object,” says Paul, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, who reads, it is fair to say, a lot of books. “I remember the edition; I remember the cover; I usually remember where I bought it, or who gave it to me. What I don’t remember—and it’s terrible—is everything else.”

For example, Paul told me she recently finished reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin. “While I read that book, I knew not everything there was to know about Ben Franklin, but much of it, and I knew the general timeline of the American revolution,” she says. “Right now, two days later, I probably could not give you the timeline of the American revolution.”

Surely some people can read a book or watch a movie once and retain the plot perfectly. But for many, the experience of consuming culture is like filling up a bathtub, soaking in it, and then watching the water run down the drain. It might leave a film in the tub, but the rest is gone.

“Memory generally has a very intrinsic limitation,” says Faria Sana, an assistant professor of psychology at Athabasca University, in Canada. “It’s essentially a bottleneck.”

The “forgetting curve,” as it’s called, is steepest during the first 24 hours after you learn something. Exactly how much you forget, percentage-wise, varies, but unless you review the material, much of it slips down the drain after the first day, with more to follow in the days after, leaving you with a fraction of what you took in.

Presumably, memory has always been like this. But Jared Horvath, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne, says that the way people now consume information and entertainment has changed what type of memory we value—and it’s not the kind that helps you hold onto the plot of a movie you saw six months ago.

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Author Farah Ahamed from Ploughshares, looks at menstruation in fiction:

“A period is something I deal with, without thinking about it particularly, or rather I think of it with a part of my mind that deals with routine problems. It is the same part of my mind that deals with the problem of routine cleanliness.” In Doris Lessing’s 1962 novel, The Golden Notebook, the protagonist, Anna, worries about her period and how it will affect the integrity of her writing. In the early 1960s, it was unusual and brave for a work of fiction to mention menstruation, let alone explore it in such detail. Broadly speaking, in mainstream fiction, examples of menstruation are few and far between.

Until recently, the topic of menstruation has been universally regarded as taboo, shrouded in secrecy and mythology. Historically, in some cultures, men refused to acknowledge it, in order to maintain a romantic image of women. In others, it is still linked with ritual impurity and lunar madness, while in certain hunter-gatherer and mountain communities, it is viewed as a sacred time for female solidarity, associated with healing and psychic powers. These ideas and practices are reflected in those few works that deal with the subject, which incorporate themes of learnt shame and the existence of women “elsewhere” due to some form of negative transformation.

Bapsi Sidhwa, in her 1978 novel, The Crow Eaters, which is set in Pakistan, gives a clear depiction of the exile to which Putli, the wife of the main character Freddy Junglewalla, is subjected during her period:

Every Parsee household has its other room, specially reserved for women. Thither they are banished for the duration of the unholy state. . . . Putli quite enjoyed her infrequent visits to the other room. It was the only chance she ever had to rest. And since this seclusion was religiously enforced, she was able to enjoy her idleness without guilt.

It is in fact only when Putli is kept isolated in “the other room” that she finds some form of freedom. Nevertheless, she is reminded every month that, “Even the sun, moon and stars are defiled by her impure gaze. . . . She knew she couldn’t help herself to pickles or preserves for they would spoil at her touch. Flowers, too, were known to wilt when touched by women in her condition.” As much as Putli is “able to enjoy” the segregation, she knows during these days she is considered by everyone to be other: “The family was permitted to speak to her through closed doors—in an emergency, they could speak directly, provided they bathed from head to foot and purified themselves afterwards.”

In The Dark Holds No Terrors, Shashi Deshpande’s 1980 novel, set in India, the protagonist, Saru has a similar but opposite experience: while Putli is sent to the other room, Saru is banished from rooms:

It was just torture. Not just the three days when I couldn’t enter the kitchen or the puja room. Not just the sleeping on a straw mat covered with a thin sheet. Not just the feeling of being a pariah, with my special cup and plate by my side in which I was served from a distance, for my touch was, it seemed, pollution. No, it was something quite different, much worse. A kind of shame that engulfed me.

Unlike Putli, Saru resents every aspect of the experience—she associates it with becoming like her mother, whom she hates. Deshpande uses melodramatic language to show her anger and resentment: “You’re a woman now, she said. If you’re a woman, I don’t want to be one, I thought resentfully, watching her body.”

Contrast this with Pettinah Gappah’s short story “The Maid from Lalapanzi,” from her 2009 collection An Elegy for Easterly. Like Putli and Saru, during her period, Chenai is put in another space, but it is a metaphorical one: “When my period came, SisiBlandina was there to say, ‘Well you are in Geneva now, and you will be visiting regularly.’” For Chenai, “Geneva” undoubtedly connotes a foreign, distant, cold, and unfriendly place.

Throughout the story, Gappah maintains a natural rhythm in the dialogue, suggesting Chenai’s situation is the norm. Even when Chenai discusses a visit from Johnson & Johnson, in which the girls in the community are taught about their menstrual cycles by marketing representatives, the tone is matter-of-fact:

The women from Johnson & Johnson had come to the school, and separated us from the boys so that they could tell us secrets about our own bodies . . . It was an unsanitary time, they said. Our most effective weapon against this effluence was the arsenal of the sanitary products that Johnson & Johnson made with young ladies like us in mind, they said, because Johnson cared.

Similarly, in My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante’s first Neapolitan novel, Elena is kept in ignorance about the menstrual cycle by her mother. When Elena gets her first period, she is “terrified by I don’t know what, maybe a scolding from my mother for having hurt myself between my legs.” The lack of shared knowledge illuminates how shame is learnt and passed on. Later, when her friend Lila begins having her period, Elena wonders whether Lila will become pretty, or ugly like herself. As it was for Saru, the onset of menstruation for Elena is fraught with anxieties about becoming something like another, or even “other.”

Read full post on pshares.org

Sarah Jessica Parker throws shade at de Blasio’s proposed library cut says Natalie O’Neil from PageSix.com.

Actress Sarah Jessica Parker and Big Apple bookworms are fighting to save the city’s libraries from massive budget cuts with a creative online campaign.

The former “Sex and the City” star is urging folks to post virtual “sticky notes” on a petition-like Web site to oppose Mayor de Blasio’s proposed $11 million in funding cuts, which would force city libraries to scale back their hours, programs and days of service.

“As Carrie Bradshaw might, I couldn’t help but wonder: Can New York City survive without strong public libraries?” Parker wrote in an e-mail encouraging library users to take action.

“Could, I as a New Yorker accept cuts to our wonderful, important, necessary, and beloved libraries? I’m sorry. I can’t,” she said.

The 54-year-old star said her family adores the Jefferson Market Library in Greenwich Village.

“It is not only a regular neighborhood stop for books, programs, and more, it is a cornerstone, a beacon, and one of the most beloved buildings in our community. I don’t know what we’d do without it,” she wrote.

By Sunday, hundreds of people had posted “sticky notes” with their names and that of their neighborhood lit house, including beloved ones in Midtown, Battery City and Yorkville in Manhattan.

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Constance Grady from Vox looks at how to publish classic books that aren’t just by dead white men.

As the canon of English literature slowly, gradually opens itself up to books by women and authors of color, Modern Library and Penguin Classics have just launched two new series aimed at rediscovering forgotten books by marginalized people.

It’s an on-trend choice. Over the past few years, more and more people have been announcing their intention to read more books by authors who aren’t straight white men, to focus their reading on people whose voices have traditionally been pushed to the margins. If you’re mostly reading contemporary fiction, that’s not too difficult to do: While publishing continues to skew white and male, especially for literary fiction, there are lots of great writers and publishing houses out there devoted to celebrating voices from the margins.

But if you’re interested in older books, things get harder. Historically, the books written by straight white men have been preserved and made part of what’s thought of as “the canon” of English literature, the important books that everyone reads in school and that are readily accessible to us all — the classics. Books by other people of different identities, meanwhile, tend to get forgotten and ignored.

Part of how we determine the canon comes from what is available to us as readers, which means what publishers have made available to us.

“A chief enforcer of the canon appears in middlebrow anthologies, those hangers on of high culture that in the Victorian period took the form of pop anthologies like Golden Treasury and today that of major college anthologies in America,” Brown University English professor George P. Landow wrote on the scholarly website Victorian Web.

“To appear in the Norton or Oxford anthology is to have achieved,” he wrote, “not exactly greatness but what is more important, certainly — status and accessibility to a reading public. And that is why, of course, it matters that so few women writers have managed to gain entrance to such anthologies” — and, we might add, so few writers of color.

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Long before #BlackGirlMagic became a thing, a black mystery writer named Barbara Neely was showing the crime fiction community how it’s done, says Kellye Garrett from CrimeReads.

As many writers will tell you—even if takes them awhile to admit it—you can in fact judge a book by its cover. And the original cover for Neely’s groundbreaking debut, Blanche on the Lam, definitely tells you all you need to know. It features the back of a dark skinned black woman in an orange dress, with her hair up and her hand on her hip. She faces a house, one that would be at home on a Southern plantation. Even though we don’t see her face, we can tell she’s not intimidated. If anything the house—and its occupants—should be worried about her. #BlackGirlMagic indeed.

This was our first introduction Blanche White. Although it wouldn’t be a long relationship—lasting just four books over eight years—it would most definitely be a memorable one, especially for readers and a generation of black mystery writers.

The first in the series, Blanche on the Lam, won the 1992 Agatha Award for Best First Novel, 1993 Anthony Award for Best First Novel and the 1993 Macavity Award for Best First Novel. It would be years before another woman of color won those same awards.

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