Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal is not so much a book as it is an experience. Oh, sure, it has a hardback cover, pages, and spine. But, as you read along you come to instructions to text a certain phone number to hear, among other delights, a recording of Amy reading a list of vocabulary words from a notebook she started in her twenties, three renditions of Humming Wine Glass, and the musical accompaniment to the final section of the book.
At one point she asks the reader to hop onto the book's website and write a few words about what he or she is doing at that very minute. She calls them Purple Flower Moments. I happened to be reading the book the other morning at two o'clock and did exactly that. You can read my contribution here along with those of other readers. Mine is titled 'The 2 a.m. miracle'.
The book, just released ten days ago, comes a decade after her Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life (that I wrote about here). I was crazy about that book and thought the idea of writing autobiographical sketches in the form of encyclopedia entries was brilliant. And I love how she dreams up projects that allow her to include and interact with strangers.
A sketch from Textbook
This 'textbook' is designed with nine subject headings including Geography, Social Studies, Math, and Music all of which give Ms. Rosenthal a chance to tie in her musings (loosely) with each division.
The book is full of her meditations and memories, incidences of coincidences, anagrams, mathematical formulas using words instead of numbers, an assortment of short essays, charts, blank pages, sketches, photos, and an effusion of other clever goings-on.
Like I say, this book is an experience. I hope it is one that you will share with Amy. And me as well.
Penelope Lively is a British author of award-winning adult novels and books for children. I had not read any of her works until I stumbled across her recently published memoir Dancing Fish and Ammonites.
Ms. Lively is 81. This memoir is not quite a memoir. She calls it "a view from old age." It contains her reflections on age (she speaks from experience) and memory, books and history, and the six possessions that she holds near to her heart and that "articulate something of who I am."
Although her look at her childhood growing up in Cairo and her take on the social changes that have taken place in England (and the world for that matter) in her lifetime were splendid to read about, it was of course her look at her books and her reading that especially intrigued me.
"I can measure out my life in books," she writes and begins with the enthralling tales of Beatrix Potter, the King James Version of The Bible, and Andrew Lang's Tales of Troy and Greece of her childhood, on through the romantic historical novels of her teen years, and the serendipitous reading of fiction in her adult years.
But in old age, she decides, the three titles she would pick for her desert island stash are Henry James's What Maisie Knew, William Golding's The Inheritors, and Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier.
Perhaps not my choices, I haven't read them, but like her spotlight on the six possessions that she cherishes, it prompted my own thoughts as to my favorites and keepsakes. I am still pondering these.
In addition to being a thoughtful read, I love the cover of this book. Every time I glance at the dancing fish - which are a representation of the leaping fish sherd she once found on the beach and one of her six things - I have to smile. They look so joyful.
