The Joy of Sharing Books

"Books are love letters (or apologies) passed between us, adding a layer of conversation beyond our spoken words." 

— Donalyn Miller, author of The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child

One recent afternoon we all trickled into the living room to read silently in the strong, clear light of late spring.  We were sprawled out on the couches and the floor in our pajamas for hours.  At some point, Miss. S. jumped up to her feet and broke the silence with an ecstatic cry.

“Mom! I just finished The Ghost Pony!”

“You did?” I asked, looking up from my own book at the clock.  “It only took you two hours to finish?”

“It was sooooooooooooo good!” she cried.  “You have to read it!”

“Really?” I affirmed with a smile.

“Yes!”  She said, then paused thoughtfully for a minute.  “Will you read it before I have to return it to the library, Mom?”

By now in the fairly short history of my life as a parent, I knew the second iteration of ‘mom’ meant that she wanted to be taken seriously.  This wasn’t some sort of kind-but-altogether-blasé-gesture.  She wanted me to read that book.   


“Of course!”  I said with a reassuring smile. 

“You promise?”

“Absolutely,” I said. 

The smile turned into a loppy, ecstatic grin that I couldn’t quite get off my face for the rest of the night. 

My daughter wanted to share a book she had enjoyed with me.  I closed The Prelude and got up to make dinner bathed in the strangest sensation.   I had officially made it to the circle of paradise reserved for the bookish, the bibliophile  .   .  .  my daughter wanted to share a book she had enjoyed with me!

In the early years of motherhood, I had read the What to Expect books and made a point of becoming familiar with Dr. Spock.  As such, when Miss S. started sleeping through the night at six months, I calmly observed the milestone.  When she developed the coordination to be able to dress herself and to fold her own laundry . . . I was wholly prepared.   

This was one of those developmental stages that surprised me with joy.    None of the books ever talked about the stage of life when children will want to begin sharing their interior lives with parents by sharing their favorite books.

As I read The Ghost Pony later that night, I became increasingly sensible of the life of sharing books we have ahead of us . . . a life of our conversations extended and enriched through books, a life of responses offered to one another through the books that we share, a life in which we magnify the private humors and delights we have enjoyed in books by simply sharing them.

The fact of it awes me.  To say I’ve always loved books is (duh! Wha? Doh!) a moot point.  But there is something akin to Vulcan mind melding that happens when two or more people share their beloved books.  Next to letters, it is the best way to craft those intimacies that we depend on to survive.

Earth Day, Every Day

During the first warm spell of the year we pour out of the house into the garden . . .  each of us busying ourselves with just about anything we can do just to remain outside, to remember how our bodies felt to be warm and unburdened by quilted layers of clothes.  Paddy immediately finds his favorite planter and begins to busy himself with a spade.  Dig, dig, digging the hardened soil, he lifts up the tool over his head with gusto and turns on his heel to dump the treasure into the little wheelbarrow behind him.  Most of it ends up on his head.  He squeals with delight as it falls down his shoulders in a black rain. 

I smile from where I stand, peeling the scab of winter off the garden with my lawn rake.  As the mottled leaves and wizened twigs are pried loose, I begin to see little pinheads and cones of the palest green — some the tightly furled leaves of hosta plants . . . others, seedlings of the maple tree standing nearby. 

From the east side of the house, Miss S. and the Schweitzer girls come tearing around the corner, with khakis dirt streaked and tools in hand.  With a missionary zeal they are trying to save each and every maple seedling that has fallen in the garden by transplanting it to a bare patch in the back of the house.

Tonight there will be a five rows of ghostly trees plotted in the back yard . . . as well as a special load of laundry, an apologetic call to the neighbor for sending her children home looking like refugees, and an especially thorough bath time. 

This is how stewards are made.

On this Earth Day, and every day, Songbird is dedicated to the development of literature for young minds . . . and the practice of sustainable publishing.   When I started this company just over a year ago, I  began researching the various production methods available for printing our first title books and was blown away by the environmental impact of publishing.  Consider the following data from The Green Press Initiative:

·         According to a recent study by the United States Book Industry, more than 30 million trees are cut down annually to produce the books sold in the U.S. 

·         8.85 lbs of CO₂ is created with every book produced.

·         The total carbon footprint of the book publishing industry  is 12.4 million metric tons of CO₂

·         The biggest contributor to the industry's footprint is using virgin-paper forest.  It is responsible for 62.7% of the industry's total carbon emissions.

Moreover, approximately 30% of books purchased by consumers are returned to the publisher and treated as overstock . . . sold to secondary markets or destroyed.   

Songbird chose to partner with distributor Ingram Book Group and print on demand operative Lightning Source because in doing so we were following through with our commitment to developing high quality books with low impact environmental practices.  

First and foremost, we only produce the books that are ordered for purchase.  Fewer books means fewer returns, more forests, and fewer landfills.

Moreover, as a printer Lightning Source has been recognized by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) for the certified paper products and wood product components it uses in its printing.

Of course, there’s more work to be done.  This year Songbird will continue to encourage Lightning Source to advance its commitment to the environment by using SFI certified paper in its color book printing practices . . . and we are seeking options to use vegetable based inks. 

Having signed the Book Industry Treatise on Environmentally Responsible Publishing, Songbird Books is completely committed to using less paper, and environmentally friendly materials in the production of our titles. 

The future of this little company is inextricably intertwined with the futures of our planet and of our children.  It might seem a little counterproductive . . . a little like transplanting minisucle maple tree seedlings from the front yard to the back. . . but I feel the decisions we've made for out company have made stewards of us all.

The Little Bunny Who Could

When I was a young child, there were two books that I took out of our town’s public library so many times, I can still visualize where they stood in the stacks.   One of them, Dubose Heyward’s The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes, is STILL a favorite read at the Muthupandiyan house . . . especially at Easter time. 

It’s amazing how timeless good stories are.  Written in 1939, The Country Bunny is tale about a little tawny colored country bunny whose childhood dream is to become one of the five Easter Bunnies who deliver eggs to the children around the world on Easter eve.  All the big bunnies tell her to forget it, it will never happen . . . after all, she’s a little brown girl from the country, and she’s got to concern herself with the sort of things that that sort of life will afford her — having babies and keeping a clean house. 

She grows up, has 21 little bunnies . . . and while she raises to take care of the house and one another, she never stops dreaming about becoming an Easter bunny. 

As a child who loved to play house, I was fascinated with Marjorie Flack’s pastel tinted watercolor drawings that depicted the country bunny’s perfectly ordered domestic life — the drawings of children  bunnies tending the garden and doing the laundry and making art for the walls of the home.  The very thought of is every a child’s dream — to play while keeping a little house of one’s own. 

. . . and the book explores every adult’s dream as well — to be able to hold on to one’s childhood passions into adulthood and see them realized, no matter what other dreams have come along.  As a family of readers you need not wonder whether the little country bunny will become an Easter bunny, she does!  And as readers of all ages get to accompany her on her first adventure, we are captivated by the tests of character that await her as the newest Easter Bunny. 

There’s no doubt, in the end, that she will succeed, for after all, it is her wisdom and kindness, and the agility she developed while raising her own children that are the key to her becoming an Easter bunny in the first place. . .

There’s a second gift that comes in the form of re-reading stories we loved as children .  . . and reading the book today, the Country Bunny is as much my heroine as she ever was.  I highly recommend it at Easter time, or any time, for every child . . . and every parent who ever was!

Re-Reading Eliot

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding  

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing  

Memory and desire, stirring  

Dull roots with spring rain.  

Winter kept us warm, covering          5

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding  

A little life with dried tubers.

                                                            (The Waste Land)

There are two Eliots in my life.  My son would have been the third, but my husband denied that request . . .  just as he had been when six years earlier I had suggested we name our daughter Poem.  (Bal actually laughed at me out loud with the earlier suggestion  .  .  .  the second time around he had expected enough to just give me a quick, vigorous shake of the head, without bothering to comment. )

One can easily guess the place the Eliots hold that I wanted to draw their name into the most intimate realms of my every day speech.  I love them as I am able to love few authors.  It is within the novels of George Eliot that I first encountered a literature that sensitively imagines community and association as a matter of the spirit and the imagination rather than of custom or convention .  .  .  and it is from reading the poems of T.S. Eliot that I learned the weight of a tear.

As an undergraduate, my reading of T.S. Eliot’s poems continually returned to the passages in which the speaker’s language faltered at the threshold of a moment of great emotional weight or beauty:

'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;   35

'They called me the hyacinth girl.'  

—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,  

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not  

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither  

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,   40

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

I understood this experience, and wrapped myself in the words as if they were a familiar, timeworn shawl I had forgotten I owned.  Through the course of reading his canon, I discovered the heart of light recurred again and again, and came to understand it as a moment of transcendence, an encounter with beauty which lies beyond the ordinary range of perception. 

For Eliot, as with many metaphysical poets, such encounters bore the weight of a tear.  . . absences which were immeasurable, but weighty indeed.[1]  No matter the significance of the event in the speaker’s life, he could only ever falter over the threshold of silence, unable to express just what it was that he experienced.  (Eliot’s poems are filled with such silences — talked through, around, buried, but never named.)

And yet while these moments of transcendence end, they are silently mourned and suffered for in the days and years to come.    How “Ridiculous the waste sad time/Stretching before and after,” as Eliot states in The Four Quartets.

Yet when I was younger, I overlooked a seemingly small detail . . . there are two people present in this passage.  The hyacinth girl and the one who saw her, whose very ability to communicate was stifled by the transcendent beauty he had seen in and through her. 

In fact, these moments of experiencing transcendent beauty in Eliot’s poetry never happen alone.  They always take place when the speaker is accompanied by a woman whom he presumably admires or loves in some fashion.[2]  

Over many years of loving Eliot, I have become more sensitive to the presence of that other person present during the heart of light moments of the poems, but I am left to wonder what it was that filled her eyes in those moments.

Had they seen or experienced the same thing?  Could something so seemingly impossible to share as a trancendent moment of beauty be shared?  One will never know, given there was only silence, the speaker’s solipsistic sense of waste. . . in the sad time stretching before and after.

As I have matured, the true weight of the tear in Eliot’s poetry is not carried by the loss of that transcendent moment, but by the silence that exists between the two people present to it, in its wake.  

Today I read Eliot knowing it is the words that are absent — the words framing emotions felt but not explored, the words that are thought but not said, the words that are muttered under the breath and unheard, the words brushed aside— these are the tears which possess the most weight. 

[1] The weight of a tear.  It is an image I have returned to again and again for the philosophical paradox it poses.  When a cloth tears, what physical weight is lost by the minutest of fissures in the fabric?  What psychological or emotional weight is added by the absence?  There certainly is weight possessed by absence . . . but the exact measure of that weight remains uncertain, immeasurable.

[2] Many Eliot scholars believe it is Emily Hale, Eliot’s childhood friend and longtime correspondent. 

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