Reading Between the Lines
There's nothing like feeling sick to take the wind out of a writer's sails. Over the past few weeks, I have been laid low by whatever plague has recently been circulating around Amsterdam. The one silver lining to the dark cloud of feeling blah is that you can catch up on your reading. So this seems as good a time as any to write in general about the role of reading in my Amsterdam life.
Back in the day, my brother and sister used to call me a bookworm. They meant it as an insult, I think, but I took it as a supreme compliment (right after kicking them, and hurling insults their way, probably). Our babysitter Julia used to restrict my reading, scolding me that I wasn't allowed to read at the kitchen table while eating. "You're not a Russian princess or Lady Jane," she would remind me. What a life those Russian princesses and Lady Jane must have led, surrounded by their books and mounds of food. I wanted their life. I did some quick research to see who this Lady Jane that our babysitter referred to could have been. I didn't see one mention of her reading at the dinner table.
One of the hallmarks of being a new expat is that you have more quiet time on your hands, at least at first. That gives you more time to read. One of my first stops when we moved here was a visit to the American Book Center. My beloved Maplewood book group, a source of reading inspiration and friendship for over fifteen years, had given me a gift card to spend there, as a going-away gift. I spent hours browsing the shelves, happy to hear English at a time when I knew exactly zero words of Dutch. My Dutch has improved since then, I might add, even if at times the improvement seems slight.
As I have frequently mentioned, Amsterdam is a wonderful place for peering into other people's homes. It's apparently a Dutch thing to go without curtains, laying your home bare for all to see. And with nighttime creeping ever earlier into the day, it's easier to see inside. I like getting a look at the bookshelves. When I'm at a friend's house, I often find myself looking at the titles on their shelves, using their reading tastes to get to know them better, or to simply judge them. Come on, you know you do it, too. The difference is that in Amsterdam, you don't even need to be invited in to get a look-see into what's doing on those shelves.
Here is one of my very favorite home libraries. I have a whole imaginary story going on in my head about the man who sits at the desk and reads those antique books. These are the things I do when I walk Casey. I apologize both to the people inside the homes, and to all of you who have to hear about this.
You might say it is only natural that when I first arrived and knew next to no one, that this ex-bookworm would turn to books as her best friends. In fact, there have been some recent articles suggesting many expats do tend to turn inwards, at least at first. One reason is because you don't know anyone, so you are forced to spend large chunks of time alone. The other is the language barrier. You don't know the language, so you can't even make small talk with strangers to help break up the alone time. Despite the fact that most Dutch people in Amsterdam speak excellent English, they don't speak English to each other. That means that one of my favorite forms of entertainment, the eavesdrop, is not available to me.
So one of my first goals when I moved here was to find a book group that I could call my own. My Maplewood book group was a tough act to follow and I feared sounding like Muffy, the annoying character in the cartoon Arthur, who started almost every story with the annoying tag line, "At my old school...". Oh, shut up, Muffy, all the other characters thought, but didn't say, and that's what I worried my new book group members would come to think about me. A book group is a great way to bond with strangers: you start off talking about Elsa Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, and before you know it, you understand what they consider important about friendship, about marriage, and about other important things like Italian food.
Here are about half of the members of one of my two Amsterdam book groups. This one is the American Women's Club group. One thing about an expat book group is that at any given time, someone is always either in the U.S., or traveling to exotic places, or just hosting guests and unable to come.
Here's the other book group, part of the International Women's Club. Most of the members are British, and they say things like "astonishing" to mean both amazingly wonderful, and incredibly horrible. And they sound so smart saying whatever it is that they say.
No book group is perfect - other than my Maplewood one, she said in her Muffy-ish way - but just finding some other gals to read and discuss books with was wonderful. Lonely days are gone, I found some book groups here, I thought. I do still read most of the books on the Maplewood list, and check in from time to time - by email, not letter - to see what the consensus was about them. But I no longer feel like I have to get back home just to be part of a book group.
Here's my friend Annette. This photo was taken during my August visit to the U.S. Annette started talking about how you can have different sets of friends, of varying degrees of closeness. They sit on shelves, like books on a book case. They can move up the case to a higher shelf at any time. We used to be "friends" only because our daughters are friends. It's never too late to move up a shelf, Annette pointed out. So true. Even after knowing Annette for years, I moved up on her bookcase only after we knew I was moving far away. I'm finding that expat friends tend to move up the shelf more quickly. You can take one walk in the park and go for a single coffee, and, presto, you have a new friend. This has taken me some getting used to.
In addition to all the other firsts I've checked off my list since arriving here, this is the first time I have lived in a city. I'm not counting Hoboken, N.J., which at least in those days felt like a slightly more grown up version of college, with its bars and restaurants and twenty-somethings roaming around in search of the most authentic mozzarella. No, Amsterdam is a city, even if it is petite compared to the likes of its European siblings like Paris and London. The nice thing about living in a city is that I can make good on my lifelong suburbanite's dream of doing those things that usually only the city-dwellers take full advantage of: all the museums and music and speakers.
When we first arrived here, someone told us to join the John Adams Institute. Since I knew nothing, including what an institute devoted to an American president was doing in Amsterdam, I joined us up. It was wonderful advice. The JAI brings to Amsterdam "the best and the brightest from a multitude of disciplines – novelists, politicians, historians, scientists, screenwriters, poets, photographers and tech wizards – to the Netherlands to talk about their work, their thoughts, their insights." It turns out John Adams came to the Netherlands in search of financial support for the Revolutionary War. He lived here for two years, so he was in fact an expat as well. the language of the JAI is English. Music to my ears! I've seen and heard the Pulitzer Prize winning authors Anthony Doerr (All the Light You Cannot See) and Marilynne Robinson (whose recent claim to fame is that she is one of Obama's favorite authors). I rushed out to see the author Leslie Jamison after a hot tip from my U.S. writer friend Pamela, the source of all hot tips when it comes to books and reading. I sat there mesmerized while Ms. Jamison read from her essays and talked about writing. And I found myself turning into my parents, as I marveled at how young she is to be such a successful writer. It's happening, I guess: the realization that many, many people have accomplished so much more than I, in their fewer decades on earth.
One great thing about the JAI is that it gets you out and about in the city to some beautiful venues. And if you get a little tired of listening to the speaker, you can look around at some gorgeous 17th century building or another.
When I first arrived in Amsterdam, I jumped to the wrong conclusion about the Dutch. Whenever I was on the tram, I didn't see anyone reading. I thought of the NYC subway, and how all the riders have their heads buried in books or Kindles. It turns out that the Dutch folks who show up at the JAI talks are incredibly well-read. And the reason no one reads on the tram is because it twists and turns like the roller coaster at Coney Island. And then when I was last in New York in August, I took a closer, more observant and less nostalgic look at subway life. It turns out there isn't as much reading as I thought. Most folks are huddled over iPhones, studying them as intently as if they were deciphering ancient hieroglyphics.
You might say that reading is a solitary activity, one that keeps you firmly rooted to the inside of your house. I always think about what my dad used to say about reading: since it transports you to distant lands and places, who really needs to actually travel at all? Well, my mom did for one, so he did often have to make do with the real thing from time to time. But it is true that when you read, you do get to visit places you never dreamed of seeing. This year I have been to Malaysia (Tan Twan Eng's Garden of Evening Mists) and Chechnya (Anthony Marra's A Constellation of Vital Phenomena). I have travelled back in time to 17th century England (Geraldine Brooks' Year of Wonders) and been hurtled into the future (Gary Shytengart's Super Sad True Love Story). All without leaving the house, or at least Amsterdam. My dad would have been so proud of the world-reader (and also the world-traveller) I have become. If you care, here are some of the people I have been hanging out with and places I have been in the past year. Otherwise known as some of my best friends: my books. I need to read a lot to counterbalance the songs I hear at the gym, like Big, Big Booty and It's All About that Bass (another anthem to the rear end). Songs like that are likely, in the immortal words of Rick Moranis in the movie Parenthood, to "suck the intelligence out" of me. So the reading helps even things out. I hope.
Now you can peep inside of our apartment and see one of our bookshelves, without having to leave the comfort of your own house.
If I'm lucky, I can find one of my book group books at one of the books stalls at the markets. This guy lays out his wares in neat, organized piles by genre, kind of like an elementary school teacher's classroom. Bliss for those who veer towards OCD or for the teachers among us!
Although reading is something most of us have done with ease since we were young, I have come to realize that you can actually always get better at it. Or at least learn some new tricks. This year, I took some online courses for the first time. I figured that the distance from the U.S., coupled with my new-found leisure time, gave me the chance to take some classes. The first one was a literature class called Living Writers through Colgate University, Rachel's school. I had the chance to hear two excellent English professors (one the former chair of the department) lecture via video, and to read and discuss (via online chats) books like Martin Amis' The Zone of Interest and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis. I also got to hear the authors speak when they came to campus, all from the comfort of my living room. In my sweatpants. What could be better?
I've given a lot of thought these days to how you learn to read, and how darn complicated a process it really is. That's because I am trying to learn to read in Dutch. I have a new-found appreciation for what my struggling students went through as they winced at streams of words they didn't understand in books they longed to read. I recently felt the burst of pride that many first graders feel when they finally conquer their first chapter book. For me, it was a book from the beloved Jip and Janneke series that all Dutch children of a certain age have grown up reading. As a beginner reader of Dutch books, I experience all of the thrills (and frustrations) that any new reader feels. I think it has helped me as I attempt to teach two young French children to speak, read, and write English. What a challenge! I've had to dust off some very rusty French to help them learn. My French is better than my Dutch, but both are very creaky. I'm still trying! My friend Vera, born in Germany but married to a Dutch man, has kindly agreed to take a bunch of us Americans under her wing for Dutch conversation "classes" over lunch or coffee. She somehow manages not to burst out laughing when we garble the language. We call it our Dutch Babble group.
While I work so hard to learn to read, I can't help but think back to my 5th grade class at Seth Boyden School. We rewrote the lyrics to the song, Get Lucky, renaming it Get Smarter. The theme behind the song was that it takes hard work to get smarter. We flash-mobbed the noisy cafeteria filled with first graders, showing off some dance moves and singing the new lyrics. You might barely be able to hear the words, but some particularly important ones are, "We work so hard to read more, we work so hard to explore, we work so hard to ensure, we work so hard to get smarter." Oh, the things teachers do at the end of the year to keep their students engaged! But it is not bad advice for this American gal in Amsterdam.
I'm thinking of all the readers in Paris. Here's one of the world's great bookstores: Paris' beloved Shakespeare and Co. I'm proud to say that my niece and her husband are heading there tomorrow, after a visit to Amsterdam. They, along with all the other tourists who refused to cancel plans, show the world that life marches on, with visiting and eating and wandering, and frequent stops at bookstores like this to refuel.
Bon voyage, Alissa and Scott! L'chaim!