Liars and Saints

A trend in elementary-school classrooms: Go around and name your favorite XXXXXX. Your favorite sport. Your favorite color. Your favorite bird. I find this mystifying because (a) I have to feign interest in all of the inevitably bland answers and (b) the question isn't actually a chance for a deeper conversation. The answers just hang in the air, and they die; there's silence. Yesterday, with third grade: "State your favorite ice cream flavor." This moves along as predicted, awkwardly; at times, the pause is so long that I want to shout, I want to say (uncharitably), " You can think of one, just one, ice cream flavor. Tell a lie. Make something up. This isn't a physics problem. " The class clown understands some of the subtext here, and he hijacks the conversation: "My favorite is stracciatella," he says. (Eyes get wide.) "And butterscotch. Cioccolata." (The kid isn't even Italian.) "Mint chip...Cinnamon....Black rasp...

Looking for new reading material? Here are some books calling out to me right now.... *"Steering the Craft" (Ursula LeGuin) *"One Writer's Beginnings" (Eudora Welty) *"Anna Karenina" (but not translated by Pevear et al. I'm talking about the translation completed by Constance Garnett. Apparently, Garnett has been unjustly maligned, and her work is better than Pevear's work. For the current buzzy-ness of Pevear, we have Oprah to blame. This is all via Janet Malcolm.) *"Nobody's Looking at You" (Janet Malcolm) *"Howards End" (E.M. Forster....people say the current big-ticket play "The Inheritance" is like a lesser version of "Howards End," so why not read "Howards End"?) *"The Family Fang" (Kevin Wilson...A favorite of Ann Patchett's....Wilson truly seems to be an odd duck with a need to tell stories, and his new one, about siblings repeatedly, literally, bursting into...