I met Nancy Pearl, a librarian with her own action figure and a reputation as a genius book recommender, for tea today.
Nancy found me at the back of the line at the University of Washington book store coffee shop: “We are going to discuss books!” her face said to me. We got matching teas and sat down.
I told her I was looking for books I liked more than any other book I had read. She asked first what I liked about my current favorite book.
I like what I will call Dorothea's exceptionalism in Middlemarch I said. For Dorothea is determined to create something with her life, to build something unique for her fellow humans during her time on earth. She tries to help her husband write a book she believes vital to human civilization. She tries to build cotages for the servants who live on her uncle’s land She is less willing to be buffeted by the forces of circumstance that most of us cower before and more willing to try to do interesting things.
Oh, you might like North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, then, Nancy suggested.
I want to read about Dorothea’s life if it had gone just a little bit differently from the way Eliot had it go, I continued. Eliot had Dorothea fail at both the book and the cottages. Worse, Eliot seemed to lose interest in Dorothea’s attempts: Dorothea’s book project ends when her husband dies, and Eliot says too little about why Dorothea stopped trying for the cottages to satisfy me. I wanted hear what it would have been like for her to continue to try, and, ideally, to succeed at something that incurs high cost and and produces high reward.
”Try Gertrude Bell, Queen of the Desert, by Georgina Howell,” Nancy said. Gertrude is a woman who succeeds in doing something interesting: She creates Iraq.
Nancy was so unfazed by the specificity of my request that I felt only a hint of hesitation about making my demands for the book I wanted to read even more particular. In addition, I said, I’d really the protagonist to struggle before finding something to do that is interesting enough to hold her attention for longer than the first thrill the idea of doing it produced.
“Oh,” Nancy said, her voice suggesting she’d stopped herself from clapping her hands together with the pleasure of how well this was working out. “Gertrude Bell is perfect.”
Nancy cupped her tea and looked at me, expectant without a hint of impatience. Her air suggested she believed that I would be doing her favor if I asked her more questions about books when anyone else would believe that she was the one doing me a favor that morning. She was beginning to have me believe in her perception of what was going on, so I mentioned another reaction to another book: “I liked Madame Bovary because I am also curious, as Emma was in that book, about what is meant by words such as passion.” “If you want to see passion,” she said, “try Anna Karenina.”
Nancy wasn’t emiting any signals that suggested I should stop, so I squeezed in question after question and together we put together a reading list:
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell because I liked Dorothea in Middlemarch
Gertrude Bell, Queen of the Desert by Georgina Howell because I liked Dorothea in Middlemarch
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy because I wanted to see passion
What Happened to Anna K? by Irina Reyhn because I wanted to see passion
The World Beneath Her by Deborah Weisgal because there is a George Eliot like character in the book.
