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Way back in the back then I had a series of posts recommending public domain books available from Gutenberg.org. I’m bringing it back today to recommend the remarkable writing of Helen Keller. Of course we all know who she is, but get past the feral child played rather wonderfully by Patty Duke and the tasteless jokes and you find a remarkable thinker and activist with a gift for crisp writing.

Find her major works here. Of course you should read her autobiography, The Story of My Life, which is the best known and most familiar, but The World I Live In is well worth looking into for a more mature author who captures the experience of being deafblind; it is not about the pain of darkness and silence but the wonder of being so tuned to physical sensations. And see her long essay, Optimism, where she writes about “happiness as faith.”

In my mind there is a list of short books that can change your life: Hesse’s Siddhartha, Dillards’s The Writing Life, Wiesel’s Night, or Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.  Any of these three books could be on that list.

I do not know her writing process, perhaps finger-spelling to a transcriptionist, and later poring over drafts with the secretary finger-spelling her own words back into her palm. In any case, it could not have been easy work. Keller’s writing is wonderful and important without these considerations, but as a writer I have to think about and wonder at her resolve. Maybe the effort for every line led to the precision and power in her writing.

J.D. Salinger, author of the greatest adolescent angst novel of all time and important character in of the greatest baseball novels of all time, passed away today. In his honor, here is what might very well be my favorite short story by anyone, ever.

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.

One hundred and fifty years ago today, readers in London flocked around newsstands to get the last installment (and read the famous last sentence above) of a rare foray by Charles Dickens into historical fiction, A Tale of Two Cities, a sweeping story of the French Revolution through the personal stories of a few people, particularly the Englishman Charles Darnay and the Frenchman Sydney Carton. Sydney is a better man, but is in love with Charles’ wife, whose father has been imprisoned and… Well, it all ties together.

When people disparage classics as boring, stuffy books nobody wants to read, it’s clear they haven’t read Dickens, whose books are crammed with excitement, great characters, and everything we want a novel to be. That’s hardly surprising, since what we expect of a novel has largely been formed by the works of DIckens in the first place..

All that being said, this is one holds up even better than other Dickens novels for 21st Century readers. Why? Because it is historical anyway, so the dated clothes, speech, and ways of life are supposed to be dated and there’s no distance between the author and us. What’s more, as one of his shorter novels, a reader isn’t likely to stall out half way through, as I have done many times with books like David Copperfield and Great Expectations, or one tenth of the way in, as I did with Bleak House.

What about young readers? My brother read this when he was 12 or 13 and I was 10. I remember well his pronouncements of the grotesque delights he found… “There’s a guy who gets his hands cut off!” he’d tell me. “You should read it!” He’d get a few pages further. “There’s a guy who gets stuffed full of straw!” So yes, it is a perfect book for boys who never read the classics.

Here’s a great web version that includes audio.

I said last week I’d post here and there about public domain texts, and it’s nigh time I did. With Halloween approaching, I decided Edgar Allan Poe would be a good place to start, but ended up selecting a wonderful gem of a detective story over any of his famous horror stories.

The Gold Bug is a first-rate story that would appeal to fans of The Da Vinci Code for its puzzles and problem solving, and appeal to folks like me who like the idea of The Da Vinci Code but wanted it to be better. Poe is funny, clever, and inventive in this one.

Now, Poe is a rare writer, one of those ones that continues to be popular despite having the yoke of “great writer” on him. There’s a saying that a classic is something people want to have read but nobody wants to read, but Poe is definitely a writer you do want to read. You don’t read Poe to be edified, you read his stuff because it’s enjoyable.

He’s also one of those writers who, when you’re a graduate student in literature, and you decide he’s just too popular to be that good and must be over-rated, proves upon further investigation to be even better than his reputation. Is it possible for one of the most popular writers of all time to still be underrated? Well, from a historical context, yes. Poe invented the psychological thriller and the detective story. He also, as many people do not know, was a devastating parodist, honestly one of the funniest writers of his era, as this story illustrates. He became the most famous name in scary stories without resorting to tried-and-true tropes like vampires and ghosts. He found unique, inventive ways to instill dread, often without anything supernatural. It’s just that his work is so well known, it’s easy to take it for granted until you compare him to his contemporaries and see how far ahead he was of all of them (except Hawthorne, as Poe would agree), and then look at how much influence he had on the next century of writers.

And here’s the kicker — he did all that sort of on the side, to pay the bills, while he wrote some of the most measured, exact poetry of the 19th Century. It’s sentimental for our 21st Century tastes, but the sheer poetics are astounding.

By the way, Poe’s legendary persona as drunken lunatic is wildly exaggerated. To be true, marrying your 13-year-old cousin and dying in a dramatic and mysterious way will inspire biographers to paint your portrait in a lurid way, but Poe was really much to hard a worker to be the reprobate he’s made out to be.

Anyway, one notable thing about “The Gold Bug” that makes it stand out in Poe’s oeuvre is its setting. Poe set most of his stories in Europe or vague, unnamed places that feel like Europe. This is an exception, as it is set in the southern United States and has a wonderful local color to it. I apologize in advance for the character of Jupiter, who is a bit of a racist caricature, but is also (like Jim in Huck Finn) a sympathetic and likable character.

So, if you have an hour, read this story. It’s on the house.

I draw a lot of inspiration from other books, especially ones that have gathered mold in the libraries of the world. The reason being, seriously, that all writers basically get their ideas from other books, but the further back you go, the more original you seem. Write a knock off of Twilight, and you’ll make eyes roll across the literary agencies of America. Write a knock off of Varney the Vampire, and you’ll look like a genius. Even if you get found out, because you’re going back to roots and stuff. Besides, you’ve done your homework, and everyone respects that.

I also just like the way books used to be written. I know the prose ran a little purple, but what’s not to love about this?

The solemn tones of an old cathedral clock have announced midnight—the air is thick and heavy—a strange, death like stillness pervades all nature.

It’s been a long time since anyone other than David Foster Wallace (RIP) went into the first sentence of a book thinking, OK, my main concern here isn’t that people will lose interest, but that they won’t be completely awed by my ability to write a sentence. So I’m going to write the hell out of the first sentence. No, at some point we all decided (as writers and as readers) that writing the hell out of a sentence was bad, and that curt, hard-hitting factual sentences were much better. Ones that tell the reader…

My mother drove me to the airport with the windows rolled down.

…and continue in that vein so that even a description of “gloomy, ominpresent shade” — a fragment with promise — comes too late to save what is a brisk, modern style of adverbless, unmetaphorical narration.

So maybe back then, prose ran purple. Now it runs clear. And I prefer purple to clear. We’re all told by jutting-jawed writing coaches to scratch every non-essential word, to leave nothing but the nouniest nouns and the verbiest verbs, and it’s been a long sad while since a stately cathedral clock has been allowed to peal, with sufficient narrative gravity, the opening of a spooky novel.

So there’s that, and the novelty of digging deeper than last year’s bestseller list for inspiration, and then there’s this:

Old books are free.

You can read them all for nothing. Or practically nothing, depending on your preferences.

For example, I’ve discovered that the Kindle store will have just about any classic for free or a buck or two. And a lot of times you can get the complete works of somebody or another for the same price as a single volume. I just downloaded everything by Washington Irving for a few bucks, for example. Other e-readers have free downloads.

Or you can get the $1.00 – $2.00 Dover Thrift Editions — I love those guys.

Or you can “Do the Gute!” I know, it sounds like something beer-swilling frat boys dare each other to do, but I just mean repair to Project Gutenberg and peruse their archives. Read online or print off what you want to read. There’s so much good stuff there. Not just the stories and novels, mind you, but little gems like this.

And of course, your public library doesn’t have a terribly long waiting list for anything that’s been out for over a 100 years, right?

To promote/celebrate the great literature in the public domain, I am going to start an occasional (I hope, monthly) feature where I’ll link to and write a bit about some public domain text(s) I’ve recently enjoyed. But not right now, I have to get back to Varney and find out what happens.