Body Surfing and Books

During the years I taught at a high school, I spent a great deal of time impressing on students the importance of reading.  Some took to that idea better than others.  While there are multiple reasons to read books, magazines, and newspapers, I am going to explore just one of those reasons in this post.


Books and stories teach us to see and consider the human condition in all of its many shapes.  While thoughtfully reading a great story or novel, we can turn the mirror of literature on our own lives and the lives of those around us.

Teaching high school English brought me in contact with a never-ending supply of stories and books.  As I look back on those years I remember a number of stories I discussed with high school sophomores, juniors and seniors. Several stand out, but one in particular stays with me--a story first published in The New Yorker by Anne Tyler in 1977.  It is called "Average Waves in Unprotected Waters," a strange title that is perfectly constructed.


Tyler's story concerns a single day in the tragic life of a mother who has a special needs child.  In this one day the reader discerns what has shaped the mother's life and caused her to make the decisions she has or hasn't made.  Those choices include marrying against her parents' wishes and then regretting it; seeing her husband leave after their special needs son is born;  staying with the child while paying the bills in a job that barely allows her to hire a sitter; and making a final decision about whether to institutionalize the grown child because, although she loves him, he has become too strong and difficult for her to handle. Huge events.


All of the choices the character made or had thrust upon her cause us to think about the way we weigh and evaluate issues in our own lives.

The title of Tyler's story comes from a brief scene the woman remembers from her childhood on the East Coast. Her father loved the sea and his entire life and career revolved around it.  He tried to teach his young daughter to body surf in the ocean,  but she simply stood still and let the waves slam into her.  Not adapting or meeting the waves head on seemed like the right thing to do.  In the present day the reader sees how much of the character's life has been dictated by this philosophy.  One bad decision leads to a number of ramifications, and rather than meet those changes head on she is stuck in a life in which the waves crash into her.  When the story ends it is apparent that she will continue to be a spectator in life and adapt poorly to change.


Adapting to change is a theme discussed by countless writers, and their takes on that theme are highly applicable to readers' lives.  Marriages end, children move away, jobs change or disappear, grandchildren are born, parents pass away, retirement comes along.        How do we adapt to changes such as these in our lives?  How do we learn from these experiences?


So what do we learn from books?  We thoughtfully consider the human condition in all of its shapes, and we turn the mirror of literature on our own lives.

Book, I Can't Put You Down!

I’m always looking for books that are real page-turners—I can’t put them down. If you like this kind of book I recommend the thrillers of Thomas Perry, an author of twenty best-selling suspense novels, who spoke last week at The Poisoned Pen bookstore in Scottsdale.

I read Perry’s The Butcher’s Boy, an Edgar Award winner and the first book of a series of three. The series is about a hired assassin who works under cover of darkness, kills his victim, and then receives a payoff.  In the first book he kills a senator from Colorado and must travel to Las Vegas to collect his fee.  Suddenly he becomes the hunted as his clients—organized crime bosses—turn against him. He is also just a step ahead of Elizabeth Waring, a young analyst for the Justice Department who is uncovering his tracks. The plot goes back and forth between the lives of these two—killer and tracker.  I was intrigued by the fact that Perry never gave a name to his assassin.  The climax provides one of those “stay up until three in the morning to see what happens” mornings.

Perry wrote two more books in this series, Sleeping Dogs (1992) and The Informant (2011.) In between he wrote a number of stand-alone thrillers.  Three years after he wrote Sleeping Dogs, he began a five-book series about a character named Jane Whitefield.

He spoke at the bookstore about the newest book in the Whitefield series, Poison Flower.  The Whitefield series had a five-book arc and Perry wrote them from 1995-1999, adding a sixth book, Runner (2009), and this latest book.

Perry was both charming and witty and recounted with great humor the decisions he has made while writing novels.  The new novel about Whitefield took shape in his mind when he was called for jury duty at a huge courthouse in Los Angeles.  Like most jury cattle calls, this one involved lots of sitting and waiting.  Perry began to wonder what would happen if someone broke out of the heavily guarded courthouse.  And that was the birth of Poison Flower. 

Jane Whitefield is a descendant of the Seneca Indians who lived in the western New York area where Perry grew up.  Perry’s brother, an anthropologist, helped the author with reading lists so he could capture the Seneca history of the region.  Jane Whitefield helps people disappear like a one-person protection agency.  When she helps an innocent man accused of his wife’s murder escape the LA courthouse, she is subsequently kidnapped, wounded, tortured, and chased across the country by both her kidnappers and the police.

Perry grew up in Tonawanda, New York, and received his BA from Cornell University and his Phd in English Literature from the University of Rochester.  Before he turned to writing novels he and his wife wrote and produced for television.  Shows to his credit include 21 Jump Street, Simon and Simon, and Star Trek: The Next Generation.   His website can be visited at thomasperryauthor.com/   

Have you recently read a page-turning thriller?  Add a comment and recommend it!