Harris and Me by Gary Paulson

I'm a librarian.  A couple weeks ago I was having lunch with a fellow librarian and I was telling her how I don't really read a lot of fiction, but rather gravitate towards non-fiction.  Honestly, I think being an English major almost ruined fiction for me.  I can't read novels without picking them apart in search of metaphors, themes, archetypes, tropes, and all that other crap.  Have you ever watched a movie with someone who knows way too much about film?  You're sitting there just trying to enjoy the explosions or whatever and he's sitting there talking about how NO ONE soundtracked their films better than Sergio Leone and why would ANYONE think that making a dystopian roller derby movie staring James Caan is a good idea.  It's totally annoying.  You just want him to SHUT UP so you can enjoy the thing.  That's what reading fiction is like after you've majored in English.  You can't turn off that stupid voice in your head that's been trained to suss out all these theories.  Or at least, I can't.

But, when you become an administrator who is partly in charge of the Youth Services department, you need to make sure you've got at least a working knowledge of children's and young adult fiction.  And to be clear, I do not.  My background is in administration, and reference before that.  You could take my knowledge of fiction and fit it into, well, an undergrad English syllabus and not have much overflow.  You could take my knowledge of children's and young adult fiction and fit it into a couple of very thin paragraphs.

So my colleague came up with a plan.  Every month at our Youth Services meeting, a randomly chosen youth services librarian would get to give me homework.  He or she would assign me a book to read, and I would read it.  It's not unlike being an English major again, but will hopefully involve far fewer ancient Greek authors.  And it will undoubtedly be much more useful in my day-to-day life.

And I thought, why not turn this into a blog?  Not only would it increase my accountability, but other librarians might wanna try it too.  So I enlisted my good friend Lindsy Serrano from NYPL and together we plan to take this idea and turn it into a readers' advisory tool.  We could cross-pollinate librarians from different specializations.  When I review a children's book, I could give some examples a the end of the entry of some "grown-up" books (fiction or non) that might go well with it.  Not unlike a wine pairing, if you will.  Something to maybe send home with Mom or Dad if you send the kid home with the item under review.

My first homework assignment was Harris and Me by Gary Paulson, which was recommended to me by our awesome children's librarian Dennis here at the Central Research Branch of the Johnson County (Kansas) Library.  The story here is about a boy who goes to live for the summer on the farm of his distant relatives.  We don't get a lot of backstory about the narrator except that he has lived in various places over the course of his short life, including the Philippines during the war.  We get the faint impression that he's had a somewhat troubled childhood, but it's never really addressed.  As the title suggests, most of the book deals with the narrator's relationship with Harris, his cousin.  The two kids from radically different backgrounds form a friendship over the course of a summer spent causing trouble, swimming in creeks, helping with chores, playing games, and just generally enjoying themselves like young kids do (or should, anyway).

To be succinct, this book is totally rad.  It's serious without being heavy.  It's funny without being stupid.  It's exciting without being scary (it's a kid's book, after all).  And it's edgy without having to steep itself in pretense.  A recurring plot point in the book is the fate of the narrator's prized possession:  a set of dirty pictures he somehow caged in the Philippines.  In other words, it's grown-up ideas that have been packaged for small grown-ups, not dumbed down for little kids.  I think kids would respond to this book for the same reason that they respond to Pixar movies:  they understand that they are not being condescended to.  The book opens with a description of how the narrator's parents are "puke drunks."  Kids appreciate this kind of honesty; they know when it's being withheld and they feel empowered when they're trusted with it.

Also, Gary Paulson is a top notch writer.  His prose is sharp and spare.  All of his characters, even the silent ones, are complete human beings and not caricatures.  The book is just fun to read.  He's the kind of writer that could write about the chemical process of paint drying and could probably make it worth reading.

There are two books that I would pair with this one.  One is one of my all-time favorites:  The Pastures of Heaven by John Steinbeck.  I cannot resist plugging this book anywhere I go.  Like Harris and Me, it doesn't have a linear plot so much as a set of characters that circle each other, and the book is more like a set of short stories than a proper novel with a plot that is laid out in Act One and comes to a denouement in Act Three.  It's also a book about rural life written in very economical prose, and its dry humor is very similar to Paulson's.  Paulson writes like Steinbeck at his non-preachy best:  short and sweet and funny.

The second book is A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold.  This one might be more of a stretch, but stay with me here.  A Sand County Almanac is basically Leopold's collected meditations on why he loves his farm in Wisconsin so much.  It shares with Harris and Me a respect for a life spent at honest labor outdoors, and joy in the simple.  It's also one of the most influential books on ecology to ever be published.  I never had much use for Thoreau and his hippie walkabout philosophy, but Leopold has the earnestness of Thoreau  plus the street cred (farm cred?) of a dude who actually did the damn thing.  The year after A Sand County Almanac was published Leopold died of a heart attack fighting a fire on his neighbor's property.  Thoreau died because he caught bronchitis when he went to count tree rings in the rain.  Just saying.

So there's my little essay.  Harris and Me is awesome, you should read it and recommend it.