Last week we had “reading day” on Sunday. It was my daughter’s suggestion, as both she and her sister had only done about half their summer reading, and the first day of school was looming. We didn’t set aside the whole day, just the early afternoon, but it was great and really peaceful—the two girls in the living room reading their books, George and I on the screen porch enjoying the luxury of leisure reading. Usually I don’t let myself sit down and read until bedtime, and then I fall asleep right away. It was a real treat to have a couple hours of clear-eyed, wide-awake time to really focus on what I was reading.
So we’re doing it again this week, more by default than declaration: After lunch, everyone fell into a book. I took the oppportunity to attack the stack of old New Yorkers and read two really nice articles. I expected All the Answers, by Charles Van Doren, to be a straightforward narrative of his experiences as America’s most famous quiz-show cheater; instead, it was a really touching story of family solidarity, forgiveness, and redemption. Van Doren presents himself as surprisingly diffident in the story, never really admitting to knowingly doing anything wrong and not particularly tortured about it, either. But he is surrounded by people who are much wiser than he is, chiefly his father and his wife, who set him straight. The other article, Hungry Minds, is Ian Frazier’s account of his work running a writer’s workshop in a soup kitchen in Chelsea’s Church of the Holy Apostles. I usually hate these writers’ workshop stories, but this was less about the workshop and more about the soup kitchen, and how it affected the church’s evolution, so it was actually pretty interesting. And the article is chock-full of great anecdotes; my favorite is when he runs into a soup-kitchen guest who is not impressed by the writers’ workshop because he attended one run by John Cheever when he was in Ossining. Good stuff.