Thoughts on "Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading."

 Among the things I received for my birthday last month was a set of DVDs from The Great Courses on "Banned Books." The lecturer was Maureen Corrigan, a professor of literature at Georgetown University, a book critic on U.S. public radio, and a columnist for the Washington Post.

The course examined the reasons for various book suppressions throughout history, from bowdlerizing Shakespeare to banning of famous novels like James Joyce's "Ulysses" and D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover."  She also discussed current pressures from right-wing people and groups to have certain books pulled from the schools.  

After completing the course, I wanted to hear more from Maureen Corrigan, and from the public library got a copy of her 2005 non-fiction book, "Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading."  Reading it is like having a conversation with a warm and witty friend. In it, she shares her life experiences and how they were influenced by the books she was reading.  The book is a blend of literary discussion and autobiography.

In "Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading," Corrigan looks at books that are outside the literary canon.  She is interested in "female extreme adventure tales", hard-boiled detective novels, and "Catholic martyr narratives."  What does she mean by these categories?

She describes "female extreme adventure tales" as stories abut women withstanding psychological and sometimes physical torment over an extended period.  The story usually takes place in the home, or in her body, or both.  In the modern female adventure tale, women don't suffer and be still as in earlier such tales; they act. Their precarious situations usually involve reproduction crises, abusive relationships, fatiguing caregiving and emotional burdens.  

Corrigan cites two examples of books which offer the Catholic spin on the woman suffering in silence: the Marie Killilea books about Karen, and the Beany Malone series. Reading them as an adult, she became aware of the quiet ways "through which their heroines managed to criticize the status quo and still keep their ladylike mantles in place."

She likes hard-boiled detective stories because they implicitly criticize the "evils that result from the unequal distribution of wealth."  Detective novels generate the "empowering fantasy of being in control of one's work life, calling the shots and using brains as well as brawn."

Corrigan charms us with her ways with words. She describes a character in "The Big Sleep" as a "sexy sociopath"; she says that Robert Tressell's 1914 novel, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists", which is about work, is "an epic of spackling, stripping and socialism."   She called Professor Frank Lentricchia, who published "Criticism and Social Change" in 1983, as the "dirty Harry of literary criticism," a label he wore with pride.  She includes an Ogden  Nash verse:

"The Marquis de Sade/wasn't always mad/

What added his brain/was Mickey Spillane."

I urge booklovers to read, "Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading."