Kate Schapira

My mom sends me mysteries from the swap shop at the town dump, with mini-reviews on Post-Its. Once she sent three books with one note: “One of these is good, one’s okay, and one is pretty bad.” The note she sent with Margery Allingham’s The Crime at Black Dudley reads, “I’d never read this one. It was fun. Love, Mom.” The Post-It is purple.

My mom and I love mysteries; my sister (the theatrical designer, not the librarian) and I love science fiction. She recently got me hooked on Saga, which I intend to write about here as soon as she lends me her friend’s copies of volumes 2 and 3. She left Flight of the Dragonfly, by Robert L. Forward–the middle initial’s important*–at my house after her Chanukah visit.

The Crime at Black Dudley features amateur detective Albert Campion, Allingham’s knock-off of Lord Peter Wimsey. Like Wimsey, Campion becomes more of a person in later books, but this is earlyish, 1929. I love British mysteries from between the two world wars. They are the smuggest and most anxious texts ever. Scholarship exists (she wrote airily) about the mystery novel as conservative and reactionary form: the forces of established order triumph, the people the story knows are evil are punished. In The Crime at Black Dudley, this happens.

Science fiction has its smugnesses too: progress, humanism, a kind of triumphalist advancement through the universe. 

I check every couple of days to see if Captain Awkward has updated her advice column, and feel a little twinge of disappointment when she hasn’t. Filmmaker, teacher and storyteller Jennifer Peepas is one of the contemporary writers who’s doing the most with this form. Her columns are essays, shapely and voiced; the advice is good, focusing on useful scripts for hard conversations and concrete sets of actions for ugly situations. I’ve used it to guide my own behavior and to ask potentially helpful questions of friends, and it’s one of the five sites I recommend first-year student advisees explore (the others, if you’re interested, are Know Your Title IX, Ask a Manager, Scarleteen and Unfuck Your Habitat).

I read advice columns the way some people read true crime stories or books like Into Thin Air and The Perfect Storm: nosiness, voyeurism and armchair suffering all play a part. When people write into advice columns it means they’re willing to go public in exchange for a response; reading them means I get to be nosy and voyeuristic about something that someone’s already decided to share.

Every semester I hold preliminary conferences with my writing students. I ask normal teacher questions–what do you hope to work on, what do you feel you’re good at–and take notes to help me comment on their work when it starts coming in. In my first years of teaching, I also asked, “What’s something you read and liked recently?”

“The Great Gatsby,” they’d say, or, “We read As I Lay Dying last year.”

It’s perfectly possible to like either of those books, although I’m more of a Tender Is the Night girl myself. But the way they watched me as they said the titles showed me that I needed to be more precise. “What do you read for fun?” I ask them now. “Like, actual fun. What do you read when you’re sick?”

They murmur something shy about Harry Potter or the Hunger Games, or glance sideways before asking, “Have you ever heard of Naruto?” And once that started happening, I saw the chance to do something more important than learning about their “taste” or their “influences”: I could help them see that no pleasure is guilty. Talking with my students helped me to respond both truthfully and proudly when someone asks, “What’ve you been reading lately?” These posts will imagine that you’re asking me that question about once a week.

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Seven Citadels, a four-book series by Geraldine Harris (Prince of the Godborn, Children of the Wind, The Dead Kingdom, The Seventh Gate), is a quest story.