- Oh, hi there.
There's two things I can't resist staring at,
an author's bookshelf, and myself.
That's why I've brought them both together in this show,
Show Your Shelf.
Today's guest is Lois Lowry.
She's a children's author who's won two Newbery awards.
One for her book "The Giver,"
which my son read this summer
after it was assigned from school,
and loved it so much he made me read it.
Now I'm making you read it.
Her new book, "On the Horizon,"
is a collection of poems she's written for children
about World War II.
I can't wait to hear her stories
and see her bookshelf,
which I'm sure is weighted down by Newbery Medals.
♪ Show your shelf ♪
♪ Show some spine ♪
♪ Dust off your tiny jackets ♪
♪ Show me yours, I'll show you mine ♪
♪ We're delighted to have you with us ♪
♪ Perhaps we appear pretentious ♪
♪ But we're sincerely here to share the wealth ♪
♪ So show your shelf, show your shelf, show your shelf ♪
Lois Lowry, thank you so much for doing this.
We're so excited and grateful.
- Oh, my pleasure.
- I'm already impressed by your bookshelf.
Is this the main bookshelf in your house,
or the only bookshelf?
- Oh gosh, it has a little history.
A few years ago, I lived in a much larger house
with a zillion bookcases.
And then I decided, 'cause I'm old, to downsize.
And the hardest part was downsizing my books.
I moved to a smaller house.
This is not my only bookcase,
but I got rid of all my fiction, boo-hoo,
including a first edition
of "The Shining" in which Stephen King had written,
"We've got to stop meeting like this."
And later I was told that was worth money.
- That's a very specific decision.
What made you ...
It's like you're a library.
You got rid of half the library?
- My thinking was this.
I'm not gonna read these again.
I know how they come out.
And many others were signed by the authors,
who were acquaintances of mine.
And so, because I had read somewhere
that John Updike went into a used bookstore
and found that there were books by him signed to people,
and he was kind of hurt
that those people had donated them to used bookstores.
So I took a razor blade
and went through those novels
and sliced out the pages
with the author's affectionate signatures
so their feelings wouldn't be hurt.
- Wait, so what did you do with the signed pages?
- I threw them away.
I mean, what good are they? - Wow.
- I'd like to say I was young and stupid,
but I wasn't that young at the time.
I was probably in my 40s.
Old enough to know better, but I didn't, what can I say?
- We asked you to choose three books
that are very meaningful to you.
One of them is a collection of E.E. Cummings poems.
- Yeah, okay.
You can see it's very dog-eared.
And I picked it up because I had used a quotation
from Cummings as an, I guess it's called an epigraph
at the beginning of a novel that I wrote.
Let me grab that one for you.
It says, "Along the brittle treacherous
bright streets of memory comes my heart."
One of the things I love about Cummings' work is his use
of incongruous adjectives,
but he makes them work.
Who would call streets brittle?
And yet the streets of memory
are so brittle and treacherous.
I love this quotation.
In my family, when my kids were young,
we sat down every evening,
and instead of saying grace,
the way some people did,
we actually held hands
and we recited a poem by E.E. Cummings,
same one every night.
And it began, "I thank you God for most this amazing day,
for the leaping greenly spirits of trees,
the true blue sky."
And then there's more that I'm forgetting.
And it concludes, "For everything that is infinite,
everything that is yes."
- You would say that every night before dinner?
- Yep.
- Do you remember how you came up with that idea
of doing that instead of grace?
Were you already doing grace, or you added this?
- We had been, and we substituted this.
- What was going on in your life
that you wanted to make that change?
- Oh, that's an interesting question.
I think actually what was going on was
that I had not finished college.
I married when I was 19.
I had four children before I was 25.
And then when my youngest child began kindergarten,
I went back to college.
So this was probably in that time
when I was back as a grown, mature woman.
Well, an immature grown woman,
when I was back studying again and studying literature.
And so I think that's what led me
to substitute the Cummings poem.
- Where do you keep all your medals and awards?
Is there like an awards room?
- Oh, I used to, in Cambridge where I lived
in a large house, I had shelves in the dining room,
and I used to call it my wall of perpetual self-adoration.
And the shelves were filled with all these awards.
And then when I was preparing to move,
it was not easy packing up a large house.
And I had put all of those awards,
including the two Newbery Medals into a carton.
And then somehow a terrible thing happened.
I had someone come to haul away the junk,
and they picked up that carton and off it went.
And when my publisher heard about that,
they very kindly contacted the American Library Association,
who made me two duplicate brand new Newbery Medals,
so I do have those.
- I wonder if someday someone's gonna find them
and send them to you, like finding-
- No, no, I'm sure they went to a dump.
But listen, who needs a wall
of perpetual self-adoration?
- This is Show Your Shelf first.
You picked a collection of letters from E.B. White.
- I so treasure my collected letters collection.
I want to know that person.
I want to see their picture.
And I really like it when I get
to see a picture of their desk
and find out what kind of cigarettes are smashed
in their ashtray.
I like all that detail stuff.
If I could, I would want to peek
into their medicine cabinet.
Of course I can't do that, but I like reading their letters.
- When did you buy that?
Why did you buy that?
- I don't know when I bought it, but it's very yellowed.
But what I just found in here is
something I wrote.
I think this might've been The Washington Post,
that said, "The question this year is,"
and presumably they asked this question of many authors.
"What book do you find yourself coming back to?"
And I'll read you what I wrote to them.
"Because I spend a substantial part of each year
in rural Maine, his voice resonates with me
as he describes the quotidian life on a Maine farm."
I'm just recalling how satisfying it was
to find a way to use the word quotidian,
which is a word you don't get to use very often.
In one letter, he mentions that he's building a stone wall,
and he calls it easier than writing.
- Do you feel like building a stone wall
is easier than writing?
- I've never built a stone wall,
but I have an old farm in Western Maine.
The house was built in 1768.
I had a stone wall built there to replace one
that was crumbling.
And it was very hard to find a stone mason.
And the guy I found looked like Brad Pitt.
So I spent that summer writing a book,
I don't remember which book it would have been,
and glancing out the window
at this very handsome guy building my stone wall.
He was like an artist.
I would watch him pick up a stone
and look at it and decide how to place it.
And then he would pick up one and compare the sizes.
Anyway, he built me a beautiful wall.
- It sounds like writing though,
like finding the right thing and shifting it, yeah.
- The difference is in writing,
particularly with a computer,
unlike the typewriter days,
you put things in place the way you want them to be.
And then magically, you can go back and shift them around.
When you build a stone wall
you gotta get it right the first time.
- When real passionate readers write to you,
how do you deal with that volume?
- I have one little girl
that writes to me frequently,
and I'm gonna have to tell her soon,
I can't continue an ongoing relationship.
- How do you break up with with an email buddy like that?
- It's hard, it's hard.
But one writer broke up with me.
This was kind of a sweet story.
She was a little girl in Vermont and she wrote to me.
And this was back in the days of real letters, before email,
and again and again.
And I replied every time, briefly.
And then she wrote me a letter and she said,
"This is a hard letter to write."
And she said, "I've outgrown you."
And she told me the name of a adult novel she was reading.
And she said, "I'm no longer reading your books.
I'm sorry to tell you this."
So I wrote back and said, "Bravo for you.
You're growing up.
That's the way things work.
My feelings aren't hurt, and I wish you well."
But the reason I remember this one in particular is
I recently heard from a child who said,
"My mother used to write to you."
And it was this same child.
I remembered the name.
The little girl in Vermont is now grown up,
has a little girl of her own, who is writing to me.
- Okay, so for your third book,
you picked "The Yearling"
by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.
It was the best-selling book of 1938,
and I've never heard of it.
- Okay, and it was published for adults.
I think it might've been a book of the month club selection,
which is why it would have arrived in my home.
But the amazing thing is that my mother read this book to me
when I was eight years old in 1945,
even though it was a book for adults.
I mean, it's not a book with sex and violence,
but the language is sophisticated.
And how my mother knew that I would relate to it,
I don't know.
But she certainly made the right choice.
- Is that the original copy that your mom read to you?
- No, it isn't, but it's identical
to the one my mother read to me.
- You re-bought it at some point?
What made you re-buy it?
- I have talked about this book so often,
and the fact that it was illustrated by N.C. Wyeth
and it has gorgeous illustrations in it.
My mother would read a chapter to me at bedtime,
and then she would leave the book beside my bed.
And I would just lie there for a bit,
looking at those gorgeous illustrations.
I had so entered the world of that book.
And one of the reasons I loved it from the illustrations
is because the little boy looked like me.
He was my age, and he was skinny and blonde,
but he lives on a very poor ramshackle farm
on the Northwest Florida.
And his family is very what we would now call deprived.
And he acquires this fawn
and it becomes his pet.
What can I say, it's a very, in many places, a sad book.
The children's books that I was reading
to myself at that age were all happy.
And suddenly I was plunged into this world
of poverty and some violence.
And the fawn begins to, as it grows,
begins to eat the crops on this little farm.
The father, who you just saw a picture of dad in his bed,
he's been bitten by a rattlesnake, so he can't get up.
And he says to the boy, "Take my rifle.
You have to kill the fawn."
I mean...
- So your parents subscribed to the book of the month club.
And would you read those books sometimes,
or did that affect you?
- The fact that my mother was a reader
was certainly something that permeated my existence.
And if a book came every month
and I saw my mother reach for it with excitement
and sit down and curl up,
I mean, that set the tone for my household.
- We got you a gift
- You did, and it's right here,
and I swear I have not opened it.
- Okay, it's a book.
And I wanted to pick a book.
I'd never met you but I wanted to pick a book
that I thought summed up your impact
or your career or who you are.
And so this is the book I picked.
I hope I did okay.
- Oh, yes.
The Giver, you know, is one of the most banned books
in the United States.
This is about that, yes.
- So yes, it's about...
It's dystopic, which I know you've written about.
It's about books being banned, which you've endured.
It just reminded me of such a smart, calm reaction
to a horror that's going around them,
which I think you do so well.
- I mean, the meaning of the title,
that is the temperature at which paper burns.
And it's about book burning.
And I just want to tell you one final story.
A couple of years ago, Howard and I were in Germany,
and we were on a tour with a guide,
following the rise of fascism and of Hitler in Germany.
And I don't remember which city this was in,
but we were taken to the square where in 1933,
they had piled books, including Hemingway and Freud
and many others, and burned them.
And our guide, who was a German school teacher,
said that there is now a ceremony of sorts,
and he participates in it,
where people go and stand on that square
and read aloud the books that were burned there.
It was such a wonderful commentary on the passage of time,
and the way things can be healed.
So thank you, this is very special.
- Thank you so much for doing this.
It means a lot to me and my son.
- Oh, thank you.
It's been actually fun for me.