The OT Book Club & Literary Society, week of 1-20

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Bart’s Books, Ojai, California

Founded in 1964, Bart’s Books is a beautiful outdoor bookstore where you can sip lemonade in the courtyard surrounded by a maze of bookshelves, play a game of chess in the shade or read a short story under the apple tree. Not just a desirable al fresco space, Bart’s Books has heart. Gathering here for art shows and weekly community events is a bit of a local tradition.

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When John Cheever's editor suggested an omnibus collection of his short stories, the writer was nonplussed. "Why do you want to do that?" he asked. "All those stories have already been published." The resulting book, The Stories of John Cheever (1978), became one of the bestselling short story collections of all time, winning its author a National Book award and a Pulitzer. But it didn't just buttress Cheever's uncertain reputation. As Robert Morace notes, it "revived interest in the short story on the part of publishers and readers, making it both commercially more viable and critically more respectable".

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he became, by chance, the chronicler of Westchester, New York, just as it became the first large-scale suburban area in the world. His Shady Hill is a fictional territory to consider alongside Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County or Thomas Hardy's Wessex. But while you might expect social commentary to trip across its manicured lawns, or satire to barge through the mushroom-coloured raincoats thronging its station platform, Cheever's suburban fantasias are a good deal stranger than that.

Proclaiming Cheever's strangeness should be a cliche, but for each generation the WASPiness of his settings seems to shroud his work in a phantom conservatism. Even if some of his most famous stories are fables about radios that transmit neighbours' private conversations ("The Enormous Radio"), or angels of death walking the streets of Manhattan ("Torch Song"), the casual observer's general impression remains one of cocktail hours, affairs and hungover Sundays.

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the ability of schools and teachers to foster a love for reading in students is under assault in today’s educational climate. We live in a time of high-stakes accountability, where quantifiable metrics, namely standardized test scores, are used to judge students, teachers, and schools. Now, we are faced with the Common Core, new standards in Math and English Language Arts that are sweeping the nation. Incentivized by billions in federal grant dollars, 45 states are adopting the Common Core, with some states rolling out their implementations over the last two school years and other states waiting until next school year.

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In her Paris Review interview, novelist Andrea Barrett talks about her difficulties in high school, how she used to skip class and was a “horrible student.” Yet there was one person who stood out, a 10th-grade English teacher named Mrs. Williams. Mrs. Williams gave students “an extensive list of really good books to read” and then asked them to journal about their reading experiences. Soon, Barrett was reading more than she ever had before. “Mrs. Williams,” Barrett says, looking back, “was important to me in ways I didn’t understand for years.”

This is a relatable feeling. The lasting ramifications and reverberations that result from the guidance of our teachers — these people who, at the time, may have seemed silly, ridiculously strict, overly enthusiastic, and unbearably old — are hard to quantify. Yet many of us have been shaped in tremendous ways by these teachers who took the time and extended themselves, these teachers, like Mrs. Williams, Miss Kirwin, and Mrs. McKee, who went above and beyond and brought reading into our lives. Booksellers everywhere should be sending these teachers thank-you cards. These are the people who are inspiring the next generation of readers and book-buyers in America.

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