Souvenirs of a Blown World

Once again, a book with much potential that falls a little flat. What this book was able to do that a book I read earlier this year wasn't able to do, One More Day Everywhere, was it told me a story by telling stories.

One of my biggest pet peeves in the world is having something over-explained to me. I think people in general indicate when they aren't following along, and so when they don't indicate confusion, stopping to over-explain only ends in frustration and even feeling insulted. One More Day Everywhere spent too much time telling me how I should feel about the whatever story it just told instead of letting the story speak for itself.

This book, Souvenirs of a Blown World is anecdotes from McDonald's life that tell a story about the 1960s. What he cleverly did (he passed away in 2008) was he just told each story from his own perspective and with nice detail and then ended the chapter. And it moved smoothly.

What I didn't get a sense of, and so why this book still only receives a "C" grade, is of some kind of chronology or big picture or structure. It seems random, which I'm sure it's not but still it seems. I feel like this is a bunch of essays thrown together because they have a common theme or common author. I'm going to leave it at that, because I don't feel like overanalyzing.

One extremely clever thing McDonald did, though, was to use phrases, sentences, quotes, etc. from previous chapters as epigraphs introducing the theme of the next chapter and it was usually a brilliant tie-in. Why this excites me: in grad school I used epigraphs at the beginning of my stories and my workshop class would tell me how tired that kind of technique is. Authors don't do that anymore, nor do they put thoughts in italics nor do they use quotation marks for speech (that was actually said in one of my undergraduate classes). And I'm like, who cares what other authors are doing now? This is what I like. But you know, most of them were only interested in copying what was going on now, not actually expressing themselves in a way that...expressed....themselves.

Anyway, high "C."