The Book Thief Post #2

I gave up as soon as I was told to pay attention down the road, then had a metaphor that hadn't happend yet explained to me, then time jumped again.

The Book Thief Post #1

I'm reading The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.  Kind of.  I just came to the realization (five minutes ago) that if I'm going to read it - because I was thinking of abandoning it - I'm going to have to skip the bold passages where he uses meta-fiction to steer readers toward his message.  I just.  can't.  handle.  it.  It's like watching a movie with someone who's seen the movie, and they keep poking you and telling you what's going to happen next and how it affects the outcome of the movie.  Or is whispering to you the whole time about what you should be thinking by the end of each scene. 

STFU.

The Dark Lantern

I eventually just had to kinda skim through this novel after reading nearly two hundred pages.  It's a little over four hundred pages, and once I realized the characters were just mediocre and it seemed like the whole novel would be the same thing over and over, I decided to flip through it to find something that would seem different or interesting.  I found nothing.  I'm sure people who like novels set in the late 1800's would love this book, though, as it is rich with descriptions of the London setting.  I, however, can't even be bothered to wonder what gradiation of C I would give it, so I'm just going to give it a C.

B Grades

Today would be a good day to continue my long-defunct series on why I give certain grades to the novels I read.  I believe I'm up to 'B' now.  Since I just gave a wonderful novel a grade of 'B' rather than what it would have scored had it ended better, maybe it's a good day to reflect on 'B' novels in general.

It's funny, because in movies a B-movie would be regarded as at once a failure and a success.  B-movies fall into that one and only awesome category of "so bad it's good."  It isn't quite so in my literary estimation.  'B' books are ones that are brilliantly written in some way or another but fall just shy of perfection.

'B' is for 'but.'  In other words, "this book is amazing, but...."  For instance, Paul Bowles's novel The Sheltering Sky is a beautiful depiction of the philosophy of life and fate, but I've often felt there was a missed opportunity with the character of Tunner.  I feel like he just disappears from the novel, and while I know that was Bowles's intention, I was left unsatisfied.  Remember, these grades are highly personal, so though I can step back and examine Bowles's motivations for the choices he made in the story, I still have a nagging feeling there could have been a different choice that would have been more satisfying.

That doesn't even mean I wouldn't give an 'A' grade to a book where something is left wholly unexplained.  I think The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides is extremely brilliant, and it gets a hearty 'A' even though there is a feeling that the reader (and the collective narrator) will never truly understand what led these girls to their decisions.  It's underlying, and the reader can infer, but I didn't finish the book feeling in any way dissatisfied with the events within.

'B' is for 'box.'  Because the books that earn a 'B' grade go in a box.  They don't go on my bookshelf because that's reserved for 'A' books, books on writing, journals, writing files, and miscellaneous items.  The 'B' books go in a box because for some reason I can't let them go but I may not know why.  Maybe, like Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, I will slowly realize it meant more to me than I originally thought.

'B' is, then, for 'back again.'  These are the books that seem to fester somewhere in the back of my mind, and it may be because they have flaws that I wish to examine.  Very few books are presented perfectly, and any author worth her salt would say there is always room for revision, even eighty-five years down the line (though not revision from some prescriptive bullshit editors who co-wrote a certain 'on writing' book).  These also may be the books that truly inspire, because where there are flaws there are opportunities for new writers to examine the other possiblities, what could have happened had the story taken the other fork in the road.  Tunner becomes a new character, with a new name, but his story is carried forward.  Tunner is 'back again.'

In the book I just finished, 1Q84, one of the main characters (Tengo) is a writer.  He ghost-writes a novel with a seventeen-year-old girl and then decides to continue the story in his own new novel, fleshing out the world the seventeen-year-old presented and putting new characters into it.  Tengo must have felt the original novel fell short of something, or at least that there was opportunity for exploration.  Is there a good 'B'-word for 'exploration'?

Yes.  'B' is for 'beyond.'  Beyond these characters and this particular story there is room to build.  'B' is also for 'building.'  The story, like the mansion from Rose Red, isn't finished and may keep 'building' itself if only in the imaginations of those who have entered. 

1Q84

I finished reading the novel 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami.  It took quite a long time because it was 925 pages long.  Which is fine by me; I love a good, long novel more than anything.  I love being invested in the various characters and following multiple story lines.  I like connecting dots and forming an image of a distinct time and place.

This novel was a dream as far as characters and pacing.  Many readers would have found it too slow, too drawn out, and would most likely give up.  Although I'm not sure that's true because once you get to a certain point you will develop a need to know how the story ends.

That would be it's one downfall, though.  The ending was highly anticlimactic.  I, in a way, knew that was coming because Murakami kept invoking Chekov's Gun (Anton Chekov's rule that once a gun is introduced into a story it has to be fired) and there was a palpable feeling throughout that Murakami would break that rule.  He did, but I also expected at least a little more action for an ending, a little more story, than there was.

Overall I would give this book a high B+.  It would have scored an easy A if there had been a little more to the ending because it was all too easy after 900 pages of suspense and tension.

The Story and Its Writer

One autumn, over a period of about four months, I worked my way through the anthology The Story and Its Writer: Fifth Edition. It contains something like 140 short stories, plus some essays and commentary that I'm currently working through. The stories in the volume are, to any extent, the best of Western Literature with a slight mixture of authors from farther East. Of course I found most stories to be, on a personal scale, mediocre, but I don't think that diminishes their worthiness to be included in such an anthology. No one could possibly be fundamentally affected by every story in a 140-story volume. But just on a personal note, these are the stories that for some reason resonated deeply with me:

Peaches by Abe Akira
River of Names by Dorothy Allison (more than any other)
An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce
The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski
The Company of Wolves by Angela Carter
A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner
That Evening Sun by William Faulkner
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
My Kinsman, Major Molineux by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (arguably the most important)
The Rocking-Horse Winner by D. H. Lawrence
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates


The stories people thought I would love that I actually hated or felt mild distaste for:

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie
On with the Story by John Barth (I've talked about this before)
Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
How to Become a Writer by Lorrie Moore
A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor
Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut

Right now I won't go through each one and what I loved about it. Anyone who has read most of the stories in the first category will know a lot of them deal with something supernatural or with temporal dissonance. But they do so rather cleverly. Anyway, I was just anthologizing a little myself.

P.S.  I hate Blogger's new layout.  Hate it.

My Bookshelf

I just wanted to take a moment and post a list of the books on the top shelf of my bookshelf. They are my absolute favorites, the books that most inspire me, or the books I'm most proud of.

Stephen King
The Talisman
The Eyes of the Dragon
The Green Mile Series
Everything's Eventual
On Writing
The Dark Tower Series

Other Books

The Oresteia
- Aeschylus
Call Me Ishmael Tonight
- Agha Shahid Ali
The Country Without a Post Office
- Agha Shahid Ali
The Shell Collector
- Anthony Doerr
One Hundred Years of Solitude
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Grendel
- John Gardner
The Iliad
- Homer
To Kill a Mockingbird
- Harper Lee
The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye
- Jonathan Lethem
A Guidebook for the Perplexed
- Moses Maimonides
Blood Meridian
- Cormac McCarthy
The Harry Potter Series
- J.K. Rowling
Lying
- Lauren Slater
The Elements of Style
- Strunk & White
The Picture of Dorian Gray
- Oscar Wilde

Unknown Choose Your Own Adventure Book with No Cover and No Way to Tell What the Book's Title Is
- Author Unknown

Other Readings

Through the Language Glass by Guy Deutscher

I wanted to like this. It had been on my wishlist on Amazon for over a year. It started out fantastically and, since I bought the Kindle edition one day when it went on sale, I was making notes left and right. The further I got into the book the more I realized I wasn't learning anything, because essentially the author would present an outdated fact about language, talk about the advancements made since that fact was believed true, challenge the advancements with recent experiments, then undermine the experiments with other observations. In the end, I came out of each chapter completely confused about what I was supposed to believe.


Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

I don't know what's wrong with me lately, but it seems like maybe I'm hyping books in my head too much, getting too excited, because the ones I'm most excited about turn out to be awful. Last year at around this time I was thinking that choosing less random books was leading to more satisfaction, that if I read synopses I would be able to predict my personal preference toward certain books but I think maybe the novelty of making the list I made was too new, too exciting, and it was carrying over so that I looked past the flaws of those first books. Because now, a year later, I'm finding my satisfaction vs. my disappointment to be about the same ratio as when the books were just random.

What I thought this book would be: a mostly realistic portrayal of the underground scene in London with some surrealistic moments. Instead it is an out-and-out fantasy in an entirely made-up world, based on London, but with more magic than reality. I've come to realize that I don't really want too much magic, especially if I'm not expecting it (Harry Potter is "exactly as it says on the tin" as the saying goes - the summary is it's about an ordinary boy who finds out he's a wizard). The summary of Neverwhere is that a man gets pulled into the "dark subculture" of the "abandoned subway and sewer tunnels" of an "alternate reality." You may say, well, it says "alternate reality," so I should have had a clue, there's a big difference between a general statement of alternate realities and outright saying "there will be wizards."

The one thing that kept me going was that I was imagining the character of Richard from the TV show Keeping Up Appearances as the main character, also named Richard.


Drive by Daniel Pink

A book about what motivates people in the workplace. An impulse buy when I wanted to learn more about business because I was trying to get a job at our corporate office. Surprisingly more interesting that half the books I thought I would love. I wish the heads of our company would read it so they might learn why it's bad to offer a bonus for making a goal and then suddenly take it away just before that goal is reached.


The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe

Another impulse buy. I thought it would be different (a theme I'm experiencing) but at least I wasn't crushingly disappointed. It was relatively close to expectations, but I thought there would be less academic talk and more ranting as it was supposed to rip the bourgeois art world of the sixties apart and expose the critics for being responsible for a bunch of pomp and circumstance. It did but not as amusingly as I was hoping.

There were other books but I don't really remember them and so they aren't worth another hour out of my life.

I'm a Bum. Also, The Maltese Falcon.

I have a hard time keeping up with journals and blogs mainly because I can't just write or type something. I have to scrutinize every word and read my entry multiple times before I can submit, and often one post takes me hours to write. Maybe it's a good thing the home office of the company I work for turned me down because they didn't think I would be fast enough to keep up with the pace they needed for communications between the office and the field.

Anyway, I'm here to give a review to The Maltese Falcon. Let me preface this with the story of why I wanted so badly to read this book. Years ago I watched a little famuos movie called The Usual Suspects which has an incredibly well-written twist ending. It's brilliant. Capital 'B' Brilliant. One day I was reading an article about the movie (a review in Rolling Stone or something) and the reviewer compared the movie to the mystery novel The Maltese Falcon, saying the ending of The Usual Suspects was second only to Falcon as the greatest surprise ending in the history of writing. Naturally, I needed to read The Maltese Falcon. I have, for years mind you, avoided even reading synopses of this book for fear of the ending being revealed. This happened to me once when I read the introduction to a book, where the introduction talked about the various ways to interpret the ending. I was not happy.

So I bought the book and began reading. First, it was not well-written, despite the caption on the front cover saying "Dashiell Hammet is a master of the detective novel, yes, but also one hell of a writer." (The Boston Globe.) It's funny, when you notice things you know you do in your own writing and realize how annoying they must be to readers once you see them through the eyes of a reader. Hammet would describe the actions in a scene excrutiatingly thoroughly, like how Sam Spade would pull a cigarette, put it to his lips, take out his matches, take out one match, light it, lift it to the cigarette, etc. Jesus, he lit a cigarette, okay? I mean, that kind of detail is fine the first time but not every freaking time he lights a cigarette or cigar. It also made for some choppy reading.

I recognize the book was most likely ahead of its time, and that it used specifically precise slang for detectives and criminals of the 1920s, but I just found a lot of the dialogue and even narration laughable. I tried, hard, to understand this book probably set the precedent for using correct slang and dialect, but it just made it sound goofy, like a spoof. I guess I like books that don't try so hard and therefore have a universal feel to them. I bet I would have cared about the characters more if I hadn't been trying to decode what certain phrases meant and hadn't been rolling my eyes at what seemed like a giant cliche.

I wonder if I feel the same when someone uses specific Southern slang, or New York street accents. I wonder if those things have withstood the test of time in the real world (most Southerners still have the same phrases and accent as they did 100 years ago and the same goes with at least the New York accent) where as gangsters in no way speak the way they do in this book. Maybe they do speak that way and I would laugh at them if I heard them today, and promptly be shot.

Worst of all, though, was that the mighty ending, fabled to be the most shocking in all of literature, was extremely disappointing. It was actually obvious from the very beginning. I found myself praying it wouldn't turn out that way. Maybe in 1929 no one had ever made a twist like this before (HIGHLY doubtful - no wait, impossible and I know it's not true because I've read stories written before 1929 with similar twists). I wanted the stupid falcon to mean something more than it does. I'm sorry if that ruins a part of the plot for you but that's an ugly truth about this novel - everything in it was disappointing. I don't feel any need to go back through and see if I can find the clues that were so obvious when the ending was revealed but that were cleverly hidden while in the midst of reading. I felt the need for that when I watched The Usual Suspects, and also felt the details throughout were just amazing and so very brilliant in hindsight. There was a point where the main character of Falcon, Sam Spade, was reading the newspaper and he kept dismissing the financial news as unimportant. He does it twice. I thought that would prove highly important to the legendary twist - that he would have seen everything had he not kept skipping that section - but nope. So very disappointing.

I give this novel a low C-, bordering on a D+. I think it might not have faired as badly had I not been anticipating it for so long but that's life, because I had anticipated it and what an anti-climax. I hope my next long-anticipated novel, IQ84 doesn't disappoint.