Wow, it's been a while since I've posted. I didn't realize. I have read books. I promise.
On with the show...
This book was quite an entertaining read. I read it in two days, which is not easy for me, and that tells me I enjoyed it. I like quirky characters. I like fantastic situations and supernatural phenomena. I like adolescent protagonists. I like book series...es. I just might read the sequel. I am giving this book a B-.
Why a B-? Didn't I just say it entertained me? Didn't it have a mixture of many things I love? Yep. But...adulthood and literary criticism have set in. I have (shudder) expectations now. Imperfections bother me unless the rest of the story is so strong it carries me beyond these cracks in the foundation and I don't feel I have to hurdle over them myself. A few of my quibbles with the book are minor yet troubling. One is purely based on what I've come to desire when I read fantasy or magic or what have you. Actually, I could probably blame Harry Potter. Anyway, here are the major pros and cons of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children:
Pro #1: A fleshed out protagonist. I like him. He's normal yet not, logical yet not, young yet intelligent.
Pro #2: A great setting. I love WWII stories. I love European stories. Though the book begins in Florida, the series is clearly going to be set in mostly Europe.
Pro #3: I felt satisfied by the easy but still clever puzzles, such as what one of the "peculiars" draws and where it clearly is, even though the heroes don't know where it is yet.
Con #1: Continuity! The main character would do something, a day would pass, and he would say, "The man I met this morning..." No! You met him yesterday! Or how incongruent (that is so a word, why is it underlined by my Spellcheck?) the whole timeline is, period. Or when the main character has his hands tied behind his back, but then he rolls up his pants (without being untied!) and then he's being led by a rope which would indicate his hands are in front of him, so how did all this happen? Am I supposed to infer they untied him so he could remove his shoes, then they decided to tie his hands in front? These are just a few examples of the continuity issues.
Con #2: Caricature. Some characters are just extremely stereotyped. That's not always a bad thing, but here it almost made me put down the book at one point. That point came when the wise old Miss Peregrine herself rips our protagonist a new asshole because of something she should know he wouldn't know not to do. And then we find out later she does the same thing he did! And it isn't ironic. I also found the unemotional relationship between the protagonist and his parents disappointing. And convenient. And I don't like anything in literature done for convenience.
Con #3: The big one. My own problem, really, and I know this and I'm fine with that. I...don't like it anymore when I feel like fantastic things are random for the coolz. Why did the monsters look the way they did? I understand the event that turned them into monsters, but why those particular shapes, sizes, tentacles, teeth, etc.? I know why the author chose the "superpowers" of each of the kids (based on real photographs he has come across). But somehow even then their powers seem...random. The author says in an interview included in my edition that sometimes he forced photographs into the novel because they were just too cool. That made some characters feel...forced. I know it's nitpicky. I know I've crossed over to some dark side that can't just shut up and go with it. But it is what it is.
My friend and I were talking about Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 one day and she asked me to explain the point of the father's side story and the "town of cats." I can't explain it. But something in my gut tells me Murakami did not just include that part for the coolz. I can feel it's meaning. Even if I can't explain it. I want things to have meaning even if I don't know the meaning myself. I feel like a lot of Miss Peregrine's is just randomness with no metaphor. Ugh, I'm beginning to need metaphor. What's wrong with me?
Anyway, it took me way longer than necessary to write this. Hopefully soon I will read a book that completely blows me away.
Tuesday, July 1, 2014
Tuesday, September 4, 2012
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.
Saturday, September 1, 2012
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.
STFU.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
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.
Thursday, May 17, 2012
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.
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.
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.
Monday, May 7, 2012
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.
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.
Friday, April 6, 2012
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
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
Thursday, March 8, 2012
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 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.
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.
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Has It Been that Long?
It has indeed. You knew I wouldn't be able to keep up with some sort of discipline, right? Wrong! I just haven't posted and keeping track is a drag, dude.
I've added a few things to the routine - instead of reading each of the Writers at Work books as a whole, I'm going to read one interview a week until I get through the series. I've also added one essay/short story/whatever from a magazine called McSweeney's, which is edited by the same dude who does the Best American Non-Required Reading series, so it is AWESOME. The current issue came in a box that is a giant head, complete with drawings of brain matter and sinew. Lovely and pretty hysterical.
That means I've also changed the goal of two books a week to one fiction book and one non-fiction book a week. Still 104 books a year, but changed up so I get a little knowledge thrown in with my entertainment.
Right now the non-fiction book is one I've been meaning to read for a long time. It's An Exaltation of Larks by James Lipton, the man who hosts Inside the Actor's Studio. It turns out he's a genius. It's a book, by the way, that would totally bore anyone who isn't a word-nerd. It's just lists of phrases like "a pride of lions" or "a nest of machine guns" (my personal favorite). Sometimes there is a back story to where the phrase originated. Sometimes, just lists.
I've added a few things to the routine - instead of reading each of the Writers at Work books as a whole, I'm going to read one interview a week until I get through the series. I've also added one essay/short story/whatever from a magazine called McSweeney's, which is edited by the same dude who does the Best American Non-Required Reading series, so it is AWESOME. The current issue came in a box that is a giant head, complete with drawings of brain matter and sinew. Lovely and pretty hysterical.
That means I've also changed the goal of two books a week to one fiction book and one non-fiction book a week. Still 104 books a year, but changed up so I get a little knowledge thrown in with my entertainment.
Right now the non-fiction book is one I've been meaning to read for a long time. It's An Exaltation of Larks by James Lipton, the man who hosts Inside the Actor's Studio. It turns out he's a genius. It's a book, by the way, that would totally bore anyone who isn't a word-nerd. It's just lists of phrases like "a pride of lions" or "a nest of machine guns" (my personal favorite). Sometimes there is a back story to where the phrase originated. Sometimes, just lists.
Friday, January 21, 2011
The Curious Incident of Extreme Disappointment
This critique may spoil a plot point. Read on at your own caution.
I finished reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and was not happy with the ending. The book went from a possible 'A' grade to a 'C' pretty quickly. I don't want to give away the ending so I'll be vague about it, but I think there should have been more consequences to the actions in the first half of the book. I think the mother's actions were too heroic and perfect. I think the narrator's reactions to his mother were out of character since he was set up as a logical thinker. He understood how most violent crimes are committed by someone known to the victim; using that logic he should have been afraid of his mother because he should have understood violence escalates. The hint at his mother's violence is a passing reference in the beginning of the book, but it's there nonetheless.
Too happy of an ending for a book that should have been about consequences. 'C.'
If you ever read this book you'll be saying I give away an important plot detail in this critique. It was spoiled for me just reading the summary from the publisher.
*******EVEN BIGGER SPOILER ALERT*******
The father tells the child his mother is dead. Since the summary I read says the narrator discovers his parents' broken marriage (the one I read actually says they 'are getting divorced') I knew as soon as I read about how his mother had died that his father had lied to him. I spent even the first half of the novel waiting for the narrator to discover the truth about it and it took all of the surprise out of the big reveal for me.
I finished reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and was not happy with the ending. The book went from a possible 'A' grade to a 'C' pretty quickly. I don't want to give away the ending so I'll be vague about it, but I think there should have been more consequences to the actions in the first half of the book. I think the mother's actions were too heroic and perfect. I think the narrator's reactions to his mother were out of character since he was set up as a logical thinker. He understood how most violent crimes are committed by someone known to the victim; using that logic he should have been afraid of his mother because he should have understood violence escalates. The hint at his mother's violence is a passing reference in the beginning of the book, but it's there nonetheless.
Too happy of an ending for a book that should have been about consequences. 'C.'
If you ever read this book you'll be saying I give away an important plot detail in this critique. It was spoiled for me just reading the summary from the publisher.
*******EVEN BIGGER SPOILER ALERT*******
The father tells the child his mother is dead. Since the summary I read says the narrator discovers his parents' broken marriage (the one I read actually says they 'are getting divorced') I knew as soon as I read about how his mother had died that his father had lied to him. I spent even the first half of the novel waiting for the narrator to discover the truth about it and it took all of the surprise out of the big reveal for me.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Curious
Right now I'm reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and it was my favorite book so far this year until last night. Last night I realized I don't sympathize anymore with the protagonist/narrator. You see, the narrator has autism and everything is told through his perspective which is interesting and that wasn't a problem until halfway through the book when something big was revealed.
And what I realized is I didn't feel the same about his situation as he feels. After two major revelations from his father, which were scary and horrible and all, the narrator becomes afraid of his father. And while a part of me completely understands, there is also a part of me that doesn't feel the same because I don't feel his father would ever really hurt him. He could in all plausible honesty, but I don't really feel the same fear that he would as the narrator.
The other problem - and I know this is going to sound really, really horrible - is that I don't feel like the narrator feels love. I don't feel a sense of loss other than a loss of feeling safe. I don't feel like he's being pulled between a fear of what his father is capable of and a sense of the father he's losing. I feel like he's losing a longtime roommate and not a father, and I feel like his father feels like he's losing his son. I know that the book is being true to the logical way autistic children approach life and I'm sure there is love underlying that logic but I don't feel it and so I'm only reading to see how the book concludes and not because I care what happens to the narrator. I feel at this point like no matter what happens I won't really care and I'm not rooting for a certain outcome. That's a problem because a lot of people would have put this book down by this point, I think.
I like the approach of giving a voice to autistic children and trying to understand how they navigate the world. But - but - it's really hard, and we've talked about this before, to read a whole novel where the main character isn't someone you can sympathize with. It's hard to explain because the things that happened in the part of the story I read last night are horrible and I do sympathize with his situation but (I'm a bad person) I just don't sympathize with him. He exhibits signs of loss, like when he vomits after one thing is revealed or screams after the second is revealed, but he's disconnected from those feelings and in fiction this causes me to be disconnected from them, too. If more than one person reads this blog, and I doubt it and that one person is probably going to be appalled at my reaction, but if more than one person reads this I'll probably get many angry comments about being unsympathetic to a person with a disability. But I can't help feeling frustrated.
Maybe that's the point. I'm sure often with autistic children the people around them become frustrated with the lack of emotion or the quirks or what seem like sudden outbursts. Maybe I'm meant to come out of this with more patience because I'll have learned something about how different minds think about or handle situations. And I will, and I feel like I have learned. But that doesn't make the story any more compelling. I think I'll really feel bad if more horrible things happen (I will feel bad) because he's just a kid no matter how detatched he seems to be from his emotions. But (sighhhhh) I think this could be any character and I would feel bad for him. Giving him autism wasn't enough to make him compelling.
I remember once in workshop a fellow student wrote about a character who had a stutter, and our professor asked what made this character special beyond having a stutter. And none of us could answer, because if we took away the stutter the character was bland and uninteresting. The narrator in Curious Incident is a little more fleshed out and just a tad more real but still not gripping.
Maybe I'll read the next page and all this will change. I don't know. I'm jumping the gun a little here, I do know that, but I just wanted to get out how I felt. I'll have a full report sometime this weekend.
And what I realized is I didn't feel the same about his situation as he feels. After two major revelations from his father, which were scary and horrible and all, the narrator becomes afraid of his father. And while a part of me completely understands, there is also a part of me that doesn't feel the same because I don't feel his father would ever really hurt him. He could in all plausible honesty, but I don't really feel the same fear that he would as the narrator.
The other problem - and I know this is going to sound really, really horrible - is that I don't feel like the narrator feels love. I don't feel a sense of loss other than a loss of feeling safe. I don't feel like he's being pulled between a fear of what his father is capable of and a sense of the father he's losing. I feel like he's losing a longtime roommate and not a father, and I feel like his father feels like he's losing his son. I know that the book is being true to the logical way autistic children approach life and I'm sure there is love underlying that logic but I don't feel it and so I'm only reading to see how the book concludes and not because I care what happens to the narrator. I feel at this point like no matter what happens I won't really care and I'm not rooting for a certain outcome. That's a problem because a lot of people would have put this book down by this point, I think.
I like the approach of giving a voice to autistic children and trying to understand how they navigate the world. But - but - it's really hard, and we've talked about this before, to read a whole novel where the main character isn't someone you can sympathize with. It's hard to explain because the things that happened in the part of the story I read last night are horrible and I do sympathize with his situation but (I'm a bad person) I just don't sympathize with him. He exhibits signs of loss, like when he vomits after one thing is revealed or screams after the second is revealed, but he's disconnected from those feelings and in fiction this causes me to be disconnected from them, too. If more than one person reads this blog, and I doubt it and that one person is probably going to be appalled at my reaction, but if more than one person reads this I'll probably get many angry comments about being unsympathetic to a person with a disability. But I can't help feeling frustrated.
Maybe that's the point. I'm sure often with autistic children the people around them become frustrated with the lack of emotion or the quirks or what seem like sudden outbursts. Maybe I'm meant to come out of this with more patience because I'll have learned something about how different minds think about or handle situations. And I will, and I feel like I have learned. But that doesn't make the story any more compelling. I think I'll really feel bad if more horrible things happen (I will feel bad) because he's just a kid no matter how detatched he seems to be from his emotions. But (sighhhhh) I think this could be any character and I would feel bad for him. Giving him autism wasn't enough to make him compelling.
I remember once in workshop a fellow student wrote about a character who had a stutter, and our professor asked what made this character special beyond having a stutter. And none of us could answer, because if we took away the stutter the character was bland and uninteresting. The narrator in Curious Incident is a little more fleshed out and just a tad more real but still not gripping.
Maybe I'll read the next page and all this will change. I don't know. I'm jumping the gun a little here, I do know that, but I just wanted to get out how I felt. I'll have a full report sometime this weekend.
Monday, January 17, 2011
Two Books
1) Understanding Comcis by Scott McCloud. I would give this book a B. There was a part of me that was put off by the fact it was written as a comic book, and I don't know why but maybe because it made it feel choppy and underdevolped. But I really liked some of the things I learned, like "closure" and how the readers of any book fill in gaps between panels (for comic books) or paragraphs or sections or chapters. I like leaps of logic, remember, and McCloud makes the argument that comic book creators must, by simple definition of time and space and the juxtaposition of words and visual art, expect their readers to be able to make leaps and bounds. I really liked how McCloud made me feel like he knew he didn't need to talk down to his audience and he could expect a certain level of intelligence out of it.
2) The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein. Eh. It was good. It was interesting. It was reminscent of the original and of writers like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It had an older world feel to it. I liked how it reminded me how spooky something only hinted at can be, as opposed to full out monster descriptions dripping with blood and guts. It reminded me of why I find Stephen King's vampire stories so bland and his more subtle stories, like That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French, haunt me long afterwards. It's why I'm scared shitless by video games like Silent Hill but not scared in any way shape or form by games like Resident Evil. Anyway, back to Frankenstein. Eh. High C. I was turned off by all the politics. And I kept wanting to pronounce Frank-en-stine as Fraunk-en-steen. Love that movie.
2) The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein. Eh. It was good. It was interesting. It was reminscent of the original and of writers like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It had an older world feel to it. I liked how it reminded me how spooky something only hinted at can be, as opposed to full out monster descriptions dripping with blood and guts. It reminded me of why I find Stephen King's vampire stories so bland and his more subtle stories, like That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French, haunt me long afterwards. It's why I'm scared shitless by video games like Silent Hill but not scared in any way shape or form by games like Resident Evil. Anyway, back to Frankenstein. Eh. High C. I was turned off by all the politics. And I kept wanting to pronounce Frank-en-stine as Fraunk-en-steen. Love that movie.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Three Books
A) The Green Child by Herbert Read. High 'C'. It was poetic and interesting enough but not quite a page turner. Worthy enough of my time.
B) Lost Illusions by Honore de Balzac. Ugh, low 'C'. It's something about literature written during that time period (the 1800s, I think). The book was soooo long and I just didn't care about anyone in it. I also felt, pardon the pun, lost for a good deal of the story. It was something like $.89 on the Kindle, though, so not much was lost.
C) Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe. 'A-'. I loved it. Unlike The Magic Mountain, this story involved philosophy in small chunks, with accompanying scenes where said philosophy applied, and was written poetically, and followed generations of a family, which is one of my favorite kinds of stories. I was really excited by this as my first read of the new year. It and Lost Illusions were really long, but this week's are really short, so I feel it is being balanced well. Angel was a library book, so I'll have to purchase a copy of my own for my bookshelf.
And yes, I mean a paper copy. There's still something about possessing a material copy of the books we love that isn't going to die.
B) Lost Illusions by Honore de Balzac. Ugh, low 'C'. It's something about literature written during that time period (the 1800s, I think). The book was soooo long and I just didn't care about anyone in it. I also felt, pardon the pun, lost for a good deal of the story. It was something like $.89 on the Kindle, though, so not much was lost.
C) Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe. 'A-'. I loved it. Unlike The Magic Mountain, this story involved philosophy in small chunks, with accompanying scenes where said philosophy applied, and was written poetically, and followed generations of a family, which is one of my favorite kinds of stories. I was really excited by this as my first read of the new year. It and Lost Illusions were really long, but this week's are really short, so I feel it is being balanced well. Angel was a library book, so I'll have to purchase a copy of my own for my bookshelf.
And yes, I mean a paper copy. There's still something about possessing a material copy of the books we love that isn't going to die.
Saturday, January 1, 2011
The Magic Mountain
I'm done!
Okay, whew, that was a duesey. I'm not even going to pretend - it was a bit of a rough go. I'm not disputing Thomas Mann deserves the Nobel Prize for Literature or anything, but as with most books written by Nobel-winning authors, The Magic Mountain is so long and so dense with philosophy I can't remember a good deal of it. It's hands-down beautiful, and the details in it are insanely precise, and Mann must have been a genius with knowledge to beat the band, but I just can't do it. I can't follow along with an academic debate disguised as a story. Me little brain.
However - HOWEVER - I began reading Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel today and after the first page - the first page mind you - I almost orgasmed. Holy shit. It bears repeating: holy shit. Page one and I could tell Wolfe is everything I've ever wanted to be as a writer. And he's philosophical. But let me explain how his philosophy differs from Mann's.
Wolfe is poetic. He isn't trying to cram grandiose ideas down my throat. He's trying to create an image that will make me - yes ME - think. And immediately, I do. I get the image and what it means, and - AND - associate it with ideas I've read/heard/had before. ORGASMIC. I had to stop reading at work because I thought I was going to bawl with happiness.
Needless to say....
So I won't. Hate that phrase.
What grade to give The Magic Mountain? Back to some incessant Tony Doerr speak: Tony was always impressed with my "meticulous attention to details." I've held onto that like you wouldn't believe. I believe it's one of my greatest strengths. Mann made (ha!) me ashamed of myself with his attention to said details. Good lord - there isn't as much knowledge in my entire head as he poured into this book. But was it lost in all of the vast proselytizing ($3 word)? Yes. And no. But mostly yes. I wish I fully understood what Mann was trying to tell me - yes ME - but I don't. I'm okay with that, I don't need to fully understand everything in the universe. I just need to enjoy the universe while I'm in it. Did I? Eh. 79.5%. I'll round up, you know, since the kid won the Nobel Prize. Very low B-.
Okay, whew, that was a duesey. I'm not even going to pretend - it was a bit of a rough go. I'm not disputing Thomas Mann deserves the Nobel Prize for Literature or anything, but as with most books written by Nobel-winning authors, The Magic Mountain is so long and so dense with philosophy I can't remember a good deal of it. It's hands-down beautiful, and the details in it are insanely precise, and Mann must have been a genius with knowledge to beat the band, but I just can't do it. I can't follow along with an academic debate disguised as a story. Me little brain.
However - HOWEVER - I began reading Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel today and after the first page - the first page mind you - I almost orgasmed. Holy shit. It bears repeating: holy shit. Page one and I could tell Wolfe is everything I've ever wanted to be as a writer. And he's philosophical. But let me explain how his philosophy differs from Mann's.
Wolfe is poetic. He isn't trying to cram grandiose ideas down my throat. He's trying to create an image that will make me - yes ME - think. And immediately, I do. I get the image and what it means, and - AND - associate it with ideas I've read/heard/had before. ORGASMIC. I had to stop reading at work because I thought I was going to bawl with happiness.
Needless to say....
So I won't. Hate that phrase.
What grade to give The Magic Mountain? Back to some incessant Tony Doerr speak: Tony was always impressed with my "meticulous attention to details." I've held onto that like you wouldn't believe. I believe it's one of my greatest strengths. Mann made (ha!) me ashamed of myself with his attention to said details. Good lord - there isn't as much knowledge in my entire head as he poured into this book. But was it lost in all of the vast proselytizing ($3 word)? Yes. And no. But mostly yes. I wish I fully understood what Mann was trying to tell me - yes ME - but I don't. I'm okay with that, I don't need to fully understand everything in the universe. I just need to enjoy the universe while I'm in it. Did I? Eh. 79.5%. I'll round up, you know, since the kid won the Nobel Prize. Very low B-.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Almost There
I'm almost to the end of The Magic Mountain. Somewhere I must have missed a day of reading because I'm fifty pages behind my little schedule I made to get the book read by the end of the 2010. I can get that done tonight and be back on track, though.
I love the new year. There is always something refreshing about starting over. Even though it's a man-made construction (time) and, furthermore, thoroughly Western, and even though I've never quite understood why we chose the middle of winter to be the beginning of the new year, I'm always gung-ho for resolutions.
You know about my resolutions this year - two books a week and two pages written each day. I'm very optimistic. The first two books of the new year are extremely long, so I'm kind of hoping, if I can get them read on time, they will be like a trial by fire that will make the rest of the year a breeze as far as pacing myself. I can't wait to get to the Writers at Work series from The Paris Review. A friend of mine gave me the third in the series a few years ago and the interviews in it are just brilliant. There are nine in the series, so I'll be reading the other eight. One of them has interviews with Vladimir Nabokov AND Jorge Luis Borges. Holy shit.
I love the new year. There is always something refreshing about starting over. Even though it's a man-made construction (time) and, furthermore, thoroughly Western, and even though I've never quite understood why we chose the middle of winter to be the beginning of the new year, I'm always gung-ho for resolutions.
You know about my resolutions this year - two books a week and two pages written each day. I'm very optimistic. The first two books of the new year are extremely long, so I'm kind of hoping, if I can get them read on time, they will be like a trial by fire that will make the rest of the year a breeze as far as pacing myself. I can't wait to get to the Writers at Work series from The Paris Review. A friend of mine gave me the third in the series a few years ago and the interviews in it are just brilliant. There are nine in the series, so I'll be reading the other eight. One of them has interviews with Vladimir Nabokov AND Jorge Luis Borges. Holy shit.
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Philosophy Is the Talk on the Cereal Box
Awesome lyrics from Paul Simon's wife.
What I've learned from reading The Magic Mountain is that I don't get most philosophical debate. My little mind can't wrap itself around abstract ideas when they are presented in paragraphs that go on for pages and never give any concrete examples.
At one point, the main character, Hans Castorp, has what is clearly a dream from the very onset of the scene (though I think we're supposed to think it's really happening for a time) and through the images and events of the dream I came to an understanding of how Hans Castorp felt about two other characters who were always arguing their beliefs in front of Hans Castorp (he is always referred to by his full name in the book). Two witches are ripping apart a blond-haired baby and eating him alive? I immediately understood this image (Hans Castorp is blond).
Following this scene, however, is about two - three pages of narrated explanation of how Hans Castorp feels. Maybe this is necessary for readers who can't make connections between images like I can. That's fine and I'm glad Thomas Mann was thinking of them. But what it turns into for me is a daydreaming session where I wander off into my own thoughts while simultaneously reading words that go nowhere for me.
Here's the kicker - if I didn't have the dream sequence I wouldn't know how Hans Castorp feels about the two men arguing around him. I would just be skimming a paragraph that goes over my head because it's too abstract and too grand for me to pay attention. Maybe Mann is a genius for including both so he leaves no reader behind.
What I've learned from reading The Magic Mountain is that I don't get most philosophical debate. My little mind can't wrap itself around abstract ideas when they are presented in paragraphs that go on for pages and never give any concrete examples.
At one point, the main character, Hans Castorp, has what is clearly a dream from the very onset of the scene (though I think we're supposed to think it's really happening for a time) and through the images and events of the dream I came to an understanding of how Hans Castorp felt about two other characters who were always arguing their beliefs in front of Hans Castorp (he is always referred to by his full name in the book). Two witches are ripping apart a blond-haired baby and eating him alive? I immediately understood this image (Hans Castorp is blond).
Following this scene, however, is about two - three pages of narrated explanation of how Hans Castorp feels. Maybe this is necessary for readers who can't make connections between images like I can. That's fine and I'm glad Thomas Mann was thinking of them. But what it turns into for me is a daydreaming session where I wander off into my own thoughts while simultaneously reading words that go nowhere for me.
Here's the kicker - if I didn't have the dream sequence I wouldn't know how Hans Castorp feels about the two men arguing around him. I would just be skimming a paragraph that goes over my head because it's too abstract and too grand for me to pay attention. Maybe Mann is a genius for including both so he leaves no reader behind.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
C Grades
The widest category of all. I would conjecture seventy-or-so percent of all books fall into a 'C' category. And you know, it's not even really about mediocrity. I mean, it is, on one level, but it's also about 'c'ompare and 'c'ontrast.
'C'omparing one book to another is something one of my former professors hated. I guess he's right if you take the point of view of yet another professor (though I dropped the second's class after one appalling day) that no two authors can tell the same story unless they plagiarize. During college, I read for professor #1's class One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende. It is very, very difficult not to 'c'ompare these two novels. They both deal with generations of a particular family in South America, and both are magical realism. The bad thing is, Garcia Marquez's book is a pioneer of the genre. Allende's book, while good at times itself, doesn't revolutionize the genre and, furthermore, didn't really wow me otherwise, either. Allende of course would cite Garcia Marquez as one of her influences, and sometimes it's hard to shake the ghost of that influence. I give Allende credit for telling the story only she could tell - but in the wake of Solitude it's just not that special.
'C'ontrasting, to me, is the heart of literary criticism. How does one book contrast to another? How, to follow the idea of professor #2, did each author bring his own aesthetic to his particular telling of the old story? According to Stephen King, there are something like nineteen archetypes for stories, and I believe there are others who would argue that down to about six. Maybe those archetypes correspond to the six major emotions: disgust (or hate), happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and surprise (boy, four of those are terrible emotions and surprise is a coin toss - so we have a one-in-six chance of experiencing happiness in this world?). Anyway, how can a new novel make a reader respond with one of these emotions in a new way? This is how new novels 'c'ontrast to other novels.
And the unfortunate thing about Allende, for me, is that she didn't make me respond to these emotions in a new way. You know, thinking it through, I think the most important emotion may be surprise. I want to be surprised at how a book makes me feel. I think when I give a book a grade of 'C', it's because it failed to surprise me in any way, good or bad. Failing books surprise me in a bad way, by either confusing or insulting me. Passing books surprise me in a good way, by focusing on the subject in a way I wouldn't have previously thought to do so. 'C' or 'low-pass' books just make me go, "Oh, yeah, I guess."
One book that surprised me in a good way is Lauren Slater's Lying. It's a memoir. But guess what she does? She lies. The important part, though, is that she admits that for a long, long time, she believed everything she recounts to have been the truth and was shocked to learn it was all false. Because of my own obsession with false memories, I found this book to be a refreshing take on how we perceive the world, what 'the truth' means, and what makes us who we are. Abe Akira's short story Peaches does something similar, although many fiction anthologies include his story because the narrator isn't sure how to sort the truth from the fiction.
When I was in grad school, I had to take a memoir class and it ended up being incredibly enlightening. On one of the first days, our professor stood at the chalkboard and had us come up with categories memoirs often go in, i.e. stories of illness, stories of childhood trauma, stories of divorce, etc. What we discovered was there are very few original stories, even in real life. And even though each person's story, as tired as the subject matter is, should be riveting because it's so personal, it just plain isn't always that interesting.
I have a hard time giving 'C' grades to any story about the Holocaust. I know I should, but it just seems like such a monumental amount of anger, fear, and sadness it's hard to not be surprised at every turn. I'm also afraid of reinforcing what my students said about the events of the Holocaust not being all that bad. But, isn't every story of anger, fear, and sadness monumental? I don't know, but I'm able give 'C' grades out like 'c'andy as long as it's not about the Holocaust.
'C' is for 'C'ommonplace. How fast did I read it? How much did I remember? Why wasn't I more engaged? Who would I recommend this book to? If the answers are fast, because nothing was new, no one and everyone, then I know it's a 'C' book. It's a shrug-of-the-shoulders. It's a see-for-yourself. It's an I-could-do-better. I guess they're as good as any other way to pass the time.
'C'omparing one book to another is something one of my former professors hated. I guess he's right if you take the point of view of yet another professor (though I dropped the second's class after one appalling day) that no two authors can tell the same story unless they plagiarize. During college, I read for professor #1's class One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende. It is very, very difficult not to 'c'ompare these two novels. They both deal with generations of a particular family in South America, and both are magical realism. The bad thing is, Garcia Marquez's book is a pioneer of the genre. Allende's book, while good at times itself, doesn't revolutionize the genre and, furthermore, didn't really wow me otherwise, either. Allende of course would cite Garcia Marquez as one of her influences, and sometimes it's hard to shake the ghost of that influence. I give Allende credit for telling the story only she could tell - but in the wake of Solitude it's just not that special.
'C'ontrasting, to me, is the heart of literary criticism. How does one book contrast to another? How, to follow the idea of professor #2, did each author bring his own aesthetic to his particular telling of the old story? According to Stephen King, there are something like nineteen archetypes for stories, and I believe there are others who would argue that down to about six. Maybe those archetypes correspond to the six major emotions: disgust (or hate), happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and surprise (boy, four of those are terrible emotions and surprise is a coin toss - so we have a one-in-six chance of experiencing happiness in this world?). Anyway, how can a new novel make a reader respond with one of these emotions in a new way? This is how new novels 'c'ontrast to other novels.
And the unfortunate thing about Allende, for me, is that she didn't make me respond to these emotions in a new way. You know, thinking it through, I think the most important emotion may be surprise. I want to be surprised at how a book makes me feel. I think when I give a book a grade of 'C', it's because it failed to surprise me in any way, good or bad. Failing books surprise me in a bad way, by either confusing or insulting me. Passing books surprise me in a good way, by focusing on the subject in a way I wouldn't have previously thought to do so. 'C' or 'low-pass' books just make me go, "Oh, yeah, I guess."
One book that surprised me in a good way is Lauren Slater's Lying. It's a memoir. But guess what she does? She lies. The important part, though, is that she admits that for a long, long time, she believed everything she recounts to have been the truth and was shocked to learn it was all false. Because of my own obsession with false memories, I found this book to be a refreshing take on how we perceive the world, what 'the truth' means, and what makes us who we are. Abe Akira's short story Peaches does something similar, although many fiction anthologies include his story because the narrator isn't sure how to sort the truth from the fiction.
When I was in grad school, I had to take a memoir class and it ended up being incredibly enlightening. On one of the first days, our professor stood at the chalkboard and had us come up with categories memoirs often go in, i.e. stories of illness, stories of childhood trauma, stories of divorce, etc. What we discovered was there are very few original stories, even in real life. And even though each person's story, as tired as the subject matter is, should be riveting because it's so personal, it just plain isn't always that interesting.
I have a hard time giving 'C' grades to any story about the Holocaust. I know I should, but it just seems like such a monumental amount of anger, fear, and sadness it's hard to not be surprised at every turn. I'm also afraid of reinforcing what my students said about the events of the Holocaust not being all that bad. But, isn't every story of anger, fear, and sadness monumental? I don't know, but I'm able give 'C' grades out like 'c'andy as long as it's not about the Holocaust.
'C' is for 'C'ommonplace. How fast did I read it? How much did I remember? Why wasn't I more engaged? Who would I recommend this book to? If the answers are fast, because nothing was new, no one and everyone, then I know it's a 'C' book. It's a shrug-of-the-shoulders. It's a see-for-yourself. It's an I-could-do-better. I guess they're as good as any other way to pass the time.
Monday, December 6, 2010
2+
Last night I timed myself reading The Magic Mountain. I had no distractions and I read as fast as I could with total comprehension. It took me twenty-five minutes to read ten pages. The book is seven hundred pages long but each page is two pages in one, the print is so small and so densely packed. It's like reading fourteen hundred pages instead. At this rate, it will take me roughly thirty hours of straight reading to get through this book. That's four+ hours a day to get through it in a week. Not undoable, but tough nonetheless.
Don't yell at me if I can't get through it quickly. My goal with it is to read two other books this week while reading at least a chapter of Mountain each day. I've already read Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. I've always been curious about this book but guess what? It was really, really boring. Which may have been why I was able to fly right through it. C-. Again.
I don't know what the other book will be yet, but I'll let you know as soon as I make a decision. Meanwhile, I also distract myself here and there with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, which is brilliant, but also not a book easily consumed.
Don't yell at me if I can't get through it quickly. My goal with it is to read two other books this week while reading at least a chapter of Mountain each day. I've already read Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. I've always been curious about this book but guess what? It was really, really boring. Which may have been why I was able to fly right through it. C-. Again.
I don't know what the other book will be yet, but I'll let you know as soon as I make a decision. Meanwhile, I also distract myself here and there with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, which is brilliant, but also not a book easily consumed.
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