Category Archives: Reading

20: The Lighthouse

The Lighthouse by P.D. James

Another library book sale find. Wasn’t a library book, though. Looked brand-new, still with remainder price tag on. Zing!

So it’s a police procedural in PD James’s Adam Dalgliesh series, with the three detective characters (who presumably, regular readers would be familiar with from previous books) sent to a private island to investigate a murder. The book starts out by introducing each of them in turn, and providing quite a bit of detail about each of their back stories. Which I was fine with in the beginning, but later on I wondered what the point of all that was since it was barely returned to at all in the main story.

The murder mystery itself is decent, but the pacing was bogged down by the amount of description. omg, so much description! Did I really need to know about the minutiae of the furnishings and refrigerators (!) of each cottage and apartment? I do not think so. I seriously felt like this book could have been half as long. With so much wandering detail, The Lighthouse didn’t have the urgency it might have had if it had been trimmed down.

Despite the endless detail, there was curious lack of emotional connection to the characters. Maybe if some of that detail had been cut, James could have expanded on the detectives’ stories that were rather left hanging. As it was, I didn’t find any of the characters particularly compelling. I guess I was supposed to care about Dalgleish mooning over Emma, but I really didn’t, and the other two, Kate and Benton, were like robot-people.

I did kind of wonder why Francis Benton-Smith was called just “Benton.” Mayhap it was explained in a previous book.

Creepy by definition

So what? These are not private sites, anybody can read them.  —gloeden31

 

How is this #creepy? If one wants to discuss skin issues openly, one should be more than happy to have a skin-issue company actually observe the discussion.  —EthanPeter

@EthanPeter: Because reading blogs is creepy by definition. —skahammer

 

How DARE they view information that I posted publicly for anyone to read.

THIS is an outrage! —LUV_TRUK

 

Comments in response to a Gawker post titled
“Unilever Is Listening to You Talk About Your Skin Problems.”

NaNostalgia

Earlier this week, there was a bit o’ a NaNoWriMo backlash in the twittersphere. Which made me a bit nostalgic for the days when hardly anyone knew what NaNo was 😉

To paraphrase Gretchen Rubin’s blog = process, book = product aphorism (which I love), NNWM is about process, not product. It’s writing practice and regardless of how crappy the month’s “novel” ends up being, writing practice is never a waste of time. Just as practicing [whatever it is you do] is never a waste of time.

It’s all well and good for a writer who’s already got her writing routine down to say “not for me,” but NNWM isn’t really about working writers, is it? I mean, of course, they can play if they want to, and some do. But it was designed to give perpetual procrastinators a kick in the pants.

What NNWM shows you is that all your excuses about why you can’t find the time to write are just that—excuses. You can write 50,000 words in a month (I know; I’ve done it) and still live your life. It doesn’t actually take that long to meet the daily goal. 2 hours max.  And that’s not speed-writing; it’s ~13 words/minute, which is a pretty leisurely pace. You also don’t need to schedule a 2-hour block in your day to write (lovely, but may be a dream for some folks). 15-30 minute chunks throughout the day work just as well (or maybe better).

And I’ll also say, while my two NaNo successes are definitely first drafts, I don’t think they’re any worse than any of my other first drafts.  That said, I did have a pretty clear idea of my characters/premise in both cases before I started writing. And it’s true that neither of them are finished, but then again, none of my novels are finished. (Because that’s how I roll…) But I learned something from that, too.

Writers talk about plotters and pantsers. Plotters plan everything; pantsers just start writing. I fall somewhere in between. I always have a firm grasp on the characters, the setting, and the premise. And I have a general idea of how the plot will go to start, just broad strokes, not the details (that’s where the pantsing comes in). That’s all well and good. My kryptonite is plotting out the resolution in a way that seems unforced and that’s where I lose momentum. I’m not sure how to resolve (heh) that issue, but the point is: what I’ve learned is that if I have a general idea of where I’m going, the writing flows. If I have no idea, I get stuck. I’m not a full-on pantser. Good to know!

But it’s also good to stretch and break out of your comfort zone. One of the reasons I often hear for not wanting to do NaNo is the “slow writer” argument. I don’t think that’s a reason not to do it. I am the ultimate slow writer. I even wrote an article about it. It may sound counter-intuitive, but being a slow writer is one of the reasons I wanted to try NNWM. You know: do the opposite of what you normally do, just like my hero, George Costanza, in “The Opposite“:

George: Yeah, I should do the opposite, I should.

Jerry: If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.

George: Yes, I will do the opposite. I used to sit here and do nothing, and regret it for the rest of the day, so now I will do the opposite, and I will do something!

So try something different. Like sometimes you go for a short, fast run instead of a long, slow one. Think of it as an exercise. Something to stretch your writing muscles.

The idea of stretching is part of the reason why I’m pantsing it this year. Not having an idea of where I’m going is a challenge, but I’m treating it more like a freewriting exercise. I don’t expect this year’s effort to end up as a novel. Maybe a short story. Maybe a few smaller pieces. Maybe nothing. I’m not sure. This year’s idea is something I need to write about, but I’m not sure how I want to approach it. That’s why I’m calling my genre experimental. I want to leave it open and try several approaches and see how it goes. The point is, you’ve got to get it down first in order for it to be shaped into anything later.

Anyhow, I think sometimes working writers take NNWM both too seriously and not seriously enough.

Too seriously, because for a lot of people, especially many of the younger participants, it’s just a fun/exciting activity to do with others, a shared experience. There are meet-ups and maybe you make some new (offline!) friends. Win. Any writing that gets done is a bonus. And no one’s ever going to read those “novels” (except maybe an indulgent bff), so I’m not sure why anyone would worry about them.

Not seriously enough, because in the exact same way as signing up for a running race can be the thing that gives someone the confidence to say to family/friends: “I’m doing this race and I need to train an hour a day in order to meet my goal,”  signing up for NNWM (an organized event with a defined goal and other participants) can be the thing that gives someone who’s trying to fit in writing on the side the confidence to  say they need an hour a day to write in order to meet their goal. And not only is their family more likely to give it to them, they’re also more likely to cheer them on. (You might think that’s silly or illogical, but it’s true.)

So. I know NNWM’s not for everyone, and I certainly don’t think everyone “should” do it. No one should do it. Do it if you want to. Don’t do it if you don’t want to. But don’t make excuses about why you “can’t” do it. That’s like saying you “can’t” bake a potato. You can. You just don’t want to. There’s a difference.

Thoroughly Flawed

What is naïve and blinkered is the insistence that fictional characters be held to the same moral and behavioral standards we expect of our friends. It seems to me that part of the point of literature is to enlighten and expand, and there are few pleasures in fiction that expand our consciousness further than getting to observe the world from the perspective of characters so different from us, so thoroughly flawed, that if we were to encounter them in real life we wouldn’t like them very much.

—Emily St. John Mandel

Her narrative is compelling

[Lisa’s] blog is great. But I haven’t completely settled the “is she talking to me” question.  While Lisa follows me back, we don’t interact with each other. She uses Tumblr in a very social way, she isn’t really part of the crowd of people whom I otherwise follow. And I find this somewhat troubling. … I like following her because, for whatever reason, her narrative is compelling.  Following her blog is somewhat akin to watching a reality TV show (Not one of the ones where they try to out-dance each other or diet for money, but one that just follows someone’s daily life). She’s my Jersey Shore. But of course, Lisa isn’t a reality TV character, she’s a real person. Yes, I know Snooki is real, too, but celebrities are different.  … treating real people, regular people, the same way we treat celebrities, is problematic.

—Patrick Brown

Where does this feeling bad for reading (reading!) a published piece of writing come from? When and why has it become so transgressive to read? I can see perhaps feeling bad for reading something a third-party wrote about a person, for example, if it’s nasty gossip or a breach of confidence. But when it’s a person writing about themselves… well, they’ve made a choice to be a writer (or at least a “writer”) just like Snooki has made the choice to be an “actor.”

Brown is right that personal blogs are compelling in the same way as reality TV. In fact, I think personal blogs are as much responsible for the decline of the soap opera as reality TV. I think lots of people read blogs as episodic stories (there’s a limit to how many interactive relationships a person can keep up), but it’s unpopular to admit to doing this, because it transgresses the “rules” of blogging/social media. It’s ok to watch an episode of Jersey Shore and then shut the TV off and go about your day, but if you read a blog entry, then close your browser and go about your day, you’re “creepy” and a “stalker.” The overuse of those two words probably gets to the heart of why Brown feels bad about reading someone’s blog in the way he wouldn’t if he were reading a book written by the same person.

Where his argument falls apart is in his analysis of celebrity. Arguing that bloggers are not analogous to reality TV stars because people wouldn’t recognize them on the street is fallacious. People who are on TV are obviously more visually recognizable than people who write. But that doesn’t make every TV personality more of a celebrity than every writer. How many people would have recognized JD Salinger had they passed him on the street? At any rate, it’s not like Brown is acting like a papparazzo, virtually stalking Lisa with the goal of finding out something salacious to sell to a gossip blogger. He’s reading her blog. And, in this case, she actually knows he’s part of her audience, and may even be reading his blog.

He asks “is she talking to me”? The answer, obviously, from his pov is yes. He finds her narrative compelling. Ergo, she (or, more specifically her writing, her narrative) is talking to him. Now, did Lisa anticipate that people outside her immediate social circle might be interested in her writing when she started blogging? Perhaps she did, perhaps she didn’t. But once she decided to blog publicly, she opened herself up to the possibility that her real readership (audience) might, and probably would, extend beyond her imagined readership.

Desire to Read

Over dinner the other night I asked my wife Caroline to describe what moods, for her, correlate with a desire to read fiction. After a moment she said, “When I’m feeling stimulated, I like to read fiction, and when my life feels sterile, I don’t.”  This rang true to me and I think it captures one of the essential paradoxes of fiction and art more generally: that to engage it requires a withdrawal from life, but to appreciate it requires a deep immersion in that very same thing.

—Kevin Hartnett

Hmm. Really? I think I feel the opposite. Well, I want to be reading fiction all the time, but I tend to actually read more in the lulls, the times when I don’t feel like I should be doing something else. Although, I’ve been trying to work on that because I realized I’ll be putting off reading for fun indefinitely unless I set aside some time for it.

19: Anything Considered

Anything Considered by Peter Mayle

From the library book sale in the spring. Read Peter Mayle’s Provence books a long time ago, thought I’d give this a go. Same setting, but Anything Considered is a novel rather than a memoir.

This was (I’ll say it) total dick lit, i.e. the male equivalent of chick lit. I think they call it “lad lit” in the UK.

The MC is Luciano Bennett, because he’s half-Italian, so he tans nicely, and half-English, so he’s… English-y. Of course, he’s called Bennett, because Luciano is too twee. He’s mid-30s, doesn’t really have a job, lives in France. He’s broke—he alludes to some misadventure in the past where someone made off with his life savings—but this really isn’t an impediment to his lifestyle. He lives for free (IIRC) in the house of some guy who’s on sabbatical or something. I guess you could say he’s house-sitting? Except a housekeeper came with the deal.

Anyhow, the premise is that he places an ambiguous ad looking for work, and a Really Rich Dude answers it. A job is offered, and Bennett accepts, thinking he’s essentially getting a paid vacay in Monaco where he can work on the aforementioned tan. (Silly characters! Don’t they know nothing is ever as it seems?) Instead, hijinx ensue. Naturally, he partners up with a chick who happens to be both formerly a model and formerly in the Israeli Army. So she’s hot and she can kick (his) ass. Of course! (What other kind of woman would be worthy of an unemployed middle-aged dude our esteemed hero? ;-))

Well, I won’t tell you any more. This had the potential to be terrible, but it was not. It was total cheese, but the good kind. The writing was good, and I think that makes the difference between fluff and dreck. It’d make an entertaining cheesy TV movie.

The social side of reading

[M]ore and more we’re starting to explore the social side of reading. We’re asking questions like: in a world where every store has every book, is the best store the one with the most interesting readers, connected in the most interesting ways? By connecting them, can they find books they otherwise would never have found? Or read a book more deeply? … [Sometimes] reading is about ideas that want to be shared or fought over or debated. With us, those debates can rage around the pages themselves, as they’re being read. We can connect those readers in a way that no publisher or bricks & mortar bookseller ever could.

—Michael Tamblyn of Kobo
(via Bookninja)

Read Both

I think there is a trend for kids to read longer books younger, at least in the sort of community I teach in. But I don’t get the sense that this causes them to abandon picture books earlier. Rather, they read both. In my classroom today I’ve loads of picture books and the kids love for me to read them and to read them again and again on their own. Twenty years ago I focused pretty much exclusively on chapter books. So while kids seem to be reading chapter books younger they are also enjoying picture books when they are older.

—Monica Edinger

[I]t was BECAUSE of picture books that [my son] was reading Stuart Little at 4, not despite them … And even now that he’s 7 and reading from the 9-12 wall at the store, we don’t eschew the picture books. When I left for work this morning, in fact, he was switching between a YA title, Silverwing, to a picture book by Jamie Lee Curtis (no shit).

—George Murray

One of my nieces reads much like I did as a kid, so I’ve been thinking quite a bit about kids’ books and reading recently.

I started reading when I was 4, before I started school. I don’t remember learning to read. It was like an on-off switch, I guess, much the way math always was for me. Once I figured it out, I just could. But that doesn’t mean I immediately ran out and started reading adult fiction. I was 7 or 8 when I started dabbling in grown-up stories, but it wasn’t until I was 10 that I started regularly picking up my parents’ novels and reading them before they had finished.

Although I had the ability to read pretty much anything, what I wanted to read were things I could relate to: stories with kid (or teen) protagonists, stories about school, friends & (fr)enemies, and dealing with parents and little brothers. Just because those books were too easy for me reading-level-wise didn’t mean I wanted to skip over the stories. Even after I started reading grown-up fiction, I still continued to read YA right alongside. And I’d still go back and re-read my favorite picture and chapter books on occasion.

What the people who are pushing their kids to read up seem to be clueless about is that a story can be profound even if the reading level is basic (or non-existent). David Wiesner’s Flotsam has no words, but it still tells an engaging and imaginative story, one that actually requires the reader to think more to understand it than if it had words:

I think the ability to understand/interpret story is a more difficult skill than simply being able to read. People take more or less time to learn how to read, but most eventually do. On the other hand, some people never figure out how to interpret a story on their own (as you can tell by reading reviews at places like Amazon & Goodreads).*

When one is an early reader, it’s easy to get caught up in just devouring words. For me, it wasn’t enough just to read, I had to read fast. I read so fast that I often missed plot points on my first read of a book (something I’d notice when re-reading, which fortunately I often did). A wordless picture book like Flotsam forces the power-reader to slow down to figure out the story, developing creative and analytical thinking skills. And that’s a good thing!

*Afterthought: I think this is also the reason why many wannabe writers think writing a children’s book will be easy. They are just looking at the words (surface elements) and not thinking more deeply about the story. In reality, writing a complex, nuanced story with few words and a simple vocabulary takes a great deal of skill.

Futures of the book

Dan Visel, a founder of the appropriately named Institute for the Future of the Book, points out that, first of all, a “book” can mean many things: A cookbook, a comic book, a history book and an electronic book are all animals of different stripes.

“It would be a mistake to think that these various forms have a single, unified future,” Visel says. “Rather, I think it’s more appropriate to say that there are futures of the book.” He sees some books, such as romances and thrillers, migrating easily to an electronic form.

Other types of books are not only meant to be read, but meant to be seen: Like when a New York subway rider whips out a copy of Going Rogue by Sarah Palin. “That sort of book largely has value as social display,” Visel says. “It’s not so much an instrument of revelation, because all the revelations in that book, for example, were posted online as soon as anyone could get their hands on it.”

Textbooks, phone books and other compendiums of information could perhaps serve readers better in electronic versions. In fact, Visel says, “I think the electronic book as it’s currently understood — basically a simple electronic text file — will take over a fair amount of the market that’s currently served by printed books.”

—Dan Visel,
interviewed at NPR