Category: Books and Reading

One Thing After Another

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When you live three hours by road from the nearest city of any size (and by “of any size” I mean “is able to support at least two separate movie theatres and a shopping mall”), you end up listening to a lot of audiobooks.  You also end up realizing that not all books make good road listening.  You don’t want the sort of book you have to devote a lot of mental processing power to decoding in some fashion — at any rate, you don’t if you’re me, and spend a lot of your driving-and-listening time in the sort of environment where it’s necessary to devote at least a portion of your brain to keeping an eye out for moose in the road.

(Important safety tip, here:  Brake for moose.  As far as the moose is concerned, it doesn’t stop for other things, other things stop for it.  Unless you’re an entire pack of wolves, it doesn’t consider you a threat worth bothering with.)

What you want, for driving a long way at night on a moosey road, is a book that isn’t so complex you’ll lose track of everything else you’re doing, but with enough stuff going on that you’ll stay alert and not succumb to highway hypnosis.  Of late, our household has found that the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs (available for free download from Librivox) are just the ticket.  Granted, Burroughs is not the most elegant of prose stylists, nor the most original of thinkers, and he can be counted on to exhibit just about every -ism to which a white male Anglo-Saxon Protestant writer from the first decades of the twentieth century might be susceptible . . . but when it comes down to sheer one-damned-thing-after-another plot construction, the man is hard to beat.

Weather for Working

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The writing life has its ups and downs, but on days like today it at least has the advantage of taking place largely indoors.  Because if I had to do my work outside on a day like today, I do not think I would get any work done at all.

Spring is a good time to write.  So is autumn.  Winter is great, so long as you can afford to keep the heat on.   But summer is not a good time for any sort of strenuous endeavor, even of the intellectual kind.

Summer heat waves don’t summon up the good times in fiction, either.  They bring us Southern gothic novels featuring humidity and honeysuckle and family secrets (a dead mule may also be involved at some point); and if the supply of Southern gothic fails, the dog days also have a stock of noir-tinged detective novels full of adultery, blackmail, and conspiracy to commit murder.

Only in children’s and young adult fiction, really, is summertime a pleasant source of adventure and romance.

Canon Fodder

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Literary canon formation is a zero-sum game.  I can think of several reasons for this, including the tendency of the literary establishment to turn absolutely everything into an exercise in hierarchical ranking — there are people out there in the world who can’t even look at a sack of potatoes without wanting to sort them in order from The Very Best Most Nearly Platonic Potato down to The Potato Which Barely Made It into the Sack in the First Place.

And then you have the Two-Semester Literature Survey Course — taught, usually, from the Fat Two-Volume Anthology. Combine compulsive ranking of everything with a limited amount of anthology shelf space, and literary scholarship starts to look like an episode of Survivor: Bibliography.  Tenured professors and rising scholars engage in war to the knife to decide whose chosen texts are more important, more artistic, more nourishing to the mind and spirit . . . and recognizing something as “good” isn’t going to be enough.  It can’t just be good.  It needs to be better.  It has to be best.

If this is beginning to sound a bit like those other arguments . . . the ones over whether the Enterprise-D could take out the Death Star, or about who’s the bigger hero, Batman or Superman . . . well, let’s just say that the people involved in all of these arguments take them very very seriously.  The problem with the literary-canon-formation argument is that it slops over onto the heads of everybody else in the reading world, and tends to alienate a whole lot of people once they notice that it’s often their preferred reading material that’s getting dissed.  Their reading material doesn’t get a ticket onto the canon island at all, and when they ask why, the answer that comes back sounds to them an awful lot like “because all that fun prole stuff you people like isn’t high-level enough to be art.”

I don’t want to blame the literary canoneers too much, though.  It’s amazingly difficult to talk about the whole idea of voluntary avocational reading without the use of language which, deliberately or not, imposes rank and hierarchy upon it. We speak of “higher levels” of difficulty, and “greater” challenges; and — in our still-puritanical society — even words like “pleasure” and “relaxation” have a faint negative cast to them, especially when set beside words like “instruction” or “insight” or “self-improvement.”

I’m willing to accept that somebody else may find enjoyable something that I do not. After all, most of the people who tried to convince me, during my school days, that organized team sports were fun, certainly appeared themselves to enjoy them. But I’m no more fond than the next person of being told, or even feeling like I’m being told, that my enjoyment of those things that I do like is in some fashion inferior to the enjoyment experienced by other people who like something else.

My theory (I believe I’ve articulated it at the Viable Paradise workshop once or twice) is that what most of us are looking for in our reading is the perfect birthday present effect — the perfect birthday present being the one where you’re completely surprised by exactly what you’ve always wanted.

And nobody likes being told that their perfect birthday present is actually a cheap piece of Walmart trash.

Other Voices, Other Rooms

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The alert reader will have noticed by now that I quote, from time to time, “another writer — I don’t remember exactly which one.”  This isn’t so much due to absent-mindedness as to the fact that a lot of the people I hang out with, both in person and on the internet, are involved in some way with the writing and publishing trades, and all of them are in the habit of saying and writing clever things.

Generally speaking, if I can’t remember which of them said a particular thing, I look first at what you might call the usual suspects:

  • Sherwood Smith, fantasy novelist extraordinaire, who blogs regularly over at the Book View Cafe.
  • James D. Macdonald (aka Yog Sysop, aka Uncle Jim), who is one of the moderators and front page posters over at Making Light and a moderator and regular poster at Absolute Write.
  • Teresa Nielsen Hayden, another member of the Making Light blogging team.
  • All the instructors at Viable Paradise (when you have eight writers and editors and twenty-four students living cheek-by-jowl and laptop-by-netbook for a solid week, a lot of memorable things get said by a confusing number of people.)

If you want to read yet more stuff about writing and publishing, you could do worse than to check out the public online haunts of all of the above people.  They are, without exception, smart, sharp, and insightful.

We are What We (Have) Read

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Maybe somewhere out there is a writer who wasn’t also a voracious reader from the very earliest basic-reader days (show of hands here:  how many of you got scolded in first or second grade for “reading ahead” in reading group?), but most of us start out as bookworms and stay that way.  Proto-writers have the mental digestive systems of goats, or maybe sharks — if it comes our way, we’ll read it — but  we seem to find some books especially tasty and nourishing.

Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, for example.  I know I’m not the only female writer out there who imprinted on Jo March at an early age.  I loved Jo for her temper and for her unwillingness to be humble and “make nice”, and I seethed with rage on her behalf when those qualities lost her the chance to go to Europe with Aunt March.  If I’d lived in a house with a finished attic, I would have gotten myself a thinking cap like Jo’s and worn it when I went upstairs to write.  (Alas, we lived in Florida, and later in Texas, and all that we ever had in our attics was a fan to cool the house.)  I read Little Women multiple times, and then I went on to read all the sequels.

I didn’t just identify with Jo, I wanted to be her when I grew up.

For a young writer, there are far worse role models:  Jo doesn’t just think about writing, she actually writes, and writes a lot, starting out by emulating other writers and moving on to find her own subjects; she shows her work to outside readers, and takes their advice when she finds it good; she submits her material for publication; she doesn’t let rejection stop her for long; and when she achieves success she handles it with grace and good will.

Jo March doesn’t just survive; Jo wins.

(Do young male writers have their own equivalent of Jo March?  I feel sorry for them if they don’t.)

Fake Nose and Eyeglasses

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Writers talk about writing a lot. Sometimes, their sharpest observations are made in places where you (and possibly they) think they’re talking about something else. Continue reading “Fake Nose and Eyeglasses” →