Posts about reading

May152011

Great Expectations – So that’s what the Fuss is about


My experiment with audiobooks is paying dividends. Having gone through Treasure Island, I’ve turned to another classic I’ve long meant to read, Great Expectations. I finally understand why they assigned it in high school. I wasn’t a great student, something I still regret, and when they put Dickens on the lesson plan, I never saw the value in reading it. Mrs. Clark, wherever you are, I apologize. Great Expectations was boring. Too many details, too little story. I thought of the narrative as too stuffy and read Terry Pratchett and Roger Zelazny instead.

I’ve since learned that Great Expectations was a newspaper serial, which changes my perspective quite a bit. Some of the repetitive details and phrasing, for example, makes better sense when you know that readers may have gone a month without fresh material. I still don’t find that Dickens to work well in large blocks, like the hundred page weekly readings assigned in sophomore English. Taking it chapter by chapter, or in hour long listenings, creates a different experience. I’m even finding it funny, and I never expected that.

Apr272011

Giving It A Listen


Despite my literature degree, there are plenty of classics I’ve never read. Some of them were never assigned. Many weren’t considered important, or they simply weren’t part of the canon. Often I found the same works assigned over and over. I’ve read Hamlet and the Iliad more often than I care to contemplate, while less serious books were never placed on the reading list. Worse still, I was a horrible high school student, so I glossed over Dickens and other books I should have read twenty years ago.

We can add to this problem that there’s a simple truth that education isn’t what it used to be. Nothing makes this plainer than opening my aged copy of the Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Printed in the 1940s, it’s listed as a book for boys. It’s a problem that’s getting worse, as some curricula have dropped novels altogether.

It cannot be said often enough that reading widens the mind, and that the best means of becoming a better writer is to read. But knowing there’s a gap in my knowledge and filling it are two very different things. Sitting down with a classic book for an evening never makes my list of top priorities, so I’ve taken to audio books to try and make up some ground.

David Cordingly’s many references to Treasure Island put it at the top of my list to see if I can listen to a book and still analyze it. As I listen to the adventures of Jim Hawkins, I’m immediately struck by Stevenson’s approach to his narrative. Treasure Island has many of the traits and techniques of a good, modern young adult novel. First, there’s always action. We spend little time in unnecessary detail and much of it following Jim’s fight for his life. We’re dropped into the sailing vernacular without a glossary or explanation of terms. Stevenson avoids a pedantic approach. He’s not telling us a story to teach us about pirates, but instead lets events take their course at a quick pace. Jim, as a character, grows from cowering at a single pirate to boldly telling a roomful of them how he’s foiled their plots.

One inconsistency in the book is a brief point of view shift about halfway through. Stevenson needed this shift in order to fill us in on plot details Hawkins isn’t present for, but it does break up the overall flow of the narrative in a jarring way.

Listening to a book is a very different experience for me, but I find it does wonders for helping to tune my ear to pace and dialogue. Whenever I think things are slowing down, Stevenson inserts a plot twist, a betrayal or reversal of fortune. Like any book written in another age, the language is different. The pirates patois is coupled with outdated phrasing that makes a reader blink; but in a way this adds to the exotic air of the story as we’re not only looking at another culture but into another time as well.

Sep182010

Everyone Needs a Breather: A Little More on Pace


We all have periods when it seems everything goes wrong: life enters cascade failure, and one crisis after another piles on. You’ve probably met someone who just seems cursed. A personal loss is followed by a car wreck, then a flooded house, then an illness. You start to wonder which god they pissed on to create such calamity. You pity them, but you fear them a bit too. Stand too close and lightning might strike. Conflict is a rule of life and fiction, but fortunately there are good times as well as bad. Even the bleakest existence is mercifully punctuated with a bit of hope.

In fiction, and in life, everyone needs a breather, a time out, or just a break. Sometimes we can’t control the pace of reality, but as writers we get to show our characters some mercy from time to time.

I return to the issue of pacing as I consume urban fantasy at a voracious rate. In Florida I tore through the rest of the Sookie Stackhouse catalog and started on Simon Green’s Nightside books. The first book in the Age of Misrule series is next. One book that came highly recommended, but that I can’t seem to complete, is Vickie Pettersson’s Scent of Shadows.

Green, Harris, and Pettersson all work in the first person, the standard point of view for urban fantasy. This prevents the problem Kristin Nelson recently discussed, of having the action in the second chapter not flow directly from the action in the first. Doors get opened, characters are presented with a conflict, and work towards a resolution. All three share the nuts and bolt of a good read: the protagonists are compelling, the antagonist is stronger, and you want to know where the plot will go. In Harris’s series, Sookie takes regular breaks from the supernatural. I was surprised to note how much of the books deal with her domestic issues and money woes. Green uses his fantastic setting, the magical heart of London, to punctuate the action with colorful anecdotes and asides. But Pettersson never seems to come up for air. Tension in a book should build, driving the reader to keep turning the pages, but even the most action-oriented horror films have to insert quieter moments to bring things down before you reveal the next monster.

Pettersson hits her protagonist, Joanna Archer, with one shock after another. She’s brutally attacked, then reunited with her lost first love. She’s disowned by her father. She suffers a brutal personal loss. She’s dropped into a confusing supernatural battle. All of this is perhaps in the first hundred pages. With these revelations out of the way, I thought things would slow for a moment; but the revelations continue. Joanna is given the need to struggle with a legacy inherited from the mother who abandoned her, her new allies don’t trust her, she destroys a life. She’s not what they expected. Her love thinks she’s dead. He’s been targeted. She’s . . . and I put the book down.

Reading Scent of Shadows is rather like lunch with that perpetually unlucky friend. You’re obligated to go (and it is the rare book I don’t finish), but you scheduled the meeting as a lunch because you’re not sure how much more tragedy you can absorb. Hearing about his endless travails, time after time, start to wear you out.

Is Scent of Shadows a bad book? I don’t think so. There are a lot of good ideas here, including one great twist I never saw coming and thought was genius. Pettersson just hits Joanna with too much at once, without enough time for any of the revelations to really connect to the reader’s consciousness. There are enough major life events, changes, and thresholds crossed for three books in the first half of Scent of Shadows, and the compression is a problem of pacing. A little downtime here and there would help the book a lot. At least it would help keep me caught up in the story. The characters might be super human and able to absorb endless punishment, but as a reader, I’m not. I need the protagonist to catch her breath. Lesley, who recommended it, has good taste and assures me the series improves dramatically. The story has been compelling enough for Pettersson to put five of them out there, so I’m hoping to return to the story when I’m ready for more.

Jul32010

Announcing the Fantasy and Fiction Book Club!

To write, you must read. Okay, sure, you’ve also got to write, and sometimes that seems like a serious uphill battle, but what are we churning out all this stuff for if there’s no audience? I read whenever I can, usually in desperate marathons of sleep deprived consumption, but then I get out of the regular habit and slack off again. Come to think of it, I have a very similar relationship to the gym.

After letting good books pile up around the house, I know they’re good because my friend Jo gave most of them to me, I’m starting a book club to motivate myself to keep a more regular schedule and share good books with friends.

I’ll post polls here so we vote on which book to read for which month. As I believe that writing takes a lot of diversity in reading, I’ll be keeping it open in regards to genre or age. Once we’ve moved through the unread stack on my desk I’ll start taking suggestions. Please invite anyone you think would like to join. Our first book will be Winterlong by Elizabeth Hand. It’s been on my list for a while and I’m excited to finally get to it. I should point out that the Rejectionist reminded me to read this book this week, and I’m grateful for the prod to get reading it. The goal is to have Winterlong read by August 1st.