The last book was The Snow Leopard, Matthiessen, and that’s because the plane to Manila was flying over the Himalayas. I’d read it before and thought I was seeing champagne bubbles with the words, so perhaps I was the only one reading that book over the snowy peaks, unless the author himself, flying in and out of Nepal, did revise his notes. And so, in Manila I began writing Spinoza and the Himalayas, and it’s going to published an obscure magazine. And I’m so happy about it.
I remember when I was reading the 3rd volume of Flaubert’s letters to have stopped the car on 42 Bld du Temple to just open the book and look at the words on any of the pages, then at the commemorative plaque on the wall by the door where it was stated Flaubert wrote Madame Bovarie -if I remember correctly. or was it Education Sentimentale? Here.
My approach at that time privileged the belief that I, or “it” has to be more than word, the connection between what I was reading and the author of the book, that it has to be a personal matter that reached beyond the words, some kind of an attachment, Elysian attachment at the beginning -that later transformed itself into metaphysical and existential if dare use there heavy words- of some kind, some kind is telepathic attachment I vowed with the author himself that spanned the actual moment and stayed with me despite the vicissitudes of the days, and I always wanted to have that informal closeness, with Graham Greene when I visited his flat in Antibes, so many years after his death, (the building not the flat itself) and that was after reading in The Pillars of Hercules Paul Theroux that he visited him there, but his description of the house was different, ‘down a cobbled alley where the view from the window was on a dead end” or something to this effect. Or when I visited the Maison de Maitre in Sommière, south of France, where Laurence Durrell lived, after reading his correspondence with Henry Miller, where in the middle of the book there was a photo of them in the glare of the sun, on the banks of the Vidourle, and I promised myself to find that place and take a picture there as well by the still water of the river and the Platane trees turning yellow from excessive heat of Le Midi, even though the pictures in the book were in black and white, turned sepia by now, wherever the originals are. I’m still convinced it’s more than just words, like when you listen to Buckets of Rain, by our dear Bob, or Echoes on Live at Pompeii, and you feel some kind of fusion between the ages to take you easily back to Cicero or Pliny (younger and older) a sentiment that’s hard to pin down, and even harder to think that’s it is related to a job you have to do, and you kind of leave it open ended to reap whatever you can day in, day out.
I know what you mean. My travels have taken me to several places connected to James Joyce, although unintentionally. There was his flat in Paris, and the table at which he wrote in Dublin. And then my wife and I came upon his wife, Nora Barnacle's, birthplace in Galway. Joyce had long been one of my favorite authors before any of that, and finding those places just made me feel closer to him.
I liked those two words of Joyce in a brothel in Manila although it was not advertised as such but its clientele said that it was, when in the middle of the night the bellboy delivered buckets of San Miguel beer to the adjoining rooms and at dawn when the girls left the room, I could smell their fresh shampoo in the corridor and remembered as they were “leisurely and perfumed .”
He wanted the protagonist's name in the first sentence? I'm not even sure Dr Seuss was that restrictive. The Lorax doesn't show up until halfway through his own story.
Just finished Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay, a historical fantasy set in the equivalent of Tang Dynasty China around the time of the An Lushan Rebellion. Very sensual novel. Lots of jade, silk, bamboo, wine, and poetry.
Just started the new Julian Barnes, Departure(s). Apparently it's his last (the man just turned 80). I loved Flaubert's Parrot and The Sense of an Ending so I have high hopes for this one.
I try to read 50 books a year, mostly fiction. One novel a week is doable as long as I stay the hell away from my phone. I have a hard time reading fiction on a screen - my eyes prefer paper and ink to pixels - so I'm not able to read much fiction on Substack.
Regarding the "author" at the conference, it was one of those experiences that really tests a writers' resolve. Another writer, who is a far better writer than I, came out of her critique session nearly in tears. Seems like this guy was more interested in tearing people down than building them up. With that in mind I was able to completely discard all of his comments.
I just finished "The Mountain in the Sea" by Ray Naylor (2023) and "Jacob's Room" by Virginia Woolf. The former is a science fiction novel churning with ideas of panpsychism, animal-human communication, AI, and other things (to your point about engaging otherness, it concerns a subspecies of Neolithic-level octopuses discovered off Vietnam). The latter book is a series of impressions about a passionate young man whose idealism is broken by WWI.
I enjoyed both, for very different reasons. I have a wide range of tastes and interests, so I tend to be restless with the authors and genres I read. It's also part of my own quixotic creative quest to marry my love of Big Picture Concepts (which the best speculative fiction offers) with the more intimate, lyrical treatment of the human condition normally found on the literary side.
Many books, though, both "commercial" and "literary" -- as well as those touted as blends -- have increasingly come to feel what I call vacuum-sealed, almost too crisp and perfect in their execution. They feel meticulously calibrated to excite some overcaffeinated Netflix producer. There's very little of the "messiness" which I tend to respond to, as a reader -- the 12-page tangents, the meandering philosophical conversations, the gratuity of descriptive splendor, the random B or C-plots that really don't "pay off" as our cinema-trained tastes would like them to. Screenwriter friends of mine have used terms like "hot mess" to describe "Moby Dick" and "Wuthering Heights", forgetting their historical contexts and the shifting, evolving identity of the novel form over the decades.
I will say, though, that literary fiction has developed its own "formula" over the years, one I've long been able to spot a mile away. It bulges with the ego of the MFA graduate, thundering across the page with great pretentious dreams of hammering their way into the canon (as if that means anything anymore). We need to find artists out in the wild again -- the Steinbecks or Faulkers who worked at factories and picked strawberries. And by "the wild" I don't mean the scrappy Brooklyn hipster with only the $500k trust fund versus the $10m. If the ostensible "cure" for simple-minded fiction is a vacuous, navel-licking work like Jennifer Egan's "Visit from the Goon Squad" (to take one random example), God help us all.
Seems to me our culture is in a post-post-post-postmodern funk: the stale gas out of academia has combined with the putrid gases from our relentlessly corporatized publishers.
Yeah, the label of literary fiction is now mostly just a marketing tactic. Major publishing has decided that its future is dependent on the mass market, and so it has become a reflection of the tastes and education of the people who comprise it – people who have been conditioned by commercialization and social media but won't admit it, people who now think that "Moby Dick" and "Wuthering Heights" are hot messes with no redeeming literary value. I am constantly amazed at the malleability of societies and their values. When you think back to different belief systems over history, it's easier to understand what is happening to our society today as being a phase we are going through. Every generation likes to assume that it is correcting the mistakes of the past; even to go as far as to tear down existing institutions. But something about what is happening to American culture seems different this time. Too much of the change seems aimless. We know what everyone is against, but we don't know what they are for. It's not quite anarchy, because with anarchy you want to tear everything down and start over. This is anarchy tinged by capitalism. It only wants to tear down what others have, while maintaining the material desires that capitalism insists upon. Corporate publishing doesn't care about any of this as long as they continue to turn a profit.
How do you feel about audio books, Joe? I've finished far more lately than the paper or e-ink kind. I was just in Montenegro with Nero Wolfe today if audios count.
On the paper-and-paperlike front, I started Byatt's Possession last night. I expect I'll finish that. Before it I finished a promising WIP from my crit group. There's also an obscure '70s sci-fi I started and mean to return to as well.
Subtext is a topic that always triggers my imposter syndrome. I'm not sure I can spot the dividing line. There's a scene in The Black Mountain (Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe #24) in which the reclusive detective visits a body. Archie, the narrator, details Wolfe's reactions without opining on the emotions they convey. Having read enough to know the characters, I found the subtle cracks in Wolfe's armor quite affecting.
But is that subtext or mere characterization? My impression is that subtext is like a keyhole and it is up to the reader to furnish the key. They do this from a personal understanding of human nature and, at times, specialist knowledge. By that conception, an inference about emotional makeup qualifies but it is a paltry example.
I'd be glad to hear more of your or thoughts on the subject, or those of others in the comments.
I've only tried to listen to one audiobook, and it was a disappointment. But I think that had more to do with the book than the audio.
When it comes to subtext I usually default back to Charles Baxter, who characterized it as the "unspoken soul matter" in a story. The keyword being unspoken. For me, it's the meaning that a reader infers from the text. So based on what you said about the portrayal of Nero Wolfe, the fact that you deduced his armor had subtle cracks qualifies the description as subtext. It's also characterization, but it is subtext. I'm always more attracted to work that allows the reader the opportunity to make up his or her own mind about the meaning of what is happening. It helps you better connect with the story. It's that old adage about being able to step inside the character's shoes so that you can feel what the character feels.
I’m always glad I asked you, Joe. In repayment, seek out Sir Ian Holm reading The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde the next time you can piece together three hours .
I find the sameness issue more true with nonfiction books--the heavy-handed, "We want a best seller" editing that gets soooo repetitive and seems geared to 6th-grade reading level even when the subject is complex.
I read only about 30 novels a year, and some of them are works that are 50-100 years old, so I haven't noted it as much in novels. Though it doesn't surprise me. (And I want novels to surprise me! I want non-fiction to surprise me, too!)
Latest reading? Mostly poetry and history. I just finished Tina Kelley's "A Field Guide to North American Words" (poetry) and Helen Castor's "She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England before Elizabeth" and am in the middle of the tome that is Sapolsky's "Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst."
Whatever would I do without reading? Mostly I read poems; but I love long, complex books, and short but intriguing books, and books on history or science or medicine or psychology. And I do love novels, too. I could not have become a writer without being a voracious reader.
There definitely seem to be some formulaic requirements in the book publishing business. These used to be restricted to genre categories, but now appear to apply to more literary types of work (at least what the publishing industry considers literary work now). That's why I'm so grateful that a handful of writers like Rachel Cusk, who established themselves in a different decade, can continue to be published. But what happens when their careers are over? Who will take their place?
This all will end with a pertinent question! So, please enjoy reading the following description of my recent readings . . .
For years--for as far as I recall when I think of the past many years--almost all of what I've read in literature has been old stuff and stuff considered "classics." These include literary works from ancient times to much later. A few exceptions have included a few "popular"-type works, such as science fiction novels (example: Theodore Sturgeon's "More Than Human"), as well as the recent prize-winning "Tinkers," by Paul Harding.
For one period of several years I had been reading world literary works, usually English translations--from ancient epics from Europe and elsewhere to medieval Arthurian works to the Farsi epic "Shanameh" and the Georgian epic "The Knight In The Panther's Skin" to the 19th-Century Bengali author Saratchandra and the 20th-Century Tamil historical novelist Krishnamurthi, who wrote "Ponniyin Selvan" and other novels.
For another period I had read many 18th-Century novels, besides, usually but not always from Britain.
Some of what I've read more lately includes collected personal literary essays and books by Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt (both from the 1800's), as well as Michel de Montaigne's essays. I am still reading all of those. I also am reading V. Woolf's novels and short stories and essays, and her long nonfiction, too, as well as Joyce's "Ulysses." I am reading Tobias Smollett's translation of the novel "Gil Blas," along with all of those.
And I have been slowly and gradually making my way through Shakespeare, over a few years--not to mention Ambrose Bierce's book "The Devil's Dictionary." Right now, I am also reading a contemporary book of personal essays by Ann Fadiman (if I spelled her name, correctly).
I have done some reading in literary journals, additionally.
For the most part--probably rarely never otherwise--I have been having "a ball" as a literary reader for many years.
So, the question is:
Is there any issue in a literary writer writing while reading almost primarily older things? Older things that are usually considered, say, "reputable," but also some more "popular"-type works or "classics"?
I'd like to know what others aside from myself might think!
No problem reading older work, especially drawing upon traditions or establishing connections to literary history. An older writing style done in some new way could be interesting, but if it's only using that older style as it once was written, then that's been done, and my guess is that there'd have to be a compelling reason for it.
As for me I would say it depends on the kind of publishing you would like to do. The influence of older styles of writing would probably be an impediment to publishing through a major company, since their output appears to be directed at an audience that doesn't have much knowledge of those authors or styles. You'd probably have better luck publishing through a smaller independent.
All of those fake marketers who flood your in-box, extolling the virtues of your last book(s), which impressed them so much that they have a special offer for you.
🪝 A reminder today that AI has your email and knows how to bait the hook. 🪝
I got one this morning. A mile long and filled with glowing praise about a collection I put up on Amazon about 15 years ago. AI is very dangerous in the wrong hands. And there are a lot of wrong hands out there.
Don Quixote. Both parts. Having dented half of part 1 many years ago I caught up and pressed on to finish it, though sadly, not in Spanish. Remarkable book.
The paradox you describe an unreading culture that produces unreadable books is a product of the business where sophistication is tossed out to make it accessible and the 5 page agent submission is the yardstick of that stupidity. Spoon feeding the reader so they know who, what, why at every point and never have to comprehend, to judge, to learn, is what makes for solid sales. Apparently.
In my own work I discovered that I had a tendency to what I call the Chinatown plot, where something innocuous leads to something more significant and then something more and then more,, an onion shedding its sleeves is the usual metaphor here. I had an editor with one piece tell me to cut all that out and get to he piece in case the impatient reader gave up. The ephectic start being crucial to the payoff 10,000 words later.
To close, Kundera observed the same about the novelist in his distinction with the writer, as ''an explorer feeling his way to in an effort to reveal some unknown aspect of existence.''
Thanks, Guy, for ephectic. I love gaining new words, lol. My stunning discovery--and at quite an old age--was that Quixote is metafictional, long before it became the thing to be. The first "novel" had that quality.
Kundera's point is well taken: it's the great exercise of fiction to go in journeying and finding what gems lie in the words and tales.
That’s right about Don Quixote being metafictional: the book is about an avid reader who imitates exploits he’s read; he wants his own adventures to be published; Cervantes quotes an Arab source for the Don’s history; and Don discovers a book with false stories about himslef. It’s as if post modernist literature had been written from the start. Extraordinary book.
I am always amazed when a literary agent asks for a query letter and 30, or even 50 pages of the manuscript. It's pretty rare. The vast majority just want those 5 to 10 pages, and how can they possibly tell whether the book is any good from that?
"Sometimes I start reading a novel and am interested for a few chapters. But that interest wanes as the tension refuses to rise" - I notice this quite a lot, and I think there's a reason for it: many books are sold on the basis of the opening chapters or even the first few pages. Some agents and editors won't even read further than the first paragraph if it doesn't grab them. So writers concentrate on making the opening a gripping experience and then slack off for the rest of the book.
Reminds me of the radio audience tests where you'd hear a snippet of music and that would help determine what got on the radio. Getting the hook or "gripping experience" up front is sadly consistent for a society focused on image and facade.
Would you like to hear something really crazy? After retiring a few years ago, I enrolled in university classes to brush up on my skills before I started writing a series that had been percolating in my brain for years. I quickly became frustrated with the generic critiques. I finally had enough and blurted out, "Didn't anyone read this?" In classes of 25-30 aspiring writers that involved reading and critiquing each other's work, there was not ONE student who had bothered to read the day's assigned short story. When I asked why not, the most common answer was that at 5000-7000 words, it was "too long." Keep in mind that these were people who all wanted to be published authors taking a university fiction writing class taught by a multi-book published author, but not one of them could be bothered to take the time to read a 5000- 7000-word short story.
That is rather frightening. But not really surprising. And now most literary journals won't even look at a story that's over 5000 words long. I wonder what the poor published author teaching the class thought about this. If it were me I simply would have failed them all.
These are folks who will never experience the joy of reading Joyce's "The Dead," a story that feels somewhat pedestrian at the start (@swspires) but ends with a wonderful gut-wrenching epiphany.
Your remark about "aspiring writers" led me to think of how in modern times we think of writing as a career choice. Who are you? Oh, I'm a writer. Not an insurance salesman who writes at midnight (Kafka); physician by day (Chekhov), writer at night; maid, manicurist (Hurston), writer between times--stolen hours. Now that writing is a career choice, who has time to read, eh? 😏
"The Dead" is among my top handful of short stories (write up there with "Death in Venice," neither one of which is really short). I've read it more times than I can recall, and sometimes I just turn to the last couple of pages and read those to get that incredible epiphany. In fact, since you have reminded me of it, I think I'll go read those pages again.
I also asked everyone, “What’s the last book you read from start to finish?” Except for a girl aspiring to write romance novels, every other response was either, “Huh?” or “Required reading in high school English,” - but only if they couldn’t find it summarized on the internet. I don’t understand at all. Books and art are the closest thing to honest to goodness magic that we humans will ever have.
It seems sad, and for book lovers truly is, the lack of experience with one mind in solitude with another mind, the essence of reading in some ways, but I try to remain optimistic, thinking that in film, anime, and even some video games there are still stories being told, and the "idea" of storytelling won't disappear, even if books do. The future isn't for me, but I completely agree with you that there's a kind of magic in absorption in some story or other.
Qualification, Correction. After thought on your words, "Her world is the real world." You probably meant that Rachel Cusk writes about people, situaitons outside herself -- the theme of your article. If my tardy afterthought is correct, then Yes. My misinterpretation. Amends. A story or novel not about ME, but about others, which is a hopeful direction of the human conditon, is what keeps us reading.
Yes, that is what I meant by that sentence. It was a pretty clumsy way of putting it, though, and I should have edited it.
Your comment also made me think about the nature of business in America. Ever wonder why new cars all seem to look the same at any given time? Whatever becomes popular is imitated ad infinitum, and in those cases imitation is not a sincere form of flattery, it's just copycatting for profit. Major publishers seem to have forgotten what their business is all about.
I was thinking, too, about the film Jaws in the middle 70s and how it spawned 30-40 (according to one source) rip-offs. And I suspect this what the publishing industry has now become--whatever sells, give 'em more.
And they're still making rip offs of Jaws. Have you seen "Anaconda?" (I hope not.) How about "The Meg?" Apparently it's about a megalosaurus that likes to eat people.
Thanks for article. To read other fiction if you are writing fiction should be an assumption we can make about writing. As you point out, too many authors don't. Including best-selling authors. The double-bind that writers face today is to be condemned for cultural appropriation if they write about the other who may be a different ethnicity or gender or both. The writer must bracket such concerns and persevere. If he/she falters with an unbelievable character, that a valid criticism. Not becaause she attempted the character. When I review journals for what stories they've published in the past, I can't tell you how often I scroll to another journal for the exact complaint you express -- all about me. Present tense a red flag. And there is the identity criteria. My parnter, who is searching for agents for her novel, recently encountered a new agent who declared in her website that she only wanted a given gender, race. You have commented the import and open avenue of changing things politically. Yet when agents -- and by default publishers -- set such restrictions on the very material they will even consider -- and they are pervasive -- Romance, fantasy, about plucky women during World War II has flooded the market -- it is hard not to despair, then write your story or novel, place in a time capsule, and hope it gets found in a literary future where such restrictions are no longer perpetrated. One respectful thought regarding your view of Rachel Cusk: "Her world is the real world." We all have our worlds. Sometimes they overlap. To declare one writer's world the real one implies the one the rest of us live and work in is less than real. Rachel Cusk has the world she knows. Valerie Perrin, Fresh Water for Flowers, writes about a small town female cemetery keeper in France whose world is no doubt unfamiliar to most readers in America, US of A. His her world less valid because America have never had professions like cemetery keepers? I write this because I think it a dangerous literary world to begin walking to declare one author's world is real, implying another's is not, especially if it is less familiar, less privileged, more privleged. Or if that world is a world we may oppose, even hate. Solzhenitsyn wrote about Lenin. Normam Mailer wrote a whole novel on Hitler. Closing. In an interview with the director of the movie, "Flow," Latvian, European produced. He says that he does not want to "spoon feed" his audience regarding scenes that may leave an ambiguity. Yes, you are point on that we have every reason to feel patronized when an artist spoon feeds, explains. Be well. Thanks for aritcle.
Last two books finished were fixes of Denis Johnson: Train Dreams and Largesse of the Sea Maiden. Currently reading (and about to finish) Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman with some lit mags sprinkled in between. Will add some Cusk to the TBR list.
I thought Tree of Smoke was very good. I also enjoy Ward Just, whose novel Echo House traces several generations in a political family.
For something pulpy, I seek the novels of John Le Carre.
The novel I just finished is Tim Warrington's California Book of the Dead - he's deft at helping us see a character through a few well-chosen descriptors as he vividly recreates the San Francisco 1980s milieu, post-hippie but well before the tech invasion.
For a thoughtful take on human behavior, I look to the work of British writers Penelope Fitzgerald and Penelope Lively (whose short novel The Photograph is a masterpiece).
And T.C. Boyle likes to put characters from opposing sides of a struggle on collision course then share the fireworks. I particularly admire When the Killing's Done, which considers how creatures are assigned the status of "native" or "Invasive species" by the humans "managing" them - published in 2011, it's reverberating yet.
And if this subject captures your attention, I highly recommend the memoir Buffalo for the Broken Heart, by Dan O'Brien, the chronicles of a biologist who ranches cattle then buffalo in South Dakota, and shares what he learns about the Great Plains ecosystem, where buffalo are the key species. It's a beautiful book.
I'm scooping this stuff up. Tree of Smoke sits atop my next-up shelf.
Did, if you don't mind (I have looked it up, but didn't get a clear answer), P. Lively's The Photograph address photography "philosophies" in addition to time and memory? I shoot, and read such stuff (Barthes, Sontag, Modiano).
The Photograph is about the disruptions among a group of close friends, when the ex-husband finds a photograph of a group of close friends, in which his at-the-time wife is holding the hand of another man in an intimate clasp. He'd never noticed this detail before. She's been dead 10 years - how much could it matter? And yet, it upends not only his world but those of his friends who knew her.
I consume books. I don't get how you can possibly write without reading. I have just read Stoner by John Williams, a real American classic, a well nigh perfect novel. There's surely enough great literature out there, so why bother with poorly written trash.
Just finished "The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife," and I'm halfway through Ross Macdonald's "The Way Some People Die." I usually finish everything I start and read a broad variety.
As far aspiring "writers" who don't read, imagine a "composer" who can't play an instrument or doesn't listen to music. Makes zero sense. Nobody would stand for that in the music world, and the same rule applies to literature.
I’m not familiar with Rachel Cusk or Parade. I’m putting them both on my TBR lists after reading this.
I’m on the final chapters of Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead, and Book Architecture by Stuart Horwitz.
Harlem Shuffle is a gift to writers and oh yeah, readers. It’s the kind of writing that makes me want to be a better writer. I’ve dog-eared at least 20 pages and I’m *excited* to spend an hour reviewing the POVs of each chapter. I’m going to write a short review that 5 people might read. It’s the first in a trilogy, squee!
Book Architecture is the kind of craft book I’ve read a dozen others to find. There is a clear dissection of several novels and a system for analyzing and constructing stories.
My only antidote for all the no-reading around me is to stubbornly continue reading despite the many other responsibilities competing for my time. It took me all winter to read Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson but I did it. If I read something terrible or that I can’t get into, I let it go.
Yeah, that's why I always take a book to read when I fly. Not just because I want to read, but also because I want to advertise reading to others.
I see you do what I do and dog ear and mark up pages. That's what books are made for imho. In fact I had marked a few passages of Parade to include with this week's post, but I forgot to do it. Cusk, in her subtle way, makes several powerful comments about today's social media values.
Cusk and Whitehead are names I know, but I have never read their work. Horwitz was unfamiliar. Your comment got me thinking about how much good work is out there that is never read by a great many; this would be true even if the trash were somehow stripped away; you'd still never get to it all--and there's something nice about that, in terms of shaping a writer's life. Many roads to the same place.
But your comment led me into further considerations, that is, how marketplaces are antithetical to good literary work. When book readers are seen as consumers, then merit and quality play little role, and quantity becomes paramount. Put in a more practical form: I've loved Funyuns since the 70s. Those onion rings are the equivalent of Moby Dick in my taste world. But the market says I must consume more, and if I don't demand it, the demand will be created for me, so now there're twelve flavors of Moby Dick out there, and they pale by comparison with the original.
As Joe has pointed out a few times, the market is generating what the people will buy, all the more happy to sell it to them without any, if I may, (social) moral, regard. I find it difficult sometimes to clear away the smog to see beauty in book form.
I first read Colson Whitehead via his novel John Henry Days - in it he analyzes types of articles (the protagonist writes for magazines), and whether a writer is on their way up or down. It's very perceptive and also funny - and squirm-inducing if you sense you're in the crosshairs.
Interesting you mention Moby-Dick. When I was in high school, my mom was pleased to get an abridgement-outline - read this chapter, that one, that one, skip these 6, read.. etc. She was very pleased to "read the book" without slogging through the "all that irrelevant verbiage." When I finally read Moby-Dick a decade ago, I found its structure paralleled the samurai films I enjoy - a long buildup, during which you learn the factions, the stakes, the moral high ground, so that when the moment of battle finally comes you are prepared to appreciate it (and without all that, samurai films would last 5 minutes at the most!). Melville tells us about the ship, the captain, the officers, the harpoonists, the ocean currents, the ports, where whales gather with their young, how whale-meat and oil are harvested, the cultures of the crew - so when the Pequod and the white whale meet, we understand the context, and we're as prepared for the encounter as anyone on the ship. All that is not a waste of time!
C. Whitehead came onto my radar after The Nickel Boys (I'm from that area), and I've looked at and read openings of other books, but I never brought him into my library--perhaps now will be the time.
I, too, have met abridged readers of Moby-Dick, and, being a lover of biology and science, the cetology of whales captivated me. You make a great point about the buildup. So many stories need that for impact. I'm guessing you're referring to Kurosawa's great three-and-some-change-hour film (and others?), and there's no doubt it's needed and totally not a waste of time.
Actually, the style of samurai films as a genre is the long buildup/ rapid swordfight. One of my favorites is the Samurai Trilogy by Hiroshi Inagaki, starring the incomparable Toshiro Mifune as the samurai who begins as a peasant savage and gradually gains maturity, steadiness of heart, and peace of spirit. These 3 films overlap Kurosawa's work with Toshiro - Yojimbo, Sanjuro, Seven Samurai. I recommend them all!
Book Architecture sounds worthwhile - I'll track that down. I took a class at Lighthouse, a non-academic writing hub in Denver: "Reading as a Writer." We read and discussed One Hundred Years of Solitude in 4 class sessions. It was useful to have a lens through which to consider this epic. In a later iteration of this class we read Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf's evocation of her characters' lives over the course of a day. Revelatory!
The advantage of taking a class over reading a craft book solo, is the discussions sparked by the book and the ways we were asked to consider it.
Lighthouse (https://lighthousewriters.org/) offers many of its courses either online or as hybrids, so a person not living nearby can participate. Check it out!
I just happened to notice that One Hundred Years of Solitude has been turned into a series on Netflix. I cringe at the thought of what they might have done to it to make a palatable to a modern audience.
The last book was The Snow Leopard, Matthiessen, and that’s because the plane to Manila was flying over the Himalayas. I’d read it before and thought I was seeing champagne bubbles with the words, so perhaps I was the only one reading that book over the snowy peaks, unless the author himself, flying in and out of Nepal, did revise his notes. And so, in Manila I began writing Spinoza and the Himalayas, and it’s going to published an obscure magazine. And I’m so happy about it.
I remember when I was reading the 3rd volume of Flaubert’s letters to have stopped the car on 42 Bld du Temple to just open the book and look at the words on any of the pages, then at the commemorative plaque on the wall by the door where it was stated Flaubert wrote Madame Bovarie -if I remember correctly. or was it Education Sentimentale? Here.
My approach at that time privileged the belief that I, or “it” has to be more than word, the connection between what I was reading and the author of the book, that it has to be a personal matter that reached beyond the words, some kind of an attachment, Elysian attachment at the beginning -that later transformed itself into metaphysical and existential if dare use there heavy words- of some kind, some kind is telepathic attachment I vowed with the author himself that spanned the actual moment and stayed with me despite the vicissitudes of the days, and I always wanted to have that informal closeness, with Graham Greene when I visited his flat in Antibes, so many years after his death, (the building not the flat itself) and that was after reading in The Pillars of Hercules Paul Theroux that he visited him there, but his description of the house was different, ‘down a cobbled alley where the view from the window was on a dead end” or something to this effect. Or when I visited the Maison de Maitre in Sommière, south of France, where Laurence Durrell lived, after reading his correspondence with Henry Miller, where in the middle of the book there was a photo of them in the glare of the sun, on the banks of the Vidourle, and I promised myself to find that place and take a picture there as well by the still water of the river and the Platane trees turning yellow from excessive heat of Le Midi, even though the pictures in the book were in black and white, turned sepia by now, wherever the originals are. I’m still convinced it’s more than just words, like when you listen to Buckets of Rain, by our dear Bob, or Echoes on Live at Pompeii, and you feel some kind of fusion between the ages to take you easily back to Cicero or Pliny (younger and older) a sentiment that’s hard to pin down, and even harder to think that’s it is related to a job you have to do, and you kind of leave it open ended to reap whatever you can day in, day out.
I know what you mean. My travels have taken me to several places connected to James Joyce, although unintentionally. There was his flat in Paris, and the table at which he wrote in Dublin. And then my wife and I came upon his wife, Nora Barnacle's, birthplace in Galway. Joyce had long been one of my favorite authors before any of that, and finding those places just made me feel closer to him.
I liked those two words of Joyce in a brothel in Manila although it was not advertised as such but its clientele said that it was, when in the middle of the night the bellboy delivered buckets of San Miguel beer to the adjoining rooms and at dawn when the girls left the room, I could smell their fresh shampoo in the corridor and remembered as they were “leisurely and perfumed .”
Talk about making connections! If only it worked like that all the time.
He wanted the protagonist's name in the first sentence? I'm not even sure Dr Seuss was that restrictive. The Lorax doesn't show up until halfway through his own story.
Just finished Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay, a historical fantasy set in the equivalent of Tang Dynasty China around the time of the An Lushan Rebellion. Very sensual novel. Lots of jade, silk, bamboo, wine, and poetry.
Just started the new Julian Barnes, Departure(s). Apparently it's his last (the man just turned 80). I loved Flaubert's Parrot and The Sense of an Ending so I have high hopes for this one.
I try to read 50 books a year, mostly fiction. One novel a week is doable as long as I stay the hell away from my phone. I have a hard time reading fiction on a screen - my eyes prefer paper and ink to pixels - so I'm not able to read much fiction on Substack.
Regarding the "author" at the conference, it was one of those experiences that really tests a writers' resolve. Another writer, who is a far better writer than I, came out of her critique session nearly in tears. Seems like this guy was more interested in tearing people down than building them up. With that in mind I was able to completely discard all of his comments.
I just finished "The Mountain in the Sea" by Ray Naylor (2023) and "Jacob's Room" by Virginia Woolf. The former is a science fiction novel churning with ideas of panpsychism, animal-human communication, AI, and other things (to your point about engaging otherness, it concerns a subspecies of Neolithic-level octopuses discovered off Vietnam). The latter book is a series of impressions about a passionate young man whose idealism is broken by WWI.
I enjoyed both, for very different reasons. I have a wide range of tastes and interests, so I tend to be restless with the authors and genres I read. It's also part of my own quixotic creative quest to marry my love of Big Picture Concepts (which the best speculative fiction offers) with the more intimate, lyrical treatment of the human condition normally found on the literary side.
Many books, though, both "commercial" and "literary" -- as well as those touted as blends -- have increasingly come to feel what I call vacuum-sealed, almost too crisp and perfect in their execution. They feel meticulously calibrated to excite some overcaffeinated Netflix producer. There's very little of the "messiness" which I tend to respond to, as a reader -- the 12-page tangents, the meandering philosophical conversations, the gratuity of descriptive splendor, the random B or C-plots that really don't "pay off" as our cinema-trained tastes would like them to. Screenwriter friends of mine have used terms like "hot mess" to describe "Moby Dick" and "Wuthering Heights", forgetting their historical contexts and the shifting, evolving identity of the novel form over the decades.
I will say, though, that literary fiction has developed its own "formula" over the years, one I've long been able to spot a mile away. It bulges with the ego of the MFA graduate, thundering across the page with great pretentious dreams of hammering their way into the canon (as if that means anything anymore). We need to find artists out in the wild again -- the Steinbecks or Faulkers who worked at factories and picked strawberries. And by "the wild" I don't mean the scrappy Brooklyn hipster with only the $500k trust fund versus the $10m. If the ostensible "cure" for simple-minded fiction is a vacuous, navel-licking work like Jennifer Egan's "Visit from the Goon Squad" (to take one random example), God help us all.
Seems to me our culture is in a post-post-post-postmodern funk: the stale gas out of academia has combined with the putrid gases from our relentlessly corporatized publishers.
Yeah, the label of literary fiction is now mostly just a marketing tactic. Major publishing has decided that its future is dependent on the mass market, and so it has become a reflection of the tastes and education of the people who comprise it – people who have been conditioned by commercialization and social media but won't admit it, people who now think that "Moby Dick" and "Wuthering Heights" are hot messes with no redeeming literary value. I am constantly amazed at the malleability of societies and their values. When you think back to different belief systems over history, it's easier to understand what is happening to our society today as being a phase we are going through. Every generation likes to assume that it is correcting the mistakes of the past; even to go as far as to tear down existing institutions. But something about what is happening to American culture seems different this time. Too much of the change seems aimless. We know what everyone is against, but we don't know what they are for. It's not quite anarchy, because with anarchy you want to tear everything down and start over. This is anarchy tinged by capitalism. It only wants to tear down what others have, while maintaining the material desires that capitalism insists upon. Corporate publishing doesn't care about any of this as long as they continue to turn a profit.
Very well said. Late stage capitalism: everyone scrambling to get what they can before the storm.
How do you feel about audio books, Joe? I've finished far more lately than the paper or e-ink kind. I was just in Montenegro with Nero Wolfe today if audios count.
On the paper-and-paperlike front, I started Byatt's Possession last night. I expect I'll finish that. Before it I finished a promising WIP from my crit group. There's also an obscure '70s sci-fi I started and mean to return to as well.
Subtext is a topic that always triggers my imposter syndrome. I'm not sure I can spot the dividing line. There's a scene in The Black Mountain (Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe #24) in which the reclusive detective visits a body. Archie, the narrator, details Wolfe's reactions without opining on the emotions they convey. Having read enough to know the characters, I found the subtle cracks in Wolfe's armor quite affecting.
But is that subtext or mere characterization? My impression is that subtext is like a keyhole and it is up to the reader to furnish the key. They do this from a personal understanding of human nature and, at times, specialist knowledge. By that conception, an inference about emotional makeup qualifies but it is a paltry example.
I'd be glad to hear more of your or thoughts on the subject, or those of others in the comments.
I've only tried to listen to one audiobook, and it was a disappointment. But I think that had more to do with the book than the audio.
When it comes to subtext I usually default back to Charles Baxter, who characterized it as the "unspoken soul matter" in a story. The keyword being unspoken. For me, it's the meaning that a reader infers from the text. So based on what you said about the portrayal of Nero Wolfe, the fact that you deduced his armor had subtle cracks qualifies the description as subtext. It's also characterization, but it is subtext. I'm always more attracted to work that allows the reader the opportunity to make up his or her own mind about the meaning of what is happening. It helps you better connect with the story. It's that old adage about being able to step inside the character's shoes so that you can feel what the character feels.
I’m always glad I asked you, Joe. In repayment, seek out Sir Ian Holm reading The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde the next time you can piece together three hours .
I find the sameness issue more true with nonfiction books--the heavy-handed, "We want a best seller" editing that gets soooo repetitive and seems geared to 6th-grade reading level even when the subject is complex.
I read only about 30 novels a year, and some of them are works that are 50-100 years old, so I haven't noted it as much in novels. Though it doesn't surprise me. (And I want novels to surprise me! I want non-fiction to surprise me, too!)
Latest reading? Mostly poetry and history. I just finished Tina Kelley's "A Field Guide to North American Words" (poetry) and Helen Castor's "She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England before Elizabeth" and am in the middle of the tome that is Sapolsky's "Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst."
Whatever would I do without reading? Mostly I read poems; but I love long, complex books, and short but intriguing books, and books on history or science or medicine or psychology. And I do love novels, too. I could not have become a writer without being a voracious reader.
There definitely seem to be some formulaic requirements in the book publishing business. These used to be restricted to genre categories, but now appear to apply to more literary types of work (at least what the publishing industry considers literary work now). That's why I'm so grateful that a handful of writers like Rachel Cusk, who established themselves in a different decade, can continue to be published. But what happens when their careers are over? Who will take their place?
This all will end with a pertinent question! So, please enjoy reading the following description of my recent readings . . .
For years--for as far as I recall when I think of the past many years--almost all of what I've read in literature has been old stuff and stuff considered "classics." These include literary works from ancient times to much later. A few exceptions have included a few "popular"-type works, such as science fiction novels (example: Theodore Sturgeon's "More Than Human"), as well as the recent prize-winning "Tinkers," by Paul Harding.
For one period of several years I had been reading world literary works, usually English translations--from ancient epics from Europe and elsewhere to medieval Arthurian works to the Farsi epic "Shanameh" and the Georgian epic "The Knight In The Panther's Skin" to the 19th-Century Bengali author Saratchandra and the 20th-Century Tamil historical novelist Krishnamurthi, who wrote "Ponniyin Selvan" and other novels.
For another period I had read many 18th-Century novels, besides, usually but not always from Britain.
Some of what I've read more lately includes collected personal literary essays and books by Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt (both from the 1800's), as well as Michel de Montaigne's essays. I am still reading all of those. I also am reading V. Woolf's novels and short stories and essays, and her long nonfiction, too, as well as Joyce's "Ulysses." I am reading Tobias Smollett's translation of the novel "Gil Blas," along with all of those.
And I have been slowly and gradually making my way through Shakespeare, over a few years--not to mention Ambrose Bierce's book "The Devil's Dictionary." Right now, I am also reading a contemporary book of personal essays by Ann Fadiman (if I spelled her name, correctly).
I have done some reading in literary journals, additionally.
For the most part--probably rarely never otherwise--I have been having "a ball" as a literary reader for many years.
So, the question is:
Is there any issue in a literary writer writing while reading almost primarily older things? Older things that are usually considered, say, "reputable," but also some more "popular"-type works or "classics"?
I'd like to know what others aside from myself might think!
No problem reading older work, especially drawing upon traditions or establishing connections to literary history. An older writing style done in some new way could be interesting, but if it's only using that older style as it once was written, then that's been done, and my guess is that there'd have to be a compelling reason for it.
I hope others will also reply to this question.
As for me I would say it depends on the kind of publishing you would like to do. The influence of older styles of writing would probably be an impediment to publishing through a major company, since their output appears to be directed at an audience that doesn't have much knowledge of those authors or styles. You'd probably have better luck publishing through a smaller independent.
You know who else is "writing without reading"?
All of those fake marketers who flood your in-box, extolling the virtues of your last book(s), which impressed them so much that they have a special offer for you.
🪝 A reminder today that AI has your email and knows how to bait the hook. 🪝
Stay safe, friends!
I got one this morning. A mile long and filled with glowing praise about a collection I put up on Amazon about 15 years ago. AI is very dangerous in the wrong hands. And there are a lot of wrong hands out there.
You did not fall for that fakery, Joe. And neither did I.
But many writers must have been duped --- because a scheme that is LUCRATIVE and easy will continue to circulate.
Because gushing, "adoring" emails have opened 💰 wallets, a fraud is perpetuated.
Don Quixote. Both parts. Having dented half of part 1 many years ago I caught up and pressed on to finish it, though sadly, not in Spanish. Remarkable book.
The paradox you describe an unreading culture that produces unreadable books is a product of the business where sophistication is tossed out to make it accessible and the 5 page agent submission is the yardstick of that stupidity. Spoon feeding the reader so they know who, what, why at every point and never have to comprehend, to judge, to learn, is what makes for solid sales. Apparently.
In my own work I discovered that I had a tendency to what I call the Chinatown plot, where something innocuous leads to something more significant and then something more and then more,, an onion shedding its sleeves is the usual metaphor here. I had an editor with one piece tell me to cut all that out and get to he piece in case the impatient reader gave up. The ephectic start being crucial to the payoff 10,000 words later.
To close, Kundera observed the same about the novelist in his distinction with the writer, as ''an explorer feeling his way to in an effort to reveal some unknown aspect of existence.''
Thanks, Guy, for ephectic. I love gaining new words, lol. My stunning discovery--and at quite an old age--was that Quixote is metafictional, long before it became the thing to be. The first "novel" had that quality.
Kundera's point is well taken: it's the great exercise of fiction to go in journeying and finding what gems lie in the words and tales.
That’s right about Don Quixote being metafictional: the book is about an avid reader who imitates exploits he’s read; he wants his own adventures to be published; Cervantes quotes an Arab source for the Don’s history; and Don discovers a book with false stories about himslef. It’s as if post modernist literature had been written from the start. Extraordinary book.
I am always amazed when a literary agent asks for a query letter and 30, or even 50 pages of the manuscript. It's pretty rare. The vast majority just want those 5 to 10 pages, and how can they possibly tell whether the book is any good from that?
Agreed. It can only be professional bias. Judging a book by 5 pages is a hasty, inexact & unfair pseudo process.
"Sometimes I start reading a novel and am interested for a few chapters. But that interest wanes as the tension refuses to rise" - I notice this quite a lot, and I think there's a reason for it: many books are sold on the basis of the opening chapters or even the first few pages. Some agents and editors won't even read further than the first paragraph if it doesn't grab them. So writers concentrate on making the opening a gripping experience and then slack off for the rest of the book.
Remember, Scott and Dave... 47 seconds.
😆
Reminds me of the radio audience tests where you'd hear a snippet of music and that would help determine what got on the radio. Getting the hook or "gripping experience" up front is sadly consistent for a society focused on image and facade.
Would you like to hear something really crazy? After retiring a few years ago, I enrolled in university classes to brush up on my skills before I started writing a series that had been percolating in my brain for years. I quickly became frustrated with the generic critiques. I finally had enough and blurted out, "Didn't anyone read this?" In classes of 25-30 aspiring writers that involved reading and critiquing each other's work, there was not ONE student who had bothered to read the day's assigned short story. When I asked why not, the most common answer was that at 5000-7000 words, it was "too long." Keep in mind that these were people who all wanted to be published authors taking a university fiction writing class taught by a multi-book published author, but not one of them could be bothered to take the time to read a 5000- 7000-word short story.
That is rather frightening. But not really surprising. And now most literary journals won't even look at a story that's over 5000 words long. I wonder what the poor published author teaching the class thought about this. If it were me I simply would have failed them all.
These are folks who will never experience the joy of reading Joyce's "The Dead," a story that feels somewhat pedestrian at the start (@swspires) but ends with a wonderful gut-wrenching epiphany.
Your remark about "aspiring writers" led me to think of how in modern times we think of writing as a career choice. Who are you? Oh, I'm a writer. Not an insurance salesman who writes at midnight (Kafka); physician by day (Chekhov), writer at night; maid, manicurist (Hurston), writer between times--stolen hours. Now that writing is a career choice, who has time to read, eh? 😏
"The Dead" is among my top handful of short stories (write up there with "Death in Venice," neither one of which is really short). I've read it more times than I can recall, and sometimes I just turn to the last couple of pages and read those to get that incredible epiphany. In fact, since you have reminded me of it, I think I'll go read those pages again.
You inspire me: Death in Venice has been on my list a long time. Time to hie me to it.
The Dead provides so many lesson in craft.
I also asked everyone, “What’s the last book you read from start to finish?” Except for a girl aspiring to write romance novels, every other response was either, “Huh?” or “Required reading in high school English,” - but only if they couldn’t find it summarized on the internet. I don’t understand at all. Books and art are the closest thing to honest to goodness magic that we humans will ever have.
It seems sad, and for book lovers truly is, the lack of experience with one mind in solitude with another mind, the essence of reading in some ways, but I try to remain optimistic, thinking that in film, anime, and even some video games there are still stories being told, and the "idea" of storytelling won't disappear, even if books do. The future isn't for me, but I completely agree with you that there's a kind of magic in absorption in some story or other.
I love your comment, "The future isn't for me."
I feel the same way. In fact, I'm pretty sure the present isn't for me either.
Qualification, Correction. After thought on your words, "Her world is the real world." You probably meant that Rachel Cusk writes about people, situaitons outside herself -- the theme of your article. If my tardy afterthought is correct, then Yes. My misinterpretation. Amends. A story or novel not about ME, but about others, which is a hopeful direction of the human conditon, is what keeps us reading.
Yes, that is what I meant by that sentence. It was a pretty clumsy way of putting it, though, and I should have edited it.
Your comment also made me think about the nature of business in America. Ever wonder why new cars all seem to look the same at any given time? Whatever becomes popular is imitated ad infinitum, and in those cases imitation is not a sincere form of flattery, it's just copycatting for profit. Major publishers seem to have forgotten what their business is all about.
I was thinking, too, about the film Jaws in the middle 70s and how it spawned 30-40 (according to one source) rip-offs. And I suspect this what the publishing industry has now become--whatever sells, give 'em more.
And they're still making rip offs of Jaws. Have you seen "Anaconda?" (I hope not.) How about "The Meg?" Apparently it's about a megalosaurus that likes to eat people.
Nope... missed it all (thankfully). 🙂↔️
Thanks for article. To read other fiction if you are writing fiction should be an assumption we can make about writing. As you point out, too many authors don't. Including best-selling authors. The double-bind that writers face today is to be condemned for cultural appropriation if they write about the other who may be a different ethnicity or gender or both. The writer must bracket such concerns and persevere. If he/she falters with an unbelievable character, that a valid criticism. Not becaause she attempted the character. When I review journals for what stories they've published in the past, I can't tell you how often I scroll to another journal for the exact complaint you express -- all about me. Present tense a red flag. And there is the identity criteria. My parnter, who is searching for agents for her novel, recently encountered a new agent who declared in her website that she only wanted a given gender, race. You have commented the import and open avenue of changing things politically. Yet when agents -- and by default publishers -- set such restrictions on the very material they will even consider -- and they are pervasive -- Romance, fantasy, about plucky women during World War II has flooded the market -- it is hard not to despair, then write your story or novel, place in a time capsule, and hope it gets found in a literary future where such restrictions are no longer perpetrated. One respectful thought regarding your view of Rachel Cusk: "Her world is the real world." We all have our worlds. Sometimes they overlap. To declare one writer's world the real one implies the one the rest of us live and work in is less than real. Rachel Cusk has the world she knows. Valerie Perrin, Fresh Water for Flowers, writes about a small town female cemetery keeper in France whose world is no doubt unfamiliar to most readers in America, US of A. His her world less valid because America have never had professions like cemetery keepers? I write this because I think it a dangerous literary world to begin walking to declare one author's world is real, implying another's is not, especially if it is less familiar, less privileged, more privleged. Or if that world is a world we may oppose, even hate. Solzhenitsyn wrote about Lenin. Normam Mailer wrote a whole novel on Hitler. Closing. In an interview with the director of the movie, "Flow," Latvian, European produced. He says that he does not want to "spoon feed" his audience regarding scenes that may leave an ambiguity. Yes, you are point on that we have every reason to feel patronized when an artist spoon feeds, explains. Be well. Thanks for aritcle.
Last two books finished were fixes of Denis Johnson: Train Dreams and Largesse of the Sea Maiden. Currently reading (and about to finish) Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman with some lit mags sprinkled in between. Will add some Cusk to the TBR list.
I thought Tree of Smoke was very good. I also enjoy Ward Just, whose novel Echo House traces several generations in a political family.
For something pulpy, I seek the novels of John Le Carre.
The novel I just finished is Tim Warrington's California Book of the Dead - he's deft at helping us see a character through a few well-chosen descriptors as he vividly recreates the San Francisco 1980s milieu, post-hippie but well before the tech invasion.
For a thoughtful take on human behavior, I look to the work of British writers Penelope Fitzgerald and Penelope Lively (whose short novel The Photograph is a masterpiece).
And T.C. Boyle likes to put characters from opposing sides of a struggle on collision course then share the fireworks. I particularly admire When the Killing's Done, which considers how creatures are assigned the status of "native" or "Invasive species" by the humans "managing" them - published in 2011, it's reverberating yet.
And if this subject captures your attention, I highly recommend the memoir Buffalo for the Broken Heart, by Dan O'Brien, the chronicles of a biologist who ranches cattle then buffalo in South Dakota, and shares what he learns about the Great Plains ecosystem, where buffalo are the key species. It's a beautiful book.
Those all sound good, Buffalo for the Broken Heart sounds like a must read.
It's on order.
I'm scooping this stuff up. Tree of Smoke sits atop my next-up shelf.
Did, if you don't mind (I have looked it up, but didn't get a clear answer), P. Lively's The Photograph address photography "philosophies" in addition to time and memory? I shoot, and read such stuff (Barthes, Sontag, Modiano).
The Photograph is about the disruptions among a group of close friends, when the ex-husband finds a photograph of a group of close friends, in which his at-the-time wife is holding the hand of another man in an intimate clasp. He'd never noticed this detail before. She's been dead 10 years - how much could it matter? And yet, it upends not only his world but those of his friends who knew her.
I've still moved it to a check-this-out list; stories of memory and time appeal. Thanks, NC.
I consume books. I don't get how you can possibly write without reading. I have just read Stoner by John Williams, a real American classic, a well nigh perfect novel. There's surely enough great literature out there, so why bother with poorly written trash.
Just finished "The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife," and I'm halfway through Ross Macdonald's "The Way Some People Die." I usually finish everything I start and read a broad variety.
As far aspiring "writers" who don't read, imagine a "composer" who can't play an instrument or doesn't listen to music. Makes zero sense. Nobody would stand for that in the music world, and the same rule applies to literature.
I’m not familiar with Rachel Cusk or Parade. I’m putting them both on my TBR lists after reading this.
I’m on the final chapters of Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead, and Book Architecture by Stuart Horwitz.
Harlem Shuffle is a gift to writers and oh yeah, readers. It’s the kind of writing that makes me want to be a better writer. I’ve dog-eared at least 20 pages and I’m *excited* to spend an hour reviewing the POVs of each chapter. I’m going to write a short review that 5 people might read. It’s the first in a trilogy, squee!
Book Architecture is the kind of craft book I’ve read a dozen others to find. There is a clear dissection of several novels and a system for analyzing and constructing stories.
My only antidote for all the no-reading around me is to stubbornly continue reading despite the many other responsibilities competing for my time. It took me all winter to read Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson but I did it. If I read something terrible or that I can’t get into, I let it go.
Yeah, that's why I always take a book to read when I fly. Not just because I want to read, but also because I want to advertise reading to others.
I see you do what I do and dog ear and mark up pages. That's what books are made for imho. In fact I had marked a few passages of Parade to include with this week's post, but I forgot to do it. Cusk, in her subtle way, makes several powerful comments about today's social media values.
Same
I also added Mr Neutron to my TBR. Forgot to add
Hope you like it!
Cusk and Whitehead are names I know, but I have never read their work. Horwitz was unfamiliar. Your comment got me thinking about how much good work is out there that is never read by a great many; this would be true even if the trash were somehow stripped away; you'd still never get to it all--and there's something nice about that, in terms of shaping a writer's life. Many roads to the same place.
But your comment led me into further considerations, that is, how marketplaces are antithetical to good literary work. When book readers are seen as consumers, then merit and quality play little role, and quantity becomes paramount. Put in a more practical form: I've loved Funyuns since the 70s. Those onion rings are the equivalent of Moby Dick in my taste world. But the market says I must consume more, and if I don't demand it, the demand will be created for me, so now there're twelve flavors of Moby Dick out there, and they pale by comparison with the original.
As Joe has pointed out a few times, the market is generating what the people will buy, all the more happy to sell it to them without any, if I may, (social) moral, regard. I find it difficult sometimes to clear away the smog to see beauty in book form.
Absolutely. Death by a thousand choices
So well said. And I can't begin to tell you how many products that I love have been discontinued because apparently I am the only one who loves them.
I first read Colson Whitehead via his novel John Henry Days - in it he analyzes types of articles (the protagonist writes for magazines), and whether a writer is on their way up or down. It's very perceptive and also funny - and squirm-inducing if you sense you're in the crosshairs.
Interesting you mention Moby-Dick. When I was in high school, my mom was pleased to get an abridgement-outline - read this chapter, that one, that one, skip these 6, read.. etc. She was very pleased to "read the book" without slogging through the "all that irrelevant verbiage." When I finally read Moby-Dick a decade ago, I found its structure paralleled the samurai films I enjoy - a long buildup, during which you learn the factions, the stakes, the moral high ground, so that when the moment of battle finally comes you are prepared to appreciate it (and without all that, samurai films would last 5 minutes at the most!). Melville tells us about the ship, the captain, the officers, the harpoonists, the ocean currents, the ports, where whales gather with their young, how whale-meat and oil are harvested, the cultures of the crew - so when the Pequod and the white whale meet, we understand the context, and we're as prepared for the encounter as anyone on the ship. All that is not a waste of time!
C. Whitehead came onto my radar after The Nickel Boys (I'm from that area), and I've looked at and read openings of other books, but I never brought him into my library--perhaps now will be the time.
I, too, have met abridged readers of Moby-Dick, and, being a lover of biology and science, the cetology of whales captivated me. You make a great point about the buildup. So many stories need that for impact. I'm guessing you're referring to Kurosawa's great three-and-some-change-hour film (and others?), and there's no doubt it's needed and totally not a waste of time.
Actually, the style of samurai films as a genre is the long buildup/ rapid swordfight. One of my favorites is the Samurai Trilogy by Hiroshi Inagaki, starring the incomparable Toshiro Mifune as the samurai who begins as a peasant savage and gradually gains maturity, steadiness of heart, and peace of spirit. These 3 films overlap Kurosawa's work with Toshiro - Yojimbo, Sanjuro, Seven Samurai. I recommend them all!
Sanjuro's the one I'm least familiar with, and will look for it. I'll be interested to see if I can find Inagaki's work. Thanks.
Book Architecture sounds worthwhile - I'll track that down. I took a class at Lighthouse, a non-academic writing hub in Denver: "Reading as a Writer." We read and discussed One Hundred Years of Solitude in 4 class sessions. It was useful to have a lens through which to consider this epic. In a later iteration of this class we read Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf's evocation of her characters' lives over the course of a day. Revelatory!
The advantage of taking a class over reading a craft book solo, is the discussions sparked by the book and the ways we were asked to consider it.
Lighthouse (https://lighthousewriters.org/) offers many of its courses either online or as hybrids, so a person not living nearby can participate. Check it out!
I just happened to notice that One Hundred Years of Solitude has been turned into a series on Netflix. I cringe at the thought of what they might have done to it to make a palatable to a modern audience.
Checking out Lighthouse Writers now. Thanks!
Appreciate this, NC. Saves me a little searching time, but like you I'm curious about Book Arch.