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Category Archives: Reading
The Faux BBC 100
You’ve seen the lists before saying the BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed. Here’s the list you haven’t seen.
1 Conceit and Chauvinism – Jane Austoon
2 The Dane of the Drinks – PBJ Tokien
3 Jan Eyrie – Charlot Blont
4 Harry, the Boy Who Grows Up to Become a Wizard and Whip an Evil Sorcerer’s Butt series – JK Rowlin
5 To Catch a Mockingbird – Larper Hee
6 The Bible: The Book That Changed the World – Many anonymous authors
7 Withering Snipes – Emily Blont
8 Nineteen Ninety Nine – The Artist Formerly Known as Georgey O.
9 His Dark Materials – Canni Getalight
10 Profound Potential – Charlie B. Dickens
11 Wee Women – Louisa McAlcott
12 Tess: A Sad Novel You Won’t Want to Read – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 33: Prequel to Hyperbole- Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Francis Bacon (The Brain Behind Shakespeare)
15 Daphne Du Maurier – Rebecca Continue reading The Faux BBC 100
Forgotten and Imaginary Books
And now, more of the imaginary or forgotten in the literary. Here’s something from The Believer Magazine, “Short Takes on Books That Don’t Exist: Eleven Essential, Imaginary Beach Reads for Summer” by Steve Hely
From the Guardian a few years ago, here’s a list of books you may not have seen before.
"Relearning how to concentrate"
Here an Englishman talks about distraction. Alain de Botton writes, “The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything. To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible.”
He is the author of many books, including The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
Books, The End of the Making of
Mark Bertrand has an essay on the printed word.
When Ken Myers interviewed me for Mars Hill Audio Volume 90, for example, he kept asking about the decline of literacy, only to have me scoff at the pessimism. Little did I know that the flipside of Volume 90 would feature an extended chat with Dana Gioia about the NEA’s depressing literacy study. Fortunately that part of my interview was excised from the final version, sparing me the indignity of appearing unsuitably optimistic and glib. Ever since, I’ve kept what little optimism I possess to myself.
(via S.D. Smith)
But what do you call the thing beneath it?
Just when I was wondering what to blog about, Loren Eaton at I Saw Lightning Fall uses… that word!
He links to an interesting book review by Newsweek’s Jennie Yabroff, dealing with the thorny subject of… subtext!
The title in question is Joshua Ferris’ The Unnamed, a novel about a lawyer struggling with an undiagnosed compulsion to endlessly walk until he keels over. An odd and evocative premise, one that Yabroff wrestles with mightily. She initially wonders if the affliction may be a metaphor for environmental destruction or the search for the divine or the nature of addiction, but concludes that it doesn’t really matter. “What if the book is about nothing more than a man who takes really long walks?” she muses before launching into a discussion about the dangers of overanalyzing….
This leaves me no choice but to quote one of the best movies of the 1990s, Whit Stillman’s brilliant Barcelona, the story of two American cousins grappling with cultural differences, sexual mores, love, and anti-Americanism in 1980s Spain. This movie contributed one of the greatest bits of dialogue ever placed in two actors’ mouths:
FRED: Maybe you can clarify something for me. Since I’ve been, you know, waiting for the fleet to show up, I’ve read a lot, and–
TED: Really?
FRED: And one of the things that keeps popping up is this about “subtext.” Plays, novels, songs–they all have a “subtext,” which I take to mean a hidden message or import of some kind. So subtext we know. But what do you call the message or meaning that’s right there on the surface, completely open and obvious? They never talk about that. What do you call what’s above the subtext?
TED: The text.
FRED: OK, that’s right, but they never talk about that.
Note to self: Must get the DVD.
Reasons for Not Reading
Abebooks has ten reasons for not getting around to certain books. About #4, I’ve been listening to Les Miserables for months in order to get through it. Some of the digressions from the storyline are maddening.
The negative way
Loren Eaton, at I Saw Lightning Fall, writes today about the Via Negativa. That’s the technique of telling a moral story through depicting vice, and revealing its destructive effects.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, if I understand the concept correctly, was largely (not wholly) a Via Negativa story, in that it denounced slavery by examining slavery (it was also a Via Positiva story, in that it showcased the exemplary life of the main character).
When I was a boy, a teetotal relative gave me a copy of the book, Ten Nights in a Bar-Room. This was an 1854 novel, written by T. S. Arthur, in the form of a series of reminiscences by a man who stayed (at infrequent intervals) at a particular inn where liquor was served. By showing the gradual deterioration of the inn, the family that ran it, and the community it influenced, he argued for the prohibition of alcohol. It was a very influential book in its time, and a pure example of Via Negativa.
I often think of a particular scene my own The Year of the Warrior—if you’ve read it, you’ll probably recall the Great Summer Sacrifice scene. I used it to try to express all the horror which (I firmly believe) lurks behind true heathenism (as opposed to the pasteurized, humanist version generally promoted in the West today). No one has ever complained to me about the scene that I recall, but frankly it bothers me. I think I went a little too far, and if I had it to write over, I’d probably do it slightly differently.
I recall a particular novel published in the Christian market (and no, I won’t tell you which one it was), in which the author tried to do something similar, and I felt he’d crossed a line. Maybe I was wrong (the book certainly sold more copies than any of mine, and to a Christian audience). But I know there’s a danger here.
Loren’s article speaks of one danger of the Via Negativa—that the audience will miss the message, and root for the wrong side. I think there’s further danger—that the author will look into the abyss, and find the abyss looking back into him.
In my estimation (and maybe I misunderstand entirely) I thought novelist Thomas Harris succumbed to this temptation to some extent in dealing with his charismatic villain, Hannibal Lector. When Lector first appeared in Red Dragon, and when he reappeared in The Silence of the Lambs, Harris was able to keep his balance, getting deep into the psyche of the villain, but never taking his side. But in the follow-up novel, Hannibal, it seemed to me he lost his bearings, and began to delight, to some extent, in Lector’s atrocities. I never even looked at Hannibal Rising.
That doesn’t make the Via Negativa too dangerous to try. It just means we need to take care.
And choose wise readers to give us feedback.
Dull, Uninteresting, Disappointing, But I Won't Say It's Boring
The editor, writer, and I’m sure very delightful Jennifer Schuessler writes how book reviewers don’t label books boring very often.
Boring people can, paradoxically, prove interesting. As they prattle on, you step back mentally and start to catalog the irritating timbre of the offending voice, the reliance on cliché, the almost comic repetitiousness — in short, you begin constructing a story. But a boring book, especially a boring novel, is just boring. A library is an enormous repository of information, entertainment, the best that has been thought and said. It is also probably the densest concentration of potential boredom on earth.
Dull, Uninteresting, Disappointing, But I Won’t Say It’s Boring
The editor, writer, and I’m sure very delightful Jennifer Schuessler writes how book reviewers don’t label books boring very often.
Boring people can, paradoxically, prove interesting. As they prattle on, you step back mentally and start to catalog the irritating timbre of the offending voice, the reliance on cliché, the almost comic repetitiousness — in short, you begin constructing a story. But a boring book, especially a boring novel, is just boring. A library is an enormous repository of information, entertainment, the best that has been thought and said. It is also probably the densest concentration of potential boredom on earth.