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.
Category Archives: Reading
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.
Best of the Year and More
Scott Lamb has started up conversation on the NY Times list of best book from 2009.
Also, in case you missed it, the winner of the Best of the National Book Award winners for fiction is The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor, as it should be.
Douglas Wilson on Deep Reading
The men I am most indebted to philosophically are: C.S. Lewis, Cornelius Van Til, J.R.R. Tolkien, John Calvin, Richard Weaver, the early Rushdoony, Augustine, John Knox, Gary North, J.I. Packer, Francis Schaeffer, G.K. Chesterton, Paul Johnson, John Stott, Christopher Dawson, H.L. Mencken, William Buckley, David Wells, R.L. Dabney, E. Michael Jones, P.G. Wodehouse, Greg Bahnsen, and Peter Leithart. And after a diet of such books for twenty-six years, I have to say that reading an emergent book by Brian McLaren is like watching a six-year-old do card tricks.
“This is what warriors did.”
I’d meant to review Dean Koontz’ Your Heart Belongs to Me tonight, but it’s Veterans Day, and instead I’ll share a short excerpt from Grossman and Frankowski’s The Two-Space War, which I reviewed not long ago.
Across the countless centuries warriors have taken their cues from the “Old Sarge.” There was always an Old Sarge. He was the veteran of twenty battles, and he was calm. Weeping and becoming emotional at the memory of combat was not acceptable because, across the centuries, warriors found that the way to continue performing the desperate, wretched, debasing, dirty job of combat was by controlling your emotions, dividing your pain, and making friends with the memories. Every night, around the campfire, or over hot food with their messmates, this age-old process continued.
In these sessions the men also sorted out what had actually happened. In Alexis Artwohl’s twenty-first century law enforcement research, almost a quarter of the combat veterans she interviewed had memory distortions. They actually “remembered,” sometimes with vivid intensity, something that did not happen. And half of these veterans had experienced memory loss, with significant gaps in the memory of what happened. Left to their own devices, there was a tendency to “fill in the gaps” with guilt-laden acceptance of responsibility, sometimes even with a greatly exaggerated sense of guilt. “It’s all my fault.” “I let my buddies down.” “I was a failure.” These were the kinds of responses felt by many men after combat. Only their mates, the ones who shared the event with them, could help them fill in the holes accurately. And only their friends, their comrades who had shared the searing experience of combat, only they could give understanding, acceptance, and forgiveness of the events that had occurred.
Every day, day after day, this is what occurred. This is what warriors did.
Disney to Refund “Baby Einstein” Buyers
The buyers of “Baby Einstein” videos were told their children would get a leg up on brain development by watching the DVDs, but no one has seen the benefits yet. Disney is now offering a refund spanning the last five years. The American Academy of Pediatrics advises against allowing two year olds watch TV, and research has shown that reading with your child helps the child develop language skills quite a bit. Texting with your baby is even better!
Ok, I made the last part up. But I’m sure listening to Mozart in the drivethru at McDonald’s or while going to sleep builds the brain. I mean, if it worked for Mozart . . .
Also on that post from the School Library Journal is a link to a list of ten good kid-lit bloggers.
Christian Authors Show, A Christmas Carol, and Kaminsky
I did a webcast radio interview on Saturday, with an operation called The Author’s Show. (You go to this site and then click on The Christian Author’s Show on the tool bar.) Supposedly my segment has been posted now, and you should be able to select it from the menu. But I can’t make it work. Maybe you can. Maybe it’s just my computer.
Dr. Ted Baehr (with whom I apparently have some distant connection, through my publisher) loves the new animated A Christmas Carol, with Jim Carey. I guess I’ll have to see it. If I love it too, it’ll mean I’ll have four different versions to keep on DVD and watch each Christmas. I’m not sure I can carry (or Carey) all those Carols.
Noodling around the internet, I discovered the shocking news that Stuart M. Kaminsky died, just about a month ago. I’m bereaved.
Kaminsky was one of the best, inadequately appreciated, mystery writers in America. He won awards and all, but he never really broke out as I would have wished for him. Instead of writing creepy thrillers full of gore and psychopaths and cannibalism, he wrote old-fashioned whodunnits, frequently brightened by his wit and always lightened by his human compassion.
As it happens, I just found several of his Toby Peters mysteries at the bookstore, and am almost finished with them. I was planning to write an appreciation when I finished the last one—maybe tomorrow.
I haven’t made up my mind entirely whether I prefer his Toby Peters stories (Hollywood in the Thirties and Forties, with our shabby detective pulling a succession of big movie stars out of the soup) or his Lou Fonesca stories (about a sad sack Sarasota process server who mostly gets around on a bike). I’ve read one of his Inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov novels, set in Soviet Moscow, but it struck me as kind of claustrophobic and depressing. His Abe Lieberman books were good, but not as good (in my opinion) as the Peters and Fonesca stories.
We’ve lost a true professional, and someone I suspect I would have liked if I’d met him. Rest in peace, Stuart M. Kaminsky.
Kindle Under Fire from iPhone Apps
eReader apps for the iPhone are surging in popularity, according to a marketing research firm. The firm suggests Amazon’s Kindle may become a remainder to Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch, which has 57,000,000 users.