Unbearable Lightness?

We all have a handful of unread books that sit in the far corners of our minds simply waiting to be read. Books that beg to be read. Books that hit our consciousness from time to time, when we hear the book mentioned in conversation, or see someone reading the book on the subway. And in those moments, we think again "I have to read that book."

One such book for me was The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by the Czech writer Milan Kundera. I vaguely remember that the first time I learned of this book was on a train the north of Spain. That title alone grabbed me from the outset. It's perhaps one of the best titles I have ever stumbled across: The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Unfortunately though, for me the novel didn't stand up to the ecstasy of the title. I was disappointed. The plot was endlessly circular (Tomas sleeps with Woman A, then Woman B, but feeling bad, returns to Woman A, but then is drawn again to Woman B . . . and then repeat a dozen times). And the writing was too sparse, and not 'sparse' in an artistic way, but sparse in a very non-interesting way. Supposedly, the book is rife with philosophical themes, but against the backdrop of uninteresting writing and an even more uninteresting plot, the themes fell by the wayside.

So here is the tragedy of the situation: I looked forward for well over 5 years to finally reading this book. Whenever I heard it mentioned, I'd think "yes, that has to be a solid novel." My forbearance would pay off when I could finally dive deep into the text. But you know how the story ends. The book didn't do anything for me.

It's like telling a child that you'll take him to Disneyland next year, and he savors it for 12 solid months, he imagines what it will be like, he ponders the adventures he'll have, the storybook food he'll eat, and the magic day he'll have. And then the day arrives, and the lines are long and the weather is hot and humid and Disneyland is crowded as hell.

Does this ever happen to anyone else? Or am I alone in my misery?

Can your old book do this?

I don't pretend to hide my preference for older books, or deny my admiration for the tried and true. But that doesn't mean I don't know "cool" when I see it. Hover your mouse over this book cover (courtesy of Walker Books) to see what I mean. It's mesmerizing. I defy you to make just one pass...

From the Pen of William Faulkner

I’ve talked about what makes a line of prose really jump out at me here. But in my ongoing search for prose perfection I figured I’d start sharing some of the passages that have smacked me between the eyes like a transcendent two-by-four of late. Here’s a sampling from Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. All emphasis is mine:

"They stand in rigid, terrific hiatus, the horse trembling and groaning. Then Jewel is on the horse’s back. He flows upward in a swooping swirl, like the lash of a whip, his body in mid-air, shaped to the horse. For another moment the horse stands sprattled, with lowered head, before it bursts into motion. They descend the hill in a series of spine-jolting jumps, Jewel high, leach-like on the withers, to the fence where the horse bunches to a scuttering halt again."

"Back-running, tunneled between the two sets of bobbing mule ears, the road vanishes beneath the wagon as though it were a ribbon, and the front axle were a spool."

"The sun, an hour above the horizon, is poised like a bloody egg upon a crest of thunderheads. The light has turned copper, in the eye portentous, in the nose sulfurous, smelling of lightning."

"When I reach the front he is struggling with Gillespie, the one lean in underclothes, the other stark naked. They are like two figures in a Greek frieze, isolated out of all reality by the red glare."

How about you? What’s the best line you’ve come across in recent reading?

Shelf Actualization: One Month In

Well, it’s been exactly one month since we reached launch velocity here at ShelfActualization.com. And over the course of 37 posts, we’ve tried to make good on our bluster about becoming your home on the web for low-falutin literary delights and your gateway drug for literary fiction. As you can see above, we’ve already highlighted some amazing authors, and dozens of others have been mentioned along the way. And there’s a lot more to come.

But the one month mark seems like an appropriate time to take stock and see what you like about out little corner of the web, and maybe some of what you don’t (as if!).

But first, a reminder about what ShelfActualization is: It’s a place where three regular dudes unload their literary views on the world absolutely free of charge. What it isn’t, is a clearinghouse for three already-popular lit/book/publishing bloggers to combine their wits and established audiences in becoming a major force in the world of literature.

Still, things have gone better than we predicted. We’ve seen a few thousand more pageviews than we expected this early, and we’ve had readers pop up in some truly out-of-the-way places (Doha and Dominica? Lahaina and Ljubljana?) We certainly didn’t expect to garner eyeballs in all six permanently-inhabited continents (What’s wrong with you, Antarctica? Don’t you people ever surf the web between taking ice-core samples and astronomical observations?).

But the reception has been a warm one, and we want to thank all of you who have commented, emailed, participated in contests and just taken a few moments to check out the site.

We’d love to hear your thoughts about ShelfActualization so far. What, if anything, has resonated with you? What has been just “…meh?” We’ve done book reviews, original research, made reading suggestions, offered our own reading reactions, and everything in between.

Perhaps you’ve enjoyed some of our regular features like First Line Fridays, our Haiku-ption Contests or our holiday fiction offerings. If none of those float your boat, keep an eye out for some others we’ll be rolling out in the near future: Poet’s Corner, TraveLit and yes, even Literary Deathmatches.

So tell us what you think. What would you like to see more of? Less of? Etc.? Fire away.

NaNoWriMo Wrap-up: Interview with Natalie Field

This is the fourth of four interviews we conducted with 2011 NaNoWriMo winners:

Hi Natalie, what's your idea of great literary fiction?

A good example of what I think is good literary fiction is S.E. Hinton's book The Outsiders. I don't know how many people would classify The Outsiders as LitFic, but I do. In my opinion, in order for something to be literary fiction, it must be a novel that points something out about humans. It has to have a message. Often that's why you'll hear writers who are attempting literary fiction say that their antagonist is society. The Outsider's plot is purely character driven, and the book says something about people, as all LitFic should. It is probably my favourite book I've read in a long time.

NaNoWriMo Wrap-up: Interview with Jason Black

This is the third of four interviews we conducted with 2011 NaNoWriMo winners:

Hey Jason, if you would, tell us a little bit about yourself:

I'm an ex-techie guy who has fled the software industry for a life of fiction, which happened when I discovered that writing novels was a heck of a lot more fun than writing software documentation. These days, I spend most of my time as a "book doctor," a freelance editor who does literary analysis for a living. Basically, I do for independent and aspiring authors what a good agent or publishing house editor does for authors under contract: help them bring the core of their story into its truest possible form.

NaNoWriMo Wrap-up: Interview with Mike Kroll

This is the second of four interviews we conducted with 2011 NaNoWriMo winners.

Hi Mike. Why don't you start off by telling us what your idea of great literary fiction is:

Great literary fiction, in my opinion, is a work that tells both a story, as well as draws the reader into a way of thinking that enlightens their own lives. Some fantastic examples of this would be Scarlett Thomas' The End of Mr. Y. It incorporates both quantum physics, classic literature, and the power of the mind into an original and engaging plot.

NaNoWriMo Wrap-Up: Interview with Fiona Webster

This is the first of four interviews we conducted with 2011 NaNoWriMo winners.

Hi Fiona, tell us a just little bit about yourself:

I'm a 56-year-old retired physician—originally from Houston but now living In Greenbelt, Maryland, just outside of DC. I've been married to the same guy, a ponytailed botanist, for 33 years. We have no kids, by choice; our current feline companion is a black oriental shorthair named Annabel Lee. I've been on the Internet for 22 years, always with the same two letters (fi) before my @ sign. My longtime ruling passions are the music/art/writing of Patti Smith, horror literature, splatter cinema, fish (especially sharks), sailing, and science. I spend my time, when not writing, doing mail art: mostly collage postcards, but also decorated envelopes containing long letters written with a fountain pen or typed on a World War II correspondent's portable, all mailed with vintage postage.

NaNoWriMo Wrap-Up

While those of us here at ShelfActualization.com spent the month of November getting this wonderful site off the ground, thousands of other intrepid, book-minded souls were busy throwing their blood, sweat and tears into a different kind of literary endeavor: National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, for short.

Their goal? To write a 50,000 word novel in the thirty days between October and December.

"What?" You ask. "An entire novel in 30 days or less? It can’t be done."

Oh, but it has. Lots of times.

Even some great works of literature have been mid-wifed into existence in less time than NaNoWriMo gives its eager participants. Jack Kerouac famously hammered out On the Road on a 120-foot scroll of teletype paper in just three weeks’ time. Dostoevsky’s The Gambler was completed in just 26 days, and though its’ a short work, it happens to have been tackled as a side project while the author was busy writing Crime and Punishment. Not too shabby.

And Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was scratched off in just 6 days! Yeah, you’ll tell me, but the thing’s only about 100 pages long. That’s true, but at Stevenson’s pace, an entire month's work would have yielded a 500 page book of roughly 125,000 words. So, it is definitely doable.

Last year, 30,000 NaNoWriMo participants crossed the 50K word mark. This year’s writers banged out over 3 Billion words in their mad dash to the finish line. And it’s not all crap, either. Some notable recent winners, such as Sara Gruen (Water for Elephants) and Erin Morgestern (The Night Circus) have gone on to successful publication.

So, as the month drew to a close I wandered over to the literary fiction section of the NaNoWriMo forums to see if anyone would be interested in telling us about their experiences. I’m happy to report that volunteers were not lacking. So for the rest of the day, I’ll be posting our quick interviews with four of them. Stay tuned…

First Line Friday!

I’ve felt stymied this week, bogged down, stuck in a rut. So, I’m putting a negative spin on this week’s “First Line Friday.” I want to showcase what, in my mind, is arguably one of the weakest, most ineffective first lines that I have ever read (for a critically acclaimed novel, at that!).

“See the boy.”

In case you missed it, that’s the first line: “See the boy.” That’s it. And guess who wrote it?

Cormac McCarthy in Blood Meridian, one of the richest, most insanely beautiful novels ever written. And yet, the first line is extremely lacking. It’s too plain, too Biblical, too meaningless. “See the boy.” Ok, I’ll see him. What’s the big deal? There is no implementation of any language that is intriguing in the least.

But I suppose that that's how life is sometimes . . . simply lacking.

In Colum McCann’s solid novel Let the Great World Spin, he states “good days, they come around the oddest corners.” Well, it’s the same with first lines. I fully expected Blood Meridian to have a drop-dead amazing first line. But it couldn’t be further from the truth.

But to be fair, the rest of Blood Meridian more than makes up for a blasé first line.