The Writer's Voice

In the past we’ve explored the jarring disconnect between the literary voice of an author, and their actual speaking voice (see Hemingway and Woolf, for example.)  Today though,  we see how those two types of voice can meld together and accentuate one another perfectly, as Jack Kerouac reads from his rambling beat classic, On the Road:

I’ve never actually read monsieur Kerouac- something I’ll have to remedy before this novel becomes a movie on May 23^rd. But listening to the assonance and rhythm of his writing, one can’t help but wonder if he was influenced by the late, great Dr. Seuss. What do you think?

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First Line Friday

Metafiction?

MacEvoy and I are both admitted suckers for Metafiction. So, when I recently came across today's first line, I was immediately sold on the premise of the entire novel (that's the beauty of a good first line). Now, I haven't actually read the novel yet, but it's waiting for me patiently on my shelf. Here is the first line:

"The first time that Jean-Claude Pelletier read Benno Von Archimboldi was Christmas 1980, in Paris, when he was nineteen years old and studying German literature. "

The novel is the critically acclaimed 2666 by Roberto Bolano. And Bolano's first line is packed with intrigue. Without having actually read the novel, I can assume that (i) Jean-Claude Pelletier is some sort of intellectual bibliophile, (ii) Archimboldi's writings are going to be central to Pelletier's core experience, and (iii) the setting is Europe. A beautiful literary recipe! Is it not?

Those of you who have actually read 2666 will please correct me if any of my assumptions are completely off-base.

Haiku-ption Contest #6

It’s that time again. In the comments, give us your best haiku for the picture below. Winner to be determined by a vote of the fickle masses.

Three straps and- voila.

Nose Gear, girls. It’s not just for

airplanes anymore.

The Lit-Fic Starter Kit: Your Quickstart Guide to the Classics

No sooner do we claim to be dealers of the “gateway drug to literary fiction,” than one of our readers calls on us to prove it. In response to yesterday’s post, ElizabethR writes the following:

“Will you recommend a book for one who has never read any of the classics or contemporary greats? I find the thought of reading literature daunting. I'd need a book that would not send me to sleep by the fourth page. Because I literally fall asleep while reading.What would you recommend as my first piece of great literature? And how would I go about staying awake?”

First of all, you’re not alone in being daunted, Elizabeth. Great literature is almost universally seen as an impenetrable beast. The trick is finding the soft underbelly that will allow you to attack the fierce beast and find your own niche within.

And just so you know, I came late to the game myself. I detested having classics shoved down my throat in school. I scraped by in my high school English classes using a hackneyed amalgam of Cliffs Notes, film adaptations and a lucky knack for turning in-class discussions into serviceable essay answers. I think the only three assigned books I actually read during those four years were Great Expectations by Dickens, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller and Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. (All three are fantastic, by the way.)

The turning point for me came years later when it occurred to me that I had really loved each of the “great” books I had taken the time to read. They had all stuck with me in ways that riveting reads like Grisham’s The Firm, or Crichton’s Jurassic Park, hadn’t. It caused me to wonder what else I might have missed by turning my nose up at my schooldays literature syllabi. And as I explained yesterday, I’ve been playing catch-up ever since.

Sometimes a book will hit me like a ton of bricks, and sometimes a revered classic will just fall flat. On very rare occasions I’ll hit the eject button before I’ve even given the book a fighting chance. (I’m looking at you, Homer’s Iliad) Like, multiple times.

The final caveat I’ll share is that I don’t believe in the existence of one perfect book that will captivate every reader from the first page to the last, and inspire a lifetime devotion to literary fiction by force of its sheer awesomeness. If such a thing did exist, it would be entirely dependent on the personal tastes of each reader. But here are ten books that can serve as your Trojan Horse into the daunting world of classic literary fiction. (And I use the word ‘classic’ here as Italo Calvino defines it: “A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.")

This isn't meant to be a top-ten list for entry-level classics, but you'll find that all ten books are either extremely short, or extremely approachable works of great fiction. Any of them would be a good place to start.



The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neal Hurston

Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

Cry the Beloved Country, by Alan Paton

Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson

All the Pretty Horses, by Cormack McCarthy

Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck

The Stranger, by Albert Camus

Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

As for staying awake,that’s for due dates and homework assignments. Hopefully the reading is compelling enough to hold your eyelids apart, but if it isn’t, enjoy the rest. It sounds like you could use it.

How about the rest of you? What recommendations would you make to a hesitant beginner?

Back to the well? Or into the abyss?

We’ve never professed to be literary experts. In fact, the whole thrust behind this site is the belief that regular Joes like ourselves have as much to gain from great books as the career academics and industry professionals who have made good literature the focus of their entire lives.

We hope we can add some unique insights to an unnecessarily stuffy lit culture, and maybe inspire some new readers of good books while we’re at it. In short, the goal is to serve as a kind of gateway drug for literary fiction. But what we’re really doing, more than anything else, is chronicling our own journey of discovery. If I didn’t already realize that, it became pretty clear when I sat down to look at what I’ve been reading lately.

I’ve only been tracking my reading habits for a little over a year. But in that short time, I’ve probably covered more new ground than I had in the previous 30. To wit:

• The last 15 books I’ve read have been by authors who were brand spanking new to me.
• Going back to the beginning of last year, I see that 34 of my last 41 reads are the works of writers I’d never had the pleasure of reading before.
• Throw in the next two books in my To-Be-Read pile, which are both by authors unfamiliar to me, and we’re talking a full 84% of my last 15 months’ reading- all of it a sad, desperate attempt to catch-up on 200 years of classic literary fiction.

Will I ever be caught up? Not a chance.  But I’m having a blast just trying. 

What about you? Are you more apt to go back to well of authors who are tried and true? Or are you blazing a trail through the unknown like me?

The Science of Powerful Prose... Revisited

In this previous post, I took a stab at identifying why certain combinations of words seem to explode off the page, while others just sit there, inert and ineffective.


It turns out that much brighter minds than mine are busy delving into the mystery:

"Researchers have long known that the “classical” language regions, like Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, are involved in how the brain interprets written words. What scientists have come to realize in the last few years is that narratives activate many other parts of our brains as well, suggesting why the experience of reading can feel so alive. Words like “lavender,” “cinnamon” and “soap,” for example, elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells."

"Last month, however, a team of researchers from Emory University reported in Brain & Language that when subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active. Metaphors like “The singer had a velvet voice” and “He had leathery hands” roused the sensory cortex, while phrases matched for meaning, like “The singer had a pleasing voice” and “He had strong hands,” did not." 

Very interesting. Go here for the complete article.


So, one way to improve your writing is to fill your metaphors with all the texture and spice of a good, hearty salsa. Who knew?


(You see what we did there, folks? Is your sensory cortex buzzing?)

The Stunning Beauty of Books

No, not lyrical  beauty- or the metaphorical beauty of ideas- we cover that crap all the time. What we're talking about today is the beauty of books as physical objects, especially when in the hands of a talented artist.

Regular lurker and occasional commenter READTHE100 pointed us to the work of Guy Laramee, who carves incredible landscapes out of old books. Here's a sampling of his recent oeuvre:

Go here for more. It kind of reminded us of the anonymous book sculptures that began popping up in Scottish libraries last year:

Fascinating stuff. You certainly can't do that with a Kindle...

Jhumpa Lahiri: My Life's Sentences

In the New York Times’ Opinionator column last Saturday, Jhumpa Lahiri wrote an excellent piece that relates to a couple of our own regular features. Here’s some of what she said:

 "In college, I used to underline sentences that struck me, that made me look up from the page. They were not necessarily the same sentences the professors pointed out, which would turn up for further explication on an exam. I noted them for their clarity, their rhythm, their beauty and their enchantment. For surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do." 

"The most compelling narrative, expressed in sentences with which I have no chemical reaction, or an adverse one, leaves me cold. In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil. The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace. Style and personality are irrelevant. They can be formal or casual. They can be tall or short or fat or thin. They can obey the rules or break them. But they need to contain a charge. A live current, which shocks and illuminates."

Very nicely put. And it echoes what we’ve tried to do here, here, here, here and here in our “From the Pen of…” series, originally inspired by this post, and in First Line Fridays, where we give thumbs up or down to various authors’ first attempts to enchant us. Read her entire piece here. And check out Ms. Lahiri’s own books below.

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First Line Friday!

And, at long last, the first line of the week is as follows:

"A half hour after I came down here, the rains began."

Hmmm. Now, I'm indifferent to this first line. Clearly, it works. But I am not convinced as to how well it works. It's too bland for my taste, like it's missing an edge. And where is "here?" I think the writer would have done better to replace the word "here" with the actual location he is referencing: the toilet? his office? Baja Mexico? downtown? The first line deserves more specification.

So who wrote this mediocre first line? Wallace Stegner, in All The Little Live Things.

But, to be fair to Stegner, let's read the aforementioned first line with the whole first paragraph, and suddenly we have some serious prose:

"A half hour after I came down here, the rains began. They came without fuss, the thin edge of a circular Pacific storm that is probably dumping buckets on Oregon. One minute I was looking out my study window into the greeny-gold twilight under the live oak, watching a towhee kick up the leaves, and the next I saw that the air beyond the tree was scratched with fine rain. Now the flagstones are shining, the tops of the horizontal oak limbs are dark-wet, there is a growing drip from the dome of the tree above, the towhee's olive back has melted into umber dusk and gone. I sit here watching evening and the winter rains come on together, and I feel as slack and dull as the day or the season. Or not slack so much as bruised. I am like a man so stiff from a beating that every move reminds him and fills him with outrage."

Eh? Thoughts?

See Africa! Read a Novel!

It’s been a little while since our last "See The World" post (previous entries can be found here and here), and with winter finally coming to a close, we’ve probably all got a touch of cabin fever. In my case, it’s a full-blown case of stage 4 Wanderlust. To set us free I thought we’d kick off the shackles of cities and towns, and strike out into the wilds of East Africa, present-day Kenya and Tanzania. Here are three great books that will take you there:

Out of Africa, by Isak Denisen (pen name for Karen Blixen.) Published in 1937, but set in 1920’s colonial British East Africa (Kenya), this is a book Hemingway called the best he’s read on Africa (fine praise from someone who’s written some great books on Africa himself.) You’ll probably recognize the first line from the 1985 film of the same name:

“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet.  

“In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold.  

“The geographical position, and the height of the land combined to create a landscape that had not its like in all the world. There was no fat on it and no luxuriance anywhere; it was Africa distilled up through six thousand feet, like the strong and refined essence of a continent.”

True at First Light, by Ernest Hemingway- Or Under Kilimanjaro, by the same author. Both were published posthumously, and both were born out of the same 1950s-era manuscript that he had left unpublished:

“It was a clear and beautiful morning as we drove out across the plain with the Mountain and the trees of the camp behind us. There were many Thomson’s gazelle ahead on the green plain switching their tails as they fed. There were herds of wildebeests and Grant’s gazelle feeding close to the patches of bush. We reached the airstrip we had made in a long open meadow by running the car and the truck up and down through the new short grass and grubbing out the stumps and roots of a patch of brush at one end. The tall pole of a cut sapling drooped from the heavy wind of the night before and the wind sock, homemade from a flour sack, hung limp. We stopped the car and I got out and felt the pole. It was solid although bent and the sock would fly once the breeze roze. There were wind clouds high in the sky and it was beautiful looking across the green meadow at the Mountain looking so huge and wide from here.”

Weep Not, Child, by James Ngugi (early pen name for Ngugi wa Thiong’o). This 1964 book is the first English novel to be written by an East African. You can imagine that its point-of view (native African) and its subject matter (the Mau Mau Uprising) provide a pretty interesting contrast to the two books above:

“There was only one road that ran right across the land. It was long and broad and shone with black tar, and when you travelled along it on  hot days you saw little lakes ahead of you. But when you went near, the lakes vanished, to appear again a little farther ahead. Some people called them the devil’s waters because they deceived you and made you more thirsty if your throat was already dry. And the road which ran across the land and was long and broad had no beginning and no end. At least, few people knew of its origin. Only if you followed it it would take you to the big city and leave you there while it went beyond to the unknown, perhaps joining the sea.”

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