Monday, October 15, 2012

Thud Factor



Like any reader, I’ve got a long list of ‘books-I’d-like-to-read’ rattling around inside my head. Some of them have been there for years. Others I heard about last week. Sometimes, when I’m considering my next read and one of these books comes to mind I’ll log into my local library account and place a hold on one of them. I did this the other day with T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom  (the book that inspired the film“Lawrence of Arabia” and a book that’s been on my list for ten years at least.)

But when the notification email came and I headed down to pick it up, there was an audible burst of laughter that I couldn’t contain as the librarian dropped the book on the counter in front of me. I knew in a second that I wasn’t ready for this thing. It was huge, and it was heavy. Huger and heavier than my Organic Chemistry textbook in college. I peeked inside on the off chance it was a large print edition.  It wasn’t.

So I took it home, put it on the scale (a full five pounds, for the curious) and took the following picture, before placing it in a pile of books "to-be-returned," unread:



I should have placed a quarter next to it, or had one of my small children try to hold it, for reference, but I don’t generally carry cash and I don’t believe in child abuse. 

I’ve been tossing around the idea of writing something about the books I’ve never finished. But for now anyway, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom  belongs in different category:  books I never started because I chickened out after a single glance. 

Which books have made you crap your pants?

Friday, October 12, 2012

First Line Friday: A Peek Into the Future



Back to our First Line Fridays series. We’ve covered setting, axioms and dialogue, now let’s take a peek into the future.

Sometimes the best way to kick off a novel is to come right out and hang the ending before the reader like a carrot before a horse. This doesn’t necessarily mean the story is spoiled, mind you, but when the reader is given  some sense of destination the immediate reaction tends to be “Whoa! Okay,  so that’s where we’re going? I’m game.” Here’s a perfect example, from Gabriel Garcia Marquez:
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” —from One Hundred Years of Solitude.
We covered another such first line not too long ago, by Jeffrey Eugenides:
“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.” — from Middlesex.
Here’s what I wrote about that line at the time, it applies just as well to the first example:
"I love how the author delivers the crux of the plot in the very first line. He’s still going to take us through the twists and turns of a novel-length work, the slow burn of details, the crescendo of backstories and present action. But right there in the first line, he stabs his finger at the map and shows us our destination. It has the effect of making you wonder ‘how the devil are we going to get from here to there?’ And I, for one, was sold on the story."
Here’s another one, from Robert Graves’  I, Claudius :
"I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as "Claudius the Idiot," or "That Claudius," or "Claudius the Stammerer," or "Clau-Clau-Claudius" or at best as "Poor Uncle Claudius," am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the "golden predicament" from which I have never since become disentangled."
But sometimes all you have to do is hint at the ending. Others have handled the peek-into-the-future opening much more subtly. Take the first line of Dickens’s David Copperfield :
“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”
Or Paul Auster’s City of Glass:
“It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not."
In that example, we don’t even have the slightest idea what  “it” is that the wrong number started, but there’s a hint of the story and its ending in there that makes you want to learn more. Count me as a fan of the peek-into-the-future first line. 

Thursday, October 11, 2012

Another month in the can


It’s been thirty more days, and in that period we’ve touched on roughly 50 authors. In case you missed them, here are our five most popular posts from last month:
Plus a smattering of the unlikely search terms that brought readers to ShelfActualization.com:
Keep coming back!

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

What Bugs Me Wednesday: Unbelievable Plot Points


You know what really bugs me? Unbelievable plot points. You know what I’m talking about. Those turning points in a story that, yes, are theoretically or scientifically possible, maybe even witnessed in real life, but are really only credible between the covers of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not,  and not  in any fiction that aims for a veneer of realism. As far as I’m concerned, you cannot give your character a one-in-a-million shot at making it out alive, and expect me to swallow it.

Don’t get me wrong, incredible things happen every day. Things that will blow your mind. But you can’t rely on something that happens once in a thousand tries, to save your character, resolve your story, or put a nice bow around a very messy plot. If you do, I’ll probably throw your book across the room.

Take “surviving a freefall” for example. It crops up now and again as a way to spice up fiction, and it really irks me. Are there documented cases of people surviving a fall from heights of 30,000 feet or more? Yes, there are. But that doesn’t mean you should make it the exit strategy for your character. Now, I understand the concept of terminal velocity as well as the next guy. But even if a falling body reaches a maximum falling speed due to increased drag, you’re still going to hit the ground at 122 miles per hour. Unless your book is about Gumby, I just don’t see things working out for your character.

At the climax of his novel Angels & Demons,  Dan Brown lets Robert Langdon plummet thousands of feet over Rome.  He survives, of course. He remembers from earlier in the novel that “one square yard of drag will slow a falling body 20%,” so he manages to grab some sort of window cover on his way out of the chopper. For those doing the math at home, 122 miles per hour reduced by 20% is still 98 miles per hour- but really, that’s for a face-down, belly-to-earth position. Not sure how Langdon would use his makeshift parachute in that maximum drag position. Brown might not have been sure either, which is why he had Langdon land in the Tiber River. This “churning” river is supposedly so “frothy and air-filled” that it is “three times softer than standing water.”*

Forget the fact that the helicopter would have to travel 2,000 to 2,500 horizontal feet to even get from St. Peter’s to the Tiber River. I’ve been to Rome, and that river is neither churning, nor frothy, nor air-filled. It creeps downstream like a moving lake, so I’m not buying Brown’s extenuating circumstances. It’s also probably not that deep, so in all likelihood Langdon would be looking at a few broken bones when it was all said and done. This free-fall has bugged me ever since I read it. It must have bugged Hollywood, too, because they kept Langdon on the ground in the movie.

Amendment to the complaint:

After mulling this over, I am willing to make a very specific exception to this rule. The unbelievable plot point might be acceptable as the inciting incident or launching pad for a story. In other words, if you’ve just survived a fall from 30,000 feet, then yeah, I want to learn more about you. You deserve to have your story told. And if an interesting and believable story follows your amazing brush with certain death, then I’ll read on.

As I understand it, Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses  features a free-fall from 29,000 feet. Two characters fall into the English Channel and wash up on the beach alive. Given the magical realism in the book, and the fall serving as an inciting incident for the story, I’m going to give Rushdie a reluctant pass.

This is also why the Bourne Identity works (survival of several gunshot wounds, floating unconscious yet alive in a stormy sea.) It’s unbelievable, but it’s unbelievable in a way that gives you a reason to read on, rather than being a cheap gimmick to save the story. That would have bugged me.

*These quotes from the novel are taken from this page.

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Author Look-Alikes Vol. 8


Though they don’t share the same hairline, there’s something in the eyes and mouth that makes young Erich Maria Remarque look an awful lot like John Malkovich:

High foreheard, low eyebrows, and piercing eyes- Jules Verne was his generation's Russel Crowe - plus a couple months of beard growth:

He's portly, he's got a sly expression and lots of thick hair- you can almost picture Alexandre Dumas walking into his local basement-level watering hole to a merry chorus of “Norm!”:

James Fenimore Cooper kind of reminds me of the backstabbing friend from Ghost (Tony Goldwyn):

And E.M. Forster? The first person who comes to mind when I look at that dude is Macy’s smarmy in-house psychologist from “Miracle on 34th Street” (Porter Hall):
Kind of makes you want to rap him on the head with your cane, doesn't it?

Friday, October 5, 2012

Talk Like a Beat Day



Today we’re taking a little break from First Line Fridays to remind you that “Talk Like a Beat Day” is coming up on Sunday October 7th.

Talk like what now, you ask? Like a Beat- as in Beatnik, daddyo. No, it’s not yet the international phenomenon that “Talk Like a Pirate Day” has become, but after finally joining the cult of Kerouac this year, I am heartily endorsing the Guardian’s declaration of October 7th as Talk Like a Beat Day.

Why October 7th?
“7 October was the original "Beat happening": the date that Allen Ginsberg first recited Howl in San Francisco, Kerouac beating out the rhythm with a wine jug and shouting "GO!" after every line. The beat movement of the 1950s is so rich in its own language and terminology that it's crying out for its own memorial event.”
Couldn’t agree more. Here is a glossary to get you started quickly:


And here is a collection of videos that might just give you some helpful inspiration. Can you dig it?

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Borges' Immense Reward



I thought this somewhat disturbing photo of “Borges groupies” groping the blind author and inhaling his very breath (what else would you label what she’s doing?) was worth sharing on its own. But why not give it some context? Here is a quote from the video below that I thought was pretty fitting:
“Besides, the life of a writer is a lonely one. You think you are alone, and as the years go by, if the stars are on your side you may discover that you are at the center of a vast circle of invisible friends, whom you will never get to know, but who love you. And that is an immense reward.”




Wednesday, October 3, 2012

What Bugs Me Wednesday

You know what bugs me? Poorly laid out books. 

Do I really need two inches of whitespace at the bottom of the page?  Or an inch and a half on the outer edges? No. But you know  where I could use a little bit? That's right, where the pages are actually glued to the spine. That might be kind of nice.


Above is a look at my paperback Ethan Frome  - great for marginalia- but piss poor for holding it open with one hand and not  suffering debilitating hand cramps. This awesome book was a lot harder to read than it needed to be, and yeah, it kind of bugged me…

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Eugenides! (Reviewing The Marriage Plot and Middlesex)



After reading, and loving, Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot  a month or two ago, I decided to do something I rarely do, and jump right back to the same author immediately. That time, I read his Pulitzer Prize winning novel Middelsex.  But because I’ve been so insanely busy lately, I haven’t actually reviewed either one of them here. 

Lest you think they’re not worth your time, I figured I better talk about them once and for all. And since my thoughts on both have kind of become intertwined, I thought it would make sense to review them together. So here’s a quick two-fer.

First of all, the writing. It’s straightforward, and there’s nothing pretentious about his prose, but he still packs an amazing punch with his language choices. See this post for some gems from The Marriage Plot.  Or take a gander at this smattering from Middlesex :
“Dr. Philibosian smelled like an old couch, of hair oil and spilled soup, of unscheduled naps.”
“Cologne made me think of voice coaches, of maitre d’s, of old men and their unwanted embraces.”
“I was scandalized by the filth of men’s rooms, the rank smells and pig sounds, the grunting and huffing from the stalls. Urine was forever puddled on the floors. Straps of soiled toilet paper adhered to the commodes. When you entered a stall, more often than not, a plumbing emergency greeted you, a brown tide, a soup of dead frogs.”
I absolutely love his word choices, but there’s also something in the cadence and pacing of his writing that accentuates his more interesting phrases. His style is not flowery, and it doesn’t call attention to itself, but it still manages to elicit hearty guffaws and appreciative sighs as I speed through the stories.

Speaking of the stories, I won’t share plot points or spoilers here. I’ll simply say that I thought each was engrossing in its own way. The Marriage Plot  for its intellectual themes and college days search-for-self, and Middlesex  for its sprawling, multigenerational scope. Pitting one against the other, I’d call Middlesex  the better book, but if there’s one criticism I would level, it’s this: the unliklihood of a single family history encompassing the Greco-Turkish War, the infamous Great Fire of Smyrna, the founder and founding of the Nation of Islam, and the 1967 Detroit Riot. All of that backdrop, taken together in one book, smacks ever so slightly of Forrest Gump. But I loved it. Just like I loved The Marriage Plot.  The reason, in a word, is research.

I should state here that I probably spent more time poring over my family’s gilt-edged World Book Encyclopedias than any other set of books growing up. I am, still today, a Wikipedia fiend. So if you’re anything like me, you’ll love Eugenides. Reading one of his novels is a bit like taking a series of small correspondence courses. Pick up Middlesex  and you’ll learn about all the historical events I listed above, plus silk farming, the Greek-American immigrant experience, the business of bootlegging, and the intersex condition known as 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, which lies at the center of the story. Same goes for The Marriage Plot,  only there you’ll be introduced to semiotics and deconstruction in literature, manic depression, yeast genetics, Christian mysticism and so much more.

Not only does Eugenides provide fascinating insights into all of these things, but he carries it off with a masterful storytelling ability that keeps plot paramount, yet leaves no doubt as to the novels’ broader themes. Sadly, he is on the nine-year plan (releasing novels in 1993, 2002, and 2011), which means we may not get to see another one until 2020. Until then I’ll have to savor The Virgin Suicides-  or reread one of his others. They’re that good.