The All-New Bunrab

So, I read this book called How to Read Novels Like A Professor, which turned out to be great - imagine a course on literature, except instead of concentrating on all the boring stuff, he concentrates on bestsellers and genre fiction. And he's funny. He starts out by telling us how the first two sentences of the book can already reveal exactly how much effort and attention we'll have to put into reading it. Several chapters are spent on discussing the unusual narrative techniques of modern novels - as a contrast to Victorian novels, explaining too why those were written the way they were, and how much something can change from that and still be considered a novel. We have the usual discussion of POV, and what the limitations of first-person are, and so on. He uses a lot of examples, including Agatha Christie mysteries, and the aforesaid Dickens. Mostly, when he discusses Dickens, he talks about Great Expectations, which I didn't like and never finished; he doesn't mention my favorite, A Tale of Two Cities, at all. And he spends a lot of time trying to justify reading Joyce's Ulysses, leaving me totally unconvinced - I'm still never going to read it. On the other hand, some of the books he discussed were ones I had not previously considered, that he made sound downright interesting - see more on that below. Others, well, no - he spends a lot of time on Fowles' The Magus, which I read while I was in college in the 70's, and didn't like at all, and the very points that I didn't like are what he does like about it: how "clever" it is, where you have to *work* at figuring out what's going on. And when I read it, I kept thinking, this is an awful lot of effort for very little story; there's not enough plot under the cleverness, and if I want to do this much work while reading, I'll read a textbook and get a good grade for it, thank you very much. So, not everything he considers interesting is attractive. Nonetheless, an excellent book; the writers on my flist would probably enjoy it, too.

One of the books he used in illustrating POV was Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible which I had heretofore ignored. But his description of multiple third-person non-omniscient POVs sounded interesting. So I went and took that out of the library next, and wound up reading it through in only two sittings - it was that interesting. And going in knowing what to expect, the multiple POVs, some with limited information, were not too much work, and were quite enjoyable. Lots of story in there; it's not just character and cleverness.

I also finally got around to reading Koontz's Odd Thomas and one of its sequels, Brother Odd, books which illustrate yet another POV - the *unreliable* first-person narrator, as Odd himself describes himself, comparing it to the POV in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I don't think I would have focused as much on how the unreliable-first-person POV affects the story had I not recently read the How to Read.... Anyway, I liked the first one, didn't like Brother Odd as much, mainly because of the excess of "Forbidden Planet" woo-woo - I didn't like "Forbidden Planet," for that matter, and for that matter, I hate "The Tempest" - I think it's the stupidest play of Shakespeare's that I've ever read, character and plot-wise. (Great language, but stupid.) Despite the "things man was not meant to create" vibe, though, I enjoyed a lot of the book, especially the Russian character.

Now off to more crocheting and some herbal tea.

Yesterday's rehearsal was cancelled due to ice, as were most of the Valentine's Day plans of most of the county - many restaurants were closed all day. Our street didn't get plowed till late this afternoon, after pretty much every person on the block had called the streets dept. and complained. So we got plowed and salted about half an hour ago.

Meanwhile, not exactly a rant, but sort of a lecture; I've said parts of this before, I think. Our topic for today is: Why do I like some books and not others?

One of the few things my late mother and I were ever able to agree on was what factors are important in determining whether a fiction book is any good. We didn't always agree on the relative weights of those factors, nor did we rate a given book the same under each factor, but at least it helped us discuss books in terms where we could make some comparisons and give some clear examples of what we liked. So, the three factors we agreed on were:
1. Good writing - not just spelling and grammar, although those are important, but elegant turns of phrase, literary allusions, wit and humor, and other things that indicate that the author him or herself is well-read and is aiming at an audience who appreciates the written word.
2. Plot and character - some people might choose to separate these, but we lumped them together, because character development is one kind of plot. There should be something happening in a book, some movement, a goal. Even if that goal is only the character's realization that his or her life has been wasted. There's a bit of overlap with good writing here in that the characters should have different enough personalities that when there's a conversation, we can tell who is talking; the characters shouldn't all sound identical. (Later Heinlein, for example, fails this test spectacularly - the only way to tell who is talking is to count back even or odd lines until you reach a point where a name was mentioned.)
3. Interesting presentation of novel ideas. This one's especially important in science fiction, but it matters in other stuff too - murder mysteries should not be identical plots with the names changes, or just the location changed. There might be new takes on political ideas, and it's possible to put old wine in new bottles and make it look interesting, too. So novel ideas doesn't have to mean new inventions - it just means something that makes me think about something in a way that I haven't thought about it before, or that makes me think about something I haven't bothered thinking about before.

Now, for a book to be good enough to bother to finish, roughly, it should be at least "average" - as measured by "all the other books I've ever read before" - on at least two of those factors; for a book to be *good* it should be at least average on two of them and well above average on at least one of them.

It's that "all the other books I've ever read before" that varies from person to person, of course, and that makes every person's evaluation of the three criteria slightly different. But, it also gives us a talking point for explaining why we give a certain weight to one of the factors. We can give examples in that category from the book we're discussing, and then give examples for comparison from other books. Without these defined criteria, we would find it difficult to say why we like one book better than another.

Some examples of how particular books get weighed:
Take Jack Chalker, who frequently complains in his introductions that he is something like the world's most popular unrecognized science fiction writer. Well, I can tell you something about why that might be. He's not actually a very good writer. While his spelling and grammar are adequate, his sentences are nonetheless clunky, and his dialogue unrealistic. Why do people keep buying his books, then? Because of criteria 2 & 3: his plots move right along, something happening every minute. Even if the characters are sorta cardboard, or stereotypes, or never learn, at least they're always doing something. And his ideas - Well World, for example - are novel enough, and new things pop up in the descriptions of them often enough, to reach a satisfactory score on that count. So even though he scores rather low, though not abysmal, on criterion #1, he scores adequately on 2 and 3, so his books are worth finishing if one happens to pick them up. Now, you might disagree on whether there are enough novel ideas to reach an adequate weight on #3, because you've read a different set of other books than I have, so you might conclude Chalker isn't worth reading. And that's fine, for you. At least, though, we know why we disagree, and we each know something more than we knew before about what books to recommend to each other and what not to.

Or how about Margaret Frazer's Sister Frevisse mysteries? Some people see those as just rip-offs of Peters' Brother Cadfael, and so don't bother to read them. For me, however, they reach adequate or better on all three criteria. I consider the writing to be somewhat better than Ellis Peters' - and that may simply be a matter of personal taste. As far as plot goes, both series have adequate plots and lots of interesting characters, and at least 2 or 3 characters in every book have distinct enough personalities to be worth investing some time reading about them. To my way of thinking, Frazer's books have fewer cardboard background characters than Peters' - some of the other monks in the Cadfael series never do become anything more than a name and a vague job duty. OTOH, the saintly Sister Thomasine character in Frazer's books bugs me - too good to be true. As far as novel ideas/interesting presentation goes, we hit an interesting comparison there. The Cadfael books certainly are novel, in that most of us know nothing about that time period, and so everything we read is new and different. However, some of it is alien enough from our own understanding of how people work, how they are motivated, that I just can't sympathize with them or believe that they'd act as they do. Even if it's probably accurate, I can't understand it. The Frevisse mysteries are set about 3 centuries later - early 1400's - and that puts us just enough closer to the modern world that things are more understandable. More people are literate, there's a middle class, I've heard of the kings and queens mentioned - and that's just enough familiarity that when something I'm NOT familiar with gets introduced, I have a framework to fit it into, and can add it to my understanding. With the Cadfael books, I don't have enough edge pieces to make a framework for getting the middle jigsaw pieces together very well, and even when I do, I know I'm still missing something. With Frevisse, I have more of the edge pieces, so when I get additional jigsaw pieces, I get a clearer picture. In other words, I can understand the new ideas better because I have more old ideas to hang them on.

See how having those three criteria makes it easier to talk about "what I like about this book" ? Feel free to appropriate this method and pass it on. I think if more people did their "book reviews" using this, we'd all get a lot better idea of what to read next, she says modestly.

I have been working on a sonnet about my recent ICD removal experience. What???? Are you crazy??? Well, of course I'm crazy, but that's got nothing to do with this. The thing is, the final couplet dropped into my head, along with the knowledge that it WAS the final couplet of a sonnet, and a suggested metaphor for the rest of the sonnet, while I was in the hospital. And the final couplet is damn good. If I could always write something that packed that much emotional punch, I'd dare breathe this sonnet's name in the same page with "On His Blindness." At least, that's the way it seemed to me in my drug-induced haze in the hospital. Of course, I can't write the rest of it that good, which is why I will NOT ever be mentioned in the same book, let alone the same page, as Milton. Nonetheless, even without the drug-induced haze, it's a damn fine couplet,and worth making the effort to write a sonnet that attempts to come near it. But I am having trouble with the metaphor - everything I attempt to write about it sounds more like farce, or a parody of the intended metaphor. Trying to get it to sound serious and emotional is very knotty. And it looks like I'm going to have to pick a rather peculiar rhyme scheme, given what's suggested itself so far. I started out with ABABAB CDCDCD EE, but that really sounded stupid. Then ABCABC DEFDEF GG suggested itself, but after a couple of tries I realized that wasn't quite right. What seems to be coming clear is that the rhyme is going to have to be ABCCBA DEFFED GG. Which is a little weird, but still permitted, I think. Anyway, a few more days of the hydromorphone-influenced hours during which my surgical dressing is changed, and it should shape up to within shouting distance of a final product. Yes, morphine, a/k/a good old opium, does have something to do with how much poetry I can think of. I've written poetry without morphine, of course, and I have no intention of taking this painkiller one single day longer than I have to, but I will admit that the floatingness of the brain does spark something.

Almost everything I do in the way of "art" drops into my head whole and entire, waiting only for me to produce something externally that matches it. And usually, no hydromorphone is involved. Usually, plain old antidepressant-influenced dreams are what does it. I have had entire quilts drop into my head, complete finished pattern, all I have to do is find the fabric that matches what I saw, and cut it up, and put it together the way I saw it. Those of you who have seen the Chips 'n Salsa quilt I gave to Bill and Kathy for their wedding - good heavens, was that 10 years ago??? - well, that was one of the quilts that just showed up in my brain and said to me "go out and buy fabric, and make me." And songs have done the same - the one I sang at Anita's wedding last year pretty much had dropped into my head, words and tune, the previous fall, needing only a slight bit of fine-tuning (pardon the pun) from my conscious mind, before being ready, and it told me it was for someone's wedding - I just had to wait a bit to find out whose. And the songs that are waiting for me to write them down right now - the two for the Montgomery Village Community Band to play, that involve christmas arrangements - those pretty much did the same thing. Dropped into my head nearly complete, I can hear just about everything in there, now all I have to do is get my MIDI keyboard to sound the same, so I can write them down. They also needed only the slightest bit of thinking to tweak them - a few parts where it wasn't quite clear what instruments were playing, where I had to decide "oh, that's a saxophone quartet" and "yeah, that's the oboe and the clarinet together" rather than already knowing, as I did for other parts, that one theme would be increasing numbers of trumpets/cornets, etc.

I don't know if I'd ever be able to produce any art any other way. I mean, when I was taking early music classes in college, of course I wrote the requisite canons for homework, and produced figured bass arrangements for a few lines, but those weren't art; they were clearly only exercises that had nothing to recommend them except meeting the technical requirements of the form. And I've never managed to write any poetry except limericks that didn't come to me nearly whole, and even the best limerick I ever wrote was one that came to me whole, although I had to think about the theme in order to make it appear. That was the one that won a contest in International Wildlife magazine some 17? years ago.

So I don't know. This sonnet didn't appear complete - but the couplet did, and it seems worth the effort. You all will be the first to know if I ever manage to write 12 more lines that match it!