Book Notes, part 3

 Back in June I decided to take some time off from writing in this blog.  I was still working my old job, which demanded a lot of hours, and I was not feeling inspired to keep up with much.  However, as I kept reading, I made some notes about the books.  They aren’t much, some are just impressions, but this includes some books that I would have liked to have explored more fully in posts.  I thought that I would post a collection of these here and maybe this will inspire me to go back and write more about them.

Note: I ended up with more than I thought for some of these so I decided to split them up.  Here are 5 more of them.

On Writing, by Stephen King

Pretty good book about writing.  King offers some folksy, but ultimately helpful, advise on writing.  There is a lot in this book about his own life, but that seems to be pretty common in these sorts of books.  Among the writing books I have read, King is most forceful in his admonitions to read a lot and write a lot.  Beyond this, he offers some pretty good practical advice on cutting unnecessary plot point and back story and avoiding adverbs.  This is the kind of direct advice many writers look for.  I had a snobbish time in my twenties when I didn’t want to admit that I liked King.  I am over that.  He writes good books even if he isn’t always a good writer.  This is a distinction that I think he could appreciate, given the content of the rest of his book on writing.

I have read this book before (it has been a while) and I was reminded of his candor about his own life, particularly about his alcoholism and about the van collision that nearly killed him.  He is a fearlessly honest writer who genuinely wants to tell good stories.  I can dig it.

Children of Ruin, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Read the first book, Children of Time, a year or more ago for sf book club and really liked it.  I think I missed some key elements of this early on and didn’t really catch the full meaning.  This happens sometimes when I read.  I miss part of the beginning and the whole rest of the novel is just playing catch up.  Maybe this is why I like to re-read books so much.  

Anyway, it was good but I wish I had paid more attention at the beginning.

Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott

I read this book about 20 years ago when I was in college and thinking about a life of writing.  I don’t remember what I thought of it at the time, though I have taken at least one important lesson from it.  Lamott has one chapter called “Shitty First Drafts” and this was something that I would make my own writing students read.  It tells us that first drafts should, indeed, be shitty.  They aren't meant for public consumption and don’t have to look like it.  They are messy because they are a part of the process and can be a place to explore and take chances.  I like this a lot and have tried to use it in my writing and impart it to my students.

There are also a lot of references to god that I don’t find particularly edifying, or anything that might be even notionally helpful to beginning writers.  At one point, she wants us to get rid of perfectionism in writing, a fine goal.  However, there is some nonsense about this being easier if you believe in god and zero explanation of why this might be so.  These allusions to religion probably make sense to the author, and might work for other christian believers, but there needs to be more connective tissue between the concept and the work.  I didn’t see it most of the time.  I would like to at least see the concept in action.

Overall, I have one big like and one big dislike of this book.  I like the fact that, like Stephen King in On Writing, she pushes the axiom that writers must write.  They do it because they want to and because they find value in it and in stories.  Lamott encourages writers to find their particular audience (one writer’s audience may be a parent, a child, etc.) and to write for that audience without regard for publication.  I like this.  She provides one particularly useful exercise based on this.  When hitting a stumbling point in writing, she advises writing a letter to a friend that explains a character’s motivation or why a particular point is important, or whatever the sticking point is.  I do this a lot, not necessarily in letter form, but I write about my writing a lot.  The big dislike that I have is that Lamott keeps pushing a particular view of writing and perspective that doesn’t square with my writing or what I think should be a part of everyone’s writing.  Frequently she will question why a writer is writing if they do not share some quality, such as naive wonder, a belief in god, a kind of innocence, or somesuch.  This crops up a couple of times and I thought it was unnerving each time.  She writes that writers need to seek the truth, and I think that this is right, but not in the objectified way that I take her to mean it.  To me, this reveals too much of the personal drive to write and not a proper piece of advice on writing as such.  Coupled with this, and equally irritating, Lamott frequently posits her writing students as wide-eyed fame seekers who poo-poo real advice on writing.  She repeatedly warns the reader that publication will not solve all of their problems.  Why this piece of advice is in this book, I cannot tell.  It is something that may be worthwhile mentioning in an undergraduate writing workshop, but probably not anywhere else.  It isn’t so much that I think this is untrue as it is unhelpful.  Anyone who believes it will never trust someone saying otherwise and no one else really needs to hear it.  But I say obvious things, too.  So I don’t begrudge it too much.

I wrote the first half of this a week or so ago and just want to mention that I did like the book overall even if I am a little harsh about some of the points.  It works and it is likely that the things that I didn’t like would be helpful to others.  

Atmosphaera Incognita by Neal Stephenson

This story popped up last year and I just got the chance to read it.  I don’t know if this classifies as a short story or a novella, or what.  My kindle app puts it over 50 pages, so I am going to treat it more like a novella.  The narrative is a little difficult to follow because there is not a lot of story here.  Rather, this is more of a mediation on the idea of the complexities involved in building a 20km tall structure.  The main character has been involved in the planning and logistics of building the structure and she ends up participating in a rescue mission during an extreme weather disaster that rocks the structure.  The disasters acts as a venue to answer more questions about what it would be like to build a 21st century tower of Babel.  

This was fun to read and it seems to be an update to the “space elevator” technology used in other sf stories.  The story shares in the hopeful, technologically advanced hard-sf tradition that explores the capabilities of human ingenuity.  Though I am not sure what to make of the capitalist-industrialist Carl who conceives and funds the whole project. His role in the project seems a little out of keeping with other Stephenson that I have read.  I need to think about this aspect more.

Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos

Innumeracy is one of those rare non-fiction books that I read because it catches my interest.  I try to read non-fiction as much as I can and in areas that that are outside of my norm.  In this case, this book is about mathematical literacy.  Two words about this before I continue.  First, I had first heard about this book from a math teacher in high school.  For whatever reason, this idea stuck with me and I am reading this more than 20 years later.  Second, I like math.  There was a time when I considered becoming a math major but I did not.  I think that I have a better-than-average layman’s understanding of mathematics.  I did dedicate a sizable portion of my doctoral dissertation to a literary rendering of Godel’s incompleteness theorem.  However, I am not a mathematician by any stretch of the imagination and never followed up on that idea aside from a little bit of research and reading occasional books.

So, to the book itself.  It isn’t bad.  The book mainly wants people to understand probability and simple statistics better.  This isn’t a book arguing the importance of higher mathematical concepts in daily life. It just wants folks to understand when and why stats they encounter can be misleading or totally bogus.  

There are two major drawbacks in the book.  The first has to do with the writing and style, and the second has to do with my perception of the book’s goals.  

To take the first first, Paulos writes at one point that his prose is guided by a desire to skip needless exposition (my gloss).  But he ends up being guilty of what he charges other math writers, namely, glossing over important explanations.  Paulos likes to stack up examples without explaining the significance of them.  This is self-defeating.  His purpose is to explain the importance of math to folks who do not see the importance.  But without providing adequate layman’s explanations, the book just doesn’t answer the call.  Second, and probably more damning, is that this book doesn’t provide adequate explanation for its own goals at key points.  One example that irked me was a section that attempted to apply statistical probability to choosing a mate.  Paulos gives his standard equations and explanations, but with one big hole.  Why the fuck is the selection of a mate something that is probabilistic?  Sure, maybe it is best to choose one mate from among the first third of suitors, but how is one to know how many potential mates one is to have in a lifetime?  A bigger question might be why one would think that something emotional and personal should be left to stats.  Paulos provides some equations and probabilities but doesn’t give any sense of why it would be appropriate to apply them.  

Otherwise, there is some good stuff in this book.  He just runs off the rails from time to time and can give some dumb answers, or at least, incompletely explained ones.

Full Throttle

Joe Hill's newest short story collection, Full Throttle, is as eclectic and fast-paced as 20th Century Ghosts.  I think that 20th Century Ghosts was among my favorite books that I read last year.  That book is chilling and thought-provoking at the same time.
This collection has some great high-points, but there are also some stories that left me wanting a little more.  Hill proves that he is a writer who thinks about process every bit as much as his father, Stephen King, as he provides both an introduction to the collection and notes to each of the stories.  In some ways I liked reading about Hill's relationship with reading and writing and the way that he thinks about process even more than some of the stories.  It is clear that he knows his influences and is a very conscientious artist.  The clarity that he brings to these explanatory notes borders on some of the best writing advice that I gleaned from King's On Writing. 
Rather than bumping through each of the stories, I am just going to hit upon a few that I liked the most and/or struck me in some way.

Probably my favorite story of the collection is "All I Care about is You," a futuristic, sci-fi story about a girl who pays for a robot companion on her birthday.  The story hits a lot of notes that I really like in sci-fi: the world is lived in and shows signs of wear, it is not enamored of the future and isn't afraid to show some of it's ugly parts.  For whatever technology may bring, there is still unhappiness and disappointment in the world.  For an author, like Hill, who is not primarily a sci-fi writer, this is a profound stroke.  There is a great turn in the story that I don't want to ruin here, but the interplay between the girl and the robot, and in particular the way that Hill writes the robot's simulated sincerity is very deep and well written.

"Late Returns" is ostensibly a story about a man grieving the deaths of his parents while working through a change in his life, taking a job driving a bookmobile.  But this story is also about the relationship that readers have to their books and the way that they can draw us and touch us.  This is something of a ghost story, but played in a low-key way that is very reminiscent of the story "20th Century Ghosts" from the book of the same name.  In both stories, Hill draws a line from aesthetics to life and death that is fascinating to consider. 

"Faun" is a great adventure/fantasy story with another good turn.  Hill shows his skills with classic mis-direction and connects folklore with a critique of privilege in a not-overbearing way.  This story has great momentum and offers compelling character studies of two of its key players.

In addition to all of the stories that work really well in this book, there are two that fell flat for me, and both because of the structure/conceit because there are great core ideas behind them.  The first, "The Devil on the Staircase," is written in "staircases" instead of paragraphs.  The story is pretty good but the structure is jarring and makes it difficult to read.  The pages look like those that a terrified Wendy Torrance finds in Kubrik's adaptation of The Shining.  In the note to this story, Hill bets his reader that they have never read a story written this way before.  True, I haven't, but that isn't enough to recommend it.

"Twittering from the Circus of the Dead" is similarly bound up in its conceit.  The entire story is written in tweets from a teenage girl on a family road trip.  The family stumble into a circus that contains real zombies.  Again, this is a neat story, but the structuring makes it difficult to read and, ultimately, doesn't add much to the story itself.  I would rather have read a more straight-forward narrative that was peppered with tweets, or one that was more thematically about social media than just the structure.

The remainder of the stories are good and vary in their depth.  The collection, overall, is a quality one and worth the read, however, I would still rank 20th Century Ghosts a little higher.  I still have not yet read one of Hill's novels, though I have a couple of these on my next up pile.

Doctor Sleep

I missed this book when it first came out a few years ago but came across it during the recent promotional campaign for the movie.  This book fits in with so many other of Stephen King's books for me: I like the story and the characters but they are just too long. 
This book is a sequel to The Shining in the sense that it picks up Danny Torrence's life as an adult.  He continues to shine and he has come to deal with both that and the problems that plagued his father.
We learn that he has been able to deal with some parts of what happened at the Overlook, and others he has had to lock away from himself in his own mind.
This book encapsulates something else about King's books that has become more apparent to me as I have gotten older.  King is interested in family legacy and the things that we seem to have thrust upon us.  Danny is an alcoholic like his father, and this has long been a theme in King's work.  But there is more.  Danny, now "Dan" as an adult, also has to deal with his own anger and find a way to reconnect with people.  He talks a lot about his mother and he thinks about Dick Halorann a lot.  The book is as much about his need to get out from under what happened to him when he was young as it is about anything.  He does this through the main action of the book, which is something that is unrelated to The Shining and not something I really want to get into here. 
Doctor Sleep is about dispelling the notion that there are things that are inevitable.  Dan sees signs of his own death at one point in the novel, but he is able to dodge his demise.  The novel deals more directly with alcoholism than some of King's other work, giving the reader some AA aphorisms and narrating meetings that Dan attends, as well as defining his relationship with his sponsor.  The elements of AA that seep in walk a line between individual choice and inevitability.  As it is presented in the text, AA is about staving off the inevitable, and accepting that for paradox that it is. 
I don't think that there is really a good comparison with The Shining in this novel.  The books are too different and are trying to do different things.  The Shining is a tighter novel, but it is also a less skillfully executed novel.  It requires a different sort of imagination than Doctor Sleep does because King seems more likely to fill in the gaps in his later work than when he was a younger writer.  His early novels left spaces for the reader to fill with their own fears.  More recent work seems to define the unknown a bit more.  This is not a judgement either way, just an observation. 
I have not yet seen the movie adaptation of Doctor Sleep, but am curious to see how it translates to the screen.  Adaptations of King's novels are always a mixed bag, but the quality of them has improved over time.  The last big question for me, though, is how an adaptation of this novel will stack up against Stanley Kubrik's adaptation of The Shining.

Unfinished Reviews, Part 1

What follows is a partial review/reaction to Stephen King's novel Revival that I wrote shortly after reading it when it came out in 2014.  This is unfinished for a variety of reasons but I like it because I muse a bit on the development of my reading life and the damage that high school English classes caused it.  Luckily, I was able to recover with the help of some great college professors who were more inclined to read books the way that I wanted to.

Revival, by Stephen King

As a young reader I took book suggestions from anyone willing to give them and I read nearly anything that seemed at all interesting.  It wasn’t until I was in high school that I began to learn that different authors were held in different esteem based on their perceived position along the “literature-pulp” axis.  This meant that I read an awful lot of genre fiction and novels that I was later taught were less worthy that what I might be reading.  High school was a horrible period in my reading life because those AP English classes encouraged me to look down on some books and authors, many of which are actually quite good, and work to dig the worth out of some boring books considered classics.  To be fair, there were also a lot of books that I hated in high school but have come to truly love on second readings.  

My early years in college continued in a similar vein and I stopped reading a lot of authors I enjoyed because they didn’t write the right kind of books.  It wasn’t until I was in graduate school, pursuing my Master’s in literature that I lost the last vestiges of this non-sensical way of reading literature.  I finally shook off the last bit of guilt I felt for reading horror, sci-fi, and crime books.  This happened when I re-read Stephen King’s The Shining.  The novel had its moments and was enjoyable overall.  But this isn’t about that book.

The book I recently finished is King’s 2014 novel Revival.  This novel blends elements of Lovecraft and Frankenstein with a coming-of-age/redemption story.  Jamie Morton, the narrator, relates the story of his relationship with Charles Jacobs, a one-time reverend who is obsessed with a secret occult power source that he discovers.  Jacobs draws Morton into his life at several points, at one time curing him of his heroin addiction using the secret power, and becomes more drawn into his secret researches all the while. Jacobs is a character like many in horror/sci-fi who is drawn to the sublimity of the unknown.  He finds a little-explored corner of knowledge that hints at bigger secrets to be discovered and begins to uncover an even greater power source beyond his control. King takes a play from Lovecraft’s book and sticks mainly to Morton’s reactions of terror than to the actual images of horror.  This keeps the horror more subjective and leaves more up to the reader to imagine.  

Revival is not my favorite King book.  I think he could have shaved off about 30% of the text and been left with a better novel.  A lot of Morton’s narration about his own life seems unnecessary and I spent a lot of time wanting to get to the main line of the story instead.  Morton thinks he is telling the story of Charlie Jacobs and his obsession with secret electricity, but he manages to get a lot about himself into it as well.  A bit more balance on this score would have made the book more enjoyable to read.  

On reading big books.

I have loved reading long novels ever since I was a kid.  Stephen King's The Stand is the first one that I ever read that was over 1,000 pages and I remember the conflicting joys of finishing it.  The book was such a trek to accomplish that I was at once proud of having gotten through it and a little sad at it being over.  This was also one of the first books that I spent a lot of time thinking about after I had finished it.  I haven't ever made my way back to re-read it, but I still might.
My later reading habits also followed this pattern.  I enjoyed the implicit challenge of a thick book.  They were almost daring me not to finish them, to pack them in after a few hundred pages.  And there have been a lot of times when, after a few weeks of reading, I realized that my bookmark was still in the first third or quarter of its thickness and was tempted to let them go.  But most times I kept going and there is generally reward in the experience beyond just the narrative itself.  Long books are journeys (he writes, tritely), and they do require a certain perspective to approach them.  One of my favorite critics, Northrop Frye, writes that reading is actually a two-part act; there is first the act of reading and then the thought about what one has read.  Some long books extend this and force us to rethink attitudes toward the book as we go.  The Stand challenged me because there were parts that I disliked and found boring.  The same was true when I read The Lord of the Rings books and ran across pages of elvish song.  There is a certain amount of boredom and drudgery that accompanies reading many large books that is a part of the pleasure of reading them because it becomes possible to inhabit the book in that time.  I can assign whole tracts of my life to the time I was reading one book or another.  The first time I read Infinite Jest, it took me nearly a year to get through it, but I always remember that I picked it up the summer after I completed my MA and moved back to Ohio and spent a good chunk of the time I was in Daytona grading AP lit exams for the first time reading it.  Likewise, the first time I attempted to read Gravity's Rainbow was when I was n undergrad and a professor happened to mention it.  I bought a copy at a second hand store that defeated me that first time.  I read Pynchon's Slow Learner collection instead because it was more digestible.
Long novels leave room for imperfection that is important to the make up of the narrative.  They seem to become less controlled as they go, which puts the reader back into the position of renegotiating their relationship to the narrative.   I like this, too, because the difficulty of a text, whether it be due to length or imperfections in the novel, is engaging.  Most long novels are necessarily complex and these complexities can reveal contradiction in a perceived world that make it more real.  Many of these novels leave loose threads or may lack resolution, but this makes them all the more reflective of our own lives.  We live each day in a mire of incomplete narrative threads.