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I’ve said before that I’m a reluctant short story reader (and I can see why you may think I protest too much, for I do read more short fiction than I honestly should for someone who claims to dislike it). My biggest difficulty with it is that I always end up wanting more.
I like to read in large time increments – settling down on a cold winter’s evening under a blanket, wiling away a Sunday afternoon, passing time on a long commute. Short fiction tends to disrupt my flow, making me break the surface of reality too soon. And since it doesn’t do justice to the next story to jump right in before you’ve digested the last one I’m often at a loss at to what to do when I’m finished.
So one would intelligently ask Why then are you reading essays?
Good question.
The answer is twofold: 1) I LOVE Anne Fadiman – I would read a cereal box she composed and 2) I’ve recently found myself with only short snippets of time to read so essays fit just right.
Of course there is always the danger that when you are in transition from one essay (or story) to the next one that your interest will be stolen away by another, more time consuming endeavor. Sadly such was the case for me this week. I was taken against my will into Borders where I bought a dog book (aka my crack) and I’ve been reading that ever since. I’ll get back to Anne in due time.
She’s a good companion right before sleep sets in. Except when she makes me laugh too hard.
“As much as I admire and value intellectualism and experimentation, I’ve discovered that unless a book has a throbbing heart as well as a sexy brain, I feel like the story is a specimen in a sealed glass jar and not a living, breathing creature I want to take by the hand and talk to for hours on end.”
Myla Goldberg from this Slate article.
[Author's note: I'm taking off on a tangent today, so don't be alarmed. The blog format will stay as usual, this is just a jaunt into a new direction. I've been sick for over a week, so you can blame the cold medicine if you wish. I certainly am. *I have not read this book* But I want to really, really badly. Unfortunately I will need to wait a) to get it from the library or b) until it comes out in affordable paperback to read it. But that doesn't meant I can't start talking about it. It's a little thing we in the biz call buzz.]
I’ve only very recently become the kind of person who reads the NY Times Sunday Book Review. Before this, I had always found my books in a very haphazard, but still pleasantly random kind of way. Now I read reviews. I try to follow what’s new and exciting. Actually it’s taken some getting used to; it’s a little unsettling to be aware of books when they come out (or before) as opposed to picking up a stray paperback from a pile in a store. Moreover it’s not healthy for my book buying habit – because, for me, to be aware of the new hardcovers is to buy them.
We’ve talked about this before. A poorly written book with a good story at its core can still be very interesting. In fact in a lot of cases, it will be wildly popular and ridiculously lucrative. A badly written book can still compel you to keep reading. Even as you wince and groan at the language, you keep pursuing the ending. You want to see the story unfold, so you stick with it.
Unfortunately.
For the past two weeks, I’ve been slogging through the over 600 pages of The Historian, lugging its hardcover heft to work and back (so much so the binding broke) and all I can think is that 1) Thankfully I read this book when I was commuting by train again and 2) I’m glad I only paid $6 for this book.
This book commits a crime greater than just being poorly written. It’s a repetitive, drab, pedantic history lesson yes, but that could be forgiven (I loath little more than a character summarizing what another character has just said - apparently for the remedial reader’s benefit). The problem is that between verbose and awful, awful prose (example - ”It was too serious to not be taken seriously”) there are hidden gems like this one:
“. . .but it seemed to me now that a Catholic church was the right companion for all these horrors. . .I somehow doubted that the hospitable plain Protestant chapels that dotted the university could be much help; they didn’t look qualified to wrestle with the undead. ”
Sounds intriguing right?
