Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Index Links
For the up-to-date index to all blog conents on Concept Reviews and companion blogs - CeptsForm, CeptsForm Library, Loria Series - click on CeptsFormIndex.
On Reading
Writing on Reading (a concept review)
A. J. Jacobs. The Know-It-All (2004).
-compared with-
Sara Nelson. So Many Books, So Little Time (2003).
Let us say that writing to communicate with others is a noble and worthy endeavor. Therefore, by extension, reading these communications is also noble and also, at least, potentially worthy. Hopefully, then, what can be more laudatory than writing about reading and reading those writings?
As adults, we likely approach the act of reading with two mentalities that co-exist even though they may struggle for dominance. Reading is a personal experience, for sure; reading is also for learning. Practically and professionally, we extol reading for its carriage of cultural heritage and knowledge. Personally, we relish reading because it gives us more enjoyment, discovery and insight than we gain from experience alone.
This mix of the social and selfish views is within me. And because of the jostling between them, I always want to explore the reading phenomenon more and more. Reading, its amount, purpose and efficacy, seems always to be in question, yet perhaps never before to the extent than it is right now. In the last half-dozen years, scores of books have taken up the subject. By happy accident, two of them fell into my lap by wondrous coincidence at the same time. Following opportunity, I read and considered them in sequence. I expected them to be complementary, maybe even harmonious, ever wishful that I am.
A.J. Jacobs, a writer and editor at Esquire, took on ‘Operation Britannica’ to read the 2002 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. As a fan of the mighty EB since my public librarian first helped me use it when I was about age eleven and had a question on Genghis Khan, I eagerly sought Jacobs’ book after seeing it noted in a remainder catalog. I wondered what the experience of reading the encyclopedia to gain knowledge was like. I taught reference services 21 times in my library career and always featured encyclopedias and the EB. I knew that EB, more than any other current encyclopedia, held to the idea that the Greeks had – the encyclopedia is the circle of knowledge.
Sara Nelson, a writer and editor at Glamour, planned a ‘Reading Year Project,’ whereby she would get through a book a week. She considered all those books she had meant to read for a long time as well as those that reviews, friends, and bookstore displays brought to her attention. I found a promo copy of her book in the fifty cent cart of clutter at my favorite used book store. Instantly, I saw Nelson as an inveterate reader and a practiced reviewer. She set out to do what all conscientious readers seek to do – follow their lists and piles of the unread. Nelson had reflectively chronicled her responses to what she read. And I had to know what she found.
In The Know-It-All: one man’s quest to become the smartest person in the world (2004), Jacobs sets forth his motivations. He seeks to recover an education lost to the past and restore a mind overrun with trivia from his years at Entertainment Weekly. Mostly, he wants to gain intelligence. When his Aunt Marti questions the supposition that amount of knowledge makes mental ability, he begins his defense. Knowledge equips intelligence with more reserves, he argues; knowledge exposes options and makes for flexibility in thinking. Likely many of us have thought this way ourselves.
In So Many Books, So Little Time: a year of passionate reading (2003), Nelson confesses her addiction to reading. She credits her father for teaching her to read, her mother for setting a reading example, her studious and critical sister, Liza Nelson, for bringing hundreds of books to her attention that she otherwise would have missed. Nelson’s world is made up of books, reading and relations to writers, other readers, the publishing field, as well as to non-readers especially her husband, or to emerging readers, namely her young son. Because Nelson is a professional reviewer and regards her book a week plan as time away from work, she takes a personal approach to each book. Consequently, there are no reviews in the traditional sense, but instead fifty wonderfully contextual and delightful crafted personal essays about reading as a lived experience.
When the editors of EB totally overhauled a two-hundred year old institution into the 15th edition of what became The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, they vaulted the educational purposes of the encyclopedia to its heights by a radical design into three parts. The Propaedia outlines in one volume all the article contents as a system of knowledge providing integration and direction. The Macropaedia (large learning) features the major articles with longer essays, some of them book-length, that bring related matters together. The Micropaedia (small learning) contains short articles including summaries of the major articles, none of them longer than 750 words, and the remaining miscellany that answers fact questions enmeshed with the detailed indexing of the set. Jacobs, however, disregards all this apparatus and reads through the encyclopedia alphabetically.
Most of Jacobs' report is accordingly an alphabetical hopscotch through a chaos of articles, A-Z. From the start, he says (p. 11), “One of my biggest challenges is figuring out how to shoehorn my new found knowledge into conversations. Naturally, I want to show off.” Such a penchant for the relatively meaningless becomes hard to shake. He meets Ron, who labors to understand philosophy and writes about it at length (p. 244). “He asks me what I have learned in the encyclopedia. I figure I should give him a philosophy fact.” Jacobs tells Ron, Descartes had a fixation for cross-eyed women.
I found only three selections that displayed any satisfactory depth, the articles encyclopedias, intelligentsia, and thinking. More troubling to me is how Jacobs could have read the 2002 edition, 44 million words, written it up and been published in 2004. He says little about his method except that he tried to read at every opportunity, complicated by the weight of lugging heavy volumes around. He investigated speed-reading but gave up on it as a sham. He reports that by the first 30 hours of reading he had reached “Amethyst.” This is equivalent to roughly 45-50,000 words an hour.
While Jacobs had amazing powers of dedication to plan, Nelson shows little consistency in sticking to her own proposal. She read routinely, but not always as intended. Often the book she planned to read in any given week did not fit the setting, mood, or competing interests of how she found herself at the moment. Family and friends pressed other books on her; past books once read suggested others found to be more alluring. She chose to read in tandem with her son when he needed encouragement so they could discuss together what they each read by themselves. Eight year old Charlie remarked about Charlotte’s Web, ‘I don’t like it, Mom. It’s about a girl and a pig. Why should I care?” But, they persevered. Charlie read it and liked it, because he saw it was a book about himself and others that he knows. Such is the motivation of most readers.
Nelson has wonderfully wise and astute things to say about the timeliness of reading, about gaining perspective and agility over time, about why Dickens or Wharton or Philip Roth or just about anyone else (she explains why Truman Capote is different) write all their books in the same vein. It’s their “sensibility,” the way they see the world and express that vision. Nelson makes clear that there is little reason to force yourself to read what others think you should read and you, however much you respect them as persons, can hardly bear their reading choices.
Nevertheless, two things happened for me in my reading of Nelson. I came to see how she reacted to books and why, and I could scale her reactions through my own filter, and decide where we connected. So when she said The Bridges of Madison County and Tuesday at Morrie’s were over-hyped and underachieving, I was glad that I had not bothered with them. I did not go for all her enthusiasms, but she definitely whetted my appetite. I wrote down ten books that I had been out of sync with and will at least investigate. I missed Norah Ephron’s Heartburn many years ago, but what she had to say about it made me so curious, I have been on the lookout for it ever since.
By the same token, nothing Jacobs wrote made me want to dive into the EB any more than I feel I already need or want to do. (I did look up, though, the origin of hot cross buns on Good Friday morning before we had them for breakfast.). At the end, Jacobs considers summing up his experience in one sentence and finds he cannot. But he does write a long paragraph in conclusion, a mix of wise realization and more trivia. “I know that everything is connected like a worldwide version of the six-degrees-of-separation game. I know that history is simultaneously a bloody mess and a collection of feats so inspiring and amazing they make you proud to share the same DNA structure with the rest of humanity… I know that opossums have thirteen nipples. I know I’ve contradicted myself a hundred times over the last year, and that history has contradicted itself thousands of times.” And finally, “I know that knowledge and intelligence are not the same thing – but they do live in the same neighborhood. I know once again, firsthand, the joy of learning.”
And I’ve learned that it’s harder to learn from someone you constantly question, than from someone you sincerely appreciate. And shared experience, even through reading, is more salable then keen reporting.
Mostly, I am confirmed that reading is a good thing, especially so because it is not all one thing.
_____
© 2005, 2009 by Roger Sween
The Jacobs and Nelson reviews when contributed to MACAE’s Update were instead chosen for the new joint publication of the Minnesota Association for Continuing Adult Education and the Minnesota Independent Scholars Forum and published as “Writing on Reading: What might be learned from two books,” Practical Thinking v.1 no.1 (July 2005) 8-9, 12. That article is here slightly revised, chiefly to alter it for a more general audience.
I welcome substantive comments on the contents of this blog. Personal comments to me may be made at my email address, rogdesk@charter.net.
A. J. Jacobs. The Know-It-All (2004).
-compared with-
Sara Nelson. So Many Books, So Little Time (2003).
Let us say that writing to communicate with others is a noble and worthy endeavor. Therefore, by extension, reading these communications is also noble and also, at least, potentially worthy. Hopefully, then, what can be more laudatory than writing about reading and reading those writings?
As adults, we likely approach the act of reading with two mentalities that co-exist even though they may struggle for dominance. Reading is a personal experience, for sure; reading is also for learning. Practically and professionally, we extol reading for its carriage of cultural heritage and knowledge. Personally, we relish reading because it gives us more enjoyment, discovery and insight than we gain from experience alone.
This mix of the social and selfish views is within me. And because of the jostling between them, I always want to explore the reading phenomenon more and more. Reading, its amount, purpose and efficacy, seems always to be in question, yet perhaps never before to the extent than it is right now. In the last half-dozen years, scores of books have taken up the subject. By happy accident, two of them fell into my lap by wondrous coincidence at the same time. Following opportunity, I read and considered them in sequence. I expected them to be complementary, maybe even harmonious, ever wishful that I am.
A.J. Jacobs, a writer and editor at Esquire, took on ‘Operation Britannica’ to read the 2002 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. As a fan of the mighty EB since my public librarian first helped me use it when I was about age eleven and had a question on Genghis Khan, I eagerly sought Jacobs’ book after seeing it noted in a remainder catalog. I wondered what the experience of reading the encyclopedia to gain knowledge was like. I taught reference services 21 times in my library career and always featured encyclopedias and the EB. I knew that EB, more than any other current encyclopedia, held to the idea that the Greeks had – the encyclopedia is the circle of knowledge.
Sara Nelson, a writer and editor at Glamour, planned a ‘Reading Year Project,’ whereby she would get through a book a week. She considered all those books she had meant to read for a long time as well as those that reviews, friends, and bookstore displays brought to her attention. I found a promo copy of her book in the fifty cent cart of clutter at my favorite used book store. Instantly, I saw Nelson as an inveterate reader and a practiced reviewer. She set out to do what all conscientious readers seek to do – follow their lists and piles of the unread. Nelson had reflectively chronicled her responses to what she read. And I had to know what she found.
In The Know-It-All: one man’s quest to become the smartest person in the world (2004), Jacobs sets forth his motivations. He seeks to recover an education lost to the past and restore a mind overrun with trivia from his years at Entertainment Weekly. Mostly, he wants to gain intelligence. When his Aunt Marti questions the supposition that amount of knowledge makes mental ability, he begins his defense. Knowledge equips intelligence with more reserves, he argues; knowledge exposes options and makes for flexibility in thinking. Likely many of us have thought this way ourselves.
In So Many Books, So Little Time: a year of passionate reading (2003), Nelson confesses her addiction to reading. She credits her father for teaching her to read, her mother for setting a reading example, her studious and critical sister, Liza Nelson, for bringing hundreds of books to her attention that she otherwise would have missed. Nelson’s world is made up of books, reading and relations to writers, other readers, the publishing field, as well as to non-readers especially her husband, or to emerging readers, namely her young son. Because Nelson is a professional reviewer and regards her book a week plan as time away from work, she takes a personal approach to each book. Consequently, there are no reviews in the traditional sense, but instead fifty wonderfully contextual and delightful crafted personal essays about reading as a lived experience.
When the editors of EB totally overhauled a two-hundred year old institution into the 15th edition of what became The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, they vaulted the educational purposes of the encyclopedia to its heights by a radical design into three parts. The Propaedia outlines in one volume all the article contents as a system of knowledge providing integration and direction. The Macropaedia (large learning) features the major articles with longer essays, some of them book-length, that bring related matters together. The Micropaedia (small learning) contains short articles including summaries of the major articles, none of them longer than 750 words, and the remaining miscellany that answers fact questions enmeshed with the detailed indexing of the set. Jacobs, however, disregards all this apparatus and reads through the encyclopedia alphabetically.
Most of Jacobs' report is accordingly an alphabetical hopscotch through a chaos of articles, A-Z. From the start, he says (p. 11), “One of my biggest challenges is figuring out how to shoehorn my new found knowledge into conversations. Naturally, I want to show off.” Such a penchant for the relatively meaningless becomes hard to shake. He meets Ron, who labors to understand philosophy and writes about it at length (p. 244). “He asks me what I have learned in the encyclopedia. I figure I should give him a philosophy fact.” Jacobs tells Ron, Descartes had a fixation for cross-eyed women.
I found only three selections that displayed any satisfactory depth, the articles encyclopedias, intelligentsia, and thinking. More troubling to me is how Jacobs could have read the 2002 edition, 44 million words, written it up and been published in 2004. He says little about his method except that he tried to read at every opportunity, complicated by the weight of lugging heavy volumes around. He investigated speed-reading but gave up on it as a sham. He reports that by the first 30 hours of reading he had reached “Amethyst.” This is equivalent to roughly 45-50,000 words an hour.
While Jacobs had amazing powers of dedication to plan, Nelson shows little consistency in sticking to her own proposal. She read routinely, but not always as intended. Often the book she planned to read in any given week did not fit the setting, mood, or competing interests of how she found herself at the moment. Family and friends pressed other books on her; past books once read suggested others found to be more alluring. She chose to read in tandem with her son when he needed encouragement so they could discuss together what they each read by themselves. Eight year old Charlie remarked about Charlotte’s Web, ‘I don’t like it, Mom. It’s about a girl and a pig. Why should I care?” But, they persevered. Charlie read it and liked it, because he saw it was a book about himself and others that he knows. Such is the motivation of most readers.
Nelson has wonderfully wise and astute things to say about the timeliness of reading, about gaining perspective and agility over time, about why Dickens or Wharton or Philip Roth or just about anyone else (she explains why Truman Capote is different) write all their books in the same vein. It’s their “sensibility,” the way they see the world and express that vision. Nelson makes clear that there is little reason to force yourself to read what others think you should read and you, however much you respect them as persons, can hardly bear their reading choices.
Nevertheless, two things happened for me in my reading of Nelson. I came to see how she reacted to books and why, and I could scale her reactions through my own filter, and decide where we connected. So when she said The Bridges of Madison County and Tuesday at Morrie’s were over-hyped and underachieving, I was glad that I had not bothered with them. I did not go for all her enthusiasms, but she definitely whetted my appetite. I wrote down ten books that I had been out of sync with and will at least investigate. I missed Norah Ephron’s Heartburn many years ago, but what she had to say about it made me so curious, I have been on the lookout for it ever since.
By the same token, nothing Jacobs wrote made me want to dive into the EB any more than I feel I already need or want to do. (I did look up, though, the origin of hot cross buns on Good Friday morning before we had them for breakfast.). At the end, Jacobs considers summing up his experience in one sentence and finds he cannot. But he does write a long paragraph in conclusion, a mix of wise realization and more trivia. “I know that everything is connected like a worldwide version of the six-degrees-of-separation game. I know that history is simultaneously a bloody mess and a collection of feats so inspiring and amazing they make you proud to share the same DNA structure with the rest of humanity… I know that opossums have thirteen nipples. I know I’ve contradicted myself a hundred times over the last year, and that history has contradicted itself thousands of times.” And finally, “I know that knowledge and intelligence are not the same thing – but they do live in the same neighborhood. I know once again, firsthand, the joy of learning.”
And I’ve learned that it’s harder to learn from someone you constantly question, than from someone you sincerely appreciate. And shared experience, even through reading, is more salable then keen reporting.
Mostly, I am confirmed that reading is a good thing, especially so because it is not all one thing.
_____
© 2005, 2009 by Roger Sween
The Jacobs and Nelson reviews when contributed to MACAE’s Update were instead chosen for the new joint publication of the Minnesota Association for Continuing Adult Education and the Minnesota Independent Scholars Forum and published as “Writing on Reading: What might be learned from two books,” Practical Thinking v.1 no.1 (July 2005) 8-9, 12. That article is here slightly revised, chiefly to alter it for a more general audience.
I welcome substantive comments on the contents of this blog. Personal comments to me may be made at my email address, rogdesk@charter.net.
Monday, March 2, 2009
On Writing
I suppose we read books on writing for either or both of two principal reasons. We may want to understand a particular author better; and/or we may want to learn to become a better writer ourselves, learning at the knee of these exemplars.
As I pay more attention to my own writing, I find over the years that when I read fiction, I am often reading to see how a particular author does it. Such bifurcated attention to reading inserts itself between my study to improve and my engagement with the sense the story or novel. Either I must focus on one or the other task, possibly reading more than once, or examine and reflect after my more passage when first absorbed.
Outside of public school English classes and general education college classes, I have never gone to authors’ school. I did sign up for old Doc Paulsen’s creative writing class at St. Olaf. But after the first session in which he told us he couldn’t teach us how to write, I believed him and switched to literary criticism with “Rocky;” that is, Dr. Rottsolk. That class and an early reading of Coombes’ Literature and Criticism (1953) and Aristotle’s Poetics presaged my sense of authorial self-examination.
Rand’s The Romantic Manifesto (1969) that recapitulates many of her early essays, read after college, set the standard for me. Subsequently few books on writing that I continued to seek out made as much difference to me as Rand had. Though The Romantic Manifesto is philosophical in approach, other titles on writing were all far more discursive without being helpful in the prescriptive sense. Though various books helped me in differing ways, they proved too Zen for me to grasp and put to use. Nothing until Rand’s The Art of Fiction (Boeckmann, 2000) and The Art of Nonfiction (Mayhew, 2001) were of consistent help.
When learning to write from others, fledglings suffer two threatening perils. Thinking that someone exists whom you can copy is fatuous. To imitate another author is to deny your own unique sensitivity. Authorial advice comes by suggestion and must accordingly be tested and applied where possible by one’s own trial and self-critical judgment of success. However much we may model others and hold ourselves against them, eventually writers must find their own voice.
Here are some helpful guides which have worked for me.
Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings (1984).
Three lectures have become one book. Welty in the first two sections dwells on her ancestry or parental influences and her earliest years. Since she lived most of her life in Jackson Mississippi, except for brief interludes away at school and work, those roots run deep.
Eventually she pulls away from all her reflections on those early influences of ancestry and childhood that shaped her writing. The third lecture is more overt and pronounced in its exposition of her writing life and philosophy. She wanted to be a writer; she wanted to see more of the world away from home. After higher education at Mississippi State Women’s College, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Columbia University business school, she was on her way to writing. She drew on her experiences, probed her interior, connected it with the world, and saw beyond the appearance of everyday things. She ends: “As you have seen, I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”
Upon re-reading One Wriher’s Beginnings and studying Welty for book club discussion, I realized that this book, though veiled and ending at her maturity, is as self-revelatory as she ever became. Otherwise, she wants her writing to stand on its own content and meaning without explication or any relationship to her own or anyone else’s biography.
I, too, have often worried about explicating too by way of accounting for my idea origins, characters and incidents. Those traces may be there, but they are mixed and switched.
David Madden, Revising Fiction (1988).
On cover: 185 practical techniques for improving your story or novel.
Though I had not found much practical or concrete help up to the Rand books on writing, that switched. After them, I found David Madden’s Revising Fiction: a handbook for writers thanks to my continuing bookstore prowls.
What Madden does is analyze and categorize writing problems and diagnoses them with examples of actual revisions. He shows how the likes of Sanuel Butler, Joseph Conrad, George Eliot, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Hardy, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, James Joyce, William Morris, etcetera – all the bigs of the NOVEL have improved their own writing. This is the best course in writing I can imagine.
I find that Madden helps me contend with my worst weaknesses. The attendant problem is that his coverage is so all-inclusive that it is hard to apply without being just as systematic and assiduous in one’s own industry. Nevertheless, I plan to spend a lot more time with his help, especially in the final revisions.
Ayn Rand, The Art of Nonfiction (2001).
Amazingly, the Rand industry goes on 18 years after her death. As with The Art of Fiction (2000), a series of old, recorded lectures has become an unintended book. Robert Mayhew edits The Art of Nonfiction: a guide for writers and readers. This culling and organization of salient points is a success.
Rand’s voice comes through, and her insights prove practically useful. I overlooked the dated references where her particular bête noirs are on display as with her unrelenting atheism and disaffection from her contemporary culture. She acknowledges few antecedents or analogues to her own writing outside of How to think creatively (1959) by Eliot Hutchinson.
Rand learned on her own, by analyzing other writing, abstracting general principles and applying them to her own endeavors and by practice. Writers write is her theme, and the diligently self-aware who follow this dictum can become more proficient. Writing is a worthy challenge, she asserts, and she is at her best in presenting the psycho-epistemology of the writing process.
As with everything Rand does, she weds her writing to its philosophical underpinning – objectivism. Thanks to her own expression and this editing, her approach to writing comes across as systematic and incisive, however impromptu and transitional these lectures were in their original form. The book diagnosed and laid bare several of my problems – even deep-seated ones especially of doubt and procrastination, and keeping these techniques fresh in mind will set me on new paths.
Later when our son asked for suggestions to improve his writing, I bought him a copy of The Art of Nonfiction, one I found remaindered, of course.
Rand does not fare well among the literati, even when she is most helpful.
_____
© 2009 by Roger Sween.
I welcome substantive comments on the contents of this blog. Personal comments to me may be made at my email address, rogdesk@charter.net.
As I pay more attention to my own writing, I find over the years that when I read fiction, I am often reading to see how a particular author does it. Such bifurcated attention to reading inserts itself between my study to improve and my engagement with the sense the story or novel. Either I must focus on one or the other task, possibly reading more than once, or examine and reflect after my more passage when first absorbed.
Outside of public school English classes and general education college classes, I have never gone to authors’ school. I did sign up for old Doc Paulsen’s creative writing class at St. Olaf. But after the first session in which he told us he couldn’t teach us how to write, I believed him and switched to literary criticism with “Rocky;” that is, Dr. Rottsolk. That class and an early reading of Coombes’ Literature and Criticism (1953) and Aristotle’s Poetics presaged my sense of authorial self-examination.
Rand’s The Romantic Manifesto (1969) that recapitulates many of her early essays, read after college, set the standard for me. Subsequently few books on writing that I continued to seek out made as much difference to me as Rand had. Though The Romantic Manifesto is philosophical in approach, other titles on writing were all far more discursive without being helpful in the prescriptive sense. Though various books helped me in differing ways, they proved too Zen for me to grasp and put to use. Nothing until Rand’s The Art of Fiction (Boeckmann, 2000) and The Art of Nonfiction (Mayhew, 2001) were of consistent help.
When learning to write from others, fledglings suffer two threatening perils. Thinking that someone exists whom you can copy is fatuous. To imitate another author is to deny your own unique sensitivity. Authorial advice comes by suggestion and must accordingly be tested and applied where possible by one’s own trial and self-critical judgment of success. However much we may model others and hold ourselves against them, eventually writers must find their own voice.
Here are some helpful guides which have worked for me.
Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings (1984).
Three lectures have become one book. Welty in the first two sections dwells on her ancestry or parental influences and her earliest years. Since she lived most of her life in Jackson Mississippi, except for brief interludes away at school and work, those roots run deep.
Eventually she pulls away from all her reflections on those early influences of ancestry and childhood that shaped her writing. The third lecture is more overt and pronounced in its exposition of her writing life and philosophy. She wanted to be a writer; she wanted to see more of the world away from home. After higher education at Mississippi State Women’s College, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Columbia University business school, she was on her way to writing. She drew on her experiences, probed her interior, connected it with the world, and saw beyond the appearance of everyday things. She ends: “As you have seen, I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”
Upon re-reading One Wriher’s Beginnings and studying Welty for book club discussion, I realized that this book, though veiled and ending at her maturity, is as self-revelatory as she ever became. Otherwise, she wants her writing to stand on its own content and meaning without explication or any relationship to her own or anyone else’s biography.
I, too, have often worried about explicating too by way of accounting for my idea origins, characters and incidents. Those traces may be there, but they are mixed and switched.
David Madden, Revising Fiction (1988).
On cover: 185 practical techniques for improving your story or novel.
Though I had not found much practical or concrete help up to the Rand books on writing, that switched. After them, I found David Madden’s Revising Fiction: a handbook for writers thanks to my continuing bookstore prowls.
What Madden does is analyze and categorize writing problems and diagnoses them with examples of actual revisions. He shows how the likes of Sanuel Butler, Joseph Conrad, George Eliot, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Hardy, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, James Joyce, William Morris, etcetera – all the bigs of the NOVEL have improved their own writing. This is the best course in writing I can imagine.
I find that Madden helps me contend with my worst weaknesses. The attendant problem is that his coverage is so all-inclusive that it is hard to apply without being just as systematic and assiduous in one’s own industry. Nevertheless, I plan to spend a lot more time with his help, especially in the final revisions.
Ayn Rand, The Art of Nonfiction (2001).
Amazingly, the Rand industry goes on 18 years after her death. As with The Art of Fiction (2000), a series of old, recorded lectures has become an unintended book. Robert Mayhew edits The Art of Nonfiction: a guide for writers and readers. This culling and organization of salient points is a success.
Rand’s voice comes through, and her insights prove practically useful. I overlooked the dated references where her particular bête noirs are on display as with her unrelenting atheism and disaffection from her contemporary culture. She acknowledges few antecedents or analogues to her own writing outside of How to think creatively (1959) by Eliot Hutchinson.
Rand learned on her own, by analyzing other writing, abstracting general principles and applying them to her own endeavors and by practice. Writers write is her theme, and the diligently self-aware who follow this dictum can become more proficient. Writing is a worthy challenge, she asserts, and she is at her best in presenting the psycho-epistemology of the writing process.
As with everything Rand does, she weds her writing to its philosophical underpinning – objectivism. Thanks to her own expression and this editing, her approach to writing comes across as systematic and incisive, however impromptu and transitional these lectures were in their original form. The book diagnosed and laid bare several of my problems – even deep-seated ones especially of doubt and procrastination, and keeping these techniques fresh in mind will set me on new paths.
Later when our son asked for suggestions to improve his writing, I bought him a copy of The Art of Nonfiction, one I found remaindered, of course.
Rand does not fare well among the literati, even when she is most helpful.
_____
© 2009 by Roger Sween.
I welcome substantive comments on the contents of this blog. Personal comments to me may be made at my email address, rogdesk@charter.net.
Toss It!
I have the habit of reading parts of many books, often because I want to find out something, but also because I have a tendency to start a book and while reading it another grabs my attention, and I may not get back to the earlier one for a long time, if ever.
However, a few times, I just grow disgusted with a book and give up on it. After 50 years of building a library to upwards of 13,000 titles, I am beginning to “de-select”, as we librarians say, when I pick up a book that I expect to benefit me, only to find that it is weak, tedious, or so marginal to my current interests that it’s useless to me.
Sometimes I find one so pathetic I trash it when I can’t imagine anyone anywhere wasting their time with it. Others go back into the thrift market where they came from. This fussiness over books raises its head as well with books borrowed from the library. The mantra, “So many books, so little time,” hangs over my head. I am not like my mother, who once she began a book, she felt obligated to finish it because she was being disloyal to the library, to the author, or to her lifelong occupation as a reader.
I have no such feelings of obligation. Here are some of the books I quit reading.
Frank Herbert, Dune (1965).
When I was active in science fiction fandom, one of the books enjoying a rage of praise was Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965). It had such buzz that I believed I had actually read it from all the talk in reviews and conversation. Finally, around 2000, I realized I had not read it, even a bit.
Dune is a massive achievement in concept and scope; I envy Herbert for all his sustained efforts to create its world and ethos. The David Lynch movie version thrilled me. I have an off-air tape of that film and watch it periodically, getting worked up over it every time. This is likely due to the high caliber of the actors and the otherness of the story-telling sometimes with more flesh than the novel. But, I gave up on Dune after reading 75% of it. I could no longer stand the continual internal monologues as the characters probe and question their own psyches and the motivations of others. Perhaps this impatience is a factor of my age or the absence of any real reason to know the end.
The fallout of my failed Dune experience, is that although I had acquired a number of titles in the Dune series by the Herberts, father and son, I tossed them. I had only read one other, Children of Dune, that I also wearied me. I thought it would never end. My displeasure, I think, came from the ceaseless family rivalries that bothered and bored me.
Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt (2002).
A couple years after the trial with Dune, I read a good deal of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt (2002) which had so caught my attention when I heard it discussed on National Public Radio that I had to have a copy right then.
I bought a hardbound at full price, something I almost never do, and plunged into reading it. I have long been fascinated by the concept of alternative history and intrigued by what authors can imagine. But after reading about 60% of it, I found I was forcing myself to read this tedious, episodic, somewhat-crazed exercise that seemed to be going nowhere and relied on reincarnations of the major characters over time to continue the story. Not for me.
Ross King, Ex-Libris (2001).
I had high hopes for Ex-Libris, a novel by Ross King, the story of a rare book dealer, hired by a mysterious lady to track down certain books in order to fully restore the library of her father. His search turns perilous due to lurking evil, then alternates with stories of the father who was instrumental in amassing the library of Rudolf II and saving it at the outbreak of the Thirty Year’s War.
After plowing through 60% of very erudite prose and 17th century English, I decided that this was all so contrived and purple enough to rival the most outrageous parody of Bulwer-Lytton. I could not care less as to what might happen next. Worst I had not learned anything.
Hugh Prather, A Book of Games (1981).
I’m always in search of alternative views of consciousness and cognitive development. I’d bought A Book of Games: a course in spiritual play by Hugh Prather, only 15 cents at the Red Wing Salvation Army. However, it is totally vacuous.
Open it anywhere and you find drivel like “Thoughts set the goal and therefore start the traveler on his way” (page 49). All too obvious; I don’t need these insults to intelligence, and I am repelled that anyone has the gall to try and make money in this manner.
Yes, I am fussy. I accept that my stance has a personal dimension. I like to think I have high standards, but often my regard or disapproval of a book is due to the values I like to see upheld in the daily world and also in literature. I give up on many plots and characters when in my mind, they are stupid or act for reasons that have no real accountability to life and its opportunities.
___
© 2009 by Roger Sween.
I welcome substantive comments on the contents of this blog. Personal comments to me may be made at my email, rogdesk@charter.net.
However, a few times, I just grow disgusted with a book and give up on it. After 50 years of building a library to upwards of 13,000 titles, I am beginning to “de-select”, as we librarians say, when I pick up a book that I expect to benefit me, only to find that it is weak, tedious, or so marginal to my current interests that it’s useless to me.
Sometimes I find one so pathetic I trash it when I can’t imagine anyone anywhere wasting their time with it. Others go back into the thrift market where they came from. This fussiness over books raises its head as well with books borrowed from the library. The mantra, “So many books, so little time,” hangs over my head. I am not like my mother, who once she began a book, she felt obligated to finish it because she was being disloyal to the library, to the author, or to her lifelong occupation as a reader.
I have no such feelings of obligation. Here are some of the books I quit reading.
Frank Herbert, Dune (1965).
When I was active in science fiction fandom, one of the books enjoying a rage of praise was Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965). It had such buzz that I believed I had actually read it from all the talk in reviews and conversation. Finally, around 2000, I realized I had not read it, even a bit.
Dune is a massive achievement in concept and scope; I envy Herbert for all his sustained efforts to create its world and ethos. The David Lynch movie version thrilled me. I have an off-air tape of that film and watch it periodically, getting worked up over it every time. This is likely due to the high caliber of the actors and the otherness of the story-telling sometimes with more flesh than the novel. But, I gave up on Dune after reading 75% of it. I could no longer stand the continual internal monologues as the characters probe and question their own psyches and the motivations of others. Perhaps this impatience is a factor of my age or the absence of any real reason to know the end.
The fallout of my failed Dune experience, is that although I had acquired a number of titles in the Dune series by the Herberts, father and son, I tossed them. I had only read one other, Children of Dune, that I also wearied me. I thought it would never end. My displeasure, I think, came from the ceaseless family rivalries that bothered and bored me.
Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt (2002).
A couple years after the trial with Dune, I read a good deal of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt (2002) which had so caught my attention when I heard it discussed on National Public Radio that I had to have a copy right then.
I bought a hardbound at full price, something I almost never do, and plunged into reading it. I have long been fascinated by the concept of alternative history and intrigued by what authors can imagine. But after reading about 60% of it, I found I was forcing myself to read this tedious, episodic, somewhat-crazed exercise that seemed to be going nowhere and relied on reincarnations of the major characters over time to continue the story. Not for me.
Ross King, Ex-Libris (2001).
I had high hopes for Ex-Libris, a novel by Ross King, the story of a rare book dealer, hired by a mysterious lady to track down certain books in order to fully restore the library of her father. His search turns perilous due to lurking evil, then alternates with stories of the father who was instrumental in amassing the library of Rudolf II and saving it at the outbreak of the Thirty Year’s War.
After plowing through 60% of very erudite prose and 17th century English, I decided that this was all so contrived and purple enough to rival the most outrageous parody of Bulwer-Lytton. I could not care less as to what might happen next. Worst I had not learned anything.
Hugh Prather, A Book of Games (1981).
I’m always in search of alternative views of consciousness and cognitive development. I’d bought A Book of Games: a course in spiritual play by Hugh Prather, only 15 cents at the Red Wing Salvation Army. However, it is totally vacuous.
Open it anywhere and you find drivel like “Thoughts set the goal and therefore start the traveler on his way” (page 49). All too obvious; I don’t need these insults to intelligence, and I am repelled that anyone has the gall to try and make money in this manner.
Yes, I am fussy. I accept that my stance has a personal dimension. I like to think I have high standards, but often my regard or disapproval of a book is due to the values I like to see upheld in the daily world and also in literature. I give up on many plots and characters when in my mind, they are stupid or act for reasons that have no real accountability to life and its opportunities.
___
© 2009 by Roger Sween.
I welcome substantive comments on the contents of this blog. Personal comments to me may be made at my email, rogdesk@charter.net.
Scope Note
Concept Reviews is a companion blog by Roger Sween to Ceptsform, CeptsForm Library, and Loria Series. All the postings in all these blogs continuously update as described links in CeptsForm Index.
As I have a tendency to relate one thing to other things, the idea for Concept Reviews came to me some years ago. This proclivity to see or look for relationships appeared especially strong whenever I read a book and compellingly strong when I wrote up any notes or reviews of them. Of course, I recognize that individual books relate to one another in myriad ways. Comparison of any two or number of them to one another on some basis can neither be exhaustive of a book’s possibilities to make some kind of sense nor comprehensive in any topical approach towards inclusion of even the most incisive books for a topic.
Nevertheless, thinking about one book in relation to another or a bunch of others is both enjoyable and revealing. To do so in a more deliberate and bundling or branching way than I have done before is worth the experiment. Besides, it promises to encourage me on to more reading, more thinking, more connecting, more valuation of alternatives that I already desire and more fully achieve.
Another driver is my desire to look at the longer range of worthy literature than what is current or transitory. I have nagging doubts that we as readers do not obtain enough length of focus in our attention and ought, therefore, gain a better grasp of the conversations that have taken place, not only over the decades of our own life. For centuries back us up through the inheritance of literature in all its forms and through its trails and trains of contents somehow linked together.
What follows is a series of conceptual headings with two or more titles discussed and in some way comparable to one another. What will likely happen is that conceptual postings will be revised and expanded with the passage of time as additional titles are placed with those that came together first.
I welcome substantive comments to the contents of this blog. Personal comments to me may be made at my email address, rogdesk@charter.net.
As I have a tendency to relate one thing to other things, the idea for Concept Reviews came to me some years ago. This proclivity to see or look for relationships appeared especially strong whenever I read a book and compellingly strong when I wrote up any notes or reviews of them. Of course, I recognize that individual books relate to one another in myriad ways. Comparison of any two or number of them to one another on some basis can neither be exhaustive of a book’s possibilities to make some kind of sense nor comprehensive in any topical approach towards inclusion of even the most incisive books for a topic.
Nevertheless, thinking about one book in relation to another or a bunch of others is both enjoyable and revealing. To do so in a more deliberate and bundling or branching way than I have done before is worth the experiment. Besides, it promises to encourage me on to more reading, more thinking, more connecting, more valuation of alternatives that I already desire and more fully achieve.
Another driver is my desire to look at the longer range of worthy literature than what is current or transitory. I have nagging doubts that we as readers do not obtain enough length of focus in our attention and ought, therefore, gain a better grasp of the conversations that have taken place, not only over the decades of our own life. For centuries back us up through the inheritance of literature in all its forms and through its trails and trains of contents somehow linked together.
What follows is a series of conceptual headings with two or more titles discussed and in some way comparable to one another. What will likely happen is that conceptual postings will be revised and expanded with the passage of time as additional titles are placed with those that came together first.
I welcome substantive comments to the contents of this blog. Personal comments to me may be made at my email address, rogdesk@charter.net.
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