Literature

The one benefit of having a very long commute to work each day is that it allows one to get through a lot of audiobooks and podcasts. Not that I actually listen to a lot of audiobooks, admittedly, mainly because I like to mark up my books and share interesting passages on twitter as I go. They do benefit from professional narration, though, like a radio play, and poetry especially benefits from being read out loud. Of course, audiobooks are also a distraction while driving, though if I do get into an auto accident at least I’ll go out listening to something good.

I’ve heard of Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren’s How to Read a Book here and there before, but decided to give it a read after seeing Henry Dampier’s review of it, and thinking that it may be useful, especially since I’m trying to read more (and maybe even read better) this year.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find the book as helpful as I thought I might, though that’s not really the fault of the authors. My main problem is simply that I’m already doing some of the things they suggest, e.g.  “inspectional” reading, skim- or pre-reading, or taking notes. The reminders don’t hurt, and I did pick up a few things, but I didn’t really need 336 pages of it, either.

Yep, going back to subtitles for this monthly - hey, remember when Bibliophile’s Journal was going to be a monthly series? Well, we just skipped a month or ten. No big deal.

Anyway, I’ve read a few things in the past month or so, so let’s bring the journal back.

First up, Alex Cross, Run by James Patterson, and Rules of Prey by John Sandford. Alex Cross was loaned to me by my boss, Rules by a co-worker. I’m fifty pages into the second and it’s tolerable; I finished the first and it sucks. Our hero, Alex Cross, perfectly fits the cliché of the “good cop,” so if you’ve seen most any B-grade crime movie or TV show, you’ve met this character. The villains are one-dimensional and more evil than Satan; Patterson tries to add some shock value by making their crimes perverse and adding some sexual tension between the two men, but it comes across as what an eighth-grader would write if asked to produce a “shocking” crime novel.

Once in a while, I come across a work of fiction that should be better than it is, and unfortunately Bram Stoker’s Dracula fits firmly into that category. The premise carries the novel through, and the story does have some strong points, but Stoker does a couple of things that undermine the whole work.

The first major problem is that Stoker wrote this as an epistolary novel. I believe this style used to be much more common than it is now, but was already long past its prime when Stoker wrote Dracula, and good riddance. Ideally, the epistolary style adds a sense of realism, making the reader feel like he’s a researcher going through primary documents, rather than reading an artificially constructed narrative. Since much of Dracula is essentially a mystery story, this approach does serve the plot well. However, I found the constant changes in narrator, and the changes in tone, setting, and style that accompanied that, distracting, and it made the novel more difficult to get into. Also, the epistolary style doesn’t do as good a job of conveying action as a basic third-person narration, and overall the novel may have been better if Stoker had simply used the third-person omniscient narrator.

Yeah, dropping the post subtitling thing after one week. Maybe next time, if I think of something good.

Anyway, this past month may mark the beginning of a change in the way I read books, since I’ve subscribed to Audible. I’ve listened to a handful of audiobooks in the past, and though I don’t like them nearly as much as sitting down and reading through a physical book I decided to give this a try since I often find myself listening to podcasts while, say, cooking or working out. I don’t actually follow many podcasts, though, but audiobooks seem like a logical step. Besides, I don’t get through as many books as I’d like, and this should help with that.

Yeah, I’m classing it down this time with a rather silly subtitle. Couldn’t resist, for some reason.

Anyway, as you may guess from my last few posts I’m back to my usual self, devouring one book after another. Of course, there’s always a trade-off, so recently I’ve been watching fewer anime and movies than usual. There are several interesting-looking shows coming up this season, though, so perhaps my reading schedule will collapse again in a week or two. In the meantime, besides Haruhi and The Sea, here’s what I’ve been reading lately:

The American release of Tanigawa Nagaru’s Haruhi Suzumiya novels are in the home stretch, with the recent release of The Dissociation of Haruhi Suzumiya. It’s the first of a two-part story, to be concluded in the next and last novel, so I’ll hold off on a full review. There were, however, a few things I found interesting with this one.

The most obvious feature of this novel is that the narrative splits halfway through, and what occurs over the next few days differs significantly between the two versions. Though there is some overlap between the two, the differences aren’t subtle like, say, the “Endless Eight” story arc from a few volumes back. I don’t see any hint as to how these two parallel timelines may relate to each other, except that Kyon, our intrepid narrator, does mention not having encountered a slider yet near the beginning of the book. Is it time for one to finally appear?

Last week I read The Sea, by John Banville. I went into the book essentially blind; I didn’t know much about Banville and didn’t even know what the novel’s about, but an acquaintance whose opinion I highly respect recommended it to me, so I dove in quickly.

The Sea is narrated by a man whose wife is dying, and the novel jumps back and forth between scenes with her and their daughter in the present, and his memories of spending time with a family in a beach town where he spent much of his childhood. I enjoyed Banville’s writing style; he spends a lot of time describing the setting and characters, so the story feels very real. He seems to have taken a great deal of care in how he phrases each statement, choosing just the right words for what he describes and savouring each paragraph. The narrator’s speech, though, still sounds natural, like someone speaking deliberately, trying to convey an experience even as he himself can’t quite tell why it feels significant, as in the following passage:

While telling a friend about a new poem he’d been working on, Dylan Thomas commented that he would use the title “Deaths and Entrances” for both the poem and the collection “because that is all I ever write about or want to write about."* Though Thomas did, of course, write about several other topics, he did use mortality as the topic of many of his poems. His treatment of the subject, though, changes drastically over the course of his career, beginning with satire and moving through anxiety, resistance, and finally a graceful acceptance.

The first thing most people notice when they read Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is how amazingly short it is – just two lines, plus a title. By making the work so brief, Pound successfully denies the reader a sense of closure or fulfillment after finishing the poem, which emphasizes the work’s implication of the anonymity and listlessness of the people in the titular metro station. Although Pound certainly could have made the work longer and more developed, the work is ultimately strengthened by denying the reader any development of its central idea.