So at the end of the year I briefly review the books I read. I’ll start with fiction this year…and
non-fiction will follow sometime in the next 4 months if history provides any precedent.[1]
I decided to bring some order to this year’s list by ‘counting down’
from books I did not like to those I loved in 8 categories. But the down side of this approach is that I
start out cantankerous and critical and if you don’t make it past the first
few, it seems like I didn’t like anything.
Not true. I liked most of
them. So skim the first couple if you
want to miss me yelling ‘get of my lawn’ from my rocking chair at the YA
industrial complex.
After a disappointing finish to my survey of YA dystopias (that started
last year) I turned to neo-classic Science Fiction (with a substantial
additional dose of Martin and Gaiman). I
used this list:
(and a couple others) to select
‘classic but not old’ science fiction (i.e. Science fiction with contemporary
science and modern writing[2]). So, without further preliminaries:
Pthhh[3]
– Not Good
"In
the end you can't always choose to keep, you can only choose how you let it
go."
It is hard for me to take the "love stories" in YA literature
seriously. Not because young love can
never be real, but because the descriptions of it in art are generally as thin
and naive as most high school crushes. And
dystopic window dressing aside, this is primarily a high school love triangle
where the protagonist makes the wrong choice based on very ‘YA’ ideas about
what ‘love’ is.[5]
The first book wasn’t terrible and the little dystopic romance set up
was even a little clever and a little engaging.
But once cracks formed in the utopian world and things started to take a
dark turn, everything got vested in bad romantic choices. Then, book 2 was the most useless ‘trilogy
bridge book’ I’ve ever read. So when I
found that the third book wasn’t available on CD at our library - I did not
feel even a little bit of sadness or regret or for a moment entertain the idea
of buying it.
Also building your plot around classic literature and constantly
repeating the lines of a famous poem does not make you The Book Thief if the
rest of your plot is about the raging hormones of a couple teenagers who are
simultaneously more knowledgeable and less wise than most teenagers I know.
If I Stay – Gayle Forman (A)
Macabre, emotionally heavy handed, philosophically inconsistent,
uneven, unwise, and often dull. If it
was longer I would not have finished it.
Not Terrible – But Not Good
The Leftovers – Tom
Perotta (A)
“At
her sister's urging Norah and her kids once attended a Service at ZBC. Her husband refused to waste a Sunday
morning. And she'd been a little put off
by the evangelical fervor. It was a style
of preaching she'd never encountered close up having spent her childhood as a
half hearted Catholic and her adulthood as an equally passionless
non-believer.”
OK, the set up drew me in.
What if a secular artists with a penchant for small town relational
fiction/satire, wrote a ‘Left Behind’ type story about a post-rapture world?
His imagination of the fallout of a massive disappearance was
interesting. But in the end, the
disappearance was too arbitrary and illogical to give the narrative any
directionality (e.g. there is an extended analysis of Sponge Bob). Maybe that is exactly the satirical deconstruction
of dispensational eschatology the author was going for (and not a totally
unfair deconstruction). Maybe it was a
thought experiment about losing hope in the future. But it was a better concept than novel.
Entertaining But Forgettable
Maze Runner – James
Dashner (A)
"Sometimes
you don't look very hard for things you don't think can or will happen."
The authors I have been reading really esteem Dashner. He’s shown up as a guest on ‘Writing Excuses’
and people refer to him as the big current success story. I found the Maze Runner very readable, but it
was more of an intro to a series than a novel.
It did not tell enough of its own story.
This book is consistently referenced as a perfect example of “get in
late and out early” (e.g. don’t ruin a good adventure with a lot of back
story.) But it probably got in too late
and out too early. The only thing I knew
about the characters by the end of the book was that there was a LOT I didn’t
know about them. I didn’t trust them and
didn’t really care about them enough to pick up the sequel[7]…which
seems like a failure on its own terms.
The Passage - Justin
Cronin (A)
“A
baby was a fact. It was a being with a mind and a nature, and you could feel
about it any way you liked, but a baby wouldn't care. Just by existing, it
demanded that you believe in a future: the future it would crawl in, walk in,
live in. A baby was a piece of time; it was a promise you made that the world
made back to you[8].”
I like post-civilization[9]
zombie survival narratives. I just did
not find much in this one to distinguish it.
It was professionally written and moved well, and I cared about the characters,
but it did not stay with me in any way.
Anasi Boys – Neil
Gaiman (A)
I read a lot of Gaiman this year (see Graveyard Book and Fragile Things
below). This wasn’t bad, and my feelings
about art about brothers is well documented (I tend to like it). But this book was the most forgettable of the
Gaiman bunch.
Entertaining and Not as Forgettable
Incarceron/Safique –
Catherine Fisher (A)
They
did not give me a way to see outside myself...can you imagine how it must be to
live forever trapped in your own mind
Fisher gets points for not writing a trilogy when she only had two
books of material. And I liked her world
and characters. The twist about the
location of the prison was great, the father daughter dynamic was wonderful,
and the future/period courtliness gave it a unique ‘look.’ There were a couple
great lines and I even used the story ark as a major illustration for a talk
on the Incarnation (which even sounds like Incarceron) which totally worked
(but at least in part because I used fan art that imagined the protagonist as
played by Taylor Lautnor, but also because the story is very ‘Incarational’).
Divergent – Veronica Roth
(A)
“I
am selfish. I am brave.”
“Politeness
is deception wrapped up in pretty packaging.”
“Human
reason can excuse any evil; that is why it's so important that we don't rely on
it.”
“I'm
going to shoot a muffin off Marlene's head.”
I refuse to start a trilogy until it is finished. And so with the publication of the third book
of this series, I picked up the first one.
Roth writes beyond her years, and has more mature and helpful themes
and internal world in her ‘girl in a dystopia’ than the grownups writing in the
genre are offering.[10] We are excited about the movie and I’ll probably
read the sequels this year.
Maybe Great but Seriously Flawed
Jonathan Strange and Mr
Norell – Susanna Clarke (A)
“He
had a very young man's belief in the absolute justice of his own cause and the
absolute wrongness of everyone else’s.”[11]
I couldn’t decide if Stange and Norell was tedious or brilliant. I lean more towards the latter than the
former, but I wasn’t totally sure. I
could have found an argument to put it in any of my categories. The world is rich and the characters fully
realized and interesting…but then again, for the number of pages devoted to
those tasks, they better be.
The writing was great and the magical world was interesting, though the
rules were a little difficult to piece together.[12] The best part was the alternate history. What would the Napoleonic wars have been like
if England suddenly (re)discovered magic?
But it moved very slowly. I think
it might have been brilliant at half the length.
But maybe I just cut Clarke a bunch of slack because of her love of
footnotes.
The Sword of Shanara –
Terry Brooks (A)
I also have no idea how to categorize this.
It was a re-read of one of my favorite books from High School (even
though I had almost no memory of its content).
Brooks is often credited with the rediscovery of the fantasy genre. And while the excessive use of adjectives and
adverbs bugged me (now that ‘how to write books’ have told me that they are
supposed to) the book was engaging and entertaining as an adult. It pales in comparison to modern fantasy, but
it isn’t modern fantasy and shouldn’t be judged by contemporary standards.
But it is painfully derivative.
The plotlines and characters and themes lifted directly from Lord of the
Rings were impossible to overlook. And
after I finished, a little poking around the internet suggested that this has
been a major critique of TSOS since it came out.
Still, I loved the reveal of the magic of the sword. I loved what the sword did to hero and villain
alike.[13]
The Brief Wondrous Life of
Oscar Wao - Junot DÃaz (A)
“Rushdie
says that dictators and scribblers are natural enemies. But I think that’s lets writers off too
easy. Dictators just know competition
when they see it. Same with
writers. Like after all recognizes
like.”
“We
all know how tolerant the tolerant are.”
Great writing. Interesting story.
Wonderful description of the internal world of a teenage nerd. Incredible insider observations of Dominican
culture and history.
Unnecessarily unsatisfying ending.
I don’t know enough to understand if this is a deconstruction or a
description of Dominican masculinity and sexuality. It works as the former but I’m not sure it
does as the latter. (Footnote has big spoilers but also most of
the analysis[14]). And any satisfaction the ending appears to
offer us is undone, not by the natural consequences of the story, but by a kind
of reverse “Deus ex machina," [15]
which seems capricious and unfair. I can
handle an unsatisfying ending if it was the inevitable direction of the
narrative, but this one seemed unsatisfying for no particular reason except
author whim.
The Amazing Adventures of
Kavalier & Clay– Michael Chabon (A)
“Freedom
was a debt that could only be repaid by purchasing the freedom of others.”
“(She
seemed to) live among men whose solutions were invariably more complicated than
the problems they endeavored to solve.”
I had this in the previous section but moved it up on principle. Including a Pulitzer in ‘Entertaining but
Forgettable’ probably says more about me than it. But while the text was engaging and enjoyable
I just couldn’t vest in the hasty forgiveness and reunion in the end.[16] It seemed like the last 40 pages were written
to a deadline and did not match the rest of the book’s pace, tone, or artistry. I did like the novel, though. To say ‘Chabon selects and orders words well’
is kind of like saying ‘Drew Brees can throw a football.’ But my for some reason, my early interactions
with his works[17] have still been underwhelming. I’m not giving up, though, and have a couple
picked out for 2014.
Fragile Things – Neil
Gaiman (A)
"I
was not so old that I would deny my own senses."
I love short stories. In the
same way that I think that most non-fiction books should be 1200 word
pamphlets, I think most novels could be novellas or short stories.[18] And I think short story, novella, and very
short story are Gaiman’s better genre.
Several of these stories are amazing.
“A Study in Emerald,” “The Map Maker,” and others are wonderful. In fact, with a couple exceptions, the
stories get better as the volume proceeds.
And in most cases, I listened to the story, went online and read a bunch
of analysis, and then listened to it again.[19]
But, The Problem of Susan…
I knew that I was going to disagree with ‘The Problem of Susan’ but I
thought that it would be clever and subversive and interesting and even fun…but
at least it would be worthy of the volume and the author. And the first 80% of the story was all those
things. A deconstruction of Lewis worthy
of Gaiman. And then it turned. And by the time the Lion was performing
felatio[20]
on the Witch, I turned on the entire volume. [21] Gaiman argued that he had always found the
bit about Susan in ‘The Last Battle’[22]
‘irritating’ and wanted to write a story equally ‘irritating.’ Maybe he meant to ruin a wonderful,
thoughtful, subversive, nuanced story with a ghastly, horrific ending. Maybe that is a not-so-subtly parody of the
end of Narnia. But I was irritated, and
pissed. So a book that should have been
in the final category instead, gets the ‘should have been great, but deeply
flawed’ designation.
Really Good
Pattern Recognition –
William Gibson (A)
“Advertising is the inverse of espionage.” [23]
“If
they had asked she would have told them she was weeping for her century,
whether the one past or the one present she didn't know.”
"Paranoia,
he said, was fundamentally egocentric, and every conspiracy theory served in
some way to aggrandize the believer."
I’ve never read Neuromancer and will remedy that someday. But Gibson is one of the premier science
fiction authors (credited with inventing the term cyberspace and siring the
cyber punk fiction genre – plus he has a great name) so I got the only audio
book the library had by him. It was very
good. He’s an excellent writer and the
adventure romp was very readable without ever feeling artless. Plus, his insight on our time and travel is wise
and penetrating and often fun. He gets the
artfulness and artlessness of our era, and packages it in prose.
For example, he posits that ‘jet lag’ is due to the fact that our soul
cannot travel as fast as planes, and takes a while to rejoin us in full effect
when we hop around the globe, which is surely a profound metaphor of some sort.
But sometimes he stops writing cyper-punk page turning adventure and
takes a break from cutting social commentary and just writes. There is a scene near the end of the book
that I don’t remember as prose as much as a perfectly shot black and white film
sequence. If I have to think twice about
whether I read the book or saw the film…when there isn’t actually a film option,
and author done something special.
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
– Cory Doctorow
“Junkies
don't miss sobriety, because they don't remember how sharp everything was, how
the pain made the joy sweeter. We can't remember what it was like to work to
earn our keep; to worry that there might not be enough, that we might get sick
or get hit by a bus. We don't remember what it was like to take chances, and we
sure as shit don't remember what it felt like to have them pay off."[24]
This is the kind of book where the premise is better than the execution,
but at 120 pages, a great premise and an acceptable execution is totally
sufficient (Seriously, I’m, not hard.
But if you make me read 500 pages…or a trilogy, the requirements for
artfulness and/or entertainment increase).
In the future, Disney is taken over and run by rival ‘gangs’ that
coexist uneasily and occasionally try to expand into each other’s
territory. Oh, and people can be
uploaded into new bodies when they die so everyone is really old but young[25]…but
no one is particularly mature.
Glasshouse – Charles
Stross (A)
"a
vestigial agricultural installation maintained for aesthetic or traditional
reasons" – description of a 20th century suburban garden[26]
I like a heavy dose of science in my science fiction. And Stross fits the bill.[27]
His writing is great and the concept was interesting, even if his
themes were a bit heavy handed.[28]
Future ‘war criminals’ who have had that part of their memories
expunged are recruited as part of a sociological experiment to populate a
simulation of our time (which was historically important but actually lost to
history, so they are trying to re-create and understand it
experimentally). This sets up a very
natural opportunity for ‘fish out of water’ social commentary.
There were a lot of similarities between this and “Down and Out in the
Magic Kingdom”[29]
but while the premise of DAOITMK was more fun, the premise of Glasshouse was
pretty great and the execution was mostly excellent.
Fantastic
Game of Thrones/Crown of
Kings - George RR Martin (A)
“There
is no creature on earth quite so terrifying than a truly just man.”
"It
is one thing to be clever and another thing to be wise. I wonder what the years have done to him."
“How
can a man be brave when he is afraid? A
man only can be brave when he is afraid.”
“War
was easier than daughters.”
I’ve written a lot about my affection for GRR in the posts
about my own experiments with writing and wrote another post
on these books (and have others in the works).
So, ‘let me sum up.’ Mostly I
love GRR’s world building (‘he world build’s like a grown up’), but his
willingness to buy real dramatic tension at the cost of beloved characters is
something you have to respect.
World War Z – Max Brooks (A)
"Freedom
isn't just something you have for the sake of having. You have to want something else first and
then want the freedom to fight for it."
I am kind of a sucker for ‘found literature’ genre fiction[30]
and for zombie narrative. And this is
the best of both. It cobbles together an
oral history of a fictional event with a series of short stories that stand
alone and work together. It is wonderful
precisely because it would not make a good Brad Pitt movie, it tells a human
story in a decentralized medium, exploring our shared qualities in diverse
responses.
Silence – Shusako Endo (A)
"Why
is human life so full of grotesque irony?"
“Trample!
Trample! It is to be trampled on by you that I am here.”
Fantastic. Difficult and brutal
and beautiful.[31] A Japanese author takes on the era of
Christian persecution[32]
and poses a supra-Moltmanian answer to the problem of suffering and, more
particularly, the silence of God.[33][34]
The Graveyard Book – Neil
Gaiman (A)
“People
want to forget the impossible. It makes
the world safer.”
“If
you couldn’t trust a poet for sensible advice, who could you trust?”[35]
This was my first exposure to Gaiman.
It was wonderful. Just a
delightful light (if with a little bit of characteristic Gaiman darkness) story
built on a fun concept: What if a graveyard full of ghosts[36]
(with a little corporeal help from a vampire and a wearwolf) attempted to raise
a child. Kind of like a mystical jungle
book. His children’s literature tempers
his darkness with lightness and wonder in a really fine way.
A Constellation of Vital
Phenomenon – Anthony Marra (A)
“We
wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than
wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we
are.”
I read these last two books after I read several books (and listened to
a lot of audio content) on ‘how to write fiction’ near the end of the year (see
non-fiction list to follow). They both
demonstrated precisely what those books were describing making it look simultaneously
effortless and entirely unattainable. [37]
As with Junto Diaz’ work and Dominican history, part of the allure of Constellation
is that I was almost entirely ignorant of the Chechnyan conflicts,[38]
and Marra writes as if he had been there.[39]
“It
was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin
shoots of some new desire rising from within it.”
Saunders was pitched to me as “a PhD in geophysical engineering[42]
turned author.” Is that something I
might be interested in? Yes. Yes please.
10th turns out to be a diverse short story collection that
does interesting and sometimes disorienting things with point of view, includes
a couple perfectly constructed narratives,[43]
majors on themes of privilege[44],
explores a range of human states with surprising ease, and is about half populated
with what I would characterize ‘literary science fiction’ where incremental technological
innovation enables the plot but serves the prose.[45]
Next: Non-Fiction
This post was written while
listening to the Sons and Daughters Pandora channel.[46]
[1] Also, yes I realize that I am currently 2/3rds of the
way through my physical/theological anthropology series (though I might be the
only one that realizes it). The third installment
is done but not done enough. And I
wanted to get the year end list closer to, you know, the actual year end. So the speculations about a cold blooded
incarnation will run a little farther from the celebration of the incarnation
than I expected.
[2] Since one of my reading objectives is to read good,
contemporary literature so that I can develop an artistic intuition for my own
writing, which is mostly genre Science Fiction that aspires to be literary
Science Fiction.
[3] Picture me making a raspberry sound.
[4] (A) indicates I listened to this as an audio book,
which is the primary way I experience fiction.
[5]
The whole book is based idea that the best match would be substantially better
than the second best and would correlate with attraction. The whole romantic premise that this book is
based on, actually, overlooks most of the recent (and not so recent)
psychological findings on happiness, self determination, self understanding,
and regret. Young adult literature, (like
adult literature, but more so,) should craft a fake world that makes reality
more real, not that makes reality seem the way we want it to be.
[6] Of all the things about this book that are
objectionable the parenting was the worst.
The parents were Portland musicians who were about a decade or two past
their prime, but never seemed to change their approach to life. They parented by coolness, ordering their
family with playful banter. And this
worked, because this is fiction…bad fiction…bad young adult fiction (which has
a lower bar for ‘plausibility structures’ it needs to pass through and,
therefore, requires less realism).
[7] Contrast this to Divergent that hit the ground
running (off a train) but built characters I cared about by the end.
[8] Totally unrelated to the book, something like this
quote is at the heart of my theology of children. Saying stuff like “the world is too broken to
bring children into it” (which my wife and I said for almost a decade) sounds
kind of loving and wise but is either total bull shit* or total chicken
shit. It is a capitulation. Having children is both an actual and
dramatic act of hope and a pact with the evil in the world that we will not roll
over that easy. It is a big F-you to the
evil in this world. It refuses to allow
evil to define the terms of the game. It
is the ultimate act of faith, that behind the horror, there is something or
someone fundamentally good in the fabric of the universe and that reality is worth
experiencing despite its many capricious and violent features. Forget the ‘sinner’s prayer’, the biggest
expression of my faith in God is those three little people.
*What it actually
means, usually, is that the world is too scary to make myself that vulnerable
to its power. I’m too scared of what the
world can do to care that deeply about someone in it. Or I like free time.
[9] I refuse to use the term ‘post apocalyptic’ because
there is nothing ‘apocalyptic’ (politically subversive symbolic prose that
reveal cosmic reality behind human hegemony) about almost any zombie
narrative. We use the words dystopic and
apocalyptic interchangeably, but they are not the same words.
[10] It certainly helps my affection for her writing that
we share a world view and I generally agree with her analyses and sensibilities. But I think it mostly just helps that she
actually writes from a formed world view.
An artist has to have something to say.
[11] “As early as the twelfth century it was recognized that
priests and magicians are in some sense rivals…In many ways the two cosmologies
are remarkably similar, but priests and magicians draw very different
conclusions from this understanding. Magicians are chiefly interested in the
usefulness of these supernatural beings; they wish to know under what
circumstances and by what means angels, demons and fairies can be brought to
lend their aid in magical practices. For their purposes it is almost irrelevant
that the first class of beings is divinely goo d, the second infernally wicked
and the third morally suspect. Priests on the other hand are scarcely
interested in any thing else.”
[12] Understanding the rules of a magical world is pretty
important to maintain tension, otherwise the reader will just expect a magical
resolution.
[13] I
have a post mostly written about this.
[14] Spoiler alert ******So let me get this straight, Oscar
gets unnecessarily murdered, and the package that was supposed to make his
death redemptive is lost in the mail, but we are supposed to be ok with this
(or at least, less sad) because the fat kid finally got laid? Did I misunderstand? A really beautiful, well observed work, until
the puzzling ending.”**********
[15] What is the opposite of a “Deus ex
machina?" Whatever it is, it seems
similarly out of bounds.
[16] Spoiler Alert: **********A father going AWOL for 5
years is not ok. It is very hard to see
him as a sympathetic character after that.**********
[17] I tried to get into Telegraph Avenue three time and
just couldn’t get far enough to count it on this list.
[18] My own novel wants to be about 45,000 words.
[19] I’m not sure if this makes the stories obtuse or
brilliant, but I’ll go with the latter.
[20] I don’t know how to spell this word, but WORD doesn’t
give me good options and I refuse to type it into google.
[21] It didn’t help that the story that followed the
‘Problem of Susan’ celebrated an affair with a particular lack of remorse and
was equally ‘irritating.’
[22] Admittedly, “The Last Battle” was the weakest of the
Narnia volumes and Lewis did not have a lot of warm relationships with women in
his life until his brief marriage just before their deaths (you cannot do a
fair feminist evisceration of Lewis until you understand the exploitive nature
of the relationship that dominated his youth and young adulthood)…but I have
always thought far too little attempt has been made to understand ‘the problem
of Susan’ (a term coined by this short story) on Narnian terms.
[23] “We have no
idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that
sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future,
or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another
day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things
can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our
grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because
our present is too volatile. ... We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios.”
[24] “I think that I
was too self-centered to ever develop good skills as a peacemaker. In my
younger days, I assumed that it was because I was smarter than everyone else,
with no patience for explaining things in short words for mouth-breathers who
just didn't get it.”
[25] Everyone who had serious philosophical conundra on that
subject just, you know, died, a generation before. The Bitchun Society didn't
need to convert its detractors, just outlive them.
[26] My affection for this quote will surprise no one who knows
me and my feelings about lawn care and gardening.
[27] Drop the word ‘senescent’ to describe ‘being old’ and
you’ve pretty much got me.
[28] And his religious themes are downright clumsy.
[29] Turns out the authors are friends.
[30] Probably because of my belief that Kierkegaard
(particularly Either/Or) invented the genre.
I have a ‘series of short stories’ (that currently is one short story
and two introductions by fictional editors) that is of this ‘found literature’
type and borrows the initials from SK’s editors in Either/Or (which goes three
pseudonyms deep in an experiment in irony that is complicated even for a guy
who did his dissertation on irony and people debate what he believed because
most or all of his works were ‘ironic’).
[31] The similarities to The Power and the Glory are
substantial and probably genetic, Endo studied in Europe about the time Greene
was going through his ‘Catholic Phase’ and was influenced by his work.
[32] One of the most brutal (and successful) attempts to
eradicate the Christian faith in its history.
[33] He goes beyond ‘solidarity of suffering’ to ‘service
of suffering.’
[34] The world also kind of came alive to me because of my
familiarity with Xavier’s writings and much of the novel takes the form of
Jesuit letters in this tradition and from this era.
[35] “So, its only death, many of my best friends are
dead.”
[36] One of the reasons the graveyard book is fun is that
it compresses history forming a community out of the inhabitants of different
eras. I read this book while I was
studying Revelation this summer and was struck by the fact that this is also
part of the wonder of the New Jerusalem in Revelation. It is a city of extreme cultural, ethnic, and
temporal diversity which is way cooler than its architecture (which is also
post-modern before post-modern architecture was a thing, a culmination of the
best from multiple eras). Imagine the
grace an self forgetfulness and self skepticism to build a community not just
across all ethnic and class divisions but also across all temporal divisions.
[37] More disturbing was that several of Mara’s sentences
were better versions of some of my better sentences. I’m not sure what that means. Are Mara and I building with the same
cultural raw materials and generational sensibility, he’s just doing it
better. Should I be discouraged or
encouraged that if I had read this book before drafting mine that several of my
better sentences would be plagiarized if they had not been inferior? Or is it just an availability bias?
[38] Note: in both cases I am assuming that they describe
an actual history and not an alternate history as in, say, Strange and Norell,
but that illustrates the depth of my ignorance of both conflicts.
[39] And he’s like 28.
How does an American in his 20’s imagine like this let alone write? Literature is the only art form where youth
surprises me, which I think means it is harder.
If you can age out of an art form in your 20’s (cough-popular
music-cough) it can’t be very hard.
[40] I remember thinking, the reader is unlike any audio
book reader I have ever heard.
Understated and apt. It was
Saunders. Another data point for my theory
that if an author can read his/her own book, it is always a better product.
[41] There is one problem with audio short story
collections. This was a problem with
Fragile Things but especially with 10th of December. There is no break between the devastating end
of one story and the relentless beginning of a new one.
[42] From Syracuse.
[43] In one case, a detail that originally seems like a
mile non-sequiter slowly grows to take over the story.
[44] Dealt with complexly and with the appropriate level
of nuance and mystery. “The artist’s
job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery.” -Saunders
[45] Several of these stories have stuck with me. Of course the S.G.s and the Doxitoal. But one little story where an actor at a
renaissance fair takes a drug to enable his performance and the sensibility and
nobility of a different age change his actions in ways that no one expects is
really wonderful.
[46] For some reason, I find myself suddenly able to
stomach ‘worship music’ when usually even just the phrase irritates me. Not sure how or why, but I’m going to roll
with it.
