What I Look for in a Book

Choosing which books to read, of the thousands if not millions of choices is an overwhelming decision. For each book I read, there are thousands that don’t make the cut. Time is precious. Until this year, I read lots of great books, but I didn’t have a plan or a method to guide my choices.

I decided to get more intentional with my selections and that begged the question, what am I looking for in a book? I ran across this post from 2006 at litblogger Scott Esposito’s Conversational Reading. Scott’s focus is on modern and postmodern fiction and he reads quite a bit of work in translation (and in Spanish, for that matter). I’ve included two litblogger’s lists in their entirety (although each of the original posts has more content) because I think their criteria is interesting. Scott has some specific criteria to identify what he likes and he’s listed them in order of importance.

Ongoing Dialectics. I like to feel that the book I'm reading is a debate, not a lecture. I like to feel that I can't judge what the author's intent is until the last page, and sometimes not even then. If I think the book is becoming too obvious in what it's trying to tell me, then it becomes just a dull demonstration. I get bored. I probably won't finish it. The ideas that animate a book should be like a tightrope walker, now teetering a bit one way, now teetering a bit the other way, always forging forward on an invisible thread. Note that this debate can take many forms--debates over philosophical ideas are the most obvious, but a book could also debate any of the following: different interpretations of a character, different value systems, different interpretations of events, different approaches to constructing a narrative or conducting a life, different styles. Note also--there's no rule that there can only be one dialectic per novel.

Challenging prose. Challenging prose is interesting prose. I love feeling that an author has abandoned me to a room full of hostile words. See, for instance, the beautifully complex sentences of James Joyce, Malcolm Lowry, or William Gaddis. I like feeling like I'm constantly under pressure to interpret what the wuthor is telling me. I'm also interested in challenging prose on the level of a story: see, for instance, the narratives of Kazuo Ishiguro or Manuel Puig--I love how they continually make me feel like I'm just a step away from cresting a hill, after which I can look down upon the story and finally see how it works. (Note also: this moment is inevitable, but it is also inevitably a letdown; I like it when authors delayed it as long as possible.)

Stylistic creativity/skill. I almost put these into two separate categories, but then decided I couldn't separate one from the other. Some authors tinker with form, some perfect forms that have already been invented, but either way I think it requires a good deal of creativity and skill. Regardless of whether they're tinkerers or perfecters, however, I think authors should be showing me something I haven't seen before. Imperfections in style, while unavoidable, should be rare and forgivable. Also under style comes voice, which should be strong, original, and suit the aims of the novel. However, if I feel like a book has nothing to say, or that the prose isn't interesting, then very rarely will I keep reading, despite how much stylistic creativity or skill is present.

Depth of metaphors. I love metaphors with multiple meanings, and I love it when authors can orchestrate their books so that these metaphors interact in interesting ways. I would reference the works of Haruki Murakami here, most notably The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I especially love book-spanning central metaphors that become a pivot point. A caveat: this is not an invitation for limitless complexity. Obviously there's a limit to how much meaning can be loaded into a metaphor before it becomes contrived, not to mention confusing.

The book makes an attempt to embody the workings of some organism. While not a deal-breaker, this is something I look for and am interesting in. Call it a pet interest of mine. Most often, the organism observed is the human mind, but I chose the word "organism" because I didn't want to limit things a book can embody to only the human mind. For instance, Don DeLillo's narratives don't embody the workings of the human mind so much as the systems that societies are organized upon (see also Orwell, David Mitchell, Pynchon). There have also been authors who have attempted to build alien consciousnesses.

Fidelity. Authors are free to tell their stories in whatever world they choose (our own simply being the one most commonly chosen). But once they have decided on their world and the rules that govern it, authors should never break those rules for frivolous reasons. Deus ex machinas suck (unless they're being explicitly used to point out something interesting about how they suck).

Characterization. Although I recognize that authors can use flat characters to good effect, I'm far more interested in well-characterized characters. Simply put, I think people are interesting and I like learning about them. I like seeing the creative ways an author can draw a character and how well the subtle nuances are brought out.

Economy. I don't have terribly strong feelings about sparse prose vs luxurious with prose, but if I have to choose one, I'll easily choose too sparse. Did I mention I love minimalists?

Humor. I think many good authors are playful authors, but I don't think being playful is the same thing as being humorous. Many authors are playful, but few are humorous. I like it when they are. See, for instance, DFW, who makes me laugh out loud.

Big Books. This is somewhat whimsical, so I'm putting it pretty far down the list, but I do have a soft spot for big books. I'll forgive more in an epic simply because I often admire its scale.

Edward Champion at Reluctant Habits followed Scott’s example and came up with this list:

A sense of playfulness. I will confess that a novel with a playful prose style is likely to tickle my fancy more than a straightforward tale written in that humorless realist mode that James Wood is so smitten with. This is not to suggest that I am adverse to realism or serious fiction. Richard Yates remains a firm favorite and I’ll go into the whys of this a tad later. The playfulness, however, should adhere to some reasonable human construct. It should be justified, motivated not by an author flexing his chops (see Dave Eggers and, to some degree, Saul Bellow, early Martin Amis, and Benjamin Kunkel), but because the nature of the fiction requires it. But here’s the strange loophole: If an author presents a unique and distinct way of seeing the world (such as Colson Whitehead, Richard Powers or David Foster Wallace), I’m more willing to forgive him his narrative digressions.

A concern for details. I have a soft spot for books that dare to present the world’s quotidian details in ways we haven’t seen before. Nicholson Baker comes to mind. Carol Shields too. Colson Whitehead, definitely. I suspect this is why I also like Updike so much and am willing to forgive Terrorist (and even the dreadful Gertrude and Claudius) for its flaws. When Updike writes about old buildings being split up like a cardboard box, there is something in his phrasing and imagery that makes me quite giddy. I feel as if I am seeing the world in ways that I haven’t observed it before. Sometimes, it could be through a miniscule detail in the phrasing. Sometimes, it’s just outright daffy foci. When Baker describes a paperclip and dares to chart precisely how it was manufactured, I feel indebted to him for overlooking some pivotal aspect of the world that I should be paying attention to.

Keeping it real. I’m not a big fan of magical realism. My bullshit detector flies off the charts when people inexplicably begin flying in the middle of a novel because the author can’t determine a way to progress his narrative forward. There are certainly exceptions (Murakami, Calvino, Borges) with authors who dabble in the surreal, but, for the most part, such exercises escape a writer’s first and foremost duty: to convey the human experience in a way in which we can believe it. I can believe, for example, the extraordinary world of China Mieville’s New Crobuzon because there is an underlying structure to its gaslights, its curious criminal justice system with the Remades, and its underground scientists toiling away at experiments in dingy apartments. Likewise, I can look at a book like Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road and ferret out the precise details which reveal the Wheelers’ discontentment. The environs or the genre or the highbrow/lowbrow status matters little to me. It’s the verisimiltude that keeps my motor purring.

A fresh perspective. For the next LBC round, I nominated a book that had one of the most unique perspectives I had encountered in some time. It was not simply the book’s unusual and quite idiosynchratic perspective that rocked my world, but, tied into my last point, the realization that this author had weaved a tale of unexpected poignancy that felt as real as any other tale. This harkens back to my earlier point of recontextualization. I think Scott and I differ a bit on this point. We once got into a heated conversation about David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, in which he felt that what Mitchell was portraying was typical and I defended the book’s ability to recontextualize both narrative and the world around us, while agreeing that its platitude-stacked ending was a bit of a letdown.

A sense of ambition. One of literature’s great challenges is to push the envelope further in a way that we haven’t seen it before. I can forgive a flawed book like Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, which I wrote about here, because it’s attempting an earnestness that is well at odds with the irony-soaked novels and literary realism so fashionable today. Likewise, if Robert Coover sometimes leaves me cold or a John Barth volume flounders, the ambition still sticks to the craw.

Giddy experimentalism. To me, Gilbert Sorrentino and David Markson are extraordinary writers because they experiment in a manner which invites. Sorrentino’s elaborate lies (such as the giddy notion of a character playing “roles” in various novels offered in Mulligan Stew) and Markson’s sentence-by-sentence approach to narrative remind us that experimentalism doesn’t have to be a cold and off-putting affair. Theirs is the purest and most difficult form of experimentalism to pull off.

Difficulty. I like books that challenge me. Books that I have to deconstruct, books in which I constantly have to look up things, books that compel me to reread them later, books I savor. I like books in which I don’t really have a sense of what’s going on until Page 75. I like books, like Ander Monson’s Other Electricities, that, with its index, suggest an interconnectedness that a grad student might spend weeks dwelling upon. I like Gaddis’s approach to dialogue in J.R., where we have to work to figure out who is speaking (which implies that we really aren’t paying nearly as much attention as we should).

Balls. I like writers who make me feel uncomfortable. I like writers who tell the truth. I like writers who want to take me to places I would never visit in a million years. I like writers who throw me into a horrific place and refuse to take the easy way out.

My goals as a reader aren't nearly as sophisticated. These are two litbloggers, among a number of them that I find interesting and I learn a lot from them. They eat and breathe literature and a great deal of the time I frankly don’t understand what they’re talking about. But I love what they’ve done with these lists. Creating a list like this really helps to focus on the books most likely to meet my own criteria, but more importantly, it helps me to think about why I’m reading in the first place.

For now, this is my list:

Originality. An artful novel needs to tell a story in a way that’s never been done before or present a unique perspective. The artfulness and originality may be in the story itself, the themes, the characters, the structure or the prose, but there has to be something that is unique to each author’s style.

Challenging Prose. I’m an active reader. I like it when an author makes me stretch. Proust has stretched me a fair distance. I’ve had to look up unfamiliar words and terms and refer to endnotes to understand cultural, geographical and historical references in order to understand and enjoy the work. Saul Bellow’s work is similarly challenging at times, but I love the payoff.

Ambition/Risk Taking. This makes me think of a novel I read last year that was incredibly ambitious, highly original, had deeply drawn characters and somehow just missed the mark. I would rather read a novel where the author has gone out on a limb, even if it doesn’t quite work than a formulaic story that works, but where the author didn’t take any chances or try anything new.

Characters With Depth. A book needs multi-dimensional characters to work.

Artfulness. Fine writing leaves me with a sense of wonder and the sensation that the author has superhuman powers. The perfect metaphor, description that is unusual, but never jarring, appropriate use of rhythm and the ability to write sentence that goes on for hundreds of words without exhausting the reader are all characteristics of artful writing. I love an author who gives me sentences or paragraphs that are so beautiful that I have to stop and read them again and maybe even break out a highlighter so I return to them and savor them again.

I’ve always been drawn to modernist literature and it seemed logical to me that I should start the year out by starting Marcel Proust’s seven volume novel, In Search of Lost Time. The modernist literary movement peaked in Europe in the early 1900s and According to Wikipedia modernist literature involved such authors as Knut Hamsun (whose novel Hunger is considered to be the first modernist novel), Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Dylan Thomas, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, James Joyce, Hugh MacDiarmid, William Faulkner, Jean Toomer, Ernest Hemingway, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Joseph Conrad, Andrei Bely, W. B. Yeats, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Luigi Pirandello, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Jaroslav Hašek, Samuel Beckett, Menno ter Braak, Marcel Proust, Mikhail Bulgakov, Robert Frost, Boris Pasternak, Djuna Barnes, and others.

Reading In Search of Lost Time has been a great reading experience. I finished the third volume last night and will take a Proust break for several books before I start the fourth. It has made me realize how satisfying it is to me to not only read, but to study literature. The beauty of reading titles that are so canonical is that there is no shortage of information and opinion about them, so I've been spending quite a bit of time reading blogs that focus on literature and literary criticism.

Some of the blogs and websites I've been reading lately are: The Reading Experience, Chekhov's Mistress, Mark Athitakis' American Fiction Notes, A Commonplace Blog, Maud Newton, The Elegant Variation, The Millions, Wyatt Mason and The Believer.

Where does all this heavy reading and studying leave my writing? Where, indeed.

I haven't touched my draft novel, The Foundling Wheel in months, but I have been trying my hand at some short fiction. I have always puzzled at the idea that some writers find that they are influenced by the writers they read. Never once did that happen to me, until recently. I don't know that stylistically Proust has had much of an influence, but the views into character and his detailed observations have profoundly affected the way I think about telling a story. For the double whammy, I find myself trying to emulate Saul Bellow.

There's no way to predict what path I'll take with writing now. Maybe I'll trash everything I've ever done and start over and maybe I'll decide that studying and absorbing the great works already in print is enough.

How about you? Do you plan out your reading list, and what do you look for in a book?

The Year 2008 Mapped Out in Books

It is perhaps fitting that the last book I finished reading in 2008 was Living by Fiction, by Annie Dillard and it’s even more fitting that I didn’t read Annie Dillard’s work until now.

The reading list for 2008 is long and varied. I didn’t have a plan for what I wanted to read this year and the titles are a mix of books that won awards or critical acclaim and books that were recommended to me by people I trust. Some were gifts, eleven of them were written by other bloggers, two were written by the man I voted for to be our next President and several are non-fiction titles I read to feed my interest in culture and politics.

The novels I read were a mixed bag and I enjoyed most of them. I firmly believe in the maxim that a writer needs to read as much, if not more than she writes. In 2007 and 2008 I spent a lot of time reading books that would give me a better idea what kind of novelist I want to be and I’ve finally developed a fair level of confidence that even though I can’t directly answer that question, I know where I’m headed.

The titles I’ve highlighted are the ones that I felt most strongly about and that left me with the rare thought that I'd love to have been able write them.

1. Forgetfulness, by Ward Just
2. Josie and Jack, by Kelly Braffett
3. Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, Illustrated by Joe Ciardiello
4. Twinkle, Twinkle, by Kaori Ekuni
5. On Love, by Alain de Botton
6. Veronica, by Mary Gaitskill
7. How Proust Can Change Your Life, by Alain de Botton
8. The Sky Isn’t Visible From Here, by Felicia C. Sullivan
9. I Killed Hemingway, by William McCranor Henderson
10. Gang Leader for a Day, by Sudhir Venkatesh
11. The Fourth Watcher, by Timothy Hallinan
12. Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee
13. The Double Bind, by Chris Bohjalian
14. Torch, by Cheryl Strayed
15. The Raw Shark Texts, by Steven Hall
16. How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, by Pierre Bayard
17. Meyer, by Stephen Dixon
18. The Price of Salt, by Patricia Highsmith
19. Nine: Adolescence, by Amy Hassinger
20. Desperate Characters, by Paula Fox
21. John Lennon & The Mercy Street Café, by William Hammett
22. Paris to the Moon, by Adam Gopnik
23. The Empanada Brotherhood, by John Nichols
24. How the Dead Dream, by Lydia Millet
25. Now, Discover Your Strengths, by Marcus Buckingham & Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D.
26. One Sister's Song, by Karen Degroot Carter
27. The God File, by Frank Turner Hollon
28. Head Case: How I Almost Lost My Mind Trying to Understand My Brain, by Dennis Cass
29. America, America, by Ethan Canin
30. The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield
31. The Eleventh Draft, edited by Frank Conroy
32. Time's Arrow, by Martin Amis
33. Rose's Garden, by Carrie Brown
34. The House on Fortune Street, by Margot Livesey
35. Simon Says, by Kathryn Eastburn
36. The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger
37. The Bright Forever, by Lee Martin
38. Catching Genius, by Kristy Kiernan
39. Inglorious, by Joanna Kavenna
40. A Three Dog Life, by Abigail Thomas
41. Migration Patterns, by Gary Schanbacher
42. Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen
43. Tethered, by Amy MacKinnon
44. How Fiction Works, by James Wood
45. Hoffman's Hunger, Leon de Winter
46. She Was, by Janis Hallowell
47. Bad Behavior, by Mary Gaitskill
48. Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill
49. Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami
50. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
51. Leaving Atlanta, by Tayari Jones
52. Man in the Dark, by Paul Auster
53. The Audacity of Hope, by Barack Obama
54. One Good Turn, by Kate Atkinson
55. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski
56. The Confessions of Max Tivoli, by Andrew Sean Greer
57. Dreams from My Father, by Barack Obama
58. Matrimony, by Joshua Henkin
59. The Art of Travel, by Alain de Botton
60. The Nine, by Jeffrey Toobin
61. The Conscience of a Liberal, by Paul Krugman
62. The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins
63. Crazy for God, by Frank Schaeffer
64. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, by Richard Hofstadter
65. The Fall of Rome, by Martha Southgate
66. The Maytrees, by Annie Dillard
67. Like Trees, Walking, by Ravi Howard
68. On Beauty, by Zadie Smith
69. God Knows: It's Not About Us, by Blayney Colmore
70. Edinburgh, by Alexander Chee
71. Songs for the Missing, by Stewart O'Nan
72. Orange Mint and Honey, by Carleen Brice
73. Living by Fiction, by Annie Dillard

I own many short story collections, but I rarely read one of them from cover to cover (I only read two short story collections in 2008). I do like to dip in and out of them, so I've decided to list the short stories as I read them. There is a new sidebar with the most recent:

The Babysitter, by Robert Coover

Going into 2009 my reading goals are quite focused. Although I will continue to cheer my fellow bloggers on and I'll support them by buying their books, I plan to be much more stingy with my reading time and my choices will be far more self-serving in order to advance my writing goals.

I have an entire bookcase loaded with books I've not yet read and I intend to work through it with a vengeance.

I plan to start 2009 out with one of the big mothers I've been saving (or putting off -- take your pick) because of length and difficulty, so if you've got a yen to read Swann's Way, Gravity's Rainbow, The Recognitions or Infinite Jest anytime soon, drop me an email and we can give each other moral support.

How was your year in reading? Did you have a plan and if so, did you stick to it? If you're a writer, did you read any books you'd like to have written? What books did you most enjoy?

Note: My first post inadvertently left off Orange Mint and Honey, by Carleen Brice. I don't recall when I actually read the book, but I was honored to have the chance to read an advance reader copy and I was so thrilled that I kept it a secret -- and consequently neglected to list the book on my sidebar or the first run of this list.

The Year Mapped Out in Books

As a way of further mulling over and therefore delaying the on paper documentation of my 2008 resolutions, goals, wishes and dreams, I decided to post the list of books I read in 2007.

Recently, Scott and I watched the movie High Fidelity, which was adapted from Nick Hornby’s novel. It was the umpteenth time we’d seen it but we both love it. Just as those of us who love music hear songs and immediately make autobiographical connections, so it is for me with the books I read and fall in love with.

The list itself provides a sort of map of my figurative and literal journey as a writer this year.

I found the Joyce Carol Oates at The Strand on my trip to New York City in May. I read Everyman, by Philip Roth on the plane trip to New York. The John Gardner books rocked my world and made me yearn to write even more, while reinforcing my insecurities and motivating me to read, read, and read until my eyes fall out. I read four of these books for my first writers’ retreat and discussed them with new friends I found there. Some of these are books written by fellow bloggers, and I loved every one of them – the books and the bloggers. Strange to read a book by someone you know, but don’t. Some were written by the faculty members of the Lighthouse Writers Workshop. How much was each fictional main character like his or her creator? I could never get that question completely out of my mind. I read four of five of these books when we went to Cabo San Lucas in October and some I read with a dictionary by my side. Some books were recommended by friends, some were award winners and some just looked good.

Do book titles take you back to a significant moment at some point in your life? Can you remember details about where you were and what was happening in your life when a particular book resonated strongly within you?

And here’s a question I’m really curious about – can you separate characters in a book written by a fellow blogger -- since we only sort of know each other – from who you think the author really is? I’m confessing this tendency because I can’t seem to help it. If I actually knew the author in person, I’m sure the differences between the person and the character would be obvious. Or, if you’ve published fiction – does it bother you to know that people probably make assumptions about who you are based on your characters?

Happy reading in 2008!

1. Black Swan Green, by David Mitchell
2. Atonement, by Ian McEwan
3. A Nail Through the Heart, by Timothy Hallinan
4. The Boy Who Went Away, by Eli Gottlieb
5. The Murder of Jacob, by Mary Ellen Johnson
6. Then We Came to The End, by Joshua Ferris
7. Look Me in The Eye, by John Elder Robison
8. The Secret History, by Donna Tartt
9. In the Electric Eden, by Nick Arvin
10. The Rings of Saturn, by W.G. Sebald
11. White Noise, by Don DeLillo
12. 78 Reasons why your book may never be published and 14 reasons why it just might, by Pat Walsh
13. Away, by Amy Bloom
14. No Place Safe, by Kim Reid
15. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino
16. The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford
17. From Where You Dream, by Robert Olen Butler
18. Articles of War, by Nick Arvin
19. The Children's Hospital, by Chris Adrian
20. Old School, by Tobias Wolff
21. So Long a Letter, by Mariamba Ba
22. The Yiddish Policemen's Union, by Michael Chabon
23. On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan
24. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, by Mohsin Hamid
25. To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf
26. Poetics, by Aristotle
27. Souvenir, by Therese Fowler
28. Ravelstein, by Saul Bellow
29. Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson
30. Augusta Locke, by William Haywood Henderson
31. Jesus' Son, Stories by Denis Johnson
32. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
33. A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby
34. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
35. Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
36. All the Numbers by Judy Merrill Larsen
37. The Liar's Diary by Patry Francis
38. Elements of the Writing Craft by Robert Olmstead
39. The Art of Fiction by John Gardner
40. On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner
41. Making a Literary Life by Carolyn See
42. Word Work by Bruce Holland Rogers
43. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
44. Everyman by Philip Roth
45. The Female of the Species by Joyce Carol Oates
46. Blindness by Jose Saramago
47. Spoonwood by Ernest Hebert

Reading Like a Writer

It must be frustrating to make a book selection for a workshop or book discussion group. No matter what you choose, the odds are that in a large group of people, most of them won’t like it. As writers, we need to be realistic when we think about the type of book we’re writing and recognize the reality that if a hundred people read the first page, most of them probably won’t want to keep reading. Whether it’s mystery, chick lit, sci-fi, fantasy, paranormal, thriller, suspense, up market, down market, women’s fiction, gay fiction, literary fiction, historical fiction or any of the dozen more categories I’ve probably left out, there is a specific audience for each book.

Less than a week before Kurt Vonnegut died, I bought a signed, first edition copy of Bagombo Snuff Box, his Uncollected Short Fiction. I don’t know why I found it or decided to buy it then, but I’ve considered it a sign ever since. In his introduction, Mr. Vonnegut recounts his story as a writer and as a professor of writing. I like to refer to the following section from the book often, because these eight simple pieces of advice are succinct enough that I can keep them posted in front of me at all times:

“Now lend me your ears. Here is Creative Writing 101:

1. Use the time of total strangers in such a way he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things – reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them – in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your reader as much information as soon as possible. Readers should have such complete understand of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.”

Today, I’m thinking a lot about number seven.

Most successful writers will tell you that reading and reading and reading some more is just as important as writing and I happen to agree with them – happily, of course because I love to read.

One of my favorite things about the retreat I attended recently was that there were book discussions, led by our instructors. We read a collection of short stories, a memoir, a book of poetry and essays and a novel.

It was interesting to note that although there were twenty four retreat participants, the book discussions themselves were attended by only a handful of us. I was lucky. I read a pretty wide variety of books and so I didn’t mind reading any of them, although I might not have chosen them myself. The first discussion was an eye opener. We discussed the short story collection, Jesus’ Son, by Denis Johnson. One of the discussion participants hadn’t read the book, but opened it, looked through it and then closed it. He said he’d seen all he needed to see. Another read it, but said he didn’t like it. He thought it glorified drug use. The truth is that the collection of stories are linked and they are about a period of time in the author’s life when he was mired in drug and alcohol use. The stories reminded me quite a bit of William S. Burroughs or Charles Bukowski, primarily because of the subject matter. What I got from the stories was that they didn’t glorify anything related to substance abuse. In fact, each story had moments of beauty, but we were helplessly on a ride with the author that we knew would not end well. By the last story, the author was in rehabilitation and was cautiously optimistic. There was hope. I read the stories, not as a casual reader, but as a writer and there was some incredible writing, but the participation in the discussion group drove home the point to me that even writers have a very difficult time reading like writers.

The hardest book for me to read, not literally, but from the standpoint of having to make myself read it, was the memoir by Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle. The writing is good, the narrative structure works, but my confession here is that I’m tired of memoir. So sue me. I’m in the minority because that was probably the most popular reading and it’s been on the New York Times Bestseller List for a very long time.

I also put off reading Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson until last, because I’d read Gilead just before getting the reading list and I rarely like to read two books in a row by the same author. Still, her writing is beautiful. It’s a challenge for me because books heavy on description of landscape are usually not my thing. But something happened when I read Housekeeping. I’d been reading critically for a while and although I initially found the description of the glacial lake, the isolated mountain town and the gloomy town somewhat heavy, I got into them as the story progressed. My last post has an excerpt from the book that is all description and through the reading and the discussion, I learned just how effective this can be, when done as well as Marilynne Robinson and to name one of many, Annie Proulx does it.

It had an impact on my writing. Until the retreat, I’d acknowledged the use of this type of description as something writers use to varying degrees, depending on their personal style. I tend to read novels heavy on character, with a lot of internal dialogue, so of course I tend to write in a similar style (I think). The night before I had to do my own reading at the retreat, I wrote a paragraph of description of place at the beginning of the scene I planned to read. It works (I like to think) and it is consistent with my voice and style.

Not every book I read is necessarily one that I’d choose myself, but the longer I read critically, the easier it is to evaluate work on how well it’s written and to admire how a writer handles scene or dialogue or plotting in a genre that’s not my personal favorite. Had I not been reading critically and studying the techniques and styles of writers I might not read for my own pleasure, I wouldn’t have discovered this and improved my own writing.

It’s very likely, I’ll return to Reading Like a Writer, by Francine Prose. I read it last year, but I suspect it will be quite a different book when I read it again.

I know most people don’t read this way. I know that when I finish writing my story, no matter how well it's written, it won’t be one that most people will want to read; no story appeals to everyone. I may be consciously making a decision to write in a way that makes the already slim chances of publication even slimmer.

That’s OK. My eyes are open.

Who do you write for? How wide or limited do you imagine your audience to be, and how does that make you feel?

How Did You Learn to Love Books?

Last night I read some pretty grim statistics about the reading habits of adult Americans. I spent some time looking at various websites to try to validate the numbers. Nothing I read was surprising. There is a direct correlation between education level and reading habits and a direct correlation between a child’s exposure to reading materials at home and his or her reading skills. There are no revelations there. The percentage of people who claim that they read books on a regular basis varies, depending on education level but on average it’s safe to say that less than half of all adults in this country read books at all. I was motivated to look into this after reading a post at the author, Eileen Cook's website that I initially found at Seize a Daisy.

I’ve been trying to figure out why some people can’t live without books and some people have no use for them. Almost everyone in my family, including my maternal grandfather who left school the age of nine, read books constantly. Secondary education didn’t factor in as there are few college graduates in my family. I don’t ever remember not reading. I remember the first time I did read words on a page. I remember books I read growing up – The Cat in the Hat, Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web, The Trumpet of the Swan, The Grimm Brothers Fairy Tales and a great one called, May I Bring a Friend? I remember reading Laura Ingalls Wilder in third grade and tearing through all the Little House on the Prairie books. My mother’s Nancy Drew Mysteries were at my grandmother’s house and I read all of them. I moved on to the YA of my day – S.E. Hinton -- and wore the covers off of The Outsiders and That Was Then, This is Now.

Sometime around sixth or seventh grade I started reading adult paperbacks. I read Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Love Story first and then I had pilfer books and read them in secret. There were stacks of books everywhere and when nobody was watching I read On the Beach, Alas Babylon, The Choirboys, The Carpetbaggers, The Happy Hooker (Yikes), Fear of Flying, Valley of the Dolls, Flowers for Algernon, The Exorcist, The Godfather, Trout Fishing in America and countless others.

I found a box of my father’s old books and entered my brooding junior high beatnik/existentialist phase, reading On the Road by Jack Kerouac, Howl by Allen Ginsberg, The Stranger by Albert Camus and No Exit by Jean Paul Sartre. I vaguely remember No Exit and reading these books up in my room while blowing cigarette smoke out the attic window and feeling pretty sophisticated. They had an impact on me and that summer between seventh and eighth grades I was caught shoplifting – yes, in a bookstore – a book about becoming a writer. I’d inherited my mother’s portable Smith Corona and typed out my adolescent angst on onionskin paper in that attic room night after night.

The first adult book I ever read that was recommended by a friend my own age was Carrie, Stephen King’s debut novel. A boy in my American History class told me I had to read it because it was “wicked good”. That was 1976, my freshman year in high school and I read every word King wrote for the next decade. Mr. Walker, my Freshman English teacher marked up a story I turned in for having sentence fragments and ellipses. I tried to argue that Stephen King wrote like that and Mr. Walker told me Stephen King was a bad writer. So much for early reviews.

Mr. Walker and my other teachers introduced me to Shakespeare, Homer, Thornton Wilder, John Knowles, Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, Anne Frank, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Stephen Crane, Victor Hugo, Herman Melville, George Orwell, Tennessee Williams, Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain. I remember all my English teachers and I loved the world they showed me.

I read whatever I could find for many years, especially when I was in the Air Force. There was a lot of “hurry up and wait” so at 2 A.M. in a tent in the snow, I was just as likely to be reading a paperback the person on shift before me left behind, whether it was a World War II story, a Tom Clancy thriller, the biography of Ted Bundy or When Bad Things Happen to Good People the person who relieved me was to be reading The Catcher in the Rye or Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. We swapped books constantly. The Stars and Stripes bookstore had a limited selection but I found a hardcover once called The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by a new writer called Michael Chabon, I stumbled onto one or two Kurt Vonnegut and Tom Robbins books and I read everything Anne Rice wrote that I could get my hands on.

For many years I've been overwhelmed with new releases and the desire to read with a more educated and critical eye. I want books that make me think, show me something I’ve never seen, present a perspective I’ve never heard and use words in ways I couldn't imagine. As a lifelong lover of books, my taste and choices have evolved to suit the time in my life. I’ve missed out on reading so many good ones. That's the biggest drawback to a lack of higher education. New and intriguing works come out every day. I’ve added a new category of links to Eudaemonia, called Literary Criticism and I’m learning a lot from these thoughtful bloggers.

I’m pretty sure the era I grew up in is long gone. Reading was natural when there were only a handful of TV stations, no video games and no such thing as a VCR, let alone cable or the internet. If you were grounded as much as I was, it wasn’t possible to survive without books and a library card. Making sure that books are plentiful and buying books for the children and young adults in my life has always been second nature, but the average kid doesn’t have the kind of time on his or her hands that I did. I know that exposure to books fosters a love of them, but what can each of us do to encourage the kids now?

How did you develop your love for books? Were you surrounded by them growing up? Who turned you on to books you loved as a teenager and young adult? Do your children love books as much as you do? Has your taste in books stayed pretty consistent or has it varied widely? What can be done to increase the number of readers in this country?

Note: A subsequent visit to Eileen Cook's site indicates she has started a revolution! Apparently I was only one of a lot of people who decided to pick up the ball and blog about this. Better still, there are some creative and hilarious suggestions about how to remedy this crisis. Stay tuned and look for more revolutionaries in the coming days.

Do I Really Like This, or Do I Just Want To?

Painting is as lonely a business as writing can be, so Scott has developed friendships with other artists over the years and alternates his studio time with group outings to paint en plein air, visits to other artist’s studios and vice versa. Today, Bob MacPherson came to spend some time with Scott.

Bob and Scott have different styles, both somewhat impressionistic with a bit of the abstract here and there. We started to talk about abstract art. Bob recalled being in a museum and looking at a collection that was primarily different colored squares, juxtaposed on each canvas in various combinations. The paintings weren’t speaking to him and he was about to write them off when he overheard a docent explaining that the artist was exploring the concept of psychology and art and how different color combinations can evoke emotion. That made the paintings a bit more interesting.

When I first met Scott, I was a big fan of modern art. Six years living in Europe afforded me the chance to take several art history courses – you couldn’t beat the field trips. Learning about nineteenth and early twentieth century impressionists, fauves, cubists and expressionists within the context of history gave me a great academic appreciation for their work.

Living with art and among living artists, understanding what they are striving to achieve and how they can make a living doing it has given me an altogether different point of view. I still have an academic appreciation for modern art, but I’ve learned a whole new level of appreciation for representational art as well. I’ve learned that what I can appreciate in a museum is not necessarily what I want to see hanging in my living room.

Coincidentally, I was finally able to start reading Francine Prose’s Reading like a Writer and there are some similar parallels between the visual arts and literature. When I was in high school back in New England, reading the classics was still very much a part of the curriculum. I loved reading Shakespeare, as long as it was in the classroom where a teacher could guide me through it. When I tried reading it on my own, I was lost.

I’ve always loved art and literature pretty equally, so over the years, I’ve either read or attempted to read as many “great” books as I could. I’ve enjoyed most that I’ve read, but not all. I tried to read Faulkner several times before I finally picked up As I Lay Dying. I made it through, enjoyed it, was able to follow it reasonably well, but am certain there was a lot I missed. Tropic of Cancer is still sitting on the shelf, unread but someday I’ll try it again. I read William Gaddis’s last novel, Agapē Agape with its five page sentences and it took enough focused concentration to light the book ablaze. I needed a three hour nap to recover. I have another Gaddis novel also waiting patiently in the bookcase for me to crack it open, but it may be waiting a while.

Why would a rational person, with limited time to read for pleasure, put herself through this? It’s because I know how much I’ve loved other books that were tough to get through, once I was able to find their rhythm and get into them. Sometimes I couldn’t do it outside of a classroom.

It’s definitely a different kind of reading than I do when I need something to get me through a long flight, but as long as I’m not completely lost and I see the beauty of the author’s work, I enjoy it -- don’t I? Or is it that I just want to be able to say I read it?

An engineer friend of mine maintains that all abstract artwork is a case of “the emperor has no clothes”. Maybe sometimes this is true. When certain art and literature is so esoteric that it requires special education to appreciate, can we really love it?

What books have you struggled to read and then fallen in love with? Which ones have you tried to read and abandoned? Do we really read serious literature because we enjoy it, or because it’s a challenge and if it’s critically acclaimed, we want to see what the reviewer saw?