05/10/2008
Literary Books and the Wandering Mind
I'm about 50 pages into Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, which has been in my to-read pile for at least a year now. It's one of the books that looks interesting in terms of the overall concept of the story. In general, I'm not a fan of literary novels, nor am I a fan of Canadian Literary novels. So far, this is the only book of Atwood's that I've even been remotely interested in reading.
The Handmaid's Tale, like many literary novels, is so far kind of devoid of plot. The 50 pages have been describing routine life in the Republic of Gilead and in this one Handmaid's life. It's an eye-opening environment worth describing, but the whole thing is spent describing this environment and mundane daily life rather than actually doing something. So far the plot consists of this handmaid going shopping for eggs and meat, looking around her room, and walking down the street. I hope something interesting happens soon!
In these 50 pages though, I've come to realize what it is I don't really like about literary novels. They try to make too much of my (the reader's) thought process explicit. We all know about bad novels with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, or the ones that treat the reader like an idiot by explaining the dead obvious. These are the ones containing passages like, "Kayla was backed into a corner by the machete-wielding madman, who smiled like the cheshire cat beneath his black mask. She shook like a leaf and screamed. She was really really scared." Obviously (or, Hopefully) novels like this will never sit on the bookshelf of timeless classics. To me, many literary novels are a less obvious but equally potent version of this.
As I read The Handmaid's Tale, I realize that Margaret Atwood can get away with something pretty plotless so far because she's allowing us into the Handmaid's mind, and the Handmaid is toying with random observations, snippets of thought, and out-of-the-blue comparisons in her mind. For example, the Handmaid walks past a wall where there are bodies on display, hanged. The Handmaid comments about the unoccupied hooks on the wall, "The hooks look like appliances for the armless. Or steel question marks, upside-down and sideways." What's good about the whole passage where the Handmaid is observing the bodies on the wall is that it really shows how emotionless her reaction to them is. She observes how things look and makes visual connections only; she represses emotional connections. But the whole novel is like this; making random connections. This is often how my own mind operates too: I'll see or hear something, and make weird connections to other things in my mind, unusual comparisons, etc. My problem with literary novels, then, is that the author is trying to do this, and my mind would normally also be doing this, so they interfere with each other. I guess it's kind of like doing chest compressions on someone who is already living; you can interfere with the heart's natural function. When I read a novel that is constantly making the connections my wandering mind normally would, it interferes with the smooth running of my mind and it gets irritating.
I suppose those people who are not bothered by this problem, and who love this sort of literature, fall into one of two categories:
1. They can focus so intently on the novel that they can reign in the wandering mind.
2. They just don't make any connections on their own; they have to wait for authors to do it for them.
Anyway, I'm going to try to make it through The Handmaid's Tale because I am fascinated by the context, even though my semi-conscious "back of mind" is having a rough go of things!
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04/27/2008
Cool New Book...
I just finished reading the book Spunk & Bite, by Arthur Plotnik. Spunk & Bite takes its name from the Strunk & White Elements of Style book, which I have not read, but which is supposed to be one of the bibles for writers looking to know how to write properly. Anyway, Spunk & Bite is basically about how rules can (and possibly should) be bent to create interesting writing. Overall I didn't think the book was the greatest, but there was one memorable chapter called "Magic in the Names of Things", which tells about finding just the right word for the things in your writing, rather than something like, "the thingamabob that does such-and-such".
I'm so excited now, because after reading that chapter, I've discovered that books like the Random House Webster's Word Menu exist, and is apparently a glossary of all sorts of interesting words. I also discovered what a thesaurus really is.
Yes, you heard that right! I actually thought I owned a proper thesaurus, but as it turns out, the book I had was called the 21st Century Synonym and Antonym Finder which is not quite the same thing. In that book, you look up a word, and it has alphabetized lists of synonyms and antonyms below it. In a thesaurus like Roget's Thesaurus, ideas are mapped out in tree-like structures at the beginning, and once you find the idea that's close to, or related to, what you want to express, then you go find the topic number and there it gives synonyms and related words, organized by flavour. How cool!
So yesterday I was at a second hand store and spotted a nice copy of Roget's Thesaurus for $1, so now I'm the proud owner of a proper thesaurus. I'm so pumped! Now I'm truly on the way to being a proper writer. :-) Or, at least, I'm taking a step in the right direction!
Step 2: Stop dilly-dallying and start writing again.
10:14 Posted in Books | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
03/16/2008
Luck o' the Irish!
Tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day, and consequently I spent the entire afternoon at a dress rehearsal for a big dance show our school is doing to celebrate the occasion tomorrow. That was OK, except there was a lot of 'hurry up and wait' happening, and it's actually a lot trickier trying to stay lined up where we're supposed to be when we're in the middle of dancing. I'm sure the show will be fine anyway though, especially since there are a lot of the really showy girls who will be participating.
It's an interesting experience to be part of this, but on the other hand, I'm going to be really glad when it's all over and I can go to bed at a reasonable time on Wednesday nights, rather than stay up for a dance rehearsal that goes til 10 pm. A friend of mine recently sent me a list of tips for getting a good night's sleep, and one of the tips was to avoid exercising in the 3 to 4 hours before you go to bed. So I guess 10 pm doesn't quite fit in that category. Oh well. I'm looking forward to having some sleep time back!
Yesterday was actually a really good day for that - I've had a cough and a cold all week and have been dragging myself out of bed to get to work at the usual times, even though I felt zombie-like. Saturday was the first day I got to sleep in, and I stayed in bed until almost 11 am. It was bliss! It was my lucky day too, apparently, since I then went to the library, and on the shelves of used books for sale, I found The Brendan Voyage by Tim Severin, a book I've been wanting to buy for a while because it is so relevant to the novel I'm writing. It was in perfect condition (but minus its dustjacket), hardcover, for $2. I was originally going to buy a copy off eBay, but that would have been around $15 for an OK-condition copy. I'm glad I took the time to scour the racks at the library yesterday! I also spotted a book on Wildflowers of Great Britain and Europe, which was neat, since my story is set in the Faroes, so I bought that for another $2. I also found a book on Shakers of Pleasant Hill and one on healthy(-ier) cookie recipes that minimize use of refined sugars and bleached flour, and a lot of the recipes looked good, so I bought that. I can't wait to try some of those recipes! So all in all, I feel like I hit the jackpot at the library.
So now all I have to do is continue synthesizing that information and get going on finishing that novel I started. I started re-reading it last weekend. It's not the greatest by any stretch of the imagination, and needs a lot of editing, but it didn't make me cringe anywhere near as much as re-reading my work normally does, so maybe this one actually has potential! Basically I just need to be able to "see" where this plot is going a little bit better, and I hope that will get me out of my rut. Here's to finishing the novel this year!!
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