TUMBLR
A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...
Posts tagged "reading"
Want your favorite (living) author to write another book?
The absolute best thing you can do is buy a copy of their most recent book and give it away. More sales and more readers mean it’s easier for the author to get the next one to you. (Here’s mine!)
Want a new book from your favorite dead author? You have to write it yourself…
Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
I really, really liked this novel — I’d never heard of Hamid before, but a friend rec’d it on Twitter:
the book’s structure mimics that of the cheap self-help books sold at sidewalk stands all over South Asia, alongside computer manuals and test-prep textbooks. Each chapter begins with a rule—“Work for Yourself,” “Don’t Fall in Love,” “Be Prepared to Use Violence”—and expertly evolves into a narrative.
The whole thing is written in second person, and none of the characters have names. It might sound gimmicky, but it’s not — the execution is pretty perfect, and really moving.
From chapter six, “Work For Yourself”:
Like all books, this self-help book is a cocreative project… when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create. It’s in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book becomes one of a million different books…
…Readers don’t work for writers. They work for themselves. Therein, if you’ll excuse the admittedly biased tone, lies the richness of reading.
Mark Athitakis lays out my biggest gripe about ebooks:
[I read] almost always with a pen or pencil in my hand, ready to underline a sentence, scribble a margin note or, if I’m particularly struck by something, dash off a trio of exclamation points. I don’t think of this as something I do in addition to reading — it’s how I read. So something always feels a little off when I read a book on my Kindle or iPad… E-books promise all sorts of frictionless interactivity, except the one I really want.
Note taking is just one problem. Books aren’t just in conversation with readers but with themselves: What happens on page 362 harks back to something on page 15 that foreshadows events on page 144. Noticing these connections is part of my work, and it wasn’t until I began reading e-books that I realized how much bouncing back and forth I do in a physical book, something e-books don’t easily facilitate. Readers enthuse about being immersed in a good book, but e-book progress bars encourage us to read only one way: straight ahead, at a sprint.
cf. Errol Morris: “A printed book is a random access device, a Kindle is not.”
Filed under: ebooks
If you want to be a writer, you have to be a reader.
My friend Dan Chaon (author of Stay Awake) illustrates the problem with modern lit: everybody wants to be a writer, and nobody wants to be a reader.
The writing community is full of lame-o people who want to be published in journals even though they don’t read the magazines that they want to be published in. These people deserve the rejections that they will undoubtedly receive, and no one should feel sorry for them when they cry about how they can’t get anyone to accept their stories.
As a teacher, he runs into a lot of what I call the “I like to write, but I don’t like to read“ students:
[I]t has surprised me, over the years, how few of my creative writing students have made any effort to engage with the community that they supposedly want to be a part of.”
He then offers up a really great analogy: students who want to be rock star musicians.
They have started a band, and they are spending their weekends and off hours writing songs and practicing. Without fail, these kids know everything there is to know about new music. They are listening all the time—they can discourse on Bob Dylan as easily as they can talk about the new e.p. from a new band from Little Rock, Arkansas, or wherever, and they have a whole hard drive full of demos from obscure artists that they have downloaded from the internet.
I wish that my students who want to be fiction writers were similarly engaged. But when I ask them what they’ve read recently, they frequently only manage to cough up the most obvious, high profile examples. What if my rock star students had only heard of …um….The Beatles? We listened to them in my Rock Music Class in high school. And…. And Justin Timberlake? And, uh, yeah, there’s that one band, My Chemical Romance, I heard one of their songs once.
How awful would that be?
Young writers, if you want to be rock stars, you have to read.
It bears repeating: if you want to be a writer, you have to be a reader first.
Every writer I know worth their salt is a voracious reader, and many of them have the opposite attitude of the students mentioned above, summed up here by William Giraldi: “I don’t enjoy writing. I enjoy reading.”
See also: Blake Butler’s call to “Be an open node,” where he talks about concrete ways you can join the literary community:
(1) When you read something you like, in any form, write the author and tell them.
(2) Write reviews of books you like… You can’t expect to be recognized for your work if you aren’t recognizing others for their work. Open the doors.
(3) Interview writers… I have done this for years and have made friends by doing it, have ‘opened doors’ so to speak: in other words, by helping others, you are also helping yourself.
(4) If you have free time, start an online journal. Start a blog, a review, an anything. If you don’t know how I’ll help you. Say stuff. Mean what you say.
(5) If you have a journal already, respond faster. Pay attention to your inbox.
Filed under: reading
Lynda Barry, The Freddie Stories
I love this book — I first read it in the 1999 paperback edition put out by Sasquatch Books, but now Drawn and Quarterly has re-issued it in hardcover with new artwork, a new afterword by Lynda, and about 50 extra strips.
Something that has been in the back of my mind popped up when reading this book — I think I enjoy reading comic strip collections more than I do “graphic novels” or plain ol’ comic books. There’s something kind of magical about watching a story unfold in these four-panel segments.
The genius of Lynda’s strip style is that she can cover so much in four panels — the strips aren’t even what you would consider typical cartoons, something like Garfield or Nancy with speech balloons and visual gags — the narration often takes up at least half to 3/4 of the panel, and then the drawing is rarely an illustration of the narration, but rather, some sort of juxtaposition, a glimpse of the scene, or something that pushes the story further or comments on it and makes you go to the next panel. So, there’s interplay between the narration and the panel underneath, but THEN there’s the jump to the next panel, where a lot can happen. She telescopes time in a really interesting way. And THEN there’s the jump that happens when you turn the page.
In the chapter “Blood in the Gutter” of Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud talks about the importance of “the gutter” — the space in between panels — and how the gutter “plays host to much of the magic and mystery that are at the very heart of comics.”
Here in the limbo of the gutter, human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea. Nothing is seen between the two panels, but experience tells you something must be there. Comics panels fracture both time and space, offering a jagged staccato rhythm of unconnected moments. But closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified reality.
I might argue that there are three elements that act as gutters in The Freddie Stories — the line between the narration and the rest of the panel, the space between each of the four panels, and then the space in between the page spreads. I think this highlights why I love reading strip collections so much, this one in particular — we’re given so many breathing moments, spaces in which we can fill in the gaps and use our own imagination to make the story our own. It highlights the real magic of the inherently interactive experience of reading — the words and the pictures need us to make them come alive, they need us to fill in the gaps…
Filed under: Lynda Barry
