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Beginning to revise Study Machines (except that now it’s called Enter Title Here)

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on May 1, 2013

revision1I’m in the process of revising Study Machines (the contemporary YA novel I wrote during Spring Break). Except now it’s called Enter Title Here, which makes me laugh every time I think of it. I’m (surprisingly) really enjoying the revision process. On Monday, I spent ten hours cutting 10,000 words. About 1500-2000 of those were in full scenes, the rest was bits and pieces. I’m a bit shocked by it. I literally cut words as rapidly as I normally write them. And I really have no idea what it is that I cut. I think it was mostly extraneous descriptions (describing two gestures where one would do) and shortening dialogue (cutting places where characters said the same thing twice). But it’s hard to tell if I’m tightening the manuscript or just thinning it.

When I revised This Beautiful Fever, I also cut about 9,000 words. But in that case, it was a horrible death-slog through the text. I cut words at a rate of (I’m not kidding) about 150 an hour. I’d spend three hours cutting and all I’d have to show for it was the loss of two manuscript pages. Am I just a better writer now? Or is Enter Title Here a looser book? Or am I going too far in my current cutting?

I dunno, probably a combination of all three.

When I cut words, I do take solace in the idea that there’s nothing sacred about these specific words. I wrote most of them between the hours of 8 PM and 12 AM while I was sitting in either: a) the incredibly cold–and normally uninhabited–living room of my parents’ flat in New Delhi; b) my dad’s (much warmer) office, in that same flat; or c) the window seat of my bedroom in a Sri Lankan villa. These were not words that I sweated blood over. I wrote them in a blind rush. And if I’m cutting too much, then the new words that I write will probably be better and more thought-out than the ones that I cut.

Overall, I am really not a very good reviser. I always look for ways to avoid reimagining the draft in significant ways. It’s obvious (at least to me) that there’s no way I’m telling this story in the most effective and economical way. But, while I know that on an intellectual level, my heart does not agree. It’s kind of in love with the current form of this story. Oh well, that is where the critique process comes in. It was only after it’d gone in front of a few eyes that I was able to make the (fairly significant) changes that This Beautiful Fever needed. I don’t really even need to get suggestions from my critiquers, it’s just that once I know that there are problems in the draft, then my mind finally starts addressing itself to the task of fixing those problems, rather than rationalizing them away.

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In order to be interesting, a nonfiction book must flirt with—but NEVER cross—the Textbook Axis.

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on April 5, 2013

UnderstandingComicsCoverI was recently thinking about Scott McCloud’s seminal work on how comics work: Understanding Comics. It’s a comic book that explains all sort of stuff about comics: the tradeoff between a cartoony style and a realistic style; how panels are arranged for effect; the types of panels; the history of comics—everything you never thought about while you read your favorite work of sequential art. It has tons of information and has taught me tons of things that I didn’t know. But I also find it to be incredibly dull.

I have never finished the book. Someday I’ll finish it, but that might be years from now. I’ve been reading it at a rate of 20 pages every three months, usually when I’m on a plane. Twenty pages is about all I can take before I am utterly tired of it.

Because the book is told in comic form, it took me awhile to realize why I found it to be so dull: it’s a textbook.

Textbooks are never interesting. Even when they’re written in an engaging voice, by an accomplished writer, they just don’t operate on that atavistic level that engages a human being’s desire to keep reading or keep watching or keep playing. A textbook can never really get its hooks into you.

Part of this is because textbooks don’t really tell a story, so they don’t engage our narrative sense. Lots of nonfiction books—even non-narrative ones—sort of tell a story. For instance, Taleb’s The Black Swan is the slow unfolding of a thesis about probability. The accretion of evidence and argumentation in some ways functions as a story. Textbooks don’t have that.

But I’ve even enjoyed some nonfiction books that didn’t have a story in them (Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, Carnegie’s How To Win Friends And Influence People, David Orr’s Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide To Modern Poetry; etc). I think the key here is information density. Once a work starts putting more than a certain level of information on each page, too much of my attention is devoted to processing and retaining it—I have to stop reading after awhile, because reading the book is mentally exhausting.

However, after thinking about this for awhile, I realized that the nonfiction books which I love the most are the ones that came as close as possible to this level of information-density (a line that I call “The Textbook Axis”)—ones that flirted with becoming textbooks, but didn’t actually get there.

These works provided a mental workout, but the challenge was light enough that it overcoming it was a pleasure. To this end, I have organized, a list of books that I believe fall on either side of The Textbook Axis. I’ve read all the books on the left-hand side and tried to read the books on the right-hand side.

Almost A Textbook

Textbook

The Feminine Mystique

The Second Sex

A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell

Every work of actual philosophy

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

Collapse by Jared Diamond

Robert Caro’s Lyndon Johnson books (and also the Power Broker)

Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibson

Plutarch’s Lives

Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

All of the works on the right-hand side were enjoyable on a paragraph- and sentence-level (this was especially true for Emerson’s Essays. The man was intensely quotable). But the overall effect of the book was quite dull. Because there was too much information on each page!

Of course, people’s Textbook Axes differ in positioning. I’m sure there are people who enjoy reading Walden. And I bet that one’s Textbook Axis changes positions over time. Hmm, maybe I should use Understanding Comics as a litmus test. On the day that I no longer find it to be boring, I’ll know that I’m ready to go out and tackle a whole wide world of heretofore dull books.

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Literary novels only have two kinds of endings

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on March 27, 2013

JABCI am a huge believer that reading books should not be work. And that, conversely, there is a right time at which to read every book. And if you read a book at the wrong time, then you rob yourself of the chance to read it at the right time. That’s why I hate being assigned books for a class: the time for them is rarely right.

I just finished rereading To The Lighthouse. It was fantastic, and I enjoyed it so much more than the first time I read it, three years ago (when I don’t think I really understood what was going on). But, somehow, I think that the time for me to read it was still not right. I found my attention wandering. I wasn’t locked-on in the same way that I was for Mrs. Dalloway.

But, after finishing TTL, I picked up the used copy of Karen Joy Fowler’s The Jane Austen Book Club, which I got for free a month back, and I instantly knew that it was the right time for me to read this book.

First of all, I’ve read every Jane Austen novel.

Secondly, there’s just something about it that transports me back to a very specific time in my life: a time that I rarely think about. It makes me feel like I’m eighteen again, and it’s the summer before college, and my reading tastes are just starting to broaden, and I’m reading tons of these science fiction short stories that I have (quite literally) ordered in wholesale lots from eBay.

Fowler’s book is not science fiction. It’s a very realist novel. But there is something about the world of the novel that is very reminiscent of humanist SF from the 70s, 80s, and 90s. It’s a calm and clean world. Nowadays, science fiction is very busy and cluttered: so much is happening, there are so many eyeball kicks and fantastic technologies and strange slang words. But in the stories I’m thinking of—the stories of John Varley, John Crowley, Howard Waldrop, Nancy Kress, Maureen McHugh, Robert Reed, Joe Haldeman, etc—there was a sedateness and an orderliness that I found very comforting, without being able to really define it.

Those stories did not take place in amoral universes, not in the way that the stories of, say, William Gibson or Kij Johnson or Elizabeth Hand feel a bit amoral. Terrible things might happen to people, but those things were aberrations: the world was not of a piece with those things.

In the same way, the Jane Austen Book Club is about a world that is fundamentally nice. You might dip into peoples’ lives and see terrible things, but you also see them sitting around a fire and discussing Jane Austen and you know that they’ve found a way to endure and even prosper.

I think that’s a worthwhile thing to have in fiction. It’s true that we’re born alone and we die alone and that eventually the universe will destroy us all. But it’s also true that life is full of graciousness and decency and niceness. To The Lighthouse recognizes both of these things, but Woolf mixes them in an odd way, so that the tragedy is woven through with the grace, while Fowler’s book always makes sure to end things with a note of niceness.

In some ways, that is what marks Fowler’s book as a genre novel. I often joke that there are only two kinds of literary short stories: the ones what descend into a bottomless pit of sadness at the end; and the ones that descend really, really deep into the bottomless abyss of sadness, and then curve up just a tiny bit, so as to end on the most minute note of hope (for the best examples of the latter, see the endings of“Babylon, Revisited” or Gone With The Wind).

I don’t know why this is. I don’t think a happy ending is necessarily falser than a sad one. An ending is a very arbitrary thing, and since people do sometimes have happy moments in their lives, I don’t think it’s terrible to end a story while inside one of them.

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Eight writing manuals that are not an absolute waste of time

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on March 14, 2013

artMost writing books are a terrible waste of time, because they give you pretty basic Creative Writing 101 type advice about point of view, tense, plot structure, etc. and then combines it with a few workshop platitudes like “show, don’t tell”; “start strong”; “characters have to change during the story”, and then wrap it up with some canned advice like, “the most important thing is to write every day and read widely.”

If you don’t know that stuff, then maybe one of those books might be worthwhile. As I recall (this is way back in the dusty recesses of my memories from my last year of high school), I found Damon Knight’s Creating Short Fiction to be fairly useful. Oh, wait, Self-Editing For Fiction Writers was also really useful, actually. It’s all about how to cut words and make things cleaner. Well worth a read. And I thought that Donald Maas’ Writing The Breakout Novel was a fairly good overview of things you should think about when you’re trying to write fiction with commercial appeal.

Mostly, though, I don’t enjoy books that are about how to write. I am sure that there are some good ones out there, but I think that the craft of writing is something that you mostly get a sense for by reading books and then trying to do the things you’ve read. For me, the best writing books are the ones that give a sense of how to go about your life as a writer. Honestly, I can’t remember even a tenth of the actual advice that is in any of the following books, but each of them gave me this very vivid sense of a writer who’d developed their own systems and modes of writing. To me, these books are more like commencement speeches than handbooks. Their mix of advice and autobiography inspires you to go out into the world and find your own way of looking at it.

  • About Writing by Samuel Delany – The best writing book. This is my bible. For several years, I had it on my bedside table and whenever I was feeling down, I’d leaf through it. Delany’s intelligence is so vast and cool. It flows from whatever he is talking about. There is plenty of advice (good advice) in here about the actual writing. But there’s also advice on how to conduct yourself as a writer. The overwhelming lesson of this book is that if you want to write good fiction, you should be as serious and curious as Delany himself.
  • Starve Better by Nick Mamatas – Typical acerbic wisdom from Nick. Half the book is about writing fiction and the other half is about freelancing. Mamatas is a contrarian, and in these essays he largely aims to explode myths propagating by other advice-givers. If you’ve been reading his livejournal for the last eight years, then most of these essays are probably already familiar to you. However, if you haven’t, then you absolutely need to get this book. His persona is pugnacious, but also literate and sensitive. He’s the reigning defender of the uncommercial side of commercial fiction.
  • On Becoming A Novelist by John Gardner – The author of this book taught inside the academic creative writing industry for years (as did/does Delany, of course), and serves as a kind of voice from over there. Over there is a weird place, where they do things pretty differently. For instance (as I recall), his chapter on publication basically says, “Publication will come when you’re ready.” That advice is insane. But you know what else they do over there? Write some good fiction. Gardner’s advice is a bit more froofy and mystical than you’ll find in creative writing books written by spec-fic writers (although, by the standards of literary writers, it’s pretty hard-nosed and practical), but that’s okay. Sometimes you need a little froofiness.
  • Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke – Literally ten letters written to an aspiring poet by Rilke. Hard to describe them. They’re exhortations. They’re about finding the silence inside of you and learning how to feel your way to the point where poetry rises out of you. The letter format is wonderful, because it feels like he’s literally writing to you. It’s also beautiful that he took so seriously the aspirations of someone who really hadn’t produced anything yet.
  • What is Art? by Leo Tolstoy – Almost no other creative writing book dares to tackle the topic “What kinds of things should you write about?” But Tolstoy goes there. Spoiler: You should write about stuff that’ll improve the reader’s moral and spiritual condition. The most insane performance in this book is when Tolstoy summarizes (and then dismisses) two thousand years worth of aesthetic theory. He also takes down ballet and the opera for being immoral, and then he rails about the millions of people whose lives are being blighted by art. This is brilliant stuff. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. After reading this, you will spend twelve hours absolutely convinced that Tolstoy was right. Of course, it’ll eventually wear off (thank God).
  • Booklife by Jeff Vandermeer – Advice about how to organize your writing career. In retrospect, I was perhaps a bit too early in my career when I read this book, since I didn’t really have any publications or any kind of profile yet. But it was mostly revelatory because it’s the only writing book that concedes that there is this thing, this “booklife,” as Vandermeer calls it, which threads throughout your writing career and which you need to nurture and manage.
  • On Writing by Stephen King – This book is half writing advice and half Stephen King’s autobiography of his life as a writer. The writing advice is take it or leave it; the autobiography, though, is gripping. Stephen King is the spec fic phenom of the latter half of the 20th century. How can anyone not want to get in there and figure out how he did what he did? In this book, he comes across a bit like a Stephen King character. Always slightly down-at-heel, but hopeful and self-educated. It’s a resolutely blue-collar image of how to produce literature.
  • Zen In The Art Of Writing by Ray Bradbury – This book is actually a bit depressing. I am not sure it’s possible for me to work as hard as Bradbury did. The story I remember most is that he’d sit down on Monday and write the whole first draft of a story. Then on Tuesday he’d write the second draft. Wednesday he’d write the third. And so on until Friday, when he’d write the fifth draft and then mail out the submission. That is insane.

Hmm, that was significantly more books than I thought there’d be.

P.S. I know someone is gonna mention Elements of Style. Don’t even get me started on Elements of Style. That book might be a fine guide to grammar and usage, but it’s no good on style. I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let some old (and dead) dudes tell me that I can’t incorporate business and military slang into my writing.

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Just finished Mrs. Dalloway, it was one of the most engrossing reading experiences of my life

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on February 26, 2013

Mrs._Dalloway_cover            Three years ago, I got my first Kindle and I almost immediately loaded a whole bunch of classic novels onto it. One of those novels was Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. I’d just finished reading To The Lighthouse, and I really wanted to read more Woolf.

However, my reaction to To The Lighthouse (three years ago) was a bit mixed. I was 60% bored and 40% astonished by its brilliance. Still, Mrs. Dalloway is a classic. It’s one of those books that you’ve got to read. So, roughly every two months for the last three years, I’ve opened up that file, read the first thousand words of the book and been like, “No. This is too unfocused and too meandering. I can’t tolerate 70,000 more words of this.”

But on Saturday night (well, morning) at around 2 AM, something changed. I read the next thousand words. And the next thousand. And I got about a tenth of the way through the book and I became really excited by it. There was something in it that wasn’t just interesting; it was intensely gripping.

I read it in about four hours on Saturday afternoon and late night. And it really was one of the most purely pleasurable reading experiences in my life. Even though I was tired and someone headachy and not my best self at all, I was totally absorbed in the novel. For those who don’t know, it’s the story of one day in the life of a Clarissa Dalloway, the wife of a member of Parliament. She walks around town a bit, talks to a bunch of people, then gives a party. Of course, the novel doesn’t stay with her: it zips into the heads of her husband, a former lover, and a random shell-shocked WWI veteran. It has no chapters and not even that many section breaks, it’s just one long stream.

And it’s perfect. Like, you know when you read a short story and you think, “Everything fits up exactly right” and you know that there is no way the author could’ve managed to hold all those threads for even a thousand more words? Well, Mrs. Dalloway is 70,000 words of that!

On a sentence level, it’s a joy to read. The mechanics of the novel are brilliant. Woolf eschews all the technology of action: the walking around, the doing things, the opening doors and getting into carriages. Basically, you know what the characters are doing by what they see. If they see something different, then you know they’re walking down the street. If they see the inside of a house, then you know they’ve gone inside. It’s so subtle and so intuitive. It actually feels much more natural than the standard way of doing things: you feel like you’re inside the protagonists’ heads.

Everything in the novel is so vivid and so heightened. At times, I was almost resentful towards the characters: they felt so much more alive and so much more interesting than I am. I wanted to live my life on the level that they were living theirs. They feel things so deeply. An aeroplane passing overhead is a mystical moment. A motorcar stopping in front of a store is a majestic occurrence.

It really didn’t have any dull bits. Every page had its pleasures. Every page had something startling and fascinating. At times, the novel felt like it was touching upon every possible theme: art, religion, war, aging, youth, mental illness, happiness, politics, social stratification, career success, colonialism, feminism, everything! Although it is primarily told through the eyes of this very narrow set of very upper-class people, there are so many characters who walk on for just a moment. And even if they have just a few pages, they feel like people. Like at one point, we spent just a thousand words in the head of Miss Kilham, who is the tutor of Mrs. Dalloway’s daughter. Kilham is very religious and very politically radical, and she desperately wants the daughter to like her. There’s something so palpable about her desperation, but also something very heroic about her.

Honestly, this is the first book I’ve read in a long time where I said to myself, “I wish this book didn’t have to end.”

Reading it was like being a kid again, and reading without any kind of agenda or expected outcome, just for the pure pleasure of tooling around between the lines of the page. Honestly, I am a little astonished that books still have the power to affect me in that way. You know, I’ve often wondered whether modernism was a solution that was in search of a problem. To me, all these new narrative techniques and advanced plotlessness didn’t necessarily seem to offer a better reading experience than Tolstoy or Chekhov.

Now I am a convert. Mrs. Dalloway definitely gave me a type of involvement and a type of pleasure that I’ve never gotten from a conventionally-structured novel.

P.S. Also, yay for lesbian subplots! Every time someone is like, “Oh, of course [some novel] had to be coy about the homosexuality, because it was published in the fifties or in the sixties,” I think about 1920s novelists like Woolf and Proust who were being pretty darned explicit about it. The lesbian subplots were the absolutely best part of Mrs. Dalloway, and they unfold in such a clear way. Mrs. Dalloway is lying in bed (she sleeps separately from her husband), and she’s basically thinking about how she could never please him in bed, because she lacked a certain kind of passion, and then she immediately starts thinking about her childhood friend and how her love for that friend was similar to what a man’s would’ve been. It’s just an aspect of the story, obviously, and Dalloway’s lack of sexual fulfillment isn’t played up as a huge tragedy (the way it would be in a modern novel), but I thought it was nonetheless super interesting.

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Quick thoughts on books that I haven’t read in a long time

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on February 22, 2013

  • gone_windI’ve only read Gone With The Wind once, when I was in 9th grade, but it made a huge impression on me. I still remember its strangely hopeful ending. There was something so perfect about Scarlett deciding to go back to Tara and regroup. It was exactly the right note on which to end the book. That was also the book that taught me that heroes don’t need to be sympathetic; they just need to be interesting. Scarlett was unintelligent, selfish, and cruel, but there was something riveting about her: she demonstrated how far you can get in life on sheer ruthlessness.
  • I was thinking the other day about Voltaire’s Candide. It’s a famous book, but not as widely-read as it should be. I think this one book that’s seriously suffered from being labeled ‘literature.’ Whenever you hear about it, it’s described as some deep philosophical tract on the education of the youth. But that’s not it at all. It’s a super-fun romp. It’s way more Arabian Nights than Bhagavad Gita. And it’s also weirdly bawdy and horrifying. People die in monstrous ways and if they don’t die, they degenerate and become haggard shells of themselves. It’s definitely worth an afternoon of anyone’s time.
  • One year, I spent so much time reading Saul Bellow and I’ve retained very little of it. It’s all blended together and left me only a mental picture of a slovenly but handsome man of letters who wanders around making caustic judgments on the people around him. Anyone who’s going to read him should just start with Ravelstein and then maybe not go any further. It’s not only one of his shortest books, but it also feels like his kindest and his least self-absorbed.
  • I wish George Orwell had written more nonfiction books. I enjoyed Homage To Catalonia, Road To Wigan Pier, Down and Out In Paris And London, and Fifty Essays much more than I enjoyed any of his novels (and I enjoyed his novels quite a lot). No one explains stuff quite as gently and kindly as he doess
  • On Wednesday, I saw The Silver Linings Playbook, which has a scene where the main character reads the end of A Farewell To Arms and then gets angry and throws it out the window. I loved A Farewell To Arms and I think its last line (one of the most famous last lines in literature) is an exactly perfect one. That line should not have been anything else. It’s deeply affecting and it, obviously, added something to the toolkit of modern literature. But that last line is also very upsetting, because it feels cheap. You have a character who’s cool and collected and slightly shell-shocked and then, at the very climax of the book, you pull away from him and refuse to pierce that dignity. It feels like the book can’t bear to ever allow its protagonist to ever seem less than utterly manly. And I don’t think that books should be solicitous of their characters in precisely that way.
  • John Steinbeck is so weird. I still find it hard to believe that the author of Grapes of Wrath could’ve also written Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row. They’re all about impoverished people, but Grapes is so righteously angry in a way that the other two simply are not. Tortilla and Cannery almost kind of glorify a life of poverty and portray poor people (or at least certain subsets of poor people) as being more genuine and more authentically in touch with life. But Grapes says exactly the opposite: it’s about how poverty destroys families and shreds human dignity. Ever since I read Tortilla Flat, I’ve never been able to get excited about Steinbeck in the same way. It’s a good and interesting book, but it’s also repulsive and cold-hearted one and, honestly, more than a bit racist. I still haven’t read East of Eden. Every description of it makes it sound rather unappetizing to me (a retelling of Adam and Eve using a ranching family in 1930s and 1940s Salinas, California), but I really do need to get around to that someday.
  • Other strangely-unappealing books that I’m constantly picking up and putting down and which I plan on getting around to sometime in the next forty years:
    • Crime And Punishment
    • For Whom The Bell Tolls
    • Ulysses
    • Gravity’s Rainbow
    • As I Lay Dying and Light in August
    • Middlesex
    • Song of Solomon and Beloved
    • A Passage To India
    • Mrs. Dalloway
    • Lord of the Flies
    • Invisible Man
    • Where I’m Calling From

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Why Gone Girl is super-excellent (despite its somewhat-skippable writing style)

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on February 19, 2013

8442457As I mentioned in my last entry, I’ve finished reading Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn’s recent insane super best-seller. The novel occupies an interesting cultural place: it’s a crime thriller that’s found a substantial readership amongst both sexes. It so often feels like literature (and all pop culture, in general) is very gender-segregated. There are women’s classics and men’s classics; women’s bestsellers and men’s bestsellers. Gone Girl kinda bridges that divide.

There’s something of a war of the sexes element in the novel. For those who don’t know, it has two first-person narrators: a husband and his wife. After the wife goes missing and the husband becomes the chief subject in her presumed murder, a media frenzy ignites in a manner that’s somewhat reminiscent of the O.J. Simpson or Scott Peterson cases.

The plotting of the book is phenomenal. What blew me away right from the beginning is the table of contents. I mean, look at this Table of Contents (I’ve elided some things from it to make it more readable on the web):

 

  • Part One: Boy Loses Girl
    • Nick Dunne: The Day of
    • Amy Elliott: January 8, 2005
    • Nick Dunne: The Day of
    • …
  • Part Two: Boy Meets Girl
    • Amy Elliott Dunne: The Day of
    • Nick Dunne: Seven Days Gone
    • Amy Elliott Dunne: The Day of
    • Nick Dunne: Seven Days Gone
    • Amy Elliott Dunne: Five Days Gone
    • …
  • Part Three: Boy Gets Girl Back (Or Vice Versa)
    • Nick Dunne: Forty Days Gone
    • Amy Elliott Dunne: The Night of the Return
    • Nick Dunne: The Night of the Return
    • Amy Elliott Dunne: The Night of the Return
    • Nick Dunne: The Night of the Return
    • Amy Elliott Dunne: Five Days after the Return
    • Nick Dunne: Thirty Days after the Return
    • …
    • Amy Elliott Dunne: Ten Months, Two Weeks, Six Days after the Return

 

Right away, just from looking at this ToC, you know three things:

  • Amy is not dead (because although her narration begins seven years in the past, it does eventually come up to the present day).
  • She eventually comes back
  • She has some kind of future. Or, at least, ten months after the main action of this book, she is still alive.

This is wonderful! Right in the Table of Contents, Flynn has thrown away some of the most obvious generators of suspense: Did he kill her? Is she alive? Will she survive?

And throughout, the plotting is just superb. Information is revealed at the right time and the revelations are shocking but not absurd. There’s something delightfully playful about the story. It eschews the expected thing and the easy villains. It really kept me reading.

The writing is…interesting. The novel does not have that typical bestseller style, with short sentences and plain language. It’s told by two first-person narrators who both have strong voices. They both jump around in time and hide information from you and narrate things in their own way. There is plenty of figurative language and complex sentence structure and detail.

But…there’s something about the writing that makes the book a bit hard to read. For the first fourth of it or so, I found my eyes skipping over paragraphs and then getting lost (since this is not the kind of book where you can really skip whole paragraphs, since information is buried in the center of paragraphs and doled out at semi-random intervals). There’s just something about the writing that screams out that you shouldn’t be reading all of it. Eventually, the difficulty went away and I no longer had trouble reading it.

But, after I finished the book, I started to think that maybe the problem was that the details that the book chooses to include often seem kind of extraneous. They don’t really advance the plot or reveal much about the character. Like, take this paragraph from literally moments before the narrator discovers that his house is in shambles and his wife is missing.

Quiet. The complex was always disturbingly quiet. As I neared our home, conscious of the noise of the car engine, I could see the cat was definitely on the steps. Still on the steps, twenty minutes after Carl’s call. This was strange. Amy loved the cat, the cat was declawed, the cat was never let outside, never ever, because the cat, Bleecker, was sweet but extremely stupid, and despite the LoJack tracking device pelleted somewhere in his fat furry rolls, Amy knew she’d never see the cat again if he ever got out. The cat would waddle straight into the Mississippi River – deedle-de-dum – and float all the way to the Gulf of Mexico into the maw of a hungry bull shark.

The paragraph is not overtly bad, it’s just pointless. Bleecker barely appears in the rest of the novel. The characters almost never think about him. Furthermore, although we now “know” that Amy is the type of person who loves and cossets her cat, we never really get the sense that this is true. Like, nothing in the book discredits this, but nothing supports it, either. The cat is just sort of tossed in here for the hell of it.

And that’s not really how novels should be written.

It’s also weird because I’m reading Flynn’s second novel right now (Gone Girl is her third), and this novel doesn’t have this issue at all. The writing is sharp and the details are well-chosen.

I think the issue I have with Gone Girls’ writing is directly related to the complexity of its characterization. Basically, in this novel, Nothing Is As It Seems. And in order to support the mystery, each character needs to be described in ways that support two separate portraits. It has to be possible for Nick to seem both like a roguish schmo and a cold-hearted wife-beater. And the novel has difficulty threading these lines. With two first-person narrators like this, there’s just not enough ambiguity. I mean, everything almost hangs together. You can almost see how it’s possible for someone to see either version of Nick and Amy…but sometimes the strain shows through.

Basically, in order for this story to work, the characters have to be complex in an incredibly multi-faceted and contradictory way. And I can believe that they are that complex, because I want the story to work. But the story never quite succeeds in showing us what that complexity would look like. We never quite get a sense of what Nick and Amy do and say and talk about when they’re not, you know, enmeshed in a bizarre murder plot.

But whatever, it’s an incredibly ambitious and thought-provoking novel and it’s really fun to read. I highly recommend it.

Posted in Books | Tagged: , | 4 Comments »

I really enjoy knowing approximately how long it’s going to take me to read a book

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on February 17, 2013

self-measure-titleI only read one book at a time. But, since I’m in graduate school, I need to read a book a week as part of my readings’ course. Thus, I now need to time exactly when I’m going to finish my books. This has resulted in a huge leap forward in my ability to assess how long it’s going to take me to read any given book.

Basically, the lynchpin of this system is the Kindle. Anyone who has used one knows that the Kindle doesn’t use page numbers to mark your location in book: it uses location numbers. For instance, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (the [amazing] book I just completed) is around 7000 locations long. Now, there’s no hard and fast rule for what a location actually means. Really, it measures the length of the encoding that underlies your text. Thus, even if you have two texts that’re of the same length (in terms of a wordcount), the text with more encoding (italics, bolding, lists, tables, fonts, etc.) will have more locations than the one with less encoding. However, a general rule of thumb is that 1000 locations = about 22,000 words. For instance, Gone Girl has 7000ish locations and is about 150,000 words.

As I noted years ago, I used to read about 15,000 words an hour. Now, that was an actual reading speed: it included bathroom breaks, checking my email, fidgeting, making a snack, staring into space, etc. It also tended to include 10-15 minutes of going outside and smoking. Since quitting smoking, I’ve observed that I’m usually able to read 1000 or so locations (20k or so words) in an hour. If the novel is a very fast-paced thrillerish novel (i.e. one that has a lot of skimmable prose), that can sometimes be more like 1300-1400 locations in an hour (it’s possible that some of this is due to fast-paced books catching my interest and resulting in fewer distractions per hour)

Thus, I knew, even before I began it, that Gone Girl was going to take me at least 7 hours to read (it actually took more like 5.75 hours, since this was one of those books that you can read fast). Next, I’m going to read George Saunders’ Tenth Of December: Stories for a Monday book club discussion. Since it’s about 3000 kindle locations, I know I’m going to have to devote about three hours to it tomorrow. I don’t know what I’ll read after that, actually (although I am feeling an urge to return to either return to J.M. Coetzee or to read one of Gillian Flynn’s earlier novels), but I know that I need to finish it by Wednesday night (when I have to read the text for our Thursday class—it’s short, so this should take no more than an hour). Generally speaking, I can’t expect more than two hours of reading time on a weekday, so I need to make sure that I don’t select anything longer than 100,000 words. It’s all a very orderly system.

The result of this calculation is that I feel less afraid to take on long books. Even if book is about 300,000 words, I know that only represents 15 hours (or about a week and a half) of effort.

Posted in Books, General Principles | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Three suspense novels that I’ve recently enjoyed (A Simple Plan, Silence of the Lambs, and Murder on the Orient Express)

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on February 13, 2013

asimpleplanYou know, I don’t really care about plot. I mean, I write fairly plot-heavy stories, because that is the expectation in the speculative fiction world, but it often seems a bit pointless to me. It’s a whole lot of running here and running there and inserting enough foreshadowing to earn your surprising, yet inevitable, ending. There’s some weird way in which plot just doesn’t feel fun. To me, the best plots are the ones that don’t call too much attention to themselves: they’re content to serve as a scaffolding for the good stuff—the setting, the characterization, the dialogue, the funny bits.

And this extends to my reading. I don’t usually read stories in order to find out what happens next. In fact, if I feel like things are getting too suspenseful, I’ll sometimes go and look up the plot summary on Wikipedia just because I don’t actually value the experience of being kept in suspense.

But, lately, for some reason, I’ve been reading a number of suspense-type novels. And I’ve not only enjoyed them, but I’ve learned a lot from them. You hear so much about how “all the plots have been done before” and how “it’s about execution, not ideas,” but the truth is that a novel can get a lot of mileage off an idea that hasn’t been done before.

For instance, Silence of the Lambs found a clever way to solve the ur-problem of the mystery genre. Basically, criminals are sexy and cool. People read mystery novels, in part, because they want to hear about awesome and charismatic criminals. But, since the whole novel is about catching the criminal, there are a lot of logistical barriers to getting the criminal onscreen before the end of the novel. By necessity, the detective can’t really interact with the criminal very much, since they’re supposed to be trying to figure out who the criminal is. This is particularly problematic in serial killer stories, where a major part of the allure is the grotesque psychology of the killer—this person is supposedly utterly unlike regular people, but you never get to see him.

Some novels solve this by using a split-screen approach. You follow the criminal and the detective in alternating chapters. But this is still a bit unsatisfying, because your super-cool detective still never gets to interact with your super-cool criminal and because it destroys the mystery—now the audience knows exactly who the criminal is and, basically, how he’s going to get caught.

asotlbookSilence of the Lambs is ingenious because it just throws in an extra serial killer. You have Hannibal Lecter, who is not really at all relevant to the plot, to flounce around and act all cool and scary and have witty exchanges with Clarice Starling. And then you have Buffalo Bill, to provide the actual mystery. Although it makes the plot super messy (you could lift out every Hannibal-related section without materially affecting the rest of the book), it also makes for a very enjoyable story. In terms of reading experience, neither half of the book could work without the other. Without Hannibal, there’d be no fun. And without Buffalo Bill, there’d be no suspense.

Also, it’s worth noting that Silence of the Lambs is very well-written. It has a stripped-down style that feels effortless, but must’ve been a lot of work to achieve.

Another one that I recently read was A Simple Plan, by Scott Smith. A student in the MFA program recommended it to me. I could not believe that I’d never heard of this book before. It is amazing. It’s a very typical noir story: three guys in rural Ohio find $4 million in a crashed plane in the woods and they find themselves doing increasingly desperate things to keep it. It’s weird. This novel is so utterly simple, and even predictable, but a few simple modifications to the model were all it needed in order to feel fresh. Somehow, this story dispenses with the noir affectations. There is nothing cool about the hero. He’s a dope: an accountant at the feed store. At some point, he even says, “We’re not smart enough to get away with this.” But he tries so hard. At every stage, he sits down and he thinks and he plans and you can feel his mind struggling to make everything come out right. There’s something so real about the protagonist. Oh, and his wife. His wife is amazing. I guess she’s a femme fatale? But she’s not sexy. She’s cold and calculating but still never human. I’ve never read another character like her in a crime novel.

Agatha Christie’s novels tend to not have much personality, and Murder On The Orient Express is no different. Hercule Poirot is kind of a null as a detective. He’s nothing more than a funny accent. And her characters are just sketches. They’re backgrounds: they have no voice; no realness. Only her settings sometimes escape the general lividity. At times, the snowbound Orient Express started to feel a tiny bit alive. But, you know what, none of that matters. Because Christie really is a genius. She somehow managed to do stories that had never been done before (and, once done by her, can never really be done again). This one had a jaw-dropped ending that I came to almost unspoiled. An extremely successful novel.

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My latest self-help find: Feeling Good, by David Burns

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on February 6, 2013

Feeling-Good-David-BurnsI hate doctors, but I love self-help books. With doctors, the incentive is for them to either: a) get you out of there as fast as possible; or b) milk you for as many tests and treatments and visits as possible. Self-help books, on the other hand, mostly succeed through word of mouth:  a self-help book needs to not only leave you feeling good, but also feeling good enough about the book that you recommend it to other people.

I have enjoyed a number of self-help books. I think I’ve already mentioned Dave Carnegie’s How To Win Friends and Influence People and How To Stop Worrying And Start Living. They’re both delightful and informative books that’ve given me a lot. I also read David Allen’s Getting Stuff Done, which, while not quite as immediately helpful, did certainly get me to start thinking about my approaches to project planning and just generally doing all the stuff that I need to do in life.

More generally, my ethos in life is that if there’s anything you need to know or do, then there’s probably a book somewhere that tells you how to do it. If you want to be happy, then it’s silly to try to figure it out for yourself: someone else has probably already figured it out and put it in a book.

I am also big on self-improvement. Sometimes I am prone to thinking of myself as a machine that is getting faster and more efficient with each year. Every year I need to make finer and more precise adjustments to my functioning in order to gain smaller and smaller improvements in efficiency. It is a wonderful feeling. Going from 92% to 93% is as great as going from 25% to 50%.

However, I’ve mostly been forced to go it alone, because I’ve found that most self-help books are not nearly so good as Dale Carnegie’s. In fact, most self-help books are awful, because they’re, like, they’re basically systems of magic. It’s really weird. You’ll be reading a perfectly ordinary book like The First 90 Seconds, which is about how to make good impressions on people. And, suddenly, it will start talking about positive energy and focusing your auras and stuff. That doesn’t work for me. Positive thinking is one thing, but most books go beyond saying that you’ll be happier if you think positively: they say that the world will actually bend itself, in a quasi- or even outright-mystical manner, to your positive thoughts. No.

And even when they’re not awful, self-help books are often vague and overly general, or they’re focused on short-term results. They’re just about giving you that two-week burst of good feeling so that you tell everyone about it. They’re about helping you lose that 10 pounds in 28 days, and they don’t care whether the pounds come back because during that 28 days you’ll tell everyone you know about how wonderful the book is.

So despite a few good experiences with them, I have not read nearly as many self-help books as I’d like to have read. And I’d almost kind of given up on self-help.

Then came these last 2-3 weeks. Guys…they were terrible. I think you might have noticed a slightly downbeat tone on the blog. I don’t really know what happened. After a wonderful six-week long burst of energy (during which I wrote two short stories and an entire novel and shrugged off a number of pretty calamitous events like my childhood cat dying and my apartment filling with sewage), I just fell into this very blue mood where I couldn’t enjoy good things and even tiny bad things started to seem like huge obstacles.

I’ve had blue moods before, and I pretty much know what to expect. I’ve noticed that they tend to come sometime in January-February (last year at this time, I was super anxious about hearing back from MFA program). My understanding of my own moods is that they’re pretty cyclical. Bad and good moods basically descend upon you for neurochemical reasons and the only thing to do is to just sort of wait them out. And that’s what I was prepared to do this time. Actually, it wasn’t so bad this time, because I recognized that the things I was worried about were demonstrably minor. Everything in my life was exactly as good (if not even better) as it was three weeks ago.

But yeah, it was slow going. And then I read this post on the Guardian’s book blog (an amazing site, by the way), which contains a list of books that psychologists recommend for patients who have various mental problems. And one of those books was The Feeling Good Handbook, which sounded intriguing. When I looked it up online, the FGH had too many worksheets and exercises and stuff (I hate worksheets and exercises), though, so I read its more texty companion volume Feeling Good: A Guide To The New Mood Therapy.

And I immediately started to feel better.

The theory of the book is that negative moods are caused by negative thoughts? And that negative thoughts are usually characterized by illogical premises? And that if you work out the illogical premises in your thoughts, then you can respond to and circumvent them? I’m not sure that I buy into the paradigm. To me, my negative moods feel very external. I’ll have the exact same thing happen to me, but on a bad day, it’ll set off all this angst and worry while on a good day, it won’t affect me at all. If all of this is just due to my, like, “bad” thoughts, then why do I have bad thoughts on one day and good thoughts on another day? I think there’s more to it.

However, I think the book is astute in noting that one conduit by which we can affect our emotions is by trying to sort out our thoughts. In some ways, there’s a very meditative component to it. You sit down with pen and paper and write down all the thoughts that go through your head. Then you pick them apart and sort out exactly why they’re inaccurate (and I agree that depressive or anxious thoughts usually have an inaccurate or hyperbolic quality to them [although I will note that there is such a thing as depressive realism]). And then you write up some counteracting responses (which, for me, usually take on this Stuart Smalleyish affirmative quality: “No, what I did wasn’t shameful”, “Yes, I am working hard enough” etc) and then at the end of it, you feel loads better.

The book itself is pretty dry and not nearly so fun to read as self-help books usually are. But the exercises are very interesting and practical and well-suited to a temperament like mine (there is nothing I love more than the various modes of self-analysis). There’re even a checklists you can use to self-assess how anxious or depressed you are. It’s wonderful.

Also, I enjoyed the underlying promise of the book. The author, a psychiatrist, claims that you basically never need to feel super-depressed. I would certainly like to believe that. I do not enjoy losing weeks of my life to moodiness.

Of course, it’s hard to say whether the book really helped me. I might be putting the cart before the horse. It’s entirely possible that the reason I picked it up was because I was already starting to feel better.

EDIT: I also realized that the Guardian article no longer has the list of 30 books (or maybe it never did? And I just hallucinated it or something?), but anyway, I’ve copied the list below, in case anyone wants it. They all have that same slightly stodgy feel to them. You can see why I was attracted to the only one with a sexy title:

  • Anger Overcoming Anger and Irritability by William Davies
  • Overcoming Anxiety, Kennerley by Helen Robinson
  • Overcoming Anxiety, Stress and Panic : A Five Areas Approach by Chris Williams
  • Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway Susan Jeffers
  • Overcoming Binge Eating Christopher G Fairburn
  • Getting Better Bit(e) by Bit(e): A Survival Kit for Sufferers of Bulimia Nervosa and Binge Eating Disorders by Ulrike Schmidt and Janet Treasure
  • Overcoming Bulimia Nervosa and Binge Eating Peter J Cooper
  • Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (second edition) by Frankie Campling and Michael Sharpe
  • Overcoming Chronic Fatigue Mary Burgess and Trudie Chalder
  • Overcoming Chronic Pain by Frances Cole, Catherine Carus, Hazel Howden- Leach and Helen Macdonald
  • Overcoming Depression and Low Mood: A Five Areas Approach (third edition) by Chris Williams
  • Mind Over Mood: Change How You Feel by Changing the Way You Think by Dennis Greenberger and Christine Padesky
  • Overcoming Depression: A Guide to Recovery with a Complete Self-help Programme by Paul Gilbert
  • Overcoming Health Anxiety by Veale David and Rob Willson
  • Introduction to Coping with Health Anxiety by Brenda Hogan and Charles Young
  • Overcoming Obsessive Compulsive Disorder by David Veale and Rob Willson
  • Understanding Obsessions and Compulsions by Frank Tallis
  • Break Free from OCD: Overcoming Obsessive Compulsive Disorder with CBT
  • by Fiona Challacombe, Victoria Oldfield, Bream and Paul M Salkowskis
  • Overcoming Panic and Agoraphobia by Derrick Silove and by Vijaya Manicavasagar
  • Panic Attacks: What They Are, Why They Happen and What You Can Do About Them by Christine Ingham
  • An Introduction to Coping with Phobias by Brenda Hogan
  • Overcoming Relationship Problems by Michael Crowe
  • Self-Esteem Overcoming Low Self- Esteem by Melanie Fennell
  • The Feeling Good Handbook by David Burns
  • Overcoming Social Anxiety and Shyness Gillian Butler
  • Overcoming Insomnia and Sleep Problems by Colin A Espie
  • The Relaxation and Stress Reduction workbook by Martha Davis
  • Manage your Stress for a Healthier Life by Terry Looker and Gregson, Olga
  • The Worry Cure: Stop Worrying and Start Living by Robert L Leahy
  • How to Stop Worrying by Frank Tallis

Posted in Background Checks, Books | Tagged: , , | 1 Comment »

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