Book Commercial - Treasure Island

As Jim Trelease says in The Read-Aloud Handbook, one of Oprah Winfrey's great contributions to a renewed interest in reading in the United States is her ability to function as a commercial for a book. This really struck me, and it's something that I've been endeavoring to do when I read aloud. Build the book up before you begin! I had a recent experience with my own children, who are sometimes reluctant to settle in to listening to a new book if the style is unfamiliar, that shows how “hype” can really make a difference.

My son was given Treasure Island for his 6th birthday last June. At the time, I hadn't read it, and — although I knew it had something to do with treasure (clever) and I thought there were possibly pirates in it — I didn't give my son any introduction. I didn't even know if I would enjoy it myself. I launched straight into it without preamble:

Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17--, and go back to the time when my father kept the “Admiral Benbow” inn, and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof (p. 3).

Ninety words in the opening sentence! My 6-year-old balked, and no wonder. But then one day I decided to read Treasure Island to myself. I couldn't put it down. And then I went to the Internet and looked up Robert Louis Stevenson and things like “black spot,” “Davy Jones,” and “Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.” Now I was prepared to be a commercial for this book.

Theo had seen me reading Treasure Island, and heard me “oohing” and “aahing” when it got exciting or scary, and he wanted to know what was happening. I showed him the poem “Fifteen men on a dead man's chest,” which was familiar to him from watching Pirates of the Caribbean, and I told him that it was written by the author of Treasure Island. I told him that there were vicious pirates and lots of danger. Now and then I would give him a taste, saying something like: “Oh no! The little boy in this book is making friends with a pirate – but he doesn't know he's a pirate! He should know! He was told to watch out for a one-legged man! And this guy has only one leg, Theo! What is going to happen?!?” When I finished reading the book myself, I immediately started it from the beginning again, this time reading aloud to both of my kids, who were hanging on to every word. And while I did skip over some lengthy descriptive passages, I didn't substitute any of the difficult vocabulary. In that first sitting, I read them eight chapters and they begged for me to go on. We finished the entire book in only five sessions, and it's over 300 pages long. Because I had done a little research, I was able to explain a bit about the black spot and other things that might have otherwise been a bit obscure. I wouldn't have been able to do that if my first reading and theirs had been simultaneous. We're now reading Kidnapped by the same author.

Fforde

My friend Richard put me on to Jasper Fforde. I'm halfway through his second book in the Tuesday Next series, Lost in a Good Book, and am just loving it. Watch this space for a thoughtful review—but make sure you set a timeout interval or you're liable to expire before one appears.

For now, let me just say that I've seen comparisons to Terry Prachett and Douglas Adams, but neither seems quite right to me. These books are meatier. They are full of literary allusions; I'm madly taking notes of things I should read or re-read or research to see if they're real or made-up as I work through them. Right after reading The Eyre Affair, I beelined for a copy of Jane Eyre in the bookshop. I meant to buy it and read it, thus filling one of many embarrassing (but not unexpected) gaps in my literary education, but I'll sheepishly tell you that instead I just flipped straight to the end to see whether or not Jane actually ended up with Rochester. (She did! Hoorah!)

I'll do my best to marshall my thoughts about these books into something sensible for my next post.

Susan

My favorite books from my childhood are those in C.S. Lewis's Narnia series. In particular, I love The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Naturally, when I was a little mite, I didn't pick up on the Christian symbolism. Now that I am a Big Fat Atheist, I notice it all right, but don't give a hoot. Actually, that's not quite true: if anything, I rather enjoy it. I suppose it's because the books were already special to me.

More of a problem for me is the fact the Susan doesn't get to come back to Narnia at the end of the series. Why not? This is especially hard for a child reader to understand. A child reader wants the whole family together: the thought of an excluded one is hard to accept.

I can tell, even from the very first book that she appears in (T.L.t.W.a.t.W.), that Susan is not Lewis's favored child. She doesn't want to give in to the magical world. In Prince Caspian she is the last to see Aslan and is responsible for leading the children astray while they are on their way to join the battle. In The Last Battle, Susan does not appear and is described by one of the children who returns as "...no longer a friend of Narnia." But why? Is it because she is too cautious and sensible to believe (to have faith?) or is it because (as some critics think) she is becoming a sexual being, more concerned with her own beauty?

And what of Aslan's words in T.L.t.W.a.t.W.: "Once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen of Narnia"? How are we to reconcile these things? Perhaps Susan just has to wait for her turn. Maybe she has a thing or two to learn first.

Neil Gaiman (most awesome modern fantasy writer) wrote a short story a few years ago called "The Problem of Susan." (It appears in his recent collection, Fragile Things.) This story features an elderly Professor Hastings, who is Susan Pevensie in her dotage. Worth a read. Gives quite a different perspective. Don't read aloud to children.

Enduring Love

Have you read Enduring Love by Ian McEwan? No? Well, do.

I've read it before and am reading it again now for book club purposes. (Yeah, book club! There's hope for you yet!) I wish I hadn't let so many intervening years (6 or 7) go by since I last read this book.

Here's what I love:

- The entire opening chapter. There is nothing to equal it. It stands alone beautifully. In fact, I do believe, although I couldn't swear to it (the front matter of my edition makes no mention of it), that this chapter was originally published as a short story and that is how I first encountered it. A picnic, a yell, five men running toward each other across a field, disorder, tragedy, guilt, the beginning of obsession. I don't want to tell you any more: just read it yourself and then let me know what you think.

- The writing is exquisite. Here's an example; the narrator is describing his experience of recounting the story of the tragedy to friends:

I watched our friends' wary, intelligent faces droop at our tale. Their shock was a mere shadow of our own, resembling more the good-willed imitation of that emotion, and for this reason it was a temptation to exaggerate, to throw a rope of superlatives across the abyss that divided the experience from its representation by anecdote. Over the days and weeks, Clarissa and I told our story many times to friends, colleagues, and relative. I found myself using the same phrases, the same adjectives in the same order. It became possible to recount the events without re-living them in the faintest degree, without even remembering them.* (p. 36)**

- The philosophical questions: What are our moral obligations to our fellow humans; are they different for relations than for strangers; how do we balance self-interest and altruism? What is the biological basis for altruism? How does game theory impact our decisions?

- The science vs. religion threads that appear throughout the story. Rationality vs. irrationality.

- The discussion of love. The parallel discussion of obsession.

* This exactly how I feel when telling a friend a story about something that happened to me. If I have a 1 hour delay in the airport, it pisses me off a certain amount. Let x be that amount. I tell you about it... now, you may like me, but you're not me, so although you sympathize, my feelings of x will elicit something less than x in you. 1/2 x, let's say, if I am lucky. OK, so when I tell you about my experience, I am trying to do more than give you the bare facts. I want to communicate how the experience made me feel. So, without meaning to lie, really, my 1 hour wait at the airport somehow becomes a 2 hour wait at the airport in the retelling. And now you, bless you, feel x too. Thank you.

** Vintage Edition, 1998.

Steig and Peet

I have been enjoying two fabulous children's authors: William Steig and Bill Peet. They have a lot in common, it turns out.

Both were American. They were contemporaries: Steig was born in 1907 and died in 2003 (aged 95); Peet was born in 1915 and died in 2002 (aged 87). Both charmingly illustrated their own stories*. Both had interesting careers outside of their work as authors: Steig was a cartoonist for The New Yorker; Peet wrote for Disney.

Both wrote stories about innocent child or animal protagonists battling the odds to achieve something. Steig's characters outsmart evil captors, break free from enchantments, and face storms to find their way home for a happy reunion with loved ones. Peet's stories frequently contain an environmental message. In one story, a little bird flies from New York City to California to live in a redwood tree. In another, a group of animals hop a train to try to find a new home after their habitat is destroyed.

Gripping stories, sweet pictures, engaging characters... yes, yes, yes. But what I am enjoying the most at the moment is the rich vocabulary in these books. They are for quite young children, really, but neither Steig nor Peet shies away from big or uncommon words. Here's what I've found in a quick flip-through of the ones that happen to be lying about:
- Steig: perplexed, ceased, compote, exclamations, defecate**
- Peet: chortled***, blunder, diminishing, bedraggled, sycamore, indestructible

I read aloud to my kids every night. And I've had enough of Go Dog Go, Green Eggs and Ham****, and Are You My Mother? I love books like this instead: books that engage me as much as they engage the kids. My kids prefer them too.

* With a few exceptions; for instance, Steig's later work was illustrated by others. Hard to draw when you're, like, 92.

**Seriously!

*** Peet loves this word! I've seen him use it in at least three different stories.

****Am I the only one out there who is not a fan of Dr. Seuss's illustrations? Creepy. Why are they all smiling with their eyes closed? And all those floppy feet...

Sir Salman

Salman Rushdie became Sir Salman last week: on June 15, 2007, he was knighted by the Queen.**

Here are some quotes, running the gambit from frightening, through appropriate, to fluffy.

A Pakistani government minister sees this as justification for suicide attacks: "If someone exploded a bomb on [Rushdie's] body he would be right to do so unless the British government apologises and withdraws the 'sir' title." (The Guardian, June 18).

The Guardian sees this as a "...belated endorsement by the British establishment."

My favorite is one that Bill Poser found and mentioned on LL; he doesn't identify the original author: "The queen is a piece I recognize, and so is the knight, but what, scacchically, is a "rushdie" and how does it move on the board?"

(Scacchically, Poser tells us, is an adverb that means "from the point of view of chess." This obscure word is recorded in the OED*** as dating back to 1860—thanks to Language Hat for looking it up for us.)


** On the same day, the founders of an erotic lingerie line received MBEs.

***The OED may approve, but my spellchecker frowns.

[Update, 2007-06-20: Seriously now. Predictably, things have worsened. An Iranian government official calls the knighthood "a provocative act," and Pakistan has asked Britian to rescind the honour.

This takes me right back to 1989. Coincidentally, I happen to be reading God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, and in Chapter 2, "Religion Kills," he reminds us of some of the public statements made by religious organizations when the fatwa against Rushdie was first issued. Rather than the universal outrage that one might have expected, Hitchens reminds us that the Vatican, the archbishop of Canterbury, and the chief sephardic rabbi in Israel agreed in official public statements that, while the threat of violence was a pity, The Satanic Verses was indeed blasphemous. Other public figures agreed. If you haven't yet read the famous exchange of letters between Rushdie, John Le Carre, and Hitchens that appeared in The Guardian in November 1997, now is the time to remedy that.]

But sometimes I want to keep them

Omit needless words. So say Strunk and White. And so do many others who write on writing. Be concise; be direct. These are the virtues.

God knows, it's a proud day for me when I can turn something like this:

To maintain synchronization between the two controller cards, the operating system occasionally performs an automatic reload of the standby controller card. To facilitate the automatic reload of an controller card, the auto-boot variable must be set to true.

Into something like this**:

To synchronize the controller cards, the operating system occasionally reloads the standby controller card automatically. Set the auto-boot variable to true to enable this process.

(I ran a word count on the before and after, I confess. Don't scream, but sometimes I'm tempted to include this type of data in my annual self-appraisal at work. So far I've refrained. I suspect that's been wise.)

Now I want to show you something else. Something wordy. Something that would cause any measure of the FOG index to choke. And yet something from which not a single word could be excised. It's from Stephen Fry's Paperweight; it's from a review Fry wrote of Bernard Levin's book, In These Times:

I have to confess right here and now that my feelings upon being called upon to review an anthology (and it is Levin himself who says that the volumes are collections of pressed flowers, and we all know that an anthology is, if it is to be taken au pied de la lettre, nothing more, nor indeed less—and who would have it otherwise?—that a posy or, mutandis mutandis, nosegay—though no doubt the gentlemen who busy themselves with instructing us how to live and speak would have words to say, nay, shriek, on the subject of how gay or otherwise the nose may, or, come to that, may not be, for as sure as eggs are graded ovular Euro-units there will lurk in some dank council cupboard a malevolent creature whose 'nosegay' is now proscribed, look with a spot I damn it—of flowers, and if you, having followed the wild and twisting path of my clauses to a successful conclusion, can sight, in the purple distance, the welcoming beacon that promises an end to this parenthesis, then Levin is the writer for you—five hours of reading Levin and the plain English sentence is only a dimly perceived memory, if I can just find my way out of this clause, I will join you....) are not unlike that of a schoolboy on being called upon to write a report on his schoolmaster.

That's 231 words, kids! In one sentence. I wouldn't omit a single one. But perhaps it all comes down to how one defines needless.

**Yes, this is what I do all day. I know some of you repair injured bodies, enlighten young minds, preserve our environment. Some of you create businesses, look after children, rescue animals. Some of you take care of the aged, drive our economy, define public policy. Some of you create music, create art, create dance. Some of you design buildings, write books, program computers. Some of you study the stars. Unclog drains. Breed mosquitoes.*** Police our streets. Search for a cure for cancer. Lead Expotitions to the North Pole.**** But I, I...well, I turn this (that nobody reads) into that (that nobody reads). But that's OK!

***Ha ha! Did you notice that this one isn't virtuous? I do know someone who does this. He does it with a surprising amount of enthusiasm.

****Who Am I Kidding? Obviously I am getting carried away. I have 6 readers that I know of. And none of you likes long cold hikes.

Not just romance, but...

Is this this article really telling me that Harlequin Publishing not only publishes romance novels, but that it also publishes African-American romance novels? What the hell?? We have plain old reg'lar romance and African-American romance? What am I supposed to conclude here?

Biographies

I like very few biographies (auto or otherwise). Actually, now that I come to think of it, I read very few biographies. They simply don't tempt me. I stride right by the biography section in the bookstore or library without it even registering in my field of vision. Kinda like true crime, romance, sports, self-help (well, I do notice self-help. I point and laugh at it a bit and move on), interior design, astrology, and graphic novels.

I only go for biographies of people I'm already completely captivated (obsessed?) by. Usually writers. Here are some I've read and loved:
- By Heart: Elizabeth Smart a Life, by Rosemary Sullivan
- Experience, Martin Amis
- Moab Is My Washpot, Stephen Fry
- Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov
- Inside Memory: Pages from a Writer's Workbook, Timothy Findley

But if I don't already know you and love you...meh. Don't want to read about you.

Ahem. We were assigned an autobiography at book club last week. Not going to say what it is yet. I'll give it a chance: it might be good. I will read it cheerfully. I still owe them one for Confederacy of Dunces.

And maybe I will find that I can be captivated by the life story first, and the life's work second.

What Was She Thinking? Notes on Class

My book club meets tomorrow. It's usually quite a drunk-fest, and frankly we rarely get around to discussing the book, but I want to be prepared this time because they actually let me pick the book. It's the first time they let me pick since I picked Confederacy of Dunces last year, which Did Not Go Over Well To Put It Mildly. In fact, it went over so badly that I hear about it pretty much every time we meet ("...well, that one sucked but at least it didn't suck as hard as Confederacy of Dunces," is a typical remark you'll hear two or three times on a given evening.) It's only with large reservations that they were willing to give my current suggestion, What Was She Thinking (Notes on a Scandal) by Zoe Heller, a try. I've got a lot on the line, so I've got to get organized.

I don't want to bore you with the same old summary you'll find in everyone's Amazon.ca (or .com, if you prefer) reviews, but I'll just give you a super-duper quick synopsis to put you in the picture before I get to my main point. The story is set in modern England. Barbara, the narrator, is a teacher and is usually described as a bitter old spinster (or something worse) which is a bit narrow I think but I'll let it go. She is formidable but lonely, and she latches onto a bright, beautiful, upper class teacher called Sheba who is new at the school. Barbara is obsessed with Sheba and her life, and this topic makes up the bulk of the narrative. Sheba starts an affair with a teenaged boy at the school and this is the scandal referred to by the title (or is it? hmmm....I'll let you decide). Of course, it all comes out in the end—Barbara plays a key role in this—and Barbara records every detail in her notes.

What really struck me about the book—and I've been surprised that I haven't seen much written about this elsewhere—was how much class came into the story. Barbara is middle class and she is critical of those that she perceives to be above or below her social class. She also is an intellectual snob (does that go with being middle class? Not sure). The book has plenty of revealing examples of her feelings about this.

Barbara's snobbery is not surprising; it's pretty consistent with what you learn about her character throughout the book. What does come as a surprise, at least to me, is Sheba's snobbery. This is only revealed at the very end of the story, when Sheba finally explodes at Barbara after discovering that she was the one that spilled the beans about the affair and has been keeping detailed unflattering notes of the whole business. Up until this point, Sheba is portrayed as wonderfully accepting and nonjudgmental—this is part of her charm—but of course this could be because we are seeing her through Barbara's eyes and hearing what Barbara chooses to tell us.

So, here is what Sheba says near the end. (Keep in mind that Sheba is unspeakably furious at Barbara. She blames Barbara for the loss of her family, her reputation, her lover, her job, her home...everything. And this is the worst insult she can come up with. Very telling.)

"You have such delusions of grandeur, don't you? It's fascinating.
You actually think you're somebody. Listen. Let me tell you something. You're nothing. A bitter old virgin from Eastbourne."

OK, this is going to be my angle for Friday night. Wish me luck. And if I'm looking for a new book club on Saturday, you'll know why!

Margery Allingham

I love Margery Allingham. She wrote mystery novels for the most part; many could be categorized as adventure stories too. But it's not usually the plot of her novels that I love (although I have no complaint about the way she spun a yarn). I don't care who dun it. I don't find myself racing towards the ending, dying to know how it all comes out. No. What I love are Allingham's characters and her descriptions of universal human feelings and behaviour—so often, I find myself thinking, "Yes... that's captured it exactly." And often it's just a word or two in a passage that does the trick.

I just re-read The Fashion in Shrouds, first published in 1938. The first thing that struck me was the simple phrase "sickening deterioration" that Allingham uses to describe the feeling that one gets when one's love is gradually losing interest and one knows it. Perfect.

And how about this, a paragraph that appears near the beginning of Chapter 8 after an embarrassing scene at a restaurant:

It was a comic moment but it passed too soon, leaving only a growing sense of embarrassment as half-a-dozen diners at other tables swung round to stare with that insolence which comes from an attempt to look casual, or perhaps invisible, before they returned to warn their companions not to look round immediately.

Insolence. Without that word, I suspect the paragraph would not have caught my eye. I certainly wouldn't be telling you about it. But its presence made me stop and read the passage through a couple of times, relishing the aptness of the description.