Because seven is a cooler number than eight.

Some people would have you believe there are no new stories to tell. Christopher Booker would have you believe there are only seven plots in all of existence (though he does allow for subplots under his comedy and tragedy headings, because (I can only assume) most people with a brain could tell you that “tragedy” is not, in and of itself, a plot). I admit I’ve never read his book, and I know better than to let TV Tropes suck me in while I’m trying to get anything done, so I’ll take a stab at those seven plots and say they’re something like this: Lord of the Rings, Oedipus (marrying your mom—is that comedy or tragedy?), Cinderella, Twilight (though I’ve never read it), Star Wars, Inception, and To the Lighthouse, though I still can’t tell you what happened in Inception, and something tells me Booker hasn’t read much Woolf if he thinks her plots would fall under a heading such as “The Monster.”

In grad school, we sometimes talked about someone (and, forgive me, I forget who, because I was almost completely uninterested in simplifying plot this far) who had said there were two: someone comes to town, someone leaves town (or, perhaps I’m mis-remembering because I just looked at Cory Doctorow’s page on Wikipedia; have you tried the random article feature? It’s as much of a time sink as TV Tropes). Read more »

Right now, I am in the middle of six books. The number jumps to fourteen, however, if you count books I’ve started and mean to finish but haven’t picked up in over a year. It goes up again to sixteen if you count the two books I’m reading (very slowly) in French. Seventeen if we include audio books. And I admit it: this is pretty normal for me. The number one reason I don’t finish books isn’t because I don’t like them but rather because I forget about them. I’m easily distracted by newer and shinier books, or at least by ones that I don’t have to walk all the way into the living room to retrieve.

Some people are one-book-at-a-time readers. It’s one and done for them, one and done. I don’t understand these people.

I like books to fit my mood. I like having books for all the many occasions that might arise. For instance, if I were to take a trip tomorrow, do I have a book that would (1) pack easily, (2) not earn me strange stares in public, and (3) engross me enough so that I don’t get bored in the backseat of the car, in the airport terminal. Then, there’s the book I read over meals or in the bathtub. This book is almost always a reread, something I can pick up and put down at a moment’s notice, something I could do without if I dropped it in the water and had to wait a few days to but a new copy. (True story: I dropped a first edition in the bathtub the other day; this was actually a poor bathtub choice.) Finally, there’s the book I think will impress my colleagues or my peers. Preferably, this book is also somewhat unknown so that I can recommend it to everyone I meet and it will be a new discovery for them. Read more »

Probably my favorite book read this past year, though it's always hard to choose.

Here’s a quick recap of the book I read this past year, and those that I’m looking forward to reading this year. Only new reads listed (I’m a big rereader).

Top five favorite books of 2011 (in no particular order):

• Room, by Emma Donoghue
• My Happy Life, by Lydia Millet
• Cleopatra: A Life, by Stacy Schiff
• Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson
• You Know When the Men Are Gone, by Siobhan Fallon

Five most disappointing books of the year (not necessarily ones I disliked but rather ones that I expected more from)

• The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender (loved it, but the ending disappointed)
• People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks (great premise, but short on character development)
• Cathedral, by Raymond Carter (I struggled to get through this one, honestly)
• The Next Queen of Heaven, by Gregory Maguire (just not that much to say about it, and overly quirky)
• Inheritance, by Christopher Paolini (too much introduced, not dealt with, cliched characters and situations, etc.) Read more »

A few weeks ago, I read an interesting essay about rereading books. It got me thinking about which books I reread often and which ones I’m looking forward to reading a second time, as well as how to balance the stack of books I want to read with those I love to reread. If I only have two hours, should I stick with the guaranteed enjoyment of a book that I get something new out of every time, that I feel inspired and refreshed by? Or should I take a chance on a book that might blow me away but also might disappoint me?

It’s a tough call, because it’s pretty great to fall in love with a book for the first time. You get all excited as you’re going through it, and you’re thinking damn this is good and did he/she really just pull that off? and you inevitably think please don’t f**k up the ending. And then the book ends in a place that you’re intrigued with or satisfied by or maybe you’re pissed about where it ends but you think the rest of it is fantastic, and either way you don’t really want to leave the world of the story. It’s disappointing, yet satisfying, to finish a book you love. Then right after you finish it or maybe the next day, you’re walking around making all these connections in your head, thinking about the larger implications of the work and what a killer move that was at the end and how you want to be/sleep with the protagonist or other interesting character. And then, if you’re a writer or teacher or student or any sort of careful reader, you start taking the thing apart and holding the pieces up to the light, trying to figure out the what and how and why and especially the would I ever try that?

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“This is your brain…” Imagine a freshly hatched egg rolling on the kitchen counter.  To the left is a skillet set on a stovetop and there’s butter already simmering on its stick-resistant and concave surface.   Some legendary actor then cracks the egg shell with one hand, allowing the yoke and stuff to spill into the hot skillet.   The egg fries quickly — sunny-side-up — and the voice-over of the commercial continues, “And this is your brain on drugs…  Any questions?”

I’ve seen variations on this themes on everything from astrological horoscopes to bumper-stickers to political buttons (see end of post) to a manual on Zen Buddhism (This is your brain on Buddha!)

And yes, as prevention programs go, this one beats Nancy Reagan’s “Just So No!” hands-down.

Metaphors, 1.

Moralizing Slogan, 0.

And yet, before we, in the creative arts, run up the score, I’d like to consider a book on the brain that has been acclaimed by neurologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, neuro-imaging researchers and even by such egg-heads as the editor of Poetry Magazine, Christian Wiman.   The book is published by Yale University Press and is written by Johns Hopkins mega-star in the above fields, Iain McGilchrist.  It’s entitled, “The Master and His Emissary,” which is odd, considering it has nothing to do with the despicable institution of slavery, nor with any messengers who might have made special deliveries.  Nothing literal like that at all.

On the contrary, the subtitle saves the day (not to mention the marketing department’s ass):   “The Divided Brain and the Making of the Modern World.”  And it is here — in that criss-crossing, apple-saucing of the two hemisphere’s of your primary internal organ, your grey matter, that the rubber meets the road… that the kettle becomes black… that the chicken (coming first) traverses the road, lays the egg (coming second), which gets fried in the skillet, next to the kettle on the adjacent back-burner…   The point is, once the author clears his throat, everyone who has ever set a coffee mug down upon a literary journal of any reputation should stand and salute.  Or bow and genuflect.   McGilchrist is brilliant, as the mere progression of chapters in the table of contents can testify:

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Photo credit: franks anger

My wife and I are in the process of moving. This means that, while she is engaged in productive and worthwhile activities like organizing the pantry and securing one of those baby gates at the top of the stairs, I’ll be busily about one of my favorite nerdy avocations: arranging books.

There are countless wonderful ways in which you can arrange books on your bookshelves. Beyond this modest list, I am open to reader suggestions. If I like your suggestion, I’ll arrange my shelves accordingly and invite you over so that you can see your handiwork.

1. You can arrange them by genre. In the heady days of my youth, this was my approach. There was a section for novels, one for short stories, one for theatre, one for memoir, etc. Each genre was arranged alphabetically by author. This seems a bit obvious.
2. You can arrange books by historical period/literary movement. The great 19^th century Russians can lead into the Euro-American modernists of the early-mid 20^th century, into the great post-war literary upheaval, into the postmodernists. But this stumbles both in its inability to account for the various branches of the literary tradition and in its placement of writers who, like Georg Büchner or William Maxwell, do not fit easily within a given literary milieu.
3. You can, alternately, abandon any such universal organizational apparatuses and see the whole of literary history as a long, winding sequence that points inevitably to you and your writing. (Isn’t this how we normally see literature?) Read more »

I heard about this growing controversy while surfing various blogs over the weekend. Some people in Britain are pushing to have a Literature Prize, since they argue that the Man Booker Prize rewards sub-par works of art. Two quotes from the article:

And yet there’s a consortium of people, headed by literary agent Andrew Kidd and supported by a host of literary types, who last week announced they were putting together a prize, to be known as The Literature Prize, for “writers who aspire to something finer.”

The Literature Prize is looking to do the literary equivalent of applauding houses built with staircases that require mountaineering gear to climb them.

If you read this blog often, you probably already know which side of the debate I fall on, but I’ll say it again anyway, mostly because I feel so strongly about this issue. Readable books are good books. The sense of inflated ego that comes from getting through a difficult book does not make that book more worth than one that is accessible. And books and literature should be accessible, on the whole. Isn’t that why we create art? To be read and enjoyed?

If you study the plotting of the books, if you pay attention to the themes and ideas Rowling tries to convey, you'll see that Snape can't possibly be a bad guy. But even knowing this, the reveal was surprising.

There are spoilers in this post, but if you haven’t read Harry Potter by now, well—what’s wrong with you?

We’re less than three weeks away from the final installment of the Harry Potter movies: Deathly Hallows Part II hits theaters at midnight on July 15. I’ve already got my tickets for the midnight double header (Parts I and II), and I’ve gotten over my sadness that the Lansing-area does not have an all-day marathon like Grand Rapids, does (yes, I would have gotten up at 4:30 a.m. to watch all eight movies, I know that makes me a bit of a fangirl).

I started reading Harry Potter at about fifteen. My sister had the first two books, and I made fun of her for reading kid literature (never mind that she was a kid). My dad read books one and two to my sister, but since she was in the room next door, I eventually started listening in. Then, when the third book came out (we only had one copy of each book, at that point) I read it straight through one night because I knew I had to give it back to my sister in the morning. Book four we read aloud as a family then listened to on audio book in the car on the way to one of my soccer tournaments (24 hours in a car is not enough to listen to Goblet of Fire, by the way). The fifth book came out during a family reunion in Alabama, and there were no bookstores in a 50-mile radius. I waited in line at Walmart at 6:30 a.m. then promptly ignored my relatives for the remainder of the trip. (As a funny aside, this place was so hick that Walmart had only stocked a few copies, and the employees were surprised that they were over halfway sold out ten minutes after they opened. My family bought four copies. We don’t like to share.) The sixth book I bought at midnight the day before work selling Sunglasses, a day, I admit, that I wasn’t all that on the ball, because I’d been up until almost 7 a.m., repeatedly telling myself, “just one more chapter.” The seventh book I read over three days, because I didn’t want to admit it was all over.

My generation, my sister’s generation—we’re in an interesting spot. We grew up with the madness (even if some of us were just a touch older). It was the book that started midnight release events for books rather than relegating them to just movies. It was the book that got an entire generation to read, to love reading. But these are the things we all know about Harry Potter. These are the things in every news story.

Ever since I stayed up all night reading Prisoner of Azkaban ten-plus years ago, I’ve been waiting for the next piece to come. First it was the books, then the movies. And now even those are ending. I’ve always liked the suspense of waiting, of wondering what’s going to happen. This has become especially true since I started writing. The more I learned about stories, about plot and characters, about language, the more I was able to analyze the books, to critique, or guess what was coming next. I was too young, too inexperienced, when the fifth book came out to understand that Sirius needed to die, to get that heroes need to lose their mentors to be able to stand on their own. I don’t remember how I felt about Dumbledore’s death the next book, but that very fact makes me sure that it came as less of a surprise. By the time the seventh book came out, I had seen that big character twist coming. Snape, I’d argued for two years, had to be good. All evidence aside, the structure of Rowling’s world, the messages she was trying to convey, meant that he couldn’t possibly be bad. Otherwise the world really was black and white. (Also, I knew a Weasley had to go, by sheer odds).

I won’t argue that Harry Potter is some great work of literature on the language level. It was never supposed to be. Her writing does seem to reflect the fact that the books moved beyond children’s literature in the later books, but there is just as much of an argument that she simply got better through practice as there is that she upped her game for her adult audience (more, even, in my opinion). Yeah, some things are annoying (for instance, Rowling loves for Hermione to say things “waspishly,” usually to Ron, and if you can’t hear that tone in her voice without the adjective, you haven’t been paying attention). But there are other things she does well, even if they are heavy handed, if compared to adult literature. The scene in the seventh book where Ron walks out on Harry and Hermione is especially well done (so much so, in fact, that the movie version of it felt very flat to me), and it was the first time that I really noticed, as a writer, that you can accomplish a lot of things by having the characters’ surroundings reflect the mood you’re going for. (Also, the plotting is nothing short of astounding. I have nothing but respect for people who put together series where each book builds on the previous; I can hardly hold the form of a story in the palm of my hands.)

I’ve always been a firm believer that you can learn from any type of writing, good or bad, genre or literature (though this distinction makes me uncomfortable), for children or adults. Harry Potter has confirmed this to me. Whether you love or hate the books (or don’t really care), you can’t deny that there is something magical in the stories (pun totally intended). Anything that inspires such a multitude of readers deserves to be studied for that fact, if nothing else. (As an aside, I hate to make that argument, because it means that I will probably end up reading Twilight someday, no matter how that hurts me inside. But it’s still true.)

Is anyone else a Potter fan? Is anyone else doing anything special in preparation for the final movie? If, like me, you feel both excited and sad about the end, just remember, there’s still more coming.

This past week marked the one-year anniversary of my return to Michigan from Spokane. I graduated on a Friday, left on Sunday, made it back to my house in Michigan on Wednesday, loaded up my storage unit that evening, and got on a plane to Europe the very next day. Some of my books made it to the bedroom I’ve commandeered in my parents’ house. Most had to stay in paper boxes in the storage until a mile away due to limited shelf room. They were only supposed to be there for 6 months or so. 9 months tops.

But this past weekend, I cleared more room and returned to my storage unit. After beating back the approximately 87,000 spiders and preparing myself for the inevitability of being startled by the newly resident mouse (note: if that mouse is living in a box of my bedding, I’m going to have a fit), I selected the equivalent of three additional boxes of books to live on my home shelves.

I wish I had room for them all. Books were bent oddly. One even had inexplicable damp pages. They were warped in odd ways. None had been chewed, at least. Strangely, it was the hard covers that sustained the most damage.

To make things worse, I recently decided to stay at my parents’ house until I leave for France next September, which means my stuff—my books!—will stay in storage until I buy an apartment in summer of fall of 2013. That’s two more years! I swear I’m going to have nightmares about my poor books.

So someone tell me: How do I save my books?

The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article criticizing (if that’s a strong enough word) the darkness in YA literature. Publishers, the author says, “use the vehicle of fundamental free-expression principles to try to bulldoze coarseness or misery into their children’s lives.” As someone who has always enjoyed young adult literature, you can imagine this struck a nerve.

I’ve blogged before about genres that don’t seem to get enough respect, and so I’ve spent the last few hours trying to find a way to put a new spin on this issue (because, really, this is just another iteration). But then I came across this response, which didn’t fit with my thoughts at all but still felt oh so right. I still believe issues such as this (and, as another example, the V.S. Naipaul crap) need to be talked about. Tonight, however, I’ll let others do the talking for me. In the meantime, I think I’ll go read a dark and threatening book.