TMI: Summer Reading Lists

I love to read.  The printed page is one of my true passions in life.  Language, words, syntax, a turn of phrase… for me it is movement, music, poetry and dance.  That’s why I was only too happy to answer this week’s TMI Questions.

TMI QUESTIONS: 

Questions designed to reveal Too Much Information

Link: http://tmiquestions.blogspot.com/

This week's topic: 

Summer Reading Lists

What are you reading this summer?

I plan on finally finishing ‘Three Junes’ by Julia Glass.  I am just finishing the second portion, so one more ‘June’ to go.  She is a ‘literary’ writer, as opposed to a simple story teller and I find her style and voice a tad off-putting (snobbish, classist), placing distance between the page and the reader.  I don’t find her characters particularly well-drawn or believable (emotionally).  It’s an ambitious story pivoting on an interesting literary device.

Then it’s on to Janis Ian’s autobiography, ‘Society’s Child’, which I expect to devour in short order.

I have stacks and stacks of books that are begging to be read and that I plan on getting to in the next 30 years.  So even though I truly love books, I really wish I would stop buying books.  I feel like I am slighting the ones I already own and plan to read, while doing a great disservice to the new arrival, for they will inevitably end up sitting on the pile for some time to come.  Those damn piles make me feel awfully guilty, but I am a very slow reader.

Is your summer reading material different during the summer then from the rest of the year?

Different?  No.  Though I tend to do much less reading in the summer.  During summer, I am typically outdoors and lack time to merely sit.  When travelling, I will take a book along with me and never crack a page.  People tell me I am ‘scattered’ and that is particularly true in summer.  For me, reading requires quiet and stillness, and summer is a time of noise and movement.  By autumn, I start drifting back into ‘school’ mode and am much more apt to read (and write), a habit I have always attributed to my love of academia; its structure and discipline having been indelibly etched into my morphed DNA.  

What are your favorite genres?

Biographies, character driven novels (usually written by women), and the classics.  And BAD BOOKS.  I love reading horribly written books, because I learn so much from them.  James Patterson is my go to guy in this category, although there are a number of authors whose work is so bad that  I cannot seem to read beyond the first few chapters, mainly because I keep re-reading the same paragraphs over and over again, trying to discern exactly what the hell they are trying to communicate.  Dean Koontz springs to mind.  His writing also gives me headaches and makes me nauseated.

Do you have a favorite author?

Many.

Among them:

·         Anne Tyler

·         Faye Weldon

·         Sue Miller

·         Charles Dickens

·         Edgar Allan Poe

Poets:

·         Stevie Smith

·         Sylvia Plath

·         Emily Dickenson

Do you have a favorite book?

I have a book I consider to be ‘the best written book of modern times’ that I cite as my favorite: ‘The Confederacy of Dunces’ by John Kennedy Toole.  It is brilliant and I think everyone should read it.  It’s a pity the author took his own life, because he was very gifted.

Others I would like to note:

Ferdinand the Bull by Munro Leaf

Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss

Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

  

I am disappointed that you did not ask us about books and authors we loathe.  So, forgive me for spilling blood, but I have to vent.  ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ reads like something a Fifth Grade girl would write while learning how to masturbate.  It is a horrible book; poorly written and badly edited.  The fact that it is one of a series of three boggles my mind.  Stephen King and Anne Rice both need to allow their publishing houses the opportunity to edit their books; their early work (guided by skilled editors) is quite good while their latter works suffer from word diarrhea and excessive ego/adolescent myopia rendering them unreadable. James Patterson and Dean Koontz should not be termed writers so much as typists.

And there is another category I wish you asked us about – books you have attempted to read but could not make it all the way through.  Typically, I commit to finishing anything I start and have trudged my way slowly through a number of really tiresome novels.  That said, ‘The Cider House Rules’ by John Irving vexes me.  I have attempted to read it three times.  Each time I get to the middle of the book and develop a strange kind of amnesia, as in, I forget I am reading it and never finish. I like John Irving, but cannot manage to get through ‘The Cider House Rules’.

Where is your favorite place to read?

My bed.  Which you would think would be reserved for sex, but no.  In fact, my bed is the one place I never have sex. But I do read there.  It is the only activity other than sleeping that is allowed there (well, also thinking and dreaming).  I have a window behind the head of my bed, which I love to crack open so that a breeze wafts over me as I read or sleep.  There is a giant lilac bush (currently in full bloom) right in front of the window and, this time of year, the fragrance is subtle and lulling. 

Do you like to reread books? Which one(s)?

Never.  It spoils the experience, tampers with the memory, destroys the magic.  If I reread, it becomes a textbook or a manual (which are the only books I have ever revisited). 

Can you read while in motion?

Not in a car.  It makes me nauseated. On a plane?  No problem.  And people that read while running on a treadmill?  Wow.  That is an amazing skill.  Unfortunately, due to balance issues, I am doing well if I manage to remain upright when running on a treadmill. 

The debate continues: paper vs. electronic.

No debate here.  I love books.  I love their covers, their pages, their smells, their typeface, their bindings, their thickness, and their weight.  I love to see them in stacks or on shelves.  I like touching them.  Libraries fascinate me.  It’s like works of art you can touch and caress.  Someone bought me a Kindle for my birthday two years ago.  I was touched, but made them return it.  I knew I would never use it.  I read enough crap on the internet on my laptop.  I don’t want the romance and affection I feel for literature to become associated in anyway with that experience, not that those feelings are transferable. 

Growing up, books were a great source of safety for me.  I hid behind them (learning everybody’s secrets). Libraries have always been sanctuaries for me (in fact, I believe I spent all of 7^th Grade in the library).   

BONUS 

Do you get off on trashy novels? Recommendations?

Define ‘trashy’.  Well, this is my definition:

• The Sookie Stackhouse Series (True Blood) by Charlaine Harris
• Anything written by Fannie Flagg
• Any book that got published because it reminded an editor of ‘Sex and the City’. 

I don’t dig books about werewolves and vampires.  I think Anne Rice killed whatever enthusiasm I might have once had for them. But Charlaine is different.  Her writing is simple and plain.  That said, I tried to read some her other series, but found them lacking.

Fannie Flagg just has a nice flair for nostalgia, small town life as we wish it were, and great spirit.

‘Sex and the City’ rules.  I love slutty bitches in high heels. And all those knock-offs by other authors that followed?  I love those, too.  They are like eating potato chips.

And for the record, I love those naughty homo pulp novels they sell at dirty bookstores.  They are not well written, but then it's pretty hard to pay attention to proper tense and word usage when reading and turning pages using only one hand!

Stumbling Towards Mediocrity

James Patterson is an awful writer.

Anyone with any appreciation for the English language, anyone who has had any firsthand exposure to the human condition, anyone who has ever held a conversation with another human being, anyone who has ever spent time on the planet earth, anyone who has experienced a moment of reality, or anyone who has ever read a ‘really good book’, will tell you – James Patterson is an awful writer.  Possibly the worst.   Certainly one of the most successful bad writers of all time.

Put it this way – he makes Stephen King look like Charles Dickens.

I have worked my way through several of Mr. Patterson’s books.  They are a mind boggling mess: narrative voices that shift without reason, characters that do things that make no common sense, dialogue that sounds as if it was translated into English from some form of ancient Gaulish by a man who speaks only Mandarin.  Chapters are short, so you feel you are really making progress.  Plots?  Well, the word ridiculous springs into mind.  Mr. Patterson is the kind of storyteller with both eyes on the clock… the story ends exactly when it is supposed to, and he is not above throwing physics, common sense, or character development into a wood chipper in order to accomplish it.  Why?  Because James Patterson is more interested in writing a lot of books than he is writing a good book.  So his work probably ends up the way it does for any one or all of the following reasons: the author is disinterested, lazy, under a deadline, or needs to pay for that new deck he put on his house in Miami/the Hamptons/San Diego/Mars.

Why do I read books by James Patterson?

Because I, too, aspire to be a mediocre writer.

My ultimate goal is to have a book I write turned into a Lifetime Television for Women Movie of the Week, starring a string of C-List actresses well past their A-List prime.  What?  It could happen.  In a world where the SyFy Channel (is that what they are calling themselves these days?) exists, there is a need for product to fill the airwaves, and why couldn’t I be one of those people who write something that plugs up one of those programming holes?

Yes, I now aspire to stumble towards mediocrity.  No longer do I pine to bask in the glow of literary praise.  No longer do I practice my Oscar acceptance speech.  No longer do I wonder what I will do for a follow-up album after I win my first Grammy.  No.  I just want to be a schleb.  And not even a wildly successful schleb like Mr. Patterson.  I will happily settle for writing a book people sometimes see at rummage sales in the free bin that was made into a movie no one remembers ever seeing.  And what has brought about this change, this acceptance, this embrace?

Because I’m a realist.  I know that may be as good as it ever gets.  I’m not unhappy about it, nor am I rendered numb or immobile by this realization.  Rather, I find myself actually working on a book that I may actually finish writing (which also seems to be one of the hallmarks of any James Patterson novel: he typed his way all the way to the end!).   I’m on Chapter 20.  I’ve been working on it for a year and a half.  One friend has been reading it as I’ve been writing and is encouraging my pipe dream by acting as my cheerleader (which I really appreciate). 

I guess it was just a matter of time.  I mean mediocrity – it’s like McDonalds; found EVERYWHERE.  So prevalent is it in our society that one’s life cannot help but be touched by it, and, therefore, one cannot help but eventually succumb to it. 

It brings to mind a line from one of my all-time favorite plays (favorite, because it is a brilliant piece of writing), Edward Albee’s ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’  It’s something Martha tells Nick: “Relax!  Sink into it.  You're no better than anybody else.”  

And that’s okay.

Accepting one’s own eventual mediocrity is such a relief – a weight lifted from your shoulders.  You can then get on to the real important things in life… like watching Lifetime Television Movies and reading James Patterson novels.