It’s time for another update on what I’ve been reading. This time I’ve focused on a few things that sometimes stop me from enjoying books as much as I otherwise might.
Poetic books – Many years ago, after reading the novel Fugitive Pieces, a well-written and highly-acclaimed book, I made a rule that if a book was described on the jacket as being lyrical or poetic, I’d put it right back on the shelf.
I’m more of an intuitive person than a sensory one, so descriptive language, beautiful though it may be, doesn’t resonate with me. When I’m reading a book, I want to forget that I’m reading and be pulled off the page and into the story, and that doesn’t happen if I’m paying too much attention to the language. My mom, on the other hand, loved Fugitive Pieces.
A recent book club pick – Undersong by Kathleen Winter – forced me to break my rule. Here are a few of the reviews:
Undersong is a stunning, spellbinding, poetic triumph. —Toronto Star
Gorgeous, era-evoking prose. —The Globe and Mail
It is very much a book about language and atmosphere. —Quill & Quire
This novel, set in England’s Lake District and infused with gorgeous images of honeybees and gardens, is a lyrical portrait of a brilliant but peculiar woman whom many scholars believe inspired much of her brother’s work. — Reader’s Digest Canada
Red flags everywhere! I suppose it makes sense that the book focused on “language and atmosphere”, as it’s a fictionalized story of the life of Dorothy Wordsworth, sister of the poet William Wordsworth. There’s not much in the way of plot, dialogue or character development, but the language, apparently, is quite evocative (if you enjoy that sort of thing).
Books based on real life (but not really) – Whenever I watch a TV show or read a book that is loosely based on or inspired by real-life, I find myself being pulled out of the story. I keep wondering which elements are real and which are fictionalized. Often I start googling in the middle of the show, or part-way through the book, because my curiosity gets the better of me, which usually leads to spoilers. Two books I read recently fell into this category.
Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts, at 933 pages, is a long read. I borrowed it from a friend in England who said it was her favourite book ever, and she’s in good company as many of the reviews say the same thing. Other people hated it. I was somewhere in the middle, partly because of the whole true or not true distraction.
Roberts fled to India after escaping an Australian prison in the early 80s. While on the run, he spent time living in a slum in Bombay (now Mumbai), did time in an Indian jail, and joined the mafia. He wrote Shantaram while finishing his sentence in an Australian prison, where guards destroyed the first two drafts. Roberts describes the book as a work of fiction based on his own life experiences, but it aligns so closely with the events of his life that I was often left wondering which parts were true and which were fictionalized.
That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy reading Shantaram. It offers a captivating view of life in Bombay, and his portrayal of life in an Indian prison was chilling, but I think I’d have liked it better if it was either purely autobiographical or purely historical fiction.
The Aviator’s Wife, by Melanie Benjamin, is a fictionalized version of the life of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife of Charles Lindbergh. I have vague childhood memories of hearing about the Lindbergh kidnapping, so vague, in fact, that when I picked up the book, my initial thought was, “Didn’t they have a baby that was kidnapped in a giant blimp?” (momentarily conflating my childhood memories of the Lindbergh baby and the Hindenburg disaster). There were many parts of the Lindberghs’ story that I wasn’t aware of and I enjoyed that part of the novel, but I also felt uncomfortable at times, particularly when it came to the kidnapping of their child, such a personal and tragic event. It seemed almost unseemly to be attributing thoughts and feelings to Anne and Charles, knowing that readers would judge them based on a fictionalized version of their responses. I felt much the same way watching The Crown, a show that was well-researched with great acting, but I couldn’t help forming opinions about the real-life people based on how the show’s writers choose to portray them, which felt unfair.
Self-improvement books
One of my pet peeves is when people refer to fiction as something you read for entertainment and non-fiction as something you read to learn. People learn through stories and if you read enough novels, you’ll learn an awful lot about human nature.
I don’t read a lot of non-fiction, other than memoirs, and relatively little in the self-improvement genre. I think self-help books often give us a false sense of having taken action on something we haven’t taken action on.
I read about a study that showed that social media makes people less likely to give to charity because sharing posts about an issue makes them feel like they’ve done something. I suspect a similar thing happens with self-improvement books. We read the book that tells us why exercising is important and then we feel like we’ve taken steps to improve our health, when all we’ve done is read a book about it (I’m not saying I’m immune to this tendency).
Reading self-improvement books makes us believe we can become the person we’d like to be. We finish the book feeling all inspired to change and convinced we’re going to become better people, but I suspect only a small minority of readers make concrete improvements to their life after reading a self-help book. I could be wrong about that. I’d be interested to hear which self-help books have changed your life.
Clear Thinking was written by Shane Parrish, a friend and former colleague. I started reading his blog, Farnam Street about ten years ago. I remember that he had about 10,000 Twitter followers at the time. Being a grammar nerd, I’d message him when I found typos or grammatical errors in his posts. Eventually, he started sending them to me to edit before he published them, and I even wrote a few posts. A few years later, he quit his government job to devote himself full-time to Farnam Street, at which point he hired professional editors. Fast forward to today and he’s got half a million Twitter followers, a popular podcast called The Knowledge Project, and a New York Times bestselling book called Clear Thinking.
It’s difficult to provide an unbiased review of the book because I’ve been following his stuff for so long that I’m already familiar with most of the ideas being presented. He doesn’t claim to have come up with any original ideas, but he’s very well read and he’s interviewed hundreds of people who are among the best in their fields. He’s spent the last few years sifting through all those ideas to put together “the best of what other people have already figured out”.
It’s a book that can help change your life, but it requires some deep reflection and commitment to work at it, not just a quick read. I guess that’s what I was trying to say about the self-help genre. It’s not about the books themselves, but about people’s expectations when they read them. Sometimes we read a book hoping for a quick fix because we’re not willing to put in the effort required to change (and I’m definitely including myself here). “Hmm, so I should exercise more and eat less sugar and carbs…got it. Glad I read that book or I’d never have known that! I’ll get right on it.”
The rest of the books I read in the last few months didn’t push any particular buttons.
And The Birds Rained Down by Jocelyne Saucier, was another book club pick that could probably be described as lyrical (there are exceptions to every rule). It’s a really lovely story about two elderly men who each live on their own in the woods and are determined to finish life on their own terms. The original was written in French and there’s a movie version that I’ve heard is worth watching.
Precious Cargo by Craig Davidson, was a quick and easy read that we probably picked up at a used book sale somewhere. Davidson was a struggling writer who took a job driving a special-needs school bus for a year, and then wrote a book about it. It was a pleasurable read, nothing too deep, but entertaining.
Rosie by Anne Lamott. I had to go back and look this one up to remember what it was about and, even then, it didn’t really ring many bells for me. It’s about a woman struggling to figure out what she wants to do with her life, and her precocious daughter (there are definitely more precocious children in literary fiction than in the general population). It received good reviews but obviously it didn’t make much of an impact on me as I can’t even recall enough of the book to tell you what I liked or didn’t like about it.