Sak

On Reading: Choosing Battles

10.27.09 23:59
Section: Sak
Filed Under: Copyright - Sak, Questions, Rants

A couple of books I’ve picked up recently haven’t settled well with me so I’ve been deliberating over the reasons why, and even whether, to give up on a book that I’ve started. There are so many books out there to read that sometimes it’s difficult to tell, even from a recommendation, whether any particular piece is worth the time. Not everybody reads the same way. I know some who read very quickly, scanning over certain aspects of a writer’s work that they are willing to forgive, while other readers may take their time, are very careful to examine every passage, every sentence, so certain details are important. In some cases, though, maybe there’s some mysterious element to the book that can’t exactly be pinpointed, something non-specific, but that leaves you a little dissatisfied. Do you slog through to the end, give the work its merits, and move on from a less than satisfactory experience to another hopefully better one?

I had such a recent experience with the novel Grass, by Sheri S. Tepper. It has been recommended to me a couple different times by a close friend who really enjoyed it, and I’ve seen it mentioned elsewhere as being fairly highly regarded. Unfortunately, for me, there was something about the work that didn’t settle well with me. My first attempt at reading it I put in a hundred pages or so and then set it aside for a couple months before picking it up again for a second attempt. On the second try I resolved to get through it to the end.

The book has some wonderful elements to it. The world of Grass, its creatures and environment, was incredibly imaginative. Tepper’s descriptions of future religions, a long extinct alien civilization, and the telepathic communications between the humans and the evolved species of the planet were somewhat original and compelling. Still, there were style elements that didn’t work for me. The third person omniscient perspective that Tepper used was downright annoying at times. Passages didn’t taste right when the prose tried to shift attention from one character to another. There were also tedious introductions at the beginning of a scene or chapter that felt like she didn’t think that her readers were actually reading the book. Finally, the ending of the novel left me wanting. A good deal of character development seemed missing, only to be summed up at the end. Only a couple of the characters had any appearance of development throughout the book, and I felt that other, important characters were skipped entirely. The denouement simply detailed outright how many of the characters had changed as a result of their experience. I thought this was unfortunate because of the religious overtones and ethical dilemmas presented in the novel. Unless that was an intentional element used to imply the lack of openness to certain ideals, or failure in the proper handling of an ethical conundrum.

How and why some writer presented a particular passage are things that I can spend hours going over in my head. This includes what may at first appear as mistakes. I am constantly going back and rereading a passage or sentence in order to figure out if the author has intentionally left out what I consider an important word as a matter of artistry, or if it’s an issue of poor style or even worse editing.

The inspiration, or guilty rambling, of this post is the result of a recent book that I decided to drop after the first hundred pages. The piece was Matter, by Iain M. Banks. It was interesting to experience the more stylized U.K. English voice in his work, yet there was this one passage in the book that I had a good deal of difficulty accepting, and may have been the result of possibly shoddy editing. The example from _Matte_r that left me sour occurs in the first 30 or 40 pages:

There was a saying: Wisdom is Silence. In the end, he simply bowed his head to the lady, saying nothing. He sensed as much as saw her turn and leave.

Now, I have really shitting editing in some of my work. I’ve been known to miss a word here or there, but I’m only one pair of eyes rereading something I’ve written for the twentieth time, and so I may miss something because I’m going over it too quickly, or without taking a decent enough break between editing sessions. I’m quick to make a fix if someone else notices a mistaken sentence and inform me of it. But as a wannabe writer, I’ve encountered countless warnings that if your shit isn’t spot-on perfect, then it’ll never be published. What’s more, if your book is being put out by a major publisher, it’s had some number of editors reading and rereading it. So how could something so obvious be missed that many times to make it into print? Is it that I’m just an ass-hole when it comes to a certain standard that I expect in published works, and so I’m not willing to accept the occasional mistake or two? Maybe my expectations for myself as a reader and writer are too high? Whatever the case, there was something missing in the final sentence in the above passage that frustrated me, left me wondering. I went back and reread the paragraph a few times to make sure that it wasn’t a matter of voice. I kept reading, watching for similar form to appear, but there was nothing and it kept eating at me that it didn’t fit.

For example, in Cormac McCarthy’s, The Road, a sentence appeared that at first gave me similar pause:

In the nights in their thousands to dream the dreams of a child’s imaginings, worlds rich or fearful such as might offer themselves but never the one to be.

First encountering that sentence made me wonder if punctuation or a word might be missing so I reread it and its scene a few more times and gradually merged with the lyric poetry of it. As I continued reading, I found that same poetic language appearing a number of times in a few more pages, and began to appreciate it as his unique and delicious voice.

Still, after a hundred pages of trying to get into Banks’ Matter, it still didn’t settle right with me. My perception of the error struck me as a glaring inconsistency. It was therefore quickly gobbled up by the library’s book return chute. Really though, in a hundred pages and one simple editing mistake is enough for me to give up on a book? I think there was more to the book that didn’t work for me. As much as I enjoy science fiction and fantasy, there are elements in the science fiction and fantasy genres that become tiresome and even annoying—creating bizarre creatures just for the sake of a bizarre species, ridiculous naming conventions, and so on.

I feel bad for dropping a title back into the book return. I worry that maybe I’ll miss out on some imaginative element hidden somewhere in the work that will fascinate or inspire me. If only I could figure out how to change my standards, would I develop a greater inner repository from which to draw upon to develop my own ideas and works? Yet there’s only so much time, and as much as I may feel like I may not be as well read as I’d like to be, I also have to pick my battles.

Nancy Pearl, whom my friend Anne lovingly refers to as “The Librarian Goddess of Seattle,” suggests what she calls The Rule of 50. The basic idea being that since you couldn’t possibly read every book on the planet over the course of your lifetime, you shouldn’t force yourself to the end of a book you’re not enjoying. If you’re fifty years old and younger, give a book 50 pages to prove itself. If it’s not winning you over in those 50 pages then ditch it. When you’re over the age of 50, subtract your age from 100 and read that many pages before deciding. Of course, this is a guideline. I suppose that if you’re 101 and still avidly reading, you might want to give a book a few more pages just to make sure. Nancy also recognizes that your mood at any given time may have to do with your distaste for a book, and that it might actually rock your world if you let some time pass and pick it up again and try later.

It’s quite possible that my experience with Matter had everything to do with my mood. I’d just trudged through one science fiction piece that didn’t really feel rewarding and picked up another one. Then again, I went and picked up a third, The Road, immediately after Matter, and loved every bit of it. (Arguable, though, that The Road doesn’t really fall into the typical Science Fiction genre.)

Hypocritical as it is for me to admit, it’s also very likely that I’m some sort of purist when it comes to writing, and every time I see an editing job that looks like it was handled by a word processing program instead of careful eyes, a little lunatic inside my head starts flailing about and screaming violently. I’m barely able to get past that in the writing on the Web, so I can’t help but wonder how much others miss when they read through something quickly, which is difficult for me. Is there an unconscious faculty in many that will read over an improper word and substitute it for the correct one, or that instinctively fills in a missing word to complete the sentence proper even though it wasn’t on paper? How much of this type of faster reading is expected among the masses that a certain level of poorer editing in some books and written material is acceptable? It’s obvious on the Web where making money means posting often, even at the expense of quality. But is this a bad habit that we’ve learned from older, traditional publishing in the rush to make sure to finish one book and get on to the next as quickly as possible instead of making the decision to drop a book we’re not enjoying, for whatever reason, and move on?

I guess it’s all left to our own, individual scrutiny and personal choice.

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