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Musings on Books
Apr. 12th, 2004 08:14 amWhat is it about books? After several false starts finding something to read this weekend, I took a stack of my TBR books and read the first chapter of each, to decide if I would keep it or dump it.
Make that "tried" to read. In many cases, despite liking the genre, general premise, and sometimes other books by that author, my attention wandered within a few pages.
I don't think it's because I'm "not giving them a chance." There have been several times when I picked up a book that I figured I would skim and dump, only to be sucked into it. I read the last chapter of Blood and Chocolate first to see how it would turn out... and backed up to read and enjoy it all the way through. I bought Unusual Inheritance as part of a job lot of books and figured I'd dump it in the first three paragraphs... only to find myself at the beginning of chapter 4 and gaining speed.
'Tis a puzzlement.
In other book news, for those who haven't friended![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bentleywg, she has a link today from The Observer, for an interview with the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. One quote fascinated me:
Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we've seen too many of her books on screen. All we can think of is country houses, heritage frocks and Colin Firth's chest in a wet shirt. But if Austen were alive today, she'd be writing about chartered accountants in Welwyn Garden City. ... Yet Jane Austen writes about these humdrum lives with such empathy that they seem endlessly fascinating. And her first act of empathy is to write about them in the kind of book these woman would themselves read - the romantic novel.
He's right. But then, it is that empathy, that ability to tap into feelings that were not only felt then but now and describe them with warmth and humor that has made her work last for centuries. Most romance authors - and I speak of her contemporaries as well as ours - can piffle and amuse, but not tap so truely into the universal experience. And that is why their novels come and go in a year.
Side issue - The book section of the Post had a marvellous defense of romances this weekend - yes, they're formulaic, with the boy-meets-girl, misunderstandings ensue, ends with a wedding plot... but then, so are mysteries, which promise an equally rigid structure of crime-investigation-red herrings-resolution. Good point.
Current Book: Storm Front, book #1 of the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher. It's completelysuricattus' fault that I even know about this series.
Make that "tried" to read. In many cases, despite liking the genre, general premise, and sometimes other books by that author, my attention wandered within a few pages.
I don't think it's because I'm "not giving them a chance." There have been several times when I picked up a book that I figured I would skim and dump, only to be sucked into it. I read the last chapter of Blood and Chocolate first to see how it would turn out... and backed up to read and enjoy it all the way through. I bought Unusual Inheritance as part of a job lot of books and figured I'd dump it in the first three paragraphs... only to find myself at the beginning of chapter 4 and gaining speed.
'Tis a puzzlement.
In other book news, for those who haven't friended
bentleywg, she has a link today from The Observer, for an interview with the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. One quote fascinated me:Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we've seen too many of her books on screen. All we can think of is country houses, heritage frocks and Colin Firth's chest in a wet shirt. But if Austen were alive today, she'd be writing about chartered accountants in Welwyn Garden City. ... Yet Jane Austen writes about these humdrum lives with such empathy that they seem endlessly fascinating. And her first act of empathy is to write about them in the kind of book these woman would themselves read - the romantic novel.
He's right. But then, it is that empathy, that ability to tap into feelings that were not only felt then but now and describe them with warmth and humor that has made her work last for centuries. Most romance authors - and I speak of her contemporaries as well as ours - can piffle and amuse, but not tap so truely into the universal experience. And that is why their novels come and go in a year.
Side issue - The book section of the Post had a marvellous defense of romances this weekend - yes, they're formulaic, with the boy-meets-girl, misunderstandings ensue, ends with a wedding plot... but then, so are mysteries, which promise an equally rigid structure of crime-investigation-red herrings-resolution. Good point.
Current Book: Storm Front, book #1 of the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher. It's completely
suricattus' fault that I even know about this series.
