The Choice

You hold a book in your hands.

The cover is tattered leather or perhaps brown cloth, the pages feather-soft from use and from the long and crooked road of years.

This book, you can see, is old. It is, in fact, the oldest thing you have ever touched. But there is something else that marks this book as special.

The spine is scorched black, and if you lean in and inhale the fusty pages you catch a sour tang of smoke. A scent older than the oldest things in this world.

Once, someone tried to burn this book.

Can you see it? Can you see the pile of books as tall as your head? The street is dark with smoke and the burning pile glows. Can you hear the frenzied shouting, can you see the shining eyes of the devout? Their chanting.

Throw it on. Burn them. All of them!

Can you see their hysteria, their certainty? The absolute rightness of their destruction?

But this was not 1937 Germany. This was another time, in another place. An Other Place, as some have called it.

And the shrill voices screaming for fire came from the soft throats of children.

Now. You have a choice. Will you open the cover of this book that has survived fire and snow and worse? Will you rest your fingers on the stained page and begin to read?

Or will you turn away? You would not be the first. It is not, after all, a happy story. There is ash, and there is blood. And there is loss.

But — as you will find, if you are lucky — just as with a long and storied life itself, there is also courage here. And joy. And hope. A spark struck in the night; the iron tang of the heaving sea; the snowlaced breath of mountains whispering of high places.

And a boy, jumping into the mud.

Come.

Glimpses

I recently re-read Francisco Stork's excellent Marcello in the Real World. Even though I'd read it a year or two ago, and this time was reading for technique, like a surgeon watching an operation, I was still pulled into the story.

But even as I was tumbling and roiling along, I noticed something that I've never seen before: There is no wasted narrative.

This is an epiphany for me, as I tend to write circles around what I really want to say. And then, having said it, I write my circular way back out to the story. The result is a fatty first draft that always needs to be tightened.

At first I worried that readers wouldn't able to connect the dots. First a character is eating dinner and then he's doing dishes? What? How did he get there? So I diligently (and tediously) would narrate the whole thing. Bo-ring.

What Francisco Stork does reminds me of some study that proved how little of a word has to be there for us to recognize it. Or of those stories of B-17s that returned, critically damaged, to airfields in London, somehow able to limp home.

Marcello in the Real World has only the bare number of scenes to carry the story. I don't mean that it's sparse: it's anything but. No, I mean that the gaps between scenes -- so invisible when you're deep in the story -- are actually pretty big when you stop and analyze them.

The magic here is that the reader fills in those gaps without even noticing.

And what it means is that the amount of narration I thought was the absolute minimum ... can be even less. The result will be a tighter story that's not ruined by being over-told.

So now I ask myself: what is the absolute minimum I need to show in order to carry the story forward? It's less than I think.

Escape into Print

I readily admit that I prefer printed books to reading online. Hey, I also build wooden boats from hand, and cook pizza from scratch. I like doing things that way. But because I also pretend to be living in the 21st century, I've been known to spend time online. Such as, um, typing this right now.

This means I try to be objective --agnostic, really, is a better word -- about whether people prefer to read online or in print. I know what I like, which is all I can control anyway. But even so, today's story in the NY Times caught my eye.

Children, a study has found, are more comfortable reading online than anyone had expected. Evidently the scientists didn't consult babysitters, teachers, or anyone who's spent more than a few days with a child.

However, book lovers take heart: most of them would not give up printed books. Hooray!

Because I can't help but feel that when a society prints its last book, it ends its own story. Printed books, like libraries, are vital to democracy. As I noted before: sure, you can burn a stack of printed books; confident moral despots can cry for their banning; and bookstores can fail to carry them.

But they can and always will be snuck under covers; read instead of Algebra; slid into lockers, smuggled across border; printed on basement presses. A printed book holds the fire of revolution. Because -- and this will come as no surprise to anyone who loves to read as much as I do -- stories have power. And printed books ... well, they have magic.

Plus, I have to admit what triggered this entry in the first place: the sudden awareness, as I clicked "close" on one more pop-up ad that appeared as I was trying to read the news online, that maybe web advertising will become so intrusive that people are ANNOYED BACK TO PRINT. Can you imagine reading a news story without animated ads dancing around your peripheral vision, or the screen suddenly going dark so you can see a video for a luxury watch?

I can. It's called the printed paper.

Icelanders, Marcelo, Freedom

Two more books of notes for my ongoing research: Sagas of Icelanders and the effervescent Marcelo in the Real World (Francisco X. Stork). Both of them very different books ... or are they? Each lets us join in characters' struggles with the divine.

Meanwhile, Amazon pitches a hissy and then un-hissies. Whether you think that Amazon delisting MacMillan books as a protest ("Look upon my works, ye mighty...") gives the online superstore a black eye (I do) and whether you believe the infernal e-Book pricing and rights model needs to be taken outside and given a firm talking to (I do) and whether you have expressed frustration that people just e-invent new e-words for new e-products is so much e-baloney (I do!) one thing has become startlingly, perfectly, beautifully clear:

Printed books have more freedom than e-books.

Printed books can be smuggled and read under the covers. They can be disguised inside math textbooks, left in barstools, wrapped in plastic and buried as treasure. Reading them can be an act of transgression. Subversion. They can be burned, yes; but also thrown over walls.

E-books, if I understand electricity and technology correctly, communicate with the store selling them. That's how you get them, after all. You can't give them away, or loan them, or receive them as gifts or graduation presents or heart-in-throat reminders of broken relationships. The store knows what you bought, what you browsed through, and -- potentially -- what you read, and how long it takes you. It can -- theoretically -- remove those books from your device.

Can you image if the manager of your local indie bookstore busted through your door and started taking your books from your shelves? Hold on, just let me get my two-by-four.

Look, I'm not nostalgic or short-sighted enough to close my eyes to e-books. Just because I prefer printed books doesn't mean that other people might not like e-books. After all, the priority is reading, and joining the author in spinning that magic that comes from reading a story.

In some sense, arguing about e-books vs print is like arguing about whether it's better to read while in bed or sitting in a chair. Shouldn't we be worried about sloppy storytelling instead?

At the same time, I very much like the fact that printed books, once released into the world, have so many possibilities that can never accrue to e-books. That is freedom.

What the Dickens is that thing in the dark?

I am reading A Tale of Two Cities for the first time. This is only my second Dickens book (first was Great Expectations) and I'm loving it.

Here's one of my favorite elements -- and I saw this in Great Expectations too: Dickens takes the reader through a series of scenes, or sometimes whole chapters, which seem completely unrelated to the action at hand.

For example, our hero is following his father one foggy night, only to find that he and his ne'er-do-well co-conspirators are digging up bodies. He flees in terror! And then we have two or three consecutive chapters of a French nobleman mistreating the locals. Maybe then we'd jump ahead four months, or a year, to a criminal trial where entirely new characters are speaking, worrying, fuming, and so on.

But gradually, for such is the magic of Dickens, the threads tying all these miniature stories together become apparent. Slowly I realize that this person is the same Jacques referred to three chapters earlier; that the dissolute lawyer is actually in love with the young woman we last saw as a small child five chapters before.

At first this seemed distracting and random, but now it's almost a game as I try to piece together the narrative from these various viewpoints, for the story is larger than any one character can tell. (It's also a warning to read everything closely, since you can never tell what will turn out to be significant: a good warning for fast and careless readers like me.)

It reminds me of the story about blind men and an elephant, though I prefer regular people and an elephant in the dark. Why does that sound so strange?

They circle around this great and silent mystery in the dark, one of them touching a trunk and reporting a snake, another brushing against a leg and claiming that it is a tree, etc.

Come on, metaphor, we're almost there, hold together!

The elephant is the story. Each person's perceptions are a part of the larger whole. And it makes me wonder: how much of this could I get away with in my own writing?

Hold the Line

Here is a quote I came across in Mark Helprin's A Solider of the Great War:

To see the beauty of the world is to put your hands on lines that run uninterrupted through life and through death. Touching them is an act of hope, for perhaps someone on the other side, if there is another side, is touching them, too.

This gave me chills when I heard it (audiobook). It was spoken by the main character, a man who has made a study of aesthetics, and a study of the study of aesthetics: the beauty of the world.

Isn't this what we are trying to do when we create, or read, or visit a museum, or sit on a rock watching clouds race? To create, or uncover, and share a line that can exist and affect people after we have left the room or left the world.

Fish Pirates?

Today on Jim Lileks' blog, he mentioned browsing the YA section of a bookstore, and he made the following observation:

After the haircut I got a book Natalie has requested – part of a 946-volume series about talkative, clannish cats. I spent some time examining the rest of the books in the YA section, looking for my own niche. I think Fish Pirates is open, as well as Yugoslav Amoebas with Magic Powers. Perhaps a series about a world where all the kids have magic powers, and then some interesting, conflicted, smart, resourceful kids discover they don’t have any powers at all.

(If you're not familiar with this blog, he rarely discusses books, or at least, books I read, but he does provide a steady supply of wry and very funny observations on politics, parenthood, cereal boxes, postcards, architecture, and more. Try the Gallery of Regrettable Food. Or anything else. Wonderful stuff.)

At any rate, what exactly are the niches in YA books these days? In fact, what is a "niche"? I would think a niche is only full when nobody buys and reads the books in it anymore. Vampire stories would seem to be overflowing the market yet ... people are still reading them.

And is the diversity of books so bad? (I know that's not his point. Probably.) I love that just about anything you can imagine is available. Samurais? Check. Vampires? No comment. Fairies? Yep. Elves dwarves hobbits rabbis stepmothers talking beasts magic technology dystopia historical fantasy spy thrillers horror romance high school drama dragons zombies octopi pirates bird-people aliens.

It's all there! Makes it tricky for writers to find their own space -- and maybe this is the best working definition of "niche" -- but it represents an incredible wealth of options for readers. I remember coming home from the library with a stack of books as long as my arm. It felt like Christmas morning.

So bring on the fish pirates and magical amoebas. Or so say I.

Big and Small

Once upon a time there was a furry blue monster with oddly thin arms named Grover. In one memorable scene, Grover leans close in to the camera, nearly filling the frame.

"Near," he says, and then huffs and puffs back, back, back until he's just a far blue dot.

"And ... far!"

That's the image that occurs to me as I work through the ideas of big and small. Big concepts and small examples. Big stories and little characters. I mean the elastic springiness that any good story must have to deal with large, universal themes on the one hand, and the characters through which those themes are explored, on the other.

It's easy -- well, as "easy" as writing can ever be -- to write a sweeping epic, full of noise and battle and ... shallow characters. Conversely you could also write a very tight, focused story dealing with nothing but character development. Both are good, and everything in between.

(As an aside, this is one of the many things I love about books: nothing is off-limits. Everything is possible, from cell phone novels to novels in verse to nine-word stories. Everything.)

What I want to do is take some of those universal human themes -- courage, guilt, betrayal, defiance -- and bring them to the reader through the characters, to the extent that it's possible. When I can show a twelve-year old character grappling with guilt, or making the right but hard decision, or struggling to understand a world -- and a story -- beyond his understanding and which doesn't patronize him, when I can do all this I'll be pleased.

I've been thinking some more about D. M. Cornish's Foundling and this is one of the things I loved about it. The main character, Rossamund Bookchild (how can any writer not love that name? we are all children of the book) finds himself in a rich, vibrant, and very dangerous world that does not make things easy for him. Neither the antagonists nor Cornish himself patronize Rossamund ... which means as readers we also are not patronized. Plus the illustrations are incredible!

It's difficult to explore these larger themes yet still make the characters and the story approachable. As a reader I want to see this, as a writer I want to build it. In close where the characters think; then swoop far, far out to issues that resonate beyond the characters and even the book itself.

Otherwise we'd just watch trash TV.

A few more

Came across a few more recent and "on deck" books:

Ian McEwan's Atonement. Picked this up in San Diego. Superb and well worth the hype (I have not seen the movie). He writes from a variety of perspectives so convincingly that it's like looking through a window: the author is transparent. Or rather, invisible. A master.

Alan Garner, The Stone Book Quartet. A highly regarded series of novellas, bound into a single volume. Like Atonement, I read to learn the craft from a master.

Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and a collection of essays. Ditto the above on learning from a master. Plus I'm interested in a non-Western approach to story and memory.

Daoud Hari's The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur. Saw this reviewed in the NY Times and was intrigued. The voices of the underserved and victimized in print: there can never be too much of that. And Hari's account will, I hope, give me a glimpse of a perspective I could never get on my own. Isn't that one of the beauties of a book? And after reading Dave Eggers's "What is the What" and Uzodinma Iweala's "beasts of no nation" I continue to want to learn more about that troubled region and the very bad things happening there.

Victor Hugo's The Three Musketeers. One of the first adventure novels, and on my re-read list for a look at a masterful portrayal of humor, swordplay, carousing, and honor. Swash swash, buckle buckle.

Carl Sauer's Northern Mists. Picked this up at Maxwell's House of Books in La Mesa, CA -- again -- for research. It's a nonfiction survey of European seafaring during the Middle Ages. Plus it's filled with irresistable maps. Imagine rowing or sailing to the endless horizon in a ship filled with stinking dried fish and skins of water, hoping to find ... what? Cibola? Vinland? Gold? Redemption? The last great mystery? Before the world was mapped, it was all out there, waiting. And in many cases, peopled.

Okay, you loquacious lurkers. I know I'm not the only one with a book habit. What's on your nightstand / kitchen counter / coffee table?

[Updated with this from my brother: his book takes place during World War II. Beyond that I cannot go; tace is Latin for candle.]

What I'm Reading

I've received an overwhelming spate of questions on what I'm currently reading. Honestly, people, turn off the fire hose!*

I typically read whenever possible. La, am I expected to sit there at breakfast and drink coffee but read nothing? Impossible. Sometimes it takes me longer to select what to read than to make the meal. Luckily I'm deep into a few books, with more on deck:

Breakfast reading: War of the World by Niall Ferguson. Thanks to my buddy Ken for recommending (and loaning) this to me. It's a wide-ranging nonfiction survey of twentieth-century warfare, with WWII as the fulcrum of that long century of industrialized violence. Fascinating, though I admit I skim the hard-core economics to get to the real human issues: what makes people hate or kill or forgive or despair or persevere?

Bedtime reading: Post-Captain by Patrick O'Brian. I've blogged about (and read) this series before. Truly superb historical fiction, with on-shore romance and intrigue, spies, great naval battles, deep and poignant sketches of friendships, and behind it all, the rich and complicated world of 19th-century Britain. Truly wonderful, and I'm re-reading it now so the sailing scenes can help inspire my next book.

While-making-dinner reading. There's a lot of down time in cooking -- usually I'm waiting for water to boil or delaying setting the table -- so recently I finished up The Lies of Locke Lamora. I'd seen a reference to it on some blog but then immediately forgot where, so I gamely read through it, unsure of what might have caught my eye. It's grown-up fantasy, with a lot of plot packed into a thick trade paperback. There are more in the series but I doubt I'll pick up the next one.

Evening reading. This is for the time between dinner and bed when I'm wandering around the house avoiding packing my lunch. Often I'll disappear upstairs "on an errand" and get pulled into a story. On deck: Walter Benjamin's essay "On Storytelling," which I saw referenced, and highly recommended, in a book about ... storytelling. (Suddenly They Heard Footsteps, by Dan Yashinksy). Both the essay and the book that mentioned it are on my list as research for my next book, where the idea of storytelling will play an important role.

Vacation reading. Just back from a week in San Diego, it seemed appropriate to try all-new books. Thus: D. M. Cornish's excellent Lamplighter, a middle-grade fantasy about an orphan who finds his way through a world bewildering to him and to us, filled with monsters -- real monsters, that eat people -- ships powered by living muscle, warriors who implant themselves with additional power-giving organs, martial dancers, on and on. The richness of the world Cornish creates would be notable even in a lesser book, but to his credit the author writes a very good story. Highly recommended.

Also while on vacation: A History of Old English Literature by Michael Alexander. I first read The Seafarer in one of Alexander's translations while in college, and its haunting tone has stayed with me ever since. More recently I've begun to wonder if some of the themes -- loneliness by choice, exile, responsibility, cold voyages -- might fit into my own book. They trickle in like melting ice, how they trickle. And thus I set out to learn more. This book was instructive but I was hoping for a full version of The Seafarer (since I've evidently lost the book I had in college; shameful).

Not to be left out: a draft of a book my brother has written about -- but no! I'll wait to hear from him if I should reveal more. I never know how much of pre-publication content to reveal. I will say this: it is the winding core of a very good story.

Just found this today: the Associate Press hired a team of anthropologists to help investigate why people aren't reading newspapers as much, or as well, or in the ways that they once did. That report is now available and should make for interesting reading on media consumption habits. My dad's a journalist and this topic is very close to his heart. As to mine, since I always picture people reading books rather than retinal projections or e-stories or whatever the kids are talking about these days.

And there's more. Oh, there is more. The Little Prince. Irish folktales. The Kalevala. Icelandic sagas. History of ship construction. The sequel to Lamplighter. The Diary of Anne Frank. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. On and on and on....

*Note that while double-checking the exact meaning of "spate," I came across this useful word: suctorian. It does not mean what you might think, though I intend to trot it out into conversation whenever possible.

Also note that spatterdock also does not mean what you might think. Must ... escape ... dictionary!