Odes and ends

[33for3]

What to read. And why?

One newspaper feature I look forward to every week is the NYT’s ‘Bookends’ in the Sunday Book Review - a discussion on books, reading writing etc. Recently, two writers discussed the relationship between an accessibility of a book and what we perceive as brilliance. The central question they were trying to answer was: is something that is really hard to read worth reading? 

This knotty question has vexed many over the years. Dickens was brushed off as too populist when he started out (and there were many who pooh-poohed the popularity of the serialised versions of his books – a rage among newspaper readers.) Back in the 19th century, many considered Dickens to be ‘not serious enough’. But today, most will agree that Dickens occupies a place along with other authors of “serious literature”. He is not a writer who you are likely to choose when picking up a book before you board a flight.

The other day, someone said to be: “There are some books I am drawn to naturally when I read the reviews or the first few paras. I just want to continue reading them. Other books, I don’t feel a real connection. So I stay away.”

This is probably the majority opinion. And even if people don’t actively think about this, there is enough research to suggest that many are choosing their reading material based on what is accessible and what is being spoken about at the time. Books that demand perserverence and work are often tossed aside for those that are “breezy” and “unputdownable”. 

The strange part of this is that when we were in school nobody really gave us much of a choice. There were stories and books assigned in our syllabus and we bloody well had to read them irrespective of whether we were drawn to them or not. We read Shakespeare’s plays and involved short stories by Jim Corbett. For the 11th and 12th standard, we were assigned Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. Now if I were to pick up that book at a store and skim through the first few pages, I would be instantly repelled. But back then, we ploughed through the text and at some point, discovered the joy of actually working hard to read something. To slow down with each sentence, understanding the meanings of new words and keeping up with the rhythms of each sentence; to approach it page by page, chapter by chapter; and to focus one’s attention despite the convoluted descriptions and trangressions. There was an effort that went into reading the book. And I still remember the day when I finished – it was as satisfiying as completing a half-marathon.

The question I often ask myself is: what did that experience teach me? 

First of, I remember very little from the book. I know the broad storyline and remember the passionate love (and rage) that Heathcliff evoked in Catherine but if you were to quiz me on the minor characters and other nitty-gritties, I would fail. I even forgot (until I just confirmed online) if Catherine dies in the end or not.

But there was a larger lesson I took at the end: that one can’t abandon a book just because it is difficult to read. There will be times when one can read what one wants (and spend plenty of days with ‘unputdownable’ literature) but there will be other times when one needs to commit to books that have endured for long. A Tolstoy or a Virginia Woolf or Faulkner may not get the pulse racing in terms of their prose. But the fact that they have been around for so long – and that many great writers have gained so much from them – is reason enough to set aside a few days/weeks/months to read them. And to feel a genuine sense of accomplishment once the task is done. 

[33for3]

The hard part about reading

I’ve been thinking about reading. Mostly about why I read so little as a child, even though I grew up in a house that was overflowing with books. My parents are voracious readers (always have been) and it was constantly drummed into me that success in life was a function of how much one read. There were no shortage of options: from Shakespeare to Dickens to Maugham to Rushdie to Encyclopedieas to books on philosophy to books on travel to... you get the picture. 

My parents also took great pleasure in visiting bookstores and book fairs. Sometimes an uncle or aunt would visit with a bagful of books and say, “Since these were gathering dust, we thought we’ll leave it here.”

All this meant I was constantly filled with a sense of guilt. There were so many books to get through and I hadn’t even begun to make a dent. Each time I read a Tinkle or Amar Chitra Katha comic, my guilt was more acute - here I was, wasting valuable time reading “trivial books” (as my dad, called it) instead of getting through all the “good books” that were staring at me from the shelves.

Around the time I was 10, I was beginning to be drawn to sports (mainly thanks to my sports-mad grandfather). But neither dad or mum had any interest in sports, and I’m sure they saw sports too as “trivial”. My dad would have possibly laughed out loud had I asked him to buy me a sports book (because where did a trivial matter like sports have any business in the serious world of books? Where was the space for intellectual inquiry in a universe where jobless people were wasting time running around a field?)

Which meant there was almost no sports books at home. And it was only thanks to a classmate here or a distant cousin there that I got my first taste of reading about sport. In fact, on a visit to Madras during the summer holidays, I spotted a cricket book in my uncle’s shelves and spent the next 20 days re-reading the same book – so much so that many of the lines imprinted themselves in my head. I later kicked myself for not copying down the whole book in a notebook. At least that way, I would have been able to read it again even after the holidays finished.

Over the next few years, the only non-textbook reading I did was either comic books or sports books. This was not because I didn’t like reading fiction or other “serious” non-fiction. It was because I didn’t know where to start. Though we studied many of Shakespeare’s plays in school (some abridged, two unabridged) I found the language hard to grasp. So there was little chance of me sitting down with a Shakespeare play and reading it end to end (if it was not part of the syllabus). The collection of short stories were thoroughly enjoyable (and here was my introduction to writers like Ruskin Bond and Graham Greene) but when I thought it would be a good idea to read a Greene novel during a Christmas break, I couldn’t get past the first few pages. Maybe I wasn’t patient enough. Maybe the language was of a higher standard. But mostly, I think, I was too intimidated. 

You see, people at home treated reading a book as just another task one undertakes. My mother always had a book by her bedside and she made it a point to tell me that one must read at least ten pages every day. The problem was that reading put me to sleep. So by the time I was through with a page or two, I was yawning, struggling to understand what the words were telling me. 

So I tried to read first thing in the morning. That way, I assumed, I would be fresh. But that didn’t work either. Each time I started to read a few pages, my attention wandered. And I put off the reading for some other time.

Now that I look back on it, I can think of several reasons:

1) Holding a 250+ page book in your hand can be an overwhelming experience. For someone who was struggling to get through two or three pages at a time, it was unimaginable to ever think I would finish a book. It would take so much effort for me to plough through the first chapter. Imagine the tenacity required to through fifteen or twenty more!

2 Each time I struggled with reading a book, I would put it aside and start another. Intiially, I assumed I would find some book somewhere that would actually be easy to read. Something that I would be able to easily finish. But the number of unfinished books kept piling up. And each time I set a book aside, my confidence took a hammering. 

3 Over the next few years, I discovered many pulp writers like Sidney Sheldon and James Hadley Chase. And blitzed through their books. They were easy to read and their plots always kept me interested (though after a while it was becoming clear that each book was not too different from the other.) The problem though is that the guilt never left me. Yes, I was reading something. But again, I was back to reading trivial stuff, books that gave me temporary pleasure – books that I could at least finish – but not books that were serious literature. The more I read these pulpy thrillers the more I was convinced that I was wasting time. And the guilt continued to build.

Then, sometime when I was in my early 20s, I read Animal Farm. It took me about a week to read that tiny book (a tiny mighty book) and it was when I finished that an epiphany struck. I needed short books! Books that wouldn’t make me feel incompetent but books that would make me feel like I could actually finish them. 

So I spent the next two years reading books that were less than 150 pages long. Each time I would go to a bookstore, I would look for narrow spines. And, irrespective of the writer or genre, I would make sure I read the book from start to finish. The beauty about reading a tiny book is that you don’t feel bad feeling sleepy after reading five pages. You know that if you read five pages for ten days, you will probably finish one third the book. And there is a major major relief that the thought brings.

Gradually, I became bolder. I moved to 200-page books and 250-page books and then, on my 27th birthday, actually decided it was time to break 300.

Now all this may sound silly for those who have read a lot from a young age, those who have picked up a Marquez or a Hemmingway and breezed through the pages in a matter of a week. This post is not for you. This is for those who are constantly filled with guilt for not reading, for those who feel that they are wasting their time reading “trivial stuff”. And for those who sometimes wonder if they will ever find the time or patience to ever read another book again. 

Pick up a small book. Read slowly. Even if you read a page a day, keep at it. You will eventually finish. And there are not many thrills that can compare. 

[33for3]

All words are equal

It always struck me as odd that the dictionary considers all words as equal. There is no specific section for ‘important words’, no words that are highlighted or written in a larger font, no words that have an asterix next to them. It doesn’t matter if the word is as benign as ‘to’ or as the innocous as ‘and’. It still shares the same importance as words as loud as ‘rumbunctious’ and ‘tintinnabulate’, words that make you understand their meaning by the sheer effect they have on your ears. Rum-bunc-tious: that’s probably the sound you hear when you hammer a drum with a branch of a tree.

The writer’s challenge – and something that becomes difficult when one writes on topics close to one’s heart – is to accord each word the same importance. To ensure that he or she is not carried away by the moment by using words that sound powerful; rather to weigh each word and choose the one that will have the most telling effect. 

Here’s point No. 3 of VS Naipaul’s rules for beginners:

“Do not use big words. If your computer tells you that your average word is more than five letters long, there is something wrong. The use of small words compels you to think about what you are writing. Even difficult ideas can be broken down into small words.”

It is easy for sports writers, especially those who are covering live events, to fall for this trap. While trying to capture a great moment in sport, it is tempting to reach for the big words – to rush to type out words like ‘devastate’ and ‘annihilate’ – when, in fact, shorter words like ‘raze’ and ‘flatten’ may be more representative. There is also a tendency to say ‘mere words cannot describe the scale of this achievement’ (or something to that effect). Which is both insulting to the power of words (so powerful that it has scared dictators and despots witless) and an admission to one’s own ineptitude.

[nevver]

Try and stop her

[33for3]

“What does a writer of prose learn from poetry? The dependence of a word’s specific gravity on context, focused thinking, omission of the self-evident, the dangers that lurk within an elevated state of mind. And what does the poet learn from prose? Not much: attention to detail, the use of common parlance and bureaucratese, and, in rare instances, compositional know-how (the best teacher of which is music). All three of these, however, can be gleaned from the experience of poetry itself (especially from Renaissance poetry) and theoretically – but only theoretically – a poet can get along without prose.”

[thisbelongsinamuseum]

Believe it or not, this blog has never paid a visit to the 51st U.S. state known as Puerto Rico. And I’ve been writing about one-of-a-kind attractions for five years - my sincerest apologies! I guess this next place just slipped my notice.

In the mountains of central Puerto Rico is a museum shaped like the contents displayed inside, which we’ve seen before (Ukraine’s Pysanka Museum comes to mind). According to the native Taíno religion, zemí (cemí) is a god, spirit or ancestor that are physically represented as sculptural objects. Known as “amuletic zemís", which are usually depicted as a three-point stone with one side of the stone having a human or animal head with the opposite side having hunched legs or “frog’s legs”. The Cemi Museum, which opened in 1989, preserves artifacts related to Taíno culture with a small display of cemis and pieces of pottery and tools as well as a carved, pointed wooden tongue depressor that was used in ritual vomiting ceremonies. There is also a mural with examples of the petroglyphs created by the Taíno people.

(Image Source)

[33for3]

Remarkable cover of a remarkable book. As economical and precise as the writer himself. 

[33for3]

Convo with a second-hand bookstore owner. The chap is 70-plus and quite a boor. And the problem with boors like him is that it’s hard to avoid talking to them and trying to troll them. Because they will always fall for the bait. Problem is, they will also mostly win at the end. 

Me: "This book is eight bucks!"

Him: "It's by Virginia Woolf"

Me: "The pages are fading. The cover has wrinkles." 

Him: “It’s still by Virginia Woolf”

Me: “You know I’ll get it for less online, right?”

Him: “Yes. But if you really value the book – which you must – you must buy it where you found it.”

Me: “You are trying to tell me that I value this book less if I borrow it from the library and read it for free?”

Him: “If you found the book in the library - while perusing the shelves – then fine, read it for free. But if you found the book while perusing the shelves in my shop, then you are valuing the book less by reading it elsewhere.”

Me: “Okay. I am going to sit here for the next 5 hours and finish this book. Then I won’t buy it. Is that okay with you?”

Him: “Then I’ll consider giving it to you for seven bucks.”

Me: “!”

Him: *evil grin*

[bookmania]

Vagary, n. The mistake is thinking there can be an antidote to the uncertainty.

David Levithan, The Lover’s Dictionary (via bookmania)

[33for3]

“If Olga had been just a bit less brainy perhaps she might have considered herself quite pretty. But since she was intelligent, she saw herself as far more unattractive than she actually was.”

[bookmania]

This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don’t get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can’t do anything, don’t get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it’s ready to come undone. You have to realize it’s going to be a long process and that you’ll work on things slowly, one at a time.

Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood (via bookmania)

[extraterrestrialfox]

[strandbooks]

Foma Gordeyev by Maxim Gorky, p. 275.

[aleyma]

Alice Pike Barney, Firelight, late 19th-early 20th century (source).

[33for3]

Where do you think is the ideal place to write? I've said this often before: a desert island in the morning and a big city at night. In the morning I need silence, and in the evening a few drinks and some good friends to chat to. I need to be in constant contact with people in the street and know what's going on in the world. This all fits in with what William Faulkner meant when he said 'the perfect place for a writer was a brothel, because it's very quiet in the morning but there's partying every night.'

From The Fragrance of Guava: Conversations with Gabriel García Márquez by Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza (via www.RanaDasgupta.com)

[33for3]

Diego Rivera, "Frozen Assets", 1931

[33for3]

Bullfight (Pablo Picasso)