The Office of Letters and Light Blog

Unusual, Intriguing Novel Narration

I just finished reading Hannah Pittard’s 2011 novel, The Fates Will Find Their Way. It’s a naturally intriguing story: a 16-year-old girl goes missing without a trace, and her suburban classmates obsessively speculate—in both the short and long term—about what may have happened to her.

Pittard’s choice of perspective makes this narrative even more absorbing. The entire book is told in the first-person plural: the collective voice of the boys who dreamily wonder about the girl’s fate.

We interrogated each other for information, eager to be the one to discover the truth. As it turned out, we’d all seen Nora the day before, but seen her in different places doing different things—we’d seen her at the swing sets, at the riverbank, in the shopping mall. We’d seen her making phone calls in the telephone booth outside the liquor store, inside the train station, behind the dollar store.

The result is wonderfully opaque. A plural perspective can never be definitively pinned down, and so the narrative drifts and bobs—as elusive and unreliable as the certainty of Nora’s circumstances.

What books have you read that make use of unusual perspective or narration? Have you tried this technique in your own novels? How did it work for you?

– Chris

A Contemporary Education.

In the past few weeks of my internship, it has become more and more apparent to me that my formal literary education has guided me in one direction: towards death. That is, my bookshelves are lined with authors that are no longer capable of writing because, you guessed it, they’re all dead. From Woolf to Wilde to Joyce to the Brontes to Frances Burney, I like my books old, and my authors’ reputations set in stone.

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Adaptation

It’s nearly mid-March which can only mean two things: One, it’s almost time for Script Frenzy, and two, it’s almost time for The Hunger Games premiere. I’ve been a proud, self-proclaimed Hunger Games nerd since I read the series a few months ago. If you haven’t yet read it, I recommend it! It’s a quick read and well worth it. To add to my delight, they are adapting the book into a full-blown movie, which seems to be a reoccurring pattern nowadays.

In fact, it seems that these days publishers are strategically seeking out novels that can be made into movies. Precious, The Kite Runner, The Lovely Bones, The Virgin Suicides—there must be hundreds, if not thousands of top box-office movies that started as books. So this leaves me wondering whether or not I should adapt a good book into my Script Frenzy script.

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A Book-Loggy Year

Back in January, I wrote about my New Year’s Resolutions here on the blog. Public accountability, after all, is a great motivator, and I was hoping that by declaring my intentions to all of you, I’d be a little more likely to stick to the resolutions.

My big resolution was to keep track of all the books I read in 2011, and thanks to the suggestions in the comments, I ended up with a GoodReads account. When I set that account up, I set my reading goal for the year at 100 new-to-me books. (Re-reads don’t count.)

I am here today to admit that I failed. I’m at 78 books right now, and I’ll probably manage another 5 or 6 before the year is out (mmm, holiday reading), but there’s no way I’m going to make it to 100 books. I had a couple of lags in my reading—the month I spent in Vancouver waiting for my sister’s baby to arrive, the time after I dislocated my knee and couldn’t get to the library, pretty much all of November—but I’m confident that I can make it to 100 in 2012.

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Feeding the Fantastic

In my writing experience, and perhaps in others’ as well, some styles of writing are held above others. I often hear about professors who declare themselves unfit to critique science fiction or fantasy because of their lack of experience with it, and it often seems that genre fiction and literary fiction were at odds with one another. I remember several students in my creative writing program who felt left out because they wrote science fiction or fantasy.

Though I respect the notion of needing the authority to comment on a particular genre, isn’t that the perfect excuse to explore the topic? Sci-fi and fantasy are both distinct, and there is a wealth of works in those genres that have crossed over into popular or literary fiction. Plus, there are subgenres to suit everyone’s tastes: dark fantasy, high fantasy, speculative fiction, diesel punk, cyberpunk, other things ending in the word “punk”—you get what I’m saying.

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Reading Whale-Sized Books

A couple weeks ago I was lucky enough to catch a screening of Raul Ruiz’s last film, Mysteries of Lisbon, on its brief (but glorious) theatrical sprint through San Francisco. The film is very much concerned with the passage of time, and all told, your ten bucks gets you 272 minutes (four and a half hours) of entertainment, not counting a 10-minute intermission.

I’ve never been one to shy away from a long movie, but when it comes to fiction, if a book is longer than 400 pages, it’s going to need some really exceptional cover art to get me on board. It’s not that I don’t believe these books won’t be great, it’s that I’m a painfully slow reader who hates putting down a book half-finished. If I start a novel that’s 900 pages, I could be working on it for a few months. What if it’s not brilliant? (On the other hand, as a friend pointed out, this could be extremely cost-effective entertainment.)

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Another Bestselling NaNo-Novel!

Well, folks, it’s happened again. A published NaNo-novel has made it onto the New York Times Bestseller list. Number five in fiction overall, and number two on the hardcover list. The book in question? The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern.

I have to admit, I was wary of this book. Compare anything to Harry Potter and my hackles immediately raise. Violently. That being said, I did pick it up the day it came out, and was rather pleased with what I found inside. It’s a wonderfully immersive romp, full of magical sights and sounds and, above all, the circus. Morgenstern is a master of description, and brings the circus to life in every way.

I had the pleasure of attending a reading of The Night Circus at The Booksmith earlier this month and, I have to say, it was one of the more interesting readings I’ve been to. There were magicians! And juggling! And streamers! It was almost like being at a real circus. But in a bookstore.

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On Appreciating the Hufflepuffs

Growing up, everyone wanted to be in Gryffindor. If you characterized yourself as a do-gooder in the face of fear, or weathered hardships without complaint, you were a Gryffindor. If you always chose the high road and completed every side quest in every RPG, you were a Gryffindor. Gryffindor was the house of heroes, the house of the chosen one, and the house that Dumbledore seemed to rain upon with numerous points for whatever reason he deemed suitable.

“Harry finished his supper all by himself! Fifty points for Gryffindor!”
– Professor Dumbledore

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Breaking the Reader-Author Boundary

I don’t know how many of you have Kindles, or any sort of e-reader, but I ran across something last week, and I think it’s relevant for anyone who reads or writes at all. On The New Yorker’s book blog, Mark O’Connell posted “@Reading in the Age of @Author,” about a new feature in the beta-testing stages for the Kindle. The feature is called @Author, and it will allow readers to highlight certain sections of text (in books from participating authors) and ask the author questions about it.

There are many factors at play here, from super-connectivity in our technological age, to the process of reading itself. However, I think the most crucial is what this means for the role readers play in creating meaning. As O’Connell points out, the prevailing attitude has long been that an author is separate from the work, and that “the reader’s interpretation should carry just as much weight as the author’s intention.” Much to the consternation of many high school English teachers, I agree with this statement, and I’d wager many of you do, too. Thus, my biggest fear about the @Author feature is that it will demote the reader’s experience and interpretation to a thing of lesser importance.

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Beach Games

I was lucky enough to spend last week at the beach with my family and extended family and the family of my S.O. One night, S.O.’s stepfather suggested a great game, which I have never played before: name your favorite novel, favorite paragraph, favorite word, and—-if you like—-favorite poet and poems as well.

Seems impossible, right? But it was also fascinating to hear these favorites of my family that, much as we love reading and books and words, we had never discussed before. There were a lot of surprises.

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YA Literature: It’s For Adults, Too!

I was recently reunited with my favorite book of all time. Yup, that’s right: although there are many great books out there, I have had a consistent favorite now for five years. For the past few months, the book had been living on a friend’s shelf. After I shared my love for the novel, she asked if she could borrow it to see what I was gushing about. When I got it back, I lasted one day before I ended up in my reading chair with The House On Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros in my hands. Do you love it, too?

I have read this book once a year since it was first recommended to me. Cisneros utilizes language to paint a young woman’s coming-of-age story that remains timeless. My favorite element of the novel is that it is written as vignettes. This stretched my mind to see other forms that a novel can incorporate, and the lyrical, image-packed chapters contain elements of poetry. This is my kind of novel!

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My name is Percy Jackson.

When I was a kid, my best friends were books. Sound familiar? In fact, back in the day, when the MS Readathon was held in the US, I was the national champion! Twice! I’d like to say that this had to do with my nascent philanthropic heart, but a more honest answer is that the Readathon gave me an excuse to spend even more time with my BFFs, and like any kid avoiding chores or life, I took it. For one month each year, I was free to read during every waking second. One of the books I read during that time, returning to it again and again over the years, is Edith Hamilton’s famous Mythology. Remember it?! It is a compendium of the Greek myths, told in a straightforward style. Hamilton makes the myths’ concepts easily graspable, even when read in the less-than-pastoral setting of my youth.

Hamilton has been on my mind lately since Tutoree and I have been reading The Lightning Thief. In the year that we’ve been reading together, Tutoree has not proven to be a lover of books. He is busy with real friends from the real world, he is a champ at karate, he swims. No matter how I encourage him, fairly shouting about the glories of reading, he’d rather live off the page. But The Lightning Thief is provoking a change in him where I’ve failed. He read a record 59 (!) pages on his own this month (for the first time, I had to catch up with him!). I am positive that this new-found love for reading is because Greek myths are at the heart of The Lightning Thief’s adventure and they work like a magnet to our minds.

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