I want to run something by you guys.
Months ago, I read an article on PRdaily.com called How to improve your writing in 15 minutes. I read articles like this because they keep my wordcrafting muscles toned and agile, and sometimes there are good tips. (Tip for my fellow writer friends: PRdaily has a lot of good articles about writing, so if you want to stay sharp, check out their writing exercises and word-nerd features.)
Anyway, leave it to me to get more out of the example than out of the article itself. I got hooked on the example topic: "How to become a better communicator." In particular, the third talking point under step 1, "Read often so you're able to speak confidently about a number of topics."
At the time it struck me that I OD'ed on this in college, being able to speak confidently on tons of different topics, because at any given time I was taking 3-4 classes in which that was how we spent our time: reading (or in my case, "reading") lots of books and articles, and talking about them.
Actually, I've been doing this my whole life. My lifelong book addiction hooked me up with a love of language, an outlandish vocabulary, an atrophic social life up to age 14, the most random pockets of expertise you can imagine, and something to contribute to almost any conversation. The difference has been mainly what I read. As a 6-year-old, it was Babysitter's Little Sister; at 8 I devoured Encyclopedia Brown; the summer before middle school I burned through the juvenile fiction and into the YA section at my local library, and then housed Harry Potter interspersed with the entire bibliographies of Madeleine L'Engle and Philip Pullman, and the misadventures of Georgia Nicolson, until I graduated high school. In college it was a lot of heavy academic stuff, philosophy and social theory and ethnographies (a genre I still get jazzed about even though most academic literature makes me gag and pass out).
Now? I read PRdaily meta-articles about writing. I read post-grad and travel blogs. I read vampire novels bought as a ploy to get me to go on dates with coffeeshop crushes. I read Facebook terms and advertising guidelines, New York Times and Huff Post articles about the impending apocalypse, and interview tips. And I read the nerdiest book you would have never heard about if Borders hadn't gone out of business and madly sold their entire inventory for $2.
It's called The Great Typo Hunt and it's about two dudes who go on a Pan-American road trip documenting and correcting typos in the name of better communication across the nation.
Yes, I'll be the first to admit what a honking big word nerd I am.
So a few weeks ago I was sitting in my car on my lunch break, reading this book, and I thought, "This is pretty good for a mediocre book." And then I realized what I had just thought and my head snapped up. I am loving this book. It makes me laugh out loud on a fairly regular basis, and I've actually had to close it a few times on something that blew my mind so I couldn't focus on reading anymore, and I needed to process it for a few days before picking the book back up. Also, I kind of love travel writing. Holy Cow!: An Indian Adventure, for example, or Eat Pray Love, in spite of all the criticism. (Yes, those are Goodreads links. Feel free to friend me.)
So why would I file it away in my mind as "mediocre"?
In that moment, I decided I put it there for its obscurity. The fact that I didn't hear about it through the grapevine, and in fact I had never heard about it before, and didn't know anyone else who had read it either. I couldn't talk about this book. It would be complicated to reference in conversation because I would have to explain the whole principle, or give a synopsis and include a link to its webpage if I wanted to mention it in a blog post.
Is it prior text status that takes a book from mediocre or good to great? Does the shared experience of having read some 300 pages, the shared familiarity with characters and plotlines and settings, make a book a favorite? Is this why we recommend books to fellow lit-lovers? So we can talk about them, and thus bump the book we enjoyed into greatness, among the monuments of our formative experiences?
Tell me what you think. I'm dying to be back at school to be around people that like talking about such things, but I'm not. So PLEASE hit me up with thoughts and comments.
Meanwhile, I will mention that I spent Sunday in Philly's Chinatown in search of flaming drinks, lotto tickets, fortune cookies, and a great birthday for my girl Kristy. We found all of those things. Like a boss.
Also, my phone (i.e. my life in device form) decided to go swimming in the cat bowl on Monday, and I've just now turned it on after a 2-day rice bath. It's just graced my ears with a symphony of message alerts, so here's hoping there will be photos in future posts.
Though I will never admit this if you ask me in conversation, my life is never boring.
Months ago, I read an article on PRdaily.com called How to improve your writing in 15 minutes. I read articles like this because they keep my wordcrafting muscles toned and agile, and sometimes there are good tips. (Tip for my fellow writer friends: PRdaily has a lot of good articles about writing, so if you want to stay sharp, check out their writing exercises and word-nerd features.)
Anyway, leave it to me to get more out of the example than out of the article itself. I got hooked on the example topic: "How to become a better communicator." In particular, the third talking point under step 1, "Read often so you're able to speak confidently about a number of topics."
At the time it struck me that I OD'ed on this in college, being able to speak confidently on tons of different topics, because at any given time I was taking 3-4 classes in which that was how we spent our time: reading (or in my case, "reading") lots of books and articles, and talking about them.
Actually, I've been doing this my whole life. My lifelong book addiction hooked me up with a love of language, an outlandish vocabulary, an atrophic social life up to age 14, the most random pockets of expertise you can imagine, and something to contribute to almost any conversation. The difference has been mainly what I read. As a 6-year-old, it was Babysitter's Little Sister; at 8 I devoured Encyclopedia Brown; the summer before middle school I burned through the juvenile fiction and into the YA section at my local library, and then housed Harry Potter interspersed with the entire bibliographies of Madeleine L'Engle and Philip Pullman, and the misadventures of Georgia Nicolson, until I graduated high school. In college it was a lot of heavy academic stuff, philosophy and social theory and ethnographies (a genre I still get jazzed about even though most academic literature makes me gag and pass out).
Now? I read PRdaily meta-articles about writing. I read post-grad and travel blogs. I read vampire novels bought as a ploy to get me to go on dates with coffeeshop crushes. I read Facebook terms and advertising guidelines, New York Times and Huff Post articles about the impending apocalypse, and interview tips. And I read the nerdiest book you would have never heard about if Borders hadn't gone out of business and madly sold their entire inventory for $2.
It's called The Great Typo Hunt and it's about two dudes who go on a Pan-American road trip documenting and correcting typos in the name of better communication across the nation.
Yes, I'll be the first to admit what a honking big word nerd I am.
So a few weeks ago I was sitting in my car on my lunch break, reading this book, and I thought, "This is pretty good for a mediocre book." And then I realized what I had just thought and my head snapped up. I am loving this book. It makes me laugh out loud on a fairly regular basis, and I've actually had to close it a few times on something that blew my mind so I couldn't focus on reading anymore, and I needed to process it for a few days before picking the book back up. Also, I kind of love travel writing. Holy Cow!: An Indian Adventure, for example, or Eat Pray Love, in spite of all the criticism. (Yes, those are Goodreads links. Feel free to friend me.)
So why would I file it away in my mind as "mediocre"?
In that moment, I decided I put it there for its obscurity. The fact that I didn't hear about it through the grapevine, and in fact I had never heard about it before, and didn't know anyone else who had read it either. I couldn't talk about this book. It would be complicated to reference in conversation because I would have to explain the whole principle, or give a synopsis and include a link to its webpage if I wanted to mention it in a blog post.
Is it prior text status that takes a book from mediocre or good to great? Does the shared experience of having read some 300 pages, the shared familiarity with characters and plotlines and settings, make a book a favorite? Is this why we recommend books to fellow lit-lovers? So we can talk about them, and thus bump the book we enjoyed into greatness, among the monuments of our formative experiences?
Tell me what you think. I'm dying to be back at school to be around people that like talking about such things, but I'm not. So PLEASE hit me up with thoughts and comments.
 |
| "There's 2 parties in here, and us. ...We're a party. Let's be honest." |
Also, my phone (i.e. my life in device form) decided to go swimming in the cat bowl on Monday, and I've just now turned it on after a 2-day rice bath. It's just graced my ears with a symphony of message alerts, so here's hoping there will be photos in future posts.
Though I will never admit this if you ask me in conversation, my life is never boring.
First: Now that I have graduated, I have loads of free time. Let's meet up and discuss fun things!
ReplyDeleteSecond: As a fellow anthropologer I strongly believe in shared experiences. I've never thought about reading books as a shared experience, but now that you have suggested the idea I can't help but shout, "Of course!" I can think of a few books that I would call mediocre though they are considered classics and timeless favorites because of the collective familiarity with that text.
1. YES! Let's hang. I still want to see/hear some of your writing too!
Delete2. Maybe it's an anthropologist thing. Prior text and shared experiences and the collective consciousness and all that...to us everything is about the social implications. I'm thinking this because the other two comments were so much more about the individual experience. What do the anthropologists think about THAT?
So the question you posed made me think of my host family in Senegal - when I first got there, I was pretty uncomfortable/nervous most of the time, so I read voraciously to occupy my time. However, I soon realized that the Senegalese don't reads novels very often. They're more likely to drink tea, sit outside and watch the traffic go by, or even watch TV. The common factor? They did it together - shared activities. It's such a community-centric culture that ALL activities were shared, and "me-time" hardly existed. Once I realized that my family thought I was actively separating myself from the community when I would pick up a book, I left the books in my room and participated in communal life. Looking back, that marks a turning point in my relationship with my family. Reading is individual - you're in the world of the story and characters of the book, not the people around you, and it made it seem like I didn't want to be there.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure what this says about reading, shared experiences, and how we value books, but it definitely made me evaluate how I spent my free time. It's interesting to think about how much of reading actually happens individually, and how much happens in discussing a book.
Well in my case in college, most of my reading happened in discussing a book (case in point: Great Con, where I "read" every Western classic ever to be published, thanks to my classmates who ACTUALLY turned the pages and absorbed the text...)
DeleteIn all seriousness, though, I'm piqued by the cultural factor and I'm taking it in 3 different directions:
1) The value of reading in my socialization was IMMENSE and my circles have always valued books a LOT. My family and friends and the educational system I was brought up in. Not so in some other places, or even socioeconomic situations.
2) One thing I love to do is sit with another person who's reading a book and read separately together. Puts "presence" under an interesting light.
3) I have historically struggled (and likewise a lot of people around me have struggled) to just SIT and BE TOGETHER. I come from several long lines of big-time DOERS, so sitting for a cup of tea and some shared silence has only recently become a part of my life. And I value the shit out of it. Notably, reading is pretty much impossible in these situations.
I like where you took this. Not intrinsically about the individual/shared experiences of reading, but about time. Isn't everything about that? What do we do with what we have? Time & money, death & taxes. Reflection.
It took me a few months after graduation to get into a new reading habit - the mass of books and printed articles I accumulated in my mind during those four years had clogged my ability to sit down for a 50-page excursion, just for fun. I think the first book I read that renewed my drive was "The Corrections" by Jonathan Franzen. That is a beautiful book and I was quickly trying to pawn it off to anyone else so they could see the beauty in it as well. I wanted them to read it so they could understand something like what I experienced. It's the same reason we'll chat about TV shows (Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad fans are always welcome conversationalists) or the news and whatever else we have buzzing around our lives today (like, apps - do people talk about apps?). Once I had my reading legs underneath me, I started devouring books at a much quicker pace. I read some Camus, Bill Bryson's book on "almost everything", Vonnegut, and most recently completed my new favorite book, Infinite Jest. Most of those have led to some kind of interaction with other people, whether it was the guy I know who is obsessed with IJ and lent me his well-worn, read-over-five-times copy, or the co-worker who also thinks Vonnegut is wonderful. I like other people that like books, but I think I may still just like the individual adventure of reading a book more. Why else do we read but to feel like someone else, to understand more about the world than we have been able to through our own experiences? And I think we try and do the same with people when we are with them. We want to know these people because they are not who we are - they are different and they can teach us.
ReplyDeleteA similar thing happened to me after graduation. The book that snapped me out of it was "The Help," but unfortunately I went on to read some pretty awful books after that and it turned me off of reading for awhile. I have had to work at being ok with setting down books I'm not enjoying.
DeleteLoving your thought: "Why else do we read but to feel like someone else...?" I would have never said it like that, but definitely throughout my childhood and awkward adolescence I read about adventures and people who knew who they were, or at least were figuring it out, in some active way that somehow seemed perpetually beyond my reach. Reading was how I dreamed.
I'm interested in the balance that comes out of your comment: You gave much more credence or airtime than I did to the individual experience of reading (and so did Mary) and yet somehow managed to hold onto the value of reading (or watching TV) as a shared experience. That balance still feels a little precarious at the end of your comment, with tenuous ties between the individual experience of reading and sharing experiences as a mode of teaching and learning... I want resolution. Maybe there isn't any?
I really enjoyed the classes that were focused on reading a set of pages for each time we met (which were arguably most of them) and discussing them in detail. Everyone has their own knowledge built up, but previous to each class everyone had to read the same pages and then we were in the same room to talk about it all. Some really cool things happened in those rooms. I heard people say things I too had thought when I read the same paragraph. I heard wildly different ideas that I hadn't considered at all. There were arguments and agreements, all surrounding something that someone not so different than all of us wrote down once (plus some editing...). That's a really cool idea.
DeleteI think we learn by reading alone and we also learn by reading in the hope of making discoveries and sharing them with each other. A great deal of the discussions in those classes made me reconsider the way I believe the world and everything in it works. I think this is a bit full-bore, but I think those discussion can change who you are (we are always changing, as it is). But the books that I don't tell a soul about do too. We're all out here to find out what we believe and though I would say that I'm more inclined to learn on my own (as an only child and all), I love talking about knowledge and sharing wisdom and telling good stories, from fiction, non-fiction to real life. And I love hearing the same from others. I think if there is any resolution to this whole idea, you make it yourself, by reading a great deal and reaching out to others as you go.
Good timing on this post - the NYT has a series of articles today that focus on many of the same ideas you brought up here. Check it out - http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/06/06/is-fiction-changing-for-better-or-worse/
Thanks for the link, and for honing your point. I think when it all comes down to it I have had equally fulfilling reading experiences both socially and independently, although I struggle in general not to share things with other people. Just my personality I guess. But yes, there are definitely things I have never shared about the books I've read.
DeleteThat being said, I wholeheartedly recommend "Typo Hunt" to anyone interested in the English language, communication, travel (particularly in the U.S.), critical reflection, racism, politics, history, and thinking in general. Today I was laughing out loud in the parking lot reading it.
I also enjoy the meta-ness of this discussion, the fact that we are sharing articles and books and ideas with each other -- all via the written word. To quote you, Jordan, "There were arguments and agreements, all surrounding something that someone not so different than all of us wrote down once."
A cool idea indeed.