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Superb Writing Bowls Me Over!
On my Houston-Bangkok mega-trip, I read Graham Swift's The Light of Day. What a master! He conjured up so much emotion that I was pretty much a wreck when I got here. I'm literally not sure I can survive the book. He pegs human frailty so perfectly ...
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Comments
Delish! Can't wait to read it. We have to write about that dirty pleasure -- READING BOOKS -- write about it more around here, write about it all the time, write about where we all picked up the habit. I remember watching my mother drag home about 10 books (thick ones) a week from the Greenwich, CT library like it was a pile of gold. It was.
At my house you were forgiven almost every sin if you did it because of a book you were reading, a book you'd read, or a book you were hunting down to read.
And we need to name that amazing sensation -- world slippage (?) -- where if you've been reading Lolita for instance, when sitting in an airplane or walking through an office, you expect to have the book characters slip into the "real" world you inhabit.
It would be more real to me to look into the next seat in business class and see Humbert Humbert shyly leafing through a copy of HBR, or being led on a factory tour by Dolores Haze, the new SVP of Marketing for Victoria's Secret Asian Operations.
Perhaps it should be called "Literary Repopulation" to describe the binge and hangover only reading can supply as the characters from a book brazenly escape their pages and populate your waking hours. I definately suffer from it.
But how rude it would be to explain to the lackluster "characters" in your "real world" that they pale in comparison to those spawned from 26 tricky little letters -- beats human DNA all too often.
Posted by Halley at February 2, 2005 8:24 AM
Reading opens the mind to the world of what some philospher called secondary qualities, tase, smell, touch, detail...
Halley, isn´t life pure fiction? I remember the character of Julian Sorel in Walter Scott´s "Red and Black", always dreaming with being a copy of Napoleon and failed to live his own life, where all the elements for a novel other than Scott´s story were present.
Posted by felix gerena at February 2, 2005 1:11 PM
It was Stendhal who wrote "Red and Black", not Walter Scott. Julian Sorel was the character of the novel.
Posted by felix gerena at February 2, 2005 1:16 PM