Books: What are you reading today?

If you don't like downer books, better stay away from Journey to the End of the Night, or a lot of Vonnegut. I tend to like them, as everywhere else in our mass media but books -- and even in most books -- the message for by far the most part relentlessly cheery, even to the point of being oblivious. A little lemon and vinegar keep the sugar from being cloying.

There are many parents just as bad, trust me. We were a foster family when I was a kid, and we got all their leftover kids after they abused and abandoned them. There is no limit whatever to human greed, evil, or simply neglect. Whatever can even be imagined has been done countless times. To me it's all in the telling.

I downloaded it on my kindle when it was on sale a while back. I've been looking forward to reading it, and your remarks on it actually make me want to read it more. It sounds like he didn't fail to inject passion into his story.

Sometimes I think we can be thrown for a loop due to lifelong expectations built up in the storytelling we've been allowed to see following such strict conventions. Always the happy ending, romance shoe-horned in however possible even when entirely silly, every situation with its silver linings and every character with a secret heart of gold. The truth is that some stories are just sad, and popular culture tends to protect us from that. Some characters, in real life too, really do follow stereotypes right out of a comic book. The truth is, in real life, the hero usually dies.

I find many stories inherently more interesting when they follow the true, rather than imagined, roundedness of life -- that it has all sorts of dimensions and trajectories, that the entrants continue after the winner has been declared, that many consequences last rather than being ephemeral products of the mind that are essentially no more than mere trite manifestations of willpower and attitude, including the consequences -- and people -- we shield ourselves from by thinking too little about, thus protectively narrowing our world and thereby our souls.

Perscribo said:

but the fact that his own mother didn't champion him is most heartbreaking to me. An all-too-prevalent story that IS hard for readers like me to swallow. Perhaps it's too honest, and his Russian grandmother did bury all of them, lol.

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That's a very common story too. I had an abusive father, for one, and my mother didn't protect me either. I've read cops talking about even extreme cases, saying that as long as a check is coming in, a lot of families will put up with anything.

Did you like it? I really liked that one.

I usually get bored in places. It's the overall balance that's important to me, and whether I can find any stand-out moments.

Re dialogue vs. description, too much or too little of anything can be unbalancing. I think with description, it's the type of description that matters.

Description, so to speak, is the essence of the "heist" movie and its most fun sequences. You see something really interesting happening and can't take your eyes away from the screen for a second. Description of some dullard doing approximately nothing, on the other hand -- for a long, long time -- or of irrelevant background details, begins to grate.

Same with uninteresting people talking, or people talking about uninteresting things. Look at almost any of the famous Christopher Walken appearances, though. They're all dialogue, and they're mesmerizing. They can be quite long. And they can make a movie, pretty much all by themselves.

So it's more how well it is done, than what it is, IMO.

Well, I just went to a poetry workshop at the local library led by Oregon's reappointed poet laureate, Paulann Petersen. It was a lot of fun. I met some interesting people and joined a local writers group I hadn't known existed, though I've searched for one more than once. I'll be checking them out soon. Another group formed up after the workshop with the intent of giving readings, and I signed up for that.

I didn't know what would be involved, so I brought down a bunch of my poems just in case. Turns out we each crafted two poems on the spot after building up a backlog of images to draw from. Some surprisingly interesting poems were written in very short order, and there were far more people than I expected to see.

I bought one of Paulann's books as a courtesy for her leading the free workshop. She had a few out there, but what sold me on her book "A Bride of Narrow Escape" was the snippet of a review on the back that said the book engaged with the poet's issues of having her parents die. Talking to her during a break, she told me her mother had Alzheimers, and I told her about the problems my own elderly father was having and how hard it was to deal with it, including how hard it was to deal with it on the artistic level by writing poetry about it. It was a three-hour session, but there wasn't much time to talk.

I wrote a complete short poem there, and started off on another one. Paulann went from table to table seeing if anyone wanted to read, and I volunteered. I started off in a clear strong voice so people could hear (I couldn't hear half the poems being read out in whispered voices, and didn't want people to hear only bits and pieces). I ended up shaking in my boots as I got hit by a sudden bout of nervous self-consciousness. I can give a talk to employees, and used to give speeches well enough, but I have never done a reading of any "creative" work before. At least not since college creative writing classes. So I sweated blood. But there was healthy applause and someone told me they liked the poem after the session was done. All in all, despite my dreadful sudden flash of crippling, bowel-pulverizing nervousness, it was a good idea to read, because one day, who knows, it might matter that I can do it without swallowing my tongue.

All in all a fun and worthwhile experience. I look forward to reading the book. I read a postcard-sized(large postcard-sized) insert she stuck into the book for me while I was scribbling away which had another poem on it. Very nice, with a really nice end, and it made me happier I had decided to buy her book.

Is that the sequel?

I read that book long ago. It seems to have become all but forgotten, but it was a great read. And I don't usually associate with the implied politics readily. I loved the bits about the political uses of art and the vicious dissection of people who traded conscience and art for security and approbation.

Just finished Jeff Strand's new book, "Bad Day for Voodoo." It's a YA book with (duh) supernatural elements. Here's my review on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/review/R5WXQW...007SOL2BM&nodeID=133140011&store=digital-text

Also reading an anthology of dragon short stories.

Before that, read a short book about serial killer H.H. Holmes:

http://www.amazon.com/review/R17NIQRIQ5PX8C/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

Been very sick the last three weeks so haven't been reading much lately. No presence of mind, could rarely even make it through a movie. Just starting to snap out of it in the last week. Aborted a few reading projects because of it, but hope to be clear enough to pick them back up soon.