Mostly brainless

I've just finished reading Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's trilogy in four parts. Perhaps one day I'll move on to the fifth book, Mostly Harmless, but it's about Arthur's daughter and I have a general aversion to books containing revisited characters, especially if they've gone on to have children. I don't care to imagine their lives post-adventure; I like to leave my characters free in the big wide world with endless possibilities before them. (I know I'm preaching to the converted here, but this was my biggest problem with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.)

Whilst I'm sure Adams will have treated this altogether differently, I'm not sure whether I want to read the book. So, in the meantime, I'm searching for something to read next.

As I was packing my photo albums the other day, I flicked through one and came across a quotation from one of my favourite books, Emily Climbs: "To love is easy, and therefore common -- but to UNDERSTAND -- how rare it is!"

I started thinking about it. If there's one piece of advice this media-saturated world gives us, it's BE YOURSELF! I am myself. I am myself everywhere I go, but how often do I come across someone who actually sees me? It's one thing to 'be' yourself, it's quite another to have friends who know and understand that self. I'm blessed to have a few such friendships.

All this gave me an itch to read L.M. Montgomery's Emily trilogy again, but the books are packed away. Right now, with thesis-writing and house-moving upon me, I need two things from a book:

1. Brainless. I do occasionally read chick lit, but it doesn't give me the sucked-in, switched-off feeling I need, because I tend to over-analyse it. What I need is lad lit.

2. An ebook. Because pretty much everything I own is in boxes, but my ereader is still out.

I think I'll go download me some Nick Hornby.

Widening Horizons

Salon's Laura Miller invites you to read a book you think you'll hate in 2010:

"Champions of the book like to think that reading broadens the mind and expands the sensibility. It can't do that, though, if the reading lists we choose from are too narrow."

Read more here.

In which I attempt to explain one of the reasons I read

I am one of those empathetic types they call a bleeding heart, a softie. My conscience is permanently in hyper drive. Not that I always do the right thing. I know I should buy fair trade; I do. I also know I should be a vegetarian; I’m not.

I grew up being described (by parents, aunts, uncles, family friends, etc.) in terms which indicated that my good traits are of the ‘soft’ variety: gentle, sensitive, quiet, tender-hearted.

In some ways I’ve changed a lot in the last few years; in other ways I haven’t changed at all. My friends would say I’m tougher. I don’t really think that’s true. I think I was always tough, it just took a while for me to realize it and act accordingly. Some of the things I have wanted to believe have crumbled in my hands; some of the clichés I wanted to reject have persisted. I have surprised myself with my own toughness, my own ability to withstand.

I have retained my bleeding heart. And that, I think, is the toughest character trait I have. It’s not easy to keep beliefs when acting on them takes great effort. It’s much, much easier to stop caring and go with the flow. If you ask me, jaded cynics are the soft ones.

I buy fair trade because I’m tough enough; the reason I’m not a vegetarian is that I’m too soft.

What has this got to do with reading?

Fantasy and Philosophy

It happened when I was six. It was lunchtime at school, and we were acting out the narrative of a story we all knew (I can't remember what it was anymore), and this one boy just would not get his part right. I distinctly remember my frustration. I hit him over the head with the book (the one we were acting out), and thought 'I'd rather be reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe anyway.'

After that, I spent a lot of lunchtimes reading the Narnia chronicles. I was too young to understand that this was social outcast behaviour; I just genuinely preferred to be reading them and that was that.

I was six when I fell in love with fantasy.

I did, however, fervently deny being a fantasy buff until I was twenty. I was at university, taking a unit about fantasy fiction when it eventually clicked: You know, fantasy is a lot like philosophy.

The wonderful, the amazing thing about philosophy is that it's about clarity. Pick a topic, the kind of topic that is hugely important but which most people are vague about (when pressed, they will mumble something about gut feelings and 'just knowing' or 'everybody knows'). There are philosophers who have wrestled with it, separating concepts which most people conflate, applying logic, exposing fallacies, pinning down what we mean by certain terms, laying bare what it is that we really think. Clarity.

Beautiful. Clear. Complex, but sensical.

When you apply philosophy properly, you address old, familiar, confusing issues with clean, crisp, ordered thoughts and the issues become as clear as if they were brand new. Philosophy has a way of sweeping away the muck of familiarity and mistaken associations.

Then there's fantasy fiction. Any fiction, really, but especially fantasy fiction. Fantasy is always about the hugely-important-but-difficult-to-define things, but it deals with them through narrative. It presents them in all their muddled complexity, it acknowledges the human impossibility of understanding. It provides little paradigms, dancing around the real issues by presenting us with the points of view of flawed and limited characters. It involves messy and mistaken actions and prods at the big consequences of these.

But it does all of this in a way so unfamiliar, in a world so unlike ours, that in the confusion we see with clarity issues and ideas which, in our own lives, are obscured by their familiarity, their uncomfortable closeness to ourselves. Fantasy has a way of sweeping away the muck of familiarity and mistaken associations.

Now, I am unashamed to call myself a fantasy buff.

It's not about gaining a level of great enlightenment. It's about always understanding just a little better. It can be as hard-won as a difficult philosophical proof, or as easy as getting carried away by a story.

What people like to read

To what extent is "literary merit" mutually exclusive with being a good read?

Says Nick Hornby of literary awards: "the books that have actually come to mean something to the culture have all been ignored, so what you are saying to people is the books you like are no good. It is not true and it is not right."

You can see the full interview in The Australian, here.

Nick Hornby's About A Boy is one of my all-time favourite books. If you've seen the film, don't presume you know what the book's about!

Meanwhile, another story in The Australian discusses popular misconceptions about the romance genre, and why women like to read it.

Even so, I read the first few pages of Candace Bushnell's One Fifth Avenue the other day and found myself completely disgusted with the poor grammar and overt plot devices.