The One About Books

Because a book just isn't as good if you can't swallow it whole.

Recently, while attending a Mormon wedding (long story), I bumped into an old English teacher from my high school who I hadn’t seen in a couple of years. We exchanged all the usual pleasantries, her asking me about college (“Why yes, actually, I am still a journalism major. Yes, I agree, that is a shame.”) and me asking her about high school (“Kids are still crapping in the urinals, huh?”). However, it didn’t take very long for her to use her womanly powers to deliver a question that completely disarmed me and forced me to lie in a vain attempt to save face.

“So, what have you been reading lately?”

At first I laughed and said I’d been reading my textbooks, but of course, that wasn’t true, so I mumbled some stuff about the Vonnegut I’d been reading last summer and called it good. English teachers! Even after you graduate, they’ll always know how to make you feel guilty for not broadening your literary horizons as much as you should. The same thing happened to me last summer, when another former English teacher (I have a lot of former English teachers) pointedly asked me if I’d ever finished reading David Copperfield, which he had assigned my class to read roughly 18 months earlier. To answer now, no – I didn’t even make it halfway. SparkNotes was very informative.

Stephen King once said that you don’t have any hope of becoming a good writer if you don’t spend at least four hours a day reading and four hours a day writing. That statement always nags at me after I spend five hours playing Grand Theft Auto IV and half an hour pounding out a shoddy and hastily written blog so that I can free up my evening for more Grand Theft Auto IV. I’d love to dismiss Stephen King’s words, but the fact of the matter is that he’s about the only writer whose books keep me coming back time and again – thus, there is a good likelihood that the man might know what he’s talking about. The literally hundreds of books he’s sold might also be an indicator.

Reading is by nature more difficult than other forms of leisure. For example, my family recently acquired the Comcast Digital TV Magic Box, which has given us access to about 30 more channels plus the vast wonders of OnDemand (which I will cover in a separate blog). This means that whenever I’m bored, there’s always going to be some sort of interesting content beamed straight into my house; content that requires nothing of me save for the fact that I sit still and look at the only appliance in the room that is talking to me. Video games are a step up, as they present me with a wide variety of problems to solve, usually by shooting people in the face (although I will on occasion run them over with a firetruck). However, in both cases you’re still looking at a screen and pushing buttons – your own imagination is disengaged as you either look at somebody else’s (on television or in a movie) or actually go play around in it (in a video game).

Reading, on the other hand, is all about recognizing letters and forming them into words, the words into sentences, and the sentences into pictures. Sure, it happens instantaneously (if you aren’t a business major), but it still eats up a lot more brain activity – and I don’t know about you, but when offered the choice between some brain activity or minimal brain activity, I always go for that second one. As somebody who wants to be a writer, that’s an absolutely horrible thing to say/be.

In hopes of changing this, I went to Powell’s (the local mega-bookstore) and bought three books for a total of roughly $30. My hope had been that the significant investment would guilt me into finishing everything I’d bought, instead of reading half (or less) and then abandoning it, as I did with the fourth Harry Potter book and, believe it or not, The DaVinci Code. I vowed that I would not lose interest in any of my purchases and would read them all in full.

I was so zealous about this that I wound up reading my first purchase, The Forever War, in less than 24 hours, which sounds really great and pat on the back worthy until you realize that I paid $14 for a book which I just as easily could have read in the store. The good news is that I liked the book, the bad news is that I don’t know if I’m going to read it again. Of course, cultural edification doesn’t come cheap.

I had anticipated my second purchase, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, as a more enjoyable experience than it actually was. The book takes Jane Austen’s novel and seamlessly adds “ultraviolent zombie mayhem” in 19th century prose; protagonist Elizabeth Bennet is a ninja zombie hunter who trades barbs with Mr. Darcy when she’s not beheading zombies or sparring with her trainers.* I slogged through 115 pages, and I’ve come to the conclusion that while I’m very enthusiastic about the zombies, they’re only one third of the book’s subject matter, and I’m just not as interested in prejudice, pride, or any combination of the two. Yes, the zombie battles are great, but there’s a lot of Jane Austen between them. It’s like eating Lucky Charms – you bought it for the delicious and festive marshmallow, and while the marshmallow is good, you’ve got to wade through an awful lot of bland-ass Cheerio-lookalikes to get there.

*When The Girlfriend first saw this book, the title was partially obscured. “Pride and Prejudice!?” She exclaimed, holding out some hope that I might not be a lost cause. “I can’t believe you’re getting this!” Then she picked up the book and saw the full title, and her face registered the expression of extreme disappointment that I’ve come to know so well. “Oh. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Great, Truman.”

I had hoped the third purchase, a detective novel called A Drink Before The War (written by the guy who wrote Mystic River), would be a good time and a fast read, but it instead felt like it was written by somebody competing in a “talk like a detective” contest. The pages were so thickly laden with streetwise jargon and crime slang that I was halfway scared that the individual words would beat me up and take my wallet. Also, the protagonist was a tough-as-nails detective of the “Jack Dynamite” variety, which I always find hard to relate to.

Three books purchased, two of them abandoned despite my best intentions to the contrary – pretty bad showing for an aspiring writer. My consolation is that I have high standards, and that as two thirds of my purchases didn’t meet with them, I’d be better off looking for books I actually want to read instead of forcing my way through stuff I don’t care about (just like I did back when I actually read my textbooks for school). I suppose the real trick now is seeing whether I actually take the initiative of going and finding something I do want to read, or just use my elitist “high standards” excuse and keep shooting people in the face.

I mean, in video games. See, I was connecting it to the earlier thing.

I don’t actually shoot real people in the face.

Truman Capps grudgingly acknowledges that he stole the name “Jack Dynamite” from Zero Punctuation, but a name that great only comes along once in a great long while.