WordWacky

There’s nothing more to say about this book, it’s true. Yet I also believe my reading experience is enhanced by a multitude of ideas around a single work.

This is the book your creative writing teacher wants you to write. It is sparse, and the verbs are active. Epic without being overwritten, it has a verbal landscape that exactly mirrors the charred country the protagonists traverse.

Yes, it’s apocalyptic; yes, it’s man versus man — along with man versus nature (himself?). It is every paranoid’s fantasy taken to its impossible, right-around-the-corner conclusion. It is predictable in this way.

You won’t care.

This is a story of love and commitment under the harshest imaginable conditions. Our unnamed heroes walk on, always at the brink of unthinkable deaths, and still there are lessons, a father’s lessons, his legacy to his son, a son’s lessons of innocence for his father.

Most of the insights of the father go unspoken, however: “The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone.”

McCarthy doesn’t use quotation marks to mark dialogue. His commas are so infrequent, you almost believe they’re completely absent (on two full pages of complicated sentences, I counted two). All of the -n’t contractions lack their apostrophes. Many to-be verbs are just missing. Civilization has broken down completely, and with it all order, says McCarthy with these omissions.

The placement of text on the pages — lone paragraphs and vacant expanse of page — contribute to the barren landscape of the characters’ worlds.

A paragraph separated by breaks on either side:

In that long ago somewhere very near this place he’d watched a falcon fall down the long blue wall of the mountain and break with the keel of its breastbone the midmost from a flight of cranes and take it to the river below all gangly and wrecked and trailing its loose and blowsy plumage in the still autumn air.

I had to read this paragraph several times, inserting mental commas as I went. I enjoyed every reading of it more than the last.

What do you want when there’s nothing left to want? Who do you trust when there’s nobody left to trust and the rules you learned to live by no longer fit — how would you even figure out who to trust? What would you do — or not do — to survive?

These are worn out questions that are haunting and dusty and new and familiar in The Road.

…own a bookstore located on their farm in Wisconsin. It’s not marked; it’s not centrally located. They never advertise, and their only regular hours are 9-5 on Saturday.

They have more than a million titles, which is many more than a shopping center chain store.

This inspiring couple will amaze you.

Lenore says that the most important book of all is Mother Goose’s nursery rhymes:

“If a child knows eight nursery rhymes before the child is four years old, that child will be an excellent reader when he is eight years old.”

(The video is a little slow to start, since there are a couple of intros edited in. But it’s worth it.)

[via My World... My Perspective...]

In a Radiohead-like move, author Paulo Coelho increased sales of his books by offering downloads of them for free. His publishers, inspired by the increase in sales, later did the same.

Coelho himself has an answer to my title question, “Why buy the book…?” from Torrentfreak:

“A (real) book is easy to carry, easy to read anywhere. Reading a book on a monitor on the other hand is very tiresome, and it would be even more expensive to print (considering cartridge prices) than to buy a paperback,” he says.

Coelho considers the downloads previews, and hopes that previewing encourages readers to buy the book. It has, too — in its 34th week on the Bestseller List, The Alchemist is number six.

Never mind that citing Coelho as a favorite will lose you dates, if you believe the readers of the New York Times book blog, Paper Cuts (read the comments). This is the same New York Times that maintains the bestseller list on which Mr. Coelho has managed to rise back up to #6 with a book that is fifteen years old.

[via Shelftalker]

Someone once told me that among writers, there are those who underuse and those who overuse the comma. I am in the latter camp. That there are precise rules to govern comma use is a surprise to some — many liberal comma users like myself are more interested in the pace of their piece than adherence to standards.

According to Lynne Truss, author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, as quoted in Wikipedia:

A passage peppered with commas — which in the past would have indicated painstaking and authoritative editorial attention — smacks simply of no backbone. People who put in all the commas betray themselves as moral weaklings with empty lives and out-of-date reference books.

While it would be easy to feel offended by this, I am instead encouraged to do things my own way. Strange quote for a book subtitled, “The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.” 

Also from Wikipedia — commas have history:

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In A.M. Homes’s novel, This Book Will Save Your Life, middle-aged protagonist Richard Nowak has had what he believes is a brush with death, followed by a mid-life crisis.

This is a story we’ve heard before — in fact, Homes is flirting with some real cliche in the subject matter of her book. But it manages to be completely unexpected, anyway.

Bizarre things happen to Richard Nowak. They will make you laugh.

The characters in This Book… are mostly described without any real reference to their physical form. We understand them, picture them because of their actions and dialogue. We imagine we know someone like each of them.

Richard’s position and circumstance (crossed with his near death experience) allow him to be absurdly helpful to others — strangers, family, his housekeeper — and as a worldly cynic, you wait the entire story for this to backfire on him. People can’t just go around being maniacally generous like that, you think. And his life definitely gets more complicated, but it also gets richer.

The prose is simple and unobtrusive, allowing the incredible plot (and I mean that in a couple of ways) and pitch-perfect dialogue to stand out. My critic was forced into hiding, edged out by the characters that had come to life in my mind.

Can a fable take place in modern day LA, with complex, quirky characters that curse and threaten and fuck? A.M. Homes says yes, and she’s proven it to me with This Book….

It seems to me that there’s an inverse relationship between the number of letters and/or syllables in a word and how many different meanings it can have. Is this due to our tendency to nickname — that is, to shorten? Seems logical.

I had to look up the word that meant “having many meanings.” Polysemy itself has one. Good word to know, even if only 17 English speakers in the world will understand when you say it out loud.

I haven’t tried that yet. Let’s say it out loud together: “POL-ly-see-me.” Or the less personable version: “puh-LIS-uh-me.”

After Tatiana sent me this cool video of a pop-up book today, I began to ponder the polysemous word, pop (>30 definitions!).

I won’t bore you with all of the definitions of pop. Here are some favorites:

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