the perfect book?
Aug. 8th, 2006 11:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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maticoquala who asks the question:
What is your perfect book? Imagined or real. Describe it and provide an example. She does not mean the one you'd write, but rather the one you'd like to read.
Here's my response:
I'm not sure there is perfect book at least for me. I like the combo of mystery, adventure, derring-do. I like romance but not for "romance" sake. And I want imperfect, flawed characters.
I've found a couple books here and there that I adored, but not sure perfect is the word I'd use to describe them. For all have flaws here and there. Perhaps this is a side-effect of having a critical mind or a trained critical mind - via the English Lit major and the law school, really could not escape it. But then, perfect isn't what I want. I like flawed narratives, that do not give you everything, that leave something open to the imagination, gaps here and there.
Books that come to my mind which I can remember, I've read so many, some of the titles have blurred in my memory, that I'd think of as near-perfect reads or fit those qualifications:
The Sparrow by Maria Doria Russell
Hyperinion by Dan Simmons
Ship of Fools by Richard Russo
The Chronicles of Lymond by Dorothy Dunnett
His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman
Grass by Sherri Tepper
But these are all flawed and lack aspects that I'd want in a perfect book - such as humor.
No dragons either, I'm afraid. But I've read very few novels with dragons that I felt worked.
I'm also a moody reader. It depends on what I'm feeling at the time, how I feel about a book or what qualifies as the perfect book. I remember thinking Donna Tartt's The Secret History and Elizabeth Hand's Waking the Moon were the perfect book when I read them, now, I don't think so. I'm fickle. I fall in love with the book, hug it, sleep with it, cart it about with me, then when I'm through, throw it under my bed in a box or tuck it two rows back on my overcrowded bookshelf. Possibly never to look at it again. Some of my books if they are lucky, if they have that gap that plays with my mind - the gap that makes you create fanfic or makes you itchy like a craving that can't be quenched, those books get read again and again and again. Until I can play them in my head, memorized, and still that craving remains unsatisfied.
For me what lies at the heart of the perfect book, perfect story - the thing that gives me that craving is a character, a character that I've fallen for on some level. Hard. For me it is always about the characters. This may explain why I'm a fiction whore and have very little patience for non-character oriented novels -where the main goal is to impart information.
So the perfect read? I don't know.
Another post online - discusses books as food. There are popcorn books - chewy but quick. Steak - rich, takes a while to chew, but deeply satisfying. Celery - lots of chewing, not much nutritional value or sustenance. Caviar - takes work to get to, hard to find, but if you are willing, greatly rewarded.
Not sure which books I'd categorize that way either.
And yet another meme - the Proust Questionnaire - that asked who my favorite authors, books, poets, painters, composers were - once again I draw a blank. I can't choose from the hundreds I've loved.
For me - well, I have relationships with my books. Sometimes they are quick little flings. Some one night stands. Some long ardorous affairs. Some marriages that appear to last decades. I have been known to divorce a book and to have a lengthy separation. Some I have joint custody of - like a child. Other's I've watched marry someone else and live happily ever after. Some are companions. Some mere acquaintances. And some lifelong friends, who I've memorized and keep to myself. Private.
Reading, after all, is in of itself a solitary activity, a communion of sorts with words. It's just you and the book. People can be in the room with you, noise can be in the background, but you have fallen into another world through words, mere words that your mind has interpreted and given value, created pictures, and colors and senses and sounds. So that the world on the page is in your head and no matter what is going on around you -it is just you and that book. No one else. And it takes time, a commitment to read. Oh sure you can scan, skip over the letters quickly, have a fling with the book - no committment entered. Or if you want to take the time, to be alone, just you and it, no matter where you are, let yourself go, it is a bit like falling in love. OR falling period.
And when it comes time to come up for air - due to the need to sleep, eat, work, what-have-you, you think - wouldn't it be heaven if you did not have to? If you could just stay here in the book and it could go on forever?
Those are the perfect reads I think, the one's I don't want to leave. I miss when they are completed.
And it is rare that I share those reads, they are private things. I can't possibly explain what I felt and if someone else reads the book, I know that it is unlikely they will form the same relationship with it that I have. For books are like people - everyone's chemistry is different.
That's why they are so special. It's as if the person writing the novel has by magical means downloaded a part or piece of their own personality, own persona within its pages. So just as we relate differently to the actual person, we relate differently to the book.
I remember, different times in my life, thinking thank god for books. I can live without just about anything else on the planet, in fact I have to one degree or another at different points - didn't have a tv for a while, no radio, no music, no computer - but always had a book. I would not want to live in a world that did have books, and many many many books. More than I can count or possibly read. And in every genre, category imaginable.
Ah. Time for bed. And a little more reading...I think.
Books on tap: Jonathan Franzen's "How to Be Alone"
and Elizabeth Bear's "Hammered
maticoquala who asks the question:What is your perfect book? Imagined or real. Describe it and provide an example. She does not mean the one you'd write, but rather the one you'd like to read.
Here's my response:
I'm not sure there is perfect book at least for me. I like the combo of mystery, adventure, derring-do. I like romance but not for "romance" sake. And I want imperfect, flawed characters.
I've found a couple books here and there that I adored, but not sure perfect is the word I'd use to describe them. For all have flaws here and there. Perhaps this is a side-effect of having a critical mind or a trained critical mind - via the English Lit major and the law school, really could not escape it. But then, perfect isn't what I want. I like flawed narratives, that do not give you everything, that leave something open to the imagination, gaps here and there.
Books that come to my mind which I can remember, I've read so many, some of the titles have blurred in my memory, that I'd think of as near-perfect reads or fit those qualifications:
The Sparrow by Maria Doria Russell
Hyperinion by Dan Simmons
Ship of Fools by Richard Russo
The Chronicles of Lymond by Dorothy Dunnett
His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman
Grass by Sherri Tepper
But these are all flawed and lack aspects that I'd want in a perfect book - such as humor.
No dragons either, I'm afraid. But I've read very few novels with dragons that I felt worked.
I'm also a moody reader. It depends on what I'm feeling at the time, how I feel about a book or what qualifies as the perfect book. I remember thinking Donna Tartt's The Secret History and Elizabeth Hand's Waking the Moon were the perfect book when I read them, now, I don't think so. I'm fickle. I fall in love with the book, hug it, sleep with it, cart it about with me, then when I'm through, throw it under my bed in a box or tuck it two rows back on my overcrowded bookshelf. Possibly never to look at it again. Some of my books if they are lucky, if they have that gap that plays with my mind - the gap that makes you create fanfic or makes you itchy like a craving that can't be quenched, those books get read again and again and again. Until I can play them in my head, memorized, and still that craving remains unsatisfied.
For me what lies at the heart of the perfect book, perfect story - the thing that gives me that craving is a character, a character that I've fallen for on some level. Hard. For me it is always about the characters. This may explain why I'm a fiction whore and have very little patience for non-character oriented novels -where the main goal is to impart information.
So the perfect read? I don't know.
Another post online - discusses books as food. There are popcorn books - chewy but quick. Steak - rich, takes a while to chew, but deeply satisfying. Celery - lots of chewing, not much nutritional value or sustenance. Caviar - takes work to get to, hard to find, but if you are willing, greatly rewarded.
Not sure which books I'd categorize that way either.
And yet another meme - the Proust Questionnaire - that asked who my favorite authors, books, poets, painters, composers were - once again I draw a blank. I can't choose from the hundreds I've loved.
For me - well, I have relationships with my books. Sometimes they are quick little flings. Some one night stands. Some long ardorous affairs. Some marriages that appear to last decades. I have been known to divorce a book and to have a lengthy separation. Some I have joint custody of - like a child. Other's I've watched marry someone else and live happily ever after. Some are companions. Some mere acquaintances. And some lifelong friends, who I've memorized and keep to myself. Private.
Reading, after all, is in of itself a solitary activity, a communion of sorts with words. It's just you and the book. People can be in the room with you, noise can be in the background, but you have fallen into another world through words, mere words that your mind has interpreted and given value, created pictures, and colors and senses and sounds. So that the world on the page is in your head and no matter what is going on around you -it is just you and that book. No one else. And it takes time, a commitment to read. Oh sure you can scan, skip over the letters quickly, have a fling with the book - no committment entered. Or if you want to take the time, to be alone, just you and it, no matter where you are, let yourself go, it is a bit like falling in love. OR falling period.
And when it comes time to come up for air - due to the need to sleep, eat, work, what-have-you, you think - wouldn't it be heaven if you did not have to? If you could just stay here in the book and it could go on forever?
Those are the perfect reads I think, the one's I don't want to leave. I miss when they are completed.
And it is rare that I share those reads, they are private things. I can't possibly explain what I felt and if someone else reads the book, I know that it is unlikely they will form the same relationship with it that I have. For books are like people - everyone's chemistry is different.
That's why they are so special. It's as if the person writing the novel has by magical means downloaded a part or piece of their own personality, own persona within its pages. So just as we relate differently to the actual person, we relate differently to the book.
I remember, different times in my life, thinking thank god for books. I can live without just about anything else on the planet, in fact I have to one degree or another at different points - didn't have a tv for a while, no radio, no music, no computer - but always had a book. I would not want to live in a world that did have books, and many many many books. More than I can count or possibly read. And in every genre, category imaginable.
Ah. Time for bed. And a little more reading...I think.
Books on tap: Jonathan Franzen's "How to Be Alone"
and Elizabeth Bear's "Hammered
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no subject
Date: 2006-08-09 08:11 pm (UTC)I would also include humor, and of course great characters in a fascinating setting (someplace I want to spend time, with people I'd like to get to know) are necessary for me to say a book is 'perfect'. In a way I could say that my comfort books are my perfect books, since I can read and reread them with so much pleasure.
But in imagining the perfect book I am looking to be surprised (and of course a comfort book can have no more surprises). I pick up so many new books filled with anticipation of it being full of new things, new characters and new ideas, sometimes that is fulfilled and usually it isn't (although books are way more likely to give surprises than TV, which in turn is way more likely to surprise and amaze than most movies...for some reason).
Jim Butcher has really been coming through, he has given me new books where I was shown things that were beyond my imagination. JK Rowlings was a little disappointing in her last book, which was anticipated with so much excitement. Right now amazon is shipping me a new book by Laurie R. King which really sounds like something special so I just can't wait to get my hands on it (we'll see if I will be thrilled and amazed, or vaguely disappointed). But that feeling of excitement is a big part of the perfect book for me.
Just as when I would sit down to a new episode of Buffy, almost too excited to sit still, wanting to know what would happen next.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-10 03:02 am (UTC)Also agree about the need for humor. I need to laugh. Books that don't make me laugh at least once, tend to feel a tad long and tough to get through. I need that break.
I think part of the problem the TV show "Hex" has - is it lacks a sense of humor. Buffy could take you to a very sad place, make you sob, then make you laugh the next. And tv shows and books require a bigger time comittment than most films - which just require an hour or two. You get to see all the sides of the characters in a tv show or novel - and if it is true to life at all - one of those sides must be laughter, I'd think.