Reading for a Cause: Darfur

Natasha, at Maw Books is kicking off a month-long Reading & Blogging for Darfur campaign. For each book you read or video you view, she will donate 50 cents to an organization for aid in Darfur. If you review said book or video on your blog, she'll donate 50 cents more. But wait! There's a whole lot of other ways you can help too! See here for the details.

With lecture prep a priority, I don't know how much I can get done this month, but I'm going to head over to the library to see what they have. I've already read What Is the What (goodness, a YEAR ago!), but there's much more to be done.

I hope you'll consider doing this!

Wonderful Resource for Book Reviews

Natasha, at Maw Books, has compiled hundreds of online reviews at Book Bloggers' Book Reviews.
What a fantastic resource!!

I hope to have some in-progress thoughts/reviews posted soon regarding Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, and Borg/Crossan's The First Christmas (yes, I know we just passed Easter.)

In the meantime, I hope to upload some of my old reading reviews so they will all be consolidated here.

Memoir Fraud

I found this article to be very intriguing. John Dolan discusses fabricated memoirs and why people feel compelled to write them and read them. It is a fairly provocative and uncomfortable article in some of its points, and I do find him to be a bit sanctimonious in his condemnation of "middle-class " readers and people who watch TV for escapism.

It got me thinking, however, about the lines between truth and fiction, and how our categorization of literature into different genres has a lot of implications for "artistic license." There are plenty of works masquerading as fiction that are actually memoirs. Is claiming something to be fabricated when it is in fact true any better than falsifying a memoir? I'm not sure. It is a different kind of dishonesty--one that is probably less hurtful to the reader. Yes, I know that fiction will often draw upon the life experiences of the author, but when you can identify real-life people (who are still living) in a fictional work, I think that needs to be addressed. The disclaimer one finds in fiction, about any resemblance of the characters to real and living persons being coincidental, is there for a reason. It exists because too often the connections are not coincidental and are an opportunity for the author to air dirty laundry under the safety net of "fiction."

50BC08: #3 The Music of Chance (Auster)

50 BOOK CHALLENGE 2008 #3 TITLE: The Music of Chance AUTHOR: Paul Auster (Penguin, 1990, 217 pages) GENRE: Fiction Rating 3.5 out of 5 I appreciated what this novel was trying to do, but was bothered by my complete and utter lack of attachment to the characters. The premise (lives colliding by chance) is intriguing and the narrative is beautifully executed. What was missing for me was the answer to "why?." The main character seems to be a passive observer to his own life, with a few moments of real passion interspersed. Auster does have a gift for metaphor, using Pozzi and Nashe's wall as a symbol of perseverance and incarceration at the same time. There is a tenderness that while left largely unexplored, runs like a tiny stream throughout the story. It is this stream that saves the book. We learn how quickly solitude loses its freedom-like quality when faced with personal loss. (cross-posted)

Why Should We Read?

I just finished reading a most interesting article in the New Yorker. Caleb Crain's "Twilight of the Books" decries the decline in reading (supported by substantial data) and examines some of the differences between literate and illiterate learning. I recommend reading the entire article, but here are few excerpts upon which I'd like to comment.

In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There's no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument...Since there's no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to tell a story with values different from current ones, it is either forgotten or silently adjusted. As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past's inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth."

I can think of entire groups of people who are probably cursing Gutenberg. :-)

While I'm not ready to indict oral culture (and I think that "cliché" and "stereotype" take on slightly different meanings in an illiterate context, given that those terms are from the language of literacy), I do believe that a decline in reading is contributing much to the ignorance and apathy so prevalent in the world. Reading is force-fed in the schools, but often what is missing is the other component: writing. Writing forces critical thinking. Multiple choice options may test basic comprehension of facts, but they do not test the ability of the student to engage with the material in a critical way. The ball is red. The ball belongs to Sam. The child has learned two bits of data but has not been given any kind of encouragement to think creatively (one of the biggest benefits to be had in reading books!) If reading, from an early age, is merely the conveyance of information, where is the motivation to read? Why not watch television, which can also convey information? Television is entertaining, but the images come so quickly, there is little time to think beyond them (although some will analyze these images afterward). There is no "pause" button necessary in reading. And chapters are not determined by advertising money.

In citing data regarding the increased participation of readers in cultural activities and voting, Crain offers:

"Perhaps readers venture so readily outside because what they experience in solitude gives them confidence. Perhaps reading is a prototype of independence. No matter how much one worships an author, Proust wrote, "all he can do is give us desires." Reading somehow gives us the boldness to act on them. Such a habit might be quite dangerous for a democracy to lose."

Food for thought, yes?