Braddy Reads Sleeping Freshmen Never Lie

After reading a rather large stack of "real literature," I felt it was time to kick back and read some lighter stuff before diving back in. I found a couple of books based on friends' suggestions and powered through them. Sometimes it's nice to be able to get through a book in a single week... or even less (more on that later).

A friend recommended David Lubar's Sleeping Freshmen Never Lie after reading it through and noticing certain similarities between the main character and your humble blogger. I wondered if I should be offended. Then I started reading... and knew I should be.

I kid, I kid. I'll admit to being a bit uncomfortable with the comparison, but most of that has to do with my discomfort with teenagers (they scare the living $#@% out of me). And Sleeping Freshmen Never Lie has A LOT of teenagers in it.

The story's pretty predictable: Scott Hudson starts high school, dreads being unpopular, gets beat up and crushes on the unattainable girl, starts to make friends with people he feels he shouldn't be seen with, hates all his classes except one where he feels understood, etc. Even though I can't name a single other book that has a similar plot, I know I've read this type of story before... It's kind of forgettable.

Still, I'd say Sleeping Freshmen is well worth reading, despite the unimaginative plot. The central message - learning to respect yourself without regards for what others think of you - is pretty important for teenagers to hear, so I can give the author a bye on that. The real draw to the book, though, is Scott's personal writing.

Throughout the book, the author inserts several clips from Scott's notebook - letters he writes to his unborn brother, lists of survival tips for high schoolers, opinions and editorials... The jokes are often immature and unsophisticated, but that doesn't stop them from being genuinely funny.

One caveat, though - Scott discovers Tom Swifties in the first chapter or two, and he employs them throughout the book. I've read enough of Boys' Life magazine back when I was in Scouts to know that Tom Swifties just AREN'T funny. Bleagh.

I've been a little harder on the book than I meant to. Sleeping Freshmen Never Lie isn't going to win any awards, but it doesn't have to. The book is funny, full of likeable characters, and just original enough to make it worthwhile.

Braddy Reads... Like a Writer

Every now and again, I feel a tinge of guilt that I did NOT actually read all of the texts I was assigned to read back in college. I still wound up reading approximately 36 books a semester, though, so I don't usually feel all THAT guilty. Still, I like to go back sometimes and read some of the books I was assigned in school but never actually got around to.

I just finished Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer, which was an assigned text for one of the many, many creative writing courses I took. Prose's thesis is that a writer learns best how to write not through the workshop method so popular these days (and ironically the method that made up the very class wherein I received this book) but through methodical study of the writing styles of the masters of the past.

To get her point across, Prose includes vast excerpts from novels and short stories of the past 200 years, which she then meticulously breaks down to analyze why the writing is so good. She makes her point pretty well, but... well, she doesn't do much to prove her OWN writing talent. I'll just say it's gotta be nice to put a book out there that's only 50% what you wrote yourself.

I kid. Prose's writing is just fine. In fact, she concludes her analysis of some lengthy Chekhov passages with a passionate little appeal that may well become a mantra of sorts for me:

Come back! I've made a mistake. Forget observation, consciousness, clear-sightedness. Forget about life. Read Chekhov, read the stories straight through. Admit that you understand nothing of life, nothing of what you see. Then go out and look at the world.

Still, Prose's purpose in writing her book is to... convince people to go and read OTHER books. And... well, she was successful. I've compiled a list of books Prose recommends EVERYONE read that I'll personally be hunting down to read for myself - and hopefully fill in some gaps in that English major education of mine.

Here's the short list (in no real order):

• Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
• Philip Roth, American Pastoral
• Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
• Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
• Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: Selected Stories
• Paula Fox, Desperate Characters
• Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
• Richard Price, Freedomland
• Stuart Dybek, I Sailed with Magellan
• Heinrich von Kleist, The Marquise of O-
• Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (shut up)
• George Eliot, Middlemarch
• Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education
• Henry Green, Doting and Loving
• Scott Spencer, A Ship Made of Paper
• Joy Williams, Escapes
• Harold Brodkey, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode
• Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis and Other Stories
• Anton Chekhov, Tales of Anton Chekhov
• Ivan Turgenev, First Love
• Samuel Beckett, The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989
• Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo

And, yes, that's actually the SHORT list.

Now I guess it's on to the next book - cuz this list might take a while.

The Lists: Top 5 Books

In writing about Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, I realized that I've read some of the best books I've ever read just in this past year. Just for kicks, I thought I'd write up a quick list of my favorite books - books that I haven't just enjoyed reading, but that have inspired me to try something a little different with my own writing. This is by no means a definitive list - things'll likely shuffle around quite a bit, even in the next year.

So, in no particular order, here are Braddy's Favorite Books (for Right Now):

FAVORITE NOVELS:

1. Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev
2. Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
3. Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
4. Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
5. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

There's value even in the snootiest of literature.

FAVORITE POETRY COLLECTIONS:

1. Billy Collins, The Trouble with Poetry
2. Louise Glück, The Wild Iris
3. William Stafford, Even in Quiet Places
4. E.E. Cummings, E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems, 1904-1962
5. Langston Hughes, Selected Poems of Langston Hughes

Just because poetry's obsolete, that doesn't make it not awesome.

FAVORITE YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE:

1. Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak
2. Walter Dean Myers, Monster
3. Nancy Farmer, The House of the Scorpion
4. Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street
5. Ray Bradbury, Farenheit 451

Twenty-seven counts as young adult, right?

FAVORITE CHILDREN'S LITERATURE:

1. Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
2. Jerry Spinelli, Maniac Magee
3. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
4. Neil Gaiman, Coraline
5. Sharon Creech, Love That Dog

How do I distinguish between children's lit and YA lit? Poorly.

FAVORITE GRAPHIC NOVELS:

1. David Mazzucchelli, Asterios Polyp
2. Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor's Tale
3. Grant Morrison, Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on a Serious Earth
4. Jonathan Hickman, The Nightly News
5. Stan Sakai, Usagi Yojimbo v. 22: Tomoe's Story

Every list is better if Batman is on it at least once.

MISCELLANEOUS FAVORITES:

1. Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon (memoir)
2. Keith Johnstone, Impro for Storytellers (textbook)
3. Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (play)
4. Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia (nonfiction)
5. Shaun Tan, Tales from Outer Suburbia (picture book)

Some things can't be defined. For everything else, there's MasterCard.

Braddy Reads The Sun Also Rises

I was a total HACK of an English major. I spent three years in advanced English classes in high school, studied literature intensely all throughout college, and graduated college at 24. Yet I'd never read a single novel by Ernest Hemingway until now.

The Sun Also Rises now probably sits near the top of the "Best Books I've Ever Read" list (and it's been a fine year for those). Hemingway's terse, unadorned prose actually conveys more than enough information to get across, not just the plot, but the subtext as well. For something so seemingly simplistic, it's surprisingly elegant.

There isn't much going on in the plot. Jake Barnes is a journalist in Paris, and he is in love with Lady Brett Ashley. He was shot in the war. They go to Spain and watch the bull fights, and they all get very drunk. The end. However, Hemingway crafted a group of characters that feel more grounded in reality than just about any I've read elsewhere (the fact that they may be based on actual colleagues of his certainly helps). As a result, their problems feel more severe than melodramatic crises of other novels.

Hemingway's style of writing is sometimes referred to as the Iceberg Theory, wherein most of the substance of what he writes is not readily apparent, or "under the surface." With that in mind, reading the novel becomes something of a psychological study. All that drinking certainly becomes more worrisome...

Hemingway's writing style probably isn't for everyone, but I found it nearly revelatory. The Sun Also Rises is about the perfect novel for me: quick to read, engaging, and stylistically unique. Once I finished it, I wanted to start reading more Hemingway right away - and that's a pretty big compliment.

Braddy Reads A Tale of Two Cities

After reading A Christmas Carol, I became convinced that Charles Dickens was one of the greatest writers in the English language... and after branching out a bit and reading A Tale of Two Cities, I'm still pretty sure of it.

I just wish Dickens weren't so long-winded all the time.

It took me a while to get into A Tale of Two Cities, mostly because, from my point of view, it took a long time to get to the point where the plot elements introduced actually started to MATTER. That said, Dickens creates some fantastic characters (I was especially fond of the banker, Mr. Lorry), and his prose, as always, was a delight to read. I fell in love with a particular passage describing the employees of a cerain London bank:

Cramped in all kinds of dim cupboards and hutches at Tellson's, the oldest of men carried on the business gravely. When they took a young man into Tellson's London house, they hid him somewhere till he was old. They kept him in a dark place, like a cheese, until he had the full Tellson flavour and blue-mould upon
him.

It's a completely insignificant passage, yet it's so unique and so vividly descriptive that I actually re-read it a couple of times.

Also, I started craving cheese.

Of course, Dickens's engaging prose sometimes gets the best of him, and he often pulls the brake on the prose so he can editorialize for a bit (for crying out loud, he names one of the vengeful leaders of the French Revolution "Vengeance"). There were times when I wanted to grab Mr. Dickens by his froofy scarf, shake him violently, and yell, "TOO SUBTLE!"

I doubt he'd appreciate the irony.

Getting to the end of the book proved to be a chore - I knew where the plot was going and how everything would be wrapped up 100 pages before the end, so I felt little motivation to finish. Still, I haven't been turned off to Dickens, and I'll probably pick up another of his books soon.

Braddy Reads Mister B. Gone

Ever since I started exploring the world of horror movies, I've been curious to take a stab at horror fiction. So I picked up this little book by horror legend Clive Barker. Mister B. Gone tells the story of a demon who has been trapped within the pages of a book.

And that book... IS THE ONE YOU'RE HOLDING RIGHT NOW!

Actually, that's the entire reason I picked this particular book up. I love the idea of fiction having an impact on the "material" world, so to have a book consciously out to do you harm... That's a conceit I can get behind.

Sadly, the story itself is pretty lacking. We read the life of a demon from the Ninth Circle named Jakabok Botch or "Mister B," a nickname that comes literally out of nowhere and leads to one of the most forehead-slappingest title inserts I've ever read ("Mister B, be gone!"). For most of the book, Mister B is a pathetic, spineless coward, who goes to great lengths to describe just how wretched and disgusting he is.

On occasion, the demon breaks away from the narrative to play "mind games" with the reader - claiming he can read your innermost desires, commenting on the sweatiness of your palms, etc. Truthfully, these were the parts of the book I found most effective. I don't know that I ever felt anything close to fear from reading the book, but Clive Barker pulls some pretty skillful moves writing AS a demonic book. More than once I caught myself smirking and thought, "Wow, that was clever."

Again, though, the actual NARRATIVE is weak. Mister B isn't a character to fear or even pity. He's just disgusting. The few attempts that are actually made to turn Mister B the sniveller into an intimidating figure are so ridiculously over the top that I can't tell whether I'm supposed to laugh or dry-heave.

For example, there's a scene where Mister B is driven away from a local village after he has terrorized them for months. The villagers found his location because Mister B had gathered up a bunch of DEAD BABIES so he could BATHE IN BABY BLOOD. Apparently, there was a hole in the bag he used, so he LITERALLY LEFT A TRAIL OF DEAD BABIES that led right to him.

Actually, the fact that I find that funny may be a little scary in and of itself. Still, I didn't read Mister B. Gone to experience the fridge horror from unintentional comedy.

Sorry, Mr. Barker. I just didn't like your book.

Braddy's Library: A Statistical Breakdown

From humble beginnings...

TOTAL BOOKS IN LIBRARY: 353

FICTION: 77
NONFICTION: 35
PERFORMANCE: 32
COMICS: 134
POETRY: 55
RELIGIOUS: 20

TOTAL BOOKS BOUGHT FOR SCHOOLING: 71
*Number of those read completely: 41

CURRENTLY READING: 5

FICTION STATS

Young Adult Fiction: 21
Hardcover: 12
Short Story Collections: 8
Books Purchased at "Buy 2, Get 1 Free" Sales at Barnes and Noble: 9
Books I Totally Plan on Reading Someday: 7
Books I Bought to Say, "Yeah, I'm a Guy, and I Have Memoirs of a Geisha. What of it?": 1

NONFICTION STATS

Reference: 10
Manuals on Writing Tutoring I Never Read: 9
*Ones I Plan to Read: 4
*Ones I'll Never Read but I Keep on My Shelf to Look Smarter: 5

PERFORMANCE STATS

Plays: 24
*Shakespeare: 16
*Plays I've Been In: 2
Songbooks: 8

COMICS STATS

DC: 38
Marvel: 24
Dark Horse: 42
Books with Batman in Them: 27
*Books with Batman Punching Vampires or Zombies: 2
Collections of Newspaper Comic Strips: 6 (7 if you count this)
Comics without Super Heroes: 45

POETRY STATS

Impulse Purchases: 28
Collections I've Read from Cover to Cover: 9
Book-Length Narrative Poems: 4
Books I Own because I'd Be a Hack Poet without SOMETHING by Dickinson or Eliot: 2

RELIGIOUS STATS

Books of Scripture: 3
Titles I Have Copies of in English and Czech: 2
LDS Institute of Religioun Manuals: 9
*Manuals from Classes I Never Took: 6
*Manuals from Classes about Getting Married that I'm Proud I Never Took: 1
Really Awesome Biblical Concordances: 1

TGI...M?

Monday nights are among my new favorite things... go figure.

Last night is what you might call "productive."

1 - I read the script for A Streetcar Named Desire. The whole thing.

(By the way, I saw A Streetcar Named Desire when I was in junior high. I must not have known much about... well, anything, because I had absolutely no recollection of all of the pedophilia, bigotry, and rape goin' on there. Good family read)

2 - Our ward did a "speed friending" activity last night. It's like "speed dating" but with half the level of commitment.

3 - In addition to everything else I've been reading, I've been trying to work my way through the complete Sherlock Holmes library. Got another two chapters read last night, as well.

And here's the big one:

4 - I pretty much finished two chapters in my novel. Now, I pulled a lot of material from my first draft, so it's not all 100% new material. But, that said, I wrote 536 new words (double my daily goal) and now have two full, complete chapters (I still have a couple of paragraphs to go in chapter 3, but I should be able to finish that tonight).

So, yeah... I'm awesome.

Things I'll Love Forever: A Christmas Carol

I can't think of a better way to kick off the holiday season proper.

I don't know if this makes me a literary snob or just a sentimental ol' fool, but A Christmas Carol is, without a doubt, one of my all-time favorite stories ever written in the history of ever. Enough hyperbole? THERE'S NEVER ENOUGH HYPERBOLE!!!

1 - I know we've all seen about a tetra-bajillion different film adaptations of this Christmas classic, but have you ever actually read the book? It's beautiful! I read the book for the first time in a British Literary History class back in college. I had to shut myself in my room to read it, because I couldn't help but repeat all the words to myself out loud. It's THAT GOOD. Dickens writes DELICIOUS words.

2 - You want proof that these words are tasty? Check out the audioplay performed completely by Patrick Stewart. He even makes little high-pitched voices for all the women and Tiny Tim. Good stuff.

3 - Now, you know those tetra-bajillion film adaptations I mentioned earlier? Yeah, THEY'RE ALL GOOD TOO!

(Okay, I haven't seen them ALL. I reserve the right to hate on the new Jim Carrey adaptation until I've seen it

You've been warned - don't mess up my Christmas spirit!

Personally, I love some of the cheesey musical adaptations, like Scrooge starring Albert Finney and, of course, A Muppet Christmas Carol (I just love me some Michael Caine).

4 - The message of A Christmas Carol speaks to the optimist in all of us (yes, I do have an optimist in here somewhere). The potential for good is in all men. Yes, it's true that people like Ebenezer Scrooge do a lot of harm to their fellow men, but with the right motivation (and perhaps a bit of divine intervention), that evil can be turned into something good.

5 - This one just now occurred to me:

A Christmas Carol may be the absolute best Christmas story this side of the Nativity. While the story itself focuses on the holiday, it's meaning transcends the usual month-long, holly-and-ivy banalities. Sure, there's some talk about Christmas being the season of giving or love or some @#$% like that, but the holiday for Dickens is more a celebration of the human spirit of kindness that should exist within our hearts ALL YEAR. For those who are mean and stingy (a phrase that should really only be used when speaking to a three-year-old), Christmas is a time of redemption, a chance for them to reflect on who they are and who they should be.

A Christmas Carol is a timeless holiday classic, well worthy of being loved forever. Which I do.

Starting Musicophilia

I like to think I'm smart. The trouble, though, is that I occasionally have to do something that I would consider smart in order to maintain the illusion. Since making intelligent decisions aren't really my thing (as evidenced by my choice in scholarly pursuits and the results of most haircuts), I usually just opt to read a book that makes me look smart.

So yesterday I started reading Oliver Sacks's Musicophilia, a book that analyzes the interaction between music and neuropsychology. So far the focus has been on abnormal reactions to music, but there was one peculiar story right at the beginning that caught my attention.

The very first story in the book involves a man who survived getting struck by lightning. He experienced marginal memory loss for a few weeks, but nothing major, and eventually fully recovered. However, after the lightning strike, this man noted an increased interest in music - to the point where he started teaching himself to play the piano and composing. Eventually, he performed his music in concert, where many in the audience expressed the wish that they could get struck by lightning, too.

Hmm, I wonder...

Braddy Reads The Screwtape Letters

C.S. Lewis's fabled Screwtape Letters have been on my list a long time, and now I get to talk about 'em.

For me, talking about The Screwtape Letters is problematic. See, I love a good story - a meaty narrative I can sink my teeth into. At the same time, I like to go through a LOT of stories in a short space of time - probably why I prefer comics and poetry to other forms of storytelling.

Of course The Screwtape Letters aren't ABOUT the story. Yes, there are a couple of different plot threads - there's Uncle Screwtape's agenda against his nephew Wormwood, Wormwood's attempted corruption of the unnamed young man, and the young man's courtship, war service, and eventual death...

...um, spoiler alert. I guess.

No, The Screwtape Letters are REALLY a sermon in disguise (we are talking about C.S. Lewis, after all). It takes a bit of decoding to get to the theological core of the message, since the letters are all written from "the wrong side" - of the Atlantic!

ZING!!!

Still, I read The Screwtape Letters and felt enlightened - and that's without taking the hours of meditation and introspection that material of this nature demands. I found myself rethinking the language I use, the company I keep, the very thoughts I occupy my idle time with.

So, yeah, reading this book caused me a lot of grief. But I suppose you can count that a success.

Braddy Reads Tuesdays With Morrie

Here’s a book that I heard about, but never really got the desire to read until recently: Tuesdays with Morrie. Apparently, the book’s a lot more famous than I thought – there’s a made-for-TV movie and stage adaptation, all based on what I found to be, essentially, a self-help book.

For those of you who may not have read it (or seen it, or had someone gush about it to you), Tuesdays with Morrie is the true story of Mitch Albom (also the book’s writer), a business-minded yuppie, who reconnects with Morris Schwartz, one of his old college professors, a few months before the latter dies from Lou Gehrig’s disease. Mitch visits Morrie weekly for several months, gleaning the last kernels of wisdom from his teacher as the disease slowly takes its toll. After Morrie dies from the illness (spoiler alert, or something), Mitch decides to take some of Morrie’s advice to heart and reconnects with an estranged sibling.

Now that I’ve written it, the plot synopsis seems pretty unnecessary. The real reason to read Tuesdays with Morrie is to hear Morrie’s advice – the things he considers most important now that he’s dying. Morrie’s philosophy is that, when one learns how to die, one learns how to live. Accept death with grace, and fear seems to slip away.

For me, the money quote that sums up the whole book comes when Morrie starts talking about people with materialistic aims – those always spending their time and money acquiring the newest, latest, and greatest things.

"These were people so hungry for love that they were accepting substitutes. They were embracing material things and expecting a sort of hug back… Money is not a substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness. I can tell you, as I’m sitting here dying, when you most need it, neither money nor power will give you the feeling you’re looking for, no matter how much of them you have. "

Morrie’s ultimate ambition is the “pursuit of tenderness,” or the human connection. That’s the one thing that makes life worth living, and people whose attitude prevents them from making that connection often still strive to FIND that connection, although likely in other places where they never can. Because money doesn’t hug.

Here’s a side note – my personal response to the book. Morrie comments on society looking upon “tenderness” and “emotional connection” as signs of weakness. At first, when I read that, I thought, “Yeah, that’s pretty weak.” Then, as I thought about it a bit more, I realized that I didn’t think of that trait as being WEAK, per se, but rather as FEMININE. Which probably makes me horribly sexist or something.

Anyway, I actually quite enjoyed this book. I found the plot to be overly sentimental… which is a horrible thing to say, especially since I’m talking about a real person’s reaction to an actual, historical death. Since I’ve never really gone through that experience myself, I didn’t have a lot to connect to there. Also, I probably just need a bit more time to grow up and connect to my icky, icky feelings.

All irreverence aside now, Tuesdays with Morrie may be one of those “life-altering” books which changes the way you think. I’ve already found myself thinking of ways I can be less materialistic and cultivate better relationships with other people. No matter how much the “plot” bores you, a book that can do that is always worth the read.

PS: I’m probably going to hell for this whole thing.

Braddy Cries a Single Tear for This Poor, Fallen World

Last summer I picked up a novel called The Thirteenth Tale. I'd had my eyes on this book for a long time - something about the cover design just caught my attention and wouldn't let it go.


When I finally read the book... well, it's a new favorite of mine. A reclusive book collector named Margaret is commissioned to write the biography of eccentric novelist Vida Winters. While composing the material she will turn into Vida's last book, Margaret stays at the mansion where Vida has gone into seclusion. Both Margaret and Vida lost a twin sister early in their lives, and each is haunted by their twin's absence as though by an actual ghost. The twins' presence can be felt all throughout the mansion and even follow Margaret when she travels into the English countryside to visit Vida's childhood home.

Between the giant, empty mansion and the omnipresent ghosts, the book feels a lot like Wuthering Heights.

And I mean that in a good way. Personally, I've always liked Wuthering Heights. It's not my favorite book, but it's a heck of a lot better than drivel like Jane Eyre, which every effin' high school kid is forced to read under threat of receiving a failing English grade. Some kids very wisely choose to fail anyway.

Anyway, though, Wuthering Heights is pretty good. And The Thirteenth Tale is exactly the kind of book to excite interest in a classic work of literature like Wuthering Heights. If only there was some way to reignite people’s interest in literature of this nature. If only SOMETHING could help young people see just how great a good book can...

Wait, what is this crap?! "Bella and Edward's Favorite Book"?!?!

No. No way. Shoot my effin' eyeballs out. This isn’t worth it.

A Little Twilight Hate for Your Weekend

To be clear: I've never read the books. I'm sure they're horrible. I persist in my belief that the books are royal garbage based solely on the opening to Twilight:

"My mother drove me to the airport with the windows rolled down. It was seventy-five degrees in Phoenix, the sky a perfect, cloudless blue. I was wearing my favorite shirt - sleeveless, white eyelet lace; I was wearing it as a farewell gesture. My carry-on item was a parka."

THIS is not good writing. As a matter of fact, this is certifiably BAD writing. The first paragraph of any book - especially the first part of a series that needs to grip its audience - should be COMPELLING. I, as a skeptical reader, need to know why I'm going to spend several hours reading THIS book instead of watching Arrested Development again.

What's compelling in this first paragraph? Four sentences, and not ONE of them indicating that our as-yet nameless protagonist is capable of doing a guldarned thing.

Where's the hook? Where's the carrot that's going to motivate me to continue to the second paragraph, or turn the page? Should I, as a reader, see in Stephanie Meyer's description of a cloudless sky an omen of danger? What's that on the horizon? A cloud? Merciful Hemingway, I hope it's not a Nimbus!

Or maybe it's our protagonist's outfit that's supposed to draw me in. Okay, really, the outfit's the only clue I've got to help figure out who the CRAP this speaker's supposed to be. "Sleeveless, white eyelet lace..." Probably a girl.

Although...


Of course, a good opening is going to raise questions. And Stephanie Meyer’s opening comes CLOSE. The girl's outfit is a farewell gesture - I guess that means SOMETHING. But that little bit of almost-engaging detail is immediately buried under a completely pointless observation about some froofy parka. Why do we care?

A good opening rases questions that will motivate us to read on, not frustrate us with a lack of detail. Some information WILL be withheld, but what we’re given will ground us at least a little bit in SOME kind of context. As a point of comparison, let me show you the opening lines to other books. GOOD books.

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” – Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

Already we see what’s coming – we’re going to read about an unhappy family, one that’s unique in its unhappiness. Already our brains are firing up, ready to take pleasure in the misfortune of others (as brains are generally prone to do).

“You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly – Tom's Aunt Polly, she is – and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.” – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

I don’t know about you, but this first paragraph really makes me LIKE our speaker. He’s definitely the tiniest bit illiterate, but there’s a bit of charm in his dialect. Okay, TECHNICALLY, he didn’t tell us his name, but the whole frickin’ book’s named after him, so I’m willing to let it slide (It’s Jim Crow, by the way).

See, Mr. Twain’s already given us a REAL reason to read on. If we’ve never read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, we’re liable to ask, “Who are Aunt Polly and Widow Douglas? What are these ‘stretchers’ Huck’s talking about? Why does this boy talk so funny?” And if we HAVE read Tom Sawyer, we’re likely thinking to ourselves, “Ah, boy! What’s that loveable rapscallion Huck going to do to tick off Aunt Polly and the Widow THIS time?”

Here’s a line from a Nobel Prize winner:

“For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.” – Disgrace, J. M. Coetzee

Bet you’re curious what comes next, aren’t you? Some of you are probably wondering who “he” is, but most people are curious about how he solved the “problem of sex.” The nonchalant treatment of a somewhat touchy subject GRIPS you, right from the start.

From there, of course, the book goes on to address rape (both statutory and the garden variety) and impotence. So, yeah, good Sunday afternoon reading. Right after church.

Now here’s a single opening sentence that successfully hooked readers for SEVEN lengthy books:

“Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.” – Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, J. K. Rowling

Rowling’s not really the best writer, but this opening sentence does a lot of things right: it vividly paints a portrait of the characters addressed with a minimal use of words. While the word “normal” doesn’t generally mean much, the author’s voice more than compensates with the use of the phrase “thank you very much.” We can easily imagine that these Dursley people say that type of thing regularly. They’re your normal Jones-keeper-uppers, perfectly content to keep the amount of “extraordinary” in their lives at a minimum.

So what have we learned? Good writers draw you in to their stories immediately with tasty little details, powerful characterizations, and maybe just a little shock. Bad writers write books that get turned into movies starring THIS guy:

who, ironically enough, actually looks more than a little like THIS guy:

Yeah, I WENT there.

What's Going On With Love Story?

Sorry, Miss Swift, but I think you got it wrong.

Okay, so “Love Story” is not exactly my “pick of the week.” That’s okay – we’ve obviously got different tastes in music. I’ll forgive you, even though my opinion is OBVIOUSLY so much superior in this regard. I’m referring, of course, to your blatant misuse/abuse of two classic pieces of English literature.

Yeah, Romeo and Juliet is THE classic love story, the one everyone turns to when they talk about the perfect couple. But, you see, the reason Romeo and Juliet is such a great story is BECAUSE they both die unhappy at the end. The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is what distinguishes a truly powerful piece of literature from sappy, highly marketable Disney fodder, which (no offense) is exactly what your song is. The song’s cheerful, peppy, and optimistic – everything Romeo and Juliet ISN’T. There are plenty of other love stories to draw from that don’t end quite so… gruesomely… for the romantic protagonists.

And another thing: what’s the deal with the scarlet letter? You know the line:

“‘Cause you were Romeo, I was a scarlet letter
And my daddy said stay away from Juliet.”

…

…

…

What?

No, seriously, I don’t get it. Have you ever READ The Scarlet Letter? Hawthorne’s protagonist, a woman named Hester Prynne, is ostracized by the Puritan society in which she lives for her sexual promiscuity. The village leaders force her to sew a big red “A” into her clothing to mark her as an outcast. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt here: you’re writing a song about a character who’s NOT you, and therefore this is not a confession of your teenage indiscretion.
But why include the scarlet letter, which is basically a big neon sign that says to the whole world, “Hey! I’m a hussy!”

Why do this? Why take elements from The Scarlet Letter and Romeo and Juliet – which have nothing in common, really, other than their classification as “Books No One Wants to Read in Twelfth Grade English and Yet are Found on Every Curriculum Reading List in the USA” – and include them in a tinny teeny-bopper pop song. It’s almost like you’re TRYING to sow the seeds of deep, sinister meaning into an otherwise inoffensive lyric… actually, I totally approve of that. Carry on.

That STILL doesn’t excuse “Teardrops on My Guitar,” though.

Books I've Read... In Case You Were Dying To Know

Here we go: another meme. Can't believe how far I've fallen that I'm actually doing this. According to the original post, the BBC claims that most people have only read about six of these books. I'm gonna go ahead and call foul on that. A lot of these books have two listings, and I don't know anyone that's read six of these. My bet is some bored teenager made this up to spam all his friends. Still, it looks like fun, so here we go.

So everything marked with an "X" is something I've read.
Everything with a "+" is something I read and "loved."

And, since I can't just follow the instructions, be on the lookout for some fun-filled commentary.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
- Never going to read it. Ever. Unless it's got zombies in it. Then I might.
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien / (That's a half-X, by the way)
- I've made it halfway through The Two Towers, then decided I was done.
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
- Don't remember much about it, other than it's miserable.
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X+
- Yes, I like Harry Potter. And I'm okay with that.
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X+
- A junior high favorite. Also, a pretty darn good story.
6 The Bible - X+
- Love the book of Psalms. Good poetry.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X+
- Not sure why I like this one. Torturous to read, but good.
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X- (And that's a half-+)
- I can't say for certain if I like the book, but I feel everyone should read it.
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy X
- See Jane Eyre.
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
- This one's on my list to read eventually.
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare /
- I've read some. Others I'll read... maybe... if I feel like it.
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X+
- Read it in third grade. Liked it then. Haven't read it since. But the dramatized radio play is a lot of fun.
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
- Also on my list.
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
- George Eliot's a girl, by the way.
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
- Wrote papers on it in college; never read it.
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky X+
- I liked it when I read it, but Russian translations are brutal. I'll never read it again, probably.
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X+
- Steinbeck's depressing, but I love him for it.
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X+
- I know it's probably creepy for a guy to love this book as much as I do, but I don't care.
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
- I started it, but I forgot how painful Russian translations are. Never finished it.
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
- I saw the OLD movies - the BBC ones they aired on PBS. Yeah, those were cool.
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lost World - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini X+
- Not sure I'd read this one again, either, but it was worth reading once.
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X+
- To this day, I'm not sure why I read this book. I think I was trying to appear sensitive to some girl.
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X+
- The Disney films leave out the part where Pooh and Rabbit kidnap Roo and try to blackmail Kanga into leaving the 100 Acre Woods.
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X+
- Orwell makes you think. This, by the way, is a good thing.
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
- Meh.
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
- I was in a musical version of it once. Man, that was a horrible play!
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
- On my list.
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
- List.
52 Dune - Frank Herbert X
- Loved it in junior high. Tried to read it again a couple of years ago, and it bored me to tears. I hate crying, so I didn't finish it.
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
- What's with all the bloody Jane Austen books?!
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
- I read the first chapter.
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X?
- I honestly don't remember if I finished this one.
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
- Ew.
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
- The movie depressed me. Don't know why.
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
- Remember that list of mine? Yeah, this one's on there.
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
- No. Just... just no.
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker X+
- Read it in eighth grade. I keep telling myself I'll read it again. Then I keep buying more movies.
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
- This one's actually on my bookshelf, but I've never read it.
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
- On my list. I'll probably do some baking that day, too.
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X+
- The BEST book to read out loud.
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X+
- Dexter's Laboratory references Heart of Darkness. Seriously.
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X+
- Grown-ups take themselves too f****** seriously.
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams X
- And the cartoon's scary as sin!
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 The Witches - Roald Dahl X
- Big fan of this guy. Should read more of his stuff.
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
- Like this one, for example. And I like the Johnny Depp version. A LOT.
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo X
- The whole thing... all 1232 pages of it... NOT fun!

Fear and Loathing in SLC

Still bringing old blogs over from Facebook. Today's entry was originally posted on 10.30.08. Guess what it's about?

Halloween may very well ranks as one of my favorite holidays, although the peace, harmony, and wanton avarice of a modern Christmas do provide stiff competition. Halloween is one of the few great “unchained holidays” – it’s the perfect opportunity for seriously awesome parties. Go ahead, hand out with all your friends until the early hours of the morning! Eat candy until sugar crystals form along the walls of your arteries! If you’re a man, wear eyeliner and women’s pants! No one will think you’re gay!

(Seriously, my emo-rock star costume is probably my favorite costume ever, followed closely by my Euro-trash getup and the year I went as Stupendous Man from Calvin and Hobbes).

So in honor of Halloween, I’d like to compile a list of my top scary movies. Unfortunately, I don’t really watch any scary movies. Case in point: I threw a Halloween party my sophomore year in high school. We had a blast with tons of good food and costumes. We even went to a haunted house some other kids in my neighborhood had put together. It was, if I may borrow a colloquialism, off the hizzook.

(We interrupt this note to inform our concerned public that Stephen Bradford has just had his right to borrow colloquialisms eternally and irreversibly revoked).

The party ran into a bit of a snag when it came time to show the scary movie at the end of the night. I choose the movie closest to a true horror that I could think of: The Mummy. That’s right, our big Halloween scare was watching Brendan Frasier try to act while fighting off badly-rendered CGI mummies. The horror, the horror.

Actually, one of the girls at the party went home that night and had a nightmare about being chased through the halls of a pyramid by a giant mummy. So I guess the movie did have an appropriate scare factor. Plus, I was in her dream, too, apparently, and was the only one smart enough to bring a friggin’ shotgun to fight off the mummy. Any event which leads to me looking like a hero, even if it is only in a dream, must be categorically defined as “awesome.”

So, yeah, don’t know much about the horror movie genre. After The Mummy, the only other horror movies I’ve ever seen are Young Frankenstein (which doesn’t really count because it’s actually a parody of the whole horror genre) and The Sixth Sense (which only counts because it convinced M. Night Shyamalan that he should make MORE movies).

Okay, there’s one legitimately scary horror movie that I’ve seen, and even this one might be a bit of a stretch. It’s an old silent picture called Nosferatu, and it was the first cinematic interpretation of Brahm Stoker’s Dracula. The director’s take on the vampire is a bit different from the glittery, effeminate, love-monkeys that we’re used to seeing these days (shame on you, Stephanie Meyer). Whatever else goes on in that movie, the vampire is actually scary. Even though, by today’s standards, a lot of the acting, the special effects, and, of course, the screens of text that interrupt the action are outright laughable, everyone will gasp in surprise and shock when Count Orlock first appears with his pointed ears and rat-teeth. It’s a truly frightening moment, and Hollywood should really try to return to the rodent-vampire thing.

Speaking of Brahm Stoker, I COULD take this moment to go over the most frightening books I’ve ever read. I mean, I got my undergraduate degree in English, so I should know a lot about books, right? Sadly, that’s not the case. I read Dracula in eighth grade, and I don’t really remember it being all that scary. Other than that, I can think of exactly three horror writers, and I’ve never really read any of them extensively. First, there’s Stephen King – whose work, to be honest, I’ve never actually read, but if they read anything like the movies based off them, I think I’ll pass. I’ve seen people who are actually afraid of clowns watch the movie It and be cured.

The biggest name in horror fiction may very well be Edgar Allen Poe. And I may have to turn in my English major badge after this, but I have to say I really don’t like Poe at all. Too wordy. Nineteenth-century American literature generally doesn’t age very well. I did once have a lot of fun recording a radio play of “The Telltale Heart” way back when I was in fifth grade. My classmates and I recorded it in the back room of the library. We made the sound of the heart beating by jumping up and down on the ground as loudly as we could. The librarian got mad at us and almost kicked us out. That’s a scary story, right?

The last horror author I have any kind of familiarity with (and I’m pretty embarrassed to admit this) is a fellow by the name of H. P. Lovecraft. This is the man that invented the Chthulhu mythos, if you know what that is. If you don’t know what that is, you’ve probably been on a date in the last month. Chthulhu is some type of ancient, tentacled, alien-God-creature that is so horrifying to look at that anyone who sees him is instantly struck with madness. Lovecraft INVENTED the cliché of the monster that’s too horrible for words to describe. Anyone else see the problem in telling a story about “monsters too horrible for words to describe” in a novel? Lovecraft, unfortunately, didn’t.

So the only genre I really know anything about after eliminating books and movies would be video games. And here I can come up with some scary titles. Like, for example, Resident Evil 4 (this time, it’s not Resident Evil 3). The first quarter of the game has the player running around a dilapidated Spanish village, avoiding villagers who may or may not want to eat your brains/cut your face off with a chainsaw. My money’s on “may.” There’s nothing quite like standing alone in a quiet street, suddenly starting as a maniac with a bag over his head fires up a chainsaw behind you, then watching in horror as he literally mows you down even after you emptied an entire clip from your handgun into his chest. Hopefully, I’ll only ever see that in a video game and never have to live through it in real life again.

The problem with Resident Evil 4 is that, after that first quarter, there’s nothing really that scary again. Sure, you run around a hedge maze while evil, bloodthirsty dogs howl at the mist-veiled moon. But the instant the dogs appear and sprout tentacles, all the fear leaves my body to be replaced by the bitter cynicism rooted in my heart. I mean, seriously, what were the game developers thinking?

“So we’ve got these dogs that chase you through the hedge maze. How do we make them scarier?”

“I know! Let’s have them grow tentacles out their backs!”

“Tentacle-dogs, I love it. Now, we’ve got this maniacal little man-child with Napoleonic delusions of grandeur…”

“Ooh, ooh! He turns into a giant tentacle monster!”

“Oookay, more tentacles. And lastly, we’ve got this mysterious supporting character who wants to help but winds up dying tragically after the cult leader stabs him in the back with a knife…”

“Not a knife! A tentacle!”

“Sit down, Jenkins, or I’ll take away your juice box!”

Who decided that tentacles are scary? Oh, right. Lovecraft. That hack.

My most recent “scary game” acquisition is Fatal Frame 2 (this time, it’s not Fatal Frame 1). I haven’t played very far in it because, truth be told, the game scares the CRAP out of me. The premise is pretty ridiculous – ghosts are attacking you, and the only way you can defeat them is to take their picture. It’s like Ghostbusters on safari.

But, actually, the game is pretty scary. You play as a teenage Japanese girl, dragging your crippled sister around a deserted town. Why exactly you’re in the town, I don’t know. You probably took a wrong turn playing hopscotch. Anyway, there are ghosts, and corpses hanging from the rafters, and yadda yadda yadda, then, “Boo!” – some horrifying beastie jumps out of nowhere and screams at you, and you have exactly two seconds to take its picture before it vanishes again. Or kills you.

Now, I’m a perfectionist, so when I play this game, I have to try to get a picture of every ghost. A transcript of me playing this game would look something like this:

Japanese girl takes a picture of the mystic, ghostly altar. The picture develops, and then transforms into the picture of a bleeding, screaming man. Suddenly, a ghostly man appears.

GHOSTLY MAN: DON’T LOOK AT ME!!!

STEPHEN: Holy crap! [Stephen drops the controller and screams. The ghost disappears.] Dang, that was scary. [Pause]. Aw, crap, I forgot to get the ghost’s picture. Gotta reset.

Again, Japanese girl takes a picture of the mystic, ghostly altar. The picture develops, and then transforms into the picture of a bleeding, screaming man. Suddenly, a ghostly man appears.

GHOSTLY MAN: DON’T LOOK AT ME!!!

STEPHEN: Geez, it did it again! [Stephen drops the controller again]. I think I’m getting goosebumps. [Pause]. Crap!

So, yeah, scary stuff. But I get the feeling that I still don’t have many of you scared yet. Maybe I’m just the kind of guy that should stick to the “fun” aspects of Halloween and leave the fear to the professionals and Captain Howdy. Or maybe I just haven’t unleashed the one demon that truly terrifies me every time I see it, the one that, no matter what I do, I can only stare at in mute, speechless fear:

A pretty, intelligent woman with a kind heart and a strong, confidant personality.

Anyone else scared? Just me? Man, I suck at this game!