Cary Neeper's Blog: Reviewing World-changing Nonfiction - Posts Tagged "reading"

Quoting Bryant Meyers: "Every community needs a big story, a story that frames our lives and our understanding of the world. . . that gives answers to questions of meaning and provides moral direction and social purpose. We need to know who we are..., where we are..., what went wrong (making sense of the poverty, pain, and injustice we see), what we must do (what must change and how it can be changed), and what time it is (how our past, present, and future fit into this picture....Any vision of a better human future must have its roots in the story that makes sense of our lives.
--Bryant L. Myers, Walking with the Poor : Principles and Practices of Transformational Development (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1999), 20-21.
Read about it here.

Why do we write? Why do we read? Why have there been one million books published every year in the US alone? And countless blogs? Why are there so many more, now that self-publishing is so easy? I suspect it's because we all have a "big story." We want to share the "frame" that give us "understanding of the world." Perhaps our vision will provide nourishing roots for a "better human future."

As Bryant Myers suggests in the quote above, we need to know for following:
"Who we are?" I see my angst, my caring, my joy reflected in this blog's Hen House gang. I experience aging with my 13 year-old dogs. I want to reflect that awareness of things common to all life by creating alien characters in my fiction. They also share, in spite of differences so vast they are at first beyond awareness or comprehension.
"Where are we?" I thrill at the magnificence of the universe in new pictures from NASA and gorgeous photos of Earth on Pinterest. I want everyone to experience the awe I feel when hard evidence reveals the intricacies of how genes work, how cosmology and biophysics give birth to and sustain life and mind. I shiver at the knowledge of complex systems that describes everything connected in nonlinear ways, providing the possibility for amplification of our every effort (thus meaning?), along with the threat of unpredictability with those same efforts. This also invades my writing.
"What we must do." this is the hard part. We not only see different solutions, we see different problems, because all our experiences differ. Perhaps the best we can do is focus. "Write what you know," say some pundits. Perhaps we should write from or out of what we have experienced. We can try to provide a positive vision, a way out, a dream scenario that reassures and guides.
"What time it is." As we learn from the past, and look at what is happening now, can we paint in words a picture of the future grounded in realism, one that contributes to a "moral direction" and a nourishing "social purpose," a story that provides faith or hope in "questions of meaning" if not unquestioned "answers."Walking with the Poor: Principles and Practice of Transformational Development

I hesitate to review a prize-winning book, especially one well written and insightful. The introspection of the first person character carried me on, for I could identify with his youthful doubts and mediocrities. I could also identify with him as an older person looking back on a life well-lived but questionably significant. However, too much can begin to sound like whining.

My main criticism is that the story's suspense is built on failure to communicate--a device used way too often in soap operas. Too little motivation is given for both the actions taken and the dire consequences of reactions to those actions.

I kept reading. I love well-written English--but in the end, the book didn't tell me anything useful about human nature. It merely raised questions about the author's motivation. He seemed to be more interested in trying to shock the reader than carrying his exploration of human nature to a satisfying insight. What are we supposed to learn? That we are Not designed to carry on tragedies with resignation, at least with some understanding of fate or a touch of forgiveness? Is genius our undoing? Bitterness our destiny? Our mediocrity our salvation? Maybe that's it.

John Cleese So Anyway... by John Cleese, all of it, almost every word, New York, Random House, 2014.

I received John’s book (“John” because I feel I know him very well now) for my birthday last November, picked it up last April, and again in May or June (I forget). Then I read a few pages every night until now, when I couldn’t put it down.

The first time I picked it up (racked with guilt because I had delayed so long after receiving such a kind gift) I wondered why I was staying awake--reading all the details about Cleese’s classmates calling him “Chee-eese! etc.” Where was the humor I expected? Why did I care that his predicament was that he was a “very tall little boy.”

The next time I picked it up, I giggled a little and realized I had missed some wonderful dry humor the first time around. It was sometimes subtle, then not, then maybe I didn’t get it. In any case, I kept reading, every night, just a few pages, until I suddenly found myself learning about how comics (namely Cleese and his friends) go about writing humor.

I also learned about persistence and hard work--hours critiquing, rewriting, letting it settle into the pages, then rereading and re-writing, sometime resurrecting old themes or dumping scripts that didn’t work.

In the end of the book, including the index at page 391, after Cleese and cohorts celebrate the Python years, the author includes (for free, because my brother had already bought the book) some scripts (too few!) he found in someone’s dark closet somewhere. I laughed out loud. What wonderful silly fun! Most of their recorded shows had been lost, since the huge old tapes were reused in those days.

Near the end, while unable to put the book down, I ran into one serious comment that reflected a concern that has left me disturbed now for some years. Cleese noted that “...while attitude to swearing and vulgarity have shifted...another set of values seems to be threatening comedy...the life-denying force called political correctness...hijacked and taken ad absurdum...”
We need more comedy these days; it helps us stay real.

Now I know why I kept reading. It wasn’t just the interesting stories about his writing and comedy career, it was his charming take-it-or-leave-it-and squeeze-it-good-when-possible attitude toward life and the English language.