Christopher’s Comments (group member since Mar 05, 2009)

Christopher’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

Congrats, Ben! Outstanding news. Gives the rest of us little people hope. :)

Martyn wrote: "I actually do think the novels have been poorly edited in the English translations. The amount of time the characters drink coffee is absurd...they'd probably spend the entire novels on the toilet...."
My wife made the same point when she read it. It's a bit like cataloging every single time a character goes to the bathroom--maybe it's realistic, but it's not necessary.

Martyn, I read both and liked both. I agree with you on Lisbeth Salander--she's an odd, odd character. I can see what you're saying about the translation--not that I know Swedish at all, but there was a slight stiltedness to some of the sentences. However, it didn't really detract from the reading experience.

These aren't books with lots and lots of description--they are very focused on the characters and what they are thinking and feeling and how they interact. No long descriptions of setting. There's a journalistic, Hemingway-esque feel to the sentences that makes them rather easy to read--not like wading through Conrad or Melville (both of whom I like).

I'd encourage you to read the second book. Some of it is a bit over the top, I'll agree...although if I want pure realism, I'll just pay more attention at my day job.

Bonita wrote: "Happy Birthday, Swanny!"

Thanks, Bonita!

Count me in. You can call me Ishmael.

It's easy to make fun of Dan Brown. Heck, I've done it, right here AND back on the MySpace Fiction Files. He's fond of dialogue like this:

"You need to tell me and you need to tell me NOW!!"

Jack Bauer has nothing on some of Dan Brown's characters when they're stressed out.

But the guy can plot thrilling scenes. Not aesthetically beautiful ones, no, but his stories make me think of Robert Ludlum, if Ludlum had been interested in ancient, arcane info.

I'm usually not good at predicting stuff in books--I guess my willful suspension of disbelief mode is pretty strong. I predicted just about everything in this book. And I was still swept along in the chase. Now I have a hankering to go visit D.C. again.

Are the characters all that believable? No. Does Dan Brown sometimes write bad dialogue? Yes. Is the plot outlandish? Yes. Are the number of chapters in this book ridiculous? Yes. Will any of the scenes in this book stay in my head for a long time? Nope. Do I think I could write a better book? Honestly, yes. (And I'm trying.) But even when it was bad, it was entertaining. It's the literary equivalent of TV, like watching a "Law & Order: SVU" marathon (although Benson and Stabler are more realistic and I'm secretly in love with Mariska Hargitay).

All that said, I can't imagine reading this book out loud or listening to an audio tape of it. But the movie will come along sooner or later, I'm sure. (And "The Da Vinci Code" film with Tom Hanks was better than the book, I thought--although you can SEE how Brown is seeing his newest book as a movie.)

Choosing books for students is pretty interesting. A good teacher can make most any decent text relevant to highly-motivated students. My AP kids see the value in most everything we read, even if at first they're resistant to a particular book (like Grendel, for instance).

Your average high school student is another matter entirely. My 9th-grade girls' class (we have gender-based English classes in 9th grade) loved Speak, which made sense--female freshman narrator who gets drunk at a summer party and subsequently raped by an upperclassman. She calls the cops, who bust the party and thus ensure social pariah status for the narrator when high school starts. But the same students also read The Catcher in the Rye and had very different reactions. A third or so of the students really liked Holden and felt for him. But half of them wrote in an exam essay, given a hypothetical challenge from parents to ban the book from the curriculum, that the book should, in fact, be banned, because Holden could be a bad influence (bad choices and language) and that students couldn't relate to him today. I mean, some of them wrote, high school students don't go casually into nightclubs and order drinks. And would a 16-year-old just wander around ALONE in New York City? I don't think so. God bless them for their innocence. I actually thought about assigning them All About Lulu this spring, but I'm not sure they're ready for Will Miller.

I think giving students a list of books from which to choose is a good idea. It's creating that list that is tough.

And I'd argue against retiring The Great Gatsby. One way good literature gets perpetuated is that students are exposed to it. The trick is to be understanding with students about how a text may be difficult or hard to relate to, and so a good teacher's job is to find those connections. Teenagers can relate to fake (Daisy) or vicious (Tom) people, to the idea of constructing an identity (Gatsby), and to navigating complicated social situations (Nick). If you teach Gatsby in the context of American literature--the American dream and the reality of conspicuous consumption in the 1920s/1980s through early 2000s--students get the major themes of the book. It's like teaching Shakespeare--students immediately go "oh, this is too hard" and so the teacher's job is to demystify Shakespeare, give the students a better handle on the languages (lots of tricks available to do that) and the stage action, and then let them loose. But that's another thread...

1) What author do you own the most books by? It's a toss-up between Shakespeare and Stephen King, which may tell you a lot about my reading habits.

2) What book do you own the most copies of? Probably Hamlet.

3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions? To paraphrase Winston Churchill, "That is the sort of question up with which I shall not put."

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with? Bilbo Bag... I mean, Cassie Maddox from Tana French's Irish detective series.

5) Who is your favorite fictional character? Falstaff.

6) What book have you read the most times in your life? Hmm...probably The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, with Hamlet and Ice Station Zebra close behind.

7) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old? Ice Station Zebra by Alistair Maclean

8) What is the worst book you've read in the past year? The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown. (And it wasn't awful, just the worst book out of the ones I did manage to read.)

9) What is the best book you've read in the past year? Bleak House.

10) If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be? Moby Dick.

11) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for literature? Someone whose books I might actually read.

12) What book would you most like to see made into a movie? Not another Jane Austen book...they've been done to death. I'd like a really good Hound of the Baskervilles, or Ice Station Zebra if they kept the focus on the mysterious British narrator and not on the American nuclear sub captain.

13) What book would you least like to see made into a movie? Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

14) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character. When I was a kid, I was following my father through the airport. He was wearing a pork-pie hat and a trench coat and carrying a bag--he didn't see me. He went through security, and I called after him. He didn't hear me. I tried running through security, but the airport guard stopped me. I looked up and saw it was Morgan Freeman (who I only knew at that age from "Sesame Street" or maybe "Electric Company"). Then Morgan Freeman turned into Dracula--white shirt, black cloak, and all. I woke up the house screaming my head off.

15) What is the most lowbrow book you've read as an adult? The Last Girls by Lee Smith.

16) What is the most difficult book you've ever read? Moby Dick

17) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer? Shakespeare for language and characterization, Milton for sheer scope of vision, and Chaucer for pure narrative.

18) Austen or Eliot? Austen. Never finished an Eliot book.

19) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading? God, where do I start. Ulysses. David Copperfield. Lolita. Fitzgerald other than Gatsby. I used to be embarrassed that I hadn't finished an Ayn Rand book--now I'm rather proud of that fact.

20) What is your favorite novel? That's like asking me which of my sons is my favorite. Completely not fair. And it changes all the time. Donna Tartt's The Secret History was for a long time. Sacred Games is up there. And, of course, Moby Dick.

21) Play? Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (though I've never seen it performed live). Henry IV, Part One, too.

22) Short story? "Good for the Soul" by Tim Gautreaux is awesome. It's tied with Isak Dinesen's "The Sailor-Boy's Tale."

23) Work of non-fiction? Men at War edited by Ernest Hemingway. (Contains some fiction, but lots of non-fiction, too.)

24) Who is your favorite writer? If forced, I'll say Shakespeare.

Under the Dome by Stephen King

The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket - Edgar Allan Poe

What Dan said above about having his head up his keister...sorry I've missed all these birthdays of all these great people. Happy happy, ladies and gentlemen.

Maybe. But fifteen is still young. There's a whole lifetime between fifteen and eighteen. I always knew I wanted to be a writer (at least since eighth grade) and figured being an English teacher was a good way to pay the rent until I scored my first novel. Then a funny thing happened on the way to literary fame--I realized I loved teaching. I remember when I was in my mid-twenties being puzzled by friends who didn't know what they wanted to do. And I think I was the outlier on that one.

Being an English major is a romantic idea, even when you're serious about it. I mean, really, you spend your whole time surrounded by great prose and poetry. You get academic credentials for reading and talking intelligently about books. And when you realize writing papers about those books is much, much harder than you realized, when you pull off a good paper, it's like getting a paycheck in the mail.

Most teenagers I know--and they're a relatively sheltered bunch in my suburban private school--are a curious blend of jaded naivete. They know far more about the world than I did at their age--especially at 14 and 15--but they have no experience against which to judge the world, and so their views of the world are, necessarily, incomplete. Which is good, because they're only 14 or 15. The really bright kids--my AP students--are brilliant and love reading. I assigned Beowulf and Jane Eyre for summer reading and they ate them up, especially Bronte (though some of them loved Beowulf as well).

And that's the difference--the reading, the desire to spend time alone with a book.

Nadia said she wanted to major in English at college and someday hopes to be published. She does not see a problem with reading few books. “No one’s ever said you should read more books to get into college,” she said.

Maybe I'm just a literary snob, but...seriously? I mean, hey, I love the Internet--and this group wouldn't exist without it--and computers and technology, but there is nothing on the Net as good as a good book. Nothing. Except maybe digital versions of books.

I've read that education in the U.S. is the broadest and the shallowest in the world, at least among major industrialized nations. We teach a little about a whole lot of things but sacrifice depth in order to do it.

A couple of things. First, some classics, as difficult as they are, ought to be introduced to students who could handle them for the most part. I didn't like "Moby-Dick" when I was assigned to read it in high school, but I realized it was a strange, powerful book. Ten years later I picked it up again and re-read it, discovering that I loved it--but I wouldn't have done that, in all likelihood, if I hadn't read it before.

That said, I had an English teacher in ninth grade who allowed us to read anything we wanted as an outside book, once every few weeks, and report on it. He wasn't always thrilled with my choices--I was big into Alistair MacLean thrillers--but I liked being able to have some choice.

Now, as a high-school English teacher, I try to do that dance between "getting the kids involved" and "but they need the classics!" One thing we're doing this year with ninth graders is actually reading FEWER books because we're going to spend a lot of time working on writing. Also, the four ninth-grade English teachers couldn't all agree on a book to teach at the end of the year, so we're each going to choose one by Christmas, based on our students' strengths and interests.

I'd also add that some teachers, no matter how good they are, will never get all of their students interested in any one book. I'd be happy if my students read anything regularly, outside of assigned texts. I see that happening less and less.

Happy birthday, Ben, and Shel and Dan, too. "Bensheldan" is almost a name...maybe in a fantasy novel. Hmm...

In any event, have a great one!

I've never been in this house...and I've never read Gone with the Wind either...but I always thought this was kind of cool:

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Margaret Mitchell House

With Atlanta's modern skyscrapers and office buildings all around--that white marble mausoleum in the background is the new Federal Reserve Bank--this house just sticks out like a sore thumb. A nice visual reminder that, hey, writers and books are important.

And Lauren--don't know about the "hero" theme of Into Thin Air. We just wanted incoming freshmen to read something they might actually finish over the summer.

I got halfway through "Atlas Shrugged" and shrugged myself, then put the book down and never picked it back up. Liberating, actually. I read the first page of "The Fountainhead" where the architect, Howard Roark, is standing naked in a rainstorm, laughing, and I laughed myself and closed the book. Strike two for Ayn Rand.

I've said this before, but check out Tobias Wolff's Old School. Ayn Rand makes an appearance at an all-boys' prep school in New England circa 1960. It's priceless.