At the turn of last year, I made a resolution to read a book a month and write about each one. So, as the year winds down, I wanted to take some time and review my progress. While I did read twelve books over the year, I did not manage to complete the latter half, though that was not for want of trying. I struggled to write notes that I considered coherent enough to stand alone. But, looking back, I have collected some haphazard thoughts that I wanted to gather and put in one place, as a way of wrapping the year up.
I always want to embed something of me into my writing (perhaps the same urge that causes online recipes to be prepended with paragraphs of description of trips to Thailand). Yet, many forces in my life have conditioned me to be cautious about how much I share about my life with the world. I’m not sure how the balance I strike between the two affects the final product. For instance, I wrote the following about Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck after I read it around July.
I’m wasn’t sure how to interpret it when a cute girl recommended The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck to me. My suspicious that it was not auspicious was all the more confirmed when I later asked her out and got swiftly rejected. It stung even more when I had trouble moving on, confirming that I had been unable to follow the advice in the book.
I like this teaser quite a bit. It is my level of self deprecating, a bit witty, and succinct. Unfortunately, it does not lead naturally into anything substantial.The following comes from another draft which discusses my thoughts the use and power of profanity in language as it relates to The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck as well as in comedy.
A cute girl recommended The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck to me. I wondered if it wasn’t too on the nose to recommend a self help book but I decided to read it anyway, partly because she was cute, partly because of its striking title. Vulgarity magnetizes attention. Like muffler-less Harleys, profanity knows no subtlety. So in the business of writing, where individual words are chosen for their nuance, the use of vulgarity deserves due scrutiny for its boisterous presence.
Profanity is honesty. The use of profanity in Manson’s writing emphasizes his book’s central message. There is a certain level of self regulation that most of us do. The same self regulation that prevents me from eating a family sized bag of potato chips also prevents me from swearing around young children. Well, at least most of the time. So swearing comes off as honest because it is an explicit rejection of that self regulation - which is the whole gist of the book. We care too much about things that do not and should not restrict our lives. If we do not care about certain things, we can live fuller lives. Swearing is a method of conveying that through example.
The calculated use of swearing in writing reminds me of a discussion that a revered group of comedians had on Talking Funny (HBO 2011). In it, they discuss their approach towards swearing in comedy. They talk about the notion of “cheap” laughs. Louis CK talks about claims such as “If you use ‘fuck’, you are getting an easy laugh.” Louis dismisses the notion out of hand saying, “let’s go see you get a laugh with ‘fuck’.” While their conversation delves deeper into the particular intricacies of what makes each comedian proud of a joke, the idea that Louis enunciates is clear to me. “Fuck” does no new work. Yet Louis often adds profanity into his stand up. Consider the following joke from his show Chewed Up (2008).
“Parents live for the tiny vacations from the kids, the little tiny, when you, when you, when you put your kids in the car and you close their door and that little walk around to your own door. It’s like a Carnival cruise. It’s just the greatest. Moans. And you just stand at your door and you are like, oh fuck, that was bad. That was bad. Oh shit, what did I say, that was bad.”
When the audience laughs in response to this joke, they aren’t laughing in time with the vulgarity at the end. They laugh out of sync with the vulgarity. There is a core joke that is doing the legwork there. In fact, you could completely rewrite the joke with the same core concept. Here is Jerry Seinfield’s retelling of that joke,
“So I go on vacation with my kids and I pack up the car and the kids and I’m clicking in the carseats and I put the wife in and I get everything set and it is so much work to get a family in a car. I close the door for my wife on the passenger’s side. I walk around to the driver’s side. That’s my vacation.”
It is a completely clean rewriting of Louis’s joke. As Ricky Gervais says of the difference,
“[Jerry] made it like a joke. [Louis’s] is like his life’s falling apart.”
I think part of what makes Louis’s act a funny and accurate representation of a parents struggling to keep it together is the profanity. The joke would not change if you removed the profanity, but it would become a more restrained delivery, which is at odds with the effect that Louis is attempting to achieve.
Thomas: Not sure how I want to conclude the rest or grander takeaways. Perhaps end with
I think that I was more receptive of the message that The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck was preaching. It definitely helped that Manson comes off as a down to earth, honest fellow trying, like the rest of us, to make his way through life. It is completely plausible to me that how he writes is exactly how he thinks. Or I could have liked the book more because a fucking cute girl said she liked it.
At the time of writing this second draft, my YouTube recommendations were all stand up comedy bits. I really, really like jokes and just loved the sort of discussion that Talking Funny put on display. People voicing honest opinions in a casual, entertaining fashion makes me happy and I wanted to bring that part of my life into expression. I was happy with the way that I tied the beginning and ending together. I feel like this note had legs though perhaps its content was a bit limited. I think the core theme here, how words convey intent, or honesty in this case, is a fruitful place of discussion. It is most applicable to writing that attempts to persuade, but also to comedy, non fiction, and even fiction-dialogue can make characters seem more or less trustworthy, depending on the author’s desire.
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck was not the only self help book I read this year. A coworker of mine mentioned Bill Gates Sr.’s memoir Showing Up for Life so I picked it up and read it. I also picked up Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art because I have been feeling in a procrastination and motivation slump and I saw it mentioned in a comment on Hacker News. For all three self help books, I had few meaningful comments-which I guess is expected of the genre. For Showing Up for Life, the best I could muster was the following comment to my coworker.
Gates is reveling in his life and his loved ones. The book reads like someone fondly recalling their favorite moments and recounting them around a dinner table. I kind of want to be famous so that I can do the same - just regale a huge audience with tales of my extraordinary friends. I’d tell stories about my debate partner who went on to become a Rhodes Scholar and (hopefully) the most influential public figure in the world. And I would tell stories about my friend, the bombastic hacker who feels like he jumped off the 4chan message boards with a finely tuned moral compass.
If it isn’t clear, I adore my friends and the people around me. I can often come off as a misanthrope-a problem I’d like to resolve-but I do deeply internalize the people around me. The actions of people around me have an outsized impact on my life-a trait that I acknowledge. My high school salutatorian speech centered entirely around that theme. I physically recoil when when I hear myself and the speech is not as good as I remember in my head, but I’ve included it here anyway.
Besides the self help books, Patrick Rothfuss’s The Slow Regard of Silent Things was another book for which I could not form substantive thoughts. Looking back at the notes I wrote for it in June, I find that I wrote some of the following fragments: “voyeuristic instincts”, “pandas don’t know how to have sex”, “asian american admissions”. I have the vague notion that these notes all made sense together at one point.
I did have a second draft, but it was the fusing of two minds and two separate drafts.
There is a clip of Ira Glass talking about art where he says, “For the first couple years you make stuff, and it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit.”
I don’t claim to have particularly good taste. But I do have enough self doubt to split between the both of us. And every so often, I go back and read something that I’ve written. Not even my creative works, but essays and arguments. The drafts and half expressed thoughts. Often I’ll out think myself out of something I’m doing. Those thoughts of, “it is pointless”, “no one would want to read it”, etc. So it was shocking to discover that Patrick Rothfuss, author of the award winning Kingkiller Chronicles, expresses similar sentiments. For him, perhaps there was no doubt about the quality of his writing, but instead the style of story. He was under the impression that The Slow Regard of Silent Things didn’t quite meet expectation.
In the afterword, Rothfuss tells a story where he voices his concerns to Vi Hart. Quotes Rothfuss is not wrong, The Slow Regard is not a normal story by any stretch of the imagination. It pleases me that this afterword that Rothfuss writes completes and crystallizes The Slow Regard. After all, the story itself expresses itself as a story about a girl who doesn’t quite fit into society whose primary drive is helping others find the places they fit in. It is deeply satisfying that the Rothfuss worries that a portrait about a girl who doesn’t fit in who helps others that don’t fit in won’t fit in. Sometimes, when I write down my thoughts, there is a worry that what I write is obvious. It is demoralizing writing obvious truths. And one may think that it is obvious that The Slow Regard is saying something about feeling out of place or being alienated.
I left off with this part unfinished. Often times, I’ll get a train of thought that doesn’t quite know where it wants to go. They aren’t fully fledged ideas. The are more like little quips that I try to spin into something larger. One book that I loved was Reading Like a Writer I started writing based on the one thought that “Francise Prose wrote a passionate love letter to literature disguised as a guide.”
A dear friend gifted me Reading Like a Writer. Displayed prominently on its cover, “New York Times Bestseller”, the “A Notable Book of the Year” stamp, “A love letter to the pleasures of reading. -USA Today”, the subtitle “A guide for people who love books and for those who want to write them”, and the author’s propitious name in the largest letters, Francine Prose. Reading Like a Writer is partly all of these things. At times it masquerades as a lesson in reading. Other times, Prose offers writing suggestions. Occasionally, she lapses into neither. But consistent through and through is passion.
It was not clear to me until chapter 4 it was passion that motivates Reading Like a Writer. The book begins structured as follows. Chapter 1 is an overview of close reading, the entire subject of the book. It’s the art of extracting as much as possible from every significant word in the book. And Prose follows up that chapter with a chapter on Words. Then sentences. And then chapter 4 is about paragraphs.
The practical advice Prose gives tends to be more guiding principles. For writers, it feels like the following, Write a lot. Have a lot to write about and express that in as few words as possible. Observe the world. And finally, there are no hard or fast rules when it comes to writing. For readers, it is, read old books that have survived the test of time. Pay attention to every word, especially the odd words, the odd moments, the choices that writers make that makes that writer stand the test of time. And then dissect those choices. They were made intentionally.
Francine clearly loves reading and writing and talking about reading and writing. She’s the friend that just cannot stop talking about their favorite thing and showing you in fine detail the angles they think best exemplify their favorite thing. And suddenly, by the time that your friend has thoroughly explained the history of the decision that led to the event that gives you context on the main point, you have, regardless of whether you began with an interest in the history of the ladder, a vested opinion about midichlorians.
Rereading what I wrote those many months ago, I am once again reminded by how much I loved the passion that Prose put into her book. I try to be a passionate person and try to express that as much as possible because I am trying to emulate the people that I am drawn to. People like Prose.
And finally, in the list of books that sparked something to say, but nothing substantial enough to stand alone, is Norwegian Wood. The book reminded me so much of an offhand comment that someone made. I think I would have started a note something like this.
I took a class on Shakespeare my senior year of college. Though the class focused on the later plays, the tragedies and the romances, we only briefly touched on Hamlet and it wasn’t required reading. Apparently, this was for the better, for one day, when I was at office hours with my TF discussing my final paper thesis, she made an off-hand comment. “You shouldn’t read Hamlet.” Confused, I asked why. She said that she thought that Hamlet was too angsty and moody for young men. I laughed and she said that I seemed relatively put together and could probably handle it without getting too many wrong ideas about life. Of all the things that I could have remembered from that class-the nuance and power of the language in King Lear or the broader takeaways from The Winter’s Tale (which I would go on to see at The Globe in London), those comments are the most vividly embedded in my mind. From the moment she said it, I was certain that she was mistaken. After reading Norwegian Wood, I am more certain than ever that she was wrong. I most certainly could not handle Hamlet.
The protagonist of Norwegian Wood is a bystander watching life pass by. Toru is apathetic, unambitious, and dismal. Introverted, with few friends, he is driven by his sex drive and boredom. In short, he is who I feel I am on bad days. The difference between Toru and I is that Toru can be excused for his behavior. It is hard, however, to remember this when I am empathizing with him. Instead, Toru comes off as a potential role model. He seems relatively content with his life, though a bit lonely. I have slowly come to understand his level headed, mollified writing as a product of his coping. He manages to make extraordinary friends, experience a sweeping breadth of life, and do it all without seeking life out himself. The way Toru describes it all, it is easy to forget the suffering that hides beneath the writing.
It was hard for me to step back from the story and recognize how deeply I was being drawn into Toru’s mindset. It is alluring to think the way that Toru thinks. The more level headed friend in the book club that formed around this novel had it right when he expressed his hatred of Toru.
Norwegian Wood reminds me of the bildungsroman books I read growing up. In particular, the one I thought the most about was What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1991). I don’t really remember the style of language that was used. I do remember that my best friend in high school, who I lent the book, commented to me that she really hated the use of Becky’s character. My friend expressed a sentiment like, “She is like an angel, swooping in to save the main character.” That stuck. Angels are a work of fiction. Life is everything else.
In fact, the multitude of similarities between Norwegian Wood and other American literature that I’ve read was surprising. The influence of American literature and music is obvious.
I would want to talk about the huge American and European influence that exerts itself over Murakami’s story but I cannot remember anything from the novels that Murakami references by name.
Finally, I also read Sapiens by Harari. I would love to write about how thought provoking a book Sapiens is, but I cannot quite find the words to do the book justice. All I can manage are a series of scrapped introductions.
“If I was a superhuman, my superpower would be detachment.” Yuval Harari says in an interview with the New York Times. That article convinced me to pick up his celebrated book, Sapiens, and after reading through it, I immediately thought of that quote. Truly, the main draw of the book is the detached perspective that it offers. The book’s “crisply written” “vivid language” and “casual tone” helps draw you in and lead you to understand the world from this detached perspective.
But in addition to Harari’s valuable detached perspective and his expansive knowledge base, there are two additional facets of Harari’s writing that compelled me to engage more deeply with Harari’s writing that I’ve thought about before. The first is the casual tone which Harari addresses the audience. I find it unusual for a history (ostensibly) book to take such an opinionated perspective is present it nearly contemptuously.
I think that Sapiens deserves all of the praise that it has received and it was one of my favorites this year.
It is fitting to have ended the year with Sapiens. Every book that I have read this year, regardless of whether I liked them or enjoyed them, have imparted me with new perspective. It should be obvious to me that that’s one of the main points of art - writing or filmography or otherwise. But I think it is worth repeating because it has taken me a long time to find the words and truly understand what that means.
It is worth writing, I realize, for an audience of one. I should write because of the perspective that I can develop. If it isn’t obvious to me then I should write to make change my own perspective. All of these half baked notes and drafts are worth writing because they help guide my thinking - even if my thinking only arrives as a half baked idea because that is better than no perspective at all.
List of books read:
Unfinished:
Recommendations in bold