It seems there are so many other things in which to put my attention now. When I was a kid there was a swing under the tree and lots of shade and all the books I could possibly collect before summer vacation, three vacuous months on the farm within walking distance of nothing but a store with a bologna blade for thick or thin cheese and processed meat sandwiches.

Reading Experience Digitally Interrupted

Once I got home from a visit to our unincorporated farm town’s shopping epicenter, and peeled the wax paper from the strange cheese a little more like cardboard than the creamy Velveeta I’d been introduced to as “cheese”. I now know it’s actually a chemical spread dyed to look like the real thing. That sense of being separated from the original source of a thing is how I feel about digital platforms for literature.

At first I was eager to adapt. I tried the first several years that books were accessible online to use a Kindle or one of the others that I don’t remember but it was a strain for my eyes to latch onto the shapes of the letters, the words, the sentences. the meaning would get stripped away by the glare before I got to the whole meaning, an entire idea, a paragraph.

Interpretation: Reading by Ear

So now I listen to audio books. It’s a totally different thing than actually reading because you are listening to the words through the voice of an interpreter of the meaning. a Good Reader can make a meandering book feel structured and meaningful. A Bad Reader can ruin classics with too much rapidity or a bad accent. Some try to act out the meaning that is obvious or worse the subtext and this is disastrous, a sure sign of a newbie. But I still try out many audio book renditions and mostly they are good or good enough. Here I will keep a running tab of my bought (audible) and check-out (library) audio book experiences.

This week’s fare:

The Guilty Pleasure Read

A cheesy thriller by David Baldacci who writes wonderful characters and laborious self-indulgent plots that I suffer because his books are populated by a main character that I want to take around with me. I want to drive around with Amos Decker this week and am about 3/4 through The Memory Man, the first in a series of four or so volumes.

Superbly Thought Out & Yet Still Funny Read

A superb thinker and tightly wound existentialist with a sexy sense of humor, Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination is also cued up on my library app. I’ve just started it five minutes ago so will have to add more to my experience of her work and come back to report on my experience. However, I will go ahead and report that the first five minutes of Wave are promising, eliciting a smirky laugh from me already. Plus it is she who has inspired this post and my ambitious intention to keep a running tab of my literary, high and low brow reading taste already evident, on this post.

-a.h.

P.S. – the photo comes from ducking into a London gallery on a cold, rainy day and finding myself inside a cozy W. G. Sebald exhibit. An excerpt of his oeuvre, perhaps it was Rings of Saturn, was piped into those headphones I’m wearing via an evocative reader’s voice in a plush, velvet curtained forest green corner of the hushed, nearly empty art space.

Update, the next day:

Since I experience the other side of reading as a writer I want to know what Baldacci and Ursula Le Guin thought about their work. The former is easy. I virtually attended his Masterclass while I was working on my second book. I listened to his talks and Neil Gaiman’s lessons which is how I remembered Le Guin’s very famous essays and luckily found both writers’ work on my library app.

(I’m amazed how many people never use the library’s extensive selection of audio books. All you need to do is get an account from them and then download their free apps. I do this before going to my paid source, Audible.)

David Baldacci is extremely muscular in his description of his writing trajectory but never perfunctory, he’s genuinely enamored with the relationship he has to the writing process. Starting out from the perspective of his little nook tucked away after a long day as a lawyer he passionately pecked out several midnight hours worth of content before completely his first few books according to his interviews on Masterclass. He comes across as a man who has fit his Southern childhood nicely into his career as a prodigious writer. He seems to have a deep respect for his writers and even more respect for the potential that others have to do what he’s doing. Baldacci expresses clarity about writing as a calling that not all are going to fit into. He explains that it is a demanding profession and that like the background that he hails from, a writing career is work, often grueling work for which his childhood poverty amply prepared him. He also professes to love every minute of it and he seems to be telling the truth as I listen to the audio product, The Memory Man. It isn’t what I would call fine literature. He isn’t known for being an artist per se. At least not in the way my creative writing undergrad degree peripherally purports to have prepared me.

Brain Food: Art and Entertainment

However, Le Guin, someone that I would call an artist and whose work fits into an ever loosening critical theory/literature framework, is more challenging intellectually of course. And, I don’t know about you, but, even though it might be unpopular among some of my peers to admit, sometimes my primitive brain just want to be led down the story pathway. The amygdala craves our primordial roots.

Planted in the soils of our brain’s architecture are the caves and savannas our ancestors inhabited hundreds, thousands, even millions of years ago depending on your archeological affinities. Le Guin was a world maker who extended the fantastical imaginings of the consumer of her work. In so doing she set up a platform from which my current read, The Wave of the Mind is a meta piece of nonfiction that proscribes the writer’s affinity for existential movement between creator and pen or keyboard. Since reading itself became a ritual of divination for me long ago, books literally would fall off the vast book shelves of places like Barnes and Noble (Nashville) or City Lights (San Francisco) or Malaprop’s (Asheville), or Bodhi Tree (West Los Angeles) back in the heyday of book stores, I count the entry of Wave as a signal from the ethos of writers, somewhere beyond this universe, maybe alongside Le Guin’s, Earthsea. The bleeps of sound arrived the morning I was struggling most with the book I’m working on, ready to close up the google doc the unwieldy manuscript is stored on, willing, almost, to move onto some other project waiting to be courted by the creative gaze.

Sticking with the process after I listened to Le Guin espouse the phenomenological encounter with the entity of words themselves, I take a deep breath and exhale with relief and release of old patterns. Instead of leaving my love for stringing letters and words to the extra-sensorial corporeality that ideas first present, the ugly rudiments of my creative impetus, guts poured onto a page take on the look of a roughly filled in canvas, the type I used to face in my loft every morning after taking my son to school and returning after a Pacific Coast hike to the aloneness of painting.

Ephemeral Underpinings of Readership

Commitment is an awkward word in my vocabulary when it falls outside the few essential people and activities that my nervous system can adhere to. Once I do stop on something, an idea, an experience, I am like the sea squirt, attached for the long haul without much cerebral musing to follow. I have never married in the physical realm, not person of this 3D world or project of the 4th. It has taken a half a century to weigh me down enough with the gift of the Crone. She appeared in a journey I had in my mid-twenties and seemed so old and now that I am closer, closing in on her corporeal reality, I sit closer to her place on what I can make out now is an old oak stump. She’s riveted to the wood with its cycles of years circling her skirts. I am much stiller now and she entertains my questions for longer increments of non-time. We occupy non-space so it is fitting that she does not speak with her mouth.

Now, though after living decades each year scooting me up closer to her big ladle and pot where she brews up something I can neither smell nor have I been invited to taste. Perhaps someday she will gesture with that big wooden spoon and offer me a sip of the steaming contents. For now I feel her in my solar plexus beating out a refrain that is painful, acidic with its stripped down bare bones. I can read the pain and it is what Le Guin hears, too. It is the old woman’s knowledge of language’s origins, the sounds that cannot be heard with the human ear.

That is the power of “reading” Wave with the aid of audio. I am standing at the edges of a crowd in the coffee shop at the bottom of a large mountain range and amidst the murmurs and occasional dog yaps the words are making it through to the ancestral regions of my brain, nibbles offer encouragement offered by one so practiced in the field I want to lay down in after I finish trampling the flowers its offering with my clunky fumbling fingers on my keyboard.

It’s 10:00am and I’ve been siting here since the early crew of baristas unlocked the doors of the cafe and allowed me to enter early. They are used to me showing up here. Thee mountain view is spectacular after a long day of working at my laptop, the tips of the terrain stung orange, umber, and deep purple with a smog filtered lens that only La La Land rush hour traffic can provide. After the sun has taken succor from the Pacific and cast off its tentacles above the haze to the dimming sky do I feel the impetus to pack up and leave. Usually I’ve had several large jasmine dragons by the end of a work day.

Today I have been here almost five hours and I’m just getting started. Nowhere to go anyway; the rain is coming down harder and harder and since I shucked my Mexico Museum water activated jungle design umbrella into a dumpster once it was bent beyond use by the chilly winds of the Andes and the annual blasts of the desert Santa Ana’s I am bound by these walls. Five hours ago I was the only customer and now every spare spot on the upholstery surrounding my favorite corner and the uncomfortable molded chairs is filled with variously sized and gendered derrieres.

Regardless of where you sit (pun intended) on the bench of artistic purity, even after giving this topic lots of thought I still feel unsettled. My reading efforts began when Fun with Dick and Jane was a primer for first graders way before the R rated movie with a similar title. See Jane. See Dick. See Jane run from Dick. I almost forgot about Spot the seminal dog for people of the sixties public educational system.

Spot and Dick and Jane lived within the odiferous pages of my elementary education. In the first grade Mrs. Moore, the blue eyed goddess at the helm of my introduction to academia as kindergarten did not exist in our one stop light town until my youngest brother was shuffled off to day care so my mother could proliferate as a journalist on the local newspaper while I edited the middle school newspaper where she attended as a high schooler.

Renovated and cleared of all upper-classmen’s salaciousness I had to use my oddly adult imagination to create an advice column for the young lovers in my peer group encountering sexual consternations not quite as developed as the predecessors of the old building left littering and alliterated on the secret corners of the ancient bathrooms and behind library books where I doubled as a student librarian.

the Time Bound elements of narrative: Audio vs. text

10:43 AM. The weather app on my phone says that it will stop raining in 15 minutes or so. I hope that is accurate. I am in need of a walk and several gulps of the spring water stationed in the seat of my Mustang. What is the opposite of a rain dance?

Last night I left the cafe and plugged into The Memory Man’s last third. I’m somewhere around chapter 54 or so and I’m starting to get annoyed by what genre and the adherence to it does to the natural flow of a story. I get the sense that the beautifully crafted character of Amos, the main protagonist would flow so much stronger if given his natural inclinations instead of the periodic insertions of the author’s prodigious abilities as thriller genre maestro. Indeed the peripheral protagonists might organically feed on the crop of material Amos himself with his limitless abilities as a crime solving savant. Instead the other characters surround him with platitudes and the awful dictate of the genre to clarify for a dumbed down audience the intricacies of the plot.

What I would say to Mr. Baldacci is this; your audience most likely gets your story on the first go round. You’ve done a great job of crafting a coherent, easy to follow narrative that I enjoy until you regurgitate it through a clumsy paragraph of exposition in the form of unnatural dialogue. Surely the FBI agent in particular has developed crime solving chops that make extemporization (I may have made that word up; I’m sure you’ve noticed I do that) of the murderer’s actions on a second go round unnecessary even to a juvenile readership.

Perhaps the repetition of facts reads differently than it hits the ear through the audio version. I trained as an actor and worked on other people’s projects for a decade. I made my living delivering exposition and it sucked. It’s possible I developed a professional aversion to it. If so, my apologies sir. I do remember when my eyesight was 20/20 and I read the pages of a book with the speed of insatiable hunger. Reading a thriller was like running a marathon back before audio books prevailed in my experience of literature. I remember reading John Grisham’s The Firm over one snowy evening and night not stopping except to run a hot bath where I continued my read over a table of steam while my toddle slept mercifully through the night, a rare thing for him, in the next room.

However, I take issue on this public forum because like Plant, Page, and Jones, ditched Led Zeppelin after Bonzo’s untimely exit, “baby, baby, baby, I’m gonna leave you” way before “summer comes a-rollin’.” I confess I am struggling to continue listening to the story so I wanted to let you know why I may stop a third of the way through your journey, Amos. I don’t want to leave you. You’re magnetic in your wounded, uber detective way and your trajectory from indigent to apartment dweller is truly effective social justice material, but gosh, please ask your maker to give the people around you in your story world more credit. Would you agree it might challenge you and allow you to stretch your cerebral potential thus truly coming across on the page (or audio track) as more of a savant and less as a gentle, deft survivor of unspeakable violence while being pandered to by supposed seasoned professionals and mindbendingly brilliant criminal minds.

Timing is Historic

It is now 11:00 AM. The rain stops like clockwork right on the hour the meteorologists predict. I like knowing when the clouds will finally empty or pass us by; it’s a utilitarian life hack. Like I said, I have been sitting here a long time. My cold brew is more than half gone but still cold. That’s the blessing of foregoing hot drinks. My new discover that the chemical makeup of coffee is much different when it has bypassed high heat has changed my way of participating in cafe life. the inclusion of coffee to my diet is akin to adopting cigarette smoking in Berlin. to this day the cafes are filled to the brim with smoke, at least where the writers and thinkers tend to cluster.

“I don’t write a book so that it will be the final word; I write a book so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me.”

– Michel Foucault

Writing mysteries or thrillers seems to be all about structure and timing, too. Like all books though, some stories gel into an emancipated reality and some stall along the way even when under the helm of highly skilled and successful writers. While learning to write, one could be a student of its mysteries forever says Foucault, it’s important to take the entire spectrum of writing into consideration if for nothing else than the fact that, like personal experience, mistakes are far more lucrative as future success builders than actual and always subjective successful endeavors.

As a genre thrillers seem the most like life to me now but as a young woman romances were more germane to life. Having just completed North Woods, 2023, Daniel Mason which manages to read like a thriller but is so deftly crafted as to appear innocuous on the shelf. It is anything but. I won’t go into detail. It’s a book you need to read, though, if for nothing else than to compare it to other less successful stories that keep you salivating for more.

The Spoils of Marketing Literature

One suggestion, a personal preference. I didn’t so much as google this book because I didn’t want to be predisposed to its tone or theme. while I was looking up the author’s name to make it more specific for this post I saw a parade of google hits from the New York Times to NPR for the Pulitzer Prize nominated writer’s current offering. So, if you don’t care about being freshly encountering the material go ahead, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

For instance, one header in the search lists what is a very applicable adjective for the story. But I have to tell you, not having had that description polluting my own experience of the narrative made the author’s talents incredibly more effective. You will have all the time in the world, supposedly, I guess it could be a death bed read, good one if that’s how it turns out, how gruesome of me, I know, to do an extensive search and harvest of all things North Woods post read. I’m going to listen to the NPR review now that I know it’s there and I already have had my own experience of Mason’s story.

There is one thing I will say that might be a good pointer toward the moon while clearly not being the moon; Mason’s book might be on my book shelf next to Richard Powers’, Pulitzer Prize winning, The Overstory. Enough said.