What's in a Name?

There’s really no denying that names have a lot of power. How many times have you picked up a book for no reason other than it had an interesting title? How many times has the name of a book actually impacted how you feel about the book as a whole? How many times has just hearing a powerful name inspired you?

Rather than discuss why this is, I’d actually rather just talk about a few of the best book titles out there, as well as what makes them so meaningful.

Tell me, friends: What are some of your favorite book titles? What makes them so interesting/powerful/meaningful to you?

So then, for a very short list of only a few of the best names I've encountered:

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor

This is absolutely the most amazing name ever conceivable for a book. (Okay, maybe that’s a bit hyperbolic, but still…) Really, though: this is the very very most amazingest book title I’ve ever come across. I read the book once some years back, and remember feeling that the book itself didn't quite live up to how wonderful the title is. That said, though, I'd like to give the book another shot in the near future and see if my feelings on it have changed.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safron Foer
Not only is this one of the greatest book titles I've seen, it's also one of the greatest books I've read. I read it too long ago to be able to write up a fair review for you now (unless I read it again, which is likely), but trust me when I tell you: the book is extremely great and incredibly beautiful.

Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
This is a great example of a book that I read largely because of the title. Sure, I'd already been a fan of C.S. Lewis before reading Faces. But reading the back cover, this book really didn't appeal to me that much - it truly was the title that sold me on it. What exactly the title means though - and where it appears in the text - makes it even more powerful. What a profound phrasing, which you'll only fully understand once you read the book. (And you definitely should read it.) (Oh, and though it's not a full review, you can read a couple of my thoughts on the book here, if you'd like.)

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
I haven't even read this book (yet). I just think it's a truly fantastic title, which is practically a story on its own. Really, the implications of this one phrase are mind-bending. (When we talk about love, we're not really talking about love? - cosmic.) In fact, I'm not the only one who's noticed how great of a title this is - it's been blatantly repurposed at least twice so far that I know of: once by Haruki Murakami for his book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, and then later by Rob Bell for his book What We Talk About When We Talk About God.

If You Feel Too Much by Jamie Tworkowski
First of all, if you're not familiar with the works of To Write Love On Her Arms, you should get familiar with them, because they're wonderful. Aside from this, If You Feel Too Much is a lovely name that perfectly addresses Tworkowski's audience and exemplifies the overall mood and heart of the book. I might even go so far as to say that, of all the books on this list, it's the most intimately connected to the content of the book itself - which is certainly to Tworkowski's credit.

(I see now that apparently I like book titles that start with "If..." I hadn't noticed before. Interesting...)


Now it's your turn!

REVIEW: Confessions - Kanae Minato

• Year first released:  2014
• ISBN of the edition I read:  0316200921
• Publisher of the edition I read:  Little, Brown and Company
• My rating (out of 5):  4

10 or 11 years ago, I read The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. It was a fantastic mystery (regarding a stolen gemstone) told from the perspectives of 11 different people involved in the affair. The first - and longest - part of the book sets up the entire scenario and introduces us to all the key characters. From there, we're given more and more details, ideas, and points of view from each of the other characters, until the final part, which ties everything together and brings us the ultimate solution.

Minato's much more recent Confessions has a similar setup:

Part 1 introduces us to the underlying crime (this time, the tragic, heartless murder of a 4-year-old girl) which propels the story as a whole. Each of the subsequent parts then show us a different character's perspective on the matter, before arriving at its downright chilling ending.

Unlike The Moonstone, though, the flow to Minato's story is constantly pulling us forward. We're actually presented most of the details - and even the culprit - by the end of Part 1 - the first 50 pages of the book. Then, rather than revisit the same depressing scene over and over again with each new character's perspective, we're shown the aftermath that each character faces in response to the initial murder.

It's a deliberate, clever approach that works on several levels. Once you realize that you already know the answer to the crime only a fifth of the way into the book, you will inevitably wonder, Where could the story go from here? Isn't it already finished? Indeed, it is not - not by a long shot.

The layers that each new character adds to the story unfold in a highly intricate fashion, leaving us to wonder what is really at the heart behind everything. The facts we thought we knew become distorted. We discover that the motives aren't what we had originally been told. And, importantly, we may not have seen the last of the crimes... [no spoilers, though]

We might say that Confessions is a mystery in reverse. Rather than the book merely being about trying to solve the murder at the beginning, we already know who the murderer is and how the deed was performed. What matters here is the spiral, the after effects, all of which eventually point to the book's highly effective, disturbing, shocking final page. (Pleasingly, the final twist of the book is on the very last page - you do yourself a disservice if you stop reading the book at any point before then.)

Full of deep characters, a plot that twists with almost every page, and an intriguing look at justice - what it really is and looks like, how it is achieved, who is responsible for enacting it, etc. - Confessions is one of the best mysteries I've come across. I'll definitely be diving into Minato's next book, Penance, in due time.

Point of View, pt. 2: the Narrator's Role

In the first part of this discussion on point of view, I said:

If Suzy is the main character - most of the scenes include/follow her, the narrator shares Suzy's thoughts with us, etc. - there's no very good reason to suddenly jump into Bob's head just to show us what Bob is thinking - especially when Suzy is standing in the room with Bob. Rather, a less lazy approach would be for the narrator to continue following only Suzy, and make Bob's thoughts or feelings evident by his words, his expressions, his actions, etc. - you know: "show instead of tell" and all that. 

When this happens, I wonder Who is the narrator, exactly? How does s/he know what all of these different people are thinking?

It's an interesting question, one which, frankly, not enough writers ask as they're crafting their books. Who is the narrator? 

Often, when a story is written from the third-person perspective, the narrator isn't meant to be a character from the book. (Of course the narrator is likely going to be a character for first-person stories, but we're not going to focus on that for now.) 

It's fine if the narrator isn't a character. Generally speaking, there's no reason the voice telling us the story has to be involved in the story.

Then again, we've all read plenty of books in which the narrator intrudes upon the story, responds to it, expresses their own emotions and subjectivity on the happenings. And when this happens, there's no way around it: we're reading the words of an individual personality. And an individual personality can't know what everyone in town is thinking.

These intrusions by the narrator can be small, subtle, overdrawn, exaggerated, or anything in between. Sometimes they can be as minute as a punctuation mark or as big as a monologue.

To give some examples of this, I'm going to pick on Jane Austen. Largely this is because she's already been solidified as a classic, so it's not as though I'm going to harm her reputation by saying anything bad about her. Also - let's call it what it is - she wasn't great about all of this POV business.

In the second chapter of Pride and Prejudice, we have this line: 

Mrs Bennet deigned not to make any reply...

So Mrs Bennet doesn't say anything. That's fine. But if we think about the word choice here, Austen actually took it just a step further: Mrs Bennet deigned. What this means is that Mrs Bennet felt it would be beneath her dignity to reply. 

In this case, the narrator doesn't just tell us that Mrs Bennet didn't speak - which could have been an easy, objective thing to say - the narrator goes a step further and tells us what was going on inside Mrs Bennet's head. It's a subtle difference which hinges on just one word, but it's important. 

On its own, this isn't a problem. On the very next page (at least, on the next page of the edition I read), though, we then have this line:

Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how. 

Once again, we have an example of the narrator knowing what is going on in a character's head - this time, Mary: Mary wished to do something, but didn't know how. 

In the space of two pages, we have the narrator knowing what's going on both in Mrs Bennet's head and in Mary's head.

Now then. On their own, there's nothing wrong with these two sentences. It seems this book merely has an Omniscient Third Person Narrator (that's your fancy English term for the day). And as long as the narrator doesn't have any sort of personality on her own, there's nothing inherently wrong with this.

Once the narrator intrudes and displays any sort of personality traits or opinions, though, suddenly we have a problem. Then we're not just dealing with narration; we're being exposed to another, unnamed character with her own distinct ideas. 

Let's look at a subtle example of this from the very next chapter of Pride and Prejudice:

What a contrast between him and his friend!

("Him" is Mr Bingley; "his friend" is Mr Darcy.)

As you'll know from reading the book, Bingley and Darcy have highly different personalities. This statement, then, can be seen as objective enough on its own. (There is a hint of the narrator's judgement in the sentence, but since the statement is so obviously clear to any reader - and to any other character in the book - I'll call it objective enough.)

What about that exclamation mark at the end, though?

The narrator didn't want to simply tell us that Bingley and Darcy are different. Rather, she pointed it out excitedly or emphatically. In other words, suddenly the narrator is bringing her own emotions into the mix. Not only are the two characters different - the narrator feels something about their difference.

And we can see this because of one punctuation mark.

Do you see the contradiction here?

It is okay for a narrator to know what multiple characters are thinking/wishing/feeling/etc. (The Omniscient Narrator.)

It is okay for a narrator to feel something about the events or characters of the story. (The Personal Narrator.)

It is NOT okay to have both of these - an omniscient narrator AND a personal one.

This simply doesn't work. If the narrator has a personality, then suddenly she has been characterized. And if she's characterized, then - even if she isn't named or directly addressed or anything else along these lines - she can't know what any of the other characters are thinking or feeling. She can only be inside her own head - not everyone else's. 

What do you think, though, friends? Have you noticed these sorts of things in your readings? What are some examples of books that have been handled particularly well - or particularly unwell - along these lines?

a Few Thoughts on Point of View, pt. 1

For some reason which I can only begin to guess at, an author's use of Point of View seems to be the thing I'm the pickiest about while reading a book. Of all stylistic elements an author might play with in their writing, their POV is the most noticeable - and, often, the most irksome - thing I come across.

I don't mind whether a book is written in first-, third-, or even second-person perspective - certainly all have their place; I've written in all of them plenty of times myself. How these perspectives are handled, though, can just about make or break a book.

I touched on this briefly in my review of Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War, where I said:

My personal preference is that a book - even one written from the third-person perspective, such as Chocolate - only follow the point of view of one character throughout the book's entirety. I say this, though, freely acknowledging how subjective it is. There's nothing, per se, inherently wrong with switching between characters. Many authors do it, and there's not necessarily any very concrete reason this should be disallowed.

(Before I continue, let me make one thing clear: There's a difference between a book switching POV between various characters, all of whom are partaking of the same story, and a book which alternates between two stories, each with different characters. Some examples of the first type - the type I'm focused on right now - would be The Chocolate War or One of Us Is Lying; an example of the second would be Good Morning, Midnight.)

There have been plenty of books I've liked well enough that have included multiple POV's. Just last week, I read and reviewed No Country for Old Men, which did precisely this (and you'll notice I didn't comment on it in my review). Almost every manga I've read switches POV constantly. Sci-fi and fantasy tend to do this with high frequency as well. (Just look at The Lord of the Rings, for a famous example.) You'll also notice that almost every movie ever does this. (Can you even think of an example of a movie which includes the main character in every single scene? - I can think of maybe two, if that.)

This isn't my preference, but it's passable. Sometimes - particularly when a story is spread geographically - there's not much of a way around this, at least not without stretching feasibility.

If the story all revolves around a cast of characters whom are closely connected and whom often occupy the same pages, though, shifting the POV can begin to feel rather lazy on the author's part.

If Suzy is the main character - most of the scenes include/follow her, the narrator shares Suzy's thoughts with us, etc. - there's no very good reason to suddenly jump into Bob's head just to show us what Bob is thinking - especially when Suzy is standing in the room with Bob. Rather, a less lazy approach would be for the narrator to continue following only Suzy, and make Bob's thoughts or feelings evident by his words, his expressions, his actions, etc. - you know: "show instead of tell" and all that.

When this happens, I wonder Who is the narrator, exactly? How does s/he know what all of these different people are thinking?

(Of course, the narrator of a story very often isn't meant to be a character in the book. This will be the focus of part 2, though, so I won't go into that thought for now...)

When it all comes down to it, if I can't think of a very concrete, specific reason for the narrator to jump inside a different character's head, it usually just feels like the author is taking the easy way out.

Again, I know this is at least partly subjective - so what do you think, friends? Is this something you notice in your readings? How do you feel about it?

REVIEW: The Chocolate War - Robert Cormier

• Year first released:  1974
• ISBN of the edition I read:  9780375829871
• Publisher of the edition I read:  Random House Children's Books
• My rating (out of 5):  4

In his introduction to The Chocolate War, Cormier explains that he was surprised when his agent called the book a "young adult" book. Apparently he hadn't meant for it to be a young adult book - just an "adult," general fiction book.

On the one hand, Chocolate falls pretty squarely into the label of young adult: the setting is a high school, all of the major characters are teenagers, etc. Their situations and struggles are reflective of - and highly realistically portray - high school life. Also, the actions and motivations of the characters are likely to be relatable and empathy-inducing for teenagers.

On the other hand, though I think I would have generally liked Chocolate if I had read it while in high school, I am certain I got much more out of it now, at age 32.

Chocolate has been labeled a "coming-of-age" story - a label that people are tempted to throw on pretty much any young adult novel that doesn't involve vampires or death matches - but this label is certainly false for Chocolate. It is not a book about growing up, finding your place in life outside of high-school for the first time, or anything of the sort. Yes, a couple of the characters experience growing pains once or twice, and the question of forging your own identity pops up here and there throughout (though mostly only for the main character, Jerry). However, to relegate Chocolate to this breed of story is to do it a disservice, and to miss the point of the novel.

Rather, Chocolate is a psychological game that resembles an intricate, dramatic thriller more than the writings of John Green or Rainbow Rowell. More than once, I've seen the book compared to S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders. Through a casual glance, I suppose I can see the connection. Having read both, though, Chocolate is a much more complex, psychological novel which avoids the brutish machismo of Outsiders in favor of a finely-crafted web of manipulation which grows to be downright Machiavellian.

The main antagonist of the book, Archie, goes far beyond a playground bully, landing himself squarely in the presence of Shakespeare's Iago (from Othello). Like Iago, Archie comes across as highly charismatic and honest (except to those who know his real motives). His charm allows him to weave himself into the lives and situations of nearly everyone around him, all of whom ultimately fall prey to his machinations. And, also like Iago is in Othello, Archie is undoubtedly the most fascinating character in Chocolate, and the gravity into which everything else in the story is drawn. He is a puppetmaster, pulling the strings of all the other characters.

Archie's strings are both what made me enjoy the book more than anything else, as well as what makes me think that I got more out of it now than I would have as a young adult. Though the story isn't hard to follow (I wouldn't call the plot simple, just well-explained), I think that it is easier to understand and admire the different situations and ideas now that I'm not so close to the world portrayed in the book. I imagine I would have thought the book was merely "cool" and "clever" at the time; now I am able to catch on to more of the psychological subtleties involved.

To put it more directly, without the charismatic, sinister, awe-inspiring genius of Archie, Chocolate would have been a completely different - and probably a completely worthless - book. I don't compare him to Iago hyperbolically.

Cormier certainly excelled at bringing his characters and their world to life in Chocolate. Each piece of this manipulative puzzle worked excellently. Nothing in the book left me confused, wondering why it happened or what the character's motivations were. This is all largely to Cormier's credit; most young adult authors seem incapable of weaving together such solidarity and meaning.

I have one complaint about the book, though, and it's too big to ignore.

Cormier's writing was mostly solid: his descriptions, characterizations, use of setting and metaphor and word choice were all highly effective. There is a consistent tone throughout Chocolate that most writers should be jealous of.

Cormier's use of point of view, though, could serve as an example for new writers of exactly what not to do in their own writings.

My personal preference is that a book - even one written from the third-person perspective, such as Chocolate - only follow the point of view of one character throughout the book's entirety. I say this, though, freely acknowledging how subjective it is. There's nothing, per se, inherently wrong with switching between characters. Many authors do it, and there's not necessarily any very concrete reason this should be disallowed.

Indeed, for the first 13 chapters of Chocolate (just under half the book), the POV changes at chapter breaks. The shift is always easy enough to follow. But then inexplicably, beginning with chapter 14, the POV begins switching much more erratically throughout, even multiple times mid-chapter. Though I still didn't have any trouble understanding where the story was or whose mind we were following, this constant shift was distracting and, I fear, a bit lazy on Cormier's part. Was there no other way to relate these occurrences through the eyes of the character whose mind we were following on the previous page? - I'm sure there was, if Cormier had thought through it a bit more. Granted, obviously these shifts were intentional - but intentional or not, they rubbed me the wrong way.

Worse, along these lines, there's also one - but thankfully only one - instance in which Cormier switches POV mid-paragraph for one little sentence. This, clearly, was not intentional, but rather a mistake on Cormier's part (which somehow also passed untouched through his editor's desk).

(I'm referring to a scene in the final quarter or so of the book. I no longer recall the page number, but it's in a dialogue between Jerry and one of his friends, The Goober. The scene follows Jerry's perspective, but then for one little, insignificant sentence, suddenly we're in The Goober's head, before immediately switching back to Jerry's in the very next sentence. Oops.)

As much as I enjoyed Chocolate - particularly the machinations of Archie, which were sheer, twisted delights - this large mishandling of point of view will keep me wary of reading Cormier's other books. No doubt someone who is less picky about this sort of thing won't be as bothered as I was, though. And, even still, it was worth trudging through the erratic POV for this fantastic story, in order to read what is, deservedly, a pillar of young adult fiction.

REVIEW: No Country for Old Men - Cormac McCarthy

• Year first released:  2005
• ISBN of the edition I read:  9780375706677
• Publisher of the edition I read:  Knopf Doubleday
• My rating (out of 5):  3.5

I don't often read multiple books in a row by the same author (unless they're a series, but even then, I usually take breaks in between entries). But, for some reason, after setting down Child of God, I just wasn't ready to step away from Cormac McCarthy yet.

I actually haven't gotten around to the 2007 movie No Country for Old Men yet. Now that I've read the book, I'm quite interested in seeing it, though. It's certainly a story which I'd love to see come to life. There's a raw realness to the entire ordeal that truly begs to be on display visually, not just on the page.

In fact, I have to admit that I am highly surprised by what I'm about to say, especially since this is Cormac McCarthy we're talking about here (and you know how much I enjoy McCarthy), but...I'm inclined to think No Country would actually be a better movie than it was a book.

...no, really: I can't believe I feel that way about a McCarthy book.

Though the writing in No Country is still head and shoulders above just about any other author writing today, I found it to be his weakest book stylistically. (In fact, though every other aspect of the book is better than All The Pretty Horses, I'd even say Horses was written better than No Country.)

More than once, I had a bit of trouble envisioning a scene, understanding the action, sometimes even figuring out who was speaking. (Admittedly, this last gripe is due in part to the fact that McCarthy doesn't use quotation marks for his dialogue, but it's never been as problematic for me before as it was this time around.) Several times I had to re-read small sections in order to get a better grasp on what was going on.

As well - and very importantly - McCarthy spent significantly less time/words describing the setting of No Country than any of his other books I've read. Gone are the simple, powerful sentence fragments and metaphors that give us the evocative, earthy connections to the worlds McCarthy creates in each of his novels. Though these sorts of images aren't, per se, necessary for a book to work, they've always been a particular highlight in McCarthy's writing - enough so that their absence was starkly noticed here.

There is much to praise in No Country as well, though, and I don't want to tip the scales too far in the wrong direction. The characters of No Country were all incredibly vivid and realistic. The main antagonist of the story, Chigurh, was especially powerful and intricate. Though I can't in good conscience root for him, all the same, I appreciated his ideals and his perspective at least as much as the main protagonist - likely more. A few times in the book we're treated to Chigurh's ideas about the situation - or even just about life generally - and these were, without a doubt, the most fascinating, haunting bits of the book.

Though the plot wasn't terribly complex, it was an appropriate fit for the mood, the time, the characters. If the story itself had gotten too much more entangled, it would have risked alienating the lifelike people who populate No Country. Better that McCarthy left the story simple to contrast with the complexity of the moods, persons, and ideals involved.

I suppose that, to be perfectly fair, No Country might deserve a 4 more than a 3.5. It's hard not to stack it up against other McCarthy books, though - in which case, I feel just barely disappointed enough to deduct half a point.* I'm still quite pleased to have read it, though, and much more interested in seeing the movie than I was before reading the book.




*For more of an explanation on this thought process, feel free to check out my post from a few months back Having High Expectations of Creators.

Enjoying the Classics, pt. 2

(Be sure to start with pt. 1 before treading into this post.)


...but, subjectivity aside, there must be a reason that classics are...well, "classic," right?

Sure, we all have different tastes. There are plenty of people who sincerely love the Beatles and 1984. Even above this, though, there must be something that qualifies a book (or a song, a movie, etc.) to be considered "classic."

To make it perhaps a bit overly simple, I suppose we can break it down in three ways, only the first of which I've discussed so far:

We can rate a book based on how much we enjoy it,
how well-crafted it is,
and how important it is.

No, I'm not enjoying 1984 so far. But is it well-written? Is it culturally significant?

The answer to these two questions are "yes" and "very much yes." And sometimes that's enough to rise a piece of art into the zone of "classic."

Not every book is merely meant to be enjoyed, is it? Some are written because the author has some sort of idea or message to impart, and believes that a novel is the best medium for conveying it. Perhaps the author wishes to explain, highlight, or even oppose some sort of zeitgeist in his/her world. There is no doubt that fiction has always been used as a means to this end - surely it always will be (barring some sort of Fahrenheit-451 scenario from happening, God forbid).

Of the three ways of judging a book, I put them in that order for a reason: specifically, I was thinking of them from most subjective to least subjective.

Whether or not a book is enjoyable is 100%, through and through a matter of opinion. What I enjoy might come off as downright garbage to you, and vice versa. After all, I can't stand the Beatles, and I'd bet you probably enjoy them. (Personally, I've never met anyone who doesn't like them; I suspect I may be the only one.)

Whether or not a book is well-crafted is still partly subjective, though I would argue there are at least a handful of measures we can discuss a bit more objectively. (Is the author's word choice appropriate for the subject matter, without being too limited or too wild? Is there variation in the sentence length and structure? Is the setting fully established? Are the characters internally consistent? etc.)

Whether or not a book is important is really not very debatable. This question is something that can be quantified with reasonable objectivity. How have people responded to it? What sort of impact has it had on the culture into which it was introduced? Does it have a timely message?

In fact, of each of these three judgments, we realize that whether or not a book is enjoyable is actually the least determinant factor regarding whether a book is considered a classic.

It's for the best this way. If classics were just based on what's popular and sells well - and on what people merely enjoy, regardless of literary merit or significance - then we run the risk of Fifty Shades of Grey being considered a classic in another 50 years. And that's just not a world any of us would want to live in.


What do you think of all of this, friends? Are there any classics which you don't enjoy, but which you appreciate for their value? Let's hear about them!