Category: books

I read a lot, yet I still buy books faster than I read them. There always have been and always will be books in my life.

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye was not a book I enjoyed. In general, I don’t like spineless characters, and I don’t like unreliable narrators, and Holden Caufield is both!

If your idea of great fiction is a story that successfully produces a powerful emotional reaction, then okay, I agree that Salinger’s book is great. It made me feel absolutely awful. After reading it, I felt I needed to go look at pictures of kittens or something to wash it out of my head. Blech.

More details about the book with SPOILERS below.

Continue reading The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass

Writing the Breakout Novel is a book by an experienced agent about how to write fiction that is not just good but great.

Maass offers valuable advice on how a newbie can avoid amateur mistakes and how a published author stuck in a rut can get out of it.

Broad topics include: premise, stakes, setting, characters, plot, subplots, point of view, theme, and industry shop talk.

Do you want to be published? Drop what you’re doing and read this book. Do you want to start getting fat royalty checks again? Sit up and pay attention. Whatever situation you’re in, it’s time to seize the day. It’s time to break out.

If you’re interested in this book, I also highly recommend Save the Cat by Blake Snyder.

When and Why I Read Writing the Breakout Novel

Go big or go home!

I also read this book 26-Mar-14 to 28 Mar-14. Worth reading twice, or as many times as necessary.

Genre: non-fiction (writing)
Date started / date finished:  13-Mar-17 to 19-Mar-17
Length: 260 pages
ISBN: 9781582971827 (paperback)
Originally published in: 2001
Amazon link: Writing the Breakout Novel

The Weekend Novelist Rewrites the Novel by Robert J. Ray

I’d say The Weekend Novelist Rewrites the Novel is useful whether you’ve got a completed manuscript or not.

There are suggested methods for rewriting a whole manuscript by targeting certain parts of it on specific weekends, and suggested methods for writing vivid word pictures: use sensory descriptions, strong verbs, and concrete nouns—especially repeated objects that can become symbols.

But there are larger lessons, too.

The book talks about the primal conflicts that make stories compelling. Using examples from successful fiction and film, it explains story structure by breaking down subplots by character and showing how major scenes happen when secrets explode from the subplot and collide with the plot.

I still like Save the Cat better.

When and Why I Read The Weekend Novelist Rewrites the Novel

I read this before. I remember it had useful things to say about subplots.

Genre: non-fiction (writing)
Date started / date finished:  07-Mar-17 to 13-Mar-17
Length: 266 pages
ISBN: 9780823084432 (paperback)
Originally published in: 2007
Amazon link: The Weekend Novelist Rewrites the Novel

Saint Anything by Sarah Dessen

Phew. Okay. Saint Anything was way less heartwrenchingly dire than Dreamland!

I loved the ongoing debate about what the band should be called; reminds me of the Zits comic in which Jeremy’s mom offers the band some goat cheese pizza during practice, and “goat cheese pizza” thus becomes the name of the band.

I’m always impressed by Dessen’s fake world. At least some of the time she reuses the same town and high schools, which makes the places feel familiar and real even if they’re not. Her world also has its own shops, restaurants, brand names and pop stars. The culture her teen characters inhabit is specific and authentic without being real. It isn’t tied to a specific place and time.

I have noticed technology creep in over the years, though, which might give readers a way to place the setting in time. For example, the characters didn’t have smartphones in earlier books… but nobody had smartphones in 1996 when Dessen published That Summer! The characters; computers and phones aren’t an important part of the novels, but teens reading the earlier ones might scratch their heads wondering why tech isn’t as important in the characters’ lives as it is in their own.

When and Why I Read Saint Anything

I’ve read all Sarah Dessen’s books so far.

Genre: fiction (YA)
Date started / date finished:  04-Mar-17 to 06-Mar-17
Length: 417 pages
ISBN: 9780147516039 (paperback)
Originally published in: 2015
Amazon link: Saint Anything

Save the Cat by Blake Snyder

I love Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat.

I’ve been using Snyder’s fifteen-item beat sheet to analyze movies. The beat sheet has helped me remember movies after I’ve watched them, and has also helped me appreciate their twists and turns as they happen. Ultimately, I hope internalizing the beat sheet will help me as a writer.

A 2013 Slate article blamed Snyder for a slew of bad movies, claiming that ever since he published his ‘formula’, movie-makers have slavishly followed it, to the detriment of art. It’s hard to disagree, until you read the rebuttal, which is that bad movies exist because making good movies is hard. Okay, yeah, fair enough.

Storytelling is an old art, and stories already had a three-act structure back when Aristotle was around, because he wrote about it. Nobody blames Joseph Campbell, with his famous Jungian Hero with a Thousand Faces, for ruining storytelling by outlining the meta-myth from which all myths spring. No more should we blame Snyder for understanding how best to bend myths into movies.

I read the Campbell book in 2014; didn’t much care for it. I’ve considered reading Christopher Vogler’s book The Writer’s Journey, but I suspect it’s more on Campbell’s end of the spectrum than Synder’s. Somewhere sitting happily in the middle is Robert J. Bly’s book The Weekend Novelist Rewrites the Novel, which leverages many mythological archetypes and terms from Greek rhetoric but explains and exemplifies them usefully, often giving tips for writing novels lifted from—you guessed it—the discipline of screenwriting. I’m tempted to read something by Syd Field or Robert McKee, but then, at least at this point, I’m not actually interested in screenwriting per se.

Save the Cat isn’t all about the much-maligned beat sheet; if it were, the book would be called Blake Snyder’s Beat Sheet instead. What else is in the book?

  • how to write and test a good logline (one sentence movie concept)
  • Blake’s list of 10 unconventional movie “genres”
  • how to choose a hero
  • how to arrange your scenes on “the board” (use four rows; one row of about 10 scenes for Act I, two for Act II, one for Act III)
  • how to leverage a handful of quirkily named commonsense rules of screenplay writing (including Save the Cat)
  • how to troubleshoot a weak screenplay
  • what to do after you finish writing a screenplay
  • a glossary of terms (industry terms and Snyderisms)

Right, so, what does “Save the Cat” mean anyway? It just means that your protagonist should do or experience something very early on to win the audience’s support.

When and Why I Read Save the Cat

I have read this book before. It has been great at helping me think about plot. In fact, I have the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet on the wall by my computer. I read the book again to get a firmer grip on the details. There is so much more good advice than I remembered. How does it all fit in such a short book with so much whitespace? I don’t know how he did it.

Genre: non-fiction (movies, writing)
Date started / date finished:  26-Feb-17 to 04-March-17
Length: 195 pages
ISBN: 9781932907001 (paperback)
Originally published in: 2005
Amazon link: Save the Cat

Style by Joseph M. Williams

I never thought I would read the word “turgid” so many times in my entire life. Style: Toward Clarity and Grace repeats the word, of course, because it’s telling you how to avoid writing “turgid prose”.

There’s a lucid chapter on the subject of usage, which deftly cuts through all the normal chatter about what should be a rule and why or why not, but most of the book is not about controversial words and grammatical constructions. It’s about what makes a passage understandable, and it describes the process of transforming one that’s not into one that is. It’s describing the acquisition and communication of concepts and knowledge as much as anything. It’s almost a book of cognitive psychology. I have a lot of books on language and writing, but I don’t think I’ve ever read anything like this before.

Maybe that’s because it was originally a textbook. It feels a bit strange to watch someone poke sentences and move bits of them around on the page; the skills being described can only really be improved through use. This version of the book is informative, but perhaps not as effective as the versions that give the reader practice writing and revising.

More on what I liked about the book and when and why I read it below.

Continue reading Style by Joseph M. Williams

Everybody Writes by Ann Handley

Everybody Writes is a book that Derek Zoolander would recommend to “adults who can’t write good and want to do other stuff good too”. If you’re one of those, then, by all means, share and enjoy.

It’s not, or not entirely, Ann Handley’s fault that I found her book disappointing. For one thing, I had high expectations. I eliminated at least a dozen books on blogging from my Amazon cart before I decided to buy hers. For another thing, I was, simultaneously, reading a book on writing I much preferred, an erudite tome called Style by Joseph M. Williams. And anyway, I am probably not in the target audience. The subtitle of Part I, “How to Write Better and How to Hate Writing Less”, should have been an obvious red flag: I don’t hate writing.

The book has a lot of good reviews on Amazon, so some people seem to have found it useful, and even I got some use out of it—just not as much as I was hoping to.

More on what I disliked about the book as well as when and why I read it below.

Continue reading Everybody Writes by Ann Handley

Dangerous Liaisons by Choderlos de Laclos

Dangerous Liaisons is a deeply disturbing book.

I think what bothers me most is the fact that sincere expressions of supposedly private emotions are betrayed to third parties, i.e., that innocent people are being made fools of and don’t even know it. It is horrible to suspect that others are laughing at us; it is even more horrible to find out that we have indeed been laughed at, and that, further, we deserved it, if only because we were naive.

Do you think you can evade vicarious injury by identifying with the clever if cruel miscreants rather their victims? Then you will be pained when the novel fails to conclude as happily for them as they seem to assume it will. No one gets away unscathed!

The ambiguous stance of the book allows readers multiple interpretations. One lesson you could say the book teaches is never to give anyone the benefit of the doubt, though perhaps it’s simply saying that no matter how suspicious you try to be, your trust will always be misplaced. A more benign lesson would be that the ridiculous French loan-word ‘liaison’ has two i’s in it—if I never type the word again, it will be too soon.

Meanwhile, I offer you a presumably accidental pun on the word “affair” in the form of a questionably worded Quizno’s ad.

When and Why I Read Dangerous Liaisons

This work was chosen as the Hungry Hundred Book Club book for February 2017.

Genre: fiction (French literature)
Date started / date finished:  28-Jan-17 to 06-Feb-17
Length: 409 pages
ISBN: 9780140449570 (paperback)
Originally published in: 1782
Amazon link: Dangerous Liaisons

Ship or Sheep?

Earlier I wrote about the “his/he’s” distinction in Singapore, which corresponds to the “ship/sheep” distinction this pronunciation book refers to.

Apparently people have been struggling to differentiate these two words at least since the time of George Eliot. This is a passage from Middlemarch, published in 1872.

“I hate grammar. What’s the use of it?”
“To teach you to speak and write correctly, so that you can be understood,” said Mrs. Garth, with severe precision.
“Should you like to speak as old Job does?”
“Yes,” said Ben, stoutly; “it’s funnier. He says, ‘Yo goo’—that’s just as good as ‘You go.'”
“But he says, ‘A ship’s in the garden,’ instead of ‘a sheep,'” said Letty, with an air of superiority. “You might think he meant a ship off the sea.”

Here’s a more modern take: a pun that requires the conflation of “Griddy” (the name of an F&B outlet at Our Tampines Hub) and “greedy”:

Middlemarch by George Eliot

When I read Middlemarch in 2015, I was surprised when the focus shifted away from the character I thought was the protagonist. In fact, the book has an ensemble cast whose stories are woven together by a variety of relationships all contained within the same geographical area, the town of Middlemarch. Hence the title.

One of the Hungry Hundred Book Club members said the book was about “knowing the other”, though obviously not in the science-fiction sense of knowing aliens from other planets. I very much agree. The plot relies on characters who make assumptions and project their own worldviews on others unknowingly, then find, having hurt others or themselves, that they were mistaken.

The characters are not to be blamed for not understanding each other perfectly to begin with (such problems are perennial human ones), but we can certainly judge them for the actions they take and the attitudes they adopt when they realize they are wrong.

My evaluations of some of the characters below as well as information on when and why I read the book.

Continue reading Middlemarch by George Eliot