Movies for Readers: The BFG

First Edition of The BFG

This "Movie for Readers" will, I suspect, make a whole lot of money when it is released on July 1, 2016.  The BFG, as in "The Big Friendly Giant," is based on the popular 1982 children's book written by Roald Dahl and illustrated by Quentin Blake.  My own girls were just a little too old to enjoy the book as children, but now as teachers of young children, both of them are looking forward to the film.  Although an animated adaptation was shown on television in 1989, this is the first major film production of The BFG.





Movies for Readers No. 19

We've Already Gone This Far

Patrick Dacey’s We’ve Already Gone This Far is a collection of thirteen stories about the residents of the fictional little town of Wequaquet, Massachusetts.  Wequaquet is very much a working class town, and like their counterparts everywhere, its residents are trying to get by as best they can in a shaky economy.  They all grew up dreaming the American dream, but now there don’t seem to be enough jobs to go around.  Life, though, has to go on - and some things never change.  Dacey’s stories and his characters remind us that we are all in this thing called life together, and that we have more in common, than not.

These are stories about failed marriages, mothers with sons fighting wars on the other side of the world, old men desperate for friendship, men running as fast as they can just to get by, and others hoping to rekindle old relationships.  Admittedly, none of these people are particularly happy, but Dacey makes them seem so real that the reader is likely to recognize a part of himself in each of them.  In all most every instance, these people are not defined by their problems, but by their hopefulness that things will get better if they just keep plugging away. 

One of my favorites is “Friend of Mine,” the story of a retired high school football coach unfortunate enough to have two vengeful ex-students rent the house next door to his.  The young men are as unhappy with their lives as the old coach is with his, but one of them still remembers how the coach often said, “There’s always the day before the day everything changes.” And, although it doesn’t happen like either of them thought it might, that day and the one after it finally come for both of them.

“Incoming Mail,” a series of letters from a mother to her soldier son, is one of the funniest sad stories imaginable, so funny, in fact, that it is at times difficult to remember that the letters are being written by a woman fast losing her mind – and that there is a boy on the other end of the letters who is probably being driven a little crazy himself by what he reads. 

Patrick Dacey

There are few happy endings in We’ve Already Gone This Far.  Most often, the stories do end with the characters in better positions than which they began, but their happiness is all a matter of degree, and most of them settle for happier rather than for happy.  In “Mutatis Mutandis,” for instance, a fat woman who is so desperate to lose weight that she willingly humiliates herself on a reality T.V. show, settles for attracting a new lover.  And then there are the men in “Acts of Love” and “Frieda, Years Later,” one of whom finds a new friend only when he hits rock bottom, and the other who, despite his wandering eye, comes to very much appreciate what he has at home.  “Lost Dog,” though, is a true tragedy.  This one tells the story of three young soldiers who naively wander off into the desert in search of a stray dog that reminds them of home.  Fittingly, this is the last story in the collection, because it is certainly the most haunting of them all.

These are stories about one of the most basic of human instincts, the desire to emotionally connect to others.  It is what, after all, we are all about, and Patrick Dacey reminds us beautifully in this debut collection of just how much we need each other.

Review Copy provided by Publisher

Blog Suggestion: The Neglected Books Page

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I am going to do something today that I've never done since starting the Book Chase blog in January 2009: I am going to suggest that you start paying regular visits to another book blog.  

The Neglected Books Page has set a very special mission for itself.  The blog describes itself as where "you'll find articles and lists with thousands of books that have been neglected, overlooked, forgotten, or stranded by changing tides in critical or popular taste."      Articles are categorized by type, so that blog latecomers like me can browse them at leisure (although I should warn you that you can spend hours browsing and reading from this blog's archives):

• Excerpts from Neglected Books
• Featured Books: Long Reviews
• Featured Neglected Authors
• Gems from the Internet Archive
• Gleanings: Articles from Other sites
• Justly Neglected
• Links
• News
• Poetry
• Publishers
• Reader Recommendations
• Short Notices: Short Reviews

Whether or not a book or author joins the neglected class is often determined as much by chance and sheer luck as anything else.  What else was being published at the same time, in the same part of the world?  How successful was the publishing house in keeping its doors open?  How many copies saw print?  Is the author a one-book wonder or did he leave behind a substantial back catalog?  What language was the book first published in?  

Questions like these are just the beginning, though.  So many different variables, variables that can be combined in an almost infinite number of ways, determine whether a book will survive more than a limited first printing, that a site focusing on forgotten books is fascinating.  If you are an avowed used-bookstore browser, you will almost certainly find yourself wondering about (and maybe researching) some of those wonderful old books you've been  passing by all these years.  

So, take a look at The Neglected Books Page and let me know what you think about it.

The Sand Men

Having lived the ex-pat life in a Muslim country or two (although only in the poorer, more politically chaotic ones), I was immediately drawn to the premise for Christopher Fowler’s The Sand Men.  Fowler’s novel happens to be set in Dubai, one of the richest of the Arab countries - but what even the richest Muslim nations have in common with the poorest ones is a huge divide between the rich and the poor.  It is almost as if the two groups live on different planets, and ex-pats thrown into the mix do not always handle themselves properly when exposed to such a glaring contrast. 

Lea and Roy Brook are in the financial struggle of their lives in London when Roy receives a job offer from a company building several luxury hotels in Dubai.  Roy is out of work and the young family is simply hanging on for dear life, so Roy’s acceptance of the job offer is really a no-brainer.  But after she has moved into the huge company-housing compound with Roy and their fifteen-year-old daughter, Lea begins to wonder about their decision. 

The ex-pat compound has developed a subculture of its own, one that is only remotely similar to anything that Lea has previously experienced.  The ex-pat wives, although they are not forced to give up any of their rights, are almost eager to spend their days in mindless cooking classes, ladies groups, and puttering around the house while their husbands do the important work.  These women may not be quite of the Stepford Wife variety, but they are most definitely the next best thing.  Lea, a magazine writer in her old life, is not content to live that way for the two-year term of her husband’s work contract, and almost immediately, her attitude brings her to the attention of a handful of likeminded spirits – and a few sinister people who want to keep her from stirring up trouble.

Christopher Fowler

The Sand Men is one of those thrillers in which the good guys find it almost impossible to tell the difference between ally and enemy – and as players come and go, Fowler makes certain that his readers face the same dilemma.  When a long series of very strange accidents begins to claim the lives of those Lea feels closest to, she senses that time is running out for her.  She either has to figure out what is happening and stop it, or she has to run for her life.  But whom can she trust?

As Joseph Heller put it in Catch-22, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”

The Sand Men provides quite a thriller ride for those able to reach the proper level of suspended disbelief.  If you’re willing to go there, this one might be for you.

Men vs. Women - Reading Differences

There's an interesting piece in The Guardian today regarding a study undertaken by Jellybooks to determine the differences between male readers and female readers.  As it turns out, there is almost no difference in the likelihood that male and female readers  will finish a book (said to be a 27% rate for men and 28% rate for women), but others of their reading habits are significantly different.  Do keep in mind that 80% of the volunteers for the study were female because it strikes me that that could skew the results somewhat.

“The initial decline during which most readers are lost is much sharper and earlier for men than it is for women, and this is a behaviour that we observe for the majority of books,” writes Rhomberg. “So put another way, men give up on a book much sooner than women do. Given the identical completion rates, we take this to mean that men either have more foresight in this regard or that women continue reading even if they already know that the book is not to their liking. We suspect the latter, but cannot prove it at this point.”

So, according to Arthur Rhomberg (Jellybooks founder), an author has somewhere between 20 and 50 pages to convince male readers to finish a book.  Personally, I set the limit at 40 pages, figuring by that point I can accurately predict whether or not a particular book is for me. 

The study did turn up something interesting about those more likely to complete a book they've started:

Age was a bigger factor in completion rates than gender, found Jellybooks, with readers under 35, and over 45, more likely to finish a book than those between the two ages, for the majority of books. Rhomberg speculates on Digital Book World that readers between the ages of 35 and 45 may be the “most time-pressed demographic”, with “little time for reading”.   

This makes perfect sense to me.  I have kept a personal reading diary/list since February 1, 1970 that includes information about books and pages read per year.  Looking back at the list is always fun because of how it reflects my changing literary taste over the past few decades (hopefully, proving that my taste has gotten better, not worse) - but the thing that really jumps out at me is how my overall reading dropped off from my mid-thirties to my mid-forties when family and career demands peaked.

So, while I find the "study" interesting, I'm not at all sure that it proves much because of its female-heavy, small sample and the fact that it did not include tree-books (printed copies).  Too, all the books in the study were provided free of charge to the readers, and that makes me wonder whether the "completion rate" would have been higher if the same readers had actually paid for the books with their own money.  My own completion rate (which includes purchased books, review copies, library books, and other free books) has been right at 91% for the last five years, for instance.  Whether that high rate has more to do with having "skin in the game" or the possibility that I do a better than average job of predicting books I will finish, I don't know.

Regardless of my skepticism, this is a fun study to consider, and I thank Jellybooks for sharing it with the rest of us.

Bird by Bird

In Bird by Bird, her 1994 writing guide, Anne Lamott approaches the craft with a near perfect blend of seriousness and humor, never speaking down to her readers, while at the same time reminding them that a healthy sense of humor about themselves is one of the most useful tools in a writer's kit.  Lamott may not be able to turn you into the writer you want to be, but she will motivate you to keep plugging away until something happens – even if that “something” turns out to be a lifetime of writing for your own expressive pleasure.

Lamott characterizes herself as a shy, strange-looking child who learned to use humor to deflect the taunts about her looks that boys made as they rode by on their bicycles.  As she puts it, "So first I got funny and then I started to write...” And it paid off, because in high school the desire of her classmates to see themselves reflected in her stories gained her the kind of popularity she otherwise would never have enjoyed.  Anne Lamott's defines her life and who she is by her writing, and she knows that there are countless others out there who feel the same way.  Bird by Bird is her gift to those others.

Bird by Bird is divided into five parts, each section geared to take the want-to-be writer another step or two toward that goal.  Part One, "Writing," focuses on structure and on techniques designed to keep you coming back to the keyboard.  She begins with the "short assignment" concept by which a writer focuses on one tiny part of the story he wants to tell rather than allowing the bigger picture to overwhelm him.  From there, Lamott covers everything from plots, to the dangers of perfectionism (which she calls "the oppressor, the enemy of the people"), to the merits of using flawed and failing characters, to plot, and finally, to a section about recognizing "when you're done."

Anne Lamott

Parts Two and Three focus more on keeping yourself in "the writing frame of mind" and knowing where to look for "help along the way."  Lamott describes the writer as someone who stands alone but decides to take a few notes in the meantime.  She points out that a writer is always writing, that no matter what is happening around him, his job is to "see people as they really are," including himself.  Lamott promises that simply giving yourself "permission" to begin writing will start you thinking like a writer, someone who sees material everywhere he turns.

The fourth part of the book addresses writer's voice, reasons to continue writing (to expose the unexposed), publication (if you are one of the very lucky ones), and the new fears that come with finally being published (such as the terror that you now have to prove that you can do it all again). Lamott calls the last part of Bird by Bird "The Last Class," and here she repeats much of what she tells her writing students in the classroom.  Not all of them will become published writers, she tells them, but they should not let that stop them because being a writer will change their lives.  Writing will "nourish the spirit," is "Intellectually quickening," and has "the potential to be as rich and enlivening as the priesthood."  Above all else, she says, "Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation.  They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul."

If you want to be part of the "noble tradition" of writing, published or not, Bird by Bird may just be the book to get you there.