When I was a kid, I loved going to the library -- my folks took me there constantly, budding little geek that I was, and I devoured the kids' section. I remember in particular a book on the Bermuda Triangle that I must have read a dozen times (Google + Amazon = wow).
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| Explain the disappearance of Flight 19! I dare you! |
Every year the library had a contest (for kids) to see who could read the most books -- of course, I crushed it. In retrospect, it's obvious that my habit of reading books too quickly to learn anything from them is the fault of a small public library in the Midwest. Bastards.
But I'm jumping ahead.
Eventually, after exhausting (several times) every kiddie book on Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, Psychic Powers, and the Bermuda Triangle, I stumbled over to the young adult'ish fiction section at age 8 or 9 or 10, and found the Book of Three. I was immediately hooked. The Hobbit followed shortly thereafter, along with the purchase (okay, mom bought them for me!) of mass quantities of Dungeons & Dragons paraphenalia.
Good times, good times. But ... WERE THEY?
Er, well, yeah. But I have regrets. Like most geeks, during my teens I devoured mind-dribble fantasy novels like I had devoured all those kiddie-books on paranormal goofiness. I must have read 50 or 100 books a year during that time, but as far as books that I remember ... well, it's very few. I recall enjoying the Book of Swords trilogy, the first few books of The Guardians of the Flame series, Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality, Terry Brooks's Elfstones of Shannara, and Lawrence Watt-Evans's The Misenchanted Sword.
In retrospect that while I enjoyed much (some?) of what I was reading, it's probably not right to call it "reading" -- "skimming" is much more accurate, and it's kind of a shame.
This has become obvious to me as I've tried to read books in the same genre in the last few years -- I find that, almost without exception, I don't have the patience for them, and part of it, I think, is that I'm much more mindful now about when I skip over the Boring Parts. I try to reset and read everything, and soon realize that I have better things I could be doing with my time.
This really hit home when I recently attempted to reread The Misenchanted Sword. I had some great memories of this book; I read a bunch of Watt-Evans when I was a teen, and I remember it was this book that hooked me.
But now, I'm crossing wires -- there are really two points to all this:
1) When you skim books, you learn very little about what makes good writing good, and bad writing bad, because you just ignore everything that doesn't interest you. Given the number of books I've read, I should know a great deal more about description, plotting, and story structure than I do. Alas...
2) Analyzing books you enjoyed when you were younger can be a dangerous, but useful exercise ... sure, you may end up wondering what in the hell was wrong with you, but I think it's starting to give me some insights into what makes genre fiction good. They are both inspiring and depressing.
#1 has been sufficiently covered: if you're a young'n reading this, and you want to be a writer someday, PAY ATTENTION. Reading isn't a race. I used to bask in how geekily cool it was to check ten or twenty books out of the library at once:
Now, I wish I'd read fewer books, more deeply. Of course, if you're not planning on ever becoming a writer, it's fine to just skim away, read The Good Parts and toss the rest, but if you are ...
#2 ... well, that's the topic for the next post.
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