Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, and books on tape. You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.
Non-fiction and fiction books can be beautifully written and make our hearts sing as we read them. They have beautiful language, interesting images, a depth of emotion and inspire the reader. They make us sit up and take notice that something important is being said and in a wonderfully new way. It is a joy to read them.
I am always delighted to find wonderfully written non-fiction books. An Alchemy of Mind by Diane Ackerman is one of those.
Many times, though, history seems dry and that is a shame. One or two paragraphs sometimes covers years and a few dry facts sometimes represents thousands of people’s lives.
It is fiction that many times invites us into a character’s life who is living the history and helps us understand what it is like to be there. The story, when well written and based on careful research, can teach us so much and be memorable. Often those books are beautiful and inspiring even when sad. They make our heart sing for the life that was lived and we fold the characters into our minds as if we had known them.
I have read a biography of Louisa May Alcott about the hardships of her life, but reading Little Women is more stunning and memorable. Is this fair? You may argue with me in the comments below.
I also read about Jane Austen’s life and prefer her books. I read Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams by Lyle Leverich and yet The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire seem more real.
The books that make our hearts sing lay bare the human heart to us and share a character’s thoughts and triumphs, their failures and redemption that we can empathize with.
Of course, novels can lie. We have to be careful.
In Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin by Jill Lepore there is an interesting discussion about history and historical fiction on pages 237-242.
Fiction was (Jane) Austen’s answer to history, to biography, to the memoirs of great men. But it wasn’t only Austen’s answer; it was the eighteenth century’s answer: fiction, not history, could tell the stories of ordinary lives, something that’s necessary because there’s more to the past than the march of monarchs….
Novels like Austen’s didn’t only critique history; they were history. In the eighteenth century, when the novel was born, novelists called their books “histories” smack on their title pages. (Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne).
…Richardson wanted his novels to be read with “Historical Faith,” since, he believed, they contained a kind of truth, the kind of truth you can find in poetry: the truth of the possible, the truth of what it means to be human. The truth of fiction was its intimacy…
Fielding insisted that what flowed from his pen was “true history”; fiction was what historians wrote…
Like Fielding, (William) Godwin believed that the novel was not only another kind of history but “the noblest and most excellent species of history.” History made claims to absolute truth, Godwin observed, but “the reader will be miserably deluded if, while he reads history, he suffers himself to imagine that he is reading facts.” Instead, he is reading the historian’s always partial, prejudiced, and ignorant interpretation of facts. The novelist is the better historian because he admits these deficiencies. The novelist, not the historian, Godwin argued, is “the writer of real history.”
When prose sounds like poetry it can make us catch our breath in delight.
From History of the Rain by Niall Williams:
pg. 244
I know what the river is like at night. I know how it tongues the dark and swallows the rain and how it never ever sleeps. I know how it sings in its chains, how steadily it backstrokes into eternity, how if you stand beside it in the deeps of its throat it seems to be saying, saying, saying, only what you cannot tell...
pg. 246
Then, forty yards downriver, Virgil comes up through the surface. He yells.
It's not a yell of panic or fear but of joy, and at that moment my mother discovers that my father is a wonderful swimmer. He's learned in deep waters and distant places and not only has he no fear he makes fear seem illogical, as if water and current and tide are all graces and a man's movement within them natural as it is on earth. His stroke is unhurried. There is a kind of elemental delight in crossing the pull of the river, in feeling it, allowing it, resisting. He swims like he could swim forever. I think he could. I think he can.
He comes back to her and holds his place in the water at her feet. 'Come in,' he says.
'I could kill you.'
It's not the reply he was hoping for. When I get around to writing it, it will not feature in Chat-Up Lines for Girls who Don't Get Out Much.
pg. 288
Here in Faha, of rain we have known All Kinds, the rain that pretends it's not rain, the rain that crosses the Atlantic and comes for its holidays, rain that laughs at the word summer, sniggers at the dry day in Ennis twenty kilometers away, hoots at what pours, streams, teems, lashes, pelts and buckets down. But this was different.
It had intent. That's what Mam thought. And the intention was Flood.
Some books that made my heart sing:
Non-fiction:
Gettysburg by Stephen Sears
River-Horse by William Least-Heat Moon
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
And There Was Light: Autobiography of a Blind Hero of the French Resistance by Jacques Lusseyran
my Bookflurries review:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Small Woman by Gladys Aylward
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Wild Trees by Richard Preston
An Alchemy of Mind by Diane Ackerman
Fiction:
History of the Rain by Niall Williams
Street of a Thousand Blossoms by Gail Tsukiyama
The Secret of Santa Vittoria by Robert Crichton
The Charioteer by Mary Renault
Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
In the First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
(Foreword…In 1968 an expurgated version titled The First Circle came out in many languages. The loss in English of the preposition “In”…subtly shifts the novel’s focus from people in a place to the place itself; the present version eliminates this distortion…Compared with the version previously available in English, the plot has been altered, depictions of some major characters have been substantially modified, new characters have been introduced, and many entirely excised chapters have been reinstated. For readers familiar with the previously available English version, In the First Circle will be a revelation).
Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, Of Men and Mice by John Steinbeck
Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie
What books have made your heart sing?
Diaries of the Week:
Write On! Terry Pratchett and the rules of writing.
by SensibleShoes
http://www.dailykos.com/...
The Second Coming
by Emmet
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Note: A big congratulations to MT Spaces for having his book published.
“The First U.S. Edition of The Great Salt Lake Mime Saga and Amsterdam's Festival of Fools was officially published on St. Patrick's Day 2015.
(information on how to order.)
https://greatsaltlakemimesagaplusadamfestivalfools.wordpress.com/...
Standing invitation to my Bookflurries posse -- if anyone is sincere about writing a review this theatrical memoir, please send me an email via the link above.”