Daydreamer welcomes this post from blogauthor *Tracy Wren*
There aren't any book police out there making you finish the book. Just as there aren't any cinema police stopping you from leaving the theatre or from sneaking into the theatre on the other side of the hall. The answer to your question - how long to read a book - is, as long as you want to. The old surrealists never wanted to finish watching a movie. They just wanted to experience an emotion, a color, a movement of light. That was enough for them. Even if I were on a train going through Siberia, I wouldn't finish an obnoxious book. On the other hand, I would never read past the first ten pages of a book I didn't like in the first place. Any book I brought with me on a long train journey, would hold some merit, from my point of view. There are too many fabulous books out there that I want to read, and many I'd like to read again.
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aren't the thought police within - that's the problem in a free country - I like the allusion to the surrealists and their giving themselves voluntarily up to the dream condition - and maybe paying the price of accessibility??
ReplyDeleteIn Germany exploring Berlin this summer with the kids and trailing through the museums in Charlottenburg we came across a surrealist expo including the non-stop showing of 'Le Chien Andalou' - I remember how we sat mesmerised by the images - daughters transfixed despite aching feet and grouchy need for lunch soon! i'm no connoisseur but I recall the dreamlike aura was above all one of narrative compulsion translated into strangely pleasurable angst. Even my whingey six year old sat open-mouthed to see what would happen next..where was that moustache that just sprouted and disappeared in the palm of the dream-girl's hand going to pop out next. Amazing. What other surrealist films would compare like this to the 'cinematically illiterate'?
ReplyDeleteI have heard once an interview with a german writer who writes also for children (Erich Kästner probably) and he was speaking about the difference between writing for children and writing for adults : in books for children, if you haven't "grasped" the attention of your reader in the first page, it's fiished for you :) So, are we simply too conformist here that even without book-police we try sometimes to break through the book we don't like ???
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