What a lovely weekend, eh? I had so much energy! I got lots of chores done and yet also had plenty of time to read. I’m making my slow way through Don Quixote at present, so I was looking for something light, preferably nonfiction, to go along with it. (I like to keep a couple of books going at the same time, for variety.)
The first candidate I picked up was a novel. Within the first dozen pages I had been introduced to about a dozen zany characters. The story hadn’t even gotten going, and already I was overwhelmed. The coup de grâce came when the author described a character coming back from a hunt “with a brace of skinned rabbits slung over her shoulder.” Now, I’m not saying it’s impossible to skin rabbits in the field; I’m not saying there aren’t hunters who skin rabbits in the field; I’m just saying that in my whole life I’ve never known a rabbit hunter — and I’ve known a lot of them — to dress a rabbit in the field. Sounds like a recipe for a mess of dirty rabbit to me. I was reminded of a book excerpt I read some time ago. The book was set in Indiana and the author described the sound of “the crickets in the trees.” Again, I’m not saying crickets don’t occasionally climb trees….
That’s the sort of thing that can really put me off a book. It’s kind of sad to be so picky, and probably hypocritical, because I’m sure I breeze right past similar solecisms on topics I don’t know anything about.
Next try. I pick up a book I bought at the Green Valley Book Fair. This was a nonfiction book about the author’s struggle with a chronic headache and her efforts to find pain relief in a medical culture that overvalues technology and undervalues women’s reports of pain. Sounds fascinating, doesn’t it? So why wasn’t this topic worth writing about in grammatical sentences? I don’t mind a conversational style, but I do mind when the writer figures it’s more important to be colloquial than to be clear. I gave it a good try (20 pages), but sentences like, “It was like with the grab bags we had at holiday time at grade school in the 1970s,” eventually wore me down.
The third book I tried was a travelogue of the author’s many trips across the United States by car. Here’s a little taste:
Why are we doing it? Why are we crossing the country this time? This time, it is summer vacation. It is summer vacation and after visiting relatives, as usual, and going to a wedding, way up in some faraway, nearly roadless Northwest mountains, after crossing the country once, from New York to Oregon, we are crossing the country yet again, from Oregon back to New York, to get home, to wrap up after six thousand miles, to rest. We are heading from one shining sea to another. We are not heading for the Pacific, as is customary in the history of cross-countrying; we are heading east. Once, when I was young, I headed west…”
For crying out loud. For crying out loud, why is is necessary to repeat, to reiterate, to tell once again the same information you just wrote? The same information you just wrote is being repeated again! If I were to finish this book, I would have effectively read the same information at least three times over. Couldn’t just a few precious words be cut so that a trivial, vapid book of 388 pages might become an interesting, informative book of, say, 150 pages? Gaaaaah.
By this time I was thoroughly exasperated. I did what I always do when the universe isn’t spinning my way: I griped to my husband. He suggested I read What is Life? by Erwin Schrödinger. Riiiiight. Schrödinger. Sounds relaxing.
But I had nothing to lose at this point, so I picked it up, and it’s an absolute jewel of a book. Clearly written, beautifully explained, elegantly concise. Proof that it can be done. It can be done.
Proof that’s I’m always right.
Except when you are, of course.