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When I stop reading one book and, inevitably, batter on into the next, I find that the usual change in prose style, word choice and structuring can hinder my progress through the initial pages of the book. As a result, I often find myself having to re-read parts more often than I like. This is frustrating
and rubbish. For this problem, I have concocted three possible solutions:
1. Read Dickens and only Dickens.
2. Read a mental sorbet Mr Men book or so between each major reading project.
3. The Graduated Prose Style Taxonomy.
I hate Dickens and I can't read Hargreaves without hearing Arthur Lowe in my head, which is distressing, so this leaves option three.
The Graduated Prose Style Taxonomy - yes, I know that that's not a correct use of Taxonomy - is a book categorisation system, to be employed perhaps in libraries and certainly online, designed to allow a reader to select his next reading matter without having to experience a jarring change in writing style. The creation of this Taxonomy will require, I should imagine, a fairly large amount of academic involvement (and the concomitant bickering) but once created the catalogue could be made available on the web and, to facilitate tweaking and adjustments, made user-editable. Perhaps a graphic display like that of the Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus could be employed. Thus, a user might be able to plot a stylistic journey from the Da Vinci Code to, oh, I don't know, The God of Small Things.
Of course, there would be a large number of metrics (e.g. Fleisch Kincade (sp?), comma density, clause length) and quasi-metrics (1st 2nd 3rd person) and creating all this data would be a Herculean task, but hey, aren't all academics self-mythologising anyway?
Visual Thesaurus
http://www.visualthesaurus.com/
[calum, Aug 08 2005]
Arthur Lowe
http://home.btconne...tars/bio_arthur.htm
[calum, Aug 08 2005]
Southern Gothic
http://en.wikipedia...iki/Southern_Gothic
[calum, Aug 10 2005]
[link]
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Croissant for the mention of Mr. Men. Do you perceive the problem being in just style differences? Or are there elements of plot/storyline/characters etc.? |
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I am an academic and I am not a self-mythologist. Discuss. 25 Marks. |
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I thought that the Da Vinci Code *was* a
mental sorbet. |
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I thought that the Da Vinci Code was mental. |
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There'd be a few hundred books to be read between the DVC and The God of Small Things, I reckon. |
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Good idea, though. I read Umberto Eco's Mouse or Rat? followed by Crow Road, by Iain Banks, and my brain spazzed right out. |
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Sadly, most of my reading is in titles that start with an "A" (a primer, a synopsis, etc.). There is probably an unconscious physical reaction when I switch to Dan P. McAdams or the like, mental sorbet with nutty sprinkles. |
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William Gibson vs Neil Stephenson gave me a headache. If you slip into a Gibson while you're Stephensoning, you've got to go back 5 pages and start over. |
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Charles Dickens is distinct enough to have his own 'voice' (maybe my problem with Gibson/Stephenson is that in my head, they sound like they might have a similar voice, so I get lulled into a false sense of security) when you're reading him so it's easier not to be confused with anyone else. |
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zen_tom's mention of sci-fi throws up a possible extension of the Taxonomy, to encompass genre type, that would allow the plotting of a graduated course between, say, all that space robots nonsense to girly "corsets and fainting" literature. |
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Probable worst ever switch: finishing James Joyce's Ulysses and starting The Cold Six Thousand by James Ellroy. From zero punctuation stream of consciousness to three words per sentence. |
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Recommend: Lanark, by Alasdair Gray. Southern Gothic to half Scottish nighmare fable, half autobiography. Haven't read "The Long Home" so I couldn't speak to the graduation of prose style. Gray uses a clean, basic language but no dialect. |
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Well, that's a switch from "Because of Winn Dixie" (Kate DiCamillo) because you're caught in it, over to Bryher (Annie Winnifred Ellerman) because it's reading is too tedious to throw it an accent. + |
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//try reading an accounting text book//
Oh, now that brings back memories of crawling through "Accounting for Solicitors", which reading required by the Law Society, who you'd think, as solicitors, would realise the limited relevance but hey, there's no accounting for solicitors. |
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Yeeha, churning my own idea but I just shifted
from Muriel Spark to Simenon to Alice Munro and
the stylistic differences in sentence construction
are not colossal, but the position of the authorial
voice relative to the characters was interesting.
Spark being nearer to key characters, Simenon
latched limpetwise onto a single (rather alarming)
mind, and Munro examining the actors in the
world she has created with a demonstrated
perfect understanding. This could be another
taxonomy, another way of moving from book to
book. |
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Interesting. When I finish a book I normally switch genre for the next one (I tend to rotate between history & fiction) which gives me your 'mental sorbet' effect. I suppose it's a bit of an expectations management exercise for the brain really. |
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Likewise, I also find a wrenching change of genre quite refreshing. I recently finished Frank Dikötter's "Mao's Great Famine" and moved seamlessly into Haruki Murakami's "IQ84".
Also, [calum], you *finished* Ulysses?! - you must be the only one... |
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Wrenching genre (and style) change is (are) fully doable with the GPST. If we know what is close to what, we should straightforwardly be able to say what is far from what. |
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[hippo], I have a flexible definition of "finished", which generally sits closer to "finished with". |
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Related idea: a radio programme or similar which each week discussed a book, the next week's book being thematically related to the book preceding it, but allowing over the course of the series to pivot away on sub-themes. For example, you could:
start with The True Deceiver (Tove Jannson) on a superficial theme of cold;
using the cold theme, move on to Of Walking In Ice (Werner Herzog), and then, using the theme of lunacy / isolation, move on to;
American Psycho (Bret Easton Ellis) and using its theme of Hell move onto;
Dante's Inferno (Dante) and so on and so forth
with the first half of the programme being devoted to the treatment of the incoming theme and the second to the outgoing theme (or, I suppose, discuss the same theme across two books in the same show). Basically, a book reading version of Tangents (Ben Frost). |
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