Hostile reading
Jul. 24th, 2012 10:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustEvery now and then (not very often, but from time to time) I find myself reading a book and fighting it every step of the way. I'm wondering if it's just me, or if it happens to anyone else? I'm not talking about books that you have to read for some reason - because they are set texts or necessary research or even Great Books - I'm talking about books you read for pleasure, that you like or enjoy enough to want to go on reading, but with something in the back of your mind going ":Oh, no! Oh, we're not going there, are we? Oh, I wish you wouldn't do that!"
I'm not crazy, I know there's nothing to be gained by this. An author's going to write the book that they're going to write; and even if I could (or wanted to) influence them otherwise, it wouldn't work on a book they've already written. And yet that's the effect that some books have on me.
I felt it with A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, which I also found completely absorbing, and I felt it again with Gillian Cross's A Map of Nowhere. Gillian Cross is a reliably good - well, better than that - writer, and the title was intriguing, and I didn't look any further than that. With the result that I found myself reading a story that on plot summary alone I would have steered well clear of (Nick is caught between the charismatic gang, Wrong but Romantic, and the oddball loner, Right but Repulsive). Plot summary, as we know, is no guide to anything, but as Nick gets himself into a hole and keeps digging, makes bad decision after bad decision, something in my mind is saying, not to him but to the book: ":Don't do that! I told you I didn't want to go there!"
I'm sure it's an excellent book. It has some splendid things in it: the game, the landscape, a twist in the tail. It also has some things which I found unsubtle enough to be uncomfortable about, in an entirely rational way. But just at the moment, the thing that interests me is that overall reading against the text: do other people do this, or is it just me?
I'm not crazy, I know there's nothing to be gained by this. An author's going to write the book that they're going to write; and even if I could (or wanted to) influence them otherwise, it wouldn't work on a book they've already written. And yet that's the effect that some books have on me.
I felt it with A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, which I also found completely absorbing, and I felt it again with Gillian Cross's A Map of Nowhere. Gillian Cross is a reliably good - well, better than that - writer, and the title was intriguing, and I didn't look any further than that. With the result that I found myself reading a story that on plot summary alone I would have steered well clear of (Nick is caught between the charismatic gang, Wrong but Romantic, and the oddball loner, Right but Repulsive). Plot summary, as we know, is no guide to anything, but as Nick gets himself into a hole and keeps digging, makes bad decision after bad decision, something in my mind is saying, not to him but to the book: ":Don't do that! I told you I didn't want to go there!"
I'm sure it's an excellent book. It has some splendid things in it: the game, the landscape, a twist in the tail. It also has some things which I found unsubtle enough to be uncomfortable about, in an entirely rational way. But just at the moment, the thing that interests me is that overall reading against the text: do other people do this, or is it just me?
