What Makes This Book So Great

by Jo Walton

  I mostly don’t read when I’m sitting on the loo, but when I worked in an office I used to, and I’d finish my chapter, too.

  I always read in bed, even if I haven’t had time to read anything all day. I don’t do this for any reason other than that I know no other way to fall asleep—I read until I am asleep, then I put the book down and take my glasses off and switch the light off. So even on the busiest, tiredest day, I read a couple of pages.

  Now, I can if I want to sit down and read for an extended period of time, and I often do. Some books I have literally read without putting them down. If I am stuck in bed I’ll lie there with a pile of books, reading directly from one to the next. It’s the same when I’m on a long train journey on Amtrak—I’ll just read and look out of the window for days. (It’s great. You have such comfortable trains in the US, and so cheap. Wonderful way to get around.) There are some books that seem to repay more sustained attention, especially when I’m just starting them. Conversely, there are others that I enjoy in little bits but that get wearying when I sit down and read them for hours. I have nothing against reading in great gulps—it’s just that I don’t find it necessary for enjoyment. Reading in little sips works too.

  So I was wondering—how odd am I? How many people are like me, reading as they go about their day, and how many like my friend, needing clear chunks of free time to get into a book? Does it matter if it’s a new book or a re-read? Do some books require more sustained attention than others? Are you a sipper or a gulper?*

  SEPTEMBER 8, 2010

  120. Quincentennial: Arthur C. Clarke’s Imperial Earth

  Arthur C. Clarke’s great strength as a writer was the way his vision merged the poetic and the scientific. His great weakness was that he was too nice—he always had a terrible time envisaging conflict, which gave him a hard time with plot.

  I know something about Imperial Earth (1975) that most of you don’t, except theoretically. It was once a new book. It’s obvious really, everything was new once. People bought shiny copies of The Fellowship of the Ring in the fifties and waited for the other volumes to come out. But I remember Imperial Earth being new, because I bought the paperback from one of those rotating wire racks of books they used to have in newsagents in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth and everybody smoked and you could buy a new Arthur C. Clarke paperback and a quarter of Cadbury’s mini eggs and still have change from a pound. I vividly remember taking both the book and the eggs up into the park and sitting on a bench in watery sunlight reading the book and eating the eggs until book and eggs were finished. I still have the book, and I can still taste the eggs when I read it, which must make that one of the best value-for-money pounds I ever spent. It was the Easter holidays of 1977 and I was twelve. I thought Imperial Earth was one of the best books Clarke had ever written.

  Reading it now, it gets astonishing points for all the things old books usually have to get a pass on. It has gay characters, bisexuality is considered normal, there are poly relationships, the main character is a person of color and so are large numbers of the other characters, it contains an older female character, it passes the Bechdel test, the president of the US is female. I’m sure I didn’t notice any of this when I first read it except the nifty blackness of Duncan Makenzie. There’s not much in the way of ethnicity—this is pretty much a post-ethnic world, but as far as skin color goes, darker is considered more aesthetically pleasing. There is one minor character who is a Muslim and a haji. He’s a cloning specialist. There’s one fat bald character—these things are considered to be unusual aesthetic choices because they’re both fixable.

  It’s an interesting vision of the universe. It’s utopian—this is a solar system in which all the problems have been solved and everything is nice. There’s no personal wealth, rulers (on Earth anyway) are chosen by lot from those qualified, capitalism has withered away, Earth has been reforested, the planets are being settled, everybody is happy except the odd psychopath. The quincentennial of the USA is being celebrated to calm delight. This is really an unusually positive future even for Clarke—Earth has a population of half a billion, the excesses of the twentieth century have been cleaned up, there aren’t actually any problems as such.

  Duncan Makenzie is the second clone of Malcolm Makenzie, the ruler of Titan. Malcolm definitely wasn’t chosen by lot, he was the intrepid engineer who figured out a way to make colonizing Titan pay. He nevertheless runs the place benevolently, and not even the opposition have a real problem with him, or his clone Colin, or Colin’s clone Duncan. Duncan goes to Earth to celebrate the quincentennial and, while he’s there, to get a clone of himself made for the next generation of Makenzies. While he’s there he runs into his old girlfriend Calindy and his old best friend Karl. In a different book, Karl would be a mad scientist and an antagonist. Here he’s a slightly secretive and mildly deranged scientist.

  The science is odd at this distance. There’s what appears to be an iPhone, described in detail. There are “comsoles” which are home computers—they contain no moving parts and haven’t changed at all in hundreds of years, but they have monitors and keyboards and they’re networked, so pretty good. The spaceships buzzing between the planets are using new mini black hole propulsion drives, which might make Titan’s lucrative hydrogen business obsolete and cause economic problems. We have learned a lot more about Titan since this book was written—all the Titan stuff is obsolete, but still nifty. We’ve also discovered the Kuiper belt since this was written, which again makes some of it obsolete. But, oh well, it was the state of knowledge when he wrote it.

  When I was twelve I thought the (so incredibly mild as to be hardly there at all) sex and the relationship between Duncan, Calindy, and Karl were at the heart of the book. I also really liked the spaceship trip from Titan to Earth, and the stuff about SETI was all totally new to me. I was also very impressed by the stuff about cloning—again, totally new. I also credit the pentominoes with my subsequent obsession with Tetris.

  Now I think the best bit of the book is the descriptions of exotic Titan, which seem perfectly normal to Duncan, and of perfectly normal Earth, which he sees as exotic and weird. The reversals here are still lovely—Duncan thinks a jet of oxygen burning off in the methane atmosphere is pretty normal but finds a horse alien and doesn’t know what a butterfly is. I also like the terse conversations between the clones who understand each other too well to need to say things in full—but I don’t for a minute believe that they would really be like that. I think cloned parents and children would have just as many problems as the normal kind. But the emotional feel of the cloning works.

  It’s hard to say how much of my enjoyment of this book is nostalgia (like the remembered taste of chocolate) and how much I actually enjoyed reading it. If I read it for the first time now nothing in it would be new and the only thing that would be odd would be how nice everything is. No conflict! The plot really is, “What I did on my summer holiday,” and that plot has been done better than this. I notice it isn’t in print, while Clarke’s real classics still are. But I enjoyed reading it again, in the copy I bought new when Pan could still say, “His great new novel” on the cover. It’s not his best, but even minor Clarke has charm.

  SEPTEMBER 8, 2010

  121. Do you skim?

  This is kind of a follow-up post to “Gulp or Sip,” and like that post it arises from a conversation with a friend. (A different friend. I have a lot of friends who like to read.) This friend said that if she was getting bored with something in a book she’d skip ahead until it got interesting. “How do you know?” I asked. “I skim,” she replied. “If there’s a boring action sequence, or a boring sex scene, I’ll skim until we get back to something interesting.” To clarify—she doesn’t read all the words. She stops reading and just casts her eyes over the text, speed reading occasional phrases until she has missed the bit she doesn’t like. It’s as if she’s re-reading and she decides to skip a thread she didn’t enjoy, except without having ever read it in
the first place. Or it’s like the way you might look for a particular bit on a page to quote without getting sucked in to reading the whole thing, except without having read it before. It’s not like the way you can keep reading in your sleep and suddenly realise you didn’t take in the last few pages. It’s a deliberate action—the way in a non-fiction book you might decide not to read a chapter that covers a topic you don’t need. Except, of course, that she does it with fiction, and not to a clearly marked endpoint, but to where the text gets interesting again.

  I never do this. I’ve never even thought of it. It seems really weird to me.

  So what I want to know is, do other people do this?

  Ugol’s Law states that if you ask, “Am I the only one who…?” the answer is always no. There are things absolutely nobody does, but if any one person does something, then there are others who also do it. So it seems very likely that it’s not just my friend, and other people do this.

  What I want to know is, don’t you miss things? I mean it might look like a boring sex scene, but who knows that the protagonists aren’t going to break off foreplay to discuss the way neutron stars work? (Real example.) Or who knows what clever things the author might be doing in a boring battle scene? Patrick O’Brian uses them for characterisation. If a book is really too dull for me to care what happens, I might put it down altogether, but if it’s interesting enough to keep reading, I can’t imagine just skipping a chunk—nor have I really got a handle on where you’d start reading again. How can you tell? And how do you know you didn’t miss something vital that might have made the whole book make more sense?

  I’m talking about reading for pleasure here. I understand how it’s possible to read boring non-fiction for information, and skip the sections labeled as containing no useful information. And I’m mostly talking about reading SF and fantasy, though goodness knows I don’t skim when I’m reading mainstream novels either.

  I read in hopes of little sparkling moments that are going to turn my head inside out. I increase my chances of getting them by reading the kind of writers who have done that to me before: (Vinge, Delany, Dean, Le Guin, Wilson, Schroeder, Cherryh…) where really skipping even a paragraph might leave you lost and confused at the end. I can see that there are other writers I enjoy whose work isn’t that dense, but I still don’t want to miss anything. Who knows where that moment might be hidden? It’s either worth reading or it isn’t, I can’t see the point of half-reading it. I can’t understand how that could be fun. If it hasn’t sucked me in so that I want to keep reading it then I might as well be eating broccoli. Or reading something else.

  Are there books that have good bits and bad bits so clearly defined that this makes sense as a reading strategy? Why have I never read any of them? (Hypothesis: They’re all about vampires and pirates.) How widespread is this anyway? If you do it, what do you get out of it? And if you’ve done it, do you feel as if you’ve really read the book and can talk about it afterwards?*

  (Health warning: If you do this skimming thing with my books, please don’t mention it. You might send me into a decline.)

  SEPTEMBER 21, 2010

  122. A merrier world: J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit

  The Hobbit isn’t as good a book as The Lord of the Rings. It’s a children’s book, for one thing, and it talks down to the reader. It’s not quite set in Middle Earth—or if it is, then it isn’t quite set in the Third Age. It isn’t pegged down to history and geography the way The Lord of the Rings is. Most of all, it’s a first work by an immature writer; journeyman work and not the masterpiece he would later produce. But it’s still an excellent book. After all, it’s not much of a complaint to say that something isn’t as good as the best book in the world.

  If you are fortunate enough to share a house with a bright six-year-old, or a seven- or eight-year-old who still likes bedtime stories, I strongly recommend reading them a chapter of The Hobbit aloud every night before bed. It reads aloud brilliantly, and when you do this it’s quite clear that Tolkien intended it that way. I’ve read not only The Hobbit but The Lord of the Rings aloud twice as well, and had it read to me once. The sentences form the rhythms of speech, the pauses are in the right place, they fall well on the ear. This isn’t the case with a lot of books, even books I like. Many books were made to be read silently and fast. The other advantage of reading it aloud is that it allows you to read it even after you have it memorised and normal reading is difficult. It will also have the advantage that the child will encounter this early, so they won’t get the pap first and think that’s normal.

  I first read The Hobbit when I was eight. I went on to read The Lord of the Rings immediately afterwards, with the words, “Isn’t there another one of those around here?” What I liked about The Hobbit that first time through was the roster of adventures. It seemed to me a very good example of a kind of children’s book with which I was familiar—Narnia, of course, but also the whole set of children’s books in which children have magical adventures and come home safely. It didn’t occur to me that it had been written before a lot of them—I had no concept as a child that things were written in order and could influence each other. The Hobbit fit into a category with At the Back of the North Wind and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and half of E. Nesbit and Enid Blyton.

  The unusual thing about The Hobbit for me was that Bilbo Baggins was a hobbit and a grown-up. He had his own charming and unusual house and he indulged in grown-up pleasures like smoking and drinking. He didn’t have to evade his parents to go off on an adventure. He lived in a world where there were not only dwarves and elves and wizards but also signs that said “Expert treasure hunter wants a good job, plenty of excitement and reasonable reward.” He lived a life a child could see as independent, with people coming to tea unexpectedly and with dishes to be done afterwards (this happened in our house all the time), but without any of the complicated adult disadvantages of jobs and romance. Bilbo didn’t want an adventure, but an adventure came and took him anyway. And it is “There and Back Again,” at the end he returns home with treasure and the gift of poetry.

  Of course, The Lord of the Rings isn’t “another one of those.” Reading The Lord of the Rings immediately afterwards was like being thrown into deep magical water which I fortunately learned to breathe, but from which I have never truly emerged.

  Reading The Hobbit now is odd. I can see all the patronizing asides, which were the sort of thing I found so familiar in children’s books that I’m sure they were quite invisible to me. I’ve read it many times between now and then, of course, including twice aloud, but while I know it extremely well I’ve never read it quite so obsessively that the words are carved in my DNA. I can find a paragraph I’d forgotten was there and think new thoughts when I’m reading it. That’s why I picked it up, though it wasn’t what I really wanted—but what I really wanted, I can’t read anymore.

  I notice all the differences between this world and the LOTR version of Middle Earth. I noticed how reluctant Tolkien is to name anything here—the Hill, the Water, the Great River, the Forest River, Lake Town, Dale—and this from the master namer. His names creep in around the edges—Gondolin, Moria, Esgaroth—but it’s as if he’s making a real effort to keep it linguistically simple. I find his using Anglo-Saxon runes instead of his own runes on the map unutterably sweet—he thought they’d be easier for children to read. (At eight, I couldn’t read either. At forty-five, I can read both.) Now, my favourite part is the end, when things become morally complex. Then I don’t think I understood that properly. I understood Thorin’s greed for dragon gold—I’d read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and I knew how that worked. What puzzled me was Bilbo’s use of the Arkenstone, which seemed treacherous, especially as it didn’t even work. Bilbo didn’t kill the dragon, and the introduction of Bard at that point in the story seemed unprecedentedly abrupt—I wonder why Tolkien didn’t introduce him earlier, in the Long Lake chapter? But it’s Bilbo’s information that allows the dragon to be killed, a
nd that’s good enough for me, then or now.

  Tolkien is wonderful at writing that hardest of all things to write well, the journey. It really feels as if he understands time and distance and landscape. Adventures come at just the right moments. Mirkwood remains atmospheric and marvellous. The geography comes in order that’s useful for the story, but it feels like real geography. Noticing world differences, I’m appalled at how casually Bilbo uses the Ring, and surprised how little notice everyone else pays to it—as if such things are normal. Then it was just a magic ring, like the one in The Enchanted Castle. The stone giants—were they ents? They don’t seem quite ent-ish to me. What’s up with that? And Beorn doesn’t quite seem to fit anywhere either, with his performing animals and were-bearness.

  The oddest thing about reading The Hobbit now is how (much more than The Lord of the Rings) it seems to be set in the fantasyland of role-playing games. It’s a little quest, and the dwarves would have taken a hero if they could have found one, they make do with a burglar. There’s that sign. The encounters come just as they’re needed. Weapons and armour and magic items get picked up along the way. Kill the trolls, find a sword. Kill the dragon, find armour. Finish the adventure, get chests of gold and silver.

  One more odd thing I noticed this time for the first time. Bilbo does his own washing up. He doesn’t have servants. Frodo has Sam, and Gaffer Gamgee, too. But while Bilbo is clearly comfortably off, he does his own cooking and baking and cleaning. This would have been unprecedentedly eccentric for someone of his class in 1938. It’s also against gender stereotypes—Bilbo had made his own seedcakes, as why shouldn’t he, but in 1938 it was very unusual indeed for a man to bake. Bilbo isn’t a man, of course, he isn’t a middle-class Englishman who would have had a housekeeper, he is a respectable hobbit. But I think because the world has changed to make not having servants and men cooking seem relatively normal we don’t notice that these choices must have been deliberate.