Between blotch and blok

While was commenting elsewhere on books only partially re-read, I suddenly realised how much of my life was the fault of T H White. I'm sure I'd never had the same inclination to study mediaeval literature if I hadn't read The Once and Future King; nor attempted falconry, but for The Goshawk; and I'm sure the plan to acquire bees is as much to do with the bees in The Book of Merlyn as anytihng else.

The Goshawk is probably my desert island book.

I apparently have a large TBR pile. Actually several, online in open browser tabs, on the Kindle, and in a bookcase. Except these aren't the to be reads: these are the started, part reads, stalled partways.... I don't ever give up on a book. I merely place a bookmark, or two (for which, the explanation is coming), and move on. I'll come back to it. The bookcase, the "a-reading" collection, the open tabs: these are the reading equivalent of the knitter's UFOs (unfinished objects [and don't ask me about those!]). My actual TBR pile is virtual: the Amazon wishlist, for the most part, and bookmarks of reviews in Diigo (I'll leave my username for the guessing ;-).

I don't ever give up on a book.

Last night I finished Susanna Clarke's Piranesi. I'd begun it sometime in the late summer/early autumn, put it aside, and picked it up last night an got through the remaining two thirds. Six months, maybe, elapsed time. Partly, this was the inconvenience of it being a physical copy, rather than electronic. But mostly, I just got stuck.

Or, another example, perhaps the most extreme. I was given, by a very dear friend, a copy of The White Guard by Mikael Bulgakov. It was my nineteenth birthday. Twenty years or so later, I sat down and finished it. But, at least, I finished it, the right way round.

I'd really rather finish a book than not and whilst I have the storage space and feel no guilt in having a large backlog (it does not very often call to to me like a heap of unfulfilled commitments, broken promises) there is something to be said for finishing a book before you've completely forgotten much of what you've read.

I was very careful with my wording of the end of that last sentence--"finishing a book before you've completely forgotten much of what you've read"--not saying, as I might have done "getting to the end of a book before you've completely forgotten what happened at the beginning", because I have a method that sometimes prevents a book transitioning from read in a few days to decades-long haul.

I confess, judge me as you will, that I always read the last page of a book pretty much as soon as I've read the first few pages. It's partly a habit borne of undergraduate years with a week to write an essay on a novelist or theme in the dim, dark days before the internet provided helpful summaries and full-text search to help with the speed-reading and digesting. It's also that I've found with non-fiction that I can get a good handle on a work by its index, appendices, bibliography, glossary, concluding chapter. I've written that way round, too: if the software's not done, but there are specifications, a legacy system, it's often possible to define the terms for the glossary, create some appendices, even before the meat of the text can be constructed.

I'm not, it appears, hung up on linearity. I've read many trilogies starting with book 2, or even book 3. I hop around hypertexts.

In sum, I do not feel bound to start a page 1 (or even page i: I read all the front matters [and hate how the Kindle takes me straight to the start of the main text so I have to go back to the front cover]) and read through to the end. That being said, at some point I set my eyes on the first line of the first chapter and start reading a book. Mostly, and in reasonable time, I whizz through and finally savour with more appreciation the final few paragraphs on the concluding page that were somewhat meaningless, somehow mysterious when I'd sampled them before.

Except, when I don't. I stall. I attempt to push forward. I read a page over. The next occasion I pick up the book, I re-read that page. I plough through the next, realise I've taken nothing in, read it again. Bogged down I consign the book to the shelf or leave it to sink down the list in the a-reading collection, supplanted by newer works.

When this happened with a David Brin, probably The Uplift War, I didn't put the book down. I was invested enough in the story to want to know how it got to the end. So interest was I that I went back to that last page that I'd already seen and read it again. I think the final chapter was short, so it seemed quite reasonable to read it in its entirety. And the penultimate chapter. And the ante-- After a handful of chapters, I had seen more conclusions to stories I'd hardly seen framed that I went back to the sticking place and shot through much of the remainder of the book. If I felt I was flagging, I marked my place and read another chapter back from the end, before returning to the more usual order or progress. I finished, or read all of, the book, and, I think, enjoyed it.

Several points arise from this. The first is the need, when dealing with physical volumes, for two bookmarks for any book getting this treatment. Not all do. Some just wait on the bookcase until I come back to them afresh.

The second is the interesting metric of where the two bookmarks meet. Since I always read the last page early, there's an implicit second bookmark just before the end of every book i read. So, if the start of chapter 1 is 0% and the end of the last paragraph of the final chapter is 100%, then no book I read hits 100%. Most hit as close to 100% as makes no odds. The others, the ones where the second bookmark slips back a few pages, whilst the first bookmark progresses in fits and starts, are more interesting.

Take Piranesi. I read part one with a little effort. And gave up awhile. When I restarted last night, I read maybe two or three pages into part 2 and then knew I was unlikly to go on. I reread the last page, and this was sufficiently interesting (exciting, even) that I read the final part. At the point I took the plunge and read the parts in reverse order finishing the rest of the book in a single sitting. Of course, it's not really about finishing, is it? It's about whether I enjoyed the book, which I did: I will re-read it sometime sooner rather than later. Have I somehow cheated? Spoiled something of a build up, a gradual revelation that had been carefully constructed by the author? Did I miss out on sharing Piransi's putting together of his story as he experienced it? Maybe. Perhaps I had a different set of a-ha moments: this is the point where x, who did y further on, is first introduced; this is why z happened later. More meta? That would probably be me (blame those undergraduate English days).

Piranesi gets a score of around 15%. I think it works that way. The only other book that would score on quite such an extreme would be Bodies of Light by Sarah Moss where I think I read two chapters in before heading to the end and working back. In that case, I think the book was improved by the reordering.

I'm going to call my technique the "Finnemore Method".

Eggs!

Elderly hens ahve not been laying this winter.

So, eggs!

Also, this had me laughing out loud. For reals ;-)

    "... at this moment Aunt Hester returned.

    "Timothy," she said in a low voice, "Timothy has bought a map, and he's put in—he's put in three flags."

    Timothy had ….! A sigh went round the company.

    If Timothy had indeed put in three flags already, well!—it showed what the nation could do when it was roused. The war was as good as over."

So, yesterday I bought a book called, somewhat uninspiringly, Planting Patterns: from the air". I'd spent much of the evening prior to my purchase staring longingly at the cover in the distance and speculating as to how I might knit it up. Yes, really. Once I'd actually picked the work up -- no mean feat: it's more of coffee table than a coffee table book -- there was no going back as the pictures inside, reminiscent of Rothko's canvases, were stunning. I'm now uncertain as to whether I should write poems about them or continue with the knitting idea.

It's an entire book of aerial photographs of fields in Switzerland and France for the most part, including pasture and greenhouses and even saltworks. They've all been very carefully shot to line up with the rectangle of the page which enhances their geometry. Some are quite bizarre. For example, a bare field littered with the hoops and poles for a planned poly-tunnel looks like the result of serious digging on the part of some mad palaeontologist, a litter of huge bones against the bare earth. Another poly-tunnel example has the arches erected, but almost invisible; the shadows instead resemble an arrangement of fish-hooks.

There are pictures of success -- harvest and the gathering in of crops -- and failure too -- frost-damaged brassicas, failing wormwood. Yes, wormwood. I'd never really thought about how field of wormwood might look. No green fairies inside.

I dumped the book in front of Looby Loo this evening and suggested she might find it interesting. Her immediate rejection of the notion (it is after all mandatory to say no to anything. Parent suggests) was instantaneously transformed into a gasp of delight as she opened a page at random.

I'd never have imagined that fields could be quite that interesting and beautiful.

Two more: there's nothing like being stuck next to a feverish, dozing girlie for getting a long novel finished.

( haiku and hiking (kinda)... )

The cow, taking a big
dreamy crap, turning
To look at me

Jack Kerouac