Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, and books on tape. You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.
Two very wise writers have spoken about why we read and why we must be good readers.
I define story as a narrative of events (external or psychological) which moves through time or implies the passage of time, and which involves change.
I define plot as a form of story which uses action as its mode, usually in the form of conflict, and which closely and intricately connects one act to another, usually through a causal chain, ending in a climax…
Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing.
Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.
Pgs. 145, 146 Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin
Reading this helped me understand better the different kinds of books that I read and enjoy. I read a great many mystery and scifi/fantasy stories that are plot driven. Yes, the characters often grow and change which makes the book better than just pure conflict on a battlefield of a strange world or in space. I have often said in my diaries that I don’t need excessive violence or unending action to find a book suspenseful and Le Guin explains why.
Books of essays by people who left a homeland and came to America often show someone losing, changing, discovering. The books are poignant and life affirming.
In The Republic of Imagination, Azar Nafisi says:
(pg. 3)
Stories are not mere flights of fantasy or instruments of political power and control. They link us to our past, provide us with critical insight into the present and enable us to envision our lives not just as they are but as they should be or might become. Imaginative knowledge is not something you have today and discard tomorrow. It is a way of perceiving the world and relating to it.
(pg. 16)
Every state, including a totalitarian one, has its lures and seductions. The price we pay for succumbing is conformity, a surrender of one’s self to the dictates of a group. Fiction is an antidote, a reminder of the power of individual choice.
Every novel has at its core a choice by at least one of its protagonists, reminding the reader that she can choose to be her own person, to go against what her parents or society or the state tell her to and follow the faint but essential beat of her own heart.
(pg. 17)
If we believe in the Constitution, ‘We the People,’ then we know that the task of defending the right to imagination and free thought is the responsibility not just of writers and publishers but of readers, too.
(pg.21)
Dorothy, Alice, Hansel and Gretel all return home, but they will never be the same, because they have learned to look at the world through the alternative eyes of the imagination. That essential transformation is a change of heart. In a depersonalized and atomized environment, the heart preserves our essential humanity and makes possible our connection and communication with the rest of the world.
We the readers are like Dorothy or Alice: we step into this magical world in order to return and retell the story through our own eyes, thus giving new meaning to the story as well as to our lives.
If the story of my life were a plot in a book, it would have plenty of changes in it. I am glad for that. It wasn’t just time that changed me, it was books and knowledge.
Diaries of the week:
Write On! The joys of cutting words.
by SensibleShoes
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Self-publishing 101: Using LaTex to create a beautiful book
by akadjian
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Books Go Boom! Jorge Luis Borges's 'The Library of Babel'
by Brecht
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Note: Thursday at 2:00 PM is
Self-Publishing 101 by akadjian
NOTE: plf515 is taking a break from WAYR. I am sending him best wishes and hoping he will be back soon.