Posts tagged with “idea”

29 May

On Holiday Reading

05:31 AM
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I think there really should be a post on my blog that discusses Holiday reading and books.  In fact there ought to be one whenever I take a holiday.  The last was probably for going to Wales, but this was only a weekend and Dylan Thomas remained untouched!

This time it is a week and it is in Northumbria.  Reading seems a more likely proposition.  My Ereader is loaded with “White Tiger” which is this months choice for the Brixton urban bookgroup.  And I have “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen”  on load from my library which is the choice of the reading group there this month.  I also have the unabridged audio book of the same work for the car journey, which I am almost certain we shall manage to fit in since the drive is over six hours long, from London to Northumbria.

That gives the context, and I shall be especially interested to compare my experience of the three media forms, audio, Ereader, and paper.  I shall either make additional posts or edit and expand this one to give an update, assuming I am online whilst on holiday.  Should I be offline the posts will appear on my return, in June!

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3 February

The Invention of Everything Else

05:57 AM
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I approached this book, the last months for my library book group, with eager anticipation.  Then I attended the group before getting through more than a couple dozen pages, and listened to the book be roundly criticised.  And then I read the rest of the book.  So it is interesting to me how I now react to the book.

One of the reasons I was eager to read the book was simply what I think is a great title.  I am fairly convinced the title alone is a large part of the reason for th ebooks apparent success.  The other reason is that one of the main subjects in this fictional account is the figure of Nicola Tesla.  Throughtout my youth my father and a friend were often fiddling with a Tesla coil in the basement and placing razor blades in the middle of pyramids to sharpen them, and other such weirdly trendy things in the zeitgeist of the times.  So I was eager to find out more.

The book is written with some engaging language, in places the descriptive prose is positively poetic.  The research seems to be fairly sound, and I have to admit I was quite well engaged with the New York of the times the novel is concerned with, primarily around the thirties and forties one imagines.  However the main “meat” at the centre of the novel promises much but fails to deliver anything one can truly get ones teeth into.  Someone at the reading group said I may as well ready the first thirty pages and the last thirty, I would not be missing much.  I could not take this advice, but looking back over the book I can see just what he meant!

The other problem is that one is unsure how accurate the impression one gains of Nicola Tesla is.  Granted, Ms Hunt is creating a fictional character, but there are so very many direct quotes and facts which she has drawn on and placed within the work that I think it is flawed if it does not try to faithfully recreate at least the author’s impression of the character.  And do so without adding a mish mash of fiction to muddy the waters.  Now the only test of this is to research oneself - and I have not yet done so, but if I have time intend to, look into the life of Mr Tesla.  In this case there is plentiful material to draw on.  Someone from the book group had looked into his own autobiographical volumes and I imagine they could be fascinating.  There was one aspect I seriously enjoyed and which the reading group surprisingly overlooked; this was the description of a newly opened and extensive public library in New York.  If I ever get to visit New York I should like to trackthis building down and visit it (assuming it is based in fact and still exists).  I enjoyed the use of this setting thorougly and thought it was quite cleverly deployed, far more so than the New Yorker Hotel which I became bored by.  Also after looking the hotel up in Wikipedia I do believe I actually stayed there when visiting New York in the ninetties and I am sorry to say it had none of the features on display that are so well portrayed in the novel. Perhaps it says something that I found the locations more engaging than most of the characters!

Having said all this there is something the book tries to do which I think is what it was intended to be about.  I am not sure I would get it from the first and last thirty pages.  I believe the intense relationship between a father and a daughter is sketched in a little after the opening of the novel.  Then in concluding the prose seems to shift up a gear as the daughter deals with the death of her father and her future after the loss.  I do believe this is what Samantha Hunt might have taken as the central theme, but then again it could have been a love triangle which seems to be sketched in (and how much truth in that?), it could have been a romance (one is always tantalisingly offered but not really portrayed in the novel), it had many possibilities but ultimately tried to approach all of them and therein lies the failure in my opinion.

Still, great title it must be said! I wonder if the title helped garner the Orange prize nomination and other awards?  Somehow I suspect contacts and networking are everything there and the title largely incidental…  By the way I like the openning page of her website linked above - worth a click, though I suspect completely opaque from an accessibility viewpoint.

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3 November

The plot thickens

07:43 PM
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This morning the reason my NaNo word count jumped is I finally managed to thrash out some sort of a plot outline with a few sketchy details.  In the process I realised where I planned to intersperse some of the blog posts that fit into the book.  This is where it gets interesting…

It occured to me that in addition to the main character(s) blogging or emailing I would also involve some comments from the blog.  So dear readers this means that in future you too could become part of my NaNoWriMo novel!  I have not thought it through - perhaps I have to add an “About Nano” page with all sorts of disclaimers that I retain rights to use comments… I am not sure if that is required, have to look into it if I have time.  Of course no comments may come - then I shall have to create my own log ons and make “faked” ones!  Oh what a tangled web we weave!

I had to dash then to practice the Elgar - on returning I descended into many matters geeky (reformatting external Hard Drive, finalising laptop recovery and more which I forget)… Before I know it now it’s the wee small hours and I am still awaiting the format of the drive (well, it is 320GB!).

So far as I can see the idea still holds water… I shall make a page and paste the writing I have so far into it - this will have notes so that you can get the gist of it.  Of course i should warn you that if you intended to read whatever I manage to produce then the notes would give you a pretty good idea what is going to happen!

Rather than pages I could put all the writing to another blog at a different domain (effectively using the blog as a publishing engine of sorts).  This idea flies better then pages (although i shall make ONE).  BUT it will take up valuable time to implement and I really need to try to focus myself into my writing far more.  It is bad enough that I have to drive to Derbyshire to sing the Elgar this weekend, though I’ll take the laptop and try to snatch what moments I can for writing (and, of course, making a blog post!).

- maybe even make a page for the Nano book - but that would need some sort of “read more” function built in and i am not at allsure that can be done at page level….

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