Why? Why was my last posting in June?! I have two problems with keeping this blog up to date: I prefer to write a review immediately after reading the book and do not like to start reading a new book until I have posted the review. If a few days pass with no time for writing, I start another book and get too removed from the review. Sigh…I am not obsessive on many issues, but writing is one of them. This entry will be a quick review of one book with a brief mention of the prior novel read.
If you have never explored Book Riot, I highly recommend this site for honestly interesting articles and book recommendations. Recently I read one of their recommendations, What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund; it is a thought provoking examination of our minds at work when we read and a deceptively quick read because you will want to read it again…and again.
Peter Mendelsund is the associate art director of Alfred A. Knopf, book cover designer, and a “recovering classical pianist” (book cover). He approaches the topic through focusing on several famous works including Anna Karenina. His love of music and art are also strong components. It is a fluid use of examples familiar to most readers. This reader found herself making some immediate connections with things she thought about while reading No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod. I delayed writing about MacLeod’s novel because I needed to let it settle in my mind. I thought, mistakenly, that Mendelsund’s book would be one I could read for a bit and put down. But by page 19, I knew that was not going to happen:
Most authors (wittingly, unwittingly) provide their fictional characters with more behavior than physical description. Even if an author excels at physical description, we are left with shambling concoctions of stray body parts and random detail (authors can’t tell us everything). We fill in gaps. We shade them in. We gloss over them. We elide. Anna [Karenina]: her hair, her weight—these are facets only, and do not make up a true image of a person.
Of course! And it already had me thinking: how much description of a character do authors really give? How clearly do we see a character? I’ve thought about this many times. I don’t see characters clearly – just enough. While reading No Great Mischief I envisioned body types and general features but not true faces. Even books I love and have read multiple times do not create exact images of characters in my mind. It is not important to know the exact features of Hester Prynne or Huck Finn; their beliefs and actions are the importance of character. Character is not defined by looks.
Mendelsund discusses the issue of characters brought to life in films: “One should watch a film adaption of a favorite book only after considering, very carefully, the fact that the casting of the film may very well become the permanent casting of the book in one’s mind. This is a very real hazard” (41). I stopped reading for a moment because one of my favorite novels, To Kill a Mockingbird, is a victim of this experience. I saw the film before reading Harper Lee’s novel. When I read it, all the characters were clear images in my mind: clear images of the actors performing the roles. Those images were so real; years later, teaching it for the first time, I bought the film on VCR (latest technology of the time). I was shocked to discover the snowman scene had been edited out. Colleagues convinced me it was never in the film, but the actors/characters were so clear in my mind, I saw them while reading that scene. Thinking about it now, I guess I was “reading a movie.”
His thoughts on reading are haunting me now in a wonderful way. This book has not changed me as a reader, but it has changed the way I will discuss books. “Words are effective not because of what they carry in them, but for their latent potential to unlock the accumulated experience of the reader” (303). No one ever reads the same book twice; I may read a book I have read before, but I am a different person. I have discussed this many times with students. It is why I enjoy reading books multiple times. “To read is: to look through; to look past…though also, to look myopically, hopefully, toward…There is very little looking at” (334-5).
Mendelsund, Peter. What We See When We Read. Vintage Books: New York, 2014. Print.
And…No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod is a marvelous, award-winning Canadian novel. Unfortunately, MacLeod is one of the creative voices we lost in 2014. The narrator, Alexander MacDonald, “guides us through his family’s mythic past as he recollects the heroic stories of his people: loggers, miners, drinkers, adventurers; men forever in exile, forever linked to their clan…beginning with the legendary patriarch who left the Scottish Highlands in 1779 for Nova Scotia” (from the back cover).
MacLeod, Alistair. No Great Mischief. McClelland & Stewart LTD: Toronto, 2001. Print.
