Bad Habits
I’ve been thinking a fair bit lately about how I read what I read, and how I enjoy it. Or, what’s in it that I enjoy. It seems to me that much of the pleasure in my reading comes about from bad habits. Which is to say, habits that I can’t help but think ought to be bad, but which nevertheless feel central to the act of reading. Maybe that feeling’s an illusion; maybe it’s the secret why bad habits become habits. At any rate, I thought I’d be self-indulgent this week and throw out what I’ve come up with, as I’d love to hear if any of it resonates with anyone else’s experience of reading.
My first bad habit is a tendency to make a preliminary judgement about a book after only a page or two. Maybe even less. That’s a judgement that can, and often does, change as I read on. But it still feels like I’m having a response — equal parts emotional, imaginative, and rational — based on incomplete information. Of course one has the right to a first impression, and of course it’s worth keeping an eye on whether the book you’re reading is repaying the time you put into it. But the reaction I have is something broader than that; it’s a kind of synecdochic sense of the book that derives from reading a small part of it. And it can be not just misleading, but horribly misguided.
A book like The Lord of the Rings grows as it goes on; it grew as it was written, and its shape as a story tends to reflect the way its characters go on journeys to unexpected places. A book like Little, Big (which I think is the best post-Tolkien novel of the fantastic I’ve read) keeps building thematically and narratively as it goes on, and makes that act of building into a structural principle of the novel: the fact that the story gets bigger the further in you go relates directly to one of the major themes of the book. So in both cases, you can’t really judge the book from the opening pages, and in both cases it may be a while before you really get a sense of what’s going on. In both cases that distance, that development, how the registers change over the course of the story, is key to the whole experience.
We’re slowly capturing all the online fiction we’ve published here over the past 12 years as part of our Black Gate Online Fiction series. This week we present the complete text of Alex Kreis’s “The Renunciation of the Crimes of Gharad the Undying,” one of the shortest tales to ever appear in Black Gate.
Today, with finally a free minute between holiday commitments and work deadlines, I took a minute to hop over to Patrick Rothfuss’s blog, because I had not yet donated to the Worldbuilders charity and, as you can see on the right, Rothfuss and I (and my wife) are all pretty tight … and contemplative.
To my surprise, I got a bunch of emails asking for more details about the weird teaching gig I described in