Readers Build Vivid Mental Simulations Of Narrative Situations

So I had a simulation running in my head Sunday night, when I stayed up until 2am reading the excellent Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, a very nice sci-fi dystopia for pre-teens, but works well as light entertainment for adults too. Elliot liked all the fighting, but I thought the emotional complexity of the main character was nicely drawn.

ScienceDaily (Feb. 5, 2009) — A new brain-imaging study is shedding light on what it means to "get lost" in a good book — suggesting that readers create vivid mental simulations of the sounds, sights, tastes and movements described in a textual narrative while simultaneously activating brain regions used to process similar experiences in real life.

Nicole Speer, lead author of this study, says findings demonstrate that reading is by no means a passive exercise. Rather, readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative. Details about actions and sensation are captured from the text and integrated with personal knowledge from past experiences. These data are then run through mental simulations using brain regions that closely mirror those involved when people perform, imagine, or observe similar real-world activities.

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Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis

I've just finished this beautiful long historical sci-fi novel from 1992 by Connie Willis, about a grad student in medieval history who time-travels back to the 1300s and is accidentally stranded in 1348, the black plague. There is lots of history, but the novel really turns on a portrayal of the fierce love the student comes to feel for the child Agnes. Willis is so amazingly assured in drawing the dialogue between the two, as the plague descends on the village, that it cannot be other than real, and yet it is a novel. Breathtaking, to me.

French BD classic: L'heritier (Largo Winch)

Largo Winch is the inheritor of one of the world's largest fortunes... but he's irrepressibly cool and adventurous... and someone is always trying to kill him. Action-packed BD that can be read in an enjoyable 30 minutes... like watching a TV show. What I don't get is how or why anyone would pay $15 for something like this- you can watch any TV show for free and get the same entertainment value. I guess kids like Elliot read them multiple times (E read all the Tintin ones dozens of times). So I suppose on a per read basis it turns out to under a dollar. Not so bad. Good fun, and wonderful graphics.

Why am I blogging about this on FAVL site? Few American readers know that BD are the literature of choice over there in francophone West Africa. I find it fascinating how graphic novels never really caught on in the U.S. QWERTY anyone?

The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak

I'm trying to get a collection of books together for the students who will be going to Burkina Faso on the Reading West Africa study abroad program... in particular books about the power of books, or the nature of reading itself, just so even in their leisure reading the students are thinking about the importance of libraries and especially the transformative power of fiction. So in that vein I read The Book Thief. I can't recall who suggested it to me. I'm not sure the writing is Coetzee-quality (but then what is?) but the story definitely makes this a perfect leisure reading book. Grim, but not so grim as The Road. Nor, for that matter, as grim as Uwem Akpan's short story, Fattening for Gabon, which the more I think about it is truly a brilliant piece of ethnographic fiction... the character of Fofo, the uncle, is so sharply drawn it almost brings tears just to think about him.

Anyway, I strongly recommend The Book Thief for adults and readers above age 12 who are able to appreciate very strong images of death and suffering; the book is about the grim life of a young girl growing up in a small town in Germany during WWII... lots of death all around. Indeed, the narrator is Death, a clever device.

The amazing power of Lois Lowry

So I just paused for breath and found that I had read 123 pages of the semi-sequel to The Giver, entitled Gathering Blue. So far it is a beautiful children's story. It is a truism that the best stories always involve an orphan with a special destiny, who hears the voice of her mother in her dreams and times of stress, calmly evoking the warmth of the hearth. But Lowry takes that commonplace and makes you want to be that orphan.

Messenger

Just finished Lois Lowry's wonderful, but perhaps not quite interesting enough for ten-year olds, book Messenger. There's a very nice plot summary available here. We had been listening to The Giver, the Newbury-award book that precedes, by perhaps 40 year, the events this book. It was a pleasant surprise as I was reading to gradually realize the books were connected. The genre is hard to pin down- it is very small-scale fantasy, I guess, more heavy on the awe than the fantasy. The awe, in fact, is constructed by the reader knowing that the fantasy is metaphor, and not meant to be literal. The two books complement beautifully Alan Garner's Stone Quartet, which focuses all on the awe, with the fantasy only hinted at.

Far far away from Uwem Akpan

We try to be good, but we can't, and occasionally we indulge in the trashiest sort of fiction... I couldn't resist buying Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle. For a simple reason: my mother's nickname is Dodie. Written in 1948, it is a very self-conscious and deliberate heir to Jane Austen. Very trashy, pretty decent writing. By the end it becomes tedious. But her descriptions of the "mad" father's attempt to follow up with a sequel to his literary bestseller Jacob Wrestling is really interested and quite modernists.

Anyway, they made the novel into a movie a couple years ago, which I have no interest in watching. But if you want something a little different for night-time reading, this book is it.

Want to feel bad about humans? Read Neil Gaiman's The Eternals

I read it last night to see if appropriate for my 10 year old. I'm not a big fan of superhero stuff, but this was pretty good. Very cheeky, and very up to date. Very very far from Africa though. But, the blog rules say it's OK to indulge every now and then.

Cannot recommend this enough

I just finished Alan Garner’s “Tom Fobbles Day”, the third of his Stone Book quartet. Yesterday I had read "The Stone Book." These tiny novellas- about 60 pages each, are beautifully written masterworks. Even though their main characters are children, and in child-like mysterious situations, filled with portents of destiny, they are not really for children, except those who will truly appreciate exceptional writing.

Talking on a misty morning provokes profound reflections

Got up early this morning to give a talk about FAVL at the Sunnyvale-Sunrise Rotary Club. I like breakfast, so not problem! A warm and gracious audience, asking good questions about our efforts to produce local books and the summer reading program. After, as I was driving out of the parking lot of the Sunken Gardens golf club, where the Rotary meets, I saw through the mist a group of six Japanese women golfing (well, I presumed, given the location, time of day, etc.) Just the previous night I finally finished a wonderful novel, The Sound of the Mountain,by Yasunari Kawabata. It is a delightfully slow meditation on aging and family, and the the main character, the elderly (for the time) Shingo, notices the natural world in a way that I only aspire to. There is nothing "particularly" Japanese about the novel; it is a universal story, though there is plenty of Japanese culture in it. So the profound reflection? I love getting older (I'm in my forties). I know I'm going to regret saying that in thirty years. But the ability to make ever more connections in my head, with my past life as a person, is a really nice feeling. "Sweet," as the kids say.

Bande Dessinées

I've never been a big BD reader, but at the Martin Luther King, Jr. library (San Jose's main library) I picked up a copy of Godard-Ribera's Le Grand Scandale: San Francisco. It was pretty good. Nice illustrations, some humor. Took about an hour to read. Meanwhile, Elliot read five Yu-gi-oh illustrated comic books (graphic novelties, he called them) in a single evening. So I have some friendly reading competition.

Why did I suddenly remember this?

Always Sunset - 2, a lovely if traditional Japanese move set in the late 1950s, that I saw on the plane back from Burkina Faso.

Spring, 1959… four months after the events of the first film. The Olympics in Tokyo has officially been announced, and Japan is about to take its first step into a period of high economic growth. Chagawa has been living with Junnosuke but is still unable to forget Hiromi, the love of his life who had left Third Street without a word. One day, Kawabuchi returns to take Junnosuke away. Chagawa is given permission to take care of Junnosuke on the condition that the child enjoys an ordinary standard of living. To prove himself to Kawabuchi and to show Hiromi that he has become a better man, Chagawa begins to write a literary piece to win the Akutagawa Prize, a dream that he had given up long ago.

Isn't that weird? One of the main characters in this ordinary working class neighborhood wants to win the Akutagawa Prize, and everybody knows what the prize is and wants him to win (they help him etc.). This is 40 years ago when Japan was very poor, though obviously wealthy compared with much of present day Africa. But hard to imagine any ordinary person in Lagos, Nairobi or any urban center in Africa knowing or caring about a literary prize. And even more bizarre, his story (of course he wins, what, did I spoil it for you?) sounds like the most trite, ordinary story (well, on the basis of them reading aloud the final closing line... and admittedly I'm going by the subtitles ;-). Why, even the most ordinary writer in Central African Republic could write a story like that! So we need a major donor to come up with prize money and publicity please!

Not out of Africa, but an interesting read nevertheless

On the plane back from Burkina read Appointment in Samarra, published in 1934, by John O'Hara. Interesting technique employed, of not ever quite knowing what the novel is about, and then even at the end not really sure. There are multiple plots, and different characters take center stage at different points. You think the novel is about one person, and then that person never appears again. The sociological commentary on the well-to-do just as the Depression hits is very interesting.

More Ian McEwan

Over the last couple days I read On Chesil Beach, a remarkable exploration of a wedding night gone horribly awry. This one should not be made into a movie, please don't do it. Don't sell the rights. Don't even think about it. It's all the interior monologue of the two protagonists. While somewhat lacking in verisimilitude (could they really have talked so little both being so intelligent?) I found however that it easily reverberated with my own experiences (nothing like the novel, but analogous). And in Burkina and Ghana, even simple interactions are so ripe for mutual misunderstanding.... not just with "westerners", but amongst people living in the same village for years. I love it when we're in the middle of a FAVL discussion and one of the librarians gives a quizzical look to one of the others, like, "I can't figure you out..."

Ian McEwan's Atonement

Read in in a five hour sitting on the flight from New York to San Jose last week. Curious that no airlines advertise on-board libraries. Jetblue makes a big deal out of their 64 channels. But practically any book is more entertaining and customer-satisfying than the pabulum available. There can be no greater demonstration of what the Jesuits mean when they aspire to the "highest humanism" than to be reading Atonement, take a break, accidentally flip to Fox News, and watch "not highest humanism".

That said, there is something a bit too precious about the book. I enjoyed the self-conscious asides about crafting a novel, a somewhat welcome contrast to the over-serious Crow Lake. But at the same time, important elements of that self-consciousness are left out. Why are the characters in Atonement impossibly rich? Important for the story? Can only rich people be "minds" that need to be understood? Or does McEwan understand the market for fiction, where rich people are going to sell more movie rights than poor people? But a wonderful book, I thought.

Mary Lawson - Crow Lake and The Other Side of the Bridge

These meticulous character studies of children growing up to be adults in a tiny farm community in Canada are gripping and Zola-esque (but much shorter) tableau's where destiny and choice come to a head in the second to last chapter. So they are deeply satisfying reads... until the second to last chapter, because when destiny and chance come to a head, well, the experienced reader always sees an author making choices, so suddenly the "transporting away" evaporates which is a little disappointing. But 200 pages of fantastic prose for $19.95 (or free at your local library) is a bargain, natch. Thanks to Sheila Conway at SCU's Orradre Library for reading at the coffeehouse one day and prompting me to ask what the book was.