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The End of an Epoch
Jun. 8th, 2021 11:22 amMy city has ended its mask mandate, which means that the library has also ended its mask mandate, which means... well, many things. But most immediately it means that we are no longer stationing a person at the door all day to ensure compliance, which means that I will no longer get to spend hours sitting at the door, reading blissfully away uninterrupted but for the occasional pause to chirrup "Can you pull your mask over your nose, please?"
(If you've ever wondered about my overstuffed Wednesday Reading Memes, this is how they came about.)
I am of course bereft, but in terms of books the timing has worked out well. When we first set up door duty, I made a list of books that I thought would work well for door reading, from which I proceeded to deviate constantly because that's who I am as a person... but even so I've gotten most of the way through it. I rounded off my final day of door duty just a couple of chapters shy of the end of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel.
I've meant to read this book for years and am glad that I've finally gotten to it. A few points that really struck me:
1) In the introductory chapter, Forster introduces an image of all the English language writers in history scribbling away in a great reading room, and groups them not by time period or genre or literary tradition but by the outlook of the work & its approach to life. This is probably only useful to certain approaches to criticism but it seems very useful for book recommendations.
2) One point that Forster returns to is that a novel can hang its hat, so to speak, on any of the aspects that he enumerates: a novel may be poorly written and bizarrely plotted and people by cardboard cutouts, but if the story is good enough none of that will matter and people will keep reading, filled with the urgent desire to know what happens. (Forster argues that a story is a sequence of events, while a plot is a sequence of events connected by causality - that is, a story may be a picaresque adventure with little connection between episodes, but a plot demands that one episode lead to another.) Or a novel might lean on its scintillating prose, or its compelling characters - one really good aspect can make a book beloved, even if its other parts are lacking or even deeply flawed.
3) Speaking of flaws, Forster comments that novels are very apt to go off at the end, which is something I've noticed myself, and puzzled over, because many of my favorite novels have endings that are disappointing or even bad... and yet the book is still a favorite. Clearly there's a distinction between an ending that is unsatisfying (but you've got to stop somewhere) and an ending that actively spoils the book that came before it.
4. The chapter I just finished (which perhaps I wasn't paying enough attention to; I was distracted because we were running short of masks) is about fantasy, which Forster seems to define differently than everyone else in the world. Possibly I should read it again and see if that clears things up.
(If you've ever wondered about my overstuffed Wednesday Reading Memes, this is how they came about.)
I am of course bereft, but in terms of books the timing has worked out well. When we first set up door duty, I made a list of books that I thought would work well for door reading, from which I proceeded to deviate constantly because that's who I am as a person... but even so I've gotten most of the way through it. I rounded off my final day of door duty just a couple of chapters shy of the end of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel.
I've meant to read this book for years and am glad that I've finally gotten to it. A few points that really struck me:
1) In the introductory chapter, Forster introduces an image of all the English language writers in history scribbling away in a great reading room, and groups them not by time period or genre or literary tradition but by the outlook of the work & its approach to life. This is probably only useful to certain approaches to criticism but it seems very useful for book recommendations.
2) One point that Forster returns to is that a novel can hang its hat, so to speak, on any of the aspects that he enumerates: a novel may be poorly written and bizarrely plotted and people by cardboard cutouts, but if the story is good enough none of that will matter and people will keep reading, filled with the urgent desire to know what happens. (Forster argues that a story is a sequence of events, while a plot is a sequence of events connected by causality - that is, a story may be a picaresque adventure with little connection between episodes, but a plot demands that one episode lead to another.) Or a novel might lean on its scintillating prose, or its compelling characters - one really good aspect can make a book beloved, even if its other parts are lacking or even deeply flawed.
3) Speaking of flaws, Forster comments that novels are very apt to go off at the end, which is something I've noticed myself, and puzzled over, because many of my favorite novels have endings that are disappointing or even bad... and yet the book is still a favorite. Clearly there's a distinction between an ending that is unsatisfying (but you've got to stop somewhere) and an ending that actively spoils the book that came before it.
4. The chapter I just finished (which perhaps I wasn't paying enough attention to; I was distracted because we were running short of masks) is about fantasy, which Forster seems to define differently than everyone else in the world. Possibly I should read it again and see if that clears things up.
