Reading with low expectations

When Daniel Woodrell was the featured author a week ago at the Writers in Paradise conference in St. Petersburg, he had this advice for readers: "Every fourth or fifth book, read something you don't think you'll like." It was by doing this, he said, that he discovered James Salter, a writer he didn't expect to like, but did.

Reading books you don't expect to enjoy is a lot to ask of any reader, but especially those of us who can't find enough time to read more than a fraction of the books we do want to read. Books require a big investment of time, and sacrificing this time to read anything that's not on our personal must-read list seems like a waste.

Yet Woodrell does make a good point. Just because we don't expect to like a book doesn't mean we won't like it, and reading books outside our comfort zone can expand that comfort zone and introduce us to new writers who may become favorites. And just because we start a book doesn't mean we are obligated to finish it. If you don't like a book after 50 pages, chuck it and turn to something you know you will enjoy.

As a book reviewer for many years, I have frequently found myself reading books I really did not want to read -- and sometimes enjoying them. I think, for example, of Gene Logsdon's 2008 novel The Last of the Husbandmen. Logsdon writes primarily about farming and gardening, and his few novels have gotten little attention. I did not expect to like The Last of the Husbandmen and was surprised when I did.

I think Woodrell's advice is especially good for those readers stuck in a particular groove -- those who read only mysteries or only romances or only nonfiction or only best sellers. These people need to broaden their horizons a little bit and try something different once in awhile.

I know a man who reads a lot and enjoys talking about books, but he confessed to me once that he never reads anything written by a woman. That seems outrageous to me. For starters, I think he should try Candice Millard's The River of Doubt, a book about Theodore Roosevelt's trip to the Amazon, which nearly cost him his life. I can't imagine him not liking that book, despite his bias against female writers.

No doubt there are also women who avoid books written by men. I knew a prolific writer named Robert Liston who once told me he also wrote romance novels under a woman's name. He refused to divulge his pen name for fear that women would no longer read them if they knew they were written by a man. Maybe he was right, but having a man's name hasn't seemed to stop Nicholas Sparks from being a best-selling romance writer.

Occasionally reading a book we don't expect to like is probably a good idea for all of us, even if it accomplishes nothing more than confirm for us that we were right in the first place.

Every moment changes the world

At various points throughout Michael Frayn's novel Spies, reviewed here a few days ago, the narrator Stephen Wheatley makes comments like "Everything has changed once again, and changed forever" and "The world has changed yet again." Profound things are happening in the life of the boy he was when these events occur, and each one restructures the world as he knows it.

I am inclined to believe that even seemingly minor actions can and often do restructure the world. Perhaps the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Brazil cannot really cause a tornado in the American Middle West, or whatever "the butterfly effect" supposes, but I do believe that small things can have widespread consequences. This idea is explored in the German film Run Lola Run. When Lola runs around rather than through the middle of a group of nuns on the street, it impacts differently both her own life and the lives of the nuns. Little things really do mean a lot.

Several years ago my wife and I found this to be dramatically true twice during a drive to Toronto. While on Interstate 90 in New York, we were passed by a flatbed truck carrying a weed trimmer. As it was going around us, the truck hit a bump in the road and the trimmer flew up into the air. When it came down, the truck was no longer there. It hit the pavement and bounced into our lane, barely missing us. Had we been traveling only slightly faster, it would have hit us.

Hours later as we approached Toronto on the multi-lane Gardiner Expressway, I glanced into my rear-view mirror and saw a red sports car careen from one side of the highway to the other and back again, somehow not hitting anyone (that I could see) despite the rush-hour traffic. Had we been moving only slightly slower, it would have struck us.

Our actions have ripples that change the world, or at least our own little part of it. Meanwhile, our lives are being rocked by the ripples caused by the actions and decisions of others. Just living is a heavy responsibility.

A character of another sort

"People want you to be what you write about," novelist Daniel Woodrell commented during his public presentation Wednesday night at the 9th annual Writers in Paradise conference at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg. He knows this from experience. Woodrell, the author of Winter's Bone and other novels about  poor, white people in the Ozarks, is often confused with his characters. Sometimes, he said, devoted readers will even give him jugs of whiskey at book signings.

Yet if he isn't really as rough-edged as most of his characters, it may only be by the grace of God. He grew up in the Ozarks (and lives there now), and the people he writes about are often based on people he has known, even members of his own family.

Woodrell read the opening pages of The Maid's Version, his next novel scheduled for publication in September. He said the book is based on stories his grandmother, once the illiterate maid for a prosperous family, used to tell about a tragic explosion at a local dance hall in which many of the town's young people were killed or terribly injured. The cause of the blast was never determined, but his grandmother always suspected that her employer had something to do with it. An investigation into the explosion was called off, Woodrell said, when the panel seemed to be getting too close to the truth. His novel will offer a fictionalized version of what happened that night.

Writing the missing book

When she was a student at the Iowa Writers Workshop, Ann Patchett said, "I wrote like I fell in love." She was passionate about writing and about those short stories she turned out. But just as a passionate romance can, ideally, turn into a durable marriage, so writing should, with time, become less emotional and yet more rewarding. "Now writing is really my job," she said at a Writers in Paradise event in St. Petersburg. "Both of these things (writing and love) get much better over time."

Patchett no longer writes short stories, but novels, including the best-selling State of Wonder. She gave up short stories, she said, because "I wasn't in a short-story amount of trouble." She was then working at a TGI Fridays and realized short stories were not going to be her ticket to the writing life she desired. "If I had an idea that good," she said, "I wouldn't blow it on a short story."

And although she is now the author of several well-received novels, Patchett said she realizes they all really tell the same story. "My story is a group of strangers who are thrown together to make a family," she said. She expects she will keep on telling that same story over and over again because it is her story, perhaps the only one she has to tell.

If that is the story she writes, perhaps it's because that's the story she most wants to read. Asked by novelist Dennis Lehane if she pictures a particular reader in her mind while she writes, she said no. "I guess my ideal reader is myself. I write the book I think is missing."

The cell phone problem

"I don't know how to write a novel in which characters have cell phones."

Novelist Ann Patchett made that rather surprising comment the other night at the opening of the annual Writers in Paradise conference at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Fla. It turns out, she was serious. In every novel she writes, she said, she must find a way to separate her characters from their cell phones. Things like drama, mystery, tension and suspense often require isolation, and how can a person with a working cell phone be truly isolated?

Patchett said she visited remote parts of the Amazon to research her most recent novel, State of Wonder. She was horrified to discover that even in one of the most isolated areas of the world, there was still good  phone reception.

Two other authors at the conference, Dennis Lehane and Andre Dubus III, echoed her feelings about cell phones.

Might cell phones help explain the growth in popularity of historical fiction? Are many of our most gifted writers setting their stories in earlier times expressly to avoid having to deal with cell phones?

As we read contemporary fiction, it might be interesting to watch for references to cell phones. How do writers make use of them and how often do they invent ways to neutralize them (sort of in the way the bad guys in stories used to cut telephone lines)?

Child's play

You wouldn't think that a story about two boys at play could turn into such a nail-biter, especially when neither child is ever in any real danger. Yet Michael Frayn's 2002 novel Spies reads like a thriller.

Certain odors can take us back to faraway places and long-ago times, and it is a smell that causes an old man, Stephen Wheatley, to remember a particular summer during World War II when he was growing up in a new neighborhood in London.

Stephen is a quiet boy, preyed on by bullies, whose only friend is Keith, also a loner. In their relationship, Keith is always the leader, Stephen always the follower. Keith invents the fanciful games they play. One day Keith announces, "My mother is a German spy." And so the boys, doing their patriotic duty, closely observe Keith's mother to try to learn her secrets.

It turns out that his mother, if perhaps not a spy, nevertheless does have secrets, and what the boys discover shakes up their lives and the lives of others in the neighborhood.

Frayn is marvelous writer, and Spies really is hard to put down, just like a more conventional thriller.

Inviting confusion

I recall a rundown motel, reportedly favored by prostitutes, that called itself Holiday Inc. It seems unlikely that any travelers ever thought they were staying at a Holiday Inn, but the motel's name still never seemed quite kosher. Reputable businesses usually select distinct business names and product names that will stand apart from the competition, not lead to possible confusion.

And this brings me to the two major newspapers in the Tampa Bay region of Florida. For years,  the Tampa Tribune and the St. Petersburg Times struggled for dominance, with the Times winning that struggle year after year. Then a year ago, in an apparent attempt to seal the deal, the Times became the Tampa Bay Times. It said it wanted to make it clear that it served, not just St. Petersburg, but the entire Bay area, but as I complained at the time in my previous blog, the change, rather than making anything clear, invited confusion with the Tampa Tribune.

Now the Tribune has struck back. A few days ago it launched an edition distributed on the other side of the Bay called the St. Petersburg Tribune. So now if you want the St. Petersburg paper, you have to look for the one that says Tampa at the top, and if you want the Tampa paper, you have to seek out the one that says St. Petersburg at the top.

This is an area with a great many winter visitors, so I can imagine that a lot of people are buying newspapers without knowing which one they are actually buying.

Holiday Inc. was an amusing name for a motel, but I doubt it ever actually fooled anybody. Fooling people, however, seems to be the whole point of the Tampa Bay Times and the St. Petersburg Tribune.