A little later than usual (and a little longer than usual given the Sunday slot) but who cares? Time for this month's edition of reading clearout, where I briefly cover a few books I won't summarize in a full reading review.
Tell It Slant by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola (July 2021)
This is a highly regarded instructional work for creative nonfiction, but for me it fell short of expectations. It's almost certainly a question about fit - Tell It Slant seems designed to guide coursework for an introduction to creative nonfiction, but given the lack of alternatives for slightly advanced levels I think others have deputized it as an appropriate resource for writers with more experience.
There is certainly plenty for any writer to learn from this book, most of which I've collected in my book notes. There are some good insights about craft, such as how using present tense is a way to avoid the temptation for summarization, or that reviewing variants of "to be" is a necessary step for sharpening prose. I liked the obvious but easily forgotten idea that the best topics often follow from the details of our lives that others find the most interesting, generally revealed by the manner or intensity of their questions. I think the suggestion to ask interview subjects their preferred questions has application beyond the scope of researching for a writing project. There is even a helpful technique for finding endings - if you keep the theme of the work in mind while writing, it simplifies the search for the right conclusion.
It may be worth noting that I read the third edition of the book, which has an anthology of example essays. I reread "The Coroner's Photographs" from this section. It also contained "Math 1619", a work I highlighted when I reviewed Shell Game back in December 2019.
A Writer's Diary by Virginia Woolf (June 2021)
This is actually a reread (I first read it at the end of 2015) but I doubt there will be a third round given that after this reading I couldn't figure out what I liked so much about it a few years ago. This isn't necessarily to criticize Woolf's diary, but the sense is that my future forays into her work will focus on her essays and novels.
A short glance over my book notes points out some interesting comments (my top pick being that nothing bores like meeting a new person who says the same old things) but I think the best parts from the work were the short insights into Woolf's philosophy about writing. She notes, for example, the difficulty of continuing her work while she is lacking sufficient praise, or that a major challenge for writing is the necessity to keep going long after losing a project's creative spark. These comments are much like the common contemporary remarks about writing in the way they accept the general difficulty of the craft, but Woolf never drifts toward clichés and metaphors when she has a concrete supporting detail within reach. Perhaps these direct remarks were enabled by the fact of the diary having been written outside the view of the public, but I also think it speaks to her superior writing ability - just as she can write a better novel than her peers, she can also write a better commentary on the craft.
Amusingly, what's remained with me in the weeks after reading is a note she makes about America's climate - it's almost entirely disagreeable, particularly in the summers when everyone sweats all day and no one can sleep at night. It's perhaps necessary to remind readers that Woolf wrote these entries in the shadows of two world wars, when no one had access to today's (micro) climate-changing amenities. Still, as a longtime complainer about our summers, I did feel slightly vindicated to have a giant of world literature on my side.
Memoirs of a Kamikaze by Kazuo Odachi (May 2021)
It's a shame that in these times I never had the occasion to hold this book in front of my face on a crowded Green Line commute - distracted passersby have a tendency to make comments about such books, where the topic represents something about which they know just enough to forget they know nothing. That said, it's not clear to me how I would have responded to any questions about this book while I was still reading it. This is based on a recent realization that it's the type of book about which readers might be better off maintaining a certain public silence, lest any remarks discomfort those who've long settled for the simplified understanding of war offered at the local middle school.
Odachi was a teenage pilot who was assigned to a kamikaze unit in the final year of World War II. The first 75% or so of this memoir is a gripping and sometimes difficult account of his experience. A firsthand account of this period is a highly unusual find on an English language bookshelf, and there were a few surprising details that I pulled into my book notes. I think the reason why these books are important is stated in a comment made by Odachi himself about his service - by facing and acknowledging death, he and his peers discovered a meaning of life in the sense of achieving an understanding about how to be human, which is a realization that often proves elusive to the average experience. By reading such accounts from the brink of the unique oblivion generated by the grinding reality of war, we relate to a perspective from afar that gives us a brief but invaluable reminder that others found significance even during lives defined by such hopeless circumstances
