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Posts from the ‘Book Recommendations’ Category

Aug 16

Water for Elephants, Masterful Writing in a Modern Day Romantic Tale

“But my final thoughts are tactile: the underside of my forearm lying above the swell of her breasts. Her lips under mine, soft and full. And the one detail I can neither fathom or shake, the one that haunts me into sleep: the feel of her fingertips tracing the outline of my face.”
– Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants (page 156)

Water for Elephants: A Novel is an example of a successful novel with great writing and a plot that challenges the norms of a romantic tale.

First published to unexpected but wide acclaim in 2006, Water for Elephants spent twelve weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list and ranked first on the Barnes & Nobles Paperback Fiction Bestseller List. Popularity of the book spread beyond the US with translations of the novel into over 44 languages. In 2011, the movie Water for Elephants was released and grossed over 113 million USD in ticket sales.

But once you read the book, Ms. Gruen’s success is not so surprising.

Sara Gruen masterfully sets pace by combining scenes and times so seamlessly her words communicate both at the same time. For example, she writes, “The gravy on the meat loaf has already formed a skin.” (Gruen 8). The image does more than indicate a few minutes have passed, it shows a specific picture, that all of the readers will relate to and find disheartening. Who likes gravy with skin? We not only see the clock ticking, we see the retirement home, the thick gravy, the skin, the blandness, and the monotony. Not only is time indicated but a mood is set and the environment is described, all in one sentence.

Subtlety makes Sara Gruen’s writing poignant. While rambling about the downsides of age, the 90 something year old Jacob predictably reflects on aching limbs and muddled minds. At the end of his list, however, he states that age silently spreads cancer throughout your spouse. (Gruen 12). The personal fact is unexpected and catches the reader off guard. Sure age is a terrible thief but the riveting detail shared in the passage is how much Jacob feels cheated that his wife has been taken away from him. Up to that point, the reader isn’t aware he has a wife. In one line, we know he has a wife, she has died of cancer and he is always thinking about her. His love and her omnipresence stabs a knife through the reader’s heart more sharply than an entire paragraph singing her praises.

Gruen further heightens the intensity of her character’s pain by first painting the canvas of the world as it should be, only in the next paragraph to dash the sanctity of this world into a thousand pieces with unexpected news of what the world has become. When Jacob is fetched from a lecture by school administrators, he thinks, “If I get expelled now, my father will kill me. No question about it. Never mind what it will do to my mother. Okay, so maybe I drank a little whiskey, but it’s not like I had anything to do with the fiasco in the cattle—.” In Jacob’s world, this is the worst that can happen and he does not suspect that something far worse lurks ahead.

A few pages later, Jacob draws these two worlds together in two lines, “This morning, I had parents. This morning, they ate breakfast.” A tragic death and departure each cause the characters great pain. This pain can be amplified by accentuating their innocent unexpectedness of events about to occur.

Last but not least, Gruen creates characters who are realistic because they are contradictory. She gets away with this by openly acknowledging the inconsistency:

It’s hard to reconcile this August with the other one, and to be honest, I don’t try very hard. I’ve seen flashes of this August before – this brightness, this conviviality, this generosity of spirit – but I know what he’s capable of, and I won’t forget it. The others can believe what they like, but I don’t believe for a second that this is the real August and the other an aberration. And yet I can see how they might be fooled. (Gruen 229).

Along these lines, Water for Elephants may represent the advent of the modern-day romantic tale. In this new version, the heroine finds herself caught up in a love triangle and discovers true love in the other man. And as if that isn’t change enough, the other man enters the scene not subsequent to her marriage but rather during it.

Water for Elephants combines historical facts with fiction as the backdrop to a tale of romance. Regis’ basic definition of a romance novel is, “…prose fiction that tells the story of courtship and betrothal of one of more heroines” (Regis 14). The novel even fulfills Regis’ eight narrative elements of romance novels. Of course, the lack of a happy-end along the lines of ‘boy-and-girl marry, and live happily ever after, ’ will no doubt prompt many rule-abiding romance readers to picket in protest. But personally, I enjoy the English Patients, Bridges Over Madison Counties and Out of Africas that tell tales of romance that are anything but simple. Life is not simple. And how many times can Nicholas Sparks be considered a writer of “love” stories rather than romances before someone takes a serious look at how have “agreed” to define the romance genre? But I am getting ahead of myself.

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Works Cited
Genre, Writing. “The WD Interview: Sara Gruen | WritersDigest.com.” Write Better, Get Published, Be Creative | WritersDigest.com. Web. 7 Nov. 2011. <http://www.writersdigest.com/writing-articles/by-writing-genre/literary-fiction-by-writing-genre/sara-gruen>.

Gruen, Sara.Water for Elephants: A Novel. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin of Chapel Hill, 2006. Print.

Regis, Pamela. A Natural History of the Romance Novel
. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2003. Print.

Rich, Motoko. “Water for Elephants – Sara Gruen – Books – New York Times.” The New York Times – Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. 5 Nov. 2011. Web. 5 Nov. 2011. <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/11/books/11elep.html>.

“Sara Gruen.” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Web. 5 Nov. 2011. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sara_Gruen>.

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Jul 28

Life has No Mistakes, Only Lessons

“By permitting oneself to laugh at the world, and think outside the boundaries of ordinary normal thoughts, brilliant new solutions can arise.”
– Pete Blaber, Autor of The Mission, the Men, and Me

A review of:

Blaber, Pete. The Mission, the Men, and Me: Lessons from a Former Delta Force Commander. New York: Berkley Caliber, 2008. Print.

Normally I would not read a book like, The Mission, The Men and Me. But a friend whose opinion I value cornered me. Said friend had ventured into a different part of the book store on my behalf, and now it was my turn to do likewise. I was obligated for friendship’s sake. (You know how that goes). I planned to honestly and politely begin the book and somewhere along the way, after reading the few chapters etiquette demanded, stop.

Except I didn’t.

I kept reading.

Beyond the testosterone oozing pages, Pete Blaber’s The Mission, The Men and Me offers insightful life lessons for anyone who finds themselves in a position of leadership. Blaber avoids parroting platitudes found in many leadership books by scattering his nuggets of wisdom amongst stories of his positive and negative experiences as a Delta Force commander. The tales alone would have probably sufficed to hold a reader’s interest for the length of the book — like hunting down war criminals in the Balkans, training along the Continental Divide in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area in Montana and guiding his men in Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan. However, combined with thoughtful reflections about constructive and destructive leadership modus operandi, Mr. Blaber successfully elevates his book from a military account to a leadership strategy manual.

Some of the passages I highlighted:

“The most effective weapon on any battlefield – whether it be combat, business, or life – is our mind’s ability to recognize life’s underlying patterns”

“There are no mistakes in life, only lessons.”

“History has proven it’s not the quantity of men or the quality of weapons that make the ultimate difference; it’s the ability to out-think and out-imagine the enemy that always has, and always will, determine the ultimate victor.”

“By permitting oneself to laugh at the world, and think outside the boundaries of ordinary normal thoughts, brilliant new solutions can arise.”

“Pride and hubris are two of the most common derailers of a person’s common sense.”

“…good leaders don’t wait for official blessings to try things out. They use common sense to guide them because they understand a simple fact of life in most organizations: if you ask enough people for permission, you’ll inevitably find someone who believes that they should tell you no.”

“… a leader must possess some key traits, specifically openness, an adaptive approach to thinking and making decisions, and constant deferral to the guy on the ground.”

“… convinced that it was far better to be doubted, mocked, and ignored than micromanaged.”

“My job as a leader wasn’t to tell them how to do their jobs; rather, it was to provide an environment that fostered experimentation, followed by thoughtful and honest reflection on what we learned and how we could apply it.”

“Courage has been called a contradiction in terms, meaning a strong desire to live manifest as a readiness to die.”

“It’s not reality unless it’s shared isn’t just a guiding principle for how to think and make decisions…it’s also a guiding principle for how to operationalize.”

“The single best thinking and decision-making tool a leader has is to consistently conduct reality checks by asking a profoundly simple question: “What’s your recommendation?”

So if you are looking for an interesting book this summer, my recommendation would be for you too to broaden the boundaries of your normal literary horizons and consider Mr. Blaber’s 

.

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Jun 2

What She Carried: The Second Book I Never Leave Behind

The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide To Character Expressionby Becca Puglisi, and Angela Ackerman

When I get into the rewriting stage, I have two books fending off coffee mugs, empty printer cartridges and Milka Haselnut chocolate wrappers for some desktop space. The first is a long-time companion– a hard-cover Roget’s International Thesaurus, 4th edition from 1977 donning a dashing orange cover offset by black binding and gold lettering. I have lugged my 1316-page faithful friend with me since childhood, coffee stains and complicated tab coding and all. What Roget lacks in slimness, he makes up for in his inexhaustible fastidiousness fondness for just the right word. About a year ago, much to Roget’s chagrin, a newcomer joined our cozy little twosome – The Emotion Thesaurus, by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi.

When I first introduced Emotion to Roget, I could almost hear the old man’s snickers at the 161-page black and blue paperback newby, “You call yourself a thesaurus?” But Emotion could hold her own with 75 different root emotions beginning with “Adoration” and ending with “Worry.” Perhaps Roget’s smugness, was simply an expression of his anxiety.

But amongst shelves upon shelves of “how to” books, what makes this one distinctive? The Emotion Thesaurus not only aids my efforts to show a particular character emotion, the index of emotions helps me pinpoint what my characters are experiencing in the first place. Once I know the emotion, Ackerman and Puglisi equip me with a complete arsenal of emotional behaviors to set loose on my characters. With this book, I can make my spurned lovers tug their ears (anguish), my teenage space explorers repeat the same things over and over (amazement) and my murder suspects scout for exits when entering a room (paranoia). Because even the best writers sometimes need guidance to help overcome old habits like the trusty nod, the knowing smile and the terrified shriek.

The Emotion Thesaurus breaks down each emotion into three elements: physical signals (body language and actions), internal sensations (visceral reactions) and mental responses (thoughts). The authors also include three additional categories: Cues of Acute Long-Term [enter emotion here], May Escalate to (other emotions listed), and Cues of Suppressed [enter emotion here]. As an added bonus, every emotion section ends with a Writer’s Tip such as the benefit of describing a character’s appearance by having the character interact with his or her environment.

Just as fictional characters should interact with their settings, fictional works should interact with their readers. A feat accomplished through emotion. In his book entitled, Writing for Emotional Impact: Advanced Dramatic Techniques to Attract, Engage, and Fascinate the Reader from Beginning to End
, Karl Iglesias tells writers that their mantra should be, “I’m in the emotion-delivery business, and my job is to evoke emotions in a reader.” Sol Stein in On Writing states, “Manipulating the readers’ emotions is exactly what the author should do…” In Immediate Fiction: A Complete Writing Course
Jerry Cleaver writes, “The emotions we’re feeling are the emotions of the characters. What they feel, we feel. The better the story, the more we lose ourselves in the characters, the more we become them. If they’re excited, we’re excited. If they’re sad, we’re sad.” For Ansen Dibell, emotion must cause a reaction. “Thought or emotion crosses the line into plot when it becomes action and causes reactions.” And of the three things that Orson Scott Card states a writer owes a reader in Elements of Fiction Writing – Characters & Viewpoint: Proven advice and timeless techniques for creating compelling characters by an award-winning author, “Emotional Involvement” is number two.

The Emotion Thesaurus is the result of collaborative effort by Becca Puglisi, a YA fantasy and historical fiction writer, and Angela Ackerman, a Middle Grade and Young Adult fiction. Together the two of authors host the website, “The Bookshelf Muse,” an award-winning online resource to help writers in their writing efforts. With their book, The Emotion Thesaurus, they have also presented writers with an indispensable resource — and one that Roget and I will always be sure to include, even if it means foregoing the Milka.

Still not sure how I feel about this book? Just see me stroking its cover, doodling its name with hearts and confiding all my secrets and desires into its pages (love).



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