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Fahrenheit 451

5/26/2016

It is time once again for another entry in my year-long experiment in living (actually reading) fiction. In the interest of keeping these intros short, I’ll recap that my literary travails this year have encompassed everything from mystery to science fiction, and I have pulled major lessons about writing from each work. The last novel of this first round was no exception: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, one of the best-known examples of dystopian science fiction, which is becoming one of my favorite genres. I know I said similar things about Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, but once again I was completely blown away by this work and consider it possibly the finest piece of fiction I’ve read in my short life. Bradbury’s use of language to describe this futuristic, ignorant world is fraught with incredible prescience. Each sentence is crafted tautly and conveys miles beyond just what the words say. Overall I would say this encompasses the two major lessons I learned from the reading of this masterpiece:

Writing a book about books. It seems simplistic, but this is the only example of this type of writing that I’ve come across to date. Beyond all the other themes of this book, Bradbury was most concerned with the passing on of information. This novel is a celebration of the written word, and Bradbury takes great pains in the characters’ dialogue to describe what has happened to society to make the concept of learning almost obsolete. Nowhere else is this better understood than in the characters we meet at the end of the book: a group of over-educated (for this universe) men who have taken to memorizing books, rather than daring to have the physical things around to be burned by the firemen. Conversely this is also implemented well by the main antagonist, Captain Beatty, who delivers long diatribes against books but ultimately begs to be killed by the main character, possibly because of what he knows he has done to his world.
Using a novel to tell truths about society. This is a more general theme that I have discussed, especially concerning The Picture of Dorian Gray, but I wanted to return to it here as this is where the book became even more impactful for me. Recall that Bradbury wrote this book, which features flat-screen televisions, in-ear headphones and a vicious electronic animal-type device that hunts down its prey, in the early Fifties. Not only was he railing against the dumbing down of the McCarthyites, but also predicting where our society was heading as things like television were one-tenth the size of those that appear in the novel. Bradbury was spot-on in seeing how other forms of 20th century media would begin to crowd out literary works, and deftly uses this as an allegory of the importance of reading to gain knowledge. This book is the best example I have come across of using this genre to speculate about where our species is heading, and has become an eerily prescient guide to our current age.

There are plenty of other lessons to draw upon from this novel, but I’m guessing many of you have read this one and seen your own parallels to our world. If not, I can’t recommend this book highly enough as it has affected me tremendously, and in ways I’m still figuring out. Plus it is a great example of how to pack the sentences of a fairly short book with meaning - each one entails much more than the sum of its words, making this a book worth paying deep attention to each time you read it.

Well, that’s it for the first round of fiction in this experiment. Up next is a book on writing itself: Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer. I’ll write an essay on that and also present the list of books that will encompass the second half of my year. Stay tuned for more updates on my year of living (actually reading) fictionally!

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The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

5/15/2016

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It’s time once more for an update in my year of living (actually) reading fictionally. To recap, I’ve tackled everything from 19th-Century literature to a cat mystery novel, and each selection has given me few important ways to improve my writing. The fifth book in this year-long experiment was The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, by Swedish crime novelist Stieg Larsson. This was another attempt to read a mystery novel, but I never expected to be so compelled by the work that I could barely put it down. I won’t give away much of the amazingly and intricately detailed plot, but I will say that it’s is a taut psychological thriller that delves deep into societal themes such as violence against women, corporate illegality, hacking, investigative journalism, and family dynastic issues that turn horribly ugly. It was a fantastic read and it’s going to take some restraint not to jump immediately into the next book of the Millennium trilogy.

Now, to some of the major lessons I learned about writing from this work.

Writing like a journalist. This is something I’ve shied away from since my first novel, mostly because I worried that my non-fiction style was cramping my fictional efforts. After reading this book, however, I am more convinced that this style isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Larsson gives us all the facts we need and keeps the language realistic, yet despite the less than florid language the main characters felt very alive to me. Mikael Blomkvist, the investigative journalist, is an exciting presence to follow as he pulls on the various strands of the Vanger family legacy, and despite having to make some incredible moral concessions still comes off as complex. Lisbeth Salander is one of the most complex characters I’ve ever read and one I want to find out more about through the course of the rest of the books in this series. Both of these characters are not described any more than necessary, and it works well for the drama of the story.
Planning out the plot. This became more obvious to me as the story went along. While Larsson does tie up many loose ends of the narrative there is still quite a bit that we don’t know about the backstory of these characters that he obviously meant to include in the next books. This points to an important role of the storyteller: make sure you know where you’re going with the plot. I can relate a personal struggle to this one, as I worked on my second novel (Last Man on Campus) without much thinking on how the story would end overall. While this got me a decent twist to use toward the finale, I was left with a story that just “stopped” and will need a sequel (someday). If I had done more planning on the overall story I could have better dealt with this issue. Larsson sets up a world for these characters to inhabit in which a lot has already taken place, and at the end there is a fairly large wedge placed between Blomkvist and Salander that will have to be resolved if they are going to work together on later cases. Besides this are the sophisticated plot details Larsson must have planned out regarding the mysteries surrounding the Vanger family, which the author obviously pondered a lot as he was working on this story. The main lesson here: don’t be afraid to really think out your plot to the end of the road, even if the final product doesn’t quite match your expectations.

Overall I enjoyed reading this novel and at times struggled to put it down, so intensely interested was I in the mystery. I feel like I understand the genre even better after reading this book, and would definitely recommend it for people who like to be shocked or are interested in the more societal topics Larsson takes on within the work.

Up next will be the final book of the first half of this experiment, and one I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never read: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Then I will tackle one book on writing, and return in the second half with a more recommendation-based list of titles which I’ll post at that time. Stay tuned for more updates on my year of living (actually reading) fictionally!

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Fahrenheit 451

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

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