Slow burners and literary fiction

I'm naturally an impatient person.  I struggle to read or write long novels.  I'm a slow reader so generally prefer a fast-paced read with plenty of dialogue and not too many long descriptions.  A story that pulls me in from the start and compels me to find out how it all ends.  If I get bored I tend to skim and flip to the end of the book to see if it is worth the effort.  I do that with films and TV programmes too.

However, recently, I've been savouring the delights of some slow burners.  The first was The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters.  

I was nearly halfway through the book before it grabbed me.  The pace was interminably slow, with endless, apparently unnecessary descriptions and little happening in the story.  Or so it seems.  I nearly gave up.  But how glad I am that I persevered!  The story uses the device of the unreliable narrator superbly and this has to be one of the cleverest constructions I've read in a very long time.  Like a dark, disturbing jigsaw puzzle, a mystery littered with clues that you simply can't spot the first time round.  As soon as I had finished I immediately went back to the beginning, hunting them out.  If you want to find out more I wrote a review for Goodreads  http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/483099747   and it really got me thinking about the way I have limited myself in so many ways as a writer, how lacking in confidence I am of attempting such a feat.  If you write, then I urge you to read The Little Stranger to learn about the craft. 

I'm currently reading a totally different genre but another slow burner called Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart (I referred to this in a previous post http://janeayres.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/more-on-journeys.html as far back as January 2012, which shows how long it has taken me to read it!).  It's a dark, funny satire set in a future chillingly similar to the present, where technology rules. (see my post http://janeayres.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/slaves-to-machines.html).  I have really struggled with the first half of the book, again because it takes its time and little (apparently) is happening but now I am halfway through, it has me hooked and I can't put it down.  I need to know where the journey ends. 

Encouraged by this experience I have been thinking about the idea of the slow burner and questioning my own reading preferences - and wondering if I would ever have the confidence to take on this kind of writing project.

Can you recommend any slow burning novels that were worth the wait?  And what did they teach you as a writer?

Related post: http://janeayres.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/on-books-digital-landscape-and-bigger.html
http://janeayres.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/reading-bigger-books.html
http://janeayres.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/readers-does-size-matter.html

http://janeayres.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/on-books-and-reading-and-pony-books.html

http://janeayres.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/on-ways-to-read-book.html

Book links: 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Super-Sad-True-Love-Story/dp/1847082491/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1366490518&sr=1-1&keywords=super+sad+true+love+story

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Little-Stranger-Sarah-Waters/dp/1844086062/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1366492528&sr=1-1&keywords=the+little+stranger+sarah+waters

More on journeys

I said in a previous blog that life is a journey.  I do believe this.  I feel it.  Not long after I had written it I started to read Super Sad True Love Story, a novel set in the future by Gary Shteyngart.  He was interviewed in the BBC documentary called Books - The Last Chapter (referred to in a previous blog) and this inspired me to seek out his novel.

The second paragraph reads, “Don’t let them tell you life is a journey.  A journey is when you end up somewhere.  When I take the number 6 train to see my social worker, that’s a journey.”

That made me think about my journey.  Where do I want to end up?  I don’t know the answer yet, although we all end up in the same place ultimately.  Journey and destination.  Both matter.

Train journeys and car journeys both provide great creative space, I find, whether I am driver or passenger.  Ideas fire off unprompted in a way that rarely happens if I am staring at my computer screen.

I’ve just read Rumblestrip by Woodrow Phoenix, a monochrome graphic book all about what happens when we get behind a steering wheel.  The layout cleverly simulates a car journey and as you read, you feel as if you are in fact on a virtual car journey.  I came across this book in a store in London at http://www.theschooloflife.com/

I keep promising myself I will go on one of their day schools some time.  Anyway, the book provides alarming statistics about deaths caused by driving and is thought-provoking.  I sometimes dream about driving a car, and when I drive at night, I sometimes wonder if I am dreaming.  Woodrow Phoenix describes it perfectly:

“There is a dreamlike quality built into the experience of driving.  A car windshield is a big window.  And also a screen….locations unwind on the other side of this rectangular glass almost as they do on a movie screen….you sit cocooned in your cabin….everything outside your windows is contained, the rest of the world an arm’s length away…..you glide through location after location as if they were erected just for you to drive past.  Every journey is a narrative with you at the centre.”  

I love that last line.

Related posts:
http://janeayres.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/for-journey.html
http://janeayres.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/footsteps-in-sand-guest-blog-from-jan.html
http://janeayres.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/journeys-and-shapes.html
http://janeayres.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/wheels.html

On books, the digital landscape and bigger stuff

Before Xmas, I watched the BBC documentary called Books - The Last chapter? in which Alan Yentob spoke to writers, agents, publishers and thinkers about the future of the printed word.  Or books to be precise.  I found it thought-provoking, disturbing and strangely moving.  I cried.  Then I watched it again and made notes because in June 2012 I will be organising a conference in Folkestone to explore and discuss the way that digital technology is impacting on writers and readers.

Some choice snippets from the BBC programme:

• Digital makes the private public. 

• Technology expands the mind but shrinks the world

• Technology offers a choice to broaden horizons

• Are we addicted to technology? 

• We are trading 24 hour global connectivity for privacy, individuality and ultimately humanity

• "The challenge today is to disconnect.  It takes religious conviction to say no to it, because everyone’s at the party, everyone wants your attention, everyone’s screaming for it.  The party’s everywhere.”   (writer Gary Shteyngart)

• We made the books, then the books made us

• “First we shape our tools, then our tools shape us.”  (Marshall McLuhan)*

• The internet is brain changing.  The way the brain experiences a book (printed) is different to a digital book. 

• “Neurons that fire together, wire together.”    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_O._Hebb 

The last point interested me and a reference was made to Hebb’s Law.  If I understood it correctly, the assertion was that if you use a specific technology often enough (or undertake any highly repetitive action) neurons in your brain fire in a certain way and make strong connections so that the action we undertake becomes second nature.  This “rewires” the brain.  The conclusion being that as human beings, use of digital technology that encourages a short attention span could mean we are effectively rewriting or re-programming our brains and that this will affect our evolution.  Mind blowing (literally).

“Electronic media creates an oral culture - emotional, subjective, collective, irrational.”  Marshall McLuhan again.  

* Marshall McLuhan was a prophet in his own time. As early as the 1960s, he saw the powerful impact of technological change on the world and showed us a new way to explain our world and society. Today, such McLuhan phrases as "sensory impact," "the global village," and "the medium is the message" have become part of the language. 
http://www.mcluhanmedia.com/m_mcl_manmessage.html 

Related posts:
http://janeayres.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/connectivity-and-communion.html
http://janeayres.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/on-connections.html
http://janeayres.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/running-writing-and-living.html