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Dec
03
The Bare Necessities—Charles Yu (HOW TO LIVE SAFELY IN A SCIENCE FICTIONAL UNIVERSE)
2010 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
The Bare Necessities is a series in which authors and book industry professionals share annotated reading lists of books they love.
Charles Yu is the author of one of my best books of 2010, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.
Hidden Frameworks
(or, Five Non-Fiction Books That Make Me Want To Write Fiction)
There’s a chair in my house where I do most of my writing (or, to be accurate, there’s a chair in my house where I often stare at my computer while wondering why I do this to myself). Next to the chair is a small, circular table, and on the table is always a tall stack of books, always on the verge of falling over. I like having a pile of titles to look at. If I get blocked or want to take a break, I’ll pull one of the books out of the stack and open it to a page at random and read a little bit. It’s sort of like having a writing workshop there in the room with me, people to have conversations with, bounce ideas off of, and steal from.
The books in the pile cycle in and out, depending on the season, what I’m reading or writing about at the moment, or just for variety’s sake, but I find that certain titles are almost always in there somewhere, and in fact, always near the top, as I find myself going back to them over and over again. And I’ve realized that many of these permanent fixtures are non-fiction books. I think I prefer reading non-fiction to fiction when I’m trying to write fiction, because hearing someone else’s voice while trying to stay focused on my own is sort of like listening to the radio while trying to practice the violin.
These five books cover very different areas of interest: social interaction, psychiatric diagnosis, tourism, video games, and comics as an art form. I think the reason they are of particular interest to me is what they have in common: each book seeks to identify hidden frameworks, to delineate deep structure in the world, or even structure in the way we perceive the world.
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman
An examination of the nature of social interactions through the framework of performance.
Have you ever been at a cocktail party and had the experience of talking to one person knowing that a different person is watching you talk and attempting to determine your level of sincerity? So, while you are talking, you are, at the same time, trying to give off a certain impression to the person you know is watching you. Or perhaps the opposite: you try to cultivate an appearance of being natural, to give off the impression that you don’t know you are being observed. Goffman’s analysis of these sorts of phenomena (so commonplace and woven into the fabric of everyday life so as to be almost invisible) is penetrating and fascinating in its own right, but to a fiction writer, this book is full of treasure. It’s almost like a textbook, propounding a grand unified theory of dinner parties (and many other situations).
Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter by Tom Bissell
Bissell approaches video games from the point of view of a gamer. I’ll admit, although I’ve spent my fair share of time with Atari and Nintendo as a kid, I’m not a serious or even casual gamer. Only someone who has logged thousands of hours on the couch in front of a console, many of them alone, could probably truly understand the real rage, wonder and euphoria that can come from moving a bunch of light and color around a television screen. Nevertheless, Bissell’s writing is so good that he gave me a genuine appreciation for the medium. He seems to have a deep and perceptive intuition about how a good game brings pleasure. As an added bonus, Bissell’s access to some legendary game designers allows the reader to get a look into the way these creators think about the architecture and psychology of their created worlds. Bissell’s own thoughts on what it means that so many people enjoy so much time in these artificial environments are theoretically interesting and also surprisingly personal.
Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche by Ethan Watters
Watters argues that American notions of mental illness have been and are being exported to other countries, and that, at least in some cases, this is a very bad thing for the people in those countries. Using four main examples (anorexia, post-traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia and depression), he explains how Western, and specifically American, ideas about these illnesses (including methods of diagnosis and clinical/pharmacological treatments) have been imposed on other cultures, cultures with very different social, religious and other values. In looking at how these Western templates and models clash with local customs, practices and beliefs, Watters illuminates not only the foreign conceptions of mental illness, but also sheds light on how certain concepts which may intuitively seem fundamental and even universal (such as well-being, the relation the individual to the larger community, and even the conception of the mind itself) are, in fact, heavily influenced by inherited framework, specific to each culture.
The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class by Dean MacCannell
Sort of like Goffman’s book, but inverted. In The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life, Goffman looks at a wide variety of social interactions and phenomena and unifies them through a single metaphor (his “dramaturgical model”). The performance framework is used as a powerful, flexible concept and applied to various situations and circumstances.
In The Tourist, MacCannell takes a single phenomenon, that of tourism, and uses it as a metaphor for how social reality and “authentic cultural experiences” are constructed, particularly by members of certain socio-economic strata. I once wrote a story loosely based on MacCannell’s ideas, and even in some of the things I am working on now, I find myself repeatedly circling back the ideas in The Tourist, but deep down I know that there’s no way to ever capture it better than Don DeLillo already did, in White Noise, with his chapter about “the most photographed barn in America.”
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud
Even though I collected and read comics as a kid, I’ll admit, until I read this book, I think I had a kind of tacit inferiority complex about them as a form of artistic expression. Of course, as an adolescent, I was vaguely aware that there were certain literary classics, like Maus, but on the whole, even as I was enjoying comics, it was as a semi-guilty pleasure, with some sort of under-developed, not-well-thought-out idea that there were probably more edifying ways to spend my reading budget. McCloud’s incredible book changed all of that. It’s a meta-comic, a work of criticism and theory that is also an appealing and entertaining comic in its own right, and it is packed with information in both graphic and verbal form, explaining to a dunce like me concepts like abstraction and sequential representation, ideas which are of interest to me as a reader of comics, and non-comic books, and as a writer, and as someone generally interested in the creative process in any medium.
Related posts:
- Book Review: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
- I’m bringing out The Bare Necessities! [Feature Announcement]
- The Bare Necessities—Sandra Brannan (IN THE BELLY OF JONAH)
- The Bare Necessities—Michele Filgate (River Run Bookstore)
- The Bare Necessities—Peter Geye (SAFE FROM THE SEA)
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Rebecca Schinsky, Regator [Technology]. Regator [Technology] said: The Bare Necessities—Charles Yu (HOW TO LIVE SAFELY IN A SCIENCE FICTIONAL UNIVERSE) (The Book Lady's Blog) http://bit.ly/fSDiAO [...]
Interesting article. I think the Video Games book looks like the most interesting of the bunch. I am asking for it for Christmas. Thanks, Charles.
WONDERFUL post! I loved this. I have only read a Tom Bissell work (the one on Vietnam) and agree, he is a terrific writer. I’ve read great reviews of the McCloud book, too.
Care’s Online Book Club´s last [type] ..The Woman in White
Love this post — so nice to get Charles’ perspective here