2012 Tournament of Books Preview

Time again to get ready for the Tournament of Books. I've moved my obsessive coverage over to Book Riot, and you can check out my 2012 preview guide there.

On another note, I've finally decided to do with The Reading Ape. It'll continue with a bit more frequent posting than right now, but with a slightly different focus. Look for a post about that in the next week or so.

The Dictionary of Fictional Techniques: "Fred Weasleys" and "Gandeaths"

The Dictionary of Fictional Techniques is a running feature here at the Ape in which I observe, name, and discuss heretofore uncategorized (at least to my knowledge) literary devices. For a list of previous entries, please scroll to the bottom of this post.

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 This special two-for-one entry in The Dictionary of Fictional Techniques was inspired by a post I wrote for Book Riot: Why Ron Weasley Should Have Died. 


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The Fred Weasly:

A secondary character who dies to give a story pathos. 

Examples:

Fred Weasley. Boromir. Mr. Tumnus. Star Trek characters in red suits. 

Discussion:

It’s not an overly complicated move: give the story weight by making loss real, but at the same time protecting the main characters. Fred Weasley’s are particularly common in children’s literature (ostensibly to protect kids) and serial works (for purposes of maintaining storylines). 

To my mind, a Fred Weasley is a cop-out, especially in “epic” stories: it makes the rhetoric of danger and doom effectively null. For all of the peril of Sauron, only Boromir from the Fellowship gets it and as he dies in the first book, we don’t ever develop the kind of connection to him that we do to those who make it to the end. (In hindsight, how laughable is it that Merry and Pippin survive not only the battle of Minas Tirith, but also the battle outside the gates of Mordor?)

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The Gandeath:

 A character death that is reversed through resurrection or reincarnation.

Examples:

Gandalf. Aslan. Optimus Prime. Harry Potter. Obi-Wan.

Discusssion:

There are two purposes of a Gandeath. First, it can serve as a variant of the Fred Weasley; you get the pain of loss, but without the finality of it. The second purpose is to imbue a character with a messianic quality. 

(I have to admit that I find this really annoying and manipulative. This probably stems from my frustration with Ob-Wan's full-bodied reappearance in The Empire Strikes Back. I didn't, and still don't, understand why, if he could pop up and hangout like that, he didn't do it all the time. Would have been super-helpful.)

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All entries in The Dictionary of Fictional Techniques are original to The Reading Ape, unless otherwise cited. (This means that they aren’t ‘real words,’ so don’t use them in your freshman comp essay)

Previous entries in The Dictionary of Fictional Techniques:

Telechronance

The Generalized Categorical

Paracatenation

The Dostoevsky Dash

Proxy Detailing

Side-loading

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Buy books mentioned in this post (or anything else, actually) using the below links, and The Reading Ape gets a small referral fee to defray our nominal operating costs.

Amazon | Powell's Books | Shop Independent Bookstores

My Biggest Book Nerd-Out

Over at Book Riot, we're running a book blogger appreciation contest. For all you bloggers, just write about your biggest book nerd moment and you'll be entered. Full details here. I'm not eligible (naturally), but I wanted to participate. So here's my non-entry entry.
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On Christmas eve, 1997, I camped out for Toni Morrison. It was the publication day of Paradise, her first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in 1993, and the promised final installment in a trilogy beginning with Beloved and Jazz.

So it was a major release by a major writer, but it was also a rite of passage for me. About six weeks earlier, I had decided to change majors, from pre-med to English. For me this was more than a change in required courses or even career path, it was an acknowledgement of who I was and who I wanted to be.

I was a book person and wanted to spend my life in books. 

So I went down to my local Borders (now gone like all the rest), and waited for the doors to open at 7am. There was a crowd of holiday shoppers there, but as I zipped to the new hardcover section, no one followed; I was the only there for Paradise. For some reason, I thought there would be others. 

I was disappointed. This was no opening weekend of a blockbuster movie or first day of the baseball season. It was just me. 

But then I looked around and saw the frantic, last-minute shopping around me. It wasn’t that these people weren’t interested in books; they were buying them by the armful. But they didn't care about them as I did, didn’t live for them as I did (and still do.) And that made me feel good about me. 

I couldn’t start reading Paradise that day; the holiday hustle was in full swing. But the afternoon of Christmas day, familial cheer activities fully discharged, I took my gifts up to my room, piled them in the corner, and shut the door. Then, for the next nine hours, I read. 

And I haven’t stopped.

BOOK RIOT: Week 1

Well, Book Riot survived it's first week. For those of you who haven't checked it out yet, can I interest you in a run-down of what we wrote about last week?
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Sometimes, you just need a handbag made out of dictionaries.

I like cheap books almost as much as I like sports novels.

I'm a lit snob, so I'm going to try these YA books. Apparently, there's a lot you can learn from that stuff.

Snooki wrote an embarrassingly bad novel (and has a deal for her next one), but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy real books and the Jersey Shore at the same time.

A lot of people "like" books on Facebook, but some people like books about plucky lady journos better.
A book can be an ideal travel companion, that is unless you can't stand it and chuck it.

People can't seem to leave perfectly good books alone. They are either needlessly modernizing them ormaking terrible movies out of them.

There are a lot of books about hapless white dudes out there. Which is exactly how I would not describe Toni Morrison.

A lot of people put money on who would win the Nobel Prize. Though the announcement day favorite didn't win, there's a good case to be made that Bob Dylan should have.

And if you want to share any of these posts, you can retweet them without fear of reprisal from the language police.
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Thanks to all of you that have taken a look; as for the rest, give us a shot, won't you?

Announcing My New Blog Project: Book Riot

You may have noticed that things have slowed down here at The Ape of late. And there's a reason for that: for the past few months I've been hard at work on a new blog project that is launching today: Book Riot.

Some of you may have seen mention of it floating around (especially on Twitter), but let me tell you a little about it. Book Riot is a book news and commentary site that slots somewhere between your higher quality book blog and a mass market site like The Huffington Post (but, you know, good). The goal is to write about books in the accessible, entertaining way that bloggers do but with the goal of breaking through the blogosphere bubble by being a little more professional and a little more consistent. Our target audience is someone who likes to read, but wouldn’t read an individual book blog (probably there is someone in your life who does like to read, but isn’t a nut about it like us).


As for my role, well, I'm co-founder (along with my friend and business partner Clint) and will be serving as Editor-in-Chief. In short, I'll be doing a bunch of writing (considerably more than I ever did here), recruiting writers and bloggers (more on this below), and working with our writers to do entertaining, educational, and otherwise engaging writing about books and reading.


So far, we have a stable of thirteen writers, many of whom are bloggers that I've met through doing this humble little blog (Rachel from A Home Between Pages, Greg from The New Dork Review of Books, Amanda from Dead White Guys are all writing and all have been regular commenters here).


In the coming weeks, we are going to be looking for more contributors and I hope some of you will consider joining us. I'll post more about that when we are ready for more, but one of Book Riot's goals is to bring the best of what book bloggers do to a wider audience.


The Reading Ape will still be around, though likely in his current leisurely pace. I do hope you will check out Book Riot---if we do it right, I think it'll become a regular stop on your internet route.


Thanks so much for reading here; my experience writing The Ape led directly to this new venture, and I hope you'll come along as well.


Many thanks,


Jeff O'Neal

My Guest Spot on Bookrageous

Quick note to let you all know that The Ape made a special guest appearance on the Bookrageous podcast this week. Check it out here.

For the incurably bookish, this is a bi-weekly must listen. Basically, the three regular hosts, Jenn, Josh, and Rebecca talk about what they're reading in the first section and then take on a broader topic in the second session.

I talked about John Warner's The Funny Man, Lily Tuck's I Married You For Happiness, Stanley Fish's How to Write a Sentence, and Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy. I also spontaneously invented the "wonk-o-meter."

The second section of the show was about Banned Books Week, and in vintage Bookrageous fashion, a potentially plodding topic turned out to be damn near spritely.

I had a great time. Even if you don't listen to my sonorous baritone (heh) in this episode, you should give this podcast space on your precious iOS device.

The Dictionary of Fictional Techniques: The Discrete Appositive

The Dictionary of Fictional Techniques is a running feature here at the Ape in which I observe, name, and discuss heretofore uncategorized (at least to my knowledge) literary devices. For a list of previous entries, please scroll to the bottom of this post.
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The Discrete Appositive:
An appositive that exists as a sentence fragment immediately after its antecedent noun

Example:
"Fair-haired, solidly built and not tall--not taller than Nina--his eyes are light blue, like a dog's. A husky."
                          -I Married You For Happiness by Lily Tuck

Discussion:
The discrete appositive here is "a husky." I'm interested in how authors represent thought (especially in close third-person narration). Here Tuck uses this little device to mimic a slight cognitive pause. The result is that we can feel the character thinking, trying to remember the particular canine eyes.

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All entries in The Dictionary of Fictional Techniques are original to The Reading Ape, unless otherwise cited. (This means that they aren’t ‘real words,’ so don’t use them in your freshman comp essay)

Previous entries in The Dictionary of Fictional Techniques:

Telechronance

The Generalized Categorical

Paracatenation

The Dostoevsky Dash

Proxy Detailing
Side-loading

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Buy books mentioned in this post (or anything else, actually) using the below links, and The Reading Ape gets a small referral fee to defray our nominal operating costs.

Amazon | Powell's Books | Shop Independent Bookstores

"Please, for the love of books, learn from us."

Today, I'm guest posting for Book Blogger Appreciation week with a piece called "What Professional Critics Can Learn from Book Bloggers." Check it out. Cheers, -TRA

Live-Blogging DEAD POETS SOCIETY

It's a bit of a ritual for me to watch Dead Poets Society before the start of the new semester, as inspiration, as warning, and as sentimental indulgence. This year, I thought I would make some comments on it as I rolled through it. Time-stamps are meant to help you watch along, should you desire. I didn't do much editing, so forgive the typos and bewildering punctuation.


Alright here we go:

[1:27]
There’s something so compelling about the pomp and circumstance of boarding school. For many public school kids, or at least this public school kid, the solemnity and ritual of candles and banners and uniforms and pledges and hymns around school seems as foreign as the Greek Orthodox church.

[2:47]
Quick, in what year is this movie set? Hard isn’t it? Could be 1927, could be forty years later. It is 1959, Welton’s centennial. 1959 is an interesting choice; a few years earlier and the 1960s, which Keating some sort of harbinger of, would seem too far away. A few years later, and the boys’ initial conformity would seem unbelievably square. So really, this is a story that seems sort of out of time, but really it’s hard to imagine it happening in any other year.

[2:55]
First shot of Neil (Robert Sean Leonard) in the same frame as his father (Kurtwood Smith). Neil’s blankness here isn’t encouraging. Nor is his father boredom. I wonder how much this role got Kurtwood Smith his part on That 70s Show, as Red does seem to be a less-ambitious version of Mr. Perry.

Friday Forum: Lovably Bad Books

Last week, I tore through Ernest Cline's futurist 1980s nostalgia romp, Ready Player One. I knew from the first page that a) it wasn't a great book and b) that I was going to absolutely love it.

The experienced reader/critic part of my brain saw the flaws: wooden dialogue, unbelievable coincidence,  narrative cliche, and a variety of other narrative black-eyes.

But then another part of my brain took over: the remnant of my adolescent, Mario Brothers-playing, Darth Vader-loving, coin-op obsessing, X-Men reading, Middle Earth-daydreaming self took over. My hard-won critical eye was completely helpless.

And this has happened before (Harry Potter and the early Tom Clancy novels come to mind): for some reason, certain kinds of novels have the ability to short-circuit the taste and discernment I have been cultivating for the last couple of decades. And it feel sooooooo good.

Has this ever happened to you? With what books? And what was it that caught you? __________________

Buy books mentioned in this post (or anything else, actually) using the below links, and The Reading Ape gets a small referral fee to defray our nominal operating costs.

Amazon | Powell's Books | Shop Independent Bookstores