Someone once said somewhere: if you want to know something about a book, turn to page 99.
You always read on the blurbs: 'the first lines gripped me' or the first sentence was magical and drew me in. Our fascination with origins, the opening shots, the line between the boring old world and the exciting first page, the second lives and fresh starts. The romance of crossing over. There it is: the intangible sense of newness: the novel.
Recently, it was the first line from The Big Music that was supposed to have this magical quality of hooking us to an image (and it is an image we want, after all, and not the beauty of the words); then it was the catchy opening from Canada. There must be something, after all, that generates and sustains interest and when you think about it wasn't it there all along in those first notes? One reason you never seem to able to finish Exley- despite numerous attempts-is that the first pages just seem mediocre and a far cry from the classic it's supposed to be. Of course, the real reason is the quality of the paper and the poor print. One reason you can never start M.D. Foot's Debts of Honour is that the quality is too good.
And then what about the last pages? Is there a book that ends so well that you forget how average the rest of it was? Is there something like what Kahneman calls a "peak effect"? The best last pages have to be from Stoner, though if pressed you wouldn't be able to say why. But when you want to slow things down, give up marking passages or phrases with your pencil, and simply let things sink, then you're in the zone. Leo the African and Khayyam were polar opposites; on with a good first third, the other with a good last third.
Maybe short stories cut through the beginnings and endings problem.
Are endings always good, do you always eagerly seek them and if so why?
'Most of us want extraordinary things, after a while, to quit being extraordinary-to end.'
---from The New Yorker.
Real life isn't like that. Get back to the mundane routines. Your life isn't like that.
The end to that Auster book was terrible, comical even. But Falconer! Now you're talking.
There is nothing, by the way, on page 99 of Great Jones Street so that theory is out the window.
~~~
You always read on the blurbs: 'the first lines gripped me' or the first sentence was magical and drew me in. Our fascination with origins, the opening shots, the line between the boring old world and the exciting first page, the second lives and fresh starts. The romance of crossing over. There it is: the intangible sense of newness: the novel.
Recently, it was the first line from The Big Music that was supposed to have this magical quality of hooking us to an image (and it is an image we want, after all, and not the beauty of the words); then it was the catchy opening from Canada. There must be something, after all, that generates and sustains interest and when you think about it wasn't it there all along in those first notes? One reason you never seem to able to finish Exley- despite numerous attempts-is that the first pages just seem mediocre and a far cry from the classic it's supposed to be. Of course, the real reason is the quality of the paper and the poor print. One reason you can never start M.D. Foot's Debts of Honour is that the quality is too good.
And then what about the last pages? Is there a book that ends so well that you forget how average the rest of it was? Is there something like what Kahneman calls a "peak effect"? The best last pages have to be from Stoner, though if pressed you wouldn't be able to say why. But when you want to slow things down, give up marking passages or phrases with your pencil, and simply let things sink, then you're in the zone. Leo the African and Khayyam were polar opposites; on with a good first third, the other with a good last third.
Maybe short stories cut through the beginnings and endings problem.
Are endings always good, do you always eagerly seek them and if so why?
'Most of us want extraordinary things, after a while, to quit being extraordinary-to end.'
---from The New Yorker.
Real life isn't like that. Get back to the mundane routines. Your life isn't like that.
The end to that Auster book was terrible, comical even. But Falconer! Now you're talking.
There is nothing, by the way, on page 99 of Great Jones Street so that theory is out the window.
~~~
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