Where is the Line?

I think that the story should be mostly true in order to be called a memoir. I don’t think that it has to be totally true to be a good book though. While it may not be a memoir, a made up story can still be good. A Million Little Pieces may have been mostly a lie or a little bit a lie or however much a lie, but in the end it’s a good book and that’s why readers kept reading it. It’s a hard industry and James Frey did what he had to do to get his book out there.  I don’t think the genre labels are as important as everyone makes them.

It is okay if a book is partially in one category and partially in another. We have all seen iTunes attempt to classify music as rock, alternative, etc. and a lot of the time I’m thinking…ehh that’s not really what I was thinking.  What books are classified as are just names, a good book is a good book.

If we have to give genres labels I would agree that memoirs should be true. Obviously no one wants to read a conversation like:

Mark leaned over and said, “hey”,  then I said, “hey”, then he said, “how’s your wife”, and I said, “Oh she’s good, and Karen?”, on and on. That would be a terrible book. No one’s life is interesting enough to be completely and accurately documented and sold for millions of dollars around the world.

Readicide

I don’t think that schools should stop teaching the classics. It isn’t WHAT we read; it’s what we have to do while reading it. Analyzing every aspect of the book and finding themes and elements that aren’t even there is what kills reading. I could lie in bed and read Jane Eyre for a few hours. It wasn’t my favorite but it was a totally tolerable book. However, since I didn’t want to make notes and highlight the living crap out of it, I avoided reading it all together. Then it became a pattern to just avoid reading the books so I wouldn’t have to active read. When my second tri teacher started checking our active reading I developed a new system. I would not read the book, but put a clean post it on every other page, highlight any random sentence and then go back through and write the “meaning” of that sentence on the post it. It proved to be an effective system, however I wasn’t actually reading.

I like to read the classics in school though. Otherwise I would never read them and there are a lot of them that I really like. I loved To Kill a Mockingbird and I liked Color of Water and Romeo and Juliet. They were all good stories but I didn’t even finish the first two because they give us so much to do and analyze in so little an amount of time. I always wanted to go back and finish them but we would have already moved on to the next book so I never got around to it.

There definitely is a difference between literary and commercial. Literary is more fancy and creative whereas commercial just tells a story. I think that literary book authors should get credit for being talented writers but if the commercial book sells, those writers deserve the money. I think commercial writers get a really bad rap.

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read - Mark Twain

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