Crazy for God

I ordered Frank Schaeffer’s Crazy for God (subtitled “How I grew up as one of the elect, helped found the religious right, and lived to take all—or almost all—of it back”) as part of my research for The Babylonian Codex. I thought I’d just skim it, focusing on the parts where he talks about his and his famous father’s contributions to the rise of the radical Christian right and the formation of the Moral Majority, and then toss the book in the library donation box.

Boy was I wrong.

This is a story told with brutal honesty and a rare and penetrating wit. It begins, “You can be the world’s biggest hypocrite and still feel good about yourself. You can believe and wish you didn’t. You can lose your faith and still pretend, because there are bills to be paid, because you are booked up for a year, because this is what you do…”.

From there, Crazy for God takes the reader on a journey that is part autobiography, part magical mystery tour. Whether he is writing of his bizarre childhood growing up wild at his parents’ utopian evangelical mission in Switzerland (where guests included the likes of Timothy Leary and Led Zeppelin) or his equally fascinating stint as a boarder in the world of England’s elite public schools in the sixties and seventies, Schaeffer introduces us to an unforgettable cast of colorful and deftly drawn personalities. Ironically, the book actually focuses very little on the part of his life’s story that prompted me to buy it in the first place. I didn’t care. A gifted storyteller and brilliant analyst of character, Schaeffer made me laugh out loud, wince, and think long and hard about everything from family life and parental love to the ways in which the people we meet affect the course of our lives.

I’m not normally a fan of autobiography, but I sat up late into the night reading this one, unable to put it down. The truth is, it’s been a long time since I enjoyed a novel as much.

The library sale isn’t getting this one.

Hot Buttons

Do you have a situation/conflict/kind of character you just can’t read about?

I ran across one last night. I’ve been meandering my way through Snow Falling on Cedars and rather enjoying it until the story suddenly grated across my worst, I-don’t-want-to-read-about-it, don’t-want-to-think-about-it issue. So what’s my hot button?

A character getting cheated out of or foolishly losing his money.

I know, I know; this says volumes about me and none of it is nice. But it's one of my worst nightmares and I don't want to go there.

I know people who can’t read about the murder of children (I have a hard time with that one, but it won’t stop me cold). Other friends say they can’t read about a character who commits adultery.

So what’s your “hot button”?

Are You Visual or Aural?

Can the way we like to learn also influence the way we write and the kinds of books we like to read?

This interesting concept was suggested to me by Sabrina Jeffries, a NYT bestselling romance writer who recently visited our Monday night writers group (she was in town visiting her agent and critique partner of many years, both of whom are members of the group). She said she was an aural learner, and she thought that’s why she didn’t like putting a lot of visual description in her books and becomes inpatient with writers who do. (She also said where she picked up this interesting concept, but I was so focused on the idea itself that I didn’t hear that part.)

It’s an intriguing idea. I Googled learning styles and discovered that, yes, our preferred learning styles do influence more than just they way we prefer to study. They also affect the way we internally represent experiences, the way we recall information and the words we choose. So it makes sense that they would influence the way we write and whether or not we like James Lee Burke.

There are actually several different approaches to learning:

Visual (spatial): prefers using pictures, images, and spatial understanding.
Aural (auditory-musical): prefers using sound and music.
Verbal (linguistic): prefers using words, both in speech and writing.
Physical (kinesthetic): prefers using body and sense of touch.
Logical (mathematical): prefers using logic, reasoning and systems.
Social (interpersonal): prefers to learn in groups or with other people.
Solitary (intrapersonal): prefers to work alone and use self-study.

Although we usually have a dominant learning technique, most people use a combination of these approaches. The same person can even use different styles in different situations. My kids, for instance, learned better when they could move around (works great for memorizing spelling words at home, but not so good in a classroom situation when everyone is expected to sit down). My daughter also discovered she could remember her French vocab words if she wrote them on colored cards: blue for masculine nouns, pink for feminine. But our styles are not fixed; we can develop our abilities in our less dominant styles. And each of these styles uses a different part of the brain, so the more areas of the brain we use when learning, the better we remember.

I guess my exercise with the colored note cards shows that I’m very visual. My card system also betrays that I’m very logical; I like to diagram things out and classify information. But I’m also highly aural: I remember material I hear in a lecture better than I remember what I read, just as I learn the words of songs or poems I hear very quickly. Unfortunately, I am not at all kinesthetic; when my girls and I were taking Tae Kwan Do, they’d learn our belt pattern the first night and then spend the next three months trying to drill it into my thick head. I’m also a solitary rather than a social learner: no study groups for me.

How about you? How do you think your personal learning style influences your writing or reading?

You Can’t (Usually) Go Home Again

One of my favorite books of all time is M.M. Kaye’s Trade Wind. I fell in love with it when I was quite young, and have reread it with equal pleasure several times over the years. So when I came upon Kaye’s Death in Zanzibar at the recent Friends of the Library Booksale, I considered it a find.

If you’re not familiar with the two books, Death in Zanzibar is a whodunit from the fifties, very much in the style of Agatha Christie. In writing the “modern” murder mystery, Kaye conceived a backstory involving a rakish nineteenth-century English outlaw/privateer, a prudish American do-gooder, and a trove of hidden treasure. In one of those fascinating twists of the creative process, she found herself so obsessed with her “backstory” that she later went on to write that story, too, in a sprawling historical novel that became Trade Wind.

I remember checking Death in Zanzibar out of my local library in the seventies, and being swept away by lush descriptions of the island and its culture. So I thought I was in for a real treat when I started reading it last week—“thought” being the operative word in that sentence. To begin with, where’s the island? I’m now half way through the book, and we’re still on the plane! Why didn’t I remember that part of the book? Obviously, because it wasn’t memorable. Yet I intend to continue reading, not because I’m enjoying the story (I’m not) , but because the book itself is an eye-opening period piece.

First of all, it’s taking our heroine days to get to Zanzibar; that’s what international travel was like in the fifties. I myself have vague memories of flying back and forth to Europe as a child and having to stop and spend the night in the Azores (okay, I know I’m really dating myself here!). Yet if I were to read this book without looking at the copyright date, I suspect I’d guess it was written in the thirties, rather than in the fifties. Ladies wear lovely linen suits and hats, and young women traveling alone are ever-so-careful of their reputations. A flamingly gay secretary is caricatured in a most politically incorrect way, as is the Westernized Oriental Gentleman (aka Wog, for those of you familiar with overt mid-twentieth century British racism), who is portrayed as a sinister character largely by virtue of being labeled a “nationalist” who wants to kick the benevolent British out of their God-given colonies. Oh, and then there’s all the talk about the evil “Reds.”

Sadly, Death in Zanzibar is a novel that has not aged well in the way of, say, To Kill a Mockingbird, or Huckleberry Finn, or even Kaye’s own Trade Wind. It occurs to me now that all three of those novels were actually “historicals” at the time they were written, even though the first two were set within the remembered lifetimes of their authors. Which is a thought I hope to ponder, at a later date.

On Abandoning a Book Unfinished.

My Monday night writers group has coined a word to describe the act of abandoning a book unfinished: proctorizing. Obviously, this is something I do frequently—far more than anyone else in the group—although I’ve noticed they do it more and more these days. They’ll come in and say, “I started So-and-so’s latest, but I proctorized it after about a hundred pages,” and then go on to analyze why.

There was a time when I religiously finished every book I started, even if I wasn’t enjoying it. When I was a child, I knew I liked some books better than others, but I never analyzed why. I had this naive belief that if a book was published, then it was somehow anointed as worthy of being read.

As I grew, I came to understand the differences between popular fiction and the classics, but I still finished every book I began. At some point, one of my teachers handed out a list entitled One Hundred Novels Every Educated Person Should Have Read. I don’t know who compiled that list, but I was determined to be labeled an Educated Person. As I grimly plowed through one after the other of the books on that list, year after year, I experienced some wonderful books I probably never would have read otherwise. I also encountered some real stinkers. But when I found my attention wandering, I naturally attributed it to a failing on my part. After all, who was I to say Fitzgerald sucks?

It wasn’t until I was in college and began reading more modern popular fiction that I finally realized that yes, really awful books get published—and hit the bestseller lists—all the time. Just because some idiot editor let this tripe into print didn’t mean I had to waste my precious reading time finishing it.

Sometimes I put a book aside and go back to it later, thinking a change of mood might improve my reception of the story. At other times I can appreciate a book’s merit, but realize that for one reason or another it’s not for me. But frequently I abandon books in something close to a rage because the author has really, really annoyed me. For the sake of market research, I will at times try to continue those books for a while, hoping to understand what it is about a particular bestseller that explains its appeal. I’ve come to realize that clunky writing, silly factual errors, gaping plot holes, thin characters, predictable or implausible situations don’t seem to bother most people.

We all read for our own reasons, and find pleasure in our own combination of factors. But with so many books out there to read, and the time for reading them shrinking every day, I find myself less and less willing to tolerate a book that fails to sweep me away in that magical way I first came to love as a child. Which is why I proctorize so many books.

Are You Impressed Yet?

According to the March 2007 Library and Information Update, one third of readers surveyed said they read “challenging literature” in order to be perceived as being well read, even though they couldn’t follow what the book was about. One half said reading classics makes people look more intelligent, while forty percent lied about having read certain books. Another survey found that half of their respondents admitted to having bought a book simply to leave it lying around the house looking impressive.

Topping the list of books people admitted they bluffed about having read: Lord of the Rings, War and Peace, Withering Heights, 1984, Harry Potter, Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, The Da Vinci Code, and The Diary of Anne Frank.

If you think that’s scary, think about this: these are the honest liars. How many people buy books to impress their friends or claim to read books they haven’t, yet don’t admit it?