I finished up Dragonsong, and was quite glad I did.  In the end, I really enjoyed this volume for its main character’s spirit and creativity and, well, just plain spunkiness.  The concept of the squelched artist “due to injury, injustice or lack of opportunity, social class” was something this novel explored, too.  In any case, engaging enough for me to decide to go out and buy the next three books in the “suggested reading order” I found at a fan-site.

But before I trek back to Pern, I decided to read Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha, which sucked me in fast and hard.  I love autobiographical life stories, whether fictional or real.  An interesting life told as a story, and told in the first person.  And, again, the rebellious girl with a good heart, who actually wants to do well for herself but keeps getting caught in unfortunate circumstances.

Much like The daVinci Code, this is (I think) a mix of fact and fiction; I’d be curious to know how much of what the author relays to us is based on good research, and how much is imagined.

And, with any book which is purported to be an intimate look into the life of a person of one gender, but is written by a person of the other, I am somewhat skeptical.  No matter how much research you do, certain nuances of issues specifically female or male are usually only shared with persons of that gender: i.e., women share more with other women when it comes to menstruation, pregnancy, birth, sex and romance, sagging boobs, and all things female.  Men, I imagine, are much the same way.  And a lifetime of absorbing such nuances cannot be replaced with thorough research. So, I have to ask myself, how much could Arthur Golden really know about the life of a geisha?

That said, I’m enjoying the story immensely.  About halfway through, and will probably finish it early tomorrow.

Well, well, well…  This is a much better experience, this particular journey to Pern.  I’m finding Dragonsong to be a very different book from the previous one, in several ways.  A scant few hours since my last post, and I’ve readily ploughed through a hundred pages or more, and even had time to get a good night’s sleep in between chapters.

The principle reason?  Characters.  The previous book, ponderous ol’ Dragonquest, was event focused, with personalities to carry the story, but little depth of feeling to explore as a reader — all the action was action or problem-solving or narrative detailing the history or background of a particular aspect of story.  A lot of explaining, and not much exploration of the people involved.  The current volume, on the other hand, is character-based, focused as it is on Menolly, the rebellious passionate girl character I referred to in my previous entry.  Action happens to her, around her, because of her, but what the story is about is her experience of all of this.

The story runs concurrent with that of Dragonquest, overlapping in the storyline about the search for firelizard eggs, and sudden, off-schedule thread-fall.  But rather than focus on the overall picture, the planet wide (well, partial-planet) response to the threat of threadfall, this one takes a particular figure, far from the scene of action in the previous volume, a rather insignificant person in most ways, and views the situation through her limited experience of it.  Writing it out, it would seem to be a storyline very unlikely to work.

But this kind of story really does work, where a character unrecognized for her (or his) unique qualities none-the-less makes something of herself, or impacts her family/community/the world at large in an unexpected way.  Might be a small way, might just be carving out a self-reliant happy existance for herself — witness my love of good old Jane Eyre, an unlikely heroine if there ever was one.  And yet she perseveres, doggedly moving through what life offers – challenge or opportunity – and finally ends up doing alright for herself, in a truly hostile world. 

Menolly has something of the same dogged character, even if her author isn’t quite the artist that Bronte was.  And so, this is a story I actually want to read, and it was even a bit hard to tear myself away to update this journal.

Now, for some granola, a fresh cup of coffee, and more Dragonsong.

Finished the book.  Decided to read volume three, Dragonsong, before I hit Memoirs of a Geisha.  Ten pages in, it appears to be a more interesting and engaging story.  Memoirs can wait.

Isn’t life funny?  Then again, this particular book’s main character seems to be a familiar favorite of mine:  the Independent, Headstrong Girl who bucks expectations to Do The Right Thing.  You know, Jo in Little Women, or Scout (the little girl) from To Kill a Mockingbird, or spunky, demure Jane Eyre, or the Dune series characters Sheena, Siona and Darwi Odrade.

So off I go, into a pulpish but hopefully more enjoyable story about Those Irrascible Humans and their Unquenchable Dragons from the Thread-Scored Planet of Pern.

I am slowly, ever so ssssslloooowwwwlllyyy, wending my way towards the end of Dragonquest.  The book is more interesting now than it was at first; the writing is about the same, the characters standardized and not especially interesting as people, but the plot has gotten a bit thicker, and now the book is actually going somewhere.  We have a few Problems, some Potential Resolutions, and of course still being in the middle of the book, I don’t know but assume we’ll get some Solved Problems right after we reach a plotline Climax.  Stock.  Oh well.

All of this has made me wonder why I drag myself through books which aren’t very satisfying, when I have something like Memoirs of a Geisha or an impending re-read of Herbert’s Dune series awaiting me.  Why don’t I jump right to them?

My friends and family will attest to the fact that I am really not great at finishing projects which bore me, so why don’t I just put the thing aside, move on to something more interesting, and should the desire ever crop up again read the damn book down the road some year.

Somehow I am driven to finish the novel, to see where the story goes, to prep myself for future Dragons of Pern novels, should I ever read more, to get some sense of completion out of the experience.

In truth, I feel some sort of obligation to the author, I suppose, who clearly made great effort to put together the story for me (as a member of her reading audience), regardless of what I think of the end result.  That doesn’t always hold me to the end of a book or movie; if I’m offended by the content, for example, screw the presumed efforts of the creator.

Somehow, in a book like Dragonquest, there is enough for me to hang on to, and nearing the end, I know that I will, of course, finish it, remember it (at least a little) and even if I don’t cherish the book, it will have added at least a little something.

I suppose that I read such books for the same reason that I occasionally watch B movies.  And it is enough, somehow — just hard to describe why.

This isn’t an entry about what I’ve been reading, but rather what I’ve been seeing.  Day off today — spent most of it in front of the computer with a big ol’ law&order marathon on the boob tube.  I’ve seen this commercial from Liberty Mutual a number of times, and have had a pretty strong reaction to it.  You can view a pretty distorted recording of it here, but the essence of it is that someone watches another person do a kindness for a stranger; the first then goes on to do a kindness for another, is observed by another person who goes on to do a kindness for another stranger, and is observed by a person who… you get the idea.

I like the general character of the vignettes, the way in which the little film is made, the way it tells a story without spelling it out, the way the film loops around to its own beginning, and I love the music which it is set to (still trying to find out what that might be).

The acts range from a woman passing a table in a diner reaching out to scoot a coffee cup back from an elbow about to sweep it to the floor, to a man helping a stranger who has slipped on a sidewalk, to a woman pushing a man out of the way of falling boxes, to a man picking up a toy which has fallen from a stroller (there are nine acts of responsability shown in the filmette).

The message is interesting:  the first time I watched the commercial it caught my eye, and I got the general character of it.  But it wasn’t till seeing it the second or third time around that I saw the specific action.  At first I viewed it as a simple version of “pay it forward” — someone is nice to someone else, then the 2nd person is nice to a 3rd person, the 3rd to a 4th.  But it’s more complex than that.  It’s not the one who received the kindness who then goes on to extend their help to another.  It’s a person, a stranger, watching others interact, who then goes on to perform a good deed for another.  Then a stranger watching that act of kindness is inspired to extend a hand to another.  And in all of the interactions, the help is offered to people who appear to be complete strangers.

The message of being kind, of watching out for others, is definitely part of the picture.  But it is the idea that a responsible act inspires a third party to act in support of another, of taking care of people whom we do not know, which really marks a special message.

I was touched by this little production, which is essentially a short film, and have watched it repeatedly.  Until you get to the voice-over at the end, you’d never know it was a commercial for a insurance company — seems more like some social-behavior message that a interfaith organization would put out.  Whatever the source, very nicely done.  However, I’m not persuaded to buy insurance.