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Filed under: Reading | Tags: Booking Through Thursday, books, memes, Nero Wolfe, Reading, Rex Stout
Sometimes I find eccentric characters quirky and fun, other times I find them too unbelievable and annoying. What are some of the more outrageous characters you’ve read, and how do you feel about them?
It’s funny, but for some reason, mystery writers always feel the need to make their detectives as eccentric as possible. Agatha Christie, for example, had Hercule Poirot, the small, fastidious Belgian. But I think the most eccentric has to be Nero Wolfe, created by Rex Stout. I really enjoy his novels, set in New York beginning in the 1930s. Mr. Wolfe (no one is allowed to call him by his first name) is a very successful detective, but somewhat difficult to work with. He is described as being unusually obese. He loves food and has a full-time Swiss chef. He also loves beer and drinks six quarts a day. His other passion is orchids. He had a greenhouse on top of his brownstone with thousands of plants and employes a full-time horticulturalist to care for them. He also keeps a very rigid schedule every day and never leaves his house, if he can help it. He is especially distristful of automobiles. He hires people to do the leg-work for his cases, usually his full-time assistant Archie Goodwin.
Sometimes I have a hard time believing all of his eccentricities, but mystery novels are always more about the plot than the characters anyway, so I tend to forgive them.
Filed under: History, Reading | Tags: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Booking Through Thursday, books, memes, Reading, Rebecca West, Yugoslavia
What’s your favorite book that nobody else has heard of? You know, not Little Women or Huckleberry Finn, not the latest best-seller . . . whether they’ve read them or not, everybody “knows” those books. I’m talking about the best book that, when you tell people that you love it, they go, “Huh? Never heard of it?”
I know I’ve mentioned this book on this blog before, but I have to answer Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West. West, a British novelist and literary critic, traveled through Yugoslavia with her husband in 1938. At bottom, the book is a journal of her experiences, but it is so much more than that. Wherever she goes, she digs into the history of the region to the point where the line between the past and the present begins to blur. She’s also able to relate that history to the history of Yugoslavia as a whole, going back on occasion to the Roman Empire. She weaves everything together so seamlessly that not until the end of the book do you realize that she’s surveyed the entire history of the country.
Her writing is also extremely lyrical, and she paints such vivid pictures of everywhere she goes that it makes me sad that I can’t see a lot of the places (Sarajevo, Kosovo) the way she describes them.
She even manages to work in a little spy mystery as the clock ticks down to World War II, and they encounter sinister agents of Germany and Italy as well as British operatives.
At over 1,100 pages, it’s not a book for the faint of heart. Also, the one criticism I have is that West has some pretty strong biases. She hates Germans and Turks. She loves Serbs. Getting a well-rounded knowledge of the former Yugoslavia has required further reading, but no other book has made me fall in love with a place I’ve never been.
Filed under: Life, Random, Writing | Tags: Life, Random, synesthesia, Writing
When I read te title to this article on Salon, “The Letter E is Purple,” I knew immediately what it was about–synesthesia, a neurological condidion in which the brain gets certain sensory perceptions crossed. For example, people with synesthesia associate letters and numbers with certain colors or sounds. I alwasy read any articles about it I can find because I have it.
For as long as I can remember, each digit 0-9 has had its own color. Zero is black. One is yellow-orange. Two is blue. Three is red. Four is indigo. Five is yellow-green. Six is blue-green. Seven is lavender. Eight is yellow. Nine is midnight blue. Higher numbers are sometimes combinations of the colors of their digits. Thirteen is orange (yellow-orange + red). Such associations have always been normal to me.
Letters have colors too. The intersting thing is that letters that represent “lighter” sounds have lighter colors than letters that represent “heavier” sounds, making me think that there may be something to the theory of phonosemantics. For example, the letter I is yellow, while the letter M is dark red. And in one instance, a letter actually has a taste. The letter H has a bittersweet taste like a grapefruit.
Places have colors, too. Greenville, SC, where I grew up, is, well, green. Spartanburg, about half an hour away, is orange, and Charleston is yellow.
Synesthesia doesn’t hinder normal brain function, and it has actually helped me. It works as a mnemonic device on occasion. If I’m trying to remember a word or a date, I can sometimes think of its “color” to help me. Or I know I’ve mispelled a word because it’s the “wrong color.”
When I’m writing, it helps, too. I can pick words or phrases that have certain “colors” if I’m going for a particualr mood, and it usually works. It also helps with picking names for characters. Adam Mire is a dark, reddish-purple name for a quiet intellectual prone to depression. Stephen Cahill is light but solid orange name for an easy-going but responsible type of guy.
It’s probably reason I can’t read comic books, though. Oh, well. I guess life has its trade-offs.
