Savouring versus Inhaling...

[Guest]

Before we get a slew of Clinton jokes posted, JUST STOP!

I am a voracious reader. My husband has nightmares where he is pinned under a pile of books with my 9 year old daughter perched on the top reading while I am wheeling yet another wheelbarrow full of books toward him.

But, there is a difference between the books I consume and the ones I savour.

Harding- I savour
Weber- I inhale
Dostoevsky- I savour
Coulter- I inhale....

You get the picture. I have actually not read all of Harding's novels because I think I would fall into a depression if I knew there were no more to read for the first time.

So, the questions I have are these: What makes a book a "savourable" book? What makes other books "inhaleable"?

Scanning back through some of the novels I inhaled without stopping to eat or sleep I have noticed that they aren't complex in sentence structures.

Looking forward to all of your brilliant insights...

b

 

[Chicklet]

I read books.

 

[raphy]

I read everything. Voraciously, insatiably. Books, newspapers, the back of cereal packets, the instructions on canned food.

Words in a row.

That's all I ever require.

 

[Icingsugar]

I read books.

I'm with chicklet. Books I read.

Or ok. Some I read, some I lose myself in. As for why, it doesn't really matter. It can be jsut a damn good story, or depend on the mood I'm in when I read it.

 

[Guest]

C'mon, people, you know what Bridget means.

I 'savour' the classics and 'modern' classics; hardly anything written after 1950 though. I'll get seduced once in a while by a new writer, but it's always a quickie.

Just several mentions for savories: Anna Karenina, many Chekhov stories, all of Turgenev and Dostoevsky, Henry James, Edith Wharton, the Brontes, Beckett, Joyce, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante...

Perdita the literary snob

 

[pop_54]

Ha

C'mon, people, you know what Bridget means.

I 'savour' the classics and 'modern' classics; hardly anything written after 1950 though. I'll get seduced once in a while by a new writer, but it's always a quickie.

Just several mentions for savories: Anna Karenina, many Chekhov stories, all of Turgenev and Dostoevsky, Henry James, Edith Wharton, the Brontes, Beckett, Joyce, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante...

Perdita the literary snob

Hello lovely one, fancy a quickie

I'm not a big reader these days, I just don't seem to have the time with work and all, and I hate trying to read a book in too many instalments.

I too used to savour the classics though, and just skip through newer more frivolous stuff.

pops.............

 

[Guest]

Re: Ha

Hello lovely one, fancy a quickie

Of course, Pops, you're as classic as they cum.

Perdita

 

[MathGirl]

Re: Re: Ha

Originally posted by perdita Of course, Pops, you're as classic as they cum.

Dear Perdita,
My God, you're so ..... easy.
MG

 

[Guest]

Re: Re: Re: Ha

Dear Perdita, My God, you're so ..... easy.

You keep saying that Maths. I'm not really. I only have two cyber beaux at the moment, and they both make it "easy" for me to be what you call me. But I'm not easy. Get it?

Perdita

 

[ffreak]

My taste varies across the spectrum.

I savor Pulitzer winners (my favorite is still House Made of Dawn by Momaday 1969)

I inhale Spenser Novels (an ex-boxer, ex-cop that is a smart-ass quoter of English Poetry and Literature)

I savor the 'Classics', I try to read a different one every few months (I often fall-off the wagon and reread one that strikes me - there's something new to be found each time)

I inhale mystery and horror writers like Walter Mosley, or Andrew Vachss, or Jonathon Kellerman, or Stephen King, or Peter Straub, or Kemmelman, or...
I don't think there's enough room here.

Hey, I just made the connection reading is like sex. Sometimes we just want it so bad we devour our partner and sometimes it is so delicious that we just have to slow down and savor every minute detail of the sensations we derive from such pleasure as they course through us and drive us inexorably on a heavenly cloud towards that promise of a final earth-shattering, wondrous revelation about our own brief immortality in an all too mortal world.

Oh, sorry. Just got carried away.

 

[Guest]

Hey, I just made the connection reading is like sex. Sometimes we just want it so bad we devour our partner and sometimes it is so delicious that we just have to slow down and savor every minute detail of the sensations we derive from such pleasure as they course through us and drive us inexorably on a heavenly cloud towards that promise of a final earth-shattering, wondrous revelation about our own brief immortality in an all too mortal world.

That is so true, and I completely agree.

Most books I devour; to get a quick fix. I find the odd rareity which I enjoy so much, that I want to savour every single word. Most books that I read, a lot of people would class as 'pulp' fiction, these I read fast. I'm with everyone else: the classics I tend to savour and take my time over.

Loulou

 

[Guest]

The books I savour I end up possessing. So much so that when I see other copies of them in bookstores I feel like buying them again, just for the pleasure of it.

Once a jerk I knew had a copy of a book I loved and I wanted to steal it because I thought he didn't deserve to own it.

Yep, pretty snobby. Perdita

 

[oggbashan]

Dear Perdita,

Now you can understand why I own a bookstore.

Selling the books is a problem.

It is great when I can introduce someone to a new author that they appreciate.

It is hard when someone buys a great book that I know they will never understand.

Og

 

[Icingsugar]

C'mon, people, you know what Bridget means.

I 'savour' the classics and 'modern' classics; hardly anything written after 1950 though. I'll get seduced once in a while by a new writer, but it's always a quickie.

Just several mentions for savories: Anna Karenina, many Chekhov stories, all of Turgenev and Dostoevsky, Henry James, Edith Wharton, the Brontes, Beckett, Joyce, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante...

Perdita the literary snob

Well, that's exactly my point. I do read anything and everything (novel-wise, that is). And there is really no logic as to which author or which novel gets me turned on enough to enter that "Dinner, maybe later. Sleep? Forget sleep, I'm reading!"-state that leaves me like dead the next morning, but with a mind-boggling motion picture set on repeat behind my eyelids.

There are really three levels of reading books for me:

* I read, but doesn't enjoy. (but read on, it might get better)
* I read, and enjoy. (Most common)
* I read, and get mind-fucked. (Is that anything like 'savouring')

No special breed of books ever fall into either category. Renowed classics can as easily bore me as set my head on fire. It depends just as much on wether that particular book hit the right keyts in me, and also in what mood/place in life I was when I read it.

 

[Guest]

Ice, I pretty much agree with you. I didn't mean I enjoy or appreciate all the classics (what I've read is like the tip of the iceberg compared to what I haven't and will never read).

That said, I used to hate to not finish a book, no matter how boring or disliked. Now at 56 I am very conscious of wasting time, so there are plenty of unfinished books I simply resell at my local used bookstore.

"Mindfuck" for savour, good blunt alternative word.

Perdita

 

[OT]

So, the questions I have are these: What makes a book a "savourable" book? What makes other books "inhaleable"?

b

A good story will usually trigger the inhaling response (mostly because I'm impatient and skim quickly along to find out what happens next.) Rarely do I find an author who writes tight enough that I care about every word.

A clever writing style is more apt to trigger the savor response, in which case I am more intrigued by how the story is being told than the story itself.

When I stumble upon a good story told well, I skim first then go back and savor on the second reading

 

[dr_mabeuse]

When the story grabs you, you read. You can;t stop reading; you have to know what happens next.

There are also books that are great not so much because of the story, but because of the author: the insights, the way he/she says things, what the author notices. In this case it's just a treat to be with the author. These are the ones I savour.

I read for content, I savour the style.


---dr.M.

 

[Guest]

great stories and great language

I see a small pattern: great plots/stories drive many of us to inhale the novels while great language/structure can draw us in to savour the novels.

I confess that I have a few novels that are dear companions. I reread them to soothe myself. They are best for relaxing, since if I want to drift off I am not compelled to read and find out how they end. Some of these are ones I originally inhaled, others are ones that I may have struggled through the first time.

Interestingly, for me, is that I actually am conflicted about some of my favorite novels. So many of them are like watching a train wreck. I am inexorably drawn in and cannot not finish them.

b

edited: dr m snuck his posting in while i was writing mine.. great minds and all that

 

[Guest]

This seems apt to quote here.

"If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. ...

My own Words chill and burn me."

— Emily Dickinson

 

[Icingsugar]

"Mindfuck" for savour, good blunt alternative word.

In fact, it's pretty much to-the-letter for me when it comes to strong reading experiences.

Some pepole tend to read with their head, enjoying the structure of a text and basking in style and form, being able to pinpoint a plotline or tempus as 'interresting'.

Others seem to read with their heart, strong on empathy for the characters, thinking trough the whole process 'I wonder if they'll get each other in the end.' or something like that.

I'm one of those that read with my guts. I forget there even IS an end. Analysing a great book for me is like trying to analyse an orgasm. It's not easy. Because when I'm sucked into it, I'm not thinking a single conscious thought. So being mind-fucked is pretty much as accurately as I can describe it.


The gut focused reaction seems to be more common when pepole listen to music. And I'm the same there. A certain song, or snippet of a pop song/symphony/whatever can make my toes curl without me ever being able to explain why.

Give me a movie or a poem though, and I'm much more brain than heart or gut.

 

[ffreak]

When they suck you in so deeply that it's possible to forget that you're not in a real world, they've done their job well.

Ah, the sharp tang of dirty air, horns blaring, neon lights a glitter while we shoulder our way through the crowds down the sidewalk of a big city, looking for love and laughter, mayhem and mystery in the pages of our alternate lives as played out in the shared worlds of favorite authors.

 

[Guest]

Ice, I 'read' you. When I listen to my favorite music it's as if I have no skin; at times as if I have no body. Nothing comes close to that, not even my most beloved literature.

Perdita

 

[Just_John1]

Re: great stories and great language

I confess that I have a few novels that are dear companions. I reread them to soothe myself. They are best for relaxing, since if I want to drift off I am not compelled to read and find out how they end. Some of these are ones I originally inhaled, others are ones that I may have struggled through the first time.

Hey Bridge... oops or should I say Bridgetkeeney... Don't want to get in trouble... Interesting thread. I find that books fit one of three categories for me, They create an existance that I will re-read and re-read to re-experience the vision, they tell a story that I'll read once or they suck and I never finish them.

The books that have become modern classics for me are ones that give me an insight to another way of life I've never experieinced. An example would be W.E.B. Griffen. I love his books and read them constantly. They give an interesting insight to military life, albeit a relatively privledged view, still a view of a life style I've never experienced and really never understood. Not what most would consider a classic but very entertaining and from what I understand a pretty good example of what happens in military life.

Books that I'll read once for the story are books like Dale Brown books. Always a good story but just a story not an "experience"

No one needs an example of books that suck. Everyone has their own list.

I struggle with the "classics" on a regular basis. I always have... I think it has something to do with getting my wrist slapped with a wooden ruler when I told the headmaster that the old man and the sea was boring. I've been rebelious ever since.

I'm done rambling... thanks for listening.

JJ1

 

[SlickTony]

I struggle with the "classics" on a regular basis. I always have... I think it has something to do with getting my wrist slapped with a wooden ruler when I told the headmaster that the old man and the sea was boring. I've been rebelious ever since.

Fortunately The Old Man and the Sea is a short book. I can understand your issues; I have them myself. This is why I've sort of given up reading the things you're Supposed to Have Read and read exactly what I damn please.

I tend to read a book I like the way a cow eats grass: I gulp it all down and sort of bring it up and chew on it later.

 

[MathGirl]

my most beloved literature.

Dear Perdita,
Can I borrow your latest "Readers' Digest Condensed Books" when you're done with it?
MG