book... reactions

waiting to hear from a restaurant on whether on i can do a review of them or not.
perfect blogging time.

so i checked out three books from the public library to last me on my week-long trip visiting my parents in NC - two of them the middle and conclusion to the terry goodkind trilogy, wizard's first rule, and another called the jane austen book club, which was a staff recommendation that i spotted at the library, and picked up because i've read all of austen's books anyway. but it would have helped if i had read them more recently, coz the only chapters in which i could really see the author's art were the ones dealing with persuasion and pride and prejudice. anyway, at home i found two boxes i have been searching for for ages, of my old books, mostly from my english major, but some others as well. picked out ender's game, because i had already finished the three library books by my third or fourth night there.

so, this is what i figured out:
throughout my reading of all the books, i kept recalling something a fiction workshop professor told us on the first day of class (back in 2004) - that when you are writing fiction, the best approach is to let your characters carry the story. develop them, let them carry the plot along - don't start with a plot idea, or a theme, or anything like that. while i did write a story from a theme not long after this that won some recognition, i still think the character thing is a good idea, because of course what really carries you through a good novel is when you care about the characters in some way.
so, is that what makes a "good" book? i don't know... i know that i couldn't put stone of tears or blood of the fold down, except toward the end of the second one because the plot started to feel contrived and way too complicated. it may not have been the best writing in the world, and not everything about the characters truly drew me in, but the storytelling was excellent. and what made me check the books out in the first place was my desire to find out what else happened to richard and kahlan after the first book, and what did it mean for darken rahl to have only been an "agent," etc etc. cared about the characters, cared about the world they lived in.
the austen book took me longer to read. there's a different taste to these contemporary fiction books... not quite the feast that fantasy books used to be for me. i can tell from reading it that fowler is a "good" writer, and it is a "good" book - well-crafted, clever, literary in more than one sense because of the austen echoes. but honestly, some of the characters in the book club just slipped in my mind and then out again... allegra stood out, because she was gay and then betrayed by her partner in a writing group sort of way; sylvia, because she was allegra's mother; grigg, because he was the only guy in the group and the youngest child in a family with three older sisters... and see, i can barely remember any of the others. somebody named bernadette. prudie. don't recall anything much about them.
if i write "literature," if i want to get published, is this the sort of stuff i have to write?

orson scott card was so, so, so very different. i thought i had read ender's game before, but i didn't recall the ending this time around - maybe i had started it and never finished. i felt so much for little ender that i went back and reread the ending a few times (since i still had a couple of days left in NC). i thought about it, and figured that (similar to another thing the fiction workshop guy told us) the best of any genre of literature tells you something true about the human condition. and this is what i learned from ender's game: that we destroy that which we don't understand; that love can be healing, but only if we open our hearts to it.
i couldn't help comparing ender wiggin to frodo baggins. frodo saved the shire - but not for himself; he had to leave for the havens in the end. ender saved earth, but in the end he couldn't return there either. but frodo's departure at the grey havens was basically a sort of death, whereas ender - by traveling to the new colony, and then traveling with his sister in search of a home for the hive queen - had a sort of almost-immortality, as he aged in space travel and not in earth years. and it was his sister's love that made this possible. did frodo simply close himself off to the possibility of healing? why do we just accept that he was no longer whole ("i am wounded... it will never really heal...") and could not remain in the shire even for those who loved him?

another interesting thought that popped up... there is much talk in the goodkind trilogy about how wizards use people in order to help humanity... i guess because they have great vision and can fit their "usees" into the puzzle they are trying to piece together. so, zedd uses richard, adie, etc; richard uses the mud people, du chaillu, the sisters of light, his mord-sith guards, etc. and in ender's game, everybody uses ender - colonel graff, anderson, and even valentine is used by graff in order to use ender, the ultimate goal being to train the universe's best military genius to defeat the "buggers."
but in the end, valentine also uses ender, volunteering him without his permission to be governor of the first human colony on an older bugger world - but mostly to make sure that he ends up going the same place she does, because she loves him. and she tells him this, when he chafes for a moment:

"Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to fill the roles given you by good people, by people who love you. I didn't come here because I wanted to be a colonist... I want a chance to know the brother that I love, before it's too late, before we're not children anymore."

i wonder about this. did gandalf use frodo, too? he told him once, even the very wise cannot see all ends. it's important to LOTR that there is a Power, a providence sort of thing, that transcends the power of the wizards and of sauron himself. ("bilbo was MEANT to find the ring"). but maybe gandalf saw more than others could, and knew frodo was the only one with the hardiness (and tookishness) to carry out the deed. he knew gollum had a role to play, and they certainly all used gollum toward the noble end of destroying the Ring.

is this what determinism means? that we are all used by God? and that it is our greatest honor to be used so, the best we can do to fill the role He lays out for us? i get the feeling card's idea is more of a, well, secular idea... not like tolkien's thoughts. but one can always stretch the idea so.

speaking of tolkien, we watched donnie darko last night. much more interesting than i thought it would be. but hubby was disgusted that drew barrymore produced it, and thought the whole "cellar door" (that is the tolkien reference, for anyone who wants to look it up) thing was stupid. i can sort of see it, though...

so it turns out i'll be doing a review of the restaurant, after all, but not till tomorrow morning (that's when i'll go meet them). it's the third pizza place i'm doing in two months... i expressed that concern to my editor, but he said, "well, people eat a lot of pizza." true, true!