Weekly Reading Update #4

The Great Purge and the Art of Letting Go

Hello again, and welcome back to what I'm still calling a blog despite mounting evidence that it might actually be performance art about literary masochism. Quick check-in: if you're a returning reader, I guess this is for you too now. (Are we friends yet?)

When Books Get Voted Off the Island

This week delivered the most ruthless purge since I started this project: I Marie Kondo'd my reading list. (And yes, MK's "does it spark joy?" played into it.)

New Rules of Engagement:

I established what I'm calling the 25-40% rule: every book gets a fair shot at hooking me through the first act, but if it hasn't earned my continued attention by the midpoint of Act II, it's out. No appeals, no second chances based on online reviews promising it "gets better later." Life's too short, and my TBR is EXTENSIVE.

Main novels that got the axe: Assassin's Apprentice, Tigana, Kushiel's Dart, Hamnet, and Oryx & Crake. Short story collections that didn't make the cut: The Emerald Circus, The Faery Reel, Alien Sex, and The Door in the Hedge.

Fantasies Crumble:

Assassin's Apprentice was the hardest cut. This was the book that started the entire project—I thought I wanted to write fantasy, I'd loved Hobb's Liveship Traders trilogy, everyone raves about her character work. But despite finishing the novel, I spent the entire experience frustrated by structural choices that seemed to violate basic reader contracts.

Tigana broke my heart in a different way. Guy Gavriel Kay's first part was genuinely promising—action-supported lyricism, compelling political intrigue, characters I cared about. But Part 2 devolved into melodramatic overindulgence where beautiful language served no purpose except to be beautiful.

Kushiel's Dart got ten chapters to prove itself. Ten chapters of ornate worldbuilding and elaborate sexual politics that never cohered into a story I cared about.

Competition Becomes Fierce:

The effect on reading list was swift and brutal. Books that seemed great before (when compared to the books not doing much for me) now have to fight tooth and nail to keep their place on the list. Raising the bar across the board elevated everything.

Enough housekeeping… Without further ado, here are this week’s insights.

Can We Really Kill the Author?

I came to Oryx & Crake with significant goodwill banked. The Handmaid's Tale moved me deeply in my mid-twenties. A trusted friend had raved about The Year of the Flood (book 2 in the MadAddam trilogy), promising the series delivered a masterful twist that would justify any early frustrations. Atwood had earned the benefit of the doubt.

For the first seven chapters, that goodwill sustained me through what felt like solid but unremarkable work. Her language was beautiful, her craft clearly sophisticated. There were issues—some heavy-handed moments, a story that occasionally dragged—but nothing deal-breaking. I was reading on the strength of reputation and expectation.

Then I encountered an article critiquing Atwood's work. I hadn't sought it out; it just appeared in my feed, offering a lens I'd never considered. The critic pointed out biases and privileges that are often invisible to those who possess them—the kind of blindness that comes from swimming in your own assumptions without realizing the water exists. I felt personally called out by the article. And it made me think…

Here's the uncomfortable truth: once you see something, you cannot unsee it.

Suddenly, what had seemed like minor issues felt more pronounced. The messaging in Oryx and Crake became overwhelmingly heavy-handed and Atwood's approach started to feel patronizing. Instead of being guided toward insights, I felt lectured. Instead of being trusted to think, I felt manipulated into predetermined conclusions.

This experience crystallized something I'd been wrestling with throughout this project: interpretation is always a collision between authorial context and reader context. Both the writer's and the reader's circumstances—their time, purpose, personal history—inevitably shape meaning. There's no such thing as reading a text in isolation from these influences. Context is inescapable.

Would Oryx and Crake have escaped the cull if I hadn't read the article? We'll never know.

Unreliable Narration as Reader Education

This week delivered a masterclass in narrative manipulation courtesy of Gregory Frost's "The Root of the Matter" from the Snow White Blood Red anthology. The story, which starts as a straightforward, albeit disturbing, retelling of Rapunzel through Mother Gothel's point of view, warps on you once you reach Rapunzel's continuation of the story.

This isn't just clever plotting. When Part 2 forces us to reconsider everything, we're not just learning that Gothel may have made up the whole story. We also realize that her narrative voice controlled our interpretation of events by teaching us to read the story through her psychological framework. We're experiencing how point of view shapes reality.

Both narrators seem to be telling their truth as they understand it. This is unreliable narration in service of genuine insight rather than just plot twist satisfaction. Instead of feeling tricked by the author, I felt educated about how perspective works, how power dynamics shape storytelling, and how victims and abusers can inhabit completely different versions of the same reality.

POV and What Characters Notice

Here's a craft insight that should be taught in every writing class but somehow gets buried under plot mechanics and character arc theory: what your characters notice and focus on can reveal more about them than the choices they make.

Most craft instruction focuses heavily on what characters do—their choices, their goals, their external actions—and how these reveal character. But people reveal themselves just as much through what they pay attention to, what they ignore, what strikes them as important or irrelevant in any given moment.

When a master writer tells you that a character notices how another sets a glass down "precisely in its ring of condensation on the table" this isn't just a random detail.

Of course, the action tells quite a bit about the character who sets down the glass in such a precise manner (OCD much?). But, more interestingly, it also tells us a lot about the character doing the noticing.

Point of view is a window into how a character's mind works, what catches their attention, what they value. Observational choices characterize the observer as much as the observed, without requiring exposition or self-analysis.

This becomes a problem when a book juggles shifting points of view. When every character filters the world through the same authorial consciousness, you're technically getting POV but not true perspective.

Dialogue Tags and the Simplicity Principle

Here's a craft insight that emerged from watching a fellow writer tie herself in knots trying to avoid repetition: sometimes the most sophisticated choice is also the simplest one.

Readers typically skip right over frequent use of "said" and "asked," focusing instead on the content and speaker. These invisible workhorses of dialogue attribution do their job without calling attention to themselves. But distinctive tags create friction—they pull readers out of the conversation to notice the author's word choice.

More problematically, when you're reaching for synonyms just to avoid repetition, you often end up with tags that redundantly state what's already evident. If the dialogue clearly shows someone expressing an opinion, "opined" doesn't add information.

Watching masters handle this confirmed the principle. Rachel Cusk occasionally uses functional alternatives like "she continued," but only when it serves a specific purpose—in this case, emphasizing that a character won't stop talking. The tag adds characterization rather than just variety.

Since distinctive dialogue tags pull attention from the content they follow, they should serve a genuine purpose by adding something substantive to the reader's understanding—otherwise, stick to the invisible workhorses "said" and "asked."

Units within Units

One of the most overlooked challenges in long-form storytelling is creating satisfying reading experiences at multiple scales simultaneously. How do you make individual chapters feel complete and rewarding while serving the larger narrative arc? Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children has become my master class in solving this puzzle.

What struck me this week is how "every chapter is like a short story" while the overall momentum never flags. Each chapter centers on one main event or set of related events, complete with its own emotional arc and thematic coherence. You could theoretically read any single chapter in isolation and feel like you'd experienced something whole.

But here's the sophisticated part: Rushdie threads multiple ongoing storylines through each chapter, pulling in elements from previous chapters and seeding expectations for future ones.

Take his use of recurring symbols and images. Each chapter gets imbued with one running symbol or metaphor that gives it thematic unity—snakes and ladders, the colors of the Indian flag, holes in sheets and chests, many headed monsters. But these symbols also connect back to earlier chapters and forward to future ones, creating layers of meaning that accumulate over time.

Setting Up Next Month's Deep Dive:

The weekly reading has been circling around questions of narrative voice and reader contracts, so that's where I'm heading for the monthly deep dive. Specifically, I want to explore the contract between reader and narrator—not reader and author, but the relationship with the voice actually telling the story.

There's something crucial about distinguishing between narrative voice, POV character, main character, and protagonist. These can all be different people, and understanding their relationships seems key to why some books create immediate trust. When those contracts get violated the entire reading relationship breaks down. But when the contract is honored, even difficult or experimental narratives can carry readers through challenging material.

Time to figure out how that magic actually works.

Closing: When Less Becomes More

The week's real discovery isn't about any individual craft technique—it's about creating the conditions where craft techniques become visible in the first place. Sometimes you have to clear away the noise before you can hear the music.

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That's the damage report for week four. Let me know what resonated. Or vote me off your island. I won't be offended. Hey, I'm all for culling!