Chris

The Idle Book Club 1: The Sense of an Ending

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I think it's important to draw a line between likable and lovable characters. I'm also suspicious of the former, especially in the hands of a clumsy writer who obviously wants them to be well-liked to the point of being wish-fulfillment or a Mary Sue. Infinite Jest, for me, is basically a master class in how to construct characters that are lovable even if you would be horrified to hang out with them in real life.

It might also be understood as the boundary between emotionally-open and emotionally-vulnerable—we get a lot emotionally-open writing online, but so much of it is defensive posturing or strutting where there's nothing really at stake, just like Tony's reactionary letter to Adrian and Victoria that's ostensibly directed at them but is instead a working-out of internal dramas. The Sense of an Ending is in large part the emotionally-vulnerable part of Tony coming to terms with the own carapace he's built around himself, so cemented in place that it no longer seems a part of him but instead a feature of the world itself.

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I have eagerly anticipated this podcast, and I was not disappointed. It did bring up all the insecurities about aging and memory I had when I first read Sense of an Ending, but I still really enjoyed listening to your thoughts. Very insightful. I agree that good books don't necessarily have to offer an escape for the reader; most of my favorite books have actually made me incredibly uncomfortable.

Infinite Jest, for me, is basically a master class in how to construct characters that are lovable even if you would be horrified to hang out with them in real life.

I don't know, I think I would still want to have dinner with Don Gately, even if he cooked it.

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Excellent cast, keep it up! Though still not a fan of the intro and outro.

One of the thing that I got from Tony and wasn't mentioned on the cast is that, not only is he reexamining his life, but he also genuinely wants to make up for past mistakes.

If I remember well, after the recollection of his 20s the book is mostly about him, mulling over how to do that properly and putting that on paper. In that sense, I thought that the example of him mentioning Victoria's brother in his e-mail wasn't representative of the way he's written since, in that instance, he's being a dick on purpose.

Present Tony's whole existence is bent toward finding a course of action for making things better: sometimes, his lengthy thought experiments even bring him to what could be a proper and sensitive course of actions, but he always ends up choosing the worse alternative.

The irritating and tragic aspect of his character is that he means well, but he thinks that relationships are puzzles with a definite solution and with each realization, self discovery or unearthed information, he wrongly assumes that he finally got the last missing piece and that his actions will from now on be spot-on.

I think it's important to draw a line between likable and lovable characters. I'm also suspicious of the former, especially in the hands of a clumsy writer who obviously wants them to be well-liked to the point of being wish-fulfillment or a Mary Sue. Infinite Jest, for me, is basically a master class in how to construct characters that are lovable even if you would be horrified to hang out with them in real life.

Personally, I never really understood the relevancy of likeable or lovable quality when it comes to character writing. The only thing I value is the writer's ability to make his characters relatable - either by making me empathize with them or giving me keys so that I can rationalize their behavior and emotions. Whether I like them or not, agree with their actions or not, it has nothing to do with how potent they are or the worth of what the book is telling me through them.

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Personally, I never really understood the relevancy of likeable or lovable quality when it comes to character writing. The only thing I value is the writer's ability to make his characters relatable - either by making me empathize with them or giving me keys so that I can rationalize their behavior and emotions. Whether I like them or not, agree with their actions or not, it has nothing to do with how potent they are or the worth of what the book is telling me through them.

I guess for me lovable and relatable are very similar: when I'm reading through the eyes of a character I don't have to necessarily like you or think your actions were good, but if I can get close enough to understand your values, then that's enough for me. There's sort of an adoration beyond simple approval there.

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I want my characters to be interesting. To give me a reason to care about what happens to them. I just finished The Picture of Dorian Grey, in that 2 out of the 3 main characters are utterly despicable men. But in their way they are all fascinating and I want to know them more.

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Totally unrelated to the book but was related to the podcast, had to relay this experience.

I usually listen to Idle Thumbs podcasts in browser, so when it is over, my headphones go quiet until I start something else.

This time, when the podcast came to an end and the Indiana Jones theme started playing, I thought nothing of it, except to comment to myself "I wonder why they chose to stick this at the end?"

It wasn't until I sat down at my computer to stop it playing that I realized my iTunes had continued on to the Indiana Jones theme randomly in my library.

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First off: good show to hear Alex with his inimitable announcing voice again.

Like I said in the earlier topic, I'm really happy with the tone of the podcast being somewhat more serious. It fits the topic much better and encourages some really impressive in-depth thinking. I think it's a very good sign that I was pretty embarrassed throughout that I hadn't been thinking about certain aspects of the book in the same light as you did. A pretty big puzzle piece fell into place when you talked about Tony not being the actual protagonist. That was a revelation.

This is why I was and am so enthused for the podcast: I hope it'll sharpen my critical thinking skills retaining specifically to books. It's pretty novel territory to me, so I'm glad this exists. I've started reading Cloud Atlas and look forward to the pre-discussion when I hopefully finish it in a few weeks' time.

As for the likeability of characters, I don't think that's a necessary quality at all to gain access to a story. The way I watch films, for instance, I get just as much - if not more - excited by a person who is obviously uncouth than a hero I like or would like to be. I'm thinking of Daniel Plainview from There Will Be Blood or the man whose name escapes me from Last Year at Marienbad. What is more fascinating than having what appears to be a villain before you, and then figuring out what makes them tick, and perhaps even finding something to relate to?

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I have to agree with the criticisms regarding Veronica's character. She spends so much of her own time dealing with Tony, which is clearly unpleasant for her, but she draws it out by being completely unhelpful. She doesn't seem to care whether Tony understands or not, and he couldn't when she hands him red herrings one after the other, but she drives Tony around London and let's the situation go on for months.

Also, regarding who's the protagonist, I feel the book is about memory, self-image, remorse and old age. The subject matter is thought processes. That there is this conventional drama that acts as a catalyst for how Tony starts thinking about his past and character doesn't make him less the protagonist. The book isn't about Adrian, Veronica and her mother.

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If that last comment was spurred by my post: my use of 'protagonist' was ill-advised. Obviously Tony is the focus of the book, but what was discussed was his involvement in the narrative thread about the sordid affair with Veronica, her mother and Adrian. Tony reflects on it and pushes himself into the investigation, but is not the main player or even a crucial part of the equation - he's merely a hurtful accessory.

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I have to agree with the criticisms regarding Veronica's character. She spends so much of her own time dealing with Tony, which is clearly unpleasant for her, but she draws it out by being completely unhelpful. She doesn't seem to care whether Tony understands or not, and he couldn't when she hands him red herrings one after the other, but she drives Tony around London and let's the situation go on for months.

I really do not understand the dislike for Veronica; I think her actions make complete sense given the circumstances. She's doesn't owe Tony an explanation, which is why she never directly comes out and tells him what's going on. At the same time, she wants him to figure it out, s0 he can share in some of her pain. It's a push and pull between two desires: to not reward him with an explanation and to punish him by letting him know what the last 40 years of her life have been about. If I were in her situation, I'd probably act the exact same way.

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I really do not understand the dislike for Veronica; I think her actions make complete sense given the circumstances. She's doesn't owe Tony an explanation, which is why she never directly comes out and tells him what's going on. At the same time, she wants him to figure it out, s0 he can share in some of her pain. It's a push and pull between two desires: to not reward him with an explanation and to punish him by letting him know what the last 40 years of her life have been about. If I were in her situation, I'd probably act the exact same way.

I agree. This guy has been absolutely invisible to her for 40 years (after not really clicking as a couple in the first place), and suddenly he comes out of absolutely nowhere to bother her about what is basically an ancient artifact related to what is probably the most disruptive event (or series of events) that has ever occurred in her life.

That's not to say that someone else in the exact same situation might not have reacted differently; everyone reacts differently to unusual circumstances. But I don't think her response makes her an unbelievable character, or a horrible person.

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I just don't get why she engages with him at all, some guy who was a bastard to her 40 years ago. I don't see how Tony knowing would share her pain at all, and if that's what she wanted, she could have achieved it with far less discomfort to herself. I would understand her wanting Tony to know nothing about what actually happened. Most people hide their weak spots from people they don't like. I just felt like she was a storytelling device to put this drip feed of information about what happened back then into the story. It's not a judgment regarding the morality of her character.

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I didn't read the book but I really enjoyed episode 1. I don't think characters have to be likable but a story should have at least some sympathetic characters or else I don't really care what happens to them (hello Walking Dead TV Show). Joffery (from Game of Thrones) is an example of an extremely unlikable character that I still enjoy because he's maybe not sympathetic but understandable/believable? Great discussion and the new intro/outro is really fantastic.

Can't wait to hear what you thought of cloud atlas.

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I enjoyed the cast very much. I appreciated how you summarized events as you went along, because I had already gone hazy on some of the details.

I just don't see that from what I read.

You wouldn't, because the story is told from Tony's perspective. This ties into what the fellows were saying about how you can only see the barest sliver of another's internal life. We operate on assumptions of what motivates other people, while the reality is that it's alien. I don't mean to say that you can have characters do whatever the hell without any sense of consistency and use that as an excuse for poor writing, but in this case, I think it's fitting for her to be inscrutable to Tony (and, by extension, the reader).

People who I think I know well do things I can't fathom all the time. You may have an idea of how you (or a similarly-wired person) would act in her situation, but that will only take you so far.

I like The Argobot's interpretation of her actions; I think it makes a lot of sense. It may not be explicitly present in the text, but it shows that there could very well be an emotionally consistent explanation for the way Veronica acts, and in this case, that's good enough for me. Our narrator is kind of a clod, after all. (In the same way that we can all be clods sometimes.)

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Although I didn't get as much out of the book - in part because its impact was diminished by other books having explored the same thing for me and also because it is one of my obsessions anyway - I really liked your talk about the book as it has urged me to get back to finishing one of my own chapters.

One of the things that really nailed it for me was that reading Tony's perspective irritated me from the offset and continued to irritate me to the end. I couldn't put my finger on it and when you pointed out all the annoying little pathetic/pedantic things he did that it became apparent as to why I hated him.

Please note: Hated him as a person but as a well written character I thought he was very good because he was so annoying.

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Has the third book been announced already? I don't want to listen to the cast because I haven't read the book.

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Man, bits of that cast got me right in the feels the same way the book did. It is super intense to think about some of the things we may have done to our own minds to shy away from things that are painful. I spent too much of my life trying to be fearless, and now I'm afraid my fears have gone underground and go in masks as shapeless aversions to things I should like. Do I not want to do something because I'm tired, or because I'm afraid of something? It is hard to tell.

Now... a few times there, I think both Sean and Chris said something to the effect that everyone's said or written something like that letter, something horribly reckless and mean as retribution for being hurt. Even in my most honest retrospection, I don't believe I have, but-- I worry that this is because I've lead a safe, a 'peaceable' life. So the character of Tony got to me more personally in that way, though I'm so super sensitive of the effect that I have on people at all times that the letter bit was pretty agonizing.

I don't know! I'm trying to interact with the world more, but I've constructed so much of my identity around a love for and fetishization of creativity and analysis that it's hard for me to interface with the world the way other people do. I worry about living a cold and lonely life, but I worry more about sacrificing my ambitions for a shallow and superficial happiness that will leave me even colder in the long run. All of this may seem like a digression, but the book and discussion of it brought up a lot of these thoughts again-- though, granted, they're never far below the surface of my thoughts anyway.

Existence and identity... tricky stuff, yo.

Thanks for book blasting. It is as excellent as I'd hoped it would be.

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Nappi: no, all we know is Cloud Atlas Shrugged is the next book. I imagine that if they're planning a longer novel, such as Infinite Jest, they'll announce it a few months ahead.

Problem machine: Those feelings are completely relatable and I'd be surprised if someone hadn't been there every now and again. Just remember that as long as your life isn't this--

--you're doing fine. PS. The Weather Man is a pretty amazing movie.

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Yeah, Cloud Atlas is probably about the biggest novel, give or take a hundred pages, we'd toss out for a regular Idle Book Club. Chris and I have talked about definitely wanting do Infinite Jest but we'd treat that a special cast and give people 2 or 3 months heads up.

Month 3 hasn't been chosen yet; we'll announce it during Ep 2: Cloud Atlas. (Does that sound like enough time for people to read a book that is 300 to 500 pages?)

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I'm about 130 pages in since last week. The book cast is definitely spurring me to devote a few hours to reading every evening, that's a good thing. I think I'm gonna be fine, but I wouldn't dare to speak for other people with perhaps less free time in the evenings? 500 pages seems doable so far, though.

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I still think you should try to announce a new title two months in advance if possible. Shipping a book to Finland may take more than a week already and I have quite a little spare time at the moment.

It is not a big problem as I can always listen to the casts later. It would be nice to be able to take part in the pre-discussion every know and then, though.

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A bit late here, but anyway:

While there are things I really enjoyed about Sense of an Ending, I just can't get past Barnes' handling of (for lack of a better word) "future" Veronica.

I apologize if this is rehashing old ground.

Let's look at it from her perspective: Your boyfriend sleeps with your mom and you get a special needs brother. Perhaps you blame this on your boyfriend from before your boyfriend-who-slept-with-mom, maybe you don't. Either way, that boyfriend was a total asshole who sent you a ridiculously mean letter. Now you have to care for your special needs brother, AND your boyfriend-who-slept-with-mom killed himself. Total bummer. Skip forward forty years, and asshole boyfriend starts sending you some probing emails (and comes off a little skeezy). Instead of ignoring him, or telling him "You're an asshole who made my life a whole lot worse", you concoct a complex scheme to prove to him again something which you took pains to point out forty years ago, which is that he is incapable of understanding the world around him in a way that is compatible with a. reality or b. the way you see reality.

Her scheme goes something like this: 1. Send a fragment of a journal entry from dead-boyfriend-who-slept-with-mom that uses a coded math problem to explain a situation that asshole-boyfriend is unaware of (to prove how unaware asshole-boyfriend is?) 2. Meet with asshole-boyfriend in person to see if he got it 3. Nope he didn't, drive him around and do a crazy curb-stop to show him your brother in the hope that he would somehow guess or make sense of the whole situation 4. Nope he still doesn't get it, tell him he'll never get it then go home.

This just doesn't make sense to me. If this is really Veronica's plan, then she is not acting like a person. She is acting like a literary cog in the plot machine. That is my problem with it.

The rest of the book is really, really good. I just feel like Barnes wrote himself into a place where Veronica could no longer be a believable character. This is a problem for me, because a huge part of the attraction I have to the book is the way it accurately portrays our ability to misunderstand not just our history - and reality in general - but also the people around us, their motivations, and their realities. But when the people in the book don't read like people, it undermines the overall effect. So the question becomes, how do you solve that problem? If you're Barnes, what do you do? The mystery of the letter works so well as the keystone of the second half of the book, and yet it really doesn't make any sense for Veronica to send it to him. Sure, you can hand-waive this away ("It's all she had kept" (I think it actually does say that she burned the diary) "She didn't realize that no one would be able to reasonably work that out" etc.) but it's hard to get past.

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I still think you should try to announce a new title two months in advance if possible. Shipping a book to Finland may take more than a week already and I have quite a little spare time at the moment.

It is not a big problem as I can always listen to the casts later. It would be nice to be able to take part in the pre-discussion every know and then, though.

As someone who has no problem getting an eBook and reading 500+ pages in a month, I actually support having 2 months lead time to help get more people involved in the discussion.

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As someone who has no problem getting an eBook and reading 500+ pages in a month, I actually support having 2 months lead time to help get more people involved in the discussion.

Cool. I'm out of town for a week but we have some Book Club house keeping to attend to when I get back and I'll bring up announcing two months ahead.

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