NPR's review headlines the book as "A Masterpiece", and the first line of its review is "This is unbearable." I read Never Let Me Go so I know what this means.
Nice article. I have a new year’s resolution to read more good literature and listen to more classical music. Anyway, Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go has been on my Audible wish list for a year so I just bought it. Thanks Adam for posting this.
Sorry to be a little off topic, but I notice that most of my friends and family spend a lot of time watching movies and other streaming media, but from conversations it seems to me like they spend little time reading (with some exceptions). We all get to allocate our own time, but I like limiting myself to a maximum of one movie a day, but I feel good about spending much more time reading, choosing an active pastime of visualizing the people and world depicted in books, rather than passively watching streaming content. A movie has to be really fantastic to get the same effect as just a good book.
I think it's important to be a bit careful in "ranking" entertainment activities in the absolute, rather than purely by personal enjoyment. The knowledge/information retention rate from most light reading (i.e. without taking notes, researching context, re-reading, etc.) is surprisingly low, really, and it's better not to drink one's own kool-aid in that regard - no, the quantity of books read in a year doesn't neatly equate to understanding, just to, presumably, a lot of good fun.
"I spend my time doing better things than you do" risks coming across as arrogant, rather dissuades others from reading more, and also closes one's own mind to considering the strengths and depth of other types of media.
That said, I enjoy reading as much as you do. I am extremely grateful to my parents for encouraging the habit - I think reading books taught me as a young child to empathize with others around me, by letting me into the internal thought-worlds of their characters and getting me used to inhabiting other viewpoints. In that sense I think reading can also be very formative for comm skills during a certain time of life.
This is incredibly well put, and it reminds me to read on a more active basis.
I have two different "modes" when reading - 1) for novels and light matsrial, which is just casual reading, 2) for material that warrants study, typically using a pen to underline critical information and write thoughts in the margins.
You seem to suggest that casual reading, while I'm sure shares some spillover benefit, should not be mis-characterized as active study and is closer to entertainment. Do you make a conscious effort to read most things actively?
> You seem to suggest that casual reading, while I'm sure shares some spillover benefit, should not be mis-characterized as active study and is closer to entertainment. Do you make a conscious effort to read most things actively?
For the most part, no. I'm OK with a lot of the reading I do being purely for entertainment (yes, even the non-fiction books). To some extent the primary spillover benefit is that even years later, I will vaguely recall that I encountered a concept before and where - so when I need the details, I just go look them up again.
I don't think that reading for entertainment only is such a bad thing. Ok, so I just let a popsci book on $subject wash over me and in a year nearly all of it will be gone from my mind again - but while reading I felt immense joy at the new understanding and information. It positively reinforces curiosity and knowledge-seeking as an activity and and makes me happier. That does help with life.
With a number of books what I do is highlight references to names/concepts/ideas I feel are under-explained or worth some more research on, and then rather than googling them immediately, I finish the book first and then make some time to work through my list of highlights afterwards. It's tedious, but it also effectively forces me to skim through the book and the context of the highlights again. That (slightly) improves my recall later on, but it also often makes me realize the super-structure of the book much more (i.e. how was the author building up their argument over the length of the book, why did they chose to order things in the way they did perhaps, etc.)
The more important distinction is not to treat it as if the activity itself has magical properties that automatically translate into a better life in some form.
Ask yourself what you want to read and what you want to get out of that.
If you read casually but don't actually enjoy the activity beyond the satisfaction that you are reading and that this is a Good Thing, there's no point. If you underline passages and study but nothing really comes out of that study over time, there's no point either assuming it is not an activity you inherently enjoy for its own sake.
That's why just having a vague goal of 'reading more' is a bit of a trap
I was actually saying that everyone gets to choose how they spend time.
Although I don't usually do this very much for for fun fiction, I otherwise select/hilite text that I think is important while I am reading. When I think of a previously read book, it is quick to open just the hilites - for me this is a great trigger for my memory (I am almost 70, so this helps!)
re: joy of reading: this really hit home when my grandchildren were really young, especially the transition from my doing all the reading to them taking over reading.
I have the opposite problem: I wish I could manage to watch more than one film a day! Although I am not watching inane and streamed content, but rather classic auteur cinema that I torrent Blu-ray images of and maintain my own collection. I do appreciate literature and I read a lot – and even more when I am traveling and away from my home cinema – but I have always been jealous of people like Richard Linklater or Toru Takemitsu who managed at times to watch 500 films a year and thus gained a vast knowledge of the art form.
I love Richard Linklater's work also, especially Waking Life. I was thrilled many years ago to receive a first-contact email from him. (I was, I think, the second featured Creative Commoner (related to releasing worked using Creative Commons licenses), and I think he was the first).
I am usually retired about 2/3 of the time since 1998. During periods when I am not working, I do watch more movies. I am super busy working for a unicorn startup right now, so extra movie watching is put on hold.
The opposite. Just like with the canon of literature, seeing that many films allows you to unlock some delicious references made by later filmmakers to earlier ones. For example, every Truffaut film shot after 1964 contains at least one homage to a shot in a Hitchcock film, so watching Truffaut after you have seen all of Hitchcock only makes Truffaut’s films more enjoyable.
Aren't references closer to what you earlier described as inane content? Don't get me wrong, I appreciate them too, but they bring nothing other than a jolt of dopamine from the recognition. An auteur making a reference to another auteur is not really that different in terms of depth from Marvel Movie №32 making a reference to Marvel Movie №55. Or at least it is not qualitatively different. As far as I can tell, the whole point of art is to be confronted with new ideas. 500 films/year sounds like it would dull the senses for that and not allow you enough time to digest a film's ideas before the next meal
> As far as I can tell, the whole point of art is to be confronted with new ideas.
The “whole point of art” for most of human history has been to continue a tradition of craftsmanship, and innovation has its place but is certainly not the whole point. It wasn’t until the 20th-century that innovation became “the whole point” for the Modernists, whose views were not universally shared. Down the centuries, works of literature, music and cinema have regularly featured references to the artist’s forebears without being dubbed "inane" for it. (There certainly is a qualitative difference from comic-book movies, which are low culture, often by their creators' own admission, instead of high culture). And whether a person can properly "digest" works of art at that pace completely depends on the person; evidently many people can.
I don’t like articles with lengthy preludes, here’s where the discussion about the book starts:
... Klara, the narrator of Ishiguro’s new novel, is a kind of robot version of Stevens, and a kind of cousin of Kathy H. She’s a carer, a servant, a helpmeet, a toy. “Klara and the Sun” opens like something out of “Toy Story” or the children’s classic “Corduroy” (in which a slightly ragged Teddy bear, waiting patiently in a department store, is first turned down by Mother, and finally plucked by her delighted young daughter).
I agree it's a very long prelude, but I'm glad I read it; I learned about a couple of different literary genres I hadn't heard of before, and I found it useful to understand what Ishiguro was doing.
Very good book; plausible and relevant wrt current discussions surrounding AI, although possibly with a few narrative-facilitating concessions. Relatedly: apparently this same reviewer had some very harsh words for The Unconsoled in his review of that book (anyone have a copy of the review?). Now, he calls him a "master", so that's definitely progress.
Thanks for that link. His comment that he began from children's literature bolsters my impression that the book can be seen as an improved re-working of The Velveteen Rabbit.
Good review, but I felt like some things about the plot were spoiled. I think sometimes "literature" reviewers feel that plot isn't really important, and so spoiling it doesn't matter.
It is the artifice of dozens and hundreds of generations preceding you. Shaped by nature and by random events, you are an observer, the universe observing itself.
