Christmas Is All Around Us

My efforts at becoming more readerly have been paying off. When I get home from work after a long day, I’m most interested in settling down with a snack and my latest read. When I get up to go to work in the morning, for a single moment I contemplate whether I should bring my book along, just in case I get there a few minutes early. I’ve even found myself setting my book on the sink while I take a shower, wanting to have it close by even when I should be concentrating on bathing.

Yep, it’s fair to say that I am getting my old habit back. It feels good, though it’s not helping me get anything else done around the house.

Sometime last week I finished Tad Williams’ book Tailchaser’s Song. I had initially picked up the book mainly because of the intriguing cover. I read it because I was curious to know what a book featuring cats could possibly be all about. I finished it because it ended up being a pretty good story.

In the end, there’s not a lot to say about Tailchaser’s Song. The writing style is very mediocre, even though the plot gets to be quite entertaining. Even though the novel features cats as characters, it’s not a book for cat lovers. Williams could have inserted any other animal into the story line, and it would have come out looking pretty much the same. This book is not infused with charming cat personality, as one might have hoped.

When judging a book’s worthiness, I often think back to a passage from Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451:

“The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.”

I like to think that what Bradbury is describing here is the literary quality of the work. Is it literature, or just a story?

These ideas can all be pretty vague and arbitrary at times, but luckily for me I have a more concrete way of judging how a book fares on my lit-scale: the pen factor. How many times, during the course of my reading experience, was I compelled to get up from my chair in search of a pen, in order to underline some idea or wonderfully worded passage?

In Tailchaser’s instance, only twice.

Throughout the entire story, there is no real underlying theme or idea about life, or anything more profound than seeking adventure and doing something vaguely noble. Toward the very end, however, Tailchaser comes across an ancient bullfrog who tells him that none of his adventures and achievements really matter in the big scheme of things. She says,

“Remember this one thing, Tailchaser: all your troubles, all your searching, and wandering, and struggling—they are as one small bubble in the world-pool.”

Given my recent revelations concerning the Meaning of Life, this struck a chord with me, and I promptly underlined the sentence and ear-tagged the page. I like that idea. For all our struggling and self-important feelings, we’re just another drop in the puddle.

This is as deep as Tailchaser’s Song gets, however. The only other time I whipped out the pen was when Tailchaser, traipsing through the countryside, encounters sheep for the first time:

“Their fleecy bodies dotted the downs like fat, dirty clouds that had settled to the ground, too heavy to stay aloft.”

The discovery of that uncharacteristically humorous and poetic description is, I think, worth reading the entire book to find.