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Leanne Pankuch Author

Leanne Pankuch Author

Tag Archives: reading

Prologue – schmologue…wait, what?!

25 Sunday Feb 2018

Posted by leannepankuch in Uncategorized

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anne mcaffrey, dragonriders, dragons, fantasy, humor, pern, prologues, reading, science fiction, writing

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Having grown up reading high fantasy novels, I came to have a deep love of author-drawn maps, glossaries of elvish terms, and character lists that included the names of dragons, queens, princes, wizards and the boy who worked in the castle kitchens and didn’t know he was a hero in the making.

But, there was one familiar component of fantasy novels that I regularly scorned – the prologue. After all, who wants to read an entire pre-history of a world/land/kingdom before the voice of the main character speaks? Or, if a single event or action was so vitally important to the story, I wondered, why doesn’t it happen, or why don’t we find out about it, in the actual story? I admit that, sometimes, if the prologue was only a couple of pages long and not titled Prologue, I was, in fact, tricked into reading it. Say, for example, the title on the page read Kingdom of Maron, Year of the Conquest, and then, in the voice of the old king’s servant, told (in eight paragraphs) how he smuggled the baby princess out of the castle during the attack of the evil forces and left her with two kind old women in a cabin, in a little village, on the far edge of the forest–just before he was killed by a marauding band of sorcerers. Then, on the very next page, the title read Kingdom of Maron, Sixteen Years After the Conquest, and the real story actually began with the now sixteen-year-old princess-who-doesn’t-know-she-is-a-princess-but-I-know-she-is-the-princess wondering why she was so different from everyone else in the village….

Grrrrr….

Needless to say, I avoided prologues whenever possible. Which leads me to the point of this post–my confession of how I once mistook a fantastic science fiction series for a fantastic fantasy series.

The series was The Dragonriders of Pern, by Anne McCaffrey.  The novels each begin with a looooooonnnngggg prologue about a sun and the planets around it, and orbits and blah, blah, blah. I skipped right to the lovely maps and glossaries and cast of characters and immersed myself in what I thought was one of the most original fantasy novels I had ever read. There was a new world with dragons that bonded with riders and could disappear and reappear at will. They protected the villages of weavers and fishermen and farmers and miners and music-playing harpers from an evil (Thread) that fell from the sky and devoured all living things. There were no machines or computers in this land, just a kind of non-religious early middle ages society. I LOVED the Pern books and devoured every one. The original trilogy, the Harper Hall trilogy, the story of Moreta’s Ride…and then came Dragonsdawn…and wait, what?!

I discovered my error. Dragonsdawn told the story of the original colonists who came to Pern in a SPACESHIP. How they hadn’t known about the biological organism – Thread – that existed on a nearby planet and fell on Pern when the orbits of the two planets came close enough. How they used genetic manipulation of an indigenous species – fire lizards – to create the sentient dragons that could bond with humans and fight the threat of Thread.

I couldn’t believe it. I felt like an absolute idiot. Suddenly, so many details in the “fantasy” storyline shifted and made an entirely different kind of “science fiction” sense.

And, readers, because of that incident, although I still doubt the need for most prologues, I now read them all – long, short, pointless, lengthy, or predictable.

Lesson learned.

My Physical Book Addiction— A Rambling Confession of Guilt (Not!)

05 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by leannepankuch in Uncategorized

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book addiction, book collecting, creativity, Csoda Album, fairy tale illustrations, fiction, physical books vs ebooks, reading, writing

I like to tell stories about how I read voraciously as a child. Even when I put down my current book to eat breakfast or lunch, I would find myself searching out the words on the cereal box or the mayonnaise jar. I read everywhere. All the time. I couldn’t stop. It was a torture to me that I was subject to motion sickness during the long car trips my family made between Illinois and Canada and I was forced to read signs and mile markers and license plates and bumper stickers instead of books.

I’m grown up now (at least in years) and my addiction has grown to monumental proportions. It isn’t just reading that marks my “illness” now, but the thousands of physical books that I own. You see, I’m not just one of those crazed readers who consumes the NY Times Bestseller list in as few bites as possible or who belongs to some snooty book club who dissects literary one-hit wonders to the point of college literature class torture. I do, indeed, read, and I sometimes I even read e-books– (gasp!). But the book that earns a permanent spot on my shelf must have one exceptional quality that most new books lack.

I must want to re-read it.

Not immediately. Not for a special purpose. Not necessarily for research or inspiration—but simply because the writing drew me in. It took me to someplace new. The words made me feel and care and escape. Perhaps the writing wasn’t perfect, but there was something…some intangible magic that was called to life as I read, like a Pagemaster-y Inkheart-ish enchantment. I am forever searching for the story that has the capacity to ensorcell me again and again and again.

What books are on my shelf? So many, my friends, so, so many. Jane Austen, J.R.R. Tolkien, George Orwell, Lois Lowry, Christian Jacq, Garth Nix, Victoria Holt, Neil Gaiman, Suzanne Collins, Madeline L’Engle, C.S. Lewis, Philippa Gregory, DuMaurier, Irving, Bronte, Stoker, George R.R. Martin (damn him!), Thackeray…the list goes on and on and on…new authors, old authors, young authors, dead authors.

And, as I’ve grown older, I’ve found that it isn’t just fictional stories that can transport my spirit, but poetry, nonfiction, history, and even just fantastic illustrations. I own an extensive collection of Elizabethan history books including antique first edition biographies of Elizabeth I. And I’ve become a collector of fairy tale books of all kinds—particularly old volumes with illustrations from the so-called “Golden Age”—Arthur Rackham, Caldecott, Greenaway, and Dulac are among my favorites (I recently acquired a copy of the Hungarian “Csoda Album” illustrated by LEFLER AND URBAN…so amazingly beautiful, sigh…).

Lefler and Urban, 1911

From The Csoda Album, illus. Lefler and Urban, 1911

I’ve also become enamored with Edward Gorey’s offbeat art and stories. And studies of world mythologies (Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces) and Victorian cemeteries and asylums have all earned a place in my personal library, as well as books on the art and craft of writing and the history of language.

I have over 2000 books on the shelves around me as I sit at my desk writing. All of these books mean something to me. I can pull any book off the shelf and know that it is a worthy companion. The physicality of the book is part of its relationship to me. It’s a little like the difference between hugging someone in person and sending them a little “*hugs*” message in an email. I don’t read or collect books in the way that some individuals “friend” others over social media. I’m not just gathering the largest pile possible or reading to keep up with pop culture. I have read the words, pondered and processed and daydreamed about the content, closed and opened the cover, reveling in the weight and thickness/thinness of the pages, and followed the trail of thought to the author’s last word or the artist’s brush to the final colorful stroke of expression.

I recently packed up my library and moved to a new house in a new state hundreds of miles away. Books are heavy, friends, very heavy. And packing and then unpacking and reorganizing my cherished collection in a new, smaller space has been challenging. After I mentioned this to someone in my extended family she asked why I just don’t buy electronic copies of my books.

I tried to explain but she shook her head, obviously not understanding. I think she felt sorry for poor book-addicted me–as so many other, practically-minded people do.

And we feel sorry for them, don’t we?

If Jane Austen and Charles Dickens had a baby…Middlemarch!

30 Friday Aug 2013

Posted by leannepankuch in Uncategorized

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Charles Dickens, creativity, fiction, George Eliot, Jane Austen, literary mash-up, literature, Middlemarch, reading, Victorian Literature

I’ve got a confession to make. It isn’t an easy one for an avid reader and writer with a degree in English from a fine liberal arts college. I’ve always prided myself on my broadness of view and quality of thought–but here goes…

I hated Middlemarch the first time I read it.

There, I’ve said it. Now I can move on–thank goodness.

The first time I read Middlemarch, I was very young. Still all aglow from reading the complete Jane Austen, I had dabbled in Dickens without much enjoyment (excepting A Christmas Carol) when a wise professor recommended Middlemarch.

I dove in…and immediately fell in love with the high-minded Dorothea Brooke. She was a kindred spirit! I, too, felt myself “a cygnet among ducklings”–don’t we all, at some point in our lives? I read the beginnings of Dorothea’s story with a kind of rushed rapture. She was so passionate and thoughtful–a girl/woman breaking the bonds and conventions of her time–wait!

Why is George Eliot writing about all of these other people? Writing a lot about them, too. Smells like Dickens! I want Dorothea…turn the pages…okay, okay, I’ll read about Lydgate…and Rosamund…and Mary and Fred…but what’s all this about politics? Yuck! And pages and pages about boring peripherals: theology, drunks, farmers, clergymen!

I hurried my way to the end of the book, judiciously skipping some long-winded poo-poo, and prepared to be satisfied by Dorothea’s ultimate decision concerning Will Lladislaw. Instead, I found myself extremely disgruntled by the final passages detailing her future life. In fact, the happiness in the story seemed to have been the prize of the characters I had found most uninteresting!

For some time after my initial reading, I found myself agreeing with others who professed a dislike of the book, sagely nodding my head, offering high-sounding comments about the didactic tone, etc. So haughty and über-intelligent, wasn’t I?

Then, recently, I watched the BBC dramatization of Middlemarch. When the portrayal of Dorothea in that mini-series seemed to not quite match up with what I remembered from the novel, I recalled how differently I now felt about Dickens and how much more I now knew about the Victorian Era and its literature. Had I misjudged Eliot, as well? Semi-reluctantly I pulled up a free online copy of Middlemarch and began to read–carefully.

I still found it wildly complex and exceedingly long, but now the peripheral characters and stories seemed tantalizingly layered and important. I could see the irony and the sweet-and-sour poignancy of the myriad episodes that had once seemed banal, but now seemed to combine unusual psychological depth and realism. I found Lydgate to be (almost) as important to the story as Miss Brooke. And Dorothea herself? Not so perfect in my minds-eye, but somehow an infinitely more interesting character. Eliot’s work seemed a fusion of Austen’s sassy and/or ridiculous women and men and Dickens’s scope of vision (and word count!) elevated into a more truthful, less Disney-fied, and thought-provoking medium.

I could go on and on, you know. I could begin channeling George Eliot…

Just kidding! Here’s the “sum up”:

Middlemarch: an extremely long but worthwhile Victorian literary mash-up/masterpiece. Don’t be a hater!

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