Author: Sushi

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Review: The Kite Runner

I finished reading The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini a few days ago. For me, the book is typically better than the movie, and despite the excellence of the movie, The Kite Runner is no exception. As a writer, I’ve trained myself to look for the points in a novel that we all learned in high school literature: the inciting incident, the buildup, the turning point, the climax, the resolution. (You may remember them by the proper names; I’m going by memory.) For the terrible books, it’s obvious that they’re just following a formula: possibly because the education system is failing us yet again by churning out barely literate citizens, and possibly because they haven’t spread their literary wings and tried to write without the formula as a crutch. For the wonderful books, the formula may still be there, but the reader doesn’t notice because they’re too engrossed in the story.

One thing in particular struck me while reading: the character-driven story. It’s tempting at first to say “But there is no plot! People are just wandering around and doing things!” Character-driven stories are centered around people, not things, and Amir and Hassan’s childhood turns one unfortunate incident into a life story worth telling, especially when you figure out the significance of the prologue. In fact, the character-driven story made me remember why I love writing so much to start with. With characters leading the way, there’s more room to explore the world around them, and you get to hear the voice inside them that just wants to have their own way.

The verdict on the book: Would read again. I’m keeping this one. It’s a good thing, too. I think I got some water stains on it at the bus stop one morning.

Book vs. Movie: The book, hands down. The movie is great, but there are only so many themes one can explore in a feature-length film.

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Like, some words are so annoying, you know?

I took a writing course during my last semester of college, and two students used the word ‘like’ as a filler word. We’re all guilty of this crime at some point–I definitely am and am very conscious of it. However, these two students couldn’t leave a sentence untainted. One day I decided to keep track. In a seventy-five minute class meeting of fourteen students, these two students uttered no fewer than 80 ‘likes’. I didn’t do much talking that day; I was too busy keeping track of their speech patterns and probably still missed some.

Surveytakers at the Marist Institute agree. Some words really are just annoying. Surprisingly, ‘like’ didn’t make the list, possibly because it has become so ingrained in our vocabulary that we don’t notice unless the word is impairing communication. Unfortunately, the word doesn’t impair communication much until the fifth or sixth use in a sentence. Someone should do a study on how much like is too much. This possible future study could also apply to uh, you know, and other filler words. Researchers with funding, are you listening?

Whatever. I’m just a blogger. What do I know?

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An elaborate troll? Probably not.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if people like those mentioned in yesterday’s post were elaborate Internet trolls? I’ve tried convincing myself of that just to give myself a little faith in humanity. Unfortunately, the facts just stare at me in the face, at least in this case, to tell me that these are not trolls.

Besides, if they were, this would be material for a dissertation on trolling.

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Does Christianity really need another Bible?

Conservative wiki Conservapedia has taken on a new project: translate the Bible to rid it of liberal bias. Even though there are already hundreds of translations of the Bible available for general consumption, few are in the public domain, and Conservapedia plans to use the King James Version, a public domain translation with its own biases. In fact, the wiki lists advantages to having a conservative Bible available online, among them:

this would debunk the pervasive and hurtful myth that Jesus would be a political liberal today

While this topic is debatable (though I think Jesus would be a political liberal), Conservapedia is taking the wrong approach. Creating a conservative Bible to support their hypothesis of Jesus’ non-liberal leaning is simply bad logic–one of the worst kinds of all, in fact. You can’t assume that something is true and then make up your own evidence to show that the hypothesis is true. This may not be science, but the logic still stands.

Question of the day: Does Christianity really need another translation, especially one that exists to be more of a political platform than a religious one? The religion doesn’t need this one. This is what stereotypes are made of, both of religion and politics.

I can’t help but notice that no one has started translating Revelation yet, though. That one should be fun.

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A connection to writing

Despite the rise of computers, I still can’t edit anything on a computer screen. Yes, I can catch most typos and even rewrite paragraphs, but rewriting anything more substantial requires that I have a paper copy in front of me. This copy can be marked, just as all my teachers did to my essays, though few made a hobby of tearing them apart until I arrived at college.

There’s something concrete about marking up a piece of writing on paper. The piece is in front of you, and you’re able to hold the physical piece, giving proof that in fact it does exist. You can hug it, write on it, fold it, and (horrors) burn it. You can stab a hole through the middle of it and leave it to the elements. Suddenly the writing feels so much more real, the connection so much more alive, all because the writing is so much less protected by the paper. Perhaps this is why ritual burnings are so talked about.

It’s different with a computer, though. Reaching inside a computer and tampering with a piece of writing is more difficult. Instead, you modify the work with a keyboard, which is hooked up to a computer. If you haven’t already tried it, destroying a computer is hard. Yes, you can put a computer out of commission by dropping it a few too many times, but properly destroying a hard drive to the point where no one can recover data is difficult. You are less connected to your writing with a computer.

I crave that connection.