Life Lessons from the Book Tube Prize

Or, the Case for (Sometimes) Sticking with It

Longtime readers may be surprised by this week’s subtitle, because, as I have argued before, it’s good to quit. I quit all the time—my dissertation, piano (twice), running (again twice), and—if our Netflix home screen is any indication—a couple dozen movies and shows in just the past few months. I also quit books, thanks to the advice of a librarian acquaintance: Subtract your age from 100. If by the corresponding page you find you’re not enjoying the book, then you can feel free to stop reading it. Our time here on earth is finite. Why waste it on books we dislike?

Photo by Ed Robertson on Unsplash.

That being said, sometimes persistence pays off, and we’re grateful we hung in there.

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A disclaimer: There will be extensive spoilers for a recent book and mild spoilers for a twenty-year-old movie. Caveat lector!

A Crowdsourced Contest

Last December, my friend and fellow book club member Judith suggested I might enjoy being a judge for the Book Tube Prize. The judges are not academics or book professionals; they’re enthusiastic readers like me. I was excited by the idea of a prize that would be awarded by regular people and was also eager to discover new books. Plus, if Judith—an especially insightful and curious reader—was any indication, the quality of the judges and the books would be high. Sign me up!

Here’s how the prize works. Every year in January, around two hundred readers (a hundred each for fiction and nonfiction) nominate forty-eight books in each category for the octofinals, and then our leader, Robert Sheard, divides us into teams and assigns each team six books. We have two months to read our books, after which we rank them from best to worst. The top three books in each group advance to the quarterfinals—the stage we’re at now—each team gets a new set of six books to read and rank, and so on until the winners are announced at the start of October.

These were my team’s books for the Octofinals. I loved five of them, but the sixth? Not so much. Image shared with permission from the Book Tube Prize.

On the first day of February I got my list, downloaded the first book, Tom’s Crossing, by Mark Z. Danielewski, and dove in. This is what confronted me on the first page:

Rayleen Roundy, Orvop original, with braids and braces in her younger days, and still with braids in her elder years, would try once with paint to get at that moment, before she erased it with more pain, paint that is, Clop-Clop, clip, Clop, this time tryin for stacked logs of red elm, then asters, then attemptin to paint a cloud-encroached sky, and then the whole of it lost to the fires of Time. But if you’d’ve beheld her tableau and forgiven some the lopsidedness of the horse, Rayleen being no great artist, and surely not up for no Homeric echoes of the unaltered consequences of unbearable weapons or the dangerous enchantments of nine ordinary gates; if you’d’ve overlooked the mislaid perspectives of that fenced-in patch of dusty maltreated earth, well then you might’ve still seen how she caught with her lovin brushstrokes the rollin flow of the hour’s cool breeziness, as well as in her shadowless composition found a kind of portent less calm that we would all count ourselves lucky to enjoy, when campfire stories, as good as those can be, don’t dare interrupt the sun, and Journeys of the Dead don’t cross no one’s mind neither.

Hmmm. Was it all going to be like this—an infelicitous fusion of purple prose and ersatz Huck Finn dialect?¹ And just how long was this book?

1231 pages!

Was it a prank? Or a way to haze first-time judges?

Virtue Is Its Own Reward

I was tempted to quit and rank the book last after just that first page. However, in his email to the judges, Robert had made the rules clear:

Please don’t abandon any of the books you’re judging for the prize. To rate a book fairly, you really need to finish it. Even if it means speed-reading or hate-reading, I want you to soldier through all six books in order to submit fair rankings. The difference in your ranking a book 5th or 6th may well affect the final results for the group.

I had an ethical dilemma: I really wanted to continue being a judge, and I also really didn’t want to read the book. No one would know if I quit reading. If I just lied, I could have it both ways, right?

As it happens, my husband, Matt, doesn’t think there is such a thing as an ethical dilemma. There’s only the right thing to do, and people not wanting to do what they know is right. Or, as he told me, “Mari. Either you drop out of the judging, or you read the whole book. There is no other choice.” I had to admit that he was right. So I read the book at the manageable rate of about forty-five pages a day and finished the whole dang thing with a couple of weeks to spare.

You may be hoping for an edifying lesson—for example that I wound up liking the book, found unsuspected depth, learned about myself and the world, yadda yadda yadda. But no. True, the book did get somewhat better. The prose was less turgid after a couple hundred pages (maybe that can be the blurb on the back cover: “The prose eventually becomes less turgid”?), and the final stretch did gallop along. But mostly the book remained unendurable. Nevertheless I endured, and I’m glad I did. Huh. Turns out there is an edifying lesson here after all: It is good to have people in our lives who hold us to high standards and help us be our best selves.

Tarantino-ing

Well, ok, I did get something else out of the experience. I was forced to think about why I disliked the book so much, beyond just that it’s boring.²

Tom’s Crossing is the story of fifteen-year-old Kalin and his best friend, Tom. The boys make a pact to rescue two of their neighbors’ horses that have been condemned to the slaughterhouse. Tom dies of cancer, and Kalin and Tom’s sister, Landry, accompanied by Tom’s ghost, embark on an epic journey into the mountains to set the horses free. But unfortunately for them, the horses’ owners are the Porches, the most consummately evil family of fiends since the Borgias. And the Porches do not take kindly to Kalin’s rescue.

Luckily, our neighbors are not the Porch family, and so these horses can graze in peace.

The youngest Porch brother, Russell, grabs a gun and rides after the teenagers to retrieve the horses, and Landry pays him a fair price for them. He returns to his family with the money, but rather than accepting the payment, the paterfamilias, Old Porch, beats Russell so badly that he falls over unconscious, lands on a piece of broken glass, and bleeds to death. The Porch family then frames Kalin for Russell’s murder, enlists the compliant local police, and rides up into the mountains, where they try repeatedly to murder Kalin and Landry so the truth about Russell’s death won’t come out.

We later see Old Porch abusing and killing multiple dogs as well as his pet donkey, and we learn that he has also murdered people in the past. One Porch brother, Egan, molests a young teenager, beats an intellectually-disabled boy to death, and murders so many police officers that I lost count. The younger Porches are thugs who beat their girlfriends and shoot at the homes of Asian neighbors. And yet the police do nothing. The effect on readers is to make us long for vigilante violence, because we’re led to believe it’s the only way to obtain justice.³

My name for this effect is Tarantino-ing. Quentin Tarantino’s films, for example Once upon a Time in Hollywood,⁴ Django Unchained, Inglourious Basterds, and Pulp Fiction, arouse powerfully vengeful feelings in us viewers. After all, his villains are the likes of Charles Manson, enslavers, literal Hitler, and redneck rapists, so of course we long to watch the heroes “go medieval on [their] ass.” Such unmitigatedly evil people do exist in the real world, but the vast majority of the people we encounter in our daily lives are a mix of good and bad, the same as us. And besides, indulging in scenes of torture and death is not the way to solve our problems, and feeling righteous as we wallow in the suffering of others, no matter how evil they may be, is not good for our souls.

Whew. Let’s turn to a more pleasant topic.

A Wholesome Recommendation

Last month, two Australian friends invited Matt and me to the Asia-Pacific Film Festival. On the docket was the 2006 Australian film Ten Canoes.

I found this image here.

I knew nothing about this film beforehand, except that it was about an Aboriginal tribe and featured non-professional Aboriginal actors. The film opens with gorgeous drone footage gliding over a vast wetland—and also with a folksy narrator who, a few minutes in, makes a fart joke. Uh oh. This was not promising! But we didn’t want to insult our dear friends, so we stuck with it.

And I’m glad we did, because the film is terrific. It is good to have friends who introduce us to wonderful new things! In the frame story (filmed in vivid color) a young man goes out on his first big hunt with older men in the tribe. An elder passes along tribal wisdom by telling him a legend (filmed in sharp black and white) about another young man who must find his place in his community.

We learn about the oldest continuous culture in the world—60,000 years and counting—a culture that is radically different from our own. We see how the men make canoes (the fascinating process is shown step-by-step); how they hunt in a marsh (they build temporary platforms, complete with campfires and hammocks, up in the trees); what happens when there is conflict with neighboring tribes; and how the tribe metes out justice.

But we also discover many similarities between this ancient culture and our own. They face the same conflicts and struggles as we do. The film shows the downside of viewing outsiders as enemies. It asks what happens when all of society’s resources are concentrated in a few people, and when young people can’t see a path to success. Some issues are universal; there is more that unites than divides us.

Have I persuaded you to give this movie a chance? You can stream it for free on YouTube.

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How about you, readers? Is there a book, show, or film you wanted to quit, but you were glad you finished? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

The Tidbit

Forget Tom’s Crossing. For a more uplifting (and shorter!) work of art about horses, let’s listen to Rickie Lee Jones’s beautiful song “The Horses”:

1. Why is it written in this dialect? The book is set in Utah in the 1980s, not rural Missouri in the nineteenth century!

2. Large sections of Tom’s Crossing are indeed stupefying, though, for example the umpteenth fifty-page description of how you maneuver two horses up a steep scree-covered slope.

3. To be fair, Danielewski does show that good people who resort to violence suffer lifelong guilt about it.

4. I do like that before making this film, Tarantino contacted Sharon Tate’s mother to make sure she would be ok with it. That was kind of him.