Alan Goldhammer writes:
Just a quick thank you for posting about this book a couple of months ago. It finally surfaced to the top of my reading list and I have found it simply wonderful. I like the way he interleaves fiction, film and what was going during the time periods.
Also relevant is this post, “Causality and Crime: In science as in genre storytelling, the thrill of the unexpected can only come with reference to (and in confounding) some preexisting norm.”
I’m glad that some readers follow our book recommendations.
Blogging is a good way of working through a book. I often feel that I haven’t really read a book until I’ve discussed it with someone. Blogging is a form of discussion. That’s one reason I appreciate almost all the comments we get here.
I read The Rider after your recommendation last year (https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/09/16/the-rider/) and it was excellent, I recommended it in turn to my friends who are also into cycling.
I really like the book posts, Andrew!
I have not read Perplexing Plots, but the notion of norms that authors shouldn’t break reminds me of “Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone,” which emphasizes these rules in a very self-aware way, and which I’m fairly sure I read thanks to a recommendation from Andrew. (It’s not great, but is quite entertaining.)
I have not read many books about books — plot structure, etc. I started but did not finish “The Seven Basic Plots – why we tell stories” by Christopher Booker — 39 hours as an audiobook! The first chapter is fascinating, but then it becomes a slow and repetitive slog through the plots of various books, incomprehensible and potentially spoiler-filled if one has not read these already. I was wary of reading this book at all — like not wanting to know how stage magicians do their tricks — and perhaps that’s why I stay away from books about books.
To give back with a recent book I enjoyed: Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon (2024). Dark comedy? Comic tragedy? Two young men in ancient Syracuse try to stage a play with starving Athenian prisoners as actors. Its flaw is that it’s very clearly a book written in the 21st century, with anachronistic perspectives on social roles, but it’s still great.
This also reminds me that I should write a blog post about my recent dive into books written in 1937…
I forgot to mention to Andrew that it’s generally my custom to write back to authors whose books/articles I have enjoyed. Of course, this assumes I can track down their email address which is sometimes a challenge. In my experience, I get a response back over 90% of the time thanking me for reading the piece.
I also just start reading this based on your recommendation and second Ragu that your book posts are some of my favourite content on the site.
(The late David) Bordwell is an interesting, and important, thinker. He’s one of the first to use cognitive psychology in the analysis of film and one of the first to think in terms of systematic analysis of form rather than interpreting the (hidden) meaning of a film. In 1989 (I believe) he published “The Making of Meaning,” where he took one film, on the one hand, and a handful of interpretive methodologies on the other (e.g. psychoanalytic, Marxist, etc.) and showed how each arrived at its characteristic interpretation by picking what aspects of the film it focused on.
His widow, Kristen Thompson (herself a distinguished critic) still maintains their blog and website, Observations on Film Art, which has extensive materials: https://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/.
Bill:
Yes, the Observations on Film Art is on our page of linked blogs. As I wrote in my earlier post, I was sad upon reading Bordwell’s book that he had so recently died, but it was also inspiring that he finished writing this wonderful book while he was still alive.
I never met him in person, but I had a fair amount of correspondence with him about film. I shared his interest in the description of form and I was also interested in animation.