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My First Blog Post

I have a lot of thoughts.

In particular about Catch-22.

In case you didn’t know, Catch-22 is a 1961 novel by Joseph Heller about the futility and absurdity of war. It follows many different characters over the course of four-hundred some pages, but focuses on Captain John Yossarian as he tries to survive long enough to be sent home, a seemingly impossible task.

I have no desire to summarize the plot here, I wouldn’t do it justice and would probably just confuse myself, but suffice it to say that it’s good and you should read it. Not only is it a “Great and Important Work of Literature,” it’s hilarious. Heller’s writing is laugh-out-loud funny in a way that I haven’t experienced in any other book, before or since.

For me, that humor is a vital part of the work.

Now let’s talk about adaptation. It’s a tricky thing, and a lot of it comes down to themes and interpretation. Someone might choose to adapt a work to have different themes from its original iteration. Take, for example, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, a novel meant to highlight the importance of Notre Dame and kickstart a restoration campaign for the dilapidated cathedral. The novel has been adapted into many different films since its 1831 publication, usually with themes of social justice rather than of the importance of architecture.

Many adaptations, however, are not in the business of changing themes, but are an attempt to convey the messages of the original work. If this is the case, the most important thing about an adaptation, in my opinion, is that it captures the spirit of the work. I don’t care what has to change in order to tell the story, as long as it feels the same to me the adaptation is a successful one. Frankly, I think it’s exciting to see an artist’s interpretation of a story I love and usually adaptations feature a visual richness that I never would have imagined on my own.

Let me clarify something: this is not a review. I only watched two episodes of Hulu’s recent adaptation of Catch-22, so my assertions about the series are unfair and not founded in a complete understanding of the work as a whole. But, for me, Hulu’s Catch-22 failed as an adaptation because it didn’t capture that spirit of the original work, namely its humor.

Most important in this regard is the character of Yossarian who, in Hulu’s series, is suffering from a lack of personality. In the book Yossarian is mad by virtue of being the only sane person in his squadron. His desperate attempts to convince his superiors that he’s mad despite his inherent sanity mean that he is always on the cusp of craziness. One layer of the multi-tiered, titular catch-22.

Yossarian in the show doesn’t walk this line. He is quietly, starkly sane. All the humor is sucked out of him in favor of having a palatable hero. Gone is the harebrained character who crackles with life, scared enough of death to defy the United States military. Instead, Yossarian is stoic, a noble man who speaks truth to power. He’s wildly boring. And it’s a damn shame.

Books for adults are so boring.

Children’s literature is so much more creative and interesting. Whimsical, if you like.

I work in a public library, so I spend a lot of time around books, and something I’ve noticed is the hegemony and longevity of certain trends, both in children’s and adult literature. I’m sure a lot of this has to do with the publishing industry printing what they know will be lucrative, so you get a lot of boring knock-offs in both the adult and children’s sections.

For example, one current trend in adult novels that simply refuses to die is Gone Girl readalikes. I’m not saying that every author of every mystery with an unreliable narrator and either the word “girl” or “woman” or “wife” in the title is trying to trick you into thinking, “Hey, this looks and sounds like Gone Girl, I liked Gone Girl, it was fun. I’ll probably enjoy this book. I should buy it.” But I am saying that publishing houses are probably using those kinds of marketing strategies because they work and they will continue to use them until they stop making them money. (Although, of course, I should say that I know next to nothing about the publishing industry, this is all based on my own personal observation, so is purely anecdotal).

This definitely happens in children’s literature, too. I can’t tell you how many Diary of a Wimpy Kid wannabes I see on a daily basis. I’ve even seen this practice used retroactively, to make a book published prior to this over saturation appear more appealing to the Diary of a Wimpy Kid demographic. The book in question being Sherman Alexie’s Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Granted, Alexie’s novel was published several months after the first installment of Jeff Kinney’s series and I don’t know definitively whether or not there was any influence between them. Both feature cartoons and are written as a diary of the difficulties of the young male protagonist’s life, but they’re very different books, written for different audiences. Kinney’s book is light and breezy and fun and intended for a pretty young audience (7+, apparently). Alexie’s novel, however, deals with far more mature themes and often harrowing struggles (it’s semi-autobiographical and details what it’s like to be a young Native person in a hostile white world) and is intended for young adults. And yet, they’re being marketed in the same way? Is the hope for kids who grew up reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid to graduate to Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian or is it to trick young kids into picking it up because it looks similar? Or, alternatively, both, as that would probably net the most capital, especially considering the tendency for Alexie’s novel to be banned due to its more mature content?

Anyway, the point is that this kind of thing happens in children’s, young adult, and adult literature, but in children’s literature (and maybe YA, too) it seems to be less of a problem because for every knock-off that gets published there is also a fascinating, fantastical and beautiful story that gets published.

Part of this is comes down to personal preference. I like whimsy in my storytelling. Two of the adult authors whose writing I admire most, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and Salman Rushdie, employ magical realism, lending their novels a fantastical bent even if the actual plot is more mundane. To oversimplify, why would I want to read a book about a lonely divorcée trying to find romance when I could be reading a book about a blind boy and his talking spider companion outwitting an ancient witch hellbent on stealing children’s eyes in an enchanted forest? Adult fantasy rarely features any of that kind of creativity. In my experience most, though not all, falls into a few categories: A Song of Ice and Fire type fantasy (which I personally find enjoyable and is inventive and sometimes literary but is also usually pretty firmly grounded, not whimsical, and doesn’t tell a contained story but is a years-long investment that reads more like The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire), the traditional, D&D type fantasy, with stalwart heroes on a quest against evil, and urban fantasy, which I find is often a vehicle for an author to write about their favorite imaginary creature being sexy and brooding in clubs (not that there’s anything wrong with that, or that those books can’t have interesting and nuanced themes, just that they’re not my cup of tea). While each of these categories is, I’m sure, valuable in its own way, the reason these kinds of books get published is because they’re the sure-things, the types of books that have an established readership and will definitely make money. So they often tend to be derivative. ASOIAF is popular? Good, so we’ll only publish historically rooted, sweeping, multi-volume fantasy works instead of taking a chance on something more experimental. And all I’m saying is that in children’s literature, those kinds of experimental stories seem to get published way more often.

I know that the obvious solution to this problem is just to read children’s literature and to stop complaining about whatever nonsense it is that I’m complaining about. But here’s the thing: I’ve tried that. However, as this post is already becoming tediously long, I think I’ll save my foray into the world of children’s literature for next time, when I will, hopefully, use a book I’m currently reading as something of a case study and compare it with other children’s media I thoroughly enjoy.

This is embarrassing.

So I’ll skip the rigmarole about not knowing what I’m doing, not only because that’s boring, but also because why would I need to be some sort of expert to have a blog?

My name is Emily and I love storytelling. I love nuanced characters with satisfying arcs and I love rich settings and complex themes. I love all kinds of storytelling, but in particular I love the use of language as an art form. That’s what I plan to dissect and create on this platform. I’m sure other stuff will be thrown in there, too. Let’s see how this goes.