More about Reading

I‘ve wanted to read some books over, some I have not. It’s taken me months to get through Bill Bryson’s At Home: A short History of Private Life. I’m sure I will finish it someday. I use Bryson’s A Writer’s Guide to Getting it Right fairly often, but that’s not a re-read. I never finished Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, but I read his A Walk in the Woods twice.

Good writers get a reader into their work in an opening paragraph or at least in the first few pages. I read Henry Gregor Felsen’s Hot Rod (1951) several times when I was getting interested in cars. Weren’t all teenage boys in the 1950s interested in cars?

The first paragraph of Hot Rod grabbed our interest.
“Bud Crayne rounded a curve at fifty and faced into the setting sun. For the next ten miles the highway ran straight and level across open farmland. Ninety-nine out of a hundred drivers rounding that curve and coming onto the flat immediately increased their speed. Bud held at fifty. He had his reason for staying at fifty. Bud always had a reason for driving at a particular speed.”

Felsen set the hook with the first line of the second paragraph.
“A new green Plymouth sedan came up behind Bud, honked imperiously and swept by.”
What do you think was going to happen?

Why do I mention Bryson and Felsen in this post? Bryson starts his book At Home: … with:
“In the autumn of 1850, in Hyde Park in London, there arose a most extraordinary structure: a giant iron-and-glass greenhouse covering nineteen acres of ground and containing within its airy vastness enough room for four St. Paul’s Cathedrals.”
Maybe, perhaps, or possibly a 1950s teen would continue reading, but I think not – I would not have.
Even as a soon to be nonagenarian, I wonder what a giant greenhouse had to do with the title At Home: … but kept reading out of curiosity.

In my own writing, I’ve struggled with my point. Both Bryson and Felsen knew for whom they were writing.

I have a copy of another of Felsen’s Street Rod (1953). Not the one I read in 1954. I bought it for a dollar or perhaps fifty-cents at a garage sale in Vancouver, WA. Ironically, it is a ‘discard’ from Kelso High School Library, but I didn’t see it there when I was teaching there in the 1990s.