Anne of Green Gables

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The Great American Read

/ Rick Ellrod / Leave a comment

PBS is conducting a poll asking about our favorite novels in connection with a TV mini-series, “The Great American Read.”  Through October 17, we can vote each day for one or more of 100 candidates.  I haven’t watched the TV shows—but the poll alone is fascinating.

The Great American Read, logo

In my area, Fairfax County Public Libraries is running its own variant.  They’ve broken down the 100 books and series into brackets, like a tournament.  We vote on a series of pairs—which of the two we prefer—and the candidates get whittled gradually down to a climactic final round.  They’re about halfway through at the moment.

The Best and the Best-Loved

Looking at somebody else’s “Top Ten” (or Top 100, or generally Top N) list is always interesting.  We may be talking about books, classic rock songs, movie heroes and villains, or almost anything:  the most common reaction, I suspect, is when we look at some of the entries and ask ourselves, how could that possibly have gotten on the list?  Or, conversely, how could they ever have left out this?

Obviously a list of the “twelve tallest buildings” or “five longest rivers” is going to be relatively uncontroversial.  But when there’s no quantitative measure that can be applied, the lists are bound to have a subjective element.  Reading them stimulates us to ask—what could were the listmakers have been thinking when they made those choices?

With the Great American Read (“TGAR”), the subjective side is even more emphasized, because the list (and the poll) is about “America’s 100 best-loved novels,” not the best novels.  The criteria aren’t the same.  There are books we respect, but don’t like.  My favorite piece of music, as it happens, isn’t what I would judge the greatest piece of music.  A more personal appeal is involved.

Someone for Everyone

It’s clear that PBS was at pains to include something for everyone.  The books cover a wide range of genres.  The list includes plenty of “classics”—the ones we got assigned in high school—and also a lot of popular volumes that couldn’t be considered classics by any stretch of the imagination.  (I suspect there are no high-school reading curricula that include Fifty Shades of Grey.)

In other words, we’ve got our “guilty pleasures” right alongside acknowledged masterpieces.  I always enjoy the way alphabetical listings produce similarly odd bedfellows:  on my bookshelf, Jane Austen rubs shoulders with Isaac Asimov, while Tolkien is bracketed by James Thurber and A.E. van Vogt.

Adventures of Tom Sawyer, coverAlice's Adventures in Wonderland, coverAlmost any reader should find something to vote for in the TGAR collection.  If you don’t like Tom Sawyer, how about Alice in Wonderland?  Not enthused about The Godfather—try The Pilgrim’s Progress?  If you’re not in the mood for 1984, maybe you’ll find Anne of Green Gables more congenial.

By the same token, I’m guessing almost no one would accept every book on the list as a favorite.  If there’s someone whose personal top ten list includes The Handmaid’s Tale, Atlas Shrugged, and The Chronicles of Narnia, I’d like to meet them.

The F&SF Division

Isaac Asimov, Foundation, coverIn my own sandbox, the science fiction and fantasy field, the listmakers came up with an interesting cross-section.  I was a little surprised to see Asimov’s Foundation series on the list:  it’s great stuff, and an SF classic, but I’d have thought it was “inside baseball,” widely known only among card-carrying fans.  Another classic, Frank Herbert’s Dune, is probably more widely read.  (I notice the entry for Dune is not marked as a series, which is a good thing.  While there are quite a few follow-on Dune books, after the original the quality drops off exponentially.)

Other SF picks are more contemporary.  We’ve got The Martian, which I’ve mentioned before, and Ready Player One, which was just made into a movie this year—both good choices (by my lights), though not yet perhaps seasoned enough to be classics like the Asimov and Herbert entries.

We’ve got the comedic Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the classic Frankenstein, the satirical Sirens of Titan, the young adult Hunger Games, SF horror in Jurassic Park, dystopian tales in both 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale.  We have what you might call prehistorical fiction, The Clan of the Cave Bear, which I’d class as a variety of SF, and time-travel romance in Outlander (also recently come to video).  A Dean Koontz novel, Watchers, which I’d never heard of, may represent the SF thriller.  Then there’s Atlas Shrugged, which probably belongs in SF given a technological premise, although these days it’s more often thought of as a political tract.

Of course it’s always possible to regret the omissions—Heinlein or Brin or Bujold, for example—but a list of 100 nationwide favorites in all genres is never going to be able to pick up every quality work.  Since the TGAR candidates were largely chosen by a random survey of 7200 Americans, it’s easy to see why more widely-read examples are favored, whether or not they represent the highest quality.  The focus on American readers also introduces some selection bias, which might account for omitting, say, Arthur C. Clarke.

Lord of the Rings, coverOver in fantasy, the “high fantasy” epic is well represented by The Lord of the Rings, The Wheel of Time, and A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones), with the children’s division held down by the Narnia tales and Harry Potter.  Again, there are some familiar subgenres:  satire (Gulliver’s Travels), whimsy or children’s books (Alice, The Little Prince), horror (The Stand), young adult (Twilight).

I was a little surprised to see three entries in what one might call the Christian fantasy column:  The Shack, Left Behind, and something called Mind Invaders.  When an item turns up that you’ve never heard of, it’s a useful reminder of how far-ranging people’s tastes really are.

An Author’s Range

The list can also spark some interesting reflections on the range of a prolific author.  Probably most people would pick Dune as Frank Herbert’s leading entry, and Pride and Prejudice as the most well-loved of Austen’s several great novels.  But the only candidate for Dickens on the list, for example, is Great Expectations.

Great Expectations, coverNow, I’m fond of Dickens, but Great Expectations isn’t one of the stories I particularly like.  Yet it does seem to come up frequently whenever Dickens is mentioned.  (I don’t even hear quite as much about A Tale of Two Cities, which we did read in high school—possibly chosen for school because it’s relatively short; assigning a class one of Dickens’ doorstoppers would have consumed an entire semester’s worth of reading time.)  Is Expectations really representative of Dickens’ best?  I’d have picked Little Dorrit or Our Mutual Friend, say, if I’d been in on the original survey.  Or David Copperfield, maybe, as the most accessible to a modern reader.  But, again, the list suggests there’s a reservoir of interest in Expectations that I just don’t happen to share—a broadening thought.

In a similar way, it may be harder to come up with the most representative Stephen King or Mark Twain novel—there are so many of them.  (The listmakers did confine themselves deliberately to one entry per author, which makes sense.)  Even within a single author’s oeuvre, it’s intriguing to see which work a majority of readers picked as outstanding.

Incommensurable Goods

After enough of this kind of reflection, we may find ourselves with a certain skepticism about the whole comparison process.

The Fairfax County bracket system, entertaining as it is, only strengthens this impression.  There is a sorting algorithm to create a ranking by going down the list and placing each item in turn in relation to those above it.  And it’s fun to weigh random pairs of works against each other, even within the particular classifications the libraries used (Classics, Midcentury, Late Century, Contemporary).

But the match-up process yields some odd results.  (I understand sports tournament designers also have to take care to ensure good playoffs.)  There’s some plausibility in a face-off between Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights.  But what should we make of pitting Anne of Green Gables against War and Peace?  The Great Gatsby against Alice?  In some cases the entries hardly seem to be in the same weight class, so to speak.  It strikes me as a no-brainer to match The Lord of the Rings against Where the Red Fern Grows, a novel I’ve never heard of.

Even within a given author’s work, one can wonder about how conclusive a comparison actually is.  There’s a scale factor that makes some matches clear:  Asimov’s sweeping Foundation series seems a more logical “top” candidate than even an excellent short story like “The Last Question” or “Robbie,” just because of its greater scope and size.  But it can be hard to decide between stories on the same scale—two great short stories, say, or two very different novels.

Natural Law and Natural Rights, coverAt this point I’m reminded of an argument made by philosopher John Finnis in his Natural Law and Natural Rights (1980).  Noting that one of the classic objections against utilitarianism (“the greatest good for the greatest number”) is the inability in practice to reduce all possible good and bad things to a uniform measure of “utility,” Finnis takes the position that there are a number of categories of human goods that can’t be reduced to each other.  His list of such goods includes life, knowledge, play, aesthetic experience, friendship, practical reasonableness, and religion (ch. IV.2, pp. 86-90).  These goods aren’t interchangeable.  They are literally “incommensurable”—they can’t be measured against each other.

It’s possible that some similar principle of incommensurability applies to the books we’ve been discussing.  Would I want to give up, say, Pride and Prejudice in favor of The Lord of the Rings, or vice versa?  They’re unique achievements, and we realize something quite different from reading each of them.  We might be able to create some rather vague order of precedence—for example, by the traditional question of what one book you’d want to have with you if marooned on a desert island.  But that’s not the same sort of comparison as equating a dollar with ten dimes.

On the other hand, the fun of weighing (note the measurement analogy) one story against another suggests there’s some common element, or elements, in our enjoyment of a good book.  If nothing else, such match-ups can get some entertaining discussions going.

The Naming of Names

/ Rick Ellrod / 6 Comments

I love names.  Words of all sorts, but especially names; people’s names, as well as names of places and things.  Even with ordinary first names, one may always ask “Why did the parents pick that name for that child?”—whether one asks with a note of puzzlement, admiration, or horror.  But fantasy and science fiction provide wider scope for inquiry, because so many of the names in those stories are made up by the authors, rather than picked from the usual stash of baby names.

First, though, let’s look at the mundane questions faced by parents.

Name That Baby

Ariella baby name decorative blockA year ago, when my daughter was expecting her first child, she canvassed family members for name suggestions.  I was happy to comply.  Ecstatic, in fact.  I pored through a number of baby name booklets and sources, which I keep for reference in inventing fictional characters, and (naturally) made a list.

As I was putting the list together, I realized I was subliminally applying a whole set of criteria for evaluating possible candidates.  When I tried to tease out what kinds of considerations I had in mind, I came up with this set.

(1)  First and last names.  First of all, the first and last name have to go together.  Bob Levey, a Washington Post columnist, used to collect “Perfect Fit Last Names” (PFLN).  Sometimes these were simply last names that turned out to be appropriate for someone’s occupation; I once had a swimming teacher named Mr. Drown.  A Levey collection from 2000 mentions a funeral home director named Graves, a midwife named Borner, and horseback riding instructors named Sadler, Mount, and Paddock.  But sometimes it’s the coordination of first and last names that’s especially apt.  The same article, for example, cites an Ivy Plant.  The first question for parents is, do you want to saddle your child with a name that will always invite snickers?

A subtler point is whether first and last names sound good together.  For example, when my children were born, I decided that names ending in an “-el” sound would elide too smoothly into the first syllable of “Ellrod.”  That knocked out a lot of girls’ names with forms like Michelle or Annabelle.  On the plus side, it also removed the temptation to indulge in a Tolkien name like “Galadriel Ellrod.”  (More on that below.)

(2)  Too common.  You may not want a name that’s too common.  Both my children shared first names with other kids in their grade-school classes—in one case, a first and middle name.  If you’re curious what names have been most used in recent years, you can consult a Web site like Behind the Name, which also provides great etymologies.

Beren, by Elena Kukanova

Beren (sketch by Elena Kukanova)

(3)  Too weird.  At the same time, you don’t necessarily want a name that’s too exotic.  No matter how geeky you (or your kids) may be, it’s going to be tough going through life named “Aragorn Ellrod” or “Frodo Ellrod.”  (Not to mention “Kal-El Ellrod,” which fails on multiple counts.)  I almost succumbed to the Tolkien temptation when I considered the name “Beren,” a hero from the Silmarillion.  It sounds almost normal; and maybe I could bury it as a middle name.  I started trying out the name “Christopher Beren” on people, but I stopped when someone asked:  “You mean, like the Baron of so-and-so?”  Uh-oh.  The poor kid would never get his middle name spelled right, ever.

Fashion matters, too.  Names go in and out of style.  It sometimes seems that about twenty percent of the heroines in eighteenth- or nineteenth-century novels were named “Fanny.”  But it’s hard to imagine giving a child that name today.  (Behind the Names confirms my gut reaction, showing the statistical incidence of “Fanny” dropping off the chart after about 1940 in the U.S.)

(4)  Misspelled or mispronounced.  A name that will always be misspelled or mispronounced is going to be a burden for the child.  In this category we have the innovative spellings one sometimes see for commonplace names.  “Megan,” for example, is pretty common nowadays (though there were no Megans around when I was growing up).  But a girl named “Megyn” is going to be wearily correcting the spelling all her life.  And people will dither over whether “Megyn” should get some equally novel pronunciation, or just sound like “Megan.”

Colbie Caillat at the Malibu Inn

Colbie Caillat at the Malibu Inn

Names from other languages (which may be perfectly well-known in their own tongues) can fall into this category.  I’m reminded of singer Colbie Caillat, though I’m thinking more of the last name than the first.  “Caillat” looks French to me, and in French it would come out something like “kye-aw” (as she says in this interview).  But the name as it’s actually used is said “cal-lay” (there’s an audio link on the Wikipedia page), which sounds as if someone threw up their hands and said “I can’t figure it out, but it’s French, so it must end in ‘ay.’”

(5)  Commemoration.  Names that duplicate those of other family members are appealing.  We may like the idea of commemorating a parent, sibling, or more distant relative in a child’s name.  On the other hand, having the same names constantly recur breeds confusion.  I’ve torn my hair out at times trying to make sense of old family Bible genealogy pages in which every third individual is named Robert or William, and nobody at the time bothered to specify which William or Robert they were referring to.  I feel it’s more interesting to give family members distinctive names—which is one reason there’s no Frederick E. Ellrod IV.

You may also want to honor famous historical or fictional characters.  Even if their names are not weird, though, we want to be careful about how they come across.  Different people may have different associations with the same name; we can’t control that, but sometimes we can anticipate it, especially if the name is distinctive.  I might want to name a boy after Albert Einstein, but a listener might think of Fat Albert or Uncle Albert.

Emergence cover, first edition(6)  Age-appropriateness.  There are names that can become incongruous depending on the age or character of the child.  For example, “Edith” might be attractive for Tolkien fans (it was J.R.R. Tolkien’s wife’s name); but it seems so staid that I can’t picture a small child named Edith.  Conversely, it might be cute to name a girl Candace and call her “Candy.”  But that inherently trivial-sounding monicker might seem embarrassing to a teenager, and positively annoying to a grown woman who wanted to be taken seriously.  David R. Palmer’s engaging post-apocalyptic novel Emergence (1984) plays off that factor by giving us an eleven-year-old first-person heroine named Candy (Candidia)—who also happens to be a genius, an advanced karate master, and generally as formidable as any Heinlein female lead.  In this case, the very incongruity is part of the fun.

(7)  Ambiguity.  Names that are ambiguous as to gender, like “Morgan,” “Lindsay,” or “Leslie,” may appeal to some parents for exactly that reason, but they’ll also make it harder for strangers to know how to address the person later on.  When you’re writing a formal letter, it doesn’t help if you can’t tell whether the salutation should be “Dear Mr.” or “Dear Ms.”

Anne of Green Gables book cover(8)  Nicknames.  What are you actually going to call the kid?  Some names support multiple nicknames, some only one, and some are unnicknameable.  And to me at least, “Anne” has quite a different sound and resonance than “Annie.”  (Anne Shirley famously insisted on “Anne” even as opposed to “Ann.”)  You can name someone “Elizabeth” and make available a plethora of diminutives and variants, from Lizzie to Beth to Lisa.  But give a baby the name “Faith” and that’s pretty much the only possibility.  Unless, of course, the nickname comes completely out of left field.  I once was introduced to the wife of a partner at a law firm whose name tag read “Winkie.”  There was no predicting that one.

(9)  Initials.  We should at least try out the full name’s initials before we decide.  A friend of my sister’s grew up with the initials “B.O.,” and naturally at a certain age she was razzed about that.  I once put my full name’s initials—FEE—on something in an office refrigerator, and puzzled some people who thought there was a charge for that item.  If nothing else, I’ve always favored giving the members of a family different first-name initials, so it’s easy to list them on a miniature golf scorecard just by their letters.

Of course, if a person ends up changing their last name later in life, all bets are off—as if it wasn’t complicated enough already.

 

So even in the sphere of ordinary Tom-Dick-and-Harry contemporary names, there are a lot of angles to think about.  Next time, we’ll venture into naming conventions in fantastic worlds, where things only get more complicated.