Theory of Books

A Book of Plot, a Book of Knowledge, a Book of Curiosity and a Book of None

One evening after an enjoyable reading session on Finnish translated version of James Clavell’s Shogun, a theoretical lightning struck next to me with a question answered to: Why to read a book? The answer become formulated as part of Zacharian literature theory in such fashion that I could see eventually four possible reasons to read a book. The book could be (1) a Book of Plot, (2) a Book of Knowledge, (3) a Book of Language or (4) a Book of Curiosity – or a combination of any of the previous four types.

The book Shogun I could immediately classify as a Book of Plot: the story and the unfolding events were a significant point of reading. What would happen next and how would the preshadowed event of X and Y end up going by? Narration of the book based much upon storytelling even while rough ending was known from historical point of view from the beginning (the protagonist Blackthorne, based on a real life character, would become a samurai and vassal of the next de facto ruler of Japan) and hence the plot was clearly an important factor in this fictional yet historical novel, which was also obviously intentional by the author.

Due another Zacharian literary theory concept maximalism, in which more is better if it fits the same space as easily as less, I figured I had enjoyed the book more than if it would have been merely a Book of Plot. It took me but a turn of a page to figure out that at least for me the novel was also a Book of Knowledge: I learned a great deal of Japanese culture, history and even language while reading the book, even while I acknowledged that much of the history told was more and less romanticized, nevertheless. Admittedly though, certain things such as ninjas as mythical warriors do originate from Japan itself and are not simply Western misconceptions; images of fictional ninjas clad with almost legendary abilities in black were concepted in Japan in early 19^th century or so – hundreds of years after historical period of ninjas, similarly like popular culture visions of Caribbean pirates are largely based upon non-contemporary fictional literature such as Treasure Island.

Thirdly I ended up finding up the novel as a Book of Curiosity, after I had talked about the book with my wife (who had not read it, and by my assumption will not). The Book of Curiosity in my mind meant that the book would have something of interest that would be not due anything that is directly written between the covers. Meta content would be of something curious. I figured it could be something special about the author or the book success for instance; in this case it was that the book apparently after it’s appearance in 1975 had become a significant source of Japanese culture interest rousing in West after the Second World War. I can not confirm how successful the book really was in that part, but at least according to potentially fictional Wikipedia remarks it seemed to me like the novel would have been rather popular and was a major source of inspiration towards Japan in the era when there was practically no manga and anime in the West (to be honest the modern manga and anime field was still in infancy also in Japan before 1980’s in my opinion).

As a Book of Language I was unable to define the book as, since I didn’t mean that as a studybook of foreign language (which would classify as a Book of Knowledge), but rather as something which could be called as poetic. The novel has few poems in it, but they’re more like background imagery, and the actual language seems relatively plain. I did learn what means ‘tacking’ (‘luoviminen’ in Finnish), although I was familiar with such practice of sailing against the wind, but in general I didn’t find the language itself as anything particularly fancy or special. Of course I don’t know if English original was different, but I doubt it – the text just focused on telling the story for the most part. I also was first calling the concept as the Book of Words, and frankly, I’m still not certain which one would fit better.

To promptly test this new theory further, I tested the concept into few other books I’ve read recently. Namely I can think of three more: William Rodgers’ Think; A Biography of the Watsons and IBM (or more specifically Finnish translation: Ajattele! - IBM:n tarina), Sofi Oksanen’s Stalinin lehmät (Stalin’s cows would have been the English translation) and Aki Rantala’s Linux. Oksanen’s novel I did not finish, as I felt it too exhausting to crawl through almost 500 pages of it (in comparison Shogun is around 1200 pages and I could have taken more no problem). Rantala’s old Linux guide has but few pages left, and some parts were very interesting and some parts I almost had to force myself to read. Finally the Rodger’s sort of a biography book I almost regretted having started until the latter half of the book.

The Watson-IBM book I read first and it’s been already a while since I finished that. The Finnish translation did not mention it as clearly as a biography of Watson, so I was looking forward to read more about early history of computers – and in that I was disappointed. I did know that the original book was released already in 1969, so it could not yet have anything about home computers of which I knew more and expected to be more interesting, but I was not expecting the book to start from 19^th century telling about a salesman who grew into power and richness with rather questionable practices with occasionally double standards and even immoral behaviour. What even worse, the Watson himself seemed to be a businessman who didn’t really understand about computers when they finally came available, just it happened that his mechanical cash register manufacturing company was well capable of producing them when the technology came available.

So this IBM book is not a Book of Language – quite plain text and largely relatively simple expressions supposedly maybe in attempt to seek for Watson’s spirit, who was made to sound like a dictator who gives simple message to his simple folk and who was admired by the author. The first part kind of takes steps towards a Book of Plot, but that doesn’t really work out in my opinion. I didn’t find it very interesting to get to know how Watson manages to obtain his next monopoly region, especially as often the details of narration told it in fashion that “Watson was a skilled salesman” and as typical for a biography there was no fully consistent story to tell, although that is natural of course.

What the book is, however, is a Book of Knowledge, although is somewhat limited fashion. The book didn’t seem very critical, and it was quite hard to estimate whether some unreferred claim was true or not. Was Watson as innocent as he seemed to suggest during his earlier days, and was he really that sincere while being polite to some salesmen? Maybe, maybe not, but the book does not exactly allow checking any facts itself but tries to proceed with old-fashioned shut up and listen to the story “factual” narration, which obviously doesn’t always feel like the complete truth. Yet no doubt there are many truths, so despite its potential missteps, it still contains knowledge.

However, perhaps more the book goes to the field of a Book of Curiosity. It still gives certain background history for IBM, which eventually did not become as world dominating and unstoppable in the field of computers, largely due unforeseeable rise of home computers in turn of 1970’s to 1980’s, to which IBM was not as swift and successful to get to. Yes, despite IBM PC become the computer which paved a way to a standard upon which even modern computers are based upon, I still find it kind of unsuccessful if the intention was world domination. IBM PC compatibles prevailed, but IBM itself faded away from the point of view of a regular consumer and largely started to return to its mainframe production after 1980’s. In the book it is speculated that nothing could prevent IBM from becoming permanently the biggest company in the world. On the other hand in the end of the book there is some curious pondering such as about how it might at the start of 1970’s seem like wild imagination but that computers will eventually come everywhere – it took a moment, but we are there now.

In summary, I suppose it was a book worth reading, yet I could have lived without it as well. The theory seemed to work out, since it felt not worth reading only when I was unable see the curiosity value content or knowledge, when there was not else really in the whole book.

Rantala’s book about Linux is another Book of Knowledge with hardly even a trace to a plot narration or poetic narration. It won’t even go with the curiosity side, since books like that are several, and I don’t really see why mere age would make it so special in this context – the book is from early 2000’s. The age also was a problem at times, since some parts especially when it was talked about things like concurrent Linux distros, GUI applications and installation of a then new Red Hat Linux version simply felt obsolete and as such irrelevant. That took a step towards curiosity and could have deemed as historical knowledge, but for most part that just didn’t give me much.

However, overview and history of Linux plus especially Linux core operations and console commands and scripting would still be surprisingly relevant knowledge despite being over 15 years old data. How much one could get any usable information for a modern OS while reading about Windows guide from over 10 years ago? Someone might argue that this would indicate how Unix based OS would be just some old nonsense, but I’d say such thoughts would be wrong. Rather I see it upkeeping consistently the past and not discarding long-learned and applied practices after every few years, like in computer systems seems favored rather often. Admittedly though, large amount of Unix/Linux console (Bash) commands are completely unintuitive for a beginner, and without some external knowledge it would be quite hard to figure out what does commands like cat, df, finger, top or dpkg. At least GUI gives more direct hints, usually, likewise PowerShell commands are usually logically understandable English.

Finally the last poor book which I decided to not even bother to finish. After over 100 pages I had not really found any proper plot, just fragments of seemingly irrelevant narration of individuals from different eras that would be of course connected by family ties or acquaintanceships of parents and such. Of course it might be partially due myself, but this kind of postmodern narration simply gives me nothing, and in my opinion serves nothing that matters either. Yes, sure, we can get these very subjective images how it’s hard to live as a bulimic or how someone has felt her life as a woman in Soviet era Estonia has been difficult, but to me large parts of it felt just about as interesting as reading a phone book (just names swapped with foods eaten and numbers with counts of vomits) and recallings of past how I should have passed a tree from left instead of right and maybe then something would have been different when arriving the other side of nothingness. So basically there simply was no plot based narration to me that would have mattered at all.

The writing style would not go for the Book of Language either, because I felt the language used was relatively simple and poorly structured. Might have been intentional in order to rouse certain feeling where nothing matters to the protagonist, but it’s a fail if the book starts to feel so monotonous to the reader that it simply does not matter. Also the attempted steps towards a Book of Knowledge with historical references seem too subjective and fictional to be tied to almost anything significant to know about. That they had lots of Russians and their influence in Estonia for decades in 20^th century is not exactly a news or anything that would make this book worth reading. References to Estonian resistance fighters Forest Brothers (metsäveljet in Finnish, metsavennad in Estonian) do go close, but unfortunately those historical glimpses are just rare drops in the sour pool of tears and did not impress me enough to really give it a class with their maybe one tenth of the content (did not count).

One funny occasion came across to me though, which was recounting of a story of a foreign woman selling herself in Finland after the collapse of Soviet Union who carries a sign: “pilu 50 mk” (meaning ‘pusy 50 marks’ with the first word misspelled, and the sales price being extraordinarily low for the time). This is funny mainly because it almost goes to the curiosity class, yet it actually seems to be a common unconfirmed urban legend which apparently has been told having as if happened like all around Finland. My mother even told it in 1990’s having happened in Heinävesi (a small town in Eastern Finland) where this woman supposedly was in the town market square...obviously she never saw this woman herself. I had forgotten this story, but by then the latest I saw how impossible story this was to be for having happened for real – or at least should it have happened for real in all the places it would have occurred for real, it is strange how no one seems to have first hand eyewitness experience of the case (the nearest you can get is “I know personally someone who saw a woman like that”) despite the poor woman toured apparently around wide regions of Finland keeping high public profile.

Anyway I don’t see this as special enough for real curiosity value, and the book is not even Oksanen’s breakthrough novel or otherwise too significant. Her later work Puhdistus felt a bit better, but I have to admit I’m not really impressed by her writings overall and I am kind of ashamed as I’ve over ten years ago suggested her to some foreign person as a Finnish author to read – not because I’d liked it myself, as I had not yet read any of her stuff, but as she was at the time become notable and praised author in Finland. Never praise something you don’t have first hand experience of.

Somebody might not be happy for me to dislike this Oksanen’s book, but on the other hand I doubt many of such people will ever encounter to read this text. Therefore overall the theory would seem to work again – Stalin’s cows did not feel like worth reading overall, likewise it did not reach a class in any of the four specified types. Some steps towards, but only partially.

Still, I do admit that my classification interpretation is quite subjective for several parts. Someone might feel plots differently, for someone knowledge in whatever strikes to a whole different level, for someone the curiosity might fit a very personal meta level and for someone language’s beautiness is depicted with all different words and so on. Another issue is that the Oksanen’s book could be argued to have certain virtue of delivering ideology. However, delivering any ideology, intentional or not, is not a good thing as I find it propaganda and all known -isms are by default dangerous if gotten strong enough. If brought sufficiently strongly of course, that might make it worth a curiosity akin to Main Kampf, which I’m expecting to have no other value really. Make no mistake though, there is nothing akin to that in this discourse in any book referred to, alas, it is a question of a theory.