Not Quite What I Was Planning by Smith Magazine
Blurb for the back cover:
“This book is about the words”
The other evening I was lucky enough to attend a book reading at Powells for Not Quiet What I Was Planning. The people who presented the book were technically not the author but rather the editors at Smith Magazine that compiled submissions from other people who were invited to write a six word memoir of their life. For example if I, the Book Pirate, were to try and sum up my life in six words, it might turn out something like this.
“Likes books. Writes blogs. Hates Ninjas.”
Nifty isn’t it? The book NQWIWP is filled with these six worded memoirs which have been submitted from famous people, authors, and just everyday people. Now I would have a really hard time writing a review of this book in the same sense that I would normally. It’s not a novel. There is no plot. There isn’t really even an author, just editors. If it’s not a novel then, what is it? There are two ways to look at it.
The first is to look at this book as a coffee table book. It should sit on the table being picked up by friends and family who will flip through it while relaxing on the couch. It would make a good conversation starter. If this is how you view the book then there are so flaws. The first is that it is a small paperback book. Coffee table books are normally comically oversize, glossy, and contain many pictures. For NQWIWP I would make it hardbound, make the book bigger but still reasonable, fit more six-word-memoirs on each page to make the book thinner and easier to open and have lay flat, and maybe add a picture or two. Nothing fancy with the pictures because this book is about the words.
The other option is to view this book as a book of poetry. As I sat at the book reading, the audience was invited to share their own six-word-memoirs. Some were deep, some were humorous. Poetry to me is a form of writing where the author closely examines and carefully picks each word that they use in order to get just the right meaning across. That is what they did. They picked six words, carefully arranged them, edited them. These six words are really poems if you look at it from this point of view. In this case the size and binding of the book work very well. Small enough to be carried around and read at ones leisure.
With all that being said I still feel this is a really enjoyable and interesting book regardless of how you look at it. You may be able to quickly blow through it in an hour or two, but it is something that you can come back to or pass on to a friend. I would highly recommend checking out the Smith Magazine’s website where you can read other people’s six-word-memoirs in addition to submitting your own. Then there is always the matter of, you know, buying the book which you totally should do.
Tags: memoir
February 28th, 2008 at 11:49 am
Jim Radosta at Just Out wrote an excellent piece on the same book:
http://www.justout.com/jims_closet.aspx
This is such a great idea for a book. I wish I had thought of it.
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