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gslife 's review for:
Trigger Warning
by Neil Gaiman
As I grow older and become (only very slightly) less interested in the imagined futures of the 60’s and stories about wizards and dragons, I find that some of the writing I like the most is reminiscent writing by people in their second half of life. Maybe it’s a fictional reminiscing, but there’s a style of writing older authors have that younger writers seem to just not be able to get to. It seems so effortless, and it’s probably not, but I bet sitting and thinking and staring into the middle distance has something to do with it.
Neil Gaiman says this book has no theme, but I think it does. Almost. I can’t find this in Click Clack, The Rattlebag, or And Weep, Like Alexander, but I think it’s mostly about love, and the (tricky) little expressions of that word that encompass an enormous range of thoughts and feelings. There’s a huge amount of meaning in that word, probably more than any other word in the English language. I can “love” chocolate cake. But that’s obviously different from the love I have for my girlfriend, which is different from the love I have for my parents, which is different from the love I have for someone I’ve known three weeks but whose company I really enjoy. Which is different from the love one has for an imaginary girlfriend he made up when he was fifteen, I imagine. Buried in the middle of the introduction, related to a story that appears in the middle of the book, is a quote from Ray Bradbury: “Looking back over a lifetime, you see that love was the answer to everything.”
I’ve never written a book, but I can’t imagine that it doesn’t have a lot in common with creating a child, another thing I’ve never done. The analogy of two things I don’t know anything about should end here with simply implication, but the idea is too attractive to me to do that. I’ve read enough about authors writing books to think that writing a book is an incredibly painful, labor-intensive process. Oh sure, it’s probably fun to start. But then it becomes work. It grows and matures inside the mind until it’s shoved out in a wriggling, unedited mess. Then the shaping and molding begins. How could you spend so much time wrestling with one thing and not love it and hate it?
At one point during “Adventure Story” I misread a line, thinking it said “My father is bigger than life.” (The actual sentence was about how the narrator’s father was physically larger than the narrator for all of his life.) But it reminded me: my father is bigger than life and I don’t think I’ll ever measure up to what he is. It sounds like the narrator of “Adventure Story” feels the same.
And yet, sometimes books will cause me a little flicker of a smile that no one sees but I know happened, and it’s a secret I have now. It’s the second-best feeling of reading books.
And Weep, Like Alexander is a fantastic little short story in the vein of classic through-provokers by giants like Asimov and Ellison. It even has a “pompous” title (as Gaiman describes it), as Ellison is wont to do. Although I wonder if the Uninventor would be better off trying to find a solution for human self-control rather than insisting technology is the problem.
I have some very mixed feelings about Nothing O’Clock, the Doctor Who story. It’s a great story, and fits very nicely with some of the very best Doctor Who plots. But I really don’t like the eleventh Doctor. It’s not totally relevant in a discussion of Trigger Warning, but the creators of that Doctor took the perfect personality of resourceful competency mixed with self-depreciating humility of the Tenth, and turned it to eleven (sorry). Take away the subtle humility, make him all but wink at the audience, and he becomes insufferable. I digress.
I’ve mentioned before that I don’t care for American Gods, and to end the book on a short story about “Shadow Moon” (“Good name,” someone tells him, and I give a quiet “ugh”) is disappointing. It doesn’t stand on its own very well, and it has many of the same problems I have with American Gods in the first place.
The most impressive thing about Trigger Warning is that it all comes from the mind of the same man. There’s enough diversity here that if you don’t enjoy a story, there’s probably a better one for you within fifteen pages. And they all have a little nugget that’s clearly Gaiman.
My favorite stories: The Thing About Cassandra, Orange, An Invocation of Incuriosity, And Weep, Like Alexander, The Return of the Thin White Duke.
If I was underlining in this book (I can’t, it’s Lauren’s, even if she says I can (and a first edition)), I would have underlined…
- We take words, we give them power, and we look out through other eyes, and we see, and experience, what others see. I wonder, Are fictions safe places? And then I ask myself, Should they be safe places?
- Young couples would come up here, courting, and elderly couples, comfortable in each other's company, the ones whose courting days were long forgotten. Not forgotten. You never forget. It must be somewhere inside you. Even if the brain has forgotten, perhaps the teeth remember. Or the fingers.
- I bet you never make a move on a girl unless you're sure she's ready, do you?
- “It must be horrible to be so old." I shook my head. It isn't.
- ...poems ancient and modern prowled the ice floes in bear-shape, filled with words that could wound with their beauty.
- If one could live forever, if youth were simply there for the taking, that the material, the sensual, the worldly would all prolong their worthless lives. The spiritual would not avoid the call to something higher. It would be the survival of the least fit. What sort of cesspool may not our poor world become?
- Ray Bradbury was the kind of person who would give half a day to a kid who wanted to be a writer when he grew up.
- "Looking back over a lifetime, you see that love was the answer to everything." - Ray Bradbury
- "I seek adventure, not wisdom," said the Duke.
- "I'm here to rescue you," he told her. "You are here to rescue yourself," she corrected him.
- The heart is greater than the universe, for it can find pity in it for everything in the universe, and the universe itself can feel no pity. The heart is greater than a King, because a heart can know a King for what he is, and still love him. And once you give your heart, you cannot take it back.
- But you smiled all the time, as if everything you saw delighted you. (!!!!)
Neil Gaiman says this book has no theme, but I think it does. Almost. I can’t find this in Click Clack, The Rattlebag, or And Weep, Like Alexander, but I think it’s mostly about love, and the (tricky) little expressions of that word that encompass an enormous range of thoughts and feelings. There’s a huge amount of meaning in that word, probably more than any other word in the English language. I can “love” chocolate cake. But that’s obviously different from the love I have for my girlfriend, which is different from the love I have for my parents, which is different from the love I have for someone I’ve known three weeks but whose company I really enjoy. Which is different from the love one has for an imaginary girlfriend he made up when he was fifteen, I imagine. Buried in the middle of the introduction, related to a story that appears in the middle of the book, is a quote from Ray Bradbury: “Looking back over a lifetime, you see that love was the answer to everything.”
I’ve never written a book, but I can’t imagine that it doesn’t have a lot in common with creating a child, another thing I’ve never done. The analogy of two things I don’t know anything about should end here with simply implication, but the idea is too attractive to me to do that. I’ve read enough about authors writing books to think that writing a book is an incredibly painful, labor-intensive process. Oh sure, it’s probably fun to start. But then it becomes work. It grows and matures inside the mind until it’s shoved out in a wriggling, unedited mess. Then the shaping and molding begins. How could you spend so much time wrestling with one thing and not love it and hate it?
At one point during “Adventure Story” I misread a line, thinking it said “My father is bigger than life.” (The actual sentence was about how the narrator’s father was physically larger than the narrator for all of his life.) But it reminded me: my father is bigger than life and I don’t think I’ll ever measure up to what he is. It sounds like the narrator of “Adventure Story” feels the same.
And yet, sometimes books will cause me a little flicker of a smile that no one sees but I know happened, and it’s a secret I have now. It’s the second-best feeling of reading books.
And Weep, Like Alexander is a fantastic little short story in the vein of classic through-provokers by giants like Asimov and Ellison. It even has a “pompous” title (as Gaiman describes it), as Ellison is wont to do. Although I wonder if the Uninventor would be better off trying to find a solution for human self-control rather than insisting technology is the problem.
I have some very mixed feelings about Nothing O’Clock, the Doctor Who story. It’s a great story, and fits very nicely with some of the very best Doctor Who plots. But I really don’t like the eleventh Doctor. It’s not totally relevant in a discussion of Trigger Warning, but the creators of that Doctor took the perfect personality of resourceful competency mixed with self-depreciating humility of the Tenth, and turned it to eleven (sorry). Take away the subtle humility, make him all but wink at the audience, and he becomes insufferable. I digress.
I’ve mentioned before that I don’t care for American Gods, and to end the book on a short story about “Shadow Moon” (“Good name,” someone tells him, and I give a quiet “ugh”) is disappointing. It doesn’t stand on its own very well, and it has many of the same problems I have with American Gods in the first place.
The most impressive thing about Trigger Warning is that it all comes from the mind of the same man. There’s enough diversity here that if you don’t enjoy a story, there’s probably a better one for you within fifteen pages. And they all have a little nugget that’s clearly Gaiman.
My favorite stories: The Thing About Cassandra, Orange, An Invocation of Incuriosity, And Weep, Like Alexander, The Return of the Thin White Duke.
If I was underlining in this book (I can’t, it’s Lauren’s, even if she says I can (and a first edition)), I would have underlined…
- We take words, we give them power, and we look out through other eyes, and we see, and experience, what others see. I wonder, Are fictions safe places? And then I ask myself, Should they be safe places?
- Young couples would come up here, courting, and elderly couples, comfortable in each other's company, the ones whose courting days were long forgotten. Not forgotten. You never forget. It must be somewhere inside you. Even if the brain has forgotten, perhaps the teeth remember. Or the fingers.
- I bet you never make a move on a girl unless you're sure she's ready, do you?
- “It must be horrible to be so old." I shook my head. It isn't.
- ...poems ancient and modern prowled the ice floes in bear-shape, filled with words that could wound with their beauty.
- If one could live forever, if youth were simply there for the taking, that the material, the sensual, the worldly would all prolong their worthless lives. The spiritual would not avoid the call to something higher. It would be the survival of the least fit. What sort of cesspool may not our poor world become?
- Ray Bradbury was the kind of person who would give half a day to a kid who wanted to be a writer when he grew up.
- "Looking back over a lifetime, you see that love was the answer to everything." - Ray Bradbury
- "I seek adventure, not wisdom," said the Duke.
- "I'm here to rescue you," he told her. "You are here to rescue yourself," she corrected him.
- The heart is greater than the universe, for it can find pity in it for everything in the universe, and the universe itself can feel no pity. The heart is greater than a King, because a heart can know a King for what he is, and still love him. And once you give your heart, you cannot take it back.
- But you smiled all the time, as if everything you saw delighted you. (!!!!)