Reading and Writing in a Digital Age

I recently finished A Storm of Swords, the third book of the series A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin, and there are many memorable quotes and moments. More people would recognize the series from the first book, A Game of Thrones, which became a television series.

“‘Battles,’ muttered Robb as he led her out beneath the trees. ‘I have won every battle, yet somehow I’m losing the war.’” (480)               -A Storm of Swords, George R.R. Martin

The story is told through many points of view, and Martin describes many things in detail while doing a good job with the plot twists. Many things happen at once, so there is no one main character. Robb, king of the North, is fighting a war down south, but other forces have allied together against him, his home in the north has been sacked and his brothers are presumably dead. Even though he has won all his battles so far, everything else has gone wrong. The quote is ironic but true. It describes the situation very well and shows how troubled he is. It also shows how battles aren’t everything in a war. In general, I think irony makes literature more interesting. Another character also notes Robb’s dilemma in his point of view, which is cool.

Life Of Pi is a book that I first heard about through a friend in middle school. I didn’t know what to think of it, the way it was described to me was “a book about a zebra, a tiger, a hyena and an orangutan stuck on a boat.” But when I did at long last get to read it, I found it to be much more than just that. I’ve read this book probably 5 or 6 times now. It’s one of those books that I like to go back every year or so and re-read. I think it’s one of the best displays of storytelling I’ve read. Yann Martel, the author, does an excellent job of writing in first-person, making it seem as if Pi is speaking to us, the readers, directly. One of my favorite descriptions comes form when he is on a lifeboat, dying of thirst, and he just found the emergency water rations. It goes like this:

“My feelings can perhaps be imagined, but they can hardly be described. To the gurgling beat of my greedy throat, pure, delicious, beautiful, crystalline water flowed into my system. Liquid life, it was. I drained that golden cup to the very last drop, sucking at the hole to catch any remaining moisture. I went, “Ahhhhhh!”, tossed the can overboard and got another one.” (179).

What I love most about this particular passage is the way that Yann Martel uses adjectives. He wisely plays off the context of the book, using the desperation of the situation that Pi is in to enhance the reader’s experience. It’s easy to say something along the lines of “I was parched, and this cup of water felt better than any that I had ever drank before.” However, a sentence like that doesn’t fully convey the exhaustion, exuberance, and excitement that Pi feels upon drinking his first cup of water in several days. You can hear the gratitude in his language, through phrases like “liquid life”, “golden cup”, and “pure, declicious, beautiful, crystalline water.” In a normal passage about a drink of water, excessive use of adjectives would be considered unnecessary and deracting from the main message of the piece. But here, Martel’s language so perfectly fits the context of the situation. It’s almost too outrageous to read with a straight face, he’s so over-the-top in his description. When, however, you stop thinking about the hyperbole in the passage, you come to appreciate how intelligently Martel recognized the context of his own writing, and used it to perfectly exaggerate this particular scene.