Shawn Patrick Cooke's Blog

This phrase is one I've encountered in the world of video game speedrunning. When a streamer is bemoaning the difficulty of a section, or demanding to find out the "trick" to beating it, chat often responds with a quick and peremptory "git gud".

These are harsh words, but there is hidden wisdom in them.

These two simple (nay, simplified) words have such deep pragmatic implication. They speak to the person struggling, saying "You think this challenge is unfair, but it is fair. You struggle because you are not good enough. But you can become good enough! Continue to strive, continue to build your skill. And when that skill has increased sufficiently, you will be able to succeed. Until then, stop complaining."

These are lessons that we can take to heart in pretty much any skill-based endeavor, but I'd like to touch on what it has meant for my writing. Those six little letters have become something of a mantra, the ready answer for any of my complaints.

This scene isn't coming out the way I want.

git gud

I'm so sick of revising this story.

git gud

After all that work, and now I'm getting bad reviews?

lol git gud

It is the essence of personal responsibility, distilled into purest form. The game is fair; or even if it's unfair, it's the game I chose to play. If I don't like it, I could just quit.

Or I could get up, dust myself off, and fail again. And again, and again, until that failure starts to crack and chip away and show the success underneath. Until I get good.

In May of 2015, my wife and I completed our move to Richmond, Virginia. For the first time in our lives, we were homeowners, and we quickly discovered that the property dollar went farther than it had back on Long Island.

To cut a long story short, we achieved a lifelong dream by designating one of the rooms in our new home as a library. Books that had been stacked one atop another in New York, crammed into any available crevice, now had room to stand tall and vertical on our shelves.

And they didn't fill the shelves, either. For the first time, we actually used our bookends. The future was wide open and full of potential.

But that was almost four years ago, and our library has grown since then. Let me rephrase that -- our library has remained the same size, but the collection inhabiting it grew. One by one, the bookends went away, and soon our paperbacks were turning horizontal in order to maximize our space.

Of course, other rooms were colonized in that time, much like the Roman empire pushing ever outward to bring resources to the capital. History teaches how that wasn't sustainable for the Romans, and it certainly wasn't for us. Something had to give. We had to, gulp, get rid of some books.

But where to begin? How to bear parting with these companions of my youth, many of whom had moved with me across half a dozen states?

I found one or two that I didn't mind letting go, and when I had given those up, I found one or two more. Slowly but surely, I began to develop a set of rules to govern my collection. I now use these three principles whenever I reevaluate my library.

Do I want to read it?

Okay, when you put it like that it sounds obvious, but I promise it felt nothing of the kind. There were books that I owned simply to own, with no thought of eventually consuming. Atlas Shrugged is a fine example. I had some obscure notion of needing to read it to better argue against it, but that's no kind of life. Out it went, along with others of its ilk.

The above question applies even more to books I have already read. Would I consider rereading it? Rereading is a compliment not paid to every book, of course, but if I'm left with the feeling that I never want to crack its pages again, why is it on my shelf? Goodbye, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Would I recommend it to someone else?

This, in addition to rereading, is the best reason to hold onto a book you've already read. I can't tell you how often I've been deep in a conversation about literature that ended with me handing over a treasured volume to a friend who would get to experience that story for the first time.

That conversation can go many ways, though, and sometimes the conversation around a book turns to why I would not recommend it. Well then why in the world is it taking up my precious shelf space? Goodbye, Warded Man and sequels.

Is this book important/unique/distinctive/beautiful?

I love a beautiful book. The Franklin Library made some of my favorites, and I have a scattering of them on my shelves. Nowadays, I turn to the Easton Press.

Sometimes, I worry less about what they contain and more about how they'll look on my shelves. Is that vain and superficial? Maybe, but I've also found that having a book on my shelf is a gateway drug to reading it.

So those are my rules. And while they may not have reduced the total number of books on my shelves, they have certainly increased the overall quality. If I can't have a bigger and bigger library every day, at least I can have a better and better one.

I'm 40 years old, and it's time to admit something to myself. There are books on my bookshelf that I will never read.

It's just math, really. I've set a goal of reading 50 books in 2019, but I might blow that out of the water and manage 100. Of course, these are not all books that I already owned -- about half are likely to be new books purchased just this year.

In fact, of the 27 books I've read so far in 2019, 20 are books I acquired in the last twelve months. That means that only about a fifth of what I read, on average, is one of my BOMBS.

BOMBS: Books On My Book Shelf. The unexploded ordinance of the literary world.

So let's assume that I do manage to knock out 20 BOMBS a year. I have a to-read list of nearly 500 volumes right now. At my current rate of consumption, I could knock that out in about 25 years. And that's assuming that I keep pace with all of my new acquisitions.

Good thing it doesn't matter. St. Peter is not going to require a book report on everything I own as the price of admission into heaven. (Probably.) The number of books I read is not a high score to beat in the next lifetime. In short, there is absolutely, positively, no reason at all to let those unread BOMBS stress me out.

When I look at my shelves, I see the past and the future at the same time. I see the stories I have read, and the stories I have yet to read. A bookshelf without any unread books is fully in the past. I hope I always have a healthy sprinkling of unread books to spice up that static shelf.

When comic book fans talk about their favorite characters, they often mention the incumbency of a particular writer. You'll hear someone talk about "Frank Miller's run on Daredevil" in terms that leave no doubt what they consider to be the definitive version of the character.

Okay, definitive, sure. By what about canonical? Unless the entire (comic) universe collapses into a rebooted singularity -- or something is retconned out of existence -- all creators who have worked on a story have equal canonicity. Whether you like it or not, Batman once dressed up like a mummy to fight crime, and Superman once adopted Jimmy Olsen.

I feel like comics have adapted pretty well to this reality. There is almost a sort of rolling continuity, where inconvenient details from the past are allowed to age and wither away, while the important, core details of a character are refreshed and revisited and polished up.

What can truly be uncomfortable, however, is the transition of a property from a sole creator to a shared universe. One need look no further than Star Wars to see an example of a story which has changed as it has passed into new hands. I'm not here to debate whether it changed for the better or the worse, but it has changed.

I bring this up because I think it is important for fans to distinguish between canonicity and definitiveness. You might consider George Lucas's version of Luke to be definitive, and Rian Johnson's to be out of character. That is your opinion, and you have a right to it.

But you have no control over what is canon and what is not. The story has a life apart from you, apart even from those who created it. It doesn't always go in the direction you want.

There is one way I know of, and only one, to make a story go in the direction you want. And that is to write it yourself.

Charles Dickens is rightly considered one of the greatest English novelists of the Victorian era -- surely its greatest popular novelist. Though perhaps serial novelist would be the better term. At any rate, The Old Curiosity Shop was written in installments for a weekly magazine that Dickens himself published. To shift to a cinematic metaphor, this was not a film, but rather a television series, and one that was not initially intended for binge watching.

As the story goes, The Old Curiosity Shop was so popular in America than when a steamship arrived to New York, bearing the final installment, anxious readers stormed the wharf demanding copies. One cannot help but compare this reaction to pirated copies of a season finale of Game of Thrones. When I say it was popular, I mean popular in every sense of the word.

So how does it hold up for a modern reader? Well, there is a lot of interest in the story, but the core narrative, that of Little Nell and her grandfather, is pure Victorian melodrama without much to redeem it.

First off, the good parts. Dickens can certainly create characters, and his incidental and supporting characters are often the strongest. Whereas Kit and Nell are archetypes of good, and the villain Quilp an archetype of evil, what could be better than Dick Swiveller, Sampson and Sally Brass, Mrs. Jiniwin, Mrs. Jarley, or the Punch and Judy men? They are all fools, to some extent or other, but thoroughly entertaining fools. They are caricatures, but like all caricatures, they highlight features of character in an entertaining way. By observing them and reading between their lines, I learned more about Victorian England than I had known before, and that is a pleasure.

I'm of two minds about Nell's grandfather, never named. Through modern eyes, he is a gambling addict who uses his love for Nell as an excuse to indulge in his addiction. We clearly that his love is insufficient to dissuade him, however, as he behaves towards her in quite unlovely ways on several occasions. And yet the novel is more disposed to focus on the love than the addiction, and Nell's adherence to her grandfather and his welfare despite that addiction is lauded throughout.

To my 21st century eyes, that sort of blind love at the expense of self is not something to be praised. Nell was not helping her grandfather, but rather enabling him. Her refusal to part from him merely condemned her to fall prey to the consequences of the addiction, rather than doing him the slightest good. Of course, it's not as if humane and effective mental health was available in the 1840s, so what alternative did she have?

If nothing else, I'm fascinated to see a gambling addiction, a pattern of behavior that feels so modern, represented so well in the pages of a 180-year-old book. That tells me that human nature has not changed so much over time, and that Dickens was its keen observer.

The other main narrative thread, that of Kit, played out just as I would have expected it to. It is a morality tale, where evil creates its own punishment, and good arranges its own salvation. It's fun to read, because something in our natures wants very much for that story structure to be real. But as often is the case in Dickens, the plot is too reliant on coincidence and chance to feel authentic.

My recommendation is to read this book as Dickens wrote it -- a handful of chapters at a time, pausing for a week or so with every change of focus. I myself read it one chapter a day, which had a similar effect. The episodic nature of the story has room to breathe, and one can more easily appreciate the cliffhanger endings to many of the chapters.

If nothing else, it was great fun to see what passed for highly popular reading in 1840, and to examine the parallels to similarly popular works of fiction today.