#metabook

Snippet from a meta-book. This prefaces a book written by Ira Poege - a pen name, though her true self is also fictional - from my WiP, Burying Dragons.

So yeah, the second piece of digital literature I read for class was Wally Lamb’s I’ll Take You There. If you’re a self-identified feminist in your early 20s with college educated parents and grew up in a metropolitan blue state area, you’ll probably like this book, because this guy is woke as hell and pays lip service to everything your parents and professors taught you. As for me, I was rolling my eyes from every observation the protagonist Felix Funicello made about America in the 50s being regressive and passively sexist while on the other hand being impressed by how some particular voice actors nailed the local accents of Southern New England, a region I have called home for 20 years. 

I should probably clarify that I have no interest in taking part in the greater cultural discussion on feminism out of a lack of interest, and for that my experience going into I’ll Take You There as a narrative was super jaded. The story stars around a Sicilian-American baby boomer who is along with the rest of his family, and allow me to repeat myself, woke as all hell and makes sure to remind you of it every third paragraph, eclipsed only by his daughter Aliza, a third-wave feminist blogger. Felix basically gets sent back in time by the ghost of Lois Weber so he can find out the whole story about what happened to the late mother of his cousin, a Cajun woman whose life story involves her being pushed around by her husband, spurned by her conservative family and wrestling with the choice to perform an illegal abortion upon becoming pregnant with an unwanted child. 

A lot of students in class found the overtones of Verna Hibbert’s character arc to be preachy on the part of the author, notwithstanding the conversation between Aliza and Felix in Chapter One or the introduction/career overview of Lois Weber in the following chapter. Even the more socially liberal students in class found this to be a reasonable observation (from what I can tell at least). Identity politics notwithstanding, a few students also had issue with the voice acting, arguing that it didn’t feel genuine and at points sounded hammy. 

In short, there were genuine reasons on both sides to not utilize one medium over another, which is much more of a hindrance on immersion than the thematic overtones. The technical aspect that I found to be the most frustrating was how if you wanted to play the audio while you read, you would have to constantly flip to the next page on the screen, as there is no automatic feature that allows you to consume it as it is. I personally gave up on reading I’ll Take You There altogether and just stuck to listening to it as if it were an audiobook with voice acting (which it basically is). There is very little incentive to read the written material at the same time as listening to it. On the opposite end, the students who couldn’t stand the voice acting just read it as it was. I can’t really imagine how that’s fun in any way if only because the Metabook’s relegation to iOS hardware means that the pages are small and there’s well over 1,000 of them, despite the story being pretty short, clocking in at around 18 chapters. 

Because of this conundrum, I feel like I’ll Take You There failed in what it set out to do: provide an immersive literary experience through the cumulative aid of various digital mediums. One student argued on Twitter that the various mediums are simply “offered” to the reader to encourage choice in how they consume the Metabook. At first I was like, “Okay, that makes sense. People in the 21st century are notorious multitaskers and our digital landscape allows us to consume media the way we want, so why not give readers the choice in how they want to consume a book that was deliberately written for this app?” However, I realized that if the Metabook app allows for choice in whether they want to read the book or listen to it, then it should also allow readers the choice to do both without making it such a chore. If one wanted to read the book in real-time to the audio track, then the Metabook devs should have the pages turn automatically in correlation to it. With that realization, the Metabook stopped being this potentially innovative technology that takes advantage of personal freedom and technological dualism and started being this somewhat inept and frustrating medium that I am probably not going to revisit anytime soon, even if the stories were not about a self-righteous middle-aged male feminist who is not a likely stand-in for the author.

To find “the best of the best ofs,” we decided not only to aggregate a sampling of lists, but also to assign points based on the selectivity of each list. We used the following formula:

100 / # of books in a given list = points awarded to each book in that list

For example, when a book was featured on a Top 100 list, it received 1 point. But if it made a Top 10 list, received 10 points. So if a book made the cut for a shorter list, it was rewarded. The more lists a book made, the more points it accumulated.