Calvino Participates in Evil Author Day

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler pulled me in from the start. The way that it is about you reading a reader (yourself) read was very interesting. I loved how he tells you to find your most comfortable position to read and the fact that I have read in most of those positions. I also love how having a massive TBR pile but still going out to buy a new book is not a 21st century phenomenon. It was a little unsettling seeing how well he described his readers. “You open your book to page one, no, to the last page, first you want to see how long it is” (8). This was exactly what I did when I picked the book up to read it. I got comfortable in my bed and then checked to see how long the book was.

I starting off loving the book and the concept of reading a reader read their book and we also getting to read the book the reader is reading. My love for it decreased when every book ended up being a new book. It was like reading an uncompleted fanfiction that hasn’t been updated since 2014 and therefore, most likely, never will be. I was hoping, after reading the premise of the book, that the different stories would somehow come to some sort of conclusion, or that they would somehow connect to each other, like Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys. I also started to dislike how it moved away from the stories being connected to one another in some way. Like the first was because they got bond together, and then because it was a book with the same characters and so forth. When the reader goes to the publisher and reads the book from there, it starts to move away form the original story is a different way that I did not like.

This book to me seemed like Calvino had a bunch of drafts or snippets of different stories and put them together and made a story around it. It reminds me of Evil Author Day, which is fanfiction event where writers share their drafts, abandoned work-in-progress works, and snippets. I’m not a writer, I’m a reader, and I have read many that are so good, but then they end before the climax and we are left unsatisfied.

I would recommend people to read the book just because of the concept and how it is written. I would give them a fair warning though that they might hate it.

My discussion question is: What story do you want to get a completed version of to read? What makes you interested in that story and not the others?

For me it was definitely the first one, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. It might be because I was actually interested in the book and the time and not just reading it to finish it, but I would love to keep reading that story and see what was in the suitcase and what sketchy things they were up to. I do think that if I read all of the stories, not knowing that I would be left in suspense, then I would want to finish them all. I stopped caring about the stories once I figured out that they will not be continued.