Tag: books

Sampler Platter

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Some time back, I posted a tasting flight of shorter works by important authors, in the interest of giving readers a way to decide whether or not they liked a particular author enough to go on and tackle one of that author’s signature doorstop volumes.  Now, as a follow-up to that round, here’s another quartet of shorter pieces by authors of important longer works.

Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews.  Tom Jones is the doorstop (and well worth reading for its own sake); Joseph Andrews is the short one, written in response to that other blockbuster of the eighteenth century, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela.  Richardson’s novel featured a virtuous maidservant who attracts the lustful attention of her employer, Squire B, possibly the world’s most incompetent rake.  He tries everything, including abduction and a fake marriage, but never works himself up to doing the actual deed; meanwhile, Pamela steadfastly holds out for honorable matrimony or nothing, and – spoiler alert! – gets her way in the end.  Fielding, for his part, found the entire plot so silly that he responded to it first by writing Shamela, an outright parody, and then by writing Joseph Andrews, which was what we’d probably call today the genderflipped version, with the title character being the handsome young footman who resists the advances of his employer, the licentious Lady Booby, widow of the late Squire Booby (hey, no one ever said that Fielding was subtle!), and is dismissed from his position and forced to go on the road as a result.

Charles Dickens – A Christmas Carol.  Charles Dickens was the Stephen King of his day (or maybe Stephen King is the Charles Dickens of ours): He wrote big fat novels, and he wrote a lot of them, for a long time.  A Christmas Carol is short, but it’s got enough of the Dickens flavor that you can figure out whether you want to go for one of the doorstops – Bleak House, say, or Oliver Twist.  (You can avoid Great Expectations, if you like, and I won’t blame you a bit.  It’s the one most often inflicted upon long-suffering high school students, and has probably turned a lot of them off of Dickens for life.  Lord knows, it nearly did it for me.)  Dickens also managed, with A Christmas Carol, to come up with one of the great recyclable plots.  Hollywood, in particular, has been running riffs and changes on it for decades.

Thomas Pynchon – The Crying of Lot 49.  Pynchon’s another author best known for doorstop novels like V and Gravity’s Rainbow.  The Crying of Lot 49 – the title refers to an item being put up (or “cried”, as the terminology has it) for auction – is short and fast-moving, an ideal way to find out of you like Pynchon enough to try the big stuff.  Highlights include a centuries-old conspiracy of uncertain intent, a (fictional) Jacobean revenge tragedy, and one of the funniest games of strip poker ever written.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.  Russian novels are notoriously long as it is, and Solzhenitsyn carried on with the tradition.  One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is an exception, being short enough to be published in 1962 as a complete-in-this-issue novel in the Soviet literary magazine Novy Mir.  If you don’t feel up to tackling Solzhenitsyn’s mega-doorstop nonfiction work The Gulag Archipelago, One Day in the Life will give you enough about life in a Stalinist-era Soviet prison camp to be getting on with.

Ursula K. Le Guin Gets Her Snark On

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She read a New York Times interview with Kazuo Ishiguro about his forthcoming novel, The Buried Giant, which takes place in a non-historic just-post-Arthurian England, in which the author frets that his audience will say that it is fantasy.  (To be fair, it contains. among other things, a dragon.)    And she was moved to speak.

I’ve said this here before, and I’ll say it again:  One of the things I respect most greatly about Le Guin is her steadfast refusal to disavow the genre.  More than one author, upon attaining literary respectability, has stashed their propeller beanie and their Spock ears in the far back of the closet . . . all honor, then, to the ones who don’t.

Four Ways Not to Compliment a Writer

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Writers as a group appreciate having their egos stroked, and if you genuinely like a writer’s work it’s a kindness to tell them so.  But there are some compliments which can backfire on the giver, no matter how well-meant the delivery.  Most writers, most of the time, will accept a dubious or awkward compliment with a smile and confine themselves to an inward wince or possibly a private gripe session later among friends, but even the nicest writers can have the sort of bad day when the lid comes off of everything, and some writers . . . well, much as it pains me to admit it, writers – even good writers – are as likely to be jerks as anyone else in the general population.

Accordingly, here are a quartet of comments from the top of the Best If  Avoided list:

“I loved your book!  I’ve loaned it to all my friends!”

The savvy writer accepts such a compliment graciously, because word-of-mouth is still the best advertising, and because making an enemy of a reader is a bad move for a lot of reasons . . . but there’s no escaping the inward wince on behalf of all of the copies that could have been purchased if the bestower-of-compliments had confined themself to making enthusiastic recommendations at the bookstore instead.

“I love all your books!  I can’t wait until the library/the used bookstore/my buddy who lends me her copies gets the next one!”

Once again, most writers will take this compliment with a smile, because most writers can remember being young and/or impecunious themselves, and it would be hypocritical for them to complain about somebody else taking advantage of the same shifts and expedients that sustained them once upon a time.  But there’s still that inner wince, and the wistful contemplation of sales that might have been.

“I’ve loved your books ever since I was in fifth grade/high school/college!”

Again, the kind-hearted writer has no choice but to smile – and in fact, it’s nice to know that one was a formative or encouraging influence upon somebody in their youth.  But there’s no denying the fact that praise of this sort has a corresponding tendency to make the recipient of the compliment feel older than they did in the moment before it was uttered.  “I’ve always loved your books!” or “I’ve loved your books for ages!” are words less likely to send the writer in question off into a spell of broody melancholia.

“I don’t usually go for this genre/this trope/this style, but you made me like it!”

This compliment is especially tricky because sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.  Some writers like the idea of doing such a good job of a thing that they succeed in overcoming a reader’s ingrained prejudices.  (I confess to being a member of that camp myself.)  Others, though, will take offense at the implication that their chosen genre or trope or style has something wrong with it that needs to be dressed up and made palatable to the general public.  Unless you know how the recipient is likely to react, this compliment is best deployed with caution.

What do you say to a writer, then, if you want to compliment them?

Well, an unadorned but sincerely-meant “I love your books!” is always good.

I Just Want to Say…

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…that one of the things I’ve always admired about Ursula K. LeGuin is her steadfast refusal to perform the dance of genre disavowal every time the mainstream tries to claim her for one of their own.

Today’s Cranky Observation

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If ever I needed to present any evidence that this blog post by Matthew Yglesias was mindboggling in its sheer wrong-headedness, this quote alone would do the trick:

Transforming a writer’s words into a readable e-book product can be done with a combination of software and a minimal amount of training.

It appears that even noted bloggers on politics and economics aren’t exceptions to the widespread belief that novels aren’t so much made objects as they are the naturally-occurring fruit of the fiction tree.

There are a whole lot of things that have to happen to an author’s manuscript before the printer, or the e-book producer, ever gets hold of it, and surprise, all of these things involve the services of people who expect to get paid for their labor.  Yes, the author could do these things him-or-herself,  or could hire other people to do them for him/her – but authors generally have other things to do with their money (such as eating, or paying the internet bill), and other things to do with their time (such as writing more books.)

Maybe some things could be better for authors than, in the current scheme of things, they are . . . but improving the lot of authors by bringing down traditional publishing is a bit like improving the lot of coal miners by closing down all the mines.

This One Brings Up Some Interesting Ideas

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A blog post over here, by author Erica Smith, about the ever-present tension in historical fiction/historical romance writing between historical accuracy and reader entertainment.  Do follow the outbound links; they lead to yet more discussion and commentary by other writers in the field.

It’s an ongoing matter of contention, apparently, and (to my eye, at least) yet another angle on an old argument.  Classical tabletop wargamers used to (and for all I know, still do) debate for hours about the relative virtues of simulation and playability – the more accurate the simulation in a particular scenario, the less evenly-balanced the game.  Likewise, back in the days when I was active in the Society for Creative Anachronism, the “fun versus authenticity” debates were a staple of the local discourse.

I’m a big fan of fun and playability, as a general rule (otherwise, I’d never have been able to watch the historical flashbacks in Buffy and Angel with a straight face); but I’m also a fan of historical fiction and romance played according to the strict rules of the game, which includes taking into account the fact that people in the past were not men and women just like us only in funny costumes.

I suppose it’s kind of liking both authentic, straight-from-the-source Italian cooking and the spaghetti-and-meatballs your born-and-raised-in-the-heart-of-Texas mother used to make at home.  Which one you want on a particular day depends a lot upon how you feel at the time . . . and they’re both of them good, too, just as long as you remember that they’re not the same thing.

If You’re Going to be in Bradford, Vermont, This Evening…

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… then you might consider also being here, between 6  and 8 PM.

Star Cat Books is hosting a reading and signing by authors Miranda Neville and Skylar Dorset, accompanied by an English cream tea (scones! clotted cream! jam!)

It’s where I’m going to be, at any rate.  (Scones!  Clotted cream! Jam!  And of course, books.)

A Bit of Amusement

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Over at The Toast:  Every Irish Novel Ever.

It’s a hoot.  Even the comments are hilarious.  (Which is a rarity, and a thing to be celebrated when it occurs, given that the comments section of most web pages could serve as an argument for the Calvinist doctrine of total depravity.)

It reminds me of my younger son’s summation of his course in The Modern Irish Novel (which would have been more accurately titled Irish Novels Not Written by James Joyce):  “Life in twentieth-century Ireland sucked.”

When you’re done, go on to read the pages for, variously, Every French, Russian, and Canadian Novel Ever.

Look! A Link!

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My spouse and co-author, James D. Macdonald, has some new posts up over at his blog:

One on the start, a hundred years and two days ago, of the Great War, as they called it during the twenty years or so before it became unpleasantly clear that they were going to have to do it all over again, only louder and longer and with more atrocities.

One with a Smashwords coupon code for a free short story by the two of us.

A brief note on Yog’s Law.

And all you need to know about the plot of Great Expectations, in three stanzas.

Go.  Enjoy.

In Praise of the Naïve Reader

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Critics often speak, somewhat condescendingly, of the “naïve reader” – one who doesn’t have the benefit of an awareness of literary history, or of training in criticism and literary theory, or of an extensive knowledge of literature as an art form.  (In other words, a reader who isn’t a critic or a scholar, but a common-or-garden reader for pleasure.  Joe Six-Pack, or his sister Jane, spending their beer or appletini money on a book instead.)

I’ll admit, there’s a pleasure to be had in writing for an audience who knows all the inside baseball of the thing.  I’ve done it myself, at least once.  The short story “A Death in the Working” (originally published in Murder by Magic, now available in Two from the Mageworlds) plays with three different sets of inside knowledge:  the established canon of the space opera series I co-wrote with my husband James D. Macdonald, the traditions of the Golden Age country-house mystery story, and (the part I had the most fun with) the tone and format of various scholarly editions of literary works, especially those in the Methuen Old English Library, where the footnotes would often take up more room on the page than the actual text.

Nevertheless, the most gratifying comment I ever got on the story wasn’t an appreciation of all that insider geekery; it came from a reader who said that they’d like to read more stories about my fictional detective and his cases.  (I sometimes toy with the idea of taking that reader up on their request; but science-fiction/fantasy mystery novels are enough of a niche market that I don’t know if the gain would repay the effort.)

When I think of naïve readers, I also think of the fellow grad student in Old English who admitted to translating the final section of Beowulf with tears in her eyes, because in all her survey courses and the like they’d only read the first part of the poem, and so she didn’t know that – to put it in ROT-13 just in case anybody reading this is in a similar position — Orbjhys trgf xvyyrq ol gur qentba va gur raq. Or I think of a friend’s account of watching a performance of King Lear a few seats away from an older couple who had clearly never encountered the play at all before, who reacted to the blinding of Gloucester with profound shock and dismay.  Or I think about my great-uncle Jake, a huntin’, fishin’ good old boy from Arkansas – albeit one with a college education – who once said to his medievalist great-niece, “That Beowulf . . . he was a mighty hunter.”

Art is about getting people where they live, and a naïve reader will provide you with a response that’s unmediated by other people’s expectations of how they should react and feel.  It’s all very well to be the critics’ darling, but treasure your naïve readers as well . . . they will tell you a different kind of truth.