Tag Archives: novels

Geodesic domes and how I learned a bit about setting and place in novels

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Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash. This is nothing like the Weekes-Flarey dome. Or the San Antonio family’s dome. But I would definitely camp in it :)

One of the things that is the most fun about writing is when an idea just pops into your head, and the further into the novel you get, the more you realize how well it works.

With my Marion Flarey books, an impulsive idea I came to love was to make her parents’ home a geodesic dome.

I started reflecting on that again when I came across this article: Meet the San Antonio family living inside a rare geodesic dome.

Click the link to see the photos. It’s a gorgeous home. (A far cry from Marion’s parents’ rather messy dome with the leaky roof!)

The article also mentions some of the things I’d picked up over the years about the advantages of geodesic domes. They are energy efficient and relatively inexpensive to build.

So, to my point about choosing a dome for my Marion Flarey books:

Marion’s stepfather, Winchell Weekes, is tight with money (a character trait that becomes particular important in the second book, Fo Fum Flarey), so of course he would pick something cheap to build and cheap to heat.

Geodesic domes peaked in popularity in the late 70s or so. Winchell started building his dome around 1987, after the peak, but he’s eccentric enough that the timing makes sense. He’s the kind of guy who would still think domes were cool ten years after the trend had petered out :)

But from my perspective as a writer, the best thing is how I was able to incorporate the dome as an aspect of the novels’ setting. I can “shorthand” the Weekes-Flarey home by calling it “the dome,” and readers know exactly what I’m talking about. Because the interior has an open floor plan, it’s easy to “force” characters into conflict. They can’t easily escape from each other.

And because the dome is fairly unique as a dwelling place, I can create quick visuals to help draw readers into the story. I can talk about the challenges of placing furniture on a wall that isn’t flat — something Marion notes when she tours her tower apartment in Once Upon a Flarey Tale — or the way the shingles have darkened with age, and (hopefully!) readers start to form a picture in their minds of what the Weekes-Flarey home is like. Even the word “dome” is visual. You can’t read the word without picturing the general shape of the Weekes-Flarey house.

This experience has taught me something as a writer that I’ll carry into my future novels: make the buildings unique, in some way that is easy to visualize and easy to shorthand.

How about you? Have you ever set a story in a building that you could use in this way?

And have you ever seen a geodesic dome house — or been inside one? I was, many years ago when I was in my early twenties back in Chenango County… someday I’ll have to see if I can figure out where it is :)

Can Job and New York’s Gay Marriage Bill

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So this cracks me up.

One of my characters in Can Job — the heroine’s best friend — is gay, and in one of the first scenes in the book Taylor joins her at a protest related to a gay marriage bill in New York State.

Mind you, the book is not really political, unless you count poking fun at politicians as “political.” The particular pol that figures in this scene is Bo Valgus, whose biggest mistake was not his position no the issue necessarily but that he wasn’t quick enough to voice support for it during a local radio interview. This being fiction, I also couldn’t miss a chance to take a dig at a certain former state governor :-)

The DJ had asked his opinion about same-sex marriage and he’d answered “I haven’t had a chance to think about it, to tell the truth.” The idiot. Everyone knew that a same sex marriage would have come to the floor if ex-Governor Eminent Flipzer’s ungovernable hetero sex drives hadn’t led him to disgrace and ruin. Well, if not ruin, then a brief time-out to think about what a bad boy he’d been.

Overnight, the legislature had become suddenly paranoid about any issue associated with the letters s-e-x.

And so here they were, to express their chagrin with Bo Valgus.

Anyway, I’m laughing today because only a couple months after self-pubbing the novel, a same-sex marriage bill has now passed in our state.

My book is already dated!

lol

But I really couldn’t be more pleased :-)

As one of my FB friends posted, it’s a great day to be a New York Stater.

In praise of authorial intrusion

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An author ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their money.

— opening sentence in the novel “The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling,” by Henry Fielding, 1749

Shakespeare relied upon the audience and, with such devices as the soliloquy, extended the play towards it; the drama did not comprehend a completely independent world, but needed to be authenticated by the various responses of the crowd.

— Shakespeare, The Biography, Peter Ackroyd

I’ve broken a rule in my latest self-pubbed novel, and I’m worse than unrepentant. I’m defiantly unrepentant. It’s the rule forbidding “authorial intrusion.” Here’s how my novel opens.

There are a ton of stories about it floating around on the web. Half of them are baloney. The other half—baloney and cheese.

The woman is a biologist. A trained scientist. Meaning: for her, things either stack up to the measure of the five senses or you brush them aside.

So forget what you’ve read.

Forget what you’ve read from people who say she’s some kind of New Age Messiah.

And while you’re at it, forget the stuff that denounces her as a cynical fraud.

Here’s what really happened.

The book, not by coincidence, is about a woman who discovers she can see fairies. This makes it a fairy tale, and I’ve begun it with my own little twist of Once Upon a Time.

Which makes me, of course, a Bad Writer.

I wouldn’t have been judged so harshly a couple centuries ago. There was a time when authorial intrusion was not only accepted, but expected. Not today. Today, if you were to pester an agent or editor with a novel that opens like mine, your book would go straight to the reject pile.

Now I’m not saying this new novel I’ve pubbed is good. On the contrary. A) It’s not my place to say whether it’s good. And B) the experience of attempting fiction is a humbling one. Writing a good novel is extraordinarily difficult. And having finished four, I am still only a rank beginner.

It would be presumptive of me to suggest I’ve managed to produce anything that might be objectively described as “good.”

So my thoughts on authorial intrusion, or any other stylistic convention, don’t carry any particular authority. But hell. This is the Internet, and I have an opinion ;-)

It goes something like this.

There was a time when fiction was closer to its oral roots.

Before the emergence of a literate middle class, stories were told, not read, and the teller — the author — was therefore a part of the experience. It doesn’t take much imagination to put yourself in a village square in the 12th century, somewhere in Europe, where a small crowd has gathered around someone telling a story — relating an account of some battle, perhaps, or the death of a monarch, or a shipwreck, or pirate raid. A person gifted with a sense of timing, and an expressive vocabulary, a sense of how to play the audience’s emotions, would hold their interest longer. People would ask the speaker to repeat the story. The story teller would gain a reputation, would become sought-after.

And then there were the tales that were repeated orally, the epic poems and fairy tales. Why are there so often multiple versions of these stories? Because some of the people who got their hands on these stories changed things, edited things, added embellishments. These were the storytellers who knew how to juice the plot, how to better engage listeners.

Early novels translated this oral experience to paper.

When Fielding begins the tale of Tom Jones, he does so by inviting the reader to come into a public house, put down a bit of money, and have a listen. Fielding is there, in the room, not self-consciously but because it’s assumed he should be there. It’s Fielding, telling the story; reading his novel is simply a way of inviting him into your drawing room. There’s no 20th Century  conceit that he be invisible, that the story is somehow “a completely independent world.”

So what happened?

Why did authorial intrusion become taboo?

I’m no lit scholar, but I can hazard a guess. As more and more people fancied themselves novelists, the pool of second- and third-rate novelists grew. And many of these writers handled authorial intrusion clumsily.

You’ve probably come across an example, if you’ve ever picked up a badly written 19th century novel in a thrift store. It can be extremely off-putting to find yourself lectured by some long-winded boor in the middle of what is supposed to be a novel.

But our fiction taste-setters haven’t decided that authorial intrusion is taboo only if it’s badly done. They’ve made it taboo entirely. The reason for this (they say) is that authorial intrusion breaks the spell. Even the phrase itself suggests a despoiling: something intrudes on that “completely independent world;” the author has become an interloper, a violator.

Again, I agree that if done badly, authorial intrusion can spoil the mood.

But how strange that in, say, television dramas or comedies, the Fourth Wall is no longer off-limits, but in fiction it’s assumed the reader must be continually immersed in an alternative world; that the experience will be ruined if the author calls attention to the fact that the work is fiction, the characters are fiction — that you’re reading an invented tale spun by another human being.

Perhaps we’ve lost the ability, as novel readers, to switch back and forth from “suspension of disbelief” to an awareness that that novels are actually a collusion between reader and writer.

But I don’t think that’s the case.

Our literary gatekeepers have done too good a job at screening fiction against a master list of taboos.

And as a result, writers haven’t had the option of experimenting with authorial intrusion. We don’t know when it works, or doesn’t work, because it’s a tool that’s been locked away.

And that’s too bad.

Christopher Hitchens has a new piece up on Vanity Fair that you’ve maybe come across. [UPDATE: link sadly no longer works…] Hitchens’ cancer has now progressed to the point where it is destroying his vocal cords. The piece is about the interconnectedness of self/personality, writing, and voice.  “To a great degree, in public and private,” he writes, “I ‘was’ my voice.”

And now that he’s losing his voice, he appreciates how much the quality of writing depends on the quality of one’s speaking.

In some ways, I tell myself, I could hobble along by communicating only in writing. But this is really only because of my age. If I had been robbed of my voice earlier, I doubt that I could ever have achieved much on the page.

He closes the piece with advice for writers, starting with this:

To my writing classes I used later to open by saying that anybody who could talk could also write. Having cheered them up with this easy-to-grasp ladder, I then replaced it with a huge and loathsome snake: “How many people in this class, would you say, can talk? I mean really talk?”

The ability to hold an audience’s interest orally is no different than the ability to hold an audience’s interest on the page.

Now in the oral tradition, speakers used literary devices to invite their listeners into a fictional world. But it’s silly to assume that once you were past the “once upon a time” gate, the story teller never again “intruded.”

Of course they did. “Once upon a time” the spinner of tales was an active participant in the experience, casting a spell, then withholding it, teasing, making promises and then pretending to back off of them — like the grandfather reading the story in Princess Bride, interrupting a scene to tell his grandson not to worry, Buttercup doesn’t get eaten by eels. Yet.

Authorial intrusion was once part of the experience.

Not only that, but it added to the listener’s pleasure — just as Fielding’s greeting adds to the pleasure of reading Tom Jones.

So yeah. It’s a shame we’ve thrown out this particular baby on account of some stinky Victorian bathwater. But maybe now that indie authors are retaking the industry, we’ll see some authorial winking and nudging inserted here and there.

And maybe readers will actually enjoy it.

Maybe writers will begin to understand that the notion of a “completely  independent world” is itself a conceit, and in some respects an increasingly tiresome one.

Maybe we’ll start to realize that authors don’t need to always be invisible.

Maybe we’ll welcome our story tellers back into the room with us, pull up our chairs and start to listen . . .

Can novels take your breath away?

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Dani Amore, writing on technorati.com [UPDATE: link no longer good…], weighs in on the “how to price an ebook” debate by attempting a comparison between songs and novels. This cracked me up:

A song that sells for 99 cents that just happens to be a masterpiece of beauty, timelessness and meaning and can change a person’s life, is much more valuable than a $2.99 novel that the minute it’s downloaded immediately causes your Kindle to smell like a rest stop toilet.

But it’s a little sad, too, because the fact is people don’t think of novels as beautiful, timeless, and life-changing. For good reason — they’re generally not.

But should they be?

Have you ever read a novel that took your breath away, that gripped you the way a song can? What was it, and how long ago?

And what would you pay to experience such a novel again?

Can you think a good book?

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That’s a serious question.

I’m pondering it because of the explosion of writerly advice that crops up all over the intertubes these days.

Like this piece, which has a lot to offer, don’t get me wrong.

And goodness knows craft is important.

But I wonder sometimes.

For the first couple hundred years after the birth of “the novel,” writers didn’t worry about things like “structure.” Yet they managed to turn out very nice books.

How?

Okay, devil’s advocate. Maybe only *some* of them turned out very nice books. Maybe I don’t realize how many terrible novels were written by contemporaries of Fielding and Tolstoy and Dostoevski and James and Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Maybe there were hundreds or thousands of self-pubbed novels along the way that were such crap it was good riddance to them the second they were forgotten.

But that still doesn’t explain how someone working with pen and paper or typewriter could turn out an Anna Karenina or Great Gatsby without first having consumed a library’s worth of books on the craft of writing.

How could that happen?

Well. Maybe it has to do with oral story-telling.

Maybe great writers — in the classical sense — are (were?) actually great listeners. And I mean listening in the sense of paying attention to how how language — and more specifically story-telling — affects other people.

Can you tell, when you’re relating something that happened to you while you were at the grocery store last week, when your audience has begun to lose interest?

(Ooh, I hope so!)

It doesn’t have to be when you tell a story in the formal sense. We all constantly narrate our lives to other people. We’re constantly telling stories. When someone asks you how you’re doing, and you say, “I think I’m coming down with a cold,” you’re telling a story. A very dull story incidentally. Please spice it up next time. Give your story some structure!

I was about to walk out the door when my neighbor — you know, the one who can’t afford a car so she rides that ridiculous power scooter everywhere — asked me to look after her kid (again? are you kidding me???)  — five minutes she said, right, it was more like an hour, and the kid has this horrific cold, she soaked a box and a half of Kleenex easily before mom toodled back up on her scooter again, and of course three days later I wake up all stuffy, fever of a hundred and two, omg, please bring soup!

But that’s not all. If at any point during your tale about your self-centered neighbor and her snot-nosed urchin you notice your audience’s attention is starting to wane — you edit. Immediately. On the spot.

I was about to walk out the door when my neighbor — you know, the one who can’t afford a car so she rides that ridiculous power scooter everywhere — asked me to look after her kid (again? are you kidding me???) — well long story short, the kid had a cold, gave it to me, I’m miserable, please bring soup!

We’d get a lot closer to spinning good stories on paper if we paid attention to how our stories hold people’s attention when we spin stories orally.

So yeah. I think there was a time when writers honed the aspect of the craft we now label with words like “structure” by telling stories — or more specifically, by paying attention to the way people react as they listen to stories.

Tell you something else. When writers began to play with the novel as if it were a painting — moving words around as if they were objects, rather than written versions of oral language — and in that way devised what in its most extreme form we’d call experimental fiction, they began to separate the novel from the connection it once had with with oral story telling.

It amounted to a distortion, of course. So maybe one reason some people need to study “craft,” now, is because the “the novel” became so distorted that post mid 20th century writers are . . . not ignorant, exactly, but maybe the connection of the novel to oral story telling isn’t as obvious to writers today as it once was, and as it needs to be.

I’m not sure, however, that this is something that can be taught from the head. Which gets back, finally, to the title of this post. The ability to pick up on the non-verbal signals people give off, when they’re listening to a story, is not something you do with your intellect.

It’s something you do with your whole self — your body, your heart.

Imposing rules on a novel via your head might result in a novel that is well-thought-out.

But is that the same as “good”?

Too old to write?

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In a blog post that also appeared in The Guardian, Amanda Craig voices her suspicion that publishers favor younger women writers. [UPDATE: link no longer works.] “Up until the 1980s,” she writes, “it was expected that novelists would be people of some age and experience.”

Today, however,

publishers would far rather I were some stripling of twenty-five. Novelists now regularly get their teeth done (I am not going to mention Martin Amis, because his really were a medical necessity.) We all, if female, discuss plastic surgery with increasing urgency and interest, and every so often one or two disappear and return looking strangely fresher.

Holy denouement Batman!

Being a writer now requires a gal to become superficial and obsessed with her looks????

Deep breath.

Okay.

I could take some cheap shots at “the publishing industry” here, but I won’t, because A. you don’t need me to, you can compose a few zingers just as well yourself and B. I rather like the publishing industry and feel a bit sorry for it, and want to leave it alone.

And publishing, as a business, is more like gambling than anything else.

I can understand the inclination to place a bet on someone who is at the dawn of her professional life, rather than someone who spends weekends shopping for cemetery plots.

But where does that leave “the novel” — you know? The novel as an art form. That “the novel.”

Let me tell you a secret. I tried to write novels when I was in my 20s.

I couldn’t. And I know why, now. I had  nothing to say.

When it came down to putting something to paper, the only time I felt I was being honest was when I wrote poetry, because the only thing I “had” was emotion; the only thing I could do as a writer that had any integrity as I understood it was to wallop a handful of emotion up against some lamp post or car door or fella and put some words around what it felt like.

It’s a limitation common to every young writer. It has to be. It takes time to build a rich enough frame of reference to do anything else. It takes years and years.

How does a young writer get around that?

Why, by studying the “craft” of writing. You know! Because by using the “craft” of writing, you can fashion something out of nothing. You add a little verby glue to your nouny sawdust and mold it and sculpt it into the dearest characters, the most fetching characters, the most charming plots. Anyone can do it! Anyone can.

Only tell me this. What does such a novel accomplish?

I’m being serious here.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot, because I often abandon novels half-read. Very often, appallingly often. And these are “well-written” novels in the sense we’ve come to understand “well written” today. But there is something missing from them — they leave me with the feeling that they are wasting my time. So my question is: for what am I trading the three, four hours that it takes me to read a novel? What I am getting in return? Entertainment? Diversion?

Diversion?

If that’s all, then “craft” is all the novelist needs. Bless you then, dear writer, go off and craft to your heart’s delight. Goodness knows there’s a huge market of people who crave diversion.

But what if I want more? What if I want my life to be changed? What if I want to be the guy who read David Gemmel’s The Legend, and then when he saw another guy being beaten up, he heard the words “What would Boromir do?” and intervened, and saved a man’s life?

What if I want the novel I read to somehow become a transformative experience for me?

Can such a novel be written by a 20 something equipped with nothing more than craft and a handful of emotion to wallop up against things?

A disorder peculiar to our novels

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What I’ve been doing instead of blogging :-)

(besides working of course! my day job has been pumping writing assignments to me like an out-of-control gadget in an I Love Lucy bit)

is reading.

Shakespeare: The Biography

One book I’ve just about finished now is Shakespeare: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd, and a couple nights ago got to the chapter covering the period where Shakespeare was writing Coriolanus. One of the themes Ackroyd explores is Shakespeare’s use of contemporary political events in his drama; in Coriolanus, there are parallels between the events of the play and the 1607 Midland uprising by English peasants against the landed gentry. Shakespeare displays an empathy with his characters; for instance, he portrays his rioting Roman citizens as motivated by imminent starvation. Nonetheless, notes Ackroyd, Shakespeare didn’t take a political position in the play. Instead, he “displaced and reordered” the events of his own day “in an immense act of creative endeavor.”

Everything is changed. It is not a question of impartiality, or of refusing to take sides. It is a natural and instinctive process of the imagination. It is not a matter of determining where Shakespeare’s sympathies lie, weighing up the relative merits of the people and the senatorial aristocracy. It is a question of recognising that Shakespeare had no sympathies at all. There is no need to ‘take sides’ when the characters are doing it for you.

To take this a step further, consider Norman Holmes Pearson and W.H. Auden’s introduction to Viking’s The Portable Romantic Poets, in which they write:

Consciousness cannot divide its donnes into the true and the false, the good and the evil; it can only measure them along a scale of intensity.

Exactly. And so we have in Shakespeare that he seeks the intensity of consciousness rather than, say, ethical illumination; this explains also why “art” in the service of some sort of Message is invariably off-putting, like a note struck not quite in tune; even though we may nod in approval our jaw has tightened slightly; we are burdened by such “art” rather than released.

A Disorder Peculiar to the Country

As it happens, I’ve also just finished another book, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, by Ken Kalfus, which the book jacket promised to be “rollicking” and “a brilliant new comedy of manners.” The book, if you haven’t heard, is set against the backdrop of 9/11 and its aftermath; the plot is the bitter interplay between a man and wife who are divorcing. It was a 2006 National Book Award Finalist and got press when it was published for having incorporated 9/11, and for the opening hook: both protags believe for a short time that the other had perished that morning, and hate each other so much they both hope it to be true. And so you have the frisson of public horror mixed with private triumph, raising the possibility that the book will somehow conflate or even alchemize public and private worlds, public and private reactions. It’s a book, IOW, that suggests we will find some sort of Meaning, if only of the sardonic sort.

And so I read, hunting. Here’s a bit of what I found: a reference so passing as to almost seem inserted (as if the actual event occurred as Kalfus was drafting the book; it didn’t, it actually happened before 9/11, although in the book, whether by error or literary license, it’s said to have happened in 2002) to a suicide bombing of a pizzeria in Tel Aviv. Marshall is reminded of the bombing when he’s walking in Manhattan and is startled, post-stress-syndrome-traumatically, by the sound of a “heavy steel grille being slammed shut on the back of a truck parked in a loading zone;” he goes on to reflect:

This was a world of heedless materialism, impiety, baseness, and divorce. Sense was not made, this was jihad: the unconnected parts of the world had been brought together and made just.

So Marshall’s personal world is allegorically connected to international events. Nod, nod.

Earlier in the book Joyce, the wife, again in a scene that felt to me patched-in, is said to be “intently” following the invasion of Afghanistan — so much so that she memorizes the country’s geography, the better to follow the military campaign’s every move. She’s also “drawn to the Afghan people, for their beauty and primitive dignity, even if that dignity seemed contradicted by their brutality, untrustworthiness, and venality” and asks

Would American wealth and the expediencies of its foreign policy corrupt the Afghan people? Or were we being corrupted by their demands for cash, their infidelities, and their contempt for democratic ideals?

Meanwhile her life hadn’t changed. She was still not divorced and she had lost hope of ever being divorced; or, more precisely, her marriage was a contest governed by one of Zeno’s paradoxes, in which divorce was approached in half steps and never reached. After the long post-9/11 interregnum, Joyce and Marshall had resumed meeting with the lawyers, who themselves seemed wearied by their disputes despite the cornucopia of billable hours.

You can almost hear the study questions forming in the background. How does the Afghan invasion shed light on Joyce’s behavior toward her husband? Her attitude toward her divorce? How she views herself within her marriage?

And of course there’s also the possibility that we’re intended, as well, to find Kalfus himself peeking through, a kind of parallel world outside the book where he is wink wink nudge nudge “taking sides.” More study questions.

What we don’t find, however, is intensity. There’s the Jerry Springeresque viciousness of Marshall and Joyce’s mutual hatred, but that’s not intensity, that’s spectacle. Certainly neither Marshall nor Joyce “take sides” in contemporaneous political questions, unless moral ambivalence itself counts today as side-taking.

We’re left with mere Meaning.

It’s enough to make one wonder if that’s the most to which a literary writer, writing in America today, can dare aspire.

Related: I also blogged about The Portable Romantic Poets here.

If it feels good, read it?

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I found this via Booksquare — a Guardian story that claims people prefer books with happy endings.

Okay, I’m willing to believe that. Who wants to pay money to be made to feel miserable? (Yeah yeah that just invites a whippersnapper response, doesn’t it! Go ahead, it’s the weekend!)

But halfway through the first draft of this post, I realized that the info on the study’s methodology was a bit on the thin side, and what there is raises a flag in my Bordeaux-livened brain:

The survey of 1,740 respondents was carried out on the World Book Day website.

So this is, what, like an AOL poll? :-o

The details from the outfit that conducted the poll, Worldbookday.com, aren’t much thicker:

An online survey was carried out on the World Book Day website between January 1 and 9 February 2006. There were 1740 respondents.

The survey was commissioned by the organisers of World Book Day and analysed on their behalf by Education Direct.

Well, maybe Education Direct was able to extrapolate Reality from 1740 Internet users? Hmmmmm.

I next googled to see how other papers are presenting the survey results. Here’s how it’s framed by The Telegraph:

Book readers overwhelmingly prefer novels with happy endings . . .

and

Almost half the nation’s readers . . .

I.e., no qualification that maybe, just maybe, the poll might not be representative of the larger population.

The Mirror, otoh, spins it into a story on the Top 10 Happy Endings. How funny is that: falling back on pure fluff somehow feels the most honest of the batch :-)

Bah to book overhype

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I recently picked up a paperback because its cover sported a glowing blurb by an author whose work I enjoy.

The book was a resounding disappointment, and, no dummy, I, I made a mental note to never trust a blurb in quite the same way again.

I’m comforted to learn that I am not alone. Heck no, I’m part of a trend, according to Damian Horner on Bookseller.com, who says that readers have become cynical about the rave reviews and gushing quotes that accompany so many book launches today.

I suspect we will soon see publishers working much more closely with bloggers and reading groups. They will run ongoing focus group panels and maybe some will even follow the Miramax model and ruthlessly target awards and prizes.

They already are. In an interview with conservative blogger/radio pundit Hugh Hewitt, for instance, Robert Ferrigno talks about how the publisher of his new political thriller, Prayers for the Assassin, spent “six figures” on website and blog marketing. (The website lets fans enter, virtually, the futuristic world of the novel.) Ferrigno predicts that in five years, “publishers will not be advertising in print media, except in very rare cases.”

These tactics work by generating word-of-mouth, which has credibility because the Mouth generating the Word tends to be a peer–a reader, just like you are, who has no vested interest in praising something that’s no good.

The weakness of this tactic, however, is that an amateur’s recommendations can be worthless, as well. Fifteen minutes scanning the reviews on Amazon is all you need to convince yourself of that ;-)