Tag Archives: Books

Step away from the book

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In the Telegraph, Nick Hornby wonders at our insistence on reading “difficult” books:

. . . we have got it into our heads that books should be hard work, and that unless they’re hard work, they’re not doing us any good.

I recently had conversations with two friends, both of whom were reading a very long political biography that had appeared in many of 2005’s ‘Books of the Year’ lists.

They were struggling. Both of these people are parents – they each, coincidentally, have three children – and both have demanding full-time jobs. And each night, in the few minutes they allowed themselves to read before sleep, they ploughed gamely through a few paragraphs about the (very) early years of a 20th-century world figure.

At the rate of progress they were describing, it would take them many, many months before they finished the book, possibly even decades. (One of them told me that he’d put it down for a couple of weeks, and on picking it up again was extremely excited to see that the bookmark was much deeper into the book than he’d dared hope. He then realised that one of his kids had dropped it, and put the bookmark back in the wrong place. He was crushed.)

Hornby then comes to a theme I’ve blogged about before: the artificial & unhelpful split between “literary” and “commercial” fiction. We’ve come to believe that there’s something superior about books that are difficult or that better us, somehow. But perhaps this is a conceit:

Those Dickens-readers who famously waited on the dockside in New York for news of Little Nell – were they hoping to be educated? Dickens is literary now, of course, because the books are old.

But his work has survived not because he makes you think, but because he makes you feel, and he makes you laugh, and you need to know what is going to happen to his characters.

Read the article & then let me know what you think. Is it best if people read soley for the sheer pleasure of it?

Reading through feminist eyes

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Okay, when I first caught wind of the This is Chick Lit vs. This is Not Chick Lit controversy, I thought it was a matter of highbrow vs. lowbrow novels. Obviously I was wrong. It’s about who’s being the better feminist.

What Elizabeth Merrick’s anti-chick lit camp argues is that serious female writers are getting shorted. Their books don’t receive equal attention by the [presumably — I’m restating what I gather is the argument here, haven’t fact-checked] male-dominated publishing industry and [presumably] male-dominated book-review industry (limited, for the purpose of this battle, to the venues that most matter in the literary world, e.g. The NYT Book Review).

And now, into this sad situation, introduce a glut of lite novels with pink covers that quickly begin sucking the air out of bookstores and the dollars out of female readers’ purses.

So what does Merrick want for her writers?

Money?

According to a citation of The Top 10 of Everything by Russell Ash (found originally on The University of Michigan’s Internet Public Library but page now deep-sixed), of the top ten bestselling books of all time, only one is a novel: The Valley of the Dolls, by Jacqueline Susann, comes in at #9.

Of the thirteen other novels Ash lists as having sold at least 10,000,000 copies worldwide, another four are by women (Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Colleen McCullough, The Thorn Birds, Grace Metalious, Peyton Place, Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind). Granted, five out of 14 isn’t quite 50 percent, but the list cited by the (now defunct) website is also nearly 10 years old — it predates J.K. Rowling, for instance.

According to Guinness World Records, the best-selling fiction writer of all time is Agatha Christie.

A quick peruse of author names on the the top selling books by year linked here suggests that men have edged out women by about 2:1 over the past several years. But this seeming disparity may have an innocuous explanation: it may be that the pool of male readers concentrates on fewer novels. From Writers Digest:

The books men do purchase tend to be purchased on brand. Brand loyalty, [Pages editor John] Hogan says, is especially important to the male book buyer — the brand being a recognizable name like Harlan Coben or Scott Turow. This makes it more difficult for an unknown author geared toward a male audience to get recognized.

So maybe the only thing hindering woman from achieving parity on the yearly bestseller lists is the reading inclinations of men — something that also makes it hard for aspiring male writers to dislodge a Grisham or Turow. This may also explain why men perhaps read fewer female writers than vice versa, as well as why bestseller lists skew toward male novelists, even though the majority of novel readers are probably female.

Women are simply more adventurous book buyers ;-)

That’s commercial fiction. But what about literary fiction?

Or put another way: if money isn’t the problem, what is?

Recognition?

I dunno. If that were the case, then the issue must be that women writers aren’t being taken seriously by (for the sake of simplification) male reviewers.

So what?

A good friend of mine who acts as an occasional reader of my manuscripts declined to read my last one. The premise didn’t grab her — it wasn’t a match for her sensibilities.

That’s not a problem. I don’t expect everyone to get excited by my books’ premises. I certainly don’t expect many men to! lol

So what?

So what?

And who are you writing for, btw?

Update: none of the best-selling books by women made the Snarkling Reading List, for what that’s worth…

My contest picks

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Okay, as promised here are my picks for Evil Editor’s “match the synopsis to the title” contest.

This was hard! I’ll be very surprised if anyone gets even half of them right. At first I was picking the ones that seemed kind of straight, but that can’t be a good strategy, considering how goofy people get when they try to invent what they think will be a saleable novel premise. So I switched my choices on a couple, looking for synopses that have a particularly naive “out there” feel to them.

But of course, the Evil Minions submitting fake synopses were presumably trying to create examples that had that feel . . . so who knows?

Like I said — this was hard!

(And John, I promise I’ll publish which five I contributed as soon as the contest is over! I can’t do it now, tho! lol)

Q1. Spitting Image
13. After a night of drunken stupor, Hal finds himself married to a girl who is identical to a ghostly figure from his childhood dreams.

Q2. Bad Ice
8. Stan Milburn, heist-man extraordinaire, gets more than he bargains for after he steals the cursed black diamonds of Calcutta.

Q3. The Heart of the Tengeri
6. Clarissa trusted rugged jungle guide Will to lead her through the Tengeri rainforest. Will her trust in the gentle stranger lead to danger? Or romance?

Q4. Little Girl Blue
2. When rookie cop Sarah Baxter is sent on her first undercover mission, she must catch the killer quickly… or miss her thirteenth birthday party.

Q5. The Whog Manual.
6. Space Pirate Verna’s newly-stolen starship is a special prototype about to plunge the reluctant thief into an adventure he never expected.

Q6. Commandment
3. Doctor Death, the self-proclaimed lord of crime, finally meets his nemesis: The Deity. Will Death bow to The Deity’s commandment — “Thou shalt not kill!”?

Q7. Life, Love, and a Polar Bear Tattoo
10. Pam moved to California envisioning the high life and true love. Dreams don’t  always come true, Pam learns, as she struggles to pay for bread.

Q8. Raise the Buried Dead
3. Nobody ever said voodoo was easy. But when Vance raises a trio of zombies, he finds that undead underlings are more trouble than they’re worth.

Q9. When Sid was Sid
1. Chapters alternate between past and present, as Margaret Divan describes life before and after she discovered her husband Sid, is a transsexual.

Q10. Dressed to Kill
10. A nightclub owner’s plan to have themed costume parties to attract business seems to be working — until she realizes the vampire “costumes” aren’t actually disguises.

Q11. Second Growth
12. A forest fire takes Mary’s family, and her sight. The power of nature can restore the woodlands, but can it give her back her happiness?

Q12. The Midnight Diaries
3. Two kids venture out every midnight to solve crime and help their mom get elected mayor, aided by GPS technology.

Q13. The Innocence of Evil
12. Only Macy Sanders knows that inmate Trey Mitchell doesn’t deserve lethal injection. He’s innocent. But Macy’s fiance knows nothing of Trey. Or of Macy’s past.

Q14. Heart of Desire
3. Vascular surgeon NICK loves JESSICA, but her ailing ticker may “do the newlyweds part.” Nick’s first wife once promised him her heart; is she Jessica’s genetic match?

Q15 Lack of Control
3. An alpha male CIA agent must battle his inner demons and protect a vital microchip from a beautiful and mysterious spy, or millions will die.

Q16. The Island and the Bell
6. Following a plane crash at sea, lone survivor Bob has only a silent bell, found in the wreckage of the plane, to keep him company.

Q17. Bad to the Bone
6. Custom motorcycle builder Danny Irons must prove he didn’t kill the man whose oil-soaked skeleton turns up buried behind his shop.

Q18. Portal to Murder
4. A detective and his attractive partner discover a string of murders caused by a mysterious portal that transports your soul to hell. Even if you’ve been good.

Q19. The Monster Within
7. Anna’s lycanthropy is under control–until she meets Jerome, who inspires all her best instincts and excites all her worst.

Q20. Soulscape
3. Danni knows she’s special. But now she’s involved with a treacherous voodoo priest, and must prove it–on the Soulscape, the realm of the dead.

UPDATE: I didn’t win :D

Speaking of organic

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Here’s a review of a new book, We Want Real Food, by Graham Harvey, which examines the effect of the depletion of soil nutrients on the nutritional quality of our food.

To some extent, we’re able to compensate by taking vitamin supplements, but as I suggested in this post, that’s not an ideal answer, either. In the long run, we need to convert mainstream agriculture to more organic-style practices. No question about it.

Time to merge online with bricks & mortar

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A Dutch bricks & mortar bookseller has implemented Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology in two of its stores to help it manage inventory — and to help customers shop for books.

I find both applications interesting, but it’s the latter that truly rocks, and here’s why: once you’ve used Amazon’s search capabilities, hunting for a book in a traditional shop seems awfully cumbersome.

So to my way of thinking, any retailer that’s maintaining bricks & mortar outlets should be looking at ways to implement the customer-friendly aspects of online shopping in its physical locations. Being able to search for a product on an in-store kiosk is a prime example. Combine that with the capability to pinpoint exactly where that product is in the store and you’ve mimicked one of the major conveniences of an online store.

I mean, how many times have you stood in line at a customer service desk in a bookstore, you finally get a clerk to help you, the clerk looks up a title on a computer, leads you to the shelf, and then you stand there while the clerk spends another five minutes hunting for the book?

That’s pretty much the brick & mortar book-shopping experience.

Whereas with Amazon, you run a search on a title, click on “add to shopping cart” and you’re done. Don’t even have to enter your credit card info if you’ve set up an account.

The disadvantages of online shopping are that you can’t actually touch an item before you buy, and you usually have to pay shipping. Brick & mortars win hands down on those two counts. Bricks & mortars also have human beings to give you face time should the technology fail you, which is a huge plus when you need it.

So why not build on those strengths, but at the same time become more like an online store?

Another example: why shouldn’t I be able to shop at Gap.com from within a conventional Gap store?

No reason, except that Gap execs haven’t considered the possibility — or grasped what it would mean to its customers . . .

(RFID story found via Publisher’s Lunch.)

And now: reader reviews are crooked (yawn)

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A few weeks ago, on the occasion of my birthday, I decided to buy a bottle of champagne.

I didn’t want to spend a lot of money, but I didn’t want to buy something icky, either.

So I stood in front of the bank of sparkling wines offered by my favorite wine shop and considered my choices.

It happened that two other women were there, also shopping for champagne. They were apparently friends, and having a lively conversation, recalling different wineries they’d visited. After eavesdropping on them as they discussed four or five different bottles, I decided, on impulse, to consult with them.

I’d picked up a bottle of Konstantine Frank sparkling wine (which interested me because it’s an Upstate New York State vitner) and asked them if they were familiar with it, and whether it was any good.

They were gracious from the start, but also, at first, cautious. The reason soon became clear: they didn’t want to recommend something without knowing a bit about my taste. So wisely, they asked me which of the wines I did like. I pointed to the Veuve Clicquot, heh. “This, only I’d rather not spend quite that much.” And at that point, they relaxed. “Oh,” they said. Now they could help me. They knew my taste was close enough to theirs.

And they recommended a $20 Roederer Estate Brut sparkling wine.

I took it home, chilled it, opened it later that night, and was thrilled. It was delicious — at that price, perfect, in fact.

Which brings me to this 12,000-word article (excuse me, “paper”) at First Monday (tagline: “Peer-reviewed journal on the internet”).

The paper proposes to examine the scandalous behavior of on-line user reviews, with a focus on Amazon book reviews.

First, we have the reviews that are blatant plants. The article authors (Shay David and Trevor Pinch) remind us that

in 2004 both the New York Times (Harmon, 2004) and the Washington Post (Marcus, 2004) reported that a technical fault on the Canadian division of Amazon.com exposed the identities of several thousand of its anonymous reviewers, and alarming discoveries were made. It was established that a large number of authors had “gotten glowing testimonials from friends, husbands, wives, colleagues or paid professionals.” A few had even “reviewed” their own books, and, unsurprisingly, some had unfairly slurred the competition.

(The authors don’t realize how oh-so 2004 this particular scandal is. Today’s writers are urged, quite blatantly, by their handlers to call in every favor owed them since they left the cradle in exchange for glowing Amazon reviews.)

Next comes the point that many Amazon reviews are essentially spam. The text is copied from one review to another — outright plagiarism is involved in some cases — and often the review is merely a clever pretext for publicizing a website URL. (Rather like the spammers who pretend they love my blog as a pretext for adding their business site url to my comments. Yeah, that’ll work.)

Other reviews are falsely flattering: reviewers give books five stars in order to raise their own reviewer standing. Still others are obviously written more to satisfy a reviewer’s emotional needs than to provide information about a book. (Ya, no kidding.)

And then (worst of all! :-D) are the reviews that are simply crap.

What the paper’s authors don’t consider is whether anyone really takes online user reviews seriously.

I bet not. I bet most people — like me — read Amazon reviews (if at all) for the entertainment value, not to help them make purchase decisions.

It’s simple human nature. In most cases, we take advice from people whose judgement we decide we can trust — a common sense criteria that de facto excludes anonymous online reviews.

That’s not to say we have to know the person giving the advice, but we have to know something about them. Perhaps we’ve observed that they seem engaged and knowledgeable — like the two women I met in the wine shop. A well-written review in a print publication can fall into that category, even if the reviewer’s name is unfamiliar.

Maybe it’s someone with whom we simply identify — a blogger we read, or Oprah, or someone we know from work.

But taking advice from anonymous people on the ‘net?

Maybe some of us do that, once or twice. But I’m betting that people who do quickly learn how useless that advice can be.

And here’s the thing. Even if you do buy a book based on a bogus review, that’s the end of the chain, right there. You’re not going to recommend that book yourself.

So although the Internet can be a medium for word-of-mouth, it’s a foolish marketer who thinks a post on the Internet is equivalent to word-of-mouth.

The real chain is, and always has been, trust.

Or to put another way: the number of Amazon reviews is as much (maybe more) the result of a book’s popularity as the cause of it.

Hometown hero (if you are into Greek history, anyway)

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A University of Rochester emeritus professor of history, Perez Zagorin, has written a book on Thucydides titled Thucydides: An Introduction for the Common Reader.

Here’s a review, the author of which, James P. Holoka of Eastern Michigan University, says the book will “be most useful to an audience of undergraduates and other ‘intellectually curious people,'” and that Zagorin

is to be congratulated for his well-informed, evenhanded, readable, and eupeptic presentation of a formidable ancient historian.

“Eupeptic.” I had to look that one up to be sure. It means “having good digestion; cheerful, optimistic.”

Peter Stothard reviewed the same book last month for the Wall Street Journal (subscription required), writing

“Thucydides: An Introduction for the Common Reader” is a useful book. Yet as Mr. Zagorin himself recognizes, a great historian claimed by so many generals and politicians in so many struggles over so many years cannot always be understood through the minds of others. Mr. Zagorin calls for his own readers to become readers of Thucydides and to judge for themselves whether, for example, the Peloponnesian War was truly inevitable or might have been avoided by better diplomacy.

Oh, for a few more hours in the day . . .

Romance novels, a friendly-like look

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The Telegraph has published an article on romance novels.

But the real mystery is, why aren’t we preoccupied with writing and reading novels about work, or the environment or children? Why is it always about pair bonding? “Lord, what fools these mortals be,” Puck remarked, observing human lovers in a certain wood outside Athens – but then, even Shakespeare’s fairies were subject to and humbled by the velleities of passion.

Yeah, it’s a kind and respectful article. And that’s a good thing ;-)

No royalties necessary, a bit of biscuit is fine

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Joe Woodward, at Poets and Writers, explores the narrated-by-critters genre, which (he notes) started with George Orwell’s Animal Farm and in the past few years has grown to include Timbuktu, by Paul Auster; Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, by Sigrid Nunez; and The Autobiography of Foudini M. Cat, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer.

Woodward then goes on to review this year’s newest additions, Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile, Verlyn Klinkenborg (February, Knopf) and Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife, Sam Savage (next month, Coffee House Press).

The article doesn’t mention Paul Gallico’s The Silent Miaow. But that was, strictly speaking, non-fiction, insofar as it was a how-to manual for stray cats. So the oversight is understandable.