5 posts tagged “literature”
I stole this from Cori -- thanks :)
Hardback or trade paperback or mass market paperback?
I prefer trade paperbacks, but since I buy most of my books secondhand, I'll take what I can get. My biggest gripe is the lack of margins in books -- I'm a note jotter, and I LOVE big wide margins for writing. I'd like to publish a line of books printed in just this manner.
Amazon or brick and mortar?
Brick & mortar.
Barnes & Noble or Borders?
I like Barnes & Noble. However, I have a couple of used bookstores that I much prefer to either. Burwood Books (Beatrice, NE) is housed in the historic Burwood Hotel downtown, a beautiful turn of the century place with three stories of used books. The Antiquarian in Omaha's Old Market District is much the same. Stacks of books everywhere, really reasonable prices. My only gripe is The Antiquarian's regular clientele smoke. A lot.
Bookmark or dogear?
Bookmark, usually of a haphazard variety: a kleenex, a gum wrapper, a leaf, or a grocery list will do. I've made beautiful bookmarks for friends & family for Christmas, but I usually don't have one.
Alphabetize by author or alphebetize by title or random?
Maybe this is part of my problem. They're all grouped by subject: Great Plains literature, Native American literature, horror, short story collections, anthologies, 18th century British, 19th century American, etc...
Keep, throw away, or sell?
Keep. Unless I really really hate a book, it'll be mine forever.
Keep dustjacket or toss it?
I always keep them, but I flatten them and keep them on the top shelf. Just in case I end up with an accidental collectible :)
Read with dustjacket or remove it?
I can't read with a dust jacket.
Short story or novel?
I love them all. I Iove the short story form -- so compact, so forceful. It's just beautiful how tiny details can paint a complete picture. But... when you find a novel that is fantastic, it's so lovely to get lost in that world and be able to stay there for days and weeks.
Collection (short stories by same author) or anthology (short stories by different authors)?
Again, I love them all! Collections are great when you're trying to get a feel for a particular author, pick up his idiosynchrasies and figure out "what's it all mean?!" Anthologies, though... of course you can never completely trust that you won't get an editor with an agenda, but the quality of literature in an anthology gives a really high bang for your buck. If you can only have one book, make it a Norton Anthology that's 4 inches thick!
Harry Potter or Lemony Snicket?
I've never read Lemony Snicket. I did love the Harry Potter series, but I'm glad to see it wound up.
Stop reading when tired or at chapter breaks?
I just stop whenever. I carry my books around with me, so I may read a half page while waiting in line, or 43 pages while eating my lunch.
"It was a dark and stormy night" or "Once upon a time"? "Dark and stormy!"
Buy or Borrow?
Depends on the book. I buy fiction and non-fiction related to things I'm especially interested in. I borrow non-fiction for research and school.
New or used?
I love to sniff new books, but I love a used book too. I never buy one that stinks of basement though.
Buying choice: book reviews, recommendation or browse?
I'll take any kind of recommendation, even if it's only a pretty cover.
Tidy ending or cliffhanger?
Tidy endings.
Morning reading, afternoon reading or nighttime reading?
I read during carpooling, read at lunch, read while I'm eating, read in the bathtub, read before bed.
Standalone or series?
Both. I'm sorry to say that I sometimes tire of recurrent characters.
Favorite series?
Harry Potter, probably. I don't do many series. I remember liking the Green Mile series by Stephen King.
Favorite book of which nobody else has heard?
Ada the Ayrshire. :) This was a cartoon that ran in my farmer father's favorite magazine, "The Grass & Grain." We had an Ada comic book, and over the years, I never knew what happened to it. But at Burwell Books one afternoon, you could have knocked me over with a feather when I looked down and saw a copy of Ada. It cost 10 cents and is a priceless memento of my childhood. My kids think I'm odd. Who else would get so attached to a cow-comic?
Favorite books read last year?
The Road, by Cormac McCarthy; The Shawl, by Cynthia Ozick; Rachel Calof's Story, Rachel Calof; Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman.
Favorite books of all time?
On Writing, and Misery, Stephen King; Walden, Henry David Thoreau; The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck; My Antonia, Willa Cather;
Wow. Just wow. I stumbled across a copy of Cormac McCarthy's latest book in a used bookstore the other day. $1. I didn't even hesitate; how can you go wrong for a buck? Did I ever get my dollar's worth! I went in to take a bath, took the bath, and came out 3 hours later, prune-fingered and goosebumped and wrapped in my flannel robe, and sat down to start The Road over again.
Let me just say, first off, that I'm an aficionado of apocolypse stories. It all began with The Stand the summer before I started high school. Stephen King created a world that was so horrible, so alien, and an antigen-shifting virus that killed 99.4% everyone in the world. It was also a really bad time to come down with a summer cold, because I was sure that I too had Captain Tripps, but, luckily I lived. However, King let us see five chapters of life as we knew it: rock stars indulging in excess, college kids on summer break, military snafus. It isn't until we realize the nature of those snafus that we realize the horror that's about to be visited upon the United States.
McCarthy's book is different. The world to which McCarthy delivers us can only be described as scorched earth. Plants and trees are dead and black; water is thick with ash; the sky is gray and the sun ineffective; snow falls to the earth gray. From the first page, a reader wonders "What happened?!?" and that reader is still wondering on the last page. We never even know if this was a man-made calamity or an environmental problem gone spectacularly wrong, and perhaps it's best that we not know. This book is, above all else, about going on; does it matter if this was a war or a forest fire?
While King's book featured two groups of survivors, one basically good and one basically bad, McCarthy's survivors are harder to classify. His two main protagonists, a father and son, are basically good, even referring to themselves as "The Good Guys." However, McCarthy also portrays characters that are basically good but steal, characters whom we just never know well enough to classify, and characters who are so hideous in behavior that it's difficult to even consider them human. One particular scene, which I will let you discover for yourself, is revolting, and I say that as a person who is not easily sickened. What sets this book apart is the beauty of the writing and the tale-telling, and as sickening as some scenes are, the writing brings them back, over and over, even after I've put the book down.
King's book, written in the late 70s, ends on a positive note. The guys in the white hats win out in the end, and it seems as though the world will find a way to right itself. McCarthy doesn't let us off that easy. The ending of The Road is not completely without hope, but it never gives us that sense of euphoria, that "Yes! They're gonna be okay!" moment that some readers may want. Far from it. In fact, throughout the book, the situation is so bleak that the mere finding of a windfall apple seems like a triumph.
However, in spite of what may seem a real downer subject, this book is inspiring in its simplicity and its goodness. The writing is absolutely delicious. One particular phrase that I have to share describes the relationship between the boy and his father; they are "each the other's world entire." Now that is beautiful.
One Thousand White Women is a 1998 novel by Jim Fergus, known most for his writing world for Sports Afield magazine and other sporting life. In his preface, Fergus explains the how his novel was born:
However, Fergus doesn't give himself adequate credit in this summary. Not only does this novel address the disgusting treatment of the Native Americans at the hands of the United States government, but an even more overt theme deals with the role of women in the society of the time. The women who sign up as "volunteers" to be brides begin as a rag-tag collection of society's outcasts, but by the end, most of the women have become friends, the bonds forged between them only strengthened by the hardships they face together on the plains.In 1854 at a peace conference at Fort Laramie, a prominent Northern Cheyenne chief requested of the U.S. Army authorities the gift of one thousand white women as brides for his young warriors. Because theirs is a matrilineal society in which all children born belong to their mother's tribe, this seemed to the Cheyennes to be the perfect means of assimilation into the white man's world -- a terrifying new world that even as early as 1854, the Native American clearly recognized held no place for them. Needless to say, the Cheyenne's request was not well received by the white authorities -- the peace conference collapsed, the Cheyennes went home, and, of course, the white women did not come. In this novel they do.
The book is written as a collection of journals and letters written by a woman named May Dodd, the daughter of a well-to-do industrialist in Chicago, who is unlucky enough to find the love of her life in a common laborer named Harry Ames. Since her wealthy family will never hear of a mismatched marriage of this type, she simply moves in with Harry, taking factory work herself and giving birth to two children. For this very public disobedience, May's father has her committed to an asylum. Her disease: promiscuity.
When given a chance at earning her freedom through the "Brides for Indians" program, May leaps to sign up, and on the journey to Laramie the reader is introduced to a group of "brides" that includes fallen Confederate debutantes, common criminals, immigrants, artists, religious zealots, orphans, a runaway slave, and genuinely ill mental inmates. Throughout, Fergus uses a plain-spoken, yet rarely crude, conversational tone, perfectly adapted to the letters and journal entries of an educated but irreverent and independent woman with nothing to lose. Characters are sketched subtly but vividly over the course of the book, especially through the use of phonetic renderings of language, leaving the reader, near the end, with the desire not only to know, "What happened to May?" but really to know, "What happened to all of them?"
While this book, because of the nature of the plot and the well-known outcome of Indian/Cavalry relations, certainly will have no sequel, I can still remain hopeful that Jim Fergus has or will publish more. His knowledge of and obvious affection for the Great Plains and all her species, both four- and two-legged, makes his prose a joy to read.
A link to an interesting Authorlink interview here.
Patricia Marx is a longtime writer -- Harvard Lampoon, Saturday Night Live, New Yorker -- but only recently did she write her first novel, a romantic comedy entitled Him Her Him Again The End of Him. She says that she was urged by her friend, photographer Richard Avedon (you mean you aren't friends with a world-renowned photog? What's the matter with you?) to write the novel as an expression of her own personal voice, something she says she has never before allowed.
This brings up a good question for everyone who wants to write. Do you write the voice in your head, or is the voice a construct? I'm sure it depends a lot on the situation. Whoever read an English Lit final written in the author's natural voice? However, writers of fiction take note: Marx thinks that her natural voice allows readers to identify better with the character, makes it feel less staged. Hell, she didn't even give this main character a name. Why? Because, as a fellow writer, Marx is bothered by the "contrivance."
Which leads to another question: isn't the entire thing a contrivance, even if your characters have no names, even if you write in a natural voice? The answer is, of course, that it is a contrivance. But the less obvious the staging is, the gauzier the veil between the reader and the character, the better the book. Stream of consciousness was intended to remove the veil completely. Of course, any reader of Ulysses can tell you that the endeavor is not completely successful. In my opinion there is no way to seamlessly interject a characters thoughts and actions into a reader's head. For example, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway was one of the first to use the technique, but although I might sympathize with her thoughts on postwar England, I cannot completely immerse myself in the time or the place. A modern reader may simply be too far removed from the setting.
Although I agree with Marx that finding your own voice is not only important, but possibly vital to success, I think there are limits on the positive effects to be achieved. Improved writing, better characters, and verisimilitude will all result, but I think is unrealistic to hope to completely absorb the reader. Entertain, distract, engage, or even enthrall a reader -- yes. But completely transport -- no. Sadly, no.
But I can't. There is something so lifelike and so . . . so damn normal about these characters that I cannot help rooting for them, cannot help wanting to know how their lives turn out, cannot help hoping that Harry would finally get laid or something. Okay, okay, being a young adult's book, I suppose that I'm insinuating my adult taste for the risque into a more innocent narrative. But I digress . . .
Deathly Hallows continues where the sixth book left off, with Harry nearing the end of his protective charms and Voldemort quickly closing in. Advance readers warned of "how to deal with all the deaths in the new book," and, I have to admit, I was a scoffer. How many could there be? Wellll, I was surprised! There really were quite a lot, and some of them were shocking. The first happened quickly and without any kind of forewarning. The unexpectedness of it caught me off guard. From there on, I expected a death at every turn, and, even so, the next major death made me cry. Now, for those of you who don't know me, I can be emotional, but I usually can disengage from a character enough to keep from crying in public. Not this time! There I was, bawling my eyes out in a parking lot while my daughter bought eyeliner, for Pete's sake!
Once again, Rowling's knack for effortlessly weaving in backstory helps immensely, as small forgettable aspects from earlier books were crucial to the plot. One really nice thing in Deathly Hallows is that Harry and company have noticeably aged. No longer are they concerned merely with school and their own affairs; now, with the death of Dumbledore in the sixth book, Harry and his friends are forced to confront the larger issue of "What is Best for the Wizarding World?" as they approach the problems in the seventh book. They even swear, albeit in a mild form.
Overall, Deathly Hallows was a wonderful way to wind up the series. Full of action, emotion, and then more action, Rowling ties up the threads from the previous six books neatly and, seemingly, effortlessly. And frankly, I wonder if this isn't what draws so much of the criticism from those who quickly dismiss Rowling as a commercial success. She makes it look sooooo easy, and we're all jealous. Deep down, we all want to be the next Rowling, and then we won't be bitching about the commercial success.
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