The books I’m trying to read

In an interview for a book-related job, the questioning went something like this:

Interviewer 1: What are you currently reading?
TSR: *takes deep breath*
Interviewer 2: Restrain yourself!!

[Yeah, Interviewer 2 had me dialed. And I did get the job.]

The sidebar ‘books I’m reading’ has been pretty static lately, mainly because I keep starting books and then not finishing them, or rather some other book gets in the way. I currently have on the go:

- George Gissing, New Grub Street. Someday I must determine why I love Gissing so much, even though his work is so depressing, whereas Thomas Hardy’s work is also depressing but makes me want to stab myself with a sharpened pen. The problem is that this will probably require me to read more Hardy, and that is something I do not wish to do. I am rereading NGS in the hopes that it will make me feel better to be reminded that, in fact, there never was a prelapsarian publishing era of joy, and authors have always had it tough. Status: just begun.

- Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey. Required reading. I like it, but I really want to reread Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility. Status: just begun.

- Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played With Fire. I mistakenly thought this was the first in the series, though as the library won’t be able to get me that one for weeks, I might as well start with this. I am trying to approach this book with an open mind, but given that the original title of book number one is Men Who Hate Women, I have the feeling I may finish the book solely to avoid ‘but you haven’t READ IT’ arguments (though these will undoubtedly be replaced with arguments that include the words ‘you feminists’ and ‘no sense of humor’). Status: just begun.

- Tom Brown and Henry McLeish, Scotland: A Suitable Case for Treatment. Am toying with writing something set in an independent Scotland (those cries you hear are the Scottish Nationalists a-whoopin’ and a-hollerin’), and picked this up in a quest to figure out how Scots view Scottish national identity. Still not entirely sure, though most seem to agree that the deep-fried Mars bar is an aberration. Status: a third finished.

- Tobias Smollett, Humphrey Clinker. I have a woefully deficient background in 18th century literature so I figured this would help fill the gap. Also, I can read bits aloud to my Scottish friends, who splutter amusingly when they hear nice things about Alloa and Greenock. Status: three-quarters finished.

And don’t even ask about the BTR stacks/shelves. No, really, please don’t….

Travel books (as in, books for travel)

I spend a great deal of time before trips trying to decide which books to bring. There are very specific criteria:

1. I need to be as sure as possible that this book will hold my interest all the way through. I have no qualms about ditching a book at page 50 or even earlier if I Don’t Care What Happens To These People, but doing so at 34,000 feet is extremely problematic. For one thing, the flight attendants are understandably annoyed by passengers who hurl books across the cabin, and more importantly, what if I run out of reading material?? So books by authors whose work I definitely enjoy are on the top of the reading pile.

2. Paperbacks only. I carry my own luggage and I put it into the overhead luggage bin all by myself. This does not need to be any more of a challenge than it already is. Also, hardbacks take up far more space.

3. Reasonably light-hearted. Elie Wiesel’s Night and three books with ‘Auschwitz’ in the title are on my TBR pile bookshelves, but I will not be packing any of them. I also don’t ever want to be asking the flight attendants if they have a dictionary on board. However, the books must also be:

4. Reasonably fulfilling. I like to get stuck in to a longish book, as it makes the boring parts of the journey go much faster, and saves me from having to rummage around in my carry-on bags mid-flight. It’s also a good time to make a running start at a classic novel; I have fond memories of being on a National Express bus in England, giggling at Bleak House.

5. Self-contained. I don’t want to be in a random airport pining for the sequel.

6. Disposable. The primary hallmark of books for traveling with is that they can be jettisoned en route. (For trips back to the states, this has the very practical result of leaving room for the books I buy along the way.) On an extended trip with multiple stops I am usually shedding books every step of the way and in fact I occasionally schedule the reading order so that I can leave particular books with particular people. Other times I’ll leave them for random strangers to pick up. (Yes, I know about Bookcrossing.) Therefore the books have to be reasonably accessible, in case I ever do want to replace them, or nothing I ever want to see again in my life. This does have the detrimental effect that books I want to read for research are rarely able to be brought.

Now, given that my TBR collection contains a few hundred books, you’d think these criteria would be easily met, but the problem is that the books that fulfill the requirements tend to get siphoned off. Clearly the only answer is to buy more books that do, right? *looks at groaning shelves* Or maybe not.

How many books to bring? Well, for a recent four-day trip with a change of plane in each direction, I brought four books, read two, started a third and ditched it, and completed a good chunk of a fourth. Obviously a lot depends on my destination, the down time, and the general availability of English-language books for emergency replacement purposes. (For some reason I never like buying books in non-English-speaking countries. I suppose it’s because – having lived in Romania – I understand how difficult it can be to find a good selection, so I hate to take away any books.)

The selection tends to change a lot in the run-up to the trip, because packing books is far more important than packing clothing, toiletries, tourist maps…in fact, let’s just agree that the only items that trump the reading material are a) the passport and b) the emergency credit card – but at the moment, my reading stack for my upcoming trip to Japan (!!!) stands as follows:

Kyle Macdonald, One Red Paperclip. Seems entertaining.

Lauren Weisberger, The Devil Wears Prada. Ditto.

Victor Hugo, Les Miserables. In December I read about 90 pages, which isn’t even ten percent of the book, and enjoyed it enough to want to keep going, so I want to restart while I’m a captive audience.

Midge Gillies, Amy Johnson: Queen of the Air. I’m halfway through and would like to polish it off, though one could argue that a book which ends with a fatal plane crash might not be the smartest choice.

Jonathan Coe, The House of Sleep. Hope it’s as intriguing as the cover blurb promises!

Phillippa Gregory, The Queen’s Fool. I enjoyed The Other Boleyn Girl so this is a good selection.

I also have a travelers’ guide to Japan which a friend gave me (and thus it will definitely be coming home with me).

Of course, I’ll probably throw in an eighth book at the last minute. Just in case.

Land of the Midnight Sun

Stephenie Meyer, author of the teen series that made creepy abusive relationships a-ok if the man in question is a sparkly vampire (I seem to have been much less hostile in my original review, for some reason), is yanking the ‘final’ book in the series because a draft was leaked on the internet. I say ‘final’ because it’s actually a retelling of Twilight from the sparkly vampire’s point-of-view.

Now, the basic situation here really sucks. If you send out a manuscript to someone you trust, it’s a betrayal to find it splashed all over the web [though Meyer implies there were multiple steps here, rather than the person she sent it to deliberately leaking it]. I don’t want to seem flippant about that. (And I’m not even going to touch the conspiracy theories that Meyer engineered this to get sympathy and/or more attention, which has about as much value right now as debating the parentage of Trig Palin.)

(Which, if you buy the story that he’s actually – er, sorry. NOT discussing. Moving on.)

But I’m kind of amused by the range of news headlines about this.

eFluxMedia: Meyer Keeps Fans In Suspense With “Midnight Sun” Due To Online Leak. I really think ’suspense’ is the wrong word when the book is a retelling of another book. The character arc will be different, of course, but the basic plot is the same. Bella is not going to become a heroin addict and mow down the Cullens in a drug-induced frenzy. (Though I would definitely read that book.)

MTV.com: ‘Twilight’ Author Stephenie Meyer Puts ‘Midnight Sun’ On Hold. Probably the most accurate. If she’s that passionate about the Edward story, she’ll go back to it – even though it sounds as though it began as sort of a cross between a writing exercise and fanfic.

Horror Yearkbook: Twilight Author Throws Hissy Fit Over Last Book. Well, that’s a bit harsh.

But whichever line is most accurate, it’s still pretty gutsy of Meyer to put the entire draft online. I don’t know about other authors, but I’m pretty nervous about working with the curtain up.

If you haven’t got a ha’penny, then God bless you!

Is it wrong to be amused that I got two search engine hits yesterday on ‘typoe eradication advancement league’? And a zillion more on the correctly-spelled version. They must have gotten Media Attention…erm, except that the blog is gone? What’s going on around here?! – ah, they got busted for correcting typos on a sixty-year-old hand-written sign in a national park.

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Just finished reading Ha’penny [or Ha'Penny, depending on whether you consider the book cover or the publisher's page to have the definitive spelling], the second in Jo Walton’s Small Change trilogy – an alternate history where the British made peace with the Nazis. I voted Farthing one of my top ten books of 2007. I enjoyed this one, though I don’t think it will make the top ten this year. I did feel a lot more comfortable with the structure – as with the first book (and with the third, about which more shortly), chapters alternate between ‘young upper-class woman, first person’ and ‘police guy (the same one), third person’. I think they meshed better this time around, perhaps because the story followed a tighter line: there’s a plot, and we the readers know early on what it is, so the through story is ‘those who are formulating the plot’ working against ‘those who are discovering and foiling the plot.’

But the Mitford Larkin details became a tad fillerish. I can’t keep the six Mitford sisters straight – except for Unity (who I’m guessing is the equivalent of the Larkin sister who married a Nazi leader) – in terms of matching up names-to-eventual-reasons-for-fame, and to have six new names and six nicknames (only a couple of which connected to the real names) made part of my brain shut down. The fact that one of the nicknames is crucial to the denouement means that element couldn’t be sliced from the plot, but it became annoying to have the names used interchangeably. And, as I am painfully figuring out with my own novel, chunks of backstory don’t always work, because sometimes the reader says ‘why is this here?’ Bits that were integrated into the dialogue generally supported the plot and fit in much better as a result.

Another structural point that didn’t quite hold up: Viola Lark overtly informs us that this is her record of what happened, written after the fact, and she’s aware that it may be read. In fact, she hopes and assumes someone will read it someday, and adjusts her narrative accordingly. For instance, she deliberately doesn’t give details about a safe house, in case it doesn’t get rumbled and can therefore still be used. This means we know from the start that Viola is going to survive the novel – which is fine. The problem is that she makes a claim at the end of the novel which is patently untrue, and deliberately misleading. Even if she is dazed and in shock when she makes the claim, by the time she comes to write it down she’s recovered – so by writing it down she’s negating the lie she told verbally. Does she not care if anyone realizes this, or has the narrative itself abandoned the framing structure? This sort of thing happens in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, but for a fundamental purpose; here I’m just confused.

(It also made me realize that I was right not to do a similar thing in my own novel, because clearly I could never have reconciled myself to this!)

Where Ha’penny has a lot less force than Farthing is, I think, that in the first novel, the Young Lady of Quality actually gets caught up in the reality of impending fascism, and here she does not; awfulness is described, but kept at arm’s length. On the other hand, Carmichael’s story arc works better here because it develops over the course of the novel, rather than being sprung on the reader. The first chapter of the final book in the trilogy promises two debutantes attending a fascist riot, so perhaps there will be more direct contact.

Yes, that third book. It isn’t published until October. Thanks to the good nature of Patrick Nielsen Hayden, however, I have an ARC of it, so I shall read it with enjoyment and then publish a review when the time is right.

Books, self-published and otherwise

A story broke in the UK about a 93-year-old woman who sold her first novel and received pots of money. Turns out she didn’t, because it was a vanity press (which, like most vanity presses, prefers to be called a ’self-publisher’). Finally, the truth is coming out, but of course the corrections won’t get half the press attention as the erroneous story, because ‘nice old lady brings out self-published book and wants to help her friends avoid care homes’ isn’t half as newsworthy as ‘first novel earns pots of money and encourages the delusions of anyone who thinks self-publishing is the route to riches.’

(There are plenty of sensible reasons to self-publish, but fame and fortune are not two of them.)

Anyway, I’m not reading books lately, which is partly because I seem to have picked up a work ethic somewhere and have been working on the novel as well as a couple of freelance projects. I also haven’t been commuting as much these days, and I tend to do a lot of reading on the bus. This means that it’s halfway through the month and I’ve only read one book – Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which seems to be nominated for/winning awards in every possible genre. I liked it more intellectually than I loved it, if that makes sense, but then at heart it’s a police procedural, and those simply don’t thrill me.

Meanwhile, I gave up on Midnight’s Children. I feel ashamed to ditch the Booker of Booker of Bookers or whatever it is, but I slogged halfway in and I just couldn’t face getting out the hard way.

Angela Lambert: The Lost Life of Eva Braun

A biography of Eva Braun needed to be written. Sadly, this one is not up to scratch.

I have recently come to the conclusion that if you want to write a biography that runs to over, say, four hundred pages, you have to get permission from a special Biography Panel who judges whether your subject(s) actually need that much space. Eva Braun doesn’t. I got halfway through the 600-page book, and when I reached the halfway point, all I could remember from the first 300 pages was that Eva spent a lot of time:

- pining for Adolf, who completely ignored her in public and made everyone else do the same (assuming that these other people knew she wasn’t just a secretary);
- taking photographs of herself, but not being terribly accurate about labeling them when placing them in albums;
- attempting suicide.

So what took up all the space? While historical context is always necessary, Eva practically vanished for entire chapters while Nazi history came under discussion. This could have worked, in a feminist ‘I’m not going to focus entirely on one life in a spotlight but rather ground it in its wider social network’ kind of way, but that wasn’t the situation.

Instead, the book played up the fact that her life didn’t consist of much except being the hidden mistress, filling her days of boredom with sports and shopping, and having an unspecified (though probably fairly normal) sex life with the Fuhrer. She doesn’t seem to have been either a gold-digger or a monster, and she doesn’t even seem to have had a fling with any of the dashing young adjutants – but she comes across as a person who was only the slightest bit interesting because of the context she got herself into. It’s a real problem in a biography when the context overshadows the subject. Let’s face it: nice girls, even when they love dictators, do not make for drama.

Then there were the frequent asides into Lambert’s own family history. Okay, the parallels between Braun and Lambert’s mother (in the same demographic) were mildly interesting, but they padded the work without being enough of a control to definitively say ‘here’s what Eva Braun’s life must have been like.’ Yes, her mother had the same sort of mechanical pencil that Braun did, but what does that say about either of them except that this pencil was in common use? I would be interested to read a memoir about Lambert’s family history, especially its intertwining with the Third Reich; here, it got in the way of the story. What story there was.

Some of the research is solid, especially the unpublished memoirs. With the lack of hard evidence (and what exists being largely what other people said about Braun – and of course everyone else has their own agenda), these personal sources are essential and unique. Lambert insists on allowing the German-speaking reader to double-check her translations of many of the personal e-mails and excerpts she uses as evidence, which is admirable. But there’s no excuse to repeatedly quote Wikipedia as a primary source. Meanwhile, the length seems to have caused the author to lose control of her sources; I read one of the footnotes and said, am I having deja vu? Nope – it was the same quotation (with slightly different punctuation) as a hundred pages earlier.

Lambert’s style set my teeth on edge. Way too many little snide asides at the Nazis which simply weren’t necessary. Lambert tries to be analytical, but it simply doesn’t hold water when she analyzes (in two chapters) what Braun might have known and might have done about the Black Events (Lambert’s chosen term) and then switches back to her mother’s family, breezily announcing that they certainly didn’t know anything about it. Really? Why is this in a biography, anyway? And there’s a hell of a lot of leaning on Gitta Sereny’s interpretations, which only get queried in a footnote round about page 450. The occasional attempts to draw parallels with Our Own Times (about, say, torture of Iraqi prisoners and the abstinence policies of the Bush presidency) mostly fall flat.

I hate to sound so negative. I wanted this to be a biography that gave me a solid account of Braun and her space in the Third Reich. This isn’t it, and the clincher is the ending of the book. A biography that effectively ends ‘and then she died’ – or, in this case, wrapping up with brief shots of how the other major characters ended up – is a book which doesn’t leave itself the space to definitively establish that figure within their historical context, or judge how they’ve been reinterpreted.

I would like a biography of Braun that builds on this one, and I’m hopeful that it won’t bloat out to 600 pages.

Bookslut has a much more coherent review, but one which reminded me (by a comment about the work being badly edited) that I should have realized at the start that this book was not going to be solid: namely, in the two family trees that open the work (Braun and Hitler), Adolf’s first name is spelled in different ways.

I love coincidences

Yesterday I was reading Swastika Night, a 1937 novel by Katharine Burdekin (published, like many of her novels, under the pseudonym Murray Constantine – apparently adopted to protect her family from attacks, but I’m guessing also to avoid the whole ‘dismissed for being a woman’ issue). Google Books has a limited version here which is enough to give you a taste.

I’ll try to review it after I’ve finished, but what I noticed yesterday was one character stating:

I often have imagined him, perhaps on a fine summer evening, for the date at the end of the book is June 6th

I can’t recall ever reading a book when they mentioned a date and that’s the date.

Perhaps I am too easily amused.

Meanwhile, I’m thrilled that my critique partner had only a handful of substantive comments on chapter 1 and also said ‘The writing itself is very, very, very good.’ Of course, I’m now thinking, well, that’s the chapter I’ve taken the most time with, the next one won’t be so good…sometimes it’s hard to accept compliments. I now also, thanks to her, have a cracking idea for a preface which will add multiple dimensions to the story, so I have to go write it!

Books read: May 2008

Total read: 11. The most interesting:

A.J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All

I was going to compare Jacobs to Joe Queenan, but then found they loathe each other – or, at least, Queenan gave Jacobs a stunningly nasty review and Jacobs didn’t appreciate it. I guess that sainthood thing really didn’t last.

But if I were to mentally compare their two books, I’d have to say I enjoyed Jacobs’s more, if only for the index. Seriously, this is the most amusing index I’ve read in a long time, though I was disappointed that Jacobs didn’t emulate his dad by including ‘birds, for the’ and bewildered that there were no primary entries for cross-eyed women (a theme throughout the book).

This is a good book for Pretty Smart people. Not the super brainiacs, but those of us who had a fine general education, can name one Finnish composer (but not two), that sort of thing. Because then you can read the book and feel smug about the things you did know (Theodore Roosevelt –> teddy bear) and file away the things you didn’t (the Bastille was empty when stormed) and say ‘ha!’ at the errors you find (granted, I only caught apostrophe errors, and those most likely crept in after the final manuscript was submitted, but still, there are three of them).

Kevin Jackson, Invisible Forms

A great book for Pretty Smart People Who Like Books, because it’s a delightful cornucopia about the parts of books you don’t normally think much about – dedications, indexes, that sort of thing. (Again, no self-referential playfulness in the index. Why not???) Reminded me that I’ve been meaning to read Georges Perec’s A Void, written (and translated from the French) without using the letter ‘e’.

Bernd Freytag Von Loringhoven, In the Bunker with Hitler: The Last Witness Speaks

This book is a triumph of marketing.

First, the title (in the UK edition, anyway, which is the one I have). In the original French it’s Dans le Bunker de Hitler, and that part of it is, erm, metonymy? Zeugma? What’s the device for when you refer to a part to represent the whole? Because the bunker section is one chapter. ONE.

The book is 195 pages, including embedded pictures, and has incredibly wide margins and leading. Not a lot of substance.

The second part of the title is simply confusing. The last witness of what? The events of the final days in the bunker? As far as I am aware, Rochus Misch is still alive, so no, BFvL (not typing that all out again) isn’t the last. And given that he left the bunker on April 29 he certainly wasn’t the last witness of Hitler, who died on the 30th.

Quite a lot of the book consists of potted biographies of Nazi war guys and quick overviews of ways Hitler sabotaged his own military. I can get the latter from Speer and the former from Wikipedia.

The most interesting thing is the cover photograph. I’m guessing that’s a room in the bunker, but the credit goes to Getty Images and there’s no description. Yep, Getty Images says it’s the conference room. But it would have been nice not to have to do research myself.

Basically, the new stuff here is BFvL pointing out that he wasn’t a Nazi, knew nothing about the Jews, thought Hitler was evil, etc. And that’s not new, because there’s a variant in just about every post-war memoir going.

Books read: April 2008

Total books: 12. This month we focus on big name books, mainly because nothing else I read was really worthy of discussion. (Yeah, it was one of those months.)

Stephenie Meyer, Twilight and New Moon

As with the Harry Potter books, I am once again late to the party, but that has its advantages – I was able to race through the first three books without more than a minimal delay. (I’ve lent plenty of books to students but this may be the first time I ever borrowed from one….) In terms of prose style, I liked these better than the HP series – very few clunkers. In terms of plot, pretty good, though the ‘preface of impending doom’ was getting a bit old by book 3, and the event that triggered the great calamity of book 1 seemed kind of random and rushed.

Apparently book 4 is the final from Bella’s point of view, and it seems a good place to stop, as I think there’s only so far that teenage vampire angst can go without crumbling into self-parody – although Laurell K. Hamilton seems to have built a pretty good career out of a Mary Sue, and lots of paranormal sex. (These books do not, I hasten to add, have sex of any kind, paranormal or otherwise. Three books in, Bella’s vampire has barely gotten to second base.)

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis

I haven’t read many graphic novels – and a few people I know who love the genre are complaining that this isn’t a very good example of one – but it’s interesting to watch the interplay between image and word. Ooh, that sounds moderately highbrow.

Eh, as I’ve said before, I can’t write book reviews. Go read these. If nothing else, you’ll have something to talk about with other people who have read them.

Phantom book

A blog on collecting children’s books recently had an entry on Phantom Books, and it reminded me of a phantom book of my own: Dawn B. Sova’s Passion and Penance: The Lesbian in Pulp Fiction.

But surely this book exists? It has an Amazon page. It has an ISBN (0571199178; ISBN-13: 978-0571199174). It has a publisher and a publishing date – Farrar Strauss And Giroux (Nov 1 1997) or Faber & Faber (December 1998), depending on who you ask. It has a blurb from Ingram: ‘With unique access to several large private collections, Dr. Sova has extracted scenes and chapters from each decade’s pulp fiction, from the 1920s to the 1960s, and comments with wit, erudition, and light on the changing evolution of this heretofore unexamined genre of lesbian literature.’ It’s linked to at book sites and bookswap sites and library sites….

And yet. The Lesbian Pulp Fiction Collection at Duke University (seriously) lists it as ‘on order’ since December 1999. No book site or bookswap site actually HAS a copy. Aha! Worldcat says that the Library of Congress has a copy and so does a library in Halifax. So it MUST exist.

Except. I e-mailed the LOC to check on this and another book, both of which were listed as ‘on order’ in the catalog. Neither book is there. The other I found at Better World Books and let’s just say I’m treating the money I paid for this book as a donation to literacy, ’cause the prose was so bad it wasn’t even laughable (kind of a new age romance with a lizard bad guy – okay, HE was laughable, but otherwise it was at the level of excruciating fanfic). About the Sova book, the helpful librarian said that both the LOC record and the Halifax library’s record are incomplete, and the book was never received by either of them. Frankly, he doesn’t think the book was ever published. And when a librarian says that, it’s time to listen.

Yet it’s weird that there’s an awful lot of information out there about a book that was never published.

I wrote to F&F but never got a response, so if Dr. Sova ever reads this, maybe she can solve the mystery.