Signal boost

The middle of my day was brightened by an extremely interesting discussion by Bruce Holsinger of his medieval thriller A Burnable Book. He will be speaking this evening at 7pm at Book Culture (details here) - go and see him speak if you can!

(I only know Bruce slightly in person, but I always think of him as a kindred spirit, insofar as we share a love for literary scholarship, reading and writing fiction and endurance sport....)

Light reading update

My review of Ellen Ullman's new novel By Blood is up at Slate.  Very happy to be writing for a new 'venue,' as they say!

Miscellaneous light reading around the edges of a busy week: Delia Sherman's lovely young-adult novel The Freedom Maze, which both is and is not like the time-travel books I devoured in my childhood, and Alan Glynn's excellent thriller Bloodland.  Just started on Edward St. Aubyn's At Last, which seemed to me as I read it last night to have what is possibly one of the best opening chapters I have ever seen.

Tabloid treasures

A very good piece at the FT by Marek Kohn (site registration required, but if you do not register you will miss the picture of the "merman chimera"...) on the Wellcome Trust's collection of curiosities. It is accompanied by a fantastic slideshow.

I survived my 10K swim this morning; the water was full of chop and the buoys kept shooting all over the place in misleading directions, but it was very enjoyable taken in sum. I can now hardly lift my arms above my shoulders!

Finished the Neal Stephenson book this afternoon. It is enjoyable, but not so much my cup of tea: I think so highly of some of his books that this one has to count as something of a disappointment. I think the fact is that for thrillers, I really prefer either first-person or third-person limited narration, and see no reason for an absolutely enormous cast of characters: there is some serious redundancy here, at least if you consider the book from the point of view of the Lee Child-Dick Francis school of thriller-writing, a school I obviously admire (perhaps partly because my own cast of thought is more clearly Stephensonian than Childish or Franciscan). There are three separate pairs of young man-young woman who basically end up all blending together: it really is true of the men as well as the woman (older-generation protagonist Richard is by far the most fully realized character), but it is particularly problematic for me as a reader in the case of the women. I wanted to press a copy of Taylor Stevens's The Informationist into Stephenson's hands to show him what can be done in this vein. This may, though, really be primarily a function of genre preference: I don't think the Stieg Larsson books are perfect, but they are so very much what I like in terms of light reading that I can forgive them their implausibilities, wish-fulfilling aspects and other excesses. There is some very good writing here, lots of funny and sharp observations very effectively phrased (his prose style is as Gary Lutz might say "tractional, load-bearing" but with interesting word choice and an excellent ear for a phrase), and I feel certain that the book will appeal profoundly to those who have ever played role-playing games, table-top or computer-based!

Swimming and Stephenson were both good for mental health, but though I did a couple hours of work-related stuff today as well, I still have a huge amount to get done tomorrow for Monday - the semester is well and truly underway...

Light reading catch-up

I had such good intentions about making this a semester in which I would spread my work out evenly across the week, but in fact I worked so hard Sunday through Tuesday that I basically collapsed and could do nothing yesterday except exercise and read a novel (the first two thirds or so of Neal Stephenson's Reamde, on which my verdict so far is very similar to that of the Amazon reviewers - fun fast read, but there's not so much to it - it rather reminds me of Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net - I prefer my female protagonists to have a more fully rendered interiority!). I must write comments on some assignments today, or Sunday will not be a pretty sight chez Davidson (I am doing a long swim on Saturday morning, one for which I am signally undertrained, and am not counting on any great level of mental acuity and application in the afternoon!).

Other light reading around the edges (really I feel I have had no time to read anything, but this is clearly a misapprehension of sorts, I seem to have read several novels): Marcus Sakey's excellent Chicago noir The Blade Itself; Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus (quite reasonably good, but falling under the same rubric as what William Empson diagnoses as "the badness of much nineteenth-century poetry," explained by him as being "written by critically sensitive people [who] admired the poetry of previous generations, very rightly, for the taste it left in the head, and, failing to realise that the process of putting such a taste into a reader's head involves a great deal of work which does not feel like a taste in the head while it is being done, attempting, therefore, to conceive a taste in the head and put it straight on to their paper, they produced tastes in the head which were in fact blurred, complacent, and unpleasing"). Unfair as a description of, say, Tennyson's best poems, and in a similar respect perhaps slightly unfair to apply to Morgenstern, but there is something to the diagnosis (and in fact this is, curiously, what Morgenstern's novel is about/thematizes, as her circus is even more clearly than her novel trying to 'put the taste into a reader's head' without grounding it effectively in technique).

Closing tabs:

Guinea pig rentals! (Via Tyler Cowen.)

Things Apple is worth more than.

Source statements

Brent sent a good link earlier, subject line "Suitable background bit for a thriller." Really it could probably be milked for an entire series...

Catch-up

I had to cancel my race, ugh - a great disappointment, but I will survive, it is not the end of the world. Glumness-inducing, though! I believe I am now on the mend, but still feeling pretty much under the weather, with a bad cough and low energy levels.

It would be seriously misrepresenting things if I implied that I had not been without New York consolations in the meantime. L. successfully defended her dissertation yesterday, and her parents took us out for duck lunch; I saw friend Jason Grote's Civilization (all you can eat) (it is a good production, but the power of cough drops was strained to the uttermost limit!) and had a drink afterwards at Lucky Strike with some folks I admire.

Kio Stark's Follow Me Down is a beautiful little novel, following in a vein I think of as having been very profitably mined by Sara Gran, with every word absolutely perfectly positioned in the right place; I thoroughly enjoyed it (it is also the first I've read from Richard Nash's new venture Red Lemonade. Hmmm, it might be that this would be a good home down the road for BOMH (initial copy-edit is complete, and I am slightly daunted by the scale of the new writing and plotting required, but will undertake it as soon as I have wriggled through next set of geographical transitions)...

Other light reading: Stuart MacBride's Cold Granite (slightly cartoonish but appealing and readable); Steve Mosby's Cry for Help (implausible but suspenseful); S. J. Bolton's Now You See Me (ditto).

Two good and quite different-from-each-other books about endurance sport (tormenting myself while I can't do anything much myself): Chris McCormack's I'm Here to Win (worthwhile, interesting) and Amy Snyder's Hell on Two Wheels: An Astonishing Story of Suffering, Triumph, and the Most Extreme Endurance Race in the World. It is rare for me to read a book of this sort without having a fairly strong urge to undertake the event myself, but in this case I can truly say I would not harbor even the least little desire to do such a thing!

Light reading on the road

The Kindle is a godsend for travel; I cannot imagine what peculiar, unsatisfactory and yet physically backbreaking a selection I would otherwise have been lugging around during the past week and a half. I read a few books that were truly exceptional; I had a frantic downloading session the night before I left, when it suddenly occurred to me that ten days requires a pretty large number of words if I didn't want to have to fall back on hotel pickings, so I had a lot of good stuff to choose from.

The two really spectacular books were Teju Cole's Open City, which I loved so much that I really must write a separate post about it; and Neal Stephenson's Anathem, which I also just loved. I bought a copy of that in hardcover some time after its initial release - an ill-timed purchase, given that the paperback was about to come out, and that it is really too physically cumbersome a book to want to read in the heavier format. Also the opening 15% or so (I am a Kindle reader, the percentages are unavoidable!) is pretty awfully static; it's not unreadable, but it is the sort of thing that a less well-known writer would almost certainly have been made to cut, and I feel sure that there would have been some way to plunge much more quickly into the 'real' action of the book. But truly it is a wonderful novel; I even ended up talking about it in class yesterday (we were reading Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist and I was pondering questions about the relationship between dialogue in fiction and the philosophical dialogue - is the coincidence of the name just that, i.e. fundamentally a bit misleading, or do the two genres have something more seriously intimate to do with each other?).

I actually had some very good other books too, only they are slightly diminished by the dauntingly awesome nature of these two. I loved Lauren Beukes's books Zoo City (GENIUS! especially the pastiche material, and its witty and depressing reimagining of Pullman's daemons) and Moxyland. Deborah Harkness's A Discovery of Witches is the perfect light reading; among other things, it is so very refreshing to read a book with a female scholarly protagonist who so completely and utterly rings true to my own experience of the scholarly life. Taylor Stevens' The Informationist is also fantastically perfect reading material - how can this woman just have burst out of nowhere? Really I feel she must have been writing thrillers already under another name, this one is so very perfectly crafted and so very much to my taste; but whatever the deal, it has my strongest recommendation, I found it just fantastically gripping.

Other miscellaneous novels, good in their way but not as well suited to my reading preferences: Jennifer Crusie, Faking It; Ekaterina Sedia, The House of Discarded Dreams (I think well of Sedia's books, but they are not exactly what I like - I'm not truly a Jonathan Carroll fan either, though I have read most of his books and enjoyed a few of them very much indeed - I did really enjoy what she does here with the horseshoe crabs); Robin Hobb, Dragon Keeper (led astray in this case by my panicky search for long books), Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants (this one made me think strongly of my grandmother, who would have loved it).

Hmmm - I had better get a move on with my real day, only inertia has overcome me!

Production of quota

Circumstances did not seem hospitable to the production of quota (I am in the overly quiet little lounge in the Cayman Airport waiting for the Tampa flight to board, I am happiest working in a cafe with light buzz of conversation and movement around me), but Brent in his unassuming way seemed to think it would be a good idea if I tried to squeeze out a few words, and in fact it was easy as pie, it came very painlessly for once: c. 1000 words, for a total of 22,246 words.

At times it is a good thing to be flexible, but it seems to me plausible that the next couple weeks contain enough other disruptions and uncertainties that it will behoove me to cleave to the system of quota production with considerable rigidity...

Light reading has been ongoing; the Kindle is a lifesaver for island living! Nothing of particular substance, but all very enjoyable and very much the sort of thing I like: the two latest installments in Laurie King's Sherlock Holmes series, The Language of Bees and The God of the Hive; two thrillers by Chelsea Cain (the serial killer business is - as is often the case - fundamentally implausible, but the characters are very well-drawn and the writing's appealingly sharp), Heartsick and Sweetheart; and the first two books by Andrew Grant (brother of Lee Child), Even and Die Twice. Interesting to contemplate the phenomenon of sibling authors and the similarities of their choices (it seems clear to me in this case that it is more a question of similar choices independently made than of influence). I am fairly certain that my brother M. will never write a novel, but I still hold out hope that my other brother might do so one of these days!

The diplomatic bag

Andy Martin does a hilariously good interview with Lee Child for The Independent, including a moniker origin-story that I'd never heard before:

The origin of his name goes back to a mid-1970s train ride in the US. He and his wife fell into conversation with an American who told them that he owned a "European" car. It turned out to be a Renault 5, marketed in the US – to give it a certain Parisian chic – as "Le Car". But the friendly American said: "Lee Car". After that, "Lee" became their surrogate definite article: "Can you pass lee butter, please," and so on. When he and his wife had a baby, the kid was inevitably nicknamed "Lee Child". "I was looking for a name that was short, crisp and memorable," he says. Lee Child (Snr) was born.

It is well known to regular readers in these parts that I think Lee Child is a genius of light reading; he is also a genius of (or at least signal innovator in) publicity, witness the recent Reacher Ambassador campaign! I was invited by Lee's longtime publicist Maggie Griffin to become a "Reacher Ambassador," and seized the opportunity; in my office at Columbia is a box full of copies of the book pictured below (one of those slightly-unsightly-in-its-handling-proportions elongated mass-market paperbacks), and if you see me in New York in coming months (I have a plane ticket from Cayman to JFK on January 5) you should ask me for one...

(Given how few novel ideas there are out there about how to publicize good books, this seems to me an excellent one - give away an earlier installment in the series to hook new readers who will purchase or at least obtain all the others. I don't think the first installment in the series is as good as the later ones - I liked it very much when I read it, but it didn't exude that crack-like addictive aura that the few-volumes-later ones did, and I don't know that it would be the best choice for the give-away - but I see why this one was chosen out of recent installments. I think I would have picked Die Trying, personally; my favorite two are Persuader and The Enemy, but each is slightly anomalous in its way and probably wouldn't have been the best choice.)
(Apologies for the flash - I was too impatient to remind myself properly how to turn it off...)

Also: Jack Reacher recently made my list of the fifteen most memorable fictional characters that I could think of off the top of my head who had notionally influenced me (why, though, didn't I think of Sherlock Holmes?).

Light reading catch-up (travel edition)

Back in Cayman, after a very long day of travels yesterday. Hit the Book Market in Ottawa and got a decent stack of used paperbacks there, so had an adequate and highly affordable supply of reading for the trip.

Jane Adams' Final Frame was decent but broke the cardinal rule: it didn't work as a standalone installment in a series, it really seemed to assume knowledge of the previous installment. Lauren Henderson's The Strawberry Tattoo was poorly plotted but reasonably amusing otherwise. Caro Fraser's Beyond Forgiveness was a fairly mediocre example of a genre I do not really like, but I found it more or less readable.

Then I read two spectacularly good thrillers that had me on the edge of my seat in delight and pleasure: Caroline Carver's Blood Junction and Dead Heat. The second is even better than the first - richer, more complex - and I am certainly going to read all her others as soon as I can get hold of them, they are so much what I like (imagine somewhere on the spectrum between Peter Temple and Lee Child - not with the sheer intellectual force and stylistic beauty of the former, nor with the economy and genius elegance of the latter - but really, really good, and with eminently plausible female protagonists).

Light reading catch-up

I seem to be more than usually reading too many different books, out of restlessness and mental dissatisfaction...

The feeling of understimulation drove me to begin (but not [yet] to finish, as neither quite struck my fancy, though the Delany is surprisingly page-turnery and the Home is, bizarrely, a book that seems to have been written exactly for someone with my reading history!) the two novels hanging around that seemed most likely to tickle the brain follicles, Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren and Stewart Home's 69 Things To Do With a Dead Princess.

Polished off Lynda LaPlante's Clean Cut, which seemed to me better than the last mystery of hers I read, but had to chunk across the room in disgust the Royal Flush - Sleeping Cruelty omnibus due to utter unreadable trashiness.

Read Robert Harris's Pompeii during a couple hours of downtime on Wednesday afternoon, found it really rather good - it is a simple book, simpler I think than the Cicero series, but Harris really has the gift of storytelling and bestsellery pacing, something I admire and envy.

Finished Ambler and a couple other things that were hanging around, plus the Tristram Shandy reread (it is not truly a funny book, but Sterne is an interesting recapitulator and innovator); also dipping into Temple Grandin's book on animals and Scott McCloud's truly excellent Understanding Comics, about which more anon.

Will shortly head over to the Humane Society Book Loft to offload some of these volumes and see if I can pick out some good new ones.

"More and more stuff about the same people"

I got a kick out of Dave Itzkoff's NYT interview with Ken Follett:

Q. What compelled you, when you were still a newspaper journalist, to write your first novel?

A. The spur was a financial crisis. My car broke down, and I couldn’t afford to get it fixed. And another journalist at the newspaper had written a thriller and the advance he got from the publisher was £200, which was pretty much exactly the amount of money I needed to get my car fixed. I did not figure that out until life began to show me I was a so-so newspaper reporter, and as a novelist I might have something special.

Last night's light reading (I have been falling back on the traditional Davidsonian consolations in times of trouble, novels and alcohol!): Sam Bourne's The Last Testament. Not so much my kind of thriller, and certainly not up to the standard of Follett at his best, but eminently readable, with the proviso that it is hard for me to imagine the cognitive makeup that leads to such intelligent, well-informed and "pacey" thriller-writing with so little character development or distinction in terms of voice - but I think that each writer has a different set of strengths, advantages that feel deeply natural and that largely determine the sort of book he or she writes. It sounds more like the punchline to a joke, but a psychologist, a neurologist and a literary critic should collaborate on an article about what sorts of novels are produced by people with different cognitive processing styles...

An update from the road

In the Detroit airport at lunchtime yesterday I was overcome with a desire for sushi so powerful it must have been synonymous with homesickness; I settled for a chicken quesadilla, which was a more realistic cuisine expectation, but today I had a very delicious lunch with my father at Pod in West Philadelphia, so that is a step in the right culinary direction.

I'll go to New York tomorrow and then fly back to Cayman from JFK on Sunday. Minor inconvenience: my keys and appointment book are of course still in Cayman, as when I flew from Cayman to Ottawa on June 25 I assumed I wouldn't be away for more than 10 days or so! It will be a huge relief to settle back into some sort of a routine...

In Ottawa, we were staying in the guest suite at Meridian Place; no internet in the room, thus the lack of posting, but a nice little library downstairs from whence I plucked a volume or two of Dick Francis, true comfort reading. I reread Straight and The Edge, though honestly I have read them both a disgustingly high number of times already; I started but put aside a Joy Fielding novel whose characters I found unlikeable, then trudged through Robert Crais's Hostage, which I enjoyed rather less than I remember doing when I first read it some years ago.

We had a good and essential if extravagant visit to a Chapters bookstore on Thursday or Friday for me to pick up some things to get me from Ottawa to Philadelphia yesterday; I started very early in the morning at the airport with Tim Wynne-Jones's The Uninvited, which I thought was very good but which reminded me that there really is in some cases a difference between fiction written for young adults and (as it were) non-age-specific fiction, then read Stephen Booth's Lost River, which I found over-full of geological and geographical padding (and talk about stringing out a modest personal storyline over a huge long sequence of novels/years!) but nonetheless enjoyable.

It was a long day of travel, so I subsequently made a dent in the precautionary value-for-money purchase, Justin Cronin's The Passage. It seems to me highly worthwhile, and I quite see why it is the big book of the summer; I liked the opening sequence better than the more science-fictional future middle bit I'm in now (Cronin does Greg Bear better than he does Octavia Butler, and the mythic/scriptural/eschatological flavor is a bit much!), but I would definitely recommend it pretty strongly on the basis of what I've read so far.

(Had a stop at the Penn Bookstore earlier today and picked up a few more things just to make sure that I do not run out over the next few days. Nothing worse than living on the ragged edge of having nothing left to read!)

I'm scaling back my plans for the rest of the year in a number of different ways, as I think things will continue to be significantly disrupted. I made a painful sacrifice, but I'll get over it. (2011 is another year!) I'm putting ABCs of the novel temporarily on hold and figuring that the style book will almost certainly need significant further work/revision before it reaches its semi-final state; I have to write two talks for October and an essay for February, all three of which things are related to the ABCs of the novel, so that will allow me to make at least a modest dent in what is no doubt a massive and long-term project.

My most immediate desire, though, is to bury myself in a new novel. I was already thinking in early June that it felt strange and undesirable not to have one on the boil; I am now very certain that I'd like to get started on a new one sooner rather than later. (Not least because it is much easier for me to work on a novel than a critical/intellectual book while traveling, for both mental and logistical reasons.)

I am not sure yet if it will really be young-adult or 'regular' adult fiction (with further uncertainties about 'genre' etc.), but it is going to be a retelling of The Bacchae set in a fantastical alternate version of Morningside Heights. This gives me all sorts of interesting and enjoyable things to ponder, such as what the relationship might be between the Greek/pagan aspects of the mythology and the plot and the Christian churches and cathedrals that border the neighborhood...

The death of an author

Alas, I was greeted as I checked my email this morning by an email from Sarah Weinman letting me know that Dick Francis has died. It is a great loss!

(Reading the Telegraph obituary has just made me feel a terrible pang that I have not made for myself a career writing thrillers in the Franciscan mode, they have always seemed to me so much the most desirable kind of book - a new Dick Francis novel has always been to me something that makes the heart soar.)