There's a good article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, "Presses Seek Fiscal Relief in Subsidies for Authors": "Under this plan, all institutions would contribute to the pool, and give authors $5,000 to $10,000 in what are called 'subventions' that they could take to an academic press interested in publishing their book. Universities and colleges that require books and journal articles for tenure and promotion but do not maintain their own presses might be asked to contribute more than those that do. "
I don't think it's likely to come about that universities will really contribute to a fund without guarantees that their own faculty will benefit. I do think it's likely that more and more colleges and universities will dedicate money to helping their younger faculty to publish books. The shortfall involves relatively small amounts of money, given the huge financial commitment involved in hiring any faculty member in the first place. There's a good article in the latest issue of The Believer that sums up what took place at an MLA panel on publishing and tenure:
"Jennifer Crewe of Columbia University Press presents some numbers, which provide perspective. Average production cost of a university-press title: $25,000. Total number of copies of each title purchased by all university libraries in bygone days: 1,000. Number of copies of each title sold to all libraries in current crisis days: 200. A book that sells very well (say, 500 copies) might recoup: $10,000$12,000. Average loss on average university-press title: $10,000+. Cost of subscription to run-of-the-mill scientific journal: $20,000. It's like a parody of a MasterCard commercial, but all of the "priceless" punch lines are so painfully obvious there's no reason to bother finishing the joke."
I realize how insane this will sound to anyone who is not involved in academia. And this isn't the place to explain why this isn't as crazy as it sounds. (Though it would make a good scene in a Terry Prachett novel... I've read a whole bunch more since I last wrote this, including just now the appealing Monstrous Regiment. Let's just say it casts a whole new light on "don't ask, don't tell." Does the NYTBR not review these books? Or did I just not notice? They should, anyway...) But trust me when I say that there are actually many good reasons that universities should make a $10,000 commitment to make up the shortfall, assuming that obvious concerns about it affecting the decision-making processes at the press. But I don't see why this should be the case--or at any rate, it wouldn't add too much extra complexity to a process that is already very deeply embedded in privilege. Nobody would be so idealistic as to say that the very same book manuscript, if submitted by an independent scholar or a scholar at a not-very-well-known institution, is as likely to be accepted by a top press as if it's by a well-known scholar at a prestigious institution. I do think that if it's a good book, it probably will be accepted regardless; but if it's a medium-good-sort-of-middling book, the names start to really matter. And if it's not a good book at all, well then....
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
Sunday, August 08, 2004
A good lie-in
Guardian Books has a good long extract from Tom Hodgkinson's extremely appealing How To Be Idle. In short, laziness is a good thing.
Another good discussion of why it's not immoral to sleep late can be found in Jonathan Weiner's excellent book about the geneticist Seymour Benzer, Time, Love Memory: A Great Biologist and his Quest for the Origins of Behavior.
Another good discussion of why it's not immoral to sleep late can be found in Jonathan Weiner's excellent book about the geneticist Seymour Benzer, Time, Love Memory: A Great Biologist and his Quest for the Origins of Behavior.
Saturday, August 07, 2004
Stephen Elliott's Happy Baby
I'd been meaning to get hold of this for a while, but the recent rave by Stephany reminded me. I hit the library and found it in a strange little nook at the very back of the tenth floor of Butler Library: PR is the Library of Congress code for British literature, PS for American, and they are subdivided within these categories by something to do with the date of the author. So this is the wing where it's fiction by relatively young people (I expect if I looked online, I could figure the cutoff--I'd guess 1965, or maybe 1970). My novel was there, pretty exciting to see it in a good old library binding. And I got Monique Truong's The Book of Salt, which I've also been wanting to read. And Stephen Elliott's Happy Baby.
And it was about midnight last night and I'd finally finished revising my chapter on shibboleths and elocutionists and I picked up another volume by Terry Pratchett but I've temporarily stalled on that (Hogfather: excellent; Maskerade: minor but entertaining; Thief of Time: I like that Susan character but book didn't live up to Hogfather standard; Interesting Times, too goofy to be really enjoyable). So I pushed the huge pile of books on the couch aside and sat down with Happy Baby.
And it is amazingly good. I see in it a lot of things I tried to do in Heredity, only really done better here. This book is sexier and also more beautifully and elegantly written. It's really, really excellent. Read it. I was relieved to see Elliott quoted somewhere as saying that it took him two years to write and that he was working on it every day all day and refining the prose. Because he's got that amazingly lucid style where you fear that it might just come out of him all perfect like that. In which case he would deserve to die... I completely identify with the main female character, I am sorry to say. I like the backwards time structure. Most of all though I like the sentences and the way they add up into these very intense scenes.
I wish I had written this book.
And it was about midnight last night and I'd finally finished revising my chapter on shibboleths and elocutionists and I picked up another volume by Terry Pratchett but I've temporarily stalled on that (Hogfather: excellent; Maskerade: minor but entertaining; Thief of Time: I like that Susan character but book didn't live up to Hogfather standard; Interesting Times, too goofy to be really enjoyable). So I pushed the huge pile of books on the couch aside and sat down with Happy Baby.
And it is amazingly good. I see in it a lot of things I tried to do in Heredity, only really done better here. This book is sexier and also more beautifully and elegantly written. It's really, really excellent. Read it. I was relieved to see Elliott quoted somewhere as saying that it took him two years to write and that he was working on it every day all day and refining the prose. Because he's got that amazingly lucid style where you fear that it might just come out of him all perfect like that. In which case he would deserve to die... I completely identify with the main female character, I am sorry to say. I like the backwards time structure. Most of all though I like the sentences and the way they add up into these very intense scenes.
I wish I had written this book.
Friday, August 06, 2004
Truthfulness
I just saw this interesting comment by the writer Paula Fox. (A fullish excerpt from the interview can be found here; link via www.tinglealley.com). Here's what Fox says: "At some point I began to value 'truth,' that elusive thing, more as I grew older--not only story. I recall lying on a bed, looking at a manuscript on the floor as I reached to turn pages, and thinking to myself, I must mean everything I say, every word, and feeling it as a profound moment in my writing life."
I particularly feel this in my academic writing, though of course it's an issue in fiction as well. I don't mean just being accurate in claims about the past, though that's important too. (When I say that Noah Webster ran hot-and-cold on spelling reform, for instance--this is what I'm working on today--is that really fair, and do I really know enough to say it? The answer is yes....) I mean being, oh, I don't know how to put it, well, TRUTHFUL in a sense closer to "authentic" than to "accurate." And while I was in graduate school, I found my own personal metaphor for this. It sounds crazy, but I really did internalize the voice of one of my dissertation advisors, a genius I will refer to here just as DB. DB has a strong ethical commitment to the study of literature and he is especially interested in a group of writers defined by their interest in ethics: say, Edmund Burke, Wordsworth, Frost, Wallace Stevens, that kind of thing. And when I wrote anything, I would think to myself as I struggled to get the right phrasing, "Is this something I could say to DB without blushing? Or do I cringe a little at the thought of him reading it and detecting some kind of intellectual dishonesty--some urge to be fashionable or politically correct or just glib about something that deserves deeper probing?" And if I cringed, I worked the sentence over until it was something that wouldn't provoke the (always kind, but nonetheless to be avoided at all costs!) skepticism of DB, who had become something like the "man in the breast" (comical phrasing, but interesting idea) you find in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. I found this liberating rather than oppressive. Because it's worth working hard to get things right. In fiction, I'd phrase it more as a question of voice--I find it harder there, because I end up paring things down to the bone in a struggle to eliminate coyness, bad faith, etc.--all the things that happen when you try and find the right place to speak from. My first novel was in the end written in two different first-person voices, because I couldn't find a third-person voice I could live with. The novel I've just written is written in the third person, but it's very close to the main character's own voice.
I particularly feel this in my academic writing, though of course it's an issue in fiction as well. I don't mean just being accurate in claims about the past, though that's important too. (When I say that Noah Webster ran hot-and-cold on spelling reform, for instance--this is what I'm working on today--is that really fair, and do I really know enough to say it? The answer is yes....) I mean being, oh, I don't know how to put it, well, TRUTHFUL in a sense closer to "authentic" than to "accurate." And while I was in graduate school, I found my own personal metaphor for this. It sounds crazy, but I really did internalize the voice of one of my dissertation advisors, a genius I will refer to here just as DB. DB has a strong ethical commitment to the study of literature and he is especially interested in a group of writers defined by their interest in ethics: say, Edmund Burke, Wordsworth, Frost, Wallace Stevens, that kind of thing. And when I wrote anything, I would think to myself as I struggled to get the right phrasing, "Is this something I could say to DB without blushing? Or do I cringe a little at the thought of him reading it and detecting some kind of intellectual dishonesty--some urge to be fashionable or politically correct or just glib about something that deserves deeper probing?" And if I cringed, I worked the sentence over until it was something that wouldn't provoke the (always kind, but nonetheless to be avoided at all costs!) skepticism of DB, who had become something like the "man in the breast" (comical phrasing, but interesting idea) you find in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. I found this liberating rather than oppressive. Because it's worth working hard to get things right. In fiction, I'd phrase it more as a question of voice--I find it harder there, because I end up paring things down to the bone in a struggle to eliminate coyness, bad faith, etc.--all the things that happen when you try and find the right place to speak from. My first novel was in the end written in two different first-person voices, because I couldn't find a third-person voice I could live with. The novel I've just written is written in the third person, but it's very close to the main character's own voice.
Tuesday, August 03, 2004
Discworld
Well, I've fended it off as long as possible--too much hype, I'm not into the very jokey kind of fantasy--but finally the time came: I've just finished The Color of Magic, Terry Pratchett's first Discworld novel. (The teaser earlier in the summer was reading the lovely Good Omens, coauthored by Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.) Now I'm hooked and I've taken drastic measures. I remember being like this when I finally read Patrick O'Brien's Master and Commander. It's not so much that you say "this is the best book ever" and go and get the whole series. (Which I did, from the library at Yale--CCL--and read the whole damn thing in about four days. I'm not exaggerating. I'm addicted to novels.) It's more that you say "well, that was pretty fun, and since I need a huge supply of novels in order to get my fix, I'm getting all the rest of these, as soon as possible and preferably at no expense to myself." So as the Columbia library doesn't have more than 3--which I will go and get tomorrow--I have requested thirteen more (and I think at least one of those volumes is a three-in-one deal) from my favorite thing in the world, BorrowDirect, a service that gives certain university library borrowers access to the holdings of all the other libraries in the consortium (which includes Yale, Columbia, Penn, Princeton, Dartmouth, Cornell, etc.). You could say it affects sales in a negative way, this obsessive library use. But there are many reasons it's necessary and indeed a good thing. I will recommend these books to lots of people, and maybe even buy copies to give away. And also I would drown in a sea of books if I really bought all the books I read. Easily get through ten to fifteen novels a week. More, some weeks. Can't wait to motor through these Discworld books, anyway.
Monday, August 02, 2004
Profile of Eva Ibbotson
Check out this Independent profile of Eva Ibbotson, Enjoyment. She is one of my favorite writers, and I've especially enjoyed seeing how her last few children's books are really converging on what she does in her novels for adults. (Link via Michael Thorn's blog.
Guardian Top 10: Michael Dobson and Nicola J Watson's favorite books about Elizabeth I
An appealing-looking list that ends with one of my favorite books from childhood, Ally Sheedy's She Was Nice to Mice: Top 10s | Michael Dobson and Nicola J Watson: Elizabeth I. These two are excellent scholars--I have read Dobson's book about Shakespeare in the 18th century and Watson's about the novel of letters in the romantic period, both several times a piece. Which for academic books is saying a great deal! Often I just race through the introduction and a chapter or two, scan footnotes and comb through the bibliography for anything that sounds interesting.
Sunday, August 01, 2004
Susanna Clarke
I was gripped by this NYT Magazine piece about Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. I heard about this some time ago--on Neil Gaiman's website, perhaps?--and immediately preordered from Amazon. I am dying to read this--and in fact am about to go back and print out the PDF file of the first chapter from the NYT website. This is the novel I most want to read; it is also (though obviously I say this without having read it) rather the same kind of book that I've just written. So I was amused to see this comment by Clarke's husband (also a SF and fantasy novelist):
Greenland told me [writes the author of the piece], ''Somebody actually said on a Web site, 'I hope this novel lives up to all the hype, because if not, it's going to be a big setback for all fantastic historical crossover writers.'''
He raised his eyebrows, waiting for me to complete the joke. ''Both of them?''
--Update from a fantastic historical crossover writer....
Greenland told me [writes the author of the piece], ''Somebody actually said on a Web site, 'I hope this novel lives up to all the hype, because if not, it's going to be a big setback for all fantastic historical crossover writers.'''
He raised his eyebrows, waiting for me to complete the joke. ''Both of them?''
--Update from a fantastic historical crossover writer....
Saturday, July 31, 2004
NYT reviews Jonathan Ames
Just looked at this in the Sunday Book Review online: 'Wake Up, Sir!': Crying Jeeves When There Is No Jeeves. Ordered the book from Amazon earlier today; I've been looking forward to reading this for a while. I'll post once I've read it.
My obsession with Dick Francis
I spent some time the other day looking at The Life and Works of Dick Francis.
Dick Francis is a genius.
Seriously, if I could write a series of books this compelling, I would die happy. I love first-person novels, and these are ridiculously appealing.
I’ve been a fan forever. In seventh grade, when DF was touring the U.S. for The Danger, my mom actually let me take the day off school so that I could go to the bookstore in downtown Philadelphia (was it 18th and Chestnut? can’t remember now, but doubtless it was one of those 80s chains like Waldenbooks or B. Dalton’s). DF was delightful. I was hanging around for hours (because I had to wait for my mom to come and pick me up—yes, I know it’s pitiful…) and waited in line twice—once to get my gleaming new copy of the new novel signed, a second time sheepishly to ask whether he’d be willing to sign the stack of battered paperbacks I’d also brought. As if I wasn’t already excited enough, he was ridiculously nice to me and joked with the guy behind me in line, “That’s the age to catch ‘em at!”
I found the scandal around DF’s authorship of the books somewhat absurd. Yes, I well believe that his wife made very great contributions to them, but if they chose to collaborate and publish the books under DF’s name, who’s to criticize that? Whatever the allocation of authorship, the books are really unmatched, I think, in what they do so well: these lovely rather neutral young male protagonists used to introduce you to the “expert knowledge” associated with a particular walk of life: sometimes centered on the horse-racing world, sometimes not.
BTW my friend Emily W., also a DF fan, had the genius critical insight to observe (in response to me saying—I can’t IMAGINE how this came up!—that I wished I had a boyfriend who was like the hero of a DF novel) that one reason that he has so many female readers isn’t that you want to go out with the hero but that it’s easy to imagine you ARE him. This is compounded by the fact of how many of them are hungry all the time and worry about what they eat in order to make weight… I also like the slightly odd S&M undercurrent in some of the books….
The announcement last year that there wouldn’t be any more books (DF is still alive, but his wife died last year) was tragic! However, since I have already read all of his novels a million times, there is clearly nothing to stop me from reading them again and again. And here are my recommendations; I’ve taken the chronological list and regrouped them according to some basic categories, with stars next to my favorites (and double stars next to my favorite ones of those—he’s that kind of a writer).
So now for a show of true obsessiveness…
The great classic DF novels, pretty much unbeatable (these heros get beaten up left and right, and the language describing their pain is entrancingly lowkey…--the first two here are both spectacular, leading up to the geniusy Odds Against, and the last two not quite as good but still very enjoyable):
*NERVE 1964 Rob Finn
**FOR KICKS 1965 Daniel Roke
**ODDS AGAINST 1965 Sid Halley
*FORFEIT 1968 James Tyrone
ENQUIRY 1969 Kelly Hughes
Sid Halley sequels (addictive, but I actually think it was a pity to reintroduce him in recent years—he’s implausibly the same age as he was in the mid-1960s and some of his traits from the earlier books no longer fit, indeed he’s generically rather like all the other DF heros, which he wasn’t to begin with):
**WHIP HAND 1979 Sid Halley
COME TO GRIEF 1995 Sid Halley
The middle period (doesn’t quite reach the heights of the earlier, but consistently high quality—I think that High Stakes and In the Frame are my favorites in this group):
RAT RACE 1970 Matt Shore
BONECRACK 1971 Neil Griffon
SMOKESCREEN 1972 Edward Lincoln
KNOCK DOWN 1974 Jonah Dereham
*HIGH STAKES 1975 Steven Scott
*IN THE FRAME 1976 Charles Todd
RISK 1977 Roland Britton
Depressive heros travel to foreign countries (a variation on the usual theme, not wholly successful):
BLOOD SPORT 1967 Gene Hawkins
SLAY-RIDE 1973 David Cleveland
TRIAL RUN 1978 Randall Drew
The least memorable of the older books, in which the protagonists are reasonably appealing and it’s definitely a decent novel by DF and therefore worth reading, but that aren’t necessarily the very best:
DEAD CERT 1962 Alan York
*FLYING FINISH 1966 Henry Grey
*REFLEX 1980 Philip Nore
The “new series” DF (I have no idea if there was any actual change in either his life circumstances or his book contract at this point, but there’s a distinct shift—it all becomes much more international, i.e. the heros are living a far more privileged life and we’re no longer in that still-slightly-grungy-and-postwar-feeling Britain [a feeling that lasted well into the 1970s, judging by fiction at any rate]). I love these books, but I don’t think they’re really as good: I’ve marked a few of the ones I like most with stars. What I always wished was that DF would decide to write a book with the main character/narrator being closer to himself in age—i.e. say late 60s as a compromise. Because the problem with these later ones is that the narrators, while reasonably appealing, no longer give you that great sense of being realistic, psychologically appealing characters very much the product of the circumstances in which they were raised. This relates to my pet peeve, about not having a series detective age as years go by. Superficially, you avoid this problem by having a new character with every book, but the problem remains that you have, say, a 28-year-old who no longer feels like a “real” person that age but is instead too clearly a convenient fictional construct:
TWICE SHY 1981 Jonathan & William Derry
BANKER 1982 Tim Ekaterin
THE DANGER 1983 Andrew Douglas
*PROOF 1984 Tony Beach
*BREAK IN 1985 Kit Fielding
BOLT 1986 Kit Fielding
HOT MONEY 1987 Ian Pembroke
THE EDGE 1988 Tor Kelsey
STRAIGHT 1989 Derek Franklin
LONGSHOT 1990 John Kendall
COMEBACK 1991 Peter Darwin
*DRIVING FORCE 1992 Freddie Croft
DECIDER 1993 Lee Morris
WILD HORSES 1994 Thomas Lyon (I must say I think this is probably a low point—I have not dignified the short story collection Field of Thirteen with a listing at all, I’m afraid)
*TO THE HILT 1996 Alexander Kinloch
10LB PENALTY 1997 Benedict Juliard
SECOND WIND 1999 Perry Stuart (these last couple feel pretty thin, unfortunately—I think To the Hilt is the last really good one)
SHATTERED 2000 Gerard Logan
In sum, if you have never read a novel by DF, you are missing out on one of the GREAT PLEASURES IN LIFE.
Dick Francis is a genius.
Seriously, if I could write a series of books this compelling, I would die happy. I love first-person novels, and these are ridiculously appealing.
I’ve been a fan forever. In seventh grade, when DF was touring the U.S. for The Danger, my mom actually let me take the day off school so that I could go to the bookstore in downtown Philadelphia (was it 18th and Chestnut? can’t remember now, but doubtless it was one of those 80s chains like Waldenbooks or B. Dalton’s). DF was delightful. I was hanging around for hours (because I had to wait for my mom to come and pick me up—yes, I know it’s pitiful…) and waited in line twice—once to get my gleaming new copy of the new novel signed, a second time sheepishly to ask whether he’d be willing to sign the stack of battered paperbacks I’d also brought. As if I wasn’t already excited enough, he was ridiculously nice to me and joked with the guy behind me in line, “That’s the age to catch ‘em at!”
I found the scandal around DF’s authorship of the books somewhat absurd. Yes, I well believe that his wife made very great contributions to them, but if they chose to collaborate and publish the books under DF’s name, who’s to criticize that? Whatever the allocation of authorship, the books are really unmatched, I think, in what they do so well: these lovely rather neutral young male protagonists used to introduce you to the “expert knowledge” associated with a particular walk of life: sometimes centered on the horse-racing world, sometimes not.
BTW my friend Emily W., also a DF fan, had the genius critical insight to observe (in response to me saying—I can’t IMAGINE how this came up!—that I wished I had a boyfriend who was like the hero of a DF novel) that one reason that he has so many female readers isn’t that you want to go out with the hero but that it’s easy to imagine you ARE him. This is compounded by the fact of how many of them are hungry all the time and worry about what they eat in order to make weight… I also like the slightly odd S&M undercurrent in some of the books….
The announcement last year that there wouldn’t be any more books (DF is still alive, but his wife died last year) was tragic! However, since I have already read all of his novels a million times, there is clearly nothing to stop me from reading them again and again. And here are my recommendations; I’ve taken the chronological list and regrouped them according to some basic categories, with stars next to my favorites (and double stars next to my favorite ones of those—he’s that kind of a writer).
So now for a show of true obsessiveness…
The great classic DF novels, pretty much unbeatable (these heros get beaten up left and right, and the language describing their pain is entrancingly lowkey…--the first two here are both spectacular, leading up to the geniusy Odds Against, and the last two not quite as good but still very enjoyable):
*NERVE 1964 Rob Finn
**FOR KICKS 1965 Daniel Roke
**ODDS AGAINST 1965 Sid Halley
*FORFEIT 1968 James Tyrone
ENQUIRY 1969 Kelly Hughes
Sid Halley sequels (addictive, but I actually think it was a pity to reintroduce him in recent years—he’s implausibly the same age as he was in the mid-1960s and some of his traits from the earlier books no longer fit, indeed he’s generically rather like all the other DF heros, which he wasn’t to begin with):
**WHIP HAND 1979 Sid Halley
COME TO GRIEF 1995 Sid Halley
The middle period (doesn’t quite reach the heights of the earlier, but consistently high quality—I think that High Stakes and In the Frame are my favorites in this group):
RAT RACE 1970 Matt Shore
BONECRACK 1971 Neil Griffon
SMOKESCREEN 1972 Edward Lincoln
KNOCK DOWN 1974 Jonah Dereham
*HIGH STAKES 1975 Steven Scott
*IN THE FRAME 1976 Charles Todd
RISK 1977 Roland Britton
Depressive heros travel to foreign countries (a variation on the usual theme, not wholly successful):
BLOOD SPORT 1967 Gene Hawkins
SLAY-RIDE 1973 David Cleveland
TRIAL RUN 1978 Randall Drew
The least memorable of the older books, in which the protagonists are reasonably appealing and it’s definitely a decent novel by DF and therefore worth reading, but that aren’t necessarily the very best:
DEAD CERT 1962 Alan York
*FLYING FINISH 1966 Henry Grey
*REFLEX 1980 Philip Nore
The “new series” DF (I have no idea if there was any actual change in either his life circumstances or his book contract at this point, but there’s a distinct shift—it all becomes much more international, i.e. the heros are living a far more privileged life and we’re no longer in that still-slightly-grungy-and-postwar-feeling Britain [a feeling that lasted well into the 1970s, judging by fiction at any rate]). I love these books, but I don’t think they’re really as good: I’ve marked a few of the ones I like most with stars. What I always wished was that DF would decide to write a book with the main character/narrator being closer to himself in age—i.e. say late 60s as a compromise. Because the problem with these later ones is that the narrators, while reasonably appealing, no longer give you that great sense of being realistic, psychologically appealing characters very much the product of the circumstances in which they were raised. This relates to my pet peeve, about not having a series detective age as years go by. Superficially, you avoid this problem by having a new character with every book, but the problem remains that you have, say, a 28-year-old who no longer feels like a “real” person that age but is instead too clearly a convenient fictional construct:
TWICE SHY 1981 Jonathan & William Derry
BANKER 1982 Tim Ekaterin
THE DANGER 1983 Andrew Douglas
*PROOF 1984 Tony Beach
*BREAK IN 1985 Kit Fielding
BOLT 1986 Kit Fielding
HOT MONEY 1987 Ian Pembroke
THE EDGE 1988 Tor Kelsey
STRAIGHT 1989 Derek Franklin
LONGSHOT 1990 John Kendall
COMEBACK 1991 Peter Darwin
*DRIVING FORCE 1992 Freddie Croft
DECIDER 1993 Lee Morris
WILD HORSES 1994 Thomas Lyon (I must say I think this is probably a low point—I have not dignified the short story collection Field of Thirteen with a listing at all, I’m afraid)
*TO THE HILT 1996 Alexander Kinloch
10LB PENALTY 1997 Benedict Juliard
SECOND WIND 1999 Perry Stuart (these last couple feel pretty thin, unfortunately—I think To the Hilt is the last really good one)
SHATTERED 2000 Gerard Logan
In sum, if you have never read a novel by DF, you are missing out on one of the GREAT PLEASURES IN LIFE.
Ghostwriting
I was staggered by the excerpt from Jennie Erdal's memoir Ghosting published in the most recent Granta, and this piece at theBookseller.com confirms my feeling that I must get hold of a copy of the book as soon as possible. The part I've read is really, really funny and yet psychologically peculiar and gripping in an almost gothic way. A tale of doubles, for sure.
Occasionally I fantasize about making a decent living as a ghostwriter, but Erdal's piece doesn't make it sound like a very good idea... though surely not every employer would ask you to ghostwrite a novel for him in which the only condition is that the two young female cousins that are the romantic protagonists are so close to each other that when one of the girls has an orgasm, so does the other, even if she's thousands of miles away.
Occasionally I fantasize about making a decent living as a ghostwriter, but Erdal's piece doesn't make it sound like a very good idea... though surely not every employer would ask you to ghostwrite a novel for him in which the only condition is that the two young female cousins that are the romantic protagonists are so close to each other that when one of the girls has an orgasm, so does the other, even if she's thousands of miles away.
Thursday, July 29, 2004
Saturday, July 24, 2004
Summer reading
Check out this great little essay by Jake Arnott about how he came to be a "paperback writer." I am back from my so-called "holiday," which had its moments but was on the whole rather depressing. I consoled myself by reading many novels while I was away. Some of the high points (I'm not going to link to them all, they're easily enough found on Amazon):
Elizabeth Young's collection of essays titled Pandora's Handbag (a work of complete genius; criminal that it's not better-known in the US; BUY THIS BOOK)
Jake Arnott's truecrime
Lee Child's latest (this man's thrillers are far superior to the competition, if you like ever-so-slightly tongue-in-cheek fast-paced international action. this one is appealing because it gives Jack Reacher's back-story)
Eva Ibbotson's The Star of Kazan (I love her books, they are a major guilty pleasure)
Edward P. Jones, The Known World (this book lives up to every ounce of hype--it's both a remarkably satisfying read and one of those books that makes you shake your head in amazement at how he ever thought of such a thing--he really makes up a WORLD and the book just happens to exist as a chronicle of it--I love the way he jumps ahead and tells you how a character's life will end thirty years later, then goes back to whatever he was saying before--must read his short-story collection too, though generally I avoid those like plague--last really great one I read was Nathan Englander's For the Relief of Unbearable Urges)
All right, that's enough. I did read a whole bunch of others, including Monica Ali's Brick Lane (technically v. impressive but slightly dull, I can see why it didn't end up winning any of those big prizes though it certainly deserved nomination--but Mark HAddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night was about a hundred times more delightful and memorable... sorry, Monica... it wasn't that I didn't like your book, but it was just a little too much like Alan Hollinghurst's The Folding Star--like someone who would turn the clock back to the nineteenth-century French novel if it were possible). Also some pretty funny eighteenth-century books at the British Library--the best ones were about livestock.
Elizabeth Young's collection of essays titled Pandora's Handbag (a work of complete genius; criminal that it's not better-known in the US; BUY THIS BOOK)
Jake Arnott's truecrime
Lee Child's latest (this man's thrillers are far superior to the competition, if you like ever-so-slightly tongue-in-cheek fast-paced international action. this one is appealing because it gives Jack Reacher's back-story)
Eva Ibbotson's The Star of Kazan (I love her books, they are a major guilty pleasure)
Edward P. Jones, The Known World (this book lives up to every ounce of hype--it's both a remarkably satisfying read and one of those books that makes you shake your head in amazement at how he ever thought of such a thing--he really makes up a WORLD and the book just happens to exist as a chronicle of it--I love the way he jumps ahead and tells you how a character's life will end thirty years later, then goes back to whatever he was saying before--must read his short-story collection too, though generally I avoid those like plague--last really great one I read was Nathan Englander's For the Relief of Unbearable Urges)
All right, that's enough. I did read a whole bunch of others, including Monica Ali's Brick Lane (technically v. impressive but slightly dull, I can see why it didn't end up winning any of those big prizes though it certainly deserved nomination--but Mark HAddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night was about a hundred times more delightful and memorable... sorry, Monica... it wasn't that I didn't like your book, but it was just a little too much like Alan Hollinghurst's The Folding Star--like someone who would turn the clock back to the nineteenth-century French novel if it were possible). Also some pretty funny eighteenth-century books at the British Library--the best ones were about livestock.
Saturday, July 03, 2004
Nils Bohr Institute
i'm off tomorrow to London and then Copenhagen, the latter to do research for the next volume of my trilogy. My heart's desire is to get inside the buildings of Nils Bohr's Institute for Theoretical Physics; fortunately the Bohr Archive has a really excellent website that includes instructions for visitors: NBI Today and previously. Even in a worst-case scenario, I should be able to go and walk around and take a look at the buildings from the outside; and it's possible I'll actually be able to get in and look around.
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