Books, covers

Colleen Mondor throws down the gauntlet! Her beef is with the cover of The Explosionist - here's the link to the underlying cover contest at Bookshelves of Doom, which challenges readers to produce new cover art for a handful of books (including mine) whose covers were too "generic and girly" for teenage boys to be seen reading them!

I don't have strong opinions on covers myself, having read some huge proportion of the total number of books consumed in my life in library bindings. But it is true, the covers for The Explosionist and Invisible Things haven't been what I initially imagined.

The mental picture I had before the first book was ever accepted for publication was something more like the amazing Prokhudin-Gorskii photographic archive (the pictures are from Russia c. 1900, but taken with an unusual and uncanny color process that makes them really like nothing else on earth - you get the feel of it with the one I've included here):

I like the misty colors on the cover of Piers Vitebsky's superb book The Reindeer People:

I guess that without really thinking about it (I am not a visual person) I imagined a cover built around something like the old photos of Edinburgh buildings and street scenes - something more like this - capturing the panoramic feel of the city, and its vertical range...

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

A must-read: Ed Park at Bookforum on the Chicago Manual of Style.

(I too have a special relationship with the famed fourteenth edition, due to my brief tenure as managing editor at the now-defunct Yale Journal of Criticism, and strong opinions on hyphenation...)

Light reading catch-up (more Kindle)

Another novel from the heavenly pen of Ken Bruen, The Devil.

Sigrid Nunez' lovely novel (could have been published as YA!) Salvation City; she is always worth reading, this one is startlingly different in tone and subject matter from the last book of hers I read but it is of a kind I very much like.

Camilla Lackberg's The Ice Princess: not bad but a bit so-so.

Jennifer Lynn Barnes's Raised By Wolves, highly readable but built more on a paranormal romance chassis than on a young-adult or urban fantasy one.

And a non-Kindle tome: Jilly Cooper's Jump. Not a patch on the best of her earlier books, but still an enjoyable read. It is no discredit to the book as a whole to say that she writes animal characters particularly well, and that the star of the cast is a goat!

I continue to languish in bed with a highly undesirable and glumness-inducing lung ailment...

Distractions

A generous review at Charlotte's Library; a nice interview at Reading Rocks; an event and a contest.

Declining and falling

At the New York Press, Adam Rathe on the history of indie publisher Soft Skull (via The Rumpus).

A strange business

At the LRB, Julian Barnes on Lydia Davis's Flaubert:

There is a slightly pretentious term in wine tasting and wine writing called ‘mouthfeel’. (It is also slightly baffling: where else might you feel wine if not in your mouth? On your foot?) The Oxford Companion to Wine calls it a ‘non-specific tasting term, used particularly for red wines, to indicate those textural attributes, such as smoothness, that produce tactile sensations on the surface of the oral cavity’. There is similar mouthfeel about translation. Its general development over the last century and more has been away from smoothness and towards authenticity, away from a reorganising interpretativeness which aims for the flow of English prose, towards a close-reading fidelity – enjoy those tannins! – which seeks to echo the original language.

Stuff

An interview with me at Creative Writing Now about research and world-building in alternate history.

(I am laid low with a bad chest cold that is making me extremely glum...)

"What someone's violin is"

A lovely essay by Elizabeth Samet on why she teaches Sherlock Holmes to first-year cadets at West Point. (Via The Millions.)

"The final thing"

A fascinating and moving piece by Tom Lubbock on losing language to a brain tumor.

Saturday link miscellany

What's wrong with No. 10 (the underlying link is highly worthwhile!).

Neil Gaiman on seeing the Dresden Dolls.

Laura Amy Schlitz remembers Eva Ibbotson (link courtesy of Dave Lull).

When the rainbow is enuf

Amy Davidson's subway memories.

"Trey-eight revolve 'em"

An absolutely fascinating piece by Paul Devlin at Slate on transcription errors in a new anthology of rap. It could usefully be read by people editing Shakespeare plays...

Three weeks

until the official publication of Invisible Things.

Here's an early review (the discussion in the comments thread makes me laugh and shake my head - authors have no control over covers!), and I'll post links as other stuff comes up, including entries in the forthcoming Traveling to Teens blog tour.

I won't be blogging regularly at the site I used for The Explosionist, as it seems to me to make more sense to consolidate my efforts here, but I'll probably use the sidebar there to keep track of interviews and online reviews. I've also just posted the author's note over there, as it wasn't included in the ARCs that went out this summer.

(I am pleased to know that US residents can pre-order a Kindle edition!)

Avenging disco Romanovs

I love Cintra Wilson's Critical Shopper columns...

Light reading catch-up (Kindle edition)

The device itself continues to suit me extremely well, with the caveat that it is surprising and frustrating how many books aren't available for Kindle. Still plenty to read, I guess: but I will be glad when rights stop being sold in specific territories and electronic editions can be sold internationally....

Connie Willis's All Clear started off as a bit of a disappointment. I liked the first installment immensely, but I was unpersuaded by the first half of All Clear that this really needed to be a separate novel: the scenes of anxiety about London bombings, shelters, finding one's friends, etc. are compelling individually but when repeated cumulatively have more the feeling of an actual bad dream than of a novel; there is too little narrative shaping for my taste. The last third or so of the book is superb, though, and the conclusion is hugely emotionally gratifying, in a way that perhaps partly depends on the nightmarish aspect of the first part of the book; I just wonder whether there would have been some way to cut/edit the full manuscript so that it would have been a single long novel in one volume and without the relative longueurs of the first part of the second installment.

Arnaldur Indridason's Hypothermia is absolutely excellent, pretty much the pinnacle of what this sort of fiction ought to be: I really, really enjoyed it.

Sara Paretsky's Body Work felt a bit formulaic; she has perhaps written this book too many times before, and yet it is still a highly readable book...

Michael Connelly, The Reversal. I approached it without huge enthusiasm, it was more just something that was available that seemed sensible to load onto the device as a precaution, but I found it very good; I'm hoping that there may be a further installment of the tale, it seems to leave off with the opening for a sequel. I like it when authors of longtime series mix things up a bit; the alternating points of view work very well here, I think, and you always feel with Connelly that you are in the hands of a professional, in the best possible way.

Ake Edwardsson, The Shadow Woman (the 2010 publication date on this one misled me - I hadn't read it before, but it falls quite early in the series, giving an annoying backwards feeling to the series-driven reader): not bad, but not nearly up to the Indridason standard.

Ken Bruen, The Sanctuary: A Novel. Jack Taylor discovers Xanax! Seriously, though, Ken Bruen is a huge favorite of mine, and this is an extremely compelling installment in what is probably his most mainstream-mystery-type series. Very good writing indeed - makes my mouth water with envy, I wish I could write books like this....