I recently switched my internet provider from Comcast to Verizon. Of course, that required a change in eMail accounts, since I use the provider and not Google or Yahoo. Well, that fouled up my blog completely because there seems to be no way to swap your identity from one email id to another.
To make matters worse, I switched back again because I hated everything about Verizon as a web, TV, and phone provider. But that's another story.
I now am back at this blog, The New World of Books. I've copied a few of the posts I sent to the other blog back to this one in case anyone lost me when I was gone.
I plan to stay put as far as technology goes.
You will find me here from now on.
Thursday, December 22, 2011
You're Never Too Old
When I was young - in fact quite young - I had an unquenchable desire to write. As I’ve said in other places, I wrote my first book when I was about thirteen, my autobiography. My first novel came when I was fifteen. The whole concept of storytelling seemed so unbelievably wonderful, I gave all my free time to it. Where this came from, I have no idea. There were no writers in my family that I know of. I wrote my first novel with a pencil on lined paper and then typed it out on an ancient portable typewriter my mother managed to buy me. My family thought I was crazy spending so much time typing away at something that probably would have no success at all. My father worried that I would get round shouldered writing.
I had no success, but that wasn’t the real point. The act of writing, inventing characters and situations, was something so wonderful, even now I can’t describe it. I wrote into my twenties and thirties. My one mentor thought I had talent, but that I had nothing to say. And as I think back on it, that was absolutely true. But it went deeper than that. In order to be a successful writer, you have to bare your soul. And more importantly, you have to bare the soul of those you love, because it is in them that your experience of life is found. Tom Wolf was not the first to infuriate his family by writing about them and he will not be the last. The book he produced, Look Homeward Angle, is a great book. I had a family story to tell, with interesting characters and events, but I could not tell that story. I could never hurt those I loved. And since my family was my only inspiration, I had no great social agenda, and knew little of the greater world, my novels were shallow and mostly pointless. I had talent, but nothing if interest to say.
And, of course, in those days, everything I wrote was rejected. And as time went on, and the novels grew farther apart, I didn’t even bother sending them to publishers. I think I sent the first chapter of the first version of Good People, the book I now have up on Amazon, to a literary agent. When I think back on it, the whole incident was ridiculous. He told me the first chapter was very polished for a first time writer and that he would look at the rest of it if I paid him. So much for that. I don’t think I sent Want, which will soon by up on Amazon, to anyone.
I eventually gave up. I became a software engineer and put my writing talent into Cobol and C and Java. I loved writing code and I think I was good at it. They paid me well.
It wasn’t until I was in my late sixties that I began to think that the world that a grew up in - a really poor dairy farm - and the people I knew as a boy would be totally lost to my grandchildren. The world they will live in, the children of very well educated professionals and and even college professors, would have nothing in common with the factory workers and farmers they came from. So I decided to write a memoir to tell my grandchildren who and where they came from. Not only that, I would print it and bind it myself.
When I looked up my family tree I found that my mother’s family came to America from England within twenty years of the Pilgrims. One of my direct ancestors died fighting in King Philip’s war before the Revolution. Others fought in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. One great great uncle was even a member of Congress. The heart of the memoir, of course, was the farm I grew up on, a worn out affair that no amount of work could have saved.
The only reason I mention this is because writing the memoir really stirred my interest in writing again. When my daughter wrote her children’s book, Turtle Soup and Tiramisu, and self published it on Amazon, the bug really hit me again. I resurrected Good People and re-wrote it, changing one of the characters completely. I then did the same for Want, which is a much longer novel and, although it has nothing to do with farming, is really a story taken in great part from the own life. It’s about a shabby hotel with great expectations.
Those two efforts only made the writing bug bore more deeply into me. I find myself now writing like a demon. I have completed a short work about a man who has a stroke, cannot talk, and watches his family fall apart at the seams, his rich son marginalizing his working class son. Think the silent majority watching as our country is turned into an oligarchy.
And I have ten chapters done on a new novel about the triumph of capitalism, which is science fiction and takes place in the far future. The triumph is not one for the masses.
I guess the real point here is that it is never too old to do something new, even if it’s something old you did a long time ago.
My Latest Rant
I need a class in economics and maybe another one in marketing. I got an email today from Amazon touting their best books of the year. They are generally in agreement with me on good books, so I took a look. It was then that my lack of understanding of economics clicked in. The book In the Garden of Beasts of Eric Larson sells for $13.89 as a hardcover. (If you buy $25 worth of books on Amazon, you get free shipping, so the possibility of getting this book for $13.89 is real) The Kindle edition is $12.99. In other words it costs the publisher 90 cents to print, ship, warehouse, and take this book back if not sold. If cars worked the same way I’d drive a Lexus. Amazon puts a little note in their book lists stating that the Kindle price is demanded by the publisher. There are only two marketing explanations to the Kindle pricing: 1) the book is not selling well and the publisher has overstocked and wants to unload them. The fact that the book is on the best seller list diminishes this idea, and 2) the publisher wants to dissuade people from buying the kindle edition. What the publishers have not figured out is that they can made a ton of money with very little effort selling eBooks. But then again, I suppose the buggy whip makers did everything they could to discourage the Model T.
On another note, I had a long discussion with my son, Steve, last night about the state of the American novel. The discussion started when we both commented that the most interesting novels these days are written by Indians. (He just read the White Tiger - great book). His comment was that the American novel is dead. And I think I have to agree with him. American novels I’ve read recently have been awful. I’m talking about well received, highly praised works like A Visit From The Good Squad. Others I could mention are Tinkers, Await Your Reply, Cloud Atlas, West of Here. What’s wrong with them? Well, they are praised for being well written, and they are. But they are also very boring, confusing, pointless, or lacking in characters that seem valid. Why is this?
Well, Steve thinks the point is that it’s not writing that’s changed. It’s America that’s changed. The basic story lines that have maintained English and American novels for a couple hundred years have changed. And I think he’s right. In my view they have centered on Marriage (boy meets girl, struggles, overcomes opposition, and marries to live happily ever after), class struggles (think of The Jungle, etc), the quest (think of Huck Finn and On The Road), and the struggle to overcome obstacles to succeed (Horatio Alger and any of the pioneer novels). Ok, I will admit that my list can be torn apart any number of ways and probably leaves out many more valid themes, but I am after all just a reader and not an expert in any of this.
But the point I’m trying to make here is that each of these themes for the American novel are no longer valid. Happily ever after is laughable with a divorce rate of almost one in two and premarital sex very much the norm. Almost every American novel I’ve read in the last five years treats relationships as a mine field. Love seems to have lost its way. How many times can you read about unhappy couples without wanting to scream? It’s like listening to a friend who never talks of anything but the slug she’s married to. The pioneer novel is dead because the west had been won and pretty much destroyed by the victory. The quest has lost its way as well because the only interesting searches today are in science and a novel about finding a use for nano tubes would hardly be a page turner. The struggle to succeed has failed because of scale. The boy who struggles to open his own shop pales beside the hedge fund manager who gets multi-million dollar bonuses. And how many times can we read about sleazy traders without thinking we have no chance against the manipulators of the world. Class struggle still exists and may be more relevant today with the huge disparity between the super rich and the middle class, but it will take a genius to give us a great novel on this.
I still think there is great talent out there and maybe the great American novel can still be written. But we need new themes to capture who we are. And mostly were have to stop sounding like that whining friend.
Monday, October 10, 2011
Back Again
I have been neglecting my blog.
Part of the reason is that I have been very busy, but the major reason is that I have been conflicted over just what my blog should be about. It was always geared toward eBooks, and it will remain that way, but I want to enlarge the scope of what I'm interested in. At one point I said I would use the blog to review eBoooks. The problem with that is I can't read fast enough to maintain a recurring blog. And to say that I liked a book or thought it terrible is not enough. I think I would like to go more deeply into the process of writing as applied to eBooks.
What do I mean by that? Well, since my last blog I've read two eBooks that I believe have actually made it to the best seller list. One was The Mill River Recluse by Darcie Chan and the other The Girl in the Lighthouse by Roxane Tepfer Sanford. I rather liked both of them, but they both could have been better. The Darcie Chan book was more finished, a tighter book, but like the Sanford book, it could have been improved. What both books suffered from was a lack of content editing.
There are two parts to editing a book. First and simplest is copy editing. For some crazy reason I always get lose and loose mixed up and never see it in my own writing. This is where a copy editor comes in. Make sure the commas are correct, the typos removed, etc. Although this seems a never ending job, it is really the easiest of the two editing tasks. The more difficult one is content editing. Both books lacked this, even though they have both been well received in the self publishing world. One reason for this is we don't have a very discerning audience out there, and part of it is because content editing is hard.
I entered my review of The Girl in The Lighthouse on Goodreads and commented that the book was too long and drawn out in it's second half. I think I said something along the lines of "I get it already, move on." Oddly enough the author commented back to me that she appreciated my review because no one had ever reviewed her work in that way. I've gone back and looked at the reviews of the book and find they all praised it; no one commented on the drawn out content. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think the book could have been much, much better if it had been edited down, made tighter.
And here, I think, is the problem with self-published books. They are not edited strongly enough for content. This is what a publishing house does for you. The self publishing author has a loved-one read it, or a sympathetic friend. Really, is your mother going to tell you the scenes between Mary and John go on for fifty pages too long? Of course not.
Traditionally, writers have sought out other writers as critics. It's not an accident that the Bloomsbury Group produced so many good books. This is great if you happen to be an upper-crust Brit, live in Paris in the twenties, or New York at any time. It's difficult if you live in a small town in Nebraska and everyone you know thinks you're a dreamer because you want to write. And if you do manage to find a group of other writers near you, you may find that while you want to write dark literary fiction, they all want to write romance novels. It should be possible on the web to form communities of writers with like interests who can read each other's work. I think this is what the self publishing world needs.
Let's not be naive. Most of the self-published authors we find on Amazon or wherever, are there because the have been rejected by the publishing houses. Rejection in any form is had to take; receiving a rejection notice with your name spelled wrong after working for two years on a book you love is devastating. Believe me, I know.
I am probably the least successful writer working in America today. I began writing when I was thirteen. I started with my autobiography. When I was fifteen/sixteen I wrote my first novel. I have written, I think, eleven novels in all since and innumerable short stories. I am now seventy-one years old and have never been published- not once - until now. One of my old novels is now going up on Amazon (Good People), another is in the works, and I am working on a new story. You could take from this the idea that I must be a terrible writer. I don't think so. In all those years I've never stopped reading, which is essential for an aspiring writer. I have read thousands of books. And I think I can tell a good book for a bad one. And in my writing I have learned to cut, and cut again.
I believe in the this new world of books. I think the publishing industry is in the midst of a revolution they have no idea is coming. All the self publishing world needs is a blockbuster and everything will be thrown into turmoil. You can, of course, read from this that I hold a bitterness against the publishing industry. I don't think that's true. I have had a very successful life, have enjoyed all the books I've written, and have no regrets at all. If I were somehow in my dotage to write a masterpiece praised by the world, I would become the new J.D. Salinger and hide from it all. The old publishing industry, after all, gave me all the wonderful books I've read in my life. I just think their time is coming to an end.
But the new world of books, the self published world, needs a lot of work.
What I would really like to do is get the thousands of writers out there, who toil away on their PCs with stories they love, to somehow band together and help one another. How you do this is beyond me. But it can be done and a great book will come out of it.
Part of the reason is that I have been very busy, but the major reason is that I have been conflicted over just what my blog should be about. It was always geared toward eBooks, and it will remain that way, but I want to enlarge the scope of what I'm interested in. At one point I said I would use the blog to review eBoooks. The problem with that is I can't read fast enough to maintain a recurring blog. And to say that I liked a book or thought it terrible is not enough. I think I would like to go more deeply into the process of writing as applied to eBooks.
What do I mean by that? Well, since my last blog I've read two eBooks that I believe have actually made it to the best seller list. One was The Mill River Recluse by Darcie Chan and the other The Girl in the Lighthouse by Roxane Tepfer Sanford. I rather liked both of them, but they both could have been better. The Darcie Chan book was more finished, a tighter book, but like the Sanford book, it could have been improved. What both books suffered from was a lack of content editing.
There are two parts to editing a book. First and simplest is copy editing. For some crazy reason I always get lose and loose mixed up and never see it in my own writing. This is where a copy editor comes in. Make sure the commas are correct, the typos removed, etc. Although this seems a never ending job, it is really the easiest of the two editing tasks. The more difficult one is content editing. Both books lacked this, even though they have both been well received in the self publishing world. One reason for this is we don't have a very discerning audience out there, and part of it is because content editing is hard.
I entered my review of The Girl in The Lighthouse on Goodreads and commented that the book was too long and drawn out in it's second half. I think I said something along the lines of "I get it already, move on." Oddly enough the author commented back to me that she appreciated my review because no one had ever reviewed her work in that way. I've gone back and looked at the reviews of the book and find they all praised it; no one commented on the drawn out content. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think the book could have been much, much better if it had been edited down, made tighter.
And here, I think, is the problem with self-published books. They are not edited strongly enough for content. This is what a publishing house does for you. The self publishing author has a loved-one read it, or a sympathetic friend. Really, is your mother going to tell you the scenes between Mary and John go on for fifty pages too long? Of course not.
Traditionally, writers have sought out other writers as critics. It's not an accident that the Bloomsbury Group produced so many good books. This is great if you happen to be an upper-crust Brit, live in Paris in the twenties, or New York at any time. It's difficult if you live in a small town in Nebraska and everyone you know thinks you're a dreamer because you want to write. And if you do manage to find a group of other writers near you, you may find that while you want to write dark literary fiction, they all want to write romance novels. It should be possible on the web to form communities of writers with like interests who can read each other's work. I think this is what the self publishing world needs.
Let's not be naive. Most of the self-published authors we find on Amazon or wherever, are there because the have been rejected by the publishing houses. Rejection in any form is had to take; receiving a rejection notice with your name spelled wrong after working for two years on a book you love is devastating. Believe me, I know.
I am probably the least successful writer working in America today. I began writing when I was thirteen. I started with my autobiography. When I was fifteen/sixteen I wrote my first novel. I have written, I think, eleven novels in all since and innumerable short stories. I am now seventy-one years old and have never been published- not once - until now. One of my old novels is now going up on Amazon (Good People), another is in the works, and I am working on a new story. You could take from this the idea that I must be a terrible writer. I don't think so. In all those years I've never stopped reading, which is essential for an aspiring writer. I have read thousands of books. And I think I can tell a good book for a bad one. And in my writing I have learned to cut, and cut again.
I believe in the this new world of books. I think the publishing industry is in the midst of a revolution they have no idea is coming. All the self publishing world needs is a blockbuster and everything will be thrown into turmoil. You can, of course, read from this that I hold a bitterness against the publishing industry. I don't think that's true. I have had a very successful life, have enjoyed all the books I've written, and have no regrets at all. If I were somehow in my dotage to write a masterpiece praised by the world, I would become the new J.D. Salinger and hide from it all. The old publishing industry, after all, gave me all the wonderful books I've read in my life. I just think their time is coming to an end.
But the new world of books, the self published world, needs a lot of work.
What I would really like to do is get the thousands of writers out there, who toil away on their PCs with stories they love, to somehow band together and help one another. How you do this is beyond me. But it can be done and a great book will come out of it.
Friday, July 22, 2011
No Stone Unturned
As I stated in an earlier blog, my newest project is to read self published authors to see just what’s out there. I am a huge Kindle fan. I have owned a Kindle since the device was introduced. I started with a Kindle for two reasons. One, I only read hardbound books and they were getting very expensive - even when you buy them on discount, and, Two, I was running out of bookshelf space. The Kindle solved both problems. You can adjust the type size on a Kindle, which makes it easier to read for an old man like me, and it has the solid feel of a hardbound. And of course, the prices was right at $9.99 for every book on the best seller lists. The Kindle is still a very comfortable way to read, so that hasn’t changed. But the $9.99 price tag is going by the wayside. The average price of a best seller now is $12.99. And often it is more.
There is no way an electronic book should cost that much. So I’ve decided to look elsewhere for books. But that brings up the question of just what it is I read - or what anybody reads, for that matter. If we stick with fiction to make the discussion simpler, there are two ways to go. We can read the classics. Or we can read current fiction. The classics on the Kindle are generally very reasonably priced. I’ve mentioned before that I bought Henry James’ eight most popular novels in one file for ninety-nine cents. It’s current fiction that presents the problem. The prices just keep going up.
I have no problem buying a copy of Dickens’s Bleak House in hardbound because I know what I’m getting. For a number of years I belonged to the Folio Society where the books are astronomically expensive. But then again it was always for a known quality. My Trollope collection will be passed on to future generations (I hope). When it come to the latest hot book on the best seller charts it’s a different matter completely. Spending twenty dollars or so for a dud insults my frugal Yankee sensibilities. That’s one of the main reason I bought a Kindle. A nine ninety-nine dud is not that painful. But now the prices are rising and I’m back to where I started from.
Which brings me back to my latest project. The internet contains an explosion of self published books. Hearing about the best of them is the only problem. But that is changing. I am convinced that there are truly great books being self published. And Amazon, who has done so much to wake up a sleeping publishing industry, is in the middle of it. They now have a project called AmazonEncore, which apparently republishes the best of the self published books. And the Kindle prices for them are a couple of bucks!
Anyway, I’m getting off track. To start my project I bought for ninety-nine cents a book by John Locke called Follow The Stones. John Locke, if you will recall, is a self published author who has sold one million copies of his books on Amazon. Follow The Stones is his latest. It’s a western, the story of an ex-gunslinger who is charged with escorting a number of prostitutes and one mail order bride from Rolla, Missouri, to Newton, Kansas, in 1856.
The questions are:
Did I like it? Yes.
Is it well written? Yes.
Is it worth reading? Probably. It’s a great plane novel, something to pass the time with while waiting.
Is it Literature? No.
Which leads me to the question of what raises a book from a good airport read to a read to remember? If I were teaching a class in writing, I think I would use this book as a guide on how to tell the difference.
First of all, the characters are well defined, but there is no depth to them. What you see is what they are. And for the most part they are stereotypes. There is no attempt to tell in depth where these people came from, what made them what they are, or how they view life.
And most of the writing is dialog. What they say to each other carries the story along, with only a needed description of the landscape every now and then to fill in where they happen to be.
It is also filled with clichés. In a western with an ex-gunfighter in the lead role, you must have a young moron who wants to take him on and a sheriff who wants him out of town. And you must have an improbable sex scene. I think this book has the most improbable one I’ve ever read.
The story, on the other hand, is interesting and the history lesson it contains of how the west was really won is commendable.
Oddly enough, I could probably point out books that go too far the other way in depth of character, lack of dialog, and avoidance of clichés, and end up being boring. This book is not boring.
John Locke has a method that he uses and I certainly can’t fault it. He has, after all, sold a huge number of books. He has whetted my appetite and made me want to continue my project.
I am convinced that the next War And Peace will be a self published book from somebody we never heard of.
There is no way an electronic book should cost that much. So I’ve decided to look elsewhere for books. But that brings up the question of just what it is I read - or what anybody reads, for that matter. If we stick with fiction to make the discussion simpler, there are two ways to go. We can read the classics. Or we can read current fiction. The classics on the Kindle are generally very reasonably priced. I’ve mentioned before that I bought Henry James’ eight most popular novels in one file for ninety-nine cents. It’s current fiction that presents the problem. The prices just keep going up.
I have no problem buying a copy of Dickens’s Bleak House in hardbound because I know what I’m getting. For a number of years I belonged to the Folio Society where the books are astronomically expensive. But then again it was always for a known quality. My Trollope collection will be passed on to future generations (I hope). When it come to the latest hot book on the best seller charts it’s a different matter completely. Spending twenty dollars or so for a dud insults my frugal Yankee sensibilities. That’s one of the main reason I bought a Kindle. A nine ninety-nine dud is not that painful. But now the prices are rising and I’m back to where I started from.
Which brings me back to my latest project. The internet contains an explosion of self published books. Hearing about the best of them is the only problem. But that is changing. I am convinced that there are truly great books being self published. And Amazon, who has done so much to wake up a sleeping publishing industry, is in the middle of it. They now have a project called AmazonEncore, which apparently republishes the best of the self published books. And the Kindle prices for them are a couple of bucks!
Anyway, I’m getting off track. To start my project I bought for ninety-nine cents a book by John Locke called Follow The Stones. John Locke, if you will recall, is a self published author who has sold one million copies of his books on Amazon. Follow The Stones is his latest. It’s a western, the story of an ex-gunslinger who is charged with escorting a number of prostitutes and one mail order bride from Rolla, Missouri, to Newton, Kansas, in 1856.
The questions are:
Did I like it? Yes.
Is it well written? Yes.
Is it worth reading? Probably. It’s a great plane novel, something to pass the time with while waiting.
Is it Literature? No.
Which leads me to the question of what raises a book from a good airport read to a read to remember? If I were teaching a class in writing, I think I would use this book as a guide on how to tell the difference.
First of all, the characters are well defined, but there is no depth to them. What you see is what they are. And for the most part they are stereotypes. There is no attempt to tell in depth where these people came from, what made them what they are, or how they view life.
And most of the writing is dialog. What they say to each other carries the story along, with only a needed description of the landscape every now and then to fill in where they happen to be.
It is also filled with clichés. In a western with an ex-gunfighter in the lead role, you must have a young moron who wants to take him on and a sheriff who wants him out of town. And you must have an improbable sex scene. I think this book has the most improbable one I’ve ever read.
The story, on the other hand, is interesting and the history lesson it contains of how the west was really won is commendable.
Oddly enough, I could probably point out books that go too far the other way in depth of character, lack of dialog, and avoidance of clichés, and end up being boring. This book is not boring.
John Locke has a method that he uses and I certainly can’t fault it. He has, after all, sold a huge number of books. He has whetted my appetite and made me want to continue my project.
I am convinced that the next War And Peace will be a self published book from somebody we never heard of.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
More Ranting
I need a class in economics and maybe another one in marketing. I got an email today from Amazon touting their best books of the year. They are generally in agreement with me on good books, so I took a look. It was then that my lack of understanding of economics clicked in. The book In the Garden of Beasts of Eric Larson sells for $13.89 as a hardcover. (If you buy $25 worth of books on Amazon, you get free shipping, so the possibility of getting this book for $13.89 is real) The Kindle edition is $12.99. In other words it costs the publisher 90 cents to print, ship, warehouse, and take this book back if not sold. If cars worked the same way I’d drive a Lexus. Amazon puts a little note in their book lists stating that the Kindle price is demanded by the publisher. There are only two marketing explanations to the publisher demanded Kindle pricing: 1) the book is not selling well and the publisher has overstocked and wants to unload them. The fact that the book is on the best seller list diminishes this idea, and 2) the publisher wants to dissuade people from buying the kindle edition. What the publishers have not figured out is that they can make a ton of money with very little effort selling eBooks. But then again, I suppose the buggy whip makers did everything they could to discourage the Model T.
On another note, I had a long discussion with my son, Steve, last night about the state of the American novel. The discussion started when we both commented that the most interesting novels these days are written by Indians. (He just read White Tiger - great book). His comment was that the American novel is dead. And I think I have to agree with him. American novels I’ve read recently have been awful. I’m talking about well received, highly praised works like A Visit From The Good Squad. Others I could mention are Tinkers, Await Your Reply, Cloud Atlas, West of Here. What’s wrong with them? Well, they are praised for being well written, and they are. But they are also usually boring, confusing, pointless, or lacking in characters that seem valid. Why is this?
Well, Steve thinks the point is that it’s not writing that’s changed. It’s America that’s changed. The basic story lines that have maintained English and American novels for a couple hundred years have changed. And I think he’s right. In my view the traditional themes have centered on Marriage (boy meets girl, struggles, overcomes opposition, and marries to live happily ever after), class struggles (think of The Jungle, etc), the quest (think of Huck Finn and On The Road), and the struggle to overcome obstacles to succeed (Horatio Alger and any of the pioneer novels). Okay, I will admit that my list can be torn apart any number of ways and probably leaves out many more valid themes, but I am after all just a reader and not an expert in any of this.
But the point I’m trying to make here is that each of these themes for the American novel are no longer valid. Happily ever after is laughable with a divorce rate of almost one in two and premarital sex very much the norm. Almost every American novel I’ve read in the last five years treats relationships as a mine field. Love seems to have lost its way. How many times can you read about unhappy couples without wanting to scream? It’s like listening to a friend who never stops complaining of the slug she’s married to. The pioneer novel is dead because the west has been won and pretty much destroyed by the victory. The quest has lost its way as well because the only interesting searches today are in science and a novel about finding a use for nano tubes would hardly be a page turner. The quest in almost all cases now has become a search for a murderer. The struggle to succeed has failed because of scale. The boy who struggles to open his own shop pales beside the hedge fund manager who gets multi-million dollar bonuses. And how many times can we read about sleazy traders without thinking we have no chance against the manipulators of the world. Class struggle still exists and may be more relevant today with the huge disparity between the super rich and the middle class, but it will take a genius to give us a great novel on this.
I still think there is great talent out there and maybe the great American novel can still be written. But we need new themes to capture who we are. And mostly we have to stop sounding like that whining friend.
On another note, I had a long discussion with my son, Steve, last night about the state of the American novel. The discussion started when we both commented that the most interesting novels these days are written by Indians. (He just read White Tiger - great book). His comment was that the American novel is dead. And I think I have to agree with him. American novels I’ve read recently have been awful. I’m talking about well received, highly praised works like A Visit From The Good Squad. Others I could mention are Tinkers, Await Your Reply, Cloud Atlas, West of Here. What’s wrong with them? Well, they are praised for being well written, and they are. But they are also usually boring, confusing, pointless, or lacking in characters that seem valid. Why is this?
Well, Steve thinks the point is that it’s not writing that’s changed. It’s America that’s changed. The basic story lines that have maintained English and American novels for a couple hundred years have changed. And I think he’s right. In my view the traditional themes have centered on Marriage (boy meets girl, struggles, overcomes opposition, and marries to live happily ever after), class struggles (think of The Jungle, etc), the quest (think of Huck Finn and On The Road), and the struggle to overcome obstacles to succeed (Horatio Alger and any of the pioneer novels). Okay, I will admit that my list can be torn apart any number of ways and probably leaves out many more valid themes, but I am after all just a reader and not an expert in any of this.
But the point I’m trying to make here is that each of these themes for the American novel are no longer valid. Happily ever after is laughable with a divorce rate of almost one in two and premarital sex very much the norm. Almost every American novel I’ve read in the last five years treats relationships as a mine field. Love seems to have lost its way. How many times can you read about unhappy couples without wanting to scream? It’s like listening to a friend who never stops complaining of the slug she’s married to. The pioneer novel is dead because the west has been won and pretty much destroyed by the victory. The quest has lost its way as well because the only interesting searches today are in science and a novel about finding a use for nano tubes would hardly be a page turner. The quest in almost all cases now has become a search for a murderer. The struggle to succeed has failed because of scale. The boy who struggles to open his own shop pales beside the hedge fund manager who gets multi-million dollar bonuses. And how many times can we read about sleazy traders without thinking we have no chance against the manipulators of the world. Class struggle still exists and may be more relevant today with the huge disparity between the super rich and the middle class, but it will take a genius to give us a great novel on this.
I still think there is great talent out there and maybe the great American novel can still be written. But we need new themes to capture who we are. And mostly we have to stop sounding like that whining friend.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Book reviews
I would like to contrast two novels I’ve recently read, A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan and Old Town by Lin Zhe. I think before I talk about what I take from the two novels and what I think it tells me about America and the world I should describe and review the two books.
A Visit from the Good Squad has won all sorts of awards and has received accolades from the critics. Being the old curmudgeon I am, I didn’t like it. Why? The book is mostly about characters associated with the music industry. It spans the years from the eighties to the present. One of my complaints is with the structure of the book. To say that it jumps around in telling the story of these people is to put it mildly. The action moves between the present and the past, morphs from one set of characters to another, and adds new characters at will. Characters who fit one mold in scene A may fit a completely different one in scene B. This makes it quite difficult to follow who’s who. In fact, toward the end of the book there’s a scene that hinges on a man who remembers going to a girl’s apartment years ago. I had trouble figuring out who he was talking about until I remembered a short scene early in the book that described the situation. By then the characters had changed so much it was difficult to place them in the earlier scene.
I know that in a novel the characters should change over time. But the reader should feel the change taking place through the span of the story. In the Goon Squad the changes take place abruptly. The pretty, wild girl on page X is an unhappy wreck on page Y. Wait a minute, how did that happen? I didn’t see it coming.
My other complaint with the novel is that none of the characters moved me. Again in a novel, or any story for that matter, you should have a reaction to the characters. If you like a particular character or hate him, feel pity or sympathy or rage, the author had accomplished his or her goal. Rhett Butler is a despicable character in many way, but you love him. Scarlett is even worse, but you have sympathy for her. I had none of those reactions in this book. I took what the author said about the many characters at face value and that was it, even though many of the characters were despicable in their own way.
The lives depicted in the book were dreadful for the most part. People use each other, take drugs, divorce, cheat, lie. No one seems to get along with or understand their children. When you have money you are successful, when the money goes you are a failure. Anything that gets money is legitimate, even supporting mass murderers. When things go bad turn to drugs. When things are good turn to drugs. Sex is some sort of a contest. Love had nothing to do with it.
Is America that depressing? Maybe it is in the circles she’s describing. Maybe it is, period.
Now, to be fair, the writing is very good. The story, if you can follow it, moves along at a nice clip. The style reminded me of what you see in Wired or Rolling Stone.
I have absolutely no idea where the title came from or what it has to do with the story.
Old Town is in many ways a very similar book. Since Old Town is about China in the last eighty years or so, the comparison may seem a stretch. The similarities are quite prevalent however. The books jumps between the past and the present, and from one period back to another in time. There are a large number of characters who have ups and downs of fortune. The book describes the periods before, during, and after the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Within a few pages you might have a character described as a baby, and teenager, and an adult, not necessarily in that order. There are characters who turn to alcohol when things go well and also when things go poorly.
Unfortunately, the writing lacks the poetry that might have been present in the original version, because some of it is quite bad. The book was an enormous hit in China and was made into a TV series that has broken all records from what I hear.
I liked this book very much. Why? Well, for most of the reasons I did not like the Good Squad. I did engage with the characters. And I did seem them grow and change over time. And I saw the point of the book, which I didn’t do in the other book. Enormous change has taken place in China, and almost all of it for the better, however repressive the government. But in all that change something of China’s soul has been lost.
And this is where the comparison of the two books tells me something of what is going on in our country. In the Good Squad there is nothing lost, because there is nothing to loose. There are many unhappy people in Old Town, but the possibility of being happy still exists and the characters believe that. The Goons do not believe in the possibility of being happy, apart from the fact that more money might make you feel better. Love will not, children will not, work will not.
Maybe we have lost far more of our soul than China has.
A Visit from the Good Squad has won all sorts of awards and has received accolades from the critics. Being the old curmudgeon I am, I didn’t like it. Why? The book is mostly about characters associated with the music industry. It spans the years from the eighties to the present. One of my complaints is with the structure of the book. To say that it jumps around in telling the story of these people is to put it mildly. The action moves between the present and the past, morphs from one set of characters to another, and adds new characters at will. Characters who fit one mold in scene A may fit a completely different one in scene B. This makes it quite difficult to follow who’s who. In fact, toward the end of the book there’s a scene that hinges on a man who remembers going to a girl’s apartment years ago. I had trouble figuring out who he was talking about until I remembered a short scene early in the book that described the situation. By then the characters had changed so much it was difficult to place them in the earlier scene.
I know that in a novel the characters should change over time. But the reader should feel the change taking place through the span of the story. In the Goon Squad the changes take place abruptly. The pretty, wild girl on page X is an unhappy wreck on page Y. Wait a minute, how did that happen? I didn’t see it coming.
My other complaint with the novel is that none of the characters moved me. Again in a novel, or any story for that matter, you should have a reaction to the characters. If you like a particular character or hate him, feel pity or sympathy or rage, the author had accomplished his or her goal. Rhett Butler is a despicable character in many way, but you love him. Scarlett is even worse, but you have sympathy for her. I had none of those reactions in this book. I took what the author said about the many characters at face value and that was it, even though many of the characters were despicable in their own way.
The lives depicted in the book were dreadful for the most part. People use each other, take drugs, divorce, cheat, lie. No one seems to get along with or understand their children. When you have money you are successful, when the money goes you are a failure. Anything that gets money is legitimate, even supporting mass murderers. When things go bad turn to drugs. When things are good turn to drugs. Sex is some sort of a contest. Love had nothing to do with it.
Is America that depressing? Maybe it is in the circles she’s describing. Maybe it is, period.
Now, to be fair, the writing is very good. The story, if you can follow it, moves along at a nice clip. The style reminded me of what you see in Wired or Rolling Stone.
I have absolutely no idea where the title came from or what it has to do with the story.
Old Town is in many ways a very similar book. Since Old Town is about China in the last eighty years or so, the comparison may seem a stretch. The similarities are quite prevalent however. The books jumps between the past and the present, and from one period back to another in time. There are a large number of characters who have ups and downs of fortune. The book describes the periods before, during, and after the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Within a few pages you might have a character described as a baby, and teenager, and an adult, not necessarily in that order. There are characters who turn to alcohol when things go well and also when things go poorly.
Unfortunately, the writing lacks the poetry that might have been present in the original version, because some of it is quite bad. The book was an enormous hit in China and was made into a TV series that has broken all records from what I hear.
I liked this book very much. Why? Well, for most of the reasons I did not like the Good Squad. I did engage with the characters. And I did seem them grow and change over time. And I saw the point of the book, which I didn’t do in the other book. Enormous change has taken place in China, and almost all of it for the better, however repressive the government. But in all that change something of China’s soul has been lost.
And this is where the comparison of the two books tells me something of what is going on in our country. In the Good Squad there is nothing lost, because there is nothing to loose. There are many unhappy people in Old Town, but the possibility of being happy still exists and the characters believe that. The Goons do not believe in the possibility of being happy, apart from the fact that more money might make you feel better. Love will not, children will not, work will not.
Maybe we have lost far more of our soul than China has.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
The Kindle and self publishing
Some interesting information I’ve picked up from Amazon in the last few days…
Amazon now sells more Kindle books than hardcover and paperbacks combined. For every one hundred h/p they sell they sell one hundred and five Kindle copies. So much for the people who said eBooks would never catch on.
The other item from the big A is that they now have their first million seller self published author. John Locke, the novelist not the philosopher, has sold over a million of his books on Amazon. I’ve not read any of his books yet. I plan to. His Kindle versions sell for 99 cents each, which certainly is a good bargain. Most of his covers show very leggy girls from the waste down, which either indicates his books are filled with leggy girls or he's a leg man. I will try one and report back.
Speaking of bargains, I bought eight of the most famous Henry James novels in a single file for the Kindle for 99 cents. The file is very well done as far as the text goes. You certainly can't beat the price.
Which brings me to pricing of Kindle books. There's a new trend from publishers where the books seem to be priced just a few dollars below the discounted price of a hardbound. For example, the novel Swamplandia by Karen Russell is bookstore priced at $24.95. Amazon discounts the hardbound to $13.72. The Kindle price is $12.99. To make it even more ridiculous the paperback price is $10.17. Will someone explain to me how the Kindle price can be higher than the paperback? On the Kindle there is no printing cost, no shipping cost, no warehouse cost, no return cost. Why do they think they should make more money on a Kindle than on any other distribution form? The truth can be found in only one of two explanations: The publishers are utterly stupid OR they are trying desperately to hang on to an outdated model.
Let me look a little more closely at the self published books. At least the price is right.
Amazon now sells more Kindle books than hardcover and paperbacks combined. For every one hundred h/p they sell they sell one hundred and five Kindle copies. So much for the people who said eBooks would never catch on.
The other item from the big A is that they now have their first million seller self published author. John Locke, the novelist not the philosopher, has sold over a million of his books on Amazon. I’ve not read any of his books yet. I plan to. His Kindle versions sell for 99 cents each, which certainly is a good bargain. Most of his covers show very leggy girls from the waste down, which either indicates his books are filled with leggy girls or he's a leg man. I will try one and report back.
Speaking of bargains, I bought eight of the most famous Henry James novels in a single file for the Kindle for 99 cents. The file is very well done as far as the text goes. You certainly can't beat the price.
Which brings me to pricing of Kindle books. There's a new trend from publishers where the books seem to be priced just a few dollars below the discounted price of a hardbound. For example, the novel Swamplandia by Karen Russell is bookstore priced at $24.95. Amazon discounts the hardbound to $13.72. The Kindle price is $12.99. To make it even more ridiculous the paperback price is $10.17. Will someone explain to me how the Kindle price can be higher than the paperback? On the Kindle there is no printing cost, no shipping cost, no warehouse cost, no return cost. Why do they think they should make more money on a Kindle than on any other distribution form? The truth can be found in only one of two explanations: The publishers are utterly stupid OR they are trying desperately to hang on to an outdated model.
Let me look a little more closely at the self published books. At least the price is right.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Introduction
This is the first post to my very first blog.
Why bother?
Well, I have been an avid reader my whole life and for a good part of my life I have had a desire to be a writer. I am now seventy years old and have managed to gather a few opinions on the world of books. I think I would like to share what I have learned over the years. This won't be a place where I rant about how things aren't the way they used to be, how the good old days are long past, and how young people just don't have the brains to know a good book when they see one the way WE did in my day. Rather this will be a call for change. I think the publishing industry has its head in the sand, or maybe in a darker place, and that everything we know about books is changing. This change is snowballing the publishing industry toward oblivion. And it's because if this, the web.
I am a die hard Kindle fan. I am now on my second Kindle, a DX, and never touch a traditionally bound book if I can help it. And I am now a huge proponent of the self published book. This blog will be part book review, part soap box, and part clarion call for change.
Some history is in order. When I was sixteen I wrote my first novel. In those days you typed out the book on a device called a typewriter (a now extinct machine - the last factory making them closed in India this year). When the book was typed you sent it off to a publisher and waited. Usually the book would return with a thump on your doorstep. Inside would be a terse note saying the work did not fit their plans. A line that indicated they actually read it was a jolt of encouragement. You then sent it to the next publisher and waited.
Oddly enough, my book was picked up by a publisher and set for publication. Thinking back on it, the book was dreadful and why it was picked up is beyond me, but that has nothing to do with what I'm trying to relate. Once it was accepted, an editor was assigned to you and the process of turning the book from a jumble of words to a real novel began. I'm sure every editor saw himself as Maxwell Perkins. I became very good friends with my editor. His suggestions were very helpful.
As it turned out my book was never published. I did get some money for it, but that's a different story. I'm talking here about the process.
Jump ahead fifty some odd years to a book my daughter recently wrote. She's a dance teacher and wrote a children's book for fourth graders. She had a captive focus group who read the work as it was being written, and she ended up with a book kids really liked. What was the process she had to follow to get it published? Well, publishers no longer read books. Now you have to have an agent. If an agent likes the work, they want you to hire an editor to read it. In Anne's case, the editor said the book was fine, which indicates he never read it because it had all sorts of spelling errors and duplicate words. Spell checkers work only up to a point. Anyway, it went back to the agent ready to go. And then nothing happened. Nothing.
So Anne had another idea. Why not try self publishing? I my day (i.e. fifty years ago) a self published book meant you were a looser. It meant you actually paid to have the book printed. And the price was not cheap. As I remember the minimum cost in 1956 was about three thousand dollars. Anne, on the other hand, went to CreateSpace, which is an Amazon company. The family got together to edit the book and get rid of the embarrassing misspellings, etc. and Anne put it up on the web for free. Free. It then went on Amazon as a printed book. For free. The book is TURTLE SOUP AND TIRAMISU by A.E. Ramsay and sells for $7.99. She's in the process of setting it up as an eBook which will go to both the Kindle and the Nook. If she wants copies for herself she can order them for $2.50 each. It's printed on demand, so there is no inventory. The book now can be found in a number of local book stores, where it has sold, and has been reviewed on Goodreads.
Let me think about this. Why would any author with a brain in his head not publish this way? The publishers have become surrogate printers and apparently add no value to the process beyond the fact that they can warehouse books, ship them to stores, and take them back when they don't sell.
In this blog I will discuss this whole process even further and try to review self published books (and others). I will also rant about eBooks, which I think are the real future of publishing.
Why bother?
Well, I have been an avid reader my whole life and for a good part of my life I have had a desire to be a writer. I am now seventy years old and have managed to gather a few opinions on the world of books. I think I would like to share what I have learned over the years. This won't be a place where I rant about how things aren't the way they used to be, how the good old days are long past, and how young people just don't have the brains to know a good book when they see one the way WE did in my day. Rather this will be a call for change. I think the publishing industry has its head in the sand, or maybe in a darker place, and that everything we know about books is changing. This change is snowballing the publishing industry toward oblivion. And it's because if this, the web.
I am a die hard Kindle fan. I am now on my second Kindle, a DX, and never touch a traditionally bound book if I can help it. And I am now a huge proponent of the self published book. This blog will be part book review, part soap box, and part clarion call for change.
Some history is in order. When I was sixteen I wrote my first novel. In those days you typed out the book on a device called a typewriter (a now extinct machine - the last factory making them closed in India this year). When the book was typed you sent it off to a publisher and waited. Usually the book would return with a thump on your doorstep. Inside would be a terse note saying the work did not fit their plans. A line that indicated they actually read it was a jolt of encouragement. You then sent it to the next publisher and waited.
Oddly enough, my book was picked up by a publisher and set for publication. Thinking back on it, the book was dreadful and why it was picked up is beyond me, but that has nothing to do with what I'm trying to relate. Once it was accepted, an editor was assigned to you and the process of turning the book from a jumble of words to a real novel began. I'm sure every editor saw himself as Maxwell Perkins. I became very good friends with my editor. His suggestions were very helpful.
As it turned out my book was never published. I did get some money for it, but that's a different story. I'm talking here about the process.
Jump ahead fifty some odd years to a book my daughter recently wrote. She's a dance teacher and wrote a children's book for fourth graders. She had a captive focus group who read the work as it was being written, and she ended up with a book kids really liked. What was the process she had to follow to get it published? Well, publishers no longer read books. Now you have to have an agent. If an agent likes the work, they want you to hire an editor to read it. In Anne's case, the editor said the book was fine, which indicates he never read it because it had all sorts of spelling errors and duplicate words. Spell checkers work only up to a point. Anyway, it went back to the agent ready to go. And then nothing happened. Nothing.
So Anne had another idea. Why not try self publishing? I my day (i.e. fifty years ago) a self published book meant you were a looser. It meant you actually paid to have the book printed. And the price was not cheap. As I remember the minimum cost in 1956 was about three thousand dollars. Anne, on the other hand, went to CreateSpace, which is an Amazon company. The family got together to edit the book and get rid of the embarrassing misspellings, etc. and Anne put it up on the web for free. Free. It then went on Amazon as a printed book. For free. The book is TURTLE SOUP AND TIRAMISU by A.E. Ramsay and sells for $7.99. She's in the process of setting it up as an eBook which will go to both the Kindle and the Nook. If she wants copies for herself she can order them for $2.50 each. It's printed on demand, so there is no inventory. The book now can be found in a number of local book stores, where it has sold, and has been reviewed on Goodreads.
Let me think about this. Why would any author with a brain in his head not publish this way? The publishers have become surrogate printers and apparently add no value to the process beyond the fact that they can warehouse books, ship them to stores, and take them back when they don't sell.
In this blog I will discuss this whole process even further and try to review self published books (and others). I will also rant about eBooks, which I think are the real future of publishing.
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