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.
 

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.