Category Archives: reader

2-9-14 Readers, Writers, Booklovers Unite!

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Reading, book, Budi SukmanaHugh Howey’s Rants

Everyone who buys, sells, reads, borrows, downloads, and LOVES books has a stake in moving the publishing industry into the 21st century. It won’t happen easily. Best-selling indie novelist Hugh Howey (Wool) launched a well-aimed missile of advice at the industry in his notorious 1/8 blog post, “Don’t Anyone Put Me in Charge,” in which he explains what he would do if he ran one of the big publishing houses. He followed it up with a new barrage on 1/12, “My Second Month on the Hypothetical Job.” Even if thoughts about publication are not your daily preoccupation, his ideas are lively and thought-provoking.

For Publishing: A Radical Makeover

They would radically change the culture and the economics of the book business, making it better for readers and writers in the process. Among his memorable suggestions: get out of New York to cut overhead and get some work done. From home, mostly. (He suggests Houston. Not in August.)  He wants them to invest in Print on Demand, which would keep authors’ backlists alive. And he’d devote greater attention to the midlist bulge of authors. As publishers whittle down their emphasis to manuscripts that are “sure-fire” best-sellers, reader choice withers. And these are not people you’d want standing at the rail next to you at Santa Anita or Churchill Downs.

These next three were picked up by Business Insider writer Dylan Love:

  • “Every format, as soon as the book is available.” The day a book is released, you could buy it in hardback or paper, or Kindle, Nook, or other e-reader formats. No more stringing people along with a hardcover release, and letting them lose interest while they wait for the Kindle edition.
  • “Hardbacks come with free ebooks.” This “would change my perception of e-books overnight,” Love says. At present, e-book Digital Rights Management systems restrict readers’ flexibility. Bundling a hardback with a digital file would increase it.
  • “No more advertising.” In Howey’s publishing house, the firm’s money would “go into editors [remember when books weren’t full of mistakes?] and into acquiring new authors,” not into bookstore promotions and pricy advertisements that he says “don’t sell books.”

How Publishers Shouldn’t React

Howey admirer Baldur Bjarnason has drafted a list of tips for publishing insiders to use in their inevitable responses to Howey’s assault. The last of these is to make the argument that traditional publishers are “somehow responsible for keeping the general quality of books high.” I’ll let you explore for yourself Bjarnason’s links that stick the needle in that bit of puffery. LOL.

(Thanks to Beth Wasson at Sisters in Crime’s SinC Links for pointing out Howey’s and Bjarnason’s great posts!)

Working Both Sides of the Brain

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 Saturday’s “business side of writing” workshop reiterated the familiar disheartening theme that today’s authors (especially new authors) cannot focus solely on their writing. They need to think like entrepreneurs. Extroverts make great entrepreneurs. Alas, most writers are introverts, people who love to sit alone at their computers and create worlds.

“I don’t want to do all that promotion stuff, and I don’t know how!” is the common reaction. It’s like telling a boy who loves baseball that to succeed he also needs to take up needlepoint.

One of the presenters, Bob Mayer, pointed out today’s writers must compete fiercely for discoverability. In recent years, the estimated number of books published (mostly self-published) in the United States is between 600,000 and 1,000,000 a year. It takes a lot of effort to have any book noticed. It’s one frozen drop in a Niagara of ice.

Only two hardcover fiction books have been on the current New York Times list of best-sellers for more than 16 weeks (alas, and my snobbery is showing, one is by Dan Brown, but the other is Gone Girl, a super read).  Eleven of the 15 have been on the list less than three months. Remember when books were on the best-seller list for a year or more? Those were the horse-and-buggy days of book marketing, as gone as the girl is.

Our second coach, the estimable Jen Talty, pointed out the flaw in writers’ tendency to hang out with other writers—people who don’t ask, “So when is your book coming out?” when they learn the first draft (of probably 15) is done. What she advised writers to do is to connect with readers. That takes work and as much creativity as goes into the novel itself. “My book is for everyone” isn’t a marketing strategy.

Talty and Mayer have their own publishing partners enterprise, Cool Gus Publishing, capitalizing on opportunities in both traditional and electronic publishing. A key difference between the two is that traditional publishers are most interested in initial sales. If a book doesn’t do well out of the gate, traditional publishers’ efforts to promote it go from minimal to nonexistent, and the book vanishes. By contrast, Amazon (Kindle) and other e-publishers are in it for the long haul. Maintaining the e-file is all but free, and if an author has a book success next year or the year after or the year after that, sales of the earlier book will likely head up, too. Writers sitting on a backlist of books that never sold well are finding new revenues.

The publishing mountain gets steeper, but writers persist. It’s in our bones. Perhaps that’s because, as Mayer said, and contrary to the common expression, “Storytelling is the oldest profession.”

Best Reads of 2013

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’Tis the season for “best of” lists, and reading other reviewers’ lists of “Best books of 2013” is setting up my reading list for 2014 very well! Truth is, there are so many good new authors and so many interesting non-fiction books, being totally current seems hopeless.

Of the 52 books I read (or listened to—sometimes, an even better experience!) in 2013, here are the nine I liked best, the ones I gave five stars. The four-star books were pretty darn good, too. The entire 2013 list is on this website under “Reading . . .” Below my top picks are presented in no particular order, with my two absolute favorites appearing at the end.

***** The Empty Room – Lauren B. Davis escorts us deep inside the head of Colleen Kerrigan, an alcoholic, on the “worst-day-of-her-life.” A trip full of insights and terror that helps us better understand people in our own lives and their demons.

***** Victoria’s Daughters – Jerrold M. Packard. Getting all this complicated royal genealogy straight—given that Victoria’s descendants populated most of the thrones of Europe—and the different fates of her five daughters was fascinating. It’s hard to believe that Victoria, still so influential a presence in our literary minds, is the Great Great Great Great Great Grandmother of William and Kate’s son George! Full review here.

***** Flight Behavior – Barbara Kingsolver. A misdirected swarm of Monarch butterflies starts this novel on its way, intermingling science and belief and the priority a cast of mismatched characters place on each.

***** Gone Girl – Gillian Flynn. A deathmatch between two manipulative people that causes the reader to continually switch assumptions and allegiances.

***** The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection – Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler. The late 19th century Parisian demi-monde and the rise of scientific criminal detection. Full review here.

***** Telegraph Avenue – Michael Chabon. His usual high-quality writing and vivid characters whose fortunes become as entangled as jungle vines. What is it about? Ultimately? Everything.

**** Swamplandia! – Karen Russell. Nominated for the 2012 Pulitzer. Wonderful writing, I gave it only 4 stars, but Russell deserves extra praise for fearlessly exploring metaphor up to (and sometimes beyond) its full potential.

***** The Dinner – Herman Koch (read by Clive Mantle). A “nice dinner out” turns into an emotional conflagration. The perfect exploration of family secrets and what it means to have an unreliable narrator.

***** Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk – Ben Fountain (narrated by Oliver Wyman). A finalist for the 2012 National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critic’s Circle Award. For a war novel, there’s almost no war in it. Fountain explores the limitless terrain of hypocrisy, as a small company of ordinary American soldiers is feted for its bravery at the Thanksgiving Day Dallas Cowboys game.

What Lies Beneath

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Last week I wrote about the interview with Charles Baxter and his thoughts on story endings. I recognized his name at once as the author of a wonderful book—and if you are a writer of any kind whatsoever, you should phone your local independent book store immediately and order it—The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot. It’s part of the Graywolf Press “The Art of . . .” series, which Baxter edits.

Baxter calls subtext “the realm of what haunts the imagination: the implied, the half-visible, and the unspoken.” It takes a great deal of “surface bric-a-brac,” Baxter says, to indicate what is not being explicitly shown. Perhaps it’s counterintuitive, but hyperdetailing provides the revelation, not the invocation of great abstractions. He describes how this can be accomplished—infinitely easier to read about than to achieve, I assure you—in the book’s six essays. Readers, too, will find a lot to think about. In my case, in the “what all have I been missing?!” category.

The first essay is about staging—where people are “in the set.” Like actors on stage, a lot is revealed by who is sitting close to whom, who is listening, who reaches out a protective hand, who looks away. Body language. When characters speak, we may learn as much from how a line is delivered as from the words themselves. Literary fiction pays attention to all this and provides the reader a rich human experience; what I think of as “airport novels” don’t bother, and people who write four novels a year can’t.

Another essay talks about the unheard. People in real life often simply do not hear information that is threatening or stress-inducing. Or they don’t pay attention to others’ conversation because they are listening to their own interior dialog. Such non- or semi-listening may cause a character’s response to seem off point. It never is. It’s just a different point. And sometimes a character may want to steer the conversation elsewhere. And for a reason.

I have a post-it on my computer that reads “No Tennis Matches!” Writing dialog isn’t just about lobbing the conversational ball back and forth. Realistic conversation has digressions, slips of the tongue, interruptions, unexpected associations.

Here’s a conversation from Witness,* in which the two speakers—Matchmaker Marisa and Reluctant Genie—deliberately pursue separate agendas. Like two sides playing tug-of-war, each becomes increasingly insistent on controlling the contest. Genie’s final comment suggests she was listening all along. (Wally is her editor.)

“Leo should be here any minute.” Marisa gave Genie a sideways glance, accompanied by a sly smile.

“Tell me about this restaurant Riccardo is taking you to.”

“It’s a shame the two of you cannot join us.” Marisa came and sat on the low white-leather sofa across from her friend.

“It opened recently, he said. Read any reviews?”

“Leo is a very special man.” Marisa studied her manicure. “Riccardo says he’s been lonely.”

“If you like the place, take notes, and I’ll add it to my article.” Genie’s laugh was pitched a few notes higher than usual. The door buzzer sounded. “And here he is, with news of the world.”

Other essays in this engaging collection describe how to bring subtext to the surface, moving into the metaphorical, using facial expressions to show what’s going on inside, and “creating a scene,” in which he says, “In fiction we want to have characters create scenes that in real life we would typically avoid.” Every time I read Baxter’s book (at least three times now) I see new ways his insights could deepen my own writing and reading experience. Highly recommended!

*Witness is my unpublished suspense novel out looking for an agent.

This is “The End” . . .

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The Doors drone in the background of my mind as I write this, my foolish friend. I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about the beginning of novels and stories. Certainly a strong beginning is essential when you’re trying to hook an agent or a publisher—and maybe, someday, a reader!—and reel them into your narrative. So those, I’ve been practicing.

Perhaps just as important from the reader point of view—prospective agents and publishers will never know about this—is a powerful ending. Sometimes I read a book and think the author was just too exhausted by the end to give it much thought, but a book that peters out doesn’t seem worth the reader’s effort to get there. Recently, I read an interview of author and teacher Charles Baxter that touched on the topic of endings.

The interviewer had had trouble placing a story that ended with a fatal car crash that killed the protagonists. Finally, he listened to advice to change it, and it was immediately published. Baxter explained that you can’t have an accident like that at the end of a story, because it doesn’t look accidental. “It looks as if the author put it there.” And all the text preceding it, which led the reader to be interested in—even care about—the characters now appears to be simply manipulation. At the beginning of a story, an accident looks like an accident; at the end, the reader thinks, “the damn author set up this accident so that he could get away from the typewriter and get a cup of coffee,” Baxter said.

He also said he thought people would have the same reaction if the device was used in a movie, and I thought of Robert Altman’s A Wedding (user comments run the gamut)—thankfully saved by the fact that the bridal couple, though the stars of “their day,” were just two in a well-populated Altmanesque cast. Late-in-the-game manipulation prompted a few objections to Ian McEwan’s otherwise acclaimed novel Atonement.

A sentence from The Guardian’s review of that book applies well in this context: “Who can grant atonement to the novelist, whose God-like capacity to create and rework the world means that there is no higher authority to whom appeal can be made?” Create, rework, and destroy, too, for that matter. What Baxter might say is that the writer should work in a way that makes appeal unnecessary. And, in the case of Atonement, the fault lines are mapped with such geological precision that the cataclysm does not feel random, like a car crash, but perhaps more like a huckster’s bait-and-switch.

Critics today consider The Great Gatsby one of the finest books of the 20th Century. The power of its bittersweet ending is one reason why:

Gatsby believed in the green light (at the end of Daisy’s dock), the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

The Long and the Short of It

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Iconic scene from “The Third Man,” based on Graham Greene’s novella.

When I used to hand out writing assignments to people, a question they always asked was “how long should it be?” I’m afraid my initial response wouldn’t be terribly helpful,  and I’d say something like, “If it’s War and Peace, keep going; if it’s boring, a page is too much.”  But then I’d end end with “Oh, about 15 pages, double-spaced. That’s all we have room for.”

In fiction, really, there are no similar space constraints; instead, “the dictates of the marketplace” set the limits. Literary magazines tell you what short story length they will accept. For novels, traditional publishers generally have a 90,000-100,000-word limit on what they will consider from an untried writer. Stephen King and Neal Stephenson and Thomas Pynchon can do as they please.

What I thought of as the final draft of my first novel came in at 135,000 words. I hadn’t given the total number a single thought. It was what it was. Fortunately, my good friend Sandra Beckwith (book publicist extraordinaire) caught me up short and directed me to several good websites (See The Swivet, or All Write – Fiction Advice) addressing the question of length. Before querying the first agent, I took electronic scalpel (also known as the delete key) in hand and cut characters, scenes, and dialog so that it now is a more svelte 99,000. Painful, but necessary, and I’m ever-grateful to Sandy for stopping me from embarrassing myself. In writing my second novel, I avoided some of the traps that led me into overwriting and finished the first draft at a slim-and-trim 70,000 words, which gives plenty of breathing room to enrich the story as needed during the revision stage.

For a while now, observers of the publishing scene have commented on the rising popularity of the novella—more than a short story in complexity and character development, less than a novel in plot twists and digressions. While novels today typically run 90-110,000 words, or about 300+ printed pages, acceptable lengths for novellas vary widely, anywhere from a long short story (10,000 words) to a short novel (70,000 words).

The popularity of these shorter forms is attributed to readers’ shrinking attention span; publishers’ reluctance to invest in producing an expensive book that isn’t a guaranteed best-seller; and reading habits, with Kindle, Nook, and even smartphones lending themselves to presenting shorter works.  “Readers aren’t as aware of page count in the electronic realm as they are in a paper book,” says author Jeff Noon in a recent Forbes story by Suw Charman-Anderson. Kindle Singles are an example, and their inventory includes short fiction by best-selling writers.

Novellas also are less demanding on the authors who write them.  A novel “is a huge emotional investment, and it can be risky to put all your creative eggs in one basket if things go wrong,” Charman-Anderson says, yet novellas let authors practice plotting and character development and develop their voice. And they provide the joy of actually finishing something. For self-publishers, they are a boon.

Let’s face it: some plots and some ideas just don’t lend themselves to longer formats. Cut the flab and you have a more compelling read. Some of the most focused and powerful English-language storytelling has been via the novella, and an illustration of their strength is how easily they have lent themselves to dramatization and our continued attention, starting with the grandmum of them all:

  • The Mousetrap – Agatha Christie – 1952. She didn’t want publication to take away from the popularity of the theatrical version, so stipulated the novella couldn’t be published in the U.K. as long as the play was running. Currently, The Mousetrap is booking at London’s  St. Martin’s Theatre (60th Anniversary trailer) until January 2015, “so the novella still hasn’t been published in the UK,” according to  Listverse’s fascinating review: “20 Brilliant Novellas You Should Read.”
  • The Third Man – Graham Greene – 1949 – written as preparation for the movie screenplay, a British film noir classic
  • Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote – 1958, the movie becoming more famous than the book and giving us “Moon River”
  • Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson – 1886 – more than 120 film versions; about the recent musical, the less said the better
  • The Time Machine – H.G. Wells – 1895 – feature film and television versions; inspiration for innumerable stories on this theme
  • Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck – 1927 – which Listverse anthropocentrically titles Of Men and Mice, has had numerous stage, film, and television versions
  • A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens – 1843 – staple of the holiday season in both film and stage versions.

So, how long should your book be?

Rich Reading

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Book-Lovers’ Warning: Book Drum is a website where you may end up spending a lot of time. U.K.-based Book Drum’s slogan is “Beyond the Page” and that’s exactly where it takes you for the 176 books it includes far. Each volunteer-produced book profile includes multiple sources of enriching content:

  • Bookmarks: page-by-page commentary and illustration of the text
  • Summary: objective synopsis of the book
  • Setting: description and illustration of the main places or themes of the book
  • Glossary: foreign, invented and tricky words deciphered
  • Author: biographical information, interview videos, links and photos
  • Review: subjective analysis and evaluation of the book
  • Map: a world map pinned with descriptions of places significant in the book

The wide variety of books they’ve profiled—which feel like they’ve been taken apart and put together again—include many favorites, past and present. Classics from Dickens and Hardy and Austen up to and including Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. With Book Drum’s help, I may finally get past page 50 of Gravity’s Rainbow.

I took Book Drum for a test spin using one of my favorite books, Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I reviewed maps of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex. I read descriptions of the “life and times . . .” The bookmarks were fascinating—like the notes in a cleverly annotated classic, but with pictures! I know this book well, but I’d missed so much. I want to read it again, with Book Drum humming in the background. The volunteer contributor of content for Tess is novelist herself and freelance writer, as are many of the Book Drum contributors, while some are academics, recent graduate school spawn, and the like.

Book Drum sums up the diversity of its content in this way: “Whether it’s video of the Rockettes in The Catcher in the Rye, the Italian opera tracks that accompany Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, the historical context and maps of The Odyssey, stunning South American photography for In Patagonia, or video of Kabul kite fighting for Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, we take readers beyond the page to enjoy interactive content alongside their favourite books.”

Book Drum also has begun publishing for e-readers, with two titles so far, Heart of Darkness and The Turn of the Screw. This link takes you to the Amazon page for the latter, where you can See Inside. It’s the same principle as the website, but feels pushy. I might get used to it, but my initial reaction is I’d rather seek out the enriched content than be distracted by its intrusive presence. Similarly, I usually read the notes of a traditionally annotated book a chapter at a time, rather than constantly break the tenuous thread of my thought.

The site uses the Wiki approach, so anyone can contribute. Last spring, the Book Drum editors sent out a call for content for a profile of A Tale of Two Cities. Now I find this out! I wrote something very similar a few years ago when I was trying to convince Audible.com to offer companion .pdfs to some of its books, like those with lots of characters or foreign-named ones (think Russians!). It’s hard to keep track of the players without a program. I proposed one-line chapter summaries for people whose listening gets interrupted for a few days or weeks– “Where was I?,” a glossary to cover old-fashioned terms, foreign phrases, and special uses–also harder to follow when you just hear, rather than see, them. I even included a link to the raucous song the citoyens danced to in the blood-soaked Paris streets. So Book Drum has found a happy reader with me!

Thanks to writing buddy David Ludlum for sharing this resource.

Listen Up!

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So many friends tell me they don’t have time to read any more that I’m surprised more of them haven’t taken up audio books. While it’s true the old-fashioned klunky tapes or CD’s were a bit of a pain—and expensive, too—I’ve listened well over a hundred audio books on an MP3 player and now an iPod. One book a month is my Audible.com subscription plan, and that’s about what I can “read,” Audibly.

Apparently lots of people read in the car, and that’s OK for longer trips, but short trips around town with a lot of stops wouldn’t work for me. I like at least a half-hour, uninterrupted. Longer, if possible. So I read while mowing the lawn (electric mower), weeding the garden, making dinner, anything that doesn’t require my full concentration. My mind picks what to focus most on–another reason listening and driving might not be the best idea. Listening while cooking goes a long way to explain some of the meals around here.

On the Reading . . . section of this website you can scroll down to mini-reviews of the 10 books I’ve listened to so far this year. Thrillers are good. If you don’t catch every word, it isn’t a tragedy, and the excitement of getting to the next chapter keeps you on task. If you stop mowing and go do something else, like return emails, you might actually have to turn the book off.

I’ve also listened to some classics I knew I’d never read: Crime and Punishment (endless); The Brothers Karamazov (the mind wanders); Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (the first audio book I ever listened to—scary). These experiences suggest a book like Dr. Zhivago with a lot of long foreign names (two to three per character, at that) would not be a good choice.

What’s most impressive is the quality of the narrations. They add immeasurably. Sometimes when I recommend a book, I mention that I listened to it, and can’t be sure whether it would be quite as wonderful an experience if read. The humor comes through better, for one thing. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is a perfect example.

In the marketplace, audiobooks are on the rise. Producers released more than 13,000 titles (some classics, some new) in 2012, compared to only 4,600 three years earlier. Libraries are getting on the bandwagon, too. Patrons of the member libraries of Digital Library NJ and eLibraryNewJersey, for example, can borrow audio books just like regular books. They expire after a set number of days, and the collection is large. And free. Libraries all over the country are doing this.

I buy my audiobooks and own them “forever.” Some I’ve listened to multiple times. Amazon-owned Audible.com (my supplier) has the greatest market penetration and is adding nearly 1,000 titles a month to its already deep collection. The technology options are expanding, but I’m dubious about some of them. You can read a while on your Kindle (when you have time to sit) and pick up where you left off with the book’s audio version (when you don’t). This sounds confusing to me. I would be hearing one set of voices in my head and suddenly they’re all different. You can have the e-version read to you as you read—which would be super-annoying, since most people who have read this far can read faster than the book would be narrated. It would be like taking a walk with someone who moves at half your pace. And, new audiobook creation tools akin to the self-publishing  tools for print are designed to help authors affordably create their own audiobooks. Let’s hope the tools turn them into stellar actors at the same time! The early days of desktop publishing provide a cautionary example.

No time to read? Listen up!

Cream

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Books I read 002In front of an airport rack of books, I count up the number of titles I’ve read, usually almost none, and I do the same at B&N’s New Arrivals table, where I generally find four or five that are in my “done” stack at home. Such a sense of accomplishment to have read books other people haven’t even bought yet!

So, of course I file away January’s inevitable lists of the “best books of the year” and fell even further under the thrall of listmania when I discovered the ambitious “Best Fiction of the 20th Century”!  This meta-list compiles and compares rankings of “best books” from several notable sources: the Library Journal list, the Modern Library list, the Koen book distributors list, and the Radcliffe Publishing Course list. The lists contain 221 separate works.

About this exercise, compiler Brian Kunde says, “We may take exception to what got on the lists. We may protest over what was left off. But we do learn what others considered notable in our culture — and discover how much of it we’ve neither experienced, thought about, or heard of.”

That’s the truth! The books at the top of the list are familiar, at least by title, but nearer the bottom, memory goes sketchy. Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (#99)? Reynolds Price’s Kate Vaiden (#192)? Colin Wilson’s The Outsider (#219)?

Some of the books I’d like to check off (Done!) on these lists, did I read them or just see the movie? After the 11 TV episodes of Brideshead Revisited (#144), does anyone actually read the book anymore? TV and movie versions may have aced out the print originals of I, Claudius (#53) or 2001: A Space Odyssey (#94), too. Some books I might have read a long time ago, did I really read, or just mean to? After a few decades, memory may have resolved the matter in my favor.

The Modern Library website provides separate lists of the 100 Best as determined by its Board AND by the online votes of some 217,500 “readers.” A comparison is instructive. While the board leads its list off with Ulysses, The Great Gatsby, A Portrait of the Artist  as a Young Man, Lolita, and Brave New World (four of which I’ve read—yay!), the top ten in the reader list includes seven books by either Ayn Rand* or L. Ron Hubbard (none of which I’ve read), plus The Lord of the Rings, To Kill a Mockingbird, and 1984. The readers don’t get around to Ulysses until slot 11. How many of them have actually read it, I wonder, and how many just think they should have? I confess, I have not. Slogging through Portrait of the Artist  . . was enough, and while I used to know all the words to the song, “Finnegan’s Wake,” I haven’t tackled the book.

*A footnote about Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: Idaho state senator John Goedde brags “That book made my son a Republican!” He’s introduced a bill to require every high school student in the state to read it and pass a test on it to graduate.

Kunde takes the existing list rankings and creates a composite score—a ranking of rankings. The top 10 using his method are:

  1. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  2. 1984 by George Orwell (that’s worth a re-read now)
  3. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
  4. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
  5. Lolita by Vladimir Nobokov
  6. Ulysses by James Joyce
  7. Animal Farm by George Orwell
  8. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
  9. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
  10. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

I’ve read them all, except that big lump in the gravy, Ulysses. But these are the best 20th century books, the world has moved on, and the list is old. Only four books on it are from the 1990s and less than eight percent were published later than 1980. As time passes, more of late-century works may achieve the recognition that eventually came to other books—most notably, the now #1 ranked Gatsby.

Not that sales are a reliable measure of quality, but when Fitzgerald died in 1940, The Great Gatsby was a commercial failure, having sold fewer than 25,000 copies since its publication in 1925. Today it continues to sell 500,000 copies a year.

Exploring further:

“The Best English-Language Fiction of the Twentieth Century: A Composite list and Ranking.” by Brian Kunde.

“In Search of the Century’s Best Books” by Brian Kunde

Modern Library’s “Top 100”

An Author’s Handshake

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Pondering?
When you crack open a novel, you’ve already committed to read at least a few chapters. Rarely would you abandon it after the first few paragraphs. Not so a short story. Its opening—even its first sentence—is crucial. First sentences “establish the authorial confidence that is absolutely necessary for successful fiction. If a reader is going to follow you, it’s important that they know from the very first line that they can trust the story.” It’s the literary equivalent of “You had me from ‘hello,’” the journalist’s hook.

The above quote is from an interview with author Josh Rolnick in the spring 2013 issue of Glimmer Train. He and the interviewer talk about the importance of “opening narrative space,” which is an arty way of saying making the reader believe “anything can happen.” One of the most memorable opening lines is, and we all know this one, whether we’ve read Kafka’s novella or not, “One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin,” although I’m positive that in the translation I read an astonishing number of decades ago, those last two words were “giant cockroach.” Kafka never exactly says. Whatever. You absolutely can’t stop there.

Examples of short story first lines I think compel further reading:

  • “The Potts girl walked into the café preceded by her reputation so that everyone was obliged to stare.” – “Sundowners,” by Monica Ali
  • In his first dreamy meditations over the case, Mr. Fortune remarked that it suggested one answer to the hard question why boys should be boys.” – “The Dead Leaves,” by H.C. Bailey
  • “In the autumn of 1971 a man used to come to our house, bearing confections in his pocket and hopes of ascertaining the life or death of his family.” – “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,” by Jhumpa Lahiri

The first line of Rolnick’s own short story, “Funnyboy,” like the three above, is filled with plot possibilities: “I glanced out the window as my train pulled into the station and saw the girl who killed my son.” From that point, this story could travel anywhere, though you sense not anywhere particularly good.

But the opener needn’t so effectively forecast the coming drama, like the examples above. It can draw you in through its description of a particular time and place or the mood it sets, like Lauren Groff’s opener for “Delicate Edible Birds”: “Because it had rained and the rain had caught the black soot of the factories as they burned, Paris in the dark seemed covered by a dusky skin, almost as though it were living.” You want to take her hand and go there with her.

Writing the first few sentences of a short story is laying down a marker. “I promise to show you this,” the author says. They create a door you must open, a street you must walk down. The page you must turn.