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”

Summer Fun!

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butterflies hatched 004Two weeks ago, I wrote about the Belmont Stakes, the June jewel of Triple Crown races, last weekend I was in Washington, D.C.—a fine day in the nation’s capital—coming off several nights at the beautiful Chesapeake Bay, and today, a friend has organized a boat trip around Manhattan for her 90th birthday. What a way to celebrate summer!

Up early this morning to write this, I was treated with the sight of a deer with six-point antlers picking his way across twenty feet of grassy back yard and disappearing into the woods. My glance flew to my hostas (intact) and deck planters (ditto), so the pleasure in seeing him remained intact. I haven’t been to the other side of the house yet to see whether he’s eaten all the buds off my daylily collection. One year I had no flowers at all, thanks to this unauthorized snacking.

Early summer is the season for black bear sightings in Princeton. This year, one even scouted the campus. Cubs or young bears, usually. Since New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the country, when bears go walkabout, it usually ends badly. A town councilman explained, “They come down from New York,” a statement that raised more questions than it answered. How does he know? Why?

It’s firefly season! The woods in the back of the house are full of them. I like to watch them testing their batteries for the night, down in the grass and slowly rising. PS – this neighborhood has no cicadas at all so far, while the town up the road a piece is dense with their noise.

A frog is in the pond, croaking noisily all night. I reassure myself that little frogs can have big voices. Still, I count the fish in the morning when I go out to feed them. A heron ate ten fish—and a couple of frogs, too—a few years ago, so the net remains on the pond all the time. Diminishes the effect, but the fish are safe. Fellow pond-owners describe the huge heron colony nearby in apocalyptic terms.

These days, my fish-feeding and desultory weeding are supervised by a catbird that must have built a nest in the shrubbery near the pond. She misses nothing. A wren established herself in the birdhouse out back. Every spring, the chickadees bounce among the branches, checking it out, but they are lookers, and she’s a buyer.

Enjoy this too-short season!

Summer Soundtrack

A Day at the Races

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Into the Starting Gate

Into the Starting Gate

When longshot Palace Malice flew past the finish pole at yesterday’s Belmont Stakes (me in terrific grandstand seats rethinking my bets), it was yet another big race with a big-heart story behind it. Racing is full of them, and the New York Times coverage of yesterday’s race (see the slideshow) provides the current tale. NBC regularly milks viewers emotions with these stories, and you can’t watch its replays of Secretariat’s 1973 runs without feeling you’re watching the hero of an age.

Yesterday’s finish was an exciting validation of the Triple Crown, with three equine princes in the top slots: Palace Malice’s first place was followed by Preakness winner Oxbow in second, and Kentucky Derby winner Orb in third.

If you want to indulge your interest in horses and racing from your favorite chair, you can’t do better than:

1. Luck, the star-filled cast of this star-crossed David Milch HBO drama showed the people behind the two minutes on the track. (This is the only demonstration of how claiming races work that I’ve ever actually understood.) I’m still mourning the misguided cancellation of this series, but have to let it go.

2. Seabiscuit, the book by Laura Hillenbrand; or the movie, starring Toby Maguire, Jeff Bridges, and Chris Cooper. Seabiscuit was an unlikely horse-racing winner, and his real-life rags-to-riches story fit Americans’ late Depression mood like a glove.The camera-work in the movie, which gives you a jockey’s eye view of the race, shows once and for all what a dangerous adrenaline rush this sport is.

3. Horse Heaven, a novel by Jane Smiley. She won the Pulitzer for A Thousand Acres, but I enjoyed this book infinitely more. Huge cast of characters, including several horses, whose personalities, I have it on good authority, are portrayed with precision.

4. Lord of Misrule, a novel by Jaimy Gordon. While Horse Heaven describes the path to the high end of horse-racing, National Book Award winner Lord of Misrule describes the other direction: small tracks, low stakes, iffy horses, iffier players. Characters who really are characters.

5. The Eighty-Dollar Champion, by Elizabeth Letts. If the heart-pounding action of thoroughbred racing seems a little too much, this book tells the true and unlikely story of Snowman, a former plowhorse and his farmer-rider who became national champions in the incredibly demanding sport of show jumping (a favorite Olympic event!). Another heart-warmer.

Not recommended: Secretariat, the 2010 Disney-produced movie, starring Diane Lane and John Malkovich. Every cliché imaginable and appallingly unrealistic. Ick.

The Real British Princesses

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I discovered Jerrold Packard’s book, Queen Victoria’s Daughters, at a library book sale and couldn’t pass it up. Five of Victoria and Albert’s children were girls, and she doted on several of them, particularly her eldest and possibly brightest child, Vicky. By contrast, she never warmed to her oldest son, Bertie, even though he was destined to be King Edward VII. Cozy domestic life is associated with the Victorian era, but the Queen wasn’t a terribly involved or nurturing mother. Later, when her girls were married, she provided bad political advice—to Vicky especially, whom she persuaded to maintain her Englishness after marriage to her Prussian husband, Fritz. This alienated his parents (the emperor and empress), the stifling Prussian court, and, worst, estranged her from her three oldest children, including the future Kaiser Wilhelm II, England’s great enemy in World War I.

Victoria searched for appropriate royal husbands for the girls among the minor and now bygone German royal houses. Compassionate Alice, second oldest, married Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, plain Helena married Christian, Prince of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, and the youngest, Beatrice, married Henry, Prince of Battenberg. All the girls made royal marriages except Louise, the artistic fourth daughter and reportedly the most beautiful, who married John, future 9th Duke of Argyll. Although John’s father headed the Highland clan of Campbells, one of Britain’s oldest and most prominent families, the lack of royal blood created controversy across Europe.

Ironically, the issue of royal blood was no minor matter. Queen Victoria was a carrier of the hemophilia gene. Statistically, half her sons were likely to be afflicted, and any minor injury could bring on a fatal hemorrhage. Son Leopold inherited this damaged gene and died at age 30 after a fall. Of Victoria’s daughters, Louise and Beatrice were carriers. The disease had devastating effects on a number of Victoria’s 40 grandchildren in several royal families.

In addition to Vicky’s marriage to one German emperor and motherhood of another, her daughter Sophie married Constantine, king of Greece; Alice’s daughter Alexandra married Nicholas II, Tsar of Russia, both of them murdered by Bolsheviks in 1918, along with their four daughters and son (a hemophiliac); Beatrice’s daughter Victoria Eugenie became queen of Spain.

English royalty’s multigenerational affiliations with German families—the Hanovers, Victoria’s marriage to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and her children’s marriages—created political problems after the Great War. The wartime king, George V, renamed the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha family after the longtime home of the British monarchy, Windsor. Members of the Battenberg family, into which Princess Beatrice married, Anglicized its name to Mountbatten.

Victoria’s reign seems both long ago, in terms of the massive intervening cultural changes, and quite recent historically. Her last daughter, Beatrice, died in 1944, and her last grandchild, the unhappy queen of Spain, in 1969. Meanwhile, Victoria will be the great-great-great-great-great grandmother of William and Kate’s baby (baby-William-Charles-Elizabeth-George VI-George V-Edward VII-Victoria).

I recommend this highly readable and fascinating book for anyone interested in British history, women’s history, or the intricacies and political shenanigans of 19th c. royal households.

Advice from the Masters

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Some of our America’s best writers, “masters of the craft,” have set down their fiction-writing pens to ruminate about writing itself—what makes it good, even great, and what to avoid like the dread passive tense. I just discovered a treasure chest of these literary gems assembled by Maria Popova in her brainpickings blog—“a free weekly interestingness digest.” The collection includes advice from authors as diverse as Fitzgerald, Didion, Sontag, Bradbury, and Orwell.

Some of these authors dispense pithy observations, such as Stephen King’s “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” Some authors’ advice is more ecumenical. Elmore Leonard’s famous 10 Rules for Writing is not in this collection, though widely extracted and republished (without permission, I understand, as they are in a copyrighted book he’d prefer to sell). His book includes this revelation: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

Leonard and Hemingway are masters of the spare style, but not everyone can write that way, not everyone wants to, and not every subject fits that style. Trish, in her comment on last week’s blog, reminded me about Leonard’s admonition to “never open a book with weather,” perhaps the dullest subject imaginable for hooking a reader. But if that rule were followed to the letter, by every author, we’d miss these opening paragraphs:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. . . .

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. . . .

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.

This is, of course, the opening of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, which chronicles the impact of the dawdling obfuscations of the befogged panjandrums of Chancery Court (trusts, estates, land law, guardianships), who delay the proceedings of the cases that come before them until the parties are dead and the fortunes involved have disappeared into the hands of the lawyers. The beginning, in both its plodding tone and fog-bound, muck-mired description, freighted with symbolism, sets the reader up perfectly for the entire 1000-page novel. Much different than the writer who observes his fictional world no more acutely than to note the sun was shining.

Finally, and perhaps an observation that can apply to any fiction—from spare Hemingway to florid Dickens comes from Kurt Vonnegut. Hemingway might condense it to “Be interesting!” What Vonnegut proposes is that the style a book is written in says everything about the author:

The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. Don’t you yourself like or dislike writers mainly for what they choose to show or make you think about? Did you ever admire an empty-headed writer for his or her mastery of the language? No.

Now, there’s a challenge worthy of the most ambitious writer. Maria Popova, with her interestingness blog would seem to be on the right track. Or, as Mr. Leonard says, “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”

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.

Mysteries Continue to Thrill

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The mystery genre has retained its popularity over the years. Whether a classic “whodunit,” a cozy, a police procedural, or some new hybrid of mystery/suspense plus fantasy, sci-fi or horror, crime fiction still draws a strong audience of readers.

Surveyed for Library Journal’s annual round-up of trends in the mystery genre, more than half of the 232 librarians polled say mysteries are the most popular book genre they offer, as measured by circulation, shelf-space—accounting for almost a quarter of their print fiction materials—and e-collections, making up more than 20% of libraries’ ebooks.

While e-collections are growing (and most publishers have finally agreed to sell ebooks to libraries now), which e-mysteries they buy depends heavily on patron demand and costs. Ebook purchases are now about 6% of libraries’ acquisitions budgets, up from 1% three years ago.

“E-books aren’t the future of mystery, they’re the present,” said Soho Press publisher Bronwen Hruska. They accounted for two-thirds of the sales of the Soho Crime imprint in 2012 and half or more of sales by another mystery publisher, Minotaur. Sisters in Crime’s recent interviews with publishers revealed that while e-books are “the fastest growth sector for publishing revenues,” the effect on income—publishers’ or authors’—is not yet clear.

Amazon’s heavy promotion of low price-point books for the Kindle through various deals and free offerings has helped even a few new writers achieve electronic sales that outsell print. An example is when Leonard Rosen’s debut thriller, All Cry Chaos, was picked as a Kindle Book of the Day and sold 7,000 electronic copies and 4,000 print.

Presumably, it helps to write a good book, too. But quality—good or bad—isn’t a guarantee of sales numbers when so many books are free or $.99.

On Form and Format

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Image courtesy of www.freeimages.co.uk

For this week’s blog post, I’m referring you to an April 20 guest post—Follow that Thread!—I provided to Debra Goldstein’s lively blog, It’s Not Always a Mystery. That post builds on an intriguing essay by John McPhee about the complexity of organizing all the disparate pieces of the long, non-fiction narratives he writes so superbly. Many of his considerations apply equally well to fiction writers, who may not choose the most obvious way—strict chronology—to organize their work.

Two of the recent entries in the “Reading . . .” section of this website are cases in point. The book The Lullaby of Polish Girls (being published next month) moves back and forth in time with every chapter, but is set up to be easy-to-follow. In The Expats, a thriller I listened to, rather than read, the shifts in time and place were somewhat harder to follow, because I (mowing the lawn) couldn’t scan for a chapter title or detail to reorient myself. Still, it worked, though it’s the kind of book that could have been written chronologically and the chapters shuffled afterwards, so that the hero has only the information she should have had at any given point. In fact, I’m not sure how the author, Chris Pavone, kept it all straight otherwise!

To talk about structure in a purely mechanical sense, have you noticed that not only books, but individual chapters are becoming shorter? In the book I’m currently reading, some chapters are less than a page long, which works because most chapters switch voices from one character to another. But even in books with a single narrator, chapters may be little more than individual scenes.

This format is coming into vogue as a response to mobile devices. Authors and publishers envision people reading in short bursts, on iPads, smartphones, etc. I find all those breaks a little jarring (and they create lots of wasted space—less “book”), but it isn’t awful. What do you think?

The Changing Publishing Scene

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Writers—and some readers, too—are worried about the massive shifts in the publishing industry, including whether it will be possible to make a living as a serious writer for very much longer, not that it was ever very easy, and what making authorhood impossible means for the diversity of ideas in the cultural marketplace.

My professional organization, Sisters in Crime (it’s worth joining just to be able to say that!), recently released a new report on the state of publishing, based on expert interviews with 15 individuals involved, in various ways, in the industry. They asked about books in general and mysteries/suspense/thrillers in particular. The experts they talked to echoed the rather gloomy predictions heard for the last couple of years regarding the challenges the industry faces.

Given the difficulty new writers have being published, many are advised to go-it-alone. But “understand the risks,” one prominent agent said. Yes, it’s easy to self-publish with today’s technology, but publishing does not necessarily lead to sales and income for the writer. Because about 300,000 print titles and an almost uncountable number of ebooks are published each year—think of it as a thousand new books a day—the necessity for and burden of promotion and marketing are enormous. Accomplishing this shifts the emphasis entirely onto the self in self-publishing.

The few self-published books that have achieved financial success have encouraged many more writers to try to follow in those footsteps, creating such a rising level of background noise level, even excellent books go unnoticed.

The implications of the rise of e-books has yet to sort itself out. And, because of a number of economic pressures on publishers, the bar for new authors is constantly being raised. Worse, publishers aren’t interested in mid-list authors—“they want bestsellers.” Authors want to write bestsellers, too, but most won’t. The Great Gatsby sold poorly when it was first published in 1925, but now it is one of the most highly-ranked English-language novels of the 20th century (second-highest in the Modern Library’s list after Ulysses.) As of today it ranks #10 in Amazon’s bestsellers’ list, 4th among novels. For authors whose publishers aren’t banking on returns 88 years into the future, the emphasis on bestsellers is a problem.

The one bright spot for writers of mysteries is that the genre retains its popularity in this fast-changing environment. Mysteries account for 24 percent of ebook sales, though only 15 percent of the dollars, which means their prices are discounted compared to other books. Mysteries are 21 percent of library ebook collections and 24 percent of their print collections. And “cozy mysteries,” that less-sex-and-gore subgenre perfected by Agatha Christie and still practiced by many authors today are actually increasing in popularity.

Exploring Further:

“The Slow Death of the American Author” – Scott Turow’s recent, widely circulated lamentation in the New York Times

Sisters in Crime – membership organization promoting the professional development and advancement of women crime writers

The Modern Library’s lists of 100 best novels; one list selected by its board and one by readers

Cozy Mysteries Unlimited – website for cozy fans

Big Data & the Small Screen

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TV watching is getting better! It’s not just because TiVo lets you skip the ads, it’s not just the high-quality original programming from the premium cable channels, it’s big data doing something actually useful.

The lead feature in the April issue of Wired covers what it calls “the Platinum Age of Television,” and it says “networks and advertisers are using all-new metrics to design hit shows.” The Nielsen rating system’s hegemony has developed some pretty serious cracks in today’s multimedia environment. It was best at projecting how many people were sitting in front of their television sets watching a given show at a given time. Once the DVR arrived, Nielsen adjusted its system to count viewers who watched an episode up to a week later. And, this fall it says it will start counting views streamed over the Internet.

But it still isn’t counting Hulu, Netflix, Apple TV, Amazon Prime, Roku, iTunes, smartphone, or tablet viewings, says Wired.

Since the key younger demographic is disappearing from the ratings system and the networks and advertisers are left with grandpa in his La-Z-Boy, they’re looking to new information sources: Twitter followers, show-related trending topics, and the like. In February, Twitter bought Bluefin Labs to help it start providing some of these data. Bluefin and its competitors mine social media messages relevant to 120 different TV networks and link them to data on the people who post and the devices they use. Watching while tweeting and posting to Facebook are a new norm.

“Some day in the near future, a show’s tweetability may be just as crucial as the sheer size of its audience,” says Wired. This means that shows people actually care about will rise in the network firmament based on much more than timeslot viewers.

Networks know some shows attract a small audience that really, really cares about them. Think of the firestorm of letters they receive when they cancel one, or how NBC had to get creative with Direct TV to save Friday Night Lights. Comparing “most watched” to “most loved” shows, a lot people are watching stuff they don’t care about all that much. Viewers rate a number of shows—Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Sherlock (OMG, PBS!), for example—higher than the much more popular NCIS, Vegas and others. Which only proves what we’ve always known, just because a show is watched doesn’t mean it’s very good.

With better metrics, the shows people feel passionate about may stand a better chance of survival.

Exploring Further

Wired – How Data Powers the Platinum Age of Television

The Nielsen Company – “New Study Confirms Correlation between Twitter and TV Ratings” -3/20/13

TV.Com’s annotated list of most popular TV shows.