****On the Road with Del and Louise

Route 66, highway, Arizona

(photo: wikimedia.org)

By Art Taylor– Is it OK to say a book by a male author is “charming”? Regardless of possible gender-bias, this book is. Del and Louise are a couple brought together by crime. They met when Del was robbing the 7-11 in Eagle Nest, New Mexico, where Louise worked. They stay together during a succession of American-style self-reinventions aimed at getting a “fresh start,” reinventions that invariably wind up in one shady enterprise or another, and they ultimately . . . well, read the book and find out.

Taylor is an award-winning short story writer, and the individual chapters of this picaresque could stand alone. In fact, the first two chapters have done so, in past issues of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, where I first read and admired his work. His stories have won numerous Derringer, Agatha, and Macavity awards and are frequently anthologized.

What’s especially fun about On the Road is how well Taylor develops the two principal characters. Del wants to do right, to get straight, but it just isn’t happening, and Louise isn’t above a little larceny herself, if it promotes the couple’s welfare. Del’s intelligence is complemented by Louise’s cleverness in a pinch, and Del’s planning skills by Louise’s gut instincts. Together, they are a “doing the best they can” pair and their story is filled with humor and insight into human failings. The people they meet along the way have plenty of those, as they do themselves.

Their adventures are recounted by Louise in a straightforward and wry narrative voice that includes plenty of insight into her own shortcomings. Although the text is relatively unembellished, Taylor allows himself some spot-on literary flourishes (for instance, when he describes an early morning near Taos as “the sun creeping up, the boil not yet on the day”) and comic bits: “If that first winery we went to was upper crust, the bar in Napa was sure the bottom of the pie.”

Their travels take them from New Mexico to Victorville and Napa Valley, California, then to a comically disastrous scene in a Las Vegas wedding chapel (do I even need to say “cheesy”?). A stint in the North Dakota oil fields proves financially rewarding and emotionally bankrupting. There, Louise learns anew that “The reasons you do things don’t always make up for the doing of them.” Finally they reach North Carolina, Louise’s home state, and her acerbic mother Cora. Her relentless belittling and undermining of Del are priceless, as if all the wicked thrusts and jabs of a lifetime must be desperately delivered in one short visit.

Taylor has created an enjoyable tale and some nerve-wracking adventures without the need for a gruesome body count or far-fetched end-of-the-word-as-we-know-it scenarios. Because the story is so grounded in imperfect humanity and told so convincingly, we share Del and Louise’s bumpy ride, rooting for them every mile of the way. While their lives will never be trouble-free, the reader senses they will always be good.

A longer version of this review appeared on the Crime Fiction Lover website.

Separating the Wheat

chalk outline, body

(image: pixabay, creative commons license)

With more than a million new books a year being published in the United States, readers have to look harder than ever to find the book perfect for them. Book reviews work, if they’ve found a reviewer whose opinions they trust; best-seller lists reveal what other people are buying (or do they?); and online consumer recommendations can help, too. Even in my mystery/thriller niche, the number of new books is overwhelming. I need help!

Blogger Sandra Parshall recently reported on an excellent panel discussion involving three top book reviewers. The reviewers and samples of their reviews in the mystery genre are:

  • Maureen Corrigan, who reviews for NPR’s Fresh Air and is a contributor to Mystery and Suspense Writers; she recently reviewed Vu Tran’s Dragonfish, a crime drama she calls a noir vision of an “American gone rancid”
  • Dennis Drabelle, crime fiction editor at The Washington Post, who recently reviewed the “mesmerizing” Malcolm Mackay thriller trilogy featuring freelance Glasgow hit man Calum MacLean and
  • Bethanne Patrick, creator of twitter’s popular #FridayReads hashtag, who reviews for multiple venues. She recently reviewed Mary Kubica’s psychological thriller Pretty Baby for NPR.

Every week, these reviewers wade through hundreds of advance review copies of new books in search of gems, including those in the crime/mystery/thriller genre. They have a few groundrules that make it easier: no self-published books; look at those by well-known authors while keeping an eye out for new talent, such as Vu Tran, mentioned above, or “something unusual”; and look at the books from publishers with a good track record. Ultimately, it’s the quality of the writing that makes a book stand out, they said. (My decision rules for book reviews are described here and here.)

Parshall quoted Corrigan’s distaste for market-driven gimmicks—no “vampires living in Downton Abbey with dogs.” I’m guessing she didn’t review any of the vampire versions of Pride and Prejudice. Zombie ones, either.

Finally, they said best-seller lists are not a reliable guide to finding quality books. Marketing expert Tim Grahl, posting on Hugh Howey’s blog The Wayfinder last year, would agree. Grahl says, “I’ve become incredulous at the complete disaster that is the major best seller lists.” And he feelingly describes how the two biggest-impact lists—those of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal—are created. Not how you think they are.

George Orwell was a frequent, but cranky, book reviewer, saying it was like “pouring his immortal spirit down the drain, half a pint at a time.” Now, new legions of book reviewers are rising up to cope with the massive numbers. They’re the “consumers” whose reviews and recommendations we can read on Amazon and other book-buying sites, the social networks Goodreads and Library Thing, and others. While many consumer comments don’t rise above a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down, some are thorough and thoughtful. They’re updating the most popular strategy people use for selecting a particular book, the recommendation of a friend.

In addition, aggregator sites like Crime Fiction Lover, for which I am one of a dozen reviewers, have appeared. Similar specialty shops for reviews of romance, science fiction/fantasy, and other genres exist. And hundreds of websites like this one, that regularly review books of all types.

What are You reading?

Fall Books Already Creating Buzz

The remainder of 2015 is shaping up beautifully for readers of literary fiction. Lists of forthcoming novels by well-known—as well as new—authors promise a rich season ahead and delightful holiday giving.

Flood of Fire, Amitav GhoshThe Millions has a lengthy list of these, and I’ve picked out just few novels, one book of short stories, and one biography:

  • Flood of Fire: A Novel (The Ibis Trilogy) by Amitav Ghosh – about the first Opium War. I enjoyed his Sea of Poppies, first in this trilogy and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and The Atlantic Monthly calls him “a writer of supreme skill and intelligence.”
  • Fortune Smiles: Stories by Adam Johnson – a collection of six stories, which I would definitely read having found his Pulitzer-winning The Orphan Master’s Son so powerful.
  • The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood – winner of the Man Booker in 2000. Her new book is about “a near-future in which the lawful are locked up and the lawless roam free.”
  • Fates and Furies, Lauren GroffFates and Furies: A Novel by Lauren Groff – delves into the symbolism of Greek mythology to fully plumb the mysteries of a couple’s marriage. Read the opening sex-on-the-beach scene to find out how it all started. Her story “Ghosts and Empties” appeared in the 7-20-15 issue of The New Yorker.
  • Slade House: A Novel by David Mitchell – I’ve read five of his previous novels and enjoyed them all. Slade House began as a story in tweets.
  • Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell. If you know her from public radio’s This American Life, you know how funny and smart her social commentary is.
  • The Daughters: A Novel by Adrienne Celt—this “virtuosic debut” is “a gorgeous, riveting story about family, mythology, and curses,” says Book Riot.
  • The Big Green Tent: A Novel by Ludmila Ulitskaya – Russia’s most popular novelist describes what tThe Big Green Tent, Ludmila Ulitskayahe USSR was like in the 1950s and has become “a voice of moral authority for differently minded Russians,” said Masha Gessen’s review in The New Yorker. Sounds dangerous.

Also coming soon are books by an impressive phalanx of well-known writers, including Jonathan Franzen, Salman Rushdie, Joyce Carol Oates, Patti Smith, Orhan Pamuk, Jane Smiley, Umberto Eco, Oscar Hijeulos (posthumously), and Marilynne Robinson.

Feeding your Reading Soul

Love the premise behind Shari’s Berries Book + Dessert Pairing Guide. Gone Girl? Raspberry crepes. Alice in Wonderland? Tea biscuits and jam. The most inspired mix of gustatory and cultural delight since cinema sips—“A Modern Guide to Film and Cocktail Pairings.”

reading, apple

He must be reading “The Turk Who Loved Apples”! (photo: Greg Myers, creative commons license)

Now, what goes best with the recent books I’ve read and the movies based on them?

  • Seveneves—whatever. In the bleakness of space, when you’re eating algae, even a matzoh would be divine
  • Blue Labyrinth—a Blue Hawaii that’s a really Aloysius Pendergast-worthy one, what else?
  • The Breaks—those folks should be drinking Jack on the rocks and lots of it
  • Penumbra’s 24-Hour Book Store—lemon mousse, though it need not glow in the dark
  • The Storm Murders—awesome cajun food (no poutine, even though most of the story takes place in Quebec)
  • Inherent Vice—hash brownies, no contest!
  • Mr. Holmes—a honey pie

The extent to which readers link reading and eating is dreadfully apparent to anyone who takes a best-seller out of the library and finds greasy crumb-marks, and often the crumbs themselves squished between its pages.

4 Reasons to Read Literary Fiction

child reading, children's books

(photo: Tim Pierce, creative commons license, https://www.flickr.com/photos/qwrrty/2100913578/)

Reading is good for you! It brings pleasure, it broadens perspectives, it builds language, it imparts knowledge . . . readers know this. Research is starting to show that what we read is also important and are finding positive results from reading literary fiction, as compared to non-fiction or popular fiction. A recent round-up of this research by Will S. on The Literacy Site included the following four examples.

  1. People who read literary fiction are more empathetic. Reading a story provides a compelling experience that helps the reader understand another person’s mental state, say researchers David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano. In other words, it provides the experience of walking in another person’s shoes, and “the more stories you read, the more shoes you’ve tried on,” says Will S.
  2. Stanford University researchers have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRIs) to study the brains of people active engaged in close reading—in this case, a text by Jane Austen. The results show that careful reading (versus skimming) engages many parts of the brain and requires “the coordination of multiple complex cognitive functions.” This suggests that studying literature—beyond its other benefits—trains people to engage their brains more fully, an increasingly valuable skill in an era of constant distraction.
  3. In an article titled “The greatest magic of Harry Potter: Reducing prejudice,” children who identified with the character Harry Potter and read and discussed specific passages about prejudice responded to Harry’s “sympathy for marginalized groups” (such as Muggles or Mudbloods) by showing greater open-mindedness toward outsider groups in contemporary society (immigrants, refugees, gays).
  4. Harry Potter works for children and literary fiction works for adults because “the characters are complex, ambiguous, difficult to get to know, etc. (in other words, human) versus stereotyped, simple,” according to Kidd and Castano’s research cited above. Literary fiction forces the reader to work harder at fleshing out the characters, and trying to understand what makes them tick mirrors what is required in relationships with other people.

In sum, while reading in general has many benefits, “literary reading amplifies this effect,” Will S. says. “By reading a challenging book, you’re not only becoming a smarter person, you’re also become more empathetic.” Harder books stimulate the brain in more ways. So, he recommends, “In choosing your next book, make it a tough one. Your brain will thank you.

 

8 Exciting Summer Reads

reading

(photo: Pedro Ribeiro Simōes, Creative Commons license)

With publishers so intent on finding the next blockbuster, it’s easy for good books, make that Very Good Books, to slip by unnoticed. I’d like to suggest that my writing coach Lauren Davis’s new book, Against a Darkening Sky, which is on top of my “to read” pile, is a book I hope escapes that fate. I also trust that the flow of good will and good media coming its way will continue.

Set in 7th century Northumbria, as Christianity sweeps the countryside, it considers issues that are universal and timeless. Says Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler, it “brilliantly achieves the ideal for a historical novel: period and milieu seem utterly inextricable from characters and theme.” I’m looking forward to reading—and savoring!—it this summer.

More Recommendations

In case you missed Nancy Pearl’s “under the radar reads” segment on NPR’s Morning Edition late last week, here are her recommendations for intriguing and beautifully written works of fiction beyond the B&N front table that are well worth seeking out.

  • The Revolutions by Felix Gilman – A little steam punk, a little sci fi, a little magic and the occult—and the perils of dabbling in them. Says Pearl, “I’ve always believed that people learn from every book they read, . . . I think reading about the past in the context of the present is just fascinating.”
  • The Swimmer by Joakim Zander – in this fast-paced thriller a former spy tries to help a young woman with whom he has a strange connection. She’s seen something she shouldn’t have . . . and she’s on the run.
  • Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper – Says Pearl, this is another page-turner, not because of the speed of the plot, but because the characters from two time periods (around World War I and late 20th century) are so interesting. The story is set in motion when 83-year-old Etta decides she must see the ocean before she dies and sets out to walk there—from Saskatchewan.
  • Unbecoming by Rebecca Scherm – which is, Pearl says, “a novel about lying.” Not only is lying “unbecoming” in the old-fashioned sense, but the main character gradually “unbecomes” who she is. In a Paris antiquities shop she waits for her crimes to catch up with her.
  • The Half Brother by Holly LeCraw – We’ve all had strange coincidences in our lives, situations about which one says “if that were in a novel, no one would believe it!” Well, this novel takes on the issue of coincidence versus fate. How one choice would have created a totally different self—in other words, the spiraling kind of speculation that can drive you crazy.
  • The Strangler Vine by M.J. Carter – Carter is a historian, who can provide the convincing details of the exotic setting this novel uses. In 1837 India, its two British protagonists journey all over the subcontinent to find a missing writer. The first of a series, about which Pearl says, “I personally cannot wait for the second one.” (Awesome cover!)

A Sad History Tale

Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep himself has a new book out, Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab. It’s the true story of an Indian leader who used the tools of American democracy to try to make the case for his people and their land rights. His futile legal battle continued for two decades and ended in the Trail of Tears.

Any of these books would make for memorable summer reading. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on them and to reading at least some myself!

The Books of Summer

book, House of Leaves, Danielewski

House of Leaves page (photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

The May Wired’s guide to summer fiction leads with two 880-page doorstops: one from my fave Neal Stephenson titled Seveneves (I’ve pre-ordered!), and the other from Mark Z. Danielewski. Danielewski’s is The Familiar, Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May, with a planned 26 more volumes to come, BTW. If Danielewski’s name is unfamiliar, you may recognize the title of his last convention-shattering tour de force, House of Leaves (my review). He may have done it again, suggests Jonathan Russell Clark in his Literary Hub article, “Did Mark Z. Danielewski Just Reinvent the Novel?”

Also out in May is Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife, a thriller set in the near future when the water supplying Las Vegas and Phoenix runs out. “It’s just as apocalyptic as his first book (The Windup Girl, which won both Hugo and Nebula awards, among many others), more political, and though it didn’t seem possible, angrier,” says Wired reviewer Adam Rogers. “These days are coming,” thriller writer Lee Child says about the book, “and as always fiction explains them better than fact.” Bacigalupi views his books as thought experiments—by seeing where the world is headed, people can “make different decisions and vote for different politicians.” In other words, “Let’s not do this.”

In the same Wired issue, Caitlin Roper interviews Hollywood’s Damon Lindelof (Lost) and Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Ratatouille) about their new film, Tomorrowland starring George Clooney, and the omnipresence in entertainment media of a catastrophic future. Lindelof says, “I think one of the real reasons for all these dystopian movies, TV shows, and videogames is that it’s just easier to wreck things than it is to build something new.” Tomorrowland, he says, began with the notion of recapturing the “idea of an optimistic future, which has become completely and totally absent from the landscape.”

That’s certain true in fiction. In an NPR essay, Jason Heller says that ever since Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the dystopian literary trend has been unstoppable, if only because “the world feels more precariously perched on the lip of the abyss than ever.” Like Bacigalupi, Heller believes that “by imagining what it’s like to lose everything, we can value what we have.”

****Hold the Dark

arctic wolf

(photo: myri-_bonnie, Creative Commons license)

By William Giraldi, narrated by Richard Ferrone. This crime thriller set in the remote villages and tundra of Alaska lays bare different visions of civilization. The inhabitants of remote Keelut have their own ways of doing things—of dealing with birth, and death, and grief—and no matter how strong the forces of conventional culture are, in the end, the old ways win. In the process, the book “peels away the thin membrane that separates entertainment from art, and nature from civilization,” said reviewer Alan Cheuse in the Boston Globe.

Russell Core is a nature writer and an expert on wolves, with a famous book about them. When wolves take two, then three children from Keelut, the mother of the third child, a six-year-old boy named Bailey, asks him to come help her understand what is happening. Untethered from family and any part of life he finds meaningful, Core responds to her plea, and is drawn deeper and deeper into the lives, ways, and secrets of the remote village. The child’s mother, Medora Slone is married, but her husband Vernon has joined the military, fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan, this nation’s “desert wars.” Do not assume this has made a regular American of him.

Yet Slone is described as a renegade, and Core wonders how this squares with life as a soldier. His best friend, an Alaska Native named Cheeon says Slone can make himself look like he is doing what he is supposed to, but will be doing what he wants to, nonetheless. Cheeon did not join the military for that reason. He hadn’t that gift.

When Slone returns to find his son dead and his wife missing, well, in the classic crime novel vernacular, “all hell breaks loose.” Hell, in this case, plays out during the year’s longest nights—18 hours of darkness—and over a tundra so vast “whole states could fit on its frozen breadth.” The weather is practically another character in this frozen terrain: “Like grief, cold is an absence that takes up space. Winter wants the soul and bores into the body to get it.” Before this book is through quite a few souls fall to the cold, the wolves, and the people.

Richard Ferrone’s narration perfectly fits the other-worldliness of the Alaska Natives and the care with which residents of the far north must operate in their unforgiving environment. Giraldi is the fiction editor of Boston University’s literary magazine Agni.

11 Novels for Expectant Parents? Maybe Not

pregnant woman, reading, Kindle

(photo: Ed Yourdan, Creative Commons license)

Electric Literature presents a compendium of 11 books expectant parents might want to read instead of parenting books. Compiler Allison Gibson hit on this idea because the books she read while pregnant were “both too specific to prepare me for what I ended up encountering and too generalized to grasp before I even had a look at my own son’s face.” I had one of those very specific books, but I found it reassuring. There were answers. Somewhere. If I could find the book under piles of laundry, toppling stacks of diapers, and a storage unit’s worth of babygear.

Gibson quotes award-winning writer Marilynne Robinson’s view that fiction is “an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification,” which does make fiction seem both appropriate and vital preparation for greeting that diminutive stranger about to take over your life, 24/7/365/forever.

Here are some of the books that she recommends and why:

  • We the Animals by Justin Torres – to relish “bright moments of outright joy,” which actually seem few and far between for this family in the throes of domestic abuse
  • Bad Marie by Marcy Dermansky – to understand challenges facing new parents and their relationships, exemplified in this novel by the nanny who takes off for Paris with the toddler she minds and the baby’s father
  • White Oleander by Janet Fitch – to confirm “every parent’s dark suspicion that with the responsibility of caring for a child comes the capacity to do tremendous damage” and
  • More than It Hurts You by Darin Strauss – the title tells all

Nice try, Ms. Gibson, but I don’t think so. Just the thought of reading from this collection brings up the visceral memory of an acquaintance who asked me, nine months pregnant,“Did you see the interesting PBS show last night about SIDS?” Are you insane?

All 11 choices sound like interesting and worthy books to read, sometime. Just not until baby is safely in college. Or married. Or . . .

Another friend like to say that deciding to be a parent is “deciding to wear your heart on the outside.” Special handling required.

Pump Up Your Vocabulary

words

(photo art by Darwin Bell, Creative Commons license)

Stuck in a rut when you’re writing and want to find some fresh words for your ideas? Not sure where you stashed that dusty old thesaurus? If your vocabulary needs a bit of a boost, the Just English website has produced a gaggle of synonyms for the 96 words that are most commonly used in English. While the list doesn’t replace a thesaurus (online, I’m a fan of Visual Thesaurus), equally interesting is what those 96 words are.

Who would guess these most frequently used words would include crooked, idea, neat, and predicament? Some of the commonly used words cited include alternative slang definitions, which undoubtedly increase their usage, but Just English doesn’t provide synonyms for these.

Anger, angry, awful, bad, fear—they’re all there. A few more alternatives for “bad” than for “good,” but perhaps it means something positive that we have 27 alternatives for “beautiful,” and only 19 for “ugly.”

By age four, children know some 5,000 words in their native language, and children of age eight know 10,000 words. The average adult who is a native English speaker has a vocabulary of 20,000 to 35,000 words, and most adults learn about one new word a day until middle age. The New York Times is happy to help with that. A bit more challenging assortment can arrive in your email inbox from A.Word.A.Day.

Teens who read “lots” have about twice the vocabulary of those who read “not much”—more than 20,000 words, versus about 10,000. While reading builds vocabulary, and people who read “a lot” throughout the lifespan have a bigger array of words in their communications repertoire than do non-readers, what they read matters. On average, people who read fiction “a lot” have larger vocabularies than people who do not—even if they read a lot of non-fiction.

You can test the size of your vocabulary here. More than 5 million people have taken this test; I did, and my estimated vocab size is 37,000 words.