• The Sue Grafton Page
• The Dennis Lehane Page
• The Minette Walters Page

Most of this material is actually “old” notes that I’m just now getting around to posting after moving the site.

But the review of “V” Is for Vengeance by Sue Grafton really is new.

Novels and Television

Recent news that HBO plans to adapt the works of William Faulkner for television has prompted critical discussion of the suitability of novels for this kind of medium translation.

“The novel and television are commingling as never before. And it’s about time,” declares Laura Miller in TV and the novel: A match made in heaven. She argues that television and the novel have more in common than do the novel and theatrical film because “[r]arely are a book’s most devoted admirers satisfied by the film.” Not only must much of any novel usually be cut to fit the 90- to 120-minute format of a feature film, but the standard three-act structure of film also trims much of the rich expansiveness of a novel. “A television series, however, has the time to spread out and explore the byways and textures of a novel’s imagined world,” says Miller. But whereas the necessity for mass-market appeal of shows on the broadcast networks prevented more than an occasional successful adaptation of a novel until the advent of cable, “A network like HBO, however, doesn’t need to attract large audiences; rather, it aims to persuade a much smaller population of subscribers that it’s worth paying a little extra every month to see better programming.”

Craig Fehrman makes many of the same points in The Channeling of the Novel:

The cable network [HBO] has optioned a number of widely recognized literary works, including Karen Russell’s “Swamplandia!,” Chad Harbach’s “Art of Fielding” and Mary Karr’s memoirs. “At some point in the last year,” says Michael London, the indie-approved producer whose Groundswell Films brought “Goon Squad” to HBO, “everyone in the business had an epiphany that the DNA of cable television has much more in common with novels than movies do.”

“Indeed, where a movie means paring a novel down, a TV show can mean breaking it wide open,” Fehrman adds. He reports that many authors are now eager either to write their novels with an eye toward later TV adaptation or to collaborate on an adaptation after book publication. He compares this trend to what happened in the 1930s, when authors such as William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, Nathanael West, and F. Scott Fitzgerald all headed for Hollywood to try their pens at writing for the new medium of the feature film.

Defining Words, Without the Arbiters

You may remember learning in school that there are two kinds of dictionaries:

1. descriptive: those that describe how language is used
2. prescriptive: those that dictate the standards for how language should be used

In school your teachers used the second type almost exclusively, admonishing you to check the dictionary to find out whether a particular word in your paper was acceptable. You remember: “Ain’t ain’t in the dictionary” and that kind of thing.

This article describes the rise of Worknik and a few other linguistic databases that have arisen with the explosion of electronic communication. For these databases “automatic programs search the Internet, combing the texts of news feeds, archived broadcasts, the blogosphere, Twitter posts and dozens of other sources” to discover exactly how language is currently being used. Without the intervention of human evaluation, such databases serve only to describe how language  is used rather than to prescribe how it should be used.

25 literary resolutions for 2012. What’s yours?

The Los Angeles Times asked writers, editors and publishers what their literary resolutions for 2012 will be. If you’re looking for some literary resolutions, you’re bound to find some inspiration here. These resolutions range from “I’m going to reread “Moby-Dick,” “Crime & Punishment,” and “The Scarlet Letter” to “Read more poetry. Use fewer commas.”

And, in a related article, the LA Times checked back with some of the people who had offered their literary resolutions for 2011. Reading through this piece might soothe your conscience a bit. Lots of these people didn’t quite fulfill their annual resolutions, either.

Here are two more “best books” lists I think I’ve missed, NPR’s choices of The Best Music Books of 2011 and 2011′s Best American Poetry.

Britain’s The Telegraph provides comprehensive coverage in The Literary Year 2011. If you weren’t able to keep up with all the controversy over literary awards this year, you can beef up your knowledge here. This article also summarizes major publications in various fields (such as memoir, biography, politics, and sports) and concludes: “If it was a listless year for fiction, the non-fiction market fared little better.” PBS Newshour offers Conversation: The Year in Fiction, a discussion with Washington Post book critic Ron Charles.

Book lovers are also word lovers. Merriam-Webster, the dictionary people, offer 2011: The Year in Words, a compendium of “Defining Moments: In politics, culture, sports and more, these words spiked in lookups because of events in the news.”

The Christian Science Monitor challenges your knowledge of the year’s highly touted publications with 2011 fiction quiz: Can you recognize the opening line? [Warning: Each individual item is on a separate page, so click at your own risk.]

I’ll be creating my own list of best books read in 2011 and posting it separately. If you have a similar list of your own, you can include a link to it in the comments section.

Finally, if you’d rather focus on the year ahead than on the year past, Christian Science Monitor contributor Rachel Meier has this list of 6 books you should resolve to read in 2012 (one recommendation per page, annoyingly).

An Introduction to Psych You Up. Literally.

Maria Konnikova is a woman after my own heart. At Scientific American she has just introduced her new column, Literally Psyched, a “journey of interdisciplinary exploration”:

Here, I propose to use literature and creative inspiration to explore concepts in the psychology of the mind and human thought. To create a place that will blend the world of fiction and non-fiction, that of the literary and the psychological, of artistic inspiration and scientific exploration. To use whatever inspires me—a book, a character, a line, a moment—as a window of insight into the human mind. For who are creative writers but individuals who have dedicated their life and art to observing and chronicling humans as a whole: their interactions, their dreams, their hopes, their disappointments, the full complexity of their internal life?

And, as if her interdisciplinary approach to the areas in which literature (and other creative endeavors) and psychology intersect weren’t enough, she begins this introductory post with a personal story, a narrative anecdote from her own life that illustrates how she has become the person she is.

Literature, psychology, and life narrative all wrapped up together! This is good stuff. I think she’d probably be interested in Literature & Psychology.

Not Exactly Everyday Engineering: a Q&A with Brian Clegg

Publishers Weekly interviews Brian Clegg:

In his new book How to Build a Time Machine, Brian Clegg takes a “pop science” look at time travel, explaining quantum entanglement and superluminal speeds in terms that even a technophobe could understand. We asked Clegg about his book, some of his favorite time travel stories, and the most important scientific discovery of his lifetime.

I’ve always been fascinated by the literary potential of time travel. Devising a means of time travel is a challenge to a writer’s creative ingenuity: a blow to the head, a drug, a complex machine, a dream, a wormhole in the space-time continuum, a genetic disease, a ghostly netherworld. But the means of time travel is only a gimmick. What’s really important are the philosophical, psychological, scientific, and moral questions that would arise if, like Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, we were to come unstuck in time: What happens if a time traveler changes history? Can time travelers meet their older or younger selves in a different time period? If I could go back to an earlier time in my life knowing what I know now, would I change anything, and, if so, what might the results be? What advice would I offer my younger self? Would I listen to anything my older self had to tell me? Would I want to know how and when I was going to die?

Asked about his favorite fiction involving time travel, Brian Clegg, who has a degree in physics from Cambridge, replied:

One of my all time favorites is a short story by Robert Heinlein called “All You Zombies.” Heinlein sets up a wonderful time paradox, where the main character, who has had a sex change, goes back in time to impregnate his younger, female self. The resultant child is then moved back through time to become the mother. The character has literally come from nowhere. Perhaps my favorite novel with a time travel theme is Joe Haldeman’s Forever War, originally envisaged as a counter to Heinlein’s gung-ho Starship Troopers. Because the protagonists in Forever War are always taking long journeys at near the speed of light, they travel far into the future. By the time they return home everyone they once knew is dead, the world is not the one they remember – so there is nothing for it but to sign up for another tour.

See, its the implications of the time travelers’ actions, not the time travel itself, that’s fascinating.

Clegg believes that our ability to construct the technology necessary for time travel is thousands of years away. “But for me the amazing thing is that it’s only a matter of getting the technology right. There’s nothing in physics that prevents time travel.”

Give the holiday gift with the most staying power

For Walter Rodgers, writing in The Christian Science Monitor, that gift is books:

Even the best Christmas gifts lose their luster within a few months. Books have a staying power few gifts can match. I have nothing left from Christmases long past except my childhood books, each still prized. This season, give books. They are our bulwarks against time, ignorance, and barbarity.

Finally, here’s a photo for the season:

Although I did find the story compelling, the beginning of this book really dragged for me. I imagine the slow, drawn-out opening might not be such a problem for Norwegian readers who have followed Harry Hole through the 6 previous novels, but coming in well into the series like this made it hard for me to get involved with Harry and all his personal angst.



View all my reviews

As with so many concepts in literature, the French have an elegant word for it: uchronie. For Anglophone readers and writers, we have to make do with such unwieldy terms as “counterfactual novels”, “alternate timelines” and “allohistories” to describe these books. Uchronie is a neologism modelled on Utopia – a “no-time” rather than a “no-place”, used for “what if” books where significant historical events are changed. In its pure form, a uchronic novel involves a specific moment of divergence: in Kingsley Amis’s The Alteration (Philip Pullman fans should check out the winking similarities between Lyra’s universe and Amis’s) it is that the Reformation never happened; in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America it is that Franklin Roosevelt loses the presidential election of 1940 to Charles Lindbergh. It is a kind of literature that seems to be on the increase – my evidence for this is gut instinct, triggered by reading a spate of them including Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Andrew Crumey’s Mobius Dick and the trade collection of Geoff Johns’s Flashpoint, but a quick browse around the website Uchronia seemed to confirm the hunch.

Stuart Kelly philosophizes about the current popularity of “what if” novels that, here in the United States, are commonly called alternate histories:  “The novel most frequently cited as uchronia par excellence is Philip K Dick’s The Man In The High Castle, where the Nazis won the second world war (a conceit developed later by Robert Harris in Fatherland).”

In Praise of Book Critics

A big “thank you” to Cynthia Crossen, who, in a column in The Wall Street Journal, acknowledges that a professional book reviewer’s job is harder than it looks:

Critics read heaps of bad books, only some of which they review. They read analytically, so no sinking into a warm bath of contentment. And they inflame influential, articulate people—media-friendly authors and their fans. . . . Good book critics are exceptionally well read and can put a book not only in the context of the writer’s earlier work but also in literary history. They can say if the novel is Dickensian, Rabelaisian, Biblical, Proustian or Shakespearean or none of the above.

Good reviewers also have a conscience. They act in good faith (no personal antagonism or professional jealousy) and are civil and respectful.

My own observation is that professional book critics usually are careful to explain their evaluations instead of baldly stating them without justification. All book reviews ultimately come down to a question of personal taste, but a review that explains its evaluation is more helpful to a reader than one that simply states it. In an age when the internet allows anyone to review anything and everything, it’s helpful to keep such a distinction in mind:

Today, anyone can be a critic, but that doesn’t mean everyone’s opinions are equal. Although I often disagree with professional critics, I’m always interested in how they’ve come to their mistaken conclusions.

But even a detailed review can run into trouble, as the next item demonstrates.

Harvard historian Niall Ferguson threatens suit over bad review

Niall Ferguson, a historian who teaches at Harvard, has responded to a negative review of his book “Civilization: The West and the Rest” with an angry letter and by saying, “Don’t force my hand by forcing me to put it in the hands of lawyers.” The long review, threaded through with analyses of Ferguson’s previous works and related histories, was written by Pankaj Mishra and appeared in the Nov. 3 issue of the London Review of Books

This particular altercation seems to hinge on issues of politics and libel. Read this short article for details of the dialogue the review has produced.

Need Suggestions for the Biblophiles on Your Holiday Gift List?

If you’re still stumped about what to get for your book-loving friends and family this holiday season, here’s some help.

The Christian Science Monitor offers 6 perfect gifts for the book lover in your life. Although this is a small list, it’s diverse enough that you should find something for nearly everybody.

The Seattle Times is a bit more ambitious, with its list of 22 gift books for ardent readers. Book editor Mary Ann Gwinn’s  list includes some unusual categories:

• architecture
• bibliophilia
• crafts/domestic
• Francophilia
• geographilia
• history
• nature/natural history
• pure fun

And if you’ve a mind to patronize an independent bookstore, check out Salon’s article America’s beloved independent bookstores.

The Washington Talking Book and Braille Library serves more than 10,000 state residents and runs on the best efforts of 400 volunteers, providing recorded and Braille books for anyone with a disability that prevents them from reading books in a traditional format.

Time Doesn’t Always Fly When You’re Time-Travelling 

Susan K. Perry, Ph. D., reviews Stephen King’s latest novel, 11/22/63, about an attempt to undo the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. She begins her review as follows:

The way I see it, there are at least two kinds of time travel stories. There are those that are science-based, real science fiction. A machine is often involved, and some kind of time-space anomaly is seriously pondered. Then there is what I think of as the romantic genre of time travel. Who needs a machine when you can step through a magic mirror, walk along the sidewalk, or step down an invisible stair?

That last is King’s choice in 11/22/63.

I was drawn in by the title of her blog entry and by this opening, but, in this quite short review, she has very little to say about time travel:

It was an odd choice to have the time traveller having to go back to several years before the main incident. That makes the reading a long haul. History resets with each trip, and when the time traveller says he gets exhausted just thinking about going back again to do things better, so does this reader. The suspense becomes much more keen when we finally get to the assassination scene.

Here’s her conclusion:

King fans: you’ll love it. Time-travel fans: its approach is different enough to make reading it worth the time (unless you’ve got only a month left to live, in which case, find something better to do). Conspiracy theorists: it’s a big book, but it doesn’t break any new ground.

I’ve always liked time travel stories because I find fascinating the questions of what I’d do differently if I had the chance to relive a portion of my life or how I would react if I found myself in a time and place other than my own. I had hoped for some discussion of issues such as these in Perry’s review.

A couple of my favorite time-travel novels are The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger and Kindred by Octavia Butler. Do you have any favorites?

Related Posts:

• Taming Time Travel
• Time-travel romances abound onscreen

The Best Literary Fiction Blogs & Websites

Jane Friedman, publishing mogul and college professor, offers ” a list of the best blogs and websites focused on literary fiction and culture.”

Be sure to read the comments, where other people have submitted their own suggestions.

Doctors Should Use Shakespeare’s Plays To Diagnose Patients

The Huffington Post reports on a study by Dr. Kenneth Heaton, a retired gastroenterologist and researcher at the University of Bristol in the U. K. The study investigated how doctors could improve treatment for patients suffering from psychosomatic symptoms. Heaton concluded that doctors should look at Shakespeare’s plays for help in understanding their patients physical manifestations of psychological distress:

Analysis of the Bard’s major works showed the British playwright’s sensibility of the links between emotional distress and physical symptoms.

Hamlet suffers fatigue after the loss of his father, complaining of his “weary, stale, flat and unprofitable” existence, while in King Lear, Gloucester’s despair causes his “senses [to] grow imperfect.”

Heaton hopes that his research, published in the journal Medical Humanities,  “may help lessen the frequent delay in diagnosis for patients suffering from psychosomatic symptoms.”

This Book Is 119 Years Overdue 

The wondrous database that reveals what Americans checked out of the library a century ago

John Plotz admits that thinking about the reading experiences of people in past centuries fascinates him: “I can’t help reading inscriptions, plucking out old bookmarks, decoding faded marginalia. I catch myself wondering who was reading this a century ago, and where, and why?” As a result:

when I learned about What Middletown Read, a database that tracks the borrowing records of the Muncie Public Library between 1891 and 1902, I had some of the same feelings physicists probably have when new subatomic particles show up in their cloud chambers. Could you see how many times a particular book had been taken out? Could you find out when? And by whom? Yes, yes, and yes. You could also find out who those patrons were: their age, race, gender, occupation (and whether that made them blue or white collar, skilled, semi-skilled, or unskilled), and their names and how they signed them.

The database contains information from ledgers discovered in the attic during a renovation of the Muncie Public Library building, which was built in 1904. The collection of ledgers was brought to light by Ball State University English Professor Frank Felsenstein.

But the database is only a jumping-off point for Plotz, who has been trying to follow the life of one Muncie resident, the teenager Louis Bloom, through the library books that he borrowed. The search took Plotz to various genealogy sources. Eventually he was able to track down some of Bloom’s descendants and interview them about their memories of the man Bloom became. Plotz’s enthusiasm for these old records and what they can teach us about cultural history permeates this lively article. I highly recommend it.

10 works of fiction that might change the way you look at nature

Science fiction and fantasy have tackled everything from environmentalist utopias, to horrific industrial disasters that create pollution zombies. Here are ten speculative novels that explore environmental themes, from a variety of political perspectives, that could change the way you look at nature forever.

Read fuller discussions of these 10 works:

1. Ecotopia, by Ernest Callenbach
2. The Quiet War, by Paul McAuley
3. The Color of Distance, by Amy Thomson
4. Boneshaker, by Cherie Priest
5. The Lorax, by Doctor Suess
6. “The Magic Goes Away” by Larry Niven
7. The Alchemist and The Executioness, by Paolo Bacigalupi and Tobias Buckell
8. Lilith’s Brood (trilogy), by Octavia Butler
9. Watermind by M. M. Buckner
10. Oryx and Crake and Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood

Writing in the Guardian, Wayne Gooderham concludes: “Judging by the stories that have been written about it, writers do not make the best of friends.”

10 Most Reclusive Literary Geniuses in History

The world’s greatest writers use their literary genius to illustrate and comment on the human condition. And yet, those who could be considered to have the best understanding of human feelings often choose to hide themselves away from the public eye. The stereotype of the reclusive author is not always true, but for these literary greats, a life of solitude had more appeal than the draws of fame and awards.

Novelist Fights the Tide by Opening a Bookstore

NASHVILLE — After a beloved local bookstore closed here last December and another store was lost to the Borders bankruptcy, this city once known as the Athens of the South, rich in cultural tradition and home to Vanderbilt University, became nearly barren of bookstores.

A collective panic set in among Nashville’s reading faithful. But they have found a savior in Ann Patchett, the best-selling novelist who grew up here. On Wednesday, Ms. Patchett, the acclaimed author of “Bel Canto” and “Truth and Beauty,” will open Parnassus Books, an independent bookstore that is the product of six months of breakneck planning and a healthy infusion of cash from its owner.

Neal Stephenson, Digital Publishing, and Why Books Will Survive

Hefting Neal Stephenson’s latest 1000+-page tome, Reamde, prompts science and technology writer David DiSalvo to consider the contrast between traditionally published books and books on an ereader. He admits to participating in the ereader culture:

I own a Kindle and like it quite a lot, especially for travel, and I’m sure the latest volley of tablets arriving on the market all have something to offer—but none of these devices can offer the sense of achievement one gets from working through the pages, seeing them amass one after another behind a thumb pressing down against the satisfying weight of quality stock.

But, he adds:

Books are much more than words on a page or screen, though what that “more” is seems to irrationally persist against every notion of progress a digital economy trumpets.

I’m not sure what his notion of that “more” is, but my notion of it is the transactional building of a textual world that occurs when an individual reader interacts with a written text to create the poem, as described by Louise Rosenblatt in The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. In Rosenblatt’s terms, the text is the words the author wrote, while the poem is the imaginal world that the reader builds while interacting with the author’s text. And I don’t see how it makes any difference whether the text is printed on paper or appears on an electronic device. Yes, “Books are much more than words on a page or screen,” but that “more” is created in the reader’s mind, regardless of which form the presentation of the text takes.

DiSalvo continues:

The poet John Ashbery, speaking at the 2011 National Book Awards this week, said “Reading is difficult…[it is] pleasurable and painful…it can change a person.”  And that is precisely why I will keep buying books like Reamde as true to form books and not digital uploads to my Kindle. I want the difficult experience of reading a challenging book to resonate beyond my eyes. I want the entire experience, and I want to feel the sense of accomplishment from embracing the challenge.

All right. But, for my money, he’s begging the question. How does using an ereader prevent him from having “the entire experience” of engaging with the text? What is it about the inherent nature of ink on paper that makes a printed book essentially different from an ebook? Begging the question means assuming that something is true, then asserting that assumption as “proof” of the fact in question, and that is exactly what DiSalvo does here.

He also writes:

If we attempt to relegate reading entirely to a one-dimensional form, no matter how stylized or convenient, I think we are mystified by an illusion of progress masking regress. Maybe the loss from doing so can’t be quantified, but it’s real nonetheless, in the same way that watching the world through a TV screen instead of imbibing it through experience is a profound negation of what it means to be human.  There will never be a digital prosthetic capable of replacing what’s lost when we trade fullness for immediacy.

A “one-dimensional form”? An ereader is just as three-dimensional as a printed book; it’s just that one of those dimensions, thickness, is a lot smaller than the book’s, particularly in the case of Reamde. And his comparison of reading to “watching the world through a TV screen instead of imbibing it through experience” is simply not apt in this context. There IS a real world outside, and watching it on TV is not the same as experiencing it. But the world produced by reading a book–the poem, in Rosenblatt’s terms–does not have an objective existence; it only comes into existence when a reader creates it by interacting with a text. So this argument, too, begs the question.

In the end, the entire ebook vs. printed book argument comes down to personal preference. Some people will prefer one over the other all the time; other people may prefer one over the other depending on circumstances (an ereader is much easier to lug on vacation than a stack of books, after all). And it’s certainly all right to express one’s personal preference. Just admit that that’s what it is.

The reason is that most of our reactions while reading occur intuitively or unconsciously—that is, they happen outside of our awareness. It takes something extraordinary—and that something can be either extraordinarily good or extraordinarily bad—to snap us back to attention. But an ordinary book may never do this. As a result, when we’ve finished reading it, we don’t have much to say about it. For those of us who review most books we read, this reaction can be a problem.

One technique I’ve sometimes used to overcome such a situation is to contrast this ordinary book with a similar but extraordinary one. For example, I was once reading a novel that had eight or nine main characters; the structure of the novel comprised individual chapters told from each character’s point of view. I found this novel unremarkable because I couldn’t differentiate among the several characters. I contrasted this book to Barbara Kingsolver’s marvelous The Poisonwood Bible, which features four main characters and chapters with the characters’ alternating points of view. After reading a bit of Poisonwood, any discerning reader can easily tell which character is narrating, even without the chapter headings. The contrast between Kingsolver’s book and the one I was reading allowed me to articulate why this other novel didn’t work: (1) it had too many main characters and (2) the author did not create an identifiable voice for each character—they all sounded alike.

In another example, I recently read a novel that used the narrative technique of a fragmented storyline; that is, the book did not present its plot chronologically, but, as is so popular these days, in seemingly random chunks, labeled by date, that jumped all around in time. I found this very confusing; at the beginning of each small section I had to calculate in my head the amount of time either before or after the pivotal event when this particular action was taking place. I contrasted this novel with The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger and A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, both of which use the fragmented time technique. In those two books I found the technique effective because the interwoven, nonsequential events were an inherent part of each novel’s meaning; the inter-relation of seemingly random events was part of what drove the novel along, and I therefore had no trouble following and understanding the movement of the action. But in the novel I was currently reading the ordering of events really was random; it was as if the author had written each short section on a separate index card, shuffled the cards, then assembled them, in their shuffled disorder, into a manuscript. This was a technique used for its own sake rather than for an intrinsic, thematic purpose. For this reason the novel’s structure irritated me because it pointlessly made the action hard to follow.

The best fiction engages us emotionally, intellectually, and morally. When a novel fails to engage us, we may have trouble explaining exactly why. Mentally comparing this novel to a better one that uses a similar technique (such as narrative structure or point of view) or has a similar theme may help us pinpoint exactly why the book we’ve just finished is so unremarkable.

And I’m sure that more lists won’t be far behind.