From Somebody Else's List

Jason Kottke recently posted a link to a book called 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, foreword by Peter Ackroyd and Edited by Peter Boxall. (I've used Jason's referral code, as I'm not a member of Amazon's program, and somebody should get the bump, should you decide to buy the book from that link.) Posting about a book like this is worthless, really, unless you've managed to take a look at the list, and so here it is (or so I've been given to understand). The list is composed entirely of fiction, and by that they mean prose fiction so nobody has to worry about struggling through Shakespeare or Milton (why Shakespeare should be much of a struggle is beyond me, but plenty of folks seem intimidated). It's also pretty heavily biased in favour of books published after 1900, and we could debate forever why some books were chosen and some were not. Why choose Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden, an excellent book, certainly, but not the follow-up Still Life, the only work of literature other than Othello to reduce me to tears? Why so much Faulkner, but no Light in August? The list seems compiled rather than considered, but I suppose that's the way of lists. And even though this list is presented with less behind it than, say, Harold Bloom's The Western Cannon, here's what I've read from it (note that I've included The Recognitions, because I'm reading it now, and that I have excluded those works that I have not read in full):

  1. Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro
  2. On Beauty, by Zadie Smith
  3. The Double, by José Saramago
  4. Fury, by Salman Rushdie
  5. Choke, by Chuck Palahniuk
  6. Life of Pi, by Yann Martel
  7. House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski
  8. Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson
  9. Underworld, by Don DeLillo
  10. The Ghost Road, by Pat Barker
  11. The Stone Diaries, by Carol Shields
  12. Regeneration, by Pat Barker
  13. Possession, by A.S. Byatt
  14. Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro
  15. Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco
  16. The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie
  17. The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, by Douglas Adams
  18. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, by Douglas Adams
  19. The Passion, by Jeanette Winterson
  20. Watchmen, by Alan Moore & David Gibbons
  21. White Noise, by Don DeLillo
  22. Neuromancer, by William Gibson
  23. Flaubert's Parrot, by Julian Barnes
  24. Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie
  25. The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco
  26. If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino
  27. The Virgin in the Garden, by A.S. Byatt
  28. Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
  29. The Public Burning, by Robert Coover
  30. Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino
  31. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson
  32. Slaughterhouse-five, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
  33. The French Lieutenant's Woman, by John Fowles
  34. Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, by Vladimir Nabokov
  35. 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke
  36. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick
  37. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez
  38. The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon
  39. V., by Thomas Pynchon
  40. Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
  41. The Collector, by John Fowles
  42. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey
  43. Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov
  44. Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges
  45. Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem
  46. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
  47. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
  48. Naked Lunch, by William Burroughs
  49. The Once and Future King, by T.H. White
  50. The Bell, by Iris Murdoch
  51. On the Road, by Jack Kerouac
  52. Pnin, by Vladimir Nabokov
  53. The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
  54. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
  55. The Quiet American, by Graham Greene
  56. The Recognitions, by William Gaddis
  57. Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
  58. Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming
  59. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
  60. Gormenghast, by Mervyn Peake
  61. Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell
  62. Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake
  63. Animal Farm, by George Orwell
  64. Ficciones, by Jorge Luis Borges
  65. The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  66. The Glass Bead Game, by Herman Hesse
  67. Between the Acts, by Virginia Woolf
  68. The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler
  69. Murphy, by Samuel Beckett
  70. The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien
  71. Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner
  72. Miss Lonelyhearts, by Nathanael West
  73. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
  74. Orlando, by Virginia Woolf
  75. Steppenwolf, by Herman Hesse
  76. The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
  77. Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf
  78. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  79. Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse
  80. Ulysses, by James Joyce
  81. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce
  82. The Thirty-Nine Steps, by John Buchan
  83. Sons and Lovers, by D.H. Lawrence
  84. The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad
  85. Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
  86. The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James
  87. The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells
  88. The Invisible Man, by H.G. Wells
  89. The Island of Dr. Moreau, by H.G. Wells
  90. The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells
  91. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson
  92. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
  93. Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson
  94. The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James
  95. Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There, by Lewis Carroll
  96. Silas Marner, by George Eliot
  97. A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
  98. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë
  99. The Pit and the Pendulum, by Edgar Allan Poe
  100. A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens
  101. Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
  102. Émile; or, On Education, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  103. Pamela, by Samuel Richardson
  104. A Modest Proposal, by Jonathan Swift
  105. Moll Flanders, by Daniel Defoe
  106. Love in Excess, by Eliza Haywood
  107. Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Okay, I'll be honest, I just like posting lists every so often, and I feel like I'm due. And 107 books, from a list like this one, really isn't so bad, especially considering I was twenty years old before I started reading much beyond spy novels and bad fantasy.

Posted by August on 05.13.08 at 1:18 PM | Comments (0)

#41 - You Only Live Twice, by Ian Fleming

The prose in this book was as compact and exciting as it has been for all the previous books, but Fleming was pretty obviously losing steam. The idea of dressing him up as a Japanese miner (including skin dye!) and training him in Japanese customs and then expecting him to pass muster in less than a week is patently ridiculous. The Japanese culture is incredibly nuanced, and at the time Fleming wrote this novel, the influence of the West had not extended so far into their culture as it has now, making Bond's transformation even less believable. I suppose the only consolation is that it doesn't work. Bond is found out very quickly by almost every Japanese person he meets. I won't comment on the Euro-centric attitudes that border on racism; I've already mentioned how poorly Fleming fares with non-European cultures when reviewing previous Bond novels. All that should be said here is that, while Bond himself makes little effort to respect the Japanese culture, Fleming himself at least tries to do so.

Exciting as these books are (and I don't care what others say; there is a lot of stuff in the Bond books that don't boil down to action) the bits in which Bond is revealed as weak and human are still the best. At the end of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the novel before this one, Bond's new wife was murdered in the final pages. The first hundred or so pages of You Only Live Twice are taken up, not so much with Bond getting used to his assignment and meeting new people (although those things happen), but with Bond's depression and apathy. The Bond of You Only Live Twice is not daring and reckless; he simply does not care whether he lives or dies. He has even botched several missions and is on the verge of being fired!

Part of me is sad that there are only two Bond books left for me to read, but given that Fleming seemed to have been running out of ideas (which you can read more about in this Guardian article) I'm glad that I don't have to look ahead to a long and painful fall from grace. If you're new to the Bond novels or simply a long-time fan looking for an attractive full set (I quite like the garish trade paperbacks that I've been reading, but tastes vary), then might I suggest you look at these amazing new hardcovers.

Next, a truly never-ending book, The Recognitions, by William Gaddis.

Posted by August on 05.11.08 at 3:36 PM | Comments (0)

#40 - The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman

I actually finished reading this on Thursday night (this being Saturday afternoon), but my allergies were so severe that I could barely think, let alone write a coherent blog post. Likewise last night after work. The allergies are with me still, but they have cleared sufficiently that I can now function more or less at my previous level, paltry and insufficient though that may be. The Amber Spyglass was not quite what the first two books were. It didn't have the sense of fun, adventure and wonder of The Golden Compass, nor was there the sense of transition of The Subtle Knife. This was a book almost exclusively of conflict and self-discovery. It's also a book of considerable controversy, probably more so than the other two. One of the big points of contention is the so-called "sex scene" near the end of the book. The two underage children do not actually have sex, though I can see how it would seem that way to folks who see sex in any aggressive, romantically fueled contact between a male and a female. There certainly is such contact, but any reader who paid attention to what happened before and after the contact will realize that neither Will nor Lyra (I hope I haven't spoiled anything for any of you) simply aren't at that point. They are still young, and innocent, and so much full of joy and terror at this new notion of love and physical intimacy that they are barely able to kiss and hold hands. You can forget about them tearing off their clothes to get at the interesting bits underneath. It wouldn't occur to them, and if it did, it would scare the bujeesus out of them. People need to grow up and stop looking for any excuse to vilify folks they don't agree with. Speaking of vilifying folks they don't agree with, the other major point of controversy is Pullman's apparently anti-Christian and more specifically, anti-Roman Catholic point of view. I'm not entirely certain how to present Pullman's point of view, except to say that it's not really the religion that he vilifies. For Pullman, it all comes down to people. The Church has power in Lyra's world, and so it attracts the sort of people who want power for its own sake, and to Pullman's mind (and here I tend to agree with him), those people tend to be pretty bad people. Pullman obviously disagrees with the message, but he doesn't present the institution as malevolent; it's the people who are malevolent (and the Metatron, who was once a man—even God, or the Authority, who makes a brief appearance, is not the villain other characters have presented him as), and the reason to reject the church is not because the institution is evil, but because it forces people to give up human interaction with the world. It invalidates the human experience. And that's really the choice that Dr. Malone tempts Will and Lyra with (just as the serpent tempted Adam and Eve in Eden). Will they meet the world afraid of themselves, disconnected from their souls because of what they've been told by some nameless, faceless authority, or will they greet the world and each other as human beings, fully aware of their weaknesses but with all of themselves? It's not much of a choice, really, and I can see how even today some people would be afraid of it. I think it's from that fear that many people condemn Pullman's trilogy.

Even though I just finished reading a series of three books, they were all bound together in a single volume, and that made it seem in some ways like a kind of never-ending book (close to a thousand pages, folks!), so now I'm going to read to something quick and light before moving on to the next big thing. So, next is You Only Live Twice, by Ian Fleming.

Posted by August on 05.10.08 at 3:54 PM | Comments (0)

#39 - The Subtle Knife, by Philip Pullman

The shortest of the three novels in the His Dark Materials series, The Subtle Knife feels very much like a transitional work. At least one new major character is introduced (Will), and a new magical object (for which the book is named), but otherwise very little seems to have happened as far as Lyra's adventure to find her father is concerned. The book does feel considerably more mature, dealing more frankly with matters of sexual maturity and issues of moral authority (and not coming down entirely against moral authority; Pullman rather sensibly comes down only against arbitrary moral authority). I can't say that I had as much fun reading this one as I did The Golden Compass, but I now have more respect for Pullman's ability to pull together a functioning set set of rules for world-building. Lyra's world seemed rather skimpy in the first volume, but pulls together nicely here.

Next: The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman.

Posted by August on 05.06.08 at 12:39 AM | Comments (0)

#38 - The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman

I had originally planned to read The Pale Horseman by Bernard Cornwell for book number thirty-eight, a book that had come to me along with a dozen or so others in a package from my father (whose taste in historical fiction is quite good; he steered me towards Patrick O'Brian, after all), and I had even announced that fact on this blog, but I got a hundred pages in only to learn that it was the second book in a series, and that while I had been sent the third book, I had not been sent the first. I am not the sort of person who will read a series out of order, so I switched to The Golden Compass instead, and here we are. For those not in the know (although how could you not be, given that it was recently adapted into a major motion picture starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig—a fact the enormous gold sticker on the cover demands I recognize), this is the first book in a trilogy known as His Dark Materials, a title appropriately lifted from Paradise Lost. The trilogy has a reputation for being anti-religous, or at least anti-Christian, and I can certainly see that in The Golden Compass, where the enemy is the well-meaning but cruel and authoritarian Church.

It's marketed as a children's book, but I prefer to think of it as an adventure story, because while it certainly feels like children are the target audience, there is a tremendous amount of bloody and violent death and a good deal of language—mostly in the form of scientific terminology, although not always—that would probably be over the heads of most junior-high aged kids, and probably would have been over my head when I was that age (I had an unusually high vocabulary at that age, though I seem to have let it plateau). It is rollicking good fun, though, and seems to have an intellectual depth that's not present in either the Harry Potter or Narnia books. I would have loved them at that age, and I'm enjoying them now.

Next is The Subtle Knife, by Philip Pullman.

Posted by August on 05.03.08 at 2:10 AM | Comments (0)

#37 - A Good Man is Hard to Find, by Flannery O'Connor

I can't remember anymore if I'd read some of these stories prior to this week, or if I'd simply heard so much about them that it only seems like I had. I was interested in reading this book because O'Connor had a reputation for being controversial, and also for being somewhat forgotten, although I don't pretend to know how true that last is. I only know that finding even this one volume of her work was pretty damned hard, and I had to look for quite some time. (I may not have mentioned this before, but I don't buy books online unless it's absolutely necessary; even when buying used or remaindered, I prefer to give my money to someone in the neighbourhood.)

I have no difficulty seeing how her stories could be seen as controversial back in 1948. They address head on issues of race and religion; they tackle a decaying, morally bankrupt American South in ways that no doubt made her contemporaries very uncomfortable. Reading these stories is an uncomfortable experience for me a half-century later, and not just because, like most people in this day and age, I tend to flinch when I see the word "nigger" in print. O'Connor's stories do display the moments of grace that she is famous for, but they display them only after she has raked each of us (and her characters, of course) over the coals for our ignorance, for not thinking we have ignorance or prejudice in us, for our justifications and our pride. Reading these stories would make even the most egalitarian of us wonder if maybe we aren't as open-minded and fair as we like to think we are. I found myself asking the question, if I had been born, rural soul that I am, in the days of my grandfather's generation, would I be the same man I am today, or would I be like the people in O'Connor's stories? My grandfather was not like them, and that gives me hope, but that's not the same as knowing.

If you're the sort of reader who doesn't think that writers should moralize, or don't believe that literature can or should possess any sort of moral authority, then I won't recommend this book to you. I'm not always sure about what I believe. What is right at one moment doesn't always seem right at the next, and I suppose that's the nature of moral inquiry in the world we live in, but that doesn't stop me from believing that moral inquiry still has a place in art, and that making us question ourselves is not only a kind of moral authority, but a necessary one. I don't think that literature should instruct us in what to believe (and O'Connor had enough skill with irony that she was never quite didactic), but it should force us to do our best to understand why we believe what we believe. A Good Man is Hard to Find will do that for you.

Next: The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman.

Posted by August on 04.26.08 at 9:12 PM | Comments (0)

#36 - The Projectionist, by Michael Helm

This is a bittersweet moment for me. Well, not this exact moment. More like three hours ago, when I finished reading the book. That was a bittersweet moment. You see, Michael Helm has only written two novels. On the one hand, I just finished reading a second spectacular novel by Michael Helm; on the other hand, there are no more Michael Helm novels left for me to read. I can guarantee you, that should I compile a list at the end of this year as I did at the end of last year, a list describing those books that I enjoyed reading the most in that year, both of Helm's novels would be on it. In fact, I think it's safe to declare Helm my favourite living Canadian author, supplanting the still wonderful Sheila Heti. Actually, come to think of it, all three of my favourite (living) Canadian writers of prose fiction have only two books to their name (Helm, Heti, and André Alexis*).

Okay, okay, the book itself. The Projectionist was actually Helm's first novel, and while I regret reading them out of order, it was actually In the Place of Last Things that was first recommended to me, so I felt obligated to try that one out first. Helm's prose style is already fully developed, as though somewhere there are a dozen practice novels that were discarded before he arrived at this level of craft. Though his sentences have a slower, more rural pace to them, Helm pays attention to word choice and syntax and all the wonderful mechanics of language in much the same way as J.M. Villaverde (whose work, it now occurs to me, I have already compared to Helm's on this site). Every word and sentence seems to be in the right place at the right time, performing the right tasks. Recently, Steven Beattie commented on what he perceives as a disconnect between technique and subject matter in Canadian fiction:

The problem with all these novels (and the above certainly does not constitute an exhaustive list) is that the form and the content of the works seem extricable, when they should not be. As Mark Schorer writes in his seminal essay, "Technique as Discovery": "The novel is still read as though its content has some value in itself, as though the subject matter of fiction has greater or lesser value in itself, and as though technique were not a primary but a supplementary element, capable perhaps of not unattractive embellishments upon the surface of the subject, but hardly its essence."

Readers who are looking for writing that recognizes the essential coherence of subject and technique, of form and content, would be advised to steer clear of the above-mentioned novels [...]

I disgree on some of his examples (Douglas Coupland doing much of anything to worthwhile effect is news to me, and I felt no disengagement at all between the form and content of Shields' The Stone Diaries—quite the opposite, actually—and I'll grant him Leon Rooke with no argument) but the point itself is well made. Too often Canadian writers focus on either honing their prose or their plot, as though an excess of attention to one will compensate for lack of it in the other. I also admit that I can be kept interested in a bad plot if the sentences are good enough, but poorly written prose will often leave me cold to an otherwise excellent plot. I suppose the point I'm trying to get at is that Helm doesn't suffer from this problem. Style and substance are here married as equals, and it was no shotgun wedding. Helm does for the Canadian northwest what Faulkner and others have done for the American south. He's given rural life a language and dignity of its own, in a way that not even Margaret Laurence did, although she came damned close (I like to think of her as the Grand Old Dame of Canadian letters, being much more deserving than Iron Maggie). My only real complaint is that I didn't get to do it first.

The preoccupation with memory that I noted about In the Place of Last Things is present in this novel, although in a less developed form. The narrator of this novel, a man of questionable reputation in his home town, is also a kind of rough-draft for Russ Littlebury, though I somehow doubt either character would see themselves as particularly similar. If there is any problem with this book, it only emerges when looking at it side by side with his other novel, and even then, it's not a problem with this book so much as it is with the other (which was actually better). That problem, which I have hinted at, is that the characters are too similar, and certain themes and plot elements repeat themselves perhaps too vigorously. It's a small thing, when placed against how just flat-out good both books were. I'm gushing, seriously.

Next: A Good Man is Hard to Find, by Flannery O'Connor.

*It came to my attention immediately after posting this review that André Alexis published a second novel (his third book of fiction) yesterday. Hooray!

Posted by August on 04.24.08 at 2:41 AM | Comments (0)

#35 - Courage My Love, by Sarah Dearing

What is it with French flaps these days? I hate the goddamn things. Sure, I suppose they look pretty and expensive, but books saddled with them almost always have tighter bindings, and that makes them more difficult to hold open, and all that extra weight near the outside edge of the book means that they can flop closed on you at exactly the wrong time. They are just a pain in the ass. I know, I know, Ed had told us that we shouldn't talk about the cover when we review a book, that treating the thing like an artifact is out of bounds. Ed is wrong (or full of shit, depending on how much he's irritated you on any given day). In an ideal world—and in the academic world as well, which is far from ideal—we talk about "texts" rather than "works" or "books". Texts are they mystical abstract things that enter our minds directly, free from encumbrances like paper or ink or the tightness of the binding or that nagging pain we get from sitting too long. The problem is, that when one is assessing the quality of a thing rather than, say, trying to explain why it conforms to neo-Marxist ideology, the way we interact with that thing matters. The conditions matter, if only because we need to understand if something other than the thing (the book!) is affecting our judgement. I don't care how good it is, if a book is printed in such a way that it's always flopping closed or the type runs into the binding or whatever, I'm going to get pissed off at the book and that's going to affect what I say about it. Ed tends to miss details like that (but then, any long-time listener to The Bat Segundo Show will know that there's lots that Ed misses, like when an author is trying to explain—if only through an increasingly aggressive tone of voice—how asking the same questions six different ways won't change their answer, whether Ed agrees or not, and would he please change the fucking subject already). Anyway, I'm sick of French flaps.

I bought this book because it takes place in Kensington Market, a neighbourhood that's about a ten minute walk from my apartment. A woman named Phillipa Maria Donahue, after leaving her home of Cincinnati for her asshole husband, having an abortion and becoming a housewife, decides that the comforts of Yorkville are too constricting (oh that we could all have such problems), and figures that just disappearing into the sloppy mess of the Market is an ideal escape, a way to experience a genuine life, genuinely lived. Or something. She changes her name to Nova Philip, rents a cheap room, gets some new clothes, and befriends a charming but mostly harmless local troublemaker (who is just as big an asshole as her husband, but who is a different kind of asshole, so she likes him) named Tommy Gunn. What's up with all the ridiculous character names I've been coming across lately? It's like a group of middle-aged Wisconsin housewives made a list of potential gangsta-rap pseudonyms and started handing it out to writers. It's embarrassing.

Dearing is said to live in, or at least around, the Market, so I find it curious that the scenes set in Yorkville ring more true. Kensington is painted as a dangerous, almost feral place at times, particularly at night, and that just hasn't been my experience of it. Granted it's not the safest place in the city after dark, but it's not the crazed wilderness of junkies and muggers that it's made out to be. Perhaps in the intervening years (the novel is set in 1999) gentrification has set in, but I doubt it has done so to that degree. I was pleased that I recognized the shops and divisions that "Nova" eventually wanders into and describes, including Courage My Love, the store for which the novel is named (although given where Dearing's protagonist rents her room and her reasons for being in the Market to begin with I think Asylum might have been a more appropriate title, though certainly a less appealing one). I even use similar names for the streets (Fish Street, Clothes Avenue, Vegetable Avenue).

I'm afraid to say that, though I enjoyed the book, I didn't really like any of the characters. Phillipa/Nova remains a tourist at the end of the novel, despite her assertion otherwise, and her sense of entitlement doesn't seem to have been stolen from her, despite an act of violence in the closing pages. Her husband is an asshole, and quite inconsistent at times. He doesn't have a personality so much as he's just repeatedly positioned in such a way that he irritates or offends Phillipa/Nova. We aren't meant to like him, but he winds up being a generic roadblock instead of a real human being. Tommy Gunn is all about the tough love, as much a caricature as the husband (Brendan? Dan? was that his name?), just more useful to the protagonist. I almost wish I didn't enjoy the book, because then I could feel my irritation with its shortcomings is more justified. Maybe ambivalence is a good thing for a book to create in the mind of the reader, I don't know.

Next: The Projectionist, by Michael Helm.

Posted by August on 04.21.08 at 1:00 PM | Comments (0)

Man of Constant Sorrow

Most of the writers I know who are either barely published (like myself) or as yet entirely unpublished live in mortal terror of two possibilities. First, that no-one out there will like their work and their masterpiece will never find the home it deserves, and second, that their work isn't any good at all and their work will never find a home at all. I alternate between one fear and the other with occasional confident bursts that border on arrogance. As I see things at the moment, there are two options open. We can persevere, if only slowly like myself, and continue to send our typescripts* to journals and agents and publishers. The other option is to self-publish. I respect this option, but rarely will I support it with my dollars. It's not that I believe there is no such thing as a good self-published book, or that there are no decent writers self-publishing. I'm sure there are many. What I do know is I will only be able to read so many books in my life, and I choose those with care according to a set of standards that, while perhaps not unique, are still my own. One is that the book must have first passed through the gauntlet of a professional editor's red pen. Publishing is a business, and editors are human beings, so obviously their opinions are fallible and their motives for selecting a book not always purely artistic or aesthetic. Commerce enters in. But still, somebody else out there, someone with experience and judgement, someone other than the the author him or herself, has declared that not only is the book worth their time, but they feel it is worth mine as well, and are willing lay down the cost of printing to back up that opinion. It is imperfect at best, but still it is something.

Despite how badly and (it seems recently) how often the system can fail, it pains me to see some self-published authors consumed by their anger. It's hard work to self-publish. Writers must not only be writers, they must be businessmen and designers and promoters and salesmen.** It's also hard, and I know this from experience, to have your work rejected. The rejections are not personal, but writers often have difficulty separating themselves from their work. Having a story or a poem or a novel rejected, especially if it happens repeatedly, can feel very much like the editors are rejecting you personally. It can be disheartening. Trust me, I understand.

To cope, I think writers must consider two things. First, that agents and editors are human beings doing a job. Unless you've done something incredibly rude or stupid to piss them off, they aren't out to get you, and most likely have no opinion of you personally at all. In fact, even if you did do something rude or stupid, they probably still aren't out to get you. You just won't be able to have any useful dealings with them. After all, while there are certainly assholes out there, most people won't act liked jerks until you give them a reason to. Not everyone's tastes are the same, and not everyone will enjoy your work. Get over it, and look for an agent or an editor who does, and be sure to do it politely. Second, and this is the moment we all live in fear of, a writer must consider that maybe his work just isn't good enough. I know that it's fashionable to behave as though we are all in this together, as though taste is all that varies and all writers are created equal. It simply isn't so. There is some horrible writing out there, and you might be one of the folks shopping it around. I might be one of them too. I can't tell you how many times, with panic in my heart, I've looked at my own work—including work that's already been published—and asked myself, "what was I thinking? Who would read this crap?" We can't all be William Faulkner or Vladimir Nabokov or Virginia Woolf or Carol Shields or whomever it is we admire. When confronting this possibility, I do not suggest giving up. Let me say that again: do not give up. Instead, get better. Read more, write more, do another draft. Be merciless in your rewriting and your editing. Also remember that getting better doesn't happen overnight. It could take a year, or two years, or ten years. It could take even longer. I won't pretend that it isn't demoralizing, but it's not useful to either your work or your emotional well-being to take it as a personal affront.

Which brings me to Cliff Burns. I first heard of him three days ago, when Dave posted about him. Mr. Burns has a talent for rage and vitriol that is truly astonishing, and he directs it all at editors and publishers, seems to take every rejection personally. You can read some of his complaints here. When folks suggest that his responses are extreme, he has replied the following (you can find it in the comments at that last link): "My posts are not the aggrieved rantings of a petulant author, they are based on experiences I've outlined, in depth, in an essay called "Solace of Fortitude" (Google it, you'll find it)." I did search for the essay, and found it here. The story he tells is not so extraordinary, not so different from hundreds I've heard and read about, some of those stories being about the early years of now successful authors. Mr. Burns would have us think the rejections are unwarranted, however, particularly because of experiences like the one outlined here. That is indeed a ridiculous thing to have happen, but as I said before, editors are human and sometimes the currents of commerce prevail. He challenges us to download his novel, read the first ten pages or so, and see for ourselves if he should have a home with a major publisher. I did just that (you can find the novel, So Dark the Night—a good title by the way—here). I read the first twelve pages, in fact. Were I an editor, I would have rejected this novel as well. I may not have even finished the first ten pages. The prose is juvenile, with a cliché—either a phrase or an image—not only on every page, but in nearly every paragraph. His characters have names that would seem ridiculous in a parody of a genre novel, never mind in the real thing. I would not only refuse to recommend So Dark the Night to others, I will not even finish reading it. Mr. Burns' novel is simply not very good.

But Mr. Burns ought not give up. His blog is exactly as Dave described it, "entertaining and smart". He is not without talent; it simply does not show in So Dark the Night. Mr. Burns does not need to quit, he needs to get better. Unfortunately it may be too late. He has taken his rejection notices as assaults on his worth as a human being, and has responded by insulting editors and publishers directly, liberally employing words like "fuck" and "cunt". I mentioned above that doing something rude or stupid is a good way to ruin your already slim chances at publication for reasons that have nothing to do with the merit of your work. Mr. Burns has done something that is both rude and stupid at the same time. I'm sure that Mr. Burns is a fine human being; I have no doubt that were we to sit down over a cup of coffee that we would get along. The fact that I don't think very highly of his novel does not mean that I don't think very highly of him. I don't know him, and so I have no real opinion about him as a human being to speak of. I understand that twenty-five years is a long time to struggle. I understand the sense of helplessness, and the sense of hopelessness. I have had more than my share of those two feelings (though I have not written about them here), and I am not without sympathy for Mr. Burns. If he thinks he can find an audience in self-publishing, then I wish him all the best, but it doesn't stop me from thinking that his anger is misplaced. We all live with the same fears about how our work my be accepted, we all have the same trouble separating ourselves from the work we have put so much of our sweat and emotional energy into. The publishing industry is no doubt flawed, but name-calling and such is unproductive, unprofessional, and downright childish.

*I hate to be the one to break the news, but manuscripts are so-called because they are written by hand. When you send a publisher or whomever a type-written document, it is a typescript. You may not share or be interested in my linguistic pet-peeves, but I reserve the right to kvetch on my own blog, and will happily allow you to do the same on yours.

**I know that I use masculine forms most of the time, but I find consistency preferable to alternating between genders, and I despise the vague and grotesque grammatical constructions necessary to make all things gender-neutral.

Posted by August on 04.20.08 at 5:27 PM | Comments (0)

On Writing

I'm a writer. People know this about me, though I haven't published very much, and nothing outside of this blog for a while now. It's not entirely for lack of trying, although that is certainly part of it. The reason I'm not trying to get published right now is because I have, for the time being, given up on short fiction and am trying my hand at a novel. After two years of work, I'm on chapter three. From that statement you can learn that I've successfully passed the major "first chapter" hurdle, and that my biggest problem is maintaining momentum. Thank God I've only planned on a total of ten chapters. Even when my momentum is at its best I work quite slowly.

I don't bring this up because I want congratulations or criticism. I bring this up because I want to start posting about the process, about the act of writing, the preparation and the decision making. I bring my novel up because writing about the process may appear suspect when one has published very little, and I thought it would be a good idea to let you folks know where I'm coming from in my observations and ruminations. Who knows? It may help me with my own work, with the momentum, to make my thinking so public. It certainly couldn't hurt. I won't be keeping a running word count or anything like that, as I write all my first drafts in long-hand, nor will I discuss the specifics of plot or character. I'm not interested in opening a discussion about my novel-in-progress. I want to talk about writing. Think of it like this: just as I'd rather ask an author a question like "why did you choose the stream of consciousness form instead of a standard 'realist' form?" than "where do you get your ideas from?", I'd also rather talk about why I chose to use an elaborate syntax than where I got the idea to make my protagonist's second cousin a circus clown (that's not actually in my book, it's just an example). I will post when I have passed major(ish) milestones, like completing a chapter or a complete draft or something, but otherwise I will write about more abstract concerns. And hopefully with more clarity and organization than displayed in this post. Oh, I will tell you that the working title for my novel is A Temporary Life, although that is subject to change once the project is finished.

Posted by August on 04.20.08 at 3:59 PM | Comments (0)