Chatterbox reads -- and reads, and reads, and reads: Chapter 8

I'm continuing to open each new thread with a poem composed during the years of the First World War, by someone who saw service in the trenches or elsewhere, or who otherwise experienced the bitter, long-drawn out, murderous conflict.

This latest choice is the work of Isaac Rosenberg. He was an unusual combattant: of Latvian Jewish ancestry, he emigrated to South Africa in hopes that the climate would be better for his health (he had a weak chest). He was also critical of the war itself, even in the early stages when jingoistic patriotism was the norm. Nonetheless, he sailed back to England, enlisting in part to earn a regular income (he was an artist as well as a poet, having studied at the Slade).

Rosenberg was killed on April 1, 1918, near Arras. When I worked at Vimy Ridge, I visited his grave at one of the Commonwealth War Graves cemetaries.

Returning, We Hear the Larks
by Isaac Rosenberg

Sombre the night is.
And though we have our lives, we know
What sinister threat lurks there.

Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know
This poison- blasted track opens on our camp -
On a little safe sleep.

But hark! joy - joy - strange joy.
Lo! heights of night ringing with unseen larks.
Music showering our upturned list'ning faces.

Death could drop from the dark
As easily as song -
But song only dropped,
Like a blind man's dreams on the sand
By dangerous tides,
Like a girl's dark hair for she dreams no ruin lies there,
Or her kisses where a serpent hides.

The calendar says it's June, even if the weather feels more like April, still. I'm still bumbling along with too few really engrossing books, although I returned from BEA/BookExpo with a massive stack of galleys and new book/author ideas that I hope will make the rest of the year more exciting.

Meanwhile, I'll continue re-reading some older trilogies and other series: Paul Scott's Raj Quartet (well, reading that for the first time), Pat Barker's WW1 'Regeneration' trilogy (I'm on to book #2) and Olivia Manning's epic "Fortunes of War series. Then there is some new stuff that excites me, starting with Edward St. Aubyn's just-published (in the UK) satire, Lost for Words, and moving on from there. The usual mysteries, and I want to read more non-fiction, and I'm going to try to add some lighter stuff in hopes of keeping the black dog at bay.

Here's what I'm continuing to shoot for in aggregate. Ambitious, but wotthehell...




I usually keep tabs on my books one by one as I read them, and probably will finish five separate batches of 75 books over the course of the year. When I wrap 'em up, I'll post a mini-review or other comments here. I'll also post comments on the essays that I read for the categories challenge, but these will NOT be included in the total # of books read (unless I complete an entire book of essays.) I'm not doing so well on the essay front, I confess. Actually, I've been doing VERY badly, so I've dragged out some books by Virginia Woolf to dip into this month.

Anyone curious about the essays can follow that thread: http://www.librarything.com/topic/161117




I'd like to keep re-reads to about 25% of my total reading, and the target for non-fiction is about the same. So roughly 50% of the books I read this year should be "new to me" books, whether by authors I've never read before or old favorites. I'll mark all re-reads with an asterisk (*), and note whether a book is fiction or non-fiction, and also whether it's an audiobook.

A guide to my highly subjective ratings system. Don't treat it as gospel or anything more than my opinion. I'm not trying to second guess the rest of the world, just chronicle my own experience with a book. With fiction, I value strong and compelling characters, a convincing plot (that doesn't have to move at the speed of light) and what, for want of a better phrase, I can only characterize as unpretentious writing. By which I mean, I have a strong and ever-growing aversion to authors whose primary goal seems to be to demonstrate how clever they are, rather than to write a great and convincing story. Clear and elegant prose trumps convoluted and overly structured Big Themes and Ideas every time.

Genres? Well, I'm an avid mystery fan; I read a reasonable quantity of chick lit, and have taken some baby steps into fantasy, mostly via dystopian lit. I also read a reasonable amount of "classics" and literary fiction, although I tend to take a wary view of the "insta-classic": the novel by a previously unknown writer who is suddenly hailed as the next Salinger/Kafka/Bellow/Thomas Mann/Tolstoy/whoever. The publishing industry has a strong incentive to promote this kind of stuff; I've got an equally strong instinct telling me that about 75% of this stuff will be merely OK reading and only some of it will survive to earn the title of classic in 50 years' time. In the world of non-fiction, I look for a strong narrative arc and a clear, coherent voice and thesis -- and readability, above all. I tend to shun polemical stuff -- there's enough of that flying about elsewhere. I'm somewhat reconsidering my aversion to memoirs, although not the "I had a tough and horrible life event/disease/abuse situation, and I'm writing about it now because memoirs make money" sub-genre, which I loathe with a growing passion. The grief memoir is a prime example of this. At the other end of the spectrum are books about books, history tomes and books that make me look at the world in new ways and via a different prism.

The Ratings!
1.5 or less: A tree gave its life so that this book could be printed and distributed?
1.5 to 2.7: Are you really prepared to give up hours of your life for this?? I wouldn't recommend doing so...
2.8 to 3.3: Do you need something to fill in some time waiting to see the dentist? Either reasonably good within a ho-hum genre (chick lit or thrillers), something that's OK to read when you've nothing else with you, or that you'll find adequate to pass the time and forget later on.
3.4 to 3.8: Want to know what a thumping good read is like, or a book that has a fascinating premise, but doesn't quite deliver? This is where you'll find 'em.
3.9 to 4.4: So, you want a hearty endorsement? These books have what it takes to make me happy I read them.
4.5 to 5: The books that I wish I hadn't read yet, so I could experience the joy of discovering them again for the first time. Sometimes disquieting, sometimes sentimental faves, sometimes dramatic -- they are a highly personal/subjective collection!

The Books! (Being the Third Chapter of Suzanne's 2014 Reading Adventures...)




1. Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America by Owen Matthews (4.4), STARTED 4/25/14, FINISHED 4/30/14 (non-fiction)
2. Chestnut Street by Maeve Binchy (3.9), STARTED 4/30/14, FINISHED 5/2/14 (fiction)
3. The Hour of the Cat by Peter Quinn (4.1) STARTED 4/28/14, FINISHED 5/3/14 (fiction) (audiobook)
4. The King's Revenge by Don Jordan & Michael Walsh (4.4) STARTED 5/1/14, FINISHED 5/4/14 (non-fiction)
5. The Venetian Bargain by Marina Fiorato (3.15) STARTED 5/3/14, FINISHED 5/5/14 (fiction)
6. Still Midnight by Denise Mina (4) STARTED 5/3/14, FINISHED 5/6/14 (fiction) (audiobook)
7. Fallout by Sadie Jones (3.3) STARTED 5/5/14, FINISHED 5/7/14 (fiction)
8. Faro's Daughter by Georgette Heyer (3.4) STARTED 5/6/14, FINISHED 5/8/14 (fiction)
9. *Pied Piper by Nevil Shute (3.5) STARTED 5/7/14, FINISHED 5/9/14 (fiction)
10. The Confabulist by Steven Galloway (3.65) STARTED 5/9/14, FINISHED 5/11/14 (fiction)
11. China Dolls by Lisa See (3.75) READ 5/12/14 (fiction)
12. The Rise & Fall of Great Powers by Tom Rachman (4.35) STARTED 5/11/14, FINISHED 5/13/14 (fiction)
13. The Visitors by Sally Beauman (3.75), STARTED 5/10/14, FINISHED 5/14/14 (fiction)
14. Hangman by Stephan Talty (4.3), READ 5/15/14 (fiction)
15. *In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden (4.2), STARTED 5/7/14, FINISHED 5/12/14 (fiction)
16. Homeland: Carrie's Run by Andrew Kaplan (2.7), STARTED 5/4/14, FINISHED 5/16/14 (fiction)
17. The Glass Kitchen by Linda Francis Lee (3.5), READ 5/16/14 (fiction)
18. The Marathon Conspiracy by Gary Corby (4.15), STARTED 5/16/14, FINISHED 5/17/14 (fiction)
19. The Impossible Exile by George Prochnik (5), STARTED 5/15/14, FINISHED 5/19/14 (non-fiction)
20. The Rhetoric of Death by Judith Rock (3.7), STARTED 5/19/14, FINISHED 5/20/14 (fiction)
21. Dry Bones by Peter Quinn (3.8) STARTED 5/17/14, FINISHED 5/20/14 (fiction)
22. The Trigger by Tim Butcher (4.5) STARTED 5/19/14, FINISHED 5/22/14 (non-fiction)
23. Northanger Abbey by Val McDermid (3.75) STARTED 5/21/14, FINISHED 5/22/14 (fiction)
24. One Night in Winter by Simon Sebag Montefiore (4.4), STARTED 5/19/14, FINISHED 5/22/14 (fiction)
25. Old Enemies by Michael Dobbs (3.55), STARTED 5/22/14, FINISHED 5/23/14 (fiction)
26. The Corsican Caper by Peter Mayle (3.15) READ 5/23/14 (fiction)
27. Twelve Who Don't Agree by Valery Panyushkin (5), STARTED 5/23/14, FINISHED 5/24/14 (non-fiction)
28. Our Kind of Traitor by John le Carre (4.25), STARTED 5/7/14, FINISHED 5/25/14 (fiction) (audiobook)
29. Separate Beds by Elizabeth Buchan (3.2) STARTED 5/25/14, FINISHED 5/28/14 (fiction)
30. Sepulchre by Kate Mosse (2.3) STARTED 4/18/14, FINISHED 5/28/14 (fiction) (audiobook)
31. The Forest of Souls by Carla Banks (3.3) STARTED 5/27/14, FINISHED 5/29/14 (fiction)
32. *The Autobiography of Henry VIII by Margaret George (4.5), STARTED 5/24/14, FINISHED 5/30/14 (fiction)
33. The English Achilles by Hugh Talbot (3.5) STARTED 5/8/14, FINISHED 5/31/14 (non-fiction)
34. The Explanation for Everything by Lauren Grodstein (3.85) STARTED 5/30/14, FINISHED 5/31/14 (fiction)
35. Astonish Me by Maggie Shipstead (4.15) STARTED 5/31/14, FINISHED 6/1/14 (fiction)
36. That Summer by Lauren Willig (3.3), STARTED 5/30/14, FINISHED 6/2/14 (fiction)
37. The Sting of the Drone by Richard A. Clarke (3.8) READ 6/2/14 (fiction)
38. Arts & Entertainments by Christopher Beha (3.3) READ 6/4/14 (fiction)
39. The Forever Girl by Alexander McCall Smith (1) STARTED 6/3/14, FINISHED 6/6/14 (fiction)
40. *Death in Captivity by Michael Gilbert (4), STARTED 6/1/14, FINISHED 6/6/14 (fiction) (audiobook)
41. The Day of the Scorpion by Paul Scott (4.35), STARTED 5/19/14, FINISHED 6/6/14 (fiction)
42. Interesting Times by Terry Pratchett (3.6) STARTED 6/2/14, FINISHED 6/7/14 (fiction)
43. Enemies at Home by Lindsey Davis (4) STARTED 5/20/14, FINISHED 6/7/14 (fiction)
44. I Murdered My Library by Linda Grant (4.6) READ 6/7/14 (non-fiction; Kindle single)
45. Gutenberg's Apprentice by Alix Christie (3.75), STARTED 6/7/14, FINISHED 6/8/14 (fiction)
46. American Romantic by Ward Just (3.7) STARTED 6/7/14, FINISHED 6/9/14 (fiction)
47. Midnight at Marble Arch by Anne Perry (3.6) STARTED 6/8/14, FINISHED 6/10/14 (fiction)
48. Linnets and Valerians by Elizabeth Goudge (4.5), STARTED 6/10/14, FINISHED 6/11/14 (fiction)
49. The Devil in the Marshalsea by Antonia Hodgson (4) STARTED 6/10/14, FINISHED 6/12/14 (fiction)
50. Mambo in Chinatown by Jean Kwok (3.75) STARTED 6/12/14, FINISHED 6/13/14 (fiction)
51. Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey (4) STARTED 6/12/14, FINISHED 6/14/14 (fiction)
52. The Wars of the Roses: Stormbird by Conn Iggulden (2.8) STARTED 6/3/14, FINISHED 6/14/14 (fiction)
53. Lost for Words by Edward St. Aubyn (4.1) STARTED 6/5/14, FINISHED 6/14/14 (fiction)
54. The Vacationers by Emma Straub (3.5) STARTED 6/14/14, FINISHED 6/15/14 (fiction)
55. You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz (3.85) READ 6/15/14 (fiction)

Some other goals & objectives:

I'm setting myself some sub-challenges here: to read or re-read 20 books with a theme that revolves around World War I, its causes or its aftermath. These can be any kind of fiction or non-fiction. I'm also going to try to read 20 books published by Europa Editions. These are starting to pile up on my TBR mountain and it's a shame as they often are very good and a way to discover new to me writers. Indeed, one of the most interesting non-fiction books I have read of late was Valery Panyushkin's analysis of the opposition to Putin, Twelve Who Don't Agree.

Herewith, the tickers and the place I'll log these in addition to the "main" list. I'll list the books I intend/hope/plan to read, and check 'em off as they are completed. Subject to change!!!

World War I: The Great War, its Causes & Its Aftermath




1. The Beauty and the Sorrow by Peter Englund
2. The Final Whistle by Stephen Cooper FINISHED 1/30/14, 3.8 stars
3. The Cartographer of No Man's Land by P.S. Duffy
4. The Archduke's Assassination by Greg King
5. The Unending Vigil by Philip Longworth
6. The Ways of the World by Robert Goddard FINISHED 1/26/14, 3.75 stars
7. *The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell
8. *The Missing of the Somme by Geoff Dyer
9. Vimy by Pierre Berton
10. Roses of No Man's Land by Lyn Macdonald
11. Death's Men by Denis Winter
12. Undertones of War by Edmund Blunden
13. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning by Jay Winter
14. Peacemakers by Margaret MacMillan
15. *Night Shall Overtake Us by Kate Saunders FINISHED 1/30/14 3.7 stars,
16. The Wars by Timothy Findley
17. The First Casualty by Ben Elton
18. The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West
19. *Regeneration by Pat Barker FINISHED 4/13/14 5 stars
20. Rising Above the Ruins in France by Corinna Haven Putnam
21. At Break of Day by Elizabeth Speller
22. Singled Out by Virginia Nicholson
23. Dead Man's Land by Robert Ryan FINISHED 3/18/14 4.35 stars
24. Fallen Soldiers by George Mosse
25. Stella Bain by Anita Shreve
26. The Happy Foreigner by Enid Bagnold
27. The Absolutist by John Boyne
28. Wake by Anna Hope FINISHED 3/25/14 4 stars
29. The Forbidden Zone by Mary Borden
30. Gossip From the Forest by Thomas Keneally FINISHED 1/31/14, 4.5 stars
31. Empires of the Dead by David Crane
32. 1914: A Novel by Jean Echenoz FINISHED 1/29/14, 4 stars
33. War Horse by Michael Morpurgo, READ 2/10/14, 3.4 stars
34. Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany's Secret War Against America by Howard Blum, FINISHED 2/11/14 4.5 stars
35. The Trigger by Tim Butcher

Europa Editions: Old Friends & New Discoveries




1. The Man in the Wooden Hat by Jane Gardam READ 1/4/14, 4.2 stars
2. Last Friends by Jane Gardam FINISHED 1/20/14 3.8 stars
3. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
4. The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante
5. Zeroville by Steve Erickson
6. Lazarus is Dead by Richard Beard
7. The Have-Nots by Katharina Hacker
8. The Dream Maker by Jean-Christophe Rufin
9. Bound in Venice by Alessandro Marzo Magno
10. Summertime All the Cats Are Bored by Philippe Georget
11. Garlic, Mint and Sweet Basil by Jean-Claude Izzo READ 1/7/14, 3.85 stars
12. Bone China by Roma Tearne
13. The Thursday Night Men by Tonino Benacquista
14. Dispute Over a Very Italian Piglet by Amara Lakhous
15. Last Train to Paris by Michele Zackheim
16. Cecilia by Linda Ferri
17. The Frost on His Shoulders by Lorenzo Mediano
18. Heliopolis by James Scudamore
19. The Nun by Simonetta Agnello
20. Twelve Who Don't Agree by Valery Panyushkin FINISHED 5/24/14 5 stars
21. In the Orchard, the Swallows by Peter Hobbs
22. The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price by Wendy Jones
23. Revolution Baby by Joanna Gruda
24. Seven Lives and One Great Love by Lena Divani
25. Time Present and Time Past by Deirdre Madden

My "just in case I need it later" reserved space...

Happy June, everyone! I'll update all my reading tomorrow. I'm still in BookExpo recovery mode. Unbelievably exhausted.

I'm intending to read Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy over the next few month's as well. The Ghost Road is a set book for my next OU course, but I can't help feeling it would make more sense to read the books leading up to it as well. (I've previously read Regeneration alone, but it was a while ago). And I'm coming around to the idea that maybe I should give Edward St. Aubyn another go. We read Mother's Milk some time ago in my RL book club and I didn't like it at all, but none of us realised at the time that it was part of a series. I've seen so many positive comments since that I do think perhaps I ought to try reading from the beginning.

Edited to add: I've just looked up a review of the Melrose books and remembered why I didn't like Mother's Milk. I think it could be summed up as a book about obnoxious rich people behaving obnoxiously, or rather, people who weren't rich (at least by their own standards) but felt they had a god given right to be. Maybe, I won't give them another try after all - it will just annoy me intensely!

Huge fan of Isaac Rosenberg, Suz so thanks so much for the opening poem.

Congratulations on another new thread and wishing you a wonderful Sunday. xx

Happy New Thread, Suzanne!

I'm dropping in to say hello on your thread while it is short enough to hitch a ride!

The only ones in your WWI list that I've read are the Pat Barker (read the whole trilogy shortly after they were published) and the Return of the Soldier, one of the earliest of my Virago collection that I read. That was good - doesn't describe the war directly at all, but the changes between before and after.

OK, I've been procrastinating long enough. I have been incredibly lazy this weekend, just collapsing and reading, feeding myself when necessary, and curling up with the cats. After the exhausting few days in NYC -- clearly, I'm no longer up to the pace of the city as this is what I remember feeling like when I first moved there and was getting used to it -- I really needed two very quiet, peaceful, tranquil days (and off my aching feet...)

But it's time to catch up on my final reads for May, in other words, to update my notes on ALL the reading I did last week.

179. Separate Beds by Elizabeth Buchan is a book by an author I've been reading for years; this one, however, has been sitting on my shelf unread for two or three years, and I must have had a sixth sense that it would be underwhelming. Set in the aftermath of the financial crisis, about a family hit by personal problems and job losses and who need to learn to pull together, it's quintessential women's fiction a la Anglaise, and didn't quite work for me. Plod plod plod. 3.2 stars.

180. Sepulchre by Kate Mosse at times was almost laughably trite and melodramatic. I had hoped there would be more about the Languedoc, a region of France I love, but it's secondary to some bizarre tarot fantasy stuff, a quirky double time-line plot, etc. etc. Nor does Mosse pay much heed to what is historically plausible. Apparently her 1891 heroine is from a somewhat middle class family, respectable enough (even though her mother is the mistress of a general). And yet (a) she and her mother attend the burial of her brother's mistress?? How on earth is she even supposed to be that aware of what is going on in his life? (b) as a teenager, she is allowed out on her own in the evening to meet her brother at a performance at the Opera?? I don't think so... The contemporary heroine somehow gets a contract to write a bio of Debussy, even though she's got no credentials (she's a high school teacher). Plausibility flies out the window. I'm not entirely sure why I finished this. Stubborn, perhaps, combined with curiosity (wanted to see how on earth Mosse would resolve the odd plotlines) and I didn't have another audiobook to listen to in the evenings. 2.3 stars.

181. The Forest of Souls by Carla Banks was more interesting when it comes to its underlying subject -- the conflicting loyalties and shifting borders in Belarussia in the late 1930s and early 1940s -- than as a mystery/thriller. It worked OK as the latter, true, but the former was very intriguing, and definitely showed the ways in which past lives can continue to haunt us. Basically: the death of a young researcher probing into Lithuanian history proves to be the loose thread -- once pulled on, it unravels, exposing all kinds of ugly secrets. There are some implausible connections between the characters, but I liked the way the author explores the idea of discoveries made by children and grandchildren about their beloved relatives. Intriguing rather than compelling. 3.3 stars.

182. The Autobiography of Henry VIII by Margaret George was a re-read of what remains an excellent and somewhat revisionist novel about Henry VIII. George does a great job of imagining her way into the king's mind. How might he have viewed his decision to do away with Anne Boleyn? To break with the Pope? What we see as blatant self-serving may have been something else altogether. Of course, Henry's view is sometimes convincing, and sometimes self-serving, but in George's interpretation, always provocative. And sometimes, it's very moving, as when she writes of Henry puzzled and mourning his inability to build a genuine emotional connection to the young Elizabeth (of course, the reader can understand why, but Henry's blind spot ensures he doesn't; that doesn't make it less poignant) or of the death of Charles Brandon, only a year or so before Henry's own death, the end of a 50-year-long friendship, which literally brought tears to my eyes. 4.5 stars, a great example of what historical fiction can be. But it's LONG.

183. The English Achilles by Hugh Talbot is a biography of the first earl of Shrewsbury and I assume (judging by the surname) the author's ancestor, a hero of the Hundred Year's War and one of the last really "noble" noblemen of the traditional feudal era, who was killed in battle in 1453, just before the Wars of the Roses erupted. My interest in this is that he was the father of Eleanor Butler, the "other woman" in the Edward IV/Richard III succession crisis. It's an interesting bio, but dated, and I'm not sure how reliable it is. For instance, there's no mention here of the youngest Talbot daughter, who went on to become Duchess of Norfolk. Odd omission from even the genealogical tables. 3.5 stars.

184. The Explanation for Everything by Lauren Grodstein turned out to be more interesting than I had feared, even if sometimes it felt a bit too carefully structured. Andy Waite is struggling: it has been years since his wife was killed by a drunk driver, but he's muddling through, hoping to get tenure at an obscure New Jersey liberal arts college, trying to raise his daughters, trying to make sure the drunk driver is denied parole, and trying to make sure his mice behave as expected so he can apply for funding for an evolutionary biology study (into alcoholism, natch.) His personal life is a bit of a desert, too, in spite of the fact that his one-time alcoholic neighbor clearly has a thing for him. He's teaching his "There is no God" course when a transfer student, Melissa, challenges him to supervise her independent study project on intelligent design. He finds the idea of a benign deity seductive; just what he needs to make peace with it all. There's a parallel plot, here: his Princeton mentor met his downfall at the hands of a protegee who was seduced away from science to religion (no spoiler details...) and so the whole novel evolves into a prolonged rumination over the purpose of religion in everyday life. I think I found this more clever and insightful when I was reading it; looking back, the conclusion was simply too abrupt and unconvincing. Why would a professor wait that long for a substantive discussion about a year-long project? Even one as ditzy as this guy? So, ultimately only 3.85 stars, but it's made me curious about other stuff she has written. Her characters are interesting even if the plot occasionally sags under its own weight.

Hi Suz. I love that opening poem. And I am so curious about what you'll think of Elena Ferrante's novels. I have decided that her work is definitely not for me but I have reading friends who adore her.

>11 EBT1002: I keep procrastinating about starting those books, perhaps because there is so much division of opinion!

I thought you might enjoy reading Kate Forsyth's post about researching her historical novel The Wild Girl which is based on the life of Dortchen Wild. She lived next door to the Grimm brothers and married one of them.
http://www.kateforsyth.com.au/kates-blog/the-story-behind-the-wild-girl

Definitely donating my copy of Sepulchre without further ado, it's kicked around here for many a year.

Happy New thread, Suz! I hope you are getting some rest in today.

Thanks for reviews and hopes that the two quiet days are enough to get you running again!
Happy New Thread!

>13 avatiakh: Thanks for the link! I think one of her books (poss. this one?) was available at BookExpo, but it conflicted with about three other things, so I didn't manage to nab it. As it was, there were two books that I did want that I didn't manage to get, so...

>14 msf59:, >15 LizzieD: I have been INCREDIBLY lazy this weekend. I have barely moved; not talked to anyone and worst of all done NO work. If that amount of hedonism isn't restorative, nothing will be. A pity, really, because the weather seems to have been quite nice, if a bit chilly. I did want to get to the library and then to see "Belle", the new movie set in 18th century London, but however ridiculous it sounds, it felt as if the amount of effort required would have left me ill-equipped to face a week of work. So I'll need to make time for both in the early part of the week, before my library holds expire and the movie leaves town.

I have already finished my first book of the month!

185. Astonish Me by Maggie Shipstead was a pleasant surprise. I had postponed reading the NetGalley version I had received, and actually started listening to the audiobook instead, for some reason. Possibly because I found her previous book, Seating Arrangements very banal and quite disappointing, and wouldn't even have read this had it not involved the world of ballet and a story about a defecting Russian dancer. Yes, there were strong echoes of Baryshnikov's story (sometimes too strong), and even the occasional echo of "The Turning Point" (the movie in which Shirley MacLaine and Anne Bancroft are former best friends, one of whom is now an aging prima ballerina at the top of her game; the other of whom left to marry and have children; one of those children's decision to dance brings them together and into conflict). There are two ballet friends here, too, although the plot lines don't parallel the movie quite so directly after the divergence. Because Joan, after helping Arslan to defect dramatically, ends up leaving ballet -- she knows she isn't good enough to dance the top roles, and has discovered she is pregnant. (all this is in the early chapters.) She persuades childhood crush Harry that the baby is his, and they go off to live a suburban existence far from ballet, while Elaine continues to rise to the top in Arslan's world. Until Harry, Joan's son, and his friend Chloe, in their turn see their future in ballet, and the world is turned on its head. I thought this was a vivid portrayal of the world of ballet, of New York at the time (the 70s through to the late 1990s) and while it skips around a lot, it ultimately holds together and makes sense. Brilliant? Nope, but a very good read. 4.15 stars.

New thread benisons, Suz!

I completely concur with your thoughts on Sepulchre. I read the first in that series, Labyrinth, and then Sepulchre, the first because I received it as a gift, the second because I couldn't believe it would be as bad as the first. But it was. No more!

Great opening poem, Suz.

>17 richardderus:
>19 kidzdoc:
Thank you, gentlemen!

>18 gennyt:
I had fun with the televised series of Labyrinth, and then snagged Sepulchre as a Kindle Daily Deal somewhere (UK?). So I figured I should read 'em in order. I can tell you that at this rate, I will be in NO hurry to read #3. I'm fascinated by the area's distinctive history, but she doesn't even do a tremendously good job with that. You might as well read Mary Stewart's Madam, Will You Talk?.

I didn't know there was a teev series of Labyrinth.... will have to check that out!

>21 sibylline: Have you read the book? It's basically Cathars, and variants of Da Vinci code-style conspiracy, with supernatural stuff thrown in.

http://www.amazon.com/Labyrinth-John-Hurt/dp/B00JPFTX5O/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&q...

>22 Chatterbox: oh yawn

Suz, I saw this and thought immediately, "I wonder what Suz would say."

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/columnist/wolff/2014/06/01/the-battle-betwee...

I thought it was an interesting take and one to which I am rather sympathetic...

I got The Autobiography of Henry VIII a couple of years ago, partly based on your recommendation (it's a popular title in this group!). I'm thinking when I'm done with the latest Matthew Shardlake book (I've been devouring them all in a row!), it might be a natural title to follow up with.

Merry New Thread!

>25 Smiler69: There is a new Shardlake due out in the autumn! But yes, this would be a good way to "check" your thoughts about Cromwell and some of the characters that appear in the second half of Margaret George's book.

>24 katiekrug: Michael Wolff makes a lot of sense in that article, at least from a broader perspective. I'm not sure about the specific issues of distribution, but It's true that both publishers and Amazon have made decisions in their narrow economic self-interest, and it ill behoves either side to make grandiose claims in the name of the literary public. Neither has done a terribly good job by readers, other than by making books slightly cheaper (Amazon) and helping to maintain the basic infrastructure of editing (the publishers). But in both instances, they have failed. Midlist authors struggle to make a living from writing, where once this was possible. New authors get tinier advances, and publishers are less and less willing to take risks. Self-publishing floods the world with (frankly) a lot of dreck, poorly-written, poorly-conceived, poorly-structured and utterly unedited manuscripts by people who should have stuck to their day jobs and who know don't understand why they don't have admiring hordes following them. Publishers curate; the goal is always to have a weird and wacky array of them so that every niche is catered for, but that the product has a certain kind of quality. We don't have that any longer, and instead we're in a kind of cacophany. We can fill our eyes with free content, and good writers get lost in all that noise.

I don't know what the answer is; what the way forward is. Instead of Wolff pointing fingers and denouncing, I'd rather see him suggesting what kind of future path might take shape that works, economically and in the interests of the literary output. He knows enough about the intricacies of the business, and he's got the chutzpah to challenge the powers that be. Maybe he simply doesn't know, or maybe it's easier to critique than to propose a new regime?

We're still relatively early in this process, but frankly, I don't see anything good coming. I'm not at all sure how I will be making money in a decade, or whether I'll still be making money. Perhaps I'll only make money any time someone clicks on what I write, which means I'll have to shape my content in such a way as to appeal to a certain passionate kind of readers, if I hope to make money. Is that a world we want to live in? Where we only get content we approve of or "up vote"? You may think that's a silly methodology, but it's already happening in some places, either directly or indirectly (your popularity/readership means you get sponsored, and that's how you're paid). So, I worry a lot about this. I wish I were 25 years older, so I'd be dead before I had to worry about having to completely reshape the way my business works, again. And yes, I'm absolutely, utterly serious about that. It's not being morbid - I just would have been born in the late 1930s instead of the early 1960s!

>23 ffortsa: LOL! Hope you had a fab trip and that you'll share pics with us soon??

Yes, I saw that! You can be sure I'll get my hands on it asap! But I wonder if it'll be coming out in NA then too or whether we'll have to wait much longer. Any idea?

Hi Suz- I actually snagged an audio copy of Astonish Me. Glad you liked it in that format. BTW- Good review! I know there has been mixed opinions on Seating Arrangements, which I haven't read. Some people really love it. Maybe I'll check out her latest, first.

>27 Smiler69: It says October in the UK, and February in the US. In Canada? Who knows... Depends on whether the distribution is via US or UK and how speedy it is.

>28 msf59: I just found Seating Arrangements very banal. It's one of those over-used tropes: throw a group of people with all kinds of seething undercurrents between them in a single location, preferably at some kind of special event (holidays are a favorite, in this case it's a wedding) and then let the conflicts erupt. Everything is very, very, very predictable. So, too, in some ways, was Astonish Me, but it FELT much more fresh, perhaps by virtue of being less well-trodden ground. She simply didn't take refuge in one of the most banal plot devices known to writerdom this time, even though few of her characters really breaks free and surprises the reader. So, still not a "wow" factor, but...

I'll hope for October, but February isn't so bad. I wasn't aware of that US release date and feared it might take up to a year longer. "Feared" is maybe a strong word... :-)

>26 Chatterbox: - Thanks, Suz. Iknew you would have somethig thoughtful and insightful to say. I tend to give in too much to my knee-jerk reactions ;-)

>31 katiekrug: Thanks for the compliment, but I don't know how insightful that really was... Just a reaction, really.

>30 Smiler69: I'd think that if you're lucky, it might be an Xmas release in Canada, but if you're hoping for an audiobook, look for it in February. I think the gap used to be longer between them. I may exercise some discipline and not get it for UK Kindle -- or maybe not... Depends on how big the TBR is at that point, whether I can nab an ARC, and what the pricing is.

I'm very, very lucky -- my friend Alice managed to find a Kindle Paperwhite at Heathrow and is bringing it back for me. The eInk on the one I bought last june is starting to go wonky, and I do NOT want to end up Kindle-less, nor is it easy (as it turns out) to simply move a US-registered Kindle to a UK account. I will wince at the damage it will do to my cash balance, but spread over a few months, I'll just suck it up. Read all the free books from BookExpo and not buy any more, etc. No more Amtrak, just Megabus. Etc.

Two more books finished! Both ARCs from Amazon Vine. I rather overdid the requests from "Last Harvest", the Vine feature that allows you unlimited requests among the ARCs that have been hanging around for a while. The downside of that is that the temptation to over-request is acute, and Amazon rewrote the rules last year to require us to review 100% of everything requested within 30 days of receipt. In practice, that means before the next newsletter is posted. Technically, I'm past due now on a bunch of reviews, but it won't matter until June 19, when the next newsletter is posted; if I'm not up to date by then, I won't be able to make any new requests. (Had that been the case in May, I wouldn't have my lovely new mattress...) After completing these two, I still have FOURTEEN ARCs to read between now and then:

Gutenberg's Apprentice by Alix Christie - FINISHED
Arts & Entertainments by Christopher Beha -- FINISHED
American Romantic by Ward Just - FINISHED
Bark by Lorrie Moore
The Devil in the Marshalsea by Antonia Hodgson -- FINISHED
The Wars of the Roses: Stormbird by Conn Iggulden -- FINISHED
The Vacationers by Emma Straub -- FINISHED
The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt
Mambo in Chinatown by Jean Kwok -- FINISHED
Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey -- FINISHED
The Quick by Lauren Owen
The Word Exchange by Alena Graedon
You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz -- FINISHED
The Forever Girl by Alexander McCall Smith -- FINISHED

Oh dear.

Anyway, the two I wrapped up today were reasonably entertaining genre fiction.

186. That Summer by Lauren Willig was a modestly amusing if rather predictable romance that isn't either as fun or as downright goofy as her "Pink Carnation" series. Julia, an unemployed NYC banker, inherits a house in London from a great aunt she can't remember, and learns some unexpected stuff about her family, both about her mother (who died in a car crash when Julia was only five) and about an ancestress's entanglement with a member of the Pre-Raphaelites back in 1849. Finding a mysterious painting appears to be the clue to it all. Nothing really mysterious, but a good train read and not terribly taxing for exhausted, post-BookExpo brains! 3.4 stars.

187. The Sting of the Drone by Richard A. Clarke is quite a respectable and fast-paced thriller, albeit never being all that surprising in plot twists and turns, and relying heavily on action rather than character development. (The author made his name for standing up during the 9/11 Commission hearings and acknowledging failure on the part of intelligence officials.) It would be a great beach read for the summer -- like Clancy lite. What if the bad guys figured out how to undermine the drone program and turn it against the USA? Clarke manages to make the drone program folks not sound like right wing nutjobs, but thoughtful operatives, even as he's clearly aware of the backlash of their actions -- and of the possible ramifications of the spread of drone technology. Worth reading if only for that, but there are some moments of great suspense, too. Just don't expect Great Literary Genius here -- it's the equivalent of a Hollywood summer blockbuster movie. 3.8 stars.

OK, tomorrow I have to get myself back on the work treadmill.

That's a daunting list to complete between now and June 19th! A good mix of authors/genres. Looking forward to seeing what you think.

Hop all's well there with you. Glorious weather here.

Suz, I followed your comment in Mark's thread to your profile to check out your pics of your feline friends. Jasper was a very handsome fellow! And Molly looks beautiful. I love that she purrs so loudly your mom can hear her.

This should be Tigger & Molly, on the floor of the Providence apartment:



Can't get a reasonable-sized one of Cassie up there. ETA: there we are. From when she was a baby. Now she's a fat cat.

And the books are all here! The books, in this case, being my BookExpo trophies...



Tigger didn't want to be left out of the process of photographing the stash...

I love the way Tigger has muscled in on that photo! Excellent book stash, with or without cats.

You should have seen him when he had his face smushed right up in the camera lens, Genny! He was stalking back and forth in front of the camera. Eventually, I realized that he wasn't going to let me take a picture of the books without him in it.

32: Richard Clark would be an interesting author if only he knew how to write.

>39 magicians_nephew: Ha! Yes, well, the bonus of the suspense genre is that an ability to write is not required. As demonstrated by many other "writers" in that field...

When a guy is as handsome as Tigger, he deserves to be in every picture!
What a great pile of books!!!
I can't wait to hear about them. Happy Reading.

I just came home from a Baileys Prize shortlist discussion tonight, apparently The Undertaking is excellent. I'd forgotten that I bought it for my Kindle a few weeks ago until this morning.

I'm loving all the book piles too Suzanne. Books + cats... what could be better?? Well, actually, Coco added to the mix is pretty amazing too! I don't think any of my anti-depressants work as effectively for me as he does!

Great photos - love the cats and the books. I notice you picked up a Garry Disher book, I quite like his work, must read more of him.

>36 Chatterbox: Wow. One word Suzanne: DAUNTING! Can't say I'm familiar with any of them but I know you will resolve that for me and let me know which ones I should read. It's great having you as a weather vane re: books;-) Of course, I can only manage a fraction of the books you devour so easily.

BTW I'm now reading a book you highly recommended and I'm finding it to be excellent...The Daughters of Mars so thanks for that:-)

>44 avatiakh: I just checked and I have a kindle copy of Hell to PAy, the original title in AUstralia/NZ was Bitter Wash Road.

>45 brenzi: Am glad that you're enjoying the Keneally! When you've finished that, I'm going to nudge you to read his OTHER WW1 book, Gossip From the Forest.

>44 avatiakh: I actually had to check my stash as the name didn't even ring a bell. I think it was part of my mad swoop on Soho Press's table. This year they basically put out all their ARCs as if it were a buffett table. Can you spell "feeding frenzy"?

>42 elkiedee: I nabbed it for my Kindle as well, so may pass on the ARC to a friend of mine who is eager to read it...

>41 LizzieD: >43 Smiler69: Tigger photo bombing the attempt to take pics of the stash was quite funny. He then pre-empted my comfy new desk chair, so that I only got to occupy half of it -- perching on the front of it to work. I'm sure that's ergonomically unsound.

This year's haul totaled 49 ARCs, I think. Two of them were not really reading books -- an economics book, and a business tome that I'll probably pass on to an editor. Two others were anthologies of magazine writing. So that leaves me with 45 books. MUCH more restrained than in prior years. Incidentally, both list and pics exclude my new hardcover of the Prochnik book about Zweig, which I stuck on a shelf before it could get damaged.

Went to see "Belle" tonight before it leaves town after Thursday night's shows -- my third movie this year, after only seeing one last year! Wowza! All because of the new migraine meds...

It was OK -- fairly conventional/predictable, but still moving. There are two interesting-looking movies coming, an Indian flick called "the Lunchbox" and a Polish film, "Ida", a black and white movie about a novice who wants to take her final vows as a nun but then discovers she's actually Jewish, left at the convent as an infant during WW2. She goes off to spend time with her only surviving relative, an aunt. Providence really only has two movie theaters -- this one-screen cinema up near Brown that shows more artsy fare like this, and the mall's multiplex, where you can catch the Hollywood blockbusters.

Now, dinner and bed, with a book and some cats.

He then pre-empted my comfy new desk chair, so that I only got to occupy half of it -- perching on the front of it to work. I'm sure that's ergonomically unsound.

We've all been there, Suz!

Thank you for the kitty photos, Suzanne. I love Tigger's photobomb of your book pile.

Among that glorious pile of books, the one that jumped out at me immediately was the new Tana French. I will eagerly await your review of that one.

Lovely kitties and wow, what a book haul it was!

>48 lyzard: omigod, that's almost exactly the image that I posted on Facebook. Where, I might note, Tigger is getting ALL the sympathy. There is even a suggestion that I should go and buy ANOTHER chair for myself and leave this one to Tigger. Ignoring the fact that whichever one I want to sit in would automatically become the one he wants to occupy...

>49 rosalita: It will probably be a little while before I read the Tana French; I'm just about to start book #2. Although I gather they CAN be read out of order?

>47 Chatterbox: I'm very distantly related to Disher, we are both descended from the Disher family who left the Scottish Borders for South Australia in 1838. Anyway he's a highly regarded crime writer over in Australia. I only 'discovered' him when I was sent the genealogy info on the Disher family by a researcher who was unaware that one of the sons bolted to NZ in the 1850s and founded a small dynasty here.

I keep scrolling up in coveting perusal of your book haul, still I don't need 40+ new additions to my tbr pile.

Beautiful kitty photos, Suzanne!

Not to mention the books - that's quite a haul.

>51 Chatterbox: I've read the first 3 Tana French and I would agree they can be read out of order.

>51 Chatterbox: If it makes you feel any better, I usually end up sitting on the floor...

Oh, photos of adorable cats and awesome books! I kinda love it here in your thread...

Hi Suz! Love the book haul photos! Wow! And Tigger is a beauty.

I really want to get my paws on Bark, even though I still have not read her first collection. Bad Mark. I have still not read Ward Just either, but I have one or 2, in the stacks.

Question: What do you do with your ARCs, when you are through with them? Inquiring minds...

>58 msf59: Amazon Vine ARCs come with big restrictions on what I can do with them. I have to either keep them (the terms of service, rigidly interpreted, say I can't even let someone else read them...), I can't give them away (much less sell them) and if I do want to discard them, I have to wait six months and then throw them in the recycling bin. Which I just did with a bunch of less than compelling books dating back a few years.

With non-Vine ARCs -- the ones that I get from BookExpo, directly from publishers or via ER -- that come without restrictions, I'll keep the ones that I really liked. The others I try to pass along, where appropriate. Earlier this year, I sent along a surplus copy of You Should Have Known when it was still pre-publication to a friend of mine who was in the doldrums. Some I send to my sister in law or my mother. If it's autographed, it's a keeper, of course. If you're wondering about Bark, alas, it falls into the category of "things I can't share"...

One more Tigger picture. Since he can't understand why this is ALL ABOUT BOOKS. When, clearly, cats are just more important. They have soft fur, they purr, they entertain quite as effectively...

I completely understand the "things I can't share" angle. LOL. I was curious about it, since you receive so many. I pass on quite a few, that I do receive. Why not, right?

^Cute Tigger pic!

They have soft fur, they purr, they entertain quite as effectively...

Yes, but can they tell a good story?

That being said, I know what you mean.

Spock: of the tribbles They remind me of the lilies of the field. They toil not, neither do they spin. But they seem to eat a great deal. I see no practical use for them.

Dr. McCoy: Does everything have to have a practical use for you? They're nice, they're soft and they're furry, and they make a pleasant sound.

Spock: So would an ermine violin, Doctor, but I see no advantage in having one.

>62 magicians_nephew: Jim, ROTFL... followed by an acute attack of hiccups. Seriously... an ermine violin??
................ryew p (that was Tigger, walking on the keyboard. He's continuing to have his say here...)

> 61 I suspect they could. They simply choose not communicate.

> 60 Absolutely; I would if I could. There are a great many of the Vine ARCs that I probably wouldn't need to hang onto -- that don't meet my new criteria. (They have some kind of emotional value; they are likely to be re-read at some point, which actually does capture quite a few since I do re-read; they deal with something that's of ongoing interest, which captures a lot of non-fiction books.) I err toward the side of not throwing something out -- which feels quite drastic. But in the last two months I did a bit of a sweep, and tossed the older ones that were deeply mediocre to bad, and have a stack that will meet the same fate when the six-month threshold has passed. I'm also happy to spread the wealth. Unless it's a favorite author, or an autographed copy, in which case I will cling to it, I'm usually happy to pass along an ARC.

I keep most books, and the ones I give away are duplicates. Quite a lot of the books that come up on Vine also end up being Kindle deals, and in some cases I've found nicer copies in charity shops, or both. I recently gave away a bunch of books including Vine ARCs on Freecycle, to someone who is setting up reading groups for former prisoners. I wouldn't attempt to sell ARCs but if Amazon ever comes after me over books I've given to my mum or Genny or Heather, or anyone else, I'd be rather shocked! It's widely believed that a lot of their higher end stuff, mostly not books, is heading straight for ebay, and they don't seem to have even taken action over that. I can't see that most of the books have much resale value, though there are exceptions - The Cuckoo's Calling was a UK Vine offering last year and I think it even made it to Last Harvest before the revelation of Robert Gailbraith's real identity - I wonder how many people who got those copies have sold them (some might be hanging on, I think I would have been tempted in that case to Kindle and sell).

>64 elkiedee: Yes, I doubt that they'll hunt me down and kill me. That said, with the possible exception of my mother, I will try and keep to the Terms of Service for Vine; I just feel better about it. I agree they are extremely unlikely to come after me -- and even if they did, I can always say I just tossed it in the recycling bin -- but it really just boils down to what they have asked me to commit to do in exchange for the free stuff. I think it's a bit odd that they have more rigid policies vis a vis ARCs than do the publisher themselves, but they don't distinguish between ARCs and non-book stuff, and I've signed on the dotted line and am reaping the benefits of the program. I'm the last person to be the Vine Police, though! And heaven knows what those folks do who end up with stacks of out-of-date electronic equipment...

So, some of you may remember that back in 2011, my agent tried in vain to shop my genealogy book proposal around. Today, I spot the current month's issue of Harpers with a big story about our obsession with ancestor-hunting on the cover -- precisely my proposal. Cue Suzanne going off into stratosphere, given that my agent had told me there was no appetite for such a book. (The magazine article is by Maud Newton, who appears to be writing a book on the topic.) I think I'm going to be hunting for a new agent and trying to see if I can still revive this. I've been trying to write the book for seven years, so it will break my heart if someone else manages to beat me to it, especially because an agent tried to convince me to write about unemployment instead (this was his idea last year... instead of trying again with "Bluebloods, Black Sheep & Missing Links").

Tigger is a handsome cat, and the new office chair does complement his coloring. He looks like he could tell a good story, too.

Well half the time that's me in the cartoon above. Perched on the edge of my seat so as not to disturb.

I don't know quite what will happen with book publishing, but I'm more optimistic. Some of the Indie publishers - quite good ones - do a thing now that is between vanity and the full monte.... you pay them but. An important but. They won't take on a book with no merit because they don't want to be associated with crappy books. And it might be on a sliding scale depending on how optimistic they are about some success. Many of these presses already de facto do this - often publishing books when the writer has gotten a grant from, say, their college or by winning a prize. I think it is a very good idea, ultimately, for the unproven writer. It's not prohibitively expensive, you get the benefit of solid editing and copy editing (which you can't count on these days anyway) and guidance about what to do after it's published. You are in charge of it - choose your own title, your own cover and it is printed on demand which saves paper if it is a bomb.

I am blown away by your BEA book haul! I really want to read The Book of Life as I enjoyed the first two. Sounds like the trip was worth the effort.

Is anyone else participating in the #bookaday challenge this summer?

The Bookaday challenge is to name a least favorite book by a favorite author. I nominated Fugue in Time by Rumer Godden.

My book of the day: Arts & Entertainments by Christopher Beha (see below)

>56 Mr.Durick: Eeeek, Robert, why did I get a wood louse this time??

188. Arts & Entertainments by Christopher Beha is one of those Amazon Vine ARCs that is lingering, reproachfully unread, but which I can now cross off my list. (The book will appear in July.) I had read Beha's memoir, The Whole Five Feet, about his reading his way through the Great Books, and liked his voice and his approach, and the opening chapters of this book augured well. Eddie is a former actor whose career never really amounted to much, and now he's stuck teaching drama to students at the private Manhattan school that he attended on a scholarship. His wife is struggling to get pregnant, and in despair. They're not only broke, but in debt -- and the only thing, Eddie figures, he can do to make them whole and pay for another round of IVF is to sell a sex tape he has of him with an ex girl friend who has made it big in television and is starting to break into movies. But then it all goes pear-shaped, and Eddie finds himself trapped in reality television land, where "reality" is anything but... The problem here is that Beha seems to be so in love with satire that he writes himself into a kind of corner. It's overkill, although darkly humorous and spot on in its critique of our celebrity obsessed culture. It just isn't convincing. We see everything through Eddie's eyes, but his wife, Susan, seems to undergo a weird and never really explained personality transplant midway through that made much of what followed unconvincing for me. As a result, the novel ended up feeling like whatever you'd call the male version of chick lit, but with satire at its core instead of romance. Amusing, kinda sorta, but never satisfying. 3.3 stars.

I've got about 160 pages to go in Day of the Scorpion, the second book in the Raj Quartet, and have launched into a new Discworld novel for a genuinely humorous antidote to Beha. After that, methinks it's time to delve into Deborah Harkness's witchy world, before I forget all the complexities of the plot from Shadow of Night.

Wood louse was the only unused w animal that came immediately to hand. I was reluctant to use it, but that it is not an insect convinced me I could. Should I change the set of animals from which I choose? I could eventually run into a similar problem elsewhere; I like bears, bats, bovines, and bunnies, but eventually I'd be stuck with bed bugs.

Robert

>70 Chatterbox: love the phrase "Goes all pear shaped" - very descriptive!

>71 Mr.Durick: Are species going extinct so rapidly, or am I launching new threads too rapidly? Isn't there a cute panda bear or something?? *she said, wistfully*

>72 magicians_nephew: classic, albeit slightly old-fashioned English slang, I'm afraid. I'm sure that someone here knows the roots of it.

So, I was away when my cable bill arrived (in Toronto) last month. Just before I went to NY, I put it in the mail, so the payment probably started working its way through the system at the beginning of last week. I haven't yet received my June bill. Today I got a COLLECTION CALL from Cox Communications, demanding that I pay the "past due" balance on the account. Please note, the payment has technically been "past due" for a whopping eight days. I don't use online bill pay because of one particularly nasty situation in which the gas company credited my payments to someone else's account for 14 months (it did end up as a whopping great credit on my account when it was finally straightened out, but took two years to resolve, and in the meantime I had to double pay), and another company buggered up my account in an entirely different way. I suppose one day I'll have to (and I would in an emergency situation) but these guys can just look at my account and see that in the year I've been their customer I've got a perfect payment on-time payment record. Then this call, with someone haranguing me to pay within 24 hours or I'll have my service cut off -- when technically, I've actually paid in advance for the service I'm receiving until June 10? Excuse me while I erupt like Vesuvius, but really... I can't pull the plug on these guys for another year and even then may be stuck with them to some extent, but man am I steamed... (clearly...) Sorry for rant...

Back to regularly scheduled programming.

Cable companies are The Devil. And I say that as someone who is not reflexively anti-business or anything!

>73 Chatterbox: It gets easier to pull the plug and they start behaving more badly? I mean, really... I have to wonder what would have happened had I been in hospital, or away for two or three weeks. It's clearly an attempt to force people to set up auto bill pay, but I don't want to do that for any number of reasons. Quite aside from the assortment of problems I've had (delays in processing them; errors), you make your information more vulnerable to being hijacked online. Moreover, what they really want you to do is schedule a monthly payment on a specific day. When one's cash flow is uneven, as mine is, that's not really a good idea. I could do it, but I don't want to have to remember to move stuff around just to cover a cable bill. It's much easier to pay 'em all at once, once a month and be done with it. Grrr...

Just finished writing my summer reading stories for The Fiscal Times.

Pouring rain here and still chilly. At this rate, I may never need my A/C this summer. Currently, the weather is only suitable for ducks. When last I checked, my feet remained unwebbed.

I have a policy of never setting up auto-pay directly with companies and that goes double for cable companies who in my experience are the sketchiest companies I've ever dealt with. Online bill paying is a great convenience and I use it all the time without problems, but no one should ever feel forced to use it and the usual grace periods should continue to apply just like they used to before companies got spoiled by the possibility of instant gratification.

Oops, I guess I had a rant inside me waiting to get out, too. :-)

Yes, the problem is that once you set up an online bill pay, it's open to abuse. Like the company that decides you should pay 'em twice in the same month. Every month. Sigh.

Yes, we all have our rants just itching to emerge!!

Exactly. When I do online bill pay I do one-time payments through my credit union's online portal rather than directly with companies. That way the company only receives the payment and doesn't have my details to make extra charges.

>78 rosalita: That's what I do too, although it has resulted in a couple of months where I got a penalty for late payment because I wasn't paying attention.

>79 ffortsa: Which is completely fair; I accept the late payment penalty. A collection call with threats, when my payment was due only eight days ago (indeed, was mailed on the day it was due) is egregious.

On a separate note: I will be talking to a prospective new literary agent on Monday afternoon. 24 hours since I pinged my existing guy about this Harpers story and I haven't heard anything. Not acceptable.

>75 Chatterbox: I'm not going to rant, but even if I didn't have any other objection to setting up auto-pay (and I do), that kind of petty persecution makes me stubborn. I wouldn't do it even if I wanted to.
Sorry about the agent. I couldn't understand at the time why he wasn't right on board with your genealogy idea.
We have thunderstorms looming, but I would be happy to send you 10 or 20 of our extra degrees of heat any time.

>81 LizzieD: How about we split the difference? I was just on the phone with my high school chum in Atlanta, who was griping about the beginning of summer down there. I don't think I'd mind the extra degrees, but what I'd REALLY like is to get rid of the dampness. I could probably grown mushrooms indoors.

To be fair, my agent said he loved the proposal. He just didn't have the contacts to sell it, I think, and ultimately didn't want to really invest the time in developing them when this wasn't his major area of focus. He would rather shape me to his area of emphasis than vice versa. And I've been trying very hard to kick back against being labeled "business/finance writer". Kate Kelly has a new book out about commodities that, based on the excerpts I've read, seems rather simplistic to me and certainly something I could have written (at least, unlike Kate, it's a market that I have written about extensively...). I'll know more when I see the full book on Monday, when an ARC arrives. But I had absolutely zero interest in writing a book like that. That's the kind of book I would have written a decade or more ago. (Indeed, the argument -- that speculators are starting to drive the commodities market -- is at least a decade old, and probably a few years out of date...)

I disagree with the snide tone of this. I happen to agree with the underlying argument, which kinda nails my problem with YA books. I'm not talking about iconic ones, like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but the most recent crop. Frankly, teenagers are only so interesting. So an author faces a dilemma. Either he/she has to go back to tried and true plot themes (the outsider!) which simply become repetitive eventually (give me something more interesting than a teenage outsider, puhleeze!!!) or put the teenager in peril (a dystopian horror, or a mortal disease). Either way, I too often end up feeling that the appeal to me, as a reader, is coming in the form of sentiment rather than intellect or even elegant writing. I don't agree that anyone should be embarrassed by what they are reading; simply that at my age I see absolutely no point in reading much of anything aimed at a YA audience. That is its target audience, and as a fully-fledged adult, I ain't it! What puzzles me more is that I'll see people in their late 20s insist, straight-faced, that it takes less TIME to read 500 pages of Divergent than to try a book of less than half that length by Mohsin Hamid, Colm Toibin; The Things They Carried, A Month in the Country by JL Carr, etc. If they were honest about it they'd say they want brain candy. Which is fine. I consume plenty of it myself. But the proponents of YA are being a bit disingenuous right now, methinks. Like the senior publicist at Penguin, who tried to urge me out of the line to meet Azar Nafisi to pick up some YA titles, arguing the latter were more significant (this, at BEA.)

Thoughts?

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2014/06/against_ya_adults_should_be_emb...

For context, I do find the snotty tone works against the author's point.

I don't agree with the article at all. I think it's perfectly reasonable for you to say you don't enjoy reading "young adult" or children's books, and for you or the author of that article to prefer reading other things. And I would be much more interested in meeting Azar Nafisi even though I enjoy reading some YA books. We all have the right to our own preferences. But I don't feel embarrassed reading books written for younger people, nor do I think I should. Nor do I feel embarrassed reading the other genres dismissed in the article.

I think every sort of book has good, bad and very mediocre examples - the worst book I've read in ages was pretending to be literary fiction - its themes were those of a chicklit novel but it didn't have the appeal or entertainment value of a good read in that area, it certainly had nothing new to say about anything or anyone.

A few years ago here, the Harry Potter books and Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy (and I would argue the latter as an example of children's books which have real literary merit, or at least Northern Lights which I've read in print (I listened to the others in audio), the former are the work of an excellent storyteller) were published in different sets of covers so you could get Harry Potter with grown up covers. Now that's ridiculous.

From the article: YA endings are uniformly satisfying, whether that satisfaction comes through weeping or cheering. These endings are emblematic of the fact that the emotional and moral ambiguity of adult fiction—of the real world—is nowhere in evidence in YA fiction. These endings are for readers who prefer things to be wrapped up neatly, our heroes married or dead or happily grasping hands, looking to the future. But wanting endings like this is no more ambitious than only wanting to read books with “likable” protagonists.

The author seems to assume that an adult reading YA books is only going to read YA, and that the YA is automatically going to be lesser than the adult books someone would choose to read, both points that I strongly disagree with. I read both - usually about half and half, sometimes more adult books. Yes, some of it is entertaining brain candy, but so is some of the adult fiction I choose to read, and I'm not going to say that a book isn't as good for me to read because I may not be the target audience (isn't a good book a good book?). I find it hard to believe that, say, The Fault in Our Stars is automatically less appropriate for me to read than Nicholas Sparks' books because one is written "for teens" and one for adults. I read some literary fiction too, but personally I do want to like the characters I'm reading about and I do like hopeful/satisfying endings more than I like ambiguous ones. I rather resent it when someone tries to tell me that makes me "less" of a reader, which the tone of the article seems to suggest.

The other thing too is... sometimes the "YA" label is just a marketing tool - The Book Thief was an adult book in Australia, and when it was published in the United States, it was labeled "YA." It's a book that my library book discussion read, and we had an interesting discussion about that, if we saw it as a "teen" book based on the protagonist's age alone.

On the other hand, if someone doesn't want to read teen or children's fiction, well, that's fine too. I wouldn't go the lengths of the publicist to say "but this is more important." That seems to me to be equally misguided.

Good luck with the prospective agent. I, for one, like the title and premise of your ancestors book.

Do you think the anti-YA writer is taking a controversial position to get a reaction/eyes on the article? Not a big YA reader (or SF or horror, either for that matter) but can fully understand why others would be. There are plenty of books out there to be enough for everyone.

>86 michigantrumpet: I think she actually believes what she's writing, and is being clumsy and/or provocative in the way she expresses it. I do think that she was careless in her argument though. I think what she was trying to do is to draw a direct comparison between what is held out to be the best of YA fiction being written today, and the best adult fiction -- i.e. apples to apples. So, she's not trying to take A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or The Outsiders and compare it to a bodice ripper/Nicholas Sparks/James Patterson/formula mystery writer of choice. And I have heard that argument made in the book world, over and over -- by publishers, by booksellers, etc. That you could put The Handmaid's Tale or 1984 up against some of the YA dystopian stuff being written today and they would be comparable -- just that the YA version features-- d'uh -- young adults as the protagonists. I don't agree with that.

>84 elkiedee: Luci, I'm in complete agreement with you that some of the most heinous books in existence are banal novels dressed up as literary fiction. It makes me gnash my teeth in outrage. I keep stumbling over this pretentious balderdash, too.

>85 bell7: Clearly, brain candy isn't the sole domain of YA novels; there's plenty of that in adult fiction as well! Perhaps it's a function of my age, but I'm going to have MUCH less interest in reading YA brain candy, however. It has nothing to do with being embarrassed about being seen reading brain candy, and everything to do with whether a book is going to engage my interest and attention. And the fact is that since I hit my 30s, the doings of teenagers are simply more remote. It all seems to blend together and feel very repetitive, theme-wise. The Fault in our Stars probably wouldn't have engaged me much had the main characters been adults, either, simply because of the level of sentimentality, but the self-revelations that the characters experienced are really the fodder for all novels with teen characters, as I noted previously. So it may be my age -- and I think I'm starting to "age out" of chick lit, too, because I'm finding women in their 20s and 30s looking for love for the first time are also starting to be more boring and generic and less inherently interesting to me. My brain screams *MORE*

There are some readers who will read only or primarily YA books -- I know several. Many of the ones I know are women in their 20s (in one case, early 30s), although in one instance, it's a guy in his 60s. Some do it because they don't want to spend more time or energy on books; as Jana, the friend who posted this on her FB page said, "I don't want to have to spend too much time thinking about what I read". On the other hand, this is someone with hundreds of books in her home, so she is reading a LOT. And yeah, I suppose in a way I am judging her, because she has a good brain, she wants to spend her life as a writer, and a lot of the stuff she is reading is unchallenging, in both theme and writing style. So no, she shouldn't be embarrassed by what she reads or have to apologize for it. On the other hand, given her aspirations, am I going to draw some conclusions if she chooses not to be more curious or adventurous in her reading? Yup, probably, in that personal context.

>85 bell7: Excellent point about labeling. Not all books with young protagonists automatically are YA. Where does that line get drawn? I've never seen anyone answer that satisfactorily. Clearly, some books are written expressly for the YA market -- with the market in mind. And others, like The Book Thief, like In the Shadow of the Banyan, like The Kite Runner (which I believe has a young protagonist? I haven't read it...) are just books that happen to have youthful main characters as the focus of the plot.

Related to the above, an example of a rather bad/pointless novel...

189. The Forever Girl by Alexander McCall Smith is a stand-alone novel by this author that I hoped might be like the Isabel Dalhousie series, or even have some of the same charm as the Scotland Street series. Instead, it's an epic miss, and an epic mess. We kick off in the Caymans, where Clover and James are raised next door to each other by expatriate sets of parents. There's a kind of desultory romantic interest between Clover's mother and James's father than never goes anywhere (like so much in this novel) and turns out not to matter anyway to the plot), which just rambles and rambles along. Clover decides that she's in love with James when she's 12, and sticks to that resolution and agonizes about it, even though he appears completely indifferent to her and indeed sees her about six or seven times over the next decade. Until the final five pages. Really, just don't bother. 1 star. Wouldn't have finished it had it not been one of the Amazon Vine ARCs, free in exchange for a review. No idea what the label is on this, whether YA or adult romance, but whatever it is, there should be a warning label: BEWARE: TEDIOUS AND UNBELIEVABLE CONTENTS.

190. Death in Captivity by Michael Gilbert was an audiobook version of a novel by an old favorite of mine, now sadly dead. Gilbert was himself a POW in Italy and his obituary (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1510088/Michael-Gilbert.html) suggests that he used his experiences there for this novel, which is intriguing indeed. The audiobook was meh; the narrator had a terribly old-fashioned upper-crust English accent, and you could hear him turning pages and occasionally swallowing water while reading; I can see this being very annoying and I won't try another of the newly-released audiobooks. That said, it was fun to re-discover another of these books, which are understated in their drama while still being suspenseful. "Cuckoo" Goyles emerges as the main protagonist here, assigned by the British senior officer to investigate the mysterious death of an unpopular Greek prisoner widely suspected of being an informer for their Italian jailers. He's found in a half-completed tunnel, and when the body is moved (to protect the tunnel from discovery), the Italians decide to frame a British officer for the Greek's murder. But it's 1943, and the Allies have landed in Sicily and are about to invade the mainland. Can they all escape the camp before a worse fate -- the German army -- arrives? And was the Greek, perhaps, really just an innocent victim after all? In which case, who's to blame? Lots of complexity and interest here, and Gilbert should be better known. I may try to re-read Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens soon; a great collection of short stories, with some truly chilling/noir yet deadpan protagonists. 4 stars.

Slatesnark strikes again. ::eyeroll::

Slatesnark??

>87 Chatterbox: Good points. I think context has a lot to do with it, and that's something that a shorter article often doesn't address, I would imagine because of space? I read a lot more YA ten years ago (early twenties) than I do now (early thirties). Part of it was the ability to relate to the characters and themes, and part of it was that I was reading a lot of heavier novels as an undergrad English major and wanted something quicker and lighter to read. I work with teens on a volunteer basis, so I find some of what I read in YA relevant in talking with them, use it in my job some (I'm the adult reference librarian, but it's a small enough library that I talk with all age groups on the job). I read a lot of fantasy, and in my experience that's a genre that often tends to blur the lines between teen/adult titles, so that could have something to do with my perspective too. I still enjoy some YA, though I do find myself having less and less patience for tropes like love triangles and angsty moments. My main connection with The Fault in Our Stars was more from the perspective of someone who's lost family to cancer, so I could relate to the thoughts on mortality and being the survivor.

Also, I would not go so far as to compare The Handmaid's Tale or 1984 with a teen dystopia... I may be in the minority, but I basically consider adult dystopia and teen dystopia different genres. It's hard to explain what I mean, other than to say I think they're making different points and doing different things as a result - to me, it's almost like an adult dystopia is saying, "Look where we could be headed if we don't turn things around now" and a teen dystopia says "Sometimes the world you're stuck with sucks, but you can make a difference if you try." At least, this makes sense in my head... I hope I'm conveying it clearly. :)

Edited to add - actually, thinking about context a little more it puts me in mind of what I half-jokingly say about my brothers' reading. They read more difficult books than I do, and tend to like what I might find too experimental or ambiguous or sad, so I tell them I might read the quantity but they read the quality.

>91 bell7: Yup, you made that distinction between teen and adult dystopia very clear, and framed it in a way that I hadn't thought of before but that makes tremendous sense in light of the different kinds of books that the two seem to produce. Clearly, you should be publishing some of these titles!

And you and I both seem to approach reading the same way -- as a kind of "barbell", with the heavier stuff (whatever it is) at one end, balanced by lighter reading at the other. In my case the proportions may vary over time, but whenever they get out of whack, I become uneasy. It's like a diet of candy; I start craving vegetables! And if I've been reading too much non-fiction and/or serious fiction, I crave some comic relief.

That's why I have to really rein in my requests from Amazon Vine. It lands me with duds like the Alexander McCall Smith book, above, which I requested just because it was free and it meant I didn't have to try and get it from the library (and have it arrive at an inconvenient time). And means that there is a ten-day period where I'm reading nothing but ARCs (or very little else) just in order to crank out the reviews in time. Sigh. That being said, it's time to pick the next ARC! And finish the last 30 pages of The Day of the Scorpion by Paul Scott.

"Slatesnark" = "the Nick of Time" from days of yore when print mattered.

You are doing really well in the quantity read department! You always amaze me!

The News Hour is doing a feature on the Book Expo tonight--I'm hoping but not counting on catching a glimpse of you, Suz.

>95 ronincats: Look for the body splayed out on the ground somewhere near the comfy carpeting of the Norton booth, Roni!

>94 thornton37814: Thanks, Lori, although either I'm being pickier when evaluating my reading or this year is coming up short on the quality, alas... I certainly feel as if I'm finding fewer books about which to get really excited, which is sad.

That said, however, I did finish:

191. The Day of the Scorpion by Paul Scott, being book #2 in the Raj Quartet. I'm not sure at the moment quite who I have to thank for finally picking up these books after more than a quarter of a century, although I know that Peggy is one of them! But whoever you are -- thank you! This is quite different in tone from The Jewel in the Crown, the opening book in the quartet, and feels rather like a series of set piece encounters between characters who either have been and will remain, or who will become, important in the rest of the book as the ripples of the Mayapore riots of 1942 continue to spread out, and the dance of death that is the relationship of the colonizers and their subjects in India in the final years of the Raj plays itself out.

Through the documents and memoirs that made up the first book, we have already met Ronald Merrick, the harsh and rather insecure young police officer whose attitudes and methods shaped so much of the outcome of book #1, include the injustice meted out to Hari Kumar and Daphne Manners. Now, Daphne is dead in childbirth, Hari is imprisoned, and the child -- conceived as a result of rape or of love, no one can tell -- is an infant, inexplicably (to the bastions of the Raj, of whom Sarah Layton's family number themselves) being raised by her great-aunt, Lady Manners. Sarah through whose eyes we see much of what unfolds, is more of a questioning soul: aware of her role as part of the backbone of the establishment, yet also conscious of the fact that many of those who occupy privileged positions by virtue of their nationality and skin color are no more worthy than, say, Ahmed, the son of a Congress politician whom she encounters briefly at a princely state, Mirat, when her sister Susan is married to a British soldier on the verge of being dispatched to the front lines in Burma. As I said, much of this is in the form of long setpieces: The nawab of Mirat has an intriguing wizier, a White Russian named Brunowsky, who spends more than a dozen pages at the wedding talking elliptically to Merrick at the wedding; later on, there's another conversation between Brunowsky and Sarah after a railway station encounter. Merrick and Sarah have two long philosophical conversations, set a year or so apart, giving Merrick a chance to lay out his own ideas about the British in India, the reader a chance to see the world through his eyes and understand his behavior, and Sarah to clarify her own thoughts about him. Lady Manners is able to witness a questioning of Hari Kumar. And so on.

These scenes, taken as a whole, help the reader to form their own sense of the building conflagration: the willful blindness of some who simply assume that all will go back to the way it was when the war is over; the existence of the INA, an army formed of Indian POWs who defect to join the Japanese against the British; the plight of thoughtful individuals on both sides of the "barrier" who know the old ways are gone but who can't quite conceive of what new relationships will replace it. This is a very inadequate exploration of some intriguing ideas.

I will say that the nature of the book -- these carefully-designed scenes that end up feeling like extensive philosophical discussions between characters -- doesn't always help with the flow. Sometimes it does feel as if these are staged vignettes, and the action flows from one to the next. Scott is such a talented writer, with the ability to inhabit his characters' minds to an eerie degree (they are always thinking, thinking, thinking...) that it doesn't matter once one has immersed oneself. But, pulling back a bit, I found myself realizing that for me, there was that something extra that was missing here that I'd like to have for this to be a really great book -- a seamless reading experience. Had that been there, I would have grabbed it and raced right through. Instead, I found it quite simple to put it down at the conclusion of one of these little scenes, as a satisfactory resting place, and come back to it later. Days later, sometimes! So, 4.35 stars.

ETA: After pondering Lori's comment, and my response to it, I updated my profile page with my best books of the year, something I had been too lazy to do so far in 2014. Alas, it's a relatively short list! (I excluded re-reads.)

I think that reading 21 books, excluding rereads, that you felt so positively about, is quite a lot, especially as one of them is actually 3 novels.

>97 elkiedee: Perhaps my lingering feeling of dissatisfaction is due instead to having more bad reads? I don't have the energy to go back over recent years to test that hypothesis -- and frankly I don't really think it's a great use of my time! -- but I do feel that my rather reckless approach to these "Last Harvest" Vine books has meant that I'm grabbing at books that I might otherwise have sought out at the library and given up on quite rapidly. I'm thinking of a bunch of titles here -- Teatime for the Firefly, Vienna Nocturne and The Taste of Apple Seeds that were really very mediocre books, and those, like the one above, that were actively painful to read (or the Antonio Garrido books published by Amazon's own imprint.)

If it's a library book, I can just toss it on the heap to take back, and label it DNF. Not so with Vine ARCs, as you know. Add to that the other books that I keep reading hoping that they'll get better but that end up in that no man's land of 3 stars to 3.5 stars -- really unsatisfying but not actively bad -- and it just hasn't felt like a year with a good ratio of "wow" books to "meh" or bad ones. If I look back at 2011 and 2012, I can see a lot more books that I felt much less equivocal about.

Or maybe I'm just getting crankier with age?? :-)

And one more book, about which there is much less to say:

192. Interesting Times by Terry Pratchett was a fun-enough Discworld novel, although I think, in spite of the cute, homicidal Luggage and other side plots, and the Pratchettian take on China and the terracotta warriors, I prefer those novels that are set in Ankh-Morpork and involve a more familiar lot of bizarre characters. Here, the satire was perhaps a tad too predictable for my taste, and I could see some of the gags coming several pages away. Didn't make it less amusing, but overall, not as enjoyable as many of the others. A solid 3.6 stars.

Books on the go:

Gutenberg's Apprentice by Alix Christie will be my next ARC, prompted by a discussion on a friend's thread about whether to head for Vienna or Prague. I'm advocating both, and for some reason this made me start thinking of medieval towns in the neighborhood of both cities. Ergo Gutenberg.

I've started The Book of Life by Deborah Harkness, and will make my way through that in the next few days.

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris -- I'm about a third of the way through this library book, which is due back shortly, and am bemused. Not only is the main character a dentist (shudder; major dental phobia and far too many descriptions of dental work in the book) but he's a kind of sad sack to whom odd things are happening. It's quirky but I can't make up my mind.

The Likeness by Tana French -- Five false starts in the audiobook means I'm going back to square one AGAIN, but this time with the real book. Sigh.

For amusement, a small Europa, Seven Lives and One Great Love by Lena Divani

Enemies at Home by Lindsey Davis -- I'm past the halfway mark in this entertaining, flip Roman-era historical mystery featuring Flavia Albia, adopted daughter of her previous investigator. When I finish that, my next mystery will be a NetGalley offering, The Low Road by A.D. Scott.

My next audiobook will be an older book by Robert Goddard, set partly in Cornwall, Days Without Number. So far, so good, although it is a re"read".

My non-fiction book is a family memoir by Alexander Stille, The Force of Things.

And oh yeah, I have some work to do this weekend. Had a really crappy night's sleep last night, never more than about 90 minutes at a stretch without waking up, for the second night in a row. (Partly Cassie's fault -- whenever I move, she squawks indignantly, thus ensuring I wake up.) The new bed is the only saving grace.

So the bed will be getting a positive review, I take it? I am currently sleeping on a mattress in the middle of the living room and can't wait to have my actual bed back, lumps and all...

Hoping to join you on The Likeness this month...

>100 katiekrug: The bed got its positive review yesterday. The cats are in line for negative reviews for the month, however. Tigger's abduction of my chair; Cassie's passive/aggressive behavior vis a vis the bed (which she clearly likes, too...)

Is the bedroom floor getting refinished?? I do hope you're back where you belong soon!

I try to avoid Amazon's own publications now unless they're from authors who I have some previous knowledge of (either having read or knowing that they were published by conventional publishers previously). And Amazon published books feature heavily in Kindle bargains here. If I can buy it for 99p I'd sooner choose things which are likely to be much more expensive to buy for at least a few months if not forever. Their imprints include Thomas & Mercer, Montlake Romance and Lake Union I think, as well as the more obvious AmazonCrossing

I'm finally coming to the end of a massive pile of Amazon Vine offerings which have meant I haven't been able to request anything since July 2013 - 38 books read, 35 reviewed. There are some I regret and I'll be more careful next time, but current offerings include the Anthony Doerr novel that Cusha loved, and the new Kamila Shamsie, and there are several others if those are all gone. Once I request I'll have 37 days - so will probably be ok for the first July newsletter as well as both the June ones from Wednesday 11 June. (Deadline would be 18 July, newsletter on 17th).

>102 elkiedee: Wow, yes, that's the plight that I want to avoid! I've managed to stay ahead on a month to month basis, but it has been a scramble.

I bought the Anthony Doerr book outright, using the $$ I got for the ABNA round two judging. That's almost all gone now (I think I have about $50 left), so I'll have to be a bit more careful.

And yes, I'm putting a block on Amazon's own-brand books. I quite liked Martin Jensen's Anglo-Saxon mysteries, and as long as I wait until I get snag them for 99 cents or 99p (as I know I'll be able to do soon enough...) I'll get those. Otherwise? Nope.

Extremely bizarre -- I dozed off to get another hour's sleep after my post above, thanks to an inadequate night's sleep last night. It was never more than a light doze, and so suddenly I was in London, having tea and seeing a film with friends near Whitely's, off Porchester Gardens. I thought to myself in my sleep, oh wait, I need to send Darryl an e-mail, because I'm sure he's in London now, too... (having, of course, just read his thread while wide awake...)

By weather standards, at least, I'm probably better off, since it's high 70s and sunny and delightful here -- perfect weather, while I also read Rhian's thread, according to which the weather in the UK today is utterly dreadful. On the other hand, I do miss London. But it will be a while -- perhaps a year or so -- before I can get back there. *sad face* It's about the only city that I ever feel like hugging, if that makes any sense at all.

OK, now must try to stay awake and alert. bleach. Wish I were one of the cats and had an excuse to zzzzz 22 hours a day.

>101 Chatterbox: - Yep, the bedroom floor should be done tomorrow (it was supposed to be done Thursday but the crew hit a snag, hence my 3-night campout on the living room floor...). At least it will be worth the wait! SO glad to be getting rid of so much dingy old carpet.

193. Enemies at Home by Lindsey Davis is the second mystery featuring the daughter of Falco, Davis's previous ancient Roman investigator/hero, and she's a rather modern and feisty heroine and narrator. Which is just fine, and makes this an entertaining and lively series, if sometimes slightly anachronistic in tone, if never in historical detail and setting. (She may not sound like a Roman of Domitian's era, but Flavia Albia never puts a sandal wrong...) This time, she's investigating the murder of a wealthy Roman and his new bride on his wedding night to his second wife: the family slaves, who can be put to death for failing to prevent the murders have all taken refuge at a temple and are lying their heads off. The rather attractive aedile, Faustus, whom Albia encountered in her previous investigation, enlists her aid again, and while the inquiry drags on a bit too long for my taste, by the end it's picking up speed and the plot turns out to be nicely complex. The final third of the book makes it all worthwhile and bumps the rating up to a solid 4 stars.

194. I Murdered My Library is a nice little Kindle single (note to fellow TIOLI folks: I've added this to the TIOLI Meter under Madeline's newly created works list, NOT the books list, since it's a scant 28 pages long in "real" book length) that nails the experience of getting older with too many books in an era that values reading and "dead tree" books much less. Grant knows just what happens to books left unattended. "Books multiplied, books swarmed, books, I sometimes dreamt, seemed to reproduce themselves -- they were a papery population explosion ... You cannot have a taste for a minimalist decor if you seriously read books." She recounts her favorites (we both read the ballet/horsey books of Lorna Hill!) and muses on the allure and shortcomings of the Kindle. A library, Grant knows, is "a full larder for the soul". But what happens when you know full well that you'll never re-read many of these? Grant's move to a smaller flat prompts the "murder" of the title, and while she knows she would "be ashamed of being a writer whose house had no books", will she go too far in slaughtering her darlings? Read it and find out.... 4.4 stars.

Has anyone read any of Grant's novels?

>96 Chatterbox: I seem to go through spurts this year, but overall, it has just been a mediocre year in regards to quality.

>106 Chatterbox: Has anyone read any of Grant's novels?

Me, me. I really liked her book When I Lived in Modern Times about the creation of the state of Israel in 1946. Wonderful prose and she established such a tremendous sense of place that Tel Aviv just leaped from the pages. It's really stayed with me too Suzanne.

>108 brenzi: Thanks for the recommendation, Bonnie -- it's now on my Kindle, with some of the last of my ABNA judging money! I also picked up A Tale of Love and Darkness, which Grant mentions in this short piece, and that I've been meaning to read for ages, possibly since it first came out. I think I heard Amos Oz discuss it, or the book discussed, on one of the New York-based NPR radio shows at that time, and it grabbed my imagination. But it never made its way onto my shelves. Now, however, it is on my Kindle...

It seems like I've had more duds than usual this year, too. A couple have been ARCs that sounded promising but didn't pan out. Most of the others have been for the CAT challenges in the 2014 Category Challenge group. Last year's CAT challenges worked well for me. One of them was an Awards category. I found and tried books I might not have otherwise discovered and several were among my top reads for the year.

I've also read Linda Grant and when she came to New Zealand made the trip in to the bookstore (now long gone) to hear her talk up The clothes on their backs which I enjoyed. I've read her nonfiction The People on the Street: A Writer's View of Israel as well as When we lived in modern times. I followed her blog for a long while though she doesn't post as often now, I remember reading her blog during the Mumbai attacks & aftermath and her disbelief at how the British government offered so little support to those Brits injured in the attack, she knew one of the victims. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/may/10/will-pike-taj-hotel-mumbai-terror-a...
I put I Murdered My Library on my kindle when it came out and will read it once I finish Story of a secret state by Jan Karski. Just seem to be reading more slowly of late.

That Slate article was out of line, can't people just be allowed to read and enjoy. I read YA and children's books though don't do all my reading in this area. I think a large segment of the population just aren't into literary fiction and we should just accept it and move on. Most would have been put off by high school set reading.

I read I Murdered My Library on the bus the other day (I've moved it to the Works section too). For me it had a particular personal appeal - she lives 2 or 3 miles from me in Crouch End - I really miss the bookshop she talks about, Prospero's, too (as well as the Woolworths). I can't help wondering whether I bought any of the books she culled from her library in her local Oxfam Bookshop.

I've read 3 of her novels. I liked The Clothes on Their Backs and When I Lived in Modern Times a lot, I wasn't quite as keen on We Had It So Good but would still like to read her novel coming out next month which is meant to be a sort of sequel.

>110 cbl_tn: I do hope that the dud syndrome isn't contagious...

>111 avatiakh: Thought that the snide tone was out of place, and that she was over-reaching in her argument. But while I'm quite prepared to agree that any YA title can transcend its genre, just as any mystery, fantasy, romance, or general novel can transcend ITS genre and become something truly extraordinary, not all do. And the claims I increasingly hear on behalf of YA on the part of the publishing industry and booksellers are increasingly, well, odd in tone. I hear it from publicists, that if I'm not paying attention to YA, I'm missing out on great novels, and when I ask for examples, the books cited are ones that I've tried to read and found tedious. Clearly, no one should tell anyone to be sheepish about what they read; equally, no one should insist that this is this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. It just isn't. Like most genres, it's going to appeal to some readers more than others, and large swathes of it are going to be only so-so. And I will say that anyone who hopes to make his/her living as a writer (and not as a YA fiction writer) and is reading 200 plus books a year, solely YA romance, is doing themselves a disservice. And that's something that I'll stick to. It's not about reading and enjoying, in that case. It's about reading as a way of learning how different kinds of writers work, and if you limit yourself, you limit what you're going to be able to do in your turn. But then (and I'm rambling on again...) there clearly is much less emphasis out there on learning how to write well. I've done a lot of tutoring over the years, working with everyone from teens to adult immigrants, and I've seen both ability and interest levels in otherwise well-educated and literate native speakers decline steadily over the last 10/15 years. Slightly unnverving. I haven't picked up any volunteer work of this kind since moving, and I'm not sure that I want to continue with it, for this reason. Have no idea what the cause is (I very much doubt it's what they are reading!), but a part of it certainly ties into a general lack of conviction that being able to communicate clearly in writing matters at all.

>112 elkiedee: Wow, wouldn't it be fascinating to know if you picked up any of those books? You should post any purchases you made in the relevant time frame, along with a contact e-mail, and see if she reaches out to you! Good to have the second voice in support of When I Lived in Modern Times. Very odd that her name was so familiar and yet I didn't seem to have read any of her books...



I could not resist.

Gorgeous.

I've attended a lot of talks given by YA and children's writers and most are extremely well read. I especially have enjoyed listening to Patrick Ness and MT Anderson discuss writing. A few writers become extremely trendy and while sometimes their work is good, a lot isn't really crossover material. So I agree with you on the publicists pushing too many to the detriment of the ones that are really really good. Publishers need books that sell if they are to survive and unfortunately that does often mean popular over literary.

I dread the future that digital publishing looks like ushering in, especially as Amazon continues to flex muscle and publishers see less and less profit to put back into nurturing a new generation of writers. I rarely browse the kindle books as they are so chock full of self-published books and I'll only read those where I either know the publisher or the writer from previous times.

I confess I avoid virtually all self-published books as a matter of principle. A friend of mine wants me to read a novel that a friend of hers has self-published, and it's very hard to say no. But it's a bit of a no-win situation. The person in question isn't a writer, hasn't hired an editor (I asked) and has just published this himself. That's great, and I'm sure it's satisfying, and he's doing a great job marketing it. But there is so much I either have to or want to read, that I just don't want to go on a route march through tedious to downright dreadful prose and poorly-structured narratives with cliches (sorry, can't do accent aigu on this computer's keyboard) and cardboard characters. The odds are extremely high that I won't like the book, and then what do I do? Say sorry, crappy book, so I won't review it? Or, sure, I'll review it, but it's going to get only 1 star? After all, there are plenty of books that DO get edited (theoretically, at least...) and still emerge in dire need of remedial assistance.

I don't think it's just about digital publishing and Amazon. They have just exploited an opportunity that "traditional" publishers left sitting there. (as per the Michael Wolff piece that Katie posted above, at >24 katiekrug:.) I find not much to admire on either side of the equation, and both are battling for the moral high ground. An unpleasing spectacle, to put it mildly. Having just come from BookExpo last week, perhaps this is rubbing me slightly more raw than it would otherwise do.

The people I feel badly about are those midlist authors who are working hard to turn out quality work, not just jump on board whatever commercial bandwagon happens to roll past them. The latter will always make out OK, one way or another, as will those who are self-promotional. Nor am I concerned about those who manage to "brand" themselves (think, Karen Russell or any of those anointed by the New Yorker as the top novelists under 40, etc.). But for every one of those, there are two or three writers who are every bit as good, who doesn't have as aggressive a publicist, or as wide a network, or didn't know which MFA program to apply to (or couldn't finance an MFA program). It's like watching Michael Lewis suck up the oxygen in the business books arena. I don't agree with whoever it was that idiotically suggested that JK Rowling should stop writing (and I remember thinking that I hadn't much liked HER books, either -- I think it was Lynn Shepherd?) in order to give other writers more air, but big names cast long shadows. A friend of mine's book on the same topic as The Big Short came out before Lewis's book, was more detailed (and more accurate), included footnotes and bibliography (something Lewis never likes to include, oddly...) and once Lewis's book appeared, his sales flatlined. It's popularity/recognition over merit, and publishers, who have to pay a fortune to get the rights to the popular books (Lewis gets advances in the high six figures per book) need to earn out those advances, and so invest very, very heavily in marketing, drowning out any attention that other titles might get. So sometimes I'm surprised to hear about some books, simply because there's no investment in marketing any more. At BookExpo I make a point of picking up catalogs, when available, just so that I can hunt for some of those interesting books. Sometimes they become my next great read.

Re that pic, I think the black kitten on the end is poised to dash off and get himself some boots.

...and need we mention the advances that a lot of celebrities get at the expense of those mid range writers. Some publishing decisions are plain stupid, such as the advance given to Pippa Middleton.

his tail is up, the others are down!

I find that some YA (and indeed children's) books are well worth reading, but a lot are very formulaic, although that could be said about many (if not most) adult books as well. When I read a good YA book now I'm often conscious of a feeling that, while I can enjoy the book, it will often not get more than three and a half stars for a good solid read, whereas if I'd read it when I was the age of the target market I would have loved it!

Edited to add: weather much improved here, by the way!

>106 Chatterbox: Has anyone read any of Grant's novels?

I read and really liked The Clothes on Their Backs, so it's somewhat inexplicable that I haven't read anything else by her.

>111 avatiakh: Interesting link, thanks.

>115 Chatterbox: One time a friend asked me to read a book another friend had written (not a writer) and there was no way I could wiggle out of it. I ended up saying it wasn't a genre I was familiar with (true) and that everyone needs an editor and it would be worth her while to hire someone. Another time when a friend of a friend asked me to edit his manuscript and I could see it needed a complete rethinking and that it would take days and days, if not weeks and weeks, of my time I skimmed it and made some general suggestions "for his next revision" (which, by the way, I'm sure he wasn't thinking of doing), and he actually thanked me. Maybe you could do something similar for the self-published book unless the friend of the friend in question is completely opposed to doing any more work, in which case it would be as you say a thankless task.

Somewhere in some article about the Amazon-Hachette mess, I came upon a statistic that showed that publishers make more profit on digital books and pay the authors a lower royalty. Can't find the article now, but I fear for "real" books.

>83 Chatterbox: I was getting caught up over here - so behind!

I read the Slate article earlier this afternoon, and I've been stewing about it all day. There's a really snarky tone to it, isn't there? Then we had friends over for dinner and we talked about the article. It made for an interesting dinner discussion.

Warning: My opinions on this are likely to come across as Opinionated.

I read a lot of YA/teen books, mostly because I have a teenager, and I even like some of them. Some of them are excellent and others are total rubbish. Part of the reason IMO, is that many of these books are actually adult in content and theme (I think of YA as 18+) and disguised as teen lit. Some of the problem here is really a matter of labeling.

One of my personal pet peeves about these books is that the teen characters are cast in adult situations and often given adult tasks and dialogue while the actual adults are missing or incompetent. The thing that frustrates me the most is the epidemic teen sex - sometimes totally graphic - in these books. I will freely admit that I am against teens having sex. Yep. It's true. I don't think they are emotionally or neurologically capable of handling that level of intimacy. Hell, lots of adults struggle with it. So, therefore, I am not a fan of "teen" books that glamorize teen sex. Books that discuss sexuality in a real way can be great. The Outsiders comes to mind. On the other hand, the Divergent series. Do we know of any real life scenario in which it is acceptable for a young girl to join the army and then get into a relationship with her adult mentor? Or Twilight: In real life, if your daughter had a guy lurking in her room watching her sleep, wouldn't you want her to call the cops? If she was obsessing over a weird guy or say, two weird guys wouldn't you put her in therapy? I know the argument. "It's just entertainment. Everyone knows it's not real." Do they? Do they?

I agreed with this point from the article:

It’s not simply that YA readers are asked to immerse themselves in a character’s emotional life—that’s the trick of so much great fiction—but that they are asked to abandon the mature insights into that perspective that they (supposedly) have acquired as adults.

But, I disagree with her comment: when I read The Fault in Our Stars. I thought, Hmm, that’s a nicely written book for 13-year-olds. Um, really? 13- year-olds should read a book about a teenage guy arranging a European vacation for his terminally ill girlfriend, hiding the fact that he is also terminally ill and then they have sex, because, YOLO? Oh yeah. Depends on the 13-year-old, I guess. And it's still an adult theme, even if it's about teens, and the parents are oddly uninvolved...

My 15 year old son has read Divergent and The Fault in Our Stars, and lots of other books like that. Because I'm not a fan of censorship, and I can't follow him around his whole life monitoring his reading. But he knows I have read them or he knows I will, and he knows we will talk about the books and I will ask him what he thinks and I will give him my adult perspective and insights and hope that he takes some of it on board.

I am getting off the soap box now, but I just want to file one more little quibble for the record. Can we be done with the dystopian/paranormal romance love triangle trilogies? I think that has been thoroughly explored and found to be unsatisfactory for everyone involved. The end.

>120 nittnut: Jenn: I love that penultimate paragraph, and that's that kind of booklationship I hope to have with the future-pre-teen/teen Charlie.

Morning, Suzanne!

So much here! I agree with Bell7 about the YA/Adult dystopic distinction. Even if high schoolers read 1984 and The Handmaid's Tale, they are still adult literature, meant to prompt adult thought and discussion.

Glad you are getting the ghastly rug out!

Glorious New England weather the last few days.

Love the Puss in Boots photo, that is wonderful!

Where is the #Bookaday challenge to be found?

>47 Chatterbox: Wowza! All because of the new migraine meds...
Yes? This sounds promising.

>65 Chatterbox: current month's issue of Harpers
Oh no! I suppose encouraging there’s interest you can point to, but a shame if someone else gets there first. Hope your agent search is successful.

I confess, skimming to catch up... read the YA article and can see the point, fad prompts anti-fad, but for many people YA or whatever is just one more item in the repertoire, so meh.

What I got from the article was the author was against adults feeding themselves exclusively on a diet of YA books, and on that score I tend to agree with her. I joined a group of Montreal bloggers a while back, and several of them read and reviewed only those kinds of books, which I thought was a little strange. Arrested development, anybody? I like to mix things up too much to ever stick to any one genre or category for very long, and there's a great swathe of YA stuff I'm not interested in from the get-go, because it just seems like they're all variations on the same tropes. But then, that can probably said about a lot of literature, both good an bad.

Love the Puss'n Boots photo. Agree the blackie looks ready for action!

Lots of visitors! Which is very nice after another night of bad sleep (third in a row -- piffle).

>117 avatiakh: Yes, what does Pippa Middleton have to say, pray tell, beyond, "how to be the sister of someone who managed to snag a prince, and date the most eligible men in England?" Really... And if that makes me a book snob, so be it; I shall embrace the title gladly.

>118 SandDune: Somehow, many readers and most publishers seem to have lost that sense: that 90% of what they will put out in this category is just going to be a "good read", full stop. Which is fine. Just don't tell me it's brilliant because it is aimed at The Young.

>119 rebeccanyc: Rebecca, in my contract (which, mind you, was drawn up six years ago and may no longer be remotely standard), my e-book royalties were very slightly lower. What wasn't true then but may be true now is that when the publishers cut the retail price, royalties suffered. When I tested that by looking at my contract, that didn't seem to be the case, or at least (if I recall correctly) only to a very, very minor extent. I really should dig out the contract and double check, and look for a recent royalty statement as well. But I remember thinking that this was interesting and it explained the publishers' intransigence vis a vis the agency pricing model. Ultimately, what matters most is sales, in any format. If you don't get a lot of sales, you won't get a second contract, and it will become academic what form they came in. Odds are that your book will never earn out its advance and you won't collect royalties anyway (mine hasn't and probably never will) unless it got (a) a tiny tiny advance (b) sells extremely well or (c) becomes a surprise bestseller. The reality is that a handful of authors "carry" the rest.

Alas, I don't think my thoughts as an editor/writer were being solicited. Just a five-star review on Amazon from someone known for being a prolific reader and a top reviewer whose seal of approval might fuel sales. Anything else likely would be met with a blank stare of the "but that's not what we asked you to do; can't you just stick to the program? variant!

>120 nittnut: Interesting and clearly well thought-out perspective! I think in my teens I somehow jumped over whatever passed for YA in those days (the 70s) and started reading adult books. Actually, I was reading adult books by the time I was 9 or 10. I'm not sure where it would fall on your spectrum of appropriate theme/content, but it did raise some eyebrows among my parents' friends. That said, the first adult books were by Georgette Heyer and Jean Plaidy -- hardly racy fare, even at that age. (I had read The Diary of Anne Frank at the age of 7, so my reading comprehension was well up to adult books by 9 or 10.)

So, if I look back, I was definitely reading about adult themes -- including lust -- at a very young age. (In a way, this was good -- my mother was extremely reluctant to discuss the facts of life, so I ended up figuring much of it out via novels and fitting it into the framework of what I eventually learned in health class at about 12/13!) On the other hand, these were adult stories, with adults as protagonists, or to the extent that they were teenagers, they were teenagers who were recognized as adults -- i.e. historical novels set in eras where a teenager was someone who could marry, was expected to ride off to war or, if a woman, oversee a household and have children. I never equated my experience with theirs. The summer I was 14, for instance, I read several novels by Daphne du Maurier. Not YA; no teen protagonists. No identification by yours truly. When Magnus the mad professor takes drugs to time travel, I didn't relate (in The House on the Strand). I read some Helen MacInnes thrillers that summer, too (it was the summer we moved to Belgium, scorching hot, and we were shut up in a hotel for most of it, which is why I remember so vividly!) and a lot of Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh. Eventually stumbled onto the "Angelique" novels, which did cause my mother to roll her eyes slightly, but that's all.

Oddly, the books that I had read up to that point in which adults were AWOL and children were in adult roles were actually CHILDREN'S books! True, there was no sex, but Enid Blyton's adventure books (indeed, many of those books) have kids having adventures with adults nowhere in sight. My childhood favorite, Geoffrey Trease, had teenagers playing very adult roles, saving the country from the Spanish Armada, etc. (though the books were written for younger children). Often, adults were villains, or at least uncertain in their loyalties. Then there were some where adults explicitly vanished, like one children's novel I read about a seaside town evacuated during World War II, where a group of children were literally left to live by themselves on the funfair pier. Or in another WW2 book, the fabulous We Couldn't Leave Dinah, in which a brother and sister on one of the Channel Islands end up staying behind after their families are evacuated to care for their beloved ponies, and trying to survive during the Nazi occupation.

But yes, I take your broader point, and applaud your approach to letting your son discover what it is that he likes and doesn't like on his own, and finding a way to talk to him about it. For my part, I was quite happy NOT to discuss it, and to have books be MY thing. I do share books with my mother now, but in those years I think I would have felt any questions about what I was reading and what I thought about it as intrusive, since she was so omnipresent in the rest of my live, second-guessing every move I made in every other respect. (For instance, I was't allowed to go out on a date until my mother had formally met the guy involved; since I attended an international school, where kids could live 20 miles in the opposite direction from the school from where we did, meaning that the kid would have to get someone to drive him to our house to meet my mother formally before she would agree to let us go to a school dance or to a movie -- not just to pick me up , mind you -- this meant I hardly ever went on dates during high school except with a guy down the street from me, or as a group, with people my mother had met at parties at my house.)

>121 scaifea: G'morning! (Or, just turned good afternoon here!)

>122 sibylline: Here's one of the "Bookaday" lists, Lucy; I have rather dropped the ball on this in recent days, I fear...

https://www.boroughpress.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/BOOKADAY_June.pdf

>123 qebo: I've been on Topamax for the last three months and it's made a BIG difference to the migraines. It's not infallible, and not without side effects (for instance, it is really aggravating my struggles with words -- I'll often type a homonym in error, as some of you might have begun tonotice...) But it's really encouraging.

I have a conference call set up with a new potential agent, referred by my Guardian editor, on Monday afternoon. I finally heard back from my existing guy late Friday, more than 48 hours after I e-mailed him (unimpressive), and we're going to talk on Wednesday). I want to talk to this new guy first and get a sense of who he is and what he thinks of the project.

>124 Smiler69: Ilana, yes, it's one thing if someone in their 30s/40s is reading YA in the same way they'd dip into any other genre, looking for interesting books. I wouldn't go quite as far as to say "arrested development"! But reading books that are only about teenagers, as you get older? This is just a personal note, but I can't begin to imagine making YA a big part of my book diet for that reason, at least, not without seeing a LOT bigger ratio of really interesting or different kinds of books. Again, this is just a personal response; one of the theories I have come up with to try to explain why so many of the YA books that many people (including many here on LT) seem to love have left me completely, absolutely cold. I do like some of the dystopian stuff, but that's because dystopian books intrigue me, anyway: the "what if"? element, and the vision of a world that isn't fantasy but recognizable enough as a vestige of our own to anchor a narrative, and yet provide a vision of what may happen in the future.

For me, it seems as if teens as protagonists tends to limit things in a way that other genres don't. When you are writing a mystery, the book itself can be of precisely the same literary merit (to the extent that that is ever measurable, of course), but if your protagonists aren't teens, they can have a wider variety of experiences, a greater emotional range, etc. Of course, that doesn't always translate into a better book. It just means that an author doesn't have to rely on something like dystopian plots or mortal illnesses to elicit interesting character detail. Life has already made them more interesting. Teens are interesting because of their potential; for what they might become. Adults are interesting because of what life has made them.

I'm about halfway through Gutenberg's Apprentice and finding it a bit underwhelming. The author -- who is, it seems, herself a printer -- can write well, but is in love with the printing and apprenticeship details and is giving short shrift to the kind of historical detail that lets the reader know where they are in time and space. We're kind of dropped into a place in time and left to sort it out, with the help of clues. It's good, but could be really excellent, and isn't.

195. Gutenberg's Apprentice by Alix Christie never really became what it could have been. When it was good, it was very, very good, as in the author's vivid descriptions of the Frankfurt fair of 1454 in the final chapters. But it gets bogged down in overly-detailed technical detail that starts out being fascinating, then moves to being merely interesting and finishes by serving as a drag on the story. Finally, the story itself is tremendously complex, involving multiple tugs of war between church and secular authorities, between guilds and independent craftsmen like Gutenberg (at least, I think so...) and between the noblemen and merchants. None of these are well enough developed for the casual reader; someone who knows nothing of late medieval Europe and comes to this blindly may well end up being alienated from historical fiction from life. The author, understandably, is fascinated by the intellectual leaps that made possible the conceptual and technical breakthroughs of the first printing press, and she does an amazing job of setting those in an intriguing way -- comparing the "devilish" new technology of printing to the cannons of Mehmet II that enable him to seize Constantinople in 1453, for instance. But while overall the book is well written and focuses on a fascinating period, it's just not a compelling STORY. I never forgot that I was reading a book that someone else had written, and was constantly being distracted -- as the apprentices wondered how many pages they had left to print of Gutenberg's Bible, I was wondering how many more pages of this I had left to read. 3.75 stars. Not bad, but a disappointment, and leaves me badly in need of a thumping good read; something in which I can really immerse myself. Nothing seems to be fitting the bill. At least I can check off one more Amazon Vine ARC from my list...

>125 Chatterbox: Understood! (About both royalties and the reviewing request. When I worked in textbook publishing, we used to say that the company's best-selling trade author paid our salaries.)

>125 Chatterbox: Wouldn't I just love to sit down and talk books with you in RL! I know we've talked about this before, but I think my childhood reading life was pretty similar to yours, with the exception that my mother tried to keep tabs on what I was reading for a while. I was reading classics like Pride and Prejudice by age 10 or 11 and I had worked my way through a good number of the standard classics by then. I am sure I skipped the YA/teen genre as well. I have no memories of anything in that range other than Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret, which I read because my mother forbade it. I remember being completely underwhelmed by it. I understood the content because I was taught the lesson on "How Things Work" by my father (who had a zoology degree and may have slightly overdone it with textbook diagrams and such) when I was about 8. I also started my romance reading around age 12 with Georgette Heyer, and I'm glad. She helped me set my expectations nice and high for that genre, lol. By the time I was 13 or 14, my dad was giving me books about the Cultural Revolution or the Russian revolution or The Gulag Archipelago, and that kept me pretty busy.

As far as my son goes, I never interview him about books. He doesn't do interviews. I don't know if there are a lot of kids like him. He is totally disorganized, hates being told what to do (well that's normal) and is a bit of a slug about school. On the other hand, he's the kind of kid that goes to the library and checks out An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, reads it and then comes and reads sections he's marked and wants to discuss them in relation to some other thing he's read and expects a rational and intelligent discussion of same even if it's say, 10 pm on a Wednesday night. Or he'll watch a movie like Seven Pounds and then go read The Merchant of Venice because I tell him I think it's a sort of modern re-telling. He's asking for Dostoevsky now, so I have some re-reading in my future if I'm going to be able to keep up the illusion that I have some idea what I'm talking about. No, with him it's more a book club style discussion. We talk about theme, structure, characterization, why the author might have put a character in such a situation, comparisons to other books. That sort of thing.
He wants to write, and he's written some pretty mature poetry for his age, but he doesn't yet have the ability or the desire to work as hard as he'd need to. I am trying to support that by giving him a wide variety of things to read. It's kind of a full time job.

Hope your meetings with both agents go well. Is it obnoxious to ask what you're wanting to write? Maybe you have said and I missed it. Hope you find your thumping good read.

>130 nittnut: Your son's approach to reading sounds fascinating, and i can see why it would keep you on the hop! Being asked to discuss Locke after a long day just before bed on a Wednesday -- with zero advance notice -- would freak me out more than a little! But kudos to him for being that adventurous. I think I hit a brick wall with Dostoevsky at about 20 or 21; I was still too young to understand the themes, and old enough to recognize that while I could read it without trying to grasp those themes, I wouldn't be getting out of the experience all that I could. And for some reason, I haven't gone back to it. Don't really know why.

Speaking of brick walls... the book project that has been in abeyance for the last two or three years has a working title of "Bluebloods, Black Sheep and Missing Links: Our Obsessive Search for our Roots", and deals with the hows, whys and wherefores of the latest resurgence of obsessive interest in genealogy, which is different in nature from any that has gone before (or so I would argue...) Idea was born back in 2006, put on the shelf in 2008 when I started work on the Wall Street book, dusted off in 2011 when that went into paperback and I was free of the project and rewrites and edits, and then it kind of fizzled. What I fail to understand is why. Now I want to be able to see whether it's the idea, whether I'm the wrong person to write this, whether I simply shouldn't try to write another book, or what. I'd like it not to be lurking in the back of my mind...

In the meantime -- off to the DMV in the morning for my state-issued photo ID. NOT for my driver's license.

>115 Chatterbox: The people I feel badly about are those midlist authors who are working hard to turn out quality work, not just jump on board whatever commercial bandwagon happens to roll past them.
Me too. They are neither here (freshly on the market and happy with two sales) nor there (best-selling with the full support of a team) and must work away as is.

^a genealogy revolution huh? My MiL recently (5 years ago) provided us with 'the family tree'. She delights in relaying the information at any opportunity that her family came out to NZ before the first settler ships. In doing my preliminary psychology reading (yes, I am proudly that much of a nerd) tells me the reasons for her frequent advertisement of this :)
I think your book sounds very interesting. Does some of it (the obsession) stem from the Mormon's record-keeping being digitised relatively recently?

>132 LovingLit: I think the digitization simply facilitates the obsession; the roots of it are more psyco/sociological in nature...

>131 Chatterbox: Dostoevsky is just a lot of work, IMO. I am sure that since I last read him in my late teens, early 20's, my experience will be very different this time around.

I think a book on the genealogy craze would be fascinating. You should do it. I think you'd be a great voice for that story. I can give you a whole section on the LDS (Mormon) perspective. My mother is a 3rd generation genealogist - I've done some, but the bug hasn't really bitten me too hard. She loves it. It is her preferred activity. I would agree with Megan's comment that my church's focus on searching for your roots has had a large effect. Not just the digitization, which is, as you said, more of an aid, but because there are 15 million + of us world wide and one of the things we are all doing is searching out our ancestors. If you want chapter and verse on why, I can PM you. LOL But, if I may offer my (totally unsolicited) opinion, a book on the modern craze would not be complete without an LDS perspective. ;)
Brigham Young University offers an entire degree in Family History/Genealogy. Sort of boggles my mind, but there it is.

ETA >132 LovingLit: It's not so much the "Mormon's record keeping" that's being digitized. It's the church going all over the world and digitizing all the records of everyone everywhere they are allowed to do it. They arrange to give those churches, cities, synagogues, whatever a copy and take a copy for their archives. My mom said recently there was a church in Germany or somewhere (because that's where she's currently researching) where they went in and digitized the records and then not long after they were done, the church caught fire and all the original records were burnt. That's like a horror film for genealogists. The parish records are on fire!!! Oh the horror! right? Anyway, the idea is to try and digitize as many of these old records as possible before they are lost. We have this cool online project where we can volunteer to read through the scanned documents and put the important information into the database. They set it up so that 3 or 4 different people will do the same document and then another 2 people review and approve. Then it goes into the permanent database. Millions of records are being digitized this way. All of these records are then made available to anyone who needs them, for free.

Sorry Suzanne. I lurk for months and then just won't go away...

>125 Chatterbox: Yep, I suppose my experiences were similar. Apart from the Famous Five and Doctor Who books which I read pre-teens I went straight to adult fiction, history, poetry and classics from a period before I was shy to bathe in front of my mum. I do recall reading Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence at about 11 years old and The Lord of the Rings at about the same time.

>134 nittnut: I should do it -- but I need a book contract. Which means I need an agent and a publisher who believe in the project...

And yes, I've spent some time in Salt Lake (although, as a die-hard agnostic, the theological logic underpinning some of the reasons for the genealogical research sometimes makes my head spin!) and have a chapter in my outline entitled "Mecca". So, there you go! Fingers and toes crossed...

OK, rushing off to DMV to try and get that sorted out.

I agree, the work that the Mormon Church has done has been incredibly helpful for us amateur genealogists. I have been sporadically working on my family's history for years - I began back in 1974 when Alex Haley wrote Roots.

Well, talked to prospective new agent, who was mildly encouraging, but thinks I need to dramatically refocus the book. I suspect, after the abortive attempt to sell it as is in late 2011, that he's right; he's sending me some general thoughts and I've sent him what I have, and we'll talk again. It's a kind of "tough love" approach, but rather better than the scattershot let's throw it at the wall and see if it sticks approach by my probably soon to be ex-agent.

ETA: The key to all this, you see, is where will the sales come from? If I write it as a behind the scenes look at the world of genealogy, and then hope to sell to the genealogy crowd, he pointed out that most of them already KNOW the behind the scenes stuff. And that crowd is where the sales are. So it may make sense to rethink the premise...

Nearly four hours at the DMV. But my state ID will be en route to me soon. Phew. I think I need to have some lunch and curl up for a nap, then get down to some work.

Following the discussion about adults reading YA with interest. I read some YA but couldn't do a steady diet of it. I'm like you Suz, I like to balance reading stuff that makes me think with more fluffy "fun" stuff. If there's not a good mix I get a little twitchy.

I think there is some excellent YA being written, and I have found some especially good middle grade stuff recently, Wonder springs immediately to mind. However, something that bothers me now about YA, and I think its because I am a parent of teens, is that whole thing about teenagers being off having adventures, or sex, or whatever...and the parents are nowhere to be found. That is so foreign to how I parent that it pulls me out of the story. I don't have a problem with the teens having those adventures, even the sex, because its definitely happening in real life, but the parents never have input at all in many cases. Not even to ask the teens where they are going, where they've been, do they want dinner, or anything. Its like there are never any good parents in YA land!!

I've been thinking about the appeal or lack of appeal of teen protagonists. The YA titles that appeal to me and that i've liked tend to be historical fiction, set during my teen years, or my parents or grandparents' teen years. It gives me a point of connection with them.

My "homework" from Eric-the-prospective-agent is interesting. First of all, a list of "comps", or comparable books. That is, books that a prospective publishers might compare market potential. The trick? They have to be published since 2010, and have at least 50 Amazon reviews. Tougher than you would think... That excludes books like Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis (a model of the type of book) and Who Are We? by Samuel Huntington (subject area), because of the publication date. It excludes Arrival City by Doug Saunders and another Who Are We -- and Should it Matter in the 21st Century by Gary Younge (not enough reviews). So I end up with a selection of books that range from The Seven Daughters of Eve (DNA and genealogy) to Gun Guys and Among the Janeites (examples of going behind closed doors into unusual worlds) to Searching for Zion by Emily Raboteau and The Hare with Amber Eyes (family-based narratives or memoirs based on an author delving into family history).

A second list! This one is aspirational in nature. Right now, if you look me up on Amazon, and pull up my books (one of which that matters for this, the other that really doesn't as it's a co-written investment book), and look down to the part where it says "customers who bought this item also bought...", the list is dominated exclusively by books about Wall Street and the financial crisis. So, Eric wants to know what books -- or rather, what authors -- would I LIKE to see on that list? Now that, let me tell you, is a VERY interesting exercise, and it's tougher than you would think. Because sometimes it's a book, not an author. And it has to be realistic. I mean, I might say I'd love to see Patrick Leigh Fermor there, or the novels of Hilary Mantel, but since I'm not proposing to write literary travel or a compelling novel, so that isn't a valid comparison. And at the same time, it has to be a list that the agent is going to grasp immediately -- the point of it all is to give him a sense not just of what kind of book I want to read, but what kind of writing I want to be doing. (This is kind of appealing, frankly, as it means that he's unlikely to try to bully me into writing another business/finance book just because it's the obvious path and the easiest for him to identify and to sell.) But the authors and books on it have to reflect me, but they also have to have big market potential. There's no point sticking someone on there whose book has crashed and burned, as apparently Daniel Rabosh's Rapture Ready did. I liked the book, and Radosh got a $150k advance for it. The problem? It sold only 1,200 copies in hardcover, a big fat belly flop of a failure. The people he was writing about (the born again community/Christian pop culture) didn't want to read about themselves, and those outside didn't want to read this kind of a narrative: they wanted to read something less sympathetic or at least more hard hitting than a witty tour of Christian rock bands and theme parks. If they read this, they wanted to be told there was a point to it, all, i.e. that we need to be aware of this because there's a threat to democracy or something of this kind. But it was just a "isn't this interesting" kind of book.

All of which brings me to the third part of the homework, and the most significant, really. Eric argues (perhaps a little too deterministically) that all potential bestsellers fall into nine basic categories. I won't bore you with all of them, but one is showing (through unprecedented access) that everything works just as you expected, or everything is just as corrupt as you had expected. (I suppose the Monsanto book that Megan/IreadthereforeIam just read & reviewed would fit into that category.) There is one that shows that something you've already discovered -- a power or ability -- isn't something you need to change, but an asset, like Susan Cain's book, Quiet. Or an "explainer" book, like A History of the World in 12 Maps by Jerry Brotton, where a list or other numerical format explains something in a quirky way.

My book could fall into one of two camps. The first is "This book chronicles a level of personal investment no sane person would undertake", aka the stunt memoir (think, A.J. Jacobs.) I'm wary of this, because I dislike this kind of book, which all too often feels like a book in quest of a stunt. Then there is what he describes as a "strawman" argument book. "Everything you know about this subject is wrong. For every argument you knock down, you have to build something better in its place. Readers must recognize, without help, what the mirror image argument is." (Examples: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins; Obama's America by Dinesh D'Souza. Here, I could build up a provocative argument around nationalism, national identity, snobbery or identity politics and, in the process of destroying it, paint a picture of what genealogy mavens are doing and why it matters to them. This would require a lot of very careful thought, however, and some very careful structure.

So, there you have it. Any thoughts on the above welcome. I'm going to have dinner and collapse (back) into bed. Long day ahead to catch up on time lost today at the DMV and agonizing about books, etc. Have to get my brain back on track. At least jotting down these thoughts has helped me clarify 'em.

Wow. That's some homework assignment! However, it seems promising in terms of what you'd want in a prospective agent.

I kind of like the argument book in the sense of painting the picture of what genealogists are doing and why - but I'm not sure what argument you'd be knocking down... I suppose I will have to read the book. LOL

>136 Chatterbox: I understand the skepticism many people feel regarding religion. However, part of the problem is attempting to apply logic to what is essentially an act of faith. Another sort of inexplicable reality that complicates human interaction, no? All that aside, I think that you could write an interesting and intelligent book on the subject.

>142 nittnut: The argument would revolve around the merits of clinging to some kind of "identity" in a world where narrow identities are increasingly less possible (viz, my friends who are a Thai/American couple whose children have been born in Brazil and Japan, respectively, and who now live in France -- what identity should their kids have???) and perhaps less desirable (look at the damage that narrow nationalism/parochialism has done, from religious parochialism in northern Ireland and the Sunni/Shi'ite divide in Islam, to Basque separatism, the Flemish/Walloon mess in Belgium; the civil wars in the Balkans. The spats over who gets to be a member of an Indian tribe and who isn't; who is counted as an Orthodox Jew and whose conversion isn't good enough for the rabbinical courts. So, the strawman argument would be, we need to stop clinging to our roots, because it emphasizes what divides us (the past/history/historic feuds/snobbery, as in "my ancestors go here first/your ancestors were convicts and mine were royalty") rather than what unites us (building a common future). It's probably a valid and provocative thing to set up -- a struggle.

Then: what value is there in doing this, in light of these obvious negatives? That would be the core of the book. Arguing that there is a point to it, that people clearly feel a psychological need to cling to something that is "theirs". That indeed, the latest round of genealogical fascination has arisen precisely in tandem with globalization, the dramatic increase in mobility (how many people are born and die in the same town? and how many of their neighbors in the same community likewise?) and the big demographic changes. So that genealogy is a way to cope with an identity -- citizen of the world -- that is too vast to make intuitive sense to us. We need something more narrow, that we can relate to more readily. The challenge then is making it something innocent (like this genealogy mavens) and not destructive (like Serbian nationalist death squads).

Jenn, you're completely correct in religion being not subject to the laws of faith. However, faith isn't something you just decide to acquire one day; nor do you acquire it by trying. (If you did, my great-grandfather, once a Baptist minister and descendant of a long line of Baptist ministers, would never have lost his faith; he certain tried very, very hard to rediscover it and didn't WANT to lose it!) I think, in many ways, religion is tremendously comforting and useful -- it provides an explanation, a purpose and meaning to all the nonsense. I'd love to have that. I don't have it. I can't simply acquire it by wanting it. You can't wish yourself into it. Sure, you can go through the motions, read the books (and I am willing to bet that you'll find agnostics are some of the best informed folks out there about ALL world religions and theologies, for that very reason!) but belief comes from within. My parents didn't bring me up to believe or disbelieve; I was left to find my own path. My sister-in-law's family is full of church-going Catholics and my niece and nephews have all been baptized; my brother and his family now attend a middle-of-the road Protestant denomination even though my brother's beliefs are probably much like mine and my sister in law, as a physician, has found that her medical studies (she is a psychiatrist, and is also qualified as an ER physician) have left her tilting toward agnosticism as well. Yes, if there is one thing that I would agree we folks on the agnostic/atheist end of the continuum don't understand it's the logic/faith thing; if there's one thing that our counterparts among the believers don't always get, it is that belief is not about an act of will, either, or even about having an open mind. "If you have an open mind, you will believe" someone once told me, and what I DID believe about that statement was that it was utter balderdash! To the extent I'm skeptical or wary of organized religion, it is due to the fact that it is inevitably organized by fallible human beings. Even the best of us will get it wrong, and sometimes horribly wrong (the inquisition, and the usual litanies of abuse in the name of various gods). Humanism -- not making a god of humankind, but treating fellow humans with respect and consideration -- seems to me a good proxy for some of what religion can offer, though clearly not all. There's no transcendent element, no sense of purpose, because there is no element of the divine.

But the above is just to clarify my thoughts, not to get us into a theological debate! Hopefully the "strawman" explanation helped...

Ha! I don't feel a theological debate coming on.
I totally agree about the "open mind" comments. That's sort of like saying "if you have an open mind, you'll agree with me," which is amazingly obtuse.

I think your premise about identity is interesting. I have never seen genealogy as a way to determine my national or political or religious identity. In my family it's a way of seeing where we've been, understanding our roots, and yes, maybe family identity. However, unless you're OK with revisionist history, you're just as likely to have a Southern slave holder as a Yankee abolitionist, so it won't always be an identity you want to parade around. LOL
How genealogy has effected my life (and I'm not trying to influence your book or anything, just share a story) is more about learning about where some of my traits come from. My Great-great-grandmother who emigrated from Denmark with her family when she was 3 wrote her life history when she was elderly and bed-ridden. It is one of my most precious possessions. She told stories of being a young wife and pioneer and how hard life was. Once, she had to make shoes for her children out of her husband's old boots. She wrote that it was hard to sew because she couldn't see through her tears. She wrote about how much the world had changed in the time that she lived, she wrote about how important her family was to her. She did not write about being Danish or American. For me, I think my ability to make things out of what I have, to tough it out when times are hard, those things are part of my heritage. I love it when my mother finds a story about one of the family lines she is researching and she calls and tells me about it. I love thinking about what their lives may have been like. Recently she was working on this couple who married just before the Civil War. I am so curious about their lives. My mother is still looking for more documents and information, but just by the birth dates of their children, you can almost piece it together. She was pregnant when he left for the war, there's a gap, then another baby mid-war. A gap, then post war there are a bunch of them one after the other. So, chances are he was a soldier.
I am fascinated at this approach of seeking roots to support a national or religious identity. It's a different perspective for sure. It's also interesting to think about the perspective of an adopted child. I have one. Will he want to seek his "family" identity in his biological or adoptive family? Or both? And if it's not genetic, does it matter?

>144 nittnut: What a wonderful story....

When I spoke about "identity", I probably wasn't clear enough -- the perils of 'thinking' out loud and shaping ideas on the fly. I would be knocking down the strawman of what we think of as identity (the pernicious parts of nationalism) and celebrating the other parts (the family identity, the sense of community, etc.). Genealogy can be used in both, to identify who is and who isn't included as part of a group (see my comments above re the Indian tribal membership) and it can grow from there. For instance, I literally had someone hiss at me in Ireland when traveling there because my ancestors -- who left in the 1820s! -- had been Protestants. Not landowners, mind you, but very small farmers, blacksmiths, miners, etc., and probably largely illiterate. But crucially, Protestants, and that mattered enough nearly two centuries later for someone to hiss at me as if I were a demon. In the 21st century. When I was simply trying to understand more about the county itself not just my own family's experience, to boot. I was rather stunned! Obviously, that's one experience, and not the average. But IF I work with this agent, and opt for this model (the strawman argument), I think it would involve the way the general public tends to conflate these two kinds of identity.

The bottom line here, perhaps, is that whenever someone searches for identity, it involves searching for something that differentiates them from others. The tendency among some of those (members of affinity groups, like the Daughters of the American Revolution, or the groups who claim descent from royal ancestors) is to take pride in a link by birth to virtues that aren't theirs, acts that aren't theirs, that relatively few people can claim to have a connection to, and yet are part of history. It's a kind of privilege, in their eyes. (Think about the way the DAR has traditionally behaved -- not necessarily the way it is today, but the historical approach -- and the fact that adopted children, for instance, don't qualify for membership....) Differentiation can creep into "I'm better than you are, nyah nyah nyah", depending on the person and the type of the cause. It's not just about nationality. It can be about being part of first families or pioneers, and pride can be interpreted (incorrectly or correctly) as arrogance. It can and has also been accompanied by economic and social privileges (think: Boston Brahmins).

So, that's the underbelly. That's the reason why emphasizing heritage is a bad idea.

The reasons it's good are precisely those you outline so eloquently in your post -- because for the vast majority of people they have nothing whatsoever to do with these systemic issues. It's about personal identity. The trick is to decouple them.

You see why this is a much more complicated book to plan and think about writing?? :-)

*lurking*

Fascinating stuff, to which I have nothing intelligent to offer...

Suzanne, I would read that book!

I think you should write a book about people who can't resist taking random online quizzes. You could interview me for it, and then when the book came out, we could do the talk show circuit together!

Can anyone tell I really don't feel like working today?

>147 rosalita: Thanks! Now, if I could get $5 down from 20,000 people, that might get me a publisher... :-)

>148 katiekrug: Gee, Katie, however could I have gotten that idea? I'm in the same boat. Phone interview at 11:30 looming, and a massive editing project due by afternoon that I really should be working on, but once I start, I'll have to break off and re-start. Can you tell I'm rationalizing??

Just tell me where to send the fiver. :-)

LOL! I should put together a pledge list, and when it gets up to 5,000 or so, take it to a publisher...

I'd pitch in, too!

>152 katiekrug: 4.998 to go... :-)

Have you considered Kickstarter? A strawman book would probably appeal to a reasonably big audience at $10 a pop....

>154 richardderus: Not terribly good for my brand. If I really wanted to do it at absolutely any cost, I would. But (a) it's better for the book to have a conventional editor and a conventional launch (it will get me in the doors that I need to get in, at academic institutions, with pundits like Skip Gates, etc.) and (b) frankly, it's better for me to do it conventionally, since not being able to find a publisher will suggest to the broad media world that it's not a great project, with all that then says about me as a journalist/writer/reporter. What would work for someone outside the media world wouldn't work here, really. Or at least, would have RL consequences that might not be all that great, or at least unforseen/unpredictable.

Ah. Cogent and potent, those arguments.

>156 richardderus: Bluntly, if this makes me money, net/net, I would be happy and surprised. I would be content with an advance that is about 1/3 of what I got last time out, which would mean that I'd pretty much be bankrupt for a year while I wrote the book (because you only get 1/3, less agent's 15%, up front, before the whole thing is finished and accepted). If someone says, hey, I'll buy this for $30k, that sounds like a lot. Until you realize that's $10k to write it, less 15%. And that writing will take a year, and involve travel. So basically, that "buys" me two to three months, full time. And that would be a good number, honestly, these days. The only edge that a novelist has on a non-fiction writer is that IF you sell a book, what you're selling is the finished book that you've been writing at your kitchen table for all these years. So there's less of a gap between the payout on those thirds, or at least, you don't have to spend as much time on the book while waiting for payout #2 and can focus on earning money some other way.

So, the focus is less on maximizing my revenue than on having a successful book that can open the door toward a different kind of book career for me, and a different kind of label on my forehead.

*Following conversation with interest*

I had no idea writing non-fiction was such a "business"...in terms of the advance and how you figure your expenses and how much time your advance will pay you to work on the project.

>158 Cobscook: sadly, lurve doesn't pay the bills... *grin*

That said, if I were doing it solely as a business, I wouldn't go near this project. Or at least, I'd do it as Richard suggests, as a Kickstarter project. Or, if I were better at marketing myself, I'd self-publish. Low/zero overhead, and income flows directly to MY bottom line.

But those aren't the only considerations.

>145 Chatterbox: Sorry - I did understand that was the argument you were going to deconstruct - and what I meant to say, was that it would be an interesting read because I had not thought of genealogy in those terms. So, an interesting perspective and worth a look. DAR is a great example. We (my mother and I) qualify, but have never joined specifically due to the issues you mention. It is exactly a point of prestige and pride and not because one desires to emulate the principles of the American Revolution. Which is probably a generalization, but not an image I want to associate myself with. And yes, I can see how this will be a rather involved project. :)

>148 katiekrug: LOLOL! My FB page is full of those people. I have taken a few myself, but struggle with the randomness of the questions and the results. My scientific brain can't reconcile the relationship.

>157 Chatterbox: Hooray for you for expanding your horizons. It's a lot of work, and brave too!

>160 nittnut: - Yes, I'm afraid I'm one of "those people" :) Rarely meet a FB quiz I won't take. Just today, I learned that I am as smart as a 13 year old by acing a middle school history quiz AND that (you'll appreciate this) New Zealand is the country that best matches my personality (though the explanation that came at the end made no sense but it was still fun)!

And I aced the same test. It's Katie's fault. What is funny is that I beat my high school friend, Harlan, who (of course) when he saw it on my FB page was tempted to take it. Now, Harlan registered a perfect score on his SATs waaay back in the day, and is still Mr. Polymath, and he got a QUESTION WRONG. Hilarious. So I'm smarter than Mr. Perfect SAT. Which kinda made my decade, actually.

>160 nittnut: -- aha, yes, I see... Yes, the personal (focusing on what unites us) rather than the institutional (what divides us as a group from others).

OK, books.

196. American Romantic by Ward Just is the first book I've read by this author, and could well end up being the last. He does explore interesting themes, but while the writing is often quite beautiful, even elegiac, the plot and characters drift across this work like puffs of smoke. They're equally insubstantial and unconvincing. At its heart, it's the story of the quintessential well meaning American, who, over the course of a few crucial days/weeks in Vietnam, early in that country's American engagement, loses his significant chance at romantic love with a peer -- albeit someone who may not "fit in" -- and his professional sense that he might make a difference when a mission he sets out on becomes a farce and then a fiasco. Both will haunt him until the end of his life. The rest of that life is a kind of drifting, from one post to another, from Africa to Norway; he marries, then his wife disappears from the novel. He retires; we see him having dinner with his ancient father and watching the boats in the Mediterranean from his retirement home. There is a lot of musing, a lot of emotion, but while there was plenty to think about here, there wasn't a lot for me to immerse myself in. Hmm, dunno. The caliber of the prose is sometimes astonishing. But... 3.7 stars.

197. Midnight at Marble Arch by Anne Perry had the merits of at least being something I wanted to finish. I've been reading this series off and on for about three decades, which is unnerving. Sometimes I get fed up with Perry's grand and unconvincing emotional flourishes, put into the mouths of her characters. Sometimes I'm curious enough about late Victorian London and in the mood for something predictable, to want to catch up with the Pitts and their doings. I think I'm now at least two books behind in each of Perry's two series. This one featured a series of violent rapes of young society women; one ends in death and a man -- rumored to be her lover -- is accused. But could this simply be a cover for a far more nefarious plot? After all, there are dark doings afoot surrounding the Jameson Raid; clearly the seeds of the Boer War have been planted... 3.65 stars.

One more ARC off my list, but still a lot to go!

>143 Chatterbox: The argument would revolve around the merits of clinging to some kind of "identity" in a world where narrow identities are increasingly less possible
oooh, I like. Very topical too, imo.

>161 katiekrug: woohoo! an honorary NZer ;)

>162 Chatterbox: I have the same reaction to Anne Perry. In that I read them, then I get fed up at some point and stop for awhile (read years) and then try again.

>161 katiekrug: The last quiz I attempted told me I was some Disney princess or other, which was a bit of a shock. I don't think I'll be able to take another one.

My Facebook quiz epiphany came when I took one over the last few days to identify which Game of Thrones house I belonged to. When it came back as House Baratheon, I was downright bemused. WTF?

Delurking to say this has been a fascinating discussion.

A couple of thoughts -- Your mention of Skip Gates immediately brought to mind his recent TV program. He speaks to a populace whose ability to trace their heritage --"Roots"-- has been stolen from them. It seems to be a source of great pain to many to have this taken away. It is also interesting that he focuses upon the use of DNA testing to show how much disparate people are connected. "See, you even have native american DNA ..." In that sense, we can feel a kinship across humanity.

I am also thinking of Maya Angelou, who has spoken eloquently about how we stand on the shoulders of those who have come before. When I heard her speak it was about the elders in her community where she grew up who sacrificed so much for black suffrage and rights. In this sense, learning abut those who came before is much more the source of humility and gratitude than arrogance.

Finally, I think of a thread of legal thought (Scalia is a prime example) requiring us to go back in history to see what the framers of the Constitution and early judiciary intended. In this sense, it is a jurisprudential type of root-exploring.

Not making much sense, but it ate up some time until I head to lunch.

Carry on!

All useful thoughts, Marianne, thanks!! Amusingly, re Skip Gates, he did manage to prove his descent from someone who fought in the War of Independence, thus qualifying him to join the male equivalent of the DAR, whose name I can't be bothered to look up right now. According to Alex Haley's son, who I met at a genealogy conference, when he was inducted, "you have never seen a more uncomfortable bunch of middle-aged white men in your life." I bet!

i think you mean "SAR". I would have loved to be a fly on the wall at that induction ceremony.

>168 catarina1: You're right! And I think Haley Jr. was there, filming it. I'm not sure if the film has ever aired anywhere, though.

So, you thought there was nothing whatsoever left to say in the debate over whether or not The Goldfinch is a literary triumph or just a thumping good read? Ha! You were wrong...

Vanity Fair weighs in with the following discussion, which at least reveals just how backbiting and nasty authors can be, and how terribly terribly seriously they take themselves... (saints preserve us...)

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2014/07/goldfinch-donna-tartt-literary-critici...

>170 Chatterbox: - Oh, blerg. What makes someone the country's "most important critic" anyway? I guess I don't see how, ultimately, any of these critics operate in any different way from any other reader in assessing a book's merit. But maybe I'm not giving them enough credit? I don't know much about "professional" critics. And then to have an author like Francine Prose decide that she can determine what is worthy and what isn't....? If she can do that, why can't she write such a book?

Ultimately, to me, none of it matters because it's really just a discussion that's going to be had in the echo chamber that is the small, rarefied world of literary criticism where people who think themselves very important will bloviate on a topic of such little concern to most people that it becomes comical. As the writer of the piece notes, only time will tell. Until then, can't we all just form our own opinions, share them if we like, and then shut up about it?

/cranky rant

Well, she has written very well-received books. Personally, I find her writing style (as a novelist) more crisp and appealing than Tartt's and her narrative more focused. I was interested to see someone in that piece point to The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud, which I actually listed on be "best of 2013" list (although it didn't make the top 10 list, I think it was on the "also ran" list..)

I agree, it's all opinion at the end of the day. But it's rather refreshing to have a different opinion to set against a chorus of unstinting praise and genuflecting adoration. When I finished "Goldfinch", my reaction was "what on earth is all the fuss about"? The prose flopping all over the place irritated me, as did the improbable plot twists. They didn't bother other readers; so be it. What got on my nerves slightly more than book, though, was the response from some folks when I said that to me it was a thumping good read, but ultimately a mediocre work that I didn't think I'd end up re-reading. You would have thought I'd wandered into a convocation of cardinals at the Vatican and questioned the divinity of Jesus. OK, I'm exaggerating, but not by much. So when I stumbled over Prose's commentary, I was rather relieved that she echoed my concerns about the books merits, even though she went further than I would have done, to dismiss its worth.

In any event, I found this of interest because I find the debate over literary criticism interesting, in an academic sense. I agree completely that only time will tell -- one reason my already immense skepticism about literary prizes only grows larger with each year and each prize -- but by the same token, these people, both the ones you agree with and those you don't, end up shaping what gets read, what is put in a more prominent place on the bookshelves, what librarians and booksellers stock. I like to see the tug-of-war (even when I'm a victim of it...) simply because when everyone rushes to one side of any boat, I'm pretty sure the damn thing is about to capsize.

>167 Chatterbox: I would love to see a film of that! I read a great little book last year called Setting the Record Straight: American History in Black and White that did a lovely job of pointing out that the history of the US wasn't made exclusively by white men.

Haven't read The Goldfinch yet, and frankly, every time I pick it up and read the blurb, it just doesn't grab me. Maybe someday.
I am a little bit of a classics snob. Like you say Suzanne, I don't think something is a classic unless it's stood the test of time. A long time. :)

>172 Chatterbox: Well, if you didn't like The Goldfinch it makes sense that you would agree with Prose's criticism, Suzanne. Whereas I loved the book so am disinclined to read the article because I don't care what someone else thinks about a book I already read. :-)

Hi Suz- I really liked the first half of The Woman Upstairs but then somewhere it faded on me. I don't know what it was. I know many readers love that book.

Suz, If anyone knows the answer to my question, I thought it might be you! Ilana is reading The Six Wives of Henry VIII. Her post reminded me that Catherine Parr is one of my favorite historical figures.

I know that a baby girl was born from her marriage to Thomas Seymour (the cad), but I've never found any information regarding what happened to this child. Do you know?

Thanks!

>173 nittnut: I'm not sure I'm a classics snob, though I understand what you mean. I quite happily romp all over the countryside in my reading. Giving Mark conniptions, I occasionally even will dip into a James Patterson novel, if there's one on the new releases shelf near the checkout counter at the library that I haven't read.

As a friend of mine posted on my FB wall, "why can't (Goldfinch) simply be considered an extremely well written piece of popular fiction?" As I noted in response, I'd echo the sentiment, even though I'd question the word "extremely".

>174 rosalita: That's the thing, Julia, I DID like The Goldfinch. The key word being like, not love. I think it was somewhere around 3.9 stars in my decidedly unscientific system? 3.8? 4? So it's not that I disliked the book and was seeking out something to support my dislike.

Rather, that I didn't like it -- or rather, admire it -- in the way I felt I was expected to admire it. I couldn't love it, and the glowing, uncritical reviews just left me scratching my head. So at the time I read Prose's critique I was still trying to capture what it is that wasn't there -- the elusive X factor that would have put it over the top for me. One thing that Prose did (forgive me!) was to juxtapose two segments, one from Goldfinch when Theo is looking for his dealer so he can get high, and one from the Patrick Melrose books by Edward St. Aubyn, when the latter's protagonist is in roughly the same condition. Bang. Right between the eyes. The latter excerpt was vivid, INSTANTLY gave me a visceral sense of what the protagonist was feeling and experiencing as he yearned for a hit (even though I've never been addicted to drugs or gone in quest of a dealer in my life). Set by its side, the former excerpt was wordy without ever putting me inside Theo Decker's skin. In a way, Prose didn't need to write anything else: she just needed to put those two excerpts side by side and she had shown me what she meant. Now, what you extract from that, in terms of meaning, is something else altogether. Does that make the book not worth reading? Of course not. Does it make the book less worthwhile? Of course not.

>171 katiekrug: Just a further thought on criticism. They are writers who make wonderful literary critics; in some cases their criticism is on a par with their literary writing. Virginia Woolf (although her essays today are less well known), Simone de Beauvoir, Northrop Frye (who never wrote novels), Lionel Trilling. Margaret Atwood is a critic as well as a novelist. Seamus Heaney was known as a poet, but also wrote astonishing critical works. So I think many of those asked to review books are writing great books -- perhaps not runaway bestsellers with a literary fiction veneer, but how many of those are there in any given year? Perhaps half a dozen? A bit of a thankless job to be asked to review these books, if you're a writer...

Oh, one other review that caught my eye. I know zilch about the reviewer, whether she's a writer, or whatever, but again, this is a review that nailed something that I found disquieting in a book that I recently read and that has continued to niggle. I just couldn't like this book all that much, and this critic has had the courage to come out and put a voice to my unease. The author is being a pedant.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/16/road-to-middlemarch-review-rebecca-...

So, another example of the utility value of critics!

>175 msf59: I think a lot of readers struggled with that book, Mark, which is a pity. I fell in love with it in the first chapters, in which the narrator addresses the reader with such tremendous passion about what it is like to be a solitary woman. It resonated, and the prose literally sang. Did the plot always support the weight of Messud's ambitions? it did not. Nonetheless, I was always intrigued, and the writing was usually write on target. It wasn't florid and overblown. It wasn't experimental for the sake of being so. It was deft, elegant and adroit.

That said... I can see where the nature of the plot and characters would simply lose many readers. First of all, there's the fact that the narrator is one of those difficult (for many readers) people, an often sympathetic and unlikeable character; someone who lets us know that her cheery exterior is belied by her internal thoughts and yearnings. Then, too, the nature of those thoughts and dreams revolve around the theme of envy -- a universal human emotion, but one we REALLY don't like to acknowledge. And if we acknowledge it in a book we love, do we implicitly acknowledge it in ourselves??

This is what I enjoy so much about books with unlikeable protagonists -- they pose such provocative questions create such uncomfortable situations for readers! It's sometimes fun to be made to squirm, and challenged, and be told (implicitly) that I'm self-delusional if I think that these things that make someone unlikeable aren't present in me, too.

But in the case of Messud's novel, well, they clearly cost her readers and popularity. I do think it's a MUCH tougher sale to have an unlikeable woman protagonist than an unlikeable guy (eg Theo Decker), partly because when you've got a female author AND a female protagonist, and a plot revolving around themes like relationships (as Messud's did), your readers are going to be female. And I would argue that they are more likely to want to identify (cue sweeping generalization!!) with the main character. (But seriously, I'm not sure that I've ever encountered a guy who reads who has said to me he wants to be able to like the main character.) I'm still not read to argue that I'd put Messud in the category of a really great novel, but it certainly resonated with me on all levels -- structure, plot, narrative pace, writing, characters, 'believability' -- than did Goldfinch.

For some context in all this, a really great novel, for me, is one where I walk away at the end of it thinking I have simply peeked over the author's shoulder into another world. The author has simply channeled that world, and done it with beauty and precision. Keneally did this in both of his two WW1 novels (and I need to seek out more by him! Mantel has done it in several of her novels, most recently the two Wolf Hall books. Colm Toibin has done it. Helen Dunmore almost pulled it off in The Siege. Laurie Colwin's short stories do it. The Cat's Table by Ondaatje. Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden. These are a few recent books. Others come close, Longbourn, for instance, but don't quite clear the hurdle. Other books may win five stars from me, but more because they are thumping good reads than because they take my breath away in this manner. The list above leaves me literally breathless, with tears in my eyes, feeling grateful to even have had a chance to read them.

Oh dear, I'm rambling away on my podium once again...

>168 catarina1: Cross posting, Linda!

This is one of those Big Mysteries, I'm afraid... There is a probable story, to which folks have long subscribed: that she died young. For many, it has simply been convenient to suggest that she died at the same time that her mother was born. In fact, the one thing we DO know is that that isn't what happened to little Lady Mary Seymour.

That's because her name pops up in guardianship and estate records for at least the next 18 months. It was a turbulent time, because very shortly after Catherine Parr's death, Thomas Seymour began careening downward -- a man of much wit and very little judgment, as Elizabeth Tudor would later describe him as being. Eventually, after breaking into the private apartments of his nephew, Edward VI, in what seems to have been intended as an idiotic coup d'etat against the administration of his older brother, the Duke of Somerset, the king's protector. He was arrested, tried and executed for treason in March of 1549, when his daughter was only seven months old. It seems as if the Somersets then sent her off to the household of Catherine Brandon, the widowed Duchess of Suffolk. This probably was a decent choice, as the two Catherines, Parr and Brandon, had been fellow Protestant reformers and close friends during the final years of Henry VIII's reign (as their much older husbands had been lifelong friends). I'm attaching a link to an interesting historical article, which seems to me to miss the personal links and friendship that existed between the two Catherines, and instead has Catherine of Suffolk griping about having to maintain Lady Mary in all the state owed to the daughter of a one-time queen. What the author of this piece also fails to note is that by this point, Catherine was struggling to manage the Suffolk estates for her young son, and had been treated disrespectfully by the rather arrogant/upstart Duchess of Somerset (as had Catherine Parr!) for some years. She now was being told to pick up after them -- probably doubling the size of her household in the process!

http://www.historytoday.com/linda-porter/lady-mary-seymour-unfit-traveller

But the fact that 1550 is the last time we hear any reference to Mary Seymour, when the documents enabling her to inherit her father's estate went through. Beyond a doubt, she died sometime in the next few years, before she could reach an age where she would logically appear in letters or legal documents once more, eg through marriage or by administering her own estates. When Mary Tudor came to the throne in 1553, Catherine Brandon and her second husband, a man of ordinary birth, left the country -- she was stepgrandmother of Jane Grey AND a diehard Protestant. They fled in 1555 and ended up, of all places, in Lithuania, not returning until Elizabeth was on the throne. But there was no mention of Mary Seymour accompanying them (there are contemporary ballads; Catherine's husband ghost-wrote an account of their travels for Foxe's Martyrology) and no mention of her guardianship being entrusted to anyone else. The only possible conclusion is that she was dead by then.

Longer answer than you had expected, I think, but hey...

And now, to the books...

198. Linnets and Valerians by Elizabeth Goudge: Oh, how I relished this sweet (but never sentimental or saccharine) and gentle little book aimed primarily at children of anywhere from 8 to 11, but equally appreciated by those who enjoy a degree of charm, whimsy and tiny element of magic (both black and white). I really have to thank JeanneD for her TIOLI challenge or I may not have started reading this as soon as I did -- it was a Kindle special in the UK only a few weeks ago, and I nabbed it because I remember vaguely liking a couple of books by the same author. (It has bee reissued under the much less appealing title of The Runaways; this works much better!) The basic plot line is simple: the four Linnet children, Nan, Robert, Timothy and Betsy, ages 12 down to 6, have been left with their strict grandmother (it's 1912, although the book was written in 1964: the author would have been of an age with Nan, having been born in 1900) while their father sails up the Nile with his army regiment. NOT a good idea. When the book opens, all four (and their mutt of a dog) are locked into separate rooms, with Timothy being confined to a cupboard. Robert figures out a way to free them, and off they go, ending up "borrowing" a horse cart and horse, which takes them, seemingly magically, straight to its stable door. Equally magically, the stable and the attached house turn out to belong to their eldest uncle, Ambrose, whom they have never met, and who professes a dislike of children. And yet... He charms them; they charm him and the house casts a spell over the previously ill-behaved Linnets, who knuckle down to studying the classics in the morning and glorious adventures in the afternoon. They encounter the black witch Emma, in her store nearby with her mysterious cat, Frederick (who swells up and then shrinks, depending on whether he's called on to exercise his powers), and the tragic Lady Alicia, who has lost (literally) her young son and her husband years ago. But the Linnets' arrival shakes things up all around... There is a wealth of delightful detail (I relished Nan's tearful joy on being shown into her very own parlour as "mistress of the house") and overall this is the kind of feel-good book that is a great recipe for jaundiced souls. It isn't Victorian -- it was written when I was two years old -- but nor is it of its time. I suppose there is an element of nostalgia, and viewing the past through rose-tinted glasses, which may make it appeal to people of my age more than to a cynical 12-year-old. That said, there's a lot of joy and delight to be found in these pages. It's still squarely a children's book, and I'm not sure it is imaginative enough to transcend that (as in Wind in the Willows) but it is richly deserving of a MUCH wider readership. 4.5 stars.

Since I'm blitz-posting thanks to my intractable migraine, inability to sleep, and lack of self-edit button as a result of painkillers (Fioricet does that to me) and since I've already inflicted this on Amber on HER thread, and since it's Throwback Thursday on Facebook/Twitter/wherever:



That would be me, on the left, age 14, with the Monte Carlo casino kinda sticking out of the left side of my head. The guy in the pic is a Welsh-Italian painter who had gone from starving in a garret to tax exile in the last few years (he had become a kind of court painter to the Saudis). He had become a friend and drinking buddy of my father's during our time in London, aka the starving days. Andrew went on to become even richer (this is taken from his penthouse in Monaco!) and now owns Picasso's former studio/farmhouse) but still refuses to paint a picture of a cat for me. I fail to understand. :-) That said, he did smuggle me into the casino, both that summer and the next one, so I can't be too hard on him.

By 1978, at the age of 16, I was spending my summers as a guide at Vimy Ridge. I know I've mentioned this -- the WW1 battlefield -- but thought the picture might be interesting.



Those are the trenches you see behind me, with concrete replicas of sandbags. The terrain was once flat but has been left as it was in 1918, distorted by shell holes and sappers.

So that is how I USED to spend my summer vacations. Trust me, it was considerably more fun (even though it didn't always feel like it at the time) than sitting at my desk and slogging away...

Great stories and photos!

Oh, cool photos! Thanks for sharing!

Morning Suz! Love those throwback photos. They are gorgeous.

I do agree with you about the opening chapter(s) in the Woman Upstairs were stunning. Her anger was nearly palpable.

>179 Chatterbox: added to the wishlist.

I love the pictures and the tales! Happy throwback Thursday!

So, the latest news from the book front is very, very bad. So bad, indeed, that I'm having chest pains.

Turns out that Maud Newton signed a book deal with Random House three weeks ago to write a book whose basic outline is NEARLY IDENTICAL to my proposal. This from my agent, who finally got back to me this morning. He didn't apologize; didn't say he'd dropped the ball. Nothing; nada. (This is the guy who told me a year ago that there wouldn't be a market for the book.)

She clearly has been ahead of me in developing a platform: http://thebegats.tumblr.com/

This means that my book will now not see the light of day. Ever. Even though I've written about 20,000 words, interviewed more than three dozen people and worked on it, off and on, over the course of seven plus years.

So please understand if I'm grumpy, upset and cantankerous right now. This is the biggest professional blow I've had in many, many, many years. Perhaps more than a decade.

>186 Chatterbox: Oh, that's terrible news! So sorry to hear that. You deserve to be grumpy.

I ranted on FB about this. Very sorry to hear it.

Interesting how she developed her platform. I wonder if that is becoming more and more necessary.

>188 katiekrug: It is. (becoming more and more necessary). Because publishers view it as an alternative to them spending money on marketing. The author has a built-in base of readers/fans who will buy the book (see my comments above, jokingly, about lining up pre-orders...)

>186 Chatterbox: I am so, so sorry for this blow to have come to you. Life is heinously unfair, isn't it.

Your representation needs to change, IMO. Such a lack of accountability is reprehensible.

"I'm sorry" is inadequate, but it's really all I have. I grieve for you.

I'm so sorry for the injustice of what occurred. You have every right to be upset!

Thanks, all. If there's injustice, it's only of the karmic kind. She has just as much right to pursue this as I do.

Grief, yes; that's exactly what it feels like. A death in the family, really. I know it sounds exaggerated, but that's the analogy that comes closest.

That's terrible for you Suz, so sorry. And this on top of migraine and sleeplessness too. You have a free pass to rant and rave and moan and groan as much as you need to.

>186 Chatterbox: Hugely sorry to hear that Suz!

I also am very sorry to hear that.

Robert

Oh, dang. As you know, I sort of went through something similar, and so I know the pain and hurt you're going through. I'm so sorry.

>197 scaifea: Yes, Amber, and yours was indeed a really blatant Injustice, with a capital I -- basically, intellectual piracy. Mine is simply what happens when there's a good idea floating around, a lazy/lackluster agent who can't get his act together and a writer (me) who isn't pushing hard enough or aggressive enough herself. It's not iniquity. It's bad karma.

>198 Chatterbox: It's still incredibly saddening and frustrating, I imagine. Keeping you in my thoughts, at any rate.

>172 Chatterbox: You would have thought I'd wandered into a convocation of cardinals at the Vatican and questioned the divinity of Jesus.
*chuckle snort*
You don't want to do that, I am sure :)

>186 Chatterbox: that is heinously bad timing on their part, and utterly unfair for you! What a strange thing for the same idea to have been chugging simultaneously away. I'm sorry for you!!

Eta: rereading my words I am not sure they convey enough meaning. You must feel floored by this :(

>186 Chatterbox: I am really sorry to hear that. While I get that two people can have similar good ideas, where was your agent in all this? Thinking of you and hoping that a brilliant new project feels right very soon.

>201 nittnut: Asleep at the wheel, is the answer to that.

I haven't quite given up on this one. The next step is to find a new agent and to see if something can be salvaged.

>200 LovingLit: Probably not all that strange; it was a good idea. I was lucky this didn't happen sooner. And yes, it's like being hit over the head.

I'm sorry to hear the bad news. But it does confirm that your idea is actually a very good one! I'm glad that you are forming plans to salvage it.

>202 Chatterbox: Looking at something of a bright side, if someone else has written a book on the very same subject matter (and is getting it published) and has a platform and an audience willing to listen (and buy), if you manage to salvage some of your writing (angle it differently? I don't know) and get an agent who actually does something, there should be an audience ready and waiting for you.

>186 Chatterbox: This means that my book will now not see the light of day. Ever.
Oh, damn damn damn. I’d marked >141 Chatterbox: so I could think a bit before replying, and returned to this.
He didn't apologize;
I hope you’ve fired him.

>202 Chatterbox: find a new agent and to see if something can be salvaged.
Is the agent of the homework in the running?

>204 PawsforThought: The problem was that recently publishers saw NO audience for this. So they may not be optimistic about the appetite (i.e. spending power) of people for TWO books on a very similar topic in a very short time span. That's now the hurdle -- it's a very different one from the one I was facing previously. And if I wait until the concept is proven (i.e. the book is out) it's too late. dilemmas...

Oh how totally infuriating! Hope you can salvage something from all your work.

Aaaarrrrgh sorry to hear that news.

One more throwback Thursday pic, because it made me laugh when I spotted it:



This would have been taken on the balcony of our flat in London; I think probably late 1970 or early 1971.

>206 Chatterbox: - "The problem was that recently publishers saw NO audience for this."

Is that your own understanding or what your agent said?

Unless your idea is exactly the same as the other writer's, I don't see why there can't be another book on the subject. I'm just thinking of other topics that continually see new tomes produced; WWI comes immediately to mind. Don't you just need a slightly different angle? I don't know a thing about the publishing business but I do know a raw deal when I see it. So sorry Suzanne.

>210 katiekrug: Aha, Katie, yes, you put your finger on it. My understanding derives from my agent's experience (not just what he said, but from his inability to find a buyer for the MS)

>211 brenzi: WW1 is quite a broad topic, with many many angles. This is less than a proven concept, so far. It's still possible, I agree. I can only try.

I mentioned, previously, that I had spoken to an agent on Monday afternoon, before I got confirmation of the book deal. He just replied to my e-mail about the news. I found the first sentence a little disconcerting -- what is this about "letting" me write a certain kind of book?? -- but the rest is encouraging:

"I wasn't going to let you try to write precisely the book Maude Newton is anyway. She may have (shockingly) gotten a deal from RH, but it was from a young fiction editor, and I feel confident predicting it will tank. I suspect it wasn't for good money, and it was only because it was a cover story. You want to get a deal from a stronger editor, and you want your book to succeed. That would require a different approach anyway."

I'm not quite as sanguine, and, as noted, I find the bossy tone slightly oppressive, so I'm not sure that this is someone I really want to work with, should I have a choice. But on the other hand, the POV is encouraging. He certainly gave me more info about the editor than my agent did.

Anyway, back to books. I'm going to have to do some aggressive reading over the weekend to make it through my ARC mountain ahead of Thursday's Amazon Vine deadline.

199. The Devil in the Marshalsea by Antonia Hodgson was a fast-paced and entertaining mystery set in the debtors' prison of the Marshalsea in London, circa 1727. Tom Hawkins has been leading a rackety life, and he's shipped off to the Marshalsea when he can't pay his bills; only the timely intervention of a mysterious and unpopular writer of scurrilous broadsheets, Samuel Fleet, also incarcertated, will save him from being consigned to the deathtrap of the "Common Side". But now Hawkins is lodging with Fleet -- and his predecessor as Fleet's roommate was found mysteriously done to death in such a way that even in the Marshalsea, a place where life is cheap, rumors abound about his fate. Tom is promised his freedom by powerful folks -- but only if he can get to the bottom of what happened to Captain Roberts, preferably before running afoul of the murderers, pissing off the jailers, succumbing to jail fever, being caught up in a riot, or otherwise ending his life prematurely. There are some great twists at the end, as Tom realizes just how far he can and can't trust those around him. That said, while it's entertaining and tremendously atmospheric, it doesn't really transcend the genre. So, a solid 4 stars, and recommended for what it is -- just don't expect great Literature.

Sounds like an entertaining read, at least!

>213 ronincats: It was, thank you! As Mambo in Chinatown is shaping up to be, thankfully -- I picked up that and Elizabeth is Missing as my next two ARCs to conquer.

Following up after my conversation with the other agent, who represents some very, very serious writers (winners of National Book Awards, etc.)

He said flat out "no". Just as advice. That with about 40% of the market off limits (now that Random House and Penguin have merged) it would be even harder than before to get a competitor to put up a bid for a rival book. He said he just went through the same thing with a Civil War book, and while that eventually sold, it was about the Civil War -- a significantly more vast subject than what I'm proposing to do. With such a narrow focus, and knowing that a massive rival has bought this book, it would be unlikely to work.

(He also thought I'm crazy to do a non-business book, but that's a separate issue... and one where I disagree with him.)

I'll talk to one or two more agents, but the big hurdle will be at this level: the publishers know they'll be signing up a very similar book (even if it has a different angle or starting point). They're going to see through the different angle to the heart of it.

I don't like the news, but I kind of admire the fact that he wasn't doing weasel word stuff like "we can wait to see how this does" or, at the other extreme, just eager to do a me-too book at any cost. Because I also have to consider that if I go up against a book published by a behemoth house (with marketing muscle), whoever the editor is also needs to be very, very committed to it. Ideally, it should be one of the other big 5 publishers, for that reason, and they've already seen it.

The bottom line is, I think this is toast. And it's at least 50% my own fault, for letting the idea languish for so long and not prodding Giles (agent) into action in spite of himself, or swapping agents a year ago.

So I think I'll spend the weekend having a nervous breakdown.

Sorry things aren't panning out better for you, Suz. Sounds like the world of publishing is every bit as cut-throat as one reads it to be.

>215 Chatterbox: Rats. The book business sounds even more unkind than I had thought. Sorry for your long arc of work and the discouragement. And the migraine. Does a nervous breakdown include anything indulgeant and fun? If so, you certainly deserve the luxury. Otherwise, I hope it passes quickly!

>217 ffortsa: No, a nervous breakdown involves me hiding under my duvet, or whatever the weird weather permits as an equivalent. It's just really bad karma.

Of all the disappointments in my life, this is up there, one of the two or three biggest. Ever. I'd compare this to one big work disappointment of about 14 years ago, and the end of the relationship that mattered most to me in my life. That big. Not death-in-the-family big, but massive.

200. Mambo in Chinatown by Jean Kwok was an entertaining enough yarn in its own right, although I suspect that over time, it will prove to be as un-memorable as was her previous novel, Girl in Translation, which I know I read but about which I remember absolutely nothing at all! Two sisters, being raised by widowed father in New York's Chinatown; he's well meaning but traditional; elder daughter, 22, is probably dyslexic, toiling as a dishwasher until, Cinderella-like, she lands a job first as a receptionist in a dance school and then when it is clear she has a talent for dance, as a future dance instructor. But her younger sister -- academically promising -- is getting sicker and sicker, and her father's fear of Western authorities (and hospital bills) ensures that he clings to Eastern medicine, which just seems to be making matters worse. At its heart, a classic trope: the immigrant culture clash/second generation story meets "Strictly Ballroom". Sweet, sometimes a little too much so, but OK light reading. 3.75 stars.

201. Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey is almost hallucinatory and quite disturbing to read: a mystery story told through the eyes of an elderly woman succumbing to dementia who knows that her friend Elizabeth is missing, but can't get anyone around her to believe her. But her conviction that Elizabeth isn't where she should be, and her attempts to investigate Elizabeth's disappearance, overlap with her crystal-clear (to her) memories of her life as a young girl in 1946, when her older sister Sukey also disappeared. Which is the real mystery, and is there a crime here to be solved? And what is the real tragedy? It's tremendously disturbing and vivid to read this portrayal of a woman's life disintegrating -- and it's all-too convincing. 4 stars.

Just catching up on your news, Suzanne. Sorry about your book. That really sucks.

>215 Chatterbox: Hope your nervous breakdown is going alright. It's good to have one every now and then. ;)

It has been very educational getting a more personal view of the current state of the publishing business and the way things sort of work when someone is trying to get a book written and/or published. I think I am even more amazed at how much junk gets published if even the good stuff can't get through.

Just reading through your threads here on LT, IMO, you are qualified to write books on many subjects other than finance. There are always good discussions going on about history, book reviews/reviewers and many other things. I am always impressed at your ability to see more than one side of an issue and the depth of research you are willing to do on subjects that take your interest. Sign me up as one who will be willing to buy and read anything you write, and I bet I'm not the only one.

Thanks for the moral support -- sorely needed right about now.

Just in: Robert Harris has one the Walter Scott Prize for his novel An Officer and A Spy. Some of you will remember that I raved about this after I read it late last year, and it ended up on my list of five or ten best books of 2013, so I'm thoroughly behind this win. Which also is a very lucrative one -- it's 25,000 British pounds.

Five straight days of rain is making everything here feel nastily unpleasantly damp. Yuck.

Suz, sorry you're going through a hard time. Hope the skies clear for you, both literally and figuratively soon.

Great news about Robert Harris winning the prize. I absolutely loved An Officer and a Spy too (thanks to you bringing it to my attention in the first place) and it's definitely on the reread list.

More sympathy for the book debacle. I am so so sorry.

>220 Chatterbox: From wishlist to cart.

>223 Chatterbox: RICHLY (!) deserved. Excellent read.

What a disappointing Stanley Cup finals. I wish the Rangers could've made a better series of it. Well, now that hockey is over, maybe I can read more.

Richard, yes, this may bring fresh insight into "auntie"'s final days.

Linda, I like to think of the Rangers' defeat as karma for their win over the Habs. Yes, I do recognize how silly that is. But it consoles me that all the hubris of the Rangers fans of my acquaintance has been crushed, and their gloating is at an end...

I wish I didn't have all these ARCs to read. I'd kinda like to find a really really fabulous book to read -- another An Officer and a Spy. Of course, these do not grow on trees. Which is why they win prizes.

I'm also sorry to hear about all this about your proposed book. What about an e-book under a different name, at least you'll get some income from it?

I also loved An officer and a spy and think that's great news for him. Good luck with your ARC reading.

>228 avatiakh: Kerry, that would really just work for vanity's sake, and frankly not even then. It wouldn't be a competitive title on the market, so I'd just be doing it for the sake of doing it. Again, if it were a novel, yeah, I probably would. But not something like this, which is the kind of book that I should be doing and taking credit for. If I write under a pseudonym, that would just come across as weird in the market. And yeah, word would get out, unless I decided not to promote it at all, in which case there would have been no point in writing it.

Again, that's the conundrum of what I do for a living. I'm a journalist; a professional writer with one book published by a major press. Releasing a second book via e-book, self published -- the kind of book that should come out via some other publisher, the traditional route -- sends a not terribly great set of signals. Another reminder from the agents: that this book would shape what I am able to do in the future. That's fine, if I'm seeing it as a one-off project. To the extent that I want to see it as a way to make publishers and newspaper/magazine editors view me as more than just a business/finance writer, if my next project is something niche and high risk and doesn't do well -- especially if I challenge Random House/Penguin and lose -- then I could end up not being able to get another book contract again. Period. Getting the contract, which now seems so hard, could actually be the easy part, and I could end up regretting it in ways I don't yet know. I've always known about the consequences of a book that doesn't thrive -- it's not just about not earning out the advance, but about how bad the flop is and the context for it. Anyway, these are the complex realities.

So far, I haven't had a single dispassionate voice from anyone within the biz urging me to toss caution to the winds. I will talk to a few more people, but even if I end up writing the better book, it could sink without a trace and leave me worse off, both financially and reputationally. And I can't ignore those considerations.

Meanwhile....

202. Wars of the Roses: Stormbird by Conn Iggulden is a Boys' Own Adventure version of the years leading up to the wars of the roses. If you can get past the incredible, laugh-out-loud anachronisms (men wearing breaches) and errors (people appearing as characters after their deaths IRL), the book seems to be an excuse for the author to turn these dramatic events into a simplified melodrama featuring an entirely fictional character doing entirely implausible stuff. (Imagine, if you will, a common-born spymaster, tweaking the royal Duke of York and calling him Richard and insulting him to his face in 15th century England? I don't think so...) There are problems with the time line, which Iggulden has compressed to make it feel as if a decade or so flashes past in less than a year. Basically, he wants lots of swashbuckling and is puzzled about what to do in between. The result isn't very impressive. 2.8 stars. Another ARC bites the dust, though.

203. Lost for Words by Edward St. Aubyn is the entertaining satire of the "Elysian" Prize, England's most coveted literary prize, and the cast of characters who covet it and must decide who gets it. It's a slight novel, more of a jeu d'esprit than a serious book itself, but it's funny and occasionally poignant, as St. Aubyn's characters occasionally display real agonies over what the process of writing involves. Not meant to be taken seriously, although I'm fairly sure that it has some humorless folks in the London literary establishment gnashing their teeth in outrage. Well-written, and an entertaining summer book, ultimately works best as just what its author intended and thankfully never pretends to be anything more, unlike the books it satirizes. 4.1 stars.

I'm so sorry to hear about your book disappointment. I've been away at a conference this week and mostly lurking rather than posting, but I have followed along as your news progressed from bad to worse. As someone else mentioned a few posts earlier, I too have great confidence in your ability to write knowledgeably on any number of subjects in a way that will appeal to a wide variety of readers. After you've had time to process this blow, I hope that a new opportunity will surface for you.

We had a couple of yucky, cool & soggy days in Indiana earlier this week, but today I drove about 400 miles in absolutely beautiful weather from central Indiana to Tennessee. Hopefully it's moving eastward towards you and will be there by tomorrow.

O.K. Polly-Anna puts in an appearance. I knew that she would. If you put this book away now (and that's certainly how it's looking), there's nothing to say that 20-25 years down the road it won't be something you'd love to do and the world would love to have. I know that's not particularly helpful, but that's the nature of this Internet stuff. A person is free to type out all sorts of guff that nobody wants or appreciates. I'm still sorry.

>215 Chatterbox: The bottom line is, I think this is toast.
How very disappointing. The reasoning is enlightening, considering how much stuff that seems pretty much the same is out there; I’d’ve assumed room for two genealogy.

>229 Chatterbox: To the extent that I want to see it as a way to make publishers and newspaper/magazine editors view me as more than just a business/finance writer
Do you want to be seen as something else specific, or as more of a generalist?

>232 qebo: The goal here has always been to break out of my little tiny/constrictive box. When I was younger, I still hoped (don't laugh) to be a foreign correspondent. Not that ludicrous, really, when you realize that I've spent large swathes of my life overseas, speak or communicate in several foreign languages, and am at ease working in new environments. But that's one of those things that everyone wants to do -- a glamor beat -- and that has a lower barrier to entry than what it is that I am doing, ironically enough.

So the goal now is to somehow transform myself into a general writer, who can weigh in on themes such as "the way the world around us is changing". Sound nebulous? Sure, and it's hard to point to specifics of what I mean -- especially since I don't have other brilliant book ideas just itching to present themselves to me. But I'd like to write about the fault lines in our society, I suppose. Take the book industry. What does this Hachette/Amazon rift say about where the book industry is going? What about the physical book, which hasn't changed all too terribly much since Gutenberg turned it into ink stamped onto quires of paper? I'd love to be someone about whom people would say, oh, we need to get Suzanne to write about that, because she has such a keen eye for the way the world is changing around us. And then go on to write about a dispute over charter schools, and then to something over well-intentioned people clashing in their definitions of philanthropy. From there, to, I don't know, writing about my upstairs neighbors, who know that they accidentally bought two plots of land (!) and will run an urban farm on one, plan to build small zero-energy houses on one to sell at no profit. Simply because they don't want to make money by providing a basic human need. And so on. There are so many interesting things and people and ideas that are changing the world or the way we see the world, or what we consider to be important. That's the ground I would like to occupy as a writer. It doesn't lend itself readily to classification, perhaps.

I suspect I need to start out organically, at the back end -- blogging (building a better blog or Tumblr feed and showcase for what I write, even if I don't sell it...) I don't know. Clearly, if this is what I want do/be, I need to take a new approach, be more strategic. I can't sit here and wait for a new idea to present itself, like a gopher popping out of a hole right before my eyes.

Overly long answer in response to short question...

>230 cbl_tn: Oh, how I hope you're right about the weather. It's been not too warm, but just soggy and oppressive. Today had clear intervals, with a few nasty thick clouds overhead, and a still-humid feel to it. I'm emptying my baby Eva-Dry dehumidifier (which I keep humming in my bedroom 24/7) every 72 hours, which is astonishing. It's not hot enough, temperature wise, to turn on the A/C, but I ran it for an hour or two this afternoon just to deal with the mugginess.

>231 LizzieD: Hi Pollyanna! You may well be right. It could be an old lady book, if I live that long. Then it would be irrelevant about how this book fares. What would matter more is whether there is still a demographic trend toward an interest in this topic, or whether it can be reshaped for a new audience in a new way.

Overall, I just feel kind of hollowed out by all this turmoil. Emotionally drained. Not fun.

I also need to convince Cassie that her place is NOT in the MIDDLE of the bed, but at the edge, somewhere. Really 13 pounds of cat doesn't get to trump a 10x plus multiple of that human with opposable thumbs AND the ability to deal out Greenies. Every time I move her she whimpers plaintively and edges right back again -- or just climbs right onto my legs. Sigh.

>229 Chatterbox: I can understand, just wish it could be different and you got a book out of all this. And good luck with Cassie, I have a beagle doing similar stuff, I always wish I had trained the dog to stay away from the bed, but she was such a cute tiny puppy once upon a time.

Clearly being despondent is helping me power my way through these ARCs. I now only have four left to read, plus the slim book of short stories from Lorrie Moore, Bark. That's significantly more manageable than it looked only a few days ago.

204. The Vacationers by Emma Straub is a novel by a newish, youngish writer but one that draws on a very, very old formula. You take a group of people, all of whom face difficulties, challenges (and preferably some of whom have secrets of some kind and varying degrees of seriousness) and put them in a situation where they have to confront each other and confront their particular demons and challenges. Lo, epiphanies ensue, catharsis is achieved. See my comments about Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead in >29 Chatterbox:, above. In this novel, the situation involves parents, their adult son and his older girl friend, their daughter (just graduating from high school), the wife's closest friend and his husband, a married gay couple hoping to adopt a baby. They're all en route to Mallorca, where in two weeks, all kinds of stuff will bubble to the surface and be resolved. The writing is more than competent, and if this is your bag, why not? That said, once you get past the formula, which is banal, and the good writing, there's not much there, there. Pity: I'd like to see this writer deploy her skills on something more interesting and fresh. 3.5 stars; it would be 3 stars if not for the writing (eg, the bookish daughter on the Brontes, who "weren't afraid to let someone die of consumption, which Sylvia respected.") Not Wharton, not Henry James, though, when it comes to pithy observations of Americans abroad.

It has stopped raining. This deserves a post on its own.

Not only that, but it isn't oppressively humid. It hasn't been hot (temps in the 60s and low 70s) but the little Peltier-style dehumidifier I keep in my bedroom (not one of the big compressor models that draws a lot of power) has a small reservoir that now is needing to be emptied every third day instead of once every week to ten days. (In winter, if I use it at all, it's perhaps twice a month...) I'm thinking about buying a second one for my front office, since the sofa there tends to absorb a lot of humid air during the spring and summer months. Yuck...

Time to do some more ARC reading... Maybe if I alternate it with something that is pure pleasure, the need to finish it all up by Thursday will feel less like a chore.

Morning Suz! I was just raving about An Officer and A Spy to Joe the other day. That is definitely one of my favorite reads of 2014. It was just about perfect.
I am really enjoying NetGalley. My approval rating is on the rise. I just requested the new Atwood collection and I hope I get it. The only one I have on my Dashboard is the new Michael Faber.
Have you heard any buzz on California: A Novel, by Edan Lepucki? I've heard it mentioned a couple times now and it sounds terrific.

>236 Chatterbox: Made me laugh, Suz, especially because here in the Seattle area we got a wee bit of rain in the past 24 hours and we're all delighted by this fact. The dry weather arrived far too early for comfort. It's not that we don't enjoy the dry, sunny weather (we do), but it bodes badly for the fire season and all that. We're used to Mayvember and Junuary.

And >233 Chatterbox: Your comments about your writing ambitions are very interesting, Suz, and the examples you list are things about which I would read if you wrote about them! "There are so many interesting things and people and ideas that are changing the world or the way we see the world, or what we consider to be important. That's the ground I would like to occupy as a writer." Wonderful!

Putting An Officer and a Spy on hold at the library.

I'm also adding An Officer and a Spy to my reading list. I intended for a book or two about the Dreyfus Affair to be on this year's reading list, but I haven't managed to read anything about it yet. References keep popping up in other things I've read, and it's one of the gaps in my history education. Do I need to do any background reading before I get to An Officer and a Spy?

I've been thoughtfully reading and mentally composing lots of responses to all of the wonderfully considered, varied, and interesting things discussed on this thread, and now... they're all gone! Suffice to say that I think you're a wonderful writer who has the ability/skill/what-have-you to write whatever you'd like on whatever topic you'd like. Whenever this book gets published You can count on this Milwaukeean buying a copy!

And thanks for the Throwback photos, and photos of your cats! You've had such a fascinating life, Suzanne!

>36 Chatterbox:: holy crow!

I lost your new thread and now have a major catch-up ahead. Think I'd better make a cup of tea.

>238 EBT1002: Ellen, the writing ambitions are late-at-night-hyperbolic-and-unfocused ramblings, really. What this might mean in the way of practical book projects is utterly elusive. Sadly. :-( But thank you for the kind words...

Meanwhile, I shall try and divert the rainclouds back the other way, even though I know that the weather patterns flow west to east.

>240 cbl_tn: I think Piers Paul Read has written something quite recently about the Dreyfus Affair -- not sure whether there was a major anniversary or whether people kind of connect that to the runup to WW1? In any event, it can't be more than a year or two old, and he has a rep for being a good writer when it comes to non-fiction (he also writes novels). You might take a look at that? I haven't read it myself. A lot has been written, generally, but that springs to mind as most recent and as being a comprehensive, overall history.

That said, I don't think you need to know a heck of a lot about it in order to read Harris's novel. Indeed, you may want to read the novel first, and savor the suspense, and then go and read a non-fiction account that will give you more insight and detail.

>241 LauraBrook: I suspect all my interesting bits of life are now firmly in the past, alas! But all advance book orders from Milwaukee greatly welcomed!

>242 tiffin: Mz Tui, hello -- Earl Grey do you? Or would you prefer mint? That's about all I have on hand at the moment.

Powering through the ARCs....

Book du Jour:

205. You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz was unexpectedly gripping, in spite of the all-too-predictable plot that takes too long to get rolling and the fact that it's all psychological drama, as the protagonist, psychoanalyst Grace Reinhart Sachs, is forced to confront her own blind spots even as she counsels her clients to deal with theirs. The problem? Her clients, at least, have the luxury of being able to address their woes in the relative privacy of a therapist's rooms; Grace's personal drama/trauma will end up being played out across the mass media as the irony of the title she has chosen for her advice book to women on choosing a spouse -- "You Should Have Known" -- is driven home with a vengeance. The catharsis, too, is slightly too pat; the villains are extremely villainous (but largely exercise their villainy offstage) so we witness Grace agonizing about it all and resolving her dilemmas. In spite of it, this remains reasonably compelling. 3.85 stars, a quintessential "women's novel".

Reading the above ARC, I was stunned by some of the howlers it still contained, that I desperately hope someone caught before the final edition went to press. The heroine has hands covered in flower when she bakes (!) and her son reads staples of the middle-school cannon. (I hope they didn't explode...) Sigh. I rarely encounter such glaring homonym errors in ARCs, or at least, not that many of 'em. It became almost funny.

Now, back to The Word Exchange by Alena Graedon, which after a few futile efforts to get launched into it, is turning out to be a tremendously creative novel, albeit not that simple to read. It's perilously close to meta-narrative...

I'm rather bummed that I'll have to return The Temporary Gentleman by Sebastian Barry to the library unread tomorrow. It means putting another hold on another copy and waiting for it to arrive. There are other available copies, but the system's rules say that MY copy has to go back to the Barrington library and that I can request that one of the available copies be sent to me. I can't just renew the Barrington copy. Oh no. That would be too logical. And the Kindle version is $13, which I'm not crazy about paying. All very frustrating, since I'm about 25 pages into it, and now will probably have to wait at least a week for the new library copy to show up. Grrr.

>243 Chatterbox: Oh, that's so frustrating. UK kindle edition of The Temporary Gentleman is £5.39 - I know that's still over $9 but it's a little less.

What rate do they charge fines at? Would it be prohibitive to pay fines for an extra couple of days?

>I have to pick up two other books that I've had holds on tomorrow -- if I don't, they'll send the books out again, and I'll go back to the bottom of THOSE hold lists, which are really quite long. And they won't give me the holds if I have an overdue book, I fear. I can always try to talk my way through it for a day or so... It's really just until I get past this ARC-reading binge. I have about 120 pages left of The Word Exchange, which is good but requires concentration, and then three books that don't hold all that much appeal:

Bark by Lorrie Moore -- not in the mood for short stories
The Quick by Lauren Owen -- why did I request an ARC of a novel about vampires, especially one more than 500 pages long?
The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt -- trying too hard to be clever, and several early attempts have left me stranded on about page 20.

"...the system's rules say that MY copy has to go back to the Barrington library and that I can request that one of the available copies be sent to me."
Absurd. And frustrating.

The errors in the ARC of You Should Have Known cracked me up. As a psychologist, books along the lines of this one sometimes interest me but this one is not persuasive enough. Thanks for the comments, both about the novel itself and about the ARC you happened to read. :-)

Morning Suz! ^Did you miss me up there? Bats eyes. I heard Moore interviewed on a podcast. I want to read Bark!!

>233 Chatterbox: (don’t laugh)
Not laughing at all, given what I’ve seen of your interests and skills.

I'd like to write about the fault lines in our society ... It doesn't lend itself readily to classification, perhaps. ... Overly long answer in response to short question...

Excellent answer! And presentable in an “elevator pitch” but I’d think very difficult to become the “on call” expert for an abstraction, so much simpler to find an expert on the concrete topic du jour. Maybe anecdotes within a theme, how the world is changing in a particular describable way? Seems you’ve been doing this in some of your Guardian articles, with a financial spin.

Suz -- I'm so very sorry about the news and your book proposal. I checked out Newton's page and it does seem like a book I would definitely enjoy reading. I am so sad it won't be your wonderful insight. I grieve for you .. and me and all other interested readers.

Also following up on the discussion regarding criticism. A topic well worth exploring some more. A friend of mine wrote the Ballet reviews for the Boston Phoenix for years (and now writes occasionally for the Globe). We have talked at length about the role of the critic and their responsibility to art, the artists and the public. It has also come up recently in a completely different context re: Yelpers and Restaurant reviews. I am interested in the difference between those who are professional critics/reviewers and self-appointed ones writing on Yelp/Amazon/Goodreads and here on LT. I saw Jon Favreau's movie "Chef" recently where a critic figures prominently. You hear about people trying to hold a restaurant hostage for a free meal over a bad Yelp review. You have the targets of the poor review reacting badly to criticism. (Or even stalking the critic.) Lots of things going on in my head over this all.

I had the opportunity to meet Claire Messud just at the time she published that book at the Berkshire Wordfest at the Edith Wharton Estate. (Sept 2012) A fascinating woman, who lives here in New England. She spoke on a panel about transgressive characters. I believe she would agree with your assessment. She spoke forcefully about male transgressive characters such as in Lolita. People seem to find it much easier to dislike a male character and still like the book, than a female 'bad' character. I've been much more sensitive to my own feelings -- it isn't enough for me to say I didn't like a book because I didn't 'like' the main character. I feel I have to be able to articulate why the book didn't work for me on more specific grounds.

Maybe a book about Criticism. I don't know. I'm babbling.

Hope you are enjoying our glorious weather.

>249 michigantrumpet: A book about Criticism! Marianne, that sounds like an outstandingly good idea to me. Suzanne could make it that and a lot more. Does that spark any desire, Ms. Box?

I was looking around for a Robert Harris book for my face-to-face meetup to try. An Officer and a Spy sounds like the one.

As Miss Lizzie says there is a tension now between the amateur critics and the professional ones.

Thank you for posting those wonderfully evocative photos - my favorite is you on the battlefield in summer job mode.

>246 EBT1002: Yes, I don't think the reason to read this would be the psychological/psycho-analytical background. I suspect what was mildly interesting to an outsider like myself might well have you rolling your eyes and gnashing your teeth. There are some scenes in the book of her counseling sessions; I've no idea how true to life they might be or how a pro might view them. (My sister in law is a psychiatrist, specializing in treating eating disorders in adults, one of only about two or three people in Ontario who do this, but I still don't know much about the mechanics of it all, except to note that it clearly doesn't help her navigate family relationships of various kinds with fewer strains....)

>247 msf59: Hi Mark, mea culpa... Had not even heard of that book, but it wouldn't necc. cross my radar screen. I'll have to start on Bark later today.

>248 qebo: The problem, indeed, is that it's an abstract concept. The great thing about the genealogy book is that at some point I just basically sat bolt upright and realized, omigod, this is a book, and it combines fascinating abstract, existential questions and cool, intriguing real life stories about real people. Home run. That said, it's less about being an expert on an abstraction than the first person someone things about when they want a writer to explore a quirky topic that touches on some of these themes. That often is what happens. Right now, in a few quarters, I'm kind of a go-to person for finance topics, but that's it.

>249 michigantrumpet:
>250 LizzieD:
The pro/am criticism issue is interesting, but at best I see that as a magazine piece, perhaps Slate or HuffPo. If you lengthened it, you'd end up basically exploring the same theme in a very similar way, with different protagonists and different venues (eg Goodreads vs NY Times and Yelp vs Ruth Reichl), but not making radically different points. Nor am I sure that the only broader theme I can see here is one I really want to explore, or that would make for a book. (That is, does the democratizing force of the Internet on opinion lead to something better or worse, qualitatively, than we had when we had fewer but more expert/curated voices?) I really appreciate the thought that went into this, though!

>251 magicians_nephew: That is EASILY the best Robert Harris book. The two Cicero books come close, but if you've got people in the group who have a bee in their bonnet about reading about ancient Romans, etc., that's not going to be helpful. This is a great compromise -- the feel of a modern day suspense novel but with a kind of patina over it. Really, very good.

And yes, you're right about that tension. We just have to read some of the responses on LT to the pros' views of our favorite books... When we agree with the pros, the response tends to be silence (suggesting we think they're irrelevant); when the pros disagree with us, the response is somewhere along the continuum from irritation to sputtering outrage, with the default response being "who do they think they are?" Well, people who've been reading exhaustively and intensively for much of their lives (just like we have), but who also have taught themselves to think about what they read (not just react to it) in a comparative way and to evaluate it in writing. I write for a living, you all know how much I read, and in how much depth, but I'm no critic. I judge books in a different way.

Perhaps the issue is in the way we see critics? Not how they see themselves -- let's face it, how often, IRL, do you take anyone at their assessment of themselves? Because a president thinks he is God's gift to the nation, do you agree? Of course not. There's a tacit agreement that we all disagree about that. So a pro critic may want us to accept their views of a book, just as a politician wants 100% of the population to side with him/her. Both, if they are pragmatic, should know that ain't gonna happen. That's not going to stop either from making their case; nor should it. Because probably both have thought more about whatever the subject/book is from a number of different perspectives than we have, because our livelihoods aren't based on it. You guys may not end up agreeing with my conclusions/opinions about financial markets or business but you do me the courtesy of listening to how I reach those conclusions, because you know that's what I spend a big chunk of my time doing -- far more than most people here (with the exception of vivians and one or two other folks).

So, when I see a critic writing -- and I mean a critic, not a book reviewer in People magazine or a local newspaper -- I'm curious about what it is they are bringing to the book; what their knowledge is going to lead them to that I might not see. I may well end up disagreeing with their ultimate conclusion, but that doesn't mean I toss everything they say out the door as worthless, arrogant, elitist, blah blah blah. I'll want to see where I think they went wrong in their analysis -- in the facts they assembled? in the premise? in the weight they place on certain factors? -- but I'm not likely to toss out the door as completely worthless the sum total of decades spent reading, absorbing and trying to understand books.

That said, I have no time for nonsensical literary feuds. Richard Ford spitting on Colson Whitehead after a bad review? (Yes, literally....) I don't like Stephen King's attitude, because he seems to go around with a chip on his shoulder. On the one hand, he's upset because he's not being recognized with prizes; the other, he says "I don't like James Patterson" because all his books are the same. Note: not that he didn't like the books; he didn't like the person. I could probably live my life happily without reading books by either (I'm not a fan of horror, and while I enjoyed 11:22:63, I thought it was terribly overwritten), but Patterson kept it classy. "I'm a good dad; I'm a good husband." Or Lynn Shepherd saying JK Rowling should just stop writing (because she's sucking up all the oxygen in the room that might go to other books -- presumably hers among them.) Stuff like that is bizarre and pointless.

"covered in flower" ooof

Check your email. *smooch*

>252 sibylline: Lucy, above my right shoulder in that pic, or rather, the right shoulder as you look at the pic, is a giant crater created by the explosion of a shell or a mine (I can't remember which any more -- too old!)

Clearly, that was one of the days that my parents had driven down from Brussels to visit. The clue is that not only was the pic taken by my father but that I'm wearing a skirt. Since I had to cycle 11 km each way to and from work (from Arras, where I stayed in a youth hostel, in a tiny tiny bedroom off the main room), I didn't wear skirts very often! I'd occasionally wear a dress, which was workable on my girl's bike (no crossbar!) but never a jean skirt (zero flexibility).

>254 richardderus: I spotted the e-mail before I saw your message here Richard - THANK YOU!!! *Smooch* back. I do not deserve, but shall strive to deserve it...

I was caught up briefly in a small contretemps; Morningstar took exception to my Sunday column. Their own press release says "Morningstar is no longer providing municipal credit analyst research and commentary"; they're now trying to say that because they're still providing data, that's research. Because users can put it into models and use it in an analytical way.

Sigh.

>256 Chatterbox: Jeesh. The Morningstar dodge is so transparent as to be a sheet of glass.

Enjoy!

To be fair, they're using a different definition of "research" -- shaping it in quantitative terms. The problem is that (a) That's not how the ordinary investor who uses their service will see it (b) that's not how they themselves described it and (c) even if true, it's only half of the total research picture. Research can be data driven, but also must be analytical.

Richard kindly gifted me with a Kindle version of The Temporary Gentleman by Sebastian Barry, meaning that I no longer have to jump through the bureaucratic hurdles in order to finish the book -- or race through it, because the Rhode Island system limits me to a single renewal, even for a book that nobody else has requested to read. (I acknowledge that the Brooklyn system's policy of 99 renewals, each of 3 weeks, is slightly absurd on the other extreme - how many years does that add up to?? More than five??) but one renewal? That gives you six weeks to read War and Peace. Then you have to return it. And if it didn't come from your branch, it has to return to ITS branch. Then you have to summon it again, and wait for it to reappear. And branches can turn down requests. One of my holds got stuck in the system for so long that I was the top ranked person with a hold for two months for an in-demand book, and a book was ostensibly en route to me. It just never arrived. I had to cancel the hold completely, and start again at the bottom, because the branch was refusing to release the book outside its network.

Generally, I like the statewide network -- it's a great idea -- but the tight restrictions on usage of older books strikes me as bizarre. I'm about to return an unread Pratchett, for instance. I'll go back and get it again later...

I may be remembering ill, but I think that you are a fan of Patrick Leigh Fermor. Then this may be germane:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/jun/19/inspired-voyage-patrick-lei...

Robert

Your library system would drive me crazy - the libraries I use (3 different boroughs) offer 5, 6 and 10 renewals and when, rather too frequently because of the number of books I have out, I run out of renewals, I take books back, return them and take them out again. I have had some books out for years - I finally returned a book last year when I found my own copy in a charity shop which I borrowed in April 2009.

>259 Mr.Durick: Robert, you are remembering perfectly! Thanks for drawing my attention to this, which is the latest edition of NYRB that I hadn't yet seen. And I hadn't yet read the book, either -- I have probably been saving it for a month kinda like this one has been!

>260 elkiedee: Luci, yes, the Brooklyn system is much missed in that regard! I suppose it does instill a bit of discipline. LOL.... The problem really is with holds. I can't control when they're going to show up and what really frustrates me is that I can't tell by looking on the computer where I stand in the queue, as I could with the Brooklyn system. I know how many holds there are, total, but not how fast it's moving. So four or five books can arrive at once, at a time when I've got a mass of ARCs to read for Amazon.

Which reminds me, I need to get back to those, now that I'm back from the library. The cats are very annoyed that I dared to absent myself for two whole hours. Even though part of it was spent picking up cat food. Really.

>253 Chatterbox:
>259 Mr.Durick:

Aha, now this piece on PLK's final book is a great example of what a professional critic can bring to the table. It's not about "liking" or "disliking" or passing judgment; it's about setting the book in context. A brilliant piece of writing. Do I wish he wouldn't pick nits about PLK? Sure. Does that detract from the astute observations? Nope.