Twilight

Okay. You know what? I liked it.

I'd already tried once and aborted before the end of the first chapter. But I will not be defeated so easily. So this time when I started, I said to Chris "Okay. Make me sit here and read the first three chapters. If I can get through those, I'll be hooked, and I'll read the whole thing in one sitting, and it will be awesome." And that's pretty much exactly what happened, except that it took two days instead of one because an evening at the arcade beckoned.

And despite [insert all the things that are horribly wrong here...trust me, I noticed them. I'm an editor], I had a totally great time reading this. I would not know what to say to a male human who liked it, since virtually everything good about it fell into the "adolescent female fantasy" category. And that bit was done flawlessly. I ooohed and aaahed and squeaked and squealed and very near burst into tears a couple times... so essentially, "I laughed, I cried, it was better than Cats!"

Honestly, I think if it were better written, Twilight wouldn't be as good. Right now it's totally over the top and ridiculously serious, and this combination of characteristics is exactly equivalent to the mindset of its intended audience. Which is awesome, and clearly effective at causing massive amounts of money to be flung in the direction of the author.

So...that's it. I'm not going to front that I'm too good for this...I have my literary cred, I can soak the damage to my reputation of liking a few over-adjectified bestsellers. Plus I just read Dorkismo: The Macho of the Dork, and it told me I can like anything I want. Hah.

Da Vinci Code

Speaking of books that came out yesterday, apparently there's some more Dan Brown in the world now. Why the world needs more of his writing...well...the world knows more about these things than I do.

Conveniently, I just read the Da Vinci Code last week. Totally by chance, in fact. I am clearly in tune with the universe. I'm going to give it some extra points off the top because I'd already seen the movie so I can't say what it must have been like to read it when the element of surprise still existed. Maybe it was better?

And...I don't get it. Why is this so popular? It's not tremendously interesting or exciting, it's got lots of history and no sex, and the writing is very, very middling. I mean, it's not that bad. I'm not going to dump on it--it's competent, it puts words in orders that communicate things. Which, as an editor, I can promise you is harder for most people than it sounds.

It is total crap with adjectives, definitely. How do you "wake up slowly"? How do you take a "long sip"? What does it look like when somebody is walking with "a haunting certainty to her gait"?

It also leans heavily on one of my favorite pet peeves - informing the audience that something is interesting by having a character directly tell them so by word or action. To whit:

"With an unexpected jolt, Langdon stopped short."

'And not just any person,' Teabing blurted, clambering excitedly to his feet.

And my personal favorite, all of the following are from one conversation. One.

"Sophie felt a little chill...Sophie was surprised....Sophie glanced at the art book before her, eager to move on....Uncertain, Sophie closed her eyes...Sophie glanced up, looking surprised...Sophie shook her head...Sophie looked overwhelmed...Sophie felt as if the entire night had turned into some kind of twilight zone where nothing was as she expected...Sophie was sure she had missed something...Sophie turned to Langdon to help...Sophie was mesmerized...Sophie was amazed...Again, Sophie was speechless...Sophie was starting to feel overwhelmed...Sophie was surprised...The words seemed to echo across the ballroom and back before they fully registered in Sophie's mind...Sophie stood transfixed...Sophie felt the hairs stand up on her arms..."

Soooo, yeah. Mostly readable, kind of fun, a good way to feel highbrow and still read trashy writing. I guess. I'm sure there must be better ways.

The Girl who Played with Fire

This one doesn't even get a cover picture. Will I read the third book in the series? Yes, I will, if only because the second book in almost every trilogy is a boring disaster. I don't even know what was going on with this book. The NYT seemed to like it alright, but I'm going to have to diverge with them once again in matters of art...this was a horrible, plodding mess. A huge percentage of it is dedicated to Lisbeth buying a condo, furnishing it at Ikea, and going grocery shopping. Hurrah, right? When she was tattooing "I am a sadistic pig" onto the stomach of a man who really deserved it in the last book, I was totally saying to myself "Self? Don't you really want to know whether she'd go with the Aspelund or the Malm for her guest room?"

Actually, the best part about this book was that a couple characters had names that I only know from Ikea furniture.

When I finally realized what the main plot was, I couldn't believe it. I'd really hoped all that was just a subplot, and kept waiting for something more interesting to kick in, but about 90 percent of the way through I finally gave up and accepted that the bad guys were that two-dimensional. Gah.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

This book was really quite good. I agree almost exactly with the NYT review of it, which is a bit scary because that never happens...maybe writing my own reviews (I've got a new one up, by the way) has made me more attentive. It has its flaws, but one can only assume that the editorial process was somewhat stunted by it being a) a translation, and b) released after the death of its author.

However. This is a best-seller. The waiting list for the sequel at the library is prohibitive. People love it, they buy it, they fling money in its direction. And it's not trash, either. So I'd like to use it as a bit of an example of that thing I always say about how all the writing "rules" should come with the caveat "unless it works, and/or you do it really, really well."

This best-seller is guilty of breaking all of the following rules that authors in writing groups spend countless hours warning each other about:

• Not starting the story right away. The main plot doesn't present itself until 15% of the way into the book, and even then there is a fairly large plot detour before it gets fully underway.
• Not finishing the story quickly after the climax.
• Taking place in a foreign country, where people have foreign names and worry about foreign issues. Can an American audience identify with characters named Holger and Dirch? Do they care about social problems and corruption in Sweden?
• Being too long. This book is pretty long. I'm not sure how long, but definitely pretty long. Publishers don't like long books right now because of the cost of paper, you know.
• Having a major part of the intrigue be related to coded Bible verses.
• Having long passages of not immediately relevant history and back-story.
• Using multiple perspectives. It's all third person, but several different characters' points of view are utilized.
• Being about a writer, and then presenting a situation where the writer becomes famous and adored. I've actually got a whole post somewhere in the back of my mind about how funny it is that writers always become the most obviously passionate about their subject when they're able to work in their latent impossible dreams of total success, but for now, suffice to say that this is horribly cliché.

All this, and I still sped through it and immediately started on the sequel, as did many others from the looks of it. This is not an excuse to break the rules, and I'm not saying it couldn't have been much improved by hammering out these issues, but the story and writing were good enough to carry it through despite any objectionable elements. Food for thought.

***

PS - Amusingly, awesome group blog The Book Book just had a post on this as well. It's somewhat more useful than mine for things like, er, plot. Read it here!

Tales of Chinatown (1922)

Some things I love: short stories of the mysterious persuasion, literature from before political correctness was invented, fiction that takes place in really dirty parts of London when telephones and cars were unusual possessions.

Tales of Chinatown comes from midway through the career of the prolific Sax Rohmer, who specialized in writing about the "Yellow Peril" of the Chinese neighborhoods in London, and who died most ironically of the Asian Flu in 1959.

Many of the stories read like an unambitious contemporary knockoff of Sherlock Holmes, though with a somewhat more active role for the Watson character, Knox. Others, though, are just completely weird little supernatural vignettes that are much more Poe than Doyle. A theme of cultural identity runs through all the stories, with mixed-race characters struggling to keep the better part of their souls afloat in the face of much darker undercurrents that threaten to pull them into the dangerous criminal underworld.

Like I say, nothing that you could get away with nowadays without being run out of town with flaming pitchforks, and maybe rightly so. But still, a very interesting and revealing foray into a dark little corner of history.

Choke (2001)

I somehow made it all the way through Choke without realizing it's by Fight Club guy. I have possessed this knowledge in the past, but for some reason it just didn't click, despite the really obvious similarities. The plus side of this was that I was actually able to judge this book on its own. The minus side is that when you judge this book on its own, it's pretty unpleasant. Well-written, certainly, but really very icky.

Pacing's great, voice is great, style is great. Twist isn't nearly as good as Fight Club but I feel like I probably missed some details while I was skimming through the icky bits. It feels derivative certainly - the gross-out anatomy stuff, the support groups, the weird sex, the weirder jobs, the insane people. But hey, if you do something well, why not revisit it? All the great authors do. But I don't know. Anyone read both?

I feel like I like this one more in retrospect than I did at the time...It's not you, Choke, it's me. You did great.

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976)

I think the heat is probably making me cranky, so perhaps I was less patient with this book than I should have been. But I'm wary of just writing my dislike off to the fact that I am So Sweaty, because I clearly remember reading Jitterbug Perfume, and it was the same thing. In the case of JP, I giggled myself into a frenzy for about the first two thirds of the book, then suddenly realized I was tremendously bored, put it down, and never finished. I never do that, I'm a consummate book-finisher, so this stuck in my mind.

I did finish Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, but it was with a fair bit of grumbling and swearing. For about the first half it was pretty good, there were giggles to be had and intriguing images to be lost in. But then, splat. Two hundred pages of alternating mediocre erotica and mediocre philosophy, all wrapped in overdone self-conscious word games. And the history of whooping cranes in America. By the time the story kicked back in near the end, I was totally disenamored of both the characters and the plot, and found no satisfaction in a resolution that I probably would have quite enjoyed if it had happened a hundred and fifty pages sooner.

Next up, this "Chuck Palahniuk" character. He better watch out though, because until the thunderstorms start I am not on speaking terms with writing that doesn't make me forget I'm in the guldurned sauna here.

Kindle sample chapter reviews

I was lucky enough to take a little vacation in the States last weekend, and of course I brought the Kindle along to witness the glory that is the Full Kindle Wi-Fi experience. And, well...wow. I mean, I adore my Kindle, Wi-Fi or no, and I already have more to read on it than I'm going to be able to manage in half a year at least, but all of that is just base logic...the truth of it is, I fell in love. You can order books. All the books. From. Your. Bed. Or from the car mid-roadtrip. And then, because I get motion sick and can't read in the car, you can have it read your new acquisitions to you. I took out a sample subscription to the New York Times, because we were in New York, and it downloaded to my Kindle each morning as I had my tea in the hotel cafeteria.

Oh! And we saw an ad for it in the subway. That was neat.

Okay, so I won't front - the wi-fi is an insanely amazing thing. But I also don't have an iPhone, so maybe it's just because this was my first exposure to handheld 3G anywhere-internet. Though to be fair, the connection was a bit lousy - I had to log into facebook again every time I did anything, so log in, type a wall post, log in, post the wall post...sigh. So the iPhone would probably win that battle. But still. You can Beam Books Out Of The Sky. It's like heaven.

Oh, so I downloaded some sample chapters. And by "some" I of course mean "every one I could get at before my battery ran out." Now that my pet rat has gotten old and his greatest joy in life is to be read out loud to, I've been reading him a whole variety of NYT bestsellers, and he seems to be quite enjoying it. To date:

Swimsuit: I was relieved that this ended when it did. This man does many things I never would have allowed as an editor, plus I'm not really big on the whole "gruesome murder" bit. Benji enjoyed it.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society: Is that right? This one was a big hit all around, and even the Manfolk, who pretended to be playing video games and not listening, let out a couple of good chuckles over it. I would definitely accept this one as a gift, if I have any admirers.

Twilight: Ah. I see.

Finger-Lickin' Fifteen: Um...maybe I just wasn't in the mood? I'm rather pleased that there's this huge series of popular books with a Latina heroine, so we'll give this a thumbs up, but...meh.

How the Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll: Now, this one actually takes advantage of the sample chapter setup. Unlike stupid James Patterson, whose fancy "publisher" apparently didn't have enough time to look and see that 60% of his sample was the table of contents, this here book gives a big fat juicy sample, unhindered by massive quantities of front matter. I'm only a few pages in (Benji was dissatisfied by the lack of dialogue), but the narrator seems like a sweetheart and he's saying all those smart things about Blues music that always make me go all weak in the knees.

Stay tuned for a guest post from that boy who downloaded all the sci-fi sample chapters.

New Book Reviews

By me!

• Jaunt, or, "Why you should seriously get a professional edit and never use exclamation points again!?1!!"
• Drowned Sorrow, or, "Trashy supernatural horror is supposed to have plot holes. Thumbs up!"

Also, a great example of what I was talking about in this post came up yesterday...author goes on ranting diatribe against negative review, comes out looking like a heinous, arrogant monster. Good job, Alice Hoffman.

Responding to negative reviews

I read somewhere that, as an author, you're never supposed to respond to bad reviews of your work. No matter how tempting it is. And I think this is very good advice! Granted, the review landscape is changing. It isn't just ivory-tower NYC intellectuals writing for elite newspapers and journals anymore. This whole Web 2.0 business lets everyone and his alligator write reviews of everything they set eyes on.

But all this might not change the fundamental fact that you aren't going to gain anything by responding to your negative reviews. It's easier than it used to be, and it's certainly tempting to get a comment in there right below the review in question that rebuts all the points the reviewer has made. But still...

This hasn't happened to me yet, though I'm afraid that at some point in my reviewing history I'm going to get snarked at. I'll tell some author that their work is unreadable, and they'll fire back that I'm a disgraceful illiterate child who wouldn't know great art if it was inserted into my nostril. And I'll probably cry...I'm much too sensitive for the internet.

I'm such a rambler! What I'm trying to get at is that this one reviewer on the site I write for said this one book was badly edited and did weird things with character voices and really just needed another good go-through before it was printed. And the author of this book fired back with a just-this-side-of-civil missive that really only made her look, if not worse, then really quite unlikeable. I'm not likely to read historical drama on the subject of slavery and redemption by an author who sounds like my cranky 9th grade English teacher on a bad day.

The points the author makes are, I imagine, the classic responses of somebody whose work has been belittled in public. She says she's heard from readers who really liked it, that she's sold many copies, that she had tons of people read it before it went to print to check for errors, that she intentionally did that thing with the dialogue (and even has a professional source who told her it was okay!), and, zinger of zingers, that there was a typo in the review. Meow!

The thing is, none of these arguments mitigate the situation. A reader can sympathize if you've had tons of people check for errors, but that doesn't make it less annoying when they bump into them in the text. You can explain what techniques you've used all you want, but if the reader doesn't get it and just thinks it's weird, none of that matters. Even if an Important Personage gave you the thumbs-up.

This isn't to say that a reviewer may not be totally off-base, miss the point of your work, and not enjoy something that piles of readers will eat up. Goodness knows that's happened more than once in the history of book reviews! But you as an author will come off as more gracious, and more triumphant, if you haven't started catfights with all the reviewers who put you down on your way to the top. The proper time for such behavior is when you're accepting your major literary award and you throw in a snide comment about all the people who put you down and didn't recognize your genius.

Book Reviews

I admit it - writing is hard for me. I think it might be just that that I'm out of practice, but it's really an uphill battle. I admire authors immensely for being able to produce pages and pages of words, when I totally struggle to string together...like...two. Words.

Anyway, I've been writing book reviews for the website Self Publishing Review, which I've been quite enjoying. It's really fascinating to read the books that people have self-published! It must be terrifying to send your book off to be reviewed, especially without the buffer level of knowing that a publishing house accepted/edited/designed it. That way at least you can blame the publisher for any mistakes, and know that even if the reviewer didn't like it, at least the acquisitions editor did!

With the kind permission of Henry Baum, the mastermind behind the Self Publishing Review, I'm going to be going into a little more depth on the editing angle of the books I've been sent for review. I've made a few remarks on editing in the SPR reviews, but I'd like to talk more specifically about what another edit could have done for each book. It'll be a paragraph-structure adventure! But not right now, because I'm sleepy.

For the time being, you may revel in the glory that is my SPR reviews:
Daywalker, by Rebecca Rock (Vampires)
The Legend of Jimmy Gollihue, by George LaCas (Literary fiction)
Fairy Senses, by Frances Ruiz (YA Fantasy)

Don't you bring me no bad news

I've noticed that in the world of book reviews, there seems to be a policy of only reviewing books that are "worthy of review." That is, if the book is amateurish, or unremarkable, or just plain bad, there's nothing said about it. Silence.

Now, I can see how reviews, even bad ones, will serve as publicity for a book. I can see where reviewers might think they won't even waste people's time reading about something that they absolutely should not read.

But honestly, I don't buy it. In what other field, art or otherwise, does something bad not even merit a mention? Bad films get reviewed. Bad art shows get reviewed. Hell, bad microwaves get reviewed! But a mediocre book, even if it was good enough to get picked up by a publisher...nothing.

And I personally would like to know about these things! Even if it's just a one-liner: "Spelling atrocious. Cover amateurish. Story full of holes. Couldn't finish--like reading nails on a blackboard." That would do. Especially given the explosion of books available through POD and self-publishing...books really are a commodity rather than an art form a lot of times, and I sort of think they should be treated as such on the review circuit.

I really distrust websites that only run good reviews. I assume that somebody is paying them or giving them freebies, and I assume that their good reviews aren't trustworthy. Just like I wouldn't trust a math teacher who gives all his students A's, I don't trust a book review website that only rates books "excellent!", "classic!", or, at worst, "very good!" (book reviews dot com, I'm looking at you!).

If readers should have the freedom to decide what they enjoy reading (even if it's Twilight), they should also have access to the information necessary to make an informed decision.

That is all.