13 posts tagged “books”
So, remember roughly about a year ago, where you were?
I remember where I was: Sweatin' up a storm in Ft. Lee, New Jersey and eatin' up the yummies on the set of "Law & Order: SVU" in between watching the filming, taking notes and interviewing cast members.
Some of the most amazing 10 days of my life, I tell you.
Today, the advance copies of "The Law & Order: SVU Unofficial Companion" arrived and I had a moment of pure squeeing pleasure. Then I had a few more moments.
As I told my mom on the phone, I think I would have been airlifted by sheer joy alone had this been a novel; as it is, it's pretty darned wonderful to have anything that goes into a library with your name on it. I've been working on that part of my life's goals since I was about 12.
Not perfect, of course: I can see one or two places where small changes were asked for but not gotten -- but it's hard to quibble: Nearly 500 pages, not everything can be perfect. I'm a very, very happy camper.
And if this has inspired you in any way, it's available for pre-order at Amazon.com.
Squee!!
I am a book lover. But I'm cheap. Well, hardly flush with cash. That's the main thing. If I had tons of money to toss around I'd buy hardbacks left and right. But my general M.O. is this:
Hear of book.
Find book in library.
Reserve book.
Wait.
Tap foot.
Wait.
Get book.
Read book.
Love book? --> Get hardback.
Like book? --> Return. Consider paperback some other time. Maybe read again.
Hate book? --> Return. Wash from memory.
Nowhere in there does "buy original hardback, unread" tend to fall in. I just can't spend upwards of $30 to get the best version of a book. And if I really like a book, I want something that lasts.
This all led up to the fact that I'm actually listening to my very first audio book, and it's a story I never would have picked up in print form. First of all, I'm really not a fan in theory of audio books. Reading is not the same as listening. And I'm generally not a fan of the pulp crime books that seem to come out by the dozens written by men with bold Anglo-Saxon names: James Patterson, Ed McBain, Brad Meltzer. But: Tell me something's free, and I'll take a sniff.
That's how I ended up listening to Brad Meltzer's "The Millionaires." Boing Boing said it was free on iTunes, so off I went. Hey, if I hate it, there's not even a book to find a new home for. I just delete.
Listening to a book this long (technically it's my second audio book; I'd read Stephen King's "The Mist" years ago, then listened to it on an audio book later on, but that's a novella and I had read the darn thing first) is an odd sensation. It's one man's voice -- Tony Goldwyn -- doing all the voices, and all the narration. And he has a rich, pointed tone that is the equivalent of drinking too much Evian -- nice at first, then suddenly too, too much. The voice reminds me of those guys who do voice-overs for movies: A lot of drama, a lot of intonation, a lot of emphasis. And a lot of accents.
The two main characters, Oliver and Charlie, are brothers who conspire to steal $3 million from the private bank they work for. Suffice it to say, everything goes horribly wrong. But I wonder if, had I been reading it, if Charlie would be as goddamned obnoxious as he appears to be in hearing it. I imagine Meltzer wrote him to be endearingly charming; read by Hicks he's on my last nerve.
It's an oddly intimate experience, too, having this one person's voice in your head so much. I listen on the way to work and on the way home, so that's about an hour or so each day, bouncing around up there. I'm picturing it as I listen, so it's as if the whole thing was a play taking place on the subway. But it's more than that -- I'm plunged into the story more closely than I ever have been reading. I do read a lot, which means I read fast, which means I don't read every word. Here, you have no choice.
I'm still not sure that I'm sold on audio books; I'm certainly not going to pony a lot of money up for them. But then again, I haven't finished "The Millionaires." More when that happens.
In other book-related news, the New York Times says these five books are the best novels of the year. I've decided to be ambitious and read them. At first, I thought, "Maybe I'll try and read them before the end of the year!" Then I saw how many people were in line ahead of me (see the far column).
In the case of "Then We Came to the End," I think the title will refer to the end of 2008 in terms of when I will likely get a hold of that book.
Patricia Highsmith, my nemesis.
Yes, she did a lovely job with the Ripley books (she's behind "The Talented Mr. Ripley," among others), but I've been burned twice now and I'm done. Done, I say!
I checked out a book of her short stories earlier in the year. They were divided up into sections. The first section was comprised of all of these shorties about animals in human (if I recall correctly) situations where things went badly wrong for no particular reason, after which time the story ended. To wit: Elephant businessman goes to work, gets fired, goes for a drink, meets an ostrich who lures him into a mugging. The End. Again, and again. I tried the rest of the book and it turned out the rest of the stories were much the same.
But I guess I had memory loss. For fifty cents at a used book fair over the weekend I bought "Edith's Diary," a novel by Highsmith. Interesting in a historical sense -- she published it in 1977, and it takes place in the late 1950s through early 1970s, an era not always captured via suburbia. It was also interesting to see how much common alcohol consumption there was -- everybody was drinking rye or gin or scotch all day it seemed, and beer was considered "low-class." I felt almost like she was trying to imagine what Shirley Jackson's life was like.
In any case: The back of the book promised that Edith, our titular heroine, would move to the suburbs and end up taking care of "drooling Uncle George" and her "sly" son Cliffie (a nickname that should never have existed in this or any other universe) and that the "subtle" end would be malevolent and horrible and "worse" than homicide, or something like that. Along the way she would be writing in her diary and making up a perfect universe in which Cliffie was a good son and George wasn't involved and her husband Brett -- not even mentioned on the jacket! -- wouldn't leave her for his secretary.
There were bits of that. Very little diary-writing, actually, and in the end nobody reads it but her anyway, so talk about your MacGuffins.
I finished it this morning. And the end was worse than I could have imagined. Because yet again, there was no climax, no denouement of consequence, it just ... petered out. And I was left with the same feeling as the elephant stories -- namely that something happened while I was watching, and while it was catastrophic, it left me oddly uninterested.
So, this is a bookmark to myself to quit reading Patricia Highsmith. Waste. Of. Time.
I'd like an opt-out button for things other than email.
A few years ago, when I did the Club Med thing, they gave you a bright yellow wristband to wear so you'd know (and they'd know) you were pwned by the Club for your stay.
And really, I had no complaints about the whole stay there, except: It was damned hard to get frickin' left alone. I went solo, and brought along a huge stack of books, and planned to get through as many pages as possible, while optionally giving myself a bit o' the melanoma. (I scored on that last part; I gave myself a heat-related, itchy rash on the legs.) Anyway, if I was anywhere other than the beach, and alone, invariably someone working with the Club would come up and sit down and initiate chat.
And you know, if I have a book open in front of me, and I've picked the one empty table in the late lunch room, it's a fairly safe bet I'm there to be left alone. But it was like they had the Eleanor Rigby mandate -- no, no look at all the lonely people.
I decided that next time, I want the "leave me alone" wristband. If you're wearing it, stay away.
Anyhow, all of that surfaced again recently when I finally realized that the last Harry Potter book is due out. (I'd realized this a while back; you'd have to have a brick touching your brain through your nostril to not know it's coming.) I'd like to read that book in my own free time, sometime after I've pored through the small stack of other reading I'd like to do. But because the Venn diagram of Early Harry Potter Readers almost entirely overlaps with Manic Computer Users and Frequent Blog Posters, I'm now going to be afraid to use the Interwebs until I've read it. Because some fool is going to make some kind of half-knowing, wink-wink remark in the headline of a blog post and All the Secrets Will Be Revealed.
(Or, as already happened: Someone posted a link to the main URL of a blog, not the entry's permalink, and I clicked over to read the entry. Alas, a new entry had gone at the top of the main blog -- which decided to reveal all of the "Deathly Hallows" spoilers that were allegedly hacked (SPOILER ALERT IN THE ARTICLE) from the Scholastic computers. The eye, she was drawn to the words, and the words, they were remembered. If true: Oh, dear.)
So I despair of avoiding knowing ahead of time, which blows. I really don't want to know ahead of time who dies, who lives and how it all ends.
I need a wristband. ("Sing Blue Silver" fans, rejoice at the reference.)
Living in the Zeitgeist is a pain in the ass sometimes.
This post dedicated to Lynda, who claims zero interest in all things Potter.
Oops.
From my birthday entry last year:
Just finished up another Neil Gaiman Sandman book and Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," which is the bleakest, most depressing, most -- frankly -- useless post-apocalyptic book I've ever read. It's pretentious up the wazoo, eschewing apostrophes in contractions and occasionally purposefully (I have to assume) misspelling things like "bye and bye" instead of "things happened by and by." Since it's not exactly Riddley Walker era dystopia, and the lead protaganist was alive during the nuclear holocaust, there's really no reason to imagine that his language skills are slipping in those terms. I'm sure there are purists who will call it poetry; I'll call it rubbish. And there's no arc, not really. Just a slow drag to the end, at which suddenly there's one glimmer of hope and then it's over. So what was the point?
Well, clearly I'm not getting invited to judge any literratchure any time soon. Not that any offers were exactly pouring over the transom before now.
I stick with my judgment: The book blows. And this from someone who loves post-apocalyptic/dystopian books.
However, based on the other subject matter being discussed in that post from last year, my perceptions can be wrong about many, many things.
How do you know?
A question that can apply in so many areas, but in creative endeavors specifically it has many applications:
1) How do you know where to start?
2) How do you know where to end?
3) How do you know if you're any good?
4) How do you know if you should bother trying to be published?
et. al.
My latest in that endeavor is the ever popular "How do you know which agent is right for you?"
I'm doing research. From what I can tell the general recommendations are to hunt down every scrap of information available to you about a potential agent -- who they've published, is it like your work in subject or theme or approach, are they taking applications, how do they take applications, do they turn the toilet paper flap side down or flap side up. (The answer to that latter one has to be flap side down. Accept no substitutes.) It seems as though you're supposed to get enough information for a biography on the agent before you can approach them.
Meanwhile, most who have any information in the public domain -- web pages, information in books, etc. -- don't offer up a whole lot of detail. They list the books they've recently acquired, what they're best known for, and perhaps a few general subjects or genres they're most interested in. Well, unless you've read their acquisitions/best known fors those lists don't help much -- and look, I understand research but I'm trying to get published myself, there's a limit to how much of a reading list I'm going to take from one agent's clients -- and the general subjects or genres are about all you have to go on. Could I go agent by agent and spend hours, if not days or weeks, researching them before sending out a query? I could. But I could also just do some basic informational gathering to eliminate the obvious nos, then send out my queries. There's no guarantee the former would rate me any better-qualified (for me) agents than the latter.
So that's the next plan of attack. I'm getting 15 agents I think are useful. Some of which are being picked only for their interests -- I need me some suspense, thriller lovers -- and some of which are being initially selected for location (hey, they're one neighborhood over!) and then whittled, and some I'm digging more deeply into because the agent's name has a nice ring to it. I'm talking to you, Jake Elwell. That's a name. He's probably 31 with two kids and a dog, but that name says: cigar chomping reader of books. Or possibly a private detective.
I've got nine agents this way. I'll do more research at 15. Then comes the query letter. To hook or not hook? That is the question. I'll cross that bridge when I find it, as a great lyricist once said.
I was at a convention over the weekend, and was able to sit in on several panels related to publishing. Some of it was pretty basic -- our "Query Letter" session leader spent half of the hour going over such basics as 1-inch margins, submission guidelines and researching the right publisher, all of which are valuable but: Not About A Query Letter, Thank You.
But the thing that sticks with me as I now pursue an agent* is this: A first-time novelist is lucky to get $5,000-$10,000 advance for her book. (And the royalties you'll get after that only start coming to you in checks after you pay the company back with each sale.) An agent gets between 15-20%. Twenty percent of $10,000 is $2,000.
That's it. Just $2 measly K for shipping the thing out, calling up the right folks, pursuing the leads. Now, I'd take it, but $2,000 wouldn't last very long, salary-wise. And sure, I might be trying to shop around several books at once. But proportionately, $2,000 is not a lot for the amount of work put into it -- and that's if the agent and the writer are getting top (average) dollar. Figure 15% on $5,000 and you'll see some major shrinkage of numbers.
Now, of course, you could be that writer who sparks a bidding war. But agents are really hoping you'll turn into a consistent writer who can be consistently published, and the amount of work being put in to sell you each time will diminish, thus making their returns greater.
Personally, an agent who can sell my book can have 100% of my advance. Five thousand would be a nice way to fix up the kitchen, but it's not going to change my life. Selling the book would do that, if only because I would have finally had a book published.
But that's the reality of the agent. I hadn't thought about it that way before.
*Addendum: Have now finished the synopsis -- which feels all right but also seems to leave out so much -- and am preparing to enter it into the "Murder in the Grove" contest. It's not an agent or even a publisher, but it's a start and it had a deadline of the end of this month. Next, tracking down some agents I should be contacting.
It's a remote post! Not that you'd know it. Texas is messing with me for a few days: I'm down in Austin for the film portion of the South By Southwest (SXSW) festival extravaganza which begins today, switches to an interactive and then music portion, then dies in a haze of beer and barbecue. Actually sounds like a lot of fun.
I've got to be an on-air personality down here, for whatever that's worth. And if you're just appearing on the Web, I don't even know what you call it -- certainly not "on-air." The magazine is having us make short video packages (90 seconds) each day which is severely cutting into my movie-and-panel-watching time. But I got some new clothes, so it's not all a wash. More on that later.
I did drive out to my mom's place, though, in my rental car. Thank God I had the option of a GPS, though, because trying to drive and constantly check out my mapquest directions in the middle of all of that vast flat Texas nighttime would have completely freaked me out. GPS took me the fastest route, but it was 90% undedeveloped backroads with abrupt turns and no streetlamps. I rode for extended periods with the brights on and could think of a hundred ways things could go Very Bad. No wonder so many recent horror movies are made in the Austin area. But enough on that, too.
What I'm really here to share is my dream! And of course that's what everyone reads blogs for. But it's a writing dream, so here goes. But a preface: I skinned my last synopsis of 13K words down to a mere 3K, so we're on the right track. Gotta hit bone on the next go-around. So, the dream: I apparently had submitted my book to an agent or publishing house which, shock and horror, decided to read it. This is all pre-dream. So I'm going to the agent/publishing house and they hand me several sheets of paper that have been hand-typed (old typewriter fonts, not computer fonts) on something like onionskin paper, and partly filled out with hand-written notes. Basically, it's a summation of why the book won't be published/represented by them. I only remember one comment/critique, something like, "It was so nice that you decided to take the reader through every emotional journey the lead character took," but somehow I knew that wasn't a positive thing -- they were being sarcastic about it being belabored. All I knew is it meant I'd have to rewrite the damn thing, and that they hated it.
But the real thrust of the pages wasn't the book critique -- it was a list of every time I'd called or contacted one of the company's representatives to find out what was being done with my book, and extensive notes detailing what a belligerent jackass I'd been each time. As if this was the kind of thing agents and publishers are really thinking about.
Another anxiety dream, sure. But I hadn't done any writing yesterday and being in Austin I won't have time to do it for a few more days, so where he heck did this one come from?
The subconscious is a strange land, even stranger than Texas.
Then you hear about these kinds of stories (photo warning at the link, mildly gruesome). In Eureka, California, a 65 year old woman (nearly my mom's age) name of Nell Hamm went hiking with her 70-year old husband Jim in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park. Now, give them credit for even going on a walk, much less a 10-mile hike (the story says they were at the end of the hike when it happened). They were just strolling along when a mountain lion came out of nowhere and took a personal interest. In Jim's head.
The lion pounced on Jim Hamm.... He was trailing his wife when the big cat attacked, pinning him face down on the trail.
Nell Hamm did all the right things. She approached and screamed at the lion. Then she grabbed a branch and began beating it on its back.
``It wouldn't let go, no matter how hard I hit it,'' she said in an interview at Mad River Community Hospital Thursday, where her husband was in intensive care recovering from surgery.
Jim Hamm, who was trying to tear at the face of the cat, told his wife to grab a pen from his pocket and stab the cat in the eyes. She did, but the pen broke.
``That lion never flinched,'' she said. ``I just knew it was going to kill him.''
Now, that's kind of a conversation I'd like to have heard. Well, not really. But can you imagine trying to communicate to your wife that she needs to poke the cat that is using your head for a chew toy in the eye with the ballpoint pen in your pocket?
"I say, dearheart, might you pluck that pen from right over there and give him a right stab in the soft parts?"
"Where, dear?"
"My pocket, love."
"All right, then! Shall I click the inkwell or not?"
"Honestly, lovey, I don't give a shit."
Somehow I sense it was more abbreviated than that. Anywho:
Nell Hamm picked up the branch again and this time slammed it butt-end into the cat's snout. The lion had ignored her until then. Finally, she had its attention. The cat stepped back, and glared at her with its ears pinned back.
``I thought he was going to attack me,'' she said.
Instead, the cat slipped into the ferns and disappeared.
Good show! I like this Nell, and frankly I think Jim's rather sporting, too. I wish him luck in his recovery.
Now, that's a survival story to tell the grandkids, I tell you what. But what struck me the most about it is that both of them -- Nell especially -- appear to have remained completely cool and focused in the face of immediate, life-threatening horror. Imagine what you might have done: fled? Screamed uncontrollably? Both? Fainted? You just can't know until it faces you, and that's when you know if you're a survivor or not.
I'm in this sort of mindframe because I've just finished reading a marvelous book called "Deep Survival," by Laurence Gonzales. (I'm fascinated in survival techniques, stories and advice, and right now am taping another episode of Les Stroud's "Survivorman" on Discovery Channel, while eagerly awaiting the return of the more artificial Bear Grylls in "Man vs. Wild." Some of this is book-connected, but I've been writing the book so long it's become a personal interest, too.) I had thought that Gonzales' book would be story after story of numbskulls getting into trouble in various ways, then getting back out again, or even of seasoned experts getting into trouble, and getting out again, with a sprinkling here and there of theory and advice and big-picture reasoning.
Instead, Gonzales did the opposite: The book has a sprinkling of stories here and there, with a continuing thread of his own father's survival, having been shot down over Germany in WWII and breaking a significant chunk of bonage in the process, nearly getting shot by a German local and having his nose almost do a Michael Jackson. But the big section of the book is about the psychology, the thought process (or lack thereof) of people who are survivors, and of people who aren't. He talks about the ways the human brain works, citing studies and examples such as a test where individuals were asked to count the number of passes a basketball made between players. During the exercise, the scientists had a man in a gorilla suit walk by. Once the test was over, everyone had a number of passes to report, but a significant number never saw the man in the gorilla suit. The brain focuses on one thing -- it makes a map of expectation -- and happily goes to work. Everything that doesn't fit the expectation, or the map, gets thrown out as unnecessary. That's how people fall down elevator shafts: They expect the elevator, and see the elevator even if it isn't there, and down they go. That's how people get lost in the woods: They have a picture in their mind of what the route will look like, and when it doesn't, they keep that picture and make the world conform to it.
There's much more, but that first bit has made me a little softer towards what we all usually laugh at as boneheaded moves, or Darwin Award type stuff. We all have to make some assumptions to get through life; if I had to check every chair before I sat in it to make sure it was sit-worthy, I'd waste a hell of a lot of time. But there may be that one chair with only three legs that sends me on my keister. The point is that we all have expectations, and that works. But it's when we refuse to abandon those expectations in the face of reality that we get ourselves in trouble -- and sometimes become Darwin Award winners. Gonzales points to snowskiiers who, despite being warned not to gun themselves up a hill because of the likelihood of avalanche, do it anyway. He says the people who are most likely to get into trouble doing that kind of thing are the people who got away with it before. They did it, they were successful, they got an emotional rush from it. So, as he says, their minds made a "bookmark" to the pleasurable event. And the next time, regardless of risk, they want that rush -- the brain wants that rush -- so without really thinking it through, off they go. And become buried in the subsequent snow.
There's a lot more there, and there's no point in going through the whole book in a blog post. The book just had a real effect on me, and then seeing how Nell and Jim handled their own survival situation made me reflect on what I'd learned. They stayed cool, they changed the map (i.e., Okay, we're not getting in the car to go home and make dinner and watch "American Idol," we're now doing this) of expectation in an instant, and didn't stand around going into denial or frozen in fear. Again, we can't all know how we'd react in this situation. But it might just help to be aware that there are other ways to deal with this sort of thing -- and that those other ways are more likely to get us out of it than just standing there, waiting to be eaten.
UPDATE (Jan. 28): The cat's not coming back, in this instance.
SECOND UPDATE (Jan. 28): And at the moment, things aren't looking good for the victim, either. Best wishes, Jim.
Mom always says she has a Polish birthday, referring to Pole weddings that go on for a week or so. (That's what she says.) I'm kind of getting to that level, too -- the celebration started a week ago Tuesday, when I went out with Julia to a screening of "The History Boys," had dinner after, and got a lovely green scarf (a real green scarf, and it's not cruel) and a small box from India. Had lunch with Rebecca on Friday -- she's a bit too frayed and harried for gifts and cards right now but I got nice email wishes from her. Then the cards came, and Lynda's Amazon Wish List choice landed on the desk on Tuesday -- "The Electric Company" on DVD. Hee! There's even a "Silent E" karaoke number, which I sense will get done after many whiskeys. Tuesday night was Bond night, and Cameron slid me a certificate for Barnes & Noble just pre-Bonding. And Lordy, that was a good Bond film. I'm going to go again on Friday night. Seriously. Daniel Craig is one fine specimen.
Today was the big day, so I took off work, went for a fantastic ribs meal at the Blue Smoke Cafe -- the Danny Meyer influence lives -- walked around town looking for a potions shop that appears to have gone out of business (up in smoke?) -- and ended up just buying a few odds and ends before the meal put me into food coma on a bus and I had to head home by way of the library. Just finished up another Neil Gaiman Sandman book and Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," which is the bleakest, most depressing, most -- frankly -- useless post-apocalyptic book I've ever read. It's pretentious up the wazoo, eschewing apostrophes in contractions and occasionally purposefully (I have to assume) misspelling things like "bye and bye" instead of "things happened by and by." Since it's not exactly Riddley Walker era dystopia, and the lead protaganist was alive during the nuclear holocaust, there's really no reason to imagine that his language skills are slipping in those terms. I'm sure there are purists who will call it poetry; I'll call it rubbish. And there's no arc, not really. Just a slow drag to the end, at which suddenly there's one glimmer of hope and then it's over. So what was the point?
I digress. Post-apocalyptic books aside, it was a very good day. And then it got topped off with flowers -- white roses no less -- from the sweetie. In a beautiful blue vase. He wanted to make sure I got the blue vase: "It was a whole package." And, coincidentally matches the bedroom. How wonderful is that?
Hope you're happy too.
