What’s New, Buenos Aries: an open letter to publishers

May 14, 2013 by 6 Comments

An Open Letter to Publishers:

Hi there.  You don’t know me, but you’ve certainly taken a lot of my money over the last 45 years—ever since I was old enough to receive an allowance and smart enough to spend most of it on books instead of candy at the corner store.  You can think of me as a long-running repeat customer.  I read.  A lot. And I want to talk to you about a growing issue in the books and other printed material I read.

Grammar.

That’s right.  You remember grammar, yes?  Punctuation marks, spelling, things like that?  You used to hire people as copy editors and proofreaders to catch mistakes and correct them before unleashing your books, magazines, and newspapers on the general public.

I realize that publishing has taken some financial hits lately.  People get more of their news online, for example, instead of on paper.  Is this really an excuse for allowing your standards to go to hell in a handbag?  Do you think that your online audience is less likely to notice the misused apostrophes, the run-on sentences, the incorrect forms of there, their, and they’re?  Sure they’re all on their social media sites, where internet-speak is more lenient and the audience more forgiving.  That doesn’t mean they don’t want to see things done right elsewhere.  I’m not going to recommend an article or opinion piece full of typos.  And I certainly am not going to finish reading one either.

As a writing teacher, I used to make it clear to my students that while it was certainly important that they have good solid ideas backed up by solid evidence in support of those ideas, they could have the best idea EVER and it wouldn’t be much use if no one could understand it because they were hacking their way through a forest of grammatical errors to get to it.  You might keep that in mind the next time you rely on spell-check, auto-correct, and Microsoft’s execrable grammatical suggestions.

I can’t be the only person annoyed by missing quotation marks around paragraphs of dialogue in a novel I’m reading.  Or by newspaper headlines where half the letters of a word are missing or transposed.  Or by an article headline that reads “Improvements Okd at Twon Meeting” (that last one appeared just like that in my local paper).  Or a published novel filled with random typos ranging from “teh” for “the” to my current favorite, “Buenos Aries” for “Buenos Aires”.  I paid money for a pleasant reading experience, not for the experience having to sit and mentally correct typos or grammar in order to actually understand what I’m reading.

I think computers are amazing things.  Mine certainly makes my life easier in so many ways.  But to rely on an algorithm to catch and correct very human errors is foolish and cheap.  My computer doesn’t know the difference between to, two, and too.  It only knows whether or not I’ve spelled them correctly.  It has no means of figuring out if I’ve used the correct form in that particular instance.

When these types of errors are passed on to the public for consumption, it makes the consumer mad and the publisher look lazy, sloppy, and unconcerned about the impression being made on the consumer.  So I implore you: give a recent English graduate a job and hire real people to proofread your product.  Consider it your contribution to boosting the economy if you like, but take my word for it—you’ll boost your sales, too.  I know I’m not going to repeat a bad experience with a product that I’ve repeatedly found to be shoddy.  If nothing else, have some pride in what you’re sending out to the public.

Please.

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The Genre Dance

April 25, 2013 by 11 Comments
Sidelines, Lois McMaster Bujold

Sidelines, Lois McMaster Bujold

I’ve been reading Lois McMaster Bujold’s Sidelines of late.  Sidelines is a collection of essays, speeches, travelogues, and sundry other non-fiction bits and pieces, and it completely deserves and shall have its own review.  However, as I was reading the text of a speech Bujold gave at the 2008 World Science Fiction Convention (Denvention 3), I remembered this half-written piece I started, oh, months ago, in response to a review I read of Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance that dealt with the book as a romance.  That review (you can read it here) really bugged the crap out of me, although I couldn’t figure out why until I realized that the reviewer was cherry-picking the bits out of CVA that dealt with Ivan’s romance and pretty much giving short shift to the fact that while that book, and many of the Vorkosiverse books, do contain romances for the characters, they do not fall within the boundaries of a romance as it is traditionally defined.

Captain Vorpatril's Alliance

Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance

Now I’m not someone who thinks genre is a dirty word—all books are genre books to some extent, and thinking about the ways that a particular book falls within the boundaries of a particular genre doesn’t bother me—you’ll note that our tags in this page usually place a book within some sort of  category: mystery, romance, SFF, biography, etc.  Genre is a handy label that gives the reader an idea of what to expect—certain tropes are common and various elements are expected in certain genres.  So if I were asked, for example, “Tell me about Moby-Dick”, I could say “It’s about this insane sea captain who seeks revenge on a whale” and that tells you what the story is about, sure, but it doesn’t tell you much about how the story is told—but if I say “It’s an adventure novel about an insane sea captain who seeks revenge on a whale”, well.  That gives you a much better idea of what you’re in for.  By the same token, I could say “It’s the classic novel about…blah blah blah” and that suggests something completely different in terms of expectations.  As Mark Twain once noted, “A classic is something everybody wants to have read, but no one wants to read.”  Most people hear the word classic and their mind goes straight to dull.  Or possibly old-fashioned. Or even good for you.  No one likes literary spinach.

Genre labels have expectations.   It’s then up to the story to meet those expectations, fail to do so, surpass them, or turn them on their heads.  But I think in the above example you can see the danger in them as well.  Useful as the label is, it’s also possible to use them to mislead.  If I really wanted to push Moby-Dick like a crack dealer on an unsuspecting reader, for example, I’d avoid labeling it a “classic” and stick with “adventure story”.  Science Fiction comes with its own issues as a label (which Bujold hilariously details in an essay later in Sidelines where she describes being the only SF author at a book fair and soliciting opinions about why the people there didn’t like the genre.  The answers range from “it’s too hard” to “I only read important books”).  You see the problem with labels… because oh those pesky pre-conceived notions.

Me, I don’t think it’s any crime to like genre books and read them. I don’t think they’re unimportant–in fact, I think they are undervalued as a whole by critics.  Are some of them fluff?  Oh sure. Some of them have no heft to them whatsoever.  I’ve also read some “important” books in my time that are fluffy, or overwritten, or just plain stupid.  That’s not a genre issue, that’s a writer issue.  Genre does not equal bad, or lacking value.  Genre does not deserve to be looked down upon like a hairball the cat left on your new rug.  Poop on that.  Want to read a fluffy cat mystery?  Do it.  Fluff is sometimes exactly what someone needs.  I don’t know about you, but sometimes I don’t want to think too hard about what I’m reading.  I just want to read it.  It’s to escape, not to improve my mind. I compared this need once to the difference between fast food and fine dining.  Sometimes you just want a Happy Meal to fill you up.  You don’t really care if there’s actually any beef in your cheeseburger.  Happily, though, there are just as many substantial books that do have some heft to them.  So if you want that, you can have it.  If you don’t, you don’t have to.  That’s the great thing about our world.  There are so many books, bless ‘em.  Something for every need and occasion.

A Civil Campaign

A Civil Campaign

So having established that, let me get back to this idea of genre and cherry-picking.  And Bujold.  Since it was her speech at Denvention 3 that got me revved up on this topic again, I shall use her as an example: if you say to me “What is A Civil Campaign about?” well good grief.  It’s about a lot of things.  It certainly is about romance, and I’m confident that folks who are romance fans will not go away dissatisfied in that respect.  But. It has to be understood that while you can read A Civil Campaign strictly as a romance novel, if you have no prior knowledge of Miles or Ekaterin, or of Kareen and Mark, and have no interest in the Vor caste, or in the complex world Bujold spent 8 previous novels building, you will have merely skimmed the surface of what is, in my opinion, not only a great novel, but a great series.  And you will not understand the nuances of the Miles/Ekaterin romance if you do not understand the world they live in.  Rather than a romance for all time, it becomes just another romance.  And it’s way more than that.

I’m glad to see people recommending Bujold to readers who may not have much experience with SFF, mind you.  I think she makes a great bridge between the romance and science fiction genres in those of her novels where the romance elements are more pronounced. And I want to be clear that I don’t think the author of the original post was trying to pull some kind of fast one on their readers.  But this kind of unintentional thoughtlessness bugs me.  It’s sloppy thinking and it can, as demonstrated above, be misleading.  To treat Bujold strictly as a romance writer is dicey at best because the Vorkosigan books are space opera–character-driven science fiction adventures.  Sure, some of those adventures include some romance now and then, but.  It’s essential to make note of how the science fiction elements influence the romances: how the Vor culture dictates how Miles acts and Ekaterin responds, or how Kareen feels trapped by societal expectations for her gender, or how Donna Vorrutyer has to take a drastic step in redefining herself in order to circumvent tradition and what effect that has on her romantic future.  You couldn’t take these people out of their world and plunk them down in Regency England or midland America and expect their romances to work because their behavior is conditioned by the culture Bujold creates (likewise, taking Regency characters and parking them on Barrayar?  No—for exactly the same reason.)  I’m trying to say—and probably making a hash out of it—that you cannot separate the wheat from the chaff here.  Bujold herself describes ACC as what happens when you put Regency romance and the science fictional world of Barrayar into a blender and push start.  Miles is who he is because of the world that he grew up in—to pull him and his pursuit of Ekaterin out of that world and isolate them would be like trying to grow a bonsai’d skellytum in my backyard.  The romance in Bujold’s novels is the same way: it grows out of the fictional world she’s built, it’s not there in spite of it.  It’s as much a part of the landscape as the Dendarii mountains, and it’s just as organic to the series.

So yes—A Civil Campaign has romance novel elements in it.  It also has elements of political intrigue, feminist thinking, an examination of gender roles, a consideration of how traditions can be bent toward a more progressive future, and all the elements of a comedy of manners.  But it is still science fiction in the same way that Memory may make use of mystery tropes, but the answer to the puzzles—both the mystery Miles is trying to solve and the mystery of why he pulls one of the most boneheaded moves of all time– is found in the science fictional elements Bujold created.  Without those elements, there’s no sparkle in the diamonds the author’s cut.

This doesn’t mean, incidentally, that I think romance or mystery has no place in these worlds—the absolute opposite is true, in fact, and Bujold herself notes in another Sidelines speech that borrowing those tropes helps place her characters into new and interesting situations.  I think they enhance the worlds created in so many ways, mainly by giving the reader familiar touch points to help them settle into unchartered territory, but also by allowing characters who might otherwise be alien to us to have a handle we can grasp.  They serve as bridges to new, unexplored territories, and there’s no reason you can’t have a mystery or a romance on a foreign world–I’m sure they have problems to solve and people they love just like we do.

To give you another example, Dorothy L. Sayers subtitled her final Peter and Harriet novel, Busman’s Honeymoon, “a love story with detective interruptions.”  But here’s the thing: Peter and Harriet have had a rocky 5 year courtship for a variety of reasons.  When they finally do marry, there are adjustments to be made and they have to make them, to figure out how to live with each other without making the other one a lesser person.  It all starts out as playing houses for them, until a murder interrupts their honeymoon.  And wisely, that’s where Sayers laid her conflict—at the heart of their relationship, their working as a team, their varying attitudes toward their responsibilities for the people involved in the death of a not very likeable man.  Without the mystery, there would be no conflict—they’d just continue to play house.  She uses the genre to get to the very core of her characters, just as Bujold uses her genre to get to the center of all of hers.  But A Civil Campaign is not “A love story with science fiction interruptions” any more than Busman’s Honeymoon is really “a love story with detective interruptions”.   You can’t cherry pick them out of their home genre because that genre is what shapes the romance.

In her Denvention speech, Bujold offers three definitions of genre.  First, it’s “any group of works in close conversation with one another.”  Second, in terms of readers, it’s “a community of taste,” a subject I could probably write paragraphs on but won’t because I’ve already gone on waaaaay too long here.  And lastly, she notes, genre is “a marketing category.”  I agree with all of that.  Again, it’s a handy tool, a way to categorize what we read and to some extent why we read it.  But she also offers a caution, which is what I’m going to end this lengthy screed with, because to me, it perfectly sums up the problems with cherry-picking or trying to cram a book into a category where the fit isn’t quite right:

“The categories are a welcome and necessary convenience, when they aren’t perceived as more than that. But when genre labels in this sense start being used as counters in status games, or become walls dividing readers from books rather than doors leading to them, such labels become toxic.”

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Five Life-Changing Books

February 28, 2013 by 5 Comments

In my previous post, I talked about how my daughter’s Honors Reading List got me thinking about how we define texts these days and how I think that definition has expanded with advances in technology.  You can kind of think of this post as part two of that discussion.  I’m going to talk about what I’d put on a list like that, although I’m not about to list 15 texts, mostly because I’ve got some crud that’s making my head ache.

So, to review: as part of receiving an Honors degree at her college, my daughter has to defend what is known as the Honors Reading List, an annotated list (or narrative essay) that consists of 12-15 texts that demonstrate how she has grown as a critical thinker and as a person during her college career.

The Diary of a Young Girl

The Diary of a Young Girl

I graduated from college 30 years ago this May, and I’ve changed a lot since then.  My list is more The Five Books That Have Changed Me in some way:

1. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl: I first read this when I was around 12, and I reread it to this day, especially when I’m feeling sorry for myself.  This was the first thing, book or otherwise, that made me realize that whatever problems I might think I have, they are nothing compared to what other people endure.  It was the first book that made me realize the world was a much bigger place than my own little corner of it.  And it also made me see that without hope, you’ve got nothing.  Those are all big lessons for a 12 year old girl to learn.

Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers

Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers

I should note that Anne Frank’s diary is also on my daughter’s Honors List, and for exactly the same reasons.

2.  Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers: I first encountered Lord Peter literally at the end of my high school days (I read Murder Must Advertise during my high school graduation) and this novel at a time when I was still struggling with the idea of what I wanted to do with my life.  This is the book that made me want to teach; its idealistic view of academia and the scholarly life had a tremendous impact on me—it was like a siren song.  I quickly learned that the view was idealistic once I actually started teaching, which in some ways made me really resent the book.  But there was a second component to Gaudy Night that really influenced me, and that was the struggle between Peter and Harriet to find a way toward a relationship that enhanced them both and took nothing from either of them.  I’d been through some half-hearted relationships by then and was thinking there was no one out there for me.  Peter and Harriet’s struggles showed me why I shouldn’t settle for just anyone and modeled what a marriage should be—a true partnership of the minds.  I met my husband about a year after I read this.  28 years later I can honestly say that teaching turned out to not be my proper job, really, but my marriage’s success owes a lot to Peter and Harriet’s difficult courtship.

M*A*S*H

M*A*S*H

3. M*A*S*H:  Not the book (which isn’t all that great, to be honest) or the movie (not that I do not love it), but the television series.  There are a number of things about M*A*S*H that stand out to me and for me and helped me become me: its anti-war themes and its refusal to whitewash what war is—a slaughter over a conflict of boundaries or philosophies, all romanticized by tales of glory and bravery—is just one.  If you ever get a chance to watch the episode titled “Sometimes You Hear The Bullet”, you’ll get the idea.  But as M*A*S*H began to last longer than the Korean War did, you got an expansion of that basic theme: the effects of long-term deployment on the unit’s psyches, on their families and the time they can never get back with them, on how the war shaped and changed them.  The most startling transformation was with the Hot Lips character, who starts out as a sex kitten interested only in climbing the military ladder through the only means available to her, sex, and grows into a strong woman not willing to compromise herself even with a general who offers her promotion.  Hot Lips becomes Margaret, proud of her accomplishments and the value she brings to the unit as a nurse and a woman.  It’s quite a transformation, and one I took a great lesson away from.  At a time when feminism was still in its toddler years, Margaret became a great role model for me.  And 30 years after M*A*S*H ended, it still holds up in all of the above ways and more.  It’s still funny, and it’s still relevant to our lives.

The Complete Poems, John Donne

The Complete Poems, John Donne

4. The Complete Poems, John Donne: my first encounters with Donne were not happy ones, and I probably would have happily left him behind when my course in early English lit was over, but I happened to be in choir in college, and our choir director set one of Donne’s Holy Sonnets (#7, “At the round earth’s imagined corners”) to music, and it all suddenly clicked.  I became something of a Donne devotee after that, spending years reading and rereading his works and mining them for meaning.  Through him I learned about balance more than anything: that humor can be used to make a serious point, that the sacred and the profane are not mutually exclusive, that relationships should be complimentary, not struggles.  I read a lot of poetry, and at one time I wrote a great deal of it; many other poets influenced me as a writer, but Donne alone shaped me as a person.  I still read this book on a regular basis—it’s almost a spiritual guide for me at this point.

The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher

The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher

5. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher: Penelope Keeling is such a great character, and I’ll tell you why.  Because she is who she is.  She makes no excuses for who she is.  She does not expect others to be like her, nor does she expect them to like her.  She cannot be bullied or guilted into anything, and she takes responsibility for her actions.  She is kind and generous, even when those around her don’t deserve such things.  She reminds me of how I ought to be when I’m at my worst.  And she taught me that it’s always better to be myself than to be what others want me to be—that that’s where true happiness lies.  She’s not wrong.

I’d love to hear what books shaped you—tell me about them in the comments if you’re so inclined.

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NY Times: Notable books of 2012

December 4, 2012 by 6 Comments
The Scream, Edvard Munch

The Scream, Edvard Munch

When I think of the word notable, I must have a somewhat different view from The New York Times, which recently published its list of 100 notable books for 2012.  Of the 53 books listed under “fiction and poetry”, I have read…zero.  I have heard of one of them–Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home.  And of the 53 authors listed there, I’m familiar with 10 of them, meaning I have either read something by them or have at least heard of them.

Of those 53 books, the only one I’m even remotely interested in reading is Pat Barker’s Toby’s Room, the sequel to Life Class (which was a pretty good book, by the way)—I didn’t realize it was out or I’d have been all over it sooner.  The rest of them sound boring.  I mean, they may not be, don’t get me wrong.  But the write-ups, and in the cases where I was curious enough to read the actual review, didn’t exactly inspire me to either run to my library or look them up on Amazon.  In fact, in a lot of cases, they sounded like they’d be too much work.  I’m kind of at a point in my life where when I read a book, I don’t want to feel like I’m back at college struggling through Last of the Mohicans because someone’s going to give me a test on it and I’d better know that Cora’s sister’s name is Alice and that Chingachgook isn’t a river.

Fifty Shades of Grey

Fifty Shades of Grey

Anyway. All the usual suspects are on that list—Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Chabon, Ian McEwan—but you want to know what I find most notable about the Times’  list?  There isn’t a genre book on it.  Apparently new releases by people like Iain M. Banks, Lois McMaster Bujold and John Scalzi aren’t worthy of inclusion. Nor are books by Charles Todd, Peter Lovesey, or any other writer of detective fiction.  If there’s a romance on there, I don’t see it.  Now some of these books that are listed would possibly qualify as genre—two of them appear to have speculative fiction qualities, and a few of them might qualify as thrillers or mysteries.  But I’d be willing to bet the Times considers them “novels” first and “genre fiction” second.  Because while notable is apparently a fine word to use in The New York Times Book Review, genre appears to be a very dirty word.

So I suppose my question here is—what makes a book “notable” to the NYT Book Review editors?  Do they have a set of criteria that have to be met?  Or is a book about a “worthwhile” subject enough? Does it have to do with sales?  Where someone placed on their bestseller list?  How long they were on it?  Because if that’s the case, where is Fifty Shades of Grey, which as I write this is lounging comfortably in the top 10 for the 38th week (incidentally, one has to go all the way down to #8 to find a “Notable Book of 2012″; the top 7 consist of 4 thrillers and 2 contemporary romances, plus the James book, just saying…).  I wish I had some idea what they based this on, because otherwise I’m left to conclude that it’s based on what someone somewhere finds “literary” or “worthwhile” and I suspect we might disagree about how those words are defined.

I don’t want to be pedantic or stubborn or sound stupid, but I have no idea, based on reading their brief summaries, why most of these books are “notable”. Sure, two of these books in some way manage to invoke Anne Frank (one of them, to be fair, is a collection of short stories, so I’m going to assume that the title of Nathan Englander’s book is meant to suggest larger themes), some of them deal with fictionalized foreign affairs stuff, and there’s the usual proliferation of angsty-sounding middle-aged people longing to be anything but middle-aged, but what’s so notable about those things?  The Casual Vacancy is full of angsty middled-aged people, not to mention angsty teenagers, but it’s not notable.  I’ve read other books that have raised the ghost of Anne Frank that weren’t labeled “notable”, so what, exactly, gets a book on the list?  One conclusion I feel I can draw is that being somehow labeled a “genre” book isn’t going to help, and obviously since I’m not the editor that’s not my call, but it kind of ticks me off because the implication is that genre books or popular fiction aren’t worthy of being deemed “notable” or, gasp, literary.  And that’s a load of horse hockey.

Redshirts, John Scalzi

Redshirts, John Scalzi

Because here’s the thing: I can name you oodles of books that qualify as “classic literature” that are also–wait for it–genre books.  Moby-Dick may be the bane of most English majors’ existences, but it’s also an adventure novel.  Frankenstein is a horror novel.  The Time Machine?  Sci-fi.  Animal Farm?  Fantasy.  The Scarlet Letter?  Romance.  And you can call James Joyce’s Ulysses a lot of things, but I dare you to suggest it’s not “literary”.

I know popular fiction is literary fiction’s unmentionable cousin to some people, but please.  Books like John Scalzi’s Redshirts and Charles Yu’s Sorry Please Thank You: Stories—to name just two examples—have merit besides being popular entertainment.  Take Redshirts, for example.  It’s a funny book.  It’s downright hilarious in spots.  But it also inventively takes the whole Red Shirt trope and turns it inside out, and in the process Scalzi makes some pretty trenchant observations about how often we take basic things in life, not to mention life itself, for granted, while musing on the notion that we may or may not actually be in charge of our own destinies.  Now to me, that’s a worthy theme for a notable novel.  But apparently to the Times, it’s only worthy if it’s delivered in an acceptable format, which would be anything that isn’t a science fiction novel.

Since they’re being cagey with their definition of “notable”,  I’m going to tell you what makes a book “notable” in my world.  It’s a book that has something to say.  Or entertains me in some new and interesting way.  Or takes a stale, over-used idea and turns it on its head.  Or does something unusual with a standard type of character.  Or takes my mind off my troubles.  Or just tells me a really good story or takes me somewhere I’ve never been before in some fashion.  It might be a romance, it might be science fiction, it might be a cozy mystery or a police procedural, and it might even be whatever the hell literary fiction is.

So here, for your entertainment, are Donna’s Notable Books of the Year for 2012:

  • Redshirts, John Scalzi: notable for squeezing a tired trope into a new and interesting shape.  And because it has ice sharks.
  • Sorry Please Thank You: Stories, Charles Yu: notable for being the best collection of short fiction pieces I’ve read in years and years.
  • Libriomancer, Jim C. Hines: notable for a heroine who isn’t built like a coat hanger, for magic without wands, and for boldly refusing to neatly resolve a romantic triangle at the end of the book by suggesting it’s possible to actually love two people at once.
  • The Violinist’s Thumb, Sam Kean: notable for making an incomprehensible subject (genetics and DNA) easily understandable to a layperson.
  • Granddad, There’s a Head on the Beach, Colin Cotterill: notable for an unusual setting and for shedding light on an under-reported subject matter in the US (the abuse of Burmese refugees in Thailand).
  • Emperor Mollusk versus the Sinister Brain, A. Lee Martinez: notable for making me laugh at a time when a good laugh was most definitely something I needed.  Plus it’s a nice homage to pulp sci-fi.
  • The Confession, Charles Todd: notable because Todd is able to continue to make Ian Rutledge fascinating despite the length of this series, and because the plotting in this particular entry is mind-bogglingly good.
  • Live and Let Drood, Simon R. Green: notable for taking a fatigued series and breathing new and unexpected goodness into it.  Also qualifies as just pure entertainment.
  • Cop to Corpse, Peter Lovesey: notable because a new Peter Diamond mystery is always worth noting.
  • Clean, Alex Hughes: notable debut novel set in a future Atlanta society where technology is mistrusted and those with extrasensory powers are mistrusted even more.  Especially notable for its powerful portrayal of addiction and staying clean.  Seriously, pick this up—it’s an awesome book.

 

Clean, Alex Hughes

Clean, Alex Hughes

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Between the Wars

November 6, 2012 by 20 Comments

When I was a junior in high school, and good grief, that was a long time ago now, we did a unit on poetry that most people groaned over. Now, to be fair, the vast majority of my classmates groaned over just about everything, and I suspect our teacher was used to that and just carried on, hoping that one day something would inspire us–or at least make the groaning stop. That day came for me when she handed us typed handouts that contained several poems written by soldiers during or directly after WWI. One of them was “Anthem for Doomed Youth” by Wilfred Owen:

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

In 1977, WWI was long past, and I grew up during a time period that tended to teach American history starting at Christopher Columbus, lingering lovingly over the Revolutionary War, and, if we were lucky, getting past the Civil War and into the Restoration. Thus my fellow classmates and I knew virtually nothing about WWI except the very basics—who fought whom, who won.

That poem struck some chord in me, though. I don’t know why, it just did—lingering feelings about Vietnam, perhaps. I read it over several times, then went to the library and borrowed a book on WWI (that I did not finish because it was very heavy on battles and not so much on causes) and another that was a collection of WWI poetry by English poets.

Thus was born an interest that has never really gone away. Over the years I’ve read more about WWI, the period between the wars, and, to some extent, WWII. My focus has always been on England—logically, American didn’t enter WWI until near the end, and it’s in many ways a forgotten war in this country. Its impact on England was much bigger, and so over the years my interest in that time period has mostly been focused across the pond.

To Serve Them All My Days

To Serve Them All My Days

This is all a very roundabout way of saying that one of the kinds of books I love to read are books set during or between the wars in England. Here are a few of my favorites:

• To Serve Them All My Days, R.F. Delderfield: David Powlett-Jones takes a post in a boys school at the advice of his therapist just before the end of the first World War, the idea being that he’ll be able to help the headmaster out of a jam while taking advantage of the country atmosphere to help his emotional healing. As it turns out, the boys are just as helpful as the country air. Lest you think this sounds somewhat maudlin, it’s not—Delderfield takes in the sweep of the entire generation between the two world wars and discusses a number of events often ignored by other writers who use this setting, including the General Strike and the Great Depression. Davy’s an able leading character, and the women in his life are all remarkable, but the real gem is Ian Howarth, an irascible English master. If I had to make a list of just five books I could take with me when I die, this one would be on there.

• The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Dorothy L. Sayers: All of Sayers’ Wimsey novels are set between the wars, and Peter Wimsey, former Major, Rifle Brigade, opens the series by taking up detective work as a means of keeping his still shattered mind occupied. By the time this, the 4th Wimsey novel, happens, the War is several years past, but when an old general is found dead in a chair at his club after the moment of silence on Remembrance Day, it all comes rushing back to Lord Peter. Sayers, married to a WWI vet herself and familiar with the issues these men faced, uses this particular book to, among other things, explore the different ways veterans were affected by their experiences in the trenches. And the mystery part isn’t bad either.

Coming Home

Coming Home

• Coming Home, Rosamunde Pilcher: Set primarily in Cornwall, this is the story of Judith Dunbar who, at 14, is left behind in boarding school while her mother and sister return to the Far East, where her father works. Judith becomes friends with the daughter of local gentry and is gradually absorbed into their clan. Eventually, WWII breaks out after one last golden summer, and Judith’s life is turned upside down. What I especially like about this book is that Pilcher shows a variety of experiences during the war—Judith’s work in the WRENs, her aunt and uncle’s military family experiences, and the Carey-Lewises coping on the home front and the consequences for British families trapped in the Far East. But mostly, it’s just hard to resist her formula of romance and adventure and family.

• Black Out/All Clear, Connie Willis: these are kind of cheating because they’re actually time travel novels, but they’re oh so good. Three time travelers are trapped during The Blitz. They have to cope. There are also other periods during WWII covered (time travel rocks, seriously)—the ARPs, who are virtually never used in fiction, the Doodlebugs, etc. I adored both of these when they were released and I’ve reread them since. Still lovelovelove them. They’re a bit verbose, but it’s really hard to care. As a bonus, fans of Agatha Christie and Oscar Wilde will love all the references to them.

And, if you’re wondering what started my fascination with this time period, you can always pick up a copy of the book by the guy that started it all for me—The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. Even if you don’t like poetry as a rule, Owen isn’t your typical poet: his work is moving without being overly sentimental. Even 35 years after I first encountered “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, I am still moved by it in ways I cannot describe.

The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen

The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen

Filed Under: General, Historical, Mystery, Romance, Science Fiction Tagged With: , , , ,

You Should Be Reading: Simon R. Green’s Ghost Finders

October 23, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Ghost of a Chance

Ghost of a Chance

Simon R. Green is, of course, the author of the wildly popular and well-regarded Nightside series and the equally popular Secret Histories that features the James Bond parody Eddie Drood.  His most recent entry in the fantasy games is the newer Ghost Finders series, which features three British ghost busters who battle things that go bump in the night.  Ghost Finders has received more mixed reviews than Green’s other work—most of the complaints I’ve seen deal with the lack of character development and repetitive plotting, valid criticisms of a series.  In this case, those criticisms are not exactly on point.  The Ghost Finders books are meant to be cheesy, popcorn fantasy, and in that they succeed.

Anyone looking for something high-minded and literary shouldn’t read these books because there’s absolutely nothing of the sort to be found within their pages. This is straight-up adventure fantasy, with over-the-top plotting, and it’s meant to be fun.  They’re formulaic, to be sure, and the main characters are more caricature than realistic.  If you’re thinking at this point, “Wait.  WHY are you telling me to read something like this?  Where’s the merit?” then I’m going to respond, “The merit is in the utter ridiculousness of it all, that’s where it is.”

I read Ghost of a Chance when it was first released, and my first impression, about 50 pages in, was “He has got to be kidding”, thought in a much more sarcastic tone than I can convey on this page.  By page 100 I realized he was kidding, in a good way, and I settled in to enjoy the ride.  Ghost of a Chance is almost a spoof of traditional horror novels.  I say almost because it gets pretty bloody and ugly at the end, when all the joshing and jokey dialogue suddenly runs up against some seriously nasty stuff.

Ghost of a Smile

Ghost of a Smile

The second entry, Ghost of a Smile, takes a different turn—it’s a bit more sci-fi than horror, and we meet the Mr. Evil of this set piece for the first time here.  By the third entry, Green goes off on yet another tangent—Ghost of a Dream is part Steampunk hat tip (steam trains, mediums, steam-driven science, Victorian villains) and part Nancy Drew mystery, all served up with a heaping helping of a wink and a nudge, as if he’s saying “watch this if you want to have some fun.”

If you’re anything like me, sometimes some cheese just goes down really well.  We have three people here—a technogeek girl named Melody who has nothing lyrical about her, a depressed, neurotic telepath named Happy, and their charismatic leader JC (who always wears flowing white garments and has long hair…)—who are so standard it’s silly.  It also can’t be an accident that they’re written like Scooby Doo characters and placed in similar plots—Green is a much better writer than that.

Ghost of a Dream

Ghost of a Dream

So I am forced to conclude that all of this is deliberate on Green’s part.  And why not?  He’s proven in his previous work that he’s a clever, clever writer.  Once you get past the idea that there should be something serious about all of this, you can see the glee just dripping off the page.  The guy’s having a good time writing these, and it shows.  They’re engaging, you don’t really have to think while you read them, and they have just enough substance to keep them from completely floating away.  In the most recent entry, Ghost of a Dream, for example, the action takes place first at a haunted train station, followed by a haunted theatre.  You kind of expect some old guy to pop up at the end, shaking his fist at “those meddling kids” in a setting like that, but instead what you get is Green’s most interesting creation, The Flesh Undying, an otherworldly creature determined to destroy all of humanity in order to return to its own dimension, and, at the root of it all, a rather serious theme about how dreams of fame and accolades for oneself, when placed above the needs of others, can lead to tragedy.

One other notable characteristic about this series.  In general, stories involving the supernatural or creatures from another dimension tend to imbue their ghosts with monster-like tendencies.  They attack because they can; it’s in their nature to destroy because they are miserable or angry, either at the idea of being dead or at being trapped in a dimension they don’t want to be in.  The chills and horror come from that unpredictable nature, and even the best ghost stories seldom give shape to their spirits beyond a physical manifestation and a goal of scare the crap out of the characters.  Green goes well beyond this.  His ghosts are not all monsters (although some of them most certainly are monstrous), and in a rather amusing bit of irony, are often better developed characters than his trio of heroes.  Some are scary, like The Flesh Undying and his corrupted minions, and others from the series are sweetly human, like Kim, the ghost-girl JC falls in love with.  Still others are invested with a dignity that invokes sympathy in the reader.  The comparison between his ghostly creations and his human ones suggests to me that Green finds the possibilities in those other dimensions more worthy of exploration than the ones we already know in the here and now.  And you know, when you look at it that way, we probably are fairly two dimensional, cardboard-like creatures by comparsion.

I freely admit that this series is not going to work for everyone, and people who are huge fans of his Nightside and Deathstalker series are especially not going to appreciate what he’s doing here.  Plus, Green’s shenanigans can get a bit tedious, and the complaints about repetitive plot bits really are valid—JC, Happy, and Melody are limited in what they can do to bust those ghosts—but as something to amuse yourself with on a rainy Sunday, or to cleanse your palate after something a little more serious, you can do worse.  Make yourself a big bowl of popcorn, put up your feet, and go adventuring with JC, Melody, and Happy.  Have a little fun.

 

 

My copies of Ghost of a Chance and Ghost of a Dream were generously provided by the publisher during my tenure at RT Book Reviews and initially reviewed for that publication.

Filed Under: Fantasy Tagged With: , , ,

National Banned Book Week, 2012

October 4, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Walter Cronkite once said, “Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.”

This week (Sept. 30-Oct.6) is the 30th anniversary of National Banned Book Week.

It drives me nuts that I even have to write that. Seriously.

Here we are in 2012, and we’re still challenging and banning books from libraries and schools. Every time I think about it, this little ball of rage forms in my chest.

The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games

Let me be clear about something: I am all about freedom. That would be freedom to decide what your own child gets to read or doesn’t get to read. It’s not my call to tell any parent that they should let their child read something they think is inappropriate. If someone thinks Harry Potter is the devil incarnate, then they should go right ahead and think that and not let their kids read the books. I will defend anyone’s right to believe that and to exert authority over the reading material that ends up in their home and in their child’s hands.

I’d appreciate it, though, if they’d offer that same courtesy to other people. If I don’t get to tell you what you or your child should or should not be reading, you don’t get to do that to me. So don’t call my local library and say “I demand you remove The Hunger Games trilogy from the shelves (see here for an explanation) just because it gave your middle school kid nightmares. I’m an adult, and I might want to read it myself. And I assure you, I can cope with a nightmare or two.

When my daughter was in high school, there was the usual kerfuffle at another local school about Catcher in the Rye, one of those books that seems to always appear in somewhere near the top of the most challenged books lists. In some ways, I was amused that a book could cause such a stink just because it’s got some less than savory language in it. I mean, chances are her special snowflake has heard worse than a few F-Bombs while riding the school bus or walking down the hall between classes or in the locker room at the gym. Reading an interview with the parent in question in my local paper, though, really ticked me off. The parent in question hadn’t ever read the book. But she’d “heard” that it had swearing in it. She didn’t want her son to read a book that had swearing in it. There was no attempt made to look at what value the book might have, or what her son might learn from it. It had swearing in it. It must be trash.

Oy. That really did bug me—she didn’t know what the book was about, she just knew she didn’t want her kid reading it. Well, okay. Why not go to your local library, check out the book, and see what it’s all about before raising a fuss about something?

(As a side note, I’d also like to say that I really think that by the time any child hits the age of sixteen, that child is really a fledgling adult and should be granted the privilege of making choices about their reading material themselves, but this isn’t a parenting blog. But I’m much more inclined toward a sympathetic viewpoint regarding parental control over books with younger children than with teenagers. Just so you know where I stand on that…)

To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird

I’m always astounded by what appears on the banned book lists and the reasons given for the challenges (Incidentally, you can view the most challenged books list for last year here). Some perennial challenges include the Harry Potter books (glorifies witchcraft), Little House on the Prairie (depicts racism against Native Americans), Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird (depict racism against African Americans), and recently, The Hunger Games (too violent, anti-family). And of course, Catcher in the Rye.

Books do not exist in a vacuum, nor are they written in one. Huck Finn and Mockingbird were written at a time in our history when people of color were treated appallingly in this country. They are accurate to the time periods they were set in, and they are meant to teach their readers something about human behavior. They don’t condone racism and violence—they speak out against it. How do we expect our children to learn from our own mistakes throughout history if we won’t let them see the effect those mistakes had on other human beings? Likewise, Laura Ingalls Wilder is writing a somewhat sanitized view of her own life, recording the history of the times she grew up in as part of the great western migration. That history included prejudice against Native Americans. Should she be untruthful about that? Pretend that part of our history didn’t exist? Should we pretend that the violence in The Hunger Games isn’t a reflection of our contemporary culture, which is violent, and which does trend toward sensationalism?

I think people have a right to restrict what their children are exposed to, and naturally I think people have a right to read whatever they want. I mean, honestly, it’s not my call, and while I never stopped my own child from reading anything she wanted to read, that’s my kid. If someone doesn’t want their teenaged son to read Catcher in the Rye, then they absolutely have the right to request an alternate title for their child if it’s a class assignment, or to have their child return a book they think is unsuitable to the library. But I wish that before they’d call and complain to their local schools and libraries and ask that titles they disapprove of be completely removed that they’d think about the opportunities they are depriving their children of—the chance to talk to their parents, and with their teachers and peers, about upsetting or controversial subjects. It’s an opportunity to initiate a real, useful dialogue about volatile issues—about bullying, gender issues, racism, whatever.

They’re also preventing them from exploring a world and viewpoints contrary to the ones they’re currently exposed to. If we don’t challenge our children to think for themselves, how on earth will they ever see past the smoke and the mirrors that is contemporary politics? How will they learn what is fact and what is fiction? How will they learn to dream, to aspire to greatness, to hope for better things? How will they learn to decide what’s right and what’s wrong? How will they learn to be productive citizens of a nation founded on the idea of personal liberty if one of the first examples they get is a parent trying to take that personal liberty away from someone else? Because it must be said: when someone asks that a book be removed from a public or school library/reading list, they are tacitly saying that no one else has a right to decide what they should and should not read for themselves.

And that’s just wrong.

Filed Under: Opinion Tagged With: ,