2012 Reading Challenge
2012 Reading challenge, book 4: On Writing
February 8, 2012
The name “Stephen King” has by now become a byword for “successful author.” He’s one of those authors, along with J.K. Rowling, that are always cited as the exception to the rule that most writers won’t be able to live solely off the fruits of their writing. He’s ubiquitous. In light of both this and my interest in fantasy and sci-fi, which often encroaches upon the borders of horror fiction, it might surprise you to learn that I didn’t read my first Stephen King book until nearly 4 years ago – that book was Insomnia and even he admits it was a muddled novel. So, what do I think of a book about writing, written by one of the titans of the industry? Let’s find out.
Title: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (10th Anniversary Edition)
Author: Stephen King
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Rating: 5 out of 5
About the book: Part memoir and part instructional manual, On Writing ties together King’s career as an author with more personal facets of his life. In an unusual move, the instructions about writing – arguably the biggest draw – are placed towards the end of the book, and On Writing instead devotes its first half to King’s childhood, adolescence, and attempts to break into the publishing world.
What I liked: From the start of this book, I felt that I was in the presence of someone who made me comfortable and welcome. More than that even, I felt a tremendous sense of self-assurance when I read it. King’s been there before, knows the pitfalls, and is happy to steer you around his memories with confidence. Every time I finished a section or chapter in this book, I told myself, “OK, it’s time to put the book down now.” And then, of their own accord, my eyes would snake down or over to the next page, and I would be held fast once again. This was, literally, the first book of the year that I could Just. Not. Put. Down.
Throughout the book, I got the sense that although writing was something he put effort into, he didn’t fall into the pretentious Byronic-hero hole that so many other authors, both beginning and established, fall victim to. (It’s a hole that I’m only now learning how to crawl out of.) Instead, he made it feel as natural, physical, and vital as chopping wood. If you have enough wood, your house stays warm. If you crank out enough words, you stay warm.
A lot of the time, I judge a book by how vividly I recall the images later, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t expunge from my mind the scene that King describes of having an ear infection as a child – one so intense that his eardrums had to be repeatedly lanced with a needle to drain the pus. I have tried and tried, with no avail, to stop imagining the looming needle coming closer to perforate my own eardrums. That is strong writing.
In the instructional section on writing, King unpacks the metaphor of a “writers’ toolbox” and runs with it. The advice inside is fairly commonplace – know your grammar, remove adverbs, etc – but they’re relayed in such a matter-of-fact manner that they acquire additional heft. He also provides an extremely useful glimpse into the revision process by including a “before and after” sample of his own writing, and then going step by step through the changes he made to tighten up his prose. Revision is an extremely important part of the writing process, but seldom is it actually demonstrated instead of discussed.
Besides all that, look at the cover. It’s got a Corgi on it! I love Corgis. Knowing that Stephen King owns them just makes him even more awesome in my book.
What I disliked: The length – it’s too short! I could easily have read another 200 pages. In particular, the move away from the memoir section was too abrupt, as it stopped nearly right after the acquisition of Carrie, his debut novel. King did write about his substance abuse problems, but I would have appreciated greater insight on what led him down that path and why he felt he needed to self-medicate. Yes, it’s not a topic that really lends itself to a discussion of the writing craft, but it is something that a lot of writers end up dealing with anyways.
The verdict: I originally gave this book 4 out of 5 stars on Goodreads. Then I started reading Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, and that book paled in comparison to this one so much that I retroactively bumped it up another star. Whenever I read this book, I felt I was in good hands. What better can be said about an author than that?
Next up: Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott.
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Book statistics, genre love, and genre hate
January 28, 2012
Last week I started an additional side project related to my reading efforts. Spurred on by an article in Salon talking about gender bias in book reviews, I have decided to keep a spreadsheet of my own reading efforts with the intention to derive some nice statistics at the end of the year. Will I end up giving print books higher ratings, on average, than eBooks? What about female authors versus male ones? There are so many questions to ask and answers to seek, and so many ways from which to view this information, that this project is impossible to resist.
Regardless of this, one thing has become obvious despite the small pool of books I’ve read so far this year: I really don’t like crime/detective fiction.
My chief complaints about both Zoo City and Empire State (oddly enough, both published by Angry Robot Books) had to do with their attempts to blend sci-fi/fantasy story elements with crime/detective story elements. The combination didn’t work for me, and in Empire State in particular, I found that the author’s application of sci-fi elements was used to wallpaper over some glaring inconsistencies.
This raises an interesting question, then: do I dislike the crime genre as a whole, the mixing of genres, or just the way those two books handled said mixing? Well, now that I’ve got my handy-dandy spreadsheet, the question will be a little easier to answer come December 2012, won’t it? Assuming, that is, that we don’t blow up in some Mayan calendrical apocalypse.
Anyways.
I read Old City Hall near the end of 2010 and really enjoyed it. I enjoyed it so much, in fact, that when I went to Word on the Street in September 2011 and told the author, Robert Rotenberg, how much – oh my god, can I tell you what an intriguing character Albert Fernandez is? – he gave me an autographed copy of the book for free.
OCH is about a crime, and one of the main characters is a police detective. Does the book fall, then, under the rubric of crime fiction? Or rather, since many of its most important events take place in a courtroom, should it be classified as a legal thriller? Where does one draw the line dividing genres? In this case, is there even a line to be drawn? I have no idea. All I know is that I found the book’s analysis of coutroom behaviour fascinating, and wanted even more of it.
On top of that, I also enjoyed the movie Children of Men when I saw it, and that was based on a book by noted detective fiction writer P.D. James. Would I like her Adam Dalgleish books just as much if I tried one? I don’t know. Part of me doesn’t want to read mysteries because my knowledge of the genre is so poor that it will feel like work – the literary equivalent of eating broccoli (make sure to read at least 5-8 servings per year!). However, another part of me knows that I’m missing out on some amazing fiction because of my own wariness.
This is another issue that I hope tracking my reading on a spreadsheet will be able to rectify: If I can analyze my reading habits and figure out what patterns and holes there are in said habits, I’ll be closer to improving them and to becoming an even better editor.
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2012 Reading challenge, book 3: Empire State
January 25, 2012
Title: Empire State
Author: Adam Christopher
Publisher: Angry Robot Books
Rating: 2 out of 5
Well, it was bound to happen – I came across a book that I didn’t like. Empire State by Adam Christopher will no doubt please some readers, but I am not one of them.
About the book: It’s New York in the 1930′s, and a catastrophic fight between two superhero-like figures has inadvertently caused a rift in space-time. This rift begets a parallel version of New York known as the Empire State. The Empire State is grey, gloomy, rainy, and isolated, perpetually dealing with rations due to a never-ending war with a nameless, faceless Enemy.
However, private detective Rad Bradbury has stumbled into what could be a lucrative case – a girl whose disappearance the police won’t investigate. Things become even more puzzling when her body turns up and the police still refuse to get involved. Combine this with an unusual occurence at the docks – a ship has returned from a fight with the Enemy for the first time ever – and Rad finds out that he’s stumbled upon the most important case of his career: one that could lead to the destruction of the Empire State itself.
Note: The spoilers start here.
What I liked: The sci-fi elements were intriguing, but the only standout passage I can recall is the sequence where Rad, our protagonist, comes face-to-face with the fissure connecting New York to the Empire State. The interdimensional rift and its surrounding mechanical paraphernalia were the only part in the book where I felt awe and wonder at the proceedings. Everything else was a wash.
What I disliked: Here’s the “everything else” I’m talking about. There were so many problems that I had with this book that it’s hard to enumerate them all. Take it as a very telling sign that it took me a full week to read this book, and almost another full week to write this review. However, in the interest of being thorough, I will go through some of the problems I perceived:
- The rift-causing cataclysmic fight between the two superheroes occurred at the very beginning of the book, but the one person who saw one of the superheroes survive is mentioned in the first two chapters and then dropped completely (as is all mention of the original NYC) for the following 10 or so chapters. Talk about whiplash.
- It is revealed that the Empire State occupies a pocket universe. Fair enough. But on top of that, the pocket universe and the rift that connects it to the original New York already existed in unrealized form, and it was already occupied by the faceless force that the Empire State calls the Enemy. It turns out that the Enemy is somehow both a reflection of both New York and the Empire State. Because what the hell, why have a single parallel universe when you can have two, right?
- All of the people in the Empire State are copies of people in New York, except for the prime villain behind it all. Instead, both he and his double occupy the Empire State within the same body, and the hosting body manifests split personalities. How is this possible, you ask? Why, because the villain (an influential judge in New York) somehow managed to enter the pocket universe before the Empire State was even created, and seize control of it at its moment of birth. No explanation is given for how he was able to find the rift and not be subsumed by the Enemy in the intervening period.
- The rift (also known as the Fissure) has time dilation properties. This provides a rather handy excuse for people who wander into it to go missing for 19 years. Despite all this, there are people on the New York side of the Fissure who can predict the events of the Empire State timeline; this makes it incredibly easy for people to pop in and out of the action when a daring rescue is most convenient.
The case that Rad is asked to solve goes off the rails immediately and becomes tied to something much larger – the potential destruction of Empire State as other characters attempt to merge it back into the prime reality. So far, so good. But the final 50 pages are non-stop action of a bewildering sort, as everyone and everything moves, people get repeatedly injured, and characters change allegiances like a person with OCD washes hands (Captain Carson, I’m looking at you).
Speaking of flip-flopping, it’s never truly clear what will happen if the Fissure is tampered with. Some characters believe it will result in the two realities merging. Others believe that it will result in annihilation – a meeting of matter and antimatter writ large. Of course, when the Fissure actually is tampered with, it results in the tenuous connection between the two realities being strengthened, not diminished. This, along with almost all of the other phenomena the Fissure exhibits, is casually explained by the excuse that the Fissure is so unusual, almost anything is possible.
The verdict: This novel was a strange and frustrating beast. The noir/crime elements of the story– missing girls, corpses, down-on-their-luck detectives, crusading journalists, and lots of both booze and beatings – were so haphazardly blended with the later sci-fi elements that I was left scratching my head.
I gave this book 2 out of 5 stars on Goodreads. This is the lowest my GR ratings tend to go – I like to believe that I’d be smart enough to ditch any book deserving of a 1-star rating before I finished reading it. However, this book frustrated me because a lot of the time, it felt like the author was breaking the rules of his world whenever he thought it convenient – it felt like I was reading a less egregious version of the book described in this article from the Onion. I really wanted to like this book considering all of the effort publisher has spent building buzz around it, but I just couldn’t overlook its flaws.
Next up: On Writing by Stephen King
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2012 Reading challenge, book 2: How to Win Friends and Influence People
January 20, 2012
Title: How to Win Friends and Influence People
Author: Dale Carnegie
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Rating: 3 out of 5
My 2012 reading has continued apace. Here are my thoughts on the first non-fiction book I read this year, which I finished over a week ago.
About the book: This was one of the books, if not the book, that launched the self-help genre. The title pretty much says it all. However, the subject matter is deeper than the title suggests, as it also talks about effective leadership skills, and talks about interpersonal skills in greater context.
What I liked: I liked the sense of Dale Carnegie’s voice that shone through the text. Yes, the tone is a tad fusty (the book itself is over 75 years old), but I got a more authentic sense of the author’s voice here than I did when reading other famous self-help books like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People or Getting Things Done.
Those other books sounded fake because the anecdotes used to illustrate key concepts were so heavily paraphrased that they ended up sounding like the authors themselves. They also packed a lot of fluff – GTD, in particular, could have been just as useful at half the length. In contrast, How to Win’s chapters were succinct, and the letters and anecdotes that Carnegie quoted really did sound like they were written by other people.
I also liked that this book had such practical information; it contained little jargon or technical-sounding acronyms. Instead, there was just good, old-fashioned psychological insight, the most important of which can be boiled down into five words: people like to feel important.
What I disliked: Yes, the book explicitly states on the cover that it’s all about how to influence people, but I was still uncomfortable with some of the pieces of advice offered – they felt downright manipulative. On top of that, I’m unsure whether the now-dated references to celebrities and captains of industry detract from, or add to, the book’s charm.
The verdict: I liked it, and felt that a lot of the book’s suggestions were practical and easy to implement. It says a lot of true things about human nature, even if the book’s method of attack is flowery and old-fashioned.
Next up: Empire State, by Adam Christopher.
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2012 Reading challenge, book 1: Zoo City
January 15, 2012
One of my goals for the year is to read at least 40 books (at least 25 of which must be fantasy or sci-fi), either on paper or in digital format. So far, I’m off to a good start, as I’ve already completed two books and am partway through a third. After that, there are at least three more books (all non-fiction, all about the process of writing) that I want to read. With that in mind, I’m going to posting reviews of my 2012 books. So here goes: my thoughts on the first book I read this year.
Title: Zoo City
Author: Lauren Beukes
Publisher: Angry Robot Books
Rating: 3 out of 5
The plot: Zinzi December is a disgraced pop journalist with a Sloth on her shoulder who pays off the debts she incurred as a junkie by writing 419 scam emails. Like all residents of “Zoo City,” a slum in Johannesburg, she’s been “animalled” – that is, she’s done something so awful that she’s now been spiritually conjoined with an animal familiar.
Like all “zoos,” her animal has also given her a unique power, or mashavi. Normally, while Zinzi uses her mashavi of finding lost things to earn some money on the side, she refuses to find lost people. However, the shady associates of a music producer have asked her to find a missing teeny-bop starlet, and the payment for doing so is too great to turn down. When she digs deeper into the girl’s disappearance, she gets tangled up in a world of drugs, lies, and black magic…
What I liked: I loved the merging of fantasy aspects with real world ones. No one knows what first caused the mysterious “zoo plague,” but interstitial chapters within the book flesh out the world of Zoo City by providing snippets of academic and pop culture material written about the “zoo” phenomenon. Cleverly, one of those snippets contains a citation to an academic article reinterpreting Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy in light of the zoo plague.
On top of that, the setting of Johannesburg is both familiar (in that it’s wonderfully textured and realized) and strange (in that the only other major spec-fic story I can think of set in Johannesburg is District 9). Finally, Zinzi December is a marvelous character. She’s smart, tough, self-serving, and able to think on her feet. She’s hard to like but easy to admire, and I take my hat off to Lauren Beukes for writing a main character that is so complicated. I wouldn’t want Zinzi to be my friend, but I would want her to have my back.
What I disliked: I feel that the book’s chief misstep was the mystery itself. Of course, as with many crime/detective stories, nothing is as it seems and the people asking Zinzi to take on the job have ulterior motives.
Ultimately, the resolution of the story – involving murders, kidnappings, blackmail, and a heck of a lot of black magic – seems too bloated and frenetic to appreciate. Although I’ve muddled my way through some of the unspoken motives of the perpetrators, now that I’ve finished the book I feel that there are a lot of plot holes I still can’t patch over.
The verdict: I liked it, but not as much as I had hoped to. I came to this book with high expectations based on some interviews with the author that I listened to and on the book’s surprise win of the Arthur C. Clarke Award. However, I’ve never been a big fan of detective fiction, and the book’s melding of it with speculative fiction/magical realism left an odd taste in my mouth. I wanted to see more of the slums of Johannesburg, hear more South African slang, and read more about how zoo people have become a new global underclass. I also wanted to see more of Zinzi’s backstory, which I think has been left too much to the imagination. Instead, I got a detective story mixed into all of it, and it dampened my enjoyment of the book.
Next up: How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie.
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