2006 Books Read – #12

House of Smoke by JF Freedman

When we were visiting the parental units earlier this summer, they had a box of books by the door ready to go out. Mom asked if I was interested in anything. I poked through the box and grabbed a Paul Theroux novel. She encouraged me to take this one as well.

This is a okay detective story, but nothing special. I kept getting ahead of the plot, which… I’m not sure why that is. I never used to be much of a plot-guesser. Maybe I’ve just read too many detective novels and I know all the elements.

The lead is a female ex-cop turned PI with Issues (her ex beat her, she’s lost custody of her kids). My main quibble is that it was obvious to me that this was a male writer writing a female character. He kept having her do either a) things guys think all women do (like wear sexy pink panties under her police uniform. WTF?) or b) things guys want women to do (like the requisite f/f “but I’m not a lesbian!” “me neither!” sex scene). Also, she inevitably had to be rescued by a dude. Arggh.

So yeah. Somewhat exasperating, but an acceptable beach read. Totally the kind of thing you’d pick up in the little new/used bookstore just off Main Street in the resort town you’re spending your vacation in to read at the beach. You know what I’m talking about. Which, come to think of it, is probably exactly where it originated 😉

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

We went to Seattle!

First stop: Wallingford (tee hee).

At Gas Works Park, we watched people sailing on Lake Union:

Discovered the Ballard Locks (Hiram M. Chittenden Locks) are an endless source of entertainment on a sunny Sunday afternoon:

The Space Needle may be a cliche destination, but you can’t argue with the views:

Pike Place Market: like Granville Island, but bigger and less yuppified. The fish-tossing is a bit silly, but the Market Spice tea is yum!

2006 Books Read – #11

Girlbomb: A Halfway Homeless Memoir by Janice Erlbaum

This came to me as a “just because” gift from Eden. Isn’t she sweet? 😉 Okay, thoughtful. That’s better. Wouldn’t want to ruin her rep!

No expectations this time around; I knew nothing about the book except for what was on the book jacket.

Like Running With Scissors, Girlbomb is a memoir of the author’s teen years. Like Augusten Burroughs, Erlbaum ends up almost-but-not-quite homeless as a result of poor parenting. In her case, she leaves home (and ends up in a shelter) when her mother gets back together with an abusive husband.

Erlbaum, like Burroughs, has a good sense of humor about her experience. Unlike Burroughs, who quit attending school somewhere around the 6th grade, no matter how chaotic her “home” life got, Erlbaum kept going to school and ultimately graduated. I suppose some people will find this incredible, but it made sense to me. I think it goes to what I was saying in my RWS review: of course, high school is inane, but it does provide order / structure, which would be comforting if the rest of your life is in chaos.

Ultimately, I found Girlbomb a more relatable memoir than RWS. Although the events portrayed were more extreme than than anything I personally experienced, they also had the ring of familiarity. I sympathized with the author’s actions and motivations, rather than being frustrated by them. And the people, while not always likable, at least had some redeeming qualities—more “normal” human fallibility, less outright crazy.

2006 Books Read – #10

Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs

Disclaimer: It’s quite possible that six years of reading submissions has left me fed up with Outrageous Antics as plot devices. Yes, I know, this is a memoir.

This was another book I expected to like more than I did. I mean, I liked it, but I didn’t love it. Maybe there was too much build-up (I read somewhere that this & Dry were Anderson Cooper’s favorite books). I don’t know. It wasn’t as funny as I expected. It was more like, enough already, pull yourselves together, people. I mean, I went through one year (I was 11) when I was kind of messy—I think it was more of an experiment than anything—letting the clothes pile up on the second bed and stuff like that. But it always felt so good to clean it up. I mean, maybe that’s why I’d let things slide a bit, because putting them back in order was so satisfying.

Anyhow, point: I’m pretty sure if I’d been stuck living with this incredibly annoying family (OMG, soooo annoying! Not wacky at all. Just irritating. Trying way too hard to Be Eccentric, IMO. I wanted to give them all a good smack.), I’d have come to the end of my rope with the unhygienic living conditions damn quick and would have been doing dishes, laundry, and home repairs in order to maintain my own sanity. I certainly couldn’t have just rolled with it. I’d have lived in a tent in the backyard if necessary.

So essentially I read this twitching with frustration at the inertia.

Anyhow. Props to Burroughs for not taking the “woe is me” road (which he certainly could have just with his insane mother and ass of a father). His take is matter-of-fact, even lighthearted (probably the reason the book has been called funny, but it’s not really the same thing). Burroughs seems to be saying (to use the cliche du jour): it is what it is. No after-school special syrupy life lessons here. That was refreshing.

2006 Books Read – #9

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

I’d been wanting to read this since I first heard about it. And it was good: a well-written, entertaining story. But at the same time, it wasn’t quite as satisfying as I expected—I think because, although it’s ostensibly a first-person narrative, I felt detached from the narrator.

Partly the detachment stems from the fact that the story is told in flashback, and since a good deal of it the narrator couldn’t realistically know (the history of his parents & grandparents), he has to be making it up based on what he does know. So you have a doubly fictional narrative, if that makes sense.

Also, the narrator is 41 as he’s telling the story, but the story essentially ends when he’s a teenager—aside from a brief “and this is what’s happened since then” bit at the end. So there’s that lack of immediacy too.

I do think that this detachment was intentional, that the story was meant to have a sort of clinical feel to it, and not just in the overtly with the biology “lessons,” but also in the overall treatment. And I do think the tone suited the narrator. Still…

The tone almost seemed at odd with the frothy multi-generational saga and many over-the-top (more farcical than melodramatic) plot developments. Almost like some dude in a lab coat narrating in a monotone while wacky hijinx ensue on the other side of a one-way window. (Which is not all that far off from what actually happens…)

And yet, I can’t say that this clash wasn’t intentional. It’s quite possible that it was. I’m just not sure that it entirely works.

Then again, it could be that I’m just leaning toward more focused stories these days and this is a little too “epic” for my current taste.

Toasted Cheese

Toasted Cheese 6:3 is up!

2006 Books Read – #7 & #8

East of Eden & Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters by John Steinbeck

I’d read EoE before, but it was a long time ago, summer of ’92, I think. I picked up an already cheap Penguin at Book Warehouse for $1 because the back cover had been slashed when they opened the box. Anyhow, it was long enough that, while I remembered the general gist of the story, I was vague on the details. I’d been wanting to re-read it for a while, partly because I had the book playing a role in one of my stories and I wanted to make sure it would fit. And then last summer I found a copy of JoaN at The Book Shop and grabbed it, knowing immediately that reading them together would be the perfect way to re-visit EoE.

Of course, part of EoE is a modern version of Cain & Abel, but I’d forgotten how much of Steinbeck’s own family history was in it—if indeed I actually recognized it as such the first time I read it. There are really two separate story threads—the Trasks & the Hamiltons. And JoaN makes it clear that EoE was written in part as a letter to Steinbeck’s sons. Would a book like this get published today? (Would it have been published then if Steinbeck hadn’t already made a name for himself?) On one hand, the Hamilton part is superfluous—you’d still have a complete story without it (as in the movie). On the other hand, they’re the reason he’s telling the story. So.

I read the two books alternately, so I kept at approximately the same point in both throughout. “Approximately” because there were obviously changes between the first draft of EoE and the published version that meant the two books didn’t line up exactly.

Steinbeck wrote the journal on the left-hand pages of a notebook and the novel on the right-hand pages. The journal, written as a letter to his editor, was his warm-up for the day. One thing I never figured out— he writes throughout of having the pages typed and also sent to NY, to his editor. So was he ripping them out of the notebook at the end of each day? That doesn’t sound right. Maybe he just handed the notebook over to the typist, she typed fast so he could have it back by the next morning, and they sent the typed pages to the editor.

I was surprised by how fast he wrote this, his longest novel. Essentially the first draft was written Feb – Oct 1951. Nine months! So you’d think he was this perfect writer who sat down every day and wrote like a machine, right? Wrong. He was a huge procrastinator. For example, he wrote in pencil (crazy!) and he was completely anal-retentive about his pencils. They had to be a certain kind, he spent time sharpening them at the beginning of the day so he wouldn’t have to stop while writing, gave them to his kids when they got too short, etc.

And his journals were filled with same crap that goes through my head before I start writing. Which, honestly, is really comforting. There is, in fact, a point to the “pointless” blathering we writers do before getting down to “real” writing. The mundanity of life is important and so is explaining to yourself what you want to with your project. Of course, the flip side is that you actually do have to start working on your real project at some point.

As for the Steinbeck’s epic, I suppose I am a true “Cal” in that, not only do I sympathize with the cynical Cal, I can’t even imagine anyone identifying with the angelic Aron. But I suppose someone must.

2006 Books Read – #6

The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown

Confession.

I read The Da Vinci Code.

Here’s how it happened. We were at my parents’ place back in June and they mentioned that they’d seen the movie and asked if I’d read the book. I said no and made my standard joke about probably being the only person on the planet who hadn’t read it.

Then: “We have it,” Dad said. “You can borrow it.”

I was cornered. I couldn’t use the excuse that Dan Brown didn’t need any more money. I was uncomfortably overcome with the feeling that I was being a terrible literary snob by not reading it.

So I read it.

I hear Brown teaches creative writing. I hope he’s a “do as I say, not as I do” type, because he has numerous annoying habits including, but not limited to: overuse of exclamation points, overuse of italics, extremely short chapters, an almost complete reliance on “as you know, Bob” dialogue, and a need to end every chapter with a “cliffhanger.” I wasn’t thrilled with the “Matlock”-style confession from the implausible villain, either.

I do enjoy a good page-turner. But this book… yawn. I was ahead of the characters in figuring out a lot of the clues (zzz), found the shocking revelations not all that shocking (powerful men revised history to suit their own purposes? No!), and thought the ending was incredibly lame: after all his conspiracy-theorizing, he lets the church off the hook, pins the whole thing on rogue academic (WTF?) and goes “haha!” (use best Nelson* voice) at his readers and declines reveal the Big Secret (probably because he couldn’t come up with anything good enough) that his characters had spent the entire book searching for.

But here’s what really bugged the crap out of me: there are precisely two female characters in the entire story, and one of them doesn’t come into play until late in the book. (Oh, wait, there was another bit player who was female. But she was just there long enough for a male character to kill her. Typical.) So mostly one. And that female character is referred to as “Sophie,” (despite the fact she’s an agent of the French police) while the male characters are all referred to by their last names. Arghhh!!! He couldn’t call her by her last name too? That was too great a leap? Really?

And, of course, there are the usual cliches: male lead protects female lead, male/female leads fall in love at the end (but by the next book in the series, he’ll have moved on to someone new and she’ll never be heard from again, natch). Now granted, Brown’s chauvinism is of the ingrained sort epidemic in our society, but given that the major theme of the book was the “sacred feminine,” you’d think that someone (his editor, if not he himself) would have taken pains to work on the more obvious indicators.

*from The Simpsons

Irony

So the other night I’m culling submissions. I’m about halfway through this month’s subs and at that point, I’ve added about two things to my “to be considered” folder (everything else is a “no”). I take a break and check Bloglines and see this Miss Snark post: Pay vs unpaid mag markets.

My question is, if you are seeking an agent and all of your publishing credits are from non-paying “amateur” publications, does this impress an agent? Or do you look for publication in paying markets only?

I thought Miss Snark’s answer was excellent, in particular these two points:

I don’t pay much attention to the rate structure because I know a LOT of small literary journals that are labors of love don’t pay much besides copies of the mag and a pub credit.

and

Getting paid isn’t the point here. Having someone who is not your mom say your work doesn’t suck is what reassures me.

Yes! Exactly! How many times have I said this? The key to credibility and professionalism in writing is not money; it’s a proper editorial process.

But, of course, then there were doofy comments like this:

I have to disagree somewhat. Many submissions come to me yammering on about the millions of places the author’s been published, none of which I have EVER heard of: … If anything, this takes away from the credibility of the author, in my mind.

Give me a break. Just because you personally haven’t heard of a publication doesn’t mean it isn’t a good one. It would be impossible for any one person to have heard of every publication in the whole world.

But this was the comment that made me laugh out loud, considering what I was doing:

Seems to me that any never-heard-of online-only “publication” is not worth submitting to. There is little incentive for the online pub to turn anyone away (it’s essentially free to publish everything), and lots of incentive to have more and more and more on their site (think of google). … Of course, over time, the better ones stop being never-heard-of.

I ask: What incentive do I/we have to publish crap? I don’t want crappy writing associated with my name. I’d die of embarrassment. Besides, what would be the point? If your goal is maximizing Google hits, there are easier ways than running a literary journal.

No publication starts out as prestigious. Every publication was once unknown. It takes time to build a reputation. If every writer felt the way this one does (“Oh, I’m not going to submit there; I’ve never heard of it.”), no new publication would ever succeed.

Five years ago TC was a “never-heard-of online-only ‘publication’.”

From the beginning, we made our editorial policy clear: quality, not quantity. Writers took a chance on us. I remember vividly the first time something exceptional landed in our submissions box. Was this for us? Really? Wow! That was the moment I first felt that TC was going to be something special. Without those writers submitting to us in the early days, TC would have withered and died. Instead, it has flourished. I hope that the writers we have published are as proud of their TC credit as I have been to publish their work.