Category Archives: Book reviews

Book reviews, Social comment

Eat, pray, love?

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This book is not the sort of travel book that draws me in, but I ended up starting to read it anyway while unpacking our library (a lengthy, back-wrenching task at our house). It is by Elizabeth Gilbert, and in case one can’t read the stuff on the cover telling one that they made it into a movie, there’s a picture of some actress on the cover. I know I’ve seen her but I don’t recognize her name. Erin Brocovic, maybe.

Eat, Pray, Love. Three things a lot of us do every day without high drama, though it’s a more promising title than Pee, Swear, Groan.

Not sure what makes me recoil from books whose titles sound like idylls. I am sure that Frances Mayes is a delightful lady. Even so, when I wrote a manuscript about travel in Ireland, my working title parodied that of Under the Tuscan Sun. It all sounds so effete, so fragile, so froufrou, so gritless. I am far too affected by names in this regard. I battle this weakness; in fact, I forced myself to read Mayes’ book simply out of respect for what I was going to parody. And it was about like I thought it was: another book about fixing up old Mediterranean properties and cooking food in them. Not a thing in the world against an author who seems like a very nice lady that can probably spend an hour preparing an artichoke in just this special way she learned from an old grocer named Beppe so that it tastes like ambrosia delivered by angels and served by cherubs, but if I’m going to read about idyllic Tuscany, my kind of travel book is Dario Castagno’s Too Much Tuscan Sun, a Sienese tour guide writing about how ridiculous some of his clients are. The highlight of the dude’s life is when his social fraternity wins an annual horse race for the first time in decades. (Imagine: “Hi, my name is Joe, and I am a Ravens fan whose team won the Super Bowl last year.”) He actually puts that in the blurb; how much class does that require? A true character, and if you think about it, a much sharper cultural portrait of his region than you imagined you might get.

So I’m not much impressed by ‘now a motion picture!’ or an idyllic title everyone’s heard of, much less a picture of a Serbian actress. Most of my travel library, most of you haven’t heard of. Imagine someone who has combed used bookstores for ten years, and in each one, has bought only the single most unique, interesting travel biography. Paul Theroux? I read a couple and liked them well enough, but he’s nowhere near as fun as Tim Cahill. Bruce Chatwin? Couldn’t tell you. I read one and nothing about it stands out in my memory, which is not true of the incredibly ballsy and laconic Tim Severin. Redmond O’Hanlon? Another one whose titles turn me off, this time for pretension. ‘No Mercy.’ ‘In Trouble Again.’ Not only do those tell me nothing, I can’t help thinking the author considers himself a vast badass. Maybe he does. Maybe he is. If so, I won’t need the title to tell me that. A real travel badass is Tony Horwitz throwing up in a bucket on a tall ship, or the Australian woman who went on a camel trip and just stopped wearing clothes at times. She has the guts to describe how she just let her menstrual blood seep down her bare thighs, out in the middle of nowhere. I forget her name, but I’m not done with my coffee and I can’t remember it offhand; I’m hiding out here from the twelfth annual 9/11 garment-rending, sort of hunkered down for the day. A search for “Australian camel travel woman” should fetch her.

At least I don’t judge the book by a cover. If Mayes had pictured a stack of hockey pucks on her cover, or a shot of herself in a bikini, it wouldn’t have changed a thing for me. Titles affect me abnormally.

Of course, you can’t review a book based on reading a quarter of it, nor merely its title, and you can’t hold against it that it was popular enough to be a movie. I fought off all my biases and started reading, because I needed something to read, and this was something I hadn’t read. So far, it’s basically: woman who serially gives too much until she can give no more, then gets all depressed about it and finally decides to spend a year doing something good and selfish for once as therapy. It’s a much better Lifetime plot than most of what they show, that I’ll grant you, because to me Lifetime movies are a steady stream of shows about women being hurt, abused, scared, cheated and killed. I’m not sure how that helps anyone to watch, but evidently those are very popular themes with some women, or there wouldn’t be a movie channel devoted to them. Then again, I’m not sure how an annual self-laceration helps a whole country, but evidently once again I’m in the minority there as well.

I’m sure the events in the book are very interesting and formative to the author, and probably to people who have been in similar situations and wished they could just hare off somewhere else for a year. To me, maybe not so much. It does beat hell out of the rest of what I’m reading around the net this morning.

Book reviews

Why you missed out on Hornblower, and need to fix it

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The original Star Trek was described as ‘Hornblower in space.’ Do you understand what that means? If not, a great experience awaits you, one I had long ago. You missed it because, in a world of endcaps and trash, C.S. Forester is often forgotten. The closest you ever got to a view of the age of fighting sail was Russell Crowe’s utterly un-naval, chin-challenged persona, which you were led to imagine authentic because the effects were so impressive and realistic-looking. For my money, Master & Commander was to Hornblower as an average drag performer is to Sandra Bullock. As in, don’t even. You cannot ‘pull it off.’

You’ll like the process of fixing your Hornblower deprivation. Think of it as a dental procedure in which you feel no pain and vague arousal, and can eat solid food that very night.

The English are by nature a seafaring people. In the UK, the Royal Navy is the senior service. Royal Navy captains and admirals were expected to win, whatever the odds. These people produced Admiral Sir John Jervis, who risked the fate of an empire at 1:2 odds at Cape St. Vincent; for that he was Lord St. Vincent. They produced Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, pivotal commodore at Copenhagen and victor of Trafalgar. They produced Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, later Earl Jellicoe, victor of Jutland. They produced Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, later Viscount Cunningham, who covered the Commonwealth evacuation at Sphakia, Crete at great risk, even as a world away, my mother was being born in Colorado, with the words: “It takes three years to build a ship; it takes three centuries to build a tradition.” If I have not convinced you that the Royal Navy comes to do battle, nothing will.

Want to feel it? Read C.S. Forester’s Hornblower novels. Not kidding.

They came out in non-chrono order. Begin with Mr. Midshipman Hornblower. (Sorry, but WordPress’s link adding is currently broken. Try http://www.amazon.com/Mr-Midshipman-Hornblower-Saga/dp/0316289124/ .) Should be easy enough from there. What you gain:

  • Obvious and wondrous knowledge of the age of sail. The art of sailing was heart and soul of capable naval maneuver in those days, and you will walk away understanding much about what sea captains faced in the Napoleonic era.
  • A great and protracted adventure and romance story spanning the Pacific coast, Caribbean, eastern Mediterranean and Baltic.
  • A savagely self-deprecating Royal Navy officer who never accepted less than anyone’s best, especially his own.
  • Often hilarious reading of the best kind: that which avoids pushing it, and lets the reader find the comedy.
  • A picture of the times, credible and textured. Excellent political and historical detail, nestled perfectly in the times.
  • While not many women in the story, one key female character is very strong and inspirational.

Flaws? I think Hornblower’s escapes and linguistics a bit convenient, especially his quick mastery of two romance languages despite terminal tone-deafness. However, my rule is that fiction authors get one area in which they bend credulity a bit. Forester uses this token on language knowledge and absorption in his protagonist. Okay, fair enough. Given that, the escapes are less suspending of our disbelief. Artful.

The whole series is artful. It is also fantastic international adventure, with some warfare but not at all constant. Some of the language reflects prejudices of the era, and there’s nothing for that. Some feel that such things must be excised. Others, among them myself, believe that to excise them is selective denial. If you take the racial slurs out of Huckleberry Finn, for example, you take away the authenticity. We should not try to pretend our forebears were better than that, and lived by modern standards of our day which would have shocked them. Yeah, there’s one jarring moment where Hornblower yells at his crew for a feeble effort, and says that he’s seen it done better by ‘Portuguese niggers.’ Dislike button. But if you’d read Mark Twain in spite of that, you’d read this in spite of that, I should hope. Plus, if I recall, that’s the only use of that term in all the series. Use of deprecatory slang for adversaries (Spaniards, French) is far more common, and is part of military culture. Unless we’re going to denigrate the WWII generation for all the times they said ‘Krauts,’ ‘Jerries,’ ‘Huns’ and so on. No takers? Didn’t think so.

It is also great military fiction. To write top-grade military (including naval) fiction, the author must have a firm grasp of military culture: the varied attitudes and competencies that make up an armed force. This will mean some crazies, some saints, some spuds, some plodders, some fools, some cowards, and mostly pretty competent people doing the best they can. It will mean cumbersome regulations and constant worry about career impairment. It will mean good people sometimes getting a bohica, and bad people sometimes getting benefits they do not deserve.

I read a couple of the Bolitho novels by Douglas Reeman (as Alexander Kent), and one other in the same genre whose name now escapes me. None compared to Forester in authenticity, storytelling or flavor.

The books came out in a strange order, beginning in the middle, but are best read in the order of Hornblower’s career. The only weird one is Hornblower During the Crisis, which is an unfinished novel with some previously published stories included. I’d save that one for last, and accept the jumping around that is in it. The rest of the books, if read in story order rather than order of release, will tell the full tale of our hero’s career.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

The worst thing about book reviewing

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…is a bad book by a good guy.

I mostly don’t donate free content to Amazon any more, and when I do, there’s usually a motive beyond the desire to share my opinion. There are many reasons why, from the basic dumbness of the rating system to Amazon’s whoring of the content to not donating work to for-profit enterprises. In the past I’ve talked about how not to solicit book reviews. That’s another reason why: most of the books whose authors wish me to review them, I don’t care to read. Either their book is in a genre I’ve never shown that I cared about, or they want me to review galleys or e-copies, or they write badly enough in the letter to make me decline. After you get one bite of a rotten egg, after all, do you keep eating?

Now and then, an author does it all right. I had such a situation just before we moved to Idaho. Author seemed mature, pleasant and sincere, pitched the review correctly. I really don’t like thriller stories that much, but I’ve reviewed enough Laurell K. Hamilton books that if he imagined I liked thriller/mystery, it only meant he’d done his homework. He offered a complimentary print review copy, as authors (or publishers’ reps) must. They simply must, for it’s the only compensation the reviewer gets in return for committing to read a book which may be agony to finish, donating hours of time to a tragic cause while looking wistfully at the pile titled ‘Books To Read Which I Know Are Much Better Than This.’ The only way he could have hit the ball harder was for the subject to just happen to line up more with my preferences; say, a travel biography. If there were a book I’d take a chance on, this author’s would be the one.

So I did. My custom is that when I’m sent a review copy, I drop any other unpaid work in its tracks and get to reading. The author deserves that courtesy. I let the author know the book (actually two) had arrived, grabbed a diet cola and sat down to read.

The ideal result for all is that I love the book. I don’t want to shamble through 300 pages of suffering. I also don’t want to write a review that leaves blisters. I don’t want to write a Gentleman’s C review (a three-star review given out of mercy to a one-star book). If the author is famous, or has committed offenses against historical writing, I don’t one bit mind hammering the stake, decapitating the corpse, sewing holy wafers into the fangy mouth, and chucking the head into a river. That sort of author will probably never see the review, and if he or she does, probably won’t care. S/he will probably do another line, say ‘those who can’t do, pan those who can do’ and tell Araceli to do a better job on the kitchen. To an aspiring author, though, a very articulate but harsh review is a serious problem.

Most people work more on the principle of suggestion than they like to admit. In this context, if Joe Reviewer highlights a dozen glaring weaknesses in a book, anyone who reads that review and then the book is likely to watch for those weaknesses. And to post ‘me too.’ The whole picture can unravel. One could always take the ‘tough luck, be a big boy/girl’ approach, write a brutally honest and balanced review, and let the chips fall. And if I took reviewing more seriously than is the case, I might. In fact, I really don’t even give a damn about Amazon reviews. Too many fools, too much gang-rating, and too many people with no taste. They are the worst metric going that does the most needless damage to good books and promotes bad books. Yes, the people have spoken, but the people are stupid. This is why McDonald’s is more popular than Fuddrucker’s, and why democracy breaks. It follows that, not wanting to suffer though a bad book, I try to avoid reviewing them. Now and then I get surprised in a bad way, as in the case under review.

I’d expected to yawn over the story but not the writing, yet it was the other way around. The author had a great story concept, but the presentation was pure tyro. If he engaged an editor, he or she needs to be fired. Typos, typesetting mistakes, bad character introductions, perspective all over the place, forgetting what the reader knows and does not, dialogue not very credible, passive voice everywhere, inconsistencies of tense. If I had been asked to edit it, the author would have paid what I charge for a complete rewrite. And yet the fundamental tale was excellent, with plenty of surprises and good discipline in pace of revelation. Even as I groaned over the flaws, it held my interest to the very last in a genre I barely like.

What do you do in that case? Hammer the stake? Deceive the public? Welsh on your commitment?

Sure, you have every moral right to post a completely honest review, and in the take-your-quarts big boy/girl school of professional writing (where being mean is a way some people like to show off their cred, and where being arrogant and smug is taken by so many as a sign of authorial coolness), you would. You’d also hurt a human being. Remember, I care minimally about my rep as an Amazon reviewer. Amazon and its reader base don’t pay me enough to care. The only pay I got was a copy of a book, and I’m not generally inclined to turn around and hurt people who paid me…if I can help it. I also would rather not leave behind me a trail of slain dreams. To get me to play Simon Cowell, they have to up their bid. A lot.

When I realized that an honest review would skewer the book, I wrote to the author and said so. I offered him three choices:

  1. The big boy/girl method, posted with no holds barred.
  2. Same review, but sent to him privately.
  3. A more informal yet candid critique, without the writing-for-public-consumption gloss.

What I did not tell him was that 3) would be far and away the most painless and helpful for both of us. Happily, that’s what he chose anyway. If I have to say it, I did not pitch my own services as a book mechanic. Now that would be sleazy: lurk for writers needing help, lure them in, beat down their will by panning their writing, then offer to save them for a fee. Marketing in disguise; the car dealership service department where you take your vehicle in for an oil change, and they ‘find’ $2000 worth of stuff to fix (that would cost $750 at a real mechanic’s shop, except the real mechanic would tell you that $250 would cover what you actually need). The HVAC company in Kennewick that came out to diagnose a minor noise, kept breaking my heater a little worse with each visit, then wanted to sell me a new one. I despise it and I’m not going to do it. I was approached as a reviewer, and should stick to that.

He took the critique well, considering I was telling him he couldn’t write. What he does with that is up to him. It’s the worst thing about book reviewing: trying to remain halfway considerate without sacrificing honesty. And it’s why I decline most requests for reviews. I am in this situation too often for my liking, I end up doing lots of extra work, and there’s always the chance I’ll be punished for it anyway (making me wish I’d just adopted the big boy/girl approach).

Book reviews

Bad history

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The current state of mass-market historical writing is bad.

What do you expect when you pick up a book about the Ottoman Empire, or women in war, or the history of the United States? At a minimum, I expect that the author knows that history and omits no credible evidence. I expect that details that are in question will be addressed with solid research, or at least some reasonable, clearly labeled speculation. I expect the author to make clear his or her own obvious hobbyhorses, a few favorite points which the book will seek to prove, and probably spend too much time on. Ideally those might not be, but most historians have them, and as long as they are easily spotted, we can make up our own minds. I expect the author not to lie.

Those are the basics, the point of entry, the minimum acceptable standard. If you can’t count on the author to know the history, after all, you can’t trust the analysis. If the author doesn’t know what is controversial, s/he is unqualified to address the controversy. If the author works in his or her hobbyhorses too subtly and pervasively, the whole book gets slanted. If the author would lie–including leaving out well-known evidence–the book has zero credibility.

Can I say that older history books met the above standards better than those today? Not with confidence. Our lives bias us. Can I say that I’ve read some of the worst garbage of my life in recent years? Why, yes. Yes, I can. I’ll give you a couple of poster children.

A favorite U.S. history in leftish circles, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States purports to tell our history with greater regard for the average person’s experiences and plights than, say, your standard indoctrinary high school history book, which is focused mostly on major figures and nation-shaping developments. Sounds like a worthy idea–and Zinn botches it. In numerous cases, he completely mischaracterizes events; an example is how he presents King Philip’s War as a war of extermination against the Native Americans. Even Indian historians, whom one might imagine a little prone to understandable bias on the subject, know and will tell you: that’s false. It was the Indians, sick of encroachment, gearing up to kick some colonial ass. And while the Indians eventually lost, they did inflict tremendous damage on the New England colonies. The problem is obvious: even when the truth dictates otherwise, Zinn is here to paint colonialism in the most hostile color he can arrange, facts be damned. He doesn’t need to do that. All sources make clear enough that the colonists had mistreated and aggravated the Indians plenty enough to convince them that this was a war for their own survival. A fair mind could hardly blame them for striking while they still had anyone or anything left to strike with. The truth makes the colonial era’s treatment of Native Americans bad enough; there’s no need to invent reasons. And when Zinn reaches his own lifetime, he goes completely off the reservation. He’s not even trying to tell meaningful history any more. The last portion appears to be nothing more than his frothy rant at every injustice he saw or learned of. Again, he didn’t need to go overboard. In many cases–especially the minority experience–the truth would have done. This is terrible. If you read this book, on balance, you absorb more misrepresentations than you gain new, reliable information. You’re supposed to know more truths after you read a history book, not have lingering falsehoods to disprove.

Just as bad is Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen’s A Patriot’s History of the United States. This actively pains me. Allen was my undergraduate advisor, my TA in my first history class, the man into whose office I walked and said, “Hi, Mike, I want to be a history major.” He told me what I needed to do, shook my hand and welcomed me to a discipline that has become a lifelong passion. I remember him as a capable educator and a very good guy, and I am sure he is still both. Then how could he attach his name to this book, and call it history? I still cannot know. Of course, the hobbyhorse is evident in the title, as with Zinn; you expect a certain degree of associated slant, but you don’t think they’ll fail to tell you the details of what really happened. Let’s look again at King Philip’s War, per capita perhaps the bloodiest in our history. We are told it happened, and resulted in a staggering defeat for the Native Americans. No more. That section is focused mostly on the militia system, with its strengths and weaknesses–which is a perfectly reasonable subject on its face. But when you omit to tell about the actual events, you’re writing incomplete history. That’s unacceptable enough. What is even less acceptable is that virtually this whole book is as over the top to the right as Zinn is to the left. Time and again we are served up light fare on events, but heavy integration into modern right-wing politics. The entire book reads as an indoctrination as to why one should vote Republican, and why anyone who doesn’t must surely hate his or her own country. If you want to write about that, fine–but that’s not history. It’s political indoctrination, as unappetizing as the Zinn version.

Again, I’m not claiming either book’s title lied in the qualifier, at least not too much. ‘People’s’ and ‘Patriot’s’ give at least some clue. I’m claiming both lied in the word ‘history.’ A history survey must tell the history. If you want to spin it, as long as you told it in good faith, well, that’s kind of regrettable but is human nature. Here is the real problem: people who haven’t studied a lot of history are going to fall for this stuff in many cases. Written by a college professor? They’ll tend to believe it. Sure, s/he might slant it, but surely wouldn’t lie, or skip, or misrepresent. Surely. They just wouldn’t do that, right?

They would. They do.

It really is buyer beware when it comes to published history.

How do you guard against this, if you aren’t that informed about the subject matter (which might be why you wanted to read a book)? It’s all about critical thinking. If you’re comfortable with that, you can skip the rest. If not: I read reviews, especially the critical ones. A key to the study of history is to assess credibility, decide what and who to believe. While some reviewers’ articulacy makes them look more credible than they are, most will reveal their biases and levels of understanding. Read enough reviews, and you’ll find some with the ring of truth that touch on the same issues other credible reviewers mention. This practice will serve you well deciding how much of what you read you can believe.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

Fetishism in writing

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Here’s an area for improvement by literary critics as well as authors: fetishism. Not only do authors need to rein it in, but reviewers need to start calling it out.

Fetishism occurs when the author displays a pattern of preoccupation with some otherwise normally hidden or forbidden aspect of life. There are reasons the author would not want to do that:

Privacy. Maybe W.E.B. Griffin really shouldn’t have so openly advertised his fascination with the young, virtuous, occupied-with-life virgin who suddenly presents the story’s rake with her ‘pearl of great price’ (WEB’s favorite term), then immediately drops everything else in life and now desires to play house and begin spawning infants. What does that say about him? His perception of women? I wouldn’t wish to speculate too much. However, if that were my kink, I’d sure as hell be unwilling to broadcast it on the endcaps. To give Griffin credit, he has seemingly heard the critics and taken action. (To give him discredit, he’s now mostly letting his son ride his coattails, and the son is not the author the father is. Brian Herbert, take note.)

Predictability. When I pick up a J.T. Edson western, I know for sure that I’ll get some British culture superimposed on the old American West, and that’s one thing. It’s minor, but it’s part of his approach, and kind of novel to be on the receiving side of cultural ignorance. I also know that, before a certain point in the book, two women will start a physical fight. And yes, bodices/blouses/etc. will be ripped. His women will care more for baring each others’ bouncy dairy tackle than for kicking their adversaries’ butts. Not only does it give us a not-necessarily-wanted view into what sharpens J.T.’s pencil, it’s predictable. Thus, when you come to it, unless that’s your own personal kink and the whole reason you bought the book, perhaps you just roll your eyes and scan through it, eager to get back to the story. Or, if it offends you–and I can think of women who would get real tired of reading a man’s descriptions of relatively uncommon and unrealistic female behavior–you might just stop buying the books. Once you are onto an author’s pet themes, and you can tell in advance a certain amount of what you are going to get, some of the discovery is certainly pre-done.

Boredom. The trouble with any fetish, in writing or acted out for real, is keeping it fresh. Suppose you continue writing. You’ve decided you don’t need editors. Your friend’s critique just didn’t grasp what was cool about your style, so what does she know anyway? And throughout all your writing, you keep coming back to the trope of restraint. Your reader knows, because you write your most evocative wording when you take her into the mind of someone who cannot move. The problem is not just that every reader with a sixth grade diploma knows that you’re drawing deep upon your own fantasies. The problem is: how do you keep tying them up tighter, more elaborately, to keep it interesting for the fans? There is a creeping human tendency to freshen by intensity. Your reader expects some new kink every time, and is bored with the old tired ones. If you keep going this direction, you’ll contract what I call Hamilton’s Syndrome. It may bring you wealth, but it won’t create good books.

Hamilton’s Syndrome is my newly coined term for fetishism ratcheted up to the point where it overshadows the story. When Hamilton first began the Anita Blake series, she was brilliant. An appealing heroine, edgy motif, interesting and credible internal conflict for the protagonist–a heel-wearing, Schnauzerlike tough gal seeking to hold onto her humanity and beliefs. The fetishism was always around the edges of the story, but was sustainable; at least, I thought so. Then, some seven books in, Hamilton cut her heroine loose from humanity, slipped all those anchor cables. Eventually the story became secondary; the main focus was on monster hurts and wounds and problems, all of which could only be remedied by increasingly kinky and elaborate forms of sex with Anita. I recall one book in which the initial monster sex crisis took up the first third of the volume. Oh, and lust became a physical hunger for her, the fifth food group. The story is no longer even the point; the question posed by Hamilton’s Syndrome is, how can the kink-o-meter continue to ratchet up? How long can Hamilton top herself?

In my own writing, I watch for fetishism with great care. For one thing, I am intensely private. Consider that since this blog began, I have experienced serious life and health problems involving crippling pain, trauma and serious psychological shock and distress from which it may take me years, even the rest of my life, to recover. I never shared them here. Some may have leaked through, but not on purpose. It’s not that I’m ashamed; it’s that I believe I’m here to entertain, provoke thought, educate, and otherwise be fun to read. I am not here to back up the personal issues dump truck on you, fishing for support. Were I diagnosed with terminal cancer (for the record, I am not), I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t blog about it. This blog is part of my work (which is why, with regret, I can’t post the video of some Texans eating surströmming–too crude for work). I go other places to pour out my real troubles. Even alluding to them in this paragraph is an uncommon show of vulnerability for me. Well, I don’t think many writers compartmentalize as well, and some I believe lack compartments to begin with: a filing cabinet consisting of a large heap of papers.

So I guess the question the writer faces with fetishism is at least twofold: just how far are you willing to invite random people to analyze your mind (as I have done to Hamilton…she asked for it), and how are you going to keep people from either being bored with you, or poking fun at your blatant fetish? The ‘I’m a badass bitch, screw everyone, I do it my way, if you don’t like me and my writing, go to hell’ reflex answer is, of course: “Who cares what they think? I am after all a complete badass! And I post at least three times a day on Facebook trying to convince myself of it!” Well, here’s the problem: if you are writing to get paid, people have to want to buy your book. Thus, while you can’t let yourself obsess about what everyone thinks, you cannot ignore and dismiss your reader’s preference. Yeah, if you get paid, you do care what your reader thinks–and you aren’t such a badass.

Such are the paths down which fetishism leads in writing. Have I convinced you that you really would rather not be there? I would be especially glad for commentary on this topic. Am I treating fetishism too harshly? Is there an effective, sustainable way to work it in? We’re always told to ‘be ourselves,’ and here I am challenging that to a degree. Can you counter my stance?

Book reviews

Current read: _The Kugler Dynasty_ by Studio Dongo

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This is the intro to a science fiction series about life afloat in pyramidal, functionally unsinkable cities. I liked it better than I’d imagined I might.

The author, whose real name is rather more conventional than ‘Studio Dongo,’ is known for a dry and slightly serrated sense of humor. Thus, I spent a lot of the story in one of those moments: “Okay, I think there is some deliberate gonzo comedy sprinkled here, but I’m hesitant to come out and call it that, because it might just be something else that I’m not a clever enough reader to pick up, so I’d better not pop off.” The diverse subplots dovetail well, and in a far less formulaic way than your typically predictable Dean Koontz endcap thriller (that you’d swear was outlined like a basketball tournament bracket).

About halfway through, the tale started to pick up for me. By three-quarters, I was excited to see where it would go. Other than the expected dovetailing (without which we’d be opening a can of ‘huh?’), I was left in enough doubt of what-happens-next to hold my interest. I like it a lot when books do that, and it’s not as common as one might wish. By the end, I was considering ordering the next book just because such good groundwork (open sea?) was laid for a lot of potentially interesting and exciting story possibilities.

I’d call it a four-star book that would rate a fifth star except for some portions with too much tell rather than show. That’s my own personal bugaboo: the first time I see “She felt…”, I’m now hyper-alert for such things for the duration of the read. It says a lot for the story that I liked it well overall, in spite of this aspect pushing one of my buttons.

Available in hardcopy at the link at top, or in e-version.

Book reviews, Scumbag studies

Recent read: The Rajneesh Chronicles

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By Win McCormack, The Rajneesh Chronicles proposes to tell the story of an Indian cult’s takeover of a tiny Oregon town, the shenanigans committed by the guru’s minions, their biological terror activity and their downfall.

This interests me because my home residence was rather close to Wasco County, Oregon. I played high school sports against teams from Wasco County, shopped there, drove there for such fun as existed. The bioterror attacks harmed people I knew and liked, folk who were just going to The Dalles for dinner (typically a substandard prospect). The short version: in 1981, a guru named Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh got out of India before the state turned the heat up to frying temperature, and decided to park his movement in Antelope, Oregon. Antelope only had about forty residents, its county of Wasco having about 20-25,000 residents. The Rajneeshees bought up a distressed ranch near Antelope, started building a compound, brought in over a thousand of their own people, took over Antelope by sheer electoral numbers, renamed it Rajneeshpuram, and tried to take over the government of Wasco Country. That’s where the bioterror attack came in–it was meant to keep voters from the polls. They had homebrew salmonella, and they hosed it onto public salad bars. It sickened about 750 people, with roughly forty hospitalized (a very heavy load for the local hospital). With bad timing, my family could have been among them.

The Rajneeshes were pretty sinister; imagine one of those breakaway pseudo-Mormon polygamist communities with their total control over sworn local police and politics, but larger. Supposedly, this was all about enlightenment, peace, love and such. Given how efficient the Rajneesh leaders were at milking money out of new arrivals, and how many expensive cars Rajneesh owned, looks to me like it was a big con game dressed up in cute red robes. Eventually the state of Oregon caught on, the Federal government got involved, and both started leaning on the Rajneeshees. Rajneesh himself was deported, some of his lieutenants did jail time, and Antelope got its town back–and for the first time in its history, it might actually interest the outside world. (Antelope is remote as hell.  It’s about 85 miles south of The Dalles, and the only thing nearby that would attract traffic is a resort on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation.) The nearest city is Madras, OR (which has decided not to rename itself Chennai).

Here’s what’s awful about this book. On its face, it can’t lose. It was assembled by a reporter who spent a lot of time busting out Rajneeshee shenanigans, back in the day. He was perfectly positioned to write a definitive history of the group, its activities, its people (especially the colorful and combative Sheela Silverman, aka Ma Anand Sheela), the whole story. It ought to hit the story into the nosebleed seats.

It does not. The editor/author just gathered up a bunch of old magazine articles from the Rajneesh years (many of them his own), arranged them in chrono order, added some pics, and called it a book. What is wrong with this? Think of what goes into a magazine article. An article cannot assume the reader’s familiarity with the previous events. It has to re-introduce the persons involved, define again esoteric terms, recap the story to date, and so on. In every article. Every time. What’s more, except for the front and back material, that is all the reader will receive. No ongoing analysis and interpretation, no insertion of new facts come to light in the intervening quarter century, no fullness of story. If you had an old stack of the magazines in which the articles originally appeared, you’d already have the book.

This I do not like. Every columnist, blogger or journalist who just gathers up a pile of old stuff and slaps it together into a book has cheated, because any hosehead can do that. A book meant to tell the story of an event (such as calling it ‘Chronicles’) should do just that, relating the tale in light of all relevant knowledge past and present. This could have been an excellent study in religious cults, their tendency to exaggerate leaders’ virtues and faults, and how people got sucked in. It could have been very much worth the money, especially in these days in which the threat of biological terror is taken very seriously. We could even have learned which restaurants were attacked, how it was carried out, more about what went on inside the cult, what its current ‘Osho’ diaspora thinks of it now. (They aren’t hard to find. I dated one for a year.) We could have heard stories from those who got sick.

Nope. That would be work. Other than the intro material, it’s just a bunch of old magazine articles. The source material has been mistaken for the book.

What a cheesy way to wring some modern profit from a bunch of outdated work–for which one was already paid once.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

Should authors respond to negative reviews?

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In my opinion, the answer is a universal and thundrous ‘never!’ Don’t apologize because they say they wasted their money, don’t gripe that they weren’t fair, don’t bitch that they were mean. Don’t do anything. Say nothing. Shut up. I think it’s fine to respond to an exceptionally positive review, or respond to a question, but when they are critical, say not one word. You cannot win. You can only look worse.

You will look hypersensitive, thus showing other detractors that your goat is available for the getting. You will look like your work hasn’t been very successful, because you feel a negative review is impacting you. You will look petty, because you are bickering. And if you’re not careful, you may look stupid, because you fail to get the point everyone else got.

While new authors are usually the most sensitive about reviews, some damned famous ones can get very worked up about an adverse review. One may remember Laurell K. Hamilton finally breaking down and venting Dear Negative Reader, which came to define a trope. She’s never heard the end of that piece, because it conveyed to the public where she was sensitive.

The reasons not to crab back at critical reviews divide into two groups:

Professional:

  • Maybe they were actually being merciful, and you’ll convince them to stop that and say what they really thought.
  • You look petty and small-time, with so little real work to do that you have time to argue with reviewers.
  • Your book must not be selling very well if you’re afraid of a bad review.

Personal:

  • It shows the weak spot in your armor of public presence.
  • It then gives more people a good reason to want to find that weak spot and use it to torment you.
  • It opens you up to a debate you cannot win even if you’re right, stepping onto a level playing field where people won’t hesitate to gang up on you.

As you might guess, this came up due to an author’s mistake. A little over seven years ago, I wrote the following review of Joann Kuzma Deveny’s 99 Ways to Make a Flight Attendant Fly–Off the Handle: A Guide for the Novice or Oblivious Air Traveler.

Before I paid $13 for this I should have looked at the length. My mistake. There isn’t a whole heck of a lot of content here compared to other recent flight attendant books out there, and that content can be boiled down to a few salient points of guidance for travelers:

1) Have no emotions except gratitude to your sainted flight attendants for choosing to serve you. Strive for your own form of sainthood, which amounts to never having needs or feelings except the foregoing.

2) You are not here to get from point A to point B. You are here to monitor your every action to improve the flight attendants’ convenience. Now you know.

3) Flight attendants basically do not like you, so watch it, lest you receive the Dreaded Eye Roll and the Stony Ignore.

There. I saved you $13. Too bad the author doesn’t give us any real reason to want to make her life easier, as she doesn’t seem to like us much to begin with. Well, I didn’t like her co-workers much either to begin with, based on experience, but I’ve always tried to keep an open mind. I still will, but no thanks to Deveny.

That’s where the book fails those it purports to help: it fails to create any sense of community between flight attendant and passenger. Both are victims: the victims of airline deregulation, cramped planes, crappy food and miserable overall conditions. The two most aggrieved groups involved in the airline industry are natural allies. A balanced book that promoted improved relations between the two would be a real service. Instead, into the hands of already angry and frustrated passengers is dropped a treatise on how to spread that annoyance around to the nearest targets–with no incentive offered as to why they should not. So I’ll pick up some slack here.

Fellow fliers, please try and treat your flight crew with courteous respect, for everyone’s benefit, in spite of the fact that they rate you slightly above a used diaper. In so doing, you’ll rise above the mean-spirited ranting that fills this book. Focus your anger where it is deserved: the airline industry executives and the immense bonuses they get, all because flight attendants and passengers are the ones jointly taking a hosing.

As for me, I want to fly even less now than I did before I read it. I wonder if it’s occurred to the author that this sentiment isn’t really going to promote greater job security in her field.

As cold as that seems, the truth was colder. If I’d meant to hurt her, I’d have estimated the word count, to show people how little actual content they were buying. I’d have pointed out how many copies were for sale for $0.01 on the secondary market. I’d have given her one star (Amazon’s lowest rating) instead of two. I’d have used much harsher verbiage. It needed a critical review, but I had no reason to want to make sure it stung. Had I lacked all empathy for flight attendants, I wouldn’t have pleaded with the public to treat them decently in spite of the book.

Today, a mere seven years later, she commented on the review to complain:

Please look further to 99 Ways… eleven 4 & 5 star reviews. The overall rating is 4 out of 5, with only 2 people, with no sense of humor, in the minority. (2 to 11)

She left a similar gripe on the other critical review today. Here’s what’s comical there: she’d left a similar gripe on that one two years ago. Evidently she didn’t even read her own comment. The best argument she could come up with was, in digested form: ‘ignore this humorless minority opinion, other people love it.’

Salient point: before she griped, she looked okay. She had a couple of negative reviews, a much greater number of positive ones, and the reader was left to judge who to believe–the majority or the minority. (As I see it, I did my part. If they still want to buy it, it’s not my money, so I am not invested and don’t care.) Now she looks bad. Now every reader knows that she will be easily stung. If some real jerk wants to, he or she can use that to make the author’s life very unhappy. Not the sort of thing I (or any person with a life) would do, but the Internet has every kind of person, including obsessive psychotic bullies.

Will I do as I told her, and go back to re-read and edit the review so as to do a more thorough job of shooting the book full of holes? Nah, I doubt it. I was mainly warning her what a dumb thing she’d done. I’m not as sensitive about such things. She doesn’t like my review, well, fine; if I had cobbled together a minimal amount of mediocre content into a $13 book, and someone called me on it, that’s not what I’d want to hear either because that speaks to the book being a bad value. If it really is a bad value, of course that’s the last thing she wants people to grasp, because they will buy one of the 33 used copies available from $0.01 (at which price point it’s an okay value). I responded mainly out of kindness, to teach her a bit of a lesson, which she really does not deserve of me.

Then that thought morphed, and I realized that the entire subject might make an interesting blog entry. There is a perspective from the author’s side, but the great majority of talking about writing is done purely from a reader’s perspective; maybe readers are interested in the author’s side. One of the first things an author needs is to learn how to behave. If Deveny now pulls up this post on search, and leaves a snide comment, that’ll be proof she didn’t get what I was trying to convey to her, but I won’t stop her from compounding the mistake. Nor will I be angry. This is writing for public consumption, and not everyone will like or value it, and some of them will say so. I’ll deal with it and move on.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

Current non-read: The Land of the Painful Shame

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Okay, the real title is The Land of Painted Caves by Jean M. Auel. I am going to link you straight to the reviews, just so that I’ll never stand accused of encouraging anyone to buy this.

Like many of you, I loved Clan of the Cave Bear. For its flaws, it presented prehistoric people as…people. Good, bad and somewhere in between. It painted credible cultures based upon significant archaeological research. It took some liberties with SoD (that’s a cool kids’ acronym I learned at a Radcon panel about Suspension of Disbelief), but none so grotesque as to detract from a fun story. Over the years, it turned into Cro-Magnoporn, getting progressively worse. Lots of tasting her ‘tangy salt’ (I always wondered if Jondalar actually brought a primitive herbal salt shaker to his oral sex sessions) and homing in on her ‘nodule.’ (Anyone ever heard a woman scream for some hot nodule attention?) Nodules and prehistoric condiments aside, it was never this bad.

One might also consider what it means for me to write this. I may be only the bathroom attendant in the writers’ club (‘here’s your towel, sir…ah, very generous, sir, thank you kindly’), but my badge at least gets me in the servants’ entrance. Consider, please: what if I were to one day meet Jean Auel, whose latest book I’m impaling with one of Ayla’s atlatls? I once came close to that painful experience, sitting in a panel where one of the panelists seemed familiar. Finally remembered that, on Amazon, I’d given her book meh out of five stars. Squirm, squirm, squirm. No one, therefore, can imagine me fundamentally eager to alienate Ms. Auel without good reason; that would be insane. If I thought I could do the book justice with kindness and tact, I would.

Can’t. This is just bad. It’s so bad, I don’t think it’s Jean Auel. I could not force myself past page 73.

It is mostly tell rather than show, one of the most amateurish bugaboos that editors have to beat out of writers. We get paragraphs of “Ayla felt….” No, no, no. Don’t tell me “Ayla felt…”! Don’t! Show me how she feels and what’s on her mind through her actions, her dialogue, others’ reactions to her. I don’t care how you do it. I don’t care if you establish that when Ayla is nervous, she has a bad habit of inserting a finger up each nostril. “She eased two fingers into her nostrils” beats “Ayla felt nervous” every time.

Then there’s the dullness problem. Now, I grant that if you love herbalism and scenes about making tea, this might not be so dull. If you like long rehashes of past events, maybe it’s not that dull. And I recognize that after waiting ten years between books, some backstory is needed because we’ve forgotten some of it (or perhaps never read those books, never slurped on their tangy salt). We don’t need this much. The dialogue is wordy and uninspiring, with everyone spelling out everything, leaving nothing for the reader to infer/discover. It often feels like expository or technical writing.

There, that’s the big problem. It doesn’t feel like fiction. It feels like expository writing. It sometimes feels like a software manual. I can take some guesses as to what might have happened:

Guess #1: Auel, being contractually shackled to the publisher for X number of books, was required to write another one before she could be manumitted. No one said it had to be a good book, and she realized full well that her name guaranteed a certain number of sales, thus automatic profit, and that’s why the publisher insisted on it. That’s what publishers do with big names: once it’s clear that the Name guarantees a profitable release, they get it locked in for a series of books. You owe us one more, bucko, or you can retire, but you can’t write anything else until we get it. So she phoned it in, getting it over with, and trying her best to make sure they wouldn’t want any more.

Guess #2: she somehow ran out of money and had to do something. I find that highly unlikely, as Auel has made enough money on the series to buy me and sell me into slavery, but folk have written books for stranger reasons.

Guess #3: she got real offended by all the readers who threw tomatoes at her Cro-Magnoporn, and decided to torture them. (Laurell K. Hamilton seems to be doing it. You no likey my porn? Okay, you get twice as much, that’ll learn ya.)

Guess #4: she forgot how to write good fiction. Kind of hard to imagine, because we don’t really start going backwards until our minds start to turn to muesli, and even then, usually that shows up in other ways. Very rarely does a capable writer suddenly revert to second-year college English student.

Guess #5: it got farmed out to ‘lancers. I am sure that’s what happened with Herbert and Anderson’s latest Dune monsterpiece and it wouldn’t surprise me if several other big names/franchises were also doing it. A lot of stuff gets hired out to freelancers. We work cheap, and a lot of us make real livings as tech writers, which makes our writing sound like vacuum cleaner manuals. It is not inconceivable that they just paid someone, or someones, several grand (no royalties, bucko) to write this. I suspect this because the writing is too amateurish to reconcile with what we know Auel is capable of. Well, maybe it ain’t her at all. I can just see it: “Look, you owe us another book. You don’t want to write it. Fine, so don’t write most of it. Write the parts you like, sketch a storyline, and we’ll hire some literary mercenaries for flat fees. We’ll sign them to NDAs that will allow us and you to confiscate their duodenums if they talk. Win/win/win. Oh, sure, the readers will be hosed, but they have no taste anyway.”

You don’t think the publishing industry would do that? If so, you do not know them. Some publishers would not, and those I respect. Some would, faster than you can say ‘slurp her nodule.’ Never underestimate what someone will do for a guaranteed income stream.

I can’t say with certainty what happened here. All that is mere speculation. What I can say is that 73 pages left me wanting less. Life is too short to finish this book, but it’s not too short to warn others away. The kindest, tactfulest, mercifulest thing I can say is that I don’t think Jean Auel really wrote this.

Gods, I hope not.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

Newly published: Lucky Man, by Shawn Inmon

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My most recent editing project was Shawn Inmon’s spanking new short story, Lucky Man. The Kindle version is available as we speak. While I categorized this with book reviews, that’s just for organizational purposes, since obviously no one can purport to present a review of a book on which he worked.

Upon my initial read, I liked Shawn’s story concept. One thing that really gripes me in fiction is predictability, and the story remained unpredictable all along. Shawn is growing rapidly in the craft of writing, because this is my second go-round with him on a project, and I didn’t have to deal with any of the stuff I caught last time. We were on to new, subtler changes and storyline considerations. Most writers just don’t absorb things as fast. It’s like a baseball coach teaching someone the virtues of opposite-field hitting, and the hitter starts knocking doubles off the opposite field wall. Well, yes, in fact, yes, that will do nicely.

If you don’t have a Kindle, Amazon will happily let you download emulation software for your machine. Thus, if you can read this post, you can read Lucky Man. I think you will find it of value well out of proportion to the $0.99 Shawn wants for it.