What I've Been Reading

It's curious how different books can be when you read them than what you expected from the back-cover blurb.

I recently discovered the work of Julia Spencer-Fleming, a really excellent mystery author. On recommendation of members of my writers' group, I read her first book, In the Bleak Midwinter. Had it not been praised by people whose judgment I trust, I would never have tried it--I would have shunned the book based on the back-cover blurb. The heroine is an Anglican priest--a woman priest--and I'd expect a book featuring a priest or minister to be preachy, to force-feed religious dogma to the reader. How wrong I was!

In the Bleak Midwinter (2002) is the only debut novel to have won six major mystery awards--according to the author's website, it "made debut history when it won the St.Martin's/Malice Domestic contest, the Dilys Award from the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association, and the Agatha, Anthony, Macavity, and Barry awards for Best First Novel." After reading it, I can say it deserved those awards.

No sooner had I finished the book than I purchased and read the second in the series, A Fountain Filled with Blood (2003), which was as good as the first book. I have the third in hand now, Out of the Deep I Cry (2004), and I'm eager to start on it. There are two more in the series after this, To Darkness and to Death (2005) and All Mortal Flesh (2006). All Mortal Flesh has been nominated for the Agatha award and also for Mystery Ink's Gumshoe award. It also made several "best of 2006" lists, including Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Library Journal.

I love to discover a good author who's already completed several books in a series, because I don't have to wait for each book. Of course, once I reach the latest book, I'm on the wait-a-year-for-the-next-one list. But at least while reading the backlist I can immerse myself in the bliss of wonderful writing.

In a few days I hope to post an entry on Spencer-Fleming's books. I want to analyze what makes her books riveting.

Bibliomania

My blolleague Charles Gramlich had an entry in February on Biblioholism. This is a disease I share with him. I believe my case is more severe, however, moving from -ism into mania.

I have loved books for as long as I can remember. Starting with Little Golden Books (my earliest reading), progressing through our family's set of The Book House for Children (which I still have), through the Children's Classics. (I still recall that set fondly, with its great novels such as Black Beauty, Little Women, The Black Arrow, Rose in Bloom, Treasure Island--and I still brood because my mother gave the set away to another family when I was in high school.)

We had little extra money, so it was rare to get books of my own. I was a heavy library user until I first began earning my own money during college. I promptly joined a mail-order book club--Literary Guild, I think it was--and began building a personal library. I didn't have a theme to the library; I just bought books I thought I'd like. It grew and grew.

Within a few years I discovered what has now become a lifelong frustration: never enough bookcases. Because, you see, after I read a book, I keep it; I am a re-reader. If I like a book, chances are that one day I'll go back and reread it. Although I have an excellent memory for associating book titles with their authors, I don't have a good memory for plot details. I'll remember generally what the book was about--e.g., genre, setting, basic story--but not enough to keep me from enjoying the book again when I re-read it.

As time went on, I continued buying books, and my library grew. When I occasionally had to move to a different house, packing and moving the books was the biggest and most back-breaking issue. Still I held on to them, however. Having lots of books made me feel rich, replete, and blessed.

In the early 90s, my love of buying books expanded into mania. I was dealing with various difficulties in my life and buying books became an outlet for me. In 1993 I joined a local chapter of Romance Writers of America, decided I wanted to write romance novels, and began buying and reading them at an unprecedented pace. (I had always enjoyed reading the romance genre, but had never read as much of it as I did after I joined RWA.) Most romance novels were published only in paperback, and a substantial number were in the "category" lines of Harlequin and Silhouette which generally are only on store shelves for a month or so. As a result many of them, even those that were really well-written books, went out of print quickly.

My local library does buy paperback romance, but the librarians have so little respect for the genre they don't even bother to alphabetize the books, so finding a particular book can be difficult or even impossible. Further, the library doesn't buy every paperback romance that comes out, so I couldn't be sure of finding what I wanted at the library.

Hence, I realized I had to buy the books when they came out to be sure of having them. And, as I discovered more and more romance writers whose work I liked, I began looking for their backlists, and buying their older books whenever I could. I hit the bookstores whenever I could, obsessively scouring the shelves for books I wanted. For books that were out of print, I went to used bookstores.

I spent money on books the way some women spend money on clothes or shoes or makeup or jewelry. Or the way gamblers spend money at a casino.

And I didn't buy only romance. I bought other types of novels--mysteries here and there, thrillers from time to time, mainstream fiction, and lots of nonfiction, too. I couldn't resist those Sale shelves at Barnes & Nobel, where I found wonderful nonfiction books for such low prices. I figured I needed to build up a good research library for the historical romances I was planning to write. More recently, I've been buying a lot in the Dark Urban Fantasy genre.

Now I own thousands and thousands of books. No, I haven't read them all--I bought a such a pace over the years that I couldn't keep up with the influx. I now have so many books that even if I never buy another book, I probably will never finish reading the ones I already own.

I purchased a program to catalog my library several years ago, which partly automates the process by allowing me to scan in the ISBN bar code on books. The program then downloads information on the book from various websites such as Amazon or the Library of Congress. I have nearly 5,500 entries in the program now, and that's only the books that are actually in my house. I rent a climate-controlled ministorage unit where there are dozens of boxes of other books--I have no idea how many, because I haven't cataloged those yet.

Obsession. Yes, I admit it. But I love my books. I need my books.

To quote Arnold Lobel:

Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.

I've Been Caned...

As punishment for my sins against physical health throughout my life, the Universe has caned me.

Yes, I've had to start using a cane recently. I twisted my knee a couple of weeks ago and have been suffering with it since then. I limped and teetered around for a couple of days, hoping the pain would disappear, then decided a cane would help me get around. It's a humbling experience in some ways, but I have found a cane is useful for more than just walking.

First, I noticed that my pets were all afraid of it -- apparently dogs and cats instinctively fear sticks. Of course I wouldn't strike any of them with it, but I've found that by holding it in front on me and swishing it around a bit, I can keep them from jumping up on me (which is important now that I'm unsteady on my feet). Subsequently I discovered I can use it to press elevator buttons, or to hold open elevator doors without risking my hand or arm in the process. I can use it to push/pull items on the floor closer to me. I can shake it in the air at naughty children who are riding their bikes on my lawn. And it does help a bit in public places--there are a few people who will hold open doors for me, or offer me other courtesies, as a result of my using the cane.

It's a real ego-killer to occasionally catch sight of myself, reflected in a plate-glass window, stumping along with the cane and lurching from side-to-side. On the other hand, now I really empathize with people who live in constant pain. I understand better how people can become addicted to pain medication. And I feel even greater respect for those who go through life with serious disabilities.

On the lighter side, I discovered when Googling for a picture to accompany this blog entry, there are THOUSANDS of websites that in one way or another focus on walking canes! Who'd-a-thunk-it?

And I guess I really will have to see a doctor about this bum knee after all, since it's not getting any better. Darn.

Info Dumping

In my weekly writers’ group we regularly mention information dumps, perhaps because so many authors are guilty of that fault. All of us in the group notice them and see the info-dump as a technique to be avoided.

For anyone who doesn't know what an info-dump is, here's a good description from Bruce Sterling's version of The Turkey City Lexicon, originally published in Paragons: Twelve Master Science Fiction Writers Ply Their Craft, edited by Robin Wilson (St. Martin's Press 1996), ISBN 0-312-14032-1:

Info-dump: Large chunk of indigestible expository matter intended to explain the background situation. Info-dumps can be covert, as in fake newspaper or “Encyclopedia Galactica” articles, or overt, in which all action stops as the author assumes center stage and lectures. Info-dumps are also known as “expository lumps." The use of brief, deft, inoffensive info-dumps is known as "kuttnering," after Henry Kuttner. When information is worked unobtrusively into the story's basic structure, this is known as “heinleining." [After Robert Heinlein]

Wikipedia has an entertaining article on Exposition (plot device), with amusing references and examples of infodumps. As explained in the article,

Exposition is a literary technique by which information is conveyed about events that have occurred prior to the beginning of a novel, play, movie or other work of fiction. This information can be presented through dialogue, description, news reports, flashback, or even directly through narrative. Because exposition generally does not advance plot and may impede present-time action, it is usually best kept in short and succinct form, though in some genres, such as the mystery, exposition is central to the story structure itself. . . .When the presentation of exposition becomes awkward or wordy, it is sometimes referred to by the pejorative expressions plot dump and info dump.

The problem is, how do you avoid an info-dump when there’s a lot of information you want the reader to know?

The best way to convey information to your readers is to integrate it into the story as seamlessly as possible. This takes skill and can be time-consuming--but it can be done. A good article about handling info dumps is "The Artful Infodump," by Charles Coleman Finlay.

Over at the Rth Dimension website, Rich Hamper has a bunch of suggestions for avoiding info dumps. His list includes an explanation of each term, but here I'm just going to name them:
deductive introspection; introspective reminiscing; flashbacks; "stranger in a strange land"; the briefing; "the bard"; media blurbs; strategic character; "the Dr. Watson"; and strategic debate. For his definitions, click on the link above.

At our next meeting my weekly writers' group is going to discuss info-dumps. Each of us will bring in an example of an info-dump to share with the others. There are some sharp minds and fine writers in that group, so it ought to be a good session. I'll let you know what we come up with.

P.S. You can find another version of the Turkey City Lexicon here; edited by Lewis Shriner, it's shorter than the Bruce Sterling version mentioned above. Oh, and thanks to Ariane Little for tipping me off to the Finlay and Sterling links.

Poetry, Schmoetry?

A couple of postings on House of Sternberg piqued my interest the other day, as often happens when I read Stewart's blog. (The Cult of Sternberg flourishes!) Stewart wrote a two-part posting titled "Poetry...Let's Talk." It was engendered by indignant comments on his remarks in a prior posting, in which he criticized contemporary poetry, likening it to prose that simply has the lines broken in the middle. In response to the angry mob, in "Part I" Stewart decided to develop meaningful observations about poetry through dialogue and analysis. He continued his discussion in "Part II."

I was going to skip reading those posts--the mere word "poetry" is enough to deflect my attention to other things. I've never been drawn to poetry per se. In college I was an English major and, in that capacity, had to read and analyze a lot of poetry. I've never read poetry for entertainment . . . even now, reading poetry feels like an "assignment." Hence, I avoid it.

However, driven by my compulsive side as well as my desire to honor another writer's oeuvre, I went ahead and read the poetry postings. They started me thinking about poetry.

I realized that despite my lack of interest in poetry, ironically I have written poems from time to time--mostly following periods of upheaval or tragedy. Considering my own impulse, plus the continuing drive many people feel to write poetry, as well as the popularity of songs, I've realized that humans have a fundamental need for poetry.

(Song lyrics are poems, as strange as that seems for some of them...I recall a hit song from my high school years, "Wild Thing" by The Troggs, which seemed to consist of the only four lines, reiterated endlessly: Wild thing / Wild thing / You make my heart sing / You make everything groovy. . . . n.b.: I just checked on Wikipedia and found I am wrong--there actually are several more verses, but all that stays in my memory are the lines I quoted.)

There are poems I like, all of them traditional verse. My favorite poem is Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold (which I first read in high school). Wistful, melancholy, existentialist, and lovely, especially the last lines:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

(To read the entire poem, which has three verses, see http://www.bartleby.com/42/705.html.)

The words in William Blake's poem The Tiger always fascinated me with their rhythm and flow, but I never really understood what it meant. I'm pretty sure it's one of the poems I had to analyze in college years ago, but the analysis is gone from memory; only the words remain. The words are mesmerizing, however, especially the first and last verse, which are the same:

Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

(http://www.bartleby.com/101/489.html)

Another fragment of verse that has stayed in my memory is by Byron. On searching for the lines to quote them here, I was surprised to discover they are not from a stand-alone poem--rather, they're excerpted from the ending of Byron's long poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage:

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar . . . .

-- Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto iv. Stanza 178.

(http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/chpl10h.htm)

I won't try to answer Stewart's question ("What is poetry? or at least what is it today?"). As a non-fan of most poetry, I'm not qualified to pass judgment on that. All I can say is, I know it when I hear it, and I know what I like. Most poetry I've liked is in a traditional style; it need not rhyme, but it must have a noticeable rhythm, and beautiful language that captures strong emotions and/or memorable moments.

After all this, I've realized that perhaps I should try reading some poetry from time to time. Maybe it's something I needed to grow into, and maybe I'm finally ready for it . . . .