I read a lot of Poppy growing up. Back then, it was all extremely visceral horror that was sometimes referred to as “splatterpunk.” Vampires, ghosts, cannibals and serial killers with HIV, it was all rather grotesque and very, very dark.
I loved it. It influenced me quite a bit, and what pieces remain from my early writing portfolio show this rather shamelessly and explicitly. During my teenage years and through my vampire fiction phase, nobody influenced me more than she did, including Anne Rice and all the bizarre, fucked up authors who penned books in the Dell Abyss line. Nobody.
Somewhere along the line, young, cult horror phenom Poppy Z. Brite grew up. And, eventually, so did I. As I grew older, I became a bit of a gourmand, and I also lost some of my interest in horror. Not all of it, mind you. I’d like to think my horizons just broadened a bit, allowing me to include all manner of fiction (even “serious literature,” to my initial chagrin) on my reading lists.
It was with a bit of surprise that I found out a few years ago that Poppy Z. Brite had been writing books about New Orleans chefs. The New Orleans part didn’t shock me, nor did the sexual orientation of her characters, but leaving horror behind? I didn’t really want to believe it at first, and for several years I put off her Liquor novels, reading her older works or books by other authors. I wanted to go back and see if I was affected by the earlier horror novels as much as I was the first time I read them.
One thing I’ve found out over the past year is that nostalgia is an exceptionally powerful emotion, and that most things are stronger when viewed through the smoky looking-glass of time. Nothing I’ve gone back and reread has been as joyous a read for me as the first time I picked it up as a teen. Nothing. Some have come close and still stand up as powerful stories, but as I’ve aged the things that grip my heart and move me have changed a bit. I’ve come to accept this as a hard fact, and despite knowing that the magic won’t be as powerful or may not even be there at all, I’m still going to go back and reread some of the things I loved that influenced me. I’m just not going to have lofty ideas about reconnecting with the books in the way I had before.
Sometimes, though, you just need to move forward. Pick up new books you haven’t read, give new authors a chance. In this case, give an old friend a shot at something new. And I did.
Liquor is a tribute to food that borders on sexual fetishism. I love it. I read most of it in one day, unwilling to put it down before I got to the last page.
Rickey and G-man are lovers, have been best friends since they were in the fourth grade and have been working in the kitchens of New Orleans restaurants since they were fifteen. Bouncing around from employer to employer (not always due to their own planning), they grow tired of working for other people. They want freedom, control over their own culinary creations and a bit of money. Being poor and working sixteen hours a day six days a week for some rich asshole is no fun indeed.
Rickey is struck with an idea while drinking in the park. Dishes made with alcohol. A whole restaurant based on the concept of alcohol in food. In a city like New Orleans, where natives and tourists alike cruise the margarita stands, where people are encouraged to drink all they can, an idea like this could be their golden ticket.
But first, Rickey and G-man have to straighten out their own issues, shake off the people dragging them down and find the capital to make their dream come true, and it won’t be easy.
I will be tracking down the two sequels, Prime and Soul Kitchen, this summer. A previously published prequel of sorts, The Value of X, is a bit pricier and harder to obtain, but I will be tracking that down at some point as well.
5/5
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Friday, June 12, 2009
#10 of 2009: Shampoo Planet by Douglas Coupland
The best thing about Douglas Coupland is his ability to bring the mundane facets of pop culture, the brand names and logos and catchy jingles, to the forefront of our consciousnesses. How many people actually think about hair care products, plastic toys, pet food or clothes? I mean, how many think about them in great detail, trying to figure out where these things fit into the great mosaic of North American life?
Not many, I would imagine. That’s part of advertising and pop culture’s success, the ability to worm their way into life and stand stock-still in the background like Scooby and Shaggy in rickety suits of armor. There, but not visible, at least not to the people with so much going on in their lives already.
Tyler is ambitious, the son of an aging hippy, a Regan youth with a bathroom full of incredibly specific hair-care products and a collection of globes in his bedroom. It is the early Nineties, and he and his girlfriend spend their days either at school or hanging out in a diner in their Pacific Northwest town, a semi-rural area known for its chemical-processing plants (contracted out to the government, no less) and half-dead shopping mall.
Lancaster, Tyler’s hometown, is where yuppies lay down to die.
Tyler wants to work for Bechtol. Tyler sells imitations of name brand items in order to save up enough money to buy a car and go backpacking across Europe. It is right after his return from his vacation that our story begins.
Watch Tyler interact with his Mother and siblings, deal with his drunken lout of an ex-stepfather, screw up his personal dealings, reconnect with his ambition, experience loneliness for the first time in his adult life and attempt to salvage his future, all against the backdrop of the hyper-comsumptive pre-Y2K years! It’s like gazing upon a psychedelic ant farm blown up into human-sized proportions.
I’ll be honest. To me, this was not as endearing as Microserfs, nor as slick and funny as JPod. I just didn’t find myself as emotionally involved in the characters’ lives. I didn’t have as clear a mental picture of them. They were interesting, but in the same way the characters from 1990s night-time television were interesting. Watching them flirt and stir up drama and grow older and wiser was entertaining, but after an hour, after the credits for the episode came up, I didn’t spend much time thinking about them. At least, not until the next episode.
Not Coupland’s best work, but being Coupland still better than 90% of the books you’ll find in Barnes. A great way to spend a few days sprawled out on the couch, for sure, and the cover art is a minimalist feast for the eyes.
3/5
Not many, I would imagine. That’s part of advertising and pop culture’s success, the ability to worm their way into life and stand stock-still in the background like Scooby and Shaggy in rickety suits of armor. There, but not visible, at least not to the people with so much going on in their lives already.
Tyler is ambitious, the son of an aging hippy, a Regan youth with a bathroom full of incredibly specific hair-care products and a collection of globes in his bedroom. It is the early Nineties, and he and his girlfriend spend their days either at school or hanging out in a diner in their Pacific Northwest town, a semi-rural area known for its chemical-processing plants (contracted out to the government, no less) and half-dead shopping mall.
Lancaster, Tyler’s hometown, is where yuppies lay down to die.
Tyler wants to work for Bechtol. Tyler sells imitations of name brand items in order to save up enough money to buy a car and go backpacking across Europe. It is right after his return from his vacation that our story begins.
Watch Tyler interact with his Mother and siblings, deal with his drunken lout of an ex-stepfather, screw up his personal dealings, reconnect with his ambition, experience loneliness for the first time in his adult life and attempt to salvage his future, all against the backdrop of the hyper-comsumptive pre-Y2K years! It’s like gazing upon a psychedelic ant farm blown up into human-sized proportions.
I’ll be honest. To me, this was not as endearing as Microserfs, nor as slick and funny as JPod. I just didn’t find myself as emotionally involved in the characters’ lives. I didn’t have as clear a mental picture of them. They were interesting, but in the same way the characters from 1990s night-time television were interesting. Watching them flirt and stir up drama and grow older and wiser was entertaining, but after an hour, after the credits for the episode came up, I didn’t spend much time thinking about them. At least, not until the next episode.
Not Coupland’s best work, but being Coupland still better than 90% of the books you’ll find in Barnes. A great way to spend a few days sprawled out on the couch, for sure, and the cover art is a minimalist feast for the eyes.
3/5
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Max Barry's Machine Man
I am a huge Max Barry fan. Completely unapologetic, too. The man’s got a wit so sharp it could slice diamonds, a knack for creating unique characters without crossing over to the side of ridiculous caricatures and nobody, seriously nobody, does love triangles and nerd romances quite like him.
I think it’s official now, after fifty-some installments, that we can now add “drives the experimental novel like he stole it” to a list of Barry’s accomplishments.
Barry’s no stranger to more typical means of literary promotion. He has a blog. He has a Twitter. Hell, he even links to NationStates, the international simulation game based off his novel Jennifer Government, on his website. Standard stuff, really, especially for an author in the twenty-first century with global appeal and readership.
What he’s gone and done now, though, is a bit different. Machine Man is a take on the Japanese cell phone novel, a work of (usually) short fiction published online in small bursts, generally written on and designed for the displays of handheld devices. They are immensely popular in the Land of the Rising Sun, and some have made the lucrative transition from digital copy to print edition.
Max Barry has done something similar, though not through cellular technology. He’s writing a page a day and publishing each one on his website. He writes the pages one at a time and they appear on the site and in subscribers’ email boxes in the early morning (at least where I am, in US Eastern). While the feed was still in its free beta stage you could also get your pages via Twitter, but after #43 (which is an amazing section of the novel, by the way) you have to be a paid subscriber in order to view the daily updates.
Machine Man is about one Dr. Charlie Neumann, research scientist for a shadowy company called Better Future. Charlie has an accident. Charlie loses a limb. Charlie becomes a prosthesis addict. That’s all I’m going to say, but rest assured the plot is standard Barry goodness. Don’t believe me? Scribe, Barry’s domestic publisher, bought print rights while the project was still in infancy.
Six ninety-five may seem like a steep price to pay for electronic media, especially of the non-music variety, but there’s no email I receive that’s as welcome as my morning Machine Man fix.
I think it’s official now, after fifty-some installments, that we can now add “drives the experimental novel like he stole it” to a list of Barry’s accomplishments.
Barry’s no stranger to more typical means of literary promotion. He has a blog. He has a Twitter. Hell, he even links to NationStates, the international simulation game based off his novel Jennifer Government, on his website. Standard stuff, really, especially for an author in the twenty-first century with global appeal and readership.
What he’s gone and done now, though, is a bit different. Machine Man is a take on the Japanese cell phone novel, a work of (usually) short fiction published online in small bursts, generally written on and designed for the displays of handheld devices. They are immensely popular in the Land of the Rising Sun, and some have made the lucrative transition from digital copy to print edition.
Max Barry has done something similar, though not through cellular technology. He’s writing a page a day and publishing each one on his website. He writes the pages one at a time and they appear on the site and in subscribers’ email boxes in the early morning (at least where I am, in US Eastern). While the feed was still in its free beta stage you could also get your pages via Twitter, but after #43 (which is an amazing section of the novel, by the way) you have to be a paid subscriber in order to view the daily updates.
Machine Man is about one Dr. Charlie Neumann, research scientist for a shadowy company called Better Future. Charlie has an accident. Charlie loses a limb. Charlie becomes a prosthesis addict. That’s all I’m going to say, but rest assured the plot is standard Barry goodness. Don’t believe me? Scribe, Barry’s domestic publisher, bought print rights while the project was still in infancy.
Six ninety-five may seem like a steep price to pay for electronic media, especially of the non-music variety, but there’s no email I receive that’s as welcome as my morning Machine Man fix.
Monday, June 1, 2009
#9 of 2009: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
I read for a variety of reasons. I read to enlighten myself, to pass the time, to be entertained, to fill up with ideas I would never ordinarily expose myself to with only my imagination at the helm. I read because each book has a fundamental idea behind it, an idea I can uncover page by page, an idea that reveals itself to me in a style particular to the author who penned it.
Sometimes I come away from a book feeling like I have not fully absorbed the concept behind it, or even worse, that the book had nothing but an empty core behind its story. Most of the time these are books that are written in a style that I really do not like, or they are books that I just downright hated but forced myself to finish. Tea From an Empty Cup is one such example.
Slaughterhouse-Five is very much a book that feels incomplete to me, though strangely enough it still worked. I didn’t hate it - to the contrary, I found it extremely enjoyable and rather delightful with its early postmodern eccentricity. It just felt extremely open-ended, as if someone came along and cracked a reasonably straightforward narrative open out in the weightlessness of space and let its contents lazily float away in all directions, drifting into nothingness.
I felt like I’d managed to retrieve some of those fragments, though without any idea of how they once fit together. It was as if they were randomly stacked into a sheaf of paper, bound and mailed to me in the guise of a complete novel.
I knew it wasn’t a complete story, and the author knew it too. But, since the rest of the words and pages were lost in a vast dark nothingness, we decided to pretend it’s all that was ever written, and we each pretended that we were none the wiser, though the other party may have had their suspicions.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that Slaughterhouse-Five lacks what we might normally expect from a novel-length work of fiction, which is another nice way of saying that climax and denouement are completely absent. It is ultimately perfectly fine, though, because this is a novel that operates and succeeds on several levels. The only one it does not succeed on is the level of the standard format novel, which would require much more action and closure than Vonnegut ever delivers. It works as a piece of science fiction, and as an example of metafiction (oh, how it shines) and even as a piece of magical realist literature.
Either it doesn’t work as a plain novel, or I’ve failed my duty as a reader, which has been and always will be to comprehend a work on all intended levels. I’ve done that before, and I’m sure I’ll do it again, but with Slaughterhouse-Five I’m not sure if I did or not. The book is quick and written in a very simple but dated language. It’s impossible not to know immediately what time period in which it was written, which instantaneously endeared it to me. Unlike reading Gibson or Wallace, I didn’t need to make any mad grabs for my dictionary. Everything was right there on the page in quirky, lovable, easy to digest chunks.
But, aside from “War is ugly and pointless,” were there any other concrete ideas to be taken away? I don’t know. It could be possible that the only thing left after that were the stories of different ordinary people, their mostly mundane lives and slightly tragic deaths, and the moments they played out that could have easily gone on forever.
4/5
Sometimes I come away from a book feeling like I have not fully absorbed the concept behind it, or even worse, that the book had nothing but an empty core behind its story. Most of the time these are books that are written in a style that I really do not like, or they are books that I just downright hated but forced myself to finish. Tea From an Empty Cup is one such example.
Slaughterhouse-Five is very much a book that feels incomplete to me, though strangely enough it still worked. I didn’t hate it - to the contrary, I found it extremely enjoyable and rather delightful with its early postmodern eccentricity. It just felt extremely open-ended, as if someone came along and cracked a reasonably straightforward narrative open out in the weightlessness of space and let its contents lazily float away in all directions, drifting into nothingness.
I felt like I’d managed to retrieve some of those fragments, though without any idea of how they once fit together. It was as if they were randomly stacked into a sheaf of paper, bound and mailed to me in the guise of a complete novel.
I knew it wasn’t a complete story, and the author knew it too. But, since the rest of the words and pages were lost in a vast dark nothingness, we decided to pretend it’s all that was ever written, and we each pretended that we were none the wiser, though the other party may have had their suspicions.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that Slaughterhouse-Five lacks what we might normally expect from a novel-length work of fiction, which is another nice way of saying that climax and denouement are completely absent. It is ultimately perfectly fine, though, because this is a novel that operates and succeeds on several levels. The only one it does not succeed on is the level of the standard format novel, which would require much more action and closure than Vonnegut ever delivers. It works as a piece of science fiction, and as an example of metafiction (oh, how it shines) and even as a piece of magical realist literature.
Either it doesn’t work as a plain novel, or I’ve failed my duty as a reader, which has been and always will be to comprehend a work on all intended levels. I’ve done that before, and I’m sure I’ll do it again, but with Slaughterhouse-Five I’m not sure if I did or not. The book is quick and written in a very simple but dated language. It’s impossible not to know immediately what time period in which it was written, which instantaneously endeared it to me. Unlike reading Gibson or Wallace, I didn’t need to make any mad grabs for my dictionary. Everything was right there on the page in quirky, lovable, easy to digest chunks.
But, aside from “War is ugly and pointless,” were there any other concrete ideas to be taken away? I don’t know. It could be possible that the only thing left after that were the stories of different ordinary people, their mostly mundane lives and slightly tragic deaths, and the moments they played out that could have easily gone on forever.
4/5
Saturday, May 30, 2009
#8 of 2009: Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas by Tom Robbins
I initially bought this book at the urging of a friend of mine who swore up and down that it was the best book he’d read “in forever, it’s sick, seriously, go out and read this now.” Before I go any further, let me point out that he uses the word “sick” as a synonym for “awesome,“ and the word pops up in conversation with him rather frequently. For a moment I honestly believed the book was disgusting, depraved or just plain rude, before I realized what he actually meant.
As it turns out, the first time I attempted to read this novel my initial fears weren’t too far off. While not actually rendering me physically nauseous, there was something about this book that got on my nerves so much that, after fifty pages, I put it down and forgot about it for a few years. It could have been any number of things, really.
It could have been the fact that the book is narrated in second person perspective, like a Choose Your Own Adventure, which for some people is so highly distracting and dizzying that they avoid the particular format like the plague. You will really like this book if you are a narcissist, or like to fantasize about being someone else. In fact, if this is the case, you can feel yourself looking the book up on Amazon and purchasing it this very moment, paying for it with your own credit card. See? See how irritating that could become?
It could have been that the book deals in mid-90s stock exchange drama, a subject I could honestly care less about. I have somewhat of a distaste for hardcore white-collar dealings and this book is full of characters and terminology that, while I didn’t have difficulty understanding, I certainly wasn’t all that fascinated by.
It could also be the fact that the main character is a woman I would consider to be the perfect photo negative of myself. She’s career-driven, obsessed to be more accurate, concerned only with money and the stock index and the current going price of Fortune 500 shares. She’s a cultureless bitch in a Porche she hasn’t paid off yet, in clothes she hasn’t yet reimbursed her credit card for, living in an apartment she deems too small and low class for her that she’s desperate to move out of, banking her entire existence on getting into a place with a doorman and and a few hundred extra yards of space inside.
Oh, she’s just a treat, this prudish, squeaky voiced woman with her older, too sincere, rich-as-hell-but-unconcerned-with-money Christian boyfriend that she keeps around for no reason at all. Did I mention the boyfriend lives with Andre, a born-again macaque that was once one of the boldest jewel thieves in France? No?
I spent fifty pages inside the head of this woman, thanks to Robbins’ choice of narrative, and the whole time I was screaming to get out. She hates sex, everything is gross to the point where she blushes at the drop of a hat, she hates her Filipina background and her hippie parents, she hates not having money and the world laid at her feet and she hates the common people of Seattle. In addition to an overly nice but boring boyfriend and his pet monkey, her best friend is a 300 pound tarot reader named Q-Jo, and she hates being seen with Q-Jo in public because, oh yeah, the world hates fat people, especially fat people in purple turbans and other garish attire, so she keeps her best friend swept up under the proverbial rug in order to maintain her professional veneer.
I was rather amazed I got to page fifty, seeing as the whole time I just wanted to slap her. Or myself, seeing as I was supposed to be her this entire time. I felt pretty disgusted as I put it back on my shelf, relieved to find something a bit more enjoyable to spend my time on. And there that book sat, for two more years at least, until I picked it up again a few weeks ago.
I blame my recently-acquired interest in late twentieth and early twenty-first century humor fiction for sending me back to Half Asleep. Having read Barry and Coupland and Nielan over the last six months to a year, my attention turned towards Robbins again, a writer that numerous people have gushed to me over. Rather than buying another one of his books, or trying to find copies in the library (I love libraries but get a bit antsy over their rigid time restraints, due to my short attention span and habit of flitting back and forth between books) I decided to pick up and read Half Asleep. The whole way through. No more putting it off and leaving it shelved, telling myself I’d get around to actually completing it at a later date. Nope. Going to read it now.
And read it I did. I have to say that the second time is a charm for this one. It was so much easier this time around.
I found myself again rolling my eyes and feeling disgusted by Gwendolyn Mati and her obsession with emerging from the long Easter weekend triumphant over all of Wall Street and earning millions during an impending crash. That’s what this book is about at its core, a market on the brink of annihilation and a young, incompetent stock broker furiously trying to cover her possibly illegal (and most definitely amoral) investment strategies from both boss and client.
It’s also about philosophy, capitalism, African tribalism, sex, disease, space aliens, telepathy, hallucinogens and the arcane. It could also, if you stretch your imagination a tiny bit, be about love.
I started off wanting to beat the holy hell out of Gwen, just as I did last time, but pushing through this novel, page by page, I was able to witness her transformation from a completely self-obsessed, arrogant bitch to a woman who might have her heart in the right place even if she’s a bit on the narcissistic side. It was an amazing albeit snail-paced transformation, made all the better and worth waiting for by numerous encounters along the way that leave her humiliated and knocked down more than a few pegs. There are a few places where I had to hold my giggles in.
Is it possible to experience Schadenfreude against yourself? In this instance, I think so. And at the end, after I was flushed of all available derision, I actually felt a bit good for her.
4/5
As it turns out, the first time I attempted to read this novel my initial fears weren’t too far off. While not actually rendering me physically nauseous, there was something about this book that got on my nerves so much that, after fifty pages, I put it down and forgot about it for a few years. It could have been any number of things, really.
It could have been the fact that the book is narrated in second person perspective, like a Choose Your Own Adventure, which for some people is so highly distracting and dizzying that they avoid the particular format like the plague. You will really like this book if you are a narcissist, or like to fantasize about being someone else. In fact, if this is the case, you can feel yourself looking the book up on Amazon and purchasing it this very moment, paying for it with your own credit card. See? See how irritating that could become?
It could have been that the book deals in mid-90s stock exchange drama, a subject I could honestly care less about. I have somewhat of a distaste for hardcore white-collar dealings and this book is full of characters and terminology that, while I didn’t have difficulty understanding, I certainly wasn’t all that fascinated by.
It could also be the fact that the main character is a woman I would consider to be the perfect photo negative of myself. She’s career-driven, obsessed to be more accurate, concerned only with money and the stock index and the current going price of Fortune 500 shares. She’s a cultureless bitch in a Porche she hasn’t paid off yet, in clothes she hasn’t yet reimbursed her credit card for, living in an apartment she deems too small and low class for her that she’s desperate to move out of, banking her entire existence on getting into a place with a doorman and and a few hundred extra yards of space inside.
Oh, she’s just a treat, this prudish, squeaky voiced woman with her older, too sincere, rich-as-hell-but-unconcerned-with-money Christian boyfriend that she keeps around for no reason at all. Did I mention the boyfriend lives with Andre, a born-again macaque that was once one of the boldest jewel thieves in France? No?
I spent fifty pages inside the head of this woman, thanks to Robbins’ choice of narrative, and the whole time I was screaming to get out. She hates sex, everything is gross to the point where she blushes at the drop of a hat, she hates her Filipina background and her hippie parents, she hates not having money and the world laid at her feet and she hates the common people of Seattle. In addition to an overly nice but boring boyfriend and his pet monkey, her best friend is a 300 pound tarot reader named Q-Jo, and she hates being seen with Q-Jo in public because, oh yeah, the world hates fat people, especially fat people in purple turbans and other garish attire, so she keeps her best friend swept up under the proverbial rug in order to maintain her professional veneer.
I was rather amazed I got to page fifty, seeing as the whole time I just wanted to slap her. Or myself, seeing as I was supposed to be her this entire time. I felt pretty disgusted as I put it back on my shelf, relieved to find something a bit more enjoyable to spend my time on. And there that book sat, for two more years at least, until I picked it up again a few weeks ago.
I blame my recently-acquired interest in late twentieth and early twenty-first century humor fiction for sending me back to Half Asleep. Having read Barry and Coupland and Nielan over the last six months to a year, my attention turned towards Robbins again, a writer that numerous people have gushed to me over. Rather than buying another one of his books, or trying to find copies in the library (I love libraries but get a bit antsy over their rigid time restraints, due to my short attention span and habit of flitting back and forth between books) I decided to pick up and read Half Asleep. The whole way through. No more putting it off and leaving it shelved, telling myself I’d get around to actually completing it at a later date. Nope. Going to read it now.
And read it I did. I have to say that the second time is a charm for this one. It was so much easier this time around.
I found myself again rolling my eyes and feeling disgusted by Gwendolyn Mati and her obsession with emerging from the long Easter weekend triumphant over all of Wall Street and earning millions during an impending crash. That’s what this book is about at its core, a market on the brink of annihilation and a young, incompetent stock broker furiously trying to cover her possibly illegal (and most definitely amoral) investment strategies from both boss and client.
It’s also about philosophy, capitalism, African tribalism, sex, disease, space aliens, telepathy, hallucinogens and the arcane. It could also, if you stretch your imagination a tiny bit, be about love.
I started off wanting to beat the holy hell out of Gwen, just as I did last time, but pushing through this novel, page by page, I was able to witness her transformation from a completely self-obsessed, arrogant bitch to a woman who might have her heart in the right place even if she’s a bit on the narcissistic side. It was an amazing albeit snail-paced transformation, made all the better and worth waiting for by numerous encounters along the way that leave her humiliated and knocked down more than a few pegs. There are a few places where I had to hold my giggles in.
Is it possible to experience Schadenfreude against yourself? In this instance, I think so. And at the end, after I was flushed of all available derision, I actually felt a bit good for her.
4/5
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
#7 of 2009: The Forest for the Trees by Betsy Lerner
Occasionally I am caught in the grip of a nonfiction frenzy, usually focusing on a series of books with one theme running through them all. Last year, for a brief period, I was enamored with food journalism (The Zen of Fish is still one of my favorite nonfiction books, and probably always will be), picking up book after book on seafood and produce.
I’m guilty of doing this with fiction as well, buying up large quantities of a single author’s works (Barry, Gibson, Block and Wallace last year, Coupland this year), but it really seems to stand out when this happens with nonfiction. I think this is mostly the case because my nonfiction benders are fueled by topic and theme rather than a single author.
I have been dusting off my writing books as of late, straightening them out on the shelf to make room for new additions. Writing books are crucial to me, the tomes I turn to when I need advice, reassurance or examples of proper form. These are the books that most successfully help me aggregate my back brain for ideas, that illuminate the path ahead of me so that I don’t stumble completely and make a right ass out of myself when submitting manuscripts. They are my templates for style and substance, and while similar to one another there is not a single book in my collection that is not wholly unique.
I stumbled upon The Forest for the Trees while perusing the writing reference section of the local Barnes and Noble. The cover is absolutely brilliant, bright #2 yellow pencils slowly morphing into various trees where the sharpened graphite points ought to be. Flipping it over, I was also impressed by the collection of publication-submitted review blurbs. There are no overenthusiastic urgings by individual writers here, merely words of of praise by major journals and newspapers. Not overly minimalistic, but to the point. I liked it.
I also liked the fact that the author, Betsy Lerner, has run the gamut of bibliophilic employment, from a budding poet in an MFA program to an assistant editor working her way up the editorial chain at several major publishers to a literary agent. It’s much easier to take the advice, anecdotes and bad news (the whole industry is a crap shoot of timing, luck and talent, after all) when it’s coming from someone who has experienced the subject from multiple angles.
Inside, the book is divided into two main sections, Writing and Publishing. The first section, Writing, details the various motivations to write and different types of authors, which has garnered Lerner a bit of criticism, especially on peer-review sites like Amazon. It seems some authors, amateur and professional (though leaning more towards the amateur), do not appreciate being pigeonholed, even when it is done lovingly by a person who has spent years in the business. I don’t mind it. I found little bits of myself in each of the chapters, The Ambivalent Writer, The Natural, The Wicked Child, The Self-Promoter and The Neurotic. The only chapter I did not identify with directly, Touching Fire, is about substance abuse and mental illness, and I have had some small indirect contact with those types of people as well. Overall, I felt that Lerner explained her examples well and provided a great deal of feedback to each type of person she felt would benefit from her work. I didn’t for a moment find myself offended. Rather, I found myself full of new avenues to explore, mostly in the form of other writing-related books, as Lerner has a habit of citing other works in her examples.
The second part, Publishing, is broken down into the natural stages that a first-time writer will encounter and outlines what to expect with each one. There are six chapters, Making Contact: Seeking Agents and Publication, Rejection, What Editors Want, What Authors Want, The Book and Publication. Some of the information is common knowledge, or at least should be, but interspersed in with the advice that all authors should already be aware of (and aren’t always, judging by the personal stories of bad writer behavior) are insider details on editorial processes, book designing, publicity and the interpersonal relationships between the writers and the team of people that help them get their work into the public. It’s fascinating, really, and more than a bit humorous in places.
The Forest for the Trees reads much like Bird By Bird would if Anne Lamott were able to step back from her work and view the situation more objectively, though Lamott’s own work will always have a warm, welcoming spot on my bookshelf. Having the multiple-angle viewpoint helps quite a bit in getting the whole picture, rather than just the neurotic nail-biting writerly side. However, this is not really a book for someone who needs advice on how to write. The fact that you’re writing is just assumed, and it never goes into technical detail. For that, I would suggest the work of James Smith (if you have to pick just one, go for The Writer’s Little Helper, as he has the annoying habit of reusing exercises in multiple books) or James Scott Bell’s entries in the Writing Great Fiction series.
4/5
I’m guilty of doing this with fiction as well, buying up large quantities of a single author’s works (Barry, Gibson, Block and Wallace last year, Coupland this year), but it really seems to stand out when this happens with nonfiction. I think this is mostly the case because my nonfiction benders are fueled by topic and theme rather than a single author.
I have been dusting off my writing books as of late, straightening them out on the shelf to make room for new additions. Writing books are crucial to me, the tomes I turn to when I need advice, reassurance or examples of proper form. These are the books that most successfully help me aggregate my back brain for ideas, that illuminate the path ahead of me so that I don’t stumble completely and make a right ass out of myself when submitting manuscripts. They are my templates for style and substance, and while similar to one another there is not a single book in my collection that is not wholly unique.
I stumbled upon The Forest for the Trees while perusing the writing reference section of the local Barnes and Noble. The cover is absolutely brilliant, bright #2 yellow pencils slowly morphing into various trees where the sharpened graphite points ought to be. Flipping it over, I was also impressed by the collection of publication-submitted review blurbs. There are no overenthusiastic urgings by individual writers here, merely words of of praise by major journals and newspapers. Not overly minimalistic, but to the point. I liked it.
I also liked the fact that the author, Betsy Lerner, has run the gamut of bibliophilic employment, from a budding poet in an MFA program to an assistant editor working her way up the editorial chain at several major publishers to a literary agent. It’s much easier to take the advice, anecdotes and bad news (the whole industry is a crap shoot of timing, luck and talent, after all) when it’s coming from someone who has experienced the subject from multiple angles.
Inside, the book is divided into two main sections, Writing and Publishing. The first section, Writing, details the various motivations to write and different types of authors, which has garnered Lerner a bit of criticism, especially on peer-review sites like Amazon. It seems some authors, amateur and professional (though leaning more towards the amateur), do not appreciate being pigeonholed, even when it is done lovingly by a person who has spent years in the business. I don’t mind it. I found little bits of myself in each of the chapters, The Ambivalent Writer, The Natural, The Wicked Child, The Self-Promoter and The Neurotic. The only chapter I did not identify with directly, Touching Fire, is about substance abuse and mental illness, and I have had some small indirect contact with those types of people as well. Overall, I felt that Lerner explained her examples well and provided a great deal of feedback to each type of person she felt would benefit from her work. I didn’t for a moment find myself offended. Rather, I found myself full of new avenues to explore, mostly in the form of other writing-related books, as Lerner has a habit of citing other works in her examples.
The second part, Publishing, is broken down into the natural stages that a first-time writer will encounter and outlines what to expect with each one. There are six chapters, Making Contact: Seeking Agents and Publication, Rejection, What Editors Want, What Authors Want, The Book and Publication. Some of the information is common knowledge, or at least should be, but interspersed in with the advice that all authors should already be aware of (and aren’t always, judging by the personal stories of bad writer behavior) are insider details on editorial processes, book designing, publicity and the interpersonal relationships between the writers and the team of people that help them get their work into the public. It’s fascinating, really, and more than a bit humorous in places.
The Forest for the Trees reads much like Bird By Bird would if Anne Lamott were able to step back from her work and view the situation more objectively, though Lamott’s own work will always have a warm, welcoming spot on my bookshelf. Having the multiple-angle viewpoint helps quite a bit in getting the whole picture, rather than just the neurotic nail-biting writerly side. However, this is not really a book for someone who needs advice on how to write. The fact that you’re writing is just assumed, and it never goes into technical detail. For that, I would suggest the work of James Smith (if you have to pick just one, go for The Writer’s Little Helper, as he has the annoying habit of reusing exercises in multiple books) or James Scott Bell’s entries in the Writing Great Fiction series.
4/5
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
#6 of 2009: Microserfs by Douglas Coupland
I didn’t think it would take me so long to get to book number six for the year, seeing as how I sped through everything last year. This time around, though, I’m in the middle of revising a rough draft and I’m whittling away at my DVD collection along with reading novels.
For the longest time, while reading Microserfs, I got the feeling that it wasn’t as good a read as jPod. It took me much longer, and some of the concepts were outdated, but when I got to the end of it I came to the conclusion that it might, in its own way, be even better.
The book begins in late 1993 and runs until January of 1995, a period of time where I was slowly becoming more and more obsessed with technology. My fascinations were directed more at word processing, game playing and general screwing around rather than actually learning to code, which wouldn’t present itself to me until around 2000 and in such a poor fashion that I never really gave it my full attention. The characters in Microserfs, however, are fully immersed in the world of corporate coding farms and the Bill Gates deification that almost always tagged along back then.
Wave after wave of nostalgia hit me while reading Microserfs. I remember the commercials the characters bring up constantly, the Play Doh and Lego, the sugar cereal and megacorporations and clothing labels. I remember the current events, the celebrities, the earthquakes and fires on the news. So much of this book seems like it was yanked out of my life that it feels surreal, like pulling memories out of a dark corner that I wasn’t aware held anything at all.
Fast food is addictive but about as bad for you as a bunch of simultaneous chest x-rays.
Apple was, and always shall be, the height of cool.
Lego are impressive, but the claw-like hands on their little people (minifigs) are creepy as hell.
Not too long after this book came out I would wind up owning the much-ridiculed (in the novel and in my life) Geo Metro. It really didn’t have the capacity to kill anyone, or even so much as bruise.
This was like prematurely opening up a time capsule full of VCRs, fax machines, early-stage cell phones, GAP khakis, laptops, processed foods, Crystal Pepsi, Melrose Place and ramen noodles and going “Oh yeah, I remember this stuff. Man, weren’t those the days!”
I’m not going to delve into it in too much detail, but lest anyone think this book is some shallow jaunt down memory lane (or, around its publication, a piece of pop culture masturbation) let me say there is a very subtle but noticeable human undercurrent present at all times that comes out in full force towards the end.
Man, I miss the 90s.
5/5
For the longest time, while reading Microserfs, I got the feeling that it wasn’t as good a read as jPod. It took me much longer, and some of the concepts were outdated, but when I got to the end of it I came to the conclusion that it might, in its own way, be even better.
The book begins in late 1993 and runs until January of 1995, a period of time where I was slowly becoming more and more obsessed with technology. My fascinations were directed more at word processing, game playing and general screwing around rather than actually learning to code, which wouldn’t present itself to me until around 2000 and in such a poor fashion that I never really gave it my full attention. The characters in Microserfs, however, are fully immersed in the world of corporate coding farms and the Bill Gates deification that almost always tagged along back then.
Wave after wave of nostalgia hit me while reading Microserfs. I remember the commercials the characters bring up constantly, the Play Doh and Lego, the sugar cereal and megacorporations and clothing labels. I remember the current events, the celebrities, the earthquakes and fires on the news. So much of this book seems like it was yanked out of my life that it feels surreal, like pulling memories out of a dark corner that I wasn’t aware held anything at all.
Fast food is addictive but about as bad for you as a bunch of simultaneous chest x-rays.
Apple was, and always shall be, the height of cool.
Lego are impressive, but the claw-like hands on their little people (minifigs) are creepy as hell.
Not too long after this book came out I would wind up owning the much-ridiculed (in the novel and in my life) Geo Metro. It really didn’t have the capacity to kill anyone, or even so much as bruise.
This was like prematurely opening up a time capsule full of VCRs, fax machines, early-stage cell phones, GAP khakis, laptops, processed foods, Crystal Pepsi, Melrose Place and ramen noodles and going “Oh yeah, I remember this stuff. Man, weren’t those the days!”
I’m not going to delve into it in too much detail, but lest anyone think this book is some shallow jaunt down memory lane (or, around its publication, a piece of pop culture masturbation) let me say there is a very subtle but noticeable human undercurrent present at all times that comes out in full force towards the end.
Man, I miss the 90s.
5/5
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