Category: Books

The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling

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 There are a lot of “big books” this fall, much-anticipated books by well-known authors, such as NW by Zadie Smith and Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon. Perhaps the biggest of all is The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling (author of the Harry Potter books. In case you’ve been living under a rock since 1997).

Very little information about The Casual Vacancy was given out before its official publication date, other than that (1) it would feature neither witchcraft nor wizardry, and (2) it was for adults, not children. Having just finished the book, I can confirm that both of these things are true. I can also tell you a bit more:

The Casual Vacancy begins with the death of Barry Fairbrother. Barry leaves behind a widow, four children, and an empty seat on the Pagford town council. There is an important vote coming up, concerning the Fields, a low-income housing area that has long been a thorn in the side of many Pagfordians. Depending on the result of the vote, the Fields will either remain part of Pagford, or will become instead part of the larger neighboring town of Yarvil, which will most likely close down the Bellchapel Addiction Clinic. (Pagford’s small, but not sleepy.)

Enter an ensemble cast of townspeople who are, largely, self-important and petty. There are gossipy old women, self-conscious and selfish teenagers, resentful wives, fearful wives, affluent families and poor ones, insiders and outsiders. This isn’t a comedy or a farce; Rowling’s skill is such that each character is multidimensional. Though they don’t understand each other, and tend to assume the worst, the reader sees the true motivations behind their behavior. Every character wants something, which makes each character believable.

On top of that, Rowling is, as we all know, a master of pacing, and The Casual Vacancy is compulsively readable. For more detail (but no serious spoilers), read my review on Goodreads.

NW by Zadie Smith

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Last Wednesday, I rushed home after work to feed and walk the dog, then rushed to the Cambridge Public Library to see Zadie Smith read from her new book, NW, and answer questions. Despite minimal advertising for the program, there was a long line; in addition to the auditorium where she was speaking, the CPL staff opened up an auxiliary room and set up a simulcast; I was one of the last four people allowed into the overflow room, and I was glad just to get in.

Smith read two sections from NW, one from the middle where Felix Cooper visits Annie, and one where Natalie Blake is part of a confrontation in a playground. (The book’s title, which refers to northwest London, reflects the author’s belief that “a novel is a local thing.”) Hearing an author read from her own work is nearly always enjoyable, and in this case it also helped give us Americans an idea of what the various NW characters were supposed to sound like (as we follow Smith’s advice, “Read what isn’t you,” e.g. the unfamiliar).

NW is divided into three parts, each focusing on a different character and each with a different narrative style. Felix’s story, in the middle, was the most straightforward, but only tangentially connected to Leah Hanwell and Natalie (formerly Keisha) Blake’s stories. The book opens with Leah, and ends with Natalie, whose section is broken into numbered segments; part of this ran in The New Yorker before the book was published.

As those who have read Zadie Smith’s work before know, she is fiercely intelligent and it can take some effort to keep up with her writing; additionally, in NW, the shifts in writing style will keep you on your toes. All three of the main characters grapple with their past, present, and future: in short, their identities. Though the writing is nontraditional and the characters are confused about who they are, NW has, in a way many other novels don’t, “thematic coherence” that resonates.

Read my full review, with quotes, on Goodreads.

Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read

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Preparing for Banned Books Week at the library (September 30-October 6), I’m getting excited ahead of time. The American Library Association (ALA) has several cool badges and banners available to download for free (remember to give credit for the images if you use them).

Reprinted by permission of the American Library Association.

On the ALA site, you can also see lists of the most frequently banned/challenged books, by author, year, or decade. You can also see that almost half of the Radcliffe (now Columbia) Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century have been challenged or banned; if you did any of your assigned reading in school, I can pretty much guarantee that at least one of those books is on that list.

The most frequently challenged/banned books list is overwhelmingly comprised of classics (think To Kill A Mockingbird and Brave New World) and young adult literature (The Giver, A Wrinkle in Time, Harry Potter). The most common reasons for challenges are “sexually explicit,” “offensive language,” and “unsuited to age group,” and the most likely challenger, by a tremendous margin, is a parent.

I was fortunate that during my childhood and adolescence, my parents, teachers, and librarians never told me I couldn’t read a book. Reading has always been a positive part of my life, not something that ever harmed me – even when I was reading material “unsuited to my age group.”

Let’s all celebrate our freedom to read, not just September 30-October 6, but all year, every year – because reading is magic.

 

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

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An alternative title for this post, taken from author Madeline Miller’s event last night at Porter Square Books, could be: Mythological Fiction: “Am I really having a centaur in my novel?”

 “Mythological fiction” is how Miller categorizes her novel, The Song of Achilles, rather than historical fiction or simply literary fiction, and it’s apt: The Song of Achilles is a retelling of part of Homer’s Iliad, complete with heroes, gods, and mortals. Authors who choose to adapt or retell myths have a choice, said Miller, to write the gods as characters or to explain away their presence (e.g., Was it Poseidon or an earthquake?). Miller chose to include the gods as characters, notably Achilles’ sea-nymph mother Thetis, and his and Patroclus’ teacher, the centaur Chiron.

 Miller’s impetus for writing The Song of Achilles was Achilles’ extreme grief over Patroclus’ death in the Iliad. To explain Achilles’ reaction to Patroclus’ fate, she writes about their adolescence and coming of age together from Patroclus’ point of view. The Song of Achilles tells an ancient story in an accessible way; the writing is both modern and lyric. Of adapting Homer’s original material, Miller said, “Great artists [such as Homer] understand human nature…the stories in the past illuminate the present…great art has great psychological insight.” The story seems modern because human nature has not changed: pride, love, grief, and revenge are as familiar to us now as they were three thousand years ago.

 

The gleam in the dark: writing and reading fiction

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I’ve been a fan of Lauren Groff’s writing for years, so I was delighted to find this interview with her (via Twitter). The interviewer, Jason Skipper, asked Groff about her research for Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia, and Groff replied, “Research is about following the gleam into the dark.” She followed this beautiful sentence by talking about the difference between “creative” facts that spur one’s imagination, as opposed to those facts that dampen the process. This makes sense: just think about researching for work of historical fiction. Some facts will be fascinating, suggesting plot points all on their own, while others will seem like obstacles to the story.

Skipper then asked Groff about connection, “as a person born on the cusp of the digital age – making you old enough to remember a time without it, and young enough to realize its potential.” I have copied most of Groff’s resonant reply: “We are cuspies, aren’t we? There’s a glow to that time before things went all matrix on us, before everyone was plugged into the mainframe by their fingertips….I do remember people talking more. Nostalgia is dangerous, though, and I can’t tell whether those days actually were more authentically connected, whether they seemed so because I was an adolescent, or whether memory is spackling everything over with a thick layer of pretty-pretty.”

She continued, “In terms of writing, I think what most fiction writers treasure more than anything is the feeling that they’re living for the length of a book inside another person.” This echoes the sentiment in editor Jennifer Jackson’s publicity letter in the ARC of Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars: “[The book] reminded me why I became a reader in the first place: because it is the best chance you will ever have to live another life.” Both author and reader see books as a means of escape and of empathy.

This isn’t a coincidence. In an article entitled “Your Brain on Fiction” in The New York Times earlier this year, professor of cognitive psychology and novelist Keith Oatley suggested that reading produces “a vivid simulation of reality.” The article’s author, Annie Murphy Paul, wrote, “Fiction with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other peoples thoughts and feelings.”

Paul continued, “The novel, of course, is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and emotional life,” and cited work by Dr. Oatley and Dr. Raymond Mar indicating that “individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective…novels, stories and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life.”

Just over a month after the “Your Brain on Fiction” article ran in the Times, the Boston Globe ran a piece by Jonathan Gottschall called “Why Fiction is Good for You.” (Originally, I was going to cite both these pieces in a post called “A spoonful of fiction makes reality go down,” about why kids should be able to read what they want without parents or teachers fearing that the content of the books will damage them somehow; it seems that rather the opposite is true.) Gottschall reports, “Research consistently shows that fiction does mold us…mainly for the better, not for the worse.” When people read fiction, they imagine themselves in the characters’ lives – which may be completely different from their own. This encourages empathy, and “by enhancing empathy, fiction reduces social friction.”

Imagination leads to understanding; understanding leads to empathy. It turns out – surprise, surprise – that stories are good for us.

10/4/2013 Edited to add: A study published in the journal Science found that after reading literary fiction, “as opposed to popular fiction or serious nonfiction, people performed better on tests measuring empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence.” Read the article from the New York Times “Mind” section, in which author Louise Erdrich is quoted: “For Better Social Skills, Scientists Recommend a Little Chekhov”

From Jane Eyre to Gemma Hardy

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Last night, I had the pleasure of hosting Margot Livesey at the library for a reading and booktalk. You know that Sourcebooks T-shirt, Authors Are My Rockstars? That pretty much sums it up for me, but I think I managed to be somewhat graceful and well-spoken (keeping the “likes” and “ums” to a minimum). Margot herself was just lovely (you can listen to an interview with her on the Leonard Lopate Show if you missed last night’s event), and I was so excited to do this program with her.

Check out the library blog post to read more about the books we discussed and recommended: The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain, Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel, Rules of Civility by Amor Towles, and Gold by Chris Cleave.

After reading from The Flight of Gemma Hardy and recommending some other books, Livesey answered questions from the audience. One person asked how autobiographical the novel was; Livesey said, “Like Charlotte Bronte, I stole from my own life…I borrowed recklessly and exaggerated wildly.”

Livesey also discussed why she chose to “re-imagine a novel” that was published in 1847 and hasn’t been out of print since (165 years)? “It’s preposterous,” she allowed, but the story clearly has “enduring appeal,” the nature of which has to do with the combination of two old and powerful narratives: that of the orphan and that of the pilgrim/traveler on a journey. Jane Eyre – and Gemma Hardy – combine these two into one.

Also, by setting the story in the 1950s-1960s, Livesey was able to “write back” to Bronte, showing how far women have come (though, as she noted last night and in the interview linked to above, the “swinging ’60s” didn’t reach parts of Scotland until the 1970s). As a reader, it was deeply satisfying to see Gemma standing up for herself in ways that Jane couldn’t.

So, if you haven’t already read it, do add The Flight of Gemma Hardy (and also perhaps my other favorite Livesey novel, Eva Moves the Furniture) to your to-read list.

The Growing Pains of E-Books

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Like many librarians in public libraries, I spend a fair amount of time explaining how various e-readers work, how the digital media catalog (separate from the regular library catalog) works, and how to accomplish the many steps required to download an e-book from the library collection.

I know that we live in a time of unprecedented and rapid technological growth and change, and that what we are going through now is just growing pains. The book industry, like other media industries (music, film), is trying to figure out how to deal with this change.

But it’s not happening fast enough, or thoughtfully enough. The prevalent model right now is one book, one reader: libraries buy (or, more often, license) one digital copy of a book, and one library user can borrow it at a time. With vendors and digital rights management (DRM), publishers are attempting to make the digital world obey the same rules as the print world, but this is artificial and must give way to a better model.

Even with the current model, most major publishers are not participating; they refuse to sell or license e-books to libraries. This comes as a surprise to many library users, which means librarians must do a better job of raising public awareness, notes San Rafael Public Library Director Sarah Houghton (a.k.a. the Librarian in Black).

There are other models out there: Brian Herzog (a.k.a. the Swiss Army Librarian) explains a newer platform called Freading, a token-based system that eliminates waiting lists. The main catch is that Freading’s 15,000+ books don’t include any from the “Big Six” publishers (HarperCollins, Random House, Penguin, Macmillan, Hachette, Simon & Schuster), and therefore many popular titles.

Eventually – sooner rather than later, one hopes – the major publishers will see that their fears are unfounded, and that selling or licensing e-books to libraries will not gut their sales. (After all, selling print books to libraries didn’t kill the book industry.) In an article that reported research findings showing “a symbiotic relationship between library patronage and consumer book purchasing,” School Library Journal editor-in-chief Rebecca Miller said, “It’s exciting to have data to back the sense that library use is also an economic engine for the book industry. Publishers now have proof of how libraries support their business models.”

For years, articles asking “Are libraries obsolete?” and wondering, “Will [fill in the blank] be the death of libraries?” have abounded. Libraries are still here, though, and most want to remain relevant; we want to continue offering “the highest level of service to all library users through appropriate and usefully organized resources” (ALA Code of Ethics). In many cases, libraries offer not just access to resources but also a community center, a place for people to meet, learn, work, and create. Now, with the rise of self-publishing, the question has become: Are publishers relevant? Are publishers obsolete?

Not quite yet. The mainstream publishing industry still has value. Its editors and publicists have decades of experience in identifying great work, improving it and polishing it through the editorial process, spreading the word about it through publicity and advertising, and printing and distributing it.

But the Big Six aren’t the only game in town. While they drag their feet, libraries would do well to consider other sources of e-content. As Jamie LaRue points out in his recent Library Journal piece, “All Hat, No Cattle: A call for libraries to transform before it’s too late,” independent publishers have shown themselves to be much more open to working with libraries than mainstream publishers have been. Additionally, digitization projects throughout the country have made more content available online; and of course there is self-published material.

So, publishers: what’s stopping you from reaching more readers by selling e-books to the “staggeringly effective marketing machine” (LaRue) that is the library? And librarians: it’s time for us to work together to explore other options instead of letting the Big Six call the shots. As LaRue points out, “If we pay public dollars for content, then we must be able to take possession of the copies. Anything else is sheer vendor lock-in and shirks our obligation to preserve the public record.”

Libraries and librarians are waiting, impatiently but often too quietly, for publishers to work with us on this. It has the potential to be a situation where everyone wins: publishers profit, authors reach a wider audience, libraries provide excellent service, readers have access to a wide variety of resources.

 

The Light Between Oceans

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M.L. Stedman’s debut novel The Light Between Oceans is published today. I had the opportunity to read an advance copy of the book this past spring, and it was fantastic; I reviewed it on Goodreads at the time, but here it is again for those who are interested:

In the aftermath of the Great War, Tom Sherbourne returns to Australia, and works alone on an island as a lighthouse keeper. On occasional trips back to the mainland, he meets and then marries Isabel Graysmark; they return to the island together, where Isabel conceives and miscarries three times.

Shortly after the third miscarriage, a boat washes up on the island, containing a dead man and a living baby. Isabel persuades Tom not to report it – to bury the man and keep the baby as their own. He uneasily agrees; but back on the mainland, the baby’s mother grieves for her lost husband and son.

The Light Between Oceans is an extraordinary story of the difference one decision makes; how the future must be lived when the past cannot be changed; of right and wrong and love. Not only is it a beautiful book with strong characters, its thought-provoking central dilemma makes it a great discussion starter and excellent book club pick. Also: bonus points for a gorgeous cover.

Reviewers and Readers: what do we want?

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I read a lot of books (understatement of my life), and a lot of book reviews (especially since it’s now part of my job), but until recently I did not know about Bookmarks Magazine. They have their own reviews, but they also provide links to reviews elsewhere. Two of the most useful features on the site are “see all of this week’s reviews” and “see most-reviewed books (last 8 weeks).”

For collection development purposes (i.e. buying books for the library), I’ve been relying on traditional sources, like Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal. These are all great resources, but I also really appreciate being able to go to Bookmarks to read several reviews of a book at once.

Recently, having just read Gold by Chris Cleave (and having attended a reading at the Brookline Booksmith), I was curious as to how it was being reviewed in the mainstream press. Thanks to NetGalley, I had the opportunity to read Gold before its official publication date, knowing little about it except the basic premise, and form my own opinion (in a word: lovefest) before I read the opinions of others. Reading some of the reviews Bookmarks linked to, I found that others’ opinions were decidedly mixed, with at least one reviewer (LA Times) complaining of “a feeling of being manipulated.”

Now, book reviewing is a subjective thing, but this seemed to be an odd complaint. No one really likes the word “manipulate,” but isn’t that what all writers, fiction and nonfiction, aspire to do? Nonfiction authors nearly always have an agenda; they are trying to convince you to see things a certain way. (Granted, while plenty of nonfiction has an obvious bias, other nonfiction aspires to be bias-free. It’s basically impossible, but points for effort.)

Fiction, on the other hand…fiction is made up. Invented. Imaginary. Necessitates, frequently, a “willing suspension of disbelief.” We read fiction because we are hungry for stories, and because even though characters and places might be made-up, they are also often deeply true. The authors who can manipulate us best are the ones we love most.

 

Book it to the library

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I just wrote a long-ish post on “the value of your library,” most of which applies whether you’re an Arlington, MA resident/library user or not. The main point of the post is that public libraries, even if you only visit yours two or three times a year, are a pretty amazing deal. Arlington, for example, spends $44.57 per capita on its public library.

If you live in Massachusetts and are interested in the per capita spending for your local library, check out this report (PDF) from the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners (MBLC), which has that data for every one of Massachusetts’ 350 towns. Average per capita spending is $37.15 (or 1.30% of the municipal budget); the medians are slightly lower.

Can you think of a better deal for forty bucks? I can’t. Check out ilovelibraries.org’s Library Value Calculator to see what the library is worth to you.