Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 235

Crime fiction is great, but I doubt it’s the favorite

Via The Passive Voice blog, this perhaps implausible article in the Guardian: It’s no mystery that crime is the biggest-selling genre in books

No offense to the author, Sophie Hannah, but does that seem the least bit plausible? Here is the claim:

It has happened at last! Finally, the literary world is a meritocracy! Crime fiction – which I first became aware of as the Best Genre Ever when I read my first Enid Blyton mystery at six years old – is now officially the UK’s bestselling genre. Nielsen Bookscan data at the London book fair has revealed that crime novels in 2017, for the first time since Nielsen’s records began, sold more than the category rather vaguely labelled “general and literary fiction”. Crime sales of have increased by 19% since 2015 to 18.7m, compared to the 18.1m fiction books sold in 2017.

Now, it does seem possible that crime fiction might have outpaced general and literary fiction. Not only possible but indeed, reasonable and just in a fair world. But . . . Bookscan? Surely Sophie Hannah realizes that Bookscan only counts sales of physical books, right? And not all of those; Bookscan is in fact supposed to do a better job capturing sales of general and literary fiction than genre or commercial fiction.

In particular, I think everyone accepts that Bookscan misses a lot of SFF sales and an actual majority of Romance sales. Also a lot of mysteries, so if the official numbers suggest crime and mysteries have outpaced literary sales, I bet the former is WAY ahead of the latter.

This graph, based not on official sales numbers but on reader surveys, suggests that indeed, mysteries and crime are not just a nose ahead, but far ahead of “literature” and general fiction. Counting “thrillers” in with mysteries and crime naturally inflates that number; also, I wouldn’t do that if I were creating the categories. Thrillers and mysteries offer quite a different reading experience. Granted, there’s a good deal of blurriness at the boundary, but think of cozy mysteries and then a thriller like The Breach by Patrick Lee and really, it’s apples to nutmeg.

Anyway, though I think the excitement is overdone, the linked article is perhaps worth reading if you have a minute. This is an interesting suggestion:

…what accounts for the sudden surge in the genre’s popularity? Here we need to look at another eternally popular genre, romance, which also has puzzle at its centre: where will true and lasting love come from? Is true happiness possible? Is he The One?…

Both crime and romantic fiction are driven by quests for conclusive answers and happy endings. The killer being safely locked up is as much a happy ending as marrying Mr or Ms Right. In both genres, the realism of the driving force (puzzle/need for happy resolution) combined with the not-quite-so-realistic comfort/fairytale value of the genre-prescribed ending (safety restored/happiness with a true soulmate) is what appeals.

Could be, could be! Though I think one might make way too much out of the puzzle aspect of romance, which is almost completely beside the point imo. But isn’t it true of most commercial fiction — not just the categories mentioned, but most SFF and most other genres — that we expect a reasonably satisfying resolution most of the time? Bad guys go down in flames, good guys ride off into the sunset, relationships more or less work out. Yes? Not grimdark, of course, awful endings are pretty much the whole point of grimdark, but as a general rule we expect poetic justice to be done all around and the story to have some sort of feeling of satisfying closure.

Well, that’s two points, not one, so this is not a very cohesive post. Nevertheless: I doubt mysteries and crime are really outpacing romance (even though both this article and the linked survey indicate they are.) I doubt this because of numbers like these: Romance earned $1.44 billion in 2017, whereas mystery/crime clocked in at $728 million. I’d like to know where those numbers came from, but nevertheless, I look at that and think: Sales numbers are collected in iffy ways, but Romance is going to be on top of sales for a long time to come.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The World of Tiers series by Philip Jose Farmer —

The World of Tiers series by Philip Jose Farmer, which I remember rather fondly from decades ago, is on sale at Amazon: $2.99 for the first three books.

His past a mystery and his present unbearably mundane, Robert Wolff is simply trying to buy a new house in Arizona when he stumbles upon a secret doorway through space and time and enters the World of Tiers. Made up of ascending levels of jungles, plains, medieval cities, and, at the top, a Garden of Eden, and populated by fantastical creatures, from nymphs and centaurs to merpeople and strange amalgams nonexistent on Earth, it’s beyond anything Wolff could have imagined in his previous humdrum existence. And when his youth is restored in the bargain, it seems he’s truly found paradise.

But there are dark forces in this new world, and Wolff is plunged into an epic quest up through the tiers, accompanied by Paul Janus Finnegan, another earthling, now known as Kickaha. Wolff’s journey to find Jadawin, the Lord of this world, will lead to answers about his own identity—and determine his fate.

Very pulp fiction-y; I have to admit that looking back on it now I’d class it as Fantasy Adventure For Boys.

Fun, though. I definitely enjoyed it back then and might like to re-read now.

Please Feel Free to Share:

Recent Reading: The Demon and the City by Liz Williams

First, a report on the strategy of choosing books at random from the TBR shelves:

I have never, NEVER been less interested in a book for the first quarter, and then wound up liking it quite a bit. I have NEVER decided I was uninterested in the characters, unthrilled by the plot, and done done done with a book and then flipped ahead a bit and suddenly gotten much more interested.

Question: is this a feature of the specific book? Or a feature of the strategy? Hard to say with a sample size of one. If I keep going with randomly selected books this summer, I may find out.

On the other hand, did any of you possibly have a similar experience with The Demon and the City? Or with another book in Liz Williams’ Inspector Chen series?

This is the second book of the series. The official description is lacking, so here is a much better description and review, of which I’ll pull out this part because this reader’s experience was similar to mine:

Detective Chen Wei goes on vacation for a couple of weeks and the whole city of Singapore Three goes to Hell. … chaos and conspiracy (and hilarity) ensue when Chen returns from vacation to find Singapore Three in a state of upheaval, so close to the Day of the Dead, when the barriers between the worlds grow thin. He and Zhu Irzh [his demon partner] work frantically to unravel this mess with barely enough time to capture the sinister force and save the city. … their chemistry/partnership breathes life back into the story….That’s what the first half of this book is missing, this strange yet familiar connection between Chen and Zhu Irzh that started in the first book. … That’s not to say the events prior to Chen’s return are boring; it’s just different like an unexpected break from narrative. An investigation and near-apocalypse without Chen’s involvement seem out of balance somehow, as he is the element that ties everything together. When he returns, the investigation is steered back on track and the story has a sense of direction again.

I don’t know that Inspector Chen is my favorite! character! ever! But until he turned up about a third of the way through the book, I couldn’t get interested. I didn’t like Deveth, the first pov character who was introduced (of course, murder mystery here, she didn’t last long. She reappeared in a different form, though, because Singapore Three is like that.) I didn’t like the second pov character, Robin. I didn’t care for Zhu Irzh, I didn’t like the villain, and I truly was not interested in the fate of the world.

Then I hit this scene where it looked like Robin was also going to die and I was like, Don’t care, I’m done. But I did flip ahead a bit just to give the book one more chance and two things happened: Chen turned up and, sure enough, breathed life back into the story. And it turned out Robin hadn’t been killed after all. So I skipped back a bit, to where Chen reappeared, and read the rest of the book from there.

And you know what? I liked it quite a bit. Zhu Irzh works so much better as a character when Chen is present.

The demon had bridled. “I’m not unremittingly evil—and me saying that just goes to show that I’m not a typical demon. I have feelings, too. I have a conscience. I helped you save the world, didn’t I?”

Chen, though conceding that there was a measure of truth in this, had remained resolute. “I don’t think you’re unremittingly evil,” he said. “I just think you’re . . .slightly dodgy.”

I don’t know, I think Zhu Irzh is closer to unremittingly evil than merely dodgy. I sort of like him, but maybe his evilness is why I needed Chen in the story. Robin is such an idiot at the beginning. She is at least trying to be a better person by the middle. Jhai, the villain, is SO EVIL. Even she is not so awful by the end, if only because she’s suffered, um, some personal reverses.

Other features that make this series iffy for me:

1) Singapore Three is very nearly too gritty for me. It’s a great setting, don’t get me wrong, but I would prefer knowing less about its filth and poverty and the hopelessness of so many people … I think it’s also hitting my claustrophobic-setting button because so many people seem trapped in lives of quiet desperation and I just hate that.

2) Are we ever going to actually meet Chen’s wife? I know she’s a demon, but we know almost nothing about her and she never seems to be actually featured. How in the world did Chen come to marry a demon? I don’t think we actually found out much about this in the first book (Snake Agent) and we never see Inari in this book.

3) Both Heaven and Hell are so unappealing, and the Night Harbor, yuck. It seems that in this world, most people first live lives of quiet desperation and then endure afterlives that may be worse.

Given that all afterlives appear to be real for their various adherents, I’m amazed everyone in Singapore Three doesn’t convert en masse to Christianity. How does that even work? — I mean all religions and afterlives being true? I would really like to have Chen or Zhu Irzh meet a Christian so that Williams would tackle that question.

Features that mean I may go on to the third book:

1) The setting is so ornate and interesting.

2) I do like Inspector Chen and I guess Zhu Irzh as well, at least under the right circumstances.

3) Williams’ writing is very good. I bet she gets told she’s writing very “intellectual” books and that she would do better to write more “emotional” books, because I get told that and my books are not nearly as intellectual as hers.

Who should try this series:

1) If you like urban settings, you should definitely try Singapore Three. Especially if you also like non-European settings.

2) If you like both detective novels and fantasy, you may well appreciate Inspector Chen.

Please Feel Free to Share:

Recent Reading: Bitterblue

I haven’t been reading many new-to-me books lately; I’ve been re-reading the Touchstone Trilogy and bits of Cyteen and Regenesis instead. But, as I work my way through fiddly revisions of this and that, and also experience epiphanies about my actual supposed WIP and pick that back up, I have also started very slowly tackling my physical TBR pile. Which consists of three short shelves plus a longish row of books on the floor, and this summer I would like to whittle that down until nothing is on the floor. May be too ambitious a goal, we’ll see.

Also, I have despaired of ever being in the mood to read some of the books on my physical TBR pile, so I am trying out a new strategy: I shut my eyes, run my hand along the shelves, and pick a book totally at random. Even if I’m not in the mood, I start reading that book. If I don’t think I like it, I will keep going a little or skip ahead and try again so that I feel like I’ve given the book a fair try. I will have a comment about this method in a later post, but for now I want to focus on Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore.

I will start by saying that although I liked the first book, Graceling, I really did not think it was all that and a bag of chips. I thought the characters were pretty typical, the plot fairly predictable, the fundamental worldbuilding fairly unbelievable, and the actual storytelling good enough to carry me along through the story anyway. I didn’t read the second book, Fire, because it just did not sound as though it would be something I would like. Bitterblue, on the other hand, did.

Eight years have passed since the young Princess Bitterblue, and her country, were saved from the vicious King Leck. Now Bitterblue is the queen of Monsea, and her land is at peace.

But the influence of her father, a violent psychopath with mind-altering abilities, lives on. Her advisers, who have run the country on her behalf since Leck’s death, believe in a forward-thinking plan: to pardon all of those who committed terrible acts during Leck’s reign; and to forget every dark event that ever happened. Monsea’s past has become shrouded in mystery, and it’s only when Bitterblue begins sneaking out of her castle – curious, disguised and alone – to walk the streets of her own city, that she begins to realise the truth. Her kingdom has been under the thirty-five-year long spell of a madman, and now their only chance to move forward is to revisit the past.

Whatever that past holds.

Where Graceling was if anything too straightforward, Bitterblue is thoroughly confusing. I mean that in a good way. For a long time, nothing makes sense, to Bitterblue or the reader. The palace is so weird and confusing and everyone who lives in it is also weird and confusing, from servant girls like Fox to important advisers like Thiel and everyone in between. All these weird, confusing things happen, both within the palace and out in the city.

The reader is likely to sort all this out and come to certain disturbing conclusions about Leck’s past activities well before Bitterblue does, which is reasonable because not only is Bitterblue in the middle of events, not only is almost everyone — every Monsean, anyway — looking her in the eye and lying to her, she also doesn’t have that depraved an imagination. She sure tries hard, but she’s so wrapped in a fog of past and present deception, of course she has a hard time figuring things out. Plus her evil father’s mind-control power means she has hardly any memory of her childhood before he died.

Well, this all makes for a dramatically more interesting novel. Plus Bitterblue is someone the reader can really get behind. She tries so hard to be a good queen. She is a genuinely kind, serious, responsible sort of young woman, caught in a terrifying and baffling situation. Plus she isn’t super beautiful or super clever or whatever. There’s a bit of a love triangle, but it’s not ridiculously intense, doesn’t get in the way of the story, and certainly doesn’t venture into Mary Sue everyone-falls-in-love-with-the-heroine territory.

Also! Every single continuing character from Graceling is more complicated and more interesting in this book, from Katsa and Po right down the list. Giddon, a totally unimportant secondary character from Graceling, is far more important and interesting in this book. He’s a great character here, very possibly my favorite character in the book.

Possible flaws:

Now that I’ve finished Bitterblue, I have read through a handful of Goodreads reviews. Quite a lot of them say something like this: The book was way too long, the pacing was terrible, the middle dragged, Bitterblue spent all her time waiting for something or other and not nearly enough taking effective action.

My own response was different. I thought the waiting and the hopeless way Bitterblue would step into the fog of confusion and get thwarted and turn around and try again was fine. It felt to me like that whole middle part of the book deepened the fog that surrounded her and effectively wrapped the reader in that same fog. Also, it didn’t seem slow or badly paced because I zipped right through it. If a reader focuses mostly or exclusively on YA fantasy, then the book may well seem pretty slow. If a reader tackles a lot of long, involved, possibly slow-paced adult fiction, then in comparison Bitterblue may seem much faster. Compared to, say, the five-book Shadow Campaigns series that I read earlier this spring, Bitterblue was a quick, effortless read.

But obviously your mileage may differ.

I will add that some secondary character arcs are profoundly tragic. The things Leck did, and forced other people to do, and made everyone forget about — you can imagine the PTSD that resulted, and some of those stories do not have happy endings. I didn’t find the story hard to read; I found the presentation of those kinds of problems highly sympathetic, and, surprisingly, not too dark. But again, your mileage might differ.

Overall: I really liked this one and I do recommend it, especially to readers who might have found the first book of the series a little simplistic and predictable.

Please Feel Free to Share:

What is High Concept?

At Pub Rants, this: [C]onversations about high concept often end with I can’t tell you exactly what it is, but I know it when I see it. So instead of searching for a definition of high concept, let’s look at some of its features…

It is indeed a slippery term, not one on which I’ve ever felt I had a good grasp. Let’s see what characteristics Danielle Burby, Kristen Nelson’s colleague at Nelson Literary Agency, has come up with:

1. Unique idea that makes the agent or editor say Whoa, a story like this has never occurred to me!

2. The idea is also easy to pitch in one or two sentences.

3. The idea is one that will appeal to a wide audience.

4. The story plainly involves high stakes.

5. The story prioritizes action and plot over character and introspection.

…. Okay, click through to read Burby’s comments about these features.

What I’m getting, when I try to think of examples, is stories that probably involve everything but (3). In other words, SF or F stories.

I just doubt that SF and F will have as easy a time breaking out into a wide audience as, say, thrillers (or, I guess, erotica). I suspect that any story set in a less familiar world is going to have a harder, more uphill battle to appeal to a wide audience. Don’t tell me about GAME OF THRONES. Without the TV show, the books alone would never have turned into a phenomenon. Fantasy subgenres with more familiar settings — ie, UF and Paranormal — are a whole lot more likely to be popular than other SFF subgenres, especially since they pick up a subset of Romance readers.

Despite this uphill struggle for widespread appeal, here are some SFF works that seem high concept to me:

SEVENEVES by Stevenson. Big Whoa moment, easy to pitch (The moon shatters, wiping out nearly all life on Earth; the human species is re-founded by just seven women), hugely dramatic, super high stakes, and — yep — it prioritizes plot over character and backstory.

CLASH OF EAGLES by Alan Smale. Legionaries from a Rome that never fell march into North America and meet the native Cahokians — who have hang-gliders! The stakes are pretty big, but I will say, there is a lot more emphasis on character than in the former example. Though not a lot of backstory.

TEMERAIRE by Novik. The Napoleonic War — with dragons! Very easy to pitch. Pretty high stakes, plenty of action, but again a fairly heavy emphasis on character. Does this tend to contradict point (5) above, or are these character-driven but also action-heavy stories not really high concept? I think they are pretty high concept and so I’m not sure I agree with point (5).

These were just off the top of my head. What else seems like an obvious contender for high concept within SFF? Can you think of one which really broke out into a wide audience, beyond the norm for popular SFF books?

Please Feel Free to Share:

Many endings to Omelas

Via File 770, this long list of different endings to “Those Who Walk Away from Omelas.”

Once upon a time there was a city called Omelas, where everyone lived good and happy and fulfilling lives.

And in time it came to pass that a young man by the name of Outis came of age in that city; and, as with all who lived in that city, he was taken to a secret place where a wise elder showed him a small cold dirty room. And in that room there was a small cold dirty child, naked and hurt and starving, who had never known the least human kindness.

And the wise elder said to Outis, “In our city, everything is good and no one suffers. But it all depends on this child. If the least kindness is shown to him, our city will become like all other cities. There must always be such a child in Omelas.” …

Then follows one ending after another, of which my favorites are:

1)

…And Outis asked the elder, “Why?” And the elder showed him to a library filled with books. And Outis studied the books for many years. And when he was an old man with a gray beard, Outis went out of the library and returned to the child and took the child out of the room, and in the child’s place he put a stone. And the stone was naked and dirty and cold; and the child Outis took and bathed and cared for. And Omelas carried on as it always had; and from that day forth no child suffered there.

I like this solution, though not the span of time between problem and solution.

2)

“…[or else] the city will continue on as it always has, only your internet will be slightly slower.”

And Outis went back up into the city, and on that day he became a citizen of Omelas; and the child continued to suffer.

Hah! Biting humor there.

3)



“…the best predictions of our scientists suggest that there will be a slight average decrease in various hard-to-measure kinds of happiness, which nevertheless in total adds up to more suffering than this child experiences.”

And Outis said to the elder, “I will have no part in this evil thing.” And he took the child and bathed him and cared for his wounds. And the average happiness increased in some ways and decreased in others, and the net effect might have been negative, but the best results on the matter had p > 0.05, so the scientists of Omelas could not rule out the null hypothesis.

Definitely my favorite!

Please Feel Free to Share:

Now that’s a sentence

Have you heard about this book? The Assignment: or, On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers, by Friedrich Dürrenmatt.

Dürrenmatt, it seems, wrote a 123-page murder mystery in 24 short chapters, each of which is one sentence long.

The wife of a psychiatrist has been raped and killed near a desert ruin in North Africa. Her husband hires a woman named F. to reconstruct the unsolved crime in a documentary film. F. is soon unwittingly thrust into a paranoid world of international espionage where everyone is watched—including the watchers. After discovering a recent photograph of the supposed murder victim happily reunited with her husband, F. becomes trapped in an apocalyptic landscape riddled with political intrigue, crimes of mistaken identity, and terrorism.

F.’s labyrinthine quest for the truth is Dürrenmatt’s fictionalized warning against the dangers of a technologically advanced society that turns everyday life into one of constant scrutiny.

Dürrenmatt was a bit ahead of his time: he wrote about this idea of constant scrutiny back in 1986, right before the Age of Constant Scrutiny was born.

Here’s a snippet from a comment that seems to capture something of the feel of the story: “Yet you know right away that something is different, first in the format: the novel consists of 24 ‘chapters,’ each of which is a single sentence, some stretching for several pages (it would be really interesting to try to diagram one of these babies), that read aloud (yeh, I sometimes read aloud) like a digressive ramble, and read silently in an irresistible rush and tumble of words.”

Good job by that commenter, David — his sentence may not be 5 or 10 pages long, but it is 66 words long, which is pretty impressive.

Intriguing idea! Many commenters refer to the sentences as comma-filled run-ons, which is interesting enough. Wouldn’t it be kind of fun to try this kind of thing with sentences that are actually grammatically correct rather than run-ons?

Here is a post about extremely long sentences.

Faulkner’s longest sentence—smack in the middle of Absalom, Absalom! —unspools in Quentin Compson’s tortured, silent ruminations. According to a 1983 Guinness Book of Records, this monster once qualified as literature’s longest at 1,288 words, but that record has long been surpassed, in English at least, by Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club, which ends with a 33-page-long, 13,955 word sentence.

Really! Well, I wish I’d been assigned Absolom, Absolom instead of The Sound and the Fury. I doubt I would have liked the former better overall, but I hope I would have enjoyed that 1288-word sentence.

Doesn’t all this make you wish you could go back in time and try to write an English essay as a single sentence, perfectly correctly, in order to freak out your English teacher?

Maybe that’s just me.

Also possibly just me: a wistful desire to go back in time and write an essay in iambic pentameter; or write a book report that sounds perfectly fine but is total nonsense from front to back; or write a REALLY abstruse classification essay about, say, extinct perissodactyl species.

Alas, none of these ideas occurred to me when I was actually in school.

Please Feel Free to Share:

Fifty is too big a list

Over at Book Riot: 50 Must-Read Coming-of-Age Novels

Which caught my eye because of my instant reaction which was: I’m not clicking through to that. Fifty is way too many books to consider.

Then I clicked through, but only so I could write this post. The fast TOO BIG reaction is more interesting to me than the list.

Also, fifty is too small a list! That’s my second reaction, following a split second behind the first. EVERY SINGLE YOUNG ADULT NOVEL is a coming-of-age story. Isn’t it? Isn’t that practically the definition of a YA novel? No matter what else is going on, the protagonist(s) and probably various secondary characters move inextricably from childhood into adulthood. That’s got to be true of 99.9% of everything published as YA in the last 20 years!

On top of that, if the pacing is too slow or the book is too long or for any other reason under the sun, you may publish your specific book as adult, but often it is still a coming-of-age story, so we wind up with what, a twentieth? a tenth? of all adult fiction also falling into the coming-of-age category.

And you’re going to cut the list down to fifty? What a pointless exercise.

Also, if you do click through and glance at the top ten or so titles in this list, you’ll see they’re all contemporary YA. So why not say the top fifty great contemporary YA books? That would help readers decide whether the list is really something they might be interested in or not.

Some of the titles included sound really out-there —

THE LAST ILLUSION BY POROCHISTA KHAKPOUR

“In an Iranian village, Zal’s demented mother, horrified by the pallor of his skin and hair, is convinced she has given birth to a ‘white demon.’ She hides him in a birdcage for the next decade. Rescued by a behavioral analyst, Zal awakens in New York to the possibility of a future. A stunted and unfit adolescent, he strives to become human as he stumbles toward adulthood.”

…. Can’t quite see myself reaching for that one, no. But it’s still more-or-less contemporary YA, I guess.

This one sounds much more appealing to me:

THE HOUSEKEEPER AND THE PROFESSOR BY YŌKO OGAWA, TRANSLATION STEPHEN SNYDER

“He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem—ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him. And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them.”

Wow, that must have been a challenge to write. On the other hand, nothing in this description suggests that it’s a coming-of-age story, so if the Book Riot author of this post — Dana Lee — decided to include it, she might have written a description that more clearly suggested a coming-of-age theme.

Well, well, that is beside the point, which is about the number 50. Which is very nearly as bad as the number 100.

Who can decide what to put on a list of the 50 best fantasy novels of all time, or the 100 best historical romances of all time? When I consider questions like that, what I get is FIELD TOO LARGE, both for the list and for the category.

And even after someone goes to that much trouble, who can dredge up enough time and interest to make it to the bottom of the list?

Qualities that produce a superior list:

a) Specificity. The ten YA novels I have loved most this decade, say. The ten novels I remember best from my early teen years. The ten fantasy novels that might have most influenced my own writing. Like that.

b) Brevity. Ten is ample. I grant, five feels like I’m getting shortchanged, and seven feels like a cop-out. If you’re going to hit seven or eight, you might as well head for ten. Nice round number. Ten is good. Twelve if you can’t bring yourself to stop at ten. Fifteen is about as long as any list ever needs to be.

What do you think? Do lists of fifty or more titles act as click-repellent for you?

Please Feel Free to Share:

Definitely mud time

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.

You know how it is with an April day

When the sun is out and the wind is still,

You’re one month on in the middle of May.

But if you so much as dare to speak,

A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,

A wind comes off a frozen peak,

And you’re two months back in the middle of March.

A bluebird comes tenderly up to alight

And fronts the wind to unruffle a plume

His song so pitched as not to excite

A single flower as yet to bloom.

It is snowing a flake: and he half knew

Winter was only playing possum.

Except in color he isn’t blue,

But he wouldn’t advise a thing to blossom.

The water for which we may have to look

In summertime with a witching wand,

In every wheel rut’s now a brook,

In every print of a hoof a pond.

Be glad of water, but don’t forget

The lurking frost in the earth beneath

That will steal forth after the sun is set

And show on the water its crystal teeth.

From “Two Tramps in Mud Time” by Robert Frost

On a less poetic but funny note, this spring in Missouri is like:

Which may be the funniest and most apt thing I’ve ever seen on Facebook.

Please Feel Free to Share:

Why are these books out of print? ???

Here’s a post from James Nicoll at tor.com: Why the Hell Are These Books Out of Print?

I’ve read two of the books on Nicoll’s list: Growing Up Weightless by Ford and Doorways in the Sand by Zelazny. I’ve read other titles, not the ones mentioned, by Donald Kingsbury and Joan Vinge and Liz Williams, and since I like and admire their writing, I wouldn’t mind picking up other books by them — apparently not the titles Nicoll picks out, though, unless they’re available used.

I noticed Growing Up Weightless in particular because I sort of liked it and sort of hated it, and this ties into a post from yesterday: The relationship between the protagonist and his father is not toxic, but it is a very difficult, tense relationship. And the ending is tragic in an important sense; not that anybody dies, but that the relationships between the protagonist and his friends are basically destroyed in a surge of extreme bitterness. Nothing in the description emphases either point, but these qualities have always prevented me from re-reading the book despite agreeing with basically every point in Jo Walton’s positive review.

Doorways in the Sand I liked, but I’m not sure I would pick it especially for a list of the books that should most urgently be brought back into print. What I would choose … hard to say. Let me think …

For such a list, I think it’s best to include only books that aren’t available as ebooks. Those are the ones that are most thoroughly out of print. If I had ages to think about it, my list might be different, but off the top of my head, I would include:

1. The Ivory trilogy by Doris Egan, plus I really wish she had been able to go on with this series.

2. The Gandalara series by Randall Garrett. I still like the giant cats in this series, even though I’m less inclined to enjoy giant cats in fantasy than I used to be. Garrett is one of the only authors I can think of who treats his giant cats as real characters with desires and needs that don’t necessarily line up with their human companions.

3. Sword of Winter by Marta Randall. An excellent novel, Randall’s best imo. I remember turning to the scavenger hunt scene to specifically look at the craft involved in writing such a fast-paced scene.

4. The Plum-Rain Scroll, The Dragon Stone, and The Peony Lantern by Ruth Manley.

I would PARTICULARLY like these to come back into print because I have the first one and the other two are unavailable. I mean, unless you are willing to pay $500 for a copy. The last book doesn’t appear to be available, period.

Interesting information about Manley’s trilogy:

The three books in her series are: The Plum Rain Scroll, first published in hardcover by Hodder and Stoughton, Sydney, in 1978 was named Book of the Year by the Children’s Book Council of Australia in 1979. It was published in paperback in 1980.

The Dragon Stone, first published in hardcover by Hodder & Stoughton, Sydney in 1982 and shortlisted for the 1983 Book of the Year by the Children’s Book Council of Australia. It was published in paperback in 1983.

The Peony Lantern, first published in hardcover by Hodder & Stoughton, Sydney in 1987 and never released in paperback.

All of them are set in some mythical unspecified time which is no time, a parallel Japan almost, where figures from any age from the Age of the Gods onward may be encountered, a Japan of all times and eras. Their pages are filled with eccentric lords, dotty ladies, nutty monsters and ghosts and all manner of magical happenings in which favourite Japanese legends are incorporated into the story as part and parcel of the events befalling the heroes (one of the joys is that of recognition). All is written in a bright, descriptive down-to-earth style with some delicious turns of phrase.

Look at that. The first one was Book of the Year, then the next was shortlisted, then the third was never released in paperback and is now completely unavailable. It makes one wonder about Hodder & Stroughton, it really does. Ruth Manley died in 1986, it says here, so these books have no one to bring them back. I guess her heirs are never going to put her books out as ebooks. It’s a damned shame.

Any books on your shelves that you especially love but that are now out of print? What would you put on this list?

Please Feel Free to Share: