Richard McGowan's Blog: Smashed-Rat-On-Press - Posts Tagged "logic"
Yah Yah I Read YA Books. Doesn't Everyone?
I'm going to take a break from "serious writing" for a moment here...
In today's Digital Reader there's an "editorial" by Mike Cane about YA books: Snooty Snobs Should Shut Up. Heh heh. It's a rebuttal against an article about how adults shouldn't be reading YA books, or at least why they should be embarrassed to do so.
I beg to differ. I read lots of YA books, and even Y books, because... Well... they can be imaginative and fun and even serious. And usually not boring, and almost never pretentious. (To find out more about pretentious literature, try A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose.) Just because a book is labelled YA, or even a children's book, doesn't mean it contains only puerile themes and gaga-goo-goo language, or heaping shovels full of canned boredom like so much capital-Literature. And you know... It's OK for adults to think about, and read about, kid stuff. (Even if some adults naïvely seem to believe that kids never think about "adult stuff" and nobody under eighteen has ever read Fanny Hill.)
Good work can also sometimes hang out in more than one tent. For example, go read Fly by Night and tell me it's not a serious, adult book about freedom of the press and censorship. Oh, wait, it's a YA title and the protagonist is a child. (FBN is also better than its sequel, by the way.)
Growing up as a boy, I missed lots of great "girlie books" so I started cranking through some of those in my thirties. So what? I'm not embarrassed about that.
And if this book-talk is all boring, try popping over to Dear Prudence: Help! I discovered my teen daughter using a hand mixer—on herself. Yeah. Kids never think about adult stuff.
I admire YA authors, actually, and I envy their restraint. Every time I try to write something suitable for the under-30 crowd, or especially the under-18 crowd, I still end up with sex, drugs and grand opera... So even starting with youthful protagonists, I simply cannot write a suitable book for children.
And just to be clear: I'm way out of the loop here under my rock, so I don't really know what they're talking about. I just wanted to rant for ten minutes while taking a break from watching Sanguinity Hematode wrestle with her current train-wreck.
In today's Digital Reader there's an "editorial" by Mike Cane about YA books: Snooty Snobs Should Shut Up. Heh heh. It's a rebuttal against an article about how adults shouldn't be reading YA books, or at least why they should be embarrassed to do so.
I beg to differ. I read lots of YA books, and even Y books, because... Well... they can be imaginative and fun and even serious. And usually not boring, and almost never pretentious. (To find out more about pretentious literature, try A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose.) Just because a book is labelled YA, or even a children's book, doesn't mean it contains only puerile themes and gaga-goo-goo language, or heaping shovels full of canned boredom like so much capital-Literature. And you know... It's OK for adults to think about, and read about, kid stuff. (Even if some adults naïvely seem to believe that kids never think about "adult stuff" and nobody under eighteen has ever read Fanny Hill.)
Good work can also sometimes hang out in more than one tent. For example, go read Fly by Night and tell me it's not a serious, adult book about freedom of the press and censorship. Oh, wait, it's a YA title and the protagonist is a child. (FBN is also better than its sequel, by the way.)
Growing up as a boy, I missed lots of great "girlie books" so I started cranking through some of those in my thirties. So what? I'm not embarrassed about that.
And if this book-talk is all boring, try popping over to Dear Prudence: Help! I discovered my teen daughter using a hand mixer—on herself. Yeah. Kids never think about adult stuff.
I admire YA authors, actually, and I envy their restraint. Every time I try to write something suitable for the under-30 crowd, or especially the under-18 crowd, I still end up with sex, drugs and grand opera... So even starting with youthful protagonists, I simply cannot write a suitable book for children.
And just to be clear: I'm way out of the loop here under my rock, so I don't really know what they're talking about. I just wanted to rant for ten minutes while taking a break from watching Sanguinity Hematode wrestle with her current train-wreck.
More Zombification of Recently Deceased Authors
(Yes, Virginia, this is just another rant you can skip...)
The author was dead: to begin with. Dead. Dead. Dead...
She passed beyond mortal ken in 1973, which is more than forty years ago, so that isn't really very recent. In other words, she has no longer any demonstrable need to pay rent, eat, keep a roof over her head, raise her children, entertain herself by reading, or take part in any of the other myriad activities in which living people engage.
That is why I was so disappointed when, having just read that Miss Buncle's Book was one of someone's comfort books for cozy re-reading, I jumped up right away and went out to look for a copy.
Formerly, of course, the book was published in the dark ages--the 1930s, that is--in England, in hard cover, and if you could find one, the blogger assured me, it would cost you hundreds of dollars.
(I'm sorry to disappoint any authors out there, but if I'm going to spend hundreds of dollars for a single book, it had better be a limited edition and have the author's signature and thumb-print on the title page, in blood. Luckily these days even first editions of Miss Buncle's Book are going for merely $10 to $20, possibly because it's been re-published.)
Even if the book is as comfy as the blogger assures me it is, I have to wonder at the mentality of the publisher, who apparently must have inherited and thus own the copyright to the book, in putting it up for sale at $9.25 for the Kindle edition. Others in the series are similarly priced.
That's a lot for a pile of electrons, the mere ghost of the physical objects of decades past. I suppose it's true that someone had to (probably) scan a printed copy of the thing and produce the e-book edition, and I'm willing to pay for all that, of course. But for goodness sake, they didn't have to edit it. It was already published and went through that mill in the '30s. They did obviously pay a swanky cover designer, but they don't have to stock inventory, or deal with shipping, market heavily, or do any of the other publisher-like activities that are required for new books.
Maybe I'm a cheapskate, but: why on Earth would I pay $9.25 for the e-book edition of a book by a dead person when I could get a used paperback copy of the book for only $1.99?
The author, who is Dead you'll recall, will be just as well-served in her grave by me buying a used copy as she will if I buy a new e-book for $9.25.
That's why, if I were going out to buy a comfortable e-book for $9.25, I would probably just buy two e-books by a living author who could still use the cash. (Like L.B. Hathaway, as a random example.) Or I might pick up a couple of Lyn Hamilton titles; she's dead, too. (And I know someone scanned, not typed, at least the first of the Lara McClintoch mysteries because I've seen first-hand evidence of uncorrected OCR failures.)
Or I could buy a couple of cappucinos, pour one of those on the ground in honor of Seshat, then read something from Project Gutenberg. Or I could snag one of the gazillion free Kindle books by living authors who are so desperate to sell anything at all that they're giving away free samples on street corners, and then pour two cappucinos on the ground (because Saraswati likes coffee, too).
Nine or ten dollars for the electronic edition of a book published in 1936 by an author now dead? I don't think so. It just feels like somebody is trying to make out like a bandit by riding on her (now skeletal) coat-tails. One thing I will say for it: the cover of the new edition is rather beautiful and makes Miss Buncle look a lot more chic than one of the original covers did, so I hope the artist is being fairly compensated.
Rising from a mist within the door knocker, I can almost hear Marley's eerie voice wailing: "At least it's cheaper than an epipen!"
The author was dead: to begin with. Dead. Dead. Dead...She passed beyond mortal ken in 1973, which is more than forty years ago, so that isn't really very recent. In other words, she has no longer any demonstrable need to pay rent, eat, keep a roof over her head, raise her children, entertain herself by reading, or take part in any of the other myriad activities in which living people engage.
That is why I was so disappointed when, having just read that Miss Buncle's Book was one of someone's comfort books for cozy re-reading, I jumped up right away and went out to look for a copy.
Formerly, of course, the book was published in the dark ages--the 1930s, that is--in England, in hard cover, and if you could find one, the blogger assured me, it would cost you hundreds of dollars.
(I'm sorry to disappoint any authors out there, but if I'm going to spend hundreds of dollars for a single book, it had better be a limited edition and have the author's signature and thumb-print on the title page, in blood. Luckily these days even first editions of Miss Buncle's Book are going for merely $10 to $20, possibly because it's been re-published.)
Even if the book is as comfy as the blogger assures me it is, I have to wonder at the mentality of the publisher, who apparently must have inherited and thus own the copyright to the book, in putting it up for sale at $9.25 for the Kindle edition. Others in the series are similarly priced.
That's a lot for a pile of electrons, the mere ghost of the physical objects of decades past. I suppose it's true that someone had to (probably) scan a printed copy of the thing and produce the e-book edition, and I'm willing to pay for all that, of course. But for goodness sake, they didn't have to edit it. It was already published and went through that mill in the '30s. They did obviously pay a swanky cover designer, but they don't have to stock inventory, or deal with shipping, market heavily, or do any of the other publisher-like activities that are required for new books.
Maybe I'm a cheapskate, but: why on Earth would I pay $9.25 for the e-book edition of a book by a dead person when I could get a used paperback copy of the book for only $1.99?
The author, who is Dead you'll recall, will be just as well-served in her grave by me buying a used copy as she will if I buy a new e-book for $9.25.
That's why, if I were going out to buy a comfortable e-book for $9.25, I would probably just buy two e-books by a living author who could still use the cash. (Like L.B. Hathaway, as a random example.) Or I might pick up a couple of Lyn Hamilton titles; she's dead, too. (And I know someone scanned, not typed, at least the first of the Lara McClintoch mysteries because I've seen first-hand evidence of uncorrected OCR failures.)
Or I could buy a couple of cappucinos, pour one of those on the ground in honor of Seshat, then read something from Project Gutenberg. Or I could snag one of the gazillion free Kindle books by living authors who are so desperate to sell anything at all that they're giving away free samples on street corners, and then pour two cappucinos on the ground (because Saraswati likes coffee, too).
Nine or ten dollars for the electronic edition of a book published in 1936 by an author now dead? I don't think so. It just feels like somebody is trying to make out like a bandit by riding on her (now skeletal) coat-tails. One thing I will say for it: the cover of the new edition is rather beautiful and makes Miss Buncle look a lot more chic than one of the original covers did, so I hope the artist is being fairly compensated.
Rising from a mist within the door knocker, I can almost hear Marley's eerie voice wailing: "At least it's cheaper than an epipen!"
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