Never Too Much of a Good Thing
The fabulous Midori Snyder has launched her own site, but will continue blogging at the Endicott Studio too. Go say hi.
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Books
NBA Noms Hit
And these are some lists. In young people’s lit we have:
Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Kathleen Duey, Skin Hunger: A Resurrection of Magic, Book One
M. Sindy Felin, Touching Snow
Brian Selznick,The Invention of Hugo Cabret
Sara Zarr, Story of a Girl
Loved the Selznick, still haven’t read the Zarr for some bizarre reason (but yay! and I’m looking forward to it), and the Duey is currently in the stack. I know nada about the Felin and haven’t gotten a copy of the Alexie yet. Strong list–although I would have loved to see Flora Segunda on there, my own personal favorite of the year to date.
And bloggers everywhere will be cheering Joshua Ferris’ inclusion in the best novel category, I’m guessing–not to mention fan favorite Denis Johnson.
Updated: Sara Zarr posts about finding out Story of a Girl is a nominee.
But It’s So Good
As someone who’s been reading mostly YA for the last year (because of the MFA program) with a salting of Books For Adults, I can honestly say that it’s been one of the best reading years of my life because of all the fine work in that arbitrarily-defined field (past and current). I write YA because that’s what I write.
Now Jeff has a list of the reasons why he doesn’t read YA, which makes me kinda sad. (And, yes, I realize these are–mostly–tongue-in-cheek.) But, hey, as long as teens are reading it, I don’t mind so much.
Damned By Faint Cliches
A little snippet of A. Alvarez’s The Writer’s Voice*, from the section titled "The Cult of Personality and the Myth of the Artist":
For the dissident writers, an author’s integrity could be judged by his tone of voice and his attitude to language. Like George Orwell, they believed "the greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity," and the language of insincerity is cliche–the debased phrases and dead metaphors that come automatically, without thinking, without any personal input from the writer. Orwell says of empty formulations like these, "If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." Style, he meant, defines intelligence as well as sensibility; how you write shows how you think.
Why, yes, I do have a packet due this week.
*I can really recommend only the first part of this book–though the whole thing is interesting. Alvarez makes some beautiful points about writing and voice, but undercuts them with repeated, overly defensive swipes at what he views as today’s "politically correct" academy. There’s also a patchwork quality that likely comes from the material having begun as three separate lectures. Here, it just reads as changing course mid-way through to begin cataloguing judgments about various eras of poetry (coming down hard on the Beats) in a way that doesn’t lead to any particularly salient points about voice.
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Bradbury Season: Vamp-riffic
It’s the most wonderful time of the year, I think — October, leading up to All Hallow’s Eve. There is something richer about fall after the thin heat of summer; it feels like a time particularly suited to stories.
And, of course, to vampires. Now, sure vampires are overdone. There’s a tiredness to the whole business that is only overcome by sheer force of will. Usually, it requires something new to accomplish this — something like Scott’s scientific rationale and parasite love, or mixing it up with a fantasy vampire-themed restaurant like Cynthia’s Sanguini’s. 
But today, I want to talk classics. I want to talk scary vampires that crawl out of graves and have bad hygiene and menace superstitious villages. Think Nosferatu minus the suit and you’re in the right ballpark.
I leave up to you the order in which you choose to read the following two books, but they are a perfect pairing for Bradbury Season. Both these books return to the roots of the vampire, the things that made them so interesting and scary and potent to begin with, in a fine gothic style.
The first is Paul Barber’s Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality
. This is an absolutely delicious, fairly academic book from Yale University Press. Barber dissects centuries of burial traditions and superstitions and the like surrounding the vampire, while also getting at the larger issues of why the idea of such a creature exists and why it has inspired so many outrageously interesting practices.
I’ll give you a transitional paragraph picked at random from the chapter "Some Theories of the Vampire" to convince you:
Clearly we must begin by determining whether our informants–who show a remarkable unanimity–are telling us even part of the truth. Do bodies swell, change color, bleed at the lips? People who have exhumed buried bodies know more about such bodies than people who have not done so: the Serbian peasant has an edge on the folklorist. And the forensic pathologist, it would seem, has an edge on both of them and will be our constant companion for the next chapters.
If you can resist a book like this, you and I may be in danger if we’re ever stuck making cocktail conversation.
That covers the academic side, the history and folklore, so how about a new book that takes those original traditions and makes a
beautifully successful, wonderfully scary gothic out of them? Marcus Sedgwick‘s My Swordhand is Singing is on the cusp of release here in the U.S., having won the shadow Carnegie last year in England. (Sidenote: Isn’t that the best title you’ve encountered in ages?)
I was skeptical when it showed up in the mail, for the reasons in the paragraph above about vampires =ing tired. But that title. It overpowered me. I’m so glad.
I won’t say much to spoil it, but Sedgwick does a remarkable job conjuring a remote seventeenth century village and the complicated dynamics between a boy and his father, um, vampire-hunting together. The writing is rhythmic and lovely. A taste:
Away, across one of the river’s arms, something watched the hut. It stirred. The figure of shadow moved slowly from cover and then sped like daybreak into the trees.
It’s a spare book, a quick one and oh so satisfying. The perfect read for Bradbury Season.
Check out what my compadres are recommending for their creepy October reads over at Chasing Ray (full list at the bottom of Coll’s post).
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What a Fantasy
Neil Ayres, editor of the new online zine Serendipity, writing on the Man Booker site about how magic realism and its less socially acceptable cousins have fared (or not) with the award and why:
From the wealth of experimental and magical realist writing on the Man Booker shortlist and winners’ podium over the years, the judges would seem to agree. So it won’t be the decision to write outside of our own reality that causes Animal’s People to win or lose this year, it will be the quality of the writing. It’s just a shame the same can’t be said of all the great eligible science fiction, horror and high fantasy that has been published.
There is interesting work in this area coming from the left-field, mostly from America, with magazines like Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and Electric Velocipede tending a stable of successful mid-list authors working across the gamut of genre. Some have attempted to present a manifesto, define it as a movement, or at least seek a common thread running through the work of these authors. In my opinion, though, the only common thread is that these authors are writing outside of realism, whether in science fiction, fantasy, horror and steampunk, absurdism, surrealism, or magical realism.
With Man Booker’s ongoing recognition of the quality of the talent writing in magical realism today, perhaps the future is looking up for well-written, original speculative fiction of all kinds.
We can only hope. And, anyway, it’s worth reading this whole essay. (Via.)
Shutterbug
NPR Morning Edition had a charming discussion with Linda Sue Park, Ruth Ozeki and Arthur Levine about the newly-released Click, a novel written by ten authors. Not just any ten authors, either — in addition to Park and Ozeki, we’re talking Nick Hornby, Roddy Doyle, Gregory Maguire, David Almond, Tim Wynne-Jones (yay!), Deborah Ellis, Margo Lanagan and Eoin Colfer. Each author gets a chapter and the result, rather than being a train wreck, is delightful. At least so far–I’m just finishing up reading it now.
The NPR interviewer noted at one point that the result is a bit lumpy (though she seemed to mean this in a not entirely bad way) and Arthur Levine agreed, saying that life is lumpy too, and "in many ways this book is a construction of a life. It’s a life seen from many different angles and with many different people’s perspectives, and that’s just how anyone’s life is."
Proceeds from the book go to Amnesty International. It’s definitely worth checking out.
Um
I was really happy to see Jenny Downham’s Before I Die score the featured review in this week’s Entertainment Weekly. But then Thom Geier irritated me with this bizarre paragraph:
Unfortunately, Downham’s publisher has handicapped Before I Die by labeling it a young-adult novel, thus ghettoizing this gem to the back of most bookstores. It’s a shame, because this book is vastly superior to most so-called adult novels with high-school-age protagonists that have been embraced by the literary establishment.
Still, he finishes up:
In luminous prose that rings completely true, Downham earns every tear she wrings from her readers. I trust there will be many of them–many readers and, of course, many tears.
And how will these readers ever find the book, since it’ll be hidden in the back of most bookstores? Seems like sloppy thinking that doesn’t quite compute. (The implication that younger readers or readers frequenting this part of the store are somehow less worthy than those lofty adults it would garner up front grates as well.)
The sad thing is that if Geier routinely read the young adult fiction he believes constitutes a ghetto, he’d find many, many examples of books that surpass "most so-called adult novels with high-school-age protagonists" (and many of those with adults). Now I haven’t read Downham’s book, but it sure sounds like what he’s picking up on–and one of the things that made it so affecting for him–is the immediacy of the best YA fiction. And that’s one of the things that is commonly missing from adult books about teenagers, which tend to come from a place of remove or distance. This leads me to believe that Downham’s publisher has been wise, and understands better than Geier the type of book they have on their hands.
The review doesn’t seem to be online yet, but here’s an interview Jennifer Reese did with Downham about the book. More once I’ve read it.
Little Books
The Washington Post’s profile of the thoroughly charming Junot Diaz recounts a classified find when he was just a kid that led to his getting 500 books from a little old lady:
"That was the first time I found ‘The Borrowers,’ " he says, referring to Mary Norton’s children’s classic about unseen, Lilliputian-scale people who live by "borrowing" from normal-size humans. Other favorites from this unlikely trove were titles by explorer and naturalist Roy Chapman Andrews, "the guy who went to Mongolia and found the dinosaur eggs" — Díaz still dreams of traveling to Mongolia himself — and a variety of "books for young people, like ‘On Hygiene.’ Great stuff!"
There’s nothing so great as the first really significant book score of your life. I’ve posted about mine before (number 10).
Also, I can’t wait to read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao:
Tolkien shows up everywhere — Trujillo is Sauron, his henchmen are Ringwraiths, a guarded upper-class enclave is "so Minas Tirith" — but the references are never explained. Neither, for the most part, are allusions to the Marvel universe and to numerous other works of pop or high culture. If you’re unfamiliar with Galactus the planet-eater or the works of Joseph Conrad, you’re on your own, just as you are in the many untranslated Spanish passages.
Rubs hands together…
RIP
Madeleine L’Engle has died. Her acceptance speech for the 1963 Newbery Award for A Wrinkle in Time is up at her official site; here’s an excerpt:
So how do we do it? We can’t just sit down at our typewriters and turn out explosive material. I took a course in college on Chaucer, one of the most explosive, imaginative, and far-reaching in influence of all writers. And I’ll never forget going to the final exam and being asked why Chaucer used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote in a white heat of fury, “I don’t think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these things. That isn’t the way people write.”
I believe this as strongly now as I did then. Most of what is best in writing isn’t done deliberately.
Do I mean, then, that an author should sit around like a phony Zen Buddhist in his pad, drinking endless cups of espresso coffee and waiting for inspiration to descend upon him? That isn’t the way the writer works, either. I heard a famous author say once that the hardest part of writing a book was making yourself sit down at the typewriter. I know what he meant. Unless a writer works constantly to improve and refine the tools of his trade they will be useless instruments if and when the moment of inspiration, of revelation, does come. This is the moment when a writer is spoken through, the moment that a writer must accept with gratitude and humility, and then attempt, as best he can, to communicate to others.
A writer of fantasy, fairy tale, or myth must inevitably discover that he is not writing out of his own knowledge or experience, but out of something both deeper and wider. I think that fantasy must possess the author and simply use him. I know that this is true of A Wrinkle in Time. I can’t possibly tell you how I came to write it. It was simply a book I had to write. I had no choice. And it was only after it was written that I realized what some of it meant.