Best Books of 2008 (sort of)

It seems everyone is unleashing their best of 2008 lists at the moment. Unfortunately I’ve only read (slash listened to) three books that came out, in one form or another, in 2008 (The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland, A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammad Hanif (audiobook), Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk), and none of them are close to being in the top ten books I’ve read this year.

Which exposes the big lie of most of these year-end lists: that the best books/music/films people have read/listened to/seen that year were all there in the new releases section. The motivation is clear: these lists help move units and solve the ‘what do I get my step-brother for Christmas?’ dilemma. But how many truly great books come out in a given year? And how many of these books were on best of lists in their given year?

So, with that pointless proviso out of the way, here’s the list of the best books I’ve read this year:

[(A) denotes audiobook]

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

I blogged about it here soon after finishing the book and my opinion has not changed. Neither has my opinion of the book I compared Brodie to: The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks (A) (good but not top ten material). The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie experience encouraged me to read some more Spark (I’d read two of her novels previous to Brodie), but The Driver’s Seat was an exercise in frustration and The Comforters went soft after the first few chapters. Still, Brodie will always be a book I remember fondly, especially due to its close ties with Edinburgh.

Breakfast of Champions and Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Breakfast of Champions was the first Vonnegut book I read in 2008 (perhaps my fourth or fifth overall) and like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, it encouraged me to read more of this author. I think, upon reflection, Cat’s Cradle was my the favourite of the 2008 batch (others in order of appreciation: Galapagos, Hocus Pocus, God Bless You Mr Rosewater). I’ve mentioned it here a couple of times this year, but it’s KV’s voice that gets me, and it's there in all these books. Breakfast and Cat's Cradle are just that bit more memorable in terms of plot and inventiveness.

Who Will Run The Frog Hospital by Lorrie Moore
Another short novel (so far, only Breakfast of Champions was over 200pgs, and that included illustrations), but the behemoths are coming. Not that Who Will Run The Frog Hospital felt light in any respect. Tight without being stingy. Witty without being cynical. Elegiac without being morose. Moore walks many a sharp edge and the result is a book I will read again.

The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster

I had read ‘City of Glass’, the first novella in the trilogy, before this year, but (inexplicably) never got around to reading the next installments. So when I got ahold of the book in 2008, I read ‘Ghosts’ and ‘The Locked Room’ and then returned to ‘City of Glass’ which leads off the collection. Auster is a seriously smart man, and sometimes the strings of his smartness show, but I can always forgive the slips for what he says about the acts of writing, reading and living. I also read The Brooklyn Follies (A) this year, and liked it until the end, at which point its significance sort of dissolved, rather than crystallised.

Disgrace by J.M. Coeztee (A)

I’d studied Coeztee at university and found him too stark, too academic, but Disgrace was a revelation. Perhaps it was the short time I spent in South Africa last year, or all the mongrel dogs I saw as I listened to the audiobook on the walk to work, but this was a book I connected with. I love the way it insistently tackles the questions at its heart, but never truly resolves them, and never devolves into polemics.

Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (A)

The first longer novel on the list (the audiobook was 21 CDs). This will be another novel forever linked to my time in Edinburgh (I blogged about my listening experience here). Complex and riddled with intractable questions, but frequently funny, always inventive, and, most important, interesting. I went on to listen to A Wild Sheep’s Chase (A) a few months later, which now reads like a dress rehearsal (in terms of themes, character, narration, you name it) for Wind Up Bird.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (A)

Another fatty which I listened to while filing in my third best (read: worst) temp job in Edinburgh. It took me a while to get over Franzen’s showy, almost smarmy style, and longer still to warm to it and his characters, but I got there in the end. Not quite the era defining doorstop it hopes to be, but despite all the backhanded compliments, this book refuses to be left off this list.

Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris

I remember over at the Millions earlier this year when a teacher asked if this book would be suitable to teach in his high school English class and someone said no. Not because the book is bad, or difficult, but simply because you really need to have worked in an office (perhaps any sort of full time work) to get the most out of this book. Some of the plot towards the end was a bit “first book” (I hate myself for using that term and those quotation marks, but whatever), but the third person plural narration is genius, and more importantly, executed so that doesn't stand out like a genius idea. Did I mention it was funny? Probably the funniest book I read this year.

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

Okay, so I’ve only just started reading this book, but sometimes you can just tell. Like, if you think about slowing down so you can savour each page, that’s a good indication. If you think about actually buying a copy (mine’s from the library) so it can be the book you take around the Americas with you, that’s another sign. Something tells me I don’t have to worry about the ending messing anything up (see Brooklyn Follies). Perhaps it’s Kurt Vonnegut calling it “The Great Gatsby of my time” on the front cover.

So that’s ten. There’s a second tier of books which I would recommend people read, but for some reason they just didn’t squeeze into the top ten. For example, I really enjoyed George Saunders’ The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil / In Persuasion Nation (which I read in the single UK edition ----> ) and his earlier short fiction collection Pastoralia, but they kind of cancelled each other out.

Then there was Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (A), which I had in my top ten for a while until I remembered Joshua Ferris. It seemed to have everything—strong, believable narrative voice, interesting premise explored with restraint—but it fell off at the end (again).

Sometimes, books suffered by comparison to the one I had just finished or was reading concurrently (see Wasp Factory). Sadly for Lloyd Jones, I read Mr Pip after Then We Came To The End. Whereas I shared the office experience of the latter, I didn’t share the love of Great Expectations with the former.

Then there were books that were good, but paled in comparison to their author’s best work (see The Names by Don DeLillo, The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon).

Okay, well, for completeness, here’s a list of the remaining books I haven't yet mentioned that I read this year (I’m sure I’ve forgotten some… I need to write these things down somewhere):

Jekyll and Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Money by Martin Amis (A)
Skinny Dip by Carl Hiassen (A)
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (A)
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (A)
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
World Made Flesh by Jack O'Connell
Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell
Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald
Casino Royale and Moonraker by Ian Fleming

This list excludes poetry (I’ll post about the Scottish Poetry Library, again, next week), and literary journals. If I did not appear in The Best NZ Fiction Volume 5 I would have put that in my top ten by virtue of it being The Best Reading Experience of The Year.

Compiling this list has really bought home how much I’m looking forward to returning to NZ and diving head deep into some local literature. A couple of years ago I was lukewarm on NZ fiction, and stone cold on NZ poetry / all poetry. Things change, eh? Call it what you will (maturity, homesickness, brainwashing), but next year’s list will look quite different.

Other observations:

Okay, so there are only two female authors in my top ten, but this is a vast improvement on a couple of years ago. Making boys read Jane Austen before they’re ready probably does more harm than good. Again, it’s a maturity thing. You can keep your Couplands and Palahniuks, give me more Lorrie Moore!

Three of the top ten were consumed as audiobooks. As I’ve said before, reading and listening to books are different experiences but in the end, you should still be able to say you’ve ‘read’ The Corrections or whatever. If it weren’t for audiobooks, I would have read a third less books this year than I did. It’s something I’ll continue to do as long as I have my hearing.

Until recently I was always guarded about I'm reading certain books. Not that they were embarrassing in guilty pleasure kinda way, but that, as someone who claims to be an aspiring writer, I had only just read Kafka's Metamorphosis or the biggest book to come out of NZ in the last decade (see Mr Pip). But I'm learning, slowly, not to take myself so seriously. There are more books out there that you absolutely must read than you could physically read (and/or listen to) in a lifetime, so you gotta get selective. Sure, you'll make a bad decision here and there, but the fact no two bookish people have read the same books is what makes that booky conversation tick.

Finally, given this site is all about me trying to write a lot of words, it’s probably worth reflecting how the above reading list impacted, if at all, on what I wrote in 2008.

Well. There’s a short story which will appear in my short fiction collection to be published by Random House in 2010 which bares many similarities to Galapagos. But I hadn’t actually read that book when I wrote the story, and it was more of a general Kurt Vonnegut vibe I was channelling. I then read Galapagos as a sort of compare and contrast (I’m satisfied they’re different animals). And re-reading my story, I think it sound more like George Saunders than KV, so…

The story I’m working on now may or may not sound a bit like Who Will Run The Frog Hospital. I can’t tell, I’m too close to it at the moment.

Um.

When I was doing my hundred word stories (November experiment) I often found myself starting in the third person plural, so maybe that was Joshua Ferris coming through?

But that's all I can really think of.

When I was younger I found it difficult to write and read at the same time. Well, not simultaneously, that would be extremely difficult—but to be halfway through a book and in the midst of writing my own story. I remember once trying to write a workshop exercise while reading Huckleberry Finn and producing this kind of Southern-inflected voice. Another time, I gave Marisa a copy of Shampoo Planet by Douglas Coupland and she said, “It sounds like the stuff you write” (or something like that).

Now, after years of practise, it’s easier to sit down and write in the voice I intend, rather than unintentionally mimicking someone else. I think. Part of that is actually reading more than I did, say, six years ago. Being used to different voices in my head than my own.

That’s why I’m glad I’ve gone through and done this summary. Because a) there’s no way I’d be able to remember all of this in a couple of years, b) it acknowledges the important though difficult-to-place role reading has played in the Year of Eight Hundred Thousand Words, c) this summary itself constitutes 0.25% of my yearly wordcount.

As Tesco's are constantly reminding me: Every little helps.

No Accounting For The Taste Of An Accounting Student

Why I Used To Enjoy Books By Chuck Palahniuk, Using His Latest Novel, Snuff, As An Example

1. "It's the vibe of the thing, Your Honour"

Dirty, dark, wry, nihilistic, visceral. Snuff is all of these things. Shocking, too, perhaps, depending on your shock threshold. (Tick yes if you find hardcore pornography, date rape, incest, mutilated genitalia, and/or urine socked stuffed toys shocking.)

2. It sure was interesting

Snuff contains riffs on the following topics: the history of gang bang style pornographic films, the death or maiming of more traditional movie stars as a consequence of their craft, a history of vibrators, gang-land tattoos, the history of cyanide, the means of suicide of movie stars of yesteryear... do you see a theme developing? See dark/dirty/nihilistic discussion above.

Chuck Palahniuk has done a lot of research, and he does his best to impart his learnings to the reader.

In addition, there's all the stuff he just plain made up himself, like the names of fictional porn actors named after alcoholic beverages (Branch Bacardi, Cord Cuevo, Beamer Bushmills...) and the names of Cassie Wright's films (variations on real books/films: The Da Vinci Load, Butt Pirates of The Carribean, The Importance of Balling Earnest).

3. No fat

Snuff is only 197 well-spaced pages. Every sentence and every chapter feel crafted, honed. There are no big words. Certain phrases (‘True Fact’...) and images (dandruff, bronzer…) reappear and act as refrains, helping to add a rhythm to a passage and remind us who is talking.

4. More twists than a packet of... um, twisties

Every chapter hums along with it's surface concern and then right at the end you realise all is not as it seems: Mr 72 believes he is Cassie's son / Mr 600 might be Mr 72's dad / the disgusting dude Mr 600 is watching on TV is actually himself...

And then there's the biggest twist of all, which, like Fight Club and Choke and Invisible Monsters (and maybe more, I'm getting forgetful), revolves around people not being who they say they are, or being more than they say they are. I didn't pick Snuff's big twist until half a page before it happens. That's pretty good. I'm honestly trying not to be sarcastic in this first section.

But I can't keep it up any longer.


Why I No Longer Enjoy Books By Chuck Palahniuk, Using His Latest Novel, Snuff, As An Example

1. "It's the vibe of the thing, Your Honour"

Hardcore pornography, date rape, incest, mutilated genitalia, an unhygienic craft service table... Snuff sounds shocking on paper, but everything is presented with so much intent - - the scene where Branch Bacardi absent-mindedly shaves his nipple off; the scene where Mr 137 accidentally eats a flake of Sheila's dandruff - - that it's not shocking. It's like those modern horror movies where the villain and the blood and the guts and the screaming gets 90% of the screen time, and it's not actually scary anymore, it's something else (sadistic?).

And as for the wryness, the jokes are as stagey and hammed-up as the sadism, I mean schlock, I mean shock. All those porn star names and porno titles. It just becomes another device to space out a chapter.

2. It sure was interesting

There's nothing wrong with doing research. I simply object to the way Palahniuk inserts the findings of his research. On most occasions, the riffs are presented as reported speech, and intercut with two or three of the following: direct speech regarding something else, either from the narrator or a third person; a description of something happening in the present (what Cassie Wright is doing on the TV screen / the state of the waiting room / the signatures on Mr 137's Autograph Hound); a description of something that happened in the past. I don't mind the fact these riffs are intercut (they need to be spaced out by something!), but that someone is supposedly saying these things.

For example, the exchange between Sheila and Cassie Wright in chapter 12 presents the history of pelvic floor exercises and a catalogue of film actors who befell terrible injuries whilst filming as Cassie’s reported speech, while in direct speech we only get earthy sentiments like, “He’s hot,” and “Fuck… that one was genuine jade.” And then, the direct speech Cassie Wright doesn’t know the philosopher Aristotle (“The man who married Jackie O?”). This may be an attempt at humour, but its real effect is to underline how the research element is independent of the character ostensibly delivering the nuggets.

Indeed, the voice of these research-heavy riffs is constant, regardless of whose speech is being reported and which of the four narrators is doing the reporting, and this is why I am left thinking: Thanks for that, Chuck Palahniuk. It's all too clumsy, too showy, too schlocky.

And then there's the strange tension created by all of these real world facts and anecdotes (Annabel Chong did this, Annabel Chong did that), with the pantheon of fake porn Palahniuk regales us with. It's not a case of having to figure out where the real world ends and the fiction begins, the two are so clearly delineated by voice and content that they are almost different languages. No, the problem is that it yet again reminds me of Chuck Palahniuk and the act of compiling this book (I say compiling, because it's a cut and paste job more than a successful attempt at a prolonged prose narrative).

3. No Fat

Snuff may be concise but if you poke around the story, you find there's nothing there. The action takes place over a limited timespan (about 10 hours) with minimal flash backs, and the novel purports to see the action from four different perspectives -- but what do we really get in that time? 30+ chapters with the same structure: set-up, twist; set-up, twist. And the four voices, despite a few token efforts at differentiation (the “True Fact” refrain, Mr 600's use of "dudes"), all of the narrators share the same voice as Palahniuk's other damaged, grimy narrators. They aren't narrators so much as perspectives from which a third person limits their knowledge and relates the action. I guess out-and-out omniscience runs contrary to Palahniuk’s nihilism, I mean romanticism. Everything presented on the page is in service of the vibe, nothing is in service of the characters.

Having wafer thin characters does allow the author more scope in where he can take them. Crazy shit appears to work on the surface, because all we have in Snuff is surface: characters who don’t know each other can suddenly fall in love (Mr 72 and Sheila, the hitherto gay Mr 137 and Cassie), or act out of character (the selflessness of Mr 600's final act), because there wasn't really any depth of character their to begin with.

4. More twists than a packet of... um, twisties

The set-up, twist structure begins to grate after a while. It's a bit like a child overusing exclamation marks. The twists stop being twists because they are expected. Near the end, Palahniuk has forced himself into a corner: he needs to out twist his previous twists, out shock his previous shocks, out gross everything that has gone before. So we get necrophilia, electrocution, ghosts and sexual welding.

At the same time, the last twenty pages are the worst kind of throwaway. Whereas earlier in the book the writer's bodily fluids could be clearly detected on the pages, it's as if Palahniuk doesn't truly believe in what he's asking us to believe at the end of Snuff: the chapters are shorter, the cut-up structure within chapters is set aside, the nifty research he digs so much is all but gone (there is a Marilyn Monroe riff, so...), and we are rattled through to another ending with two damaged individuals forming an unlikely couple in the rubble.

---

The above is a purely personal take. I suspect I would have liked Snuff if I read it six years ago -- though the subject matter would still have been alienating. This is not to say that I am now a better reader and that anyone currently who likes Palahniuk's work is any sort of inferior. Just that my tastes have changed. I want different things from fiction. I can cope with less twists and less grime and less cool-factor if the story can make me suspend my disbelief. The fact that I have immersed myself in writing fiction over the last six years means it's harder to make me suspend my disbelief: my default mode of reading is thinking about what the writing is doing. I'm less forgiving of loose writing and sore thumb scenarios. But the good stuff can still suck me in. That's why it's so hard to write about the good books and why I took two pages of notes while reading Snuff. The fact I'm no longer an angry young man might also explain why the Palahniuk vibe has lost its appeal.

I suspect if I was to read a book by Vladimir Nabokov, the writer I swore allegiance to after Palahniuk, I'm sure I would be able to write something similar (if a little less scathing). The thing about reading (and writing, too, I guess), is that you can never step in the same book twice.

Starred Reviews or Saggy Books?

Rating a film or album out of five stars is ham-fisted, but the practice still pervades the industry. Books, on the other hand, have largely avoided a rating system being incorporated into their reviews. Is this due to snobbery on the part of reviewers/books editors or perhaps even readers? Or is there something that sets books apart from other rateable commodities?

Perhaps the first place to use star ratings was the military. Senior ranking officers such as brigadiers and commodores received one star, and as they progressed further up the ranks they gained more stars until they were top dog (Admiral of the Fleet, Field Marshal, etc).

In 1926, The Michelin Guide introduced a star rating for exceptional food in the restaurants it reviewed, expanding its rating system to three stars in the 1930s.

Around the same time, accommodation started to be rated. Nowadays, many organisations, such as the AA (or in the US, the AAA) review both restaurants and accommodation using a star system (although often they aren't stars but diamonds or rosettes...).

Film and music reviewers have also taken liberties with the 'star' system, from Siskel and Ebert's Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down to Robert Christgau's report card grading (A+ = Marquee Moon, A = Born To Run, etc). Gimmicks aside, it seems the urge to quantify and compare certain types of media as one would a restaurant or a hotel is strong.

Is it really the case that a good movie is as easy to distinguish from a bad movie as it is to tell a dive from a deluxe suite?

Of course not. Reviewers disagree all the time. In fact, it makes great TV when they do. While living in Australia, one of the few TV shows I watched with any frequency was the ABC's At the Movies with David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz. Despite the fact I was seeing less and less movies at the cinema, the show was at it's most engaging when one host was bowled over by a film and the other was left untouched. When they both loved or loathed a film, there was always a sense of disappointment, of dead air being filled with uh-huhs and oh yesses.

Review aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes seek to remove the subjectivity and twist reviewing back to quantitative blacks and whites. 69% of reviews were favourable for I Am Legend, so it must be okay. Really?

Book reviews (at least the reviews I read in print and online) don't bother with stars or rosettes or coronets. But why is a book less like a hotel room than a movie, especially if that movie is based on a book?

I think it has something to do with the complexity of books. I'm talking here about both novels and short story collections. The way you gather together threads throughout the reading process may differ from book to book, but the fact still remains that after you finish the final page, your work as reader -- as audience -- is not over.

The amount of work required after finishing a book is often a good measure of its worth. Having now finished Ian Fleming's Casino Royale and Moonraker, I can say they aren't very good pieces of literature, comfortable in the knowledge I'm not being undeservingly snobbish. The only thoughts I was left to work through at the conclusion of these books was how they tied in with the films and the overall Fleming/Bond legacy.

Several other books I've read in the past few months have, on the surface, and even while reading them, seemed good enough. It was only when I finished them and moved onto the next book in that particular pile (home, travel or lunchtime) that I realised how little I was thinking about the book outside of reading it. And how little it came back to me after having finished it.

Mohammed Hanif's A Case of Exploding Mangoes was shortlisted for the Booker this year, and made me realise how little I knew about Pakistan's role in the Soviet-Afghan conflict of the 1980s. But the story itself (narrator is arrested on suspicion of involvement in assassination plot...) went in one ear and out the other (excuse the cliché: it was an audiobook).

Another audiobook, The Brooklyn Follies, was more engaging whilst I listened to it, but, strangely for something that ends on the morning of September 11, it seemed to ask no questions of me as a reader after the final line. Stranger still since I am an Auster fan, and expected something to chew on. Perhaps it was because I knew 9/11 would be the terminus at which the book got off, so as I listened, it seemed 'The Times They Are A'Changing' was playing in the background?

Other books I have not enjoyed reading but for some reason they stuck in my throat. After raving about The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, I approached The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark with high expectations. And after two pages my expectations were being met. Sadly, the rest of the book (it was only 106 pages, I think) were an exercise in disappointment. I was reminded of the first book of Spark's I read (The Public Image) and why it took me so long to get around to reading another of her books.

The graph of my reading experience for The Driver's Seat would looks something like this:

However, my negative reaction stuck around in my head for the next week, forcing me to ponder what Muriel Spark was doing. In the introduction John Lancaster suggested The Driver's Seat was not one of Spark's most popular books because of it's unrelenting darkness. Indeed, it only shows one side of everything. In many ways, it felt less substantial than a short story, let alone a novella, let alone a novel as it purports to be in some places. And while I dispute Lancaster's claim, that it's a masterpiece, I can't help feeling now that it builds, rather than diminishes, my estimation of Muriel Spark.

So, to add in the chewing over period, the graph now looks something like this:

For comparison, this is what the graph of my reading experience for Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut would look like:

This is pretty typical for my relationship with Vonnegut. The voice usually kicks in straight away and gets my respect as a wannabe writer, but it's not until maybe twenty pages in that the story gets true momentum and I'm hooked. From time to time, the voice, or perhaps the things it has to say, strangle the plot (and my enjoyment), resulting in the judder bar effect. But, ultimately, it's the messages (both proclaimed from the mouthpiece narrator and limned by the plot) that linger long after finishing the novel, continually lifting my regard.

I know some films have continued to affect me long after viewing them. Fight Club (as a well-adjusted, angry teen). Easy Rider (that LSD trip in the cemetery...) Um... There might be a few more.

But for the most part, movies end for me when the credits roll. Okay, I may have a wee discussion about how (*spoiler alert*) Verbal was Kaiser Soze, or why those virgins killed themselves, but it's different to a book. Even a good attempt at turning a book into a movie, like Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, leaves me feeling like I have been gliding on the surface of something, whereas the book had penetrated the meniscus.

Albums certainly grow (or shrink) in import with time. I wasn't so sure about Fully Completely the first 10-12 times I listened to it (over the space of 2 years), and then one day it clicked (I've been earworming 'At the Hundredth Meridian' for the last three weeks). But that's the nature of albums: they are constructed to be engaged with repeatedly. Bad albums (and almost every double album ever made) ignore this fact.

Half decent films, especially in this age of dedicated movie channels and DVD/Blu-Ray, also invite repeated viewings.

And, while we're at it: hotels are there to be stayed in whenever you need, and restaurants shoot for repeat custom.

All these rateable commodities seem to share this possibility of return. The reviewer has only seen the film once or twice, or listened to the album for a week. They visit the hotel every six months, but haven't seen in every room, nor have they tried every dish on a restaurant's menu. But they still feel confident they can recognise a 4-star experience when the have one.

But books. They seem to be a different creature.

I know some people do re-read their favourite books with regularity, but not me. There's too many possible favourite books out there to discover. Something about the architecture of a book, its length and the level of engagement required, means that a once-through is as much as can reasonably be expected. (I know many novelists and academics would disagree...). But because of what has gone into the experience (all those words, scenes, characters, experienced in different sized chunks in different places at irregular intervals), it takes more to unpack the book and evaluate its lasting impact.

All this is to say two things:

One: I wouldn't want to labour book reviewers with a star rating system, because they may not have "finished" the book by the time they submit their review. That is, they would have read the final page, but who's to say they don't need another week (or month, or year) to discover what they really feel about it. I think this is where criticism and review part ways.

Two: I do think keeping a personal rating system for books would be interesting, and perhaps useful. If I continued to do my little graphs of the reading experience for a given book, and how it performs once the covers are closed for good, patterns would no doubt emerge. Is there, in fact, an ideal worm? I believe a novel has to build, but it also has to start big to grab the reader. But you can't aspire to write a saggy, U-shaped, book. Same goes for short story collections. The first and last stories usually have a bit of tangy zizzle about them, but you can't hide poor stories in the middle or get away with too many of the same story.

I probably won't graph every book I read (I get enough graphage on Sundays), but it would be interesting if the 5-star system was overthrown and instead people talked about a saggy movie or a judder bar meal. It might help remind us that every reader/viewer/diner/guest's view is different yet valid.

As for Generals and Colonels, I think they can keep their stars.

Status Report: Week Forty-One

While not as bad as last week, number forty-one was another sub-par effort, though for different reasons than those I wallowed in last week. No, I actually felt stories bubbling up inside of me. I was less tired. My time was more my own. The problem, this time, was reading.

I am normally reading three books at once. One is the audiobook I listen to while travelling to and from work. One I leave at work and read during my lunch breaks. Another I read at home. Now that we have our own bathroom, I have split the last category in two, leaving one book in the bathroom, and one beside my bed.

On a given week, I would expect to read 100-150 pages of my lunch time book, anywhere from 50-200 pages of an at-home book, and listen to about 7 hours of an audiobook (which corresponds to 180 pages at a rough guess). That’s an average week.

I don't think that's a lot. In fact, when I allow myself to think about life after this million words malarkey, I usually feel that I could pull back on some of the writing (less blog posts and graph making, less rookie poetry), and spend more time reading books.

But, even in the Year of Circa 800,000 Written Words, all it takes is one book to bump writing from my top priority.

On Monday I finally received my contributor’s copies of The Best New Zealand Fiction Volume Five. They were posted a month ago, but to my old address. So the anticipation had rather built. In fact, it is now more than a year since I got an email from Owen Marshall asking if I would like to submit anything, so the arrival of the finished product was a long timing coming. (I once had a dream that a full-blown Scot from work who’d never been to NZ also got a story into the collection, and I was outraged…)

After scanning the introduction for the appearance of my name (I’m only human) I quickly got sucked into the other stories. One of the first things I noticed was BNZF5 is ordered by author’s surname, as was the last edition of Sport. This is fine. I tend not to read short story collections or literary journals in a linear fashion. The beauty of such books is that you can jump around. You have 15 minutes left of your bus journey so you flick through and find a four page story. You aren’t really in the mood for a story in the second person, so you read instead about a trip to Morocco. Having an arbitrary order seems to encourage such behaviour.

Jumping in and out of these stories got me excited about reading again. Every spare moment felt like a book should fill it. I looked at the poetry I was bashing out and decided I’d rather be reading finished products from better poets than myself. On Saturday I went to the Scottish Poetry Library and again struggled to limit myself to six books. (Along with this exercise, the SPL is one of the main offenders when it comes to explaining my sudden obsession with writing and reading poetry).

The books I am currently reading now looks like this:

The Blind Assassin is my audiobook. The two Bond novels I found in the closet of our new flat and they had been my bathroom and bedside books until BNZF5 arrived, and they look set to be relegated further with all that poetry around. The one book not pictured is Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell, which is in my desk at work.

With any book, but especially with poetry, I can’t stand to have it lie around without at least having read a few pages. With the Miłosz and the Geoff Cochrane, this ended with me reading the whole books through. (I have now read all of GC’s poetry collections from 1992 to the present; again, thanks to the SPL).

So my reading is all over the place. Writing seems less exciting: I might not know exactly what’s going to happen, but I at least have a modicum of control. This week, at least, control was something I could do without.

At some stage, I hope to talk about what’s actually gone on inside some of these books…

But until then…

Week Forty-One – The Stats

Weekly Wordcount: 16,815 words (compared to 12,007 words last week)
Average: 2,402 words per day (compared to target of 3,001 words/day)
Most productive day: Sunday 12 October, 3,347 words
Least productive day: Wednesday 8 October, 1,458 words
Year-to-date: 646,559 words (134,822 words behind target)

Failure Will Not Be Tolerated: Why Writers Shouldn't Be Given Any Free Passes

Yesterday I argued that novelists should be allowed to warm up in the public eye; that by publishing their promising but ultimately flawed books, it might increase the chances they will write a Mr Pip or a White Noise, and give fanbods something to search for in secondhand bookstores.

But.

I can just as easily argue the contrary: that only the crème de la crème (to borrow a phrase from Miss Brodie) of novels should be published. In fact, there are three pretty good lines I could, and will, run.

One: Financial

Why should publishers subsidise writers who haven’t yet mastered their craft? What guarantee is there that a mid-list writer will ever break out? I would be wary of any publishing house (or agent) that accepts work that they do not believe in. The novel emerged as a commercial form pretty much from its inception - - and a popular form to boot. The worst thing we could do to the novel is remove it from the marketplace completely.

And, now that I’m well into my devil’s advocate role, what’s the role of all those writing workshops if it isn’t to get all of those amateurish, imperfect, unsellable books out of the way before a writer thinks about publishing?!?

Two: Market dilution

There are already too many books being published. Far too many to read. And some of these books, I’m sure, are responsible for turning people off reading. It’s commonly bandied around that reading a book beats immersion in any other media, but it’s not easy to write something -- to use words and words alone -- and create a believable world. One word out of place or out of character can be as damaging as the projector chewing film in the cinema.

As Douglas Coupland said:

We live in an era of genuinely diminished attention spans. I'm competing with reality TV and with shows written by 24 to 30 professionals per episode. If I have something to say, it had better be something fucking important, and it had better be said in some new and unexpected way.

[Aside: the novel he was spruiking when he said this, jPod, isn’t exactly the best example of writing, or storytelling, but I still agree with what he said.]

Three: The Writer’s Responsibility

It might have happened, somewhere, perhaps in a small town, one where tractors are still a common sight on the main street: the townsfolk ask the resident genius, “Please become a writer.” He politely declines. They pull out their pitchforks. He changes his postion.

But for everyone else: No one is forcing you to be a writer. You chose this path, knowing full well it was a difficult one. If you can’t toil away without payment or praise until your book-length manuscripts are good enough to receive payment and praise, then maybe you don’t deserve it?? Maybe this is Literature’s form of hazing new-comers? Maybe it’s the constant kicks to the abdomen that build the killer six pack, which, years down the line, will make the fanbods swoon?

…

The thing that I’ve noticed while trotting out my arguments for and against writing apprenticeships in the public eye is that it’s difficult, either way, not to romanticise the act of writing and the result. Perhaps this is because I’m a wannabe, currently in the kicks-to-the-abdomen-phase, who, in his weaker moments, lets his thoughts drift to the swooning fanbods stage.

[I imagine becoming a novelist is difficult for those who are immune to romanticism.]

So, to keep this on a personal level for a moment longer, what do I really think? I have submitted two novel manuscripts to publishers (NZ and Aus) and agents (UK and US). I have written portions of two more novels this year, one of which I will complete in 2008, Scouts honour. Would I like to have had one or both of my unpublished novels published at the time?

Well, in case you hadn’t noticed, there are pros and cons. As Rachel King mentioned in a comment to yesterday’s post, if your first published book bombs, no matter where you publish it, the hill is that much harder to climb the next time. But if you aren’t given the option to publish, the hill is still a daunting thing to stand before. What if I spend all this time on a new book and nothing comes of it? What if I really am just fooling myself? Very real fears, my friends. (I would worry about any writer who does not have these moments, because it would suggest they don’t care enough about readers and/or that they are a robot, and based on current technological constraints I’m sad to say robot’s do not make good writers).

Being a writer is about conquering the fear and writing. The best writing is fearless. These statements are difficult to mesh. It is a complicated game. Sometimes you don’t know you’ve won until after you’re dead (let’s not get into the metaphysical debate my poor phrasing just threw up).

With regards to me, personally, this is all moot. When I send something off to publishers and agents, I want it to be published / believe it should be published. When I stop sending it out (as happened with both "complete" manuscripts) I don’t want it to be published anymore. There’s no great theorising going on about apprenticeships and capital-L literature. When I finish something, I either believe it’s the best thing in the world and submit, or I don’t believe and know that it’s not really finished.


Footnote:
These arguments are for novels. Although creating a book of short stories is a difficult task, it’s a very different proposition. The key to a good short story collection is good stories. Overarching themes and interconnections between stories help sell books, so I’m told, but you can link and overarch all you want: if you’re stories suck, your book sucks. As with any form, you learn to write good short stories by writing and reading a lot of them. But the investment is not normally as big as with a novel. It’s easier to write off a short story as flawed and move on than it is with a novel. It’s easier to draft and redraft and redraft and redraft a short story than it is a novel. You can submit short stories to competitions and litmags and websites and get published, do your apprenticeship in public, so to speak, before thinking about anything as daunting as a book-length collection.

The novel and the short story are different forms; thinking of short stories as baby novels is like calling a dog a baby elephant (though they both walk on for legs, the wee one will never grow into the big one). But still, to continue my dodgy simile, if you are good at training dogs, some of the skills will be useful if you find yourself coaching an elephant football team.

(Not So) Brilliant Failures: Why Every Novelist Deserves A Loss Leader or Two

I would encourage anyone with even the slightest interest in New Zealand literature to read Gregory O’Brien’s 2008 Janet Frame Memorial Lecture (care of NZ Books Abroad) which he delivered last week.

Some highlights:

Brilliant failures are more desirable than sedate successes. Far better that writers aim for largeness of vision, dynamism and risk, and then fall short, rather than adhering to some prevailing, complacent notion of excellence. Baxter’s late poetry is a great example of a writer pulling back from achieved and recognised excellence, pushing poetry into rough, uncharted territory. His greatest poems are, you could argue, his least excellent ones…

[To which I would say: ‘Ah, but at some point you must come close enough to success to get noticed!’]

Literature is not a track event. Everyone is not running in the same direction—nor should they be. If literature is a race then it is one where, when the starting gun is fired, the participants run off each in their own direction. It is only arts funders and prize-givers who line writers up on some invented racetrack, facing the same ribbon…

And the list of works/authors mentioned would make an impressive To Be Read pile.

Next, I would point you to Maggie Rainey-Smith’s post on Leaf Salon, which compare’s Greg’s plea for the laboratory of literature with the much more market-driven view of literature from Australian literary agent Sophie Hamley.

I’d agree that the middle ground is often over-looked in these sort of State of The Nation Addresses, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a desirable place to dwell. Until Mr. Pip, Lloyd Jones was probably in the middle-ground (he wrote books about rugby and Albania, got reviewed, but was far from a celebrity). Now he’s just won the $60,000 Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction and it seems like he’s always been the ne plus ultra of NZ Letters. Not so.

There’s something to be said for apprenticeships. These days it’s virtually impossible to have a book-length apprenticeship in the US and UK, and to a lesser extent in Australia, but the possibility still exists in New Zealand. I think.

I started reading Don DeLillo’s The Names (1982) yesterday. The main reason was it’s set in Greece. A secondary reason was: this was the book he wrote before White Noise (1985) which is one of my favourite books. But it got me thinking about how DeLillo published eight novels before White Noise. I haven’t read them all, but if there’re anything like Great Jones Street, I’m not missing much. Once White Noise came out and DeLillo won the National Book Award, I’ll bet people started looking at him in a different, ‘Our Lloyd’ kind of way.

Things must have clicked after that, as he then knocked out Libra, Mao II and the behemoth that is Underworld. I wonder if DeLillo could have “knocked out” these four books (all ‘brilliant failures’ in their own way) if he hadn’t paid his dues as a mid-list author dispensing shiny-but-not-exactly-brilliant failures for 14 years??

It’s one thing to expect authors to cut their teeth on short fiction for little or no reward. But it’s another to expect them to knock out novel after novel in the pursuit of perfection without publishing one or two of those learning experiences. Book length publication means feedback from people who haven’t said no. It means the author is forced to push ahead into new waters, or if they must regurgitate, they better have a bloody good reason. It means non-writers will give them a break for about six months. It means they get money, even if it’s only enough to cover all the printing and postage costs that got them to the point of publication. It means that, when it finally clicks for them, and their books find readers and praise and prominent positions in bookstores without the slightest effort by the author, these readers and praisers will have something to go back to. These first failures mightn’t be brilliant by themselves, but I guarantee you, if the writer is worth a damn, the whole story will be better for having these hiccups than for not.

So, struggling writers and penny-pinching publishers, hear the cry of the long-tailed, far-sighted spectre of Literature: You cannot read smoke.

Edinburgh International Book Festival Wrap-Up

Now that I have attended literary festivals in Wellington, Brisbane, Melbourne and Edinburgh, I know there’s several ways an hour long session with a writer can go. There’s the session where the author reads for too long and leaves very little time for discussion. There’s the session dominated by the chair who has too much or too little knowledge of the author. There’s the session where everything goes well until the audience is asked for questions and there are none. There’s the session where everything goes well until the audience is asked for questions and there is an endless supply of terrible ones…

The motivation to attend most writers’ sessions is to hear the voice behind the voice on the page, and the thoughts behind the book. This was the case with me and Andrey Kurkov (see below). Often, the least interesting part of a session is when the author is asked to read from their latest work (as per Nam Le). You’ve either read it already (if you’re paying £9, you better bloody like their stuff), or it’s so hard to grasp what is going on out of context, or the author isn’t a great reader of their own work. But I’m talking about prose sessions here. The rules don’t apply to poetry…

Carol Ann Duffy
Saturday 23 August, 8pm

Carol Ann Duffy took the stage after a brief intro from the chair and proceeded to read poems for the rest of the hour. She began with two excerpts from 'The Laughter of Stafford Girl's High', and ended with the final section. In between she read poems from her collections The World’s Wife and Rapture. I haven’t read the latter, but I had experienced all the other poems on the page before. Unlike prose, where hearing is a poor cousin of reading, most poems that come to life when read aloud, when performed. This is not true of all poems (some are built for the page, some are unreadable), and not all poets are performers, but Carol Ann Duffy did a good job on Saturday of choosing her set list (continuity, variation, humour) and performing it in such a way that the audience never felt like it was missing a trick.

Nam Le
Sunday 24 August, 10am

There’s always an exception to the rule. In this case the rule is: A short story collection (especially a début collection) can’t make waves. Of course it helps if you’ve done a Tour of Duty at the Iowa Workshop and held fellowships on both sides of the Atlantic. The cynical among us might add the fact that Nam was born in Vietnam (and grew up in Australia), but his collection, The Boat, shoots down expectations that it will play up his exoticism (his word) from the very first story.

The session was actually held as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival, beamed into the RBS Main Theatre in Edinburgh’s Charlotte Square via Satellite link-up. The audience in Edinburgh got the chance to ask two questions, just to prove this was live and interactive, though the questions were so astute, I almost wonder if these audience members were plants by the festival, or Edinburgh City of Literature, to ensure they weren’t embarrassed in front of the newest City of Literature.

Nam Le spoke candidly and eloquently about how his stories and ultimately his collection came together. A glance at the Q&A section of his website reveals he’s been saying the similar things since March, which isn’t anything against the man, just the world in which writers are forced operate (should they desire to sell many books or at least get reviewed by the NY Times…).

I’ve already quoted one of his analogies on this blog and find myself chewing over the thoughts provoked by this session much more than any other I attended over the festival. Not bad for a freebie.

Andrey Kurkov
Sunday 24 August, 6:45pm

Andrey Kurkov is a Ukrainian of Russian extraction who writes in Russian, though he is also fluent in Ukrainian, and Japanese (in which he trained as a translator; this almost led to him joining the KGB), and English (Sunday’s reading and Q&A was all in English) and perhaps several other languages. His most well known book is Death and the Penguin.

His session, however, fell into the ‘annoying chair who hijacks the hour’ category. When the floor was opened up to questions, I thought, “At last, the books might get discussed!”, only to discover that other audience members were just as interested in what the future holds for politics in the Ukraine—and screw any insights into the books of Andrey Kurkov!

When one audience member expressed his dismay at Kurkov’s views, delivered with his typical black humour, about Ukranian politicians (they’re nice people, but they love money *shrug*), and how, being so close to Poland, this would be disastrous for the EU, and, “Please reassure me it’s not so bleak,” I lost faith in humanity. I raised my hand to ask the next question, but someone else was chosen. My head fell into my hands, but to my surprise, the woman with the microphone asked my question. In fact, being a professional translator, she was better qualified to ask about how involved Andrey Kurkov is in the translation process (Answer: he’s has a new translator for English, who has never contacted him, which is not uncommon across the 20+ languages his work has been translated into; however some, like the Japanese translator who spent three days in Kiev visiting all the sites in Death and the Penguin, do go beyond the call of duty)…

So, the session was not a complete wash, but whenever you write this on the back of your ticket, you know something dire has happened:

When I spend a lot of time by myself, or in the exclusive company of people I have known for a long time, I find my thoughts (and writing) are quite positive w.r.t. human beings on an individual scale. But when I am surrounded by strangers I find I am a total misanthrope.

This was, thankfully, not my final brush with the Edinburgh International Book Festival. On Monday, the last day of the festival and a bank holiday (woo-hoo), Marisa and I attended Ron Butlin’s free reading. He read a very short story and two short poems (one of which I’d previously read here). I would like to thank Ron Butlin, and all the other Ten at Ten authors (and whoever at the Festival came up with this new feature) for restoring my faith in book festivals and humankind. Honestly, sometimes you can’t beat a good reading.

So, my thoughts about the world’s biggest book festival really all boil down to this:

I would have liked to have seen more, but several factors limited the number of sessions I attended:

* the cost (upwards of £9 per hour long session; much more if you wanted to attend a workshop)

* the timing i) (a lot of events on during work hours)

* the timing ii) (a lot of other fringe/international festival events competing for my time and money)

* the nature of book festivals (see misanthropism, cynicism above and elsewhere).

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie vs The Wasp Factory

The planets aligned such that I finished two books on Friday. My lunch time reading for the week was The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark - - its 128 pages fit perfectly into five thirty-minute sessions (I read a bit slower while eating, not possessing the multi-tasking gene and all). And my walking to and fro audiobook was The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks.

It was not a coincidence, exactly, that both books were by Scottish authors - - each was a token Scottish borrowing from separate trips to the Edinburgh Central Library - - though I didn’t realise I had Scot against Scot until well into the week.

When I finished both books on the same day it sealed their fates: comparisons must be drawn (and even when the analysis evaporates, they will remain yoked in my memory).

The few references to Inverness in The Wasp Factory (it is the nearest city to the island Frank Cauldhame and his father inhabit) were enough for a spark of recognition, a flash of appropriate terrain (though I’m pretty sure the island is fictional) from one of my road trips north.

If the setting of The Wasp Factory provided a spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie set off fireworks. The story is set in Edinburgh, primarily 1930-36, though it stretches beyond in terms of time and place (more on this later). I live in Edinburgh in 2008. Here, seventy years is nothing.

The passage in chapter two which begins, “It is time now to speak of the long walk through the old parts of Edinburgh…” takes everyone who’s important (Miss Brodie, her set of six girls, and the reader) across the Meadows, to the Grassmarket and onto the High Street. Though you are more likely to encounter American tourists (why are they all compelled to buy woollen sweaters and wear them the next day?) than a crowd of unemployed (“The Idle” as Eunice calls them), even the modern tourists can pick up the grimy vibe that the Old Town will never shake.

Then there’s Mr Lowther’s grand old house in Cramond, the clouds on the Pentland Hills, the warning that one of the girls might end up a Girl Guide leader in Corstorphine… Even the school-girl rhyme Edinburgh, Leith / Portobello, Musselburgh / And Dalkeith was its own Catherine Wheel of recognition. I’m not making a point about the worth of the book (yet), just that reading is so often enriched by what you can bring to the text.

Similarly, the reference to Miss Brodie’s ancestor Willie Brodie would have gone over my head before I arrived in Edinburgh. Sure, there’s enough in the text to understand how this points to another case of duality, but for anyone who has had a pint in Deacon Brodie’s the message is writ in neon.

These recognition fireworks go some way to explaining why I enjoyed The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie so much, though they are no basis upon which to make claims about the quality of the book.

But it is a quality book. Its structure, zipping forward and back in time, is discomforting but, at the same time, exhilarating. In proleptic fits were are told Miss Brodie will be betrayed, whom she will be betrayed by, and ultimately the minutiae of the betrayal, all before their proper time. That is, ‘proper’ if this was to be a more traditional narrative where suspense is built by keeping cards face down until all the money is on the table.

This is how The Wasp Factory works. We are presented with mysteries and questions ranging from the prosaic (What is the wasp factory? What’s in the study) to the significant (Why did Eric go crazy? Why does Frank act the way he does?) and we are given answers when the story is good and ready. One of the signs that The Wasp Factory is a good book is that the seemingly prosaic questions, the things that keep your reading from page-to-page (rather than make you pick up the book once you have put it down), are intrinsically linked to the significant questions. But once we know why Eric is crazy (the Incident of the Smiling Child is perhaps the most memorable part of the novel, though it is also the most conspicuous answer to a question posed by the structure) we do not return to the question.

Okay, fair enough.

But is this how we function in real life? Once we know that the gulf stream is primarily responsible for Scotland being more temperate than should be expected of its longitude, we still may ponder the phenomena. By saving up the best revelations for the end, a book can’t really do this pondering thing. This: Walking Round The Building To See If There’s Another Entrance/Exit.

[Aside / Great Moment in iPod Shuffle: ‘Cage Around the Sun’ by Monster Magnet just played on iTunes. It strikes me as the perfect soundtrack to The Wasp Factory, both book and song being rooted in adolescence; many confluences between the lyrics and the story (the construction of elaborate devices, cruelty to animals, “Queen Bee F***ing Cyclops” vs Wasp Torturing Eunuch…).]

The final twist of the The Wasp Factory was okay (*damning with faint praise alert*), but it is followed by the most tedious part of the novel: Frank muses about what we’ve just learnt in the dénouement and how it made him what he is. The problem is that the action of the novel has ended, there are no other doors we are waiting to see behind, so that all we have is words. The big themes that are drawn up by the narrator sound like “big themes”, which means they sound ham-fisted.

But in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, we know Miss Brodie will be betrayed by one of her set for most of the book, and (I won’t spoil it for you) which girl it is for at least half of the journey. The question of Who shifts to Why, and this is always a much trickier question.

As we dance around the thirties, weaving in and out of the Brodie Set’s adolescence, we are not solely reading for answers, we are reading for the pleasure of the book’s company. It is a tremendously funny book. I didn’t realise this until a third of the way through, then, with every page, its funniness increased. I think if I were to re-read it now, I’d find the beginning hilarious…

[Five minutes later…]

Okay, I just re-read the first few pages and I was right. “All of the Brodie set, save one, counted on its fingers, as had Miss Brodie, with accurate results more or less.” On a first read through, one assumes the humour resides solely in the counting on fingers, which might be enough for a mental grin But, on a second read through, the “more or less” is so telling it becomes the punch line (inaccuracy will consign Brodie and others to fates unbecoming the crème de la crème). And then there’s the “save one”, who we learn further down the page must be Monica Douglas, who is “famous mostly for mathematics.” But on a second reading, one knows this already, and it is therefore adds another delight to the already brimming sentence.

This is not the first novel by Muriel Spark I have read (it’s the third), though it is the first that struck me as masterly. It can’t all be down to the favourable comparisons with The Wasp Factory and the fact it’s set in the city I’ve lived in for the last ten months. It is certainly her most famous, there must be good, universal reasons for that. And I remember someone urging me to read it a couple of years ago. Though then, of course, I wouldn’t have known where Cramond was.

***

Footnote: Last week Iain Banks wrote an interesting piece for the Guardian on the writing of The Wasp Factory (it was his first book to be published, though the sixth he wrote). I'm linking to it here because a) it's interesting b) shares some similarities with my own position as manque novelist and c) I feel a bit bad for using The Wasp Factory as the contrast to a book I clearly preferred.