tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-225377432024-03-07T00:31:13.440-08:00and another thing...Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08700441634700745541noreply@blogger.comBlogger144125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22537743.post-91505264326813760482015-06-08T10:31:00.003-07:002015-06-15T12:53:24.196-07:00The NIGHT MUSIC Art Competition — Submissions due July 31! <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9B5AyMcbdGqId1a6ElZs5F2K0q7aixdsscqkXDQ3XpZkX1AFhdsV9RknuodTwZYx5TPTpSXdg5f7wm2hhdIefGWJiScNJGxl071PcWZ2L0jc2qWGpNpzlbM-5-Yv09whAtM7U/s1600/night-music+US+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9B5AyMcbdGqId1a6ElZs5F2K0q7aixdsscqkXDQ3XpZkX1AFhdsV9RknuodTwZYx5TPTpSXdg5f7wm2hhdIefGWJiScNJGxl071PcWZ2L0jc2qWGpNpzlbM-5-Yv09whAtM7U/s320/night-music+US+cover.jpg" width="206" /></a><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="color: black;">To coincide with the publication of <a href="http://johnconnollybooks.com/novels-night-music.php"><span style="color: #814552;"><b>NIGHT MUSIC</b></span></a>, I'm inviting readers to participate in an art competition. A panel of judges will select seven designs to be used for a set of art cards that will be given away with copies of the book. </span></span>
<br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="color: black;"> </span></span>
<br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="color: black;"> Here's the brief: <span style="color: #814552;"><b>pick a novel of horror or the supernatural, and create an alternative cover for it</b></span>.
You might fancy having a go at Stoker's DRACULA, or Mary Shelley's
FRANKENSTEIN; or, The Modern Prometheus, or THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE
by Shirley Jackson. A novella like STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL & MR.
HYDE may appeal, or something more modern like Stephen King's SALEM'S
LOT, or Thomas Harris's THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, which is much a horror
novel as a thriller. We'll even allow you to use short story
collections as your inspiration, such as GHOST STORIES OF AN ANTIQUARY
by M.R. James, or THE DUNWICH HORROR and OTHERS by H.P. Lovecraft. The
choice is yours: all we ask is that the cover be inspired by a work
already in print. <b>Because one of the cards will feature the NIGHT MUSIC cover design, I'd prefer
that you <i>not</i> choose one of my books for your design. </b></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="color: black;">Winners will receive a check for €250, or the equivalent in local
currency (dollars, dinars, shells, domesticated animals) and a signed
copy of NIGHT MUSIC , as well as a set of the art cards. </span></span>
<br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="color: black;"> </span></span>
<br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="color: black;"> The
art cards will measure 12.5 cm x 17.5 cm, so your design should follow
those proportions. Designs may be in color or black and white, and may
take the form of drawings, paintings, photographs, collages or anything
else that can be reproduced by standard four-color printing processes. <b>
The design must include the title and author's name </b>of a work of horror currently
available for sale or in the public domain. Please do not use any images
that would need to be licensed from their copyright holders. </span></span>
<br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="color: black;"> </span></span>
<br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="color: black;"> Send your submissions as PDF or JPEG files, attached to an email that includes your full name and mailing address, to <a href="mailto:contact@johnconnollybooks.com" target="_blank">contact@johnconnollybooks.com</a> with the subject line NIGHT MUSIC ART COMPETITION. <b>Closing date for receipt of finished designs is July 31</b>. </span></span> </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: black; font-size: small;">Good luck! </span></span>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08700441634700745541noreply@blogger.com35tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22537743.post-15461685847483889472015-02-03T09:10:00.000-08:002015-02-03T09:10:26.131-08:00BOOKS READ IN NOVEMBER, DECEMBER AND JANUARY<b>Books Read in November:</b><br />
<i>The Heist</i> by Daniel Silva<br />
<i>Deadline</i> by John Sandford<br />
<i>Reykjavik Nights </i>by Arnaldur Indridason <br />
<i>Sitcom</i> by Saul Austerlitz<br />
<i>How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe</i> by Charles Yu<br />
<i>I Must Say</i> by Martin Short<br />
<i>The Man in the High Castle</i> by Philip K. Dick<br />
<i>The Lily and the Lion</i> by Maurice Druon<br />
<i>Mad River</i> by John Sandford<br />
<br />
<b>Books Read in December:</b><br />
<i>Doctor Who: A History </i>by Alan Kistler<br />
<i>Lullaby </i>by Ace Atkins<br />
<i>1984</i> by George Orwell<br />
<i>Light of the World</i> by James Lee Burke<br />
<i>Summer Lightning</i> by P.G. Wodehouse<br />
<br />
<b>Books Read in January:</b><br />
<i>The Old Curiosity Shop</i> by Charles Dickens<br />
<i>Man on the Run: Paul McCartney in the 1970s</i> by Tom Doyle<br />
<i>The Narrow Road to the Deep North</i> by Richard Flanagan<br />
<i>Darkmouth</i> by Shane Hegarty<br />
<i>A Shed of One's Own: Midlife Without the Crisis</i> by Marcus Berkmann<br />
<i>Armchair Nation</i> by Joe Moran<br />
<i>Something Red</i> by Douglas Nicholas<br />
<br />
So my experiment in keeping note of the books that I've read during the year comes to a kind of close — except, of course, that it doesn't, as I'm going to continue recording the titles, and may even continue to bother other people by talking about them, in this blog or elsewhere.<br />
<br />
A friend of mine named Bob Gulyas sent an email this morning to tell me that he'd begun recording his reading for the first time. Bob has quite a few years on me, and admitted that if, when younger, he'd started entering in a notebook the titles of all the books he'd read, he'd have a shelf filled with notebooks by now. Still, it's never too late to start, and he's off and running now.<br />
<br />
As I think I've mentioned before, I probably read more books than ever this year simply because I had committed to keeping a record of them. Writing their names down was a little like wearing a literary Fitbit: whereas in the past I might sometimes have been inclined to put my feet up in front of the television instead of reading, my desire to get in as many books as possible in any given month meant that television — and other distractions, such as watching movies on planes — fell by the wayside. There were books to be read, dammit! I had to keep up my average.<br />
<br />
The issue of difficult books did occasionally arise, though, as longer — or more literary — titles simply took up more reading time than others. Someone suggested that a way around this might be to categorize a book as having an average length — say 300 pages — so a 600-page book would count as two books, a 900-page book three, and so on until I could consider picking up Roberto Bolano's undeniably hefty <i>2666</i> (898 pages, 2.6 lbs in hardback) without fear of mucking up my book score. But that felt like cheating, and I never did get around to <i>2666.</i> (I've since been warned off it by a couple of people, so it's unlikely that I ever will read it unless I'm jailed for a considerable length of time — although one of the people who told me not to read it is, in fact, in jail, and even he couldn't get through it.<br />
<br />
The elephant in the room where the matter of big books is concerned is Dickens, and my list of books read in 2014 — more than 80 — would be one title longer if it weren't for <i>The Old Curiosity Shop</i>, which I started at Christmas and finished on January 1st. I try to read one Dickens a year. I've now read pretty much all of the entertaining ones, with the exception of <i>A Tale of Two Cities</i>, and now must resign myself to tackling <i>Barnaby Rudge</i>, and <i>Martin Chuzzlewit</i>; splendid stuff, I'm sure (well, maybe not <i>Barnaby Rudge</i>, which tends to be ominously disguised as one of his "less popular" works), but probably lacking the ease of <i>The Pickwick Papers</i>, or the greatness of <i>Bleak House</i>.<br />
<br />
Anyway, <i>The Old Curiosity Shop</i> scuppered me at the last. I blame Little Nell, who as everyone knows (and spoiler alert if you're the only one who doesn't), is doomed from the off, and looks increasingly peakéd as the book progresses. It's one of those novels that really only gets interesting when the supposed heroine and her aged relative are offstage, yielding to the villainous Quilp in particular. Still, there's a certain satisfaction in having read it, and instead of being the last book read in 2014 it became the first book finished in 2015.<br />
<br />
Onwards we go . . .<br />
<br />Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08700441634700745541noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22537743.post-37536472513176148292014-11-27T13:59:00.001-08:002014-11-27T13:59:24.173-08:00BOOKS READ IN SEPTEMBER AND OCTOBER<b>Books Read in September:</b>
<i> </i><br />
<i>The Poisoned Crown</i> by Maurice Druon
<i> </i><br />
<i>The Royal Succession</i> by Maurice Druon
<i> </i><br />
<i>The She-Wolf</i> by Maurice Druon
<i> </i><br />
<i>Film Freak</i> by Christopher Fowler
<i> </i><br />
<i>Blue-Eyed Devil</i> by Robert B. Parker
<i> </i><br />
<i>Bull Mountain</i> by Brian Panowich
<i> </i><br />
<i>Hunting Evil</i> by Guy Walters
<b> </b><br />
<br />
<b>Books Read in October:</b><br />
<i>Inherent Vice</i> by Thomas Pynchon
<i> </i><br />
<i>How Star Wars Conquered the Universe</i> by Chris Taylor<br />
<i>Hitler’s Furies</i> by Wendy Lower
<i> </i><br />
<i>Frankenstein</i> by Mary Shelley<br />
<i>Going Off Alarming</i> by Danny Baker<br />
<i>Revival</i> by Stephen King
<i> </i><br />
<i>Only When I Laugh</i> by Paul Merton
<i> </i><br />
<i>Horror Stories: Classic Tales from Hoffman to Hodgson</i> edited by Darryl Jones<br />
<br />
One of the things I’ve discovered by writing down the names of the books I’ve read this year is that I’m reading more books than I might otherwise have done. I think it may be the opposite of keeping track of one’s calorie intake, which usually results in the ingestion of less food. (A doughnut can contain more than 350 calories, incidentally, and you know that they never taste as good as they look . . .) With books, though, I keep pushing myself to read more and more. Ideally I’d like to have read 100 books by the end of this year, but I don’t think I’m going to reach that. Still, I won’t be too far off, although I have noticed that the shadow of my desire to read more books is a reluctance to tackle books that are very long, as they might bring down my average.<br />
<br />
Thus, although I have a very nice copy of <i>The Count of Monte Cristo</i> by Alexandre Dumas on my shelf, and it’s a novel that I’ve meant to read for many years, I keep putting it off as it’s about 900 pages long, and might well represent a couple of weeks of reading. I wonder, too, if I’m secretly concerned about my own mortality, and figure that, even if my plane starts to go down during this current publicity tour, I might still have just enough time to sprint through another Maurice Druon book or, you know, reread <i>The Great Gatsby</i>. Then again, I might be too busy screaming, although it’s hard to conceive of any situation in which I wouldn’t try to get a few more pages of a book read. That, my friends, is the mark of an obsessive.<br />
<br />
Speaking of Maurice Druon, I’m now on the sixth of his seven-novel sequence, The Accursed Kings, so I’m quite the expert on the French monarchy in the 13th and 14th centuries, and have just learned that Clémence of Hungary was the first person in history to own a fork, which is always useful to know. Druon requires a little commitment, as it can be difficult initially to keep track of various factions, princes, knights, and, indeed, dead kings, of which there are quite a number. Not surprisingly, he was a huge influence on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, but it also strikes me that historical fiction, like fantasy literature, is much more conducive to, and welcoming of, sequences of novels than my own mystery genre, which generally distrusts books — even as part of character-driven series — that require readers to have some knowledge of preceding novels. My Parker books form a sequence, but I’d suggest that they’re the exception in the mystery field, not the rule. They’re not the sole exception, though: Preston and Child do something similar with their Pendergast books, and the work of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, progenitors of the Scandinavian crime genre, is best read in sequence. Still, mystery fiction prefers its series protagonists not to have too much of a memory, I think.<br />
<br />
October, meanwhile, contained a significant gothic element, thanks to Mary Shelley, Stephen King, and Darryl Jones, and a timely visit to the <a href="http://www.bl.uk/events/terror-and-wonder--the-gothic-imagination">gothic exhibition at the British Library</a> in London, which I can heartily recommend should you find yourself at a loose end in that city and fancy seeing Shelley’s manuscript of Frankenstein, or a letter from Jack the Ripper promising to mutilate the ears of his next victim, which he duly did. If nothing else, I suppose he was a man of his word . . .
Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08700441634700745541noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22537743.post-613255923312600302014-09-01T11:49:00.004-07:002014-09-02T04:05:05.306-07:00BOOKS READ IN JUNE, JULY AND AUGUST<b>Books Read in June:</b><br />
<i>The Broken Shore</i> by Peter Temple<br />
<i>Amateurs </i>by Donald Barthelme<br />
<i>Fire & Rain</i> by David Browne<br />
Selections from <i>The Oxford Book of American Short Stories</i>, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, and <i>The World's Greatest Short Stories</i>, edited by James Daley<br />
<i>The Spectre of Alexander Wolf</i> by Gaito Gazdanov<br />
<br />
<b>Books Read in July:</b><br />
<i>Dave Gorman v. The Rest of the World</i> by Dave Gorman<br />
<i>Who Killed Palomino Molero? </i>by Mario Vargas Llosa<br />
<i>Death in the Andes</i> by Mario Vargas Llosa<br />
<i>Shock Wave</i> by John Sandford<br />
<i>The Conquest of the Incas</i> by John Hemming<br />
<i>The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde</i> by Robert Louis Stevenson<br />
<i>I Am Pilgrim</i> by Terry Hayes<br />
<br />
<b>Books Read in August:</b><br />
<i>The Unbearable Lightness of Being</i> by Milan Kundera<br />
<i>The Long Goodbye</i> by Raymond Chandler<br />
<i>The Boy Who Drew Monsters</i> by Keith Donohue<br />
<i>The Murder of Roger Ackroyd</i> by Agatha Christie<br />
<i>In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile</i> by Dave Davies<br />
<i>Five Came Back</i> by Mark Harris<br />
<i>The Tiger in the Smoke</i> by Margery Allingham<br />
<i>Judge Dredd: The Cursed Earth Saga</i> by Wagner, Mills, McMahon and Bolland<br />
<br />
Gosh, it just struck me that I'd been a bit remiss in adding to my Books Read This Year blog, mainly because, well, I've been reading a lot of books, and trying to write a couple as well. I had hoped to get at least fifty books read this year, but I seem to have exceeded that target already, even counting the selections read from two short story anthologies as the equivalent of one book. Mind you, waiting around airports and then sitting on planes for long periods of time helped . . .<br />
<br />
I won't tarry long, as I feel the draft of the new Parker book calling me, but I did want to offer a brief word on short stories, as I found myself reading a lot of them in June.<br />
<br />
In May of this year I gave a workshop to aspiring writers in Sydney as part of the <a href="http://www.swf.org.au/">Sydney Writers' Festival</a>. (I don't tend to give many workshops, mainly because I don't have much idea how I manage to write <i>my</i> books, and therefore I worry about trying to give advice to other people on how to write theirs.) Nevertheless, an issue that came up in the course of the session concerned short stories. One of the writers in the course wanted to write only short stories, but felt pressured — I think by others in her writing group — into using them as a dry run for novels, which she had absolutely no interest in writing. So her question was: Is the art (or craft) of writing short stories a thing in and of itself, or should short story writers inevitably feel bound to broaden their ambitions and write longer fiction?<br />
<br />
The answer would seem pretty obvious: short stories are not simply underdeveloped novels, and it's probably unwise to view the writing of them as the literary equivalent of stabilizers on a bicycle. On the other hand, it is also true that writers of short fiction may feel a certain pressure — whether from classmates, publishers, or themselves — to explore the great plains of fiction in its longer form.<br />
<br />
Some writers, though, are just born to work in the short form. Raymond Carver was one, although when asked why he chose to work in the form, his answer cleaved closer to practicality than to questions of art. This is from an <a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3059/the-art-of-fiction-no-76-raymond-carver">interview with Carver </a>in <i>The Paris Review</i>:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b> INTERVIEWER</b></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
In an article you did for <i>The New York Times Book Review</i> you mentioned a story "too tedious to talk about here" — about why you choose to write short stories over novels. Do you want to go into that story now? </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>CARVER</b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
The story that was "too tedious to talk about" has to do with a number of things that aren't very pleasant to talk about. I did finally talk about some of these things in the essay "Fires," which was published in <i>Antaeus</i>. In it, I said that finally, a writer is judged by what he writes, and that's the way it should be. The circumstances surrounding the writing are something else, something extraliterary. Nobody ever asked me to be a writer. But it <i>was</i> tough to stay alive and pay bills and put food on the table and at the same time to think of myself as a writer and to <i>learn</i> to write. After years of working crap jobs and raising kids and trying to write, I realized I needed to write things I could finish and be done with in a hurry. There was no way I could undertake a novels, a two- or three-year stretch of work on a single project. I needed to write something I could get some kind of payoff from immediately, not next year, or three years from now. Hence, poems and stories. I was beginning to see that my life was not — let's say it was not what I wanted it to be. There was always a wagonload of frustration to deal with — wanting to write and not being able to find the time or the place for it. I used to go out and sit in the car and try to write something on a pad on my knee. This was when the kids were in their adolescence. I was in my late twenties or early thirties. We were still in a state of penury, we had one bankruptcy behind us, and years of hard work with nothing to show for it except an old car, a rented house, and new creditors on our backs. It was depressing, and I felt spiritually obliterated. Alcohol became a problem. I more or less gave up, threw in the towel, and took to full-time drinking as a serious pursuit. That's part of what I was talking about when I was talking about things "too tedious to talk about." </div>
</blockquote>
<div style="text-align: left;">
In other words, Carver claims to have started writing short stories because he didn't have the time to write long ones, which actually seems like a pretty good reason, all things considered. I suspect that he was also artistically suited to the short form. It was where his genius lay, and he was fortunate enough to recognize that fact, whether through enforced circumstance or actual experience. </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Donald Barthelme presents a different example, as he wrote short stories and novels — or, more correctly, novellas, as his longer fiction (<i>Snow White, The Dead Father, The King</i>) isn't very long at all. He was a better short story writer than he was a novelist, which is in no way to damn him with faint praise: Barthelme was so good a short story writer that his novels couldn't really compete. "Fragments are the only form I trust," he once said, but his stories are not fragments at all. They are complete entities, and reading the best of them — like "The School" in the Oates anthology, or one of my favorites, "<a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/69008592/Engineer-private-Paul-Klee-Misplaces-an-Aircraft-Between-Milbertshofen-and-Cambrai-March-1916-Donald-Barthelme">Engineer-Private Paul Klee Misplaces an Aircraft Between Milbertshofen and Cambrai, March 1916</a>," simply makes one want to read more, which is why I went back and read <i>Amateurs</i>, a collection from 1976 that includes the quite splendidly funny and upsetting "Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby." Admittedly some of the tales in <i>Amateurs</i> are a bit too tricksy for my liking, and I have to confess to not quite understanding what Barthelme was trying to do with them, but I've never read anyone like him in the short form, and if you could see your way toward trying <i>Forty Stories</i> or <i>Sixty Stories</i>, which function as Barthelme Best Ofs, I reckon you won't be disappointed.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
It was also a pleasure to read Tobias Wolff's "<a href="http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/huntsnow.html">Hunters in the Snow</a>," which does what only perfect short stories can do — namely, to give us the sense of wandering in at a crucial point in an ongoing narrative, a moment of epiphany, and then leave the ends to trail in our minds like the strings of jellyfish. Wolff is another example of someone who seems to me more comfortable in the short form than the long — I've admired his novels, but they haven't moved me — although I'll take his non-fiction over both. </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Finally, I suppose short stories have been on my mind because I've gradually been working toward another <i>Nocturnes</i> anthology, and I've written more short stories over the last couple of years than in the eight years preceding them. For me, they're neither easier nor harder to write than novels: they're just different. It's like using another muscle, and the more you train it, the more familiar its use becomes. Short stories are unforgiving of flab; unnecessary words, paragraphs or digressions stand out more in the short form than in a novel. But they also allow the writer a certain freedom from the conventions of the novel, in particular the obligation to offer the reader some kind of conclusion — an ending or an explanation, however partial — as a reward for slogging through 300 or 400 pages. A short story permits the reader a glimpse, and nothing more, but it's a glimpse in which a whole world is briefly revealed. </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
And now I have a novel to write . . . </div>
Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08700441634700745541noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22537743.post-67503662892673290292014-06-11T10:02:00.001-07:002014-06-11T10:22:31.245-07:00BOOKS READ IN APRIL AND MAY<br />
<b>Books Read in April: </b><br />
<i>Wodehouse: A Life</i> by Robert McCrum<br />
<i>The Ginger Man</i> by J.P. Donleavy<br />
<i>Rock Stars Stole My Life</i> by Mark Ellen<br />
<br />
<b>Books Read in May:</b><br />
<i>The Undertaking</i> by Audrey Magee<br />
<i>Frank: The True Story that Inspired the Movie</i> by Jon Ronson<br />
<i>Field of Prey</i> by John Sandford<br />
<i>Watching War Films With My Dad</i> by Al
Murray<br />
<i>Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock
and his Leading Ladies</i> by Donald Spoto<br />
<i>Creation Stories</i> by Alan McGee<br />
<i>A Blink of the Screen</i> by Terry
Pratchett<br />
<i>Galveston</i> by Nic Pizzolatto<br />
<i>One Leg Too Few: The Adventures of
Peter Cook and Dudley Moore</i> by William Cook<br />
<i>Ethan Frome</i> by Edith Wharton<br />
<br />
Okay, so the first thing you’ll
notice is the disparity between the amount of reading done in April and
May. In part, this is because <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Ginger Man</i> took up more time than I
thought it would: I’ve tried to read it twice before but never managed to get
to grips with it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This time I
persevered, and now I never have to read it again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We all have books that, for some reason or
another, fail to connect with us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For
me, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Ginger Man</i> seems destined to
remain one of those, but at least I’m no longer nagged by my failure to finish
it.<br />
<br />
The
main reason for getting so much reading done in May, though, is that I spent a
lot of the month on aeroplanes, and planes are one of the few safe havens
remaining to those of us who want to read undisturbed by people on cellphones,
although even that little nirvana is gradually being encroached upon.<br />
<br />
I’m also really protective of my time alone
when I’m doing publicity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I spend whole
days talking to people – readers, booksellers, journalists, publishers – and I
enjoy doing it. (After all, there’s nothing terribly difficult about having
people spend hours telling you how wonderful you are, and those who love books
are generally good company.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To continue
enjoying it, though, I need to balance it with a little time to myself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s why I never take up friends’ offers of a
bed at their home instead of staying in a hotel, and it’s also why I like to
slip away for a meal or a glass of wine in the evening with only a book for
company.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes, I may even do some
writing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve also come to realize that
I only have one liver, and it’s hard to be the good time had by all every
evening.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
<br />
And
in the end, writers are, by nature, solitary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Books are created in solitude, and not always when one is at one’s
desk.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even on tour, I tend to be
thinking about the book on which I’m working.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Free time becomes precious, and reading fuels writing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Promotion is a kind of balancing act between
the public and the private, between what one needs to do to create awareness of
the book (and taking pleasure from the task, as it’s an important aspect of
being a writer in the modern world, and should be done with good grace) and
what one needs in order to keep creating new work, which is one’s own
space.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I began writing, that space
was always the little office I kept at home.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now, because of the demands of travel, I’ve learned to bring that space
with me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
<br />
Anyway,
I seem to have ploughed through quite a number of books in May, although I
confess to only reading the Discworld stories in the Pratchett book, and I skipped
the extended interviews in the biography of Cook and Moore.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(And I felt guilty for doing so, as if I was
somehow cheating.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was like not eating
my greens.)<br />
<br />
One
thing did strike me recently about my reading, although I must credit friend
and minion Clair for bringing it to my attention: so far this year, the books
that I’ve read have been overwhelmingly male. This caused, to borrow a phrase from the late Douglas Adams, a long dark
tea-time of the soul, especially since I was reading Al Murray’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Watching War Films With My Dad</i> at the
time, a book that couldn’t be more male if it had a penis dangling from the
front of it. I mean, I’m not the kind of
person who goes into a bookstore and announces that “I need a book, any book –
just as long as it’s not written by a woman, because I don’t like those kinds
of books, whatever kind they may be.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
didn’t consciously set out not to read books by women, but was I unconsciously
doing so?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Had I simply slipped into a
kind of bad habit or was the relative absence of female authors on my list
underpinned by a set of assumptions that I couldn’t even admit to myself?<br />
<br />
The
solution, I determined, was just to adapt my reading behavior, because I didn’t
want to be “that reader.” Hence the
Audrey Magee book, and the Wharton, and I’ve just finished Sarah Lotz’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Three</i>, although that’s something for
the June list.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Neither <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Undertaking</i> nor <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ethan Frome</i> was exactly cheery, although, to be fair, the former
concerns a marriage of convenience during World War II, and takes in the
Holocaust and the horrors of the Russian front, so an absence of hilarity is largely
to be expected. The latter, meanwhile,
draws conspicuous attention at an early stage to the potential danger posed by
an elm tree near a sledding run, leading one to suspect that an elm tree/sled
incident is on at cards at some stage. Wharton does not disappoint on this front, although she manages to add a
twist to the whole business that will cause the casual reader to look askance
at elm trees forever after – and, indeed, to cast a cold eye on life in
general.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
<br />
So
a good month of reading, then: allowing for stories and interviews skipped, I’m
up to 30 books read so far this year, and I’ve also taken a step on the way to
being a better person.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m positively
glowing with self-satisfaction…<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08700441634700745541noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22537743.post-37462836743790787922014-04-23T11:33:00.001-07:002014-04-23T11:33:28.987-07:00BOOKS READ IN MARCH<i>Creole Belle</i> by James Lee Burke
<i> </i><br />
<i>Eminent Hipsters</i> by Donald Fagen
<i> </i><br />
<i>The Lonesome Heart is Angry</i> by Paul Charles
<i> </i><br />
<i>The Spinning Heart</i> by Donal Ryan<br />
<br />
It was inevitable, I suppose. After making sterling progress in January and February towards my aim of an average of a book read per week for 2014, I came a bit of a cropper in March. Okay, so I’m still averaging a book a week for the month, but after eight books in January and seven books in February, a mere four for March seems rather poor, especially as two of them were pretty short. I’ll excuse it on the grounds that one of the books that tipped into April was very long indeed, with quite small print, and one of the March books was also pretty long, especially for a mystery novel.<br />
<br />
Let’s begin with that book, since it’s kind of what I did. Occasionally I’ll meet would-be-writers (and, indeed, published writers) who try to avoid reading anything remotely resembling their own work while writing. I suppose they worry that they might be overly influenced by the style of the writer whom they’re reading, and I accept that this can be a real concern, especially when one is starting out. I can still spot the paragraph in <i><a href="http://johnconnollybooks.com/novels_edt.php">Every Dead Thing</a></i> that was written under the influence of too many Cormac McCarthy novels, mainly because it’s a paragraph long and entirely untroubled by punctuation, apart from the full stop at the end.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, there’s a lot to be said for reading a writer of undeniable excellence who is working in the same field as you are. At the very least, it gives you something for which to aim, and will remind you of how good the writing within your genre can be. That’s as true of mystery fiction as any other. There’s a lot of serviceable writing in the genre, but not a lot of really great prose. Some people might argue that you don’t read mystery fiction for the prose, but that’s like saying that you don’t judge your furniture by the quality of its construction. It’s enough that the table is flat, and your cup doesn’t slide off. It’s the same mindset that likes to describe mystery fiction as essentially plot-driven when, as any fule kno, it’s character-driven, or at least the best of it is.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.jamesleeburke.com/">James Lee Burke</a> is one of the writers who made me want to be a writer. He’s one of the great prose stylists in the mystery genre, or indeed any genre, and for my money he’s the greatest living mystery writer. He’s so good that I’m always one book behind. I don’t read his next-to-last book until I have the latest one on the shelf. That way, I’ll always have one in reserve. (When I mention this at book events, it’s nice to see a lot of readers nod in understanding. I may be odd, but I’m not alone in my oddness.)<br />
<br />
With that in mind, <i>Creole Belle</i> is actually 2012’s Dave Robicheaux novel, and I still have 2013’s book, <i>Light of the World</i>, to read. Which is nice. It was, as always, an illuminating experience to read it as I began writing the next Parker book, although, slightly worryingly, it did touch on some of the same subject matter as the novel on which I’m working. Still, that happens less often than one might expect, given that all creative endeavor draws from the same cloud of inspiration.<br />
<br />
What’s interesting about <i>Creole Belle</i> – the consistency of the quality of Burke’s work apart – is the extent to which its characters are shadowed by mortality. Burke made a decision a long time ago to allow his characters to age, which has kept the books fresh. If, as I said above, all fiction is fundamentally about character, then by allowing the characters to change and develop, a writer can ensure that his or her fiction changes and develops too. I always enjoyed Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels, but because Spenser never really aged, the books never really changed either. They were all basically the same, which was kind of reassuring. Sometimes it’s nice to know what you’re getting before you buy it.<br />
<br />
Perhaps it’s not surprising that Burke’s characters should have mortality on their minds. Their creator is no longer a young man, and the concerns of his characters probably reflect his own. Nevertheless, I hope Burke has many years left in him yet. For my generation of mystery writers, he remains something of a touchstone, and I personally am lost in admiration for him as both a writer and a decent, moral human being.<br />
<br />
Oddly enough, I felt a point of contact too with Donald Fagen, whose <i>Eminent Hipsters</i> provided a palate cleanser between novels. I’d kind of skimmed through it before Christmas, but I wanted to return to it when I had a little time on my hands. Okay, so there’s something mildly frustrating about one half of Steely Dan writing a kind of memoir in which Steely Dan is barely mentioned, but I can only assume that he’s saving the Dan years for another book, which is fine with me.<br />
<br />
The essays that form the first part of <i>Eminent Hipsters</i> are curious and amusing, but the real meat is in the tour diary that takes up most of the book. I suspect that Fagen has partly created a character called “Donald Fagen” who is marginally more curmudgeonly than he is, but not by much. He clearly doesn’t care much for traveling, yet making a living requires that he tours. He gets annoyed that the audience for his tour with Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald want to hear old Dan tunes instead of the R&B and soul that is the backbone of the trio’s set, yet also recognizes that the only reason that most of them have bought tickets is because he’s half of Steely Dan. Finally, he shares with me one of my own bugbears at concerts: the apparent inability of people to simply attend a concert without holding up a cellphone and watching it on a screen as they record it. As Fagen notes, it’s as though they can’t conceive of actually being present unless they have some physical evidence to remind them.<br />
<br />
So put your phones away, or Fagen and I will do for you.<br />
<br />
Strangely, I read two Irish novels this month, which may be a record for me, since I have a recorded antipathy towards Irish fiction in many of its forms. The first was <i>The Lonesome Heart is Angry</i> by <a href="http://paulcharlesbooks.com/">Paul Charles</a>, published next week. I know Paul well, and am hugely fond of him: he’s a good writer, and a fine human being, but it’s always a risky business when one is asked to provide a cover quote for a book by a friend. Nevertheless, <i>The Lonesome Heart is Angry</i>, with its gentle but incisive examination of small-town secrets, was a pleasure to read, and almost made me reconsider my attitude to Irish fiction in general, which I find worrying.<br />
<br />
This doubt about my own prejudices was further exacerbated by <i>The Spinning Heart</i> by Donal Ryan, which has become something of a phenomenon in Ireland, and won the Guardian First Book Award in the UK this year. It has also been shortlisted for the 2014 Impac Award. It’s a novel constructed from a series of interlinked short stories, each concerning a different character in a small Irish town, and its success is unsurprising. Ryan can write, and although I’m still not entirely convinced that a book constructed from interlinked short stories is actually a novel rather than a collection, I came away from it very glad that I’d read it, and glad too that, for once, the hype appeared to be justified.<br />
<br />
And so we’re into April, and I’m already looking good for at least another four books this month — but two very large research tomes are calling to me, and I know that they’re going to scupper my progress eventually…
Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08700441634700745541noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22537743.post-57518506371983902202014-03-04T13:44:00.002-08:002014-03-04T15:09:37.983-08:00BOOKS READ IN FEBRUARY<i>Tough Without A Gun: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart</i> by Stefan Kanzer<br />
<i>Sharpe’s Rifles</i> by Bernard Cornwell
<i> </i><br />
<i>One for the Books</i> by Joe Queenan
<i> </i><br />
<i>White Fire</i> by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child<br />
<i>The Prince</i> by Machiavelli
<i> </i><br />
<i>On Machiavelli – The Search for Glory</i> by Alan Ryan
<i> </i><br />
<i>Vicious Circle</i> by Wilbur Smith<br />
<br />
And so the great push to read more than fifty books this year continues to store up literary goodwill for those months when book consumption is reduced to a trickle: seven books this month to add to last
month’s eight, which isn’t too shabby. Mind you, I didn’t get to at least two books that I was supposed to have read. One arrived in the mail while I was in the middle of other stuff, and I’d already read the second, so technically that would have been a reread, although it would still have counted towards the final total even if it didn’t succeed in contributing to the fulfillment of my basic aim, which is to reduce the number of unread books on my shelves.<br />
<br />
But we move on, for this month’s reading material provoked a number of questions, the first of which is: When should a writer stop writing? It’s an interesting question. Should writers continue until the pen is prized from their cold dead hands, a bit like Chuck Heston’s guns, or should they stop when they begin to experience doubts about the quality of their output? Is that even possible, given
that most writers are so riven by doubt anyway? If concern about the quality of their work was a factor, most would have stopped writing long ago and gone off to become window cleaners.<br />
<br />
Jim Crace announced last year that <i>Harvest</i> was to be his last novel. Here’s an extract from an interview with Crace about that subject in the London <i>Independent</i> newspaper.
<br />
<blockquote>
"Retiring from writing is not to retire from life," he says: there's his painting, politics and tennis, as well as his first grandchild and regular trips to the US – Crace has a sinecure at the University of Texas, where his archive is held. "But," he continues, "retiring from writing is to avoid the inevitable bitterness which a writing career is bound to deliver as its end product, in almost every case."</blockquote>
Does a writing career always end in bitterness? I do hope not. Disappointment I can understand – a writer is never quite as successful as he might have wished, never as critically or commercially garlanded, and never quite manages to write the book that was in his head when he started – but that sense of existential dissatisfaction is true of most lives, whether creative or not. Bitterness is something very different. We can live with disappointment, but bitterness poisons the soul.<br />
<br />
Anyway, I mention this only because Wilbur Smith, whose latest novel I read last month, turned 81 in January, and is still publishing a book every two years. I <a href="http://johnconnollybooks.com/int_smith.php">interviewed Smith a long time ago</a> and found him to be an interesting, if peculiar, man. He was clearly a product of the nineteenth century who happened to be born in the twentieth, and was set to struggle with the twenty-first. His worldview was essentially colonial and, given what appeared to be his problematical relationship with his daughter, I was kind of glad that he wasn’t my dad.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, his novels — the historical ones, at least — had given me enormous entertainment over the years, even as I began to recognize their sometimes outdated, and possibly offensive, sexual and racial underpinnings. He was perfectly pleasant company for the hour or two we spent talking at Dublin Airport, and had no particular airs about him. And it’s no mean achievement to reach one’s ninth decade and still be writing, although the £15 million book deal that he signed in 2012 includes a promise to produce up to two titles a year for three years with the help of “carefully selected co-authors.” As one newspaper put it, “Smith will reportedly sketch plot outlines and characters, leaving his appointed writers to flesh the skeletons out into full books.” Make of that what you will.<br />
<br />
All of which is a preamble to discussing <i>Vicious Circle</i>, his latest novel and the second to feature security expert Hector Cross, when, in fact, I’d rather forget that I ever read it, and have that part of my brain excised. Smith’s novels set in the present day are always more problematical than his historical fictions, perhaps in part because it’s easier to gloss over the sexism and racism in the historicals by partially excusing them as reflections of the eras in which they’re set. <i>Vicious Circle</i> may just be the most unpleasant book that I’ve read in recent times, featuring a level of sexual violence inflicted on women and children unlike anything I’ve never previously
encountered in a work of commercial fiction, including pedophilia, rape, anal rape, disembowelment, the removal of organs (ears, to be specific), shooting, stabbing, drowning, and the feeding of live women to hogs and crocodiles. The women who didn’t die came straight from central stock casting, and the only thing more disturbing than the content was the fact that there will apparently be a further sequel. Frankly, if I was one of his proposed ghostwriters and was handed an outline for another novel like this one, I think I’d wash my hands of the whole business and leave with my pride and dignity
intact.<br />
<br />
So the reading month ended on a sorry note, but until then it had been going reasonably well. I’ve never had a huge interest in Humphrey Bogart, to be perfectly honest, although I’ve generally liked his films, but I was in the mood for a piece of cinema biography, and Kanzer’s book had been well reviewed. The typeface and setting on my Faber edition of the book wasn’t great, though, and made reading it more difficult than it should have been, but I finished it admiring Bogart more than I had at the beginning – which is always good – and understanding him more as well, which is even better. He was generally, as P.G. Wodehouse might have put it, a good egg, and a better actor than some give him credit for. He himself admitted that he made “more lousy pictures than any actor in history,” but the mark of greatness is that you can still be good when surrounded by mediocrity, and Bogart managed that more often than not. He knew that he owed his public a good performance, and he tried to give
that in every film. It’s a simple motto to live by, but a hard one to live up to: Do Your Best.<br />
<br />
Bernard Cornwell was one of the first writers ever to say anything nice about me in print, and we entered into a brief correspondence – and an exchange of books – which I really should resurrect, if only to tell him how much I enjoyed <i>Sharpe’s Rifles</i>. I’ve dipped in and out of the Sharpe books, which details the exploits of the titular British rifleman during the period before, during, and after the Napoleonic Wars, but somehow I’d never read <i>Sharpe’s Rifles</i>, chronologically the first in the series but actually the sixth to be published. It’s a real gift to be able to write sustained action (in a way, it seems to go against the whole notion of “show, don’t tell,” since action requires description — “telling” — to bring it to life, and that’s harder to do than it appears) and maintain momentum over the course of an entire book without sacrificing nuances of
character, but Cornwell succeeds. Neither does he overwhelm with historical and military detail, which is another rare skill: it’s obvious that he knows his stuff, and is confident in his knowledge, which allows him to leave most of it out. After all, nobody likes a show-off.<br />
<br />
Why was I reading Machiavelli? It’s a long story. I’d tried to read him in my teenage years, but I don’t think that I wanted to be a despot badly enough back then. For various reasons I was required to attempt <i>The Prince</i> again last month, and while I probably fancy being a despot more than I did at the age of sixteen, I don’t really believe that I have the energy for it any more. There does seem to be rather a lot of essential, if sometimes regrettable, killing involved, and, if you live by Machiavelli’s model, you really have very little time to do much else. He doesn’t have much truck with all of that art and music nonsense. If you’re serious about ruling, then get out there and start knocking off the opposition and scouting out the landscape to defend it from all those other rulers who’ve also been reading <i>The Prince</i>. Like Sun Tzu’s <i>The Art of War</i>, <i>The Prince</i> is one of those books sociopathic business executives read in the hope that it will give them the edge on their rivals. Unfortunately, unlike Machiavelli or Sun Tzu, they probably haven’t read very much else, and therefore their frame of reference is distinctly limited. Alan Ryan’s commentary on Machiavelli and his best-known work was more informative than the book itself, which still seems to me to
combine the odd nugget of common sense (don’t hire a servant who is more interested in enriching himself than enriching you) with the bloodthirstiness of someone who has never killed and therefore finds it very easy to advise other people on how, and why, to kill. Nasty piece of work, Machiavelli — and his lessons from history are a bit dubious to boot.<br />
<br />
As someone who has collaborated on a book (<i>Conquest</i> with Jennie Ridyard, Mrs. Her Indoors) I have a certain curiosity about the collaborations of others. It’s not terribly usual in fiction, when you think about it (Wilbur Smith’s future Pattersonesque experiments excepted), and, as a reader, there is always the temptation to try and spot the join. I remember reading <i>Black House</i>, the Stephen King/Peter Straub collaboration, and being aware of a certain disjunction in style.(Straub is, in general, a denser writer.) King, though, has claimed that the parts people think were written by him were written by Straub, and <i>vice versa</i>. I’m not entirely sure that I buy his argument, although he may well have fancied having a go at writing like Straub. Why, I don’t know. Not that Straub is a bad writer, but it does seem a bit pointless for King to write like him when he has a perfectly good Peter Straub metaphorically sitting in the same room as him, and Straub, in turn, has
a very decent Stephen King to hand.<br />
<br />
Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have been writing together since about 1995, I think, although I seem to remember that <i>Relic</i>, their first collaboration, was attributed in the UK to “Preston Child,” and only later were they surgically separated, as it were. Again, there is a slight shift in style between the writers, with Preston, I’d guess, being the denser prose stylist.<br />
<br />
<i>White
Fire</i> is the thirteenth of their books to feature FBI Agent Aloysius Pendergast, many of which have been good fun. They did hit a bit of a bump in the road with the so-called “Helen Trilogy,” comprising a series of novels that required not so much a suspension of disbelief as the racking of it, culminating in an attempt to explain how someone could appear to be eaten by a lion when, in fact, that person may not actually have been, which is a difficult trick to pull off for all concerned. I remember once being asked if I worried about my novels becoming a bit like the later seasons of <i>The X-Files</i>, when the show became tied up with its own mythologies to a self-defeating extent, and the Helen Trilogy veered close to that territory. (I can’t comment on my own books.)<br />
<br />
So it may have been that I approached <i>White Fire</i> with a certain degree of caution. It moves along at a fair old pace, and does dispense with all of the wife/lion business to concentrate on a self-contained plot but, unfortunately for me, that plot involves a lot of Arthur Conan Doyle and
Sherlock Holmes, pivoting, as it does, on a supposedly “lost” Holmes story. I’m sorry: Holmes remains a kind of blind spot for me. I enjoyed the original stories, and I’m very fond of the BBC’s modern reinvention of the character, even if — as in the latter half of Conan Doyle’s own career — the plots are less involving than the characters of Holmes and Watson themselves. But I really don’t have any patience with Sherlockiana, or people writing pastiches of Conan Doyle, however affectionately meant or well done they may be. I’m starting to feel that, when authors die, their characters should be allowed to die with them. So it’s not the fault of Preston or Child, who strike me as very
decent sorts. It’s not you, guys, it’s me.<br />
<br />
Okay, and maybe a little bit you.<br />
<br />
Finally, we come to Joe Queenan, a writer who could snark for his country. I think I first encountered Queenan back in 1999 in the form of <i>If You’re Talking to Me Your Career Must Be in Trouble</i>, a collection of sharp-edged essays and interviews, which remains the best thing that he’s published,
although <i>One for the Books</i> comes close. It is a memoir of books and reading, and part of the pleasure of it lies in finding opinions with which one wholeheartedly agrees (He likes Ford Madox
Ford’s <i>The Good Soldier</i>! He gets annoyed with people who force books on him, insisting that he should read them, but he gets really angry with people who <i>lend</i> books to him while insisting that he should read them: if they want him to read their chosen books so badly then they should just buy copies of them for him!), leading one to suspect that Queenan may be a reasonable, right-thinking
individual after all, only to immediately stumble across other opinions so wrong-headed as to make one wonder if Queenan has been the victim of some unfortunate industrial accident or botched cranial intervention. (He doesn’t like P.G. Wodehouse! He quite likes <i>Anil’s Ghost</i>!)<br />
<br />
I particularly liked his diatribe against blurbing, the practice of writers producing excessively admiring quotes about other writers for use on the front of books.
<br />
<blockquote>
Blurbs in particular can no longer be trusted. Usually they are written by liars and sycophants to advance the careers of bozos and sluts. In many cases authors will call in favors from friends who praise books they know to be dismally inadequate. This is volitionally cruel, because writers know that other writers hate writing blurbs. They hate it when their editors ask for them, and they really hate it when their friends ask for them. Being asked to write a blurb for a friend is like being asked to give your friend’s gross, dysfunctional kid a summer job. . . Conversely, writers hate writing blurbs for strangers, because it forces them to read books they do not want to read,
at a point when time itself is running out on them. All blurbs should be written before the age of
fifty; after that, one should never read a book one does not want to read,
unless there is money in it.</blockquote>
On that note — and I kid you not — I have to go and write a blurb...
Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08700441634700745541noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22537743.post-22243654397399363812014-02-07T14:22:00.001-08:002014-02-07T18:09:58.124-08:00BOOKS READ IN JANUARY<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>The English Girl</i> by Daniel Silva<i> </i><i> </i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>The
Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay</i> by Michael Chabon<i> </i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><i>Rough
Country</i> </i>by John Sandford</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><i>Brimstone</i>
</i>by Robert B. Parker</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Tatiana</i>
by Martin Cruz Smith<i> </i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Raising
Steam</i> by Terry Pratchett<i> </i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i></i><i>Double
Down</i> by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann<i> </i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Adventures
with the Wife in Space</i> by Neil Perryman<i> </i> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">So, as a kind of New Year’s
resolution, I decided to start keeping a record of the books that I read during
2014. In some ways, I regret not
starting this much earlier in life – somewhere around the time that I read my
first book, which was a Secret Seven adventure by Enid Blyton, which I think
might have been when I was five or six – but it’s a little late for that
now. Still, it would have been rather
lovely to have a record of all that I’ve read, an indicator of progress and
accomplishment. I could even have marked particular achievements with a gold
star, like finishing <i>Don Quixote, The Life
and Opinions of Tristram Shandy</i>, and <i>War
and Peace</i>, and little frowny faces of regret for those books started but
then abandoned (<i><span style="text-transform: uppercase;">A</span> La Recherche du Temps Perdu</i>, which I still believe
talks about me behind my back in a French accent) and books that should never
have been started to begin with (too many to name, I suspect, but I still want
back that time spent on <i>The Da Vinci Code</i>).</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Anyway,
eight books read in January doesn’t seem like a bad start to the year, as I’m
tentatively aiming for an average of a book a week, so knocking down eight in
one month will make up for those inevitable periods when I either get bogged
down in a book, or encounter one that takes a little more time and effort to
read. (<i>In the Shadow of the Sword</i>, Tom Holland’s study of the birth of
Islam, was one such book last year. I learned a lot from it, most of which I
fear I’ve already forgotten, but the minutiae of various branches of the faith
detailed in the last third proved to be heavy going, and I felt like a man
slogging through thick, compacted snow.)</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">And
what of those books? Well, I’m something of a fan of Daniel Silva’s Gabriel
Allon books, even if, as often happens with an ongoing series, the structure of
each novel is pretty standard: Allon, an art restorer and Israeli agent, is
pulled reluctantly into some case of international terrorism; bad things happen;
he gets his gang together; and vengeance is meted out. Actually, leaving out the international
terrorism element, that could describe most mystery novels, my own included. In
Silva’s case, this is all accomplished with a considerable measure of style, and
no small amount of tension. He’s very good.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Here’s
the thing: I don’t believe in the concept of guilty pleasures. If you like
something, and it doesn’t do anyone else any harm — or, indeed, yourself —then
it’s fine to like it. If anything about the Allon books makes me slightly
uneasy, it’s a general tendency to paint the Israelis entirely as a force for
good, and the Arabs or Russians as pretty much uniformly bad. Now I’m no
expert, but I suspect the geopolitical situation is slightly more complex than
that. End of note.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">That
notion of guilty pleasures is one that is explored both tacitly and explicitly
in Michael Chabon’s <i>The Amazing
Adventures of Kavalier & Clay</i>, which had been on my shelf for a long
time marked, metaphorically speaking, “to be read . . . sometime.” I read Chabon’s
first novel, <i>The Mysteries of Pittsburgh</i>,
when I was in college and liked it a lot. It was one of a number of books given
to me as a thank-you by one of my classmates in return for escorting her to the
Trinity Ball, which was no chore. (She also gave me <i>Looking for Rachel Wallace</i>, which was my introduction to the novels
of Robert B. Parker.) <i> </i></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Kavalier & Clay</i> is set in the world
of comic books during and after the Second World War — the first golden age of
comics, if you will. It also functions as a passionate defense of the idea of
escapist fiction, and the fact that the hero of the comic book created by the
title characters is called “The Escapist” is no coincidence. The final pages
contain a lovely defense of escapism, taking as its starting point the myth of
the golem, the defender of Prague’s Jews created from clay, which is worth
quoting here:</span></span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">The shaping of a golem, to him,
was a gesture of hope, offered against hope, in a time of desperation. It was
the expression of a yearning that a few magic words and an artful hand might
produce something — one poor, dumb, powerful thing — exempt from the crushing
strictures, from the ills, cruelties, and inevitable failures of the greater
Creation. It was the voicing of a vain wish, when you got down to it, to
escape. To slip, like the Escapist, free of the entangling chain of reality and
the straitjacket of physical laws . . . The newspaper articles that Joe had
read about the upcoming Senate investigation into comic books always cited
“escapism” among the litany of injurious consequences of their reading, and
dwelled on the pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to
escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life.</span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Lovely, isn’t it? If, as a reader
or, indeed, a writer, you ever feel called upon to defend your choice of
reading or subject matter respectively, it would be worth learning that section
so you can quote it back in full in the face of your critics. Actually, I had a meal recently with someone
who, with the best possible intentions, seemed determined to force me to expose
what s/he believed to be my inner demons, the monkeys on my back that drove me
to write. I know that I have them, but I tend to keep them to myself. But when
I tried to explain that, on one level, to leave my readers feeling contented
with the time they had spent with my book was the most basic requirement I make
of my work, my interrogator appeared rather disappointed, as if this was
somehow insufficient. It’s not
everything, I said, but if it was all that I could offer, then it would be
enough.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">We
move on. The John Sandford novel, a co-write with a friend of his (although his
friend’s name doesn’t appear on the cover, which is a bit underhand) is one of
the novels featuring the Minnesota police investigator Virgil Flowers novels as
opposed to Sandford’s better-known books centering on Flowers’s boss, Lucas
Davenport. Sandford, either alone or in cahoots, has a particular gift for
writing action, which is harder to do than it sounds. He’s also funny in print,
which again is harder to do than it sounds. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">The late Robert B. Parker had the
same gifts, and while <i>Brimstone</i> is
one of his westerns, it still reads very much like one of his Spenser PI novels,
which were, in their way, westerns set in present-day Boston. Parker’s work is
proof positive that we read for character, not plot. <i>Brimstone</i>’s plot isn’t up to much, and the same could be said for
any number of the Spenser novels, but it was a pleasure to spend time in the
company of the characters, and his books have passed many a happy flight for
me, and kept me entertained over solo dinners when I’m away from home. God rest his soul.<i> </i></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Tatiana</i>, meanwhile, is the latest of
Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko novels, and is published in the shadow of the
writer’s struggle with Parkinson’s Disease. I understand that it was dictated,
and it seems to me that this process has altered the texture of his writing. MCS
was always a very good prose stylist, but the writing in <i>Tatiana</i> is particularly graceful, with a distinctive rhythm to
it. It’s one of the best of the later
Renko novels, maybe even the best.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Terry
Pratchett, too, writes while dealing with a debilitating illness, in his case
Alzheimer’s, which seems to me a particularly cruel affliction with which to
curse a novelist, given the importance of keeping a thousand small details in
play from start to finish. <i>Raising Steam</i>,
the latest Discworld novel, bears no trace of Pratchett’s illness and, while
it’s not the funniest of the series, it’s still a joy to enter that perfectly
constructed world. I had the pleasure of <a href="http://www.johnconnollybooks.com/int_pratchett.php">interviewing Pratchett in Dublin</a> some
years ago, and I enjoyed his company. He’s on the board of trustees of the Orangutan
Foundation, incidentally, in no small part because the Librarian of the Unseen
University was transformed into an orangutan during an unfortunate magical
incident and decided to stay that way, as it made it easier to get around the
stacks.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">I’m
not really much for political books as a rule, but Halperin’s and Heilemann’s <i>Game Change</i>, about the 2008 US
presidential election, gripped like a thriller, as well as amusing me greatly. <i>Double Down</i> isn’t quite as interesting,
mainly because the tension between the emerging Obama and the Clintons isn’t as
strong, and there is no Sarah Palin moment. The most entertaining scenes occur
during the Republican Party’s nomination process, as a series of increasingly
unlikely candidates (hello, Herman Cain) pop up, ignite briefly, and then fall
to the ground in flames. Poor old Mitt Romney comes across as someone who has
been told how regular human beings behave but has never actually met one, and
so must go purely on misguided instinct when he’s forced to imitate one. I
actually ended up rather liking Romney, even though I wouldn’t want to be
trapped in an elevator with him and forced to try and make awkward
conversation. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">And
finally, a little salve for my geek soul: Neil Perryman’s <i>Adventures with the Wife in Space</i> deals with the author’s mission
to force his wife Sue to watch every episode of classic <i>Doctor Who</i> — in other words, from the BBC sci-fi series’ birth with
William Hartnell to its temporary demise with Sylvester McCoy. It helps if you know what they’re talking
about, or else discussions of Daleks, Yeti, Zygons, and the sartorial
selections inflicted on Sixth Doctor Colin Baker may well go over your head,
but it’s funny and loving as a portrait both of fandom and marriage, even if,
by the end, Perryman concludes that no small number of <i>Doctor Who </i>episodes just aren’t very good. It’s that plot/character thing again, and
something else: no matter how bad the episodes, those of us who were, and are,
devoted to the series came back because we got to spend time with the Doctor in
the Tardis.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">We
got to escape, for a time . . . </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span></span>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08700441634700745541noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22537743.post-7604838347954366222013-11-13T16:15:00.004-08:002013-11-13T16:16:21.605-08:00A DREAM OF WINTER <i>This story appeared in the November 15, 2013 issue of <a href="http://www.shortlist.com/entertainment/books/a-dream-of-winter-by-john-connolly">ShortList Magazine</a>. The challenge was to <a href="http://www.shortlist.com/entertainment/books/a-dream-of-winter-by-john-connolly">write a story that was exactly 300 words long</a>.</i><br />
<br />
When I was a boy, I attended a school that stood by a cemetery. Mine was the last desk, the one closest to the graveyard. I spent years with my back to the darkness of it. I can remember how, as autumn descended, and winter gathered its strength, I would feel the wind blow through the window frame and think that the chill of it was like the breath of the dead upon my neck.<br />
<br />
One day in the bleakness of a January afternoon, when the light was already fading as the clock struck four, I glanced over my shoulder and saw a man staring back at me. Nobody else noticed him, only I. His skin was the grey of old ash long
from the fire, and his eyes were as black as the ink in my well. His gums had receded from his teeth, giving
him a lean, hungry aspect. His face was a mask of longing.<br />
<br />
I was not frightened. It seems strange to say that, but it is the truth. I knew that he was dead, and the dead have no hold over us beyond whatever we ourselves surrender to them. His fingers touched the glass but left no trace, and then he was gone.<br />
<br />
Years passed, but I never forgot him. I fell in love, and married. I became a father. I buried my parents. I grew old, and the face of the man at the school window became more familiar to me, and it seemed that I glimpsed him in
every glass. Finally, I slept. I slept, and I did not awaken.<br />
<br />
There is a school that stands by a cemetery. In winter, under cover of fading light, I walk to its windows and put my
fingers to the glass.<br />
<br />
And sometimes, the boy looks.<br />
<br />Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08700441634700745541noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22537743.post-11391870063879706212013-06-09T08:05:00.002-07:002013-06-09T08:09:23.679-07:00TEN RANDOM (BUT MUCH LOVED) BOOKS SELECTED FROM MY BOOKSHELF<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #f3f3f3;">Recently
the lovely folk at <a href="http://www.foyles.co.uk/">Foyles</a> bookshop in London asked me to write
something for their website. It seemed like a welcome opportunity to
browse my bookshelves and write about individual books that caught my
eye. As I did so, I realized - not for the first time - that my
affection for the titles in question was often tied up with the specific
copy of the book that I owned. I could recall the circumstances under
which I had bought it, or the reasons why I had gone looking for that
book in the first place. Each copy was a marker, a little milestone on
my progress through life, and while the titles themselves are
replaceable, those particular copies can never be replaced. </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #f3f3f3;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #f3f3f3;">Whatever
the merits of ebooks, they simply don't allow the reader that degree of
emotional investment in a beloved object. If you're curious, you can
read more here: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.foyles.co.uk/john-connolly" target="_blank">http://www.foyles.co.uk/john-connolly</a></span></span></span>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08700441634700745541noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22537743.post-28600231281946517952013-01-07T11:50:00.001-08:002013-01-07T11:52:57.606-08:00ON PHILIP ROTH, AND FORGETTINGI'm not sure that, when I was an unpublished writer, I ever really wanted to be given the opportunity to pick the brains of published writers. First of all, I didn't know many published writers. There was the poet Brendan Kennelly, who taught me in Trinity College and came from my mother's village, but it never struck me to ask him anything about publishing, and I was long gone from university by the time it became an issue. Similarly, Dave Hegarty, the gentleman who owned the first gym I ever joined, published a novel while I was there, but I was only about eighteen or nineteen at that stage, and my being a novelist seemed about as likely then as my chances of becoming Mr. Universe.<br />
<br />
But even when I began working on my first book, which became <i>Every Dead Thing</i>, I had no urge to seek the advice of those who were already published. I didn't want to take a writing course conducted by a novelist, or corner a writer at a book-signing. As a journalist, I attended a couple of book launches, and interviewed a writer or two, but I never mentioned to any of them that I was working on my own book. It wasn't that I was supremely self-confident, because I wasn't. It simply never crossed my mind that it was something I might bring up (like a hairball). If the writer's life is best suited to those who work alone and don't find solitude a burden, then I was halfway there before I ever set a word down on the page. Writing, like politics or religion, seemed to me to be best left undiscussed in polite conversation.<br />
<br />
So it was with some interest that I read the description of a waiter-cum-writer's encounter with the great, but presumably somewhat glass-is-half-emptyish, Philip Roth. (<a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/12/31/in-which-philip-roth-gave-me-life-advice/">Here's the link</a>, in case you haven't seen it.) Basically, Julian Tepper, the waiter-cum-writer in question, presented Roth, who was minding his own business apart from attempting to order breakfast, with a copy of Tepper's recently published first book. Why Tepper chose to do this, I do not know. Philip Roth wasn't doing him any harm. He just wanted to have breakfast. It takes quite a degree of chutzpah to think that a Nobel Prize-winning novelist, who had recently announced that he didn't read fiction any more, would suddenly recant upon being presented with a first novel called - I kid you not - <i>Balls</i>. In fact, if someone tried to present me with a novel called <i>Balls</i> before - or even after - I'd eaten my breakfast, I might be tempted to express some unhappiness, and suggest there are more appropriate times to hand someone a novel called <i>Balls</i>, although none springs to mind at this moment.<br />
<br />
Roth, it seems, told Tepper that <i>Balls</i> was a "great title," although he might have been kidding. It's probably hard to tell with Philip Roth. He then went on to share the following advice with Tepper:
<br />
<blockquote>
“Yeah, this is great. But I would quit while you’re ahead. Really, it’s an awful field. Just torture. Awful. You write and write, and you have to throw almost all of it away because it’s not any good. I would say just stop now. You don’t want to do this to yourself. That’s my advice to you.”</blockquote>
Maybe it's just me, but I find it a little sad that Roth has presumably forgotten all of the joy and pleasure that attended the publication of his early work - and, indeed, possibly some of his later work too. After all, this is a man who enjoyed an astonishing second wind with the publication of <i>American Pastoral</i> and the novels that followed, and probably got something out of the first wind that attended the publication of <i>Portnoy's Complaint</i>. Yes, the pleasure that comes with the completion, and subsequent publication, of a book is fleeting. Doubt quickly sets in, and no sooner is a book published than the writer frequently wants to retrieve it from the shelves and set about rewriting it, but by then it's a little too late. We can never "unpublish" our books: they trail behind us, a series of experiments that we almost got right. We try to make each book better than the last. Sometimes we even succeed for a book or two. Inevitably, though, we will encounter a critical shrug, a passing remark from a reader or reviewer that suggests our best work was still our first book, and everything that followed has been downhill since then.<br />
<br />
Then again, maybe all Roth ever got from writing was misery and unhappiness, but I doubt it. There are writers who wear the burden of being a writer very heavily, in part because they confuse taking what they do seriously with taking themselves seriously, but also because, if you make something look like hard work, and huff and puff a lot about it, then it will discourage the competition while possibly encouraging your publishers to pay you a bit more, and also make people believe, in passing, that you might be an artist, and that's halfway to being a genius. This pose gave Todd Rundgren one of his best album titles, <i>The Ever Popular Tortured Artist Effect</i>, and continues to be Standard Operating Procedure for would-be literary lions and lionesses the world over. This is not to say that Roth is not a great novelist: he is, but he'd still be a great novelist even if he could bring himself to be a little more gracious about fiction in general, and a little less Eeyore-ish in his pronouncements to young novelists, even ones who interfere with his digestion by presenting him with novels called <i>Balls</i>.<br />
<br />
I like being a writer. Yes, it's often frustrating, and I worry about how the changes in publishing are going to affect what I do, and the possibility that I'm harming my career by experimenting too much, and the likelihood of being damned as a fraud and a blight on literature. I start each new book wondering if this is the one that I won't be able to finish, and if such a failure might mean that I will never be able to finish another book again. I've yet to write a book with which I'm entirely happy, but if I did, what then? Would there be any reason, any impetus, to continue? Failure is what impels us, and the paradox is that the very thing driving us forward is also the thing that slowly chips away at our ability to do what we do. "Try again," wrote Samuel Beckett. "Fail again. Fail better." We fail, and we try again, but are we eventually destined to drain our reserves of strength, and grow weary of the fight? Is that what happened to Roth?<br />
<br />
Perhaps all that can be learned from Tepper and his encounter is that, all things considered, it's probably better to give old writers a wide berth.<br />
<br />
And maybe younger ones too.<br />
<br />
THIS WEEK JOHN READ<br />
<i>Sit Down and Cheer: A History of Sport on TV</i> by Martin Kelner
<i> </i><br />
<i>The Fallen Angel</i> by Daniel Silva<br />
<br />
AND LISTENED TO
<i> </i><br />
<i>Lux</i> by Brian Eno<br />
Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08700441634700745541noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22537743.post-67862683284381833022012-08-18T09:23:00.001-07:002012-08-18T09:23:19.704-07:00THE DOG IS IMMORTAL<div class='posterous_autopost'>I have come to accept that the affection of my readers for me, if it exists at all, is largely bound up with their fondness for my characters. By this I mean that, if I died, they would be a bit troubled, but if I killed off, say, Charlie Parker, they would be very angry indeed. I do not take this too personally. If my readers choose to feel more strongly about a fictional character than they do about me, a living, breathing person with bills to pay and dogs to walk, then so be it. I'm not saying it isn't hurtful, but I put it up there with my other half's continuing infatuation with Brad Pitt: if Brad Pitt should turn up on our doorstep to claim her then, reluctantly, I shall have to learn to live without my beloved, and there will be no hard feelings. On the balance of probability, though, I suspect that she is going to have to make do with me for the foreseeable future.<div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style=""> </span>The matter of a reader's affection for a series character was brought home to me by a recent article in <i>The New Yorker</i>. (Yes, I have a subscription to <i>The New Yorker</i>, and it's the best $120 a year I've ever spent. As my friend and fellow author Declan Hughes once put it, he feels better for just having it in the house. I never read everything in it, and there is at least one cartoon in every issue that I fail to understand, but what I do read, and what I do understand, probably makes me a better person, or at least makes me feel like a better person, which is Declan's point. I think.) Anyway, in the July 2nd issue there is a lovely article by John McPhee about the editing process, and it should be required reading for every aspiring writer, not least because it illuminates the sometimes grey area between proof-reading and editing, which are two very different things. Increasingly, in this heady age of self-publishing, the distinction between the two is being willfully blurred, and the result can only be work of inferior quality. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style=""> </span>A sidebar: with two new books about to be published, I'm already steeling myself for the inevitable e-mails, often written in a suitably harrumphing tone, pointing out the typos that have crept into the finished works. These missives are, in the more ill-tempered cases, accompanied by the same question: doesn't anyone proof-read these books? The answer, of course, is yes: I go over the manuscript and the typeset pages so often that I start to become depressed; my editors read them; their copy-editors read them; the proof-readers read them. And you know what? Mistakes will always creep through, because that's the nature of all human endeavor. <i>The Wrath of Angels</i> is almost 160,000 words long. Even if one were to find 16 typos in that manuscript - which I hope is not the case - it would still only represent a margin of error of .01 %, which most scientists would accept as pretty good indeed. Being an author has taught me to be forgiving of such matters. Yes, it may be annoying to find typos or errors in a book, but the miracle is that there are not more. Where errors are pointed out - preferably discreetly, which is the sign of good breeding - I'll always try to correct them for the next edition, but the triumphalism of a minority of correspondents is very wearing. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style=""> </span>Sorry, where was I? Ah, yes, <i>The New Yorker</i>. So, as a boy John McPhee was a fan of the Silver Chief series, written by one Jack O'Brien. The series concerned the adventures of a sled dog in the "Great White North", and they were catnip to the young McPhee, which was why he was quite distraught when the author died. Some years later, he happened to be visiting his Uncle Bob, who had published the Silver Chief novels under the imprint of the John C. Winston company. He was quite surprised when a man arrived for an appointment with his uncle, and was introduced to McPhee as "Jack O'Brien, the author of 'Silver Chief.'" The gentleman in question appeared to be in the fullest bloom of health, and when McPhee shook his hand it didn't fall off, as one might have expected of the hand of a man who had been deceased for some time. When the man left, McPhee remarked to his uncle that he had been under the impression Jack O'Brien was dead. Uncle Bob replied: "He did die. He died. Actually, we've had three or four Jack O'Briens. Let me tell you something, John. Authors are a dime a dozen. The dog is immortal."</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style=""> </span>So there it is: authors are mortal. Characters, if the authors are very fortunate, live forever. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style=""> </span>Although I'd like to be the first author to reverse that trend.</div></div>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08700441634700745541noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22537743.post-70327041126848691572012-04-18T08:47:00.003-07:002012-04-18T08:52:35.488-07:00The Bus Tour, Day 7: On Reading One's Own ReviewsSo….<br /><br />Yesterday on the <a href="http://mysterybustour.tumblr.com/">Big Bus of Fun</a> the talk turned to reviews, and specifically the reading of same by the writers under discussion. Long, long ago, when publishers were dependent upon a clippings bureau, or the actions of its regional representatives, to keep track of reviews, writers would have to wait quite some time to read reviews if, in fact, they ever got to read them at all. A bad review might be like a sighting of some mythical creature by 19th century explorers: rumors would eventually reach home concerning the nature of the beast, but specifics would be thin on the ground, and the whole thing could even be discounted as the ravings of a fevered mind. Even when reviews assumed solid form, the wise publisher would probably do some minor pruning of the files before passing them on in order to ensure that the worst offenders were quietly lost, thereby allowing the finely-honed equilibrium of the writer remained undisturbed. <br /><br />Now, of course, a quick Internet search will bring up everything anyone has ever said about you, good or bad, which, for the writer, is a dismal state of affairs. By and large, writers shouldn’t concern themselves unduly with reviews, just as they shouldn’t go seeking weekly blow-by-blow accounts of their sales figures, which Amazon and some publishers offer as a matter of course. It’s like worrying about meteor strikes, or when the sun might die: there’s not a lot you can do about it either way, so you’re better off just getting along with what you’re supposed to be doing.<br /><br />Mind you, this was hard-learned behavior on my part. Like most writers, I can recall the specifics of bad reviews from early in my career. My first novel, <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href=" http://www.johnconnollybooks.com/novels_edt.php">Every Dead Thing</a></span>, received a couple of real stinkers, most in the UK, I think. One was from a British Labour party politician, now deceased, who used a quote from the book itself to help drive in the dagger. At one point, someone says to Parker, the private detective at the heart of the book, that he hopes never to see him again. “My sentiments exactly,” wrote our political friend, and that was the end of that.<br /><br />Two of the worst reviews came from fellow writers, because writers-turned-reviewers have an instinctive understanding of just how to hurt another writer with high-impact criticism. It’s a bit like being mugged by surgeons: their boots naturally find the soft spots. One of those reviews, I now realize, was a hatchet-job designed solely to scupper the career of a young writer who was perceived to be getting too much attention, and remains an example of gracelessness that should be handed to anyone who is considering sharpening a reviewer’s pencil before plunging it mercilessly into the soft, fleshy pulp of a first novel. The other wasn’t as bad, and went for a tone of limp-wristed disdain over outright hostility.<br /><br />I met the writer of the latter review at a festival in the northwest of England some years later. We were on a panel together, and he circled me in the wary manner of a locust that’s just been dropped into a terrarium with a spider. After the event, once he’d calmed himself with a drink or two, he confessed that he’d been very nervous of meeting me, as he’d written the review based upon the belief that our paths would never cross. (That was an unwise assumption to make since, had he examined the book a little more closely, he’d have noticed that we shared a publisher.) In fact, he went on, the prospect of our meeting had rather spoiled the month preceding the festival, and he’d been unable to enjoy much of anything. I nodded sympathetically, and then pointed out that we’d actually already met once before since the publication of the review in question, although he’d clearly been too drunk to remember.<br /><br />Something similar happened last year, when I met a writer who immediately confessed to having given <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://www.johnconnollybooks.com/novels_lost.php">The Book of Lost Things</a></span> – a book that managed to survive the reviewing process almost entirely unscathed by very adverse criticism - a bad notice. He looked a bit sheepish, admitted that he’d been wrong about the book, and hoped that it was all water under the bridge. I had to tell him that I didn’t even know that he had written a bad review and, had he kept his mouth shut, he’d probably have managed to get away with it. <br /><br />The younger me, I suspect, might well have Googled the review in question at the first available opportunity, just to have something to be annoyed about. Now I know that it doesn’t really matter. I’ll always be curious about the general critical response when I publish a new book, but I’ve become very careful about what I read, and I avoid bad reviews entirely, unless I stumble across one by accident and find myself scanning it before I’m even entirely sure of what I’m doing. Nevertheless, even then my instinct is to turn away before damage can be done. <br /><br />Look, here’s the thing: writers are plagued by self-doubt, and the ones that are not probably aren’t very good writers. Our tendency is to believe the bad reviews because they are our own self-doubt made manifest, and to ignore or immediately forget the good reviews because we secretly believe that they’re wrong. James Lee Burke once told me that you have to learn to ignore the catcalls and the applause, and he’s right. That doesn’t mean it’s easy, or that you won’t occasionally lapse, but as a general rule for writers, or anyone who presents creative work for public consumption, it’s a good rule by which to abide. <br /><br />Time to go. Someone on the bus might be talking about me, and I’ll want to listen in. I’ll bet they’re saying something horrible…Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08700441634700745541noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22537743.post-91720361470416888532012-04-17T06:23:00.002-07:002012-04-17T06:26:32.062-07:00The Bus Tour, Day 6: On Delayed GratificationTo pass the time on Sunday’s veeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrryy extended jaunt through the tornado-battered American Midwest, I was watching the fifth, and final, season of "<a href="http://www.hbo.com/the-wire/index.html">The Wire</a>." Now before I’m deafened by the cries of those who can’t believe that I haven’t watched it already, let me explain. (And before I go on, let it further be noted, in an only mildly boastful way, that I know David Simon – “How my friend David Simon and I laughed!” “As I said to my friend David Simon…”, etc. – which makes it doubly peculiar.)<br /><br />Anyway, the reason why I hadn’t yet watched the final season of "The Wire" was because, obviously, I was saving it, and saving it for a very particular occasion, one that I hoped I would recognize what it manifested itself: “In case of emergency, break glass and read Burke or Macdonald, or alternatively watch Season 5 of 'The Wire'.” So Sunday was just such an emergency: a long bus trip, and withdrawal symptoms as a consequence of being unable to read or write. There was nothing for it: I had to break out and watch "The Wire." Only Simon could save me. I now have ten minutes of the penultimate episode left to watch, and then the last. I’ll look at them today as we drive to Minneapolis, and then that will be it: no more Wire.<br /><br />I consider the fact that I’ve saved the series for so long (almost four years!) something of a strength, to be honest. It suggests that I might be rather good at tantric sex, should I ever choose to indulge in it or, indeed, should I ever find myself with quite that amount of time on my hands. (Sting can do it, but then he doesn’t have a whole lot else to do, really. I’m a busy man. I have places to be…) <br /><br />But it’s not just DVD box sets that I’ve saved. (You should know that I’ve held on to the final season of "Deadwood" for the same reason.) I also have a couple of Ross Macdonald novels that I’ve yet to read, and Macdonald has influenced me more than just about any other writer, but if I read those books there will be no more, and the closest I’ll get to that experience again will be to go back and reread the earlier books, which isn’t quite the same. On a slightly different level, given that the man remains hale, hearty, and prolific, I’ll often wait for a new James Lee Burke novel to come out before I read the one that’s gone before. I want one in reserve, but there’s also the assurance of knowing that I’m not going to be disappointed. Whatever else happens in the world, Burke, Macdonald or, indeed, David Simon and his fellow conspirators working at the top of their game will not let me down.<br /><br />Am I alone in this? I do hope not. Tell me, please. In the meantime, I have the final episode of "The Wire" to watch. I feel a tear coming on…Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08700441634700745541noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22537743.post-68993220828736800982012-04-16T06:54:00.003-07:002012-04-16T07:23:01.220-07:00The Bus Tour, Day 5: On "The Reflecting Eye"So, it’s Day, um, Five (?) on the <a href="http://mysterybustour.tumblr.com/">big bus of fun</a>. We still have a full complement of folk, and physical violence has so far been avoided, although our sweet French videographer is leaving today so we will have nobody to patronize. <br /><br />Anyway, when this tour was announced I decided to arrange a special limited edition of “The Reflecting Eye,” the Charlie Parker novella that had previously appeared in the <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://johnconnollybooks.com/novels_nocturnes.php">NOCTURNES</a></span> collection but had never been published in hardback. I commissioned artwork, rewrote portions, and arranged for it to be bound by a lovely bookbindery in Maine. The bookstores we visit are just paying me the cost of making it, and they’re keeping all of the profits. It’s a vote of confidence not just in bookstores, but in the beauty and value of the physical object of the book, something that we’ve been coming back to again and again on this tour. <br /><br />For the final time, I’m no Luddite, and I recognize that the ways in which we read are changing, but the two forms – printed and electronic – have to find a way to co-exist. The question that those of us who care about books in any form have to ask is: will the world be a poorer place without bookstores and, indeed, without easy access to printed books? If the answer is yes – and if it isn’t, well, you’re wrong – then we all have to try to support them as best we can. So… here’s the introduction to the new edition of “The Reflecting Eye,” which can be found in the limited edition.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Introduction</span><br /><br />It’s strange for a writer to have to look back on his younger self and try to remember what he was like at the time. Every book that is written comes to feel like the shedding of a skin, another step in a slow process of what one hopes is growth and improvement, and so the writer that I now am finds it hard to recall the writer I once was, even though less than a decade separates me from the man who wrote “The Reflecting Eye.”<br /><br />Nevertheless, let’s start with the facts. By 2003 I had written five novels: four featuring the private detective Charlie Parker and one, <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://johnconnollybooks.com/novels_bm.php">Bad Men</a></span>, in which he had only a brief, walk-on part. I think that I was still in something of a state of shock to find myself published at all: while I might have hoped that my first novel, <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://johnconnollybooks.com/novels_edt.php">Every Dead Thing</a></span>, would find a publisher, I did not expect it to do so. It had been rejected so often while I was still in the process of writing it that I had finished it more out of a dogged, pigheaded refusal to abandon it — and, along with it, any hope that I might have had of being a novelist — than an actual belief that someone, somewhere might want to present it to the reading public, and demand money in return. <br /><br />By the time I published my fifth book, <span style="font-style:italic;">Bad Men</span>, I had begun to think that there might be some small chance of my doing this for the rest of my life, although I still expected the rug to be pulled out from under my feet at any moment, to have my publishers scream “Fraud!” and begin some form of legal action to recover their misplaced advances. (I still feel like this a lot of the time, but I now have a lawyer who assures me that we’ll fight them all the way.)<br /><br />But even with five books under my belt, I still wasn’t sure what kind of writer I wanted to be. I was reluctant to sign long-term contracts, and similarly reluctant to commit to writing a Parker book every year, even though annually publishing a book featuring a recurring character is probably the best way to ensure bestseller status in the crowded mystery market. (It’s also, incidentally, the best way to stagnate as a writer.) Instead I was drawn to short stories, and to supernatural fiction in particular. The supernatural already played a significant, and increasingly important, role in the Parker novels, and <span style="font-style:italic;">Bad Men</span> was an explicitly supernatural thriller, but I wanted to explore the genre still further. An invitation from the BBC led me to write five supernatural stories to be read on radio, and I enjoyed the experience so much that I continued to write only short fiction for the rest of the year, and those tales became the early foundations of the <span style="font-style:italic;">Nocturnes</span> collection. <br /><br />In a way, writing those stories allowed me to assess my literary armory. I was able to try on new styles, to experiment with new voices and different forms of narration. Looking back, I see Nocturnes as the point at which I began to discover myself as a writer: the basis for all that has followed, including <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://johnconnollybooks.com/novels_lost.php">The Book of Lost Things</a></span>, the Samuel Johnson books, and the direction that the Parker novels have taken, lies in that collection.<br /><br />The stories in <span style="font-style:italic;">Nocturnes</span> were bookended by two novellas: “The Cancer Cowboy Rides,” and “The Reflecting Eye,” the latter marking the return of Charlie Parker. I remember one reviewer commenting that the inclusion of the Parker story seemed to indicate a loss of faith on someone’s part, presumably my own. The argument, if I understand it correctly, was that I didn’t believe Nocturnes would bring in readers unless Parker was somehow a part of the collection, which struck me as missing the point entirely. The fact is that I would have been better off had I published “The Reflecting Eye” as a separate volume entirely, as I could then have been confident that fans of the character would have reached into their pockets to buy a new mystery, however brief, in which he featured. Including “The Reflecting Eye” in <span style="font-style:italic;">Nocturnes</span> certainly cost me additional sales, as short stories are generally regarded, not without some justification, as a niche area of publishing. <br /><br />But by placing “The Reflecting Eye” in <span style="font-style:italic;">Nocturnes</span> I wanted to send out the message that the Parker stories and the supernatural tales were all part of the same universe, that I drew no distinction between the two. This was a particular point of importance for me as I believed that the mystery genre was essentially conservative by nature, and amenable to experimentation in only the narrowest of terms. It disliked the mixing of genres and seemed to reserve a particular hatred for the supernatural, an aversion that had its roots in rationalism, subsequently fertilized by a fundamental misunderstanding not only of that term and its opposite, anti-rationalism, but of the very meaning of the word “mystery,” which has, at its heart, supernatural connotations. <br /><br />For the same reason, at least one plot point in “The Reflecting Eye” has found its way into my non-mystery novels: the use of mirrors and reflective surfaces as windows into other realms, a device that recurs in <span style="font-style:italic;">The Book of Lost Things</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://johnconnollybooks.com/novels-hells-bells.php">The Infernals</a></span>. This is the universe of my stories, and it must be consistent in its rules. The idea of an alternative reality existing behind mirrors arose out of one of my childhood memories. In the front room of our home in Dublin there was a mirror without a frame that hung on the wall above the fireplace. Looked at from a certain angle, and especially without the reflection of a person visible, it seemed to me more like a window than a mirror, as though, if I stared at it for long enough, I might glimpse another family living their lives, and other figures passing through a room that resembled our own. From such childhood imaginings are adult nightmares made.<br /><br />“The Reflecting Eye” also marks the first appearance of a character that would come to be of considerable importance in the Parker novels that followed: the killer known as the Collector. I’m often asked where my villains come from, as they seem to strike even the most hardened of mystery readers as particularly appalling. To this, the honest answer is that I don’t know. Quite often I have no clear picture of the villains when I commence writing my novels. I may sometimes be aware of the shadows that they cast, but their form is uncertain. They are, for want of a better term, creatures of the id, and it is only as I start writing the stories that they find their point of entry into this world. To varying degrees, Pudd in <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://johnconnollybooks.com/novels_kk.php">The Killing Kind</a></span>, Brightwell in <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://johnconnollybooks.com/novels_ba.php">The Black Angel</a></span>, and Herod (and the accompanying figure of the Captain) in <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://johnconnollybooks.com/novels-whisperers.php">The Whisperers</a></span> all came as something of a surprise to me when they made their first appearances on the page. <br /><br />I’m not trying to suggest that I’m somehow channeling these entities, or receiving signals from the ether in the manner of those unfortunates who believe that aliens are targeting them with radio waves, and consequently take to wearing hats made from aluminum foil for protection. Stories, and the characters that inhabit them, form themselves in the spaces between writing as much as when writers are at their desks. Raymond Chandler used to say that when he was not writing, he was thinking about writing. It’s also true to say that, even when writers are not thinking about writing, somewhere in their heads the process of writing continues nonetheless.<br /><br />So it was that the Collector popped into “The Reflecting Eye” somewhat unexpectedly, but it was probably simply the case that he had been standing in the wings since the story’s inception, waiting for his cue to appear. There was something fascinating about him, this man (if man he truly is) who believed himself to be doing the Lord’s work, hunting down those who, by their actions, had forfeited their right to life in this world, and to peace in the next. He has since made two further appearances in my novels, and plays a crucial role in <span style="font-style:italic;">The Wrath of Angels</span>, the book that will appear later this year, but I had no idea that he would become so significant when he first wandered into the overgrown yard of the Grady house, digging for bones in its dirt.<br /><br />But “The Reflecting Eye,” rewritten slightly for this new edition, is still Charlie Parker’s book, and a significant moment in his own ongoing story. How many chapters that story has left to run, I cannot say, but I want it to continue for as long as possible because I love writing about him, and I don’t want to think of a time when I can no longer view the world through his eyes. He has become too much a part of my life to let him leave it so easily, or so soon.Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08700441634700745541noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22537743.post-44469466206878127152012-04-15T05:28:00.001-07:002012-04-15T05:30:44.696-07:00The Bus Tour, Day 4: (Not) Writing on the BusOkay, I have to confess to being slightly frustrated by being on the bus and unable to write. Boredom is a relatively unfamiliar concept to a reader: as long as we have a book (and it doesn’t even have to be a terribly good book, although it obviously helps if it is) we can endure a great deal. Similarly, the frustration of being unable to write is not something with which I’m familiar. I can get frustrated WHILE writing, which is a different matter, and I don’t know what writer’s block is (I think that’s different for every writer who suffers from it), but to be prevented from writing by one’s environment (in this case the rolling, seasick-inducing motion of a long bus journey) makes me want to gnaw my arm off. So yesterday was bad as we had about six or seven hours on the bus, divided into two journeys of about two and a half hours and four and a half hours respectively. Today is rather worse, as I’m sitting on the bus just as we’re about to embark on a six and a half hour trip. Goodbye, Buffalo. Hello – eventually – Ohio.<br /><br />On the other hand, I suppose the tour comes at a pretty good time as far as writing is concerned, if there can ever be a good time to be unable to write. <span style="font-style:italic;">THE WRATH OF ANGELS</span>, the Charlie Parker novel due for publication in September, was delivered in March, and my British editor, who tends to read my manuscripts sooner than my American editor (possibly because she loves me more, although far be it from me to incite my editors to compete for my affections, even if it would be nice if they did), put it straight into production. This means that any queries she had were minor, and could be dealt with after the manuscript had been copy-edited. It’s a bit like submitting your homework to teacher and getting it back without a note ordering you to write out each of your mistakes ten times until you grasp the importance of coherent sentences. Secretly, we all expect to hear the words “The start is good, and the end is good, but pages 12-340 will have to go…”<br /><br />Meanwhile, by the time I left Dublin some 80 of the essays for the <span style="font-style:italic;">BOOKS TO DIE FOR</span> anthology, in which the world’s finest mystery writers discuss the mystery novels they would add to the canon, and which is also due for publication in September or October, had been received and edited by my co-editor, Declan Burke, and me. Given that the deadline for receiving essays was March 31st (and, in many cases, made a pleasant whizzing noise as it shot past the ears of putative contributors), and the deadline for the submission of the completed manuscript to our publishers is April 30th, it’s just as well that the lion’s share of the work had been done before I departed, but it still leaves only 10 days to edit the late essays, ensure all of the contributor and subject bios are present and correct, and do one final read through to satisfy my control freak urges. <br /><br />What next? Well, there’s another collaborative project at which I haven’t looked since November, but which I’m now anxious to tackle with a view to letting my editors see it before the summer. Oh, and I’d started writing a short story, more or less to pass the time between submitting <span style="font-style:italic;">THE WRATH OF ANGELS</span> and starting another novel in earnest, but that grew from a short story into a long story, and from a long story into a novella. It’s now on my laptop and needs about three or four thousand words to bring it to a close, but I can’t write them because I’m about to get on the bus again, and I’ve been writing to you instead of finishing the tale that I had to tell. <br /><br />Hello, bus.<br /><br />Sigh. I really wish I could write on a bus.<br /><br />Oh well. Raymond Chandler used to say that when he wasn’t writing, he was thinking about writing. I guess I now just have even more time to think about writing…Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08700441634700745541noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22537743.post-48593699022344210602012-04-14T05:00:00.000-07:002012-04-14T05:09:20.783-07:00The Bus Tour, Day 3: On Recommending BooksMy friend Matt didn’t like <span style="font-style:italic;">The Religion</span>. He didn’t like it at all.<br /><br />For those of you unfamiliar with <span style="font-style:italic;">The Religion</span>, it’s a 2006 novel by <a href="http://www.timwillocks.com/">Tim Willocks</a> set against the backdrop of the Siege of Malta in 1565. It’s incredibly violent, but it’s also one of the most immersive reading experiences that I’ve had in recent years. I lost myself in <span style="font-style:italic;">The Religion</span>. I even felt a bit like I was living through the Siege of Malta in real time. I would wake up in the morning and read <span style="font-style:italic;">The Religion</span>, wading through mud and filth and gore, then go to bed with the memory of it all still fresh, only to begin the whole thing again the next morning. I actually got to meet Tim Willocks for the first time recently, and I told him how much I’d liked the book. Apparently, the sequel, entitled <span style="font-style:italic;">Twelve Children of Paris</span>, is written, and will be published later this year. Spoiler alert (not): it sounds like it’s going to be pretty violent again. <br /><br />But Matt, who turned up to say hello at the Mystery Bus tour’s New York stop, didn’t like <span style="font-style:italic;">The Religion</span>. Now Matt may well be wrong about the book – hell, he’s frequently wrong about things, albeit in an interesting way, while I, needless to say, am always right, although I am open to hearing other people explain why they think I might be wrong, if only because I find it amusing – but I felt an unexpected pang of guilt for enthusing about the book to such an extent that he felt obliged to read it, and then persevered with it even though he wasn’t enjoying it. <br /><br />“But why did you like it?” Matt asked plaintively and, as I tried to explain to him why he was so patently wrong about it, he just looked more and more bewildered, and, I might venture to suggest, even hurt. “Why? Why?” he persisted, and I started to feel a bit as though I’d let him down in some way, rather as if he’d entrusted the care of his houseplants to me while he was away and I’d deliberately let them die, laughing as they wilted on the windowsill.<br /><br />That’s the difficult thing about recommending books to others. As a writer who is, first and foremost, also a reader, I get asked to recommend books quite often, insight than the norm into the relative quality of various works of literature. But our taste in books is so personal, and so dependent upon factors unique to us – our life experiences, our reading history, even the mood that we happened to be in when we first began reading the book in question – that expecting others to have a similar reaction to a book we ourselves have loved is probably a mistake. They may like it, but equally they may not. Naturally, if they don’t like it they’re wrong, but at least they’ll be wrong in a way that we can understand, if we try.<br /><br />Still, the rejection by another of a book that we have liked, even loved, brings with it a range of emotions. There will be disappointment that the recipient of our book largesse has failed to appreciate its value, and a sneaking suspicion that we may have entirely misjudged the person in question, leading us to wonder what the hell we were thinking when we started being friends with them in the first place; but there will also be a modicum of guilt, for we, however inadvertently, and with only the best of intentions, have committed that most grievous of book sins: we have forced another person to read a book that did not give them pleasure. We have wasted a little of their valuable store of reading time, for we only have so much time on this earth, and only a limited number of books that we will be able to read in that time. Those of us who love books dearly will die with unread books on our shelves. We may even keep ourselves alive for long enough to finish the book that we are reading on our deathbed, rather like the 19th century reader who was reputed to have clung to life for long enough to read the last installment of the Dickens novel that was being published at the time before finally expiring, presumably content. As we grow older we become increasingly intolerant, even resentful, of books that squander our time and energy. We hear the clock ticking, and the voices of all of the better books on our shelves crying out to be read. For readers, it is not money that is the principal currency, but time. We have to be careful with it, and spend it wisely, for there are too many books, and too few hours to accommodate them.<br /><br />So I’m sorry that Matt didn’t like <span style="font-style:italic;">The Religion</span>. To make up for it, I’ve promised to find him something that he will like. It’s a task that I’ll take seriously. I’ll think long and hard about it.<br /><br />And then I’ll buy him the sequel to <span style="font-style:italic;">The Religion</span>.Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08700441634700745541noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22537743.post-62137373842101966272012-04-13T16:37:00.002-07:002012-04-13T16:44:08.360-07:00The Bus Tour, Day 2One thing that travelling by bus offers is time to think, particularly if, like me, you feel distinctly ill if you try to read. Yesterday saw me spending time in two lovely independent bookstores in New York: one was Otto Penzler’s gracious <a href="http://www.mysteriousbookshop.com/">Mysterious Bookshop</a>, where we commenced this little mystery jaunt. The other was <a href="http://www.booksofwonder.com/">Books of Wonder</a>, the specialist children’s bookshop on 18th Street, where I browsed, had coffee, and watched kids read, which rather gladdened my heart. If there is anything more uplifting to the spirit of a reader and writer than being in a room surrounded by books, it is being in a room surrounded by books that children are enjoying.<br /><br />My heart, it must be said, was in need of some gladdening. Many of you will be aware of the US Justice Department’s lawsuit against five US publishers, essentially accusing them of collusion in setting prices for e-books. The ins and outs of the case aren’t really at issue here, but what troubled me was a comment from an interested party who suggested, not particularly sorrowfully, that the whole affair would be “bad news for bookbinderies.” <br /><br />Bad news for a lot of people, one fears. Bad news for independent bookstores. Bad news for publishers. Bad news for writers. And, ultimately, bad news for readers, even if, initially, a few dollars may be knocked off the price of e-books. Again, all that remains to be seen. (This is not an anti-Amazon screed, incidentally: I use Amazon as a customer and, as a writer, I benefit from Amazon sales. I suppose, echoing Jack Nicholson, I’m just asking why we can’t all just get along…) <br /><br />It just seems to me that an element of gloating over the perceived demise of printed books has crept into the discourse over e-books. A year or so ago, a mystery writer was pictured on the front of a magazine warming himself beside a brazier of burning books while sipping a cocktail. The writer in question – for whom, quite frankly, I never had a great deal of time, and that picture just confirmed that my first instincts had been correct – has become something of a proselytizer for e-books, and the magazine cover image, which he apparently suggested, was his way of communicating his message that the printed word was on the way out, and long live the age of the electronic book. <br /><br />I can think of few more depressing sights in recent years that a writer glorying in the burning of books. Even the Nazis had the decency to make the casting of books on to the pyre look like a bit of a chore. He joins the sorry legion of folk who use terms like “dead tree publishing” and “legacy publishing” to describe the beauty of a book, thereby dismissing everything from the Gutenberg Bible to that beloved, battered paperback that you’ve kept since your childhood, and which would be among the first things you’d try to save if your house was on fire. It’s ignorance on a bewildering scale, and makes one feel that, for a brief instant, you’ve come in touch with the spirit of those chaps who burned the library at Alexandria.<br /><br />Just to be clear on this: I have no particular problem with e-books. If that’s how you want to read, then fine. Go for it. As long as they’re sold for a fair price, one that represents some reasonable reflection of the effort that went into producing it on the part of the writer and the publisher, then there’s no reason why e-books should not simply be another way to enjoy reading. It should be understood by all, though, that books and e-books are not the same. They can and should co-exist, but there are those – shamefully, writers among them - who would prefer to see the e-book triumph and its perceived competition vanish entirely: first the bookstores, and then the books themselves.<br /><br />But I don’t want to see bookstores disappear, and not simply because physical bookstores happen to be my preferred way of buying books. I grew up in a house where there were books. Some of them belonged to my grandparents, with whom we shared a house. Some were my mother’s, as my father didn’t read much aside from newspapers. A great many, as the years went on, were mine. I bought them new when I could afford them, or used when money was scarce. Often there would be library books alongside them because, even when I had little money, our local library at Dolphin’s Barn in Dublin offered me the choice of more books than I could ever read in a lifetime. <br /><br />In other words, I grew up surrounded by books. I saw them before I could read them. I understood that these objects were part of our life as a family. I was curious about them and what they represented. I can still recall my first, faltering steps towards becoming a reader, and the sense that, for this effort, I would be rewarded with an expansion of my consciousness, a new way of experiencing the world, a new way of being. <br /><br />I suppose I’m wondering now if the metal-and-plastic tablet devices that are set to become so much a part of our lives will offer the same experience. They are not dedicated objects in the way that a book is. A book has one main purpose, which is to be read: an e-reader, outside of the most basic of models, has many. If it’s equipped with internet access then it brings with it, along with certain benefits, the singular curse of that access, which is distraction. The internet is a distraction engine. It encourages us to flick, to scan, to read widely but not deeply. The book function on an iPad or iPhone is, in a way, the antithesis of the other roles for which such devices are equipped. A book’s requirements of patience and immersion from the reader sit uneasily beside Twitter, and Facebook updates, and Google, and the ubiquitous hyperlink. <br /><br />More to the point, what will the home libraries of the future look like? I suspect this is the last generation that will see significant household libraries of books accumulated on casual basis – by which I mean libraries that have not been gathered as part of a formal collection, or with the potential future financial value of the books in mind - with cluttered shelves mixed with hardbacks and paperbacks. The paperback will soon disappear. The hardback will remain, but will be the preserve of collectors and hardcore fans of particular authors. Ultimately, will there be homes where a library is represented only by a tablet device? Is that really a library at all? If there are households where books, if they exist at all, are essentially virtual and not actual, then how will this impact upon children as they grow up, for surely children’s tastes are formed by their environment? Will the idea of being surrounded by books, whether in childhood or adulthood, ultimately become obsolete? <br /><br />If that happens, there will be few stores, if any, like Books of Wonder or Mysterious left, or indeed any of the independents or chain stores that this bus tour will visit over the coming week (for now, with Borders gone, Barnes & Noble has come to seem ever more valuable, with its miles of books, and its still astounding range). We will have fewer books around us. The gloaters will have won, but theirs will be a hollow victory, and the world will be a poorer place in which to live. <br /><br />But maybe I’m wrong. I’m open to being corrected. <br /><br />I’m just thinking.<br /><br />That’s what I do on a bus…Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08700441634700745541noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22537743.post-25880785471667634642012-02-07T11:25:00.000-08:002012-02-07T11:30:35.992-08:00ON UNREAD BOOKS AND GROWING OLDThe bookshelf in my bedroom has been intimidating me for long enough, so I’ve decided that it’s time to do something about it.<br /><br />Here’s the thing: the bedroom bookshelf seems to be the place to which new books gravitate, specifically the ones that I’ve bought for myself with the full and certain intention of reading them in the near future, if not immediately. Unfortunately, like most readers, I’m also something of a compulsive book buyer, and so I inevitably end up buying books at a faster pace than I can read them.<br /><br />The bedroom bookshelf is now full, and I’ve started doubling up on books, which can only mean that the obscured books are destined to be forgotten unless I introduce some form of rotation system, which smacks both of obsessive-compulsive behaviour and the final, desperate days of Rafael Benitez at Liverpool football club.<br /><br />The bedroom bookshelf problem is compounded by the fact that there are also bookshelves in the hall, the dining room, outside the living room (three), in the guest bedroom (two, both doubled up to the max), and in my office, which is where the advance copies of books sent to me by authors and publishers tend to end up on the grounds that I’m less likely to forget about them if they’re in front of me every day. <br /><br />Unfortunately, this approach has backfired because of the associations of the bedroom bookshelf with books that are to be read soonest. It would make more sense to put the advance copies on the bedroom bookshelf so that they, too, become sprinkled with immediacy dust, but then where would I put the books that I’ve bought for myself? They can’t go in the hall, the dining room, or outside the living room because those shelves are full. Even if I could put them in the guest bedroom I wouldn’t because, with the best will in the world, those poor books are NEVER going to be read. The guest bedroom is a literary gulag. It is where unread books go to die. <br /><br />No, the current system, imperfect though it may be, has to continue, but the least I can do is attempt to make some serious inroads into the books in the bedroom. So, for the past month, I’ve been knocking books out of the park, so to speak, as far as the bedroom is concerned, alternating fiction and non-fiction, aided by the fact that I didn’t buy any books at all in January, since nothing came out that I wanted to read. (Actually, I tell a lie: I did, but I left them in another country so they don’t count.)<br /><br />You know, there is a great satisfaction in reading rapidly, and with serious intent, and clearing one’s shelves along the way. I long ago got over any sentimentality about holding on to books. Unless they’re signed, or have some kind of association with someone I know and like, they go in the charity box once they’re read. I make exceptions for the occasional non-fiction book, and music books that might prove useful for my radio show. Otherwise, once I finish the last page, it’s bye-bye book. <br /><br />(And, no, I don’t want to hear about how an e-reader might be useful in my case because a) I don’t like using them; b) I prefer reading printed books; and c) you don’t own an e-book (you’re just licensed to access its content), and I like owning books, whatever I may ultimately decide to do with them. End of lesson.)<br /><br />Anyway, yesterday I finished Len Deighton’s SS-GB, a book recommended to me by my good friend Steve Stilwell, a gentleman with whom I may disagree on many things – generally because he’s wrong and I’m right - but with whom I agree on most. The great thing about SS-GB was that it was a fast read: I began it on Sunday night, and read the last page in bed on Monday night. My previous book – Peter Bart’s INFAMOUS PLAYERS – took me two days, but that was because I was distracted by the weekend’s newspapers. The book before that, which was John Sandford’s BURIED PREY, also took two days, although it shouldn’t really have because I was tearing through the pages. That’s three books in less than a week and, on top of what I’ve already read this month (including TREASURE ISLAND, which I’d somehow neglected to read until now, and A FEAST OF CROW by George RR Martin, which took a while because it’s 1000 pages long, give or take), represents a considerable inroad into the bedroom bookshelf stockpile.<br /><br />One thing I have noticed, though, is my reluctance to read books that are very thick, or that might take me an unduly long time to get through. A FEAST FOR CROWS represented nearly a week’s reading, and that’s simply not good enough if I’m going to clear some space on the shelf. It’s one of the reasons why I haven’t yet managed to pick up Stephen King’s latest, 11/22/63, as that’s quite a chunk of book change and I don’t want to mess with my momentum. On the other hand, reading 11/22/63 would leave a decent sized hole on the shelf, but it would still only be one book. Then again, TREASURE ISLAND, though dense, was comparatively short, and while I felt a sense of satisfaction in adding another book to the ‘completed’ pile – and a classic, no less – its absence from the shelf didn’t free up much room.<br /><br />Oh well: I never claimed this was a perfect science, and in my darker moments I acknowledge that I am engaged in a Sisyphean labour. There are still more books in the house than I’m ever going to read, and there are new books on the horizon. As February dawned, books started appearing that I might want to add to the bedroom bookshelf, and last week, in a moment of weakness, I ordered one of them. It was Marcus Berkmann’s A SHED OF ONE’S OWN, which deals with the trials of male middle age and therefore seems somehow appropriate in the context of my current obsession with de-cluttering my bookshelves. Perhaps it’s just one facet of a larger desire to simplify my life as I get older. Having too many unread books on one’s shelves, too many unlistened to records, too many unwatched films, starts to rankle, and becomes an uncomfortable reminder of one’s own imminent mortality. I have to read these books! I’m going to die one day! Maybe soon!<br /><br />Time to go. I have books to read…<br /><br /> <br />This week John read<br /><br />SS-GB by LEN DEIGHTON<br />INFAMOUS PLAYERS by PETER BART<br />BURIED PREY by JOHN SANDFORD<br />EMPIRE OF SILVER by CONN IGGULDEN<br /><br /><br />and listened to<br /><br />LE VOYAGE DANS LE LUNE by AIR<br />D&B TOGETHER by DELANEY AND BONNIE<br />OLD IDEAS by LEONARD COHENJohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08700441634700745541noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22537743.post-26873519119296226112011-10-04T07:26:00.000-07:002011-10-04T07:39:09.463-07:00DOES IT MAKE YOUR HAND HURT?It is an unseasonably humid day in New York, the kind of day designed for sitting in an air conditioned bar, sipping something cold and mildly fruity, and less mildly alcoholic with a copy of the New York Times for company in the absence of one's nearest and dearest. It is most certainly not a day to be hauling oneself in and out of subways and the occasional taxi in order to sign books at the city's bookstores - not, I hasten to add, because such an activity is a chore in itself, for it is not, and God forbid that anyone should read this and mistake it for a plea on the writer's part to be required to perform anything resembling a real job, but because it is slightly unbecoming of an author to arrive at a store's information desk bathed in sweat and panting like a bloodhound at the end of a long and harrowing fugitive hunt. Even the most understanding of booksellers is entitled to be a little dubious about the <span style="font-style:italic;">bona fides</span> of a sweaty, croaky man with a peculiar accent who claims to be the author of the books in whose direction he is frantically pointing and ownership of which he is apparently claiming by spraying them with his own perspiration. <br /><br />On the other hand, weather permitting, drifting in and out of bookstores to sign one's books is a very pleasant way to spend a Sunday afternoon, just as talking to readers and booksellers and about books - one's own and the work of others, assuming one's ego is wiling to allow the existence of the work of others, however inferior - is considerably less than a chore.<br /><br />Quite often in the course of a signing, especially one that is particularly well attended, I'll be asked some variation on the question: "Does it make your hand hurt?" Now that's open to a number of answers, some of them unfit for popular consumption, but I tend to rise above the obvious and reply that, no, it doesn't at all, and even if it did it would be a very good complaint. <br /><br />Like most authors, I can remember a time when nobody would ask me to sign anything at all. I recall tramping around Britain for <a href="http://johnconnollybooks.com/novels_edt.php">EVERY DEAD THING</a>, my first book, and arriving at stores in which my impending arrival, advertised with a showcard and a time, seemed to have aroused absolutely no interest at all among the local population. Now, again like most authors, I had kind of hoped that my first novel would change the world, and in every small town crowds of adoring acolytes would be waiting to greet me with palm fronds, rose petals, and babies to be kissed. The reality, as you may have surmised, was somewhat different, and this continued to be the case for a number of years. My novels sold okay, but nobody wanted to meet me, or have a book signed. Now more people want their books signed, and some of them even want to meet me, although not many of them want to meet me twice, which is probably understandable. <br /><br />I remember going into a chain bookstore in the northwest of England to sign copies of EVERY DEAD THING, pen at the ready, only to be informed that I shouldn't sign too many copies. "We haven't sold any yet, dear," a nice lady explained, for this was a time when a signed copy was regarded as a sold copy, which meant that the bookstore couldn't return it to the publisher if nobody bought it. I would essentially have defaced my own book, thereby rendering it valueless. I signed three, I think. I hope that they sold. I wouldn't want to have left the bookstore with an irksome debt. Now bookstores don't tend to mind too much if I sign their stock, which is nice. <br /><br />This was the first time that I had done the round of New York stores since Borders went out of business, and I missed them because they had been just as good to me as <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/">Barnes & Noble</a>, and no writer likes to see bookstores go out of business. I'd also made friends among the Borders crowd, and it pained me to think that they were out of work, although some of them have now found homes at B&N, or with other stores, although most have had to find jobs in areas without an outlet for their love and enthusiasm for books and reading. <br /><br />It's one of the reasons why I find myself growing increasingly angry with those of my peers who seem to have divested themselves of any loyalty to bricks-and-mortar bookstores in favor of a rush to solely electronic publishing, too ignorant to even be ashamed to use phrases like "dead tree publishing" or "legacy publishing" about the beauty and usefulness of a printed book. Hey, guys and gals: those bookstores, chains and independents, that you've apparently abandoned to their fate were the making of you all, and you were very willing to badger their owners into stocking your books when they were the only game in town. I'm as happy as anyone to take my royalties on e-book sales, and I'm grateful to the companies that distribute me in that form, but I firmly believe that electronic publishing and printed books can co-exist in our brave new world, and I'd dearly like to see bookstores survive to take their place in that world, because it will be a poorer, coarser place without them. End of lesson. <br /><br />So, sweatiness apart, today was a very good day, enlivened by chats with booksellers, some of whom even bought copies of my books for themselves and for others. I almost had a shelf to myself in B&N on Union Square, and I rather hope that they'll put up a commemorative plaque when I die. At B&N near Greenwich Village I had a bonding moment over Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood with the marvellous staff behind the information desk. At <a href="http://www.crimepays.com/">Partners & Crime</a> I had one of those fine chats in which recommendations are exchanged, and at <a href="http://mcnallyjackson.com/">McNally Jackson</a>, that great independent on Prince Street, I met again the lovely Michelle, who used to work at <a href="http://www.riverrunbookstore.com/">RiverRun</a> in Portsmouth, just down the road from my stomping ground in Maine. <br /><br />Even after all these years, though, I'm still plagued by that sense of doubt specific to authors signing in bookstores, and it's this: if the bookstore has lots of books in stock, the author worries that nobody is buying them; if it has only a handful in stock, the author worries that the store is not ordering enough, and therefore nobody is buying them, because they can't. It will never cross the author's mind that people might actually be buying the books, hence the relative lack of copies, or that the author is sufficiently popular that the store feels confident enough to keep multiple copies of his or her various works in stock. No, it's either bad news, or worse news, with nothing in between. <br /><br />But there was <a href="http://johnconnollybooks.com/novels-burning-soul.php">THE BURNING SOUL</a> in each store, which was nice to see. Nicer still, perhaps, was the fact that <a href="http://johnconnollybooks.com/novels_lost.php">THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS</a> seems to have found a permanent place on the shelves of both chain stores and independents. I remain hugely fond of that novel, and I'm always touched to see it in stock. It had no luck when it came out: it was barely reviewed on my own side of the Atlantic, was rejected by a major TV book club for implying that Red Riding Hood might have harbored feelings for the wolf, and was the first of my novels not to make it into the Top Ten Bestsellers list. But as the years have passed it has found its way into the right hands, thanks to readers recommending it to other readers, and the passionate support of booksellers in both chain stores and independents. <br /><br />And, every time I sign a copy, I think to myself, "Hello, little book . . ."Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08700441634700745541noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22537743.post-81432838167589780942011-07-18T11:12:00.001-07:002011-07-18T11:12:03.255-07:00ON BLURBING - AGAIN.<div class='posterous_autopost'>Eighteen. That's how many there are in my office right now: eighteen. I feel guilty every time I see them, but I can't get rid of them, not yet. It's terrible, just terrible. I am, officially, a bad person. <p /> I'm talking about advance copies of books that have been sent to me in the hope that I might be able to offer a supportive quote. They arrive at such a pace that it's impossible to keep up with them. If I read them all, I'd never read anything else. I'm on various publishers' lists, my own publishers occasionally send me a book (always with a 'no pressure, just if you have the time' get-out clause), and then there are manuscripts that have come to me by more personal paths, such as the one I'm reading one at the moment for a friend (a friend who will, incidentally, owe me lunch as a consequence, not least because he sent it as an electronic copy, and since I don't like reading books on screen I had to print it off, all 300 pages of it. You know who you are . . .) <p /> Rather worryingly, at least one of these advance copies has been on my shelf for so long that it has already been released in paperback. I figure I can probably give that one away now. The others don't appear to be past their publication date yet, so I'd better hold on to them. It doesn't seem right to give the ones that haven't yet been published to friends, or to the charity store. They're the ones that make me feel guilty. "Read us!" they cry. "Please, we're really good, honest we are. Your quote could make all the difference to our chances of success . . ." Actually, that last part probably isn't true. In fact, if I look back on all of the books to which I have given supportive quotes, hardly any have made any kind of an impact at all. It may even be the case that a supportive quote from me is the kiss of death for a forthcoming book. I'm starting to suspect that even I wouldn't want a quote from me on one of my books. <p /> Nevertheless, I feel like I've done my duty this year, because although I gave only - only! - four quotes, I've read at least twice that many forthcoming books. Some of the ones to which I didn't put my name were quite good, or at least interesting, but they didn't really make me want to enthuse about them to others. That's the key, I suppose. You have to ask yourself if, in the normal course of events, you had bought this book, and read it, would you press it into the hands of people you knew and liked on the grounds that they had to, simply had to, read it. If the answer is 'no', then you shouldn't blurb the book. Okay, so writers don't always adhere to this: they'll blurb a book because they like the writer's work, even if the book in question does not display the writer's talent at his or her best, or because an editor or publisher has put them on the spot, or because the writer in question is a friend, and they'd like to maintain that friendship. It's a complicated business, blurbing. <p /> In two cases, I read the books that I'd been sent because an editor or writer broke the First Rule of Blurb Club: you never, ever ask if the writer has read the book that he has been sent, or even if the book has been received. It's like putting a message in a bottle. You throw it into the sea, and you just hope that somebody replies. You don't send another bottle asking if someone has received the first one. That way lies madness. Still, some people insist on breaking the rule, and then the recipient of the advance copy and subsequent rule-breaking e-mail has to squirm a little, and either come up with some excuse for not reading the book, or play dumb, or simply read the blasted thing while nursing a grudge for being pressured into doing so. <p /> You see, I do try to read as many of these books as I can and, at last count, I think I've given quotes to four books already this year, and that's probably quite enough. If my name appears on many more books, I'll start to feel like James Patterson. It's also a question of trying to make a quote worthwhile. After all, if your name appears on every second book announcing that it's the greatest thing since Tolstoy looked at a pen and thought, you know, I might give this writing lark a go, then readers will have a right to feel suspicious. This is known as being a 'blurb whore', and blurb whoredom is the writer's equivalent of being the girl (or boy) who can't say no. You get a reputation. You're anybody's for a cheap meal, or a couple of free books. A certain amount of ego may enter into the equation too. It's quite nice to be asked to give a quote, because it implies that you've moved up a little in the rankings. Your name is worth something on the cover of someone else's book because you have a relationship with your own readers, and maybe they trust you enough to believe you when you say that another book is good. That can go to a boy's head, and pretty soon your name is popping up all over the place, blurbing stuff that even the author's mother won't read, and suddenly folk don't respect you any more, and you're forced to wear a pair of scarlet letters on your breast. BW: hang your head in shame. <p /> But the other problem is that I buy lots and lots of books. I like buying books. By investing my money in them, I'm kind of promising myself that I will also invest the time required to read them, as well as supporting the industry of which I am a part. I even buy books published by my own publishers, even though I could get them for nothing if I asked. Except for books by a handful of authors whose work I love more than most of my own limbs, I'm less likely to read a book that I've received for nothing than a book for which I've paid. It's a curious thing, but there it is. With that in mind, the bookshelf in my bedroom, which is generally where my purchased books end up, is currently piled high with unread material that I really, really want to read. I buy a couple of books a week, on average, but rarely get to read more than one, so the pile keeps growing at a faster pace than I'm reading, and then all of these other books arrive each week that I haven't bought and which might be good but, then again, might not be, and . . . <p /> Well, you see where I'm going with this. We only have so much time on this planet, and I'd like to spend as much of it as possible reading books that I know I'm going to enjoy, or in which I was sufficiently interested from the off to purchase. It may be a sign of the slow encroachment of some crushing conservatism that will eventually lead to a dementedly right-wing mindset, causing me to read only non-fiction books about the Raj, and begin sentences with the words "You know, Hitler did a lot of things wrong, but . . ." Then again, it may simply be the case that reading shouldn't feel like homework, and while some of the advance copies I've read this year have given me immense pleasure, and I've indicated as much by putting my name to them, I've generally enjoyed the books I bought far more. <p /> Do I want people to stop sending them? Sometimes. Then again, I know there's the possibility that one may catch my eye, perhaps a book that I might not otherwise have read, and I'll read it and think, hmmm, that was good. Maybe I should tell someone about it. <p /> Still, eighteen. Eighteen books, none of which are now likely to be read. <p /> And more on the way . . . <p /> <br />THIS WEEK JOHN READ <p /> A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin <p /> AND LISTENED TO <p /> Weather Report, Stan Getz, and George Benson. Hey, it was a jazz week . . .</div>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08700441634700745541noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22537743.post-6086943200196033282011-05-29T11:01:00.001-07:002011-05-29T11:01:23.389-07:00The Children's Book Tour<div class='posterous_autopost'>This week saw the end of the first lengthy book tour that I've done for a children's book: in this case, Hell's Bells. While I did some kids' events for The Gates a year or two back, this was a much more comprehensive affair, taking in two and sometimes three kids' events most days. Generally they took place in school libraries, or in local libraries to which the schools brought the kids. <p /> So what were they like? Well, it was the hardest work that I've ever done: the most rewarding when the events went well, but the most soul-destroying when they did not. On one level, it was like returning to my early days as an adult mystery author. Back then, nobody really knew who I was, or what I was trying to do. I mean, there are large numbers of people who still don't know who I am, and could care less about what I'm trying to do, but at least when I do an adult event most of the people in attendance will know something about me, and may even have read some of the books. With kids, though, I'm still at the level of just about being better than double maths, and I get about five minutes of grace from them before I have to start proving myself. True, there were some schools in which the kids had been primed, and a number of them had read at least one of the books, but there were lots of other schools where I was an unknown quantity not only to the the kids themselves but to their teachers and their school librarian. It's hard to stand up in front of an audience that has no conception of who you are, and try to convince them that you're worth their time not only while you're talking, but afterwards in the form of the book you've written. <p /> Halfway through the tour, I found myself waking up each morning with a pain in my mouth and neck. I realized that I'd been clenching my teeth while I was sleeping, and my neck was taut. I've never really been nervous before doing events, mostly because I enjoy doing them, but I was nervous throughout these past two-and-a-half weeks. In part, it was because there was no way of knowing quite what to expect from the kids or their school. If I arrived and there were 200 (or sometimes more) children packed into the school hall, then I knew I was heading for disaster. You can't communicate with 200 plus kids for any length of time. It's impossible. There's also the likelihood that nobody will really have told them who you are, or why you're there. They won't have read the books, or even Googled your name. You're just a bloke standing at the front of the room, usually without a microphone, shouting at them in a strange accent. <p /> Those days were horrible. I felt like a comedian dying on my feet during an act, facing a crowd that wasn't laughing, or even listening. No books would be sold and, for the most part, you'd be ignored by both kids and teachers. After doing two such events in a row in one day quite early in the tour, the rep just left me to wander disconsolately around the city in the hope that I might decompress a little. That was the start of the clenching and the taut neck. <p /> I started to learn that a law of diminishing returns applied when it came to talking to the kids. 60-70 was probably the maximum, 30-40 ideal, although my final event was at a lovely high school in London more than 100 children. They were great - attentive and funny - but I did have to roam back and forth across the room quite a bit so I could maintain as much eye contact as possible. It was also clear that I was happier talking to younger kids. Older teenagers had no real interest in a book like Hell's Bells, but by the time I realized that I was halfway through an event with older teenagers, and it was rather too late to rescue myself. Subsequently, I tended to talk to the older kids about The Book of Lost Things, or even the crime novels, and kept the Hell's Bells-related stuff for those aged 13 and under. <p /> Overall, though, the positive experiences far outweighed the negative ones. I've never had as much fun as I did talking to kids in places like Leicester and Peterborough, Norwich and Ilford, Broughton, Bury and Boston. They made me laugh, and their questions forced me to think on my toes faster than any that have been thrown at me by adults. At the end of those events, my adrenalin would be coursing, and I'd leave the school with a smile plastered on my face. Occasionally, a small person would call out 'Goodbye, John!' as we drove away, and I would be very happy indeed. <p /> Then I'd immediately nod off as my energy levels plummeted. <p /> Some great questions from kids: <p /> 1) Why do you talk so fast? <br /> 2) Are you rich? <br /> 3) What kind of car do you drive? <br /> 4) When you were a kid, did you want to be a private detective? <br /> 5) If you were a detective, what mystery would you solve? <br /> 6) You write about Hell? Have you ever been anywhere like Hell? <br /> 7) What was the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to you when you were young? <p /> <br /> There will be more such events to come. The US tour for The Infernals begins in October, and there will be more books for young people to come. I love writing them, and I've loved chatting with kids about science and books and reading and life over these past few weeks. I'll take the odd event that doesn't work as the price to be paid for all of the ones that do. And to all of the kids who came along to events, and to the teachers and librarians who encouraged them to do so - <p /> Thank you! <p /> This week John read <p /> Roseanna by Sjowall and Wahloo <br /> Satori by Don Winslow <p /> and listened to <p /> Director's Cut by Kate Bush <br /> Feel It Break by Austra</div>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08700441634700745541noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22537743.post-26064800481223461322011-04-16T04:29:00.001-07:002011-04-16T04:29:43.733-07:00Win an advance copy of HELL'S BELLS!<div class='posterous_autopost'><p>With just over a week before the first events for HELL'S BELLS start, we're giving away an advance copy to one lucky member of the website forum. Make a contribution — leave a comment, start a thread — anywhere on <a href="http://www.johnconnollybooks.com/forum">the forum</a> between now and midnight GMT Tuesday 19 April, and your name will be entered into a random drawing for an advance copy of HELL'S BELLS.</p> <p>One entry per person — though of course you can post as often to the forum as you'd like — and spam doesn't count. Jayne, our lovely forum moderator, will delete any posts she considers inappropriate, and her discretion is final. And no, she is not susceptible to bribes.</p> <p>Good luck!</p> <p>[CL]</p></div>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08700441634700745541noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22537743.post-7849097993230435152011-04-13T08:59:00.001-07:002011-04-13T10:58:19.924-07:00Displacement Activity<div class="posterous_autopost">I should really be doing something else right now, but then most of the time I feel that way. For the moment, though, my guilt centres on the final step to be taken in sending the revised manuscript of THE BURNING SOUL back to my British editor. </div><div class="posterous_autopost"><br /> Receiving editorial notes is a funny business. They're always welcome, but I tend to open the envelope with a degree of trepidation. There will be a covering letter, usually praising me as some kind of genius (my editors do know how to butter me up, I'll give them that) and promising that, upon my eventual demise, statues will be raised in my honour so women and small children (presumably not my own, but you never know) will have somewhere to prostrate themselves in grief, tearing their hair at the loss I represent to literature and, indeed, manhood in general, while stern chaps stand behind them and discreetly wipe manly tears from their eyes. </div><div class="posterous_autopost"><br /> Or words to that effect. </div><div class="posterous_autopost"><br /> Inevitably, following all the stuff about posterity and deathless prose, there will be a 'but' somewhere around the third paragraph. That 'but' will speak volumes. Sometimes, it isn't even a proper 'but'. It will be disguised as something less potentially damaging to my fragile ego, such as 'I have only a few small queries . . .', or 'Perhaps you might like to look at . . .' It's at this point I realise that I'm probably not going to get the statue, or the wailing women, or the stout fellows with handlebar mustaches commenting upon how I was the best of them, and quite the chap, and how they wouldn't have minded if I'd slept with their wives. Far from it, in fact: they'd have been flattered, and their beloved spouses would have been happy to oblige. No, none of that for me, not now. Perfection has eluded me once again... </div><div class="posterous_autopost"><br /> Actually, the editorial notes were relatively incident-free on this occasion. They mainly amounted to some grammatical errors - darn it, and I thought I was positively Banvillesque in my command of English - and a suggestion that I shorten two anecdotes, while perhaps considering offering the reader less about the intricacies of the wholesale fish business. (Well, I thought it was interesting, and I don't even like fish.) Last time out, with THE WHISPERERS, my editor and I differed on the whole philosophy and structure of the book, and ultimately we had to agree to differ. I wasn't sure that I could make the changes she wanted while writing the book I had set out to write. Thus it was less an argument over quality - at least I hope it wasn't, although I know that THE WHISPERERS will never be her favourite among my books - than about the nature of the book itself. Still, the discussion was worth having, and we've known each other for too long now to fall out over something like that. </div><div class="posterous_autopost"><br /> On a related note, I've encountered two writers in the last month who were discussing the nature of e-books and self-publishing. One of them was a gentleman (Lee Goldberg), while the other, who shall remain nameless, is, at best, a half-decent self-publicist with a chip on his shoulder about mainstream publishing. The Self-Publicist, in his discussion of the future of publishing, took the view that all a writer really needed was a decent copy editor (essentially, someone who checks spelling, grammar and consistency, and adds instructions for the typesetter) and a cover designer, e-publishing rendering any other input unnecessary as far as he was concerned. At no point did he mention the importance of an editor rather than a copy editor and, more particularly, the relationship between an editor and a writer that, in my case, now spans 15 books. Most writers are not very good at editing themselves, and no book has ever been made worse by the input of an editor. Even Raymond Carver, that exquisite writer of short stories, benefited from the editorial changes of his editor Gordon Lish, if one is to judge by the recently published original versions of the tales later contained in WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LOVE, the 1981 collection that arguably made Carver's reputation. The stories in the original form are more discursive, and arguably less poetic, at least in the sense in which that word is most frequently used when it comes to Carver's work, and they are certainly less minimalist. Lish was undoubtedly a heavy editor, but one might legitimately ask if Carver's work would have been quite so immediately acclaimed following the publication of that collection had the stories remained in their original form. </div><div class="posterous_autopost"><br /> Anyway, all I know is that my books would have been immeasurably poorer without the advice and gentle touch of my British editor, Sue Fletcher, and my American editor, Emily Bestler, who have been looking after my work for fifteen and fourteen books respectively. Maybe the Self-Publicist is the exception to all this. If so, he, and not I, deserves to have that statue raised in his honour. Still, it's depressing to hear so much of the debate about e-publishing being conducted only in terms of increased income for writers, with little regard for issues of quality. Writers need editors, and the longer a writer and an editor work together, the better that writer's work will be. </div><div class="posterous_autopost"><br /> Still, I had begun to make significant changes to the manuscript even before my editor's formal changes arrived, which lends credence to the view that a book is never finished, merely abandoned. THE BURNING SOUL, like all of my Parker books, had a prologue and an epilogue, but in this case I had doubts about their merits. In part, the prologue was a hangover from a period when the book was to have been written entirely in the present tense. It was, I thought, a nice piece of writing in its present tense form, but that's not the best reason to allow anything to stand in a book, and the prologue arguably hampered the reading of the novel. THE BURNING SOUL required the reader to be thrust immediately into the circumstances surrounding a child's disappearance so, almost as soon as the book went to my editors, I began to wish that I hadn't sent it off without first sorting out the issue of the prologue. Shortly after that, I met my editor at a dinner in London. Almost her first words referred to the prologue, but at least I was able to say that I had already recognised, and begun to wrestle with, the problem. </div><div class="posterous_autopost"><br /> So the prologue has gone and so, of course, has the epilogue, because you shouldn't have one without the other. After that, I sat down and made most of the changes my British editor had requested. I always tend to disagree with one of her suggestions, if only to allow myself the illusion that she might be fallible too. In this case, I declined to remove four lines about a court case. When I read back over the typeset manuscript in a month or two, or even glance at the finished book, I'll probably feel that she was right in the first place. She usually is. Meanwhile, my American editor's suggestions are due to arrive in the coming weeks. In addition to editorial changes, my lawyer friend John read the manuscript and spotted some legal areas that needed work, and the book is not only more correct because of his advice, but has been improved too. The manuscript is also in the hands of a private investigator and a Maine police detective. They will find errors, or suggest alternative, better ways for the plot to work. I'll make those changes too. </div><div class="posterous_autopost"><br /> All that remains is to transfer the manuscript from Apple Pages into MS Word, correct all of the reformatting that seems to occur, and send off the revised version. I should be doing that now instead of writing this blog. So why the displacement activity? </div><div class="posterous_autopost"><br /> Simple: once it goes, I have to decide what to do next. </div><div class="posterous_autopost"><br /> Playtime is over. <p> <br /> This week John read </p><p> THE DUBLINER DIARIES by Trevor White<br /> THREE STATIONS by Martin Cruz Smith </p><p> and listening to </p><p> C'MON by Low<br /> LATE NIGHT TALES by Midlake</p></div>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08700441634700745541noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22537743.post-45144872358759365812011-04-12T02:02:00.001-07:002011-04-12T02:02:39.780-07:00First look: THE BURNING SOUL's UK cover!<div class='posterous_autopost'><p>It won't be out until September 1 — but here's the cover of the next Charlie Parker novel, <em>THE BURNING SOUL</em>, to be published by Hodder in the UK, Ireland and Australia.</p> <p> </p> <p><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <img alt="Burning_soul_uk" height="709" src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/temp-2011-04-12/hettjnbgvyHleGcbchIDftsesfhAjhqxyvIrjuaoGnzCtifbxFixsqifGFid/Burning_Soul_UK.jpg.scaled500.jpg" width="461" /> </div> More information to come in the months ahead!</p> <p> </p> <p>[CL]</p> <p> </p></div>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08700441634700745541noreply@blogger.com3