Ada Limón

Ada Limón is the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States.  Recently Krista Tippet had the opportunity to interview her as part of a program at the Ted Mann Concert Hall in Minneapolis.  This is a delightful program and I highly recommend it.  Ada is insightful and also very funny.  In the program she reads a number of her poems.  She and Krista discuss how isolation during the pandemic affected her writing. 

Krista Tippet's On Being started out as program on public radio and ran for many years but now I believe she is just doing it as a podcast.  

Here is a link to the podcast on the On Being website but you can also find it through Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Pet Peeves About Books

 Ron Charles, a book critic at The Washington Post, recently had a column called What Readers Hate Most in Books based on what readers told him.  The responses ranged from dream sequences, to historical anachronism, to the the use of certain words, to the lack of quotation marks, to sexist tropes, to a character "who pinches the bridge of his nose to indicate frustration" (yes, really).  

I very much related to the complaints about length:

Excessive length was a frequent complaint. Jean Murray says, “First books by best-selling authors are reasonable in length; then they start believing that every word they write is golden and shouldn’t be cut.” She notes that Elizabeth George’s first novel, “A Great Deliverance,” was 432 pages. Her most recent, “Something to Hide,” is more than 700. 

Susan Moss suspects this is a misimpression of prestige. “Only J.M. Coetzee seems to think an important book can be under 300 pages.” 

But it’s not just the books that are too long. Everything in them is too long, too. Readers complained about interminable prologues, introductions, expositions, chapters, explanations, descriptions, paragraphs, sentences, conversations, sex scenes, fistfights and italicized passages.

I find a lot of books to be too long.   And too filled with exposition.  I'll finish a book and think, that was ok but it would have been better if an editor had stood up to the author and said "It's too long." 

Other readers dislike "gratuituously confusing timelines" which I'm not sure I completely understand.  It could mean many things.   Personally, I dislike the trend in books to have two (or three) different timelines and each timeline is  covered in different chapters.  I (perhaps erroneously) blame MFA programs on this because I (perhaps erroneously) have this idea that many people in MFA programs write a lot of short stories and I (perhaps erroneously) believe that they like to write chapters that are like little short stories.  But with cliffhangers.  

One thing that wasn't mentioned that drives me crazy is character dialog that doesn't sound like how people really talk.  People don't talk in narrative.   People don't use other people's full names over and over.  People don't always talk in full sentences.  I could go on.  (And I often do.)   

The floor is open for complaints. 

 

Bookish Talk - February 2023

 Here is some book-related news from the past few weeks: 

• Bookshop.org announced the inaugural Indie Champions Awards and gave one of my favorite book podcasts, Backlisted, an award in the podcast category.  Bookshop.org works to connect readers with independent booksellers all over the world.  It first launched in the U.S. in 2020. The podcast category is judged for consistency in creating Bookshop.org lists featuring the books mentioned in their episodes, using Bookshop.org links on their website and social media and mentioning Bookshop.org on air.
• As a way to combat inflation in the book world, Egyptians can now buy books on the installment plan. Customers can take up to 9 months to buy a book, paying 1.5% interest.  
• Salman Rushdie has a new book out.  He is still recovering from the attack on him in 2022.  
• I missed this last month, but 9 year old Kayden Hern became the poet laureate at the inaugural ceremonies of the governor of New York. Not sure that is an official post but it is still pretty cool.
• The Brooklyn Public Library has a program called Books Unbanned for teens living in banned book communities.  Young adults ages 13 to 21 can apply for a free eCard from BPL, giving them access half a million eBooks and audiobooks. It was actually launched in 2022 but there has been a lot of publicity in the last few weeks. 
• If you are a fan of biographies, you may want to check out the 2023 Plutarch Award longlist announced by Biographers International. I'm interested in the biography of Constance Baker Motley.  But maybe you prefer to read about John Singer Sargent or George Balanchine.
• Interested in astronomy?  Here are the top 10 astronomy books of all time acording to Astronomy.com.
• The National Book Critics Circle has announced the longlist for its awards.  I've never had much luck with the winners of these prizes, but others might be interested. 

Mini Book Reviews - January 2023

 Here are some mini-reviews of books I read in January.  

• A Heart Full of Headstones by Ian Rankin.  I know, I know.  I was going to read fewer mysteries in 2023.  But Ian Rankin's  Rebus mysteries are some of my favorites and I was surprised I missed it when this one was released a couple of months ago.  John Rebus is back, and Siobhan Clarke and Malcom Fox (who has had a promotion) and, of course, Big Ger Cafferty.  I remember there was a time I liked Malcom but I'm obviously not supposed to these days.  Siobhan doesn't.  The novel opens with Rebus on trial (!) and then goes back in time.  I have to say I did NOT guess why he was going to end up in the dock.  It will be interesting to see where Rankin goes after this novel.  Recommended, but really you need to read the whole series to get the full story.

• Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett.  Have you ever been on a really long car trip with a child?  Say, a child of 7 or 8.  And you make the mistake of asking the child about a TV show they have watched.  The child takes a deep breath and proceeds to tell you every single detail about that TV show, with digressions about what she likes to wear when when she watches it and whether her dog likes it, and why her dog has the name it has, and how her grandma doesn't like the dog but how grandma liked the TV show and how her grandma bought her the tie-in toy from the TV show and it's her favorite toy, well except for another toy that is also her favorite toy, but her teacher took it away from her when she brought it to school but her teacher also likes that TV show and .... four hours later she is STILL talking and you are exhausted from listening to her.  That's this book.  (Not the plot, but the style.) It's exhausting and annoying and I should have DNF'd it.  Emphatically NOT recommended.  Don't waste your time.

• The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab.  Hmmm.  It probably wasn't a great idea to start a book that is over 600 pages (on my e-reader) right after finishing a book I hated.  I should have read a "palate cleansing" book.  But, I read it anyway.  It was MUCH better than Checkout 19 (but that's not saying much, is it?).  A mix of fantasy and historical fiction, this novel follows the titular Addie through 300 years of life.  No she isn't a vampire.  She is an ordinary young woman who makes a Faustian deal with the devil (who the novel never calls the devil and she calls Luc).  She doesn't want to get married, have kids and never leave her French village.  She wants to Live!  So he gives her a life for as long as she wants it BUT the catch is that no one ever remembers her.  If they leave to go to the bathroom and come back, they say "who are you?".  It's a lonely life.  Then suddenly she meets Henry who for some reason CAN remember her.  Why?  While there were moments when I enjoyed this book, it wasn't perfect and regularly annoyed me. Mostly my issues had to do with the plot and not the writing.   The historical parts of it were too superficial for me to really get into.  And I had no patience with the flirtation with Luc.  I also thought it was a particularly bleak view of the world where the only supernatural being (god?) that responds to her cries is the evil one.   I also thought it was too long by about 25%.  But I can see where a lot of people (especially people more into fantasy than I am) would enjoy this more than me. 

• Toward That Which is Beautiful by Marian O'Shea Wernicke.   Girl from St. Louis in the late 1950's joins the convent and then in the early 1960's gets sent to their mission in Peru in the middle of nowhere.  She falls in love (or thinks she does) with the priest there and questions her vocation.  She also questions what the American missionaries are actually doing in Peru.  This was a choice by my book club and everyone but me thought it was great.   The author grew up in St. Louis and was briefly a nun.  And taught in Peru (but didn't marry a priest).   So there were autobiographical bits to it.  That part was kind of fun.  The main character grew up on Waterman Ave and went to St. Roch's grade school.  My mom grew up on Waterman Ave and went to St. Roch's grade school (but didn't become a nun).  My biggest problem was that I didn't like the writing.  It was yet another book written in the first person that relied on the narrator to be very naive (at the age of 25) in order to make the plot work.  So I found the character at best boring and at worst annoying.   I would never have chosen this book on my own, but, while it wasn't my cup of tea, the rest of my book club enjoyed it. It does have a strong sense of place. 

• The Henna Artist by Alka Joshi.  I thought this would be my "palate cleansing book", something light after the last few books that I didn't care for very much.   In fact, I thought this was a mystery because I knew it was part of a series.  It is not a mystery.  It was not what I expected at all.  Set in post-independence India of the 1950's, it is the story of Lakshmi Shastri who supports herself as a henna artist in Jaipur, India.  Lakshmi long ago left her abusive husband and disappeared from her village.  She has worked hard to make something of herself and seems on the cusp of security.   She is providing services to many high ranking Indian women, even managing to get an introduction to to the local Maharani.  She also has a business on the side using her knowledge of herbal medicine.  Enter a younger sister she didn't know existed, and things become complicated. I enjoyed this book very much.  It is a story told in the first person but I didn't mind because Lakshmi is an intelligent woman.  This is Joshi's  first novel and although she has an MFA  it didn't seem like the typical MFA novel.  It was much better.  There is a sequel already published and a third book coming out in March. 

• Silverview by John Le Carre.  This was Le Carre's last novel, finished before his death in 2020.  I purchased it shortly after it was published in 2021 but waited to read it.   I've always enjoyed Le Carre's writing.  He has intricate plots with spare writing.  He doesn't tell you everything that is going on, he trusts his readers.  This novel was no different.   It was much shorter than I expected, only 167 pages on my e-reader.  I feel like it could have been slightly longer.  On the other hand, it did what he wanted it to do in those short pages so why write more just to pad it?  The ending didn't surprise me but on the whole I don't think Le Carre was really into surprise endings.  He was more into process.  I enjoyed it, although I wouldn't rank it up there with Tinker, Tailor. 

• Murder at the Serpentine Bridge by Andrea Penrose.  This is the latest installment in the Wrexford & Sloane mystery series.  Set in the Regency period, the two principal "detectives" are the Earl of Wrexford (an aristocrat more interested in chemistry than aristocratic social life) and Charlotte Sloane (born an aristocrat but shunned by her family when she eloped to Italy with a penniless artist).   Charlotte leads a secret life as what we would call a political cartoonist.  This installment had a dearth of chemistry and only a few political cartoons, but it was a good mystery.  It takes place at the celebrations of the  British victory over Napolean and, in the afterward, Penrose tells us that her descriptions of the celebrations are historically accurate while her plot (stolen plans for a military weapon of great destructiveness) is fictional.  I enjoyed it.  I like this series.  Not as much as the Sebastien St. Cyr series by C.S. Harris, which is set in the same time period, but I do like it.  My biggest issue with it is that sometimes Penrose decides to have lots of narrative come out of characters' mouths.  People don't talk like that. And sometimes the narrative is not needed - trust the reader to put two and two together on their own.

• The Right Sort of Man by Allison Montclair.   I picked this up thinking it would be a fairly standard British mystery.  I knew it was set in post-WWII Britain.  I knew it involved two women solving a crime.  But it wasn't what I expected.  This was more like a novel that involved a mystery.  It is 1946.  London is in ruins.  Iris and Gwen, who met at the wedding of a mutual friend, have decided to start a business.  The Right Sort Marriage Bureau is basically a matchmaking business.  Gwen, from the upper upper classes, is a war widow with a six year old son, forced to live with her horrible in-laws.   Iris has a mysterious background from the War that She Can't Talk About.  It's hard to start a business but even harder when one of your clients is murdered and the police arrest the man you fixed her up with.  To save the reputation of the agency, Iris and Gwen try to prove he's innocent.   I liked this novel because it gives a really good picture of London right after the War.  And the characters talk like real people (albeit real people from the 1940's - there's a sort of 1940's movie dialog banter that goes on sometimes, but I don't mind that.)  There are sequels.  I will read them.

Those are my thoughts.  Remember, of the four doorways into a novel (plot, character, sense of place and language), I'm looking for the language doorway to be the biggest door in order for me to love a book.  (See my post about the Four Doorways).

Bookish Talk - January 2023

Some bookish moments I had this month:

• Three Pines Alert: One of my favorite book podcasts, Currently Reading, announced that they are going to take a deep dive into Louise Penny's Inspector Gamache books over the next few months.  They haven't yet announced when they will begin.  But they are going to have a series of special episodes where they just discuss one of the books, beginning with the first in the series and working their way through to the last book released. If you are a fan of these books you might want to tune in for these special episodes. 
• A Book Village: The New York Times had a story about a town in New York that turned itself into a book village.   Main street has eight independent book stores.  The town only has 400 residents.  But the town hosts several book festivals a year that attract people from all over.   The inspiration was the Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye which is a book mecca for readers. 
• A Really Long Book:  Egyptian archaeologists announced that they discovered a 16 meter long ancient papyrus in Saqqara, a necropolis of the ancient city of Memphis.  It contains texts from the Book of the Dead and could shed new light on ancient Egyptian beliefs.   (This combines my love of archaeology and books!)
• Poet Laureate:   A small village in Virginia has named its own poet laureate.  Every village should have a poet laureate.
• TS Eliot Prize:  Poet Anthony Joseph has won the 2022 TS Eliot Prize for his collection Sonnets for Albert, an autobiographical collection about growing up with an absent father. Joseph is a Trinidad born poet, novelist, academic and musician. 
• PEN Longlist Announced:   PEN America announced the longlist for its literary awards.  I hadn't heard of most of these works.  The prize categories span fiction, nonfiction, poetry, biography, essay, science writing, translation, and other categories.

Book Podcasts

I’ve been trying out book podcasts over the last year - always on the hunt for that new great read and they are good to listen to when I'm on a walk or right before bed with the light out.  And I love listening to people talk about books.   

I look for podcasts with discussions of books by readers. I do not like author interviews all that much.  I have little to no interest in hearing an author flogging her latest book.   If I like the author I have some interest in hearing an interview when they are not on book tour where they talk about their writing in general.  But mostly I'm looking for reviews/opinions about books. 

So, for instance, I subscribe to NPR's Book of the Day podcast but I never listen to it because it's all author interviews.  I subscribe just so I can see names of new books. 

Here's a list of some I've been listening to in the last six months:

• The Currently Reading Podcast.   This is a weekly favorite of mine. Usually this is hosted by the same two women - Meredith and Katie.   But there are also Mindy, Mary and Roxanna who fill in from time to time.  So you get a wide variety of views.  I like the format of this.  As they say "light on the chit chat, heavy on the book talk".    They usually start out by talking about that week's "bookish moment" in their lives and then move on to talk about what they have lately read (3 books each).  They don't always like the books, which is refreshing.  Then they have a "deep dive" into a book topic.   I like the podcast even though mostly my taste doesn't always align with theirs (although it aligns with Mindy's so I like when she is on). 
• Backlisted.  This is a British podcast that I never miss.  It shows up every other week (although it is now on hiatus).  The two regular hosts, John and Andy, have different guests each episode and they talk about older books. I've found some great backlist reads through these discussions. 
• The Book Club Review Podcast.   This is a monthly podcast with two hosts - Kate and Laura.  I listen to it but not always.  They sometimes talk about the books their book clubs are reading, sometimes they talk about other books.  Sometimes they have interviews (I seldom listen to those).  I don't always agree with them but they do talk about interesting books. 
• Books and Authors (BBC Radio 4 Podcast).   I think this is actually a BBC Radio 4 show that also shows up as a podcast.  There are two types of shows on this.  One is a pretty normal show about books, with some interviews and some reviews etc.  The other part is "A Good Read" with Harriet Gilbert where she and two guests all read the same three books and discuss them for 1/2 hour.  That's my favorite part.  I subscribe to this and always listen to A Good Read but sometimes skip the others depending on the topic. 
• Slightly Foxed:  The Real Readers Quarterly.  This is a new one I've been listening to. They talk about books that "are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal".  It supposedly comes out monthly but sometimes they skip months.  I haven't completely made up my mind on this one yet. 
• The SSR Podcast.  Host Alli Hoff Kosik and a different guest each week talk about old-school kids books.  I don't listen to all the episodes (I'm too old to have read some of the books they talk about) but I enjoy listening to discussions of the real oldies. 
• Novel Pairings.   I very much regularly disagree with the two hosts of this one (whose names I can't remember).  I've thought about stopping but they are moving into a series over the next few months on classic children's literature that intrigues me. 
• One Bright Book.  I found this through some people I follow on Twitter who decided to start their own podcast to discuss the books they liked.  There are three panelists (two women and one man) and they pick ... interesting ... books.   It comes out monthly and I subscribe. Some of the books are newer and some are older.  Half the time I've never heard of the book they've picked to discuss that month but that's ok. 
• Poetry Unbound.  This is a little different.  It's "an immersive reading of one poem" that comes out weekly.   The poem is read. Then the host, Padraig O Tuama analyses it.  Then he reads it through one more time.   It is short and I find it very relaxing. 

Those are the ones I'm enjoying right now.  

The Four Doorways

When I posted my 2022 reading summary last week, I mentioned that there were a number of novels I read that I thought were just "meh" but that someone else might like.  I thought I would try to explain that a little more because I don't want that to be taken the wrong way.  I don't want you to think I was saying something negative about those people who might like those novels.   That's not what I was saying.  I just meant that those novels didn't have what I was looking for in a book, but we all aren't looking for the same thing in our books. 

Nancy Pearl, the the former Executive Director of the Washington Center for the Book at the Seattle Public Library, is often asked to recommend books for people.  She uses what she calls her four "doorways" to help a person find the kind of book they like. 

It seems to me that all works of fiction and narrative nonfiction are broadly made up of four experiential elements: story, character, setting, and language. I call these “doorways,” because when we open a book, read the first few pages, and choose to go on, we enter the world of that book. And I’ve come to believe we can help readers better choose their next book by looking at the proportion of these four elements.

A book with story as its biggest doorway is one that readers describe as a page-turner, a book that they can’t put down because they desperately want to discover what happens next.

A book with character as its biggest doorway is a book in which readers feel so connected with the characters that when the book is over they feel they’ve lost someone dear to them.

Readers of novels in which setting is most prominent say things like “I felt like I was there,” or, as one man told me, “When I finished Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, I immediately made plans to go to New Mexico—I had to see for myself where it took place.”

A book in which language is the major doorway leads readers to utter sentences like “I read more slowly because I wanted to savor the language” or “I’m not even sure what the book is about, but I loved the way the author wrote.”

I feel that any good book will have all of those doorways, but the key question is which is the MAJOR doorway?  

The big doorway I'm looking for is language.  If I love the author's use of language, including how she structures the story,  I don't need as many of the other elements to be strong.   It's not that I don't need the other doorways, I do.  But I don't need all of them and there may be one that is substantially missing.  For instance, sometimes I like books that have little to no plot - which drives other people crazy.  

For me, a work of what is supposed to be literary fiction better have a big language doorway or I will probably judge it "meh".   Many best sellers fall into the "meh" category for me.  People love them because they are real page turners or because they have a fascinating character or a real sense of place and will tell me that it is a "great" book.  And it is.  For them.   But I might find it just a "meh" book if the language doorway is the smallest doorway. 

That doesn't mean I think it is terrible.  I just don't rank it up there with my "great books", or sometimes even "good books".  It's just ... fine.   But nothing special.   Why?  Because the writing didn't draw my in. 

Of course if the book has a great plot AND good characters that I feel attached to AND a good sense of place (one reason I love historical mysteries and/or mysteries set in other countries) I can overlook writing that is just fine but nothing special.  Hence all the mysteries I read.  But there is a big difference between the mysteries of, for instance C. S. Harris, who has a great writing style, and other mysteries where I notice that the dialog is clunky and people don't really talk like that. 

Another thing about the way I take in a book ... it is mostly about sound for me.   I can usually hear the way every character sounds, even the narrator.  I don't really SEE things, at least not like a movie in my mind.  Oh, I have a strong sense of color and movement.  If the characters are in a forest, I have a general sense of trees and light (or moonlight) coming through branches.  But the author could give me the name of every tree and, unless it's an important plot point, I don't see them specifically.   But if the author is at all good, I know specifically what every character sounds like. 

One of my favorite books a few years ago was Milkman by Anna Burns.  Other people I know couldn't get through it.  They, apparently, were not alone according to the LA Times:

... the book has been met with careful appreciation and lots of not particularly kind words in reviews stating that it is “eccentric,” “odd,” “difficult” and “complicated” — all meant to suggest it is a hard read. In the Guardian, Sam Leith, who is the literary editor of the Spectator, rounded up what he called the “epithets chosen” from reviews, including “brain-kneading” and “challenging” and “impenetrable” before making a case for the importance of such “difficult” books. The book has also been called “relentlessly internalized” and “baffling.” 

Most people I know who didn't like it found it was the language, the WAY it was written, that was hard to wrap their heads around.   And I think part of the problem was that the way it was written really required you to HEAR the main character's voice. Otherwise it would have seemed like just a lot of words.  

I don't think I had a problem with Milkman because I could "hear" the main character and her Irish accent very vividly.   So the language worked for me and brought me into the story where I discovered the plot and characters and, yes, a strong sense of place.  My friends who listened to the book on audio liked it much better than those who simply read it - and I think part of the reason was that it helped them hear the main character's voice since they were actually HEARING a voice. (It's one reason I'm not big on audiobooks; I like to hear the voice I hear in my head and not an actor's voice.)  

Of course, if I don't like the voice I am hearing, I find it hard to like the book.   That's why books that are written in the first person are sometimes difficult for me.   Often, to make the plot work the character either has to be unreliable (and sometimes a downright liar) or they have to be a little (or a lot) stupid.   I don't like the voices of stupid people in my head.  So, even if the plot is good, and the writing is fine, this will often be a "meh" book for me.  But it probably doesn't bother most other people. 

Anyway, that's why I judged a whole bunch of well-reviewed books as "meh" books.