RTW: Best Book in October

Road Trip Wednesday is hosted by YA Highway. This week's topic is: What's the best book you read in October?

Thanks to a (capital-m) Move, October was not a huge reading month for me. Also, I was reading Lady Chatterley's Lover, which is an incredible book for a lot of reasons but not exactly a page-turner.

Hence, victory was pretty easy this month for M. T. Anderson's Feed. Although--if I had read 20 books in October and all of them were fantastic, Feed still could have won. I am going to highlight one particularly awesome line one more time:

"I don't know when they first had feeds. Like maybe, fifty or a hundred years ago. Before that, they had to use their hands and their eyes. Computers were all outside the body. They carried them around outside of them, in their hands, like if you carried your lungs in a briefcase and opened it to breathe."
Isn't it so true that already we're so symbiotic with technology that it's like an extension of our bodies? Think of all the people you see walking around in the grocery store with Bluetooth headsets on. M. T. Anderson, you are a genius.

Time for me to go watch Oh? Wow! Thing!

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Back that MSS up

First things first: My sister is tiny, and so is her derriere.* Why is that relevant?

Well, the first time she visited me after I moved to New York, I was super excited to show her my little shoebox of an apartment and my matchbox of a bedroom. I didn't even let her put down her bags, so she was carrying a large duffel bag as I dragged her around (for all of 20 seconds the tour took; the apartment was that small), and as we squeezed through the doorway into my bedroom (door couldn't open all the way in order for bed to fit in the room), her butt knocked over a glass of water on my desk.

Problem was, my laptop was sitting next to said glass.
Ruh-roh.

(But it 100% wasn't the fault of her butt.)

Commence frantic attempts to drain the laptop and panicked calls to Apple. They told me to keep my poor iBook turned off for 72 hours, then reboot to assess the damage. Of course, the warranty had just expired.
I was lucky and when I booted it up after an anxious, computer-free weekend it worked. It thrived for another year until it crashed due to old age. Yet the water-glass-tiny-butt incident taught me an important lesson. Okay, two lessons:

1) Keep liquids in a sippy cup by your computer. [My sis bought me a Little Mermaid giant sippy cup that weekend and I still use it around my computer. NERD ALERT!]
2) ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR WORK!

Before that accident, I was very, very, very, very bad about backing up my work. I didn't have an external hard drive, I didn't use a thumb drive, I didn't even email docs to myself to save them in Gmail. Now, I am obsessed with backing up my files. I literally back up my hard drive every time I use my computer for writing. Maybe it's overkill, but I'd rather err on the side of saving my work than having to recreate it.

I've heard too many horror stories of laptops dying and then backpacks with external HDs inside being stolen and years of work being lost. They give me the chills. So: get a hard drive; start emailing files to yourself; use Mozy or whatever; just do it.

Back that MSS up.

*There wouldn't be a problem if her butt were big, though. I do like big butts, and I cannot lie.

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Lady Chatterley's Lover

I started reading Lady Chatterley's Lover for Banned Books Week, but it took me, erm, a little longer than a week to get through it. I won't lie--I had to work at reading this one; it was a this-is-good-because-of-the-historical-context-and-themes read, not an I-love-these-characters-and-the-plot-is-gripping-must-read-more! read.

I knew going in that it was reputed to have "explicit" sexual content, but I kinda expected it to be explicit for 1928--I mean, it was published smack-dab in the middle of Prohibition. So "explicit" would be, what, a kiss? Some euphemisms standing in for the act of love?

Um, no. [blushes furiously]

And now for a little censorship history mini-lesson: Did you know that Penguin in the UK went to trial for obscenity when they published it in 1960? They had to prove that it had "literary merit" to escape conviction (subjective, much?). The 1961 edition then had to include this disclaimer: "For having published this book, Penguin Books were prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act, 1959 at the Old Bailey in London from 20 October to 2 November 1960. This edition is therefore dedicated to the twelve jurors, three women and nine men, who returned a verdict of 'Not Guilty' and thus made D. H. Lawrence's last novel available for the first time to the public in the United Kingdom."

In the U.S., it wasn't published until 1959, although the Gotham Book Mart famously sold it.

How strange is it that a book about two consenting adults falling in love, finding spiritual "wholeness" through their relationship (physical and emotional), couldn't be published here until 50 years ago--just because it describes sex. (Okay, it describes it a lot. A LOT. But it's never gratuitous and always central to the story.) Apparently the girl who wrote the Duke sex thesis has attracted book-deal attention, and Tucker Max (whatever your opinion of him, I don't judge) is a bestselling author--how much things have changed.

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Win things!

Head's up: Confessions form Suite 500 is giving away a copy of Nightshade. Enter here through Wednesday, October 20th.

And leave a comment on the YA Audiobook Addict blog to win a signed Rick Riordan audiobook.

But wait--there's more! Lisa Desrochers is having multiple contests on her blog: http://lisadesrochers.blogspot.com/

Good luck!

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Literary Tatts

Galley Cat posted on Friday about the just-released The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide: Kurt Vonnegut, e. e. cummings, and Shel Silverstein are the Most Popular Literary Tattoo Inspirations

Here's the book trailer:

The Word Made Flesh - book trailer from Tattoolit on Vimeo.

I might not be inked myself, but I LOVE THIS. I love the idea of people being so passionate about a phrase/sentence/author/book that they make it a part of their physical person. If I were to get a tattoo, I would get a literary one.

What would my tattoo say/depict? Hmm. That's hard to say. Here are some contenders:

"You don't want to hear the story of my life, and anyway I don't want to tell it, I want to listen" from Mary Oliver's poem "Dogfish" [Actually, there are many lines from that poem I'd tattoo on myself. I love me some Mary Oliver.]


"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Last line of The Great Gatsby


"And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea." T.S. Eliot, from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock


"If you aren't cute, you may as well be clever." David Sedaris, from Me Talk Pretty One Day


"I am my own heroine." Marie Bashkirtseff, from her journal [Honestly, I think this would win. Although I would need to MAKE SURE that the tattoo artist gets that final e, otherwise. . . .]

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John Irving writes for young readers, not uptight adults

The Letters of Note blog "is an attempt to gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos." I wish I'd caught this amazing letter from John Irving to a librarian at Plymouth Regional High School during Banned Books Week. Best lines: "I imagine, when I write, that I am writing for young readers—not for uptight adults. . . . I thank you for having the courage to stand up for a novel that is utterly sympathetic to young people." (Click the link above for the full text and transcript)

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Feed

M. T. Anderson's Feed: The most frightening book I have read, possibly ever.

Also one of the funniest. And most creative.

From Publisher's Weekly (because I do not like writing synopses):
In this chilling novel, Anderson (Burger Wuss; Thirsty) imagines a society dominated by the feed a next-generation Internet/television hybrid that is directly hardwired into the brain. Teen narrator Titus never questions his world, in which parents select their babies' attributes in the conceptionarium, corporations dominate the information stream, and kids learn to employ the feed more efficiently in School. But everything changes when he and his pals travel to the moon for spring break. There Titus meets home-schooled Violet, who thinks for herself, searches out news and asserts that "Everything we've grown up with the stories on the feed, the games, all of that it's all streamlining our personalities so we're easier to sell to." Without exposition, Anderson deftly combines elements of today's teen scene, including parties and shopping malls, with imaginative and disturbing fantasy twists. "Chats" flow privately from mind to mind; Titus flies an "upcar"; people go "mal" (short for "malfunctioning") in contraband sites that intoxicate by scrambling the feed; and, after Titus and his friends develop lesions, banner ads and sit-coms dub the lesions the newest hot trend, causing one friend to commission a fake one and another to outdo her by getting cuts all over her body. Excerpts from the feed at the close of each chapter demonstrate the blinding barrage of entertainment and temptations for conspicuous consumption. Titus proves a believably flawed hero, and ultimately the novel's greatest strength lies in his denial of and uncomfortable awakening to the truth. This satire offers a thought-provoking and scathing indictment that may prod readers to examine the more sinister possibilities of corporate- and media-dominated culture.

This is my favorite line in the whole book:
"I don't know when they first had feeds. Like maybe, fifty or a hundred years ago. Before that, they had to use their hands and their eyes. Computers were all outside the body. They carried them around outside of them, in their hands, like if you carried your lungs in a briefcase and opened it to breathe."
The image of carrying your lungs outside of your body--it's so striking. What an incredible simile.
All of the language in Feed is incredible. The dialogue and slang is dead-on. Can't you imagine a future world in which the most popular show is "Oh? Wow! Thing!" I mean, the gossip part of Yahoo is already called OMG.

Feed scares me because I feel like we're already living in its society, minus some technological advancements that are only X years away. (This Gizmodo post kind of underscores how exponentially technology changes and its effects on different generations.) When this book was written (pre-2002), we didn't have iPhones or Facebook or Twitter or Foursquare. Now the eponymous feed, in which people get live updates from corporations and contacts 24/7, is eerily close to current technology. A place as consumerist and ADHD and superficial as the America of Feed is nightmarish to me, although I'm sure some people would be excited about tech advancements like that. I mean, I'm already a semi-luddite who refuses to get a phone with internet.

Feed's plot was as good as the writing: fast-paced, witty, emotionally resonant. This is another book that I can't stop talking about. So timely, so provocative, so good.

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RTW: Fave First Lines

Road Trip Wednesday is hosted by YA Highway. This week's topic is: A novel's opening is like a pick up line. If it's good, you might take it home. If it's bad... well. You know. What are your favorite first lines?

Funny you should ask, because I've been marvelling over the first line of my most recent read, M. T. Anderson's Feed:

We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.

I love that line because: 1) right away, it communicates the (totally unique) physical setting, 2) it also tells the reader that this story is in the future or some kind of alternate universe, in which people can casually go to the moon, 3) it shows that the narrator was unimpressed by the moon, which is curious, 4) the voice is great--phrases like "completely suck" are natural slang expressions and give you a big hint that the narrator is young but not a little kid.

That's a lot to get across in one sentence. I read that and thought, Tell me more.

I also really like the first line of Daisy Whitney's The Mockingbirds:

Three things I know this second: I have morning breath, I'm naked, and I'm waking up next to a boy I don't know. 

Again, it instantly captures a setting (in bed, waking up--but it's an unfamiliar bed and bed-mate) and voice. I love that Alex, the narrator, divulges first that she has morning breath. That makes her so relatable. Next she tells that she's naked--that's saucy. When she divulges that she doesn't know the boy, the reader goes, Wait, what? How's that? Bingo! Reader = wooed.

(I really want to share the first line of Fumped, but I'm keeping it classified for the time being. [insert sad face] I can tell you that it's dictionary definition, though.)

Update: Here's an evolution of first lines from Fumped, all of which have been axed at some point.
1.0: I plopped down on the floor in the upstairs bathroom, the backs of my legs slowly adjusting to the cold tiles.
2.0: You're not the only person this has happened to—I've gotten dumped by my best friend.
3.0: Last year in History we learned about the volcano that destroyed ancient Pompeii, and how the ruins show life as it was the moment before disaster struck—plates on the table, full of food that was about to be eaten. [I know--WTF was going on with this one?!]

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Do your characters have to be "likable"?

Salon's Laura Miller asked that question in a recent installment of The Salon Reading Club:

All of this raises a question I've been wanting to ask since we started, concerning an observation people often make about Franzen's (and many other authors') characters, which is that they are "unlikable." I confess, I've grown to hate such remarks. It makes me feel like we're all back in grammar school, talking about which kids are "nice" and which kids are "mean." It's a willfully naive and blinkered way to approach a work of literature.

(Warning if you go to the link: the club is discussing Franzen's Freedom and may contain spoilers.)

It's a great question for writers. What if you want to write about a character who is unlikable, or annoying, or deeply flawed in ways which might alienate your readers? Certainly, many famous and iconic characters are neither nice nor entirely relatable: think Humbert Humbert, Heathcliff, Harriet the Spy, Hamlet. Flaws are essential to those characters--they make them who they are, and make them interesting.

My knee-jerk response, as a writer, was that it doesn't matter if a character is nice or likable. I was thrilled that Laura Miller found likability concerns "naive." I bristled at the idea that "likability" should be a concern while writing, particularly at the expense of creating realistic, nuanced, complex characters.

But. Maybe likability is often conflated with relatability. A 100% nice and likable character is boring and alienating, but a mean character can be alienating, too. Relatable characters don't have to be nice, or mean, all the time--and they are interesting. Relatability is important because it connects the reader with the story and compels him/her to keep turning the pages. Try reading about an abhorrent main character after 50 pages--with a few exceptions, it's tiresome. People are so busy, and there are so many books to read--if you can't hook your reader somehow, you will lose them. Writing relatable characters is a good way to hook your reader.

A great example from my recent reading: Elspeth in Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry is not a nice person. At times, she's charming and likable; other time, she's horrifying. Yet there is enough of a balance of relatable actions with shocking ones that it's easy to identify with her (at least partially) and want to read more of her story. Elspeth is complex, and trying to solve the riddle of who she is is part of the appeal of the book.

What do you think about likability? Do you have a hard time reading unlikable characters? Writing them?

*Understatement of the century.

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The Art of Non-Conformity

I never would have picked this book up on my own, so I'm glad that the ARC fairy dropped a copy on my desk a month or two ago. Nothing against self-help/career books, but I tend to spend my precious reading time on fiction and narrative NF. Still, when the back jacket proclaimed:

“You don’t have to live your life the way other people expect you to. You can do good things for yourself and make the world a better place at the same time. Here’s how to do it.”

I was intrigued.

Chris Guillebeau is a convincing tour guide on this journey to add value to one's life and work and challenge the status quo. I loved his declaration that he subscribes to a "guru-free" philosophy and isn't going to tell anyone else how to live his/her life--just provide his own experiences as a motivating example. The whole point of the book, as I interpreted it, is that people too often sleepwalk through their lives and careers, doing things they might not enjoy because they are conventional and appear to be the only, or best/most mature/traditional path.

I liked the dual emphasis on personal fulfillment and charitable giving. Guillebeau put his money where his mouth is--he's giving 100% of his author proceeds to a charity water project in Ethiopia. I loved how he emphasized personal satisfaction as the ultimate goal, not money nor power. How refreshing.

As happens in many self-help books, after a point the reader starts to want concrete advice on how to make these exciting changes, not another personal anecdote from the author or inspiring generalities. But when the book is about finding your own individual source of career and personal fulfillment--there is no checklist you can follow to success. You have to figure that stuff out for yourself. That's kind of the point.

So if you need a little motivation to make a career change, or take the plunge and enroll in grad school, or start writing that book you've been plotting in your head for years--this little tome might give you the nudge you need.

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Ghost Writer

The September issue of Smithsonian ran a fascinating story about author Patience Worth, the 17th-century ghost who (allegedly) channeled her fiction through a 20th-century housewife, Pearl Curran.

From Gioia Diliberto's article:
Speaking through a Ouija board operated by Pearl Lenore Curran, a St. Louis housewife of limited education, Patience Worth was nothing short of a national phenomenon in the early years of the 20th century. . . . Almost overnight, Patience transformed Pearl Curran from a restless homemaker plagued by nervous ailments into a busy celebrity who traveled the country giving performances starring Patience. Night after night Pearl, a tall, blue-eyed woman in a fashionable dress, would sit with her Ouija board while her husband, John, recorded Patience’s utterances in shorthand. Those who witnessed the performances, some of them leading scholars, feminists, politicians and writers, believed they’d seen a miracle. “I still confess myself completely baffled by the experience,” Otto Heller, dean of the Graduate School at Washington University in St. Louis, recalled years later. Through Pearl, Patience claimed to be an unmarried Englishwoman who had emigrated to Nantucket Island in the late 1600s and been killed in an Indian raid. For three centuries, she said, she’d searched for an earthly “crannie” (as in “cranium”) to help her fulfill a burning literary ambition. She’d found it at last in Pearl.

You can read the full text here: Patience Worth: Author From the Great Beyond

The case of Patience/Pearl brings up some questions about the writing process and authorship. Did Pearl really think that Patience was channeling stories through her? Or was Patience a persona that Pearl created to inspire her writing? The paranormal aspect certainly led to Pearl's fame and success as a writer--fiction under her own name was not as well-received. Pearl might not have been able to obtain success and literary stardom on her own, due to attitudes toward women and literature during her time. Attributing her stories to a ghost, strangely enough, gave her the credibility she needed to get published. Maybe that was Pearl's intent all along? But how does that explain her vast knowledge of the 17th century, despite her lack of formal education?

Even authors who don't attribute their work to ghosts and spirits have likened the creative process to a spiritual event--Stephen King calls writing "an act of telepathy" in On Writing, "a meeting of the minds" between the reader and the author. Whatever her motivation, Pearl Curran took the telepathy in her writing literally--and made her story as an author (whether it's truth or fiction) all the more interesting.

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Revision Trick: Kill the Internet

Despite the fact that I spent approximately 27 hours of my 62-hour weekend sleeping, 3 eating and cooking, 1 running, and at least 20 on moving-related tasks--I still edited 100 pages (yes, those revisions are never-ending. Seriously). Wahh? How is that possible, you ask?

No internet.

And no TV.

Sure, I'm a dedicated and disciplined writer, and when I set goals for myself, I mostly meet them. But that doesn't mean that I don't fall prey to the Procrastination Monster. And the #1 way I like to procrastinate? The internet. It's funny how after I finish revising a chapter, I tend to wander over to Twitter, or check out some blogs, or watch cat videos on You Tube, or read the news. . . . Or check the weather, then try to find the perfect new pair of wellies/gloves/coat/sandals/etc. Suddenly it's 30 minutes later. Or 45. Or an hour. Crap. Where did my 3 hours to write go?

Because I just moved, the internet isn't hooked up yet. I don't have cable (very sad), but the TV isn't hooked up yet anyway so it's not like I could watch it if I had it. Currently during my writing breaks, my procrastination options are limited. It's been awesome.*

After two days of internet-free writing, I feel like my impulse to check Gmail every 200 words is lessened, if not gone entirely. I wonder, if I never had a high-speed connection to tempt me, how much more would I get done?

So if you're having trouble focusing on some pesky revisions, turn off Airport or unplug the modem. Or, go crazy and put your cable on hold for a month. See how much you can do in the ensuing quiet. Bask in the productivity. (Of course, you won't get to Tweet about how efficient you are--but IMHO, it's worth it.)

*I don't mean to offend those of you who love TV and the internet. I myself am a TV-lover and internet addict. This post is less about TV/Internet being bad and more about how giving up them from time to time can help your writing and productivity. So put down those pitchforks.

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