Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Books ‘n’ Authors
SBD: Dangerous Ideas
Americans like to fight over dangerous ideas. Evolution, there’s a good one. God help us if we could have gotten here without God, you know? Democracy is another dangerous idea. See: Lamont vs. Lieberman and all the fear-fallout that occurred when the people’s candidate won the primary.
But this isn’t about politics. This is about another set of dangerous ideas, ideas that go largely unchallenged by the fundamentalists, that permeate our supermarkets, our libraries, our bookstores. Ideas that threaten the family, people!
I’m talking about that most insidious of genres, ROMANCE.
SBD: Do you really need that ring?
To get the taste of Trouble in High Heels out of my mouth, I picked up Jennifer Crusie’s Fast Women at our local used bookstore. I peeled through it in a week, record time for me.
Here’s the set-up: sisters-in-law Nell, Suze, and Margie (related through their marriages to the men of the Dysart family) are the eponymous fast women. Nell, our protag, has been through a rough divorce. Forty-something, cancer thin, and an emotional zombie, she takes a temp job at a detective agency, where she soon tries to run Gabe McKenna’s life and gets her post-divorce cherry popped by Gabe’s cousin Riley.
Despite the early Nell-on-Riley action, this is Gabe’s and Nell’s romance, with Suze + Riley playing a strong supporting role. An embezzling mystery (which soon becomes a murder mystery) provides a good slug of narrative drive, as does the verbal back-and-forth between Gabe and Nell. Margie is the weak link of the team, a bewildering character whom Crusie did little to develop.
For me, the most interesting part of Fast Women was Crusie’s dissection of the reasons why people get married. She seems to be saying that folks get married for the wrong reasons all the time, so it’s not enough to end that romance with a ring — the ring needs to be offered for the right reasons, too. As Nell speculates towards the end,
It should be harder to get married, she thought. You should have to take tests, get a learner’s permit, you should need more than a pulse and twenty bucks to get a license.
For today’s Smart Bitches Day post, I’d like to pose a question: is marriage a necessity for an HEA?
Let’s look at it. Happily ever after. We end up together, we’re bonded, we’ve vowed to be there for one another no matter what crap the fates throw our way. Sure sounds like marriage to me, but that narrowminded opinion shows disrespect to those folks who have bonded for life without license, ring, or ceremony. Alan Rickman and his gal, for example. And what about all the married couples who are living unhappily ever after, or have made a farce of their vows? Surely happily ever after should not require a wedding ring.
Opinions?
D.
PS: There’s even some girl-on-girl action in Fast Women. I shit you not. I would have taken it a good deal farther, but that’s me for you.
SBD: Delivering the Goods
From the start, the reader knows he’s in competent hands, or at least the hands of a competent publisher. We get a slick cover featuring shapely calves and stiletto heels, with oodles of diamonds on the floor to suggest the promise of intrigue. On the back, a hot-lookin’ Christina Dodd beams with confidence.
So what if the premise sounds hokey: new to Chicago, novice lawyer Brandi Michaels gets dumped by her husband, has a night of passion with a tall, dark, and mysterious Italian count, then finds out she’s being stalked, requiring her to depend upon the Count for protection. Everything else seems to bode well, including a competent opening scene. Eleven-year-old Brandi watches as her dad dumps her mom. We soon learn that Brandi has insecurities about being perceived as stupid (despite being “one of the smartest people in the country”) and hangups vis a vis her absent daddy. Nice — strong character development right from the get-go.
But I think you would all agree that a contract exists between the author and the reader. I’ll buy your book, and you’ll deliver the goods. In this case, “delivering the goods” means convincing me of the passion between these two and making me care enough about them to cheer when they hook up in the end. At a minimum, I should believe (A) we’re in Chicago, (B) the hero is Italian (aside from an ability to speak the language and execute, oh God, not another “typically Italian hand gesture”), (C) the author knows something about jewel thieves and the mob.
Sadly, Trouble in High Heels is unconvincing on all counts. Since Dodd’s main characters never spring to life, neither does my interest. Brandi is a stereotype, a statuesque beauty (and smart, too! Not dumb, really!) as is Mr. Dark-Mysterious-Sexy, Roberto. Their passionate weekend happens largely off-screen, yet we’re asked to believe that their desire for one another is damned near irresistible. In such a situation, skimping on the sex is a capital show-don’t-tell offense.
The supporting cast seems unoriginal, cribbed from the movies. Roberto’s father is a knock-off of William Hickey’s character in Prizzi’s Honor, right down to the “Have a cookie, dear?” line, and the chief baddy is a stock Robert Loggia-style thug.
The worst failure-to-deliver is Brandi herself. Trouble in High Heels packs a mystery (is Roberto a notorious jewel thief? What is he up to, anyway?) which befuddles our heroine right up to the novel’s climax. One of the smartest people in the country? Uh-uh, honey, not when I can figure things out 150 pages before you. Talk about obtuse.
Christina Dodd’s wordsmithing lacks little polish on a technical level. She strings the words together perfectly well, knows how to construct a scene, doesn’t fumble the dialog. Yet there’s no heart here, no sense of caring.
Okay, Beth, is that bitchy enough for you?
D.
Thirteen books I loved as a kid
I don’t know how well these books stand up over time. Fond memories do not often equal a pleasurable reread. Recently, I tried to reread Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain series and thought it a pale imitation of Tolkien. And I’m not even all that crazy about Tolkien.
A list like this is a biography of sorts — or, at the very least, a growth chart. Here we go.
1. Sailor Jack and Bluebell, by Selma and Jack Wasserman. I’m amazed you can still find this book online. Why do I remember it? (A) It was the first book I memorized and was able to ‘read,’ and (B) as a 4-year-old, it provided no end of chortling entertainment, owing to the wilful mispronunciation of Bluebell as ‘blueballs.’ Oh, I was quite a card.
2. Curious George, by H. A. Rey. With my sister’s help, I learned to read thanks to the Curious George series and the L.A. Herald Examiner Sunday Comics. (Oh, Prince Val, will you ever come out of the closet? And Lois was one of my early crushes. Look at the rack on her, will you?)
3. Amazon Adventure, by Willard Price. Here’s the set-up: brothers Hal and Roger travel the world with their father, who captures exotic animals for a metropolitan zoo. In this, the first novel of the series, dad gets taken out of the picture early (stabbed by spies, or something like that — I haven’t read this book in nearly four decades!) so the boys have to finish the job on their own, battling Amazonians (nothing PC about this book, no sirree), army ants, anacondas, and some sort of predatory cat.
Recently, I picked up a copy of this book, thinking Jake might like the series. Atrocious writing, laughable dialog — I couldn’t get past the first chapter. As a kid, I read the whole series.
4. Dorp Dead, by Julia Cunningham. Orphan boy gets adopted by ladder-building freak who keeps him locked up in a cage. Creeeepy. According to the publisher, this novel “dramatically changed children’s literature in the 20th century.” I don’t know if that’s hyperbole, but I do recall this book was way different than anything I’d read up to that point (3rd of 4th grade, that is).
5. Bless the Beasts and the Children, by Glendon Swarthout. Maybe I liked the tragic ending. Maybe I was a closet conservationist as a kid. Or maybe I was a twisted little perv who loved the scene in the movie when the in-crowd kids piss all over our hapless heroes. Yeah, one of those. I certainly didn’t love it for the sappy Carpenters song.
6. The Tripods series, by John Christopher. Another early introduction to tragedy — and I’m still a sap for unhappy endings.
7. Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. Even as a kid I understood that other little kids were beasts. Not me, of course. The rest of ’em. Golding merely confirmed what I had already suspected.
8. Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart. I went through a long post-apocalyptic phase wherein I inhaled Earth Abides, Erewhon, Lucifer’s Hammer, and God only knows what else. That’s about the time I saw the movie A Boy and His Dog, one of my all-time favorite SF films. What I remember best about Earth Abides: a stranger comes to live with a group of survivors. Somehow, the men in the group figure out that this new guy has VD. They ask themselves: we have a good thing going here. Do we really want to have some guy with the clap screwing our women? And so they kill him. That made a big impression on my as a kid.
Another near-apocalyptic short story I remember well and still love: Larry Niven’s Inconstant Moon, a romantic story about a man and woman on the eve of disaster. Here’s the full text.
9. Relativity, by ???. From 2nd grade until 6th grade, I must have checked this book out twenty times. In the beginning, I loved the bug-eyed looks the older kids gave me when I read it in the library. As I got older, I loved the book itself. Great explanations of the twin paradox and the expanding universe, the red-shift, and the Doppler effect. All of the math got stuck into the appendix (I remember puzzling over the Lorentz transformations — way beyond me, even in 6th grade). Those were the days, when a guy could impress girls by reading a gnarly-looking book.
10. To Live Again, by Robert Silverberg. What if you could collect the souls of famous or talented dead people and stuff ’em into your skull? And what if they didn’t particularly like being there? Sadly, my memories of this one far exceed the experience of re-reading. I tried it recently and couldn’t even get through the first 50 pages.
11. Inferno, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Thirty years ago, Niven and Pournelle took a cheap shot at Kurt Vonnegut by imagining his gravestone in hell, with the inscription, So it Goes. Well, ha-ha, Vonnegut’s still going strong (well, he’s still going, at any rate). Despite this cheap shot, I enjoyed Inferno well enough to read it a few times. It’s a modernization of Dante’s Inferno, in case you hadn’t guessed, and one of the better fictional treatments of hell, in my opinion.
12. All the old Vonnegut: Breakfast of Champions, The Sirens of Titan, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, Mother Night, Slaughterhouse Five, and especially, Cat’s Cradle. As a pre-teen and young teenager, these were my primers on cynicism, religious skepticism, and irony.
13. Xaviera! Her Continuing Adventures, by Xaviera Hollander. I lost my literary cherry to Ms. Hollander, the woman who fed my teenage obsession with sex. I don’t remember this book as being erotic, so much as nuts-and-bolts graphic. Thanks for all the woodies, Xaviera.
D.
Leave a message in the comments, and I’ll give you some cool linky love below.
Pat’s List of Literary Wunderkinds (wunderkinden? help me out, Gabriele)
Invisible Lizard has 13 of his own favorites, too
Thirteen sucky flowers from Kate (seven, actually, but since there’s multiple flowers in each photo, we’ll let her slide)
Erin O’Brien searches for her G-spot, with a little help from her friends (so it’s not a 13. so sue me.)
Technorati tag: thursday thirteen
Dish from an insider
Over at DailyKos, Swordsmith dishes on publishing. Who’s that, you ask?
A bit of background: I’m the author of nine published books and a former NYC editor, who still does a fair amount of work for various publishing firms. I teach writing and book publishing at the university level, and remain tied into the publishing world (particularly science fiction and fantasy) on various levels. I’ve written and edited both fiction and nonfiction, and I’ll talk about both in this series.
The series thus far:
Part 1 – Why bad things happen to good books.
Part 2 – Avoiding publishing scams.
Part 3 – Literary Conventions (with an emphasis of SF Conventions)
Part 4 – Book Packagers.
Good stuff.
D.
Bailing out on a Crusie, and a giveaway
Yes, I know I should have consulted with Candy before buying Jennifer Crusie’s Faking It. Can I say anything good about this book? No. Fifty pages into it and I’m bailing.
Here’s why, in ascending order of importance.
1. Poorly written, poorly edited. If my internal editor is having more fun with a novel than I am, something is wrong.
2. Rush job. Close cousin to #1, I know, but here’s the thing: so many of the conversations leave me wondering, “Huh?” that I suspect Crusie zipped through this without re-reading. Or perhaps I’m just that thick.
3. An implausible story line which relies too much on coincidence. ‘Nuff said.
4. Forced humor. I loved Bet Me and What the Lady Wants mostly for Crusie’s sense of humor. I know she can do better than this.
But the most important reason I’m dumping Faking It:
5. I don’t give a damn about the H or the H, I don’t like them, and whether they hate each other forever’n’ever or screw like minks for the last 100 pages of the book, I don’t care. What’s missing is believability — they don’t feel like real people to me.
***
You want a book recommendation? Here’s a book recommendation: buy Carl Hiaasen’s Basket Case. Read it for pleasure or study the man’s technique; he’s a master.
I really ought to write a full review on Basket Case, and perhaps I will some day soon. For now, though, I’m spent. I slept poorly last night, then worked until 5 PM in the OR. (More tonsils. And more tonsils. And more tonsils.) I squeezed in 45 minutes in the gym, then popped back over to the hospital for Surgery Committee Meeting. Oh, the horror: it lasted until just past 8:30. Forgive me if my muse is chattering like a Hellraiser cenobite.
I’m torn over whether to write a crappy Thursday Thirteen or bag it altogether. I think I’ll leave the decision until tomorrow, which means I’ll probably bag it altogether. Ah, well. You’ll live. I have a terrific idea for a TT, but I don’t want to ruin it by writing a tired rush job tonight. (Here’s the idea: Thirteen Horrible Diseases. One of my top picks would be PAM. I’ll let you puzzle over that one.)
But back to Basket Case, and the giveaway: I’ll send a copy of Carl Hiaasen’s Basket Case to one randomly chosen commenter. Lurkers, this is your time to come out of the woodwork.
Suggested topic for comments (if you’re a lurker who doesn’t comment “because I never know what to say”):
Think about a book that you stuck with for a short while (say, less than 100 pages) then gave up on. Why did you stick with it for as long as you did, and why did you finally give up?
Wish me luck getting sleep tonight. Insomnia can be a real bitch sometimes.
D.
End logic
Of all the books you have read, what are your favorite endings?
I’ve been thinking about endings ever since Tam wrote about it (scroll down to June 29, but along the way, don’t miss yesterday’s post on method, or the July 1st post on discipline). Tam’s bottom line:
Main storyline’s finished? Major support threads dealt with? Fine, you bastard, you’re OVER!!
Leave it to Tam to end her books with a bloody ax 😉 Anyway, I began wondering whether I could find any common themes among books I consider well-written. In the examples which follow, I’ll try to avoid spoilers, but I ain’t making any promises. I’m hoping you’ll think of your favorite endings and share some ideas with me in the comments. I’m especially interested in you mass devourers of romance. When all of the novels end in an HEA, what constitutes a good ending versus a bad ending?
On to the examples.
Holy crap, this is good
As part of my current assignment for Tangent, I’m reading “Going to See the Beast” by William Sanders.
What a delight. I’m only a third of the way through, but I don’t want it to ever end. Let’s see: we have Bobby Joe, Joe Bob, Ann Coulter*, and the Antichrist. Who could ask for anything more?
Go. Read it. Come back later and I’ll have more Seattle-foo for ya.
D.
*I figured it out from one of the first sentences: “She give me this little bitty smile, without showing no teeth. It made her look exactly like her picture in the newspapers that she used to write for.” Bingo! I always knew she’d be Left Behind.
Note way cool nude-in-nude-in-nude effect
Well, not really by Walnut, but you wouldn’t believe how tough it is to change the author stamp.
Erin and I met when we guest-blogged together at Demented Michelle’s place. The Demented One will be joining us shortly. What struck me most about Erin, since I’m a typical shallow guy who thinks with his testicles, is how cute she is, and how incredibly willing she is to bare her skin on her blog. We’re a lot alike in that regard, except her skin is worth looking at and mine is all covered up with hair.
Without further ado, here’s the lovely Erin O’Brien:
Greetings Hoffmanians. My name is Erin O’Brien and I am a writer in Cleveland, Ohio.
Was that not a nice, simple, polite introduction (nude picture not withstanding)?
It always amazes me how people introduce themselves and present themselves on the Internet, particularly in the blogosphere. Take our humble host, for instance. Although I have never met the good doctor, I know that he has a proclivity for earthy oral experiences. Now, I find nothing wrong with this. In fact, I find it refreshing in our increasingly sanitized, deodorized and hairless world. But can you imagine approaching someone at a cocktail party, someone you have never met and saying, “I love the smell. If I’m getting freshly washed goods, I feel cheated,” of the feminine … er … experience?
Granted, it seems the vast majority of bloggers go under anonymous names or titles. (Note at this juncture this does not include me or Dr. Hoffman.)
I, on the other hand, pride myself in taking the higher moral ground. Instead of announcing the status of my pubic area, I merely referred to the controversy surrounding how hirsute a woman should be. The resulting post, which was more or less a take-the-day-off filler post, garnered a flurry of commentary.
People love to talk about this stuff online. Look how much traffic the same topic stirred up here. Enough about shaved genitalia. Now onto me.
BUY my novel, Harvey & Eck!
READ the funniest thing I ever wrote.
MARVEL over the fact that I watched a bunch of people masturbate and got paid for it.
VISIT WITH OBSESSION The Erin O’Brien Owner’s Manual for Human Beings.
This is the light and the truth. This is the sound of falling water.
Erin O’Brien
www.erinobrien.us
erin-obrien.blogspot.com/
If I had any hair to pull out . . .
Occasionally, I visit one of our local used book stores. It takes me a year or so to forget the score and there I am, back again, amazed by the sight of hundreds of books, none of them worth reading.
Me: Where do you keep your hard-boiled?
Bookstore person: (blank stare)
Me: You know, hard-boiled, noir . . .
Bookstore person: (blank stare)
Me:Â Like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett.
Bookstore person: (blank stare)
Me (running from store): Aiieeeeee!
***
But seriously.
You learn a lot about a community by looking at the contents of their used book stores. There’s a reason why the best used book stores are in places like Berkeley and San Francisco. Interesting, diverse population = interesting, diverse used books.
Needless to say, I can’t wait for Seattle.
D.