Novelish

Book News & Reviews

• Sara’s Holds Shelf reviewed Elizabeth Knox’s Dreamhunter. She recommends it for fans of Philip Pullman, which is enough to get my attention.
• George R. R. Martin posted an update on his LiveJournal. A Dance with Dragons is going slowly, but making some progress; he’s hired an assistant.
• Fantasy Book Critic reviewed The Sharing Knife by Lois McMaster Bujold. It’s going on my list of books to read at some point in the future, I think.
• Mary Modern is coming out next month and looks promising - I’m really enjoying literary fiction that includes some elements of fantasy lately. (Found this on Fantasy Book Critic’s list of July books, but the post has mysteriously disappeared since.)
• It strikes me that this is all decidedly fantasy-genre in nature, which wasn’t my intent. I did finish Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend. My review of that is in the works.

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You may have noticed the Google ads on the sidebar by now. I’ll be experimenting with different positions, but I’m going to try and keep them from getting in the way if at all possible.

If you really don’t like them, get Firefox and install the Adblock Plus extension. It removes the majority of web advertising.

“Rockin’ Girl Blogger”

Tiffany of the RockStories blog presented me with this shiny award:

As I understand it, I’m supposed to pass it on to five other bloggers. The idea of that is a little intimidating, since I’m so new to the blogosphere, but I’ll try.

1. Bookshelves of Doom - Book reviews, news, and other miscellaneous thoughts - more or less the same type of thing as Novelish.
2. Maddy, who is guest blogging on Neil Gaiman’s journal for two weeks (starting June 20th). She’s done a great job of it so far.
3. Arin i Asolde - Quite possibly the best collection of fiction writing advice available on the internet.
4. Miss Snark - She’s no longer blogging, but she still deserves it.
5. Violent Acres - Just because I enjoy reading it when I have the time.

I should say that these are based wholly on whether I like them personally - nothing else. I’m not sure if “rockin” is a term I’d use to describe any of them.

Come to think of it, I wouldn’t describe Novelish that way either, but oh well.

ISBN: 978-1570615009
Pages: 304 (paperback)
Author: Nancy Pearl

Most of what I could say about this book is also true of Book Lust, which I reviewed last month - the largest difference being that this covers young adult and children’s literature exclusively. Instead of repeating myself, I’ll add a few additional thoughts.

Though Book Crush gave me a few dozen titles which may turn out worthwhile, I was less impressed overall.

I read just about every dragon story I could lay my hands on when I was younger, so YA books featuring dragons is a topic I know a fair bit about. Book Crush’s list of them seemed notably incomplete - Dragons of a Lost Sea (and sequels) and Dragon’s Milk are two books I would consider absolutely essential, yet both were absent.

I didn’t notice any obvious omissions on the other lists, though perhaps because I’m not as familiar with their topics.

Book Crush is sorted by age group, with numerous Book Lust-style book lists within each section. Nancy Pearl surprised me by suggesting parents evaluate several of the books in the teen section due to mature content.

Now, I’m against any sort of censorship - I think people should be able to read anything they want by that age. Even if you disagree with me on that point, though, it still doesn’t make sense: she recommends Gregory Maguire’s Wicked later on without comment. I love Wicked, but it’s marketed as an adult book and several teens I know complained to me about the sex scenes. So why hand out these warnings selectively?

Moving on: many books are suggested specifically for male or female readers, and it seems a little presumptuous to assume someone will like or dislike something based on their gender. (From PW’s January 22nd 2007 issue: “At Books and Co. in Dayton, Ohio, two teenage boys stood in line for an hour and a half to get a pair of jeans signed” by Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants author Ann Brashares.)

I think it’s a good idea to give any type of book a chance - particularly for writers, but really anyone. I’d have thought a librarian of all people would agree. Assuming someone really doesn’t want to read something, don’t they have the intelligence to deduce that for themselves, based on the description? Or at least by browsing some reviews online, which you should probably do before rushing out to order it, anyway.

Then there are recommendations for books that, honestly, I don’t think are worth recommending. Stuff like Eragon (which I disliked) and Just Listen (which I despised) were not only mentioned but praised. While my opinion of those books may be in part a personal one, it doesn’t give me much faith in the other suggestions.

ISBN: [Varies by edition] Words: 162,000
Author: Daphne Du Maurier

“THE UNSURPASSED MODERN MASTERPIECE OF ROMANTIC SUSPENSE,” boasts the cover.

Well, I’m not sure about that - the book was published in 1938, and neither romantic nor suspenseful are adjectives that immediately spring to mind, by today’s standards - but I enjoyed Rebecca quite a lot for other reasons.

The unnamed narrator of Rebecca is vacationing with her employer when they happen to meet the widower Maxim de Winter at their hotel. She soon falls hopelessly in love with him, and though she couldn’t be more astonished when he proposes to her, she accepts. They have a small, private wedding while traveling abroad.

But when they return to Maxim’s magnificent country estate - Manderley - some of the servants are less than welcoming to the new Mrs de Winter. Her happiness, she realizes, may not come as naturally as she had expected.

Does that sound boring? Because it’s not. The plot was very well put together, in fact, and contained some fairly sizable surprises.

The writing felt extremely British and reminded me of Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle in places. I liked it. I liked it enough that I’d probably read most anything written in a similar style, regardless of content.

The whole atmosphere created by the book’s style is also apparent in its settings - Manderley shares all the charm of Brideshead or one of those large houses from the Jeeves and Wooster television series. It was all very early-twentieth-century, in a good way.

Some reviewers consider the ending to be something of a tragedy, but all things considered, I wouldn’t agree. I thought it was satisfying enough. I should probably leave it at that so I don’t spoil anything, but I’m sure anyone who’s read the book will understand what I’m talking about.

“The Kingkiller Chronicle, Day One”
ISBN: 978-0756404079 | Pages: 662 (hardcover)
Author: Patrick Rothfuss

Sometime last year, in a thread on the NaNoWriMo forums, a user commented that they don’t mind clichés if they’re done well and in a fresh way.

The “in a fresh way” part is obviously important here, but something about stumbling into a fantasy world that you feel like you know is kind of comforting. You’re already aware of many of its characteristics, rules and limitations - any small variations of the generic setting can be easily digested as you go along. If a wizard or elf or goblin or troll comes along, you immediately have some idea of what that might mean.

(These “preexpectations” all began with Tolkien’s Middle Earth, I suppose, and were reinforced by the numerous fantasy epics released since then.)

I mention all this because I think it’s one of the main reasons I like The Name of the Wind so much. It has a lot of the things that are unsurprising in a high fantasy novel - largely stereotypical inns and innkeepers, a troupe of traveling performers, a school of magic, an ancient evil - but it manages to remain original at the same time.

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It’s cloudy out. I took a picture of them - the clouds, I mean - with my sugar-snap peas in the foreground. It looked good in sepia.

My OS X weather widget tells me it’s raining, but my eyes tell me it’s not; as such, I must conclude that rain in the near future is not out of the question.

I’m reading bits of Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend at intervals, which had a slow start and which is very different from her last novel but which I’m beginning to like.

I’m also picking up Watchmen and Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer - oh, and a nonfiction research book - and reading a few pages of each before setting them down again.

But most of all, I’m staring at my Google Analytics statistics page in a state of dazed bewilderment, pressing the refresh button every couple minutes. Yesterday’s post made it to Reddit’s front page as well as getting some StumbleUpon attention, and the number of people who stopped by is quickly approaching 25,000.

Twenty-five thousand.

To give you some perspective, the daily visits have generally been between 20 and 50 until now. I was happy with that; I mean, Novelish opened barely two weeks ago and this is my first blog, so I’m still learning. But today I was forced to upgrade my hosting account just to keep the site online.

With so much attention, there’s inevitably been a lot of comments about “cover deja vu” around the internet (and on Reddit in particular). Mostly they’re positive. Some people felt that the title was misleading - or that photos repeated on multiple covers is really no big deal and I shouldn’t be so damn proud of finding it.

The truth is, I didn’t put much thought into the title or anything else. I wanted something short that would convey the content of the post; Cover Deja Vu seemed to sum it up nicely. I wanted people to know it involved stock photos, so I added The Dangers of Stock Photography to the end.

I thought the post was a rather good idea, but nothing huge - I expected to get a few hundred visits from it at most, if I was lucky. Would I have spent more time on it if I’d known about the 25,000 visitors? Yes. Yes. I’d have gone through another dozen drafts at least. Actually, I think I’d have been afraid to post it at all.

Which brings me to the main point of this entry: the realization that so many people are reading what you write can be a scary one. I wanted Novelish to be a place for me from the beginning - people who liked it would read it, but I wouldn’t concern myself with creating popular content. And I’m finding that it’s much, much harder for me to stick with that plan after such a huge traffic surge.

Sure, I’ll consider myself lucky if one in a thousand of those visitors become regulars here, but something about the knowledge that I might have even 25 more readers than I did last week makes me very conscious of the quality of my writing. I have to wonder how novelists with tens of millions of books in print (like J.K. Rowling, Dan Brown, or even Charles Frazier) ever get by.

My next review (of Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind) should be ready sometime tomorrow. is delayed, but will be posted soon. Until then, I’ll do my best to stop obsessing over whether I’m focusing on the right things, using the right words, and successfully getting my message across.

Go into any bookstore and you’ll see photos on covers everywhere. I’m not sure whether publishers think photography sells books better or they’re just too cheap to pay an artist, but it seems to be a growing trend in cover design.

Most of the time, I don’t have a problem with it. I mean, I don’t want to see artwork on covers disappear, but variety is good.

The thing is, when a publisher buys a photo, they don’t get exclusive rights to it unless they commission the photo shoot themselves (which is rare) - meaning anyone can come along and pay to use the same image, including other cover designers.

That isn’t a bad thing, necessarily, but it does create a feeling of déjà vu when you come across one of these “repeats” - it’s almost like glimpsing a character from some past book come to haunt the pages of your new one. It’s also interesting to see how different the covers came out when their designers used the same starting point.

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ISBN: 978-0399153440 Pages: 510 (hardcover)
Author: Kate Mosse

To some extent, it’d be hard for me to not enjoy Labyrinth, simply due to the (mostly) intriguing tale, the unique combination of historical and contemporary fiction, and the French settings like Carcassonne and the Pyrenees.

But it wasn’t as much fun as it could have been, and pretty much every aspect of the book could be improved on. So, without further ado…

My three main quibbles:

Characters

None of the characters in Labyrinth felt truly developed to me. Or to put it another way, they were largely generic, even with the little traits that differentiated them from each other.

To be fair, it could be that I didn’t get a proper chance to know any of them - the viewpoint character switched around quite a lot.

Writing Style

The writing itself is… well, not good, but in the same way that I consider the majority of bestsellers to be not good. I could write paragraphs on what exactly is wrong with it, but in the end, it all comes down to one thing: it just doesn’t sound right.

Plot

I liked the plot well enough, but I think the inclusion of supernatural elements makes it a lot weaker - especially since I wasn’t expecting them. I mean, fantasy is one of my favorite genres, but for this sort of book it’s a cheap way of doing things.

What do I mean by cheap? Well, consider The Da Vinci Code (which IS a comparison many reviewers make). It “reaches into the past” in the same way as Labyrinth, but Dan Brown went to considerable effort to ensure everything was technically feasible - and as someone who knows how much easier plotting gets when you add a little magic, I have to admire him for that.

See also:

• Labyrinth review on BookWitch
• Review on Between the Covers
• Read the prologue (in third-person present-tense; the rest of the book is third-person past-tense)
• Kate Mosse’s advice to writers

Forthcoming on Novelish: Reviews of Rebecca, On Writing, and The Name of the Wind, a post on the dangers of using stock photography on book covers, and thoughts on whether listening to a book on tape “counts” as having read it.

Novelish opened on June 2nd, or fifteen days ago. Keeping a blog has been great fun for me - if slightly more effort than I’d anticipated - and I’m starting to make small adjustments:

General updates

• The Read in 2007 page is updated with the latest books I’ve read (I’m up to 40 so far). The links to some of my more recent reviews have been added.
• I cleaned up the blogroll a little. Rest assured, all my favorite sites (and any sites that link back to me) are still there.
• I changed the category pages to show an excerpt of the full post only. Why? Basically, Google was under the impression that they were more important than the individual post pages, and individual posts were showing up as Supplementary Results - and I’m hoping this will fix it.

Social sites

As part of my efforts to promote this blog, I’m experimenting with pages on various social sites. Feel free to have a look via the links below. (And, if you like, add me as a friend on any of these communities that you’re part of.)

• MySpace - I have a layout that matches the Novelish one somewhat. considering it’s MySpace, which is notoriously difficult to design for, I’m happy with how it turned out.
• Flickr - No, there’s nothing here except a screenshot or two and images from previous blog posts. But I plan to make more use of it later on.
• BlogCatalog
• Technorati - If you have an account there and enjoy reading Novelish, please consider adding me to your favorites.