Ebooks...

I was surprised to read in a post on Publisher's Weekly that an industry study negates the popular assumption that ebook sales eat into the print market. Ebooks - particularly etextbooks - were heavily used, but didn't impact print sales. That's good news and bad news. For the promoters of the Kindle, saving trees is a big selling point. But the ebook reader won't necessarily save any trees... instead, there's the additional kilowatts (perhaps just watts) the readers will require. That technically adds to the electrical power we need to generate... so ebooks are hypothetically more convenient (how's the Kindle going to handle getting dropped in sand?), no improvement on saving trees, and another damn battery operated appliance.

So what's the upside? Another gadget, something else to buy. Hmm... do I sense another addition to the junkpile of history where now resides the 8-track tape player?

Literary history

I was thinking of great literary nonfiction I've read, which includes some of Orwell's work, and others like John McPhee. My favorites have been history titles: Son of the Morning Star and Custer and Sitting Bull, Nathan Philbrick's Mayflower the most recent. I'm currently working through Lepore's New York Burning. The latter is not going to make my list of great non-fiction. Lepore has fleshed out pre-Revolutionary New York City nicely, especially its slave population, but her writing bogs down in the way that academics sometimes do when trying to write for a popular crowd.

The lack of zombie novels...

Why, oh why, do I enjoy zombie flicks so? A good one is a real treat, as compared to the many very-low budget flicks one can find on Netflix. I have never read a good zombie novel (correction: I have never read any zombie novel). This may be because I don't read science fiction anymore. Or because there's no Mary Shelley of Zombies.



A quick search of Amazon (don't you freaking love the inter-web?) provides four zombie titles, but only one novel. I expect there must be more than one, but Amazon feeds my suspicion that there aren't many.

So I'm going to write one...

George Orwell

Or Eric Blair. As nonfiction writers go, Orwell is among my favorites. During and after earning my graduate degree in history I found myself reading almost everying he wrote. The one that endures among others is Down and Out in Paris and London. Orwell was a beacon of truth in a time of much bullshit. He favored socialism in postwar England, but he wasn't afraid to take on Socialism, both in the grand and petty forms. In The Road to Wigan Pier he has a famous piece where he's on a bus in the country that stops and picks up two riders dressed - unconventionally - in shorts, with sandals and other accoutrement that elicits the comment from other riders, under their breath, "socialists". Orwell confesses he had the same thought - these geeks are socialists. He goes on to discuss the practical impediments to bringing Socialism to England, but not fatalistically, rather in a way that would ease the transition.
What poverty truly felt like, that was where Orwell excelled as a reporter, in part by living poor. In both Wigan Pier and Down and Out he writes of being poor; in Down and Out he spends months living in flophouses and eating garbage, then returns to England where he discovers the promised job isn't there and once again he is poor. Now he does a tour of the poor houses in England, and one is living again in miserable conditions, living among the unwashed and dying.
Lesser titles: Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which he himself called his least favorite work; again, it focuses harshly on class and economics. Burmese Days covers his early years as a petty bureaucrat in India.
1984 is his best known title, and it is a tour de force, but as a work of ficition left me a little bored. Orwell was at his best writing in the first person, writing about the world he was living in.

Writing about baseball

Baseball is the only sport I follow at all faithfully, and specifically I follow the Red Sox. I haven't always, but after living in New England for almost thirty years, the bug caught. I remember about twenty years ago, while riding out a stretch of unemployment while earning my MLS, reading a novel I found in the Waltham Public Library, If I Never Get Back. It was a time-travel novel, so if I were cataloging it I'd have to cross science ficiton with sports (not sure how many books span those two). I do not recall the writer, but I remember reading the jacket copy and he was an English teacher from the Left Coast, and the book was a pretty well researched story set in the early years of the game. Instead of being called Sox, teams with that appellation were called 'Stockings'... the Red Stockings, etc. It entertained me, and the main reason it's stuck with me is that it's the only sports title I've ever finished reading.
I keep meaning to read some baseball biographies but I don't consider sports figures ordinarily entertaining enough to justify a book... (some fan, eh?)

Niagara Falls history

Born and raised in the falls, I have published a historical novel, The Stone House Diaries, in 2005. Sales were disappointing. For a book to be successful one needs good reviews, and then getting to market on time is helpful. For reasons forever a mystery to me, the Buffalo News declined to review it - how many novels about the falls get published any given year, in particular by one born there? The Niagara Gazette was more than generous with good vibes and column inches. The second problem was getting it to the stores for the Christmas rush. The publisher missed the deadline and it showed up two days before Christmas - one might prefer to debut a title on January 23rd. At least it's quiet.

A third issue is that Niagara Falls is a poor city. I call it the Atlantic City of the Great Lakes now. The library bought six or seven copies, and in the summer of 05 all the copies were checked out with a waiting list. That was nice to see, but I also knew every copy borrowed was one less sold. Emblematic of that, I learned that the copy I gave my mother she lent to her friend, and she lent to their minister... lots of mileage on a few copies. Being a librarian I was pleased, but as an author I groaned....

I've written another novel, tentatively called 'Where the gold is buried', based on a family legend set at Old Fort Niagara. I'm working on finding an agent now. 'Muse and the Marketplace' was a very bracing primer for finding an agent. It ain't easy.

All the Pretty Horses and almost anything else by Cormac MacCarthy

I decided last year to try reading Cormac MacCarthy. After a little research, I decided to start with Blood Meridian. What a ride. At first it reminded me a little of Larry McMurtry, but it gets darker than Larry does, and I finished it and said "give me more." So I read The Crossing, which was set in more recent times - 20th century - but for purposes of setting and character and dialog could have been a hundred years prior. Then I took on All the Pretty Horses, and I realized that MacCarthy, aside from being a supreme stylist, really tells the same story almost every time. It's usually two young guys from Texas that go to Mexico and have (mis) adventures. My other shallow, illiterate complaint with MacCarthy stems from his love of sticking a page or two of Spanish conversation in the book every now and then. Not being bilingual at all, I assumed he was writing for the English reader and the conversations rolled with the story line. Then one day I used an online translator and discovered, damn! the conversations are not MacCarthy showing off his Spanish, they need to be translated. So, being a lazy, pissed-off American, I stopped reading his stuff for a while.

Incidentally, I'm a truly lazy American. If a great book gets turned into a movie, there's a high risk I'll just watch the film and not get around to the book. With All The Pretty Horses, I'm glad I read the book first... so much lost.

Anyway...
Then I read The Road. A sharper turn left literarily speaking I can't image. Suddenly it's a post-apocalytic future with a man and his son trying to reach the South on foot from the Northeast - a long ways from Mexico (still managed to keep any women characters out). I was utterly drawn in before I realized it was science fiction (which I just don't read anymore, college was enough). The Road. No horses, no women, mostly rainy weather, in lieu of a wagon the father is pushing a shopping cart, fortunately not too many barbarians, and a relatively positive ending where MacCarthy finally gives the boy a mother figure. I plan to reread Blood Meridian and The Road, but probably not the rest of them. At least not until I learn Spanish. Which I'm not studying.