Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George
I'm really hoping EG keeps the appalling female love interests at a minimum on this outing.
Catherine the Great - Robert K. Massie
Maybe I'll even get around to reading that Potemkin biography I bought ten years ago.
Love Her to Death - M. William Phelps
Phelps is my True Crime find of 2011, I'm trying to meter out his books. Knowing there's reliably good true crime available makes the bad books bearable.
Showing posts with label Random Thoughts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Random Thoughts. Show all posts
Reading Along
I’m in a funk book-wise. After finishing Gregg Olsen’s latest, the amazing A Twisted Faith, it’s as though nothing is quite living up to expectations. Not a fair reaction but not unexpected either. When I finish a particularly good book I want to read something just as good; I want that same reading high. When the book is genuinely great, well, great is rare and two in a row is rarer still.
The Go-Between disappointed, The Inheritance of Rome is a tad denser than anticipated and Blind Justice is good but I only listen to 30 minutes of it a day so I’m never fully immersed in it. And that’s what a great book does for me – it takes me outside my day-to-day life. Which is why I usually save the latest books from reliably great authors for times when I really need an escape.
That and the fact that there’s no literary bonbon in my reading rotation at the moment is making every page seem slower than usual. Good thing I didn’t tackle Elizabeth George’s latest just now. I’d probably end up heaving it across the room.
This Template Oppresses Me
That's right, I'm blaming the template for my lack of recent posts. I switched templates roughly 10 times in the past five days and I'm back to another Blogger freebie and still it's a blah. I think this is the one I started with two years ago. Maybe it just needs a better font.
Resolutions
I did not read 75 books last year. I wanted to, I even joined a group on LibraryThing to do so. But I didn't. I read a not insubstantial 63 books last year. Well, some of the books were very insubstantial but the amount was not. It's just less than 75. So, reading resolution #1: read 75 books in 2010.
#2: read more of the books I already own before buying more
#3: except Kindle, which is always exempt from any reading rule I make for myself
#4: request fewer ARCs; nothing is worse than having to write a review for a book that wasn't even bad enough to enjoy hating
#5: read more fiction; between True Crime and History I can go for weeks without reading fiction and even then it's usual a mystery that I read rather than "straight" fiction.
I should also pick the Daunting Classic to Tackle for 2010. Trollope, perhaps?
#2: read more of the books I already own before buying more
#3: except Kindle, which is always exempt from any reading rule I make for myself
#4: request fewer ARCs; nothing is worse than having to write a review for a book that wasn't even bad enough to enjoy hating
#5: read more fiction; between True Crime and History I can go for weeks without reading fiction and even then it's usual a mystery that I read rather than "straight" fiction.
I should also pick the Daunting Classic to Tackle for 2010. Trollope, perhaps?
Reading Heaven
There are rings of reading heaven, just as there are rings of hell. I'm in a particulary lofty ring of reading this weekend:
- I'm reading two fantastic books at the same time (ok, not simulatenously, but you get the picture)
- One is fiction and the other is non-fiction, the perfect balance
- One is by an author who is new to me (hello, back catalog!)
- I'm also listening to a very good mystery on audiobook
- I'm nearly up to date on my Kindle back log - a mere 5 books not completed, only three of which are untouched
It's as if Mary Lovell, Robert Goddard, Ann Rule, Kathryn Casey and Bryan Burrough all published new books on the same day.
What is Wrong With These People?
Yet another "fake writer" (to use Gawker's perfect phrase) has been unmasked. The latest case of "well, it's not literally true but I called it a memoir because it's MY truth" is Misha Defonseca Her story is highly entertaining. She didn't really escape from Nazis at the age of four and go live with wolves in the forest. She isn't really Jewish. But she felt Jewish.
I totally understand where she's coming from. This year when I did my taxes I felt poor. Sadly, the IRS doesn't agree with me.
Misha clearly mistook her calling. She's not meant to write memoirs. She needs to start writing intentional comedy. Lines like "I beg you to put yourself in my place, of a 4-year-old girl who was very lost" are comedy gold when you remember that the fake memoir in question was written by a 70 year old. Misha also helpfully points about after saying that "This story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving" that sometimes she finds it "to differentiate between what was real and what was part of my imagination."
There's a name for that, dear. Crazy. Now crazy, I can understand, but stupid part of the equation, too. It's one thing to go around telling your insane story at the local synagogue where a general politeness might cause anyone to refrain from questioning the story of 4 year old who survives World War II by wandering the forests of Warsaw for 4 years. That just takes a complete lack of conscience. It's another to publish this insane story and assume you'll get the same level of sympathetic credulity. That takes complete stupidity in these post Binjamin Wilkomirski and James Frey days.
It's really very simple. If you write about how you underwent root canal without any anesthesia or survived the advanced stages of AIDs while being on the run from a band of pedophiles bent on revenge or evaded the Nazis (and one presumes, the Russians) for four years with only the street smarts and survivalist skills that can be acquired by the age of four, someone is going to ask "how did he/she do that?" Someone is very definitely going to call bullshit when you go around claiming that you survived a concentration camp at the age of 4, slept in a wolf pack in the Warsaw woods at age 4, or functioned as a total bad ass in and out of prison while sporting the kind of lisp guaranteed to inspire beat downs in high school locker rooms let alone in prison.
At least impostors are most entertaining that plagiarists. They bother to make something up, they just forget that when you do that it's called fiction. The only creativity a plagiarist provides is in their justifications. Cassie Edwards (read the full story here) claims she had no idea credit sources. This would be the part where I make a joke about how Cassie wouldn't like it if someone lifted portions of her novels and plopped it into their own romance novels except that after the controversy I tried to read one of her books. (In the aisles of the local library. I did try and thank God I was standing up. How do people stay conscious while reading Cassie's oeuvre?) Her books are horrible. Not "this is a bad romance novel horrible." Full-on, "I can't believe I'm reading this", "How the hell did this ever get published" horrible. I simply can't believe someone could be desperate enough to copy this undiluted horribleness and call it their own.
Then again, maybe this is how she avoids the Nora Roberts syndrome. Then again, maybe Cassie should consider taking her savage series to Warsaw circa 1940. I'll bet there were ferrets in the Warsaw woods too.
I totally understand where she's coming from. This year when I did my taxes I felt poor. Sadly, the IRS doesn't agree with me.
Misha clearly mistook her calling. She's not meant to write memoirs. She needs to start writing intentional comedy. Lines like "I beg you to put yourself in my place, of a 4-year-old girl who was very lost" are comedy gold when you remember that the fake memoir in question was written by a 70 year old. Misha also helpfully points about after saying that "This story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving" that sometimes she finds it "to differentiate between what was real and what was part of my imagination."
There's a name for that, dear. Crazy. Now crazy, I can understand, but stupid part of the equation, too. It's one thing to go around telling your insane story at the local synagogue where a general politeness might cause anyone to refrain from questioning the story of 4 year old who survives World War II by wandering the forests of Warsaw for 4 years. That just takes a complete lack of conscience. It's another to publish this insane story and assume you'll get the same level of sympathetic credulity. That takes complete stupidity in these post Binjamin Wilkomirski and James Frey days.
It's really very simple. If you write about how you underwent root canal without any anesthesia or survived the advanced stages of AIDs while being on the run from a band of pedophiles bent on revenge or evaded the Nazis (and one presumes, the Russians) for four years with only the street smarts and survivalist skills that can be acquired by the age of four, someone is going to ask "how did he/she do that?" Someone is very definitely going to call bullshit when you go around claiming that you survived a concentration camp at the age of 4, slept in a wolf pack in the Warsaw woods at age 4, or functioned as a total bad ass in and out of prison while sporting the kind of lisp guaranteed to inspire beat downs in high school locker rooms let alone in prison.
At least impostors are most entertaining that plagiarists. They bother to make something up, they just forget that when you do that it's called fiction. The only creativity a plagiarist provides is in their justifications. Cassie Edwards (read the full story here) claims she had no idea credit sources. This would be the part where I make a joke about how Cassie wouldn't like it if someone lifted portions of her novels and plopped it into their own romance novels except that after the controversy I tried to read one of her books. (In the aisles of the local library. I did try and thank God I was standing up. How do people stay conscious while reading Cassie's oeuvre?) Her books are horrible. Not "this is a bad romance novel horrible." Full-on, "I can't believe I'm reading this", "How the hell did this ever get published" horrible. I simply can't believe someone could be desperate enough to copy this undiluted horribleness and call it their own.
Then again, maybe this is how she avoids the Nora Roberts syndrome. Then again, maybe Cassie should consider taking her savage series to Warsaw circa 1940. I'll bet there were ferrets in the Warsaw woods too.
Because Plagiarism is SO Romantic
What is it with romance writers and plagarism? Ok, I know I'm guilty of using a very broad brush here. Hundreds of romance writers ply their craft on a daily basis without resorting to plagiarism. Still, when I saw this headline in today's New York Times, A Romance Novelist is Accused of Copying, I got that old feeling.
Romance novelist Cassie Edwards is accused of plagiarizing a number of sources including a novel by Nora Roberts. Poor Nora Roberts, she's apparently the plagiarizers preferred source. Is this her punishment for being so damn productive? Or was Cassie Edwards hoping that she could join Janet Dailey in committing "mind rape" on Nora? I remember the Dailey case vividly, as much for the sheer lameness of her excuse - a psychological disorder made her do it - as for her dedication to her source. A kind of monogamy, really. It was only Nora Roberts for her. Lucky Nora.
But my original question remains: what's up with this? Cassie Edwards, Janet Dailey, Kaavya Viswanathan. (And I won't even mention writers who, literally, plagiarize themselves.) Is it the economics of this genre? The expectation that a romance novelist will churn out a minimum of two books per year. Is it a wacky coincidence? Do publishers put too much pressure on the semi-talented? Do the writers themselves lack respect for the readers of the genre? Do publishers lack respect for this genre and fail to do their due diligence?
Clearly there's no one answer but the lack of respect issue is ringing bells for me. Most genres don't get the respect they deserve. There are good and bad writers, good and bad books in all genre yet romance novels seem to be treated little better than porn. I think I read one book last year that would qualify as a romantic thriller. I'm not a major consumer of the genre. That said, I have fond memories of reading through every Phyllis Whitney one summer, all the Victoria Holt's another. I'm still planning on tackling a goodly batch of Georgette Heyer's one day. I respect the greats of this genre the same way I respect Agatha Christie or Arthur C. Clarke, and I respect their readers too. It's a shame a few authors seem to think that romance readers have zero recall.
Kudos to the women at Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books for living up to their smarts and bringing this wretched behavior to light.
Romance novelist Cassie Edwards is accused of plagiarizing a number of sources including a novel by Nora Roberts. Poor Nora Roberts, she's apparently the plagiarizers preferred source. Is this her punishment for being so damn productive? Or was Cassie Edwards hoping that she could join Janet Dailey in committing "mind rape" on Nora? I remember the Dailey case vividly, as much for the sheer lameness of her excuse - a psychological disorder made her do it - as for her dedication to her source. A kind of monogamy, really. It was only Nora Roberts for her. Lucky Nora.
But my original question remains: what's up with this? Cassie Edwards, Janet Dailey, Kaavya Viswanathan. (And I won't even mention writers who, literally, plagiarize themselves.) Is it the economics of this genre? The expectation that a romance novelist will churn out a minimum of two books per year. Is it a wacky coincidence? Do publishers put too much pressure on the semi-talented? Do the writers themselves lack respect for the readers of the genre? Do publishers lack respect for this genre and fail to do their due diligence?
Clearly there's no one answer but the lack of respect issue is ringing bells for me. Most genres don't get the respect they deserve. There are good and bad writers, good and bad books in all genre yet romance novels seem to be treated little better than porn. I think I read one book last year that would qualify as a romantic thriller. I'm not a major consumer of the genre. That said, I have fond memories of reading through every Phyllis Whitney one summer, all the Victoria Holt's another. I'm still planning on tackling a goodly batch of Georgette Heyer's one day. I respect the greats of this genre the same way I respect Agatha Christie or Arthur C. Clarke, and I respect their readers too. It's a shame a few authors seem to think that romance readers have zero recall.
Kudos to the women at Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books for living up to their smarts and bringing this wretched behavior to light.
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