As some of you may know, Eric & I had the opportunity to interview Mary Higgins & Carol Clark, co-authors of light-hearted mystery stories written in time for the Yule / Christmas / Hannukkah/ Boxing Day holiday every year. Author signings are strange and frightful beasts in their own right: I have heard a few Famous Thinkers Whose Names I Can’t Remember Now say that you should never meet the author of your favorite novel. You will not exchange meaningful insights; you will not achieve some nirvana of unspoken, profound communication or a meeting of like minds; most likely, you will choke a few times on all the statements you rehearsed saying and stare like a deer in headlights into the beleaguered eyes of your favorite author, who has just fended off a too-fanatic fan and is still recovering from the trauma.

The answer: they are very pleasant– though I kept wondering if they were secretly wondeing which of their characters I resembled the most.

You know how everyone likes the book critics who always hate what they read, because it’s so entertaining to read their insults? For this Review o’ the Week, we’ve picked a scathing review by Melody from Utah, who did not particularly like Sleeping with the Fishes in the Fred the Mermaid series by Mary Janice Davidson:

The main character is completely unlikable. I think the author has sassy and sarcastic mixed up with bitchy and volatile. From the first page Fredrika (Fred) is someone who’s frighteningly selfish and who reacts like a 5 year old. Honestly, until about the third page I wasn’t sure if I was reading Fred flashing back to when she was 5 years old.

The author admits not knowing the least bit about marine biology and the sea shore and as admirable as the admission is it does nothing to improve her book. Her ignorance not only shows, it glares and bites back. It also leads the storyline to be shallow (pardon the pun) and nearly useless. If you enjoy Danielle Steele’s work though, you will love this book.

The best part of the story is Fred’s best friend Joshua; his love story and personality is worth the read. So I did finish the book.

Ouch! Don’t let Ms. Davidson see this. Thanks, Melody, for your entertaining review!

Vida Winter, the eccentric dying woman at the heart of The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, is in a panic. After decades of fabricating the story of her life to entranced journalists, she has finally acquiesced to one young writer’s plaintive request: “Tell me the truth.” But Margaret, the biographer she’s contracted to tell her story, is walking toward the door. “I will tell you a story!” the old authoress calls after her, to make her come back. Two Once Upon a Times, two false starts—Margaret reaches for the doorknob.

And then: “Once upon a time, there were twins—“

Margaret freezes—the vital chord has been struck. She cannot leave now. And so, our story begins.

For all my experience with novels, I still don’t understand the bewitching qualities of The Thirteenth Tale. It may be the plot, sweeping us elegantly along with its lunatic millionaires, once-grand estates falling into decay, incestuous families, feral twin sisters and family deaths, mysteries, ghosts.

The passages I like best, though, are about reading. At one point, Winter presents our biographer protagonist with a hypothetical moral dilemma: you have a gun, and you are watching a man operate a conveyor belt that’s dumping every copy of every book you’ve ever loved into a blazing inferno. With every second, another copy of Jane Eyre (or For Whom the Bell Tolls or The Catcher in the Rye or…) is destroyed, and soon every copy of the work left in the world will be gone. You have a choice: do you kill him, or do you watch him obliterate these books and their memory?

The moral: books matter, tales matter; we make ourselves through the stories we tell. It is only at the end of the book, as Winter reconciles herself to her terrible origins, that she can at last stop being the ghost of her childhood. The magic lies in the telling of the tale, long ago omitted from her best-selling anthology Thirteen Stories of Change and Desperation, a book that only contained twelve: it is the story of her life, told to Margaret in harsh, ugly words, words like broken glass. But it is her story, and in its telling, she can find peace.

This week’s featured review comes to us from Kristin in Chicago as she gives us her take on The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly:

Children are often much more imaginative than adults. This can lead to horrible things like nightmares, but in books their inventiveness often keeps them alive where adults have failed; especially in coming-of-age novels. The Book of Lost Things manages this idea exceptionally well.
In this story, David has recently lost his mother and longs to have her back. He’s also gained a younger sibling and a step-mother whom he in uninterested in. He copes by escaping into books, a medium his late mother had often praised. As he delves deeper into this story-world the lines between reality and fiction blur and David believe himself to be entering a new world. Here he encounters new dangers that threaten the family he resents.
As David becomes more involved in trying to survive as well as protect his friends in this world and his family in the next, he begins to grow up. With astounding rapidity he must face his own fears, learn to solve problems and finally is left to fend for himself. His ingenuity often saves him while he learns the rules of things. It’s sad that as we learn the rules we often forget to be inventive, which is why I believe coming-of-age novels are so popular. They allow us to experience the best of both worlds.
This novel follows the normal template without being overly trite or entirely predictable. The author’s own inventiveness and word choice bring the story to life in a way that most books fall short of. Connolly does not pull any punches in telling his story, death and depravity are not hidden from the young boy yet nothing is obscene, just realistic. This book receives my whole hearted recommendation.

- Kristin
Diverxtrme

Many thanks to Kristin for her thoughtful review!

Think you can write a better one? Start reviewing!

Who here doesn’t like a good dystopia story? I read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World last night in a four-hour reading binge, figuring the whole time I’d stop at the end of the chapter.

I loved 1984, as much as someone can love such a terrifying novel, and expected more of the same from this dystopia story that was written fifteen years prior to Orwell’s. As a work of philosophy and ideas, it’s fascinating just to read what the new world is like—how people are conditioned from conception for their intended social castes, how embryos of would-be manual laborers are starved of oxygen to prevent full physical and mental development. As a work of fiction, though, the book annoyed the heck out of me. Huxley’s characters are largely unsympathetic, even the protagonist of the second half of the book, the Savage, whom Huxley treats like a mouthpiece for his views. “But I don’t want comfort,” the character says at one point, decrying society’s happy pills, values of empty entertainment, and uniformity. “I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” I thought: ah, shut up, you melodramatic plot device.

But this version of the future, if not as well-written, is more plausible than the one shown in 1984. In Orwell’s world, the government controlled the people through social conditioning and fear to love Big Brother and hate their country’s enemies, whoever they were at that moment. In Huxley’s, society has conditioned itself from the lowest ranks up and there is no longer one authority controlling the new world’s agenda: everyone from children to international Controllers believes that the goal of life is only comfort and fun, and in doing so, destroys society’s ability to pursue greater meaning.

Which thought terrifies you more: a totalitarian government watching your every move or a culture of hedonism, where the answer to every problem is taking happy pills?

In college, I was an English major. The immortal words of Lewis Caroll carried me through many a panicked night in college, when successfully writing the first sentence of my paper seemed slightly less likely than my odds of winning the lottery. How do you begin a paper, a column, any written expression of personal thought when you’re faced with all that white space to fill?

To answer that question, Caroll provided me with the most helpful advice I’ve ever heard: “Start from the beginning, proceed to the end, then stop.”

So here we are, the first column of the Literary Life, ready to talk about the beginning. I don’t think it starts with BookSwim, the concept of online rental, or the older concept of book rental itself. Why are we here writing this?

For me, it starts with those agonizing nights in college staring at the screen. I spent hours finding the perfect way to talk about Nabokov’s sentences, and I drank a lot of coffee so I could spend all night thinking about books.

It’s been a few years since my last paper deadline, but I’ve kept the urgency of those late nights with me. Books are never just about grades, or even their characters, styles or authors. We read to experience another person’s mind from the inside out, to remember what we could never learn in our own lives. Books are about sharing the recorded experiences of humanity, and when we pause to engage in the necessarily slower act of reading, it is always a search for meaning, a defiance of fast-paced superficial modern lifestyles.

That’s the beginning: the act of pausing to read and think, or in my case, being paralyzed for hours finding the right thing to say. Whichever flips your pages, we’re here to talk about books and reading, and here we are.