def.Tran·sum·er·ism [kuhn-soo-muh-riz-uhm] n.Transumers are consumers who would rather rent or pay for managed access to items/information rather than own them. (see TrendSpotting) BookSwim is proud to be a transumerist; a rental and product sharing advocate on the forefront of a revolution to transumerism.
There’s always a trouble reading memoirs: writers have a habit (and arguably, an obligation– otherwise, why bother paying attention?) of describing things as more meaningful, more beautiful, than most of us would perceive them. Sometimes, this insistence on plot, metaphor, and ultimate significance doesn’t translate from novels, their natural habitat, to real life, where the details are messier, the characters less consistent, and guns we saw in the first act rarely make it to the third act, much less go off. I once read of a regular blogger whose significant other broke up with her over her writing, saying he felt as if the only reason she was in the relationship was so that she would have something to write about. It’s a risky approach, treating real life like a work of art.
Mark Doty begins his heartbreaking memoir Dog Years by explaining his need to apologize for writing, of all things, about his dearly departed dogs. This is the man who wrote another memoir that so clearly evokes the feelings of grief that I could barely read a chapter on the subway without needing to pull up my hood and pretend I had allergies: Heaven’s Coast. That earlier memoir chronicled the last days of his partner Wally, who died of AIDS after they had been together for twelve years. In Dog Years, Doty mentions some of the negative reviews he had received for that earlier work– notably, one British reviewer who accused Doty of being a psychic vampire, living off the corpse of his deceased lover.
Ouch. Most of the reviews of Heaven’s Coast are overwhelmingly positive, but it’s possible to find other readers who agree with the vampire-accuser. “This book,” one anonymous online reviewer writes, “despite the horrors it sometimes documents, ends up reading like one long, shrill assertion of its own marvellous[sic] sensitivity, inviting the reader to congratulate themselves on their special ability to share in it. Sometimes bad writing is also morally questionable, and this is one of those times.”
The detractors seem to agree on a common viewpoint: that it is inappropriate for Doty to write about his loss, at least in the manner that he does; that his writing reflects to them an indulgence, even macabre delight, in airing emotions that should remain private. There’s a revulsion in their negative reviews and the hideousness of their metaphors, aside from their insensitivity– a kind of disgust that we usually reserve for obscene things.
So we come to the problem of memoir: writing about real life to make it interesting (which usually means tragic, challenging, and very occasionally hilarious) without triggering the voyeuristic feeling that we’re reading someone’s diary. I’ve come across this kneejerk revulsion to difficult memoirs, for books from The Glass Castle to Angela’s Ashes. A reader invariably accuses the author of being self-pitying, hyperbolic, whiny, even a liar.
Admittedly, in this case, Doty comes from a background in poetry. This means that when he writes about an emotion, he not only describes it, he lingers, examining the feeling in every setting, from every point of view. So accusing him of melodrama, perhaps, or self-importance, comes easily.
But what do we want when we read memoirs, if not this close examination of feelings we may or may not share but want to see someone else surviving? A man loses his partner of twelve years, a girl born to Mormons escapes after years of physical and sexual abuse, and they write their stories. Do we demand that these writers present brave faces throughout their stories, as if they had always had the strength they do now? Reading these memoirs can be so harrowing, so effective, that getting through the book makes us feel as if we’re undergoing the same difficult circumstances, inviting them onto ourselves whenever we open the pages. Most of us will find the redemption of such difficult reads in the strength and hindsight the protagonists gain after their hard-won triumphs, so our main interest lies in the ‘after’ rather than the ‘before.’ Or are these reactions instead demonstrating a belief that emotions like grief and rage should be kept private, as if they are never warranted in adults, as if we should be ashamed of them?
I wonder sometimes if we’re surrounded by too many media sources, too many stories, so we feel ashamed that our own lives aren’t bigger. Doty lost his partner, and this hurt; he also lost his dogs, and that hurt too, if not as much or in the same way. We look to writers to tell us about our own lives, help us make sense of this pour of babbling experience that never bothers to explain itself to us. Is it wrong to treat the death of a dog as something worth talking about? What makes one life experience worth noticing, the other a kind of private thought reserved for self-reflection?
I say: if a man experiences the worst loss he will endure in his life, and he needs to write about it to put his mind back together… let him linger. Let him stare as long as he needs into the place where we hide our powerful emotions, afraid that if we let them loose, we will never have the strength to navigate our lives again. And if someone else accuses him of making too much prettiness out of private grief?… well, some people drink themselves to oblivion to forget how hard life is. Some people need to tell stories of their own lives so the world will still feel beautiful, still worth inhabiting, despite the pain. What else are writers for?
While we’ve waited for the Kindle to spark a culture-wide switch to e-books, fans of the old paper and binding format have busied themselves with anxious questions: does this spell the end of paper books? Is this the device that will truly — gasp — revolutionize the way we read?
Now, it looks as if book publishers are answering: sure — but only with paperbacks.
Some book publishers now release new titles with the caveat that the e-book versions will be delayed, even indefinitely, so they don’t compromise more profitable hardcover sales. The Kindle edition of Harper Collins’ Sarah Palin biography Going Rogue will begin sales on December 26th, with only the hardcover edition available for holiday shopping, while Twelve Books has no plans to ever release a Kindle edition of the Ted Kennedy memoir True Compass (current list price $35).
This hasn’t endeared the publishers to Kindle readers, most of whom expected the expense of new releases to vanish along with paper and dust jackets. Some vocally boycott Kindle books selling above the $9.99 price point, using Amazon’s own tagging system to label books ‘9 99 boycott’ in their catalog. Their argument is that an e-book, little more than an elaborate text file with the ability to show a few black and white pictures, has no visible production costs. Take out the costs of printing, warehousing, and distributing, and the only cost left seems to be the electricity needed to run Microsoft Word.
The cost of an e-book has become such a point of contention because it makes distinct something we haven’t had to distinguish until now: the price of content, independent from its medium. When we purchase that new hardcover at an average list price of $25, it’s easy to think that most of our dollars pay for paper, binding and gluing, warehouse staff. We’re ready to accept these costs because of their tactile results: thick pages, colorful covers, a handsome typeface–in the end, a tangible object, straightforward and perfect at what it does. In its simplest form, though, what we’re really buying when we purchase a book is access to a written work, a means of viewing a verbal record. The physicality of paper books has tricked us into thinking we’re paying for the cost of the physical object, the pages themselves, when what’s really being sold is their words.
The reason this is important? It’s clear what a tangible object costs: the slimy salesman at the used car dealership will sell the Corvette with an engine straight out of The Fast and the Furious for more than the Camry salvaged from someone’s front lawn. Abstract products sell for whatever people will pay for them at that moment. This relative cost of access already takes place in the paper book marketplace, as demonstrated by the Harry Potter novels’ simultaneous rise in demand and price:
* Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (1998):24.99
* Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003):29.99
* Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007):34.99
According to publishers, the majority of a book’s ultimate sales price pays for intangible costs as well: preproduction (editing, graphic design, etc.), marketing, and author royalties and advances. Money Magazine found that these three made up about 77% of a hardcover’s production costs. By these numbers, a publisher doesn’t save much on an e-book over a paper book: about 23% of existing costs. So maintaining the same profit means a fair price for a $27.95 hardcover in an e-book format would amount to $21.50. Imagine how many ‘9 99 boycott’ tags a Kindle book would receive at that price!
Different pricing needs to match the different emotional, intangible appeals of the two book formats. So: what is the true draw of the Kindle?
The easiest answer is cost savings, but what reader spends $300 and up on a single-purpose machine — unlike, say, a $300 iPod that also sends text messages, takes pictures, and browses the web — expecting to save money? Cost savings don’t sell the Kindle. Its appeal, much like the appeal of its prime offering, is intangible: ability to look up and download titles at any location with cellphone service, portability, and the irresistible promise of having all the books you’ve ever wanted in one place, like a thorough and flawless memory bank — the Holy Grail of every avid reader. Not many readers can afford the buy-in cost of a device that, at its current price point, is suited best to a very specific kind of reader: the kind of avid reader who reads often enough for a $300 reading machine to make sense, who has reason to need the room saved by storing hundreds of titles on a device as thin as a pencil.
With fewer than half of Americans reading regularly (and those readers averaging a modest seven books a year), plus the $250 plus price of every e-reader device so far, book traditionalists have no need to fear the imminent extinction of the paper book. Even those who spring for the Kindle seem to purchase as many paper books as they had before buying the device. But the only way to make new releases profitable on e-readers such as the Kindle is for the reading audience to reevaluate the traditional metrics we’ve used to measure a book’s worth. Past the weight of its pages or the speed of its delivery, a book’s value will remain constant, and with a near-constant price, between paper and electronic formats: in its words.
Hey out there in internet land. In the course of one’s life, one may find the compulsion to say to oneself: “Boy, I wish I had a Literary Life podcast to listen to right now. Where did Chip & Eric go?”
Sorry for the radio silence, folks. As fate would have it, we’re here scrambling like mad with the great work: the Sistine Chapel of graphic design; the iPod of site functionality, speed, and grace. You know what I’m talking about: the relaunch of BookSwim’s website.
We’re currently scheduled to unveil BookSwim 3.0 in the first week of May. In the meantime, expect a limited return of the Literary Life with silly surveys on Tuesday and blogging on Thursdays. And if this doesn’t quite fill your Literary Life needs, fear not; we’ll return in force after the site relaunch.
NJ Transit likes to change the train schedule on random holidays– MLK Day used a standard schedule, Presidents’ Day used the holiday schedule.
Thus I found myself loitering at Newark Penn Station this past Monday, finding ways to kill fifty minutes before the arrival of my train home. While I sat on a bench and let my mind wander, I noticed what had once seemed to me a near-impossible site: a young family, parents maybe in their late thirties, with a small boy of about eight years old sitting quietly. Propped in his lap was a thick book with a colorful cover about twice the size of his head.
Literacy makes a comeback in the new generation!
A second thought, though: I also began my reading escapades with fantasy & scifi. Then in my college years, I suffered the traditional English major’s guilt that I hadn’t spent my prime reading years perusing, say, A Time to Kill instead of high fantasy. There’s a period of time in your life as a young adult when everything you read actively impacts your personality; books will never be as enthralling or surprising or instructive after that door in time closes. And I wonder now how different my mind could be if I had spent those years reading works that talked about the real world and our ways of dealing with it, instead of stories that are fun but the literary equivalent of cotton candy.
Granted, my father used to read Moby Dick to me as a bedtime story– but I wasn’t quite old enough to appreciate novels, much less the classics.
Question of the week: Should we use the children / YA fantasy literature trend as a doorway to encourage deeper reading?
Want to know the greatest thing about comic conventions, and why you should go even if you’re not a comic-readin’ fool? The vast amounts of swag showered upon you by the hundreds of vendors in a space the size of three football fields. I began ComiCon snatching up every free book someone offered to me, and as the weekend went on, my backpack filled too much. I started to be more selective: no Weddings from Hell for me, thanks, I’m all full up with Devil May Cry (Dark Hunter 11) by Kenyon and The Outlaw Demon Wails (The Hollows, Book 6) by Harrison. (Incidentally, why are all fantasy novels part of long involved series? I always get the feeling I’m missing out on half the book’s details.)
I’d thought there was an unwritten rule that guys were forbidden from specific activities: walking into Victoria’s Secret unaccompanied; driving Miatas; and reading, or at least getting caught reading, romance novels. Werewolf romance novels included.
To my surprise, the less-fair sex was well-represented in the autograph lines for Sherrilyn Kenyon, Carrie Vaughn, Jeaniene Frost, and the other venerable authors of the vampires-and-love-triangles genre. So, having received these free books anyway, I swallowed my prejudices and gave the books a try.
Maybe it’s because the last novel I read was Love in the Time of Cholera, which combined the worst elements of the inane ridiculousness of romance novels with the torturously long descriptions and verbiage of classic literature. Maybe it’s because fantasy and horror were my genres of choice when I broke into adult novels at the tender age of 12 and I left them in pursuit of more highbrow pastures.
…but Devil May Cry and Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty and the Midnight Hour went down like candy. Quick, light, sweet, requiring little brain power and some serene suspension of disbelief, these books were the literary equivalent of popcorn. While occasionally contradictory (one moment, Protag and Manly Love Interest will be kissing; then they’ll be standing apart and Manly Love Interest says “Don’t touch me! I don’t need your pity!”; and then they’ll start kissing again, with Manly Love Interest cautioning Protag that “This doesn’t give you any power over me”), who doesn’t want to read about Sumerian gods running Las Vegas casinos? Or werewolves hosting talk radio shows?
I must conclude that paranormal romance, while unlikely to earn a Nobel Prize in literature any time soon, deserves its current surge of interest for the enjoyable escape it offers. Don’t worry, though– I have no plans to buy a Miata.
It always gets me: that compelling sentence in a book’s description that catches my eye and forces me to read through the rest of the blurb, when all I’d meant to do was add it to a customer’s rental pool. I’m talking about the sales copy, the short book description written with action verbs and the same melodramatic, slightly inaccurate terms used to sell hair growth medication, diet pills, and $14,000 exercise machines.
Here are some of my favorite examples of riveting, exciting, man-I-gotta-read-that-book yet surprisingly generic blurbs. Can you match each compelling blurb with its book?
1) The killer has the whole city by its strings–and he’ll stop at nothing to become the most terrifying star that Washington D.C. has ever seen.
2) With this life-affirming tale of friendship and fate, [author] once again shows why she is a nationally bestselling author with legions of loyal fans.
3) But there are some lines that should never be crossed—like the one [character]’s stepping over . . . again!
4) A story of depth and emotion, hilarity and imagination, [title] tells a story of love, family, and loss.
5) But when a chance encounter brings them together again, the time has finally come to make a choice, one that will have profound consequences for them both for the rest of their lives.
I had a great idea yesterday. So good, I knew I couldn’t tell anyone about it or someone might steal it. What if there were a book about…. [great idea I can't share]? And instantly, I found myself plotting how I would write the Most Compelling Book Ever within the next year.
According to yesterday’s edition of The New York Times, in an article entitled “Self-Publishers Flourish as Writers Pay the Tab”, this is a common impulse. Almost everyone thinks he or she has a brilliant novel dormant in the subconscious. Once a little effort is spent sitting down and writing the thing, the beloved project will sweep across the nation, changing minds and hearts in a furious blast of praise and appreciation, and the humble writer will never have to work their stupid day job again.
Call me an elitist, but I think I prefer the time when publishing a novel seemed impossible. Now, anyone with the willingness to inflict his written opinions on the public can add to the pile of published dreck waiting for the incinerator or recycling bin. Volumes of bad poetry pour from Lulu.com’s presses, and it seems every author contacts us asking if we can add Crocodiles I Have Loved, the new book of stunning genius from previously unpublished author Joe Schmoe, to our catalog.
The sad truth is: not everyone can write. Each of us without fail thinks we’re the one to produce that work– witty, engaging, meaningful, something that transcends genre or specific population and speaks to everyone. And I suppose it’s a beautiful thing when anyone with a voice, a story to tell, and a penchant for self-expression can get his work out there. But is it worth filling our shelves with works that belonged in the back of the sock drawer? Is it worth going from the equivalent of a newspaper, wherein every piece you see has been edited and approved by professionals from the idea stage to final copyediting, to blogs, where you could have a Shakespeare typing on the same website used by teenage girls to talk about their middle school crushes?
Well, enough pondering for one day. I have this brilliant idea, and I’ve got a book to write.
A question of etiquette, dear readers. This morning, after my daily lapse of consciousness on the train ride to work, I glanced over at one of my fellow passengers. He was reading a book on his lap so I couldn’t see the cover; I could just make out that the pages were yellowing, and figured it was a find in a used bookstore that I had no chance of recognizing.
He turned the page, and I recognized the picture of the Doomsday clock, a few minutes to midnight, with the picture of something red ‘oozing’ down an otherwise black page. This was the only graphic novel to make it to Time’s 100 Top Novels of the 20th Century: Alan Moore’s Watchmen, a dark epic of humanity’s failings that transcends its format.
When I’m talking to a customer on the phone and I see a book in a member’s pool that I’ve read, my usual reaction is to bellow in approval and encourage swift reading of the title. This kneejerk reaction doesn’t seem appropriate on the train. At the same time, though, it’s tough being a book fan– it’s not like a movie, where millions tend to see the same film at the same time. Where can we go to talk about our books and share our enthusiasm? When we notice one of those easily-missed details in a book, and we’re excited to share it with other readers who might not have seen something so small, who do we talk to?
Reading a book is a solitary experience– when we we someone reading the same book, it can be hard to fight that impulse to share our insights because we have so few opportunities to do so. Hard to say on the morning commute, though, when everyone is struggling to muster the energy for the day ahead and may not be open to literary discussion.
So, the question that began this post: fellow book-lovers, when you recognize a book that a random stranger is reading, what do you do?
As promised, I returned to a certain beloved graphic novel series as my recuperation from a certain piece of classic literature. And again, I’m flashing back to the various English teachers in my life, rolled into one Platonic ideal: a chain-smoking, cynical middle-aged man in a paisley vest, grumbling startlingly insightful comments in a gravely voice.
My brother bought comic books when we were kids. I always liked words better than pictures but I read them when he wasn’t looking: Spawn, Witchblade, Spiderman, X-Men, Superman. Not high literature, but a willing & available avenue of escape during stress. And thus were my thoughts about comics for years to come.
So then, when confronted with a graphic novel masterpiece like Sandman, or Watchmen, or The Dark Knight Returns– part of my brain still can’t process this. I’ll read a stirring masterpiece in this form and I hear myself wondering why I’m taking it seriously. It’s that old prejudice that serious books don’t have pictures. And that terrible phrase ‘graphic novel’ smacks of PCism and euphenism. Oh– you mean a COMIC BOOK? You know, like ARCHIE and BEETLE BAILEY?
But the authors who deal in this genre see it coming, and in the introduction to Sandman, one of the writers notes that it will be years before academia recognizes the genius and intricacy behind the series, one equal to that found in a Faulkner or Joyce work. And when that happens, he writes, the dissertations will come in, the critical commentary, the articles in peer-reviewed journals.
Read a good graphic novel. See what I mean. Fight the urge to discount a work because of the novelty of its format (we forget that the novel was disregarded as a frivolous format in the nineteenth century, fit for entertainment, certainly not serious literature). Literary genius can be just as strong combined with thoughtful artwork, enhancing and complicating the work instead of rendering it laughable.
Danielle Steele or F. Scott Fitzgerald? Needful Things or One Hundred Years of Solitude?
This week, I turned the final page of Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. As usual after finishing a classic book, I’m overwhelmed by a sense of accomplishment, satisfaction… and disgust with my own reading level.
I’d read the book during my 45-minute train commute and sometimes the pages would fly by like the scenery– and then I’d hit yet another block of long description. The riverboats! Another passage about Florentino’s ridiculously improbable stalker-love! Another paragraph of lovingly translated lyricism about the mundane, which after a few sentences appears to my eyes as “blah blah blah.” And I’d have to put the book down and stare out the window.
I’d like to be worthy of Marquez’s literary achievement in this book and take note of each brilliant subtlety in the text. However, I’m a child of my generation: fighting the slowly brewing ADD that’s taking root in our collective consciousness. Every time I slammed into yet another antiquated Block O’ Description, I had to fight the urge to give up this whole classic literature nonsense and turn to video games.
This was a literary gem, triumphant and sparkling, and deserving of all the positive adjectives greater critics than I have used to describe it. But every chapter I completed was a hard-won victory over short attention span and impatience with the old-world habit of taking as many words as necessary to describe a commonplace thing, and now I’m left with one desire: to sit down with a nice graphic or teen novel. Rutgers English department, please forgive me.
Holy crow! This week, we introduce “The BookSwim Minute” segment with an interview with authors, Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark - co-authors of the new holiday title, Dashing Through the Snow. We took questions from you, the BookSwimmers, last week, so be sure to listen for yours!
Also this week, we call out Brian Williams (who, aside from publicly scoffing at the very idea of BookSwim, really is an awesome guy), nominate this week’s Alpha Library, and give you the skinny on new BookSwim features, including our brand new upgraded shipping! Press that play button to find out all about it.
It’s a good, old-fashioned theme song contest! Submit your idea for a theme song, as described in the first minute of this week’s podcast, to TheLiteraryLife@BookSwim.com. The winner gets the fabulous prize of hearing his/her contribution at the beginning and possibly end of each edition of The Literary Life on BookSwim.com.
Next week’s show will feature something special: for all of you listeners out there still gift-hunting, simply give a BookSwim Gift Card and, in the field that asks for more info on how you heard about us, write “Literary Life”, followed by a 5-word persuasive essay on why renting books is great. All entries will be read aloud each week until January 1st.
How was The BookSwim Minute? Should we try to do it again? Some weeks? Every week? Which author do you think we should try to get on the show?
