FRIDAY: Forgotten Book

Our pal, and recent Derringer winner, Patti Abbott, has suggested that on Fridays some of her blog buddies post a reminder of a book that caught us when we read it, but now may be forgotten by the reading public.

Most of the participants in Forgotten Books have revisited novels, which makes sense since many of Patti’s blog buddies are fiction writers. You know I write fiction. I certainly read fiction, but I am also an enthusiastic non-fiction reader and a huge fan of oral histories. I want to read how people felt and what they thought as history swirled around them.

Today my forgotten book is The Great Divide, Second Thoughts on the American Dream, by Studs Terkel. Like many of Terkel’s books, this one is a series of oral histories, essays if you will, on conditions in the United States at the end of the Reagan Era. The stories point out the divides among us: social, racial, religious, political, and, most starkly, economic. In a time when unemployment hovered around ten percent, and when the national debt was far too large, when unions were busted and farmers abused, many Americans seemed not to understand how it happened or how it could be fixed.

The Great Divide was published in 1988. If you can find a copy, pick a few sections at random. Compare then and now. Could be interesting.

Patti would also like me to “tag” one of you to tell us about a Forgotten Book on your blog next Friday. Since I don’t generally “tag,” I am hoping that someone will volunteer in the comments of this blog. It’s a refined “tag.” Just think of a book you read and tell us why you liked it. And since this is not a school book report, there is no required number of sentences.

This link will bring you to Patti’s list of today’s Forgotten Book participants.

Terrie

Women of Mystery Meet Ellery Queen

Welcome to Two Sentence Tuesday.

We are proud to announce that Women of Mystery contributor Meredith Anthony has a story “Murder on the Main Line” in the July issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

This is the second month in a row that a member of Sisters in Crime New York Tri-State Chapter has been represented in Ellery Queen. As you may recall, Meredith Cole had the honor in June with her story “Exercise is Murder.” Do I see a trend?

Here are two lines from “Murder on the Main Line,” which I read on Sunday.

Bitsy’s hyperaware senses, as tuned as a cat’s, were on full alert. But even so, she almost missed the arrival of Luke and presumably Aaron late that night.

And here are two lines I wrote this week.

“Someone mentioned to me that it was far more likely that Vi’s extracurricular activities were the cause of her death." So much for my despising gossip, here I was quoting Calysta as if she was the Guttenberg bible.

So let’s have it, ladies and gentlemen. What did you read? What did you write?

Terrie

What's Not To Love?

Clare's post yesterday on the various kerfluffles around the writing world got me thinking about two strains of chatter I have seen in the past week.

First, there are numerous blogs participating in a project started by Patti Abbott wherein blog authors use Fridays to recommend books. Says Patti, "I'm worried great books of the recent past are sliding out of print and out of our consciousness. Not the first-tier classics we all can name, but the books that come next."

On the other hand, there seems to be quite a bit of chatter about what turns readers off. On one reader forum I belong to, the moderator posted a poll asking about bad editing in published books [membership in Delphi forums required]. Here are the options:
• It makes me mad, but what can you do?
• It makes me mad, and I'm going to write to the publishers.
• It makes me so mad, it's putting me off buying books from the worst offenders.
• Other (specify).

At the moment, there's a 60-40 split between "what can you do" and "not buying books from the worst offenders." (If you feel like answering this yourself in the comments, I'll be happy to pass along your comments.)

At the same time, a conversation began in a romance readers forum at LibraryThing about "wallbangers", i.e., books so bad you throw them against the wall. These appalling books range from books with horrendous plots or dialogue, to those with factual errors, to...well, you name it.

In both of these discussions, a good number of people have been turned off entire bodies of work--either they won't read anything written by an author or anything published by a certain publisher. As a writer, I find this both encouraging and frightening.

On the scary side, what if I accidentally publish with one of those publishers people refuse to read? What if I make a mistake and am shunned forever for it? But I can control those things. I research publishers, and the list of those who publish my kind of work who I'd work with is comparatively short. (Compared to what, you ask? Compared to the list of publishers of genre fiction overall.)

As it happens, the ever-helpful Victoria Strauss has a post today on researching small presses. One thing she mentions only in passing, but I would emphasize, is actually reading books published by the press in question. That's usually the first thing I do. And I evaluate every aspect of a small press book if I am considering them as a viable publishing option-- not just the contents, but the price, the design, the paper quality. I am a consumer of books in both the literal and figurative sense and I don't want to put my own work out in a way that doesn't please other readers.

As for the factual stuff turning off readers, well, luckily, research is something I enjoy (witness all the years I spent in school getting useless advanced degrees). Some things I will, inevitably, get wrong, especially in the law enforcement arena, but I hope I won't make the glaring kind of errors people are talking about in these threads.

But I find all these discussions--not just "don't forget about these great books," but also "these books are so awful they left dents in my wall on the way to the trash"--encouraging. They mean that readers are still passionate. Some people, at least, are involved enough in what they read to be both enthusiastic about books they love and angry about books that aren't what they should be.

All that, I think, bodes well for the future of genre fiction, in whatever form it may come to be distributed.

Something New for Writers and Readers

Do you like audio books? Do you like short stories? Hello, have I got something for you!

Head on over to Sniplits. Subtitled Audio Shorts 2 Go, Sniplits offers audio short stories in a variety of genres and lengths. As described on the website’s About page:

Unlike audiobooks that can take hours to finish, these stories take just a snip of time. They are the perfect pack-and-go entertainment for just about any pause in your day. A 10-minute story might be just what you need for a coffee break, while a two-minute story might make that wait in line at the bank’s drive through a little easier to take. How about a 20-minute story for your lunch break, or a 40-minute story to get you through your dental appointment.

After joining Sniplits (which is easy, quick, and free), you can search for stories by author, length, or genre. The stories are inexpensive, costing 48 cents for pieces less than five minutes long and 88 cents for anything over five minutes, including stories over an hour long. Once you purchase a story, you can save it in your library or download it to any device capable of playing digital music. Compatibility shouldn’t be an issue because the stories are all published DRM-free. Even better, each story can be downloaded to 10 different devices—and they don’t all have to be yours. So if you really love a certain story (for example, something you wrote yourself), you can share it with friends.

The website is new—in fact, it’s still in a beta version―but a fair number of stories are already available. They’re divided into the following genres:

• Literary, mainstream
• Adventure, travel, sports
• Humor
• Horror, spinetinglers
• Period pieces, historical fiction
• Mystery, crime, PI
• Romance
• Speculative, sci fi, fantasy, myth
• Suspense, thriller
• Western
• Tweens2teens

If you’re a writer, Sniplits is an interesting new market well worth considering. If you hate your voice, don’t fear—stories are submitted in written form and Sniplits hires professionals to read them.

Sniplits is currently looking for “beach reads” of between 100 and 8,000 words. For the details and submission guidelines, see the website’s Authors Room page.

The Politics of Reviews

I never think twice about reviewing a product. Want to know what I think of my Honda Hybrid? I love it. Want to know what how the pistol-grip Dremel works? It doesn't. But books are something else entirely. Reviewing a book is hard for me because I really hate to hurt people's feelings and I know that even people who write really, really bad books work hard at them and send them off into the world believing they are wonderful.

On the other hand, if a book is chock full of ghastly grammar, plodding plotlines or atrocious alliteration, shouldn't other readers be warned before plunking down their money?

You may (or may not, depending on what loops you are on) have heard the bruhaha about a certain author who went so far as to track down the personal information (name, address, family names, etc) of a woman who gave her book a mere three star review on Amazon. That's after chastising the reviewer in the comments section of the review and recruiting people to vote that the review (three stars, remember, not one) be removed as abusive. And there are other authors, rather famous ones, in fact, who are also known to "game the system" by having friends go in and post 5-star reviews whenever negative reviews pop up.

I rarely read Amazon reviews because for the most part I find them utterly useless. Unless I am trying to get a plot summary, of course, in which case, there's always back matter masquerading as a review by "Harriet Klausner." I do read Janice Harayda's One Minute Book Reviews, though she mostly doesn't review genre fiction, so I rarely read the books she examines. She does, however, do wonderful children's book reviews on Saturdays, where I collect present ideas for my various nieces and nephews.

John Connolly said something about reviews that's stuck with me now for over two years:

I can’t remember the good things that were said about my books because, in some deep, dark place inside of me, I didn’t quite believe them and so they didn’t stick in my memory. I can, by contrast, probably recite sections of the bad reviews verbatim. They stung because in another deep, dark place inside of me, I believed that they might be true.
(March, 2006--as with most things he writes, the whole post is worth reading, especially the chunk on bland reviews and internet reviewing)

So today, as I was about to add a book to my LibraryThing library and give it a mere three stars, which--for this author--would be a decidedly low mark from me, I started to wonder about whether that author had a LT account, and whether she'd be upset. I still think the book deserves three stars because it's part of a series, and there's far too much focus on stuff that happened earlier in the series, but now I feel a bit awkward. After all, I read Tess Gerritsen's posts about how upsetting she finds bad reviews.

What about you guys? Do you read reviews? Write them? Would getting a negative review upset you more if it were "this book sucks" or if it went into detail about the problems? Is "what a fab book" sufficient praise, or would you prefer more specific compliments?

UPDATE: People asked about the original story for of the Amazon fight, and Dear Author has conveniently posted a timeline.

On Prologues

I seem to be reading a spate of books of late that have completely pointless prologues. I realize the custom in the suspense genre these days is to open with some poor innocent being captured or killed by a serial killer so that we can see just how deviant the "baddie" is (or so the author can then relax a little, having already shown you the basic plot and stressed you out) and I've gotten used to that. I've even written a prologue for my romantic suspense, though it's not nearly so involved as some. (I posted a draft of it a while back, here, and while it's undergone some revisions since then, it hasn't become much more elaborate.)

I didn't have a prologue at first, but as I wrote, I realized that I wanted the reader to know that Nicole was dead long before the characters became certain of it. I wanted them looking for clues before the characters did, and that was the sole purpose of the prologue.

But the past few books I've read, I wonder why the authors bothered with the prologues and why no editor told them the book would be stronger without one.

• In one case, the prologue--which occurs more than a hundred years before the rest of the book--shows the discovery of an archaeological find. One of the artifacts is stolen later in the book, which forms the basis of the mystery/suspense, but nothing dramatic happens during the find, nothing vital that is not explained more than once later on in the story.
  
• The prologue of another book, taking place nearly ten years before the rest of the story, depicts the main character witnessing a murder as a child. The event is definitely life-altering, and you do need to know about it to understand the protagonist, but it's recalled so many times in the book, in dreams, in discussions, etc, that I got bored with all the repetition.
• The third actually takes place after the book begins. That is, Chapter 1 is dated earlier than the prologue. You get the prologue again later on in the book.

None of these is unique to the book in question. I've seen all these techniques used more than once (and the list is far from complete--certain styles of prologue get used regularly). However, reading these three books one right after another really brought question of a prologue into focus for me. All these books are by "name" authors (I'm too lazy to see whether they all qualify as "best sellers"), who've been writing and publishing for years, and now I want to go back and see whether they've always incorporated these introductory bits with information readers get again later on, or whether there's some sort of trend that's making them feel they need to have them.

I am a careful reader, so if I get information in a prologue, I don't want it again in the body of the book. If characters are going to discuss in detail a crime that's taken place, I don't need to see it being committed--you don't have to show the blood spilling first if you're going to give me two pages of spatter analysis later on down the road. (On the other hand, if you do show the spillage, that's fine...just give me a single sentence about what the spatter analyst had to say when the time comes.)

On television, there's a minute or two of story before the titles roll. Often, in shows like Cold Case, Without a Trace, Criminal Minds, the crime takes place in that first spot, and the rest of the show is an investigation into it. Sometimes, further crimes take place during the show, but there's a teaser up front, and that's how I often feel about the prologues in suspense novels. Maybe that's actually why I don't even notice the "serial killer grabs a victim" prologue any more; I'm so used to it from television.

So I wonder...how do the rest of you feel about prologues? Do you have particular types you like or particular ones that make you crazy? And what about epilogues, while we're at it?

Pssssst! Wanna Read Some Good Stuff?

Since I can’t seem to stop blogging about the two stories from Murder New York Style that have been nominated for the Agatha Award for Best Short Story, I thought it only right to link the stories of all four nominees for your reading enjoyment. Truth be told, our own Nan Higginson made me do it. Fair play and all that.

And the nominees are:

Donna Andrews, "A Rat's Tale" Ellery Queens Mystery Magazine

Rhys Bowen, "Please Watch Your Step" Strand Magazine

Nan Higginson, "Casino Gamble" Murder New York Style

Elizabeth Zelvin, "Death Will Clean Your Closet" Murder New York Style


And, of course there is always news to be had about the anthology itself. We are pleased to announce that Murder New York Style, the e-book, is now available through Fictionwise. and is offered in these eBook formats: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [1.4MB], Palm Doc (PDB) [331 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [352 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [962 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan(FUB) [340 KB], hiebook (KML) [1.6 MB], Sony Reader (LRF) [1.3 MB],iSilo (PDB) [299 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [833 KB], Kindle Compatible(MOBI) [848 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [512 KB]

Last but far from least, our friend, writer and all around creative genius Chris Verstraete, has put up a cover of Murder New York Style on her Miniatures page. These tiny covers are used to fill the shelves and libraries of the detailed and delicate rooms created by miniature enthusiasts. Chris’s book, Searching for a Starry Night, A Miniature Mystery will be released in May 2008. Run on over and look around Chris’s website. You will be amazed.

Terrie

Two Sentence Tuesday: Your Exquisite Corpse

Image via E.C. Gallery, beinArt Int'l Surreal Art Collective


I wrote: “And you don’t want your nosy parishioners to know? This mysterious meeting, for which you insisted I abandon my glassware unwashed, isn’t for anything embarrassing or tawdry, is it?”


I read: With a straight razor and a sure hand, he rapidly scraped away at his cheeks, his squared-off chin, and his pale throat. Then he took out a small scissors and carefully clipped any errant hairs that might disturb the shape of his luxuriant black mustache.
- The Midnight Band of Mercy by Michael Blaine

If you'd like to play along, offer up a random 2 sentences you've written and read this week in our comments. Once we get a string going, it's like an exquisite corpse in writing, or eavesdropping your way through the most fascinating hotel bar.

Update: C'mon, anyone? E-mails, grocery lists, anythang... Is the picture scaring you away?

Book Spots Of My Youth

Last Monday, Terrie wrote about New York City's "Book Row" for My Town Monday, so I figured I'd write about four spots I visited frequently for books as a child: my parents' bookshelves, our small town library and bookstore, and the pharmacy.

I spent much of my childhood on the far east end of Long Island, before the LIE (the Long Island Expressway, aka "the longest parking lot in the world") made traveling out to the "boonies" easy. (A history of the LIE.) Thus, before "the Hamptons" were "the Hamptons." East Hampton, where we lived, was one block long and sort of half a block wide (the half-block had both the hardware store and the pizza parlor, but that was about it). Mostly--as far as kids were concerned--town consisted of the five-and-ten, White's Pharmacy, the single movie theater and the bookstore. Oh, yeah, and the butcher shop, which had a donut-making machine in the window. Krispy Kreme? Ick. Dreesen's spoiled me for life...there's never been a donut to compare to theirs, which came out of the oil fresh and hot, then were coated however you wanted.

There were some stores, like the dress shop and the health food store, that interested adults, but didn't really call to us as children. There were no chain stores or fast food restaurants. They were strictly forbidden by the Ladies Village Improvement Society. (The LVIS had a used bookstore in their building in later years, but I was more apt to donate to it than to find anything there I hadn't already read.)

Like I said, there was a single movie theater. The movie didn't change all that often and my parents limited the amount of tv we watched, which didn't matter that much in East Hampton anyway, given that the reception was often spotty. So for entertainment once it got too dark outside to play, we read.

First, I read all the books in the bookshelves in our house. There were some books there from my mother's youth--Betty Gordon, Betty Wales, and the like--my siblings' books, and my father's mysteries. It was in those bookshelves that I first ran across Travis McGee and and Hercule Poirot. I am pretty sure the Mary Stewart and Phyllis A Whitney books on those shelves belonged to my mother, but they could as easily have been left by some family friend who stayed with us.

But even though we had many visitors, they would leave only a few new books over the course of a year, and there are only so many times you can read The Gnu And The Guru Go Behind The Beyond or The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel), so it didn't take long to get through the "playroom" bookshelves.

So soon enough, it was off to the library.

Our house was about a mile and a half from town. The library, conveniently located about half a mile before getting to the village, was a perfect break when walking or biking to or fro. It wasn't a big library, by any means, and it was definitely geared for kids (little kids who were there with their parents, not big kids who rode their bikes over themselves), but it was still a great spot to browse.

The bookstore in town was geared toward fancier reading. Lots of New York Times bestsellers, "literary fiction," etc. Often open late, it was the perfect for post-kiddie-movie trip. The "genre fiction" aisles were small, but the books were crammed in, so I could usually find something to read.

And if I couldn't? If all the fantasy novels looked dull, and the thrillers didn't thrill, there was always the drugstore where, in addition to the "bestseller" rack, they had the "category romance" rack, and a couple of racks of pulp fiction at its finest. These books, all ridiculously short, were only appropriate for one evening's entertainment. But luckily, the racks were refilled once a month, so I could be guaranteed new material every few weeks.

All in all, podunk, Long Island, wasn't a bad place for a geeky kid with a bent for genre fiction.

Get Your Murder Here!

Due to some Blogger issues, I can't put this in the sidebar at the moment. I hope once Blogger gets working again, I will be able to. But in honor of her Agatha nomination, Nan Higginson's story, Casino Gamble can be downloaded for free by clicking this link: Casino Gamble.pdf.

Two Sentence Tuesday

So, now that My Town Mondays are underway, and what with Clare's and my looming deadlines (self-imposed, but grinding nonetheless), I thought I'd start something silly and fun: Two Sentence Tuesdays.

Every Tuesday, I am going to post two sentences I've written and two sentences I've read. I encourage you all to join in the fun. C'mon...it's just two sentences. And they don't have to be two particularly outstanding sentences, either. They can be bits you wrote for a novel, or words from an email, just plunk down something you wrote this week.

And, heck, if we get enough sentences together, we could have a story, and maybe, just maybe, we might achieve Nan's status...Agatha nomination! Yay, Nan!

In my push toward Nanliness, this week I wrote:

Even sitting on the train, however, Callie could not relax, and when a transit officer entered their car, seemingly intent on memorizing the faces of all the passengers, panic welled up in her chest. Mac had seated himself to her right so he could hide his ruined cheek by facing her, but the window behind their seats acted as a mirror--should the office glance at it, he’d notice the unmistakable scar.

This week I read:

Prepare for battle.

The wedding guest list is often the place where all interested parties--from brides to grooms to mothers to guests to the adult spokespeople for squalling infants--first cross swords.

That's from my sister-in-law's book, Something New.

Alex Keto Beat Me To It

Our Texas friend Travis “Hey I’m 35 now, maybe I’ll run for President” Erwin (see comment section on Alex Keto's Blog in response to the blog post: Why No One Running for President Represents Change ) has a new Monday series over at One Word, One Rung, One Day called My Town Monday. Travis has invited his many pals to give him a blog post link about their hometowns or any old place they feel like describing.

As the Queen of New York City, I offered to post my valuable insights on my beloved City for this week's Monday gabfest. Lo and Behold, citizen of the world Alex Keto beat me to it. When you are roaming around his blog, after you finish his entertaining and accurate look at the Island of Manhattan, 2008, take a peek at his blog on life in West Berlin. Yep, before they took down the Wall.

Never fear, I will just take a huge jump back in time and describe the Manhattan I really miss. I was born and raised in the Bronx, the only borough of New York City that is actually on the mainland of the United States of America. (I love throwing that into conversations, particularly with Manhattanites.) But in the good old days (please excuse my children while they roll their eyes) the entire City of New York was an adventuresome playground for kids from all five boroughs.

We ran free around the city, in the same way farm kids ran free around the farm. All we needed was fifteen cents for a subway ride, or the courage to sneak under the turnstile, (praise and thanksgiving for the statute of limitations) and we were off on any number of adventures. Before I drown us all in reminiscence, let me focus on one of my favorite places.

Just below Union Square, the center of book buying in New York City was a strip of used bookshops that lined Fourth Avenue and was know colloquially as Book Row. Many of the shops specialized: cookbooks, social science books, one kind of fiction or another. Most of the shop owners wouldn’t allow us in the store without adult supervision for fear that we were street urchins (true) who did not have a real respect for books. (Not true.) Sometimes we could get a bookseller to trust us if we asked the right questions. “Do you have any Nancy Drew books with the old blue covers?” or “Do you have any books of stories or poems that Edgar Allen Poe wrote when he lived in New York?” Then he (or she) would guide us through the store, chiding us not to touch anything. One or two owners (it was always the owners) gave us rags or tissues and cautioned us to wipe our hands before we were more than a foot or two inside the threshold.

Marvin Mondlin, estate book buyer at the Strand Bookstore (the only remnant of the Book Row of long ago) and Roy Meador, a collector have co-authored a book about the used bookstores along Fourth Avenue and the culture of book buying in the City. It's called Book Row: An Anecdotal and Pictorial History of the Antiquarian Book Trade

Times change. Now when I walk into a major chain bookstore, with all their neat shelves and computerized indexes, not to mention their coffee shops, I hear the ghosts of Book Row: “You kids, watch the piles. Don’t knock the books down.” “You want the edition from before the war or the one that came out in 1947?” (This from memory, no punching in numbers and looking up.) “Don’t bring that soda bottle in here; you could spill." "Get out. Get out, you lousy kids.”

They don’t make ‘em like that any more.

Terrie

Short Stuff Sticker Shock

Allow me to hie to my fainting couch like Madame Recamier.

If hardcover prices don't already make you a little woozy in your weejuns, here's the latest wrinkle in softies, courtesy of my local drug store.

As I'm enviously prone to do, I was browsing the widely available, ergo widely read, book and magazine titles at a major chain. I spied a new (to me) title by a bestselling author of whom I am a sincere admirer, if less ardent in recent years. I noticed it wasn't very thick when I picked it up, but I don't always mind a quick read. I browsed the back cover. Still fine. I flipped inside for a peek at a random page in the thick of things (my preference over first or last pages). The text was HUGE, relatively speaking. It was at least 12 point font, but I'm betting more like 13 or 14. For weak-eyed readers, this will be welcome, but it wasn't stickered as one of those easy-to-read versions. Given the thickness of the book, I found myself curious, and started counting rows and words.

Keeping in mind that standard manuscript format is 250 words/page and that's how we typically estimate finished lengths in pages for agents and editors, etc, here's what I found in my admittedly non-comprehensive riffling and counting:

This title's pages were 25 lines long. Pretty standard, check.
The lengths of margin-to-margin lines ranged from 6 words to just one I counted with 11, and the majority come in at more like 7 words.
This got me to a generous average of 175 words/page on full pages.
There were 275 numbered pages.
This calculates to slightly over 48,000 words.

Now, that's an unrealistic maximum, because this book has LOTS of shorter pages due to pithy chunks of dialogue and the half-page chapter beginnings and partial-page chapter endings. As I recall it now (and forgot to note specifically, drat!), there were more than twenty chapters and some almost blank and numbered back pages. I think it's no grinchiness to say the book is, in fact, much closer to 40,000 words, about half of what I expect in a small paperback, and is still priced at the standard $6.99 mass market price.

I've since checked online, and the hardcover of this comes in at 176 pages, so the word/page count in that edition probably comes closer to the standard 250/page, but what do you think about buying a non-illustrated, series hardcover of that length for the $17.95 list?

I believe readers can and will judge whether they think it's worth it. I'm not calling anyone out, but let no one tell you the long-form short story or novella's a dead form. You just can't call it that openly, and you need a reader base so hungry for content that they won't squeal at half-servings.

Is this a trend? Do you know others besides the title I saw?

Dripping Red Valentines for You

I hope you like it...I can't return it. Image via the creatures in Andrew Bell's head.


Just in case you're feeling thematic and have the time to read (I will), here's a delicious sampler:

CLASSIC
The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe. A meaty short story, but the rest of any good collection will fill out this spooky meal.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. The story of colonialism and good and evil in nineteenth century Africa where a steamboat pilot navigates wild country to deliver an ivory-trading agent and his inventory.

The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene. WWII British assistant police commissioner Henry Scobie is stationed in a West African town where he struggles with his desires and duties.

THRILLER
Bleeding Hearts: A Novel by Ian Rankin. First published under the name Jack Harvey, this early novel includes a tweaky British assassin being hunted around the UK and United States by an American P.I.

Runaway Heart: A Novel by Stephen J. Cannell. Futuristic tale about disabled LAPD cop Jack Wirta who's hired to help the founder of the Institute for Planetary Justice uncover the corrupt corporations and and government figures involved in a dangerous genetic engineering scheme.

HISTORICAL
Heart of Ice by Alys Clare. In 1194, the body of a traveler coming to Hawkenlye Abbey to take the Holy Water ends up found in a ditch with French papers and possibly the plague.

Hearts and Bones by Margaret Lawrence. Midwife Hannah Trevor investigates the death of girl found strangled on Valentine's Day, 1786, in Revolutionary War Maine.

TRADITIONAL
Bleeding Hearts by Susan Wittig Albert. A China Bayles mystery about the herbalist and former lawyer in Pecan Springs, Texas, where the high school football coach is implicated in nefarious improprieties.

Cactus Heart by Jon Talton. 50 years after a cattle baron's twin grandsons disappeared, Arizona Deputy Sheriff David Mapstone finds a pair of small skeletons in a abandoned warehouse and uses his background as a history professor to uncover the long-buried truth.

NOIR-ISH
Heart of the Old Country by Tim McLoughlin. Coming of age tale in rough corner of Brooklyn with loads of realistic local flavor.

The Girl with the Long Green Heart by Lawrence Block. Caper with two long-con artists and the millionaire target of their real estate swindle.


I haven't read all of these titles. Think of them more as springboards than comprehensive endorsements. However, I would read any of them based on the back-cover blurbage and will probably get to a few more. Categories above are loose, too. Just pointers, not pigeonholes. If you've read any of these or other books that fit today's bill, please share your views in the comments. You have our heartfelt appreciation.

Saluting Bookstores

I have no idea where she came from originally. Fab salute, though!

Upon reading the sad news of the closing of another local bookshop, JB Dickey, owner of Seattle Mystery Bookshop, jotted a note to the newspaper asking why it seemed so difficult to get publicity for local bookstore successes. I read this from the Seattle Times site (snips mine):

...When we moved our shop, the Seattle Mystery Bookshop, over the Memorial Day weekend in 2005, we sent out a press release saying how here was a story about a small, independent bookshop that was doing so well that it could move to a larger space after 15 years, and no one in the local press paid any attention. Two and a half years later, business is terrific; 2007 was our best year yet, a 6.5 percent increase in sales over 2006...

If you want to know how independent booksellers really are doing, come ask us. Reacting to the closing of one bookshop by saying it is another death-knell of an industry simply isn't fair or correct and can be counterproductive. It can also mislead customers and drive more into the hands of the corporate Big Boxes, encouraging the difficulties that small independents face. Why not do a story about how some independents are doing fine because of their customers who want to support small businesses? Isn't there a story in that?...

JB has more background and more insight at the bookstore's blog, and it's also worth reading if you like charting how little online happenings suddenly swirl over their banks.

So, are there local bookstores near you doing it right, and what do you like about them? Let's celebrate!

Banishing Words

Last week, Lake Superior State University released its List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-Use, Over-Use, and General Uselessness for 2008. The school, located in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, has been publishing this whimsical wish list annually since New Year’s Day 1976.

Every year, thousands of words and terms are nominated for inclusion on the list by English-speaking people around the globe. This year’s final list has 19 entries, from the current “it” words organic and webinar, to the oldies but goodies perfect storm and give back, and to terms such as [blank] is the new [blank] and it is what it is that make many people I know want to deck whoever utters them. Interestingly, only one word, sweet, is a kid favorite.

While I understand the logic behind each word’s inclusion on this year’s list, and I even wholeheartedly agree with certain selections, not all these words and terms bother me. At the same time, there are some words and terms not on the list that make me want to retch every time I hear or read them.

One word I’ve been seeing in more and more novels lately is shrug. It doesn’t disturb me when a character shrugs a response or shrugs off something like an appointment or a hurt. What drives me insane is when a character shrugs into a coat. No one slips a coat on anymore. No one slides into a coat. No one tugs a coat on, or pulls it on, or even just puts it on. No, everyone seems to shrug into coats these days. When one of my favorite authors had her character shrugging into a coat in every other chapter recently, I almost threw the book across the room.

Another term that bothers me is boot up, as in boot up the computer. For some reason, this term sounds very dated to me, although it probably isn’t. Personally, I stopped booting up my computer years ago. Now I just turn it on, much like I turn on a lamp, a TV, and my car. Sometimes, however, I have to admit, I do very much want to boot my computer—out the door, out the window, against the wall, with all the force I can muster.

But the top of my list is reserved for the euphemisms used in romance novels. Before I even read my first romance, I’d heard the joking about these euphemisms. I thought that’s all they were—jokes. But they weren’t just jokes, and they continue to flourish today; I see them over and over in the romance manuscripts I edit. His throbbing maleness. Say huh? Her secret spot. Um, her childhood tree house? Her sweet spot. The ice cream aisle of the supermarket! I almost prefer today’s erotic romances over the PG-rated ones because at least they call these body parts by name—or at least something less silly.

None of these words and terms is truly horrible. They’re just my personal cringe inducers. Do you have any words or terms that push your buttons—um, that bug you—er, that get you started?

Do We Need to Move?

Looking for your audience? Wanna be closer to your readers? How about property shopping based upon book sales, etc.?

The annual rankings of the "most literate cities" are out from Central Connecticut State University, accounting for per capita booksellers; educational attainment; internet resources; library resources; newspaper circulation; and periodical publications.

These cities led the per capita bookstores list:
1 Seattle, WA
2 San Francisco, CA
3 Minneapolis, MN
3 Cincinnati, OH
5 St. Louis, MO
6 Portland, OR
7 Pittsburgh, PA
8 St. Paul, MN
9 Cleveland, OH
10 Washington,
10 Denver, CO

What Do You Write?

Over at the BookEnds Blog today, Jessica posted about respect--and the lack thereof--for the romance genre. This comes just after a long discussion on Dorothy-L (or at least I think it was on Dorothy-L--I belong to too many lists, obviously!) about the choices editors and agents make to call something "suspense" or "thriller" vs. "mystery" because mysteries don't sell as well.

But whether they sell or not, people respect mysteries. You don't see people in the mystery aisle at the bookstore who dart out of the aisle once they realize someone's seen them, or turn their back so they won't be recognized. These are things you see when you breeze through/by the romance section.

My current work in progress is a romantic suspense novel. I call it my "smut book" around the house. Not out of a lack of respect, but because the romance is the hardest part for me to write. I can plot the mystery, I can research the international laws and procedures, I can even walk around the house muttering lines of dialogue until they sound natural, but I can't manipulate the romance. The characters have control over that. Referring to the book the way I do is a constant reminder to me not to let my focus on that area of the story slip.

And yet, I do find it harder to tell people I am writing romantic suspense than I did to say I was working on a mystery. Which is ridiculous, given that more than 50% of mass market paperback sales are romance, and that a good portion of the bestseller's list is romance.

So let me tell you an awful secret: not only do I write romance, I read it. Now, I don't read historical romance. I did when I was twelve and thirteen, but after that, my taste for history was too factual--I liked hard history, not historical fiction. Besides, historical romances were the embarrassing one with the bodice-ripper covers.

But romantic suspense, and the new "mystery romance" genre are among my favorite kinds of books to read. Dorchester Publishing's "Making It" line of mystery romances, for example, are perfect beach reading. Lighter, more humorous, more romantic than traditional mysteries, they have enough suspense to keep me intrigued, but not enough to make me nauseous with fear, the way some of my favorite thriller writers do. (I don't like roller coasters--but I do like thrills and chills while my feet are firmly planted!) I just bought Gemma Halliday's latest, Undercover in High Heels, from Amazon, and it occurs to me I don't know where they shelve "mystery romances" at my local Borders. I'll have to take a look.

Because shelving is what it's all about. I know a number of men who read Iris Johansen, who's shelved in the Mystery & Thriller aisle, but who's always written--in my opinion--romantic suspense. Ditto Elizabeth Lowell and Tami Hoag. But offer these men a Sandra Brown book and they'll look at you in horror, though Brown is no less adept at the thriller side of the coin than Lowell or Hoag. And her books, like theirs, consistently hit the bestseller lists. It's just that she's shelved in the romance section.

So I'm going to add something to Elaine's "complete" for my 2008 phrase. I'm going for "complete disclosure." My name is Laura, and I write romantic suspense.

Books Not To Buy

If you're like me, you have an ever-growing list of books you want, and people know it. So when they're desperate for a last minute prezzie, they go out and get you a gift card from Borders or Barnes and Noble or Amazon.

This year I was lucky enough to get this book, which has been on my Amazon wish list for ages. I also got a gift card from Borders, so now comes the complicated process of trying to figure out which books I need right now, and which can wait a while.

The only book reviews I read consistently are Janice Harayda's One Minute Book Reviews. I like her style, and one minute is about all I have to figure out if I want to invest in a book. In today's post, Janice points out Entertainment Weekly's Worst Books of 2007. Not that there are any on the list I was planning to buy, but it is nice to have a short list of books not to buy when the list of books I do want is so long, and gets longer every day!

Proust and the Squid and the Matrix

How often will I get to write a title like that without being drunk? Yay! Explanation of image in last paragraph.

We've been discussing this topic from various angles when considering the recent and disouraging NEA survey on reading and in considering e-readers and the different ways we interact with them versus a book. How about versus video?

Well, in the yet-unsettled debate of the developmental value of television as educational medium and of fluent reading as a distinct and superior cognitive
activity, there's a newly assembled set of interesting arguments. Caleb Crain's whole New Yorker article is worthwhile, including highlights of the important differences in cognition between readers and illiterates who really do perceive and process the world around them very differently. (via Arts & Letters Daily) There's also juicy stuff on how much TV (even educational) for kids seems to be the magic amount before the onset of underperformance in grade-level reading, science, and math. Here are some snipped chunks I found interesting:

...Taking the long view, it’s not the neglect of reading that has to be explained but the fact that we read at all. “The act of reading is not natural,” Maryanne Wolf writes in “Proust and the Squid” (Harper; $25.95), an account of the history and biology of reading. Humans started reading far too recently for any of our genes to code for it specifically. We can do it only because the brain’s plasticity enables the repurposing of circuitry that originally evolved for other tasks—distinguishing at a glance a garter snake from a haricot vert, say...

...Drawing on recent imaging studies, she [Wolf] explains in detail how a modern child’s brain wires itself for literacy. The ground is laid in preschool, when parents read to a child, talk with her, and encourage awareness of sound elements like rhyme and alliteration, perhaps with “Mother Goose” poems. Scans show that when a child first starts to read she has to use more of her brain than adults do. Broad regions light up in both hemispheres. As a child’s neurons specialize in recognizing letters and become more efficient, the regions activated become smaller.

At some point, as a child progresses from decoding to fluent reading, the route of signals through her brain shifts...reading starts to move along a faster and more efficient “ventral route,”... With the gain in time and the freed-up brainpower, Wolf suggests, a fluent reader is able to integrate more of her own thoughts and feelings into her experience. “The secret at the heart of reading,” Wolf writes, is “the time it frees for the brain to have thoughts deeper than those that came before.”

...When reading goes well, Wolf suggests, it feels effortless, like drifting down a river rather than rowing up it. It makes you smarter because it leaves more of your brain alone. Ruskin once compared reading to a conversation with the wise and noble, and Proust corrected him. It’s much better than that, Proust wrote. To read is “to receive a communication with another way of thinking, all the while remaining alone, that is, while continuing to enjoy the intellectual power that one has in solitude and that conversation dissipates immediately."

This seems, to me, like an erudite explanation of what avid readers, even writers, struggle to explain to the unconvinced: the rich and exciting fountain of thoughts and feelings which is possible while reading because the translation of squiggles into meaning has become fluid and automatic.

If you haven't seen The Matrix, the movie takes place in a dystopian future where humans live unaware that they're enslaved within a machine-made simulation of what was once normal life. The few humans outside this shared delusion often view the simulation (people, buildings, weather, everything) not as images and sound, but instead choose to monitor it as lines of computer code cascading down their screens. (screen capture image above) As it turns out, this story detail is expressing a real truth about human cognition. Once we've learned to effortlessly decode, we can perceive more completely, faster, and with better retention from reading than experiencing real-time images and sound. The good news: The Matrix takes place centuries in the future. The machines have become implacable overlords using humanity as wet-cell batteries, but people are still reading. Whew!