Has anyone ever written a negative review of this book? If so, it better not have been mean!
I don’t like admitting that some writers might be too smart for me. Yesterday I was reading an article on The New Yorker website about “hatchet job” negative book reviews when I got lost. There were a lot of names I didn’t recognize and words that I didn’t immediately know (I don’t look words up in the dictionary very often anymore), so I lost interest. But the topic of mean/nasty book reviews intrigued me.
The author’s point (or one of them) was that British reviewers still go for the “hatchet job” while American reviewers go for the more gentle approach. That makes sense to me. The United States has been inundated with anti-bullying campaigns for years, and maybe it has taken hold in the literary community. Writers like Dorothy Parker and Gore Vidal (and a bunch of old book reviewers whom I had never heard of), who were once celebrated for their literary insults, would now be viewed upon as literary bullies. I don’t know if Great Britain has gone anti-bully. I watch sessions of the House of Commons just for fun every once in a while (I have no idea what they’re talking about), and I don’t think any of the speakers I heard could sponsor any anti-bullying legislation with a straight face.
I guess the “hatchet job” was more common in the United States a generation (or two) back. I’d also guess that some of the “hatchet job” reviews were more for the ego of the reviewer than for the education of the reader. Dorothy Parker and Gore Vidal were known for insulting other writers, but from what I’ve read (which is a tiny percentage of everything they’ve written), their insults weren’t very good and their comments weren’t very insightful. As school children, they might have been bullied (pure speculation on my part) for being snooty, not for being clever, and that might have contributed to their mean-spirited negativity.
Part of the problem is that people aren’t trained to give or take criticism. A couple decades ago, I was in a writers’ group where we were encouraged to start our critiques with statements like “If I were writing this, I would take this approach,” or “If this were my selection, I would focus on this character instead of that character.” It was positive but still constructive. There wasn’t any “This was good,” or “This needs more work.” It was a difficult standard to maintain. About a year into the group, a member threw my manuscript on the floor and called it a waste of his time. That wasn’t constructive. It was kind of mean and negative. And it wasn’t clever. At least Dorothy Parker and Gore Vidal tried to be creative in their insults.
If anything, book reviews today have gone too far the other way. Now there are too many too positive reviews. The positive review has become just another sales technique, which is okay as long as we readers are aware of that. Between sock puppets, friends of the author, and reviewers not wanting to make anybody angry because they’re trying to sell their own books, it’s tough to trust book reviews anymore.
During my first year of Dysfunctional Literacy, I wrote several negative reviews of popular books, but I hope my negativity had a point. I wrote that Stephen King uses too many clichés in his newer books (and his older writing wasn’t nearly so lazy). I wrote that John Sanford’s characters all talk the same way. I wrote that Sue Grafton’s alphabet mystery series was a really stupid idea (but she found a market of readers who follow her books, so that gives me hope that readers will go for some of my stupid ideas too). My reviews were negative, but I hope they weren’t mean. I’d read them again to find out, but reading posts that are two year’s old can be painful.
*****
The New Yorker is not meant for me. I’ll admit that. The article that I mentioned is an example where the author has taken an interesting topic and then lost me after a few paragraphs. I’d criticize the article for being longwinded and rambling, but then I’d leave myself open to accusations of being ironically mean-spirited for writing a “hatchet job” on a New Yorker article when I claim to not appreciate “hatchet jobs.” So I’ll just say the topic was great but the article wasn’t for me. I hope that isn’t negative.
But enough about me! How negative should reviews get? Have reviews gotten too positive recently? Do you even trust book reviews anymore? And finally… does anybody read The New Yorker on a regular basis anymore?
I knew Danielle was having a bad moment when she slammed the front door and yelled “Fuck!” instead of “Shit!”
Danielle wasn’t the type to make a quiet entrance, even during her good moments. She slammed doors shut, slammed doors open, and even if a door didn’t need closing, she’d beat on it just to let me know she was there. She coughed loudly and sneezed loudly too (but she never sprayed). She snored loudly (but claimed she didn’t). The only thing she didn’t do loudly was use the restroom. At any rate, I was surprised, not because she made a loud, profane entrance, but because she had returned so soon. Since she had just left a few minutes earlier to go to work, I was pretty sure what the problem was.
“Car didn’t start?” I said from the couch. I had just begun reading a stack of comics and was a bit miffed that she had interrupted my quiet time (but I wouldn’t admit that to her).
“Fuck!”
“Is it the battery?” I asked.
“Fu… It’s not the battery,” she said.
When it came to cars, I could change a flat, check the oil, and jump a battery, but that was all. So if a car didn’t start, I’d always go for the battery. “I can try a boost if you want to make sure,” I suggested.
“I said it’s not the battery!”
I figured I’d keep my mouth shut for a few minutes and let her work out her frustration on something other than me. She called a few of her friends, but nobody answered. She paced around the apartment, said “Fuck!” a few more times (Danielle could be sweet, but she also over-cursed sometimes), and then sat down close to me on the couch.
“Can you drive me to work?” It hurt her to ask. She didn’t want me to have anything to do with her “work.”
But it was good to hear Danielle over-cursing again. She had been subdued (her version of subdued) for the past couple nights since the slutty blonde furniture incident. I had been angry with her for the first time, and she had taken it well; she hadn’t yelled back or cursed me out. Instead, after I had calmed down, we kind of worked things out. The big issue had been that I wanted to get rid of the stolen furniture.
“When I look at this, all I see is slutty blonde.” I had told her after looking at the living room furniture: the entertainment center, the couches, the coffee table, the framed paintings, all stolen items from the slutty blonde. In Danielle’s defense, the slutty blonde had owed her some money.
“And I see a great deal,” Danielle had said. She figured we had paid 1/3rd of the furniture’s value. “Plus, that douchebag boyfriend probably spent all her money.”
“Whenever I lend money to a friend,” I had said, “I just decide that the money is already gone. I’d rather lose the money than the friend.”
“A friend pays back the money, no matter what,” Danielle had countered.
“I don’t want to lose a friendship over money.”
“If a friend won’t pay me back, then fuck ‘em. They’re not my friend.”
“Friendship is more important than money.”
“I can always find friends.”
“I can always earn more money.”
Then Danielle had said, “Your family must have had money.”
“We were middle class,” I said, almost defensively. I knew that my parents had struggled to pay some bills, but I hadn’t known that as a kid. We had lived in a decent house, and I had never been aware of money as an issue.
“We didn’t have money,” Danielle had said. “And I always knew it.”
That was where the conversation had ended. We had different perspectives on this issue, and neither of us was wrong (except for the part about stealing furniture). And I knew that if I ever borrowed money from Danielle, I’d better pay her back.
Now Danielle needed a ride to work. By “work,” she meant rubbing her mostly naked body on drunk guys who would feel her up when the bouncers weren’t paying attention, but we didn’t talk about that. Danielle had told me before we started living in sin what her job was, so I couldn’t complain about it. We just called it “work,” like I called my job “work.” Both of us knew what the other did, but we never talked about either job, mine because it was boring and hers because of a lot of (hopefully) obvious reasons. Besides, I really didn’t want to think about that, and Danielle didn’t want me to think about it.
Danielle was already late, so she barely hesitated when we reached my car. She hated my car. It was reliable and paid for but also bland. Still, it was the vehicle taking her to work, so Danielle was gracious enough not to make any rude remarks about it. She just blew some air out of her lips, rolled her eyes, and got in. At that moment, the slutty blonde was probably lucky she hadn’t owned a sports car.
Even though I had never been to Nero’s, I kind of knew what to expect. Patrons usually wore ties and drove expensive cars, but they still got drunk and grabbed ass whenever they could. And when they got drunk and grabbed ass, they stuffed twenty dollar bills into g-strings. A few would even hand over credit cards. Danielle was nice looking, even without make up, even in well-lit areas, even before guys got drunk, so once she started grinding down on guys with money, she could pull in some good cash. That’s why she worked almost every night. But I tried not to think about that.
“Don’t talk to anybody,” Danielle said as I drove. “Just drop me off and leave.”
“Okay,” I said. I really had no problem with that.
“Somebody’s gonna try to talk to you,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because you’re my boyfriend,” she said. “A bunch of guys there wonder what you’re like. They’re curious.”
Nero’s was like a super-center topless club, but it couldn’t be seen from the street because of a giant brown brick wall that surrounded the half block. Despite its name, the only Roman architecture involved were a couple pillars by the front. Nero’s looked like a big block building from the outside, with a lot of guys with giant forearms strutting around the entrance. If a customer wanted to park himself, he drove to the far end of the lot, but Danielle wanted to be dropped off, so we sat in the valet line, which was about ten cars long.
As we pulled in, a valet directed us to the line of cars waiting to be parked. Danielle rolled down her window, leaned out, and shouted, “It’s me! My car broke down!”
I heard a few guys laughing in the distance, and one guy yelled out “Again?”
The valet pointed to the right, and I drove straight up to the front door.
“Don’t talk to anybody, remember,” she said with a swift smacking kiss on the lips. “I’ll have a friend bring me home.”
“Don’t steal anything,” I said.
“Shut up,” she said and slammed the door. Then she put her head through the open passenger window and said with her cheese-eating grin, “Love ya!” and jogged into Nero’s before I could respond.
What?
*****
To be continued in… The Literary Girlfriend: Casual Love
And to read “The Literary Girlfriend” from the beginning, start here.
Reading the classic comic book for fun as a kid meant that I could pretend to have read the actual book as an adult. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This may be a “Duh!” moment. Researchers claim that kids who read for fun at an early age read a lot more as adults and have better math skills than adults who didn’t read as much as kids (more here). In other words, reading just for enjoyment might be good for you.
I say “might” because I don’t trust studies. Researchers can make/support any claim they want, so I don’t automatically believe something just because a study says it’s true. For a study, this one has a significant sample size. And it was conducted over a long period of time. These are good signs. But I still don’t automatically believe it. I want to believe it, though.
The study claims that kids who read for fun read more as adults. That makes sense. Of course, kids who hate reading will be more unlikely to read. Nobody wants to do what they don’t like to do. I’m a believer in reading for the fun of it. That’s the only reason I read anymore. I’m done with school (I hope), so I don’t need to read anything that I don’t want to read, and if something that I don’t want to read absolutely has to get read, then my wife does that for me (and I can say that without much fear of retribution because she usually doesn’t read this blog).
It’s a lot easier to read for fun as an adult than it was to read for fun as a kid. As an adult, I can read what I want when I want. When you’re a kid, you’re at the mercy of adults. If you want to read the latest copy of The Walking Dead, and your parents give you the complete boxed set of Little House on the Prairie, you’re screwed (and you’ll probably hate reading for the rest of your life).
I was lucky. My parents let me read what I wanted. I read comic books, Mad Magazine, and lots of Charlie Brown books, but my parents kept some other stuff around too. I read a couple Narnia books in elementary school. I read The Hobbit. I even began reading Conan the Barbarian books. While other kids read Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends, I had a copy of Uncle Shelby’s A, B, Z Book. You can’t hate reading while reciting Uncle Shelby’s A, B, Zs to a bunch of your friends.
I read a lot of comic books as a kid, and I turned out alright. At least, I think I did, but reading so many Classics Illustrated comic books made me a literary fraud. By reading comic book versions of literature such as A Tale of Two Cities or Moby Dick and then reading the first few pages of each classic novel, I could usually pretend that I had read the classics and get away with it. This made me seem much more literary than I really was. But I actually read a few entire classics too, like The Three Musketeers (still one of my all-time favorites) and The Iliad (not one of my favorites).
Supposedly, reading for fun has carry over in other areas, such as math. Maybe avid readers will say that they still suck at math. But maybe they would have sucked at math even more if they hadn’t read for fun. I have no proof to back that up, but I’ve learned that if I say something with enough authority in my voice, people will believe me.
And maybe reading for fun really has helped my math skills. My job has almost nothing to do with math, but I still use basic math by choice in my personal life. For example, if I’m paying cash, and the total is $3.27, I might give the cashier $4.02 to get three quarters back instead of a mess of change. Most clerks look befuddled (they probably don’t read for fun). A few understand right away (they probably read for fun). If I hadn’t read for fun as a kid, I might have a bunch more useless change in my pocket right now.
I like reading for fun. I read because it’s fun. If reading always felt like War and Peace, I probably wouldn’t have done it as much as a kid, and I wouldn’t be reading now. Without my love for reading, I never would have started Dysfunctional Literacy or written The Writing Prompt or begun The Literary Girlfriend. It was because of my mom and dad (who both let me read what I want) that I now read and write and occasionally can do math in my head. Thanks Mom and Dad!
Reading about this study made me think about the books that I read for fun as a kid. What books did you read for fun when you were a kid?
I sometimes recommend this book, but it’s not the best book ever, and it won’t change your life, and you might not even like it.
I don’t know why, but I get annoyed when somebody tells me how great a book is. It’s probably a character flaw on my part. The person recommending a book is sharing (I despise the word “share,” so that might be part of it) something personal when he/she makes the recommendation, so my automatic rejection is irrational and rude (even though I don’t mean to be).
Maybe it’s the way the recommendation is phrased. Maybe it’s just me getting cranky as I get older. But when a friend makes a wildly enthusiastic book recommendation, I feel the urge to make a snide comment (and I don’t normally make snide comments). Here are some of the snide comments I don’t make:
Friend: “You’ll love this book.”
Me: “Don’t tell me what I’ll love.”
Friend: “This is the best book ever!”
Me: “You’ve read every book ever?”
Friend: “This book speaks to me!”
Me: “Now books are talking to you. At least the voices in my head belong to me.”
For whatever reason, I get defensive whenever somebody tells me how much they love a book (or movie, or TV show). It might be because nobody listens to my recommendations. I read (or pretend to read, but they don’t know that) a lot of books. I don’t recommend a book unless I actually finish it. Finishing a book, that’s the highest compliment I can pay to a book, but it’s only been recently that I’ve begun admitting to my intellectual friends that I don’t finish books. They’re taking it well. Most of them are still talking to me.
Anyway, I don’t think anybody I’ve talked to about books has ever read the books I recommend. The books that I recommend (but nobody reads) are Bernard Cornwell’s King Arthur Warlord trilogy(The Winter King, The Enemy of God, and Excalibur) . Yeah, I know, another trilogy. But this one was written almost twenty years ago, when trilogies were still trilogies but not quite as… trilogy-ish (I hope people know what I mean). I really enjoyed reading these books. I reread sections of them about once a year. Whenever I recommend a book (or series) to a friend, this is the one.
But I don’t think anybody has ever taken me up on my recommendation. Maybe nobody wants to read another King Arthur book. There were a bunch of them before I even discovered this trilogy. There was L’Morte D’Arthur, The Once and Future King, The Crystal Cave series, The Mists of Avalon, and bunch of other stuff that’s usually from Merlin’s point of view.
Plus, Bernard Cornwell is a hack. He writes way too much stuff now. He wrote maybe twenty Sharpe novels about the Napoleonic Wars. I’ve read a bunch of them (and always enjoyed them), but I couldn’t tell you the names of any of them or what happened. They were all the same book. Bernard Cornwell inspired my reading rule where I don’t read more than three books by the same author anymore. He’s that guy. He’s that kind of hack. But his King Arthur trilogy was great. He is a potentially great author who went bad.
Despite my glowing reviews, nobody I know will read these books. Maybe it’s the King Arthur thing. Maybe it’s my monotone voice. Even when I’m excited, I still sound bored. If I sound bored, then no wonder I can’t convince anybody to read the books I like.
Some books are easy to recommend because they’re already really popular. The Harry Potter books are safe. John Green’s The Fault in our Stars seems to be an easy pick. The Cat who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest books were hot a couple years ago. By easy picks, I don’t mean bad. I mean… easy. You probably won’t get burned if the person you recommend them to doesn’t like them. After all, how can millions of other positive reviews be wrong? If somebody doesn’t like a Harry Potter book, it’s that person’s fault, not the fault of the person who recommended it. But a Bernard Cornwell King Arthur trilogy that nobody I know has ever heard of? That’s a risky set of books to recommend.
What books do you love that nobody else seems to read? I know I’m a hypocrite for asking this question, but I don’t believe hypocrisy is that big a character flaw; it’s almost impossible for a human to be 100% consistent on everything. Anyway, I’m asking, so I promise not to get annoyed if you tell me it’s the BEST BOOK EVER, or if it speaks to you, or if I really have to read it. I won’t even get annoyed if you use the word “share” (or “sharing”). And if I get annoyed, I won’t mention it.
So… what books do you love but can’t convince anybody else to read?
Even as the tattooed guy was clenching his fist to punch me out, I pieced together the events that had led up to this moment. The slutty blonde behind the tattooed guy owed my girlfriend Danielle some money. The slutty blonde wouldn’t pay Danielle back, so Danielle had stolen her furniture and put it in my/our apartment. Danielle hadn’t told me that the furniture was stolen (it was nice furniture!). Now the slutty blonde wanted her furniture back, but Danielle wouldn’t give it up until she got her money back. Danielle (from the safety of our second-floor apartment balcony) and the slutty blonde were repeatedly calling each other bitch, and the tattooed guy called me a pussy and was moving forward to fight me.
I had maybe half a second to make a decision about how I was going to defend myself. I hadn’t been in a real fight since junior high, and I had lost (but I got left alone after it, so in the long run, I guess I won), but I knew my weaknesses. I punched like a girl, and I refused to pull hair (like a girl), so that left few options. He was too big to win a grappling bout, but since we were just outside the front door of my apartment, I could push/pull us both down the steps. It would hurt a lot, but it would most likely be the end of the fight, and Danielle wouldn’t know that I was a coward and a wuss. I bent my knees and was ready to make my first move when…
My hairy neighbor stepped out onto his balcony. He was a big guy too, but without the muscles and tattoos. “Everything okay?” he asked.
I looked up at the sky and silently thanked God. The tattooed guy sneered, but then my neighbor’s front door opened and his two hairy friends stepped out. The tattooed guy moved back a little, and the sneer disappeared.
I felt relief but also knew I wanted to resolve the situation while I had the upper hand. I didn’t want this tattooed guy to come back when I didn’t have a trio of hairy neighbors to bail me out.
“I’ve got some cash,” I said to the slutty blonde. “I’ll buy the furniture from you.”
“Hell no,” the slutty blonde said, but then the tattooed guy put his finger in her face and turned to me.
“How much?”
“$500?”
“One thousand,” he said.
“You called me a pussy for no reason,” I said. ‘That’s worth at least a few hundred bucks.”
The tattooed guy glanced at my three hairy buddies and shrugged. “800.”
“750.”
The tattooed guy nodded, and the slutty blonde started shrieking out a protest. “But that’s my…”
“Shut up,” he said, and she quieted down.
I thought about the envelopes of cash I had stashed away inside various bagged comic books inside the second bedroom. “Danielle, I’ve got some cash in the…”
“I know,” she said, and rushed back inside, slamming the patio door. I was disturbed by the mental picture I had of Danielle flipping through thousands of my bagged comics looking for cash while I had been at work, but I didn’t have time to get mad about that. A few minutes later, she was back out with a wad of cash. I leaned over to the balcony, took the cash, counted it, and gave it to the slutty blonde. Before she could count it, the tattooed guy took it, counted it, and nodded.
“Is that it?” I said. “Is this over?”
“It’s over,” the tattooed guy said.
As they walked silently down the steps, the slutty blonde fuming and the tattooed guy fiddling with the money, Danielle called out from the balcony. “Wait!”
Both of them stopped and looked back. I stared at Danielle, who had struck her pose, hands on hips, chest out, cheese-eating grin. I was hoping for a reconciliatory message. I really hate uncomfortable moments like what we had just been through. Maybe Danielle would apologize for the misunderstanding and ask that they could put it all behind them.
Instead she reared back and screamed out:
“BITCH!!!”
Then she slowly, dramatically, stepped back inside the apartment and slid the balcony door shut.
I was appalled by what she had done, but I laughed anyway. When I’m nervous, sometimes I laugh at inappropriate things. My three hairy buddies laughed too, but it was obvious they thought it was funny. Even the tattooed guy laughed, shaking his head and still fiddling with the cash. I almost felt sorry for the slutty blonde.
After they left, I turned to my neighbor. “Jeez, I don’t know how to thank you. I think I was about to get punched out.”
My hairy neighbor looked past me to my front door and said quietly, “You need to be careful with her.” He shook his head and went back inside his apartment.
I slowly walked into my/our apartment, and my relief turned into instant anger when I saw Danielle facing me with her usual pose and grin. This was the first time I had been truly angry with her.
“What… What the fuck were you thinking?” I stammered.
I hardly ever used foul language when I spoke, so Danielle was surprised. She even forced the cheese-eating grin off her face and stepped back.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was going to give the furniture back. I just wanted to piss her off some more.”
“No, you weren’t,” I said. “You can’t put me in situations like that. I’m not a fighter. I don’t do that.”
“I’m sorry!” she said. “I didn’t think they’d come here.”
“I can’t have stuff like this happen!”
“I know! It won’t. I’m sorry!”
“The last week and a half have been great,” I said, starting to breathe normally. “Maybe the best in my life, but I can’t live with somebody that steals furniture and doesn’t tell me about it, and treats people like you treated that… that slutty blonde.”
“But she deserved… That’s how… The people I…” Danielle paused. “That’s why I don’t want you to meet my friends.”
“Those were…?”
“Those weren’t my friends,” Danielle said. “But my friends are like that. I’m like that, but I… I don’t act like that around you. Most of the time.”
“My girlfriends usually read books,” I said. “They don’t get me into fights.”
“I read books,” Danielle said, half-heartedly holding up Pride and Prejudice, even though she wasn’t really reading it.
“You can’t put me in situations like this,” I said, my anger starting to subside. “I’m just not emotionally equipped to deal with ‘crazy shit’ like this.”
“Crazy shit?” Danielle said, the cheese-eating grin returning. “This was nothing.”
*****
To be continued in… The Literary Girlfriend: Car Trouble
And to read “The Literary Girlfriend” from the beginning, start here.
What am I more likely to read? Jane Austen novels, a Russian classic, or a comic book with pretty pictures?
As a writer, it’s sometimes painful to go back and read old stuff that I’ve written. It’s even worse if somebody else reads it. A few days ago somebody found the first post that I wrote for Dysfunctional Literacy and left a comment. It was complimentary (way nicer than the post deserved), but when I went back and reviewed the post (and a few others after that), I was mortified.
The posts were poorly written. I referred to myself as “we” and mentioned the people who read this blog (there weren’t any back then) as “dysfunctional literates.” I’m kind of embarrassed by that now. I’m tempted to go back and edit or delete everything from the first year, but I also think there’s nothing wrong with seeing how this blog has progressed over time.
Even though the quality of writing was poor, some of my early topics were pretty good. The first couple posts I wrote were about the rules I have for reading books. Life is short, and I know I won’t have time to read everything that I want, so I need to some rules to make my reading as efficient and enjoyable as possible. Since I don’t want to just repost poorly written blog material, I’ve rewritten the posts into one, kept a few lame jokes, deleted a bunch of stuff, and added a rule.
So if you want to read like me or are curious about what my rules for reading are, here they are:
Rule #1- There are exceptions for every rule.
Yeah, that’s not as dramatic as Fight Club’s rule, but at least my Rule #2 is not the same as Rule #1.
Now that I think about it, stating that every rule has an exception isn’t really a rule, so I’m no longer going to use that as Rule #1.
New Rule #1- No more than three books per series.
I don’t read any series that goes over three books, or if I begin reading such a series, I stop after three books. Seriously, how many stories truly deserve more than three books? Not many do. If The Lord of the Rings could be told in three books, then so should just about any other story. Even The Bible is only two books, and if God only needs two books, then who do we think we are to write more books in a series than God?
And if I’m going to read a series with more than three books (hey, there can be exceptions, remember?), the series has to be completed before I start reading it. I reluctantly began reading A Game of Thrones a few years ago, despite the series being more than three books. Then I realized that George R. R. R. R. Martin hadn’t finished the whole thing yet. Then I heard that the latest books get sidetracked, and now I’m wondering if Martin wrote himself into a convoluted situation that he can’t get himself out of. I used to read Marvel Comics, so I know all about convoluted storylines, and I don’t need that kind of nonsense in the novels I read.
Rule #2- No books more than 500 pages long.
How many stories are truly worth the effort it takes to read (much less write) 500 pages? A few might be worth it, but not many. Usually a novel longer than 500 pages means that the editors didn’t do their jobs (or in the case of 19th century Russian authors, the translators didn’t do theirs either).
Yeah, The Bible is over 500 pages long, but that’s God for you. If any author is allowed to get longwinded, it’s God. I pretty much allow God to write what He wants without complaining about it. God can make His own rules. I once found a typo in The Bible and got into an argument with my English teacher over it. Who was I supposed to believe about spelling, my English teacher or God?
Rule #3- No more than 3 books per author.
There are a lot of great authors out there, and I’d like to read as many of them as possible. Most authors who write lots of books follow a formula. If you’ve read two or three of their novels, you’ve read them all. When I think like that, I don’t yearn for the latest Stephen King horror/fantasy or the newest James Patterson schlock that somebody else probably wrote.
I don’t have anything against schlock. I love schlock. I write schlock. I just want a variety of schlock in my life.
Rule #4-No books with bad dialogue.
This is probably the only subjective rule of the bunch because reasonable people can disagree about the quality of dialogue. You can’t really disagree about whether or not a book is 500 pages or not or whether or not a series has more than three books in it. I guess you COULD argue about it, but reasonable people would look at you funny.
Even though it’s subjective, dialogue is important to me. If the characters don’t sound authentic, then I can’t put myself in the story. I have a problem reading YA fiction because hardly any of the authors have a feeling for the way kids/teenagers/young adults talk. I’m almost surprised that teens/young adults put up with that, but then again, everything is new to them.
Some of the dialogue in The Bible is kind of corny, but I’d never admit that to God. As far as I’m concerned, God writes great dialogue, but humans mess up the translation.
Rule #5- Sample many, finish few
I’m a big believer in NOT finishing books. I used to complete every novel I started just for the sense of accomplishment, but then I started to accomplish real things in life (I hope that doesn’t sound like an insult to people who finish books no matter what because I mean that as a reflection of me and not other people). Reading shouldn’t be a chore (unless you’re in school), and I’m getting old, and if I don’t want to finish a book (or eat my broccoli), then I don’t have to.
I’m proud of the number of books I haven’t finished. I used to lie to people and say I’d read the books that I had actually stopped reading, but conversations are more interesting if I’m honest and say “I started that book but couldn’t finish it.”
*****
I like my rules for reading, but I also know they wouldn’t work for everybody. Some people have a certain number of books they want to finish within a certain time. Some readers want to consume every book by their favorite authors. Some refuse to read any books written by certain authors. Some readers might not even have any rules at all for reading books.
But enough about me! What rules do you have for reading or NOT reading books?
After more than a week of living in sin with Danielle, I started getting comfortable with the idea of what she called “crazy shit” in her life. Despite her big talk, I had seen little of this alleged “crazy shit.” She had alluded to it, but I hadn’t seen much proof, other than some harmlessly weird behavior. Wearing inappropriate clothes, and over-cursing in front of kids and old ladies, and making weird noises in the library, and getting us kicked out of a football game, all of that was outside my comfort zone, but it wasn’t what I called “crazy.”
I was starting to wonder if Danielle was exaggerating the “crazy shit.” People did that. Maybe she was a bit dramatic about her personal life, but I wasn’t going to fault her for that. We were living in sin, and I liked her being around. If she wanted to call some of her minor bizarre behavior “crazy shit,” then I’d call it “crazy shit” too, and both of us would be happy.
And then the crazy stuff started to happen.
I was returning home from work on the Monday after the football game incident. My/our apartment complex was spread out all over the block so that I had to park a couple buildings away from where we lived, and as I was walking from my car and turned the corner to my apartment unit, I heard two women yelling “bitch!” at each other. I stopped and listened carefully, dreading the possibility that one of the voices belonged to Danielle. Unfortunately, once I walked closer, my fears were confirmed.
Danielle stood on my/our second floor apartment balcony yelling at another woman who was standing with a muscular guy outside our front door. The other woman was tall, skinny, and wearing tight inappropriate clothes like Danielle. Danielle and this skinny woman kept calling each other “bitch!” really loudly while the muscular guy watched with his arms folded. I was pretty sure all my neighbors were either really concerned or thoroughly entertained by the scene.
I hesitated before walking up to my/our apartment. I thought about turning around, strolling back to my car, and driving off. I could call Danielle from work and tell her I was running late. I really don’t like loud confrontations. They make me uncomfortable. And whatever was going on, Danielle was safe. She could call that skinny woman a bitch to her heart’s content behind the safety of the balcony and could always step into the apartment when her vocal chords got tired. But I knew I had to back up my girlfriend. If she was willing to live in sin with me, I had to be willing to at least see what was going on.
As I got closer, I could see that my initial impressions were right. The skinny woman dressed a lot like Danielle, with a tight t-shirt and shorts that went up too high. Besides that, they didn’t look anything alike. The skinny woman was blonde with an orange salon tan. Plus, the skinny woman wore too much make up. It made her look kind of slutty. I know I probably shouldn’t refer to her as the slutty blonde, but even after all these years I feel the need to back Danielle up in these types of conflicts.
I felt a bit wary of the guy the slutty blonde was with. He was a little shorter than me but muscularly broad with a wife beater shirt and a bunch of cheap tattoos on his arm. His facial hair was patchy, and he had a pissed off narrow-eyed expression as he tried to stare me down. I wasn’t sure what to say to him, so I gave him the nod of acknowledgement. When in doubt, I always go for the nod.
Then I asked Danielle, “What’s going on?”
“She stole my furniture,” the slutty blonde said before Danielle could respond. The guy took a half step toward me, and I instinctively moved back and regretted giving up the space.
“She owes me money,” Danielle yelled back.
“I want my furniture back, bitch!” the slutty blonde screamed.
“I want my money, bitch!” Danielle screamed back.
My mind works slowly sometimes, and it took me a moment to process this while Danielle and the slutty blonde were calling each other “bitch” with a bunch of adjectives thrown in. Danielle was accused of stealing the slutty blonde’s furniture. Danielle did not deny the accusation. Danielle instead said the slutty blonde owed her money. Last week, Danielle had replaced my beat up furniture with much nicer furniture. The furniture had not been brand new. My conclusion?
“Danielle,” I said. “Do you… happen to have… this lady’s… furniture?”
Danielle stared at me, then said with her mouth tight, “Yes, Jimmy. I…happen to have… her… furniture.”
To an onlooker, Danielle probably sounded like she was being rude, but at least I knew that Danielle had understood my question. The slutty blonde’s furniture was in my/our apartment.
“Do you want to… maybe… give… this lady… her furniture back?” I asked.
“Yeah, when… she… gives me… my money.”
“I’m gonna call the police,” the slutty blonde said.
“Call the police, bitch,” Danielle said. “See who goes to jail.”
The tattooed guy turned to me. “What’ you gonna do about this, pussy?”
Then he took a couple steps toward me. There wasn’t much space between us now. I could step back and stumble down the stairs, or I could turn and make a stand against the wood railing behind me. I swiveled and backed up against the wood railing. I took a deep breath, hoping to have a moment to emotionally prepare myself for what was about to happen. I could tell that I wasn’t going to be able to talk this guy down. He had a point to prove to his woman. I kept my eyes on the tattooed guy and caught Danielle from the corner of my eye. She could end this by giving the furniture back. That was all she had to do, but she was still in a bitch-calling contest with the slutty blonde. She either wasn’t aware of what was about to happen to me or she didn’t care. Danielle wasn’t going to back down. This tattooed guy wasn’t going to back down. I either had to flee or fight.
*****
To be continued in… The Literary Girlfriend: Crazy Stuff Part 2 .
The problem with writing a post that nobody has ever read is that nobody can tell you what was wrong with it. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
It’s something most writers probably wouldn’t want to admit. I wasn’t going to, and I normally wouldn’t, but there’s a point to be made, I guess. I have a blog post on Dysfunctional Literacy that nobody has ever read. I published it on this blog almost two years ago. It’s still there. It can be found if readers look for it, but nobody ever has. According to my stats, it’s never gotten any hits. When I wrote it, my home page hardly ever got read either, so as far as I can tell, nobody has ever read that post.
It would be embarrassing, but nobody’s ever read it so nobody knows about it. How can something that nobody knows about be embarrassing? In fact, I’m also almost proud of it. I’m tempted to put up a link to it as proof, but then somebody might click on it to read it, and the whole point of this post would be lost. Even worse, somebody might click the “like” button just for the heck of it, and that would really tick me off. If somebody “liked” the post that I claimed nobody read, then I would lose all (or at least some) of my credibility, and I can’t have that.
In this post that nobody has ever read, I compared two books about baseball. It’s not a bad post. It’s probably way too long, but nobody would know it was too long before they started to read it. That meant the topic was bad. Or the title was bad. Or the lack of a picture turned people off. For whatever reason, this post has gotten no hits in two years.
I’ve written stuff that I WISH nobody had read. I’ve written a bunch of lame jokes that I probably should delete, but I keep them up to remind myself not to publish every day just for the sake of publishing something every day. I have nothing against writing every day; I think it’s a mistake to publish something every day (unless you’re that good of a writer, and I’m not).
At first, it hurt my feelings that nobody read this post. It was a long post. I spent a lot of time (I don’t know how much) revising and perfecting (in my mind) the word choice. I thought my Brad Pitt introduction was good enough to suck people in (it didn’t work). I spent hours working on it, and then when I finally posted it, nobody read it.
When I checked my stats a few minutes after publishing it (that’s always a mistake), nobody had read it. Nobody? I was a little surprised. 30 minutes later, I checked again. Nobody? 60 minutes later. Nobody? Overnight. Nobody? By then, I figured the post wasn’t going to get many hits, but I didn’t think the post would NEVER get any hits, not even an accidental search engine look.
I could have just left it as a Word document, and it would have saved me some aggravation.
I don’t get frustrated when I write an ebook, and few people buy it. People don’t have time or money to buy ebooks from unknown authors. I occasionally buy ebooks to support bloggers that I like (and some of the books are actually good). But nobody was willing to read this blog post for free. Even my worst selling ebook has sold more copies than this post has hits.
Now that it’s been almost two years, I’m kind of proud that nobody has read that post. Dysfunctional Literacy is doing okay as a blog, way better than it was two years ago. I think I’m improving as a writer, and I’m learning a lot from other writers and their blogs. But when it comes to responses, I have to remember not to expect anything because you never know when you’re going to write something that nobody will ever read.
Am I the only writer this has happened to? Have you ever written something that didn’t get read… at all?
When Danielle had said that she wanted to see a bunch of guys pee into the communal trough in the men’s bathroom, I hadn’t been wild about the idea. It was kind of embarrassing that my girlfriend would say/do something like that in front of my friends at the football game. At the same time, I didn’t want to seem judgmental. After all, Danielle seemed to accept my flaws, so Kirk and I got her disguised and marched her up to the communal. Everything had seemed fine until Danielle screamed.
I was standing a few men down pretending to take care of business when I heard her shriek. It was loud and shrill, and I jumped (it was a good thing I wasn’t actually doing anything because there might have been some misdirection pee, and I could have been punched out).
Danielle had stepped back from the line, brushing her hands against her waist. “Shit!” she cursed. “Shit! Shit!” Danielle cursed a few more times and fled the men’s room, Kirk’s baseball cap flopping to the wet floor. I grabbed it and ran out too. The walkway wasn’t too crowded, so it was easy to follow Danielle as she darted past and dodged other people milling around. I saw her duck and pull her hair back down over her shoulders. She hid behind a column for a moment near a crowded concession area, and when I caught up to her, she was holding my windbreaker below her waist and hopping in place with gritted teeth. She wasn’t wearing my sunglasses anymore either. She looked like a college girl again (even though she wasn’t), but a very upset one.
“You alright?” I asked.
“I got peed on,” she exclaimed, pointing to a few wet spots on her jeans.
“You got pee splashed,” I explained. “Most of that’s probably water.” That was a lie, but maybe it would make her feel better. “It will fade in a minute or two.”
“It’ll still be there!” Danielle stammered. “I have somebody else’s pee on my jeans.”
“So do I, probably,” I said. “It happens to everybody at the communal.”
“You didn’t warn me that could happen!”
“I didn’t think of it.” I was actually disappointed in myself. If I had thought of the probability of pee splash, I could have avoided the whole situation. Nobody likes getting splashed by somebody else’s urine, especially women. I should have thought of that. But I also knew that I wasn’t a quick thinker in high stress situations. “That’s what you get for wanting to watch guys pee.”
Danielle was about ready to curse me out in public (I could see an “f” forming on her lips) when Kirk stepped in.
“You broke character,” Kirk said to Danielle.
“I got peed on!” Danielle said again, pointing at the spots on her jeans. “These jeans are ruined.”
“You’ll be okay,” said Kirk, unimpressed. “You have to have a long wet line or a wet spot larger than a nickel for you to say you got peed on.”
“I didn’t know there was pee criteria,” I said.
“Shit,” Danielle said, looking past us. “Those guys.”
I turned and saw a couple ushers talking to a cop, and they were pointing right at me. They looked serious. If they had heard about a woman screaming in the men’s bathroom, they didn’t seem to think it was funny.
“Let’s go sit down,” Danielle said. “I’ll keep low.”
We ducked behind the column, passed through a concession area, went down an escalator and then doubled back up to our original level back to our seats. Even though none of the sections had been that crowded, we had moved quickly, so we thought there was a good chance we had lost them.
“How was it?” Linda asked as we returned to our seats.
“I got peed on,” Danielle announced loudly enough for several rows to hear.
As I sat down, I glanced back to see the cop and the two ushers moving in our direction and pointing. I nudged Danielle.
“Shit,” Danielle said again. “Shit. Shit.”
“How did they find us?” I was confused. Danielle had switched out of her man disguise so quickly, there was no way anybody in the men’s room would recognize her.
“You followed me out,” Danielle said. “You’re tall. And you grabbed my baseball cap. And you were loud.”
“Nice going, Jimmy,” Kirk said.
I could feel my face turning red. It wasn’t my fault that Danielle had shrieked in the men’s room, but history (which gets recorded by the most vocal) would show that this incident was my fault. I fumed, but I kept quiet.
Danielle gave Kirk a dirty look as she patted my knee. “He was worried about me. I’ll go talk to them.” She stood up, put her glasses back on, stuck her chest out, and strolled up to the cops.
“Your girlfriend,” Kirk said quietly, leaning toward me. “She’s… something else.”
“Yeah,” I said. I still hadn’t figured out the right words to describe her.
“So…” Kirk hesitated, then asked even more quietly so Linda wouldn’t hear. “You sleeping with her?”
“Yeah,” I said with pride.
“Damn,” Kirk muttered, not because I was getting some, but because he wasn’t, and he’d been dating Linda for a few months already. “How long you been going out?”
“About a week.”
Kirk gave a sideways grimace toward Linda and shook his head.
“We’re living together,” I added. “And she knows about the comic books.”
“I like her,” Kirk said. “But I think she might make your life more interesting than you want it be.”
Both of us watched Danielle as she spoke to the cop and the ushers. Whatever she was saying didn’t seem to be working. The cop kept shaking his head, and the ushers kept checking her out. Finally, Danielle nodded, shrugged, and returned with her head bowed. The cop stood at the end of the row with his arms folded.
“Shit,” she said, with a cheese eating grin. “I got kicked out.”
“They take their gender separation seriously here,” I said.
“They thought you were chasing me,” she said.
“Then why are you getting kicked out?” I asked.
“I told them why I went to the men’s room,” she said. Then she giggled. “I could have pressed charges against you. But I don’t like it when my boyfriends go to jail.”
“That’s… happened before?” I asked.
“Prison,” she said.
“And…?”
Again, both Linda and Kirk stared at Danielle.
“I don’t think he’ll get out for a while.”
“Ex-boyfriend, right?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Interesting…” Kirk mumbled.
“I gotta go,” Danielle said, nodding to the cop. “I can wait outside if you want to watch the game.”
“Somebody’s got to keep you out of trouble,” I said, standing up.
Danielle was quiet as we exited the stadium, the cop lurking a few yards behind us until we got to the parking lot. She held my hand and made sure we brushed sides a few times. Despite being kicked out, despite kind of being embarrassed by the scene, I felt comfortable. Walking hand in hand with Danielle felt natural, like we were meant to be together, which seemed strange, me being this comfortable with a woman like Danielle.
“You mad?” she asked.
I hesitated before answering. “I’m actually enjoying the moment,” I said. “I’ve never left a football stadium not knowing what the score was.”
“Losing 13-3,” she said, then she stopped. “Shit! I left your Sense and Sensibility with Linda.”
“I guess you’ll have to pretend to read another book,” I said. “Pride and Prejudice is supposed to be better, anyway.”
“Pride and Prejudice is better than Sense and Sensibility?” she said. “I’ll remember that.”
Kirk was right. My life had become more interesting since I had met Danielle. And despite my paranoia, most of the interesting parts had been pretty good. The negative parts of “interesting,” like getting kicked out of a football game, didn’t seem like a big deal anymore. Maybe I was getting over the idea of being embarrassed by Danielle’s behavior. Maybe her “interesting” behavior wasn’t that bad after all. If getting kicked out of a football game was as “interesting” as it got, maybe we could be okay.
Unfortunately, I was about to find out how “interesting” Danielle could really get.
*****
To be continued in… The Literary Girlfriend: Crazy Stuff.
And to read “The Literary Girlfriend” from the beginning, start here.
Fans of Agatha Christie swear she’s turning in her grave right now. I hope that’s not true because turning in a grave is probably tough and really uncomfortable. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I almost feel sorry for Sophie Hannah. Now that Agatha Christie’s estate has given its approval for her to write a brand new Hercule Poirot novel, she may become one of the most vilified authors since James Frey. To Agatha Christie fans, anybody other than Agatha Christie writing a Hercule Poirot novel is worse than (or almost as bad as) Ben Affleck playing Batman. I guess we’ll have to see the finished products before we decide which was worse (or better).
I don’t quite feel sorry for her though. Sophie Hannah will get paid (probably really well) for writing a Hercule Poirot novel, which is more than a lot of authors can say. At least she has a book deal. I can’t feel sorry for her for that. But I hope she has a thick skin because she’s going to need it.
I’ve never heard of Sophie Hannah (author novels like The Carrier, Kind of Cruel, two books that I’ve never heard of). From what I’ve read about her (not much), she has a decent reputation as an author. Writing a Hercule Poirot novel is probably a good gig, as long as you know ahead of time some readers/critics are going to hate you no matter what. She could write an outstanding whodunnit, the best in decades, and it still wouldn’t matter to Agatha Christie fans. Since it’s not Agatha Christie, it will automatically suck. If it’s any consolation, at least Ben Affleck probably won’t portray Hercule Poirot.
I’m not going to buy the non-Agatha Christie Agatha Christie novel. But I don’t blame Agatha Christie’s estate for letting another author to write a Hercule Poirot book. From their point of view, this is an opportunity to increase book sales and make lots of money. Even if the new Hercule Poirot book isn’t very good, it will probably sell a few copies and maybe even lead to more sales of old books that Agatha Christie actually wrote.
This isn’t the only time that a beloved character has been written by somebody other than the original author, but it doesn’t always work. A James Bond novel written by somebody other than Ian Fleming is just a book about a spy who happens to be named James Bond. A Godfather book written by anybody other than Mario Puzo is just a book about a bunch of gangsters who happen to have the last name Corleone. And a Hercule Poirot mystery written by anybody other than Agatha Christie is just a book about a detective who happens to be named Poirot.
When I was a teenager, I read most of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books. I remember some as being great (From Russia with Love and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service), and I remember a couple as boring (Diamonds Are Forever and Moonraker). Since I read these books more than three decades ago, my opinion of them doesn’t mean much, but I’d guess that Agatha Christie wrote her own share of mediocre books. Authors like Agatha Christie (and maybe even Ian Fleming) are judged by the quality of their finest novels, not by their most mediocre.
A book written by Sophie Hannah isn’t going to be automatically worse than a novel written by Agatha Christie, but her book will probably be compared to Murder on the Orient Express or Death on the Nile. Her book probably won’t be compared to Agatha Christie’s worst book, (whatever it is); it will be compared to her best, and some people will hate Sophie Hannah’s version, no matter what.
I don’t have a problem with this “hate it before I read it” attitude. I’m not one of those people who think everybody should be open to everything. When it comes to literature, readers should be closed minded at times. There are too many books out there to keep up with, and being closed minded brings an order to a chaotic publishing industry.
I’m not going to read a Hercule Poirot novel that’s not written by Agatha Christie, but I don’t have a problem with it. I’ve read James Bond books not written by Ian Fleming. I’ve Conan books not written by Robert E. Howard. How about you? Would you read a book about your favorite character if it wasn’t written by the original author?
Dysfunctional Literacy 