Our friend Dave Lull kindly shared this link, where the Lit Hub blog interviews him (about half an hour) about his latest novel, The House At the End of the World. Contrary to the title, he doesn’t actually explain how to sell 500 million books. I would have noticed.
I didn’t like the book as well as I hoped to, but I concur that the very important themes the author talks about here are highlighted in it.
This is cool. Turns out Gregg Hurwitz, of the Orphan X books, is a student, friend, and collaborator with the noted Norwegian-Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson.
I did not know that.
Lots of talk about good writing too.
Stephen Hunter has a new book out, and I’ve got it. It is, needless to say, a sheer delight to read. At the rate I’m going, I’ll probably have a review tomorrow. So, in anticipation, I post the short interview above, which is pretty old. But most of the interviews I found with him were heavy on gun topics. I have no objection to gun topics myself, being a gun nut too. But I thought, in this space, I wanted to find something focused a little more on storytelling, because, however much an expert Hunter may be on gun topics, he’s even more knowledgeable about plotting and characterization. I think this interview, from 2010, advertising his novel I, Sniper, showcases that. To an extent.
The interviewer refers to the roman à clef nature of the novel’s beginning. Most of you are probably familiar with the term, and it’s explained as they talk.
Advice to writer’s: If you’re going to write a roman à clef, aim high. Portray famous people – political figures and celebrities. Do not write a roman à clef in which you show that guy you hated in high school dealing drugs or visiting brothels, unless you’ve disguised him beyond all recognition. If he can guess who he is in the book, he can sue you. Public figures can’t do that; they’re pretty much fair game, according to law.
Author Stanley Wheeler has published an interview with me at this address.
He’s the author of Threading the Rude Eye and other novels involving flintlocks and dragons.
Last week, an independent bookstore in Chicago splashed up attention for many Twitter users with a tweet complaining about a customer who wanted to rent rather than buy some expensive books. Rebecca George, a co-owner of Volumes Bookcafe in Chicago’s Wicker Park, wrote in Jan 9 tweet: “Turns out one of our biggest sales last month was for the person to stage their home for the holidays and now they want to return them all. Please don’t do this to a small business, people. That one sale was a third of our rent.”
The books were eye-catching art and cook book, no doubt published to show off the reader’s good taste. The most modest book in the set was entitled Authenticity: The Vain Attempt at Finding the Real You. (I’m sorry. I made that up.)
The tweet has been seen almost seven million times and picked up by news outlets, making January a very good month for sales by good-hearted book-buyers showing their sympathy.
What else is online?
Reading Good Books: An essential freedom that builds character more than we know. “American kids, more than ever, are stratified into those who read—those who have regular access to books—and those who don’t. I’m not talking here about basic literacy, but being open to the human good that is the enjoyment of literature.”
Kristin Lavransdatter at 100. Sigrid Undset wrote a “medieval romance in the twentieth century (published between 1920 and 1922), [and] she somehow reverses a thousand years of morbidity, bringing a long dead genre back to life. . . . Kristin Lavransdatter is really just a love story—but one of the most savagely honest love stories ever written.”
Mystery: All About Agatha is a podcast that has read all of Agatha Christie’s novels, discussed them, and ranked them against each other. I look forward to looking up All Hallow’s Eve to see if they place it within the worst five.
Writing: Backstory brings characters to life, making them appear as real people, except when it floods the reader with irrelevant details. So it’s a very good, except when it isn’t.
Terry Teachout: The New York art critic died last year on Jan. 13. Patrick Kurp calls that fact “comparably difficult to believe. It’s like saying France no longer exists. Seldom in my experience was so prominent and successful a writer so generous with his success.”
And Titus Techera talks about the conversations he had with Terry about film noir and its relation to men in post-war America.
Photo by Hatice Yardım on Unsplash
Sad, sad news. The historian Paul Johnson died today. He was born in 1928, and was a practicing Roman Catholic. He wrote more than 40 books, as well as innumerable articles. Originally a leftist, Johnson grew disenchanted with the Left, objecting especially to its blinkered moral relativism, a theme that runs through all his works. His books Modern Times and Intellectuals were formative for me (I delighted in his takedown of Ibsen in Intellectuals), and I also appreciated The Birth of the Modern.
The English Spectator has a memorial post today here. It includes a quote from an article he wrote for them on moral relativism:
As I see it, the Satan who confronted Jesus during this encounter is the personification of moral relativism, and the materialism which creates it. What we are shown is not merely ‘all the kingdoms of the world’ but the entire universe, in all its colossal extent, reaching backwards and forwards into infinity and beyond the powers of the human mind to grasp except in mathematical equations. We are told: this came into existence, not by an act of creation, but as a result of the laws of physics, which have no moral purpose whatever — or indeed any purpose. There is no conceivable room for God in this process, and mankind is an infinitely minute spectator of this futile process about which he can do nothing, being of no more significance than a speck of dust or a fragment of rock. If you will accept this view of our fate, then there is just a chance that by applying the laws of science to the exclusion of any other considerations, and by dismissing the notion of God, or the spirit, or goodness, or any other absolute notion of truth and right and wrong, we shall be able marginally to improve the human condition during the minute portion of time our race occupies our doomed planet.’
Rest in peace, Mr. Johnson. You’ll be much missed.
Your correspondent is a tad down today. Translation work has been slow (read nonexistent), and it snowed and snowed for days and days. Stopped today, and we should be safe for a while according to the forecasts. But it’s… full out there. Chock full. This is one of those years when we don’t know what to do with all the accumulation. The piles along the driveway are nearly as tall as we are.
Of course my neighbor clears the snow for me with a machine, but it’s guilt-inducing to watch him at it.
The news is depressing too. I think I’m going to turn off talk radio again for a while (except for some hours of Prager). Listen to Pandora instead. Confession: I’d like to see my party, you know, pulling together. But I’m afraid that if I say that I’ll be accused of being a RINO. The arguments in favor of the Twenty make some sense to me, but I don’t like watching friends turn into enemies. Simple soul that I am, I don’t think that really helps in the long run.
Above, maintaining the theme of love for That Hideous Strength I’ve been proclaiming all week, here’s Andrew Klavan talking about it. Some of this is a little hard to understand (how can anybody not love Narnia? How can anybody read THS with ease the first time through?), but his opinions on the meaning of the book are spot on. They get him the all-important Walker endorsement, which is nice.
My thanks go out to the people at Shepherd.com, who asked me to select a group of five novels to promote. The idea is to push books I like, and also to give people some clue what my own books are about. You can see my selections here.
Rather a nice concept, I think. The site is worth poking around some.
Big news in the literary world today – as this article from the Chicago Sun Times reports, Sherlock Holmes will finally be wholly in the public domain as of tomorrow, the last copyrights for his stories having run out. (If I understand correctly, most of the stories are already out of copyright, but Doyle was still cranking the things out – reluctantly – in 1927).
That was two years before he was filmed doing the interview above. It’s ten minutes divided into two halves. The first half – the interesting part – tells how he came to write Holmes, and discusses the character’s fame. In the second half, Doyle climbs up on his perpetual hobbyhorse, Spiritualism. You, like me, might want to give that part a miss.
I think Doyle underrates himself as a writer in this monologue. He suggests that the great appeal of Sherlock Holmes was the logical, “scientific” approach to problem solving. I think the great draw was always the inherent interest of the characters, especially the friendship between Holmes and Watson.
One of the little stock speeches I often employ to repel prospective acquaintances involves a comparison between Sherlock Holmes and James Bond. If you watch very old Holmes movies (and I’ve viewed a few lately), you might be surprised to see that they’re always set in the years when the film is made. Thus we see him and Watson tootling around in automobiles and talking over phones. (In one strange film, The Speckled Band [1931], Raymond Massey plays a youngish Holmes employing a stable of secretaries to continually collate information for him, like a primitive database.)
I like to point out that people in the early 20th Century saw Holmes just the way we see James Bond today. The Bond stories were originally written in the 1950s and ‘60s, but the movies began in the ‘60s and have gone on from there. Thus we think of Bond as a contemporary. We assume he’s operating in 2022 (soon 2023), and that he carries a cell phone and uses a PC, among other things. The fact that this is a very different level of technology from what’s found in Ian Fleming’s original stories doesn’t bother us at all.
In exactly the same way, people in the 1920s thought of Holmes as a man of their time. They expected him to drive a car and use a phone (and in fact, in the later Doyle stories he actually does those things). The idea that Holmes should be stuck in the late 19th Century only came later. The Hound of the Baskervilles with Basil Rathbone (1939) was the first movie to put him back in period, and that was an innovation.
A blessed New Year to you.
I’m still working away at That Hideous Strength. My slow progress shouldn’t be taken as a sign of disinterest; I’m enjoying it quite a lot. I just have things I’ve got to do, and I’m moving slow because of the fall I took. So I don’t anticipate a review until next week.
Above, a very short clip from 9 years ago, of the mathematician John Lennox reminiscing about listening to Lewis lecturing at Cambridge. This was actually the very last lecture series Lewis ever delivered, before ill health forced his retirement. His eccentric lecturing “style” is well documented from several sources, though others report that Lewis actually starting lecturing out in the hallway before even entering the classroom. His voice carried well.
