Fiction

Not a Review

6 Comments
close-up of a young woman reading a book

I decided not to review a novel a few weeks ago, because what I was reading got under my skin. Maybe I’m thin-skinned, or maybe I couldn’t adjust to the genre. I didn’t know it was a historic romance until a couple chapters into it. That’s entirely my fault. A few clues on the cover and in the general description should have been enough, but no, I thought it was historical fiction, maybe even a bit of fantasy. I even said to myself, “I hope this doesn’t become a romance,” a few pages before the book swatted me in the gut.

A woman, taken from her home as a child, raised by nurses in a distant land, and well-trained to survive and hide in the wilderness, sees a prince who is searching for her without a clear sense of her. She is hidden in the trees on the mountain side. The wind whips around the prince, pressing his cloak to his skin, and this medieval sylan thinks to herself (paraphrase), “Wow, is his face as handsome as his body?”

Maybe I’m a puritan, but this strikes me as completely out of character.

Later, when the prince is badly injured and she begins to nurse him back to health, the narration dwells on her need to wash him, and bodies have unseemly parts . . . It’s distasteful. It was all written indirectly, because it is a Christian novel, and maybe overall the story accomplished its goal, but I didn’t want to take it in. I’ve read worse, that is, more vulgar narration, but I wouldn’t have it this time. I’m not sure why.

Uncategorized

Link sausage

1 Comment

Stopped at KFC for supper tonight. They were playing mariachi music. I suppose that’s the new normal. Even in Kentucky.

I don’t like mixed metaphors in my dining, though. Of course, my regular Chinese buffet plays Classic Rock. The last time I went there, the hostess, for some reason, was asking me if I knew the names of the various songs that were played. (Probably because there was nobody else in the place.) I think she was trying to assimilate. I only knew one of them (“We Are Family” by the Pointer Sisters). I guess I need to assimilate myself.

I re-wrote my review of the film “Elling” for The American Culture blog. You can read it here, if you want mostly the same thing, with extra pretentiousness.

Finally, here’s Andrew Klavan’s latest “Klavan On Culture” video. I liked it.

Reviews

Hot

5 Comments

It’s not as hot and humid as when I stacked hay bales in the loft of my dad’s barn back in 1960, but it’s pretty stinking swampy out there. The weather forecast said 70% chance of thunderstorms this afternoon, but when I got home the sky was clear and blue, and I took my walk anyway. It rained this morning, and will likely rain again tonight, but for now the only moisture is suspended in the air, in molecule form, in high concentrations.

Last night I watched another new DVD acquisition, Robert Altman’s “Popeye.” What a strange movie. Awful script. The songs are just an embarrassment. But the actors seem to be having fun playing cartoon games, and the visuals are great, and Robin Williams sings the Popeye song all the way through at the end. It always leaves me feeling better when I’m done with it.

A Norwegian relative wrote me years ago from a vacation in Malta, saying he’d toured the Sweet Haven set, which apparently is (or was at the time) still standing as a tourist attraction.

Speaking of DVDs, I’m on the cheap plan with Netflix now, and I’m taking the opportunity to view some of the cable series everybody’s been raving about. This weekend I finished the final episode of “Rome.”

Continue reading Hot →

Bookselling, Publishing

A Novel's Setting Can Be the Key to Its Marketing

2 Comments

Be sure to scan this interview with a self-published author who has sold many books in the locale in which her novel is set.

As a self-publisher, you’ve sold 50,000 copies of your books. I’m sure every self-published author wants to know your secrets. So, let’s start from the beginning: When your first book was hot off the press, did you have a marketing plan? Did you have an existing platform or readership of any kind?

I had a very simple plan for my first novel. My husband and I were living in Nashville, Tenn., at the time, and when the novel released, we loaded our trunk with books and drove to Sanibel Island, the setting of my book. I sat out in the car with our baby as my husband went in and out of every book and gift shop on the island asking if they’d like to carry the book.

I remember letting out yelps of pure joy and shock every time he returned to the car to tell me, “Yes!” Of course the shops were cautious at first, taking only a couple copies at a time and most did want books on a consignment basis. If they sold, then they would pay us.

Authors, Bookselling

Methods for Book Signing

Leave a comment

Overlook Press comments on an article about how book-signing events go down in New York. It isn’t first come, first serve. From the article:

It’s just that certain branches are simply better for certain types of books. “There are definitely uptown authors and subjects and downtown authors and subjects,” he said. “A lot of it has to do with where a writer has most of his posse. Thus, you’re not going to put the latest Tea Party author at the B&N at 82nd and Broadway,” Mr. Kirschbaum continued, alluding to the store in the heart of the famously liberal Upper West Side.

Authors, Fiction

Where Are the Conservative Novelists?

3 Comments

Reviewer Craig Ferhman writes, “Every so often, spurred by some kind of creative liberal guilt, someone will ask: Where are the conservative novelists?” He reviews a first novel from a conservative novelist, and I have to ask, looking at this review, if foul language is required for publishing serious stories today?

Reviews

Addendum to DVD review

Leave a comment

It occurs to me, in thinking more about the film “Elling,” that it’s actually quite a pro-American movie.

As I mentioned, Elling, who has his doubts about the whole idea of freedom, is devoted to the Norwegian Liberal Party.

Later in the movie, the great symbol of freedom becomes a big American automobile.

I smell subtext.

So there’s that.

Reviews

DVD Review: Elling

6 Comments

It was probably inevitable I’d pick up the Academy Award-nominated comedy from 2001, Elling sooner or later.

First of all, it’s a Norwegian movie (English subtitles). Secondly, the name of the title character is a derivative of the old Viking name Erling, a name with which I have associations. And finally, it’s about people with emotional disorders. I have some connections to that field of experience as well.

The Elling of the film is a middle-aged man who suffers from agoraphobia and fainting spells. He spent his early life living with his mother, and was placed in a mental institution after her death. While in the hospital he made one friend, a big, strong fellow named Kjell Bjarne (first and middle name; Scandinavians generally use both if they have them). Kjell Bjarne is obsessed with sex and extremely foul in his language (even in subtitles). However, as we soon learn, he’s entirely innocent in terms of actual experience with women.

The two are set up in an Oslo apartment, on a trial basis, by the Norwegian social welfare system. If they can learn to function in the outside world, they are told, they’ll be given greater freedom.

Elling isn’t entirely sure he wants such freedom. Continue reading DVD Review: Elling →

Authors

Thoreau, Born Yesterday (so to speak)

Leave a comment

Henry David Thoreau was born July 12 a while back. He’s thoughts on place can be transformational, not that I know anything about them. Here Thoreau talks about what appears to be enlightenment.

That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way. After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his Genius tries again what noble life it can make. All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas say, “All intelligences awake with the morning.” Poetry and art, and the faire stand most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour. All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness, they would have performed something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. . . . To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.