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By Paul Kirsch, on May 21st, 2010 Author: Ian MacLeod
 2004, Ace Trade
Filed Under Sci-Fi, Literary
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
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| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
10 |
Once I arrived at graduate school, I immediately discovered that people read “literate” and “popular” writing differently. Those two terms, and the spaces between them, go by a lot of names. “Character based” vs. “plot based” is a big one. I once heard a newcomer (of more seasons than myself) say he was there for the “serious fiction program.” I wondered which part of my education (or my writing) I wasn’t taking seriously.
Both sides have their merits and their pitfalls. I can’t say that every book I’ve read is Dostoevsky, but that doesn’t mean I hold it to any less rigorous a standard. Any book should entertain and inspire with equal measure. It pays to stay receptive to any work of fiction that is written well.
Take the steampunk genre. When it comes to mind, your imagination settles on something akin to a refined lady hiking up her skirt as she leaps between the cars of a moving train. Not what you’d typically find in a “narrative-heavy” read, where the emotional geography between characters counts for more than the shifting position of clockwork cities. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. When you pick up steampunk, you expect you’re about to experience the unlikely adventures of a time period that never was. But believe me, it goes both ways. I’ve seen steampunk narratives every bit as thick (and characters as deep) as anything you could find under the Penguin Classics label. And sometimes, even more so. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on May 20th, 2010  Recently, Apple’s been feeling its oats, and Steve Jobs has been picking fights with absolutely everybody, even bloggers who just want a portable porn pad. Here’s a breakdown of the two biggest Apple fights out there.
Apple v. Amazon
First there was terror. When the iPad was announced, Jeff Bezos messed his cargo shorts when he heard Apple was supporting both ePub and the Agency model. He promptly caved and let publishers walk all over him—although he did it, of course, with a minimum of maturity, because that’s how he rolls. But Bezos (not to mention publishers) got proper snookered by the sneaky Jobs.
Despite all the furor over Apple’s embrace of the agency model (which might not even be legal in countries where they regulate their corporations), the iPad isn’t selling many iBooks. Penguin claims to be leading the pack (you know, if you don’t count free Gutenberg books, which are “selling” twice as much as Penguin). But let’s not forget that iBooks aren’t very popular, in the scheme of iPad apps—in fact, Feedbooks distributes more books.
If the iPad does start selling tons of iBooks, well, publishers are screwed then, too. Apple can evidently force prices down to $9.99 if it feels like, and in April 2011, they can simply rescind the agency model agreement. Ha!
All this has led to, shall we say, some tension in the publishing industry. Publishers are choosing up sides, and even unleashing their wrath on unsuspecting authors who want to publish ebooks. Then there are the obligatory rumors that Kindle’s grip on the market is slipping, but since there’s a Kindle app for the iPad (not to mention iPhone and soon Android) I don’t understand how Apple will ever win a book fight.
And by the way, Google’s launching its own ebookstore, which I’m guessing and hoping will use Adobe ePub formatting. Meaning neither Apple nor Amazon customers will be able to read Google ebooks. Because Apple hates Adobe, too! Why? Well, more on that after the jump… …
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By Eric Markowsky, on May 19th, 2010 This book has been chosen as a Great Read
Author: Wallace Stegner
1938
Filed Under Literary, Historical, Western
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
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| Language..... |
8 |
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A friend of mine loaned me The Big Rock Candy Mountain as the capstone to a conversation about Great American Novels. Wallace Stegner is an author I’d heard a lot about but never read. As a novice, I was a little intimidated by the bulk of the book. My friend assured me it was well worth the 563 page commitment. And it was. That and more.
The Big Rock Candy Mountain is an American saga about the trials of the Mason family. Set against the historical sweep of the early 20th century, the closing of the West, the First World War, the Roaring Twenties, and the Great Depression, Bo Mason leads his wife and sons in the reckless pursuit of their fortune, leaving his wife Elsa to salvage a life for all of them in the margins of her husband’s endless ambitions. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on May 19th, 2010 Today at Woot: refurbished Sony Pocket Edition ereaders for $115 including shipping. That is one helluva deal. The Pocket Edition is one of our recommended ereaders for book readers (as opposed to magazine or newspaper readers). More info in our ereader comparison.
If you were considering a Kobo, think seriously about this instead. Basic-model ereaders are more or less interchangeable, and Sony supports Adobe ePub, which means you can borrow library ebooks through your local library (Kobo supports Adobe, too—the difference is 35 bucks). Sony software is a headache, but if you’re reading books and loading up only once a month or so, it’s not so bad. And $115 is a great price.
By Sean Clark, on May 18th, 2010 Author: Robert Löhr, translated from the German by Anthea Bell
 2007, Penguin
Filed under Literary, Historical
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
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Truth: Wolfgang von Kemplen was a lower-echelon Hungarian aristocrat who built a clockwork automaton of wood and iron in the late 18th century, and managed to deceive crowds of people (including luminaries like Johann Philipp Ostertag and Edgar Allen Poe) that it was a thinking machine that excelled at chess. Only years after Kemplen’s death was the secret compartment, which could hold a tiny man, revealed to the public.
Fiction: Just about everything that happens in this charming and at times gripping story about Kemplen’s machine, including the existence of Tibor, the devoutly Catholic dwarf from Italy, who excelled at chess and acted as the brain of the wonderous chess automaton.
In the novel, Kemplen enlists Jakob, a Jewish craftsman, and Tibor, a chess whiz who can fit inside the tiny compartment. Together the three men pull the wool over the eyes of an entire society. The machine, known as “the Turk,” gains notoriety quickly; as fame builds, so does pressure. You might think this would be a story about external forces pushing against a secret, trying to crack the nut, and the characters’ resistance to that. And there is some of that. But much of the dramatic tension derives from the relationship between the three men, their moral drives to keep or reveal the secret, and plenty of two-faced backstabbery. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on May 17th, 2010  Author: Ron Rash
Ecco, 2010
Filed under: Literary, Short Stories
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
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| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
6 |
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Ron Rash excels at creating haunting, affecting portraits of emotion. They don’t often twist, and they don’t often surprise, but at their best (like his most recent novel, Serena, which I loved), they can be darkly riveting.
The short stories in Burning Bright—and they are quite short—largely rely on their premises. If the emotional territory he stakes out is rich enough to yield pay dirt in only a dozen or so pages, these too can be as compelling as Serena.
Rash manages that feat in only a third of the stories here. The rest of the time, unfortunately, there’s simply something missing.
…
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By Eric Markowsky, on May 14th, 2010 A few weeks back, I read Ken Auletta’s New Yorker article on the release of the iPad. The piece focuses on the future of publishing, ebook pricing and sales; the impression it leaves is one of confusion. Publishers demand higher prices, consumers expect lower prices, and big distributors, like Amazon and Apple, have their own motives for trying to please both parties without alienating either. For the time being, there seems to be little agreement about just how much ebooks should cost.
 Auletta’s article was clear about one thing though: in the long run, ebook prices must fall. He closes by quoting “a skeptical literary agent” who says, “You can try to put on wings and defy gravity, but eventually you will be pulled down.” In other words, eventually, consumer expectations will win. If buyers think ebooks should be cheap, then they better be cheap or no one buys.
But how cheap? With no printing or shipping, the cost of making and selling one more ebook is practically nonexistent. This is the biggest advantage of digital publishing, and maybe also the biggest obstacle to fair ebook pricing. If one more ebook costs publishers nothing, how much should they charge for it? They have to charge more than nothing, but how much more? How low can prices go to meet consumer expectations and still benefit publishers?
Fair warning to the faint of heart: this is about to get intensely nerdy. It’s about to get economic. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on May 13th, 2010  Twilight sucks. We don't have to keep talking about it. But we can, if you want to. It’s pretty easy to work up a good hate for intellectualism—especially the smarmy, condescending kind. Books (or “literature” if you want to get snooty about it) and the serious discussion of them sometimes get confused for just that sort of pretentiousness.
One instance of such confusion is an essay called “I Just Want to Read,” by Ann Nichols, in Open Salon. In short, Nichols bemoans the overuse of formal literary theory, and pines for the days when, like the title says, she could read just for pleasure.
She makes some good points, especially about the ease with which you can fake hifalutin-sounding insights about literature (just learn and use a few words like “postcolonial” and “metafictional” and you’ll get a B in most lit classes). But for the most part, Nichols’s anti-criticism rant irks me, for several reasons. Here they are.
Nichols starts with an anecdote that immediately sets off my internal BS alarms. It’s the old when-I-was-a-kid bit, this time about a wide-eyed girl with a stack of books and a dream:
I was reading critically in the sense that I liked or disliked books, and knew what did and didn’t make sense or appeal to me, but there was not, at that blissful time in my life, any imposition of an external standard of quality or any requirement that I investigate the author’s prerogatives or background.
First of all, critical reading is not the imposition of an external standard of quality. …
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By David Duhr, on May 12th, 2010  Author: Juan Gabriel Vásquez
Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009
Filed under: Literary
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
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7 |
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When it hit me that The Informers was, in fact, the text of a book written by the fictional protagonist, I wanted to kick it, and Juan Gabriel Vásquez, across the room. It always gives me a sinking feeling, to learn that I’m reading embedded text. A book within a book. Occasionally it succeeds, more often it fails miserably. In Vásquez’s The Informers, it … kinda works, kinda doesn’t. The result is a novel that is at times spirited and at other times flat and lifeless. It gave me that sinking feeling, but was just good enough to make me trudge on. …
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By Sean Clark, on May 11th, 2010  Author: Craig Nova
1992, Grove Press
Filed Under Literary
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
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| Entertainment..... |
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5 |
Dean Gollancz is a professional arsonist who helps clients defraud insurance agencies. He brings his teenage son Ray–an intelligent and well-behaved teen–on a few jobs to show him the ropes. Soon a professional relationship and camaraderie develop between the two, where before there had been little connection at all. This begins to fracture when they both have a sexual relationship with the same girl: Iris, one of Ray’s classmates. Iris leaves California to become a Vegas prostitute, and Ray leaves for college on the east coast. This leaves Dean alone. He drinks too much, and he becomes sloppy. His bravado deflated, Dean is exposed as the small-time crook his really is.
Ray is the strongest character in the book. He is unwaveringly true to his own set of morals, and much of the novel concerns him trying desperately to balance loyalties, both to others and to himself. The relationship that is ostensibly the crux of the novel (according to the jacket copy) is that between father and son. But most of Ray’s decisions, namely, to turn his back on his Ivy League education and commit arson for his father’s employer, a Mr. Wei, stem from his relationship to Ivy and his desire to seek her out. At times this relationship can feel forced or unbelievable, but observing Ray’s steadfast sensibility forced into difficult situations remains the most satisfying aspect of the novel. …
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2004, Ace Trade
