Libby’s Literary Non-Tastes

Hello all!

I’m so sorry I’ve been AWOL for a couple of weeks; I keep having these devilish things called “second midterms” (which completely defeat the purpose of the word “midterm” and should therefore not be allowed to exist), but unfortunately I’ve been forced to study for them and so I have. *HEAVY SIGH* However, here I am! I don’t have much of a topic this week, as tests and quizzes tend to take up the kind of time that I’d normally spend nerdy-ing, but I’m generally decent at talking about books, so I shall.

Today, as you do, I stopped by the college bookstore after a Cheese Shop visit with my mother after arriving back at the Burg. She got coffee and I (much too caffeinated already) wandered into the fiction section. One thing I’ve noticed about our beloved college bookstore is that it is one of those places that only carries very specific things — things it thinks will sell, rather than books it thinks are good. (Apparently that’s the reality of running a decent business.) Actually, I think that’s a Barnes & Noble’s thing in general — it’s hard work to keep a bookstore afloat in this day and age — but this kind of sales technique means I’ve noticed patterns in the kinds of books that are being sold. Categories, of sorts.

So in this week’s blog entry, I’m going to be a mean, horrible, literary snob and write about two of those categories — categories that sometimes seem to make up the entire Barnes & Noble’s fiction section.

First of all, there’s the Dark Paranormal Romance. These things usually seem to cover the entire YA section of most bookstores — if I walk over there and just take a quick glance at it, I often don’t even see any other sort of book on the shelf. They usually have one-word titles (things like “Destiny” or “Immortal” or “Caged”; words that sound vaguely dark with the odd bit of kitsch thrown in) and covers depicting teenage girls with blood on their lips, wearing combat boots and black lace blouses that are probably too see-through to go out comfortably in public in. The blurb usually goes something like this…

Egbertina was just an ordinary girl — not very pretty, not very popular, always under the radar. But all that changes when she starts volunteering at the local blood bank and meets Benjamin. He’s a vampire — a Creature of the Night — and he’s dangerous. He can see through walls and clothing alike, and at night, he feasts on the blood of small rodents. Though he begs Egbertina to stay away from him, the beautiful strawberry-red color of his irises makes that impossible. 

As they begin their illicit romance, Egbertina finds she has a few dark secrets of her own… secrets that might hurt Benjamin more than he could hurt her. Will a bounty-hunter, a mysterious boy who calls himself a were-bumblebee, and a man who may or may not be Egbertina’s father keep them apart? Or will Egbertina and Benjamin manage to keep their romance… Clandestine?

(Clandestine being the title of the book, which, thankfully, does not exist.)

I completely understand why these books are appealing — they make you feel sort of naughty reading them, which is always nice, and who doesn’t want to meet a nice werewolf/vampire/faerie king thing and have them swear eternal love to you? The problem is, reading them makes me feel… well, idiotic. Who on earth can take all those blood splotches on the cover seriously? I inevitably end up laughing hysterically at them, showing them to everyone I know, going “THIS IS THE WORST THING EVER! BWAHAHAHA!” and eventually putting them down in favor of something that makes me want to find out what happens next, rather than knowing that Egbertina and Benjamin will live happily ever after in a sort of vampiric wonderland that hopefully doesn’t involve them chewing on anyone’s necks. It’s just not my thing.

(Sometimes I wonder why nobody has written a centaur romance yet. I asked this question of my family last week and there was a long silence. My little sister pointed out the problem of the horse’s bottom. Now I understand.)

Then there’s the Extraordinarily Deep and Lyrical Literary Novel. I’m probably in the vast minority of the world by not liking these books. I feel like maybe I’m missing something, but to me these books seem mainly like a mish-mash of random elements, told with as many metaphors as the author can think up, and tied up with a big fancy ribbon at the end containing much-too-many Deep Truths About Life.

The thing is, there are a LOT of these. I read an article once that said you could tell if a book was one of them if the word “lyrical” was used to describe the book on the back cover. (I’ve taken that as a warning sign ever since.) Another clue is when the cover says it’s a book about “the ties that keep us together” or “long-buried secrets”.

This is the kind of book where the author is very interested in a particular person or place or culture or disability or circumstance, and so they make their character interested in it too, usually doing research in order to uncover some sort of long-lost family secret, or solve some mystery, or go on some road trip. Everyone they meet seems to have some sort of Problem or Truth about themselves that they’re hiding, or (most often) something especially Interesting — they might have a disability, or be a minority race — and the main character helps them to solve their problems and make their lives better. I’ve noticed the main characters themselves tend to be fairly boring, except for whatever Problem leads them out through the plot. And for me, that tends to make the whole book boring.

I’ve found that these kinds of novels usually go like this…

Ermintrude, born into a Haitian-Creole family, was adopted by a typical All-American couple when her first family died in a horrible fire in Port-Au-Prince. She grows up normal and happy, until the fateful day when a mysterious letter addressed to her arrives in her mailbox. It says it’s from her father — he survived the fire, but just barely, and has spent the past twenty years recuperating from the terrible burns all over his face, which he never wanted his daughter to see. He tells Ermintrude that, if she agrees, he will meet her in Florida in two weeks’ time. 

Ermintrude, conflicted, takes a road trip across the United States, always tormented by the thought that maybe she doesn’t want to see her father after all. Along the way, she meets a circus performer with no arms, a happy young schoolgirl with worse burns than her father, a raucous Haitian-Creole family that stirs strange memories within Ermintrude, a rabbit with mysterious psychic abilities, and the strange young man who owns the rabbit, who might just turn out to be more than a friend…

And always does.

At any rate, I’m trying very hard to find books to read that aren’t one of the above, which is proving a bit tricky. I recently discovered Helen Oyeyemi, whose writing I’ve completely fallen in love with, so that’s tiding me over for a bit. And I read an interview last week with a French author called Amelie Nothomb who claims she’s “ugly without the hat!” (a beautiful black confection she was wearing in the interview photo), which I thought was such a funny thing to say that I might just have go out and read one of her books too. We’ll see.

As for NaNoWriMo… I may or may not finish. I’ve got some kind of dreadful Physics final coming up. I’m about 9,000 words away from the finish line, but since that finish line becomes a reality in three days, that’s a lot. Really a lot.

But I’ve never failed yet! So perhaps I’ll do a few late nights, force some word vomit out of myself, and finish the dang novel. It’s about gout and curses and bagpipers and a number of other bizarre things, and is worse than either of the two aforementioned book categories, and must never see the light of day (or else I’ll die of embarrassment), but it’s FUN. And so I want to finish.

I’ll let you know next week if that happens. 🙂

-Libby

Books and bookstores

I’m pretty bad at picking favorites. I don’t have a favorite film, director, song, band, album, genre of music, place, etc. You get the idea. But I do have a favorite book. So I was more or less thrilled, yesterday, when a friend asked me what it is, because I actually had a real answer.

It happens to be All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 masterpiece. To clear up some assumptions I’ve heard a lot of people make:

> The plot is based loosely on the life of Huey Long, the governor / senator of Louisiana who got assassinated. A lot of people seem to assume the book is some sort of thinly veiled biography of Long, but his fictional representation is arguably not even the main character. It’s more like Warren was inspired by Long’s story. So if you read it, don’t go through it thinking it’s an On the Road kind of thing.

> It’s not about politics. At least, it’s only a little bit about politics. There’s a lot more going on here: issues of morality, religion, idealism, and even a little existentialism. And some other things. Point is, it’s not a political novel. Politics is just the setting for these other things. If you try to read the book expecting politics, you’ll either be disappointed or confused, and either way you’re missing the point.

This is one of those perfect novels where all the author’s philosophical ramblings fit right into the plot. In this book, we follow Southern politician Willie Stark’s rise from a do-gooder idealist zero to a corrupt, power-hungry leader. It’s all narrated in first person by Jack Burden, who’s more or less Willie’s right-hand man. The story’s exciting as hell (which I hear is pretty exciting), but it’s probably the prose that makes it my favorite book. I’ve read and reread this and it’s passages like these that get me every time:

“It was like the second when you come home late at night and see the yellow envelope of the telegram sticking out from under your door and you lean and pick it up, but don’t open it yet, not for a second. While you stand there in the hall, with the big eye looking straight at you from miles and dark and through walls and houses and through your coat and vest and hide and sees you huddled up way inside, in the dark which is you, inside yourself, like a clammy, sad little foetus you carry around inside yourself. The eye knows what’s in the envelope, and it is watching you to see you when you open it and know, too. But the clammy, sad little foetus which is you way down in the dark which is you too lifts up its sad little face and its eyes are blind, and it shivers cold inside you for it doesn’t want to know what is in that envelope. It wants to lie in the dark and not know, and be warm in its not-knowing. The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can’t know. He can’t know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can’t know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn’t got and which if he had it, would save him. There’s the cold in your stomach, but you open the envelope, you have to open the envelope, for the end of man is to know.”

And like most good books, if you read carefully you’ll catch clever allusions to other works. Warren was a Shakespeare fanatic, so he drops little references all over the place. But like I said, you do have to read carefully to notice. Like here:

“A man’s got to carry something besides a corroded liver with him out of that dark backwood and abysm of time, and it might as well be the little black books.”

Tempest lovers, did you catch that? Act I, Scene II. It’s in one of Prospero’s lines:

“Thou hadst, and more, Miranda. But how is it

That this lives in thy mind? What seest thou else

In the dark backward and abysm of time?

If thou remember’st aught ere thou camest here,

How thou camest here thou mayst.”

But notice how Warren changed it ever so slightly. Could be him misremembering it, but I doubt that. I don’t know why it’s different in the novel but hey, cool. This sort of thing’s all over All the King’s Men.

So I tried to explain all this to my friend, but wasn’t very successful. It’s difficult to talk about these things while you’re biking down the side of a major road, so we moved on to talk about comics instead.

What’s probably going to be more interesting to you, provided you live near Williamsburg, is where we were going while having this conversation: the Book Exchange. I saw it in passing a few weeks ago while I was on a bus and decided to go check it out in the future, and didn’t get around to it until this week. But so we visited it and figured out how it works. You give them books and they give you credit on a store account (one-fourth of the original sale price of each book you donate), which you can use towards buying other books other people have donated to the store, which is like any other used bookstore except for the exchange part. I was not aware of anything like this in my hometown so it’s all pretty novel to me. And since it is a fairly unpretentious variety of used bookstore, they have loads of romance and sci-fi novels all over the place. In other words, an effectively niche bookstore with a convenient mode of payment. It’s 1303 Jamestown Rd. (I think) so go check it out.

The end. Happy reading, or something.