An unnecessary defense

The romance genre does not need any defense from me. It's doing quite nicely on its own, thank you, with sales up 7.7 percent in 2009 over the previous year -- a rise that's particularly notable amid the decline of book publishing as a whole. I got that figure from a recent piece in Bloomberg Businessweek magazine. That's where the issue of defense comes in. Because this piece, while noting the success of the genre as a whole, then spent the rest of its time ridiculing the various microniches that have found particular recent success, including NASCAR, paranormal, Amish and (snicker) crafts! You might catch the tone of the piece from the headline -- "Getting Dirty in Dutch Country" -- though if you'd actually read any of them you'd probably figure out quickly that the Amish-set romances, unlike a lot in that genre, don't get dirty, and that's a big part of their appeal. It turns out there are, in fact, romance readers out there who aren't into ripped bodices and explicit sex. So some smart writers and publishers are catering to them. That's worthy of ridicule? There's another reason the romance genre doesn't need any defense from me. It already has far more prominent champions, notably the smart women of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, whose response to the Bloomberg piece* is what alerted me to its existence in the first place. Yep, I had good SAT scores, I have a master's degree, I read a lot, sometimes I read romances and I regularly read SBTB -- but I never read Bloomberg Businessweek. Even though a good friend of mine writes for it. What does that tell you?

If you're genuinely interested in the romance genre and/or the industry behind it, I can suggest a good source of information. Beyond Heaving Bosoms, the book written by the Smart Bitches themselves, is a fun and interesting analysis that reflects what's so cool about them. They're appreciative fans of the genre -- but also gimlet-eyed realists about its flaws and hilariously harsh critic of ridiculous narratives. Check out some of their low-graded reviews if you don't believe me.

And I agree with their conclusion about the Bloomberg Businessweek piece: that its take on the genre is, essentially, offensively sexist. The plots, characters and conventions of romance novels are certainly escapist, ridiculous and highly unrealistic. The prose is unlikely to wind up on the shortlist of Nobel contenders. Just like a whole lot of other popular genres, like thrillers, crime dramas and self-important psychobabble. You don't get romance? You think it's crap that people shouldn't waste their time or money on? I sympathize, believe me. I have had to learn to maintain a neutral expression, or even an enthusiastic helpful one, when a library patron comes in asking for the latest James Patterson or to be added to the 80-person list for The Lost Symbol. And you know what? I do it. Because 1) it's my job and 2) hey if that junk makes you happy, go for it.

It's the contempt in the Bloomberg Businessweek piece that got my blood boiling -- the sort of patronizing dismissal you rarely see displayed toward the hardboiled guys -- who may even wind up as critical favorites, reviewed in the New York Times! My personal favorite line in the piece was the snotty "Insiders insist that knitting is distinct from another ascendant microgenre: quilting." (Though I wonder if he's confusing mystery and romance -- haven't seen a lot of knitting or quilting romances. Or any, now that I think about it.) But my point is, um, yeah, they are different. Quite different in fact, which wouldn't be surprising or ridicule-worthy if you had the slightest firsthand knowledge of either. Which obviously, being an Important Male Newsguy, you wouldn't. I'll try to put it in terms he might understand: It's kind of like saying, Hey it turns out people think baseball and basketball are actually different games! Even though they both use a round thing and keep score in points! Those stupid people!

That's enough ranting from me and like I said, the SBTB website is the place to be if you're interested in the genre and have my kind of take on it. But just thought I'd blow some steam and add to the chorus. Especially since it is Romance Awareness Month.

* If you are offended by profanity or general abusive crudity, this website in general and this post in particular are not for you. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Aug. 27 update rant: Not the same issue but related is the recent flap over the lovefest Jonathan Franzen is experiencing from the New York Times and others (cover of Time mag???). I don't feel comfortable dissing Franzen without having read The Corrections or his new novel but I sympathize with Weiner and Picoult (whom I haven't read either and don't plan to). I will, however, take this occasion to express my irritation with his essay championing the novel "The Man Who Loved Children" by Christina Stead. It wasn't his point I had a problem with -- it sounds like an interesting book, I'd never heard of it or its author and now it's going to be republished. Nice job! The problem I had was with his nostalgia for 1965, "when our country still took literature halfway seriously." Ah yes, the good old days of the 1960s. When it was still perfectly acceptable to be horrifically racist and sexist (just watch an episode of Mad Men! Or read a history book) and the literary culture could exist in its rarefied little trustfunded atmosphere, occasionally enlivened by an outsider like Kerouac for titillation's sake.

I'm sorry, but SHUT UP. Yep, the democratization of pop culture has its horrifying aspects, to be sure -- just about any reality TV show bears that out. But it also allows way more people to take part, and provides way more interesting views into other lives than the Good Old Days Franzen is mourning. True, it's not quite as good now as it was then for white guys. But should a guy who was chosen by Oprah (and I must admit I have been mildly irritated with him since that episode, in which I think he behaved like an elitist dick) and then put on the cover of Time really be bitching?

Too close for comfort

I have an issue with books that touch on subjects close to me, fiction or nonfiction. Maybe it's two issues:

1) They get it wrong, which is irritating on all kinds of levels -- it's kind of like when some out-of-town journalist comes in and writes about your place and those little details that aren't quite right drive you nuts.

Or, 2) They get it right, which is even more uncomfortable and reminds me of my own weaknesses, or things I should have done, or places and people I miss. For these reasons I haven't been able to bring myself to read The Last Resort, Alison Lurie's novel set in Key West. That one will be resolved soon; the novel is the next choice for the library's One Island, One Book program so I will read it, dammit. I also have not read Home Town by Tracy Kidder, which is about Northampton, Massachusetts. Northampton is not, strictly speaking, my hometown although I was born there, but I grew up close by, knew it my whole life and worked there as a newspaper reporter one summer. I had my feet measured at Ted's Boot Shop. I remember when the main street had a hardware store, not a bunch of ice cream shops and trendy boutiques. I know that if you're really from there and not some Smithie/yuppie transplant you call it Hamp, not Noho. Kidder has lived in the region for many years and is a wonderful reporter and writer; there's no reason to fear he's going to get it wrong. I'm more afraid with this one that it will make me question my choice to live my adult life so far from home. This is not the most rational of approaches.

So a couple weeks ago when I started reading reviews of a novel called One Day by David Nicholls I felt a combination of anticipation and dread. Anticipation because this novel was about two people almost exactly my age (they graduate from college in 1988; I graduated in 1989), following their lives connecting and not connecting for the next 20 years. It had a strong endorsement from Nick Hornby, so I knew it was likely to be a highly readable, probably funny novel. But I also knew that even though it is British it might strike uncomfortably close to home.

I ordered it from the library anyway -- there just haven't been that many novels that are so exactly on point for Generation X -- and on just about all counts, I was right. It is highly readable, it is in many ways quite funny and it strikes way too close to home, especially the female lead, Emma Morley. She's smart, an aspiring writer who wants to do good in the world but is insecure about competing with self-promoting media types. The male lead, Dexter Mayhew, did not remind me of me but he reminded me of a few guys I have known and been fond of, even when they behaved badly. He's goodlooking, confident and comes from money, all of which means while Emma is toiling away in a crappy Mexican restaurant then starts teaching at a comprehensive (public in the American sense) high school, Dexter is traveling in Italy and India, then effortlessly launching into a career as a TV host of silly pop culture shows. It doesn't mean he's any happier than Emma, just more commercially successful. And to a few people -- like Emma -- Dexter reveals his own insecurities and his own capacity for kindness and generosity. Even while he is also behaving very very badly.

BIG SPOILER ALERT HERE -- I'M ABOUT TO START TALKING ABOUT KEY PLOT POINTS SO IF YOU WANT TO READ THIS BOOK AND DON'T WANT TO KNOW, STOP READING RIGHT NOW!!!!

Still here? So ... when I finished this novel, I felt upset. Really upset. I was curious about whether Dexter and Emma would ever get together -- they do, of course -- but I suspected Nicholls was going to pull the rug out from under me in some fashion. I was not expecting him to go and kill off one of the protagonists. Naturally, it was Emma, the one I really identified with. So I was upset that Emma died, I was upset that poor Dexter, after finally getting his act together and recognizing the good woman in front of him, was griefstricken ... and I was upset with myself for being so upset about people who are, after all, fictional characters.

What is up with that? I tell myself these people don't really exist, never existed -- but its gets to me far more than it should. Which is I suppose why we read fiction -- to enter another world, find out about other people, get a view into other people's lives and get into their heads the way you never could with a real person. When bad things happen to fictional characters, provided they are fictional characters I have emotionally invested in, it's far more upsetting than when I'm reading nonfiction where plenty of bad things happen to people. This doesn't really make sense -- after all, in nonfiction you're talking about real people who presumably really went through the terrible experience you're reading about. But with fiction you have collaborated in bringing the characters to life for the period of time you're reading about them. That's my excuse anyway. A book with a similar emotional residue was Maggie O'Farrell's "After You'd Gone" -- although that one was less of a shock because of, you know, the title. It's all enough to make me want to go running back to books where I know damned well the ending will be happy -- or possibly nonfiction, where I'm unlikely to get quite as caught up in the interior lives of others.

I'm giving One Day 4 stars -- it's very well done and I didn't mind the premise, in which Nicholls checks in on the characters on a single day each year. Some people have called it gimmicky, but it seemed like a fine structure and worked for a novel covering a 20-year timespan. The day is July 15, St. Swithin's Day, which has no significance for me but apparently the Billy Bragg song was a big inspiration. Give it a read, especially if you're a Gen Xer who's been hankering for some fiction that reflects the lives of our generation.

Oh yeah -- dragons again

I've already gushed several times about my fondness for Naomi Novik's Temeraire series -- it's the Napoleonic Wars ... with dragons! Which sounds a bit silly but as someone who's not a frequent reader of fantasy, I found the series enthralling. I was tipped to it, by the way, from an unlikely source -- the romance site Smart Bitches Trashy Books, where I was scanning through their highly graded reviews (of which there are not that many -- unlike most romance sites, these women are tough graders). I came across the review for His Majesty's Dragon, the first book in the series, and was intrigued, even though I don't think I'd read anything with dragons since an Anne McCaffrey book or two when I was a kid and they didn't really stick. Harry Potter doesn't count. Anyway I rushed through the first five ... and then had to stop and wait for Novik to publish her next one. Which finally happened this month, and I wanted it so badly that I downloaded it onto my Kindle and read it.

(Small diversion here: I find I don't read all that much on the Kindle, since I have such preposterous access to books on the job, but I think it is extremely useful for two things: 1) Classics, which you'd like to read someday but aren't necessarily sitting on your public library shelf. They are way out of copyright and thus cheap as hell on the Kindle -- I have loaded mine up with pretty much all of Dickens, Anthony Trollope and Elizabeth Gaskell and dammit someday I really am going to read them and 2) when a new hardcover comes out that you must have THIS VERY INSTANT and you're not willing to sit around and wait for the library copy to show up -- in that case, the Kindle is cheaper than buying the physical version and has the added attraction of being instant. That was the case, for me, with Tongues of Serpents.)

OK back to the book.

It's been long enough that I actually wish I had gone back and re-read the previous books in the series -- I knew the general outlines of why the characters were where they were (Australia, or as it was called at the time New South Wales) but some of the minor characters escaped me. It would be cool if series novels had little reviews like "previously on" segments of TV shows on DVD. Then again, I could easily have just looked up the earlier books myself on Amazon or LibraryThing or Novik's own website, I suppose.

There wasn't a whole lot of action in this one, in which the dragon Temeraire and his human "handler," more like partner, Laurence are sent across Australia looking first for a potential traveling route and later for a stolen dragon egg. What makes this series so great, though, and this book worth the while if you're already into the series, is the characterization and specifically the relationships between dragons and people. The dragons are intelligent, highly so -- there are ways Temeraire outstrips Laurence, such as mathematics and languages. But the dragons have far less sense of duty to King and country and overwhelming loyalty to one person -- his or her handler -- so persuading the dragon to do what you want can be an interesting negotiation. This is especially true for Temeraire, who was Chinese-bred and has seen China, where dragons are treated far better than in Europe. In the middle of that, the people have to navigate their own worlds where military and diplomatic protocol matter ... but so do morals and ethics. So Laurence, for example, has to deal with the attempts by William Bligh (of Bounty fame) who has been overthrown as the colony's governor and wants Temeraire to help re-install him -- even though it's clear that pretty much everyone on the continent hates his guts and he's a terrible administrator.

But it's not all complicated emotion -- it's all done with a nice light touch and a lot of it is quite funny, especially with the firebreathing dragon Izkierka, whose handler is Laurence's (and Temeraire's) former first lieutenant and who gets some interesting ideas of her own.

Does this all sound crazy? Maybe it is -- but it makes for an interesting setup and all kinds permutations that you could never have in straight-up historical novels of, say, Patrick O'Brian or Bernard Cornwell. I'm giving this one 3.5 stars just because I have high standards for Novik but I still recommend reading it -- though not if it's your first one. This is a series you want to read in order, from the beginning. We have the first four in the series in the collection of the Monroe County Library.

A report from Library Land

I recently attended the American Library Association annual conference in Washington, D.C. -- the mother of all library conferences. According to an ALA news release, there were 19,513 attendees -- and I believe it. The gathering was so huge that I knew my college housemate was there -- and never saw her once in three days (she is a university library dean and operates on a whole different level of librarianship). What did I learn? For one thing, from the moment I stepped into the Convention Center to pick up my registration packet, I realized this was my tribe. Everyone looked a little familiar, even though I didn't know any of them. This conference was one of the first times I've felt real regret for not going into this field earlier in my career -- even though I value everything I learned from journalism and other jobs.

It was an exceptionally well-organized conference, which I suppose comes from having these down after all these years. Everything was in the room specified, at the time specified. Events started on time and did not run over their allotted time. A lot of conferences could take a few lessons. For me, it was a nice mix of literary celebrity and practical info. My only complaint is that not much seemed geared toward little libraries like ours -- and I know there are a lot of us out there. No doubt that's because little library staffers don't have time to attend ALA conference organizing sessions, or make their name in the field as speakers. But it's worth keeping in mind because I bet a big part of ALA's constituency actually comes from little shops.

There were some big name writers there -- Toni Morrison as the keynote speaker at the opening general session, John Grisham, Junot Diaz, Dennis Lehane. It was interesting to see the difference between librarians as an audience from a purely literary gathering like the Key West Literary Seminar or the Miami Book Fair. Librarians seemed purely appreciative, not needy in the way that literary eventgoers can sometimes be, and I liked that. Naturally all the writers made sure to give props to libraries and librarians.

Some other mostly random observations and quotes:

What is it with the librarians and Second Life? I just don't get it -- and I don't want to and I won't. Maybe it's because I associate it with a particularly unappealing former work colleague but it just strikes me as creepy. Isn't Regular Life enough, or more than enough to keep up with? I suppose this is just how others feel about Facebook but that's cool. No one's forcing you to do any of those things. It just seems like I never hear any references to Second Life ... except from strangely enthusiastic librarians.

"You don't walk into Nordstrom's and say, 'please show me your inventory management system.'" Stephen Abram of Gale, talking about the way we present our online public access catalogs to patrons.

"We are living in a golden age of comics and book design." Audrey Niffenegger, author of "The Time Traveler's Wife," "Her Fearful Symmetry" and the upcoming graphic novel "The Night Bookmobile."

Dennis Lehane said the first nine screenplay adaptations of his novel "Shutter Island" tried to change the story to have a happy ending -- and they all sucked.

The panel called "Isn't It Romantic?" -- which featured six very nice and funny writers of romance novels -- was held in a room that was way too small for the crowd, in stark contrast to other sessions that had much bigger rooms and were half full or less. I think that speaks to the dissing of genre in general and romance in particular (I didn't check out the couple of scifi sessions I saw on the agenda so I don't know if those had similar room assignment/crowd issues). Too bad -- because we know they're popular with readers and obviously with a good section of librarians, too. Speaking of stereotyping, I think I was at the exact median of age, body size and apparel choices in that room -- making me feel both at home and strange, like when I see Swedes whom I've never met and am not related to, but who sort of feel familiar.

And this isn't ALA or library-related at all but if you go to Washington and have limited museum viewing time, I cannot recommend enough visiting the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. They share the old U.S. Patent Office building and they are both fantastic museums that are also a reasonable size to take in. The Portrait Gallery side, in particular, offers a nice precis of American history at the same time as seeing some cool paintings. And I got to see a genuine painting of Elizabeth I there! (Yes, she's not American but she played a role in early English settlements.) The real thing! The guy who painted that was looking at her! That gets my Tudor geek on, big time.

Of course, if you're interested at all in libraries you will probably visit the Library of Congress -- I'm embarrassed to say this was my first visit there but it was so worth it. What a gorgeous building, and monument, to the mission of libraries and their centrality to our country. And it's a working library, too. The tour was great, with all the cool architectural and artistic details explained and they had a great exhibit called Exploring the Early Americas. Highlighted in this exhibit is a map from the early 1500s by German mapmaker Martin Waldseemüller, for which the Library recently paid $10 million. Why, you might wonder, would our national library pay $10 million for some German map? It turns out this was the map in which Waldseemüller named that big continent to the west after one of the early explorers: Amerigo Vespucci. OK. Now I get it.

Don't worry I'm not writing about ebooks

I'm sick to death of reading about ebooks and digital publishing because it all seems to come from the poles -- either we're looking at the Glorious Future or the Terrible End of literature. Plus there's so much being written and published, both online and in print, by self-obsessed media types, that you couldn't possibly follow it all. Plus as a wise person once said about Hollywood, nobody knows anything. So why kill myself trying to figure it out when really smart people who are paid to do so obviously can't? I chose this image because I recently completed two online book club reads -- in both cases, ahead of the official schedule. The first was Neil Gaiman's American Gods for the inaugural One Book One Twitter. The second was Justin Cronin's Passage for the inaugural Salon Book Club.

I liked both books a lot -- each gets four stars -- but in terms of communal reading experience I have to give the edge to Salon -- even though they're only midway through and even though I have spent a lot less time with the online component than I did with the Twitter side and I don't plan to contribute to the Salon discussion, as I did to the Twitter talk. It might be because I'm more comfortable with someone in charge -- and I fully understand that the brilliance of Twitter is that no one is in charge -- but if I have a chance of sitting in on a book discussion guided by the brilliant Laura Miller, I'm taking it. The Twitter conversation was necessarily stutterstep and repetitive and without nuance. Salon's is far more limited in terms of the number of people taking part -- but the contributions seem more thoughtful and considered. In other words, more like reading a book.

This is not an anti-Twitter jeremiad. I was mildly Twitterphobic and am now glad to have gotten over that. It's fun to use it as a kind of personalized wire service; I follow mostly book-related feeds but also a few news feeds and a couple celebrity feeds (Jason Bateman and Will Arnett, OK?). I also follow a couple cycling feeds (Lance Armstrong and Johann Bruyneel).

As for the books -- American Gods was good but I really need to re-read it because limiting myself to the 1B1T reading schedule was just too frustrating and too scattered. There's a lot going on in that  novel, with a lot of characters and side stories thrown in, and too much time between reading sessions meant I forgot too much. The Passage is one of this summer's hot books -- it's, inevitably, about vampires but this ain't no Twilight/True Blood dreamy vampire. These are bad vampires, initially created by a government experiment run amok and they manage, in short order, to destroy America as we know it. It's been compared quite a bit to The Stand by Stephen King, which I haven't read. I don't even read in that genre. But I found it an engrossing, well written tale that credibly created a world and included characters whose fates mattered to me. Isn't that what a good summer book is supposed to do?