Important anniversaries

This weekend is Labor Day. In the Florida Keys that usually means some commemoration of one of the strongest hurricanes to hit the continental United States -- the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935. It swept across Islamorada in the Upper Keys and killed an estimated 408 people, many of them World War I vets working on a New Deal relief program to build a highway in the Keys. It also destroyed the Overseas Railway, Henry Flagler's final achievement, which connected the Keys to the mainland for good. The railroad was not financially worth rebuilding; much of the roadbed and most of the magnificent bridges were converted for use in the Overseas Highway. You can see a lot of them today, alongside the replacement bridges that were built in the 1970s and '80s. Why is this a topic for a book blog? For one thing, I have written many times about the railroad and interviewed survivors, for an oral history series I wrote for the Miami Herald in the 1990s and an oral history compilation I put together for the Herald's late, lamented Tropic Magazine. But more currently, my current employer the Monroe County Public Library has just posted more than 700 images related to the railroad to our Flickr account, and these images (including the one above) are something to see. Historian Tom Hambright wrote a blog post about the images and the railroad for our website [link to be provided once the library website recovers from whatever database affliction it is currently suffering].

The other anniversary is upcoming -- in 2012 we in the Keys will be marking the centennial of the railway reaching Key West -- on Jan. 22, 1912, Henry Flagler himself rode the "first train" onto the island and was greeted by, essentially, the entire town population. The Key West Art & Historical Society is already planning a major exhibit, which I can't wait to see, and I'm sure many other events will spring up. If you're looking for a readable account of the railroad's construction and destruction, I recommend Les Standiford's Last Train to Paradise. There are a bunch of others that focus solely on the hurricane; I like this one because it captures both ends of this epic, tragic story that changed and defined the Keys.

Mock-ing-jay, yeah!

It's always fun to get caught up in one of those mass movements of reading -- that way you can discuss books with complete strangers and/or friends on Facebook. Mockingjay, the final installment in Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy, suddenly became one of those books this summer. This seemed to catch a lot of people by surprise ... but not those of us who had read the first two installments, Hunger Games and Catching Fire.

The popularity of YA literature in general and dystopian YA lit in particular was recently examined in an insightful essay in the New York Times. I thought this had just dawned on me since I started working in a public library and suddenly had daily contact with YA books. But now that I think about it, I have been reading more stuff intended for young readers since the Harry Potter phenomenon hit the bigtime -- especially Phillip Pullman's magnificent His Dark Materials trilogy (though I feel like I need to go back and read Paradise Lost to really understand it and, darn it, I just haven't gotten around to that). I've also read The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1, and enjoyed it.

But The Hunger Games and its sequel, Catching Fire, were on a whole different level. They're set in an unspecified future, after the nation has destroyed itself via nuclear weapons and is divided into impoverished districts that are all governed oppressively by the decadent Capitol. One of the methods and symbols of oppression is an annual spectacle called the Hunger Games in which a pair of kids from each district are sent into an arena to fight to the death. Naturally, our heroine, Katniss Everdeen, is chosen in the first eponymous volume. Actually she volunteers -- she's a skilled hunter and outdoorswoman and it's her timid and beloved little sister's name that is drawn on the horrible day.

The final volume is a showdown between the rebel districts and the Capitol and our heroine has become the symbol of the rebellion, the Mockingjay. I'm not going to reveal any further plot points but I'll say that the book is, like its predecessors, compulsively readable and thought provoking at the same time -- more nuanced and multi-level than a lot of your good-versus-evil fantasy tales. I felt a slight sense of letdown for two reasons, neither of which I can blame on Collins. 1) I had elevated expectations, from my own anticipation and abetted by all the public excitement -- I had a similar issue with the final Harry Potter volume. In the future, I'll have to try to wait until after all volumes in a series get published before jumping on the bandwagon. (Yeah, right.) 2) A related problem -- I was reading too fast. I do that when I'm gulping down a book purely for plot, which I was here. I'd like to go back and re-read -- maybe all three volumes since there's only three and they're reasonably sized, not Harry Potter-like tomes. Overall, though, I'll give this one 4 stars and the series as a whole 4 1/2.

Queening it up

I've had an Eleanor of Acquitaine thing for a long time. It hasn't been as virulent as my Elizabeth I thing, probably because there are a lot fewer novels, movies and TV shows made about the Plantagenets than the Tudors. The 12th century was a long time ago and we have a lot less to go on about how they lived, what they wore, said, ate, etc. Still, there's some good stuff -- the book that got me started was A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver by the great E.L. Konigsburg. She's better known for From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, the story of two kids who run away and spend a week or two at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (how DID that woman get away with those crazy hard-to-remember titles???). But her book on Eleanor is superb, especially for a kid who's into history and appreciates a strong woman character. And what a woman! Eleanor was a significant landholder in her own right -- her holdings dwarfed the smaller lands that then made up the kingdom of France -- and she was queen of France AND England, annulling her marriage to Louis of France in order to run off with the future Henry II of England, 12 years her junior. It was an alliance of power and property, to be sure, but appears to have been a love match, too, at least in the beginning. By the end, Eleanor joined her sons in rebellion against their father and when that rebellion failed, was imprisoned by him. After he died, her son Richard the Lionheart let her out and she kept the country together while he went off on crusade, got himself held captive then was killed. Very dramatic all around.

Eleanor is probably best known fictionally via Katharine Hepburn's portrayal in the movie version of The Lion in Winter and that's good, too, though I've always thought the movie came off as one of those stagey let's-take-a-play-and-perform-it-outside-and-call-it-a-movie movies. I prefer the younger Eleanor, the one who insisted on joining her first husband on Crusade and on dumping him for the more suitable young Henry Plantagenet. Now that would make a great movie. Starring Cate Blanchett.

It looks like Eleanor might be coming in for a Tudor-like popular revival -- there are several new novels out about her and I snapped one of them up as soon as it arrived at the library, especially since it was by Alison Weir, a historian/novelist I knew had written a well-regarded popular (as opposed to academic) biography of Eleanor. But I'm sorry to say Captive Queen was a severe disappointment (2 stars). More on that later -- I'm reviewing it for Solares Hill and don't want to scoop myself here -- but it just wasn't good. I checked A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver out of the library just to check up on my Eleanor and found that it holds up very well and was a good reminder of a good fictional treatment (4 1/2 stars!).

I would still like to read a good one meant for adults and I keep seeing references to Sharon Kay Penman's trilogy on Eleanor and Henry II -- When Christ and His Saints Slept, Time and Chance and Devil's Brood. We have all three of them in the library collection -- but they are big books, especially the first, and I just haven't been in the right place to take them on. So instead I went with Penman's mystery series set in the same era, featuring a bishop's bastard son named Justin de Quincy. The first is The Queen's Man (the queen of the title is Eleanor) and found it was a very capable historical mystery. So if you like that Ellis Peters sort of thing, check out this series. (3 1/2 stars). Another enjoyable medieval mystery featuring Eleanor (this time as a murder suspect after the death of Henry's mistress Rosamund de Clifford) is The Serpent's Tale, second in Ariana Franklin's Mistress of the Art of Death series. Finally, one I haven't read but that is recommended by a library patron with whom I am sympatico in literary taste is Eleanor of Acquitaine and the Four Kings by Amy Kelly.  Unfortunately it's not in our library collection but this patron got it via Interlibrary loan -- and you could, too!

I've also started Weir's own biography of Eleanor and am finding it very informative and enjoyable -- which just makes it all the more heartbreaking that the novel turned out so badly. It shows, too, how difficult historical fiction can be. You can have all the settings and facts right, but if the characters are wooden and implausible, it just doesn't work. I should have realized this was a possibility -- Weir's first foray into fiction was a novel about Elizabeth I, whom she has also written about as a biographer. I started that book with the same sort of high hopes and could not proceed past about 50 pages, which is very unusual for me. But I thought her novel about Lady Jane Grey, Innocent Traitor, was just fine, so I thought she'd figured it out.

One last queen: Tudor popularizer extraordinaire Philippa Grey's new series ventures back into Plantagenet territory, with the Wars of the Roses between the Lancasters and the Yorks, the wars which were finally resolved with the arrival of the Tudors.  The second installment arrived at the library recently and I grabbed that one, too. The first in this series, The White Queen, focused on Elizabeth Woodville, who married Edward IV (York).  The second is called The Red Queen and its narrator/heroine is Margaret Beaufort (Lancaster) who was mother of Henry VII (Tudor). It was OK -- better than Captive Queen -- but something of a slog, because Margaret just isn't a very compelling character. She's pious, cold, and ambitious, all of which I'm sure was perfectly normal and appropriate for her time and station but who wants to spend all that time inside her head? I'll give that one 3stars. And I'm looking forward to a small break from all this queenship and a return to the dystopian YA world of Suzanne Collins, with Mockingjay, the final installment in her excellent Hunger Games trilogy.

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.