My epic problem

Last week, while home from work with a sore throat, I spent the whole day reading the new highly-touted novel, A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness. I liked it, as did the folks at Publisher's Weekly and Booklist (which gave it a starred review). Even more impressively, it showed up at number 2 on the New York Times' hardcover fiction bestseller list in its first week -- nice to see a first-time novel by an English professor up there in Patterson/Larsson land. Yet. Toward the end, I found myself racing through -- not quite skimming but definitely not paying close attention. This is a bad habit of mine, especially if I'm reaching the end of a book at the end of the day and know I won't be able to sleep until it's done. But I found myself also getting a tad annoyed and I realized what that was about.

It's the "Wait, there's more!" syndrome, commonly seen in action/epic movies (Wyatt Earp and The Dark Knight come to mind) where there is just one denouement/near death experience/ultimate showdown too many. Or three.

I realize that's kind of the point of an epic book like this one -- and it's the first part of a trilogy so there's more to come. But after awhile, especially in a single volume, it starts to feel like Too Much. This is the reason I've given up on Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series. Each single volume just involves too many James Bondish escapes. Even in a fantasy where you've suspended disbelief (time travel and all that not to mention a brawny, sexy Scotsman who's also really smart and thoughtful, too), it's asking too much to follow these characters through yet another traumatic event. I think if you're going to follow the same people on epic adventures it helps to break it down into more digestible episodes like your standard mystery or thriller series. And one of the geniuses of Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey-Maturin series, I realize now, is his ability to take us along on extended periods where nothing much actually happens, plotwise, but we're still enthralled by just hanging out with those characters in those settings.

I feel the need here to repeat that I really did like Harkness' book -- which contributed the new (to me, at least) feature of supernatural beings doing yoga together as well as great European settings and the always-alluring enticement of ancient secrets hidden in an old book in the archives of the Bodleian Library. This book, like Justin Cronin's blockbuster from last year, The Passage, (which I also read and liked but felt a little annoyed at its super-hype) is getting a lot of props as a sort of genre/literary hybrid, although the vampires in A Discovery of Witches are more traditional dangerous romantic hero types, not the viral predators of The Passage. I rated A Discovery of Witches 3 1/2 stars on LibraryThing which is my standard "enjoyable read" rating and I will probably read the next installment. The fact that I'm spending so much time thinking about this book indicates that it's good, good enough to stay inside my head for a bit. And I am glad to see a non-Patterson-violent-male thriller book up there selling well. As the review in the Miami Herald pointed out, Harkness's book uses elements from fantasy, romance and historical fiction, and I'm all for all those genres getting more play.

Maybe it's the English major in me, or the romance reader, but the parts I like best about these books are the characters and their idiosyncracies. I know you need lots of action to keep people interested and I know if you're talking about some kind of supernatural showdown there has to be lots of conflict with lots at stake. I just hope Harkness, Cronin and others (I'm sure their success means there will be tons of others) trust their readers, and themselves, to know that we're reading these stories for more than just one more Incredible Cheating of Death.

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?

Recent reading roundup

I'm currently immersed in one of this summer's Hot Books -- The Passage by Justin Cronin -- which I'm attempting to read with Salon's Reading Club (look for a future post contrasting that with the One Book One Twitter experience reading American Gods -- the short version is that I like the Salon experience better, at least so far). And there are a couple other titles I've read in the last month between everything else -- though now we've got the cable with the World Cup on and the Tour de France right around the corner so my reading rate could slow right down. (There are three copies of The Passage in the Monroe County Library system, by the way, with two requests pending so if you want this one you should get on the list.) But here's a report on a couple of recent reads before they get too far into the rearview mirror. My Name is Mary Sutter by Robin Oliviera -- historical fiction set during the Civil War about a midwife who longs to become a surgeon, with lots of family drama going on. For some reason, this one just didn't grab me though I did finish it. It struck me as one of those "look how much research I did into the time period" historical novels. That stuff needs to come through not quite so obviously. We do have it in the Monroe County Library collection, just not at the Key West Library. I'll give it 3 stars.

The Big Skinny by Carol Lay -- a graphic memoir (my favorite genre in the graphic format, I'm finding) about a woman's decision, at around the age of 50, to finally lose weight and keep it off. How does she do it? Why, she counts calories and exercises more! Amazing! The book has a great opening where Lay is at a party and some woman is marveling at her weight loss, asks her how she did it -- and is deeply unhappy with Lay's answer. People would prefer there were some magic bullet, of course, rather than the old "eat less and exercise more" answer. The rest of the book is both Lay's story of why she was chronically overweight and the strategies she uses to stay thin. I liked it a lot. Not in the Monroe County Public Library collection, unfortunately -- I got it through Interlibrary Loan (thanks, Palm Beach County!). 4 stars.

American Gods -- Neil Gaiman's novel about a war between the Old Gods (Norse, Egyptian, you name it) and the New Gods (technology, media, etc.) on American terrain was chosen for the inaugural One Book One Twitter read and I jumped on it for two reasons: I'd been meaning to read that book and I was feeling mildly guilty for being Twitterphobic. It was an interesting way to get to know Twitter and I'm glad I finally read some Gaiman. But it wasn't the best way to read a book, especially this book. I wound up finally jumping ahead of the two-to-three-chapters-a-week reading schedule and finishing it in one big rush. And I liked the novel a lot but I'd like to re-read it, not according to some Twitterific schedule. This one, by the way, is in the Key West Library collection. 4 stars.

Speaking of graphic memoirs, or memoirs in graphic novel format, or whatever the hell you want to call them, I'd been meaning to read Stitches by David Small since it came out -- it got fantastic reviews. And we even have it at the library. But I hadn't gotten around to it -- until I was looking at the program for the upcoming ALA conference and saw that Small will be appearing there, along with Time Traveler's Wife author Audrey Niffenegger (whom I had no idea was an artist, too). Anyway it was enough to send me over to our small-but-growing graphic novel collection to check it out on Saturday. I opened it after work and I think I finished it before the sun was down. It's great -- harrowing, for sure -- like all memoirs, in the graphic format unhappy childhoods make terrific narratives. And Small's art is great, too. My favorite in this level is still Alison Bechdel's Fun Home -- but this one is a close second. In fact, the only graphic memoir I think I didn't like was one where the "author" was not the artist. I'm not sure why -- it just didn't feel authentic in some way. But this one did. A great book. 4 1/2 stars.