Collected Miscellany

I can so relate to this sad tale of woe:

Pity the poor bibliophile who caves in to every temptation to buy a book whenever a new catalogue arrives in the mail, when he strolls through the local bookstore or surfs Amazon.com or the numerous websites of publishing companies or university presses. He knows every discount catalogue by name and saves all the promotional coupons from every chain bookstore in town.

He has probably read a review of a book, no, many books, by someone he respects. Or maybe he has really, truly read another book by the same author and was duly impressed. He might even have read a book on the same subject and harbors a theoretical resolve to deepen his knowledge on the subject.

[. . .]

So the books keep piling up. First, every inch of every bookshelf is filled. After that, the books are stacked up on top of the bookcases. Then books are placed sideways in front of the books on the shelves. Books get stacked up on chairs, under side tables, on the floor in corners, even under the bed or dresser. They accumulate in boxes and in every nook and cranny in the house.

The bibliophile, not unlike a stealthy alcoholic, starts sneaking books into the house and stashing them away, sometimes wrapping them up as Christmas gifts with a card indicating they are from some other random member of the household.

There is no way that all those books are going to get read despite the reader’s endless promises to himself, no doubt sincere, that his lifetime reading plan will allow him to eventually plow through every single one of them, come hell or high water.

So many books, so little time.

Interesting segment from Ed’s interview with Richard Russo:

Russo: You know, it’s funny. That particular metaphor of doors, of walking through doors closed behind you, and then having fewer doors to walk through and choose between, was the metaphor that I used to use when I was teaching to describe how plot worked.

Correspondent: Interesting.

Russo: When I was teaching my undergraduate and especially my graduate students. Plot is a very difficult — they say, how do you come up with a story? How do you know what happens first? What happens next? All of that. And I was trying to explain to them that the best stories, the best plots, are the ones that end up kind of paradoxically, you want to be surprised. But after the surprise, you want a sense of inevitability. Like that’s the only place the story could have gone. Those two things, that’s why a lot of books are disappointing. Because that’s a very hard effect to achieve. How can you surprise somebody even as, after they register the surprise, they say, “Oh, of course. This is the only way it can go. This is the only way it could have gone.” Those two things are antithetical. And yet the best books always have that. That coming together. So I was always looking for a metaphor to explain that to people. To my students. And I’d say, all right. Think of it this way. You’ve got a thousand doors. You choose one. You walk through it. Now you’ve got five hundred doors. You walk through that. You’ve got two hundred and fifty doors. Every time I started explaining that to students, that there were fewer and fewer doors, that was going to provide the inevitability. But there was still the surprise. You didn’t know. Every time a character makes a decision, it seems that there are so many other possibilities. So it’s a series of surprises that ends up with a sense of inevitability. But as I explained that to my students, and as I was writing this book, it occurred to me that’s also a description of life and destiny.

Henry Kisor’s first mystery novel, Season’s Revenge, was a Christmas gift from my mother-in-law.  A resident of northern Minnesota she found it in her local bookstore.  Living here in Ohio, I was unaware of the book or the author.  For some reason, book stores assume that only people who live in certain regions can relate to mysteries set in the north woods.

I am glad she gifted me with such a present because not only have I enjoyed his books (see here and here) but I have enjoyed our Q&A’s (here and here) and his blog.  This is the perfect example of word of mouth advertising at work.

I bring this up because Kisor’s latest novel, Cache of Corpses, has recently been released and it would make a great Christmas present for any mystery fans on your list.

Cache is the third in a series featuring Deputy Steve Martinez a Lakota Indian who was raised by a Methodist preacher in upstate New York but who found a home and a career in Upper Peninsula Michigan.

The “cache” of the title is a play on the hook for the novel’s plot: the modern-day treasure hunt hobby of geocaching.  When Martinez finds a headless body wrapped in a plastic bag he has no idea that it will connect him to this burgeoning hobby and prove to be one of his most difficult, and dangerous, cases yet.  But as further clues, and corpses, are found it becomes clear that someone has turned this technological sport into a deadly game.  To further complicate matters, Martinez is running for sheriff against his old boss Eli Garrow.  This is not the best time to have bodies piling up and an unresolved case ripe for gossip.

I will confess that I have a soft spot for the characters and setting of Kisor’s mysteries.  I have Native American roots and, having been born and raised in Michigan, have spent some memorable summers in the UP.  But regardless of whether you know anything about the area, or have any connection to it, the Upper Peninsula makes for an interesting setting and Kisor makes the most of it.

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I guess the movie isn’t following in the book’s successful footsteps:

SATURDAY AM: Friday night only $8.6 million from 3,528 theaters with anemic per screen average. Weekend estimate for $27 million. Cost of movie: $200+ million. Wildly expensive flop should sink New Line Cinema chairman Bob Shaye’s chances to stay on when his contract expires in 2008…

 

I recently re-read the book and will offer my thoughts here soon.  Now, I wonder if I should spend the money to see the movie.

The Sky People has just been released in paperback; it is the first of two books in S.M. Stirling’s The Lord of Creation series (the second, In the Courts of the Crimson Kings, is scheduled to be released in hardcover in May 2008). This series is science fictional, and technically in the subgenre of alternate history; the central divergence in the Lord of Creation universe is that Venus and Mars are habitable planets for human beings, and that in fact human beings live on both planets – something proven conclusively in the early 1960s. Venus (the central setting for The Sky People) is a universally tropical jungle planet where ferocious dinosaurian and mammalian predators may be found coexisting; Mars is a slowly dying desert world inhabited by the decadent descendants of a lost empire.

If any of this sounds like the setting for an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, it’s deliberate. In writing this, S.M. Stirling had consciously made the decision to extrapolate how our world would have reacted to a situation where the assumptions of 30s pulp science fiction writers were actually true. The history of Earth itself does not seriously diverge until the 1960s, but changes accelerate quickly. By the time of the late 1980s (the time when the action takes place) Earth has been rather smugly divided between American/British Commonwealth (self-explanatory) and “Eastbloc” (Warsaw Pact & PRC) control, with the European Union (Western Europe) being a distant third. Brushfire wars are largely a thing of the past (the last being in 1967 in the Middle East, with the end result being a mandated settlement enforced by both major power blocs), and what conflict exists is mostly Cold War spy/counterspy black operations. The great political and scientific focus is on the exploitation of space resources, to the point where the biological sciences are several years behind our timeline’s activities. In short, aside from the existence of transistors and absence of ray-guns, very little about this universe would be surprising to a pulp hero.

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