Reading? Still Sexy: Books Part IV

[corianderstem]

That book's on my list. The Chernobyl one, not the 50 Shades ... although now I have to go and look it up to see what it's about!

Edit: yeah, that looks terrible. The subtitle alerting us that it's "Book One of the Fifty Shades Trilogy" isn't doing it any favors.

 

[beegee]

Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of the Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich.

I read this years ago. Definitely not an easy read, but such an important one.

I read somewhere 50 Shades started as erotic fan fiction based on the Twilight series that the author self-published and put on Amazon. A following apparently grew and caught the attention of a real publisher and here we are, complete hype and chaos.

It's straight out of my personal nightmare.

 

[MrsSpringsteen]

I finally read Bossypants by Tina Fey last week and I loved it. It's hilarious. I was in the library with tears literally running down my face. She's just awesome.

 

[corianderstem]

I read somewhere 50 Shades started as erotic fan fiction based on the Twilight series that the author self-published and put on Amazon. A following apparently grew and caught the attention of a real publisher and here we are, complete hype and chaos.

Yup. Pretty fucking much.

I'm so annoyed that the damned thing is on the cover of Entertainment Weekly (with a naked woman holding the book -what the actual fuck).

I'm going to be writing them a letter. 8 million Twilight cover stories wasn't enough, now we have to suffer through Twilight fanfic on the cover?

 

[beegee]

It makes me wish I'd been hanging around the fan fiction section of PLEBA all these years instead of IO, then maybe I'd be facing a massive payday.

Then again, I'd rather be respected for my writing than rich.

Wait.

I think.

I mean, yes, that's right.

 

[corianderstem]

There's a YA author who's huge and her series is going to be a movie, so she's probably the next thing to explode. Can't recall the name of the books/series, but the author's name is Cassandra Claire.

She was big in the Harry Potter fanfic world.

 

[Pearl]

Ugh, fanfic? That's the new way to be a published author? I might as well drop my novel in the making and do some fanfic myself if I want to strike it rich.

Jeez, first Twilight reduces the art of writing to zilch, and now fanfic has reduced it further.

 

[corianderstem]

I'm about 10% into it right now. It's so bad. And it definitely reads like fanfic. (Maybe that's my past fandom activities showing.)

Not like I went into this thing with an unbiased opinion, but still.

And for those wondering, I'm guessing it's "Twilight fanfic" in the sense that she took the characters and plopped them into a completely unrelated time and place, not that this is a story about vampires and idiot girls. So of course now I'm picturing Edward and Bella having these conversations. Blerg.

Back in my fic days, there were a ton of honestly talented people with beautiful writing styles who wrote X-Files fanfic. So talented writers are out there, dabbling in fanfic because it's fun. Why can't they be the ones getting published instead of this kind of stuff?

 

[anitram]

OK I'm not going to lie - I've read some fanfic in my day (well an earlier, younger day) and this book would fall in the bottom of the fanfic range. It's really THAT bad. It's astounding that the author got a 7-figure payout for the trilogy PLUS $5M for the movies!

After bleaching mine eyes, I read "The Sense of an Ending" by Julian Barnes. Very, very quick read as it is short. Broken down into two parts - the first one is the narrator recalling part of his youth, from high school days through college with his clique of friends. The second part is set in present-day and deals with the bequest of an old diary, which brings up the memories again. Really interesting take on memory and what we remember, how we remember and why we remember it. I very much enjoyed the writer's style and I liked the first half better than the second. The ending was very much sudden and jarring (it's something that I personally don't love in books but that's neither here nor there).

 

[Pearl]

I remember the U2 fanfic back during the Elevation tour. The writing done by those girls/women was amazing. I wonder if any of them went on to publish a novel, short story, etc. because they really did have talent.

 

[corianderstem]

It's not even the fanfic aspect that bothers me so much, now that I'm reading it. It's that it's just so bad. The writing is ridiculously poor in many ways.

 

[Pearl]

Is it written like its a Mary Sue?

 

[corianderstem]

No, but knowing that it started as Twilight fic, it's sure hard to picture anyone other that Robert Pattison and Kristen Stewart.

It's not helping.

 

[beegee]

What's a Mary Sue?

 

[IWasBored]

I thought fanfic was only publishable for characters that are now in the public domain--like that ridiculous woman who writes Sherlock Holmes fanfiction where a young woman apprentices herself to Holmes and becomes his girlfriend. That's a Mary sue--so done who essentially inserts an unbelievable, idealized version of a perfect/badass character that the main character falls in love with (usually completely against the actual characterization of that guy). Awful.

 

[corianderstem]

Well, that's the big controversy in the fic world, I think. It started as fanfic, but then the author took the characters and "de-Twilighted" them or whatever, changed whatever details so that it was not fanfic .... but if the whole story was conceived around someone else's characters, how does that work? The legal tidbits have always been an ongoing conversation among fic writers. It's kind of interesting.

Apparently whoever published the wretched thing had lawyers in their employ who cleared it.

 

[corianderstem]

Just to clear the crap from my brain before I call it a night, I'm almost done with an actual book, one that is really not based on fanfic or sparkly vampires:

True Notebooks by Mark Salzman

Book about the author's year spent teaching a writing class in a CA juvenile hall. It's about what you'd expect, with the tough gang member inmates turning out surprising insight and talent, but it's a very good read. Moving, funny, sad, etc.

 

[IWasBored]

Still sounds ridiculous. And I kinda hate how, even though I avoid sparkly teenage vampires in all their ubiquitous media forms, on the odd occasion where I do run into a vampire, I can't help but cringe. Thanks, asshole twilight people. Bastards.

 

[Pearl]

What's a Mary Sue?

That's when the author writes a character entirely based on herself and is worshiped and praised by the man she's having sex with.

Wikipedia describes it better than I can:

A Mary Sue (sometimes just Sue), in literary criticism and particularly in fanfiction, is a fictional character with overly idealized and hackneyed mannerisms, lacking noteworthy flaws, and primarily functioning as a wish-fulfilment fantasy for the author or reader. It is generally accepted as a character whose positive aspects overwhelm their other traits until they become one-dimensional.

 

[Saracene]

Jeffrey Archer - Cat O'Nine Tales

A very entertaining collection of short crime stories, some of which apparently originated during Archer's time in prison. The book also had some lovely whimsical illustrations, which makes me wish that book illustrations weren't just confined to children's literature. I'd love it if every book had them.

Mary Sue, LOL

 

[Rachel D.]

I just finished The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest yesterday. The story seemed too long and drawn out, but there was so much going on that I suppose it was necessary to get all the details put in place. I thought she was never going to get out of the hospital and there was a long section that just seemed to be about people following each other around to spy on them. It was worth it to get to the end, though.

There were so many characters to keep track of with all the police officers, government agents, journalists, doctors, and other people, but the author actually did a good job of putting reminders in there of who each person is when he mentions them, especially if they haven't been seen for a while. The government coverups made me wonder how much of that goes on, especially the spreading of disinformation in the media. Now I'm going to be paranoid!

It's really a shame that the author is no longer with us. I would be interested to see what else he could come up with.

 

[corianderstem]

The Night of the Gun by David Carr

A reporter who went off the effing deep end with addiction to crack and cocaine decides to dig into his past and find the truth about the things he did back then, because he discovers his memory is quite the unreliable narrator.

Gory details about his addiction, but dude knows how to write. Really, really excellent book.

 

[BoMac]

Sounds like something up my alley. Will have to pick that one up.

 

[Pearl]

A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini

Excellent, excellent. Once again, Hosseini has told the history of Afghanistan by using a powerful story about two women who become unlikely best friends. And he also used the twists and turns as seen in The Kite Runner. Too bad he's only written those two books; I'd like to see him write more books because I love his style. He really sucks you in to the story.

Now onto That Used to be Us by Thomas Friedman

 

[corianderstem]

Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane

I was so happy that Lehane wrote another Kenzie/Genarro story. This one, a sequel to Gone Baby Gone was a fun read, but felt much slighter than the others.

Heat by Bill Buford

The author takes an apprenticeship in one of Mario Batali's New York restaurants, and also goes to Italy to learn how to make pasta and how to butcher. Loved it! It didn't make me want to become a better cook, but it did make me want to eat and eat and eat.

After reading half of it yesterday, I craved Italian, so I moseyed down to my neighborhood's best Italian restaurant, to which I'd never been. Holy crap, it was so good.

 

[moiph]

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins. Fiance is having me read it. I'm a guy but I think this book is pretty good so far to be honest. I'd rather have kids reading this than alternatives (a lot of YA fiction seems to focus exclusively on love and boys and things that shouldn't matter). Really excited for the movie.

 

[corianderstem]

Have you read the other two books in the series? Your post reads like you haven't. Surprising to start out with the third in the series!

 

[moiph]

Have you read the other two books in the series? Your post reads like you haven't. Surprising to start out with the third in the series!

I read them! So far Catching Fire has been my favorite but I'm only 7 chapters into Mockingjay so we'll see.

 

[corianderstem]

Okay, just checking.

 

[corianderstem]

Loving Frank by Nancy Horan

Frank Lloyd Wright and his mistress. Not so much a story of their scandalous affair, but from Mamah's perspective of trying to be a "free" woman in that time period.

Two people in my choir raved about it, although I was more curious to find out what the "horrible thing" that happens in the book was, since they just acted like it was the most awful thing they'd ever heard. (It's tragic, yes.)

It was a quick read, but kind of dry, but probably only because I didn't really care about either of these people.

But now, of course, I need to go Google pictures of the Lloyd Wright house Taleisin, which, shamefully, I never saw despite living in Wisconsin most of my life.