Tales from Chaucer

Libraries are always 'weeding' books, by which we mean getting rid of things that are too worn, or old, or unused, or in which the information is no longer correct. This is distressing in principle to some people, who see libraries as eternal housing for all things ancient. But a library only has so much space, and has to keep making space for what's new -- so out goes the old. We like to recited the mantra that everything old is not a treasure. Some old books are just old books.
But sometimes you come across something that is just too priceless to discard, and often it has more to do with the book as an object, as an artifact, than as a work of literature. I came across one such today. This is a book from 1959 called Tales from Chaucer. The author, Eleanor Farjeon, sought to render many of the stories from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in modern English, so modern readers could enjoy them. It has been a long time since anybody read it, and who knows how many people read it back then? We have a few other books that are complete renderings of Chaucer's most famous work in modern English, so do we need this one?
As I said, the author is Eleanor Farjeon, but it is illustrated by Marjorie Walters. Each chapter heading has a black and white woodcut showing the character the tale is named for -- the Knight, the Parson, the Nun, et cetera. Throughout there are color tinted plates of notable scenes from the stories. The plates are on thick paper stock, and in remarkable shape despite being nearly fifty years old. I could never bear to take this book out of the collection. Not only is it a beautiful work in itself, but it also harks back to a time not so long ago when books and reading were one of the most brilliant and colorful mediums of entertainment. I still think they are, and I am thankful that there are so many library users who agree. But a book like this still stirs something in my memory that I think we will never recover.

What's in a Prize?

At a recent book discussion group we talked about Inheritance of Loss by Indian author Anita Desai. The book won the 2006 Man Booker Prize, the most coveted book award in the United Kingdom. But opinions about the book were mixed. One member of the group who especially disliked it wanted to know how it had won a major prize. This is a question I have been often asked; I suppose anyone who conducts a book discussion, or stands at a library circulation desk talking about literature with people has been asked the same question often.
For one thing, tastes differ. Even on the level of ‘literature,’ by which I mean writing that takes itself seriously as art – about one in a hundred book by my count – there are books that some people just don’t like. But with literary awards it goes beyond that.
Whether it’s the Pulitzer, the National Book Award or the Nobel Prize, there is as much politics that goes into each year’s selection as there is consideration of the merit of the work. Sure, Octavio Paz gets a Nobel Prize, and Nadine Gordimer and Czeslaw Milosz. But Elfriede Jelinek (Austria)? Imre Kertész (Hungary)? One can almost hear the discussions of whether it’s time to give the prize to a woman, or to someone from eastern Europe. It is almost impossible for literature, or anything else that is made in the real world and presented to the real world, to remove itself completely from political considerations and be judged solely on merit.
Get out an almanac sometime and read the list of books that have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. How many have you read? How many have you never even heard of? What seemed so well-done in, say, 1942 (Is This Our Life by Ellen Glasgow) or 1995 (The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields), may be less than compelling today. Moreover, nobody remembers the reason that particular author was thought to merit a major award that particular year.
I think literary awards are a great way to keep track of what people who appreciate literature are reading. I use them in selecting books for book discussions, and for my personal reading. But I don’t kid myself that because this book won this award this year, it’s the best book out there.

Subtitles for Subpar Books

In contemporary publishing, the most reliable way to tell that an editor doubts the appeal of a new book is by its subtitle -- or subtitles. Books with a strong identity use no subtitle. Rudi Giuliani's Leadership wouldn't deign to explain itself. It's a book by a leader about leadership. Some subtitles are just fine, and help us understand quickly what a book is about, like The Perfect Storm: a True Story of Men Against the Sea. But that was an excellent book, so the editor probably wasn't pulling his hair out over its sales potential.

But how about the 2006 book on forensic investigation, Every Contact Leaves a Trace. Not the most compelling title to begin with; so they explained it at length with the subtitle: Crime Scene Experts Talk about Their Work from Discovery through Verdict. With a subtitle like that, the book hardly needs an introduction. But I guess the editor wanted to make sure to cash in on the public's fascination with crime scene investigation: and by helpfully pointing out that the book covered the process 'through Verdict,' people could comfortably assume it was close to the experience they were used to from watching Law and Order. Or how about the 2005 book Justice on the Grass: Three Rwandan Journalists, Their Trial for War Crimes, and a Nation's Quest for Redemption? Enough information? Does it make you want to read it? I can almost see an editor poring over the finished manuscript and thinking why on Earth did I hire this writer to write about this? How will I ever sell this?

I am thinking about this because I just finished reading a book whose title so epitomizes this trend that it's laughable. The title is The Sun Farmer: the Story of a Shocking Accident, a Medical Miracle, and a Family's Life and Death Decision. Do you want to read about a shocking accident? No? How about a medical miracle? Still no? Surely you'd like to read about a family's life and death decision. The fact is the book is not very good, and the publisher surely knows it, so there is this transparent attempt to interest readers by hook or crook. The problem is that the story, though compelling, can be told -- and was told, by the same author -- in the space of a newspaper article. But somebody decided to stretch it to book length, and it didn't work well.

Among the mysteries about how the book came to be the particular product it is, I'd like to know why they ordered the elements of the subtitle the way they did. Because the family had to make its 'life and death decision' before the 'medical miracle' could take place, but in the subtitle, this logical order is reversed. Is a medical miracle more compelling than a family's angst? Or did somebody think that putting the family last would emphasize this element? However they arrange it, any reader with the attentiveness and persistence to get through the book will surely realize that a good 25% to 30% of its length is pure padding.

So keep an eye out for long and silly subtitles, the most reliable warning that the product within needs some explaining. Have you ever encountered an exceptionally bad subtitle?

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow . . .

Something many people don’t know about libraries is that we are constantly ‘weeding’ our collections. There is finite space on our shelves and hundreds of books come out each month, many of which we need to buy to keep our collection current. So we weed old books that are no longer interesting, or that contain outdated information.

It’s easy to see that you can get rid of travel books that contain old prices and names of restaurants that are closed. Likewise with medical books whose information has been rendered incorrect by recent research.

One of the hardest calls to make when weeding are books that come under the subject headings ‘Presidential candidates,’ or ‘Presidential candidates – biography.’ Books about winners – Reagan, Clinton, Bush – and books about losers – Perot, Dukakis, Kerry – share equal space. During the election cycle, these are hot items; but interest in them is very short-lived. I mean, it was once a hot topic, but our copy of Unfit for Command, about whether John Kerry was a hero or a traitor in Vietnam, hasn’t been checked out since January 2005. Do we get rid of it now, or is it an important historical piece? Like Unfit for Command, many of these books are pitifully short on objectivity, so one surmises their accuracy is likewise suspect. This undermines their historical value, but what if someone is specifically researching the sort of smear campaigns that go on during American presidential campaigns?

Books on George W. Bush exemplify this trend. They range from the reverential A Charge to Keep: My Journey to the White House, written by Mr. Bush himself, to the accusatory Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush President. Again, these are both more campaign documents than history, but do we keep them for that purpose?

Probably no candidate has engendered more irrational fear than Hillary Clinton. With titles like Extreme Makeover of Hillary (Rodham) Clinton and Can She Be Stopped?, it seems that people regard her as some sort of liberal voodoo queen. Frankly, Hillary’s not my favorite candidate out of the gate, but this kind of silliness is laughable. And again, I don’t suppose – whatever the result of the election – that anyone will be reading these books after November 2008.

So they clog our shelves, a product of our inability to judge their continued relevance. Kind of the like the people they’re written about.

Authors and Book Discussions

The other night we had a book discussion with the book’s author there. This is the second time I’ve ever been able to do this; although there are plenty of local authors, many of them write things that are not that appropriate for discussion – mysteries, thrillers, things like that. People have asked me if it’s difficult talking about a book when the author is sitting right there. I don’t think it is. Most authors like to discuss their work, and if they perceive people as serious readers, they like to hear their thoughts, even their criticisms.

The first time I had an author at a book discussion, it was Richard Burgin, and we were discussing his novel Ghost Quartet. This is a book with several unsavory characters and much reprehensible behavior. Some of the readers liked it; some simply disliked the characters too much to enjoy it. But they told Mr. Burgin these things and he talked about it with them, and even made some want to read the book again to see the things he was talking about. One person in the discussion even brought up a point that Mr. Burgin claimed no magazine or newspaper critic had ever noted – and was relieved that somebody finally said it. All in all it was one of the most interesting book discussions I have been to.

This time, we had author Scott Phillips in attendance while we discussed his novel Cottonwood. It was interesting to see the different styles of authors during a discussion. Where Richard Burgin had been quiet, even reticent during the discussion, Mr. Phillips was loquacious, and offered a good deal of insight into the editing and publishing process, and how his book had become the particular work we had before us. This prefigured the major criticism one of the group members brought up, that there seemed to be a break in the action between the first and second parts of the book. The author pointed out that in the original manuscript, there were a few hundred more pages between those two sections, with a lot more action and character development, but that the editor, leery of publishing too long a book, asked for significant cuts. I don’t think one can have better insight into a work of art than to have the author describe how it came to be what it is – the good and the bad.

I hope sometime in the future, we’ll be able to have another discussion with the author present. Have you ever been to one? How did it go?

When the Best Food Books Are Not Cookbooks

These days some of the best food books are not cookbooks, but books about food, particularly about what we should be eating. These works go beyond the old arguments between vegetarians and omnivores, and ask us to consider whether our whole system of eating in the modern world, especially in the US, needs to be radically changed.

The most well read and talked about book in this genre is last year's The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. In that book he eats four meals, starting with a meal wholly dependent on the 'industrial food grid,' and ending with a meal in which he grew, hunted or gathered every ingredient. It is a very revealing look at our modern food habits, and I hardly know anybody who has read it who doesn't begin questioning their own diet.

Several new books will be coming out this spring that ring changes on this theme. One is A Movable Feast by Kenneth Kiple, an intriguing look at where the foods we are all familiar with came from, and how they have come to be disseminated throughout the world. Apples that originated in Kazakhstan, chickens that originated in China, potatoes that originated in Peru, the list goes on and on. The book climaxes in a long chapter that asks whether we can sustain a food paradigm in which we expect to see every kind of produce available at any time of year, regardless of how far it has to come -- and not only see it, but pay a low price for it.

Also out this spring is Alice Waters and Chez Panisse by Thomas McNamee. This book promises to be definitive look at the life and career of our doyenne of sustainable agriculture, local produce, eating fresh, you name it -- if it has been an important movement in food in the past quarter century, Alice Waters and her groundbreaking restaurant have been in the midst of it.

A third book is by beloved novelist (and perennial book-club favorite) Barbara Kingsolver. In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Kingsolver tells of moving with her family to a farm in Virginia where they take an oath to eat nothing that they themselves didn't grow or purchase within a narrow radius from surrounding farmers. Over a one-year period Kingsolver shares with us her many challenges and triumphs, and tells in her inimitable style of such things as trying to find enough food to live on at a barren farmer's market on a freezing day in March, trying to plan an elegant party for many quests based on farm produce, and encouraging reluctant turkeys to mate.

Keep an eye out for some of these books, and let us know what you think of them!

Talking About Talking in Books

I just finished reading Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, which is the next book we'll talk about in our book discussion group. I thought it was a pretty good story. I read right through it in two evenings. But it was a little dependent upon stock characters, and I find that troubling. Someone on the back cover had compared Gruen to John Irving, and I thought, well that's one thing Irving never has -- stock characters. But more than that, I was troubled by the poor dialogue in the novel.

All the characters spoke like characters in a bad movie, or worse, a bad TV show. Any time there was a need for narrative exposition, it was handled by Jacob, the wide-eyed newbie at the circus, repeating, 'But I don't understand . . .' until some poor interlocutor had exhausted the subject. Characters even said things like, 'Oh you're good, you're very good,' the way they do in unimaginative daytime dramas.

Good dialogue is one of the hardest things to write. Not only should it not sound like how we really speak -- because real talk is, let's face it, pretty boring -- it should be unique, to help express the shades of meaning in the story itself, and colorful enough to help define characters. This can range from the broadly comedic, like Dickens's Ebenezer Scrooge crying 'Bah! Humbug!' to the very subtle. Some of the best writers of dialogue that helps define character have been William Saroyan and Virginia Woolf, and in modern times, Annie Proulx and Cormac McCarthy. Roddy Doyle, perhaps Ireland's best working author, sometimes writes whole books in thoughts and dialogue, with no interceding narration.

We watch so many movies, and so much television, that we are used to characters speaking in cliches, and used to hearing huge chunks of expository narrative handled by one character. Think of the typical scene in a thriller where a commanding officer or chief of police or lead FBI investigator stands in front of the only person who can handle the mission, or crack the case, or find the killer, and says, 'Let's see, you were orphaned at nine when a burglar murdered your parents, raised by a doting maiden aunt, went on to be tops in your class at Harvard, spent ten years undercover during the Cold War . . .' -- et cetera. We expect this in television -- it's probably necessary since there's a limited amount of time to tell the story. But in novels, we should hold authors to higher standards. We should at least be thinking about the misuse of dialogue when we encounter it.

What do you think?