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Stanislav Fritz writing as Tobin Loshento

Book Review: The Secrets of Life and Death by Rebecca Alexander

3 1/2 (out of 5): Well worth reading.

A reminder that I almost never give out a "5."

This novel reminded me a bit of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which is a good historical/fantasy/magical realism book also.

First, I would say that this was much better than I would have guessed from reading the back cover blurb. Usually these capture the essence, but this really did not.

The protagonist is Jackdaw "Jack" Hammond and she is "almost" dead. She has cheated death with the help of a woman and they both help other people (all whom seem to be women) who are about to die. Now someone is hunting Jack and other almost dead. Check out the back cover synopsis if you want more synopsis like details.

Ms. Alexander's writing is generally well done. From a craft perspective I found the two stories--one in the past loosely based on history and one in present day--not done the way I would have liked. The present is the more compelling story.  The past (1585) is an interesting back story of the researcher and assistant who dig up and document the secrets of life and death, so to speak. It also has the hints as to who is hunting Jack. My issue is that this does not need to be told as a full fledged second novel within the novel. It is a bit of a MFA thing/style (and I say that given my own MFA, but feeling there is some justification to the critique that MFAs tend to churn out similar thinking people--albeit that may be more true in the U.S. than England).

The historical piece bothered me also in the subtle way that the atrocities of the church and inquisition were portrayed--almost a glossing over. I felt this was important given that the modern day story has the church and inquisitor in the story still. The author is making an effort to make sure that the antagonists are not cookie cutter good and bad, but the effort is incomplete--especially given the final scenes (which I will avoid giving away).

The basic idea and plot I really like. There are people who die early, but are not 100% fated to die and one can use "magic" or something resembling that to halt it. There is a bit of the occult here, but I like the blurring of this line. Alexander makes sure that this is not 100% devil/evil/occult.

The male protagonist, professor Felix Guichard is a bit of an idiot and I found myself almost wishing Jack would not end up with him. Given the church aspect it is not shown why Felix buys some of the rhetoric that the inquisitor spews forth. A historian (which is what he is supposed to be) should be very skeptical of the church and its motives. I am talking about the political institution, not blasting religion per se. Still, this is within the area of not all protagonists are pure good, nor perfect. The novel has both Jack's POV and Felix's. I found Jack's more honest and compelling.

I would have loved to have dropped most of the POV of the historical piece (present it via other means) and replace it with some fleshing out of Jack's mentor and the ambiguity of her motives, which I think were great: what will a mother do to save a daughter and ends justifying means. In this case the end being both Jack's life and the baby her blood saves.

There is an arc for Jack, which I think is important in any character driven novel. She learns and grows.

Ms. Alexander's work illustrates that for fantasy there continues to be some very interesting work coming out of England and I hope the U.S. audiences and publishers enjoy it enough to change their habits.

I look forward to new work from Rebecca Alexander. This is a strong debut novel and most writers improve over time.

 

Book Review: Beyond IQ by Garth Sundem

Three out of Five Stars. Worth reading.

This is a fun little book, with a lot of brainteasers and puzzles in it that in theory help stretch your other IQ -- the types of things that are not in a traditional IQ test.

The "puzzles" as I call them are going to be familiar to anyone who, for instance, listens to Car Talk and their weekly puzzle quiz. The idea is a bit of the "think outside the box."
Will this book actually boost your ability to think like this? I personally don't think so. It will probably jar your thinking in some areas to stretch the way you think, but I found too many of these to be really exercises in semantics. Then the issue becomes do you read the subtle meanings of every sentence you encounter and look for flaws? If you do, you might get more of these puzzles, but simultaneously you will lower your test scores on standardized tests as they focus on "accepted" meanings of a sentence and word.

Still, a fun airplane ride book and if you like to play around with meanings of words and looking for an "out" in a puzzle, you will have fun with this.

I give a bit of a ding in that the back cover over sells/states what the book is about. For a non-fiction book I don’t think that overselling should be done.

I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

An “Amazon author” ends up siding with Hachette…sort of.

Like many authors who have a “relationship” with Amazon, I received an email letter from Amazon with the subject line: “Important Kindle request.” The text of the letter should be available at Amazon’s website that they created just for this: www.readersunited.com

The irony of Amazon’s push with its “Readers United” campaign is that it appeals to the reader and the author with the illusion that it is just doing what is good for everyone and that Hachette is not. It implies that if Hachette went Amazon’s way that authors and readers would benefit.

I find this funny. Amazon is as self-focused as any corporation and when they point out that Hachette is a $10 billion dollar company, it is even funnier. Amazon’s sales for 2013 were about $100 BILLION.

The argument put forth includes that eBook prices are highly elastic and they are helping both authors and readers by pushing for lower prices. The flaw is that this is based on individual book pricing. The total number of books sold, ebook and paperback, per year, per capita, is highly in-elastic. We all have time for reading a certain number of books. The elasticity is a substitution effect. More people substitute for the cheaper books, if you lower the prices for some of them.

If you reduce prices for all books, then authors as a group do not win.

The letter from Amazon made a comparison to paperback books around WWII. The flaw with that comparison—back to elasticity and total demand—is that period of time the total number of readers was exploding. More people had both high school and college education. The total demand was exploding. Thus, the lower prices of paperbacks fed the NEW demand. Publishers back then were stupid not to figure out the demographics, but from an economics standpoint that was where the elasticity came from. Huge demand increase with a widely varying income. Today’s demand remains flat, even if you gave them away for pennies.

Hachette and other publishers are not saints. I and almost any struggling author would give a laundry list of reasons to hate a big publisher, until you are with a big publisher as a top list author. But, that isn’t really the argument put forth by the solicitation Amazon is putting out to all its KDP authors.

Amazon as a publisher is right now much easier to work with, as an author, than Hachette. To a point. Amazon won’t give me an advance on my royalties. Amazon won’t promote my book. Amazon will accept my book, almost no matter what. It will give me a fair share of sales, sure. But, again, that is not what the argument the open letter makes. It is trying to say it is looking out for all authors, including Hachette authors. Would mid-list Hachette authors like a better contract with Hachette? Sure, but the lowering of eBook prices by Hachette for Amazon will not automatically get them a better contract. To imply such is a non sequitur.

The other argument, which is certainly a common one for any monopoly, is that “what we are doing is good for the consumer.” Readers will get lower priced eBooks. How can that be bad? The free market at work.

My response is more subtle and subjective.

Acquisitions are a normal process for a large company with capital to grow. Yet, l examine the list of acquisitions with some skepticism that it is all good for the reader (or consumer). Not everyone will come to the same conclusion and I am not arguing with this list that large is inherently bad.

Acquisitions by Amazon include:

PlanetAll, a reminder service based in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Junglee, an XML-based data mining startup based in Sunnyvale; Bookpages.co.uk a UK online book retailer, which became Amazon UK on October 15, 1998; Telebook (www.telebuch.de) was Germany's leading online bookstore, it became Amazon's German online store; Internet Movie Database (IMDb). Alexa Internet a database company;[] Accept.com a financial services company; Drugstore.com 40% investment in 1999, increased stake in 2000, sold stake to Walgreens in 2011 for a 90% loss; GeoWorks, a wireless communications company, acquisition of a minority interest;Pets.com, purchased a 54 percent stake;LiveBid.com, which produced Internet-based auction software; e-Niche Incorporated comprising Exchange.com, Bibliofind.com (hard-to-find book titles), and Musicfile.com (hard to find music titles); HomeGrocer.com, a 35 percent stake in the online grocer;Gear.com, 49 percent stake (the company was purchased by Overstock.com in 2000); Tool Crib of the North, acquired the online and catalog sales division of the company in October 1999, selling a very wide variety of tools and home improvement items; Convergence Corporation, software to connect wireless devices to the Internet;MindCorps Incorporated, applications for web sites including online chats to web based databases; Della.com, gift registry, expert advice, and personalized gift suggestions, Amazon purchased a 20% stake (in April 2000, the company merged with WeddingChannel.com; Back to Basics Toys, catalog toy store[;Ashford.com, retailer of luxury products, Amazon acquired a 16.6 percent ownership Leep Technology Inc., developer of on-line database query tools; Online music retailer CDNow. By 2011, the website cdnow.com was defunct and in use by a different company.Joyo.com, a Chinese e-commerce website. BookSurge, a print on demand company, and Mobipocket.com, an e-book software company. CreateSpace.com (formerly CustomFlix), a distributor of on-demand DVDs (since expanded to include print on-demand books, CDs, and video), based in Scotts Valley, California.Smallparts.com, an industrial component supplier. Shopbop, a retailer of designer clothing and accessories for women, based in Madison, Wisconsin.dpreview.com, a digital photography review website based in London; Brilliance Audio, the largest independent publisher of audiobooks in the United States. Audible.com; Fabric.com; Box Office Mojo; AbeBooks; Shelfari; (including a 40% stake in LibraryThing and whole ownership of BookFinder.com, Gojaba.com, FillZ; Reflexive Entertainment, a casual video game development company. Zappos, an online shoe and apparel retailer Lexcycle, SnapTell, an image matching startup, Stanza, a rival e-book reader to Amazon's Kindle. Touchco.,Woot, Quidsi, BuyVIP, Amie Street, Toby Press, LoveFilm, The Book Depository, Pushbutton, Yap, Kiva Systems, Teachstreet Evi, IVONA Software, Goodreads, Liquavista, : Double Helix Games, and comiXology.

I am probably in the minority when I say that my concept of a semi-free market includes fostering competition and letting that competition live or die without predatory practices. There are a number of books out detailing how Amazon would crush the competition through a means that did not involve consumer competition, then after crushing them, acquire them. None of it was illegal and many may even admire Amazon for this, but I am not sure I buy that the consumer always wins, as implied by the “Readers United” campaign.

Ultimately, my response is, yes as an author I would love that it was easier to become a Hachette author and that it was easier to get a reasonable contract, but pressure by a retailer that is ten times its size on price and terms for Amazon is not the pathway I would prefer. The market will continue to put pressure on Hachette and all large publishers to change their author model and Amazon is part of the reason for that (by buying up a lot of great technology and innovative self-publishing companies), without this particular battle. This battle is a red-herring from the other market forces.

My best case scenario is that Hachette stick it out, buck Amazon and then get its own act together to actually compete with Amazon. The best way to compete? Offer authors more flexibility and access and embrace eBooks in a flexible way. Create transparency to the consumer. Make it transparent that a book costs X to produce and market before it even goes to either print and eBook form and that the book needs to make X just to cover the costs. With this transparency, we would understand that there is a risk/reward ratio at work. Hachette is risking X for every book.

Amazon, with eBooks, is risking close to zero for every book. Yet their reward is 30-40% of the price. With that model, it is very easy to try and force a publisher to reduce eBook pricing. The risk reward ratio remains constant for Amazon, but increases for Hachette.

Hachette needs to change, but in this particular fight, with the lines that Amazon has drawn in its letter, I end up siding with Hachette.

Review of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra

In reading Anthony Marra's book, I soon realized I was carrying a lot of baggage in my thinking. I should get some of that baggage out of the way, so that any reader of this review understands some of the bias.

A minor piece of baggage is that the back cover of this is plastered with short blurbs of overwhelming praise. Too much! This ends up being a metaphor for one of my criticisms later, but I am sure that this ruffled me the wrong way to start with. Tone it down Random House.

The main baggage is that my mother lived through Czechoslovakia in WWII and then the early Soviets. Her family escaped in 1948 when the first coup d'etat occurred and they were slated for defenestration.

This meant I grew up hearing about both the horrors of war and occupation and the vagaries of smuggling, black market, and Soviet ineptitude. The question that springs to mind in reading this is "what is really different here for a reader that understands this sort of thing?" My short answer is less than most of the overly enthusiastic blurbs on the back might think.

The next piece of baggage is that I am a writer also. I have been tainted by an MFA and struggle with my own writing on a daily basis. I certainly wish I could write sentences as well-crafted as Marra’s all the time, but at the same time I have some biases on writing style that made me roll my eyes with this book.

The writing style utilizes some techniques that often work, but at times are tedious. One is the use of a quite distant omniscient voice/narrator. It does give us insights into the characters, but we move from (for example) Natasha, to knowledge that some person she is meeting will eventually get Parkinson’s but that his hand doesn’t shake yet.

This is a bit of post-modernism that is sometimes brilliant, sometimes cute, sometimes gets in the way.

On the subject of post-modernism and still in the omniscient, the non-linear narrative often does not work for me. Marra is trying to cover a ten year period and jumps back and forth. Fine. But, some of this is back story that really should have been left as backstory. The omniscient narration used for this feels very distant and often entire chapters were expository writing with no dialog. I don’t want to get trite and say that he just tells versus shows, but he comes close to this. Much of this feels like information dumps of backstory.

Yet, the book is good one. Not great in the sense of “A 21^st-century War and Peace” as the blurb from New York Times book review indicates, but a very good perspective on Chechnya and very distinct, three dimensional characters.

Marra loves his similes and to a lesser extent his metaphors. In the first twenty-five pages, or so, I felt that while each sentence was a gem, it was a bit like seeing Liberace in print. It became really hard to focus on the story with so many “gems” on the page. This may sound silly, as I love a great sentence, but I actually found it distracting for the first 25 or so pages.

He does a great job of having details that are both symbols and that are threads connecting the characters, such as a history of Chechnya that was originally 3,000 pages long, then made into a 150 page slice that was published which the author then burns the remaining pages. The small slice is then read by other characters that don’t know each other and there is symbolism layered all over this. Marra does a great job with this sort of literary technique.

I loved the small discussion at the end with Marra. The technique of writing a full novel, printing it, then starting over again, is interesting. Other authors do similar things, but I think he is the first to do it four times in a row.

Bottom line, this is a great first book and I expect Marra to produce more. He deserves praise. I simply think there is room for improvement and that the subject matter at a high level (vagaries of war, occupation, disrupted lives, etc.) has been done before and that the approach here is not novel. If you have not been exposed to this type of book, or don’t have a perspective on Chechnya, this is well worth a read. If you have been exposed to this, but enjoy it, it is also worth a read. If you want to really be swallowed up by the characters and feel close to them, this is probably not your book.

The Evil, Dreaded, Stupid, Misguided—Synopsis

A lot of agents and some publishers require a query letter, a few pages, and a synopsis.

The truth is that this is simply “stupid.”

Look, I know more than most, that agents and publishers are looking for a reason to NOT request more material. But, it is flawed thinking.

How do I know more than most? Well, when I am not writing under my nom de plume, I am an editor and tiny, miniscule, publisher. Despite our size we get a lot of queries. Yet, we turn most down (mainly due to size and bandwidth, not that many are not good). However, when I wear my writing hat I realize that I SUCK at writing a synopsis. Writing a synopsis is a bit like writing a short story. It takes, in my opinion, a special gift. That gift is not the same as writing a novel.

While flawed, I think that reading the first twenty to fifty pages is a much better indicator.

Maybe (probably) I am just making excuses for my own inadequacies. Yet, when I scan some of our own submissions (where we do indeed ask for a synopsis) the synopsis becomes less of a tool for selection and more of a tool for editing and cross checking the big arc. I don’t look for writing STYLE in a synopsis. Just the arc. Ah, well. The sour grapes I have when I wear my writing hat is the filter when I wear my editing hat. It truly helps me handle rejection on my own and gives me full empathy for all authors going through the submission process.

Book Review: Codex Alera Series by Jim Butcher (AKA the Fury series)

Like most authors, I tend to read a lot also. I thought I would post a few reviews, once in a while, as I read. I will post only Fantasy and Science Fiction in this blog – to tie into my own writing. I tend to give a bit of a writer’s type of review, which I hope is vaguely interesting to some.

I am a big Butcher fan, as are a lot of other people. He consistently ranks as one of the top selling authors.

The Codex Alera series is good, but fairly flawed. Using the Amazon star rating, I give it three stars (which means it is worth reading). Warning, as I am reviewing the entire six book series, there are spoilers.

With fantasy and science fiction, the genre generally focuses on plot and ideas quite a bit with the characters usually second. With Butcher’s Dresden Files series, I would say what makes it a winner is the character gets a lot more emphasis than many writers give in this genre. In Codex Alera the main foci are the ideas and and plot.

The “fury” concept is a nice one—in general. However, I feel that Butcher never really develops any rules for the furies and the use of them. He has a tendency to do this with his other writing, but here it is more extreme. He may have developed them off camera so to speak, but the rules are not evident. Still, in general I can forgive this aspect.

The world and the over arching plot is a bit “been there, read that.” Whether intentionally, or accidently, he borrows a LOT from Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series.  Huge, evil force that can destroy the whole world, “slave” collars that are remarkably like the collars in Wheel of Time, a hero who has hidden powers and is coming into them, who leads an ever increasing world wide army, but has compassion for his troops.  A race of warriors that are “barbarians” where the women are super tough, slim and fight well and one falls in love with him and bonds with him. 

Despite that similarity, I like Butcher’s writing more. It is faster, leaner, and does not bog down. At least a few of the main characters actually die (whereas Jordan kept a lot of them alive).

Unlike Dresden, the Codex series is written in multiple points of view. I like that and the third person. He does this well.

What I think is by far the biggest flaw is his ultimate world wide enemy, the Vord. These don’t really become the world enemy until the third book (which I like, the characters drive it forward until then). The vord, without going into too much detail, are simply not believable even within the context of a fantasy world and the furies. They multiply, via a queen at a rate that is impossible given that the queen is busy doing other things. Also, they multiply and sustain themselves in such a way that they destroy all future sources of nourishment completely. This is never explained, if they actually succeeded in conquering the world, they would simply die off from starvation.  Part of the reason this is so annoying is Butcher does a nice job of having various protagonists and antagonists use their brains and the laws of physics generally apply (side note, except the “bending of air” to bring something in focus and closer. You aren’t bending air when you bend the light rays, but that is minor.

Despite the flaws, Butcher does a nice job in weaving in political intrigue and different thinking for different races. If he had not spent so much time in the last three books on simply an army building and fighting, it would have been a better series. I think the first two, or three books are four stars, but the ending set drags this down to four.

It has been said before that there are no new stories, just variations on themes. While generally true, I think this does not vary enough in the overall arch, but is still worth the read. I am sure I will continue to read Butcher as he continues to write. I just hope I don’t imitate him and others too much in my own writing—because the temptation is there. I would almost give him an extra half star in that he proves that he is not a one hit series/style writer with this, despite its flaws.