In Which We Discuss Lolita, Catch-22, Stephen King, and Lionel Shriver

The funny thing about reading classics is it's all been done before.  I finished Lolita a few days ago, and I was quite pleased to find out that Humbert Humbert was supposed to be creepy.  I was a bit worried that the whole thing was a defence of paedophilia, and it would turn out that the author thought H.H was totally normal.  Luckily, no.  Though I do wish they'd stop putting young girls in provocative poses on the covers, it's a total misrepresentation.  And creepy.  HH style creepy.  Like, "reader, she came on to me, look at how she's posing!".  To which I will recite Ellen Page's speeches from Hard Candy, you creep.

Ahem.

I started Catch-22 yesterday.  That book has been in my unread pile for almost a decade.  I was surprised to find that it's funny, really laugh-out-loud funny.  I knew I planned to read it someday (eventually), so I tried to avoid spoiling it for myself.  It's dark humour, but that's what my family goes in for.  My aunt had her leg amputated a few weeks ago, and we've already discussed getting her a parrot and an eyepatch for Christmas.  It's how we cope.

In other news, Stephen King did a recent ask-the-author session on Reddit.  There's a summary of the questions and answers here, and the entire thread is here.  It's finished now, but it's still an interesting read.  I'm very gratified to see how many other people loved Rose Madder.

Lionel Shriver did a similar session yesterday, on Goodreads.  She seemed to get bored halfway through, though.

In Which We Discuss Another Kobo Competition

Go here to play.  Each day until the 26th of June, Kobo will be releasing one new trivia question based around film adaptations of books.  Each correct answer will get you a discount code for 10%-75% off certain books and answering all ten correctly puts you in a draw to win either the top prize of two Kobo Aura HD eReaders + $1000CA (approximately £640), or one of the second prizes of a Kobo Mini.  I have one; they're adorable.  Mine is called Opal.  Terms and conditions here.

No, I'm not going to tell you the answers.

In Which We Discuss Carrie

Carrie was Stephen King's first published novel, written while he was at university.  It's not his first published work; to my knowledge, that would be Graveyard Shift, a short story which appears in Night Shift, if I recall correctly.

The story (as relayed in the introduction) goes that Stephen King, newly married to Tabitha, was writing short stories to sell to magazines for extra money.  He started Carrie, wrote the shower scene, and decided his time would be better spent writing short stories to sell than a novel which nobody might want.  Tabitha fished the pages out of the bin, read them, and suggested that he finish them.

Incidentally, Tabitha King is a writer too.  In one of the most romantic things I've heard, Stephen King has said that Tabitha is one of his favourite writers.  I have her first novel, Small World, which was published in 1981.  I might slip that into my experiment, between Roadwork and Danse Macabre.  It would actually be pretty interesting to read both Stephen and Tabitha King's work in published order together, to see if they were thinking on similar themes, if they inspired each other, if they both worked out the same issue through writing, etc.

Carrie was published in 1974, at which point Stephen and Tabitha had been married for three years and had two children, Naomi and Joe.  Joe is also a writer, under the monicker of Joe Hill.  He and his father have collaborated on a few recent short stories.  One is available on the Kindle store, and I gather that the others are available as eBooks, but haven't researched where yet.  Joe Hill has published three novels and a collection of short stories; I've read Heart-Shaped Box and intend to read NOS4A2.  So including him is also a possibility.  I don't need to commit to that right now, since his collection of short stories, 20th Century Ghosts, wasn't published till 2005.

Owen Phillips King, who was born quite a bit after Carrie, in 1977, is also a writer.  He's published a collection of three short stories and a novella and one novel, starting in 2005.   He's also married to a writer, Kelly Braffet, and they are cute together, but, honestly, this is getting absurd.  According to Goodreads, Kelly Braffet has published four novels, starting in 2005.  I wonder what happened in 2005; did the King family propose a writing competition in 2004 or something?

I'm kidding, I'm sure that year is a coincidence.

Naomi King is not a writer, doesn't even have her own wikipedia page, and probably enjoys her privacy.  And if she or Joe turns out to be married to a writer, I am throwing in the towel right now.

Anyway, Carrie.  In short, it's about a telekinetic teenage girl, who has horrible things done to her, and makes things explode in return.  Apparently, King was inspired to start writing it because someone had told him he couldn't write women, and he wanted to prove them wrong.  So, he began with menarche, and the theme of menstruation and blood continues throughout the novel.  It's a lot more apparent in the book than the film (I saw the film at thirteen, and it scared the bejeesus out of me).

I first read Carrie at fifteen, possibly sixteen, and since I experienced menarche at the age of eleven, it was old news to me by that point.  My grandmother experienced it at eight.  That was a terrifying experience for her.  Her 1950s father conducted himself well; he was the only one in the house, so he tootled off down to the shops to buy her some towels.

The book is semi-epistolary, with newspaper clippings and excerpts from books within the fictional universe discussing the event.  There are also third person segments which offer a more unbiased viewpoint.  It's pretty short, especially for Stephen King.   In my paperback edition, only 242 pages in total.  Purely based on wrist strength, it's a lot easier to read than the brick that is the illustrated edition of 'Salem's Lot, which I'm working through now.

I like Carrie, and I think that Stephen King does write quite good women.  I don't like Carrie as much as Rose Madder or Dolores Claibourne, but it's pretty good.  The film is a pretty faithful adaptation, too.

Part of what inspired me to do this in the first place was this flow chart, which lists the links each of Stephen King's books has with the others.  In Carrie's case, it references Castle Rock.  Later, Johnny Smith in The Dead Zone mentions the prom night fire, and Ray Bower, the infamous body of The Body (filmed as Stand By Me) was from Chamberlain, where Carrie is set.  Finally, Dinky Earnshaw of the Dark Tower #7 says he doesn't want to be like Carrie.

In Which We Discuss that Creepy Bastard Humbert Humbert

In other news, I've been struggling through Lolita.  It's all told from the point of view of Humbert Humbert (an in-universe pseudonym).  I'm currently on page 50 or so, and that's after two days of trying.  H.H. is vile.  It's reminding me a lot of The Collector, only about a paedophile, not a serial killer.  Like Frederick, H.H knows that what he's doing isn't socially acceptable, but he doesn't think it's actually wrong.

Just to interject here; I don't think anyone having specific desires is wrong.  Acting on desires which hurt other people is wrong, but having the desire - which you have little to no control over - is not at all the same as acting upon it.  A paedophile is not automatically a child-molester.  They could live their entire lives fighting their feelings, training themselves to fetishise something else, and never lay a hand on a child.  So, when I describe H.H as vile, it is not because he simply has thoughts that he cannot control.  It's that he makes Dolores, the young girl he focuses on, complicit in his desire (Lolita is his nickname for her).

H.H mentally labels young girls he is attracted to as "nymphets", rather than "children".  As far as I can tell, he does this so that he can take them out of the category of children, and mentally consider them to be magical creatures who are complicit in his desire for them, who tease him, in fact.

As I said, the book is in the first person; we have no reference point other than H.H's viewpoint.  Here's a quote;

All at once I knew I could kiss her throat or the wick of her mouth with perfect impunity.  I knew she would let me do so, and even close her eyes as Hollywood teaches.  A double vanilla with hot fudge - hardly more unusual than that.  I cannot tell my learned reader (whose eyebrows, I suspect, have by now travelled all the way to the back of his bald head), I cannot tell him how the knowledge came to me; perhaps my ape-ear had unconciously caught some slight change in the rhythm of her respiration - for now she was not really looking at my scribble but waiting with curiosity and composure - oh, my limpid nymphet! - for the glamourous lodger to do what he was dying to do.

Oh, would you look at that.  He magically knows that a child wants him to kiss her, and is willing to let him.  He just magically knows that.  And he also knows that we'll doubt him, but he knows he's right.  Magically.

Ugh.

Personal story time!  I have a livejournal account, which I don't update now, but which, at one point, I was very active on.  I attracted a follower; a man in his late thirties/early forties, who had an open marriage.  He was mostly good to talk to - we shared an interest in cycling, I think it was - but he began posting weird comments.  For example, when I posted a quote from a song I love, "I need Brazil/ the throb, the thrill/I've never been there/but someday I will", he made a comment about me getting him overheated.  Literally, all I posted was that quote.  That time, I ignored it.  My reaction was mostly one of confusion; was he hitting on me?  Was he making a lame joke I didn't get?  I figured it was a one off, and I'd just ignore it, and it would go away.

It was not a one off.  He did not go away.

When I finally asked him to stop, he insisted that I'd liked it, that I'd been complicit in his comments.  He cited the fact that I invited him to like a page on facebook - "Tab A, Slot Me" as evidence.  I'd invited everyone to like that page; it was a funny line.  It wasn't a personal invitation to my slot me.  I'd recently started a relationship, and he claimed that I only wanted him to stop because of that, and it didn't mean anything, so why was I letting my boyfriend control me?  Not true, in fact.  Part of what gave me the courage to ask him to stop was the knowledge that someone else would be bothered by his comments, but that wasn't why I wanted him to stop.  I wanted him to stop because he was creepy.

This attitude, this assumption that someone else is an into you as you're into them, and the refusal to acknowledge any other scenario...that's what makes H.H utterly vile.  Another quote;

A brave Humbert would have played with her most disgustingly (yesterday, for instance, when she was again in my room to show me her drawings, school-artware); he might have bribed her - and got away with it.  A simpler and more practical fellow would have soberly stuck to more commercial substitutes - if you know where to go, I don't.

...ah, the call of Nice Guys (tm) everywhere; "At least I didn't rape her!".  No.  No dude, the fact that you didn't rape or molest her does not make you an especially good person.  Not raping or molesting people is the bare minimum requirement for humanity, and you don't get special points for it.

He also gets in a bit of snobbery about men who use prostitutes, before going on about his romantic soul.  I'm not getting into the rights or wrongs of the prostitution industry.  After all, it's possible that any prostitute he did hire would have been just as abused and coerced as Dolores would have been had he chosen to molest her.  And, true, so far all he's done is think horribly, manipulative, entitled things, and not actually laid a hand on anyone (though, earlier, he does describe visiting prostitutes, so I don't know why he's being all holier than thou here).  Anyway.  I had a point.  I think I was going to say that paying a prostitute was preferable to raping a child, before remembering just how much they can have in common.

So yes.  Humbert Humbert.  Vile human being.  But, I'll reserve judgement on the book as a whole until I'm slightly further than 1/6 of the way through it.  At the moment, I'm assuming that Vladimir Nabokov knows how fucked up H.H is, and that's his intention, like it was for John Fowles.  But we'll see.

In Which We Discuss Annie Murray, Race, and Being a Legend

I have had a very productive morning!

My local library, South Yardley, had Annie Murray speaking at their monthly coffee morning, so I went along.  Apart from the librarians, I was the youngest person by about thirty years.  I can see why Murray's books would appeal to the older generation.  In my case, I like that I know intimately the streets the characters walk on; someone older than me could picture them at the right time, as well.

I got my copy of My Daughter, My Mother signed.  Soldier Girl is actually my favourite, but I don't own a copy.  Also, My Daughter, My Mother is special to me because it's about two single mothers, one of them originally from India/Pakistan, in Birmingham in 1984.  I'm half Indian, and I was born in Birmingham in '88.  As I said when she signed it, that book is the one that's most about me.  Most recently - as in, I finished it at half one this morning - I read Chocolate Girls, about three women living around Bournville/Selly Oak during the second world war and the decade or so afterwards.  I liked it.  It was a bit hard to push through at first, but it really picked up near the end, and I read the last two hundred or so pages in one go.

I had a nice chat with the cute librarian on the way out.  I found a graphic novel of I Am Legend, so we started talking about that.  He hadn't read it or seen all of the film.  I am disappointed in the cute librarian (not really).  I told him that I liked that the main character was black, even though it was Will Smith, who is the black guy who doesn't scare white people.  I like white people - my mother is one - but, I swear to god, you could pick up any book in the average British library, and some ridiculous percentage will have a white person as the main character.

Then we talked about The Hunger Games.  I started to point out that olive skin isn't freckly, but then remembered that I am olive-skinned and currently have freckles on my shoulders, so I shut up on that point.  We agreed that the outcry over Rue looking exactly as she was described - ie, black - was ridiculous, and he conceded that the casting call for Katniss specifying a white actress was a bit much.

In Which We Discuss Stephen King and Another Challenge

A few weeks ago, I thought of reading all of Stephen King's novels in the order they were published, like I did with Lisa Jewell's.  It's really interesting to watch an author change over time; Jewell went from being sinle (I think) to being married with children, and her books do reflect that.

King is a little more challenging, for a few reasons.  Firstly, he's written almost a book a year since 1974.  Secondly, he doesn't publish in chronological order.  In one book, a character who's also an author holds on to manuscripts when he writes more than one a year, and submits them to his publisher, sometimes years later, when he lacks other ideas.  I believe that, in the introduction to that one, King admits to doing the same.

A lot of my physical books I intend to buy either as Kobo or Kindle editions, in order to reduce weight.  Last time I moved, I had somewhere between 15-20 boxes of books.  It was insane.  I am never doing that again.  I've reduced the books I'm keeping to one bookcase, and most of those are either sets, which look so nice together - like Gollancz Sci-fi and Fantasy Masterworks, or my Point Horrors - or books which were simply never made available as digital editions, like Marlys Millhiser's The Mirror, or William Sleator's Singularity, both are which are awesome, and which I highly recommend.

I also have a collected edition of books published under Richard Bachman's name, Bachman being King's pseudonym.  I intend to keep those because they include Rage, which King and his publishers are no longer comfortable with republishing.  Rage is about a school shooter, and its similarity to actual school shooters is what makes King so uncomfortable.

I was going to write about how expensive old copies of Rage are to buy, which is still sort of true; new editions of the original run go for over a thousand, while used copies are over £200.  But Rage appears to be included in the Kindle Edition of The Bachman Books - it's not so clear from the description, but the 'look inside' option shows the introduction from the edition I have, and mentions Rage as being included.  The Kindle edition goes for £5.99.  Since I already have a copy, I won't be buying it, but that's still pretty interesting to know.  Plus, £5.99 is a steal for four Stephen King novels in one.

Anyway; I'll be reading in the order published rather than the order written, so here's the list, courtesy of wikipedia.  Books I've read before are bolded - all the rest will be new to me.  I absolutely intend to read other books between these - including trying to get my unread pile down - so this will take a while.

Carrie - 1974
'Salem's Lot - 1975 
The Shining - 1977
Rage - 1977
Night Shift - 1978
The Stand - 1978
The Long Walk - 1979
The Dead Zone - 1979
Firestarter - 1980
Roadwork - 1981
Danse Macabre - 1981
Cujo - 1981
The Running Man - 1982
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger - 1982
Creepshow - 1982
Different Seasons - 1982 
Christine - 1983
Pet Sematary - 1983
Cycle of the Werewolf - 1983
The Talisman - 1984
Thinner - 1984
Skeleton Crew - 1985
It - 1986
The Eyes of the Dragon - 1987
The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three - 1987
Misery - 1987
The Tommyknockers - 1987
Nightmares in the Sky  - 1988
The Dark Half - 1989
Four Past Midnight - 1990
The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands - 1991 
Needful Things - 1991
Gerald's Game - 1992
Dolores Claiborne - 1992
Nightmares & Dreamscapes - 1993
Insomnia - 1994
Rose Madder - 1995
The Green Mile - 1996
Desperation - 1996
The Regulators - 1996
Six Stories - 1997
The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass - 1997
Bag of Bones - 1998
Storm of the Century - 1999 
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon - 1999
The New Lieutenant's Rap - 1999  
Hearts in Atlantis - 1999
Blood and Smoke - 1999
"Riding the Bullet" - 2000  
On Writing - 2000
Secret Windows - 2000 
The Plant - 2000      
Dreamcatcher - 2001
Black House (with Peter Straub) -2001
Everything's Eventual - 2002
From a Buick 8 - 2002
The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla - 2003  
The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah - 2004
The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower - 2004
Faithful - 2004
The Colorado Kid - 2005
Cell - 2006
Lisey's Story - 2006
Blaze - 2007
Duma Key - 2008  
Just After Sunset - 2008 
Stephen King Goes to the Movies - 2009
Ur - 2009     
Under the Dome - 2009
Blockade Billy - 2010
Full Dark, No Stars - 2010
Mile 81 - 2011    
11/22/63 - 2011
American Vampire (with Scott Snyder) - 2011
"Throttle" (with Joe Hill) - 2012
The Dark Tower: The Wind Through the Keyhole - 2012 
A Face in the Crowd (with Stewart O'Nan) - 2012
"In the Tall Grass"  (with Joe Hill) - 2012
"GUNS" - 2013
Ghost Brothers of Darkland County - 2013
Joyland - 2013
The Dark Man: An Illustrated Poem - 2013
Doctor Sleep - 2013

...so, I just spent the last half hour or so editing that (with a break to go to the library), and, Jesus Christ, what have I let myself in for?

I cut out a few of the reprints - the Salem's Lot and It 25th anniversary editions, for instance - and The Bachman Books collection, since I'll have read everything in it by the time I get there.  I have Carrie (and I'm already halfway through), I just borrowed Salem's Lot from the library again (the illustrated 25th anniversary edition, thank you very much), The Shining is in my unread pile, Rage is over on that shelf, and Night Shift is only £3.99 in the Kindle Store.  Wish me luck!

In Which We Discuss Sookie Stackhouse, Rape and Feminism

Trigger Warning for Discussion of Rape.

 

Spoiler Warning for Sookie Stackhouse (up to book 8) and possibly the True Blood series.  I don't know, I've not seen it.

 

Last night - or rather, very early this morning - I finished one of the Sookie Stackhouse books, All Together Dead.  My mother bought me a box set of the first nine and the short stories for Christmas, and I've been working my way through them.

The Sookie Stackhouse books are the series on which True Blood is based.   The main character, Sookie, is a telepathic Louisiana barmaid who, in the first few books, dates a vampire, gets slowly drawn into the supernatural world, and, while not so much enjoying the life-threatening parts, loves the fact that she can't read most supernatural minds.

Speaking of her telepathy; Sookie describes it as a disability, which confused me at first.  I wondered if that was offensive to real people with disabilities, to describe an ability like that as one.  Then I realised that I was defining disability as something which "most" people would agree is worse than "normal", and I realised that that was a really problematic way to think about it.  Sookie herself describes the ways in which telepathy is a problem; she finds it hard to have friends, when she knows what they're all thinking, and she's never had a lover, because, seriously, how off-putting would that be?  Hearing everything your lover thought?

Anyway.  At one point, Sookie locked in the boot of a car with the vampire she's been dating.  I think they were still dating at that point, but this was quite a few books ago.  The vampire, Bill, is injured, and incredibly hungry.  When he wakes up, his body takes over, and since, for vampires, blood and sex and intrinsically linked, he has sex with Sookie without her consent, and without his will or knowledge until afterwards.

I'd almost completely forgotten about this until, looking through reviews last night, someone brought it up as an example of the series being anti-feminist, since Sookie isn't particularly traumatised by it, and since she mentally defines the event as part-rape.  I disagree, personally, but to explain why, I need to go into my own experiences.

I've been seriously sexually assaulted twice.  The first time was with a man; we were both drunk, and, no, that doesn't make it okay.  Please understood that I am talking only about my own experiences and how I dealt with them, and I'm in no way trying to say that my way is right.  I'm just describing what happened to me.

So.  We were both drunk.  I said no; he ignored it.  I wasn't frightened, or hurt; during, I was just kind of wishing he'd stop, so I could sleep.  Immediately afterwards, I was sad.  After that, I was angry.  I wasn't traumatised by this.  I avoided associating with that person again, and with his friends, especially since, when I made it clear I didn't want to sleep with him again, he tried to insult me by saying he'd thought I was a virgin.  I'm not sure why that's supposed to be an insult, and it hardly makes him look better (see?  Annoyed and snippy).  But not traumatised.

Contrast this with my second experience.  That time was by a woman.  She was a friend of a friend, and I had known that she'd had a crush on me; she'd revealed it the night of experience one, by kissing me against my will.  I hadn't seen her in almost a year by that point, and I'd done my best to forget about the whole night.  She apologised to me, and, at the time, I thought she understood that I wasn't interested in her, and was apologising for the groping.  I've since realised that she hadn't understood that at all, and was merely saying that she was sorry that experience one had happened.

I ended up staying at hers.  She was a friend of a friend, and she was a woman; my mind just mentally marked her as 'trustworthy' despite prior experiences.

She ended up pinning me down and trying to kiss me again.  She told me that she'd been in love with me for four years (we'd met once, a year before), and that she "knew" I was gay, and that I returned her feelings (neither were true).  Apparently, I'd been giving her "signs".

I tried to talk my way out of it, while trying to surreptitiously wrestle her off me, and I know that sounds ridiculous, surreptitiously wrestling someone.  It felt like, if I made a big deal, it would be an escalation, and then things would get worse.  I was worried that I'd be seen as a drama queen if I escalated it, like my friends wouldn't want to be around me any more because they'd blame me for causing drama.  I didn't want to disturb anyone else sleeping in the house.  I just wanted the entire situation to stop, with no repercussions, and I knew if I escalated it, there would be repercussions.

Then she started talking about how she knew I was into it because of my breathing (slowly growing more panicky), and she began to seem turned on by the fact that I was struggling.  She had her hand over my mouth at this point, and when she took it away, I remembered that I had a mouth, and screamed as loudly as I could.

It worked.  She immediately got off me, and let me go.  I had time to pull on my clothes - she'd leant me pyjamas before attacking me - and then she physically pushed me out the front door.  Yanked on my hair too, in a petty, childish way.  I still panic if anyone does that to me now.

I called the police.  She did too, to accuse me of attacking her.  The police called me a liar during my interview, and blamed me for trusting her.  They dropped the charges due to "lack of evidence".  I spent two weeks sleeping as little as possible, starving myself, and drinking constantly.

Even though experience one was technically more physically traumatic, I found that experience two was the one that left lasting wounds.

So, going back to my point; Sookie's reaction makes sense to me.  Her experience lacked what truly scared me about experience two - the fact that someone seriously wanted to hurt me, and didn't care how I felt about it.  Her first experience was rape, same as my first experience was more technically rape than my second, but it made sense to me why she'd want to draw a mental distinction between that and something that she would have found traumatic.

I'm not saying that anyone who would have found an experience similar to my first experience or to Sookie's traumatic would be wrong - I'm saying that not being traumatised by rape isn't a wrong reaction either.  I don't want to bandy about the idea that "rape isn't always traumatic" because that's the kind of thing psychos have a field day with;  all I'm saying is that my first experience didn't traumatise me, so it makes sense to me that her experience wasn't traumatic for her.  The character made sense to me.

And no, I don't think her reaction is anti-feminist, in the same way that I don't think mine was.  Being traumatised or not by an attack is not a feminist decision.  It's not usually a decision at all.

Of course, the difference is that my experience was real, and that Sookie's was fictitious.  My experience was just what happened; her experience was how someone imagined that another person might react to a hypothetical situation, and that reaction was broadcast to a huge audience.  I get that.  I'm not sure how I feel about that part.  It's not untrue that some people have that reaction, but then, it's also not untrue that some people lie about being raped.  But, the rates of false accusation for rape are identical to any other crime.  Despite that, people still have this idea that it happens often, which is ridiculous.  Because people have that idea, I am concerned about portrayals of people lying about rape in fiction, purely because it happens so much more often than it actually does in real life.  It's not untrue that it happens, but showing it like that feeds an untrue and damaging idea.  I'm not convinced that this is the same thing.

I like Sookie, though.  She's more patience, understanding, and less prone to overthinking than I am.  I'm thinking of cross-stitching a "What would Sookie do?" bookmark.

In Which We Discuss Book Wankers and Other Types of Media

I originally had the title of this post referring to "literary snobs", but I prefer Book Wankers.

In the past few days, I've seen a few comments, on facebook pages and the like, which espouse the idea that books are the be-all and end-all of intellectualism.  The idea that everyone should read, that reading automatically makes you a better, smarter person, that reading is the ultimate form of entertainment accessed only the intellectual elite, etc etc.  Coupled, of course, with the idea that reading is rare, and that we ought to do something about the uncultured masses who are simply going about not-reading and playing on their smartphones all the time.  Because, of course, smartphones are not a worthwhile use of anyone's time.

Quote: "What America needs to improve it's [sic] literacy rate and get people off their smart phones."

Fuck.  Off.  You pretentious little wanker.

Every form of media has its pros and cons. Reading is one of the oldest forms of narrative, after oral-storytelling, so, yes, it has a huge archive.  That doesn't mean that other forms of narrative are less worthy.

Speaking of the massive archive of written narrative, a commonly cited statistic is that 90% of everything is dross.  That's a made-up number, of course, but there is some truth in it.  In the internet age, that's more apparent than ever, since now that 90% isn't as filtered.  Anyone can upload anything they like, and 90% of it will be utter dross, like it always was.

An idea that comes up a lot, with music as well as literature, is that things are getting worse.  No, they aren't.  Things were always 90% terrible.  It's just no one bothers to remember the 90% - they just let the 10% shine.  Penny Dreadfuls were pretty popular, but no one worships those as Victorian literature.  I can't be arsed to look up specific titles for this, but a lot of the music that's still popular from the sixties, seventies, and eighties, wasn't the only thing happening at the time.  A lot of the music we still enjoy, that's heralded as classics, wasn't even the most popular at the time.

Anyway.  Point I was making.  Literature has a great deal of centuries of the 10% good stuff to look at.  Other forms of media have things to offer too.

Films are the obvious one.  You can present things in a visual format which you simply cannot gain the same effect with if you wrote them down.  Take the film of Sweeney Todd, for instance.  There was a wonderful moment, for me, when SPOILER Sweeney slit the beggar woman's throat, and her head was thrown back and shown in full light for the first time, and there was this moment of realisation that just hit like a tidal wave.  Wouldn't have the same effect if someone had just written; "It was Lucy". SPOILER.

There's a scene in PS. I Love You, where the wife goes home after the funeral, calls her home phone, and listens to her dead husbands voice message over and over.  That does happen in the book, sort of, but it had a completely wordless realisation in the film that worked perfectly.  That's a scene that couldn't (and didn't) work that way in a book.

I've never studied film, and I usually watch them with my attention half on something else, so these aren't the best examples out there.

The Sweeney Todd example couldn't work in a play either; you need the close up on her face.  Speaking of plays, I know there are some people out there who think that reading, for example, Romeo and Juliet, would be a much more intellectual experience than watching the Baz Luhrman film.  Fuck off.  It's a play, you're supposed to watch it.  And with actual plays, rather than films of plays, there are a lot of things that can be done.  I once saw a version of 1984 in which, during the two minute hate scene, the actors faced the audience and pelted us with foam balls.  It was terrifying, and took us into the action in the way the book couldn't, and didn't.

The other thing about films (and plays, and graphic novels) is that they are collaborative, and there's a certain charm in that.  The basic fact that a book is (normally) written by one person, while a film can have hundreds working on it?  That makes a difference.  Look at Labyrinth.  The creators of Labyrinth were trying to tell at least four different stories there, and it comes out awesome (a love story, a coming of age story, a finding an heir story, a strange world fairy story, etc).

Speaking of graphic novels; yes, comic books can tell awesome stories too.  Look at what Gaiman's done with them.  A story told with panel visuals as well as speech and some narrative text is different from a book, and just as worthy of attention.

Then we have TV series.  A lot of the same benefits as a film, but different.  It's longer, but it's split into parts which means it has cliffhangers.  The time element is a factor, too.  You rarely spend more than two hours with a film, maybe as much as eight hours with a book.  A TV show like Friends is a few hundred hours of narrative.  You can do things with that sort of time span that you can't with a book.

Video games can make use of the time spent with them, too.  You spend time with these characters.  It's your effort that defeated that boss.  It's your mind that's solving that puzzle.  It's you who slowly revealed the story, through your actions, building it up layer by layer.  There are wonderful narratives and experiences that are unique to the videogame format.  Take Braid.  A major theme of Braid is nostalgia, and that's embedded in the gameplay itself.  It plays like Mario.  And Tim, the main character of Braid, is nostalgic for his past, which, like that of the player, is likely to have included the Mario games.  There's also the ending, which I won't spoil for you, but which I don't believe could be done nearly as effectively in any other format.

The other point I wanted to make, apart from the benefits of other forms of media, was about what you get from a narrative.  I don't think that that's solely dependent on the creator.  What you get from a piece of narrative - book, film, tv show, play, game - depends both on what the creator put in, and what you put in.  I could skim my way through War and Peace and get less out of it than by spending a few hours playing Braid and being completely absorbed in thinking about it.  That isn't to say that the people who worked on Braid are better or worse creators than Tolstoy; I'm just attempting to illustrate that you are a factor in what you get from a narrative just as much as the creator is.  Maybe Dickens, or Austen, or any other writer you care to name is better at illustrating a point or an idea than another writer is; that doesn't mean any one person can't get the same concept and intellectual benefits from another writer, or a totally different form of narrative.

Finally, I wanted to talk about this idea that there's something wrong with people who don't fit your intellectual idea.  And what I wanted to say was, fuck off.

All those people who go on about how no one else reads, and this is such a terrible, terrible thing?  You are pretentious book wankers.  People who don't enjoy the same forms of narrative as you are not stupid because of that fact.  Reading isn't even a natural habit for human beings.  We spend thousands of years coming back to the cave in the evening, looking at flickering lights and listening to oral narratives, which, in fact, is rather more like TV.

God.  It reminds me of people who are like "you're in your early twenties!  You should be out having fun!"

Again, fuck off.  I am having fun.  My form of fun does not often involve drinking and dancing till 3am (though I have done that on occasion and enjoyed it very much) and that fact doesn't mean there's something wrong with me.  Like the fact that most other people in the world don't read 200+ books a year doesn't mean there's anything wrong with them.  Sure, according to your (pretentious book-wanker) value system, the Lord High Ruler of intellectualism is the classic novel, and everyone should be reading it.  Your value system is subjective.

Finally, to deal with the smart phones thing; I have both the Kobo and Kindle app on my iPhone.  I also have a number of podcasts, including one in which various authors read New Yorker Fiction, and one with various Radio Dramas, as well as a few audio books.  Smartphones and literature are not either/or.  I didn't point this out earlier, because this answer ties into the idea of the Lord High Classic Novel.

In Which We Discuss the Happy Housewife

Of the books I've been reading over the past week or two, a few stood out to me. I just finished The Happy Housewife, so I'll talk about that first.

Heleen Van Royen's The Happy Housewife was originally published in Dutch.  I read it in English, because I am a sad little monoglot.  I can remember buying it; I think I was about fifteen or sixteen, and I got it on special offer in Waterstones for £2.99.  It still has most of the sticker on it - that stuff sticks after almost a decade.  Going through my unread pile was such a good project; there are some real gems in there, and they've just been sitting there for years, and I could have read them any time, and I never did.  I don't know why I didn't.  On that note, I've decided that I cannot abide to-do (read/make/cook/watch/listen) lists that I never do anything with, and that just get longer and longer beyond all realistic possibilities.  I'm no longer making a point of working through my unread pile, but I am making more of an effort to get through that and my "recipes to make" pinterest, and it's been awesome.

Anyway; The Happy Housewife.

It's written from the point of view of Lea, a formerly happily housewife.  She is, for want of a better word, a bitch and I love her.  She has a lot of the same thoughts I do - that everyone else is a total idiot, for example - but she just expresses hers, while I tie myself in knots over why my thoughts aren't fair or reasonable, and other people probably think the same about me, and it's highly unlikely I really am the only non-idiot in the entire world even if it sometimes feels like it, in my more kvetchy moments.

Lea and her husband have decided to have a baby, and at the start of the book, Lea goes into labour.  It becomes clear very quickly that it wasn't so much a case of Lea wanting a baby - I get the impression that it's just what everyone does, and her husband wanted a baby, and she doesn't refuse.  Early on, she thinks to herself that she could quite happily have carried on being a lady who lunches, with no children to care for.

I'm about to start spoiling the book, so before I do, here's some more things.  The book focuses on post-natal depression and grief, including talk of suicide and almost a hundred pages worth of description of what I would consider a graphic labour.  So, y'know, trigger warning for all that.

Spoilers for The Happy Housewife Beyond This Point.

I love the fact that this book had such a detailed description of labour.  I've read a good few hundred books in which, over the course of the story, a character goes through labour, and I can't think of any other times when it stretched over more than a few pages.  It just isn't talked about.

Lea's labour is traumatic.  I don't know how it compares to other labours, but I don't think that's really important. Firstly, her midwife insists that she must give birth at home, because "it's better for the baby" (Lea observes that the midwife's fee is a lot more for homebirths). She's denied any anaesthetic because a 'natural' birth is "better for the baby".  She's repeatedly cut during the birth (which I know was a medical necessity at that point, but wouldn't have been if they'd just given her the damn caesarian) and given stitches afterwards.  While she's being sewn up, her husband calls relatives to tell them that the birth went "fine" and that they have a son, whom he has already named (this may or may not have been discussed between them, it wasn't mentioned).  He hasn't looked at Lea at this point, who is in mourning for her body, specifically her cunt (she uses that word; I like it).  She's sacrificed her body, for something he wanted more than her, in a way which could have been avoided, and he hasn't even looked at her.  He describes her as "fine".

Lea becomes increasingly frustrated, due to feeling powerless which is understandable, because people she should be able to trust keep putting her in situations in which she is in their power, and then ignoring her wishes.  Her anger seems perfectly justifiable, to me.  Not so much the bits when she begins to have delusions, believing she is the second coming of Christ and almost succeeding in drowning her son, obviously.  Those bits are not rational, and she did receive effective, if terrifying, medical care for her postnatal depression.  However, the bit when she's screaming at people to look at how her cunt's been ruined?  That doesn't seem like a totally unreasonable reaction, considering what she's just gone through, and the fact that no one seems to think the loss of her body should be important to her at all.  It reminded me a little of this post on depression by hyperbole and a half.  I feel like it would have helped Lea so much if someone had just listened to her and sympathised with her.  Like, "wow, those fish are dead.  I'm sorry for your loss"; "you're right, your body is changed beyond all recognition, and you have a right to work through that loss".

Oh, and then while Lea was trying to come to terms with the change in her body, particularly her cunt and breasts, her husband was all, oh of course we'll be breastfeeding, it's so much better for the baby.  Oh, are you planning to use your nipples for that?  Fuck off then.

I need to put in a disclaimer here, because I've never been a mother.  But it seems like having a primary caregiver who is supported and listened to is a lot better for a baby than one who feels miserable because she isn't, and makes a damn sight more of a difference than whether they're breastfed or have a 'natural' birth.

In Which We Discuss Annie Murray and My Unread Pile

It's June 1st, and my unread pile has 154 books in it (including one that I finished today, but I'm counting anyway because it was still unread by the end of May).  According to GoodReads, I read six books between the 20th and the 31st - Juliet, Naked I finished today.  Don't ask me where the rest went.  Some I gave to my grandmother, with the knowledge that they'll be there when/if I want to read them.  I also bought one new book.  I think my books breed and hide from me, because the numbers never quite seem to add up.

I've really enjoyed this project, even though I didn't succeed in my goal.  Some of those books have been there for almost a decade, and I don't know why I never got to them before, because some of them were awesome.  Annie Murray, who writes books set in Birmingham, will be giving a talk at my local library soon, so I expect I'll get a few of hers out of the pile over the next week or so.  She'll be speaking about her new book, The Women of Lilac Street, and that'll be at South Yardley Library on the 17th of June, between 10:30am and 11:30am.

I like that Annie Murray's books are set in Birmingham.  There was a weird moment, when I read My Daughter, My Mother when I was on the exact same bus that the character was travelling on.  I like that.  I like being able to picture the street the characters are on - it happens so rarely.

I really liked Soldier Girl, the middle entry of a trilogy of girls growing up in Birmingham in the early 20th century.  I like Molly.  I would like to be friends with her.

One of her books that I didn't like was Orphan of Angel Street.  The main character seemed like a complete Mary Sue.  She was so perfect, and terrible tragic things happened to her, because she was so perfect and lovely and everyone wanted her, but it all worked out okay.  I just found it a bit melodramatic, and found it hard to like the character, near the end.

The librarian whom I asked about the event highly recommended Where Earth Meets Sky, which I have.  I think I'll probably reread Soldier Girl and that before the 17th.