Just because you can, should you?

"Borders recently started a self-publishing program with the print-on-demand company Lulu. Would-be authors can pay $299 for formatting, printing and an ISBN code, or for the $499 “premium package,” an editor will address structure, plot and documentation, along with basics like grammar, punctuation and spelling." - The New York Times: You're a Writer? Me, Too!

I fear we're approaching the end.

Robert Alexander's Trailers

I have never read any Robert Alexander, though I do own The Kitchen Boy. I was wandering around the bookweb and came across his live book club page. That was interesting, but what was even more interesting were the trailers for his three novels.

Try to watch just one AND try to drive home today without going by the bookstore or library.

The Kitchen Boy
The Romanov Bride
Rasputin's Daughter

The Girl Who Stopped Swimming

Joshilyn Jackson is hilarious, and she has a unique way of putting things. One of her, self-professed, favorite things to do is to refer to long titles or phrases using their acronyms. The Girl Who Stopped Swimming is either Swimming or TGWSS, pronounced tog-wiss. Makes sense to me: it would be rather cumbersome to constantly refer to a book in progress as The Girl Who Stopped Swimming. That's just a mouthful.

But it's not cumbersome to read, that's for sure.

Laurel Hawthorne has a perfect life - perfect house, perfect husband, perfect daughter. One thing isn't perfect, though. She sees ghosts. When the ghost of Molly Dufresne, the girl next door, visits her one night asking her to come to the Hawthorne's pool, Laurel looks in panic to see Molly's lifeless body floating in the water. The police want to say it's an accident, but her daughter Shelby is acting weird, and her daughter's friend, Bett Clemmons, isn't saying anything. Did Shelby see something, or, more frightening, was Shelby involved? Laurel must pierce the facade of her perfect life to uncover the mystery of the Molly's death. As she follows the path to it's nail-biting conclusion, Laurel learns a thing or two about family and the price of perfection.

In this novel, the characters leap off the page, and the suspense surrounding the mysterious death of the girl next door will keep you riveted to the end. Thalia, Laurel's sister, is the most interesting character. Her derisive wit and bulldog attitude is engrossing, not to mention downright hilarious. Jackson has a keen sense for pacing, and the story never lags. Like with all good mysteries, it's difficult to foresee the conclusion. This is a great novel to read when your toes are all sandy at the beach or to escape the tedium of whatever ails you at the moment. Tog-wiss was my first introduction to Jackson, but I have Gods in Alabama and Between, Georgia on my shelf waiting for some attention. They won't have to wait long.

An Interesting Notion

"The precise metaphysical procedures by which a book goes about writing another book need not concern us here. Suffice to say that our human scribes remain entirely ignorant of their possession by bibliographic forces; the agent in question never doubts that his authorship is authentic. A bit of literary history might clarify matters. Unlike Charles Dickens's other novels, Little Dorrit was actually written by The Faerie Queen. it is fortunate that Jane Austen's reputation does not rest on Northanger Abbey, for that author of that admirable satire was Paradise Regained in a frivolous mood. The twentieth century offers abundant examples, from The Pilgrim's Progress cranking out Atlas Shrugged, to Les Miserables composing The Jungle, to The Memoirs of Casanova penning Portnoy's Complaint."

James Morrow, The Last Witchfinder, page 5

Other 'bibliographic forces' at work (proposed because how would I know; I'm not a book, and these things are supposedly hidden from us human scribes):

1. The Awakening revised itself in Candace Bushnell's Lipstick Jungle
2. Vargas Ilosa's The Storyteller decided to get more derisive and hunchbacked in Indra Sinha's Animal's People
3. Virginia Woolf's Orlando got saucy with Jeannette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.

A Prequel to Anne of Green Gables?

Usually, sequals, prequels, and attempts to retell popular novels from the point of view of minor characters is something I shy away from. Occasionally, though, I'm too curious to stay away, even when I know I should.

I fell victim to two books based on DuMaurier's Rebecca: Susan Hill's Mrs. DeWinter and (can't remember her name) Rebecca's Tale. The first was dreary and unsatisfying, and despite what I hear about Hill, I haven't been able to pick up another one of her books. The second was just awful. The writing was jarring, and the characters grated on my nerves. To be fair, however, the premise was interesting: a packet of letters surfaces years after Rebecca's death and...(can't remember the rest, so maybe it wasn't as interesting after all.)

I have yet to read March, though the fact that it won the Pulitzer put it on my list. Also, it doesn't (to my knowledge) delve too much into the girls' life at home because it sticks mainly with Mr. March on the battlefield. I might be able to handle that.

Finn surfaced last year, and it's on my shelf. Huck's dad was a total snake, and I hear that Clinch did ok with filling in the cracks, but how can a person really follow Twain? Sort of impossible task, I would think.

The Wide Sargasso Sea is also on the radar screen, but, again, haven't tackled it. How does one improve upon Jane Eyre? Perhaps that's the point; it's not improvement, just expansion of the beloved texts.

And then we, ultimately, come to Gone With the Wind. Margaret Mitchell is spinning over her sequals, prequels, and revisions (Wind Done Gone), and I'm REALLY holding out on reading Scarlet, though I have it on my shelf, too, and curiousity might get the the better of this cat soon enough. I still argue that there was no way she got him back. Sometimes people just go too far. Rhett Butler's People is supposed to be good.

And now, there is a prequel to Anne of Green Gables. Read the review here. I just can't go there. Some things are sacred, and there is NO WAY this is anywhere close to what I have imagined for my Anne, so I'm going to leave this one to the less passionate readers.

Last words

100 top last lines from novels, and no, they don't ruin the books, so go here and be amazed at how the best of the best end their great works of literature.

I was glad to see Gatsby in the top 10.

Baths and Books

Taking my daily trek around the bookweb brought me to a cute little article at The Guardian about reading books in the bath. When I was little, I took baths all the time. My parents were fans of keeping the house super cold, especially during the winter (cold weather aids sleep, my dad says), so the house was usually freezing. The joke was that I would run around a bit trying to get warm on very cold afternoons. Then I would disappear. A few moments later, Mom would laugh as she heard the bath tub water running. I would run the water as hot as I could stand it, the aim being to thoroughly warm myself and turn my legs that great cooked lobster color. Of course, I would take a book into the bath, too. Without it, I'd get bored and get out of the water too quickly, which was against the entire point.
Then I went off to college. There was a bathtub on my hall, but I wasn't about to put my bottom in there; too much opportunity for disease and dirt in that gross bathtub. The same was true for the bathtub in my first apartment. My husband's condo started out with a bathtub and then fell victim to overzealous home improvement...which lasted a year. But now, we're in a new house with a fabulous new bathtub, and my husband likes to keep the house just as cold (in the winter) as my dad did, so the old ritual of lobster roasting my legs and reading a great book at the same time is back in vogue for moi.

Alistair Harper had this to say:
Baths are one of the few pleasures body and self can appreciate simultaneously. This is entirely because reading in the bath is the height of civilization. Taking a bath instead of a shower is a philosophical decision - a declaration that the world will have to manage without me for a little while. And the world can stick it when I can be with a book while immersed in a coffin-shaped pool of pleasure.

Yup, I agree with he said.