Peter Boody's Blog: Inside Out: a not-so-smalltown editor's life

Here's a status report for anyone interested in the trials of self-publishing in this new age of empowerment for us crazies:

This has been like making one more cast or two into striper waters before calling it a day (I always stayed, in my striper days, until my arm hurt):

Hoping to resuscitate sales as this novel fades into the sunset, I sent out a query in October to about 20 Amazon reviewers (thru a service that found them) asking if they'd consider reading TJRM. Eight said they would.

I also scheduled a paperback giveaway thru Goodreads, which drew more than 625 contestants, most of whom also marked the book as a "To Read" on their shelves.

Fifteen won a copy; I mailed them out last week.

What did I get so far for these efforts?

Sales have never been so bad. One Kindle copy this month, no Nooks, paperbacks or Smashwords. In fact, I just "unpublished" the Nook and Smashwords editions so I can stop checking those sites. Not worth the effort.

As for reviewers, there have been:

• Two five-star ratings, one from a top 500 Amazon "vine" reviewer who wrote a sharp review that emphasized the racial aspects of the novel; (** -- see update at bottom)

• A 4-star rating from a guy who liked it a lot but dismissively detected "a tear jerker" ending;

• A 3-star from a Floridian who said he had expected more comedy so felt the book "missed" but thought the history elements were well handled;

• And a 2-star from a Indie writer Texan who really seems to have been loaded for bear when he took up this book and — while saying the dialogue was "right on for the period" — blasted it for errors, bad writing and ridiculousness. (One of the 5-star people specifically praised the writing and even what he called the editing ... Hey. Why does this paradox still surprise me? It has been going on since I published the first Kindle edition.)

That's an average so far of 3.8 -- which is just below its Goodreads average of 3.90 after 69 ratings.
And thanks to the Texan and the guy who wanted comedy, its Amazon rating is down from 4.5 to 4.4 after 34 reviews.

I note that a lot of literary works, including great ones, have ratings like this and a similar rating array ... mostly 4's and 5's, but a lot of 3's and a certain percentage of 2's and even 1's. Huckleberry Finn, one of the greatest of great American novels despite its flawed, rushed ending, is a 3.77 on Goodreads, with more than 1,000 ratings of 1. Good grief. They are probably not people I'd like to have dinner with.

Well, I dread the potential reviews still likely to come in over the next couple of months from the reviewers and readers who have not yet chimed in. *

But I hope against hope their ratings will beat the odds and the clear pattern that now seems set in stone: My little masterpiece, such as it is, will never been recognized by a wide audience. For all its apparent simplicity, it's too complicated. So it's no wonder that no reviewer has hit the nail on the head in a way that ties together the personal and the national issues raised by the story's elements.

The many readers who want pot-boilers and genre fiction won't like it.

That film rights query last summer from the big Beverly Hills agency sure made it hard to get over my hopes, even though I've heard nothing since.

And hey -- one very nice thing: The Hennepin County Library in Minneapolis and its suburbs says on its website that it has 3 copies of TJRM on order. Nice! How did they even know it existed? And why 3 copies? (And why don't I see any order for 3 copies on the book's Createspace dashboard?)

Arghhh. I'd much prefer to be working on a new book than thinking about these pointless things.

* One came in yesterday from Jim M on Goodreads, another reviewer whom I solicited. Five stars, I am delighted to report. Says he couldn't put it down. "Great book," can't wait to visit Monticello again. So how come the book works so well for readers like him and evokes such contempt from a few others? if it WERE badly written, I'd get it. There are a lot of badly written books that get by on story line alone. But as an old editor, I know it's not badly written. I really wonder if it has to do with politics in at least some of these cases even though these reviewers blast the writing. They think it's a liberal screed which it is not.
** A 4-star came in Nov . 30 with a fascinating review and it looks like a 5-star came in Dec. 1 but it has not yet propagated to a place where I can read it. Goodreads is like that. (And since then another 5 and a 4 from people I did not solicit for a review or who did not win a free copy.)

Can you imagine the kind of focus and intensity required to write a novel like Elizabeth Gilbert's "The Signature of All Things" or Donna Tartt's "Goldfinch"?

I just finished reading Gilbert's book. It was a masterpiece. I will soon read Tartt's ... my wife just finished it. She loved it.

I suspect these two authors had to be obsessed by their chosen topics ... even possessed ... for quite some time in order to write their books. And perhaps obsessed (if not possessed) long after.

It's not normal behavior, is it? All those millions who drive to work each day, sit at their keyboards, hold meetings, stand around in the hall, and go home at night ... Do they focus that intensely on anything?

Perhaps they are obsessed with something ... making money, fending off a competitor, their suspicion that their spouse is wandering or their kid is peddling drugs.

But a fantasy world? What kind of people obsess about a world they make up in their own heads? If they're older than 12, the answer is crazy people ... and writers, from novelists to historians.

I include historians because they are living in a fantasy world too, even though it is based on the facts they have gathered about real people and actual events. To write her fabulous, award-winning book "The Hemingses of Monticello," for example, can you imagine how deeply Annette Gordon-Reed must have dived into the world of Thomas Jefferson and the Hemings family, as she understood (and therefore imagined) it to have been?

I did it myself, very joyfully if perhaps less competently than AGR, when I was researching and then writing "Thomas Jefferson, Rachel & Me," my realistic fantasy about TJ having to make it in the 21st century. I did it through the long process of revising and polishing the mss. And I'm still doing it, I'm afraid, as I keep pushing for the book to be noticed.

I just cannot believe TJRM won't find its audience. I say so publicly even though I realize the chances are that, down the road, I'll just look like a fool.

And there's the problem for a writer: how and when do you extract yourself from your fantasy world?

For me, I think the time (after more than three years of writing, revising and marketing) has come. In fact, it's overdue.

But when little things keep happening every now and then to renew hope -- another great review, an inquiry from a big agency about film rights, a Tweet from a besotted reader -- it becomes very hard to turn off the focus and intensity that were required to create the book and get it out there.

Quitting was easy with my previous novel, which I delusionally believed could find a market. It is not a fun book, as good as it is. Few were interested. And after a matter of months, I got over it. In fact, I really did not want to think about its subject matter any more. It was a relief to put it behind me.

As for the TJ book, I'm ready ... even though I am not tired of it. I'm still amazed I wrote it.

For a writer in this predicament, I think the only answer lies in find something new on which to obsess.

Trying!

Wrote this in September 2008 when I was editor of the East Hampton Press. Since then, added another novel (Thomas Jefferson, Rachel & Me) to the list of masterpieces ignored by agents and publishers (at least until a big agency inquired about its film rights in early August):


Long ago, a boss of mine used to talk about his old days in the newspaper business. He had once covered the continent of Africa. How did he do it? “A little bit goes a long way,” he said.

You can’t uncover every story; and you can’t get all the way to the bottom of every story you do uncover. But a tidbit of news, with some good quotes and some background, is all you need to produce good copy and cover the bases.

That kind of superficiality, he added, ruined people who wanted to write fiction, which had been a once-upon-a-time plan of mine. Reporters who have learned and internalized the tricks of the trade can’t pull off a short story or a novel. They are either blocked entirely or they produce plodding crud.

I didn’t like hearing this. I believed one day I’d write another novel and become the new Fitzgerald, Hemingway or Tom Wolfe. (I knew I was not clever enough to be the new Faulkner; I didn’t realize then I wasn’t quite clever enough to be any of those other three guys either.)

I had won some awards for fiction writing in my school years. I’d produced a novel, too, which my high school English teacher thought was pretty good. Called “The Sinking of the Moon,” it was a variation on the theme, “How I spent my summer vacation”—in Bridgehampton, 17 years old, madly in love with a pretty red-headed girl, worried about the girl I’d left behind at school in New England, and having a lot of trouble managing life at home with my father and stepmother.

My English teacher told me he had no doubt I’d become “an important American writer” one day, I think just because the manic pace at which I churned out pages in my free time amazed him. And I figured if Francoise Sagan could publish a hit at age 17, I could do it too. It was never published, despite encouraging words from a publisher.

I was counting on my next book to make me a household name, whenever I happened to write it. That all depended on when inspiration struck and I felt the urge once more to sit at a keyboard spewing out pages.

Meanwhile, I covered the Southampton Town Board, Zoning Board, Planning Board, Board of Trustees, police and wrote a feature a week for about three years. Then my boss sent me off to Westhampton Beach to be editor of another paper he owned. I was 27. I lasted about two years and escaped by going off to the Columbia School of Journalism and getting married. After that, I went to work in the city for Flying magazine.

I had given that job about 18 months when long-awaited inspiration struck. Missing the much faster pace and more engaging world of community newspapers, I dreamed up a story about a corrupt little town on an island and a young guy who showed up one day to run the local newspaper. I wrote it while I was at work and on the train I took home up the Hudson. There were several mysteries involved, including a murder. There was also, our intrepid young editor learned, a local economy based on, gasp, sex for hire.

And the mysteries didn’t stop there. There was also a healthy dose of personal intrigue included in the mix, having to do with a long-lost father figure who had taught our hero how to fly as a kid. For reasons not exactly clear to me so many years later, the book was called “Poontown,” I blush to admit.

An agent liked it. Gloria Jones of Sagaponack, James Jones’s widow, read it, too, and tried to interest Doubleday in it. She told me she thought she’d nearly succeeded in getting an editor behind it but “marketing said no.”

Sigh. I had walked away from the boring city magazine gig by that time and my wife and I had headed back to eastern Long Island, where I signed on as managing editor of The Southampton Press, my old alma mater. After two years at that job, I was made the editor. Then, after some 14 years at the helm, it was time for literary inspiration to strike once more—either because or in spite of the fact that I had gone through the thrills and chills of open heart surgery.

I began writing a book that I would eventually give the title of “The Consequences of Longing,” about a pilot who has the terrible misfortune of losing his job because of a heart condition. He winds up becoming obsessed with the first girl he ever loved—even though, as he discovers later, she’s dead. I spent years on it, working whenever I could put together a few minutes of precious spare time, trying to make it perfect, to polish it until every word, sentence and paragraph was exactly right.

“The third time’s the charm,” I told myself. For all that, I got some nice rejection letters through an agent, but no takers.

And now I’m thinking I’m pretty much out of steam with this novel stuff. I know, I know: getting books published is more about persistence, productivity and imperviousness to rejection—and knowing the market—than it is about ephemeral things like talent and skill. In the vast scheme of things, those two elements are fairly commonplace; the nose-to-the-grindstone and commitment traits are a bit more rare.

As for this news business, the proof is in the pudding, I suppose, and I’d have to say that at long last I am convinced. Getting a handle on the skills needed to write news is bound to ruin any instincts a person might have for writing fiction.

A little news on the Indie author front.
Out of the blue, I got an inquiry from a major agency based in Beverly Hills and NY yesterday by email asking if the TV/movie rights to THOMAS JEFFERSON, RACHEL & ME were available.
I said yes.
Now waiting next move — if any.
How about them apples! An Indie book, with almost no marketing compared to a commercially published title, seems to have attracted the eye of the Big Leaguers. With no agent involved. Just me making myself look like a pipe dreamer pushing my oddball novel.
I must add that TJRM's impending breakout may still be nothing more than a pipe dream.
I have learned from a friend whose daughter knows this business that I may never hear another word from the agency; the book may have been on some list that some assistant had to work through.
OK, it is absolutely thrilling that my practically unknown, self-published book made such a list in the first place — but if it all comes to naught, so what? Another flash in the pan, of which there have been several for TJRM (although this would be the biggest, brightest flash of them all).
Who knows? I'll keep you posted. Fingers crossed.
P.S. -- After a week, I did write and got an email back from the agent trainee who sent the initial inquiry on behalf of an agent.
I asked him how UTA even had known about my book, much less had enough interest to wonder about the film rights. And I postulated that it seemed to me his inquiry had to be more than routine list making for the agency because my book is not a bestseller or well known; it's not "out there" as potential movie fodder. So someone must have taken a special interest in it after having read it ...
"All true!" he replied, ambiguously, promising to check with the agent if he could tell me "where the interest is coming from."
Have not heard anything since.
My guts tell me I will ... someday. So patience, Gertrude! How many indie authors can rightfully indulge in this kind of angst?

The ironies cascaded through my mind as I headed north to Lexington and Concord on April 19, the anniversary of the skirmishes in 1775 when “embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard ‘round the world,” as Mr. Emerson put it.

My wife thought I was crazy to make a detour on my solo trip to points much further west and north. But for all the years since elementary school that I’d longed to see the places where American militia and British regulars first exchanged sustained fire, I could only imagine what the green at Lexington and the bridge at Concord looked like.

With some time on my hands, and well aware how fast time goes by and chances are lost, I decided I was going, Boston Marathon bombing lockdown or not.

Lexington, my first stop, is a couple of towns northwest of Watertown, where the night before my trip police and the Tsarnaev brothers had engaged in a shootout, leaving Tamerlan dead and Dzhokhar on the run. Depending on where and when you got your news, the “authorities” — a term I’ve always detested as toxic jargon — had “asked” or “ordered” businesses to stay closed and people to stay off the streets, not only in Boston proper but in several towns extending west to Watertown.

By what authority can police shut down a swath of suburbs, short of a declaration of monumental emergencies and martial law? If this was an order, I doubt the “authorities” could win that one in any court with reasonable judges on the bench (and that excludes that court with Thomas, Alito and Scalia aboard). If it was a request, nobody can sue.

Whatever. My wife thought the authorities would never let me enter Lexington. I doubted that could be true. How, short of shutting down all roads, can you stop people from jumping in their cars and trucks and going about their business? Without a declaration of martial law, it can’t be done except maybe in North Korea.

As I expected, Lexington was open for business and bustling. After all, it was Patriot’s Day — a very big deal in Massachusetts and especially in Lexington and Concord, drawing tourists from all over.

Interestingly, it was the local businesses that were open. The corporate outlets — the Starbucks and Panera — were closed. Starbucks had a cute handwritten note in the window saying they were closed out of concern for their customers’ and employees’ safety.

Sam Adams would have barfed and I thought of Benito Mussolini’s alleged comment that “facism” should be called “corporatism” because it blossoms with the merger of corporate and government power. I fear we’re well down that road, by the way.

But I’m no radical. Like the patriots of 1775, who just wanted Parliament to leave them alone to run their own affairs as Parliament had done for more than a century, I’m really a conservative who likes the ways things are, or at least used to be, back when Republicans signed sweeping environmental regulations and, for all the tough talk, opened the door to adversaries like China.

So I actually went on defense when a punky-looking young college-age couple — with tattoos, nose and ear rings, and spiky pink hair — started complaining to me about the heavy police presence at Lexington’s Battle Green.

The cops weren’t allowing anybody to cross the street and stroll that triangle of hallowed ground, which wasn’t big deal because you could still see it just fine and the best stuff, like Buckman’s Tavern, where the militia waited for the regulars to arrive, was on the open side of the street.

“It really says something about this country that you can’t go on the Battle Green because the police won’t let you,” the young man said.

“It just isn’t right,” the girl said. “We came a long way.”

Trying to ignore that tinge of entitlement, I agreed, admitting it was ironic the cops were keeping citizens off the green. But the cops were there, I added, not because of the lockdown. They were bracing for a big demonstration in support of gun-control legislation then pending against all odds in Congress. Pro-gun people had vowed to hold counter-demonstration and police were trying to keep a lid on things.

Some pro-gun people were there, in fact, milling around with no opponents to bait. I overhead one, a rather grungy looking man, reading an historic marker memorializing a fallen American and telling a boy carrying a flag whom I took to be his son: “Here’s where Americans first started fighting for their rights …”

I sensed there was an unspoken qualifier: “ … by using their weapons against their enemies,” and that troubled me, as correct as it might have been. I had the feeling he was indoctrinating the boy with the idea that guns are for shooting authorities – government people, soldiers, police — when they start trampling on one’s rights.

The college kids shrugged. “So this place was all about freedom and because of the police we can’t go walk on the green. That’s a bad scene. It just seems wrong.”

What a jumble it was all getting to be in my head. I think things were a lot clearer for those brave farmers who stood their ground as the British regulars formed and took aim at them. If we ever reach a stage again at which citizens must fight or die, I wonder if we ‘ll live up to the challenge and just what we will be fighting for.

My trip was a memorable detour. I no longer have to imagine Lexington or Concord or the North Bridge. It's really there, rebuilt in the 1950s to look like the one that “arched the flood” in 1775. The gentle Concord River still swells with the spring freshet as it ambles through a great shallow bowl of greening fields.

I hope those punky college kids got there, too, but I didn’t see them.

Funny how there are a quite a few reviewers (completely unknown to me) of my last novel, "Thomas Jefferson, Rachel & Me," who make a point of saying the book is well written — but then there are a few who make a point of saying the writing is not good.

Wish I knew what they meant. None offer specifics.

I'm an old editor. I've seen some bad writing, let me tell you, including some by one of these very same reviewers (the 2nd kind I mean). I don't think TJRM suffers from it. There are certainly things in the book the sharp critic can fairly target but, compared to a lot of books out there, TJRM is in a class I'd call well crafted.

There's always room for more editing; I don't mean to suggest it's perfect, although I've tried to get it there with many revisions over the past two years. The Kindle, Nook and Smashwords editions now include the latest polishes; the paperback will soon.

But I do wonder sometimes if a group mentality might be at work, perhaps people from writing or reading groups, virtual or actual, who get herded into conformity, or perhaps even bullied, by one outspoken member who has some kind of axe to grind.

To me, "good writing" isn't a subjective thing (while whether or not one "likes" a book certainly is). Good writing is a technical thing, like a good fly cast or crosswind landing, even though there is plenty of art in both.

This is why it annoys me to be accused of something I don't believe I am guilty of.

Just tell me the writing style doesn't work for you, for whatever reason, and I'll shut up. Can't argue with THAT!

Mile Marker Zero by William McKeen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I'm a Key West fan and must admit I'm one of those bourgeois touristy people that have allowed the developer and corporate types to turn Key West into a Disneyland version of its former dirty, stinking tropical-trash self. So despite my guilt, and my personal failure to head to Key West when I was 21 to go hang at the Chart Room, I really enjoyed this book, which is about the 1970s in Key West, when the Chart Room crowd — including Jimmy Buffet and writer Tom McGuane — formed a kind of manly salon of late-day Hemingway wannabes.
Or maybe just jerks. Some of these guys sound kind of like real assholes*: drunk out of their minds and chauvinistic tyrants ... at least McGuane does and he becomes, essentially, the focus of the book.
McKeen doesn't find the humanity in him or the rest of them, which I assume is there somewhere. He just kind of runs through their adventures in a curiously choppy, disorganized and sometimes even repetitive way. (* Jimmy B excepted and I doubt Tom McGuane is really an asshole either; no devoted father and fly fisherman could be.)
There are lyrical and richly moody moments in the book that stitch fragmented anecdotes, blotchy scenes and scattered moments together and the overall effect has a charm and appeal. But the writing --- or at least the organization and structure --- is peculiar if not downright bad.
The story line, for example, begins not with McGuane but a very well crafted and strong depiction of a guy I'd never heard of before, Tom Corcoran, deciding to make a life in KW after his Navy career. It was good stuff but it disappears ... only to re-emerge near the endless swan-song ending of the book, with news of the bizarre disappearance if his devoted wife and his late career as a writer, which is barely covered.
I suspect the problem is that the book is really a transcription of interview highlights stitched together with some made-to-order literary binder. It's all disguised as a book meant to be like "Philistines at the Hedgerow," an excellent example of the genre: a series of rich vignettes that each focus on a particular player on the Hamptons scene on eastern Long Island (where I live) in the 1970s or so. That book was brilliantly executed, a bestseller for Stephen Gaines and it deserved to be, with richly drawn character studies and fully realized accounts of important events in the lives and times of each subject.
This sometimes shaky imitation is a must read and even a good book for any Key West aficionado but it has serious flaws. I still give it a 4 because I did enjoy it, I'm glad McKeen wrote it and maybe he did the best anybody could with the material, which features less than heroic and maybe even less than fascinating people, at least when they were in Key West.



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Remember, back in the last century, how stupidly complicated it was to program your VCR to record a TV show? My poor father never could figure it out and regularly called on me for help.
He wasn’t all that old or at all feeble so I thought it was a little silly that he couldn’t figure it out for himself. Either his brain just wasn’t wired in a way that allowed him to learn the ropes or he did not want to waste the increasingly precious moments of his life learning how to press a lot of buttons and follow an on-screen menu.
I can’t blame him. Now I’m 62 and I see a pattern evolving in my own approach to technology. I’m starting to rebel.
I now have a very grumpy thought constantly in mind: Only children brainwashed their entire lives by marketers to be good little consumers can be willing to bother with the current state of affairs because they know no better.
I know, I know. Now we can Skype. Now we can Instagram. Now we can Facebook. We can look things up and get answers anywhere, anytime. And computers allow us to do so much so easily!
The fact is computers allow capitalists to save money by offloading staff. Those lucky people who still have jobs have to work five times as hard as they used to work thanks to those labor-saving computers into which they stare all day and night.
Ahem. No. I’m not a Marxist.
So much of computer work is overhead, management and maintenance. And when you stop and realize that so much of the personal cyber experience is, in the end, designed to prompt you to, sooner or later, buy something, you’re going to wonder if you’ve been had, doing all that work to keep the purchasing path wide open.
My wife and I just got back from a long road trip and we’re exhausted not from the driving but from the experience of trying to make the TV remotes work in the motels we stayed in.
Just before the trip, I had to spend $1,200 to have a faulty computer sensor replaced in my car’s engine because it might have shut down the engine down for no other reason than its own delusional (I mean incorrect) view of reality.
Hey. Do you remember the days when you flipped a switch or dialed a number or picked a TV channel and you got what you wanted instantly? Remember when things you bought had no missing parts, flaws, software bugs, or extra things you had to go buy next to make them work right?
And remember the days when you could make a quick phone call to ask a customer service person for help and you got it because customers were always right?
Nowadays, you are on your own. You have to search the web to find answers to your problems. It might take hours, even days. But isn’t it wonderful that you can do your part to save Verizon or some other corporation the costs of selling things that work or providing decent costumer service? It’s good for the economy! It saves jobs! Why, if they had to spend that money, they’d have to fire thousands of minimum wage earners.
I mastered computers because I had to but, for many years, I actually enjoyed working with them — even as, over the course of my career, they became absolutely fundamental to the editorial process.
They make so many things easy. Save a story to the server and bingo it’s there for the editors and then ready to flow into the paper, no typesetters or production people required.
But I wonder if they create their own reasons for being. I remember with some anxious amazement how I used to write long news stories on yellow foolscap, plowing right along — once I’d gotten the lead right — with the need for only minor tweaks. Now I can barely write a paragraph before I stop, reconsider, and take it all apart and rebuild it, deleting this and adding that and moving one hunk of it to the end and another hunk to the beginning.
What’s up with that?
I set up a website for my book (I know, I know, you already know about my book) a year or two ago, designing it with Apple iWeb software and fumbling my way through the nearly incomprehensible GoDaddy site to obtain my domain name and set up my hosting account.
After a year, I got annoyed with GoDaddy because, as services came up for renewal, I found it impossible to get a clear picture on one screen of what I owed and why. As part of my new rebellious phase, I searched the web for “Alternatives to GoDaddy” and discovered other people hate the site, too, for similar reasons.
I followed one blogger’s instructions for closing my GoDaddy accounts (I couldn’t figure out how to do it on the site itself … but now I wonder if the blogger was planted on the web by a competitor) and I explored the blogger’s recommendations for better hosting services. I signed up with one, Dreamhost, and in a week I was getting long robot emails explaining why their server was down and why my website might not be available on line.
Oh well. I didn’t mind because, after hours of struggle, I had not been able to figure out how to get a decent site laid out.
Has my brain atrophied that much in a year? Can a service advertised as easy for non-techies be even more complicated than GoDaddy? Can you fool all the people all the time these days and get away with it?
I sense that kids have no problem with the way things are, which I think has to do with the fact that they’ve never known any other life. Futzing with computers IS life for them. They know what IPS and DNS mean and they love it, the idiots.
And certain older persons, who have never had to master computers, software, apps or websites and live in a sort of Colonial Williamsburg life bubble, are doing fine, too.
Well, I have much to be thankful for and I shouldn’t be such a raving grump. For one thing, I have the chance now and then to rant in public, just like the crazy people we used to see on the sidewalks on Midtown.
They are all buried in their laptops or iPads now, doing it on line.

Blind Pilot by Ambrose Clancy

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


"Magnificent" is probably an oddly grandiose word for most readers about any book but, as a writer, that's what comes to my mind a day after I finished this novel.
There is a sweeping, epic effect even though the story line is essentially simple and focused on a couple of months' time. But there are so many vivid characters, so many twists and turns down dingy streets and alleys and into the bleak towns and open countryside and ragged shorelines, so much lyrical description of the essentially dreary wet and grey world, and so much background texture woven seamlessly into the story that it all feels like a very weighty part of one's own life in the end, as if I lived there for a while, which I never have; never even set foot. And to me, that is a magnificent effect that very few people could pull off by just putting words on paper.
This is such a big, sprawling book about such a big mess of a subject and yet it is carbon steel hard and cold -- another magnificent effect that reflects its subject: these cold, heartless people engaging in their pointless heroics and murders.
For that reason, it's not easy going (even though I found it easy to be swept along in it .. I am a ridiculously fussy reader and reject novels almost instantly when they hit a sour note) and I can't imagine the usually soft, silly American novel-reading public ever embracing a challenging book like this. And if it's lovable characters they want, they won't find them here.
I gather it was a hit in the UK 30 years ago and I sure can see it as a film or HBO mini-series except, of course, the topic is no longer hot. Too bad because the era should be revisited — it's history now, unknown to a new generation, at least in the US — and this story may be to the Troubles and Ireland what Moby Dick is to whaling and mid-19th Century America.
Although there is an undercurrent of love for Ireland — who could tell this harsh story without love driving them on — it is unsparing in its evocation of the elemental tragedy of the place.



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So I read in the Huffington Post that Amazon has struck a deal to buy Goodreads for an undisclosed sum.
I don't hate Amazon but it's Walmart-like impact on independent bookstores troubles me and its voracious appetite is a fearsome thing.
The profit motive, and unbridled power, are not a good combo.
Goodreads has been a good resource but I always had some suspicions about the motivations behind it. Sure, it was good for readers and writers but it also seemed an easy, low maintenance way for somebody to make some good money, sooner or later.
Can't hold that against anybody.
But if we believe that any service-oriented site is all about doing good, we are dopes. Everything is always about money.