Image via Wikipedia

There was a decidedly testosterone slant to Eric’s list of “must read” books, probably because it was intended for a young man, the one affectionately referred to as the Idiot.  But what if you were making a list for a young woman?  Not that any of his recommendations were specifically unsuited for the female psyche, but suppose this young woman only reads fashion magazines, and she’s never picked up a book for pleasure?  Perhaps she’s entering the work world, the one still dominated by those with a Y chromosome.  Maybe she’s searching for something more than surface-skimming, page turning best sellers that are forgotten as soon as the last page is read.  What would your reading recommendations be?

Well, here are mine.  None of them are considered high art, a couple might be classics, and at least two are definitely in the pulp fiction category.  A few mirrored the cultural shifts that affected women during a particular era, some even contributed to the changes.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn has a wonderful opening about the Tree of Heaven that only grows in cement.  It’s a poignant coming of age story:  a smart, observant young girl struggles to make sense of life with an alcoholic father in a household forever battling poverty.  Getting an education was the underlying theme and that’s an especially vital message to women.

Gone with the Wind has the most memorable and well-known female character of the twentieth century, mostly because of the movie.  Reading the book, though, gave me a deeper appreciation for the tragic nature of Scarlett’s blind infatuation.  There was a brief, intimate scene that wasn’t in the movie.  It showed Scarlett’s vulnerability with Rhett and drove home the message that if you open your eyes, you might actually find you have something better than what you thought you wanted so desperately.  Or, maybe I recommended this one because I just love it and think any young woman who reads it will get hooked on reading.

Valley of the Dolls exposed the sick depravity behind the glamour of Hollywood and Broadway.  It made a splash in the ’60′s for its tell-all approach to sex, drugs, and the power struggle within all relationships — not just the ones between men and women, but also the ones women have with each other and with their own bodies.

Fear of Flying was a liberating soft porn novel that arrived in the early ’70′s.  Its legacy was the phrase “zipless f**k” which is how the author, Erica Jong, described a chance sexual encounter on a train with an anonymous stranger.  She tapped into the secret longing for sex without emotion or attachment that many women harbor.  But the book had a creepy, bleak view of life and that’s probably why her subsequent work never commanded the same level of excitement.  Without hope, it’s hard to pull off a second act.

The Group by Mary McCarthy was a disturbing portrait of eight Vassar women pursuing love and work after graduation in the early ’30′s.  The story reveals many of the traps that can destroy a promising future.  The characters were all bright, educated, upper income women, yet oddly, the underlying message was that while an education is important, it’s not a guarantee for success in real life.

The important questions in all these stories evolved from a woman’s relationship with the men in her life — drunken fathers, lost lovers, and disappointing husbands.  Every generation seems to grapple with the same universal questions about education, marriage, career, and motherhood.  Their choices may be nuanced by the time and place they were in, but essentially the questions are the same.  I think each of these novels offered a take on the contemporary feminine narrative of their day.   Sometimes it’s easier to see the potential consequences of our choices when we live it vicariously through a well told story and an engaging character.

Fiction can be for more than entertainment, it can be a thread that links one generation to the next, offering a nugget of insight into life.  And, it’s cheaper than therapy.

What great novel for a young woman do you think I missed?

Related articles

• Literacy Rant: Closing Thoughts (writingiscake.com)

I love books. And, normally I’m one of those late adopters when it comes to new products, especially electronics.  For me any new invention or innovation has be tested, used, abused and given a certain length of time to discover any life threatening properties before I’ll try it.  That’s why it’s a bit surprising that I was one of the first to get the new Kindle 3 – the slim delicate one that lets you read outside. 

What I like

• The battery seems to run forever without needing a charge. You don’t even need to bring the charger along with you on a trip which is very impressive.
• It’s small enough to slip into a purse without adding any bulk or weight.  That makes traveling with Kindle much simpler except on a plane.  When going through security, Kindles are treated like electronics and the flight attendants make you turn it off during take-off and landing.
• You can find hundreds of classics from Amazon for less than a dollar.  It’s so easy to fill your Kindle library by downloading for ten dollars recently published books, and everything else costs even less.  There are other ways of finding pre-1922 books, but it takes quite a bit of searching to find the best edition, and more software to remember and manage.

 What I miss

• It just doesn’t feel right.  That visceral sense of reading a book is completely lost.  With Kindle there’s no physical perception of how long, how important, or how old the ‘book’ is.  Sure, there’s a numerical sizing system with Kindle, but how long is a 10,000 unit book?  With Kindle, the books are imaginary just like the characters and story.
• There’s really not much need to go to a bookstore or a library anymore.  Wandering the bookshelves and picking through the discount table appeals to me as a reader.  It’s as though I think something serendipitous will happen and just the right book with jump out at me, demanding to be read.

After I finish the stack of paper books I’ve already got, I suspect I’ll be mostly a confirmed Kindle reader.  I just wonder if in ten years time they’ll discover that the electromagnetic waves emanating from the Kindle alters the structure of your brain or ruins your eyes.  I guess that’s the price of progress.

Related articles

• Kindle 3 under threat due to poor retail availability, rival eReader offers (ireaderreview.com)
• A Kindle User Explains it All [Kindle] (gawker.com)
• Amazon To Allow Book Lending On the Kindle (yro.slashdot.org)

I’ve been wracking my brain to come up with an Iconic Romantic Heroine for the 20^th century.  Soliciting advice from others, more often than not, I received the suggestion of Scarlett O’Hara from Gone with the Wind.   She’s an iconic character no doubt, but of the Anti-Heroine variety.  While Scarlett’s embedded in our cultural psyche, ultimately she’s a tragic figure.  The ending to Gone with the Wind was intentionally vague and certainly not in the ”happy” category.  So, I quickly dismissed Scarlett and continued my search.

Next I considered Lucy Honeycutt from Room with a View by E.M. Forster.  This was an early 1900’s novel published during the narrow era of the Edwardian age.  She was a heroine who exemplified the transition for women coming out of the rigors of Victorianism but before the full effect of the 20^th century took hold.  She was more transitional than iconic, so I moved on.

Finally, I had to realize that the suffrage movement, which culminated in the USA with the passage of the 19^th amendment, was a distinct pivot point that changed the way women viewed their place in society. A new perspective challenged the notion of dependency on men for a woman’s sense of happiness and fulfillment.  Not surprisingly, within ten years of women getting the right to vote, there was a new heroine on the block – Nancy Drew.  Ostensibly written by a female author, Carolyn Keene, the books were actually written by a collection of ghostwriters, both male and female, working under the tight strictures of a single editor.  Nancy Drew became the strongest female role model for young girls in that large swath of the middle to late twentieth century.  Her original persona was a spunky, independent young woman with a boyfriend comfortably in the background.  She was updated in the fifties to offer a less threatening, more submissive role model.  Her character make-over is a prime example of the pendulum that swings with the conflicting desires of  the female audience.  Ultimately, Nancy Drew is a heroine but with no romance, so she too fails the test for the iconic romantic heroine.

In the seventies a new subgenre emerged in the historical romance trade.  The realities of the sexual revolution with reliable, female controlled pregnancy prevention and the opening up of higher education to woman produced a new need to fill – how to romance a woman who wasn’t supposed to rely on a man to fulfill her destiny.  The answer was one of the biggest ironies of feminism – the glorification of rape fantasies and unwanted pregnancy.  The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen Woodiwiss was one of the first in describing sex with intimate detail.  Soft porn became the essential ingredient for a successful historic romance novel in the ‘70’s.  The modern romantic heroine now needed to be skillful between the sheets and willing to tell all about it.

In the nineties there was Bridget Jones as the bumbling, ditzy, slightly slutty heroine.  She may endure as an iconic heroine but more than likely she’ll be one of the countless characters that sparkle for a few years and then pass into oblivion when the next new swing of the pendulum comes round.

There was another heroine that came close – Joan Wilder in Romancing the Stone.  She was pure and modest, and had the perfect job for a modern woman – romance writer.  It was an entertaining story, but it too falls into the transient category.

I finally came to the conclusion that the Iconic Romantic Heroine may have met her demise in the 20^th century, or at the very least she’s still Missing in Action.   If there is a 20^th century iconic heroine out there, who gets her man and a happy ending, I’d love to know.  Please tell me if you think of one.

Related articles

• Iconic Romantic Heroines – Intro (writingiscake.com)
• Joe Queenan’s guide to romance cliches (guardian.co.uk)
• The Art of Romance -1 (socyberty.com)
• Jane Eyre – The Tragic Romantic Heroine (writingiscake.com)

In my memory, Jane Eyre will forever be linked to chocolate ice crème.  I remember spending the better part of a weekend, aged 15 or 16, with the book in my lap and a bowl held up near my chin.  Complementary pleasures — one a fleeting sweetness, the other lingering as a dark engrossing image with a happy ending.

For young girls who love reading, Jane Eyre is a near right-of of-passage.  It’s a blend of Gothic romance, Victorian morals and Fairy Tale sensibility rendered through an austere, some would say stubborn and defiant heroine.  The first few pages peg her as unlikeable, according to her aunt and three cousins.  Jane’s response is a resolve to never be anything other than herself – stoic, smart and judgmental.  The action flows mostly through her decisions to follow her moral convictions, satisfying those persnickety Victorian readers.

A Pair of Stepsisters

Bronte created matching sets of cousins to fill the role of stepsisters.  They were placed in the story like bookends of good and evil.  The first were paternal cousins, Eliza and Georgiana Reed.  Both qualified as unsuitable human beings, destined for unhappiness. Further into the story, at a point where a crisis passes, Bronte introduces two women who later turn out to be cousins on Jane’s mother’s side.  It was a tad too convenient, but the cousins Diana and Mary Rivers served as the idyllic stepsisters to round out the happy ending.

Two Suitors

Charlotte Bronte offered up two suitors as polar opposites.  The hero, Rochester, was more emotionally flawed than any of the Austen heroes.  The second suitor, St. John, was never comical or frivolous.  Jane’s rejection of his heartless, cold offer of marriage was painful and dense, and had not one drop of comedy.  St. John’s character seemed to be a tool to convey Jane’s near perfect understanding of the men in her life.  She deftly intuited how to manipulate Rochester in the engagement period before the wedding.

Gothic Romance

Rochester’s wife being insane and kept in a castle tower of sorts provided the gothic element that readers were accustomed to, although it was not nearly as dark as Wuthering Heights.  Bronte used the orphan archetype with its typical deprivations that lead to bliss.  True to the genre, bliss first appears in the form of a man, Rochester, who intends to marry her.  The irony is that Jane Eyre was more than capable of taking care of herself and Rochester.

Jane Eyre, the tragic heroine who earned her happy ending.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Ten of the best disguises in literature (guardian.co.uk)
• Mr. Rochester is a Creep: A List (themillions.com)

The Romance Plot Thread

Enjoy them or despise them, a romantic plot thread, as long as it’s not gratuitous, enhances most stories. Otherwise, Top Gun wouldn’t have had the guy get the girl in the end.  An Officer and A Gentlemen was the same story simply written for a female audience.  

What makes a romance work?  Tension.  Sexual, emotional, or intellectual, in whatever combination the audience demands.  A timeless romance conquers all three.  But, the early fairy tales were largely confined to the emotional sphere, restricted from offering any sexual images, the intellectual reduced to symbolic mysticism.  The tension was by necessity all emotional.

Face Time

In the earliest versions, Cinderella attends three balls, seeing the prince each time.  Afterward she runs home with him chasing her in vain.  In Snow White there was no interaction with the prince until he’s attracted to her when she’s in a glass coffin.  I’d hate to examine the psychological meaning of that symbol.  For Sleeping Beauty, her prince charming was a mercenary lured by the promise of riches, never having set eyes on her.  By comparison, Cinderella’s prince knew who she was and sought after her desperately.  Being desired for who you are is a powerful emotion, and resonates beyond gender definitions.  It’s a more complex concept adding heft to the feelings evoked.  That’s the appeal, and the reason Cinderella has been co-opted as a modern story more often than all the other fairy tales taken together.

Foreground vs. Background

In the original version, Cinderella had no fairy godmother; it was the little critters who helped her.  She worked her tail off for that wicked stepmother.  By contrast Snow White was a silent symbol of purity and submissiveness.  The evil Queen and the amusing dwarfs dominated the stage.  Snow White’s one effort was to eat the poisoned apple and fall into a coma.  It was about the same with Sleeping Beauty.  She pricked her finger and fell asleep.  A comatose heroine isn’t much of a role model, or much of a role.

Cinderella is a cultural icon, an action figure who sets the baseline for feminine aspirations and desires.  That’s why she’s eternal, appearing in one form or another in every generation.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Hosting a Preschool Fairytale Ball(brighthub.com)
• Who is Prince Charming?(brainz.org)
• Iconic Romantic Heroines – Intro(writingiscake.com)
• Fairy Tales Aren’t For Disney and Kids Anymore(amog.com)

In 2 months, 4 days and 12 hours, the dead will walk… onto your TV screen!

Premiering on Halloween night, AMC TV’s presentation of “The Walking Dead“, which long-time readers may remember is my favorite zombie book, has all of the makings of becoming my favorite visual zombie experience as well.  Veteran (and venerable) screenwriter and director Frank Darabont (Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile) is at the helm and the writer for the graphic novels, Robert Kirkman, is heavily involved.

A trailer was premiered last month that the San Diego Comic-Con and the official AMC website has some other great behind the scenes video clips, including a time-lapse of a three and a half hour makeup and prosthetic appliance session shown at sixty times normal speed.  Darabont is well-known for his attention to detail, so I have no doubt that he has gathered a crack team of special effects wizards to bring this story of the limits of human survival to life.

I look forward to re-reading the books, while I wait for this highly anticipated event and I hope the kids that come to the door looking for treats on Halloween night appreciate my homage.

No, this post isn’t about shuffling dead taking center stage at the local pub’s open mic night.  Rather, if you like your zombies mixed with a little bit (or a lot) of humor, then the recent  Zombieland and the venerable Shaun of the Dead have to be on the ticket (or at least in your Netflix queue).

Released in 2004, Shaun of the Dead follows a group of regular folks that find themselves in the early stages of a zombie uprising in London.  The horror and gore aspects of the film are downplayed and the humor is heightened by way of its subtlety.  The story builds consistently to its climax, deftly resolving into a humorous postscript.

Released in 2009, Zombieland is a big budget film that follows several loners as they come together during the advanced stages of a worldwide zombie apocalypse.  The horror and gore aspects of the film are over the top and the humor is often times a bit heavy handed.  The story builds chaotically at times and, as is often the case with today’s big budget films, paves the way for a sequel.

For Shaun of the Dead, the zombies are wielded as both metaphor and antagonist, with parallels drawn between the main characters’ lives and the devolving scene around them.

For Zombieland, the zombies are front and centerpiece to the action with great special effects and lots of splatter.
As two sides of the zombie humor coin, both films ably walk the line between horror and comedy.  While I certainly prefer the style of Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland is entertaining as well.

As a child, I grew up admiring and reading such super-sleuths as Nancy Drew and Encyclopedia Brown. My tastes changed as I grew older and I found myself drawn to true crime novels where the only mystery was what made a person crack and commit such heinous acts as serial killing and cannibalism.

Somehow, and I’m not sure how, but one of the most prolific mystery writers escaped my notice. Until recently I had never picked up an Agatha Christie novel. So at the suggestion of the book club to which I belong, I went in search of a good mystery by Christie. The library shelves literarily brimmed with her books. I chose the novel Crooked House and rushed home to start enjoying a good mystery.

The truth? I hated it. I really wanted to love it because I figured that if I could find a liking for her books it would be a long while before I stood in the aisles of the library scanning titles in desperate search of a new author with whom to connect. Why didn’t I like this book?  Was my love of true crime novels tainting the experience?

It dawned on me then why I didn’ t connect with the book: Too many underdeveloped characters. I understand you need an array of characters in a mystery or else you end up with something like: “Well, the butler did it because the only other character in the book is dead.” But if you include several characters who qualify as potential suspects, you darn well better develop them so that I, as the reader, can form a connection.

Crooked House takes place in an old mansion where several members of an extended family reside. When the patriarch ends up dead, everyone is a suspect, but not everyone is developed into an interesting character. Out of all the characters, and there was upwards of 14 in all, only two were developed. One was the protagonist and narrator and the other was the killer. Not much of a mystery then and I wonder if I read more of her books if I could pick out the killer simply by picking out the developed characters.

A good mystery is hard to write I am sure, and sometimes it is also hard to find. Ultimately, I think I learned that in order to compose a decent mystery you have to rely very much on the development of your characters. And next post I will discuss an author I feel does this well.

I don’t think I am ready to give up on Agatha Christie just yet. Such a legend deserves another chance I think. So if you could suggest a few of her novels to look into I would appreciate it.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Get a clue! Say “happy birthday” to Nancy Drew. (newsarama.com)
• Fiction’s Global Crime Wave (online.wsj.com)
• Nancy Drew’s Sexy Secrets (plastic.com)
• Agatha Christie mysteries on the next “Dave White Presents” (thespyreport.livejournal.com)
• Mystery Novels Recognized In Prestigious Edgar Awards (huffingtonpost.com)

This is a Spoiler Alert people!  This movie has a bit of a ‘twist’ ending which I will talk about.  If you haven’t seen it and don’t like spoilers you might want to watch the flick before reading this.

Anyway…I was born and grew up during the Cold War.  Ah, the good ol’ days.  Younger readers might not know it but we were reasonably certain that the whole world was going to be blasted into the Dark Ages with Nuclear Missiles. 

Sound scary?  More like awesome!  At least according to the scads of movies I watched like A Boy and His Dog and The Road Warrior and Steel Dawn.  There were enough of them that post-apocalypse was a whole genre and they all had the same tag line–”In a post-apocalyptic world a lone warrior…” 

Of course the Berlin Wall fell and then the Soviet Bloc fell and I had a basement full of canned food and a crossbow I would never use to fight off gasoline pirates.  After the Cold War ended movies stopped being about nuclear winter and started being about horrible diseases (Outbreak, Twilight).  But then the Hughes brothers go retro and give us a classic post-apocalypse movie.  Written by Gary Whitta and starring Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman. 

Everything is as it should be.  We have a blasted skeleton of a world where human life is cheap and soap and water are valuable.  We have the Lone Warrior walking through the desert.  No surprise that Denzel is both calm and cool but tough and menacing.  He fights and kills when he has to but tries to avoid trouble and just “stay on the path.”  In addition to his pump shotgun, bow, and sword, he carries a book.  He reads from it every day before locking it and carefully wrapping it up. 

We then meet Carnegie the Overlord of a small town.  Carnegie just happens to have road crews out searching for books.  For one book in particular and it’s not hard to figure out that book is the very one carried by our Lone Warrior.  It’s also not hard to figure out that the book is a Holy Bible.  The two men meet and when Carnegie finds out about the book he’s willing to kill to get it.  The Warrior fights his way out and retakes his Path.  He’s followed by a young woman named Solara (Mila Kunis) who’s curious about him and why the book is so valuable. 

Of course Carnegie and his henchmen pursue them and eventually the Warrior is cornered and has to give up the book in exchange for Solara’s life.  Carnegie takes the book and shoots the Warrior, leaving him for dead.  He doesn’t die though and manages to keep up his quest despite his grievous wound.  With Solara’s help he travels West to Alcatraz and finally names himself (Eli, of course) and tells the people there he has in his possession a King James Bible.  Alcatraz is apparently a sort of armed monastery where a small group of literati are saving books from the world that was. 

Of course as soon as the bad guy gets the book and the good guy just lets it go; savvy movie goers know that something’s up.  They start trying to figure out the twist and there is one.  Normally I don’t like to spoil endings but I’ve already gotten into an argument about this ending so I’m just going to say it.  Eli is blind.  When Carnegie gets the lock open on the bible it’s written in braille.  Back at Alcatraz Eli recites the book he’s read every day without fail for thirty years to be transcribed. 

This is how to do a ‘twist’ ending.  It’s a trick and a payoff to be sure but it isn’t a gimmick.  It affects the story but it isn’t the point of the story.  It’s subtle enough that I had to go back and watch it and say ‘I’ll be damned, that dude was blind the whole time.’ 

The movie obviously deals with religion and faith but this too is subtle.  By moving the story to a world where nobody has religion or faith, the storyteller can move past contemporary ideas of both.  In fact there’s no real preaching to the story.  The book means one thing to Eli and another to Carnegie.  Carnegie is the ‘bad guy’ no doubt but he’s not evil.  He wants the book to give people hope so he can rebuild a civilisation with safety and order.  Sounds kinda reasonable actually. 

So what we have here is a well paced and beutifully shot action movie with a couple of strong leads.  We also have an engaging story about what’s worth fighting for beyond mere survival.  The Wasteland Warrior character brought full circle to his archetypal roots of a knight on a spiritual quest.  In short, some good Storytelling.

Can creative writing be taught? It’s a loaded question, and one which Francine Prose, the author of the 2006 book Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them, tackles in the opening passages. Given the popularity of creative writing programs across the country, it would seem heretical to answer “no.” Ms. Prose herself has led plenty of such workshops, and as she notes, “A workshop can be useful. A good teacher can show you how to edit your work. The right class can form the basis of a community that will help and sustain you. But that class, as helpful as it is, was not where I learned to write. Like most, maybe all, writers, I learned to write by writing and, by example, from books.”

Thus, the central premise of Prose’s book is the notion that writers learn to refine their craft by paying close attention to what good writers do in their work. As she states, “This book is intended partly as a response to that unavoidable question about how writers learn to do something that cannot be taught. What writers know is that, ultimately, we learn to write by practice, hard work, by repeated trial and error, success and failure, and from the books we admire.”

Prose examines the subject of good writing by focusing on the following topics: Close Reading, Words, Sentences, Paragraphs, Narration, Character, Dialogue, Details, and Gesture. She also includes three additional chapters entitled “Learning from Chekov,” “Reading for Courage,” and “Books to Be Read Immediately.” (After all, how could she write a book about learning from the masters without including a list of illuminating books?)

What I find most useful about Reading Like a Writer is the quality and scope of the examples she draws from to illustrate her points. The passages range from Flannery O’Connor and Katherine Mansfield to Samuel Johnson and Henry Green. This is not a book which will teach the fast track to literary success or how to create a marketable plot, but for people seeking to bolster the quality of their writing, it is well worth a look.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Creative writing as literary ‘intervention’ | Vanessa Thorpe (guardian.co.uk)
• Developing a Creative Writing or Journalism Portfolio (brighthub.com)
• A Book For All Writers (ghostwritinguncovered.com)