Are self-published books any good? Part 3

The Self-Published Novels

I have now read through all of the self-published samples and the verdicts are below. I’ll also post a summary of the results shortly.

Lexi Revellian – Remix

What a place to start! In terms of quality of writing, Remix is indistinguishable from a professionally published novel. Quirky, cosy and instantly likeable, the plot skated along, never faltering and managing to pull off a neat balance between originality and familiarity. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it
I’m not sure it was quite as good as the sample for Room, but it was close. I’ve bought the full book and would have done so even if it was 10 times the 49p price tag.

Lauren Burd - Immortal

After Remix gave me confidence in self-publishing, Immortal brought me crashing back down to earth. It was so bad I couldn't even finish the sample. Bursting with superfluous detail (we're told the main character's every movement, brushing her teeth, brushing her hair, lifting her bag...) and repetitive, cliched descriptions (everyone has ivory skin), this confirmed all my worst fears about self-published novels. There were also a litany of embarrassing spelling and grammatical errors. I gave up after reading 'faux pa'.

CS Marks – Elfhunter

Elfhunter is an unashamedly derivative fantasy, but one that is no worse than many of the professionally published tomes on the market. Alongside its imitation Tolkien setting, it suffers from some clunky sentences and the author’s eagerness to fill the reader in on the world’s history in the first few pages, but these are faults that are common across the genre and Elfhunter was certainly charming in places.
I read a lot of this kind of thing years ago, but not so much any more and there was nothing in this sample that really grabbed my attention. I imagine it would appeal to a lot of people, but it isn’t one for me.

Ali Cooper – The Girl on the Swing

After the two previous self-published mis-hits, my confidence was beginning to waver. However, the excellent Girl on the Swing has gone a long way to restore it. From the evidence of this sample, this past-life drama is elegantly written and expertly crafted and I got so lost in the story that coming to the abrupt end of the sample gave me a bit of a jolt.
Like Remix, this is easily better than most of the Booker contenders and is another self-publishing success. I'm keen to read the rest of the novel as I really want to know how this pans out.

Patsy Whyte – No Easy Road

Despite its listing in Amazon’s fiction section, this is actually an autobiography, albeit one with a very novelistic style. Whyte’s writing is very vivid and she creates strong images in the reader’s mind. Even just the few chapters of the sample were moving and insightful and I felt privileged that Whyte had chosen to be so open about her harrowing life.
This is not the type of thing that I would normally read, so I don’t think I’ll be buying the full book, but I’d certainly recommend it to anyone who enjoys reading ‘triumph over adversity’ true-life stories.

Kenneth Rosenberg – No Cure for the Broken-Hearted

I had fairly high hopes for this one as it was the highest-ranking self-published book that I selected from Amazon. Sadly, I was disappointed. For me, the writing in the sample was fairly pedestrian and lacked the wit or sparkle necessary to drive a romantic novel. Compounding this, the text was also hampered by basic grammatical errors, such as ‘principle’ for ‘principal’.
Not something I would recommend, but may be an enjoyable read for someone who doesn’t want anything too demanding and is willing to ignore the grammar.

Are self-published books any good? Part 2

The Booker Shortlist

In my quest to compare the opening chapters of professionally published and self-published novels, I have now read through all of the Booker samples. The verdicts are below and the verdicts on the self-published books will be available once I have read through the samples in the next few days.

Emma Donoghue - Room

I didn't think I was going to like this and was a little perplexed as to what it was doing on the Booker shortlist. Given the subject matter I expected a barely fictionalised ambulance-chaser about the Josef Fritzl case, prurient and voyeuristic. On the strength of this sample, I was very wrong.
The technique of telling the story through the eyes of a young boy who knows nothing other than space inside the Room brought a very different dimension to the story to what I expected. It transformed what could have been a true crime cash-in into a very intriguing study of the mind of a human being whose entire world is defined by four walls. I will definitely be reading the full novel.

Howard Jacobson – The Finkler Question

I didn't find this to be quite the stinker I anticipated after reading the reviews on Amazon, but neither did it seem to be the obvious choice for a Booker winner. The typical linguistic flamboyance of Booker winners wasn't present here and I found the prose somewhat bland and cliched, particularly when compared to last year's winner Wolf Hall. The sample worked better on an emotional level: it made me smile at times and some passages were rather poignant.
Despite this, I was a little underwhelmed and I'm not planning to read the whole book. The only reason I wanted to read on a little further was because the sample stopped midway through a paragraph mentioning the importance of windows in Czech history, something that has long struck me as particularly curious.

Damon Galgut – In a Strange Room

This was the Booker nominee that I knew the least about. I didn’t even know the basics of the plot before reading this (very brief) sample. I was impressed with Galgut’s lyrical writing style, although at times he seemed a little too distant from the action. Nothing in this sample would have discouraged me from reading on if I had the full book in front of me, but at the same time I’m not particularly eager to buy it.
Had I been doing a blind test I suspect I would have identified this as a self-published novel. It has the feel of a university creative writing course to it, with its elaborate language and focus on backpacking, which would have led me to wrongly believe it was a first novel. I was genuinely surprised to find it was written by a 47-year-old with a handful of novels already under his belt.

Peter Carey – Parrot and Olivier in America

I’m very glad that this sample was three times as long as In a Strange Room, otherwise I might have reached a very different conclusion. I didn’t really gel with the first half of this sample at all. It lacked incident, the sentences were formidably long and the vocabulary was difficult to the extent that it sometimes looked as if a dictionary had spilled onto the page (I think it was Orwell who said writers should never use a complicated word when an everyday one would do).
Luckily, it got better and by the end of the sample I was keen to find out what happened to Olivier and his dysfunctional aristocratic family. I found the latter half of the sample witty and interesting and I’m definitely keen to see how things develop.

Andrea Levy – The Long Song

A difficult one this. There was nothing wrong with Levy's writing and the situations she drew were interesting enough, but I couldn't help getting the feeling that I had read so much of this type of thing before. There has been a spate of slavery fiction in recent years, making it very tough to find a new angle. The opening paragraphs of The Long Song, with an old woman in the 1800s recalling her past as a slave, reminded me of similar opening paragraphs in Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes. Hill's novel came out just a year before Levy's so they were presumably writing them simultaneously, which just shows how common a theme this is becoming.
My problem with The Long Song is that I didn't find the writing in the opening chapters as compelling as that in The Book of Negroes or in Toni Morrison's Beloved or Alex Haley's Roots. It wasn't bad, but I felt it failed to bring anything new to this crowded genre and that alone didn't inspire me to read on.

Tom McCarthy – C

C was the sample that I was most looking forward to, but as it turned out it certainly wasn’t my favourite on the Booker shortlist. I enjoyed reading it, but it lacked the tension of Room or the vividness of Parrot and Olivier.
It’s a book I might read in the future, but I’m certainly not rushing to buy it at the current Kindle price of £7.80 (the paperback and no doubt a cheaper ebook will come in August. It certainly had potential and could develop into a great read, but for the moment it can wait.

Are video games literature?

Interesting article on the Guardian's website today asking why top writers are not writing for video games: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/feb/23/video-games-writers-novelists

In my opinion, there's certainly a lot of scope for a talented writer to produce a video game script that matches the quality of great novels. The problem is one of acceptance.

Check out the syllabus for a typical university literature course and you'll see that, despite now having over a century of heritage, film and TV scripts are still not widely considered literature at the same level as theatre scripts. Students of 20th century literature are likely to study Tennessee Williams or Harold Pinter, but not Woody Allen or Paul Schrader. There is little logical reason for this. Why should a play written for the big screen be any less literary than a play written for the theatre?

With little over a decade of serious scripting to its name, it will likely be a long time before the powers that be consider a video game script as literature and that itself will deter great writers. That is a real shame as the creative industries should be encouraging innovation.

Are self-published books any good? Part 1

The ebook revolution has had a perhaps seismic effect on the future of publishing in more ways than one. One of the most interesting developments is the proliferation of self-published books. Now it is easier than ever for an author to get their work to readers as the cost barrier surrounding printing books has been removed.

I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that, as far as I know, I have never read a self-published novel. Admittedly, until I got my Kindle at Christmas I hadn’t really had access to any. Most of my book buying took place in bookshops where only the ‘proper’ publishers were on display.

I was also wary of the quality conundrum. I think that only the most fervent self-publishing advocates would deny that, on average, published books are likely to be better than self-published books. They have already been through several layers of acceptance, from agents and publishers, whereas anyone can self-publish anything as an ebook. With a traditionally published book you at least know that someone other than the author has given it their seal of approval.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that all self-published books are bad, any more than it means that all traditionally published books are good. But the quality control process has been removed. You can argue that Virginia Woolf was self-published, but that certainly doesn’t make every self-publisher a Woolf.

So are there any self-published Woolfs out there today? Or perhaps to be more realistic, are the top self-published novels of a similar standard to the top published ones?

I’m not in a position to do a blind test, however, I have downloaded the Kindle samples of the six novels from the 2010 Booker shortlist and also six self-published / small publisher titles from Amazon’s Top 150 ebooks. I will read the samples then assess the books and rank them in order of the likelihood of me buying the full novel. I haven’t read any of these books before and all the authors are new to me so it will be interesting to see how this experiment turns out.

The books to read are:

Booker shortlist

Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America

Emma Donoghue, Room

Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room

Andrea Levy, The Long Song

Tom McCarthy, C

Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

Self-published

Lauren Burd, Immortal

Ali Cooper, The Girl on the Swing

CS Marks, Elfhunter

Lexi Revellian, Remix

Kenneth Rosenberg, No Cure for the Broken Hearted

Patsy Whyte, No Easy Road

Will any of the popular self-published books be able to match up to the Booker titles? I’ll post the results here over the next few days.

Review: Ink in the Blood

Title: Ink in the Blood
Author: Hilary Mantel
Nationality: British
Year: 2010
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Rating: 6/10
Summary: Entertaining, but I expected more for my 99p

The outline

Mantel recounts the unpleasantness of her recent hospital stay.

Sample

When Virginia Woolf's doctors forbade her to write, she obeyed them. Which makes me ask, what kind of wuss was Woolf?

The verdict

Ink in the Blood is an engaging and thought-provoking account of a hospital stay which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. Mantel vividly identifies the awkwardness and discomfort of a modern hospital, while touching on questions of the nature of being an author. However, it’s a story that quite literally falls short. It’s actually little more than a well-written newspaper article (at 287 ‘locations’ on my Kindle I estimate it’s only around 2,500-3,000 words). For 99p I would have expected it to be around three times longer.

The best books I read in 2009

The best of the best

Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale 

Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, The Gathering Storm
Stephen Mitchell (translator), Gilgamesh
Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Sarah Waters, Fingersmith

Special mentions to:

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Neil Gaiman, American Gods
Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Sarah Waters, Tipping the Velvet

The best books I read in 2010

The top three (in no order)


Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5

Special mentions to:

Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, Towers of Midnight

Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis 

Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety 

Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World 

David Petersen, Mouse Guard: Autumn 1152 

Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front 

Review: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Title: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Author: Tom Stoppard
Nationality: British
Year: 1966
Publisher: Grove Press
Rating: 7/10
Summary: Patchy and dated but worth it for the better parts

The outline

Postmodern drama follows the off-stage existence of two of Hamlet’s minor characters.

Sample

Guil: Actors! The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn't death! You scream and choke and sink to your knees, but it doesn't bring death home to anyone-- it doesn't catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says-- "One day you are going to die." You die so many times; how can you expect them to believe in your death? 

The verdict

I wavered between giving Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead both a higher and a lower score. The beginning and the ending are great examples of postmodern theatre, but much of the middle of the play seems to be little more than a Waiting for Godot wannabe. The comedy wanes - particularly when the players are involved - , the message gets repetitive and the concept starts to show its age. The sharpness of the beginning is lost and the play lurches forward before redeeming itself in its final act. In places it is indeed very funny and very insightful, but it’s far from consistent in my opinion.

Review: Chess

Title: Chess
Author: Stefan Zweig
Nationality: Austrian
Year: 1942
Publisher: Penguin Mini Modern Classics
Rating: 9/10
Summary: Grand Master

The outline

First published following the author’s suicide, in this novella the passengers of a cruise ship challenge a travelling grand master to a chess match they seemingly cannot win.

Sample

Every child can learn its basic rules, every bungler can try his luck at it, yet within that immutable little square it is able to bring forth a particular species of masters who cannot be compared to anyone else, people with a gift solely designed for chess, geniuses in their specific field who unite vision, patience and technique in just the same proportions as do mathematicians, poets, musicians, but in different stratifications and combinations.

The verdict

You don’t have to be a fan of chess to enjoy this addictive little novella. Zweig’s tale of the passengers of a cruise ship who challenge a chess grand master to a match is about much more than just a board game. It’s a powerful exploration of genius and of the workings of the human mind. Zweig expertly builds tension and I was compelled to read on to find out the outcome of the match.

This edition was published as part of the Mini Modern Classics series celebrating Penguin Modern Classics’ 50th anniversary and after this I’m keen to read more both of this and the other shorts in Penguin’s collection. This is a great introduction to Zweig for those, like me, who had previously not read this twentieth century master.

Review: The Great Gatsby

Title: The Great Gatsby
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Nationality: American
Year: 1925
Publisher: Penguin Modern Classics
Rating: 6/10
Summary: Great style, little substance

The outline

Widely proclaimed as one of the greatest novels of all time, Fitzgerald’s roaring twenties literary soap opera follows the decadent, trivial life of a group of young socialites.

Sample

There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city, between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants including an extra gardener toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.

The verdict

The Great Gatsby is undoubtedly a beautifully written book. The final pages in particular are famously elegant and thought-provoking. However, despite this obvious literary brilliance I found it was a novel that was very difficult to warm to.

I was expecting something deeper, something more ambiguous, something where the characters didn’t seem so thin and distant. Maybe it seems more powerful if you’re surprised to find that beautiful people are ugly inside.

Like its characters, The Great Gatsby is ultimately shallow and has little of note to say. For me, Fitzgerald never got under the skin of his characters and that is what a novel like this needs. I liked the style, but this certainly isn't one of the best novels of the C20th to me.

Review: The Gathering Storm

Title: The Gathering Storm (The Wheel of Time, Book 12)
Author: Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson
Nationality: American
Year: 2009
Publisher: Orbit
Rating: 10/10
Summary: Sanderson delivers the impossible


The outline


The Wheel of Time turns again. Following the untimely death of Robert Jordan, Brandon Sanderson takes on the seemingly impossible task of reviving the ailing series. The Seanchan are poised to attack, the Forsaken are lurking in the shadows, Egwene is captive in the White Tower and Perrin is still wandering across the map... Will any of this have changed by the end of the book?


Sample


Nynaeve tugged her braid again.


The verdict


I loved the Wheel of Time series when it first came out back in the 1990s, but I read only a few chapters of books 10 and 11 as the series seemed to have lost its way and was moving nowhere fast. I'm not a fan of continuations of series written by different authors and wasn't planning to read The Gathering Storm until I saw highly positive reviews on Amazon. Am I glad I did!


The Gathering Storm is arguably the best book in the series, certainly the equal of my two favourites The Great Hunt and Fires of Heaven. The epic adventure gets moving again and there's plenty of classic confrontations that help to bring the series back to its zenith. We get deep into Rand's psyche and the stirring chapters about Egwene in the White Tower are among the best fantasy scenes I have read. And what an amazing twist! It was like reading Jordan at his best and there was not one stage when it was readily apparent that another author was continuing his words


To fans of the Wheel of Time who haven't bought this book because they doubted that Brandon Sanderson could convincingly continue the series - think again. This is a remarkable achievement.

Murakami on Kindle

Does anyone have any idea why there are no Haruki Murakami books on the Kindle? Please?

Review: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Title: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Author: Haruki Murakami
Nationality: Japanese
Year: 1985
Publisher: Vintage, translated by Alfred Birnbaum
Rating: 9/10
Summary: Wonderful Wonderland, but not for readers who prefer their fiction realist and close-ended

The outline

An open-ended, surrealist narrative in typical Murakami style. The odd-numbered chapters, set in the near future, follow a ‘Calcutec’, a man who encrypts confidential data in his brain, as he goes on the run from a criminal organisation which wants to steal his thoughts. The even-numbered chapters focus on a man devoid of all memories who arrives in an inescapable fairytale city, where unicorns roam outside the walls and shadows are forcibly removed from inhabitants. As the story progresses it becomes clear that these two narratives are not as disparate as they first appear.

Sample

As dusk falls over the Town, I climb the Watchtower on the western Wall to see the Gatekeeper blow the horn for the herding of the beasts. One long note, then three short notes - such is the prescribed call. Whenever I hear the horn, I close my eyes and let the gentle tones spread through me. They are like none other. Navigating the darkling streets like a pale transparent fish, down cobbled arcades, past the enclosures of houses and stone walls lining the walkways along the river, the call goes out. Everything is immersed in the call. It cuts through invisible airborne sediments of time, quietly penetrating the furthest reaches of the Town.

The verdict

This beautiful and enigmatic novel is pure Murakami - a work of poignant magic realism where the characters have no names and the mundane sits side-by-side with the supernatural. The story weaves together two alternating narratives - one fast-paced Tokyo cyberpunk, the other a poetic and haunting fairytale - which are at first connected only by motifs of unicorn skulls and elegant librarians but gradually become more and more closely entwined as they move towards a superb and powerful ending.

This is a must for fans of Murakami and anyone else who appreciates unconventional storytelling.

Great opening lines

- They put the behemoths in the hold along with the rhinos, the hippos and the elephants.

Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, 1989

- It was the day my grandmother exploded.

Iain Banks, The Crow Road, 1992

- It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.

Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers, 1980 

The First Post

Welcome to my blog about the wonderful world of books.

I will be posting here reviews and comment with a focus on fiction. This will cover a wide range of books from all over the world as I'm quite varied in my reading habits. The classics, contemporary literary fiction, fantasy, ancient epics, children's stories, realism, post-modernism, drama, poetry, short stories, novels... I don't believe in genre stereotyping.

My comment pieces will cover subjects linked to books that I have recently reviewed and issues of particular relevance to the present moment. When writing my reviews I will try to be honest and insightful. I'll be using a marks-out-of-ten scoring system, with only a very special group of books getting the top score. As part of trying to be honest in my reviews I will rate books not on their reputation or influence, but on what they mean to me.

Importantly I will endeavour to keep my reviews spoiler-free and at the top of each comment piece will warn readers of any books that are spoiled by the words that follow.

I hope that you will find these posts useful and enjoyable. Read on!