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.