Margaret's Column

After reading Stephen King’s The Dark Tower and Peter Matthiessen’s brilliant Shadow Country back to back, I decided I needed something light. (after Shadow Country, something by Brian Moore or Cormac McCarthy would qualify). So I’m reading Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch.

Pratchett is light, and frequently hilarious, but he’s never frivolous; behind the funny exterior, he has a lot to say about power, and the uses and misuses thereof, corruption, and the daily struggle to just keep one’s feet in an uncertain world. When I read his books I keep a pencil handy to mark these little insights; I think he’s as profound as Swift. Why he never quite gets his due critically is beyond me. (Well, actually it’s not. He writes fantasy, doesn’t he? Thus his work is nothing but light escapism. Lord, I hate snobbery.)

Next, I will probably FINALLY get to Dan Simmons’s Rise of Endymion, which, like Night Watch, has been sitting on my shelf for some time. Simmons is another seriously underrated writer. This man wants readers to think. And his erudition floors me.

Since the Simmons I have is an omnibus of Endymion and Rise of Endymion, that will take me through most of February. I think Cold Mountain will be next; it seems more like winter read than something for sunny weather. I haven’t read this since it was new, so I’m looking forward to it.

Then what? Actually, I don’t know. Perhaps something new will appear, maybe in the book club circular, that I simply must read. I owe great thanks to the science fiction book club, which is where I discovered Simmons, Pratchett, Naomi Novik and Patrick Rothfuss.

So, I see that my ‘list’ takes me through February at the furthest. Perhaps that’s as it should be-this isn’t a list for class, after all. Perhaps after that I won’t even worry about it; I’ll just prowl around and see what looks good to me, or if my mother recommends something. Right now she's prodding me to read The Divine Comedy. I promised her I'll think about it. 

Houghton Mifflin, Tolkien’s own publisher, froze acquisitions and laid off a bunch of people. This means they’re not buying any new manuscripts. It’s chilling, all right.

Borders Booksellers, the second-largest chain in the country, is undergoing a ‘restructuring’. Meaning, most likely, closed stores, lost jobs, and less selection at remaining stores.

Just last week, yet another phony ‘memoir’ was exposed-after a ringing endorsement from Oprah Winfrey and a movie deal. Herman Rosenblat’s touching story of two children helping each other survive to Holocaust, only to meet on a blind date years later, turned out to be a total fabrication. I think that’s three (or is it four?) fake memoirs in the past year. No industry needs that kind of black eye.

So, what’s to blame for all of this? The industry itself, of course.

Some time ago, I’m guessing the late seventies or early eighties, publishing decided to adopt the Hollywood model; acquire product that will move fast, build franchises/series/brand names (I’m always suspicious of a book whose author gets a bigger font size than the title). Work for the quick turnaround. Occasionally publish a smaller, ‘prestige’ book to let people know you still care about good writing.

I suppose this worked for a while, but in the end it was doomed to crash and burn. The reason is simple: Books are not movies.

True, both (or good ones, at least) can take you to other worlds, engage your heart and mind, make you think, make you cry. But the experience is different. Put five hundred people in front of a screen and run the flick, they’ll get everything at the same time, the dialog, that fiery explosion, that thrilling sunset. Give the same people a book, and very likely none of them will be on the same paragraph at the same instant. Some people read more slowly, some like to go back and reread little passages just because the writing stirred them, or maybe they missed some little bit and need to refresh.

But publishers got greedy. They wanted the quick turnaround and they began super-hyping star authors at the expense of lesser-knowns. When Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince was published in 2005, Scholastic spent eight million dollars on promotion. Never mind that the book promoted itself, never mind that Scholastic must have had dozens of new authors whose work needed the boost. But these days most of the big houses leave new authors on their own when it comes to marketing, which makes one wonder why they picked up the book in the first place.

Now they’re in trouble, and we’ll all lose because of it. We lose because new books that don’t ‘fit the profile’ won’t get published, (Twelve years ago, twenty publishers rejected Cold Mountain. Would anyone pick it up under today’s conditions?) . We lose because more books will go out of print, and because the houses that survive will publish more hum-drum retreads in the hope that they'll sell.

This probably isn't as dire is it looks. This is a shaking-out rather than the apocalypse. The world is still full of people who love to read, and they will demand good books. But shakings-out can be uncomfortable, even traumatic. A lot of people will lose their jobs and a lot of imprints will disappear. It will be interesting to see who survives.

I think the best outcome would be the death of the huge publishing conglomerates and the return of smaller houses that are truly independent. Even now, the few smaller publishers that remain are putting out better work than the biggies (on the whole at least). On-line publishing and self-publishing will also fill the gap. I think that in five years, the industry will look very different.

Let's see if we can all hang on.

 Check out this article from The Nation, where Mr. Engelhardt draws comparisons to what's happening in publishing to the mess in other industries.

www.thenation.com/doc/20090105/engelhardt

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions-at least not the way most people use that term. I don’t vow to lose weight (don’t really need to) or get more exercise (get plenty already). But the first week of the New Year is a good time to begin things I’ve been thinking about anyway.

Part of this is the combination of the weather and post -Christmas doldrums. January in Southern Oregon tends to be cold and foggy, with intermittent rain and snow. And all the bright lights and festive decorations are put away for another year. With no more holidays to look forward too, it’s pretty dreary. Setting goals and beginning new projects raises the energy level. If you feel gloomy and depressed, just clean out your closets-you’ll feel better.

Of course, this may also be the reason that so many don’t keep their resolutions; the cold gloom all around them just screams ‘what’s the point’? Perhaps we should move New Year’s to the spring equinox. Warmer weather, the return of growing things, baseball-people might have more incentive. Just a suggestion.

Part of it too, I suppose, is that I’m getting older; time no longer seems limitless, the way it did twenty or even fifteen years ago. I may seem a bit young to be facing down my mortality, but I have reached an age where I realize that every day counts, and that only elderly people call me a kid (little kids call me ‘ma’am).

So here’s what I hope to accomplish this year, in no particular order.

1. Get the second volume of the Lorrondon Cycle out. I actually have people who are waiting for it. Not many, but every little bit of encouragement tastes like Prime Rib. I also hope to finish the third book. The draft is about to go to my editor, a.k.a. Mom.

2. Organize my reading list. Sometimes I finish a book and then flail for a couple of days, deciding what to read next. All the while I feel I’m wasting time. So, when I finish Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country, I think I’ll start Dan Simmons’s Endymion, which has been sitting on my shelf for about eighteen months. I’ve already sworn to buy no more books until February. I’m drowning in them already.

3. Clean out my den. This room is full of boxes that are full of things I can probably do without, like issues of Entertainment Weekly from 2004. It’s one of my favorite magazines, but still!

4. Get better on the chores. Sometimes I let laundry sit in the basket for two days before I finally put it away. That’s just laziness.

Hmm. Not an overly ambitious list, but it should keep me busy through the winter. Perhaps in the spring I’ll revisit this, see where I am, and what more needs to be done.