Loneliness - WHITE OLEANDER

Hannah Arendt made loneliness the condition of totalitarianism, as well as its consequence. Janet Fitch knows loneliness to be the very wind that blows through existence. In Los Angeles, it goes by the name of the Santa Anas--the gust that opens White Oleander and continues to blow until you are immune to it, or it swallows you whole, which pretty much amounts to the same thing.

Somehow I missed this book in 1999 when it came out. So, belatedly...like most good things in my life. Everything is steal-able in this book. But two lines I dog-eared:

"Save your poet's sympathy and find some better believer. Just because a poet said something didn't mean it was true, only that it sounded good" (349).

And,

"I couldn't stop thinking about the body, what a hard fact it was. That philosopher who said we think, therefore we are, should have spent an hour in the maternity ward of Waite Memorial Hospital. He'd have had to change his whole philosophy.

The mind was so thin, barely a spiderweb, with all its fine thoughts, aspirations, and beliefs in its own importance. Watch how easily it unravels, evaporates under the first lick of pain....The body was the only reality. I hurt, therefore I am" (401).

Finally, back to my own writing after such a long hiatus...

Origin Stories - AND I DARKEN

Besides the addictive opening hook to this story--a gender-bending tale of Vlad the Impaler's history, re-imagined as the female badass, Lada the Impaler--the book does so many things well. Kiersten White is just a solid writer who tells a layered story. And neither the strong female protagonist or her brother, who questions his own sexuality as he discovers his love for another man, feel gimmicky. In fact, all the characters seem completely authentic, and their development is slow--in a good way--and considered.

But what I most want to steal from this book, besides the feel of something epic and gathering, like a storm, is the haunting presence of origin stories. Mehmed, heir to the Ottoman sultan's throne, explains to Lada why he must conquer Constantinople.

He says, "My whole country was founded on a dream. Less than two hundred years ago we were nothing but a tribe, running from the Mongols, with no home of our own. But our leader--my ancestor--Osman Gazi dreamed we could be more. He saw a moon rise from the breast of a great sheikh and descend into his own. From his navel grew a tree, and its branches spread to cover the world" (370).

I want the entire tone of my next work to be that lush mythological imagining.

Confessions - TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

Ok, this is not something to admit out loud, but I'm in a confessional mood, so here goes... I never read Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird in school. Either we weren't assigned it, or I cliff-noted my way through it. In any case, I'm so happy I didn't, because I just got the chance to experience it for the first time--as an adult and an aspiring writer--and I'm just blown away. Besides amazing dialogue and a protagonist to make you weep, laugh out loud, and actually give a shit about the story, there are a few things I want to steal from this book.

1. Few adverbs. Maybe it's because I recently finished Stephen King's On Writing, which should be required reading for every writer (and he loathes the adverb with a kind of religious fervor), it's hard not to be indoctrinated. So I was on the hunt for adverbs in this book, and happy to find that they didn't clutter up the sentences like they're wont to do.

2. Bookends. The beginning and ending of this novel are in perfect communication with one another. Go back and re-read the opening after you finish the book, and you can see the work of a skilled storyteller. Everything feels necessary without being heavy-handed.

I have a feeling I'll be plundering the gems of this book for a while.

The Righteous Feeling of Being Wronged - BIG LITTLE LIES

Ignoring the fact that every book these days seems to have the words "Lies/Liars" or "Girl" in the title, Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty was a super fun read. I'd never read anything by her before, but walking around with the book, I was shocked by how many friends said, "Oh, I read every single thing she writes." So, clearly, I'm late to the game.

One of the things Moriarty does so well - besides humor (and sentiment without being sentimental) - is cut to the chase of certain, fundamental human behaviors that feel familiar, even if you've never been in the exact position as her characters.

For example:

"He turned off the bathroom light. They both went to opposite sides of the bed, snapped on their bedside lamps and pulled back the cover in a smooth, practiced, synchronized move that proved, depending on Madeline's mood, that they either had the perfect marriage or that they were stuck in a middle-class suburban rut and they needed to sell the house and go traveling around India."

...and kinda just perfectly captures the pendulum swing that the mind is capable of depending on the vagaries of mood. So, yeah, I'll steal that.

And this one:

"It was over now. There would be no further recriminations about the party. In fact, the very opposite. He'd be tender and solicitous. For the next few days up until he left for his trip, no woman would be more cherished than Celeste. Part of her would enjoy it: the tremulous, teary, righteous feeling of being wronged."

The Righteous Feeling of Being Wronged. Yes, who hasn't milked that feeling for all it's worth at some point or another?! So, I'll take that one, too.

Restraint - WE WERE LIARS

Thinking about my next book project, and the first ideas that come to me are not about plot, but about atmosphere. A book that is pared down. A book that makes inferences rather than hits you upside the head with information. A book that is closer to abstract painting than photorealism.

Something about We Were Liars by E. Lockhart captures this. There is an economy of language. Short sentences. Concise paragraphs.

"Next day Mirren and I take the small motorboat to Edgartown without permission.
The boys don't want to come. They are going kayaking.
I drive and Mirren trails her hand in the wake.
Mirren isn't wearing much: a daisy-print bikini top and a denim miniskirt."

And it goes on like this. Sentences that say more than they say. And that's important in order for the book to pull off its final reveal.

I'm hoping to channel just a bit of that quiet, confident sense of language that trusts the reader just enough so that the reader rises to the occasion.

Into the Shuffle - THE PERFORMANCE

As my first novel, No Winter Angel, comes to a close, there is one outstanding debt that I have not written about here--in part, because I read it so long ago, but it has stayed with me, probably informing lots of things I don't even realize.

It's a short story by Arthur Miller called "The Performance," and actually, I discovered it by way of a song that I heard in 2003 by Erin Mckeown, entitled "An Innocent Fiction." She'd read Miller's story and wrote this beautiful homage to it.

"The Performance" is about a Jewish tap dancer from the United States who travels to Europe in the 1930s and winds up dancing in a private show for Hitler, who subsequently falls in love with the performance without realizing that the performer is Jewish. Just the idea itself is so powerful. And I was--and continue to be--struck by the "breathtaking idea of a government" taking interest in a dance. And how intoxicating that must feel to the dancer, even if the government is repugnant and vile.

I had to explore the complex way this must play out in the artist's mind. When you read the dance scene in No Winter Angel, this is the image I want to convey. The terror and the power and the intoxication that make any simple moral judgment suspect.

And this image of Hitler, almost childlike in his awe and carnal in his enthusiasm, stays with me: "The troupe went into the stomp, shoes drumming the stage floor, and Hitler seemed transfixed now, swept up in the booming rhythms, both clenched fists pressing down on the tabletop, his neck stretched taut, his mouth slightly agape. 'I thought we were looking at an orgasm,' Harold said." Indeed!

The Game Is Never Over - READY PLAYER ONE

I could not put this book down. Ernest Cline is a kick-ass writer who tells one compelling story. A month ago, I got the chance to play with an HTC Vive virtual reality visor, and when I told the guys who owned it that I was doing "research" for my book, they said, "WHAT!? You haven't read Ready Player One!" So, off I went to read it in hopes of not being an ignoramus. And now all I want is a haptic suit, gloves, and my own private bay to explore the OASIS.

The cover says Willy Wonka meets The Matrix, and I was like, "um...that sounds ridiculous." Actually, it's kinda spot on and the scavenger hunt for James Halliday's golden egg has you turning pages like you're reading for your life.

Thievery for the day: keep the stakes high, folks. The book doesn't pull its punches. Players die. Avatars die. Love is found and love is lost and you hold your breath until the bitter end.

Read My Thoughts - THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO

I picked up this book because an agent who read the first draft of my manuscript said that there was a definite camaraderie between my work and Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking trilogy, the first book of which is The Knife of Never Letting Go.

So first things first, nicest compliment ever. If there's any resonance between our writing styles, nothing makes me happier.

As far as my usual plundering goes, however, I think I have to pass on stealing anything from this book. In part because there's already so much crossover. Not least of which is the similarity between Todd's home, Prentisstown, and Avie's, Perontess. But also the dogged secrets that follow the protags around like an undetonated bomb waiting to go off.

So instead, I'll just leave this book with my highest praise. The language, the Noise, the very play with typography itself was so unique and compelling, it just felt like something new and different.

Here's to hoping I follow in Ness's footsteps!

Salivating - PROMISED LAND

My dad has always been a fan of my writing, but, he's drawn to a very different kind of narrative. Punchy sentences. Linear plot. Nothing mystical. Straightforward. Since he knows I'm writing a book, he wanted me to read one of his favorite authors--someone who "really knows how to tell a great story." He gave me Robert B. Parker, Promised Land (1976).

First off, I now realize that my dad's favorite kind of speech is basically a mix of W.C. Fields and Parker's Private Dick, Spenser (does he even have a first name? I've already forgotten it, if it's included in the novel at all). A kinda wise-guy, speak out the side of your mouth tone. Some beating people up (who obviously deserve it), some bending of the rules (whose violation only reinforces how misguided those rules are in the first place), some acts of restraint and a few bite-sized words of wisdom. All in all, not a bad read.

But the funny thing is, while I was expecting it to be a tough guy book through and through, it turns out to be so completely laden with gourmet food imagery ("My platter of hot hors d'oeuvres included a clam casino, an oyster Rockefeller, a fried shrimp, a soused shrimp and a stuffed mushroom cap"), you almost can't go two pages without getting a reference. In between thug encounters ("You wise bastard. I'm going to straighten you out right now"), you are practically bombarded with food. Entire paragraphs of it.

"I made a Greek salad with feta cheese and ripe olives and Susan set the table while I took the lamb cutlets out of the pan and cooked down the wine. I shut off the heat, put in a lump of unsalted butter, swirled it through the wine essence and poured it over the cutlets. With the meal we had a warm Syrian bread and most of a half gallon of California Burgundy."

And there are two things of which I'm almost 100% positive: my father would not remember or overtly notice those food references (believing the book to be basically ass-kicking and good sleuthing) AND that those passages dramatically increase the pleasurability of the book. They make your mouth water. They make you feel like you've participated in a good meal.

In the end, with writing it's not just what you do front and center, but what you smuggle in. Sometimes a well-described meal is exactly what is needed.

Agony and Anguish - RABBIT, RUN

For a while now, I've been struggling with a title for my book - and the two books that will follow to make up the trilogy. First mistake, give the title so much power that you can't help but buckle under its impossible edict.

Should you decide to do a search on "how to title a novel," hoping to find some bit of inspiration, you'll find the same vague suggestions over and over. Use the hero's name or the villain's name or aspects of their character or place or a metaphor. The list goes on. But for me, it failed to inspire.

So, Rabbit, Run. John Updike does so much here. So much to steal--from the richness of a protagonist that you simultaneously care about and despise, to the impending sense of claustrophobia that existence seems to usher in underhandedly ("As he closes the door he feels he has spent his whole life opening and closing this door"), to the impossibility of simple resolution.

But what I need most right now is title guidance, and here, at least, I have my first step forward.

Rabbit, Run. An imperative. Maybe instead of trying to pull a title intact from the narrative, I start with mood. Grammatical mood. A command. Run, hold, steal, breathe. That at least feels like a start.

Tidal Imaginings - MOON PALACE

Pulled into this book so forcefully...a book where so little actually happens. Boxes of books double as furniture, time passes by virtue of books consumed (not so much read as felt with the tip of a finger), weight is lost, fathers are lost, money is lost, and all of it is ultimately found in one way or another.

There is so much to steal from Paul Auster--but first and foremost, the general ambiance of M.S. Fogg's narrative voice (which sounds like a boat name to me). 

A few lines that I will either steal verbatim (epigraph?) or at least, steal in spirit: 

"My life had become a gathering zero, and it was a thing I could actually see: a palpable, burgeoning emptiness...The room was a machine that measured my condition: how much of me remained, how much of me was no longer there. I was both perpetrator and witness, both actor and audience in a theater of one. I could follow the progress of my own dismemberment. Piece by piece, I could watch myself disappear" (24).

"Byrne told me that you can't fix your exact position on earth without referring to some point in the sky. Something to do with triangulation, the technique of measurement, I forget the details. The crux was compelling to me, though, it's never left me since. A man can't know where he is on the earth except in relation to the moon or a star. ... We find ourselves only by looking to what we're not. You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky" (151-2). 

Elevated - ELEANOR AND PARK

Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor and Park: a kind of brutal honesty--a not shirking from imperfection, from characters' own hangups over their imperfections. Which, by some strange alchemy, transforms them into something desirable, extraordinary, dimensional.

Too many great things to say about this book--the narrative voice(s), the awkward stumble-and-fall into love, the mounting anxiety that shit is going to hit the fan, the three-word postcard that narrows hope to a fine point.

What I'm stealing: a powerful self-consciousness about who one is that feels true. It ends up being the thing that makes us root for Eleanor and Park and fall in love with their love.

What They Say - RUNAWAY

The profound loneliness that belongs to love. It's there in Alice Munro's Runaway...making you almost long for the quiet pain of it all, the muted ache, the underside of love.

For some reason, I found myself nostalgic for a time and place I have never experienced--not fin de siècle Paris or early 20th century New York, which it's easy to romanticize. Something colder, more remote. The desolation of small lake towns in Canada in the 70s and 80s, of winters without end on a remote farm off some dusty road. Places where it makes sense that love perhaps always leaves you empty and fulfilled all at once. 

But that's not what I'm stealing here. Instead, I'm interested in the way Munro taps into the language of ordinary things. The way the world communicate with us, telling us how things are, the way metaphor smuggles in deeper truths. 

"The eyelids pressed down heavily, like punishment, over her faded eyes" (Powers).

And mouths: "She was a slim suntanned woman in a purple dress, with a matching wide purple band holding back her dark hair. Handsome, but with little pouches of boredom or disapproval hiding in the corners of her mouth" (Passion).

"He had a high pale forehead, a crest of tight curly gray-black hair, bright gray eyes, a wide thin-lipped mouth that seemed to curl in on some vigorous impatience, or appetite, or pain" (Passion). 

And rooms: "Along with the hard pressure of the light and the noise, there was the same feeling she got now in her own house, and that other people coming into her house must be aware of even more strongly.

     The feeling of something being out of kilter, in a way that could not be fixed or altered but only resisted, as well as you could" (Powers). 

So It Goes - SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE

Picked up Slaughterhouse Five yesterday and devoured it. Today, can't get Kurt Vonnegut's narrative voice out of my head. Humor and heartache and fabulous fantastical time-traveling reed of a character in Billy Pilgrim.

I love this line, among others: "And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.
She was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes."

In a book where plundering a teapot gets you shot by a firing squad, here's what I'm stealing: the act of restraint. Not ramming something down a reader's throat, but placing it on the tongue. Letting it dissolve in time.

The Future is Nigh - FOUNDATION AND EMPIRE

When I was an undergrad, a philosophy professor of mine told our class that we'd better learn to "read with charity." The comment was directed at those students who flippantly dismissed Aristotle or who were quick to claim that Kant was a moron or that Heidegger simply got it all wrong. To read with charity is to assume from the outset that the text knows something you don't...and that the canon is not made up of dithering idiots, even if it should always invite healthy debate.

It is in the vein that I read Isaac Asimov's celebrated work, Foundation and Empire. Everyone under the sun (who reads and loves science fiction) has insisted I read it if I am writing (even remotely) in the field.

So, I guess I feel guilty (of foolish?!) for not loving it. Although the energy of the book picked up as it went along, I didn't get lost in the story, or connect with any of the characters per se. I wasn't bowled over by the language or flipping pages like a ravenous reader. Sill, it feels smart and complex and there are certain ideas that I know will find their way into Avie's world.

As for the plunder: The idea of psychohistory...something determinate--if not on the individual level, as least when it comes to humanity en masse. The future-seeing of Hari Seldon, which hovers over the work in mythical proportions, is linked in certain ways to my own clairvoyants, the Severii, for whom the future is both already-written and revisable.

Scaffolding of the Gods - THE WISE MAN'S FEAR

As the Violent Femme’s say, “Everything, everything, everything, everything.”

There's so much goodness in The Wise Man's Fear, follow-up to the equally amazing first book in the series, The Name of the Wind.

Patrick Rothfuss has the gift of narrative, pulling us in with magic and desire and betrayal. There's so much to steal here, but Avie needs one thing in particular from this book. 

What I’m stealing: The myth-making that functions at the depths of this story. Not just the Chandrian. or the Edema Ruh; not the legacy of magicians at the Unversity, or even the power of a Name. It is the myth of the moon--the beautiful way it elevates the entire story into the realm of the gods. I will take that, thank you very much. 

Holding Out - THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS

The other week I told my friend Becky that I wanted to up the ante with Avie - the girl needs gifts in a major way. Becky said, "Oh, you should read The Girl with All the Gifts" (M.R. Carey).

Hmmm.

So, a post-apocalyptic zombie story - again! Meh, I thought.

But I was so wrong. Which just goes to show that good writing is oxygen for a claustrophobic genre.

Stealing from this book: sometimes we love a character more for hating him in the beginning. Transformation is hugely satisfying. Even small acts of decency can appear as kindness when a character begins as an asshole....perhaps just a truism about life (and about 90% of my crushes from junior high onward).

:)