Writers including Matt Haig, Gina Miller and Cressida Cowell give their new year's reading resolutions
Links of the week December 23 2019 (52)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
30 December 2019
Matt Haig
I have been very dark and gloomy with my reading habits this year, perhaps in tune with the social mood. Like a pig sniffing for truffles, I am going to hunt out humour and hope in the new year, and plan to reread Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy quartet, which I haven't done since I was a teenager.
I have been told that Mr Fox by Helen Oyeyemi is very funny, so I will get that too. I also want to read Pablo Neruda's Odes to Common Things as I am a fan of Neruda and have never read it. It is about the pleasure we can take in everyday items in the world around us, from soap to tomatoes, and I am thinking it will be the perfect antidote to all the big-picture worrying the world is encouraging us to do. I feel a lot of us need to reconnect with the immediacy of the world around us, and so I will seek out books like this, in order to stay (relatively) hopeful about life.
As if the year wasn't bad enough, in 2019 we were obliged to say goodbye to far too many members of the worldwide literary community-from the universally beloved to the highly controversial, from the mega-famous to those who worked tirelessly behind the scenes. So before we break for the holiday, consider this a final farewell to some of the writers, editors, and booksellers we lost this year-though it is certain that for most, this tribute will not be their last.
Prolific and widely loved poet Mary Oliver died early this year at the age of 83. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for her collection American Primitive, and a National Book Award in 1992 for her New and Selected Poems. Known for her simple phrasing and her odes to the natural world-and also, if less so, for her eroticism-she was the rare kind of poet whose work sold, and it seems to have filtered down to just about everyone (i.e. not just habitual readers of poetry).
As a book publishing phenomenon, young adult literature entered the decade like a lion. At the beginning of the 2010s, a generation that had grown up obsessed with Harry Potter and other middle-grade fantasy series decided it wasn't that interested in adult literary fiction, with its often lackadaisical plotting and downbeat endings. YA stood ready to supply them with plenty of action, cliffhangers, supernatural beings, mustache-twirling bad guys, and true love. But now, at decade's end, YA seems to be eating itself alive.
By 2010, Stephenie Meyers' Twilight had already proven that a multivolume YA franchise with a romantic triangle and lashings of paranormal brooding could be a virtual license to mint money, especially when the inevitable movie deal came along. Then the 2012 film version of Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games, a series already enormously popular in print, was a hit in theaters, adding dystopian yarns to the roster of blockbuster YA themes. To distinguish themselves in an increasingly crowded field, the genre's characters sported ever-stranger and even outright gimmicky special powers-the ability to manipulate iron or kill with a touch or turn into a bee-and they wrestled with societies that dictated who they married, segregated them into factions based on temperament, or subjected them to surgery that eradicated their ability to love. Dystopia was a trenchant genre for middle-class kids who grew up heavily surveilled by parents and social media, as well as pressured to vie for their spot in a relentless meritocracy starting from grade school.
I won't start with Franzen, because nobody needs that. Not anymore. So let's just start with the women.
In late March 2011, the New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman interviewed Jennifer Egan about her new novel-in-stories, A Visit from the Goon Squad. It was Egan's fourth book, following a string of minor hits, and it was also that rare event in 21st century publishing - a cyclone of critical and commercial triumph, from airport tables to book-review pages. Treisman read aloud a note from a reader who explained that Egan's writing made her want to "discontinue her subscription to her antidepressants." Goon Squad was a hybrid miracle, a brilliantly arranged postmodern collage with a beating heart warm enough to render SRRI's obsolete. Who knew that could still happen?
The first 400 words of my novel, Adjustments, were written mostly to prove to my publisher, who had asked for the story, that I had no novel to write. I was a non-fiction, just-the-facts writer who had read little fiction as an adult, let alone had any interest in writing it.
The next 138,000 or so words were written to outrun the plot bearing down on me like a gravel truck on the highway. My publisher, unconvinced of my alleged novel-writing improbability, not only encouraged me to continue (and I, apparently, acquiesced), but once several thousand words and the faintest outlines of a real plot had started to take shape, she began to publish the story online in serial installments.
"It's the way Dickens got things going," she said. "It'll work out fine."
Writing a novel serially for release in real-time is a process that, like trying to outrun that truck on the highway, can be both exhilarating and exhausting. You experience the immediate delight of moving a story forward and receiving feedback from readers as the story unfolds. But it also means ongoing pressure that comes when you don't always see the next act unfolding. I don't know if I would write a story in this format again. What I do know is I would remind myself of some things next time.
In the summer of 2018, Putnam published an unusual debut novel by a retired wildlife biologist named Delia Owens. The book, which had an odd title and didn't fit neatly into any genre, hardly seemed destined to be a blockbuster, so Putnam printed about 28,000 copies.
It wasn't nearly enough.
A year and a half later, the novel, "Where the Crawdads Sing," an absorbing, atmospheric tale about a lonely girl's coming-of-age in the marshes of North Carolina, has sold more than four and a half million copies. It's an astonishing trajectory for any debut novelist, much less for a reclusive, 70-year-old scientist, whose previous published works chronicled the decades she spent in the deserts and valleys of Botswana and Zambia, where she studied hyenas, lions and elephants.
As the end of 2019 approaches, "Crawdads" has sold more print copies than any other adult title this year - fiction or nonfiction - according to NPD BookScan, blowing away the combined print sales of new novels by John Grisham, Margaret Atwood and Stephen King. Putnam has returned to the printers nearly 40 times to feed a seemingly bottomless demand for the book. Foreign rights have sold in 41 countries.
There's a joke the rest of the world (and maybe America too?) shares about the baseball World Series-series it may be; world it ain't. The recent CrimeReads "The Rising Stars of Crime Fiction in the 2010s" list was excellent-but of the 12 profiled authors all were either from the USA or Canada with one Brit. America and Canada are great, but hey, it's a big wide crime world out there in the other 95% of the world's population.
So, okay...I think we can be a bit more globally-minded while keeping to the CrimeReads stated criteria (that, perhaps having published earlier, their career has really taken off in the last decade) for inclusion with one extra caveat, for being global-I'll only include those either writing in English or translated into English. And I have to confess, I'm not a committee, it's just me.... and all suggested additions and recommendations welcome....
So here goes ... starting in Europe...
With new takes on Little Women and A Christmas Carol this month, we're doing a Tomatometer deep dive into reboots to ask whether TV is better than film, whether big changes work, and more.
In 1896, a 45-second clip featuring a segment from the book Trilby and Little Billee was produced and started a 123-year old trend of literary works being adapted into films or television shows (and being adapted again and again). With films Little Women (2019), West Side Story (2020, pictured above), Wendy (2020), Emma (2020), and television movie A Christmas Carol (2019) and limited series War of the Worlds (2020) on the horizon, we decided to take a deep dive into the Tomatometer to see which of the literary adaptations are the Freshest, and which are the Rottenest (it's a word).
We pulled the data on 32 books that have at least three feature-length movies (80-plus minutes) or television shows with Tomatometer scores (don't ask about Gone Girl, it's only been adapted once) and created a dataset of 145 movies. We chose to exclude comic-book adaptations and movies like Godzilla that have copious reboots - it's nothing personal, we just wanted to stick with literary adaptations.