Audiobooks are having a moment. As they soar in popularity, they are becoming increasingly creative - is the book you listen to now an artform in its own right, asks Clare Thorp.
Links of the week January 1 2020 (01)
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:
6 January 2020
Back in 1878, shortly after he had invented the phonograph, Thomas Edison hit upon an idea. Leaning over his new machine one day he recited the words: "Mary had a little lamb. Its fleece was white as snow." As he created the first ever audio of the spoken word, Edison dreamed that the technology might one day allow a whole novel to be recorded. Fast forward nearly 150 years, and he'd be pretty impressed to find more than 400,000 audiobooks available to download straight into his pocket.
I've always sort of wondered what I wasn't getting about "Little Women."
I'm pretty sure I read it in school, though I would be hard-pressed to recall a single scene. I know I saw at least part of the 1994 film - the one with Winona Ryder, Claire Danes and Christian Bale - but I remember walking out of the room midway through and never returning, much to my mother's dismay.
Nothing about the March sisters of Louisa May Alcott's perennial best seller particularly stuck with me, and as an adult, annoyance overshadowed apathy as I tried to understand how the literary heroine of so many women I admired - the spunky, independent writer Jo March - would, by the end of the novel, relinquish her art for marriage, and then proclaim that she is the happiest she'd ever been.
What was I missing?
It appears that what I was missing was Greta Gerwig - along with the real-life story of Alcott, on whose life the book was based, with a few major differences.
Of course, Gerwig isn't the first to change the way "Little Women" gets told. People have been adapting, and then critiquing, and then adapting, and then critiquing it for decades - each iteration a kind of Rorschach test for how the world feels about women at the time.
This generation of kids has access to an abundance of digital information and technology from a very young age. And that means that the skill sets of these kids are completely different from those of their parents when they were children. Research by Kids Insights shows how much technology is going to change the future of workforces, with as many as one in four children already having learned to code to some extent. Growing up digital natives, they are acquiring specific skills - often passively while enjoying other entertainments and interests.
As children especially become increasingly involved in social activism, they're also becoming more conscious of their favourite brands' actions - and this is influencing their choices. Global consumers, down to the very youngest, are seeking out companies that care about environmental issues.
"Nobody knows anything ... Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time it's a guess and, if you're lucky, an educated one."
That's what William Golding said in his 1983 book, Adventures in the Screen Trade. He was talking about the Hollywood movie industry, but he might just as well have been talking about today's publishing industry.
Justin Ractliffe, the new publishing director at Penguin Random House Australia, quotes Golding in a report he's just made to the industry, based on a study tour to the US. Funded by a Copyright Agency fellowship, he did a lot of researching and interviewing and compared the publishing business to another company producing mass entertainment, Netflix.
You've been there. You're having dinner with friends, talking up a storm. After a laugh or a sigh, the conversation falls to silence. You've exhausted a topic. The silence feels awkward, and no one puts forward a new topic. How do you tolerate that moment of nothing?
The most basic way to imply time passing is to announce the time. Then depict some activities. Then give the time. Boring stuff. Another way is to list the activities, giving lots of details, task after task, and to suddenly arrive at the streetlights blinking on or a chorus of mothers calling their kids to dinner. And these methods are fine, if you want to risk losing your reader's interest. Besides, in Minimalist writing abstract measurements such as two o'clock or midnight are frowned upon for reasons we'll discuss in the section on Establishing Your Authority.
A white romance novelist's ethics complaint against the author Courtney Milan for calling her book a "racist mess" led to the censure of Milan and sparked an uproar across the publishing world. Now the novelist, Kathryn Lynn Davis, says that her original complaint about the professional harm she suffered was not accurate.
In an interview with the Guardian, Davis said she was "encouraged" by the administration of Romance Writers of America (RWA), a trade association for romance writers, to file a formal complaint against Milan, an influential former board member and diversity advocate. She now feels she had been "used" to secure a political outcome that she had never intended.
As a controversy over bias and a lack of transparency at the Romance Writers of America continues to roil the country's foremost writers association for romance writers, the RWA has announced that it will postpone the 2020 RITA Contest until next year. The RITA Award is the U.S.'s top prize for romance fiction.
"Due to recent events in RWA, many in the romance community have lost faith in RWA's ability to administer the 2020 RITA contest fairly, causing numerous judges and entrants to cancel their participation," the RWA said in a release. "The contest will not reflect the breadth and diversity of 2019 romance novels/novellas and thus will not be able to fulfill its purpose of recognizing excellence in the genre. For this reason, the Board has voted to cancel the contest for the current year. The plan is for next year's contest to celebrate 2019 and 2020 romances."
I've always been a slow reader. I've loved books since I was a kid, but I didn't identify as a voracious reader until grad school. My writing professors touted the importance of students reading thousands of books before taking a stab at penning their own. So, in an effort to maintain positive habits after graduation, I decided to track my reading.
I'd jumped on the habit-tracking train before: daily words written, weekly miles run. For a while, I even tracked the minutes I wasted on social media (I don't recommend this-it's too depressing). The outer accountability of habit tracking has helped me form healthier routines and utilize my time more wisely. I set my first annual reading goal at 40 books, finishing the final page of book number 40 before the ball dropped that New Year's Eve.
As the year progressed, I read several books I wasn't wild about. In the past, I've always felt at peace with abandoning a book before finishing it. Why waste time on a book I don't love, trudging through to reach an ending that won't satisfy? But reading a book a week made it harder to justify abandonment. I didn't want to fall behind-like I said, Goodreads will tell you when you do. And the thought of that sent my Type A brain into a tailspin. So I wound up finishing several books I felt lukewarm about from the very first chapters. I bolted through short story anthologies cover to cover, most of which I ordinarily would've thumbed through, reading only the stories with openings that piqued my interest. The pressure to finish books sucked some of the day-to-day joy out of my reading life.