Month: October 2018

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The Frenetic Life of a Netgalley Reviewer & Favorite Writers’ Bags

If you read blogs or Goodreads reviews, you often see this odd last line:  “Thank you to Netgalley [and X Publisher] for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review.”

And you may ask, What the heck is Netgalley?  Well, it is a website where critics, bloggers, and consumer reviewers can request e-galleys from publishers.

My favorite new book of the year.

Netgalley is a mixed blessing. I have read the best Netgalley books; I have read the worst   Netgalley books.  The biggest temptation: requesting too many books. I’ve been lucky lately.  Three of my favorite books this year are  from Netgalley: Alice Mattison’s counterculture classic, Conscience (which I posted about here), Laura van den Berg’s surreal The Third Hotel (here), and Pat Barker’s retelling of the Iliad, The Silence of the Girls (here).

But what if you dislike a  book?  Yes, we’re doing it “in exchange for an honest review” (theoretically),  but I only trash books I have paid for!  I put aside The Splintering of the American Mind (a controversial book about identity politics) and Zachary Mason’s Metamorphica (a collection of retold myths) because they “were not for me.”

Since professional reviewers do not indulge in public expressions of gratitude–the reverse is far more likely–I email my thanks  to publishers.  (Yes, I have manners.)  Though it is lovely to get new books, it is unnecessary to write a thank-you note in the actual review.

My rule:  don’t let Negalley take over my life.  I don’t want to be that person who allows Netgalley to dictate my reading. Nope, I’ve got to read classics.

Here’s a typical day in the life of a Netgalley reviewer.

  1. Turn off your phone and finish Bloodmoon, Peter Tremayne’s entertaining new Sister Fidelma mystery, only to discover Negalley had archived the book before the publication date –which means I’m too  late with my review!
  2.  My husband has  a broken collarbone so I suggested he write some consumer reviews.   He reads widely, but he refused:  he wants to read what he wants to read.  ( N.B.  He recommends Richard Powers’s The Overstory, which is on the Booker shortlist.)
  3. One e-book was so  crazily formatted that I gave up: the letters “fi” were inadvertently omitted from  words  so that I had to puzzle out that “rm” meant “firm,” “nd” meant “find,” etc.

And now I think I’ll read a classic, because I need a break.

DO YOU SHOP FOR AUTHORS’ TOTE BAGS?  Here are my favorites.

1  I was tempted by this “I heart Mr. Darcy” bag at Barnes and Noble, but I actually “heart” Captain Wentworth.

Catullus bag

2 Here is Catullus’s popular two-line poem (85).  And here is my  literal translation:  “I hate and I love. You probably ask why I do so./  I do not know, but I feel myself suffer and am tortured.”

3.  I doubt Doris Lessing would appreciate this.

4. This bag shows the title of Robert Heinlein’s 1960s  cult  classic, Stranger in a Strange Land.  Loved this book!

5.  Who doesn’t want this cute Mrs. Dalloway bag?

6,  I can’t resist this Dickens knock-off:  A Tale of Two Kitties

7. I love this Jane Eyre bag.

Do let me know your favorite literary tote bags!

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Empowering Women & Three Literary Links

In the last two years, women have boasted about victimhood.

Yes, I know.  It’s very sad.  But we are powerful women now, aren’t we?  And it’s time to tune into that.

I was a victim of statutory rape.  And I pitied the lesbian teacher who seduced me, because she manipulated me with stories of how difficult it was to be gay because people constantly rejected her. When I wrote about  it here  a few years ago, readers misinterpreted it as “a gay thing.” That’s because I wrote about it from my perspective as a teenager, not as a Woman of a Certain Age.  The worst things at age 16 were the bad sex and boredom.

Women need to rediscover their strength and self-reliance! Lightening up is the only way I keep from gnashing my teeth! The Iowa state govenment, under the auspices of Governor Kim Reynolds (a woman), has defunded  Planned Parenthood  and shut down five clinics with devastating repercussions for women’s health.   And, remember, we’ve got to vote for the Democrats in November to refund Planned Parenthood.

AND NOW FOR LITERARY LINKS.

1. Patti Smith writes brilliantly at The Paris Review about Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. (It is actually the foreward to the Penguin Deluxe edition of Little Women.  Here’s the first paragraph.

Perhaps no other book provided a greater guide, as I set out on my youthful path, than Louisa May Alcott’s most beloved novel, Little Women. I was a wiry daydreamer, just ten years old. Life was already presenting challenges for an awkward tomboy growing up in the gender-defined 1950s. Uninterested in preordained activities, I would take off on my blue bicycle, to a secluded place in the woods, and read the books I had checked out, often over and over again, from the local library. I could hardly be found without book in hand and sacrificed sleep and hours at play to enter wholeheartedly each of their unique worlds.

2. Philip Styrt writes a stellar piece at Tor about epigraphs:   “Always Read the Epigraph: A Lesson for Fantasy Readers.”

Begin at the beginning,” the King said gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”— Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Stop!

see you there, with that novel in your hand. Turning to page 1 (or, given the vagaries of publishers, maybe page 3), are you? Starting with the prologue, or the preface, or good old Chapter 1? Well, I’m here to tell you to turn that page back in the other direction and take a look at what you might find lurking in the front matter of the book. No, I’m not talking about the publication information (though I’m sure the Library of Congress would love to feel appreciated) and not even the acknowledgements and the dedication (though while you’re here, why not find out who the author loves?). I’m talking about the epigraph. The little (often italicized) sayings or quotations nestled in the very beginning, right before the action starts: right ahead of that opening paragraph on page 1 you were about to read.

3. Jon Meacham writes at the New York Times that “Henry Adams’s 1880 Novel, ‘Democracy,’ Resonates Now More Than Ever.” 

Meacham wrties,

The enduring relevance of “Democracy” is a tribute to the gifts of Henry Brooks Adams, whose identity as the author was revealed by the publisher after Adams died in 1918. Few people in the midst of the post-Civil War Gilded Age had a better feel for American democracy than Adams. Great-grandson and grandson of presidents, historian, professor and journalist, Adams had left Boston in 1877 for Washington. “I gravitate to a capital as a primary law of nature,” Adams wrote a friend. “This is the only place in America where society amuses me, or where life offers variety.”’

As he worked on his monumental histories of the early Republic, Adams took time to write “Democracy,” a novel that one might have expected if Anthony Trollope and Ward Just had somehow managed to collaborate across time and space. Mrs. Lee, a widow and an idealist about public life, is a desirable catch. Two suitors are especially drawn to her: John Carrington, an aristocratic young Virginian, and the practical and ambitious Senator Silas Ratcliffe, a rising man from Illinois.

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Shopping with My Husband & Stella Gibbons’s “Bassett”

A photo from the ’60s.

Do you feel overwhelmed?  And stiff!

Here’s my latest exercise challenge:  shopping with my husband.

Although I bicycle, nothing prepared me for this shopping trip.  Usually I make the list and he shops (because I distract him with my extravagant love of name-brand canned tomatoes).  But now he has his arm in a sling, so I went with him.

He picked the fruit, I the vegetables.  He made me put them back because they were organic.  Too expensive.

He also taught me to arrange the cart properly.   I wondered, WHY CAN’T THE PIZZA CRUST GO IN THE BACK OF THE CART? WHY DOES IT GO IN THE FRONT?  AND WHY DOES THE MILK GO BENEATH THE CART?  AND WHY DOESN’T THE CAT LITTER GO UNDERNEATH?

This is why we seldom go grocery shopping together.

The most taxing part:  pushing the full shopping cart up the hill to the top of the parking lot.  He tried to pull it from the front, but I would not allow this.

P.S.  He is healing, and that’s what I care about!

BASSETT BY STELLA GIBBONS.

Stella Gibbons, best-known for her satiric first novel, Cold Comfort Farm, the winner of the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize in 1933, wrote over 30 novels and collections of short stories.

And I have enjoyed her realistic novels thoroughly–even more than Cold Comfort Farm, if truth be told.  (See my posts on The Charmers and Westwood.)

Over the summer I read Bassett, a charming novel published in 1934.  Time flies–I meant to post on it earlier–but I’m just getting around to it (and am a little vague on it by now.)  In this delightful novel, Gibbons cleverly explores the worlds of two loosely-connected sets of characters: a couple of middle-aged women who go into business together, and a mismatched young couple down the road who fall in love–but will it last?

This witty novel begins with Gibbons’s description of the eccentric Miss Hilda Baker, a Londoner who works in a pattern-cutting office. “Museums and galleries, dens and historic haunts of peace lay all around Miss Baker, yet she lived as narrowly as a mouse in its hole; and went backwards and forwards between her lodgings and the offices in Reubens Place, for 21 years without  much change being made in her dark ordinary house.”

In the opening scene, Miss Baker is speculating on how she should invest her savings of 300 pounds.  She doesn’t want a car, or to travel. She doesn’t want to fritter away the money.  And so she is intrigued by an ad in Town and Country:  Miss Padsoe, a spinster in a country town, needs a partner in the conversion of her house into a rooming house.  Miss Baker checks it out:  she has a long, uncomfortable trip to the country and is not at all crazy about it. But when her boss sacks her (he is downsizing), she accepts Miss Padsoe’s offer.  And the adventures of Miss Baker and Miss Padsoe–which begin with Miss Padsoe being locked out by the bullying servants–are great fun to read.

Less amusing are the adventures of the aristocratic Shelling family down the road. Queenie Catton, a naive young woman with no job skills, takes a job as  Mrs. Shelling’s companion.  George, the sophisticated son of the house, falls in love with Queenie, though his sister Bell warns him Queenie is not their kind and that it would be wrong to seduce her.  If only Queenie had realized that he was a little too close to his sister Bell–but Queenie doesn’t understand their near-incestuous relationship.

I loved the parts about Miss Baker and Miss Padsoe. A lively novel–so much fun!  even though it is uneven.