Characters to hate

I've dealt with my favourite characters, but what about the least favourite?

I often find that the characters I truly despise aren't the villains and the supervillains- there is pleasure in disliking these, they are literary devices and they are there to be disliked. But what about the characters towards whom I'm supposed to feel sympathetic, and simply don't? Those, I really cannot forgive.

1. Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë – there seems to be nothing to Heathcliff’s personality but abuse and manipulation. He was bent on destroying the lives of all he knew, including the woman he was supposed to love. Where is the heroism in that?

2. David Meredith, My Brother Jack, by George Johnston – David’s self-serving morality never won any points with me. Even worse, he recognized his own failures and refused to do anything about them.

3. Queen Jadis, The Magician’s Nephew, by C.S. Lewis – In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the White Witch is something of a literary device, a villain, not truly despicable. But before she became the White Witch, Jadis was a Queen who, even in the prime of her very human youth and beauty, thought more of her own power than she did of her people.

4. Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, by Shakespeare – Enough said.

5. Captain Kennit, The Liveship Traders Trilogy, by Robin Hobb – Kennit is pretty much a pirate version of Heathcliff. I will concede to Robin Hobb, however, that Kennit is a masterfully complex character, the most difficult on this list to hate.


As you might gather, I have no truck with the Byronic Hero. Life throws terrible things at all of us. Being ‘damaged’ is never an excuse for abuse, manipulation or compulsive lying. The Byronic Hero is a large part of the reason I avoid many classics, and the reason I refuse to read Twilight.

I do, however, have quite a soft spot for the antihero, who is different.

Aesthetic value?

One of the primary arguments extended against e-books is that books, in their hard copies, have an aesthetic value that simply cannot be replicated electronically. The texture of the paper, the smell of the ink, the lush covers. I myself have extended this argument.

I was struck, however, by an odd thought when I visited my local village library on Monday. Going to this library is like stepping back in time. No computers, just cards which slip in and out of yellow pockets, and stamps. The second floor of this library is lined with old hardcovers, some exquisitely bound, some so faded along the cloth spines that it is impossible to read the titles.

Haven't we already lost much of the aesthetic value of books? What, truly, is the aesthetic value of a mass-market glued paperback when compared with a leatherbound hardcover with thick pages and hand-stitched binding?

On a trip to Europe last year, I was lucky enough to visit some amazing libraries. The Long Room of Trinity College, Dublin, was among them. It was stunning. It was full of beautiful books. I hope we'll always have beautiful books, that publishers will keep commissioning them and printers will keep printing them. But what have we really lost if mass-market paperbacks turn electronic?

Ten Rules for Writing Fiction

"Remember that all description is an opinion about the world," says Anne Enright.

The Guardian provides writing advice from several authors here.

Buying a better way

Something that matters a lot to me is finding a better way to buy. It's important to me to find fair trade or single origin (easily traced and therefore usually ethically sourced) coffee and chocolate. It's important for to me to buy clothes and jewelry that weren't made using sweat shops or other forms of exploitation.

The publishing industry is one in which large corporations make a lot of money and small, independent publishers struggle to make ends meet. It is a very old industry, currently in flux due to the rise of e-books and online giants such as Amazon. It is my belief Amazon has consistently put its own needs above those of readers and publishers, and furthermore has used its clout to bully publishers into submitting to this. For a brief list of controversies surrounding Amazon, see this.

Monopoly of an industry by a single online giant is good for nobody.

There is, however, a little-known Australian online retailer of books, fishpond. If future, if you want to buy books I've mentioned, I'll link you there.

Most of my readers are Australian, and so will benefit from free shipping for orders over $49, book prices listed in Australian dollars, and a guarantee that ordering from fishpond will cost Australian customers less than ordering from Amazon.

Furthermore, my conscience will be clear because I'll know that I've linked you to a site that respects the needs of publishers, authors and readers.

Three wonderful things

• Robin Hobb's next book, Dragon Haven, is due out on March 1st. Bless her for being so prompt with her releases, in a genre so notorious for postponed release dates.

• I just discovered a site called 'The Cultural Gutter', dedicated to forms of art "generally considered to be beneath consideration." The sci-fi page is so wonderful that I will even forgive it for including fantasy under the banner of 'sci-fi'.

• I am eating M&M Minis with a spoon. Not book-related, but nonetheless very exciting.

Buy on fishpond: Dragon Haven (The Rain Wild Chronicles)

Miller on Austen

Laura Miller remains insightful as ever:


"Marvin Mudrick published 'Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery' in 1952. Irony (the real kind, not the Alanis Morissette variety) was Austen's predominant mode, as Mudrick pointed out, and this not only made her 'almost inhumanly cold and penetrating' but also positioned her against 'all the delusions intrinsic to conventional art and conventional society.' That was the manly '50s speaking; by the 2000s, Austen became, in the popular mind, a wistful reminder of all the chivalrous pleasures of a long-lost social order -- a society that would have driven the average contemporary Janeite to insurrection if she actually had to live in it.

"Like Dumbledore's mirror, Austen's fiction seems to have the ability to reflect whatever its readers most wish to see. Austen is the grandmother of chick lit, much as that fact may irk her highbrow admirers. But that's not all she is, and to persuade yourself that her novels are only about being courted by rich, handsome men well-versed in ballroom etiquette is to be as dangerously silly and frivolous as Elizabeth Bennet's youngest sister, Lydia. The chick-lit take on Austen is forever trying to subtract the brutal social and economic realities from her fiction (as well as ignoring the mortifications her heroines undergo)".


Thank you, Laura Miller. The rest of the story is here.

I’m all for resistant reading, but I think it’s just annoying when tragedies, satires and comedies get turned into ‘romance’ in the public consciousness. Think Romeo and Juliet, Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights. Yes, romance is an aspect of these stories (and one which I enjoy, with the exception of Wuthering Heights) but if you read them purely as romance you’re missing so much.

For the record, I’m a Darcy fan because I like intellectual, argumentative, challenging men with integrity, not because I have any illusions about how ‘nice it would be’ to have doors opened for me by a 'gentleman' for the rest of my life.

The magic of words

Maybe my heritage has something to do with my obsession with words:

“The [Finnish] magic is not like anything else known by that name in European literature. The magic is entirely the magic of words. These ancient people believed in the existence of words, by the utterance of which anything might be accomplished. Instead of buying wood and hiring carpenters, you might build a house by uttering certain magical words. If you had no horse, and wanted to travel rapidly, you would make a horse for yourself out of bits of bark and old sticks by uttering over them certain magical words. But this was not all. Beings of intellect, men and women, whole armies of men, in fact, might be created in a moment by the utterance of these magical words.”

Lafcadio Hearn, quoted in Tales from a Finnish Tupa. (I can't get onto the publisher website and the authors seem to have none, but this is a helpful review.)

I've ordered this book for myself, and can't wait for it to arrive! I've grown up with Finnish food, Finnish family and the Finnish language, but sadly I wasn't brought up on Finnish folk tales. The ones I have heard I love, because they are the earthy, pagan, magic-y sort.


Buy on fishpond: Tales from a Finnish Tupa

E-textbooks

As much as I love paper and ink books, I must say I would have welcomed e-textbooks with open arms. Too bad they're coming too late for my undergrad years. I'd especially love access to such a resource this year, as my Honours thesis promises to have me carrying around mountains of books only relevant for a chapter here, a page there...

Well, perhaps an incentive to study postgrad.

Available at booksellers everywhere except Amazon

For those of you who haven't already heard about this:

Publisher Macmillan and global online bookstore Amazon were engaged in battle this week. The long-short of it is that Macmillan demanded higher profit margins and higher prices for the e-books sold through Amazon and Amazon responded by ceasing all sales of Macmillans' books (both e-books and hard copies).

The story can be found here. The end of the story had Amazon acceding defeat, but not without resentment: "we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles." (Fancy that, a publisher having 'monopoly' over its own titles!)

Anwyay, the most amusing thing in the whole debacle was this advertisement in the New York Times, which read: "available at booksellers everywhere except Amazon":

I note that at the time of writing, the book in question is still not available through Amazon.

Edit: For the interested, Salon's Laura Miller provides an in-depth discussion here.

A Further Edit: Author Scott Westerfield posted his opinion on the topic at his blog here, with such eloquence and humour that I now think I absolutely must get hold of one of his books.

The Sartorialist

If you're into clothing, this is a book you must check out:

Scott Schuman's philosophy is inspiring- he's a fashion photographer who takes photos of ordinary people wearing their everyday clothes.

I like to wear things that look interesting, but still function as everyday clothes. I like colour. I like beautiful fabrics. I like things that are not the norm. I like clothes that make a statement about who I am.

This book is full of inspiration for out-of-the-ordinary outfits, like the "shirt as skirt" I just had to have. (Yes, I got myself one. It's so easy to make- no sewing required. Tip: only use a shirt with a pleat in the centre of the back. And pinstripes work!)

Look over The Sartorialist for ideas, or just because it's beautiful to look at.

(P.S. Thanks ML for putting me onto this book!)


Buy on fishpond: The Sartorialist

Sometimes a cover says a lot

Like this one:

The back cover is even more confusing. It caught my eye at work today, and I turned it this way and that several times before my poor brain registered that the text was oriented more than one way.

I haven't read it, but now I want to.

It's called The Collapse of Chaos, and it's by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart.

Apparently it's a science book, about the origins of complexity and simplicity. Science isn't my forte, but a cover like this says 'I have a sense of humour and I'm accessible'. The Terry Pratchett endorsement doesn't hurt either.








Buy on fishpond: The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World