Books read, late February

[mrissa]

Lois McMaster Bujold, The Vor Game, Komarr, and Borders of Infinity. All rereads. Some of the most typical comfort reading we have around here is Bujold. None of these were particular favorites -- I started out with some I hadn't reread in awhile, in the main Vorkosigan sequence. I ended up thinking about the characters, Ekaterin in particular, in the context of another favorite series, so I started rereading those, too, and I expect to be bouncing back and forth between them until I run out.

John Griegs Forlag, Norwegian Folklore Simplified. Sent to me by a friend, as a joke, this is the racist thing I was talking about before. It's not only very racist but also very thoroughly and casually sexist (assuming without data that some boats must have belonged to women because they were designed for use in fjords rather than the middle of the North Atlantic) and very thoroughly and casually...is racialist the word I'm looking for here? Maybe. It's an old book, and I think no modern English-speaker would claim that the Scottish and Norwegian peoples were of different races. But even to the extent that "product of its times" is ever an excuse, it wasn't one here: it wasn't that old a book, that other people weren't being a great deal more sensible on the same subjects at the same time. It was mostly just plain wrong.

David Marusek, Counting Heads. I was excited to read this after I read Marusek's short story collection, which I liked a lot. Unfortunately, it started with a novella that was in that short story collection, which made it feel less fresh to me to begin with. Then when we got to the bit that wasn't novella any more, and -- as with Beggars in Spain when I reread it as an adult -- the seam showed rather more than I'd like. I suspect that making a novel out of a novella -- or making a novella out of a section of novel -- is an extremely difficult thing, with many pitfalls in pacing, character development, etc. Despite all that, I did settle in with this book eventually and enjoy it. I'd just recommend the opposite reading order to other folks: novel first, short story collection second. Probably that's how most people would have the opportunity to encounter them anyway, since the novel is more broadly available.

Oh, and just a trivial little point of praise -- which is not meant to be damning with faint praise, as this was in no way my favorite thing about this book -- it was really nice to read a book where white people did not all have British surnames. A great many white people in the English-speaking world are not called Andrews or Porter -- or, branching out into other parts of Britain, Jones or MacPherson. There are plenty of quite pronounceable names all over the rest of Europe. Learn them. Use them. (Also in the future I firmly believe we will find many people whose visual ethnic cues do not match their surname, in part because we find them in the present. markgritter has cousins on his Lyzenga side -- Lyzenga is an extremely Dutch surname -- who were born to Korean, Mexican, and Sudanese parents, respectively. Go ahead and make Mr. Tanaka-Novacek look like his ancestors all came from Mali, if you want to. It's a more plausible future than one in which we all match our surnames exactly.)

K.J. Parker, Evil for Evil. Second book in the aptly named engineer trilogy. I really love how evil is done in these books, not because one person is inherently wicked but because people want different things and don't always care about what others want, and sometimes because it's convenient. I find this a less comfortable and more accurate view of evil than in a lot of high fantasy. Also I like characters who try to improve things, dammit, even when they do so for bad reasons. However, it is clearly not a nice series in any way, and I will be waiting to read the third book until the PT stuff has calmed down a little. Or more likely a lot.

Dorothy Sayers, Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, Whose Body?, Lord Peter (an omnibus of the Lord Peter Wimsey short stories), and Clouds of Witness. And this, obviously, is the other series in which I'm bouncing around. Harriet's first relationship reminded me a bit of Ekaterin's, the man who was just awful enough to make things impossible for her, without meaning to be nasty in particular. The difficulties of Our Hero in wooing Our Heroine after she has been so hurt and disillusioned before. I will be interested in seeing where else the similarities are and are not as I read the rest of the series -- combat veterans with lots of scars inside and out, yes; mothers a great deal of fun in their own right, yes; tendency to babble, yes. I think it would all have been a great deal less interesting if Lois had set out to rewrite Lord Peter Wimsey in space and had tried to make all the parallels line up. But there are some interesting points to ponder along those lines.

Recently susan_palwick wrote a journal entry advocating what gets called the first rule of fiction writing, which is, roughly paraphrased, to figure out the worst thing that can happen to your character and then do it. Lois McMaster Bujold is often cited as a practitioner of this fine art, and extremely talented people like Susan Palwick advocate it. And frankly I think it's nonsense. There are dozens of worse things that could happen to characters at any turn. I can come up with more thoroughly horrific scenarios for Miles Vorkosigan to live through without breaking a sweat. But the thing is: they're not more interesting.

I think the first rule is to figure out the most interesting thing that can happen to your character and then do it even if it's really awful. Which is not at all the same thing. Miles is more interesting having married Ekaterin than he'd have been if she'd died when her life was threatened in Komarr; more interesting than if she'd panicked at the last minute and run away to Beta Colony to change her name and never see him again; more interesting than if he'd done something well-intentioned she could misunderstand and have a restraining order slapped on him (if, in fact, there is such a thing on Barrayar, rather than just Cousin Vorguido breaking your kneecaps). And if I believed that Miles had gotten Ekaterin -- and Nikki -- and the babies -- just to make it all that much more terrible when they were all taken away from him forever -- I would flee that series and never come back. But I don't. Because it's not about the angst quota. It's about interesting human reactions and interactions. I think even the people who advocate doing your worst every time know that deep down, or they've have written very different books indeed.

Edited to add: Susan Palwick, who has no lj with which to comment but who gives permission to reproduce the comment here, writes, "Actually, your paraphrase was a little too broad. I don't advocate doing the WORST thing; I only say that characters need to be in some sort of pain (an inevitable byproduct of conflict, which drives plot). In other words, over-protecting characters is as detrimental to fiction as over-torturing them." Here's the original entry, which I should have linked in the first place. And here's another entry that clarifies her thoughts on the subject.

I think that characters who are over-protected are far less likely to see print than characters who are over-tortured, but maybe that means I'm reading the wrong books.

Comments

Re: do your worst

[zalena.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on interesting, instead of worst. But I will say the sequence involving Miles' twin was pretty awful and upset me.

I have a beef with authors who put their characters through needless suffering. Bujold comes close at times, but most the time her plots are interesting enough, or the suffering seems to have reason enough, that I let it go.

I'm trying to think of an author I just WON'T read anymore because of their cruelty to characters, and my mind becomes blank.

Oh yeah, except for Michael Chabon because so far every book I've read of his features some kind of cruelty to dogs, and I've just had enough of it. But I think we've already discussed this because you asked if I've read the more recent one about Alaska and I said no.

Re: do your worst

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And there was cruelty to dogs in that one. For sure.

Re: do your worst

[aedifica]

I tried to read Tess of the d'Urbervilles when I was in high school, and I ended up stopping in the middle, not because it was a "hard" book but because of all the terrible things that were happening to Tess. Blech.

Re: Hardy

[zalena.livejournal.com]

I loved Tess because I identified with the character who was much pushed about by fate (and her author.) However, her suffering is nothing compared to some of Hardy's other books. I think Jude the Obscure is the one I wish I hadn't read. It features child murder/suicides. The hardest part is the knowledge that Hardy based most of his novels on actual news stories. He'd read about something horrible happening and then try to recreate the path of human suffering that led to those events. So sad.

Of course, some of his early books are interesting. Madding Crowd is one of the only books I can think of that features sheep bloat as a major plot point.

Re: do your worst

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

I decided I wasn't interested in reading the third book of Robin Hobb's Soldier Son series because book 2 was just pure egregious protagonist-bashing. Internally consistent, sure. Interesting? Um, no.

Re: do your worst

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And thank you for voicing those concerns at the time, so I could just skip book 2. You are a humanitarian.

Re: do your worst

[zalena.livejournal.com]

I love Hobbs' world building and characters. But I also have discovered that I tend to skip her second books because of the aforementioned protagonist-bashing. Which I would call both internally consistent and, to a certain extent, interesting, but sometimes seems unnecessary, and is definitely painful to read.

Re: do your worst

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

I would argue that while the second books of the Farseer Trilogy and the Tawny Man series, while loaded with angst, actually had aesthetic merit, in large part because the shit-storms that Fitz had to suffer through were largely of his own creation. (Which isn't to say that they weren't depressing as all get-out.) Nevare, on the other hand... he gets to be the bitch of the plot. Which is to say that everything that can go wrong short of him being killed or crippled does, and it has no causal connection to his choices, other than him having made one decision back in book 1 which resulted in him being the target of MAGICAL DOOM.

I get that Hobb wanted to make the colonial aspects of her wild-west equivalent appropriately nasty, but they way she chose to do so removed any and all of my desire to finish the series, as the poor oppressed indigenous people were just as unsavory, in their own way, as the agents of the colonial powers. By the end of Forest Mage, I wanted pretty much everyone involved, including Nevare, to die a horrible fiery death.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

just Cousin Vorguido breaking your kneecaps

Hee!

[shalanna.livejournal.com]

Just to say--if someone ever comes at you with a bat to kneecap you, RUN!!! I don't care if you have to vault a bus, you're better off not breaking those kneecaps. Been there. Evil, evil days.

Now I know why Guido breaking the kneecaps is SUCH an ominous threat. Never again!!

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

And also why self-defense advice always seems to stress stmping the kneecaps - both disabling and hard to block.

Sorry that you're speaking from experience. Ow.

[snurri.livejournal.com]

I think the first rule is to figure out the most interesting thing that can happen to your character and then do it even if it's really awful.

Thank you for saying this. I've never liked (or observed) that rule, and this makes miles more sense to me.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Glad to be of service!

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Come to think of it, even a number of the white characters I can think of with non-English names have those names largely because their ancestry is a plot point, from Paul Delagardie to most of the Jewish characters I can think of anywhere. I have never seen my own last name iin fiction, and it's quite a common one.

On the other hand, when trying for more realistically multicultural names, when are you trying too hard? Shadow Unit comes near to that line for me, and it's something I've probably been guilty (http://spoonriverrail.livejournal.com) of myself.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think that piling lots and lots of names on a single character is my breaking point for when it's "trying too hard." But there are lots of things for which I'm not really attuned to "trying too hard": having all non-white characters in an SF novel, for example, does not strike me as trying too hard. And I suspect that a lot of the women who are accused of "trying too hard" to have strong women characters are just like me: they see strong women as how the universe keeps functioning rather than a special exception.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I think the all non-wihte characters thing would depend for me: if it's within a family or circle of friends or neighborhood, it seems perfectly reasonab;e to have them all nonwhilte. Or if it's a world where that makes sense, like say the US a while from now if interracial mating taboos continue to erode.

But every character having a different ethnicity is brderline for me. The reason Shadow Unit doesn't *quite* cross that line for me is that DC really is that diverse. And so is talent and the WTF operatives were carefully recriuted for their talent.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hmm. See, I live in Minneapolis, as close to "among my own people" as the world could provide me, and yet having everyone in a group be a different ethnicity doesn't strain my credibility at all. I can readily think of situations I've been in like that -- there were eight of us sharing an office when I was in grad school, and eight different ethnicities. Or I remember when scottjames lived in a dorm suite in college that had six guys, six religions -- and not counting "Christian Reformed" and "Reformed Church of America" or "Missouri Synod Lutheran" and "Wisconsin Synod Lutheran" as separate to get there, either. I believe it was a Prot, a Catholic, a Muslim, a Jew, a Buddhist, and an atheist, but I may be wrong, it may have been only one Christian and a Hindu or animist or something instead. (He was at a different college, so I can't say, "Oh, yeah, it was Person X, so he must have followed Religion Y.")

Obviously this is not a universal solution, but if everybody having different ethnicities is bothersome, having two people of the same non-generic-white ethnicity seems like a reasonable answer.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

You're going to see it in fiction this autumn!

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I'd forgotten that :-)

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

I had thought that Bujold said your reader would believe you if you did the worst thing. She does so much twisty plotting in which a lot of things have to come out right at the last minute, my memory is that she was saying you had to set up twenty bad things to make your amazing coincidence, not twenty good things.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That may well be what she said, but it's not what gets attributed to her in situations like this one.

I don't know that I believe that, either, though. I think a less skilled writer than Bujold could give you a string of twenty bad coincidences followed by one good coincidence and have you disbelieving the whole lot.

[elsue.livejournal.com]

You're right, Bujold has said, probably several dozen times or more, that she starts a book by finding the worst thing she can do to a character and doing it. Others have proposed (and I believe she's accepted) the amendation "...that the character can grow from."

El

[shalanna.livejournal.com]

>>I think the first rule is to figure out the most interesting thing that can happen to your character and then do it even if it's really awful. Which is not at all the same thing.<<

Yes!! Thank you! I have always thought the teachers who keep vending this rule to us are kind of wacked-out. The "worst" thing is probably either death (which ends the book rather quickly, or at least makes it a paranormal) or having some kind of catastrophic neurological event and being left a vegetable who's aware of surroundings but can't respond--but how much of a readable book (if anyone could stomach it at all) would THAT make for? (Our class read or watched Dalton Trumbo's "Johnny Got His Gun" when I was at an impressionable age.) Now, they'll argue that they mean "the worst WITHIN REASON," but they don't SAY that. Who's to say what's the "worst" and how it limits the plot of the rest of the book?

Maybe the funniest thing that's still realistic can happen instead.

I also hate it when we have lots of needless suffering and endless descriptions of how PAINFUL it is and how the BLOOD just runs all over, etc., etc. And characters whose whole families were immolated before their eyes in the war, but they escaped and are wracked with guilt, plus they have bad dreams about it that are explicated in the text. Aack! I don't read people who hurt/kill domestic animals or for that matter wild animals. Hubby asks why murder mysteries don't bug me that much morally, and I tell him that it's OK to kill off an evil ex-boss who always lied on your performance review and waited until 3 minutes before quitting time to come up with an emergency all-night project with presentation at 8 AM in the morning, but NOT to zap an innocent little squirrel. He should understand the difference.

I get a lot of static from beta readers and even from agents anytime I use names that are not common. I can even point out where the name comes from and how it ties in thematically, and they still say, "Readers stumble over these." So that's the caveat about using realistic names. Some people will NEVER be able to understand that "Nguyen" is pronounced "Wen" by most people with that surname, and it makes them mad that they have to BLEEP over it every time they see it in your text. (Because they can't hear it right, you see.)

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Maybe you could use Thu instead. Same ethnicity, almost as common, and easy to pronounce for English speakers. (They might think of it as thoo instead of too, but that won't kick them out of the story.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That's odd. Maybe short stories get held to a different standard, because I've never gotten slack for the ethnic names I use, and heaven knows I use some doozies.

But as I said, there are names in most ethnicities that people will be able to pronounce, or at least will think they can. Paula's example of Thu instead of Nguyen may be a good one if this is consistently a problem. Or using a Polish name like Kowalski instead of one that begins Krz-.

I have to say I'm glad that David Marusek didn't choose to write as David Morse or something else instead.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Also, depending where your story is set, an Eastern European name like Kowalski may be actually more likely, since so many names got 'simplified' (to American ears) during the great waves of migration through Ellis Island. That dosn't seem to be happening as much with mre recent immigrants: my guess is that one reason is that so many more of them are literate in the Roman alphabet to begin with.

[aedifica]

I thought about Komarr and Strong Poison, et al., after you mentioned them together, and the similarities I came up with are different from the ones you found. Hooray for different minds seeing different things! (I just saw "devoted (or desperate) courtship of a woman who isn't at all sure that's a good thing" as the shared theme, once I looked for it.)

By the way, I think "contest" in the first paragraph was supposed to be "context," yes? And I love the concept of Cousin Vorguido. Not that I want to meet him, you understand.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

See, this is why it's worth not saying everything you're thinking right away! Because the things other people think of come out interesting, too.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

But you have to know something to know you've pronounced Nagy wrong!

[zwol.livejournal.com]

but what would the picture be?

[brooksmoses]

A Playmobil container ship on a blue-blanket sea, piled high with refridgerator-magnet vowels. Or maybe consonants; I'm not sure.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Maybe "pronounceable" isn't the proper criteria, just "apparently pronounceable". If a reader is mentally pronouncing Nagy wrong, at ast it's not likely to throw them out of the story.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

How would you pronounce Nagy correctly? (The one I used to vaguely know pronounced it exactly as it looks to an Anglophone.)

-Nameseeker

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, it's the g that's the problem. In Hungarian it's not as in "one who nags," but a lot of Nth-generation Hungarian-Americans do pronounce it that way.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

"I think the first rule is to figure out the most interesting thing that can happen to your character and then do it even if it's really awful."

That makes me think of this Websnark post (http://www.websnark.com/archives/2004/10/entitlement_and.html) from a few years back, which makes a distinction between story conflict (generally good) and authorial sadism (generally bad). The example involves some horrible things happening to Marmaduke.

[ide-cyan.livejournal.com]

FYI: Entries in syndicated feeds on LJ only appear temporarily, therefore the links you posted might disappear within a few weeks or months. The direct links to the blog whose entries appear in syndication would be better.

http://improbableoptimisms.blogspot.com/2008/02/first-rule-of-fiction.html
http://improbableoptimisms.blogspot.com/2008/02/why-its-first-rule-of-fiction.html

[zed-lopez.livejournal.com]

Probably the worst thing that can happen to anyone is some variation on impotently witnessing everyone they love tortured and everything they love destroyed (which is generic, thus boring.) I've looked on the "what's the worst thing that can happen to a character?" advice as shorthand for "what's the worst thing that can happen that stems directly from the character's own failings and foibles?" (which is particular, and, it is to be hoped, interesting.)

Taking "A Fish Called Wanda" for deliberately heavy-handed, hence easy, examples: the worst thing that could happen to Archie? Being embarrassed. To Otto? Being called stupid. To Ken? Hurting animals. To Wanda? Ummm... being deprived of hearing men speaking foreign languages? She's less personally challenged in the movie than the others.

In the last Vorkosigan book, watching Miles wallow in depression for half the book was unpleasant, but I thought the crisis that got him there was a great choice of a problem stemming from his faults.

So, anyway, I'm with you on interesting, but, through the mighty powers of selective interpretation, think that people pushing "what's the worst thing?" are really with you, too.

Also, hey! I actually looked up my lj password so I can post comments!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The last Vorkosigan book? Are you behind a book or perhaps two? Because Diplomatic Immunity was not even slightly wallowing. Even A Civil Campaign didn't seem nearly as wallowy as Memory.

I still think that 1) the worst thing that is very particular to a character may still not be the most interesting thing that an author can choose for the next conflict or challenge and 2) people should be extremely careful with advice that involves such firm superlatives as that.