Frustration | Picky Girl: I read. I teach. I blog. (pickily)

This is gonna be one of those picky posts where I rant a little bit. Ok? Ok.

So. After studying writing for a looo-ooong time, I learned a couple things. One of them is that there is a lot I’ll excuse in a book or short story. Dialogue is not one of them. In fact, there is a book I haven’t finished (and you guys know I don’t DNF around here) because the dialogue was not in quotation marks but instead used dashes to indicate new speakers. Uh, no.

One professor once said Evelyn Waugh was a genius with dialogue because he didn’t really ever have to tell you who was speaking. You knew because the dialogue was so well characterized.

I have had students write entire research papers on the discrepancies of “Who said what?” in Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.”

Dialogue matters: children should more or less speak like children. Background shouldn’t be handed to me on a silver platter, i.e. “Remember that time when mom did that thing that made the plot of the last book really plausible and now I have to bring it up because otherwise this reader won’t know what I’m talking about?” Yeah. That. It should be as natural as possible, too, and if you use dialect, you sure better have it down pat.

What characters say and how they say it is monumentally important to a book. Dialogue can advance plots, develop characters, and a whole lot of other stuff we take for granted, but the second it’s done badly…yikes.

I say this all because there is “a book” that others have given high praise and which I have read but cannot review because I thought the dialogue was so darn bad, and I really don’t want to say “This book was ok, but the dialogue was flipping awful. I mean, terrible.” Because that’s just mean and doesn’t do anyone any favors.

*Exhales* Load lifted and all that jazz. Back to reading more Miss Silver, where the dialogue is always quite charming. If you haven’t picked her up yet, might I ask why?

It is Friday, my friends. Rejoice. I am feeling happy and sunny today, and I thought I would share my front door makeover with you.

As I’ve mentioned before, my house is 108 years old, and I have the original front door and hardware. I have never been in love with the door, but that was partially because it was this dirty, ugly maroon. See below.

with Christmas wreath and ugly screen door

with ugly, useless screen door (it had a tear in the screen)

So this weekend, I bought a quart of Valspar by Eddie Bauer Daffodil in high-gloss/enamel and decided to brave the heat to get this project done. (Yes, I had tried about 8 samples before getting this particular color). I had gone over the door a lot with the sample paint just to make sure it was the color, so ignore the ugliness.

First step: tape doorknob and plate

Why didn’t I just remove it? Well, it’s been on there for over 100 years. If it ain’t broke…. and all that jazz. So I taped it like so:

Lots of little pieces of tape later...

Next step was to remove the deadbolt and some of the paint I had gotten on it from my enthusiastic sample painting. There were two screws on the inside of the door. Loosen those, and the lock comes away in two pieces. Voila!

Then, because I didn’t want to sling paint through to the other side, I taped it as well.

After that, I was ready to paint. And paint. It was hot out there, but I put my trash bag underneath the door to catch drips and would let each coat dry before evenly applying another. Thin and even strokes. I actually did use a brush, though I would have used a tiny roller had I had one at the house. Then, sit back and let it dry.

Eat some strawberries and have a glass of tea while you do this...

After you’ve re-hydrated, appreciate your work.

Yea! Oh, and burglars: I photoshopped out the other two numbers. HAHAHA!

I absolutely love it and am so glad I went with the cheery yellow. It’s also kind of ironic since I hated the yellow on the siding of the house, but come on – it was dingy and looked like melted butter. Ugh.

So that’s it. A couple of hours, some mad taping skills, and a little paint, and you’ve got a totally new look. Have you done anything to brighten up your space recently? Or would you never go for a yellow front door? Don’t be scared. I can take it. I think.

Happy Friday!

I saw this ad for the first time this weekend, and though I won’t get all IHATEAMAZONtheyarekillingbookstores on you, I will say the first thing that popped into my head was “Who doesn’t want to go to the bookstore?” Amazon’s marketing campaign is so off. Readers love going to bookstores. That is why we are so adamant about saving them. We love just being at the bookstore. I mean, I love my Nook Color, and it can be extremely convenient, but I never think: “YEA! Downloaded the book. No need to go to the bookstore.” Craziness.

Amazon: “target audience.” It’s an important term in marketing, and I don’t think you’ve quite internalized it yet. Go back to Marketing 101.

What do you think? Did you pick up on this, or am I being way over-sensitive?

*I received this book from Viking/Penguin. The Magician King will be published in August 9, 2011. Preorder your copy here.

At the end of Book I, Janet and Eliot tear Quentin away from his grief and anger to take his place on the throne as one of two kings of Fillory. Janet is a queen, and the two have found Julia, the girl Quentin loved in vain at the start of the novel. In Fillory, they laze about and try to ascertain just what royalty does in a magical land.

Quentin and Julia plan a trip to the Outer Island on his ship the Muntjac, needing to get away from the tedium of the castle after a series of ominous events indicate all is not right in Fillory. Along the way he learns the story of the Seven Golden Keys and decides to follow the trail to find them. However, Quentin has not yet learned magic is not quite what he thinks it is and after locating the first key, he uses it and is plunged back to Earth. Insecure and out of his element, Quentin must rely on Julia and her hard-won dark magic to help him find his way back and heal Fillory.

So. If you read yesterday’s review, you know I was not a huge fan of The Magicians. However, as I also mentioned, I really liked Lev Grossman’s writing style and decided after taking a look at the website for the books that I would give it another go.

I still really disliked the characters. I mean, after the friends he has lost or who have been injured by all this questing, Quentin is still so eager to jump in and go on a quest for no apparent reason. For such an intelligent guy, he has no forethought. Plus, he is king of Fillory, this land he has always wanted to experience, and he is still unhappy.

BUT. And that’s a big “but” – Julia’s story made this book for me. In the last novel, she is taken to Brakebills for the exam but doesn’t pass. She sees Quentin and knows he has passed, but Dean Fogg tries to delete the memory, and it literally drives her insane first, trying to recall what happened and then, trying to understand why she wasn’t accepted. Julia explores magic in her own way, learning in magic “safe houses” and obsessing over spells. Accepted into an elite group who researches the source of magic, Julia feels as though she finally finds her place until the magic she loves destroys her small family of friends. Her story is incredibly dark and rather disturbing in several instances, but she and her friends’ exploration of magic and the divine was tense, well plotted, and interesting.

All in all, if you liked or even sort of liked The Magicians, I think you will really get into the sequel.

************

On that note, the publisher has kindly offered a finished copy of The Magician King to a lucky reader of this blog. All you have to do to enter is answer the question below by Tuesday, July 26, 2011:

Who are some of your favorite fantasy/magic authors and which book is at the top of your list? If you don’t read much fantasy, what might tempt you?

UPDATE: The winner of this giveaway is Amy! Congrats.

The short version: A story of college students at a school of magic who aren’t happy with their lives and sit around drinking and complaining before they graduate and do a lot more drinking and complaining before they go looking for trouble…and find it.

Warning: a somewhat snarky review follows.

***

Quentin is the smartest kid he knows, but he is bored as hell. His parents are wrapped up in their own lives, and the girl he’s in love with isn’t in love with him. He has grown up reading a series of books about children who had adventures in the land of Fillory, and he’s stuck on Earth. In other words, his life is atrocious, and no one else has ever experienced such horrendous torture. You should all feel very sorry for him. Quentin certainly does, until an odd series of events leads him to Brakebills College, an elite school of magic where he passes the entrance exam.

From then on, it’s magic and studying and magic and studying with a few high and low points, like having sex while transformed into a fox, nearly dying in the wilds of Antarctica, and sitting around playing welters, a game of magic. Then Quentin and his friends, Eliot, Janet, Josh, and girlfriend Alice all graduate. Life as a magician in the real world is pretty boring. Do you get a real job? Well, why would you? There is a mysterious “magician’s fund” that apparently is never depleted and provides magicians money when they need it. (I’m all in, by the way.) However, again these characters are miserable – drinking too much, doing drugs, having meaningless sex – and they need something. That something is Fillory. Because lo and behold, it really exists. So the gang ponies up and heads to Fillory, but it isn’t all magic bunnies and beautiful nymphs. Something is wrong in Fillory, and Quentin must figure out what it is in order to try to be happy. (Here’s where the plot finally comes in, right around page 240.)

***

Because that’s all this novel is really about. Quentin is really really unhappy with absolutely no real reason (until the end) to be unhappy. But I have to start this review with this: Lev Grossman has some serious writing chops. In fact, that’s the only reason I finished this novel because lord have mercy, it was long. And drawn out. And not a lot happened for two-thirds of the book. There is no overarching plot here, and I guess that’s what annoyed me the most. At times I checked to make sure it wasn’t a spoof of Harry Potter and Chronicles of Narnia, since it referenced each multiple times. Fillory was essentially Narnia, which made me think Grossman could have just used it in the book instead of creating something so darn similar but not calling it Narnia. I kept checking to see what page I was on because I could not believe how long it was taking me to read this book. Without any real plot to move the book along, Grossman relies on his characters, and they are kind of a bunch of assholes. They are selfish, lazy, and pretentious. Alice, Quentin’s girlfriend, was the only character I remotely liked, simply because her background and unhappiness made sense. Everyone else just sort of claimed unhappiness for sport. Alice is the only one who actually points it out, telling Quentin:

[L]ook at your life and see how perfect it is. Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it; there’s nothing else. It’s here, and you better decide to enjoy it or you’re going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.

And pretty much, he is miserable forever – at least the forever that is this book – even with a pretty cool, British-y magic school, some pretty darn good friends, and money out the wazoo. Ultimately, this book was an exercise in futility, reinforcing the idea that some people ain’t happy and ain’t never gonna be happy, no matter what. If that’s magic, I don’t really want any part of it.

So I gotta know – have you read this? Did you react at all to it like I did? Or have I lost my non-magical mind?

jenn aka the picky girl

P.S. All is not lost. The nice folks at Viking sent me this book and The Magician King, the sequel to this book, for me to read and review. Come back tomorrow for a giveaway and to see why I think it’s (somewhat) redemptive.

Other Reviews:

The New York Times

Fantasy Book Review

Entomology of a Bookworm