Nesbø, Harry and 'Phantom'

Jo Nesbø

In Wednesday's post I went over the lineup of the nine novels to date in Jo Nesbø's series about sometimes Oslo police inspector Harry Hole. Let's pick up the frequently asked questions where we left off.

Q: How violent are the books? I'm not big on books about serial killers.... A: Only a few of the books to date actually involve serial killings. You definitely don't need to be a fan of, say, Thomas Harris to enjoy the Harry Hole books. Violence? When I read The Snowman, it struck me as the most violent book so far, with The Devil's Star a close second, but the violence never seems gratuitous (or purely genre-driven) to me. True, the books all involve homicide investigations, including at least some forensics. And Harry does manage to get roughed up quite frequently, even for a fictional detective.

Q: Suppose I'm the one reader who never got into Stieg Larsson's books? Or Henning Mankell's? Or.... A: Not a problem. Scandinavia is just a geographic region--not the best reason to read one author rather than another. Scandinavian crime novels are all different. Even Nesbø's own novels seem to me quite different from one another. Try one. You might like it. (I suggested The Redbreast as a starting place for US readers. But not because it's in any way 'typical'.)

The 9th Harry Hole novel
German translation
Die Larve (2011)

I'm blogging about Nesbø and Harry this week because I just read the ninth book in the series, the one that will be published in the UK in March 2012 under the title Phantom. (I can't contain my enthusiasm for the book, but I'll do my utmost to keep this post spoiler-free.) Until this point I'd been playing catch-up with Nesbø; with this book I have become a follower--as addicted to the series as his hero and certain other characters in the new book are to their drugs of choice.

Harry is a recovering alcoholic with memorable lapses; the new book involves the illegal drug trade in Oslo. Phantom, appropriately enough, brought me more highs and lows, as a reader, than any other Nesbø novel. And by lows I mean not disappointments but... let's say developments from which some readers may take a while to recover. Obviously I'm still working on my recovery, three days after finishing Phantom. And speaking of following--and serials--I'm already impatient for the next book in the series. I just realized: Harry Hole is a serial. The blogger is, at least sometimes, the last to know. (Inexcusable parenthesis, especially addressed to fans of Samuel Beckett: I've had my own I-can't-go-on-I'll-go-on oscillation with Phantom and its final scenes. Try, all readers of Phantom please try, this experiment on yourselves: count the number of days or hours after finishing Phantom before you start thinking about book ten in the series.)

Speaking of trying to remain spoiler-free: by some lucky accident, I managed to read the first several chapters of Phantom without knowing certain facts about the plot. I had read only the earliest, briefest descriptions released by Nesbø's German publisher, Ullstein--which have since been replaced by longer blurbs that continue to be discreet but reveal, among other things, how the set-up of the novel relates it to the others that preceded it. In other words, I was surprised--not bowled over, more delighted, mildly but quite 'pleasantly' surprised--by parts of the set-up with which almost every future reader may be familiar before starting the book. (It was, for me, the first of the book's 'highs'. It's a high you may still be able to share--if you restrict what you read and hear about the book between now and the time you read it.)

The whole experience made me dream of an alternative universe in which readers could approach each new book in a state of comparative innocence. In which publishers didn't feel they had to give anything away for the sake of making a sale. In which bloggers, even, rivalled one another in discretion.

I've far exceeded my allotted 500 words for the day--which can be justified not by anything I've communicated about the plot of Phantom (of which I'd vowed to reveal as little as possible) but perhaps by the fact that I'll be taking several days off from blogging (although not from Twitter). I'll be on the road, and if I weigh in here at all it will be only with a comment or two rather than a scheduled post. (By the way, I'm holding off on talking about book eight in the series until closer to its US release date.) Happy reading, listening and coffee-drinking, and happy living as well--until next time.

Nesbø's Harry Hole: The Line-Up

Yesterday I finished reading Jo Nesbø's ninth and latest Harry Hole novel, and I'm still reeling from it--still on its emotional roller-coaster, to be honest. (That novel, 'in case we're interrupted', appeared in the original Norwegian in June, and in German translation under the title Die Larve this month; the anticipated English title is Phantom. [We may be interrupted by my word tally: I'm back to enforcing my self-imposed maximum length of 500 words per post.])

US mass-market paperback, 2011

Because Nesbø and Harry Hole are still new to most US readers, I'd like to run through a few general reference points (to which I gave short shrift when trying to introduce the series last March). When I finally return to speak directly about Phantom, it will be to give it a spoiler-free rave, limited mostly to how you can intensify your enjoyment of it.

So. What do you need to know about Jo Nesbø? His name is pronounced 'yoo NESS-buh' in Norwegian but often simply 'Joe NEZZ-bo' in English. He was born in 1960 and trained as an economist. Was a successful soccer player but was permanently sidelined by injuries. Worked for about a decade as a stockbroker by day and rock musician by night (vocals and guitar with the band Di Derre). Best known as author of the Harry Hole novels but has published one stand-alone thriller (Headhunters) and the Doctor Proctor series of children's books. 

And about Harry Hole (pronounced, to everyone's great relief, 'hah-ree HOO-lə')? He's an Oslo-based (later Hong Kong - based) police inspector (later ex- or acting), a recovering alcoholic. A loner in general, but capable of deep, loving, lasting-but-failed attachments. Smart. Surprisingly likeable.

There are nine novels to date in the series:

1. The Bat
2. The Cockroaches
3. The Redbreast
4. Nemesis
5. The Devil's Star
6. The Redeemer
7. The Snowman
8. The Leopard
9. Phantom

All nine have been published in Norwegian and in German translation. The first eight have been published in French. Numbers 3-8 have been published in English in the UK, with number 9 expected in March and number 1 next after that. Numbers 3-5 and 7 are available in English in the US, with number 8 announced for December and number 6 expected next after that.

Frequently asked questions begin:

Q: Do the books need to be read in order? A: All things being equal, it's desirable. Advice to US readers: start with number 3, The Redbreast [link UPDATED 5 March 2012], and read the subsequent novels in order, in so far as availability permits. The first two novels are less important to the rest than are 3 through 9 among themselves. The Bat Man is set in Australia and is referred to often in recent Hole books because it establishes Harry as one of the few Norwegians with hands-on experience hunting down a serial killer. (It was the first Nesbø I read, and, although I kept going after that, I find it the least engaging book in the series.) The second, The Cockroaches, is set in Bangkok. All the rest are set principally in Oslo and form parts of various plot arcs that interconnect them.

Next: more FAQs and more about number 9, Phantom.

Towards an All-Access Pass: Dickens & Co.

A week ago, when I started writing about the coming Dickens bicentenary, I said I was addressing 'primarily… people who in some way or another love Dickens, or who can remember deriving pleasure from a Dickens novel at some point in their lives'. The response to that post suggests that there are many such readers. But what about the others?

I'm not talking about people who prefer Austen or Thackeray or one of the Brontës or George Eliot or Henry James or Virginia Woolf to Dickens.

What concerns me today, and what has concerned me for decades, are the perceptions, or beliefs, or phobias, that inhibit some readers' access to all of these authors, if in differing degrees--to say nothing of the factors that inhibit access to books in general, or to art in the broadest sense.

Even if we restrict ourselves, for now, to questions of the accessibility of 'Dickens', by which I mean to say, roughly, of authors from Austen through Virginia Woolf, this is still an enormous topic, one that I approach with great humility and with no illusion that I can resolve anything with a single blogpost. My ambition, instead, is to start a conversation, one that will be open both to those who have and those who don't have the 'access' we're talking about.

I said that this has concerned me for decades. One starting point for me was a conversation in Washington, D.C., in the late 1980s, at one of the Endowments. I was there to interview for a job, but the conversation was small talk between interviews. Someone was mentioning the 'exiling' of 'classics' (meaning something like Austen-through-Woolf or Homer-through-Steinbeck) to a separate section in the back of some bookstores in shopping malls, and the fact that most readers had their last contact with 'classics' when they took their last formal literature course in high school or college. I asked why the speaker thought that was, and he or she quickly responded, 'Oh, they find them too difficult.' At this point, without thinking, I said something like: 'Yes, but how do they end up with that perception? After all, Dickens isn't any harder to read than Robert Ludlum.'

Well, it was immediately obvious that I had 'lost' my audience--and I hadn't seen it coming. Here I was in a group of writing and reading professionals, all of whom, I'm still certain, had been reading Dickens and all the other 'classics' for most of their lives. I expected them to be briefly taken aback but then, on reflection, to agree with me. But they weren't having any of it. (It later emerged from the same conversation that at least one of them, an 18th-century specialist, found Gibbon hopelessly dry and perhaps a bit forbidding. Go figure.)

Perhaps I was wrong. Or perhaps I was trying out my material on the wrong 'room'. (I didn't get the job, either, but that's a different story.)

To be continued. Soon: the example of Jane Austen.

Doing the Numbers, or, The Swimming Hole

Just a few words, this morning, about numbers. And thresholds.

I'm going to ignore, briefly, one of the best pieces of advice I've seen given to bloggers/tweeters, which goes something like 'No one but you cares about your own numbers; so what if you just added your 1000th follower or got your 5000th hit?'

But I'm blogging not only for what you might call read-only types; I'm blogging for everyone, potentially, and that includes people who are themselves bloggers or who might start blogging some day if they only knew how easy it is.

And I opened the door in Wednesday's post to at least a little talk about numbers when I mentioned that Monday's post about the Dickens centenary and readathon had become in less than 48 hours my sixth most-read post (of 'all time', which in the world of Jascha Writes means about 30 months). What I didn't realize at the time (because I was looking at the automatically generated most-read list that appears at the foot of every page of the blog and not at the actual numbers) was that Monday's Dickens post was in truth in a three-way tie for fourth place. By this morning, moreover, it was tied with last February's Ellery Queen post for third place. (The leader, if you will, continues to be Jo Nesbø, with my sole real Nesbø post to date scoring almost four times as many hits to date as the Dickens. Still back in the pack is determined newcomer James Hulbert, whoever that is, with respectable numbers of hits for four posts [in the top 10] relating to his novel A Kiss Before You Leave Me.)

As today's new business, I'd like to note two (additional) numbers, before they're swept away in the wash of ones and zeros in which we seem at times to be living.

Yesterday, Jascha Writes crossed the 10,000 threshold for cumulative page views ('pageviews all time history', in Blogger-speak)--thanks in no small measure to my friends Dickens and Nesbø, and, even more, to you. And, to every one of you who might have been wondering whether, if you 'gave' a blog, anyone would show up, I think this answers that question with a definitive yes.

The week's second threshold number may be less immediately significant to non-bloggers (and pre-bloggers, not-yet-bloggers), but most of the rest of you will understand. This is a Twitter number. Twitter caps at 2000 the number of people it allows you to follow--until you have enough followers yourself to justify letting that cap drift higher. The (unpublished, unofficial) threshold is currently 1820, and @jaschawrites crossed it a few days ago. Beyond this point, growth in the number of followers can become geometric again, after having been hampered in the run-up to 1820. And all of that I owe to the first 1820 and all the others to come. Thank you!

The moral of both of this week's threshold crossings, to put it succinctly, is a message of abundance: there's room here for everyone, and we create possibilities for one another and for ourselves. And that's something that we 'qualitative' types can hang on to when all the ones and zeros have moved on.

Because it isn't really a racetrack. It's a swimming hole.

Come on in....

Even More 'Readable' When the Price Is Right

First Oprah, now this.

While everyone else is congratulating Julian Barnes for winning the Man Booker Prize last night for The Sense of an Ending--at the end of what felt like a very long Booker season in which the most loaded term in public literary discourse was 'readability' (saluted by some as a genuine strength of certain books under consideration, decried by others as code for 'dumbed-down-ed-ness')--let's recognize Charles Dickens' latest triumph: Monday's post about his bicentenary and the Dickens readathon, immediately shot to sixth place (out of 84) in the list of all-time most-read entries at Jascha Writes. Dickens still has a way to go before he overtakes Jo Nesbø (who has long been in first place), but the Nesbø post has been up, collecting clicks, since March. (Soon it will be time for a 'sequel', a post about the eighth and ninth Harry Hole novels, The Leopard and Phantom.)

In that Dickens post I mentioned in passing that Amazon.com was offering some very attractive Kindle deals on Dickens titles in Penguin Classics. I recommended that you consider Pickwick Papers and the other Dickens titles to which you could surf from there. What I didn't realize at the time was that there are dozens of other Penguin Classics at Amazon prices the likes of which I haven't seen for close to three years.

In my experience, prices like this don't last. So if you take one of the links below and don't find anything special... well, that means the train has left the station. But, as of this writing, the prices for US Amazon customers are under one dollar. If you share any of my attachment to Penguin Classics, such prices for annotated editions with introductions, may just be too good to pass up.

From today's perspective, the Victorian novelist best situated to rival Dickens, is of course George Eliot, and her masterpiece is Middlemarch. Virginia Woolf called it 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people'; to put it quite differently, I can assure you that there is life after Silas Marner.

My second recommendation comes with multiple caveats. The edition in question is an abridgment, and the work is one that could be assailed from either side of the 2011 'readability' debate. I find it highly readable in the best sense of the term, and an edition like this one (or the old Viking Portable, with which I'm more familiar but which this one has supplanted) is a good way for first-time readers to test that assessment. The book is Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire--which I propose as a document of its own time (the 18th century) rather than of the centuries it treats. (Notes to the principal text, incidentally, are Gibbons' original ones; editor David Womersley provides a good introduction and the bridging passages.)

In each case, surf on from the initial link to find more.

Dickens: What Are You Doing for the Next 16 Months?

I already know that this will be just the first of many posts I'll devote to Charles Dickens (1812-1870) over the course of the next 15 months or so--and not just because the Dickens year 2012 (the bicentenary of his birth) is approaching.

What I have to say today is addressed primarily to people who, in some way or another, love Dickens--or who can remember deriving pleasure from a Dickens novel at some point in their lives.

On the weekend I came upon a series of posts on the Penguin UK blog, about how one group of readers is celebrating the approaching anniversary: with a massive 'Dickens readathon'. Their goal is to read all 16 of Dickens' novels at the rate of one per month. They've already made it through Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and David Copperfield--and they're having a ball. Here's a temporary link to Penguin's 'feature' about the readathon, and here, here and here are more permanent links to the three 'Doing Dickens' posts (to date) chronicling the group's progress and impressions of the first three books.

I'm posting these links today because there's some chance you might like to join the readathon yourself. And because I notice that Penguin has slashed prices on the Penguin Classics ebooks of many Dickens titles. If you'd like to explore this, click here for Amazon UK or here for Amazon US to get to the page for the first novel, Pickwick Papers, then surf from there (using 'Customers who bought this item also bought') to see additional titles. Ordinarily I'd recommend searching for free ebooks at Amazon, but at the current prices the Penguin Classics editions with introductions and notes are very tempting.

I confess that I've never managed to read Dickens following a timetable. Even my attempts to read individual novels on a schedule imitating their original serialization have met with little success: I've been unable to stop at the end of an installment when I've had the rest of the novel ready and waiting, right there in my hands. (Some readers, however, love to read Dickens at a regular pace. I believe it was J.B. Priestley who read all of Dickens every three years, and that Anthony Burgess kept a similar schedule.)

What I can say, though, is that there's no bad Dickens, not even a novel that's slightly less enjoyable than it was on an earlier reading. How many writers can you say that about?

I'd planned to suggest alternative ways of celebrating the Dickens bicentenary, but let's save them for another day--and for your comments. To see more about how Dickens fans are celebrating around the world, though, see the Dickens 2012 website.

Returned to Life, Digitally: Thackeray & Bennett & Mailer & Monroe: Consider the Possibilities

When I led off Monday's Q & A with an answer referring to Thackeray, I had a moment of sadness, as I tend to do whenever he comes up. I grew up in a world in which his greatness was weighed against that of Dickens (his sole imaginable Victorian rival, we thought). True, most readers ended up preferring Dickens, but they had to think about it for a minute.

Today, if U.S. readers under 40 know Thackeray, it's likely to be solely for Vanity Fair, his only novel to have remained in print, in multiple editions, throughout their lifetimes. They may not even recognize the title of his Henry Esmond (1852), which I first knew as a mass-market paperback (from Pocket Books), then as a Modern Library hardback--both of course now long out of print. (Let me say about Esmond only that it's an historical novel that you either love or admire--freewheeling, enormously likeable; there are some readers who call it their favorite Thackeray, just as there are some for whom La chartreuse de Parme is the best Stendhal.)

At some point in the 1990s I picked up a new copy of what was already my favorite edition of Esmond, a Penguin Classics reissue of what used to be called the Penguin English Library edition (of 1970). (It has a real introduction and real notes, by John Sutherland.) Then, in no particular order, that edition and most of the rest of Thackeray went out of print, and I moved to Florida, somehow having donated most of my Thackeray. (It was just one of those things about which we say: 'It seemed to make sense at the time.')

It's not surprising that the ebook revolution of a few years ago brought onto the market, quite suddenly, a vast array of Thackeray, available for free from Project Gutenberg or in the 'aisles' of almost any ebookstore. What did surprise me was the ready availability of ebook counterparts of still unavailable print editions. Thus Sutherland's edition of Esmond is available today as an affordable Penguin ebook and looks better than ever (link for US Kindle here, or for UK iBooks here). It may never be restored to print (except in the sense that the Penguin UK website offers what I suspect is a print-on-demand edition, costing the equivalent of over US $25.00 and over three times the price of the ebook)--but the ebook is an 'easy download'. (Aren't they all?)

Let me also mention briefly that the same is true for an even more 'lost' Thackeray novel, Pendennis, as edited in 1972 by Donald Hawes with an introduction by J.I.M. Stewart, now returned to life as a Penguin ebook available in the same online stores.

What we're experiencing with ebooks is parallel to a phenomenon we already know from the digital revolution in recorded music: performances long unavailable are restored to us, sometimes even enhanced. For example, when I went shopping for Tony Bennett on vinyl in the early 1980s much of his catalogue was no longer available. By the end of this year it should all be available, digitally, and to me at least it sounds better than ever.

I continue to be surprised (wrongly, I think) by what these revolutions return to life. I discovered only yesterday that Norman Mailer's Marilyn (1973) has been released as an ebook--perhaps in anticipation of the 50th anniversary (next August) of Monroe's death. The book was a huge bestseller (outselling all of Mailer's other books except The Naked and the Dead) but has now been out of print for a few years. No new print edition is scheduled.

Although Mailer never had, for me, quite the status of my favorite authors, I followed him for most of his career. It felt at the time as if we all did. One of Mailer's greatest sins, in the eyes of his detractors, was the extent of his self-promotion; in retrospect, though, his excesses in this area don't seem to approach those of, say, 1980s singers, or certain bloggers of the present day. If his name is now less likely to be mentioned first in quick accounts of 20th-century writing on the border between reportage and fiction (New Journalism, nonfiction novel...), that may say more about the rest of us than about the value of his work. I'm only beginning to reread Mailer, and so far my experience has been mixed: The Fight I finally put down without finishing; Marilyn, which I just downloaded this morning, is more promising so far.

Norman Mailer (1923-2007) always was a 'lightning rod'. If you're looking for someone to dislike, or to dismiss, you might have to look for a long time to find a better candidate. But, if you can imagine that he might just be someone whose time is coming around again, give his prose a try in Marilyn. (And look for next year's ebook release of what may be Mailer's masterpiece: The Executioner's Song.)

'La Boutique Kindle': Now at Amazon.fr

Less than six months after the opening of the Kindle Store at Amazon.de, Amazon.fr at the end of last week began selling Kindle readers and ebooks to customers in France, Belgium, Monaco, Luxembourg and Switzerland. (Kindle Stores are expected at Amazon.es and Amazon.it in the months ahead.)

The new Kindle (priced in France at 99 euros [~ US $137]) has a  polyglot interface (the user chooses whether to see menu options in French, German, English, Spanish, Italian or Portuguese; default dictionaries are also available in all six languages), and the French site offers some 35,000 French-language ebooks in Kindle format, including 4,000 free classics.

So far, ebooks play a smaller role in France than in the US or the UK. The French market seems to me to be about where the US market was four years ago, and French prices even for backlist titles might strike American readers as strangely high. Most French publishers still base an ebook's price on that of the original full-priced print edition, not on the rack-sized paperback edition (if any) with which the ebook might be considered to be competing. For example, the French translation of Stephen King's Christine costs 14.99 euros (~ US $20.70) as an ebook but only 6.00 euros (~ US $8.29) as a rack-sized paperback. These prices are of course set not by Amazon but by publishers. (French law prohibits any discounting of ebooks and severely limits discounting of print editions.) Competition (along with the growth of ebook readership) may in time lead more publishers to follow the model of Gallimard, which already bases ebook prices on prices for corresponding rack-sized paperbacks (in cases where these exist).

By the way, Amazon is far from being the sole player in the French ebook game. The largest French retail book chain, Fnac, has just announced a new partnership with the Canadian firm Kobo: Kobo reading devices and ebooks will be offered in Fnac stores and at the Fnac website. (This is only one of a series of similar international partnerships being established by Kobo.) Fnac and Kobo are both forces to be reckoned with.

One happy by-product of the opening of la Boutique Kindle is the beefing up of free French-language offerings at the US (and international) site Amazon.com, where French-language ebooks carry the words 'French edition' after their titles. The more impressive options include works by Diderot, Sade, Dumas and Balzac--four links from which to start surfing--and that's just confining myself to 'the 26'.

Of course, la Boutique Kindle wouldn't be complete without A Kiss Before You Leave Me and a James Hulbert Page Auteur (where you can even read my dernier tweet, if you've somehow missed it everywhere else).

Please join me in saluting the opening of la Boutique Kindle--and the new Fnac-Kobo partnership--as welcome developments in the ongoing internationalization of our shared experience of reading and writing. And let's keep looking for ways to do a better job of it--for one another, as well as for ourselves.

New Meme on the Block: Q & A on Reading Habits

A friend in California just alerted me to a new meme that's apparently sweeping 'my' zone of the blogosphere. It can't hurt to give it a try....

1. Favorite childhood book? Vanity Fair.
2. What are you reading right now? The Leopard (Jo Nesbø), Sternenstaub [=Perry Rhodan Neo, Band 1] (Frank Borsch), Was ist Aufklärung? (Kant)
3. What books do you have on request at the library? None. I read almost exclusively digitally and, rightly or wrongly, I despair of finding the ebooks I want through the local library system.
4. Bad book habit? Reading too many books at once. Being attracted by 'shiny objects'.
5. What do you currently have checked out at the library? Nothing. See number 3 above.
6. Do you have an e-reader? Yes, a Kindle, a NOOKcolor and an iPad (on which I use mostly iBooks but on occasion another app).
7. Do you prefer to read one book at a time or several at once? In an ideal world I might read one at a time, but in fact I read several at once.
8. Have your reading habits changed since starting a blog? No.
9. Least favorite book you read this year (so far)? There's nothing that I would single out to mention in this way. Actually, it's been a pretty good year so far. I set less store by my negative reactions to books than other people do to theirs; I prefer to say that there are books that I 'didn't connect with at the time'. Non-connections don't lead (in my case) to powerful insights about what books should be.
10. Favorite book you've read this year? I can't pick just one. Four stand out: The Redeemer (Nesbø), Cinq lettres d'Egypte (Flaubert), Le funambule (Genet) and Montauk (Frisch). I was somehow surprised by all four, and less by their content than by the amount of pleasure I drew from them.
11. How often do you read out of your comfort zone? If I have such a zone, it must be quite broad. I'm almost always trying to push my own limits in some way.
12. What is your reading comfort zone? See number 11 above--but I'd say European and New World prose of the 18th century and thereafter.
13. Can you read on the bus? Yes.
14. Favorite place to read? In my easy chair, in the living room, with my feet up.
15. What is your policy on book lending? I can't remember the last time I lent a book. I confess that it's not an area where I've ever been conspicuously generous. But most books, printed books, I give away as soon as I finish reading them.
16. Do you ever dog-ear books? Only virtually. I doubt that I have ever in my life dog-eared a printed book.
17. Do you ever write in the margins of your books? Yes, in pencil, but not as much as I used to. And I do make some digital annotations in ebooks.
18. ...of your textbooks? Yes, in textbooks more often.
19. What is your favorite language to read in? My most honest answer would probably be: in English, French or German indifferently. But I do have some deep-seated, half-examined weaknesses for the immediacy of the German language and for physical characteristics of cheap French paperbacks. It would probably take decades of analysis (of one sort or another) to make any more sense of this.
20. What makes you love a book? Some combination of surprise (see number 10 above), lack of pretentiousness, textual or writerly passion, sheer beauty, daring... but for me 'the greatest of these is' surprise (in the sense used above).
21. What will inspire you to recommend a book? Any of the characteristics mentioned in number 20 above; the suspicion that other might-have-been recommenders are giving it short shrift.
22. Favorite genre? Crime fiction, I suppose, although my greatest weakness is for what you might call 'genre-benders': for example, for books situated on the border line between crime fiction and literary fiction.
23. Genre you rarely read (but wish you did)? Autobiographies from the 19th century or earlier.
24. Favorite biography? Easy: Stefan Zweig's ('full-length', although fragmentary, posthumous) Balzac.
25. Have you ever read a self-help book? Many of them, in the 1970s. And even today I may approach the occasional book of any randomly chosen official genre as having implications for my life. I'm not proud of it--but from time to time I display most or all of the 'bad' habits that I try to persuade others to refrain from.
26. Favorite cookbook? I honestly can't remember ever reading a cookbook from cover to cover. The ones I've most enjoyed dipping into? Those by Julia Child.
27. Most inspirational book you've read this year (fiction or non-fiction)? The War of Art (Steven Pressfield).
28. Favorite reading snack? Love to read. Love to snack. Somehow, though, I never do both at the same time.
29. Name a case in which hype ruined your reading experience. I'm honestly having trouble coming up with an example. It has surely happened frequently over the years--although more often when I was much younger, because I was more likely then to take certain other readers' opinions as reliable. It may be worth reminding ourselves that authors are generally not responsible for the hype their books receive. It doesn't seem to make sense for me to decry as overhyped the early works of some hard-boiled U.S. detective novelist of the last century or some of the later works of a doyenne of the British psychological mystery--especially if we can all agree not to take the hype so seriously in general.
30. How often do you agree with critics about a book? I can usually see the basis of a critic's assessment--but total agreement is rare. Today I just skim reviews that I might have read very closely when I was younger.
31. How do you feel about giving bad/negative reviews? My dislikes seem to me far less noteworthy today than they did 20 years ago.
32. If you could read in a foreign language, which language would you choose? Of the languages that I don't know well enough to feel I can read in them, Spanish is my greatest regret.
33. Most intimidating book you've ever read? If I rule out Proust (because La recherche was on my orals and I had to read it), and anything by Hegel (because my dissertation 'covered' 'all' of him and so I had to read him), and Ulysses (because I taught it)--and I'm not sure I should rule out any of those three--I'm not sure what I'm left with. I was well prepared by my education, meaning also by my parents, to be able to approach just about any book without much sense of intimidation. It makes more sense for me to salute my parents and all my teachers than to try to adjudicate further. If I have a 'secret' in this area, it's that most readers can read with relative ease most of what they might imagine to be intimidating. I'll blog about that soon.
34. Most intimidating book you're too nervous to begin? See number 33 above.
35. Favorite poet? Shakespeare, although he didn't come to mind until after Baudelaire and Yeats.
36. How many books do you usually have checked out of the library at any given time? See number 3 above.
37. How often have you returned a book to the library unread? Over the span of my life, not often, but it's happened.
38. Favorite fictional character? That's a surprisingly difficult question for me, perhaps because I tend not to think in those terms. But the one answer that pops into my head is Isabel Archer (The Portrait of a Lady): I found myself watching very carefully how the characterization was done....
39. Favorite fictional villain? Not always sure who is, and isn't, a villain. But Balzac's Vautrin (the master criminal who appears in different works under different names and who ends up in a career situation that I shouldn't 'anticipate' here; he's on board in three of the highest-profile novels, Père Goriot, Lost Illusions and A Harlot High and Low [Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes])--Vautrin is my best candidate. (Note, of course, that he is just as prone as any heroic type to loving 'not wisely but well'.)
40. Books I'm most likely to bring on vacation? Delicious page-turners by beloved authors: e.g., Dumas, Wodehouse, Nesbø.
41. The longest I've gone without reading. The summer I spent in Hamburg the year I turned 20. I worked in an office job all day and enjoyed the pleasures (high and low) of the city every evening and didn't manage to read at all. I find this incredible, to this very day.
42. Name a book that you could/would not finish. Céline's Bagatelles pour un massacre. I was sure until then that I could read anything. I was wrong.
43. What distracts you easily when you're reading? Not much....
44. Favorite film adaptation of a novel? All that comes to mind is Trainspotting, and that's considered on its own merits, and not as an adaptation per se. I tend to think about all films, whether adaptations or not, in that way.
45. Most disappointing film adaptation? Let me get back to you on that.
46. The most money I've ever spent in the bookstore at one time? Years and years ago, something in excess of £200 spent on one of my then-annual visits to Hatchards.
47. How often do you skim a book before reading it? Never.
48. What would cause you to stop reading a book halfway through? A better offer (I'm afraid).
49. Do you like to keep your books organized? You'd never know it--but I do!
50. Do you prefer to keep books or give them away once you've read them? Give them away.
51. Are there any books you've been avoiding? No.
52. Name a book that made you angry.  In the sense in which I think you mean it, see number 29. In a very different sense, Les misérables.
53. A book you didn't expect to like but did? Tess of the d'Urbervilles.
54. A book that you expected to like but didn't? It usually doesn't turn out that way. Let me get back to you.
55. Favorite guilt-free pleasure reading? No contradiction there. Anything I love. See number 40 above.

Welcoming Readers from 26 'New' Countries--and Everywhere Else as Well

I was just sitting down an hour or so ago to draft what I planned for this, my second and concluding blogpost of the week. (I'm experimenting this month with blogging only three times a week, and between now and next Monday I won't have my usual access to the Internet.) A post was starting to take shape in my head, something like 'The "Great Books": Very Approachable'--when I took a quick look at the blogroll in the column to the right and got some news that pleased me so much that I have to blog about it today.

Apple's iBooks has just increased from 6 to 32 the number of countries in which it offers my novel A Kiss Before You Leave Me and 50,000 other ebooks handled by the aggregator Smashwords. Last week you could find Kiss in the iBookstores for Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the UK and the US; starting this week, it's also in the stores throughout Scandinavia, the rest of Continental Europe and beyond.

Think of Smashwords as being like a wholesaler or distributor in the bricks-and-mortar world. Indie authors and publishers frequently deal directly with Amazon but rely on Smashwords to get their books out to Sony, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and other vendors. Smashwords is an outstanding partner for all of us (readers can shop there, too)--something I always tell new authors one-on-one but need to stress here as well.

A Kiss Before You Leave Me has been attracting more and more readers at iBooks (in France, the UK and the US), readers it might never have found without the partnership between Smashwords and Apple. I've written before about the special importance to me of readers from all over the world (for example, here).

It's clearly not just about numbers. Readers, wherever they live, are far more to a writer than mere consumers--and all our talk about distribution and e-retail should never obscure that fact. Readers from Cyprus, Scandinavia, Slovenia and everywhere in between have been with the blog Jascha Writes from its earliest days. I welcome all of you, all over again. And if our communication also comes about in the 'aisles' of your iBooks or iTunes store, so much the better.

Thank You, J.A. Beard, for 'Art, Obsession and Betrayal'--and More

Today I have the pleasure of thanking author, blogger and reviewer J.A. Beard for 'Art, Obsession and Betrayal', his in-depth review of my novel A Kiss Before You Leave Me for the blog My Indie, My Tea and Me.

J.A. Beard is a highly perceptive and insightful reader--and I say this not only because he's been kind to A Kiss Before You Leave Me. Regular readers of Jascha Writes have heard enough from me about Kiss, at least for the moment. Please join me in linking to J.A. Beard's review of Kiss and benefiting from his take on the book. (To sample from his other recent writing online, you might want to start with this post on Lady Murasaki and The Tale of Genji, or with any of the Beard links above.)

Beard is part of a growing number of writers, reviewers, bloggers, editors and scholars who go to work every day on behalf of independent writing and publishing. Yes, indie is going through the roof. We can thank J.A. Beard, and people like him, for that, too. And we--you--can join them.