Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë

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The first good reason for my finally reading Jane Eyre is the richer understanding lent to this webcomic (full props and credit to Hark! A Vagrant):

The second good reason is for getting over this stigma that Charlotte Brontë and other authors like her (see: Jane Austen) produce pure chick-lit. Yes, women seem to love this story type more than men do; honestly, I think this difference stems more from our manly prejudices than from any qualities inherent in the works.

Why shouldn't men like to read a good love story? Especially when that story is not mere mush and sentiment, but chock-a-block full of subversion, spooky attic noises, and near-death wanderings, its romance element nearly takes a backseat. (I say nearly, for Jane Eyre is a wholly different kind of story without the love interests.)

Actually, these romance stories--when well done!--are among the most intriguing. We know these two characters are perfect for each other; we know they ought to get together and get on with the down-and-dirty already; and we really really believe they will. How is it that the protagonists' inevitable pairing is stretched so thin that we demote it from knowledge to belief? How is it that, despite our knowing (or thinking we know) precisely how the story is going to end, in the generalities if not in the specifics, we keep reading, enthralled, our certainties tempered and our knowledge doubted?

Pulling off those questions is a remarkable enough feat for any storyteller. And readers, male and female alike, appreciate when an author does it well. We men, though we might not like to admit it, fall in love as often and as powerfully and as capably as our counterparts. We have the same doubts and anxieties about romance, and the same exultation and exuberance. So why should we not partake of the same literature with the same enthusiasm?

Give romance a shot, men. You couldn't start with a much better example than Jane Eyre.

Podcast of "In the Haus of Broken Toys"

To coincide with the launch of A Thoroughly Good Blue, podcasts.ie have recorded several of the anthology's contributors reading their pieces and are now releasing them (for free!) to the public.

Already my reading of "In the Haus of Broken Toys" seems to be well-received, and it just launched on Friday. So follow the link to get the podcast for your very own (for free!). It's also available on iTunes (for free). And then please feel welcome to let me know in the blog comments what you think of the reading.

Did I mention that it's for free?

If you like what you hear, and you want to read more, remember that the ebook of A Thoroughly Good Blue is available on Amazon for a steal of a price.

Thank you, Microphone readers, for your support!

Needful Things, by Stephen King

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I've finally taken the plunge and read my first Stephen King book -- which is my disclaimer way of saying that, for all I know, what I'm about to write may be no-duh to longtime King readers. It's what struck me after reading Needful Things, though, so I'll say it anyway. (And before anyone rides me on a rail for being King-ignorant [Kingorant?], I've got Misery on my shelf to read soon.)

This book is (so I'm told) not King's most horrific writing, nor his most frightening, though I would call it frightful. What struck me so deeply was not the fact that the Devil comes to town as a well-groomed shopkeeper looking to con some people out of their souls, but that the town goes to hell on the highway of their own paving. Human greed and pride rule the day here, and while the people of Castle Rock may push their vices to the extreme, they act in ultimately human ways -- ways in which, under the right circumstances, you and I might well behave.

King could have actually made the story more frightful by backing off on the shopkeeper's control over human characters. Throughout the novel and up to right near the end, his powers of mental persuasion and delusion remain evident and only grow more powerful. I had the very real sense that the townspeople were being played -- not merely manipulated, but moved around the board like stiff, non-living chess pieces by an all-powerful hand. Persuasion is not the name if the game so much as domination. Yes, human desire for physical possessions (and the attendant jealousy and greed that fester like aggravated cold sores) courses through all the characters -- but we don't need the subordinating hand of a demonic salesman to induce magnificent and irrational destructive behavior. You don't even have to wait for Black Friday to observe how covetous normal people can be. Even your run-of-the-mill advertisements recognize this covetousness and employ incredible amounts of psychological influence on the human mind when it comes to triggering "need" rather than mere "want"; basically, what the impish shopkeeper in this book does to his customers, people themselves do to others anyway.

Yes, a satanic proprietor can exacerbate the worst of our qualities. The traits are already there, though. The frightful part of Needful Things is not that the Devil has ridden into town; it's what we're capable of doing with a little nudging. And all I have to do is look around my own reality to see that perhaps, in some ways, King overestimates just how much evil influence we might actually need to jump off the deep end.

Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel

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I just have to say that, as a writer of illustration-less fiction, I will forever be envious of the graphic novel for the effortless-seeming way in which it can tie multiple threads together in a single frame. See how this bit of dialogue from one place and time is juxtaposed over this meaningful image from another place and time? See how this motif shows up in the background of this picture just as another character is practicing lines from a familiar play, lines which are suddenly charged with subtext and weighted with heretofore unanticipated meaning?

Yeah, I love that effect.

Fiction has its own ways of pulling off similar effects, but seldom so neatly and smoothly as a good graphic novel. Alan Moore does it infamously well in Watchmen and other books; as far as I'm concerned, Alison Bechdel does it as well as anyone in Fun Home.

(What, you've never heard of her? I hadn't either, until someone recommended this book to me. Turns out I might have been in the ignorant minority -- on Amazon, Fun Home is currently in the top 250 books. Not graphic novels; all the books. Even Watchmen lags behind in the 700s.)

Bechdel's graphic memoir is well worth a good, thorough read for a dozen reasons other than this one. But if you should pick it up, do pay attention to this layering of meanings and interpretations. You won't feel disappointment at seeing the magician's wires -- actually, I suspect you'll be all the more amazed at how well the trick is played.

A Thoroughly Good Blue - the ebook is live

Click to buy the ebook for your very own!
(It makes a lovely e-gift, too.)
(Also, when the contributors are famous, you can be all kinds of cool by saying, "Yeah, I read them before they were big.")

(If pricing information shows as unavailable, just sign in to your Amazon account.)

I posted about A Thoroughly Good Blue back in February, when this anthology was easing into the second trimester. The rush of conception was well behind us, and the basic building blocks were laid, but most of the development was still to happen.

Today, the fifteen authors whose poetry and short stories are included in this volume welcome the ebook into the world, and we thank everyone who supports up-and-coming writers the world over. You make it possible for folks like us to dream about feeding ourselves by doing what we love.

The ebook is available on Amazon through both the US and the UK sites for a steal of a price. (Proceeds benefit the School of English at Trinity College Dublin, by which I mean they get paid back for funding this project in the first place.) We're simply excited to get our writing into the wider world. It's one thing to have your friends and peers read a story; it's another entirely to know that complete strangers have (legal) access to it.

My inclusion is a story called "In the Haus of Broken Toys," which one advance reader called "impressively creepy" and which has convinced my number one reader that I ought to do Gothic. Look out, Poe!

---
The limited print version will follow its sibling in mid-May. I don't think hard copies will be available on Amazon, but if you're really really dying for one, get in touch with me and we'll see what we can work out.

An Evening of Long Goodbyes, by Paul Murray

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Without a doubt, this story is among the five funniest books I've ever read -- and I'm a big fan of such funnymen as Tom Robbins, Kurt Vonnegut, and Dave Barry. For that reason alone, it's worth reading.

What sets An Evening of Long Goodbyes apart from so many other funny books, though, is not simply that its writing is so hilarious. I don't want to say that anyone can write a bunch of one-liners (though there are plenty of hack stand-up comedians out there who think they can), but this book contains a much more nuanced and difficult-to-deliver style of humor than the set-up-to-a-punch-line formula: the narrator, Charles Hythloday, is either the world's most oblivious man or else the master craftsman of denial, and through his perspective the reader is able to see his world as he simply cannot.

Even if Charles had a particularly developed sense of humor, it would be so aristocratic (not to be confused with the well-documented Aristocrats joke) as to be inaccessible. No, what we are privy to is the story of a man who puts himself in the worst possible corners, whose naivete about the world at large rivals that of a particularly sheltered kindergartener, whose delusions are so grand that we almost -- almost -- wonder whether he is mentally restricted.

He's not ill, though, which is to say he's fully recognizable as a human being with very human foibles and hang-ups that cannot be simply explained away by a clinical diagnosis. Therapy may help this character, without a doubt; but when we laugh at his story, we're laughing at the world he has built around himself. It's not so much finding humor in a person falling down as it is finding humor in a person stepping on the banana peels that he has spent his life strewing about his own lawn.

Unlike some funny writers, Paul Murray doesn't let his humor horse pull the plot cart. Charles has much growing to do, and his story of self-discovery and his claiming of self-awareness comes first. He can't help it if humor arises from the situations he places himself in, or from the delusions he has spent a lifetime building. The jokes never feel hollow, because we're never cheated out of the story's substance.

Life really is funny, when we think about it. Which is probably why those funny stories that take life itself seriously (including Murray's other novel, Skippy Dies) are the most hilarious of all.

The Ramona books, by Beverly Cleary

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Back in November, I wrote about the deep and simple pleasures of reading aloud. The tradition continues in our home, and this time, we read three of the Ramona Quimby books by Beverly Cleary -- Beezus and Ramona, Ramona the Pest, and Ramona the Brave.

These books formed a crux of my childhood reading. Goodness knows how many times I checked each of them out from the elementary school library and gaped at the inevitable disasters that are a young girl's attempts to navigate the world. I thought I didn't remember anything that happened in these stories, though I did recall the vicarious thrill of getting into and out of trouble with good ol' Ramona Q.

Turns out, I remembered much more than I ever gave my mind credit for. These books had lodged themselves in the deep shelves of my mind, and with first-grade delight I recalled most of what was about to happen just before it happened. They evoked for me the incredible and rare experience of re-discovery -- in book terms, those cherished stories that you enjoy re-reading, not simply for the familiar comforts of a good yarn, but for that reiterated thrill that never quite diminishes.

Perhaps part of this thrill comes from how I read Ramona now that I am one of those adults who populate her world (seriously, I'm now older than her kindergarten teacher). You see, Cleary gets a lot of credit for not talking down to children, and I recognized many of Ramona's struggles in my own adult-level existence. For me, Ramona's adventures circle around her need to sort out her identity in life -- how to write her name, how her peers and her elders perceive her, how she wants to be perceived, and how she wants to behave within her own sphere when no one at all is looking.

Those aren't issues that go away no matter how well we resolve them as children. (Well, maybe except for the name-writing ones, but I for one have contemplated revising my signature at several points.) I doubt even the happiest and most self-assured among us never ask themselves questions about their own identities. Who we are is perhaps less important on a practical level than who we think we are, and who other people believe us to be.

Maybe, just maybe, Ramona Quimby helps us to be okay with our self-inflicted identity crises clear through life. Reading her stories again as an adult certainly doesn't hurt.