Crap Looking Books Relaunch!

This week two years ago, I decided on a whim to launch into a project that would shake up my reading habits and to add some variation to the books on my shelves. Crap Looking Books was born, and had me scrabbling around markets and second book stalls looking for the most ridiculously awesome and awesomely ridiculous looking books I could find.

Crap Looking Books intentionally judges books by their covers, and finds out if those judgements hold true. It's about those point-of-sale decisions we make when buying books and the methods that publishers, writers and artists use to influence those decisions.

It's about shaking expectations and using a writer's eye to judge whether the cover and book are in the same genre, and what mistakes and strokes of genius the writer makes to that effect. 

It's about taking a look at what quietly passed for popular literature in the past decade, or twenty or thirty years ago, and holding it to account where necessary.

It isn't about taking a swing at the big names or the obvious abominations. Maybe JK Rowlling needs to be taken down a peg or two, maybe the Twilight Series is massively overrated, and maybe (MAYBE?!) 50 Shades of Grey is deplorable trash.. but all three of those series have featured effective cover art, some defining waves of generic titles to follow.

With the mess of topics and opinions at This Is Where The Voices Go, and a rising audience for Crap Looking Books that I'm inclined to believe aren't also interested in my other material, be it the scruffiness of Miquita Oliver or shoplifting TV chefs, I've decided to celebrate Crap Looking Book's second birthday by gifting it its own dotcom, and all the promotional material that goes along with it.

I've set up a Facebook Page for readers to keep in touch, but more importantly to suggest other titles that they may want me to cast a Crap Looking Books eye upon!

Well I'm excited for the coming months and content, and think keeping Crap Looking Books and This Is Where The Voices Go separate can only be a good thing for both of them, though I'll be post any relevant books content to both! 

Enjoy!

Nick
xx 

On Female Authors ...

(x-posted to This Is Where The Voices Go)
Rejected Title: "I need Maurier books than just Daphne"

While browsing the fantastic events calendar for Manchester Literature Festival, I found myself noting just how many of the female authors (but the not poets, strangely) I'm completely unfamiliar with. This got me to wondering why none of the female authors I follow ever do events or talks. 

A cursory glance at my bookshelves provided me with the answer. If you take away my near-complete Daphne DuMaurier collection and the obligatory Harry Potters, a shockingly dominant male bias shows its face.

a female writer, evidently

Pull out any books bought for university that have survived the six years since (Austen, Bronte, Shelley, Winterson, Zadie Smith, A.L Kennedy, Stella Gibbons, *) and I'm left... with two... Simon Lia's beautiful graphic novel Fluffy which I one day hope she'll let me put on a stage, and Claire Dowie's Creating Chaos.

Thinking my collection was incomplete, I checked out the books that I lust after, rather than just those that I own. Of the 217 books on my Amazon wishlist, only 18 are by female authors, and only 9 of those are fiction.

My first reaction was one of guilt, but that didn't feel right. Despite what I said about Linda Barnes, I have no issue with female authors. I don't really think of them as female authors, just as I don't think of men as male authors. Both are just extra words on a book cover or a flag to tie a series or style around.

It's not my fault that classic science fiction and fantasy was male-dominated. It's not my fault that the most attractive covers on the shelf last time I was a-browsing were attached to works by David Drake and Jeff Somers. I've got to blame the industry, and go about fixing this bias by filling my shelves with female authors, right?

No.

Putting my new-feminism cap on for a moment (they gave me one at university, it suits me when I like it), I have to say that actively searching out female authors simply because they are female is just as sexist and oppressive as having an ignorance of female authors. Gender plays no part in quality of writing, nor should it affect prominence of genres or form, although certain lists are more likely to push certain familiar styles.

So what's the solution? Passively expose myself to as many books as possible in the hope that some of them are by female authors? I'm fairly sure that's what I'm already doing, and it isn't enough.

UPDATE. Well we've proven enough through the comments below that crowd-sourcing is an excellent way to get hold of new writers, and I don't want you to think for a moment that I'm pandering when I say I'm going to enjoy working my way through all those recommendations. I also have to say I love that you're chatting amongst yourselves too!

But still.. the fact that it had to go to crowd sourcing is not such a great thing. I can easily generate a list of male writers I have never read or know nothing about, but the same clearly isn't true for women writers. I'm not special in this regard, and don't feel that my situation is a rare one. We should all be able to pull names from the air regardless of their gender, age or race, and I feel the need to return to blaming this on the availability of information, and the relative lack of exposure women writers receive, and should consider that a goal worth working towards.

Well like I say, I'm off to follow up on some of this excellent feedback, and to pass it on.

Nick

xx
*I nearly put Wilkie Collins on this list but a quick google proved a worthwhile error-check..

Crap Looking Book Responses #5:Terry Nation's Survivors

a disappointment, yesterday

So I recently found myself enthusiastically devouring a copy of Terry Nation's post-apocalyptic Survivors. For those of you who don't know Terry Nation, he's the now-deceased British science fiction writer responsible for.. well.. most British Science Fiction. He's the guy who invented the fucking Daleks, and near-single handedly penned Blake's 7, the grandaddy of story-arc science fictions like Babylon 5, ExoSquad and even Red Dwarf, which inspired a generation, brought some of our major writing current teams together in shared interest, and firmly stuffed a stencil of Oleg Gan's face in my "possible tattoos" folder.

If my fanboying isn't obvious enough, let me state clearly that I was excited to get a hold of this book and wanted above all else to be sure I liked it.

Dang.

The book falls down because it is one of those TV-to-novel adaptions that focuses on key episodes from its given series at the cost of other material, and which doesn't make any bones about doing so. There are maybe a few interesting scenes or moments, but the the interesting stuff is skipped over. For example an understanding of just how our post-apocalyptic gabble survived the winter is left out, yet we're treated to agonisingly drawn out conversations about cups of tea and wood-chopping.

There's limited petrol, patience and food in the dying world, yet there seems to be an over-abundance of brandy. They put it on their wounds, give it to their sick, toast their pregnancies with it, and might as well water their crops with it. Come the apocalypse, we'll all be warmly wasted. Your son goes missing, your lover dies, and you might get shot in the face, but cheers! Pip pip!

The reason why this falls under Crap Looking Books of Which I've Never Heard is... well the crap looking cover. Staring out at my excited face were four actors of varying familiarity who supposedly starred in the 2008 remake of the 1970s original series on which this book is based. All of whom have gone on to better things, not all of whom were even that prominent in the 2008 adaption.

Now when it comes to television and scripts, Terry Nation is an extremely visual writer. It makes it easy to work as his Director of Photography, because you don't have to imagine what he wants the audience to see. Unfortunately he seems unable to shake that in the novel format, and every landscape, person, car, gun and vegetable (and brandy!) is described in Tolkeinesque detail the moment they enter the scene.

Thanks to this I really did feel like I was playing "Guess Who?" with the faces of the cover-bound characters and the extensive descriptions offered, when really I wanted to play "spot the Terry Nation motifs and nuances, then bask in their awesomeness".

My off-and-on dislike of actress Freema Agyeman, and the disapproving scowl of Julie Graham was fuelling my reading, driving me to identify who they were in the book in order to get hating on them. I felt like I was constantly waiting for a clue or tell by which they'd reveal themselves, and invested myself far too heavily in each and every character as a result, many of whom turned out to be just passing through.

We can bandy about cliches on not judging books by their covers, but the simple truth is that covers and illustrations will always hold influence over our reading. By the end of the book I still didn't really know who the people on the cover were, and in all seriousness/ridiculousness I felt this left the narrative unresolved for me. I knew it was a nonsense response to have to my own invented struggle, and yet there it was.

If the cover featured an indistinct huddle of survivors clustered around a dwindling fire, or a post-apocalyptic team of farmers working the ground while a city burned on the horizon, then I may have found an enduring image that reinforced some of the more important tones of the text. unfortunately all the cover offers is the lazy wrapping of one tie-in with the imagery of another. Disappointment and detachment abounds.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to stock up on end-of-the-world brandy.

Nick
xx

It's a case of books, and bookcases

 (x-posted to This Is Where The Voices Go)

a bookcase, yesterday

The combination of a recent family bereavement and Facebook finally releasing the admin shackles on my page No, I do NOT have too many books! has had me thinking about the past. The past and bookcases.

I have a complex relationship with e-readers, probably because I don't own one. I have a complex relationship with books, probably because I own thousands.

As a child I remember staring at all the books on the shelves in our dining room* and wondering what they were about, wondering where they had come from and where they fitted in with the history of my family and the broader history of the world around us. Some covers and titles were intimidating in their quirkiness, like all the Paddy Clarkes and Sue Townsends, while the Tolkeins stood like defiant stores of treasure and Abbie Hoffman's call to Steal This Book proved almost too tempting. Books weren't just stories, they were little pieces of the world, weathered or preserved with reason and purpose, little histories in and of themselves.

I can't imagine a child staring at a Kindle with that same level of awe.

Don't get me wrong. E-readers, the Kindle foremost of them all, are exploding the worlds of reading and literacy. People who had given up on reading are again picking up the habit. A countless multitude of texts are at the fingertips of every single user/reader, and independent presses are finding themselves ready and able to compete side by side with the big publishing houses. The Kindle has done nothing but help in the spreading of words and stories.

But it's still just a little black stick.

In e-readers, the wonder of a stack of books is replaced with a coolness factor, an intrigue as to what the device is and what it can do, but with no precedence over a mobile phone, TV remote or electric can opener. When a book no longer satisfies a child, all books are not held to blame because all books are not the same item, but part of the rich tapestry of objects and ideas that the child is exploring. Tie all literature together in one device, and when the content becomes jaded and spurned, the device becomes jaded and spurned. Suddenly the entire world of literature can be snuffed out with the flick of a power key.

And at the very basic level... a child will find a kindle makes a much less serviceable hat.

That house I grew up in is still there, still lived in by my parents, with most the books on those shelves standing the same as they did twenty years ago. Boxes and piles of other books now cluster around their feet, sprawling over the piano that stands between them, and working their steady way across the floor to consume the rest of the room.

Nick

 xx

*Pretentious as that sounds, it was "dined" in at a rate of less than once per year.

Why I watch the film first, or "Give me back my face!!"

 (x-posted to This Is Where The Voices Go)

So just a quick pre-birthday blog brought on by workplace discussion about Game Of Thrones, and my holding out on the books until I've fully seen the show, and my propensity towards watching the film before reading the book.

I don't know how common this is, but I have a fairly visual imagination. Make a joke about a coworker's privates or mention a particular video involving a jam jar, and my horrible horrible brain will throw pictures of it at me. It's a double edged sword for writing, since seeing everything so clearly makes for an easy scene to set, but also limits me in recalling just how much of the scene I've painted.

No matter how film differs from the book it rips off or its eventual novelisation, a film-before-book approach will always colour your reading with images grabbed from the screen. Which is fine. You've been given a set of premade puppets to work with, and while the book might have them dance to a different tune or story than the one you're familiar with, and maybe flesh it out a little, but it won't suddenly mash up character faces unexpectedly. Unless you're reading the novelisation of Vanilla Sky. I seriously hope such a thing does not exist.

But if you read the book first, you make the characters first. Sure there's guidelines in the text but ultimately you paint their faces and gait yourself, deciding upon their most likely expressions and mannerisms. Maybe you're told that they smile or scratch themselves, but you ultimately set the framework for those actions, and decide how they scratch or smile. 

Along comes the film and suddenly what you have in your head is at odds with what you're seeing. That isn't Edward Rochester, it's Orson Welles. That isn't Anton Gorodetsky, it's Konstantin Khabenskiy. you're not watching the text, you're watching a film interpretation of the text, populated with actors and props and budgets and limited suspension of disbelief that steadily pisses you off and alienates you. When I pick a fight with a text I want it to be for mature and thought out reasons, not because a character "doesn't look right".

There are exceptions. Intentionally one dimensional nobodies like Neuromancer's Henry Dorsett Case can be played by anyone, as can anyone whose characterisation is much more about their actions or feelings than how they appear to themselves or others.

My primary exception to the rule was to rapidly consume the Harry Potter books before exposing myself to each of the films, an exception I find mainly excusable because of the flexible relevance the films seemed to hold to the books, be it for marketability, dumbing up, or trying to put David Tennant's face in as many scenes as possible.

Comics and graphic novels, as a medium, tend to hold a little more sway over their cinematic product, their already existing prominence as visual mediums and die-hard, often rabid fanbases influencing casting choices, or as in the case of Ultimate Avengers, causing casting choices based on who the original designs were denied to mimic.

Closing with that point, I'm off to see Cobie Smulders in a onsie The Avengers, and see if there's anything in there worth ranting about...

Nick

xx

Writing for stage and screen, and for Yourself

 (x-posted to This Is Where The Voices Go)

Fans and followers of National Novel Writing Month may not be aware, but that month of writerly passions and furies has a sister scheme called Script Frenzy, where the aim is to produce 100 pages of fairly well-formatted script in 30 days.

Since I turned down a BA in Scriptwriting 10 years ago, I've never been drawn to the format, but this year I'm getting geared up for it.

Here's why, and why you should too.

Scriptwriting is bare-bones storytelling. It lacks prose's distractions of character description and setting, pushing dialogue and story to the forefront. I'm the first to admit I write poor dialogue, often smothering it in a telling rather than exposing it in a showing. 

But in scripts you can't just say that "he told her all about himself", you have to show exactly how, and what words he used. There are no internal monologues or third person narration to hide behind.

Similarly, you can't hide a poor story in pretty scenery when you can't "see" the pretty scenery. While in script there is always an idea of where the characters and events are, there is no need or outlet for lavishing attention on place and circumstance. The characters, and their words and reactions, must speak for themselves.

Who we are is never really about what we think, and much more about what we do and say.

Concepts of place and reality also tighten down on the narrative devices you can employ. You can't have a dragon appear from nowhere without everyone that saw it getting into some serious tunnel-vision mindfuckery about where it came from. When you start to think about real world applications and possibilities, you start to limit yourself to those real worlds, and work within a more rigid and logical framework.

Even in a full-on High Fantasy setting a dragon has to come from somewhere, which'll have you writing caves into hillsides and hillsides into landscapes as a realm unfolds that makes sense rather than merely serving a purpose.

With quantity-not-quality projects like NaNoWriMo, the trend is to over describe settings and people, perhaps focusing on every single strand of hair on a lover's head, or counting the tiles on the bathroom floor. Perfect if your protagonist is a little autistic or hungover, but having them stand slack jawed and stock-still while they take everything in doesn't bode well for a visual medium. 

Come to think of it those quantity boosting tactics are probably why so much modern literary fiction is full of autism and drunks.

Scriptwriting has an advantage over prose when writing for length. Often in prose you might send a character off on an abortive mission just to kill some time and fill some pages, but with a script you're working so unavoidably alongside characters that they'll often resist your nonsense, stopping dead in their tracks and forcing you to keep things direct, succinct and relevant.

Then when the characters are writing the story, it pretty much writes itself.

Nick

xx

Like most modern scripts, mine is an excellent vehicle for Stephen Mangan and James Lance.

A swear in the fucking title

 (x-posted to This Is Where The Voices Go)

So just after New Year I finished reading the book that I started before Christmas, an awful, dreadful thing  stuffed with prostitutes and shotguns, and the kind of dialogue you'd expect from Engrish dubbing. The central character approached the narrative in an ingenious fashion, routinely getting knocked unconscious for the boring parts before coming to just in time for any action. 

I should set up some sort of mental filter that engages when I'm out hunting for second hand books, one that stops me from picking up anything from the crime genre, with all its frustratingly two-dimensional bent cops, hard rains on dirty streets, casual acceptances of pederasty, and meticulous descriptions of gun and car types.

Even that filter would've struggled when I saw the cover of MAIN BITCH in Oxfam. That such a book had found its way into a store filled with cardigans and the smell of old people (boiled sweets and sawdust) was fantastic in itself, but the bold red lettering emblazoned over the tawdry black and white sketch of a sulky prostitute just screamed of deviancy and brown paper bags and the independent press. 

There was nothing specifically wrong or singular about such a purchase, but I still felt strangely empowered and aberrant swapping those paperbacked pages for cold hard cash. I was like a teenager buying condoms for the first time.

Then...well then I decided to take the book on the train, and suddenly found myself quite uncomfortable with the looks of concern from tweed old women and from young families travelling to the city for the day, especially when their faces turned from the pleasure and interest of seeing someone read... to the understanding and interpreting of the words and images on the cover. I told myself I should probably be more careful, and more conservative with how I displayed my reading material...

That is until I had a few more hours to kill, and decided to kill them along with a few brain cells in the standing area of a Covent Garden Wetherspoons. Suddenly I was holding the book high and pointing the cover directly at a group of slightly alternative-looking twentysomethings, or anyone who dressed and moved liked they'd been to university, waiting for their slow nods of approval to commence.

Yes, that's right, I'm reading. I'm reading a book in public, rather than kicking a ball or punching someone. I am an academic and we have so much in common, person slowly wondering why that man with the book is nodding at them.

An unofficial office party wound their way to bar, by which I mean a large group of men in suits started baying for booze. I held the book with even more resolution and defiance, often getting in their way as they shouted various slang words for breast and used the entirety of their lungs and spines to laugh at nothing.

Yes, that's right. I'm reading a book in public without shame, in a place you'd never read a book. I know something you don't know, and have access to an understanding that you can't quite grasp. The book itself speaks of a world you don't know, a world you've joked about, a world you wish you knew more about. It intrigues you. Me and my book intrigue you, you men who wish  I'd take my buzz kill and go find a place to stand that didn't take up so much space.

So in a matter of hours and a pint and a half I went from a timid travelling academic to a pretentious and showy prick, and all it took was book with a mild swear word in the title. Mark Ravenhill would be so proud.

Nick

xx

Oh! And it says something for Main Bitch that the best review they could find essentially says "I read it from start to finish, turning each page to see what happened next" .... that isn't a review, that's a description of what happens when you read...