Luddism

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There are books you really want to read, and books you feel you should read.  There are authors who delight in telling you what’s going on, and there are authors whose writing obfuscates.  I’ve always preferred the former in both scenarios, but I felt I should read William Gibson’s Neuromancer.  I guess I’ve grown apart from science fiction.  (It’s not you, it’s me.)  Or at least some of it.  And I encounter too much jargony writing among academics.  I’m a simple guy with simple tastes.  Also, noir has never been my favorite.  Case, the protagonist, is difficult to like.  As a literary achievement there’s no doubt that Neuromancer is amazing.  And highly influential.  It’s the story of a thief/conman (Case) who’s hired for a mission that he doesn’t understand.  Along the way he falls in love (sort of), but, well, noir.  Dames.  The imaginative elements are pretty stunning, and some of them have come true.  AI being one of them.  And maybe that didn’t help sway me to liking it too much.  I’m no fan of AI.

I didn’t read the novel to critique it.  Admittedly, I’m a Neo-Luddite.  I use tech, and even enjoy it sometimes, but I prefer print books, movies (on celluloid) in theaters, and music, if recorded, on vinyl.  Old fashioned.  I do like some of the convenience, however.  Who isn’t addicted to getting tedious things done quickly?  Well, some of them.  In any case, I found the Molly character intriguing.  I couldn’t help but think of Blade Runner the whole way through.  William Gibson claimed that his novel didn’t copy the gritty texture of the movie, and  I believe him.  I’ve written books after thoroughly researching a topic only to discover, too late, that someone else had largely done the same thing already.  It happens.

The plot itself is quite good. Still, there’s an ethical element involved.  I wonder how much AI optimism comes from guys who read such novels as teens.  I have trouble thinking of any way that generative “artificial intelligence” can end well.  It seems a misguided and oversold idea.  Now commercials tell us how much we need Al, and he appears in new devices, wanted or not.  He’s not welcome in my home.  I’m slowly getting used to the idea of having a phone near me most of the time.  I use it seldom, but when I do I’m glad for it.  I don’t watch movies or read books on it.  My favorite times are when it’s sitting there, being quiet.  Some of us are dinosaurs in a cyberpunk world that’s become reality.  And dinosaurs, well, we prefer the world before the electronic revolution.  Maybe even before the rise of the primates.

Trying to Write

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Realizations dawn slowly sometimes.  From childhood on I wanted to be a writer.  Teachers encouraged me because I seemed to have some talent, but in a small town they didn’t really know how to break through.  Besides, terrified of Hell, I was very Bible and church focused—not really conducive to the worldliness needed to be a writer.  The realization that recently dawned is that I’m competing with people who can put full-time into writing.  I’m trying to squeeze it into a couple hours before dawn every day because 9-2-5.  9-2-5.  9-2-5.  It’s exhausting.  I often read about writers, wondering how they get noticed.  Even the people I try to get to publish my fiction read stuff others likely have more time to write than I do.  Why do I keep at it?  Sometimes it’s just impossible to keep ideas inside.

I’ve got ideas.  Some of them would make fascinating movies.  I even had an editor of an online journal that published one of my stories say that.  I’ve got a cinematic imagination trapped in the aging body of a day-worker.  Oh, I’ve got a professional job, of course.  What I really want to do is “produce content.”  I know others in publishing with the same dream.  One of my colleagues has managed to break out and she’s now publishing novels that are getting noticed.  I’m still writing for academic presses because I know how to get published by them.  My fiction has been suffering from neglect.  To stay sharp you have to keep at it.  I’m a self-taught writer.  I’ve not taken a course in it my entire life, and it probably shows.  Not even Comp 101.

Fairness is a human construct and ideal.  Reality lies with Fortuna (cue Carl Orff).  I’m better off than most people in the long human struggle with equity, I realize.  For that I’m grateful.  I do have to wonder, however, if struggle isn’t essential to making us what we need to be.  The writers whose work endures often had to struggle to get noticed.  Many died in obscurity.  I wonder if they ever realized that they were leaving a legacy.  You see, writing is a strange blend of arrogance and self-doubt.  Many of us go through intensely self-critical times when even our published books seem to mock us from their shelves.  The realization, now fully day, that I will always have to struggle to do what I know I’m meant to do sheds light.  Even in the world of privilege, the struggle inside is real.

Seeing Seagulls

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It was a seventies thing.  Even though I lived in a small town, even I had heard about Jonathan Livingston Seagull.  At first I didn’t know it was a book.  (A similar thing happened to me in the nineties with a character named Harry Potter.)  It was probably in college that I learned this was a book I should read.  I did, and I followed it up with Illusions, also by Richard Bach.  Now, this was unorthodox stuff.  These novels consider what some would call superhumanities and others self-deification.  The two are related.  In any case, Jonathan Livingston Seagull is a story about a seagull that overcomes limitations.  An inspirational book.  The publisher had no great expectations for it but it ended up becoming a number-one bestseller without any real marketing support, largely through word of mouth.  You’d have had to have been living in a cave in the seventies not to have heard people mentioning Jonathan Livingston Seagull, whether bird or book.

I got a hankering to read it again but alas, it was one of the books destroyed in the flood.  I went to a local bookstore and was disappointed to see that it was out in a new edition—larger, and, of course, more expensive.  Longing eventually overcame reluctance and I bit the bullet.  I’m glad I did.  The story is still as empowering as I remembered it, but the fourth part, the new one, strikes me as very necessary.  In it, rumors of the disappeared Jonathan Livingston Seagull have turned him into a god.  A god, moreover, whose followers are more interested in the orthodoxy of ritual than what he taught.  This was published before Trump’s first election, but it accurately describes what “Christianity” has become under his two-pronged reign of terror.

The idea of Christianity itself has become deified to the point that Jesus—what he did and taught—have become completely irrelevant.  Now, you don’t have to walk all the way with Richard Bach (I read the two books after Illusions as well, The Bridge Across Forever and One), but this book has a message that still rings true after all these years.  The book is over half-a-century old now and I am glad that it’s having a small resurgence.  The message, when the book ended at part three, was perhaps a little lighter.  We still, however, have to learn to overcome limitations.  And there’s a fair amount of wisdom in this little book.  Even though it was a seventies thing, it remains a good thing.

Dark Library

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Although it’s booming, I’m not a romance reader.  Not in the modern sense, anyway.  I’m a big fan of the Romantic Movement, which gave us the gothic novel, but the distant descendant of the latter is dark academia.  And dark academia is what brought me to Rachel Moore’s The Library of Shadows.  That, and ghosts.  I’d read somewhere that this novel (probably classified as young adult as well) brought dark academia and ghosts together and indeed it does.  I’m finding dark academia to be quite liberating.  I may no longer be a card-carrying member of Club Academe, but that setting is never far from my mind.  Enough about me.  Here’s the story: Este is a student at Radcliffe Prep, reputed to be the third most haunted school in the country.  She doesn’t come from money, however, since her father, a former Radcliffe Prep student, died prematurely and her mother has gone in search of anything that might remind her of him.

Este, unlike her wealthy cohort, isn’t sure how she fits in.  She doesn’t believe in ghosts.  Until she falls in love with one.  (This isn’t really a spoiler since it’s on the back cover copy and you can infer as much from the cover art.)  The story revolves around how to resolve that tension.  I’m sorry to admit that I’m not sure if “fades” are a traditional kind of ghost or if they were invented for this story, but they are behind the somewhat-horror elements to the tale.  Moore lays out the rules for her ghosts: they can’t walk through walls (so they can be locked out of a room), they tend to be not seen in natural light, but artificial light brings them into view, if they want to be seen.  And those that inhabit the library at Radcliffe, have bodies that can affect the physical world, but they can’t connect with anything living.  The fades are much worse: they kill mortals.

Moore’s story is a romance and a fantasy, but it is fun to read.  As a first book it has the freshness that somehow fades when writers become too jaded with the system.  (As someone who has tried repeatedly to get fiction published, believe me, I know.)  I suspect those looking for serious adult fiction might find it on the light side, but romance does have its attractions.  Since this is for younger readers there’s nothing too explicit here.  Just a story that keeps you interested as the pages turn.  And if romance has ghosts, and fits dark academia, I wouldn’t rule out reading more.

Interiors

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I first started reading Stephen Graham Jones after hearing him do a reading on YouTube.  I’ve always had a great deal of respect for Native Americans and his style was so sincere and down to earth that I was immediately drawn in.  Jones is now a well-established horror writer.  I’ve read a couple of his books and I have a couple more on my shelf, waiting.  Mapping the Interior is an early novella that has recently been repackaged and re-released.  You get the sense that even established authors have to prove themselves and then people will go back and read what they wrote before becoming somewhat famous.  In any case, it’s a haunting story about loss, growing up, and belonging.  At least that’s the way I read it.

Junior, the narrator, lives with his mother and younger brother in a modular house, off the reservation.  They are just barely getting by, Junior’s father having died and leaving them to live on one modest income.  But then Junior, who sleepwalks, sees his dead father in their house.  He becomes convinced that his father is victimizing his younger brother, Dino, who has a disability, in order to gain a body again.  Meanwhile, the kids at school all pick on Dino and the next door neighbor doesn’t like having Indians living so close.  He has mean dogs and an attitude.  Tension grows throughout the story as Junior has second thoughts about his father, whose death was never really explained to him.  There are some frightening scenes in this short book.  And a kind of matter-of-fact sadness.

Jones is a compelling writer.  He reminds us that American Indians know very well that they were wronged, but also have little or no recourse to justice.  The characters here keep on keeping on because that’s all you can do.  The end of the story does have a twist that is wrenching, especially after reading all that Junior has done to help his brother.  I read a fair amount about and by indigenous writers—the kinds of things many of those in power would like to ban and deny.  The experience of those whose heritage includes being colonized or/and enslaved is very important to know and to hear.  These are people who’ve been victimized and their stories need to be told.  I’m glad to have discovered this particular book, even as I’m awaiting the time to take on his longer, more recent work.  His is a voice worth listening to.

House of Catherine

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A blend of horror and dark academia.  That’s how I’d classify Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas.  For some time I’ve been pondering the connection between the two genres, and this novel is one of slow-building dread.  I’ll attempt to avoid spoilers, but I will say there’s a somewhat optimistic ending to the tale.  The eponymous Catherine House is a three-year college.  Well, not exactly a college.  It is a highly selective school that works with something called plasm.  Only the most select of those admitted are permitted to work in the department that handles plasm.  The others pursue different academic fields.  When they’re done, they’ll be connected for life and will succeed because of the many Catherine graduates who’ve shared their intensive program and reached positions of power.  The novel follows Ines, a girl who had a rough upbringing and who isn’t sure how she ended up at such a school in the first place.

The tip off to the unsavory part of the House is the secrecy.  Students cannot leave campus for their three years.  Their families are not permitted to be in touch and the students are encouraged to forget about their past lives.  Their thought process is influenced by plasm pins.  They are given a freedom many college students would crave—alcohol is freely available and sex is encouraged.  They also have a very rigorous course of studies.  Students do fail out.  Ines, finding close friends for the first time in her life, has trouble believing that she belongs here.  She’s not bright enough to work with plasm, but her boyfriend is.  And then Ines discovers a dark secret.  One that forces her to a very difficult decision.

The dark academia aspect is more pronounced than the horror one.  In fact, the horror is more by implication than by direct narration.  We’ve got an academic setting where something has clearly gone wrong.  We don’t ever really learn what plasm is, but it becomes the ultimate concern, to borrow language from Paul Tillich, for those who research and work with it.  It seems to have supernatural attributes.  Catherine House explores what it means to be young and learning about relationships, and love, and the harder lessons life gives.  At first Catherine House seems like a noble academy, but soon suspicions begin to build into a quiet horror.  An existential variety of horror more than the kind induced by monsters or people that are purely evil.  The characters are likable but flawed.  It’s the system, however, that introduces the darkness at the House.

Welcome 2026

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I put great stock in holidays, but I’ve never felt a deep connection to New Year’s Day.  I’m more of a morning person than the stay up late sort, and the New Year also seems cold after the coziness of Christmas.  But here we are in 2026 nevertheless.  We’re encouraged to look ahead.  I’m not much of a corporate person and I don’t see much wisdom in devising five year plans in an unpredictable world or any such nonsense.  The way things have been going in the news, it’s hard to have a five-day plan that bears any resemblance to reality.  But New Year’s Day does seem an appropriate season for optimism.  Hope stands here, anticipating better days ahead.  I am, despite appearances, an optimist.  I do believe in progress and the calendar keeps on ticking over regardless.  What will 2026 hold?  Who knows.  Best to take it one day at a time.

For me personally, I’ve got a couple books nearly complete and I do hope to find publishers this year.  And I’ve got many others started as well.  Writing is an act of optimism.  I’m always touched when someone lets me know they’ve found my work interesting, or even helpful.  Someone once contacted me to let me know Holy Horror had helped them through a difficult time.  This made me happy; writing books is a form of connection.  When I read books—a major planned activity for 2026—I’m connecting with people I don’t know (usually).  Writing to me feels like giving back.  The funny thing about it is the tension of having little time to do it seems to make it better.  I always look forward to the break at the end of the year but I find myself using the time to recover rather than for the intensive writing I always plan to do.

I have spent the last several days doing a lot of reading.  That too is a coping technique.  I’ve got some good books that I’m looking forward to finishing in 2026.  And the blog bibliography continues to grow.  Looking ahead I see reading and writing.  That to me is a vision of hope.  I didn’t stay up to midnight last night—that only makes me start out the new year grumpy.  No, instead I woke up early to start the year by writing.  And reading.  What does 2026 hold?  I have no idea.  I’d rather not speculate.  I do believe that as time stretches on some improvements will begin to take place.  I do believe holidays are important, both looking back and looking ahead.

2025 in Books

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As has become traditional on this blog, the last post of the year recaps my favorite books from the preceding 365 days.  I’ve finished 68 books this year, a little down on my usual pace.  My only excuse is that some of them took me longer to get through than I anticipated they would.  And life doesn’t always afford the time for reading you’d like, even for those of us who are intentional about it.  As for the books, it’s easiest to discuss them by category.  I read quite a few contemplative books this year that I quite needed to read.  They included Katherine May’s Enchantment, Brian Treanor’s excellent Melancholic Joy, Carlos Alberto Sánchez’s Blooming in the Ruins, and Viktor Frankl’s classic Man’s Search for Meaning.  These books underscore that thinking can be its own reward, and experiencing life is an opportunity for thought.  I should also add The Oxherd Boy by Regina Linke.

For general nonfiction, Ursula K. Leguin’s Steering the Craft was a good start.  Although older, I enjoyed Martin Tropp’s Mary Shelley’s Monster.  Although sobering, Peter Fleming’s Dark Academia: How Universities Die was an important read.  The Secret Life of a Cemetery by Benoît Gallot was also informative.  I do think my favorite nonfiction book for the year was J. W. Ocker’s Poe-Land.  Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction was quite informative, a learning experience in its own right.  

The largest category for the year, overall, was fiction.  I’ve been trying to read more novels and most of them this year fit into dark academia.  My favorite among them was Mona Awad’s Bunny.  I see the sequel is out, but I’m waiting for it to be released in paperback.   Others that I quite enjoyed were Katy Hays’ The Cloisters, M. L. Rio’s If We Were Villains, Kazou Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Goldy Moldavsky’s The Mary Shelley Club, and Brittany Cavallaro’s A Study in Charlotte.  These represent quite a diversity of what dark academia can be.  Among the horror novels, The Bad Seed by William March is another older title, but still scary.  Kiersten White’s Hide and Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea were both memorable.  Kanae Minato’s Confessions spanned dark academia and horror.  

None of this is meant to detract from the many other very good books I read this year, some by authors I know.  Looking back is a funny thing; some books seem to stand out for the impression they made.  This is quite individualized for each person, I’m sure.  I’m grateful to have been able to spend another year reading, and to all the authors I’ve read for providing the necessary ingredients.

Dreamscape

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I remember them but imperfectly, my dreams.   This can be frustrating when, for example, I dream up a story, complete with an ideal ending, then wake up with only fragments left.  I suppose I’m like most people in that I go through phases when I remember dreams and other periods when I don’t.  Lately my sleep patterns have me recollecting much of the strangeness in my sleeping head, but not enough to get it all written down into the story that was playing out so perfectly upstairs.  Dreams are one reason that we don’t understand consciousness.  We’re not 100% rational creatures.  And we know that other animals dream.  Our minds stay active when we’re asleep and they seem to have no limitations.  The stories we tell ourselves when our eyes are closed!

I have some recurring dreams.  The details always differ, but I regularly dream that I’m teaching once again.  The offending institution apologizes for having dismissed me.  Would I please come back?  Of course, one-off dreams are more common.  Sometimes I have the presence of mind to write them down, but I’m at an age when waking up is often in the service of finding the bathroom and that really breaks the mood and sometimes makes me forget.  From my childhood I’ve been told that you don’t die in your dreams, and indeed, usually you wake up before you hit the ground, or whatever.  I have, like Maggie Evans in Dark Shadows, dreamed of myself as dead.  That’s generally not one of the more pleasant of the species, but the mind ranges widely across the dreamscape.  I have a deep sense that we should pay attention to dreams, but being a 9-2-5 worker, getting the morning routine underway has to take precedence.

Lately my dreams seem to be working out fictional stories deliberately.  It’s as if my subconscious is saying, “You have unpublished stories sitting on your hard disc, why aren’t you doing something about it?”  I sometimes wake up feeling guilty that I’ve been writing nonfiction books when I have several weird stories scrawled out that could use a little more attention.  And some other writers I’ve met on social media have been encouraging me to self-publish those stories.  So far I’ve resisted, but the temptation is growing.  I work in publishing and I can say that the industry is quite difficult to navigate and finding an editor who “gets you” is almost impossible.  Maybe I should be basing more of my stories on dreams.  At least in the dream world, they’d find a publisher.

Religious Zombies

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Zombies never quite add up in my brain.  I’ve read a few zombie novels, nevertheless.  Joseph Hirsch’s Church of the Last Lamb is one such novel.  I’ll try to avoid spoilers in the note below.  The story begins with zombies already a part of the landscape.  An Army outpost in Ohio is trying to hold out until mortals get the upper hand and reestablish civilization.  The outpost is run by the military and civilians, “softies” have menial jobs as well as other support duties.  One of these civilians, Jon, has dreams of saving enough to be able to settle down and have kids with his girlfriend.  In this world, however, this privilege has to be purchased and generally only those in the military can afford it.  Violating rules about conjugal visits, Jon is brought before the colonel in charge and given the duty to accompany five soldiers on a dangerous mission out among the undead.

Surveillance has shown that a private individual living in the Church or the Lost Lamb has found a way of repelling—killing, actually—zombies.  The squad’s mission is to find the secret and bring it back.  Chances of returning aren’t great.  Zombies respond to the canonical head shooting, but ammunition is in low supply.  Swords and axes play a part in the tale.  The soldiers make it to the church, but one of them dies when zombies swarm their transport.  The others make their way into the church, where a scientist takes on the persona of a priest.  He has, however, come up with a formula to make zombies really dead.  In exchange for it he has a mission of his own that he wants the remaining men to undertake.  Two more die on the adventure.

Jon was a teacher in previous life.  He has to learn how to adapt to this new way of thinking to survive.  Making things more difficult, there are rival groups fighting against the surviving remnants of civilization.  There’s lots of combat and a fair bit of gore.  But then again, this is a zombie novel.  I won’t say more than that.  I enjoyed reading this more than World War Z, but it underscores how much those of us who are softies have trouble understanding military culture.  I found it engaging that religious imagery was drawn into the story as well.  As I’ve often noted on this blog, horror and religion interact well.  The church plays a pretty central role in the narrative, underscoring this winning combination. 

About Books

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I have tried my hand at fiction writing at least since I was ten.  My first attempted novel was at about fourteen.  Fiction has always been a large part of my life.  Now I work in publishing and still struggle to get my fiction published.  I picked up Big Fiction by Dan Sinykin because of another blogger praising his work.  Subtitled How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature,  it is an ambitious book.  I learned a lot by reading it but also found myself putting the book down in a huff.  Not because of the author, but because of the subject.  I grew up in the sixties and seventies, before conglomeration took over big fiction.  Conglomeration is simply the practice of companies buying out other companies.  Even I know that diversifying your portfolio is considered good business practice.  So companies buy one another out.  Thing is, that makes a difference as to what is available to read for the general public.

I’m old enough to idealize elements of the past.  I’ve worked in the corporate world for nearly a decade and a half now and I miss the time prior.  Still, this is fascinating history to read.  Currently there are five major fiction publishers (all of which also publish nonfiction).  They are Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan.  How did there come to be only five?  Sinykin will answer that question for you.  He also explores the smaller nonprofit publishers and the independents.  There’s one big independent publisher left, Norton.  Reading through this book I realized how woefully inadequate my knowledge of fiction authors is.  I read a lot, but there were many, many names I didn’t recognize.  Sinykin tells the stories of many people whose individual tastes may very well have decided which authors you’ve read.

Publishing is a vast and sprawling world, but a very small industry.  In these days when self-publishing is widely practiced, and some authors make a living writing, publishing, and promoting their own books, it may seem that big fiction is less relevant.  Still, these publishers stock the shelves of Barnes & Noble as well as your favorite indie bookstore.  A few things stand out for me: all of this development is recent.  Most of it happened during my lifetime.  There are still powerful editors, but they don’t have the power they used to.  And business-speak has become the language of publishers instead of the countercultural impulse that drives many writers.  This book is an education in itself, even for those of us who work in the book business.

Half-Way Through

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Here’s a writing phenomenon.  Maybe it only happens to me (I am self-taught), but when I’m writing a book a strange thing happens.  When I’m doing my rewrites, and there are usually several, about halfway through I’ll have an epiphany.  Something I should’ve been doing from the beginning.  Then you’re left standing at a crossroads: should I go back to the beginning again now?  But still need to address a basic rewrite as well as the new approach in the second half, so should I just carry on and then start rewriting from the beginning, catching up with the second half?  That may sound like a trivial question, but I assure you it’s not.  You see, right now I have two books in a complete stage.  “Complete” here means done in draft form.  When I write a book it gets rewritten several times before I consider finding a publisher, but when an important point comes to you halfway through, you’re between worlds.

Now, I work alone.  I am part of a local writers’ group and I’m only now starting to get to know others who’re willing to talk about writing.  I know several writers who don’t talk about it.  They’re still friends, but for me, there are few topics I’d rather discuss.  That’s how I learn.  You see, I have no idea what’s normal.  Do other writers labor over multiple rewrites?  I know some do, but I suspect some don’t.  I know that when I write a short story sometimes the first version seems best to me, but try to get such a thing published.  No, you need to rewrite.  Polish.  Make it shine.  But what if one half is shinier than the other?  This is starting to be a regular occurrence.

Inspiration is fickle.  That’s something we can all agree on.  But when you’ve been scrawling on a topic for weeks, or months, and then a realization dawns, you’ve just added yourself additional weeks or months of revision.  I’m sure a great deal of it is due to my own psychology.  Another part is due to writing under the constraint of a 9-2-5 job.  There are only so many productive hours in a day, and since mine come early they necessarily end when the work day begins.  I’ve tried writing after work but my brain and body feel like a CPR dummy when work’s through with me.  The next morning I start at it again, but the question is still should I finish this up with my new insight, or should I go back to the beginning?

Reading Habits

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I keep track of my reading on both this blog and Goodreads.  It’s a little easier to follow the numbers on Goodreads, so I tend to use their stats.  One thing I’ve noticed in tracking my pacing this year is that academic books slow me down.  I desperately hope this isn’t endumbification, but I feel the need to consult the experts even as I try to write for a wider audience.  Having been trained as a professional researcher, it’s difficult to let go and just read the popular books—those with the style I need to learn to emulate.  But academic books take so long to get through.  Maybe it’s because they’re consciously designed not to be fast reading.  They take time and have concepts that require thought as your eyes consume the words.  They’re also the language I spoke for a good few decades.

My nonfiction reading pile constantly grows taller and I can’t seem to keep up.  Largely it’s because many of them are academic books.  I’m aware that in the real world, where books sell more than a couple hundred copies, that those who can’t claim “Ph.D.” after their names make the most successful writers.  A few of my colleagues have broken through to mainstream publishing, but they generally have university jobs, and tenure.  They don’t have a 9-2-5 schedule that holds their feet to the fire for the lion’s share of every day.  There are writers, I’m learning, who hold down jobs and write more successful books.  They generally aren’t academics, however.  Normal people with intense interests that they express beautifully in words.  Then they go to work.

I’m trying to break into that world.  I know that the publishers I’ve resorted to have been academic publishers.  They don’t really compete with the trade world, nor do they really even try.  Their’s is a business model adjusted for scale.  When you can’t sell in volume, you need to jack up the price.  But to have something intelligent to say about a subject, you have to read books.  I guess I need to learn to read non-academic non-fiction.  Kind of like I have to drink decaf when I have coffee (rarely) and have them add oat milk to make it a latte.  This is difficult for an old ex-academic like me.  I want to know how writers know what they do.  What are their sources and how deeply did they dig?  As I set my shovel aside I realize that I’ve begun to dig that academic hole yet again.

Elementary, Academia

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Continuing my dark academia streak, I enjoyed Brittany Cavallaro’s A Study in Charlotte.  Although I’m not really a Sherlock Holmes fan, I know enough of the lore to appreciate how deeply steeped this novel is in Sherlockiana.  In the world of the novel Sherlock Holmes and John Watson were real people.  Watson wrote the books authored by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in real life.  The books are well known and widely read in the universe of A Study in Charlotte.  The adventures in those novels and stories are, here, factual.  The book is narrated by Jamie Watson, a descendant of John Watson.  While at Sherringford Academy in Connecticut he finally meets Charlotte Holmes, descendent of Sherlock.  They become friends and have a campus murder to solve (thus, dark academia).  I have to confess that I had the image of Jenna Ortega, of Wednesday, in my head as Charlotte.  The two (Wednesday and Charlotte) are similar in many ways.

Although flawed, Charlotte is an inherently likable character.  The story contains enough fun to prevent it from being too grim, even with the death of a Sherringford student and the violent attack of another.  The murderer goes to great lengths to frame Charlotte, and the novel introduces some of the Moriarty descendants as well.  Watson tries to get close to Holmes, but she holds everyone at a distance.  The story includes some family dynamics—the Holmeses rational to the point of being cold, Watson’s mother constantly warning him to stay away from Holmeses while his father eagerly observes how Charlotte works.  Putting the action in Connecticut allows for a trans-Atlantic element since both families are, naturally, British.  The story is well told.

The novel should appeal to those who enjoy detective stories and who appreciate a smart, if troubled female lead.  In this latter aspect, Cavallaro shows herself a perceptive Doyle fan.  Sherlock Holmes isn’t always a perfect character.  He uses drugs and is an eccentric.  This story transfers all of that to Charlotte but making her a young woman while Watson is a rather love-lorn young man, opens the potential for a relationship unlike the classic Holmes and Watson.  I don’t say “romantic” relationship, because Charlotte isn’t really receptive to romance, although her strict rationalism wears thin when something goes seriously wrong.  We all like to believe that there are people a few steps ahead of everyone else, as long as they’re good.  The Moriartys are also masterminds but the novel doesn’t allow us to decide that they’re all bad.  This is an intriguing tale that fits into dark academia in an elementary way.

Being Written

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Some books want to be written, no matter what major publishers have to say.  The truth is, being an author is more like being a radio receiver than a transmitter.  Books come to you, begging to be written.  Given our culture, we equate importance with money.  Tomes that earn the most are obviously the most important and erudite.  So the (capitalistic) wisdom goes.  We follow the lucre.  If you read this blog you’ve probably had an experience like this: you find a book that you’ve never heard of that captures your interest.  You read it, transfixed.  When you tell others, nobody seems to have heard of it.  I’d say a number of books I’ve blogged about fall into that category.  The “general reader” follows what the big five publishers suggest they should.  It becomes a feedback loop.

Academic presses—university presses and others that cater to either students or professors as their primary readerships—produce some fascinating books.  Often they’re priced a bit higher than we want to pay.  That’s because they don’t sell at the volume that a big five book does.  The higher the quantity the lower the unit cost, right?  Books that wanted to be written but either price themselves out of sales, or aren’t backed up by a team of marketers and publicists, may be some of the most interesting reading material out there.  You’d never know it, though.  From the point of view of an author, most of my books came begging to me.  I occasionally think of commercial potential because, well, if you’re going to put years of your leisure time into something, you’d like to get at least a little back.  And you’d be glad for feedback, or someone what wanted to ask you about what you’d been begged to write.

Sadly, we have tunnel vision.  It only sees the shining spots crowded with dollar signs.  And since others are willing to pay for it, we have to assume that it’s good.  I’m working on my next set of imploring projects praying to be written.  I can’t handle them all, being gainfully employed helping others who write books that want to be written.  We write them for each other.  I figure that if I’m receiving the signal somebody must be sending it.  And I have a difficult time turning down an idea that pleads with me.  And if someone unexpected picks one of our books up and gives us a like, we show that even receivers can smile.