RIP the Fifth

Part of me can hardly believe that the fifth annual RIP challenge is here, or that this is my fourth time participating already. It feels like it was only some two months ago that I was making my list for RIP IV, and preparing to discover the wonder that is Wilkie Collins for the first time. And only a mere six months before that – surely it can’t have been longer? – I was hurriedly putting together my list for RIP II (Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Book of Lost Things were included) and preparing to leave to study abroad for a semester (kind of like now). Where does time go?

No, it has not escaped my notice that this is not the first time I begin a RIP post with a bout of nostalgia – and this is only one of the many ways in which Carl’s reading challenges are just like Christmas. Unfortunately, this year I won’t actually get to be around^* for much of RIP (which, for the newcomers, lasts from September 1st to Halloween), but I shouldn’t let that keep me from the joys of list-making, should I? I’ll hopefully be with you for the final weeks of the challenge, and until then I’ll certainly be thinking about joining this lovely bloggy celebration of all things creepy, Gothic, horrific, mysterious and perilous. Without further ado, here’s my list of potential choices for this year’s RIP:

• The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters – As I think I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been saving this one because I don’t want to run out of unread Sarah Waters novels. But I’m only human, and I can’t resist for much longer.
  
  
• Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenager – Yes, as usual I’m one year behind everyone else.
  
  
• Ghost Stories by Edith Wharton – I don’t know much about these, actually, but I love those Wordsworths Classics of the Supernatural editions, and somehow I have a feeling I’d like Wharton’s short fiction a lot.
  
  
• Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen – I’ve only ever read one of Blixen’s short stories, “The Blank Page”, but I absolutely loved it. Time to read more.
  
  
• East Lynne by Ellen Wood, Aurora Floyd by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and No Name by Wilkie Collins – If I could, I’d happily spend the whole of September and October reading nothing but Victorian sensation novels. I hope to get to at least one of these, but it will depend on what the library at my new location has.
  
  
• The Woman in Black by Susan Hill – Another one I can hardly believe I haven’t read yet.
  
  
• Don’t Look Now by Daphne du Maurier and The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson – because both authors are brilliant, and because I need to read more short stories.
  
  
• Fledgling by Octavia Butler – I absolutely loved Kindred and can hardly wait to read more Butler.
  
  
• The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie – …which will be my first Christie. I’ve been on a mystery kick this year, so it’s about time I make Dame Agatha’s acquaintance.
  
  
• Love Lies Bleeding or The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Wilson – Another classic mystery author I think I might really enjoy.
  
  
• Whatever I can find by Michael McDowell – I confess hadn’t even heard of McDowell until recently, when a reader of this blog and fellow lover of du Maurier, Shirley Jackson and Angela Carter e-mailed me urging me to read him. How can I resist a recommendation from a fan of those three writers? McDowell specialises in Southern Gothic family sagas, which definitely sounds right up my alley.

There. As always, if you’ve read any of these I’d love to hear your thoughts. Considering how busy I’ll be for all of September and part of October, I doubt I’ll have time for more than three or four books, but listing them is half the fun, right? I can’t wait to hear all about what everyone else will be reading.

In other news, I’m off to spend the weekend in one of my favourite cities in the world, Santiago de Compostela, where I’ll see The Arcade Fire, one of my favourite bands. I hope your weekend is as wonderful as mine promises to be, and I’ll see you next week!

*on which more soon.

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Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is mostly set on the Greek island of Cephallonia during WW2, and tells the story – or rather, a very personal story – of its occupation by the Italian and German armies. It’s the story of Dr. Iannis and his daughter Pelagia, a young woman much too smart and independent for her time and place; of Mandras, Pelagia’s betrothed, who joins the Greek resistance and is almost driven crazy by what he sees; of Drosoula, his mother, a woman whose widowhood has doomed to invisibility; of young Lemoni and the pine marten she find and tames along with Dr. Iannis and Pelagia; of Carlo, a gay Italian soldier who joined the army in the hopes of finding someone to love; and of course, of Captain Antonio Corelli (and his mandolin) – a sensitive, funny, intelligent, artistic, and vaguely embarrassing and apologetic Italian invader who the Greek characters grow to love despite their determination not to.

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is a fictional social history of a forgotten side of WW2, told in a style reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It’s a sweeping, passionate, and alternately hilarious and heartbreaking novel, and it’s and a novel that does the very things I love the most about historical fiction: it fills the gaps in history; it focuses on the individual human costs of the political bigger picture; it draws attention to the cobwebby corners of the past that seemed doomed to being forgotten; and most importantly of all, it humanises them in a way that a simple factual account never could. I had only the vaguest idea of what had happened in Greece during the Second World War before reading this book. And I had somehow never even heard of the massacre of Cephallonia, which cost over five thousand people their lives. I won’t tell you more than this about it, though, because as unfortunate as it is that it isn’t remembered more widely, perhaps it’s not a bad thing for readers to have it take them by surprise as they read this book—I know that after this I won’t forget it any time soon.

Captain Antonio Corelli, the character who gives the novel its title, doesn’t make his first appearance until a good two hundred pages into the book. So yes, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin starts off slowly, but the back story is absolutely necessary. The fact that you get to know the characters so well is a big part of what gives the book its emotional power. Furthermore, the fact that we get a glimpse of pre-war life in Cephallonia allows the contrast between the then and the now to be all the more marked. Much like the characters, you barely realise there’s a war coming, and even after it does come, you sometimes forget it’s on at all. But then come the hunger, the unspeakable violence, the death, the grief, the misery, and the wounds that last a lifetime.

Having said that, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is a book that crept up on me. I didn’t realise at first just how much I had grown to care. In the final a hundred and fifty pages I knew I was sufficiently emotionally invested in the story to cry; but then again, I’ll readily admit it doesn’t take that much for that to happen. It was only after I finished the book that I realised how much it had affected me and stayed with me. I dreamed about the characters for two nights straight. I found myself missing them terribly. I miss them all still.

One of my favourite storylines was Carlo’s, the Italian soldier I mentioned above. Carlo’s story deals with the invisibility of glbtq people, and with the absolutely crushing weight of a silence that, in that particular context, could only be broken at the cost of his life. His story captures the overwhelming loneliness of knowing there’s a crucial part of you that can never be known, let alone loved. Carlo falls in love twice, and army life allows him to be close to the men he loves—but he knows that if they had the smallest inkling of the truth nature of his feelings he’d be lost, in all senses of the world. This bit in particular absolutely broke my heart:

According to Dante my like is confined to the third ring of the Seventh Circle of Nether Hell, in the improbable company of usurers. He gives me a desert of naked spirits scourged by flakes of fire, he makes me run in circles, perpetually and in futility, looking for the ones whose bodies I’ve defiled. You see how it is; I have been driven to search everywhere just to find myself mentioned. I am mentioned almost nowhere, but where I find myself, I find myself condemned. And how remarkable it is, you doctors and priests, that Dante pitied us when God did not. Dante said, ‘It makes me heartsick only to think of them.’ And Dante was right, I have always run in circles, futilely, looking for the warmth of bodies, scorned by God who created me, and all my life has been a desert and a rain of flakes of flame.
Yes, I have read everything, looking for evidence that I exist, that I am a possibility. And do you know where I found myself? Do you know where I found out that I was, in another vanished world, beautiful and true? It was in the writings of a Greek.

Other than Carlo, my favourite character was Pelagia. First of all, I have to confess it took me a while to make sense of how the book dealt with the whole theme of gender: in one of the initial chapters I was taken aback by a joke about battered wives. There’s of course a world of difference between portraying a certain attitude or mindset and the kind of world in which it’s prevalent and endorsing it or dealing with it lightly, and the very last thing I want is for literature to sweep anything disagreeable under the rug. But at first it can be hard to tell, with a storyteller you don’t yet know and trust, how the narrative as a whole frames the characters’ stance on certain things.

Fortunately, as the novel progressed, Louis de Bernières completely earned my trust. Corelli lost part of my respect towards the end with a comment about “damaged goods” in reference to – I kid you not – women raped during the war. But that’s the character; not the book as a whole. Comments like these are not gratuitous, and while the narrator does not of course address them explicitly (not being George Eliot, I doubt he could get away with it), there’s ample room in the narrative for a consideration of their consequences. So all in all, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin dealt with gender very satisfyingly, and it took Pelagia and her plight – as I said, a smart and educated young woman in a world not really ready for it – absolutely seriously.

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is a love story, a very human account of the war in Greece, a plea against totalitarianism of any sort, and a book that effortlessly combines humour with gut-wrenching moments. I couldn’t have loved it more. This marks the ending of my unofficial quest to read five books from my tbr pile this summer that you picked for me. I owe you a big thank you: I loved Half of a Yellow Sun, Atonement, and this, and I had a lot of fun with The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie and The Eyre Affair. We’ll need to do this again soon; clearly you know me well, and thus letting you make my reading decisions for me every now and then is evidently a very good idea.

Favourite passages:

I know that the Duce has made it clear that the Greek campaign was a resounding Victory for Italy. But he was not there. He does not know that the ultimate truth is that history ought to consist only of the anecdotes of the little people who are caught up in it. He ought to know that the truth is that we were losing badly until the Germans invaded from Bulgaria. He will never acknowledge this because the ‘truth’ belongs to the victors. But I was there, and I know what was happening in my part of the war. For me that war was an experience that shaped the whole course of my thought, it was the deepest personal shock I have ever had, the worst and most intimate tragedy of my life. It destroyed my patriotism, it changed my ideals, it made me question the whole notion of duty, and it horrified me and made me sad.

Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don’t blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being “in love”, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I ad it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches we found that we were one three and not two. But sometimes the petals fall away and the roots have not entwined. Imagine giving up your home and your people, only to discover after six months, a year, three years, that the trees have no roots and have fallen over. Imagine the desolation. Imagine the imprisonment.

It did not occur to him that he was a statistic, one more life warped and ruined by a war, a tarnished hero destined for the void. He was aware of nothing but a vanishment of paradise, an optimism that had turned to dust and ash, a joy that had once shone brighter than the summer sun, but now had disappeared and melted in the black light and frigid heat of massacre and cumulative remorse. He had struggled for a better world, and wrecked it.

Other opinions:
Giraffe Days

(I was surprised not to find more, but I guess everyone else read this pre-blogging? Let me know if I missed yours.)

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Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks

Year of Wonders is set in 1665-6 in the village of Eyam, Derbyshire, and is based on a real occurrence: historical records tell us when the Bubonic plague reached Eyam, its inhabitants voluntarily quarantined themselves to keep the disease from spreading to neighbouring towns. Brooks tells the story of the plague year from the point of view of eighteen-year-old Anna Frith. Anna is an ordinary woman who works at the rectory as a domestic servant, and despite her young age she is a widow and a mother of two. During the plague year, she suffers many loses; learns much about herself; and befriends the rector and especially his wife, Elinor Mompellion. The three take the care of the town into their hands, but most of the time they can do little but watch helplessly as the world as they’ve always known it changes beyond recognition.

Geraldine Brooks begins this story in media res, in the autumn of 1666, when Eyam’s population had already been more than halved by the plague. She then takes us back to 1665 and shows us how it all began. Normally this is a narrative technique I like, but I’m not completely sure it was effective in the case of Year of Wonders—on which more soon. Anyway, I liked how Geraldine Brooks used this set-up to comment on gender, class and power; I liked her examination of social tensions, fear, violence, and the many factors that will push people over the edge; and I liked how well she captured the fear, disbelief, despair, numbness and loneliness of the townspeople as the population continued to drop.

I also liked Anna a lot – especially the fact that Brooks picked a narrator with a certain degree of powerlessness who becomes more powerful as the story progresses, thanks to her role as a caretaker and to the knowledge and expertise she acquires. As the number of those afflicted by the plague increases, the traditional social order erodes, and Anna’s age, gender, widowhood and social stand cease to weight as heavily on whether or not she’s taken seriously. What matter is that she sits with the sick when nobody else will, and that though she can’t work miracles, she can bring them some relief. Of course, whether or not these changes are lasting is a whole other matter; and as the story of another character shows us, there’s danger in power and in the visibility it brings, especially when so many are desperately looking for something or someone to blame.

Most of all I liked the fact that Year of Wonders is a story about a world “on the brink of modernity”, as Brooks herself put it. Through the inhabitants of Eyam, she attempts to capture a paradigm shift; to portray the mindset of a group of people who were experimenting with new ways of thinking about the world. In Eyam different faiths, beliefs and forms of viewing the world coexist, though not always peacefully as it can be expected. There are some who see the plague as divine punishment for the townspeople’s sins; others as the result of a curse or the practice of witchcraft; others as a natural phenomenon to which God, if present at all, is indifferent; and others still, like Anna, as a natural phenomenon whose occurrence shouldn’t necessarily be interpreted in terms of faith. My one complaint is that Brooks didn’t take these ideas further – Year of Wonders is not a very long novel, but there was perhaps room for a little more depth when dealing with these issues.

I quite enjoyed this book for the most part, but unfortunately the final section lost me. First there’s the problem I mentioned earlier, with the in media res beginning: you know from the very start which characters survive and which ones don’t, and the death of a certain character in particular is foreshadowed so often that when it does happen, it no longer has the emotional impact it could have had – instead, the whole thing just feels overly dramatic, faintly ridiculous, and far too drawn out. (I kind of feel like a horribly callous person for saying this, but I really can’t help it.)

After that a lot of equally dramatic things happen in quick succession, and I’m afraid that my suspension of disbelief deserted me for good at this point. It’s not so much what happens in itself; it’s the fact that the final section feels so at odds with the emotional tone of the rest of the book. Though it deals with tragic events, Year of Wonders is for the most part a very restrained novel. Anna sounds like someone who was numbed by so much grief, and for some reason this felt more real to me than the histrionic tone of the final forty pages or so.

I could say that Anna’s initial moderation struck me as more true to the worldview of the time period than the final drama, but to be fair I have no reason at all to believe that seventeenth-century people were any less given to strong expressions of emotion than we are. Yet there was something about the ending – I cannot pinpoint what – that felt wrong to me. Perhaps it all comes down to the fact that in historical fiction, the perception of accuracy can matter as much as accuracy itself. At any rate, this was a very personal reaction, and I don’t expect that other readers will necessarily feel the same

As you can tell, I didn’t love Year of Wonders nearly as much as I loved March, though for the first half or so I was convinced that I was going to. Then again, this was Geraldine’s Brooks first novel, so it’s only natural that it’s not quite as polished or satisfying as her later work. I do like her writing a lot, as well the unusual points of view she picks and the themes she deals with, so I know I’m going to continue to read her.

Bits I liked:

At day’s end, when I leave the rectory for home, I prefer to walk through the orchard on the hill rather than go by the road and risk meeting people. After all we’ve been through together, it’s just not possible to pass with a polite, ‘Good night t’ye’. And yet I haven’t the strength for more. Sometimes, not often, the orchard can bring back better times to me. These memories of happiness are fleeting things, reflections in a stream, glimpsed all broken for a second and then swept away in the current of grief that is our life now. I can’t say that I ever feel what it felt like then, when I was happy. But sometimes something will touch the place where that feeling was, a touch as slight and swift as the brush of a moth’s wing in the dark.

I open the door to my cottage this evening on a silence so thick it falls upon me like a blanket. Of all the lonely moments of my day, this one is always the loneliest. I confess I have sometimes been reduced to muttering my thoughts aloud like a madwoman when the need for a human voice becomes too strong. I mislike this, for I fear the line between myself and madness is as fine these days as a cobweb, and I have seen what it means when a soul crosses over into that dim and wretched place. But I, who always prided myself on grace, now allow myself a deliberate clumsiness. I let my feet land heavily. I clatter the hearth tools. And when I draw water, I let the bucket chain grind on the stone, just to hear ragged noise instead of the smothering silence.

Other blog reviews:
Linus’s Blanket, books i done read, Medieval Bookworm, Write Meg!, The Book Whisperer, Fizzy Thoughts, Coffee Stained Pages, Book-a-rama, The Written World, Serendipity, At Home With Books, Age 30+: A Lifetime of Books, Lakeside Musings

(Have I missed yours?)

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Trent’s Last Case by E.C. Bentley

Don’t let the title fool you: Trent’s Last Case is in fact the first mystery featuring Philip Trent, E.C. Bentley’s gentleman of leisure turned crime reporter slash sleuth. Published in 1913, the book is a precursor to the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, and Trent was repeatedly mentioned by Dorothy L. Sayers as an influence on Lord Peter Wimsey - this being, of course, the reason why I read this book.

Trent’s Last Case opens with the murder of Sigsbee Manderson, an American businessman and millionaire. Mr Manderson is found dead outside his house in the early morning – he’s been shot through one eye in a way that excludes the possibility of suicide. Puzzlingly, he took care to dress carefully before going out in the middle of the night for unknown reasons, but forgot his denture on his nightstand.

Philip Trent is called in to investigate the murder by an old friend with a personal interest on the case: his niece is the now widowed Mrs Manderson, and he fears that, because her experience of widowhood has been akin to that of the protagonist of Kate Chopin’s “Story of an Hour”, suspicions will fall on her. Trent’s objectivity is supposed to be an advantage, but it doesn’t take him long to get personally involved himself: the more he gets to know Mrs Manderson, the more drawn to her he feels.

Much to my delight, there are indeed quite a few similarities between Trent’s Last Case and Dorothy L. Sayer’s mysteries. The premise – a woman being suspected of a murder because she was in an unhappy relationship with the murdered man, and our sleuth falling in love with her – is reminiscent of Strong Poison (or rather, the other way around), which is another love story slash mystery. The characterisation may not be quite as in-depth as Sayers’, but then again I’m saying this after spending only one book with these characters; to be fair, they are satisfyingly complex and human. Most interestingly of all, this is a story about personal relationships, marriage, respectability, and what hides behind the “polite fictions” of society, as Trent calls them. This is one of the things I most enjoy about classic mysteries (and their precursor, the sensation novel): they allow a glimpse behind the curtain of respectability at a time when this was still a rare thing.

Bentley’s portrait of Mrs Manderson was a pleasant surprise: not only is she allowed a voice, but her marital unhappiness and her refusal to be a trophy wife are taken absolutely seriously. But then, what did I expect of a writer Sayers enthusiastically endorsed? The following passage, though worded a little dramatically, does a great job of conveying the dullness and despair of the life of an intelligent woman trapped in a world where she’s not allowed to do more than look elegant and be a society lady:

Can you imagine what it must be for any one who has lived in a world where there was always creative work in the background, work with some dignity about it, men and women with professions or arts to follow, with ideals and things to believe in and quarrel about, some of them wealthy, some of them quite poor; can you think what it means to step out of that into another world where you have to be very rich, shamefully rich, to exist at all—where money is the only thing that counts and the first thing in everybody’s thoughts—where the men who make the millions are so jaded by the work, that sport is the only thing they can occupy themselves with when they have any leisure, and the men who don’t have to work are even duller than the men who do, and vicious as well; and the women live for display and silly amusements and silly immoralities; do you know how awful that life is? Of course I know there are clever people, and people of taste in that set, but they’re swamped and spoiled, and it’s the same thing in the end; empty, empty! Oh! I suppose I’m exaggerating, and I did make friends and have some happy times; but that’s how I feel after it all. The seasons in New York and London—how I hated them! And our house-parties and cruises in the yacht and the rest—the same people, the same emptiness.

This brings me to yet another very interesting thing, which is Trent’s Last Case portrait of modernity. Much to my surprise, the other book this reminds me of was The Great Gatsby: both are acutely lonely stories set in social worlds where people are seen as disposable, and both deal with the ruthlessness of the modern world, particularly the world of money and business. As Trent is told at one point,

This is a terrible time in which we live, my dear boy. There is none recorded in history, I think, in which the disproportion between the material and the moral constituents of society has been so great or so menacing to the permanence of the fabric.

It’s interesting to find this state of mind expressed so clearly before the Great War. I’m far from a Luddite myself, and looking back on the early twentieth century from a distance things don’t seem as bad as all that. But knowing what we know, we can’t really just dismiss those who were pessimistic and wary of unchecked progress.

Trent’s Last Case is also full of other fascinating period details, like the fact that cars, telephones, and the collection of fingerprints were all still novelties that required some explaining. I couldn’t help but smile at this passage:

‘I expect you both know what the back-reflector of a motor car is.’
Trent nodded quickly, his face alive with anticipation; but Mr Cupples, who cherished a mild but obstinate prejudice against motor cars, readily confessed to ignorance.

As for the mystery itself, obviously I can’t tell you all that much, but I will say that it’s a good one. It’s a little convoluted and impossible for readers to guess on their own, but it’s satisfying all the same. The whodunit is supposedly solved halfway through the book, and it’s then that things get truly interesting. There are twists, turns, yet more twists, and always more to the truth that you suppose: you don’t get the full story until the very end. Best of all, Trent’s Last Case is very much a psychological mystery. More than the details of the crime, what keeps you reading is being eager to find out what motivated this or that person to do such and such – and that’s my favourite kind of crime story.

(Have you posted about this book too? Let me know and I’ll add your link here.)

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The Sunday Salon – Bookish Pet Peeves

At the risk of sounding like the Scrooge of book blogging, I have to confess that there are a series of phrases, words and ideas prevalent in literary discourse of all kinds of which I’m really not a fan. They aggravate me, bring out the three-year-old in me, make me inwardly grumble “UR DOIN IT RONG”, and, in one case in particular, even make me consider getting contrary slogans tattooed on my forehead, just because I can.

But before I go any further, bear with me as I make a short aside: I keep a .txt file in my desktop where I scribble down ideas for future Sunday Salon posts as they come to me - which often seems to happen while I’m working. What this says about my levels of concentration is perhaps best left unexamined. Anyway, the words “bookish pet peeves” have been there for months now, and part of the reason why it took me so long to develop this into a full post is because I was worried I wouldn’t be able to make it sound impersonal – which it absolutely is.

So let me start with a disclaimer: these things may annoy me, but that doesn’t mean that a person saying or doing them will ever annoy me, or that I’ll look down on them (it’d be absurd and hypocritical if I did, because as you shall see that I’ve been guilty of many of them myself). It’s possible that these turn up in book blogs, as they do anywhere else where books are discussed, but I’m really not talking about any blog or person in particular. I think we all have a bit of tendency to be easily annoyed in the abstract but much more understanding and forgiving when dealing with real human beings, which is just as it should be.

With that out of the way, here they go – my top sources of annoyance in literary discourse:

• The word “message” when applied to literature – A book that can be neatly summarised in one sound bite or two is probably not a very good book at all. I have always believed that literature, even when not as its best, is about much more than just disguisedly conveying a particular message. As the great Ursula Le Guin so eloquently put it in The Language of the Night, Any creation, primary or secondary, with any vitality to it, can “really” be a dozen mutually exclusive things at once, before breakfast.
  
  Besides, I dislike “message” because it has implications about authorial intent that “theme”, for example, does not. A “message” is something the author hides in the book for the reader to decipher – and therefore said author has absolute control over it. A “theme”, on the other head, is far from one-sided, and depends as much on the text as it does on an active reader. Most authors probably do try to communicate specific ideas through their writing, consciously or not, but I’m not at all a fan of the idea that they have absolute control or even the last word over how these should be read.

• The expression “the graphic novel genre” – You saw this one coming, didn’t you? I confess I have a bit of a tendency to blurt out “medium” whenever I hear it, which probably makes me sound like an irritating know-it-all. But I just can’t help it; it’s stronger than I am. Also, “Comics/Graphic novels ARE NOT A GENRE” might have been what I had in mind earlier when I mentioned forehead tattoos. I’ve gone on at length before about why this gets to me so much, so instead of repeating myself I’ll just invite you to click the link.
  
  (Seriously, though. They are so not a genre. And calling them one perpetuates so many erroneous ideas and misconceptions about them. Argh argh argh okay I’ll shut up now.)
  
  
• For very similar reasons, the expression “the YA genre” – to me this is every bit as absurd as claiming that the whole of adult fiction is a single genre. There are YA romances, YA mysteries, YA fantasy novels; there's YA science fiction, YA realistic fiction, YA dystopia, and so on. Once again, my problem with calling YA a genre is that it makes it sound a lot more samey than it actually is. I notice that people tend to see YA as a lot more homogeneous than, say, children's literature, and I wonder how much the fact that it's often referred to as a genre has to do with that.
  
  
• Using the words “novel” and “book” interchangeably – This leads to repeated references to “this novel” in reviews of non-fiction, short story collections, memoirs, etc., which kind of makes my head explode. It's also why I’m not completely comfortable with “graphic novel” as a replacement for “comic”, which results in the paradoxical term “non-fiction graphic novel” (though I do use it myself and fully acknowledge that “comic” has its own share of awkwardness).
  
  
• Mistaking a single character’s thoughts/opinions/worldview for those of the author, or reading everything autobiographically – This seems to happen with alarming frequency, and in my experience even in literary circles right after students have been repeatedly beaten over the head with Roland Barthes (I’m not exactly a big fan of his, but not because I think he’s wrong in this regard). When it comes to ideological readings of a novel, it’s especially important to base them on what the novel as a whole suggests, rather than on any isolated character’s stance. The second can of course be one of the things that reveal the first, but it’s never the whole story. Possibly you’re thinking that this all goes without saying, but sadly in my experience it really does not.
  
  
• The expression “this book transcends its genre” – Bonus points when applied to graphic novels, of course. To be honest, most of the time I’m not even sure what this means. I mentioned it in my fantasy reader’s FAQ a few months ago, so I won’t go on about it at length, but to put it briefly, it annoys me because it’s yet another way of putting a whole genre in the same bag. E.g.: “Fantasy is of course still bad; the only reason why Wicked by Gregory Maguire is good is because it ‘transcends’ it.” I was reminded of this recently when reading Savidge Reads’ excellent interview with mystery writer Sophie Hannah, who said:
  

  ‘Crime Fiction’ is a category that contains, as you say, writers like Kate Atkinson, Susan Hill, Barbara Vine, Karin Alvtegen, all of whom are great writers. I’m slightly uncomfortable with the idea of anyone’s crime novels being ‘more than’ crime fiction, because that suggests there’s a limit to what a crime novel can be, and I don’t believe there is.

  Exactly. The same goes for every genre, really.
  
  
• Using the term “simplistic” positively – this one just confuses me, and possibly my inadequate grasp of English is to blame here. To me, to call a book “simplistic” is one of the very worst things I can say about it: it means that it betrays the complexity of the world and of human nature by oversimplifying it; by not acknowledging nuances and portraying the world as black or white. So it really baffles me to read things like, “this was such a nice story, so sweet and simplistic”. Surely the writer means “simple”? Can the two words really be used interchangeably?
  
  
• The word “hype” – the misfit indie music fan in me is to blame here. I realise that people use the same word to mean different things all the time, but thanks to all the time I’ve spent in online music communities, to me “hype” will always mean “something hispters feel they have to turn their noses at because it has become far too popular”. An example of its usage:
  
  Person A:‘Have you heard the new Arcade Fire yet?’
  Person B: ‘Yeah. It’s just hype.’
  Person A: ‘Total hype.’
  Person B: ‘Meh.’ *Takes a sip of iced latte*
  
  The understanding being, of course, that the new Arcade Fire is completely devoid of any merit, but there will always be people who’ll claim to like it just because it’s cool to jump on the bandwagon. What those people don’t know, though, is that those who are truly cool will be the first to jump out of the bandwagon the second it begins to give any signs of getting crowded. I wonder if there’s ever a point when it becomes cool to jump back in?
  
  More seriously now, I don’t like “hype” because it sounds dismissive – it seems to be a way of talking of people’s enthusiasm for something in terms of its collectively, as if that made it any less valid or sincere. Possibly this is one of the reasons why I so loved Barbara Ehrenreich’s Dancing in the Street – it is, after all, a passionate defence of shared pleasures. And on a related note, I also really don’t like the idea that being enthusiastic about something (individually or collectively) is a sign of lack of critical thinking, as if you couldn’t think carefully about something and decided that yes, you do love it passionately and shamelessly.
  
  
• One-size fits all book recommendations – This is possibly the trickiest item on this list, and it’s one I’m definitely guilty of myself. But the more I think about it, the more absurd it seems to me to universally recommend or un-recommend a book. People are so different, and what makes a reading experience precious is so often personal and unique. How can we ever really know if our enthusiasm or lack thereof will be shared?
  
  Hearing people say they wish everyone would read this or that book doesn’t really bother me, but it does bother me to hear “I don’t recommend this book to anyone”, or “I can’t imagine how anyone could possibly enjoy this book” (the latter in particular often has a touch of righteousness to it that really rubs me the wrong way). This could be because I’d much rather waste my time on what was, to me, a bad book than to miss out on a good one because I trusted someone else when they warned me away from it.
  
  I do know that the majority of us don’t mean any of these things literary even when we do say them, but they’re a short and easy way of expression the intensity of our like and dislike. I guess that as long as we don’t start thinking that they are or should be universal, there isn’t really a problem.

What about you? What are your own bookish pet peeves? And do you agree or disagree about any of the above?

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