Recently, I’ve been watching YouTube videos of speeches, interviews and presentations that Stephen King has given over the years. To me, these act as a visual supplement to his book On Writing that I consider indispensable for anyone interested in the art and craft of creative writing. If that describes you, you should own a copy. With that in mind…
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
This has been an unusual book year for me. I have tried to read three books from authors whose previous efforts I’ve enjoyed. As this chapter’s title says, Nobody’s Perfect.
In a John Grisham/Stephen King interview I watched on YouTube each writer was asked how many pages into a book it takes before they give up on it: Their answer was 50 to 100 pages. Just yesterday, I stopped reading a new book by a favorite author after just 48 pages. It started out so interesting but then it went into spaces that were just, dare I say it, boring.
An interesting corollary to this idea arose when, in another interview, Mr. King was asked by his son Owen about how far into a novel that he was writing did he get before giving up? The answer was 400 pages. King goes on to describe the book—it sounded interesting—but says he finally gave up because he couldn’t find a way to end the book.
There are some books I’ve read, even from some of favorite authors, that I plod through all of the pages to the very end periodically asking myself why I’m still reading. Usually the answer is, I keep hoping it will get better. The worst case for me was Moriarty by Anthony Horowitz, creator the the Foyle’s War TV series. When I got to the end, I was just mad and sorry I read the book. As I said, nobody’s perfect.
What I’m Reading Now
Right now, I’m reading Fixit, the sixth book in the IQ series from Joe Ide that follows the adventures of the Holmesian, African American detective Isaiah Quintabe. And yes there’s a Watson here in the form of Juanell Dodson, who’s not a chronicler of these stories but an inventive and complementary character making their escapades a memorable journey. Having read the other five novels in the series, I’m just part way into the book right now and am enjoying the heck out of ir*.
Mr. Ide is also the author of The Goodbye Coast: A Philip Marlowe Novel, a book I heartily recommend for fans of the Marlowe character. It’s a re-imagining of Philip Marlowe focusing on him as a young man who occasionally works together with his retired detective father, who has fallen upon hard times. It’s not the Marlowe you know, but it’s one that you want to know and provides some insight into the man he is destined to become. Hardcore Raymond Chandler fans may not like the book but it’s not without it’s charms and well worth a read.
*Permit me a bit of a rant: Why do mystery book (maybe all novel) writers always get guns and cars wrong. I’m far from an expert on firearms but I find many mistakes in how handguns are referred to and used in these stories. Cars? More often than not the writers are wrong, wrong, wrong. In Fixit, for example, Isaiah Quintabe is described as driving a 1968 Ford Mustang GTI. GTI? His car is not a Volkswagen or any of the other cars that carried the GTI moniker, it’s a Mustang GT. At first I thought it was due to errors by an overzealous copy editor but the author makes the same mistake more than once. On the other hand, Mr. Ide is an expert at the guns that are mentioned in this novel, so there’s that.
What’s On Deck?
Mary recently ordered me three books from Barnes & Noble’s wesbite as gifts. They are: The Clinic by Jonathan Kellerman, The Silent Speaker, a Nero Wolfe novel by Rex Stout and Every Man a King by Walter Mosley. Two have already arrived and the Nero Wolfe books seems to be back ordered. I also purchased a used book from eBay—Majic Man by Max Alan Collins—a 1999 release that’s a look at The Roswell Incident. I am happy to report that the book arrived and was in like new condition. Then there are a few library books that were in my que, including One Fearful Yellow Eye by John D. MacDonald and the IQ-series novel from Joe Ide. Look for reviews and updates on all these books in the weeks to come.
If you’re wondering how I decide in which order to read these books, it’s simple.Typically I stack them up on my nightstand in order of size—smallest at the top—and work my way down the stack size-wise. BUT if there are library books in the stack as there is right now, they get read first (in size order) because they have deadlines when they must be returned. This is the biggest stack of books I’ve had in a while and I’m really looking forward to jumping into all of them..
PS: In a previous Book Club post I promised a review of MacDonald’s 1979 novel The Green Ripper. I’m hoping to do that after I finish One Fearful Yellow Eye.
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