We had a great time in Hawaii. It was a desperately needed vacation for both of us – and us together – and we’re home much relaxed and with recharged batteries.
Whenever we’re traveling, I don’t feel like our trip is truly complete without a bookstore hunt, the funkier and more independent the better. In Kauai, it turned out that there were only two real bookstores, and one of them – Borders – was long closed by the time we got there. So we tooled over to the other side of the island (oh the suffering, the suffering.. miles of Pacific coastline and lush green) to visit the Talk Story Bookstore. Without a doubt, it met all my critical funky and independent book browsing needs in Hawaii, and when you’re in the area I strongly recommend checking it out.
Actually finding the right book, that’s a different challenge.
It’s not the fault of this bookstore or any other. The publishing industry puts out a lot – a LOT – of utter dreck. And the great books are like a powerful drug high, the lesser imitations just don’t do it for you anymore. So your standards as a reader go up, while it seems that the standards of the publishing industry in general go down, which leads to the “Fifty Shades of Grey Ripoff Aisle” at Barnes and Noble. God help us.
But for some reason it seems for me that my favorite books turn up on or near vacation. You just have to get lucky, because you’re not really looking for them. You don’t know to look for them, your eyes instead immediately focused on the familiar (“dammit, babe, I didn’t fly all the way to Kauai to buy a damned Chuck Palahniuk novel..”). They have to approach you laterally, out of the corner of your eye. You have to prepare to be surprised, and just get a little lucky.
The idea is to find a good book that you never in a million years would have stumbled over if you weren’t currently in someplace strange and in a vacation state of mind. One of my favorite recent books, The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway, I found during a beach vacation we took in 2010.
This trip turned up two solid finds for me: John Dies At The End by David Wong, and Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician by Daniel Wallace. I burned through the former in three days and am still reading the latter. Both excellent books.
But goddammit, great books are getting harder to trip over, especially when the local B&N insists on burying them in a file cabinet in the basement behind a locked door with a sign reading “Beware of the Leopard”. And many of the bad ones seem to have commonalities. So here are our book selection guidelines, loyal R&K readers.
The Page 99 Rule. Read the plot description on the back, then the first page (can this author open a story?). Then jump to page 99. Any writer can polish and repolish the first few pages of a book to perfection. How is he or she doing a hundred pages in? If page 1 is great and page 99 is full of cheesy, hamfisted dialogue, put the book down and look somewhere else. This is our first and most golden law of picking a good book.
The Read-Aloud Rule. From the earliest days of our relationship, when we were long distance between Florida and California, we got into this routine where I would read to Kristi at night until one of us fell asleep. All of the books on our “What We’re Reading” page were read that way. So when I’m flipping through a book for “us” reading potential, I imagine myself reading the prose aloud. If it’s going to annoy me – long winded passages, abuse of second person viewpoint, stupid dialogue – back on the shelf it goes. (NOT a surefire rule, as there are several books I’ve enjoyed reading to myself but would have hated reading aloud. But it’s still a reasonably workable guideline.)
These gripes are personal preferences, your mileage may vary:
The Plucky Heroine. The protagonist is the cheerful girl who wants everything and by GOLLY has the can-do-it-iveness to make it happen. Especially bad in books that attempt to be period fiction (The Spiritualist by Megan Chance, I’m looking at you), but also unbearable if she’s tasked with solving a murder that the local police are unable or unwilling to tackle.
FBI Agent Dirk (or Diane) Steele. Seriously. Tom Harris did this once to perfection with Silence of the Lambs, and every upstart novelist has been trying to rewrite that book ever since. The moment I see the words “FBI Agent” in the plot description, BZZZT! back on the shelf it goes. Feel free, by the way, to substitute “FBI” with “NSA”, “CIA”, or any other similarly interchangeable three-letter acronym that basically means “angst-ridden superhero with a badge”.
The Serial Killer Antagonist. Often pursued by FBI Agent Dirk (or Diane) Steele. The serial killer antagonist, the classic 1980s bad guy and urban monster, was and still is Ted Bundy – the clean cut, trustworthy-looking All American Boy who just happens to like killing college girls. Thing is, Ted’s been dead since 1989. And yet, the serial killer antagonist lives on in endless reams of lazy plotting and off-the-shelf conflict. Just let it go.
Men Writing Women, or Vice Versa. This is a position that I’m very slowly coming around to, with the helpful insistence of my wife. Men writing women as basically men in drag, or damsels in distress, or in some other way that basically reflects themselves as male writers projecting into a false female facade. It does ring untrue. But just as bad are women writers writing male protagonists: again, movie superheroes or rom-com nice guys. When we find a book where the author is attempting an opposite-sex protagonist, we approach with caution. For every Clarice Starling (who, while a great character, was still a fairly masculine female protagonist), there’s an army of Miracle Dunns. You can look her up.
Good Guys Versus Bad. This is my personal thing. My wife loves detective mysteries and police procedurals, and that’s a time honored literary tradition but it’s not my thing. White knight against black knight on the field of honor with the world at stake.. ugh. Never rings true with me. I want fucked up characters doing the best they can with what they have to work with, in a world where fucked up situations force imperfect compromises. Rarely do I find that in the world of the crime-solving detective. Give me ambiguity.
Jane Austin With Monsters. I enjoy torturing my English-teacher wife with these books. They make her eye twitch. But seriously guys, let’s please give the “modern updating of literary classics, now with MONSTERS!” thing a rest already.
Stuff We’ve Read Before. This pretty much summarizes bad books in general. Someone strikes success with a new (or recently rediscovered) formula, and then suddenly everyone dives into the pool with rehashed versions “in the tradition of” the prior success.
Yes, I know (as Cormac McCarthy once put it) that all books are basically made from other books. I get that. But there’s rearranging preexisting art to make something new, and then there’s scoping the market for the “sure fire” book formula. Or even worse, rewriting popular movies as new novels. There are simply way too many damned Dean Koontz, Stephen King, Danielle Steele, John Grisham and Tom Clancy ripoffs out there – they suck the oxygen right out of the average bookstore.
Do you have any personal rules or guidelines you use to find great books? Leave comments below – we’re always looking for a shorter and more surefire path to books that don’t suck.