h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi, Jab

In real life, I try to understand where people are coming from in terms of the things that influence their choices of reading matter. I'm naturally curious about this, so it seems like a good fit as a career.

I'm trying to understand your comments from the Bad Poetry thread
regarding the use of real people as characters in fiction. What I'm not yet clear about is the extent of your disapproval of this. For instance, do you avoid books like "Sacred and profane," by David Weiss, which was a fictionalized life of Mozart? Or how about Philippa Gregory's historical novels about the court King Henry VIII ("The other Boleyn Girl" and its sequels). Going a little farther afield, there is also Colleen McCullough's "First Man in Rome" series, which gives us the Roman Republic starting from
the time of Caius Julius Caesar's father and moving forward.

Since I run a book discussion group, and since the ladies in the group have a keen interest in history, I have had to rely heavily on some of the books I have just mentioned. Historical fiction, if it's done well, gives some of the flavor of what it was like to interact with historical figures on a day to day basis. This is usually lacking in a standard biography or set of memoirs.

William Shakespeare made heavy use of historical figures in his plays.

All of these examples are given because life is complicated and messy. You might have been saying (though I don't know for sure) that a well-resarched and thought-provoking novel about a person long-dead would be all right, whereas schlocky books that use Jane Austen or Mozart (or, obviously, Sylvia Plath) as detectives in murder mysteries or characters in science fiction would be
deplorable at best.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Your friend, Paul

Probably either, Paul, but the popular novel naturally.

How would you feel if your beloved granny just died and someone thought "Great!" we can stick her in a story about Southern trash who live by the bottle and the gun, in a trailer down in Alabama? I've done lots of research on that type." Or, "we can make her a superhero who saves the world - Supergranny! We could even make a cartoon character out of her for a movie. Family? Who cares about the family? All I know is it rhymes with money".

I know one thing - it would make me very angry if I were in that position. Because the novel would be trash, either way, historical tales from another culture, like Beowulf, notwithstanding.

Even factual and respectful biographies, truth-discourses -like those of Plath and Larkin, can upset people very much - Ted Hughes and others.

Friends, of course,

Jabs

Of course it would make you angry, Jab. It would make me angry, too. I did say that life is messy, though, because sometimes it's the family members themselves who wirte the disturbing books about their parents/grandparents. Chris Buckley has just written a book about his parents (William Buckley and his wife) that will have some conservatives upset. And, the popular series of detective novels starring Eleanor Rosoevelt were written by--her son.

So, I am constantly finding that I *don't* know many of the answers.
I'm not against treating people decently. Of *course* I would be upset faced with the example you gave about my grandmother, and yet......my curiosity comes riding out of the woodwork. If someone who knew my grandparents when they were younger came out with a story that shed new light on what they were like before I ever knew them, chances are I would eat it up. I never met my grandfather, and always wondered what he was like. There are family stories about the fishing trips that he would go on, but never get to, because he had to stop to talk to every friend he met. That he had so many friends, but I never got to be one of them--that is sad.

But in my line of work, I meet people with all kinds of ideas about what they will and will not read. Some will not read stories with talking animals in them (not even "Animal Farm" or "Charlottte's web"?), or didactic works in which animals are used to illustrate various principles (not even "Aesop's fables").

By all means, let's keep talking. What kinds of things do you like to read?

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, Paul. It seems that I'm the one who's out of step. Admittedly she's far from being in fashion, but I looked up Edith Sitwell's bestsellers on Amazon UK, and she appears as a character in Neil Gaiman's 'popularly' written American Gods at no.1 in the list , and her own Collected Poems (no Selected, but she does appear in poets of the 30's I think) doesn't come in until no.210. - of her own search! You can imagine the miniscule sales that represents.

I give up. Popular taste is obviously beyond me. I blame the parents.

Mind you, when I bought her Collected she was out of print entirely, so I suppose things are looking up...

Jabs

Typo - minuscule

Thanks, Jab.

I gave up on popular taste long ago. When I read to please myself (rather than for my work), I usually read nonfiction: biographies, books about ice ages or global warming, books about the First Century A.D. I enjoyed "The Ghosts of Vesuvius" and "Desire of the Everlasting Hills." I don't read much contemporary poetry, but three recent volumes deserve praise: Seamus Heaney's translation of "Beowulf," Ted Hughes's "Birthday Letters," and Stephen Gyllenhaal's "Claptrap."

I tried (but failed) to finish reading "Heartsong Mountain," by a Chinese Nobel prize winner.

I enjoyed "The Dante Club," a mystery novel set in Boston just after the end of the Civil War, when Longfellow was working on his translation of Dante's works. Hard to believe, but you could not read Dante in English prior to that time.

Susan Cheever's "American Bloomsbury" is a work of nonfiction that covers the remarkable convergence of literary talent that centered around Ralph Waldo Emerson's house in Concord in the 1840s and 1850s. Emerson's centrality in New England letters is also indicated in mentions of him in "The Dante Club." I duplicated some of Emerson's poems and gave them to my book discussion group.

Right now, I'm reading a book called "The Thoreau you don't know." It would probably annoy Thoreau no end if he knew that people nowadays think of him as a naturalist. That wasn't his intention! He wanted to use natural phenomena to change the way people thought about their lives.