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Write Better By Reading Better Books
While writing your own book, learn from these eight great new novels.
Posted April 1, 2017
During my first novel's long journey from my mind to existing in the world as an actual book (and e-book), I continued reading good novels by other authors.
Often, while reading, I would get an idea for a better way to handle a flashback or a new way to show action in a mostly-talk scene. Or something tiny would excite me, such as one single gorgeous word that I sensed would fit perfectly at a particular spot in my own work-in-progress.
And each time this happened, I'd get newly motivated to dive back into and add to or revise my work.
In that spirit, here are some excellent recent novels that may motivate you and help improve your own writing.
8 NOVELS FOR WRITERS WHO READ
My Last Continent by Madge Raymond is a delight for those of us who can enjoy cold weather but who are not going to brave time in the Antarctic. Raymond's imagination lets us experience the intensity of frigid days and nights, while, as a bonus, demonstrating the many ways there are to describe an environment.
Fiction set within the context of science is a fine way to learn, I find, so long as you don't take all the science bits too literally. In Raymond's novel, you need not be the outdoorsy type to relish putting yourself in the place of a committed scientist who spends much of the year alone in a most unforgiving place, adding to science's knowledge of endangered penguins.
When romance enters the story, choices must be made—not only "your tent or mine" but, before a possible future can happen, "your half of the world or mine." Plus weather always dictates timing.
These facts were new to me:
Antarctica is not a country; it is governed by an international treaty whose rules apply almost solely to the environment. There are no police here, no firefighters, no medical examiners. We have to do everything ourselves.
And this:
It seems like there are two kinds of people who come to Antarctica. Those who have run out of places to go, and those who have run out of places to hide.
Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters may have a curious title, but there's nothing frivolous about this novel. This re-imagining of history and the present day is described like this in Winters' novel:
No such thing as the Underground Airlines, not really, not in any grand, organized sense. No command center in the deserts of New Mexico. . .; no paramilitary force with helicopters and flash bombs, waiting on the orders of a mighty antislavery general to rush into motion. There are rescues, though. There are saviors. It’s piecemeal; it’s small-group action, teams of northerners, daring or crazy, making pinprick raids into the Hard Four, grabbing people up and hustling them to freedom. . . . You just gotta know the right people.
Appreciation of freedom is heartfelt:
The great bulk of my life, then, had passed outside the Hard Four, in the free part of the land of the free. But even after all these years, I still found myself astonished daily by the small miracles of liberty.
Plot-wise, nothing is as straightforward as it seems. Characters change and grow, surprising us and themselves, in this suspenseful thriller with heart.
Two Days Gone by Randall Silvis is what, in my opinion, a mystery novel should be (up there with Tana French's work). Did Thomas Huston, a writing teacher, murder his wife and three children? Detective DeMarco works hard to get into Huston's mind.
DeMarco imagined what it must have been like for a man six feet tall to lay huddled in that tiny space. The earthen walls were indented with a hundred heel marks, half-moons gouged into the soil. DeMarco put his fingers to one of the heel marks. He rolled and turned and pushed at these walls through the longest night of his life. But the soil was cold. Huston had fled at least an hour earlier, leaving nothing behind but a damp depression filled with his scent. ... But the sight of that hole filled DeMarco with grief. A brilliant man reduced to a beast.
Once Huston is located (far into the book), things get complicated quickly. Silvis takes the time to show us the humanity, personality, and motivations of everyone involved.
Days without End by Sebastian Barry is a touching and altogether different Civil War tale narrated by a voice that brought the writing of Mark Twain to my mind.
Nothing too tricky about dying for your country. It’s the easiest item on the menu. God knows the truth of it. Young Seth McCarthy he come up from Missouri to be a drummer boy in the Federal army and what does he get only his head took off by a Federal shell.
A pair of inexperienced young men join the war, form a makeshift couple, find ways to be themselves in spite of the prejudices of the time, face grave hardship, and raise a young orphan Indian girl for as long as they can. The untutored but insightful narrator learns life lessons the hard way, through pain, until he becomes wise. Heartbreaking and gorgeously written.
The One-Eyed Man by Ron Currie opens with a first chapter that is a marvel. On those few pages, in which the narrator stands obeying a broken Don't Walk sign for hours on end, we get superb pacing, a hint of quirky humor, and the perfect set-up for a narrator of uncertain reliability. When he witnesses a robbery in progress across the street, he makes a decision that affects everything, and we are deeply drawn into this odd story.
Plot and incident fill the pages, but The One-Eyed Man is more about character and meaningfulness. Readers who crave the best literary fiction will enjoy the marvelous conversations in which the narrator protests the inanities of our world, even the tiny ones, such as calling bottled soap "liquid hand wash." Though the narrator doesn't complain with the intent of being funny, it's impossible not to find humor in his inability to accept the lies everyone else readily accepts. "I'm just trying to understand," he says repeatedly.
In taking apart incidents we all encounter daily, Currie points our attention at prejudice, ridiculous grocery store signs ("Get excited about gourds"), the frustrations of trying to recycle a phone, and so-called reality shows. Mainly, though, Currie tackles the meaning of love and of life itself with profound psychological wisdom. All in all, an outrageous story filled with humor, compassion, and insight.
Himself by Jess Kidd is an utterly charming darkly comic wonder of Irish magic realism. The ghosts in this small village are ever-present, but they keep their intrusions minimal, sweet, funny, and, at times, useful. An orphan whose mother lived—and probably died—in this village returns in his twenties from Dublin to find answers to the mystery of his birth. The writing is captivating. One brief example:
Bridget narrows her eyes. She has the disheveled appearance that comes from sharing her bed with cats and eating her meals out of a tin.
Father Quinn was cursed to inherit her as his housekeeper, as if he wasn’t already significantly burdened. But Bridget came with the parochial house, just as her mother had before her. Bridget is the first to admit that she isn’t a patch on her late mammy in the housekeeping department. Although she can rewire a house, drink Tadhg Kerrigan under the table, and castrate a bull calf singlehandedly, none of these are prerequisites for a (successful) priest’s housekeeper.... Unlike her daughter, Mother Doosey took exemplary care of her priests. It was common knowledge that you could eat a meal from Mother Doosey’s front doorstep without the slightest unease; nowadays Father Quinn rarely finishes his dinner without coughing up a hairball.
Inhabited by Charlie Quimby is a sequel to Monument Road, and while you needn't read Quimby's first novel first, I'm glad I did. It clarified some plot points in the newer work that might have left me confused. Quimby has created a believable fictional world in a Colorado city undergoing change. Using compelling incident, intricate detail, and deep insight, he gets into the mind of his homeless and other characters, demonstrating their humanity as well as their weaknesses. If you're a patient reader, if you're intrigued by gentrification and competing societal and individual impulses, you'll find much here to learn from and gnaw on.
Just One Damned Thing After Another: The Chronicles of St. Mary's by Jodi Taylor is a really fun reading experience. Whenever I hear that an initially self-published novel was so popular that it sold a zillion copies, I always suspect it must be a book that panders to readers' basest instincts and nothing more. Not this one.
I'm a time travel groupie, but even if you're not a special fan of the genre,Taylor's book, which is the first of a series, is well-written, funny, witty, and fast-moving. The press materials use the word "zany," as well as quirky, inventive, and addictive. Yes, it is all those things. More conversational in writing style than literary, the narrative nonetheless manages to include enough historical tidbits so readers may actually learn a few things. Plus there are romantic elements. And, oh yes, Taylor's dry English wit leavens the proceedings nicely.
Copyright (c) 2017 by Susan K. Perry, author of Kylie’s Heel
