Welcome to this month's edition of Six Degrees of Separation, which is a monthly meme hosted by Kate from Books Are My Favourite and Best. The idea is to start with a specific book and make a series of links from one book to the next using whatever link you can find and see where you end up after six links. I am also linking this post up with The Sunday Salon, hosted by Deb at Readerbuzz.
The starting point this month is the 2023 Booker Prize winner, Prophet Songby Paul Lynch.
For my first link I am going to use two connections. I am choosing The Bee Sting by Paul Murray because of the name Paul but also because this book was listed for the 2023 Booker Prize.
Last year, I saw Paul Murray at the Melbourne Writers Festival. Another writer I saw on the same day was Japanese author Toshikazu Kawaguchi (I posted about that here). He has a number of books but I am going to choose his latest book Before We Forget Kindness, and not just because I can play off the sound Bee!
If I think of the word Kind, there is a famous quote from both the book and the movie The Help by Kathryn Stockett which goes "You is kind. You is smart. You is important."
Originally I was thinking that I would look for another book to movie that Octavia Butler starred in but she wasn't in the movie I was thinking of. Then I realised that Jessica Chastain was in the movie of The Help and she was also in one of my favourite movies based on a book, The Martian by Andy Weir.
It probably isn't a spoiler to say that The Martian is set on Mars, which leads me to the book The Iron Hand of Mars by Lindsey Davis. This is part of the Marcus Didius Falco series set in ancient Rome
Another mystery series set in Rome is the Rome Escape Line series. The first book in the series is My Father's House and the author is Joseph O'Connor, who I only recently learned is the brother of the famous singer Sinead O'Connor. The second book has just been released and is on my TBR pile.
Paul Lynch, Paul Murray and Joseph O'Connor are all Irish authors so I have managed to go full circle which I don't normally manage!
Next month, the starting point is Salman Rushdie’s memoir, Knife.
Before getting into my post proper, I want to quickly say thank you to the bloggers who got together and organised Armchair BEA. I had so much fun over the last week, and I know that I still have a ton of posts to read from the event! I really hope that we get to do it all again next year!
Now, to what I wanted to talk about today. A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I was reading The Help by Kathryn Stockett.
In the author's note for that book, Kathryn Stockett wrote:
I was scared, a lot of the time, that I was crossing a terrible line, writing in the voice of a black person. I was afraid I would fail to describe a relationship that was so intensely influential in my life, so loving, so grossly stereotyped in American history and literature.
and further on
What I am sure about is this: I don't presume to think that I know what it really felt like to be a black woman in Mississippi, especially in the 1960s. I don't think it is something any white woman on the other end of a black woman's paycheck could ever truly understand. But trying to understand is vital to our humanity.
Reading this book had me thinking about voice, and what it is made up of. Firstly, when you are reading a book where there are different types of voices, there could be differentiation in terms of the words that are used, the spelling and grammar which could be used to indicate race or ethnicity or level of education, but other factors that go into giving a character voice, and in particular in giving the reader a sense of authentic voice can also include attitude. As much as we like 21st century attitudes is it realistic to expect to see that attitude in a 19th century woman. Usually not. This is an area that does tend to crop up particularly in relation to those feisty women who defy convention in fiction, but in reality there were so few women who did act against societies norms. The ones who did are exceptional and it is fantastic to read about them, but the numbers of those type of women portrayed compared to the number of women who would have actually acted in this way is definitely disproportionate.
Often times some of the biggest pitfalls relating to voice can come from trying to write a nationality other than your own. There may be certain words that people from certain places are expected to say as a result of cultural stereotypes, but in reality that could be something that isn't every day for every person. Seeing that mentioned several times could be jarring to the reader.
Let me give you an example. One of the things that have been used to promote Australia and that we have a kind of stereotyping about is that we all call everyone mate, as in 'G'Day Mate'. I can't remember the last time I said that to someone. Even just using the word mate is not something that I would use regularly. I remember having a conversation with Heather from Tales of a Capricious Reader not too long ago where we talked about this, and she used the example of the word Y'all, as in 'howdy y'all' and having a similar reaction. Now to be fair, there are some Aussies for whom calling someone mate is a part of everyday idiom. I used to work with a man who called everyone mate. The interesting thing is that he had immigrated to Australia as a teenager, and had lived in a couple of other cities, so maybe it is something that he had more exposure to than I did. So if I read a book where there is an Australian who constantly calls everyone mate to me it doesn't feel genuine at all.
Another example is accent. For example, when I hear that famous line from the Meryl Streep movie Evil Angels/A Cry in the Dark, where she proclaims that 'a dingo took my baby', every time I hear that it is jarring and I think that so does not sound like a genuine Australian (see the video below). Having said that, if you can find audio of Lindy Chamberlain talking, she has a much broader accent than I do so maybe regional differences account for at least some of this difference of opinions.
My point about all this in relation to The Help in particular is that I thought that Kathryn Stockett did a really good job in giving the white and black characters in distinctive voice by using different spelling, grammar, intonation and and in conveying their attitude. The thing is though, my impression is based on what I have seen in movies, in what I have read in other books, and not from personal experience. A quick glance at Amazon shows a small minority of one and two star reviews, and a lot of them talk about not liking the dialect and so obviously their personal experiences have obviously bought influence to bear upon their reading experience.
For me it felt authentic, and I thought it was an excellent read.
This week my teaser comes from page 57 of The Help by Kathryn Stockett:
Mrs Charlotte Phelan's Guide to Husband-Hunting, Rule Number One: a pretty, petite girl should accentuate with makeup and good posture. A tall plain one, with a trust fund.
I was hoping for more rules so I could catch myself a husband, but no such luck!
Teaser Tuesday is host by Miz B at Should Be Reading. Head on over to find out all about it, and how to join in!
This morning I started reading The Help by Kathryn Stockett. I know that if I was to say I must be the last person in blog land to read this book, there will be 10 comments that say "oh, I haven't read that yet either". There are however times when it feels as though it must be true, and not just about The Help.
Some times one particular book seems to be popping up everywhere. Maybe part of the reason for that is that as a blogger I tend to gravitate towards the blogs of people who I know have a similar reading taste to me. Some times though, that hype is more manufactured that organic and there are times when it isn't easy to tell the difference.
There are times when seeing the same book over and over again makes me want to go out and get it, and read it straight away, but there are times when it has the opposite effect.Can a book possibly be that good? What happens if I am the only person who doesn't get what the attraction is? It's not the kind of thing that I normally read? And yet, if I hadn't stepped outside of my comfort zone, I would have missed out on some of my favourite reads ever. Books like The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos RuisZafon, and just this year The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss (the windy theme of the examples given are purely coincidental!) are both books that I wouldn't have necessarily thought that I would love but I did.
The Help then made several Best of 2009 lists outside of the book blogosphere as well, which bought even more attention to it. At the end of the day, the only way to find out for sure is to actually sit down and read the book to make up your own mind, so I think that is what I am going to do this afternoon. Before I do that though, I thought I would ask a few questions:
Does lots of hype around a book make you want to read it, or is it more likely to turn you off a bit?
Have there been books that everyone else seems to love that make you go meh?
What's the last really hyped book that you read and loved, and wished you had of read earlier?
Are there any new books out at the moment that are getting plenty of hype that you think people should go out of their way to read?
And now I am off to read.... or maybe sleep. You never can tell what is going to happen once I lay down on that couch!
