The SMB Book thread

Just finished Eye of the Needle, which Ken Follets first book. Decent read but a bit of a corny ending.

Him and Barbara must have a boring time in the sack as his sex scenes are like something out of a Mills & Boon

Follett has written some of my all time favourite books. The century trilogy and Pillars Of The Earth are absolutely outstanding.
 


Follett has written some of my all time favourite books. The century trilogy and Pillars Of The Earth are absolutely outstanding.
Funny thing is I couldn't get into Pillars of the Earth, but some of his other books, Hornet Flight, Key to Rebecca, The Man from St Petersburg and a Night over Water are some of my all time favourites
 
Funny thing is I couldn't get into Pillars of the Earth, but some of his other books, Hornet Flight, Key to Rebecca, The Man from St Petersburg and a Night over Water are some of my all time favourites

I would recommend A dangerous fortune and a place called freedom
 
Read this just after Apocalypse Now was released!
The NME fillum review mentioned AN was based on Heart Of Darkness which lead me onto Tropic Moon via another review. Similarly discovered The End Of The Night by Louis ? which was apparently the inspiration for The Doors song of the same name on their first album which also features The End which kicks off Apocalypse Now......
I somehow ended up then reading a couple of books on the making of the Kariba dam which I loved for the animal rescue element from the areas about to be flooded.
Journey to the End of the Night by Louis Ferdinand Celine.
 
Godric -- Frederick Buechner

Bit of local interest here. It's a historical retelling of a twelfth century hermit who lived at Finchale Abbey by the Wear. The Wear is characterised remarkably, it almost becomes a River Jordan of the rustic British wilderness. Good mix of evocation and humour. Pulitzer nominee.

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I'm now finally going to head through Middlemarch. Wish me luck.
You will love Middlemarch. Sags a bit in the middle but stick with it. I am currently heading through The Portrait of a Lady and wondering why on earth I've never read any Henry James before.

Short story comps were really good to me when I started entering four years ago. I had some success in some of the big ones: BBC, Writers & Artists, Bath, Fish etc But in the past 18 months it's been very noticeable that the shortlists, and sometimes the longlists, are often entirely female. In part it's wrapped up in the 'MeToo' thing, but when a comp is open to all and there's supposedly no restriction on subject matter, it's wrong to take entry fees off people who have no realistic chance of winning. For that reason I've largely stopped wasting my money. That said, when I tally up entry fees against winnings over the past four years I'm still healthily quids in.

Sadly, the days of writers like Somerset Maugham being able to buy a house from the earnings of a single story are long gone. The occasional competition success and publication in literary magazines and anthologies is about the most you can hope for. But once the stories are out there in the world, new opportunities can crop up. I got a story published in the Saturday Evening Post (the US mag that was one of the main outlets for the short stories of Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, Kurt Vonnegut etc) purely because they read it elsewhere.
Well done on doing so well. My experience of creative writing courses at 3 British universities (one short course, one Postgrad diploma, one MFA) is that the student intakes are majority female, sometimes overwhelmingly so, which in turn is going to feed through into who enters these competitions as we're encouraged to use them as a means to break through. As for the entry fees, a lot of competitions couldn't run without them but some offer free entries for people who need this, which is good to see and should be more widely adopted.

I don't know why the writing community is on the frontline of the gender war (the old war that is, fought in the binary trenches. God knows what will happen when male writers start identifying as female; that'd give the woke brigade a dilemma). Last year both the BBC and Sunday Times Awards shortlists were all female, this year's Commonwealth Prize shortlist is all female (and last year's, I think), and female writers dominated most of the other major short story prizes last year, as well as having several prizes that are women only.

Mostly I keep my head down and just keep writing. I've made a living out of it for more than 30 years, and it's only since I've begun to dabble in fiction that the gender thing has become an issue (in fact, in my career, almost all of my editors have been women - odd, given that we're reliably informed that the industry is totally male-dominated).

I have a literature blog and every year I put on the list of books I've read, usually to no comment. Last year there was a brief flurry of Twitter controversy when a woman took issue with the fact that of the 160 books I'd read 'only' 30% were written by women. Honestly, if we get to the point that instead of reading what we like we must conform to quotas I'm done.
Because 'the writing community' controls a large part of our culture, and women and other groups are under-represented in it, that's why. But I think you know this.

You say "It's only since I've begun to dabble in fiction that the gender thing has become an issue". It's interesting that you never took issue with gender of writers until you were put in a situation where, perhaps for the first time in your experience, the majority were women. I infer you never took issue when your writing world(s) was/were majority male. I think you need to get a bit 'woke', brother ;). Happy to accept I've inferred too much of course, and you've always worked and written in environments with a 50/50 gender split. Otherwise, welcome to our world. On my current course, the tutor was astonished at a straw poll of the students: 50% of the women said they would publish under a gender neutral name, just as JK Rowling had to do because her publishers feared that otherwise boys wouldn't read her. We know how the world still is for us.

@Monty Pigeon Here's some more stats for you, from our sibling art-form screenwriting. They are from a study that looked at the period 2005-2016
  • Only 16% of working film writers in the UK are women.
  • Only 15% of films had credited female writers, only 11% were predominantly female-written
  • On average, budgets for male-written films are higher than for female-written films
  • And yet women-written films tend to generate higher revenues
  • Only 28% of TV episodes over the ten year period were female-written
  • This dropped to 14% of prime time TV, 11% for comedy, and 9% for light entertainment.
https://writersguild.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Gender-Inequality-and-Screenwriters.pdf

So yes, this is why writing is at "the frontline of the gender war". Sorry if it's all a bit too 'woke' for you.
 
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You will love Middlemarch. Sags a bit in the middle but stick with it. I am currently heading through The Portrait of a Lady and wondering why on earth I've never read any Henry James before.


Well done on doing so well. My experience of creative writing courses at 3 British universities (one short course, one Postgrad diploma, one MFA) is that the student intakes are majority female, sometimes overwhelmingly so, which in turn is going to feed through into who enters these competitions as we're encouraged to use them as a means to break through. As for the entry fees, a lot of competitions couldn't run without them but some offer free entries for people who need this, which is good to see and should be more widely adopted.


Because 'the writing community' controls a large part of our culture, and women and other groups are under-represented in it, that's why. But I think you know this.

You say "It's only since I've begun to dabble in fiction that the gender thing has become an issue". It's interesting that you never took issue with gender of writers until you were put in a situation where, perhaps for the first time in your experience, the majority were women. I infer you never took issue when your writing world(s) was/were majority male. I think you need to get a bit 'woke', brother ;). Happy to accept I've inferred too much of course, and you've always worked and written in environments with a 50/50 gender split. Otherwise, welcome to our world. On my current course, the tutor was astonished at a straw poll of the students: 50% of the women said they would publish under a gender neutral name, just as JK Rowling had to do because her publishers feared that otherwise boys wouldn't read her. We know how the world still is for us.

@Monty Pigeon Here's some more stats for you, from our sibling art-form screenwriting. They are from a study that looked at the period 2005-2016
  • Only 16% of working film writers in the UK are women.
  • Only 15% of films had credited female writers, only 11% were predominantly female-written
  • On average, budgets for male-written films are higher than for female-written films
  • And yet women-written films tend to generate higher revenues
  • Only 28% of TV episodes over the ten year period were female-written
  • This dropped to 14% of prime time TV, 11% for comedy, and 9% for light entertainment.
https://writersguild.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Gender-Inequality-and-Screenwriters.pdf

So yes, this is why writing is at "the frontline of the gender war". Sorry if it's all a bit too 'woke' for you.

The film industry is a whole different thing. After recent scandals, I think it's starting to redress the balance - not before time.

Since turning to fiction seriously in the past few years, I have been part of the online community of writers. I don't think at any stage in my career my gender has been the reason for my advancement. As I've said, most of my editors - from the very start - have been women.

I've often been asked for advice by fellow writers - both male and female - and I've never seen any distinction: they're writers first and foremost. My recent frustration is that when I've been on female-dominated shortlists, or have lost out to exclusively female longlists, several female writers I know, and regard as friends, have celebrated the femaleness. These prizes mean as much to me as to anyone else competing for them. Campaign for a level playing field by all means. But why would anyone celebrate a shut-out of fellow writers by dint of gender?

I've altered by reading habits over the past few years to include many more female writers. Some of them are now ranked among my favourites. My reading balance tends to be skewed because at the same time I'm also reading my way through the great works of literature, which, for historic reasons, tend to be written by male writers. I can't help that.

I have consciously altered my own fiction to bring female characters to the fore. Going back through my journalism, I have never knowingly discriminated by gender. Female interviewees have always featured prominently in my pieces. I'm more than willing to fight the battle for equality. I'm not willing to advocate the triumph of one gender over the other, either way.
 
I've often been asked for advice by fellow writers - both male and female - and I've never seen any distinction: they're writers first and foremost. My recent frustration is that when I've been on female-dominated shortlists, or have lost out to exclusively female longlists, several female writers I know, and regard as friends, have celebrated the femaleness. These prizes mean as much to me as to anyone else competing for them. Campaign for a level playing field by all means. But why would anyone celebrate a shut-out of fellow writers by dint of gender?
How do you know people were shut out by dint of gender rather than inferior talent?
 
Your question could be turned on its head, surely?
It could be, but it comes to the same thing: @Monty Pigeon has suggested, unless I've read him wrong, that open competitions he has entered have made biassed listing decisions based on gender. I'd like him to substantiate this because it's a strong allegation.
 
How do you know people were shut out by dint of gender rather than inferior talent?

I asked why would anyone celebrate it? Why would someone in the writing community tweet, for instance: "Yay, another all-female shortlist. Go girls." That's celebrating a gender shut-out. I would never dream of tweeting the equivalent for an all-male shortlist. Nor would I think it.

It could be, but it comes to the same thing: @Monty Pigeon has suggested, unless I've read him wrong, that open competitions he has entered have made biassed listing decisions based on gender. I'd like him to substantiate this because it's a strong allegation.

If you enter a competition for which there is no theme, and then, in their longlist announcement, the judges state they are proud that the listed stories reflect the "#MeToo Moment", do you not think it safe to assume that they just might have employed a criterion in the judging process that was not specified in the original entry instructions? There's nothing wrong with competition judges aiming to capture the zeitgeist, but if that's going to be an integral part of the selection process, don't take entry fees off writers who've assumed that 'no theme' means they can write about anything and be in with a shot of winning if their story is good enough.
 
England’s Dreaming by Jon Savage.
Big Sex Pistols based account of the 70s punk phenomena, from its build up in both London And NYC to the death of Sid Viscious.. Mebbes time for a new edition or an account from then onwards?

The weakness of the book imho is the overlong personal histories of Malcolm Maclaren and Vivienne Westwood at the start that had twice previously had me sticking it back on the shelves and reading summit else. Though once I’d Forced my way through the early chapters an interesting light was cast on their prime time punk actions and motivations by their formative years. Maclaren and Westwood have possibly a separate book in their joint stories? Mebbes even a fillum? Plus it reveals that that the singer of “M” Pop Music worldwide classic hit single used to share a flat with them in their students days!
Savages frequent insertion of pretentious literary and philosophical quotes alongside his supposedly contemporary diary entries got on my tits anarl.

All in all a crackin read that had me googling a few of the less famous characters to find out where they’d got too.
 
The Border - Don Winslow 6.5/10
Bit of a tricky one for me. Don Winslow is one of my favourite authors, his early novels are tight, gripping thrillers about the drug trade. Unfortunately his later novels have become overblown and preachy, losing the tightness and fast pace that kept you engaged.
This is almost non-fiction with some characters being well known figures with just their name changed. Donald Trump being the obvious example.
It is one long info dump, and whilst the information itself is interesting, it prevents it from being an enjoyable novel in its own right.
To a certain extent, I think you need adjust your expectations of what you are reading.
If you've watched El Chapo or Narcos Mexico you will know large chunks of this story already. Not sure if that is a positive or not.
It is a better read than The Force which is both preachy and clichéd. I didn't dislike it but can't say I enjoyed it either. I feel it would have been improved by being considerably shorter and allowing the reader to fill in the gaps. The Nico story could have been left out altogether because whilst it was informative on the plight of child immigrants, it added little to the overall story.
This is just one instance of dialogue where the need to over explain almost killed the book.
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If you wish to be educated about the drugs trade and links to the US government then this is for you. If you are looking for an entertaining thriller, possibly give it a miss.
 
The Wall by John Lanchester

Picked this up on the back of the Booker list. Starts really well and touches on a few contemporary issues such as the environment, generational divides, immigration, etc. without being too heavy-handed. It's well paced and keeps your interest without ever being too obvious until a good two-thirds of the way through.

Unfortunately, unless I've drastically missed some point, it gradually peters out into a non-ending. I've rarely read a book that promised so much and then failed to deliver any kind of ending (not even Stephen King). Disappointing but I'd still give it a 7/10 since the main part of the book is so enjoyable.
 
The Chain by Adrian McKinty 10/10
More than lives up to the hype. Brilliant idea brilliantly executed. There aren't many thrillers around that, in the midst of all the action, allude to Borges. But first and foremost it's about plot, and that keeps the pages turning. I read it in two sittings.

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