Boosterism

Hey sports fans! The countdown is ON! Superbowl Sunday is almost here! Who are you rooting for -- Denver or our home town favorite, Seattle Public Library? That's right, 12th readers! We are headed to a smackdown! Tweet what you are reading to @SPLBuzz with the tag #SEAreads and/or #ReadingBowl. Show that Seattle is the most literate city!

And whil we are choosing sides, are you Team Bronte or Team Austen? Do you cheer for Edward & Bella or Beka Cooper? Or maybe you're a Katniss backer.

Does Cinderella (Ever After, Just Ella, Ella Enchanted) bring you to your feet or are your hurrahs for Rapunzel (Tangled, Book of a Thousand Days, Zel, Rapunzel's Revenge)?

Is your armchair quarterbacking aimed at the Donner Party or the American Revolution or the Civil War (Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales)?

Which game could you have changed?

Fan Fiction

I heard Marcie Sillman interviewing Tom Keogh on KUOW recently about why Sherlock Holmes is such an enduring character and he called the modern day BBC series with Benedict Cumberbatch glorified fan fiction. Cool! Fan fiction is totally getting its day in the limelight!

You know what it is, right? It's pretty self-explanatory -- fans of published stories (books, games, movies) take the characters and settings, and play with them. It's been around for ages, but the Internet made it possible for amateur writers to easily share their vision with others. Some of those stories have been picked up and published in their own right. The fan fiction world I'm most familiar with is Jane Austen -- there are numerous web sites and I daren't actually go there! But I do know that a number of the Austen spin-offs (Pamela Aidan's trilogy and Sharon Lathan's series, for example) started as writings online that gained enough of a following that book deals resulted. Cassandra Clare (The Mortal Instruments) got her start writing Harry Potter fan fiction and E.L. James' 50 Shades of Grey started out on a Twilight fan fic site.

I love that people can hone their writing skills and get immediate feedback from readers. I am intrigued that the phenomenon can lead to publication. As a reader who loves living in my book worlds, it is appealing to have more access to my favorite characters. I may not agree with how another author imagines Miss Anne Elliot, for example, but I'm happy to visit her version.

What do you think -- is it cheating? Is it plagiarism? These characters were developed by writers who make a living by publishing books; why is it okay for others to use them? That's the question Cath in Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl has to answer for herself. In her mind, her stories are kind of like taking Star Wars action figures and making up new adventures, but that logic doesn't fly with her college writing professor. Does the fact that virtually all fan fic is written by fans for other fans and that money is not part of the equation matter?

Something to think about...

Unlikable Characters

Roxane Gay, my most recent writer crush, has a very thought-provoking article in Buzzfeed about unlikable characters, specifically unlikable women characters. That link is here, but this is the most awesome defense of characters we love to hate by Claire Messud, from the Gay essay:

In a Publisher’s Weekly interview with Claire Messud about her recent novel The Woman Upstairs, which features a rather “unlikable” protagonist named Nora who is bitter, bereft, and downright angry about what her life has become, the interviewer said, “I wouldn't want to be friends with Nora, would you? Her outlook is almost unbearably grim.” And there we have it. A reader was here to make friends with the characters in a book and she didn't like what she found.

Messud, for her part, had a sharp response for her interviewer. “For heaven's sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you're reading to find friends, you're in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn't ‘Is this a potential friend for me?’ but ‘Is this character alive?’”

Wow! Just wow! Isn't that the truth? What would Charlotte's Web be without Templeton? Boring, that's what! 

I often say that I have to love the characters to love a book. Like Messud's hapless interviewer, it's often because I want them to be good people. On my first reading of Emma, for example, I was horrified. Reading about Jane Austen's privileged young woman meddling in her neighbors' lives was terribly uncomfortable for me. I was embarrassed for her. As I have grown as a reader though, I have to come to realize that having to love a book's character/s is not so much about goodness, as it is about recognizing these people, and more importantly, recognizing myself in them. 

My favorite books have characters that I believe in, that I can trust to behave authentically, whether or not I want to share a pie with them. Furthermore, my favorite characters have something to show me about myself. Sometimes that's a good thing and sometimes it's really unpleasant, but in the end I am always glad I made their acquaintance.