Lisa Dempster

Been meaning to write this for a week now…

Stasiland was fantastic! A poignant kind of travel narrative historical memoir, very easy to read and quite heartbreaking reading about the personal lives of Eastern Germans – both pre- and post- liberation. Highly recommend.

After the Millenium Trilogy, I got a bit of an appetite for detective and crime-y fiction. All in a row I read Ghostlines by Nick Gadd, The Black Russion: A Jack Susko Mystery by Lenny Bartulin, The Low Road by Chris Womersley. The Low Road isn’t really detective/crime (it’s more thriller), though it does have criminals in it and they are on the run so it kind of fits in with the others. It was my favourite of those three books, because oh my it was bleak. If you like your fiction dark I can recommend it. Ghostlines and the Susko book are both art crime novels, but I preferred Ghostlines – it was a little less macho, and it’s set in Melbourne’s inner west to boot. The plot line was also a bit more plausible.

(Psst, I saw Girl with a Dragon Tattoo at the movies. It’s a bit cheesy but the Lisbeth character is perfect, perfect, perfect.)

Bicycle Diaries I’m still dipping in to and it’s fantastic – especially for a traveller and bike lover. Do I want a folding bike? Well, no. But I do want to ride my bike in cities around the world! The tone is a bit earnest which surprised me for some reason, but I enjoy the scrabook-y, diary feel. Highly recommend.

Travels with Herodotus took a bit me a while to get into; because it examines an ancient text it was a bit of a struggle at first, but then slowly Kapucinski’s languid style engulfs you and you ease into it. This was not my favourite Kapucinski book but it’s probably the most ambitious – a memoir of two travellers, living thousands of years apart, Kapucinski and Herodotus. Seriously. Is Kapucinski the greatest travel writer, or what? It’s a great introductory text to Herodotus as well.

Confessions of an eco-shopper I didn’t touch – there’s always one in every pile that gets short thrift! I’ve returned it to the shelf…

I did read Committed: a skeptic makes peace with marriage by Elizabeth Gilbert though. Yes, chick lit, I reads it. I’ll tell you something though, Elizabeth Gilbert may have become a megasuper chick lit star by writing Eat, Pray, Love but she is an intelligent and interesting writer. Eat, Pray, Love is not her first book, and is a departure from her usual style (she has a long history of writing about masculinity), but it is suprisingly good. Not excellent, but not the trash it gets accused of because of its popularity either. Committed is in the same vein, I didn’t love it but it’s an interesting look at marriage and the so-called traditions that go with it.

This is an interesting article going ’round the literary traps: Literary journals segregating fiction.

It talks about how many lit journals publish ‘big names’ or more professional writers in their print publications, and put their emerging writers online, noting several benefits and problems to this model.

Benefits:

• It allows the journal to highlight up-and-coming authors that wouldn’t make it into the print issue.
• Maximizes the potential revenue from the print journal (Big names sell mags).
• Provides fresh content online, driving traffic to the website.
• Helps the biggest journals appear hip and relevant by launching burgeoning authors, rather than only publishing established authors.

Problems:

• Perpetuates the stereotype that print is prestigious and online is second-grade.
• Divides the journal brand, where some authors put in their bios “Famous Journal X” and others have to add an additional caveat, “Famous Journal X online.” It’s a false dichotomy — if you wrote an online piece for Esquire, you would just put Esquire in your bio, not Esquire Online.
• Creates less of an incentive for journals to invest in a young writer, to stand behind them strongly enough to publish them in a print journal. Instead, younger writers can reliably be shuffled to the (cheaper and safer) online spaces.

The Rumpus said this about BookFox’s post:

But, as BookFox points out, there’s a few big downsides to this, the most important of which is the fact that it allows these journals to seem like they are supporting emerging writers without putting their full weight behind them.

And, while I can’t get inside these editors brains, I have a feeling that this might be the way some of them look at it. But what the big traditional journals may or may not yet understand is that their online content just might affect the way people view their journal, at least in the long term, much more than their print publication.

It has been interesting over these last few years watching how many print publications around the world have chosen to move online; it’s obvious that many don’t really respect or even understand the medium. How many times have you seen something that is created because someone seems to have thought ‘wow, everyone is blogging – we need to blog’, but then shows a complete lack of understanding about how the medium works? Or when the editors/writers who create them clearly see the medium as second rate. In a situation like that, everyone suffers. The (often emerging) writers are relegated to second-best. The publication’s reputation suffers because the writing is not on a par with the printed version. It just doesn’t make sense.

But as BookFox notes at the end of the post, this may be a transitory stage, and of course there’s going to be trial and error during such a process:

I’m guessing this model of original content in both print and online capacities will slowly erode the current dominant model of Print as primary, with a website as the second-tier source of bulletin board and excerpts. Perhaps this is actually a transitional stage: we’ve seen virtually all literary journals ramp up their online presences in the last five years, and now we’re entering a stage where journals are starting to blend their print/online production, and in the future we might see another shift.