The Saturday Morning Post (No. 22)

Today I have a well regarded, award winning, fantasy novel from 2018 to review. I had put this ebook on reserve four or five months ago and it only recently became available. That says something about how popular this five year old book is. Let's get into it.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

Jade City by Fonda Lee  DNF 52%

Quitting it at the 52% mark should tell you that I enjoyed the story, for a while. At first I was thinking that it would be a B grade read. But as the story went on, and on, I found that I had to force myself to pick the book up to read it. And finally, when I found myself skim reading long exposition pages and even action sequences, I decided that I had enough. It simply wasn't working for me.

Why? I've got the time, so if you do as well, let's go a little deeper into why this didn't work for me.

The story is set in Kekon, a fictional fantasy version of a Japan or Korea-like country. It is an island nation that had recently throw off fairly modern colonial rulers during some sort of world war. The setting is a late 20th century time period like era, with cars and expressways, airplanes, land phones, TVs, etc, all, I gather, relatively recently introduced. The world building is okay, Japanese-y, but with nothing particularly unique about it. The jade in the title comes from the fact that for a certain race of people, wearing jade gives them magical/super powers, but if they wear too much, it can make them go crazy and kill them.

The story concerns ex-freedom fighters who expelled the occupying colonial power, but are now criminal gangs, each of which control sections of the city of Janloon. We have the No Peak Clan, and their major rivals the Mountain Clan, as the main factions with a clan war brewing between them. In this respect it is a gangster story. We see the story from the No Peak Clan perspective, mostly. They are the "good guys" (sic) in the story. 

My personal issues with this story include...

I'm not a crime story reader and I can't say that I would naturally root for a crime family. While the No Peak Clan seemed nice enough for a criminal enterprise, well, as you sow, so shall you reap. Que sera sera was pretty much my attitude.

The story is told from point of view of multiple characters, which is not my cup of tea. I found that there were too many for me to care about any one of them. Some of the point of view characters were not members of the No Peak Clan, and there was, I believe, some clumsy foreshadowing about one such character. The thing about stories of this type, beyond not spending enough time with any one character to develop an emotional tie to, is that they seem artificial to me. A constructed story, rather than an organic narration. I can sense the author building the story just behind the scenery as they assemble their mosaic of subplots.

Next, I don't like stories where the plot depends on people doing dumb things. I realize that a lot of stories require people to make mistakes, or do foolish things, but I don't like it when it seems that the story hangs on it. I also don't like choices that seem designed to create conflict/tension that don't make a lot of sense when examined from outside the plot. Let me explain. 

Some mild spoilers ahead.

For an example in this book of people doing dumb things for the convenience of the plot, we have a sister of the No Peak Clan's leader. She has given up wearing jade, wishes to stay clear of the clan, and wants to live her own life. This includes having her own apartment outside of the guarded clan compound. However, without wearing jade, she does not have the magical/super powers that go with them. So with the first skirmishes of the clan war already underway, you would think that she would realize that she was a soft target to either be killed or kidnapped and use against her clan while living alone or traveling around a contested city. Despite her reluctance to don the jade again, you would think the danger would be obvious enough to her to don her jade in self defense, or at least live within the compound. But no, she hadn't at the 52% mark, and I have to believe that fact will come into play sooner or later, especially since she sent a secret bodyguard packing. Dumb. To me that doesn't make sense. She's not that naïve, so I have to believe that's for the convenience of the plot.

More central to the story is the fact that the more jade one wears the greater ones powers - as long as the person can control the power. Wear too much jade and it destroys the person. Jade does not appear to be any more rare than jade in this world. While the amount of jade produced is controlled, it is the criminal gangs who controlled the supply, so that you would think that each of these criminal organizations would be able to supply their thugs with all the jade they could handle. That being the case, I don't see why there would be any reason to wear the jade from a dead enemy thug in addition to their own, and thus, risking jade overload. This, however, is a major plot point, as the leader of the No Peak Clan kills an opponent in a duel and adds his jade ornaments to his own. However, he is not able to handle all that jade, causing all sorts of physical and mental issues. The in-story explanation amounts to saving face, showing how strong in handling jade he is, but you could just as easily argued that by showing distain for the defeated thug's jade, as something he doesn't need, would enhance his standing. Knowing the fate of those who overload themselves, there is no reason why this character should poison himself, still he does. It seems to be pure stupidity on his part, and to me, the reader, it seems something done only in the service of drama and plot, as it will no doubt play a large part in the last half of the story.

In addition, I found that the pacing rather slow, due, I think, to all the chapters devoted to subplots. There were at least six sub-plots that we were following, each featuring the various point of view characters. Some readers like these complex stories where all the sub-plots come together at the end, I don't. As I said at the beginning, I find this type of story too deliberately scripted to suspend my disbelief. In this story all those sub-plots just made for a fragmentary read that broke the narrative flow, for me.

Last word; all of my complaints arise out of my personal biases. If you don't share them, you may well like this book.

Coming next week; another fantasy novel and a detective novel reread.

Best of Times, Worst of TImes

 

The Tale of Two Cities opens with the line; "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." Looking at my latest sales report, that line could apply to my report as well. Not that I'm complaining, it is still the best of times when it comes to sales totals. But if you look closer, you can see that those numbers hide, if not the worst of times, a tale of how times have changed in author publishing business, for the worst, for most of us. 

Let's take a look at my sales, specifically how easy or hard it is to sell books, and how it may have changed over the years. I will compare my first year as a publisher, that would be 2015-16, to my last full year, 2022-23. A Summer in Amber was my first book. I released it in late April 2015, followed in July by Some Day Days, and then The Bright Black Sea in September. In those first 12 months I sold 6,608 books. The best way to answer my initial question seems to be to measure those sales with a crude metric, sales per year per book. To do that we simply divide total sales into 3 equal parts, one for each book, even though they were on the market for varying lengths of time and sold in different amounts. What we want is an average sales rate per book per year. Dividing 6,608 by 3 we get 2,202 copies sold per book per year on average in 2015-16.

Now let's compare that average per book sales to my 2022-23 sales results. I sold 19,524 books in 2022-23. A record number. Great! However, since I now have 14 books for sale, we need to divide those 19,524 books by 14, which gives us a sales per book per year average of 1,394 copies! Nearly half of the per book average of 2015-16. It certainly seems that it is getting harder to sell books. Even free books.

But wait! That total included audiobooks. I wasn't offering audiobooks in 2015-16. So if we want a more accurate comparison, we should only count ebooks for 2022-23;which would be 11,326 of them. Divide that number by 14 we get a sales per book per year average of just 809 copies, down considerably from the 2015-16 rate of 2,202. In 2022-23 I'm selling books with about 37% of the efficiency that I was in 2015-16. And this, mind you after having been in the business for 8 years.

But you know what? Those 2021-22 sales numbers above include ebook sales on Google. In 2015-16 I wasn't selling books via Google. I sold only thru Smashwords, et. al. and Amazon. So if we want to accurately study the decline in sales, we need to compare sales rates between 2015-16 and 2022-23, apples to apples. Thus, we should probably count only my 2022-23 Smashwords and Amazon sales of ebooks, which came in at about 6,253 copies. Dividing that total by 14 yields a sales per book per year average of just 446! Yikes! I'm now only 20% as efficient at selling books compared 2015-16 on those two stores. And the 2022-23 number includes the unparalleled sales of 2,790 copies of The Girl on the Kerb. Had that book sold like all the others, the result would have been even lower. More like 300 copies per book. 

So, over the last eight years, I've gone from selling an average of 2,202 copies of every ebook I offer per year down to only 446 copies per ebook per year between Amazon and Smashwords. If sales had continued at the 2015-16 rate I would be selling something like 30,828 ebooks a year on Amazon and Smashwords alone, instead of 6,253. Talk about diminishing returns. Only the fact that I expanded my distribution to Google in both ebooks and audiobooks has kept Cealanda Press chugging along. And Google sales will no doubt fade as time goes by as well.

The simplest explanation would appear to be that I'm not writing books people want to read. There is some validity to this, as my books are not mainstream SF. However, since I've been writing in a very similar style right from the get go, that seems unlike to be the reason for the decline in rate of sales. I think the fact that I write a variety of stories may make it hard to capture every sale from every reader; illustrated by the fact that my space opera, The Bright Black Sea outsells every  book by a significant margin. A slightly more likely explanation is that I may have already reached most of the "low hanging" readers who are open to reading my books, making finding new readers increasingly harder to come by. New books? New books sell more, and I had released three new books in 2015. Well, I release 2 new books in 2022-23 so that newly released books are likely not a factor. While most of the books in my catalog "old," having been around for a few years, that is not a negative. Having a back catalog of books is, I think, a plus in author publishing, allowing a reader who stumbles upon one of your books and likes it, the chance to immediately go on to read more of your books. 

One might also blame the fact that there are way more books available today than in 2015. But even back then, there were way too many books as well, so I don't think this is a major cause in the decline in sales efficiency I'm seeing.

What I think makes it ever harder to sell books is the fact that the author publishing market has consolidated, just like businesses do in the real world... It has become a "big" business, relatively speaking, compared to the good old days of 2012 -16. These days you need to go big or go home. Now an author wishing to publish their book has to approach publishing very much as a business if you want to sell more than a handful of books. And be ready to spend money on it.

Another factor may be that readers of ebooks have found their groove and settled into it. They don't leave it to beat the weeds for new and different reads like they may've back in the early days of ebook publishing. And even if they do search out new books, there are so many books to choose from, that no author publisher can expect to sell many books to these intrepid explorers. 

A final reason may be that Amazon has gotten serious about make even more money off of author publishers by selling, rather than just giving away, discoverability to authors; i.e. they sell ads on every product page. Most of the books you see on any product page appear there because some author paid money to have it there. These ads are critical to finding readers. So much so that I know of several full time fantasy authors who spend "only" $1,000 to $1,200 per month on advertising ($12-18K a year). Of course their sales support those ad buys, but it serves to illustrate the scale of business operations needed to sustain a successful full time publishing career in author publishing these days. One can probably get by on less, if one doesn't need to earn a living from writing, but even so, one can easily spend thousands of dollars, and never see much, if any, of it again.

I have to wonder if anyone starting off as an author publisher today with anything less than a great book, accurately targeted at a lucrative genre/subgenre, and a startup budget in the thousands of dollars will ever sell more than a handful of books. 

Oh well, I guess I can play the "glad game" and say that I'm glad I'm still selling as many books as I am, enough so that the "best of times" numbers do a darn good job of masking the "worst of times" numbers of my publishing business.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 21)

 

A new week, a new saga. This time, one you' al know.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell  A-/B+

I suspect that all Americans of a certain age is familiar with the story of Gone With the Wind either from reading the book (often many times) or via the famous movie. I had neither read the book nor seen the movie before starting this saga, though I was familiar with a vague outline of the story, like most Americans of my generation. For readers not familiar with the story, for whatever reason, I'll simply say that it is a long novel first published in 1936, and has long been considered on of the great American novels. It tells the story of Scarlet O'Hara, the cold, proud, driven, and very ruthless daughter of a wealthy Plantation owner in the American South during the years from just prior to the American Civil War to the aftermath of that war known as the Reconstruction era. 

Born in 1900, and growing up in Atlanta Georgia, Margaret Mitchell was a writer from an early age, writing stories and novels as a teenager. For Gone with the Wind, she was able to draw on the experiences of people who actually lived through the Civil War and the Reconstruction era that followed the war to create a story rich in the details of that time and to create a novel which reflected the life, and the attitudes of the people who endured the war and its aftermath in the Georgia countryside and the city of Atlanta, a city that was sieged, captured, and eventually burned by General Sherman's army late in the war. Mitchel wrote about those time with a wonderful mix of clear headedness and sentimentality. For that reason, the book is both loved and hated.

Once again I find myself reading and reviewing a book a book that approaches race relations from an earlier historical period. I believe that the time frame and the author must be considered when judging a book. My approach is to take these books a historical records of the time and attitude of the period, and judge the story and writing independently of those considerations. 

So let's get those considerations out of the way. First, the book is written from the view point of wealthy, pre-Civil War Southern, slave owning aristocrats. If it had been written from the viewpoint of a small Southern farmer "crackers" or those below them on the social scale, "white trash," this pre-Civil War South would probably look mighty different, far less idyllic and elegant. And while Mitchell is very clear headed about the arrogance, shortcomings, and foolishness of this wealthy class, there is a strong whiff of the "romance" of the "Lost Cause" in their portrayal. Second, slavery is completely whitewashed. None of the ugly sides of slavery is ever shown, and in her very unflattering portrayal of freed slaves, she seems to be saying that the blacks were better off slaves. That said, the main black characters are treated sypathicly, as valued people. Third, she recounts the hardships of Reconstruction to a far greater extent than a story about Scarlett O'Hara would justify. This extended description of the hardships suffered in Georgia resulted in the story rather dragging in the last 1/3 of the story, at least for me. Plus as a Yankee, it invoked no sympathy in my heart. If you start a war, you better damn well win it. And if you don't win it, you must expect to pay the price of defeat, no matter how exacting that price might be, especially for a war that cost the lives of over 600,000 people, not to mention all the life-long scared survivors. And lastly, there is the now objectionable language of the time (both when written and the historical period) that is used when referring to blacks. Any modern reader needs to consider these built-in biases, when choosing whether to to read this book or not.

As for the story itself. It is quite wonderfully written, though perhaps a bit overly long, the pace sagging a bit in Parts 4 & 5, due, as I mentioned, to the overly long account of Reconstruction, as well as less exciting things happening in the later half of the story. Unlike the last saga I read, Mitchell takes you back to the old South in such a wealth of images and details that you will feel that you lived there, sometime in the half-forgotten past. You live those years through thick and thin along with Scarlett. Her writing is very fluent, not only on a sentence level, but in the way she tells the story. You sort of glide through the books shifting from long descriptive passages of places, times, people, seamlessly shifting to Scarlett thoughts, hates, fears, and most of all, her determination to succeed - at any price. Conversations are often more speeches than conversations, but are written so engagingly that they seem quite natural. The speech of all the black people in the story are written in dialect, i.e. misspelled words, take that for what you will, and except for short passages, I did not try to translate them. There is a lot of "telling" in the way this novel is written, but by and large I didn't find it a burden, at least until I neared the end...

I debated what score to give Gone With the Wind; a B+ or an A- and settled on giving it both. While I enjoyed the book a lot, I had my reservations, as stated above. I opted for A- score on the strength of how detailed, atmospheric, and just how sweeping the story Mitchell crafted was, but on a more personal enjoyment level, I did take a a few points off for a score of B+.

We will be reviewing a fantasy book next week, the first of a series. After all, tomorrow's another day.

The 8 1/2 Years in Publishing Report

It is time once again for the semi-annual report of my publishing venture. As an author/publisher I wear two hats. As an author, I consider myself an amateur, which is to say that I write for the joy of creating. I don't need to be paid for this effort, it's its own reward. However, I take a more business-like approach in my role as a publisher.

As a publisher, my "mission statement" would read something like this; Cealanda Press's goal is to sell as many C Litka books as possible, as efficiently as possible, without loosing money in doing so. Since C Litka books are not mainstream Amazon ebooks, the likelihood of making enough money to make a financial difference in my life is nil. Thus, making money is not a priority in my publishing business. That said, not losing money is a priority, even if it could be justified as "spending" money on my "hobby." My business model is designed to meet these criteria.

With the exception of beta reading by outside volunteers, the production of my ebooks, paper books, and audiobooks is done inhouse, and as such, it involves only a minimum amount of expenditures, namely author copies of my paper books for my beta readers and postage to send it to them. This minor expense is covered by my non-free sales on Amazon. In order to achieve the widest possible sales, with the greatest efficiency, which is to say, with the least amount of effort on my part, I price my books at my cost and let their low price do all my promotional work. 

In the chart below, you can see how my publishing business is doing. The first two columns compare my sales for the first half of this fiscal year year, May thru October 2023-24 to the same period last year, the last column reports total sales of each of my books to date.

I sell my ebooks for free via Smashwords, whose sales totals includes sales from Apple. Sales on Barnes & Noble (via Smashwords) is a rounding error, that I just add to the total number of books sold to the sales total. Kobo (also via Smashwords) does not report free book sales, so they are not included in these totals. I also sell ebooks and paper books via Amazon. Most, but not all, of my ebooks on Amazon.com are free, most, but not all of my ebooks are full price on Amazon stores outside of the U.S. Those sales, and the odd paper book sold account for all my revenue. In addition, I sell ebooks and audiobooks via the Google Play Store, both are sold for free. My books also are available from several other non-U.S. bookstores and libraries via Draft2Digital.

For reference, my last report, my full 8th Year report can be found here.

The Sales Chart of the first half 2022-2023 vs 2023-2024

Book Title / Release Date	1H 2022 Sales	1 H 2023 Sales	Total Sales To date ebook & audiobooks total sales
A Summer in Amber 23 April 2015	244 244 Audio	289 231 Audio	Total 9,683
Some Day Days 9 July 2015	221 331 Audio	321 201 Audio	Total 6,199
The Bright Black Sea 17 Sept 2015	925 520 Audio	397 306 Audio	Total 17,753
Castaways of the Lost Star 4 Aug 2016	Withdrawn	Withdrawn	Total 2,176
The Lost Star’s Sea 13 July 2017	423 433 Audio	371 306 Audio	Total 10,156
Beneath the Lanterns 13 Sept 2018	299 377Audio	296 215 Audio	Total 5,160
Sailing to Redoubt 15 March 2019	344 299 Audio	304 196  Audio	Total 4,858
Prisoner of Cimlye 2 April 2020	310 359 Audio	286  230 Audio	Total 3,380
Lines in the Lawn 8 June 2020	17	24	Total 169
Keiree 18 Sept 2020	331 349 Audio	339 234 Audio	Total 2,987
The Secret of the Tzaritsa Moon 11 Nov 2020	428 255 Audio	357  214 Audio	Total 4,143
The Secrets of Valsummer House 18 March 2021	290 382 Audio	265 251 Audio	Total 3,225
Shadows of an Iron Kingdom 15 July 2021	409 989 Audio	351  301 Audio	Total 3,933
A Night on Isvalar 15 July 2021 (Amazon only  @.$.99 & Kindle Unlimited) 9 Star Nebula. Mystery Omnibus ($.99) Lost Star Omnibus ($.99)	19	6 8 2	Total 46 Total 8 Total 2
The Aerie of a Pirate Prince 29 Sept 2022	154 36 Audio	344  222 Audio	Total 1,594
The Girl on the Kerb 6 April 2023

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 20)

Well, we've reached the end of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time series, so it's time to share my thoughts about them. I have a lot to say, so let's jump into it.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

A Dance to the Music of Time by Nicolas Poussin 

A Dance to the Music of Time Series of 12 Novels by Anthony Powell  C-

In my book grading system, a "C" is an average book. It is enjoyable, but not has nothing outstanding to recommend it over any other book. I usually do not finish books that would rate a "D" or "F" they just get "DNF". So, while I am not rating this series very highly, I did enjoy it enough to real all 12 books, which says something. And I should mention that the minus "-" it received was based solely on the last book, Hearing Secret Harmonies, which I did not enjoy at all. I think it "jumped the shark", so you can discount that "-" if you care to. However, given that the place and time period these books are set in is my favorite in history, this series of books had the potential to be an A+ series. The fact that it ended up a C- means that I will probably have a lot of rather negative things to say about it below. Just keep in mind that despite my criticisms, I enjoyed it enough to have read the entire series, and also keep in mind that I DNFed Lonesome Dove when McMurtry killed off Gus, after purchasing all four books and having read the two prequels, so that I have no problem not finishing a book I don't enjoy. Even if I paid money for it. With that out of the way, let's begin.

A Dance to the Music of Time, whatever it's literary aspirations may be, is a soap opera, pure and simple. The story involves a number entwined of families and characters woven together in an endless story. They grow up, start careers, fall in and out of love, get married, divorced, have affairs, advance, or experience setbacks in their careers, get rich, powerful, or not, in a closed loop, recounted in one long series of books, a series that could've continued on after the 12th book, even if I wouldn't have...  It can be looked on as a R. F. Delderfield saga on steroids.

While I am not much of a lad for literary fiction, I have read books by British authors such as W Somerset Maugham, Compton Mackenzie, John Buchan, Nevil Shute, and Joseph Conrad, so that when I say that Anthony Powell's writing style is nondescript, even mundane, I say so in light of having read similar stories by some what similar British writers. His writing is wordy, thoughtful, and aspires to be literary. Heck there's passages of untranslated French and quotes from some classical literature in these books, so yah, he's a literary writer. Still, I found his writing serviceable, but unremarkable, his story telling pace slow, his scope limited.

I'm not a visual person, so that I don't expect to "see" a scene in my head like a movie, but the best writers, when they set out to create a scene,  or a place, evoke a sense of that place and mood. By and large Powell fails to do that, at least for me. Oh, he takes the time to describe rooms in great and concrete detail, and as such does a competent job of painting a scene, but unless you are familiar with similar rooms, descriptions of furnishings can only do so much in creating a sense of the place. When it comes to London, he attempts to create a mood, a sense of place. I found these descriptions interesting. Having taken dozens of YouTube bus rides through London including the districts he describes, I came away with an appreciation of how much London has changed since the time he was describing them. Some of the rundown areas of the city he talks about are today's very trendy neighborhoods, and a house on Regent Park that he visits would be accessible only to millionaires these days. I guess that is the dance of time. However, once you get beyond rooms and London, his description of the countryside entirely failed to evoke any sense of place, time, mood. These descriptions often seemed to be meant more as symbols than actual places. And in general his failure to evoke the mood the historical times the story was set in was a major failing for me, since it applied to the entire time period this series covers. I hardly recognize England at any of them.

There was a British TV mini-series drama made from these novels. The people on the covers of the books I used to illustrate the series are drawn from this series. Now, if I was asked to filming this series, I would've filmed it in black and white, since the entire series of books seemed to me to be very grey in tone. Not quite noir, but in the entirety of 12 books there is not one scene of authentic joy. Every scene is told with a flat, reflective, semi-cynical eye towards the people and events. Dances and parties are attended, people gather for drinks or dinner, and if people are having fun, the narrator sees it all, people and events, as merely a guise. Life is grey, and if life has any bits of joy, happiness, and true laughter, they are not recorded by the narrator. To have filmed these books in black and white would've been faithful to the source material.

Talking about grey brings us around to the first person narrator, Jenkins. In a first person narrated story, the narrator is a character in the story. In these books Jenkins is hardly a character at all. He is mostly an observer, hardly ever an actor. We learn next to nothing about him. For example when he meets his wife, we are merely told that having done so, he knew from the start she was the girl he was going to marry and no more. He doesn't even describe her. Their marriage happens between books, and with the exception of a few scenes in the later books, she remains off camera, as does his children, his family life, his work. He makes some sort of living, first working for a publisher, then for a film studio, and later, I guess as a writer and a book reviewer, but all this is mentioned only in passing. 

What he does is observe and ponder in long passages is what the other characters are thinking and why they are doing whatever it is they are doing. If these books were written in today's popular third person style with multiple point of view characters, the series would be half its length, and we, the reader, could've gotten to know the characters so much better, seeing their lives from their actual points of view. For the thing is, despite Jenkins' observations and pondering, we really don't get to know the characters very well. They remain opaque and vague. On one hand, do we ever know what people are truly like? But on the other hand, if pages and pages of speculation get you no closer to knowing... well what exactly is the point? One gets the impression that they are just objects upon which abstract observations about humans in general can be hung, rather than using these observations to craft true characters.

In any event, Powell uses this vagueness, the opaqueness, and the malleability he gives his characters to enable him to do whatever he wants with them. Indeed, I felt that the characters were always doing things that seemed to make no sense based on what we knew of them; things that seemed to be just for the convenience of the plot. Despite supposedly having a cast of 300 characters, he used and reused the core characters over and over again, regardless if, in my view, it made sense for that character to do whatever he had them doing. For example he has one extremely unpleasant female character who, for some reason, and I can only think for reasons of plot, everyone seems to fall in love with, including Winderpool who marries her, despite being the most unlikely character in the story  for him to marry. Or, for that matter the most unlikely person for her to marry. 

Speaking of Winderpool, he turns out to be the main character of the series, despite, or because, he is an altogether unpleasant character. No matter where Jenkins is, or what he is doing, you can always expect Winderpool to turn up, and you will never be disappointed. The whole series follows his story arch depicted in bits and pieces. There are, of course, many other characters as well, each described and pondered, but they come and go and come again, as needed across 12 books, only to fade away, die, or become a generic character, a mere name. Whatever their character was in the beginning long forgotten or blurred by age. They appeared in the later books just to dress the set as it were. The fact of the matter is, that with Jenkins being such a nonentity, there are no really memorable characters beyond Winderpool, in the 12 book series. He wins by default.

The blurb for this books says, in part, "It is unrivalled for its scope, its humour and the enormous pleasure it has given to generations." I found almost no humor in this book. Humor is a tricky thing, what some people find funny, others don't, so I can't say that the blurb lied, but I'll be damned if I could find anything more that a single remark, and some dialog by a character named Stringham that I felt were amusing. There is a scene where Winderpool, often the object of misfortune, gets a bowl of sugar poured on him at a dance by a girl. I assume this was meant to be a humorous incident, but Powell spends 7 plus pages setting up, describing, and pondering the incident... far too long and seriously for it to be funny. I have a feeling that the humor in these books, if there is any, and it wasn't just something a kind fellow book reviewer tossed into his review out of friendship, was the type that you had to be there, and know the people, to appreciate.

So did the books enrich my life in any way? Well, they passed the time and kept me interested in the dance of time. But I must confess that I'm not much of a lad for philosophy, so if there were nuggets of universal wisdom in the text, I overlooked them. Not being a regular reader of literary fiction, I probably wasn't the ideal audience for these books, so take that into your account when considering my opinions. 

What is there left to say? The story was interesting enough to keep me reading, though I would've DNFed it after the last book if it hadn't ended there. However, I have to admit that I would not recommend it to anyone I know. Read W Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge instead.

The 500 Mile Long Parking Lot

Yes, I know, this parking lot doesn't look to be 500 miles long, and it isn't. Indeed, it looks longer in the photo than it really is. However, if you were to, let's just say, circle around it on your bike some 5,000 times, you would've traveled at least 500 miles. And gotten nowhere. A very zen thing to do. I speak from experience. I've put on 506 miles on my bike this season just by riding around this parking lot - like an obedient 7 year old whose mother told him that he could only ride his bike in the driveway. In many ways we get younger as we reach old age; more cautious, physically weaker, mentally less, shall we say, agile, not to mention those diaper things... So riding my bike around the parking lot is somewhat in character. That, at least, is my story.

However getting old is only part of the reason. The fact that it is the only flat surface on the hill we live on is my main reason for sticking with the parking lot. When I was a decade younger I used to spend two hours riding some 20 miles or more on my bike every day, spring, summer and fall, on a flat ex-railroad bike trail. Over the succeeding years I eventually cut that back to one 10 mile ride a day because my knees were aching by the end of the season. And then 4 years ago we moved to a new city and to the top of a hill. Between that hill and advancing age, I'm now down to a mere half an hour and 3 miles a day. 

However, since 2010 when I purchased my Trek automatic 3 speed bike - a semi-dangerous solution looking for a problem - and the mountain bike I picked up at a yard sale several years later, I've put in some 26,700 miles on my bikes. And that doesn't include all the "miles" I've put on riding my bike on a rack these last half a dozen the winters, as the front wheel doesn't turn.

In any event, we live on the top of a hill and while one can ride around a small park and still stay more or less on the top of the hill, which I did for a year or so - one is still either going up or coasting down a slope, the going up of which wasn't doing my knees a favor. 

Of course there is a wider world to ride than the top of our hill, but I have the feeling that either going up or down our hill would eventually kill me, though in different ways, so that's best avoided even with an electric bike. And while the city has plenty of bike trails and lanes, it's a hilly city so there wasn't many places to ride at my age without either an electric bike or tossing my bike into the van and taking it someplace to ride. Going someplace to ride is too much trouble and while buying an electric bike was something I considered, I realized that for what I ride my bike for, I didn't need to ride anywhere, so I didn't need it. 

I ride a bike neither for exercise nor as a tourist, but for the zen experience of mindfulness, or in my case, for the opportunity to think of things - like the words I want to write - for more than 30 seconds at a time. It is a well known that doing something mindlessly repetitive, like walking, or in my case, riding a bike, is an aid to thought. Some of the most famous theoretical physicists were known to take long hikes in order to sorted out the quantum mysteries of the universe. I use the experience to string words together, over and over again until I can sit down and type them on the screen, like I'm doing now. And for that reason, I'm not concerned about the scenery. I knew the stretches of the bike trail I used to ride like the back of my hand after 15 years of walking and riding it. And though I'm no longer treated to the occasional sight of deer, foxes, turkey, geese other birds and all the wild flowers in season, that the bike trail through field and woods provided, I now get to talk to the neighbors when I'm out riding around the parking lot.

All in all, it is lucky for me I don't mind being seen as eccentric. I'm a writer and an artist, after all. As far as I'm concerned, being a zen bike rider is just another feather in my hat. Speaking of hats... well, we'll save that subject for another day.

Next week, the semi-annual report of my publishing company. Stay tuned.

The parking lot on the last day of the biking season.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 19)

Here is the third installment of my review/thoughts on Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, which I am treating as a novel in 12 parts rather than a 12 novel series. Rather than dragging this out, I am including the last two omnibus books, i.e. six installments in this review, and will give you my overall review next week.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

A Dance to the Music of Time; Autumn by Anthony Powell

The Valley of Bones  (1964)

The Soldier's Art  (1966)

The Military Philosophers  (1968)

The Valley of Bones covers the first year or so of World War ll. Jenkin is now in the army as a second lieutenant commanding a platoon in a regiment that is stationed in Northern Ireland for training. We meet a mostly new cast of characters, the officers and enlisted men he works with. Most of the officers are not regular army, but civilians like Jenkins who had signed up at the beginning of the war. Some of them are old enough to have served in World War l, or been part of the Territorial Army, a part-time army like the American National Guard. Most of them, however, are finding their way in the army as they go along. For some it is a dream come true, others an escape from a less than successful life, and still others, a long grey nightmare. I found this installment with Jenkins in this entirely new situation more interesting than the usual dinner party/meeting format that characterizes the series. That said, it is still mostly concerned with Jenkins trying to decipher the character and motives of the people, new and old, that he meets in the course of the story.

The Soldier's Art gives Jenkins a new job while still in the regiment stationed in Northern Ireland. In this installment he is an aide to the now familiar, though unpleasant character, Windmerpool from his school days, who is a Major at the regimental HQ. We get some new characters, plus the appearance of another old school pal who shows up. A leave allows him to get to London and encounter yet more familiar characters. By the end of this installment, we are into 1941, with first months of the London Blitz behind us, but London is still experiencing raids nightly. As with all these books, the world outside of Jenkin's focus on people is hinted at with off handed mentions more than even sketched in.

In The Military Philosophers we find Jenkins now working in London working for an Army organization that liaisons with the remnants of the armies of defeated and overrun countries like Poland, the Belgium, etc. As in all these books, exactly nature of what Jenkins does, or for that matter, what the office he works for does is not really fleshed out in any great detail. There is a problem or two, and a trip to meet Field Marshall Montgomery (never named), and a glimpse of the war in London, but mostly the setting gives Powell an opportunity to introduce new characters for Jenkins to deal with, as well as bringing back old ones. This story takes us to the end of the war with Jenkins collecting the civilian clothes that British soldiers are issued at the end of their service.

A Dance to the Music of Time; Winter by Anthony Powell

Books do Furnish a Room  (1971)

Temporary Kings  (1973)

Hearing Secret Harmonies (1975)

Books do Furnish a Room is set immediately after World War ll. Jenkins is working on a biography of one Robert Burton that brings him back to his old, unnamed university, and an old tutor. We meet some new and some old characters there, and he gets involvement with a new publishing house and a new magazine that involves a cast of characters from previous installments. While he is not directly involved in the venture, he is a contributing book reviewer. The main focus of this installment concerns a new character, Trapnel, a rather bohemian writer who writes pieces for the magazine and is working on a new novel. This aspect of the story struck me as something like W Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence, which followed the career of a painter. In our story Jenkin recounts the ups and downs of Trapnel, as he becomes involved with more familiar characters.

The next installment, Temporary Kings, is set a decade later, 1958 to 1959 and opens at a writers' conference in Venice. Here we meet several new characters, including a female college professor and a rather strange American professor who researching the now late Trapnel with a view of writing his biography as his dissertation. Along with these new characters, we meet the usual suspects and explore the various mysteries concerned with the tragic end of Trapnel and his mistress, and the implications of that end in regard to the usual suspects.

The long novel concludes with Hearing Secret Harmonies, once again skipping ahead a decade to be set in 1968 to 1971. In this one some of the characters from the last installment reemerge, as well as a charismatic hippy cult leader. The old characters are dying off and those that remain are so generic now that all that remains of whatever characteristics he described in earlier installments have been lost, at least to me. You would needed to have taken extensive notes to know who these people are and what they did in previous installments. I am going to save most of my thoughts about A Dance to the Music of Time to next week, but I will say here, that I really did not like this particular installment and felt that the book fell off rather sharply in Winter, which characters acting not as you would think they would, give their established characteristics, but as needed by the author, which is something I do not like at all.

But enough, stay tuned for my full review of the 12 book novel coming next week.