L’Yan’s continuing obsession with bad blurbs

I love terrible blurbs. Although they are often unhelpful when I am trying to categorise a book, they at least give me a good laugh.

How’s this for a phenomenally terrible blurb:

Shirley is a prostitute. She thinks she knows all her customers: the first-timers, the talkers, the lookers, the hard guys, even the occasional psychopath. But, Mr Fox is no ordinary customer: who ever heard of a punter who quoted T.S. Eliot or arranged meetings at the Tate? With their every encounter she becomes more and more confused. Is it just a scripted pick-up? Or perhaps some bizarre kind of God-game? Love-Act toys with the reader’s curiosity right to the very end. It could be a book about seduction and manipulation or truth and invention or desire and the end of desire. Or not. It is for the reader to discover where the conundrums of M.E. Austen’s taunting game can lead in a first novel of rare and compelling ingenuity.

Blurb from M. E. Austen’s Love Act, Black Swan, 1982

An entirely unhelpful blurb of “rare and compelling” stupidity. I love it.

The Dag’s Dictionary by Richard Glover

Excerpt from The Dag’s Dictionary by Richard Glover, published by ABC Books 2004:

Damn!nesia (damn nee’ zee ah) n.

An affliction by which you walk purposefully from one end of the building to the other, but forget mid-trip where you were going.

I suffer from this constantly.

JimmyD’s staff always get a laugh out of this book.  We have a copy in stock right now for $11. But be warned: this book never sticks around very long!

I also like this one:

Liebry (ly’ bree) n.

A pile of unread but fashionable books placed on a coffee table in order to impress visitors.

L’Yan

This copy is now SOLD. Let us know if you are interested and we can putyou on our seeking list!

Submit a review to JimmyDs and WIN.

Here at JimmyD’s we like to read, but we can’t read everything. Magda is a keen enthusiast of Scandinavian crime (and Fred Vargas, the French crimestress with the strange name), but my own (Agnes) favourite crime writers are Raymond Chandler and his contemporaries. L’yan knows a lot more about fantasy, but I for one wouldn’t know a David Eddings if it fell out of the sky and clocked me on the head (maybe I should do something about that, and I probably will, but after I investigate the hundred or so books and authors and series I mean to look into in the near future).

Here at JimmyD’s we like books, but we couldn’t possibly have time to read our way throuh every book in the shop, and there are people considerably more qualified to (say) tell us just what distinguishes a King Penguin from a boring old Penguin Classic.

Do YOU want to have your say? Submit a book review to JimmyD’s by commenting on one of our entries. Just tell us what you thought of a book in the comments, even — you don’t have to write something worthy of the New York Times Book Review, but of course if you can you’re more than welcome. The best book review (or comment) each and every month will receive a) our praise and b) a book voucher. Oh, and it’ll be displayed in pride of place in the window.

So what are you waiting for?!?! Get writing!

See the little speech bubble at the top right of the post, next to the title? Click that to leave a comment.

Was dubious about Di…

Hi all! L’Yan here.

I would like to thank all the ladies who continually recommend Di Morrissey to me as a light read. Its taken me two and a half years but finally I have read some of her work.

Recently I have tried Monsoon, The Islands and The Reef. I wouldn’t usually have bothered reading more after Monsoon as I found the characters drab and the story dragging, but I warmed to The Islands and really have to admit that I quite liked The Reef.

Why these three titles? Why, because they are on the A&R/Dymocks top 100 of course! Otherwise how would I have narrowed it down? The blurbs really don’t tell you anything: if you compare blurbs, all the books seem to be the same. So I went with the recommendations. You really can’t trust a blurb.

What I disliked: her cliche male characters; some seemingly unnecessary chapters where nooothiiiing happens (I do not have the attention span for this!). What I loved: her strong female characters; her sense of the importance of the setting to both character and reader; and her descriptions of the landscapes (she is particularly emotive about Australia, which I love!).

I would recommend Di Morrissey to fans of Judy Nunn, Monica McInerney, current Kate Grenville and Geraldine Brooks. Aussie Aussie Aussie. Let me know if you can recommend anything else.

Seeking: Mao’s last dancer by Li Cunxin

Do you have copy of this title that you want to sell or trade at JimmyDs Bookshop in Springwood. We have a customer waiting for a copy of this book right now.
If you have a copy that you are willing to recycle please phone on 4751 8010, email magda@jimmyds.com.au or bring it in to the shop. We buy and credit books in great condition

Covers so bad-Too many cooks

An all but ordinary cover except for the slain gingerbread man and the stained cooks knife. When the blurb on the back of a book includes words like; hot new romance, gorgeous homicide detective, pretentious boss and seamy sex scandals, you know that the book could have been written using a romance template no thesaurus required.
Magda

Seeking:Fearless Fourteen by Janet Evanovich

Do you have copy of this title that you want to sell or trade at JimmyDs Bookshop in Springwood. We have a customer waiting for a copy of this book right now.
If you have a copy that you are willing to recycle please phone on 4751 8010, email magda@jimmyds.com.au or bring it in to the shop. We buy and credit books in great condition

The Flying Emu and other stories by Sally Morgan

Twenty delightful stories for children about how the world began by the author of the wonderful autobiography ‘My Place’, where she told the story of her aboriginal ancestry and mother and her grandmothers experiences living in Western Australia.
This book is in lovely condition and the stories will delight young ones.

Let’s hear it for the Byronic hero.

Two books I selected from our shelves that contain typical Byronic heroes. Wondering how I linked these together?

You may not know what I’m talking about, but you know the type. That’s the thing with stereoypes, with heroes, with protagonists. We may not have a term for these things, but we all know the type.

The typical Byronic hero is idealised but flawed. Lord Byron, for whom the Byronic hero is named, was the first “modern-style” celebrity, and nowadays he’d be characterised in the media as a rock star. His ex-lover Lady Caroline Lamb famously described him as “mad, bad and dangerous to know”, and this is the essence of the Byronic hero.

The Byronic hero is intelligent, cunning, and maybe even criminal. Crucially these more negative characteristics are set off by something negative, perhaps a tendency toward introspection and moodiness, or a streak of cowardice (perhaps just realism) or narcissism. Consider Rhett Butler from Gone With The Wind. He is shunned by his family for being thrown out of West Point, yet is obviously well-educated. He has an adversarial relationship with many characters, and his insight into human nature prevents him from salvaging his love for Scarlett. Cue bitter tears.

The Byronic hero is also intelligent, astute and educated, yet he or she (usually he) struggles with integrity, often bucking convention and suffering for it. Byronic heroes are usually physically attractive and generally in love with someone, but (again, most importantly) often are burdened with a dark secret or source of guilt. Consider Stephen Dedalus from the works of James Joyce. Stephen is considered by his friend Buck Mulligan to be a great poet, but he cannot seem to relate to many people very well. He is extremely guilty over the fact that he could not pray for his mother as she lay on her death bed – his stubborn moral decisions about religion (among other things) prevented him from doing this).

The Byronic hero may be privileged (socially or in terms of money) but will show a disregard for social conventions and their own responsibilities.

The Byronic hero often has an understanding of his of her inner world, but may be overburdened thus. You’re beginning to see a pattern, right? You know a character like this.

To further explore this, I’ll first tell you about some boring literary stuff. Then we’ll talk about some real (fictional) Byronic heroes.

Scholars have traced the tradition of the Byronic hero from the works of John Milton. Milton published the twelve-book version of his epic poem Paradise Lost in 1674. It is heavily concerned with the conflict between God’s foresight and omnipotence and man’s free will.

It wasn’t until the American and French revolutions and the Romantic period that people really began to sympathise with Satanic characters. In 1819 Percy Shelley (a contemporary of Byron) put forth that Milton’s Satan was morally superior to the tyrranical God of the poem. Most crucially, he said that Satan’s greatness of character is flawed (again) by vengefulness and pride. Byron wrote a semi-autobiographical epic narrative poem from 1812 to 1818, called Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Many of the elements of the Byronic hero are in this: a world-weary character who searches for enlightenment in foreign lands.

That’s crucial to the characterisation of the Byronic hero. The Byronic hero is flawed, and the “but” in the character’s description is very important. Brilliant BUT self-destructive, moral BUT with a Dark Secret, full of integrity but dark and mysterious, etc etc. Consider Bruce Wayne of Batman.

A few more examples: Rochester in Jane Eyre is a typical Byronic hero. Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights is also a popular example (a larger than life dark-and-handsome romance who never wavers from his goal), as well as Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. The heroes of many hard-boiled detective novels, as I discussed here, are similarly flawed. Sam Spade is a contemporary example of the Byronic hero, as is Philip Marlowe. You might also consider the titular Doctor House from the TV series House to be a similar hero — he’s brilliant but, as you probably would have guessed by now even if you don’t watch the show, Tragically Flawed in more ways than one. Gothic fiction was bursting with Byronic heroes, as are spaghetti Westerns such as The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. Consider also the Phantom of the Opera and the Vampire Lestat. The Modernist era also gave rise to a lot of Byronic heroes

Byronic heroes are a lot more interesting than your regular old white-knight hero, and there’s still usually an element of romance there… the carefully tousled hair, the enigmatic secrets, etc etc.

The Byronic hero fits into the larger genre of the antihero, which we might take a look at next time. The Byronic hero usually has an air of sweeping romance about him or her — their tragic flaws are never so tragic that you don’t adore the character eventually.

A very contemporary example is Edward Cullen from the Twilight series. And now I seem to have linked pop culture with high culture, and so I’ll finish there.

If you got the whole way through that — congratulations!

-Agnes

How Was The Play, Mrs. Lincoln?

2009 is the bicentennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln. I was reminded of this fact when I recently bought a new copy of Obama’s inaugural address, which contained a copy of both of Lincoln’s inaugurals as well as the Gettysburg Address. Very interesting reading. The bicentennial isn’t the only reason Lincoln is interesting, of course. It might take an event such as this to get Australian readers (apart from Civil War historians and others) interested in him, but he contributed massively to the American national imagination. I enjoyed seeing Obama’s inauguration speech set out on a page, because this way I could see echoes of Lincoln in what he said. I won’t make any more Obama/Lincoln comparisons, since they’ve been done to death.

Even if you’re not as interested in this part of history (and its echoes today) as I am, you’ll enjoy the suspense and real-life-crime aspect of this book. Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase For Abraham Lincoln’s Killer. It’s very exciting, and completely avoids the dry bogging-down in details that some well-researched historical books fall into. Very exciting, a good historical account of an important point in US history. If you’re looking for a book that will make history exciting to anyone, or you’re just interested in US history, this is a book for you.