Tag: diana gabaldon

Musing Mondays

Monday Musings—September 5, 2011

Posted on by Dana

Musing MondaysThis week’s musing asks: Who do you think is the hottest male/female character from a book?

Ha, ha! This is a funny question. I only had to think about it for a minute. James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser from Diana Gabaldon’s [amazon_link id=”0440423201″ target=”_blank” ]Outlander[/amazon_link] series, of course. Listen, my husband is a redhead, and he and all the other redheads out there can thank Jamie for making everyone else understand why redheaded men are sexy.

Why is Jamie “hot”? He is not afraid to be a man and have whatever feelings he has. He never tries to hide his feelings. He also has the courage not to impede Claire from being whatever she wants to be, which is an unusual trait in a man of his time (eighteenth century Scotland). He also loves Claire with an intense and lasting love that transcends time. He can be stubborn and frustrating at times, but honestly, it’s always in a predictable way—it’s usually because someone he loves feels threatened, and he thinks they are being kind of stupid. Not that they are necessarily being stupid, but that he thinks they are, mind. Another thing I like about Jamie is the joy with which he approaches life and his sense of humor. He has more funny quotes than any ten other characters in that series. In addition to all of that, he is also strong, a survivor. He has been through some of the worst humanity can throw at another person and come out the other side if not unscathed, then at least with a sense of humor and a sense of himself intact. He also shows a surprising open-mindedness for a man of his era—his affection for Lord John Grey, even after find out Grey is homosexual and is attracted to Jamie, is sincere and undiminished by the news, and his acceptance of Claire (even as outlandish as her tale truly is) is pretty remarkable.

Sorry, ladies, no pics. This one has not been made into a movie, and I prefer not to speculate (you can Google it if you’re curious), but here is a link to all the Jamie Fraser merch you could want at Cafe Press.

Honorable mentions:

Fitzwilliam Darcy from [amazon_link id=”0143105426″ target=”_blank” ]Pride and Prejudice[/amazon_link]

Rhett Butler from [amazon_link id=”1451635621″ target=”_blank” ]Gone with the Wind[/amazon_link]

Louis de Pointe du Lac (had to be at least one vampire… wait, I do have another one—hang on) from Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, but specifically [amazon_link id=”0345409647″ target=”_blank” ]Interview with the Vampire[/amazon_link]

Captain Frederick Wentworth from [amazon_link id=”193659451X” target=”_blank” ]Persuasion[/amazon_link]

and Matthew Clairmont (no pics—no movie… yet; also my other vampire) from [amazon_link id=”0670022411″ target=”_blank” ]A Discovery of Witches[/amazon_link].

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Friday Finds

Friday Finds—May 6, 2011

Posted on by Dana

Friday Finds

This week, I discovered an answer to a question that has bothering me. Until recently, all of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander books were available for audio download on Audible except for The Fiery Cross and A Breath of Snow and Ashes. I have read all the series up until The Fiery Cross, and I had decided that perhaps listening to the books during my commute would be a better option for me in terms of catching up. I was dismayed to find out I couldn’t complete my collection, and I was even more puzzled because An Echo in the Bone, the most recent novel, was available on Audible in addition to the four books prior to The Fiery Cross.

This week I discovered via Diana Gabaldon’s blog why the books were not available in an unabridged format and that A Breath of Snow and Ashes now is available, and The Fiery Cross will be available in November.

I don’t understand the notion of abridged books. Either read it all or skim it yourself, but why buy it abridged in the first place? How can you trust you have the essence of the story intact?

Gabaldon’s series is also, of course, available in paper:

  • [amazon_link id=”0385319959″ target=”_blank” ]Outlander[/amazon_link]
  • [amazon_link id=”0385335970″ target=”_blank” ]Dragonfly in Amber[/amazon_link]
  • [amazon_link id=”0385335997″ target=”_blank” ]Voyager[/amazon_link]
  • [amazon_link id=”B002VLLJDI” target=”_blank” ]Drums of Autumn[/amazon_link]
  • [amazon_link id=”0440221668″ target=”_blank” ]The Fiery Cross[/amazon_link]
  • [amazon_link id=”0440225809″ target=”_blank” ]A Breath of Snow and Ashes[/amazon_link]
  • [amazon_link id=”0440245680″ target=”_blank” ]An Echo in the Bone[/amazon_link]

What did you discover this week?

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Booking Through Thursday: Life-Changing

Posted on by Dana

36.52: The Blue Room

This week’s Booking Through Thursday prompt is “Which book changed your life?” I’m not sure I can pick just one book, but I’ll talk about a few books I’ve read that I considered monumental or life-changing in some way.

Gone With the Wind was the first “adult” book I’d read. I remember my mom had it out in the living room, and I was turning it over and looking at it. She asked me if I wanted to read it. It was really thick. The mass market paperback copy my mom had was about 1,000 pages long. It never occurred to me I might be ready to read an adult book, or that my mom thought I could. I am not sure why because my mother never tried to prevent me from reading anything. She always encouraged me to read. Because it opened the door of adult fiction to me, Gone With the Wind will remain important to me.

To Kill a Mockingbird opened some doors for me, too. It was the first book I read for school that I can remember enjoying—and I didn’t read it until 11th grade, so that’s a sad statement in itself. I loved the characters. I love the voice. I loved everything about it.

The Lord of the Rings opened the doors of fantasy fiction to me. Prior to reading this epic, I hadn’t really read much fantasy, but I truly enjoyed this book. Another benefit to my reading this book has been a connection with my father. It’s a favorite of his as well, and it gave us many great discussions.

Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series has been influential to my own writing. I learned a lot about the craft of writing from Diana Gabaldon, both through examining her choices as a writer and in reading about them in The Outlandish Companion.

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has brought me a great deal of joy. I began reading it at a time when I wasn’t very happy, and it was something I shared with my oldest daughter. I will always treasure our first read of it together. But beyond that, it’s given me a hobby and interest that I’ve enjoyed. I owe J.K. Rowling many, many countless hours of happiness. It has been nice to escape into her world from time to time. I’ve been mocked both directly and indirectly for being an adult fan of this series, and the only thing I have to say to those people is that I’m sad they have nothing better to do than to scrutinize anyone’s reading choices, especially when they’re relatively harmless—I mean, it’s not like I read instruction manuals for how to build bombs or get away with nefarious crimes.

photo credit: by Janine

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Mushrooms

Posted on by Dana

Mushroom

If you’ve never read Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series, you’ve also not likely read The Outlandish Companion, which was published following the fourth book in the series, The Drums of Autumn. It mostly serves as an encyclopedia and catch-all reference for the series, but Diana Gabaldon does discuss writing quite a bit, and one of my favorite parts of the book discusses characterization. I’ve never run across a better description of characters than Gabaldon’s. She classifies characters into three groups: onions, hard nuts, and mushrooms.

Onions are your main characters that must be built layer by layer and have depth. They’re purposeful and planned. Hard nuts are characters that need to exist for the sake of the plot, but are hard to write. They don’t cooperate. Their personalities are difficult to capture. They’re tough. Mushrooms are my favorites. They’re these characters that just pop into the story. They can threaten to take over if you’re not careful. Most of the time, they’re minor characters. The idea that fully formed characters could just walk into a story without the author knowing who they are or having planned for them was absolutely ludicrous to me—until I started writing.

I’ve written two novels and am working on a third for NaNoWriMo. In my first novel, A Question of Honor, these mushrooms walked into my story a few chapters in. They were traveling minstrels. One of them was a pretty important person, but he was hiding. They were totally awesome people, and I loved them. In my second novel, Quicksand, which hasn’t been published, my mushrooms were the first cousin and his son of my protagonist’s father. Up until today, I didn’t have any mushrooms in my current book, which remains without title for the moment. One showed up today. Her name is Laura, and I love her. I don’t know what role she’ll play later, but she just showed up, and I’ll be interested to see what she does.

I was wondering if you could think of any mushrooms in books you’ve read. If I had to guess, I’d say that Marion and Count Fosco from The Woman in White were mushrooms. I would also guess that Stephen Black from Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell was a mushroom. Shug Avery in The Color Purple seems to have a tinge of the mushroom about her, too. Though J.R.R. Tolkien doesn’t use the term mushroom to describe him, his character Aragorn seems to have a similar background: In a letter to W.H. Auden, Tolkien confessed that “Strider sitting in a corner at the inn was a shock, and I had no more idea who he was than Frodo [did]” (Tolkien Online, The Return of the Shadow). Tolkien observed of his writing that

One writes such a story not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. (“How the Tale Grew in the Telling: The Unexpected Sprouting of The Lord of the Rings“)

Sort of like mushrooms.

photo credit: Matt Brittaine

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Booking Through Thursday

Booking Through Thursday: When Series Jump the Shark

Posted on by Dana

Booking Through ThursdayThis week’s Booking Through Thursday prompt concerns series books: “If you read series, do you ever find a series ‘jumping the shark?’ How do you feel about that? And, do you keep reading anyway?”

I have found that if the early books in a series grab me, I am much more forgiving of later lapses. I really loved Anne Rice’s first two Vampire Chronicles books, Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat. I didn’t like Queen of the Damned so much, but I understood its importance in terms of the Rice vampire mythos. I did enjoy The Tale of the Body Thief. As the series continued, I liked each book less and less. I didn’t like The Vampire Armand much, I never finished Blood and Gold, Pandora was only OK, and Memnoch the Devil remains the only book I’ve ever thrown across the room. Still, I kept trying for a while, you know? Because I liked some of the earlier books so much. I read Merrick and I tried Blackwood Farm. Finally I had to admit to myself that I just didn’t like the books anymore, and that trying to recapture what I felt about the first couple was pointless: she had clearly moved in a different direction, and it wasn’t one I was going to enjoy.

I had a sort of similar reaction to Stephenie Meyer’s books. I know it’s not cool anymore to admit you’ve read them, but I’ll cop to it. I will even admit to enjoying the first book a lot. The second less so. The third even less. The last one was frankly really awful and extremely weird. Vampire babies, vampire Bella is somehow more remarkable than everyone else (Mary Sue much?), weenie pedophile Jacob, weird abusive sex. Nope. Totally jumped the shark. And I can say honestly that if Meyer has plans to extend the saga with a fifth book, I won’t read it. Breaking Dawn was a shark-jumping moment if ever there was one.

In both cases, I kept up with books in series, despite declining quality, because I had truly liked the first or first couple of books. It is hard not to feel a little betrayed by the books. It’s hard too not to feel a little angry with the author who had previous given you so much pleasure. However, I am clearly forgiving past the point of rationality, especially as illustrated in Rice’s case, and I will read an entire series if the payoff in the first two or so books was good. I have read all of Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next and Nursery Crime books published to date, and I loved them all. My favorite series, Harry Potter, just got better and better.

One of these days, I’m going to try to finish Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series. The first four books were rewarding. I never finished the fifth, and haven’t touched the others. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a sort of Pavlovian reaction to one of her book covers.

If you look at it from a behaviorist perspective, I have clearly been rewarded by enough series books to have learned to stick it out. However, it seems to take me a long time to stop expecting that reward. And you know, sometimes, I just have to finish a series to know what happens. Lately I have been telling myself life is too short to read bad books. And I have been sticking to that axiom, for the most part. A series is a commitment. It’s more than slogging through a few hundred pages. It’s a relationship with an author and her characters. And like many relationships, it can be hard to let go and figure out when breaking up might be the healthiest thing.

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Shelfari and Reading Updates

Posted on by Dana

Before I curl up with my books, I wanted to mention two things. First, I joined Shelfari today. I resisted joining another network because I am very happy at Goodreads. I am a member of LibraryThing, but unless you agree to pay for a membership, you are limited to only 200 books, so I am not at all active at LibraryThing. You might not remember this, but back in 2007 a controversy erupted over the fact that Shelfari did not used to allow users to easily uncheck the names of contacts they did not want to invite to use Shelfari. Tim Spalding, CEO of LibraryThing, also caught Shelfari astroturfing. However, I’ve not heard any criticism of Shelfari for two years, now, so I joined up. The interface is beautiful, and the community is more in charge. At Goodreads, you can apply to become a “Librarian” and edit book information, but Shelfari allows all community members to do so, which is both more risky and more open. Goodreads easily allows users to connect their accounts to Twitter, and it also allows me to share blog posts, but that may be because I’m a Goodreads author. As far as I can tell, Shelfari doesn’t allow you to do either of those things. So anyway, I’ve joined up, and we’ll see how it works out. Considering the time investment today, I hope it will be worthwhile. You can see my bookshelf in the sidebar to the right, and feel free to be my friend on Shelfari (and Goodreads, for that matter, but don’t expect too much if you become my friend on LibraryThing).

Second, I have begun two reading challenges: the Bibliophilic Books Challenge and the All About the Brontës Challenge. with my first selection, Syrie James’s The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë. It should be obvious how the book meets the Brontë challenge, but in case you were wondering how it meets the Bibliophilic Challenge, it is the fictionalized diary of Charlotte Brontë, and at only about 50 pages in, James has already mentioned Rochester and Jane and discussed the juvenile writing of the Brontës, as well as Branwell Brontë’s poetry, so I decided it met the criteria for the challenge.

I’m also in the midst of re-reading the Outlander series. I have not read the last three books, and it has been so long that I think I had better re-read the first four before I try to pick up the most recent books. I am currently working on the second (and my favorite) book in the series, Dragonfly in Amber. I am continuing to read Crime and Punishment through DailyLit, and when I have to turn out the lights, I’m reading Mansfield Park on the iPhone with Stanza.

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Outlander

Posted on by Dana

I first read Diana Gabaldon’s novel Outlander in about 1998 or 1999. I remember loving it. In fact, I liked it so much that my first early forays into creating websites were focused on a Diana Gabaldon fan site. For the uninitiated, the Outlander series is the story of Claire, who takes an early morning walk to the standing stones at Craigh na Dun near Inverness while on her second honeymoon with her husband Frank Randall and finds herself nearly 200 years in the past. She is captured by members of the MacKenzie clan and falls in love with and marries Jamie Fraser, but she knows the second Jacobite rising is coming, and she fears for his future.

On a re-read, Outlander definitely holds up. Diana Gabaldon describes her method of writing as creating scenes and then putting them together like a puzzle. I am not sure I knew that last time I read, but knowing as I read this time, I could see it in action. None of the scenes appears to stop the plot; instead, they serve to add realism and round out the characters. I remarked to my sister that the book is a little more “rapey” than I remembered, and we laughed. What I mean by that is I had forgotten that Claire was so often in imminent danger of being raped. Once again, a horrific scene of torture near the end of the novel struck me as gratuitous and over-the-top, just as it did on my first read. Gabaldon has created a gift of a character in Jamie Fraser. He pops off the page, larger than life.

Gabaldon has a gift for storytelling. I know I certainly keep turning the pages. She also has a gift for humor, and if she doesn’t flinch from describing scenes of violence, she leavens it with one of the best love stories I’ve read. I have not read a time-travel romance yet that tops Jamie and Claire’s, and I’ve read a few. 😳 What? It’s a guilty pleasure. One of the things I like best about her books is that I do learn things. I find the herbalism and history particularly interesting. The herbalism and setting of Gabaldon’s books strongly influenced my own book, A Question of Honor.

I have not read the last three books in Gabaldon’s series, and given the amount of time that has passed since I last read the first four, I thought perhaps a re-read was in order before attempting the last two. I am a little nervous about the time commitment. I have a friend who has read The Fiery Cross (I never finished it) and parts of An Echo in the Bone, and she said they were somewhat boring. I can’t recall if we talked about A Breath of Snow and Ashes. Anyone read them and can verify? I’ll probably try to read them, but I admit to being wary. I felt the early books in the series, even among the first four, were the best.

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Bookish Updates

Posted on by Dana

The Christmas holidays mean I’ll have some time to read. As I indicated in my previous post, I wasn’t getting into We Have Always Lived in the Castle, so I’ve set it aside. I really have been wanting to reread Outlander by Diana Gabaldon, so I downloaded it to my iPhone using the Kindle app. I have to say, it was like magic. I clicked a button, and when I opened my Kindle app, there the book was. I have used Stanza and Classics on my iPhone, but this is my first Kindle experience, so I’ll let you know how it goes. I understand I can annotate the book using the app.

I also picked up Jasper Fforde’s book The Fourth Bear. I have enjoyed all of his books. This one didn’t grab me yet (I’m two chapters in), but we’ll see. I know some readers don’t enjoy his Nursery Crime books as much as the Thursday Next series, but I really did like The Big Over Easy.

I’m trying to decide what to do about my own book. I want to work on editing and revising over the holiday. I haven’t completed the ending.

Finally, I watched the film based on Laurie Halse Anderson’s novel Speak, which I reviewed here. It’s an excellent book, and the film was very good, too, although not as good as the book, which is usually the case.

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Struggling with Books

Posted on by Dana

I admit I’m struggling to finish a short book. It isn’t that I don’t like it. I just can’t get into it enough to want to pick it up. Worse, I keep thinking about other books I want to read, and then I tell myself I need to finish that one first. The end result is that I’m doing very little reading.

I think I’m going to set aside We Have Always Lived in the Castle for the time being. It’s too short not to finish at some point, but I’m just not that into it for right now. I’ve read too far to give it up completely.

I am contemplating revisiting Diana Gabaldon’s series. She has just published a new one, An Echo in the Bone. I discovered my new department chair at work is a fan of this series, too. She and I are becoming fast friends. We have so much in common from our interests to our philosophies of education. I am so grateful she has come to work with me. It was funny how we discovered we had the fact that we are Diana Gabaldon fans in common: she started to tell me about the books in order to recommend them. And I had to respond, “Oh, I’ve read them!” I would say any of the older fans of Twilight should check Gabaldon’s books out. You won’t be sorry.

On the other hand, I could also read something I haven’t read. I have two Jasper Fforde books on my shelf. I’m not sure. Maybe I’ll stare at the book shelf for a while until I figure it out. All I know is I’m finished with grad school for the semester, and NaNoWriMo is over (and I won!). My novel is called Quicksand. I actually need to tidy up the ending because I wrote more than 50,000 words, which is the requirement for winning NaNoWriMo, but I didn’t finish my book. I also decided to set it aside and revisit it with fresh eyes when its time to revise. However, it has now been a little over a week since NaNoWriMo ended, and I am finding I miss my characters. Some of them became very real to me, and I enjoyed seeing them every day when I came home.

Once finals begins (or ends), and I have a little more time, I should post some excerpts or podcasts about my book. I am really interested in trying to publish it, but I admit the prospect of trying to find an agent is daunting.

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