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Penguin Books Online Digest, 9/1 - 9/11, 2009

EXCERPT

EXCERPT How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It James Rawles (Plume)

EXCERPT Shooting Stars Lebron James and Buzz Bissinger (The Penguin Press)

EXCERPT The Scarpetta Factor Patricia Cornwell (Putnam)

EXCERPT An Education Nick Hornby (Riverhead)

 

FEATURE

FEATURE Disgrace (Movie Tie-in Edition) J. M. Coetzee (Penguin)

FEATURE The Smartest Retirement Book You'll Ever Read Daniel Solin (Perigee)

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David Owen is our guest blogger during the week of September 14. If you have any questions for David Owen, add a comment to any of his posts. Here is some more information about Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability:

A challenging, controversial, and highly readable look at our lives, our world, and our future.

In this remarkable challenge to conventional thinking about the environment, David Owen argues that the greenest community in the United States is not Portland, Oregon, or Snowmass, Colorado, but New York, New York.

Most Americans think of crowded cities as ecological nightmares, as wastelands of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams. Yet residents of compact urban centers, Owen shows, individually consume less oil, electricity, and water than other Americans. They live in smaller spaces, discard less trash, and, most important of all, spend far less time in automobiles. Residents of Manhattan- the most densely populated place in North America -rank first in public-transit use and last in percapita greenhouse-gas production, and they consume gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn't matched since the mid-1920s, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. They are also among the only people in the United States for whom walking is still an important means of daily transportation.

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I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area (born in Martinez, schooled in half a dozen towns and cities); it's thus natural that I would set the October Daye books in the same place. I know the geography, I know the local history, and more importantly, I know how the Bay Area feels. Every city has its own atmosphere, its own set of tropes and customs. In the Bay Area, where geography and meteorology conspire to create a dozen tiny micro-climes, going from one city to the next can feel like going to an entirely different state. We have deserts, forests, tunda, gravid farmland, and craggy mountains. It's possible to start the day in Concord in midsummer, cross the San Francisco Bay to winter, and go out to dinner in Berkeley's lovely autumn. Northern California is a place where "logic" holds very little sway.

Toby spends the majority of her time in San Francisco, an iconic city, nestled up against the water and ringed at night in cotton-candy fog. I've spent years wandering around the city, and it still sometimes seems like a fairy tale to me, a place too improbable and perfect to be real. Then the sun comes up, or I'm walking to the train station and I'm just too tired to care anymore, and everything is dirty and broken-down and old. That's San Francisco, too, and it's that dichotomy that makes San Francisco such a perfect place to anchor my particular version of Faerie.

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My first writers' conference/retreat was in 2002. I'd written a whole lot of words before then, but I'd never studied writing craft, which meant that I used the components, but couldn't name them. So when the freelance editor who reviewed my scene asked, "Whose point of view is this in?" I cocked my head, confused by the question. She continued, "You know. Whose head are we in? Whose point of view?" I thought this over for about five seconds and replied with what I felt was the perfectly obvious reply. "Well, the same point of view all my stories are written in. Kimberly's point of view." I'm sure she thought, Oh Boy.

I saw myself as the invisible narrator, telling the reader what a particular character was thinking and feeling and doing in each scene. After all, if we were truly in a character's point of view, why would the character be thinking of him or herself in third person? If I'm relating a story about something that happened to me, I don't say, "Kimberly parked her silver convertible under the tree's canopy and then..." I'll say, "I parked my car under the tree and then..."

In real life, only eccentrics, egomaniacs, and a few foreign dictators (who probably fall into one of the first two categories anyway) go around referring to themselves in third person. But in books, while there can be an all-knowing narrator, more often the convention is to write about characters in the third person from the character's point of view. Except, that is, for books that are written in "first person."