Between books
I have three books in progress right now but none of them is really interesting me much. I used to finish every book I started but since having Noah, I’m not willing to commit that much time to something that doesn’t hit me right away. This is too bad because as we all know, some books are slow starters.
I’ve also lost patience with books that do weird things with punctuation. For example, one of the books I’m reading now doesn’t have any quotation marks. Instead whenever anybody says anything, there’s a hyphen. Now that’s just stupid. I mean, really, this book isn’t doing anything else unusual or inventive to justify making it so hard to figure out when someone stops talking.
I’ve also got several books sent to me for review, which I only scan to see whether or not they suit our audience. Many of them don’t and it’s just lazy PR people, I guess, not bothering to think about where they’re sending the books. A book on heart disease, for example, is hard to place in a pregnancy magazine since nowhere within it does the author talk about pregnancy and heart disease or breastfeeding or heart disease. No, in fact this book seems to be targeted to an older audience who is likely not pregnant or nursing or even raising small children. I got one that was an outrageous, irreverent book on retirement. What the heck? But I still like getting free books because every once in awhile there’s a really great one in there — one that’s appropriate to my job and that I can promote and actually make my job a bit easier. Very nice.
Re: hyphens instead of quotation marks, I’ve noticed them in a lot of (mostly older) British works, never in American. Puig did it in Kiss of the Spider Woman, Joyce in Portrait of the Artist, and I think more recently Iris Murdoch in Word Child. And more, I am sure, those are just the few that I recall. I can’t find any references online to the protocol/correctness, but I think it is fairly acceptable, at least historically.
I should mention that I kind of enjoy the hyphens because they blur the internal and external dialogues. It was reading Joyce that made me stop fighting the text for information. It gives you what it wants; the text is another character in the story. If you acknowledge and accept that at best it is an unreliable narrator, it’s easier to be patient with the work.
I just finished The Woman Who Walks into Doors by Roddy Doyle, who uses hyphens for dialogue in all his books. I don’t think I could’ve said it better than hillary just did–it has a way of blending what gets said out loud with all the things we only say in our heads.
PS, Dawn: Nov 22nd entry was very funny!
Love that you read, write and adore your blog. Just so you know that those annoying hyphens are in european publications. Well at least in France where I am. I’ve learned to accept them and well …actually its nice the fact that you get a new line and a little dash each time the speaker changes. I have noticed french people get really confused with “American” style dialogues smack in the middle of a paragraph…. “parenthesis” just don’t seem to help them.