Things I'm Thankful For
That Are Word-Related, Anyway
Good morning and welcome to a very special holiday edition of Shelf Life. Greetings from the Nashville suburbs, from which I write today’s edition while I hang out with my family for this bird-related holiday. I have a great tradition of phoning in the Thanksgiving edition of Shelf Life because I have better, or at least funner, things to be doing on Thanksgiving Eve, like getting into the Beaujolais nouveau ahead of time.
The past couple years I wrote about tropes I’m thankful for, but when I wracked my brain I couldn’t think of any particular literary tropes I’m thankful for this year. Probably because I have not done all that much reading this year, because ADHD springs eternal. Therefore, I’ve broadened the topic to some word- and writing-related things I’m thankful for in 2023 and I will tell you about those now so we can all get on with watching the dog show.
First, I’m thankful for the dog show. It’s not word-related, it’s just generally great. Here are the word-related things I’m thankful for in 2023.
Bite-Sized Literature
I’m thankful for short books. Usually I enjoy a doorstopper as much as the next guy, and at earlier life stages when I had more free time, energy, and motivation, I would love to get my hands on a 1,000-page sci fi, horror, or fantasy novel (or better yet, a whole series of them) to keep me in reading material for at least a few days.
During the past several years—probably like the last ten years if I’m being honest—I have not had the wherewithal to do as much reading. I’m just more tired, more scattered, busier, more easily distracted, and I have a shorter attention span than I used to. I suspect this is true of many people—that we have shorter attention spans than we did ten years ago—owing to the rise of the ubiquitous smartphone. I haven’t read any science on this but my empirical evidence is: The novella is back, baby.
Common wisdom is you can’t sell a book (to a publisher) that’s substantially over the generally agreed-upon appropriate word count length for the genre. It’s also commonly understood that you can’t sell a manuscript that’s under the prescribed word-count length, either. I’ve sometimes been chastised by fellow editors and publishing folks for counseling hopeful authors that it’s better to be under the target word count than over it.
I offer this counsel because the novella is enjoying a resurgence. I don’t think I’m the only person who has less capacity for long novels anymore, and publishers have noticed. Tordotcom (an imprint of Tor), for example, publishes many novellas and their publications are well-received. In the 2023 Hugo Awards’ Best Novella category, Tordotcom published four of six nominees, including the winner. In 2022, all six nominees were from Tordotcom.
This phenomenon isn’t happening just in genre fiction, either. The Booker 2023 shortlist included Western Lane by Chetna Maroo (176 pages) and Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein (208 pages); People from Bloomington by Budi Darma (208 pages) won the 2023 PEN Translation Prize; and The Call-Out by Cat Fitzpatrick (192 pages) won a 2023 Lambda Literary award.
So anyway, it sure seems like a good time to sell a novella and it’s a great time to read one because there’s tons of good ones out. I have The Beautiful Bureaucrat by Helen Phillps (192 pages) on my bedside table, lent to me by a friend whose recommendations I trust. I don’t know anything about it except that’s short. I’m looking forward to diving into that one soon.
In no particular order, ere are some novellas from the last couple years of my reading list that I’m particularly thankful for:
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Motar and Max Gladstone, 223 pages (recommended by Bigolas Dickolas!)
Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky, 204 pages
The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo, 124 pages; and its sequel,
When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, 98 pages (there are more but I haven’t read them yet)
The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho, 155 pages
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, 116 pages
Thanks for keeping me reading when the tank’s on E.
Film Adaptations of Books
I’m thankful for movie and streaming adaptations of books I like, although sometimes I feel like I might be the only one. I feel this way because Reddit keeps trying to show me content from a particular sub that is dedicated to hating The Wheel of Time Amazon series. I don’t know why I keep seeing their posts, because I think the algorithm probably has figured out I like this show. Maybe the algorithm doesn’t want me living in an echo chamber and wants to show me other opinions. In any case, there’s a whole sub dedicated to hating on this streaming show.
Frankly, I love an adaptation of a book or series I’ve enjoyed whether it’s faithful to th source material or not. Either I get to enjoy a book retold in a new medium, or I get a series inspired by a book I enjoyed but with fresh, new content to surprise me. It’s win-win. The adaptations I like best are the ones in the middle between painfully faithful and recklessly unfaithful. Those first two Harry Potter movies, for instance, were so meticulously faithful to the source that they felt stale to me the moment they came out. And then you have an adaptation like World War Z (2013) that is so different from the source there’s barely a passing resemblance. Something like the Amazon Prime Wheel of Time series is perfect to me because it’s faithful enough to maintain the things I liked from the book series but takes an innovative approach to a lot of aspects, particularly those that are out of date now, thirty years after the books started coming out.
Speaking of “thirty years later.” If you had told me in 1993 that one day thirty years hence I’d be able to sit down in the comfort of my living room and watch big-budget adaptations of
My favorite comic book, She-Hulk;
The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan;
“The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allen Poe;
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood;
Oh, and, The Baby-Sitter’s Club series by Ann M. Martin?
I would never have believed you.
We’re in a golden age of film and streaming media right now and especially of literary adaptations and I’m grateful for it. A lot of the meager reading I’ve done this year has been inspired by watching a show that reminded me of how much I love reading.
Judgement-Free Reading Experiences
I’m thankful that literally nobody I know judges my reading choices; or at least that nobody does it to my face. I don’t really care if people pass judgment quietly to themselves and don’t make their judgment my problem.
I think everybody should read whatever they enjoy. For some people that’s literary fiction, or it’s nonfiction, or classics, and for some of us it’s a stack of genre fiction novellas and graphic novels and any of the above are equally valid and valuable. Classics aren’t better reading material than graphic novels. Literary fiction isn’t a more valuable use of one’s reading time than science fiction. And conversely, if people enjoy reading classics, or challenging literary fiction, or nonfiction—good for them.
I used to make judgments on myself for preferring to read genre fiction and I used to put pressure on myself to read “more valuable” books, but now that I don’t do that I find it’s much easier to pick up a book and start reading because pretty much every book I have around is something I genuinely want to read and not something I think I should read. I’ve also stopped judging myself for DNFing (“did not finish”ing) a book I started. If I’m not into it after a few chapters, and not enjoying it, it’s best to move on and there’s no shame in that, either for me or for the book that got DNFd.
So, I’m pleased to say that I no longer keep a “prestige title” hanging around partially read so that when someone at work asks me what I’ve read lately I can say, “Oh, The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee, you?” Instead I just say whatever I’m actually reading or have read lately and no one cares. Plus, I love it when people tell me what they’re actually reading—I might not end up loving it but I’ll at least give it a try.
A Few More Things I’m Thankful For
Quickly, before I sign off:
A forthcoming horror anthology with one of my short stories in it (details to come as soon as I have them);
Shelf Life (the writing practice and habits it gives me) and its readers (I love you);
Virginia’s Woolf’s “biography” of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel, Flush (or any book about a dog, I’m not picky);
The dog show, which I’m going to watch right now.
See you on the other side of the food coma.
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