Review: The Terrible Event by David Cohen

* Copy courtesy of Transit Lounge *

Sporting one of the best cover designs of the year so far, The Terrible Event by David Cohen is a collection of short stories promising 'death, destruction, disappearance, decline and defeat' and sounded right up my alley. 

A brief word on the cover first. Designed by Josh Durham from Design by Committee, this cover design is immediately eye catching and I keep seeing it popping up everywhere. It really taps into my love of stationery and will no doubt be one of my favourite cover designs for 2023. The mention of parallels between this collection and the work of David Sedaris further stoked my anticipation for this Australian collection.

Containing eight stories in total, I enjoyed the sense of nostalgia that started to build.

"The toy was as addictive as it had been in bygone days. Pulling the string triggered memories of backyard cricket, Choc Wedges and Saturday morning cartoons - the very cartoons that had introduced him to Bugs Bunny in the first place. Those were the days." Page 44-45

The Australian setting and mention of Choc Wedges, Holden Commodores and rippled soled desert boots was ripped right from my own childhood and the sweary dialogue in the story entitled Bugs, was great. Here's our main character in Bugs reminiscing about inheriting his dad's old Olivetti typewriter.

"And when you pressed a key, you could see the type bar strike the paper, leaving behind a black letter or number. Nothing made interesting noises anymore. Nothing had any weight or resistance. Mark recalled the hole punches of his youth, the staplers. Where were they now?" Page 65

Yes, the hole punches!! I think back to how much our desk accessories have changed in my time, with liquid paper in bottles to hole punches, fax machines and staplers. I still have a mini red stapler purchased in 2000 that's so small it takes No. 25 staples and it's stapled thousands of bank statements, travel itineraries and meeting agendas over the years. If you love stationery as much as I do, see my review of Adventures in Stationery: A Journey Through Your Pencil Case by James Ward.

Back to the collection, hole punches feature in the aptly named short story Holes, and it was here that I started to notice a few common threads or easter eggs that connect through the collection. I won't include them in my review in case they're spoilers - I'm looking at you Nathan! - but not being a regular reader of short stories, I thought this was cool.

While there's limited time to connect with a character in a short story, character descriptions like this provided a neat shortcut to personality, and I could readily relate:

"Zoran's conversations were limited to two main subjects: cycling and craft beer. I didn't have a problem with that, but he seemed to assume that I was as interested in them as he was. If I tried to steer the conversation in another direction, he'd steer it back, before too long, to one or the other. He showed no particular curiosity about me: I think I was really just a receiver for whatever he wanted to talk about. He might ask me what I'd done on the weekend... but only as an entry point for him to tell me all about the cycling and beer drinking he'd done." Page 99

I have a person JUST LIKE THIS in my life too!

My favourite story in the collection was The Enigma of Keith: Another Memorial, which contained an interesting story about the erection of a fictitious roadside memorial, installed to determine whether the presence of a memorial (white cross, flowers) has any impact on driver speed. Do drivers slow down when they notice a memorial on the side of the road? You'll have to read The Terrible Event to find out!

My Rating:

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Interview with John M. Green, author of Nowhere Man and Born To Run

John M. Green

Thanks to John for joining My Four Bucks today.  John is the author of two novels reviewed on My Four Bucks, Nowhere Man and most recently, Born to Run.

In your bio, we learn that during your 30 year career you were a very successful banking executive and partner in 2 major law firms before deciding to leave the business sector and become a writer.  What gave you the courage to leave all that behind and plunge into the uncertainty of being a writer?
My wife was the trigger, my role-model. She gave up a successful business career to follow her artistic passion, sculpting, and encouraged me to do likewise with my own passion for writing. It’s a thrill to be able to inhabit two entirely different worlds, the business and the artistic, and to get to do it together is pretty rare.

What can you tell us about your writing habits?  Do you ever like to write outside or in public? 
When I’m in ‘the zone’ I’m fairly oblivious to my surroundings (unless they’re part of a scene I’m writing), so I’m not prissy about where I write. My third novel, The Trusted (out in November 2012), was written at home at my desk, in bed, in the garden, on boats, trains and planes, in airports, hotel rooms, and in places where I’ve set it, such as Saint-Petersburg, Paris, Venice, Athens, New York, Boston – even North Narrabeen beach in Sydney. 
But my main routine – how I write mostly – is by hopping out of bed around 4am when the world around me is dead quiet, and sitting at my computer for as long after that as I can. Some days I’ll write for a couple of hours, some for 16 hours, sometimes I’ll write nothing – perhaps fiddling, plotting, researching. Other days I’ll write maybe 1,000 or 2,000 words and there have been days when the characters won’t stop doing what they do and they’ve given me way more.

Do you listen to music when you write?  Do you take any handwritten notes?
Because I wanted to get into Tori Swyft’s head—she’s the hero of my 3rd novel, and will be the mainstay of my new series—and she was world junior women’s surf champion at 13, I wrote a lot of The Trusted with surf rock instrumentals crashing over me: classics like the Atlantics (Bombora, Pipeline) and the Surfaris (Wipeout) and more recent works like The Break’s Church of the Open Sky – The Break’s members are from Midnight Oil and Violent Femmes, and one is a mate.
Thatcher, another character in The Trusted—a professional hacker – has a thing for Brandenburg Concerto No 4, so that was another course of my musical diet for this book.
My first novel, Nowhere Man, was driven quite a bit by Midnight Oil’s Power and the Passion (and there’s a chapter set to it) and Puccini’s Nessum Dorma.

One My4Bucks reader would like to know how you came up with the idea for Nowhere Man and why it took so many years to publish after you completed it in 2001.
I started with a question ‘What if I were the Time Traveler in the HG Wells classic, where (or rather, when) would I go to live an enjoyable life?’ And I decided it would have to be in Australia, and today. Despite the politicians, we Aussies do live in a postcard, right?
Why so long? I finished it in August 2001, but in that original version of the story, my fictional terrorists destroyed the World Trade Centre in New York. And when that terrible event actually happened a few weeks later, it was also literally the end of the story. I had some strong emotional connections to that horror, which I explain in my Author’s Note in the book, so it took me quite a while to come back to the manuscript to find a new catastrophe and embark on a rewrite. Funnily enough, I settled on a global financial crisis, and ‘finished’ in 2006/7, just before it happened, so when it actually happened, once again I had to rewrite the book before it got published.

A second My4Bucks reader would like to know if you're planning to write a sequel for Nowhere Man, as she'd like to know more about how the program works, how people can travel through time using it and what happens to Sam Sing.
I’d like to know, too! A lot of readers have asked me about a sequel, and it may come, but I’m not working on it yet. I’ve got too tied up with my new character, Tori Swyft.
One reader even emailed joking that his copy of Nowhere Man was defective because the stock price chart on page 104 stopped too early, and he wanted the copy that showed the share prices going forward a couple of years from now so he could use it for stock trading.

I imagine being a co-founder of Pantera Press requires you to read submissions from writers much of the time.  How do you decide when a writer is worthy of being published by Pantera Press?
Because it’s so tough even for great writers to get published, we expressly set up Pantera Press to focus on debut authors, with the aim of nurturing and continuing to publish them, and building their readership over time. What we’re on the lookout for are great stories – plot is critical to us – with characters who readers will care about, and strong writing. We also need to ‘click’ with the writers; developing personal relationships with our writers is critical to us.

When you're not reading for work, what are some of your favourite books/authors?
I have an eclectic taste. I happily go from Kate Grenville, Geraldine Brooks, Edmund de Waal to Michael Crichton, Marele Day and Harlan Coben (and Pantera Press’s other authors, of course, who I read for the pleasure as much as for work). I read loads of non-fiction too.

My favourite character in your political thriller Born to Run was the little boy Davey, and my favourite part in the novel was when Davey was telling the King Kong joke in ASL (sign language).  It really had me laughing out loud, can you tell me your inspiration for his character?
I’m thrilled you loved Davey, and the humour. Because I had a seemingly “ideal” couple – Isabel, hot favourite for the White House and her ex-general war-hero husband – I didn’t want it to be a plastic set-up, I needed tension at home, so I used the humour for lightness, to contrast with the darkness that Davey’s disability stemmed from psychological distress over his father’s first marriage break-up. 
One of my favourite actresses is deaf actress Marlee Matlin, who won an Academy Award for leading actress in Children of a Lesser God and was also fabulous in The West Wing. Subliminally, she might have inspired me. To paint Davey as realistically as I could, I consulted a US expert on hearing-impaired kids.
By the way, because I needed a US president in my next novel, The Trusted, little Davey and his mother, President Isabel Diaz, get a small role, but it isn’t a sequel to Born to Run.
I really like it when authors have a crossover of characters in unrelated novels; it's like a little treat for loyal readers who have read all of their work.

In Born to Run, you were able to write about your love of US presidential elections, do you have any other interests that you'd like to explore or focus on in your next book?
Saving the planet is a justifiably hot topic. So in The Trusted I pitch light green against very dark green. The story is about brilliant eco-terrorists, PhDs, who spend ten years as sleepers, getting themselves into positions of great influence and power from where they hope to turn back the planet’s gas-guzzling clock – by destroying the financial system, food supplies, shipping, you name it. They’re trying to save the planet, though their methods are extreme. When I started researching this, I discovered there are many extremist green groups, though none as sophisticated as my fictional one – at least none I’ve found so far, and fingers crossed, it will stay that way.

Having now published two books, do you have a favourite?  Has one sold more than the other, or is that akin to asking a parent which is their favourite child?
I think that’s right. Maybe when I have a few more books under my belt, I might have more perspective to answer that question.

What do you have planned for the rest of the year?
I’m going to be overseas for a bit of it, mainly in NY so I can enjoy the run-up to the presidential elections, but also to get the vibe for the novel I’m just about to start. It will be the second Tori Swyft thriller.

Anything else you'd like to share with your readers?
A surprise for me, a pleasant one, has been how readers can sometimes read what you thought you’d written quite differently to how you see it. For example, a few readers have told me they wished Nowhere Man had a happy ending, but for me it is a really happy ending. I won’t explain that to your readers, Tracey, since it gives the ending away, but I suspect you know what I mean.

Thanks so much for joining us here at My Four Bucks John, it's been a pleasure having you.
My pleasure, Tracey. Thank you for the opportunity, and also for taking the time to read my stories.

Review: Sorry, Sorry, Sorry - The Case for Good Apologies by Marjorie Ingall and Susan McCarthy

Apologies are complex. A well-worded apology can soothe hurt feelings, save a failing relationship or repair one, while a bad apology can exacerbate the situation or end up causing further insult. Hopefully we've all been recipients of a good apology and remember how it made us feel. I can still remember an unexpected apology at a reunion once that blew me away and healed a hurt I'd long since forgotten I even had. I've also been the recipient of terrible non-apologies, some of which still make my blood boil if I pause to think of them again.

Marjorie Ingall and Susan McCarthy are the brains behind SorryWatch, a website dedicated to analysing apologies in the news, media, history and literature. They 'condemn the bad and exalt the good' and it's easy to spend an age on their website, browsing everything from sports apologies and political apologies, to bropologies and true crime apologies.

Together, Ingall and McCarthy have published Sorry, Sorry, Sorry: The Case for Good Apologies in an attempt to educate the reader on what constitutes a good apology and the pitfalls to avoid delivering a bad one.

Some highlights on the do's and don'ts of apologising include apologising without rehashing past insults, like: "I'm sorry I criticised your terrible new hairstyle".* Another pitfall to avoid was the 'sorry you', for example "well I'm sorry you keep forgetting our anniversary". Time was also spent on avoiding the 'if' and 'but' apology: "I'm sorry if I made you feel that way", or "I'm sorry, but I never meant to offend anyone".

Attempts like: "anyone who knows me knows I'm not a racist / homophobe / insert slur here" also indicate efforts to dodge responsibility or accountability for our actions. These always sound like weasel words to me, but now I have a clearer understanding of why they never sound like genuine apologies.

In Chapter 3 (Sorry If, Sorry But, Sorry You: Things Not to Say), I learned about performative utterances. A performative utterance is a statement where the words are the action, like "I insist" or "I promise" or "I swear". "I'm sorry" is a performative utterance and saying it feels like an admission of wrongdoing. This makes us feel uncomfortable and we often don't want to admit fault, especially if we don't believe we've done anything wrong. Just ask any 4yo. Another strategy is the sarcastic apology: "well sorry for not checking with you first, I guess nobody's perfect," is a passive aggressive apology.

I do believe public apologies have changed over the decades, with PR companies and spin doctors writing statements and apologies that address an incident, event, oversight or mistake while not directly admitting any fault. Sorry, Sorry, Sorry includes some interesting examples of bad apologies like this from CEOs, police officials and politicians. I listened to the audiobook, which meant I was unable to visually enjoy the apology bingo tables that frequently accompanied the text. Since finishing the book though, I'm recognising lame apologies all around me, with plenty of 'sorry if' and 'I regret' and 'it was never my intention' examples.

No doubt we've all delivered a range of apologies that have missed the mark ourselves. So, how do we do better?

Here's the SorryWatch approach:
1. Use the words “I’m sorry” or “I apologise.”
2. Say specifically what you’re sorry for.
3. Show you understand why the thing you said or did was bad.
4. Be very careful if you want to provide explanation; don’t let it shade into excuse.
5. Explain the actions you’re taking to insure this won’t happen again.
6. Can you make reparations? Make reparations.

Sounds simple enough doesn't it? When the topic of the apology is emotive, or the insult very grave, it can be hard to take the six steps outlined above. Fortunately I wasn't reading Sorry, Sorry, Sorry - The Case for Good Apologies by Marjorie Ingall and Susan McCarthy in preparation for a huge apology in my own life, but we can all improve the interactions we have with people, and I don't think I'll ever stop wanting to do that.

Sorry, Sorry, Sorry - The Case for Good Apologies by Marjorie Ingall and Susan McCarthy was an informative read and met the requirement for the Non Fiction 2023 Reader Challenge prompt for relationships.

*All examples in this review in italics are my own.

My Rating:

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Bloggernomicon - Lost in a Good Book

I'm proud to welcome my second Bloggernomicon interviewee today. Amy Brownlee’s book blog is called Lost in a Good Book and her byline is: Read, Review, Recommend. It's a pleasure to welcome her to Carpe Librum today.

Welcome to Carpe Librum Amy and thanks for being part of Bloggernomicon. When did you start reviewing books and can you tell me the story behind your blog name?

I started reviewing books in January 2012 on the blog, maybe a bit before then on Goodreads. When I decided to create the blog I made up a list of possible names, probably all terrible if I could remember any of them, but I ended up with Lost in a Good Book because I loved the name so much and it seemed perfect for what I wanted to express on the blog. It was serendipitous too because at the time I had started reading Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series and one of the books in the series is Lost in a Good Book which ended up being my favourite of them all.

When I started working as a librarian in 2015 it allowed me to find some fantastic books to read I may never have picked up and getting to share them with a wider audience has been very satisfactory, especially when people tell me they’ve started reading a book because they have read my review. It makes it all worthwhile in a way, even though I was happily doing this blog when no one was reading it.
How many hours (on average) do you spend working on your blog each week?
If I am incredibly organized it can be almost none if everything is beautifully scheduled, but that’s rare. I might spend maybe 10 hours a week? Especially if I am scheduling and writing reviews or rearranging things and doing stuff behind the scenes.

How many books (on average) do you read each year?
It used to be 80 but the last few years it has increased so I’m reading 150 or more.

How many books do you have on your TBR?
Goodreads tells me it is 640 but it is probably more. I think the ones on that list I am realistically never going to read makes up for the ones I do want to read that I haven’t gotten around to adding on there.

How do you organise and keep track of your reviewing commitments?
In the beginning I was a lot more organised with a chart and order to what I needed to read requested books whereas now I am slack in that aspect but more organised in my scheduling. I have a yearly calendar and have a colour code for the days I need a post to go up and label what kind of post it is whether it is a special event, a blog feature post or normal post. I have coloured all the days for the year that need a post and then I override that with another colour when I have a post done for that particular day. That way I can see a whole year and see which days have posts done and which days I still need to fill. I still haven’t found the balance to get my requests that organised but I am trying to make it work.

Can you share one of your proudest moments as a blogger or reviewer?
I was able to review a debut book for one of my favourite musicians, Voltaire, and I got to interview him about his writing and how his music influenced his writing style. It was an incredible moment and seeing people share their favourite lines and paragraphs of the review was brilliant, especially since I was still starting out with my blog it was a great confidence boost.

What’s your most popular blog post? What can you tell me about it?
It’s actually a strange one; a few years ago I dedicated a month celebrating the book series His Dark Materials which was turning 20. My most popular post comes from one where I explored the characters from the first book The Northern Lights. I have no doubt many are from school searches or other research quests but I hope that one post gets them reading the many others I did about that series at the same time, or onto another part of my blog.

When asked by an author, publicist or publisher to review a book, name something that can tip the balance in their favour?
If it is a Young Adult or set in Australia I will probably agree to read it.

Have you ever been pressured to give a positive review or had an author question a review of yours?
In my first year blogging I had an author question my review. She tried to explain why I was wrong and explain the things I hadn’t understood/she hadn’t made clear then asked me to amend my review now that I knew the story better. I’ve had a good run since, maybe only a couple authors who wanted a better explanation than my review why I only gave the stars I did but other than that I’ve been pretty lucky.

What are 3 words that tell you immediately a book is for you?
Slightly cheating on spelling but “Fairy tale retelling.”

What’s your most anticipated new release for 2020?
The Hand on the Wall by Maureen Johnson.

Do you have any advice for reviewers interested in starting a book blog?

Amy loved this book so much she was
 inspired to create a book blog

Just do it. Honestly. I started this because I had read a book that was so perfect I had to share it with as many people as possible and wider than just Goodreads (The Library of Shadows by Mikkel Birkegaard FYI). 

If you want to share your thoughts about books or bookish things then find a platform that works for you and make it your own. I started on another host site which was a nightmare but found my home on Wordpress. Even if it takes some time to find your feet (took me over five years to really get my groove) then that is ok because you will learn a lot as you go. Follow blogs who are posting things you like and see how different people do it and get ideas if you are stuck, but diving in and writing about whatever you like and however you like will make the blog your own and you can grow with it.

Thanks so much for the advice and for participating in Bloggernomicon today Amy.