{"id":10273,"date":"2006-09-08T17:40:18","date_gmt":"2006-09-08T21:40:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2006\/09\/08\/10273.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:55:16","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:55:16","slug":"book-report-the-timetravelers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2006\/09\/08\/book-report-the-timetravelers\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: The Time-Traveler\u2019s Wife"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I know, I know. Believe me, Your Humble Blogger is aware<\/I> that you have all had<\/I> these conversations about genre before. Besides, y’all went through this back when The Time-Traveler’s Wife<\/a> was on the best-seller lists, and wasn’t on the Hugo list. As it happens, that was a year that I didn’t read many of the Hugo-nominated novels, although I did read Paladin of Souls<\/a>. And I enjoyed it, and all. I’d have a hard time saying which I thought was better. I might have voted for Ms. Niffenegger’s book, just because it was a bit different, and, you know, Ms. Bujold has a few awards. But, of course, because Random House didn’t market<\/I> the book in-genre, Hugo voters didn’t read it (I assume), and certainly didn’t vote for it.\n

So, it’s been five years or so that this trend of mainstream-ish literary writers have written things that are not marketed as specfic but, you know, are specfic by almost any content-based, influence-based or effect-based schema. The only one that seems to have come over big within the genre is Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell<\/a>. Will Self, for instance, doesn’t seem to have any Hugo Noms (or Nebula Noms, for that matter).\n

This, of course, is connected my continued crankiness that Never Let Me Go<\/a> wasn’t nominated for the Hugo, particularly now that the award has been given to a book that I have read (tho’ not yet blogged) and although I enjoyed the book, and I see why it won, it wasn’t a patch on the Ishiguro, as far as I’m concerned. More than that, though, it’s a sense that either genre readers aren’t reading books like TTW<\/cite>, which is frustrating to me because it really is a good book, and is good speculative fiction besides, or they are sulkily refusing to hand them awards out of spite to the publishers.\n

Or, I suppose, genre readers simply don’t like them. Which is possible, I suppose. The first few chapters of Oryx and Crake<\/a>, I’ll admit, stunk, and I’m certainly not griping about how it was ignored by the genre awards. And I suppose Ishiguro is a bit of an acquired taste. But TTW<\/cite> was the sort of book people like, as I can tell by it being a best-seller. So why didn’t people like it?\n

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I know, I know. Believe me, Your Humble Blogger is aware that you have all had these conversations about genre before. Besides, y\u2019all went through this back when The Time-Traveler\u2019s Wife was on the best-seller lists, and wasn\u2019t on the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10273"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10273\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17804,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10273\/revisions\/17804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}