What's Elizabeth Reading? ...Paul Raymond

One of the joys of my job is I get paid to read and do what I've been doing on this blog all along--review. As I said earlier, though, I get put in a tough situation when the book is not one I would normally recommend. No one would be happy with me if I lambasted a local writer's work, especially since I'm not a well-known and respected reviewer (yet). So I have to get creative.

How to put a positive spin on things without being dishonest? The last time I was faced with this issue, I ended up writing an article about what went into the book, neglecting to review the content at all. This time, I decided to do a Q&A, since the book, Paul Raymond's The Other Side: Finding the Greener Grass, was essentially a memoir with a fictional spin. The author is the main character, and the realizations he has are real, but the events are contrived to make his point blatant (I don't think that worked out well for him, but oh well, I wasn't his editor).

I thought a Q&A would go well, but then I discovered the author is a politician. I knew that before, of course, since he's on the city council, but I hadn't figured on having to machete my way through non-answers in an effort to get him to answer the question I'd asked. He kept wanting to reiterate the same points: This book is fiction, and don't judge people. That was it. I was looking for something more philosophical, since it was a reflection of sorts on his life and on judgment/stereotypes/assumptions. In essence, he wanted to talk about the book and I wanted to talk about the ideas in the book. It reminded me of an episode in Psych, where someone tells Shawn Spencer to give the answer to the question he wished people had asked instead of the one they actually posed. Annoying. It made me feel sorry for our legislative reporter. Thankfully, when I gave him a chance to look over his answers, he did a bit of good machete-work himself.

Before I let you read the Q&A, I'll say that no, I don't necessarily recommend this book unless you want to the message "Don't judge based on stereotypes" bashed into your head over and over. It is written clearly, though without much style, and will get that memo across well.

And now for portions of the Q&A, beginning with part of the introduction I gave it in the article, which can be found in full here:

The protagonist and narrator of Paul Raymond’s “The Other Side: Finding the Greener Grass,” published this summer by Nampa-based Point Rider Publishing, has an unflattering view of farmers and others he sees as not being “professional.” But when he gets laid off and takes a U-Haul truck on the road to a new town and a new start, he meets people along the way who change his attitude.

Editor’s note: The questions and answers below have been edited for clarity and brevity.

Q: Why didn’t you write “The Other Side” as a memoir?

A: When I started writing, my emotions came out. It was kind of caustic initially. I had to go back and ramp it back so I could let somebody read it. It was therapeutic for me. After that, I sat on it for years and never did do anything with it until a publisher contacted me and made me think, “Well, maybe I should do something with it.” I thought it was just personal for me, even though, as I said, most of it is fiction. Like Hank, at the store — the store was real and farmers came to the store, but that whole conversation, all that was fiction. I utilized fiction to better express my point.

Q: Why did you choose to use yourself as the main character?

A: Well, I didn’t necessarily mean for me to be the main character, but that’s the only way I could express it. I have not written a book before, so this is new and it came over a long process. It went from venting to becoming a book.

Q: What went into the decision to make it a road trip story?

A: I literally moved from one town to another, and I did get laid o•. Many of my thoughts (reminiscing) along the way are real, but most of the experiences on the journey were not. My thoughts are there, my feelings are there, but it was largely ÿction. I just used that trip as kind of a base line.

Q: Has anyone subject to stereotype in this book read it?

A: Yes, Dan, in the last chapter. I have just met him within the last 10 years, and I let him read it. He’s since passed away. But I wasn’t done with it at the time. I hadn’t added that chapter he was involved with. He thought it was really good. I have at least one farmer who is going to read it, but I haven’t had anybody — well, no, that’s not true. When I first wrote it I gave it to some people. It was offensive to them because I was so caustic. I was just letting loose.

Q: I hope you haven’t lost any friends over it?

A: Not that I know of.

Q: Were your parents any different from the other farmers you grew up around?

A: Well, I perceived my dad to be pretty sharp. A lot of people came to have him help with things. My mom and dad were both educated. I didn’t ever put them in that stereotyped position. I kind of separated them out somehow.

Q: In your opinion, what is the connection between self-confidence and a judgmental attitude?

A: I’m in my late 20s on that trip, and I kind of put myself back in that time. I was more realistically self-conscious than I am now. My self-confidence wasn’t quite as strong, and I think living on a farm kind of added to that. I pictured the people in the city to be really sophisticated, more affluent, and, comparatively, farmers didn’t seem to know what was going on. I didn’t want to be branded with them, but I was.

Q: Do you think you carried that “branding” with you through your life?

A: Absolutely. But I eventually got over it and realized that I was OK and they were OK. I kind of lived that book and wrote it; it’s actually kind of the process I went through in real life. Only, most of those events didn’t occur. It took a long time. I think those feelings about farmers and others went away when I got done writing the first hundred pages or so. I didn’t have the intensity that I started writing with because I was relaxed. I was able to talk to and associate with anybody, any culture; I haven’t had a problem with it since. It was a life-changing experience.

“The Other Side” is available online.

What's Elizabeth Reading? ...Randy King

This week, I reviewed a cookbook. Yeah, it was a first.

Randy King lives in my area, and he put together a cookbook called "Chef in the Wild." I already wrote a review for the Idaho Press-Tribune, which you can find here, so I'm not going to re-review it. Suffice it to say he goes through how to hunt, butcher, and cook a variety of animals.

Now for a couple thoughts.

First off: I don't think the quality of writing in a cookbook matters. I mean, the point is not to create great prose, to engage both your intellect and your imagination. The point is to tell you how to cook something. The end. Does this book do that well? I'd say it does, though I haven't cooked anything from it. I don't have wild meat on hand.

But I was never confused, and hunting tips and butchering instructions were given in prose format, before the recipe. There are pictures throughout the book, not for instructional purposes so much as to break up the mass of words. Perhaps they could have included pictures meant to illustrate butchering instructions. That would be my only request to better this book.

My other thought is that food blogging may have changed the format of a cookbook. In older cookbooks, you have the recipes and that is it. But if you go online, recipes are usually introduced with a personal anecdote and/or a walk-through of the recipe, giving detailed instructions and tips for how to do what the recipe requires.

The comments section below allows other cooks to weigh in on the recipe, giving alternative instructions to improve it, so the recipe-searcher can look through those and the original recipe to decide how to make the dish best. It has given light to the subjectivity of cooking. I once saw someone who said a brownie recipe was terrible because it was too soft and cake-like. They wanted brownies that were hard and chewy. I happen to think this person's mother didn't know how to make good brownies, but hey, it told me something valuable about the recipe: It made soft brownies.

While I have yet to see a published cookbook with a comments section, where other chefs weigh in on the recipe, "Chef in the Wild" did imitate a food blog in the story-before-recipe way. It wasn't just recipe after recipe. I consider this an improvement; I do so much better, personally, with recipes that have additional instructions in prose. They are the next-best thing to having the cook in the kitchen with me.

Basically, I highly approve of this evolution in cookbook-dom. I also highly recommend this cookbook to any hunters out there.

What's Elizabeth Reading? ...Bea Dubois

I was put in a tough position this week. A woman who lives in my area had written and published a book, Briarwood Cottage, and she wanted me to read and write about it in the paper. I cheerily said to send it on over.

The problem: The book isn't any good. The story is mildly interesting but has no arc, climax, or progression, and there are passages of lecture - straight lecture from teachers in the book - that does nothing for the plot or story at all. She must have done the research and wanted to use it somehow.

The characters did not make up for the deplorable story. As I said, they did not progress, and while she gave them small conflicts, each was easily resolved or forgotten. They were likeable enough, but incomplete. They weren't annoyingly 2D, if that's anything. Not deep, but there was some roundness.

As for the writing, not good. I mean, the message got across, but I got no pleasure from reading it. Simple, like if a high schooler had written the story. And this woman is no high schooler. She was writing it as a mother with young kids.

This, people, is what happens if you write a story without learning how. Not everyone can write a good story; it takes conscientious reading and writing. Please work hard so you can write something you can be proud of.

The tough position came when I needed to write something for the paper. I couldn't recommend the book. So I called the author to see if I could possibly recommend it for its one redeeming factor: It sparked intellectual interest in the Church of the Nazarene. The characters were part of that church and since one is a revival preacher, it factored in greatly. While reading, I was surprised by what these people believe and I wanted to know more. Why believe those things? How much of this was accurate, or was I misunderstanding? So I found myself doing light research into the church.

I had pinpointed the one redeeming aspect to be that it could bring interest to the church, assuming that was the author's ultimate goal.

It wasn't.

Turns out she doesn't even belong to that church, though she is Christian. Her real goal, to write a story of God helping people recover, was hinted at in the story but did not go anywhere. It was more about the characters than God.

Fail. I can't possibly recommend this book. What to write?

I ended up writing this, which was about the writing of the book and about the book, not at all a review. Safe ground. I didn't want to insult her in the newspaper - I am trying to make people want to talk to me, not push them away by being mean. The article ran in our A&E (Arts and Entertainment) section. And then I moved on to reading a cookbook someone in my area wrote. More on the cookbook later! Never reviewed one of those, have I?