For those of us trying to sneak reading into our busy lives, DailyLit is a great resource: choose any of its 1000ish titles, and it will email you a snippet a day until you finish the book. (See our blog archive for more details.) But what if you want to read something that’s not in DailyLit’s library–or if you’ve already read all of DailyLit’s titles, you speed-reader, you?

Enter dripread, which functions in much the same way but, in addition to a library of titles, allows you to upload a book of your own choosing in ePub format. Says the site’s FAQ:

What does dripread mean?
The word ‘dripread’ is an adaptation of the word dripfeed, with the word ‘feed’ replaced by the word ‘read’. If you like, a dripfeed of reading material. A slow steady stream of information which is easy to process in the normal flow of life.

How does dripread work?
Readers first create a free account and upload their own ebooks (or select a book from the existing library), dripread will then store the ebook and serialise a page to the readers email address, simple.

As the parent of a young child, most things I do—from revising my novel to writing emails to doing laundry—end up happening in ten- or twenty-minute bursts. So the ability to upload a book and nibble my way through it, bite by bite (or drip by drip) is definitely appealing! In fact, once I’m finished with my latest draft, I can even imagine using dripread to send me a small chunk of it per day to re-read and re-edit—sort of like a teacher assigning a chunk of homework a day.

Has anyone out there given dripread a try?

Image credit: Joe Schumacher, via Gothamist

Pages began mysteriously appearing on lightpoles in the city’s East Village neighborhood. As of yet, nobody has come forward to claim the work. So far, eight pages in total have made their way to the public. [...]

At the bottom of that page, readers are told to go to a different location to find the next installment. And that direction, of course, raises plenty of logistical mysteries for readers hooked on the initial installments, among them: Just how long is this book and how many pages will there be?

Predictably, some don’t like the idea:

At least one local curmudgeon is fully against this expression of creativity, and told the paper, “Honestly, I don’t like the idea. I hate it when people just post things everywhere. They have the Internet, why don’t they use that?”

The big question, of course, is: is this novel any good? Here’s an excerpt, so you can judge for yourself:

“No. No thank you. Um, no.”

Then the baby is on a chest. She is wrapped in a white blanket with green trim. A pink hat is pushed on the small head. The smallest baby looks around. She already looks around. She knows how to lie there and her eyes move up and down. A new universe arrives within a universe. I watch her and have no idea how she does that. She closes her eyes and sleeps. I think she is beautiful.

[...] I lean against a plate glass window and watch her sleep in the small plastic hospital crib. In my memory, I peer down to read the name on the small crib: “Lily McCarthy.”

I blink my eyes and focus on the baby lying near me. “Lily McCarthy,” I say.

Lily seems a few months older than my memory. Her face is fleshed out and her dark hair covers her head.

I grit my teeth and fight through the pain and reach out to the baby. Lily stretches one hand to me and smiles. The pain is so bad my eyes water, but I move to the baby and attempt to push myself up.

Maybe I worry too much that this genre doesn’t get the respect it deserves, but I often hear sentiments like “I’m not that interested in YA literature,” or “I don’t like fantasy novels.”

In “Dust and Daemons,” an essay on Philip Pullman, Michael Chabon argues:

…at its best the genre is no less serious or literary than any other. Yet epic fantasies, whether explicitly written for children or not, tend to get sequestered in their own section of the bookstore or library, clearly labeled to protect the unsuspecting reader of naturalistic fiction from making an awkward mistake. Thus do we consign to the borderlands our most audacious retellings of what is arguably one of the two or three primal human stories: the narrative of Innocence, Experience, and, straddling the margin between them, the Fall.

This is a good start at explaining why, of all the books I’ve read in recent memory, not many compare to this series, which is serial narrative of the best kind—the kind that gets richer and more complex as it develops. Before this month, there were three novels: The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, and The King of Attolia. A fourth, A Conspiracy of Kings, has just been released.

I can’t wait to read it.

Yet when I’ve recommended these books, people don’t seem to believe that they could possibly be as good as I profess. Perhaps this is “consignment to the borderlands” in action, but perhaps it’s also because my descriptions of the texts are extremely vague; any substantial information would give away incredible surprises. How do you review or recommend a book about which you can say almost nothing? Worse, how do you review three books like this? I’ll try to be as forthcoming as is good for you:

In the first book, the main character is a thief named Eugenides, nicknamed Gen. The series is set in a somewhat Mediterranean land: there are olive groves and an ocean, and the characters often snack on goat cheese and drink wine. There is not much modern technology—carts and horses, only the basics of medicine, but glass windows and pocket watches exist, as do guns. Turner says she intends the setting to be more Byzantine than ancient. There are three countries nestled next to one another: Sounis, Eddis, and Attolia, whose relationships alternate between trade partnerships and prickly standoffs. Each is ruled by a monarch: the King of Sounis, and the Queens of Eddis and Attolia. There is also a religious division between the old gods and the new, and mythology fills the first book, and weaves through the rest of the series as well. These are invisible gods I can imagine straight from the pages of D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, whose colored-pencil images have stayed with me since childhood. As in these illustrations, Turner’s gods are commanding and argumentative, scary and petulant; as likely to sigh and tell a character to go to bed as to send a more traditionally cryptic message from the heavens.

Gen narrates the first book, and when it begins he is in prison, having embarrassed himself by getting caught, a rather large blow to a professional thief’s reputation. To get out of jail he agrees to go on a mission with the King’s magus, who thinks he knows where to find a magical long lost treasure. That’s about all the specifics I can give without ruining the rest of the plot of all three books, but I can reveal a few more general things.

First, the second book in the series is better than the first, even though the first is lovely, so please, keep reading. The Thief was published in 1996, and The Queen of Attolia in 2000—there is clearly some maturing between the two. The third book is so ridiculously good it made me cry. In the midst of an adventure that turns into political intrigue, which gets wrapped around questions of faith and loyalty, this series contains a love story, and a story of redemption and forgiveness. I can think of no other values and struggles more important for younger readers to start wrestling with, and none in which I need more instruction and illumination myself. It’s all a little humbling, is what I’m trying to say.

Second: surprise. The end of the first book surprised me, but I saw how the trick had been accomplished. I thought I was prepared for The Queen of Attolia, but just when I thought I knew what the entire story was about, I was astonished all over again. And although the third book was a teeny bit more transparent, it too flipped my expectations upside down at several points.

(See how unsatisfying this kind of flabby description is? Please go read this series so you, too, can experience the frustration of giving only vague encouragements to your friends and neighbors.)

Third, even among YA fantasy novels, The Thief is exceptional because it’s a story about adults. These are not the sudden inheritors of magical powers, but people who have carried the weight of responsibility for their entire lives. Although I love the tradition in YA novels of getting rid of the parents early on so the young protagonists can transgress and transform, it’s also refreshing to break that mold.

Finally, the writing is excellent. I read several perfectly interesting, inventive, acclaimed novels soon after reading The Thief, and they just didn’t measure up. By turns lovely and funny, politically didactic and inventive, all three books are filled with real, interesting dialogue that never condescends, to any reader.

As always, when you love something so strongly, you run across someone who doesn’t, as in this fabulously boneheaded review, spotted on Goodreads:

“First off, I don’t understand why I found this book in the children’s section of the library. The plot is so complicated, the revelations so subtle, the themes and tone so mature. (And there are zero children in it.)”

Yes, Destinee, that is so misleading! (I wish her name were Mary or something, because it just makes this even more of a caricature, but I swear—Destinee.) The thought that we might encourage our children to read books that show adults as real, complex people; that we might challenge them with intricate narratives; that genre labeling might, for once, be productive instead of reductive in delivering a series this subtle and with such a mature tone to children; that we might enjoy the same books as they do, and so be able to discuss a shared reading experience—it’s really a shame. (In fairness, the overwhelming majority of the reviews of Turner’s work on Goodreads and elsewhere are rabidly positive; Destinee just struck a nerve.)

As always, the measure of maturity is a willingness not to take things quite so seriously. Here’s one example of the hilarity hidden in the fantasy, and taken entirely out of context so as not to spoil:

“Are you badly hurt?”

“Hideously,” said the king, without sounding injured at all. “I am disemboweled. My insides may in an instant become my outsides as I stand here before you.”

This is pitch-perfect Monty Python, as any seventh grader would recognize. And if you’re not encouraging your seventh grader to watch Monty Python (or to read Megan Whalen Turner), then you are not the cool parent you always hoped you’d be. These are books for young adults to stretch up to, and for adults to savor without stooping. I’m excited if you haven’t read them yet, because that means you have the thrill of reading them for the first time still ahead of you.

Wanting more character, more revelation, more subtlety, more story…and then getting all of these: is there any greater pleasure?

photo by Luigi Morante via Flickr CC

For Further Reading…

- If you’re shopping for Turner’s books (including her short story collection, Instead of Three Wishes), order from your favorite independent bookstore. And while you’re there, pick up a copy of Michael Chabon’s wonderful essay collection Maps and Legends, which includes “Dust and Daemons”.

- Read excerpts from The Queen of Attolia, and from Instead of Three Wishes.

- Listen to, watch, and read these interviews with the author: with HarperCollins (podcast), (video) / at The Enchanted Inkpot / with HipWriterMama / and with Squeetus Blog (part 1 of 3).

- San Francisco-based readers can see Megan Whalen Turner read in person on Tuesday, April 27, 2010 at 5:30 p.m. at Kepler’s Bookstore (1010 El Camino Real, Menlo Park, CA)

- Watch trailers for the first book in the series, The Thief, and the fourth book, A Conspiracy of Kings:

I am not a patient person. People who do slow, meticulous things like needlepoint and whittling amaze and bewilder me. This impatience applies to my reading habits, too: when immersed in a book I love, I can’t stop myself from reading faster and faster, eager to see the whole picture, to wolf the whole story into my head.

Luckily, though, Five Chapters exists to remind me that patience is a virtue. Five Chapters publishes one story each week, with one section of the story posted each day. It’s an old-fashioned exercise in delayed gratification, and as this week’s story is by one of my (and FWR’s) favorite authors, Aryn Kyle, I suddenly appreciate the enforced pacing, slowing down to wallow in each line of prose. This is like someone doling out chocolate mousse to you one very rich spoonful at a time, so you can relish every bit of it. Part One of “Take Care” is up now, but for the rest, you’ll have to check tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. Savor, and enjoy.

Also on FWR…

• Read more about Five Chapters and other serial fiction and why slow might be good for you
• Check out Elizabeth Ames Staudt’s review of Kyle’s debut novel The God of Animals

Screenshot of Five Chapters / image is from magneticstate.com

This being the 21st century, Twitter is a natural tool for serialization. In conjunction with Electric Literature, Rick Moody published a short story serialized into tweets, with one installment posted every 10 minutes. Reactions to the experiment were decidedly mixed, but its existence speaks to the renewed interest in the serialized fiction.

Meanwhile, online lit journal Five Chapters publishes a short story a week, with one part of the story issued each weekday. And Daily Lit allows subscribers to read variety of books–from Tom Sawyer to The Age of Innocence to The Best American Humorous Short Stories–in short installments emailed daily. Both are free.

For those who prefer paper to computer screen, author Nicholas Rombes is publishing his new novel Nightmare Trails at Knifepoint in serialized form… via snail mail. According to The Rumpus, the installments will be mailed from January 2010 to January 2011 and will be “stuffed into small manila envelopes, addressed by hand, with personal messages typed out on old hotel stationary and delivered right to your doorstep.” Rombes explains his rationale for the project thus:

As a lover of sequential, serialized narrative, I found that the most natural way to publish Ephraim’s strange odyssey was through a series of pamphlets, each one between 6 to 20 pages long, and each with a cliffhanger ending. [...] I also loved the idea of telling his story in paper format, so that the story being told is more than the story itself, but also the medium of its publication. In other words, the pamphlets are worth keeping, featuring full-color covers and, sometimes, inserts.

Rombes’s website has more information about the novel and how to subscribe.

What makes the serialized form so attractive now? Is it an attempt to reclaim an older tradition? Is it a response to short communication forms like Twitter? And if you’ve read–or written–a serial novel or story, how was the experience different from a non-serialized one?

Here is Underland’s official description of the wovel (from their website):

Every week, the author posts an installment. Installment length hits the sweet-spot of online reading—long enough to get interested, short enough to read in the cubicle at work. At the end of every installment, the author writes in a plot branch point. Does the heroine kill her lover? Will the zombies catch the soldier? Is the box empty, or is it filled with bees?

THE READERS DECIDE.

On Monday, the post goes up. Voting is open through Thursday. The author writes Thursday and Friday. The editors edit Friday and Saturday. The post goes back up on Monday. Part literature, part exquisite corpse. The pace of print journalism, the imagination of fiction, the spark of reader participation.

Check out the current wovel-in-progress, Firstworld by Jemiah Jefferson, and vote on what happens next…