Fonts, voices and flipping to the good stuff..

I was reading a recent Harper’s, a short story by Steven Millhauser, and realized that part of my feeling about it came from the font. Now I don’t know the name of this particular font but its been part of the message for years and I get this feeling of clarity and humanism just by being exposed to it. I know that my blog has moved from template to template trying to trade off between general look and available fonts and I am still not happy. But here’s the thing. Get your piece into Harper’s and I am already predisposed. The downside is that your voice will have to rise above the constant streetside murmur of the magazine font.

That’s the good example. On the other side, I cannot read italics for very long. I don’t mind them being used to indicate a book title though I think they are absurd when used to tell me the word is unusual or not in English. However, if an alternative storyline or a dream is set off from the narrative by this method, you’ve lost me. Kind of like when I read a book with multiple main narrators like Oscar and Lucinda or The Shipping News. I find that it is not uncommon to not only prefer some voices but to find others extraneous. So I have read books from beginning to end, entirely neglecting one supposedly integral element but still overall thinking that was a fine book. I do feel a little bad about this because I know that the author spent a lot of time developing viewpoints and then working on the relationships among them. Don’t think this quite qualifies as bayarding because not only do I know I’ve cut corners, I suspect I may be the poorer for it. I don’t really want to think of a book as the equivalent of a salad where I will say ‘hold the olives”. It should really be an all or nothing.

I really started this thinking to write about what I have been reading. I’ll keep it short. Just finished Declan Hughes The Colour of Blood. His third thriller/mystery and he can do no wrong. Its hard boiled Irish so can we be calling this the potato genre? The other one which I am almost done with is Elizabeth Hand’s Generation Loss. This is hard boiled and lanced, a skanky speed freak with a taste for Jack Daniels and a way with a camera finds herself on a spooky island and things ensue. The author photo shows what might be what used to be a skanky speed freak but hot if you get my drift. (Its like she’s a cousin to Poppy Z. Brite, a distant cousin to be sure).