Category: Penguin Drop Caps

X: Xinran's Sky Burial (2004)

28/4/2022

Xue Xinran is a British-Chinese journalist who has devoted her career to telling women’s stories. Her story Sky Burial is the one tome in the Penguin Drop Caps series that doesn’t fit snugly in one genre. Is it biography? Romance? Travel literature?

For her radio show, Xinran interviews Shu Wen, a grey-plaited woman in Tibetan dress. However, it takes Shu Wen two days to explain how she, a Chinese woman, came to be dressed in traditional Tibetan clothing, “smelling strongly of old leather, rancid milk, and animal dung.” So taken is Xinran with her tale of love and loss that she must write the whole story.

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B is for Brontë: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

20/8/2019

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Gretchen Rubin would say Jane Eyre is an Obliger—a normally obliging and even submissive person who every so often snaps and goes into Obliger Rebellion, revealing a steel backbone.

Jane Eyre has it rough. Her mother and father died when she was months old and her mother’s brother, who took her in and loved her almost more than his own three children, has also died. His wife, her aunt Reed, resented her husband’s affection for his niece and, since his death, she and her children treat Jane like a second-class citizen. When she is punished severely for defending herself against her older cousin’s abuse, she loses it. That’s when her aunt decides to send her away to Lowood Institution, a charity school for orphans.

At first things are even worse for Jane.

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K: The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

10/8/2019

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Sometimes a story comes along at just the right moment.

I vaguely knew The Secret Life of Bees was about, well, bees, and women, but I had no idea when I first opened the jewel-green cover of the Penguin Drop Caps Edition, with its gorgeous honeycomb K initial on the cover, that I would find inspiration for my own next story.

This summer, my goal was to get my novel As Tall As the Sun is Bright into shape and send it out to publishers. Mission accomplished. Two rejections and counting. But not having any other projects to procrastinate with, except knitting, revealed that I was stuck. What was my character’s real problem? Why does she want to go on her journey? Why does it feel like there’s some massive hole in this plot?

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Z: The Shadow of the Wind

23/4/2019

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Z: The shadow of the wind by Carlos Ruiz zafón (2001), Translated by Lucia Graves (2004)

Z is not a letter native to English and personally, I feel a little xenophobic toward it. It’s fine if it hides in word endings, assimilating as a useful lower case –ize. But when it’s the first letter, it seems angular and eccentric, like Zorro or Zombies. No surprise, then, that the Z title of the Penguin Drop Caps series is a tale of horror, torture, double identities and dark passions.

At the age of ten, Daniel Sempere, the son of a widowed bookseller, discovers a book named The Shadow of the Wind by Julián Carax in a mysterious Cemetery of Forgotten books. He is so taken by the book that he begins to look for more of the author’s work, only to discover that someone has systematically burnt nearly every remaining copy.

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M: Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851)

31/12/2018

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Call me Ishmael. One of the most famous first sentences in English-language literature. And yet, while most people know that Moby Dick is the name of a white whale and that he was pursued by one-legged Captain Ahab, how many have the courage to sit down with all 641 small-font pages and follow the ship Pequod round the globe?

I confess I didn’t. I needed the help of William Hootkins’ incredible audio recording (Naxos, 2005) to get me through it. It’s close to 25 hours long and it feels like I spent two or three months slowly listening to the dense prose, dipping into the Penguin Drop Caps edition when I had to return the audiobook to the library and wait for it to be available again.

I don’t think this book could be published today. We don’t have time for long sentences or exhaustive treatments of a subject. We deal in slogans and sound bytes. Who sits by the fire with family and reads aloud from a book when there are lifetimes of YouTube videos to watch?

So why does Moby Dick endure?

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Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813)

13/9/2018

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www.penguinshop.ca

For this post, I’m assuming you’ve read Pride and Prejudice and don’t need to be persuaded of its merits. More intelligent and eloquent people have written books and doctoral theses have been written on this novel so there’s nothing really new to say. Instead, I’m going to give you an A-Z of things beginner writers like me can learn from Pride and Prejudice.

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Q: The Greek Coffin Mystery by Ellery Queen (1932)

23/7/2018

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Credit: Penguinrandomhouse.ca

I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall at the meeting at Penguin when they discussed which author should be chosen for the letter Q. They weren’t plagued by what the French call l’embarras du choix, that’s for sure. On the Penguin Random House website, most of the authors whose last name begins with Q write non-fiction which also narrows the field.

So the editors of the series chose Ellery Queen, a name unfamiliar to me, though afterward I wondered how I had missed it. It’s the joint pen name of two cousins, Frederick Dannay (pseudonym of Daniel Nathan) and Manfred B. Lee (pseudonym of Emanuel Lepofsky), and also the name of their detective protagonist, which lends him an air of authenticity. The cousins were prolific writers of crime novels, and expanded the Ellery Queen brand to radio plays, a magazine, films and even board games & jigsaw puzzles.

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R: Haroun and the Sea of STories by Salman Rushdie

17/7/2018

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Credit: www.penguinrandomhousecom

When I was given the “R” title in the Penguin Drop Caps series I really had no idea what to expect. I was delighted by the rich azure cover, the cobalt page edges and the swirly gold cover initial embellished with an Indian motif, but all I knew about Salman Rushdie was based on an ad campaign in the Toronto subway system promoting some new book of his and the news that Muslim clerics had issued a fatwa against him. Because of the subway ads I assumed he was a Canadian writer. And because of the scary-sounding fatwa against his book The Satanic Verses I assumed he was promoting some kind of paganism that was offensive to Muslims.

Wrong and wrong again.

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L: Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee

17/5/2018

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This rich emerald green with black and white contrasting colours has got to be one of the more gorgeous covers in the Penguin Drop Caps series. The initial L is in fact composed of two Ls, one a black woodblock style, the vertical line dotted with the windows of high-rise apartments, the other a white curlicue L dancing over top. Jessica Hische’s drop cap makes allusion to the New York setting of the novel, as well as the dual identities of the narrator, a Korean-American industrial spy.

On the back is the quote “Quell the old tongue, loosen the lips. Listen, the hawk and cry of the American city.” This perfectly captures Chang-Rae Lee’s lyrical style, his frequent use of the word quell (four times), and the themes of language and the urban melting-pot.

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V: Candide or Optimism by Voltaire, Translated by Theo Cuffe

6/4/2018

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Before Seinfeld, before Murphy’s Law, there was Voltaire’s Candide. In stark contrast to Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, where “everything is awesome,” to quote The Lego Movie, Candide’s world is a string of executions, STDs, natural disasters, wars, rapes, killings and financial disasters. And this is what his tutor Pangloss calls “the best of all possible worlds.” Everything about this philosophical tale contrasts with Siddhartha, even the colour of the cover whose juicy purple is diametrically opposite Siddhartha’s fluorescent yellow. The Penguin Drop Caps edition has a V on the front cover formed by two bolts of lightning, converging to strike a little yellow man. Yep, that’s Candide, for whom whatever can go wrong does go wrong.

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<<Previous

X: Xinran's Sky Burial (2004)

B is for Brontë: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

K: The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

Z: The Shadow of the Wind

Z: The shadow of the wind by Carlos Ruiz zafón (2001), Translated by Lucia Graves (2004)

M: Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851)

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813)

Q: The Greek Coffin Mystery by Ellery Queen (1932)

R: Haroun and the Sea of STories by Salman Rushdie

L: Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee

V: Candide or Optimism by Voltaire, Translated by Theo Cuffe

Carolyn Johnson

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