Blogroll

What’s J Been Reading? [Bounty Day, 23 Jan 12]

I haven’t been posting about everything I read lately.  To be honest, the constant updating was a bit tedious and the feedback lukewarm.

But, every once in a while I find something that is just too good not to pass on.  The short story “What Everyone Remembers” by Rahul Kanakia is one of those stories.

This is a good example of fiction that breaks the “rules of writing” successfully.  For example, the protagonist-narrator is largely passive while the other characters take action around her.  Also, most of the story is dialogue.  Lastly, a lot of the information you need to understand the story is established by telling, not showing.*

Yet, this is a well-written, emotionally engaging story nevertheless.  The language is touching, the character interactions natural despite the strangeness of the main character.  I believe these aspects of story-telling are far more important to literary quality than most of the mechanistic advice we typically read in writing blogs and books.   I encourage writers and readers to take a look!

And, once you’ve read it, take a moment to think about how perfectly the title matches the precise boundaries of the story.

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* This final point might be more a consequence of length than style; if Kanakia were to make a novel of it, he might show more.

What’s J Been Reading? [Evacuation Day, 25 Nov 11]

After cleaning up from Hurricane Irene (and doing a little expansion along the way), Vermont’s famous Bartleby’s Books re-opens for Black Friday.  A huge win for indie bookselling.  And, across the Connecticut River, New Hampshire’s RiverRun rents a new location in the same neighborhood that will save the indie bookstore a remarkable $50k/year!

An intriguing new study on library users shows that (among other things) 50 percent of patrons report buying a book by a writer they first read in a library.

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What’s J Been Reading? [First of Brumalia, 24 Nov 11]

Hey, Nelson, why didn’t you identify today as Thanksgiving?  And, what the hell is “Brumalia” anyway?

Well, I have been avoiding the use of moveable holidays to identify the dates in my daily reading.  Also, I lament the fact that we have reduced the three-day Thanksgiving feast to a single day (yeah, yeah, I realize that a lot of people take a four-day weekend) so I thought I would honor the 30-day-long Roman feast of Brumalia instead, as a sort of protest against our truncated festivity.

Now, what have I read this morning?  Read more »

What’s J Been Reading? [Feast of Qawl, 23 Nov 11]

Of course, the big news in the literary world is the passing of Anne McCaffrey. The best tribute (I have read) to this amazing author is by Juliette Wade, who discusses how McCaffrey brought genre definitions into play with her Dragonriders of Pern series.  Also at Wade’s Talk To YoUniverse blog: an excellent piece on how hard choices for your characters require consequences.

Melville House, one of my favorite sources for publishing news, details an intense and disappointing exchange between blogger Jeremy Duns, who outed the plagiarism of Quentin Rowan, and the latest accused plagiarist Lenore Hart.  (By the way, considering that her subject is Poe, Lenore Hart must be a pseudonym, yes?)

BEST READ OF THE DAY: Josh Getzler at Hey There’s a Dead Guy gives us a truly remarkable insight into the writing process by showing us how a writer feels when he’s given the opportunity to enjoy his own writing as a reader.  There is so much that can be taken from this piece (for writers and readers) that I won’t say more.  Go check it out.

What’s J Been Reading? [RFK's Birthday, 20 Nov 11]

Yes, this photo is meant to be self-deprecating. Thank you.

I know you guys (the writers … guys and gals, technically) love yourselves some good query advice.  So, here’s something I read at Hey There’s A Dead Guy: Benjamin LeRoy‘s “Three Tips for Querying! (Because everybody loves a list).”  And, yeah, we do love a list.  Also at Dead Guy is an interesting piece about that unfortunate dust-up over FridayReads.

GalleyCat discusses the movement to create a Literature category at YouTube.  I’m all for it!  And… as if the Quentin Rowan scandal wasn’t bad enough, Melville House reveals yet another case of blatant plagiarism in publishing. Read more »

What ELSE Has J Been Reading? [Bonus Edition, 18 Nov 11]

Wow, I spoke too soon.  Normally I publish the daily reading around noon, and I should have waited today, too.  Lots of cool stuff since then.

Ellie Robins at Melville House talks about a Guardian piece on Melville House‘s Not The Booker Prize party, in which Sam Jordison discusses “whether literary criticism [in broadsheet book reviews] adds anything to our appreciation of books, and whether the limited pools of reviewers and books reviewed skews the picture of what there is to read out there.” Read more »

What’s J Been Reading? [Chinita's Fair, 18 Nov 11]

Accidentally left Raymond Chandler‘s anthology, The Simple Art of Murder, at home, so I was not able to read further into the short story “Pickup On Noon Street.”  Where has J been reading Chandler?  On the DC Metro, to and from work.

So, hey! Remember yesterday when I pointed you to Juliette Wade‘s discussion of gender in fiction?  She specifically talks about Ursula Le Guin‘s The Left Hand Of Darkness.  What do you know, a rejection letter for The Left Hand Of Darkness is featured in Flavorwire‘s “Famous Authors’ Harshest Rejection Letters.”  If you’ve ever gotten a rejection letter, it’s a fun read!  Read more »

What Has J Been Reading? [Birthday of the Federal Reserve and LSD, 16 Nov 11]

I finished Charles Bukowski‘s Pulp, and now I must say that I love it.  It’s the most brilliant piece of crap I have ever read, filled with absurdities and despair and flippant disregard for social norms.  Dedicated “to bad writing” it lives up to that threat, but it’s bad writing as obviously written by a writer who knows he’s writing badly.  The result is hilarious.

We now know what color moths were way back at the dawn of the Age of Mammals.  How? Scientists are some clever motor-jammers, that’s how.

At Melville House, a couple of good stories: Read more »

What Has J Been Reading? [America Recycles Day, 15 Nov 11]

Okay, you know what?  I’m really starting to like Charles Bukowski‘s Pulp.  Sure, it’s lazy and a bit too clever for its own good, simplistic and superficial, and full of potty humor so lame that it would make a 12-year-old roll his eyes.  But, a good deal of it is inspiredly moronic and/or moronically inspired.  It’s not what I would call “literature” but, as a parody of literature, it’s not half bad.  In some places, it is (if you’ll pardon the cliché) laugh-out-loud funny.

How did I miss the 160th anniversary of the publication of Moby-Dick yesterday?  Well, Melville House reminds me, and publishes a copy of the remarkable original contract for the book.  “Most striking … is how similar this is to a modern publishing contract, down to the wording in a lot of places.”

Also, there is an intriguing cast-bronze buckle dated to 600 CE, discovered buried on the Seward Peninsula.  Yeah, that’s way up in Alaska.  And, if 600 CE + Alaska + cast-bronze artifact doesn’t make you go “huh?!” then maybe you and I can’t be friends.  (Just kidding, of course we can.)

BEST READS OF THE DAY: A tie between an interview with author-songwriter John Wesley Harding (no, not the guy who “shot a man just for snoring too loud” … that was John Wesley Hardin) and a fantastic letter to the National Post about Philip Marchand’s review of Stephen King‘s 11/22/63.

What Has J Been Reading? [Robert Fulton's Birthday, 14 Nov 11]

Today, I put down the Raymond Chandler for a bit to start reading Charles Bukowski‘s Pulp on the suggestion of an acquaintance who noted similarities with my novella On The Head Of A Pin, which is also about a detective who meets Death.  So far, I find the book funny and clever, perhaps too clever, as if Bukowski is trying very hard to appear clever.  Also, I find it a bit childish and superficial.  I have seen it discussed as a riff on Chandler, but it reads more like what a Middle School boy might think is a funny take-off on detective fiction rather than a grown man’s literary commentary on it.  There are lots of sex and scat jokes, many of them treadworn.

I don’t want to get ahead of myself (I’m only on 22 of a 51-chapter book) but if you really want to understand the difference between Pulp and Chandler, read Pulp and what Andrew Mathis says about Chandler in The King Arthur Myth In Modern American Literature.   Also, I am discovering that Death + detective ≠ same story, although I am certainly better off being aware of Pulp and the comparisons readers will certainly be tempted to draw with Pin. Anyway, enough about that.

Author Elizabeth Spann Craig guest blogs at Writers In The Storm, sharing “15 Tips For Writing A Mystery.”  Reading through them makes me want to scrub On The Head Of A Pin once again.  But, no!  Must stop polishing and submit.  (My last scrub, which was supposed to be a final grammar-spelling check, ending up adding a full grand to the word count, which is exactly the sort of thing that made the last “final grammar-spelling scrub” turn out to be not-the-last.)

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