Charlotte Higgins of the Guardian doesn't care for chain bookstores, but since her favourite indies went bust awhile back; it's either that or Amazon, where she ordered her wares after a fruitless search at her local Borders.
I'd like to suggest that for every time someone on a blog or newspaper writes an article that reads "damn all the chain stores for forcing under my favourite little shop, which I remember fondly from days gone by (Higgins even remembers the booksellers names) so now I have to shop online..yes, black days.. capitalism bad, etc....
that they at least send the aforementioned former proprietor a small stipend.
Otherwise, please keep your heartache to yourself.
Posted by David
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Our own James Woods by the way
Nathan Whitlock has his say on James (How Fiction Works) Wood, and notes the pro and anti camps that seem central to him.
Posted by David
Posted by David
Too long away, Mr. Billingham
I'd forgotten how solid Mark Billingham's crime fiction was. The first couple Tom Thorne crime novels were beauties, but with In The Dark, Billingham has put together a fine standalone yarn as well.
In fact, I'm only a third through it, but he has a way of getting inflection and surroundings so right with all of his characters; so everthing can't help but ring true.
Billingham has it all over Ian Rankin, folks.
A brief review here. via
Posted by David
In fact, I'm only a third through it, but he has a way of getting inflection and surroundings so right with all of his characters; so everthing can't help but ring true.
Billingham has it all over Ian Rankin, folks.
A brief review here. via
Posted by David
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Moby? For real this time?
Second and third are still medals
It seems a picture of the second and third place books on the Booker list are Sebastian Barry's Secret Scripture and Steve Toltz's Fraction of the Whole, both of them very good, particularly Barry's book.
I've not read White Tiger, but there's a bit of grumbling around the ranking, but that's normal enough.
Posted by David
I've not read White Tiger, but there's a bit of grumbling around the ranking, but that's normal enough.
Posted by David
I know, but thanks
I guess someone had to say it, but Wired was around first or at least early enough to call BS on blogging.
"Writing a weblog today isn't the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It's almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter."
My only quibble is that I seldom see sharp witty anything on Facebook, but then I'm old enough to remember the inventor of said prose.
Oh to be Interweb young again.
Posted by David
"Writing a weblog today isn't the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It's almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter."
My only quibble is that I seldom see sharp witty anything on Facebook, but then I'm old enough to remember the inventor of said prose.
Oh to be Interweb young again.
Posted by David
Sunday, October 19, 2008
To the Golden Age...good luck
Andrew Sullivan raises a glass to blogging as a great thing that rides side saddle along with print, and how lovely it is for the primacy of words as an instrument of discourse, etc.
"A blogger will air a variety of thoughts or facts on any subject in no particular order other than that dictated by the passing of time. A writer will instead use time, synthesizing these thoughts, ordering them, weighing which points count more than others, seeing how his views evolved in the writing process itself, and responding to an editor’s perusal of a draft or two. The result is almost always more measured, more satisfying, and more enduring than a blizzard of posts. The triumphalist notion that blogging should somehow replace traditional writing is as foolish as it is pernicious. In some ways, blogging’s gifts to our discourse make the skills of a good traditional writer much more valuable, not less. The torrent of blogospheric insights, ideas, and arguments places a greater premium on the person who can finally make sense of it all, turning it into something more solid, and lasting, and rewarding."
I follow many of the blogs Sullivan notes, but honestly, it's the same core as was there years ago, and if there's more than five new blogs that I've sought out so far this year, I'd be surprised.
All these great books get in the way.
I'm reminded of the blogger subculture as heart attack risk story in the NYT a couple years ago, but that piece was almost as long as Mr. Sullivan's.
Doonesbury's Gary Trudeau-as he's done for decades, makes the point with a great deal more dispatch here.
Posted by David
"A blogger will air a variety of thoughts or facts on any subject in no particular order other than that dictated by the passing of time. A writer will instead use time, synthesizing these thoughts, ordering them, weighing which points count more than others, seeing how his views evolved in the writing process itself, and responding to an editor’s perusal of a draft or two. The result is almost always more measured, more satisfying, and more enduring than a blizzard of posts. The triumphalist notion that blogging should somehow replace traditional writing is as foolish as it is pernicious. In some ways, blogging’s gifts to our discourse make the skills of a good traditional writer much more valuable, not less. The torrent of blogospheric insights, ideas, and arguments places a greater premium on the person who can finally make sense of it all, turning it into something more solid, and lasting, and rewarding."
I follow many of the blogs Sullivan notes, but honestly, it's the same core as was there years ago, and if there's more than five new blogs that I've sought out so far this year, I'd be surprised.
All these great books get in the way.
I'm reminded of the blogger subculture as heart attack risk story in the NYT a couple years ago, but that piece was almost as long as Mr. Sullivan's.
Doonesbury's Gary Trudeau-as he's done for decades, makes the point with a great deal more dispatch here.
Posted by David
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Wednesday, October 08, 2008
show a little leg, dammit!
Margaret Drabble thinks her publisher is out to dumb her down.
She thinks she knows why,
'There is also... anxiety over the whole role of prizes in this. We have more prizes than ever before. Who are they really for? Are they to celebrate the writer and the work or is this another arm of marketing in the books trade? Looking at publishing ... it has been saturated with the notion of the creation of celebrity as a marketing opportunity ... There has to be a box, a place they can put you. I just find it annoying but it doesn't stop me from writing exactly what I wish to write."
Writers aren't celebrities and those who play in that pool for too long inevitably destroy themselves.
And a word about prizes. I'm of two minds on this, because they are a marketing tool, and unfortunately it's pretty necessary.
The Giller list was announced yesterday
Joseph Boyden- Through Black Spruce
Anthony De Sa- Barnacle Love
Marina Endicott- Good to A Fault
Rawi Hage- Cockroach
Mary Swan-The Boys in the Trees
I've read three of the five and my money is on Marina Endicott. Good to a Fault is an assured and smartly written novel, it has a lot of pull in the plot and the new publisher Freehand Books, makes an attractive package.
Now, since I never get these things right, it'll go to Boyden or Rawi Hage.
Joseph Boyden was in town last night with Andrew Pyper, both gentlemen were in good spirits, read very damn well and stayed late.
Good job all around, folks.
She thinks she knows why,
'There is also... anxiety over the whole role of prizes in this. We have more prizes than ever before. Who are they really for? Are they to celebrate the writer and the work or is this another arm of marketing in the books trade? Looking at publishing ... it has been saturated with the notion of the creation of celebrity as a marketing opportunity ... There has to be a box, a place they can put you. I just find it annoying but it doesn't stop me from writing exactly what I wish to write."
Writers aren't celebrities and those who play in that pool for too long inevitably destroy themselves.
And a word about prizes. I'm of two minds on this, because they are a marketing tool, and unfortunately it's pretty necessary.
The Giller list was announced yesterday
Joseph Boyden- Through Black Spruce
Anthony De Sa- Barnacle Love
Marina Endicott- Good to A Fault
Rawi Hage- Cockroach
Mary Swan-The Boys in the Trees
I've read three of the five and my money is on Marina Endicott. Good to a Fault is an assured and smartly written novel, it has a lot of pull in the plot and the new publisher Freehand Books, makes an attractive package.
Now, since I never get these things right, it'll go to Boyden or Rawi Hage.
Joseph Boyden was in town last night with Andrew Pyper, both gentlemen were in good spirits, read very damn well and stayed late.
Good job all around, folks.
Sunday, October 05, 2008
because university presses don't do genre, right?
Excellent news that the University of Chicago Press has re-issued a few introductory classics from Donald Westlake (aka Richard Stark)
The NYT has some kind words about them as well as the new Andrew Pyper. Killing Circle is just now coming out in the U.S.
And doesn't a genre guy get literary merit if a university publishes his stuff?
Posted by David
The NYT has some kind words about them as well as the new Andrew Pyper. Killing Circle is just now coming out in the U.S.
And doesn't a genre guy get literary merit if a university publishes his stuff?
Posted by David
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
A screed worthy of Heather Mallick
There's a kernel of justification in the bone headed missive from the Nobel Laureate permanent secretary Horace Engdahl, who yesterday cited American writing as being ""too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture" and said "the U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature.
That ignorance is restraining."
He's right that there's not enough translation, but that's true in Canada as well, and economics rather than ignorance, is at the heart of it. There's no payoff, so translation doesn't happen.
If there's a reason for an argument to be made that American literature pales next to that of another state, then make it with some specifics, but to impugn popular culture in it's place is just a lazy form of snobbery.
David Remnick gets it right in his reply,
"You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures.
The piling of all things American is getting just a bit tedious anyway, but lets lay off the American writers.
They know a thing or two about writing well.
Posted by David
That ignorance is restraining."
He's right that there's not enough translation, but that's true in Canada as well, and economics rather than ignorance, is at the heart of it. There's no payoff, so translation doesn't happen.
If there's a reason for an argument to be made that American literature pales next to that of another state, then make it with some specifics, but to impugn popular culture in it's place is just a lazy form of snobbery.
David Remnick gets it right in his reply,
"You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures.
The piling of all things American is getting just a bit tedious anyway, but lets lay off the American writers.
They know a thing or two about writing well.
Posted by David
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