Book Blog
January 23, 2011
A thought came to me while reading the second book of Suzanne Collins’ “The Hunger Games” series. While I’m enjoying it, really enjoying it (I’ll review it sometime), I did find myself focusing on the prose. Yes, I understand it’s a juvenile series (at least I hope it is). I understand that the writing is pretty basic. No clever flow, no startling visual imagery, no insightful character development, no creative language use. The story (while good) is just shipped to us, a simple description of events. She’s not alone in this – consider top-selling general-audience authors and you have Clive […]
January 9, 2011
D’ja see that new Kindle ad where cool looking people tote kindles about in bike baskets and the back pockets of stone-washed jeans? Young people all looking so active. And the only thing they aren’t shown doing? Reading. Because the thing about kindles is not quietly reading on it, it’s about bragging about how quickly you can get your books, how cheaply, how many books it holds. Ever had a kindle-ninny tell you what they were reading? No, its just about their device. Really, how many times do you have to say, “So, just what the fuck were you reading […]
December 14, 2010
You know Iran can’t have a nuclear power plant. But did you know Disney could? This pissed me off a decade ago, so I wrote a scathing novel about theme parks growing into “duchies” with their own laws, courts, and (it turned out) armies. And as I wrote it, I found myself really chewing on those enablers of theme parks, the shambling middle class. With their annual passes and their comfortable entertainment expectations, my novel did everything it could to give them a wake-up slap, a cosmic black eye. One agent asked me, “So, if you piss off everyone, who’s […]
December 9, 2010
What can I say. If it wasn’t for H.G. and his nightmarish vision of apocalypse, I might have become some sort of illiterate dummy. As it was, when I was about eleven, I read below par. It didn’t interest me, I didn’t care, it was boring, yada. Then my mom (bless her heart) sat me down every night and made me read for 30 minutes. Didn’t matter what. The TV guide, the back of a cereal box, anything as long as it had words on it. So I read a little of this and a little of that from the […]
December 6, 2010
To continue my point from the earlier post, a bit of script from a great show, the IT crowd. Postman: Moss. Amazon thingy. Moss: Ahh wicked. I know what this is. It’s the new Harry Potter. I got the child edition and the adult edition just to check there are no differences in the text Think about it.
December 5, 2010
Okay, this is my book blog. What’s the point of this blog? Well, let’s see. What would you say if you had a friend that ate at some nasty place, some sticky-elbow fast food joint. Every day, same burger, fries, and a coke. Conversely, perhaps you have been to France and walked the boulevards and enjoyed intimate dining in a street-side cafe. Or you’ve sat on a pier-top restaurant off the California coast, enjoying a local wine with your pasta as the sun slides into the golden ocean. Or perhaps you’ve been to cooking school and learned every detail of […]