I spent the week in San Francisco.
I spent the week in 1949. (more…)
Archive for the ‘Books’ Category
Baghdad-by-the-Bay
Posted in Books, tagged baghdad by the bay, book review, columnist, essays, herb caen, san francisco on 04 Aug 2016| 1 Comment »
The Changing Nature of War
Posted in Books, Culture, Politics, tagged Good-Bye to All That, Robert Graves, the nature of war, war memoir on 31 May 2016| 6 Comments »
I spent this Memorial Day reading about war; specifically, about the “Great War,” the First World War.
One hundred years ago, Robert Graves, fresh from school, left his home in Great Britain and went to war in France. He recounts his experiences and observations in Good-Bye to All That, lauded as one of the best memoirs of the Great War. Graves, if you don’t know of him, is best known for his biographical novel, I, Claudius (or, as we pronounce it in this house, “Eye Clav Divs,” because of the Imperial Roman font used on the BBC dramatization). If you haven’t read I, Claudius, put it on your TBR list, as it’s well worth reading.
But my intention here is not to write a review, because in reading Graves’s memoir, the thing that struck me most was how much the nature of war has changed, just in my lifetime. The public’s attitudes have changed as well, but not always for the better. (more…)
Pulitzer Schmulitzer
Posted in Books, tagged book reviews, books, Donna Tartt, Pulitzer Prize, The Goldfinch on 31 Mar 2016| 4 Comments »
As regular readers know, I have what I call The 40-Page Dropkick Rule. When I begin reading a book, it has forty pages to grab me, draw me in, and make me want to keep reading. For exceptionally long books, the forty page limit can be extended to fifty, sometimes eighty. Regardless the limit, if I’m not hooked by that time, the book gets tossed aside.
I created this rule because, growing up, I had a hard time putting down a book, even if I wasn’t enjoying it. It took me six months to finally finish The Agony and the Ecstasy, a book I might very well enjoy now but, when I was sixteen, it really was a slog.
Six months! One book! That’s a long time, time during which I might easily have read several other books if I’d just allowed myself to put Mr. Stone’s opus to the side. But I couldn’t. With my completionist nature, my overriding urge to “see the job through,” I couldn’t not finish the book. As years passed, my self-confidence helped me override these urges, and thus was born my 40-Page Dropkick Rule.
Once in a while, though, a book passes the Dropkick limit, only to falter farther along. Such was my experience of The Goldfinch, the Pulitzer Prize winner by Donna Tartt. (more…)
Correct Word = Right Word?
Posted in Books, Writing, tagged copy editing, Donna Tartt, editing, Pulitzer Prize, self-editing, The Goldfinch on 10 Mar 2016| 23 Comments »
I was about halfway through Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Goldfinch, when I stumbled while reading the following:
Whenever he was gluing up a piece of furniture it was my job to set out all the right cramps, each at the right opening, while he lay out the pieces in precise mortise-to-tenon order—painstaking preparation for the actual gluing-and-cramping when we had to work frantically in the few minutes open to us before the glue set, Hobie’s hands sure as a surgeon’s, snatching up the right piece when I fumbled, my job mostly to hold the pieces together when he got the cramps on (not just the usual G-cramps and F-cramps but also an eccentric array of items he kept to hand for the purpose…
The reason I tripped over these lines is due entirely to the use of the word cramp. It popped me out of the story, puzzled me, and continued to nettle me through the ensuing days, enough so that it engendered this blog post.
The stages of my reaction were as follows: (more…)
To Market, to Market
Posted in Books, Writing, tagged book marketing, creative writing, marketing your book, Writing on 21 Jan 2016| 7 Comments »
I’m not telling you anything new when I say that the publishing industry has changed a great deal in the last twenty years. However, throughout these decades of upheaval, there are two things I’ve observed that have remained pretty damned consistent:
- Writers worrying about how much effort they should put into marketing their books.
- Writers’ efforts at marketing their books doesn’t work.
Nothin’ for Sumthin’: Writer Predation
Posted in Books, tagged America Star Books, class action lawsuit, fraud, indie authors, Miami Book Fair, Publish America, Writer Beware on 01 Dec 2015| 6 Comments »
Indie authors, take note:
Back in September, I reported of an unsolicited query I received from a representative of America Star Books (ASB), offering me a spot in their “Hot Indie Authors” brochure. This brochure was to be distributed at the Miami Book Fair, held the weekend of 20 Nov 2015. My response was essentially “Sure, go ahead; show me what you can do.”
Then I waited.
My intention, for reasons that are obvious to some, was never to enter into any agreement with ASB. I just wanted to see what (if any) result would come from being included in their brochure (if indeed that actually occurred). I also wanted to see what sort of communication I’d receive from ASB, and how much.
The results of this experiment both met and exceeded my expectations.
But not in a good way. (more…)
Stop! Thief! — For the Love of Books
Posted in Books, tagged allison hoover bartlett, book collecting, book review, books, john gilkey, ken sanders, the man who loved books too much on 02 Nov 2015| 2 Comments »
This weekend I finished reading a book, the first one in a while. I enjoyed it a great deal, but it was an unusual read in that, from the book’s very first page, I felt a very real connection to it. You see, my library also includes a few stolen books.
On my “old/rare books” shelf lies an 1892 edition of The Lady of the Lake, by Sir Walter Scott. A family member—enamored of its exquisite etchings—checked it out from a library in the early ’40s and just “forgot” to return it. When it came into my possession, forty years later, it was agreed by all that returning it was unnecessary. Probably.
A few other books on my shelf have sketchy backgrounds, too. One is a Bible illustrated by Salvador Dali that I didn’t ask too many questions about, and another is a large-format book of the works Michelangelo that had been so obviously mismarked at a garage sale that paying the 50¢ asking price was nothing short of theft.
And so, when i
n the prologue to her non-fiction bestseller, The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, author and journalist Allison Hoover Bartlett describes how she came into possession of a book with a less-than-pristine provenance, I felt the echoed pangs of my own guilty conscience. (more…)
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 