Take a photo of a barcode or cover
jonscott9's Reviews (211)
Angelou's writing is by turns poetic and plain here, and it works well. She speaks to tragic events of the mid- to late-1960s, when Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. were both killed. (She was on board with the latter man's civil rights work.)
A firsthand race-riots account and personal relationships receive her gentle but firm treatment as well. Funny tidbits appear in her telling of working and writing for a theater after singing at a lounge in Hawaii and being upstaged by a bigger-voiced singer-actress who shall remain nameless.
This graceful short book is the sixth installment of autobiography from Angelou. It's a line of books that began with the classic I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. I haven't read that book yet but intend to fix that this year, daunted or distressed as I already am about the subject matter.
A firsthand race-riots account and personal relationships receive her gentle but firm treatment as well. Funny tidbits appear in her telling of working and writing for a theater after singing at a lounge in Hawaii and being upstaged by a bigger-voiced singer-actress who shall remain nameless.
This graceful short book is the sixth installment of autobiography from Angelou. It's a line of books that began with the classic I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. I haven't read that book yet but intend to fix that this year, daunted or distressed as I already am about the subject matter.
Oy, what to say about Book 2 of the Potter behemoth? It's better than the first one, still not a book I'd term "great." I get the feeling that Rowling's thinking ahead as she writes, though, and that's Smart.
I enjoy Hermione, maybe because I was her male equivalent back in the day, bookish, studious, and rule-smitten. I explicitly do not enjoy the elf character Dobby. While I'm told that he has a crucial role to come in the series, here he flat-out reminded me of Jar-Jar Binks from the latter-day Star Wars flicks. That is to say that I detested the character's every scene, word, and movement. What a deplorable urchin. I mourn his creation.
The second half of this one picked up, as did the first. I still eagerly await the darkening of the series in Book 4, two books from now as I pile-drive the lot of them leading up to the last installment's release.
I enjoy Hermione, maybe because I was her male equivalent back in the day, bookish, studious, and rule-smitten. I explicitly do not enjoy the elf character Dobby. While I'm told that he has a crucial role to come in the series, here he flat-out reminded me of Jar-Jar Binks from the latter-day Star Wars flicks. That is to say that I detested the character's every scene, word, and movement. What a deplorable urchin. I mourn his creation.
The second half of this one picked up, as did the first. I still eagerly await the darkening of the series in Book 4, two books from now as I pile-drive the lot of them leading up to the last installment's release.
To be fair, this was not the final book for LaBute's play. Which is good, as I found the dialogue remarkably lacking or uninteresting in a few patches, especially striking because it's *him*.
LaBute's stuff (In the Company of Men, Bash, The Mercy Seat) is often subtle and nuanced. His comedies are bleak and not laden with guffaws. You have to work for the reward of the jokes, and they're usually coupled with a hearty heap of weightiness, regret, or pain.
This play centers on two couples, and the main character, a man, has made a remark about how, compared to a certain female at the office, his girlfriend's face is "regular." In true LaBute spirit, this one word is seized on by the offended party and used (and abused, and dragged into the mud, and spit upon, and hung on a cross, and drawn and quartered) for all its worth in turning the tables on her man and making him feel awful.
Meanwhile the "protagonist's" best friend, who he also happens to work with, is sleeping on his quite-beautiful wife behind her back. They have a child on the way. Will our anti-hero relay this info somehow to the wife, betray his friend? These people are simple, plain -- their lives, if not their faces, are truly regular -- and most of the action happens in the factory lunchroom. (I understand the setting, saw it clearly in my mind's eye, for the two summers I worked at one such place during college.)
I don't care to share any of the dialogue here. It didn't quite percolate like other plays (the recently-read The Busy World Is Hushed, et al), and maybe it was cleaned up in the rehearsals that this book was used for. I know some dialogue was changed, perhaps even considerably, from quotes I've seen in articles about the play that have key quotations said (and thus reading) differently.
The life of a play is interesting. So is the life of any one person, and of a relationship. Few writers explore these matters, and for the stage setting, than does Neil LaBute, the one-time IPFW instructor who became a big, famous film director, and who is well known for his incisive, gutting way with words.
LaBute's stuff (In the Company of Men, Bash, The Mercy Seat) is often subtle and nuanced. His comedies are bleak and not laden with guffaws. You have to work for the reward of the jokes, and they're usually coupled with a hearty heap of weightiness, regret, or pain.
This play centers on two couples, and the main character, a man, has made a remark about how, compared to a certain female at the office, his girlfriend's face is "regular." In true LaBute spirit, this one word is seized on by the offended party and used (and abused, and dragged into the mud, and spit upon, and hung on a cross, and drawn and quartered) for all its worth in turning the tables on her man and making him feel awful.
Meanwhile the "protagonist's" best friend, who he also happens to work with, is sleeping on his quite-beautiful wife behind her back. They have a child on the way. Will our anti-hero relay this info somehow to the wife, betray his friend? These people are simple, plain -- their lives, if not their faces, are truly regular -- and most of the action happens in the factory lunchroom. (I understand the setting, saw it clearly in my mind's eye, for the two summers I worked at one such place during college.)
I don't care to share any of the dialogue here. It didn't quite percolate like other plays (the recently-read The Busy World Is Hushed, et al), and maybe it was cleaned up in the rehearsals that this book was used for. I know some dialogue was changed, perhaps even considerably, from quotes I've seen in articles about the play that have key quotations said (and thus reading) differently.
The life of a play is interesting. So is the life of any one person, and of a relationship. Few writers explore these matters, and for the stage setting, than does Neil LaBute, the one-time IPFW instructor who became a big, famous film director, and who is well known for his incisive, gutting way with words.
What to say? It's Emerson. Emerson is eternal.
I like that a lot of his sentiments are echoed later by one Frederick Buechner, a personal fave, who surprised even himself in becoming a Presbyterian minister in his life, in addition to the Princeton instructor and scholar and writer he already was.
"I like the silent church before the service begins better than any preaching."
"Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory."
"I have sometimes thought that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated."
[what I'd like to believe about my own father:]
"My aunt had an eye that went through and through you like a needle. 'She was endowed,' she said, 'with the fatal gift of penetration.' She disgusted everybody because she knew them too well."
"Happy the man who never puts on a face, but receives every visitor with that countenance he has on."
"If you would know what nobody knows, read what everybody reads, just one year afterwards."
"We resent all criticism which denies us anything in our line of advance."
"I look with pity upon the young preachers who float into the profession thinking all is safe."
"Every vice is only an exaggeration of a necessary and virtuous function."
"The most tedious of all discourses are on the subject of the Supreme Being. ... Do not speak of God much. After a very little conversation on the highest nature, thought deserts us and we run into formalism."
And the beat goes on.
I like that a lot of his sentiments are echoed later by one Frederick Buechner, a personal fave, who surprised even himself in becoming a Presbyterian minister in his life, in addition to the Princeton instructor and scholar and writer he already was.
"I like the silent church before the service begins better than any preaching."
"Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory."
"I have sometimes thought that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated."
[what I'd like to believe about my own father:]
"My aunt had an eye that went through and through you like a needle. 'She was endowed,' she said, 'with the fatal gift of penetration.' She disgusted everybody because she knew them too well."
"Happy the man who never puts on a face, but receives every visitor with that countenance he has on."
"If you would know what nobody knows, read what everybody reads, just one year afterwards."
"We resent all criticism which denies us anything in our line of advance."
"I look with pity upon the young preachers who float into the profession thinking all is safe."
"Every vice is only an exaggeration of a necessary and virtuous function."
"The most tedious of all discourses are on the subject of the Supreme Being. ... Do not speak of God much. After a very little conversation on the highest nature, thought deserts us and we run into formalism."
And the beat goes on.
Oh, books -- I just can't quit you. Usually.
It's very seldom that I stop reading a book before finished, but I did with this one. I was more than halfway through, to note. Not to entirely lump this read in with them by any means, but as with a lot of self-help-y Christian books, To Be Told just gets repetitive, with a side dish of "I know you wish to inspire, but I've heard it all before."
Dan Allender's story of recovery from abuses and addictions in his own life to become a leading spiritually-minded psychologist and counselor is a captivating one to an extent, sure. His writing is just a bit bland, though sometimes vivid and engrossing, especially in links or metaphors or analogies he makes (ever the therapist).
I think this could've been a better long-form magazine article or essay or journal article rather than an all-out *book*.
It's a bad sign when what I look forward to most about a next chapter is the quote from a trusted, revered other writer that will start it. Shew. Allender does read and quote from some of the best, be it the psalmist or The Velveteen Rabbit.
That said, faves from this book (I'm so mean) from a couple of personal all-time authors:
"Why must holy places be dark places?"
-C.S. Lewis
(this quote, from Till We Have Faces [the retelling of the Cupid & Psyche myth:] could have me thinking for hours)
"God acts in history and in your and my brief histories not as a puppeteer who sets the scene and works the strings but rather as the great director who no matter what role fate casts us in conveys to us somehow from the wings, if we have our eyes, ears, hearts open and sometimes even if we don't, how we can play those roles in a way to enrich and ennoble and hallow the whole vast drama of things including our own small but crucial parts in it."
-Frederick Buechner
It's very seldom that I stop reading a book before finished, but I did with this one. I was more than halfway through, to note. Not to entirely lump this read in with them by any means, but as with a lot of self-help-y Christian books, To Be Told just gets repetitive, with a side dish of "I know you wish to inspire, but I've heard it all before."
Dan Allender's story of recovery from abuses and addictions in his own life to become a leading spiritually-minded psychologist and counselor is a captivating one to an extent, sure. His writing is just a bit bland, though sometimes vivid and engrossing, especially in links or metaphors or analogies he makes (ever the therapist).
I think this could've been a better long-form magazine article or essay or journal article rather than an all-out *book*.
It's a bad sign when what I look forward to most about a next chapter is the quote from a trusted, revered other writer that will start it. Shew. Allender does read and quote from some of the best, be it the psalmist or The Velveteen Rabbit.
That said, faves from this book (I'm so mean) from a couple of personal all-time authors:
"Why must holy places be dark places?"
-C.S. Lewis
(this quote, from Till We Have Faces [the retelling of the Cupid & Psyche myth:] could have me thinking for hours)
"God acts in history and in your and my brief histories not as a puppeteer who sets the scene and works the strings but rather as the great director who no matter what role fate casts us in conveys to us somehow from the wings, if we have our eyes, ears, hearts open and sometimes even if we don't, how we can play those roles in a way to enrich and ennoble and hallow the whole vast drama of things including our own small but crucial parts in it."
-Frederick Buechner
This book receives 4/5 stars from me purely because it's poetry masquerading as prose. It's not because of the story, which I found rather thin at times.
A lot of people struggle with reading Ms. Robinson, I know. I may well appreciate this book more with age, if I return to it again in 10, 20, or even 40 years. I'd no doubt find it an all-time novel then (as Time mag did, in its list of the 100 best of the 20th century). For now I am part of a generation that prefers instant gratification; we are the Veruca Salt-"I want it *now*, Daddy!" g-g-generation. Sadly.
To be sure, Housekeeping is a grower. The payoff does not come speedily at all here. I did not lay into this book with the verve that I did with twin books Gilead and Home. That may be due to her knack for archaic word choice and long, fluid sentences. The longer it tarried, Housekeeping became like a very good soup that I just soaked in through my eyes.
This is a book that demands to be read slowly. Not a lot of people are all right by that, wishing for their Dan Brown-esque page-turners or their sentence candy, be it a novel or nonfiction. It's also a book that should really be read aloud. It feels like an oral history, a retelling passed down through the ages of a particular, tragic family.
The ghosts of sisters Ruth and Lucille's family blanket every page in this book. They appear everywhere -- their grandmother, their mother Helen, their grandfather. All have gone before, in one way or another, but more than once it involved the lake by the Washington village called Fishbone in this novel. Grandfather went off a bridge in a massive, historic train wreck. Mom decided to play "Thelma & Louise" solo style, going rogue and driving her car off a cliff into the waters.
Parts of this book plod along, to be sure. The chapters involving the girls' aunts come to live with and care for them were especially dull to me, if not morose. (I did imagine the aunts in my mind as being Marge's chain-smoking sisters from "The Simpsons," though. That kept me going.)
When their aunt (their mother Helen's sister) Sylvie appears, train-hopping transient that she is, to tend to the orphans' needs, the story picks up. The last 4 chapters in particular, about 75 of the book's 220 pages, make for some of the most taut writing I may have ever read. (Summons to mind the last 3-5 pages of Annie Dillard's Holy the Firm, frankly -- and I do wonder what Dillard and Robinson might think of each other and their work, for I feel they're literary sisters themselves.)
As with the third Stars Wars prequel film, the story sort of ramps up to its conclusion in those final 4 chapters, in a way that it's basically forced to because so little has happened along the way. This is a rather existential, slow-burning book. It's also a marvel of craft, of imagery and wording. Robinson is truly a poet, and she knows it. Sometimes it's as though she's etymologically pleasuring herself, tho' not in a bad way.
Listen to the Gillian Welch song "Orphan Girl," even grant it repeated listens, and you will get the gist, the sullen and yet somehow still-hopeful gist, of this story. Were I to write for the screen a script for this story, I'd surely include that as my closing-credits song.
This book is a wordsmith's delight. It's fraught with meaning and thoughts and perspectives on loss and survival and so on. Robinson's writing is so dense and so simple at the same time. Take just the first line of chapter 9: "In the weeks that followed the sheriff came twice." Brilliant.
The beautiful thing about Housekeeping is that its main theme, transience, is the very thing that will propel it into readers' hands for generations to come. This is simply not a book you read on a Kindle device. Glory be.
Excerpts!
"I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected--an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows."
Now about that sheriff:
"I knew that his function was more than ceremonial. The people of Fingerbone and its environs were very much given to murder. And it seemed that for every pitiable crime there was an appalling accident. What with the lake and the railroads, and what with the blizzards and floods and barn fires and forest fires and the general availability of shotguns and bear traps and homemade liquor and dynamite, what with the prevalence of loneliness and religion and the rages and and ecstasies they induce, and the closeness of families, violence was inevitable. There were any number of fierce old stories, one like another, varying only in the details of avalanche and explosion, too sad to be told to anyone except to strangers one was fairly certain not to meet again."
And some of her writing on drifters, the homeless, is just amazing:
"They were like the people in old photographs--we did not see them through a veil of knowledge and habit, but simply and plainly, as they were lined or scarred, as they were startled or blank. Like the dead, we could consider their histories complete, and we wondered only what had brought them to transiency, to drifting, since their lives as drifters were like pacings and broodings and skirmishings among ghosts who cannot pay their way across the Styx. However long a postscript to however short a life, it was still no part of the story. We imagined that if they spoke to us they would astonish us with tales of disaster and disgrace and bitter sorrow, that would fly into the hills and stay there in the dark earth and in the cries of birds. For in the case of such pure sorrow, who can distinguish mine from thine? The sorrow is that every soul is put out of house."
She gets downright biblical at times, in the best way:
"Cain murdered Abel, and blood cried out from the earth; the house fell on Job's children, and a voice was induced or provoked into speaking from a whirlwind; and Rachel mourned for her children; and David for Absalom. The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. That is why the first event is known to have been an expulsion, and the last is hoped to be a reconciliation and return. So memory pulls us forward, so prophecy is only brilliant memory--there will be a garden where all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve, hooped in her ribs and staved by her spine."
Yea, so starts chapter 10, and those pages are delicious. Furthermore:
"Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting. I (and that slenderest word is too gross for the rare thing I was then) walked forever through reachless oblivion, in the mood of one smelling night-blooming flowers, and suddenly--My ravishers left their traces in me, male and female, and over the months I rounded, grew heavy, until the scandal could no longer be concealed and oblivion expelled me. But this I have in common with all my kind. By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it. So they seal the door against our returning."
Just how poetic and high-end is that description of what is the everyday occurrence of childbirth? The ordinary is just extraordinary -- that's Robinson in a nutshell. As C.S. Lewis has written, "There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal."
Oh, Marilynne Robinson is an acquired taste. But once you get into it, you can taste and see that the words are good. So good. She is wine.
A lot of people struggle with reading Ms. Robinson, I know. I may well appreciate this book more with age, if I return to it again in 10, 20, or even 40 years. I'd no doubt find it an all-time novel then (as Time mag did, in its list of the 100 best of the 20th century). For now I am part of a generation that prefers instant gratification; we are the Veruca Salt-"I want it *now*, Daddy!" g-g-generation. Sadly.
To be sure, Housekeeping is a grower. The payoff does not come speedily at all here. I did not lay into this book with the verve that I did with twin books Gilead and Home. That may be due to her knack for archaic word choice and long, fluid sentences. The longer it tarried, Housekeeping became like a very good soup that I just soaked in through my eyes.
This is a book that demands to be read slowly. Not a lot of people are all right by that, wishing for their Dan Brown-esque page-turners or their sentence candy, be it a novel or nonfiction. It's also a book that should really be read aloud. It feels like an oral history, a retelling passed down through the ages of a particular, tragic family.
The ghosts of sisters Ruth and Lucille's family blanket every page in this book. They appear everywhere -- their grandmother, their mother Helen, their grandfather. All have gone before, in one way or another, but more than once it involved the lake by the Washington village called Fishbone in this novel. Grandfather went off a bridge in a massive, historic train wreck. Mom decided to play "Thelma & Louise" solo style, going rogue and driving her car off a cliff into the waters.
Parts of this book plod along, to be sure. The chapters involving the girls' aunts come to live with and care for them were especially dull to me, if not morose. (I did imagine the aunts in my mind as being Marge's chain-smoking sisters from "The Simpsons," though. That kept me going.)
When their aunt (their mother Helen's sister) Sylvie appears, train-hopping transient that she is, to tend to the orphans' needs, the story picks up. The last 4 chapters in particular, about 75 of the book's 220 pages, make for some of the most taut writing I may have ever read. (Summons to mind the last 3-5 pages of Annie Dillard's Holy the Firm, frankly -- and I do wonder what Dillard and Robinson might think of each other and their work, for I feel they're literary sisters themselves.)
As with the third Stars Wars prequel film, the story sort of ramps up to its conclusion in those final 4 chapters, in a way that it's basically forced to because so little has happened along the way. This is a rather existential, slow-burning book. It's also a marvel of craft, of imagery and wording. Robinson is truly a poet, and she knows it. Sometimes it's as though she's etymologically pleasuring herself, tho' not in a bad way.
Listen to the Gillian Welch song "Orphan Girl," even grant it repeated listens, and you will get the gist, the sullen and yet somehow still-hopeful gist, of this story. Were I to write for the screen a script for this story, I'd surely include that as my closing-credits song.
This book is a wordsmith's delight. It's fraught with meaning and thoughts and perspectives on loss and survival and so on. Robinson's writing is so dense and so simple at the same time. Take just the first line of chapter 9: "In the weeks that followed the sheriff came twice." Brilliant.
The beautiful thing about Housekeeping is that its main theme, transience, is the very thing that will propel it into readers' hands for generations to come. This is simply not a book you read on a Kindle device. Glory be.
Excerpts!
"I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected--an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows."
Now about that sheriff:
"I knew that his function was more than ceremonial. The people of Fingerbone and its environs were very much given to murder. And it seemed that for every pitiable crime there was an appalling accident. What with the lake and the railroads, and what with the blizzards and floods and barn fires and forest fires and the general availability of shotguns and bear traps and homemade liquor and dynamite, what with the prevalence of loneliness and religion and the rages and and ecstasies they induce, and the closeness of families, violence was inevitable. There were any number of fierce old stories, one like another, varying only in the details of avalanche and explosion, too sad to be told to anyone except to strangers one was fairly certain not to meet again."
And some of her writing on drifters, the homeless, is just amazing:
"They were like the people in old photographs--we did not see them through a veil of knowledge and habit, but simply and plainly, as they were lined or scarred, as they were startled or blank. Like the dead, we could consider their histories complete, and we wondered only what had brought them to transiency, to drifting, since their lives as drifters were like pacings and broodings and skirmishings among ghosts who cannot pay their way across the Styx. However long a postscript to however short a life, it was still no part of the story. We imagined that if they spoke to us they would astonish us with tales of disaster and disgrace and bitter sorrow, that would fly into the hills and stay there in the dark earth and in the cries of birds. For in the case of such pure sorrow, who can distinguish mine from thine? The sorrow is that every soul is put out of house."
She gets downright biblical at times, in the best way:
"Cain murdered Abel, and blood cried out from the earth; the house fell on Job's children, and a voice was induced or provoked into speaking from a whirlwind; and Rachel mourned for her children; and David for Absalom. The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. That is why the first event is known to have been an expulsion, and the last is hoped to be a reconciliation and return. So memory pulls us forward, so prophecy is only brilliant memory--there will be a garden where all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve, hooped in her ribs and staved by her spine."
Yea, so starts chapter 10, and those pages are delicious. Furthermore:
"Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting. I (and that slenderest word is too gross for the rare thing I was then) walked forever through reachless oblivion, in the mood of one smelling night-blooming flowers, and suddenly--My ravishers left their traces in me, male and female, and over the months I rounded, grew heavy, until the scandal could no longer be concealed and oblivion expelled me. But this I have in common with all my kind. By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it. So they seal the door against our returning."
Just how poetic and high-end is that description of what is the everyday occurrence of childbirth? The ordinary is just extraordinary -- that's Robinson in a nutshell. As C.S. Lewis has written, "There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal."
Oh, Marilynne Robinson is an acquired taste. But once you get into it, you can taste and see that the words are good. So good. She is wine.
This 3-star rating seems almost obligatory. Ugh, so Rolling Stone of me.
Be that as it may, this is an entertaining little jam of a book, 85 pages, with a charming, well-timed illustration or a blank every other page. (I can get behind that.)
Leonard is the author of crime/caper thrillers the likes of Out of Sight and Get Shorty, and plenty of his stuff's been filmed. This list is primarily for fiction writing, novels, but is well worth keeping in mind regardless of what you read and/or write.
His rules:
1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues. ("They can be annoying, esp. a prologue following an introduction that comes after a forward.")
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. ("I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with 'she asseverated,' and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.")
4. Never use an advert to modify the verb "said." ("I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances 'full of rape and adverbs.'")
5. Keep your exclamation points under control.
6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose.
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. ("Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. ... I bet you don't skip dialogue.")
My fave's probably that last one. It immediately summoned to mind That Chapter in Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray, an otherwise perfect read.
Leonard tags on one more rule, summarizing them all:
"IF IT SOUNDS LIKE WRITING, I REWRITE IT."
Brilliant.
"If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character -- the one whose view best brings the scene to life -- I'm able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what's going on, and I'm nowhere in sight."
I enjoy how he calls out a couple fellow writers by name. Ballsy. But you can do that when you're a success of his brand. He also name-drops all the right authors -- Hemingway, Steinbeck, Atwood, Wolfe, Proulx, and so on.
Be that as it may, this is an entertaining little jam of a book, 85 pages, with a charming, well-timed illustration or a blank every other page. (I can get behind that.)
Leonard is the author of crime/caper thrillers the likes of Out of Sight and Get Shorty, and plenty of his stuff's been filmed. This list is primarily for fiction writing, novels, but is well worth keeping in mind regardless of what you read and/or write.
His rules:
1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues. ("They can be annoying, esp. a prologue following an introduction that comes after a forward.")
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. ("I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with 'she asseverated,' and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.")
4. Never use an advert to modify the verb "said." ("I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances 'full of rape and adverbs.'")
5. Keep your exclamation points under control.
6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose.
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. ("Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. ... I bet you don't skip dialogue.")
My fave's probably that last one. It immediately summoned to mind That Chapter in Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray, an otherwise perfect read.
Leonard tags on one more rule, summarizing them all:
"IF IT SOUNDS LIKE WRITING, I REWRITE IT."
Brilliant.
"If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character -- the one whose view best brings the scene to life -- I'm able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what's going on, and I'm nowhere in sight."
I enjoy how he calls out a couple fellow writers by name. Ballsy. But you can do that when you're a success of his brand. He also name-drops all the right authors -- Hemingway, Steinbeck, Atwood, Wolfe, Proulx, and so on.
Cornwell is very good at what she does, and she builds on her Kay Scarpetta protagonist's appeal and mystique with this crime novel. It's the only one I've read in the series, but I was engrossed. I don't read this stuff much at all (the James Pattersons, Dean Koontzes, and Tom Clancys of the world elude me), but her brand of it was enjoyable on this trip. I like that the heroine of this series is based on a real person, the (female) former chief medical examiner of Virginia. I also dig all the forensic science that Cornwell goes into detail about -- this was surely a literary precursor to "CSI" and other shows of that ilk.
Knowledge for Generations: Wiley and the Global Publishing Industry, 1807 - 2007
Timothy C. Jacobson, George David Smith, Robert E. Wright
A fascinating look inside the history of the publishing company John Wiley & Sons, Inc., headquartered in Manhattan and then Hoboken and with an office (where I work) in Indianapolis also. Little-known fact: Indy is where all of the For Dummies reads (those yellow books, yes) are produced. It's the top brand within the company, and I work on the travel branch of those books, as well as with Frommer's Travel Guides, still the no. 1 travel-book brand sales-wise, if not the most tragically hip (hello, Lonely Planet, you who got the shoutout in Oscar-nominated animated short Logorama).
Wiley Publishing celebrated its bicentennial in 2008. That's simply uncanny for a publishing house, or for any company at this stage of the American experience. As Wiley's president famously said in '08, "Countries celebrate 200 years, not companies." Quite true.
Wiley has published Melville, James Fenimore Cooper, and many others of note. The storied history is deep and wide. This book tells it, interestingly, in color. Literally. It's chock-full of engaging photos and intriguing facts and tales.
It's a wonderful company, then and now, for the fact that members of that Wiley family remain actively involved in the company's daily decisions, as three of the heirs to its founders sit on the corporate board. They also promote wonderful charitable efforts for the environment, for animal protection, and (of course) for literacy.
Recommended for anyone with a stake in the publishing business, and for anyone who simply digs history. It's okay, I know no one seeing this review will read it. ;-)
Wiley Publishing celebrated its bicentennial in 2008. That's simply uncanny for a publishing house, or for any company at this stage of the American experience. As Wiley's president famously said in '08, "Countries celebrate 200 years, not companies." Quite true.
Wiley has published Melville, James Fenimore Cooper, and many others of note. The storied history is deep and wide. This book tells it, interestingly, in color. Literally. It's chock-full of engaging photos and intriguing facts and tales.
It's a wonderful company, then and now, for the fact that members of that Wiley family remain actively involved in the company's daily decisions, as three of the heirs to its founders sit on the corporate board. They also promote wonderful charitable efforts for the environment, for animal protection, and (of course) for literacy.
Recommended for anyone with a stake in the publishing business, and for anyone who simply digs history. It's okay, I know no one seeing this review will read it. ;-)