I usually don’t like to dive into the political arena with this blog as there are plenty of other blogs out there dedicated just that subject. However, when one writes a blog on literature/writing, and deals with subjects like free speech, sometimes it’s hard to avoid brushing on a few political topics every now and then.

I’m sure many of you have already seen the news about The New Yorker magazine’s new front cover. For those of you who haven’t seen or heard, here’s a brief description from this New York Times article:

The cover of the magazine depicts Mr. Obama wearing a turban, while he offers a fist bump to his gun-toting wife. An American flag singes behind them in the fireplace.

The link to that article will also give you a glimpse of the controversial cover. Obviously, on the surface, the way Obama is depicted can be considered offensive. It’s meant to stir up feelings of hatred, fear and maybe even a little patriotism. But the picture is not meant to be looked at "just on the surface". It’s satire.

Continue Reading

Our society has become very impatient with just about everything. We can now do research and collect vast amounts of information with the click of a mouse via the internet. We carry around various gadgets and devices so we can do our work when away from both the home and office. We even speed through rush hour traffic to get to work faster (I never really understood this one).

But if there is one thing we (I’m mostly talking about Americans here) don’t rush, is the novel. I recently came across this post from the Guardian Unlimited that takes a lot of jabs at us, gives us credit for one thing:

When it comes to the novel, however, Americans are still willing to take it slow, or at least reward the writers who do. Indeed, in recent years a highly visible group of "Great American Novels" have emerged from 10, 12, and even over 20-year gestation periods.

Continue Reading

It turns out that younger kids read a lot more for fun than their teenage counterparts. I came across an interesting article on Publishers Weekly that gives the results of a study done by Scholastic. In part, the article says:

The study found that a majority of children (68%) think it is "extremly" or "very" important to read for pleasure, and "like" or "love" doing so. However, that number decreases with age: 82% percent of children ages five to eight "like" or "love" reading, compared to 55% for children ages 15 to 17. It also found that although children can readily envision a future in which reading and technology are increasingly intertwined, nearly two thirds prefer to read physical books, rather than on a computer screen or digital device.

Continue Reading

…No, not the store Borders!

Before you plan a globe-trotting journey with your iPhone, Amazon Kindle/Sony Reader and that MacBook Air, you might want to keep reading.

A new international agreement planned to be adopted at the upcoming G8 Summit, would basically give border authorities of any participating nation the right to search your electronic gadgets in search of material that infringes on copyrights.

This means that if you are going through a border crossing (even through customs at an airport), the authorities can open your laptop (for example) and look through your files without probable cause. According to the Teleread Blog, which is where I first came across this story, says that there is little oversight for this agreement because it would…

…reportedly allow border guards in any covered country to seize your iPod, laptop, Sony Reader or Kindle—if the guards believed you’d used your evil gizmo to infringe copyright.

Lawyers to protect you? Fergit. And no appeals.

Continue Reading

A little over a year ago I wrote a post about plot vs. character-based fiction (read it here). I basically made the point that "literary fiction" is more character-based, whereas genre (mainstream) fiction is more plot based.

But recently, I was doing a little wikisurfing and I came across this Wikipedia entry for literary fiction. While Wikipedia is not the definitive source of information for any topic, it does give a pretty good overview of what literary fiction is. Aside from what I mentioned above, literary fiction generally has these "properties" that define it as "literary":

Continue Reading

Most literary types are hard pressed to give up even a single book from their collection. I often think that books are to bookworms that trophies are to jocks. Books are like trophies; they represent a sort of literary conquest where you can say "Yes, I read that."

But what do you do with all those books? I wouldn’t recommend getting rid of them. I had a literature professor in college who told us that you will never need a specific book until you give it away (or sell it). He then went on to tell us of his own house which had stacks and stacks of books covering the floor in every room. I believed him.

Continue Reading

I’m always on the lookout for new ways to consume literature. I have a Sony Reader that I love, but don’t use that much (mostly due to Sony’s poor book selection). And I have an iPhone that I use daily – for everything from making calls, surfing the net, checking/writing email, listening to music and watching movies. Yep, it would be hard to find me going about my day without my iPhone by my side.

And thanks to a great service called Readdle, I can now read ebooks on my iPhone without having to hack it or make any other changes that void the warranty. Here’s how it works: You sign up for a basic account (which is free) and they give you 50MB of storage. Okay, it’s not exactly enough to read  War and Peace, but it does give you a basic idea of how the service works.

Of course there is an option to upgrade your account. For $5/month you get 1GB of storage, the ability to read your docs offline (great for flying), and a bookmarking feature so you don’t have to scroll through 100 pages to find your spot. For $10/month, a whopping 5GB of storage and can store an unlimited number of documents.

Continue Reading

Earlier this year I espoused my views on why short fiction is so great in this post. I don’t want to just re-hash the same reasons I gave back in January, that’d be a waste of my time as a blogger and your time as a reader. But as the the title states, I do want to revisit my love for short fiction. I have been prompted to write this post because of my recent binge of short fiction reading, which has really reignited my love for this greatly under appreciated literary form.

A short story is a self-contained, miniature work of art. It is short enough to read in one sitting, giving the reader a unified experience that is unbroken. And like poetry, a short story demands a lot from each word, sentence and paragraph. The characters must be developed quickly and the plot must waste no time getting started. I find it somewhat odd, however, that most short fiction isn’t the action-packed work that we find in novels. There are no dramatic chase scenes or gruesome description of murders, at least not in the short stories I read.

Continue Reading

I have always maintained on this blog that if you want to be a writer, then you must read a lot. But not everyone agrees with that simple rule. So I wasn’t all that surprised when I came upon this article from the Guardian Unlimited where the writer describes an argument with his brother, and his brother maintains it is not good for a writer to do a lot of reading. Here’s what he says:

Reading too much, my brother explained in his English-teacherly way, is a disaster for a writer. To immerse yourself in literature – particularly those of your contemporaries – makes your work derivative at worst, and unoriginal at best.

This appears to be more of a critique of contemporary fiction than an argument for writers to shun reading. My response to such an argument would be that a budding writer should read everything from contemporary fiction to the classics and everything inbetween. Being a prolific reader of all types of works can only help and improve you as a writer.

Continue Reading

Many of us bookworms take reading for granted. Sounds like a silly thing to say, right? Well consider this, our brains were not "designed" for reading. At least not initially.

I came across a review of the book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain from the Telegraph and couldn’t help but write a post on the subject. I normally don’t write posts about book reviews, but this one seemed particularly suitable since the review itself is a very good read.

Continue Reading