I saw this today and I couldn’t help but post it here. Plus we’re all in need of a lighter post. NPR is holding a vote for the 100 Best Beach Books Ever. They received 600 nominations, which they narrowed down to a list of 200. Now you get to vote for 10, whether those [...]
Posts under ‘books’
Something I Long For and Can Never Find
For some time I’ve heard about the significance of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s work. Last year I tried to delve into Crime and Punishment but stopped around the halfway point. Now I wish I would have began with Notes from Underground. Notes is a first-person (but not autobiographical) account of a Russian man in mid-19th Century St. [...]
To Write for the Sake of Writing
Well ladies and gentlemen, apparently I’m having trouble keeping on schedule with these blog posts. I could make the argument that I have approximately three jobs right now, and that I’m only getting paid for two of them…but that’s a lousy excuse. And if I’m gonna slack on my blogging duties, the least I can [...]
A Creative Guide to Twitter
When it comes to Twitter, there are perhaps two or three different categories that people fall into. The first category consists of tech-savvy 25-and-older types, and most of these jumped on Twitter immediately, finding it a lot more interesting than other social media like Facebook. The second category might be people like myself, who have [...]
The Pen Is Mightier Than The Bomb
If in the last post I gave off the impression that I’m anything but an ardent fan of George Orwell, please allow me to correct myself. 1984 is one of my favorite novels. But recently I’ve become more aware of the less-than-coincidental similarities between that book and the way the modern world is governed. Orwell [...]
Henry Miller: Prototype For a New Kind of Protest
In the introduction to George Orwell’s Animal Farm, C.M. Woodhouse points out (in a 1954 London Times Literary Supplement) that, in Orwell’s criticism of other authors, “his recurrent theme was their failure to protest against the world they lived in. This is the whole burden of his longest and most serious piece of literary criticism, [...]
The Greatest Gatsby
The Great Gatsby wasn’t the first book I read more than once; that was The Call of the Wild by Jack London. And the reason I had read Gatsby twice so soon was, admittedly, because it was assigned reading in both high school (English) and college (Arts & Humanities) classes. However, I’ve developed this strange [...]
When The Bell Jar Descends
In an eerie coincidence, I’ve set out to write about The Bell Jar on the day after the anniversary of author Sylvia Plath’s death. For about 10 years, I’ve wondered what Plath’s story was all about. Ever since Edward Norton’s character in Fight Club mentioned Plath, I thought she must be an important author to [...]
The Emergency of Life in a Modern World
On a very un-nauseating inauguration day for the 44th President of the United States of America, Barack Obama, I turn to a book about a much less appealing human experience than we Americans are currently going through. The first novel by Jean-Paul Sartre seems to be one of the best templates for the Existentialist fiction [...]
A Reminder of Why I Made Supraterranean
This week while searching for freelance work, I happened to find the web site for Poets & Writers Magazine, the self-proclaimed “primary source of information, support, and guidance for creative writers.” Their home page currently features an article called “Agents and Editors: A Q&A With Four Young Literary Agents.” It’s essentially a five-page interview arranged [...]
