Insights - Late Last Night Books

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CHARACTERS I’LL NEVER FORGET

6/10/2014—CHARACTERS I’LL NEVER FORGET

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving is a long, dense book filled with love, friendship, loss, fear, disappointment—nearly the gamut of human emotions. I love everything about this rich book, but the feature that made the most indelible imprint on my mind was Owen Meany. Every time I glance at the book, wherever it happens to be lying, I see Owen. Whenever I mention the book, or anybody asks me about it, I see Owen. Owen is a unique assembly of physical and mental characteristics who for me will always be the symbol of John Irving’s writing.

So who is Owen?

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MAKING TIME FOR SERENDIPITY

6/4/14 – MAKING TIME FOR SERENDIPITY

Inexplicably, I found A.S.A. Harrison’s novel The Silent Wife, on my nightstand. Where did this book come from? Did my mother leave it for me? Did I buy it for a book club meeting I couldn’t attend and abandon it? I had no clue, but I picked it up and started reading.

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GUEST BLOGGER: The Best Kind of Trouble is Girl Trouble.

6/1/2014.

GUEST BLOGGER: The Best Kind of Trouble is Girl Trouble
So you’re trying to come up with a compelling story—one with drama, tension, and maybe even some danger. My suggestion for a go-to main character: a teenage girl.

Teenagers may not seem like an ideal main character, especially for a mystery. They’re under their parents’ thumbs so they can’t easily investigate crimes. They don’t usually have a wealth of resources at their disposal. They can’t be FBI agents or police officers or even dirty politicians.

But teenagers, especially teenage girls, can realistically bring some other wonderful qualities to the table, namely

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How Much Is It Worth? – May 26, 2014

HOW MUCH IS IT WORTH? – May 26, 2014

I recently heard high praise for a book by a new author and immediately went online to purchase the ebook. When I saw the price however, I was shocked. $12.99 for an ebook?! The Bird Box by Josh Malerman, and published by HarperCollins, was so highly praised, I thought it was bound to be great. But that price completely turned me off. The publisher wisely dropped the price after only a week, to $9.99 and even though I felt that was still a high price for an ebook, I went ahead and bought it. After reading it, I wish I’d waited a bit longer.

The experience led me to ask, what’s a book worth?

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What’s Cozy About Crime?

5/17/2014
I enjoyed a weekend of murder and mayhem this month at Malice Domestic, an annual convention of cozy mystery authors and fans in Bethesda, Maryland. I met some of my favorite authors and learned a whole lot about common poisonous plants and the Washington, D.C. Crime Lab.

What is a cozy? Even authors and fans try their hand at definitions. Generally, it is a crime novel without the blood and gore with an amateur detective who is somehow involved with the victim and/or suspect. Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple series is a prime example. Current authors include Margaret Maron, Joan Hess,

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Dave Barry, The Complete Guide to Guys

A HUMOROUS EXCERPT FROM DAVE BARRY’S THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO GUYS

At Three Editors Journal I read the excerpt below from Dave Barry’s The Complete Guide to Guys, immediately went to Amazon, read more, and bought the book. Here’s the excerpt from the Journal:

Let’s say a guy named Fred is attracted to a woman named Martha. He asks her out to a movie; she accepts; they have a pretty good time. A few nights later he asks her out to dinner, and again they enjoy themselves. They continue to see each other regularly, and after a while neither one of them is seeing anybody else.

And then, one evening when they’re driving home, a thought occurs to Martha, and, without really thinking, she says it aloud: “Do you realize that, as of tonight, we’ve been seeing each other for exactly six months?”

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MY BURDENS, MYSELF: WHY I CAN’T GIVE AWAY BOOKS

5/4/14 – MY BURDENS, MYSELF: WHY I CAN’T GIVE AWAY BOOKS

My daughter is giving away her books. I feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach.

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Who? What? Why? Character, Plot, and What compels Us To Turn the Page

5/1/14 – WHO? WHAT? WHY? GUEST BLOGGER SHERRY AUDETTE MORROW ON CHARACTER, PLOT, AND WHAT COMPELS US TO TURN THE PAGE

On two occasions last December the UPS guy knocked on my front door with packages from Amazon. Each contained a book I had read about and was eager to read, but had not purchased — Donna Tartt’s 2014 Pulitzer Prize winner The Goldfinch and Julian Barnes’s 2011 Man Booker Prize winner The Sense of an Ending. A mini-plot emerged in the minutes it took to carry these boxes inside and slice the tape that sealed them: What was in the packages? Who had sent these books? Who even knew I had wanted to read them?

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PREVIEW OF OUR MAY 1 GUEST BLOGGER, SHERRY AUDETTE MORROW

4/29/14 – PREVIEW OF OUR MAY 1 GUEST BLOGGER, SHERRY AUDETTE MORROW

Which comes first in a novel, the character or the plot? Sherry Audette Morrow is uniquely qualified to offer insights about how these two critical elements can make readers want to turn the page. Sherry is the founding editor of Scribble magazine (www.scribblemagazine.us) as well as a freelance writer/editor and a past president of the Maryland Writers’ Association. Her articles, poetry, and short fiction have appeared in numerous publications, including Chesapeake Life, Baltimore magazine, the anthology New Lines From the Old Line State, and Mean Girls Grown Up. I’ve benefited first-hand from her discerning literary eye, and I’m so pleased that readers of Late Last Night Books will have the opportunity to share this as well.

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Broccoli and Books

BROCCOLI AND BOOKS

4/26/2014 – Sometimes I feel as if I need to grab people by the shoulders and shake them while screaming, “but you HAVE to read this book!” This form of persuasion usually overtakes me after hearing someone say, “I don’t read (insert some genre).”

If you don’t read a particular genre (romance, fantasy, mystery, military, sci fi), how could you possibly know if you’d like it or not? Isn’t refusing to try something from a different genre a bit like a child who refuses to taste broccoli before deciding he doesn’t like it?

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Losing the Label

4/13/14 – LOSING THE LABEL

“She’s an old maid! She never married … She’s just about to close up the library!”

Recognize that line? It’s from the film It’s A Wonderful Life and illustrates the sad fate of Mary Hatch had her husband George Bailey never been born. That’s right; the poor thing would have lived her life repressed, bespectacled, alone. In short, she’d have been … *gasp* … a librarian!

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SO MANY BOOKS, SO LITTLE TIME

4/10/2014. SO MANY BOOKS, SO LITTLE TIME

Every few days I receive an email suggesting new novels I might like to read. I hear from Kirkus Reviews, Oprah’s Book Club, the Washington Independent Review of Books, Goodreads, and more. Granted, I asked to be on these mailing lists, but occasionally I find so much information overwhelming. And that doesn’t even count the bestseller lists and reviews. So many good novels are coming out every day that I’ll never be able to read them all. Priorities must be set, but how?

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IN PRAISE OF THE LONG NOVEL

4/4/14 – IN PRAISE OF THE LONG NOVEL

Pundits have it that the age of the long, rambling novel is over. Having just read two super long books with book clubs that couldn’t get enough of them, I beg to differ.

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What Are You Reading?

3-23-14 WHAT ARE YOU READING?

On Late Last Night Books we’re always writing about books and authors, but what are people reading? I took my questionnaire to people I know and people I don’t know, asking: What are you reading late at night? Why? What do you do by day? The answers might surprise you.

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Deadline: Istanbul

3/17/2014 -DEADLINE: ISTANBUL

Mystery as travel guide? That’s how I read Deadline: Istanbul, Peggy Hanson’s novel featuring a journalist named Elizabeth Darcy as amateur detective. Of course, Darcy carries Jane Austin with her wherever she goes.

Peggy spoke last week at a meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Chapter meeting of Mystery Writers of America, an organization for mystery and crime writers. She wore an Egyptian dress in memory of Elizabeth Peters, pseudonym of mystery author Barbara Mertz, who died last year.

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THE SCARY AUTHOR PHOTO

3/13/14 THE SCARY AUTHOR PHOTO

Confession: that little thumbnail photo of me up in the left-hand corner of my posts is over ten years old. It was taken right before my first book was published, although it never ventured much farther than my publisher’s website. I am famously photo-phobic. I didn’t even want to be in my own wedding pictures. But even I know that a ten-year-old picture is pushing the boundaries of both usefulness and credibility. Do I still look like that? Sure, if you squint or stand real far away.

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Should only positive book reviews be published?

3/7/14 – IS THERE STILL A ROLE FOR THE NEGATIVE BOOK REVIEW?

The world of the book review is getting mighty hard to navigate. With more and more publications tightening their belts, eliminating book supplements, and pink slipping reviewers, serious literary criticism (think James Wood in the New Yorker or Dwight Garner in The New York Times) has become a very rare commodity. At the same time, online book review sites of widely varying quality are proliferating, with new ones popping up every day.

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GUEST BLOGGER BARBARA WESTWOOD DIEHL ON THE ENDURING APPEAL OF THE SHORT STORY

3/1/14 – GUEST BLOGGER BARBARA WESTWOOD DIEHL ON THE SHORT STORY’S ENDURING APPEAL

Yes, I complain about the volume of submissions. (502 in the last 22 days, and 256 of those are short stories.) I complain about the time away from my own writing. I complain about all the administrative tasks of running a literary journal—I won’t put you to sleep with that laundry list—but all those tasks have nothing to do with the intoxicating work of reading hundreds of short stories each submission period. Yes, all of them, not only the stories that we finally publish. I’m humbled , stunned really, to have all those stories entrusted to me.

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A Review – The Gates of Babylon

02/26/2014 THE GATES OF BABYLON BY MICHAEL WALLACE – A REVIEW

We know what we like and we like what we know. That simple logic is what draws readers to books that are part of a series. We like the consistency of knowing what we’ll get when we throw down our hard earned dollars for some reading entertainment. If we like the storyline and the characters in one book, we hope the author will be consistent and bring us the same great storytelling in the next and the next.

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S. Linebaugh interviews author Bill Lambrecht

2/23/14 Linebaugh interviews author Bill Lambrecht

“I’m a black- hearted dog,” author Bill Lambrecht confesses in Big Muddy Blues. “Th muddy_author1 e contempt American Indians feel towards me at the moment might even rival the store they reserve for the Army Corps of Engineers.” Lambrecht’s nonfiction is like this, telling a big story in personal terms, sweeping the reader with him on a journey of discovery.

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2/17/2014 – Ethiopia and the Graphic Novel

2/17/2014 – ETHIOPIA AND THE GRAPHIC NOVEL

I recently toured Ethiopia, a beautiful country rich in history and historical monuments, including rock-hewn churches dating from the 12th century–some still in use. Many of the church interiors I visited are painted with Biblical scenes and stories told in panels across the walls and ceilings. They all seem more vivid and accessible than the paintings, frescoes and stained glass that decorate European churches and cathedrals.

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The Best-selling Genre Nobody Reads

2/13/14 – THE BEST-SELLING GENRE NOBODY READS

“She gasped in surprise as he ripped the garment apart, spilling free the ripe fullness of her bosom before his hungering eyes.” (Come Love A Stranger, Kathleen Woodiwiss)

Do you ever curl up with a big, juicy, historical romance? Did you just now roll your eyes at the question?

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What Dickens Knew: The Importance of Character

2/4/14 WHAT DICKENS KNEW: THE IMPORTANCE OF CHARACTER

Near the beginning of Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip, there is a delightful moment in which Mr. Watts tells his students that they will soon be meeting Mr. Charles Dickens of London, England. The students rarely see a white man in their isolated village in Papua New Guinea so they come back the next day with great expectations. Initially disappointed to learn the author has been dead for over a century, they quickly become enthralled as Mr. Watts starts reading Dickens’s last novel aloud.

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OUTING MYSELF AS A NOVELIST

2/4/14 – OUTING MYSELF AS A NOVELIST

My novel Permanent Makeup came out last month, as many of my friends and colleagues quickly discovered on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Their discovery, as much as I hate to admit it, may be even more novel than the novel.

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2/1/14 – I CAN’T KEEP FICTION WRITING IN THE CORNER

2/1/14 – I CAN’T KEEP FICTION WRITING IN THE CORNER

When I open my laptop to write fiction, I have the odd sensation that the screen is something of a mirror — a magical, looking glass through which I stepinto another world. First, I can see a shadowy version of myself on the screen. A few seconds later a stronger light begins to shine, my shadow disappears, and the magic takes over.

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