IF YOU LOVE BOOKS, DON’T READ THIS

Late Last Night Books

4-04-2016 – IF YOU LOVE BOOKS, DON’T READ THISSocial media icons

As a writer who spends endless hours alone glued to a computer, I’m well aware of the lure of Facebook, Twitter, and other digital distractions. And yet the more diatribes I read about social media addiction destroying civility and civilization, the more I am reminded of many age-old critiques of book-reading. So, at risk of incurring the wrath of book lovers everywhere, I have to ask: are books and social media all that different in their potential to distract us from our friends, family, and even ourselves?

Does Fiction Need Philosophy?

Late Last Night Books

Does Fiction Need Philosophy?

American writers rarely seem to have any formal philosophical training, wrote David Joiner to me recently (I am paraphrasing). Reading Flanagan’s biography of Yukio Mishima, he had been struck by how strongly and consistently the Japanese novelist’s work had been infused with his ideas, which amounted to a coherent philosophy concerning beauty, purity, and honour. Joiner, who is himself an accomplished novelist (Lotusland, Guernica Books, 2015), speculated that all great fiction probably has an underpinning of philosophy.

What I Learn for Fiction

Late Last Night Books

3/17/2016 – What I Learn for Fiction –

We mystery writers strive for accuracy in our fiction. This need propels us to listen to experts, surf the Internet, read unusual books, and sometimes make pests of ourselves.

In pursuit of accuracy, I asked the fire chief of a large metropolitan area what exactly was the protocol in responding to an emergency. His answer added depth and reality to that scene in my novel. I paid $250 for an eyewitness account, published in 1782, of traveling in Morocco, which helped immensely when I wrote my historical novel, Shadow of the Rock. All of us writers joke about what someone would think if he read the history of our Internet searches on poisons, guns, missing persons, fingerprints, burglar alarms, DNA as evidence and similar subjects.

What makes a good book series?

Late Last Night Books

3/7/2016   What makes a good book series?  And why do readers love them?

Check the best seller list on any given week and you’re bound to find lots of familiar authors writing about familiar characters. The heroes of mysteries and thrillers often lead the pack (Jack Reacher, Alex Cross, Lucas Davenport), but series characters also dominate in fantasy and even  appear in literary fiction (John Updike’s brilliant Rabbit series). That’s no surprise. Picking a book to read can be difficult and sometimes it’s easier (and safer) to spend a few hours with a character you know in the hands of an author you trust.

WHERE GO THE BOOKS?

Late Last Night Books

3-04-2016 – WHERE GO THE BOOKS?

No one was more surprised than me—a self-confessed book hoarder—when I let stack upon stack of books go free from my home. It all started when my 20-something daughter, packing up her childhood room, confronted me with a hallway of books that had lost their shelving status. My chance for redemption had at last arrived.
IMG_0501

Can Fitness Help You Become a Better Artist?

Late Last Night Books

Can Fitness Help You Become a Better Artist?

Living as we do in a world of Cartesian duality, most people would probably say, of course not. You use your mind when you’re writing; the body is irrelevant. It’s taken for granted that mind and body are distinct things that have very little to do with one another. And in the West, most people are much prouder of their brains than their bodies; I’ve never understood why, since both are largely inherited

Vampires, Werewolves, and Psychics, Oh My!

Late Last Night Books

2/17/2016 – Vampires, Werewolves, and Psychics, Oh My!

Vampires, werewolves, zombies, psychics—all have been popular in books over the years. Now a fellow writer is working on a novel with an otherwise normal protagonist who gains awareness of his extrasensory abilities.

Shades of J.B. Rhine. My critique group buddies know I am no fan of fantasy. My eyes glaze over at the first paragraph, but where does extrasensory perception, ESP or parapsychology as it’s known to its friends, stand? Fantasy or science? Being skeptical of all things psychical, I’m not sure how to take my friend’s writing. In the words of Hercule Poirot, I believe, this has given me furiously to think. What is going on in the world of extrasensory perception?

2/10/2016. THE GENDER BIAS BLIGHT IN NOVELS

Late Last Night Books

2/10/2016.  THE GENDER BIAS BLIGHT IN NOVELS

Think about the novel you’re reading now. Is the main character or protagonist a man? If the protagonist is a man, does the story also have strong female characters and do they get a reasonable amount of time in the spotlight? If the protagonist is a woman, how are the men defined? How often are they seen? In some of the very best novels, both classic and contemporary, most of the good parts are taken over by characters of one gender or the other. In fact, the high quality of writing in some novels helps mask the disparity in gender importance. Readers just don’t notice that the most interesting characters are all men—or women.

Another Look at Catcher in the Rye

Late Last Night Books

CITR_Salinger_Signet_294px2/7/16 — Another Look at The Catcher in the Rye

I don’t recall how old I was when I first read J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye–fourteen or fifteen, perhaps. Everyone seemed to be reading it then, and afterward, everyone seemed to adapt Salinger’s writing style. English classes became tedious as student after student read his “original” composition in an imitation of Holden Caulfield’s voice.

All of us wanted to be Holden Caulfield. We wanted to travel through New York as he did — alone, with money in our pockets, and at all hours. We wanted to read the books he liked, drink scotch, and call out the phonies. We liked that he was a straight talker, glib and slangy, a no-holds-barred kind of guy, our generation’s John Wayne.

WORLD’S FIRST NOVEL—AND THE WINNER IS…

Late Last Night Books

The Golden Ass, a Contender for World's First Novel

I just finished reading Sarah Ruden’s acclaimed translation of The Golden Ass, a 2nd  century AD, a  classic and wonderfully ridiculous work that has been called the world’s first novel. And then it dawned on me: just recently I had read (and blogged about) a couple of other first novels of sorts, The Tale of Genji and Don Quixote. I started wondering: just how many novels have claimed this title? 

COMING FEB. 1—GUEST BLOGGER MILLIE MACK

Late Last Night Books

February Guest Blogger is Millie Mack, author of the Faraday Murder Series featuring amateur sleuths CMille Mack's Caricaturearrie and Charles Faraday. The third book in the series–Take a Byte Out of Murder—is now available. She enjoys everything mysterious including books, videos, plays and especially jigsaw puzzles where completion of the puzzle reveals the solution to a crime.

A (Less Insular) Reading List for Students

Late Last Night Books

Having taught in an American university writing program for a dozen years, I am convinced that what my students need more than anything is to read more, and to read differently. Many of them do read a lot, but they are reading American writers and very little else. Recently I discovered that two of my most gifted graduate students had not read Graham Greene, which flabbergasted me. And this is not their fault–it’s the fault of the professors who keep feeding them the same predictable stuff. The obvious weakness of the contemporary fiction scene in the US (and of “Program Fiction”) is its homogeneity and its insularity.

THE PATHOS OF THINGS

Late Last Night Books

THIS IS NOT A REVIEW BY SONIA LINEBAUGHIMG_0398

This is not a review of British author Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes: Five stories of Music and Nightfall. It’s a meditation on impermanence inspired by his writing. 

Mono no aware is the Japanese idea of the pathos of things, expressed by Ishiguro as sensitivity for a past that seeps into the present of his characters’ lives. Their lives exist as words on paper, bound up in paragraphs of unresolved melancholy, tied inextricably to the falling of the day.

January 17 – Always Learning

Late Last Night Books

I am an avid reader of mysteries. No apologies. And I find I enjoy women writers more than male writers because I am often irritated by the usual male mystery writer’s lavish descriptions of fawning, willing and pulchritudinous women. Fantasy land. The acknowledged “grand dame” of mysteries is, of course, Agatha Christie. So it was with interest that I found out about a book called A Is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie by British chemist Kathryn Harkup. Amazon reviewers give it 4.5+ stars. Each chapter features a specific poison beginning, of course, with arsenic and continuing on to veronal.

This is by way of introducing the topic of the latest meeting of the Chesapeake Chapter of Sisters in Crime, an association of mystery writers and fans.

READING AND WRITING THROUGH THE YEARS

Late Last Night Books

Flipping through The New York Review of Books the other day, I realized my reading habits had changed drastically. Once upon a time I read every page from cover-to-cover – even the personal ads (in fact, I met my husband by answering one of them). What had changed wasn’t the The New York Review of Books. What had changed was me.

Happy Holidays!

Late Last Night Books

12/17/2015 – Happy Holidays and the best to you in the New Year!

wreathe copyHoliday messages surround us. We hear of Hanukkah candles lighting the stand against oppression; the Christian carolers singing of peace and brotherhood; and the Kwanzaa message celebrating family, community, and culture. Muslim festivals are at other times of the year, but their message of celebration and good wishes also spring from the well of kindness, hope, and good cheer.

But the most powerful tool we have toward peace and a better world is the written word. As Martin Luther said, “If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write.”

The Novels of Paul Auster

Late Last Night Books

12/7/2015 — Reading and Appreciating Paul Auster

Auster biggerI’ve become a big fan of the American writer Paul Auster—and not just because his first novella, City of Glass, was rejected by seventeen publishers before finding a home  and launching a prolific, thirty-year literary career (and yes, that means I’m a bit late in joining his fan club). I read the New York Trilogy (which includes City of Glass) last year and loved it, but it was only last month that circumstances led to me to pick up another Auster novel, Invisible (2009), which I found even more fascinating.

HATE REWRITING? GIVE IT TIME

Late Last Night Books

12/04/15 –  HATE REWRITING? GIVE IT TIME

Writing is rewriting. Like most writers, I do my best to apply this old adage, even though redrafting, revising, and “killing my darlings” often means a bruising battle with my ego. However, I recently discovered a pain-free way to rewrite: time. Time not only heals all wounds; it also anesthetizes the ego.

The Writer’s Responsibility

Late Last Night Books
010

Novelist Cristina Garcia with me at the University of Central Arkansas, November 20, 2015

The Writer’s Responsibility

In this age of global terrorism, impending war and inevitable ecological catastrophe, does the literary writer have any political responsibility? As a young man, I detested politics and saw myself as an aesthete. I would have answered that the artist’s role was merely to create works of beauty.

On Memoirs and Writing

Late Last Night Books

11/13/15 On Memoirs and Writing

I’ve never been one for reading memoirs. Oh sure, biographies, or a now and again autobiography, but memoirs just seemed too sticky for me. I never wanted to know that one of my favorite movie stars hated wire hangers, and beat her daughter, or really anything of the dirty laundry that takes place in the confines of a family. But this year I stumbled into the rabbit hole of the memoir.

Great War Novels for Veterans’ Day

Late Last Night Books

11/7/15 – VETERANS DAY READING: 11 GREAT WAR NOVELS FOR 11/11

There are many ways to honor the men and women who put on a uniform and risk it all for the nations that send them into war in the name of duty and patriotism. One obvious way is to put their stories in writing—fiction or nonfiction—so that others can read and remember the sacrifices they made. Among literature’s many intrinsic values is its ability to give readers a sense of what other people experience, to help us understand, empathize, and learn from the thing that others have done.

WORDS TO WRITE BY

Late Last Night Books

11/04/15 – WORDS TO WRITE BY

I knew a boy in high school who kept laminated copies of favorite quotations in his wallet. Impressed, I started collecting favorite quotes about writing and art and life myself, and pinned them near my desk as inspiration. I still have them. And, yeah, I realize I could just Google any and every quote on writing or anything else these days. But these are my own private curated collection, and before the paper yellows much more, I want to share a few words of wisdom I’ve kept at my side for a lifetime. 

Nov. 1 Guest Blogger Jen Michalski

Late Last Night Books

Coming up Nov. 1 – Guest Blogger Jen Michalski writes about the use of magical realism in fiction in her upcoming blog, “A Jolt of Vertigo.” Her fiction has always focused on domestic lives that ignite into disaster. Surprisingly, her first two novels rely heavily on magical realism. Jen Michalski is the author of the novels The Tide King and The Summer She Was Under Wajen michaelskiter, two collections of fiction, and a collection of novellas. Find her at jenmichalski.com.

Do You Know the First Thing About Writing Fiction? (It’s not craft!)

Late Last Night Books

Do You Know the First Thing About Writing Fiction? (It’s not craft!)

I’ve been thinking a great deal about how creative writing is taught in the US, about its strengths and weaknesses, and it seems to me that its great strength is that we teach craft very well, so well that there has probably never been a society that turns out so many competent, professional writers. As the Poetry Editor of a national magazine told me at AWP this year, most of the submissions he receives are technically accomplished—and yet very few of them are worth reading. Or as Robert Olen Butler describes his graduate students, they know nine of the ten things that fiction writers need to know very well—but they don’t know the first thing.