Month: January 2021

• A couple articles on the Amazon amoeba;
  • How the company has altered the industry;
  • How the workflow goes when introducing new products;
• Decluttering your books, a primer;
• Dear American Terrorists: please stop using Captain America imagery, Sincerely, the family of the dude who created Captain America;
• Google doodle and Captain Underpants, together at last;
• Book Aid International did good work in 2020;
• On diamonds in literature;
• Sourcebooks donates 200K to RBG charities in her memory;
• Analog computers from a 16thC astronomy book;
• This lengthy article on what it was like to spend a year editing the ultimate Oulipo anthology could really use a few extra constraints of its own;
• Sarah Ferguson is doing a bodice ripper;
• The New Yorker is about to get a NMA recinded?;
• On being obsessed with locked rooms in mystery fiction;
• Toronto courseware company has some deep pockets;

Sort of a slow news day in the books world. It’s almost like the media is focused on other things, whatever they might be.

• On the death of Nordic noir;
• Take a tour of William Burroughs’ “bunker” at an old Y;
• Erich Kastner’s books were burned by Nazis… Now they’re back;
• On the origins of one Harriet, spy;
• Wunderkind Sally Rooney has a new book coming in the Fall;
• 135 publishers? Looks like Germany really needs this non-fiction prize;
• YA books for fans of Bridgerton? Listen, from the bits I’ve seen, I’m not sure one should lead to the other….;
• Part of the key to better creativity is listening, says author who can’t hear us;
• Finalists for 2020 Story Prize;
• Turns out Haruki likes to compare writing to other things… here’s a list;

Terry Brooks, a fantasy writer I grew up reading, talks about wanting to finish his epic Shannara series before dying, but also how this rush and his burnout made it not his best work.

(This is really just an excuse for me to rant about nerd culture for a bit, so buckle up.)

I post this here so you can point to it when self-entitled manchild-nerds start carping about Martin or Rothfuss finishing their stories, or about how the latest Star Wars didn’t reflect their tiny white male hero fantasies. Do you want a good book/movie or do you just want any old thing? Do you want to listen to a story or do you want to make one? Art takes time and isn’t ready until the artist is ready. Plus, if your theory about midichlorians and Admiral Thrawn didn’t pan out, it’s probably because you’re not a fucking artist making movies — you’re just life-support unit for minutiae and factoids about a fantasy story meant to entertain. You’re like a PhD in Uselessness.

(In summary, my old fall back rant: At what point did audiences start thinking they were investors who got a say in a product rather than consumers paying for the chance to view it? Get a life.)

If you’d been thinking about wrapping up the series and writing an end, why did it take you 20-something years to write it?

[Laughs.] Time. There’s really no point in doing it without a strong reason for doing it; and the strong reason was, I was burnt out. I didn’t really have anything more to say about the Shannara world. Number two, I wanted to do some other projects. I had other stories I wanted to tell. Finally, and this is something you can’t identify with, but when you get into your seventies, you start thinking about how much time you have left. I thought, “I’m going to be really pissed if I die and don’t get this written.” The concept that I’d had earlier in life — that I would live forever — might not turn out to be true. [Laughs.]

You wanted to make sure that you wrote the ending.

I tell everybody, I didn’t want Brandon Sanderson writing it! Brandon’s my friend so I can say that. [Laughs.] He’s the famous example of somebody who finished off Robert Jordan’s [work] — and did so better than I thought Robert Jordan. I didn’t want somebody to think he was better than I was. [Laughs.] 

• Bernadine Evaristo using new superpowers for good;
• Send this to your family members complaining about having to use all these new pronouns… “They” has been in consistent use for 100s of years;
• Q&Q previews the spring lineups for Canada;
• Thomson Highway interviewed;
• Nice simple (USA Today) primer for frothing conspiracy theorists: you’re using the term “Orwellian” wrongly;
• Everyone relax: Judy Blume has been vaccinated;
• Indie stores in the UK are growing, reports Beattie;
• What constitutes a “radical” bookstore (note: not TMNT comics on the rack);
• Apparently there’s a rule in mysteries: you can kill anyone but the dog… (Tell that to John Wick, the loveable mass murderer);
• Dublin chooses debut novel to read together;
• Want to see the cover for Stacey Abrams’ new thriller?;
• When learning about Sylvia Plath, don’t fall into the same old traps, warns author;
• Patricia Highsmith at 100;
• Interesting library stat shows majority of books borrowed aren’t “current”;

Who even knows what this next week has in store. So kit out your apocalypse gear and buckle up, because we’re going for a drive.

• Do you miss browsing the library outside of the search bar? Time to go VR;
• The nerds at Polygon offer a list of what they think were the best SciFi books of 2020;
• TeenVogue is doing the heavy lifting in the magazine world these days;
• Your reading slump explained in terms of your skull slurry;
• Is comedy crucial for crime writing?;
• Well, no surprise there: Obama’s book was 2020’s best seller;
• Imagine if this worked for poetry – Lil Nas X tweets to fans to buy his book and they do;
• Also unsurprising: Emily D was a little pent up;
• Data from France shows how people engage with books during Covid;
• Drs prescribing writing for therapeutic reasons? I need therapeutic help AFTER I’ve been writing;
• Fanfiction is big enough to crash the internet;
• Is the next book cover trend rainbow?;
• Is Ireland headed down the dark, tired road to banning To Kill a Mockingbird?;
• Dateline: name change… AAR becomes AALA;
• The rise of the apocalyptic novel;
• Dahl’s family has said “sorry” for his awfulness… does that matter?;

It’s Friday and we’re all getting ready to hunker down this weekend and survive the plagues, pestilence, slack-jawed riots, and roving gangs of psychotic 80s-punk themed cannibals driving souped-up muscle cars with corrugated metal welded to them for armour. Oh, wait, sorry…. just checked the calendar. That’s NEXT weekend. Enjoy!

• Jesse Wente on reframing Indigenous stories with joy;
• 2020 was US’s best print year in last 10…;
• …And indies across the globe seemed to be a large part of this;
• Simon & Schuster cancels Republican riot-inciter Hawley’s book and he’s screaming as though it’s everyone’s right to be published by S&S… Privilege illustrated (also, has there ever been a person who looked more like their name was “Josh” than this douchebag?);
• BOTD: Nora Zeale Hurston… spend some time with her work today;
• Philly Poet Laureate launches phoneline for “healing” poetry;
• A brief history of reading;
• Hey, the ReLit awards are back… And while everyone is glad for an extra recognition machine, no one is asking if anything has changed… Is it still just a jury of one? Is there any transparency whatsoever on who chooses what books get considered? etc. Same questions as before;
• Richard Ford muses on how American got to this point;
• CrimeReads looks at the many, sometimes sinister, retellings of Jane Eyre;
• And something nice to end on: a look back at The Wind in the Willows;

There is nothing else happening anywhere else in the world except here in this book news post. Repeat that sentence quietly to yourself five times and make a cup of tea.

• Is Trans fiction ready for the mainstream? Torrey Peters interviewed (and reviewed here);
• I will buy Stacey Abrams’ upcoming thriller book in thanks, if nothing else;
• “How did all these books get into my house?” Could be a memoir title;
• Rediscovering Mr. Bliss (was on regular rotation in our house);
• 33 writers on why they write at LitHub;
• TNR, Arial, and Helvetica win the font favourites… but why? (My fav is Garamond — see BN logo);
• RIP: William Link, creator of Columbo and Murder, She Wrote, dead at 87;
• Salmon Poetry has been shaking Ireland up for years;
• Do you follow Reece’s book club? Here’s your new pick;
• Ever wanted to own a whole library… building included?;

Hey, it’s once again time for Canada to come together in a literary endeavor (minus poetry) to read a single (non-poetry) book that defines us as a nation of (non-poetry) readers and brings (non-poetic) ideas to the fore for us to reflect (prosaically) on who we are as a people (spoiler: not poetry readers). It makes me so proud that I’ve decided to drop the u from colour.

This article at Tor is really just an excuse for me to ramble for a bit about how I’ve been rereading a bunch of genre books I read as a teen and how those books have changed in when passing through my older, presumably greyer, grey matter. Solaris (fantastic and bizarre and how did I even find this book as a kid?), Dune (I just don’t have the zeal to go through it all again), Neuromancer (checks out), Dragonlance (so terribly written that I’m ashamed of my younger self for bearing with them), the various David Eddings books (lists of things that happened with some good moments), The Dragonbone Chair series by Tad Williams (a genuinely great fantasy story), Lord of the Rings (soooo muuuuch weather), the Fionavar Tapestry by Kay (masterpiece), etc. Do they all hold up? No. But do they all tell me something about who I became? Sure. And some books, like Solaris and the Fionavar Tapestry, really offer MORE to me now than they did back then. So it’s not a bad exercise to head back and comb through your personal set of golden oldies.

I recently found myself combing through some boxes of old books and papers and came across a fascinating personal artifact. On the surface it’s a pretty unremarkable object, just a crumbling spiral-bound notebook covered in childish graffiti. But inside is over a decade of my life—a handwritten list of every book I read between 4^th grade and college graduation. Looking through it was a bit like spelunking into the past, a unique look at the strata of different life stages, delineated by changes in handwriting and shifting interests like so many compressed layers of rock.

Paging through the tattered old list, I was seized by a sort of anthropological interest. If different parts of the list reflect phases of my life, what would happen if I took a deep dive into one of these distinct stages and revisited some of those stories? One place in particular caught my interest: from about the age of 12-15 there is a sort of genre bottleneck where my tastes suddenly narrowed from an indiscriminate mix of anything and everything to a very distinctive preference for fantasy and (to a lesser extent at the time) science fiction. There were dozens of titles to choose from, so I picked a handful of stories that conjured up particularly strong feelings, like sense memories that come back clearly even when my actual recollection of the stories is hazy (or nonexistent).

• Scumbags Zoombomb Giller reading with Canlit’s nicest person;
• How Amazon profits from book piracy (pitchforks and torches, people);
• On New Year’s resolutions and the creative mind;
• Ever wonder how SciFi authors make up their crazy-assed shit and then build worlds around it that fit?;
• Never fuck up nerd stuff around a nerd – you will never hear the end of it;
• Industry stocks are down;
• Navel-gazer Knausgaard gazes into what writers and editors do;
• Expand on that BLM momentum from 2020 and buy some books from this list of 44 Women of Colour;
• Why Marian Engel’s The Bear will still maul your mind (audio);
• One of the oldest and most in-depth book sites on the net is The Complete Review, home of the Literary Saloon blog… Here’s a round-up of their 2020 posts, if you like meatier books coverage than provided here… Foreign lit and translation is a specialty there… I encourage you to go expand your brain;
• The story of young Malcolm X;
• What’s selling well in China?;
• RIP: Eric Jerome Dickey, bestselling author, dead at 59;
• Gatsby prequel releases to mixed reviews;
• Are you a PS4 owner who longed for the days of Neuromancer, but ended up feeling ripped off when Cyberpunk 2077 didn’t run well on your machine? Here’s a list of palette cleanser books (full disclosure, I quite like the game on PC);