So, turns out lists of literary fiction are not that easy to find, unless you are looking for results from a particular year. That, however, is a list that I am not yet making. So I did my best. (Honestly, it’s not the easy to categorize literary fiction, anyhow. I’m pretty sure some of these…
Woah, this list took me a long time to scrape together. Please don’t make too much of it (as I have not read the vast majority of the books), but I wanted a place to start with titles that didn’t appear in my largely American- and Western European-heavy best books lists. This list is not…
Literature news!: Literature is news! (Did that make sense? What I’m saying is that it’s news that literature is news. Everywhere I go, I keep hearing about Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman. It’s like the literature world has busted right open and for a brief amount of time…
This is the third Bronte book I have read of the seven total novels the three sisters produced. I still have two of Charlotte’s, one of Anne’s, and Emily’s only one, which is the very next book I am starting. This has been an entertaining ride, so far. Anne is the youngest of all of…
Well, not really. She just happened to write a sequel (back in the day) to To Kill a Mockingbird which she thought little of. She, and the world, believed the manuscript was lost and Lee decided to quit the writing life, all in the 50s. Sure enough, some sixty years later, her lawyer finds the…
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, literary giant, died almost one month ago. Known affectionately as “Gado,” Marquez was first made internationally famous by his magic realism novel, One hundred years of solitude, and it remained his most famous and revered (a classic of the twentieth century), along with Love in the Time of Cholera. He won the…
Let’s get this settled once and for all. Where is the line between YA (young adult) and MG (middle grades) literature? What ages are we talking here, let alone themes and appropriateness? (Please note that this debate has been worn out just about everywhere else on the internet, but I have not settled it for…
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy, the translation by Joel Carmichael published by Bantam Books in 1981. The original was published in 1877. This is a solid book. It’s one of those real classics that fully deserves to be a classic. And, amazingly, it’s pretty great reading for the modern reader, as well. You do get…
Sitting in my most recent writers’ club meeting, my mind wandered to the issue of the modern reader and how a writer should and would respond. Most specifically, I was thinking about the attention span and the action requirements of the modern reader. Personally, I can relate. I have adult ADHD and even though I…
I pay close attention to first lines. One of my writer aspirations is to have such a great first line that they’ll be begging me to use it in the “First Lines” section of Poets & Writers. I read that section, every month, scrutinizing the novel lines. Then whenever I start a new book, I…
I have been reading an article in Poets & Writers about current writers (and book sellers) in Egypt. (Yes, I am a couple months behind on my trade reading.) With the continuing upheaval (think Arab Spring and then lots more) in the country, it is precarious to be a writer or to be selling modern…
The Sound and the Fury, written by William Faulkner, the corrected text published by Vintage International in 1984, but originally published in 1928 and (the Appendix) 1946. It is shocking how long it took me to get into this book. I don’t really like to know too much about a book before I read it,…
I have not been a fantasy fan for very long. It took a daughter who was very into The Chronicles of Narnia and then Harry Potter to change my averting, literary ways. And then I was handed a copy of The Once and Future King. Oh! Where have you been all my life, T. H.…
Lately I have heard and re-heard some very old writerly advice. It is this: Read. In other words, if you want to be a good writer, you need to read, and read a lot. Now, I have a little bit of a superstition of sorts about this. Actually, I guess it’s not really a superstition,…
About a week ago, my four-year-old son, Eamon, and I were having a conversation about heroes. He did not understand that there is a difference between superheroes and heroes, and began the conversation by stating that there are no real heroes. So I enumerated for him the types of heroes that a four-year-old would understand.…
Here is a list of my top twelve favorite books, out of the small fraction of total books in the world that I have actually read. I am an avid reader, but I just don’t have tons of time to sit around and read. Plus, there are plenty of books I have enjoyed, but they…
the starving artist 