JK Rowling nearly had “to stow her top secret notes for book seven” of the Harry Potter series when flying from New York to England recently due to restrictions on carry on items. “They let me take it on thankfully, bound up in elastic bands,” she told fans on her Web site and attested that she would have sailed back if she had not been able to take the pages with her in the plane. The Guardian has all the details. It would be easy to poke fun at Rowling’s dilemma, but I’d rather push them to let books back on planes (flights between the U.S. and Britain still face baggage restrictions due to the recently foiled terror plots). I can’t imagine flying without a book or two. That’s when I get my best reading done.
Flying with the Boy Wizard
Still on the road
I stepped into a book store in the old city of Barcelona. It was spacious and well lit with dark wood shelves and floors. Many langauges were well represented including a wide selection of English language books. It is very easy to take a shot at American bookstores when comparing them to bookstores overseas, and it's really remarkable to see the difference in person. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be an expat, estranged from my country, but sometimes yearning for contact. I think I would spend a lot of time in a bookstore like that and it would fill the void for me. With the jet lag and all that, I was having trouble diving into another book. I guess I needed a change of pace to reflect the change of scenery, so I fished into the bag of books I brought with me and came up with this beauty: Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware. I have always been drawn to certain of the visual story telling forms: typically not so much the action hero stuff, but certain "graphic novels" have caught my attention. I also like to flip through a collection of "newspaper funnies" from time to time, Calvin and Hobbes, for example, is always a delight. Rarely, however, have I encountered a book that transcends the genre like Jimmy Corrigan. This book has already received a chorus of praise and numerous awards. In a lot of cases, in fact, no one had ever considered that a graphic novel might be eligible to win certain of the awards, but this one was just too good to be ignored. I have been on a good stretch with books lately; I haven't been disappointed in while, but my next book is a bit riskier: The Lonely Hearts Club by Raul Nunez... I'll let you know how it goes...I'm off to Ireland tomorrow, and there might not be internet there, but I will try my best; if not, we'll catch up when I get back to the states.
More NaNoWriMo
Sloganeering rightly takes me to task for my sloppy framing of the NaNoWriMo debate - primarily the fact that I make no attempt to present the opposite point of view - and does it for me by pointing to Websnark's pro-NaNoWriMo post from a year ago.Clearly some people find NaNoWriMo useful (or at least fun) or it wouldn't still be around, but I question the idea that it's good for aspiring writers. Websnark presents four reasons why NaNoWriMo is an instructive exercise. The first three touch on the idea that if you want to be a writer, you have to stop being lazy and/or afraid and you have to write every day. This is undoubtedly true, and at the very least NaNoWriMo shows people how hard this really is, though I have my doubts that very many people continue to write every day on December 1 and beyond, which is the point, right? Essentially, I'm not convinced that there's an easy trick to learning how to write every day, or even that it can be taught at all.Websnark's last reason for liking NaNoWriMo is that "There are worse reasons to form a community than creativity," and that is about the best defense of NaNoWriMo that I can come up with as well. There certainly worse, less productive things one could do with one's time, and NaNoWriMo makes a solitary, often grueling endeavor fun and social, if only for one month out of the year. But, then, if writing weren't solitary and grueling, we'd all have novels out.
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What’s next for Mrs. Millions?
Mrs. Millions has decided that if I'm going to do all this blogging she should get something out of it, too. She reads a lot, and it seems that I'm always digging through our bookshelves looking for another book for her to read. Well, I'm running out of ideas, so she's decided to bypass me and go straight to you guys. She has thoughtfully provided her recent reading preferences to help you select something to her liking. You'll notice here, as well, the attention Mrs. Millions pays to the look and feel of the books she reads, so you may want to factor that in.Like Max, I look forward to vacation because it demands that vast amounts of time be spent reading. Unlike Max, I do not have a reading queue but instead rely upon recommendations (always Max's) for what to read next, or I search for an appealing title and cover from the Millions library, letting chance encounters determine my next choice. But now, Max is kindly letting me use the blog to place a request for suggestions... I call it "What's next for Mrs. Millions?"My most recent read is Small Island by Andrea Levy, which I am presently halfway through and am enjoying because it is fiction that weaves itself through history without being too tightly bound to it. Levy's book also has an incredibly intentional feel to it and it is filled with vivid detail. The book is printed on paper that is like newsprint with rough edges - the tactility of a book impresses me as much as the content. Prior to this was Case Histories by Kate Atkinson. This was not among my favorites, primarily because the story was too neat with not enough depth, and it's a hardcover with bookjacket (which I immediately removed, as I often do). But it had a tough act to follow: The World According to Garp by John Irving is messy and endearing, pressing all the wrong and right buttons. Ours is an older copy, used before we acquired it which seemed in step with the novel - I even kept this one's jacket on. And before that was John Steinbeck's East of Eden, my favorite among this group.With that brief history in mind, please send Max your suggestions sothat I will be kept from interrupting his reading time. ; ]So got any ideas? Help me out here folks. Leave your suggestions in the comments below.
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New Yorker University
If my college had offered a class on the New Yorker, I definitely would have taken it, but it didn't, and, until today, I wasn't aware that any colleges did. What a great idea for a class. Last fall, Prof. Bryant Mangum of Virginia Commonwealth University taught a class called Literature in Society: The New Yorker. Each class is constructed like an issue of the magazine with the assignments divided into these parts: Goings on About Town, The Talk of the Town, Features: Fact/Fiction, The Critics, Poems. Aside from the magazine itself, required reading includes classic New Yorker fiction. Perhaps coolest of all is Mangum's Miscellany page which includes scans of a New Yorker rejection slip, note and check.
A way in to Amazon Shorts
Gather.com, the folks who put together a chat with Jonathan Safran Foer not too long ago, have announced a new writing contest. Online writing contests are a dime a dozen, but the cool thing about this one is that the four winning short pieces (fiction or non-fiction) will be "published and sold on Amazon Shorts," which would undoubtedly be a terrific venue for any aspiring writer. In fact, it's along the lines of what I hoped Amazon would do with its Shorts program.