Category Archives: reading

May 13, 2013   Jane   feedback, fun, Jane, reading, vacation  
9

What should I read on my vacation?

Finally, our vacation is in sight.  It’s  been a long  time since we’ve been away and it’s been a long winter of recovery from emergency surgery (for my husband, Steve) and lots of hard work for us both.  But our trip to Australia to spend my son  Zach’s twenty-first birthday with him is almost here.  As these will be the longest  flights we’ve ever taken, I am wondering what great suggestions our blog followers will have for me to read.

Yesterday, one of my clients asked me if I still enjoyed reading for pleasure because I review so many flawed manuscripts.  I answered that, indeed, I am able to put my “agent’s hat” aside when reading for my own enjoyment (other than, of course, to wish that the book I am loving had been one I had represented).  The problem is that I have so little time to choose what I read and so many books to choose from.

So, I am very eager to have your suggestions.  Not only would I like to know the titles and authors of the books you single out, but also why you think they are great reads.

I very much look forward to hearing from you.

May 03, 2013   Lauren   chat, fun, Jim, Lauren, opinion, reading, Twitter, YA  
1

“She seemed to realize that she’d lost her right to knock.”

Were you with us on Twitter this past Tuesday, when Jim and I chatted with a bunch of folks about the first half of Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park?  As promised, we want to take the conversation to the blog as well, for those who couldn’t make it.  If you want to read it without the SPOILERS you might find below, why not give it a read in the next two weeks, then come back and check out part one’s conversation here, and join us on May 14th at 6 p.m. EST on Twitter (#EandPdglm)?

I’d say the subject that most dominated our discussion was the 1980s setting.  Jim and I both felt that though we love how it plays out in the book, it might have given us some pause as agents considering the book in the slush pile: as Jim asked, “Do kids care about the 80s?”  Fortunately, we had some researchers in the chat to uncover the answer for us.  Anecdotal evidence from Susanna Donato (@SusannaDonato) and DGLM client Brian Bliss (@brainbliss) suggests that teens didn’t mind the choice, might even have been intrigued by it, but would not have cared about the music referenced, which is the source of much of the bond between the two characters.  I was perplexed when Bryan reported that his teen creative writing students wouldn’t have bothered to look up the bands on Park’s mixtapes, until I realized that I didn’t bother to look up the comics that take up an equal amount of the narrative, if not more.  Of course, I’ve heard of them, but it doesn’t mean I fully understand the context.  In the end, I don’t feel like I’m missing anything.

After all, that moment where Park first realizes Eleanor is reading his comics along with him and stops to let her catch up has plenty of impact no matter what.  That was one of Kellie Lovegrove (@k_love671)’s favorite parts of the book.  Other favorite moments in the first half included: the very end of the first half, which made Susanna’s heart race.  She also loved when Park asked his grandmother for batteries for his birthday so he could give them to Eleanor.  Jim swooned over “You look like a protagonist…You look like a person who wins in the end.”  And for me, the line referenced in the title of this blog entry, which I loved so much I ran across the room to get a post-it to flag it.

So if you couldn’t make it, tell me, what was YOUR favorite part?  And what did you think of the time period?  Do you have the same sense of dread about whatever Richie reveal is coming our way in the second half?

On May 14th at 6 p.m. EST, Jim (@JimMcCarthy528) and I (@LaurenAbramo) will reconvene at #EandPdglm to talk with everyone about the rest of the book.  If you haven’t gotten started yet, please jump on in!  It’s a pretty quick, short, wonderful read.  (Though Jim and I were rooting for a contrarian to come along and mix it up—are you that person?  Come tell us why!)  I can’t wait to find out how the rest of the book will unravel.

And in case you want to catch up so you can join us next time, here’s a handy dandy widget with all the good stuff to come out of our chat under the #EandPdglm hashtag:


 

 

April 24, 2013   Miriam   fun, Miriam, reading  
12

On the sunny side of the book shelf

In the wake of what The Onion said “could only be described by witnesses as the goddamned week to end all soul-crushing weeks,” I found myself, along with most of America, in a dark mood.   The horror in Boston, the horror in Texas, the horror…well, everywhere it seemed, and nowhere to go to get away from it.  Facebook?  An endless loop of anger, grief, speculation, and uninformed rants.  Ditto for Twitter, all of network and cable tv and pretty much everyone standing in line at Starbucks.  I couldn’t wait for my bedtime reading to take me away from the insanity being parsed like Bill Clinton’s testimony on the Lewinsky affair.

Problem is, that I’m reading a downer of a book.  Breasts by Florence Williams is a smart, well-written (although badly copyedited), lively discussion about our most objectified and misunderstood of body parts.  Unfortunately, the book has more in common with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring than a Jackie Collins novel.   Basically, Ms. Williams argues that this most intelligent and adaptive of glands is also the most vulnerable to environmental toxins and the chemical stew that we are all bathing in 24/7.  Well, that was not the escapist literature I needed to take my mind off current events.

So, I eagerly accepted my son’s invitation to watch a movie with him.  But, he’s currently obsessed with all things Harry Potter and wanted to watch The Goblet of Fire.  You know, the one where that cute kid from Twilight dies and Voldemort is getting more and more powerful and evil.  What the….

By the end of that movie, I was desperately looking around my bookshelves for the happiest, peppiest, most life affirming book I could find.  Note to self, get more light reading in the house.  I finally settled on Nora Ephron and David Sedaris.  No, they’re not all that happy, but they reliably make me laugh and after that kind of week, humor is definitely healing.

What do you read when you feel like everything’s going to hell in a handbasket?  Share your upbeat choices…puhleeeze!

 

 

April 19, 2013   Lauren   children's books, fun, Lauren, reading  
4

Back to the start

It’s hard to get away from the horror of the world this week, and our hearts go out to everyone much more immersed in it than we are.

For those of us in need of a distraction*, what’s more wholesome and good and right in the world than children’s books?  Nothing, I tell you.  So PW’s PWxyz blog has some for you, namely the books that made their staff big enough readers to become the kind of people who work at PW.  Not always children’s books, of course, but a few of those are among my childhood favorites as well.  Rachel Deahl’s reminiscence about The Bridge to Terabithia really strikes a chord with me, though I’m not sure I disliked it so much.  I knew what was going to happen and was determined not to care.  And then I did.  Boy, how I did.

For me, I’m not sure I can totally pinpoint a book.  Certainly the Laura Ingalls Wilder books were incredibly important to me growing up, as I’ve written about before.  If I try to trace it back to the first book I was passionate about, I’d say it would have to be something from the Cam Jansen series.  Do you remember Cam?  She had a photographic memory (hence her name), and she solved mysteries by puzzling together the clues hidden in her brain.  She was brilliant and feisty and dedicated and maybe a bit of a show off.

I like to think she’s still a role model for me today, though my memory isn’t quite photographic and I’ve never had to locate missing monkeys.

So what did it for you?  Was it a children’s book or something you encountered later in life?  When did you give yourself up to the reading gods and never turn back?

*Did that not work?  Try this.

P.S. Do you know about the group read Jim and I are doing?  Are you already reading Eleanor & Park?  We can’t wait to discuss with you.

April 10, 2013   Miriam   Miriam, reading, writing  
7

How do you write about it? How do you read it?

Reading Cheryl Strayed’s emotional review of Sonali Deraniyagala’s memoir, Wave, about the loss of her husband, sons, and parents in the 2004 tsunami that claimed more than a quarter of a million lives, I had an immediate set of antipodal impulses I’ve experienced many times before: Rush to the nearest book store to buy the book and start reading right now! Put my hands over my ears, stare unseeingly at a point in the horizon, and mutter to myself to drown out all sound.

I’ve always been drawn to dark literature about unimaginable suffering—I remember reading Night by Elie Wiesel when I was probably too young to fully comprehend the scale of the horror he depicted, but the starkness of the images has stayed with me across the decades.  Periodically, because life is full of breathtaking tragedy, a writer is skilled enough to present his or her experience of his or her own unimaginable suffering in a way that sheds light on our sorrows and losses and the process by which we cope (well or badly) with them.

The most successful of these narratives tend to be lean and unvarnished and the authors of these books are unsparing of themselves and their readers.  They tend to be short books and completely engrossing—playing on that thing that compels human beings to stop and watch a train wreck even if we will have nightmares forever after.  So, why am I as loath to pick up a copy of Wave as I am compelled to read it?  And, which impulse should I give in to.

How do you guys feel about this kind of grief narrative?  Do you find that you force yourselves to read these books or do you pass them by on the bookshelves out of an instinct for self-preservation (emotional, that is)?

April 05, 2013   Lauren   fun, Jim, Lauren, reading  
13

Calling all readers!

One of the things that I love most about publishing is the chance to discuss books with other people who’ve read them, which is actually something I get paid to do.  It’s all well and good to recommend books to people or even complain about them, but celebrating or debating them with people who’ve actually read them is one of my favorite pastimes.

To that end, Jim and I have a mission for you:  let’s all pick a book, read it at the same time, and discuss it together.  We’ve selected four options, and now you can vote for which one we should all read.  We’ll set up a schedule so we can have a few discussions along the way, with the aim that we’ll finish reading by end of May.

So which should it be?  Place your vote in the comments—one book per commenter, please.

 

Herman Koch’s The Dinner?

Mary Roach’s Gulp?

Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park?

Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette??

 

On Monday, Jim will let you know who the winner is and the how/when/where of discussing.  So get to voting!

P.S. Three cheers for these authors who all have websites that are easy to find by searching their names, navigate, and link to the book you want!  Koch’s is actually here, but since his website is (understandably) in Dutch, I linked to RH.

 

UPDATE: Thanks for the votes, folks!  Eleanor & Park was the victor.  We hope you’ll all join us!  Details here: http://www.dystel.com/2013/04/the-abramomccarthy-book-reading-bonanza/

UPDATE 2: Join us tonight, Tuesday, 4/30, at 6 p.m. to discuss the first half of ELEANOR & PARK!  Just follow the hashtag #eandpdglm on Twitter.

March 15, 2013   Rachel   fiction, omens, Rachel S., reading  
3

BEWARE

I hope you’re all checking over your shoulder today, seeing as it’s March 15th, that fated, ominous day where Caesar should have been paying a little bit more attention. “Beware the ides of March” has become synonymous with the bad omen, ignored warning and general “sleep with one eye open” sensibility. Omens and portents are everywhere in literature—the Greeks and Romans especially loved them.

In more modern literature, the omens are tougher to spot, maybe requiring a careful rereading (and a helpful English teacher to point them out at every turn), but they are a mainstay. Whether it’s Poe’s raven or the harbinger of Anne Shirley’s doomed marriage as she envisions her funeral the morning of her wedding, the little things an author inserts into their work are rarely there by accident.

The Huffington Post ran a slideshow of some pretty interesting omens in literature, from ancient texts through to Harry Potter (that darn Grim!)—some I hadn’t even considered until they were pointed out. It goes back to that rereading aspect. Picking out nuances and theretofore unrecognized significances, symbols and yes, omens, upon reading a book over again with knowledge of how it all plays out is one of the many delights of literature.

Have you discovered any signs or portents while rereading a favorite book? Anything you didn’t notice the first time around that seem so obvious upon a second or third session?

February 13, 2013   Miriam   fun, Miriam, music, our clients, reading  
74

Lyric Literature

My first exposure to the Avett Brothers was Colleen Hoover’s Slammed.  Over dinner a few months after she became a client, we talked about the band and she recommended one of their live albums.  Since I’m almost as crazy about music as I am about books, I went off and started listening…and promptly fell in love (“I and Love and You” is on constant rotation in my brain).

But, this isn’t the first time I’ve been led to an artist that I became infatuated with through a reference in a book.  The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love led me to explore the golden age of Cuban music (pre-Castro, pre-exodus), for instance.  And, novels like  A Visit from the Goon Squad  are veritable treasure troves of musical references while memoirs like Patti Smith’s, Keith Richards’ and Neil Young’s can keep you looking up song titles on iTunes for weeks.  Since I believe great songwriting is poetry and poetry is storytelling that rhymes (or doesn’t), I love the marriage of literature and music.

On this Valentine’s eve, what devastating, unforgettable songs have you come across in books?

February 01, 2013   Rachel   fun, Rachel S., reading  
3

Location, Location, Location

Books transport you to wondrous places! They take you on journeys to distant lands! Escape reality with a book!

These are, of course, true, if a little bit precious, completely clichéd, and totally overused statements. However, they are so because there is that grain of truth to them. Books really can make you forget your surroundings, drop all cares and make reality unimportant for a little while.

The problem is, however, getting there. Getting immersed in a book is heavily dependent on how much you can let yourself be taken in by it. I find, personally, that unless I’ve already gotten in deep with a book and it’s one of those that I’m thinking about even when I’m not reading, when I’m planning the next time I can really sit down and make another dent in the pages, that it takes some settling in to focus.

Oddly, I’ve found I concentrate best on a book when I’m not at home surrounded by all those cozy comforts. My favorite reading locales are bustling cafes, bars and coffee shops. Couldn’t tell you why, and I don’t know that it’s completely normal, but the complete familiarity of my apartment* and the quietness I find there is more of a distraction than continuous chatter, background music and movement.

Sometimes I prefer going out alone solely so I can sit by myself and read—it makes me happy and I focus on a book all the better for it. Just last night, I was reading alone at my favorite watering hole and it was there that I was finally able to get to the point of “okay, I’ve got the measure of this book now” where I couldn’t when I had started it at home mere minutes earlier. The lights went down, but one of the bartenders came over and made me a makeshift candle tower (not as precarious as it sounds, I promise) and so read on I did.

Where do you read best? Is it home with something nice to drink or munch on, in the park, library, café, bar or anywhere else? Am I less of an oddball than I imagined? Whenever I’m out at a coffee shop I see more people on laptops than anything else, so I suppose the home-away-from-home aspect transcends all media, but then again, computers come with headphones, and I’m no good at reading with headphones in, so there’s that. Rambling over, and awaiting your replies!

*Oddly, the same is not true of my childhood home, where I can read on the living room couch ‘til the cows come home, but I’d say that’s more a matter of habit than any kind of conscious preference.

January 25, 2013   Lauren   Lauren, reading  
5

Phases

A conversation Jim and I were having got me thinking about literary phases: he mentioned how much nonfiction he’d been reading lately, and it made me think how little nonfiction I’ve been reading lately.  Last year, my personal reading was all about YA—sure, I read other things, but the list was disproportionately skewed toward realistic fiction for teens.  On thinking about this, I’ve realized that I don’t so much have broad personal reading interests, but rotating interests.  Thinking back, in college I read every chick lit book there was till I came across one I couldn’t finish, and then I started in on literary Brit lit of the 80s and 90s.  But when I went one Amis novel too far, I switched off to lengthy magazine articles and didn’t pick up a book till I came across something impenetrable there.  This is apparently my reading personality, and it’s not unlike the way I consume music, television, and movies.  (I have a terrible habit of first seeing an actor whose work I enjoy and then watching their entire IMDB page in a short span of time, till I can’t stand to see their face.  Let me tell you, there are precious few actors whose output is always worth seeing.)  And it’s likewise true of genres, but there’s no call for turning my back (temporarily) every time I’m disappointed.  Intellectually I know that my love or hate for one book has no bearing on its competitor, but apparently when it comes to something as ethereal as what I’m in the mood for, an exciting novel or dreary tome dictates what will come next.  Now that I realize this, I wonder if I can counterprogram it—try to let that love spill and enthusiasm over into a new genre, or push forward in one in which I’m under-read despite what came before.

So I think I need to get some more narrative nonfiction on my to do read pile, and maybe I should spice things up with a thriller or two.  Any suggestions?

« Older posts
Newer posts »