Category Archives: reading

November 18, 2009   DG&B   fun, guilty pleasures, Miriam, reading  
14

Guilty Pleasures

by Miriam

Browsing NPR.org’s Book section, I came across this and it made me think about my own literary guilty pleasures. Given that I take pride in being an eclectic (some might say schizoid) reader, I don’t generally feel guilty about many of my choices but every once in a while I find myself sneaking around with a book that I think will raise eyebrows on the train or lead to outright taunting by my rude friends and family members. Usually, this has to do more with the cover art–certain romance novels leave very little to the imagination–or provocative title than with the actual content, but I find that I tend to feel a little guilty reading certain pop culture blockbusters such as the Twilight series. It’s positively unseemly to be swooning over vampires, along with millions of teenaged girls. Or is it? What are your guilty pleasures?

November 17, 2009   DG&B   about us, Chasya, favorites, fun, interns, optimism, reading, why we are agents  
11

Why I Am An Agent (Chasya)

by Chasya

Sick and confined to bed this weekend, I gazed aimlessly at the television during the few short hours I managed to stay awake hoping for some distraction from the painful knot in my throat. At some point I switched away from TLC’s Cake Boss marathon for a second, only to catch Jeremy Piven’s Ari Gold screeching at someone or another (Kevin Connolly, maybe? I’m not really sure, in my Theraflu-induced haze I wasn’t processing much). Which gets me thinking, now that I’m less fuzzy-brained, about agents and why, despite the stress of it all–particularly during a difficult and uncertain time for this business–I became one myself.

First things first, let me dispel the myth that agents are screeching Ari Gold-like banshees. Obviously he’s a caricature of an agent (even if he is based on a real person). But aside from that, we in publishing like to think that the industry is a bit more genteel than Hollywood.

So if I don’t get to yell at people on the phone all day long, you ask, why did I become an agent? Well, it just started with an old-fashioned case of wide-eyed idealism and took off from there. As with many of the people you’ll find populating publishing, some of the most memorable moments of my life involved books. Those moments led me to define myself as an ardent book-lover. For instance, when I was five my neighbors would come over to my house, and I would feel very important as I read to them all aloud. We went through the entire Disney series that my mother had been purchasing one by one at the grocery store. When I was in the fourth grade and trying to plow through as many books as I could in Mrs. Rosen’s library, I was reading one afternoon on the bus ride home and was so absorbed that I kept on reading despite intense motion sickness and had to get off at another kid’s stop just to puke. I got back on after the driver nearly pulled away and resumed reading. When I first read Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal in junior high it almost made my head spin and fall off. I was enamored. I wanted to marry Jonathan Swift. Who would think an essay about eating babies could do that to a person? There are a multitude of these small, seemingly unimportant moments, but I won’t embarrass myself further by trying to relay them in any earnest sort of way. All I can say is that now, for many, many tiny reasons, I really love books.

And that love affair blossomed into a so-called useless degree in English literature. One that many students pursue, wondering “What am I supposed to do with this?”

I knew I wanted to do something practical. I knew I wanted to work in publishing and be a cog in the great machine that produced those things I was so impressed by. So I did what you do when you start out in publishing–I got an internship.

The business turned out to be far more complex and fascinating than I could have ever imagined and led me to want to stick around. Especially now, as it undergoes significant changes, it will be interesting to see how things progress. The things I wouldn’t really say aloud anymore (but appear to have less of a problem putting in print) are still there. But now what drives me is the added bonus of helping clients pursue their goals and guide them through the process. It’s rewarding and fun, even if it’s challenging.

But I can’t be the only one with these types of memories–and I certainly shouldn’t be the only one to admit them! What small moments led to your love of books?

November 13, 2009   DG&B   memoir, nonfiction, opinion, Rachel, reading, truth  
11

Is a story just a story?

Recently, former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair, addressed the W&L Journalism Ethics Institute for its 48th anniversary. This prompted a debate around the water cooler and on blogs and made its way to discussions on news programs. For, if you remember, Blair resigned from the New York Times in 2003 following an investigation that found he had plagiarized and fabricated a lot of the stories he had written for the paper. Some of his reporting was on the Iraq war and the Beltway sniper attacks. It was understandable that people were surprised that Blair would be addressing the Journalism Ethics Institute because we trust reporters to tell us the truth. We don’t expect them to fabricate or edit stories to make them more entertaining, as Blair did.

What about memoir authors who fabricate stories? James Frey and the debacle involving A Million Little Pieces comes to mind. Frey received a lot of attention from his book when it was published–Oprah praised him, A Million Little Pieces was in a million little bookstores, everyone talked highly of this new talented writer. But upon investigation, Frey’s story was proven to be inaccurate in parts, and some readers who had once been fans of the memoir wanted their money back.

Some authors don’t really care about the difference between fiction and nonfiction. A story might just be a story. But is it unfair to truthful memoir writers when an author, such as James Frey, fabricates tales to sell books? Does it prove that Frey is a talented writer that we believed his tales? Or is it infuriating to have loved a book as a memoir and find parts of it to be complete fiction?

How much tweaking should be allowed in memoirs to make them entertaining these days, and do you care about the difference between fiction and nonfiction storytelling?

-Rachel

November 04, 2009   DG&B   Miriam, opinion, reading, science fiction  
4

The present of the future

I like the idea that literature is a vehicle for exploring (and exploiting) our anxieties, both personal and cultural. I tend to agree with Cory Doctorow that science fiction has always been more about the present than the future. What do you all think?

-Miriam

October 30, 2009   DG&B   fun, future of publishing, Lauren, reading  
7

Shhh! People are reading.

This morning on the subway, I had the pleasure of seeing a diverse world of book reading in action. My Sony Reader and I sat down next to a woman reading a book on her Kindle. Across from Mrs. Kindle was a woman reading The Lost Symbol in hard cover. Standing up next to her, a woman read a trade paperback about our post-something-I-couldn’t-make-out world. When Mrs. Kindle got off to switch trains, a young man sat beside me, reading a book on his iPhone. A woman came on the train and stood just in front of him, reading Chris Marie Green’s Midnight Reign. When Mr. iPhone left, not only did this woman sit down in his seat, but she switched books to Nora Roberts’s Bed of Roses. Throughout the ride my end of the train also held a couple Metro and AM New York readers (because it’s hard to argue with free!) and someone reading a current affairs mag, but there was only a single person I saw who wasn’t reading at all and almost everyone was reading a book, in whatever genre or format best suited them. My only regret is that technology thwarted my subway voyeurism–I am, after all, the sort of person who subtly takes camera phone photos of F train passengers reading DGLM titles. I could see from the way the text was formatted that they were reading actual books, but not which books they were reading.

With all the fighting about how we get our content and how much we pay for it and who’s reading the right things and who’s reading the wrong ones, it’s nice sometimes to have a moment to be happy that at least we’re still reading!

-Lauren

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