Category Archives: reading

February 14, 2012   Jim   Jim, reading  
2

Unusual Valentine Reading

So it’s Valentine’s Day again. How does this keep happening?

Based on the fact that I handle a number of romance novels, it’s clear that I enjoy a good love story. But I’ll note here that I really flip for love stories that are a bit…unusual.

Last summer, I lost my mind over Brady Udall’s The Lonely Polygamist. A novel about a husband of four who has an affair with a married woman, it had all the drama of five love stories packed into one book. But what I most admired about it was how realistic the emotions felt, how relatable this unlikely family was, and how thoroughly non-judgmental Udall was about his characters. It’s a brilliantly rendered novel, and I highly recommend it for those of you looking for something a little less expected on this particular Valentine’s Day.

Or maybe you’re so totally over this holiday that you want to see love partnered with bloodshed. Happily, there are some dark minds out there willing to accommodate you. Donald Ray Pollock’s sprawling The Devil All the Time features a serial killing couple that picks up hitchhikers so that the husband can photograph the wife in flagrante delicto with them…and murder them. And the husband is impotent! I mean…it’s pretty much all things for all people. That doesn’t even begin to cover how deeply twisted the novel is. It’s one of the most brutal, unflinching works of fiction I’ve read in some time, and I’ll just say it: it’s bloody fantastic. (Bad pun alert!)

Before I swing back to sweeter love stories, let’s also mention The Silence of the Lambs because you know Clarice had a thing for Lecter, J. G. Ballard’s sex among the car wrecks in Crash, and the excruciating horrors of bloodlust, pedophilia, incest, and love-gone-wrong of Dennis Cooper’s (I think it’s amazing, but I can’t recommend it because I’m scared you’ll judge me) Try.

Let’s get back to the more romantic (though still unusual) side of things, for those of you who don’t feel violent when V-Day comes around! You could read my all-time favorite novel as of this exact moment (it rotates between three or four): The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The ultimate story of falling for someone out of your league, Quasimodo’s passionate tumble for Esmeralda destroys me every time. If you can find a last paragraph that makes me cry any harder, I might actually end up institutionalized.

Or, dive into Elizabeth McCracken’s The Giant’s House and feel free to swoon over Peggy and James, the spinster librarian and 8’7” younger man who find mutual understanding in this beautifully compassionate, heartfelt novel.

Also, if you want to watch a movie instead of reading today, it’s okay. I won’t tell. Harold and Maude, anyone?

So tell me: what are your favorite love stories, be they dark, depressing, beautiful, sweet, or otherwise?

Lastly, I mentioned in my last blog post that I intended to read all 16 books in the Tournament of Books before it kicks off this year. Four to go! One of them is still 1Q84… Whether I make it or not is a total coin toss, but I also wanted to recommend the most unexpected surprise of the event so far: the intense pleasure of reading Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers. Talk about a writer to watch!

February 07, 2012   Morris   Twitter, advice, book club, comics, fun, reading  
5

1book140

Almost 2 years ago, my friend Tom ranted and raved to me about American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I was hesitant; even though I read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy, American Gods seemed like it would be long, tedious, and ultimately, boring. Then it became the first selection of the monthly twitter book club and I decided it would be nice to join in. So I got myself a copy and started reading. Neil quickly became a favorite author of mine. I immediately ran out to read all of his other works, and I can’t imagine life having not read them.

The brilliant Jeff Howe (@1book140) realized that the biggest conversation in the world was an amazing opportunity to create the first truly global book club. It’s called 1book140, and although it took some figuring out, they’ve got it down to a science now. It is an amazing conversation to be a part of.  This month, 1book140 is reading graphic novels. We’ve begun with Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, which we are reading this week. Next week we’ll be reading Art Spiegelman’s The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. The week after is dedicated to the great V for Vendetta by Alan Moore, and we’ll be closing out the month with none other than Neil Gaiman and The Sandman Vol. 1: Preludes and Nocturnes.

It’s super easy to follow along on twitter. First, follow Jeff Howe for official updates. Then, use the hashtags to join in:

#1book140 for general discussion

#1book140_1 for Understanding Comics

#1book140_2 for Maus

#1book140_3 for V for Vendetta

#1book140_4 for Sandman

(This also makes it really easy to ignore the schedule.)

I’m in the middle of Understanding Comics right now, and even for a long-time constant comic reader like me, it is very insightful. I haven’t yet read Maus, but I have only heard good things and I am really excited to start it. V for Vendetta and Preludes and Nocturnes are both amazing works, and are arguably two of the greatest graphic novels ever written. So come and join us. You might discover something amazing.

January 30, 2012   Jim   Jim, reading  
10

Reading to Completion

There are plenty of people who tell me that once they start a book, they can’t put it down until they finish it even if they absolutely hate it. Being an agent, I find this unfathomable. But if I’m being honest, even before I entered the dazzling world of publishing, I was never the sort of person who felt compelled to finish something just because I had started.

Reading for a living, though, and knowing that there’s always more work to be done, has only made me more impatient with titles I pick up for pleasure reading. My apartment is littered with books I’ve abandoned after 20 pages because I’m convinced that there’s something better to be found elsewhere on my own overstuffed shelves.

That said, I can think of books that I know I would have abandoned if I weren’t driven for a specific reason to finish them, and I think of what I would have lost by not reading them. What if I had given up on The Corrections because of the talking poop scene? It didn’t matter that I had loved the novel until that point. I was convinced in one scene that the book was about to shatter wide open, and I only kept going because other people told me to. Or what if The Crimson Petal and the White wasn’t something I was reading for office book club? There was about a 100-page stretch in the middle there that I thought was kind of a snooze. Without being obligated to, would I have kept going for the 500 or so pages I still had ahead of me?

When I start to look at the books I haven’t finished in this way, I do start to worry about material I’ve passed on. I like to think that I’ve mastered a way of reading differently when considering for work–after all, if I just hate 20 pages, isn’t that what editing is for? But those doubts will sneak up on you every time. And that’s my dirty secret—the deep internal fear that I will have missed something amazing because I abandoned it too soon.

Of course, there isn’t time to read every page of every submission. That would literally be impossible. And certainly some submissions, strung together in a poor facsimile of English, don’t merit greater consideration. Others very well may.

And that’s something I’ve been giving a lot of thought to lately—giving people who might have something there a little more benefit of the doubt. Instead of reading until I think something is a no, I can read 10 more pages. Or 20. These are manageable numbers. It comes back to The Corrections for me. Even the best authors go a little wonky sometimes. So I probably owe it to everyone to see if they get beyond their talking poop moment.

Of course, with pleasure reading, sometimes I don’t so much “give up” on books as fall away from them. I was reading (and enjoying) Swamplandia when I left for vacation last summer and forgot to pack it and never picked it back up. The same exact thing happened with The Marriage Plot over Christmas. Interestingly, both show up on the Tournament of Books list for this year. http://www.themorningnews.org/article/here-comes-the-rooster Longtime readers might remember that I adore the ToB. This year, I’m going to use it as a motivator to get back into those books that I was enjoying but didn’t finish. And because there is a whisper of OCD about me, I’m going to attempt to actually complete all 16 books on the list. I’ll give up if it gets in the way of reading for work, but I need a silly goal to give myself, and this fits.

So far, I’ve completed five. My biggest roadblock (literally) will be Murakami’s 1Q84. If anyone wants to join me on the road to attempt to read them before the bracket kicks off in March, I welcome the company on the reading road! Maybe drop me a line on Twitter @jimmccarthy528 to let me know where you’re at! If you’re looking for a starting place, might I recommend Donald Ray Pollock’s viscerally thrilling (if brutal) The Devil All the Time or the one I’m working on now: Ann Patchett’s so-far-so-stunning State of Wonder?

January 27, 2012   Lauren   Lauren, fun, opinion, reading, why we are agents  
4

The magic of words

If you follow me on Twitter (@laurenabramo), you might already have seen my delight at the appearance of one Stephen Fry at Barnes & Noble in Tribeca on Tuesday.  I’ve spoken of my love for him (and QI) on the blog before, so I don’t need to bore you with the details of why he’s in many ways my model of everything a human being should strive to be.  Instead of reading from his new memoir (published here in the US by Overlook), he spoke about his love for words.  Apparently, young Stephen was introduced to the magical possibilities of language when he came across the work of Oscar Wilde, who opened his eyes to the fact that words can do so much more than convey meaning and direction.  It’s what endeared him to the written word as an art form—and not coincidentally is much of what I love about Fry himself.

Hearing Fry wax rhapsodic about Wilde made me think about the first time I really got excited by how much power words could have.  I’d always loved reading, but I think much of my early love for books was love for story or characters.  It wasn’t even a book that first tipped me off to what language could do: it was A Few Good Men.  If you aren’t a huge fan and can only recall the climactic court room scene that might seem an odd choice.  But A Few Good Men comes from the pen of Aaron Sorkin, whose greatest strength as a writer has always been the absolutely glorious sentences he constructs.  It’s not even Jack Nicholson telling Tom Cruise he can’t handle the truth that was the clincher for me—throughout the film there are lines and moments that to my young mind were revelatory.  I started keeping a notebook of quotes and transcribed a pretty decent chunk of the film, adding those from other sources along the way.  The way Sorkin expressed even the most trivial things with a cleverness I’d never encountered before was really amazing for me.  I’ve been in love with words ever since.

Of course, it wasn’t long after that I discovered that the best resource for such word mastery was often in books.  Over the years I’ve taken to noting exquisite turns of phrase, not usually in a centralized location or even one I’ll return to, but with a folded corner.  I may never need it again, but I’m not the sort of reader who can let those moments pass unmarked.  In clients’ manuscripts, I usually go for a simple “!!!” in the margin.  No good phrase should go unnoticed as far as I’m concerned.

Surely Fry and I aren’t alone in this moment of explosive realization—I’d imagine many readers and especially writers would feel the same way.  Any distinct sources of epiphany for any of you?

P.S. I may have linked to this before, but it’s worth a listen/watch.  Pretty mesmerizing.

P.P.S. While I’m linking to tangentially relevant things involving British people, I was reintroduced to the delight of this clip from That Mitchell and Webb Look by Twitter earlier this week—I’d love to credit the person, but can’t remember!—and it’s worth watching.  This is pretty much exactly what all my meetings with clients are like.  What book would not be improved by adding a shark, I ask?  And you should definitely kill your main character in the first chapter.  Or don’t.

P.P.P.S. This blog post somehow inadvertently became a very clear view into what TV would look like if I were in charge of it.

January 26, 2012   Jessica   great books, opinion, reading, recommendations  
1

Reading to Quiet the Monkey Mind

My family has been in the grip of a particularly nasty stomach virus this week, so aside from endless loads of laundry, I fear I’ve not been able to accomplish much. My recent attempts to read this week’s New Yorker felt uncomfortably like the Shouts and Murmurs piece contained therein, “Me Reading,” in which the author, plowing through Anna Karenina on her Kindle while seated on the subway, is hard-pressed to concentrate.

“ ‘Yes, I understand it all now,’ said Darya Alexandrovna. ‘You can’t understand it; for you men, who are free and make your own choice, it’s always clear whom you love.’ ”

Did Larry really finish the Pecan Sandies? Now what will I eat?

“Sergei Ivanovich Koznyshev wanted a . . .”

Jane’s a nice name. I could make waffles

My own waffling came to an abrupt end, however, when I got to Adam Gopnik’s The Caging of America: Why Do We Lock Up so Many People? His argument: “The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life,” which he elaborates in his discussion of several recently published books on the American system of incarceration.  His piece was so effective, so astringent, so appalling that it banished all distraction–professional, domestic, and epidemiological–and nailed me to the page.

I’m curious to know what you’ve read, whether an article, a book, or a blog post, that shut down your multitasking “monkey mind” and commanded your absolute attention.

January 24, 2012   Morris   about us, reading  
16

Goodreads?

Social media has taken the world by storm, and shows no sign of letting go. Publishing, in particular, has taken a love to Twitter. Most of my feed is made up of my favorite authors, agents, and editors. Readers took a foothold on twitter as well, with #fridayreads and, with us comic book readers, #newcomicday.

Goodreads.com is a website I adore, in theory. When I first found it I spent hours setting up my shelves, adding and review books I read, and setting my to-read lists. I was going to use Goodreads as my virtual library – and my to read list. But then months passed, and I didn’t update goodreads once. I’ve “rediscovered” goodreads lately but it seems to be just another website I need to remember to check.

So my question to you is: How do you use social media to back-up your reading?

January 10, 2012   Morris   Morris, great books, reading  
2

A Report. Kind Of.

Way back in December (it feels like forever ago) I blogged about reading two books at once. I promised to report on how it went.

Well, here it is. Kind of.

I was reading Embassytown, a novel by the wonderful China Meivelle, and 1922, a novella by the legendary Stephen King. I found that while I read 1922, and took a break from Embassytown. 1922, being a measly 120 or so pages, didn’t take very long to read, so the break from ‘Town wasn’t very long at all, hardly noticible. Still, I didn’t actually flip between the two.

1922 was terrifying, by the way. Emabssytown was incredibly dense, but very thought-provoking and satisfying .

So, the experiment continues! The Art Of Fielding, by Chad Harbach, and Sleepless, by Charlie Huston. So far the biggest issue is deciding which one to put in my bag – The Art Of Fielding is too big for me to fit both…

January 06, 2012   Rachel   Rachel S., holidays, reading  
5

Still love it.

Everyone is finally settling back into routine post-holiday vacations and travels and of course, the first thing everyone says to everyone else immediately after greeting is, “How was your holiday? What did you do?”

Now, I was as excited as anyone at the prospect of a nice stretch of time in which all that was required of me was resting, eating, seeing family and friends, and generally doing as I pleased. It’s always nice to have a break from work! So what did I spend a large part of my free time doing? Reading, of course.

In fact, judging from the blogosphere and twitterverse (I’m really impressed at how technologically in tune I sound there), it seems like that’s just what most of the publishing world did on their time off. I finished up The Paris Wife before devouring Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, and with the remaining time, I started reading the New Yorker’s collection of stories, 20 under 40. This is what reading is for us all—a passion. Just because it’s a main component of our jobs, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t a pleasure to immerse oneself in a book during free time. Reading has been an escape of mine for as long as I can remember and that’s not going to change.

Having long stretches of time to sit down, undisturbed and just read whatever it is that I want to read, without any worry about deadlines or the need to focus and scrutinize detail or writing is bliss, and it’s why when I’m finished everything I have to do for work, whether it be reading or otherwise, often the only thing I want to do is, well, read.

How about you? Did the time off afford you the opportunity to discover some great new books or revisit old favorites?

December 21, 2011   Miriam   Miriam, advice, fun, great books, reading  
2

I wish you books…

Read a book!

Because it makes you smarter.

Because it’s fun.

Because it sharpens your wit and develops your capacity for empathy.

Because it makes the existential void a little less like a black hole.

Because it allows you to defy the laws of physics and travel through time and space.

Because it forces you to consider other opinions, other practices, other “right” ways to do things.

Because it allows you to walk into the most well attended, interesting party, listen in on outrageous conversations, get caught up on all the gossip…and leave whenever you want.

Because the more you read, the more your brain and soul expand.

Because you can’t be lonely when you’re immersed in a good book.

Because just this year, I’ve hung out with Keith Richards and Patti Smith, fallen in love with Hemingway all over again, realized that Dr. Seuss writes the best self-help books, been dazzled by Jonathan Franzen and Jennifer Egan, transported by Mary Stewart, titillated by Eloisa James, and tickled by Nora Ephron’s latest review of her crazy life.

Because I can’t imagine how bleak the world would be without books to record and re-imagine our achievements and losses, our  triumphs and tragedies, and all the greatness and smallness of our shared humanity.

So, go to your nearest bookstore or click on the “buy now” button on your eReader and get a book (or books) and start reading.    Then, tell everyone about it.

Happy holidays!

December 20, 2011   Morris   Video Games, adaptation, media, multimedia, opinion, reading  
3

Video Games + Books = ?

The New York Times wrote up a new Scholastic children’s book series today: Infinity Ring. What is interesting to me about this series isn’t that it is written by several different authors, some of which we represent, or that it is (according to the New York Times, anyway) supposed to be the successor to the Harry Potter throne. What I find interesting is that there is a tie-in video game, and that it is being called a multi-media property.

Video games are certainly one of the most interesting story telling mediums today, mostly because it hasn’t quite figured out how to best tell a story. Role Playing Games, like the recently released The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, have an expansive history of elaborate backstory and narrative driven gameplay. Action and Shooter games, on the other hand, have put significantly less emphasis on story, but some games, like the Assassin’s Creed series and the Uncharted series, are looking to change that. Meanwhile, there are those games that put story absolutely up front and center, like 2010’s Alan Wake, but those tend to fall flat on gameplay to the point of being totally boring. Of course, being an interactive medium, video games should be focusing more on player interaction than story. The greatest game I’ve ever played, Shadow of the Colossus (please play the ps3 version), has a story so bare bones and minimal it almost isn’t there. I call it the greatest game I’ve ever played because every time I play it, without fail, my palms sweat, my heartbeat triples, and I get this feeling of utter fragility in my limbs. That is what video games excel at – getting the player completely physically and emotionally involved in the game. You would imagine that video games that tie-in to other properties would do this exceptionally well, as the story and characters have already been laid out for the game designers and they need to just focus on the gameplay – like Shadow of the Colossus does.

An example of a truly great tie-in/multi-media project is Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire: the novel was really gripping, the comic was fun as hell, and the video game was absolutely amazing (I still play it). More importantly, each medium offered stories and aspects of the project unique and well-suited to that specific format. To the point where not only did each of the three work well as a standalone entity, but you couldn’t really consider any one of them to be the principal focus of the overall story. All three worked together in concert.

I have high hopes for Infinity Ring. There are really great authors behind it,  Scholastic is an exceptional publisher, and I think the timing is perfect for something new to sweep in and steal the hearts and minds of our youth. I really, really hope to see is a truly multi-media project in which all the different mediums being used are used to their full potential. It could be revolutionary, to the likes of which we haven’t seen before, and I can’t wait to see what happens.

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