emccullough's Public Library

'Its detractors were operatic in their vilifications. The poet Phyllis McGinley called it an abomination and said its adherents should be lynched; and the historian T. Harry Williams went so far as to pronounce it "the most horrible usage of our times" — a singular distinction in the age that gave us expressions like "final solution" and "ethnic cleansing," not to mention "I'm Ken and I'll be your waitperson for tonight."'

"Authors of science books often begin as writers of science news. As a science journalist who is looking to write a book, I’ve become very curious as to how other science journalists made the leap forward. I suspected that the questions that go into books might be different from those that drive newspaper and magazine journalism. With that in mind, I asked six successful science authors what questions they have found themselves asking — of themselves or of their sources — when writing books."

"Step 1: Be born strange, weird, abnormal, or any combination of those. Or have an embarrassing physical flaw, or a big brother who beats you up every day, or a sexually enticing neighbor whose tantalizing ways fog and warp your prepubescent thoughts. The result of any such influence is that you will grow up with a cockeyed view of the world and your place in it, a perception that will cause you to disavow traditional American values, maybe force you to seek solace in amorphous notions of beauty and truth, or in the soothing music of language, or in the need to create and control your own imagined universes rather than the demented universe you have been forced to inhabit. This will make your family seem like strangers to you and will foster in you an indefinable longing, which you will attempt to ease through sex, shoplifting, and, eventually, creative writing."

'The Charlottesville author will be talking about and signing copies of “The Right-Hand Shore” at 5:30 p.m. June 7 at New Dominion Bookshop. The novel revisits the fictional Mason family Tilghman introduced to readers in 1996 via the novel “Mason’s Retreat.” The Retreat is an antebellum estate located on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. The new novel takes place on one day — Sept. 8, 1920 — as the dying matriarch of the ancestral farm tells a relative about its long and sometimes brutal history.'

'I am, as my mother would say, “a busy little beaver.” While writing my most recent novel, I was working full-time, going to school at UCLA and training for a 50 kilometer footrace. I also slept, ate, saw friends, posted on Twitter and Facebook, blogged, belonged to a book club and watched a number of “Mythbusters” episodes. With that kind of schedule, one question comes up a lot, especially from other writers: “When do you write?”' Via http://ebookliteraryandmedia.com/ (Check it out!)

Michael Dirda on Reddit. Very cool conversation.

"'I’d take off Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. I read it perhaps 25 years ago and have never understood why others hail it as a classic. I find its entire premise repulsive.' It’s one thing not to like Lolita. It’s another thing to be unable to understand why others might admire it. And, FYI: everyone finds the premise difficult."

"The legendary writer’s reporting from the Toronto Star archives, featuring historical annotations by William McGeary, a former editor who researched Hemingway’s columns extensively for the newspaper, along with new insight and analysis from the Star’s team of Hemingway experts."

'I’m a loud and proud book abandoner. That’s right, I will stop reading a book if I’m not enjoying it. I like to say, “life is too short for bad books” because that’s catchier than saying “life is too short to read books you don’t enjoy and/or are not the right fit for you.” I’m a copywriter, I always go with pithy even if it’s slightly inaccurate. Becoming an abandoner was a long, slow process. For most of my life I believed that if I started a book I had to finish it. It didn’t matter how much I loathed every page *cough* American Psycho *cough*. If I read page one, I was all in. Most people I know are finishers. It’s as though there’s this weird, unspoken commandment. Thou shalt finish all books. Why is this? Where did it come from? Really, I’m curious. If you know, please do share.'

"Ever since I fell in love with Jernigan I’ve been drawn to books with one-word titles – partly because Sonny Mehta loves one-word titles, but mainly because they can be so enviably concise and memorable, so perfect. At their best, one-word titles distill content to its purest essence, which is what all titles strive to do, and then they stick in the mind. Sometimes, of course, they fall flat, and much of the time they’re just lukewarm and vague or, worse, falsely grand. Over the years I’ve developed categories and a pecking order. Here is my unscientific and by no means exhaustive taxonomy, beginning with the best and ending with the worst kinds of one-word book titles:"

Every time I think I've found all the great writing blogs out there, I find another one. Nonfiction writers, check this one out.

Three book recommendations from author Daniel Pink: two non-fiction books about India and Pakistan, and a novel he calls "one of the best novels I’ve read in years."

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"The gulf between the reality of Vonnegut the man and Vonnegut the author was wide, and perhaps to be expected. Author Charles Shields shows how Vonnegut’s experiences – growing up in Indiana with a family determined to shape his career path, caught up in the horror of the Second World War, raising an extended family –- shaped Vonnegut and his writing."

"Do fiction writers have an obligation to ensure that the science they import into their novels is credible? Or does the creative license that writers enjoy mean that there's no such responsibility? What happens when a novelist explicitly notes that the work in question is based on trusted science, but scientists insist is it not? These questions have been on my mind since I reviewed Jodi Picoult's new novel Lone Wolf for The Washington Post."

Oh, yawn, it's JFranz again: "There’s so much to read and so little time. I’m always looking for a reason to put a book down and not pick it up again, and one of the best reasons a writer can give me is to use the word then as a conjunction without a subject following it."

'Let's start with The Atlantic, a most peculiar hybrid of a magazine these days. While ostensibly being a highbrow, liberal magazine, featuring long pieces about, say, the Arab spring, The Atlantic has developed a taste for commissioning articles by and about women that wouldn't be out of place in the Daily Mail's Femail section, in which the writer undermines feminism in the name of "telling it like it is".'

"And speaking of zombies: Bland plot summaries, worn out compliments and the requisite quibbles have surely done more than excess bile to drain the life out of the nation’s book review sections. I look longingly at the fist-fights in British newspapers and wish we could roll up our sleeves more often in this country. But that would require aggrieved authors to fight back, instead of quietly enduring critics’ abuse."

"Now I’m not talking line editing. I’m talking serious revision, as in re-visioning. Really looking at the story in a different way, from a different angle. It may mean that I slice and dice some of the stuff I like the best, but if that’s what it takes, that’s what I’ll do. Because in the long run it’s not about those (in my mind) brilliant sentences. It’s about the story."