Posted in Books, Fiction, Writing on April 27th, 2005 No Comments »
There’s a guy. A writer. He goes by the name of Alexander McCall Smith. You can read about him here (the CBC Web site) - Automated Storyteller: The curse of the prolific author.
It appears I’m not the only person who has noticed this guy doesn’t just write. He writes a lot.
And I can’t keep up. [...]
Posted in Books on April 4th, 2005 No Comments »
Wired had this item: Video Shills for Literary Stars.
The upside of this is that authors and publishers are using technology and making an effort at being a bit innovative in their marketing. (The industry has always struck me as being somewhat luddite so this is a good sign to me.)
On the other hand, though [...]
Posted in Books, Communication, Language on April 3rd, 2005 No Comments »
Because I have something of an obsession with wind and weather, I recently read Scott Huler’s Defining the Wind : The Beaufort Scale, and How a 19th-Century Admiral Turned Science into Poetry. It turns out to be an interesting, if somewhat eccentric, study of making something useable.
If nothing else, the book illustrates how the idea [...]
Posted in Books, Business, Career, Work on March 28th, 2005 No Comments »
There’s a fascinating book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience and it helps to explain why the more successful you become in today’s world of work, the more your work becomes a nightmare from which you wonder if you’ll ever wake up.
It relates, in part, to something Seth Godin wrote about [...]
Posted in Books on January 22nd, 2005 No Comments »
I just finished reading one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in a while. It’s called The Dutch Wife and it’s by Eric McCormack. (For those who spend too much time in front of their TV, no – it’s not that Eric McCormack.)
Any brief summary of the novel would be misleading. It involves a [...]
Posted in Books on January 15th, 2005 No Comments »
I read Michael Chabon’s short novel The Final Solution without knowing anything about what I was about to read. Lucky me: I had no preconceived notions and, being someone with a very poor memory, I didn’t pick up on one of the main elements of the story – the identity of “the old man†- [...]
Posted in Books, Writing on January 8th, 2005 No Comments »
People don’t read anymore — at least, not as many people read as in the past and I suspect of those that do, the amount they read is reduced. And there is a good essay on this called Let’s Blame the Readers by Evan Cornog in CJR (Columbia Journalism Review). (Thanks to Writing for the [...]
Posted in Books on August 6th, 2004 1 Comment »
I’m about halfway through the novel English Passengers by Mathew Kneale and I’m loving it. It’s the kind of novel I’ve always liked. It’s funny (both in the sense of wit and its slapstick way with certain scenes), it’s dark (it’s essentially about the genocide of aboriginal people in Tasmania) and it’s a magnificent example [...]
