In Raven Stole the Moon, Jenna Rosen walks away from a life that is fractured.  Two years ago, her young son drowned in a tragic accident at a resort in Alaska.  Her husband seems to have moved on, but Jenna cannot let go of her grief.  On the anniversary of their son’s death, they attend a party that turns out to be Jenna’s breaking point.  She walks away from the party, gets in her husband’s car and drives… straight through to Bellingham, Washington.  She gets on the ferry and heads to her home town of Wrangell, Alaska — and straight into a mystery.  [Read more →]

Tags: Lisa Reads, books & writing
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Jake Adlestein, an American reporter working the police beat for a Japanese newspaper, begins his true crime story with a meeting he took with two members of the yakuza, Japan’s organized crime group.

“Either erase the story, or we will erase you. And maybe your family. But we’ll do them first, so you learn your lesson before you die,” one of the yakuza members said to Adelstein.  

Adelstein writes that this seemed like a straightforward proposition. [Read more →]

Tags: on thrillers and crime
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“[D]o not linger over your own ruins.”

Lesser minds examining Vladimir Nabokov’s posthumously published The Original of Laura (Dying is Fun), A Novel in Fragments will be tempted to begin by quoting index card D2, page 133, in which the great Enchanter writes, “Now comes the mental image. In preparing for my own experiments — a long fumble which these notes shall help novices to avoid — I toyed with the ides of drawing a fairly detailed, fairly recognizable portrait of myself on my private blackboard.” This is a trap of course, neatly set by that great player of literary games, that the present reviewer shall neatly sidestep by instead noting that when the great Nabokov passed away in 1977 (as harrowingly related by a character purporting to be Nabokov’s son, Dmitri, in T.O.O.L.’s introduction), I was four years old, and had only just recently discovered his works. I was halfway through my second re-reading of Pale Fire – I hadn’t yet found all the clues as to the butterfly/Hazel Shade connection - and I was devastated in that way that only the near-infant fan of a great author can be when he learns his favorite author has shuffled off this mortal coil.

[Read more →]

Tags: art & entertainment, books & writing
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I have occasionally described books as “a wild ride.”  Books are like trips we take — some are pleasant Sunday drives, some are fast and bumpy.  John Dies @ the End is like a ride on a twisting, speeding, swooping roller coaster.  On acid.  With no seat belt. [Read more →]

Tags: Lisa Reads, books & writing
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I have been reading the Journal of Jules Renard, as translated and edited by Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget. Originally published in 1964, it was reprinted a couple of years ago by Tin House Books. The complete journal runs to more than 1,200 pages. The Tin House edition, at 304 pages, provides a representative sampling. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson
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Rich Trzupek at Big Journalism wrote an interesting piece about William F. Buckley, who died two years ago.  

As Trzupek notes in his piece, Buckley spawned and inspired a new generation of conservative and libertarian thought.

[Read more →]

Tags: books & writing
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I wish I were in Los Angeles. For if I were, I would surely take the Raymond Chandler tour I just read about .

I’m sure LA has changed much from Raymond Chandler’s day, as I’m sure the city has also changed from my frequent visits there in the early 1970s, but a clever tour guide is trying to preserve Chandler’s LA attmosphere (and make a buck at the same time).

[Read more →]

Tags: books & writing
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Over the last decade Penny Arcade has been providing social commentary to a niche market over the Internet. I’ve been a fan since I was introduced to the comic in 2001. Their main focuses are video games and the surrounding culture, a truly vast and encompassing topic when you consider how little the Associated Press actually covers related issues other than addiction and violence. Gabe and Tycho, the artist’s and writer’s pen-names, are still making me and many other people laugh while making some good points.
[Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, just fantastic
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Historical fiction can be challenging, both for writers and readers.  It doesn’t take much — just a word, a name, a description — to bounce you right out of the story.  In the Author’s Note at the end of Mistress of the Art of Death, Ariana Franklin says “It is almost impossible to write a comprehensible story set in the twelfth century without being anachronistic, at least in part.  To avoid confusion, I have used modern names and terms.”  Still, she manages to evoke a sense of the time that had me completely swept up in the story.  It’s an excellent combination of a compelling story, interesting characters and the romance of an earlier time. [Read more →]

Tags: Lisa Reads, books & writing
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Although Philip K. Dick passed away in 1982, his novels and stories still have a feel of immediacy. These works of speculative fiction dealt with themes that still preoccupy our minds — the overreach of governments that lie to their subjects in order to increase their power, corrupt corporations that attempt to control every aspect of peoples’ lives, and the nature of identity in an increasingly confusing world. Hollywood studios love him, because his personal stories of alienation in modern society appeal to modern filmmakers, who have turned his fiction into classic films such as Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall, and at least three other films that I have seen, but whose titles escape me at the moment.

For me, one of his best works is the novel The Penultimate Inconvenient Truth, which is the story of a conspiracy among scientists and various world governments to convince people that the planet’s temperature (”planetemp”) is rising. In fact, there is little evidence of this — the scientists and governments are just using it as an excuse to consolidate power. The first chapter, reprinted below, is so prescient that it almost feels like it could have been written today, just now, by me, as a satire. Except for all those classic Phildickian terms, of course:

[Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, politics & government
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Thirteen Misconceptions Surrounding National Shelve Your Indie Novel in the Superbookstore Month

1)  America did not carpet bomb any lawless tribal regions with remaindered and pulped copies of confiscated counterfeit Indie versions of Sarah Palin’s autobiography.

2)  103,017 bottles and cans of Coke and Pepsi staged a walk out from 7-11 freezer space across the country in protest of the marginalization of indie novelists and collusive practices across the country. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, damned lies
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I was told that Lieutenant Edwin Fay was thrilled with being a naval intelligence officer back in 1964. James Bond-mania was in full swing and Fay was a big fan of the novels and films.

Fay was pleased to learn that his true-life hero, the late President John F. Kennedy, a World War II naval officer, was also a fan of the novels and once dined with Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming. [Read more →]

Tags: creative writing, on thrillers and crime
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Is George Orwell’s1984 the most influential novel ever written? That’s what Geoffrey Wheatcroft says in a recent essay in the New York Times:

No other [novel] can have so enriched the language. Try a Web search for countless contemporary uses of Newspeak, the thought police or doublethink - the expressions, that is: a glance at the political pages or op-ed columns provides plenty of examples of what those brilliant coinings describe.

My, with all this “coining” and “enrichment,” Orwell is practically the Royal Mint. Maybe Orwell’s words are still in circulation but are his ideas really in good condition?

[Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, diatribes
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Paddy Meehan is probably the most flawed heroine I’ve read in a while. By page 10 of The Dead Hour, she has already taken a bribe. She lies, she has an affair with a married man — but in her own way, she’s trying to do the right thing. Her way is just a bit roundabout. [Read more →]

Tags: Lisa Reads, books & writing
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Back in September, I reviewed The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein. I was really impressed by the book — it wasn’t really something I expected to like, but I was sucked in and really enjoyed it. Garth Stein has a new novel coming out in just a few weeks: Raven Stole the Moon is currently available for pre-order. I hope to have a review here for you soon!

Tags: Lisa Reads, books & writing
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10. Although this sonnet be one quatrain short,

9. It’s filled with every drop of Love of mine.

8. It’s filled with all my caring and support.

7. I Love you so, my gorgeous Valentine.
[Read more →]

Tags: Bob Sullivan's top ten everything, books & writing, living poetry
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Dear Roger Ebert,

Everyone suffers through the bittersweet pain of first love lost. Subsequent romances are never the same; are never remembered with quite the same quality of melancholic regret. Your first love is the only one to whom you can say things like “I will love you forever,” and not be lying just to get in her pants.

[Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, movies
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If you have a weak stomach, this book is not for you.

Wake Up Dead is probably the most violent, bloody, gore-splattered book I’ve read in ages, and that’s really saying something.  A gang war in Cape Town, South Africa’s ghettos provides the setting and the gang-bangers, drug lords, junkies and an honest-to-goodness cannibal provide the action.

On a steamy night in Cape Town, Roxy and Joe Palmer have dinner with a cannibal and his Ukranian whore.  On the way home, they’re carjacked.  Joe is shot in the leg and, in a panic, the carjackers drop the gun and take off in Joe’s car.  What Roxy does next will cause more bloodshed than she can possibly imagine. [Read more →]

Tags: Lisa Reads, books & writing
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I am reading Albert Jay Nock’s Memoirs of a Superfluous Man. He writes here of another time, of 70 years ago or more, but we might as well apply it to today, or to a few years ago:

American society had not the faintest idea of what it was doing or where it was going. It simply clung to its inveterate practice of making brag, bounce and quackery do duty for observation, reason and common sense. It had not yet got a glimpse of the elementary truth which was so clear to the mind of Mr. Jefferson, that in proportion as you give the State power to do things for you, you give it power to do things to you; and that the State invariably makes as little as it can of the one power, and as much as it can of the other. (175-6)

[Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, politics & government
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In the movie Tapeheads — perhaps the last film featuring Tim Robbins in which the actor’s entertainment value outweighed his self-regard — a disreputable record producer named “Mo Fuzz” induced aspiring video producers played by Robbins and John Cusack to make music videos “on spec.” In case you didn’t know, “on spec” means “do this for free and maybe you’ll impress me so much that you’ll make some money in the undefined future.” If you’re a writer these days, everybody seems to be Mo Fuzz. And plenty of folks taking the Fuzzes of the world up on their speculative offers seem unconcerned as to whether the effort ever pays off. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing
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The old train sputtered at such a slow speed that a fast walker could’ve easily overtaken it. Inside one of the cars, a tall, frail man with a ghost-like complexion looked around and noticed that the only passengers remaining were others just like him — men half-alive — men taking their final journey. He almost expected Charon to walk through the door and lead them the rest of the way. He even reached into his pocket for a one-heller coin, just in case. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, creative writing
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Back in the early 1970s I was stationed in Southern California while serving in the Navy. Although I’m a die-hard South Philly guy, I loved my time on the West Coast.

I particularly loved my weekends in Los Angeles, a city I read about as a teenager in the novels of Raymond Chandler and was at that time reading about the city in the novels of Joseph Wambaugh. I had also seen LA as a backdrop in a good number of movies and TV shows growing up. From crime stories to tales of Hollywood, LA was almost a mythical place to me.

[Read more →]

Tags: on thrillers and crime
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I have always loved Joyce Carol Oates’ writing.  I love her combination of long, flowing sentences and short, choppy fragments. Little Bird of Heaven is lovely to read, even when the story is heartbreaking.

Krista Diehl’s family was fine before “the trouble” came.  Her father, Eddy, ran a construction company.  A handsome man, he was well-known around town as a bit of a flirt and a bit of a drinker.  Her mother, Lucille, a stay at home mom, her teenaged brother, Ben.  A happy family until trouble came along in the form of Zoe Kruller.  Zoe was small-town beautiful — she had an exotic name, she was everyone’s favorite at the ice cream shop, she sang with a little rock band on Saturday summer nights at the town bandstand.  When she is found murdered — strangled in her bed — the prime suspects are her estranged husband, Delray, and her lover, Eddy Diehl. [Read more →]

Tags: Lisa Reads, books & writing
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I don’t read newspapers. It’s not personal. I started reading on a computer when I was really young and never looked back. Consequently certain features never make it through my front door, specifically comic strips. So, when John McPherson’s Close to Home made its big debut in my hometown paper, which I assume it did at some point in the late 1990s, I was completely unaware. But January 2010, when I was sifting through the calendars in the 50% off bin at Barnes and Noble, I found a Close to Home calendar and bought it. My other option was a girl’s college survival guide. And I don’t need any beauty tips. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, just fantastic
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Hat tip to the Mighty Red Pen for this gem: in California, the Menifee Union School District has removed Merriam-Webster’s 10th-edition dictionary from elementary school shelves because it has an entry for “oral sex.”

If I was to write a dictionary, now I know just what I’d put next to my entry for “futility.”

[Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, education
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 The amazing thing is that I finished this novel.

The premise of One Amazing Thing by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, is a cliche: a group of people are trapped together after a disaster and they may die, but before they do, they are going to tell a story from their life — their one amazing thing. It’s a mixed group, the sort of group you would call together for a photo shoot to show your commitment to diversity. Their stories are sometimes interesting — there’s a ghost, a voodoo curse, and a misplaced aurora borealis. There are bad marriages, lost love and even a dead kitten. But none of it felt real to me. [Read more →]

Tags: Lisa Reads, books & writing
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Here’s Slate’s review of Louis Menand’s new book about higher learning, which concludes with a note on the vaunted lefty politics of American academics:

In the 2004 election, he notes, 95 percent of humanities and social-science professors voted for Kerry; zero percent voted for Bush.

Oh, goody. It’s the old chestnut about the political uniformity of the academy.

[Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, education
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 One of my favorite authors passed away yesterday - Robert B. Parker, author of the Spenser series of novels. He wrote 65 novels in all, 37 Spenser novels, according to RobertBParker.net, including his newest, The Professional. The novels inspired a television series - Spenser: For Hire - that forever changed the way I read his books. I was never a big Robert Urich fan, but to this day when I re-read one of my old favorites, I hear Avery Brooks’ voice in my head whenever Hawk speaks.

According to the Washington Post, Mr. Parker appears to have died of a heart attack. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing
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The Baltimore Sun reports that, “a longtime tribute to Edgar Allan Poe may have come to an end with the absence of the ‘Poe Toaster,’ who for more than half-a-century has marked the poet’s birthday by laying roses and a bottle of cognac at his original grave site. This is the first time since January 19, 1949 that the person, whose identity is unknown, failed to arrive, said Jeff Jerome, curator of the Edgar Allan Poe House.” [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing
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 I saw the movie, Let the Right One In, last year and was immediately drawn in by it. The stark settings and minimal dialogue gave the film a sense of isolation and dread. Nothing good could happen in these surroundings. As soon as I found out the film was based on a book, I had to have it. It just took me a little while.

The book, Let the Right One In resurrects all the chills the movie gave me.

Oskar is a lonely 13-year-old boy — chubby, friendless and a bit homicidal:

Strangely enough, he already knew the name of his victim, and what he looked like. Jonny Forsberg with his long hair and large, mean eyes. He would make him plead and beg for his life, squeal like a pig, but in vain. The knife would have the last word and the earth would drink his blood. Oskar had read those words in a book and liked them.

The Earth Shall Drink His Blood.

[Read more →]

Tags: Lisa Reads, books & writing
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