blog.rightreading.com

Today I initiate what I am hoping will become a more or less weekly feature here at blog.rightreading.com — a report on book news from newspapers and journals around the world. (I say “more or less weekly” because I am currently working on a big project that is taking most of my time, and this [...]

When the ancients wrote books they were trying to get at reality and transmit spirit. But all they could convey was a general idea, in order to help lead people to the truth. Much of their spirit, their energy, their words and laughter and actions, could not be captured.
When modern generations write books they ape [...]

I received the following e-mail:
Within the last few months, I sent you a query regarding my book, [title redacted], which you kindly declined to represent. In the interim, I have built my own website , and I’ve since had grown my audience to hundreds of enthusiastic readers. I’d like to invite you [...]

According to a study by diabolical psychologist Joe Forgas of the University of New South Wales, unhappy people make the best writers.
He did a series of experiments where he bummed one group out and cheered another up. “Trained essay raters” determined that the unhappy subjects wrote superior essays.
According to Forgas “mildly negative mood may actually [...]

A friend and colleague, Will Powers, died suddenly of a heart attack on August 25. I had worked with Will when I was at North Point Press, employing him as a free-lance copy editor and proofreader. He had worked previously as a typographer at Stinehour Press, and he brought a craftsman’s eye to the projects [...]

Right Reading passes along the following e-mail unedited (except for removing the publicist’s e-mail address). This is a typical form for a book press release. The brief personalized cover note shows the publicist is doing her job diligently. The writing advice is pretty standard for conventional mainstream fiction, and writers should be aware of these [...]

“The submission process is like going to the DMV. It’s one of the great equalizers, and it tends to treat everybody like shit.” — Jess Mowry
Author Jess Mowry (Way Past Cool, Babylon Boyz, Ghost Train, Six Out Seven) has some helpful tips on preparing a manuscript for book publication. Let’s look at some of the [...]

Many years ago, as a graduate student in comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a focus in part on the linguistic model in literary criticism, I turned my attention to beyond-the-sentence topicality. Scholars have parsed the sentence since ancient time, but they have paid less attention to the way sentences connect to each [...]

moonlight illuninates
pillow shoulder sheet
monkey mind racing

Many great books begin on a quiet note — think of Tolstoy’s “All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” or Ford’s “This is the saddest story I have ever heard,” for example.
But some writers take the opposite tack. I just encountered this extraordinary opening sentence to chapter [...]

How long should a query be? Surely it depends on the nature of the work, competing editions and the book’s market segment, your publishing history, whether you know the agent or publisher, and things like that, right?
And it seems likely that queries these days would be shorter than they used to be, since new media, [...]

Wordle is “a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide.” Words that appear more often are presented more prominently. The site will make word clouds from text that you provide or from urls or even from a del.icio.us user’s tags. It’s so pointless it almost becomes interesting.
What if some well-known American writers [...]

“The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation — a book should [...]

Zachart Kanin in the New Yorker
.

According to Jacob Nielsen, in a post of nearly 500 words, such as this one, readers can be expected to spend an average of about 45 seconds on the page, an amount of time in which they might read some 187 words, or less than three-eighths of the content.
In a study called “Not Quite the [...]

Overblown prose often springs up exactly where you would expect to find it. But shouldn’t this extraordinary opening by Peter Hartlaub to his review of Grand Theft Auto IV in the San Francisco Chronicle get some sort of award?
Cultural revolution often comes from seemingly imperfect people and unpopular places.
The most influential athlete was labeled [...]

This is pretty awesome. When Hillary challenged Barack to a “Lincoln-Douglas” style debate, Fox TV’s national news ran the following graphic.

I guess they thought she said “Lincoln-Douglass.”
What a debate that must have been!
.
via Wonkette
.

Lies I’ve told my 3 year old recently
By Raul Gutierrez
Trees talk to each other at night.
All fish are named either Lorna or Jack.
Before your eyeballs fall out from watching too much TV, they get very loose.
Tiny bears live in drain pipes.
If you are very very quiet you can hear the clouds rub against the [...]

Some book titles feel so much a part of their texts that that the works’ draft titles seem like oddly fitted hats, discarded in the dressing room; others — including some forced on authors by their publishers — read like images aspired to but never quite met. And then there are the flat-out clunkers, to [...]

Recently there has been an uptick in talk about semicolons. Witness:

Hooray for the ;
I say! A subterranean semicolon!
FANBOYS and the Semicolon
Colbert on punctuation
How to Use Punctuation Correctly
Punctuation lives
The Elements of Spam
Semicolonoscopy

What does this signify? I’m not sure. Could it be another sign of the trend to the literate class becoming a cultural elite, eager to [...]