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Warren Murphy, Writer and Creator of Remo Williams, Dies at 81 http://www.nytimes.com/20...

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - -

"The novel was published in 1971. Remo was immortalized. And he did not die: He survived to return in almost 150 more titles, which sold millions of copies and inspired a 1985 film, “Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins,” with Fred Ward as Remo and Joel Grey as Chiun, the ancient Korean master of a version of martial arts called Sinanju. [...] - bentley - -

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Mr. Murphy offered would-be novelists a free primer on his website. One suggestion was, “If you could read Page Six of The New York Post or The New York Daily News every day for a week and not come up with a dozen ideas for a novel, you might consider finding a new hobby.” - bentley - -

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Jennifer D. to The Reading Room, Jennifer D.'s feed
I'm 5 books away from what I thought was a ridiculous reading challenge goal this year o_O

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 7 ] -

That's just ridiculous. :-) - bentley - [ 1 ] -

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More Titillated Than Thou - The Baffler (http://thebaffler.com/sal... http://48ic4g3gr5iyzszh23... )

9 years ago from Bookmarklet - Comment - Hide - - [ 1 ] -

The commercialization of the Amish brand is, of course, nothing new. My sister and I have a long familiarity with kitschy Amish books: guidebooks to Pennsylvania Dutch country, Amish “wisdom” books, “Plain” cookbooks. But the strange cover of Found represented something new in this faintly comical face-off between the self-segregated communities of faith we knew and a cultural mainstream incorrigibly curious about what it’s done to offend pious Anabaptist sensibilities. For a tortured Amish conscience to be front and center on a mass-market paperback meant that the bonnet-clad and buttonless Amish were merging, however awkwardly, with more commercially tried-and-true narratives of tested devotion and romantic longing." - JustDuckie from Bookmarklet - -

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"In a surprising development, the dispute among “Trufans” “SMOFS” “Sad Puppies” and “Rabid Puppies” has produced a result: We now know exactly who runs the Hugo Awards. It turns out to be Mrs. Gladys Knipperdowling, of Grand Rapids, Iowa." http://dreamcafe.com/2015... (via http://nielsenhayden.com/... )

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 1 ] -

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Silent Reading Doesn't Exist | The New Republic (http://www.newrepublic.co... http://www.newrepublic.co... )

9 years ago from Bookmarklet - Comment - Hide - - [ 2 ] -

"It is said that with the onset of a serious illness the first thing to be lost is the capacity to read. I learned the truth of that insight ten years ago, not from sickness but from homelessness. Having fled the approach of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, my family and I took refuge in my brother’s house in Dallas, expecting to return to New Orleans a day or two later. The storm, with recorded winds in the city under 100 miles per hour and, thus, only a strong category one hurricane, did not destroy New Orleans that August Monday morning. But in its wake, defective levees designed and built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers collapsed and flooded 80 percent of the city, an area seven times the size of Manhattan, with saltwater up to fourteen feet deep. By that Thursday, we were coming to understand we could not return home anytime soon. My sister, also living in the Dallas area, brought us to a film, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, to take our minds off the still unfolding catastrophe. As the comedy unspooled in the darkened auditorium, I began to feel as if I couldn’t breathe. That night, I told my wife what had happened. She was shocked—because she had experienced the same sense of suffocation. In fact, she told me, she almost had had to leave the theater in the middle of the film." - JustDuckie from Bookmarklet - -

"If I bring up this lasting effect among other New Orleanians who survived the flood and its aftermath, many will admit the same disability—and usually they are relieved to learn that someone else can’t read anymore. I think what happened to us, what can happen to someone seriously ill, is related to the silencing of the self that reading requires. Confronting an array of problems that occur to the victim of disaster or disease only little by little—do I still have a job, what am I going to do for money, will my insurance cover what I’m facing, will my marriage survive this, how is my life going to change—one holds on tightly to the self. One doesn’t dare let go." - JustDuckie - -

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Romanian city offers free rides to people reading on the bus - Europe - World - The Independent (http://www.independent.co... http://www.independent.co... )

9 years ago from Bookmarklet - Comment - Hide - - [ 2 ] -

"Those who can’t resist reading a good book on public transport have been rewarded by a city in Romania, which offered a free bus ride to anyone who read a book during their journey. The initiative, which ran for a week in June, was proposed by Victor Miron, a book-lover and resident of Cluj-Napoca in north-western Romania. Victor Miron proposed the initiative Miron said that he wanted to “encourage more people to read on public transportation”. He proposed his idea to the city’s mayor, Emil Boc, who then posted it to his followers on Facebook. The idea received such an overwhelmingly warm response that a year later it was put into action. " - JustDuckie from Bookmarklet - -

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“Happily Ever After” For African-American Romance Novelists - The Rumpus.net (http://therumpus.net/2015... http://therumpus.wpengine... http://therumpus.wpengine... )

9 years ago from Bookmarklet - Comment - Hide - - [ 2 ] -

"Romance novels appeal for a number of reasons. There are the “naughty bits” that leave the reader as breathless as the heroine, to be sure. Much of their hold over readers also lies in a forthright presentation of feminism. In these predominantly by-women-for-women works, the protagonists are not punished for pursuing fulfillment; rather, they are rewarded for it with the “happily ever after,” or “HEA,” that defines a romance novel—and typically, with some really great sex along the way. Romance novels prioritize being loved for who you are, no concessions needed. It’s a message that resonates with black women and others who have been denied their HEAs in real life." - JustDuckie from Bookmarklet - -

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"“People need to see that, love is love, regardless of who you are, whether you love someone of color, whether you love another woman,” Jenkins said. “Love is love.” In a society that routinely relegates black women to the margins, or worse, romance novels underscore that their desires and their bodies are worth of happily ever afters." - JustDuckie - -

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How To Tell If You're In an Edward Gorey Book - The Toast (http://the-toast.net/2015... http://17rg073sukbm1lmjk9... )

9 years ago from Bookmarklet - Comment - Hide - - [ 6 ] -

"Your personal style can best be described as “librarian up to no good.”" - JustDuckie from Bookmarklet - [ 3 ] -

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"Oh, did the Edwardian era end? You hadn’t even noticed." - JustDuckie - [ 1 ] -

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Round-Down: Historical Underpinnings of Continual Sexism in Publishing | The Ploughshares Blog (http://blog.pshares.org/i... http://blog.pshares.org/f... )

9 years ago from Bookmarklet - Comment - Hide - - [ 1 ] -

"Oxford University holds perhaps the largest repository of books written in English, given the statute that it receives one copy of every book published in the UK. Despite this impressive fact, I found just five books in the whole of the stacks dedicated to women’s contributions to (what many critics falsely deem) the predominately male tradition. It’s not that women weren’t contributing to the sonnet after Sir Thomas Wyatt brought the form over to England from Italy in the sixteenth century, it’s just that no one was widely circulating or reading their work–or, perhaps no one was admitting to reading it. How many of us, for example, recognize the names of Mary Stuart, Lady Mary Wroth, Charlotte Smith, Mary Darby Robinson, Anne Lock, or Louise Labé versus those of us who recognize the names of William Shakespeare, John Donne, or William Wordsworth? Wordsworth is often falsely accredited with the revival of the sonnet form, but in fact, his first published sonnet was an imitation of Helen Maria William’s—though he would later deny this and say it was inspired by Milton." - JustDuckie from Bookmarklet - -

"Despite the many gains we have made in including women in our understanding of the history of literature, many students graduate with the false understanding that women did not really write until the nineteenth century–that they just couldn’t. Even Virginia Woolf, in her iconic and popular text A Room Of One’s Own, writes of the impossibility of women writing at the time of Shakespeare, whose plays and sonnets make him famous in the minds of students of literature the world over. Woolf imagines Shakespeare had an equally talented but dismissed sister, Judith, who killed herself having never written a word, since she was never sanctioned by society to explore her gifts. Woolf’s account is heartrending—especially considering the untimely end the author met at her own hands. And yet I fear a majority of scholars and teachers of literature—and indeed even writers—have taken accounts like Woolf’s at face value and simply stopped looking for a canon of women writers beyond the token few that pepper anthologies. There is clearly still much work to be done in terms of revising our historical understanding of what it has meant to be a woman writer—and what it means to write as a woman today." - JustDuckie - -

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bentley to The Reading Room, Food, bentley's feed
Recipes from fiction. http://www.metafilter.com... http://36eggs.blogspot.co... Including a month of Harry Potter recipes. https://www.facebook.com/... https://scontent-ord1-1.x... http://2.bp.blogspot.com/...

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 1 ] -

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Shift dropped on author after typo in her romantic novel | Books | The Guardian (http://www.theguardian.co... http://i.guim.co.uk/img/s... )

9 years ago from Bookmarklet - Comment - Hide - - [ 5 ] -

"Bounty hunter Sam McKade is the new breed of hero. Tall? Undoubtedly. Handsome and chiselled? For sure. Incontinent? Erm – possibly. Author Susan Andersen was horrified to discover an unfortunate typo in the ebook edition of her new novel Baby, I'm Yours, which takes the novel out of the romance category and into something rather darker. "I apologise to anyone who bought my on-sale ebook of Baby, I'm Yours and read on pg 293: 'He stiffened for a moment but then she felt his muscles loosen as he shitted on the ground'," says Andersen." - JustDuckie from Bookmarklet - -

'as he shitted on the ground': that's a bit gross, and funny. i'll buy the book. - StefanoHBS from Android - [ 2 ] -

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bentley to The Reading Room, bentley's feed
"College & University | KY, USA | Professor: “Greek tragedy! Patriotism! Mythic families killing each other and themselves! What could possibly make this better? Probably goats!” http://notalwayslearning....

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 3 ] -

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"A Personal Take on 'Go Set a Watchman'" by Ursula K. Le Guin http://bookviewcafe.com/b... (via http://nielsenhayden.com/... ) "Harper Lee was a good writer. She wrote a lovable, greatly beloved book. But this earlier one, for all its faults and omissions, asks some of the hard questions To Kill a Mockingbird evades."

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 1 ] -

bentley to The Reading Room, bentley's feed
"Is it stealing if you empty a Little Free Library?" http://onmilwaukee.com/my... (via http://www.tk421.net/libr... ) A friend in Maryland has had the same problem with her Little Free Library.

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - - [ 2 ]

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This Will Ring Your Chimes | File 770 (http://file770.com/?p=234... ) - The Dr. Seuss/LotR mashup cracks me up.

9 years ago from Bookmarklet - Comment - Hide - - [ 1 ] -

Also, this one: "Ring and Ringwraith IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single hobbit in possession of the One Ring must be in want of a volcano." - Katy_S - [ 1 ] -

Surely more folks were amused by this than just Jenn and I. - Katy_S - [ 1 ] -

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bentley to Library Society of the World, The Reading Room, bentley's feed
We Tried — And Failed — To Identify The Most Banned Book In America http://fivethirtyeight.co... (via Library Link of the Day http://www.tk421.net/libr... )

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - - [ 3 ]

“But I soon found there was no way to get any raw data about challenges, as the Office for Intellectual Freedom refused to give me access to its database or any more details about the methodology behind its collection of challenges beyond what’s on the website. [..] The American Library Association is saying that its challenge database isn’t statistically valid and that despite the hundreds of news articles about its list, the database is not meant for public consumption.” - bentley - -

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I was surprised they included age appropriateness under "Challenges." - bentley - -

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bentley to The Reading Room
What If Authors Were Paid Every Time Someone Turned a Page? Amazon is about to find out. http://www.theatlantic.co... (via Library Link of the Day http://www.tk421.net/libr... )

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - - [ 2 ]

"Soon, the maker of the Kindle is going to flip the formula used for reimbursing some of the authors who depend on it for sales. Instead of paying these authors by the book, Amazon will soon start paying authors based on how many pages are read—not how many pages are downloaded, but how many pages are displayed on the screen long enough to be parsed." - bentley - -

I guess they won't be reimbursing readers for unread pages. - John B. - [ 1 ] -

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New 50 Shades book: a chapter by chapter review of Grey by EL James - Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.u... http://i.telegraph.co.uk/... )

9 years ago from Bookmarklet - Comment - Hide - - [ 2 ] -

"Ana - I am not on friendly terms with this woman, but it is driving me nuts having to type out that name each time - has an overreaction on a nuclear scale. They have met barely three times! I don't care if she smells of orchards and has a fabulous ass, Christian, she's clearly a nutbar. Oh thank God, it's the end of the chapter and Anastasia has disappeared in a cloud of grammatically improbable metaphor." - JustDuckie from Bookmarklet - -

"Most of Christian's staff fancy him, probably because he insists on hiring "tall willowy girls with a pretty face" who really fancy him, but walk around looking sad about it. This is fairly boring. Christian has not been anywhere near his Red Room of Pain, not even to change the batteries." - JustDuckie - -

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bentley to The Reading Room, bentley's feed
I just started listening to the Writing Excuses podcast (“Fifteen minutes long, because you're in a hurry, and we're not that smart”). This season, they’re running the podcast as a writing workshop, so I backtracked to the beginning of the season. Based on just one episode, I’m recommending it. Mary Robinette Kowal, Brandon Sanderson, Howard Tayler, and Dan Wells. http://www.writingexcuses... https://en.wikipedia.org/...

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 1 ] -

Wikipedia's description: "the four hosts discuss different topics involved in the creation and production of genre writing and webcomics." - bentley - -

bentley to The Reading Room, bentley's feed
I gotta remember this next time I get invited to another baby shower: "My girls are now 18 and 21, and both have exceptional vocabularies and are eager readers. Our standard gift for baby showers is a large stack of children's classics, individually wrapped and tied together with a veritable Reading Rainbow of ribbons, because we believe every kid needs a personal library." http://parenting.blogs.ny...

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 3 ] -

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"Crafton Hills College student, parents protest material in graphic novels English course" http://www.redlandsdailyf... (via http://news.nationalpost.... ) https://nationalpostcom.f...

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"A Crafton Hills College student [Tara Shultz, 20, of Yucaipa] and her parents have complained to college administrators that graphic novels taught in an English course are pornographic and violent. [...] Four of the graphic novels discussed in the course depict nudity, sex, violence and torture. They also contain obscenities. “It was shocking,” Shultz said. “I didn’t expect to open the book and see that graphic material within. I expected Batman and Robin, not pornography." [...] - bentley - -

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It feels like a huge portion of her objection is that reality doesn't conform to her profound misunderstanding of the medium. I have no patience for that. - Jennifer D. - [ 2 ] -

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bentley to Library Society of the World, The Reading Room, bentley's feed
Taking reader's advisory up a notch? "Can Reading Make You Happier?" http://www.newyorker.com/...

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 4 ] -

"Several years ago, I was given as a gift a remote session with a bibliotherapist at the London headquarters of the School of Life, which offers innovative courses to help people deal with the daily emotional challenges of existence. I have to admit that at first I didn’t really like the idea of being given a reading “prescription.”[...] But the session was a gift, and I found myself unexpectedly enjoying the initial questionnaire about my reading habits that the bibliotherapist, Ella Berthoud, sent me. Nobody had ever asked me these questions before, even though reading fiction is and always has been essential to my life. [...] - bentley - -

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"Berthoud and Elderkin are also the authors of “The Novel Cure: An A-Z of Literary Remedies,” which is written in the style of a medical dictionary and matches ailments (“failure, feeling like a”) with suggested reading cures (“The History of Mr. Polly,” by H. G. Wells). First released in the U.K. in 2013, it is now being published in eighteen countries, and, in an interesting twist, the contract allows for a local editor and reading specialist to adapt up to twenty-five per cent of the ailments and reading recommendations to fit each particular country’s readership and include more native writers. The new, adapted ailments are culturally revealing." - bentley - -

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Jennifer D. to The Reading Room, Jennifer D.'s feed
Woo! I'm halfway through my Goodreads book challenge, and still ahead of schedule!

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 8 ] -

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'“You cannot remain blameless if a student is concussed by a swinging cow,” the form noted.' http://www.theatlantic.co...

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 9 ] -

... that is a sentence I can confidently aver I never expected to read. - Ondatra iSkoolicus - [ 6 ] -

That article was a fun read. - John B. - -

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bentley to The Reading Room, bentley's feed
"Much of what Dwike Mitchell taught me about playing the piano has nothing to do with music. It has to do with conduct and character. When I sometimes feel a twinge of disappointment if the crowd at one of my gigs is smaller than I expected, I hear Mitchell saying, 'It's a privilege to play for one other person.' ...

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 1 ] -

"That credo has helped me though many thin situations, both as a public pianist and as a public speaker. I've stopped worrying about conditions that I can't control or change. I just do what I came to do, as well as I can." --William Zinsser, "Writing About Your Life." - bentley - -

(btw, this is a great book. It's half memoir and half how-to write a memoir. I had to slow down reading it because I wanted it to last longer.) - bentley - -

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