I’ve mostly avoided books marketed as Westerns. I read the first Lonesome Dove book in high school, but all I really remember was a river-crossing scene with a giant ball of snakes in the water. Ghost Town, Robert Coover’s postmodern take on the Western, more or less unpacks all of the conventions of the [...]
Entries Tagged as 'reading habits'
Blood Meridian or the Best Western
July 17th, 2009 No Comments
Tags: Blood Meridian · Brooks · reading habits · Westerns
The Pile of Books on My Floor -or- Summer Guilt
July 14th, 2009 2 Comments
This is the unsteady tower growing next to my bed. The crab and almost empty box of Godiva chocolates notwithstanding, it is all books and journals I have not yet read–well, those that I don’t have room for on the shelves. Initially, I thought this would be summer reading.
At the very bottom, the beginning and [...]
Tags: books · literary magazines · Llalan · reading · reading habits
Announcing Travel Writing Week!
July 6th, 2009 1 Comment
Since the sun in Boston has finally emerged, I’m finally feeling less inclined to move away or get out of town. Summer’s finally here! But since lots of our bloggers have been planning or engaging in summer travel, we thought a fun theme for our first week of July would be that genre packed full [...]
Tags: kim · reading habits · Travel Week · travel writing · writing habits
The Da Vinci Code is a Stepped-On Bag of Pork Rinds
June 27th, 2009 14 Comments
“People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad,” sayeth Ralph Waldo Emerson.
You may already know this, but Harry Potter is very bad for you. One might respond with “I know it’s not literature but I just read it for pleasure–it’s kind of like junk food.” Harry Potter is not [...]
Tags: Brooks · Harold Bloom · literary taste · reading habits · Virginia Woolf · William Gass
Recommended Reading (according to Neil Gaiman and some others)
June 11th, 2009 No Comments
I don’t really like to re-post things from around the internet unless it’s particularly interesting, and I this counts in my opinion, plus it continues our theme of summer reading. Last week, Salon.com asked a bunch of authors what they were reading and what they would recommend. Even though some of the books/subject mentioned don’t [...]
Tags: literary taste · patrick · reading · reading habits · Summer Reading Month · writers · writers' habits
If you’re already sitting down…
June 5th, 2009 No Comments
While Vernacular has already launched our Summer Reading Month, I wanted to let everyone know that June is also National Bathroom Reading Month!
Celebrate by spending your next #2 reading the #1 bathroom book, Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader . It’s a compendium of useful knowledge and fun facts, and it’ll make your bathroom as edifying as [...]
Tags: reading habits · Summer Reading Month
The Little Sleep by Paul Tremblay
June 4th, 2009 No Comments
Perhaps I’m just spending too much time in workshops, these days, but I find that my reaction to a lot of books, lately, is: It’s good, but the author needs a better editor.
I suppose it’s a bit of a ridiculous complaint to have, because usually the author in question has their book with Holt, or [...]
Tags: Andrew · Book Reviews · reading habits · Summer Reading Month
Leisure Reading (again!)
May 7th, 2009 3 Comments
Hey Old Sports, it seems like it’s been awhile since I’ve posted, but here I amAt the end of last term, I wrote a post about leisure reading and how the end of the term means being able to read the books I want to read (instead of class reading, obviously). Well it’s that time [...]
Tags: literary magazines · patrick · reading · reading habits
Life Lessons from Books
April 16th, 2009 No Comments
In Roy Kamada’s Pacific Scatterings: Asian Diaspora class that I’m currently taking, one of the common themes throughout all the readings is the construction of identity. Now, of course, there are an uncountable number of forces working around us, shaping the people we will become, whether we know it or not.
All this talk of why [...]
Tags: books · emerson courses · literary taste · patrick · reading · reading habits
Learning Without Reading
March 27th, 2009 No Comments
To get published in literary journals, it apparently helps to read them. Most people (myself included) rarely do either of these things. I read one cover to cover a long time ago–I think it was Conjunctions. I usually just read parts of lit journals in bookstores even though I know it’s crucial to support “new [...]
Tags: Brooks · getting published · literary magazines · reading habits