The Office of Letters and Light Blog

E-readers, iPads, and my love affair with plain old books.

I just finished a three-book series (you’ll never guess which) that I consumed entirely on an iPad.

I have never before read a book digitally. I’m a first-timer when it comes to e-readers, though I have dabbled in listening to books on tape. Audio books, while convenient for multi-tasking purposes, still felt lacking to me for all the reasons I have always loved reading good old-fashioned paper and ink books—the great musty smell, the heft of the pages, the way the whole book changes from crisp and untouched to worn and well-loved through the course of my enjoyment. 

Reasons that have since been reinforced by my foray into iPad-reading.

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Book Thoughts: Relatable, Action-Packed Writing Advice

“You can find inspiration everywhere. The trick is to keep your eyes open.” – Just Write: Here’s How!

I am a glutton for writing advice, and the most common tip I receive is “write what you know.” Personally, I find that a bit vague; if I only wrote about what I truly know of the banality of daily life, I’d have a pretty boring book on my hands.

Few advice-givers take the difficulty of crafting action into account, and this might be my favorite thing about Walter Dean Myers’ book, Just Write: Here’s How! Yes, he guides his readers towards writing about topics that are familiar to them (with good reason!), but he also gives specific and detailed descriptions of how to turn that boring high school fitness test into an emotional turning point for the main character.

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A favorite, you say? How outré!

A few months ago, I was in a serious reading rut. As it happens, the book that got me out of that rut was a police procedural: Kate Atkinson’s Started Early, Took My Dog. And I haven’t stopped reading that genre since.

I have never been a person with a favorite type of book—or movie, or food, or place either. I am more of an “appreciate things for its own merits and my perspective-at-the-time person.” What some might label noncommittal.

But it “favorite” is defined as being the thing, or type of thing, that brings you the most joy, by golly, I think police procedurals are my favorite genre of book. I have never said that about any other genre in my life. (Well, okay, since the time I said that the Berenstain Bears books were my favorite.)

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A Real Life Book Swap, Inspired by Twitter

For whatever reason, Edmonton has had an incredibly lively and interactive Twitter community for years, and on any given day you’ll see a ton of activity on the hashtag for the city, #yeg (which is also our airport code), and the various sub-hashtags that #yeg spawned. (#yegfood talks about restaurants and farmers markets and such, #yegwx is for Edmonton weather—you name it, we’ve probably got a yeg hashtag for it.)

As a result, there’s a vibrant real-world component to Twitter here that I’m not sure exists on the same scale elsewhere. I’ve gone to all sorts of events that have been organized on Twitter, but earlier this week, I went to what might have been the coolest one. 

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Of Books, Planes, and Halibut

I am doing a lot of traveling this summer. Between now and August, I will find myself in Maryland, Georgia, Florida, Virginia, Vermont, and Alaska. (I’m serious about the “finding myself” part; a man comes to a lot of realizations while fishing for Alaskan halibut, or so I understand.)

I’m currently packing for the longest stretch (three weeks!), and in addition to finding that I don’t have enough T-shirts that aren’t NaNoWriMo-branded, I’m struggling to figure out my reading situation. How many books does one pack for such a trip? Should they be the breezy sort that are custom-made for airport layovers, or the heavier tomes that I’ll have no excuse to keep avoiding? These are my conundrums.

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Back In the Saddle…

Last week I shared with you my shame and dismay at the uncharacteristic reading drought I was suffering through.

By airing my problem publicly, I was motivated to work harder on the fix (a good example of why we encourage our writers to publicize their goals as motivation to win!). And, my friends, it appears that I am back in the saddle again.

I hit that often-critical 88-page mark, and the book I’ve been chipping away at got good. Really good. And now I’m carrying it with me wherever I go—from upstairs to down, and vice-versa. I was even at risk of being late to work this morning because I couldn’t be bothered to stop reading and get in the danged shower. And I had an epiphany.

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A Battlestar of Thrones

I like to consider myself a pretty diverse reader, but there’s always been one big exception to that rule. I have never been a fan of the epic fantasy series that span tens-of-thousands of pages, and often come with many years of anxiety-inducing publication delays. (I spent many years worrying that J.K. Rowling was going to be assassinated before finishing Harry Potter. I don’t need more stress like that in my life.)

It’s not that I don’t like fantasy across the board; I just have limited patience for sprawling arcs with hundreds of characters with weird names to keep straight. More power to those of you who love them, but they weren’t for me. With all the buzz of late around Game of Thrones, though, I started to debate whether I should break my long-standing rule against watching movies or TV series before reading the books.

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To Read or Not to Read… Is That Even a Question?!

At the risk of overburdening the blog with posts about how and what we are reading, I feel compelled to share with you my latest thoughts on this subject. Well, sort of. My post is actually about what I haven’t been reading, and why.

I haven’t read a book in about two months. For me, this is catastrophic. Reading is my number one most very favorite thing to do in the whole world ever. If I could pick my dream job, it would be to read professionally. (Well, second only to directing a nonprofit program that encourages writers to discover their creative potential by writing a novel in a month, of course.)

Not reading is like saying, “I haven’t eaten popcorn in two months.” (To explain, I eat a lot of popcorn. A LOT. So not eating popcorn for two months would be like saying I haven’t read a book in two months. Oh. Wait.) How did I get here?

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Join the Summer Reading Conversation!

When you are hunting for summer reading, it seems like everyone has an opinion or suggestion. Newspapers, magazines, and blogs publish list after list as the sun shines warmer.

But now it’s our turn. After all, who knows books better than us Wrimos who collectively write thousands of them every year?

On Thursday, June 7, we’ll be taking part in a jumbo-sized beach ball of a conversation about summer reading. With our partners at the New York Times Learning Network, the National Writing Project, Figment, 826 National, and Edutopia, plus a bunch of other great literary organizations, we basically want to have the biggest seasonal book chat of all-time.

Here’s how you can take part:

On Twitter (@NaNoWriMo and @NaNoWriMoYWP), we’ll be keeping up with the #summerreading hashtag all day. Tweet about the books you’re reading (or plan to read), your favorite summer books, your summer-reading spots… Anything goes!

On Facebook, be ready to pitch a summer reading recommendation. What do you like to read—and think others should, too—on the beach or in the hammock?

Sounds good, right? So stockpile those books, inflate the backyard swimming pool, mix up an Arnold Palmer, and join us on Thursday. (We’ll be the ones with the absurdly large sun hats to protect our sensitive writerly skin.)

– Chris

Photo by Flickr user Anjum

Unusual, Intriguing Novel Narration

I just finished reading Hannah Pittard’s 2011 novel, The Fates Will Find Their Way. It’s a naturally intriguing story: a 16-year-old girl goes missing without a trace, and her suburban classmates obsessively speculate—in both the short and long term—about what may have happened to her.

Pittard’s choice of perspective makes this narrative even more absorbing. The entire book is told in the first-person plural: the collective voice of the boys who dreamily wonder about the girl’s fate.

We interrogated each other for information, eager to be the one to discover the truth. As it turned out, we’d all seen Nora the day before, but seen her in different places doing different things—we’d seen her at the swing sets, at the riverbank, in the shopping mall. We’d seen her making phone calls in the telephone booth outside the liquor store, inside the train station, behind the dollar store.

The result is wonderfully opaque. A plural perspective can never be definitively pinned down, and so the narrative drifts and bobs—as elusive and unreliable as the certainty of Nora’s circumstances.

What books have you read that make use of unusual perspective or narration? Have you tried this technique in your own novels? How did it work for you?

– Chris

A Contemporary Education.

In the past few weeks of my internship, it has become more and more apparent to me that my formal literary education has guided me in one direction: towards death. That is, my bookshelves are lined with authors that are no longer capable of writing because, you guessed it, they’re all dead. From Woolf to Wilde to Joyce to the Brontes to Frances Burney, I like my books old, and my authors’ reputations set in stone.

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Adaptation

It’s nearly mid-March which can only mean two things: One, it’s almost time for Script Frenzy, and two, it’s almost time for The Hunger Games premiere. I’ve been a proud, self-proclaimed Hunger Games nerd since I read the series a few months ago. If you haven’t yet read it, I recommend it! It’s a quick read and well worth it. To add to my delight, they are adapting the book into a full-blown movie, which seems to be a reoccurring pattern nowadays.

In fact, it seems that these days publishers are strategically seeking out novels that can be made into movies. Precious, The Kite Runner, The Lovely Bones, The Virgin Suicides—there must be hundreds, if not thousands of top box-office movies that started as books. So this leaves me wondering whether or not I should adapt a good book into my Script Frenzy script.

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