At Bustle, Becky Schultz talks about the 11 Books You’d Find On Lisa Simpson’s Shelf because she has great literary taste.
For example:
Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
After destroying Lisa’s room with fireworks, Bart and Homer make it up to her by spending a day at the Springfield Festival of Books. There, they encounter Stephen King, Tom Wolfe, John Updike, and Amy Tan, who Lisa admires for Joy Luck Club, a novel that follows four Chinese American immigrant families in San Francisco who start a mahjong (for money) club.
Lisa: Ms. Tan, I loved the Joy Luck Club. It really showed me how the mother-daughter bond can triumph over adversity.
Amy Tan: No, that’s not what I meant at all, you couldn’t have gotten it more wrong.
Lisa: But…
Amy Tan: Please, just sit down. I’m embarrassed for both of us.
See the other great books HERE
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I wonder what Lisa would think of my new novel, Abducticon?
It just got its first review on Amazon (5 stars) from Rainy Day, who says in part:
If you’ve ever been to a Science Fiction/Fantasy convention, ‘con’ to most people, you will love this book. If you’ve ever been involved in a con, either in setting one up, working one, or as a guest, you will recognize every single person Ms. Alexander writes about. Perhaps not every single episode that happens, as, well, the entire con and the hotel, complete with mundane guests, is hijacked by time-traveling androids and taken for a ride around the moon.
Wouldn’t that be a con to end all cons? And the reactions from the gamers? Absolutely priceless! Everything you could possibly want in a con is in this book, up to and including the replicators.
If you like cons, you will absitively posolutely LOVE this book. This is truly one of the funniest SF books I’ve read in years. Job well done, Alma Alexander!
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To write, you must read, read, read – and don’t forget to read
I’ll be a guest lecturer at this summer’s Odyssey Workshop In an interview with me for their website, I was asked: What do you think is the most important advice you can give to developing writers? I replied:
One young and aspiring writer, asking for advice of this nature, once unforgettably told me that she “didn’t have time to read.” I knew then that she would never really be a writer.
Reading is the primary education for any writer. People who don’t read never develop the love and the reverence for the written word–and how, then, can they hope to tease out its wonders?…
Beyond that, if you are serious about pursuing this as a craft, as a vocation, as a career… well… Write. Practice. It comes only with practice, this inner instinct about whether something you’ve just written is good, or if there is something wrong with it, and what, and how it needs fixing. I once wrote a page and half of something and realized that what I had there was a very dense summary of the thing I needed to actually write. Once I teased out everything that got condensed into it until it weighed as much as a literary neutron star, it turned into nearly three chapters of the book that came out of it all. But without the millions of words of practice I had already put in… I would not have known this, recognised this, figured out what I needed to do to fix it.
Read the whole interview HERE
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Speaking of reading…
Pat Conroy says:
The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language.
Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in “Lonesome Dove” and had nightmares about slavery in “Beloved” and walked the streets of Dublin in “Ulysses” and made up a hundred stories in the Arabian nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in “A Prayer for Owen Meany.”
I’ve been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career, all because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up every single thing those magnificent men and women had to give. I cherish and praise them and thank them for finding me when I was a boy and presenting me with the precious gift of the English language.
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The only book of mine that I have ever had reservations about is a collection of some of my teenage poems, self published by my proud father. Some of them were okay, but others. Well, they were the work of a young teen. ‘Nuf said.
At Mental Floss, Rudie Obias has written about authors with more serious problems with something they published.
9 Authors Who Regretted The Success of Their Work
An author who made a shark the villain, later became a shark champion; a man who wrote how to build bombs later rejected the idea that violence is an acceptable means to bring about political change.
Octavia E. Butler despised her third novel Survivor because it featured some of the worst clichés of the genre.
“When I was young, a lot of people wrote about going to another world and finding either little green men or little brown men, and they were always less in some way,” she told Amazon.com. “They were a little sly, or a little like ‘the natives’ in a very bad, old movie. … People ask me why I don’t like Survivor, my third novel. And it’s because it feels a little bit like that. Some humans go up to another world, and immediately begin mating with the aliens and having children with them. I think of it as my Star Trek novel.”
After its initial edition, Butler refused to bring Survivor back into circulation.
Read all the author regrets HERE
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Author Stops Reading White Male Authors For a Year
“Every time I tried to get through a magazine,” K. T. Bradford wrote, “I would come across stories that I didn’t enjoy or that I actively hated or that offended me so much I rage-quit the issue. Go through enough of that, and you start to resist the idea of reading at all.”
So Bradford decided that instead of reading everything, “I would only look at stories by women or people of color or LGBT writers. Essentially: no straight, cis, white males.”
The result was that she enjoyed reading short stories more, and she also became aware of how often certain magazines published whole issues in which no women or POC authors made an appearance. She went on the hunt and discovered several that published new-to-me writers and also a surprising number of magazines dedicated to under-heard voices.
Read the whole article HERE
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The top 10 liars in fiction
Nick Lake, author of There Will be Lies, selects his favorite fictional tricksters and tellers of untruths in books
Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), the greatest liar in literature? Photograph: Warner Br/Everett /Rex
Rich playboy Gatsby (The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald) lies about a lot of things. His romantic life; his past; the origins of his ostentatious wealth, actually amassed through grubby bootlegging. But the small, practical lie that has always stuck in my mind is the fact that the handsome books in his library have uncut pages, proving that he hasn’t ever opened them. F Scott Fitzgerald called the jazz age the “cut glass age”, for its glitter, outward beauty and inward emptiness. But I almost think the uncut books are a more resonant metaphor.”
See the other liars HERE
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THIS ‘n THAT
Researcher accidentally invents glasses to solve color blindness
The glasses were designed for surgeons. A doctor’s friend tried them out and discovered trees are green, flowers come in limitless colors, and a sunset can take your breath away.
Read the whole article HERE
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Quote of the Day
“The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.” ~ William Arthur Ward
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Alma Alexander My books Email me
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