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Je Ne Sais Quoi: Dealing in Subterfuges
Over there on the right, in the list of links to other sites, you’ll find a category called “Je Ne Sais Quoi.” Per the American Heritage Dictionary online at the Bartleby site, this phrase — literally, in the original French, something like I know not what — means, “A quality or attribute that is difficult [...]
Happy to See Someone Else Try This
The author with the tongue-rolling moniker Doreen Orion has come up with a trailer for her new giant-bus travelogue Queen of the Road: As the title of this RAMH post implies, this is why we read certain travelogues rather than writing them ourselves.
Sharing the Detritus of a Life with Books
Thanks to Conduit (a/k/a Stuart Neville), there’s news of a cool site called BookRabbit (slogan: “Be surprised by books – share, connect, discover”). Here’s how Conduit describes it: BookRabbit.com is a website at once a social networking site and online store for book lovers. They offer a selection of titles that rivals Amazon in both [...]
Eleven Years On
On this day in 1997, the first Harry Potter book (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in the UK, …and the Sorcerer’s Stone when it crossed the Atlantic) came to print. There’s not much to add about the book which upended not just the Young Adult market, but pretty much the whole damned publishing industry. [...]
Thinking Too Hard About Energy Conservation
“There is a lot of friction and movement in that general area.” [From Slate]
Real War
Courtesy of Steve King’s Today in Literature e-newsletter, I learned that today was the birthday (1831) of journalist Rebecca Harding Davis. Without further comment, I offer you here an excerpt of Harding Davis’s writing, looking back on the Civil War. I had just come up from the border where I had seen the actual war; [...]
“What Kind of Book Is It?”
One of the hardest — yet most important — questions an author often has to answer about his work is the one asked by this entry’s title. Now, it’s not hard at all to answer, for many authors and even more books. When you walk into Borders or Barnes & Noble, when you browse Amazon, [...]
Most-Loathed Books
Courtesy of the Times of London’s online presence, we have a list of books most loathed by various critics and writers. This is a tricky list for a writer to read, and I’m surprised they got any writers at all to contribute to it. Why? Because any writer with his head screwed on properly knows [...]
The Smell of Pages Burning in the Morning
Not really. But the new Book Roast site (also linked permanently over there at the right, under the Je Ne Sais Quoi… category) promises to be not only a generous labor of love, but an audacious experiment in book and author publicity. Here’s the idea: Each week, for five days Every day during the last [...]
How Important Is Reading?
Scary question? It depends on the answer. A young actress, Ashley Brown of Broadway’s Mary Poppins revival, provides her take on it: Not so scary, hmm?
