Welcome Thoughtful Readers:
Do you love a book that opens your eyes and makes you profoundly aware of the fact that you don’t know everything yet? Or would you rather read something with characters that feel familiar and a narrative that makes you feel warm and connected?
I feel alive when a book breaks all my preconceptions and makes me think again. I tend to read to see what is new, unknown to me.
This has not happened in a while, though it means I find myself reading lots of “very good” novels that are well-written and raise interesting issues. I have recently re-discovered Fredrik Backman, for example. His Beartown is full of wonderful moments of observation about the human condition (particularly about how adults raise children in small towns), and I have just begun the sequel Us Against You. Backman’s novels ask you to stop and think. About the world. About society. About good and evil. About neglect and where that falls into the spectrum. It is difficult to read a book like this alone—you want to discuss the ideas that the book raises with someone else who has also read the book. Perhaps this was the original reason for the creation of book clubs.
In any event, it was a joy to head over to my daughter’s school where adults who had read this book were welcomed into the Principal’s book club to discuss it. I was similarly impressed by Beckman’s novel (and the subsequent film) A Man Called Ove (full of wonderful, thoughtful observations regarding who “owns” your participation in society.)
Books like these (or like the film Women Talking) are excellent conversation-starters. Many novels seem to be written to do this: to start a conversation. I would love to see a bookstore that has a shelf of “conversation starting literature.”
But there is a whole category of books that seem to just be written for the entertainment value of the story. “Potato-chip books” as one author called her own series. These are books that are intended for solo reading, as fast as you can, as many as you have time to read. You can’t discuss these books, you can only give an opinion: I liked it, I hated it, it felt boring, it was fun…? They are meant to entertain, not to enlighten or to incentivize conversation.
There is nothing wrong with a potato-chip book, but if the marketing makes you expect a moving, earth-shattering, eye-opening experience and the book is a fluffy romance, well, it would be the same as sitting down to a chef’s table and getting frozen chicken fingers.
It would be so interesting if the marketing of books was less driven to sell the book to the broadest possible audience and more an accurate descriptor so that you would never be disappointed having spent the time to read it.
My book is available to preorder!
Please follow this link to preorder. As everyone knows by now, books are mostly sold by comparison, so if you like Twilight Zone, Black Mirror, and that sort of “strange fiction” short story, you are likely to enjoy my collection A FLASH OF DARKNESS.
A limited number of Advance Review Copies of A Flash of Darkness are available to readers interested in submitting reviews on Amazon and/or Goodreads. Prospective reviewers will receive the book in galleys as a PDF for free! and right now! Interested? Let me know in the comments or email me back!
Essays I have published in the last while:
A very short one about reading and music, you can click here to read it.
A photojournal about the cannabis shops that have opened on my block (there are many). Check it out here.
A hopeful piece about collective joy. It’s on this link.
That’s what I’ve been writing. I’m going to Seattle this week for the annual AWP writing conference. If you will be there, let me know! I will mostly be at the Pen Parentis table, handing out postcards and flyers. It’s spot number #T616. I’d love to grab a coffee with you.
Random final thought:
In the news, an alligator was found in Central Park and it has a 4-inch bathtub stopper in its belly which is making it very ill. Do you think that its owner could not stop the gator from pulling the plug on the bathtub and kept finding the pet reptile in a dry tub so had to let it go? Or do you think that the owner worried over the health of the gator after it started to lose weight, and set it free to perish naturally? Or maybe the gator was just getting big and the owner got nervous and fed it the bathtub stopper thinking this might kill it….
Of more interest than the evil/good spectrum of the original owner is…how did the owner transport the gator to the pond to release it? Via subway or Uber?
I am so happy when you take the time to respond - it makes me feel happy that my writing has generated so much thought!
It's hard for me to put books squarely in camps of idea generating or not because one's ideas as a reader are so much one's own. We inevitably do a lot of the work in formulating a response, for good or for bad. We might be misinterpreting a writer but can still get started on an interesting train of thought. I think I would divide writers less by their actual discernible novel ideas and more by whether they write in a fertile way that demonstrates understanding at every turn. It is clearer to me that some writing is alive and some is dull, and that does make a difference in what I can do with it. I can also identify that certain ideas just aren't original. Sometimes they are presented as if they are, and that is when the lack of originality is most glaring and telling. I almost feel embarrassed for the author. This is easier for me to see in non-fiction, however. Some writers certainly also make me lose respect for them by being stupid or trite. Which again is probably about setting up something as very interesting when it is not.
If that gator was transported by subway, I certainly hope it was in the dead of night! It's hard to think of a scenario where there were witnesses (unless they were accomplices), so this must be fully on the person's conscience. Unique in details if not in kind, I guess, as far as torments go.