Yet the results indicate that “reading” is a relative term. When asked about specific titles, only one in 25 people turn out to have read the novel chosen as the best in the Booker prize’s 25-year history, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children – and half these had failed to finish it. One in three has bought a book just to look intelligent
“And I just sit there under the floor lamp early in the morning and work and see what happens. Nine days out of 10, nothing good comes of it at all. Maybe on the tenth day, if I’m lucky, some little thing will start a poem.” At Home with Poet Laureate Ted Kooser (worth listening to the whole interview, in our never humble opinion)
We see the result — and the future — in this student exercise. Canadian publishing will fall easily into step with the rest of the multinational corporate publishers who see books as a peripherally profitable sub-genre of entertainment. Books will capitalize on trends — not create them. Clever ideas and excellent packages will dominate, but only occasionally will real depth and substance — what books give us that no other medium offers — emerge. As the giants of CanLit retire, they’ll be replaced by their non-fiction facsimiles. The Future’s Books from Nowhere: When students were assigned to play at being
And Kevin Guilfoile, author of Cast of Shadows, points out: “When you read all the reviews of the same book (and no one does this except the author) you realize how often they flat-out contradict each other. There’s No Crying in Criticism
Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting commas back in the same places. I like that way of working on something. I respect that kind of care for what is being done. That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they can best say what they are meant to say. If the words are heavy with the
No, this is simply to answer small practical questions, to help all you puzzled movie consumers out there: Should you read the book before you see the movie? Does it matter if they change the book? If you know how it ends, what’s the point in seeing it? Hollywood Follows the Reader – When Filmmakers Go by the Book, Should Filmgoers Go Buy It Too?
The point about the return visit is not the infantile pleasure of repetition, but the possibility of surprise. A good work of art never stays quite the same: it ambushes you, outwits you. A first exposure can provide the primitive excitement of wanting to know what happens next, a second provides the opportunity to register details, a third brings a sense of the underpinning joints and girders that make up the structure. And so it goes on. The arts column: ambushed by the unexpected – again – Rupert Christiansen acclaims the surprising possibilities of repetition
There is a strange disconnect within a man who would live on the Red Planet but insist on in-person banking. Ray Bradbury – The pulp god lives.
The purchase includes free delivery. Pearson: 1,082 classic books? I’ll wait for CliffsNotes
Although many blockbuster scares turn out to be nothing more than a ream of overheated typing with a menacing cover, officials said they are exercising great caution in handling this incendiary thriller. “We’re keeping our eyes peeled for clever devices,” NYPD bomb-squad leader Roy Czulewicz said. “But many bestsellers have been known to hold people captive for hours with rapid-fire prose. Once you pick them up, you suddenly find you can’t put them down.” Police Search of Backpack Yields Explosive Bestseller
