Reading My Way Through November

 One of the things I've done with the writing journal I started was to start recording the books I read. I have one page for writing-related books, and another for everything else. And, for no apparent reason, I'm sharing my reading list from November here.

1. The Mindful Writer - Moore
2. Writing from the Inside Out - Palumbo
3. Writing Popular Fiction - Koontz
4. How to Write Horror Fiction - Nolan

5. The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza - Lawrence Block
6. Burglars Can't Be Choosers - Lawrence Block
7. The Burglar In The Closet - Lawrence Block
8. The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart - Lawrence Block
9. The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian - Lawrence Block
10. Treason - Orson Scott Card
11. Duma Key - Stephen King
12. Empress Orchid - Anchee Min
13. The Red Queen - Philippa Gregory
14. The Last Empress - Anchee Min
15. Everything's Eventual - Stephen King
16. Mockingbird - Charles J. Shields
17. The Covenant - Beverly Lewis
18. River Marked - Patricia Briggs
19. The Betrayal - Beverly Lewis
20. The Sacrifice - Beverly Lewis
21. Supervolcano: Eruption - Harry Turtledove
22. Brothers - Da Chen
23. Red Scarf Girl - Ji Li Jiang
24. My Fair Concubine - Jeannie Lin (NOT recommended)
25. Rice - Louise Jordan Miln
26. The Three Daughters of Madame Liang - Pearl S. Buck

NOTES: Very little nonfiction read this month. A lot of library books, both paper books and 2 ebooks I borrowed from the library system.

I started the month with Lawrence Block's Burglar series. I consider Block one of my writing role models and the Burglar series is my favorite series of his.

I have a love-hate relationship with Stephen King. I discovered him when my political/religious views were compatible with King's, but as I have altered my views I become very aware of how King feels the need to put-down his conservative and/or Christian readers in every single book. But I keep coming back. The man can WRITE.

I was a fanatic fan of Turtledove during his earlier series, but the more recent ones disappoint. His characters in the more recent books are duller and more homogenized.

In Christian fiction circles there seems to be a fad for making fun of Amish romances. I decided to try one myself, picking one by Beverly Lewis. As you will see, I went on to the next two books in the series and am eager for the final one. And I'm not normally a romance reader.

I was on an Asian kick and have read a number of books with Asian backgrounds. Perhaps my interest is because many of the characters in my NaNo novel are part Korean. I enjoyed all of them except for Jeannie Lin's book. I read it as an ebook from my library and didn't discover it was a Harlequin romance until I was halfway through the checking-out process. The book was set in ancient China but was very 'lite' on setting, claustophobically focused on the love/sex story, and contains a sex scene which went on for the better part of 2 chapters. NOT what I would consider worth reading.

I might also point out that I did a lot more reading this month than I normally do. I recently got some better reading glasses and so reading is less of a pain. Plus, I decided to go to the local library, which I haven't done in years, and found they've got in a bunch of new books I haven't read yet.

You might be tempted to think I did TOO much reading considering I was also doing NaNoWriMo. But I don't think it got in the way--- that was another problem entirely. Being a writer means being a reader, and I spent some serious time being a writer in November, in both my reading and my writing habits.

What about you? Have you done much reading this past November? Discovered any good books or new authors or genres? Or have you found books that disappoint?


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Букварь: The Story of a Book I Love

 This story began over 20 years ago. I was living in Bloomfield Hills, a suburb of Detroit, and one of my more intense special interests was learning the Русский язык (Russian language Russkii Yazik). It was hard to get books in Russian, especially on a budget, though I did score some free books of Russian lessons from the Soviet Union's Radio Moscow service.

They had this really big used book sale in our area and as a family of book lovers we all went. And in the section with assorted foreign language books, I first saw Букварь (pictured above) and for me it was love at first sight. 

Букварь (bukvar) is the Russian word for primer or first reading book. This particular Букварь was a school book published in 1973 and printed in the German Democratic Republic (Communist Germany). 

It was a charming, beautifully illustrated little book, though with a few scary pictures of Vladimir Ilich Lenin who was being touted as a friend of children in spite of being the guy who ordered the murder of the Tsar's five children and many others.

As a learning tool it is a delight since it introduced those strange Russian letters one at a time, and used primarily short words (though it was troublesome looking up each one in a Russian-English dictionary).

Last night I spent a good deal of time on eBay looking at their selection of Russian children's books. I found many different examples of Букварь, with the most interesting and charming being the most expensive. Finally I came across an example of my own beloved Букварь, though a much written-in example. 

I decided to curb my coveting of all those other Букварь and to appreciate my own more. Besides resolving to study through the whole Букварь in the next couple of months, I decided to make a photographic record of my Букварь for those not lucky enough to possess one of their own.

It is available on Facebook at this link: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.195913197246744.1073741841.149187465252651&type=1&l=b9a97761e6

Question: Do you have any unusual books you particularly love? If you are an Aspie, do you have any special interests which drive you to want to purchase hard-to-find books? Is it hard to control your spending on such books?

Posts on this blog are shared on my blog's Facebook page. It's a great place to continue the conversation.
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A page from Букварь

 

Before you write, read

You may have heard it as 'A writer WRITES, always.' At least if you've watched the movie 'Throw Mamma From the Train'.  Only before you can write anything you need to put in many, many hours of reading.

Think of it like this. Writing is a foreign language. In order to speak this foreign language you must spend hundreds of hours listening to that foreign language being spoken. Only then will you be able to speak it.

Reading books is your way of listening to the foreign language. How many books have you read in your lifetime so far? A hundred? A thousand? Two thousand?

Think about the next hundred books you will read. What genres will you include? What authors? What non-fiction subject? What books will you read more than once? And how much more fluent will your writing be when you are done?

Nearly every successful writer out there was a compulsive reader of books before they ever thought of writing one of their own. This should serve as a caution to those who've decided they will be writers--- since it's a nice, indoor job and all--- even though they don't care to read on their own. You CAN'T get there as a writer by watching movies based on books, this isn't a grade school book report we are talking about but a way of life. And a way of life can't be faked.



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How many of these books have you read?

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

I found this over at Fabianspace, Karina Fabian's blog. Read her post here: http://fabianspace.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-many-of-these-classics-have-i-read.html

Instructions: Bold those books you've read in their entirety.
Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read only an excerpt.

TAG! YOU'RE IT!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 1984--George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - boring, then I found out it was written to teach kids atheism. Still boring.

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch-22 --Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - I like Titus Andronicus the best.

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - one of the first grown-up books I read as a child.

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - I read the first paragraph or so in Russian when I was learning Russian.

25 The Hitchhicker's Guide to the Galaxy--Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - I thought the ending was really, really funny....

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (All 7 of them!)

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - very dull, at least if you've already read the book Brown used as his source for the wild theories.

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood - liked it in spite of the hysterical anti-Christianism

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (and Seamonsters?)

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon - is that the one about the kid with Asperger's Syndrome? if so it's on my must-read list.....

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - I only read it for the smutty bits.

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - I keep thinking of it as the Count of Monte Crisco....

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding - my mom made me watch the movie because Colin Firth was in it and she has a crush on him.....

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville - did you know Melville is believed to have Asperger's Syndrome?

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - must have read it a hundred times in school (if I had admitted I was finished with it, I'd have had to write a book report.)

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens - I like the Doctor Who version better....

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazu Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert - Nearly as funny as Anna Karenina.

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom  - I'm betting one of them won't be Mitch Albom.

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas - I want to have a lackey just like D'Artagnon does.

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo 


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Well, actually it's a kitten. And she's so wild you'll have to come here and catch her yourself.

Isolated and In Peril: Kathryn Mackel's Vanished

An author's first duty is to make life miserable for her characters, and in this month's CSFF blog tour book, Vanished by Kathryn Mackel, the author has certainly done her duty. Her poor characters have been subjected to a terrorist attack, and are now cut off from the outside world by a strange mist. Beyond the mist is---- something scary, I don't know what.....

This book has been compared to the television series 'Lost'. I've never seen 'Lost', though my stalker is evidently quite fond of the show. (Maybe the reason I never watched is that it's emotionally unhealthy to take recommendations from people who threaten your life and call you rude names....)

Another comparison is to Eric Flint's Ring of Fire series. In that story, a small town in West Virginia is uprooted and sent back in time to Germany in 1632. Those characters don't have a terrorist bomber on their hands, but they do wind up in the middle of a war zone. (If you would like to read the first 2 books in the Ring of Fire series for free, they are in Baen's Free Library in ebook form. They are: 1632 and 1633.

A third comparison which I found at Sci Fi Catholic is to Roy Rockwood's 'On a Torn-Away World'. Roy Rockwood was a pen name used by authors of boys' adventure books. 'On a Torn-Away World', published in 1913, is described thus:

Jack and Mark build an airship and head North, hoping to find a rare plant that grows only in Alaska. But a freak earthquake causes a chunk of the Earth, along with our protagonists, to fly into outer space.

ManyBooks.net, a source of free ebooks, has 'On a Torn-Away World' and other Roy Rockwood books.
Isolating the characters from their normal world and sources of help heightens the drama of the story. The characters will have to face challenges they've never faced in their ordinary, mundane lives. Will they rise to the challenge, or utterly freak out?

Questions:
What other novels and short stories isolate their characters in similar ways?
If you were writing a similar story, how would you isolate your characters?
Answer in a comment at the bottom of the post, please.
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CSFF blog tour must-post stuff:

Kathryn Mackel's Vanished at Amazon.com
Blog tour participants:
Brandon Barr Justin Boyer Jackie Castle CSFF Blog Tour Gene Curtis D. G. D. Davidson Jeff Draper April Erwin Karina Fabian Beth Goddard Andrea Graham Todd Michael Greene Katie Hart Christopher Hopper Joleen Howell Jason Joyner Carol Keen Mike Lynch Terri Main Margaret Shannon McNear Melissa Meeks Rebecca LuElla Miller John W. Otte Deena Peterson Rachelle Steve Rice Ashley Rutherford Mirtika or Mir's Here Chawna Schroeder Stuart Stockton Steve Trower Speculative Faith Linda Wichman Laura Williams Timothy Wise

Vanished by Kathryn Mackel

Vanished is book 1 of a new series by author Kathryn Mackel. The author, as well as many of the reviewers on Amazon.com, liken the book to the television series 'Lost'. The book's genre is described as 'adult supernatural suspense' on the CSFF blog tour web site

I haven't been able to afford the book yet, but from the reviews on Amazon.com, it's something I'm hoping to get soon. The story starts out with a terrorist bombing in a working-class neighbourhood in Massachusetts--- and then it gets weird. The community is cut off from the outside world by a strange mist. Beyond the mist is a terrifying alternate world. The people must put aside their differences and work to survive.
The book, being part of a series, does not wrap up the loose ends at the end of the story, and evidently some readers wanted more closure from it.

If this book sounds intriguing to you, buy the book--- and check out some of the blog tour participants on the list below, and see what others have to say about the book.

Vanished at Amazon.com

Vanished is not available in ebook form at any of the usual ebook stores, nor are other books by Kathryn Mackel.

Kathryn Mackel's web site
Kathryn Mackel's blog
Kathryn Mackel at Wikipedia

July's CSFF blog tour book is DragonLight by Donita Paul. It's available at Amazon.com in both print and Kindle ebook format. It's also available in ebook form at MobipocketPalm ebook store, Fictionwise eBooks, Books on Board (you can rate book and download a free Mobipocket format sample) and Memoware PDA bookstore

CSFF blog tour participants, click on names to visit their blogs:
An '*' means I have already visited the blog and they have something interesting/relevant up.

* Brandon Barr on multiple point-of-view fiction

Justin Boyer

* Jackie Castle relates things about author Kathryn Mackel I didn't know before

CSFF Blog Tour

Gene Curtis

* D. G. D. Davidson - contains a unique definition of what a 'Christian Chiller' is.

* Jeff Draper is Christian horror fiction possible?

April Erwin

Karina Fabian

Beth Goddard

Andrea Graham

* Todd Michael Greene I can't remember what I was going to say about this blog

Katie Hart

Christopher Hopper

* Joleen Howell good book review that gets to the heart of the story

Jason Joyner

Carol Keen

Mike Lynch

Terri Main

Margaret

Shannon McNear

Melissa Meeks

Rebecca LuElla Miller

* John W. Otte a nice book review

Deena Peterson

Rachelle

Steve Rice

Ashley Rutherford

Mirtika Mir's Here

Chawna Schroeder

Stuart Stockton

Steve Trower

Speculative Faith

Linda Wichman

Laura Williams

Timothy Wise


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Kathryn Mackel
CSFF
Vanished