Rebutting the conventional wisdom that the Harry Potter phenomenon is good for reading, writing and publishing in general, Washington Post book editor Ron Charles has written a provocative essay entitled “Harry Potter and the Death of Reading.” In it, he cites a few facts to buttress his case that millions of people reading the […]
Books with covers you conceal
I’m always a little skeptical when magazines or newspapers run their perennial lists of what celebrities are reading, usually under the rubric of “guilty pleasures.” I mean, if they’re really guilty about it, they’re not going to be totally frank, are they? But Time magazine’s July 23 issue has a nice twist on this: […]
Setting in fiction: It helps if you live there
The fine blog Detectives Beyond Borders recently had a discussion about the significance of setting in crime fiction. Peter was commenting on an assertion by Clive James that many of today’s international crime novels are so crammed with geographic detail that they are essentially guidebooks. I’ve had the same reaction, most recently to “A […]
Hot air and cold fiction
There must be some cathartic force at work, to compel those of us who blog to arrange our most fleeting, insignificant thoughts as electrons on a screen. Maybe it’s a desire for connection, like casting a bottle into the sea in the hope that some sympathetic soul will retrieve it. Or not. Maybe we […]
The seven stages of blogging:
This is a rough description of my thinking over the last couple of weeks. Having reached stage seven already, it may be time to regroup. Not sure what I was thinking, devoting a blog to crime fiction when there are so many excellent ones already out there. Perhaps I’ll change the focus to late-50s […]
From pulp fiction, one good habit
In a far corner of the warehouse, back in the dust and shadows, there are some books I haven’t seen or read in more than four decades. I no longer remember the plots or characters or dialogue, but I do remember the pleasure of reading them. Sometimes I wonder: Did those books start my […]
Back to the keyboard — but it’s a new one
After a writing hiatus of quite a few months longer than I intended, I’m back to work on what I will refer to as “the book.” I knocked out another 500 words yesterday, and expect to make that the standard day’s output. But since I’ve had these productive impulses before, and since they tend […]