Book●ed blog readers living in the Chicagoland area are invited to a very special event May 1st at the historic Pickwick Theatre in Park Ridge. Launching a nationwide centennial celebration of legendary actor Tyrone Power (born 1914), the theatre will host a double feature of In Old Chicago and Jesse James. Special appearance by actress Taryn Power-Greendeer and theatrical producer Michael Butler (daughter and godson of Tyrone Power and actress Linda Christian). And for booklovers, a collector’s quality Limited First Edition of Searching for My Father, Tyrone Power by Romina Power, will be available for purchase. This updated and expanded English-language version of Romina’s Italian bestseller will only be sold at centennial events. If you can’t make the Pickwick celebration, Taryn will appear at the Northbrook Public Library on May 2nd at 2:00 p.m. and Romina’s book will be available for sale.
Book●ed blog readers living in the Chicagoland area are invited to a very special event May 1st at the historic Pickwick Theatre in Park Ridge. Launching a nationwide centennial celebration of legendary actor Tyrone Power (born 1914), the theatre will host a double feature of In Old Chicago and Jessie James. Special appearance by actress Taryn Power-Greendeer and theatrical producer Michael Butler (daughter and godson of Tyrone Power and actress Linda Christian). And for booklovers, a collector’s quality limited First Edition of Searching for My Father, Tyrone Power by Romina Power, will be available for purchase. This updated and expanded English-language version of Romina’s Italian bestseller will only be sold at centennial events. If you can’t make the Pickwick celebration, Taryn will appear at the Northbrook Public Library on May 2nd at 2:00 p.m. and Romina’s book will be available for sale.
“It’s still the weight of the book that calms me, the feel of the paper under my fingertips as I turn the page that grabs me. This pleasure is sharpened by understanding that what I love at this moment has only been loaned to me. I can possess it fully but temporarily — just like life.”—Gina Barreca, humor writer and professor, in the HuffPostBlog.
When you hear the name “Gutenberg”, your first thought probably is of the Gutenberg Bible. Printed in the 1450s by Johannes Gutenberg, in Mainz, Germany, the Gutenberg Bible was the first major book printed in the West using movable type. It was the revolutionary advancement in technology that introduced printed books to the Western world.
But do you know about Project Gutenberg? Founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, it is part of an equally revolutionary advancement in book publishing: the eBook. Hart, who unfortunately passed away in 2011 at age 64, invented eBooks. His Project Gutenberg continues its mission of digitizing and archiving cultural works, to “encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks”. Not only is Project Gutenberg the oldest digital library, it is one of the largest and it is free.
Project Gutenberg offers more than 42,000 free ePub books and free kindle books that you can download or read online. An additional 100,000 free eBooks are available through Project Gutenberg’s partners, affiliates and resources. All their eBooks are high quality and were previously published by “bona fide publishers”.
A new service from Project Gutenberg facilitates online publishing by contemporary authors through its self-publishing portal. It offers a free Authors Community Cloud Library, a social network Self-Publishing Portal. This Portal allows authors to share their works with readers as well as allows readers to provide comments, reviews and feedback to the authors. Every eBook has its own Details Page, Star Ratings, and Reader Comment area. There is no charge for using this service. Registration is not required for reading or downloading the publications or comments. However, registration is required to upload a book or post a comment.
Project Gutenberg is a remarkable volunteer-driven venture. They are grateful for donations of money and services. Whether you’re a booklover or an author who is a booklover, Project Gutenberg is a revolution you should join!
Want to know the most popular eBooks readers are downloading (not from Gutenberg) across the U.S.? Scribd has compiled a list of the most downloaded books, state by state. You’ll find the list at BuzzFeed.
How did your favorite movies of the past year fare at this year’s Academy Awards? Critics and fans alike said this was an extraordinary year for excellent movies. To booklovers, it comes as no surprise that four of the nine Best Picture nominees were adapted from books. Those movies are Captain Phillips, Philomena, 12 Years a Slave and The Wolf of Wall Street. And the Oscar went to 12 Years a Slave. The books behind these movies are all non-fiction. In recent years, novels also were adapted into Best Picture winners. These included Slum Dog Millionaire (2008), No Country for Old Men (2004) and Million Dollar Baby (2003).
Once upon a time, it seemed that great books rarely transformed into great movies. Times have changed as plot lines and descriptions in books are more valued by filmmakers. Possibly this change has also been as authors have grown up with movies, their appreciation for that art form inspires how they write.
Some people are concerned that literacy is diminishing as people skip books in favor of movies. Why spend many hours engaged in the active reading of books when you can get the entire story faster and easier by sitting in a theatre being passively entertained for a couple of hours? But let’s remember that these movie adaptations are made because of books that excited enough readers to come to the attention of filmmakers. Conversely, some movies lead people to the books that inspired them. The Monuments Men did not get stellar movie reviews but the story line attracted new readers to a good book they had previously overlooked.
The social media website BuzzFeed offers a list of 16 books you should read that have been adapted into in films released, or to be released, in 2014.
There will always be room for various art forms to express a good story and we should celebrate all of them.
Renee James, award-winning author of Coming Out Can Be Murder, has just released her book with a revised title, Transition to Murder, and a major plot change. Both versions of the book are available in print and digital formats. You can see my two-part interview with Renee James in the Book●ed webcast Archives, along with all my other author interviews.
Recorded books date back to the 1930s, when the Library of Congress created a “talking books” program for the blind. For years, audio recordings of books were considered the realm of the sight-impaired. Changes in lifestyle and advances in technology have changed all that. Whether travelling, working out in the gym, engaging in some rote physical activity or simply taking a long walk, booklovers everywhere are using audiobooks to be informed, entertained or enlightened. Not only has technology transformed how we listen to audiobooks, it has expanded the choices of what we listen to. And booklovers are listening!
The Audio Publishers Association (APA) is the organization that monitors and promotes the audiobook industry. It reports that audiobook products, services and sales have been growing steadily for more than a decade and estimates that the total size of the audiobook industry, based on the dollars spent by consumers and libraries, exceeds $1.2 billion.
Audiobooks have followed the same technological path as music records, freed from bulky plugged-in machines with disks to portable cassettes to more portable CDs and, now, as downloads to smartphones. Production costs and purchase prices are dropping deeply while demand is climbing. But price, along with convenience and portability, account for only part of growing audiobook popularity. Selection and quality have also dramatically risen.
Just as we started to see new book titles go straight to eBooks without first being available in print, new titles are showing up in audiobooks that were not previously in print. It’s not surprising that the digital evolution is starting to pair eBooks with audiobooks. Audible, a company owned by Amazon, has paired some 26,000 eBooks with professional narrations. The company is adding more than 1,000 titles a month and aims to eventually bring the number to around 100,000.
“Professional” narration often means professional actor narration in the audiobooks being produced today. It’s not unusual to find your favorite movie and stage actors narrating books. Seeing great potential in audiobooks, producers are investing in high-quality production values. Max Brooks, author of the zombie novel World War Z scored a huge audiobook winner with 60,000 CDs and digital-audio copies sold in advance of the release of the movie taken from his novel. The success was fueled by an elaborate production with 40 cast members, including some A-list actors.
While sales figures indicate the public’s embrace of audiobooks, the format does have its critics who are concerned that this format will diminish the pleasure or comprehension of reading, even reduce the appreciation of the printed word. Many worry about a potential recession in traditional print books. Scientists, authors and booklovers debate the benefit and detriment that audiobooks might bring to literacy and literature. You be the judge.
Are you following the winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia? Behind the amazing athletic feats and medal news are many dramatic stories about the athletes themselves. No athlete gets to Olympic competition without human drama. Sports set the stage for great stories.
When you think of sports literature, you might first think of straightforward factual books. But sports literature offers much more, whether nonfiction or fiction. It finds its way into memoirs such as Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and Jake LaMotta’s Raging Bull. It becomes the catalyst in such novels as Don DeLillo’s Underworld and John Grisham’s Calico Joe. It can be a recurring theme for authors such as Ernest Hemingway, describing bullfighting in the nonfiction Death in the Afternoon and his novel The Sun Also Rises. So many great sports stories, some already mentioned here, have been successfully adapted to movies. Other examples include Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit: An American Legend and Michael Lewis’ The Blind Side.
What elevates all great literature is found in great sports literature: the ability to take the reader somewhere new, to inform, entertain and enlighten. In sports literature, you will find agony and ecstasy, trials and triumphs, pride and humility, loneliness and camaraderie, friends and combatants, heroes and villains, honesty and corruption, sacrifice and greed, humor and pathos. Sport stories often transcend the sport itself, revealing our humanity in all its exquisite complexity. As sports have the power to transform athletes, sports literature has the power to transform readers.
For an excellent nonfiction story about courage and resilience in the face of unbelievable adversity that, while not sports literature, does have a link to the Olympics, check out Laura Hillenbrand’s highly acclaimed bestseller, Unbroken.
I wanted to tell you about some great classic books related to Valentine’s Day. But there aren’t any. It seems that, like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, the magic of Valentine’s Day doesn’t translate well into adult literature. There are many children’s books about Valentine’s Day but authors haven’t been inspired to write Valentine’s Day stories for the grownups. A pity.
There’s no shortage of classic romantic stories, of course. The genre referred to as the Romance Novel is the most popular among today’s readers. It has a long history but literary critics largely dismiss it. Their common complaint is about the narrow scope of stories, with heroines that have no other issues than love and marriage. That is a limited view of what this genre offers readers.
A Romance Novel succeeds as quality literature when it has a compelling story that evokes a particular time, place or culture, when it explores the human psyche and relationships and when it demonstrates what makes us unique while connected with one another. It’s the same criteria we use when judging novels in most genres.
Classic Romance Novels that succeeded in their day and have endured through time include Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Alexandre Dumas-fils’ Camille and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Contemporary authors who are frequently successful with Romance Novels include Sophie Kinsella, Nora Roberts, Jennifer Crusie, Susan Elizabeth Phillips and – yes, there is a male author high in the ranks – Nicholas Sparks.
Romance finds a natural home in poetry, with rhythms that resonate in the heart. Some of the best classic examples can be found in the writings of Keats, Byron, Wilde, Dickens, Browning, Burns, Shelley and, of course, Shakespeare. A wonderful contemporary poet who, with great wit and insight, writes about love in all its facets is Wendy Cope. You can read some of her work in an article in the UK’s Daily Mail. Here’s a sample of Cope’s work to entice you:
Valentine
My heart has made its mind up
And I’m afraid it’s you.
Whatever you’ve got lined up,
My heart has made its mind up
And if you can’t be signed up
This year, next year will do.
My heart has made its mind up
And I’m afraid it’s you.
This week’s posts start year two of the Book●ed blog. When I started this weekly blog, I joined an exploding universe on the internet. In the blogosphere, it is the best of times, it is the worst of times.
Whatever your interest or question is, there is a website blog waiting for you, just a mouse click away, no matter where in the world you are. All you need is internet access to get a boatload of free information. That’s the best of times.
However, there is no true oversight on the internet. People can make almost any claim without penalty. And they do. Frequently. That’s the worst of times.
For authors and booklovers, blogs can be either a boon or a bane.
Marketers advise authors to create their own website with a blog to promote their books. Companies offer services to create websites, many for free (although you may have to pay a maintenance fee or face having the website dropped). While authors might be advised to regularly update their blogs with useful content, no one advises how challenging that can be. Or how to draw people to their blogs. Can’t tell you how many blogs get sidelined within a year or are so poorly produced that they drive away potential book buyers.
Blogs are an effective way that businesses draw people to websites promoting products or services. Caveat emptor: buyer beware. If the blog or site make claims or promises that look too good, too easy or too inexpensive to be true, they likely are. If a blogger tells you one product or service is much better than all the others, make sure that blogger doesn’t have a financial interest in the service he or she is promoting. Can’t tell you how many authors have fallen into this trap, only to later bemoan losing money and time on a publisher, editor, agent or marketer that failed to produce promised results. It’s okay for a blogger to promote a product or service, as long as he or she is upfront about it.
Authors: if you want to find the real deal, look for actual examples of produced work. If possible, talk to people who have used the product or service you are interested in. Educate yourself about the processes and costs involved. Knowledge is power.
On the best-of-times side, there are many wonderful blogs that offer insights to books, authors and the many ways books are brought into the world. Blogs expand opportunities to discover great books that haven’t made the best seller lists, the major media book reviews or the front displays at bookstore chains. The Book●ed blog is one of them.
I plan to continue bringing you weekly blog posts for the love of books and reading. If there is a topic you would like to see covered, please leave a comment for me. Meanwhile, I invite you to visit the past 52 weeks’ worth of Book●ed blog posts as I welcome you to the start of another great year. It’s the best of times.
Book●ed is much more than a weekly blog. The very popular Book●ed author interview/book review webcasts that launched last year went on a hiatus in September. They will resume later this year with some very exciting news. Stay tuned for updates. Meanwhile, please visit the Book Excerpts page of the Book.ed website to learn about the books and authors that have appeared on the shows, then watch the shows in the Book●ed Archives.
The six-word title of this blog post is considered by many to be the perfect example of the literary form called flash fiction. Although legend attributes those six words to Ernest Hemingway, similarly titled stories appear to predate him and there’s nothing to confirm him as the author. No matter. This is still powerful stuff.
Last week’s blog addressed the three traditional literary forms: novel, short story and novella. Flash fiction is the new kid on the literary block, having emerged in the past twenty-five years or so. It’s still evolving, going by such names as quick fiction, nano fiction and micro fiction. Flash fiction ranges in length from six words to as much as a thousand. There’s no set format; it can be a sentence, a paragraph, a page or more. No matter. It’s gaining fans everywhere.
The origins of flash fiction are as variable as its length and format. Aesop’s Fables, written in ancient Greece, are probably the first examples of flash fiction. We find flash fiction in many cultures and many languages. Its popularity has flourished in modern, fast-paced times when gratification wants to be served up promptly.
No matter how short flash fiction is, it still must tell a complete story. What’s left, after all non-essential words are removed, is clean and sharply focused. The choice of words, therefore, is critical. As readers might not realize but writers surely know, the shorter the piece, the harder it is to write.
The best flash fiction sparks something in a reader. It can raise the spirit or crush it under its heel. It can leave a taste on the tongue that is sweet or spicy or sour. The more minimal the language provided by the author, the more space there is for the reader to imagine the unspoken details. The story becomes something considerably larger than its diminutive size.
The format of flash fiction lends itself especially well to magazines, literary journals, online publications and chap books. But they are also published in books as collections by one or more writers, sometimes following a theme, other times following a format, still other times just being an anthology of very good writing. No matter. Just go find some and check it out because really good things can come in really small packages.
Once upon a time, it seemed there were just three formats for literary fiction: short stories, novels and novellas. Although few readers could define exactly what constitutes any of these categories, they usually have strong preferences for one over the others.
Until a few years back, I favored novels. To me, short stories were sketches or snacks whereas novels were full-fledged paintings or sumptuous banquets. Who doesn’t love to become absorbed into a good novel?
In 2006, I started writing short stories as a way to hone skills I felt I needed in order to write a novel. Along the way, reading great short stories and writing my own, I came to appreciate the craft of short story writing. A great short story is as memorable and satisfying as a great novel. My list of favorite short story authors includes O. Henry, Edgar Allen Poe and Alice Munro.
Some novels are constructed of vignettes that could stand alone as short stories. Some novels expand this concept over a collection of books: each book stands alone but all are connected by plots that interweave the same characters or settings at different times or from different viewpoints. Ursula Hegi comes to mind, with several books set in the fictional German town of Burgdof before, during and after World War II, showing recurring characters from different viewpoints.
So many great books are novellas. Among the best are Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea; John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men; George Orwell’s Animal Farm; and Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
What differentiates a novel from a novella from a short story? Length, obviously, is one factor. Typically, a novel runs 40,000 words; a novella uses 17,501-40,000 words; and a short story runs 7,500 words or less. Between 7,501 and 17,500 words can be considered a short story, a novella or a “novelette”.
Beyond length is structure. Short stories have fewer characters and, usually, a briefer time span. Novels have the luxury of developing characters and plot. Regardless of the length, both forms have the ability to grab and hold you. The difference is akin to looking at photos taken through different lenses. A close-up photo may show you less than a panoramic picture but it can be examined in finer detail without losing your interest because of its dedicated smaller focus. The panoramic photo tells a more sweeping story that combines many points of interest but, perhaps, not so closely. Both can be dramatic or funny. Both can touch you deeply and stay with you like a whisper that lingers in your ear.
Form should follow function. An author should choose his or her story platform based on what the story needs in order to be most effectively told. Readers should be open to reading all formats because, as noted by my examples, great stories come in all sizes. That’s why Book●ed welcomes all formats for review and promotion.
I haven’t even touched on the increasingly popular format of Flash Fiction, also known as Micro Fiction, the shortest form of fiction. Stay tuned.
For the first eight days of 2014, I never ventured outside except to retrieve the newspaper and mail at the end of my driveway. As I communicated with family and friends outside of the Chicago area where I live, I described the weather and landscape here like the winter scenes in Dr. Zhivago: vast glazed white, with crystal sparkles thrown into the air by gusts of wind; twigs and branches encased in thin sheaths of clear ice; magnificent, silent, deadly. This was the most extreme reach of a snow-filled, deep-frozen winter.
Garrison Keillor once noted, “Bad things don’t happen to writers; it’s all material.” In that spirit, I started thinking about the role severe weather has played in books. Pick any season and, somewhere in the world, you’ll find the potential for a major weather events. It inspires writers of fiction and non-fiction, prose and poetry, adult and children’s literature.
Anyone familiar with Emily Brontë’s 1847 classic Gothic novel, Wuthering Heights, knows that dramatic shifts in weather intensify the mystery, mysticism and menace of the Yorkshire moors, which are the backdrop for the story’s themes of passion and jealousy. The storms always signal pending tragedy for doomed lovers Catherine and Heathcliff.
Ernest Hemingway challenged the standard symbolism of weather in his 1929 war novel, A Farewell to Arms. In the war experience, snow typically symbolizes death while rain represents life and growth; Hemingway flips these symbols in his World War I story. In one chapter, snow ends battle; in another, it provides a peaceful backdrop for two lovers. Autumn rain leaves the country bare, brown, muddy, and sets the stage for an outbreak of deadly cholera.
Severe weather can be a device to move a plot forward, almost taking on the role of a character. In Rick Moody’s 1994 tragicomic family novel, The Ice Storm, a series of vignettes about two families falling apart in upscale suburban Connecticut, comes to its jarring climax and resolution during a 24-hour period during-and-after an unexpected major ice storm.
Of course, extreme weather can also come at the other end of the spectrum.
Ian McEwan’s 1978 debut novel, The Cement Garden, uses torturous summer heat (inspired by the 1976 extreme heat wave in Europe that gave him a “sense of changed rules”) to create a key plot element. The story is as uncomfortable as the weather becomes. Interestingly, the characters seem frozen by life circumstances but are eventually undone by the oppressive heat.
Hurricanes, tornadoes and typhoons, real and imagined, have played starring roles in literature.
Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel, commonly referred to as The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, is considered by many as giving birth to realistic fiction as a literary genre. The plot is littered with ships wrecked at sea by storms. Perhaps the most famous tornado in literature is the one that transports Dorothy Gale to Oz in L. Frank Baum’s 1900 classic, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. These are two examples of great literature, enjoyed by adults and children, which use extreme weather as a major plot device.
Winter isn’t over by a long shot. Some of us may find ourselves severely challenged by nature. Perhaps it will inspire the next great work of literature. It’s all material.
If you’re an author, wondering if self-publishing could be a viable route to getting your book produced, you should read this Wall Street Journal article about prolific best-selling self-published author Russell Blake. This article should also interest booklovers who have shied away from self-published books in the past because they thought only traditional publishers produced good books.
Maybe it’s because I am a New Year’s Eve baby that resolutions are especially appealing to me. The problem with New Year’s resolutions that are easily begun on January 1st is the heaviness they acquire by January 2nd and the impossible burden they seem to become by January 3rd.
Mark Twain said it well, in a January 1863 letter to the Virginia Territorial Enterprise: “Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink, and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever. We shall also reflect pleasantly upon how we did the same old thing last year about this time. However, go in, community. New Year’s is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions, and we wish you to enjoy it with a looseness suited to the greatness of the occasion.”
Here are my resolutions for 2014. They never grow stale, even those that are renewed year after year. If the New Year represents anything, it represents hope.
• I resolve to think more carefully about what I eat and drink… before I eat or drink it.
• I resolve to put at least 30 minutes of exercise onto my daily schedule… like all the other things I put on my schedule, whether I do them or not.
• I resolve to not let reading material pile up all over my kitchen table. Even the cat is complaining there’s no place left for her to sit.
• I will turn off my computer at 9 p.m. every night so my mind can wind down at a reasonable time for sleep. If I set my clocks back to Pacific Coast time, that will buy me a couple of hours.
• I will write at least one short story every month. Blog posts don’t count.
• I will learn more about evolving social media. It’s like people: I don’t have to love them to embrace and accept them.
• I resolve to find more great books and authors to bring to Book●ed.
I figure seven resolutions are enough to make or break. I included at least one or two I know I will keep. At the end of 2014, I’ll let you know how I did with the others.
What are your New Year’s resolutions? When it comes to reading and writing, T.S. Eliot captured the spirit of moving forward, year to year. He wrote, “For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.”
I have a bone to pick with the concept of “best books of the year” lists.
To begin with, there is no concurrence about what books comprise the top 10 in any category. Books get rated in many ways, including by sales, by genre and by critical review.
Booksellers such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble issue their lists based on their own sales data. The established arbiters of literary achievement, such varied media as the New York Times, NPR and Forbes, present their own critics’ annual list for your consideration. Some websites will offer their readers’ top ten favorites based on online votes. Some lists are specific to a genre while others embrace all genres. The Daily Beast aggregated 40 major lists to offer “a ranked ultimate guide” based on critics’ lists – a list from lists.
Regardless of which lists are consulted, rankings of “the top books of the year” help guide readers to books that have achieved recognition for a variety of reasons. All well and good as far as that goes.
Here’s my issue: these widely publicized lists routinely omit self-published books and almost all books published by small presses. The lists are dominated by the few big traditional publishing houses with hefty promotional budgets and access to booksellers’ coveted store positions. Meanwhile, many thousands of fantastic self-published and small press- published books remain in obscurity. The authors who write those marvelous works are denied the financial support they need to continue producing quality books while booklovers are denied the treasures these books offer.
As you peruse the various lists of “Best Books of the Year”, remember that there is more than meets the eye. Much more. Certainly, you should consider reading some of the books on those coveted lists. But don’t cheat yourself of the rewards of great self-published and indie books. You’ll find some of them (along with more traditionally published books) at the Book●ed website. That’s a good start.
Another excellent source worth checking is the list of Indie Book Award winners (you’ll find Echoes of Earth on their award list; a book excerpt and interview with author L. Sue Baugh can be found at Book●ed). A third source for finding independently published gems is the Independent Publishers IPPY Awards list.
A note of interest: some bestselling books started out as self-published works before they were picked up by traditional publishers. Titles you might recognize include The Joy of Cooking; The Tales of Peter Rabbit; The Celestine Prophecy; John Grisham’s first book, A Time to Kill and Tell My Sons (you’ll find a book excerpt and interview with co-author David Murray at Book●ed).
Black Friday bled in two directions in 2013. It bled forward into Cyber Monday but, for the first time, it also bled backwards into Thanksgiving Day. It was a black and blue extended weekend for bargain-seeking shoppers while obliterating the concept of “holiday” for retail workers who had to toil in stores or handling online orders. The news coverage of the chaos that ensued across the U.S. reminded me why there is no deal great enough to entice me to a department store during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. And why I tip extra to wait staff at any restaurant I visit on any major holiday. A friend in England told me she is concerned about a similar raucous response to this year’s introduction of Black Friday in the main shopping areas of her country.
Perhaps the commercial and social pressures we face around iconic holidays bring on the nostalgia we feel for Christmases past. Even people who do not celebrate Christmas welcome the cultural symbols. Every year, I look forward to hearing old, familiar songs about Christmas, snow and winter played on the radio. I plant myself in front of the TV with a mug of cocoa or Glühwein (mulled wine) to watch the annual showing of It’s a Wonderful Life. I celebrate my German heritage with marzipan stolen, lebkuchen, pfefferneuse cookies and other seasonal sweets on the dining table to share with family and friends. I’m sure you have your rituals, too.
At this time of year, whether we’re surrounded by loved ones, friends, or in solitude, we yearn for the comfort of the familiar. Seasonal stories of love, friendship, redemption and hope are the ones we return to year after year. Whether told in novels, novellas, memoirs, short stories, poems or illustrations, there’s no shortage of fabulous books to read and share during this reflective holiday season.
What are your favorite Christmas stories? Why are they your favorites? How have they impacted your life and what do they mean to you today?
Here’s my own list of 10 favorite Christmas tales. Almost all of them have been adapted to movies but they retain the most magic in their original printed form:
One more favorite, in fact my personal favorite Christmas-time story is the one I wrote: Santa Drives a Mini Cooper. As a holiday gift to my blog readers, I am offering a free download of this short story. Simply leave a reply to this blog entry mentioning “Evelyn’s Santa Story” and I’ll be happy to email this little holiday gem to you! I will use the email address you send me but it will not be posted or given to anyone else.
I usually provide Amazon links to book titles as a source to purchase the books. However, I encourage you to check with your local independent book store and library as your first source. Your support of community stores and libraries insures their ability to continue serving you.
The story about a pair of booksellers who left Denver and set up shop on a remote Wyoming ranch with sheep has nothing to do with Christmas, yet will resonate with the holiday spirit for all booklovers. You can read it here.
Nelson Mandela’s epic struggle to lead South Africa out of the hell of apartheid was in full review by the media following his death earlier this month. His 1994 autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom also gained renewed interest with the release of an acclaimed new movie based on the book. Some media stories about Mandela included archived interviews with “Mama Africa”, the Grammy Award-winning South African singer and civil rights activist Miriam Makeba, who died in 2008. Makeba also wrote an autobiography, Makeba: My Story.
I never had the honor of meeting Mandela but I did meet Makeba. In fact, I was a guest in her New Jersey home in the mid-1960s. As a student at New York’s High School of Music & Art, I loved Makeba’s music. I carried around her 1960 debut record album, aware that her daughter, Bongi (known in school as Angela) was a fellow student. Bongi saw me with the album and we struck up a friendship that led to my overnight stay in the Makeba home. You would never guess such a soft-spoken, sweet-natured, humble woman was already a mega-star. Though small of stature, Miriam Makeba was a goddess. I was awed by her. However, it was decades before I would really understand her, only after reading her autobiography.
By the time Makeba’s autobiography was published in 1987, she had suffered cancer, the dissolution of several marriages, the sorrow of Bongi’s untimely death, a decades-long exile from her beloved South Africa homeland after she spoke against apartheid, and the loss of a welcoming U.S. after her marriage to a controversial political activist. Her autobiography appeared as she was beginning to reconnect with an appreciative American audience, just a year after her Graceland tour with Paul Simon.
The lives of Mandela and Makeba were closely intertwined, even when they were countries or continents apart. She used her voice in speeches and songs, supporting Mandela during his imprisonment. Like Mandela, she rose above personal losses and the wounds of bigotry, understanding that love eventually triumphs over hate. In 1990, a recently freed Mandela persuaded Makeba to return to her native land (on her French passport). At Makeba’s death, Mandela led tributes for the global singer who had courageously spoken out against apartheid.
Now, these two giants have left us. Others can tell us much about Mandela and Makeba but to truly understand them, one must step into their lives through their own words. In their autobiographies, we hear their voices and see through their eyes how they viewed themselves and the times in which they lived. Long Walk to Freedom and Makeba: My Story are proof of the powerful literary form called “autobiography.”
Haven’t finished your holiday shopping yet? There’s always time to buy a book for that someone special. Browse the Book Excerpts page at Book●ed for a variety of books we’ve reviewed. Each one has a convenient “Buy the Book Now” link.
You probably don’t give it a thought but your enjoyment of a book is enhanced or diminished by the look of the letters that form the words that form the phrases that lead you through the pages. The design of those letters is a craft that has developed over centuries.
In traditional typography, the specific size, style and weight of a typeface is referred to as a “font”. This harkens back to the casting of metal dies for seals and currency in ancient times and, later, to the development of movable type when letters were molded in metal. A typeface comprises an assortment of fonts that share an overall design. With today’s digital technology, the terms “font” and “typeface” are often interchanged.
Most of the common, classic typefaces we use today – including Roman, Italic, Garamond, Caslon, Fleischmann, Bodoni, Baskerville – were created before the 1800s. Fewer typefaces were created in the 19th and 20th centuries but industrialization of the printing industry brought major advances in print technology. Computer digitization of typography in recent decades resulted in countless new typefaces, including such contemporary type designs as Times, Helvetica and Futura, as well as variations of the classic styles. Today, there are thousands of different typefaces, and new ones continue to be developed.
Quantity equals quandary for the self-publishing author. Being familiar with typefaces and their effect on the reader’s experience is one more opportunity to soar or sink. Fortunately, someone decided to create a list of the most popular book fonts, based on the Top Ten Typefaces Used by Book Design Winners.
If you look at older books, especially those produced by major publishing houses, you are likely to find a note about the typeface that was chosen. That lovely piece of information is rarely mentioned in contemporary books, especially those that are self-published. It’s a pity. Not that you would choose to buy or read a book based on the typeface of the text; simply to appreciate the art in the creation and the selection. It’s worth another look.
There is one day that is ours. Thanksgiving Day is the one day that is purely American. — O Henry
After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relatives. – Oscar Wilde
As we approach the quintessential American family holiday – Thanksgiving – I started to search for samples of Thanksgiving representations in literature. You’d think that the holiday would be ripe for comedy, drama, poetry, a touch of weirdness perhaps, and certainly a cornucopia of memories. But you’d be challenged to find a bounty of books whose titles or authors you’d recognize.
While there are passing references to Thanksgiving in various novels by such authors as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain and Philip Roth, you have to go back to 1882 and the novella An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving by Louisa May Alcott to find a classic story placed in the holiday. It’s a cute story that may remind you of the movie Home Alone, when children are left to fill their parents’ role in the household with comic results. While getting a taste of life in those long-ago times, we can relate to the spirit of the family-oriented holiday.
How authors view Thanksgiving reflects the time in which the author lives and the story is told. Such is the case with Rick Moody’s 1994 novel, The Ice Storm. Set in the 1970s, the dark story reveals the underlying dysfunction of two seemingly attractive upper-class suburban families, breaking apart under the weight of contemporary cultural pressures.
Most of us have Thanksgiving recollections that fall somewhere between Alcott’s version and Moody’s. Those of us “of a certain age” also recall the first verse of a melodic poem called Over the River and Through the Woods, learned in elementary school. Did you know that when you go past the first verse, it turns out to be about Thanksgiving? The original title of the poem (later adapted into a song and a play) by Lydia Maria Child was A Boy’s Thanksgiving Day. Now you have a piece of trivia to pass around with the turkey and stuffing at your Thanksgiving table!
