An interesting article (from July) about what we might be losing in a digital-based world…the art of slow reading.
Archives for posts with tag: reading
I was reading Soulless by Gail Carriger over the weekend, which is an enjoyably light read featuring both vampires and werewolves in a steampunk setting. Being a romantic comedy in which the male lead is a werewolf (thank goodness; wouldn’t have touched it if he’d been a vampire), there’s lots of references to Alpha and Beta males (and also, given the main character, Alpha females).
Alpha males are a staple of the romance genre and pop all over the place in urban fantasy and other genres with werewolves, vampires, and/or romance. They’re usually not so blatantly labelled except when talking about werewolves, given the classification comes from pack animals like wolves. They’re really meant to personify physical and mental strength, leadership and confidence, but badly or simplistically written, they tend to be jealous, arrogant, violent arseholes who in real life would be stalkers, rapists, and domestic violence perpetrators.
In case you hadn’t guessed, I generally cannot stand the alpha male Read the rest of this entry »
A survey on how professional writers broke into publishing, part 1.
You’d think Amazon would have learnt this lesson the first time round…
Newsflash: people still enjoy reading. Who knew?
Sex in terms of male or female, my friends (usually now called the inaccurate ‘gender’). This entry is about how the author’s sex/gender influences reading decisions.
I reviewed Of Bees and Mist earlier this week (I was a little disappointed). I picked this book up based on the first few pages, the presence of leading female characters, and a bit of a whim. When I got it home, I realised the author’s name was EricK, not EricA and I have to admit that my heart sank and that I would not have bought it had I noticed that it was written by a man, not a woman.
The reason for that is simple: I generally don’t think male authors do a good job portraying woman as actual people rather than as stereotypes of their ideal or nightmare Read the rest of this entry »
Twists are the big surprises to do with plot or character motivation or hidden information that are usually revealed towards the end of the book, if not the very end. Often they’re just about throwing a spanner in the works of the story (the last minute betrayal by the trusted friend, for example), but when they’re very good, they are such that they change the interpretation of all that has gone before.
Twists are pretty tough for writers to pull off, because readers are such a diverse bunch that you’ll never get the same reaction out of more than one of them. As a writer, I tend to avoid them except where the narrative ends up requiring it (and they’re the simple sort that add a bit of complexity to the current plot, not the interpretation-changing sort). As a reader, twists tend to fall into a handful of categories for me. Read the rest of this entry »
Title: The City & The City
Author: China Miéville
Year of publication: 2009
Genre: Fantasy — Literary
My rating: 5 stars or A+
A woman is found murdered in a eastern European city. It seems like a routine case for Inspector Borlú; it seems like a routine, though well-written, murder-mystery thriller for the reader — until little hints start appearing that all is not quite routine in this city:
With a hard start, I realised she was not on GunterStrász at all, and that I should not have seen her. Immediately and flustered I looked away, and she did the same, with the same speed…When after some seconds I looked back up, unnoticing the old woman stepping heavily away, I looked carefully instead of at her in her foreign street at the facades of the nearby and local GunterStrász, that depressed zone.
I’ve previously discussed, for writers, how to choose your POV character. There’s an extra component to the POV, though — not just who, but how: first person, second person, or third person.
The character you tell your story with is often driven by the story itself, but the ‘grammatical person’ you use can be more about what you’re comfortable writing, what’s in fashion, and what your readers expect or the impression you want to give. Read the rest of this entry »
Until now, ebooks have provided me additional reading material – classics, the independent authors on Smashwords, and the occasional DRM-free book on Fictionwise – rather than replacing my paper book reading. But as I said in my last post, the fact that the Kindle app is now available in Australia and is far easier to get content for than the Stanza app thanks to Fictionwise and BoB not being very good (no browsing; unfiltered geographic restrictions; DRM not supported by my reading device, Stanza on iPhone), I can now begin to seriously contemplate converting from paper books to ebooks for at least a portion of my reading.
I already explained that format was holding me back from plunging on in to the Kindle store – Kindle format can only be read on Kindle devices and I don’t like that. Again, as I said, ePub is not really that much better, due to DRM basically making affected books device-dependent anyway and the fact that any electronic format is vulnerable to being made obsolete no matter what. I’ll buy the books I absolutely love in physical form to ensure I can keep them. So format/DRM is not so much of an issue in the long run, particularly when, to be brutally honest, most books are of the read-once-and-enjoy-but-never-read-again type anyway.
The other thing giving me pause is the price… Read the rest of this entry »
Do Nothing But Read Day. Yesterday. Any other Sunday, I would have been complying automatically and unknowingly, but not yesterday….
