Saturday, October 8, 2011
BOOK RIOT: Week 1
Well, Book Riot survived it's first week. For those of you who haven't checked it out yet, can I interest you in a run-down of what we wrote about last week?
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Sometimes, you just need a handbag made out of dictionaries.
I like cheap books almost as much as I like sports novels.
I'm a lit snob, so I'm going to try these YA books. Apparently, there's a lot you can learn from that stuff.
Snooki wrote an embarrassingly bad novel (and has a deal for her next one), but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy real books and the Jersey Shore at the same time.
A lot of people "like" books on Facebook, but some people like books about plucky lady journos better.
A book can be an ideal travel companion, that is unless you can't stand it and chuck it.
People can't seem to leave perfectly good books alone. They are either needlessly modernizing them ormaking terrible movies out of them.
There are a lot of books about hapless white dudes out there. Which is exactly how I would not describe Toni Morrison.
A lot of people put money on who would win the Nobel Prize. Though the announcement day favorite didn't win, there's a good case to be made that Bob Dylan should have.
And if you want to share any of these posts, you can retweet them without fear of reprisal from the language police.
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Thanks to all of you that have taken a look; as for the rest, give us a shot, won't you?
Monday, October 3, 2011
Announcing My New Blog Project: Book Riot
You may have noticed that things have slowed down here at The Ape of late. And there's a reason for that: for the past few months I've been hard at work on a new blog project that is launching today: Book Riot.
Some of you may have seen mention of it floating around (especially on Twitter), but let me tell you a little about it. Book Riot is a book news and commentary site that slots somewhere between your higher quality book blog and a mass market site like The Huffington Post (but, you know, good). The goal is to write about books in the accessible, entertaining way that bloggers do but with the goal of breaking through the blogosphere bubble by being a little more professional and a little more consistent. Our target audience is someone who likes to read, but wouldn’t read an individual book blog (probably there is someone in your life who does like to read, but isn’t a nut about it like us).
As for my role, well, I'm co-founder (along with my friend and business partner Clint) and will be serving as Editor-in-Chief. In short, I'll be doing a bunch of writing (considerably more than I ever did here), recruiting writers and bloggers (more on this below), and working with our writers to do entertaining, educational, and otherwise engaging writing about books and reading.
So far, we have a stable of thirteen writers, many of whom are bloggers that I've met through doing this humble little blog (Rachel from A Home Between Pages, Greg from The New Dork Review of Books, Amanda from Dead White Guys are all writing and all have been regular commenters here).
In the coming weeks, we are going to be looking for more contributors and I hope some of you will consider joining us. I'll post more about that when we are ready for more, but one of Book Riot's goals is to bring the best of what book bloggers do to a wider audience.
The Reading Ape will still be around, though likely in his current leisurely pace. I do hope you will check out Book Riot---if we do it right, I think it'll become a regular stop on your internet route.
Thanks so much for reading here; my experience writing The Ape led directly to this new venture, and I hope you'll come along as well.
Many thanks,
Jeff O'Neal
Friday, September 30, 2011
My Guest Spot on Bookrageous
Quick note to let you all know that The Ape made a special guest appearance on the Bookrageous podcast this week. Check it out here.
For the incurably bookish, this is a bi-weekly must listen. Basically, the three regular hosts, Jenn, Josh, and Rebecca talk about what they're reading in the first section and then take on a broader topic in the second session.
I talked about John Warner's The Funny Man, Lily Tuck's I Married You For Happiness, Stanley Fish's How to Write a Sentence, and Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy. I also spontaneously invented the "wonk-o-meter."
The second section of the show was about Banned Books Week, and in vintage Bookrageous fashion, a potentially plodding topic turned out to be damn near spritely.
I had a great time. Even if you don't listen to my sonorous baritone (heh) in this episode, you should give this podcast space on your precious iOS device.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
The Dictionary of Fictional Techniques: The Discrete Appositive
The Dictionary of Fictional Techniques is a running feature here at the Ape in which I observe, name, and discuss heretofore uncategorized (at least to my knowledge) literary devices. For a list of previous entries, please scroll to the bottom of this post.
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An appositive that exists as a sentence fragment immediately after its antecedent noun
Example:
"Fair-haired, solidly built and not tall--not taller than Nina--his eyes are light blue, like a dog's. A husky."
-I Married You For Happiness by Lily Tuck
Discussion:
The discrete appositive here is "a husky." I'm interested in how authors represent thought (especially in close third-person narration). Here Tuck uses this little device to mimic a slight cognitive pause. The result is that we can feel the character thinking, trying to remember the particular canine eyes.
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All entries in The Dictionary of Fictional Techniques are original to The Reading Ape, unless otherwise cited. (This means that they aren’t ‘real words,’ so don’t use them in your freshman comp essay)
Previous entries in The Dictionary of Fictional Techniques:
_________________________
Buy books mentioned in this post (or anything else, actually) using the below links, and The Reading Ape gets a small referral fee to defray our nominal operating costs.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
"Please, for the love of books, learn from us."
Today, I'm guest posting for Book Blogger Appreciation week with a piece called "What Professional Critics Can Learn from Book Bloggers." Check it out.
Cheers,
-TRA
Friday, September 9, 2011
Friday Forum: Lovably Bad Books
The experienced reader/critic part of my brain saw the flaws: wooden dialogue, unbelievable coincidence, narrative cliche, and a variety of other narrative black-eyes.
But then another part of my brain took over: the remnant of my adolescent, Mario Brothers-playing, Darth Vader-loving, coin-op obsessing, X-Men reading, Middle Earth-daydreaming self took over. My hard-won critical eye was completely helpless.
And this has happened before (Harry Potter and the early Tom Clancy novels come to mind): for some reason, certain kinds of novels have the ability to short-circuit the taste and discernment I have been cultivating for the last couple of decades. And it feel sooooooo good.
Has this ever happened to you? With what books? And what was it that caught you? __________________
Buy books mentioned in this post (or anything else, actually) using the below links, and The Reading Ape gets a small referral fee to defray our nominal operating costs.
Thursday, August 25, 2011
The Dictionary of Fictional Techniques: Sideloading
The Dictionary of Fictional Techniques is a running feature here at the Ape in which I observe, name, and discuss heretofore uncategorized (at least to my knowledge) literary devices. For a list of previous entries, please scroll to the bottom of this post.
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Sideloading:
Relaying crucial plot information indirectly.
Example:
"I was furious with her for not having told me that my grandfather had left home. He had told her and my mother that he was worried about my goodwill mission, about the inoculations at the Brejevina orphanage, and that he was coming down to help."
-from The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht
Discussion:
This one's a little tricky to see in a brief quotation because really it is about the lack of information that precedes it. To this point, we know nothing of the protagonist's location or activity. This passage is ostensibly about her quarrel with her grandmother, but the most important readerly information is embedded in a list.
I can't chart a historical line, but it seems that this kind of exposition is relatively modern. My sense is that it born of two trends in contemporary fiction: the elliptical, elusive opening and the evergreen exhortation to "show" rather than "tell." To serve both of these directives often means that it can take quite a while for a reader to have any sense of the salient narrative details until the novel or short story is well underway (here, we are ten pages in before being told where the protagonist is and what she is doing there).
Side-loading isn't then an intentional technique exactly, but the by-product of other writing decisions. And while it is not the most elegant way of providing necessary exposition, it allows for deferred information to be conveyed with seeming heavy-handed. I wouldn't be surprised, however, if many readers miss needed plot information because of its intentional understatement.
____________________________
Relaying crucial plot information indirectly.
Example:
"I was furious with her for not having told me that my grandfather had left home. He had told her and my mother that he was worried about my goodwill mission, about the inoculations at the Brejevina orphanage, and that he was coming down to help."
-from The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht
Discussion:
This one's a little tricky to see in a brief quotation because really it is about the lack of information that precedes it. To this point, we know nothing of the protagonist's location or activity. This passage is ostensibly about her quarrel with her grandmother, but the most important readerly information is embedded in a list.
I can't chart a historical line, but it seems that this kind of exposition is relatively modern. My sense is that it born of two trends in contemporary fiction: the elliptical, elusive opening and the evergreen exhortation to "show" rather than "tell." To serve both of these directives often means that it can take quite a while for a reader to have any sense of the salient narrative details until the novel or short story is well underway (here, we are ten pages in before being told where the protagonist is and what she is doing there).
Side-loading isn't then an intentional technique exactly, but the by-product of other writing decisions. And while it is not the most elegant way of providing necessary exposition, it allows for deferred information to be conveyed with seeming heavy-handed. I wouldn't be surprised, however, if many readers miss needed plot information because of its intentional understatement.
_________________________
All entries in The Dictionary of Fictional Techniques are original to The Reading Ape, unless otherwise cited. (This means that they aren’t ‘real words,’ so don’t use them in your freshman comp essay)
Previous entries in The Dictionary of Fictional Techniques:
_________________________
Buy books mentioned in this post (or anything else, actually) using the below links, and The Reading Ape gets a small referral fee to defray our nominal operating costs.
Friday, August 12, 2011
Friday Forum: Advertising, Attention, and Book Blogs
This week's forum topic was inspired by a couple of recent comments here at The Ape about advertising, attention, and literary writing.
First, Kevin, a longtime reader of this site and dedicated literary blogger in his own right, politely requested that I take advertising off The Reading Ape:
Second, in a comment to my post on the future of book reviewing, Tom Lutz expressed some discomfort in relying on advertising to support arts journalism:
I'm not sure that I can link these two comments directly, but I think they both spring from a deep distrust of advertising. Kevin (and he can correct me if I am misreading him) suggests that advertising somehow damages the experience of the content and that unless I am in uttermost need, I should forgo whatever income advertising generates.
Lutz's concern is about cause and effect; if advertising is your only means of support, then you are at the mercy of advertisers' (sometimes unsavory) desires. Actually, this is where the two comments connect: both are worried about advertising compromising content, at both the level of creation and that of consumption.
Rather than write my own response, I will let the fact that I have advertising on this site (and am more than comfortable with it) speak for me.
My questions to you:
What do you think about advertising on book blogs? What are the potential problems? Do you think the increasing amount of ads on book blogs is a positive or negative?
First, Kevin, a longtime reader of this site and dedicated literary blogger in his own right, politely requested that I take advertising off The Reading Ape:
I urge you in the strongest possible terms to eliminiate advertising from your very fine blog. It's unnecessary, unless you're living paycheck to paycheck, and they distract from your content.
Second, in a comment to my post on the future of book reviewing, Tom Lutz expressed some discomfort in relying on advertising to support arts journalism:
I continue to believe that people should get paid for their intellectual labor, and I am particularly interested in paying people who aren't otherwise "economically viable" -- that is people who are saying things that won't immediately help someone sell fast food, and therefore won't immediately attract commercial funding.
I'm not sure that I can link these two comments directly, but I think they both spring from a deep distrust of advertising. Kevin (and he can correct me if I am misreading him) suggests that advertising somehow damages the experience of the content and that unless I am in uttermost need, I should forgo whatever income advertising generates.
Lutz's concern is about cause and effect; if advertising is your only means of support, then you are at the mercy of advertisers' (sometimes unsavory) desires. Actually, this is where the two comments connect: both are worried about advertising compromising content, at both the level of creation and that of consumption.
Rather than write my own response, I will let the fact that I have advertising on this site (and am more than comfortable with it) speak for me.
My questions to you:
What do you think about advertising on book blogs? What are the potential problems? Do you think the increasing amount of ads on book blogs is a positive or negative?
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Reviewing the Book Review
It hasn't been a good summer for mainstream book reviewing. First, the LA Times cut back its book coverage. Then, The Washington Post consolidated its arts coverage by splitting up its book coverage and moving the remaining pieces to other section, including moving the fiction coverage to "Style."
For book lovers, these are not welcome moves.
Tom Lutz, editor-in-chief of the inchoate LA Review of Books, took the occasion of the LA Times reduction to write about the goals of the new publication (and to announce that they had brought onboard two columnists recently The Times recently laid off). In short the LA Review of Books aims to maintain a space for the kind of serious book reviewing that has been in decline over the last couple of decades.
This, I think, is an admirable goal, and I would certainly like the site to succeed. Still, two questions remain unanswered it Lutz's essay.
1. Why will the LA Review of Books succeed where mainstream reviewing has failed?
2. Will the writing and reviewing in the LA Review of Books mirror mainstream reviewing or will it do something else?
While the first of the questions is about money and the second about content, they are deeply linked. The unknown here is the market for literary journalism.
The LA Review of Books, Lutz says, will employ a hybrid model to generate revenue, which will include advertising, merchandise, subscriptions, affiliate incomes, fundraising, and grants. This already is acknowledgment that, as a commercial enterprise, literary journalism is untenable; you do not need grant money and non-profit money if there are buyers for your product.
That is, unless your product is really different than what has already failed. From what I can tell, the style of the first 100 posts in the LA Review of Books does feel considerably more modern than, say, coverage in the NY Times. The topics are more diverse, the writing more personal and freeform, and the general spirit more experimental. Unfortunately, I doubt that it is any more viable as a commercial product.
What I think Lutz doesn't really see (and that Edward Champion pointed out in his response to Lutz's essay) is the problem is not that there isn't cultural space for book reviewing and journalism, it's that it is happening everywhere---from book blogs, to Amazon, to GoodReads, to #fridayreads.
One of the reasons that book reviewing had a home in newspapers in the early 20th Century is that there was no where else to turn. Now, reviewing is everywhere.
My sense is that the kind of writing that the LA Review of Books wants to preserve needs preservation for a reason--it is no longer able to survive in the main of American cultural life. And that's not saying it isn't valuable, only that it needs propping up by extra-commercial forces for it to survive.
What I would like to see, and I readily admit that I don't know what this would look like, is writing about books that engages with readers to the point that those readers (and the advertising dollars their attention brings) can support it directly (one possible example is Martha Southgate's essay about The Help in Entertainment Weekly). This would not only mean a future for professional literary journalists, but also that what they write can be culturally current and accessible.
The long and short of it is that people still read. What they want to read about what they read is still very much a mystery and the crux of the problem for contemporary book reviewing.
__________________
For book lovers, these are not welcome moves.
Tom Lutz, editor-in-chief of the inchoate LA Review of Books, took the occasion of the LA Times reduction to write about the goals of the new publication (and to announce that they had brought onboard two columnists recently The Times recently laid off). In short the LA Review of Books aims to maintain a space for the kind of serious book reviewing that has been in decline over the last couple of decades.
This, I think, is an admirable goal, and I would certainly like the site to succeed. Still, two questions remain unanswered it Lutz's essay.
1. Why will the LA Review of Books succeed where mainstream reviewing has failed?
2. Will the writing and reviewing in the LA Review of Books mirror mainstream reviewing or will it do something else?
While the first of the questions is about money and the second about content, they are deeply linked. The unknown here is the market for literary journalism.
The LA Review of Books, Lutz says, will employ a hybrid model to generate revenue, which will include advertising, merchandise, subscriptions, affiliate incomes, fundraising, and grants. This already is acknowledgment that, as a commercial enterprise, literary journalism is untenable; you do not need grant money and non-profit money if there are buyers for your product.
That is, unless your product is really different than what has already failed. From what I can tell, the style of the first 100 posts in the LA Review of Books does feel considerably more modern than, say, coverage in the NY Times. The topics are more diverse, the writing more personal and freeform, and the general spirit more experimental. Unfortunately, I doubt that it is any more viable as a commercial product.
What I think Lutz doesn't really see (and that Edward Champion pointed out in his response to Lutz's essay) is the problem is not that there isn't cultural space for book reviewing and journalism, it's that it is happening everywhere---from book blogs, to Amazon, to GoodReads, to #fridayreads.
One of the reasons that book reviewing had a home in newspapers in the early 20th Century is that there was no where else to turn. Now, reviewing is everywhere.
My sense is that the kind of writing that the LA Review of Books wants to preserve needs preservation for a reason--it is no longer able to survive in the main of American cultural life. And that's not saying it isn't valuable, only that it needs propping up by extra-commercial forces for it to survive.
What I would like to see, and I readily admit that I don't know what this would look like, is writing about books that engages with readers to the point that those readers (and the advertising dollars their attention brings) can support it directly (one possible example is Martha Southgate's essay about The Help in Entertainment Weekly). This would not only mean a future for professional literary journalists, but also that what they write can be culturally current and accessible.
The long and short of it is that people still read. What they want to read about what they read is still very much a mystery and the crux of the problem for contemporary book reviewing.
__________________
Buy books mentioned in this post (or anything else, actually) using the below links, and The Reading Ape gets a small referral fee to defray our nominal operating costs.
Monday, August 8, 2011
Two Additions to Notable Release Calendar
A little while ago, I created a shareable calendar for The Millions' list of notable forthcoming releases and a modified version of it with a few personal additions.
Today, I'm adding a couple of new titles to the list: We the Animals by Justin Torres and When She Woke by Hillary Jordan.
Significant Twitter chatter spurred me to find out a little about We The Animals. After a little follow-up, this debut novel about a working-class, mixed race family not only sounds compelling from the synopsis, but glowing blurbs from Marilynne Robinson, Paul Harding, Dorothy Allison, Michael Cunningham and others raised my eyebrow. There are a few authors who can get me to read a book by blurbing it and Marilynne Robinson is one of them. The last book I read on the strength of blurb from her was Paul Harding's Tinker, which went on the win the Pulitzer Prize.
I don't remember where I first heard about When She Woke, but a dystopic retelling of The Scarlet Letter warrants at least a sample download. Haven't heard much early buzz, but I will give this a wide berth to be interesting.
If you have other books you are looking forward to that are not on the calendar already, I'd like to hear about them. Can't have too many in the dugout is what I say.
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Today, I'm adding a couple of new titles to the list: We the Animals by Justin Torres and When She Woke by Hillary Jordan.
If you have other books you are looking forward to that are not on the calendar already, I'd like to hear about them. Can't have too many in the dugout is what I say.
__________________
Buy books mentioned in this post (or anything else, actually) using the below links, and The Reading Ape gets a small referral fee to defray our nominal operating costs.
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