I was away for the long weekend (and we’re still on break today at my uni), and busy last week, and so I missed lots of interesting posts. Here are some links:
Rohan Maitzen of Open Letters Monthly read two romance novels (Chase and Heyer) and … didn’t like ‘em. Then she read another one (Anyone But You, by Jennifer Crusie) and … sort of liked it. She talks about her foray into romance reading here. (I commented over there.)
Liz, inspired in part by Rohan’s experience of reading romance, wrote The Uses and Abuses of Purple.
There’s yet another article trying to figure out why romance readers have embraced e-books, this time at The Guardian. I know, I know, it’s insulting that romance readers’ embrace of e-books is such a confounding mystery. But this one is not quite as bad as most others, as it focuses on the covers, which I frankly do think are embarrassing and often misleading, regardless of the creative and other skills required to produce them.
Over at Smart Bitches Trashy Books, Sarah Wendell is talking about her company, Simple Progress, which offers “online administration, consulting and custom marketing strategies for online media, specializing in the book publishing industry.” Very long, very heated thread, required reading for anyone interested in the way blogging and the publishing industry is changing. New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Crusie responds at great length to Sarah Wendell’s critics.
The Phantom Tollbooth is one of the Books that Changed My Life. Adam Gopnik has a 50 year reflection at The New Yorker. (Thanks to Liz for the pointer)
I noticed a new bookish Twitter handle, Book Riot (introductory post here), and followed it, and they linked to a blog I had never heard of, called Dead White Guys: An Irreverent Guide to Classic Literature. Book Riot is a “new literary blog providing comprehensive, short-form and reader-friendly news and information about reading” and Dead White Guys is… well, the name makes it pretty obvious.
Speaking of new literary ventures. USA Today launched a new romance blog, Happy Ever After. I noticed on Twitter a lot of support for the idea that a major national newspaper is devoting part of its online activities exclusively to romance.
Is this the future of the bricks and mortar bookstore? Indigo books of Canada is now branding books as a lifestyle instead of a product.
We had a great long weekend, with my older son’s U12 soccer team taking the tournament title. We stayed in Old Orchard Beach at the kind of beach motel some of you may recall from your youth, with ancient but clean rooms, happy kids running up and down the walkways at all hours, and a passenger train rattling your windows at 3:00am every morning. But spending time with friends and family, and being able to get to the beach in 5 seconds makes it all worthwhile. Here’s a sunrise picture (and given that I am absolute shit with the camera, just think how lovely it actually must have been!):
Related posts:
Lovely photo – do you have pippi shells over there? Roughly triangular, on the outside white and the inside a glossy shading of lilac-y purple? I always think of skies like these as pippi skies.
It’s a Monday Morning stepback!!!!!!! by another name of course.
Conflict of interest with SB Sarah. Well, is the only possible conflict of interest with her reviews?
(Sorry, I read Crusie’s & SB Sarah’s but didn’t go through the comments.)
To play devil’s advocate (and someone can play the other side this is just a thought exercise written out loud). SB Sarah has written recommendation articles (top of my head so this may not be correct) Kirruk reviews, Salon.com. She has been quoted in the New York Times and USA Today. She wrote a post on Huffington Post. She speaks at conventions and for all intents and purposes has an international platform. Regardless of whether or not she reviews any of her current clients books going forward, isn’t there still the potential for the appearance of a conflict of interest here?
Would she say anything negative about a new book by a client?
Does a client gets mentioned when she gets interviewed because that’s a writer she loves as opposed to those the clients she’s working for and therefore thinking of?
Yes, I’m nitpicking here. But since the relationship is a partnership from 9 months ago that wasn’t hidden but also wasn’t purposefully disclosed until Jennifer Crusie posted the disclaimer on her blog, it does make me go hmmm. Not because I think there’s anything dishonest happening but because I think it is a misstep.
Would a major newspaper still go to her for a quote as a reader advocate with this client list? Or will they be even more likely to go to her with this client list but as a PR person instead of a reader advocate? Or maybe just as the non-fiction author/expert for her platform?
The lines are real blurry here. Don’t have any real answers but my final thought is to wonder how FCC disclosure requirements come into play here with tweets, recommendations, etc. that aren’t reviews per se.
Going to check out the new USA Today blog you mentioned.
@Merrian: Well, we call them clam shells or mussel shells, but yes, there are shells! (the pipi shell looks like a clam?)
@AQ: I appreciate your comments, but I really don’t want to get into it, because there seems to be little rhetorical space for reasoned discussion, when anyone who thinks a COI may be present in this case is labeled a “raging hateboner”, “jealous”, “conspiracy theorist”, “shallow thinker”, “conclusion jumper”, and much worse.
I will say that I think it is a shame that a COI, which is a situation, a structure, has been interpreted (Quite wrongly. But what do I know? You’d better ask experts like Ms. Crusie.) as an accusation of unethical behavior, such that the possibility a COI exists cannot even be raised without appearing to impugn someone’s integrity. Since pointing out that a COI exists is not an accusation that someone lacks integrity, assertions of integrity do absolutely nothing to deal with it. Neither does “trying to be objective.” COIs, which often cannot be avoided, are not about objectivity or integrity: how they are handled is.
@Jessica:
Fair enough. I didn’t read the comments but I can guess. You’re definitely right.
I’m enjoying going through your links though. Thanks!
And, hey, normally I wouldn’t say this but maybe you should delete my number #2 rather than start a firestorm on this blog. Or edit it down appropriately.
@AQ: You’re the best! I think the storm has fired itself out mostly, and while I may self-censor, I won’t be censoring you.
http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-vn4401699
This links to a picture of the colur variations of the pipi – we eat them as clams.
http://susanmullenclaycreations.yolasite.com/works-2010.php
This one is to a lovely site of a lady who makes natural objects out of clay
I’ve never read The Phantom Tollbooth. I have a knee-jerk reaction to it because it was on the reading list of my TAG English class in elementary school, and I was going through things no seven year old should go through that put me off reading for a few years. However, that link and your mentioning of how it changed your life draws me back to the first moment I read Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth at fifteen…perhaps I should revisit TPT (and, the equally hated A Wrinkle in Time).
@Merrian: Looks delicious! I mean, beautiful!
@Evangeline: Oh dear. I also loved Wrinkle in Time. You’d best stay far away from TPT.
There is one thing that I have noticed in most cases of genre-outsiders trying to get into a genre — any genre: all genre fiction functions within a specific framework. This is also true for mimetic fiction. Some people generally like the framework of mimetic fiction, and react to it better than the other framework(s). They have trouble accepting the non-mimetic frameworks, and will usually come up with a lot of extraneous reasons for that. This is also why those people will often be the most receptive towards “gritty” crime, since its framework is the closest to the mimetic one. It’s really just a matter of taste. (I’m not saying that there are no other reasons, but this is, in my experience, the key reason.)
All this time I thought “kerfuffle” was “kerfluffle.” I don’t think I can make my brain accept the change.
It is kerfluffle — in the same way that it’s honour and grey and Hallowe’en and any number of great words that are spelled differently depending on where you live. I object to the homogenization of great spelling idiosyncrasies so I’m sticking with kerfluffle. Back in the mists of time, I remember one of the many kerfluffles on the late Suz Brockmann board centred around the spelling of the word. Is there a word czar somewhere out there that is passing decrees?
On twitter the other day someone posted a piece from (I think!) the Oxford dictionary talking about movement in the convention of having a singular subject match up throughout a sentence. But then you get into he/she, which may or may not be accurate … I’m paraphrasing madly but I think the conclusion was that there was movement and that the mixing~matching of subjects (singular/plural) goes back a good four centuries. We could kerfluffle on that
@Janet W: I tweeted this to you when I was away from the computer but the 140 characters were too limiting.
The OED disagrees with you: it spells it “kerfuffle.” It might be from a Scottish word, and it’s older than I thought (19thC).
And here’s a funny anecdote about a misspelling on fandom wank!
Either way, I’m grateful to have the term. Brouhaha is just not nearly as fun to read or say.
Nobody remembers this, but in 2009 I introduced a Kerfuffle Alert System.
Note that we are now at SEVERE.
Here’s the link to SuperWendy’s post, and Sunita’s on the kerfuffle-which-shall-not-be-named.
That is so funny — and so true. Which came first, the kerfuffle/kerfluffle or the hawt men? I note that Mrs. Giggles has a hawt hawt hawt picture of Hugh Jackman on her website.
(covering my ample butt to say that I haven’t checked other sites for LolCats or more hawtness … but your system sounds like it covers all the variables)
@Jessica: LOL! You’re right, I had completely forgotten about it. Excellent alert system.
@Jessica: Meta-kerfuffles! Hahaha. This system is even better than I remember. I’ve already made the mistake of commenting without an edit button. I should have reread this first!
Laughing madly at the R-KAS. Please, please bring back Monday Morning Stepback (or any other day of the week that suits you)
@Miranda Neville: ok.