From the "blogging when I gosh darn well get around to it department" comes...

...bullet! point! ROCK!

• Chances are, I've written more unpublished (and let's never mind the "potentially unpublishable, too" conversation) novels than you. I can sit down at the laptop and let words flow like water. (Some of those words, I hasten to point out, turn out not horrible after much, much revision, I like to think.) And yet, nothing compares to the tales told of Thomas Wolfe we're pointed to by Maud Newton: "Wolfe would be asked for a short linking paragraph — and return a few days later with 10,000 words."


• Amazon sales rankings are bullshit. Consider Tod Goldberg's exhibit one and M.J. Rose's exhibit two (with appropriate comments from #2 pulled out here).


• So I guess the story (via Rake's Progress) goes that someone slammed the new John Irving book then it was pointed out there was some connection between the author and the reviewer and it made some people look bad. Hey, whatever, man. This link/story is mostly a cheap excuse for me to break certain personal tendencies long enough to point out that holy crap did A Prayer for Owen Meany suck. And I mean, it was bad. Reading that book was like watching a 700 page flip book in which the picture never ever changed. In slow motion. In dire heat and humidity. While John Irving sat on your couch eating your Doritos and saying (mouth full, during chewing) "You know, I'm more significant than you" every fiftieth word. In other words, blech.


• Four words for you: Naughty Reading Photo Contest. Rawr! Me, I'm hoping for some good sexy librarian photos.


• I've been quiet about what I've been reading lately because I've been deep into the "writing unpublishable crap" end of the "writing unpublishable crap"/"reading published doubleplusuncrap" continuum. But I can tell you I've been reading Emma by Jane Austen and that I don't give a damn if that makes me a less manly man. And it's not because I'm some uber-enlightened 90s guy who thinks women are just as good if not better than men in both the writing department and the all-the-others department, though I am all that and a bag of cheese. No, it's because Jane Austen knew a thing or two about spinning elegant sentences together in a classy way, and it's nice to spend some time in the company of a gal with a little culturin' under her bonnet. Chick lit? More like KICK! lit. (If it weren't for the fact that the To Be Read pile is growing thicker than wild grass, I'd be tempted after this to stick with a 19th-century dame writers theme to take another spin through Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh. Mark my words, kids: EBB? Victorian Hottie.)


• And speaking of the taller than tall TBR pile, I can tell you that books I'd possibly be talking about right now if I could read as fast and as often as I like include
  
  
  • Mothers & Other Monsters by Maureen McHugh;
  
  
  • The Sound of Us by Sarah Willis;
  
  
  • You Remind Me of Me and Among the Missing by Dan Chaon (though I can tell you this much; I read the first story of Among the Missing, "Safety Man", and I was laughing by the end of the opening paragraph and cursing my fate that I should not be as superb and as chilling a writer as Dan Chaon by the end of the second damned page; "Something is happening to her", you say, Mr. Chaon? Something is happening to this damned reader, I tell you.);
  
  
  • Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link, which I picked up today when I realized that even my completely fictitious pet rock has read and enjoyed Kelly Link by this point and thinks very poorly of me for the fact that I'm still absolutely clueless;
  
  
  • The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, which has been sitting on my coffee table, far too overdue from the library, with its entirely tempting opening paragraph beckoning to me far too often, until I finally gave in today and bought my own copy, making the commitment to get around to reading it...eventually;
  
  
  • Tisch by Stephen Dixon (but only because it's short and I need a damned fix damn you give me my fix arrrgh);
  
  
  • and what looks like a whole bunch of other stuff that's all the way across the room right now.
  
  So, you know, if that's the sort of thing that interests you. These lists usually interest me. What's on your "Oh man, I really need to read that, soon" coffee table stack?


• Speaking of lists, I, uh, mean to do my own list of the five (or so) books I read the first half of the year that I think you should read too, the first semi-annual TDAOC Reads Awards or something; hopefully something longer, because, face it, TDAOCRA really isn't long enough an acronym. But, uh, you know. Life gets in the way. And stuff. And it's not like the world is going to die without my list, and it's not like the astute and long-time reader can't pretty much tell what I like the most and all. But still, lists are pretty cool, and I'd like to do some. I think I've bought one or two CDs this year that have been worth a mention, too. Now if you'll excuse me I have to go convince the bank to let me take out a mortgage on my apartment building, which I don't own, so I can come up with enough cash to buy something resembling food tomorrow.