books and things to think about:

[thanate]

I am hoarding books. I just used a borders card and placed an amazon order (since one of the Capclave authors was only available used) and picked up a bunch of things at the library. I have no idea when I'll find time to read them all. Meanwhile, we have brought the smelly (tobacco smoke) bookshelf in from the storage building, since it's probably as close to livable as it's likely to get in the near future, and so I'm populating it with DVDs and the books from my grandparents' house, which if anything smell more like smoke than it does. I was separating family books from later acquisitions by smell last night, which was probably rather inadvisable, considering that it involved my sticking my nose in the middle of books doused in 60+ years of pipe smoke. But I haven't died of evil allergen overdose yet, so we'll see.

Goal-to-date: 2 (yard sale) etsy posts, and 235 words. Sigh. Time to go back to productive, but first, some links:

Some thoughts on bestsellers over time and what may or may not be wrong with the reading public, or the writing/award-giving minority.

Meanwhile, the latter continue to argue about why nobody's reading "good books" anymore. (and what is a good book, anyway?) Lev Grossman sez: "Old hierarchies of taste are collapsing. Genres are hybridizing." This is called The History of the Novel. Those two statements could have been made at any time during the last 300 years at least.

But for those of us who just want to sell something, maybe, someday, it appears that it is still entirely possible to do so unagented, on our own.

And on an unrelated topic, a new theory that depression is really a problem-solving mechanism. The argument as stated makes a certain amount of sense, but I'd like to see them speak to the worse bits, such as downward spirals and the tendency to ignore or refuse advice and cling to bad decisions or situations.

Comments

[laeticiav.livejournal.com]

Hahah -- genres are hybridizing ... let me introduce you to the 9th century ... or even the 4th (is it a heroic epic poem? is it a saint's life? is it a school book? who knows?)

Gotta say, my depression is more about the problem creating than the problem solving ... inertia, lack of motivation, self-jepodizing (can't spell that word!) behavior not really so helpful... I'll go read the article and see what it has to say.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

I have the definite sense that before a certain point, what genre something was didn't particularly matter, though. (and that certain point seems to me to have been somewhere in the 20th century, for most people... not that I really start worrying about whether a book I'm reading is fiction or history or fantasy or what, unless it's something I really don't like, and then I wish it had gotten shelved in its own little "bad books" section) Although, to be perfectly honest, I got as far in the Lev Grossman article as the bit where he postulates that "the reader" (who he seems to think is all one hive-mind) was shocked and horrified to discover that "The Wasteland" was published with footnotes. As someone who read & loved the poem without reference to the footnotes, that was kind of the last straw.

Do read the depression article-- I'd be interested in what other people think of it. So far as what it says, it rings very true to me, but I feel like there are a lot of depressive behaviors they didn't get to, and I don't know if that's just not within the scope of the fairly short article, or that they don't fit into the theory and so are being ignored.

[pyre006.livejournal.com]

wow that article on depression is very illuminating and it makes so much sense

[thanate.livejournal.com]

What they say does make a lot of sense, but there are also a lot of depressive behaviors that don't get covered by their theory.