bookshelves of doom

Another one for the TBR list.

What the Bee Knows, by P.L. Travers.

From SDSU Children's Literature:

Travers’ other writings are equally impressive, especially her novel Friend Monkey. A good introduction to her and her mythological way of thinking is What the Bee Knows, a collection of her essays that does Joseph Campbell one better and treats the path of women’s lives as seen in fairy tales, the deep meanings of “Humpty Dumpty,” the sacredness of names in aboriginal cultures, and new ways of understanding the story of the Prodigal Son.

Free online: Two Elmore Leonard short stories...

...at Byliner.

Timewaster of the day: The Console Living Room.

From the BBC:

Classic video games from the 1970s and 1980s have been put online by the Internet Archive and can be played within a web browser for nothing.

The collection has launched with games from five early home consoles, including the Atari 2600 and Colecovision.

The games do not have sound, but will soon, the Internet Archive said.

"In coming months, the playable software collection will expand greatly," archivist Jason Scott wrote.

"Making these vintage games available to the world, instantly, allows for commentary, education, enjoyment and memory for the history they are a part of."

I SWOON.

2014 Reading Goals.

This'll be short and sweet, because my MAJOR GOAL is this:

To stop worrying about always staying on top of the newest, the shiniest, the most buzzed-about books.

To stop reading what I think I SHOULD be reading, and to read what I WANT to read.

To stop beating myself up for not writing at length about everything I read, for not posting every day, for not doing MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE.

I would also like to:

Read more adult fiction. I miss it, and I've been so busy over the last couple of years that it's been super-backburnered. I'd like to read at least a chapter a day of SOMETHING originally written for the adult market, if only as a palate cleanser.

Read more backlist. An easy 99% of the pitches in my inbox are for the NEWEST, the HOTTEST, the NEXT BIG THING. I feel like I've missed a lot of stuff over the years, and so I'm giving myself license to forgo reading some of the super-new stuff in favor of focusing on some older titles.

OKAY. I CAN DO THIS.

You? Any goals for 2014?

Today @KirkusReviews...

...I wrote about Robin Benway's Going Rogue, the sequel to Also Known As:

Going Rogue has exactly the same weakness as Also Known As—actually, the storyline is even more inane this time around—but fans of the first one won’t be coming back for the plotting. They’ll be coming back because of the many strengths of the first book: the banter, the humor, the heart. Maggie, unlike so many other teen spies/detectives/vampire hunters/world-savers, has a GREAT relationship with her parents—the interactions between the three of them are easily the funniest in the book—and not only do they know about her activities, they condone them…because they’re spies, too.

On early success and adjusting expectations.

From Jessica Spotswood's blog:

What happens when you get a big book deal, and then your sales are good – really good for a debut, totally solid, with a starred review and good reviews overall – but they are not good enough? They are not bestseller numbers? Maybe you get a new paperback cover and another tour and another chance. But maybe the numbers still aren’t good enough. And then things change.

You begin the hard work of adjusting your expectations, which got wildly inflated by all that lovely optimistic talk at the beginning. But once you get certain things – even if they aren’t even things you wanted at first! – you want to keep having them. It hurts your feelings when they stop happening, even though you tell yourself that this is a business and feelings should not matter.

Ready for a digression? Reading this post made me think of all of those young Olympians—figure skaters and gymnasts, mainly, because those are the sports I at least sporadically follow—who hit the top of their field at such a young age. Because when I watch them, I always wonder what will happen to them later. It just seems like it would be really hard to have all that glory so early on, because how would "regular" life compare?

 

Obviously, Spotswood is talking about a very different situation—on the plus side, writing can be a life-long pursuit, unlike sports like figure skating or gymnastics (at least at the Olympic level)—but there are parallels. It's tough stuff, regardless, and she wrote about a difficult, not-often-openly-discussed aspect of the book world with grace, humility, bravery, and honesty. Definitely worth a read and a mull.

"We want to understand how stories get into your brain, and what they do to it."

From eScienceCommons at Emory University:

The Emory study focused on the lingering neural effects of reading a narrative. Twenty-one Emory undergraduates participated in the experiment, which was conducted over 19 consecutive days.

...

The results showed heightened connectivity in the left temporal cortex, an area of the brain associated with receptivity for language, on the mornings following the reading assignments. “Even though the participants were not actually reading the novel while they were in the scanner, they retained this heightened connectivity,” Berns says. “We call that a ‘shadow activity,’ almost like a muscle memory.”

Cool, huh?