It's the Truth, Mom!
February 17, 2008
This is one of the rare times in my life when I can think of nothing to say. (My mother will be surprised to learn this since I have been quite the communicator beginning at five years old.) So rather than ramble on, I will just point out that BiblioBuffet has some rather special content in this issue. Please enjoy.
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Rodney Dangerfield is not alone in not getting respect. At Nicki Leone’s house, her books don’t get much either. A confirmed bibliomaniac, a passionate reader, an obsessive booklover, Nicki adores her books. She just doesn’t venerate them as she tells BiblioBuffet’s readers this week in A Reading Life. Corner bookmarks are the subject of Laine Farley’s interest this week in On Marking Books. These are the kind that can be created simply by cutting a triangular section off a junk mail envelope. Or, as she shares, they can also be works of art. She was sick and looking for a good story. But a recent review had made her feel a bit leery about the book on her nightstand. What if it wasn’t good? But as Anne Michael discovered, not everyone feels the same about any book even when their opinion is worthwhile. Follow her discovery this week in Seasoned Lightly. Everyone who is a reader now was a likely reader in school, though not all reading then was voluntary. How many of us were forced by our English teachers to struggle through Shakespeare, Dickens, Chaucer and others whose works may have left us with a distaste not only for them but sometimes for all classical literature until we grew up and achieved some measure of acumen. In A Finicky Reader, Andi Harris recounts her relationship with one book which she mis-remembered until a recent rereading. Jane Austen literary clones are so prevalent that one might almost begin to think they were a genre unto themselves. And while there is no matching the original, Lisa Guidarini finds that one modern take on “Austenania” is, well, interesting as she explains in this week’s Reviews & Reflections.
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The King’s English is a bookstore. The King’s English is also the name of a fine online literary magazine that specializes in difficult-to-publish pieces such as novellae, short stories, essays, collaborative literary criticism, book reviews and poetry. “We specialize in unpopular lengths,” says founder Benjamin Chambers, “because print journals can't afford to publish long pieces, and there's a lot of vital, eye-popping writing out there being overlooked only because it takes more than 10 minutes to read but it can’t be sold as a book. And we publish shorter forms because the brutal fact is that much of the best writing is overlooked every day of the year, regardless of length.” Check it out. |