1. Read for quality, not quantity. Last year, I took part in the Outdo Yourself Challenge, and I became very focused on how many books I was reading. Because of that, I read some books very quickly that deserved to be savored. I also avoided long books. From now on, I’m not going to be so concerned about numbers. I know that there is very little chance I can read more books than I did in 2010 and still enjoy the experience of reading. That leads me to my second goal:

2. Stop avoiding chunksters. Because I was trying to keep my monthly “books read” number high, I avoided longer books. No more.

3. Read more of my own books. I’m hoping the TBR Double Dare will help with this.

4. Only request/accept one review copy per month until completely caught up on review copies. I ended 2011 with 11 review copies still to be read and reviewed. One of my goals had been to accept less review copies for 2011, but I completely failed at that. I am hoping that an actual number limit will keep me honest in this area.

5. Read more works by authors I’ve already read and enjoyed. I read a lot of new authors – which is great – but authors that I have loved for a long time get neglected. I’m hoping to change that.

6. Read more non-fiction. 2011 was a great year for non-fiction for me – and I hope to continue that by seeking out more of it in 2012.

There you have my reading plans for 2012. Have you made any reading goals for the New Year?

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Challenge-wise, I completed one more challenge this year, but failed at the same number. As for quantity, I read two less books this year than last year.

With intended reading age, I read much less middle grade fiction this year – only 4% of my total reading. Part of this is because my kids are growing up, and so a lot of our read-alouds this past year have fallen into the YA category. I skewed more to the adult side of things than YA – about 70/30, whereas last year, it was closer to 60/30, with about 10% falling into the middle grade category.

My reading taste in genre stayed pretty much the same. Speculative is still my most-read genre, with contemporary fiction a close second and historical fiction coming in third, same as last year. I read more non-fiction this year, which I enjoyed very much. It looks like I read a lot less poetry, but I’m actually in the middle of two giant anthologies that I won’t finish until well into 2012, so that number is a bit deceptive.

One of my main goals in 2011 was to take on less review books. I failed miserably at that goal, with 24% of my reading being review copies in 2010, and a whopping 31% this year. This is a goal I plan to work on again in 2012.

Lastly, when it comes to the gender of the authors I read, I skewed more to the female this year.

Completed challenges: 16

Failed challenges: 5

Total books read: 192 – complete list with links to reviews

Reading age:
Adult 68%
Young Adult 28%
Middle Grade 4%

Genre:
Speculative 32%
Contemporary 28%
Historical fiction 16%
Non-fiction – history 6%
Mystery and Thriller 5%
Graphic novels and graphic memoirs 3%
Essays 3%
General non-fiction 1.5%
Poetry 1.5%
Short fiction 1.5%
Christian fiction 0.75%
Christian non-fiction 0.75%
Humor 0.5%
Western 0.5%

Format:
Print 64%
Audio 29%
E-book 6%
E-mail 1%

Source:
Library 36%
Own 29%
Review 31%
Borrow 3%
DailyLit 1%

Author gender:
Female 77%
Male 20%
Mixed (anthologies or jointly authored) 3%

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Twilight was gathering, and Orpheus still wasn’t here.

Do not set foot in my office.

My nightmare started like this.

Imagine a man standing on a rocky shoreline looking out to sea, pondering the question, the same question we whisper when we look up at night into a star-crazed sky – swirls of light millions of years old – everything moving away, or toward, or around: What’s out there?

“Can you tell me what’s happened, Alice?” says the calm voice on the end of the phone.

Barry Laverty – Doctor Barry Laverty- his houseman’s year just finished, ink barely dry on his degree, pulled his beat-up Volkswagen Beetle to the side of the road and peered at a map lying on the passenger seat.

In the end, write it down.

After a year of hunting, I finally caught up with Sarah.

This is what it felt like to be lonely.

I bring Naya into the Magic Kingdom.

There is no lake at Camp Green Lake.

There were years after it happened, after I’d returned from the town and come back here to the busy blank of the city, when some comment would be tossed off about the Second World War and how it had gone – some idiotic remark about clarity and purpose – and I’d resist the urge to stub out my cigarette and bring the dinner party to a satisfying halt.

On a cold January day in 1925, a tall, distinguished gentleman hurried across the docks in Hoboken, New Jersey, toward the SS Vauban, a five-hundred-and-eleven-foot ocean liner bound for Rio de Janeiro.

Here is the truth, this is what I know: we were walking on Ocean Beach, hand in hand.

All young people worry about things, it’s a natural and inevitable part of growing up, and at the age of sixteen my greatest anxiety in life was that I’d never again achieve anything as good, or pure, or noble, or true, as my O-level exam results.

This book was written without my knowledge.

Mom, Dad – if you’re listening – you know I said I was going to the South Lakeland Outdoor Activity Center with the school?

A familiar place, when you have gained heft of life, can feel as confining as a familiar pair of pants when you’ve put on weight.

A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story.

The best time to talk to ghosts is just before the sun comes up.

Louisa May Alcott approached the ticket window of the Boston passenger station clutching a large case and a black parasol.

My fingers ached as my leg muscles trembled.

The thing about lying to your parents is, you have to do it to protect them.

It started as an accident.

Some projects take forever to get off the ground.

Every morning I wake up and I tell myself this: It’s just one day, one twenty-four-hour period to get yourself through.

In all your life, only a few moments matter.

Never in her life had Catherine Parkstone imagined so many sheep.

Barry Laverty- Doctor Barry Laverty – heard the clattering of a frying pan on a stove and smelled bacon frying.

The leather-bound volume was nothing remarkable.

In the predawn darkness of August 26, 1929, in the back bedroom of a small house in Torrance, California, a twelve-year-old boy sat up in bed, listening.

Satellite City: The City of the Future, proclaimed the billboards.

The girl was the first to hear the loud pounding on the door.

I wait.

Amy considered the postcard: a boardwalk scene.

I’m sixteen. Pregnant. And the most important person on the planet.

I gaze across the veranda, beyond the rows of yachts and sailboats bobbing in the Porte de Monaco toward the sparkling Mediterranean waters.

My fall from suburban grace, or more accurately, my failure to achieve the merest molehill of suburban grace from which to fall, began with a dinner party and a perfectly innocent, modestly clever, and only faintly quirky remark about Armand Assante.

Maybe it’s the July showers that appear at 3:00 p.m., regular as sunshine, maybe it’s the September hurricanes that cut a swath across the Atlantic and then dump their guts at landfall, or maybe it’s just God crying on Florida, but whatever it is, and however it works, the St. Johns River is and always has been the soul of Florida.

Not to disappoint you, but my troubles are nothing – not for an author, at least.

Cassie was dreaming again.

Nina sees the man first.

“I guess this is it,” Joel said, leaning into the doorway of our apartment.

“Can you walk?” someone asked me.

“How did it happen this time?”

Used to be when a bird flew into a window, Milly and Twiss got a visit.

I’m not the pretty sister.

I don’t know whether it’s day or night when the girl gets up to leave.

The music-room in the Governor’s House in Port Mahon, a tall, handsome, pillared octagon, was filled with the triumphant first movement of Locatelli’s C major quartet.

The library is cool and smells like carpet cleaner, although all I can see is marble.

The girl was shaken awake.

The girl who would speak for the dead stood alone on the cobblestone drive after the rain.

That last night at Rendezvous Falls, the Ford Sunliner seemed to drive itself, the engine so powerful it felt as if some force were pulling them up the mountain.

It’s amazing how good a priest looks when you’ve got nobody else to turn to.

The most magical thing happened on the morning of my grandmother’s wedding in Tuscany.

Once, when she was thirteen, Carmen remembered turning to Tibby with her CosmoGirl magazine in one hand and her eye pencil in the other and declaring that she could never, ever get sick of doing makeovers.

Major Pettigrew was still upset about the phone call from his brother’s wife and so he answered the doorbell without thinking.

Brother Frances Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed documents, had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who appeared during that young novice’s Lenten fast in the desert.

It was long past midnight when the Horror appeared at the end of Westmoreland Road.

My life fell apart when I was sixteen.

The Matchmaker of Kenmare taught me much of what I know.

This city used to be something once.

Daddy said, “Let Mom go first.”

The faces of the many child suicides Hadrian Boone had cut from nooses or retrieved below cliffs never left him, filled his restless sleep, and encroached in so many waking nightmares that now, as the blond girl with the hanging rope skipped along the ridge above, he hesitated, uncertain whether she was another of the phantoms that haunted him.

Matilda was drunk, but then she was always drunk anymore.

Barry Laverty – Doctor Barry Laverty – slammed the door of Brunhilde, his elderly Volkswagen Beetle.

The swallow arcs and dives above the cathedral.

She heard a knocking, and then a dog barking.

The Rutherford girl had been missing for eight days when Larry Ott returned home and found a monster waiting in his house.

Life came back slowly, Kate realized.

Andrew Harrington would have gladly died several times over if that meant not having to choose just one pistol from among his father’s vast collection in the living room cabinet.

There were five of us – Carruthers and the new recruit and myself, and Mr. Spivens and the verger.

Barry Laverty – Doctor Barry Laverty – stood in a jam-packed drawing room where the sound level was as intense as the racket of riveting guns in Harland and Wolff’s shipyard.

This is the first time Alice has been allowed to walk back to their campsite from the Kelp Shed alone.

“I picked him up in my arms and I carried him home.”

He began his new life standing up, surrounded by cold darkness and stale, dusty air.

We think we know the ones we love.

This morning I woke up and was fifteen years old.

Benny Imura couldn’t hold a job, so he took to killing.

Colin tried the door, but it was locked.

“Take the wheel,” says Starla Joy, sticking the grape lollipop she’s been working on into her mouth.

Those who can, do.

In the year and a half Babe Huggins has worked for Western Union, she has been late only once before.

The gunman is useless.

We came home because we were failures.

The boy was everything to her.

I remember the first night ‘on remand’ watching the news.

Lincoln Ellis left his house with a plastic grocery bag holding a big steel can that faintly resembled a Thermos jug.

There were only two kinds of people in our town.

“You know, don’t you, that you’re looking at twenty-five to life?”

All the newspapers and TV pundits are calling this fall’s freshman college class the “Symnitol Generation,” but if the activity up and down my dorm hallway is any indication, this fall’s freshman college class is the “Stand Around Each Other’s Laptops and Play the First Thirty Seconds of Every Song on the Hard Drive Generation.”

Susan Tate never saw it coming.

There was so much talk about the new music teacher before she arrived that her coming was almost anticlimactic.

Off with their – legs.

On a rainy day in May 1945, a Western Union messenger made his rounds through the quiet village of Oswego, in upstate New York.

Ever hear this charming little rhyme?

“Once upon a time there were twelve princesses…”

Laurie Garvey hadn’t been raised to believe in the Rapture.

It was the sudden onslaught of lust that convinced Brideen Conway she had to get married.

Arthur Conan Doyle curled his brow tightly and thought only of murder.

We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.

I suppose it would be fashionable to admit to some reservations as I undertake to write the History of My Life.

My brother is eight years older than I am.

From her window Kit Zanetti can see absolutely everything that happens on Commerce Street.

Reporting, like detective work, is a process of elimination.

The trawler plunged into the angry swells of the dark, furious sea like an awkward animal trying desperately to break out of an impenetrable swamp.

We were halfway up the spur when we heard it.

There was never a body.

Death and loss, they plague you.

Had I walked by 1859 Geary Boulevard in San Francisco when Peoples Temple was in full swing, I certainly would have been drawn to the doorway.

It feels important to start with the truth about how I got here.

Dark.

I used to think our town, buried in the South Carolina backwoods, stuck in the muddy bottom of the Santee River valley, was the middle of nowhere.

My house is a storybook house.

“Are you Mary Sutter?”

He stood poised on the edge of a sheet of glass.

Katie Finglas was coming to the end of a tiring day in the salon.

It was common for American expatriates to visit the U.S. consulate in Berlin, but not in the condition exhibited by the man who arrived there on Thursday, June 29, 1933.

It was still way in the night, as it seemed to me, when my father woke me by gently shaking my shoulder with his hand.

It wasn’t chance.

My hands close around the heavy drape, twisting it into a thick cord.

Last year, I was asked if I was going to do anything special when I turned forty.

Lek opened his eyes, though his body remained as still as the gecko on the ceiling.

In times of struggle there are as many reasons not to read as there are to breathe.

This is what I know.

I can be so, so quiet.

Once upon a time.

I was standing on top of the white water tower, with my back to the sun.

The tawdry mermaid painted on the inside of Harlan’s front door wore a bikini top made of undersized clam shells.

I can’t break up with Graham today, even though I told my friends I’d do it the next time I saw him.

The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.

The seed bins are empty.

Nearly a hundred miles west of the Scillies, far from the main track of ships, lies the small, rocky island of St. Hilda’s.

“Hello?”

There was a breeze high up, rustling through the palm trees, but the air below was still and hot.

On 5 January 1942, a French police inspector named Rondeaux, stationed in the 10th arrondissement of Paris, caught sight of a man he believed to be a wanted member of the French Resistance.

I was born during the second holocaust.

Everyone my age remembers where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the contest.

New Jersey was 40,000 feet below me, obscured by cloud cover.

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1. Best Book You Read in 2011:

Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry (You know how hard it was to narrow this down to only one!)

2. Most Disappointing Book/Books You Wish You Loved More Than You Did?

Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

3. Most surprising (in a good way!) book of 2011?

A Watershed Year by Susan Schoenberger

4. Book you recommended to people most in 2011?

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand

5. Best series you discovered in 2011?

The Chaos Walking series by Patrick Ness – Yes, I did read the first book at the end of 2009, but I finished the series this year, and it was awesome.

6. Favorite new authors you discovered in 2011?

Melanie Benjamin

7. Best book that was out of your comfort zone or was a new genre for you?

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor

8. Most thrilling, unputdownable book in 2011?

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

9. Book you most anticipated in 2011?

The Death Cure by James Dashner – I still haven’t read it yet! I’m rereading book two aloud to my boys, and we’ll dive straight into book three as soon as we finish.

10. Favorite cover of a book you read in 2011?

The Sherlockian by Graham Moore

11. Most memorable character in 2011?

Lavinia Warren Bump, aka Mrs. Tom Thumb, from The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb by Melanie Benjamin

12. Most beautifully written book read in 2011?

The Winter Sea by Susanna Kearsley

13. Book that had the greatest impact on you in 2011?

What Good is God? by Phillip Yancey

14. Book you can’t believe you waited UNTIL 2011 to finally read?

Beautiful Darkness by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl

15. Favorite Passage/Quote From A Book You Read In 2011?

Good artists are people who can stick things together so that they stay stuck. They know how to gather things into formal arrangements that are intelligible, memorable, and lasting. Good forms confer health upon the things that they gather together. Farms, families, and communities are forms of art just as are poems, paintings, and symphonies. None of these things would exist if we did not make them. We can make them either well or poorly; this choice is another thing that we make. ~ from Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition by Wendell Berry

16. Book That You Read In 2011 That Would Be Most Likely To Reread In 2012?

Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry – plan to reread via audiobook

17. Book That Had A Scene In It That Had You Reeling And Dying To Talk To Somebody About It? (a WTF moment, an epic revelation, a steamy kiss, etc. etc.) Be careful of spoilers!

The end of Beautiful Chaos by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl – I’m still reeling!

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~ The amazingly gifted Beth Kephart has a new two-book deal with Philomel.

Discussion starters:

~ Book Journey: When authors attack

Reviews and blog posts that have me adding to my to-read list:

~ The Thorn and the Blossom by Theodora Goss. Vasilly mentioned this as one of the 2012 books she is most looking forward to. It looks amazing!

~ 20 Years Later by Emma Newman, reviewed by Darren at Bart’s Bookshelf

~ Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen, reviewed by Amy at My Friend Amy

~ Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me: A Memoir….of Sorts by Ian Cron. Sherry mentioned this one on her list of twelve best adult non-fiction reads of 2012.

Book to movie news:

~ Cherie Priest’s novel Boneshaker is headed for the big screen.

~ If you’re as curious as I was about how film-makers could possibly turn a book like What to Expect When You’re Expecting into a film, check out the trailer.

~ Warner Bros has released the first two official images of Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby.

Other bookish links:

~ NY Times: Publishers guild books with special effects to compete with e-books

~ LA Times: Has book blogging hit the wall? William Morrow’s blogger notice

~ New coin honors Charles Dickens

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Cover blurb: Jo March, Scarlett O’Hara, Scout Finch – the literary canon is brimming with intelligent, feisty, never-say-die heroines and celebrated female authors. They placed a premium on personality, spirituality, career, sisterhood, and family, not unlike women of today. When they were up against the wall, authors like Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott fought back – sometimes with words, sometimes with gritty actions.

Witty, informative, and inspiring – full of beloved heroines and the remarkable writers who created them – The Heroine’s Bookshelf explores how the pluck and dignity of literary characters such as Jane Eyre and Lizzy Bennet can encourage modern women, showing them how to tap into their new strengths and live life with intelligence and grace. From Zora Neale Hurston to Colette, Laura Ingalls Wilder to Charlotte Bronte, Harper Lee to Alice Walker, here are authors whose spirited stories and characters are more inspiring today than ever.

When I was a young girl, I had a girls’ Bible that had a topical section in the back. It had a list that read: “If you’re afraid, read these verses. If you’re having trouble with a friend, read these verses. If you’re feeling unlovely, read these verses.” It helped me during those tween years that can be so difficult. As an adult, I know which verses are the most comfort to me, and so don’t need a list like that anymore, but I still remember it.

In many ways, The Heroine’s Bookshelf reminds me of that Bible. Of course, I’m not saying that it’s divinely inspired, but it is definitely a book that can act as a guide through some of the difficult things we face as adult women. Erin Blakemore has drawn inspiration, encouragement, determination, and hope from the stories of these characters and their authors, and fortunately, she has shared that with us.

Are you wondering who you are, or how to be the person you know you are? Maybe you’re struggling to hold on to your faith in the face of overwhelming circumstances. Do you want to learn how to be happy, no matter what life brings? Or are you trying to hold on to family ties in spite of dysfunction? Blakemore gives you a guide to the books that will inspire you and encourage you in each of these situations – and many more.

Each chapter focuses on a different issue – faith, ambition, happiness, dignity, compassion, and so on – and explores how the heroine from a particular book can give us a map to follow as we navigate the obstacles and twists that life throws our way. She also delves into the lives of the authors, and explores the reasons they wrote these particular stories. I found the inside information on authors like Louisa May Alcott, Alice Walker, Betty Smith, and Frances Hodgson Burnett to be fascinating. Understanding the circumstances in the author’s life gives such depth and clarity to a book, especially a book that has a personal connection for the reader.

As I read each chapter, I found myself wanting to reread the associated book – or, in some cases, read it for the first time. Reading the chapter on Gone With the Wind surprised me, because I really hate the movie, and have never wanted to read the book. I am now determined to give it a try. I also experienced a longing to reread other books, books that Blakemore didn’t mention, but whose heroines call to me anyway: Persusasion, Kristin Lavransdatter, I Capture the Castle. It is truly the best kind of book that can do that.

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A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (audiobook) – I listened to two discs, but the shifting point of view and time periods were confusing. At some point, I may try this one in print.

Possession by A.S. Byatt (audiobook) – This one has a wonderful premise and I like the two main characters, but it dragged and dragged whenever it left their points of view.

The Beach House by Jane Green (audiobook) – Several married characters committing adultery and not one of them a likable character. No thanks.

Memory by Donald Westlake (audiobook) – Boring. I’m told this isn’t his typical style, though, so will probably try something else by him at some point.

Before You Know Kindness by Chris Bohjalian (audiobook) – I loved this author’s Midwives, but after a disc and a half of this one, I was bored. I thought maybe it was the narrator, but looked her name up and discovered that she also narrated Angelology, which I loved on audio. Must be the book.

Maine by J. Courtney Sullivan (audiobook) – Listened to the first disc on audio, couldn’t get into it. May try this one in print eventually.

Remember Me by Cheryl Robinson – I found the dialogue very poorly written. Also, the flip-flopping in time wasn’t done well, and so was disorienting.

The Feast of Love by Charles Baxter (audiobook) – I got a few discs into this audiobook and just couldn’t go any farther. The narrators were excellent – probably what kept me listening past disc 2, but I just couldn’t get into the multiple-POV plot.

The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan (audiobook) – I listened to one disc of this on audiobook. I love the narrator – Robin Sachs – but the sex was a bit too…. much for me.

Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson (audiobook) – This book is the history of the war between robots and humans, told in snippets of stories by various participants. At first, I thought this was a unique way to tell the story, but after awhile, the lack of any strong main characters made me lose interest.

A Passage to India by E.M. Forster – This is the DNF that makes me feel the most guilty. I was supposed to read this for a Faith and Fiction Round Table discussion. I made it halfway through, but couldn’t make myself finish it. The characters seemed more like caricatures than real-life people, and I simply didn’t care what happened to them.

Zone One by Colson Whitehead (audiobook) – I like writing that is unselfconsciously intelligent and witty. I do not, however, like writing that stands up, waves its hands in the air, and shouts, “Look how intelligent and witty I am!”

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As my reading horizons have expanded, I am finding more connections in my reading. Melissa at Mental Multivitamin calls this synchronicity – that little zing you get when something you’re reading is connected to something else you’ve just read or are working on or were just watching… I love it when that happens!

A few weeks ago, I listened to (and thoroughly enjoyed) an audiobook version of Burning Bright by Tracy Chevalier. Burning Bright is the story of two young teens – one Dorset boy and one Londoner girl – who meet and form a friendship with the poet and printer William Blake. The book describes Blake’s painstaking method for producing his books. Blake believed that to separate his poems from the drawings that accompanied them was to lose some of the truth – and so he developed his own method of hand painting plates and making each copy of his books by hand. His most famous was Songs of Innocence and Experience, which includes the familiar “Tyger, tyger, burning bright…” and others I am certain you would recognize. In Chevalier’s novel, the poem “London”, which expresses Blake’s sorrow over the social and political inequities in his town, is quoted often:

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice; in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear

How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse

(The above contains Blake’s original spelling and punctuation.)

I’ve been curious about Blake and his book ever since I finished Ms. Chevalier’s novel. When I was browsing the poetry shelf at Barnes & Noble on Thursday, I found this treasure: Songs of Innocence and Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul, 1789-1794. This is a slim paperback Oxford University Press edition – it didn’t look like much sitting on the shelf. When I took it off the shelf, however, I found that it includes color reproductions of every one of Blake’s original plates. This is a beautiful book. I read it over the weekend, drooling over the illustrations, and I will be reading it again.

I also picked up Heart of Darkness, and Selected Fiction by Joseph Conrad. I began by reading the author’s note. (I did not, however, read the introduction. I love the B&N Classics, but I very rarely read the introduction by the literary “expert” until after I read the book itself – they have a tendency to give every plot point away. The person who wrote the end notes even gave away the ending of the story in a note that could have very easily explained coal ships without ruining the story for me. Bah.) I then read the first story, “Youth.” It is a good sea yarn, and kept me enthralled with descriptions like this one:

“Between the darkness of earth and heaven she was burning fiercely upon a disc of purple sea shot by the blood-red play of gleams; upon a disc of water glittering and sinister. A high, clear flame, an immense and lonely flame, ascended from the ocean, and from its summit the black smoke poured continuously at the sky. She burned furiously; mournful and imposing like a funeral pile kindled in the night, surrounded by the sea, watched over by the stars. A magnificent death had come like a grace, like a gift, like a reward to that old ship at the end of her laborious days. The surrender of her weary ghost to the keeping of stars and sea was stirring like the sight of a glorious triumph. The masts fell just before daybreak, and for a moment there was a burst and turmoil of sparks that seemed to fill with flying fire the night patient and watchful, the vast night lying silent upon the sea. At daylight she was only a charred shell, floating still under a cloud of smoke and bearing a glowing mass of coal within.”

~from “Youth,” by Joseph Conrad

I then opened The Best American Short Stories 2007, and read the introduction by guest editor Stephen King, who had the task of choosing the twenty stories (out of hundreds) to be included in this volume. In the intro, Mr. King lamented the fact that the journals and periodicals that publish short fiction have been relegated to the bottom shelf of the magazine rack (if you can find them at all) and speculated about what that is doing to the art of short fiction:

“Instead, let us consider what the bottom shelf does to creative writers – especially the young ones, who are well represented in this volume – who still care, sometimes passionately, about the short story. What happens to a writer when he or she realizes that his or her audience is shrinking almost daily? Well, if the writer is worth his or her salt, he or she continues on nevertheless – because it’s what God or genetics (possibly they are the same) has decreed, or out of sheer stubbornness, or maybe because it’s such a kick to spin tales. Possibly a combination. And all that’s good.

What’s not so good is that writers – even those who claim to spurn Shakespeare’s bubble reputation – write for whatever audience is left. In too many cases, that audience happens to consist of other writers and would-be writers who are reading the various literary magazines (and The New Yorker, of course; the holy grail of the young fiction writer) not to be entertained but to get an idea of what sells there. And this kind of reading isn’t real reading, the kind where you just can’t wait to find out what happens next (think “Youth,” by Joseph Conrad, or “Big Blonde,” by Dorothy Parker).”

Zing! A connection. And now I’m excited to read the stories that King chose out of hundreds and hundreds to include in this book, because if he loved “Youth,” by Conrad, and I loved “Youth,” by Conrad, chances are I’m going to love some of the stories in this book.

Connections. Aren’t they fun?

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Post tags: reading

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~ Bookalicious: Thoughts on early reviewing

Reviews and blog posts that have me adding to my TBR list:

~ Darkness, My Old Friend by Lisa Unger, reviewed by Wendy at Caribousmom

~ Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante, reviewed by Lesley at Lesley’s Book Nook

Reading challenges:

~ Time for R.I.P. VI!

Book to movie and/or television news:

~ Showtime is developing Stephen King’s Under the Dome into a TV series.

Read-alongs:

~ Avis has posted the fourth part of our discussion about All Clear by Connie Willis. I won’t be reviewing it here, but you can read my thoughts in the comment section of her post. Of course, as it’s a read-along discussion, there are spoilers, so don’t read it if you plan to read All Clear. And if you haven’t read it, you definitely should – though read Blackout first, with All Clear handy because you won’t want to wait.

Other bookish links:

~ The Telegraph: Reading ‘can help reduce stress’

~ For fans of Connie Willis, her short story Firewatch, which relates to her Oxford time travel novels, can be read online.

Non-bookish links of interest:

~ This blogger makes some very good points: Regarding Facebook “Breast Cancer Awareness” Games

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Post tags: book to tv, connie willis, read-alongs, reading, reading challenges, reviewing, reviews, TBR list

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You Are My Only by Beth Kephart – release date October 25th

Pirate King by Laurie R. King – release date September 6th

The Death Cure by James Dashner – release date October 11th

Dust & Decay by Jonathan Maberry

Heartless by Gail Carriger

Beautiful Darkness by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl

Divergent by Veronica Roth

© CarrieK for BOOKS AND MOVIES, 2011. | Permalink | 10 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: TBR list

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