The Daily Telegraph alerted us (although we can't remember how we got to the Telegraph article in the first place) to Contrariwise, a blog that collects photos of literary and other wordy tattoos (is it new, or am I just too stupid to figure out how to see the archives?). Vonnegut and the Little Prince appear to be especially popular, and I'm sure the wowser below is not the only Fight Club tattoo walking around out there. (Meanwhile, I can't pass up the opportunity to link yet again to one of my favorite photos ever taken with my camera, of a grand tattoo of one of America's finest writers.)
I love words, but man, some of those giant paragraphs are overwhelming. I've never been much of a tattoo man (I don't even want to tie my identity to something long enough to put a bumper sticker on my car, much less write something forever on my body), but I must admit the Harriet the Spy is pretty sharp. Is there any bit of book that I would be willing to commit to putting on my skin for the rest of my life? My first thought was, "No way," but then I thought I could stick by "Up, and to Clayton!" pretty much for eternity. (First to spot the reference gets, well, my congratulations, triple if no Google was involved.) Or maybe Sam or Mr. Bikferd from Who Needs Donuts?.
Are there any words you'd be willing to wear? --Tom
P.S. Juliet, my colleague who passed this along to me, thought it had come from our friends at Slog, but then she couldn't find it there. But, weirdly, while I was writing my post, their books editor, Paul Constant, was writing his own post about lit tats, featuring a different blog (although some of the same photos). I feel that my mind is not my own...
It's day three of my first book tour and it's been an amazing experience. Writing and podcasting are such solitary experiences that it's easy to imagine nobody is on the other end of the metaphorical line. But of course they are, and they've been coming out in force!
Not knowing what to expect the first day, I was floored when we walked in to Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Arizona—30 minutes early—and found over 40 people already waiting and heard the store had run out of books hours earlier. Over 100 people eventually showed up [1], and I signed book plates (i.e. [2] stickers) for people to put in their books when they finally get them. (I did say “amazing,” didn't I? [3])
Because I knew that so many people who showed up are fans of my podcast, which has an interactive element, I took questions instead of doing a long reading. (In keeping with my philosophy that grammar should be fun, everyone who asked a question got a packet of Smarties, the candy my Twitter friends voted as the candy they would most associate with good grammar.)
Answering live grammar questions from an audience of grammar enthusiasts is about as nerve wracking as taking an oral exam in graduate school, with the added stress of a public speaking engagement. But it seemed to go well even though I couldn't answer every question, and as I look back on it, my explanation of why it's acceptable to say “I'm good” was rambling. (Fortunately [4], there's a great section about that topic in the book!)
This is for the man whose question I couldn't answer on the spot:
“Healthful” versus “Healthy”
“Healthful” is used exclusively to refer to things that encourage and contribute to health (e.g. [5], apples and exercise). “Healthy” means “possessing good health,” but can also be used to mean “healthful.”
It is a common myth that “healthy” cannot be used to describe healthful things such as apples and exercise.
All I could remember at the book event was that there is controversy about “healthful” versus “healthy”--not the kind of topic you want to address when you aren't certain of the answer!
I'm just finishing up in Austin and heading out for Atlanta. Check out Upcoming to see if I'll be in your area.
Notes:
- “Showed up” is an example of a phrasal verb—a verb made up of multiple words.
- “I.e.” is an abbreviation of the Latin id est and roughly means “in other words.”
- Short questions such as “Didn't I?”and “Aren't you?” that are tacked on to the end of sentences are called tag questions, and they turn the whole sentence into a question.
- “Fortunately” is an example of a sentence adverb.
- “E.g.” is an abbreviation for the Latin exempli gratia and means “for example.”
Mignon Fogarty, a.k.a. Grammar Girl, has
acquired legions of online fans with her witty and whipsmart approach to learning good grammar. Her
popular Grammar Girl podcasts are downloaded by the millions and have earned her an audience on Oprah, where she explained "who" vs. "whom." Last year she published her first book, Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips to Clean Up Your Writing, as an audio original and she's now touring in support of the handy new paperback edition. Fortunately for us grammar geeks, Mignon graciously has graciously agreed* to guest blog here on Omnivoracious from the road. If you need help with a grammar rule that always trips you up or just want to try and stump her (she's hard to beat!), post away in the comments and we'll pass your questions along. --Anne
(*Split infinitives are my Achilles' heel. How come they sound so much better split?)
It all started so harmlessly...
A few weeks ago, Daphne suggested I stray from my nonfiction comfort zone and check out Pulp writer Charlie Huston. Crime thrillers have never been my cup o' tea, but I recently read (and loved) John Connolly's The Reapers, so I figured I'd give Huston a shot. She lent me a copy of Caught Stealing and that was that.
Or so I thought.
Less than a month later, I've come to the realization that I'm now a Charlie Huston addict. Not just because I've torn through the entire Hank Thompson trilogy (Caught Stealing, Six Bad Things, A Dangerous Man) AND the stand-alone The Shotgun Rule, but because of the crazed way I devoured each title.
The need to satisfy my Huston fix gave birth to duplicitous behavior, as I literally couldn't put these books down. Their action-packed narratives made it impossible to find a stopping point, as Huston refuses to ease off the gas until the final page has turned.
As a result, here's just a sampling of what I've resorted to over the past week alone thanks to Charlie Huston:
- Reading in our dark garage after telling my wife I was fixing a broken lawnmower
- "Accidentally" taking the wrong bus home so that I could sneak in a few more chapters with a longer commute
- Faking a stomachache in order to crash on the couch with Six Bad Things
- Downing four-shot lattes each morning to compensate for a late night spent reading
And I'm not even bringing up the planned-but-not-executed "I'm going for a jog" scheme.
Thankfully, I've broken this vicious cycle and am back on track with a fantastic bio on Roald Dahl, but that doesn't stop me from sneaking glances at the copy of Already Dead on my bookshelf.
Maybe just one chapter before calling it a night tonight?
*Sigh*
--Dave
 In this week's edition of YA Wednesday, we say nothing about the 4th of July, or fireworks.
Hungry Reading
I lost Paul to a book for about a day and a half this week--he was buried in Hunger Games, the first book in Suzanne Collins' futuristic trilogy about an annual tournament of death between teenage boys and girls (on TV, of course). This book doesn't come out until October, but people have been raving about it for a couple of months now. Paul says it's a "good book for girls and boys"... something about the "action, and fashion."
He also mentioned that it reminded him of Battle Royale. Elizabeth at Fuse #8 also pointed out her husband mentioning Battle Royale in her review last weekend (because, according to Paul, "all guys" know about that movie), and she also had a hard time putting it down: "About the time you get to the fifth chapter that ends with a sentence that forces you to read on, you’re scratching your head wondering how the heck she DOES that."
YA and SciFi, together again
This month's Locus Magazine is a special YA issue with essays from Neil Gaiman, Scot Westerfeld, Sharyn November, and other YA authors, as well as interviews with Garth Nix (whose Superior Saturday comes out next month) and Christopher Barzak. I particularly enjoyed this piece from Cory Doctorow on writing for younger readers (hat tip to Justin over at Guys Lit Wire).
  Piers or Jack: What kind of girl are you, anyway?
E. Lockhart (The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks) extols the pleasures of Piers Anthony's A Spell for Chameleon (and, basically, anything else in the Xanth or Adept series) over Kerouac's On the Road in "Exile to Mundania," a fun, short piece in the July/August issue of Horn Book Magazine (online today) about her teen self trying to conform to the books she thinks her boyfriend wants her to like:
"The thing about falling in love when you are seventeen: you haven’t yet figured out who you are. So when your significant person says, “Hey, don’t you love Kerouac?” you think, “Hmmm. I did fall asleep and feel annoyed most of the time I was reading On the Road, but maybe I did love it without really noticing, because it certainly was deep and I’m fairly sure I’m a deep person--and anyway, I’m outgrowing that kid stuff I used to like,” and so you answer him, “Yes. A total genius.”"
Let the super-readers have their big-kid books (more against age-banding)
Alli at Ypulse provides some helpful background--and thoughtful insights--today on the ongoing Brit discussion of whether or not books should be marked for certain age groups (which Paul mentioned in last week's kid-lit roundup).
"...a sort of literary, slightly random, Word-Association-Rorschach-Blotty-Blog-Interview"
On her Imaginary Blog last weekend, author Lynn E. Hazen (whose Shifty comes out in September) asked bloggers Cynthia Leitich Smith (Cynsations), Elizabeth Bird (Fuse #8), and
Eisha and Jules (Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast) to respond to the following:
8 Words: About Why You Blog
7 Words: About What You Blog About
6 Words: About What Makes Your Voice Unique
5 Adjectives: Used By You or Others to Describe Your Blog
4 Adverbs: About How You Write/Blog
3 Words: Culled From Your Comments
2 Words: Any Words
1 Noun
And here's one of the responses, from Jules (and she explains her noun in the interview that follows)...
--Heidi
 
Next week, all week, Arthur C. Clarke Award and Philip K. Dick Award winner Richard K. Morgan, author of such future classics as Altered Carbon and Thirteen, will be guest-blogging on Omnivoracious (fresh off a vacation in Spain). Morgan's novels can be intensely gritty and action-packed but they also include nuanced political and social observations. No matter what the SF setting, Morgan's fiction reflects a keen awareness of the conditions of our modern world. This month, his critically acclaimed and controversial Thirteen appears in trade paperback, with the first novel in a new heroic fantasy series, Steel Remains, released in hardcover in the UK next month.
Morgan is always thought-provoking and entertaining. Look for his posts here at Omnivoracious starting July 7th.
Check out my latest Pop Culture Report (#4), in which I look at some great graphic novels, coffee table books, and one huge art book on an iconic dark fantasy figure. This time around, visual reviews of work by Greg Broadmore, Taylor F. Lockwood's Chasing the Rain, Out of Picture 2, Andrew Bolton's Superheroes: Fantasy and Fashion, First Second's Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, Centipede Press' The Art of Lovecraft, classic reprinted Moomim comics from Drawn & Quarterly, and a Fog Mound children's book featured in this week's upcoming Graphic Novel Fridays. As always, this is a DIY, come-into-my-home-and-look-at-some-books kind of video...
Welcome once again to Friday Night Videos, where we usually match up book-related videos against each other in mortal combat--to satisfy the blood-sport instincts of rabid bibliophiles. This time, though, it's the origami book contest winner and a cool video in support of Eoin Colfer's summer book tour for The Time Paradox (Artemis Fowl, book six). A programming note: After tonight, this feature will go on hiatus for a little while, returning with a slightly different focus.
First, the origami. Last week, we ran a video on how to make an origami book, along with a contest. The winner would get the coolest tiny book in my house. Turns out it's harder to make one of these things than you'd think. But we do have a winner: Catherine Cheek. Cheek is what you'd call multi-creative, as evidenced by the other cool stuff on her website. She's also recently signed on with Kate Schaefer Testerman to represent her on her cool novel Alternate Susan--and she has short fiction forthcoming in several anthologies and magazines. Here's her origami book, with more photos on her site.
 Cheek's has some experience making books--just look at this handmade beauty, for example:
 
As for what she wins, it's a copy of The Little Greenish-Brown Book of Slugs, with a copy of my just released Secret Lives thrown in for good measure.
And now for the video, which is a great example of how to build excitement for a book tour...
Oh boy, oh boy, there's nothing like opening the mail, finding a book you requested for a reason you've forgotten already, and, on the basis of a few opening paragraphs, knowing you're going to fall in love. I can't remember what drove me to ask for a copy of William Davies King's upcoming Collections of Nothing, advertised as a "part memoir, part reflection on the mania of acquisition" by a man who has been driven to accumulate a "monumental mass of miscellany, from cereal boxes to boulders to broken folding chairs," but here's how it begins:
On a hot summer day in 1998, I pulled up at the house I still owned with the woman who was soon to become my ex-wife to find that she had delivered every item connected with me to the garage. My surprise was not that she had divvied up our goods, though I would rather have done the work myself, but the spectacle of what an immense and unattractive volume of me there was, much of it retained only because I collect, as a collector collects, compulsively. And then some.
There I was, forty-three, wearing shorts and an old T-shirt already heavy with sweat, in the dusty glare of desert suburbia, Ryder truck still hissing and ticking at my back as the great panel door swung open with a shriek. The door shuddered, and I shuddered too. There were the usual black plastic bags of shoes and canted piles of shirts on hangers, portable radios and razors and power tools, but also the singular multiplicity of diverse collections of nothing, a junkstore dumpstore's highlights, stuff of no clear value to anyone but someone like me.
I am a collector, something a lot of people can understand. My being a collector of nothing will require explanation. I am on the small side. A neighbor told my parents I was the only child he'd ever seen who could walk upright under a table. Eventually I grew to a normal height, but I sometimes think of myself as an overgrown runt. My weight has always hovered just above normal, which is typical, I think, among people who grew up fighting for a larger portion. I have two younger brothers who could easily be cheated, though I chose not to, and an older sister who always wanted it all and could not be cheated because she was disadvantaged, disabled, disastrous, and later insane. Because of her, I tend to measure my fair and healthy share, then sneak a bit more. My eating disorder is in my collecting. I eat nothing, in excess.
I've read accounts of people who one day give away everything, purging themselves of material association. They report feeling liberated, disburdened, and alive for the first time. The moment of my divorce might have been a good moment for me to cleanse myself that way. I did not like what I saw under the bare bulb in that shadowy garage. There, mixed in with my necessaries, shone forth what had doomed me to a life of collecting--that super-superfluity of sub-substance. During twenty years of living with my wife, decades of relentless acquisition, I had found ways of weaving my collections into the lattice of our life. Now, brought out from concealment, arranged in heaps, not carelessly but also not artfully, these things looked like signs of hoarding, which is a diagnosis, not a hobby.
So I transported the cumbersummation of me into the Ryder and into my new, unmarried life, in the hope that I might locate myself somewhere in the midst of it.
What can you tell of a book from the first page and a half? Sometimes a lot, sometimes not, but in this case I'll be stunned (and crushed) if someone who shows this clear-eyed (even cold-eyed) style, with such concentrated power, doesn't end up sustaining it for the 161 pages that remain. Right now I've just begun another piece of candy I've been hoarding for a while (Mark Harris's Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, a book I missed when it came out in February that's turning out to be as delicious as I'd hoped), but it's going to be hard not to keep going into Collections of Nothing. --Tom
Last week, in one of those surprising coincidences that seem to happen more often than they should, Michael Phillips emailed me. Phillips had read and enjoyed my novel Veniss Underground and was looking for an e-version of City of Saints & Madmen. Oddly enough, I'd just learned about Phillips because of a piece about him that appeared on Showtime's This American Life. Despite having a physical condition that has effectively paralyzed him, Phillips reads a lot of books, using e-books and audio books to overcome the problem of, for example, turning pages. Among other things, I wondered what someone's perspective on e-books would be if they had to use them to enjoy good fiction. Phillips was kind enough to agree to an interview via email to talk about books, fiction, and his favorite authors. (BTW--although an e-book of City of Saints exists, it requires Windows XP to view it, so my editor at Bantam is working on getting Phillips a PDF instead.)
Amazon.com: Can you give me an idea of your general reading tastes? Do you read fiction and nonfiction? What kinds, etc?
Michael Phillips: I really prefer fiction. Stark reality is everywhere, when I read I like to go somewhere else, somewhere far away. I mostly like darker fiction, I don't read to go somewhere "better" than the world around us. If anything, I read to see something far worse. I love fabulism, magic realism, darker works of fantasy, and I read classics because so much modem fiction alludes to classics.
   
Amazon.com: What really energizes and thrills you in the fiction you enjoy? Why is it important to you?
Michael Phillips: I love reading about bizarre worlds and strange characters that are far outside of my own experience, yet are still relatable in some way. Chuck Palahniuk writes characters like that, disturbed, fairly psychotic people, people I'd never meet. Yet, his characters are me in some way or another. Where do I fit in to our crazy world? Why are "things" so important to us? One of his characters likes to walk the halls of mausoleums hoping to hear a scratching on the coffins, any signs of life, because that would at least mean that there is SOMETHING more after we die. It's good to know that authors wonder and write about the same obscure things that I do, and that other people enjoy reading about them. (My [own]fiction is a work in progress. I attempt fabulism, and fantasy, but I find that I'm much better at writing non-fiction. I'm working on a book of essays that I hope to publish, kind of a personal memoir.)
Amazon.com: What are some of your favorite authors, and why?
Michael Phillips: K.J. Bishop: Her book, The Etched City, is absolutely gorgeous. The world she created is so vibrant and strange, her characters so conflicted and real. Nobody in that book is all good, or all evil. Life isn't black or white, but shades of grey. I enjoy that very much. Jonathan Carroll: He creates worlds that are instantly familiar, but get very bizarre, very fast. Dogs talk, people's dreams become real, it's all so outlandish, yet he writes with such confidence that the reader buys it completely. George R.R. Martin: His Song of Ice and Fire series is amazing. Each book is thick and heavy enough to kill a man, yet they're never stale or dull. Like my other favorite authors, he's also spectacular at writing grey characters. Chuck Palahniuk: Palahniuk has an amazing knack for creating complete lunatic, low-life characters who are still likable and relatable. At least, I find them relatable. He paints a society so dark that one can't help but appreciate the beauty that we do have. Cormac McCarthy: His prose are a work of art. I read The Road in about a day, I just couldn't put it down.
Amazon.com: You must be a kind of expert on electronic books by now. Do you have a preference?
Michael Phillips: Well, I think the most important thing about e-books is that they not be limited to a single platform. They shouldn't be Kindle exclusive, or PC only. People have different reasons for needing different platforms. For example, I have a physical disability, I can pretty much only use my thumb. Paper books and handheld devices are absolutely useless to me. The Kindle's fabulous, but to many people it's just a paperweight. I need books available on my computer, particularly the Mac. Palm e-books and e-books in PDF format are great because they're readable on Macs, Windows PCs and a great many handheld devices.
Amazon.com: Are there any books you can't get in e-book form? Which ones are on the top of your wish list?
Michael Phillips: Too many. Michael Cisco, for instance, is a brilliant writer, but none of his stuff is available. I'd love to read Steven R. Donaldson, but he's not available either. Even the Harry Potter series isn't available. Sometimes audio books fill in the gaps, but they're not always available either, or they're abridged. Also, hearing an audio book just isn't |
