I always feel better after reading. I never feel good after being on my phone. The better choice is obvious, even if it is still a difficult decision to make.
The 13th Month by my friend the late Doug Colligan, which recounts in wry and often touching detail both his year in Vietnam in 1968 as a combat engineer and the trip he took back to Pleiku in 2000. Doug who had a career as a magazine editor writes with a beautiful simplicity about powerful memeories
I think of serious literary fiction as tightrope-walking without a net (of any genre's conventions, that is). Here, let me try again: serious literary fiction is a card game the rules of which only the dealer knows in advance; for everyone else around the table, only by playing the game can they haltingly and with difficulty discover the objective of the game. (Wouldn't it be easier for everyone if they just played a few hands of canasta or bridge?) All of that to say, I don't have the same standard for everything I read. I just finished Jean-Patrick Manchette's *Skeletons in the Closet* (1976): first-rate noir fiction. Now I'm about 40 pages into Jean Giono's *Fragments of a Paradise* (1944, translation 2023), and I can't yet tell you what the heck I have in my hands. All I know is that I'm intrigued.
This may make me sound like a simpleton…but what’s wrong with just enjoying reading, and other activities, for the sake of reading?? Why must everything, not just reading, be parsed and prodded and analyzed?? I could go on and on but I won’t lol. Just BE.
I always feel better after reading. I never feel good after being on my phone. The better choice is obvious, even if it is still a difficult decision to make.
The 13th Month by my friend the late Doug Colligan, which recounts in wry and often touching detail both his year in Vietnam in 1968 as a combat engineer and the trip he took back to Pleiku in 2000. Doug who had a career as a magazine editor writes with a beautiful simplicity about powerful memeories
I think of serious literary fiction as tightrope-walking without a net (of any genre's conventions, that is). Here, let me try again: serious literary fiction is a card game the rules of which only the dealer knows in advance; for everyone else around the table, only by playing the game can they haltingly and with difficulty discover the objective of the game. (Wouldn't it be easier for everyone if they just played a few hands of canasta or bridge?) All of that to say, I don't have the same standard for everything I read. I just finished Jean-Patrick Manchette's *Skeletons in the Closet* (1976): first-rate noir fiction. Now I'm about 40 pages into Jean Giono's *Fragments of a Paradise* (1944, translation 2023), and I can't yet tell you what the heck I have in my hands. All I know is that I'm intrigued.
This may make me sound like a simpleton…but what’s wrong with just enjoying reading, and other activities, for the sake of reading?? Why must everything, not just reading, be parsed and prodded and analyzed?? I could go on and on but I won’t lol. Just BE.
Here's what I think the publishing world needs; more mythic splendor, far less existential dread.