Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Vacation reading is not a new concept. Ever since the 19th century, when novels were considered relatively sinful indulgences, leisure and fiction-reading have been closely associated.
A good novelist pays attention to his characters. A good biographer pays attention to the documents before her. A good critic pays close attention to the thing she's brought to evaluate.
Literary novelists who have a strong handle on plot are often characterized as good vacation reads because they manage to transport you elsewhere, away from the petty facts of ordinary life.
Prestige podcasts, like prestige television shows, tend to have an audience that believes itself literate, well-informed, and reasonable. Listening to podcasts, in this model, is a form of virtue.
My parents and I - I'm an only child - are not particularly religious, but I was christened and raised in that vague and characteristically Canadian form of Protestantism known as the United Church.
Great novels are maps of complication, leading nowhere in particular, taking stances only provisionally and obliquely, happy to be tangled and to lack as many answers as the people they seek to depict.
Bad criticism recites rote arguments. The shame of rote arguments isn't just that they're cliches, though they are, but that they tend to hide from us why a critic is actually thinking what they're thinking.
Television became defensible - and, frankly, worshipped - because the shows started to be so carefully structured, so attentive to language, and so visually interesting that they suddenly caught people's eye.
Push the envelope too far as a female artist, and you may only earn an ocean of ink expressing concern for your delicate constitution, amounting to a caution against playing on traditionally male wavelengths.
For a long time now, movie characters have generally been articulate, even chatty. Call it the influence of Woody Allen, but we have become used to characters who are well able to explain themselves to others.
The children of the 1980s were the last before a lot of things changed. We were the last generation not to have cell phones, not to have video games, not to have parents who worried if we strayed from the yard.
The forward march of American literature is usually chronicled by way of its male novelists. There is little sense, in that version of the story, that women writers of those eras were doing much worth remembering.
We do learn a thing or two from art. It may not be the one-to-one instruction of a moral lesson or the rote learning of a grammatical rule or mathematical concept. But the habits of mind art cultivates are important.
Indeed, there has never been any sort of organised movement of people who take their cats into the outdoors. Of course, the navy often took them on ships, but there they performed a function, mousing for the officers.
Research can be a boon to a novelist - there are more things in heaven and Earth than can be dreamt of in a single writer's philosophy - or it can become a hindrance, a thick layer of algae that weighs down the storytelling.
A lot of people produce podcasts in which they simply ramble on for hours about themselves and their lives. There is something very poignant about the volume of human desire to be heard out there in the Wild West of podcasts.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to publish - or read - books that have a wide potential audience. But it does generate a certain plodding sameness of tone and subject matter that plagues a lot of contemporary American fiction.
Feminists are disappointed in each other a lot, a natural side effect of being involved in a movement, which naturally implies that progress toward the ultimate goal is the only measure of success and that setbacks are always disasters.
Book awards - in America, at least - are not like the Oscars. Awards are not cumulative, and in the case of something like the Pulitzers, the jurors often have another goal in mind: sales. They know that the Pulitzer stamp can sell a book.
Among journalists, there is a saying: 'If it bleeds, it leads.' This can result in some serious hustling - and some serious sloppiness - whenever a crime occurs. The public's longing to see and hear salacious details is, basically, endless.
The 'World Wide Web', as people quaintly called the Internet in 1996, was more or less made up of text. There was no YouTube. There was no Facebook. There was, however, Usenet, a loose and difficult-to-navigate assortment of message boards.
Television was not cool among the young people of my era, the last years of the '90s and the early '00s. It was not just old people who'd castigate you for watching anything but public television. We young people scoffed at each other about it.
The 'beach read' has become such a ubiquitous concept in contemporary literature that we assume it has always been around. In fact, the term only emerged in the 1990s, usually in book trade publications such as 'Booklist' and 'Publisher's Weekly.'
There has long been an argument in New York about what, exactly, the purpose of book awards ought to be. One model sees them as a celebration of the unquestioned best and brightest, a triumphal parade for marquee authors who have published in a given year.
For a long time, it seemed as if podcasting was a male realm, but no longer. Sure, there are lots of men doing podcasts, but women are voicing a lot of the form's biggest hits. 'Serial,' the podcast that made podcasts a phenomenon, was narrated by a woman.
Hollywood versions of watershed moments in American history are generally high-minded shlock. 'JFK,' 'The People vs. Larry Flynt,' even 'Lincoln': all of these boast excellent performances in scripts that are ultimately very conventional, even conservative.
Podcast listening carries with it a faint aura of cultural snobbery, a notion that to cue up an episode is to do something highbrow and personally enriching, whether it's a history lecture broadcast from a university or an amateur talk show recorded in someone's garage.
Many people, I've noticed by informally polling friends, are prone to distinguishing a beach read by genre. Some people thought all thrillers are beach reads; others thought all romances are. Some people thought only mass market paperbacks are eligible for beach read standards.
When Paul Beatty's 'The Sellout' was first published in America in 2015, it was a small release. It got a rave review in the daily 'New York Times' and one in the weekly 'New York Times Book Review,' too, for good measure. But by and large, it was not a conversation-generating book.
I like debate and argument, so I'm usually all right with disagreement, and I'm even all right if the critic doesn't come to a clear thumbs up or thumbs down. But I need the disagreement to have some kind of line I can follow on the map. I like following an interesting mind along it.
While 'Twilight''s popularity was undeniable among both the teenagers they were aimed at and middle-aged women who flocked to the series in droves, Meyer has drawn her share of criticism for her writing. Some feminist critics assailed what they saw as Bella's mooning over her vampire lover.
It is no secret, of course, that people have strong feelings about fat - feelings that seem only to have been inflamed by the sense, in western countries, that there is an obesity crisis afoot. Concerns about health have mutated into a kind of panic attending any mention of fat people at all.
A certain kind of person in America loves to note that they're currently soldiering through the latest Pulitzer winner for history, in particular. It connotes a certain gravitas, a connectedness to the literary and intellectual scene that most upwardly mobile professionals in America still desire.
Since the era of 'Sherlock Holmes,' private detectives had long been able to influence cases on their own. But the online detective, who had no sort of professional training or even long practice, is a purely modern phenomenon. The Internet changed everything by letting anyone become a self-appointed 'expert' on a case.
Most academic historians accept that historians' own circumstances demand that they tell the story in a particular way, of course. While people wring their hands about 'revisionist' historians; on some level, the correction and amplification of various parts of the past is not 'revisionism' as it is simply the process of any historical writing.