tana french: better than you.

I just finished reading Tana French’s brilliant first novel, IN THE WOODS, and I haven’t been this excited about a new writer since I stumbled across Natsuo Kirino a few years back. The book is ambitious in both plot and execution, weaving the threads of two crimes — one past, one present — into an [...]

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how not to win friends and influence customers.

Publishing companies grapple with the question of scheduling e-books.
Amazon.com erases Orwell books from Kindle readers.
Both of these articles are troubling, and more evidence that the publishing industry is still having trouble navigating the shark-infested waters of the electronic reading revolution. If I’m going to spend several hundred dollars for a dedicated e-book reader, the last [...]

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“i’ll break your wings and you’ll stop singing.”

I’m wading through books by Leon Uris and Will Self, among others, but have little to report at the moment on writing or reading. I would like to note, however, that the last Khanate album, CLEAN HANDS GO FOUL, is finally out after a four-year wait. The album consists of four improvised musical pieces adorned [...]

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“they stayed up all night selling cocaine and hash.”

Last night I finished reading NYT columnist David Carr’s interesting addiction memoir THE NIGHT OF THE GUN. I’ll freely admit to being a sucker for addiction memoirs, but I kind of lost my taste for them when James Frey’s A MILLION LITTLE PIECES was revealed to be mostly fabricated (which came as little surprise to [...]

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the obsessions of ross macdonald

I recently finished reading a whole stack of Lew Archer novels by Ross MacDonald, and I’m kind of ambivalent as to how satisfactory the experience was. I’m aware of the man’s high standing in crime fiction circles, but I’m not sure how he got to be so highly ranked. Sure, his books were well-written for [...]

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a suddenly empty landscape

RIP J. G. Ballard.
This is isn’t exactly surprising to me — I had known for a while that he was extremely ill — but it’s still a massive bummer. Ballard was not only one of the most visionary and innovative writers of my generation, he was an enormous influence on my own approach to writing [...]

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useful reading

Ten Mistakes Writers Don’t See.
Saving baby robots.
Things not to say in query letters.
Anatomy of a royalty statement.
READING: Ross MacDonald — THE DROWNING POOL
HEARING: AC/DC — HIGH VOLTAGE

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follett and wambaugh

I recently finished reading the Ken Follett novel THE PILLARS OF THE EARTH, which was exceptional (and, at nearly a thousand pages, exhausting). It was interesting to me because I was originally familiar with Follett only through the spy novels he wrote earlier in his career, several of which I read when they first appeared [...]

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“a man’s gotta know his limitations.”

Earlier this week I read THE NEW CENTURIONS, the 1971 debut novel by Joseph Wambaugh, and one of the best police procedural novels ever written. A large part of what makes it work so well is that Wambaugh was an LAPD cop himself when he wrote the book, and much of the book — including [...]

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words of wisdom

Want to get published? Don’t do things like this.
READING: Natsuo Kirino — REAL WORLD
LISTENING: Weakling — DEAD AS DREAMS

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