Author: Mary Daniels Brown

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Crime Fiction Trains Us for Crisis

Writer Sulari Gentill says that, since crime fiction “essentially tells the story of a crisis,” is has helped to prepare us for the world we all now find ourselves in.

This year we have already faced fire, flood and pandemic. We had fled our homes and been confined to them. And we have risen up against murder and prejudice. Each of those actions have required decisions about how to protect ourselves and those around us. They have been made in the face of real threats to personal safety.

Tie a Tourniquet on Your Heart

“revisiting Edna Buchanan, America’s greatest police reporter”

I have written (here and here) of my love for Edna Buchanan’s crime novels set in Miami featuring Cuban-American journalist Britt Montero.

Before she turned to writing crime novels, Edna Buchanan was a crime journalist in Miami.  She won a Pulitzer Prize for her newspaper work in 1986. 

In this article Diana Moskovitz addresses the issue of how television, movies, and other elements of popular culture have helped create the current problem in the U.S. of police using unnecessary force to subdue suspects. This is an argument that isn’t new. I’ve seen many stories lately of how crime dramas such as Blue Bloods and the various iterations of Law & Order have shaped the public attitude that law enforcement only uses extreme measures to subdue criminals and force information out of them when absolutely necessary. These dramas have taught us to excuse such behavior as the necessary price society pays for protection and safety, the argument goes.

And, according to Moskovitz, Edna Buchanan is one of the well-known crime reporters whose work has contributed to this public attitude. Moskovitz is talking about Buchanan’s reportorial work here, not her novels. On rereading The Corpse Had a Familiar Face, the 1987 book about her reporting that made Edna Buchanan a nationally known figure, Moskovitz realized:

. . . how police positive it was. How it is littered with calls for tougher justice, using victims as props to demand harsher sentences, and how it ignored all the ways American society sets people up to break the law in the first place. How bad behavior by officers—even the one Buchanan briefly married—is condemned, but never really traced back to any larger issue. How Buchanan’s words have reinforced institutions that a growing American conscience believes are no longer, and perhaps never were, inherently good, or even necessary at all.

After the publication of The Corpse Had a Familiar Face, Buchanan became the public model for what a good crime reporter should do: “the Buchanan model is not, primarily, about police accountability. It’s about writing a story that leaps off the page with stunning details.”

Kamala Harris is wrong about science fiction

Author Charlie Jane Anders writes in The Washington Post:

Sen. Kamala D. Harris was half right in her speech launching her 2020 presidential campaign when she said we need to address climate change based on “science fact, not science fiction.” The truth is, we need both. Science fiction has an important role to play in rescuing the future from the huge challenges we’re facing . . .

“Stories about climate change might be fiction, but they can help to sway people’s hearts and minds in a different way than a recitation of the undeniable facts,” Anders writes. “And because science fiction is the literature of problem-solving, our made-up stories about science and innovation can play an important role in helping us to regain our faith in our own ability to create change.”

How Students Built a 16th-Century Engineer’s Book-Reading Machine

Agostino Ramelli, a 16th-century military, “designed many contraptions for the changing Renaissance landscape.” One of his machines aimed at allowing users to read multiple books at one time. Although Ramelli never built the machine, its possibility has long intrigued people who study the history of the book.

This article from Atlas Obscura details how, in 2018, a group of undergraduate engineering students at the Rochester Institute of Technology set out to build the machine. It’s worth looking at the article just for the photos and illustrations, but the text is pretty intriguing as well.

20 Books to Read in Quarantine This Summer

“Our picks for immersive, escapist, or nostalgic reading—wherever you are”

If you still need more suggestions for reading to occupy yourself with during this pandemic, editors from The Atlantic have some suggestions, curated “with an eye toward stories that will resonate during a summer of continued social distancing and tentative reopenings.” They’ve “ loosely grouped them according to literary cravings you might have,” such as these:

  • IF YOU WANT TO GET LOST IN A PLACE
  • IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR A PAGE-TURNER
  • IF YOU NEED SMART OBSERVATIONS ABOUT LIFE
  • IF YOU’RE IN THE MOOD FOR A QUEST
  • IF YOU’RE CRAVING HUMAN CONNECTION

© 2020 by Mary Daniels Brown

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What Books Have Given You a “Book Hangover”?

Discussion
2020 Discussion Challenge

Thanks to these two bloggers for sponsoring the 2020 Blog Discussion Challenge:

You can join the discussion challenge at any time during 2020 by clicking on either link above.

Recently I came across the article “The Psychology of a Book Hangover” by Clare Barnett, who describes a book hangover this way:

A “book hangover” is the slangy shortcut for the feeling when a reader finishes a book—usually fiction—and they can’t stop thinking about the fictional world that has run out of pages. The story is over, but the reader misses the characters or the atmosphere of the novel. Personally, I know the hangover is bad when I have trouble even looking at another book. What passing delights can a new novel hold for me when I only want more of the story I just finished?

Here are five novels that left me in that state.

A Simple Plan by Scott Smith

Cover: A Simple Plan

This was Scott Smith’s first novel, and it’s a true gem. Three friends find a small airplane crashed in an out-of-the-way spot. The wreck contains a dead pilot and a bag containing $4,000,000. What should they do? I’m not giving anything away here because this all happens right at the beginning: They decide to keep the money. And somehow, right from that instant, I knew exactly how the story would play out. 

Reading the rest of the book was like coming upon a massive crash on the highway: Seeing it was painful, but I couldn’t look away. The story proceeds inexorably to its logical conclusion. Afterwards, I couldn’t stop thinking about the fates of those characters and wondering if, in the same situation, I would have been strong enough—and honest enough—to walk away empty-handed from that plane crash.

Empire Falls by Richard Russo

Cover: Empire Falls

There’s a lot to remember about this novel: the economic decline, the dominance of social class and wealth, the small-town milieu with its generations-old entanglements. 

But the most memorable aspect is the relationship between single father Miles Roby and his teenage daughter, Tick. Here’s a father whose first priority in life is to love, provide for, and protect his child.

Miracle Creek by Angie Kim

Cover: Miracle Creek

We humans tend to think in dichotomies:

  • good vs. evil
  • us vs. them
  • love vs. hate
  • you’re either with me or you’re against me

But Angie Kim’s novel demonstrates, over and over, that the world we live in is almost never that simple. Life is complicated and complex, and there’s always yet another factor to consider to get the full picture of something. I found it difficult to stop thinking about such issues after I finished reading this amazing novel.

Blue Diary by Alice Hoffman

Cover: Blue Diary

What happens if you discover that your whole life, your seemingly idyllic existence, is based on a lie? How do you pick up the pieces, take care of the people you love, and move on?

The Last Flight by Julie Clark

Cover: The Last Flight

I’ve saved this one for last because it raises a lot of the same issues as the previous four. Two women, both maneuvered by men into untenable circumstances, try the best they can within those circumstances to find a way out. I’ve thought a lot about both of these women since recently finishing this novel, especially about the one who . . . . You’ll have to read the book to figure out which one, but, believe me, the experience is well worth the effort.

How about you?

What novels have given you a book hangover?

© 2020 by Mary Daniels Brown

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Author News Book Recommendations Fiction Last Week's Links Literature & Psychology

Literary Links

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Time Is Not Real: Books That Play with the Art of Time

Vivienne Woodward looks at some books that manipulate our sense of time. The inspiration for this essay is the way COVID-19 lockdown has affected her perception of time:

One of the things reading fiction makes clear is how many ways there are to use and manipulate time. This period of quarantine has made me think about the art of time in my own life in a new way; it has forced me to wake up every day and make more deliberate choices about how I will spend it. Perhaps the way we experience reality is not so different from the way writers construct narrative. Joan Didion famously said that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” If we take her word on that, then let’s make better study of one of the most malleable narrative elements we have: time.

There Are So, So Many Crime Novels with ‘Girl’ in the Title

This is the fifth installment in Lisa Levy’s examination of why so many crime novels feature the word girl: “Girls are the easiest characters to put into peril and the ones with whom the audience is most likely to sympathize.”

There are links to the first four installments near the beginning of the article. 

‘I don’t like Jack Reacher that much’: Lee Child and fellow crime writers on their creations

The title of this article comes from a comment writer Lee Child made when he recently turned over the writing of the Jack Reacher series to his brother Andrew Grant.

“Creating a long-running series featuring a much-loved character can be both a blessing and a curse,” Alison Flood says here. Read how some authors, including Sara Paretsky, Attica Locke, Val McDermid, Ann Cleeves, and Michael Connelly, have dealt with their long-term relationships with their fictional creations.

On Owning Many Books

If you follow the topic “reading” on any social media platform, you’ve undoubtedly seen the statement “It’s not hoarding if it’s books.” Here Mik Awake declares, “Book-hoarding is less cute if you think of it as book-privatizing.”

As far back as the novels in Oates’s Wonderland Quartet, such as “Expensive People” (1968) and “them” (1969), which received the National Book Award fifty years ago this fall, Oates has deployed her zeal for revision to forge a style of rousing roughness. Her dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories, many of them set in western New York, forgo an air of cool mastery in favor of a kind of cultivated vulnerability, an openness to engulfment.

The Best Psychological Thrillers

Because I like mysteries and thrillers, I’m always interested in any article that includes them in its title. Here Tammy Cohen, author of six psychological thrillers, lists five of her favorites by other authors.

Cohen also offers an inclusive definition of the genre psychological thriller:

The psychological thriller explores our internal state, our internal fears, our relationships, the way we see ourselves in our domestic world, in our small world, interacting with the people around us. And it plays on our fears about things that could go wrong within that sphere. It doesn’t have to be domestic, but it usually takes place within a small group, which gives it that claustrophobic feeling.

Her definition well explains why I find that such novels explore most fully the darkest depths of the human heart and mind.

© 2020 by Mary Daniels Brown

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6 Degrees of Separation Fiction

6 Degrees of Separation: Books I Didn’t Like But More That I Did

6 Degrees of Separation

It’s time for another adventure in Kate’s 6 Degrees of Separation Meme from her blog, Books Are My Favourite and Best. We are given a book to start with, and from there we free associate six books.

This month we begin with What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt, a novel I haven’t read.

1. The only book by Siri Hustvedt that I’ve read is The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, which my library book group read back in 1999. I remember nothing about this book except that I didn’t much like it, and nearly all the members of the group felt the same way. And that experience is why I’ve never read any more books by this author.

2. Ten years later (2009) another book, Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah, produced a similar result. At our meeting one member opened with, “With friends like this, who needs enemies?” Everyone agreed with her. I have never read another novel by Kristin Hannah, even though she has become a very popular author. In fact, I’ve seen several book bloggers and Instagram readers refer to her as one of their “auto-buy authors,” meaning that they automatically buy every book the author publishes.

3. One of my “auto-buy authors” is Michael Connelly. His latest novel, which I preordered, is Fair Warning, published at the end of May 2020. Connelly started out as a journalist before turning into a full-time novelist.

4. Another author who started out as a journalist before turning to crime fiction is Edna Buchanan. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her newspaper work in 1986, but I love her crime novels set in Miami and featuring journalist Britt Montero. The first book in the series in Contents Under Pressure (1992). Buchanan is now in her 80s.

5. Mary Higgins Clark also wrote well into her golden years before she died on January 31, 2020, at age 92. She became known as the queen of romantic suspense. Her first novel, Where Are the Children? (1975), which I recently reread, is still one of the most suspenseful—and chilling—stories I’ve ever read.

6. Before Mary Higgins Clark, another Mary wrote many compelling romantic suspense novels that helped create the genre: Mary Stewart, who died in 2014 at age 97. Her first romantic suspense novel, Madam, Will You Talk?, was published in 1955. Her singular talent was combining romance with compelling mysteries that feature strong, capable women who have no fear of fending for themselves. During my high school and college years I marched against the Vietnam war while also devouring all of Mary Stewart’s novels, which formed a great backdrop for my own coming of age. 

So there we have it, a 6 Degrees of Separation list that progresses nicely from books that I didn’t like to books that I liked at lot.

© 2020 by Mary Daniels Brown

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Book Recommendations Censorship Fiction Last Week's Links Libraries

Literary Links

Last Week's Links

Murder, He Wrote

When Charles Dickens dropped dead on 9 June 1850, he was hard at work on his latest novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Readers who had already devoured the first three instalments of the story were left to solve its central mystery without the author’s help. On the 150th anniversary of Dickens’s death, Frances Wilson looks back on his final months. What lay behind Dickens’s turn to crime fiction? What were the real-life inspirations for this new novel? And, most importantly, who killed Edwin Drood?

The Lockdown Lessons of “Crime and Punishment”

“A college class weathering the pandemic finds Dostoyevsky’s savage inwardness and apocalyptic feverishness uncomfortably resonant.”

This is a fascinating account of David Denby’s experience of enrolling in the course Literary Humanities at Columbia University in New York City at the age of 76, then having the class moved online with the onset of COVID-19. Read how the pandemic-induced isolation affected students’ reactions to Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

Denby, a Columbia graduate, first took this course as an undergraduate at the university. He enrolled in the course again at age 48 to re-examine the “great books” that traditionally have made up the Western literary canon but more recently have come under fire as too limited to represent world culture. The result of that experience was his 1996 book The Great Books.

This current article recounts his third time through the same two-semester course, begun in fall 2019.

 Natural attenuation as a decontamination approach for SARS-CoV-2 on five library materials

Don’t let that dull and formal-sounding title scare you off. Now that we’re beginning to have hope that libraries will be able to reopen, this report from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) offers encouraging news—or, as it describes itself, “science-based information designed to reduce the risk of transmission of COVID-19 to staff and visitors who are engaging in the delivery or use of museum, library, and archival services.”

To sum up: “Results show that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was not detectable on the materials after three days of quarantine.”

You should take a look at the report yourself to find out exactly what materials they tested and what procedures they used.

You’re not alone: Thrillers and mysteries that also feature characters stuck in isolation

“Sheltering in place doesn’t mean you can’t go visiting. You can drop in on fictional characters trapped in isolated houses in out-of-the-way places. No social distancing is required, and you’ll sympathize when they feel the walls closing in.”

Carol Memmott, a writer from Austin, Texas, describes five mysteries, some of which are variations on the traditional locked-room mystery.

Parental Fear and Cultural Erasure: The Logic Behind Banning Books

Because I’m very openly against censorship, I approached this article with interest. Nancy Snyder here asks, “Have you ever considered what lies beneath the vitriolic fury within the parents screaming at the school board meetings in favor of banning children’s and YA books?”

I ended up quite disappointed in this article because it didn’t teach me anything I didn’t already know. Here’s the conclusion:

For anyone who respects the First Amendment and the free exchange of ideas, book banning is an exercise in repression and ignorance. Removing controversial content does nothing but have the young reader want to read the book that has been banned from them. Too often, these banned book titles are the exact books young people need to read: banned books are effective in helping children develop their own values and moral convictions.

© 2020 by Mary Daniels Brown

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Author News Fiction Last Week's Links Reading

Literary Links

Last Week's Links

Summer reading has a fraught history. But if there was ever a time to delight in escapism, it’s now

Wisdom from Ron Charles, book critic for the Washington Post:

The shame of summer reading is almost as old as summer reading itself. It took humanity 200,000 years to produce movable type, widespread literacy and enough leisure time to enjoy a book. But as soon as people discovered the pleasures of a diverting novel, some starchy scold swooped in to make them feel bad.

Charles notes that the term beach reads was still toxic in highbrow circles at the end of the 20th century and that our personal beach-reading “remains fraught with anxiety about what those choices might suggest about ourselves.” 

But I like his conclusion: “If there were ever a summer to stop apologizing, to stop pretending and to stop worrying about what we should read, it’s this summer.”

Literature Is Built on a Foundation of Horror

“Why all great writing, no matter the genre, is steeped in horror.”

I often say that I don’t like horror fiction; in particular, I don’t read fiction involving werewolves, zombies, or vampires.

But novelist Marc E. Fitch argues that all fiction is a form of horror:

Literary fiction, in its attempt to confront reality, is built on a foundation of insanity, meaninglessness, brutality and death. Authors of genre fiction are essentially writing in the basement of that haunted house. They are not the worse for it; they are engaged with the same horrors as writers included in the literary canon and sometimes transcend the genre, creating work that is both horrifying and deeply meaningful. There are no hard boundaries in classifying literature, or course, and people should read widely. But just because it isn’t labeled a horror novel, doesn’t mean it isn’t a novel of horrors.

Questioning the Very Form of the Book

Karla Kelsey discusses The Saddest Thing Is ThatI Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader, edited by Lucy Ives. “Madeline Gins uses the form to dislodge our notion of individual subjectivity, the narrator commonly known as ‘I.’”

Kelsey describes Gins as a writer who explored “the wherefores and why’s of experimental writing — of its capacity to say and do what other forms of writing or art-making cannot.”

Rufi Thorpe on the Narrative Role of the Bystander

“Writing Ordinary People Who Witness the Extraordinary”

Rufi Thorpe, author of the recently published novel The Knockout Queen, praises books that she calls “The Gospel of Joe Schmo”: “An ordinary person tells the story of their friend, someone extraordinary, who touched their life and changed them forever.”

Such novels, Thorpe writes, “are all told in first person from the point of view of an almost peripheral character.” Such novels include Heart of Darkness, The Great Gatsby, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, All the King’s Men, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Genre Labels: What Makes a Book More Thriller Than Sci-Fi?

Publishers and marketing directors love genre labels, writes S.L. Huang. Here she describes how some science fiction books end up getting classified as thrillers:

So although there are certainly scifi thrillers that straddle genres and hit it out of the park on both the futuristic elements and the fast-paced thrilling tension, here are some ways that, in my observation, a book that could easily be called science fiction instead gets sucked more into the tense and mainstream maw of the thriller category.

I found this article particularly fascinating because, although Huang doesn’t mention these titles specifically, I’ve enjoyed recent novels, including Dark Matter by Blake Crouch and The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton, that are thrillers with science-fiction elements.

© 2020 by Mary Daniels Brown

Categories
6 Degrees of Separation Awards & Prizes Fiction

6 Degrees of Separation on My TBR Shelves

book covers: Normal People, The Song of Achilles, The Sense of an Ending, Days Without End, The Luminaries, Lincoln in the Bardo, A God in Ruins

It’s time for another adventure in Kate’s 6 Degrees of Separation Meme from her blog, Books Are My Favourite and Best. We are given a book to start with, and from there we free associate six books.

This month we begin with Sally Rooney’s best seller (and now a TV series), Normal People. I’ve had this novel on my TBR shelf since it first came out, and I had every intention of reading it before working on this month’s challenge.

However, unlike the people in Rooney’s novel, these times (COVID-19 pandemic and, here in the U.S., racial injustice with associated protests) are not normal, and I didn’t get a lot of reading done over the past month. Since I therefore am not ready to deal with Normal People thematically, I’ve had to look for another approach to this month’s challenge. A check on Goodreads revealed that Normal People received a lot of accolades:

Further digging revealed that I also have on my TBR shelves several novels that in the past received these same awards. 

1. Normal People was on the long list for the Women’s Prize for Fiction (2019). The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller is a former winner of this annual prize.

2. Normal People was on the long list for the 2018 Booker Prize. The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes received this award in 2011.

3. Normal People received the Costa Book Award for Novel in 2018. Days Without End by Sebastian Barry won the same award, plus the Costa Book of the Year Award, in 2016.

4. The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton won the Booker Prize in 2013.

5. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders also won the Booker Prize, in 2017.

6. A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson won the Whitbread Award, which later became the Costa Novel Award, in 2015.

It’s comforting to know that I have so many good books still on my TBR shelves.  And I also discovered that I’ve already read several past prize winners:

  • Booker Prize: Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner (1984), Possession by A.S. Byatt (1990), and The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (2000)
  • Women’s Prize: We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver, Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, A Crime in the Neighborhood by Suzanne Berne
  • Costa Award (formerly Whitbread Award): The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by  Stuart Turton, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman, Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

The moral of this story is that I should pay more attention to literary prizes in the future.

© 2020 by Mary Daniels Brown

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Audiobooks Author News Book Recommendations Last Week's Links Reading

Literary Links

Last Week's Links

‘Killing People in Fiction Was Fun’: Mysteries That Have Stood the Test of Time

Like many of us, Sarah Weinman initially thought that the coronavirus lockdown would allow her to read, read, read. And also like many of us, she soon discovered that “Focus has evaporated. The cognitive load of living through the coronavirus has gone straight for my literary jugular.”

Her antidote for this condition has been a return to “much-loved classic crime fiction.” With the help of audiobooks, Weinman has enjoyed books by Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Patricia Highsmith, and Margaret Millar.

The Erosion of Deep Literacy

Here’s an article you might want to bookmark for reading after we emerge from the current coronavirus lockdown. The article deals with how modern technology is causing us to lose the ability for “deep literacy” or “deep reading”:

In her 2018 book, Reader, Come Home, [Maryanne] Wolf uses cognitive neuroscience and developmental psycholinguistics to study the reading brain and literacy development, and in doing so, helps identify what is being lost. According to Wolf, we are losing what she calls “deep literacy” or “deep reading.” This does not include decoding written symbols, writing one’s name, or making lists. Deep literacy is what happens when a reader engages with an extended piece of writing in such a way as to anticipate an author’s direction and meaning, and engages what one already knows in a dialectical process with the text. The result, with any luck, is a fusion of writer and reader, with the potential to bear original insight

The loss of this ability may be crucial for future human development because “Deep reading has in large part informed our development as humans, in ways both physiological and cultural.”

With its emphasis on brain evolution, this article goes well beyond the common laments on how technology is making us stupid.

This is a long and complex piece, the kind of thing that I’m having difficulty focusing on enough to comprehend and to, well, think deeply about. So I have put it away to look at again in the future. 

Not everyone hates being stuck at home. Some people are thriving

Molly Creeden writes in the Los Angeles Times, “the unusual circumstances of being cloistered at home have proved a welcome change of pace, if not wholly enjoyable. And while no one is happy about the reasons we find ourselves in this abbreviated style of living, those well-suited to it are thriving.”

Read some of the explanations by people who appreciate the changes the current situation has brought to their lives and who hope to carry over some of those changes when the isolation restrictions ease.

Top 10 Scottish crime novels

Craig Robertson writes, “I’m not a big fan of tartan noir as a label for Scottish crime fiction. It works as an advertising slogan but doesn’t capture what the broad church of Scottish crime fiction is all about. There are so many fine novels within the canon that are either not tartan – with the archaic and cliched connotations that word can offer – or aren’t noir.” 

Here he offers a list of novels that “fit into a tradition of Scottish crime novels driven by issues of duality, redemption, the nature of good and evil, and a dark, dark, humour” by authors including William McIlvanney, Denise Mina, Ian Rankin, and Val McDermid.

Lionel Shriver Is Looking for Trouble

Ariel Levy writes in The New Yorker about author Lionel Shriver, “Shriver has often been convinced that we are freaking out about the wrong things—focussing on climate change, for instance, instead of contemplating the population explosion that fuels it. The coronavirus, she believes, will ultimately prove less destructive than the international fiscal contraction that it has provoked.”

Shriver’s breakout novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin, featured a mother facing the fact that her son had committed mass murder at school. Levy writes, “her novels tend to explore almost perversely unappealing issues.”

7 Pieces of Reading Advice From History’s Greatest Minds

Ellen Gutoskey offers “seven pieces of reading advice to help you build an impressive to-be-read (TBR) pile.”

My own favorite is this one:

7. “You get to make the final decision on how, what, and when to read.” Theodore Roosevelt

© 2020 by Mary Daniels Brown

Categories
Big Books Book Recommendations Fiction Last Week's Links

Literary Links

Last Week's Links

French serial-killer expert admits serial lies, including murder of imaginary wife

Another author debunked: “Stéphane Bourgoin, whose books about murderers have sold millions, says he invented much of his experience, including training with FBI.”

85 years ago, FDR saved American writers. Could it ever happen again?

David Kipen writes in the Los Angeles Times that Franklin Roosevelt’s creation of the Works Progress Administration and the Federal Writers Project introduced “Americans to their multifarious, astonishing, broken country.” Could a similar program help pull the U.S. out of the coronavirus crisis?

To put it gently, 2020 is not 1935. The notion that a consortium of individuals can coordinate on anything like the level that a strong, organized federal government seems difficult to imagine. The sense of shared national endeavor that midwifed the Writers Project feels like a relic from another millennium.

The Sociopath in Black and White: A Reading List

Psychologist Dr. Martha Stout, author of The Sociopath Next Door, reflects upon society’s sociopaths, the people with “absolutely no conscience.” About “1 in 25 people, 4 percent of us, are sociopaths,” she writes. 

Here she examines how sociopaths “appear in literature, where unimaginable things are vividly imagined and portrayed.”

15 epic books you may finally have time to read now

This isn’t the first list like this I’ve seen, but, just in case you need a good Big Book, here’s CNN’s “list of suggested epic reads. They’re all widely acclaimed as classics (or future classics) by readers or critics. And they’re all big, honking doorstops — most of them more than 1,000 pages — that ought to keep you busy for a while.”

The 50 Best Contemporary Novels Under 200 Pages

While some people need a long book to occupy themselves during self-isolation, others have trouble concentrating and focusing for extended periods. For them, there are shorter books like those listed here.

Why it’s so hard to read a book right now, explained by a neuroscientist

If you’re one of the people having trouble concentrating long enough to read effectively, take heart: You’re not alone. Here Constance Grady interviews Oliver J. Robinson, a neuroscientist and psychologist based at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London.

I Wrote A Gothic Novel — Now Life Feels Like It Is One

Elisabeth Thomas, author of the recently published gothic thriller Catherine House, writes:

As a little girl, I dreamed of being trapped in a gothic castle; well, here I am, trapped. I’ve been ordered to shelter in place, so I’m sheltering in place. I live in a small apartment with warm yellow walls and African violets on the sill — hardly a romantic gothic manor. But somehow this apartment has become a haunted house, and I am the ghost.

© 2020 by Mary Daniels Brown

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Uncategorized

Daphne du Maurier Reading Week

stack of books next to open notebook with pen
Announcement: Daphne du Maurier Reading Week May 11-17, 2020

It’s Daphne du Maurier Reading Week, hosted by HeavenAli over on her blog.

Since I’d been wanting to read more works by Daphne du Maurier anyway—and had even bought the books—I knew I wanted to participate in this when I saw the announcement on her blog.

I have to admit that my planning didn’t work out correctly (I blame the glitch on COVID-19). Here I am on Tuesday of Daphne du Maurier Reading Week, and I’m still finishing up a long book that I started late last week. Therefore, I may have to extend my reading and writing for #DDMreadingweek into next week, but I do intend to participate, though belatedly.

These are the books I intend to read:

vase of roses with 3 books by Daphne du Maurier: The Scapegoat, The House on the Strand, The Birds and Other Stories
  • The Scapegoat
  • The Birds and Other Stories
  • The House on the Strand

Thanks to HeavenAli for hosting this event.

And now, I must get back to finishing that other book . . .

© 2020 by Mary Daniels Brown