Writerly Reading Habits

Generally, successful writers make reading a part of their routines. Several blogs and websites have lists of what books writers have enjoyed this past year. Here are two:

The Millions updates each day with a new list from a writer. So far, Charles D'Ambrosio has raved about Jonathan Ames' somewhat autobiographical graphic novel, The Alcoholic. Nam Lee re-realized how awesome Beloved is. And writer of horror, Peter Straub, wondered, When Will There Be Good News?

SF Signal has writers discussing their favorite genre discoveries. Here you'll find Jokers and Wastelands, Fables and Peanuts, a few Well-Built Cities, and the occasionally tragic Ghost in Love.

Happy Thursday, readers and writers. Be well. Do good work. Try to make a routine of it. It really does help.

On Books, Lists of Books, and Also John Hodgman

There's been another salvo fired in the war over whether books as we know them are dying. In an Op-Ed column for the New York Times, James Gleick writes about why he sees the physical book as surviving the coming digitization of everything. "As a technology, the book is like a hammer. That is to say, it is perfect: a tool ideally suited to its task. Hammers can be tweaked and varied but will never go obsolete... It is significant that one says book lover and music lover and art lover but not record lover or CD lover or, conversely, text lover." [Via Shaken & Stirred]

Also, if you love lists, especially end of year best books lists, then largeheartedboy has just the thing to fill your time this holiday season. In an impressive bit of scouring, he's compiled a collection of dozens upon dozens of end of year best lists, ranging from such obvious stalwarts as Amazon.com or the New York Times, to the St. John's Telegram list of "best Canadian cookbooks."

And in more information than you require news , check out this interview at the New Yorker with John Hodgman about, among other things, his new book, More Information Than You Require.

For the Weekend

Dear readers, it's Friday and it's a new world, but people still seem to die a lot.

Here's some stuff to look at this weekend.

John Leonard: editor, critic, sentence exploder, and person I've never read but may now become obsessed with, has died. Matthew Cheney at the Mumpsimus, along with Edward Champion and Salon, have written wonderful tributes.

In the young adult world, few feuds engender more passion and lost friendships than the one between zombies and unicorns. John Green has more.

Amazon has announced it's Best Books of 2008, which is funny considering, you know, there's still a couple months left, but I guess the "best of" year is kind of like the "fiscal" year in that it ends somewhere around October. Top ten lists include: Fiction and Literature, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Comic Books and Graphic Novels, Mysteries and Thrillers, and Romance, among others. It occurred to me to comment on the fact that there's one category called, "Fiction and Literature," and then a bunch of other categories, a demarcation that seems to imply that the other categories are neither fiction nor literature, but then I got lazy and decided just to comment on the thought of commenting.

Sometimes women writers choose, or are asked, to hide the fact that they don't have man parts. It's a topic this blog mentioned once before. Io9 has a list of "Women Who Pretended to be Men to Publish SciFi Books", a list which includes the likes of JK Rowling and the ever-present James Tiptree, JR. who, as it turned out, was neither a James, a Tiptree, or a Jr.

Enjoy the weekend. Say hello to a squirrel.