Literary doppelgangers.

Calling Jonathan Franzen “J-Franz” makes me think he should be a character on Jersey Shore. Which, now that I think about it, I would love to see.

#Drunklit

This current vampire book trend is MELTING YOUR BRAIN. Sort of.

Books for the dark night of the soul.

The Millions sums up my childhood (and adult) reading experiences exactly.

Developing your own style: Like searching for that perfect shirt.

I started really getting into girls in middle school. Like most boys my age, I was clueless. Had no idea what they wanted or what they were looking for.

This improved a bit in high school –– after countless mishaps making for great stories between my friends –– where I came to a better understanding of what it takes to attract a female. The best lesson I learned during that trial and error period is the importance of a unique personal style.

This isn’t a fashion blog and I’m definitely not a fashion blogger, but I think my lesson in personal style transgresses quite well into the literary world.

Style is just as important in writing as it is in getting that special lady –– or guy –– friend. If you think about it, what are you really trying to do with that manuscript you’ve slaved over for x amount of months or years? Sell it right? And how do you go about doing that? Make it attractive. Give it a style that’ll stand out from the rest. Developing a unique style of prose is a key ingredient to becoming a good writer. It makes you recognizable to readers, and helps you develop a following. Read more »

Words, words and more words

While reading Jonathan Franzen’s National Book Award Winner, The Corrections, I realized the amount of words I simply do not know: rube, elephantine, elfin, tumid, the list goes on.

I don’t know if this is the case for everyone else, but for me, as a reader, I tend to gloss over words I don’t know and rely on figuring them out in context. If that doesn’t work I skip them all together, so long as they aren’t central to what the sentence is trying to say.

So I began a collection of words.

I went down to my school store and bought two packs of 5x8in index cards. I cut them into eighths and kept them close to me while reading Franzen and anything I might have had to read for class. Every time I came across a word I didn’t know I circled it in my book and looked it up. When finished reading I went back and wrote the definitions to the circled words on the cards. So far I have 137 from the first half of Franzen’s book alone.

To give my collection value I set aside 10 minutes of my day to read over my cards once or twice, reading aloud the definitions and letting them sink in. I don’t remember every single word (on a good day I’ll remember a quarter of them­­), but I am becoming acquainted with them.

So why do I do this? Read more »

Just one of many negative perspectives of the Twilight saga.

An ambitious sophomore in high school three years ago, I checked out Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Striving to seem mature and sophisticated, I lugged the book around for over a month. It was the hardest read of my entire life. The worst part is I had no clue as to its significance. Grasping the bare bones of the plot, I knew there was more the novel wanted to communicate.

Sure, one reason I didn’t catch the significance was because I was a sophomore in high school. In my first year of college though, I’ve discovered I’m not the only person confused. There are whole courses devoted to Dostoyevsky and The Brothers Karamazov; the underlying significances, symbols, motifs and so on.

Maybe I should’ve stuck to Harry Potter like the rest of my classmates.

In my short time, it seems the literary world places most value on novels with human messages, even more so on novels taking long intricate routes to get to those messages. However, it seems the literary world also tends to cast novels not adhering to such standards as a “literature of diversion” as Jonathan Franzen puts it.

At school, literary high brows’ nostrils flare at the sight of a Twilight or Harry Potter novel. “That’s not real literature,” they say. I’m not a fan of genre novels myself, but I think my fellow undergrads and the literary community are wrong for totally writing off such novels. Read more »