Category Archives: In Books

My comments on books by other people.

So Many Books, So Little Time

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But they never seem to be the right books.

I have a problem: I’m addicted to books. I must have mentioned this somewhere else in this blog, but I really don’t feel like searching.

Over the past six months or so, I’ve been picking up books here and there and stacking them on my beside table for reading. The stack is now as high as the lamp there.

I’m in the middle of reading two books:

  • The Art of Fiction: A Guide for Writers and ReadersThe Art of Fiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers by Ayn Rand (which I’m sure I discussed here) is not exactly stimulating reading. Although Rand has some good, solid advice for writers about characterization and plot, it’s pretty obvious to me that she’s the only author who ever followed that advice. And I have to admit that I’m getting a little tired of her bashing the work of other writers (Sinclair Lewis comes to mind) and praising her own. Talk about big ego!
  • 100 Ways America Is Screwing Up the World100 Ways America is Screwing Up the World by John Tirman is downright depressing. I picked this book up in Canada, where it was a featured book on a shelf just as I came into the store — shows you what Canadians think of us — and I started reading it, mostly to see if I agreed or disagreed with what the author said. Not only do I agree with most of it, but he’s shed a lot of new light on a lot of topics. Yesterday’s chapters on dictators we’ve befriended over the years made me pretty sick. I don’t think I want to read any more.

Obviously, I need something lighter to read.

The other books on my night table are a mixture of political commentaries and current bestselling novels, such as Water for Elephants: A Novel by Sara Gruen and The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards (loaned to me back in May by an editor). I don’t think any of these books will be lighter.

I just checked my Amazon.com Wish List, the place I store books I want to read in the future. I hope to get many of them from the library, so I don’t have to buy them, but I have such a dismal record of returning books late that I’m embarrassed to go in there. Besides, a few of the titles you’ll find on that list are not likely to make their way into the public library of a conservative town like Wickenburg.

Unless, of course, I buy them, read them, and donate them when I’m done. Which is pretty much my plan for some of the titles.

The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: A Memoir, A HistoryBut there are a few other titles that qualify as light reading that I know my library doesn’t have. One of them is The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: A Memoir, A History by Lewis Buzbee. I read about it in an independent bookstore newsletter back in May and put it on my list. Unfortunately, it’s on my list and not on my table.

That’s the problem. I put books on my list when I hear about them and they sit there. Once in a while, when I have to buy something else at Amazon (most recently, a pair of batteries for my DustBuster), I add a book to the order to qualify for free shipping. But I always seem to order the wrong book — just another one for the pile — and not the one I feel like reading when I have time to read.

Your Own WordsOne of my recent acquisitions is a book called Your Own Words by Barbara Wallraff. It’s yet another one of the books about words and language that I like to wade through. I heard of Ms. Wallraff on a Slate.com podcast that I may have mentioned in another blog entry. Slate had a contest for euphemisms and Ms. Wallraff was involved in the judging. That got me interested in her work (that was the point, wasn’t it?) and I decided to give this title a try. Maybe I’ll read it next.

If you have any suggestions for some light, intelligent reading, don’t keep it to yourself. Use the comments link to make a suggestion. Keep in mind that I like books I can learn something from. Or books that make me think.

The Art of Fiction

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A Guide for Writers and Readers.

The Art of Fiction: A Guide for Writers and ReadersI’m a pretty big fan of Ayn Rand, having read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged at least two times each. (I’m due for another round.) So when I found The Art of Fiction, a book edited by Tore Boeckmann from audiotapes of Rand’s 1958 lectures to about 20 friends and acquaintances, I grabbed it. I’m now making my way through it, page by page.

The book covers Rand’s ideas about writing and reading fiction. I’ve just finished the first two chapters, and so far, it’s mostly from the writer’s point of view. And I have to admit that it’s taught me a whole different way of thinking about writing fiction.

In Chapter 1: Writing and the Subconscious, she discusses how writers draw upon information stored in their subconscious for descriptions and mood-setting words. A writer who can write well without struggling for the words knows what he’s trying to say and has mastered his subconscious.

In Chapter 2: Literature as an Art Form, she pretty much bashes writers who break the rules and attempt to write “nonobjectively,” resulting in text that’s impossible (or nearly so) to understand. She cites Gertrude Stein and James Joyce as examples. She asserts that a writer should choose every word carefully to convey the writer’s exact meaning. She also approaches the topic of “show, don’t tell” by discussing concretes (descriptions) and abstractions (the message the author is trying to communicate).

The next chapter is on Theme, which I’ve always struggled with. It’ll be interesting to see how she tackles the topic.

When I’m finished reading, I may update this entry or compose a new one with my final verdict. It’s not a quick read — Ayn Rand never is. But I am enjoying it. And learning.

Wordplay

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A book about crossword puzzles?

I used to be a crossword puzzle lover. It wasn’t because I loved words as much as because I had an assignment at my job that gave me lots of free time in the middle of the day. Every day, I’d do the crossword puzzles in Newsday (Long Island’s paper), the Daily News, and the New York Times. When you do three newspaper puzzles a day, five days a week, you start getting good at it. And it starts getting boring. So before that assignment was done — it only lasted about three months — actually started making crossword puzzles. That’s when you know you’ve got it bad.

(A side note here. Around the same time, I used to play Scrabble with a friend of mine’s mother and her friend. They were incredible Scrabble players and I learned a lot from them. I also made a list of and practically memorized all of the acceptable 2- and 3-letter words in the The Official Scrabble Player’s Dictionary. This is the key to winning at Scrabble, as I learned (to their surprise one day). That and having a decent vocabulary, of course.)

Anyway, that assignment ended and I didn’t have time to do crossword puzzles every day. I’d occasionally do them when trapped on an airliner flying across the country, but that was about it.

Time passed. I started listening to Podcasts, including NPR’s Sunday Puzzle, with the New York Times puzzle master, Will Shortz. Will, of course, began plugging an independent film called Wordplay that had just been made about the American Crossword Puzzle Championship. It sounded interesting. Not interesting enough to trek down to an independent theather in Phoenix, mind you, but certainly interesting enough to add to my Netflix queue.

Wordplay: The Official Companion BookWill also started giving away copies of the companion book, Wordplay, as prizes for the Sunday Puzzle winners. The other day, while in a Barnes & Noble bookstore in Flagstaff, I saw the book on the shelf and, on a whim, bought it.

It was a quick read. I learned a lot of things.

First of all, there are a lot of people that are seriously into crossword puzzles. In my crossword puzzle heydays, I was just starting to approach the fringe of how these people live. I’m kind of glad that assignment ended; I don’t think I’d want my life to revolve around crossword puzzles, as the lives of some of these folks do.

Second, did you know that the New York Times crossword puzzle is easiest on Monday, progressing to a higher level of difficulty as the days of the week pass? Saturday’s is the toughest and Sunday’s, although largest, is only about as tough as one from a Wednesday or Thursday.

How does the toughness get established? Not by the fill — that’s the letters and black boxes in the grid. By the clues. Straightforward, “dictionary definition” clues are easiest. Clues that rely on puns or wordplay are the toughest. That’s Will Shortz’s job — he doesn’t create the puzzles, but he edits them for difficulty.

Good puzzles have themes that are carried out throughout the puzzle. The more theme words or phrases throughout the puzzle, the better that puzzle is. And if theme words and phrases are puns or wordplays on the theme, all the better.

I also learned that crossword puzzles are often created by computer (a sad state of affairs) but that some expert puzzle makers can create a good crossword in a few hours. One puzzle maker actually created an entire puzzle in less than an hour during the competition, based on a theme provided by the audience.

The book includes about 50 puzzles. Some are the contestants’ favorites — you know a person is serious when he can tell you his favorite puzzle by name or date — and others are puzzles used in the competition. I left the book at my place at Howard Mesa so I could fiddle with the puzzles in the evening before I go to bed.

If you like crossword puzzles and are interested in the creation and completion processes, I highly recommend the book.

Now I can’t wait for the movie to come out on DVD so I can watch it.

Prioritizing Web Usability

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“Don’t defend your interface. Fix it.”

Designing Web Usability : The Practice of SimplicityBack in 2000, I read Jakob Nielsen’s Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity. This excellent book reinforced several theories of Web design that I had already suspected: simpler was better, Flash animations and splash pages were idiotic, and sites should be built to convey information in a way that was easy for visitors to find and understand.

Nielsen’s book was a summary of thousands of hours of usability testing with people and Web sites all over the world. It wasn’t just the opinions of an outside observer. He could make statements because he had proof that his statements were valid.

I liked his book so much that I mentioned in — and I believe I even quoted from it — in my own book, Putting Your Small Business on the Web for Peachpit Press.

Prioritizing Web UsabilityPrioritizing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen and Hoa Loranger revises and and expands the information in Designing Web Usability. Using new test results and taking into consideration new technologies and user experience levels, Nielsen and Loranger revisit many of the problem exposed in the first book, summarizing how important they are today. The goal of the book is to help Web designers create sites that are effective, easy to navigate, and informative. These are the sites that people want to visit and spend time on, the sites that communicate information and sell products or services.

Nielsen and Loranger are not shy about voicing their opinions. The book has hundreds of full color illustrations of Web pages, each with a detailed caption that points out page problems. For example, a caption for Burger King site page begins, “This is an example of the misuse of visual metaphors…” And, for a page on the Montblanc site, “Montblanc makes nice pens, but it’s impossible to find out anything about them on the company’s Web site…”

While I feel that some of their criticisms are a bit nit-picky, illustrating and commenting on what they see as problems gives the reader plenty to think about. You might not agree with what they have to say about a site’s problem, but you’ll remember it when you design the pages on your sites.

As for me, I learned a few tricks I can apply to my sites. But I’m more relieved that my sites don’t have most of the problems their book points out.

Do you design Web sites? Get and read this book!

[composed on top of a mesa in the middle of nowhere with ecto]

Why Write?

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Money.

Author Mickey Spillane died last week at age 88. He was the creator of hard boiled detective Mike Hammer.

I don’t recall reading any Mickey Spillane, but I must have. I’m a huge fan of hard boiled detective fiction — a la Chandler and Hammett. But reviewers don’t usually use the names Spillane, Chandler, and Hammett in the same sentence unless it is to comment on how Spillane fails to stack up to the two masters of the genre.

Spillane’s writing has been called “hard boiled boilerplate,” full of cliches and odd visualizations. The critics were not kind to him. But he didn’t write to please the critics. He wrote to make money, as CNN’s obituary piece confirms:

Spillane, a bearish man who wrote on an old manual Smith Corona, always claimed he didn’t care about reviews. He considered himself a “writer” as opposed to an “author,” defining a writer as someone whose books sell.

“This is an income-generating job,” he told The Associated Press during a 2001 interview. “Fame was never anything to me unless it afforded me a good livelihood.”

Which got me thinking.

I’ve often been criticized by writing acquaintances — you know, the folks who want to be authors and are always working on short stories and novels but never actually publishing them — for “selling out.” In their eyes, writing non-fiction (computer how-to books, of all things) isn’t quite as impressive as creating art by writing fiction.

But they obviously don’t understand why I write computer books. It isn’t because I love composing sentences like: “Choose File > Open. The Open dialog appears. Locate and select the file you want to open. Click Open.” It’s because I like to eat, have a roof over my head, and buy cool toys like helicopters.

Yes, it’s true. I write computer books for the same reason most people go to the office every day. The same reason Mickey Spillane wrote books with titles like The Erection Set.

As Spillane once said,

“I have no fans. You know what I got? Customers. And customers are your friends.”

Ah, if only I could have as many friends like that.