Juvenilia

So a few weeks ago, when the new generation of Amazon Kindles were announced, I went ahead and made a purchase. Although I’ve wanted an e-reader for a while, I’ve never bought one. For one thing, they’ve been too expensive. There’s no way that any e-reader should cost $200, $300, or $400. That’s just ridiculous. [...]

Last weekend I read my last book of the summer. It was a novella titled Miss Lonelyhearts, written by increasingly obscure early 20th century American author Nathanael West. I actually read the book a few years ago. At the time, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. West is a peculiar writer and [...]

The latest book I read is called Parrot in the Oven and it’s by Victor Martinez. It’s intended for YA audiences. It’s a very well written book. Compared to the two other YA books I read this summer, Bully and Ragged Dick, Parrot in the Oven is easily the best of the three. Martinez is [...]

Another one of my books on my summer reading list was Strange Future by Joshua Smith. It’s another science fiction novel (this is my summer of sci-fi, apparently). It’s sort of a time travel story. The protagonist, Thomas, and two other characters from the early 21st century are cryogenically frozen and wake up 200 years [...]

Horatio Alger is one of those authors whose name everyone knows, but nowadays, no one reads. 125 years ago, though, he was the J.K. Rowling of his era. He wrote scores of novels for children and sold millions of copies of them. Unfortunately, all those novels were so formulaic in terms of plot and protagonist, [...]

I take pride in finding just the right pictures to accompany my blog posts. I think they look nice, and apparently, so do other bloggers. I discovered yesterday that another blog has been linking to a few of my pictures in order to add those pictures to her blog. I don’t own the pictures that [...]

I got clued in to a website called “I Write Like.” Here’s a link. What the site is supposed to do is analyze your writing and try to find the famous author that you supposedly resemble. I decided to try it. First, I pasted the opening chapter of Leah. I clicked “Analyze” and immediately I [...]

What’s odd about The Diary of a Young Girl is that it really isn’t that odd at all. Even though she does give updates about the war and the political situation that has forced her and her family to go into hiding, she confesses that she isn’t really interested in politics. Once she settles in [...]

I’ve been working on two chapters lately. First, I’m still working on Chapter Dinner (that chapter is more a matter of layering than drafting). I’ve also been writing a new chapter I call Chapter Father’s Day (can you guess when it’s set?). With these two chapters, I now have twelve chapters for the novel portion [...]

I finished reading The Catcher in the Rye, the next book on my list this summer. I read the book for the first time a few years ago, and I’ve been itching to read it again, especially after Salinger died a few months ago. I didn’t read the novel when I was a teenager. It [...]