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LitNotes: Anyone Can Do It Edition
January 25, 2008

Write a Novel: If you have a cell phone, you can do it! Just ask the new generation of Japanese cell-phone novelists, like Rin, whose keyboard-composed If You has sold 400,000 copies in hardcover. Says Rin of her peers: “They don’t read works by professional writers because their sentences are too difficult to understand, their expressions are intentionally wordy, and the stories are not familiar to them."

Review a Novel: A novelist discovers that the more he explored the "murky understory of Amazon's reviewer rankings," the more he came to see the real Web 2.0 as "a tangle of hidden agendas—one in which the disinterested amateur may be an endangered species." While the swashbuckling competition for top spots like Grady Harp's and Harriet Klausner's may mimic professionals' competition for editors' attention, there the similarity ends -- the only oversight the Harps and Klausners of the world have is their own mania to stay on top.

Read a Novel: I actually knew about the Art Garfunkel Library list before Nick Paumgarten's "Talk of the Town" piece came out, but I can't remember why. I do love his list of favorites, though -- as Paumgarten notes, Garfunkel's choices include just enough "middlebrow" selections to seem sincere. In his Favorites, Garfunkel unabashedly lists War and Peace at #4, while Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving is at #2. This is truly the library of someone whose choices are his own.

Posted by Bethanne Patrick on January 25, 2008 | Comments (0)