Michael Janairo

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Author: Michael Janairo

  • A new writing contest at Gather.com

    So the Sobol award is gone, now here comes a new award contest. Here’s the skinny from Gather.com:

    Today, I’m exceptionally excited to announce Gather’s newest writing competition, one of our most promising programs to date: The Gather.com First Chapters Writing Competition. First Chapters offers thousands of aspiring, but unpublished, authors the opportunity to win a guaranteed publishing contract with Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, promotion and distribution by Borders, and a $5,000 cash prize from Gather.com. This competition will launch the career of one talented Gather member and introduce many others to the industry.

    Maybe this contest will actually work.

  • A little Menken in the morning…

    On of the book blogs I check out often is Of Books and Bicycles. In a recent post, Of Books responds to a post on a different blog — BlogLily — about book reviewing and feeling sheepish about criticizing someone who has put so much work into a book AND has gotten it published. A worthy read, of course, would be the list of rules for reviewers that John Updike wrote and is now posted at the blog of the National Book Critics Circle (I am member of the organization, by the way). But it is also good to review the words of HL Menken:

    A book review, first and foremost, must be entertaining. By this I mean that it must be dexterously written, and show an interesting personality. The justice of the criticism embodied in it is a secondary matter. It is often, and perhaps usually, quite impossible to determine definitely whether a given book is ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ The notion to the contrary is a delusion of the defectively intelligent. It is almost always accompanied by moral passion. But a critic may at least justify himself by giving his readers civilized entertainment …. If he is a well-informed man and able to write decently, anything he writes about anything will divert his readers.

  • Facts, figures about reading and books

    In catching up on my reading of what the Times Union offers readers (in print), I came across a Harvey McKay column in the business section that focuses on reading. Though he doesn’t attribute his facts, I present them here for your reading pleasure:

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  • HVCC Reads “Ironweed”; UAlbany reads “Field Notes from a Catastrophe”

    HVCC READS is a community reading program designed to encourage students, faculty and staff to read and discuss the same book — William Kennedy’s Ironweed. Meanwhile, at UAlbany, the campus will be reading Field Notes from a Catastrophe by Elizabeth Kolbert.
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  • Evolving book clubs

    In a story out of Bellingham, Wash., today (where I had my first job in journalism, by the way, at the Bellingham Herald) is a piece about the evolving nature of book clubs.

    Here’s the link to the story, and here’s a sample:

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  • My favorite audiobook of 2006

    In an earlier post, I said I’d write about my favorite audiobook of the past year. That honor easily goes to Haruki Murakami’s “The Wind-up Bird Chronicle,” as read by Rupert Degas for the Naxos Audiobooks company.

    For a review of the audiobook as well as “A Wild Sheep Chase,” click “more.”

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  • A Vonnegut controversy

    vonn.jpgA colleague is reading her first Vonnegut novel — ever. I don’t think it is necessarily a sin to be living in the Capital Region without having read the former GE worker’s work, but the choice of novel, “Breakfast of Champions,” has raised some interesting discussions.

    Namely, one other colleague says that it is the *wrong* book to be the first Vonnegut novel, that it probably should be Slaughterhouse 5 or Cat’s Cradle.

    I see nothing wrong with Breakfast, after all it has fun doodles and Kilgore Trout is writing away in Cohoes.
    This leads to a couple bigger questions I put to you, dear readers: If you had to recommend someone read one (or if you could only read one) Vonnegut novel, which would it be?

    Other questions could be: Why read him now at all? Does Vonnegut still matter?

    (one answer can be found in Indiana, where 2007 is the Year of Vonnegut:

    The Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library and the Indianapolis Cultural Development Commission are hosting a yearlong celebration of Kurt Vonnegut. Here’s a look at the highlights. For a complete list, go to www.yearofvonnegut.org.

  • Scooby Doo creator dies

    The story is here.

  • Charlie Rose interviews available on google video

    For more info, go to this blog: http://www.edrants.com/?p=5262Here’s what it says:

    A good number of Charlie Rose interviews are now available through Google Video. (They had previously been available for $1.00 per view, but Google has since added video ads, making them free, and helpfully demarcated these ads through blue dots on the timeline.)

    What this means, of course, is that the infamous DFW interview is now available. If you haven’t seen it, this is the interview in which Rose, who doesn’t seem to have read much of DFW’s work, asks DFW (wearing, believe it or not, a bandanna and shirtsleeves) about everything but his books. DFW comes in at the 23:17 mark.

    It’s the telltale indicator of how low the literary journalism bar has fallen (compared with, say, the Dick Cavett shows of the 1970s, where Cavett or his researchers actually read the damn books) — a veritable train wreck and a true revelation of Rose’s illiteracy. A visibly uncomfortable DFW is bullied by questions that pertain to David Lynch, with Rose boasting about interviewing Lynch instead of talking about DFW’s work. Rose’s ignorance is astonishing, particularly as DFW educates Rose about the history of postmodern literature.

    And this was only ten years ago.

    http://www.edrants.com/?p=5262