Let me sum up: Basically, The Wylie Agency has decided to develop a digital-only branch of their publishing house. They’ve signed an exclusive, two-year deal with Amazon to pimp their stuff.

Think about that a minute. Let this sink in: Authors will write novels and those novels can only be read by purchasing a Kindle from Amazon (currently priced at $189 for the basic model and $379 with all the bells and whistles) and then downloading the book from Amazon’s store (current novel price ranges from $9.99 to $12.99). Seriously? I mean, I know if there’s a way around that by cheating somehow, someone will find it and exploit it. BUT you shouldn’t have to break the law in order to avoid paying OVER TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS MINIMUM to read a book! OH MY GOD! What kind of a dystopian, backwoods bullshit is this??

I get the appeal. I do. Print is a dying industry and it’s expensive and can be bulky and a pain in the ass to store and transport and if a digital reader can give you an entire library in the palm of your hand –why wouldn’t you jump for joy!? When we order letterhead for our office it ends up costing us an arm and a leg and that’s to say nothing of all the trees we use up in the process. Then we have to store it properly and take care that it’s not too hot or too cold or too moist or too dry — lest we end up with wrinkled, crinkled, useless letterhead. It’s an expensive hassle. And that’s just in my teeny little 10 person office.

BUT WE DO IT ANYWAY. Cause you have to. And look, we’re talking about books here. BOOKS! Books — you don’t have to. You shouldn’t! I love the idea of the Kindle and I’ll probably end up with one eventually, but I hate to think of us going down that particular rabbit hole. It scares me.

I love a good book. I love the feel of the spine against my fingers. I love turning the pages in anticipation, love the feel of the thin sheets between my thumb and forefinger. I love to bury my face in an old book, to breathe in its heady aroma. I love libraries with stacks and stacks and row upon row of booky goodness. I like to walk down the aisles at Powell’s and caress the books as I go.

Can I walk into a Kindle? Can I run my hands across the backs? Can I smell an old favorite in a Kindle??? How the hell am I supposed to do that with a Kindle? You tell me that much right here and now. Yes, I will probably get one. NO, I don’t want that to mean you take away my current option. Why can’t I have both? A kindle, light and sexy for the plane. A big, fat, epic book for my bed and bunny slippers, hair up in curlers?

We’ll see. There’s a lot of missing details in that article and I’ve got some questions begging for answers. I’m going to be watching this to see where we go. I know a lot of publishers and authors are pissed right off, so maybe there’s hope yet. Maybe. I’ll keep you posted!

Stephen King wrote a couple short paragraphs on his passing over at his EW column. I won’t link to it because, like most things on the net, the comments section ruins it. I’m embarrassed BY and FOR those folks.

I’m a fan of Stephen King and I’m not embarrassed to admit that. His more recent work is a little too political and heavy-handed for my tastes, but I won’t hold that against him. I just read (and re-read and re-read) the classics (and they ARE classics, whether you’re a fan or not) and leave the new stuff for someone else. Perhaps that’s why the comments bother me so much. People can be so cruel with the things they say. How big you must feel sitting back on your anonymous high horse, typing venomous vitriol at a person who has done more in the face of adversity than you have even the capacity to dream of! How satisfying it must be for you to tear down the lifetime achievements of another person; you sitting there doing nothing, going nowhere, but talking such a big game. How proud your mothers must be!

All I can say is, fan or no, King is a better person than I. I couldn’t sit there and read the shit people throw my way day after day and not get so disillusioned and cynical that it kills me. Good on him. Perhaps he’s trained himself not to read those comments? Perhaps. But even that is an accomplishment. It would be difficult NOT to read, I should think. More difficult not to take it all to heart. More difficult to climb back in the saddle and write another column, subjecting yourself to more garbage.

Anyway, he writes regularly for Entertainment Weekly and I read his columns because he often has interesting things to say about pop culture, new authors on the scene, horror movies, etc. Check it out if you’re so inclined, I think the title of the column is “The Pop of King” or something catchy like that. Google it and you should be able to find it.  Just avoid the comments section unless you like hateful rhetoric.

This isn’t about Stephen King anyway. It’s about JD Salinger. I just got way off topic as per my usual. I wasn’t a big fan of most of Salinger’s work. I read his books, but none of them really got to me like “A Catcher in the Rye” did. I know, how predictable, right? I don’t care. It was great. I’ve read it at least a half a dozen times over the years and now I feel like reading it again. Caulfield was just such a great anti-hero. And the way he talked, his narrative really spoke to me at the ripe old age of 16 — the first encounter I had with him. I still have that worn and faded original copy from 1966. It was already  23 years old by the time I got my hands on it in ’89. I’ve got other, newer copies, too. Those are the ones I read. I leave the old, original copy sitting on the bookshelf untouched. It’s likely to fall apart if I don’t. I’ve flipped through the pages too many times now.

I remember when the boys were in middle school I tried to get them to read it. The subject matter was a little risky, but I really wanted to connect with them over this one. Jacob read “To Kill a Mockingbird” and loved it. We watched the movie and had a lot of great discussions about it. Kaileb read “Flowers for Algernon” and loved it. Ditto the great talks and movie watching. They both liked “Lord of the Flies” but hated the ending. Can’t say I blame them, but we had a lot of really heated discussions about it, debated it, analyzed it. Both enjoyed “Animal Farm” as well. Things were progressing smashingly and I was enjoying sharing my love of reading with them. I nudged them in the direction of “Rye”, but they just couldn’t get into it. They tried. To their credit they did try to make a go of it. It just wasn’t meant to be. I was really disappointed and probably pushed them too far to try again. They wouldn’t go for it and I eventually gave up.

Perhaps now that they are in high school it would be a better time to give it a go and I might mention it to them again. I might just leave it out on the table and be all like, “What? Oh, how did this book get here? Well, I guess someone should read it!”

I just remember reading it and feeling so exhilarated, so dangerous! It was an exciting book with such a rebellious theme that I was swept up in the adventure of it. Perhaps it was because I was raised in a strict southern-baptist home. I remember thinking, “If my parents knew the wicked naughtiness of this book!” and then giggling hysterically at my little secret. I was no stranger to having books removed from my possession due to their subject matter. It’s no wonder I held so tightly to this one, kept it hidden. I guess I can understand the boys and their lack of understanding. They live in a different time, a different world. It probably doesn’t seem anywhere near as dangerous to them, given all they are exposed to these days. Yet, I’ll try again. It’s worth another go.

I know Salinger was a notorious recluse. I know he shunned media and lived out his days in solitude. I don’t know why though. I don’t know if there was some reason behind his disdain for the light. Perhaps now that he’s died we’ll have some answers. It’s more fitting that those answers would come after his death, he doesn’t have to live with that which he apparently hated most: attention.

Regardless, I hope his final days found him happy and content. I hope he shucked this mortal coil with a sense of satisfaction and peace. I hope that when death found him, it found him serene and ready to go. I hope he died having never read a single internet comment thread.

RIP, Salinger, and thanks for the memories.

I just finished reading “The Forest of Hands and Teeth” by Carrie Ryan. It’s billed as “young adult fiction” and I suppose it is. It’s not like Twilight or anything, so at least I have that going for me. Mostly it was the zombies that got me. I am SUCH a sucker for a zombie. It could have been a child’s pop up book and so long as it has a zombie in it, I’m there, all like, “Yay! lookit the zombie popping out of the book!” clapping my hands, perhaps drooling a little. Who knows what’s wrong with me? Who can say?

The book follows Mary, a young girl in a remote village walled in on all sides by high, chain link fences. It’s many, many years after the zombie apocalypse and the children growing up in this sanctuary know nothing of a life without the “unconsecrated” shambling along the fence line, hungering for flesh. How’s that for cerebral reading? War and Peace it ain’t, I know. I won’t go into too many details because I don’t want to give anything away, but also because you probably don’t care. If you’re likely to read something like this you don’t want to know too many plot details and if you’re not? Then you definitely don’t want to know.

Anyway, I don’t want to talk about the story. I want to talk about The Book and its author. Carrie Ryan is a good writer, I’ll give her that. She beats the pants off of Stephanie “Nutjob” Meyer, but I realize that’s not saying much. And I realize it’s fiction for young adults and I’m far from young, so I’ve got to cut her some slack there as well. I’m not her target audience, I just lust for anything zombie-related I can sink my teeth into. Pardon the pun. But she could have done better.

It was a compelling story that had my heart racing in more than one place in the book. I was so freaked out and scared a couple times I had to set the book down and walk away for a minute. Remind myself it’s not real. I was freaking out when I had to go out on the front porch in the dark. By myself. Where there might be zombies. Holy hell, I get way too into these things for how much they affect me.

There was a little too much of the stupid side story though. This whole love triangle thing that I guess every author of young adult fiction feels compelled to inflict on their storyline. It got a little old, the constant battle between the two brothers who both have it bad for our heroine. And she pissed me off. She vacillated between the boys, unable to make up her mind about which she really loved. She was a strong, liberated, independent super girl one minute and a simpering, whiny brat the next. She got on my nerves and if I had to survive a zombie outbreak with her…well, let’s just say only one of us would make it. There was way too much pining away with moonbeams in her eyes for my taste, but I will allow that, again, it wasn’t geared toward me as an audience and just because I’m old and crotchety, doesn’t mean a 17 year old girl wouldn’t read it and just be all like [swoon] . So I don’t think she should lose points for that, is all I’m sayin’.

What really bothered me about the book is that it had so much potential. I’m reading this thing, totally engrossed in it, and I’m thinking this would make a great movie. It would even make a good television series. All the elements are there. It wasn’t until the end that it fell apart. It jumped the shark. It nuked the fridge.

When I read I get invested in the book. I give it my time, my attention. Those are two precious commodities around here so I don’t just give them away willy nilly. And when I do find something to give them to, I get mad when the end result is less than I had hoped for. I resent it. Yeah, I guess I take it a bit personally.

The book didn’t really end. Maybe she left it this way because she’s hoping for a Meyeresque 3 book deal with movie rights to follow. If so, shame on her. It’s B.S. to bait like that for your own selfish desires. What about MY selfish desires? I had more unanswered questions by the last page than I had one chapter in. She just could have done so much more. What caused the outbreak? How did all these villages come into being? What was the sisterhood hiding? What did they do to Gabriella? Why? What significance does the red vest hold? What happened to the occupants of the abandoned village? Is that where Gabriella came from? What happened to Harry? To Jed? To Jacob and Cassie? Where’s the history? What do the roman numerals signify? Who decided on that system, if it was a system? Was it a system? What purpose did it serve? Where’s Mary’s dad? How did he get outside the fence? What happens next, dammit?

But maybe I’ll never know. Maybe I’ll have to be satisfied with making the ending I would want it to have and leave it at that. I just feel a little cheated. Enough so to be blogging about it, ffs. Stephen King could have done so much with that plot. He would have given me more than enough back story. Plenty of history. He wouldn’t have left me just hanging there. I wonder if he’s read it and if so I wonder what he thinks. I imagine he would be just as disappointed with it as I was. The story telling was so good! It had so much potential! All the elements were there and then, well I guess it just seems like she got tired of writing it and decided to just end it where she was. Or perhaps because it was fiction aimed at young adults she had to keep it to a certain length. I don’t know. I think that’s selling young people short, personally. They are just as curious, if not more so, than us old fogies.

It’s too bad too because when I was reading it I was raving to the boys about how good it was. I excitedly stood over them and recounted some particularly creepy passages and they seemed to be all about it. I told them they could borrow it when I was done, but now, well now I don’t think I could recommend they waste their time, based on the ending. Or lack of one.

I want those two days back, dammit.

well, not so much written as thought about it.

well, not so much thought about it as i’ve come up with really excellent titles for them.

i come up with all these awesome book titles and i get a glimmer of an idea for the book behind the title and then i get all jacked about writing the actual book and that usually lasts until i fall asleep as that’s typically when these brilliant ideas come to me. then when i awake in the morning the only thing that lingers is the totally awesome title and that’s it.

which really, all this amounts to nothing. except this maybe. if you ever write a best selling novel and you can’t think of a title call me up. i’ve got tons!

when i read a book i develop a friendship with the author. i become intimate with the characters. i belong to that place. it’s disappointing to me when the book ends. i hesitate over the last chapter. turn the last few pages so slowly they age in time, turning yellow and crisp on the way. then, when it’s over i feel a certain sadness in the end. it’s like when you’re ten years old and your best friend moves millions of miles away from you. i hate to say goodbye.

this is probably the reason i read books over and over again. the book i’m reading now is 1200 pages and heavy as hell to cart around. and this is my third or fourth time reading it. but it doesn’t matter. to me, it’s like checking in with an old friend.

the boys don’t seem to have developed my love of books though. at least not yet. i keep holding out hope that they’ll “get it” one day. one day it will just click with them and they’ll see all the joy and wonder that lies therein and i won’t have to beat it into them.

but i doubt it. so in the meantime i’m improving my aim.