thebookishowl.com

FAIL Blog

Spotify is now streaming the new Daft Punk album, Random Access Memories (out May 21st).

The Guardian reviews the album.

Urban Titan lists the top 25 horror novels for young adults.

At the New Yorker, authors weigh in on the importance of likeability of characters in fiction.

Two writers debate whether the Smiths were the best or worst band in the past 30 years at the Telegraph.

Flavorwire lists 10 of the greatest Cold war spy novels.

Rolling Stone asks, “What is the best summer song?”

Hilary Mantel shares her reading habits with the New York Times.

Yo la Tengo frontman Ira Kaplan talks to the Denver Post about the band’s approach to recording.

Author Elliott Holt lists her six favorite books about expatriates at NPR Books.

Indie band ANAMANAGUCHI fielded questions from the Reddit community.

Zola Books interviews James Renner about his novel The Man from Primrose Lane.

Norman Lock discusses his favorite short story at Flavorwire.

Katie Shelly talks to The Salt about her forthcoming illustrated cookbook, Picture Cook: See. Make. Eat..

The Thermals visit The Current studio for an interview and live performance.

Weekend Edition interviews Colin Broderick about his new memoir, That’s That.

“When I started writing That’s That, I thought it was just a story about my childhood. And two years in, I realized — and I thought it was only going to take me two years — but two years in I realized it’s not just my story that I’m telling. And I think the book itself, it’s about personal narrative, it’s the story of a family, it’s the story of a son and a mother, but it’s also a story of Northern Ireland.”

Read an excerpt from the book.

Morning Edition profiles singer-songwriter Sam Amidon.

Shape-note singing is a communal form of music that began in New England 200 years ago, mostly from townsfolk without any musical training. It’s music that surrounded folk singer during his childhood in Vermont.

Five English scholars weigh in on the latest film adaptation of The Great Gatsby at The Millions.

Amazon MP3 offers 100 albums on sale for each.
Amazon MP3 offers over 1,400 albums on sale for .99.
Amazon MP3 offers over 600 albums for sale for .99.
Amazon MP3 offers over 400 jazz albums on sale for .78.
Amazon MP3 offers over 56,000 free and legal mp3s.

Follow me on Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Google+, Facebook, and Stumbleupon for links (updated throughout the day) that don’t make the daily “Shorties” columns.

also at Largehearted Boy:

previous Shorties posts (daily news and links from the worlds of music, books, and pop culture)

100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
Atomic Books Comics Preview (the week’s best new comics & graphic novels)
Book Notes (authors create playlists for their book)
daily mp3 downloads
Largehearted Word (the week’s best new books)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from this week’s CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

Largehearted Boy

This weekend, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park hosts its second annual GoogaMooga food festival, and I am interviewing Michael Moss there tomorrow about his fascinating book, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us.

For a chance at winning this book and a 0 Threadless gift certificate, share your favorite guilty pleasure food in a comment. Cheese is easily my foodstuff kryptonite, in any and all forms.

One winner, chosen randomly from the commenters, will receive the following prizes:

Michael Moss’s book Salt Sugar Fat

A 0 Threadless gift certificate to buy book-related t-shirts like Storytellers, The Best Channels Since 1465, Fahrenheit 451, Brainy Rainbow, or Word!, and music-related t-shirts like Death Note, Funkalicious, Music Snob, or anything else that catches your fancy.

If you have already have this book or it doesn’t interest you, I am happy to substitute a second 0 Threadless gift certificate.

The winner will be chosen randomly at midnight ET Friday evening (May 24th).

also at Largehearted Boy:

previous and ongoing contests at Largehearted Boy

100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
Atomic Books Comics Preview (highlights of the week’s new comics)
Book Notes (authors create playlists for their book)
Daily Downloads (daily free and legal music downloads)
Largehearted Word (highlights of the week’s book releases)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Shorties (daily links from the worlds of music, literature, and pop culture)

Largehearted Boy

FAIL Blog

Teach Me Tonight

Fantasy Book Critic

FAIL Blog

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.

In his own words, here is Ben Greenman’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel, The Slippage:

In the past I have written book notes for What He’s Poised to Do and A Circle Is a Balloon and Compass Both, collections of short stories that came out in 2010 and 2007. This time, the book in question is called The Slippage, and it’s a novel, and it’s coming out as we speak from Harper Perennial. Other books I’ve written have been, sometimes, manic with regard to imagination, incontinent in various ways. This one is more controlled, largely because of its plot—it’s the story of a forty-something couple in a possibly failing marriage in the suburbs, and a stretch of life during which the woman, Louisa, asks the man, William, to build her a new house. The suburbs are a major character: they help create a sense of emptiness and silence that gives the characters plenty of space to reflect but also oppresses them. As a result, I have picked songs about the suburbs, more or less.

The Kinks, “Shangri-La” (1969)

It’s rare to be able to pinpoint an exact starting point for a writing project, but I know that this book had its start in this song, and specifically in a line that Ray Davies wrote that I think about all the time: “And all the houses in the street have got a name / Cause all the houses in the street they look the same.” That’s a perfect compression of one of the main ideas here, which is how we distinguish ourselves from one another. Our insides may be different (by insides here, I mean desires, fears, ambitions) but the skins are very similar. The suburbs is a particularly accurate illustration of this principle.

Dionne Warwick, “A House is Not a Home” (1964)

I named the second section of the book after this song. It seemed like a no-brainer: It’s one of the towering achievements of the decade, possibly the best Bacharach-David composition. And it’s thematically pertinent as well. A structure is only a structure, meaningless unless filled by meaning. William and Louisa, the central couple in my book, struggle with this distinction repeatedly, in the house where they live, in the house where they may one day live, and in many other houses they visit along the way.

The Residents, “Suburban Bathers” (1980)

It seems strange to write a more traditional work and then go looking to the Residents for inspiration. On the other hand, if you were going to pick a Residents album that follows conventions while at the same time subverting them, you’d pick Commercial Album. “Suburban Bathers” also makes some superb observations about self-knowledge: “If I’d learn to love myself / I might survive the murky depths.”

Carole King, “My Simple Humble Neighborhood” (1975)

King’s song is about the magic of home, the sense of hope that comes from comfort, the joys of dreaming big. My characters deal with their neighborhood differently. For starters, they’re adults, not children, which means that their souls have ossified to some degree as a result of work and disappointment. Also, there’s more responsibility than comfort, more pressure than freedom. These things reverse the circuit.

Ween, “So Many People In the Neighborhood” (2003)

This is the counterweight to the Carole King song above: there’s no Really Rosie here, only really creepy faces peering from behind curtains, and the title repeated until it become a slogan and then a threat, and a final lyrical burst about “socks and locks and cocks and rocks.” Those are, as everyone knows, the four building blocks of deceptive domesticity.

Tim Hardin, “If I Were A Carpenter” (1967)

I have written books that were overtly about music, like Please Step Back (a funk-rock novel about a fictional Sly Stone-type musician in the 1960s and 1970s), and books where music was referenced often (like Superbad or Celebrity Chekhov). In this book, there’s only one song mentioned overtly, and it’s this one. William is sitting on the deck and hears it coming out of a portable radio. The lyrics strike him as lyrical but also incomprehensible, a kind of poetry that doesn’t solve anything in his increasingly claustrophobic life.

Jonathan Richman, “The Neighbors” (1983)

I was mindful throughout this book of not straining for effect, either via image or form or metafictional trickery. I wanted, to the degree that it was possible, to be straightforward about things. Is that what Jonathan Richman does? You could say that, though you could also say that he appears to do that while doing the diametric opposite. This song relates a dialogue between Jonathan and a woman in which his presence in her house presents some problems. He’s worried that if anyone sees him leaving, they might tell his wife, and that would create marital discord. On the other hand, he doesn’t want to let the neighbors run his life. My main character, William, faces a very similar situation, but he is not holding a guitar.

Little Richard, “Slippin’ and Slidin’” (1956)

Recently, at an event, a woman I knew came up to me and asked me if she was the only one who thought the title of my book, The Slippage, sounded dirty. She wasn’t. When the title was first announced, a British man wrote me to tell me that it was slang for screwing. I defer to Little Richard. Is there a more exciting, breakneck song about attraction and risk? No man can resist a solid sender.

Ben Greenman and The Slippage links:

the author’s website
the author’s Wikipedia entry

Chicago Tribune review
Kansas City Star review
New York Observer review
New York Times review

Believer interview with the author
Cultist profile of the author
Forbes interview with the author
Interview Magazine interview with the author
Largehearted Boy Book Notes essay by the author for A Circle Is a Balloon and Compass Both
Largehearted Boy Book Notes essay by the author for What He’s Poised to Do
Miami Herald interview with the author
The Millions contributions by the author
Page Views profile of the author
The Rumpus interview with the author

also at Largehearted Boy:

Book Notes (2012 – ) (authors create music playlists for their book)
Book Notes (2005 – 2011) (authors create music playlists for their book)
my 11 favorite Book Notes playlist essays

100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
52 Books, 52 Weeks (weekly book reviews)
Antiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
Atomic Books Comics Preview (weekly comics highlights)
Daily Downloads (free and legal daily mp3 downloads)
guest book reviews
Largehearted Word (weekly new book highlights)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Shorties (daily music, literature, and pop culture links)
Soundtracked (composers and directors discuss their film’s soundtracks)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from the week’s CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

Largehearted Boy

Many rail against corporate media—as I have—and corporate everything. An easy target. The question is: What do you replace it with?

For too many the objective seems to be Bigger Government. Top heavy bureaucracy. Yet this was tried in the Soviet Union and other places and failed.

Literature is stagnant because the choice seems to be between Monopoly Conglomerate mass market lowest-common-denominator junk, on the one hand, and NEA, university, and tax shelter-backed “literary” craftings on the other, which are as stagnant, and as junky, in their own way.

The third way is to decentralize. Not Big Government, Big Conglomerates, or Big anything. A freer and more open marketplace accommodating a wider variety of choices and new, unorthodox ideas. Neither running away from the market, nor dominating it. Letting it breathe. Idealistic, sure, but with the rise of ebooks, not completely naive.

AttackingtheDemi-Puppets

As a film and book reviewer for a number of periodicals and websites over the years, I have often wrestled with the art of rating. To some, the awarding of stars to a particular work might seem a simple matter, but there is a craft to it, and it is one of those tasks that can be as complicated as you care to make it — you can assign a rating on gut instinct, jotting down the first number that pops into your head, or you can (as I often do) vacillate back and forth over whether you should add that extra half star.

It is also one of the most subjective undertakings. It is one thing to decide whether you enjoyed a movie; it is quite another to assign it some value on a fixed scale. First off, you, the reviewer, must decide on what criteria and within what framework you are going to base your ratings. In fact, this varies so dramatically from one reviewer to the next that the best you can hope for is to be as consistent as possible with yourself.

Believe me, there is no set, agreed-upon code among professional critics to which you need worry about conforming; you just need to make sure your readers can understand your reasoning. It is also helpful to communicate your personal tastes and preferences insofar as they influence your assessments, so that readers know where you’re coming from. Here are some other considerations…

I. Weighing the Scales

The first question is which scale to use. This is pretty arbitrary and varies greatly from one publication to the next. Perhaps the most simple was Siskel and Ebert’s “Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down.” But this was a bit too austere, so they added a further designation of “Thumbs Way Up” — else how could you differentiate  a film that was an amusing diversion from a film that blew your mind?

Most use either a 4-star or 5-star scale — with other signifiers sometimes substituted for stars. A horror site might award gravestones. One online B-movie site awards Godzilla heads. The most unique rating symbol may have been Nathan Shumate’s on his Cold Fusion Video Reviews site. The cold fusion symbol was reserved for those films so jaw-droppingly bad they achieved the mythical “cold fusion” — or, at least, they guarantee an hour or two of unintentionally uproarious entertainment.

Joe Bob Briggs, the “Drive-In Movie Critic,” notoriously adds to his ratings a tally of “Drive-In Totals” (here is an example from his one-and-a-half star [out of four] review of The Devil Inside: “5 Dead Bodies. No Bare Breasts. 3-4 Beasts. Priest-Flinging”). By the way, Shumate and Briggs are two of the most consistently funny film reviewers out there, both of them exercising their wit at the expense of the lowest of low-brow cinema.

I’ve always opted for the 5-star scale, with the additional parsing of half-stars (essentially making it a 10-point scale), but I like being able to make fine distinctions. As a college professor, it drove me nuts to have, for example, a student who just missed a B grade with 79%, while another student barely eked out 70% with some eleventh-hour extra credit, yet their transcripts would record them equally as C students. How I wished the university used plusses and minuses, because clearly one was a C + while the other was a C -, and a 9% spread in quality of work — that’s a pretty significant range!

II. The Stingy Critic versus the Generous Critic

Once you have your rating scale, the next issue is how you are going to deploy those stars. Here, again, we have a strong dose of subjectivity. Sometimes reviewers are stingy with their stars, reserving that fourth or fifth one for only the distinguished few. Others are more generous — but if you leniently hand out five-star ratings to just about any work you enjoy, how do you give special distinction to that rare work that comes along and rocks your world? (Stephen King complained about the trend of movie-ratings inflation in a 2007 op-ed for Entertainment Weekly. More on that next week.)

What really got me thinking about this was that a few months ago, Patrick Rothfuss (The Kingkiller Chronicle) posted on Goodreads an explanation for how he rates works. Now, it so happens that I’ve posted reviews and ratings of both his novels on Goodreads, so I’m pretty sure he’s seen them (rare is the author who doesn’t read all the reviews of his/her work, even those anonymous ones on Amazon. Oh, maybe Stephen King or Margaret Atwood can’t be bothered to read all of them, but the rest of us — yeah).

I gave his first book, The Name of the Wind, five stars and raved about it. And, like virtually everyone else who read that book, I eagerly anticipated the second installment. The Wise Man’s Fear delivered its share of pleasures, but this time out I had a few minor criticisms; nor was it the groundbreaking work the first was (although since this is the second book of a trilogy, it is somewhat unfairly artificial to weigh the pieces without weighing the whole).

Hence, I gave it 4 stars (according to the Goodreads definition for each rating increment, I “really liked it,” but would not go so far as to say “it was amazing”). This was an instance when I wished Goodreads allowed the parsing of stars, because I might have gone 4.5. But if you give something the highest increment, aren’t you saying there’s nothing better? I try to be fairly stingy with my five-star reviews, to avoid being the critic who cried wolf by declaring any book that tickled his fancy a landmark of the genre!

Reading Rothfuss’s explanation for how he approaches rating, I discovered he is a self-professed generous star-giver. A book really has to fall short in some major way for him to knock a star off. He freely admits he wishes there was a “sixth star” option for him to distinguish the truly seminal works, being that he gives five stars to so many books and graphic novels. It seems that for a work to get two or three stars from him it really has to stink, and I’ve read enough of his reviews to recognize that he reserves one star ratings for moral condemnation — to rebuke a work for racist or sexist overtones.

If I had rated The Wise Man’s Fear according to Rothfuss’s scale, I’d have given it five stars, no question. Hey, I’m not too concerned — I’m sure Rothfuss isn’t hurt that I shorted him a star — but it does serve to illustrate the continuum that exists between the stingy and the generous reviewer.

Next week, I’ll wrap up my thoughts on reviewing with parts III and IV, which will cover critical transparency (why one should be forthcoming about personal taste and biases that might influence one’s judgment) and framework (should one judge Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure by the standard of 2001: A Space Odyssey?).

Black Gate