Category Archives: On Reading

Contemplating Structure, Time and the First-Person

In another incarnation I spent some time teaching screenwriting, which, as you may know, is all about structure. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that there is no screenwriting without structure. Typically, that means three acts highlighting a tightly causal chain of events with linear narration. In films that utilize flashback structure, these flashbacks are usually ordered so that they unfold in a linear fashion. Even Memento, to provide a notable example of a film that plays with time, employs linear temporality…

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Alas, and did my Savior bleed

Today is Good Friday. Our church doesn’t own its building, so we won’t be going to a service tonight. Instead, we’ll be watching Acts 3&4 of When the Levees Broke. While watching the first half last night I had to keep my eyes on my knitting to keep from dissolving in tears every five minutes. It’s shocking to see so many people suffering so greatly, under a baking hot sun with help so frustratingly unavailable. Why those people couldn’t have gotten food and water dropped…

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We Have a Winner!

In honor of Buy a Friend a Book week, I ran a contest to see if anyone could guess my other hobbies besides reading. I had millions of entries, but only one lucky winner. I do not: snort crystal meth make soap swim in the Hudson river teach the deaf to sing collect used bubble gum make model sailing ships out of toothpicks Someone guessed online scrabble, but I picked up that hobby after the contest began, so that’s wrong, too. If you browse through…

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Unprotected by Anonymous, MD

Synopsis: A survey of the state of affairs in campus counseling, presenting the argument that sexual activity is being left out of the equation with disastrous results. Review: The full title, Unprotected: A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in her Profession Endangers Every Student, offers a very good sense of the writer’s agenda, and she provides a great deal of evidence to support her claims. The term “political correctness” seems designed to tip off the right that she’s “one of us,” but really it’s…

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Words, Words, Words

My new addiction to online Scrabble has me thinking about how much I love words, those pesky little lettered things that roam errant across the page, resisting containment even by the author, each sentence a pregnant cumulonimbus promising disaster, by turns jocular and contentious, the period an upstart proclaiming its unearned dominance.

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I Want to Buy You a Book

It’s Buy a Friend a Book Week and I want to buy a book for one of my readers. To enter the contest, you just need to answer a simple trivia question about the Superfast Reader: What’s one of Superfast Reader’s other hobbies, besides reading? I’ll collect entries through the Contact Form below or by email until Thursday, 3pm EST. The winner will be chosen randomly from participants with the correct answer, and I’ll buy you the book of your choice up to $15USD. Good…

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10 Books I Can’t Live Without

I found this meme over at Bookfoolery and Babble, and heaven knows I love lists. These are the 10 books that form the backbone of my library, the 10 books with which I would never part, the 10 books that I will always reread at every stage of my life. That’s not to say that I could live without any books but these, but that I need these books to be me.

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How to Turn a Book Into a Movie

I’m often asked what I look for when I evaluate books for the movie biz. First and foremost, I look for the elements that are important to my employers–things that they are specifically looking for in terms of genre, execution, etcetera. I read for a couple of different places, and each has a slightly different mandate. In general, in order for a book to become a movie it has to have a strong, forward-moving plot line, and a premise that you can easily picture on…

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