Read this article. Spread it around. And then point out to others that when you have your nose in a book, you are not being antisocial, and that the world would improve if they read too…
Are you a fiction or a nonfiction person? What’s your favorite literary genre? Any guilty pleasures?“
My guiltiest pleasure is Harry Stephen Keeler. He may have been the greatest bad writer America has ever produced. Or perhaps the worst great writer. I do not know. There are few faults you can accuse him of that he is not guilty of. But I love him.
How can you not love a man who wrote books with names like “The Riddle of the Traveling Skull”? Or “The Case of the Transposed Legs”?
I get into arguments with Otto Penzler, of the Mysterious Bookshop in New York, when I say things like that. “No, Neil!” he splutters. “He was just a bad writer!”
Otto still takes my money when I buy Keeler books like “The Skull of the Waltzing Clown” from him. But the expression on his face takes some of the fun out of it. And then I read a paragraph like:
“For it must be remembered that at the time I knew quite nothing, naturally, concerning Milo Payne, the mysterious Cockney-talking Englishman with the checkered long-beaked Sherlockholmsian cap; nor of the latter’s ‘Barr-Bag,’ which was as like my own bag as one Milwaukee wienerwurst is like another; nor of Legga, the Human Spider, with her four legs and her six arms; nor of Ichabod Chang, ex-convict, and son of Dong Chang; nor of the elusive poetess, Abigail Sprigge; nor of the Great Simon, with his 2,163 pearl buttons; nor of — in short, I then knew quite nothing about anything or anybody involved in the affair of which I had now become a part, unless perchance it were my Nemesis, Sophie Kratzenschneiderwümpel — or Suing Sophie!”
And then I do not give a fig for Otto’s expression, for as guilty pleasures go, Keeler is as strangely good as it gets.
— http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/books/review/neil-gaiman-shares-his-reading-habits.html?_r=0Unlike the Harry Potter books, which are beloved by adult readers, Rick Riordan’s retellings of Greek myths seem designed to repel grownups with teen goofiness.
In which I find myself invoked all over the place, and on the winning side of an argument I didn’t even know I was having.
My speech on reading, libraries, and obligations…
Giving it sort of slowly because I had a panic attack just before I got up to speak and was convinced that it made no sense and I couldn’t read it.
“Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.”—Neil Gaiman, “Why our future depends on libraries, reading, and daydreaming”
This is wonderful.
Advance Warning: A Reading May Happen…
Just a hasty note to say that I want to read the short story I finished two days ago to an audience, to find out whether it works or not, and so on. It’s a fairy tale, I suppose, and will probably take about an hour, or a little more, to read.
I’m out in upstate New York right now with Amanda, who is rehearsing her stage show at Bard (and will be doing the first ever test performances of the new show, in all its high tech MIT magic and low tech glitz and glitter) on the 5th and 6th of September. (Tickets for the show on the 4th have already sold out.)
Information and tickets for Amanda’s Grand Theft Orchestra shows can be found here.
The current plan is that I’m going to read my story at Bard College on the 5th around lunch time. Maybe I’ll read a few other new things and round the time up to 90 minutes. Venue to be decided, and tickets are either going to be free, or very cheap (so that people who reserve tickets will actually show up.)
As soon as the venue is confirmed I’ll put up a link to wherever you can go to sign up for it.