Tag Archives: reading

Falling in love again

The PolyBlog
September 19 2016

Back when I was a wee lad, in the home country don’t you know (well, Peterborough, Ontario, population at the time around 55K), I ordered books from the Scholastic Book Club. I loved the SBC order forms, and frequently started out with 20 or 30 books I wanted, and had to whittle down my order to only one or two. One time, something I had ordered wasn’t available, and they gave me a credit plus a grab bag of three free books.
One of those free books was part of the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators series. Eventually growing to 42 books, the series was in its late teens volumes, maybe early 20s, but I think teens.

I fell in love for the first time, partly as the lead investigator was about my age, my size, and smarter than most of his friends. I had read some Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and I would go on to read Sherlock Holmes, Tom Swift, Rick Brant, the Bobbsey Twins, the Happy Hollisters, Louis L’Amour out the wazoo, Travis McGee, dozens of other series. Including my favorite “adult” series, all by Warren Murphy.

But the Three Investigators were my first true love of a series. I tracked the others down. Some through the library, most through the Trent University Book Store and a Coles store in the Peterborough Square. Then I found a bookstore on George Street in Peterborough, a rather small shop with a mix of used and new. And they carried the new 3I series books. Every couple of months, I would find a new one. I didn’t know the business model, but the authors were all on contract. Four or five in total, I think, most of whom got paid relative peanuts to write-for-hire i.e. no royalties, just paid to write in the series.

I have no idea how they licensed Alfred Hitchcock’s name, and eventually they had to deal with his death (the premise was just as Dr. Watson would “introduce” and tell the Holmes’ stories, Alfred Hitchcock would “present” the 3Is’ stories and the intros to the book were supposedly by AH).

Eventually the stories petered out, and it took awhile even to find the last couple. One or two of them I actually had to order, an unheard of idea back in 1980 or so for my pre-teen life.

Later, they tried to release an “update” to the series, with the kids no longer 10-12 but mid-teens. The stories were fine, but the characters were nothing like the earlier versions, more like kids with the same names. Pretenders, not the real McCoy.

It has been said that you can never fall in love again for the first time, but actually I can. I’ve started reading The Secret of Terror Castle, Three Investigators Book 1 to Jacob. I feared it would be too mature for him, but he’s following the story just fine. In retrospect, a ghost story premise is probably not the best of ideas since he thinks there are ghosts in our house and monsters in our basement, but I know the ending and think he’ll be okay with it. Think any episode of Scooby Doo and you can guess the outcome.

Last week and again this week, I’ve been reading to him here and there. We’re about halfway through book one. What I really want to know? If he’ll want to read Book 2 on his own when I’m done, or will want Daddy to keep reading to him. Either way, it’s nice to feel the love in the air.

Of course, I also have Artemis Fowl and Percy Jackson on deck at some point too. Not quite ready for Harry Potter, but he’s got time. There are 41 other books to go.

Articles I Like: Really? Tips to read more?

The PolyBlog
March 11 2016

One of my yearly goals that frequently reoccurs is to make time to read. Or simply to read more. So when I saw a link to an article about tips to “help you spend more time reading and finish books faster” (Source: 11 tips and tricks to make yourself read more), it seemed like a great potential resource. But when I read it, I couldn’t stop laughing at the suggestions. Maybe if you were a non-reader, but as a reader looking to carve out more time, they seemed hilarious to me.

1. Never leave home without a book — it says this is inconvenient if you don’t have a bag or purse to carry it in. Really? *I’m* a reader…half of my travel accessories are built around being big enough to carry both paper books and e-readers. I have small bags, medium bags, large bags. When I travel, I have large bags with enough room in them to carry my smaller bags for traveling around with once I get there. What reader doesn’t either have a bag if they are still a Luddite only reading paper or an ebook app (or five) on their digital devices?

2. Track your reading progress — Under the heading of “what gets measured, gets done”, here’s the thing … every second you spend TRACKING is a second you are not READING. Hello???? I want to read, not learn an app. However, tracking is important for shaming others who don’t read. If you don’t have the stats, you can’t humiliate others near as well.

3. Join a book club — book clubs are many things. But an incentive to read is rarely one of the most consistent. Reading is something YOU DO BY YOURSELF. You READ to READ, not so you can leverage it for more social interactions that will take you away from READING. On the other hand, if you’re low on your monthly quota of rich snacks, snooty acquaintances, and cheap wine, a book club might be for you!

4. Only read what you’re into — I’m sorry, that’s not how readers are wired. I read stuff I love. I read stuff I hate. I read stuff written on bathroom walls, graffiti on public buildings, the tags on mattresses, labels on cereal boxes, the name of the manufacturer of eye test charts when I’m waiting in the optometrist’s office. Read what I’m *into*? I’m INTO EVERYTHING — I’m a READER.

5. Knock out a few pages wherever and whenever you can — oh, you sly dog you. Books are like heroin or cocaine. You don’t get to just have a taste to take the edge off, you devour, you dive, you lose yourself in them until social relationships crumble around you because you were reading, lost track of time, and accidentally showed up 3 hours late to a wedding. Your own.

6. Read while you exercise — One of my favorites. I absolutely will read when I exercise. Or, more likely, I’ll exercise when I’m done reading. Which is when I finish reading every book ever written. Twice.

7. Read before bed — Really? Does this ever work out for anyone? I’m a READER, not a sleeper. This is how you ended up missing work the day after Harry Potter #4, 5, 6, and 7 came out. Cuz you were READING the night before, in bed, and stayed up for HOURS.

8. Get in tight with a book nerd — Here’s the thing. Book nerds have no friends. Well, not organic friends anyway. They have lots of paper friends. That’s why they’re BOOK NERDS — they don’t like PEOPLE!  Kind of hard to make friends with people who see you as an impediment to their continued reading.

9. Don’t read a bunch of things at one time — See point 4. I read EVERYTHING at once. If I accidentally leave a book at home, I’m on to the next book. I’m a reading ‘ho, I’ll become mentally intimate with anything with lines of text. Sometimes several partners a day. And when I’m done, I toss them aside like yesterday’s business, and I’m on to the next one! Sure, once in awhile, I’ll reminisce about my favorites, savour a particular experience, but the high fades like store-bought love often does, and I’m jones-ing for the next contact.

10. Find or make a quiet place — Quiet? Who needs quiet? I need a BOOK, after that the world disappears. Walls could crumble, buildings could fall, and I’d still be wondering what the Queen of Hearts is going to say or do next.

11. Couple it with something you love — Great idea. How do I couple reading with reading?

Maybe, after all, that article wasn’t meant for the likes of me…

My 2016 Reading Challenge

The PolyBlog
January 26 2016

Each year, I set reading goals for myself, but usually not very specific i.e. 25 books, which I blow through in a few months of binge-reading. But I don’t say in advance “these 25 books”, as my goal is usually “more”, to make time for reading. And then I do, with a binge mentality.

A year ago, I read through a whack of Robert B. Parker and Sue Grafton novels. Somewhere around 60 I think, in about three months. Just plowed through them. Binge reading. One of the downsides to an e-reader is that I finish one and immediately start on the next in the series. Narnia, Artemis Fowl, Spenser, Kinsey, all grist for the reading mill.

Yet I have also wanted to “improve” my reading selections, with some from a long list of award winners or books recommended by friends, or even just great classics. I read Dracula that way, merely because I had never read it before and it’s such a classic tale that has survived in countless forms. This year, while perusing some other reading challenges, I decided I would be VERY specific as to what I was going to read, up to and including the exact books or series I would finish.

With at least one per author whose last names start with each letter of the alphabet. And my Alphabet Reading Challenge is now set. For most letters, I had numerous to choose from. In other cases, only one or two (hello Q!). The final list includes:

  • award winners from Time Magazine, Guardian, etc., all of whom regular compile “best of” lists;
  • recommendations from friends when I started making my list;
  • category award winners like mystery writers for Edgars, Shamus, and Agathas; and,
  • national awards like Man Booker, Governor General, Pulitzers, etc.

Which means the final list for this year is a bit eclectic with a broad mix of titles to keep it interesting. Some of them I’ve even read before, but it’s been a long time, so I’m going to read them again.

  1. Margaret Atwood – The Blind Assassin
  2. Lawrence Block – Writing the Novel: From plot to print to pixel
  3. Paulo Coelho – O Alquimista (The Alchemist)
  4. Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Crime and Punishment
  5. Marian Engel – Bear
  6. William Faulkner – The Sound and the Fury
  7. Diana Gabaldon – Outlander series
  8. William H. Hallahan – Catch Me, Kill Me
  9. Kazuo Ishiguro – The Remains of the Day
  10. Donald Jack – Three Cheers for Me
  11. Stuart Kaminsky – A Cold Red Sunrise
  12. Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird
  13. Gabriel Garcia Marquez – 100 Years of Solitude
  14. Vladimir Nabokov – Lolita
  15. George Orwell – 1984
  16. Terry Pratchett – Discworld
  17. Paul Quarrington – Whale Music
  18. J.K. Rowling – Harry Potter series
  19. J.D. Salinger – Catcher in the Rye
  20. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace
  21. John Updike – Rabbit series
  22. Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez – The Dirty Girls Social Club
  23. E. B. White – Charlotte’s Web
  24. Lu Xun – Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
  25. Richard Yates – Revolutionary Road
  26. Carlos Ruiz Zafón – Shadow of the Wind

By my rough count, that’s actually about 51 books when you include the series. Not sure I can do all of them this year, but I’m sure going to try.

R.I.P. Warren Murphy

The PolyBlog
January 21 2016

Warren Murphy is and will always be my favourite author.

I was looking for one of his books in e-form today, and just reading through the description of a book I hadn’t seen before, I came across a small phrase that struck me cold — “Warren Murphy passed away in September 2015”. I missed the news entirely. Heck, I heard from him on FB sometime early last year I think, certainly less than a year before his death.

That makes it almost sound like I knew him. I didn’t. I just knew his books.

The first ones I read were the Destroyer novels. My father used to read The Executioner series, Mack Bolans, etc., Nick Carter. So I read them too. And in some pile of similar books at a used store, I came across a pulp-style novel about a killer named Remo. An expert in the art of assassination, courtesy of the House of Sinanju, the basis for all martial arts. It was a glorious premise — the cop who gets framed for a murder, goes to death row, dies (almost), and is resurrected and trained by a small organization that only reports to the President in an oblique way, designed to take on the forces that would destroy the country and who operate outside the law so far that the law has no chance of stopping them. The most lethal of all lethal weapons who could terminate with extreme prejudice.

But the pulp format belied something deeper — the books were fun. The banter back and forth between the student Remo and the trainer Chiun was rapid, insulting, brutal — and hilarious. I loved it.

Murphy wrote them with Richard Ben Sapir and I started collecting books by both of them, including the Destroyer series. Eventually, I found one of Murphy’s Trace novels. It was like striking gold. To be honest, I didn’t find Trace first. I found Digger. If that sounds confusing, it should…they are two series by Warren Murphy with different publishers. Both contain:

  • a lush of an investigator who wears a wire for all his important conversations;
  • insurance investigations for a big company that keeps him employed because one of the senior people likes him for a favour he did him once;
  • an Asian girlfriend who frequently shows up at the end of the novels, listens to the tapes and identifies an important clue to help solve the crime; and,
  • an ex-wife and two children that he doesn’t remember the name of and so calls them by generic nicknames.

Digger is Trace; Trace is Digger. But apparently there were issues with the first publisher (for Digger), and Murphy wanted to go higher end with the novels while the publisher was going pulpy. Murphy took the books elsewhere, they were more full novel length, and Trace was born. I still have the email from him where he explained some of the details (I posted about it on a list, said I’d love to find out the real story some day, another person on the list knew him and forwarded it to him, and he responded directly to me). Getting an email in my inbox from WARREN FRICKING MURPHY was like winning the lottery. I responded, and I totally acted like a fanboy. Never heard back again. I’m sure I went in the “loo-loo” pile.

But I was seriously hooked. I read Destroyer books even after Sapir died and Murphy wasn’t writing them anymore. I read all the Trace books. I hunted down Razoni and Jackson and the Digger novels. I read his King Arthur books, and Grandmaster (swords and modern mysteries!). I found out that he had written others under a pseudonym — Dev Stryker — with his then-wife Molly Cochrane, and gobbled those up too. Hard to find, and he wasn’t blazing the ebook road, so paper was the way to go (some hard to find ones I got through inter-library loans). But every once in awhile, I’d go searching and find a new one by him. Like gold, every time.

I even remember going to see the movie Lethal Weapon 2, and loving the banter, etc. For no real reason in particular, I stayed behind so I could read the credits. I partially wanted to see who the writer was to see if there were any books out there — and there it was. Warren Murphy’s name. Of course. No wonder I loved the writing. It was him.

I didn’t know for a long time that he wasn’t a secret. That he had two Edgars and two Shamus awards. That he’d been a president of MWA. That he was a screenwriter with multiple hits to his credit. That he was actually quite famous.

He was just the writer of the most fun books I had ever read. It was Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries for grown ups, and without the noir or the cozy or the modern forensics focus. Sure, I moved on. I read about V.I. Warshawski. I met Stephanie Plum. I devoured Kinsey Milhone. I fell in love with Susan the guidance counsellor that Spenser loved, and that Hawk seemed to have a warm place in his heart for too. The gumshoes, the sleuths, the professional detectives.

And it is what made me want to be a writer. For the first time, I saw a genre that I loved. Not kids mysteries, not series like Rick Brant or Tom Swift. Not sci-fi. True mysteries. Series that built a genre. Not an Agatha Christie-like sleuth, not a Sherlock Holmes. A plodder. Who got the right answer by hook or by crook, and by plain straight stick-to-it-iveness. My writing may never see the light of publication but if it ever does, if I ever get to introduce my protagonist, you can damn well bet that the dedication will be to Warren Murphy.

My library took a hit today. Five months after his death at age 81, but still a hit. I’ll miss his stories…

Defining an e-reader device…

The PolyBlog
January 19 2016

I posted earlier about Michael Hyatt’s article about ebooks, and why he was switching to paper for 2016, and now there’s a semi-related post from The Ebook Evangelist (How do we define an e-reader? | The eBook Evangelist). In it, the blogger references how popular vernacular talks about so-called “e-reader” device problems:

  • small screens (they mean like phones, which are not e-readers but rather phones that also have e-reader apps);
  • large screens (they mean like tablets, which are also not e-readers but rather tablets that also have e-reader apps); and,
  • blue-light, back-light problems (generally meaning phones or tablets, as most e-readers are e-ink devices without backlighting of that sort, although some e-readers DO now come with a different form of backlight).

Mostly though I’m sharing the link above as she has the same reaction I do — the articles are “confusing” (as she puts it) and “worthless” (in my vernacular) as they frequently throw apples, oranges and a few internet devices into the same basket, and then hope to draw some common issues with all of them by reviewing only one. A one-size-fits-all that really often fits none. and it hopelessly confuses the debate. Some other things bother me too:

  • people who are passionate about ebooks over paper or paper over ebooks — personally, I don’t care about format, I only care if people read;
  • people who argue that reading retention is less on e-devices vs. paper and that this is bad (first, we need to quantify those metrics, because they also include the person who switched from reading to playing a game, and the real problem with their retention isn’t retention but that they got distracted doing something else and didn’t read it in the first place; and second, before we decide it is bad, can we also revise the metrics to also measure engagement with the passive books vs. active e-devices, the opportunity for greater engagement with e-devices if they are actually used effectively, not just dumping raw text onto an e-device, not formatting it for an e-reading experience, and finding people don’t remember it as well as the nicely formatting paper book? People also retain books better than they do loose-leaf hand-written pages, the same medium in different “format”, so medium isn’t the problem); and,
  • writers who claim an ebook is devaluing the work if it is sold for less than $10 or something.

But maybe that’s just me…