Why subscribe?
Subscribers get every post sent to their email. Paid subscribers get exclusive posts, full access to the archives, can pick books for We Read Them So You Don’t Have To, bring cases to the Discourse Court, and get monthly personalized book recommendations and discussion spaces.
Here are some recurring segments to keep an eye out for once you sign up, in no particular order:
Actually Pretty Good: Most contemporary fiction is awful. Actually Pretty Good will highlight new books that are, like the title says, Actually Pretty Good! If we’re lucky, this series will have more than two posts a year.
Let’s Build a Canon: All canon building is stupid. And I love to do stupid things! Let’s Build a Canon will be a place to celebrate good books for no reason other than that they deserve praise. All time pegs and anniversaries will be avoided as much as possible.
Nothing Personal: A space to celebrate nonfiction books that are not memoirs or collections of personal essays. This is not a place to celebrate your dad’s favorite World War II books; instead we’ll be looking at the generally unclassifiable genre of nonfiction writing that has come to be known, for a lack of a better word, as creative nonfiction. We’ll pay special attention to my personal favorite type of book, the anti-memoir.
Discourse Court: There’s nothing the literary world loves more than some good old fashioned discourse. But what if someone could settle whatever argument is roiling the dorkiest corners of twitter once and for all? I’ll put on the judge’s robes and make a ruling on whatever stupid thing everyone’s talking about. The court will not allow for any hedging or dialectical answers.
The Book Review Review: We’ll read between the lines to see what book critics are really saying - or really trying not to say.
Trend Watch: Which authors are getting the most ripped off? Who’s getting the most comparisons in blurbs? Who’s blurbing the most blurbs (besides Margaret Atwood and Joyce Carol Oates?) Why does every book cover look like that? What’s the next type of book cover that every book is going to look like? What style is everyone using? What’s the narrative structure du jour? Why is every book ending the same way? We’ll try to get to all that.
Jocks and Nerds Get Along: Highlighting good sportswriting, good writing about sports in fiction, any sort of intersection between sports and literature, stupid gambling travails, and anything sports related that I’ve so fleshed out in group chats that it becomes a post.
In the Weeds: A continually expanding collection of literary references to seaweed (my personal obsession), weeds in general, and weed.
What do paid subscribers get? I’m glad you asked! Besides supporting my work as a writer, paid subscribers get these special perks:
We Read ‘Em So You Don’t Have To: You can pay me to read any book of your choosing (within reason!) and get my thoughts on it. (I’ve already been paid to read self-published / in-progress manuscripts and nearly lost my mind, so none of those; the Ayn Rand exception allows me to veto any book that would be personal torture to read.) I’ll let you know if the new book everyone’s talking about is actually worth the effort, or dig into the classic that’s never left your TBR shelf.
Personalized book recommendations from me. Tell me what you’ve been reading lately, what you’ve liked lately, or what you haven’t liked lately, and I’ll give you three or more books to take a look at. I’ve worked as a bookseller for six years now - I have a lot of experience doing this!
Commenting privileges on all posts.
And more to come!
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