BookWords Blogg

Book consist of words, obviously. But what about books about words? Or books about books? This blog post will take a look at two of them (book reviews!); then it’ll focus on two nonsense words, one of which is related to the title of one of the books (fun for “werd nerds”!) This will be a long blog post, but at least there will be mondegreens. Some business first. My short story "Silkod of the Drenn" is available in Journ-E: The Journal of Imaginative Writing . A stand-alone “Tond” story, it is also a (possibly unsolved) call to adventure. Scroll down to find Volume 1, Number 2. Also, continuing the story of Tond, there's Grendul Rising ; here's an interview about it. Also, check out this blog's sister, The SoundScroll . It's about music. Okay, now that that's out of the way, here's the actual blog post. The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time by Keith Houston This is a history of the printed page, told with a...

First, a shameless self-promo: the short story "Silkod of the Drenn" has been published in Journ-E: The Journal of Imaginative Writing . A stand-alone “Tond” story, it is also a (possibly unsolved) call to adventure. Scroll down to find Volume 1, Number 2. Also, nobody's reviewed Grendul Rising yet, though here's an interview about it. Also, check out this blog's sister, The SoundScroll . It's about music. Okay, now that that's out of the way, here's the actual blog post. Discussion Part One So this time I’m going to look at a psychological/sensory phenomenon that occurs in one (possibly two?) of my own novels, even though I have never actually experienced it. Or have I? As usual, this blog will review a couple of books, and the point of one of them is that maybe I actually have experienced the phenomenon in question. Auralia’s Colors by Jeffrey Overstreet It’s refreshing to read a novel of high fantasy that does not draw its concepts of good and...

Okay, I haven't blogged here for a while and there's a lot to cover. First, I have a new "Tond" novel and a short story coming out soon, the latter in an anthology. More on that later. Second, I'm going to propose a (new?) political theory; and of course, post about a book. Third, I'll see how all of those things relate to each other. Lets get started. The Political Theory: Interpretations of Symbols So here’s my idea. Liberal (“libtard”) and Conservative (“conservatard”) are not only political; they represent entirely different ways of thinking and even perceiving the world. That they are different ways of thinking is maybe not news, but that they are different ways of perceiving the world may be. I don’t know the origin of these different ways of thinking. It doesn’t seem to be from different forms of education: I’ve seen roughly 50/50 splits in classes where I teach, where everybody supposedly has been educated in the same way. It seems to stem from earli...

This time I review a collection of unrelated stories by the same author, an anthology of stories by various authors, and an unconventional novel that is actually a collection of stories in itself. But first, a shameless self-promo (concerning another anthology) and some neologisms. The Self-Promo: My story “The Scapekite” drops this week in a book called “ Iron Walls: A Burning Embers Dystopian Anthology ”. It’s a fantastical tale about a totalitarian corporation, camouflaged robots, and a (not?) chance encounter between the narrator and an old man with a kite and an imagination. I’ve done a couple of interviews about the story, here and here . Portmanteau Words The idea of a “scapekite” is of course something I made up, as is the word itself, from the words “scapegoat” and “kite”; a portmanteau word, like “smog” and “bridezilla”, packed with more than one meaning. A GAME WITH PORTMANTEAU WORDS: Which word doesn’t belong in this list, and why? a. absinthminded b. mimsy c....

Continuing along the lines of books and the words found in them, here we encounter a Facebook discussion of Scrabble and made-up words, and two books about art. The latter includes one artist who has influenced my own writing of books (including my use of made-up words). Bosch and Breughel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life by Jospeh Leo Koerner When I first encountered the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch as a kid, my reaction seemed appropriate enough: shock and fear. Later I learned that many of the seemingly bizarre details were drawn from popular idioms and expressions of the day, and so the paintings were rather like Gary Larson cartoons — and the appropriate reaction (at least of viewers during Bosch’s time) was laughter. (A couple of them are still funny today if you know the joke: “The Conjuror” and “The Hay-Wain”.) This book, however, brings into focus at least two other, deeper (and much darker) layers of meaning: one, that Bosch was aware that his paintings them...

In this post, I write three mini-reviews of books that take place in alternate realities, and then I explore a world that’s all too real now (though not in a too terribly tragic way): the world of malapostrophicated writing. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez Fascinating history of a fictional family in a fictional place; full of pathos, existential horror, comedy, and a large dose of "magical realism". Yes, there are a lot of sordid and shocking details; but if something is to be a "true" chronicle then the bad must be included with the good. The prose style is a little heavy-handed and awkward at times, though this may be simply the result of translation; the full flavor of something written in one language can seldom (if ever) be carried over into another. Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler In this quasi-science fiction novel, the author of “Kindred” spins a dark tale about survival in a near-future American Dark Age. Th...

Reviewing three collections of "Tales" this time. The theme of racism has to come up, though it was not intended originally. Also, let's start a conversation about possible alien languages. Tales Before Tolkien: The Roots of Modern Fantasy There are quite a variety of tales in this book, ranging from Tolkienesque stories of elves and dragons to horror “The Baumoff Explosive”, comedy “The Dragon Tamers”, satire “Chu-Bu and Sheemish”, paradoxically violent children’s folktales in the Brothers Grimm mode “Puss-Cat Mew “, mythology “The Golden Key”, imaginary histories “The Story or Alwina”, strange little existential gems “The Thin Queen of Elfhame”, as well as a rather unsuccessful attempt to shed fantasy of its European roots “A Zulu Idyll” (which is nonetheless told from the view of a European). Many of them combine two or more of these ideas. Some of them ring with the type of epic grandeur and deliberately archaic language that characterize Tolkien’s “High Styl...