Books
Book Lovers by Emily Henry. This author was recommended for her dialogue by a workshop leader a few months ago. Her dialogue is great. And this particular book is good for a reader like me who isn't into traditional romance and whose knowledge of it is primarily from movies, because a family member is a fan. Book Lovers has a metafiction thing going on, with the main character recognizing the cliches of the romance genre and assigning roles to the people around her. She, herself, is the evil city woman girlfriend in romances. Loved that. In spite of this, there was a lot of romance stuff going on that romance readers should like. I particularly liked how much the main character loved New York City, because the city is usually bad and country good in these kinds of stories. Henry is a good author to know about.
Short Stories
The Books of Losing You by Junot Diaz at The New Yorker. My first time reading Junot Diaz. I got the New Yorker subscription to read their on-line humor. That doesn't interest me much. It's exposing me to a wider variety of fiction writers, though. So huzzah for that.
The Closer You Were, The Less You Knew by Annie Dawid at Sequesterum. Right now Sequesterum may be my favorite literary journal. You have to subscribe to read entire short stories, but you can do so for just a few months, which seems very outside the box to me. Sometimes I find literary journals...difficult...beyond me. The things I've read at Sequesterum are sophisticated stories I can understand. The Closer You Were, The Less You Knew deals with a family experiencing tragedy on 9/11/2001. But they've been experiencing tragedy for decades, even generations. It was something I never thought of before. Tragedy is all over extended families, even if it's not tragedy on a 9/11 magnitude. In this story, it comes on top of everything else.
Short Form
A Fishing Book From 1594 is Still One of the Most Sought-After by Nature Lovers by Lance R. Fletcher in A Boy and His Dog: Outdoor Americana As a general rule, I prefer reading about very old pieces of literature rather than reading the pieces of literature themselves.
A Life of Neurodivergence: What We Thought About Paris Hilton Was All Wrong at LinkedIn? Not sure who wrote this or how I got to something at LinkedIn. It turns out that Paris Hilton has ADHD and writes about it in her 2023 memoir. We deal with ADHD in our family. I read about that.
How I Shifted From Pure Writing To Documenting Instead by Brendan Charles at The Writing Cooperative. Charles explains that he became more successful on Medium when he stopped writing "how to" articles and began writing "how I" articles. I think this relates to something I've seen going on on Medium all the time I've been there. Many people write and publish articles on things they don't actually know much about. In terms of writing about writing, I agree with Charles that most things I see on the subject on Medium have been done before. The articles appear to be researched, not the work of experienced writers discussing a craft they have experience with and knowledge of. In fact, I can recall reading a "how to/how I" Medium article once by someone who explained how many minutes he spent on-line researching a subject and then how many minutes he spent writing the article. The impression left was that his readers could do that with their writing, too. But writing about something you don't truly know about doesn't make for compelling reading.
Humor
I Miss the Good Old Days When You Could Go to a Website and Read It by Alex Baia at Slackjaw What's funny about this is that the 'good old days' aren't all that old. Except for the readers who think they are.
I'm a Regular Guy Who's Sick of Being Villainized for My Secret Second Family by Caroline Horwitz in Frazzled. We're not supposed to feel a guy with a second family is being victimized. And guess what? We don't!
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