Star Bucs V: The Empire Strikes Beloit

Head on over to YouTube to view Star Bucs V: The Empire Strikes Beloit. You won't regret it. It's a student film I made on the Beloit College campus in 2008.

Here's part one:

The Best Books I read in 2012

A few weeks ago, I thought I hadn't read anything good this year. However, as I went over my annual list of books I'd read, I was able to carve out a list of 10 stellar books. Read them if you can find them.

I read 74 books in 2012, of which 38 were nonfiction and 36 were fiction (the closest ratio I probably have ever read).

1) Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides
2) The Eye in the Door, by Pat Barker
3) The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein
4) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon
5) The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
6) Public Enemies, by Bryan Burrough
7) The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien
8) Blood Done Sign My Name, by Timothy Tyson
9) The Book of Air and Shadows, by Michael Gruber
10) Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan

 I also enjoyed An American Childhood by Annie Dillard, The Boxer Rebellion by Diana Preston, Dead Run by Joe Jackson, Death Star by Michael Reeves and Steve Perry, Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins, The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, and Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. 

 

Authorial frustration

About a month ago I read a travel book, about twenty years old, and was pretty moved by it. I found the author's website on the Internet and emailed him to say I enjoyed his book and ask if he'd done any further traveling. Two weeks later, I received an email message from him responding to my questions and thanking me for reading his book.

 I was glad the author responded and answered my questions. But I wasn't prepared for how his email was written.

Capitalization seemed to be his enemy. It was nowhere to be found in the email except, inexplicably, a single acronym. He even spelled my name with a lowercase "p." Formatting was absent, and while I could tell where paragraphs should be there were no spaces between them. Periods sometimes ended sentences, and sometimes not. The whole text seemed to just jumble together, like a third grader wrote it.

 It's a little disillusioning to get a response like this. An author, of all people, should not respond to his or her readers with poor grammar and punctuation. You aren't sending a text message, you are engaging in correspondence with someone who liked your work. You want them to still respect you. I have to wonder what this gentleman's cover letters looked like, how his correspondence with publishers and book signing organizers went. His book was so engaging and polished, but that can't have all been the work of an editor. No publisher will even look at a manuscript without it at the very least having letters capitalized when they should be...right?

I've had bosses who send out emails with much of the same poor writing. Trust me, reading those did not solidify their authority. I still have a high opinion of this author's book, but I am disappointed in him. You should never press "send" if you'd be embarrassed having the result published in bookstores across the nation.

I lost

I didn't blog yesterday. To be fair, I was busy with making gingerbread cookies and catching up on Breaking Bad and going to bed early for today's bookstore shift. But this early into January I have already broken my resolution of blogging everyday for 366 days.

Oh well, it was only an idea. I considered making a random post yesterday ("...") or changing the date of a post to "January 11", but I didn't want to waste your time. With a blog like mine with no real focus and only a few readers, it might be better that I post only sporadically. Maybe it'll make those mysterious Russians showing up in my page view stats lose interest in me.

Reading and rejection

Perhaps I should catalog what I've read recently. Just yesterday I finished In Caddis Wood by Mary Francois Rockcastle, which was part of a two-person book club I am part of. It's a novel about tragedy and redemption set in a Wisconsin forest. While it's well-written and very evocative, it's not the type of book I normally read, and therefore I was left feeling kind of blasé about it.

I had another rejection in my inbox today. The email began "Dear Author," and when that's the case, you know right away which direction the message is headed.

One year ago

It was one year ago today that I got job interview for the bookstore. The call came a day after I applied, and I only applied the day after reading the job listing online. A few days later I was given the position.

I probably will never get a job faster ever agiain.

Car shopping!

A few days ago I went to a local family-owned car dealership to look for a used car. This would be the first car I ever bought for myself, which is kind of anxiety-inducing for me. Insurance--that's like free money, right? An oil change--isn't that just refilling the tank? Mileage--well, I guess Indy said it best.

I didn't buy a car that day. For one, I've just started my car shopping and am not quite ready to buy. Second, the dealership was all out of Hondas, a make that's very reliable and thus in high demand.

In the meantime, I'll make due with my parent's cars, seen in the file photo at right. The main focus of that picture is actually a friendly rabbit (on the bottom) being stalked by our neighbor's very hungry cat (on the top).