(image via wikimedia)
I used to watch a lot of televised sports. It started when I was a teenager with no athletic ability and slightly below-average social skills. I was a borderline social outcast until I started watching and talking about football. Once I could talk sports, I could fit in with just about every group at school (I could already fit in with the groups like burnouts, nerds, and band kids who didn’t talk sports).
I didn’t even have to play sports. I simply demonstrated my passion for the local team and was more knowledgeable than almost anybody else (without being obnoxious). I learned that if you were a nerd who could talk about sports, you could talk to just about anybody.
Since then, a lot of my social life has been built around watching sports with friends and family. I have even written a blog post called 6 Reasons Why Football is the Best Sport Ever .
Despite my love of sports, I have decided to quit watching. It’s not just because I’m older and don’t care about fitting in anymore, and now that I think about it, I probably should have stopped watching sports decades ago. Here’s why:
- Watching sports wastes a lot of time.
You can save a lot of time by not watching sports. You don’t need to watch the games live in their entirety anymore. There are a bunch of highlight channels on the internet and shortened games (with commercials and time between plays cut out). You can still be aware of everything that happened without wasting hours of your evenings and weekends. Watching sports can take up a lot of time, especially if you don’t do anything else while you’re watching. Most games take up at least three hours and sometimes go even longer.
You can devote your energy for more productive things, especially today with the internet. If you used that 2-3 hours to learn new skills or spend time with friends/family in a productive way, that extra time could change your life in a positive way. If you watch football to avoid spending time with your family, then… maybe that’s a different issue.
- You can focus on more stuff that matters.
With sports, you get emotionally connected to stuff that isn’t important. It doesn’t really matter who wins a game, yet sports fans get emotionally connected, yelling, getting dressed up, getting into fights. Some fans even get depressed when their team loses.
I’ve felt that before. It’s easy to get sucked into the emotion of a game. But that devotion to sports, as fun as it can occasionally be, keeps us from the really important stuff in our lives.
When I’m on my death bed (I don’t think about this much, I promise), I’m not going to regret not watching more football games; I’ll regret (if I regret anything) not accomplishing the stuff I could have accomplished if I had watched less football. I might even regret the books I didn’t read because I was too busy watching football.
- Watching too much sports makes you dumber.
I don’t have any proof (besides anecdotal examples), but I know it’s true. When I started watching sports a lot, my other cognitive abilities flat-lined. I struggled in school a little more, especially with subjects that had been easy beforehand. I recognized it at the time but didn’t care because I was fitting in at school more and the academic drop-off wasn’t significant enough to hurt me.
Once I started wasting hours and hours each Saturday and Sunday watching football, though, huge blocks of study time disappeared. Since football is an autumn sport, my spring semester grades were always better. One year I even took a light load of college classes in the autumn so that I could watch more football, and then I took a heavy load in the spring to make up for it. At the time, I thought it was brilliant. Anybody who doesn’t watch sports probably thinks my idea was really stupid. From a normal person’s point-of-view, only a football fan would be dumb enough to schedule classes based on games.
- Sports don’t unify people as much anymore.
Sports used to be a great unifier. I grew up in an area where almost everybody rooted for the local football team (the specific team isn’t important). The team unified everybody, even people who hated each other. I once hugged a guy (in a masculine way) whom I despised just because of a great play that won a game for a team both of us liked.
But now sports is used to create divisions, which are unnecessary during a time of great divide (though I think divisions in the late 1960s and early 1970s were worse). I’m not going to get into the specific issues (because I’m not writing this to be divisive), but athletes and team organizations are getting involved in political issues that they had avoided (or stayed quiet about) in the past. Of course, they have the right to get involved and be outspoken. I also have the right to ignore them and stop watching.
When that happens, I now realize, we both win.
*****
Even though I don’t watch sports anymore, I still am aware of sports. I keep track of the scores. I watch a few highlights. I read a few quick articles every day. I know enough to still talk about it, but the time I spend on it doesn’t keep me from doing anything else.
What do you think? What other reasons do you have to stop watching sports? If you’ve never watched sports anyway, feel free to pile on with your own reasons.
(image via wikimedia)
It’s easy to finish reading a book if you like it. When you don’t enjoy a book, however, sometimes even the most devoted reader thinks about quitting. Some readers are proud to finish every book they’ve started, but sometimes it’s just not worth it.
According to a study from a few years ago, the most unfinished book is A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawkings. Even though the title had the word brief , the book wasn’t brief enough for most readers to finish it. A lot of classic literature gets unfinished too. People quit reading novels like Moby Dick or Great Expectations because literature can be too difficult or too boring.
When I quit reading a book, I don’t want to admit that it was too difficult or too boring for me. I was raised to accept challenges, so quitting because a book was too hard is a weak move. Quitters are weak, and readers are not weak (at least I’m not), so we need legitimate reasons to stop reading books that we don’t like.
With that in mind, here are three good reasons to NOT finish reading books that you don’t like:
- There are other, better books to read.
Every moment you waste reading a book you don’t like is a moment you’re not reading a book you might enjoy. Reading isn’t supposed to be an endurance test, unless it’s for academic purposes. Think of all the enjoyment you’re missing out on just so you can “endure” a book you don’t like.
If you quit reading one book so that you can start reading another book, you’re still reading. You don’t have to justify yourself as a reader as long you’re reading. It’s not like you’re quitting a book so that you can play video games or watch porn or go to work.
Finishing a lousy book is almost rewarding bad behavior. If an author writes a crappy book and everybody reads it to the bitter end, the writer is encouraged to keep writing crappy books. I don’t believe in rewarding bad behavior. Therefore, there’s no shame in giving up on a book so that you can read another better book and encourage writers to improve.
- You save a lot of time.
I hate it when I spend money on a book and then don’t finish it. To me, that’s wasted money. Yeah, wasted money ticks me off, but wasted time is even worse. I’m at an age where I’m much more aware of how much time I have left (even in the best-case scenarios). I don’t mean that to be grim, but I’m not wasting my time reading an unenjoyable book if I don’t have to.
It doesn’t even matter what a reader uses that extra time for. If you decide to use that extra time to read another better book, that’s great. Reading time is better spent with a good book than a book that you dread. If you use that time to do something with your family or fix something around the house, that’s great too. As long as you’re not using the saved time to… like I’ve already said… play video games or watch porn, it’s okay to quit a book to do something that isn’t reading.
- You don’t HAVE to read an entire book to judge it.
Once you read a few chapters of almost any book, you know what the rest of the book will be like. That’s true at least 90% of the time. I’m not sure where I pulled that 90% number, but it’s probably true. If enough people agree with me and keep repeating it, then it will be true whether it’s true or not. So I’m sticking with 90%.
You can get a feel for the writer’s style in the first few chapters of a book. You can tell if the writer can describe scenery, set up interesting situations, and write realistic dialogue. If you don’t like the writing at the beginning of the book, you probably won’t like it as the book continues either. Books might have surprises and twists, and some books take a few chapters to get moving, but the writing style usually doesn’t change that much.
Because of that, you can usually judge a book somewhat accurately without having to read the whole thing.
*****
Despite what I’ve written, it’s easy for me to decide whether or not to finish reading a book that I don’t like:
* If I’m reading for the challenge, I finish the book.
* If I’m reading for the experience, I finish the book.
* If I’m reading for enjoyment, I don’t finish the book.
What do you think? Do you finish every book you read? If not, how do you decide whether or not to finish a book you don’t like?
Maybe someday one of my books will be… aw, never mind.
If you are writing books, you probably want to sell them, and nothing sells better than a bestselling book. There’s a lot of advice about how to become a bestselling author, things like genre selection and social media strategies and other stuff like that. Most advice is vague, however, and writers need specific strategies.
I am NOT a bestselling author, just so you know, but I have studied bestselling authors and what they have done, and I have discovered five strategies that give you a much better chance of becoming a successful book writer.
1. Become a celebrity.
A person can become a celebrity first and THEN write a book, such as Magnolia Table by Joanna Gaines or Born a Crime by Trevor Noah or even Becoming by Michele Obama. A celebrity book is almost guaranteed to get sales. Celebrities have fan bases who want to support the celebrity and give them money, even if the fans often don’t read the book.
A lot of writers don’t want to be celebrities, though. A lot of writers just want to sell enough books to be able to keep writing books. Most writers don’t want to be recognized in public and followed around and stalked. For a lot of writers, being a celebrity sounds like a form of Hell.
I don’t even know what most famous writers look like anyway. I might recognize Stephen King or James Patterson or George R.R. Martin if I saw them in public, but that’s about it. That guy who wrote the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner or that woman whose first novel is being turned into a Netflix series, I don’t know what they look like, and they probably like it that way.
2. Write a negative book about the President of the United States.
A writer can write a negative book about a current president. It doesn’t even matter who the president is; a negative book automatically attracts readers who are mad that their side lost. The current president has inspired recent bestsellers like Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff and A Higher Loyalty by James Comey. When Barack Obama was president, a bunch of bestsellers were books complaining about how horrible President Obama was. A few of those writers didn’t even work for FOX News.
3. Coauthor a book with James Patterson.
If James Patterson asks you to coauthor a book with him, you are guaranteed of becoming a bestselling author. There’s a stigma to this because everybody knows that James Patterson’s name, not the quality of your writing, sold the book. Readers might not know how much you wrote and how much James Patterson wrote. Then again, most people who read James Patterson books don’t care about stuff like that.
James Patterson sells so many books that even famous people want to write books with him. Former United States President Bill Clinton could have sold a bunch of books by himself, but he still coauthored The President Is Missing with James Patterson. Having a former president write a political thriller with you might give your novel a little more credibility.
If I had a choice between writing a book with either James Patterson or Bill Clinton, I’d choose Bill Clinton, but I’d keep my wife and daughter away from him.
4. Work for a major book publisher (while lying about having cancer).
An author can work as an editor/associate for a publishing company and then have that publishing company publicize the heck out of the author’s book (while also calling it “the next Gone Girl“), such as The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn. Yeah, A.J. Finn (not his real name, but that’s okay) is now a famous writer, but everybody knows he lied about having cancer. Most people would never think about lying about cancer, not even if it would help them to network and get a book deal.
Now the world knows how scummy A.J. Finn is for pretending that he was a cancer survivor. At least, I think he’s pretty scummy. All I’ve done is change my name a little bit and composited some people in my life. And I admit that up front.
5. Put profanity in the book title.
About ten years ago, some nobody wrote a book called Sh*t My Dad Says. It became a bestseller and was successful enough to inspire a sequel and a television show. The sequel failed because there wasn’t enough of the dad who says sh*t. The television show failed because… I don’t know why because I didn’t watch it.
Kevin Smith, who wrote and co-starred in a bunch of popular movies in the 1990s, authored a book called Tough Sh*t, but it just annoyed everybody because he was a celebrity using profanity in a book title, which is either very desperate or very selfish. A celebrity’s name should be enough to sell his or her book.
Several more recent bestselling authors have continued using this strategy. You are a Badass by Jen Sincero is a lie because anybody who reads the book is not a badass because a true badass already knows he/she is a badass and doesn’t have to read the book. Another recent book, The Subtle Art of not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson, is a lie because the author obviously gives a f*ck; otherwise the word F*ck in the title wouldn’t need to be censored.
Putting profanity in a book title might be lame, but it sells books. At least it will until too many authors try it and it gets old. Then authors will have to resort to double and triple profanity. Sh*t My Dad Says will have to become F*cking Sh*t My F*cking G*DD*mn Dad Says. Profanity hasn’t gotten old in hip-hop; it might not get old in book titles either.
*****
Not every author has what it takes to become a bestselling author. Maybe you don’t want to become a celebrity, or maybe you actually like the current president. Maybe the thought of working with James Patterson (or Bill Clinton) turns your stomach. Maybe you don’t want to lie about having cancer. Maybe you don’t have any connections whatsoever with the publishing industry. Maybe all you want to do is write and be known for high-quality writing.
If that’s the case, good luck to you!
But if that’s not the case, what strategy would you most likely use to become a bestselling author?
Many fans of A Game of Thrones believe that the book series A Song of Fire and Ice will never get finished, and there might be a good reason for this. After all, author George R.R. Martin doesn’t look all that healthy, so some morbid fans speculate that he will die before he can complete the series. To be fair, I’m sure most of those fans are worried for Martin’s sake and not for that of the book series.
As much as I want George R.R. Martin to live a long time, my theory is that Martin could live another 20 or 30 years and still not finish the series. If we look at the situation from his point of view, maybe George R.R. Martin shouldn’t finish writing A Song of Ice and Fire.
Here are five reasons why George R.R. Martin (maybe) shouldn’t finish A Song of Ice and Fire:
1. He doesn’t want to finish it.
Maybe George R.R. Martin really wants to finish A Song of Ice and Fire, but he acts like he doesn’t want to finish it. The fifth book, A Dance of Dragons, came out almost ten years ago. Since then, Martin has written several books that are NOT the sixth book. If Martin had wanted to finish A Song of Ice and Fire, he probably would have done it already.
2. He likes the attention that an unfinished series brings.
Once A Song of Ice and Fire is done and fans have reacted to it, the attention that Martin receives will drop. Right now, everybody wants to know about the last two books. When will they come out? How long will they be? How different from the HBO series will the books be? Once the books are out, all the interest surrounding Martin can never be replicated. He might know that he will never be in the spotlight again. Maybe he wants to hang on to the spotlight as long as he can. If this is true, then maybe he shouldn’t finish A Song of Ice and Fire.
3. The ending sucks.
Maybe the book ending is too similar to HBO’s version and he doesn’t want to admit it. Or maybe he doesn’t have an ending at all. No matter what happens, fans aren’t going to like what happens. Favorite characters are going to die. Some predictable things might happen. It might be too much like the HBO series. It might be too different from the HBO series. The only way to resolve everything to the satisfaction of most fans is to not finish it at all. To some readers, a non-existent ending would be better than a bad one.
4. He has Game of Thrones writers block.
Let’s face it, the fourth and fifth books of A Song of Ice and Fire were completely different from the first three. The fourth and fifth books were like reading from a different series, and it wasn’t an improvement. In fact, reading those two books was difficult. As an aspiring writer, I wonder if writing those books was difficult for Martin. They took longer for him to write than the first three books did. That might mean he had a tough time writing them, and it might not be getting any easier.
Game of Thrones writer’s block might explain this. If this is true, Martin has had a long time to get out of it, and whatever he’s doing to combat the block doesn’t seem to be working.
5. There are so many Dunk and Egg stories to tell.
George R.R. Martin likes writing Dunk and Egg stories. They’re shorter than Game of Thrones books, and they’re popular enough to satisfy a part of Martin’s audience. He also likes writing the history of Westeros, and there’s a lot of history to tell. Personally, I’d rather read real history than fantasy history. I don’t understand people who think fantasy history is more interesting than real history, but that’s just me. If Dunk and Egg stories and Westeros histories are now George R.R. Martin’s passion, then maybe that’s what he should write instead of A Song of Ice and Fire.
*****
For years I said that I would not read A Song of Ice and Fire until George R.R. Martin has finished the series. Since then, I have found myself writing about it more than I write about most other topics. I finally broke down and read the five available books, so now I understand why George R.R. Martin might not finish it.
If George R.R. Martin never finishes A Song of Ice and Fire, though, I’ll be okay. I won’t have much of an emotional reaction. Like many fans, I’ll just shrug and think, I figured that might happen. And then I’ll probably write a few blog posts about it.
The Great Gatsby has a bunch of meaningful quotes that are nonsense, but only one makes this list
Literary quotes are great because they can express important thoughts in creative and memorable ways. Quotes in literature are meant to be deep but easily understood, so lots of thought has been put into these words and phrases that make up meaningful literary quotes.
It’s easy to find famous meaningful literary quotes today in the internet age. Plenty of websites list literary quote after quote, and if a meaningful literary quote shows up on more than one list, then I consider it famous.
But maybe these famous meaningful thoughts aren’t as deep as readers feel. Maybe some of these famous deep literary quotes are instead just plain nonsense.
Judge for yourself. Are these literary quotes meaningful, or are they just gibberish?
1. “Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”– F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Nonsense. “All the people in the world” haven’t had all the advantages that I’ve had, but maybe I haven’t had all the advantages they’ve had either. How am I supposed to know which advantages each person has had and hasn’t had? We don’t have the time or the ability to figure all that out. Therefore, we should feel free criticize, as long as we don’t mind being criticized too.
2. “The reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity — it’s envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud.”—Yann Martel, Life of Pi
Nonsense. That entire paragraph is pure speculation with no empirical proof or data to support it.
3. “People are capable, at any time in their lives, of doing what they dream of.”—Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
Nonsense. I don’t mean to be a downer, but that’s just giving people false expectations. People are capable of a lot of great things but “doing what they dream of” is way too general, especially at any time in their lives. That’s just pandering to a gullible audience.
4. “Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.” —Frank Herbert, Dune
Only one step beyond? Nonsense. I don’t know how many steps beyond logic the real universe is, but it’s way more than one.
5. “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
Nonsense The heart is impulsive and can steer you in the wrong direction. If you only follow your heart, you will become a short-term thinker who makes a ton of bad, selfish decisions. You’re supposed to use your brain and your heart and your… okay, now I’m spouting nonsense too.
6. “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”—Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Nonsense. The word “agony” by itself is a bit strong for “bearing an untold story,” but the “no greater agony” is bunk. There are plenty of things that are a greater agony. Sometimes the experience or trauma of the untold story is worse than the “untold” part. Sometimes telling the story would be worse than keeping it secret.
7. “People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.”—Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
I’m not convinced that Eat, Pray, Love is literature, but I despise the term “soul mate,” and any quote that involves the term “soul mate” is nonsense, unless the quote is calling the term “soul mate” nonsense. To make things worse, people who believe in “soul mates” have high divorce rates. I have no empirical proof to back that up because after the divorce, the people who believed in soul mates often deny they ever believed in that foolishness.
8. “Not all those who wander are lost.”—J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Nonsense. Who said that everybody who wanders is lost in the first place? I thought it was common knowledge that some people who wander do so for different reasons. I like to wander just to clear my mind, but not in any “I’m lost” kind of way. I’m not a fan of people making arguments against ideas that nobody really believes.
9. “We need never be ashamed of our tears.” Charles Dickens- Great Expectations
Nonsense. Men should never shed tears during a movie. That’s downright embarrassing.
10. “The Answer to the ultimate question of Life, The Universe and Everything is…42!”- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
This might be the most nonsense of nonsense quotes because it was meant to be nonsense and people actually waste time trying to figure out its meaning. It doesn’t even make sense. Out of all the numbers that could have chosen, 42 is just random. 12, I could understand. Maybe you could make a case for 7 or even 13, but 42? Where did Douglas Adams even… now I’m thinking about it. Douglas Adams just got me! AAAAaaaarrrrgh!
*****
Enough about me! What do you think? What famous deep literary quotes do you know that truly don’t make much sense?
A lot of non-writers think children’s books are easy to write. From their points of view, a children’s book author just needs to write down a cliché positive message and draw some colorful pictures, and the children’s book is ready for publication. It’s true that anybody can write a forgettable children’s book. It’s difficult, however, to put together a book that kids will want to read over and over again.
Because of this, authors and publishers have come up with some truly horrible ideas for children’s books.
Below are five horrible ideas for children’s books that were actually published:
1. Go The F**k To Sleep and You Have To F*****g Eat and now F*CK Now There Are Two of You by Adam Mansbach
Putting profanity in a book title is the cheapest of cheap ploys to sell books. Yeah, it works, but it’s still a cheap ploy. It’s even worse when you censor the vowels. If you’re going to be edgy, be edgy enough to spell out the profanity. Profanity in a book title is a sign of desperation, but the worst is when you put the profanity in a children’s book title.
The first F**k book by Adam Mansbach, Go The F*ck To Sleep, amused some adult readers for a few pages, but almost everyone agreed that the premise gets old quickly, even when Samuel L. Jackson reads it out loud. My two-year-old daughter (a member of the target audience) didn’t think the book was very entertaining, and the next day her day care called to tell me my daughter was yelling the F-word and giggling demonically.
I don’t blame my parenting; I blame the author… and the day care. Always blame the day care.
The second book, You Have To F*****g Eat, didn’t add anything new to the schtick, but this time I kept it away from my kids. Now the author has a third(?) book, F*ck, Now There Are Two of You , which makes the parents sound ungrateful. This latest book looks like it’s the same schtick, which had already gotten old by the end of the first book.
If the author Mansbach wants to revive the tired franchise, I’d suggest a change of attitude in about 15-20 years with F*ck Yeah, Now We Have Grandkids!
2. Healthy Holly by Catherine Pugh and illustrated by some guy who probably didn’t know what he was getting himself into
Maybe the idea of Healthy Holly wasn’t so bad. Alliteration combined with better nutrition for children sounds like a good idea if executed correctly. Unfortunately, the author Catherine Pugh was at the time the mayor of Baltimore and forced an obscure city department to buy thousands of overpriced copies of her book. Eventually, Mayor Pugh got caught and had to resign. Very few copies of Healthy Holly have been found, so few that that speculators believe that one day they will become collector’s items.
Healthy Holly had some problems, even without the political corruption. It was a message book. Children’s books shouldn’t be “message” books. If there’s a message in a children’s book, it should be incidental and look accidental.
I’ve heard prison food isn’t too healthy. Then again, corrupt politicians rarely get prison time. Still, Healthy Holly was a pretty horrible idea.
3. Give Please A Chance by James Patterson and Bill O’Reilly
Give Please A Chance is the kind of children’s book that makes parody obsolete. Bill O’Reilly is known for one of the greatest meltdowns in television history (it never gets old). He’s also known for getting kicked off FOX News because of sexual harassment allegations against him. He was also known for loud opinions and slightly confrontational interviews. When it comes to writing books about saying the word “please,” Bill O’Reilly might not have been the best choice.
His coauthor James Patterson has sold more books than just about anybody. He also coauthors most of those books, so we don’t how many of those books he’s really written, and most of those books are really crappy, so at the very least, James Patterson has put his name on more crappy books than anybody else.
You can tell that James Patterson was involved with Give Please A Chance because each page has only one or two sentences, just like most of his novels. You can’t tell what Bill O’Reilly contributed to this book. Still, Give Please A Chance shouldn’t have been given a chance, at least not by these two authors.
4. The Berenstain Bears by Stan, Jan, and Mike Berenstain
I don’t have anything against the original Berenstein Bears but, it was a horrible idea to change their names from Berenstein to Berenstain. Everybody knows it was originally The Berenstein Bears. I read a bunch of Berenstein Bears books when I was a kid. Everybody remembers it as The Berenstein Bears. Then somewhere along the way, the powers that be changed the name to The Berenstain Bears.
I don’t why they did this. I don’t know how they came into my house and switched out the books without ever getting caught by anybody. Millions of books all over the world got switched out and nobody was caught. There are even a few psychopaths who claim that it’s been The Berenstain Bears the entire time and that we either have bad memories or are lazy readers. I don’t trust anybody who says it’s been the Berenstain Bears the whole time. I don’t know what the truth is, but that’s not it.
I know things are getting bad because I just saw a copy of Frankenstain by Mary Shelly at the local bookstore.
Wait a minute. Hasn’t it always been Frankenstain?
5. The English Roses and other books by… Madonna????
My first reaction when I heard that Madonna writing children’s books was… Why the heck is Madonna writing children’s books?
If I remember correctly, Madonna became famous in the mid-1980s by marketing “provocative” music videos to pre-teen girls. A decade later she put out a coffee table book called Sex. Yeah, I’m leaving out a lot of information, but everybody knows who Madonna is.
Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against a celebrity who writes a sex book. But if you write a sex book, you shouldn’t write children’s books. You do one or the other. If you do both, you’re just greedy.
I’m not sure why Madonna would have wanted to write/market children’s books. I’m suspicious of the motivations behind it. Out of all the books on this list, this was the worst idea. Ironically, the books aren’t bad. The illustrator did a good job, which is 90% of a children’s book. I didn’t see anything sexual or deviant in the book. I didn’t read the book word-for-word because it seems kind of girlie, but maybe… it… wasn’t… bad.
*****
Even though I’m a parent, I’m not an expert on children’s book. Still, it was easy coming up with five horrible ideas for children’s books that still got published. What do you think? What books did I miss? What horrible ideas for children’s books have you seen?
If it’s unabridged, there’s no shame in NOT finishing a classic novel.
Should you finish reading a book, even if you don’t like it? It’s an internal debate that many book readers have. If a tedious or overwritten book is assigned reading or required for a job, most people will read it. When there’s money or a grade involved, book readers have no qualms about finishing a book. But books for personal pleasure are a different matter.
When I first started reading, I took pride in finishing every book I started. In elementary school, I finished Harold and the Purple Crayon, even though Harold was getting out of control. In middle school, I finished The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, even though I was being mocked for carrying big books around the school (they were WAR books, I explained, so that made it cool).
In high school, I finished Noble House, despite having to read a bunch of Willa Cather books in my English class. In college, I finished reading The Mists of Avalon, even after my girlfriend broke up with me for calling it a “woman’s book.” When I found out later how abusive the author had been to her family, I kind of regretted reading the book… and it also kind of explained my ex-girlfriend’s weird behavior. I was probably lucky she had broken up with me.
Anyway, somewhere along the way, I lost my passion for finishing books. I became more critical of books I read and I began noticing how much time it took to read some of them. I finished Sarum by Richard Rutherford, but I gave up on Russka. I stopped reading a Colleen McCullough Rome book within the first hundred pages (I almost got kicked out of my family’s Thanksgiving dinner for that) because I already knew what was going to happen (and the book was waaaaayyyy too long).
Now that I’m older, I don’t finish books if I don’t want to. Maybe I should finish most books that I begin. Maybe I’m too casual about which books I finish and which books I set aside. Either way, here are…
3 REASONS TO FINISH A BOOK, EVEN IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT
- You get a Sense of Accomplishment.
When I was in junior high, I read a bunch of classics like The Iliad and The Three Musketeers and (an abridged) Les Miserables because I’d read the classic comics and could tell what was going on in the books, even if I didn’t understand all the language. Still, I felt proud that I had read unabridged versions of these classics (I didn’t figure out that the Les Miserables was abridged until later). I felt that sense of accomplishment.
Then high school teachers began assigning books. Oddly enough, the sense of accomplishment vanished when I was forced to read novels. I probably would have enjoyed Of Mice and Men and Brave New World if they hadn’t been assigned. There is little sense of accomplishment when the reading is forced. I was happy with my good grades, though.
Once I graduated and started my profession (which has nothing to do with reading or writing), I chose to read for fun rather than for accomplishment. But I remember what that feeling is like. Finishing a book just for that sense of accomplishment might be worth it for some readers.
- You can actually judge a book if you finish it.
You don’t really know if an entire book sucks until you’ve read the whole thing. Years ago, I gave up on a novel called The Passage by Justin Cronin about halfway through it. I heard later that the ending was pretty good and that I had missed out on a good ending simply because I was too eager to give up on the book. Maybe I should have finished it, but I still know a huge portion of it sucks. That’s enough for me.
Even so, if two people disagree about the quality of a book but only one person has finished it, the reader who has finished the book has the more valid opinion. The quitter can still have an opinion, though. For another example, I haven’t read all of Moby Dick from beginning to end. I have read a lot of sections of Moby Dick. I can have an opinion about why readers don’t like it or don’t want to finish it. But if a reader has actually read Moby Dick from beginning to end (and understands it), then I recognize his/her opinion is more valid (in some ways) than mine.
- You finish what you start!!!!!!
I grew up in a household where we were taught to finish what we started. I learned that you don’t leave a job unfinished or halfass…errr… halfhearted. You give 100%, or you give nothing. You eat all the food on your plate. You stay awake during church. You complete all your homework. And you finish every book you start. Once that’s ingrained, it doesn’t go away… until your parents aren’t looking.
To this day, I eat all the food on my plate (but I get to choose the food now), I stay awake in church (when I go), I make sure all my work gets completed (so I get paid). But finish every book I start? Not anymore.
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What do you think? Should you finish reading every book that you start reading? What books did you finish, despite getting no enjoyment from them?
Everybody knows that a bunch of great novels have been turned into great movies. Sometimes, moviegoers don’t even realize their favorite movie was based on a book. For example, some movie critics don’t know that The Godfather was a bestselling novel written by Mario Puzo before it became a great movie.
There are already a bunch of lists that show famous books that have been turned into great movies. But what about the neglected famous books?
Not every famous book would make a good movie. A lot of great books haven’t translated to the silver (or pocket) screen very well. The recent movie version of A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline Engle was pretty bad (and I like the book). Despite several attempts, I’ve never seen an interesting version of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I’m not suggesting that these books should never have been turned into movies. I’m just saying the above movies would be tough to do.
Below, however, are some books that should NEVER be turned into movies:
1. A Million Easy Pieces by James Frey
Yes, it’s too late. I know A Million Easy Pieces is already being made into a movie, but it still shouldn’t happen. Maybe it can still be stopped. The book was originally promoted as a memoir, and then it turned out to be a lie. Maybe A Million Easy Pieces works as fiction. I don’t know, and I don’t care because I’m not going to read it.
Lying about a memoir is a sneaky writer trick, and I don’t want to reward bad behavior by reading his sneaky memoir book or watching the movie based on his sneaky book. I know that Hollywood rewards bad behavior all the time, but I don’t have to participate in that, and I won’t.
2. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
For a long time, nobody made The Catcher in the Rye into a movie. I never wanted a movie version because even when I was a teenager, I thought Holden Caulfield was a whiner. Before Holden Caulfield, fictional kids could have flaws but they tried to do the right thing. Tom Sawyer wasn’t perfect, but he protected Becky and he saved an innocent man from being convicted.
What did Holden do? He said “damn” and “hell” a lot. Anybody can do that. The world is full of Holden Caulfields, so we don’t need a movie.
Author J.D. Salinger didn’t want a Catcher in the Rye movie either but for reasons that are different than mine. I think there are a couple recent attempts to do it, but I had to search to find them, so they don’t count for much. If we went this long without a big budget The Catcher in the Rye movie, we don’t really need one, and it shouldn’t happen.
3. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Since The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt is being made into a movie, I figured other recent Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners would be next. I liked portions of A Visit from the Goon Squad, but what makes it unique as a book (point of view and tense changes) might make it suck as a movie. The story is okay. I like to see authors experiment a little bit. I’m not sure the story is compelling enough for a movie. I think HBO has/had the rights to it, but I haven’t heard about or seen any finished product.
If the book had literal goons, then it might make a great movie.
4. Becoming by Michelle Obama
Yes, it’s one of the bestselling books of all time in the United States. Yes, movie makers can’t resist books that make ton of money, so somebody is going to make a movie. And the movie will probably suck.
Despite its sales, Becoming wasn’t that great of a memoir. Michelle Obama has led an interesting life, but she didn’t make herself sound very interesting. She made herself sound almost two-dimensional in a rock star life. If Becoming becomes a movie and it sucks, critics will hesitate to say so because they won’t want to be called haters or right-wing extremists. The support of her movie will be political, just like much of the support for her book.
But politicians and Hollywood creators can’t resist money, so somebody will try to make a movie out of it.
5. The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring by George R.R. Martin
Since Game of Thrones season 8 was embarrassingly bad, fans want the last few seasons to be redone in a way that matches the high quality of seasons 1-4. To that I say, “Pffffft!”
Game of Thrones is done. I don’t mean “done” like “dead to me” or anything like that. I just mean that the television/cinematic version is completed and, like it or not, a remake version wouldn’t work.
Face it, matching the quality of seasons 1-4 would be nearly impossible. I think you can even stop watching at the end of season 4 and be satisfied. At the end of season 4, several story-lines have been resolved, some stupid story-lines haven’t been introduced yet, and several popular characters who die later in poorly-written ways are still alive.
Even though I believe A Dream of Spring is just a dream, George R.R. Martin might still finish his A Song of Ice and Fire series (I’m somewhat doubtful), but it shouldn’t be redone again, either as a movie or as a television series.
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What do you think? What books do you think should NEVER be turned into movies (or any type of show for television or streaming services)?
Hang in there, kid! There’s a purpose to all that sitting around. (image via wikimedia)
It’s back to school time, and kids throughout the country are complaining about going back. Nobody likes going back to school, not even the teachers, and it’s easy to understand why.
It’s also easy to list what’s wrong with school. Kids just sit in their desks all day while the teachers talk and talk. A bunch of the kids smell really bad. Teachers give too much homework. Teachers yell at the kids for no reason. The food in the cafeteria is nasty.
Even parents and taxpayers have complaints. Public education is “one size fits all.” Schools teach to the tests. The students don’t think the rules apply to them. The parents don’t think the rules apply to their kids. The students don’t think their teachers care. The teachers don’t think their students care. Not enough money is spent on education. Even if you think the education system gets enough taxpayer money, too much of that money in education gets wasted on unnecessary stuff.
Everybody has complaints about school. Some of these complaints might even be valid.
But we don’t have to be so negative about school. School is actually good for you, even if it sucks and nobody wants to be there. Here are five reasons why school is good for you.
1. School teaches you to get up early.
When you’re older, you’ll probably have to get up early to go to a job you don’t like. Very few people get their dream jobs without suffering first. School is like your first job that sucks, only you don’t get paid. If you can succeed at school, then you can succeed at work. If you can’t succeed at school, maybe the money of a job will motivate you. But succeeding at school will still help.
2. School teaches you to get bossed around.
Nobody likes getting bossed around, especially kids. But school helps you learn how to deal with it. Yeah, your teachers can be strict or obnoxious. Some might even get too close and speak with coffee breath right in your face. Unfortunately, your future bosses probably won’t be much better. Schools prepare you to accept instructions from somebody you don’t really want to listen to.
3. School teaches you to keep track of time.
Even if you’re constantly late to class, you can still keep track of time until the class ends by staring at the clock (if it works) or your phone (if the school allows you to keep one with you). Then you can test your sense of time by ignoring the clock and then estimating the time as you go. After years of estimating time, I can now accurately calculate the time, even when I haven’t checked it in hours. My ability to tell the time without assistance stuns my family and friends. It’s like my mutant ability.
I credit school for that.
4. School makes you appreciate freedom.
Freedom is awesome, but sometimes people don’t appreciate it. Do you know what makes people appreciate freedom? Eight hours of school. The first week of vacation is the sweetest time in the lives of many children, but as the summer continues, children and teenagers appreciate it less and less… until the new school year approaches.
When you’re an adult, you usually don’t get summer vacation (unless you’re a teacher). Adults might envy kids and their summer freedom, but then adults remember how horrible school was, and then they appreciate their everyday lives even more.
5. You might learn a skill that will help you get hired.
Yeah, some people might see this as a long shot, but it happens sometimes. You might find out that you’re good at math and that you actually like it. You might discover talents that others don’t have, like a knack for public speaking, or a love of research and analysis, or an ability to mix chemicals without blowing anything up.
Most schools have extracurricular activities that aren’t available anywhere else and give you a chance to have fun and do stuff you like. It’s true that you have to sit through seven hours of school to get to those activities, but that’s okay; it teaches you that everything has a price.
Some critics might say that I’m setting up expectations that are too high, but I don’t know. Sometimes if you have a bad attitude, you can make school seem worse than it is. I’m just trying to help you (or somebody else) see the good in school.
Whether you like it or not, if you’re a kid, you probably have to go to school. Everybody has had to go through it, and it might seem pointless, but if you have the right attitude, school can be very good for you.
If you bleed so much when you type, maybe you should quit writing… or quit drinking. (image via wikimedia)
Aspiring authors often love quotes about writing, and nobody writes better quotes about writing than famous authors. When a famous author writes a quote about writing, a bunch of people will see it because the author is already famous. If the average author writes a quote about writing, nobody will see it, so it doesn’t matter how awesome the quote is, at least not until the author becomes famous.
There’s a good reason why famous authors have more credibility when it comes to quotes about writing; nobody knows more about writing than a famous author. Some quotes about writing have become so widely known that they’re almost accepted without second thought.
But what if these famous quotes are misleading? What if these famous authors weren’t meaning to be taken literally? What if the famous authors were just messing with us? What if famous authors were toying with our emotions and fragile egos?
Below are five famous quotes about writing that MIGHT be misleading:
QUOTE #1 “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”- Ernest Hemingway
WHY IT MIGHT BE MISLEADING
Aspiring authors have enough problems, like being rejected, being ignored, and being over-criticized. We don’t need to hear about bleeding at a typewriter. I have never bled at the typewriter, and for my first ten years of writing, I actually used a typewriter. Unfortunately, I never learned keyboarding skills, so I was a two-fingered hunt-and-peck typist who used lots of White-out. If anybody should have bled out at the typewriter, it would have been me (or I). I did not bleed at the typewriter. Hemingway should not have left the impression that it’s normal to bleed at the typewriter. If you bleed while you’re writing, stop writing and maybe see a doctor.
QUOTE #2
“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”- Stephen King
WHY IT MIGHT BE MISLEADING
I know Stephen King likes to scare readers with his horror novels, but this quote sounds like he’s trying to scare us aspiring writers with his advice. I love the moment just before I start. I’m optimistic when I start. The scary part is when I know I’m about to be critiqued. And even that’s not scary. I’ve gotten to the point where I’d rather have my writing get insulted than get ignored.
If there’s a scary moment in writing, it’s when I see somebody’s facial expressions while he/she is reading what I wrote. With so much done online nowadays, I don’t see facial expressions anymore, so there is no scary part. Stephen King shouldn’t try to scare aspiring authors like that. He should have better things to do. I hear that he spends a lot of time on Twitter now.
QUOTE #3
“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.” Mark Twain
WHY IT MIGHT BE MISLEADING
If I had literally followed this advice in high school, I would have failed my English classes. I was tempted to follow this advice. After all, it was from Mark Twain. I came very/damn close to littering one of my stories with a bunch of damns and then defending it to my teacher by saying Mark Twain said it was okay.
A couple friends (now that I think about it, I don’t believe they were really my “friends”) encouraged me to use a lot of damns. They thought it was a damn good idea. When I chose not to, they said I was damn cowardly. I said I was damn smart, and a teacher heard me. He told me to watch my language, and then he left to smoke a cigarette in the parking lot. I was damn lucky. The problem with exchanging “very” with “damn” is that if you do it too often, you talk like Holden Caulfield and it gets damn old damn quickly.
QUOTE #4
“Literature is all, or mostly, about sex.” – Anthony Burgess
WHY IT MIGHT BE MISLEADING
I don’t know what Anthony Burgess looks/looked like, but I picture him as an old man. The last thing an old man needs to do is talk about sex, especially if he’s a writer. This quote makes writers look like a bunch of perverts. We’re no more perverted than the perverts who read our stuff, but still, Anthony Burgess should at least try to hide it and not push his pervertedness (also known as “perversion) on the rest of us.
Literature is about relationships. Sex is merely one part of a relationship. Maybe it gets discussed in a particular book, maybe it doesn’t. But other aspects of the relationship are important too, like… like… like…
?
QUOTE #5
“If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.” – Edgar Rice Burroughs
WHY IT MIGHT BE MISLEADING
Putting potential readers through 100 bad stories just to get to one good one is pretty poor. Hey, I can talk. I read the first Pelucidar book. Edgar Rice Burroughs could write a lot of stuff, but it could also get old, unless you don’t get tired of the chase, captured, rescue, chase, capture, escape, chase, capture, rescue/escape formula.
I know, I know, Edgar Rice Burroughs had bills to pay, and a lot of people out there were reading his books, but I think his quote encourages bad writing. It implies that if you simply write a lot, chances are SOMETHING is going to be good, almost by accident, almost by chance. Maybe that worked for Burroughs (some critics would say ALL of his stories were bad and his body of work is proof that his quote is wrong, but I wouldn’t go that far. He did create Tarzan, after all).
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There are a lot of writing quotes by famous authors out there (and there might be a writing quote that says not to start a sentence with “there”). What other quotes about writing do you think are misleading?
Dysfunctional Literacy 