– I really liked Erin Bow’s suggestion of a SNOT award for books (“given to STORIES NOT to be read ON TRANSIT, the SNOT shall honor and mark books that will make you ugly-cry while on a crowded cross-town bus”). A SNOT sticker would have warned me, for example, against reading Feeling Sorry for Celia on the train to work one morning and thereby saved me a fair amount of embarrassment (because I have not yet learned how to weep in a neat and dignified manner).
– The Guardian recently ran a series of articles on Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, including an amusing one about her incisive parodies of D. H. Lawrence and Mary Webb. There’s also a thoughtful discussion in the comments section of this article about the anti-Semitism in the book (which is definitely there, although I don’t think it’s quite as bad as many other English novels of the time).
– As I’ve been talking about Jane Gardam’s novels lately, here’s an interesting profile of her.
– And here’s yet another article about how mid-list authors are doomed, which I liked because it actually defined the term:
“A ‘mid-list’ author can be described as any author who does well but not spectacularly for a publisher: someone who might be consistently well-reviewed, will even be shortlisted for major prizes, but will not, or has not yet taken off to become a household name.”
So, I guess I might have moved from Emerging Writer to Mid-List Author, although I suspect I’d have an easier time getting my next book published if I was a Debut Author. After all, if publishers know from sad experience that your books do not sell in large (or even moderate) quantities, they are not going to fall over themselves to publish your next work, whereas if you’re completely unknown, there’s always a hope you’ll turn out to be the next J. K. Rowling. Okay, this is getting depressing. I need a squid to cheer me up.
– Today’s squid is from that bastion of scientific accuracy, Popular Science Monthly, circa 1878.
While Feeling Sorry of Celia did make me cry, it also had me laughing like a mad women. This was while I was working in the Deans’ office at my college.
Yes, uncontrollable laughter in a public setting can also be embarrassing. Perhaps the SNOT stickers could be colour-coded – for example, a red warning for laughter, blue for crying, and purple for laughter AND crying.