SleepingPoliceman

Amazon.com: Mugglenet.Com’s What Will Happen in Harry Potter 7: Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Falls in Love and How Will the Adventure Finally End

In case you can’t deduce it from the title, this is a book…that has been written and published and is available in major brick-and-mortar and online bookstores…that is a collection…of a website’s summaries and guesswork…about what’s going to happen…in another book…that’s coming out in less than a month.

OK, so the book came out last fall…but still, it’s going to be rendered completely moot in a few weeks. This boggles my mind. I refuse to believe that anybody can convince me that we couldn’t all come up with something more interesting and publication-worthy than that.

(And, yes, this is basically a placeholder post so we can tread water for the day…consider it the SP version of an extended Tony dream sequence. There is much to write about the North Carolina trip. I’m envisioning a five part series. But that might just be the blog tease in me. Who really knows?)

NaNoWriMo. AKA National Novel Writing Month.

Bring it.

boston.com: Kaavya Viswanathan less a literary phenom and more a literary felon

Remember, kids: don’t plagiarize (sorry…”internalize”) when writing your novels. If you’re going to, at least try to steal from less well-known sources. Really…bad form.

Random detail I found amusing in this story: who was the intern at the Globe who had to sit down and read this Opal book and The Princess Diaries to see how many passages were comparable? I hope they brought in a 15 year old girl for that. I can only imagine with a mid-20s grad student would think about that assignment.

Well, it took me a month, but I just finished reading George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. Weighing in at 807 pages, it’s the longest book I’ve read since high school, when I tore through The Stand one summer down on the Cape. It’s also the first sci-fi/fantasy novel I’ve read outside of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

So… the review: it rocked. Great story, great characters – it was really tough to put down. I’m itching to dive into book two, however, I have a couple of other books on my shelf waiting patiently for me as well.

Mmm… reading.

I’m giving this its own post. Here’s an interesting article about from the New York Observer about the parallels between the falsehoods in A Million Little Pieces and the administration’s selling of the Iraq war. A taste:

Mr. Frey is not the only person pouring this cocktail of lies and denial—of “emotional truth.” More than one critic quickly picked up on the link between Mr. Frey’s literary career and the fact-averse, spin-happy presidency of George W. Bush. The joint biography is easy. Both men are dry drunks with belligerent streaks, angry and cosseted children of money. Both claim to have turned their self-destructive lives around without formal 12-step treatment, through the power of mass-market personal spirituality—pop Taoism for Mr. Frey, evangelical Christianity for Mr. Bush. Both have awkward gaps in their paper trails.

Ouch. And true.

This post got a bit out of hand. Click below to take it all in.

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