For instance, in your new posts: if all it takes to increase reading among boys is a small incentive like a can of Coke, I say it’s worth it. It’s the demographic in teaching that is hardest to convince, and would benefit the most. Reading is proven to improve deep-cortex thinking, long-range planning, and conflict management. It’s also my favourite hobby, first love, and third-greatest passion. (My wife, my second love chronologically, is my greatest passion, followed by my kids)

Introducing boys to books is a worthy cause. Also, what that author did is a little ridiculous — providing a phone number so people call a reviewer is a little unsafe given how fanatical some people can be. If someone had to comment, couldn’t they just blog and twitter to their heart’s content? Nevertheless, the very best response to criticism is to improve and succeed as a writer. Do your best work, have the best attitude, and let that speak for itself.

As you know, I’m a big fan of ebooks/webfiction because of its potential for creativity and innovation. However, I loved libraries as a child, the tone and atmosphere, the shelves of books and the sense that knowledge and imagination were limitless. I’m not as attached to bookstores, maybe because most of the ones I’ve been in are very commercial. I dream of finding an awesome one like the Manhattan Restaurant for the Mind in Stephen King’s Dark Tower, or /Read/ in my own Surprising Life and Death of Diggory Franklin.

The physical experience of reading a new or old book is also vastly different, and irreplaceable. I like the internet as a delivery system, but the experience isn’t the same.

See, enabling comments would have made this shorter. ;)

Anyway, in response to your responses to the links:

I quite agree! I didn’t see the twist coming in the Incarnations of Burnt Children story – I was all prepared for the baby being safe and to have the story end quickly (it WAS one paragraph long, after all). Absolute genius, being able to set it up like that, and in such a short length …

The Wikipedia page talked about Jesus only, but now that you’ve mentioned it … yeah. There are many monomythic characters in the bible. Gideon springs to mind, as does David, and Abraham, and Paul/Saul. I wonder if turning that story on its head (character discovers great potential and fails, and then watches as another character goes through the standard monomyth and succeeds, and then both work to fight each other?) – would that work? I don’t know. Lately, I’ve been trying to refrain from writing genre fiction, and I guess it’s easier to stay away of the monomyth when you’re not writing an adventure/thriller.

Some interesting thoughts on ebooks, and I think your future projection is accurate — no one will want hardware that does only one thing (like the Kindle) when an Iphone can do that one thing and a million other things. Accessibility, diversity, usefulness — right?

Anyway, I also wanted to comment on your “miniposts” of the past few weeks (I didn’t see a way to do that before):

The Incarnations of Burnt Children story is a bit of a shiver, eh? I’m not much of one for stream of consciousness or run-on sentences, but the emotions are certainly palpable.

The community-building and interacting notes are also useful, so I’ll be checking into things like GoodReads etc. Thanks!

The Monomyth: well, I guess that’s been an effective meme for a while, huh? I think Gilgamesh and even Abraham and Moses come to mind, making this older than old school. I think some of my “literature class” commentary in No Man an Island addresses how it’s over-used, but how subverting it can create something new from the old, or at least redeem it from cliche. Thoughts?