2002 Reading Log

  1. Contact by Carl Sagan

  2. The Universe in a Nutshell by Steven Hawking

  3. Fahrenheit 451  by Ray Bradbury

  4. Up Country by Nelson Demille

  5. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  6. Bernice Bobs her Hair by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  7. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  8. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

  9. Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card

  10. Xenocide by Orson Scott Card

  11. Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card

  12. Ender's Shadow by Orson Scott Card

  13. Shadow of the Hegemon by Orson Scott Card

  14. Shadow Puppets by Orson Scott Card

  15. First Meetings by Orson Scott Card

  16. Loose Woman by Sandra Cisneros

  17. The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

  18. Woman Hollering Creek by Sandra Cisneros

  19. The Cheese Monkeys: a Novel in Two Semesters by Chip Kidd

  20. The Memory of Earth by Orson Scott Card

  21. The Call of Earth by Orson Scott Card

  22. The Ships of Earth by Orson Scott Card

  23. Earthfall by Orson Scott Card

  24. Earthborn by Orson Scott Card

  25. The Treasure Box by Orson Scott Card

  26. A Planet Called Treason by Orson Scott Card

  27. Cruel Miracles by Orson Scott Card

  28. Harry Potter and Chamber of Secrets by J. K. Rowling

A few notes on my first year of keeping a reading log. You’ll notice that a pattern begins to emerge of me latching onto a specific author and reading everything from them that I can get my hands on. This will be a recurring theme, and I find that many people share this trait with me. Reading is such an investment of time that it’s crucial that we’re investing that time wisely. Chances are if you enjoyed one of an author’s works, you will enjoy the rest of their catalog as well.

I believe I picked up Contact at the library because I liked the movie so well. It’s an astonishingly good hard sci fi book, and I appreciated the changes that the movie made, but they changed some of the basic things that make the character of Ellie who she is, so I don’t really see them as deriving from the same universe. I love the book. I love the movie. In my mind, they are very different things.

The Universe in a Nutshell was a broccoli book. I read it because I felt like I should and that it would be good for me. I didn’t particularly understand it or like it. I had carried it around for a couple of weeks in high school because I thought being seen reading it would make me look smart, but I didn’t finish it them. This time I did finish it, but it was a chore.

Fahrenheit 451 was the community read of the summer in 2002 and the library was giving out free paperbacks and hosting discussion groups for people to gather and share their thoughts on the work. I believe I’d read the book once in high school, but I read it again during the summer, though I never did go to any of the community activities.

I remember Up Country because it was my first exposure to a book being set partially during the Vietnam War and I didn’t know much about that era of history or region at the time, so it made a big impression. I learned about the Tet Offensive from this book. I remember taking an intro to Eastern religion course shortly after reading this, and as part of the curriculum, we visited a Buddhist monastery in southern Indiana that was founded by a Vietnamese monk and a small immigrant enclave. The visit coincided with Vietnamese New Year and I had learned the phrase “Chúc mừng năm mới” from Up Country and was able to deploy it during the visit, to good effect.

A part of my quest to read my way through the classics, I devoured some of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s catalog. I had never read Gatsby for school, so this was my first reading of it. It’s time for a re-read, because I don’t remember much about it, and I’m sure I’d pick up on vastly different themes reading as an adult as opposed to the 21 year old I was when I initially read it. The only Fitzgerald I couldn’t make my way through was The Beautiful and the Damned and I did start it, but never finished. Probably because of the misogyny. I’ve been staunchly feminist from an early age, even when I didn’t have the language to explain exactly why I loved Star Trek but hated Captain Kirk.

And then I discovered Orson Scott Card. I loved (past tense) Orson Scott Card. He remains the only author for whom I’ve ever made the effort to go to a reading/signing. I have a huge shelf of his books that I made the effort to get signed. And, yes, Orson Scott Card is cancelled. I no longer buy his books or re-read them. Not only are there problematic themes in his early works, he is abhorrent as a person. I won’t go my feelings about him here, but he is, and remains, a bigot. And I don’t financially support bigots by buying their work.

In between OSC, I fell back in love with Sandra Cisneros. I was introduced to her poetry in high school and she is still amongst my favorite poets. Her novel came out around this time, and I made an effort to read through her catalog. I did buy the novel Caramelo and started reading it, but never finished. It was a bit of a narrative mess and I found myself unable to connect with it.

IMG_20190902_153200.jpg

I also discovered Chip Kidd at this time while browsing a bargain bin. The book design is what drew me in and made my purchase the book, which makes sense because Chip Kidd is the renowned graphic designer behind such iconic book covers as Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and Dean Koontz’s Intensity. It would be hard to overstate how much of an impact The Cheese Monkeys had on me. I hadn’t yet begun a career as a graphic artist, but I had learned some of the basics of Adobe Creative Suite in college and my roommates had been in the graphic design program. I also hadn’t gone to a traditional four-year university, but all of my best friends had and I was envious of their experience. I felt like reading this novel gave me a small taste of what it would have felt like to have gone to learn graphic design at a university. The characters were vivid and compelling, and the story surprised me several times. I still own several copies of the book and recommend it to people, but I haven’t yet read Kidd’s follow-up novel. I should put it on my “to be read” list immediately. I think Cheese Monkeys is part of what prompted me to apply for college again.

 
“This is an odd-ball story of graphic artists attending a state university. It informed me as to how some of my friends had experienced their time at edifices of higher learning, and also what lasting value they had gained from these experiences, and led me to the further realization that I may not have benefitted from continuing to pursue a degree. On another level, the descriptions of the students pouring their energy into creative pursuits during their training to become graphic artists reignited my own interest in the field. I had dabbled in design and illustration in college and enjoyed it immensely but had no intention on making that interest into a career. I believe reading and re-reading this novel helped set me on a path to becoming a professional designer. ”
— From a 2014 Facebook post about books that influenced me
 

Post Pitmad Post

PitMad was a trip! I wasn’t pitching today, but I wanted to help support the Twitter Writing Community, so I put an offer out there to retweet my followers’ pitches…only I didn’t word my offer tweet very well and it kind of blew up on me! We’ll get to that. But first…

What’s PitMad?

For the uninitiated, PitMad is an event on Twitter where authors tweet out their 280-character “elevator pitch” for their completed novels using the #PitMad hashtag and agents like tweets to request that the author send them a query letter with a more detailed synopsis of the work. It’s a way for agents to find authors and stories they’d be interested in representing and a way for authors to match with agents. That’s the short version, there are rules to follow, and you can read up on all of the details here.

Anyway, in past events, I just scrolled the hashtag and retweeted the pitches I thought were compelling. Once, I asked my followers if any of them were participating so I could retweet their pitches. And that was my original intention for today, to boost the pitch tweets of my writer friends on Twitter and people who I was already following. But, liked I said, I didn’t word my tweet very specifically, as you can see…

I have so many new friends!

The fact that my offer was retweeted 17 times may have had something to do with the fact that I spent HOURS today on Twitter! But, the fact is, it was such a joy to do it. Before I tweeted this out, I’d already challenged myself not just to blindly hit the retweet button, but to also read each pitch and drop the author a note saying something positive or encouraging about their pitch. I’d recently had a really negative experience with a fellow writer on Twitter, and I wanted to combat the nasty taste she’d left in my mouth by modeling how to be the best that the Twitter Writing Community has to offer. Taking time out of my day to retweet pitches, read each one of them, and offer my little nuggets of positivity was how I chose to do this. There were some overwhelmingly positive side effects, and some unexpected challenges.

Challenge #1

The biggest challenge was finding something to connect with in every pitch that was brought to my attention. We all know that not every book is for ever reader, so there were a lot of stories and characters that I didn’t find compelling and a lot of pitches for genres that I don’t read. If I were to see some of these pitched books on a shelf, I might not even pick it up. But the deal was I would offer some positivity on each pitch, so I read each one and tried to find something about the setting or the character that I could connect with, even if it was just wanting to know more about a specific aspect.

And I’ll cop to being a very critical person. My first reaction to seeing a tweet with a grammatical error is to suggest a correction. I had to make sure to keep a lid on that instinct and just look for my favorite thing about the pitch and focus on that.

Challenge #2

An unexpected challenge of reading hundreds of pitches in a day was seeing the dozens of truly excellent pitches that I would read tomorrow if I could…and then comparing my own work with them. I felt wholly inadequate. All authors have those days when they feel like their work will never measure up, so why bother persevering. Honestly, this is my mood today.

Positive Side Effect #1

While hopping over to each person’s account who responded to my offer to retweet, I went ahead and followed everyone. I figured, “Let’s really be friends after this! Let’s not let our only interaction be something so transactional as a boost on PitMad.” And since there are so many of us in the Writing Community who are on Team Followback, I gained quite a few new followers who are authors. I think I followed about 60 authors yesterday and gained about as many followers myself. In no way did I intend my tertiary participation in PitMad to be a way to gain new followers, but it was a happy side effect.

I haven’t done this for my new PitMad friends yet, but I like to periodically spin through my followers list and find an original tweet to drop a reply or a like on. We all know the Twitter feed is algorithm driven which means you will stop seeing tweets from people you rarely interact with, so I like to keep the feed refreshed by interacting in a way that isn’t dependent on the main feed. I’m hoping my feed is a lot more diverse after this PitMad experience.

Positive Side Effect #2

I saw such a diverse group of pitches from so many different genres! This year I’ve been “reading outside my usual genres” just to see what’s out there that I’ve been missing.

And I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about gatekeeping, literary elitism, and how the work of genre writers and women is often diminished, and how complicit I am in these issues. I’ve got the Reading Log blog series rolling out in coming weeks (that you don’t want to miss, so please subscribe to get it delivered right to your inbox) and spending so much time analyzing my media consumption habits has taught me some things about where my own blindspots and biases are. I’m a work in progress. I’m making an effort to diversify, not just to read authors from different backgrounds, traditions, and races, but to read stories from outside of the genres that I usually enjoy. Reading pitches from genres I don’t normally read with an eye for finding something I can connect with in them was an eye-opening experience that I’m very grateful to have had.

Doing good

But the whole goal of Pitmad is to get an agent, so the question remains…did any of my retweets pick up agent likes?

I’m over the moon to say that, YES, two (or possibly three) of my retweets picked up a like by someone who looked like a legit agent. And dozens were retweeted by my followers, and a few of those picked up some agent interest somewhere along the line, so I think it’s safe to say that just the act of adding a signal boost did make a difference.

I retweeted so many authors who had very few followers, and it made me feel good to be able to help their pitch reach the newsfeeds of my larger audience. I’m not followed by any agents, to my knowledge, but I follow quite a few and when I saw a pitch that matched up with an agent’s Manuscript Wishlist, I made sure to let the author know who to query after PitMad.

I think the real difference was in replying with a positive comment. Almost everyone I sent a little encouragement to replied back with an expression of gratitude. I’ll never know how much those few words impacted someone. I hope it made a world of difference. PitMad can be utter pitch madness, as the name implies. It can be overwhelming, unbearably anxious, and ultimately a big let-down if your pitch doesn’t get any nibbles from agents. But if a fellow author tells you something kind and positive about your pitch? Maybe that can make all the difference between stashing that manuscript in a drawer and forgetting about it and powering through the disappointment and carrying on querying.