I Had a Blog Once

A long time ago I tried to blog regularly on my website. The amount of time that it took away from writing made it eventually seem not worth it. But there were some entries that I thought were interesting and worth keeping, even though this blog won't be updated in the future.

Dig in. Enjoy!
Read This!
My friend Liberty contributed a list of 50 book recommendations to a book called Read This!, which contains book recommendations from a number of indie bookstore folks. It’s pretty cool. I’ve gone through and checked off books that I’ve read and marked some that I want to read or at least learn more about.

With that in mind, I thought I’d compile a list of 50 book recommendations myself.

I think there’s a temptation to make yourself look really well-read by including books that are supposed to be great, but which you haven’t actually cracked. I thought that I would probably be better off only listing books that I actually have read. So if your favorite book is Finnegan’s Wake or Anna Karenina or something like that, I’m sure I would have loved it if I’d read it. . .

A few authors have written a lot of books that I would recommend and in these cases I just recommend one, but I’ll put a note that it is a stand in for the larger body of work (Elmore Leonard is one of these). I’m going to do these ten at a time and each time I’ll pick one title to talk a little bit more about.

So. . .here we go, in alphabetical order:

T.C Boyle  
Drop City
Bill Bryson    
A Brief History of Everything
Albert Camus  
The Stranger
Truman Capote  
In Cold Blood
Arthur Conan Doyle  
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Joseph Conrad  
Heart of Darkness
Len Deighton  
The Ipcress File (or many others)
Nelson DeMille  
Up Country
Patrick deWitt  
The Sisters Brothers
David Eggers  
ZeitounJames Ellroy  
L.A. Confidential
Justin Evans  
A Good and Happy Child
F. Scott Fitzgerald  
The Great Gatsby
Gillian Flynn  
Gone Girl
Frederick Forsythe  
The Day of the Jackal
Robert Graves  
I, Claudius
Michael Gruber  
Tropic of Night (all of the Jimmy Paz novels are good)
Patricia Highsmith  
Strangers on a Train
The Tremor of Forgery
Peter Hoeg  
Smilla’s Sense of Snow
Tony Horwitz
A Voyage Long and Strange
Jeffrey Household
Rogue Male
Bill James
Panicking Ralph
John Krakauer
Under the Banner of Heaven
John LeCarre
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Smiley’s People
Elmore Leonard
Split Images (he is incredibly consistent – it’s hard to go wrong)
Michael Lewis
The Big Short
Janet Malcolm
The Journalist and the Murderer
Henning Mankell
The Return of the Dancing Master
Hilary Mantel
Wolf Hall
Bring Up the Bodies
George R.R. Martin
Game of Thrones
Val McDermid
A Place of Execution
China Mieville
The City and the City
David Mitchell
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet
Tim O’Brien
In the Lake of the Woods
Edgar Allen Poe
The Complete Works
Richard Russo
Straight Man
Mark Singer
Citizen K
Martin Cruz Smith  
Gorky Park (almost any Arkady Renko book)
Ralph Steadman  
Ralph Steadman’s Jelly Book
Peter Straub  
Ghost Story
Donna Tartt  
The Secret History
Ross Thomas  
Chinaman’s Chance
Scott Turow  
Presumed Innocent
David Foster Wallace  
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
Jess Walters  
Citizen Vince
Financial Lives of the Poets
Minette Walters  
The Breaker
Editing
Scorch City’s release date — August 30 — is fast approaching. In the meantime, I’m working on final edits to the manuscript for my third book. Editing is, in many ways, more important than the actual writing of the first draft (at least it is for me). I feel a certain freedom when I’m writing the first draft because I know that everything except for the very best parts will inevitably be rewritten, possibly multiple times. So the first draft is really about getting everything that I have in my head on paper.

My sense is that it is difficult to figure out the mindset needed for effective editing. For one thing, you need to be able to look at what you’ve written at both the large scale (plot, character arc, etc) and the small scale (chapter, paragraph, sentence) and be willing to make sweeping changes if you need to. Sometimes, particularly in the large scale, this means getting rid of writing that you might really like, either because it doesn’t quite fit the story or it slows things down or whatever. It’s not fun, but it’s the kind of choice that you need to make to end up with a solid end product.
I find that editing for pace is hard and rely on my agent and editor to help me out there. It is the classic can’t see the forest for the trees problem where I can’t get a handle on how things flow because I’m so focused on each individual piece.

I edit exclusively on paper and type the changes into a word document. I’ve looked into tablets a little to see if I can do the same kind of editing using a stylus on an electronic file, but the resolution and clarity of the stylus writing isn’t good enough right now to make that feasible. To make matters worse, I end up printing everything out one-sided because I end up writing quite a bit of copy on the backs of pages. I’ve included an example of that in the pictures.

I’ve included images of three consecutive pages (including the back of one sheet) of the manuscript for my third book with my edits. These are fairly heavily edited and all 560-some pages don’t necessarily look like this. You probably can’t make out the actual words, but I think it gives you a sense of the degree of editing that goes in, even on a third or fourth draft.