Jared Shurin's Blog, page 5

Marketing manuals and metaphors

I’m fairly sure that I’ve shared some version of this in the past, but I like to keep this up to date when I find “new” books that I recommend.

This list started out of a Q&A following one of my many hand-wavey lectures about strategy. One of the more sensible students asked me for reading recommendations. As well as the household names ("Ogilvy!"), I also added in a few, slightly more tangential, guides.

I tend to value “strategy” more as a mindset than a discipline. Strategy is about curiosity...

Size matters

You may have missed it, as I’ve been very subtle [BUY MY BOOK], but I’ve finished editing The Big Book of Cyberpunk. (Out September! Pre-order now!)

I’ll talk a more about the actual ‘cyberpunk’ part means later on.

First, I want to talk about ‘big’.

This is a big book.

A really big book.

If you’ve not read any of the other ‘Big Books’, specifically the SF/F ones edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer: go do that. They’re exceptional. Looking at those will also give you some sense of the size you’re de...

The Great Fragmentation

If this is the advent of a “movement,” it will, unlike all previous movements, move in many different - even opposing - directions. It’s the Great Fragmentation, a reflection of what’s been happening with television audiences, the music business, and print media for some time. - Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw (2010)

Bourdain (RIP) is writing specifically about the restaurant business, but being Bourdain, his wisdom transcends any specific context. As I sit here, two of the major backbones of Web 2....

The vinyl of the skies

London gave him a feeling of pleasant anonymity, of a measured and timeless courtesy, a feeling that if he had been able to walk on his hands, he would attract very little additional attention. It is, he thought, an older and more complex culture, larded with a certain smugness, shot through with little social nuances and distinctions we never catch, vastly more tolerant of eccentricity.

John D. MacDonald - I Could Go On Singing (Fawcett: 1963)

(Or, as another great wordsmith put it.)

Peregrine fa...

Love is on my mind (and TBR)

Station identification: Hi. I’m a strategist and book-lover. This newsletter is sometimes about the former, sometimes about the latter, every now and then about both, and very often about nothing at all.

I’m currently reading through a pile of award-winning romances and analysing the values on display in each one. Why? ‘Cause! (Introduction, Progress, Reviews Batch #1, Reviews Batch #2, Reviews Batch #3, Reviews Batch #4). Over the past two months, between judging The Kitschies, I managed to rea...

Science Fiction

The above is an illustration for Hot Wheels by Syd ‘Dude who famously did the concept art for Blade Runner’ Mead. It is both very cyberpunk and, to quote Anne, ‘the most teen boy thing ever made’.

Taking a break from romance to talk about science fiction, with two updates.

The first is that The Kitschies have announced their finalists. The Kitschies are the prize for ‘progressive, intelligence, and entertaining books containing elements of the speculative or fantastic’. Basically, an SF/F prize,...

Tigers, Temptations and the Ten Percent Thief

This edition: more romance reviews, a fantastic new release (not romance), and the general grab bag of links and interesting reading.

For newcomers: I’m reading 30-odd award-winning romances and doing some spurious analyses of the values they reinforce. Why? ‘Cause! (Introduction, Progress, Reviews Batch #1, Reviews Batch #2, Reviews Batch #3).

Marjorie Liu’s Tiger Eye (2010, Option): Liu is now better known for Monstress, which is not to cast any shade on her long-running ‘Dirk and Steele’ series...

Shrewd, righteous, and utterly stupid

[T]he most cynical and potentially dangerous business in the world. Telling people what to think and what to believe. It has been frightening me ever since I’ve been in it, which isn’t long. It’s the power that frightens me. There’s more power in Manhattan, more power over the human mind, than in any city since the dawn of time….

[He] was so sincere about it. I felt he had latched on to some greater truth, some massive justification for what he was doing that far out-weighed all my petty little ...

Superb

Last weekend was the SuperBowl, which was both objectively and subjectively a classic.

How do you run 26 yards on one leg? Just find the right people to chase you.

I was not a football fan as a kid. I was - steel yourself for this revelation - kind of a scrawny nerd! I certainly didn’t play, and I didn’t really know the rules, and I thought that the people who liked football were some sort of alien species. Fun fact: I literally learned how to throw a spiral in January of this year, taught by my...

Reading Recommendations

First things first, an update on my romance reading challenge.

For newcomers: I’m reading 30-odd award-winning romances and doing some spurious analyses of the values they reinforce. Why? ‘Cause! (Introduction, Progress, Reviews Batch #1.)

Dee Holmes’ Black Horse Island (1991, RITA Winner): Keely has inherited her father’s (titular) island, which is a camp for troubled youf. She has thirty days to prove herself, and that means she needs (for reasons?) a Man, and the right Man is Jed (JED!). Jed w...