Jared Shurin's Blog, page 7

Reading my feelings

What a funny year for reading. One victim of the CRUSHING EXISTENTIAL ANXIETY that permeated 2020 was my attention span.

For a while, my ability to concentrate on reading was completely absent - given quiet time and a book in front of me, my brain would just start spinning into pandemics and elections and, well, everything else. Thanks, brain.

Eventually I browbeat my brain into a bit of focus, but, even then, my reading was limited:

I could read ‘work-related’ books. My brain understood that work...

The best of the West

Over the past few months, I read an assortment of award-winning Western novels. I chose this genre for reasons (explained at length here). Along the way, it has led to a discussion of faith and of violence (and ‘anti-violence’).

My operating theory is that Westerns make an excellent hunting ground for a vision of America. What is it that America should be? And how is it that America/ns should behave in order to achieve this goal? These two questions can be answered through ‘values’ - specificall...

Robbing Peter

Influencer marketing: the Tupperware Party.

Bookshop.org UK’s launch has been lauded as ‘what the publishing world has been waiting for’ - and has received a jubilant reception from an innovation-starved industry.

Part of the excitement comes from Bookshop.org’s classification as a ‘B-corporation’ (a privately certified, non-legal designation that requires certain standards of social impact; it does not mean not-for-profit), with the mission of helping independent booksellers. That’s obviously a ...

The truth in black and white

First, The Outcast Hours is part of a StoryBundle.

For the low-low price of ‘whatever you want to pay’, you get a copy of this lovely anthology plus four other excellent book. And if you kick in $15 or more, you get ten books total.

The theme is ‘International Noir’. I love noir, and having a book I co-edited receive that lofty designation is pretty heady stuff.

The bundle is shared with some of my favourite authors and books - again, for those that know me, you’ll know that folks like Maurice Br...

The spectacle of adjacencies

Before this descends into madness:

I’m speaking at FutureBook next month, as the keynote for INSIGHT day. INSIGHT and PUBLISHING are two of my favourite topics, and I’m pretty sure that we’re all doing them both wrong, so, you know, should be a good talk.

Now, madness.

Anne and I had a conversation about The Office (American, not British, because the latter is awful). I mentioned wanting to rewatch it, and she mentioned, well, we just did.

I’m pretty sure ‘we’ hadn’t. But then she mentioned it was i...

The last refuge

I’m now 35-odd books along in my Westerns reading. Some of note:

Return to Red River (2017) by Johnny D Boggs. As I’ve never actually seen the iconic(?) film Red River, I am absolutely not the target audience for Boggs’ ambitious sequel. (The Red River Transmedia Empire!) Unsurprisingly, it pretty much bounced off me. The bits I did enjoy were functional: the details of exactly how a cattle drive works - the long hours, the dust, the meals, the travel planning. I was just enough into the characte...

Faith, trust and pixie dust

First, elsewhere:

Zombies, according to Simon Pegg, are the ‘most potent metaphorical monster’ - but can they be relevant during Covid-19? My (fairly tricky) review of The Living Dead, over at Tor.com.

Tomorrow night, I’m hosting Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens for a discussion of his new book, Incitement: Anwar Al-Awlaki's Western Jihad. The book is not a biography, more a study of the infamous recruiter’s impact, and a deep dive into what made him so effective. As with all these book talks, this is...

The Chaotic West

I’ve been trailing Westerns (pun!) for a few newsletters now, and it is about time I bit the bullet (hey!).

After my mysteries challenge concluded, I wanted to try a different genre. Not just a palate-cleanser, but an entirely new sort of cuisine. Westerns are definitely different.

But…

In a broader sense, this is my quest for America.

The Absolutely Subjective Best Books of Part of the Decade for Me

Like everyone else, I started a listicle in January 2020 about the best whatnot of the previous ten years. And, like most everyone else, I was then side-tracked by the apocalypse. It happens.

I revisited the draft to see if there was anything useful in there. There wasn’t. But it did give me an idea. Rather than try to come up with an 'objective’ list of great books, and convince you to read them, why don’t I do the reverse?

In this case, a purely subjective ‘best of’ list, measuring the books t...

Misinformation, Mythology and the Soul of Science Fiction

A bit of a grab bag, apologies.

I have a new piece in The Bookseller explaining that books can be ‘misinformation’ too. Trust in media sources is bottoming out, and books aren’t immune. This is particularly critical for publishing: the book is already a threatened form of culture, and the authority a book conveys is one of its few remaining USPs. There have been some, to put it frankly, egregious fuckups. It needs to be sorted out systematically.

On a related note, I’m hosting Nina Jankowicz for a...