From Smithsonian Magazine:
Even before there were armchairs, voracious bookworms traveled the world just by reading.
Most people didn’t have any other choice, even after there were armchairs. And before armchairs, how many people could read?
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2013 James Ament From The Guardian:
Julian Barnes claims that British novelists feel obligated to write love scenes and so make a hash of it, replacing euphemisms with cliches. So what is so tricky about literary sex?
Since I am writing my next book, a mystery that includes murder, mayhem and sex, I was struck by this article. Yes, literary sex is tricky….
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2013 James Ament From Write Right Now. I am thinking we should probably read more of these books—lessons to be learned.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2013 James Ament From The Wall Street Journal, the opening paragraphs:
Truman Capote’s masterwork of murder, “In Cold Blood,” cemented two reputations when first published almost five decades ago: his own, as a literary innovator, and detective Alvin Dewey Jr.’s as the most famous Kansas lawman since Wyatt Earp.
But new evidence undermines Mr. Capote’s claim that his best seller was an “immaculately factual” recounting of the bloody slaughter of the Clutter family in their Kansas farmhouse. It also calls into question the image of Mr. Dewey as the brilliant, haunted hero.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2013 James Ament From The Browser—FiveBooks Interviews:
“The point of a futuristic novel isn’t to predict the future. The point is to show how humans adapt and change to deal with whatever the future brings. The skills that sci-fi readers practice are adaptability, resourcefulness, calmness in the face of change and stress.”
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2013 James Ament From The Chronicle Review. Until I read this article, I had no idea that their were people studying reading in the manner explained here:
How do we recover the reading experiences of the past? Lately scholars have stepped up the hunt for evidence of how people over time have interacted with books, newspapers, and other printed material.
“You’re looking for teardrops on the page,” says Leah Price, a professor of English at Harvard University and the author of How to Do Things With Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton University Press, 2012). “You’re looking for some hard evidence of what the book did to its reader”—and what the reader did with the book.
In the overall scheme of things, I wonder why?
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2013 James Ament It doesn’t really exist, but My Ideal Bookshelf: Portraits of Famous Creators Through the Spines of Their Favorite Books provides some insight to “those aspirational bookshelves we all hold in our heads (and, ideally, on our walls), full of all the books that helped us discover and rediscover who we are, what we stand for, and what we’d like to become.” From brain pickings.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 James Ament From the Guardian, via The Long Good Read:
One of the functions of fiction is to serve as a kind of tourism, either showing us places, situations and people that we might not otherwise reach or scrolling through snapshots of events or sensations that we remember. Crime stories rarely serve the latter purpose – most admirers of homicide novels will, thankfully, never become or even know a murder victim – but are a perfect illustration of the former.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 James Ament From The Millions:
Fiction written in English by authors of Indian descent has been critically acclaimed and commercially successful for decades. Now a new wave of talent has arrived…
When I saw the title, “Lawrence Norfolk: why does nobody eat in books?,” I immediately thought of the famous eating scene in the 1963 film Tom Jones. And, sure enough, there it was, before the article even began, referencing the “meaty performance” of Joyce Redman.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 James Ament 
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