From Around the Web: Wheel of Time companion to E-books and health

The following are links to articles and announcements that I found interesting and thought you might too. Some are recent while others were posted back in December (yep, weeding through my emails again) but all are book/reading related.

To be published November 2015

First up is this post on Tor.com that is sure to excite all Wheel of Time fans. Tor plans to publish a Wheel of Time companion in November of this year. YEAHIEE!! According to the post on Tor.com, “Only a fraction of what author Robert Jordan imagined ended up on the page, the rest going into his personal files.” I hope this WOT companion will make us privy to what went into Jordan’s personal files. The post included a short list of what will be included in the book. I’m looking forward to detailed character descriptions, a chronological historical recount of the world (if possible), and lots of maps. I also hope that the art will be superb. I love the art in the A Song of Ice and Fire companion and the historical recount in it is not bad either though I wish they had waited until the series is complete to do a companion. Anyways, I’m only on book 5 of the WOT series but I’ll grab the companion as soon as it’s published!

To be published September 22, 2015

Riverhead Books has revealed the cover of Elizabeth Gilbert’s upcoming book on creativity, slated to be published on September 22. It’s titled Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. It’s quite colorful. I’m more excited about fact that Gilbert is writing a book on creativity (I wasn’t aware) than about the cover. But it looks like the kind of cover that will grab my attention from across the room. According to Gilbert, the book is “basically a manifesto. It contains everything that I believe about creativity.” GalleyCat has more on the announcement.

I don’t do well with challenges. I certainly believe I’m behind on my Classics Club Challenge. But when I saw this challenge in my Book Riot e-newsletter, I couldn’t help wanting to join. I like how diverse it is. I will partake in Book Riot’s 2015 Read Harder Challenge. Here’s a bit on the creator’s—Rachel—intention: “I’ve included 24 tasks, averaging out to two per month, that will hopefully inspire you to pick up books that represent experiences and places and cultures that might be different from your own. We encourage you to push yourself, to take advantage of this challenge as a way to explore topics or formats or genres that you otherwise wouldn’t try.” Haven’t started yet but I’m looking forward to it!

Biographile has started another series on its website. This one is called Write Start. It’s a compilation of writers’ advice on how to start writing. I’ll be following along. So far I’ve read David Levithan on [Insert Strong Title Here]:

“The title you give a story—whether it ends up being your final title, or whether it’s just a placeholder—is your North Star. If you have a placeholder that doesn’t feel right, you have to ask yourself why it doesn’t feel right, and that, too, can guide you to where you need to be, because it shows you where you shouldn’t go.”

And Maggie Shipstead on Writers’ Little Moments of Unlocking, in which Shipstead talks about beginnings:

“These little moments of unlocking, of finding the key to the puzzle, often manifest as first sentences. The first sentence establishes so much as far as tone, verb tense, point of view, even rhythm.”

“Beginnings are a mystery, but to me they’re the most exciting part of writing, when potential seems limitless and all those terrible, thorny problems that will pop up down the line can’t even be imagined.”

From Journal to Memoir is another Biographile series I followed. It’s based on Rita Jacob’s book The Way In. Jacob’s book is slim and quick to get through. She also includes various exercises, which are included in the Biographile series.

As for articles, I read this one on Medical Daily about how e-books damage our health. It’s an opinion piece but I agree with it because of my personal experience with e-readers. They are convenient but I prefer my books.

And this article on readability on The Atlantic’s website. The article basically discusses how subjective our claims of “easy” or “difficult” books are but the author focuses more on contemporary reads like Fifty Shades of Grey rather than the classics.

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