Judith Ridge raises an interesting question about the way newspapers allocate books to reviewers in her review of the film "The Door in the Floor". Her point, made in passing, concerns the way "The Sydney Morning Herald" sent Nick Hornby's new novel, which fits into the Young Adult category, not to the resident YA reviewer but to someone with no connection to the genre.
I've skirted around this issue before - see my notes on an "Australian Literary Review" review of Richard Ford's Lay of the Land. I really can't see the point in reading a review written by someone who knows nothing about the genre in question, and isn't willing to move towards some level of understanding of it. It's a pointless exercise. A
A month or so ago we had the news of a European novelist who was convicted of a murder after police decided his crime novel show more than a passing acquaintance with some facts of the case that had not been made public. Now we have an aspiring horror novelist in Mexico who has been arrested on murder charges after authorities found various body
parts in his apartment. Reports state that there might be three bodies involved.
Max Barry is disturbed by the amount of research the writer has undertaken: "I'm sometimes asked how much research you should do when working on a novel, so let me say: this is probably too much. It wasn't just the girlfriend, you see; there's also a missing ex-girlfriend and a chopped-up prostitute. That seems excessive to me. One, I could understand. I mean, I wouldn't support it. You let horror novelists start cutting up hookers, and the next thing you know Tom Clancy is commandeering nuclear submarines off the coast of Florida...Call me a purist, but I prefer to do things the old-fashioned way: dismember people in my head."
Sometimes you get a certain blogger covering a couple of very interesting topics in the one week which are hard to ignore. Such is Judith Ridge who attended a seminar organised by the writing and society research group at the University of Western Sydney, titled "The Uses of Blogging". The seminar speakers were Kerryn Goldsworthy and Stephanie Trigg. It's best you read the piece. This is the type of writing blogs do so well: personal and informed.
