The best-selling author of 17 Jack Reacher novels recommends six debut novels that led to greater things

The only book that I might read from this list is Casino Royale. One of my top 6 books would definitely be Wild Seed by Octavia Butler. What would you put on your list?

From Salon:

“In my view, a good writer can learn something from whatever he or she reads. And so I certainly don’t begrudge a student reading any piece of contemporary fiction. In fact, I assign the annual best-of anthologies as textbooks in my workshops, and more often than not our discussions of the assigned readings — initiated by students, not by me — center on what makes the stories so goddam awful. This is useful and good.

But a fiction writer ought to engage with other parts of the culture, too. This includes reading outside one’s genre — I happen to favor sci-fi and mystery, but I think it’s fine for literary writers to read YA, romance, fantasy or whatever they please. Literary writers are in the privileged position of being permitted to raid any genre for tools to subvert and repurpose. We ought to be reading poetry, too, of course, and nonfiction. We should read instruction manuals, legal documents, restaurant reviews and corporate newsletters. We should follow weird people on Twitter and go to lots of parties and have lots of intense and ridiculous conversations with drunk people. We should go home for the holidays and argue with our families, and we ought to listen to lots of music and we ought to watch plenty of television, because television is, at the moment, the most artistically important narrative medium. We should eavesdrop, and we should gossip. We should probably be in therapy. We should probably drink more coffee.

Let’s face it: Literary fiction is fucking boring. It really is. It’s a genre as replete with clichés as any. And when you’re as deeply immersed in it as many of us are, it’s all too easy to stop noticing the clichés. They no longer stand out. They’re just What People Do. And so, we do them. If a writer of literary fiction wants to be great, she needs to poke her head up out of the echo chamber every now and then and absorb the genuine peculiarity of human striving. And that means reading stuff that is not literary fiction, and, sometimes, not reading at all.”

It is rare for me to read literary fiction. I mainly read fantasy, nonfiction, and a little poetry and scifi. I also read a lot of blogs and news-type stuff online. So what do you all think? Is literary fiction really that awful?

I saw a link to this on Racialicious and just had to share it with you guys. I don’t really have the time to participate myself because I’ve got deadlines to keep but I encourage you guys to participate.

Mr. Locke, now 61, has also published a nonfiction book, “How I Sold One Million E-Books in Five Months.” One reason for his success was that he priced his novels at 99 cents, which encouraged readers to take a chance on someone they didn’t know. Another was his willingness to try to capture readers one at a time through blogging, Twitter posts and personalized e-mail, an approach that was effective but labor-intensive.

“My first marketing goal was to get five five-star reviews,” he writes. “That’s it. But you know what? It took me almost two months!” In the first nine months of his publishing career, he sold only a few thousand e-books. Then, in December 2010, he suddenly caught on and sold 15,000 e-books.

One thing that made a difference is not mentioned in “How I Sold One Million E-Books.” That October, Mr. Locke commissioned Mr. Rutherford to order reviews for him, becoming one of the fledging service’s best customers. “I will start with 50 for $1,000, and if it works and if you feel you have enough readers available, I would be glad to order many more,” he wrote in an Oct. 13 e-mail to Mr. Rutherford.  “I’m ready to roll.”

I can’t imagine spending that much on a book review. Then again I can’t imagine paying for a review period. SMH

Unglue.it was set up in May to “unlock” hard-to-find titles and get them back into the hands of passionate readers. A Kickstarter for literary types, unglue.it crowdsources appreciation for classic books, soliciting donations from superfans with the aim of acquiring the rights and releasing them as free ebooks. Its first success, Ruth Finnegan’s Oral Literature in Africa, an authoritative study unobtainable for many years, was released a couple of weeks ago, and is now available to anyone, for free, with a host of new updates including audio material. For its author, its new availability to an African audience is particularly gratifying: “It is wonderful to think that it will now be freely read in the very continent it discusses.”

(Source: bibliofeminista)