The Life I Should Be Living Had

The Main Advantage Of Being A Reviewer Is That You Read A Lot. A Lot Of Books Get Sent To You, And You Have An Amazing Vantage Point From Which To Observe What's Going On In Contemporary Fiction - Not Only Genre Stuff, The Whole Spectrum.

Nothing Is Wrong With You. You're Not Different. Everybody Feels As Bad As You Do: This Is Just What Writing A Novel Feels Like. To Write A Novel Is To Come In Contact With Raw, Primal Feelings, Hopes And Longings And Psychic Wounds, And Try To Make A Big Public Word-sculpture Out Of Them, And That Is A Crazy Hard Thing To Do.

I Read Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Which I Think Will Subsequently Be Recognized As One Of The First Great Novels Of The 21st Century.

We Have Reached The Point Where Ignorance And Neglect Are The Best We Can Hope For In A Ruler.

The Idea Of Some Kind Of Objectively Constant, Universal Literary Value Is Seductive. It Feels Real. It Feels Like A Stone Cold Fact That In Search Of Lost Time, By Marcel Proust, Is Better Than A Shore Thing, By Snooki. And It May Be; Snooki Definitely Has More One-star Reviews On Amazon. But If Literary Value Is Real, No One Seems To Be Able To Locate It Or Define It Very Well. We're Increasingly Adrift In A Grey Void Of Aesthetic Relativism.