Noiseless Chatter Archive

So ends everyone’s favorite year, ever. I don’t think anyone within my circle of friends — real life friends and online friends alike — made it out totally unscathed, but that’s what comes with surrounding yourself people who still have shreds of moral decency, I guess. The point is: we made it through the arbitrary stretch we’ll all look back on as “2016,” probably while rolling our eyes or making a sour face or something. It was a rough year, but I don’t need to tell anybody else that. And as we look forward to one of uncertainty (unless you’re one of my readers who is already on January 1, in which case it’s probably at least a little more certain)…this blog’s future follows suit. No, I’m not shutting it down. (TOO BAD.) But my longest, most consistent project ended this year. I have a few other balls in the air, and some ideas, but it’s going to come down to where (and when) the inspiration finds me. I don’t have a specific direction right now. I do plan on r...

Hey. I’ll be back with my typical year-end post, but for now: Merry Christmas, if you celebrate that. If you don’t, happy December 25. Thank you for reading, and for tolerating my wallowing in literacy this holiday season. I deeply enjoyed writing these. It was…good for me, I think. It was a chance to just write. Not to worry. Not to be anxious. Not even to think very hard. These are books (or sometimes authors) that already mean a lot to me. I knew what I wanted to say. I sat down and said it. And that helped me a lot to get back into the habit of writing…something that, to be honest, has been difficult for me lately. Having a daily commitment was good as well. Without that…I can’t imagine I’d have done much of anything. So thank you. I needed this. I hope you got something from it as well. If you’re interested in the full list, or just want to revisit any previous entries from my advent feature, have at it: Day 1: Catch-22 Day 2: Blindness Day 3: Lord ...

Choose Your Own Advent is a yuletide celebration of literacy. We’ll spotlight a different novel every day until Christmas, hopefully helping you find one you’d like to read in the new year. Title: The Hotel New Hampshire Author: John Irving Year: 1981 I’m closing this series the way I opened it: with a book I read on a whim, and which affected me deeply. In both cases I had no expectations going in. In both cases, I just felt compelled to pick up the novel. In both cases, I came away a different person. This is why I read. This is why everybody should read. The difference between those experiences, though, is that Catch-22 turned me into a writer. I was younger then. I wasn’t…me. I was somebody, for sure, but Catch-22 hit me at the right time. It gave me direction I didn’t know I needed. It said, “Look. Look at all of the amazing things literature can do .” And I never looked back. I’ve been reading and writing ever since. The number of days on which I’...

Choose Your Own Advent is a yuletide celebration of literacy. We’ll spotlight a different novel every day until Christmas, hopefully helping you find one you’d like to read in the new year. Title: Nineteen Eighty-Four Author: George Orwell Year: 1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four is one of the few books my father ever recommended to me. He’s never been much of a reader. He likes true crime, and he’s read a few biographies and autobiographies of musicians. But there haven’t been many novels he’s read, let alone recommended. It’s always been difficult for my father and I to bond. We don’t share many of the same interests, or desires. He lives a life very different from the one I’d like to lead. I think he was expecting to have a different kind of son in his life, and it’s hard for me to believe that he wasn’t (and isn’t) disappointed by the one he actually got. And so we’ve lived our own separate lives. We both got older, and found our own ways forward…whatever “forwar...

Choose Your Own Advent is a yuletide celebration of literacy. We’ll spotlight a different novel every day until Christmas, hopefully helping you find one you’d like to read in the new year. Title: The Sound and the Fury Author: William Faulkner Year: 1929 It’s a fairly universal feeling to want to escape who you are. Of course, we can put a more positive spin on that: we want to do better, we want to improve ourselves, we want to achieve some level of comfort and satisfaction. But make no mistake; we all, to varying degrees, feel the desire to escape who we are. The Sound and the Fury is William Faulkner’s masterpiece. It’s also a masterpiece of American fiction, and one of the funniest, saddest, most astute studies anyone’s written about mankind’s driving need–and ultimate inability–to move on. It centers on the Compson family, which, through the generations, has fallen on hard times. Mainly it centers on one group of siblings–Benjy, Caddie, Jason, and Quentin...

Choose Your Own Advent is a yuletide celebration of literacy. We’ll spotlight a different novel every day until Christmas, hopefully helping you find one you’d like to read in the new year. Title: The Devil in the White City Author: Erik Larson Year: 2003 It’s rare that I read a recent novel, unless it’s been written by an author I already love. I understand that this is both massively unfair and foolish, but… I don’t know. I know that I’ll only be able to read some finite number of books before I die. Every choice of book I made, I’m choosing not to read literally millions of others. And this worries me. There’s not time enough to read everything, and when you add in the fact that there are bound to be (and have certainly been) books I’d like to re- read, the number of books I’ll ever possibly get to dwindles further. So I read older books, almost exclusively. I do this because time is an excellent curator. Something still in print after a hundred years is ...

Choose Your Own Advent is a yuletide celebration of literacy. We’ll spotlight a different novel every day until Christmas, hopefully helping you find one you’d like to read in the new year. Title: Of Mice and Men Author: John Steinbeck Year: 1937 A good many works of art have hit me like a brick, but Of Mice and Men might have been the first one to really, truly get an emotional response out of me. Like many of the books that dug deeply into me, I didn’t know at first what to expect from it. It was a summer reading assignment at some point in middle school. It was a short book, so I read it first. That was, I say in all truth, a great lesson for me to learn as an early reader; short doesn’t necessarily mean easy. Not that it was difficult to read, per se. Rather, it was difficult to process. With that ending–my experience of that ending–still so vivid to me. I’ve read it many times since. The ending still gets me. But I remember the first time I experienced...

Choose Your Own Advent is a yuletide celebration of literacy. We’ll spotlight a different novel every day until Christmas, hopefully helping you find one you’d like to read in the new year. Title: The Road Author: Cormac McCarthy Year: 2006 We’ve reached a stage in which video games are just about accepted as the art that they actually are. Not all of them, of course; it’s the medium that has artistic possibility, and just like any medium the individual artists will embrace or squander that opportunity as they see fit. But I think it says something about how far the medium has come when a very impressive work of literature–say, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road –puts me in mind of a certain video game, and the comparison is all around favorable. Neither the book nor the game look poorer when evaluated next to the other. The Road made me think of Fallout 3 . The Road came first, but I didn’t read it until later. When I did, I was reminded of that great game, and I s...

Choose Your Own Advent is a yuletide celebration of literacy. We’ll spotlight a different novel every day until Christmas, hopefully helping you find one you’d like to read in the new year. Title: The Great Gatsby Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald Year: 1925 When it comes to my experience as a reader, there’s something I don’t believe I’ve talked about before. I’ve thought about doing so, but never had a reason. Now, here, with this book, it becomes a bit relevant. When I read, I don’t picture characters. I don’t know if that’s just me, if that’s just the way readers usually operate, if there’s a word for whatever imaginative blindness I have, or what, but as much as I might easily see a setting, or an event, or an object I’m reading about, I don’t see physical human characters in my mind’s eye. An author can tell me that a character is, say, 5’6″ with red hair. And I’ll hold on to those details in case they become relevant. (As a lifelong reader I can say that they...

…and that’s all for another year! Thanks so much for tuning in! I was hoping to hit $1,000 tonight, but we hit $1,190! I love you guys! It’s not too late to donate. If you waited until the stream was over so you wouldn’t miss one moment of yuletide oddity (WHO CAN BLAME YOU) here is the donation link: https://give.thetrevorproject.org/xmasbash Many, many thanks to everyone who participated, watched, chatted, donated, assisted…well, many thanks to everyone in general. This was a great year, and it was probably my favorite mix of specials yet. I hope you enjoyed it. Let me know your personal highlights in the comments. For those who missed it, I’m sorry! Here’s what you could have winced through: Family Matters – “Christmas is Where the Heart Is” The Flying Nun – “Wailing in a Winter Wonderland” The Monkees – “The Monkees’ Christmas Show” Amos & Andy – “The Christmas Story” Welcome Back, Kotter – “Hark, the Sweatkings” The Super Mario Bros. Super Show – “Koopa K...

The chat is open! The live stream itself begins at 5 pm Mountain / 7 pm Eastern time, if you get there early, but this gives you time to register an account, settle in, and reflect on your life choices before I bombard you with seven terrible Xmas specials that we’re all watching for a good cause. Which specials? Wouldn’t you like to know! WATCH AND SEE Join us! http://original.livestream.com/timflix Speaking of the good cause, it’s The Trevor Project. You can donate right here: https://give.thetrevorproject.org/xmasbash As always, technical difficulties may occur. If they do, I will post an update on this page. Be sure to come back here if the stream goes dead. Please be patient if that happens…I promise a backup is coming!

Choose Your Own Advent is a yuletide celebration of literacy. We’ll spotlight a different novel every day until Christmas, hopefully helping you find one you’d like to read in the new year. Title: Mostly Harmless Author: Douglas Adams Year: 1992 When I decided to do this feature, I made a list of all the books I would conceivably want to include. I hit twenty-four easily, as you might imagine, and every book on that list felt right. Each of them, indeed, was one that I wanted to write about. That I wanted to share. That I felt belonged . Except for one. This one. Now, I’ll make this clear: I like Mostly Harmless . Quite a lot. My reasons for second guessing it have nothing to do with its quality…except maybe in a relative sense. It’s not Douglas Adams’ best work. (That would be Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency .) It’s not even the best book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. (That would be Life, the Universe and Everything .) It’s not...

This is your final reminder! The 4th Annual Noiseless Chatter Xmas Bash!!!! is tomorrow! All you need to do is come to this very site at 5 p.m. Mountain / 7 p.m. Eastern. (If you mark yourself as attending this Facebook event , it will do the time zone calculation for you.) Come a little early to join the chatroom, but don’t be late! We will start promptly. Probably. It’s a live stream of seven rightly forgotten Xmas specials, loads of holiday music you won’t hear anywhere else, vintage commercials, magic, AMANDA, and lots more. The stream is FIVE FULL HOURS long, and it’s full of things you will never see again. In any other context. For good reason. We’ll be riffing all of it live in the chatroom. It’s the ultimate Xmas party for introverts, so get together with great people, grab some beer and pizza, and prepare to laugh harder than you have all year. (Which, this year, isn’t especially difficult.) It’s free to attend, but we will be soliciting donations to The ...

Choose Your Own Advent is a yuletide celebration of literacy. We’ll spotlight a different novel every day until Christmas, hopefully helping you find one you’d like to read in the new year. Title: Against the Day Author: Thomas Pynchon Year: 2006 I thought I’d write about Gravity’s Rainbow. I really did. It’s my favorite novel (full stop), and God knows I can ramble on endlessly about it. This would be the easiest entry to write. Hell, in my head, I’ve already overwritten it. And if I didn’t write about Gravity’s Rainbow , maybe I’d write about V. , Pynchon’s first novel. Or The Crying of Lot 49 , which is the first novel of his that I read. Or Bleeding Edge , as it’s his most recent. Or Vineland , which is the novel of his I recommend the most to new readers. Maybe Inherent Vice , since I re-read that recently and might like to talk about it in a context other than comparing it to the film . Or Mason & Dixon , since the warm friendship at its core fits so we...

Choose Your Own Advent is a yuletide celebration of literacy. We’ll spotlight a different novel every day until Christmas, hopefully helping you find one you’d like to read in the new year. Title: The Big Sleep Author: Raymond Chandler Year: 1939 A few years ago I had a project planned for National Novel Writing Month. I participate in that whenever I can, and I never regret doing so. (Even if I don’t hit my goals.) This particular project was a bit of a pastiche of the detective fiction genre. I was cheating, because I hadn’t read much detective fiction; I just thought I’d have some fun with it. It wasn’t anything I’d need to take seriously. Fast forward a few years. My humble little draft from a silly writing exercise actually evolved into something of…well, merit. I liked it. I liked it quite a lot, actually. And instead of just being some silly riff on established conventions, it had a story and characters that I was proud of. It was worth turning into ...

Choose Your Own Advent is a yuletide celebration of literacy. We’ll spotlight a different novel every day until Christmas, hopefully helping you find one you’d like to read in the new year. Title: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman Author: Laurence Sterne Year: 1759 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is a masterpiece. Full stop. It is one of English literature’s greatest achievements, and a riotous deconstruction of the writing process in general. It relishes the subversion of expectation, pulses with comic tension, and plays its biggest (and best) jokes on the readers themselves. Now look at the date of publication. It will give you a very good idea of just how far ahead of its time this was. Sterne was breaking conventions before many authors, readers, or critics had any idea of what those conventions were. There’s one piece of advice that every young author, rightly, receives at some early point, and this novel seems like i...

Choose Your Own Advent is a yuletide celebration of literacy. We’ll spotlight a different novel every day until Christmas, hopefully helping you find one you’d like to read in the new year. Title: Flatland Author: Edwin A. Abbott Year: 1884 Every author who sets pen to page must accomplish at least one basic thing: they must describe their characters and their settings well enough that readers will buy into them. Sure, they’re writing fiction, but it still has to be understandable, recognizable, identifiable fiction. There’s a reason one novel might be dismissed as “unrealistic” while another–with extremely similar subject matter–might be embraced. They may both describe equally unreal things (they’re fiction, after all) but one of them described those unreal things more effectively, so that they no longer felt unreal. And that’s what readers and critics are actually saying when they call novels unrealistic, unbelievable, or any number of things that shouldn’t a...