by Jan Bear | Jul 2, 2004 | Uncategorized
I didn’t know this was a young adult book when I picked it up at the library, and I was well into the book before I realized that it was. It doesn’t matter, Coraline, by Neil Gaiman, and read by the author if you pick it up on audiobook as I did, is a...
by Jan Bear | Jun 30, 2004 | Uncategorized
Get religion does a great gotcha on a British snob who presumes that people in the Bible Belt don’t read. Read the whole thing; it’s worth it. But here’s what snagged my interest. They did a seat-of-the-pants survey of the top books ordered from...
by Jan Bear | Jun 30, 2004 | Uncategorized
There’s a parallel structure in fiction that runs from the overall arc of the novel down through act, chapter and scene–and, so I’ve heard, down through paragraph and sentence. There are a lot of different terms for these different aspects, but a...
by Jan Bear | Jun 29, 2004 | Uncategorized
Dictionary.com/fun: “Usage Note: The use of fun as an attributive adjective, as in a fun time, a fun place, probably originated in a playful reanalysis of the use of the word in sentences such as It is fun to ski, where fun has the syntactic function of...
by Jan Bear | Jun 29, 2004 | Uncategorized
I’ve got to run this morning, so I’ll just send you off to a funny column in the Moscow Times about mangled English in Azerbaijan. Here’s a taste (so to speak): In restaurants, menus offer weird and wonderful dishes, from “Hot and Cold...