Posts Tagged The Second Pass

End of Year Lists: The Casual Optimist

Posted by admin in comics, criticism, Literature, nonfiction on December 30, 2010

Once again I am indebted to The Second Pass for informing me of multiple “best of” literary lists that I need to reference in the next few weeks.

First up in the lists that caught my eye was The Casual Optimist‘s A Year in Reading 2010. Consider the following nitro (to a sampling of books that included items that may have not been published in 2010 :

“2010 was a year of losing battles and one of the first casualties was time for personal reading. The moments I did have were snatched on the subway and, if I could keep my eyes open, last thing at night. I often found myself unwittingly rereading chapters I had read the previous day, or worse, that very morning. The difficulty this week of compiling a list of my favourite books of the year — and the predictability of that list (to be posted soon) — made it very clear that not only did I read less than previous years, I rarely strayed off the beaten path.”

Anybody that exhibits such a great level of candor is someone I want to pay attention to more in the future.

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Writers to Read: Craig Fehrman

Posted by admin in Literature on September 28, 2010

Thanks to The Second Pass I am now aware of Craig Fehrman, a freelance writer and a Ph.D. student in Yale’s English department. As The Second Pass notes:

“After David Markson died earlier this year, many books from his personal collection started showing up in random places on the shelves of The Strand, New York’s great repository of used (and new) books. There was a bit of uproar at the time (if there can be a bit of uproar) from those who wondered how it could possibly happen that an acclaimed American writer’s books ended up in the hands of various Strand diggers rather than a protected home, perhaps in the academy. No one seemed interested in investigating whether this was simply Markson’s desire. But Craig Fehrman has …”

Go follow the links. And make sure you visit Fehrman’s blog, because growing out of his initial piece, NPR expanded upon his idea and interviewed him as well (which he links to at his blog). I may do a follow-up post on Markson.

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John Williams on The Second Pass

Posted by admin in Literature on October 8, 2009

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The Second Pass

I love books and I greatly admire people that write effectively about one’s love of good books.  The Second Pass (“an exclusively online publication devoted to reviews, essays, and blog posts about books new and old“) is the kind of concept I wish I had developed and that is overflowing with people that write effectively about books. After visiting the publication for awhile, I contacted the site’s founder and editor, John Williams, to garner a better understanding of what he’s trying to achieve. The site just celebrated its sixth month of existence and Williams entertained a series of questions from me. Williams’ career path to The Second Pass includes the following details: “From 2001-2007, he worked in the editorial department at HarperCollins. Before that, he spent time as a journalist in Texas and an editorial intern at Harper’s Magazine. His work as a freelance writer has appeared in Slate, McSweeney’s, Stop Smiling, the Austin American-Statesman, the Dallas Morning News, the New York Sun, and other publications.” My thanks to Williams for his time and for shepherding a site worthy of my jealousy.

Tim O’Shea: With six months of the site under your belt, what do you consider to be some of the successes and missteps of the site to date?

John Williams: I feel like the site overall has been a success. I’m proudest of the way people have responded to it, both general readers and people in the publishing business. The vast majority of the feedback I’ve received has been positive. I guess the most specific success was the “Fired from the Canon” feature, which hit a nerve with people and spread far and wide.

The missteps have been mercifully small (in terms of how public they are). For instance, I started the site with confidence that I could get material rolling in as I went, and that was a mistake. I should have had more “inventory” at the start. I feel like I’ve been playing catch-up in order to keep the site refreshed on a regular basis, though that’s finally starting to change. I guess another misstep would be my desire to have a “Letters” page, as a way of nodding to the tradition of letters to the editor. That’s been a bust, and I put a comments function up on the blog instead. I’m still trying to figure out what to replace “Letters” with, so the heading remains up on the nav bar for now — useless, like an appendix.

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