Christmas greetings! (and two eighteenth-century prints of the nativity)

Wishing a merry Christmas to all my readers who celebrate the holiday.



From the vaults:

Artifact of the Moment: Reflections on Nativity Scenes in Two Eighteenth-Century German Bibles

So You Want to Write a Novel (from the book blog)

From the book blog:

The "xtranormal" do-it-yourself text-to-movie animations, with curious characters saying outrageous things in monotones, are going viral. The video that introduced me to the genre is "So You Want to Write a Novel," which is one of the best. . .

For me, the exchange that struck home was this one:

Author: “It’s going to need a lot of editing: I’m not the best speller.”

Editor: “My throat is starting to close up. The publishing industry really sort of expects you to have the whole spelling and grammar thing down.”

See the whole post (and the video) on Habent Sua Fata Libelli.

100 Best First Lines from Novels

From American Book Review:

100 Best First Lines from Novels

1. Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

3. A screaming comes across the sky. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

4. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. —Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)

(From the book blog: read the rest)