It's time to graduate, seniors!

To conclude, gentle reader, please continue. Onward and upward. With awe and excitement and whatever else you prefer. Just continue.


The single greatest lesson to extract from your years stationed at your English desk, like a grizzled Army Commando posted at a missile silo, is to respect the laws of inertia. You want to be an object in motion, because they tend to do stuff. Sometimes the stuff is ridiculous, and most of the time imperfect, but it is stuff. Your stuff. Gardner tells us that life is all conjunctions, one damn thing after another, a perpetual list of ands. Art deals in the subordinate, the because. But only about things that are doing. Like your stuff.


So go do your stuff.


In case I don't see ya, good afternoon, good evening and ---.


There is nothing either good or bad but ---.


Make it a great day or not, the choice ---.


The river is moving. The blackbird must be ---.


That which we are, we ---.


And so we beat on, boats against the ---.


Have a great summer, and then a great fall, and then a great winter.


And then.

No, I haven't read Divergent,

and that is perfectly okay. You see, Divergent and its other series books are not "up my alley" as they say. I want to be crystal clear with this: Veronica Roth has done something tremendous, and her books must be good. You simply don't garner the following she has without tapping into something powerful in the reader's mind.


The reader's mind. Just not mine.


You see, gentle reader, I am not the target audience. And rather than diverge (you see what I did there?) off course and into a hoity-toity discussion on literary merit, substance, endurability throughout the ages and epochs of all time, let us all stop and appreciate what Roth has accomplished:


She made it awesome, once again, to read.


Let us consider the timeline, starting at present and moving backward in time and space:

Divergent

The Hunger Games

Twilight

Harry Potter

That is over a decade of fans wanting to read the next installment. Waiting. WAITING. ON BOOKS! TO COME OUT!!! I can still recall visiting my local Border's Bookstore (shed small tear here...) at 11:something p.m. to grab my copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, waiting in line for an hour, standing next to kids and adults alike dressed in long robes and funny hats, and then driving home to read it. Actually, I was delivering it to my lovely wife who was nine months pregnant and desperate for distraction. I believe she finished it in one hour flat. Potter is her thing, you see.


Back on point: Divergent is not my thing. Neither was The Hunger Games if we're keeping score. But really, we are not. I love the idea that all the pockets of readers out there have their thing, and that they fight over it, and call the other things lesser things. That we get hoity-toity and territorial about our things. For the record, I am a Tolkien man. LOTR is my thing, and all other things listed here pale in comparison to hobbits and Nazgul and seeing stones and old kings with weird names. Avada Kedavra that, Voldemort.


No, I haven't read Divergent. I may, if only to see what all the fuss is about. And there is a bunch. But that's okay. And the next time I swing by and arrogantly point out that your taste in literature isn't as good as mine, it's also okay to fire back. After all, one could do worse than be a swinger of birches.


Or a fighter of taste in books.

THE UNFERTH ACCIDENT in print

It's here! Forgive me, gentle reader, for a moment of self-collection. Like Rob (John Cusack's character ) from High Fidelity, I, the critic, the professional appreciator of all things literary, am putting something out there into the world.


I am very proud to present The Unferth Accident available in print:

 

Keep emailing those folks at SparkNotes.com. Because we want to see this book placed squarely between a hyperlink for Catcher in the Rye summary notes and a TSwift Look-a-Like poll. It belongs there.


Immediate orders can visit HERE. Official release date on Amazon has actually come and gone, with links on B&N to follow. There is an issue with how the author name is displaying a bit weird on Amazon at present, but we are fixing the glitch.


"Alright, let's get in there." (I need to go. My daughter has just finished her Saturday morning fort and has been waiting patiently. And I have been summoned.)