[photo: detail from Pears by Marshall Noice]
Stackers, have a kick-backish Thanksgiving week . . . if not possible, I wish you moments of calm amid the turmoil.
I’ll be back on the other side with new stuff.
In the meantime:
New subscribers/followers: Thanks for hopping aboard! Consider scrolling back to the start of this Stack—the first few posts lay out my intentions for this enterprise.
Everyone:
I want David’s Lists 2.0 to be less ephemeral than some Substacks. I want it to be a continuing resource, which means I’d like to picture subscribers scrolling back through the content sometimes. I try to number posts that continue earlier topics/lines of thought to help with that. Some of the posts are long, which isn’t the norm around the Substackverse, but I want the lists to be rich/diverse/full-of-choices. [Also (for most subscribers), hovering the cursor over a footnote will pop it up—I can slip in notes/backstory/etc. without making you jump around.]
I’d like us all the keep in mind the main ideas behind this exercise: Keeping good books from disappearing into Nowhere Land, using other readers as resources for our reading, and taking on directed reading challenges/projects.1
I love it when you leave comments or hit the like button—it tells me you’re engaging with the posts. The mushrooming of Sub-stacks is promoting the quick scan—there may be little we can do about that. But I want you to see this one as an island of solid ground. I don’t mean it to be about me, but about reading/writer-related intel I’ve absorbed and think worthy of passing on.
I keep seeing fellow Stackers touting their 6K or 10K subscribers . . . here at David’s Lists 2.0 we’re up to 152! (a couple of months ago I didn’t think we’d break 50). The numbers grow when you recommend it to others—privately, one-to-one, or via your own blog/newsletter/Stack/etc. If the urge to do this has crossed your mind, um, don’t hold back!
Ongoing Projects:
Birth Year Project:
You supply your birth year, I respond with a short list of books published that year—the popular/well-known titles first, then some books I'd recommend. If your year's already been done, I'll do an update. The seven most-recent years (and all further ones) are on their own shelf, accessed via the menu bar. Earlier ones are scattered among the regular posts toward the start of the Stack. We’ve done 14 years altogether, between 1946 and 1978.
Extra credit: You read one of the books (ideally one you're unfamiliar with), then tell me what you thought. If we get enough of these, I'll aggregate and post.
Shelter from the Storm:
The concept: Each of us has a small cache of books we know and esteem that even other readers like us likely don't know—our discoveries, books we feel a special need to keep out of the clutches of oblivion. I invite you to recommend one.
The details:
One per subscriber [for now].
Tell us why, in one sentence.
When there's enough for a list, I'll post.
You can have your name attached, or not—up to you.
And finally . . .
The keen-eyed will have noticed a new button on the menu bar—Short Story Hall of Fame. What to know about this:
These are simply my favorite stories. Every time I put up a post I’ll add at least one new story title to the HoF. Since I’m older than most of you (all??), this list will focus on stories at least twenty years old, since you may be less likely to know them already, and since they’re good models if you’re a fellow story writer.
[Wall art from Pompeii]
Here’s a link to an earlier Breather with a note about reading projects: Six Months In