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Thomas’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at Thomas’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
Thomas Allbaugh’s Followers (25)
7,946 books
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508 friends
175,876 books
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1,162 friends
1,154 books
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13 friends
2,502 books
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59 friends
1,625 books
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42 friends
739 books
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96 friends
819 books
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17 friends
615 books
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84 friends
More friends…
Thomas Allbaugh
Goodreads Author
Website
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Member Since
March 2011
URL
https://www.goodreads.com/tallbaugh
More books by Thomas Allbaugh…
For My Latest Blog
Friends, I’ve had technical difficulties over the last two years with keeping my website functional. Help is on the way. But till then, here is my latest Substack post–fyi. I hope you enjoy it. And subscribe, if you can.
Thomas’s Recent Updates
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Thomas
is on page 225 of 544 of Look Homeward, Angel
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is on page 221 of 544 of Look Homeward, Angel
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| The three stars are mainly due to the fact that I don't like this kind of mystery, the kind that doesn't allow the real skills of the detective, in this case, an attorney named Deborah Knott, to emerge. Instead, her announced involvement in the case ...more | |
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| Read this my second year in college and enjoyed a second reading. I want to say that this Eliot Rosewater is Vonnegut's attempt to write about Prince Myshkin (Dostoyevsky's hero/saint/epileptic in The Idiot), but maybe not. Certainly, once again we g ...more | |
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rated a book really liked it
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| I could see why this could get classified as a YA novel because so much of the narrative is consumed with close ups on the minds and POVs of adolescent characters. But this is also a complicated novel about motherhood and about the ways that American ...more | |
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rated a book it was amazing
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| I read other poets. But I always have a place in my schedule for books by Billy Collins. So many of these unassuming poems lead me to the place of contemplating, for example, a leaf, where, just beyond the leaf, a sense of awe at being awake that I m ...more | |
“I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place.”
― The Writing Life
― The Writing Life
“Now lend me your ears. Here is Creative Writing 101:
1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.”
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1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.”
―
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Marc, O'Connor and Cheever sound like an interesting combination. Saunders has a new book of short stories out that is great also.
This year I have been teaching lots of O'Connor and Cheever: I hope to continue this trend. I like George Saunders, so I had better read that book.
