Confessions of a Book Reviewer: The Best of Cart Blanche
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Introduction
Foreword
Preface
The Great Cavern of Old Time
Chapter 1. On Reading and Writing
The Paradigms, They Are A-Shiftin’
Is Reading Selfish?
My Romance . . . with Reading
A Difficult and Complex Art
Read and Discuss
Chapter 2. Books, Books, Books
The Accidental Book Collector
Hercules Had It Easy
Heap o’ Books
Where I Get Those Ideas
Boxes Everywhere
My Environment
Chapter 3. That Was Then, This Is . . . Young Adult Literature, Past, Present and Future
Happy Anniversary
The First Golden Age
Romance Redux
A Near-Death Experience—Young Adult Literature in the 1990s
A New Golden Age—YA Literature in theFirst Decade of the 2000s
The Present and the Prospective
The Dream Becomes a Reality
A Modern Master
Chapter 4. With a Genre Here and a Genre There
Back Home Again
Nightmare
Only a Great Man
The Object(s) of Their Affection
My Cicada Love Song
Chapter 5. Other Worlds
Cutting My Teeth on Fantasy
What Rowling Has Wrought
The Camelot Connection
The Future Is Now
The Possibility of the Impossible
The Possibilities of the Impossible
Chapter 6. What’s So Funny?
Dissecting the Frog
Crazy about Comics
Just Ducky, Thanks
Magic Man
Chapter 7. The Lives that Late They Led
A Disease of English Literature
So Many Lives, So Little Space
Get a Life!
Limning Lives
A Writer’s Life
Chapter 8. Tributes
My Churches
A Clean, Well Lighted Sanctuary
Among the Digitally Divided
A Love Letter to Weetzie
Descent into Limbo
Love, Passion, and Lectures
Remembering Myra and Mike
Remembering Bill
His First Novel
Hog Heaven
America’s New Laureate
Conclusion
Index