What first drew me to Paul Howarth’s debut novel, Only Killers and Thieves, were the numerous comparisons to Philipp Meyer’s The Son. Of course, if you parse through some of my older blog posts you’ll clearly see my admiration for Meyer’s writing. Simply by reading the synopsis, it was evident how similar this new novel would be to The Son, just replace the fields of Texas with the late nineteenth century Australian Outback.

Only Killers and Thieves tells the story of two teenage brothers who face a devastating future after their family is attacked. The boys then are left with a difficult obligation: Hunt down the people responsible. The plot itself is fairly predictable. Sure, there are moments of brief surprise, but the book is almost written in a way where Howarth did not intend to deceive. He paced the plot well; in fact, for its length (just over 300 pages), this was one of the best-paced novels I’ve read in a while. While written in wonderfully descriptive language, there were no wasted words or unnecessary scenes.

This debut novel was written with and for a purpose. It interrogates an important—and often lost—history of the relationship between the white settlers and aboriginal tribes of Australia. In that way, it is appropriately compared to The Son and its examination of white and Native American interactions. There was one quote, late in the text, that really struck home. It read, “The guilt is collective, the responsibility shared. In a hundred years no one will even remember what happened here and certainly no one will care. History is forgiving.” That passage says it all.

The book is aptly titled. Consciences are few and far between in the story, though I suspect the characters were accurately depicted given the race relations during the time period in rural Australia.

At the end of the day, this is a debut novel not only worth reading, but should be pushed to the top of your list. It’s brutal, beautiful and brooding. Much like after finishing Meyer’s first novel, American Rust, I am most interested now in seeing how Howarth follows up this exceptional debut.

My previous post was about using an original, unique, singular voice in your writing.

Before that, I wrote about the decline of good, reliable journalism, and before that about how writing has changed in the digital age.

For all intents and purposes, all of those posts were about appreciating the art of writing. Now I want to take a moment to appreciate the art of reading.

Much like with writing, reading is an art that mustn’t necessarily be mastered, but at the very least should be valued and hopefully revered.

Sustained reading seems to be losing steam in our current society. Everything is short social media posts, text messages and headlines. The ability to sit for an extended period of time and read, like we used to do as kids in elementary school, is lacking. And with that, we lose our ability to truly engage with an educating medium.

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We should all be more like Philipp Meyer, who said, “Any book that has the potential to teach me something about anything, I get it right away.”

To be completely honest, any book that gets someone reading is a step in the right direction. Sure, I know most of you, if not all, have no problem sitting down and reading an entire book, but a lot of people I know truly struggle with it. At one point in my life, so did I.

When I was a kid, I rarely read. One day I asked my mom if she’d take me to Borders to get a book.

“Why don’t you read one of the ones we have here?” she asked. We had a decent library of chapter books at home.

“I don’t want to read any of those. I want to pick out my own.”

She was reluctant toward my stubborn and slightly greedy request, but with the hope that buying me a new book, a book of my choosing, would get me reading, we went to the store. I picked out The Creek by Jennifer L Holm, and I read it. And I actually enjoyed it.

Suddenly, reading was part of my life. (That book still sits on my bookshelf today.)

They say everyone has a book in them. But apparently not all of those stories are created equal. Enter: Celebrity memoirs. Stories are just like anything else in this world — there are good ones and there are very bad ones. The disparity can be alarming (especially with celebrity memoirs).

The good ones are appreciated, even celebrated, and those from whom they come are rewarded. The bad ones, however, largely go unnoticed and are far from appreciated.

Some stories, undoubtedly, are worth more than others — at least to major book publishers. It seems that these companies have gone the way of professional sports teams, issuing record-breaking contracts to get talented people to sign on the dotted line. In the publishing industry, that means for the rights to personal stories. Really, it’s pretty unbelievable.

Let’s take President and Michelle Obama, for example. Following their exit from the White House back at the beginning of the year, it was announced that publishers waged a bidding war over the rights to their next books.

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The winner (if you want to call them that): Penguin Random House, with a final price tag of a reported $65 million. Not a bad reward for a couple who spent the last eight years, for better or worse, in the critical lens of the globe.

But I get it, he was the leader of America. Of course the story he has to tell is going to seek millions. This isn’t the first former president to garner such a large deal. Bill and Hillary Clinton have tallied more than $50 million on various books over the years, according to Forbes. And that amount does not include Hillary’s most recent memoir, What Happened, which was released last week.

Regardless of how good the stories actually are, people who spend their lives in the public eye are fetching extremely large contracts. Back at the beginning of August, former FBI Director Jim Comey inked a book deal of his own, which some experts peg well in the millions.

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All of this begs the question, what’s the value of a story? Is it in the quality of the tale itself, or is it strictly its marketability?

These days, it seems it’s only about the latter.

Luke Mogelson was never a combat soldier, but you would never know that by reading his debut collection of short stories, These Heroic, Happy Dead. That’s probably because he spent ample time around active military members and veterans while serving in the U.S. National Guard and traveling abroad as a war correspondent for The New Yorker.

From the first two pages it was unmistakable what type of book this would be — as that is where the high praise appeared from two of my favorite authors, Ron Rash and Philipp Meyer. They called the book “extraordinary” and “stunning” and my expectations were set.

The various stories, all surrounding soldiers or veterans and mostly set in everyday life after war, tell captivating tales that seem to take the ordinary and make it feel oddly important. Many of the stories are also woven together, as characters we meet in the first few appear again later in the book.

There’s violence, and heartbreak, and depression, and love, and honor. In short, there’s a little bit of everything. Am I going to sit here and tell you that they are uplifting, that I put the book down and smiled at the triumphant resolutions in each passage? Of course not. They were honest and raw, and with that type of writing comes sadness — but also depth and empathy.

I’m not a veteran, and in truth I’ve never sat down and chatted about military experience with any veterans outside of the World War II generation, but reading these stories feels like they’re coming directly from personal understanding.

It’s tough to speak with veterans about their memories of war. It almost feels like a line you’re not to cross as a civilian, asking those questions: What was it like, and how do you readjust to life back home? But Mogelson gives an unflinching view into those worlds.

Since 2011, Mogelson has lived in and reported from Afghanistan, Syria, West Africa and Iraq, so despite not being an active military member, his stories seem to capture the experience with authority.

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This collection reminds me what Hemingway said, that “all good books have one thing in common — they are truer than if they had really happened.” That’s what it’s like reading this short story anthology. Hemingway was a war correspondent also, after all, and some of his most important work centers around his experiences in those combat zones. Mogelson took a page out of the Hemingway playbook with this collection, writing in plain yet powerful language and keeping dialogue sparse and necessary.

These are the types of stories that stay with you long after you’ve read them. After reading “Sea Bass,” for example — the second story — I closed the book and placed it on my chest and thought about what I had just read, what it meant. I came to this conclusion: This is a book that needed to be written, and all significant writing needs to be read.

Have you heard? Maybe you’ve even seen, if you live in or have visited one of the twelve cities where they exist. Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, is moving into the brick-and-mortar market with a new chain of bookstores, called Amazon Books.

I need to be completely honest here: When I first heard this news, I was excited. Regardless of their motives, in an era where we continuously see physical bookstores close, it was refreshing to see new ones opening. For years it seemed like paperback and hardcover books were becoming things of the past, and it was saddening. Any news that could reverse the trend (like hearing that physical books were making a comeback) was certainly welcomed by me.

But then, after the initial effect wore off, I stopped to think about it a little more.

In an effort to utilize the successful strategies that its online bookstore has implemented, these new Amazon Books stores will feature a limited selection of titles — all of which will have covers facing the customer — to be customized through Amazon.com shopping behaviors.

These bookstores, which began in the Pacific Northwest and spread to the East Coast this past year, are aimed at merging “the benefits of offline and online shopping to help you find books and devices you’ll love,” according to the official website.

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Some critics, however, see them as a way for Amazon to continue to run its competitors, like Barnes & Noble, out of business. The resulting fear is that the online giant will create a virtual monopoly on the book market.

Personally, I have nothing against Amazon. It offers an exceptional service at competitive pricing, and it has certainly given people increased access to books of all kinds through its Kindles, affordable prices, marketplace feature and publishing options. But if you’ve read many of my articles on this site, you’ll also know that I have a strong affinity for physical bookstores, and if this business tactic leads, in any way, to the detriment of those stores then I will have to re-evaluate my opinion.

At the end of the day, I am a supporter of those who support the advancement of books.

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You may have heard: On September 15th, a new biopic called Rebel in the Rye is being released. It is the story of J.D. Salinger’s life, and I can only imagine he wouldn’t be pleased about it.

Now, this is not the first attempt to tell Salinger’s life story. Far from it. In 2013, a documentary called Salinger was released, and several biographies have also been written over the years.

As a fan of The Catcher in the Rye, I cannot pretend I don’t find his life story fascinating — I even included Salinger in my list of five recent movies all writers should watch. It was inspiring and sent me running to my computer to get working on my next book. But that doesn’t mean Salinger would be happy with them.

In Salinger, author A. Scott Berg — who wrote the biography on which the movie Genius was based — tells the tale about Salinger’s first major experience with Hollywood.

The Epstein brothers, two well-known screenwriters of the time, wanted to adapt one of Salinger’s short stories from The New Yorker, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, into a feature-length film. The movie was made, but the producer changed the name to My Foolish Heart. “Salinger’s response was extremely violent,” Berg said. “And he vowed never to sell another work to Hollywood again.”

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Salinger was extremely protective over his characters, not to mention his personal life. The man famous for being reclusive was not particularly open about the details of his life, and he certainly didn’t want to share them on a world stage.

“He always, always felt that what people should know about an author was nothing personal,” longtime friend Jean Miller recalled about Salinger. “They should know an author through his work, and that’s all he was willing to give people.”

Prior to his death in 2010, Salinger established the J.D. Salinger Literary Trust, which explicitly bars The Catcher in the Rye from ever being adapted to film.

Does all this mean that, as fans, we should boycott the new movie? I’m certainly not advocating for that. I plan on seeing it. But that doesn’t mean the author would be pleased about the spectacle.

That’s just one of the many downfalls, I suppose, of achieving such high acclaim and fame.

Take a look at the trailer for the film here:

The flagship Borders store was just off State Street near the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor. The first time I visited was my freshman year. A good friend wanted to walk the five or six blocks from our dorm to pick up Mitch Albom’s new book, and I was pleased to join. It wasn’t often a friend went out of their way to buy a physical book.

From the moment you stepped inside the store, the first thing you noticed was the smell. Or call it an aroma, because calling it a smell gives it a negative connotation and it was far from unpleasant. Rather, it was comforting. Then you stepped forward and walked the aisles, browsing, content, looking for the next book that will change you life.

This is the bookstore experience that we’ve all come to adore, and it’s the scene we fear we will lose as companies like Borders are forced to close their doors forever. That’s what happened with this store. Less than two years later, the building sat vacant. It was an end of an era — one I hadn’t had nearly enough years to experience.

Physical book sales, clearly, were dying. Let’s call them being replaced. The world was shifting toward digital platforms, after all, and physical books would be no exemption.

But after years of physical book sales decreasing and ebook sales increasing, have we finally struck a balance?

According to CNN, yes. And not only have physical book sales ceased declining, they’ve actually grown. In 2016, hardcover book sales increased more than 4% and paperback more than 7%.

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What’s the result? According to Publishers Weekly, HarperCollins is set to invest in its physical book business. The large publisher is committed to supporting “any efforts to introduce more innovation and creativity into bookselling,” while also stating that it will be supporting the growth of independent bookstores.

For bibliophiles, this comes as refreshing news. Let’s hope the trend continues long into the future.

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It’s become an epidemic, it seems, to quantify the world. The only problem is that sometimes we’re not using useful metrics.

When a social injustice occurs, people take to the streets. Thousands gather and hold protests. Thousands more, maybe even millions, take to social media to voice their grievances. Later, the success of the movement comes from the metrics: the number of marchers, the number of cities where they took place, the vast amount of tweets. But was that the point? Or was it to change government policy?

Now let’s look at the business side of metrics. Companies flush money down the drain with the promotion of tweets and Facebook posts and rave about their “reach,” a term they use to assume success. But what was the return on investment? How about the conversion? Does it matter how many new followers you tallied if it led to minimal additional sales?

Again, caught up in the wrong numbers.

Then, of course, there’s the question at the heart of the issue, or at least what I care about: Why do we try to apply these same methods of metric measurement to literature, something so innately qualifiable?

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A few months back, I read an article in Publishers Weekly breaking down the “numbers of literature,” regarding aspects such as cliché and punctuation use. It included several infographics, showing how various books and authors stacked up against each other. Among the findings: Danielle Steel started 46% of her novels with a sentence mentioning the weather, James Patterson’s Cross Fire used 242 clichés per 100,000 words, and Elmore Leonard used only 49 exclamation points per 100,000 words over his 45 books. The article, however, never answers the looming question, “So what?”

Literature was never meant to be dissected into quantifiable metrics, but it seems that’s the world where we now live. To a certain extent, I get it — by using metrics, we can more effectively study the world and our businesses, and therefore try to apply our analysis toward improving. It works in many fields — if, of course, they’ve found the right metrics to measure (the problem being that some form of measurable data is readily available to most businesses, and so defining what metrics are actually valuable is the difficult part).

But please, keep it out of literature.

Metrics break down a data set to attempt to form a new strategy. They find the best formula for success — or try to, at least. But I don’t want to live in a literary world where meeting quotas on cliché use and punctuation frequency is considered successful. (It’s bad enough that there are word count requirements!) Doing this creates a uniformity, and don’t we already have enough of that in mainstream pop culture?

The argument from me is simply: Forget about the numbers. Let the writing speak for itself.

The most recent memoir-turned-movie, The Glass Castle, opened in theaters last Friday, drawing fans with its gripping storyline and all-star cast including Woody Harrelson, Brie Larson and Naomi Watts.

This film exposes audiences to the author Jeannette Walls’ personal upbringing and struggle to navigate a life molded by two less-than-standard parents. Larson, the Oscar-winning actress from 2016’s Room, was the perfect choice to play Walls.

Honoring the book’s structure with then-and-now flashbacks, the film follows Jeannette’s adult successes as a writer for New York Magazine and engagement to a wealthy businessman, while also uncovering painful memories of her childhood, raised by an artistic, free-spirited mother (Watts) and a brilliant — when sober — larger-than-life father (Harrelson). Throughout their childhood, Jeannette and her three siblings were pulled from one home to another, often surviving without electricity, running water, or food for days on end.

This film takes viewers on an emotional rollercoaster, filled with compassion as Jeannette bonds with her loving father who, despite his failure to provide for the family (due to a history of childhood abuse from his mother, resulting in an addiction to alcohol as a coping mechanism), does what he can to fill her life with adventure and optimism — distracting from their situation by engineering a plan to build their imagined “Glass Castle”.

On the descending side of the rollercoaster, Jeannette — or “mountain goat” as nicknamed by her dad — watches her father struggle to hold it together for his family, often falling into bouts of alcoholism and self-hatred.

One theme holds true throughout the movie: despite her father’s fluctuating behaviors and string of letdowns, Jeannette and her dad share many qualities — including a sense of adventure and an unwavering bond and love for one another.

Walls’ talent for writing hooked readers, making her memoir a New York Times Bestseller, a success that allowed her to escape a childhood of neglect and earn her an incredibly prosperous career as an author.

Although her childhood was less than ideal, her story highlights one truth: that children, no matter how they are treated, love their parents unconditionally.

Philipp Meyer made his name known in the literary world with the release of his 2013 epic The Son, which is now an AMC TV show. The Son received critical acclaim and was the runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize.

But that’s not what I’m here to write about, because there is another book by Meyer, his first book, the one before The Son, that is similarly exceptional: American Rust.

First published at the start of 2009, the novel seemed to be ahead of its time in dissecting and interrogating the downtrodden society in many industrial areas of the Midwest.

At its core, American Rust tells the story of several characters in the crumbling fictional steel town of Buell, Pennsylvania, in the aftermath of the declining manufacturing industry in the United States. There was something more to it, though. It created an empathy for the characters, as if you were reading a nonfiction book about what used to make America so great. It was heartbreaking and at the same time mesmerizing.

Using a stream-of-consciousness style, Meyer introduces us to Isaac English, a quiet and small intellectual, and his best friend Billy Poe, a former football star at the local high school, as they face the reality of life in the aftermath of prosperity.

Isaac is the son of a former steelworker. At the inception of the novel, Isaac steals $4,000 from his old man — money initially received from a work-related injury that left him crippled — and takes off to run away to California. En route, he meets Poe and the two of them wander toward the railroad. Before long, they are caught in a rainstorm and decide to wait it out in an abandoned building. That’s where they encounter a ring of drifters. A short confrontation later, one of the men is dead — killed, accidentally, by Isaac while attempting to rescue Poe from an attack by the men.

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That all happens in the first chapter. From there, the novel takes off, introducing us to Isaac’s successful Ivy League sister, Poe’s single and depressing mother, and the town’s middle-aged sheriff — all battling their own inner demons while attempting to traverse a difficult and failing economy.

Meyer is from an industrial city himself, growing up in a blue-collar neighborhood in Baltimore. When embarking on this book, he wanted to tell the story of the types of people he grew up around — the hard-working, blue-collar faction of society that used to make up the backbone of America’s middle class, who now saw jobs rapidly disappearing and livelihoods disintegrating.

Maybe the most telling line from the whole book, uttered by Poe, goes like this: “You ought to be able to grow up in a place and not have to get the hell out of it when you turn eighteen.”

That’s the way life works in these parts of the country. People grow up and begin to understand that the only method of advancement is to leave — and when they do, rarely do they return.

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See, Meyer didn’t set out to write a book using fictitious liberties. He went to western Pennsylvania. He spoke with the people. He saw the devastation with his own eyes. What came of it was a fast-paced, creative, insightful and intelligent novel, one in which emotion and brutal truth are intertwined page after page.

Is The Son considered Meyer’s masterpiece, at least thus far in his career? Probably. But is American Rust a must-read, important novel? You better believe it.

“The world that used to nurse us now keeps shouting inane instructions. That’s why I ran to the woods.” — Jim Harrison

Several years ago, on a mission to connect with more literature set in my home state of Michigan, I came across a Jim Harrison book. I picked it up at the bookstore, flipped through the pages, did a quick Google search on my phone — felt the embarrassment of taking so long to discover his work — and then made the purchase.

The name of the book was True North. Since that day I’ve read six of Mr. Harrison’s books, and there are still a few — like his final book The Ancient Minstrel — that remain very high on my reading list.

The Michigan connection is what first drew me to his work, but the writing itself and the life he lived are what kept me reading. He wrote gritty yet eloquent prose. There was so much honesty in what he wrote. It was brutal truth, the kind people often don’t like to hear. And his lifestyle was so simple and rare compared to many authors today. In his own words, “The natural world would always be there to save me from suffocating in my human problems.”

Until the day he died — literally passing away with the pen still in his hand, the stuff of legend — he wrote with pen and paper. There were no computers involved. It wasn’t about cranking out manuscripts and meeting word count requirements. Writing was an art, and he never ceased treating it that way. At one point in his career he experimented with a typewriter, but he abandoned that.

He also lived in the country, whether it was on the Leelanau Peninsula in northern Michigan, or a ranch in Montana or Arizona. Life wasn’t about big city lights and Hollywood parties for Harrison — though he did plenty of partying in Hollywood in his younger days. It was the simple things, such as hunting, fishing and taking walks through nature with his dogs that he coveted so dearly.

It’s a damn shame he passed away in March 2016, because in today’s crazy world we need more influencers like Jim Harrison to remind us what’s important in life.

Read Harrison’s memoir, Off to the Side, to understand the full picture of his life — in his own words. “My life could have been otherwise,” Harrison writes simply, “but it wasn’t.”