Mark Writes Novels

Reading Books Improves Everything About You

[markbeyerwrites]

QUEST! ... the adventure begins

Introducing my newest novel ... Quest! This man-child woman-child adventure story is now available in print and ebook editions. This is the story of lusty archeologists on a not-quite-world-wide treasure hunt! Lots of things happen, because this is 1911, not 2023 ;-) Links to your favorite on-line book retailers are listed below for QUEST! And thank you for supporting the arts culture, reading, and the fantastic world of adventure-stories :-) Amazon: http://rb.gy/ll0o0 Apple: http://rb.gy/qkn4o Kobo: http://rb.gy/j0wqz GoogleBooks: (coming soon).

[markbeyerwrites]

QUEST! characters

QUEST! is coming out at the end of this month. It's a novel with 12 main characters. I had a way to keep them separate as I began to develop the story, which was to sketch thumbnails of how I saw them according to who they were and what they represented. This is the year 1911 ... and here they are:

[markbeyerwrites]

NEW NOVEL: QUEST!

QUEST! Introducing my newest novel, coming out June 29th. A band of lusty archaeologists get onto the trail of ancient treasure from the year-410 sacking of Rome. Using ancient maps, fast ships, slow donkeys, and cryptic flags, their bracing adventure brings The Faculty to the brink of success and disaster. Along with an albino magician and a side-show lycanthrope straight out of a traveling circus, their story comes from the annals of history lived large. Stay tuned to meet the characters, read an excerpt, and see the cover revealed over the coming days and weeks. QUEST! by Mark Beyer ... this is only the beginning!

#success #newbooks #readers #librarians #adventurestory

[markbeyerwrites]

The Quick & Pithy of MY READING MIND... The Fortress of Solitude

The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

This story is not about “the losers” – although plenty of them have secondary parts, and lots of walk-ons. We know those types. They fade into the background. Likely as well to bitch about how they’d never been given a chance. Losers.

Dylan Ebdus understands life differently. While having had to negotiate the micro-society of his childhood street (and, later, neighborhood) with rather poor results, he’s tattooed with the knowledge that one needs to learn something in order to make a life.

A Brooklyn landscape; a single street in Boerum Hill. That is: long before “fashionable neighborhood” was attached to this slice of low-rise cityscape. The set-up of black-white-brown friendship and its opposite. The aura of the place is enough to keep it full for any reader.

-- Mark Beyer author of “Max, the blind guy” and three other novels

Read samples on Amazon: https://rb.gy/poyrsd

Google Books: http://rb.gy/r89nk7

Kobo Books: http://rb.gy/cecwhw

Apple Books: http://rb.gy/6t87tl

#Readers #GoodRead #bookworm #goodbooks #booklover #novels #Lethem #FortressOfSolitude

 #libraries #literature #googlebooks #kobobooks #applebooks #kindle

[markbeyerwrites]

Alice ... The Quick & Pithy of MY READING MIND ...

The Quick and Pithy of MY READING MIND…

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll

A highly lively story, this little gem! Almost interactive, I think, because Alice talks to herself and insists that any story must have dialogue. Oddly enough, the colorful illustrations bring more to the story sometimes helps himself to give – DoDos and Eaglets, and that great big Puppy – not so well described for the sake of moving the story at a kid’s-attention-span pace.

This is a fast little story, and more like a game of 52-pickup. It’s no wonder people in the 1960s liked to read this story while high. Actually, perhaps this is the only way an adult can live-ily see the sense of this beautiful dream (kids get it instinctively; their sense of wonder hasn’t yet been weighed down by society).

Carroll’s story did not enchant me. I was, mostly, bored: whenever something was just into happening, Carroll pulled the plug by a) ending the conversation, or b) jumping to a new scene, or c) introducing a new character as though he needed a random change. Talk about being high.

-- Mark Beyer author of “Max, the blind guy” and three other novels

Read samples on Amazon: https://rb.gy/poyrsd

Google Books: http://rb.gy/r89nk7

Kobo Books: http://rb.gy/cecwhw

Apple Books:

#Readers #GoodRead #bookworm #goodbooks #booklover #novels #LewisCarroll #alice

 #libraries #literature #googlebooks #kobobooks #applebooks #kindle

[markbeyerwrites]

The Quick and Pithy of MY READING MIND… Post Office

"Post Office" by Charles Bukowski

Bukowski is crude in his writing; at least, the society he describes is permeated by "the crude", and also some of the crudest among Americans. In interviews, Bukowski seems to be one of the nicest, most mild-mannered gentlemen to swig from a beer can.

He wrote of life in the 1940s & '50s: crude, uneducated people.

He wrote of the late '60s: still crude people, perhaps cruder.

Is our perception of an educated America only that? Or had its softening, through higher education and bromide TV, come only in the late '70s or '80s & beyond? Or, was Bukowski showing us that segment of society few of us congenial sorts (!) ever see? We certainly don't go looking for that! Nor do we wish to fall to its level. Take life in the L.A. postal system: working stiffs; uneducated sorts, who pick up, sort, load, carry, and deliver the mail. Who among us have ever thought of "the postman" as educated? If he were, he wouldn't be a postman. That's the spirit of the thought-not-made-verbal (except at home around the dinner table).

And perhaps all of this is Bukowski's point. Though his characterization of mail recipients shows that they are not such a fun bunch either. "Post Office" is an American story, well worth an afternoon's reading.

-- Mark Beyer author of What Beauty and Max, the blind guy, and The Janitor: Or, Dostoevsky in America. To sample and buy: https://rb.gy/poyrsd

ReadersWanted #GoodRead #bookworm #booklover #dostoevsky #artstory #bookshop #schoolshootings

[markbeyerwrites]

The Quick & Pithy of MY READING MIND... Mr Sammler's Planet

Mr Sammler’s Planet by Saul Bellow

Bellow’s oeuvre has been a show of simmering rage just below a character’s surface. Perhaps a “personal recognition” of his own self? If not, then the observation of people in that world called America in the 1950s, ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s … er, was there not a time when people weren’t furious at something or someone or some group? Anyway, this is Artur Sammler, whose peculiarity is having escaped the Holocaust (he won’t use survive, b/c “What did I survive?” – yes, good point).

I like Sammler. He should be appreciated by the reader, because he’s reasonable, if opinionated; caustic, if thoughtful. Bellow lets many of the others in the story play the fool we all know of our time. Zany characters they are: every one of them is bent, almost nuts. Sammler is sanity personified among such kind: the greedy, the depraved, the losers of intellectual ability.

Sound familiar?

-- Mark Beyer author of “Max, the blind guy” and three other novels

Read samples on Amazon: https://rb.gy/poyrsd

Google Books: http://rb.gy/r89nk7

Kobo Books: http://rb.gy/cecwhw

#Readers #GoodRead #bookworm #goodbooks #booklover

#libraries #literature #googlebooks #kobobooks #applebooks #kindle

[markbeyerwrites]

The Quick and Pithy of ...

The Quick and Pithy of MY READING MIND…

Saturday, by Ian McEwan

If you’d ever thought to “record” an entire day, there would be a surprise over how much you thought about, observed, considered and accepted/rejected, spoke to people (and how, and of which topics), day-dreamed, detailed every incident you saw (or thought you saw), with whom you had contact and/or encountered … well, the list could continue. Never would it be exhausted, because something would have been missed.

This is SATURDAY, McEwan’s tip-of-the-hat to one particularly observant (though hardly decisive) Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon who awakes at 4:30am on his day off. And quite a day this is to become:

The run-up to the US invasion of Iraq makes its appearance.

His son, a blues guitarist; his daughter, a newly published poet.

His wife, a corporate lawyer.

His mother, not all there anymore.

His father-in-law, there’and’then’some.

And then something actually happens. That’s when this carnival ride rolls over the edge, and away you go.

-- Mark Beyer

author of What Beauty and Max, the blind guy, and The Janitor: Or, Dostoevsky in America. To sample and buy: https://rb.gy/poyrsd

#ReadersWanted#GoodRead#bookworm#booklover#ianmcewan#Saturday#bookclubs#library#booktofilm

[markbeyerwrites]

The Quick and Pithy of MY READING MIND...

Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson It's odd how nearly every character in this novel has the ability to quote literature -- especially Shakespeare. Of my various Brit friends I don't know any who could quote poetry, drama, or tid-bits of novels; no, not a single one, although they do know lines of dialogue from East Enders and Monty Python.

Nevertheless, these novel characters, particularly Ursula, live lives of luxury. No sign of Dickens here! Well, without such "trappings" -- is money really a trap? -- she could not have used her reincarnation to get close to Hitler.

I'm not giving anything away: the first two pages tell you about all anyone needs to know, as foreshadowing, to keep the reader-pump primed for all the events as re-combinate, hashed, diverted, inverted, and etcetera.

A fun book.

-- Mark Beyer author of What Beauty and Max, the blind guy, and The Janitor: Or, Dostoevsky in America. To sample and buy: https://rb.gy/poyrsd

#Readers #GoodRead #bookworm #booklover #kateatkison #death #reincarnation #bookshop #bookclubs #schoolshootings

[markbeyerwrites]

Seeming to be a bag lady and being a bag lady are not the same. Go look at a bag lady and this becomes axiomatic: there‘s a sour, rancid odor ten feet around her — the stench of a sort that takes weeks to ferment; hair like matted sackcloth; watery eyes, blurred and vaguely unfocused, or else glaucomatous; pants crotch stained by piss, soaked and dried a dozen times (the root source of the reek?). Yet here she is, in disguise.

(via What Beauty on Litsy)