I saw in yesterday's PW Daily that 50 Cent will be working with MTV Books to create his own imprint, G-Unit Books. While looking for more articles about this I stumbled across articles from Crain's New York Business (50 Cent and MTV Create Book Imprint) and The Book Standard (Rapper 50 Cent Set to Take on the Book Industry With a Digital Flava) that went into better detail. What interested me most is that both articles mentioned the growing popularity of street fiction (read this Salon article for more about the genre).
FYI - I'm calling dibs right now on referring to these books as Fiddy Lit. Everyone else can continue calling the genre street fiction, but Fiddy Lit is all mine.
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Tonight is my monthly meeting with my genre study group, and it should be an interesting meeting. I don't remember how the decision was made (I'll blame Ang), but we somehow agreed to read a Western for our November meeting. After weeks of procrastination I finally forced myself to sit down yesterday and read The First Fast Draw by Louis L'Amour. Better late than never, right?
My overall experience with this book was not a positive one. Initially I thought that the setting, the storyline, or the characters would be unappealing to me. Turns out I was wrong. My stumbling block with this book (and I would suspect with any other traditional Western I would try to read) was the language. I like to think of myself as a reasonably intelligent person, but Louis L'Amour is beyond me. It wasn't like the language he was using was difficult. I just couldn't understand what he was saying. The way he strung words together in a sentence was completely foreign to me. The number of times I had to go back a reread a sentence (sometimes more than once per sentence) was pathetic.
I feel incredibly embarrassed having to say this, but I don't think I'm smart enough to read a Western. Is there a genre out there that you don't feel adequate enough to read?
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