Tag: reading

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Fight for Books and Revive Reading Culture

I’m worried about literacy. We don’t have enough of it. Too many people either don’t read, obsess over social media, or scan summaries instead of experiencing the immersion of pulling a book and getting movies in their minds. Fewer people make the time or have the patience to enjoy a book, and that’s bad for our brains. It’s bad for all of us.

I’m going to recommend three books. (I wrote two of them.)

One of books I’m enjoying recently is Anthony Hopkins ‘ autobiography, We Did OK, Kid. (If you listen to the audiobook, Kenneth Brannaugh narrates, and his voice work is, as you’d expect, excellent.) Hopkins reminded me of his role in 84 Charing Cross Road. Last night, I ran across the book and I bought it immediately.

This slim volume is an ode to a bygone time when books were valued so much more by many more people. It’s an epistolary story wherein a very literate and funny woman in New York has a back-and-forth with a bookseller in London, England. Beginning in 1949, she requests used books only they can procure to her satisfaction. If you love books, you’ll love the movie and the book.

As soon as I found it at the bookstore, I had to buy a latte and dig in immediately. It’s a funny, plotless book with an unambitious premise. It’s not about dark forces taking over the galaxy. It’s just letters back and forth by bibliophiles who, incidentally, will never meet in person.

And to be honest, I choked up a little. 84 Charing Cross Road takes place in hard times. It’s a time I never lived in, yet I’m nostalgic for: A time when more people loved books, discussed books, and fiction and non-fiction were more centered in the culture. Your phone is full of vitriol. Push back on the brain rot. Reject rage bait that seeks to anger you for clicks. Choose media that informs, entertains, and enriches.

How do we fight forces pushing literacy down? Read books. Make it normal to discuss books. Review books. Support authors. Join a book club. Don’t fall for censorship. Read banned books. Frequent your local library and little libraries. Read to your kids. Put down the phone more and pick up books instead. Make reading ubiquitous again. I don’t know how much we’ll improve literacy, but at least we can try to hold the line and not let reading fall by the wayside completely.

The next book I recommend is mine, and it’s on sale now.

It’s release week for my new psychological thriller, Where the Night Takes Us.

Dr. Simon Fethullah was the FBI profiler who put the Rainy Day Cannibal away. The cannibal’s back, and the madman coming for Simon and his family. Find out more about the plot here.

Or, even better, just do this:

BUY NOW for just 99 cents!

Another recommendation:

I have entered Endemic for the Booklife Prize. Endemic won the North Street Book Prize in 2022, so I’m hopeful. Part of the deal is that I received a review from a Booklife critic. Here’s what they had to say:

Title: Endemic
Author: Robert Chazz Chute
Genre: Fiction/Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror
Audience: Adult
Word Count: 99876

Assessment:

Plot: Set in a post-apocalyptic world, Robert Chazz Chute’s science fiction follows Ovid as she navigates a transformed society and searches for her place within it. Chute creates a believable setting that gives the story a strong sense of possibility and danger. Fans of apocalyptic fiction and detailed world-building will find much to enjoy.

Prose: Robert Chazz Chute opens in medias res, with Ovid on the streets of New York after a virus has ravaged the city and much of the world. For anyone who lived through COVID-19, the premise carries an unsettling echo of reality: a city under lockdown that emerges permanently changed. Chute’s vivid descriptions give this altered world a strong sense of place, while its specialized jargon reflects the communities that have formed without leaving readers struggling to understand them.

Originality: Chute gives the story its own identity through its attention to group dynamics and the communities that emerge after disaster. Its vision of a world that remains recognizable yet has been permanently altered makes Endemic a strong addition to post-apocalyptic science fiction.

Character Execution: For fans of science fiction and end-of-the-world stories, much of the appeal lies in seeing how people adapt when the rules of ordinary life disappear. Chute portrays the community Ovid must navigate with impressive detail, while making her survival something readers will genuinely root for. Her encounters and conflicts with the people around her reveal how this new world is changing her, making Ovid a memorable protagonist.

GET ENDEMIC NOW

~ Thanks for being a reader! I’m Robert Chazz Chute, the suspense writer who works from a blanket fort in Other London. It would help me immensely if you let me entertain you. Enjoy my books for hours of twisty fun. Books make great gifts, so buy in bulk. 😉

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Reading, Writing, & Books

I miss when books were a bigger deal in the cultural landscape.

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Stay Safe. We’ll Wait.

I’m a novelist who writes dystopian, apocalyptic, and crime fiction. My current income from over 40 books is far less than I made from far fewer books in 2011. I have to be honest, though. I can’t be mad about it.

Most of my readers are from the United States, where health insurance premiums are shooting up. Disposable income is down. It’s spiraled into a dystopian nightmare where Nazis write their own warrants to bust into homes. Children are getting kidnapped by government agents. Innocent people are assaulted and incarcerated without due process.

You’ve seen the video of a gaggle of ICE agents murdering people in Minnesota while gaslighters from the federal government libel the victims and tell you not to trust your lying eyes.

Reading novels isn’t the priority right now. Protesting, justice, and a general strike are top of mind. This is not to devalue art. It’s a sad acknowledgment of what is. I see you. I care. Yes, fiction can act as a wonderful distraction from ugly reality. Novels transport us. I love putting movies in your heads. That’s not the mood many are in right now. I get that, and I am sincerely sorry for all you’re going through.

My hope is that sanity will return. My wish is that all of you will be safe. My worry is that, though the chaos is concentrated in Minnesota at the moment, you are all in danger. One day, this will all be over. As the famous book title goes, one day everyone will always have been against this.

In the meantime, please stay as safe as you can.

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For the Love of Bookstores

She Who Must Be Obeyed and I had a grand day out on Saturday. Though the egg crisis has finally hit us (fewer eggs, higher prices), at least we got out. That’s unusual. She bought shoes, and I got free popcorn at Skechers.

The highlight for me is always browsing bookstores. Not all chains are alike. When I was a book rep, I remember walking into a chain store in Brampton. It was as if all they had were remaindered books. The inventory was a mile wide and an inch deep. The Chapters in the south end of our city is far superior to the Indigo in the north end. I would have thought their inventory would be basically the same, but not so!

Funny, when I first visited Toronto, SWMBO asked what more I wanted to see of her city. Easy! Take me to all the used bookstores! She replied that she had already taken me to all the used bookstores. My suitcase was much heavier heading back to Halifax.

When I look at these pics, I so respect all the work that went into writing and publishing these books. Since my brain works the way it does, I thought, what a great bookstore! And I’ll never live long enough to devour all the books I want to read! Damn! Well, I’ll put a dent in that TBR pile, anyway.

Because of my illness in December, my birthday was a bust. Compensation arrived when SWMBO bought a bunch of books for me! For starters, I am reading Getting Signed. It’s about finding an agent and landing a book deal, and it’s really helping me prepare for my upcoming pitch meetings.

Toronto’s World’s Biggest Bookstore was my shrine until it closed. City Lights Bookshop in London is pretty good (and absolutely crammed). Fanfare Books in Stratford has stock that is expertly curated. It may be small, but they carry stuff you won’t find anywhere else, including my books! Another great one is Munro’s Books in Victoria, British Columbia. When you walk in there, a pleasurable and leisurely afternoon of book browsing lies ahead.

Have you got a favorite bookstore? What is it, where is it, and what drew you to it?

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What’s on your Best Books list?

Now that my tropical vacation is over, I’m back to the Arctic winds. I’m almost recovered from that nasty virus, so I’m back to writing. Today, after a glimpse of a Cuban beach, let’s talk about books, especially your best book recommendations.

Cuba, January 2024. Love that sugar sand.

This is a recent view from my front door. We’ve been pummeled by dangerous polar temperatures lately. In the depths of winter, I especially enjoy sitting by the wood stove or in bed and reading a book. Snowstorms outside, a good book, and hot chocolate inside make for an especially cozy reading experience.

Audiobooks keep me occupied while I work out, cycle, or do the dishes. Chirp serves up audiobooks very inexpensively. I listen through Audible, but Spotify has audiobooks now, too. You’ll find lots of classics there.

Here are my Audible stats from 2024. You’ll notice a lot of Denis E Taylor, my new favourite Canadian science fiction author. I especially love his Bobiverse series. The man is a master of the contemplation of sci-fi logistics. His go-to voice actor, Ray Porter, is a great narrator, too. The author’s website dennistaylor.org.

Audible stats for 2024.

I enjoyed going through Mark Manson’s best fiction list. I’d read most of them but found a few missing from my reading history. You might want to check out his website, markmanson.net.

What fiction do you consider essential reading, and what are you reading this weekend?

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What holds up?

When I was in university, I loved Crime and Punishment. I loved In Cold Blood. I tolerated Good Guys Don’t Dance. Recently, I found out Spotify offers audiobooks. I was curious to see what classics from dead authors I might devour as I worked out and did the dishes.

Since Crime and Punishment was a hit with me, I decided to commit to Dostoevsky’s much-admired masterpiece, The Idiot. I’m not far into it, but the listening experience has me doubting myself. I read Crime and Punishment in paperback. Listening is much less demanding, and yet I find I don’t have the patience for The Idiot.

The ponderous character descriptions do not end. The exposition falls flat. Was I more patient in the ’80s? Have I changed that much, or is it the text? Maybe I’ll have to reread Crime and Punishment to test my mettle. Am I the idiot now?

A recommendation



Meanwhile, I just began Matt Haig’s The Life Impossible. The Midnight Library was good. I find myself charmed by this story of an elderly woman solving a mystery in Ibiza. You know how a certain turn of phrase can catch you? That’s what happened to me with The Life Impossible. To paraphrase, “The woman spoke with a voice so cool, her words might have just been pulled from a refrigerator.”

Nice. I wish I’d written that.

To my question: What book do you read and reread that holds up years later? I welcome your recommendations.

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The Year Ahead: How to Deal

Endemic is live on Amazon!

I recently watched Things to Come, a movie from 1936 based on the work of HG Wells. It’s not a great film, but the subtext feels prophetic. The world of the 1930s devolves into a decades-long war that destroys civilization. Warlords take over. Scientific progress is lost. When a movement rises to bring a troubled hellscape back to modernity, those in power resist change. The good guys — in this case, an army of scientists — win. They improve on what came before the apocalypse and build a utopia. However, a hundred years later, angry mobs rise up to bring scientific progress to a halt.

At every tick of history’s clock, some people will try to hold back the hands of time. No matter how good the future might be, they want to return to a time when they thought things were better, perhaps simpler. The worst part is they want to choose for you, not just themselves. I’d prefer to order off the menu myself, thanks. Leave me and that bright, hopeful future alone.



HG Wells never watched a political debate on TikTok at 3 a.m., but he saw the anti-intellectualism coming. That’s been going on for a long time, of course, but the US election year will ramp up the nonsense, and plenty. We have a rough road ahead in 2024. I won’t list all the frets, but you’ve seen the news. You know what piles on the stress. We call it doomscrolling now, but we used to call it “watching the news,” or “being aware of current events.” You’re going to hear a lot more arguing. Don’t expect well-mannered debates on the road to truth, just stubborn parroting of propaganda impenetrable to facts. Motivated reasoning is not reasonable.

You’ll also get exposed to some happy, slappy messages about how everything’s fine or will be. When crises go on too long, misery becomes normalized. The worst is when you point out an injustice and some clod mutters, “That’s nothing new.” Yeah, ya lazy dick! We should have fixed it by now, huh? But we haven’t. I fear we won’t fix much of anything.

Whatever your cause, there’s a good chance some experts are working on it. Just as surely, a bunch of idiots are maintaining the status quo or wrecking the DeLorean’s transmission by throwing Time into reverse.

So, what to do? You’re going to go to bed each night, heave a heavy sigh, and say in a thick Southern accent, “Mama’s had a day.” I say that to my wife each night because we’re going to have to hold on to our sense of humor through it all. I don’t have a solution to the climate crisis, threats of war, or a (legal) way to convince flat earthers they’re wrong. Maybe afflict the comfortable and write letters to whoever’s in charge of the circus? In your off-time, rest and recover.

Here’s my rest and recovery protocol:

  1. Guard your peace from those who would rob you of it.
  2. The usual: Sleep, eat well, and exercise.
  3. Put your phone down more often.
  4. Avoid trying to reason with unreasonable folks. Helping anyone out of ignorance is noble, but fuckwits will just waste your precious time, and time is life.
  5. Watch Stanley Tucci in Searching for Italy. This will reinforce your belief in the hope of a common humanity that is kind, curious, and appreciative.
  6. Binge-watching Modern Family will ease your mind and bring you comfort.
  7. If childhood was a better time for you, revel in nostalgia. I watched an episode of Barney Miller last night.
  8. Read fiction. It will pull you out of the forest fire that is your existence, at least for a while.
  9. Gather with the like-minded and enter the bar back to back, heads on a swivel.
  10. Laugh at determined fools. When reason fails, laughter is often the more effective weapon.

    Finally, and most importantly:

    Read my fiction. Mama’s had a day, and I need money.