Dear Head of Mine: 2023 Recap
A Year of BOOOKS (and more) in Review
When I started Dear Head of Mine one year ago, I took some age-old writing advice and began writing for an audience of one, jotting down thoughts about books, the publishing business, music, writing, movies, and storytelling in general. Since then, honestly, it has been nice to pick to receive kind emails, comments, and messages; I did not start expecting anyone to read this newsletter and that was freeing, but knowing people are out there enjoying and engaging with these missives has been incredibly rewarding and encouraging.
A once-a-week newsletter may not seem like a lot, but looking back it’s surprising how much ground we’ve covered. Our most daunting task of 2023 was conquering Herman Melville’s White Whale, asking in the end is Moby-Dick worth reading? And we even gave the classic novel a full “edit”, cleaving the narrative from the whale facts and making them into footnotes to learn about the novel’s structure. In short, Moby-Dick imparted a bit of its craziness on this reader. And after tackling one of the most famous challenging novels, we asked: where are all the daunting classics written by women?, picking up Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook in November as one possible answer.
While conquering stone-cold classics, we also looked to other mediums and forms of storytelling in television, film and music. We started the Academy of Literature, giving out our first “Oscars for books” (coming again soon this March). Joined the Barbenheimer madness to compare Barbie’s take on feminism to the classic “Cool Girl Speech” in Gone Girl. Considered exactly how Wes Anderson edited and adapted a Roald Dahl short story. And jumped into the Taylor-Swift-Internet-traffic-sweepstakes that dominated 2023 by dissecting her expert use of cliché in 1989 and giving away some free Taylor Swift romantic comedy titles (this rom-com is ranked #70 on Amazon as of writing this, just saying).
More than anything, we read books, naturally: book clubbing in the spirit of editorial assistants and studying the great modern influences on editors and writers by examining modern classics like In Cold Blood and The Talented Mr. Ripley. More recently, we indulged our pack rat instincts and looked at every book by masters like Shirley Jackson. Donna Tartt was among Dear Head of Mine’s most talked about authors: We considered the two genius narratives Tartt has been a part of over her decades long career; asked why The Secret History remains her most influential work for writers and publishers; and ranked all three of Tartt’s monster-sized novels just last week. En route to reading many, many books we invented a new literary term that’s a cousin to the McGuffin, the Krauss, mourned the loss and celebrated the brilliance of Cormac McCarthy, and doled out some random bits of writing advice (Submissions, Drafts, Published) + (Naming, Simplicity, Perfect Imprecision).
This wouldn’t be an editor’s newsletter without tackling the weird conventions of our book business. From comp titles to the New York Times bestseller list, Dear Head of Mine played plenty of inside baseball (a favorite cliché of book publishing, in case you didn’t know):
Are editors “advocates for the reader”?
The New York Times Bestseller List
Three flawed structures of novels
Finally, we asked and attempted to answer lots and lots of thorny questions (and did not abide by Betteridge’s law of headlines):
Do your editor and agent need to love your book?
If your friend writes a book, do you have to read it?
What kind of book is the hardest to write?
How does capitalism affect what writers write?
Is it possible to make money writing?
While I’ve taken down the paywalls for old articles for the month of January, please consider becoming a paid subscriber, which gives you access to the full Dear Head of Mine archives and supports the writing of the newsletter (your subscription mostly goes right back to the pockets of independent bookstores, so you can consider it a good cause).
A final heartfelt thanks for reading, and if you have anything you’d like to see more (or less) of in 2024, don’t hesitate to leave a comment and write me here or at SeanADelone@outlook.com.
See you next week for the discussion of romance and dragons when we dive into the biggest book phenomena of the year, Fourth Wing by Rebbeca Yarros. Happy New Year and happy reading.
Good summary of your first year, a very full year so than you. You got me to read The Golden Notebook. 😀