Ross traut steve rodby biography

My writing group was talking about the inherent difficulty of the first chapter of a novel. You can&#;t put everything first, so you have to help people be reassured that the things they don&#;t know yet will ultimately be revealed. And Nathan said something interesting, something that feels true: &#;The first chapter of a book teaches you how to read the book.&#;

Our neighbors lent me a copy of a book, Richard Russo&#;s The Risk Pool. I read it on New Year&#;s Eve afternoon, picking up speed the whole way through. Indeed, the first thirty pages or so of that book taught me how to read the book. It&#;s a book about stupid, belligerent people. It&#;s a book about being the victim of stupid, belligerent people. It&#;s about a young boy who learns over the next decades to repeat every single one of his stupid, belligerent father&#;s failings. The first thirty pages set that tone perfectly, so that all I had to do thereafter was skip twenty pages forward, read half a page to de

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