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Member: Jonathan3914

CollectionsYour library (282)

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TagsAmerican Fiction (93), British Fiction (63), Reference (35), Poetry (28), Science Fiction (22), Library of America (21), Horror (21), Alabama Reference (20), Southern Fiction (16), Short Stories (14) — see all tags

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Favorite authorsWilliam Faulkner, Stephen King, Gabriel García Márquez, Iris Murdoch, Thomas Pynchon, Eudora Welty (Shared favorites)

About meI am a librarian who took early retirement in 1989 to return from New York to rural Alabama to take over the family house after the death of my parents. My friend Tom Miller, who wrote under the name Tom Canford, retired as a motion picture publicist and accompanied me. Tom died in December 2007, and recently I have set up a web site in his memory, Canford Lyrics, so named because he always viewed himself as a songwriter. The site may well be of interest to users of Library Thing. In addition to offering a selection of his lyrics and excerpts with songs from four of his musical plays, it provides information about his published novels as well as the full text of his memoir about his experiences working as a unit (during production) publicist on films with special attention to Elaine May’s "Mikey and Nicky" and Francis Coppola’s "The Cotton Club."

Since Tom and I had shared so much for forty years, I figured he wouldn't mind sharing the website with me; therefore I have included information about my published novel "Rumors of Wolves" and the full text of my unpublished novel "Siren Song." Both of my novels are set in rural west central Alabama. "Rumors of Wolves" is my attempt at the horror genre with a Southern accent: a friend described it as the bastard offspring of Stephen King and Eudora Welty (probably not surprising since they are among my favorite authors). "Siren Song" is harder to pigeonhole: let's try Theodore Sturgeonesque science fiction/fantasy masquerading as a gothic romance.

http://canfordlyrics.web.officelive.com

One of the great benefits of using Library Thing to catalog my collection is that it has forced me to handle every single book in what I considered my “permanent” collection. I discovered that quite a few were not so permanent and others were redundant for various reasons. Some of these I am listing for sale on Amazon, some I am passing along to the Tuscaloosa Public Library, and several I have listed in my inventory on BookMooch:

http://www.bookmooch.com/m/inventory/jon...

About my libraryMy “library” consists of books I have especially loved, books that I intend to read again, books that I seriously intend to read, a decent reference collection, and poetry. Separately I have a collection of over 600 books to be read and passed along (mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, some mainstream and non-fiction). At present I am adding very few titles to my library of keepers: since I am now seventy years old, I am unlikely to return again to any of the newer reads (and I do seem to have enough to keep me busy, not to mention my DVD collection and Netflix).

Homepagehttp://canfordlyrics.web.officelive.com

Also onBookMooch

Real nameJonathan May

LocationSawyerville, Alabama

Account typepublic, lifetime

Connection NewsConnection News

URLs http://www.librarything.com/profile/Jonathan3914 (profile)
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Jonathan3914 (library)

Common KnowledgeSeries (26), Awards (123), Characters (1336), Places (263)

Member sinceJul 23, 2009