a must read (or at least required listening)

This past week I was on a vacation that took me to a new realm of travel skills: a solo road trip. Sure my family sported the two-week power vacations every summer when I was little, but I could sleep or play "I Spy" or just generally keep myself occupied in the backseat. But for my 8-hour haul each way, I decided to kick back to the thing that always got me through those long drives through New England or down 101 to California: a book on tape.

Except now, books on tape are really books on compact disc, which makes finding a chapter so much easier, not to mention you don't have to haul around 20 cassettes and worry about whether you left off in the middle of side A or B. I rented Bright Shiny Morning, the latest bestseller from James Frey. And despite the controversy that will inevitably forever haunt this writer's career, his book was stunning. It's essentially small snippets of the lives of at least 20 different characters, whose only commonality is the fact that they currently live in Los Angeles. The book brought back the art of storytelling, the sense that you don't have to create fantastical plots or surprise endings that could inspire a summer blockbuster at the movie theater. Stories start with strong characters, period. It doesn't matter if they are on an epic journey or live out an entire novel in the space of one hour.

If you have strong, believable characters, you cannot fail.