Praise
What people are saying about Janice Harayda’s One-Minute Book Reviews and her comic novels The Accidental Bride and Manhattan on the Rocks …
From the blog for Powell’s Books: “Arguably the second-best online literary award after the TOB’s Rooster [co-sponsored by Powell’s] is the 2008 Delete Key Awards for ‘the year’s worst writing in books,’ awarded by the One-Minute Book Reviews blog.”
www.powells.com/blog/?author=20
From Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle: “I stumbled on One Minute Book Reviews, a fun new book blog by former NBCC board member Janice Harayda. Among other things, she has this fascinating post where she uncovers the fact that Mitch Albom actually writes at a third grade level …” From a Nov. 22 post by Rebecca Skloot on Critical Mass, the blog for the National Book Critics Circle, on Nov. 22, 2006. http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com
From Miss Snark, the literary agent: “I actually loved Janice Harayda’s The Accidental Bride. I forgot how funny she was until I found her blog.” From a Nov. 26 post by Miss Snark on Miss Snark, a pseudonymous literary agent who answers questions from writers and others on her blog. www.missnark.blogspot.com
From BookInfo.net: “… I recently came across an absolutely fantastic post from “One Minute Book Reviews” (thanks to Critical Mass for pointing me to this excellent site). The blog’s author, Janice Harayda, was prompted by the inane prose of Mitch Albom’s For One More Day to run a selection through Microsoft Word’s Readability Statistics, an optional part of the spelling and grammar check. With a false-start selection that judged Mr. Albom’s prose at a grade level of 2.8, she eventually determined that he writes at a third-grade level—3.4, to be precise. Her curiosity led her to check a comparable section from different authors, yeilding the following results:
Nora Ephron I Feel Bad About My Neck Grade 12.0
Alex Kuczynski Beauty Junkies Grade 10.3
James Boswell The Life of Samuel Johnson Grade 8.6
Stephen King Lisey’s Story Grade 8.3
Danielle Steel Toxic Bachelors Grade 4.8
Emily Arnold McCully An Outlaw Thanksgiving, a picture book for 4-to-8 year olds by a Caldecott Medalist Grade 4.3
Mitch Albom For One More Day Grade 3.4
I will leave you to peruse Harayda’s blog article yourself for her smart questions about these results, and also for an additional pay-off which I will hint at only by giving you the post’s title: “Does Mitch Albom Think He’s Jesus?”
From BookInfo.Net, Nov. 28, 2006 www.bookinfo.net
From Out.com: “The folks at MediaBistro.com’s Galleycat Daily Feed recently ran a song parody contest. One of our favorite entries, a salute to former Luv Guv Jim McGreevey, came from Janice Harayda, who writes the One-Minute Book Reviews blog. Here, with apologies to Cole Porter, are some choice bits: “You’re the top!/You’re a Turnpike rest stop./You’re the top!/You’re an NJ state cop./You’re the platinum in a recording by Bon Jovi./You’re a Springsteen CD/A Rutgers QB. You’re a Princeton c.v./You’re the Nets./You’re the Pulaski Skyway/You’re a sunset on Cape May./I’m a washed-up pol, a complete mess, a flop,/But if, honey, I’m the bottom you’re the top!” From Out.com, Jan. 19, 2006. www.out.com/gossip.asp?id=2214
From Gawker.com: “Doing their utmost, as usual, to defy the stereotype that book publishing types are cape-wearing drama nerds, Galleycat solicited Ben Greenman-style show-tune parodies of works of literature. Today, the results are in, and while some of them are as sad and clunky as the filler numbers in Dreamgirls, there are some high points. We especially liked this Cole Porter by way of One Minute Book Reviewer Janice Harayda take on our favorite Gay American: ‘You’re the top! You’re a Turnpike rest stop …’ Ha, man, if Cole Porter could only know that someone was imputing a dirty gay meaning into those innocent words.” From Gawker.com, Jan. 19, 2006
From the Daysitter blog for Conde Nast’s Cookie magazine, March 12, 2007, www.cookie.com: “I know, I know. If you’re a parent, you sometimes don’t have time to read more than the ingredients listed on a breakfast cereal box. But let’s just say you have a whole minute. How do you make those seconds really count?
The answer is this nifty new site, One-Minute Book Reviews, brainchild of writer, critic and voracious reader Janice Harayda … One-Minute Book Reviews explores just about every kind of book, a something-for-everyone cornucopia of delights. Yes, says Harayda, you can read the reviews in a minute or less. The site features new releases but also goes back to the classics, and embraces titles other books sections ignore like self-help and poetry.
“Harayda not only aims help you find pleasing reading matter, but also to guide you away from the clunkers, with ‘Books I Didn’t Finish.’ Here, Harayda tells readers where she stopped reading a particular book and why, listing the best and worst lines, and giving readers suggestions for a better book to read … Witty, smart, and blisteringly honest, One-Minute Book Reviews can give you hours of reading pleasure.”
One-Minute Book Reviews was one of the top 10 Blogs of the Day in the category of “growing blogs” on WordPress.com for Nov. 23 and 26 and on other days in 2006. A link to its first ranking in the top 10:
http://botd.wordpress.com/2006/11/23/growing-blogs-213/
One-Minute Book Reviews was the eighth-ranked book review site in the world on Google as of March 28, 2008, when this page was last updated: www.google.com/Top/Arts/Literature/Reviews_and_Criticism/.
Praise for Janice Harayda’s comic novels
The Accidental Bride and Manhattan on the Rocks:
www.janiceharayda.com/mybooks.html
