About

Dave Astor
Montclair, New Jersey

Bio: I'm an avid reader who started the weekly "Dave Astor On Literature" blog in 2014. Since then, I've written thematic pieces on all kinds of fiction-related topics. Also, I'm the author of the 2024 book "Misty the Cat...Unleashed," the 2017 book "Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time: The Book Lover's Guide to Literary Trivia," and the 2012 memoir "Comic (and Column) Confessional." In addition, I write the award-winning weekly "Montclairvoyant" topical-humor column for Montclair Local in New Jersey, and am the copy editor for the email newsletter published by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, for which I was a board member from 2009 to 2023. I'm not related to the rich Astors! 🙂

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22 thoughts on “About”

  1. Dear Dave,

    Hello! Thank you for perusing and liking some of my recent posts, including the one metaphorically entitled “📈🌆 Growing Humanity with Artificial Intelligence: A Sociotechnological Petri Dish with Latent Threats, Existential Risks and Challenging Prospects 👨‍👩‍👦‍👦🤖🧫☣️“. Please feel free to leave some comment(s) in my said posts as a token of your visiting my intricately designed website, which is best viewed on the big high-resolution screen of your desktop or laptop computer.

    This year is the tenth anniversary of your starting this weekly “Dave Astor On Literature” blog. Since then, you have composed more than 500 thematic pieces on a plethora of fiction-related topics. Such a milestone of publishing so profusely and consistently is not to be trivialized, unheeded or forgotten, and thus deserves a decent acknowledgement from me here. In addition, I would like to introduce you to a comprehensive resource that I have made available for writers, editors, publishers and reviewers who wish to systematically evaluate and determine the quality of a book or manuscript, whether it is written by themselves or others. It is available at

    📝 Manuscript Assessment Criteria ☑️

    The said Manuscript Assessment Criteria provides a complete checklist for writers to evaluate and inspect their own works (either by themselves or with a group of readers or editors) before submitting their manuscripts to publishers, and also during successive edits after the previous submission(s) and before the next submission.

    Please enjoy the resource to your heart’s content. You are very welcome to submit your feedback in the comment section there, should you think of something for me to include in the Manuscript Assessment Criteria, or if you have something to say about it.

    I hope that you will find my all-inclusive Manuscript Assessment Criteria to be potentially very helpful in the conception, development and production of your oeuvres, whether they are fictions or non-fictions.

    Yours sincerely,
    SoundEagle🦅

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    • Thank you for the kind comment, for the 10-year congratulations, and for telling me about your impressive writing resource, SoundEagle!

      You do indeed have an intricately designed — and beautiful — website, which I saw on my laptop computer. (I try to avoid looking at blogs on my phone. 🙂 ) I will think about submitting a possible comment or comments to your blog.

      Thanks again!

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      • Dear Dave,

        You are very welcome! It is indeed my pleasure to highlight your accomplishment and indefatigable dedication.

        Given your long-term position and expertise as a seasoned writer and reviewer, I am certainly very keen and curious about what you will make of my aforementioned Manuscript Assessment Criteria, which are designed for and tailored to writers, editors, publishers and reviewers who wish to systematically evaluate and determine the quality of a book or manuscript, whether it is written by themselves or others. Should you find it useful or worthwhile, please feel free to reblog it (using the “Reblog” button available in the said post) so that your readers may also benefit from it.

        Good on you for still using desktop or laptop computer(s)! It is surprising or even disconcerting that many folks try to do everything or most things on their small portable devices such as smartphones. I have never found myself enamoured with small screens. I do not mind those fantastic apps, as they provide useful information and services. I just do not appreciate the limitations of any device with a small screen, which to me is the Achilles’ heel and a deal breaker.

        Sometimes I feel that the smartphones are somewhat overrated, considering that portable computer devices are especially plagued with unresolved limitation in functionality, rapid obsolescence and problems of disposal, resulting in billions of these portable devices going to landfills and poisoning the environment every year, plus a whole host of other issues, including labour exploitation and workplace health and safety.

        In addition, it is just a phase that current mobile devices have such tiny screens. Hopefully, they will have (very) large screens in the coming years, when, in the not too distant future, scrollable, paper-thin technology will arrive, and the ultra-thin mobile device will have a screen as big as a newspaper or magazine, yet it is very light, foldable and/or scrollable, meaning that it can be collapsed or folded up to put in one’s pocket. So, when such foldable, collapsible or rollable mobiles become available, most or all of the current web apps developed for small screens of current mobile devices (and the need for, and limitation imposed by, texting and SMS messaging) will be obsolete or superfluous, whilst the usual websites will continue and function as they have been for many decades in the past, and many more decades into the future. If you need more help and wonderful tips on using and/or understanding a plethora of features and tools of my website, you will be pleased to know that I have prepared a detailed User Guide for maximizing and optimizing your experience of my highly complex and multifaceted website. You are very welcome to consult the new and comprehensive User Guide to familiarize yourself with the many features and tools of my highly unusual, uniquely customized and multidisciplinary website. The User Guide is entitled “🥳🪟🎖️ How to Enjoy SoundEagle🦅 to the Utmost 🥇🏢🍹“, and is available to you at:

        🥳🪟🎖️ How to Enjoy SoundEagle🦅 to the Utmost 🥇🏢🍹

        Once you finish consulting this User Guide, you will realize just how much more one can do at my unique website with fascinating bells and whistles to enjoy.

        Wishing you a very happy weekend and an exhilarating autumn doing or enjoying whatever that satisfies you the most, whether aesthetically, physically, intellectually or spiritually!

        Yours sincerely,
        SoundEagle🦅

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        • I appreciate the reply and the additional information, SoundEagle! Yes, phones can be a mixed bag — especially their relatively small screen size, as you note. Having a phone without also having a computer is indeed challenging (though some people of course can’t afford both). If future phones would unfold into large screens, that would be very welcome.

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  2. Dave, Looking for the best place to comment. Here is good enough. I love reading all your blogs, have fleeting thoughts while reading, inspiration to read novels familiar but unread, and suggestions for novels you don’t mention.

    The post abou/servants, slaves, and their employers, master/mistresses, or “betters” as you termed them, is timeless. A Georgian like me is forced to recall Scarlett O’Hara’s colorfully black maid in “Gone with the Wind”.

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    • Thank you, Katharine, for the kind words! Glad you enjoy the blog. 🙂

      Mammy of “Gone with the Wind” is an excellent example of a memorable servant in literature. Even as many readers wish author Margaret Mitchell had been more enlightened on racial matters.

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  4. Hi Dave,

    I’m from Montclair, NJ! A student gifted me your book last year, and I enjoyed staying up too late reading the first 50 pages. I was distressed, however, to note the lack of racial and gender diversity of the authors you chose.

    When you make a claim about the “greatest novels of all time,” and the reader then finds that the vast majority of those were written by white men of European descent, you are upholding white and male supremacy.

    I suspect that this oversight is entirely unintentional, so I offer these thoughts in the spirit of “if it were me, I would want someone to mention this so that I could learn and grow,” and I hope you will take them in that spirit.

    I have learned (on my own journey towards antiracism) that intentionality is necessary when trying to be actively antiracist, instead of simply just “not racist.” (I highly recommend Ibram X. Kendi’s _How to Be an Antiracist_ –it really helped me understand some of these issues!)

    For instance, the next time you set out to write this type of book, you might assemble a list of authors from your head, and then create a spreadsheet: how many women? How many people of the global majority? And then you could actively work to balance the numbers.

    Perhaps you would find that your arbitrary (so you note in your Introduction) restriction of *dead* authors makes it challenging to create a balanced list by race/gender, and then you might decide instead to feature “20th century novels” or whatever you need to create a balanced list.

    I hope you have a wonderful holiday!

    Warmly,
    Holly

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    • Thank you for your comment, Holly.

      Because I chose to focus on deceased authors to keep the book manageable, I was indeed faced with choosing from the unfortunately larger percentage of white male authors published back in the day, as you alluded to. But I have to dispute your feeling that my literary trivia book was not diverse enough.

      The authors of color and the authors who are women featured in my book are plentiful. They include Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen, James Baldwin, Jorge Luis Borges, Anne Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Fanny Burney, Octavia E. Butler, Willa Cather, Miguel de Cervantes, Kate Chopin, Agatha Christie, Colette, Alexandre Dumas, Harriet Doerr, George Eliot, Janet Frame, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Nadine Gordimer, Alex Haley, Patricia Highsmith, Zora Neale Hurston, Shirley Jackson, P.D. James, Billie Letts, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Daphne du Maurier, Mary McCarthy, Carson McCullers, L.M. Montgomery, Elsa Morante, Flannery O’Connor, Dorothy Parker, Ann Radcliffe, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Dorothy L. Sayers, Mary Shelley, Murasaki Shikibu, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rabindranath Tagore, Edith Wharton, and Richard Wright.

      Various living female/of-color authors, such as Alice Walker, were also mentioned in passing.

      I was very conscious of diversity while researching and writing the book over a six-year period, and didn’t need a spreadsheet to be so. 🙂 I literally counted the number of female authors and authors of color I included before the publishing process began in 2017.

      Also, there’s a woman as well as a man of color on the three-person cover. The cover artist first came up with an all-male cover; I firmly declined.

      Finally, my weekly blog here is quite diverse — I very, very often discuss authors who are women and authors of color.

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  5. This is so amazing! You have such amazing credentials behind you I am jealous! Also I found it very awesome that you are from New Jersey because so am I! Well, originally I am British but you get the point! Great talking with you and I look forward to hearing more about your upcoming book!

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    • Thanks so much, RedHeadedBookLover!

      Well, I’ve been alive long enough to have had the time do a few things. 🙂

      Great that you’re from New Jersey, too! My town (Montclair) actually has quite a few people from the UK — several of whom are friends.

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      • Montclair is such a beautiful town! I have been there many times and loved it. My town is Princeton! And I have to say that that is really interesting that you have so many UK people living in Montclair. I guess I was not the only one who immigrated when I was 17!

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