Tag Archives: Writing

A Year in Books/Day 193: Elegy for Iris

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  • Title: Elegy for Iris
  • Author: John Bayley
  • Year Published: 1999 (St. Martin’s Press)
  • Year Purchased: 2001?
  • Source: Barnes & Noble clearance rack
  • About: I get it, I really do: Iris Murdoch is one of those love them or hate them writers. The Sea, The Sea is one of my favourite novels of the later years of the 20th century, but I understand why her work isn’t for everyone. I don’t care  where you stand on the subject of Iris-as-writer, if you aren’t affected to the point of tears whilst reading her husband’s memoir it can mean only one thing. You are dead inside. Continue reading →

A Year in Books/Day 192: The Right Word II

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  • Title: The Right Word II A Concise Thesaurus Based on the New American Heritage Dictionary
  • Staff: Houghton Mifflin Company Reference Division
  • Year Published: 1983 (Houghton Mifflin Company)
  • Year Purchased: 1980s
  • Source: My lovely mother
  • About: Concise is the key here. The Right Word II is the sparest thesaurus I’ve ever read. Although not meant or marketed as such, I think it is ideal for a bright child’s use: tiny, portable, informative and easy to navigate. I relied on it for countless elementary age writing projects. I was a budding playwright then, before switching to short stories and essays in middle school. During the genre shift, I upgraded to a thicker, wordier thesaurus. I still own both of them, and every other reference book I have ever used. Even though I have not consulted this one in years, there is so much nostalgia attached to it that I cannot throw or give it away. It reminds me of why I wanted to be a writer in the first place, so it will live forever on a shelf in my studio.
  • Motivation: I didn’t need this for school, as one might assume given my age. I’ve always loved reference books, and have been collecting them since I was 5.
  • Times Read: Unknown
  • Random Excerpt/Page vi: “Discriminated Synonymies. The foundation of The Right Word II is a block of synonym paragraphs in which the meaning shared by all the words is supplemented by additional material that discriminates the various shades of meaning for each word.”
  • Happiness Scale: 10 (as a child)

[15th August Inspiration Board] Visually Inclined

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My writer’s brain requires a lot of different stimuli to keep on churning fast enough to function. A slowed down thought process is detrimental to my creativity. If you jumped out on the obvious limb and guessed that I probably have a hard time meditating, you were correct. Although I relish being alone, I do not handle quiet well. I need noise: a slightly too-loud television, a wide-faced Labrador crunching on a bone, a cat scratching on a door frame, low but audible music (The Clash or Patti Smith) pulsing from my laptop, discordantly lovely street noise breaking in through a few open windows, dogs racing and barking down the halls. Sirens. Car alarms. Screaming, skittering children. The sound of my bare feet beating against a table leg. A bus breaking to a stop. I could write with a baby squawking in my face. Noise. It’s beautiful. Continue reading →

A Reading List a Mile Long: Daedalus Books Midsummer 2012 Edition, Part II

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Here’s the companion piece to Part I, delivered as promised.

  • Travelling Heroes In the Epic Age of Homer by Robin Lane Fox
  • America Dreaming How Youth Changed America in the 60’s by Laban Carrick Hill
  • Fanny and Adelaide The Lives of the Remarkable Kemble Sisters by Ann Blainey
  • The Booklover’s Guide to the Midwest A Literary Tour by Greg Holden
  • Script and Scribble The Rise and Fall of Handwriting by Kitty Burns Florey
  • Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch
  • Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel by Edmund White
  • The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head-Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay by Louis Begley
  • The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith by Joan Schenkar
  • Woman of Letters Irene Nemirovsky and Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
  • My Paper Chase True Stories of Vanished Times by Harold Evans
  • Paris to the Past Traveling Through French History by Train by Ina Caro
  • Vedic Ecology: Practical Wisdom for Surviving the 21st Century by Ranchor Prime
  • The Life of David by Robert Pinsky
  • Saint Augustine, Tarsicius J. van Bavel, ed.
  • All Hopped Up and Ready to Go Music from the Streets of New York 1927-77 by Tony Fletcher
  • The Red Prince The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke by Timothy Snyder
  • Renaissance Florence on 5 Florins a Day by Charles FitzRoy

I’ve learned a few things from typing out this list.

  1. It should have been split into 3 parts.
  2. I am obviously intrigued by anyone with a secret life.
  3. Literary biographies are even more of a personal thing than I thought.

Plus, a bonus revelation:

  1. If I read all of these books (and everything else on my ever-fattening To-Read List) I would not only never write another word, I would spend 20 hours a day reading in bed. For the rest of my life.

 

 

 

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 9th-12th August

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  • Hermann Hesse died on 8/9/1962. “Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.”
  • Louise Bogan was born on 8/11/1897. “Your work is carved out of agony as a statue is carved out of marble.”
  • Edith Wharton died on 8/11/1937. “Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.”
  • William Blake died on 8/12/1827. “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.”
  • Mary Roberts Rinehart was born on 8/12/1876. “The writing career is not a romantic one. The writer’s life may be colorful, but his work itself is rather drab.”
  • Radclyffe Hall was born on 8/12/1880. “The world hid its head in the sands of convention, so that by seeing nothing it might avoid Truth.”-The Well of Loneliness
  • Helen Hunt Jackson died on 8/12/1885. “Bee to the blossom, moth to the flame; Each to his passion; what’s in a name?
  • Thomas Mann died on 8/12/1955. “A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”

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[All images are in the Public Domain and are courtesy of Wikimedia Commons]

 

A Reading List a Mile Long: Daedalus Books Midsummer 2012 Edition, Part I

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After re-arranging my studio, and putting the overflow stock neatly on shelves, I discovered that I have room for about 15 more books. Does this mean that I will stop buying them? Not a chance. They will probably be stacked waist-high on the floor within a year, but I promise to attempt restraint. (If it wasn’t for the library and generous family and friends, it would be much worse.) Thankfully, I receive a few book catalogs a month. I enjoy fantasy shopping in them, much as I did with toy flyers when I was a child. If something looks really compelling, I pull out my trusty reading journal and jot down the title and author on my “To Read” list. New books are added quicker than I can cross off old ones, but that is part of the joy of keeping such a record.

The Daedalus Books New Arrivals Midsummer 2012 catalog has so many interesting offerings that I have decided to split my greedy, greedy pickings in two. Here’s Part 1. Enjoy!

 

  • The Great Life Photographers by The Editors of Life (photography)
  • Hemingway Cutthroat by Michael Atkinson (mystery)
  • Schools of Tomorrow by John & Evelyn Dewey (education/society)
  • How to Mellify a Corpse: And Other Human Stories of Ancient Science and Superstition by Vicki Leon (history)
  • Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn by Martha Gellhorn (history)
  • Kafka’s Soup: A Complete History of World Literature in 14 Recipes by Mark Crick (literature)
  • A Blue Hand: The Beats in India by Deborah Baker (literature)
  • Rules of Civility: A Novel by Amor Towles (fiction)
  • A World Without Bees by Allison Benjamin & Brian McCallum (nature/science)
  • She Always Knew How Mae West, A Personal Biography by Charlotte Chandler (performing arts/biography)
  • The Art of Small Things by John Mack (visual arts)