9 posts tagged “books”
About a year ago, my mom gave me a book, "Leaving A Trace" by Alexandra Johnson. The book is non-fiction, giving advice and inspiration to aspiring diarists and journal keepers through example and demonstration. It is charmingly written, gentle in its admonishements to get, and keep, writing, and altogether worth reading.
Naturally, I ignored it.
I mean, Mom gave it to me, I read the introduction, thought "aww, isn't that nice" and put the book on my "to read" shelf and left it there until last Friday.
Last Friday was the second of two days off where I got nothing, and I mean, nothing done. I just felt drained and had no creative energy to do anything. And for some reason, one of those strange feelings that are best left unexamined lest they vanish, I started reading "Leaving A Trace".
I haven't felt this inspired and ready to write in years.
A couple of years ago, 2004 through 2006 to be specific, I managed to write everyday. Whether it was online, or in my paper journal, or in some sort of story, I managed something everyday. For a full three years. 2007 hit and I couldn't do it anymore. I just needed a break. Since January of this year, I have been trying to get re-started and nothing has geled.
But, as I said, this book is inspiring. So I'm going to follow some of the writing exercises listed at the back of each chapter as a way of re-kindling some old creative fires. I may even post them here.
If you're anything like me, a half-hearted diarist, wannabe writer, would-be journalist, you may get some value out of Ms. Johnson's book. Good luck.
Ok, I'm completely lifting this from 1 More Chapter dot com, who has made a list based on 1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, and then highlighted the ones they've read. Here's my list of the ones I've read:
28. Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
33. Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
49. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
78. Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami
93. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
94. Great Apes – Will Self
125. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami
184. The Buddha of Suburbia – Hanif Kureishi
196. A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
209. The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul – Douglas Adams
210. Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
227. Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons
238. The Cider House Rules – John Irving
241. Contact – Carl Sagan
258. Neuromancer – William Gibson
264. La Brava – Elmore Leonard
301. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
303. The World According to Garp – John Irving
311. Delta of Venus – Anaïs Nin
315. Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
320. Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
333. Dead Babies – Martin Amis
358. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
367. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
390. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
399. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
408. In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
433. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
467. Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote
484. On the Road – Jack Kerouac
494. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
496. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
508. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
511. The Long Goodbye – Raymond Chandler
518. Casino Royale – Ian Fleming
520. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
521. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
527. Foundation – Isaac Asimov
547. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
586. Farewell My Lovely – Raymond Chandler
587. For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
588. Native Son – Richard Wright
592. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
599. The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
608. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
610. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
649. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
660. The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
667. All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
689. The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
699. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
704. Billy Budd, Foretopman – Herman Melville
747. Tarzan of the Apes – Edgar Rice Burroughs
801. The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
825. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
831. Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
873. Les Misérables – Victor Hugo
908. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
916. The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
925. Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper
970. Candide – Voltaire
You know, SF and Fantasy are not too well represented on the list, or else I think I would have a much longer list of ones read. On the other hand, I'm a bit better read than I thought.
eMusic works on a subscription basis. I pay a monthly fee of around $20 USD and am able to download 90 tracks per month. The tracks can be from any album, from any genre, from any artist I choose, provided they have licensed their music to eMusic.
And now, for an addtional $10 USD per month, subscribers can choose an audiobook to download as well.
The selection is modest at the moment, although several well-known and popular authors are represented, as well as a good selection of the classics, and eMusic promises to add more authors and books on a regular basis.
I decided to try out my membership with William Gibson's Spook Country and Jonathan Lethem's You Don't Love Me Yet. The downloads were quick and easy, and, unlike, Audible, eMusic breaks each book into hundreds of tracks to make listening workable on any device. The files are good quality mp3s, just like the music, and will play on any music player.
$10 may seem like a lot for a single audiobook, but, considering that the same books often run $50 or $60 on CD, the price suddenly seems much more reasonable.
For someone like me - I have an hour long commute to work - this is a welcome addition to a service I already loved and I am looking forward to being able to get many, many books this way.
Have you ever reached the pinnacle of your vice?
Have you found that perfect chocolate, or scotch, or cigar, or vintage - the one that makes you slow your pace. The exceptional example of the form that would be obscene to scarf, gulp, or wolf down?
I started reading Bradbury Stories yesterday.
I started reading Bradbury in the fifth grade. I was in what was called the AIM program, alternately, the gifted program or honors program. Whatever, it was where we got sent for English and Math. I was accepted to the prgram because I loved and excelled at the former even though I was barely able to comprehend the latter. The other students all seemed to be light years ahead of me. The complicated introductions to algeabraic equations made them bored, sleepy, and prone to picking on me because of my limited comprehension. I took my revenge by reading faster and at a higher level than they; I took comfort in always having my nose so far into a book that I never even noticed them most of the time.
Most of the time.
My teacher was a lovely woman. She knew what was going on and knew that there was very little she could do about it; these things tend to work themselves out over the course of the years passing. She did what she could though, and the main thing she could do was feed me books. The classics at first, "Treasure Island" and "Call of the Wild", then followed by some of Heinlein's juvenille books, then, finally, "The Martian Chronicles".
"The Martian Chronicles" impacted me in a way that very few other stories ever would. I read and re-read the book until the cover fell off and I went back to Mrs. Tucker and apologized and offered to buy a new copy. She told me not to worry about it and sent me off with "The Illustrated Man".
From there I began slipping out of the Children's section of the county library, with its Black Stallion and Hardy Boys, its Bobbsey Twins and Illustrated Classics, and into the main rooms of the library. The towering stacks of the fiction room were set A - E along the walls with F - Z in long rows in the middle of the room. Walking slowly up and down the aisles I would pause and read passages from Farmer and Heinlein and Robinson and Zelazny, all masters in their own, but only pauses on the long path to the back corner, where B began.
Bradbury had his own shelf, towards the bottom, perfectly positioned for my eye height when seated on the floor. I read "R is for Rocket" and "Golden Apples of the Sun" right there on the floor, waiting for my mother to come find me. I checked out "Death is a Lonely Business" and never had the courage to read past the first chapter, there alone in my bedroom. I borrowed collection after collection of his stories and treasured each one.
"The Toynbee Convector" opened my mind to the idea that reality is only what we can believe; the sheer poetry of "The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair" made me cry.
And now, twenty-two years later, this collection, purchased on the spur of the moment for no other reason that I wanted to visit old friends, this collection sits on the edge of my desk refusing to be rushed through.
Instead, I read a single story and then set the book back down, taking the time to think and remember and savor the sheer quality of each one, like one does with the best chocolates, and scotches, and cigars, and wines and "The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair" still makes me cry.
Too much going on to write a long post, so here’s a bunch of quick thoughts:
Cory Doctorow is currently reading Bruce Sterling’s The Hacker Crackdown
I’ve just started in on Peter F. Hamilton’s Judas Unchained
Warren Ellis’ Planetary
9 Songs is the most erotic film I have ever seen and not for anyone who is squeamish about raw sexuality or explicit sex on screen. The story is a beautifully told romance between an American girl and a British man over the course of a year. The movie is roughly a series of sequences that feature Antarctic documentary footage, concert performances by some of the best bands available today, and raw, passionate sex. Recommended but with the warning that this is a graphic, experimental film and not for the easily offended.
(As a side note, I find it very interesting to note that on the IMDB message boards, there are people lined up eight deep to call Margo Stilley a whore and to accuse her of making a porno, but there is almost nothing on Kieran O'Brian's page. The difference between U.S. and U.K. sensibilities or just the standard schism between male and female sexuality?)
My wife and I watched The Departed the other night. I really enjoyed it. My wife, however, prefers the original Chinese version (Infernal Affairs) which I have not yet seen. We were both impressed with DiCaprio’s and Damon’s performances though. I understand why it got the Oscar, but I don’t feel that this was Scorsese’s best.
This week I am going to be screening The Karate Kid for my advanced students, at their request; I watched it today to make lesson notes. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed it. I had also forgotten how goof-ball some parts of it are, not to mention the obvious lack of chemistry between Ralph Macchio and Elizabeth Shue.
Finally, Script Frenzy ends soon and I’m 17,000 words (out of 20,000) done with my script. I’m not sure that is any work of genius, but there is a coherent plot, recognizable themes, and a character arc, so, maybe it will be readable after a polish or three.
I finished the painting I was working on for a friend’s wedding. I’m not entirely thrilled with it but there’s nothing left to be tweaked. It’s as good as it’s going to get; I gave it my best shot, so, as Buckaroo Banzai said “No matter where you go, there you are.”
(Disclosure: all Amazon links in this post are affiliate links. Basically, if you purchase one of the books through one of these links, I get a tiny kickback.)
A few weeks ago, I was wasting time on Lists of Bests and came across a list for Dr. Peter Boxall's 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. That particular list is, of course, enormous but I had fun listing off the books I had read. I decided, arbitrarily, to try to read the entire list. However, I would only check off books that I could remember something about. In other words, the fact that I read Treasure Island twenty years ago is not enough. I have to know something about the book and be able to at least remember the main plot points.
And, after a week or two, I decided that that list was just too big. While surfing around, I noticed that there were several smaller book lists with a lot of overlap and I thought that starting with one of those lists might make things a bit easier. So I found this list: Random House Modern Library's 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century: Fiction. I added the list to my queue and went straight over to Amazon to order the first two unread books on the list: Ulysses and Gatsby.
Once the books arrived they sat on my shelf for a month or two while I read books that were of little consequence but a great deal more fun than Ulysses. I read a lot of my usual science fiction and fantasy popcorn books, quite a few magazines, a book of essays about Firefly (the T.V. show) and a couple of books of trivia. All the while I kept looking at Ulysses and finding another way of avoiding it. Finally, I decided to just skip it for a while.
All of which brings me back to Gatsby.
There are times I would like to go back and smack my twenty-one year old self around a bit and this is one of them. Gatsby is a fantastic book; I would have loved it had I bothered to read it back when, and I loved it last week, reading it straight through in a couple of hours, then reading it again. It is called a masterpiece and rightly so, for reasons far better explained by many others over the years.
However, for myself, the biggest benefit of reading Gatsby was remembering that something need not be new to be new to me and worthwhile. So, I am feeling quite ready to tackle the next, or, rather, first, volume on the list, the dreaded Ulysses, and to finish something I should have done years ago - reading the classics.
Links: Amazon Affiliate Links for Ulysses
and The Great Gatsby. Also, The Great Gatsby on Wikipedia.What books are on your nightstand?
My nightstand, well, shelf in my closet, is divided into two sections - books in progress, and books to read next.
Books in Progress:
The Screwtape Letters - C.S. Lewis
30 Days in the South Pacific - Sean O'Reilly
The Traveller - John Twelve Hawks
The Modern Gentleman - Phinneas Mollod & Jason Tesauro
The Wizard Hunters - Martha Wells
Books to Read Next:
Alaska - James A. Michener
Travels with Charley - John Steinbeck
The Great Divorce - C.S. Lewis
Leaving a Trace - Alexandra Johnson
Birthday Stories - Haruki Murakami
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