I have always filtered the world through books, and I still do to a large extent. Writing is just an extension of that.
Category Archives: Reading
Creatures set down here bewildered
Why are we reading, if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage and the hope of meaningfulness, and press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and which reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking. If we are reading for these things, why would anyone read books with advertising slogans and brand names in them? Why would anyone write such books?
Overwhelmed with Admiration
About a third of the way through [Rupert Thomson’s This Party’s Got to Stop], I had to take a break. The essay I’m writing had stalled. My verbs seemed unconscionably obvious next to his, my sentences clumsy, my narrative voice about as natural as a conversation heard through a tin horn. I was, as always, struggling with structure. … Of course this isn’t the first time I’ve been so overwhelmed with admiration for someone else’s work that I could barely stand to look at my own. … For occasions like this, for the past couple years, I’ve kept on hand a well-reviewed novel that I don’t like or respect. It’s sitting on my desk right now, in fact. I don’t re-read it in any detail, because I don’t want it to contaminate my thinking, but flicking through the book makes me feel better about my own work, however imperfect it may be.
To Imagine a Time
It is hard for us, born so late, and living in this century, to imagine a time when a woman of social standing couldn’t just “get a job.” It is hard to think that women’s marriages were their livelihoods, just as we now think of careers in medicine or law. It feels ugly to think about, and hard to make light of.
With the Wider World
[S]ome of my favourite bloggers are mothers and write about their mothering experiences, among other things … And what unites the blogger/mothers that I do read and enjoy is, for the most part, how they engage with motherhood and with the wider world at the same time.
This is what I’m looking for in books about motherhood as well … How motherhood can be addressed in literature so as not to alienate anyone who isn’t a mom. And to understand why mothers are so reviled, in real life, on the internet, in general. Because they are a bit, and that’s a funny thing.
Like Snowflakes
And yet there is and will always be some beauty in books. And there will always be people who appreciate that beauty. Even if books eventually become the province of collectors and the peculiar few who fetishize them as objects, there will be attractive qualities to them. They are something like snowflakes or at least stamps, so many and so few alike.
Objects of Beauty
[B]ooks are objects of beauty, not just information. Those who appreciate that beauty–in the cover, in the deckle edge, in the smell of the paper–may be the ones to save paper books.
Rebound
When a book I love is ending—no matter how devastating the final pages, no matter how desperate I am to know how things will turn out, and what the very last line will say to me—I slow down. Like a kid on a bike heading downhill, I use both my brakes and my feet, let the rubber soles burn off, will the book to magically grow longer before my eyes.
One musn’t wait too long before committing to the next book, though: this is how reading ruts begin. …
What I need is a rebound book, a palate cleanser. Maybe today I’ll search for a thick-but-lightweight, no-strings-attached thriller, something that can rope me in quickly, make me forget, at least temporarily, the heartbreak I felt over the last book leaving me.
Freedom To Read Week
I’ve just been catching up on my blogreading and omg. It’s Freedom to Read Week this week! Check it out:
Stories have formed us all
I was reminded of Carolyn Heilbrun yesterday when someone mentioned writers who committed suicide.
What matters is that lives do not serve as models; only stories do that. And it is a hard thing to make up stories to live by. We can only retell and live by the stories we have read or heard. We live our lives through texts. They may be read, or chanted, or experienced electronically, or come to us, like the murmurings of our mothers, telling us what the conventions demand. Whatever their form or medium, these stories have formed us all; they are what we must use to make new fictions, new narratives.
—Carolyn Heilbrun
Writing a Woman’s Life (1988, p.37)
The Remainder Table 