Category Archives: reading
The quotes on my desktop
There are quotes about writing on my desktop. Actually, they’re in a Word file, at the top of a journal I’ve kept for the last year as I produced a fourth version of my memoir. I don’t make journal entries … Continue reading
Filed under Dillard—Saint Annie, MY LIFE, reading, spirituality, working method
Reading, memoir & hurt feelings
The founder of Ploughshares, forty years ago this fall, DeWitt Henry is a novelist and memoirist who teaches at Emerson College in Boston. His books include Safe Suicide: Narratives, Essays, and Meditations, a collection of linked essays on his generation … Continue reading
On hating certain books
Works of art are of an infinite solitariness, and nothing is less likely to bring us near to them than criticism. Only love can apprehend and hold them, and can be just towards them.—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young … Continue reading
Kindle (& Updike) redux
As I was saying early in January, I was almost through Jonathan Franzen’s 576-page novel Freedom—wow, what a Mississippi river of a book, churning with social criticism, human portraits, narrative power—when I dropped and broke my Christmas Kindle. In two … Continue reading
A Kindle tragedy
Oh no. Setting my new Christmas Kindle atop the mound of books on the nightstand beside my bed last night precipitated an avalanche. Books and Kindle took a tumble onto the hardwood floor. The books, of course, were fine. None … Continue reading
To read, perhance to Kindle
At a recent dinner party I aired my impression that Kindle books weren’t much cheaper on Amazon than real books. Friends looked at me like I was crazy. I can see why now, if they go only to the Kindle … Continue reading
Filed under evolutionary psychology, fiction, MY LIFE, reading, structure
Virginia Woolf on a writer’s education
“. . . [A] writer’s education is so much less definite than other educations. Reading, listening, talking, travel, leisure—many different things it seems are mixed together. Life and books must be shaken and taken in the right proportions.” “Let us … Continue reading
Two great literary journalism archives
I’ve learned from other bloggers about two online archives of great nonfiction—mostly essayistic or at least personal, as well as reported, magazine articles. Kevin Kelly’s site KK has, under his Cool Tools category, “The Best Magazine Articles Ever,” with a … Continue reading
Filed under essay-narrative, essay-personal, journalism, NOTED, reading, teaching
Craft, self & rolling resistance
“Writing is not a bundle of skills. Although it is true that an ordinary intellectual activity like writing must lead to skills, and skills inevitably mark the performance, the activity does not come from the skills, nor does it consist … Continue reading
Filed under editing, memoir, MY LIFE, reading, working method
It’s reading that’s hard
Writers complain a lot about how hard their work is. But dipping into Peter Elbow’s 1981 classic Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process (2nd edition, 1998) gave me a new appreciation for what readers are up against. … Continue reading
