I’ll finish the year having read somewhere between 34-36 books. That includes some heavy lifting non-fiction, some escapist pager turner fiction and a couple of books of poetry. All but one are older classics that I finally tackled in 2021. We ought to live a bit outside ourselves more often, and reading is an easy…
Looking back on this maddening year, I found I read a lot of poetry that inspired and a lot of page-turner novels that distracted. It would be easy to make half this list collections of Mary Oliver poems, but I subtracted poetry from the list altogether to focus on the craft of the written novel…
“… and anyhow travel is over, like one’s books and the rest of civilization” – Rose Macaulay This Macaulay quote, plucked from the extraordinary Erik Larson book The Splendid and the Vile, was from a letter that she wrote to a friend after her London flat was destroyed in 1941 during one of the many…
“To do the same thing over and over again is not only boredom: it is to be controlled by rather than to control what you do.” – Heraclitus Heraclitus seems to be trending on the blog, coming up a couple of times in the last 24 hours of writing. Purely coincidence, but then again maybe…
“We are carried along by our thoughts, “now gently, now violently, according as the water is angry or calm … every day a new fancy, and our humors shift with the shifts in the weather.” It is no wonder that the mind is like this, since even the apparently solid physical world exists in endless…