Reading as Fuel for Writing
This blog has been fallow for a few months and rather than let the weeds grow higher I decided to run a plow through and start fresh. That’s as far as I need to take the metaphor 😆
For the first few months of this blog’s existence, I’d been mirroring content from my newsletter, which is focused on inspiration for producing our best writing work. Instead, what I’d like to do here is discuss my next favorite topic: books. What I’m reading and enjoying (and why), what I want to read next, and all the wonderful related questions and ideas that my come up. Sound fun? I think so.
What am I reading?
Is your attention span not what it used to be? Lately I haven’t been able to read novels or any full-length work, so I’ve turned to short books—novellas, essays, short stories—to retrain my ability to focus. Cross your fingers it works. So while I have a good dozen books on my proverbial nightstand (I will admit most of these are stacked on the floor—horrors!—next to the nightstand), I am focused on two books these days.
“A rich and exuberant kaleidoscopic portrait of a great, messy, noisy, daunting, inspiring, maddening, enthralling, constantly shifting Rorschach test of a place. . . .” New York Times Book Review
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
I first visited London in the late fall of 2022, and I have been itching to return ever since. I’m well aware that I saw the tiniest slice of London, and I want to go back and have another pub dinner and see more sights and peruse more bookshops. Londoners is tiding me over until my next trip very well.
“Their stories evoke lives both near and distant, in settings ranging from Jamaica, Houston, and Hawaii to a Turkish coal mine and a drought-ridden Northwestern farm, and feature an engaging array of characters, including Laotian refugees, a Colombian kidnap victim, an eccentric Irish schoolteacher, a woman haunted by a house that cleans itself, and a strangely long-lived rabbit.”
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Reading stories written and published just before the pandemic descended is an interesting experience indeed. Our collective psyche has shifted so much in the last five years! I’m sure this is something that will be studied for years to come—we can’t even fully see how everything has changed now, though I know we know we’ve been through a profound change … Anyway, I’m enjoying these entertaining, moving stories from a past that feels like fifty years ago. What a ride!
Getting a Handle On the TBR
This weekend I spent a few hours moving everything I could from my Amazon wishlists (which I started in 2003!) to lists at my local library. The library doesn’t have everything, but it has a lot—nearly 400 titles that I, over the years, wanted to get my hands on and read.
My plan is to once a month use a random number generator to choose a work of fiction and non-fiction to read, alongside something from my physical TBR here at home, which is also in the hundreds. Maybe this way I’ll get through it all 🤞
By the way, it was really interesting to see what I added to my wishlists over the years. There were themes for sure! It’s also interesting to see which of these books are—and are not—still in print.
Until next time… Let me know what you’re reading!
