November 2014 Books

Half in Love (surviving the legacy of suicide) by Linda Gray Sexton
Published: 2010
Rating: 4
Goodreads
Author web site

Another brutally honest memoir from the daughter of Pulitzer Prize winning poet Anne Sexton who died by suicide when Linda was 21 years old.

In her first memoir, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to my Mother, Anne Sexton (1994), Linda examines the complicated relationship with her brilliant but mentally unstable mother. I read and reviewed this in August - see post.

Years pass and Linda is now happily married with two boys. However the idyllic life ends as she spirals into deep depression/suicidal ideation resulting in three suicide attempts which tear her own family apart.

For someone who seeks to understand the suicidal mind, I found this memoir to be very helpful - similar to William Styron's Darkness Visible - see post on Josh's blog for thoughts on his book.

Takeaways:

• Her description of depression is harrowing: a hungry monster, strong, insatiable, looking to devour.
•  Love is not enough to prevent suicide - neither the love for others to stop oneself nor the love from others to prevent. 
• To cope with her intense internal pain, she became a cutter. She describes in excruciating detail her thoughts and feelings while cutting and why it worked.
• She exonerates her mother and herself by saying that the motivation for suicide was a way, albeit extreme and final, to end pain.
• She recognizes that to live with someone who struggles with depression and suicidal ideation is tough. Her own husband, father and sister could not cope with her. 

On a lighter note, she has written a third memoir called Besotted about living with Dalmations.

Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian
Published: 2008
Rating: 4
Goodreads
Author web site

This historical WWII fiction is based on a diary of an East Prussian woman in which she chronicles her family's harrowing move west in 1945 - just ahead of the brutal Russian army.

Bohjalian gives a list of books that helped in his research - I've only read two and am interested in the others.

Non-fiction

• Armageddon by Max Hastings
• D-Day, June 6, 1944 by Stephen Ambrose (read)
• Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland by Jan T. Gross
• Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
• On Hitler's Mountain: Overcoming the Legacy of A Nazi Childhood by Irmgard A Hunt
• What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany by Eric A. Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband
• Sins of the Innocent: A Memoir by Mirelle Marokvia
• The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn
• German Boy: A Child in War by Wolfgang W. E. Samuel
• The Holocaust: Personal Accounts edited by David Scrase and Wolfgang Mieder
• All My Life by Gerda Weissmann Klein

Fiction

• Wartime Lies by Loise Begley
• Crabwalk by Gunter Grass
• Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky (read)

Euripides III:  Hecuba  translated by William Arrowsmith
Published: 425-424 B.C
Rating: 4
Goodreads

Tragedy upon tragedy and suffering upon suffering is this play's theme.

Queen Hecuba is wife of defeated King Priam of Troy. She has lost everything: her husband, her children, her city, her title and now lives as a Greek slave. As a mother, she has seen her son Paris, start the Trojan War by abducting Helen; her first born Hector, die at the hands of Achilles; her daughter Cassandra taken by Agamemnon and now faces the death of two other children.

I can relate to her willingness to die in place of her daughter, Polyxena:

Let me take her place upon the tomb;
kill me, be merciless to me, not her.

And when she sees the body of her son, Polydorus:

O Gods in heaven, let me die!

 What amazes me in reading the Greek tragedians are the timeless truths written centuries ago:

That man is happiest
who lives from day to day and asks no more,
garnering the simple goodness of  a life.

That no man on earth is truly free.
All are slaves of money or necessity,
Public opinion or fear of prosecution,
forces each one, against his conscience, to conform.

The Blessing: A Memoir by  Gregory Orr
Published: 2002
Rating: 4
Goodreads

I ordered this memoir after reading his Poetry as Survival and read it in two days.

He begins with a question that can only be asked years removed from the trauma: "Do I dare to say my brother's death was a blessing?"

I cannot imagine how hard it was for him to drudge up memories and feelings of the time leading up to the moment when he accidentally shot his brother.  While reading, all I could do was write OMG in the margins over and over. He was only twelve years old - just beginning adolescence. His dysfunctional family offered no solace or comfort. Then his mother died two years later. How could this kid survive? Through the power of poetry.

My memories of the horrible day when I found Josh are millisecond snapshots that sometimes pop up in my head. When certain images threaten to linger, I shut them down.

Next up - read his poetry.

Song of Myself in Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Published 1855 (1st edition) and 1892 ("death-bed" edition)
Rating: 5
Goodreads

Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
Published: 2004 (posthumously)
Rating: 4
Goodreads

I bought this book a while ago and decided to read after seeing it in Bohjalian's list of books that inspired his Skeletons at the Feast. 

The story of how this book was published reminds me of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. It is a miracle that both manuscripts survived WWII.

A French novelist from Jewish descent had a vision of writing an epic, five-part novel in the same vein as Tolstoy's War and Peace.  She began feverishly writing the first two parts while living in occupied France in 1941-1942, instinctively knowing that time was short.

She was arrested and deported in July 1942, leaving her husband and two young daughters. She died in Auschwitz the following month. Her husband was arrested a few months later and before leaving, entrusted their oldest daughter Denise, with Irene's unfinished manuscript. He also perished in Auschwitz.

Serendipitously the girls and manuscript survived but it wasn't until decades later that Denise finally decided to read what she thought was her mother's journal. As she read, Denise realized that her mother had written a powerful novel of life in occupied France.

She painstakingly deciphered her mother's teeny handwriting and took it to a publisher who recognized the historical significance of the novel. Published over sixty years after Irene's death, Suite Francaise became an instant bestseller.    

To learn more, read these articles from the NY Times and the Telegraph.

Americans In Paris: Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation by Charles Glass
Published: 2011
Rating: 4
Goodreads

All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Published: 2014
Rating: 4
Goodreads

October 2012 Books

Fall of Giants by Ken Follett (The Century Trilogy #1)
Published: 2010
Rating: 5
Goodreads

LOVED IT!  This well researched historical novel focuses on the events leading up to WWI or the Great War, the war itself, the Bolshevik revolution and the woman's suffrage movement. These monumental and world-changing events are told through the interrelated lives of five families from the US, Wales, Russia, Germany and England.

I had my ipad nearby to check facts and read more about certain events.  Having never been interested in history, I find myself  wanting to learn more. 

Winter of the World by Ken Follett (The Century Trilogy #2)
Published: 2012
Rating: 5
Goodreads

LOVED IT as much as the first.  This book covers the brief interlude between the two World Wars and WWII.  Once again, I could not put it down.  After finishing, I watched the HBO series Band of Brothers (loved it!) and read the book.

Historical fiction is my new favorite genre.  I am currently reading Jeff Shaara's The Rising Tide which covers the North African conflict in WWII.  I know absolutely nothing about this and again, finding it fascinating.  My husband says I need to watch the movie Patton with George C Scott which is set in this time period.

Band of Brothers by Stephen E. Ambrose
Published: 1992
Rating: 5
Goodreads

This book chronicles the amazing and heroic journey of the men from Easy Company, the 506th regiment of the 101st Airborne from enlistment to the grueling training which few survived; to the drop on D-Day into enemy territory, to the gallant fighting in key battles such as the Battle of the Bulge to the taking of Hitler's Eagle' Nest towards the end of the war.

I loved the HBO series and plan to watch HBO's The Pacific to learn about the fight against the Japanese. 

Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing by Virginia Woolf  edited by Jeanne Schulkind
Published: 1976
Rating: 4
Goodreads

I have started a collection of Virginia Woolf's writings and am thinking of doing a study of her life and works using Hermione Lee's critically acclaimed biography as the guide to reading her diary, essays, short stories and novels in chronological order.  I think it would be a fascinating study of a most unique and brilliant literary mind. 

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
Published: 1937
Rating: 5
Goodreads

I read this in anticipation of the movie from Peter Jackson that is coming out in December.  A quick read which felt like a reunion with old friends from the Lord of the Rings trilogy (meaning movies as I have yet to read the books): Bilbo and The Ring, Gollum, Gandalf and Elrond of Rivendell.

"The Man Who Loved Books Too Much" by Allison Hoover Bartlett

Published: 2009
Read: 2011
Genre: Non-fiction
Rating: 3
Reviews: Goodreads








This book reminded me of the recently read, In Cold Blood, as both authors found a relatively obscure story which was to be the subject of a magazine article but instead, became an obsession and a much bigger story, warranting the larger canvas of a book.

Because Bartlett chose to write in the first person (as opposed to Capote who wrote in the third person),  the reader is privy to her initiation into the world of rare book collecting.  She reads extensively of past bibliomaniacs and conducts interviews with the subjects of her book, John Gilkey, unrepentant, prolific book thief and Ken Sanders, rare book store owner and self-appointed detective, determined to bring him to justice.

We were all tenacious hunters - Gilkey for books, Sanders for thieves, and me for both of their stories. 

As she becomes submerged in the world of books and book lovers, she reminisces about the special books in her youth like Charlotte's Web:

For several days I lived in Wilbur's world, and the only thing as sad as Charlotte's death, maybe even sadder, was that I had come to the end of the book.  I valued that half-dream state of being lost in a book so much that I limited the number of pages I let myself read each day in order to put off the inevitable end, my banishment from that world.  I still do this. 

She explores the collecting obsession which is embodied in Gilkey, a man who will go to any lengths to realize his dream of owning a vast library of first edition books, and therefore being the envy of all:

Every collector, by definition, seems to be at least a bit obsessed, a little mad.....the accumulating never ends.  

While I have no interest in being a rare book collector, I did find this book interesting and a quick read.  My favorite bookish quotes are below and after reading, I spent some time thinking about my own obsession with books.

....books are historical artifacts and respositories for memories - we like to recall who gave books to us, where we were when we read them, how old we were, and so on. 

Books....root us in something larger than ourselves, something real.

Touring a personal library is a lot like going through someone's family photo album.

I love this quote from John Milton (1644) which says the soul of an author is in their book:

For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.

Since Josh's death, books have become a vital part of my grief journey. Within their pages have come help and support from survivors of suicide who have courageously written their stories, from parents who have lost children, from memoirist writing about tragedies in their own lives, from fictional stories that explore the subjects of suicide, death, grief and mourning.

I have also expanded my reading to literary fiction in the quest to broaden my own knowledge and become a better writer.  I have become a more voracious reader as time goes on, on-track to read 100 books this year, an all-time high.  Finding books to add to my TBR pile is a newly found hobby.  For example, during our summer vacation on Cape Cod, my daughter and I found three used books stores and 18 reasonably priced books.  In Vermont, my favorite bookstore Northshire, had expanded their used book section and 14 new and used books were added to my take home pile, much to the chagrin of my non-bookish husband.

What can I say?  While always a book lover in the past, it has become an absolute necessity.  And now, because of Milton's quote, I am more cognizant and actually humbled to think that when I read a book and ingest the words, that I am taking in part of an author's soul.  Writing and reading are both sacred acts.

"A Passion For Books" Ed by Harold Rabinowitz and Rob Kaplan

Published: 1999
Read: 2011
Genre: Non-fiction
Rating: 3
Reviews: Goodreads









The book delivers on its full title:  A Passion for Books: A book lover's treasury of stories, essays, humor, lore, and lists on collecting, reading, borrowing, lending, caring for, and appreciating books.  Anyone trying to curb their book-buying activities will find no assistance here.   A smorgasbord where one can pick and choose the topics.  Most interesting to me were those of a personal nature - how the essay writer connects with books, why the obsession with books, the importance of books to his or her life, etc.

Favorite Essays:
The Ritual by Rob Kaplan
This author has 4,000 books which means he has brought home on average,  2 books per week over the past 40 years.  He has a process, procedure or ritual to make the books his before incorporating them into his personal library.  First, he logs them into an acquisition list, then into a database and finally places them on the appropriate shelves.

His process:  "does not serve obvious practical purpose, yet I find the process of cataloging new books to be one of the greatest pleasures of my life.  It provides a kind of closure.  It's a means of taking possession and a way of putting things into order in an otherwise disordered or disorderly world." (16).

This essay made me think of my own process of bringing a book home and making it my own.  I have a small Moleskin notebook where I write all acquisitions; last name (first letter in red ink) and first name of the author, then title of the book.  This is a portable and handy tool when at the bookstore, library or browsing online.   I then write the following on the top right hand of the title page: my name, date and place of purchase.  If there is a particular reason why I bought the book, I will also make a note.   Then it is shelved - in no particular order as I haven't gotten around to organizing my books.  A bookcase from Staples is still in it's box - not sure why I haven't put it together yet.  Oh well.  These days, I don't push anything - just do what I want, when I want.

Comfort Found In Good Old Books by George Hamlin Fitch
Fitch was a weekly columnist for the Sunday book page of the San Francisco Chronicle for 30 years.  This book was published in 1911 and within, he writes of the comfort received from reading after the sudden and tragic death of his son.  This is obviously very relevant to me.  B&N only has this as a Nook book but I can get a hard copy at Amazon.

Some meaningful quotes from this essay:

"Books...those old favorites of all ages that can still beguile me, though my head is bowed in the dust of grief and my heart is as sore as an open wound touched by a careless hand." (56).

"The vital thing is that you have your own favorite books that are real and genuine, each one brimful of the inspiration of a great soul.  Keep these books on a shelf convenient for use, and read them again and again until you have saturated your mind with their wisdom and their beauty.  So may you come into the true Kingdom of Culture...so may you be armed against the worst blows that fate can deal you in this world." (59-60)

"One book through which beats the great heart of a man who suffered yet grew strong under the lash of fate is worth more than a thousand books that teach no real lesson of life, that are as broken cisterns holding no water, when the soul is athirst and cries out for refreshment." (60).


Favorite Quotes:

• "I cannot live without books."  Thomas Jefferson (introduction)
• "When I have a little money I buy books.  And if any is left, I buy food and clothing." Desiderius Erasmus (introduction).
• "When we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness."  Vincent Starrett (18).
• "The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait." Anatoly Broyard (36).
• "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention." Francis Bacon (322).
• "Books are the windows through which a soul looks out.  A home without books is like a room without windows." Henry Ward Beecher (164)
• "A little library, growing larger every year, is an honorable part of a man's history.  It is a man's duty to have books.  A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessities of life." Henry Ward Beecher (164)

Recommended Books

• Intoxicated by My Illness and Other Writings on Life and Death by Anatole Broyard
• Comfort Found in Good Old Books by George Hamlin Fitch 

"The Well Educated Mind" by Susan Wise Bauer

Subtitle: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had

Published: 2003
Read: 2011
Genre: Non Fiction
Rating: 4
Reviews: Goodreads


This book was in my library's carousel entitled "Books on Books".

Bauer is a professor of American Literature at the College of William and Mary in my home state of Virginia.  This paragraph of the jacket insert intrigued me:

"..offers brief, entertaining histories of five literary genres - fiction, autobiography, history, drama and poetry - accompanied by detailed instructions on how to read each type."

More specifically, the chapter called "Keeping the Journal: A Written Record of New Ideas" is what prompted me to check out the book.  After listening to The Art of Reading in which Professor Spurgin encourages taking notes while reading, I wanted to get a bit more direction.  And this book delivered.  I read the book (and journaled through it) while on the plane for a business trip to San Diego.  I was itching to dog-ear and write in the book and have determined that it is one that I must have.

Bauer says that classical learning is divided into three stages, known as the trivium.

"In the classical school, learning is a three-part process.  First, taste: Gain basic knowledge of your subject. Second, swallow: Take the knowledge into your own understanding by evaluating it.  Is it valid?  Is it true?  Why?  Third, digest: Fold the subject into your own understanding.  Let it change the way you think - or reject it as unworthy.  Taste, swallow, digest; find out the facts, evaluate them, form your own opinion."

From this premise, introduced in the first chapter, the rest of the book flows.  Bauer devotes three additional chapters on fleshing out these stages and then proceeds with specific application to the five genres.  She also gives an annotated book list that should be read in order because:

"when you read chronologically, you reunite two fields that should never have been separated in the first place: history and literature."    

A second reason is that:

"writers build on the work of those who have gone before them, and chronological reading provides you with a continuous story. What you learn from one book will reappear in the next.  But more than that: You'll find yourself following a story that has to do with the development of civilization itself."

Bauer gives her opinion as to why one translation/edition of a medieval or foreign work might be better than another.  If there is a choice, she puts the passages side by side so the reader can determine which one will be more suitable.

She also suggests audiobook versions for the Illiad and Odyssey by Homer and Beowulf.   If I ever tackle these epic poems, it will be by listening to them. 

Here is the recommended fiction list:

1. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (1605)
2. The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (1679)
3. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)
4. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1815)
5. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens (1838)
6. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (1847)
7. The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne  (1850)
8. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
9. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1851)
10. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1857)
11. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1866)
12. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1877)
13. The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy (1878)
14. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (1881)
15. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884)
16. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)
17. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1902)
18. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (1905)
19. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
20. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
21. The Trial by Franz Kafka (1925)
22. Native Son by Richard Wright (1940)
23. The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)
24. 1984 by George Orwell (1949)
25. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952)
26. Seize the Day by Saul Bellow (1956)
27. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1967)
28. If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino (1972)
29. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)
30. White Noise by Don Delillo (1985)
31. Possession by A.S Byatt (1990)

Since literature should not be separated from history, she suggests investing in history books such as History of the American People by Paul Johnson and Oxford History of Britain by Kenneth O. Morgan. In preparation, the reader should look at twenty years of history on either side of the novel, perhaps keeping a timeline of main events in the reading journal. 

This is just a snippet of useful information found in the book.  I do plan to buy it and keep as a reference book.  I like the idea of brushing up on my history at the same time. 

I'm still deciding on whether or not to start a second journal - a literary journal or a "commonplace book".  I would use it to implement the ideas gained thus far.  In addition, I found a "how to to get started" site. 

"The Book That Changed My Life" Edited by Roxanne Coady and Joy Johannessen

Subtitle:  71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate the Books that Matter Most to Them.  

Published: 2006

Read: 2011
Genre: non fiction
Rating: 3
Review: Goodreads






Found this book at the library carousel entitled "Books about Books".

The editor of this book, Roxanne Coady founded R. J Julia Booksellers in Madison, Connecticut after working 20 years as a tax accountant.   The book is a compilation of short stories by authors who at some point in their career, have read their book at Coady's store.  In their story, they share about the book or books that have changed their life.  It is a quick and fascinating read.

All proceeds go to the Read to Grow Foundation whose mission is to promote early childhood literacy by partnering with urban hospitals to supply families of newborn babies with books.   They also supply books to daycares, schools, clinics and home so have increased their outreach to young children.

I think this is a wonderful example of how a book-loving person has channeled that passion into a livelihood and a foundation that promotes literacy among underprivileged children.

The intro says it all:

"Every day in the store we see how books change lives, in big ways and small, from the simple desire to spend a few quiet hours in a comfy chair, swept away by a story, to the profound realization that the reader is not alone in the world, that there is someone else like him or her, someone who has faced the same fears, the same confusions, the same grief, the same joys.  Reading is a way to live more lives, to experience more worlds, to meet people we care about and want to know more about, to understand others and develop a compassion for what they confront and endure."

The underline is my emphasis.  It is why books have become so much more important to me...since the tragic death of my beloved son.  Opening the pages of some of the survivor of suicide books is like dropping in on a support group - on my time, when I am ready.  They have been invaluable to me in the work to process our sudden loss.  And it is work.  There is nothing easy about it.  And it helps to know that others have had to do this hard work and have survived.  Have found a way to live - while incorporating such a loss into themselves, their hearts, minds and psyches.

Below are the books to add to my TBR list.  Some I recognize, many I do not.

I Know This Much is True by Wally Lamb
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown
The Way we Live Now by Anthony Trollope
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Expensive People by Joyce Carol Oates
Little, Big by John Crowley
Escaping Into The Open: The Art of Writing True by Elizabeth Berg
From Whom the Bell Tolls by Earnest Hemingway
Teacher Man by Frank McCourt
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard
So Many Books, So Little Time by Sara Nelson

"How Reading Changed My Life" by Anna Quindlen

Published: 1998
Read: 2011
Genre: Non-fiction
Rating: 4
Review: Goodreads









A very quick read by a bestselling author whose love of books radiates from the pages.  She attributes this love to a certain restlessness as a child, and says this:

"So I wandered the world thought books.  I went to Victorian England in the pages of Middlemarch and A Little Princess, and to Saint Petersburg before the fall of the czar with Anna Karenina.  I went to Tara, and Manderley, and Thornfield Hall, all those great houses, with their high ceilings and high drama, as I read Gone with the Wind and Jane Eyre."

A number of other quotes from the book are on this post so I will not re-type them here.  I do however, want to write about some thoughts she has on why and what women read and how this differs from men.  Despite being broad generalizations that will not be true for everyone, I would like to explore further.

"...I began to think that women read differently than men....a Gallup poll taken in 1991 showed that women were more likely than men to find reading a more relaxing pastime than watching television....Some bookstore owners say their women customers are more likely to read novels, while the men more often choose biographies and history. Perhaps women feel more of a need to escape their own lives and take up those of others than men do."

"But it also seemed to me...that women seem to see reading not only as a solitary activity but as an opportunity for emotional connection, not just to the characters in a novel but to those others who are reading or have read the same novel themselves."

And:

"This ability of a book to lesson isolation is important, not simply for personal growth, but for cultural and societal growth as well."

I am also remined of a quote by Maureen Corrigan in her book, Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading.  Here, she muses as to why she and fellow bookworms read:

"...search for authenticity.  We want to get closer to the heart of things, and sometimes even a few good sentences contained in an otherwise unexceptional book can crystallize vague feelings, fleeting physical sensations, or sometimes, profound epiphanies...Readers, professional or casual, are alert to passages in a book that illuminate what was previously shadowy and formless."

It is the combination of these thoughts that speak to me.  My life is now segregated in terms of "pre" and "post Josh" - like a thick black line or better said, a chasm that irrevocably separates my two selves.

"Pre-Josh", I read novels.  Quickly.  The faster, the better.  I wanted to connect with the characters and get lost in their story. These kinds of books are aptly called "brain candy" by some.  "Post-Josh", I read for "emotional connection" and to "lesson isolation" as Quindlen says.  I also read to "crystallize vague feelings" and illuminate the "shadowy and formless" as said by Corrigan.

In fact, everything I read now is with a filter - plain and simple: Josh's death. I am searching for authenticity or truth.  I look for meaning and understanding.  I want to find the answer to THE unanswerable question: "Why, Josh, why?"

I was thinking about this over two weeks ago and drew a funnel in my journal.  At the top, where the width is greatest, I wrote the following: dreams, writing, journaling, books, thoughts, quotes, ideas, conversations, stories, memoirs, fiction, survivor of suicide books, parental bereavement books, lyrics, movies.  At the bottom of the funnel, is THE question.  After drawing this, I wrote:

"So, as opposed to others, who have no real issues, pain, sorrow, grief or tragedy, and read just to read, because they like books and have been bookish all their lives, I read and write for salvation.  To avoid or bypass mental illness, post traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, my own temptations of suicide. To be able to function.  Reading and writing is a life support.  It sustains me.  Guides me.  Illuminates.  Forces me to follow thoughts and ideas that would previously be unknown or simmering in my subconscious, wreaking havoc.  Reveals what is dormant - thoughts or feelings that lie beneath conscious thought.  If left untouched or not brought to the light of scrutiny, it could in fact, cause mental illness, breakdown, even madness."

It surprised me then, how quickly and easily these words flew from pen to paper.  And as I re-read and type them now, they still ring true.

Grieving is a lonely business.  I would not survive if not for the companionship offered in books and in my journal.

"Lessons From a Lifetime of Writing" by David Morrell

Published: 2003
Read: 2011
Genre: Non-Fiction
Rating: 4
Review: Goodreads
Author's web site






Found this at the library while looking for The Art of Fiction by John Gardner.  I picked both books up, skimmed through the Gardner book and read this one cover to cover.  A quick and easy read with interesting anecdotes from his life, including experiences in writing his first novel, First Blood and the subsequent translation to the famous Rambo films.

I found this book helpful not only in thinking about the fledgling story in my head about Josh, but in my goal of being a more thoughtful reader.

His thoughts:

• Write conversations with "alter ego" to flesh out ideas for a story and/or to create character sketches
• Avoid flashbacks as in his opinion, they move the story backwards.
• He prefers third person limited over first person. 
• Description should be multi-sensory.  He tries to use two senses in addition to sight.
• Read the first sentence, then paragraph of new books at the bookstore once a month.  Take note of the ones that grab my attention verses those that don't and ask why.  
• Be like Hemingway who practiced stand alone dramatic paragraphs with little to no adjectives or adverbs. 
• No speech tags except for "said" and "asked".   Will force to write more descriptively. 

Examples:

"I'll track you down and murder you!" Jill shouted. 

"I'll track you down and murder you!"  Jill's cheeks were as scarlet as her hair.

"I gave that jerk the best three days of my life," Jill said proudly. 

"I gave that jerk the best three days of my life," Jill shoved back her shoulders and stood straigher. 

Memorable quotes:
How characters should control plot and not vice versa.

"In the worse kind of novel, the plot controls the characters, often forcing them to do ridiculous things, because at any narrative cost, the novelist has to strain to reach the big explosion at the climax.....In the opposite and better kind of novel, however, characters control the plot.  Properly motivated, their fears and desires set events in motion and cause the plot to proceed to a satisfying inevitable end."

On plot and conflict

"Without conflict, no plot can be interesting....As far as I'm concerned, in the abstract there's only one plot, and it goes like this: A person or group or entity wants something.  Perhaps it is to survive a blizzard, to get married, to dominate the world, or to save a child trapped in a fire, whatever.  Another person, group, or entity throws up every barrier imaginable to stop that goal from being achieved.

Recommended reading:

• Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster
• Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth
• The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (powerful 1st POV)
• Huck Finn by Mark Twain (1st POV)
• Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (3rd POV)
• Raymond Chandler detective series (1st POV)
• The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (3rd POV)

"The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work" Ed by Marie Arana

Published: 2003
Read: 2011
Genre: Non-fiction: writing_authors
Rating: 4
Review: Goodreads









A collection of essays written by various authors for the Washington Post Book World.  Each essay is preceded by a brief profile of his or her career by Arana.  I found this book to be interesting and a quick read.  Gave me a boatload of books to add to my "wish list".

Favorite Quotes

From the editor:
"Writers learn their craft, above all, from the work of other writers.  From reading.  They learn it from immersing themselves in books.  They do not learn it from classrooms or workshops or manuals - the cannot be programmed to perform.  It is, in essence, lonely work: isolation is what they must learn to savor..... Come what may, they must go to their desks alone."

Anthony Trollope
"My task is to chronicle those little daily lacerations upon the spirit."

Susan Minot
"I began to write on my own - prose poetry, journal writing.  It was the first time I had a room of m own, and I found that writing was a way both of being alone and of finding out what was going on inside myself.....I wrote pages of stream of consciousness long into the night....I began to rely so much on writing that I was living a double life - one the world and one on the page.  The one on the page was more intense, more satisfying and for a long time much more real."

Nadine Gordimer
"The only school for a writer is the library - reading, reading...Ours is the most solitary of occupations....For me, writing has been and is the exploration of life.  That is why my novels and stories are what I call open-ended..."

Erica Jong
"The act of writing always made me feel centered and whole....It is my meditation, my medicine, my prayer, my solace.  If you are relentlessly honest about what you feel and fear, you can be a mouthpiece for something more than your own feelings.  People are remarkably similar at the heart level - where it counts.  Writers are born to voice what we all feel.  That is the gift.  And we keep it alive by giving it away."

"The utter trust that exists between reader and author is like the trust between lovers."

"Generosity is the soul of writing.  You write to give something.  To yourself.  To your reader.  To God.

Craig Nova
"When a writer is successful in using a story taken from experience, it is not told exactly the way it happened, but in the way that reveals, through all one's beliefs, hopes and fears, how the event should have happened."

Jayne Anne Phillips
"Writers begin as readers, and words become a means of survival."

E.L. Doctorow
"But wherever books begin....the work itself is hard and slow, and the writer's illumination becomes a taskmaster, a ruling discipline, jealously guarding the mind from all other, and necessarily errant, private excitements until the book is done."

"You can't write the book until you find the voice for it."

Richard Selzer
"A good deal of what I do is in the form of a diary."

"Writing, for me, is what purring is for a cat.  It represents pure pleasure, and there is no purer pleasure than chasing after the nature of a bodily thing and nailing it to a page."

"There's a good deal of waiting around in writing."

E.O. Wilson
"The central role of literature is the transmission of the details of human experience by artifice that intensifies aesthetic and emotional response."

Frances Fitzgerald
"To a writer, a book is much more than a job.  It's a companion - albeit a temperamental one you would sometimes like to strangle.  It's a virtual world you can call any time - a world with its own landscapes, its own cast of characters, its problems and its epiphanies.  Finishing it means that this world must disappear, this companion must go, and it will be a long time before you can find a replacement."

"Then too starting a book is almost as bad as finishing one.  There are just too man blank spaces, too many possibilities.  A book becomes fun only when it fills out a bit and begins making its own demands."

Michael Chabon
"Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed.  Telling the truth, when the truth matters most, is almost always a frightening prospect....if a writer submits his work to an internal censor long before anyone else can get their hands on it, the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth."