I tried for a week and a half to get through 23 pages of a “literary” novel I ended up abandoning, but have spent the past two hours completely engrossed in a book based on the Dragon Age video game series. Draw from that any conclusions you will. (I was surprised to find the Dragon Age novel has a higher average rating on Goodreads than the literary novel!)
No shame in my video game-book-game. Read More »
Reading descriptions of food in books is maybe one of my favourite things. I often read the descriptions two or three times, imagining how the combinations work and comparing the food to what I’m already familiar with. Recently I read a food description in Ethan Frome that was among the most unusual I’ve seen: She set the lamp on the table, and he saw that it was carefully laid for supper, with fresh doughnuts, stewed blueberries
There are some writers who I enjoy as writers more than I enjoy their writing. Stephen King is one of them. Doris Lessing is another. That’s not to say I dislike their writing, but I don’t respond to it as well as to what they say about the practice of being a writer. I’m really noticing this lately. For nearly a month I’ve been “reading” Doris Lessing’s first novel, The Grass is Singing. The book is slim, only
On not finishing books, and peer pressure Read More »
Some of my fondest childhood memories are of playing Nintendo and Super Nintendo games with my brother, and making that long suburban walk to the arcade on summer afternoons. In high school and my early twenties, I dropped the hobby for a while mainly due to lack of a console and a lack of funds (and discovering blogging probably helped), but I happily returned to it after a few years. I haven’t looked back since.
Books and video games. Read More »
One of Decca’s favourite words. In a 1977 essay in the London Daily Mail (reprinted in the New York Times and later in Poison Penmanship), she wrote that “frenemy” (which she sometimes spelled “frienemy”) was “an incredibly useful word that should be in every dictionary, coined by one of my sisters when she was a small child to describe a rather dull little girl who lived near us.” Her sister and the neighbor girl, she said, were “inseparable companions,all
Arrived back at Joan’s just in time for dinner. To it came Doris Lessing (you know who she is, a best-selling English writer of the Angry Young school) . . . and, joy of joys, 12-year-old Peter Lessing, who had learned about Benjy’s arrival and has planned his whole Easter vacation around showing Benj London! Peter is a super-nice boy, and he and Benj became bosom friends immediately. He called for Benj early this morning,
Decca and letters. Read More »
But then one day, you know, I suddenly realized with an absolute shock that there never was going to be a convenient time, and that if I didn’t make a beginning, I would be saying to my grandchildren, ‘What I really wanted to be was a writer.’ So I had to make time. – PD James, interviewed on CBC’s Writers & Company I’d never read anything by PD James. Even so, today I listened to an interview
PD James interview Read More »
I recently picked up an uncorrected proof copy of Annabel Lyon’s The Golden Mean at a secondhand book store. I liked the book overall, but I think this section was my favourite:
The fun of the uncorrected proof. Read More »
A couple of months ago I stumbled upon my dream book in a secondhand book store. Despite the name, Mrs Beeton’s Household Management isn’t my dream book because I yearn for the upper echelons of hausfrauness or anything. I discovered an older version of the book in 2008, and since then I’ve been interested by it from a historical perspective. It was the first book to present recipes in the format we know them today, rather
Mrs Beeton, and a recipe Read More »
Jonna filled the teakettle in the bathroom. Looking in the mirror, looking at her own face, she thought with sudden bitterness that it couldn’t go on like this, these short stories that were never finished and just went on and on getting rewritten and discarded and picked up again, all those words that got changed and changed places and I can’t remember how they were yesterday and what’s happened to them today! I’m tired! –
I know the feeling. Read More »
