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Recently, a number of threads in this forum have wandered woefully off-topic. I thought it might be helpful to start a general chat thread for those who wish to chat away about anything even remotely related to written or spoken language. Please use this thread to converse rather than posting off-topic in another thread.
Enjoy! ~ PJS
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What are you reading now? What's one of your favorite books? Is there an author who is a big stylistic influence on your writing?
Right now, I'm almost finished reading "Educated" by Tara Westover.
This is her first book, a memoir. She's young, and she comes from Idaho, my home state. I heard about the book from a friend, so I bought a copy, not knowing it is a best-seller.
I think this book will answer all 3 of my questions above. Tara is a whale of a writer, the book is a jaw-dropping, an astonishing story of an amazing childhood of a girl whose life is strange, unique and exceptional in the extreme.
Tara's parents are survivalists, and she never attended a public school. She didn't even have a birth certificate until age 14 because she was born at home. Her entire childhood was spent in isolation from the rest of humanity except for the 120 members of the closest tiny town and some of her extended family relatives.
She was supposed to be home-schooled. Her mother bought the books, but never taught her children anything from them.
The only book that was ever read in her family was the Bible, and Tara taught herself how to read from it with the help of an older brother who also taught himself how to read.
Her father owned a scrapyard business, and from the age of 7, Tara was out in it, cutting up scrap metal with a cutting torch when she wasn't with her mother, foraging the nearby mountain for edibles and herbs.
The family's only social activity was the local church and the small grocery in town. Her life was sometimes violent, often dangerous, always isolated, and all she knew. It was all she was ever going to know, but she hungered to know more.
At age 17, she stepped into a classroom for the first time. And she proceeded to graduate from an American college, went on to Cambridge when she received her Master's, became a visiting fellow at Harvard, and then earned a PhD in Cambridge in History.
All by herself, and only with much struggle. It's a story that is so remarkable, dramatic and well-written it's hard to put down.
I've read other hard-life childhood memoirs, but never one this good or this extreme. I seldom use the word amazing, but this one fully qualifies. It's amazing, and amazingly good.
I am currently writing, and when I write I make sure to read fiction.
I just finished Charles Bukowski's Ham on Rye. The protagonist is Bukowski's alter ego, growing up in Los Angeles in the 1920s and 1930s. It's a gritty, blunt work and Bukowski is uninterested in compromising his narrative in any way for the sake of the reader. I love that - honesty in writing is something I deeply admire. Henry Chinaski (Bukowski, more or less) is hard to love (or, even like much at all) but he works his way through a hard world in interesting fashion.
I'll definitely read more Bukowski.
Now, onto either Peter Heller's The Painter (I loved his The Dog Stars) or Mick Farren's Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife, which I stumbled across in a fantastic used bookstore in Los Angeles while visiting my sister there a couple of months ago. Not sure which I'll pick up first.
I found the more I read, the more I want to write. Reading is mental fuel for my writing engine.
Right now I'm reading another one of Erik Larson's history books Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania.
Larson is a historian, but was once a fiction writer. His histories read like novels; they are all packed with interesting incidents of the time and place, and his subjects are always rather small and narrow, so his stories can be told in great detail. I'm a big fan, and I've read most of his work.
Larson has written several best sellers. The best known is probably The Devil in the White City, an account of a cunning serial murderer who killed at least 30 innocent people during the Chicago Columbian World's Exposition, the greatest World Fair ever, in 1893.
The Exposition was held in a completely new and magnificent miniature city that featured large, but temporary buildings, monuments, and architecture that was designed by America's leading architects and was all painted white. This gleaming white made it become known as the White City.
It drew millions of people to it every day from all over the world, 27 million in all and had exhibits from 47 countries. It set the tone for the American century that followed it a few years later.
The story is told interweaving the skullduggery of the murderer with the construction and the marvels of the White City. Each account by itself is fascinating, but when woven together, reading the book is almost like being there at the time.
When the Farris wheel started up for the first time, it was by accident, and the wheel wasn't completely finished. There were bets on whether it would turn, bets on whether the wheel would stay on its pylons, and bets that it would collapse. It was over 200 feet high, and the gondolas held 44 people each, with around 30 gondolas on the wheel.
When the huge electric motors that powered it were first tested, someone forgot to throw the switch into the off position, and the thing just started and began to turn unexpectedly. People were still boarding the gondolas and were thrown out, and as the wheel turned, wrenches, hammers, nuts and bolts, and stray parts began raining down on the crowds below in a storm of steel parts.
Once all the stray parts had fallen, the operators wanted to shut it down, but all the dignitaries wanted to take a ride, followed by the several thousand people who had come to watch. They had to run the wheel for the next 10 hours before they were allowed to shut it down and finish building it. Mr. Farris nearly had a mental breakdown from fear that it would collapse during that time.
That's a typical aside in a Larson book. His account is far better than mine.
Another best-seller of Larson's is In The Garden of Beasts, an account of the last American Ambassador to Germany at the rise of Hitler and the creation of the 3rd Reich. It was a scary book, as it slowly unfolded how subtly Hitler seized the German democracy and bit by bit took it over and transformed it into a dictatorship.
Our Ambassador brought his wife and young adult son and daughter, freshly divorced from her husband, with him to Berlin.
His daughter became a big social gadfly who had affairs with a top Russian spy and a top German SS leader at the same time and kept a diary that detailed both affairs in great detail.
She was also well acquainted with Goering, Goebbels, and Hitler, and she's the central figure in Larson's history. Her father was rather oblivious to what was happening, but she wasn't, and she wrote about it.
And Larson portrayed a very vivid portrait of pre-war Berlin as the backdrop. "The Garden of Beasts" is the literal translation of the name of the Berlin zoo, which was down at the end of the street from the American embassy, and in the heart of Berlin. The name fit the city very well. Berlin was a glittering, beautiful and very brutal city.
It was a very ominous read, but there were many times when I couldn't put it down in the middle of the night after reading for hours. I highly recommend both of these books.
As usual, my books-to-read plan has proceeded off in an entirely different direction than I expected.
Shakespeare: The World as Stage, by Bill Bryson
I picked this one up when I stumbled across it at the library for two reasons. First, I enjoy Bryson's dry wit and irreverence. Second, I always like reading about artists - literary, musical, whatever - in order to try and peer into the methods behind the artistic madness, so to speak. In this case, there wasn't much of the latter. The book is more about how little we know about William Shakespeare, and why we know so little about him, than about the man himself. Virtually nothing is known of his personality. Years-long periods of his life are complete blanks. The details of his personal relationships with family, friends, and associates are entirely unknown. That said, it is classic Bryson and was thus an enjoyable (and short - less than 200 pages) read.
Last night I finished Bukowski's Post Office, another fictionalized memoir with a rather unsavory protagonist - again, the author in disguise. The book is even more base than the first one of his books that I read. It makes the consumption of the material difficult, but I appreciate the bluntness of the writing.
There's probably one more Bukowski that I'll read - Hollywood, a fictionalized account of the process of getting his screenplay Barfly produced and filmed.
Don DeLillo's Falling Man is next up in my ever-changing literary on-deck circle, but since I'll be going to the library this afternoon that may all change.
I could never hack Bukowski. Like you said, far too unsavory for me.
The opposite is true for Dan DeLillo; I think he's one of America's best fiction writers. If you are unfamiliar with him, I recommend "White Noise" as a first read.
A little help, please. I just wrote this and I do not know which is correct.....
“routed in my core beliefs”, or “rooted in my core beliefs”? Thanks.
The latter. Unless you're writing humor.
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