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Books:

The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker: A lecture on poetry cloaked in the story of how doubt effects creativity and creative block effects relationships. There are times where as a reader you may want to take Paul Chowder by the shoulders and give a good hard wake-up-shake, and yet if you've done any writing at all, you know that's not the way it works. These are the kind of holes we have to dig ourselves out of. This is the story of a poet's struggle to write the introduction to an anthology of rhyming poetry, but it is much more than that. It's an exploration of creativity that resonated with me.

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern:

Surprisingly enchanting love story! Selection of detail and use of figurative language create a cleanly embellished world that you kind of want to live in. Morgenstern's vision of love captured this sap.

The Tenth of December by George Saunders
Every word carefully selected to tickle you, the. hit you hard with the matter. And he doesn't shy away from any matter of moral complexity.

The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus: If this was a film, I would have nightmares for days. Terribly depressing. Carefully written. Pokes a little too close to truth at times to bear. I collected many sentences for their stand alone greatness.


Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

The sentences of direct narration anchor a story so watery and internal that it almost doesn't seem real. Except that it does. Very real in terms of emotion and character. A story that set up my expectations, but surprised me in the end, that explored themes of noncomformity and convention with insight that had me nodding yes and in a style so particular that I had believe it was from the heart. A slow read in the beginning that encouraged this reader to stop and smell each sentence rose, but that built momentum and meaning in the end.

Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith

Excellent mise-en-scene! A work of crime fiction in the style of an old detective film or a pulp novel. Though the mystery could have been more tightly concealed, I loved the main character Strike and his assistant and how the novel unfolded visually. I will read #2!

Quiet by Susan Cain

I wish I had come across this book sooner, as a young person or a young mother because there was so much in this book that affirmed my experience as an introvert and the parent of an introvert. What I like most about the book is that at its heart it seems to be mostly interested in illuminating the difficulties in human relationships because of personality differences and a step toward self-acceptance and understanding of others. As an educator I feel emboldened to continue my own efforts toward personality inclusiveness in my classroom because I agree with Cain's assessment: "The purpose of school should be to prepare kids for the rest of their lives, but too often what kids need to be prepared for is surviving the school day itself."


On Writing by Eudora Welty

Probably due to the reader, not the writer, there were times when I struggled with this short book on the writing of fiction, times when I just didn't get it and times when the texts used to illustrate the point were unfamiliar to me. Yet, there were these moments of connection that kept me bobbing along the surface of this heady exploration of the art of fiction and the role of the writer. Some quotes that emerged as meaningful to me:

"No two stories ever go the same way, although in different hands one story might possibly go any one of a thousand ways; and though the woods may look the same from outside, it is a new and different labyrinth every time. What tells the author his way? Nothing at all but what he knows inside himself: the same thing that hints to him afterward how far he has missed it, how near he may have come to the heart of it. In a working sense, the novel and its place have become one: work has made them, for the time being, the same thing, like the explorer's tentative map of the known world'" (45, Place in Fiction)

"Place, to the writer at work, is seen in a frame. Not an empty frame, a brimming one. Point of view is a sort of burning-glass, a product of personal experience and time; it is burnished with feelings and sensibilities, charged from moment to memnet with the sun-points of imagination" (49, Place in Fiction)

"Making reality is art's responsibility" (53, Place In Fiction).

"And if life ever became not worth writing fiction about, that, I believe, would be the first sign that it wasn't worth living" (80, Must the Novelist Crusade?).

"Fictional time may be more congenial to us than clock time, precisely for human reasons. An awareness of time goes with us all our lives. Watch or no watch, we carry the awareness with us. It lies so deep, in the very grain of our characters, that who knows if it isn't as singular to each of us as our thumbprints. In the sense of our transience may lie the irreducible urgency telling us to do, to understand, to love" (Some Notes on Time in Fiction, 100).