What I'm Reading This Week -- (May 25, 2009)
Quote de jour
"To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting."
~Edmund Burke
How fast can I do this? I'm still in my bathrobe and I'm having a BBQ at 4:30. Maybe it's time to start twittering. It's quicker with only 140 characters per tweet, but that's the subject for another post.
I breezed through the usual forest of magazines, grateful that something things never change. Have you ever noticed how National Geographic is still the odd, small size with essentially the same yellow border? It reminds me of long summer afternoons as a child poring over the exotic photographs of far away lands. After all these years, the photos still dazzle, like the ones of the frozen pre-historic baby mammoth. The rest of the covers are a weird Gestalt of culture.
Three books this week. After seeing the film Revolutionary Road, I had to read the Richard Yates novel on which the film is based. My library didn't have a copy so one was ordered online from another branch. My jaw dropped when it arrived. More shocking? It came from the library in Chappaqua, one of the wealthiest towns in the country and home of the Clintons. No matter, I whipped through tattered pages sorry I'd seen the film. Leonardo Dicaprio was so horribly miscast. It's a no win situation: reading a wonderful book first and then being disappointed by the film or vice versa. The writing is mesmerizing. It's been a while since my eyes lovingly soaked up the words on a page. If you've seen the film and haven't read the book, please do.
I'm dying to read the hot new novel with the intriguing tittle: Jeff in Venice Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer.
My favorite first sentence of a book this week is : It was as black in the closet as old blood.
Bless you Alan Bradley for giving every older, unpublished writer hope. I came across a review in a magazine about a debut novel: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley. What prompted me to order it? Was it the fact that the writer won the crime writer's association award? Nope. Or because it was written by a fellow cat-loving Canadian? No, again. It was because the author is seventy years old and only began writing after he retired. Not only has he embarked on a successful road as a novelist, but with a long series based on his crime-solving character: an eleven-year old aspiring chemist named Flavia de Luce.
http://www.flaviadeluce.com/
"To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting."
~Edmund Burke
How fast can I do this? I'm still in my bathrobe and I'm having a BBQ at 4:30. Maybe it's time to start twittering. It's quicker with only 140 characters per tweet, but that's the subject for another post.
I breezed through the usual forest of magazines, grateful that something things never change. Have you ever noticed how National Geographic is still the odd, small size with essentially the same yellow border? It reminds me of long summer afternoons as a child poring over the exotic photographs of far away lands. After all these years, the photos still dazzle, like the ones of the frozen pre-historic baby mammoth. The rest of the covers are a weird Gestalt of culture.
Three books this week. After seeing the film Revolutionary Road, I had to read the Richard Yates novel on which the film is based. My library didn't have a copy so one was ordered online from another branch. My jaw dropped when it arrived. More shocking? It came from the library in Chappaqua, one of the wealthiest towns in the country and home of the Clintons. No matter, I whipped through tattered pages sorry I'd seen the film. Leonardo Dicaprio was so horribly miscast. It's a no win situation: reading a wonderful book first and then being disappointed by the film or vice versa. The writing is mesmerizing. It's been a while since my eyes lovingly soaked up the words on a page. If you've seen the film and haven't read the book, please do.
I'm dying to read the hot new novel with the intriguing tittle: Jeff in Venice Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer.
My favorite first sentence of a book this week is : It was as black in the closet as old blood.
Bless you Alan Bradley for giving every older, unpublished writer hope. I came across a review in a magazine about a debut novel: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley. What prompted me to order it? Was it the fact that the writer won the crime writer's association award? Nope. Or because it was written by a fellow cat-loving Canadian? No, again. It was because the author is seventy years old and only began writing after he retired. Not only has he embarked on a successful road as a novelist, but with a long series based on his crime-solving character: an eleven-year old aspiring chemist named Flavia de Luce.
http://www.flaviadeluce.com/
Posted by Layla Morgan Wilde at 5/24/2009 11:44 AM 
Categories: Writing, What I'm Reading This Week
Tags: Hope for unpublished writers
Categories: Writing, What I'm Reading This Week
Tags: Hope for unpublished writers
Layla, you give me hope.
With all the books you read I feel my wishlist of around five biographies is nothing!
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Taking a much needed break here from sorting our massive amounts of junk on our move.
The Rolling Stone cover looks a bit....uh dirty? Fun stuff.
Every older writer has his or her day. I truly believe that.
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As a child, I loved National Geographic...the images transported me to faraway places.
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Yes.
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