Category Archives: Book Reviews!

Sunday Book Review: Lolita

I finished reading Lolita last week. It took me a while because originally I started reading it for my writer’s book group and didn’t finish it on time. After our meeting, other obligations rolled in and it wasn’t until summer that I found time to pick it up again. Once I began again, I couldn’t put it down.

The fact that you spend the entire story in the warped point of view of a narcissistic, delusional pedophile holds a valuable lesson regarding writing. I’m not going to review Lolita here. That has been done and the status of the novel as a classic and the fact that the writing is fantastic isn’t arguable. What I want to talk about is the lesson the book offered me as a writer.

We are all of us thoroughly socialized. Our individual sense of right and wrong in any given social or moral dilemma has been years in the making. We judge without thinking about it. We act to the best of our ability in accordance with the rules we have internalized. This reality is the primary cause of boundaries between people of different socioeconomic statuses.

Our desire to be good people can be a crutch in our writing.

It is extremely hard to create characters outside of our own boundaries of morality and propriety convincingly. It requires objectivity and a commitment to character and story and a faith that the characters we write are not projections of ourselves. They are fiction. Writing fiction requires stepping outside the self and into other.

Is it just me that finds that task to be the greatest challenge of the work we do?

Humbert Humbert is the perfect villain. He thinks he is really quite good: good intentions, good looking, highly intelligent, and charming. It is entirely up to the reader to read between the lines and see Humbert as he truly is: predatory and gross.

This extreme example of flawless characterization serves a model for all character-building. The consistency and depth of detail Nabokov employs in rendering his villain really shouldn’t be missed.

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Some past posts to keep you making time:
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

Sunday (It is Sunday somewhere, right?) Book Review

I picked The 12 Secrets of Highly Creative Women up on a whim for 50% off what are already delightfully low book prices at Goodwill. This is not the sort of book I usually buy. Maybe 10% of books I read are non-fiction and those are usually not so screamingly self-help. I don’t mean to disparage the genre. I’ve read some life-changing books of this sort, but aside from a binge I went on between the ages of 16 and 18 and my final year of college when I read five books on anxiety hoping to put and end to increasingly crippling panic attacks, I don’t tend to like them very much and they almost always go on longer than they should.

Though this book did go on longer than I wanted it to, I remained engaged and inspired through the first seven secrets. McMeekin manages to write good advice based on her own experience and the experience of women she interviewed and successfully spin that advice in a cultural context of who we are as women and to what extent we can reclaim our individual spirit in a culture perfectly happy to let us submerge our own creative urges for any perceived collective good. Each chapter covers one of the twelve secrets and moves through describing and analyzing to an exercise for the reader to use to reflect and set goals. The margins throughout the book are filled with quotes on all of the twelve topics. I found myself circling the ones I liked best or drawing a little heart next to the quote.

I skimmed the last five secrets as McMeekin at this point got a bit too prescriptive for me in her calling for logs and charts and hair-splittling list of feelings. Ironically, I think that sort of thing just zaps my creative energy and takes my creative time.

But I LOVED the parts that just mused and the book is worth a read at least for that.

From the margin of page 97: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deep fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” –Marianne Williamson, Writer

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On Writing by Stephen King

The only part I didn’t like?

The very ending. And that’s my fault. It makes me uncomfortable when people get too mushy and the very ending was definitely a syrupy shot of courage to would be writers out there.

All in all?

I loved it!

I should tell you first that I listened to King reading on audio mostly while walking the dog or heading downtown to my weekly fiction critique group. So a small part of what I liked was the sound of his voice–full of confidence–telling me what was and more importantly that if I wanted to–and only if I wanted to–I could do it.

King covers the gamut: publishing, craft, writing process, and why write anyway because it’s freaking hard work?

His advice is specific, practical, and encouraging. Read it. You’ll be glad.

“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” –Stephen King; On Writing

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
―Stephen King; On Writing

“Bird by Bird” – Sunday Book Review

“Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life” by Anne Lamott

“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. [It] was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said. ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.'”

I think most of us writers get ourselves so worked up over the big picture, the completed work, the masterpiece, that we forget larger, greater things can only come together when all the little pieces fit. Everything we write comes together the in the same way: word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph.

That isn’t to say there is no creativity or mystery involved. Those words we choose, or that choose us, to build those sentences come in a surprising array of ways. It is helpful though to remind ourselves to take it all “Bird by Bird,” to relax and let go of some of that control, to tell our internal editor to shut his or her mouth, and to just focus on taking it step by step.

“Bird by Bird” is probably the most hilarious book of writing advice I have ever read, but it is also one of the most practical. Lamott is frank about the fact that sometimes writing really sucks. Sometimes you pour your heart and soul into a draft, and re-read it only to find out it was pure rubbish. Guess what? Not only is that okay, it happens to all of us.

I know some great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much…Very few writers know what they’re going to do until they’ve done it.

Reading this book is like listening to one side (sometimes more) of a conversation with a close friend (one of those friends who is funny and encouraging, but isn’t afraid to call your bluff). “Bird by Bird” was published in 1994, and since that time I have read it cover to cover at least three times. I thumb through it constantly. When I can’t find where I left it the last time I was reading it, I panic. Whether I need a prompt, a smile, a hug, or a kick in the butt, I can count on this book to give it to me.

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Reading Like A Writer

I am lucky enough to be a part of a book group for writers and occasionally we choose a book on craft to read alongside whatever novels we are reading. This is how I came to read Francine Prose’s Reading Like A Writer s

Prose’s essential premise is that creative writing is best taught through the close reading of literature. She writes, “It’s like watching someone dance and then secretly, in your own room, trying out a few steps” (9). She endeavors to show what we ought to be looking for and how we should respond to what we see. She achieves her goal by breaking the what down by chapter topic (words, sentences, paragraphs, narration, character, dialogue, details, gesture) and showing her own close readings of text within each chapter.ome months ago.

Prose urges us to “slow down and read every word” (15). She explains that, “Every page was once a blank page, just as every word that appears on it now was not always there, but instead reflects the final result of countless large and small deliberations” (16).

Prose advises us to read with a particular kind of care and to read classic literature–works that have or will endure. She asserts this advice from the start and proceeds to show just how one might go about reading this way.

This showing of her thinking about particular books makes her book a worthy read. The backbone of Reading Like A Writer is her commentary on style in work after work after work. You might be tempted to skip this part, particularly if you haven’t read the work that contains the scene or sentence she is commenting on. I urge you not to do that. I u

rge you to treat her book with the same care she would have you read Babel or Bowen. She provides model after model of how to look and think as a writer observing the dance of another in order to dance with her own style and rhythm in a way that might move an audience to tears or laughter or insight.

Not only doesProse posit that critical reading is the only way to learn to learn creative writing, but she also suggests that it is the only way to rise about the supposed rules of writing to find a style of our own: “If the culture sets up a series of rules that the writer is instructed to observe, reading will show you how these rules have been ignored in the past, and the happy outcome. So let me repeat, once more: literature not only breaks the rules, but makes us realize that there are none.” Her implication: A writer who does not read with a discerning eye could never write above average.

I’ll admit that in my case Prose was preaching to the choir. I have not read without a pen in my hand since I was in elementary school. Whether I am making comments in the margins or copying lines that I like into my journal, reading has for a long while been both a personal experience and an analysis of style. Even so, this book kept my interest and took me through an experience in reading that I learned from, even admired. She notices more than I do and so gave me something to strive for.

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The Review I Promised You: The Chronology of Water

The reading didn’t happen. I went to my first Gray Skies Reading Series with a marked-up copy of The Chronology of Water in hand only to find that there had been a change in plans. Yuknavich would be rescheduling the reading due to a death in the family. Bummer. Understandable, but still a bummer. There was to be an open mic instead. I enjoyed the open mic and left impressed with the reading series and excited to return to their next and next events. I finished the book and will write the review I promised, though I was hoping that something she said at the reading would help me communicate the wounds and pathways opened by this book in language.

How to begin?

THE LANGUAGE:

A language bandit, she calls herself, and in many senses she is lawless and resourceful as a bandit must be. With the confidence of Cummings to flout convention and the tenacity of Faulkner to push language to the point where it approximates lifetruth, she tells the story of a woman whose love of language gave her the voice she needed to write her life as she could imagine it, literally and figuratively. She pushes words together, pulls them apart and stretches them wide. She makes up words, alludes to words that came before her, and places one word in place of another in a way that makes shocks logic but makes meaning-sense. She follows conventions of grammar, then breaks them. She lengthens or shortens sentences and paragraphs with courage, grace, and mad rhythm. Straight to the heart. Of the matter. Of feeling. Of memory. My attention to her story never once waned.

THE SUBJECT:

She tells us from the beginning that her story is not an addiction memoir, though addiction courses through it and nearly drowns her before the happy ending. It’s also not a story about sexual abuse or sexuality, though the pages throb with details of her scars and her sex. This is a story about a woman who has the strength of a swimmer and who made a “wordhouse” (191) of her life.

WHAT IT MEANT TO ME:

If you endeavor to write, you should read this book. Yuknavitch closes, “It’s a big deal to make a sentence. The line between life and death” (292).
I will admit that reading this book at times discouraged me, filled me with envy. I have tried to write a book something like this, something about how a woman pulls herself up through language and practice. I finished that book, tried to send out into the world and failed, then put it in the proverbial drawer. I have two other books I’m trying to write. Reading this book helped me come to a truth I had been at the edge of: I’m done with that book yet. I haven’t given it my best. I gave up too soon. I may not have the strength of a swimmer (I didn’t even learn until I was twelve), but I have my own strength and a wordhouse of my own.
Even if it’s the only book I ever finish. Even if the wounds if opens break me and my own dexterity with language falls short of success.

The Chronology of Water succeeds on every possible level.
Read it. It quite possibly will change you.

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Sunday Book Review…Well, sort of…

The book I want to review is The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch, but I haven’t finished it yet. I know I want to write a review on this book because since I bought it a week ago it has never been far from sight. I carry it in my handbag when I go for walks (in case I find a nice bench to sit on, I guess). I put it on the counter when I clean the kitchen. I take it to school with me and read it whenever I ask my students to quietly read. I am likely to finish it tonight (50 pages to go!).

This Thursday, Yuknavitch is coming to Olympia as a featured reader in the Gray Skies Reading Series. I will be there and I promise you, dear blog readers (who are you out there? what are you writing now?) I’ll write this review then.

We post the Sunday Book Review in the spirit of Hart Crane: “One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones appear in the proper pattern at the right moment.” I was delighted when one of my students (senior; high school) explained to me the topic for her personal narrative on how reading challenging books has changed her. She’s going to talk about how she has a deeper appreciation of craft, how she is a better writer for reading.

Hallelujah!

Sometimes I think I should just give up writing for a year or ten and read good books. Jane Smiley did this and wrote about it in her wonderful book 13 Ways of Looking At The Novel.

I am in a book group for writers and we read one book a month together and then meet to talk about it. If I had to choose between my writing groups (the other being a critique group), I have have to pick the reading group.

Thankfully, I don’t have to choose. 🙂

I am one of those people who believes ALL the answers can be found in b0oks. I buy more books in a month than I could possibly read and blame the fact that I haven’t found all the answers mainly on the fact that I have yet to read all the books. Sometimes, feeling bad about my rate of purchase compared to my rate of consumption, I will buy a book that catches my eye for someone else rather than not buy it at all.

I don’t check books out or borrow them because I have to write in them. When I read without a pencil in my hand, I feel helpless and unprepared.

There are plenty of books I could write a review for instead of Yuknavitch’s memoir and I suppose that would have been the sensible thing to do here.

It’s Sunday. It’s your turn. You have a blog to write.

I can’t.

It has to be that one. So look for it here Thursday night. I promise to write it after the reading.

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Sunday Book Review

I think we can agree that reading is essential. If you’re like me (and I’ll bet you are), certain books you read and the impact they had propelled you to begin writing in the first place. Then pretty soon, you found yourself copying down your favorite sentences from your favorite books or reading the same books over and over again. You may not have even known that by doing this you were becoming a writer.

When I am struggling to write, one of my internal editor’s favorite disparaging comments is, “Who do you think you are? Give it up. You’ll have more time to read all the really good writing out there.” This particular comment comes from a well-worn path made by my thoughts and actions based in the fear that I am somehow less than everyone else: less talented, less intelligent, less worthy of love.

When my collaborators and I decided that the topic for Sunday on this blog should be reviews of books and articles, I happily stepped forward to write the first review. I read often and closely. I feel helpless if I have a book to read and no pencil in hand to converse with the text in the margins. I’ve read plenty I can review. However, when it came down to deciding where to start, my confidence waned. I thought I’d write about Writing Down The Bones by Natalie Goldberg since that was the first book on writing I ever read and still the most inspiring (perhaps nothing can ever compare to a book read at sixteen that bids you to follow your heart?). I considered articles and books, including the book that I’m reading this month with my writer’s book group (The Sense of An Ending
by Julian Barnes). I considered books I have read specifically to fuel my current fiction project, a collection of stories exploring one woman’s relationship to food.

Until I sat and began to type, I remained mired in indecision. Each word typed made clearer the review I needed to write and why.

I first tried practicing yoga when I was fifteen years old. In the near quarter century that has passed since that curious, self-conscious time, my practice has whispered and roared, but there hasn’t been a time when I gave up practicing at all. I keep my mats, blankets, and props always where they can be easily taken out. I keep enough open floor space that a mat can be thrown down without having to move the furniture around. Is it coincidence that this is the same path my writing has taken? No. In fact, when I consider that question the answer is so obvious it makes my eyes water.

Yoga allows me to cut through the crap that goes through my mind and keeps me from writing. In the past year, my yoga practice has been a whisper, 10 minutes here or there, a full practice once a week, sometimes once a month. This has something to do with how much has changed in my life of late. Three years ago, I was married and teaching three yoga classes a week. Since then I have divorced, fallen in love, moved from a small apartment I shared with my teenage son to a house shared with my boyfriend and his two children too. My life is fuller and more chaotic. I am still reeling from the change, finding my way.

Yoga Mind and Body by the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centre is proving a kind guide back into a roaring practice. The sequence has many of my favorite poses and takes two full-color pages per asana to show and describe. The sequence is right for beginners (which some days is where I am) and adaptable to advanced practice. Most importantly for where I am in my practice is that the book leads you asana-by-asana through a full and honest yoga practice that begins and ends with relaxation. Right now, I need to be led in this way, though at times I have practiced every day without ever opening a book on yoga at all.

Is it a coincidence that the very week after I found this book and began using it to make yoga happen, the writer’s block I had been struggling with for weeks broke and I finished one story and began another? Of course not.

For me, it’s yoga. There are many meditative practices that keep our egos in check so we can do our work and do it well. Cooking. Walking. Swimming. Breathing. Biking. Gardening. There are times when all I am doing is these things and I feel guilty because I am not writing. Were those three wordless weeks truly writer’s block? Or was I preparing myself for the writing that was bound to happen?

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Ian McEwan Article

Ian McEwan on books that have shaped his writing and also some about his writing process. I particularly liked what he had to say about welcoming silent periods where you may not be writing, but ideas are developing.

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To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

O, parentheses! I have n’er seen you so buttered across the page…
The use of parentheses (in addition to parenthetical commas) throughout Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse is a point of style that cannot be ignored. I went through the book and highlighted them all. Nearly every turn of a page bears the mark of my yellow highlighter and at least a couple of pages contain parenthetical statements that are nearly a page long (Again, this is in addition to Woolf’s use of complex sentences, laden with parenthetical clauses that are set off from the primary clause with commas).
Woolf’s parenthetical statements range from descriptions of what is physically happening in the scene while we are witnessing thought “(as she sat in the window” (27), to the clarifying “(James thought)” (4), to the fragmentation of the point of view character’s stream of consciousness “(so courteous his manner was)” (195). The narrative shifts perspective often and seeks to show the limitations of the individual perspective: how we see what we want to, what we need to, and what experience has trained us to. Use of parentheses is one aspect of how the complexity of syntax in To The Lighthouse mirrors the complexity of perspective and scene. I admire how this, coupled with the use of symbolism, figurative language, and parallel perspectives create a story about the complexity of the human brain and how that isolates us one from the other.
Despite this realistic view of human interactions, I was heartened to see a glimmer of hope in Lily’s awe after explaining the artistic choices in her painting to Mr. Bankes, a moment in which she sees a power in the world, “which she had not suspected, that one could walk away down that long gallery not alone any more but arm in arm with somebody—the strangest feeling in the world, and the most exhilarating” (50).
(The psychological depth and drama in this novel spoke to me in affirmation of some choices I’ve made recently in love, the decisions first to leave a relationship that was damaging and disparaging to him and me and then to embrace a love in which so many interactions leave me feeling as Lily did in that moment with Mr. Bankes. To be two individuals, solid in personal vision, willing to see what the other sees, to listen, and to love honestly! Reading this book affirmed for me that to love is my choice, and that loving is not about two becoming one, but about two becoming a stronger two through honest affection and attention each to each.)
O, but I digress! I’d like to close this admiration of Woolf’s complexity of syntax with an exercise, just to see how when I get to the point of sentence level editing, how my own work might change and also to try out some elements of style observed in Woolf.
Here are two paragraphs from my novel as they are:
Movement saved me. Forcing my body through space, even into new shapes. the movement of my legs over the ground. Breath and body flowing in asana. One foot. The other. Running. Walking. Forest inclines. Always one step ahead of despair.
I survived the men who maimed me. A bad tattoo. Tongue-lash. A belt. A fist. Seeming gentle, unwanted hands. Movement saved me from a body without space to breathe.
Here, I’ve played around with the syntax and punctuation:
Running, walking, forest inclines: movement saved me. Movement saved me from a body without space to breathe (a body I despised). Forcing my body through space, even into new shapes, saved me. One foot. The other. (Progress!) I was mostly able to stay ahead of (that monster) despair).
I moved passed the men who maimed me: a bad tattoo, a tongue-lash, a belt, a fist, an unwanted touch. Movement saved me from a body at odds with itself, hand that hid in pockets, between thighs, shy shoulders curled like the top of a question mark.
And now, I will set this aside and continue my trek through the second draft, coming back to it when I’m ready. To The Lighthouse is ambitious in subject and form and I do believe I will return to it again, and to Woolf, who has her sentences by the scruff of the neck, even when they are lengthy.

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Make Time.

Liz Shine: Author, Editor.

Category Archives: Book Reviews!

Sunday Book Review: Lolita

Sunday (It is Sunday somewhere, right?) Book Review

On Writing by Stephen King

“Bird by Bird” – Sunday Book Review

Reading Like A Writer

The Review I Promised You: The Chronology of Water

Sunday Book Review…Well, sort of…

Sunday Book Review

Ian McEwan Article

To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf