Another Reading List

 This time from England: Denise Mina: ‘Edgar Allan Poe is so good I feel sick with jealousy’

I agree wholly with this choice:

The book that changed my life
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. I was raised in a very Catholic environment and the Pontius Pilate section resonated with me deeply because I’d written a musical about him at school and been “spoken to” by the head nun. I read the book when I accidentally went on an Ibiza Uncovered-style holiday in Corfu in 1985. It made me want to be a writer.

Otherwise, just another a reminder of how little time there is in this world and how many books!

And a site with podcasts and posts of book reviews and reading lists and new releases: Book Riot. Here is  7 of the Best Books About Writing by Jaime Herndon. Who introduces her list this way:

Language evolves; it is not static. It has always changed, and this is nothing new. It follows, then, that writing and the way we think about it and teach it should also evolve and change. But change has been…very slow. MFA programs in particular seem to be guilty of this (don’t @ me, I’m not dissing MFA programs, I went to one — I’m just saying they could use some examining, like many other kinds of educational programs). Many MFA programs still eschew genre writing, have very rigid views on what they deem “literary,” still follow the traditional workshop model, or are still teaching the same syllabi from years ago, full of mostly dead white men.

Social media, memes, and self-publishing platforms can be great, but they can also be hotbeds of misinformation, falsehoods, and at worst, hateful or dangerous rhetoric. As someone with a public health background, if I chose to refute what I see even on some of my Facebook friends’ posts, I’d be on social media all day arguing with people who think The Lancet is some medieval jousting tool. But in all seriousness, even when we read reputable outlets, critical thinking is important: who is writing this, where are they coming from with this, who funded this study, what is the aim here? And we should be reading widely from a variety of sources. We should also do this even when we’re reading things with which we agree.

On her list two stand out for me, by maybe a hair or two and my mind might change by tomrrow:

READING LIKE A WRITER: A GUIDE FOR PEOPLE WHO LOVE BOOKS AND FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO WRITE THEM BY FRANCINE PROSE

When I started to consider applying to MFA programs, this was one of the first books I read. Prose brings up the question of: how did people learn to write before writing workshops and degrees? The answer is obvious: by reading widely; by reading books from writers who came before and those who are writing now. In any MFA program, you’ll find much of the same advice: if you want to write, you need to read — a lot. Prose goes through the techniques and tools of noted writers like Austen, Woolf, and Chekhov, showing the reader what to notice and glean from the text. A smart, humorous book, this would be the first one I’d recommend to anyone interested in writing or critical reading.

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WRITING DOWN THE BONES: FREEING THE WRITER WITHIN BY NATALIE GOLDBERG

I first read this book long before I ever thought about attending a writing program. One of the best things about the book is that it’s informal and not stuffily academic. She values creativity and taking risks, while also addressing craft, word choice, self-doubt, and even where to write! Goldberg is also a Zen practitioner, and this is evident in her writing style and the spiritual way she approaches writing.