Books to Spark Your Creativity; 11-25-2019

 [I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order. The date in the title is the date it was written.Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. This may have been for a presentation in one of the community college classes I sgned up for. sch 4/22/2025]

1. Diary of Ann Frank (diary)
2. Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain (Memoir)
3. Chronicles, Volume 1, Bob Dylan (Memoir)
4. X-Ray, Ray Davies (Memoir)
5. The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age, Joyce Carol Oates (Memoir)
6. Twelve Years a Slave, Solomon Northup *  (Memoir)
7. The Story of My Life, Booker T. Washington * (Memoir)
8. Heart of a Woman, Maya Angelou (Memoir)
9. Tibetan Peach Pie, Tom Robbins (Memoir)
10. Couldn't Keep It To Myself, Wally Lamb and the Women of York Prison (Memoir)
11. The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell (Memoir)
12. Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain (Memoir)
13. Travels with Charlie, John Steinbeck (Memoir)
14. The Outsider, Richard Wright (autobiographical fiction)
15. Typee, Herman Melville (autobiographical fiction)
16. Bird on Bird, Anne Lamott (memoir plus how-to-write)
17. On Writing, Stephen King (autobiographical fiction)
18. If He Hollers, Let Him Go, Chester Himes (fiction by felons)
19. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky (fiction by felons)

I did not get a chance to present my list last Wednesday. We - my group - decided to go on rather than await an extension cord for the projector. That list contained only books in the prison library, or I knew were on the compound. I picked them with an emphasis for familiar types in prison. The idea is creativity vented stress and was for the Success and Wellness class, so I think you can see the connection between stress relief and the requirements of the class.

I will add these for you:

1. Milan Kundera, Art of the Novel
2. Albert Camus, The Rebel
3. Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
4. Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness
5. W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up
6. Jean Genet, The Declared Enemy
7. Susan Sontag, At the Same Time
8. Joyce Carol Oates, Faith of a Writer
9. Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
10. V.S. Naipaul, Writer's People
11. Edward Said, On Late Style
12. Mario Vargas Llosa, Letters to a Young Novelist
13. Nelson Algren, Nonconformity

Is 32 books too much?

sch

[* These books were ones I had not read and still have not. And in the process of adding hyperlinks to my list, I came across the following:

1. Review: Letters to A Young Novelist by Mario Vargas Llosa (January Magazine)
2. Lost and Found Books: Nelson Algren's Nonconformity: Writing on Writing (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998) (Logos Journal)
3. On Late Style By Edward W Said (The Independent)
4. How We Spend Our Days Is How We Spend Our Lives: Annie Dillard on Choosing Presence Over Productivity (The Marginalian)
5. Hatred and Self Loathing: Naipaul’s colonial shame (The Elephant)
6. (Zinta Reviews) The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art by Joyce Carol Oates
7. "Same Time: Essays and Speeches" by Susan Sontag (A Gathering of the Tribes)
8. The Summing Up - W. Somerset Maugham (My Maugham Collection)
9. Analysis of Milan Kundera’s Novels ( Literary Theory and Criticism)

sch 4/22/25]