When your new apartment is mostly books and no furniture… you know you’ve got your priorities straight.
So, the Texas Book Festival is happening soon.
Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant will be there and mostly that is boring to every person I tell, but listen.
This couple wrote the first books I ever fell in love with. They wrote the first characters I ever fell in love with. These books, these characters, were the Animorphs. Yes, the books with the silly covers. They’ve influenced my love of narrative and hero complexes and ethics and I’m so excited to go see them talk. They will be part of a panel called With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility along with with Marie Lu, Andrea Cremer, and Bree Despain on Saturday, October 27, 2012.
Here’s a description of the panel:
To blatantly steal from Spiderman: with great power comes great responsibility. Following the tradition of Western thought leading back to Homer’s Iliad, several authors use young, gifted heroes and heroines to illustrate the idea that being gifted doesn’t necessarily mean having an easy time. They instead must learn to deal with the weight of the world on their shoulders, coming to terms with the responsibility thrust upon them.
Anyway, my heart is all aflutter and I wanted to share.
writing tip #107:
to enhance your knowledge, collect classic books and sleep in a nest built from them
This is also known as the “to be read” pile on my bedside table + the “currently reading” pile that is actually IN my bed.
Yes, I know it’s smutty. I sleep with books.
(Source: gr8writingtips)
I love this on so many levels (the illustrations for Joyce’s The Cat and the Devil! my gorgeous, rambling Woolf writing for kids!)
Writers are not limited to genres, nor should they be! Write your YA fantasy trilogy as well as your highbrow literary masterpiece, if you so choose. Explore new narratives, play with words, build worlds. Be silly or serious. Don’t allow yourself to be pigeon-holed as any one kind of writer. You don’t have to follow a type. I mean, let’s break the mold, right?
My tastes are splendidly diverse! I like celebrating that.
I love Virginia Woolf and Harry Potter. I love Ender’s Game and obscure Czech poets. I mean, why not? Every book I read, regardless of its intended audience, has something to offer ME—if only because I am eager to engage with the text in a way that is personally meaningful.
Anyway, I want to read everything on this list.
re: a book is endless
“If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.” — François Mauriac
About once a year, I reread Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. Every time I come back to it, I find a different book. I find myself a different person, reading differently, absorbing nuances I’d never before noticed, loving Ender for new reasons. I also often reread Northanger Abbey by Jane Austin. I’ve read Goblet of Fire more times than I can count (it’s my favorite of the series). Strangely, I love to read The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner, too. And, of course, I go back to certain poets/poems endlessly.What do you guys reread?
Oh, I love to come back to Yeats too. I lived in Wales for awhile and during my time there I took it upon myself to memorize my favorites Yeats.
I especially loved these bits:
The Indian to His Love
Here we will moor our lonely ship
And wander ever with woven hands,
Murmuring softly lip to lip,
Along the grass, along the sands,
Murmuring how far away are the unquiet lands
and
The Rose of the World
Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?
and all of
The White Birds
I would that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea!
We tire of the flame of the meteor, before it can fade and flee;
And the flame of the blue star of twilight, hung low on the rim of the sky,
Has awakened in our hearts, my beloved, a sadness that may not die.
A weariness comes from those dreamers, dew-dabbled, the lily and rose;
Ah, dream not of them, my beloved, the flame of the meteor that goes,
Or the flame of the blue star that lingers hung low in the fall of the dew:
For I would we were changed to white birds on the wandering foam: I and you!
I am haunted by numberless islands, and many a Danaan shore,
Where Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come near us no more;
Soon far from the rose and the lily, and fret of the flames would we be,
Were we only white birds, my beloved, buoyed out on the foam of the sea!
My idea of a good time is to sit on the floor in a library and read blurbs of interesting looking books
I do this in bookstores—peruse the aisles, pulling books at random, reading the opening lines. I am honestly a fool for a good opening line.
a book is endless
“If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.” — François Mauriac
About once a year, I reread Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. Every time I come back to it, I find a different book. I find myself a different person, reading differently, absorbing nuances I’d never before noticed, loving Ender for new reasons. I also often reread Northanger Abbey by Jane Austin. I’ve read Goblet of Fire more times than I can count (it’s my favorite of the series). Strangely, I love to read The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner, too. And, of course, I go back to certain poets/poems endlessly.
What do you guys reread?
“Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another.”
“Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.”
