Sometimes we take words for granted. We use them to communicate, we misuse them, we use them out of context, we use them in groups. But take time to consider single words and you discover things you may never have noticed before.
Category Archives: Reading
Comfort Books
What are your comfort books, books you can read again and again, that foster and rekindle your desire to write?
Eating and Reading
Eating and reading are two activities that can bring us comfort and joy, which can go hand-in-hand and foster a new appreciation for the other.
How to Select a Book
A friend asked me recently what I was reading currently and how I chose my books. That got me thinking…how DO I chose books to read? With so many books on bookstore shelves, listed online, and catalogued in libraries, it can be difficult deciding which book to read…and there are always more books than I have time to read. I realised I had three ways of selecting books: a targeted approach, a general browsing approach, and a totally random approach.
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Novel critique
Notions of genre are increasingly slippery and difficult to pin down in contemporary novels. To what extent does Michael Pryor’s Hour of Need draw on features of more than one genre? What are the effects of such intermingling of genres and especially their ideological implications?
The reading writer: finding inspiration from your reading
Like a Bowerbird, I have become an avid collector. I imagine inside my mind there is an open space delicately lined with found language, words of beauty – it is quite a thing to behold! I tuck each snippet away, weaving one line, one word, with others.
It is the hope of every male Bowerbird that his blue-blessed bower will attract a twittering mate. My bower will attract great ideas from which stories will flow. As I gently tuck these phrases into my collection, other previously collected words stand out, or are plucked out, and used to prompt my writing. Of this I am certain: collecting small well-crafted gems from other writers inspires me in ways I would never have thought possible. Photo credit.
The reading writer – more first page study
Author Francine Prose, in her book Reading like a Writer, says she learnt to write by reading. “I read for pleasure, first, but also more analytically, conscious of style, of diction, of how sentences were formed and information was conveyed, how the writer was structuring a plot creating characters, employing detail and dialogue.”
Why read?
I have been harping on about the importance of reading. Today I look in more detail at why we should read, what possible benefits there are of reading, especially as adults.
The Reading Writer
What draws readers into a book? In order to keep reading and investigating writing and writing techniques, I have added another group of books to my first page analysis.