Books I'm reading right now:

To Kill a Mockingbird.
Storytelling by Kate Wilhelm.

To Kill a Mockingbird ... I love it. It brings me back to childhood, and I've fallen in love with Scout. I'll write more when I'm finished.

Storytelling...I read most of it in an hour or two yesterday afternoon. I read my first Kate Wilhelm book about 5 years ago when I knew that I was going to move to Eugene, Oregon, and I just wanted to find out a little more about the town. My tiny local library in Colorado had three or four books set in Eugene - all Kate Wilhelm mysteries. Wilhelm's definitely an accomplished writer, with hundreds of stories under her belt and an enviable number of novels. I've only read her mysteries, although I've heard wonderful things about her science fiction. I wish I could be more of a sci fi / fantasy fan, but I'm just not. I wish I could be more experimental with genre reading. It would help me in so many ways, but genre as a whole usually bores me, and when it's not a genre that I'm at least mildy interested in, well, it's just painful. Reading should never be painful, or what's the point, right? Speaking of points, let me get back to mine... I always feel there's something missing from Wilhelm's books. I can't explain it exactly. Her Barbara Holloway books are my favorite, and she does a fine job of capturing Eugene and I like the Barbara character and her dad and the two monsterous cats. But...there's something I can't put my finger on....

Storytelling is quite well-written. It's about the Clarion Writing Workshop, which Wilhelm taught at with her husband Damon Knight for 27 years. Now I'm inspired by the idea of attending a writing workshop. I hate to admit this, but I've secretly imagined writing classes and workshops and conferences to be full of terrible amateur hacks who will never get published, and so I've always wanted to, you know, sort of rise above that and go the tortured loner route. It's probably because of the one dreadful creative writing class I took in college - back when I thought history was a practical degree to acquire and didn't really think about becoming a writer. I read far too many classmates' non-stories in that class - incomplete, wandering character studies about themselves. I workshopped. I exercised. I liked the teacher - a novelist, mysteries I think, don't remember her name. She featured my story in the xeroxed class magazine and even named the little thing after my story. Flattering? Yes. I recently reread that story that I wrote so many years ago, and it was terrible. Flashbacks in a short story? Ick. Oh well. The class was not aimed at the idea of publishing, which Clarion is, and I'm ready for something like that. It sounds like fun. Not Clarion per se, since I have only a wistful interest in writing sci fi, but a good writer's workshop where they will tear me to shreds only to resurrect me into a bestselling novelist.

Book I want to read:

Gilead by Marilynn Robinson.

I'm a sucker for a good first paragraph, and this one had me at "I told you..."

I keep telling myself that the only person who is going to write my novel is me. Sadly my weekend consisted of more movie watching than novel writing. I added no more than a couple paragraphs to Chapter Three, but here are the one sentence reviews of the films:

Prime. Two stars. Predictable romantic comedy with boring characters and a far-fetched gimmicky plot that made me think less of Uma Thurman, Meryl Streep, the unknown forgettable actor who played the leading man, and whatever director, producer, and studio brought the sorry film to life.

Love, Ludlow. Four and a half stars. Offbeat romantic comedy about three charming misfits finding each other, featuring a moving performance by the actress who played the original Becky in Roseanne.

Transamerica. Five stars. What could be more fun than a road movie about a transexual who is masquerading as a born-again Christian to conceal her identity from her traveling partner, who happens to be the son she had when she was a man and just found out about, who is also a drug-addled hustler and a really nice kid?

A Winter Passing. Three and a half stars. Small-budget drama with a big-name cast who play troubled souls, who supposedly find a family in each other and are redeemed, but the interesting literary plot at times gets buried beneath a mountain of unnecessarily maudlin scenes.

One sentence reviews aren't quite as easy as I thought. I'll be a bit more pithy next time I waste my weekend away with movies.

The best writing books I've read:

Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway
On Writing by Stephen King
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
First five pages by Noah Lukeman

Yes, that's all . . . and I just realized that my library has 150 books under the Libray of Congress subject heading "authorship." A lot of writing books annoy me because the author seems to be lecturing the amateur writer. They say things like, "Try to give up writing, try to do anything else, and if you can't, you know you're a writer." Okay fine. But don't writers, and others working to follow a creative passion, get enough discouragement from the world at large? Do they need to get discouraging lectures from fellow writers, especially those who thrive off the existence of amateur writers to sell books. Perhaps I'm biased, because I think the world would be a more interesting place if we had fewer beurocrats and office workers - who in far too many cases spend their days figuring out new ways to waste time - and more writers, artists, and musicians. Wasn't the goal of technology to free humans up for more eddifying pursuits than the daily grind? I digress. I have actually learned a great deal from the many writing books I've read. A lot of people who dream about writing a novel don't realize that they don't just flow forth from the mind when one decides to tackle one. The craft requires particular skills - pacing, character development, dialogue, setting up a scene, staying organized, revising. Books can help you learn such things. The ones I listed are more entertaining to read than most.

Books I want to read.

Fiction:
Becoming Strangers by Louise Dean
Company by Max Barry
The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis
Intuition by Allegra Goodman
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

The book I just finished:

Jar City by Arnaldur Indridason, a Reykavic Thriller. Three stars. To be fair, police procedurals aren't my thing, and I wouldn't have been interested in it, except for its Icelandic setting. I felt less than completely engaged, but somehow kept up with the story line enough to finish it. The setting is well-done. It transported me back to Iceland, not as much because of the frigid September weather, but more because the daughter reminded me of the young people I met in Iceland. To be honest, I didn't connect much with any of the characters. It was a plot-driven book, written sparely, without much inner dialogue. It was a commentary of sorts on the repercussions of the geneological database in Iceland, and that part was interesting. The idea of an Icelandic murder mystery initially struck me as a bit of an oxymoron, as I recently read that their murder rate in 1998 was 0.00 in 100,000 and remains close to zero.

I need to keep track of some things, and I may as well do it before the world's eyes.