Irene was eighty years old, but she didn’t feel eighty. Not just because she was, sprained ankle notwithstanding, a spritely, trim woman, but because it was impossible to feel eighty. Nobody felt eighty. When Irene considered it, she thought that she probably felt somewhere around thirty-five. Forty, maybe. That was a good age to feel, […]
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The Book That Unleashed American Grief “John Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud defied a nation’s reluctance to describe personal loss.” Deborah Cohen discusses Death Be Not Proud, published in 1949, John Gunther’s account of the his son’s death at age 17 from a brain tumor. The publisher, Harper & Brothers, feared at the time that
Making Story Structure Your Own I’ve recently been working on reviews of two Big Books: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (530 pages) To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara (704 pages) Big Books contain so much that finding a way into discussing them is often a challenge. For both of these novels I’ve
Introduction I came upon Adam O’Fallon Price’s article The Subjective Mood, in which he laments the lack of moral depth in current fiction, back in February. I included it in a literary-links round-up, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it because I find a lot of moral depth in most of the fiction I read.
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‘Your throat hurts. Your brain hurts’: the secret life of the audiobook star If you think narrating audiobooks is a dream job because all you have to do is sit there and read, you’d be wrong. Way wrong. Read all about the complex matters of matching specific books with appropriate readers, of preparing, and of
I came across so many interesting articles this week that it’s hard to limit my list. Here are some of my favorites. On the Centennial of Iris Murdoch’s Birth, Remembering a 20th-Century Giant The intensity of Murdoch’s gaze, boring into you from the dust jackets of her many novels, seemed a promise of the books’
Five Writing Tips from Tana French I usually stay away from tips aimed specifically at writers, but I found some of French’s tips here useful for readers as well as writers, especially what she has to say about characters: There’s no such thing as ‘men’ or ‘women.’ There’s only the individual character you’re writing… .
Over on my personal blog I write on topics of interest to people approaching or already into their retirement years. When writing on the United Nations’ International Day of Older Persons, which occurs each year on October 1, I included a list of five novels that feature older adult characters. Being of retirement age myself,
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Grafton, Sue. “T” Is for Trespass (2007)New York: Putnam, 400 pages ISBN: 0399154485Random House Audio, narrated by Judy Kaye Recommended Starting a new Sue Grafton novel always means getting reacclimatized to Kinsey’s world. For Kinsey (lucky woman), time is not passing nearly as quickly as it is for her readers. At the beginning of
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