Tag Archives: reading

St. George, or naming characters and the sometimes sensitive outcomes of this


Happy St. George’s Day! I do hope you are celebrating with something tasty, or wrestling dragons, or scaring snakes, or whatever suits your fancy.

St. George was one of the saints responsible for soldiers, as well as one of those fighting plague and leprosy. He, coincidentally, was born on the same day as Shakespeare (if you can believe any facts about that latter mystical person).

So he would have been an appropriate persona for a story about soldiers and tuberculosis, but that’s not why I chose George as the name for one of my characters in Spit & Polish.

Nor was it because my grandfather was named George, nor that there was a fellow in my writing group named George. I chose it simply because it was a name appropriate for the time period.

But then I got into hot water. You see, the George in my book is a bad guy. Not a super bad guy, just a man of his time, with the associated expectations of the late 1940’s. Men were meant to dominate women. All women lived for a man. Every woman wanted a husband, any husband, and any woman who said they wanted a career was just playing games. My main character, Ruth, is at first attracted to handsome George, but soon realizes he wants more from her than she can give.

George doesn’t take this well.

What this Saint’s Day made me think of is how easy it is for our readers to think we are writing about them or someone they know when we use their names or similar histories. The fellow in my writing group got quite hot under the collar as my George revealed his nastier side. Didn’t help that the group all commented about it every time he came up in my readings. Especially when he was bad. (The character, I mean…)

Other times, when I’ve written pieces, people often think I am writing about myself, or them, even when I don’t use their names. They get hurt, or angry, or even overly excited. But truly, it isn’t about them, or me! Most of the time, anyway.

from susanleighnoble’s excellent blog entry on the subject

Selecting the name for a character isn’t easy. I found it simpler to name my children, to be frank. (see what I did there?) I scour obituaries from the period I am writing about, read appropriate news articles for names, try them out over and over, and still somehow I end up offending someone. My bad female character, for example, was named Patricia, which I am sure someone thinks I directed at a person I know, but no. Again, it was just a name from that time. Though it was fun using it…

Because, truthfully, sometimes it’s a source of glee. The evil part of me enjoys teasing my readers with suppositions. Did I mean to imply that they are like the character? Or am I really assigning that behaviour to their cousin/uncle/father/town leader? It was particularly enjoyable when I wrote my first book, Recycled Virgin, playing with religious names and events. My readers spent the first pages trying to figure out who each character was meant to be, while I just smiled. It was fun searching for the various iterations of the name Mary over the centuries and cultures, though. I do love the research. But then I have to commit, and stick a name on a character, for good or ill.

And then I find out I have somehow named everyone with a name starting with B, so I have to go through and change most of them so readers (and the writer) don’t mess them up. We hope.

Sometimes I think it would be easier to write fantasy or science fiction, where I could make up names and avoid this situation…though I suspect there are treacherous paths even there. Naming characters is such a huge piece of creating them, and it is worth the time to sort them out properly. Maybe even clear them with people you love…;-)

I’m adding this lovely painting by Scot Gustafson because I love the way he has made the dragon the size to look St. George in the eye. In the sculpture we had in my house growing up, the poor dragon was so small George’s horse could have squashed it with his hoof. I prefer an even playing field. As did Ruth, in Spit & Polish.

Happy St. George’s Day! Why not take your local dragon out for a chummy drink, instead? Though it MAY annoy your horse.

The year of reading podcastingly, or an alternative to the Book Riot’s Read Harder challenge


My darling cousin referred me to an excellent podcast, Backlisted, described thus: “Giving New Life to Old Books. The literary podcast presented by John Mitchinson and Andy Miller. Brought to you by Unbound. Visit www.backlisted.fm“

My current to be read list…

Suffice to say my life has been forever changed. Who knew there was a book called “The Victorian Chaise longue“? It’s a horror story, by the way. And I want to read it after listening to the people on the podcast discussing it. They discuss books like “Diary of a Nobody” and another must read for me, “Silence”, by Shusaku Endo. A quote from there via Goodreads:

“Sin, he reflected, is not what it is usually thought to be; it is not to steal and tell lies. Sin is for one man to walk brutally over the life of another and to be quite oblivious of the wounds he has left behind.” 

Doesn’t that sound like a mind exercise? A thought expander?

In the podcast, the speakers start off with telling the audience what they are reading that week. They read the most enticing things. So so many books I haven’t yet read, a few already on my TBR list, lots of authors of whom I haven’t even heard. So astonishing.

So, for this upcoming year, I plan to surf through this podcast’s recommendations and try to read as many of them as I can. One of the presenters is the developer of the year of reading dangerously, so how could he lead me astray?

I highly recommend the podcast, thought the intro music is the most annoying stuff I’ve ever heard. That said, they incorporate music in the rest of their presentation that add a lot to the discussion. All of the presenters seem to be having such a jolly time, all really enjoying the books they read and talking about them. It’s terribly inspiring.

So off I go, today listening to “The Complete Molesworth” with a view to reading that pretty quickly. Another for the TBR list.

Anyone game to join me in reading from this list?

Ode to the blessed librarians


I really have to stop ordering books from my library. Every time I go to pick them up from where the lovely librarians have placed them, I am so grateful I want to leap across the still-in-place barriers and engulf them in a non-socially-distanced hug.

My sanity rests on their shoulders.

I honestly can’t afford to buy every book I want to read and it is bloody hard to buy a book without resorting to Amazon these days and they already have altogether too much of my money, so the library it is.

I was blessed twice during the pandemic with locations supplying excellent libraries and librarians. I had thought I could in no way match the super duper amazing Halifax, NS library, but after I moved to Kingston, ON, I was pleasantly surprised by the joyous wonder of the library here.

It’s like candy. I search their online catalog, ask to reserve, and presto! It arrives! Sometimes there is a bit of a wait but no matter as I likely have some leftover from my last visit.

I envision the librarians secretly discussing my unusual selections. I read in clumps. Piles of cat behaviour books when I was thinking of adopting a cat, parrot training books for adopting a budgie, Patricia Highsmith novels out of curiosity, books on embroidery and fibre art and eating according to the DASH diet and cooking chocolate. All of them in heaps, cycling between fiction and non.

Looking over my list of past borrows, I note a couple of things. One, I could be said to read widely. This appropriately matches my girth acquired during the lockdown. And two, I should be writing down the books I’ve already read as I have been known to reserve the same one twice. Again, I blame my boundless retiree days, time and events slipping by unremarked.

Except, except, somehow my retiree days end up crowded with activities, and my book pile grows anon. Time to thrash through my to be read pile before it threatens to squash me…

Book junkie


I’m moving In a few weeks, and I’ve been busy packing up my life. Altogether too many crafts, every type of drinking glass, too many kitchen implements, and fourteen! boxes of books. I live in an apartment. I’m moving to a smaller one. Those books will ensure the apartment never gets blown over…

So, as I packed the boxes, pitying my movers and worrying about space for the cat, I sorted some out to take to my local used book store, a fantastic kingdom called Doull’s. I’ve written about this place before, but just to remind you, gentle reader, it is a paradise of serendipitous finds filled with staff who can find anything, anywhere. I love this place more than any bookstore I’ve ever entered.

Part of the magic involves the apparently careless piles of books everywhere. I say apparently because I’m onto you, Mr. Doull. I know you are sprinkling bread crumbs to lure your bibliophiles further into the lair, where they will find untold must-have treasures. Tasty titles topple on wobbling towers, begging for rescue.

I find it hard to get down the first hallway without five urgently-needed books in hand unless I close my eyes and plunge dangerously forward. Did I mention there are New Yorker note cards in one corner? They stack very well on top of my seven books (it’s a bit down the hallway).

The wonderful Mr. Doull assessed my cargo, and gave me a value. It wouldn’t have mattered how much he offered, frankly, though he was very fair. In front of me following the transaction lies a glittering trail of books that soon will be mine…once I move, set up my bookshelves and shave the cat.

It’s better than the yellow brick road.

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The really bad thing about good used bookstores


Went to Doull’s bookstore today.
Now, bear in mind I am moving in a few months and this is one of my bookshelves…and I have seven. Seven! Many of which I am selling to friends so I can get matching ones for my living room. They are all full.

So I walk into the store, ostensibly to buy textbooks for my son for school. He wanders off with one of the staff, who knows where everything is and constantly astonishes me by this since his store holds 1000’s of books, in piles and heaps and shelves and more piles.

I’m trapped at the door. Already I’ve found three books I really want to read, now. I pry myself away, vowing to get more than three feet in today, and in search of mysteries as my brain can’t handle much more these days…

Twenty minutes later, my son and I pile up the finds. Nine for me, twelve for him.

I ask the genial owner, he of the white beard and twinkling blue eyes (always my downfall) if he would take some of my discards. He looks a bit shamefaced. “We’re only offering store credit,” he says. “Had to do some roof work.”

Somehow I don’t think that will be a problem. If I didn’t force myself out of there I’d need another seven bookshelves and I wouldn’t have anywhere to sit in my place!

It’s a treasure trove, and fun to share with my son, who is so well read and still wants more more more, just like his mum. We already have two huge totes full of books to move to his student digs in a few weeks.
Well, at least our places are well-insulated.

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Reading “Why I read”, by Wendy Lesser


9780374289201Don’t you just love it when you open a fresh new book and, especially if you are the very first one to get it from the library and it has that scent of new adventure all over it, and you turn to the first page and realize the author is a friend you just haven’t met yet?

I’m on page EIGHT, for heaven’s sake and already I see the rest of the day before me, curled up with Ms. Lesser and a cup of tea and wallowing in her excellent writing and wisdom.

She starts off addressing the readers of her book, something she says she’s not done before, as usually she writes what she writes and hopes people like it at the end (apparently they do, judging from her publication list). This time is different, she says:

But with this book – perhaps because it so often contemplates the very relationship between writer and reader, speaker and spoken to in the works of literature I have loved – I find myself wondering about who you are? Are you a young person…, or are you an older person…? Do you come from a background similar to mine, or are we completely unlike in all sorts of ways? I would hope that the answer might be “all of the above”, and perhaps it can be, for the written word, at least as embodied in the English language, allows “you” to be both singular and plural. It’s not only the writer who can say, with Walt Whitman, “I am large, I contain multitudes”. That truth applies to readers as well. (p.8)

I think I may just take my multitudes for a gentle stroll through this book for an hour or two before I start my writing day. I can already see tea with Ms. Lesser is going to be interesting, comfortable, and stimulating. How I love meeting a new literary friend!

The lie that tells the truth that tells the lie, or how hanging out with novelists is bound to give you a richer life


too-many-booksAnd isn’t it delightful!

Just reading the Paris Review interview with Julian Barnes, well worth a stop…

There’s something about reading writers talking about other writers that makes me wish I could go back and start my life all over again, waste less time watching the sitcoms on must-see Thursday on NBC back in the day, buy myself a good flashlight, and take to reading Russian novels in the dark under my blankets earlier in life. There’s such tremendous richness out there to read and I will never ever get done with it all. Why did I bother with university, with child rearing, when I could have immersed myself in a solitary world of such glory, me, the book, a light source…

My father would tell me I am too social a creature to hide myself away, and he’s right – I need regular drenching in humanity and nature and moving about life to keep my moods stable, and I wouldn’t have given up my kids for the world.

But there they are. The books. All of them, calling to me, begging me to peek under their covers. And the books I’ve already read, who call to me to visit them again, put my mouth once again under their thirst-quenching prose, gulp them back or sip them, masticate them, laugh and cry with them.

How can I leave Nancy Mitford on my shelf for another week? What of the latest Linwood Barclay thriller? Or the beauty of an author as yet undiscovered, who I just know has a book for me hanging out in Doull’s Bookstore down the way?

It doesn’t matter – short story or novel, these books cloak the truths of life in the cover of a make-believe story, so that as you read them, the truths slip out, unseen, barely felt, until your heart senses them firmly ensconced. The story may slip away, you might have the author’s name on the tip of your tongue at parties and never be able to satisfyingly retrieve it, but when the truths are there (see: Nuala O’Faolin, for example), the feeling stays with you.

And that’s the kind of book I want so much to write – one that does just that, curls up inside someone, providing comfort even after they forget my most common name (though I must say DA Brown will give me a great shelf spot, alphabetically speaking).

And I’ll get right on writing that book, just as soon as I finish reading this stack over here…

WIshing…


I’m having one of THOSE days. You know them – the kind where you pick up one thing and then, bored with it, put it back down. You pat your cat, but he stomps away. You think about cooking dinner but it seems too much trouble. You struggle with a new task but it doesn’t go well. You start a million things and toss them all, bored and frustrated with everything.

I blame the weather. It’s been mad here today – snow and freezing rain and howling winds. My window sprung a leak and I spent a fair bit of time trying to prevent a flood. But in general the day slipped by quickly, with little accomplished. I hate when that happens.

Must be part of my Catholic guilt burden, but I figure I SHOULD be doing important stuff with my day, accomplishing things, sorting things out, striding forward into the day.

At the end of such a day, I wish I had the time back, the whole day. The hours I’ve spent watching movies and farting around. I’d use them differently, I figure to myself. I’d ACCOMPLISH stuff.

But I know, on a stormy day like today, my brain is tossed, too. There’s something about a good storm that makes me want to curl up with a good book (which I did) or write letters (did Christmas cards) and a cup of hot cocoa (Bailey’s) and maybe speak with loved ones (which I managed). SO perhaps the day wasn’t wasted after all.

 

Performance-Enhancing Drugs for Writers and more from Grant Snider


Performance-Enhancing Drugs for Writers and more from Grant Snider.

 

love this!

Overwhelmed with reading others’ writing


In Desiderata, the author tells us to avoid comparing ourselves with others as it will leave us either vain or bitter – there will always be those greater and lesser than ourselves.

How right, how true. Especially when it comes to writing.

Sometimes I wander through a bookstore or see what books are being launched every week and am humbled, defeated by all those wonderful stories out there that others are telling much better than I ever could. My writing seems unnecessary except to me, unimportant, wasteful of time and resources. My friends, when they see me in despair, say “why are you doing this, anyway?”, and then there’s always Dorothy Parker and her advice to tell budding writers to give it up while they are still happy.
I become bitter by turns, think hateful thoughts about successful authors, grumble to myself.

And then I read some stories and can feel glee and schadenfreude creeping over me.
“Oh, this is perfectly horrid,” I think. ” I KNOW I write better than THIS!”
Suddenly I feel inspired, right to write, even feel I must write if only to help repair the damage done to literature by these sloppy attempts.

I sway between these points, always awash in despair or joy. Madness.

But can I share a pet peeve?
I am so so tired of people thinking that merely putting things down on paper is writing. That it requires no practice or training or editing or research or even (gasp) reading.
Sheesh.
Sure, there’s such thing as inspiration. I have that a lot. It’s easy to come up with little ditties.
Putting together a coherent story?
Well, that takes practice and damn hard work.

I am agog with admiration at those who succeed at this. And frustrated beyond belief by people who throw a few words down on a plate like a pile of spaghetti and think they are on the same level.

Not that I haven’t done some of that myself, mind you. I apologize to all of you out there who have had to read my messes. You have my sympathy.

But hey, for a moment, didn’t you think, even to yourself, how happy you were about your writing, in contrast to mine?