assorted thoughts
Oct. 10th, 2024 10:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
agletbabyam coming to the end of a whole thing, which means i have to edit some older work, and had a very heartening realisation - which maybe shouldn't have been a realisation at all - that my writing has improved in the process of doing a phd. i guess it's all part of the same piece of work, and i haven't finished it to learn from it, so i hadn't quite computed that two years + hundreds of papers read + more than a hundred thousand words written, would make a difference. i am noting this down as a reminder to myself that writing is a way to get better at writing. don't stop once done!
had a flash of epithany that: one thing that fic writing is basically useless for, when it comes to 'Learning Writing' is hard editing - in the sense that the whole thing is darlings, and there's no need to kill any of them. on the other hand, academic writing? darlings abandoned everywhere. i think i only just properly understood the use of that phrase for the first time
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someone i follow on tumblr posted, ages ago, that they'd be interested in nominating about 6 writers, and just read them for a year. i absolutely could never do this, but i have recently felt more serious about being completionist with writers i admire, and i find it an interesting thought experiment. my immediate thoughts are something like,
1. dickens (was on a kick last month, but i do think too much dickens in one year would melt my brain)
2. henry james (i find him so interesting and his big novels so hard to commit to)
3. there's a couple of writers i've recently read one or two books, which i've really enjoyed. it feels like a deep end plunge to nominate them, but at the same time, commiting to something less known would in itself be interesting: annie proulx, iris murdoch, george eliot, graham greene
4. (i would need someone genre: maybe le guin, but maybe someone more pulpy like larry niven or samuel delaney.)
however, this is obviously a very limited list so far: very white, very anglophone. this in part reflects my academic research, which is in many ways about the manifestation of local 'classic literature', which is overwhelmingly both of those things. but i've also been pretty awful at reading stuff in translation in my own time the last couple of years, for reasons i'm not totally clear on myself. so, recommendations? your list? (i cannot promise to get to recommendations soon rn, but i will add it to a longer list which i am slowly making shorter.)
it would be interesting to come back to this post in a year and see how many of these guys i've managed to read, and who i would nominate anew.
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had a flash of epithany that: one thing that fic writing is basically useless for, when it comes to 'Learning Writing' is hard editing - in the sense that the whole thing is darlings, and there's no need to kill any of them. on the other hand, academic writing? darlings abandoned everywhere. i think i only just properly understood the use of that phrase for the first time
* * *
someone i follow on tumblr posted, ages ago, that they'd be interested in nominating about 6 writers, and just read them for a year. i absolutely could never do this, but i have recently felt more serious about being completionist with writers i admire, and i find it an interesting thought experiment. my immediate thoughts are something like,
1. dickens (was on a kick last month, but i do think too much dickens in one year would melt my brain)
2. henry james (i find him so interesting and his big novels so hard to commit to)
3. there's a couple of writers i've recently read one or two books, which i've really enjoyed. it feels like a deep end plunge to nominate them, but at the same time, commiting to something less known would in itself be interesting: annie proulx, iris murdoch, george eliot, graham greene
4. (i would need someone genre: maybe le guin, but maybe someone more pulpy like larry niven or samuel delaney.)
however, this is obviously a very limited list so far: very white, very anglophone. this in part reflects my academic research, which is in many ways about the manifestation of local 'classic literature', which is overwhelmingly both of those things. but i've also been pretty awful at reading stuff in translation in my own time the last couple of years, for reasons i'm not totally clear on myself. so, recommendations? your list? (i cannot promise to get to recommendations soon rn, but i will add it to a longer list which i am slowly making shorter.)
it would be interesting to come back to this post in a year and see how many of these guys i've managed to read, and who i would nominate anew.
no subject
Date: 2024-10-17 04:48 pm (UTC)Isabel Allende might be a good writer in translation to just read for a year, because she has a lot of books and the one book I've read by her was a surprisingly smooth read.
There's Han Kang who just won the Nobel? But that might make her books harder to get right now lol.
Also I heard the Run With The Wind novel is out in English now if you wanna start with something more anime adjacent lol.
I could read more... Virginia Woolf, I liked her a lot in high school but only read a few books and a lot of it really went over my head. I have this half-baked plan to devote myself to interwar lesbian literature as soon as I finish struggling through my current Reads The World Challenge book (Iphigenia, the diary of a young girl who wrote because she was bored, for Venezuela) and also the rest of the books I got for my birthday last month, but I haven't actually started putting together the list for it yet.
For genre fiction I've heard good things about Andre Norton if you want to read an earlier female SFF author, and I enjoyed the one single Delany book I read lol.
If I wanted to take it easy I'd just spend a year rereading Discworld or trying to read more non-Discworld Pratchetts. I love Discworld. I am basic.
no subject
Date: 2024-10-20 03:48 pm (UTC)I've not tried Storygraph Reads The World, but I think I might sign on to the 2025 iteration - it seems like a really good way to read randomly, in the most positive way possible? Allende is on my women in translation to-read list (House of Spirits, specifically), but I don't actually know much about her or her work, so I'm glad to hear you had a smooth reading experience!
I'd also definitely be curious about what your interwar lesbian literature list ends up looking like. Off the top of my head, I can only think of Woolf (who's not my favourite, put me unfairly off modernism as a whole for years), and Radclyffe Hall, and those picks do feel basic. I thought The Well of Loneliness was really interesting, but a bit more in context than content.
Extremely grateful for the Andre Norton recommendation, that's not a name I can remember hearing for, but early female SFF is so up my alley.
no subject
Date: 2024-10-21 08:33 pm (UTC)My interwar lesbian reading list includes Natalie Clifford Barney although I'm more interested in a biography of her than her novel TBH her Wikipedia page alone is WILD, Djuna Barnes's Ladies Almanack, Janet Foster though I don't think she wrote about lesbians necessarily she just was a lesbian writer then, Claudine at School by Colette, all of Marina Tsvetaeva's gay poems and letters but only her gay poems and letters, whatever Sophie Parnok did idk much about her, and I don't know how easily I'll get ahold of any of these titles because I think a lot of them are out of print in English lol but I've found Tsvetaeva's letter to Barney and I'm going to read it when I'm in the right headspace for it
If you like early female sff writers! James Tiptree is the only other name I know lol
no subject
Date: 2024-10-27 11:17 am (UTC)And oh i've made so many notes of all those names tysm. I think I came across Barney doing a dive into wikipedia after The Well of Loneliness, but I do think I then immediately ran into the problem of works being so difficult to access. But I guess the good thing about them being out of print is that they're possibly then easier to find online through other means...
I've read one James Tiptree Jr collection, earlier this year, and I think constantly about it! Some of her use of language is so good and strange, in a way that fits the genre, but never happens in it! I picked the book up on a whime, but it really blew my mind lol
no subject
Date: 2024-10-17 09:47 pm (UTC)As for writers I'd want to read all of... I have read a good number of Octavia Butler's novels but I feel like I won't ever be a Total completionist with her work because the premise of Parable of the Sower feels a bit too close to home.
More likely I will finish Robin Hobb's books first, which at the pace I've been going I read one of the trilogies per year and have three to go haha
I don't read much poetry but have in the past few years read at least a few books each of Anne Carson and Richard Siken and I would like to continue on with those!
Oh I also feel like I've in recent years been trying to get to more Shakespeare as well
This all seems both slightly random and representative of my taste so!
no subject
Date: 2024-10-20 03:54 pm (UTC)Funnily, Parable of the Sower is the only Butler I have read, and unfortunately yeah, I think one of the most effective/affecting things about it is how plausible it feels, so yeah, fair to avoid.
One trilogy a year seems like such a reasonable pace for fantasy, I think Robin Hobb has just written way too many trilogies lol (said with a heart full of admiration)
I forgot about poetry! I want to read more Frank O'Hara, but I like the bits of Siken and Carson I've read. I like Shakespeare too, I want to be completionist with him eventually but so much of reading him & any playwright is adaptions, and the adaptions that are on always feel like the plays I've already read.
I think part of the fun of the challenge is being random and reading widely within constraints, a joy and pleasure to have a taste which allows for that!
no subject
Date: 2024-10-21 02:19 pm (UTC)I haven't read any Frank O'Hara I don't think! Do you have any recommendations?
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Date: 2024-10-27 11:04 am (UTC)I've mostly read O'Hara in anthology, which is why I want to read more, but I think Lunch Poems is where I'd start in terms of collections - it's basically poems distilling his experience walking around NYC on his lunch break, observing and thinking. I also like Having A Coke With You a lot, which is his most famous poem, but it's so romantic