agletbaby: (Default)
[personal profile] agletbaby
am 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

* * *

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.

Date: 2024-10-17 04:48 pm (UTC)
mozaikmage: (Default)
From: [personal profile] mozaikmage
Have you tried the Storygraph Reads The World Challenge? I started it very late this year but it's definitely made me try reading books from a lot more countries than I usually read.
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.

Date: 2024-10-21 08:33 pm (UTC)
mozaikmage: (Default)
From: [personal profile] mozaikmage
I am 70% of the way through this year's storygraph reads the world and it's definitely exposed me to a lot of stuff I probably would've kept not reading otherwise lol I still have Lebanon, Jamaica and Sudan left (maybe I can cheat by finally reading my Jamaican friend's graphic novel...)
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

Date: 2024-10-17 09:47 pm (UTC)
shrimpchipsss: (Default)
From: [personal profile] shrimpchipsss
I think this is the first time I've heard any hint of what your PhD is about! Sounds interesting; if we're allowed to read it or even get the summary when you're done I'd love to peek at it

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!

Date: 2024-10-21 02:19 pm (UTC)
shrimpchipsss: (Default)
From: [personal profile] shrimpchipsss
Seriously! I like the idea of becoming well-read in a specific genre or writer or whatever category of your choosing, and the idea of devoting your reading time and thoughts in a more targeted way. Also so agreed about Robin Hobb haha so many trilogies (said with fear and awe)
I haven't read any Frank O'Hara I don't think! Do you have any recommendations?

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