14 February 2012

Reading Monday

I'm late...very late. You see a few weeks ago my computer crashed and I lost access to the schedule and then forgot. Now, all is good, thanks Tartlette, but I'm late...

Here is what I am reading and why I am reading it!

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray. I read it years ago, the man and I watched a very good movie and I was inspired to read it again. It is ideal to read while I'm in heavy revisions because my book is nothing like a book written circa 1845! It is a sweeping hilarious non-family saga - Thackeray is a genius and although he and Dickens could've been crib-mates - a totally different approach. The heroine or anit-heroine, Becky Sharpe, is so obviously the model for Scarlett O'Hara - an ambitious little vixen - with her foil, Amelia Sedley ( Melanie) and her man, Rawden Crawley (Rhett). Well, I could go on. It is fun to read and Thackeray's skewering of the greedy upper-class is brilliant.

Feed My Dear Dogs by Emma Richler (daughter of the amazing Mordechai) - this is also a re-read. Oh, what a wondrous book this is - it follows the foibles of a girl in a wild bohemian family as it moves from London to Montreal. It is so obviously a love letter to her own wonderous family, and is written in the most amazing prose - I love it. Get it. Read it.

A Zillion Books on Writing and Revising - Lamott, King, Bell, Koch, and so on. I pick one up every time I take a break from my wrting retreat. They keep me going in what seems at times to be a fool's errand. Well, aren't they all, ultimately.

Sorry I'm late - here goes...

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