What are your five favorite books, and why?
"The Language of the Night" by Ursula LeGuinn. Essays on creativity & writing that inspire me to be brave.
"Riddly Walker" by Russell Hoban. He creates a future where language has disintegrated & yet I was quickly 'all in'. It challenged me to expand my mind & rewarded me when I did. "Baby Todd and the Stradivarius Violin" by Teresa Kennedy. A multi-generational mystery wrapped in comedy and tragedy by turns. Full of rich, Southern flavor. The rhythm of the language alone is worth the read. "The Clearing" by Alan Arkin. Profound. Funny. Rich. "Roget's Thesaurus" Reading the groupings of words & watching the subtle changes in meaning as the move is a feast to my brain. I will open an edition at random and munch away, filling my mental file cabinets with all the colors I need to create my stories.
What do you read for pleasure?
Everything. Science Fiction & Fantasy. Mysteries. Historical markers. Biographies. For fun rides, I enjoy the series novels of Charlain Harris, Lee Child, Patricia Cromwell, Colin Cotterill, Julia Spencer-Fleming and I will read anything by Elizabeth Strout, a fine storyteller. Lavie Tidhar's "The Bookman" rocked my world. It's a much shorter list to say what I WON"T read: porn, romance, torture, war.
If I want to be able to dip in and out, I read art books filled with reproductions of the artist work, National Geographic and The New Yorker and the back of the cereal box.
Words give me enormous pleasure.
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