What I’m reading
- in print / on screen
I finished reading On Immunity this morning. Well, I mostly finished–in full disclosure, I didn’t read through all the endnotes. However, I have a feeling this is another book that will inspire more than one post–this fall has been pretty good for those!–so I may get to them yet.
I’m hoping to finish my galley of Amanda Palmer’s The Art of Asking this week, and am seriously considering taking nothing but ebooks with me on our upcoming long weekend up on the Central Coast.
- on audio
I’m past the halfway point of The Magicians. I’m liking it more than I expected to and not minding at all that I’m finding it quite derivative (I wonder if that’s at least somewhat intentional). Friends who’ve read the entire series have given me the impression that it’s improved with each book–so far, I’m glad I decided to start it.
What I’m watching
It’s all about comic-book TV around here lately–Arrow, The Flash, Agents of SHIELD. I’m not sure I’m totally sold on Gotham just yet, but we’re hanging in with it. And even though it didn’t originate in comics, I’ll count Doctor Who here–it has the right sensibility, plus it has comic-book spinoffs.
What I’m writing
I’m finding that my “100 Days of Day One” journaling project is taking a little bite out of my desire to write for the blog. It’s like there are some days when I’ve only got so many words, if that makes sense. Along with that, the time factor is always an issue, and it may be even more of one during the next couple of weeks. I’ll be making my best effort to write something every day, but I won’t guarantee how much of it will show up here for the next little while.
BTW and FTR, I’ve only missed one day of journaling since I started the project a month ago this week. I have a variety of entries, including transcribed quotes and little notes recorded while I’m reading a book. I have never kept that kind of “reading journal” before and I’m not sure it’ll stick, but I’m open to seeing how it works out for me.
What caught my eye this week
”No one book, after all, can completely capture the spirit of something so unwieldy as a state. Few—if any—books can even completely capture the spirit of an individual. And yet there are those stories that so beautifully evoke a time and a place and a way of life that it becomes close to impossible to separate the literary perception of a place from its reality—one winds up informing the other.
”So while some of these stories do indeed paint in rather broad strokes, others speak to singular experiences that still manage to be expansive in their reach. This is the writing we want to celebrate. Several of these books number among the usual suspects of lists of this kind, but many remain anything but widely known. Almost all are fiction and most are novels; some were written for children, but just about every genre is represented. All are literary in voice and spirit; every last one will let you understand a time and place in a more profound way than you maybe thought possible.”
—“The Literary United States: A Map of the Best Book for Every State”’ on Brooklyn Magazine’s website. Which book did they choose to speak for your state? What do you think of their pick?
”7. Ending a sentence with a preposition: Writing at the Oxford Dictionaries blog, Catherine Soanes refers to the notion that one may not end a sentence with a preposition as “fetish” rather than a rule. And if you’ve ever tried to contort a sentence to avoid ending on a preposition, you might suspect that fetish is linguistic masochism. Like so many rules-that-aren’t-rules, this one gets blamed on Latin-loving English grammarians who thought they could squeeze an English-language peg into a Latin-language hole. Latin infinitives are contained in a single verb; therefore, we must not split infinitives. Latin prepositions must always precede prepositional phrases; therefore, English prepositions must always precede prepositional phrases. Even if you never learned it in school, Latin is still messing with your life.”
—One of “10 Grammar Mistakes People Love To Correct (That Aren’t Actually Wrong)”, via Lifehacker
