Howards End is on the Landing: A Year of Reading From Home by Susan Hill

By Kate Phillips

          Readers always have books they haven’t read nearby whether in stacks by the bed or on bookshelves for someday. If you have new ones entering your life via the library, friends, or bookstores, some day can quickly become some year.

          English novelist Susan Hill certainly found this to be true.

“It began like this. I went to the shelves on the landing to look for a book I knew was there. It was not. But plenty of others were and among them I noticed at least a dozen I realized I had never read.

I pursued the elusive book through several rooms and did not find it…But each time I did find at least a dozen, perhaps two dozen, perhaps two hundred, that I had never read.” (page 1)

          She also found many books she would enjoy rereading and so began a journey through her own library which she turned into a book entitled Howards End is on the Landing: A Year of Reading From Home.

          As a lifelong reader in her sixties, an author, a reviewer, and a judge for literary awards, Hill has a great many books so it’s easy to imagine that one or more could be misplaced. What fun to come across so many unread books and old favorites then decide to read or reread as many as she could in one year and write about them. Another of the joys of this book is the commentary from Hill as she recalls meeting authors at parties or while interviewing them for the BBC.

          Hill is partial to classics and literary novels, but has a fondness for murder mysteries and a few children’s books, too. Among them, she recommends My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell (page 55), The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald (page 74), The Bell by Iris Murdoch (page 115), and The House in Paris by Elizabeth Bowen (page 141).

          She also enjoys diaries written by The Reverend Francis Kilvert (page 83), Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary (page 92 & 128), and The Journal of Sir Walter Scott (page 93).

          For a challenge, Susan Hill ends with a list of forty books that would last her the rest of her years on earth (pp. 235-236). Taking up the challenge, I made my list of one hundred books as I am younger with more years to read—hopefully. It’s a painful challenge as I sit surrounded by thousands of books that I love.

We only had one book in common: Shakespeare. I went with Shakespeare’s complete works as they are published in one volume. Hill chose to pick “Macbeth” since his work was not published together until after his death. However, I’m currently reading The Blue Flower since she recommended it so highly—perhaps we will have two books in common.

Have fun reading Howards End is on the Landing, discovering authors new to you, and making your own list of books to last for the rest of your life.

On Story: Screenwriters and Their Craft edited by Barbara Morgan and Maya Perez

By Kate Phillips 

          I’m always on the lookout for TV shows about writers and authors. PBS has a show entitled On Story based on the Austin Film Festival. Various hosts interview mostly screenwriters who either wrote original works or adopted them from books. Even if you are not writing a screenplay, hearing writers discuss their work is inspiring.

          On Story: Screenwriters and Their Craft, edited by Barbara Morgan and Maya Perez, is a book based on these interviews. A wide array of writers, many of them award winning or Academy nominated, give good advice.

Here are a few excerpts:

…To me, the life of writing is the life of nurturing your own enthusiasm, your own passion for writing. You’ve got to nurture it…

        --Randall Wallace (page 24)

        Credits include: Secretariat, Braveheart

…Screenwriting is much more like writing poetry—the real juice is not in the lines but the space between the lines. If the lines are done right, the audience makes the jumps. If you tell them everything, they’re just observers. If you do it right, they’re participants. That’s what you want. That’s what all great art does…

     --Bill Wittliff (page 28)

    Credits include: Legends of the Fall, Lonesome Dove

         

…What I learned was about 70% of my first drafts were awful, but there was 30% that was better stuff than I ever would’ve gotten on paper if I was limiting myself because of fear of what people might think. I’d urge young writers, first write for the content of your heart. Don’t worry about what other people might think. Just cut loose…Find a way to get it on paper…

                           --Bill Wittliff (page 32)

                           More credits: The Perfect Storm, The Black Stallion

Conflict was the major thing. I used to have this huge sign over my typewriter that said, “Conflict, Stupid.” Nine times out of ten if you’ve got a scene that’s not working for some reason, the characters are not in conflict. They’re just giving out information. They’re wandering around and not going anywhere.

    --Nicholas Kazan (page 67)

    Credits include: Bicentennial Man, Reversal of Fortune

I can’t remember who said—it may have been Hitchcock—that books are written from the beginning to the end, and screenplays should be written from end to the beginning. The ending of a movie is crucial…I think the ending is so important that if you don’t know the ending when you start, you shouldn’t do it.

            --Steven Zaillian (page 163)

            Credits include: Awakenings, Schindler’s List

Helpful advice for almost any writing project you are working on.

My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop edited by Ronald Rice

By Kate Phillips

          For readers and writers planning summer vacations, check out My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop, edited by Ronald Rice and Booksellers Across America, published in 2012). There are eighty-one independent bookstores in thirty-six states to choose from as an added bonus to or as the main purpose of any trip.

          After reading the fantastic tributes by writers like Isabel Allende, Wendell Berry, Meg Waite Clayton, Fannie Flagg, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Pete Hamill, Ann Hood, Mameve Medwed, Ann Patchett, Chuck Palahniuk, Michael Tisserand, Luis Alberto Urrea, Abraham Verghese, Terry Tempest Williams, and Simon Winchester, not surprisingly, I want to visit all of the bookstores. Luckily, two are within an hour of my home. On the next trip to see my dad, we will visit the one within an hour of his home.

Then I will branch out with friends and other family members in tow. I think we could visit maybe ten or twelve more in daylong trips from their homes—only one or two a day so we have plenty of time to browse, read, and shop once we arrive. That is the point after all.

All of these tributes mention the importance of the book-loving owners and knowledgeable staff. Beautifully summed up by Ann Haywood Leal in her tribute starting on page 201: “Finding a book a home in someone’s heart is a talent. They may not know it, but…the staff of Bank Square Books [Mystic, Connecticut] are in the business of matchmaking.”

Some excerpts from the tributes:

The floors have to creak, of course. There should be a bit of a chill inside—not dank, or damp, but enough to bring on thoughts of curling up somewhere with one of the bound companions. If the table displays, favorite picks, and the like have a quirky randomness to them, in defiance of the latest imperatives from publishers, all the better…

All of this you take for granted at The Elliot Bay Book Company in Seattle.

                                                Timothy Egan (page 88)

At Watchung Booksellers [in Montclair, New Jersey] there’s a daily rhythm to the life of books. Kids are running around—a bookstore like this is where kids are first brought into the wider world of reading—and there are the sounds of conversations about books, and the humming quiet of the browsers, and the crisp tearing and folding of gift-wrap paper at the counter, and it smells like books, with that fresh, subtly seductive smell. Independent bookstores such as Margot’s [owner] collaborate with writing in such an intimate way that makes cyber bookselling seem merely retail.

                                      Ian Frazier (page 119)

…The event is an author series called Book Your Lunch, and it’s the brainchild of bookseller Jill Hendrix, owner of Fiction Addiction an independent bricks-and-mortar bookstore in my hometown of Greenville, South Carolina. Book Your Lunch is a fantastic way to bring readers and a wide range of authors together—from mystery writers, to award-winning novelists, to non-fiction and cookbook authors. Fiction Addiction sells tickets in advance, and the featured author reads from her work, or gives a short talk, followed by a Q&A session, a delicious lunch, and then an on-site book signing.

                                                          Mindy Friddle (page 121)

Some of the writers of the eighty-two tributes may not be familiar to readers. All of the essays end with writer bios, listings of their books/works, and/or website addresses. (While 84 writers wrote tributes, two were collaborations and The Strand in New York City received two tributes so in total eighty-one bookstores are celebrated.)

As if dream bookstores and writers new and familiar to readers weren’t enough to delight readers of this book, within the essays many of the writers mention their favorite authors.

What more could a reader ask for? Well, I do wish the bookstores’ addresses, phone numbers, and websites were listed at the end of the essays or in the Bookstores by Location index on pages 375-378. Not hard to find online, but still it would have been better in the book.

Whether you are traveling or not this summer, My Bookstore is plain fun--fabulous destinations and numerous book suggestions for readers. It’s almost as good as visiting one of these treasured bookstores!

                     

The Book Lover's Anthology: A Compendium of Writing about Books, Readers & Libraries

By Kate Phillips 

          My book recommendation this week is The Book Lover’s Anthology: A Compendium of Writing about Books, Readers & Libraries published by Bodleian Library. It’s not a book you read straight through, but one you pick up when you only have a few minutes to read or just feel like browsing.

There are inspiring quotes, passages, and poems about: The Friendship of Books; Old and New Books; Good Books and Bad; The Joys of Reading; A Sentimental Education; Bibliophilia; Literary Worlds; and The Library.

          Among my favorite passages are:

           Rich Fare

…There are other evils, great and small, in this world…Of these, Providence has allotted me a full share; but still, paradoxical as it may sound, my burden has been greatly lightened by a load of books.

Thomas Hood, letter to the Manchester Athenaeum (page 29)

          Books are men of higher stature,

          And the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.

                   Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lady Geraldine’s Courtship

                  (page 35)

                  

Love and the Library

          I do not know that I am happiest when alone; but this I am

          sure of, that I am never long even in the society of her I love

          without a yearning for the company of my lamp and my

          utterly confused and tumbled-over  library.      

                    George Gordon, Lord Byron (page 182)

          I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books

          than a king who did not love reading.

                   Thomas Macaulay (page 210)

          Enjoy discovering your favorite passages!

Rain: A Natural and Cultural History by Cynthia Barnett

From Kate’s Writing Crate…

          As a reader, I always love finding books that appeal to me. As a writer, I am twice as pleased when the authors also provide masterclasses within their books.

          Masterclasses take place when performance artists and musicians work one-on-one with students. Writers don’t generally have this option, but I have found some books to be masterclasses for characters, backstories, plots, settings, voice and/or creativity.

          The April masterclass post seemed perfect for a review of Rain: A Natural and Cultural History by Cynthia Barnett. This book caught my eye for two reasons: I love rain and the cover is beautifully clever. On a white background, tiny silver raindrops fall from top to bottom except for the two inch wide by six inch long space in the center under a black umbrella where the title and author’s name appear.

          I expected to learn many facts and figures about rain and I did in this fun read. Fun? Yes, especially for writers as you will see.

          Here are some of the facts:

Amid the worst drought in California history, the enormous concrete storm gutters of Los Angeles still shunt an estimated 520,000 acre-feet of rainfall to the Pacific Ocean each year—enough to supply water to half a million families. (page 11)

Rain is sex for the exquisite orchid Acampe rigida…When raindrops splash inside, they flip off the tiny cap that protects the pollen…[then] they bounce the pollen precisely into the cavity where it must land to consummate fertilization. (page 16)

In medieval Europe, the 1300s marked the beginning of a five-century climate shift known as the Little Ice Age…The second decade of the 1300s was the rainiest in a thousand years. (page 39)

In his 1615 memoir of the native people of Mexico, the historian Fray Juan de Torquemada described an ingenious local skill, one his men wished they could take home to Spain. The natives knew how to make rainproof garments. (page 96)

The history of the waterproof mackintosh [coat] in Europe (patented in 1822) begins on page 98.

Along the Mississippi, in the third-largest river basin in the world, the same federal government that doled out 160-acre homestead plots to small farmers in a land too dry for corn built levees promised to withstand floodwaters in a land too wet for cities or cotton. (page 144)

In the early twentieth century, Eugene Willis Gudger, an ichthyologist with the American Museum of Natural History and editor of the museum’s Bibliography of Fishes, reported he had authenticated seventy-one accounts of fish rain, spanning A.D. 300 through the 1920s. (page 249)

Villages Cherrapunji and Mawsynram in India vie for the world’s rainiest place receiving close to 470 inches a year…the rainiest metro area in the US is Mobile, Alabama [which] pulls in 65 inches annually. (page 278)

          What I did not expect was for so many writers and authors to be referenced and quoted including in order of appearance: Ray Bradbury, Keats, Isaac Asimov, John Burroughs, William Carlos Williams, Victor Hugo, Charles Darwin, Agatha Christie, Shakespeare, Aristotle, Evangelista Torricelli, Douglas Adams, Jonathan Swift, William Faulkner, Kurt Vonnegut, Helen Keller, Thomas Wolfe, Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Alexander Frater among many more. Rain, mighty storms, and their consequences make for good copy.

An author even changed people’s customs on rainy days:

The disdain of the Europeans for umbrellas is noted on page 103.

“Surely that weather watcher Daniel Defoe and his 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe also helped popularize—and defeminize—the umbrella.” (page 105)

Although, the history of the umbrella goes back 3,000 years notes the art writer Julia Meech. (page 106)

In fact, Chapter Nine is entitled “Writers on the Storm” which discusses how rain plays a major part in the lives and works of Steven Patrick Morrissey, Charles Dickens, George Sand, Isak Dinesen, Emily Dickinson, Dante, Thomas Hardy, Longfellow, Hemingway, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, James Joyce, Woody Allen, Mark Twain, and others.

In 1816, Mary Shelley might not have written her classic tale if not for the Little Ice Age.

…The eruption of Mount Tambora the year before dimmed the sun…It was the coldest summer ever recorded in Europe. Shelley and her poet companions [husband Percy Shelley and Lord Byron] had to stay holed up in their villa, huddled over a constantly burning fire. Lord Byron suggested they each write a ghost story. Frankenstein was hers. (page 200)

         

Many writers find rainy days good writing days.

The Seattle-based writer Timothy Egan…did his own informal study of book authors to figure out if they accomplished their best work in the murk of the dark months. (page 203)

…Seattle transplant Jennie Shortridge said she took seven years to finish her first novel in Denver, with three hundred days of annual sunshine. “When I moved to the Northwest, I wrote the next novel in fifteen months, and subsequent books every two years,” she told Egan “The dark and chill keeps me at my desk.” (page 203)

One writer decided rain was essential to his work.

In the late nineteenth century, a western poet named Joaquin Miller, living in the mountains overlooking Oakland, California, loved rain so much that he created his own personal rain machine to make water roar down on his roof. Anytime he needed some writing inspiration, he could twist a spigot inside his house to summon a shower outside. (page 275)

          I wish I had a personal rain machine as well since rainy days inspire me to write. After I read this book, rainy days now also inspire awe.

         

The Slammed Trilogy By Colleen Hoover

By Kate Phillips

          Colleen Hoover’s trilogy for young adults, Slammed, Point of Retreat, and This Girl, follows the love affair of the tragedy-filled lives of 18-year-old high school senior Layken Cohen and 21-year-old neighbor Will Cooper. In this romantic trilogy, neither of the main characters is sick or dying, but death plays a big part in both of their families’ lives.

         Furthering the depth of emotions involved, the novels showcase poetry slams—and the poems are not only fantastic, but integral to the plot—as characters can share deeper thoughts through poems than conversations.

          Hoover, who writes eloquent prose, not only includes the illuminating poems the characters perform on stage, she bolds and italicizes words so readers know how they sound and, therefore, have a better sense of how the characters feel.

Hoover’s poetry is vigorous—the poems are part of a poetry slam after all. She uses verbs of muscle and adjectives of exactitude (Mary Oliver's phrase) perfectly. No topic is off limits.

I didn’t include any poem excerpts as the poems need to be read in their entirety as they tell stories. I don’t have permission to reprint a whole poem.

          However, here is Layken’s reaction to hearing the poem “Blue Sweater” at her first slam on page 49 of Slammed:

The lights come back up and the audience roars. I take a deep breath and wipe tears from my eyes. I’m mesmerized by her ability to hypnotize an entire audience with such powerfully portrayed words. Just words. I’m immediately addicted and want to hear more.

          Layken hasn’t yet heard Will, a favorite of the audience and the judges, perform. Her reaction to his poem “Death” on pp. 53-54:

I find myself hoping he gets lost on his way back to our booth so I have time to absorb this. I have no idea how to react…The Will I watched walk up to the stage is not the same Will I’m watching walk toward me. I’m conflicted, I’m confused, and most of all I’m taken aback. He was beautiful…He put it all out there, right in front of me.

…I don’t understand the connection I feel with him. It all seems so fast. I put my hand on top of his and pull it to my mouth, then gently kiss the inside of his palm as we hold each other’s stare…

…It feels exhilarating. Or I feel exhilarated. I can’t tell which. All I know is that I wish the last two hours of my life could repeat for an eternity. (page 55)

          As much as I enjoyed these novels, Slammed and Point of Retreat from Layken’s point of view and This Girl from Will’s point of view, I would also love to read an entire book of slam poetry written by the multi-talented Colleen Hoover. Like Layken, I’m addicted.

April is Poetry Month so Read Mary Oliver

By Kate Phillips 

April is poetry month so I’m continuing to discuss Mary Oliver’s entrancing books.

      

Ray Bradbury makes this recommendation to writers on page 36 of Zen in the Art of Writing:

Read poetry every day of your life…it flexes muscles you don’t use often enough…it expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition.

          Mary Oliver, who publishes both poems and prose, discussed writing poetry in Blue Pastures. On page 59, she wrote:

                  

It takes about

seventy hours to drag

a poem into

the light.

         

          Oliver’s poems range from four to thirty-six lines with occasionally longer pieces. To find out it takes about seventy hours per poem is amazing, daunting—and unsurprising.

          If you have read Mary Oliver’s poems, you know she transports her readers whether to the edge of a pond (“The Notebook” page 44 of House of Light), the midst of the human condition (“Halleluiah” page 19 of Evidence), or inside a painting (“Franz Marc’s Blue Horses” page 43 of Blue Horses: Poems). She does this simply with word choices—the craft of all writers yet she hones them to the stratosphere.

          Oliver reaches these heights by writing and rewriting, reading and rereading. At age 80, she’s been doing this for decades. Her talent shines due to the tens of thousands of hours she has spent writing using the 70-hours-per-published-poem math plus the untold hours spent on her prose. Add on the hours she wrote as a child, student, and unpublished writer until age 28 and it isn’t surprising she is among the best writers in the world.

          Consider a work week is 40 hours. Oliver spends an average of 8.75 work days on a single poem. That’s dedication. That’s commitment. That’s why her poems are compelling, as well as why she is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

          Oliver’s favorite topic is nature. In her poem “Good Morning,” she ponders the vastly different life forms on earth remarking:

                   “It must be a great disappointment

to God if we are not dazzled at least ten

times a day.”

                   (pp. 21-23, stanza 5, in the book Blue Horses: Poems)

          Oliver is often dazzled and shares this in her poems and observations. She knows nature isn’t cute so she writes of death as well as life. Many of her poems like “You Are Standing at the Edge of the Woods” on page 21 of What Do We Know and “Mindful” on pp. 58-59 of Why I Wake Early transform my vision of the world.

          I recommend all writers read Blue Pastures which includes more luminous writings about nature as well as her story of becoming a poet and writer. Here’s how she views her calling:

“Poetry, after all, is not a miracle. It is an effort to formalize (ritualize) individual moments and the transcending effects of these moments into a music that all can use. It is the song of our species.” (page 59)

          Oliver’s advice for all writers which cannot be repeated often enough: give your writing power and time—look for verbs of muscle and adjectives of exactitude. It’s just as simple and difficult as that.

          It’s also what makes Mary Oliver’s poetry dazzling.