2006 Reading Log

1. The Far Side of the World by Patrick O’Brian 

2. The Love of Stones by Tobias Hill

3. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

4. Expecting Adam by Martha Beck

5. The Letter of Marque by Patrick O'Brian

6. The Art of Chainsaw Carving* by Jessie Groeschen

7. Amaryllis* by Starr Ockenga

8. The Thirteen-Gun Salute by Patrick O'Brian

9. American Evita: Hillary Clinton’s Path to Power* by Christopher Andersen

10. The Nutmeg of Consolation by Patrick O’Brian

11. The Truelove by Patrick O’Brian

12. The Wine-Dark Sea by Patrick O’Brian

13. The Commodore by Patrick O’Brian

14. The Shadow of the Giant by Orson Scott Card

15. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

16. Animal Farm by George Orwell

17. Indiana Curiosities by Dick Wolfsie

18. Images of America: New Albany by Gregg Seidl

19. Uppity Women of Ancient Times by Vicki Leon

20. The Yellow Admiral by Patrick O’Brian

21. The Hundred Days by Patrick O’Brian

22. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

23. Blue at the Mizzen by Patrick O’Brian

I remember picking up The Love of Stones by Tobias Hill for $1 because I read the jacket copy and noted that Tobias Hill was a poet who had written his first novel. He’s written many now, and I should read some of his more recent work to see if he’s improved. The Love of Stones was evocative and I adored the scene setting, but the character seemed somewhat one-dimensional, and the story had some pacing issues. In all, I think it could have benefitted from a bit more editing before going to print.

I expected more, lyrically, from an established poet...what I got was an excellent sense of place from the descriptive settings, a choppy plot that doesn't quite knit together fluidly and characters about whom I remain lukewarm. Some of the situations seem a bit contrived, as well...but the story, rather the themes, have stuck with me after two years, so I can't complain that it was an overall bad book. Definitely not good, though.

-From my Goodreads review

I suppose everyone read The Da Vinci Code at some point in the 2000’s. I was no exception. I liked it, but I think people feel like they’re reading something very smart because it deals with art and architecture and classical themes, but it’s not smart fiction, really. It is an excellent example of a thriller, a genre I don’t do much reading in.

I believe I picked up Expecting Adam by Martha Beck as research for a magical realism novel I was attempting to write at the time. I never got much of it committed to paper, but I did a fair bit of outlining, research, and prep for it. It was my first serious attempt at writing a novel, and I’d still like to return to the story at some point. I began it in 2006, but in 2007 a show called Big Bang Theory debuted which took the wind out of my sails as my two main characters were a male scientist on the autism spectrum and a kindly waitress who befriends him…so basically Penny and Sheldon without the supporting cast and add in if Penny were able to do astral projection and Sheldon were a neuroscientist who flatly refused to believe in her abilities.

Amaryllis and The Art of Chainsaw Carving were both coffee table books I picked up at the library just to flip through. They earned the “did not finish” asterisk because I didn’t read them cover to cover, but felt like it was important to record them in my log for some reason. Probably because I wanted to pad the list so it looked like I wasn’t slacking off since I’d read so much in the previous year.

The Shadow of the Giant had been recently released by Orson Scott Card, and this may have been the year that I made the effort to go see him at a signing when he came to town. I remember having SO MUCH social anxiety about going. He’s still cancelled.

And because of this list, I can say definitively that I first read Pride and Prejudice at the age of 25. This would have been the year after the movie adaptation starring Keira Knightley was released, so I probably picked it up in response to that. I was still in the middle reading the Aubrey-Maturin series and those are set in the Regency time period which gives an interesting male and global perspective to Austen’s female and domestic viewpoint. I don’t remember it making a huge impact on me at the time, but I returned to read her other works at a later time and at some point my Austenite fever kicked off, though it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when or what the catalyst truly was.

Animal Farm by George Orwell is a classic that everyone should read. It’s accessible, short, and packs in a lot of societal commentary.

Indiana Curiosities and Images of America: New Albany are on the list because I was doing some further research for that book I was working on, but I also have a keen interest in local history.

Uppity Women of Ancient Times is a fun little collection of mini biographies of prominent female historical figures that “broke the rules” of their societies and are often forgotten in the history books. I haven’t read the bulk of the “feminist canon” but I sometimes pick up something like this. I should probably make a concerted effort to read feminist literature classics, though.

I believe the only reason I picked up Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert is to delay finishing the Patrick O’Brien series I’d so loved. But it’s a beguiling story. The translation I read is gorgeous, and I connected with the story on a much deeper level than I’d expected to. I think the theme of a woman unsatisfied with her life was very relevant to 25 year old me.

And now, the Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian…I can’t think of what to say about these books other than that I adored them. I once picked up a guy in a bar because we got into a discussion about not being able to read these books without being at least a little in love with Steven Maturin. Yeah, that happened.

Patrick O’Brian is a master at creating a world that feels real and fully immersive. And his ability to bring characters into conflict with each other and then bring about a resolution shows his gift for storytelling.

The first chapter was a huge culture shock for me. Having lived my life in a land-locked state, learning the terminology of sailing and seafaring taxed my brain in a very good way. Not only was I trying to follow the development of the characters and absorbing the historical context of the Napoleonic wars of which I had previously known nothing, but I was also thrown immediately into a foreign world of fo'c's'les, wasters, and unfished main yards. I went on to read all 20 of the published volumes, and to master the finer points of the anatomy of a sailing vessel. But beyond that, a fascination with the time period during which the large historical story arcs play out led me ass-backwards into picking up Pride and Prejudice for the first time, which in turn led me into a deep study of all of Jane Austen's works and then onto the Brontes. Would I have gotten around to reading Austen and the Brontes on my own eventually? Probably. But then again maybe not.

-From a 2014 Facebook post about books that influenced me

Eyes on Your Own Paper

Something that happens when you join a writing community and start interacting with other writers regularly is that you, inevitably, start to draw comparisons between their work and yours…or their manner of working or habits and your own.

This is especially prevalent around November when the NaNoWriMo crowd start talking about their word counts and their daily word count goals. Those who look at others who can bang out 5k words in a day and wonder how that is even humanly possible start to feel really discouraged, and I hear a lot of people expressing disappointment in themselves.

Quantity and Quality often have an inverse relationship predicated on how much TIME is invested.

Let me tell you about graphic design. As a professional in the field, new hires would turn up in the office and their portfolios would be amazing! I would look at their stunningly detailed illustrations and be so jealous and feel like an utter hack. I would be in awe of these younger designers who often had the design degree that I lacked and much more polished portfolios.

But then these new hires would sit with me for training and I'd find out things about them that made me feel a lot better. Sometimes they would barely know how to operate Adobe Creative Suite products. They often had no idea how to conduct themselves in a business setting or around clients. They’d have no clue about how to manage client expectations and fulfill a brief, and some even showed a stunning lack of fundamental knowledge about color and creating balanced visuals.

How could these individuals look so good on paper, but be such a disaster in practice?

Often, the secret ingredient was time.

Just looking at a finished piece, you have no concept of how long someone has worked on it. As students, these artists could have spent entire semesters honing that one portfolio piece, workshopping it with their peers and getting the professional advice of their mentors and professors on how to improve it. Or perhaps they'd executed the idea years before and gone back to polish it multiple times before including it in their portfolio.

The famous “rhetoric triangle” adapted for design. Illustration by Betsey Talbot.

But “in production" clients are rarely, if ever, going to pay for the kind of time that a high level of quality requires.

Realistically, designers don't get unlimited hours to invest on executing a brief. In my experience, the client wants things out the door quickly, under budget. The result is often a design that is “good enough”.

As a professional designer, you may not be producing work that takes advantage of everything you’re capable of offering, but your work is solid, your clients are happy, and you're not embarrassed of what you’re putting out into the world…

…until you put your work right next to something someone spent the better part of a year producing…

Then your “quick and dirty” ad campaign looks sub-par in comparison.

Comparison is the thief of joy…and confidence!

So maybe those other writers you keep comparing yourself to who are cranking out 5k words a day are working on book five of a series, so all the heavy lifting of world creation, characterization, and research is done. Maybe they're writing pulp fiction that follows a well established formula that smooths the path for them. Maybe their first drafts are an absolute train wreck.

“Your work may be something with rare depth and originality that just doesn’t spill onto the page and flow like water, but rather oozes up from your depths like crude oil and requires a long process to refine into something precious.”

It's possible that their work is very different to yours. Their work may be plain and derivative whereas you're working on something with rare depth and originality that just doesn't spill onto the page and flow like water, but rather oozes up from your depths like crude oil and requires a long process to refine it into something marketable.

But it’s worth investing the time because what you are left with at the the end of your process, however slow it may be, is something precious and valuable, not something common that can be found almost anywhere.

Trust your process. Respect your pace.

All this is a lot of words simply to say: You do you. Comparing your work with someone else’s is the source of so much suffering. Just because you prefer to edit as you go, or write in quick jolts of inspiration instead of sitting down at 5am every day and putting in a solid two hour block of writing time before letting the distractions of the day get to you doesn’t mean you’re doing it “wrong”. Your process is unique to you. The advice that someone else gives may not empower you to achieve similar results. It may, in fact, disempower you by making you feel self-conscious about the volume of your output.

By all means, try every piece of advice you’re given. Something may really work for you and help you improve your writing routine and the quality of your output. But if a technique or practice doesn’t work for you even though everyone else raves about it being the right thing to do™️, don’t fret about it. Your results may vary. You’re not wrong for doing things the “wrong way”. If it’s working for you, don’t let anyone else discourage you from persevering.

2005 Reading List

1. The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson

2. Leah and Rachael by Orson Scott Card

3. The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomas

4. Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding

5. What Should I Do With My Life?* by Po Bronson

6. The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouc

7. The Lady and the Unicorn by Tracy Chevalier

8. The Gospel of Judas by Simon Mawer

9. Atticus by Ron Hansen

10. I’m a Stranger Here Myself by Bill Bryson

11. Simple Prayers by Michael Golding

12. Shopgirl by Steve Martin

13. Chocolat by Joanne Harris

14. The Passion of Artemesia by Susan Vreeland

15. Left Behind by Tim Lahaye and Jerry B. Jenkins

16. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter* by Carson McCullers

17. Interview with a Vampire by Anne Rice

18. The Rapture of Canaan by Sheri Reynolds

19. In Flanders Fields* by Leon Wolff

20. Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian

21. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

22. Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie

23. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling

24. The Discovery of Chocolate by James Runcie

25. Tribulation Force* by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins

26. Goddess for Hire by Sonia Singh

27. Post Captain by Patrick O’Brian

28. H. M. S. Surprise by Patrick O’Brian

29. The Mauritius Command by Patrick O’Brian

30. Desolation Island by Patrick O’Brian

31. The Fortune of War by Patrick O’Brian

32. The Surgeon’s Mate by Patrick O’Brian

33. The Ionian Mission by Patrick O’Brian

34. Treason’s Harbour by Patrick O’Brian

I was very much underemployed in my early and mid 20s, which left ample time for reading!

The Years of Rice and Salt was another recommendation from my friend. I liked it much better than Quicksilver but still just wasn’t into that genre at the time or something. He raved about it. I felt neutral about it. Now, I can’t remember a single plot point from it, which I think is telling.

I had heard that The Rule of Four was like a “thinking man’s Da Vinci Code” so I picked it up. It was good, and certainly a page-turner. I remember enjoying the setting of Ivy League schools as I was very into the idea of self worth being based on education credentials at that time.

I’m almost positive that I read Bridget Jones’ Diary in reaction to having seen and liked the movie. It’s still one of my favorite movies. I re-watch it all the time. I haven’t re-read the book.

I read The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac because I felt like everyone should read Kerouac. I don’t think I feel that way now, but at the time I was influenced by a lot of Beat poets, mainly Ginsberg, and he had a major hard on for Kerouac. The story was vivid and I remember it well, but not with any fondness that made me want to read more of Kerouac’s work.

When I visited The Louvre in Paris in 2011, I remember virtually running through a specific wing, trying to find the tapestry The Lady and the Unicorn was based on. My reading habits have definitely influenced my travel destinations over the years. I find myself at museums far more often than beaches, but I know I wouldn’t love art like I do now if it weren’t for literature about art lighting that fire within me.

The thing I liked best about The Gospel of Judas by Simon Mawer was the description of the archives and processes of conservation of ancient documents. This is a major theme of my current work in progress.

Shopgirl by Steve Martin had a huge impact on me. I remember reading the novella basically in one sitting during a road trip with some girlfriends. I’m sure they thought I was being rude as hell not talking to them, but I couldn’t put the work down. Steve Martin is an astonishingly good author. The sensitivity with which he portrays mental illness is masterful, and his writing of his female protagonist is unusually deft for a male author. Too often we see men writing women who are mere caricatures of femininity, but Martin avoids this trap by populating his novel with a small cast of fully realized people. This is one case where I read the work before seeing the movie.

“This novella helped me gain such a better understanding about mental illnesses and how they can affect relationships and careers. It paints such a vivid sketch of the interior life of a creative person who is convinced that she is coping with her depression perfectly well, but the reader can see the truths that she is blinded to. It held up a mirror to my own struggles with mental illness and how being in denial about how much depression and anxiety were impacting my life was holding me back from personal and professional successes. ”

— From a 2014 Facebook post about books that influenced me

Chocolat was a book club read. I did enjoy the movie quite a bit. I remember it being very faithful to the book. I really like French literature, but I don’t believe I’d really delved into it much at this point in my life other than struggling through Le Fantôme de l'Opéra  in the original French in high school. This was an easy window into French society without it being a translation.

The Passion of Artemesia by Susan Vreeland is another in the list of art-meets-historical fiction that I expected to like more than I actually did.

I picked up a battered paperback of Interview with a Vampire and thought I’d like it since I generally do like novels that I’ve read after having seen the movie. It surprised me by being a much quicker read than I’d thought it would be. I haven’t read much Anne Rice, and doubt I will anytime soon, but she’s good at what she does.

In Flanders Fields and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter are marked with an asterisk in my list because I never finished them. They were both attempts to read a classic that never resulted in a completion. I suppose I found them to be too slow and didn’t make myself apply my mind to finishing them. They are still on my shelf, waiting for me.

The Rapture of Canaan by Sheri Reynolds was a book club read. Having grown up in a religion that was severely restrictive towards women, a lot of the story hit too close to home. The misogyny in religion is one of the main things that repel me. I remember this book being vivid, but the climax was somewhat contrived.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe was also a book club read, and I’m glad that I read it because it offered such a radically different perspective than my Western-focused book diet up until that time. I really enjoyed the description in this book, even if I did have a hard time connecting with the characters.

J.M. Barry’s novelization of his play Peter Pan was written after the play’s major success. Y’all, it is WILD. I had to look up if the book was a badly written “knock off” novelization. It’s not. It’s just THAT weird. The podcast Fuckbois of Literature nailed their commentary about Peter Pan, so I will direct you there instead of writing more on this subject.

I was finally in sync with the Harry Potter fandom in 2005. As a 24-year-old, I went to the midnight release party to buy my copy of The Halfblood Prince. I remember staying up all night reading and having to go on a bridesmaid dress shopping trip with my friend’s very religious mother the next day. She asked me how I’d been and I mentioned I was super tired because I’d been up all night reading Harry Potter, and she literally forbade me from talking about it in her presence. I wasn’t even allowed to say the words “Harry Potter”. People were so ludicrously afraid of magic in children’s literature when those books were first being released! Coming off of just having read Peter Pan probably gave me an interesting perspective on this phenomenon. How are the classic Disney films considered acceptable entertainment for children, featuring magic and dragons and fairies and kidnapping ghost boys like Peter, but a boy at a school for magic is heresy?

Like all good evangelicals, I made the attempt to read the Left Behind books. They were bad. I never finished the second one.

Goddess for Hire by Sonia Singh was a book club book. I think we liked the idea of broadening our horizons by taking on authors from different backgrounds, so we dove into this magical realism with a Hinduism twist book. I remember people being quite put out by the premise and how the book presented Hinduism. I just found it bit predictable and dull.

There are some things I read during this time that did not stay with me at all. I have very little memory of reading any of the following: Atticus by Ron Hansen, Simple Prayers by Michael Golding, The Discovery of Chocolate by James Runcie

It would be hard to overstate how hard I loved the Master and Commander books by Patric O’Brien. Of course, I came to read them after seeing the movie. I’ll elaborate in our next installment.