The Read Good Hits of the Summer

As I was tooling around WordPress today, I caught BookPeople and Book of Words posting their list of Summer reading. Since I’m no longer in school, and haven’t been for some time now, below is my current reading list. It just so happens to be Summertime. There is a very high possibility that some of these titles will end up on my Fall and Winter reading lists. The chances very greatly on what home repairs I decide to do, changes in workload, and other adulthood matters that get in the way of everything.

I’ve just finished Black Water Transit by Carsten Stroud per the request of a good friend of mine, and now have the decision of choosing my next read. There are priorities not mentioned on this list, such as finishing Don Quixote by Cervantes AND Ulysses by James Joyce. I can’t leave an incomplete book lying around forever. It drives me nuts. How people can drop a novel indefinitely is beyond me.

These titles are in no particular order, as I usually make up my mind on the spot:

1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
2. A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut
3. Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
4. The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells
5. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
6. Diptych Rome-London by Ezra Pound
7. Steinbeck: A Life in Letters edited by Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten
8. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
9. Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
10. The Federalist by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay
11. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
12. Aesop’s Fables
13. The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin

I noticed more unread books in my bookcase tonight, which are from shopping sprees long ago. It would be to my amazement, if I could plow through half of the above mentioned during the season. In light of that, I left the rest off the list. They’ll have to wait. For outside observers, I’d imagine the Twain would come as a surprise. Wouldn’t have I already read that by now?

There’s a simple explanation for it, really. In American compulsory education, there’s a limited amount of time dedicated to reading books. Since my earliest recollections in the early 80s, that curriculum has changed to compete with not only a multitude of authors but digital fluff. Iconic works get cut from the courses just as easily as anything else, and who wants to read books anyway? That’s for, like, old people or something.

Anyone else care to share the Summer list?

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Splitting Attention and Image Reflections

I’m finally at the point in My City by the Bay where I’m going to be posting stuff that no one else has yet seen. I can see plenty of you rolling your eyes right now. You keep making faces like that young ladies and young gentlemen, and it’ll stay that way. You mark my words!

Regardless, for myself and the handful of others following along, I think that will be good news. I certainly haven’t finished, nor do I know how I’ll finish the story, but I’m sure it’ll tell me when I get there. I read an article about why writers love to write, and one reason was “…because we’re the puppet master.”

Now, I don’t know about the other writers but I do know about myself. What I’ve certainly noticed is that I often question the control I have over my own stories. Sometimes they form on the paper, and I feel like I have little say in it. I could never see myself as the “puppet master.”

I loosely consider myself a writer, and not by occupation. I don’t get paid to write; I get paid to do accounting. For established veterans in the literary world, this may seem laughable or galling. Quite frankly, there isn’t any comment they can make that an entire class of grade school kids haven’t mastered. Kids are much more cruel. Trust me.

With all this free wheelin’, gun shootin’ display of foolishness (as the logical, shrewd writer would want as much money out of their work as possible), I’m starting another long story. It may be long enough to make into a novella, as it’s a blank slate. It has political viewpoints, philosophical viewpoints, and I have to build characters from the ground up. I actually like creating characters.  As a child, I didn’t have a whole lot of friends. I ended up creating entire casts of characters in my head anyway.

Enough of Memory Lane. I’ve been ticketed flying down that road before.

This brings me to the point of the post. I’m fussing over splitting my attention between two stories or finishing one and starting another. Has anyone wrote multiple stories at once? Did they find it manageable? Were they disappointed in the outcome? I’d normally do this myself, but don’t want to waste the 3-6 months in trial and error, when I could simply get feedback from other writers right now.