What Dawn Has Been Reading - 8/23/08

I haven't read much "fun" books lately as I've been vetting books for my Writing Your Voice Alive class.  The idea of WYVA (I now even pronounce that way:  why-vuh) is to help people discover and strengthen their writing voice.  One of the ways we do that is to look at other people's writing and their voice and dissect how they do it.

So, I've had to figure out what would be the best books.  Short stories were a must as 1. I didn't want to assign a novel (horrors from senior English) and 2. I wanted people to get a sense of the author's voice across several different stories.

Here's what I was reading and what didn't make the cut:

• The Thirteen Problems by Agatha Christie.  It's not that I didn't like it (and it was fun rereading Agatha Christie), but there wasn't enough variation in the stories.  It was really like reading a novel.  However, there was one piece that stuck out particularly:  "It happened a long time ago--five years to be exact--but it's sort of haunted me ever since.  The smiling, bright top part of it--and the hidden gruesomeness underneath."  How true is that for so many things?  The smiling bright top hides the gruesomeness.
• The Best of O. Henry: The Gift of the Magi and Twelve Other Stories.  Through the years, I'm sure I've read dozens of O. Henry stories, and, of course, "The Gift of the Magi" is familiar to most people who went through high school English.  But ack!  More depressing stories I've never read.  I forced myself to read four, and I gave up.  English literature be damned.  I need happy!

Here's what did make the cut:

• How I Got This Way by Patrick McManus.  Talk about voice. It doesn't get much stronger than this.  I'm going to look forward to teaching with this book. On a snarky side note, I hate the cover.  It's a picture of the author with a gorilla.  Talk about not judging a book by its cover.  I'm proud of myself that I was able to get past the gorilla.
• Not the End of the World by Kate Atkinson.  While there's some depressing stuff in this book, it's not nearly as bad as O. Henry.  There's a reason for it in Atkinson's stories.  AND they're not all depressing.  I also liked the sci-fi aspect of some of the stories (but not so way out there to turn off those who don't touch sci-fi).

Once I had these figured out, I was able to read fun books.  First on the list was a true summer read.  (With a title like A Summer Affair, what else could it be?)  It was so good (and so nice to take a break from the writing program designer gig) that I finished it in two days.   My only complaint was that the point of view wasn't consistent.  Most of the time, the point of view was from the main character, Claire.  Every so often, though, we'd get little vignettes of other people's point of view, probably so that they could tell us things Claire couldn't.  It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't seamless either.

Then onto Lady Jane by Norma Lee Clark. (It's out of print, so no Amazon link.)  I read this over and over when I was an adolescent, and so there was a certain comfort in reading it again.  It's your standard romance, which I don't usually go for, but I really liked this one.  Interestingly, and something I didn't know when I read it more than twenty years ago, is that the language is very Austen-like.  Hmmm.  Maybe that's my saving grace.  Yeah.  I'm reading it because it's like Jane Austen.  We'll go with that reason.

I finished Lady Jane earlier this evening, so now I have to figure out my next book.  I need something light, entertaining, and mind-escaping.  I'll let you know what I come up with.

Comments

[Cathy Eichelberger]

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