Tag: Carmen Maria Machado

forever too many books to read

Jonathan Cosgrove1 Comment

This year–like every year–reading has been a fantastic source of respite from the neverending parade of bad news and tragedy unfolding around us.

Recently I finished THE YIDDISH POLICEMAN’S UNION–a detective novel by Michael Chabon set in alternative history where Jewish people settled in Sitka, Alaska post WW2–and it was one of the best reads I’ve had all year.

At the moment, I’m flying through THE ONLY GOOD INDIANS by Stephen Graham Jones.

SGJ is probably my favourite writer of all time and someone I look up to immensely. Needless to say, I think this book is stunningly good. It’s seemingly so simple but yet so complicated and deep and powerful.

SGJ also has another novella coming out next month–NIGHT OF THE MANNEQUINS–which, naturally, I have preordered.

However, after looking over my Reading Log the other day, I decided that for the next half of 2020 I’d like to try and read more female voices.

Whether via marketing or algorithms or personal biases I end up reading about 50% or more cis-male authors and I’d just like to change that up a touch.

So, with that in mind, here are some titles I hope to read before the end of the year in no particular order.

Fiction
Toni Morrison – Beloved
Angela Carter – The Magic Toyshop
Zadie Smith – Swing Time
Octavia Butler – Kindred
Hilary Mantel – Fludd
Ursula K. Le Guin – The Dispossessed
Tasmyn Muir – Gideon the Ninth
Catherynne M. Valente – The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
Sarah Read – The Bone Weaver’s Orchard

Non-Fiction
Carmen Maria Machado – Dream House
Rebecca Solnit – A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Camile Paglia – Break, Burn, Blow
Lisa Kröger – Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

I’m forever making reading lists but this one is composed of people I’ve largely never read before. (Caveats-Zadie Smith was an obsession for most of uni and I read Left Hand of Darkness by LeGuin but I think at the time I didn’t get it, maybe.)

Have you read any books off this list? Anything you could recommend?

In-Sentence Suspense

Jonathan Cosgrove2 Comments

This is from the first exercise Matt Bell has posted on his “Writing Exercises” emails about creating an “in-sentence” suspension.

To briefly, and poorly, explain it’s about creating a simple sentence and then delaying the ending by using prepositions but you can also use a whole slew of other techniques. I realise I’m not explaining this well but…

Matt explains it much, MUCH better in his exercise emails which you can sign up for here.

My sentence was originally –

I have seen many places, but none of them like this, and I smile.

I liked what came out after about twenty minutes of writing, even though I didn’t really stick perfectly to the instructions given. Anyway, here it is in case anyone would like to read a very long sentence.

I have seen many places, from the safety of my head, beneath the twilight of an ocean sky, bouncing past deserts inside a broken and comically packed van where bad breath and B.O. reigned supreme, or ferried over water with sunburned skin alive and itching, accompanied by the monologue within, that spoke at length about things I don’t remember, with friends, lovers, companions, coworkers, guides, people I hardly knew at all or ever would again who spoke in languages and cadences once readily understood but now simply forgotten, steered to view the world from someone else’s vantage because the view was better or they told you that’s how it’s supposed to be seen, where obligingly you might capture the tired eyes and shining teeth of strangers, through variations of heat and darkness, constricted by limits of vision, or a willingness to witness (often, but not always, one and the same), from such great heights where cities look like galaxies or deep caverns where stalactites look like the distant skyscrapers on an absurd, forgotten, rusted planet, and the thought of a familiar blanket was not far away, but none of them like this, like you, and I smile.