Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami
I decided to pick this book back up after making the conscious decision to read books more and stop scrolling on my phone so much. Consequently, I divided my reading into bedroom and living room reading, fiction and nonfiction, respectively. For someone who generally doesn’t care for reading nonfiction, I somehow ended up with a lot of nonfiction in my TBR pile.
I initially set this book aside because of my jealousy for Murakami’s described experience of one day casually deciding to become a writer and then becoming an award-winning writer right off the bat. The Japanese tendency of excessive humility also rankled me. These two things hit hard because I have worked hard to be a writer, but it still is hard for me to have confidence in myself, even though I am working on it. That says more about me than it does about Murakami.
If there’s one thing that I took away from this book, it’s that there are a lot of aspects to being a writer and you can feel successful or like a failure depending on which aspect you want to focus on. As I try to heal from depression and self-criticism, it’s an important lesson to hear again that you should focus on the story and yourself as the writer and how writing makes you feel. Those are the things you can control. Everything else is just noise.
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If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor by Bruce Campbell
I was in Downtown Detroit, walking from a friend’s house to a restaurant when I saw a Little Free Library. Excited, I went over to peruse. What might I find? I’ve never actually borrowed anything from a LFL, but I always like to browse. That’s when If Chins Could Kill leaped out at me.
As I mentioned in my post about it, one of my favorite movies growing up was Army of Darkness. I remember how excited I was when I learned that Campbell et al. were from the Detroit area. As the story of a “working stiff” actor, which is what 90% of the industry is, I thought If Chins Could Kill was enjoyable and entertaining. There’s no great revelation, no insider knowledge, no secret revealed that suddenly reveals how to make it in Hollywood. And that’s part of the book’s charm. Campbell seems like an everyman who is also still looking for that revelation, knowledge, or secret.
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Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
Muir blends sci-fi with sword and sorcery, politics and a whodunit mystery. The writer was able to balance all of the story’s elements in a way that made for unique world-building and story.
As I mentioned in my last post about this story, this was recommended to me by my younger twin and I’m interested to here why he chose this book to recommend to me ahead of any other. E.g. he’s a huge Sanderson fan and he knows that I haven’t read him yet.
For me, the story was enjoyable, but the writing style kept me from loving the book. Written in what I might consider a fantasy-specific style, there are frequent anachronistic bits of narration, usually in the voice of the main character, Gideon, who is the vehicle of the story. That might do it for some people, probably a lot of people, but I found it to be too jarring. But the strength of the story and the character of Gideon carried me through.
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Ghostly Tales of Michigan by Ryan Jacobson
A short book at only roughly 100 pages, this collection of scary stories from Michigan is more journalistic in nature than narratively developed. There aren’t character arcs or setting descriptions or classic story structure. Each story is only a couple pages long and reads like stories you’d tell a friend over drinks you heard from your cousin’s friend’s sister’s mom who heard it from her parents as a warning. But they are enjoyable enough in this format.
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The Doomsday Key by James Rollins
I’m starting this tonight and don’t have anything to add to my conjecture in my last WIR post.
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I’ve been and am reading a couple books specifically recommended to me as favorites. What book would you recommend a friend read to understand you better?
The Chimerical Dark 