A Whole Lotta Books!

whole lotta books!

Just for fun, here are all the books from the last week that I'm adding to my Books Read list below:

The Worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien: The Places That Inspired Middle-Earth by John Garth


White Nights by Dostoyevsky (reread)


Notes From Underground by Dostoyevsky (reread)


The Silmarillion: A Brief Account of the Book and Its Making by Christopher Tolkien (essay)

Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories by Agatha Christie (reread)

Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

by Benjamin Dreyer (the UK edition)


Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective by Donald J Sobol (reread)


Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Secret Pitch by Donald J Sobol (reread)


Captain Scott's Biscuit by Thomas Keneally (essay about Antartica)


The Lovecraft Circle and the Inklings: The “Mythopoeic Gift” of H. P. Lovecraft by Dale Nelson (essay)


Muted: A short story in verse by Jessica Bell (poem, natch)


I also read The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton the week before last!


And here's a really good book I read the ARC of a couple of months ago: You Can't Catch Me by Catherine McKenzie

"Do you want to play a game?

Twelve years ago Jessica Williams escaped a cult. Thanks to the private detective who rescued her, she reintegrated into society, endured an uncomfortable notoriety, and tried to put it all behind her. Then, at an airport bar, Jessica meets a woman with an identical name and birth date. It appears to be just an odd coincidence—until a week later, when Jessica finds her bank account drained and her personal information stolen.

Following a trail of the grifter’s victims, each with the same name, Jessica gathers players—one by one—for her own game. According to her plan, they’ll set a trap and wait for the impostor to strike again. But plans can go awry, and trust can fray, and as Jessica tries to escape the shadows of her childhood, the risks are greater than she imagined. Now, confronting the casualties of her past, Jessica can’t help but wonder...

Who will pay the price?"

This description doesn't quite hint at the twistiness of this tale, or its somewhat unreliable narrator.

The story carries you along, as you wonder which character can be trusted and which can't. The final revelation was a total surprise to me -- and then there was another revelation on top of that! I should have seen the first one coming, but didn't guess the second one at all. Very thrilling!

I'm going to try reading this one again soon, to see if I can spot the clues the second time around! I'd really like a sequel, to find out how the "real" Jessica Williams is doing.


As for ROW80, this is the last week of this round. I haven't written or edited or researched a thing in the last couple of weeks. I've finished all current knitting projects. I haven't baked in a few days, because we've been going through our chocolate stash. I think I'm having a reaction to this month's writing exercise, which is:

"Your task: Write a scene of intimacy, and share up to 800 words of it.

Sounds simple enough. The catch?

Your characters must be in the dark.

Yep, lights out- darkest night- cave exploration- curtains drawn- blindfolds (consensually) applied… you can decide exactly _how_ dark you want it to be (and how that darkness comes about), but the primary aim of this exercise is to (mostly) withdraw sight as one of our senses.

Why?

We’re going to shift the lens this month when it comes to writing intimacy, to make it more… internal. No, not that kind of internal. All right yes, that kind of internal, too. But mainly: without easy visuals, we’re going to need to focus on the emotions and the action. And those are some of the keys to writing good sex."

I usually love writing these types of scenes! So why am I struggling with this one? I need a spark -- or I need to sit down and start writing all sorts of gangplanks, and go from there. Fake-it-til-you-make-it works really well when your writing feels rusty.

What do you do to kickstart your writing?