Anonymous asked:

Books you enjoyed the most in 2011 and the ones you regret not getting around to read?

Books enjoyed most: Edward St. Aubyn’s At Last was published this past May, and I could not recommend it more highly. I hadn’t heard of St. Aubyn’s “Patrick Melrose trilogy” until I saw the books mentioned in Zadie Smith’s laudatory Harper’s review, which compelled me to read the latest. Now I’m itching to read the rest! While Paula Fox did not publish any novels this year, 2011 was the year during which I discovered her oeuvre. I barreled through her entire written works and loved everything she’s ever graced with her name. In a short time, she’s become one of my favorite authors.

Books I regret not getting around to: I have yet to read Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot or Joan Didion’s Blue Nights - I know, I know, I’m a degenerate - though in my defense they are next up on my list!

Anonymous asked:

"Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint, can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation."---Graham Greene

“Most things disappoint till you look deeper.” —Graham Greene

Anonymous asked:

Quick, sweet n simple reads for flights?

I’m so glad you asked! These past few weeks, I found myself on a number of grueling flights, including a 14 hour trek from San Francisco to Shanghai, followed the very next morning by a 6 hour flight from Shanghai to Bali. Such strain would have likely put me over the edge and into a mental institution once and for all, were it not for my shiny new Kindle Fire (a tablet for the consummate liberal arts graduate), which I credit for saving my life. Mine is loaded with magazines - several months of The New Yorker, Bon Appetit, and Architectural Digest. Also on my virtual bookshelf at the moment are My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey by Jill Bolte-Taylor and The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt. Plane rides are ideal for breezy nonfiction!

Anonymous asked:

Hi! I stumbled upon this through mutual friends of ours. I too spent the first four years of my life in China and went to Dartmouth for undergrad. I find your photos, book selections, quotations and outfits remarkable and I was wondering if you have a list of favorite books you could share? Much appreciated (:

It’s a unique combination we share, 4 years in China + 4 years at Dartmouth! Picking favorites among books is so difficult; mine have the tendency to shift all the time. Perhaps given our similar backgrounds, you’ll appreciate these 5 classic stand-bys. But in general, I like to recommend specific authors, rather than specific books; it gives readers greater leeway to poke around and find something that sounds interesting on a personal level. Some of my favorite authors: Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Steven Millhauser, Shirley Hazzard, Gustave Flaubert, Paula Fox, Richard Yates, Christine Schutt, Vladimir Nabokov.

Anonymous asked:

The giving poem, I wrote it this morning, my dear. Too shy to claim authorship.--- I also wrote the little quip about you being OBESE! ;-) Happy Holidays! Keep blogging!

Happy Holidays :)

Anonymous asked:

Since it's the giving season and you are a writer, I thought you might enjoy this little quasi-poem I found: To say more than the black and white let slip/Words like gift wrapping, a multi-hued cocoon/For that between us that we hoped would fly./---The talent of saying the unsaid.

Thanks for sharing! Who is the writer of your found poem?

Anonymous asked:

"Therapists are like bloodhounds: stinky, useless, slobbering animals---unless you give them a scent to follow and have the tenacity to go with them through the heavy, painful underbrush of your life."

“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.” —Graham Greene

Anonymous asked:

May I recommend Andre Aciman’s “Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere” ? A few quotes: “Great books, like great cities, always let us find things we think are only in us and couldn’t possibly belong anywhere else…” “Writing sees figures where life sees things; things we leave behind, figures we keep.”

What a lovely image: figures versus things. Thank you for sharing! I’ll look up Andre Aciman next time I’m at the library.

Aciman’s comparison of the act of writing and that of ‘seeing’ brings to my mind a much loved excerpt from a Steven Millhauser interview published in BOMB Magazine.

“If you look at a cube, you can see only three sides… for me the simple fact that objects don’t reveal themselves completely to sight became a symbol of the general invisibility of the world… We walk through a world continually disappearing from view. One thing fiction does is restore the hidden and vanishing world. It makes the blind see. It gives us the mystic’s vision: the universe in a grain of sand (not a bad definition of the short story, by the way). That’s what I meant when I said that I want fiction to unbind my eyes.”