the voice

I appreciate that books don't audibly speak. They speak in other ways, but they don't have an audible voice. They just wait. They don't compete with each other or try to sell themselves, and yet, when you choose one to read, it will give you all it has. Then, if you decide not to read further, it's not resentful. It won't complain or take things personally or be passive aggressive or self-pitying or sabotage your reading by holding back important information.

would you fight for my love

It's surprisingly hard to put down the weight that is crushing your spirit, because you think that if you let go it will crush you for sure. 

deferrance satisfied

The first book I read by James Fenimore Cooper, the main impression I had was how boring it was. It was very earthy and basic, like a cabin in the woods. 

I didn't finish that book even though I had to read it for a course I was doing. Then, later I felt differently about his work. I recognized something of value in it, even if my initial feeling was that it was boring. 

I collect books that I haven't really enjoyed, because of their literary merit. Like Ulysses by James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett's trilogy of novels, and The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, and Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and many others. That sense of literary merit independent of enjoyment or even appreciation, is a value shared by a lot of my books. Sometimes, of course, there's both - enjoyment and literary merit, and I find that literary merit feeds into enjoyment, although not always directly. 

different reactions

Going to the Kinokuniya bookshop in Sydney, and looking in the 'literary criticism' and 'essays' sections often makes me want to write. No other section has that effect, and no other bookstore either. 

At the start of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy tells us that happy families are all the same but unhappy families are all different. They're unhappy 'in their own way' he tells us. I would say that, with bookshops, it's the opposite. All the really good bookshops I know are very distinctive. They have their own flavor. 

Somehow, they don't even have the same books. You would think they would - that being good bookshops they would have the good books - but it seems like there are so many good books out there that each good bookshop can stock a different selection of good books. 

new eyes

When I first read The Catcher in the Rye, I didn't really get it. I didn't understand the symbolism or see the artistry in Salinger's work. If I read it now, I would probably have a better sense of those things. 

ig

I sometimes forget that Instagram is used for things other than art. 

the key of change

I remember when I was studying English at uni and I was really getting into literature. I read and studied Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, Portrait of a Lady, Passage to India, and lots of other great literature. Some film versions of Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights came out and I was so excited to see them. I imagined that they would do justice to these great novels. Again and again I was disappointed, until I came to the conclusion that it can't be done - you just can't make a great film of these great novels. 

I still think there's some truth to that. You can't really do justice to a novel in film or a TV show, at least in the way that I once thought. A film is never going to do justice to what I find in these novels. What I've discovered through watching some really good shows that are based on some great novels, is that you have to change the story radically in order to do justice to it. 

You have to make something of it - something new. For example, at the center of the TV show, The Man in the High Castle, is a subversive film but at the center of the book, is a book. In the TV show, Brave New World, pretty much everything - at least all the action of the story - is different from the novel. Some key things are the same, like the names of some characters, but more importantly, what is the same between the two is the issues and the context, the dilemmas, the human story. In order to tell that same story in a TV show and in our era, you have to change it. You have to get the idea - or your own sense of the idea - and then make a TV show about that idea.