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Showing posts with the label Michael Chabon

russian doll writers

Do you ever notice a theme connecting the books you seemingly choose at random to read? I have a major theme running through recent reads and I've only just realised it. I keep reading writers who are writing about writers - and in one case a writer who is writing about a writer who is writing about a writer. It's like a nest of Russian dolls, one inside the other. Perhaps, subconsciously, I am choosing books with this theme, in fact the more I think about it the more likely it seems. In a previous post I wrote how much I enjoyed Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon, a book about an author with writer's block who teams up with a would be young novelist. Since then I have read The Shock of the Fall by Nathan Filer about a boy who deals with his mental health issues by writing and sketching in a journal. Then I read Oracle Night by Paul Auster about a writer who buys a blue notebook to begin writing again in order to help heal himself after a terrible accident. He writes a story a...

wonder boys

"Dazzling, seemingly effortless writing." This quote is from a Sunday Telegraph review of Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon. I just finished reading it today and it's shot into my top ten best ever books chart, to keep company with Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay which I read a few years ago. I'd had Wonder Boys on my bookshelf for a while. It never seemed the right moment to pick it up, but you know how sometimes a book chooses you? It comes along when you're ready for it, need it even. That's what I feel happened with Wonder Boys. I'm not one for writing book reviews. Trying to condense an entire plot into one paragraph seems rather discourteous somehow. But I will tell you that two of the main characters are a middle aged professor, and mid-career novelist, Grady Tripp and his young student and would-be author James Leer. Tripp has writer's block and no idea how to finish his 2,000 page, seven years in the writing novel Wonder...