I decided it was time to improve my writing. It felt both forced and stifled: artless, lifeless, joyless and uninteresting. And my reading was falling off too, both in quantity and quality. The two problems — with writing and reading — seemed connected. I hoped reading more (and more importantly, reading better) would help me write [...]
Tagged as:
books,
borges,
chekov,
david foster wallace,
discipline,
fiction,
geoff dyer,
learning,
literature,
pessoa,
practice,
reading,
self-improvement,
writing
I just had a crazy thought about The Social Network. It turns on this controversial and often-repeated remark (found here) by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin: I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling. I’m #TeamInternet all the way but I appreciate where Sorkin is coming from. I’m sort [...]
Tagged as:
cultural evolution,
facebook,
fiction,
film,
generativity,
internet,
movies,
narrative,
stories,
storytelling,
truth,
web,
writing
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields One of 2010′s most talked written-about books. For anyone interested in writing and storytelling this might be worth owning and occasionally flipping through for inspiration. A lot of great insights about truth and fiction — and whether either can really exist in pure form — much of which [...]
Tagged as:
anthropology,
books,
clay shirky,
evolution,
fiction,
history,
literature,
nicholas carr,
non-fiction,
reading,
richard florida,
sociology
I signed up for Goodreads last summer and now I’m finally using it thanks to the fact I actually know other people on there — the whole point of it is to make book-reading more social. Here’s my profile if you’re interested in friending-up — the more, the better. I signed up after reading an [...]
Tagged as:
books,
fiction,
geoff dyer,
goodreads,
james wood,
jeff in venice death in varanasi,
joseph o'neill,
literature,
netherland,
reading,
social media
After years failing to get engaged with any fiction, it was finally a TV series — The Wire — that made me enthusiastic enough about character and narrative to pick up a novel and actually read it all the way through. Then the natural author to go to was Richard Price, who wrote a handful of Wire episodes, and [...]
Tagged as:
autotelesis,
books,
fiction,
lush life,
ortega y gasset,
richard price,
self-becoming,
will to relevance
