In My Mailbox (1)

In My Mailbox is a weekly meme originally hosted by The Story Siren, in which book bloggers post about the books they have bought, borrowed or received in the past week. Since it began it has become fairly popular, and numerous book blogs post their weekly In My Mailbox meme. I have come across such posts and pretty book blogs a few several times ever since I have been in the blogger business, but what really grabbed my attention was Emma's blog titled Her Nose in a Book. She's 21, lives in Ontario, Canada, a recent college grad, reads immensely lot, and her taste in books is more than very similar to mine. (Not to mention that she posts utterly pretty photos of books on her tumblr page.) Anyhow, I thought I would give In My Mailbox a try. If I like it, it might get regular.

There are seven books in my mailbox this week, all of which I purchased. Yep, there goes my "I'm not going to buy any more books this year" resolution. (Well, the fine print did say "or as few as I possible can".) But let me explain how I got this far.

Every once in a while I get this sudden yearning to go to the book store, my favorite bookstore, visit my friends there, browse them and stroke them, and have a sniff or two of the intoxicating scent of the printed word. And, if I really really really love a book, and it won't stop whispering my name and chewing my ear, then take her home with me. Well, I did get such a yearning about a week ago, so on Tuesday I went to Red Bus and browsed their stacks for a rather large number of minutes. To my utter surprise and delight, I found The Friday Night Knitting Club on the "On Sale" shelf. I have kept bumping into this book on various sites recently, last time on One Sheepish Girl's blog, and I also found the review of its sequel on Emma's blog. So as I glimpsed at it at the store, it was an instant must buy.

Then I got to the "classic lit" section, where I found The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein, and I just could not leave it there. Now, I never got to write about it, but in 2011 my favorite movie was Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, which I have seen three times so far, and  most certainly am going to watch it for the fourth and fifth time. (Go, do yourself a favour, and watch it asap!) Every time I see the way Woody Allen presents the 1920's Paris with its bustling cultural life, with the members of the Lost Generation (Hemingway, Scott Fiztgerald and Zelda, Picasso, Matisse, G. Stein, etc.) seizing their days, with all those literary figures and references popping up, I am utterly and completely mesmerized. I had already been quite interested in the Lost Genereation & the Parisian expats at university, but never really had the time to dig deep. I got this very same book from the library once, but had to return it unread, and soon I forgot about it. But then came along this film, it most certainly grabbed my attention and made me want to read American high lit again. Gertrude Stein's memoir is about pretty much the same thing as some of Midnight in Paris: her life in Paris in the first three decades of the twentieth century, how she became well known as a writer and all the friends and artists she made and meet along the way. Anyhow, it's a wonderful book, I ought to write a reveiw about it some time very soon.

The third book of the week is A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway. As you probably know, I recently read Writing Down the Bones. In it Natalie Goldberg mentions this book, and suggests to read it, because it is a great one and Hemingway writes about his method of writing and his experiences as a beginning writer in Paris in the '20s. Plus, I had also known that it had something to do with the Lost Generation and the expats of Paris, G. Stein's influnce over Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, etc. As I was reading (and ohh, how much enjoying!) Stein's book, I got this sudden urge to get A Moveable Feast ASAP, and read it as soon as I was finished with The Autobiography of A.B.T. I ordered it via internet from Libra books; then when I went to pick it up, I found out that Libra has recently opened a new bookstore, right across their old textbook shop in Kölcsey Street.

Naturally, I took a look around, you know, just have a sniff of the nice book scent, and to see what kind of books they have. Well, they had a number of books on sale, all for 500 forints apiece which was an absolute bargain. This is how I bought The Last of the Savages by Jay McInerney (I loved his Bright Lights, Big City.); Anne's of House of Dreams by L. M. Montgomery (I recently grew fond of the Anne series, I ought to write about it too.); The Public Confessions of a Middle-Aged Woman by Sue Townsend (Oh, the dear Mom of our beloved loser Adrian Mole and her English humour! I wonder whether it will be as hilarious as the A.M. series.); and The Nice and Good by Iris Murdoch, because I have never read anything by her, although I did read her biography written by her husband.

Well, that's how I ended up buying six books this week instead of none (Or two. I really really had to read A Moveable Feast and the Stein book.) I will try and moderate myself from now on though. Because, for some mysterious reason, my to be read pile just keeps getting higher and higher...

So what have you got in your mailbox this week? Feel free to join in!

Book #1: Writing Down the Bones

The first time I came across Writing Down the Bones was about two (or three?) years ago, on someone else's blog. The blogger was praising the book, and suggested it to everyone who was into any kind of writing and looked for some sound advice. I immediately looked up the book, and was glad to find out that the SEAS library at my university had multiple copies of it. The following day I borrowed one, read it in a couple of days, enjoyed immensely, and found it utterly inspiring and full of useful ideas about the practical side of writing. However, due to lack of time, I never managed to write a proper review of the book, neither did I take notes, underline or copy out those ideas of Goldberg that I found the most beneficial. So when I was about to graduate, and knew that I might not have the chance to access the book again, I made sure to have it photocopied, so I could reread it once I had the time. (I could not buy a proper copy of it at the time, since it hasn't been republished since the '80s.) It had been lying around on my shelf for over eight or ten months, when, a couple of weeks ago I picked it up and dusted it off, in a desperate attempt of trying to trick myself into starting writing again.

After reading it for the second time, I still find it quite useful; as a matter of fact, I believe it is a must read for all of us, aspiring writers ( or should I say dreaming but actually not writing writers?). You should certainly read it, if for nothing else, than for simply because it will make your fingertips itch, it will make you want to write write write. Just for the sake of it, just because you breath, eat, and drink writing, because it's your destiny and your doom, your dearest friend and wickedest foe, because you cannot imagine your life without putting pen to paper, without your fingertips hitting the keys of the keyboard and making that sweet clickety sound that soothes your soul ever so comfortingly. 

Indeed, that's the best piece of advice you could ever get: just write. Just write day and night, today, tomorrow, and every day, hour after hour for the rest of your life. Just listen to the inner voice, write from the heart, write down the bones, write out the shitty part, write to the core. Stick to it, and you will get there. Just write, and fuck the rest. And then you are going to get  where you are supposed to get with your writing. That is what I am taking from Writing Down the Bones.

Nevertheless, here are some more tangible advice from Natalie Goldberg.

• "Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you where you need to go. And don't worry too much about security. You will eventually have a deep security when you begin to do what you want." (2)
• "Consider the pen you write with. It should be a fast-writing pen because your thoughts are always much faster than your hand. (...) Feel the connection and texture of the pen on paper. (...) Write in cheap notebooks. That way you won't feel compelled to write something good. You have permission to write the worst junk in the world. Give yourself a lot of space in which to explore writing. (...) Experiment. Try writing in a big drawing pad. It is true that the inside world creates the outside world and our tools also affect the way we form our thoughts. Try skywriting." ( 5-7)
• "The basic unit of writing practice is the timed exercise.

1. Keep your hands moving.
2. Don't cross out.
3. Don't worry about spelling, punctuation, grammar.
4. Lose control.
5. Don't think. Don't get logical.
6. Go for the jugular." (8)

•  "Capture the oddities of your mind. First thoughts have tremendous energy. "(9)
• "This is the practice school of writing. Like running, the more you do it, the better you get at it. Some days you don't want to run and your resist every step of the three miles, but you do it anyway. You don't wait around for inspiration and a deep desire to run. (...) If you run regularly, you train your mind to cut through or ignore your resistance. You just do it. (...) Once you're deep into it, you wonder what took you so long to finally settle down at the desk. Through practice you actually do get better. You learn to trust your deep self more and not give in to your voice that wants to avoid writing." (11)
• "My rule is to finish a notebook a month. Simply to fill it. That is the practice. I am writing for myself, I don't have to stay within my limits. (12)
• "One of the main aims in writing practice is to learn to trust you own mind and body, to grow patient and nonagressive." (12)
• "Have a page in your notebook where you jot down ideas of topics to write about." (19)
• "It is important to have a way worked out to begin your writing. (...) [Yet,] one just has to shut up, sit down, and write." (24)
• "Seperate the creator and the editor when you practice writing." (26)
• "Don't worry about your talent or capability, that will grow as you practice.(...) We learn writing by doing it." (30)
• "This is how we should write. Not asking 'Why?', not delicately picking among candies, but voraciously, letting our minds eat up everything and spewing it out on paper with great energy. (...) Simply step out of the way and record your thoughts as they roll through you." (34-35)
• "Allow yourself to be awkward. You are stripping yourself. You are exposing your life." (36)
• "Writers end up writing about their obsessions. Things that haunt them; things they can't forget; stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released. (...) After you write them down you can put them to good use. You have a list of things to write about." (38)
• "Use original detail in your writing. Be aware of the details around you. Use details. They are the basic unit of writing. If you use details, you become better skilled at conveying your ecstasy or sorrow." (41-46)
• "Writing is physical. It has to do with sight, smell, taste, feeling, with everything alive and activated." (50)
• "Writing, too, is ninety percent listening. (...) The deeper you can listen, the better you can write. You take in the way things are without judgment, and the next day you can write the truth about the way things are." (52-53)
• "Basically, if you want to become a good writer, you need to do three things. Read a lot, listen well and deeply, and write a lot. And don't think too much.(...) If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you." (53-54)
• "Don't tell, but show. Don't tell us about anger, but show us what made you angry. Don't tell readers what to feel. Show them the situation, and that feeling will awaken in them." (68)
• "Be specific. Don't say fruit. Tell what kind of fruit."(70)
• "Writers are great lovers. They fall in love with other writers. That's how they learn to write. They take on a writer, read everything by him or her, read it over again until they understand how the writer moves, pauses, and sees." (79)
• "It is important, especially for a beginning writer, to make clear, assertive statements." (85)
• "Write in cafes. Make a list of cafés, restaurants, and bars you've been in. (...) Also, please, note: don't forget to try writing in laundromats." (93-94)
• "Writers write about things that other people don't pay much attention to. (...) A writer's job is to make the ordinary come alive, to awaken ourselves to the specialness of simply being. (...) Learn to write about the ordinary" (99-100)
• "There is no perfection. If you want to write, you have to cut through and write. There is no perfect atmosphere, notebook, pen, desk, so train yourself to be flexible. Try writing under different circumstances and in different places. (...) If you want to write, you will find a way no matter what." (101-102)
• "If you want to write, write. If one book doesn't get published, write another one. Each one will get better because you have all the more practice behind you." (108)
• "Have a tenderness and determination toward you writing, a sense of humor and a deep patience that you are doing the right thing." (109)
• "When you want to write in a certain form - a novel, short story, poem - read a lot of writing in  that form. When you read a lot in that form, it becomes imprinted inside you, so when you sit down to write, you write in that structure." (124)
• "See the big picture. You are committed to writing or finding about it. Continue under all circumstances." (135)
• "If you find you are having trouble writing and nothing seems real, just write about food. It is always solid and is the one thing we all can remember about our day." (138)
• "Trust your own voice and write from it. (...) Something good will come out. Have patience. (155-158) 
• "Wait a while before you reread your writing. Time allows for distance and objectivity about your work. (...) As you reread, circle whole sections that are good in your notebooks. They can be beginning points for future writing." (162)

And above all:

• "Just write, just write, just write. In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the center of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write. Say yes, stay alive, be awake. Just write. Just write. Just write." (101)

From Where I Stand

As a new year's resolution I decided to do a new, 365 day long photo challenge. It will be something similar to Project 365, but not quite the same. This time I am going to take a "from where I stand" photo every day for a year. At first look it may not seem as creative or as challenging as P365; yet, I will try to bring out the most from each shot as well as the entire challenge itself. With this project the emphasis is not on the quality of photos and getting better photography-wise, but proving to myself that I can commit and stick to a thing, and do something every day for an entire year without giving up. I decided not to create yet another blog for only the sake of this project, neither do I want to upload and publish these photos on facebook, so I am going to upload photos to here.

Blogger is acting funny, and I can't upload photos. So I created a page on my photoblog. If you are interested, you can find the photos here.

The Reading Challenge of 2012

Here is the previously mentioned reading challenge that I came up with and will try to complete in 2012.

Over the past few years my love for reading has not only manifested in reading the printed word (and sniffing the pages and sleeping with them) but in a book-purchasing addiction too. Whenever I am happy, gloomy, bored, or busy with one too many tasks to do but I feel like procastinating, and I have a little money that is burning a hole in pocket, I can't resist buying books, books, more and more books. Even if I can't really afford them nor money- neither timewise, even if I already have a dozen books waiting to be read. I need them, I must have them, I cannot live without them surrounding me. I never have the heart to leave them on the shelf in the store, even if I know that I'll get to them only in a year or three. Hence, my once tiny "to be read" pile has kept growing and my addiction has gotten quite out of hand.

Then a few months ago I ran out of shelf-space and I received a new bookcase. When I started to divide my books into an "already read" and a "to be read" pile, I quickly realized that I had only read about one third of my books, while the "to be read" pile took up an entire bookcase and contained over a hundred volumes. That was the moment when it occurred to me to quit this crazy addiction of mine, and start actually reading my books, instead of only purchasing and abandoning them to the shelves.

So in 2012 I will try not to purchase any more books (or as few as I possibly can), and read as many volumes from my "to be read" pile as I can. Hopefully I will conquer at least 50 books by the end of the year.

Here is the previously mentioned pile:

• My Hollywood by Hugh Loudon
• Savage Beautfy by Nancy Millford
• White Oleander by Janet Fitch
• What a Woman Must Do by Faith Sullivan
• Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams by Sylvia Plath
• Wintering by Kate Moses
• Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Distruction by Sue Townsend
• A Year in Provance by Peter Mayle
• Empire Falls by Richard Russo
• The Collected Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker
• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
• The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud
• Holy Fools by Joanne Harris
• Blue Eyed Boy by Joanne Harris
• My Lates Grievance by Elinor Lipman
• Ecstasy by Irvine Welsh
• A Million Little Pieces by James Frey
• Little Men and Jo's Boys by Louisa May Alcott
• Anna Wintour: Front Row by Jerry Oppenheimer
• Long Way Round by Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman
• Long Way Down by Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman
• A Life in Letters by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Starter for Ten by David Nicholls
• The Gilmore Girls Companion by A.S. Berman
• Hester Among the Ruins by Binnie Kirshenbaum
• The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
• My Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
• The Sweetest Thing by Fiona Shaw
• Cuba by Emily Barr
• The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner
• Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
• A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
• The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
• The Dutchess by Amanda Foreman
• My Name is Memory by Ann Brashares
• Down Under by Bill Bryson
• Save Me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald
• Coco Chanel by Axel Madsen
• The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
• 127 Hours by Aron Ralston
• The Hours by Michael Cunningham
• The Good Life by Jay McInerney
• The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
• The Boys Are Back in Town by Simon Carr
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
• One Fifth Avenue by Candace Bushnell
• The Constant Gardener by John le Carré
• Hunger by Knut Hamsun
• Haven't Stopped Dancing Yet by Shyama Perera
• Cash: The Autobiography of Johnny Cash by J. Cash and Patrick Carr
• Nanny Returns by Nicola Kraus and Emma Mclaughlin
• Jigs and Reels by Joanne Harris
• While Mortals Sleep by Kurt Vonnegut
• The Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
• Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
• Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo
• The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler
• A Long Fatal Love Chase by Louisa May Alcott
• The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings by Oscar Wilde
• Forrest Gump by Winston Groom
• Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• Good Wives by Louisa May Alcott
• The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
• Anne of Avonlea by L. M. Montgomery
• The Puffin Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• Madame Bovary by Flaubert
• Chasing Harry Winston by Lauren Weisberger
• In Her Shoes by Jennifer Weiner 
• Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
• The Evil Seed by Joanne Harris
• Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell is This? by Marion Meade
• The Help by Kathryn Stockett (borrowed)
• Peter Pan by Barrie (borrowed)

Hungarian Books:

• A nap szerelmese by Dallos Sándor
• Aranyecset by Dallos Sándor
• Régimódi történet by Szabó Magda
• Mondjátok meg Zsófikának by Szabó Magda
• Álarcosbál by Szabó Magda
• Blaha Lujza naplója
• Színek és évek by Kaffka Margit
• Halálos tavasz by Zilahy Lajos
• A férfi mind őrült byy Török Rezső
• Pixel by Tóth Krisztina
• Úri Muri by Móricz Zsigmond
• Körhinta by Sarkadi Imre
• Jöttem, láttam... Vesztettem? by Székely Éva
• Franciadrazsé by Vass Virág
• Lolával az élet by D. Tóth Kriszta
• A szerelem könyvei by Salinger Richárd
• Dafke by Lugosi Viktória

(This is not the complete list yet. I will update it with my Hungarian books, plus the volumes I have in my dorm room.)

As you can see, there are buttons for different pages under the blog title. If you click on "The 'To Be Read'" button, you will find this very post there, and as I proceed with my readings over the year, I will cross out the volumes that has shifted from the 'To Be Read" pile into the "Already Read" pile. Next to the "The To Be Read" button there is the "Reading List 2012" button, under which you will find the  - hopefully - ever so growing list of books I manage to read in 2012. Fingers crossed I will be able to keep it updated.