new book

atmospheric rivers, covid boosters replete with chills and fever.  bah.  

i'm reading a new book.  this in itself is a celebration.  i used to love reading; i've always loved reading but have fallen out of the practice.  i blame social media.  anyways i started this book in 2021.  i was all hyped for 2021 to be a reading year.  i made a list of books.  the first one i chose was harry's trees.  the summer of the foot interrupted all that.  but i finally finished it last week.  (book report: it was good. i liked it.)  

so anyways tonight i started a new book.  it's called A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by george saunders.  already i am loving it.  george is a professor.  he teaches a class using russian writers to illustrate how to write. he made this book a small version of his class...well i'm not explaining it well.  but as soon as i started to read i was intrigued. here are some quotes from the book that i dig so far:

"they arrive already wonderful.  what we try to do over the next three years is help them achieve what i call their "iconic space"--the  place from which they will write the stories only they could write, using what makes them uniquely themselves--their strengths, weaknesses, obsessions, peculiarities, the whole deal.  at this level, good writing is assumed; the goal is to help them acquire the technical means to become defiantly and joyfully themselves."

become defiantly and joyfully myself?  yes please!

"the resistance in the stories is quiet, at a slant, and comes from perhaps the most radical idea of all: that every human being is worthy of attention and that the origins of every good and evil capability of the universe may be found by observing a single, even very humble, person and the turnings of his or her mind."

"to study the way we read is to study the way the mind works: the way it evaluates a statement for truth, the way it behaves in relation to another mind (i.e., the writer's) across space and time.  what we are going to be doing here, essentially, is watching ourselves read (trying to reconstruct how we felt as we were, just now, reading). why would we want to do this? well the part of the mind that reads a story is also the part that reads the world; it can deceive us, but it can also be trained to accuracy; it can fall into disuse and make us more susceptible to lazy, violent, materialistic forces, but it can also be urged back to life, transforming us into more active, curious, alert readers of reality."

uhhh.  this is going to be good.