Where Books and Readers Come Together
“When I got to the sixth veil, I went over to the Shiva statue, simulated an orgasm, and cast myself to the ground while removing the seventh and final veil.”
“Well, to me, that’s what love is. Not that anyone can understand me, though.”
“And she was tragical only in the sense that she was great, for she loved to play on the side of Victory.”
“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
Maria goes in search for her dreams without losing the best parts of her soul or her faith.
One can sense the sheer joy words must have given Orwell when he describes his history with reading and writing, and it makes this reader all the more glad that such poetry can live in the hearts of men and women.
”The name Beowulf itself, ‘bee-wolf,’ apparently meaning bear, suggests affinities with a widely known folktale figure of prodigious strength, the Bear’s Son, the distribution of whose appearances, in North America as well as Eurasia, points to a background in that primordial cult of reverence for the bear discussed in Primitive Mythology, and which is still observed among the Ainus of Japan.”
Captain Beatty, in Fahrenheit 451, imagines how fire is much like censorship, both eradicated knowledge: “‘It’s perpetual motion…. What is fire? It’s a mystery… Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences.’”
Like all writers from the moment they put pen to paper, Anderson desired to be a great writer; however, much of his life was spent as a middle-class businessman in Ohio and Virginia, later becoming the owner of Marion Publishing Company and the owner and editor of two newspapers.
In one of his latest novels, Our Kind of Traitor, Le Carré provides a tale of espionage that makes one cheer and hope for the villain to win, or at least survive. Perry and his girlfriend, Gail, befriend Dima, a Russian money-launderer, in Antigua while on vacation.
Wells writes of this natural tendency of intelligent forms “to carry warfare sunward is, indeed, their only escape from the destruction that, generation after generation, creeps upon them.”
Atwood studied Moodie, wrote about Moodie, and both Atwood and Moodie lived and wrote about the Canadian wild and the female who is transformed by it. However, Moodie is not the only Canadian writer to have influenced Margaret Atwood and the short story “Death by Landscape.”
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the first book in the trilogy and recent film with plans for the others to follow, illustrate how a writer can, on faith alone, understand what is necessary to write a compelling story.
As a writer there is always the temptation to be a cruel god over the imagined characters, typing down conflict after conflict without sympathy; there is also an even greater risk of loving the characters too much, coddling them as babes, and becoming benevolent creators over the fiction.
There can be no successful revelation of a reader’s mind merging with that of the author without a strong narrative voice. Without a proper voice, characters fall to one dimensional shades and plot unravels like yarn balls on the floor of the reader’s imagination.
