nuit_nuageuse

Books I am currently reading:

The Idiot by Fyodor Doestoevsky
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
The Plague by Albert Camus

I have been reading and stopping and reading and stopping The Idiot for about three years, which is ridiculous. It is a good story but easy to lose track of characters if you put it down for a week and then pick it up again. Memoirs is good but the translation from French seems a little awkward and bulky. When I was seventeen I went to a library sale and bought stacks and stacks of old classic books. Since then I’ve been keen to read as widely and as much as I can; unfortunately at my former job it became strangely tedious to read books after reading newspaper articles all day long, which I had to trim for brevity. Novel-writing amazes me. I have always had trouble with uncued creative writing because I feel I always put too much of myself into the characters. It’s hard to disassociate yourself from what you’re writing. I suppose it’s a lot like acting in the sense that you really need to get into the head of whomever you’re illustrating and make them say and do what they would do as that character, rather than what you would say and do in that situation. Takes practice, something I haven’t spent any time doing, really. I like nonfiction and biographies a lot. Maybe when I’m done with the above list I will start on the biographies of U.S. presidents I always hear about.