Amy Sue Nathan

Booked

I’m not much of a reviewer, but I am fabulous impulse shopper — especially when it comes to books. I like to own books, even though I own a library card. I am considering one day using that library card and borrowing a book to see if it works for me.

In the meantime, here are three of my most recent finds…about writing of course!

Flip Dictionary: I just about flipped for this. You can look up a word without being able to think of the word. You read that correctly. Think notadictionary. Think notathesaurus. Think betterthanspellcheck. Can’t think of a word for the earth between Arctic and Tropic of Cancer? It’s the Temperate Zone! Who knew? Did you know that a question within a sentence is called a tag question? Me either! Did you know that a clover with three leaves is a shamrock and a clover with four leaves is a quatrefoil? Didn’t think so. The book is strewn with lists: types of clothes, horse terms, snow and ice vehicles and 32 words for orange. Owning this book allows me the pleasure of leafing through, not clicking around…and every so often I really like that!

The Half-Known World – On Writing Fiction: Glad I read it, but I won’t read it again, so I easily could have borrowed this from the library or a friend. Oh right, I don’t have any in-person writer friends. Oh well. What I loved about this book was that each essay can stand alone, and refers directly back to the creative works it mentions. My favorite essay is called The Half-Known World. Reading it was the first time I ever got a clue that I did not have to become a cartographer to write fiction. I can leave things out and let people find their way with just enough information to make it real and make it move and make it work. The reader doesn’t have to know everything about every thing or every day or every character. I’m not sure ever wrote anything that way, but I am sure I never thought of that…of intentionally constructing only parts of the world in which my exists. This book is literary in its own right. (If you want to borrow it, email me, we can start a round-robin)

How Not To Write A Novel: 200 Classic Mistakes and How to Avoid Them–A Misstep-by-Misstep Guide: Love it! I’m on page 30 of this book and I am really enjoying the easy-to-read format. It’s more snippets than chapters with examples galore stocked with things to make you laugh and see the error of your fiction-writing ways. This is a reference tool I will reuse and a book I can’t wait to get back to. It reminds me of the first good biography I ever read. It was in college. I remember standing in a little corner of big hallway and saying to a now faceless classmate that it was just like “reading a good story.” Ha! Well, the same can be said for this book. I usually just read fiction as a way to learn about writing fiction but sometimes a little How-To is a good thing…especially when it’s also fairly amusing.

I have a much larger stack of writing books that I wish I’d never purchased. Most of them are by people who have never written another kind of book. Go figure.

I’m going to the library.