Review: Diary by Chuck Palahniuk

age: adult
genre: transgressive
rating: 8/8 tentacles

This is about art and ambition and immortality. It's about inspiration and irony. It's about the torment of geniuses.

There's this animal, amost-hysteria in Chuck Palahniuk's writing that appeals to me. His main characters (I've only ready two of his books so far) are falling apart, inside and out and then sometimes rebuilding themselves, as they strive for the extraordinary, or suppress their potential to achieve the extraordinary, like Misty Marie. The other book I've read is Fight Club.

Diary is honest and desperate and crazy and surreal and sad and tragic. I love the idea of the "lunatic's" ranting on the walls, the missing rooms. The conspiracy. I enjoy reading about the acoutrements of art--makes me want to go paint something

Review: Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose

age: adult
genre: nonfiction, craft
rating: 5/8 tentacles

Reading Like a Writer is a guide for close reading. Francine Prose dedicates each chapter to a different writing element: sentences, paragraphs, dialogue, character, detail, and more. She provides several excerpts per chapter to illustrate these aspects of writing and discusses the mechanics of each excerpt, noting what makes them work or fail to work. And ruins the end of Anna Karenina. Thanks.
 
The thing about writing, is that everybody disagrees about what makes it good--a point that Prose emphasizes as she presents example after example.  The excerpts alone (good and bad) got the wheels in my mind turning. If nothing else, Prose is an excellent curator. I liked seeing opposing writing styles smashed in side by side because they reminded me that there is no "right" way to do something. I have choices. I can learn the rules and then break them. My to-read list is longer now. Some of the excerpts made me want to read more, which made me wonder what it was about them that drew me in. Mostly conflict, I think. The promise of a good conflict. Or cleverly constructed prose. Or... something. Clarity.