Category Archives: Book Recommendation

The Red Notebook by Antoine Laura

Row boat on lake for waiting

Scene from my story, Waiting.

When I attended Diablo Valley College for two years, a preschool program was set up for students who wanted to be Early Childhood Education teachers. I enrolled my son, Adrian, and took a class from Beverly Dutra, which included being able to observe the children, how they interacted and what activities they chose. Class members wrote reports on the observations and Beverly wrote comments all over our papers. She was encouraging, wise, and an outstanding instructor.

Since then (over 30 years ago), Beverly and I have kept in touch. She has moved a few hours away, but cheerful notes from her appear every season. She is an avid reader, dislikes the internet and never uses it. The last couple of years we have been sharing books.  I send her the latest anthology in which one of my stories is published. She sends me books she finished that she thinks I would like.

 

Last month I sent her The Las Positas’ Anthology, with my story “Waiting” in it. Today I received The Red Notebook from her and a note saying my stories have a haunting quality. (Not ghost haunting.) She said The Red Notebook reminded her a bit of my writing and asked if I can discover the similar element. She has me hooked, I can’t wait to read it and see what element she means.

 

It’s available on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Red-Notebook-  The author is Antoine Laurain who was born in Paris. He is the author of five novels, including The President’s Hat.

 

Amazon’s description of the story follows:  “Heroic bookseller Laurent Letellier comes across an abandoned handbag on a Parisian street. There’s nothing in the bag to indicate who it belongs to, although there’s all sorts of other things in it. Laurent feels a strong impulse to find the owner and tries to puzzle together who she might be from the contents of the bag. Especially a red notebook with her jottings, which really makes him want to meet her. Without even a name to go on, and only a few of her possessions to help him, how is he to find one woman in a city of millions?”

 

It sounds very interesting to me, especially since it takes place in Paris, my favorite city.

 

Let me know if you read it and what you think of the writing.

The Red Notebook

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Do You Want To Be Notorious? Ask Sue Monk Kidd

Notorious imageWhen I receive books in the mail that I’ve ordered, I scrutinize the cover, front and back, and then randomly open the book. Sue Monk Kidd’s Firstlight arrived today.

I landed on page 41. Kidd describes how a woman said to her, “When I turn fifty, I want to become notorious.” Kidd asked her “Notorious for what?” The woman hadn’t figured that out yet. Kidd didn’t understand the appeal of the idea but thought about it and wondered, “What would I want to be notorious for at fifty?”

Of course, I had to read on to find out her answer.

On page 43, she describes how amazed she was on her birthday as she looked at the guests’ faces. They were “beautiful and shining.” She glanced at the white lily in a vase and it was so gorgeous “the sight nearly wiped me out.” The experience gave her an “amazement at life.”  She remembered a quote by Emily Dickinson, “Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it.”

Kidd realized she had been “moving through life on automatic pilot, half-seeing, half-here, abducted by the dreaded small stuff.. . . .We will have a true and blissful marriage to life only to the extent we are aware.” She found the answer to the question “What would I want to be notorious for at fifty?”

“Let it be for nothing more than harboring a wild amazement at life. Let it be for choking up at poetry and the sight of human faces. For falling into easy rapture over lilies and all the other run-of-the-mill marvels that make up life. Let me become notorious for going around with my bridal veil tossed back and my mouth saying I do. Renewing my vows with life. Every day. A hundred times a day.”

Firstlight has stories and essays that are drawn from Kidd’s early years of her journey as a writer and as a spiritual seeker.

What would you want to be notorious for at fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety or a hundred?

 

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The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler

The writers journeyChristopher Vogler wrote in his book, The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, that one of the most influential books of the 20th century may turn out to be Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Writers are using the “ageless patterns which Campbell identifies.” The most persistent theme is the myth of the hero/heroine. “Stories built on the model of the Hero’s Journey. . . well up from a universal source in the shared unconscious and reflect universal concerns. Writers can use the model to diagnose any plot problem they encounter.

 

Christopher Vogler

Christopher Vogler

The Writers Journey wheel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Vogler states “I’m retelling the hero myth in my own way, and you should feel free to do the same. Every storyteller bends the mythic pattern to his or her own purpose or the needs of a particular culture. That’s why the hero has a thousand faces.”

 

Vogler includes in his book, a table to compare The Writer’s Journey and The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

 

After I wrote yesterday’s post about Hada’s Fog being a Cain and Abel story, I thought about Norman in the Painting. I’m a pantser, not a plotter so I didn’t plan a theme or myth, but Jill is on a heroine’s journey. I have an idea of how it will end, but remembering Vogler’s wheel makes my ending clearer and makes the writing easier.

Have you used the Hero’s/Heroine’s Journey?

 

 

 

The third edition of The Writer’s Journey is available on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Writers-Journey-Mythic-Structure-3rd/dp/

 

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Wayne Dyer eBooks

Wayne Dyer with arms open

The following quote was in an email from Hay House. “But as we were preparing his obituary and information for the press release about his passing we were going through I Can See Clearly Now, his memoir for information to share about his life: we noticed that August 30th was in fact a very important date in Wayne’s life.

August 30, 1974 was, in fact, what Wayne considered the most important day of his life. It was the day that Wayne went to the grave site for the father he never met in Biloxi, Mississippi. After going to his father’s grave, he wrote Your Erroneous Zones in 14 days, and his life changed forever.

Dyer passed away to the day, 41 years after the most important day of his life.
In honor of Wayne Dyer, “All of Wayne’s Hay House eBooks are only $1.99 everywhere you buy your eBooks. My feeling is the best way to keep Wayne’s legacy alive is to share one of his amazing life changing books with a friend or re-read one yourself.”

Hay House Publishing at https://www.hayhouse.com

Do you have a favorite Wayne Dyer book?

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What Are You Reading?

cropped-books-crop-no-empty-shelves1.jpg  What are you reading now?  I switched genres and read Personal by Lee Child. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. Lee has a subtle humor, the characters are well-drawn, and most of it took place in Paris. He’s my dad’s favorite author. At ninety, my dad reads a book a day.

Lee Child’s birth name is Jim Grant. He is 60 years old, born in October, 1954 in Coventry, England. His writing style has been described as hardboiled and commercial.

For the Reading Group I’m in, one member chose The Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill. She uses the Stream of Consciousness technique, which I like.  It would be fun to try it one day. http://www.amazon.com/Dept-Speculation-Jenny-Offill/dp/0385350813

 

I’d love to hear what you are reading.

 

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