Tag: mission creep

A byproduct of going through Lesley’s MFA program is that for that two years, I was limited in what I could read by available time and required reading.

In the past, my book buying habit has been to buy one book at a time and get through it and/or abandon in, then go book shopping. I love to book shop (actually, let’s face facts: I love to shop, period) so I was hardly ever without a book to read; I just never had a backlog. Two years of prescribed reading has changed that in a big way. I now have a TBR (to-be-read) pile that is somewhere around fifty books.

I’m also finding that I will read part of a book, then set it down in favor of something else, with the full intention of going back to it. At this moment, there are 8 books I’m somewhere in the middle of.

• The Birthgrave by Tanith Lee
• The Elements of Journalism by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel
• The Best American Essays: 2016, Robert Atwan, series ed.: Jonathan Franzen, ed.
• E. B. White: Writings From The New Yorker 1927-1976, Rebecca M. Dale, ed.
• Brand New Ancients: a Poem by Kate Tempest
• Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books 2000-2016 by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Little, Big by John Crowley
• A Darker Shade of Magic by V. E., Schwab

So, three adult fantasies, three books of essays, one epic poem, and a craft book. The book that’s in my bag right now is the Schwab. The one that’s been on this list the longest is the Crowley.

The two single-author essay books are made up of very short pieces. To my mind, they’re not one-sitting books, because neither has anything in them that’s longer than 7 or 8 pages, and in the case of the E. B. White, there could be as many as three short pieces on a single page. The Le Guin’s shortest pieces are around a page to a page and a half. Both seem to me to be the sort of book you pick up and thumb through when you have a free moment. The White, especially, excites me because the prose is so tight and the pieces so poignant.

On the other hand, the epic poem feels like something I should sit down with and read through, possibly aloud, in one sitting. I will have to make a hole in my schedule to do this. I made it a few pages in, and then decided that I needed to start over with the above conditions met.

The craft book — The Kovach & Rosenstiel — feels like work. It’s essentially a text book for journalism students, and as a nonfiction writer, I want to have some of the finer points of objective journalism in mind. I’ve read the introduction and have in mind a strategy for getting through it. I’ve identified what feels like 4 sections of two or three chapters each, and I should sit down with each section and get through each in one session. This is where it is handy to me to know that I read approximately 30 pages an hour. Each section should take me about 3 hours. Sorry: not all reading is for pleasure.

The Best American is also required reading. I have the 2017 in my TBR pile, and as soon as I finish this anthology, that one should be added to this list immediately. This is both work reading and pleasure. I’ve found some of my favorite writing in the pages of these anthologies, including a recent piece by Franzen himself in the 2015 anthology.

The Lee is something I picked up based on a short story of hers (“Bite-Me-Not or Fleur de Fur”) I’d read for an interdisciplinary studies course in fantasy writing taught by Mark Edwards. The Birthgrave her first published book in a long and prolific career.

The Crowley is on my list for the same reason. At the time, I felt like it was a “nutritious” enough read for a budding nonfiction author, but at the moment, I seem to be drifting more towards fantasy again, so it may get picked up sooner rather than later, though probably not next after the Schwab.