Reading List

While I have been researching ways to redo this blog, I quit posting... but I've decided to keep going. I'll give it an overhaul this summer, when I have more time.

In the meantime, I think I will jump back in by posting my current reading list. There are a lot of books here, but it includes some (like the physics and math books!) that are taking me a very long time to read. I tend to read a chapter of those and let the concepts soak in for a month or so.

Art books are underrepresented here. The list would grow too long. I'm not including all of the ones I pull out as I work.

In no particular order, here goes!:

Wizards Aliens and Starships: Physics and Math in Fantasy and Science Fiction, by Charles L. Adler; I love this book!!! It is taking me a very long time to read- there are a lot of equations. But the concepts are fascinating, and I think it will be an invaluable writing resource. My teens are enjoying the bits I am passing along to them, too.

Cover to Cover (20th Ann. Ed.) by Shereen LaPlantz; this is a new purchase. I can't wait to dive in.

The Art of Slow Writing by Louise DeSalvo; do I really need this encouragement???!!!  :)  I am so grateful to know that I am not alone in taking a very long time with writing projects. This is a nice counterbalance to the book by Isaac Asimov I recently read, in which he said you can write well, or prolifically, but probably not both.

Living Things by Anne Porter (again...)

Splitting An Order by Ted Kooser; this is another new favorite

As You Like It by William Shakespeare; because I have to have a Shakespeare play going at all times!

Rendevous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke; I am having a hard time getting into this one. I think it is the *tiny* paperback print and yellowing paper that is giving me problems.

Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World by Jane Hirshfield; library selection; there is a good chapter on Basho. Still reading through the rest.

National Geographic's Backyard Guide to the Night Sky; there is a nice brief section on each constellation's mythology.

Project Origami: Activities for Exploring Mathematics by Thomas Hull; thank heavens for interlibrary loan! This book is wonderful. I made the five intersecting tetrahedra model, and it is stunning. Math would have been my favorite subject in school if I had been introduced to this.

Poetry notebook visitors

This is one of the hazards of keeping a poetry notebook in an artist's sketchbook, I suppose.

I think I just can't resist picking up a paintbrush. Even when I am writing, I still see things in a concrete way. The wooly bear caterpillar I saw the other day inspired this flight of fancy.

I won't show the whole page because the poem is not going well. This is the only pretty thing on the page, flying and crawling under a pile of scratchouts.

Maybe that's really why it's there.

Poetry and Art

I have a dear friend in the frozen north who is a wonderful poet. Yesterday, the two of us "discovered" Anne Porter's poetry on the Writer's Almanac website. (Incidentally, today's featured poet over there is Ted Kooser, another one of our favorites!) Porter's poetry is simple and beautiful. It was also interesting to learn that her husband was the painter Fairfield Porter, and her brother-in-law was Eliot Porter.

When I was 11, my parents gave me a copy of Eliot Porter's  In Wildness is the Preservation of the World. To say that this book had an influence on me would be an understatement. I still have my treasured copy, and pull it out from time to time. It is fading, but retains its beauty. I think his photographic vision shaped my love of nature, conservation, and my own artistic viewpoint.

It is interesting how often poetry and art seem to intersect, at least in my wanderings.