Tag Archive Neil Gaiman

ByGD

Perfectly Safe

In the white, liberal, upper middle-class circles I usually inhabit, safety trumps all other values. Helicopter parenting has become the standard for responsible parenting, despite data to the contrary. Schools and parents are increasingly making decisions based on the fear of lawsuits or the fear of disapproval from more safety-conscious parents instead of their own best judgement. So this quote from Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book struck me as particularly meaningful.

“I wanted to keep you perfectly safe,” said Silas. “But there is only one perfectly safe place for your kind and you will not reach it until all your adventures are over and none of them matter anymore.”

We should not seek perfect safety for our children, or for anyone we care about.

ByGD

In Which a Review of American Gods Turns into a Writing Riff

American Gods book coverFiction changes lives. I haven’t written fiction since middle school. (Except that one NaNo novel in 2008, but that was therapy.) Even so, I am subject to that universal writerly neurosis – I secretly think that deep inside me lies hidden the great American novel. At least I think it’s universal. Maybe other technical writers are perfectly happy with what they do. Maybe novelists secretly dream of writing that perfectly researched narrative nonfiction.

Anyway. When I got back from Airwaves, an idea for a story popped into my head; a few characters, some themes, a couple of scenes. This is nothing new in itself. I’ve walked around narrating stories in my head that I had no intention of ever writing down since – well, since I stopped writing them down in middle school. But these characters wouldn’t go away. Whatever else I was doing, a part of my brain was thinking about these broken characters and the shit they were going through. Since another good chunk of my brain has been following my kids around in this manner for the past five years, it left precious little attention for the tasks at hand, which has, unfortunately, been noted at the day job. Read More

ByGD

Pollyblog: Maybe I Need a Book Group

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Once upon a book group

I tried starting a book group in grad school. We were all broke grad students. So we didn’t require everyone to buy and read the same book. Each month, everyone brought one book they liked. We each pitched our book to the group. Then we loaned our book to the person who was most interested. The money we saved on books was spent on wine. The down side to the system was that since we hadn’t all read the same book, there wasn’t much book conversation once the pitches were done. Much wine was consumed. Eventually we started meeting in bars, where they never ran out of wine. The books fell to the wayside.

This is kind of the story of my life. Even though I have family and friends who read as much as I do, I never seem to know people who have read the same books I have.

Book Loneliness

After spending an intoxicating two weeks in the heady atmosphere of Iceland Airwaves, where every conversation referenced books and music and was about matters of culture and spirit. I interviewed musicians who cited Elizabeth Gilbert and Tom Waits in the same paragraph. I had rational discussions of immigration policy with a Frenchwoman over breakfast. At a museum, I bought a memoir by a Icelander who had been captured by pirates in the 1600s. I expressed surprise that a survivor of that pirate raid had written a memoir. The woman working at the gift shop replied haughtily, “We are a very literary people.” After that, it was hard coming down to the mundane world of day job particulars and school lunches.

Tiger Rag book cover

I finished Halldór Laxness’ The Great Weaver from Kashmir, and desperately needed to dissect that one with others. A few Facebook comments and the Laxness in Translation web site (and thank god for that) were my only reference points. Then I read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (much more on that one here). Several friends had already read it. I got a few “I told you you would like it,” comments. But no one really wanted to talk about it. Now I’ve read Tiger Rag by Nicholas Christopher. It’s a preview copy for a review to post elsewhere, so of course I have no one else to bounce ideas off of before I write it.

Maybe I need a new book group

So the other day my heart skipped a beat when someone said, “I’m reading the best book right now.” I almost held my breath. Was something I had read or an author I knew? We could talk about it.

omegabookcover

Then she held up a copy of The Omega 3 Diet. I spent the next 15 minutes learning about her sister’s weight loss and the connection between Omega 6 and joint pain with a frozen smile painted on my face.

ByGD

Unraveling The Great Weaver From Kashmir

The Great Weaver from Kashmir coverAs my trip to Iceland Airwaves grew imminent in October, I rushed to the library and asked what they had on the shelf by Halldór Laxness. After first telling me there was nothing, they tried again and found The Great Weaver from Kashmir (it was filed under Halldór).

Well. What an introduction to the author.

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