Here’s a literature and reading special. Kavya, one of the most positive and fun people I know, has made this, and it’s her labor of love. By the way, this isn’t a “our favorite books” list, but more of a collection of things regarding literature in general. We think this list is great and very positive-vibe-inducing, and we hope you think the same!
“It’s been a privilege to cobble together this newsletter because working with Kat is a delight. But also because reading is the one thing that I’ve had my whole life - my favorite way to pursue that flighty temptress, adventure. And with this newsletter, we’ve tried to give you a doorway into that world. If you like this, do drop me a note at srinivasan.kavya@gmail.com or tweet to me @kavyas_09. Let’s talk books and more books. - K”
- Michael Chabon is An Underdog on Top of the World - Speaking of a failed comic book club, Chabon writes: “In my heart, to this day, I am always sitting at a big table in a roomful of chairs, behind a pile of errors, lies, and exclamation points, watching an empty doorway. My story and my stories are all, in one way or another, the same, tales of solitude and the grand pursuit of connection, of success and the inevitability of defeat.”
Don’t you want to reach into the screen and hug Michael Chabon? - Bram Stoker’s 1876 Fan Letter to Walt Whitman - Bram Stoker is so delightfully earnest - and has such a sweet and genuine fanboy tone!
“The years which have passed have not been uneventful to me, and I have felt and thought and suffered much in them, and I can truly say that from you, I have had much pleasure and consolation” - Make Good Art, Neil Gaiman’s Commencement Address - You already know that Kat loves commencement addresses, and I’m a sucker for them myself. Here is what I watch when I need inspiration or a reminder. This could very well become a manifesto for artists - as it has, here.
(Also, Gaiman is as close to perfection as an author can get)
- Kurt Vonnegut Diagrams the Shape of All Stories in a Master’s Thesis Rejected by U. Chicago - I’ve begun to look at these graphs as a sort of writer’s cheat sheet. These shapes are, in Vonnegut’s own estimate, his prettiest contributions to culture. I have to agree. There’s even a scientific paper written that vindicates this - here.
(BTW, this newsletter is named after one of Vonnegut’s best books - Cat’s Cradle) - How I Wrote Arrival (and What I Learned Doing It) - Making words visual is tough - and this honest piece by Eric Heisserer is about that exactly. (In more ways than one - if you’ve already watched Arrival!) And at the center of it is:
“In all my draft work on the adaptation, I spent the most time on the intellectual and political challenges of the story. But if I ever encroached on the intimate, emotional through-line of Louise’s journey, the story fell apart. Other scenes could be sacrificed, reworked, moved, or cut to the bone. But director Denis Villeneuve and I found a bare minimum of steps to Louise’s personal journey, and that became our Alamo; our hill we would die defending. Denis had a knack for visuals that spoke on an emotional level while also dovetailing with the intellectual challenges our characters faced. Marrying those two, sometimes in a single line of dialogue or image, made the film come alive. It made us feel the story. And at the end of the day, what drew me most to Ted Chiang’s story was the way it made me feel, and above all else we wanted to transport and share that feeling with audiences.” - Who is the Genius Behind Merriam-Webster’s Social Media? - You can interview a dictionary? Be still, my beating heart. Fortunately LitHub asked Merriam Webster exactly what I would have asked:
LH: What do you see as the role of Merriam-Webster—and/or dictionaries in general—in 2016?
MW: Dictionaries have a simple and impossible job: to attempt to accurately catalogue as much of the language as possible, and that’s been a constant since the 1800s. But one way we can do that in 2016 is at the speed of the Internet: we can see what people are looking up, find out why, and then give them important information about that use in real-time. We can actually interact with dictionary users and English speakers in a direct way through social media, and that humanizes and contemporizes “The Dictionary” for people.
Sometimes this means commenting on words in the news (bigly is a real word; normalize seems to be taking on a new meaning that’s different from the one in our dictionary), but it’s just as likely to be something ridiculous like observing that yes, obviously the hot dog is a sandwich, or giving the history of a new word that hasn’t been added to the dictionary yet. Most people don’t realize that a dictionary exists in a constant state of change—we’re always updating it, because the language is always evolving—but now there’s a window into the stuff we’re working on and thinking about every day. - The Story Teller: Fact, Fiction and the Books of Madeleine L’Engle - Confession time - I adore Madeleine L’Engle. Her tough female protagonists who loved science were exactly what I needed as a geeky teenager who was asking big questions about life. Here she is, being brilliant and cheeky:
Asked to define “science fiction,” L’Engle, the author of the children’s classic “A Wrinkle in Time,” replied, “Isn’t everything? - Ursula Le Guin Has Stopped Writing Fiction—but We Need Her More Than Ever - Yes! Why, you ask?
”Imaginative fiction, Le Guin wrote in 2011, is a way of saying, “It doesn’t have to be the way it is”—“it” being the confines of gender, capitalism, or the publishing industry. Le Guin wrote people of color into science fiction at a time when white men mostly wrote about themselves, albeit on other planets, and she troubled the space-race-era faith in technological triumph. For half a century, she’s been hacking escape hatches into the roof of the suburban McMansion where American literature has been trapped.” My favourite thing about LeGuin (besides her writing of course): ”Le Guin hates being asked about her influences, which are uncountable. On the other hand, she’s written, a select number of books have made no impression on her at all—among them, Atlas Shrugged.)” - 14 Brilliant Pieces of Literature You Can Read In the Time It Takes to Eat Lunch - I’m usually wary of lists like these - but this is really, truly brilliant. Short stories are highly underrated. They may just be tougher to write than entire novels. From Atwood to Hemingway to Adichie - each story is like a tiny piece of chocolate that you get to unwrap and savour.
- The Imperishable Intellectual Jewel: Remembering A.K. Ramanujan 24 years after his Death - The story goes that Ramanujan would remark to friends that he was the hyphen between Indo-American, and this unique fluid identity is exactly what this piece recalls. With his work across languages and cultures, advocating pluralism and diversity every opportunity he had: “Ramanujan also bequeathed us a politics of culture – how to read and listen and write such that one language is not considered more naturally literary than another, that male voices, however loud, are not more important than female ones, that a Brahmin’s view of the world is not more valid than that of a Dalit, that there is never one version of a story nor is one version more true than another.”
Pair this with a heart-wrenching short poem on finding yourself, and your identity - Ramanujan’s Self-Portrait. - Roald Dahl on Writing - These little audio snippets are wonderful - heartening if you’re a writer, but also great if Roald Dahl is an old friend (like he is to Kat and me):
“When you’re writing, it’s rather like going on a very long walk. Across valleys and mountains and things, and you get the first view of what you see and you write it down. Then you walk a bit further, maybe on top of a hill, and you see something else, and you write that down. And you go on like this, day after day, getting different views of the same landscape, really. The highest mountain on the walk is obviously the end of the book, where you can get the best view, and you can look back and see all that you have done. But it’s a very very long, slow process”
Also, here is Roald Dahl’s beautiful writing hut. Goals.
- I love my wife. My wife is dead. - Let it never be said that we didn’t put in at least one piece of writing that will make you cry. Kat and I are both Feynman fans (and really, who isn’t?) and this letter always manages to wring out the tears. Always.
My contribution to this has just been the “Always.” at the end of the last piece. Hope you liked this issue :).