Rebecca Reads

Rose, Where Do You Get that Red? by Kenneth Koch is written for educators, and yet it is accessible to others. Reading it as a mother shows me that reading classic poetry to my young child can be inspiring in not just their own understandings of poetry but also in their own writing. There is [...]

In Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dogs: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences, Kitty Burns Florey sets out to tell why diagramming sentences is so much fun and the brief history of the art of diagramming sentences. To some extent, I felt Florey’s book was more memoir and humor than it was history. Yet, [...]

How many times have you reread the same story?
Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau is a collection of the same story, written 99 different ways.
Some of the stories are fascinating retellings in various styles. Some are stereotypes (feminine , cockney, Gallacism, exclamations), some are in different perspectives (past, present, blurb, ignorance), some are different styles [...]

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I loved reading Vladimir Nabokov’s short stories a few months ago because his control of language is so powerful, although I did feel that some of his stories were rather odd. Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire is similar in that it is both odd and powerfully written. It is a masterwork of creation: who [...]

I could not put down the 140-page novella The Stranger by Albert Camus after I picked it up, despite the fact that it is odd and rather disturbing. Camus’ Nobel Prize-winning writing style was absolutely beautiful: it reminded me of both John Steinbeck’s in The East of Eden (which I thought was a perfect combination [...]

In Possession, A.S. Byatt powerfully creates characters so believable that I found myself assuming that the events she writes of really happened, that the feelings described were truly felt, and that the characters actually lived.
For me, Possession’s strength lies in this powerful creation. While I enjoyed the developing action (it is a literary mystery) and [...]

In his stories, Vladimir Nabokov so perfectly captures a character, or a setting, or an emotion, that I feel that the character is real, the setting surrounds me, and the emotion is my own.
His writing in these stories is so well done that I, a very amateur writer, feel the urge to try my hand [...]

Any blocked artist, be he or she a painter, writer, or actor, can benefit from the positive course of action suggested by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way. The Artist’s Way is the most powerful call for self-nurturing and creativity that I’ve ever read. I wish I’d found it years ago, because I feel it [...]

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Hemingway’s stories are poetry: that is my first and lasting impression of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories. In his short stories, Hemingway treats words as sparsely as do poets.
I don’t usually understand or enjoy poetry because it feels so much must be inferred or interpreted. (After I finish reading the HTR&W short stories, [...]

At age five, my mother was my scribe as I wrote my first book (”The Three Little Pigs”). Since then, I have wanted to be a writer.
I picked up Stephen King’s memoir, On Writing, because it seems to be a commonly recommended book for aspiring writers. I’ve never read any Stephen King. I am not [...]