Useful insight

When I go to someone’s home, I always like to see what’s on the bookshelf. (If there is one, of course. If there isn’t, I may never return.) So I was delighted to stumble across this quotation from the French author François Muriac:

‘Tell me what you read and I’ll tell you who you are’ is true enough, but I’d know you better if you told me what you reread.

You’ll know me better, then, if I say that if I had to choose my eight Desert Island books, these would probably be the ones. Quickly chosen, with no concern over whether they’re great literature or will impress anyone. Feel free to comment with yours.

A Town Like Alice  Nevil Shute
How Green Was My Valley  Richard Llewellyn
Lord of the Rings  JRR Tolkien
Pride and Prejudice  Jane Austen
The Dark is Rising  Susan Cooper
The Jungle Book  Rudyard Kipling
Time Enough for Love  Robert Heinlein
Wind in the Willows  Kenneth Grahame

Obviously I get the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare too. So I’d ask if I could swap the Bible for Republican Party Reptile by PJ O’Rourke, a trade that I venture to suggest has never been done before.

Let’s be clear

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
Jack Kerouac

It’s hard to write well and simply. For one thing, it’s terribly easy to become intoxicated by the exuberance of one’s own verbosity and, drunk on dramatic diction, seduced by subordinate clauses (often parenthetically embedded), plummet or plunge headfirst into a prolixity that nears inspissation.

And for another, we often feel that plain language just won’t do. I mean, no real writer would say something just like anybody else would say it, surely? Why did I spend those years reading the great works of literature and studying what the most insightful critics had to say, if only to use words a child could understand in my own writing?

I will leave the conclusion as an exercise for the reader.

The Wonderland of words

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

Alice never worked in the media, evidently.