TRYING

When I started the ToFGT blog, it was my absolute intention to post every week. One of the reasons I had for starting the site, after all, was to give myself a self-imposed writing deadline with no room for excuses for not exercising writing muscles. Alas, my day job has kept me away. Though I offer no excuse, I take a small amount of comfort in the fact that my day job does involve books--reading books, talking about books, being surrounded by books and by people who write and read and teach books. So, at least there is that. Mostly, though, I take comfort in the fact that I have also been kept away by my other writing. I have had a good streak going lately of working the fiction writing muscles in what time I have had available to write at all. It is highly important to me that I make progress on that front. More on that . . . someday.

For now, I do have a couple of things on my mind this week highly relevant to the literary world that I wish to share with you.

One of my favorite books from this year, discussed in a post entitled DAWN, is Amor Towles' Rules of Civility. It is a fine New York novel and a fine gathering of words into sentences from a first-time author who, fascinatingly enough, has a day job that is distinctly unliterary. For this reason, I am amazed as much by the fact that he wrote a book as by the actual book itself. And, I admire him greatly for his commitment and plan for getting a novel written and then for seeing that plan through. What he produced was a pleasure to read. goodreads.com recently hosted a live chat with Towles about his work and it was a tremendous opportunity to hear a writer answer questions about his book and discuss his craft. I hope you will read the book, but definitely take a few moments to watch the chat here.

Also, I am excited to have lying on the top of my t0-be-read pile the newest novel from Ivan Doig, called The Bartender's Tale. This one is on loan from our local library, so I am worried about getting it read in time, especially since I am at this point only about a sixth of the way through the big Hemingway biography I am reading. I have discussed Wendell Berry in great depth here as one of my favorite authors. Doig, for me, ranks just as highly. Berry, early in his career, was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and Doig has been called a successor to Wallace Stegner, whose long life and career were highly influential for not only  subsequent generations of so-called Western writers, but also for writing in general and for land-use policy and environmental issues. I look forward to sharing much more about this latest book and about the Stegner line of authors in a forthcoming post.