JolieH

Lately, I've been reading poetry. I tried to straighten out the book mess in my room yesterday. LOL I cleared my desktop. It was stacked with mostly classics: Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Virginia Wolff. I moved the classics across the room and organized poetry books. They include anthologies, instructional, and individual works. I have a novel, “Memoirs of a Geisha,” waiting to be read, but I haven’t got into it yet. I like fictional/ cultural memoir type stories.

What I do like is writer’s books about writing, such as Anne Lamott’s “ Bird by Bird.” and Joan Didion, I started “A year of Magical Thinking,” Steven King “On Writing,” is real good. Those are above my desk along with art instruction, color theory, and biographies and letters of Picasso and Hemingway. I also have books of Gertrude Stein and others in that era.

I have a collection of children’s classics, “Alice in Wonderland,” “Black Beauty,” Wizard of Oz,” “Peter Pan,” to name a few, my daughter’s burrowed several and not returned them. I took a children’s literature course at the university.

I also took a detective writing course, so have classic detective novels, “The Maltese Falcon,” The Big Sleep,” ,”A is for Alibi” are just a few. I learned to enjoy some pulp and noir fiction.

Then there is anthologies from college, English literature, American Literature, and such.

I have a few science fiction, War of the Worlds, Time Machine, A Picture of Dorrian Grey, Dracula, and lots of short stories.

I have many books about writing, rhetoric, literary criticism and commentary, philosophy and such. I like them when I’m reading them in class, but I rarely look at them when it’s my choice.

Then I have a lot of books about painters, Renoir, Monet, Raphael, Picasso, Michelangelo, Frieda Kahlo, to name a few. Plus, painting from the Louvre and some less known artists. I like to look through these from time to time.

There are more, but that’s the bulk of them.

Beth Castillo

I chose them all ... except romance ... I od'd on romance back in my teens and twenties and was horribly disalusioned when my husband didn't fit the mould (thank God!) ... anyway, one genre not represented in the poll is Fantasy (unless you are lumping it with Science Fiction which is inaccurate)

One of my favorite Authors, Ursula LeGuin, wrote Wizard of Earthsea, which begins a series of 4 novels and a book of short stories (A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, Tehanu and Tales from Earthsea) ... oh, and aparently there's another book ... The Other Wind ... I haven't read this one ... must find a copy ...

Also, who can forget the Lord of the Rings by J.R.R.Tolkein ... the forrunner of modern fantasy ... and I love, love, LOVE The Hobbit and read it multiple times ... and I credit the poems in The Hobbit for sending me down the road of poetry love

Also, my first major on college was theater and I got quite adept at reading plays ... in my mind they are not unlike poetry ... there has to be a certain rythmic quality to the lines and actions of the players and a well written play can feed that rythym to the players ... I'm trying to think of an example of what I'm trying to say ... The Glass Menagerie ... a very difficult play to follow if the rythym is off ...

Anyway, for me, if it's written down, I'll read it.