Highlighters At the Ready
May. 16th, 2025 07:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pshaw_ravenI have been out of school for a very long time now, and I still enjoy setting up a "summer reading program." Sometimes I decide to read as much as I can of a particular author's work, or I pick a subject. But it's the same kind of buzz as getting to go to the book fair, with adult money.
I'm finally starting to feel like writing again, some of it in a paper notebook, some of it in a Google Document. I liked this piece of advice from, I believe it was Jordan Peele, who said that his first drafts are mainly dumping sand into a sandbox where he'll later build his castle. That's been an immense help. Given the crushing perfectionism I grew up around, if something requires fixing and revising, it's shit and you're a bad person. Writing in a paper notebook also helps with this because it's much harder to edit on the fly.
This summer I'm revisiting Arthurian tales, which were always a major interest of mine. I've got TH White's novels (replacing older copies I lost), and Mallory's Morte d'Arthur. I tried reading Lawhead's Pendragon cycle once and found them kind of tedious, but I may take another run at them. Stemming from Mallory, I've also got my grubby claws on The Medievalism of Lawrence of Arabia because I'm an academic at heart and love dense books I can mark up. And I love Ned.
Utterly unrelated to Arthur, I've also got Michel de Montaigne on deck. Well, he may be unrelated, or he may not be, we'll find out. In the "odds and ends" category, I'm reading 48 Laws of Power as someone who will never wield power over anyone else, but is very interested in knowing when someone's trying to use it on me.
Last year's summer books were a little disjointed and I never picked up on a theme, so it's nice to feel like I have direction this year.
I'm finally starting to feel like writing again, some of it in a paper notebook, some of it in a Google Document. I liked this piece of advice from, I believe it was Jordan Peele, who said that his first drafts are mainly dumping sand into a sandbox where he'll later build his castle. That's been an immense help. Given the crushing perfectionism I grew up around, if something requires fixing and revising, it's shit and you're a bad person. Writing in a paper notebook also helps with this because it's much harder to edit on the fly.
This summer I'm revisiting Arthurian tales, which were always a major interest of mine. I've got TH White's novels (replacing older copies I lost), and Mallory's Morte d'Arthur. I tried reading Lawhead's Pendragon cycle once and found them kind of tedious, but I may take another run at them. Stemming from Mallory, I've also got my grubby claws on The Medievalism of Lawrence of Arabia because I'm an academic at heart and love dense books I can mark up. And I love Ned.
Utterly unrelated to Arthur, I've also got Michel de Montaigne on deck. Well, he may be unrelated, or he may not be, we'll find out. In the "odds and ends" category, I'm reading 48 Laws of Power as someone who will never wield power over anyone else, but is very interested in knowing when someone's trying to use it on me.
Last year's summer books were a little disjointed and I never picked up on a theme, so it's nice to feel like I have direction this year.
