Books of the Week

How is Everyone dealing with Covid Lockdown.

Running out of ideas to keep your mind interested.

Puzzles and can only take you so far. Wouldn’t you agree.

If you’re a Reader, then you’ll definitely agree.

Books take us to new worlds, introduce us to new people, and cultures, catapult us to the heavens, and pull us back again.

A good book is like a rich red wine, full of body, fragrance, and taste.

Today I’m going share some of the books I’ve been reading.

Just to spread the love a bit.

Here we go read on…

Gulliver’s Wife by Lauren Chater

#laurenchater

This is the extraordinary tale of Lauren Chater’s Mary Gulliver, a midwife, herbalist, and a quietly
courageous woman of her times.

Chater eloquently weaves the wonders, terrors and deprivations of woman of the 18^th Century through her story.

She unravels the fears, the secrets and the darkness surrounding the love of her daughter, and succinctly reaches a reconciliation, that will bring tears to your eyes.

The intrigue and struggle to keep control of her own body and identity, remains relevant still in our modern day.

Gilliver’s Wife is the first novel I’ve read of Lauren Chater, but you can be sure it won’t be my last.

When The Stars Go Dark by Paula McLain

If you are someone who loves thrilling detective novels, then this book is for you.

#paulamclain

An incredibly powerful novel, with a heart pounding ending.

Anna Hart is a seasoned missing persons detective, whose life is totally burnt out, bridges and all.

She decides to travel back to the town where she has felt most happy in life, brought up by foster parents, yet even with their love, she could not put away the pain of her early childhood.

This haunting story will pull you under the covers, and keep you up until late into the night.

The Time Traveller’sWife by Audrey Niffenegger

This story is a rare thing, a truly original story line, not that love stories are new, the telling of this one
certainly is different. An amazing love story, that takes place over time.

#audreyniffenegger

The prose is beautifully executed, such a pleasure to read.

Henry journeys back and forward through time to meet up with the love of his life, Clare.

Clare narrates her childhood and teenage meetings with Henry, where some would say she was underage for such connections

Speculation of moral aspects occur despite the plot, and yet the story still remains intact.

Inventive, sensitive, original in the telling, a love story to last a lifetime, many lifetimes.

Niffenegger has shown amazing skill in making the ordinary, and the impossible seem probable, believable.

Finishing this book brought sadness, as the end was so sweet, I never wanted it to end.

Feel free to add your own book choices in the comments below.

Spring has Sprung

‘If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? – Percy Bysshe Shelley

Spring has arrived the last hurrah of Winter, and our spirits awaken, from a long Winter’s slumber.

Branches that were days ago bare start to bud with new growth, and birds sing with new purpose.

Even in the times we’re experiencing, we feel the stirrings of hope, and renewal.

Over the long Winter season, we sowed soulful seeds of gratitude, order, simplicity, and harmony into our lives.

Now its time to harvest an authentic gathering of contentment, and abundance.

‘Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the sense but the soul.’

– Oscar Wilde

 

Karen Gribbin 
https://www.instagram.com/studiocone10/

We can now interpret, and experience the world through our senses. Our ability to smell, taste, hear and touch.

More and more we need to look after ourselves. Go for the walk, eat a good breakfast, stop rushing around, take time to think and rejoice in the small things.

For the next two weeks, I’m asking you the pause a moment each day and marvel at the natural gifts given to us.

Today, I ask that you look at the blue sky, hear the birds sing their love songs, and let the fruits of the earth linger on your tongue, reach out and embrace those you love, or if this is not possible in person, given them a call or send them a message.

Ask the Spirit to awaken your awareness to the sacredness of your sensory perceptions.

Don’t be too busy.

Don’t put it off.

'To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exit, that is all.'  - Oscar Wilde

If we can’t give ourselves even an hour per day to ourselves, then we need to rethink what we are doing to ourselves and our relationships.

Karen Gribbin https://www.instagram.com/studiocone10/

Take time to have coffee with friends, cooked breakfast on Sundays, curl up and read a book. Care for yourselves. 

Live, don't just exist. 

Where Do We Get Ideas?

 Are you sitting there looking at a blank page? Yes, I mean You, who are reading this.

 If the answer is Yes, then stop right now, staring at a blank page will not help, if you don’t have a story idea.

We expend to much anxiety over finding a great story idea.

Karen Gribbin https://www.instagram.com/studiocone10/

"I have nothing to write about.”

 “I got nothing exciting to say.”

“I don’t know what to do to develop an idea.”

 I’ll let you into a secret, there is infinite material for stories, it needs not be new or different, and can be developed in any manner of ways.

Experienced writers find ideas from just about everything around them, and so can you.

We pull ideas from dreams, conversations, observations, images, newspaper items. Café watching doesn’t only give you characters, story ideas can come from there as well. Music themes, walks in the country, sentences from other books.

You could even mine taste sensations, a lost memory, a train trip in winter, journaling, or 500-word exercises.

Many of my own ideas come from smaller writing exercises or newspaper headlines, or a combination of two or more situations, that come together at right moment.

Karen Gribbin
 https://www.instagram.com/studiocone10/

Writer’s ideas often sit dormant for years until, that right moment comes along.

Always write down your ideas, when you think them, you may never use them, but they’ve arrived, believe me when I say ‘they won’t come again.’ Write, write, write.

New writers are often told to ‘write what they know,’ which is fine up to a point. Certainly, write about your own experiences and familiar subjects, yet understand they may not be interesting to your reader.

You ‘ll certainly need to use your imagination to develop drama, actions, and conflict into your stories.

Another mistake new writers make when drawing on experiences is they report what really happened. No one wants to hear what really happened, your readers want to see what happened.

Show not tell. Your readers are intelligent people, they can tell their own stories.

For me a story/novel needs to take me out of myself to another world, another life, another year.

What I want in a novel is the escape, the tears, the empathy with characters. All these emotions are more important than the telling.

Below is a list of idea sources.

·         Newspaper headlines/items

·        Conversations

·         Walks in the country

Karen Gribbin https://www.instagram.com/studiocone10/

·         People’s mannerisms

·         Anecdotes

·         Images

·         Paintings

·         Music

Try any of these ideas and see what you can do with them. Set yourself a task to first write 500 words, you’ll know by then if you want to expand the idea into something bigger.

THE READING JOURNEY

Over the last week I’ve been on a reading journey.

This is a bit different to my usual way of doing things, my reading material at times jumps all over the place, you could say reading is a passion in my life.

As I’ve said time and again, the more you read, the better the writer you’ll be.

But I digress, back to my recent reading journey.

Hadley Richardson 
  hemingwayhouse.com

Paula McLain is an amazing author, her treatment and style when descripting people and places is extraordinary.

“The Paris Wife.”  Fictionalised history has always been a winner, and from the first sentence; I was hooked.

The novel fictionalises the life of Hadley Richardson, the first wife of Ernst Hemingway, who were married in September 1921, and has forever changed my view of Ernst Hemingway.

What an emotional rollercoaster their marriage recreated against the back drop of 1920’s Paris, and France in general. There came a tragic separation and divorce, that Hemingway regretted for the rest of his life.

Travelling on to “Love & Run” set against the backdrops of Spain, Cuba, England, and Europe. 

Martha Gellhorn, a pioneering war correspondent, and Hemingway's third wife. 

Gellhorn wrote about the effects of the Great Depression and the ravages of war on the disadvantage and relocated. A style of journalism  not seen at the time, covering Spain, France, Czechoslovakia, and Finland.

Martha Gellhorn
explorethearchive.com

Gellhorn and Hemingway covered the Spanish Civil War together, and while away started a romantic relationship.

Gellhorn’s relationship with Hemingway was always rocky, she was quite career orientated, and Hemingway often resented the competition with his own career.

Besides the torturous relationships of  Hemingway and his wives is the richness of Paula McLain’s writing, you feel every emotion along the way, but its also her rich depiction of the places these couples lived, she artfully brings Paris, Cuba, 

Spain, and London alive with colour and energy.

On a fictional historical roll. I picked up “Circling the Sun” set in Africa, my dream travel destination. McLain recreates the life of Beryl Markham, racehorse trainer and breeder, adventurer and aviator. An amazingly remarkable woman.

Beryl Markham (nee Clutterbuck) was born in 1901 England, moving with her father to Africa as a child.

In 1942 Martha Gellhorn interviewed Beryl about her autobiography “West With The Nigh.”

Of course, I could not move past this connection, and travelled onto Markham’s autobiography.

Beryl’s prose is poetry in motion, walking along side her into the  African countryside. with all the love

Beryl Markham
brittanica.com

and passion she has, as she considered her native country.

The people she knew are all there in vivid glory, large as life are, Bror Blixen, Isak Dinesen, and Denys Finch Hatton.

Beryl Markham’s depiction of Africa and her lifelong tribal friendships are much richer than Karen Blixen’s reedition in “Out of Africa.”

These four books could lead me anywhere. Rich and exciting, are the stories of strong women in times when women had to be tough to get what they wanted. 

What I’m getting at is this journey was an excellent experience of two different examples of writing, different ways of treating the telling of history.