A heartbreaking find:

A recent report by the National Endowment for the Arts found that 53 percent of Americans surveyed hadn’t read a book in the previous year.

… I’m sorry, WHAT?

For someone like me, that’s like saying, “Hmm, I think I saw the sun twelve months ago.” I mean, I may not have as much time to read as I used to, but I don’t think a single year of my life has gone by without my reading at least 1 book.

Seriously, people?

[sigh]

Continue reading →

Apparently The Pilgrimage link is not working right now (and I was only on page 15!) so I’m reading Neil Gaiman’s American Gods online/free instead. Feel free to join me!

Edit: The Pilgrimage is back up! Yay! Now I have 2 free books to read. :)

Paulo Coelho has released another of his books online for free: The Pilgrimage. This is a limited time offer*, but I still think it’s fantastic and everyone should take advantage. I certainly am! (A free book? What more incentive do I need?) You could call Coelho a phase for me right now. You could also call it obsession. Both would be true.

–

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I have a focus problem.

Continue reading →

This past week has been chock-full of reading, and I’ve loved every minute of it. First I finished The Witch of Portobello, another wonderful Paulo Coelho book. I’ve realized that his style is essentially “fable meets self-help book,” and I like it. I don’t think it’s something I’d attempt to emulate within my own style, but imitating it might make a good exercise.

Last week I finished his book The Zahir, which is my favorite of his so far. The characters are very rich and engaging, and their plights are more “normal” than in the other two books. But The Witch of Portobello had a better (twist!) ending, like The Alchemist.

The rest of my reading consisted of excerpts from the 10 finalists for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest.

Continue reading →

“The problem with being funny,” she said, “is that then no one thinks of you sexually. Unless you’re funny about sex. But personally, I’d rather sex be good than funny.”

I’m not sure whether I can work that into a story or not, but it came to me in the shower a few nights ago, so I thought I’d share. I guess it’s part of my attempt to learn how to be funny. I think I still have quite a way to go…

(Why is humor so difficult for me??)

In other news, I finished Amy Tan’s The Opposite of Fate on my business trip last week, and I was blown away. It had been sitting on my shelf for the past 4 years (I kid you not) and now I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time before experiencing it. I give it a 5 out of 5 stars (as reflected on both GoodReads and Amazon) and highly recommend it to anyone who

• likes Amy Tan
• has an Asian parent (or knows one decently well)
• has a motherAND/OR
• likes good books.

Continue reading →

I just finished reading The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (in English, not the original Portuguese). I had a hard time getting into its style, which some people compare to that of Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, but I think the big difference is… about 180 pages. You can get away with being crisp (in terms of sentence structure and character development) and overtly allegorical in a short work, but in a novel, it gets kind of weird. At least, it did for me.

That being said, I definitely appreciate the morals that Coelho presents. Particularly as a young, struggling writer, I found a lot to take away. Basically, Coelho says that following one’s dreams is a person’s only obligation in life, and that doing so contributes to the happiness and positivity of the world. However, not everyone has the courage to try. Why? Because of the four obstacles.

Continue reading →