This may be a waste of everyone's time except for mine, but since I've been complaining about having nothing to say, and since I haven't posted anything in almost a month, I'm just going to start writing and see what comes out, almost like a Peter Elbow exercise.
I'll start with books. I've been getting in a lot of reading over the last several months. When I go to the library, if I visit the stacks at all it rarely takes me long to come up with authors and titles I simply must begin reading immediately. I visit the online catalogue on a semi-regular basis. If you aren't a big reader (you probably aren't wasting your time on my blog, but if you aren't a big reader), you may wonder who we come up with those titles and authors. The answer is that they come from everywhere, e.g, memory, previous reading, television and radio (if your paying that sort of attention), friends, family members, etc. [By the way, I've been practicing use of i.e. and e.g. after reading about them in Grammar Girl's Fast and Dirty Tricks for Better Writing. The abreviation i.e. can loosely be translated into something like "in other words," and e.g. means something like "for example." Before reading Grammar Girl I had some idea of what they meant, but not their specificity.] I'll give you an example. I met my friend Lisa's Dad a couple of weeks ago, and got to join him and his wife, and Lisa, for dinner. Lisa's Dad reads a lot of mystery fiction. While I've enjoyed mystery fiction since highschool, it's been years since I read it with any sort of regularity. When he mentioned the top 100, that was my [completely personal and arbitrary] cue to make a point of reading mystery fiction. Any conversation can fuel a literary expedition.
Right now I'm reading Dorothy Sayer's Gaudy Night, Middlemarch by George Elliot, and Strong Women Eat Well by Mirian Nelson (with a bunch of letters after her name).
Unfortunately this is all I have time to write since the babies are not napping like I expected them to.
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