BEE, again

Fiona Crawford has posted a great write up of Bret Easton Ellis' recent appearance at the Byron Bay Writer's Festival over on The Book Burgler, for those who are so inclined.




Obviously I am a huge fan of Ellis' work and it was a great pleasure to hear him speak at his Oxford Art Factory event on this tour. I was unsure of what to expect (it's foolish but easy to mistake authors for their characters, isn't it?), but I was surprised and pleased to find him a very engaging, self-deprecating and clever guy. I haven't yet started Imperial Bedrooms but I am looking forward to it all the more now.

The first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone

Going on holidays has killed my blog momentum (and trying to read postmodernist Mexican literature (at least, that's what I think it is) that isn't really to my taste has killed my reading momentum).

I will say though, that these are my favourite non-fiction books, and Franzen is probably my favourite non-fiction writer.



[Charles] Schulz wasn't an artist because he suffered. He suffered because he was an artist. To keep choosing art over the comforts of a normal life - to grind out a strip every day for fifty years; to pay the very steep psychic price for this - is the opposite of damaged. It's the sort of choice that only a tower of strength and sanity can make.

There is such tenderness to his writing, and clarity, even when he writes about his own doubt or guilt or failure to understand. It has been a while since I read How to be Alone but his essays on the Chicago post office and reading William Gaddis (a novelist who I am sure I will never actually be capable of reading) are still vivid in my mind.

Read these books, they will make you feel good about having a brain.