Some of My Favorite Reads in 2014

Favorite Love Story: Lisey’s Story by Stephen King

Gosh, it's been years since I've read anything by Stephen King other than On Writing. However, I came across a link to his Rolling Stone interview, and read this:

If you had to pick your best book, what would it be?
Lisey's Story. That one felt like an important book to me because it was about marriage, and I'd never written about that. I wanted to talk about two things: One is the secret world that people build inside a marriage, and the other was that even in that intimate world, there's still things that we don't know about each other.

More of King's Interview 

I just had to read the book. It's a voluble work. In an Author's Note, King says "yes, this book was edited". But I want to know: Was 10% cut? (His rule of thumb for whittling a manuscript down.) On the other hand, much of the architecture of the secret world of Lisey's and Scott's marriage is verbal so perhaps that's the point of the wordy repetitiveness. I don't know. But I was a big fan of King when he wrote: Salem's Lot, The (Edited Version) Stand, The Dead Zone, Pet Sematary... I began losing faith after Cujo and Christine (Apparently an English version of the book is no longer available!). But what I always loved about King was his ability to capture the inner thoughts of the common man. The Day We Planted Gage. So Louis Creed silently names the registry of his son's funeral as he slides it onto the top shelf of a closet. Wicked accuracy. Because those are the kind of sardonic things we're apt to say in an effort to cope.

King captures the inner workings of a devoted marriage so well in Lisey's Story it's almost creepy! The ways we navigate, negotiate, share, and look the other way when necessary. Although very much there, the lacing of horror is almost secondary. The most gripping aspect in that regard being the dark but ingenious: blood bools...

My Goodreads Review of Lisey's Story

Favorite Fairy Tale Retold: Charming/Cindermaid by Laura Briggs

Written in old-fashioned prose, this is one long read. Although sold as two books, it's definitely one story. I've read several "Cinderella" retellings; this is by far the most intricate and the most amazing. If you're into fairy tale retellings you must read this. But pick it up when you have some time, and you don't need to be rushed. Every detail of Prince Charming's and Cinderella's history is imagined to a completely satisfying culmination.

My Goodreads Review of Charming
My Goodreads Review of Cindermaid

 Favorite Fairy Tale Re-envisioned: The True Story of Hansel and Gretel by Louise Murphy

When I got this home from the library, I kind of groaned: it's a retelling set in World War II. I just wasn't in the mood for a story about The Holocaust! Sorry! But this re-envisioning of Hansel and Gretel, Crones and Stepmothers, Bread Crumb Trails and Ovens, won me over rather quickly. Set in the Bialoweiza forest of Poland this is a profound fairy tale retelling not to be missed.

My Goodreads Review of the Real Story of Hansel and Gretel

Favorite Original Fairy Tale: Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel García Márquez

Although not billed as a fairy tale, it is... a variation on Rapunzel and her long hair.

The surprise lay on the third niche of the high altar, the side where the Gospels were kept. The stone shattered at the first blow of the pickax, and a stream of living hair the intense color of copper spilled out of the crypt. The foreman, with the help of the laborers, attempted to uncover all the hair, and the more of it they brought out, the longer and more abundant it seemed, until at last the final strands appeared still attached to the skull of a young girl. Nothing else remained in the niche except a few small scattered bones, and on the dress eaten away by saltpeter only a given name with no surbames was legible: SIERVA MARÍA DE TODO LOS ÁNGELES. Spread out on the floor, the splendid hair measured twenty-two meters, eleven centimeters.

photo credit

And so the story begins... Although there is no Happily Ever After, the love story is tender and the journey is an amazing one—told in only the way that Gabriela García Márquez could tell it.

My Goodreads Review of Of Love and Other Demons

Favorite Book on Aging: Memories of my Melancholy Whores by Gabriela García Márquez

I thought I would hate this. García Márquez, being Colombian, is not exempt from the... um... prejudices towards the fairer sex that are... um... often inherent in that culture. I feel comfortable saying that because I was raised in a bicultural, bilingual household. As I grow older, it becomes more clear how I am not distinctly American nor Spanish... although my skin color is white, my mind is a mix. There is so much I love about the Latin culture: the musicality of the language, the vibrancy, the passion, the drama;) When I hear the language in any of it's variations it feels like home. However, every culture has its dark and light sides. Perhaps the light and dark of American is: the bright light of freedom afforded the individual; the dark being a will to inflict our way of life/"achievements" upon all we come into contact with! And the light of the Latin might be: a gifted metaphysical and organic way of viewing life and the world, with the dark being rigid gender stereotyping that is wholly synthetic. So... certain words make me cringe: Bitch, Whore, Cunt. I just don't like them. Especially, oh especially, when they are gratuitous.  So... the word "Whores" in the title didn't do much for me. But I am a rabid García Márquez fan. Despite the chauvinism inherent in every story he tells, at least, he doesn't lie about the frailties of being of man. And in Memories of Melancholy Whores he does this most eloquently and heartbreakingly. It's just a wonderful counterpoint of truth and acceptance, sorrow and hope.

My Goodreads Review of Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Favorite Book on Why Sugar is Truly Evil: Island Beneath the Sea by Isabel Allende

Long have I battled with sugar! Really. As more and more information is revealed about the "health evils" (Visit Sugarscience.org for a rundown!) of that offending white substance I am left both validated and frustrated. Frustrated that I was right, and didn't heed my own knowledge to the degree that I could have and should have; and validated that yes: Sugar is a health disaster, and we, modern society, are only half-living in the wake of the tsunami of the white crystals that we have ingested. (In moderation, of course!)

Island Beneath the Sea is not a happy story, but it is a lovely one. It is enough to make you abstain from sugar for moral and ethical reasons, if not for health, as the roots of the industrial production of sugar are told primarily through the eyes of a Haitian slave, Zarité. Pretty Powerful Stuff.

How to Read a Short Story

I finish reading Black Dahlia & White Rose, a collection of seriously creepy stories by Joyce Carol Oates. Although I'm not a huge fan of short stories, this is the third short story collection I've read in the past year. Leaf Storm by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and The Red Garden by Alice Hoffman being the other two. They are growing on me, these books of short stories.

Leaf Storm is incredible. So is The Red Garden. The stories in Leaf Storm revolve around Macondo, a fictional town in Colombia. They are horizontal because they all take place in about the same time period. The stories in The Red Garden are about Blackwell, Massachusetts and they are vertical in that the tales occur in a linear progression through time.

The twine that binds the stories in Black Orchid & White Rose is twisting. Oate's needle inserts itself into the human psyche and extracts disturbing grey matter. A few of them are really good for what they are: biopsies.

The trick I've found to reading short stories is reading them one day at a time. Kind of a reading hors d'oeuvre. That works well. It can take me a while to get through them, but I enjoy them more that way. It gives me at least twenty-four hours to absorb what I've read.

The Place Alice Hoffman Creates

Welcome to the Alice Hoffman Birthday Blog Hop! Today, March 16, 2013, I'm thrilled to be celebrating Alice Hoffman's birthday with other readers who love her unique and inimitable voice. Please visit all the sites linked at the bottom of this post for the complete experience!

I intended to write this post on Claire Story of The Story Sisters, having recently read the book for the second time. The first time I read it I fell in love with Elv. Her fierce love of horses, her inability to reduce her sensitivities to socially acceptable levels, her sacrifice of self to protect her youngest sister, along with her ability to see fairies and demons, kept me glued to every page. And when her life took an unexpected twist I sat in my papasan chair and sobbed. Not the dainty, a few hot tears rolling down my cheeks, sniffles, no, it was the snorting, messy kind that you never want another human being to witness, but feels so cleansing when it’s over.

Brave, reckless Elv. I resurrected a pair of black leather cowboy boots with pointy toes and got another tattoo, a daisy fairy on my left hip.

But after the second read, I’m on the lookout for charms.

Because this time, I'm enthralled with Claire. She’s the one who was strong enough to love both her sisters. Which brings me to another thing I love about The Story Sisters, it’s unflinching when it comes to the girl’s complex relationships. I have a friend who is an only child and doesn’t get how beastly sisters can be to one another.

I have sisters. Our relationships are strained and complicated, too. Perhaps that’s why these words in Arnish—spoken at dusk—can bring tears to my eyes: Nom brava gig. My brave sister. Reunina lee. I came to rescue you. Alana me sora minta. Roses wherever you looked.

My sisters are velvety petals with thorns, too.

Claire won me over with her silence. And her rebirth. Learning to make jewelry, mastering the craft. No matter how conventional wisdom goes on and on about family and friends, sometimes soulful work is the only thing that keeps some of us alive.

So that was my plan for this first Alice Hoffman Birthday Blog Hop, gush about Claire Story and Arnish, maybe Pollo—and Pete who wraps all the broken Story women in bandages of strength and dignity while they conjure the will to move forward, but now I’m reading The Red Garden. Quite frankly, I’m a little bit stunned.

It’s a collection of contemporary-ish fairy tales. I’m not a fan of short stories. Perhaps because it seems like a lot of investment, getting to know the characters, the setting, etc. and then—whiff—they’re gone. It’s over. But I read Leaf Storm by Gabriel Garcia Marquez last year, and found it enjoyable and fascinating. Marquez linked his collection of stories around a single place, the fictional town of Macondo, Colombia. When I discovered all the tales in Hoffman’s The Red Garden wind around and through rural Blackwell, Massachusetts, I became curious.

There are fourteen tales. I’ve read seven. The stunned part is how each one builds, externally, the literal place of Blackwell, and internally, the pressure upon the heart of the reader. It all begins with Hallie finding refuge in that bear. And her cub. And then comes John Chapman with his apple seeds and innocent passion. By the time Sophia snatches up the card of death and Amy is buried in her blue dress and bare feet, the magic is palpable. When Emily’s long walk ends in the frenzied creation of a scent-focused garden for Charlie who’s lost his sight, we’re left with a taste of wistful in the mouth and the sense of crushed potpourri in the hand.

Remember Amy and her blue dress? She may be gone, but somehow she manages to save Evan and Mattie when nothing and no one else can. But when Topsy, the elephant, dies, it leaves a gash in your heart. Thank goodness, he gets reborn as a pug whose devotion will make you remember that man is a syllable of woman.

I can’t wait to read The Fisherman’s Wife tonight.

Because in The Red Garden Alice Hoffman has doubled her creation of place.

Since Jess and I decided we wanted to create this blog hop, I’ve been asking myself: What is it about Hoffman’s work that moves me, affects me, wrings me out on such deep levels?

With her stories, Hoffman creates a place for the weary, the wounded, the ravaged, the savaged, the damaged, the self-contained, and the lonely, to take off their hats and coats and rest. Among the world of her characters we’re not too sensitive, we’re not too broken, we’re not too full of sorrow, and we’re not beyond comprehension; we’re one of them.

I think that’s why I have to read an Alice Hoffman book every few months. Sometimes daily life breaks me down, breaks down the things about me that I love about myself; reading Alice Hoffman is getting an IV drip. In her pages, I get to live in a world where I’m not too weird—spinning off an another wavelength—I’m the norm. It’s such solace. It’s so hopeful. It reconnects me to humanity.

And that is a holy thing.

Thank you, Alice.

Is Place Mystical?

I am reading The Red Garden by Alice Hoffman. Ever since I read Leaf Storm by Gabriel Garcia Marquez I am enchanted by this idea of a collection of short stories united by place. The place in Leaf Storm is Macondo, a fictitious town in Colombia. The place in The Red Garden is Blackwell, a rural town in Massachusetts.

Having the good fortune and misfortune of living many places--the good fortune of being exposed to variety and difference, the misfortune of leaving one a bit rootless--I find place to be mystical, i.e. every place on this great earth has its own unique convergence of energy.

You can't really sense place in a single visit, much as you can't always know a person after one conversation. But living in a place, over a period of time, you start to grasp its particularities, and idiosyncrasies, and how those effect the people who live there.

I have lived in the desert, I have lived near the beach, I have lived on the plains, I have lived in proximity of mountains…each place has its own identity, as definable as any person or character. I suppose that is why this concept…story of place…intrigues me so.

The first story in Red Garden leaves me thinking, as much of Alice Hoffman's work does. And I'm one of those animal lovers. For someone who is so wordy, it is perhaps their wordlessness that draws me to them. That and their eyes.

Alice Hoffman's Birthday Blog Hop!

Indie Life: Keeping it Real

Being genuine. Keeping it Real. 

How to do that in an online, Goodreads, Facebook, Twitter, Google + world?

I have spent a year trying to answer that question for myself. What I have learned is this: By jumping into the river and swimming, I begin to discover things. As I'm paddling and floating along, my heart and mind connect to things that turn me on, make me feel more alive, and help me grow my way of seeing myself, others, and the world around me.

Those are the things I retweet, share, and comment on. It feels good. There's an impulse to be random, formulaic, and mechanical, and I have experimented with that. For me, it might involve some time savings, but it never feels quite right.

I struggled a lot last year with my website and blog. Having blogged in the past, I knew what a time suck it could be. I didn't want to start up anything I would come to resent, or worse feel disconnected from. Like I was just going through the motions, or just doing it because everyone says I need an author platform.

There were a lot of false starts. I kind of went off in this direction and that one; I felt kind of stuck and uninspired. As the year wore on, I was reading a lot more and then I picked up Leaf Storm by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I fell in love with the stories in it and wanted to chatter about it. Out of all that, Eating Magic, my stream-of-consciousness eating journal, inspired by the Alice Hoffman quote: Books may well be the only true magic was born. 

I get more regular traffic from Eating Magic than anything else I've experimented with, and the truth is, I would continue with it even if I didn't get the traffic, because I love it and it's a lot of fun to write.

Russell Blake is a successful indie author who I follow on Twitter.  He made a comment on his post New Year, New Hurdles & Opportunities: They are singularities. He was referring to John Locke, Amanda Hocking, E.L. James, John Grisham, and Hemingway. He meant their particular road to success is not repeatable. So what are we to do if we can't mimic, copy, or follow behind in their footsteps?

It seems, indie authors--and authors--who experience break-out success don't follow any set rules; they follow their passions and find their own way to keep it real. I know that's the key to accessing the excitement that fired me up to take this journey in the first place.

So every now and then I ask myself: Are you keeping it real?

What about you? Does being genuine feel important to you as an indie author?

And FINALLY, a period.

I finally finish reading The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I feel like I have run a marathon up the highest mountain; endured sleeting rain in freezing cold temperatures wrapped in nothing but a measly scarf;  lived on twigs, gruel, and piss for nine months and survived it all. I want some medal.

The Autumn of the Patriarch is Gabo's third masterpiece...if you are counting Leaf Storm as one, which I am, and One Hundred Years of Solitude as two, which everyone else is (I have't read it yet).

It is an awesome and prodigious work. I see four layers in the story.

1. At its most basic, the story is a psychedelic oozing of mixed consciousness', a seething mass of point of view violations.

2. Next, it is like the most brain-bursting collection of metaphors, images, phrasing, words, and writing that I have ever attempted to digest. Often it left me staring at the ceiling, or out the window, or just plain dazed.

3. Then, there is the detailed riveting stomach-churning rubber-necking timeless classic essential portrait of the dictator. When I finish reading, I think...Gabo has captured the inner workings of every single dictator who as ever lived, still lives, is in diapers, and is yet to be born.

4. And the hard reading of the sentences that go on forever, and there is no respite, and you think just the onslaught of all the words is going to make you go crazy which makes the structure of the novel as inaccessible and inscrutable as the psyche of the subject itself.

Wow.

I am left with memories of that patriarch wearing the denim uniform without insignia and the gold spur on the left heel, who is always dragging his feet through the government house full of chickens and cows to the latrines where he and no one else writes on the the toilets long live the general, long live the stud who after selling a sea, sought in native science the only thing that really interested him which was to discover some masterful hair-restorer for his incipient baldness whose life had been seen in the  premonitory waters of basins by his mother of mine Bendicion Alvarado of my heart, he was as deaf as a post not only because I would ask him about one thing and he would answer about another but also that it grieved him that the birds were not singing when in fact it was difficult to breathe with that uproar of birds which was like walking through the jungle at dawn and they created newspapers and tv shows for him just the way that he liked them and every night he slept in his office behind three bolts, three locks, and three bars which is where they finally found him stretched out on the floor, face down, his right arm bent under his head as a pillow where he had realized at the moment of his death his incapacity for love in the enigma of the palm of his mute hands and in the invisible code of the cards and he had tried to compensate for that infamous fate with the burning cultivation of the solitary vice of power.

And FINALLY, a period. That is kind of how you start to feel, and by the end of the book, you are gasping, yearning, craving, needing, dying for that little dot.

Brilliant. But not light. Very heavy.

I am going to indulge in something  extra-super-duper-extremely lite and fluffy for my next read.

Thank you Gabo, wherever you are, for giving up the law. You and Gaugin.

the possibilities of the novel itself are unlimited...

I am determined to finish The Autumn of the Patriarch and Gerald Martin's biography of Gabo, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a Life. But The Autumn of the Patriarch is not an easy read and the biography is thick.

Right now Marquez is in Mexico. He's been working in the news, advertising and movie industries. But it seems his soul yearns for its primary language...literature...

I always thought that the cinema, through its tremendous visual power, was the perfect means of expression. All my books before One Hundred Years of Solitude are hampered by that uncertainty. There is an immoderate desire for the visualization of character and scene, a millimetric account of the time of dialogue and action and an obsession with indicating point of view and frame. While actually working in cinema, however, I came to realize not only what could be done but also what couldn't be done; I saw that the predominance of the image over the other narrative elements was certainly an advantage but also a limitation and this was for me a startling discovery because only then did I become aware of the fact that the possibilities of the novel itself are unlimited.

I just about salivate over these words, because I understand, and I agree that "the possibilities of the novel itself are unlimited."

That is why we keep reading, that is why we keep searching. That is why the shelves of ereaders all over the world are bursting with books.

The human mind thrives on novelty...we will always crave new stories...and the possibilities are unlimited.

Ah. The master has spoken.

The Last Story in Leaf Storm...

Nabo, the Black Man Who Made the Angels Wait is a love story between silence and song. A mute girl who drools and a black boy who sings.

When the horse kicks Nabo in the head and that angel calls him to join the choir, he can't leave until that girl cranks the gramophone one more time, shouts his name--the only words she can say--and sets him free.

At least...that's how I read it.

It's the last story about Macondo, so I'm left a little droopy. Endings are always bittersweet and this one's no different.

But...was the saxophone player an angel before or after he died?

Gabo sang.
Maybe he still does.
Maybe Gabo goes to the square every Saturday night to sing in that choir and hear that black angel play the sax.
That would be an ending more sweet than bitter.

Did you hear that?
It's so quiet.
The Leaf Storm has passed.

Who Would Sell a Sea?

There are things that I have learned along the way. One is: No one else can tell the truth of your life. It's because we all have filters, and see things in our own way. So, whenever someone says she did this because of that or when that happened, it may or may not be true. Because they don't really know, do they?

Given that truth, a biography, read with an appropriate sense of caution, can be a fascinating thing.

From Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A Life by Gerald Martin ...

... he began to collect the details which would eventually make a dictator of his own come to life, fleshing out the obsessions with power and authority, impotence and solitude ... Mendoza recalls that his tireless friend spent a lot of time in those days reading about Latin America's seemingly interminable list of tyrants ... gradually developing a profile of boys without fathers, men with an unhealthy dependence on their mothers and an immense lust for taking possession of the earth ...

and then we get this ... in The Autumn of the Patriarch ...

... it was thought that he was a man of the upland plains because of his immense appetite for power, the nature of his government, his mournful bearing, the inconceivable evil of a heart which had sold the sea to a foreign power and condemned us to live facing this limitless plain of harsh lunar dust where the bottomless sunsets pain us in our souls.

I mean ... WTF.
Who would sell a sea?

It's just me and the words Gabo wrote...

Then I get to Monolgue of Isabel Watching it Rain in Macondo.

It's a steady drip-drip, just like the rain. I want to take a nap. Like when it's raining.

I worry about that poor cow ... that could not fall down because the habit of being alive prevented her ... And really, like Isabel, I never thought the woman ... asking, every Tuesday, for the eternal branch of lemon balm ... would make it through the deluge. But she did. And then there was the sick woman who'd ... disappeared from her bed and had been found floating that afternoon in the courtyard.

So who fell in the well?

I don't know. But I feel like I finally get IT.

The Leaf Storm. The leaf trash. Macondo.
The awareness glows inside me like a smile.
I don't have a degree in English.
I am not sitting in some classroom.
There is not a blackboard within reach, sight, or walking distance.
The professor is at the university. Not here, in my room.
No, it's just me and the words Gabo wrote.
Brilliant.

Six Pages, One Long Line...

I am reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A Life by Gerald Martin. It's a slow road. There's not a lot of poetry. There are lots of facts, and names, and places. But it's a biography, and it's thorough.

I love the passages that speak directly to Gabo's writing, even better when he's quoted:

There's not a line in any of my books which I can't connect to a real experience. There is always a reference to concrete reality.

This is an important insight to another writer. Maybe to a reader, too. But the first time I read it, it flies right over my head like a startled bird. I drop the book in my lap and laugh.

Because I have just finished reading The Last Voyage of The Ghost Ship... six pages, one long line.

That Gabo, he's got a wicked sense of humor.

The Zany Action, Crazy Contraption of Life...

I am still savoring Leaf Storm, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I don't read in it every day. It's a very rich dessert. So, I taste a few bites and savor.

I finish Blacaman The Good, Vendor of Miracles and think about the Mouse Trap game we had when I was a kid. A Game of Zany Action on a Crazy Contraption. You drop the marble, and it rolls down a standing labyrinth to trip the trap.

That's how the story is written. The zany action, crazy contraption of life leads to the mausoleum for Blacaman the Bad. He's trapped.
Whoa.
That's a story.
I read it again, because I've just got to watch that marble roll one more time.

A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings

I love the story A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings. So far, it is my favorite in Leaf Storm. It is the reason I bought the book, years ago, in the first place. Its seven pages drench us with:

Lyrcial prose-

...a poor woman who since childhood had been counting her heartbeats and had run out of numbers; a Portugese man who couldn't sleep because the noise of the stars disturbed him; a sleepwalker who got up at night to undo the things he had done while wide awake...

Clever humor-

He seemed to be so many places at the same time that they grew to think he'd been duplicated, that he was reproducing himself all through the house, and the exasperated and unhinged Elisenda shouted that it was awful living in that hell full of angels.

And blistering indictment-

The only time they succeeded in arousing him was when they burned his side with an iron for branding steers, for he had been motionless for so many hours that they thought he was dead.

We pray, ask, beg, and plead for the divine to reveal itself in our lives.

We bemoan, fret, and sigh that the divine eludes us. Yet if a very old man with enormous wings made a clumsy landing in our yard on a wet afternoon, what would we see?

Not even with an axe...

I finish the story Leaf Storm and think:

These are the memories of how we treat one another. 
Death, the final arbiter arrives for us all.
And then we smell...

Immediately, I begin reading the Gabriel Garcia Marquez biography by Gerald Martin.

I am shocked--why?--to learn just how autobiographical the story Leaf Storm is. I feel disappointed and satisfied. Disappointed because it wasn't imagined from ground zero. Satisfied because perhaps I did get the story, more than I thought.

Then something the biographer observes about Gabo's voice gives me pause.

Many years later, when Garcia Marquez managed to reconstruct those two ways of interpreting and narrating reality, both of them involving a tone of absolute certainty--the worldly, rationalizing sententiousness of his grandfather and the other-worldy oracular declamations of his grandmother--leavened by his own inimitable sense of humor, he would be able to develop a world-view and a corresponding narrative technique which would be instantly recognizable to the readers of each new book.

And I begin absorbing in a new way how there is no becoming who we are. It is always an undoing. An unveiling. A stripping away of flawed pretense. Useless affectation, that fools no one but ourselves, must go. Because we cannot cut ourselves off from our roots.

Not even with an axe.

......grocery lists, doodles, short story, novel.....

i will read anything marquez writes......grocery list, doodles, short story, novel..... A review of Leaf Storm by Kerilynn Pederson on Goodreads.

Half-way through Leaf Story, I'm nodding my head.

I'm lying if I say I "get" every word, line, sentence. I don't.

At least not on the rational level. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's story slips and slides through every "how it should be/written" censor within me.

When I read Adelaide's point of view, being raised in a bilingual household, I know her. This outrage of things she has never been told by the inhabitants of her own home. Marquez captures the affront to her dignity better than any reel of film.

Then there is the rhythm--that bassline--steady in the background. Syncopation is as much an art in writing as it is in music. 

And the light plummets through the trees like a bird. And the maliciously premeditated gossip.

He rolls the leaves tights then ignites them. The haze from the smoke alters our sense of perception.

Who is that crazy man just eating grass?

I read several books, because one is not enough. Take a bite from each, and savor.

The Story Sisters by Alice Hoffman is creamy, bitter, and crunchy. It is not too sweet, but it is very intense. The world Elv, Meg, and Claire share unites goblins, demons and faerie queens; Paris, hawthorn trees and carriage horses; with wild girls who wear pointy boots and get black wings tatooed on their back. There is a secret language. Ca brava me seen arra? Who among us has the courage to do the right thing?

It tastes just as good the second time.

The Complete Fairy Tales by Oscar Wilde are bursts. Stabs. They hit my tongue like the darkest of chocolates. Less than a single square is plenty. A nightingale presses a thorn to its breast for the blood red rose discarded in a gutter. SIGH. Don't we all know.

Leaf Storm is altogether different. Perhaps the best salad made from the fresh greens and herbs they grow down the road at Tolstoy's Farm. Why not?

The boy, Isabel, the colonel, and Meme provide slivers of Macondo. Slices of tomato.

So who is that crazy man just eating grass?

I am starving ...

I open Leaf Storm, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and my heart kind of flutters.

I am starving.

After decades of denying myself the power of story, I am reading more and more these days. The stories are waking up something essential. But this essential thing has been asleep for a very long time--maybe since the day I was born—so its sound is faint, easier to feel than hear. I vow not to read anything that can’t spark the “I have to read that” sensation within. There are too many books, and not enough time. Leaf Storm has been sitting on my coffee table, forever. Patient.

When I write, what I read influences me tremendously. I am aware of this, so I try to be careful about what I read when I am writing. It will inevitably seep through, the good and the bad.

But as I said, I am starving, so I open Leaf Storm and read:

Suddenly, as if a whirlwind had set down roots in the center of town, the banana company arrived, pursued by the leaf storm. A whirling leaf storm had been stirred up, formed out of the human and material dregs of other towns …

In the midst of that blizzard, the tempest of unknown faces ... we were the outsiders, the newcomers … we knew that the leaf storm was sure to come someday, but we did not count on its drive. So when we felt the avalanche arrive, the only thing we could do was set a plate with a knife and fork behind the door and sit patiently waiting for the newcomers to get to know us …